Capitalists Return to the Past in an Effort to Gorge Themselves on the Fruits of Child Labor

[Pictured: Children working as miners in Pennsylvania. (AP Photo)]

By Conrad Dremel

Republished from Red Clarion.

Over the past few years, the countries of the imperial core — the United States and its junior partners in Canada and NATO —  have seen a startling reversal in what was once championed as a shining achievement of liberal democracy: child labor laws. History textbooks detailing the horrors of early industrial capitalism are replete with the soot-stained faces of child laborers. A relic, they claim, of a grim past, long since abandoned by today’s “enlightened” capitalists. Gone are the days of Dickensian chimney sweeps and adolescent black lung, banished to the dustbin of history by progressive reforms that ensured children could go to school and play and live carefree lives, unshackled from the horrors of exploitation.

This, of course, has always been a myth. Child labor persists both in the brutal exploitation in modern colonies, where children labor for little or no pay to produce chocolate and cobalt, as well as within the great imperialist countries themselves, where carve-outs for child agricultural workers were written into law from the very beginning. Even at its best, child labor has merely been constrained by the law, never abolished. And “its best” is quickly decaying as the empire falls apart and struggles to maintain its workforce. Those practices which were finally extinguished didn’t cease through the benevolence of the capitalists; the working class fought to keep our children out of the mines and the packing plants. This wasn’t a gift, but a hard-won victory.

When the COVID-19 pandemic first emerged, it quickly altered the landscape of every economy on the planet. Production was paused, consumption plummeted, workers stayed home to protect their lives, and in many places, the state stepped in to keep everyone afloat. Unemployment benefits and health coverage were expanded in even the most committed laissez-faire strongholds, such as the U.S. Measures such as eviction protection, aid payments, tax refunds and more were deemed necessary to prevent the entire working class from instantly collapsing into abject poverty and seeking more radical changes to the economic system. Top members of the Democratic Party have bragged that one measure, the expanded child tax credit, cut childhood poverty in the U.S. in half. Yet that truthful statement is undercut by an obvious revelation: this entire time, the state had been sitting on a tool to eliminate child poverty, used it only partially, and then, months later, opted to reverse the measure, thereby doubling childhood poverty.

Throughout the beginning stages of the ongoing pandemic, workforce participation stagnated. Workers were laid off en masse; some stayed home to protect themselves and their communities, others retired early, still more became unable to work due to disability, or simply died. The capitalists groaned and quailed, crying to their state and media cronies that “no one wants to work anymore!” Measures to protect these workers from both economic devastation and physical damage were instated only to be quickly reversed, replaced with harsh punishments for prioritizing their health. The pandemic was swiftly erased from public consciousness, meager reparations were rescinded, and unemployment began to fall, as desperate workers returned to the workforce en masse in order to make ends meet.

Still, the capitalists were not content. Unsatisfied with merely multiplying their wealth throughout this crisis, they demanded more. More production, more profit, more exploitation. So many workers dropped out of the labor market permanently, and so many are too sick to work on any given day, that the workforce availability declined by an estimated eight billion working hours in 2022 alone. This number is not captured in official unemployment metrics, but it is certainly noticed by the capitalists, who demand every hour of labor they can get. They demand not only an astonishingly high number of total working hours to keep their production running, but a massive reserve army of labor to undermine the negotiating position of existing workers. When they complain of a “tight labor market,” their grievance is not that there are no workers to be found, but rather that there are insufficient extra workers on the market to drive down wages. The capitalists need us to be desperate.

So with a shrinking population of adults willing and able to work, where do these predators turn their fangs? Our children. They have lobbied successfully for the loosening of child labor regulations -– easing restrictions on minimum age, hours worked, schooling requirements, sectors of employment, the need for parental permission, and even the mere enforcement of existing standards. These measures have been championed and signed into law by politicians across the bourgeois political spectrum. Across every capitalist state, every bourgeois party demands only one thing: the constant flow of profit, even at the expense of our youth.

