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

[ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX NABAUM]

By Peter S. Baron

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

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

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

Background

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Paradox of Worker Investment in Corporate Profits

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

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

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

Relinquishing Control

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

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

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

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

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

Blindness to Class Antagonisms

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

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

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

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

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

The UAW’s Investment Strategy and Worker Conflict

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conflict Between Worker Advocacy and Financial Interests

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

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

Reflection

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

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

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

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

Corporate Personhood, Monopoly Capital, and the Precedent That Wasn't: The 1886 "Santa Clara" Case

By Curry Malott

Republished from Liberation School.

Editor’s note: Beginning with overturning Roe v. Wade, the ultra right-wing Supreme Court continues to attack hard-won and elementary democratic rights in the United States, from affirmative action to the Indian Child Welfare Act. The following article is the third in our series “Crimes of the Supreme Court,” which demonstrates the fundamentally reactionary and anti-democratic nature of the Supreme Court. By examining key decisions in the Court’s history, we explain their historical and political context, the legal concepts and frameworks used to justify their decisions, and lay out their implications for later cases. This entry focuses on an 1886 Supreme Court ruling that is often cited as the precedent guaranteeing corporations the same protections as “natural persons,” although it did no such thing. Nonetheless, this case and several preceding ones demonstrated how the struggle for corporate personhood—particularly under the “Equal Protection Clause” of the 14th Amendment—was intimately bound up in the transition to U.S. monopoly capitalism.

How do the actual people in charge of corporations manage to remain protected from the consequences of the countless crimes they commit year after year? How is it that when CEOs make clear and obvious decisions that habitually violate every existing worker-won regulation, from the Clean Air Act to the Civil Rights Act, with very few exceptions, they charge the corporation—the “artificial” or “unnatural” person—instead of the CEO—the actual, “natural person” who made those decisions?

The legal grounds that corporations have the same protections and rights as “natural persons” is commonly justified by the 1886 Supreme Court ruling in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. As we’ll see, the Court’s decision in the case didn’t establish any precedent for corporate personhood, nor did the Court make any ruling on it. To the extent that the Supreme Court even debated “artificial,” “corporate,” and other kinds of personhood, they did so to facilitate the transition from “free competition” to monopoly capitalism in the country.

In this article, we explore the Santa Clara case before turning to debates within the institutions of power in the U.S. over the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. These debates can only be understood if situated within their historical, political, and economic context: the transition to monopoly capital in the U.S. To conclude, we explore the case’s destructive legacy, or the way it was illegitimately used to set precedent for the growth of monopoly capital.

The facts and outcome of the case

During the 1878-79 California Constitutional Convention, the state enacted a new tax code that, in part, prevented railroad corporations from factoring existing debts and mortgages into their total taxable value. The Southern Pacific Railroad Company, along with the Central Pacific Railroad Company, refused to follow the new code. They did not pay the additional tax, nor did they pay the back taxes they subsequently owed.

The first point of contention were back taxes—including the interest on them—that railroad companies refused to pay in California, specifically the taxes being levied on the fencing along the railroads’ right-of-way. Among the handful of complaints brought forth, lawyers representing the railroads argued that it was the county and not the state that should have assessed the value of the fencing. As Thom Hartmann points out, “the railroad was refusing to pay taxes of about $30,000,” which is “like having a $10,000 car and refusing to pay a $10 tax on it—and taking the case to the Supreme Court” [1].

Faced with the loss of revenue, a number of counties in California, including San Mateo County, filed suit against the railroad companies in an attempt to collect the taxes that the railroads refused to pay. According to Southern Pacific’s executives, they were being treated unfairly relative to “legal” or “natural” persons who could deduct debts and mortgages from their taxable income or value. The cases were consolidated before reaching the California Supreme Court, which ruled mostly in favor of the counties and against the railroad companies. The one exception concerned the fences constructed around the railroads. The Court affirmed that the fences “were improperly included by the State Board in its assessments” and, as a result, there was no legal basis for the counties to collect additional taxes [2].

The origins of corporate personhood?

Interestingly, however, the Santa Clara decision is rarely remembered for the issue of taxation and, more specifically, the role of railroad monopolies, and is instead mostly cited as the first instance of the Supreme Court upholding “corporate personhood.”

One of the railroad’s defenses at the Supreme Court hearing included arguing that the “Equal Protection Clause” of the 14th Amendment applied to corporations, so therefore the state couldn’t tax them differently from other citizens. Yet this was only a minor point among the six arguments presented by the railroads.

Moreover, it seems Chief Justice Morrison Waite quickly dismissed the argument in the case by stating that it is a general, agreed upon principle that the clause applies to corporations.  According to the ruling’s “headnote,” Waite stated the Court would not even consider “whether the provision in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does” [3].

Did the Supreme Court, then, establish a legal precedent that corporations have the same legal protections as natural persons? Despite the Supreme Court citing it as precedent for a century, and despite that it was routinely taught to law students as precedent, the ruling did no such thing.

Waite’s comment above was not part of the official ruling. Instead, it was included in a headnote written by the Court’s Reporter of Decisions, journalist J.C. Bancroft Davis, former president of the Newburgh and New York Railway Company. Headnotes are introductory summaries of cases added to Court rulings to make it easier for legal professionals and others to sift through cases.

Headnotes, therefore, are not legally-binding and hold no legal authority. It wasn’t until the 1906 ruling in United States v. Detroit Lumber Co. that the Supreme Court officially ruled in its majority opinion that headnotes aren’t part of the Court’s rulings or findings. As then-Chief Justice David Brewer wrote, “the headnote is not the work of the court, nor does it state its decision… it is simply the work of the reporter, gives his understanding of the decision, and is prepared for the convenience of the profession in the examination of the reports” [4]. This, however, hasn’t prevented the U.S. courts in general, and the Supreme Court in particular, from citing the headnote as precedent.

The headnote is significant in a few ways. First, the report of Waite’s comments didn’t include any legal or constitutional justification; it was a mere assertion. As a result, since 1886 the status of corporations as “people” protected under the Constitution has been a source of controversy. Moreover, “the concept of the corporate person lacks a principled definition and, therefore, seems to expand, or contract, depending on the circumstances and on the personal predilections of the speaker” [5].

The headnote is especially significant because of Waite’s sweeping acceptance that corporations are protected by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. This differs from a previous Court ruling in the 1873 Slaughterhouse Cases that made their way to the U.S. Supreme Court after an 1869 Louisiana legislature decision to issue a charter confining slaughterhouse operations in New Orleans to a single corporate entity, the Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company.

Crescent City’s charter required the company to run its waste downstream, ordered other slaughterhouses, most of which were much smaller, to close, and forbid the establishment of any new slaughterhouses in the area for the next 25 years. In effect, the legislature produced a monopoly on slaughterhouses for the time period. This meant that all workers, including butchers, had to work for Crescent or find work elsewhere. As a result, hundreds of members of the Butchers’ Benevolent Association, which represented smaller or independent slaughterhouses, filed suit in the Louisiana Supreme Court on the basis that the monopoly violated the 13th and 14th Amendments by forcing butchers into “involuntary servitude” and taking away their property without compensation or due process.

When the U.S. Supreme Court took up the cases, the majority opinion explicitly stated that the Amendments did not apply in this instance. The dissenting opinion by Justice Stephen Field proposed a broad definition of the Amendments at stake, one that would become more expansive as the overthrow of Reconstruction solidified. The crucial issue, he stated, was “whether the recent amendments to the Federal Constitution protect the citizens of the United States against the deprivation of their common rights by State legislation.” Field closed the dissenting opinion by asserting that the 14th Amendment applies to corporations and monopolies. He wrote that the Amendment “does afford such protection, and was so intended by the Congress which framed and the States which adopted it” [6].

Between his time on California’s Ninth Circuit Court and the Supreme Court, “Field worked tirelessly to expand the 14th Amendment to include the rights of corporations.” He was driven by careerism and a desire to reach the country’s highest court and maybe even the presidency “with the support of railroad money” [7].

In his dissenting opinion in a related railroad case, Fields expressed his outrage that the Court was neglecting the crucial question, which was if “an unlawful and unjust discrimination was made . . . and to that extent depriving it of the equal protection of the laws” [8].

Whether or not the original drafters of the post-Civil War amendments explicitly considered if and how the 14th Amendment—or the 13th— could apply to corporations or any group other than Black people is unclear. Based on available records, some argue that Congress may indeed have considered or intended for corporations to be included in the 14th Amendment, as the original drafters “were inundated with petitions from insurance companies and railroads complaining about protectionist state measures” [9]. That the 14th Amendment makes a distinction between “persons” and “citizens” is also significant, as the former “are entitled to due process and equal protection” while the latter are only “guaranteed the privileges and immunities of national citizenship” [10].

What is certainly true, however, is that almost none of the 14th Amendment cases heard by the Supreme Court concerned the rights of Black people. The Supreme Court itself affirmed this in 1938. In his dissenting opinion on Connecticut Gen Life Ins C. v. Johnson, Justice Hugo Black cited Miller’s majority opinion in the 1873 Slaughterhouse cases, doubting that the 13th and 14th Amendments would include anyone except Black people. “Yet,” he continued, “of the cases in this Court in which the 14th Amendment was applied during the first fifty years after its adoption, less than one-half of 1 per cent. invoked it in protection of the negro race, and more than 50 per cent. asked that its benefits be extended to corporations” [11].

Further, recent history affirms that the U.S. ruling class considers and treats corporate entities much more humanely than they treat Black people.

Corporate personhood and a new phase of U.S. capitalism

The period leading up to the 1886 case was characterized by monumental shifts in the political, social, economic, and racial order of the U.S. This included the heroic Reconstruction era as well as its tragic defeat and the rapid growth of monopoly capital in the country.

In the decade leading up to Santa Clara case, railroad barons emerged as a new faction of the capitalist class that provided the model for monopoly capital. This is why, just before the 1878-79 California Convention, California allowed the Southern Pacific Railroad Company to absorb several other corporations. Prior to that, Congress granted 11 million acres of land to Southern Pacific, although for their expansion the company acquired additional debts through a mortgage on its construction, equipment, railcars, and so on. Southern Pacific was also granted the legal authority to construct a line connecting San Francisco to Texas.

The trend toward monopoly predated the Civil War and coincided with the ongoing conquest of the continent. Large corporations, with state funding, facilitated the expanding interstate commerce through railways and canals, which in turn led to a larger and more integrated national economy. Federal and state legislatures promoted this centralization of capital insofar as it took the economic burden off the state while still allowing the state to use the new networks for postal and military purposes.

The pressing question for the U.S. ruling class was whether or not the government-backed monopolists would ultimately represent a unique and temporary phenomenon or provide a model for capital as a whole.

There was a clear struggle between the ideologues of small enterprises that formerly dominated the economic landscape and operated similarly to the idealistic “free competition” phase of capitalism and those of monopoly capital, where the various enterprises dispersed throughout different entities were consolidated into large ones.

As Morton J. Horowitz details in his account of how legal structures raced to keep up with the latest changes in capital, in the 1880s there wasn’t any precedent about “natural” or “corporate” persons because these categories threatened individualism and free-market competition. By the turn of the century, however, the struggles over “political economy between small entrepreneurs and emergent big business over the legitimacy of large scale enterprise” erupted [12].

The debates taking place within the ruling class had to do with whether or not there was an inherent tendency for capital to centralize. At the time, most political economists didn’t give credence to the inevitability of monopolization, seeing the railroads as exceptional. It didn’t take long until politicians, bourgeois economists, and others rightly interpreted the railroad’s economic trajectory as a precursor to a coming phase of industrial monopolization.

There was a shift in power and influence within the capitalist class from the old “free enterprise” capitalists to the new monopolists:

“By the late nineteenth century in America, fundamental changes had already taken place in the legal treatment of the corporation. First, and by far the most important, was the erosion of the so-called ‘grant’ or ‘concession’ theory of the corporation, which treated the act of incorporation as a special privilege conferred by the state for the pursuit of public purposes. Under the grant theory, the business corporation was regarded as an ‘artificial being’ created by the state with powers strictly limited by its charter of incorporation. As we shall see, a number of more specific legal doctrines were also derived from the grant theory in order to enforce the state’s interest in limiting and confining corporate power” [13].

From this point of view, the rise of monopoly capitalism, or the centralization of larger and larger sectors of the means of production into fewer and fewer hands, is driven by the self-expansive and competitive nature of capitalist production. The Supreme Court provided the legal grounds for facilitating this transformation.

Legacy of the case

In the immediate aftermath of Santa Clara, “the Court did away with 230 state laws that had been passed to regulate corporations” [14]. It was clear evidence monopoly capital was in control of politics. Supreme Court decisions in the years between 1908 and 1914, often citing corporate personhood, struck down minimum-wage laws, workers’ compensation laws, utility regulation, and child labor laws—every kind of law that a people might institute to protect its citizenry from abuses” [15].

For over a century now, the state has continued to take power and rights away from working and oppressed people and transferred it to capital. They have even perverted the hard-won gains won by people’s movements into justifications for increasing corporate power, perhaps none more disgusting than the misuse of the 14th Amendment.

While even to this day there is no clear legal basis for corporate personhood, that hasn’t stopped the Supreme Court from waging class war against the people on behalf of corporations. Because the nine unelected judges determine the law, they can legally justify whatever tactics they deploy against us.

The misuse of Santa Clara’s headnote has not only severely inhibited the ability to regulate corporations, but it has created a space for CEOs and shareholders to operate with near impunity. For example, Joel Bakan notes that “corporate illegalities are rife throughout the economy…By design, the corporate form generally protects the human beings who run corporations from legal liability, leaving the corporation, a ‘person’…the main target of criminal prosecution” [16].

The Supreme Court was created to serve the interests of the capitalist class. Its very existence stands as a barrier to the working and oppressed peoples’ desire for a true democracy. As the Supreme Court unleashes its most current wave of attacks on our basic democratic rights, we will continue to fight for a new system.

