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.

Walter Rodney: A People's Professor

By Curry Malott and Elgin Bailey

Republished from Liberation School.

In a recent book on the ongoing relevance of Walter Rodney’s work, Karim F. Hirji notes that, “as with scores of progressive intellectuals and activists of the past, the prevailing ideology functions to relegate Rodney into the deepest, almost unreachable, ravines of memory. A person who was widely known is now a nonentity, a stranger to the youth in Africa and the Caribbean” and the U.S. [1]. Rodney’s theoretical and practical contributions to the socialist movement warrant an ongoing engagement with his life story and major texts.

Rodney’s most recent, posthumously-published text, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World, offers an important perspective on the time period in which it was written and the internal position of the author. Rodney’s family worked with Robin Kelley in taking Walter’s extensive lecture notes on the Russian revolutionary era and forming them into a complete manuscript.

This essay, which complements our new study guide on The Russian Revolution, offers a brief overview of Rodney’s background historical context. Highlighting aspects of Rodney’s individual life demonstrates that his commitments were not just the result of his own individual experiences and conclusions, but were part of and emerged from the revolutionary crisis ripping through the world at the time. To better comprehend A View from the Third World, we turn to Groundings with My Brothers, which Rodney produced as a relatively new professor in Jamaica. In that book, Rodney reflects on the dialectical pedagogy he developed to make his academic labor part of the global movement against capitalist imperialism, which he also called the white power structure [2].

What is clear throughout Rodney’s work is the influence of the materialist insight that, while people make history, they cannot make it as they please, but it in the context of existing material conditions. Rather than start with abstract slogans or formulas, Rodney’s place of departure is an assessment of concrete conditions. For example, Rodney begins Groundings with a political assessment of the situation in Jamaica and he begins A View from the Third World with his analysis of the historical situation that gave way to Russia’s revolutionary era.

Raised in struggle

Walter Rodney was born March 23, 1942 into a working-class Guyanese family. According to Walter’s partner, Dr. Patricia Rodney, his parents introduced him to community activism at an early age. Growing up in Guyana in the 1950s, when the socialist movement was influential, “sociopolitical engagement was not uncommon among Guyanese youth” [3]. This was an incredibly exciting era to be a part of. It was a time of qualitative changes as the people of Guyana set out to build a whole new social and political system. “Walter and I, and our peers,” Patricia writes, “were strongly influenced by the political climate and the infectious spirit for independence that called and moved Guyanese of all generations to action” [4].

In contemporary U.S. society—a society that has been gripped by a deep reactionary counter-revolutionary force in response to the era of Walter Rodney’s generation—critical education tends to be viewed as something that can assist students in developing a critical consciousness. During the era that preceded the current one, when the colonized and oppressed world was in rebellion against colonialism and imperialist capitalism, it was the people, as Patricia Rodney alludes to above, who brought revolutionary commitments to education, not the other way around.

Walter Rodney was therefore one of countless students who took a sense of possibility with him to Queens College in Guyana. While at Queens College, Rodney became president of the historical society and deepened his interest in activism. In 1960, he won an Open Arts scholarship to the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica. Patricia notes that “it was as a student in Jamaica that Walter first felt the disconnect between his life on campus and the grassroots community that surrounded the university” [5]. Rodney then attended the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, earning a doctorate in history in 1966 at the age of 24.

While in London Rodney deepened his political commitments through a deep study of Marxism with a group of Caribbean students who would meet at the home of C. L. R. James on Friday evenings for hours on end.

Becoming a people’s history professor

Rodney accepted his first teaching position at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in 1966, but only stayed a year. However, Rodney would return to Tanzania for five years in 1969. Vijay Prashad says that Tanzania at the time was at the “highpoint” of its “experiment with self-reliance and non-alignment, which was then called ‘African socialism’” [6].

Shortly after beginning teaching in Tanzania, “the radical students from across the region formed the University Students’ African Revolutionary Front” as a response to Tanzania’s president Dr. Julius Nyerere’s Arusha Declaration of 1967, which called for a more direct move to socialism [7]. Nyerere was the leader of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), one of the post-WWII independence movements under British-controlled Tanganyika. Support for TANU grew and by 1960 the first elections were planned for the East African country. On December 9, 1961, Tanganyika became an independent republic and changed its name to Tanzania. In 1969, C. L. R. James concluded that, as a result of these developments, Tanzania stood “as one of the foremost political phenomena of the twentieth century” [8].

James specifically points to Nyerere’s focus on rethinking secondary and higher education as Tanzania’s “most revolutionary change of all…in order to fit the children and youth…for the new society which the government…seeks to build” [9]. Many of the students from across the continent Rodney encountered at the University of Dar es Salaam brought transformative, revolutionary determination, optimism, and organizational capacities with them. As a product himself of this revolutionary era, Rodney was well positioned to not just learn from, but contribute to, the radical student movement.