The rising tide of efforts to expand the legal exploitation of children pales in comparison to the capitalists’ flagrant disregard for both law and decency, with violations of child labor law in the U.S. nearly quadrupling since 2015, and growing every year. Children as young as ten are working with dangerous machinery in car factories and handling caustic chemicals in meat-packing plants. This willingness to flout their own standards of morality while violating  labor laws has always been exacerbated by periods of economic strain : the last huge spike in violations happened during the 2008 financial disaster. In every crisis, the most despicable vultures swoop in and pick clean every carcass they can find. There is ample profit to be made by siphoning the blood of the most despondent workers. 

This combined assault on child labor protections — the degradation of regulations and the violations of existing ones — is so egregious that it cannot escape the notice of even pro-capitalist institutions. The Department of Labor has recently been investigating child labor violations by PSSI and Hyundai. The PSSI case in particular has generated so much public outcry because of its sheer brutality: children were expected to use caustic chemicals to clean industrial blades, leading directly to the injury of three minors. These injuries represent only a droplet in the rising tide of blood spilt by capitalists in their pursuit of profit. The investigations by federal agencies are themselves laughably pathetic; they carry no criminal charges, only fines. To the capitalist, this is only the cost of doing this depraved business. Still, the cost seems too much for them to bear, hence their push to scrap regulations altogether. Well-funded and highly-coordinated capitalist organizations, like Americans for Prosperity and the Chamber of Commerce have drafted and lobbied for bills toward this heinous end. So far, 10 U.S. states have proposed or enacted bills that expand working hours, lower working age requirements, lift restrictions on hazardous job duties, or even grant immunity to employers for workplace injuries or death. For children. The primary aim of this legislative blitz is to protect capitalists from legal action for the death and mutilation of children. The capitalists are enriched and empowered by their shamelessness, greed, and depravity. In their vampiric frenzy, not even children are spared the bloodlust.

The working class must act immediately to defeat this reanimated monstrosity. Child labor laws did not spring out of nowhere. They were the capitalists’ begrudging concession to a mobilized, militant labor movement. Our forebears told the bosses in no uncertain terms: release our children from this despicable practice, pay us enough to support our families, or you will not get our labor. United in solidarity, workers beat back the specter of child labor and other abuses, securing some level of dignity and power for our class. But their fight was incomplete. It was exclusionary, leaving gaps where the hyper-exploitation of racialized and colonized children could continue unabated. It was impermanent, leaving capitalists the profit stream to claw back all reforms. It was unambitious, unwilling to imagine and fight for a society built on true liberation. And now this old beast is now roaring back with a vengeance. This time, we must win not only the battle, but the war.

More than Mercenaries: Police as the Crucible of Fascism in the U.S.

By Comrade Dremel

Republished from The Red Clarion.

Fascism is ascendant in the imperial core. The U.S. and its junior partners are waging an increasingly bloody war on all fronts, in an attempt to bolster the decaying husk of capital. The foot soldiers in this war are the police. Armed to the teeth and trained to kill, police are positioned as an occupying force in every locale across the empire. The violence perpetrated by police increases in magnitude with each passing year, with the targets of this violence being overwhelmingly the poor, Black, Indigenous, immigrant, queer, and disabled populations most despised by the empire. Even a cursory glance through the history of law enforcement in the U.S. exposes its role as the assault engine of white supremacy and capitalist hegemony.

Even before the settler-republic declared independence, slave patrols were organized to deal with the ever-growing population of enslaved African labor and the threat of rebellion. Hired guns would patrol the property, investigating and brutally punishing dissent, the possession of weapons, and attempted escapes. As far back as 1643, the English colonies were organizing themselves into confederations, pledging to enforce each others’ “right” to the return of fugitive slaves and indentured servants:

It is also agreed that if any servant run away from his master into any other of these confederated Jurisdictions, that in such case, upon the certificate of one magistrate in the Jurisdiction out of which the said servant fled, or upon other due proof; the said servant shall be delivered, either to his master, or any other that pursues and brings such certificate or proof.

Following the establishment of the United States, plantation owners quickly began entreating state legislatures to form standing patrols, as well as laws that explicitly targeted all Black people — regardless of their legal status. These fugitive slave laws and the patrollers enforcing them curtailed Black freedom of movement and assembly, subjected them to constant questioning, and inflicted unspeakably violent punishments. These practices spread throughout the colonies, and the institution of policing as a means of oppressing Black and Indigenous populations went from ad hoc posses to state machinery.