References

[1] Thom Hartmann,Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became People–and How You can Fight Back(San Francisco: ‎ Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2010), 18.
[2] Santa Clara County. v. South Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394 (1886), 411. Availablehere.
[3] Ibid., 396.
[4] United States v. Detroit Lumber Co., 200 U.S. 321 (1906). Availablehere.
[5] Malcolm J. Harkins III, “The Uneasy Relationship of Hobby Lobby, Conestoga Wood, the Affordable Care Act, and the Corporate Person: How a Historical Myth Continues to Bedevil the Legal System,”Saint Louis University Journal of Health Law & Policy7, no. 2 (2014): 204.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Nicholas S. Paliewicz, “How Trains Became People: Southern Pacific Railroad Co.’s Networked Rhetorical Culture and the Dawn of Corporate Personhood,”Journal of Communication Inquiry43, no. 2 (2019): 204-205.
[8] Cited in Ibid.
[9] Matthew J. Zinn and Steven Reed, “Equal Protection and State Taxation of Interstate Business,”The Tax Lawyer41, no. 1 (1987): 89-90.
[10] Ibid., 90.
[11] Connecticut General Life Ins. Co v. Johnson, 303 U.S. 77 (1938). Availablehere.
[12] Morton J. Horowitz, “Santa Clara Revisited: The Development of Corporate Theory,”West Virginia Law Review88, no. 2 (1986): 187.
[13] Ibid., 181.
[14] Howard Zinn,A People’s History of the United States(New York: Perennial Classics, 1980/1999), 261.
[15] Hartmann,Unequal Protection, 24.
[16] Joel Bakan,The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power(New York: The Free Press, 2004), 75-79.

Inventing Reality: Past and Present

By Youhanna Haddad

Capitalist countries like to claim that they have the freest media. President Joe Biden frequently reiterates America’s supposed commitment to a free press. In a similar vein, the British Broadcasting Corporation has repeatedly lauded the United Kingdom’s ostensible “freedom to publish.”

These statements often feature alongside denunciations of the alleged unfreedom in other countries — particularly those adversarial to Western hegemony. Such criticism tends to take on a certain form. Westerners claim that these adversarial powers tightly curate their media, only allowing information that reinforces state agendas. A recent (retracted) article in The Wall Street Journal, for example, accused China of “parroting lies” via their “solidified grip on information.”

But China is far from the only target. Whether it’s nations in Latin America and the Middle East, or Russia, the Global North’s prominent media institutions frequently remind viewers that information coming out of these places should be heavily scrutinized, with particular caution advised toward state-sponsored media. 

Since the Cold War, the imperial core has honed this rhetoric, which not only espouses the superior integrity of its media institutions but also attributes that integrity to a supposed respect for free speech rights. This narrative sounds good. But it rings utterly hollow upon closer scrutiny. In reality, free speech does little to keep the interests of capital from dictating the “news” Western media reports. As Lenin described over a century ago, “[In] capitalist usage, freedom of the press means freedom of the rich to bribe the press, freedom to use their wealth to shape and fabricate so-called public opinion.”

In the United States, just six corporations own a whopping 90% of the news media. This centralization demonstrates that, despite what seems like an abundance of options, the media is controlled by a tiny capitalist minority. And this minority is united by an overriding monolithic interest: profit. That means the media is only really free to report what doesn’t threaten the bottom lines of its owners.

But that is far from the only source of bias. Oftentimes, Western media institutions act at the direct behest of their governments. While the full extent of such collusion is often hidden in classified documents, what little has trickled into the public view vindicates the belief that “free” Western media is a fantasy.

The history of collusion between Western governments and media megacorporations is both storied and unsettling. Consider the 1975 Church Committee, which was organized by the United States Senate to investigate potential abuses by the CIA, NSA, and FBI. The Church Committee formed after several major news stories broke implicating the Department of Defense and CIA in the surveillance of civilians and covert assassinations of foreign leaders. 

One of the most disturbing findings was the explicit confirmation of CIA involvement in domestic and foreign media. The Committee confirmed at least “50 CIA relationships with U.S. journalists or employees of U.S. media organizations.” Additionally, it demonstrated that the CIA had control of two European press services — one of which was subscribed to by “over 30 U.S. newspapers.” With a notable lack of remorse, a senior CIA official told the Committee that, “Whether or not this type of overseas activity should be allowed to continue is subject to differing views and judgments… [in my opinion] we would be fools to relinquish it because it serves a very useful purpose.”

CIA defector Colonel John Stockwell corroborated this practice of media corruption. On his assignment to the Angolan Civil War, he allegedly headed a CIA campaign to disseminate news stories that slandered the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola and their Cuban reinforcements. According to Stockwell, a full third of his CIA personnel in Angola were career propagandists. One startling falsehood they reported was a totally fabricated execution of 17 Cuban soldiers for the rapes of Angolan women. Framed as an act of feminist liberation, the imaginary victims supposedly executed the perpetrators by firing squad. This tale made its way to the front page of the Toronto Star — Canada’s largest daily newspaper — the Globe and Mail, and local papers in Winnipeg, Halifax, and Montreal. 

More recently, a 2019 bombshell in The Washington Post revealed that — even in this century — United States’ military campaigns are shrouded in lies to make them more palatable to the American public. Generals, senior federal officials, an Afghan War czar, and a Bush-era secretary of defense all confirm that the war in Afghanistan was unwinnable while claiming that there was “no way” the United States could lose the war when interviewed. Federal officials faithfully chanted “steady progress” throughout the duration of the war despite knowing that their objectives were bound to fail via the means they were employing.

Today, the world's eyes are on Ukraine. Russian troops have been in the country for over nine months after Ukraine, against Russia’s repeated warnings, moved to join NATO. Since the invasion began, the United States has spent $68 billion to aid the Ukrainian government and military.  

While modern Russia is thoroughly capitalist, it's easy to see why NATO — the world’s preeminent imperialist alliance — views it as a threat. The country has the world's largest nuclear arsenal and its security interests are directly opposed to NATO’s objective of expanding eastward toward Russia’s borders. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not unexpected by any stretch of the imagination, Russian leaders have expressed for decades that their ability to defend their nation from invasion or global conflict would be severely compromised if NATO was permitted to expand toward its borders. 

Most infamously, declassified State Department documents confirm former Secretary of State James Baker promised Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward” in 1990. To the contrary, NATO has admitted 14 former Soviet or Soviet-aligned states since then.

From the billions in aid to Ukraine, it’s clear the United States is investing heavily in the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Much of that aid is designated for weapons that are not yet manufactured, suggesting the United States is ready to support the neoliberal Ukrainian government for years to come. This means that — just like in Vietnam and Afghanistan — the federal government is dedicated to a long-term conflict with little regard for any public resistance they may encounter. Ask yourself: When in its history has the United States heavily funded a fighting force that was trying to improve living standards for any group of working people?

Today, we face a nonstop barrage of pro-Ukrainian media. Major news outlets have been reporting optimistically on Ukraine’s war efforts, while Russian troops remain planted on Ukrainian soil since February. Western bourgeois media is clearly trying to make NATO’s investment in Ukraine seem worthwhile, as they have done to support the invasions of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

You don’t have to be a Putin apologist to understand that Western powers see Russia as a threat to their hegemony. Those with a deep respect for human life should hope to see an expedient and diplomatic end to the conflict, with no further expansion of NATO. Unlike the United States and her allies, we should not support the effort to include Ukraine in NATO at any cost. This position is nonsensical, and only remains publicly acceptable due to the tireless media campaigns of a supposedly “free press” in the Global North.

Youhanna Haddad is a North American Marxist of the Arab diaspora. Through his writing, he seeks to combat the Western liberal dogmas that uphold racial capitalism.

Directing the Moderate Rebels: Syria as a Digital Age Crucible for Information and Propaganda Warfare

By Ben Arthur Thomason

A decade into Syria’s catastrophe as one of the deadliest wars of the 21st century, we can take greater stock of its effects not just on geopolitics and Syria itself, but on imperial management strategies, information warfare, and popular culture, particularly when considering the interventions by the West and its regional allies. A key pillar of Western imperialist projects next to the hard power of bombs and economic sanctions is the soft power of diplomatic maneuvering, media and cultural imperialism, manufacturing public consent for war, and inventing realities to maintain ideological hegemony. The complementary dialectic between hard and soft power in the US led imperial project in Syria built on historical ventures in Muslim majority countries and evolved propaganda and civil society hybrid warfare strategies that may become foundational for 21st century warfare.

Complementing hard and soft power: the UK FCO media and civil society consortium

Early in the Syrian conflict, through a scheme code-named Operation Timber Sycamore, the CIA partnered with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar to flood Syria with weapons, many of which ended up on the black market or in the hands of extremist groups. In an echo of the CIA’s Operation Cyclone, where Mujahedeen fighters in Afghanistan were supplied with billions of dollars in arms including Raytheon manufactured anti-aircraft guided Stinger Missiles, the US and its allies supplied Syrian rebels, including Salafist groups like the Harakat Nur al-Din al-Zenki Movement, with Raytheon produced anti-tank guided BGM TOW missiles.

Supplementing the hard-power pressures of sanctions and lethal aid to militants was a soft power strategy that combined diplomatic pressure, propaganda, and civil society programs. Western governments and NGOs funded, supplied, and trained pro-opposition Syrian journalists, newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV stations. Pro-rebel outlets that sprung from this support were needed because Western journalists largely stayed out of reporting from rebel-held Syria for risk of being kidnapped or killed, despite the purported moderation of the Western backed Free Syrian Army and attempts to downplay the strength of extremist forces in Western media. Perhaps the most important organization, at least that we have significant documentation of right now, was a consultancy firm, Analysis Research Knowledge (ARK), and their search and rescue and media production group, Syria Civil Defence (British spelling), popularly known as the White Helmets.

Figure 1- An example of ARK’s “rebranding” projects for armed militias to sell the “moderate rebels” image (CPG01737 ARK 1.3.1, n.d.: 1)

ARK’s modern form was established as ARK FZC in 2011 and is based in Dubai, though its roots go back at least to 2009 when it was formed in Beirut, Lebanon as ARK Group or ARK Lebanon. The United Arab Emirates avoided full involvement in the arming and support of Syrian militants, instead opting to become an important partner in diplomatic and civil society efforts against the Assad government. ARK was started by former British Foreign Commonwealth Office (FCO) employee Alistair Harris, who got his start serving in the Yugoslav Wars. Contracting under the UK FCO, ARK first established a program for collecting and documenting alleged war crimes and set up an opposition media program called Basma Syria (Basma meaning smile in Arabic). In 2012 ARK, led by employee James Le Mesurier, a former UK military intelligence officer who also got his start in the Balkans during the Yugoslav Wars, established the search and rescue teams that would become the White Helmets. The group sold itself as a grassroots citizen activist humanitarian group and became media darlings in the West. 

The White Helmets were the bridge between the civil society and propaganda aspects of these soft-power pro-rebel operations. Not only did they provide services such as search and rescue, medical transport, fire suppression, and post-battle clean-ups and reconstruction, they filmed and photographed themselves doing all these things. They were often first on the scene reporting on bombings, skirmishes, and alleged chemical weapons attacks. The most famous accusations against the White Helmets, lobbed by Russian and alternative Western media, were that they collaborated with terrorist groups and staged fake attacks and/or rescue missions. Yet perhaps the more interesting and revealing thing about the White Helmets that can be confirmed is that they were a key part of a wider propaganda and civil society operation to support anti-Assad forces in Syria and justify and encourage foreign intervention led by corporate contractors working under the UK FCO.  

As the military war dragged on, Western backed militias needed to administer the areas they conquered as well as fight an information war. Since these rebel-held spaces were too dangerous for Western journalists, Western states raised a local media infrastructure through local proxies. US and European NGOs and governments funded, trained, and supplied outlets like Aleppo Media Center while ARK and its fellow UK FCO contractors set up their own media outlets like Basma, Moubader, and Syriagraph, establishing TV, radio, and magazine production for themselves or partner organizations. Other FCO contractors like Albany Associates Ltd identified and trained select spokespeople from and developed communication strategies for violent sectarian Salafi militias like Ahrar al-Sham and Jaish al-Islam. One prominent ostensibly grassroots media outlet for the Battle of Aleppo, Revolutionary Forces of Syria, was directly run by an FCO consortium member that partnered closely with ARK, The Global Strategy Network (TGSN), directed by Richard Barrett, former director of counterterrorism at MI6. These outlets then fed propaganda to their “well-established contacts with numerous key media organisations [sic] including Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, Orient, Sky News Arabic, CNN, BBC, BBC Arabic, The Times, The Guardian, FT [Financial Times], NYT [New York Times], Reuters and others.”

Figure 2- One of several maps of Syria showcasing ARK’s media and civil society operations in Syria. “ICSP Beneficiaries” refer to local Free Syrian Police units while “Media Stringers” refer to freelance journalists trained and or employed by ARK (ITT Lot C – Technical Response)  

UK FCO contractors like Adam Smith International and ARK tried to create civil society infrastructure to provide essential services that could compete with Syrian state services. They set up a Free Syrian Police (FSP) as well as municipal governance, education, and sanitation services, while the White Helmets provided emergency fire, transportation, and rubble clean-up services. The FSP alone received hundreds of millions of dollars through US and European funding and had its own scandals of corruption and connections with terrorist groups. The White Helmets alongside media outlets set up with extensive help from Western governments and NGOs like Aleppo Media Center, or media outlets directly run by Western government contractors like Revolutionary Forces of Syria, audio-visually recorded and disseminated these services from local Arabic speaking audiences to global, particularly Western Anglophone audiences. For ARK, their civil society services and “media products” were one and the same. The US and European states spent over $1 billion on these media and civil society initiatives refined through constant polling, focus groups, data analysis, and target audience segmentation to maximize their media and public opinion impact.

Figure 3- ARK “Project Schematic” showing how civil society initiatives immediately became propaganda for local and Western audiences. The events for September-November were planned by ARK to both provide rebel governance and turn their services into pro-rebel, anti-regime propaganda. (ARK 1.2.1 Methodology, c2017)

Target Audiences: The Home Front

The White Helmets became the star group of this initiative not just because they provided local services and produced propaganda at the same time; they also gave the opposition to Assad a singular humanitarian face that could shroud the sectarian and theocratic violence that characterized the bulk of the Western backed armed opposition that eventually coalesced into ISIS. Among Western media and celebrities, that’s exactly what the White Helmets became. 