In 1967, Rodney was offered a position as a history professor in Jamaica at the University of the West Indies (UWI), where his contributions flourished. As a professor in Jamaica, Rodney was “torn by the lack of connection between academia and the working class” and having “a strong desire to bridge these worlds” [10]. It is fitting then that “unlike other professors at UWI, he chose to live with his young family outside the insular university compound housing” [11]. Rodney continued to use his position as a university professor to untether his academic labor (e.g., writing and teaching) from the white power structure of bourgeois state forces to contribute to the liberation struggles of the oppressed. Refusing to put the narrow self-interest of his academic position before the broader interests of the working class, Rodney’s commitment to revolution represents not only a recurring theme throughout his work (including A View from the Third World) but of the broader liberatory atmosphere of the times.

Rodney developed a practice for bridging the gap between academia and the working class called groundings. Groundings are a dialectical process of dialogue and exchange aimed at building the revolutionary movement. Rodney saw his studies, travels, and experiences as contributions to groundings, which he shared informally in working-class public spaces and privately through formal lectures.

Groundings with My Brothers is a collection of lectures developed for their practical relevance. These lectures include tidbits of reflections on practice and pedagogy, but mostly include the content that contributed to the process of groundings. In offering a class analysis of Jamaica and various contributions to the Black Power movement, Rodney situates the Soviet example within this broad framework. His interest in revolutionary Russia was part of this larger project of charting “a new direction for Black Studies and African studies” [12]. As he writes in the second essay in Groundings:

Since 1911, white power has been slowly reduced. The Russian Revolution put an end to Russian imperialism in the Far East, and the Chinese Revolution, by 1949, had emancipated the world’s largest single ethnic group from the white power complex. The rest of Asia, Africa and Latin America (with minor exceptions such as North Korea, North Vietnam and Cuba) have remained within the white power network to this day. We live in a section of the world under white domination—the imperialist world. The Russians are white and have power, but they are not a colonial power oppressing black peoples. The white power which is our enemy is that which is exercised over black peoples, irrespective of which group is in the majority and irrespective of whether the particular country belonged originally to whites or blacks [13].

For Rodney, the Russian Revolution represented the first major victory in the global movement against racist capitalism and imperialism, which he experienced in various forms as a young person in Guyana and as an adult in Tanzania. Since capitalism is essentially a globally interconnected system, all progressive movements in the capitalist era are also related to and connected with others, while unavoidably maintaining their context-specific uniqueness. Beyond the larger historical interconnections of popular uprisings in the capitalist era, Rodney draws parallels between the experiences of poor peasants in tsarist Russia and the formerly enslaved of the Third World. The practical lessons gleaned from these connections, as highlighted below, are the raw materials for his groundings.

The Third World’s perspective

Reflecting on his own position as a professor, Rodney asks if “people like us here at the university” will follow the example of Cuba and join the Soviet and Chinese-led struggle against white power, against capitalism/imperialism? Even though most who have studied at the University of the West Indies are Black, reasons Rodney, “we are undeniably part of the white imperialist system” and “a few are actively pro-imperialist” and therefore “have no confidence in anything that is not white.” Even if the professoriate is not actively and openly anti-Black but still “say nothing against the system…we are acquiescing in the exploitation of our brethren” [14]. This silence, Rodney points out, is secured through an individualistic approach to progress, displacing the long tradition of collective struggle. As a result, “this has recruited us into their ranks and deprived the [B]lack masses of articulate leadership.” Part of the answer to the question, what is to be done is for Rodney, “Black Power in the West Indies” which “aim[s] at transforming the intelligentsia into the servants of the [B]lack masses” [15].

Like his other works, Rodney’s approach in A View from the Third World is an example of what commitments to Black liberation looked like in practice. In the Foreword to Rodney’s first posthumously published book, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905, George Lamming offers some crucial insights into the practical lessons Rodney saw in past movements, relevant to our understanding of his approach in A View from the Third World: “every struggle planted a seed of creative disruption and aided the process that released new social forces” [16].

Groundings and the Russian Revolution

Revolutionary Russia was an important source of hope in Rodney’s groundings. A View from the Third World deepens the practical relevance of his groundings on the subject by offering a thorough rebuttal and exposure of bourgeois propaganda aimed at discrediting the Russian Revolution as authoritarian, anti-democratic, and so on. Rodney also speaks to the practicality of revolution by engaging the questions of organization, assessment, and tactics and by examining, for example, the differences between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Finally, while demonstrating the correctness of the Bolsheviks, Rodney does not shy away from surfacing their mistakes, highlighting the insights their successes and mistakes offer contemporary organizers.