Following the U.S. civil war, despite the legal end of slavery, slave patrols prowled the countryside. Anti-Black violence, once perpetrated by pre-war slave-catching squads, took on the same form as anti-Indigenous violence: it shifted to the domain of terror groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. These vigilante terror organizations were, in many cases, composed of the elite of Southern and Western U.S. society: plantation owners, former Confederate officers, and ex-slave-catchers. Not only were these men enlisted by the secretive, semi-legal terror societies, but they also joined the rush of explicitly authorized “Indian fighters” – U.S. soldiers and cavalrymen, hired guns, and bounty hunters that poured into the Indigenous lands still left west of the Appalachian chain that the young settler-republic had determined must belong to white men.

To support this new drive, laws were carefully rewritten to empower police to enforce the political and economic repression of non-white people. This fundamental principle of U.S. settler law laid the foundation for the white-supremacist laws of today. The disproportionate impact of law enforcement on racialized populations has been thoroughly examined and excoriated for decades. The verdict is clear: law enforcement is systematically constructed to perpetuate white supremacy.

Since the creation of municipal and regional police in the 19th century, they have not only targeted Black and Indigenous persons. The police were not merely the enforcement arm of the theft of Native land and the suppression of Black labor; they have been the armed fist of capital, serving to break strikes, attack unions, and halt the labor movement in its tracks. Capitalists have consistently called upon police, private security, and the military to break strikes, often with deadly force. Under the guise of “peacekeeping,” cops respond to mass demonstrations by cracking skulls. Since the cold war, the intelligence wing of law enforcement has used the specter of communism to harry and infiltrate militant labor movements. With the blood of thousands of workers on their hands, the presence of police “unions” in labor federations like AFL-CIO is a grotesque mockery. The police are not workers: they are our most violent oppressors.

Cops are not simply hapless mercenaries, selling their labor as cogs in a repressive machine. They are not blameless workers caught up in a Kafkaesque machinery beyond their capacity to change. They are active participants in murder, genocide, labor suppression, and all the heinous acts for which they were created. They are the active agents of colonial and imperialist oppression. Indeed, the nature of policing as a tool of enforcing white supremacy and capital hegemony makes it especially appealing to a particular class of ideological actors. Police forces are staffed by the most motivated white supremacists. Fascist militias are largely populated by cops (active and retired), military veterans, and small business owners, as well as those with aspirations to law enforcement. They dedicate huge amounts of time, money, and labor to organizations designed to enforce white supremacy – all while comfortably employed in service of an empire built on those ideals. Many such groups paint themselves as “anti-government,” because they believe the U.S. government is holding them back from their fascist aims. That is, they resent the fact that the state has itself attempted to regulate white supremacist violence into a form it can control; they long for the early settler-republic, when any white man could wreak his will with a riding crop, a fist, or a Colt and no one would gainsay him.

State-sanctioned violence and extrajudicial fascist terrorism cannot be so identified as pointing out a badge.  In a recent database leak, exposing membership lists of the fascist Oathkeepers, numerous high ranking officers and sheriffs were identified among the hundreds of law enforcement officers on the books. One such lieutenant — who signed up for the Oathkeepers with the promise to use his position to recruit for the organization — was transferred to administrative duties upon knowledge of his involvement. Months later, he was back to his normal duties, as if nothing had happened. The police are police whether they wear their badges or not.

Law enforcement often dedicates some labor toward monitoring white supremacist extremism, although this is vastly overshadowed by its investment in tracking and attempting to entrap leftist organizations. Undercover agents and confidential informants insinuated into fascist groups often fail to report vital information, use their position to testify in defense of these groups, or are simply ignored by their handlers. The FBI, generally tasked with handling these investigations, are simply uninterested in the incrimination of fascists, instead instructing their informants to gather intelligence on the opponents of fascism. Law enforcement is deeply invested in the project of maintaining a white supremacist status quo. It has a long history of surveilling and violently repressing those who seek liberation, while giving unending leeway to those who attempt to heighten that oppression.