The program of influence peddling and manufacturing public consent for intervention in Syria made it to the highest levels of Western entertainment with the 2016 Oscar winning documentary The White Helmets, profiling the ARK created group. The documentary created a narrative of Russian and Assad military devils bombing helpless civilians who relied on angelic White Helmets as their only line of defense, scrubbing all rebel militias from the conflict except ISIS. It was made possible by the cheap labor of the White Helmet workers, with whom ARK had previously produced several Arabic-language documentaries, the money and government connections of oil and industrial interests through philanthropies like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the enthusiastic endorsements of US and UK media. The organization that led the impact campaign for the documentary and the White Helmets targeting celebrities and the media as well as Western halls of power was The Syria Campaign (TSC). TSC was started and heavily funded by a Syrian expat, US educated billionaire oil CEO and major UK Tory party donor, Ayman Asfari, whose company was convicted and fined in 2021 by a UK court for paying millions of dollars in bribes to Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE for oil contracts. Even before the Syrian Civil War started Asfari had his hands in dirty influence peddling with the UK who led the propaganda and civil society war against Syria, the UAE, who served as a regional conduit for those efforts, and the Saudis, who helped lead the hard power militia war against Syria.

While The White Helmets documentary tugged at viewers’ heartstrings over the brutality of Syrian and Russian air power, the Syria Campaign and the White Helmets pushed for the US and its allies to establish a no-fly zone over Syria. This was the same kind of intervention that was instrumental in lynching Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and throwing that country into chaos and strife it still has not emerged from. Despite the risk of inciting a hot war with Russia that a no-fly zone in Syria implied, this policy was pushed by powerful political leaders, including the 2016 Democratic party presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton.

Cynical weaponization of real and alleged atrocity stories to justify intervention and create easy good vs. evil stories for the benefit of US backed rebel factions in Muslim countries is not new. Journalist Joel Whitney (2016) showed that the weaponization of refugees and training pro-rebel activists to encourage and film atrocities has historical precedent in Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan. The resumes and CVs from leaked UK Foreign Commonwealth Office documents also point to these programs repeating and building off each other through history, particularly in the destabilized Muslim majority regions of the world in the past 30 years. Several prominent employees with leadership roles in these government contractors in Syria have long resumes before joining ARK and other FCO contractors. Their employee profiles demonstrate a pattern of receiving military, media, civil society, and government transition positions in places like Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, sometimes in that order and often including several sub-Saharan African countries like Somalia, Sudan, Kenya, Mali, and Nigeria as well. These ventures have occurred before and will continue.

Many details of the Western propaganda and interference schemes in Syria are still unknown, locked in classified internal government and corporate documents. Yet the few leaks and investigative reports we have reveal an extensive, well-funded, years-long propaganda and disinformation warfare campaign waged first against the Syrian government but perhaps more intensely against Western publics. Through groups like the White Helmets and the media they produced, Western governments and corporations backed up their multi-billion-dollar effort to flood Syria with weapons and fighters with propaganda and civil society campaigns worth about a billion dollars. These facilitated rebel administrations on the ground and helped sell a simplified whitewashed narrative of the Syrian Civil War and build war fervor for Western intervention. This built off historical precedents, committed by the same people who engaged in similar campaigns in other Muslim majority countries. 

It must be said that these efforts failed in important ways. While nearly all Western mainstream corporate media and politicians fell in line behind the White Helmets and the consortium’s pro-intervention narratives, war weary Western publics, particularly in the US and UK, were skeptical and unconvinced. Outlets like the Syria Campaign, the Guardian, and the BBC were quite troubled by the popular pushback they got which, despite their best efforts, could not be smeared as all Moscow agents or their useful idiots spreading disinformation. Russia and Syria did have their own propaganda strategy to counter Western media, and this is an inevitable reality of modern warfare. Their tactics included accusations against the White Helmets that, while containing important grains of truth, were overly simplistic and designed to paper over the brutal acts they engaged in as belligerents in a generally brutal war. Yet it is striking that, after so many criminal imperialist adventures in the region, public skepticism and disillusionment toward institutional narratives pushing humanitarian intervention in another Muslim country would be dismissed by political and media professionals with such pious Cold War style deflection and finger-pointing. These went so far as to include a sting operation and media smear campaign led by yet another organization created by ARK against academics investigating Western intervention in Syria. This ideological disciplining of public discourse is particularly outrageous when critical investigations into what Western states and their allies were doing in Syria without substantial, if any, public consent or knowledge reveal disturbing patterns of violence, manipulation, and good-old fashioned corruption and self-aggrandizement.

American Fascism: The Men, the Money, and the Myth

By J. Richard Marra

On May Day 2016, well before the election of Donald J. Trump, the Boston Globe published, "'Never forget,' the world said of the Holocaust. But the world is forgetting."[1] In it, Jeff Jacoby worries about its implications for a world experiencing a resurgence of violent right wing political extremism. For American Marxists, the timing may seem ironic. On the day of global celebration for the working class, they are reminded of both the horrors of fascism and their duty to unceasingly oppose it.

Marxist and other commentators appreciate the toxicity of fascism. However, their explanations regarding its features, organization, and operations differ. Each has enriched our understanding, while also introducing a disconcerting complexity and diversity. Accordingly, anti-fascists should aim at simplicity when considering historical fascism and Trump's 'neofascism."

The libertarian commentator George Will understands:[2]

So many excitable Americans are hurling accusations of fascism, there might be more definitions of "fascism" than there are actual fascists. Fascism, one of the 20th century’s fighting faiths, has only faint echoes in 21st-century America’s political regression.

Furthermore, there are problems regarding recognizing fascism and justifying claims about specific political regimes. James P. Cannon recognized this in 1954 with reference to Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy: [3]

Those who would judge specific American forms of fascism too formalistically by the European pattern, arbitrarily limit capitalist aggression against the workers’ movement in two forms:

They see the democratic form by which the workers are suppressed through strictly legal measures in accordance with the law and the Constitution—such as the Taft-Hartley Law, formal indictments and prosecutions for specific violations of existing statutes, etc....

On the other side they see the illegal, unofficial forms of violence practiced by “stormtroopers” and similar shirted hooligans outside the forms of law, as in Italy and Germany. This is characterised as fascist.

This kind of illegal violence under the outward forms of law has a distinctive American flavour; and it is especially favoured by a section of the ruling class which has very little respect for its own laws....This is, in fact, an important element of the specific form which American fascism will take....

Depending on one's perspective, contemporary fascism might appear nowhere, or anywhere. It is nowhere in the sense that Hitler and Mussolini are dead; and America's immigrant detention camps aren't as horrific as Auschwitz. Yet, it can emerge anywhere because capitalism is everywhere, and capitalism is its necessary and structural accomplice.[4] Given the right theorizing, many current capitalist regimes can exhibit fascist characteristics. For Will, fascism can occur anywhere because truculence toward liberal institutions and manners is common in social climates of political polarization and arrogance.

Three methodological problems contribute to the confusion. Consider, first, Lawrence Britt's[5] list of the identifying characteristics of fascism. Its items accurately capture salient features and establish a domain of likely candidate governments. Unfortunately, they don't supply an explanation regarding how any of these, or all of these, characteristics structurally realize the fascist form of governance. Lacking context, lists of attributes can become scattered and unwieldy, and fail to account for time-sensitive social and political contingencies, as Cannon anticipates. In addition, methodologies, and the theories supporting them, evolve over time. Although their theoretical "hard core" remains resistant, subordinate features may change. This may lead to reevaluations of the fascist-ness of political regimes. Finally, although Marxism, unlike capitalism, is fundamentally opposed to fascism, both are nevertheless liable to analytical bias. Will's commitment to capitalism prevents him from even mentioning it. He strips contemporary fascism of its theoretical and historical significance, dismissing it as merely a problem regarding hostile personalities.

To avoid these problems, this account will keep largely to operational matters, focusing on structures and functions. Parsimony is exercised in establishing necessary and sufficient characteristics, and explaining such features will help us introduce context. To do so, it proposes three fundamental structural components: Governance, economy, and ideology. Following Brecht and Lund, it suggests that capitalism plays a central role in the emergence and operations of fascism. However, unlike some Marxists, this analysis stops short of characterizing fascism as an extreme form of capitalism. Accumulation remains the prime purpose of the capitalist modes of production employed within fascism. Nevertheless, capitalists must routinely acquiesce to state requirements, which conveniently include protecting and advancing profitability. Both capitalists and fascists are keenly aware that workers, unions, and communists can negatively affect accumulation and the capitalist state. This mutual need is addressed by managing unprofitable class conflict through the establishment of state-run "corporations."

The Three Characteristics of Historical Fascism

When taken together, the following three necessary characteristics, involving both structural and ideological (especially nationalistic and religious) components, sufficiently define fascism.

1. Governance: Unitary and authoritarian national state controlled by a despotic "Leader."

2. Economy: State control of the economy through a system of sector-based corporations comprised of capitalist enterprises and labor.

3. Ideology: Traditionalist mythology justifying an exclusive moral exceptionalism in governmental affairs imported from 20th-century Futurism.

The key to recognizing fascism lies in appreciating how these characteristics synergize into a unique system of governance. With this in mind, let us now examine each more deeply.

Governance: The Leader Principle

The fascist state functions according to the "Leader Principle."[6] The "Leader" (aka Der Fuhrer, Il Duce) is the single sovereign authority over the state and its people. He/she stands atop a hierarchy of sub-leaders that govern the state's political and bureaucratic organizations. All sub-leaders pledge total obedience to all superiors, but always and primarily to the Leader. The fascist leader is not merely a person, but the ultimate manifestation of a state dynamically driven by its moral "will." In this way, the leader and the state are structurally and functionally identified. Mussolini writes, "the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State...." For Mussolini and Hitler, those consciousnesses, wills, personalities, and morality are theirs.

Economy: The "Third Way"

The leader dictates the structure and operations of the second necessary feature of fascism, an economic system called the "The Third Way." To understand the Third Way, let's compare how capitalists, communists, and fascists manage the class struggle that Mussolini denies.

Capitalists are attentive to class struggle, especially when it interferes with profits. They know that profit comes from their private ownership of the means of production and exploitation of labor. They understand that class struggle between owners and workers is a fact of capitalist social life. Capitalists understand that every rise in workers’ standards of living — living wages, pensions, healthful working conditions — are not only costly, but are costs that directly subtract from their profits. Thus, since workers will naturally demand such benefits, capitalists work continuously to weaken the political power of workers and unions.

For communists, class struggle is a symptom of capitalist social relations; yet they recognize that it is also a tool for working-class liberation. Their aim is to eliminate private control of the forces of production, while relocating ownership across the entire society. "Come the revolution," society will become classless. With the end of class struggle, a democratic economy is established that serves collective economic planning, and the physical and psychological well-being of workers.

Fascists place the needs of the state over all other national constituencies, including both capitalists and workers. This requires minimizing conflict between these two classes. To do this, fascists merge capitalist enterprises and unions into corporations, pairing them according to distinct economic sectors. Each corporation represents a sector of the economy wherein capitalists and labor are collectively bureaucratized, with all power vested in a state governed by an authoritarian leader.

The fascist leader principle is a relatively simple structural and operational conception, which any authoritarian state, fascist or otherwise, can implement. However, fascism couches the principle within a worldview that rejects the ideological foundations of both impotent liberal democracy and Marx's materialist sociology. [7]

...the liberal State is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results...the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State....

...Fascism [is] the complete opposite of…Marxian Socialism, the materialist conception of history of human civilization can be explained simply through the conflict of interests among the various social groups and by the change and development in the means and instruments of production...if the economic conception of history be denied, according to which theory men are no more than puppets, carried to and fro by the waves of chance, while the real directing forces are quite out of their control, it follows that the existence of an unchangeable and unchanging class-war is also denied - the natural progeny of the economic conception of history. And above all Fascism denies that class-war can be the preponderant force in the transformation of society....

To summarize, the ultimate aim of capitalism is to end class struggle by subjugating the working class. The ultimate aim of communism is to end class struggle by eliminating the capitalist class. The ultimate aim of fascism is to corporatize the capitalist class and eliminate a collectivized working class through the formation of an absolutely supreme leader and state.

Ideology: The Nasty Superman

Fascism has three ideological pillars. The first concerns mythology. Mussolini's fascism is nothing without a myth:

We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, it is passion. It is not necessary that it shall be a reality. It is a reality by the fact that it is a good, a hope, a faith, that it is courage. Our myth is the Nation, our myth is the greatness of the Nation! And to this myth, to this grandeur, that we wish to translate into a complete reality, we subordinate all the rest.[8]

The existential conception of fascism lies in an identification of a heroic people with its leader and national mythology. Consider the two fascist "philosophers" Alfred Rosenberg and Julius Evola. Rosenberg served as the Nazi Party's Commissar for the Supervision of Intellectual and Ideological Education between1933 to 1945. Among his "scholarly" accomplishments is "The Myth of the Twentieth Century,"[9] a uniquely turgid and mind-numbing justification of Nazi anti-Semitism and Aryanism. Julius Evola, one of the founders of 20th-century traditionalism, enjoyed a continuing relationship with Hitler, high-ranking Nazis, and Mussolini. He took Rosenberg's work seriously enough to critique it his "The Racist Conception of History."[10] With Mussolini, myth and tradition join: "Tradition certainly is one of the greatest spiritual forces of a people, inasmuch as it is a successive and constant creation of their soul."[11]

The second foundation of fascism involves not bigotry but nastiness, its truculence finding its roots early 20th-century futurism. Evola enjoyed a brief artistic and philosophical relationship with Filippo Marinetti's Futurist Movement. This connection is important because it exposes the second, and little remembered, ideological foundation of fascism.

Futurism speaks: [12]

...we shall extol aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the double-quick step, the somersault, the box on the ear, the fisticuff.