Rodney engages these tasks through the method of historiography. A View from the Third World compares and contrasts bourgeois, Soviet, and independent socialist writings on the Russian revolutionary era with an eye toward underscoring relevant lessons for the liberation struggles of his time and place. For example, in the first chapter, Rodney points to the international context to situate his “dialectical materialist” approach to historiography noting that, “there is every reason to be suspicious of the Western European (and American) view of the Soviet Revolution, and there is every reason to seek an African view” [17]. Rodney argues for the necessity of historical accounts that advance the view of the oppressed, of those systematically underdeveloped by the capitalist-imperialist system from which Russia was the first to make a break. In developing this view, he addresses various accusations that the Russian revolutionary era was anti-democratic or authoritarian.

Rodney describes many of the critiques against the Soviet Union, from multiple political positions, as idealist, deterministic, or stageist, because they do not deal with the concrete, materialist balance of class forces but rather with abstract concepts of the ideal, such as predetermined stages of development. Rodney engages the question of Marx and Engels’ predictions regarding where socialism would first emerge as a point mobilized to discredit either Marx and Engels or to claim the Russian revolution was a departure from Marxism.

Marx and Engels’ predictions of the socialist future—which were far and few in between—were informed by dialectical or historical materialism rather than idealism, since they were based on the information they had available rather than on predetermined, universal stages of development. Rodney writes that “historical or dialectical materialism is a method that can be applied to different situations to give different answers. Marx’s comments on Western Europe were based on a thoroughly comprehensive study of the evidence that he had before him… Hence to say anything about Russia would also require close study of what was going on in Russia” [18].

The practical relevance of Rodney’s groundings work to build a mass movement is readily apparent here: without an assessment of concrete conditions, organizers are left with irrelevant and/or incorrect abstractions and formulas not likely to gain much traction. Driving home the practical implications of this point for organizers, Rodney is instructive:

Marxism is not a finished and complete product contained in a given number of texts… Marxism is a method and a worldview. Neither Marx nor Engels believed their interpretations were unassailable given the limited amount of scientific and accurate data available to them, as well as their own limitations. Furthermore, new situations arising after their time required new analysis. This is where Lenin made his major contributions” [19].

From questions of spontaneity in the February Revolution to the issue of dissolving the Constituent Assembly in the October Revolution, Rodney makes a strong case for supporting the Russian Revolution and its Bolshevik leadership. He refutes the claim that the U.S., for example, was more democratic than the Soviet Union because it had two major parties. The difference, Rodney points out, is that the U.S. had a bourgeois democracy where the major parties represented the interest of the capitalist class, while the Soviet Union had a proletarian democracy whose ruling party was responsible to–and largely emerged from–the working class and peasantry.

Rodney also addresses the major debates within the international socialist movement. For one example, he foregrounds the international significance of the harsh condemnation of the Bolsheviks by the German socialist Karl Kautsky, “who had known both Marx and Engels since his youth, and after their deaths he became their principal literary executor” [20]. Kautsky argued that Marx’s conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat as proletarian democracy was not yet possible in Russia since the proletariat were not the majority. Consequently, Kautsky concluded that the Bolsheviks’ seizure of state power represented an anti-democratic dictatorship that imposed its will on the peasantry. Rodney summarizes Lenin’s response to Kautsky, setting the record straight that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the political domination of the exploited classes over their former exploiting ones.

Groundings against reactionary academia

Rodney exposes the counter-revolutionary role of academia as one of the primary locations producing anti-Soviet propaganda. Explaining the hegemony or dominance of the bourgeois approach to revolutionary Russia and history more generally, he interrogates “the university institutions that are responsible for the vast majority of research and publications in the field” as “an important element in the superstructure.” Elite universities exist to “serve the interests of the capitalist or bourgeois class” [21]. At the individual level, for example, “the conservative historians always expose themselves by their contemptuous attitude toward the working people” [22].

Even more explicitly exposing the role of universities in serving the larger interests of the bourgeoisie, Rodney points to a 1957 publication by R.N. Carew Hunt, who was “widely believed to be a British intelligence agent” parading as a “scholar and authority on the Soviet Union” [23]. Beyond individual professors, Rodney implicates entire university projects such as Stanford University’s Hoover Institution for War and Peace, which “is notorious for its connections with the CIA, the Pentagon and the State Department” [24].

Using himself as an example to deepen the practical relevance of his critique, Rodney rhetorically asks, “what is my position? What is the position of all of us because we fall into the category of the black West Indian intellectual, a privilege in our society? What do we do with that privilege? The traditional pattern is that we join the establishment…How do we break out of this…captivity” [25]. He offers three suggestions for academics: 1) to confront pro-imperialist and racist knowledge production; 2) to challenge the idea that racial harmony defines our “post-racial society” by moving beyond the intellectual division of labor in bourgeois academies; and 3) to connect with the masses of Black working and poor people.