The overlap between fascist groups and law enforcement is sporadically reported on by bourgeois institutions, including media exposes, academic reviews, and even intelligence reports. Like all liberal exposes, however, these serve a dual purpose; by presenting the information, they defang it. The framework of these reports usually presents the presence of “bad apples” and promises that the issue merely needs some pressing reform. Thus, these liberal bourgeois reports disguise the fundamental nature of the white supremacist violence that pervades settler society. Through the lens of liberal “analysis,” all social ills are the result of scoundrels sullying otherwise valorous institutions. However, this misunderstands not just the material base out of which these very institutions were crafted in the first place, but also the insidious ways in which they get continuously reproduced, refined, and made more suitable to their primary purpose: maintaining the particular property relations of capitalism.

Policing presents its semi-legitimate face as “protecting the people,” originally with an explicitly racialized definition of “the people,” then retreating into implications and dog whistles. To bolster the white supremacist mythos that paints racialized populations as the source of civil strife, the ruling class has spent centuries pumping money into bad studies and employing racist professors to espouse the theory that certain populations are inherently “criminal.” Every new measure passed to empower the police has come with corresponding narratives stoking the fascist flames: “superpredators,” “crack epidemic,” “migrant caravans”. This has served to simultaneously drive recruitment and political support for the police from among the beneficiaries of white supremacy. The attractiveness of law enforcement to today’s fascists is unsurprising, given this historical context.

Law enforcement itself serves as a crucible of fascism, concentrating the most destructive aspects of the ideology into a superheated core. Its role as the violent arm of the state provides fertile soil for recruiting, training, and organizing nascent white supremacists into capable, radicalized cadres, indoctrinated with fascist ideology and inoculated against empathy. Combined with the tendencies of groups toward polarization (a meta-analysis of which can be found here), the overtly oppressive role of law enforcement creates an environment that drags its members toward fascist radicalization. This radicalization happens in much the same way that all institutions (fascist or not) mature into hegemonic forms, through the mutually-reinforcing processes of selection and intensification.

Selection is the process of sorting masses of individuals based on their demonstrated values and selecting the “best” — i.e. most well-suited to the group’s aims — for promotion, deeper into the institution. Although this can be a rigidly-defined process, as in the case of deliberately constructed organizations (such as workplaces), selection also takes place constantly throughout social life. Friend groups, community associations, activist circles, and more are constantly going through a loose process of selection; those who best fit in with the group and its purpose tend to find themselves more deeply involved in it, encouraged by those already integrated within it. The values being selected for vary from group to group, and can cover an immense range of criteria: specific skillsets, existing social ties, resources, even fashion sense or humor. The most common value being heuristically screened for, across all social structures, is how well an individual “clicks” with the existing group: like selects like. “Promotion,” of course, can also be a spectrum: anywhere from simply spending more time with like-minded individuals to actively being given more responsibilities and privileges within an organized structure. As specific traits get selected for, the individuals exhibiting those traits become better positioned to do the selecting, bringing in other individuals who share those same traits that brought them through the process themselves.

Intensification is the deepening of existing values, making individuals that move through an institution become more suited to the institution’s purpose. Again, this process can be explicit or informal, depending on the specific context. Individuals can be formally trained in specific skills, subjected to exercises designed to impart values and lessons through experience, go through rituals to promote group cohesion, or simply be subtly influenced by existing members of the group in a passive process of socialization. The more formally-organized a group is, the more explicit the programs of intensification that tend to be employed, but the social aspect is always present, and is often of the most relevance. As social creatures, humans are primed to modify our own behaviors and ideals to best integrate into our particular social environments. Over time, whether through passive or active means, groups tend to engender in their members deeper commitment and competence. Whether as education, radicalization, or collegiality, intensification works to define the character of both a group and the individuals within it.

These two processes act in concert, at all levels of institutions, playing into each other to best adapt a group to its niche. Selection elevates those individuals best adapted to modulate the intensification of others: the most charismatic speakers, the most skilled leaders, the most committed to the cause, inevitably find themselves brought up into a position to bring up their like-minded compatriots. Intensification serves as an indicator for selection, with those for whom the process yields the most favorable results increasingly demonstrating their fitness. Those who fail or refuse are seen as poorly-suited to the group and become ever-more estranged, if not outright ejected from the group. As an institution takes shape, these processes can cause it to calcify and regiment its process. Selection becomes increasingly based on set criteria, with explicitly delineated measures of promotion. Intensification practices become standardized trainings and rituals aimed at achieving specific results. But even in the absence of formal protocols, the social structure itself continues to set the pace of its own development, through the placement and shaping of its members.