We wish to destroy the museum, the libraries, to fight against moralism, feminism and all opportunistic and utilitarian malignancy.

We wish to glorify War - the only health giver of the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the beautiful ideas that kill, and contempt for woman.

This political grandiloquence finds translation in five of Britt's characteristics: distain for human rights, scapegoating, hostility toward intellectuals and artists, militarism, and sexism. These attitudes and behaviors are not Trump's alone. These come from Marinetti's Futurist Aristocracy (1923), edited by the Italian Futurist Nanni Leone Castelli. Marinetti influenced Mussolini, a person many worldwide view as the epitome of the aggressive and spontaneous futurist hero.

Mussolini the futurist:[13]

The Fascist accepts life and loves it, knowing nothing of and despising suicide: he rather conceives of life as duty and struggle and conquest....

[Fascism]... repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism....war [sic] alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it.

Fascism wants man to be active and to engage in action with all his energies....[14]

For fascists, traditionalism and futurism are tools for cultural atonement, redemption, and political power. The cultural historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke[15] appreciates Evola's and Trump's ideological poison. Fascism:

 ...speaks directly to those who reject absolutely the leveling world of democracy, capitalism, multi-racialism and technology...[Traditionalists] acute sense of cultural chaos can find powerful relief in his ideal of total renewal.

It is not surprising that Steve Bannon, an Evola enthusiast and Trump's past political advisor, boasts, "I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment."[16] Bannon's Lenin isn't a Marxist, but he is a futurist.

Fascism's third necessary ideological feature is a moral "exclusive exceptionalism" in public policy and international relations, particularly justified by its traditionalist mythology. The fascist state claims the exclusive moral right to do what it wishes: no individual, group, or other nation can assert the same right.[17] Antonio Salazar, a former Portuguese prime minister and authoritarian corporatist, explains: [18]

The fascist dictatorship tends towards a pagan Caesarism, towards a state that knows no limits of a legal or moral order, which marches towards its goal without meeting complications or obstacles.

And for Adolph Hitler: [19]

It's a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command - and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad....

The Three Characteristics of American Fascism

Governance: The Fascist Presidency

Since the Civil War, America has enjoyed reasonably stable governance. It's democratic republic, separation of powers, and presidential term limits constrain the rise of tyranny. Capitalism is thoroughly imbedded in its politics, ideology, culture, and religion. It's culture celebrates freedom, democracy, multiculturalism, personal individualism, and egalitarianism; suitably framed in a comforting mythology. It's religious doctrines profess kindness, compassion, and equality among persons.

Taken together, these blessings provide Americans with a deep sense of self-identity and exceptionalism. They also offer few prospects for the rise of a hell bent authoritarian Fuhrer. Yet, for opportunists like Donald Trump, the 2016 election provided just the right circumstances for a heroic self-actualization.

Trump's fascist handler Steve Bannon has a plan. It begins by peddling a well-known TV reality superstar and billionaire entrepreneur as a national hero for the 21st century. He is marketed as a blessed, unconventional, and unrelenting savior. His operatives then inject him into a rapaciously neoliberal capitalist party. That party seizes the opportunity to both deflect growing criticism from disgruntled workers still suffering from the 2008 capitalist crisis and a ballooning wealth gap, while simultaneously safeguarding capitalist profits. Republican spin masters publicly celebrate him in their corporate media, offering him a shot at the Presidency.

Once this leader controls the executive branch, and the Republican Party takes control of the Senate and the Supreme Court, an American fascism will command absolute political authority. It can control national production and labor policy, thus removing class struggle from the political equation. This tactic takes advantage of an increasing centralization of power in the executive branch.[20] This situation is significantly different from the weak power structure at the top of the unstable Weimar Republic in 1930s Germany. Trump will exercise his authority, claiming the exclusive right to do what he wishes, and remain unaccountable. Since this impulsive and aggressive fascist leader is the incarnation of the state, all governmental policy and functions obediently follow suit. Anything or anyone getting in the way will be eliminated.

Trump is a worthy inheritor of Mussolini's political persona. His distain for human rights, scapegoating, sexism, hostility toward intellectuals, and militarism is indisputable. His immigration policy, islamophobia and racism, glorification of sexual molestation, anti-science rhetoric, and massive defense spending all herald a potential American Fuhrer.

Economy and Ideology: Steve Bannon’s 'Third-Way'[21]

Steve Bannon's fascism maximizes the operational efficiency of its governance, and coincidently the profitability of capitalism, through their fusion with the ideology of White-supremacist Christianity. The leader commands a Third Way that subjugates capitalist enterprises and labor under his control through corporations, in order to ameliorate class conflict. Capitalists in this new theo-economic state[22] will enjoy growing profits as before, as workers endure neoliberal social and labor policy that reduces their political presence. Workers will live insecure existences living on subsistence wages, fearing illness, and defaulting on their college loans. They will work more hours, save little, and receive fewer benefits.

In contrast to historical fascism, the American form benefits from an enduring capitalist program to weaken labor. Trump is elected on a day when worker participation in unions is historically low.[23] The Taft-Hartley Act, and the damage done through its original anti-communist provision, continues to block mass revolutionary efforts by workers. There are few mass demonstrations and street battles like those in Germany and Italy during the early decades of the 20th century.[24] More recently, the Supreme Court Citizen's United and "right to work" rulings impair union fund raising and organizing. Trump's truculence toward both organized labor and Wall Street is consistent with a politic that abhors class struggle.

All of this comes with Bannon's traditionalism and Judeo-Christian ethos: [25]

...look at the leaders of capitalism at that time [late 19th- through the 20th-centuries], when capitalism was I believe at its highest flower and spreading its benefits to most of mankind, almost all of those capitalists were strong believers in the Judeo-Christian West. They were either active participants in the [their] faith,...the underpinnings of their beliefs was manifested in the work they did. And I think that’s incredibly important and something that would really become unmoored....I don’t believe that our forefathers had that same belief.

...[S]hould we put a cap on wealth creation and distribution? It’s something that should be at the heart of every Christian that is a capitalist — “What is the purpose of whatever I’m doing with this wealth? What is the purpose of what I’m doing with the ability that God has given us, that divine providence has given us to actually be a creator of jobs and a creator of wealth?"

Bannon imagines America as a restored Judeo-Christian and capitalist nation with Trump as its leader. He revives and consecrates Americans as a new saintly and capitalist volk. The leader leads, and capitalists and workers reap the benefits. Value added: Everyone achieves salvation and immortality, as they are actualized in the form of the fascist state. For Bannon, "What Trump represents is a restoration — a restoration of true American capitalism and a revolution against state-sponsored socialism.[26] This restoration carries the Cross, is wrapped in the American flag, and struts to the tune of a uniquely garish form of exclusive exceptionalism. MAGA emerges as a pathologically narcissistic demon in the form of Trump's exclusive exceptionalism:

They say I have the most loyal people — did you ever see that? Where I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters. It’s like incredible.[27]

Conclusion

George Will places the intersection of futurism and fascism within the broader context of European Enlightenment:[28]

Fascism fancied itself as modernity armed — science translated into machines, especially airplanes, and pure energy restlessly seeking things to smash. Actually, it was a recoil against Enlightenment individualism: the idea that good societies allow reasoning, rights-bearing people to define for themselves the worthy life.

George Will correctly distinguishes "Trumpism" as a populist fad from communism as a political doctrine:[29]

Communism had a revolutionary doctrine; fascism was more a mood than a doctrine. It was a stance of undifferentiated truculence toward the institutions and manners of liberal democracy.

Trumpism...is a mood masquerading as a doctrine, an entertainment genre based on contempt for its bellowing audiences. Fascism was and is more interesting.

Fascism is interesting precisely because it offers a compelling doctrine, a powerful system of governance, and is doggedly persistent over time and space. But, it's also rare. Unfortunately, small samples resist generalization. Cultural, geographic, and historical variables make comparisons difficult. While Marxists understand that the boom-and-bust cycles of capitalism can lead to fascism, they don't often synchronize with other potent proto-fascist interventions. Fascism requires a unique convergence of causes and conditions. Economically, a major crisis of capitalism, significant economic distress among workers, a burgeoning wealth gap, and strong anti-union sentiments and policies prevails. There is a social climate of fear and hostility regarding vivid internal and external threats; citizens distrust distant and detached governance. They are mesmerized by a nativist and nationalist mythology energized by mythic traditions and beliefs. The spark that ignites the inferno of fascism comes as a uniquely clever and hell-bent futurist demagogue.

It is astonishing that an otherwise intelligent species would establish such profligate stupidity, wastefulness, and destructiveness as a system of governance. But it is here and continues to threaten humanity. History begs that we never forget what fascism represents, what it does, and what it takes to remove it from our presence.

Notes

[1] Jeff Jacoby, "'Never Forget,' the world said of the Holocaust. But the world is forgetting," Boston Globe, May 1, 2016, https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/04/30/never-forget-world-said-holocaust-but-world-forgetting/59cUqLNFxylkW7BDuRPgNK/story.html (accessed June 5, 2021).

[2] George Will, "The difference between Trumpism and fascism," The Washington Post, July 10, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-difference-between-trumpism-and-fascism/2020/07/09/377ae76e-c208-11ea-9fdd-b7ac6b051dc8_story.html (accessed June 8, 2021).

[3] James P. Cannon, "Fascism and the Workers' Movement," Marxist Internet Archive, Original publication March - April, 1954, The Militant, https://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1954/mar/15.htm. (accessed June 23, 2021).

[4] See Bertholt Brecht, "Fascism is the True Face of Capitalism," Off Guardian, Original publication 1935, https://off-guardian.org/2018/12/01/fascism-is-the-true-face-of-capitalism/. (accessed June 23, 2021). Ernest Lund, "Fascism Is a Product of Capitalism," Marxist Internet Archive, Original publication Labor Action September 27, 1943. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/erber/1943/09/fascism.htm. (accessed June 23, 2021).

[5] Lawrence Britt, "The 14 Characteristics of Fascism," Free Inquiry Magazine, 2003, https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.pdf (accessed June 5, 2021). See also umair, "Are Americans (Really) So Dumb They Don't Know Fascism When They See It?," Eudiamonia, April 6, 2019. https://eand.co/are-americans-really-so-dumb-they-dont-know-fascism-when-they-see-it-34cae64efa72 (accessed May 29, 2021).

[6]  "Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression," A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust, Florida Center for Instructional Technology, 2005, http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/resource/document/DOCNAC3.htm.

[7] Benito Mussolini, "What is Fascism?," Marxist Internet Archive, Reference Archive, Original publication 1932, Italian Encyclopedia, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mussolini/works/fascism.htm. (accessed September 4, 2021).

[8] Franklin Le Van Baumer, ed., Main Currents of Western Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 748.

[9] Alfred Rosenberg, "The Myth of the Twentieth Century," Internet Archive, Original publication 1930,  https://archive.org/details/the-myth-of-the-20th-century-alfred-rosenberg/mode/2up (accessed September 4, 2021).

[10] Andrew Joyce, "Review: Julius Evola's 'Myth of the Blood: The Genesis of Racialism,'" Occidental Observer, September 18, 2018, https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2018/09/18/review-the-myth-of-the-blood-the-genesis-of-racialism/ (accessed June 9, 2021).

[11] Benito Mussolini, "The Doctrine of Fascism (1932)," World Future Fund, http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Germany/mussolini.htm (accessed September 10, 2021).

[12] N. L. Castelli, ed., Futurist Aristocracy (Rome: Prampolini, 1923).

[13] Le Van Baumer, op. cit.

[14] Mussolini, "The Doctrine of Fascism (1932)."

[15] Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2001).

[16] Seth Millstein, "13 Quotes From Steve Bannon That Show The Toxic Worldview He Took To The White House," Bustle, August 18, 2017,

https://www.bustle.com/p/13-steve-bannon-quotes-that-paint-a-diabolical-worldview-he-took-to-the-white-house-77612  (accessed May 24. 2021).

[17] Charles L. Stevenson, "Value-Judgments: Their Implicit Generality," in Ethical Theory in the last quarter of the twentieth century, ed. Norman E. Bowie (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 13 - 37.

[18] "Corporatism," Wikipedia, Wikipedia Foundation, August 30, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism.

[19] Louis Paul Lochner, What About Germany? (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1943), 11–12.

[20] "The Concept of the Imperial Presidency," UKEssays, May 16, 2017,  https://www.ukessays.com/essays/politics/the-concept-of-the-imperial-presidency-politics-essay.php (accessed September 6, 2021).

[21] Here, I allude to the fascist self-branding of being fundamentally opposed to both capitalism and socialism, offering a third way of social organization. See Roger Eatwell, "The Oxford Dictionary of Political Ideologies," Oxford Handbooks Online, edited by Michael Freeden and Marc Stears, December 2013,

https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199585977.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199585977-e-009 (accessed September 6, 2021).

[22] Jennifer A. Quigley, Divine Accounting: Theo-Economics in Early Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021).

[23] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2016 Union Membership In The United States, https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2016/union-membership-in-the-united-states/pdf/union-membership-in-the-united-states.pdf. (accessed September 6, 2021).

[24] Mack Harden, "What is Taft-Hartley and Why Is It Bad?," Emergency Workplace Organizing, April 5, 2021, https://workerorganizing.org/what-is-taft-hartley-and-why-is-it-bad-1291/. (accessed September 6, 2021).

[25] J. Lester Feder, "This Is How Steve Bannon Sees The Entire World," November 16, 2016, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world (accessed June 8, 2021).

[26] James Hohmann, "The Daily 202: Bannon will be the id, Priebus the super-ego in Trump’s White House," The Washington Post, November 14, 2016,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2016/11/14/daily-202-bannon-will-be-the-id-priebus-the-super-ego-in-trump-s-white-house/58292237e9b69b6085905df2/ (accessed May 31, 2021).

[27] Katie Reilly, "Donald Trump Says He 'Could Shoot Somebody' and Not Lose Voters," Time, January 23, 2016,

https://time.com/4191598/donald-trump-says-he-could-shoot-somebody-and-not-lose-voters/ (accessed May 21, 2021).

[28] Will, op. cit.

[29] Ibid.

Power Systems, Propaganda, and the Maintenance of Exploitation

 By Marcus Kahn

In biology class, I was taught that structure determines function. The respiratory system has a lot of surface area (structure) to absorb and distribute oxygen (function). The lungs may be built of the same basic substance as other parts of the body (carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, etc.) but the structural arrangement at an atomic, molecular, and cellular level determines how the larger system behaves. A sword and a scalpel may be built of the same metal, but they are designed and structured to accomplish completely different tasks.

With this in mind, we should evaluate the function of our existing power system according to its structure and determine what it is designed to accomplish. This involves stripping away its rhetoric and self-image, looking at the distribution of decision-making power, and determining whether the system is capable of being reformed into something fair and equitable, or whether it’s a sword that needs to be melted down and transformed using the same basic substances, people and law.

A democratic power system seeks to give everyone an equal voice in collective decisions, rooted in the underlying assumption that such a system of governance would tend towards justice and prosperity. If the atoms are horizontally structured through laws that provide equal access to decision-making, this will lead to an equitable distribution of resources and opportunity. If the system is hierarchically structured and decision-making emanates from the top, the system will function exploitatively to the benefit of those in power. Democratic (bottom-up flow of decision-making) and authoritarian (top-down flow of decision-making) power systems may be built of the same basic substance (people and rules to govern their behavior), but their differing structures determine who they ultimately serve. When decision-making power is concentrated in the hands of a few, a small minority becomes capable of systematically defending their interests by creating law and enforcing it through legally sanctioned violence.

There are examples of concentrated power in monarchies and theocracies throughout history whereby the labor of the majority is exploited for the profit of the powerful few, at the cost of human life and the ability to control that life. The ‘special interests’ of the powerful minority not only differ from the interests of the vast majority of the population. Their achievement depends on popular submission to the will of those in power. But popular submission to an exploitative power system is no easy task. It is difficult to convince people to work for you and hand over the fruits of their labor, whether that’s years of unpaid childcare or ten hours a day behind a desk. Power systems require a parallel system of belief to accomplish what they can’t enforce physically. You need to convince a substantial portion of the population, as well as yourself, that you are justified in dictating their behavior and demanding their obedience.

The way exploitative power systems are justified can usefully be termed as the ‘dominant ideology’ in a given society. Dominant ideologies have varied across time and geopolitical situation. In 14th century England you might have someone holding up a bible to justify taxing landless peasants, meanwhile an Aztec priest is across the ocean telling everyone why his divine right to rule justifies economic inequality and social control. In the more secular modern age, the dominant ideology has taken on a global and comparatively homogenous character. The modern dominant ideology, (the belief system that justifies exploitation) can be conceptually divided into four interdependent categories based off their inherent properties and historical development; patriarchy (oppression justified by gender and sexuality), state-corporate capitalism (oppression justified by property rights), imperialism (oppression justified by nationality) and white supremacy (oppression justified by perceived race).

History rarely provides neat watersheds, but much of their development and form can be explained by the residual power of fundamentalist religion, the ‘discovery’ of the New World and corresponding racist-imperialist colonial systems that extended from western Europe beginning in the 16th century, and the crystallization of the state-corporate capitalist economic system through the growth of multinational corporations and massive financial institutions since the late 19th century, accelerated after WWII and enforced by powerful Western nations, primarily U.S. military and economic power.

These forms of oppression are deeply interlinked, backed by the threat and execution of lawful violence, and justified by information distributed from powerful institutions directed by men, billionaires, powerful nations, and white people, most potently all four wrapped into one person like Zuckerberg, Bloomberg, Jobs, Bezos, Murdoch, Gates, or Trump.

The means of reproducing and distributing the dominant ideology changes in tandem with technological advances. The modern development of mass information distribution systems (e.g. standardized education, corporate mass media, the public relations and advertising industries, and more recently the Internet) has given a tiny minority historically unprecedented influence over the information people receive, and therefore how they behave. If people clearly understand universal rights to freedom, health, safety, and sustenance they will resist laws, ideas, and people that oppose those rights. If they pledge allegiance to a nationalist symbol before absorbing thirteen years of revisionist history or read the same newspaper every day, they are much more likely to uphold the existing power system because they are convinced it’s the right thing to do. In its essence, what has developed over the past century is a highly sophisticated propaganda system whose ideological production is distributed among powerful institutions in the public and private sectors. These institutions are controlled by a class of individuals who share similar, though not always identical interests.

The label ‘propaganda system’ may seem counterintuitive. When we hear the word ‘propaganda’ we tend to picture a tightly coordinated and centralized government-run agency that distributes pamphlets, radio broadcasts, etc. Chomsky notes an inverse relationship between a state’s ability to use violence on its own population, and the sophistication of the propaganda system in place. The more authoritarian the power system is, the more rudimentary its propaganda, the more democratic the more sophisticated. Within so-called “free” societies like the U.K. and the U.S., violence is not always an easy option for maintaining power. Through popular struggles over the centuries, these societies have made some limited progress in securing legal protections against state-sanctioned violence, and those in power have had to find new ways to ensure obedience.

This sincere fear of public disobedience and interference in public policy has been referred to as the ‘threat of democracy’ or more recently the ‘crisis of democracy’. But the need to structurally marginalize public influence is a priority James Madison understood when designing a constitutional framework put in place to protect the interests of the ‘minority of the opulent’, and a phenomenon those in power in the 1960s and 70s understood when facing popular resistance in the form of the civil rights, anti-war, labor, and feminist movements. In response to this threat, and enabled by developments in communications technology, those with a vested interest in maintaining and furthering the existing power system established control over new means of mass information distribution to marshal public behavior without the use of force and ‘manufacture consent’ for exploitative public policy.

This system of ideological control is not centrally coordinated or even fully understood by those who participate. Executives at ABC (Disney) and NBC (General Electric) do not call each other to compare notes on how to oppress the working class. But those with ultimate decision-making power atop these rigidly structured and powerful institutions (mostly rich white men from powerful countries) share similar interests on a range of public policy issues and independently manufacture a limited range of debate that tries to ignore or vilify ideas and people that threaten their power. Though slight variations in tactics and opinion reflect the distribution of power amongst distinct institutions, the output of corporate mass media institutions is ideologically consistent due to hierarchical and undemocratic internal structures, and is also influenced by mutualistic relationships with other centers of concentrated power (e.g. a government that supplies fresh official information or the corporate advertisers who help pay the bills). These inherent structural pressures orient public discourse towards the interests of the powerful.

Corporate media institutions help to reframe critical issues that have attracted popular concern such as climate change, wealth distribution, military intervention, health care, and police power in ways that maintain the integrity of the power system and ensure the continued exploitation of the global population for private gain without meaningful public interference. By appealing to widespread dissatisfaction and perhaps themselves using the language of ‘reform’, those with power avoid addressing the need for transformative deconstruction and the institution of democratic structures of governance that are upheld by popular consent and dictated by collective decision-making rather than violence and ideological management.

The Unbearable Emptiness of Voting

By Roger Williams

Election season makes me feel like the kid who doesn’t have a stuffed animal on “bring your teddy bear to school” day. Everyone else has a favorite who they can tell good stories about and cuddle with, but I don’t so I feel left out. But then I remember that there are good reasons to resist getting pulled down by the undertow of elections.

Like cute stuffed animals, politicians make people feel good while having a marginal effect on positive social change. The main differences between stuffed animals and politicians are that 1) stuffed animals are actually cuddly, and 2) people don’t invest vast amounts of political hope and agency in stuffed animals. I recognize that arguing against what many people hold dear makes me kind of a grump, but I at least aspire to be one who is not stuck in idle criticism but is proposing alternative ideas. The particular variety of grumpiness that I espouse is one grounded in grassroots social movements that focus on direct action independent of party politics.

The prickly issue of politicians relates fundamentally to questions of the leftist orientation to the state. The cheery reformer smiles big and promises to make the system work for you. The grouchy revolutionary rolls their eyes and gets back to trying to transform the system from the ground up. The recent prominence of social democratic politicians on the left, like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has provided a big platform for the cheery reformers to make their case to the public. They speak of universal healthcare, free college, and many other nice things.

What of the curmudgeons? In rejecting electoralism do they abhor healthcare and cherish student debt? Do they ignore the plight of the masses by focusing only on long-term goals at the expense of the need for immediate material reforms? Are the grouches ruining socialism? As a card-carrying grouch myself, let me soothe your fears and dispel some mistaken notions about political crankiness.

First, grouches like free and universal health care as much as starry-eyed reformers. It’s just that the grumps think that running election campaigns are a much less effective strategy to secure positive reforms. The grouches drastically de-center voting and object to giving time or money to political candidates and instead focus on building grassroots organization to be able to take mass disruptive actions like work stoppages and civil disobedience to win demands. Second, while less the focus of this article, building grassroots social movements is the only way to increase raw working class power that makes more complete social transformation possible in the long-term.

Granted, the state is an enigmatic beast, and politicians are strange and unwitting creatures. The level of discourse in movement spaces about the merits of electoral strategy often regrettably devolves into sparring aphorisms such as “all politicians are sellouts”, “we can’t ignore political power”, “The Democratic Party is the graveyard of social movements”, “Do you want Trump to win?”

This essay attempts to spell out the revolutionary grump’s critique of electoralism by showing how the institutions of voting, election campaigns, and politicians make citizens into political bystanders and undermine their ability to effectively implement popular reforms. These critiques are distinct from but complimentary to the much more widespread objections of how electoral politics under capitalism are dominated by the wealthy through corporate lobbying and shady campaign funding. I contend here that such movements comprise the true architecture of positive social change that lies behind the shimmering facade of electoralism.

Representative democracy? Harumph

The ideal of representative democracy is that elected officials govern in the interests of the population or at least in the interests of their constituents and voters. In practice, there is an immense gap found between polls of public opinion and existing policy. The reformers think the state can be fixed and made to embody the public interest, while the revolutionaries are unconvinced. Before getting to the heart of the critique of electoralism, it’s worth briefly reviewing the evidence that our government does not embody the democratic rule of the people.

In a recent paper, political scientists Miles Gilens and Benjamin I. Page perform a large-scale quantitative analysis of public opinion data compared to legislative policy and conclude “that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens.. have little or no independent influence.”

To take just one important example, why is the US the only wealthy industrialized country in the world that doesn’t offer universal healthcare? From 2008-10, the only time when major healthcare reform seriously made it on the table in over 50 years, 77% of Americans polled said that it was the government’s responsibility that everyone’s basic healthcare needs be met, 73% supported a public option for the government to compete with private insurance plans, and 60-70% across a series of polls showed support for single-payer healthcare.

The resulting Affordable Care Act produced none of these basic and overwhelmingly popular reforms. Instead, the continued defectiveness of our healthcare system is evident today with 30 million Americans still lacking health insurance, 44 million additional Americans remaining under-insured, and an average of 20% of all people with health insurance forgoing or delaying treatment each year for a “serious condition” because of high costs. Healthcare offers a stark illustration of the public opinion-policy gap, but similar discrepancies can be found across the most important policies in the country, including defense spending and wars, higher education funding, and climate change.

Despite the insistence by some that the high school civics class theory of politics holds true, most Americans have a pretty low (and perhaps accurate) estimate of the quality of our governing institutions. Public approval for Congress over the recent decades has mostly oscillated between 10-30% and only 34% of Americans think the two major parties adequately represent the people.

While public opinion data alone provides neither a sufficient analysis nor a coherent vision for leftist politics, it’s often considerably more reasonable than the policies actually in place and provides a useful starting point for understanding the inequalities of power in society. That voting for mainstream politicians as a way to implement popular policies is not what it’s advertised to be is the unifying starting point for the buoyant reformer and grave revolutionary alike. That voting can not be fixed is the less obvious but central thrust of the grump’s grumpiness.

Voting? Phooey

Voting is a tactic for creating social change that involves expending virtually no effort. Yet, the common-sense notion that if you want something you have to work for it holds true in the realm of social change as much as anywhere else. When people tell me that all (or much of what) we need to do to change the world is check a box for a few minutes at a time once every 2-4 years, I wonder how that actually works. The pen may at times be mightier than the sword, but is the fill-in-the-bubble quiz called a ‘ballot’ really mightier than all of society’s billionaires, militarism, structural racism, and gender violence?

“But what about all the deliberation, debate, and discourse that goes into voting? Surely that’s an effortful endeavor?” Surely, but deliberation, debate, and discourse are prerequisites for political action of any kind, so the only distinguishing feature of voting is that the act itself requires no effort.

“But by engaging in debate with others and also encouraging people to vote, doesn’t voting then become a kind of mass collective action that’s exactly what’s needed to change society?” Mass collective action is not inherently progressive or effective, even if collective action of a certain kind is precisely what’s needed to create social change. I find little conceptual distinction between the millions of people who buy Coca-Cola (over the greater evil of Pepsi) every day as a collective action from those millions who vote. Individuals buying and drinking Coca-Cola is not the cause of society’s problems, but neither is it the solution. If anything, millions of people acting as mere aggregated sums through the institutions of the status quo is a prime way the status quo is perpetuated, not challenged.

“But don’t we need some way for the population to interface with governing institutions to influence their functioning and to ensure that they are run according to the desires of the citizens?” Yes, but the best way to make that mode of interfacing as meaningless as possible is to make the form of interaction between the government and the citizens as narrow as possible, such as voting. I agree that we need to interface with existing governing institutions, but voting is the least effective way of doing so.

“But if we don’t vote, the bad guys will take over!” Scaring people into voting is no way to create change nor prevent disaster but rather glosses over deeper problems of the political system that voting doesn’t address. However, for those who truly believe some politician is not as bad as the other one, it’s not that I disagree. Despite my many grumblings, I don’t insist that voting is entirely futile, just that it’s mostly so. If you think it’s worth the minuscule effort, go for it and don’t feel bad about it. I’m just critical of the widespread belief that voting will have more of a positive effect than a normal effort-to-reward calculus would indicate. The degree that voting is overvalued as a form of political engagement is the degree it displaces other more effective forms and forestalls social change.