Nowhere is this more typified than in the crucible of fascism. A new recruit on the force has already gone through several steps of selection and intensification that are adapted to the niche fascism aims to occupy. To even want to join, an individual must already believe in the myth of police as “peacekeepers.” They must ignore the blatant violent excesses of the institution. They already have an instinct toward protecting capitalist, white supremacy hegemony — whether they fully realize it or not. In other words, the police recruitment process itself has already selected for people who tend toward violence, chauvinism, ego, and myopia in service of capital (even if these traits are not always fully-formed in the novice). These traits are intensified during training, where recruits are taught laws, practice with firearms and other weapons, learn interrogation tactics, go through drills on handling “hostiles,” and more. Every step of the training serves to viscerally engrain in these recruits that they are the last line of defense for society against a violent, degenerate, implacable enemy, that their fellow brethren are comrades-in-arms, that the mission of the police is pure and righteous, worth laying down their very lives. They are taught that violent confrontation is not only inevitable, but righteous. In short, by the time they even become a full member of the force, people who were already filtered for traits suitable to fascism have already begun being radicalized into an ideological resentment toward the communities they police.

And then the process really gets started.

When that recruit walks into headquarters, he is entering a building absolutely packed with people who were just like him when they were recruits. Some were simply idealistic and justice-minded, without much regard for the obvious systemic horrors of the institution. Some were white supremacists from the beginning, and saw those horrors as noble. All of them went through a refinement process, and all have been modified by it in some way. They may have nervously laughed off bigoted comments, or they may have made some themselves to fit in. They may have seen squadmates commit acts of brutality, and thought to submit an official complaint — provoking the ire of their compatriots — or they may have eagerly joined in. They have spent every working day being exposed to propaganda, both informal and officially-sanctioned, about crime rates and the dangers of their profession and the fundamental threat posed by “certain communities.” They are promoted officially based on their arrests, tickets, experience, and the approval of higher ranking officers. They are promoted socially based on their cohesiveness within a group that has gone through these same radicalizing processes.

Those who couldn’t cut it — those who were too turned off by the systemic abuse, casual chauvinism, and blatant lies — are not in the room when that recruit walks in. Those who have best embraced that regressive atmosphere are introduced to him as mentors. In a radicalizing environment, the least radical have the least influence and the most radical dominate. In the case of police specifically, fascists find themselves easily making friends, enforcing “law and order,” and rising through the ranks, both institutionally and socially. They find themselves in positions of influence, and continue to shape the process that helped shape them. This attracts more of their ilk to the force, further impacting its development — and theirs. The state gains ever-more violent and rabid enforcers, while the fascists gain ever-more combat experience, fresh recruits, and institutional backing.

Whatever the particular proclivities of that recruit, he will find himself either becoming more immersed in the fascist milieu, more aligned with their ideals, tactics, and even extrajudicial organizations — or he will find himself ostracized, friendless, demoted, fired. The more the members of fascist militias integrate themselves into the (already fascistic) institution, the less common that latter outcome occurs. The initial selection process becomes implicitly more discerning, with potential recruits needing to meet a higher and higher threshold for what level of brutality they think is justified. The training and propaganda become more intense, directed as they are by those already selected for fascist allegiance. The distinction between state-sanctioned violence and paramilitary formations becomes more and more irrelevant.

This is the real reason all cops are bastards: all cops are subjected to a potent, omnipresent bastardization apparatus. They are recruited by fascists, trained by fascists, mentored by fascists, promoted by fascists. If they happen to join another fascist organization, that’s simply them branching out. And when they do, they bring with them tactical training, weapons proficiency, social prestige, state support, and an intensified clarity of purpose. The enemy of the working class is an active army: well-armed, well-resourced, well-organized, and highly motivated. They can be met with nothing less.

Comrade Dremel is a member of the Unity-Struggle-Unity Staff, an experienced educator, organizer, and scientist based in Maryland. Their organizing work has largely centered around labor agitation and fostering scientific literacy, with an emphasis on climate change and pandemic preparedness.