“People died for the vote.” More than just that, they fought for the vote. The point that people fought and died for the vote and then won is less an argument about how voting is the most important thing. Rather, it’s more an argument that when people expend effort to build social movements to fight for a better world, then they win things.

“Social movements aren’t magic pixie dust that you can just sprinkle on every social-historical problem and expect it to go away.” As a tentative definition of social movements to ground these critiques of electoralism, let’s try this: Social movements are rooted in webs of mass-oriented organizations that build bases in communities and move with those communities towards direct action that disrupts the status quo, such as the strikes of the 1930s labor movement and the mass civil disobedience of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. They are characterized by a disconnect between official policy and shifting popular sentiments, where a significant (but not necessarily majority) degree of public sympathy gives mass actions legitimacy. Such mass action is channeled towards those in power demanding that they alter formal policy but also is channeled towards the base by reshaping ideas and practices of political agency and self-determination.

So are social movements magic pixie dust? “Yes” in that they actually are the source of past positive social change and have the potential to create such change in the future, but “No” in that they are in any sense a cheap short-cut. Social movements take a lot of work, but it’s the actual work of making a difference. Voting, on the other hand, might more fully be characterized as magical in that it doesn’t have any real-world effect of its own and its presumed consequences are based on misperception.

Elections? Bah humbug

There’s a number of defining elements of electoral campaigns that are inimical to social change. These elements are the same ones that corporations use to create markets of passive consumers focused around brand identities, shallow exchange transactions, and individualized consumption.

Every political campaign relies on constructing a branded cult of personality around a candidate. Because sound-bites are an inadequate medium for presenting policy ideas, political campaigns come to revolve more around a candidate’s personality than their policy proposals and political records. This isn’t the fault of any individual politician; it’s the logic that all political campaigns have to apply if they want to maximize their appeal and exposure to fit the requirements of using mass media.

So the vast majority of voters come to know a politician through a picture of their smile as plastered across mailers and TV ads, a couple slogans like “tough on crime” or “tax the rich”, and a few labels such as “experienced”, “outsider”, “bipartisan”, “progressive”, “movement-oriented”, and so on. This political packaging comes to stand in for actual policy records and political relationships that might be indicative of future governance. Biden’s recent presidential campaign had little to say about his role in financial deregulation that paved the way for the 2008/9 financial collapse or the 1994 Crime Bill that helped super-charge mass incarceration. While I am more sympathetic to many of Bernie Sanders’ policy proposals, his campaign ads certainly didn’t focus on some of the less flattering parts of his political record, such as his past symbiotic relationship with an arms manufacturer or close friendship and political alliance with a Vermont billionaire developer. As corporations know very well, the best way to maximize appeal and exposure to mass markets (millions of voters are treated like millions of any other kind of customer) is to build a brand around a simple object that is injected with surface-level emotional appeal, however loosely that is tied to the rational interests of the consumer.

The most devious and disastrous aspect of the individualizing nature of the election campaign is that it encourages people to outsource their political agency to a politician. It’s the politician who has to promise they’ll fix things, and the citizens come to see themselves as largely passive consumers whose only meaningful participation is choosing one political brand over another. All of the laziness entailed in merely voting is converted into a mindset that it’s the politician’s responsibility, and not ours, to fix things. Rather than expressions of the general will of the citizenry, elections are mass disavowals of political responsibility.

Since the vote itself is such a narrow form of political engagement, and it’s the quantity of votes that determines the victor of the contest, election campaigns are organized around maximizing narrow engagement. A former long-time political campaign consultant commented:

[Obama for America (OFA)] organizers would often counsel campaign volunteers to stay away from engaging in discussions about specific issues and instead focus on sharing the “story of self,” the “story of us,” and the “story of now.” This methodology is intended to engage the prospective voter at an affective level much like a 12-step group speaker or a born-again Christian sharing her story of how she found Jesus…. I am critical of the manner that OFA used [this] methodology to short-circuit a perfectly legitimate way of facilitating the raising of critical consciousness (a long-term proposition) for the short-sighted aim of mobilizing the electorate for an election-night win.

The democracy-lessness of such frothy conversation has also been studied academically, as this study found that TV ads, campaign mail, and even the gold standard of door-to-door canvassing in the context of an election campaign were found to have virtually no persuasive effect on changing people’s minds about candidates or issues. The only thing it does have an effect on is the likelihood that the person will show up at the polling station on election day. This makes the dominant interface between election campaigns and citizens into a short-term transaction to get a commitment from someone that they’ll vote, just as corporations need to get you to the cash register or the Amazon check-out page. This kind of shallow interaction with complex issues as the primary form of campaign communication displaces institutional possibilities for deeper intellectual engagement with and political organizing around issues.

The other dominant form of “action” around political campaigns is the rally. Like voting, attending political rallies doesn’t involve much active participation. Whether it’s the candidate themselves or one of their surrogates who’s speaking, attendees typically sit or stand around for an hour or two while somebody talks at them. The content of the rally is typically an embellished verbalizing of the politician’s platform decorated with the occasional jab at rival candidates. This kind of event further encourages the projection of values and hopes onto an aspiring public servant who “does stuff” while the citizen-voter doesn’t have to.

The fact that electoral campaigns happen in short bursts in between long intervals of 2-4 years means that the infrastructure formed around these political candidates is fleeting and ill-suited for creating meaningful change. Furthermore, all the other groups and communities that get sucked into electioneering see their primary concerns and activities momentarily shoved aside while getting so-and-so into City Hall or the White House is prioritized.

An example from my personal experience comes from time I spent in 2013-14 in Occupy Homes Minnesota (OHMN), an anti-eviction group that used direct action to keep banks and sheriffs from forcibly taking people’s houses. When a local socialist ran for a seat on the city council and claimed to be a part of the grassroots movement, much of the paid and unpaid leadership of OHMN diverted resources away from home defense and towards neighborhood canvassing for his election, depriving the org of much of what it needed to actually fight off the banks in a tense period when eviction rates were still high. The candidate ended up losing, but that hardly mattered as the OHMN leadership’s decision to neglect its own mission and base for a few crucial months severely weakened an already struggling group. The organization collapsed and dissolved shortly after.

Politicians? Baloney

Just as the market is only one part of the economy over which corporations wield power, so are election campaigns just one stage of the life-cycle of the politician where leftist forces are systematically weakened. Even when the less shitty politician does win the election, they are immediately put under the extreme constraints of trying to govern in a capitalist society and many of their campaign promises are instantly hollowed out despite a politician’s best intentions.

While far from a radical platform, Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign literature sounds surprisingly progressive with his message of expanding many social programs, reforming the health care system and making health care a “right”, and taxing the rich. A few days before Clinton’s inauguration, his chief economic advisor Robert Rubin, a former co-chairman of the board of Goldman Sachs, and Federal Reserve head Alan Greenspan, a committed Ayn Rand acolyte, told Clinton that the budget deficit was too big and that the only way to avert a debt crisis was to slash government spending, causing him to temper some campaign promises and reverse others. In 2008 Obama campaigned on a popular message of getting people through the deepest economic recession in 80 years, but upon entering office he bailed out the banks and corporations while barely lifting a finger to save homeowners or aid the unemployed.

While we’ve come to expect such disappointment from Democrats, the same dynamic plays out repeatedly among socialist politicians in advanced capitalist countries. In France, Socialist Party President Francois Hollande won the presidency in 2012 on a message of anti-austerity reform, but upon entering office and even having a majority in parliament, turned around and cut corporate taxes and slashed social spending. Before him, France’s other most recent socialist president Francois Mitterand (1981-95) attempted to implement steep reforms early in his first term but then under pressure from international finance and a lagging economy he instituted a nation-wide wage-freeze, cut social spending, and came to symbolize the normalization of austerity within formerly left European political parties.

The Greek Socialist Party Syriza’s time in power from 2015-19 is perhaps the most famous illustration of the abject failure of left politics in the electoral arena, as it repeatedly caved to austerity demands of the European Union, gouging out social programs and privatizing many of Greece’s public assets. The social democracies of Northern Europe have been in retreat since the 1970s as social democratic parties make concessions to austerity and are increasingly losing parliament seats to centrist and even right-wing parties, turning their backs on the social movements that provided the pressure that led to their enviable social programs in the first place. While socialist politicians and political parties have never really controlled governments in the US to the extent they have occasionally in European countries, the evidence across the pond suggests that even if socialists were able to take over the US government, only disappointment would follow.

While the electoral contest tends to reward those who highlight style over substance, at bottom it’s not an issue of a politician’s individual moral integrity but rather of the way the whole electoral and political system is constructed to remove as far as possible the vote from actual governance in the form of determining and implementing policy. Despite good intentions, politicians have given socialism a bad name.

Political parties? Pffft

“If a politician betrays their constituents, they’ll vote them out and get someone who truly represents them.”

That sounds reasonable, but there are a number of reasons this is ineffective as a lever of meaningful democracy. First, with most terms of political office lasting 4 years, that’s a tremendously long time to wait and for politicians to have free reign before they’re “voted out next time”. Second, there’s no official way in the US for citizens to directly recall politicians. There are highly bureaucratic and lengthy methods for other politicians to unseat a particular politician, but they are very rarely used and almost always for scandals instead of the routine betrayal of the very campaign promises that got them elected in the first place. Lastly, politicians aren’t stand-alone agents but belong to political parties whose interests they are both beholden to and charged with safeguarding, and these political parties exert strong control especially within a rigid two-party system. More often than not, if one politician goes away there’s a “next-in-line” who’s not substantially different because the party is a moderating force. Think of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden coming after Obama, all of whom advocate largely the same unpopular policies, such as private health insurance.

“But people also choose which politicians stand for election through primaries and caucuses, ensuring democratic principles are maintained.”

The further one gets away from general elections and into intra-party politics, the deeper one gets into other mechanisms for choking democracy, such gatekeeping, rules-manipulation, and back-door dealing. Sure, a few committed super-citizens can go to every caucus meeting and try to out-politic the entrenched politicking careerists, but the deck is stacked here as it is at every other level of the process. It’s a lonely path as the further you go into the machine the further you get from the actual communities you live and work in.

“But this is where politics happens and so this is the necessary terrain of struggle. You have to struggle somewhere, and the deck is stacked everywhere, so why not direct our efforts at the parties that control the government?”

The labyrinth backwaters of political parties are where a certain kind of politics happens, but it’s an elite kind of politics, where functionaries compete for the approval of party funders and power-brokers. Occasionally an insurgent politician can make it through the maze and get into office, but what alternative forms of politics are sacrificed in the process?

Grassroots social movements focus their politics in the workplaces, the neighborhoods, and the streets. These are the spaces and communities where people are rooted, where their relationships are organic, and where the exercise of power is most impactful. Unions, strikes, community groups, pressure campaigns, civil disobedience, these are the forms and tactics of and for the grassroots. Yes, much of this power needs to be directed at political parties and the government, but it’s more effective to do so from the outside where grassroots movements find fertile soil rather than from inside where the toxic sludge corrodes all it touches.

Social movements? Aww man, do we have to?

“All of the good policies that have come into the world were by definition written into law by some politicians at some point, right? What was it those politicians did that we need our politicians to do today?”

That’s true. But if our purpose is to answer the bigger question of how to make the world a better place and not to confine ourselves to smaller questions of which politician to praise and vote for, then we have to re-frame things. Do politicians cause social change? They’re a part of the overall vehicle of social change, but are they a major and irreplaceable part like the engine or a minor and interchangeable part like the ashtray?

The conjuring trick here is that politicians make it look like they do most of the work that leads to policy change. When a popular policy is passed they get a photo op and put pen to paper though it was actually the hard work and struggle of thousands of community activists that actually made the policy possible. Politicians are paid fine salaries and benefits, get their own offices in fancy buildings, and receive a lion’s share of the credit when something positive happens. Grassroots organizers are often acting without being paid for it, doing so in much less glamorous settings, facing much higher risks, and are mostly nameless and faceless outside of the communities they are fighting alongside. Despite appearances, whether a politician works hard or not has negligible influence on policy outcomes compared to the vibrancy of the social movement and the communities where 99.9% of the actual important work gets done.

Consider two pivotal moments that fundamentally altered social relations in the US and led to era-defining legislation on labor unions and civil rights. The labor movement didn’t acquire rights by voting for politicians to give them rights: Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidential campaign in 1933 didn’t even mention worker rights, he supported an auto industry proposal in March 1934 that allowed company-run worker “unions”, and even refused to endorse Senator Robert Wagner’s collective bargaining legislation circulating in Congress in early 1934. Roosevelt’s labor secretary Frances Perkins said, “I’d rather get a law than organize a union” to address worker grievances and keep them from striking, preferring paternalistic government over the idea of allowing workers to have their own independent organization and power. Only after the largest sustained strike wave in US history rocked the country in mid-1934 and was threatening to go even bigger in what was already a crisis of profit of the Great Depression were major concessions granted for union rights in the National Labor Relations Act signed by Roosevelt in 1935.

It wasn’t the politicians who led the charge that resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but rather a social movement of community activists in the black freedom movement. Before becoming president and signing those bills, Lyndon B. Johnson spent two decades as a reliable pro-segregationist congressman of the Southern Democratic faction and was known for using the n-word profusely. Upon entering national politics, where he’d have to appeal to a broader social base than was needed to be elected as a Texas congressman, black social movements had by then shifted the national consciousness on race to the degree that he needed to become more tolerant publicly and willing to compromise with movement demands. Even then, Johnson was constantly at odds with civil rights leaders over the timing and priorities of these pieces of legislation.

In contrast, what’s notable about the failure of European socialist politicians mentioned above in the period from the 1970s to the present is that there were not social mobilizations and uprisings comparable to earlier periods of the 1930s and 1960s. That lack of robust popular struggle independent of the state is largely responsible for the failures of European socialist politics of the last 50 years.

While it may not be uniquely the fault of socialist politicians that there weren’t ground-shaking social movements in the streets during their time in power, radical politicians have always helped foster the superstition that elections are an important and essential part of social change, thus directing away emphasis and energy from grassroots activity. Every social gain and loss can be summarized in the same broad strokes, where politicians always have played bit parts behind the lead of mass movements.

“Well, you’re just describing the worst parts of elections, but not all politicians have to use that playbook. Good politicians can run campaigns in a way that uses only the good and none of the bad.”

While political campaigns that look and feel like a McDonald's ad campaign are the norm, certainly some politicians have tried to break the mold to be a “different” and “good” politician. They try to focus on deep rather than shallow engagement, to center ideas about society and policy instead of surface-level emotional manipulation, to emphasize longer-term engagement and give people meaningful ways to participate beyond merely voting. But do these politicians ever succeed in living up to this ideal?

“But shouldn’t we keep trying til we get it right?”

That’s what a lot of people will do. But there’s an alternative. If we take the prototype of the bad electoral campaign and turn it inside-out by doing exactly the opposite of everything that’s bad about them, what we end up with is not a good political campaign but rather a grassroots social movement without the unavoidable electoral focus on elevating a single person’s ideas and character and without succumbing to the pressures placed on us by playing by the rules of pacifying state institutions.

There’s obviously a wide spectrum of opinion on how useful politicians are. Kind of like my arguments above about voting, I don’t think politicians are in themselves bad and I recognize that occasionally they can have a small effect on things. But just like many people see voting as the most important part of social change and I see it as among the least important parts of social change, so many see politicians as the most important factors of social change and I see them as among the least important factors. Despite my crankiness I’m not anti-politician in the strict sense that I think they’re bad people as individuals, I just can’t discover any historical evidence or theoretical argument to be pro-politician either.

“But can’t we combine the best elements of social movements with the best elements of political campaigns and do them together?”

Certainly politicians that want to present themselves in a progressive light will try to attach themselves to social movements and will say that they are part of the movement. But if the arguments presented here have any validity, electoral campaigns have almost nothing to add to social movements because social movements are already all the good things we want and need to create social change.

Each element of an election campaign is just a worse version of that element of a social movement: Elevating the individual politician vs. community agency; the narrow engagement of the vote vs. kinds of community engagement and collective action needed to disrupt the status quo and win demands; investing resources in political ad campaigns vs. grassroots organizational infrastructure and support; etc… No matter how much a politician tries to be the exception, there are underlying institutional pressures baked into the rules of the game for electoral campaigns that are of a fundamentally opposite nature to the best practices needed to build effective grassroots movements.

Of course, left politicians are aware of anti-electoral sentiments, and so they, without fail, will claim that they’re “community-oriented”, “a servant of the people,” “in it for the right reasons”, “committed to social movements”, and so on. Or to take a famous recent campaign slogan, “Not me, us.” Good intentions aside, that’s not how elections work. Politicians get people to give them thousands or millions of dollars for staff and campaign ads about them and ask everyone to give them access to immense state power for which there are few formal mechanisms of accountability to voters.

I’m not claiming these politicians are Machiavellian but just that by trying to squeeze the rhetoric of a social movement within an electoral campaign they end up losing all the parts of a social movement that make it meaningful and then succumb to all of the authoritarian forces that make government slimy and coercive. I can recognize that not all politicians are the same, but I can also recognize that they are all seeking entry into the same political system and are subject to all the same constraints. Social movements, on the other hand, are the dominant form that democratic politics takes outside of the state and are the major determinant of the constraints within which all politicians operate.

“But we need state power to allocate resources. That’s why we need to run politicians so that they can work the inside track while we work the outside track.”

If politicians caused good policy, this would be sensible. But just as prominent examples were noted above of supposedly better or left politicians doing bad things in office, there are plenty of examples of politicians rightly considered bad by the left being forced into doing good things. That Republican Dwight Eisenhower’s political platform in 1956 contains striking similarities with Bernie Sanders’ in 2020 is not because Eisenhower was a radical but because the social movements that created the best of the New Deal reforms, many of which remained wildly popular, circumscribed the political boundaries that all politicians had to act within. The difference between Eisenhower winning in 1956 and Bernie losing in 2020 is far less an illustration of individual political acumen or ineptitude but of the relative power of social movements in those eras.

That Richard Nixon spent his first years as president in the late 1960s trying to pass a version of universal basic income which would have been the largest redistribution of wealth to the poorest citizens in US history is not because old Dick had a big heart, but because he was staring down the largest and most militant social movements since the 1930s and needed to pander to and compromise with more radical demands. That Nixon also created the Environmental Protection Agency via executive order and signed the act that created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is again a tribute to the grassroots activists of the 1960s and 70s and has little to do with Nixon’s personal qualities as a politician. Once again, social movements are the dominant, short-term, and long-term cause of better policy, to which politicians are not even second fiddle but perhaps the ninth or tenth.

Even though the historical examples I draw from are mostly at the federal level, it’s merely for the convenience of using widely known reference points. Against the claim that one can have more of an effect on policy by engaging elections at the local level, all of the anti-electoral arguments made here apply equally to all levels of government because, despite differences in scale, the mechanisms and elements of elections are largely the same (voter as passive consumer, politicians as corporate brands). School boards are one of the most local levels of government and the school board members in my city almost all belong to the same party and yet routinely violate their own stated principles on issues such as school privatization and unions. When local activists and groups have mobilized and shut down meetings in protest, school board members have consistently caved to grassroots pressure and reversed their votes.

Just because I don’t think leftists should focus on elections doesn’t mean there won’t always be a constantly replenishing pool of political candidates maneuvering to be the next social movement darling. If you, like me, can’t entirely erase the notion that politicians have some effect, even if very small, there’s still no reason to invest energy in politicians. Left politicians need social movements but social movements don’t need politicians. If social movements are strong, politicians will come begging for support and will consult movements for fear of incurring their wrath. Social movements don’t have to give anything up in return for this or that politician doing what social movements demand.

In summary, social movements are not only the cause of good policy, but obedient left politicians are a side-effect of strong, independent social movements anyway. Social movements should focus on building a base and moving towards collective disruptive action, and if politicians want to tag along they can but social movements shouldn’t divert any of their precious attention away from their true object.

Social Movements? Ugh, okay fine

Many people see general critiques of politicians as valid but still maintain that sometimes there are some good politicians worth supporting. As I said above, I’m not inherently anti-politician when looking at the individual themselves. But here’s the rub: leftist forces in society have a limited amount of resources to put into efforts for social change, and so the campaigns of politicians compete directly with grassroots organizations for volunteer time and donations.

While not anti-politician at an individual level, I’m anti-giving resources to election campaigns of politicians at the social level because politicians will always be less effective at creating change than social movements. This point belies the common excuse made for electoralism as a form of harm reduction. If harm reduction is supposed to have a positive net effect by decreasing the amount of bad in the world, actual harm reduction would come from engaging social movements because only they are actually effective.

I don’t consider a vote a resource at any meaningful level because voting takes so little effort, and so I’m not against voting for politicians because you think one’s better than another. But when it comes to actual resources, every donation or afternoon committed to social movements will do more to shift the balance of power in society to create change than commitment to a political campaign can do.

“But power! You’re forgetting power! If political office were so ineffectual why do politicians wield so much power?”

It may seem confusing that politicians both have lots of power and are virtually useless at creating positive social change. Why is this? Despite appearing as contradictory claims, the idea that politicians are powerful and can’t create change are two sides of the same coin. Much of what gives politicians their power is precisely the passivity with which the masses interact with the state, as described above in relation to voting, election campaigns, and political parties. Rather, those parts of society that do have influence on the state, such as the wealthy and other elites, maintain that influence because of all the active ways they engage with the state formally and informally. Such active elite practices include more above-ground methods such as campaign spending, lobbying, and corporate-politician partnership organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council, but also more below-ground mechanisms such as overlapping social and professional networks, capital strikes against government initiatives, and the revolving door between corporate and political careers.

It’s not just that the elites are “doing it right” in their active engagement with the state while masses are “doing it wrong” in their passive engagement with the state. When the masses are directed to engage politics through voting and attending a political rally, while elites get round-the-clock back-door access to politicians, we can start to see how the very structures of the state that appear natural and democratic are rather manufactured and imbalanced. The state structures discussed here are not peripheral or tangential to the functioning of the state, but rather voting, elections, and politicians are the foundational and governing institutions of the state. If those institutions are shown to be vacuous or at the very least disempowering, what are we to make of pretensions to representative democracy?

Manufactured imbalance against democracy is the state, and all attempts to use the state for positive change are constricted by this stark fact. Social democratic and socialist politicians largely accept these structures of the state and seek to use them, as undemocratic as they are, for good things. But the anti-electoralism critique advanced here suggests that it isn’t possible to create positive change using undemocratic methods. Rather the deeper kind of democracy that fuels social movements through mass participation is what really harnesses popular power for social change.

In spite of the official notion that the government is a reflection of the wants and needs of its citizens, in reality it is not a neutral tool that can be applied effectively to any task that the population or elected officials seek. A screwdriver is very bad at pounding in a nail. So while the state is a very powerful tool for elites to govern in their interest, it is a very shoddy tool for trying to create a better society that benefits everyone. With some strain even a screwdriver can pound a nail partway into a board, but the limits are real and severe. The many failures of socialist politicians recently in power in Europe are illustrative.

“So how can mass-based social movements acquire influence over state resources needed for large-scale popular reforms in the short- and medium-term if the state has built into it a bias against democracy?”

A useful analogy can be made between the grassroots fight against corporate abuse and the grassroots fight against government abuse. The modern-day corporation is a nakedly anti-democratic institution where shareholders give dictatorial powers to top executives to run things while employees are expected to do what they’re told. No one suggests that the left should focus on trying to seize higher-level management positions at WalMart in order to change WalMart’s policy from the inside and from the top down. Rather, unions and direct action by workers and affected communities are correctly identified as the effective way to fight corporate harm. Similarly, the fight against harms imposed by our government is better led by grassroots social movements than by trying to install in the government higher-level managers who will fix the problems from the inside and from the top down.

Do we want our movement towards social change and the content of social transformation to be based on the idea of choosing the right leader to give executive and legislative power to, who promises to fight on our behalf? Or do we want to concentrate our forces on the base, to build a movement rooted in the self-determination and collective action of whole communities? Should we be spectators or agents in the struggle for making a better world? In the words of civil rights organizer Ella Baker, “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.” That quote, especially as applied to politicians, encapsulates everything this essay is trying to articulate.

“You’ve been swooning over social movements this whole time but haven’t even shown how they do all these supposedly great things.”

The good news is that learning about social movements is more exciting than scrutinizing all the ins-and-outs of why voting isn’t effective. The best place to learn about what social movements are and what they’ve accomplished is by learning about their history. While I’ve used the labor movement of the 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1960s as examples, every major beneficial historical change in the US has been accomplished through social movements in some form.

It’s true that all social movements are multidimensional and have elements within them that have tended towards political elections, but all social movements have also had strong anti-electoral tendencies as well. There’s a reason why narratives about social change in the 1930s that came about from labor struggle highlight strikes and unions and not the various left and labor political parties of the day. Similarly, while some in the Civil Rights Movement, like Bayard Rustin, wanted to reorient the struggle towards working within the Democratic Party, many in the base and the leadership were resistant. Neither Martin Luther King Jr. nor Ella Baker were opposed to electoralism in the strong sense I’m advocating, but they were at pains to keep their movement independent of political parties and instead focus on mass direct action. King held a press conference in 1967 to put down rumors and push back against the pressure he faced from his more electorally-focused friends and supporters about running for president, “I have come to think of my role as one which operates outside the realm of partisan politics.”

Rather than seeing electoralism as a necessary part of social movements, it is better seen as an extraneous factor when we recognize how social movements have actually produced change. Social movements are complex and no one has the power to design them exactly to their own liking, but we can engage with and boost those parts of social movements that we find most effective.

Conclusion

Have the grumps won you over? With people so polarized on this issue, I hardly aim to change anyone’s mind. But if low approval ratings of our governing institutions and low voting rates are indicative of a popular discontent with politics as usual, maybe there’s a broad audience willing to entertain ideas about why politicians aren’t hot stuff.

We’ve looked at allegedly progressive politicians passing good reforms (FDR and labor rights, LBJ and civil rights), bad politicians passing good reforms (Eisenhower maintaining New Deal social spending, Nixon implementing the EPA and OSHA), supposedly better politicians passing bad reforms (Clinton, Obama, Mitterand, Hollande), and have just glossed over the more obvious cases of bad politicians passing bad reforms (like Trump’s tax cuts for the rich). In each case closer inspection reveals that the specific person in office had a profoundly insignificant impact on the overall trajectory of positive change compared to the size and assertiveness of social movements that existed alongside them.

Rather than continuing to buy into the myth that voting “does anything”, we’d be better off trying to make a better world by getting together with others to do something. The art of social movements obviously involves more than just “doing something”, but recognizing that “doing something” is going to be what it takes is a good first step. With actual effort and a little practice, doing something as a strategy for change might actually work. Politicians pee into the wind while social movements drop anvils from the sky.

Empty Rhetoric That Seeks to Misinform and Appease: On Biden's Farcical Anti-Monopoly Executive Order

[Patrick Semansky/AP Photo]

By Shawgi Tell

Let me be clear: capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism. It’s exploitation

—tweet from President Joe Biden, July 9, 2021

Capitalism is exploitation, period. Lol

—a twitter response to Biden’s tweet, July 9, 2021

Not a day goes by in which major owners of capital and their political representatives do not promote illusions and disinformation about the obsolete capitalist economic system. The ruling elite and their entourage rejected economic science and embraced irrationalism, incoherence, and dogmatism more than a century ago. They are unable and unwilling to offer any useful analysis of economic realities. Nothing they put forward helps advance public understanding of the economy. The mainstream news, for example, is saturated with endless mind-numbing nonsensical economic headlines. It is no accident that mainstream economics has long been called the dismal science.

The internal core logic and intrinsic operation of capital ensures greater poverty, inequality, and monopoly over time. This is the inherent nature of capital. It is how capital moves and develops. These catastrophes are not the result of external forces, extenuating circumstances, or “bad people” making “bad decisions.” They are not the outcome of ill-conceived policies made by self-serving, immoral, or uninformed people. These worsening problems did not arise because something is wrong with the intentions of some individuals who make antisocial decisions. Such notions are facile.

While individuals have consciousness, autonomy, self-determination, and agency, many phenomena (e.g., laws of economic development) operate objectively outside the will of individuals; they do not depend on the will of individuals. The laws of motion governing economic phenomena can be known, controlled, and directed, but not extinguished; they have to be consciously mastered, harnessed, and directed in a way that meets the needs of all.

Capital is first and foremost an unequal social relationship, not a person or a thing. This unequal social relationship is relentlessly reproduced in today’s society, preventing the healthy balanced extended reproduction of society. On the one side of this unequal social relationship are the majority who own nothing but their labor power and on the other side are a tiny handful who own the means of production and live off the labor of others.

Major owners of capital are the personification of capital, the embodiment of capital. This critical theoretical insight helps us avoid the rabbit hole of personal intentions and personal will, and allows us instead to objectively locate greed, insecurity, inequality, poverty, unemployment, endless debt, and other tragedies in the intrinsic built-in nature, logic, and movement of capital itself.

One of these is the inexorable tendency of competition to lead to monopoly under capitalism. Competition means winners and losers. By definition, not everyone can win when competing. Competition means rivalry for supremacy. Thousands compete in the Olympics, for example, but only a select few (“winners”) go home with a gold medal.[1] It is no accident that the economy, media, and politics are heavily monopolized by a handful of billionaires while billions of people who actually produce the wealth in society and run society remain marginalized and disempowered.

This brutal reality cannot be reversed or overcome with the utterance of a few platitudes, the passage of some policies, or the creation of some agencies that claim to be able to fix the outdated economic system, especially when all of the above come from billionaires themselves.

On July 9, 2021, President Joe Biden issued an Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy (https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/07/09/executive-order-on-promoting-competition-in-the-american-economy/).

The order is about 7,000 words long and full of anticonscious statements. Disinformation pervades the entire order.

The opening paragraph begins with the following disinformation:

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and in order to promote the interests of American workers, businesses, and consumers, it is hereby ordered….

Here, “American workers, businesses, and consumers” are casually misequated and no mention is made of citizens or humans. The implication is that consumerism is normal, healthy, and desirable, and that workers and big business somehow have the same aims, world outlook, and interests. This conceals the fact that owners of capital and workers have antagonistic irreconcilable interests and that people exist as humans and citizens, not just utilitarian consumers and shoppers in a taken-for-granted system based on chaos, anarchy, and violence.

Disinformation is further escalated in the next paragraph:

A fair, open, and competitive marketplace has long been a cornerstone of the American economy, while excessive market concentration threatens basic economic liberties, democratic accountability, and the welfare of workers, farmers, small businesses, startups, and consumers.

“Market concentration” has been the norm for generations. Monopolies, cartels, and oligopolies have been around since the late 1800s. Mergers and acquisitions have been taking place non-stop for decades. The so-called “free market” largely disappeared long ago. Objectively, there can be no fairness in a system rooted in wage-slavery and empire-building. Wage-slavery is the precondition for the tendency of the rich to get richer and the poor poorer. It is not a recipe for prosperity and security for all. This is also why inequality, tyranny, violence, and surveillance have been growing over the years. Moreover, what “threatens basic economic liberties, democratic accountability, and the welfare of workers, farmers, small businesses, startups, and consumers” is the ongoing political and economic exclusion of people from control over the economy and their lives by the financial oligarchy. There can be no liberty, accountability, and welfare when most people are deprived of real decision-making power and major owners of capital make all the decisions. Problems would not constantly worsen if people had control over their lives. The “best allocation of resources” cannot be made when the economy is carved up, fractured, and controlled by competing owners of capital.

Although recurring economic crises for well over a century have repeatedly discredited “free market” ideology, the 7,000-word executive order is saturated with the language of “choice,” “competition,” and “consumers.” This is the same worn-out language used by privatizers of all hues at home and abroad.

Further, while the executive order gives many examples of “economic consolidation” in numerous sectors, the government is not interested in creating a self-reliant vibrant diverse economy that meets the needs of all. It is not committed to reversing “the harmful effects of monopoly and monopsony.” Numerous antitrust laws have not stopped either. Big mergers and acquisitions have been going on for years. Rather, the executive order is an attempt to restructure economic and political arrangements among different factions of the wealthy elite; it reflects a new stage or form of inter-capitalist rivalry for even greater domination of the economy by fewer owners of capital. In other words, moving forward, the economy will remain monopolized by a few monopolies. Wealth is only going to become more concentrated in fewer hands in the years ahead. Mountains of data from hundreds of sources document growing wealth and income inequality every year.

The bulk of the executive order is filled with endless directives, strategies, rules, and suggestions for how to curb “unfair practices” and promote “fairness” and “competition.” But these all ring hollow given concrete realities and past experience.

Today, governments at all levels have been taken over by global private monopoly interests and have become instruments of decisions made on a supranational basis. There is a fine-tuned revolving door between officials from government and the private sector; they have become synonymous for all essential purposes. The same people who run major corporations also serve in high-level government positions where they advance the narrow interests of the private sector and then they leave government and return to their high-level corporate positions. There is a reason why the majority of members of Congress are millionaires. The Executive Branch in the United States, especially the President’s Office, is a major tool for the expression of the will of the most powerful monopolies. This is why billions of dollars are spent every few years to select the President of the country.

A modern economy must be controlled and directed by workers themselves. Only such an economy can provide for the needs of all and avoid endless economic distortions. Uneven economic development, “unfair” arrangements, “market concentration,” monopolies, oligopolies, and recurring crises cannot be avoided so long as those who actually produce the social product have no control over the social product. Workers have first claim to the wealth they produce and have the right to decide how, where, and when that wealth is used. Major owners of capital are historically superfluous and a big block to progress. They are not needed for a healthy vibrant self-reliant economy that meets the needs of all.

Shawgi Tell, PhD, is author of the book “Charter School Report Card.” His main research interests include charter schools, neoliberal education policy, privatization and political economy. He can be reached at stell5@naz.edu.

 
Notes

[1] Under capitalism the ideology of competition also falsely assumes scarcity because if nothing was scare then there would be no need for competition.

Countless Charter Schools Hire Many Uncertified Teachers

By Shawgi Tell

Privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools[1] run by unelected officials are legal in 45 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam. About 7,400 charter schools currently enroll roughly 3.3 million students.

According to a 2018 state-by-state information chart from the Education Commission of the States, more than 25 states (including Washington, DC) either do not require charter school teachers to be certified or allow charter schools to hire a large portion of teachers with no teaching certification.[2]

It should also be noted that, on average, charter school teachers have fewer years of teaching experience and fewer credentials than their public school counterparts. They also tend to work longer days and years than public school teachers while generally being paid less than them. Further, many charter school teachers are not part of an employee retirement plan and are treated as “at-will” employees, which is linked to why 88% of charter school teachers are not part of any organization that defends their collective interests.

A few examples of charter schools with uncertified teachers are worth noting. A May 30, 2019 article in The Palm Beach Post titled, “Underpaid, undertrained, unlicensed: In PBC’s largest charter school chain, 1 in 5 teachers weren’t certified to teach,” points out that the Renaissance Charter School chain in Florida routinely employed large numbers of substitute teachers and operated many schools where a quarter to a third of the teachers were not certified to teach.

Several years ago, one of the main charter school authorizers in New York State unilaterally further lowered teaching qualifications for teachers in charter schools. It willfully ignored numerous public demands to not further dilute teaching standards, prompting a lawsuit against its arbitrary actions. An October 18, 2019 press release from New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) titled, “Court rejects fake certification scheme for charter school teachers,” reads in part:

After the union fought back against “fake” certification for some charter school teachers, a midlevel appeals court this week ruled the SUNY Charter Schools Committee does not have the authority to set its own standards for certifying teachers. NYSUT President Andy Pallotta said the court ruling is a big win for the union and the profession. “This is about preserving what it means to be a teacher in New York State,” Pallotta said. “This would have created a two-tiered certification system and allowed unqualified educators to practice in some charter schools.”

While public school teachers in North Carolina have to be trained and certified to teach in public schools, charter schools are exempt from such requirements and can hire uncertified non-educators to teach. And while they enroll a significant percentage of youth, in Arizona “Teachers at charter schools are not required to have any certification.” Importantly, privately-operated charter schools are notorious for relying heavily on the infamous Teach for America (TFA) program which has come under fire for many reasons over the years. Much of this criticism comes from formers TFA’ers themselves. Many other examples from across the nation could be given.

Taken together, these facts help explain why there is such persistently high teacher turnover rates in the crisis-prone charter school sector—a situation that increases instability and does not serve students and families well. Given the broad disempowerment and marginalization of charter school teachers, it is no accident that there has been an uptick in recent years in the number of charter school teachers striving to unionize. The most recent example comes from Chicago.

It is not possible to build a modern society and nation by creating more corporatized schools that are segregated, non-transparent, deregulated, created by private citizens, run by unelected officials, and staffed with a large number of uncertified teachers. Who thinks this is a great idea? Such neoliberal arrangements lower the level of education and are a slap in the face of thousands of teacher education students across the country who spend years and thousands of dollars training to become effective certified teachers.

Notes

[1] The “non-profit” versus “for-profit” distinction is generally a distinction without a difference: both types of entities engage in profit maximization. Charter school promoters always downplay the fact that there are many charter schools, including “non-profit” charter schools, run by for-profit entities.

[2] Public schools sometimes hire uncertified teachers as well, but what makes the corporatized charter school sector different is that many charter school laws are intentionally and explicitly set up to evade certified teachers. This usually has to do with the neoliberal goal of “cost-cutting” and profit maximizing. Such a set-up lowers the level of education.

Corporate Dictatorship, Mass Incarceration, and Imperialism: The Nature of the American State

© Susan Walsh/AP Photo

By Yanis Iqbal

Republished from Dissident Voice.

“Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is  already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”

-George Jackson

USA’s President-elect Joe Biden’s cabinet picks have already deflated the hopes of lesser-evilists. Filled with deep-dyed neoliberals and unswerving imperialists, Biden’s cabinet will try its hardest to competently revive the murderous American empire. Externally, it would mean the professional management of an imperialist, interventionist and hyper-militarized foreign policy in the name of “humanitarianism”. Internally, it would signify the discursive re-packaging and ideological invisibilization of an interminable domestic war against Black communities. Whereas Donald Trump politically publicized this war as part of his white chauvinist campaign, the Democrats will cleverly cloak it in the hollow language of national unity and multiculturalism.

When confronted by the reality of Democrats openly defying some leftists’ expectation that they will be minimally better than Trump, we need to re-think our political categories and mode of conceptualization. One major concept in need of rectification is “fascism”. Through its repeated use by corporate democrats to create the Trumpist bogeyman, the word has totally lost any analytical value within the US political discourse. In opposition to the ruling elite’s propagandistic obscuration of fascism, we need to theorize it from a Marxist perspective which allows us to use it for revolutionary, tactical purposes. 

In his book Blood in my eye, the Black Panther party leader George Jackson wrote:

“One has to understand that the fascist arrangement tolerates the existence of no valid revolutionary activity. It has programmed into its very nature a massive, complex and automatic defense mechanism for all our old methods for raising the consciousness of a potentially revolutionary class of people. The essence of the U.S.A. totalitarian socio-political capitalism is, concealed behind the illusion of a mass participatory society. We must rip away its mask. Then the debate can end, and we can enter a new phase of struggle.”

From the above quotation, we can understand the structural nature of fascism in America. Instead of being confined to a right-wing faction of the political elites, fascism represents a superstructural tendency of capitalism, which helps the bourgeoisie to overcome the resistance of various social forces. Democrats and Republicans utilize these fascist tendencies in varying degrees to perpetuate the unending brutality inflicted on revolutionary forces through methods such as mass warehousing, repression and racist policing.

While Democrats and Republicans are firmly situated within a fascist framework, they are not wholly identical. While the former utilizes fascist tactics in an unobtrusive manner, the latter amplifies and foregrounds it as a central strategy. If the Democrats reproduce a dual system of political subjects - one group with “rights” and another consigned to zones of non-being - Republicans politically intensify it. Under Republicans, marginalization of those traditionally ghettoized by the former nominally “liberal” state is noticeably extended, giving a “visible” and “spectacular” character to the silent, structural violence of Democrats’ governmental apparatus.

As Gabriel Rockhill has written:

“While it is certainly true, from a tactical organizing perspective, that dealing with the histrionics of the good cop [Democrats] is usually far preferable to the barefaced barbarism of the bad cop [Republicans], it is strategically of the upmost importance to identify them for what they are: partners in capitalist crime.”

Thus, it is not the case that Democrats signify a radical break from the fascism of Republicans. Rather, both are concrete embodiments of a single phenomenon: fascism.

Whereas, the liberalism of the Democrats bases its administrative operations on an officially unannounced state of emergency (fascism) for dissident forces, the authoritarianism of the Republicans merely does the task of proclaiming aloud that state of emergency. Trump, for example, did nothing more than the aggressive declaration of a preexisting fascist formation through the creation of alliances with different social sectors - neo-confederates, declassed lumpenproletariat, socio-economically destabilized petty bourgeois and a historically privileged segment of white proletariat facing the specter of downward mobility.

Glen Ford, executive editor of Black Agenda Report, writes,

“the corporate Democrats…are the most dangerous because so few people conceive of them as fascists, despite their abject subservience to corporate dictatorship, the carceral state, and endless warfare.”

With the election of Biden, the “inconspicuous” fascism of Democrats has re-gained power, promising to return America back to its “natural” conditions of dehumanization: low-intensity, oligarchy-controlled democracy for whites; guns, prisons, murder and war for blacks. In a situation like this, it is of utmost importance that we comprehend the true nature of fascism in America.