Expanding on these directives, Rodney makes an important pedagogical statement that, in challenging the many myths of white supremacist imperialism in the process of connecting with the masses, “you do not have to teach them anything. You just have to say it, and they will add something to what you are saying” [26]. As a result of engaging the Jamaican working class as subjects with valuable knowledge, “Rodney encountered a Black Power movement in Jamaica that was already well underway” [27]. But it was a two-way street, and what Rodney contributed was “a framework that critically examined the impact of slavery and colonialism and that gave a foundation for interpreting the current situation of Black and oppressed peoples in these newly independent countries, who continued to be marginalized” [28]. In the Introduction to A View from the Third World, Robin Kelley affirms this contention, writing that “the way Rodney engaged society as a university lecturer was considered ‘strange’ and even dangerous that it was interpreted as a challenge to the establishment” [29]. Outlining what this pedagogy, this practice, looked like in motion, in action, Rodney elaborates:

“I lectured at the university, outside of the classroom that is. I had public lectures, I talked about Black Power, and then I left there, I went from the campus. I was prepared to go anywhere that any group of [B]lack people were prepared to sit down to talk and listen. Because that is Black Power, that is one of the elements, a sitting-down together to reason, to ‘ground’ as the brothers say. We have to ‘ground together.’…[T]his…must have puzzled the Jamaican government. I must be mad, surely; a man we are giving a job, we are giving status, what is he doing with these guys, [people they call] ‘criminals and hooligans’[?]…I was trying to contribute something. I was trying to contribute my experience in  , in reading, my analysis; and I was also gaining, as I will indicate” [29].

Rodney’s groundings emerged from this powerful combination of research and teaching with his eagerness to learn from, and be taught by, those looked down on by mainstream academia. Committed to the revolutionary fervor of the times, the resulting perception and treatment of Rodney as a threat to the establishment was not an effective deterrent. Rodney’s remarkable and unyielding achievements are among the fruits of the post-WWII revolutionary crisis. As the crisis of capitalism and of the white power structure deepens, so too does the influence of Rodney’s life and legacy.

Conclusion

By the age of 38, Rodney had become part of the same “tradition of intellectual leadership among Africans and people of African descent in the Americas” that includes “Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois, George Padmore and C. L. R. James” [30]. It is important to note that for Rodney, scholarship was not simply an academic exercise but one central to making the academy relevant to the liberation of the oppressed. Jamaican professor Verene A. Shepherd argues that it is Rodney’s pedagogy that is the model for the activist academic, a model that remains relevant because activists in academia are still rare and still desperately needed [31].

A recurring theme throughout not only A View from the Third World, but throughout all of Rodney’s work, is  Marx and Engels’ caution against “applying the dialectic mechanically” because the specific historical development of the balance of competing class interests does not proceed in predetermined, inevitable ways, and that what people do matters [32].

The Liberation School study guide for A View from the Third World will help today’s organizers and activists do just that.

References

[1] Karim F. Hirji, The Enduring Relevance of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (New York: Daraja Press, 2017), xi.
[2] For a more in-depth analysis of Rodney’s pedagogy see Jesse Benjamin and Devyn Springer, “Groundings: A Revolutionary Pan-African Pedagogy for Guerilla Intellectuals,” in Keywords in Radical Philosophy and Education: Common Concepts for Contemporary Movements, ed. D. Ford, (Boston: Brill, 2019), 210-225. For more on Rodney’s life, legacy, and pedagogy, see Devyn Springer and Derek Ford, “Walter Rodney’s Revolutionary Praxis: An Interview with Devyn Springer,” Liberation School, 12 August 2021. Available here.
[3] Patricia Rodney, “Living the Groundings–A Personal Context,” in W. Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, ed. A.T Rodney and J. Benjamin (New York: Verso, 2019), 77-85, 77.
[4] Ibid., 77-78.
[5] Ibid., 78.
[6] Vijay Prashad, “Foreword,” in W. Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World (New York: Verso, 2018), vii-xiii, viii.
[7] Ibid., viii.
[8] C.L.R. James, A History of Pan-African Revolt (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), 118.
[9] Ibid., 128.
[10] Rodney, “Living the Groundings,” 80.
[11] Robin D. G. Kelley, “Introduction,” in W. Rodney, The Russian Revolution, xix-lxxiii, xxviii.
[12] Carole Boyce Davies, “Introduction: Re-grounding the Intellectual-Activist Model of Walter Rodney,” in W. Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, xi-xxii, xvi.
[13] Walter Rodney, Groundings with My Brothers (New York: Verso, 1969/2019), 11.
[14] Ibid., 28.
[15] Ibid., 29.
[16] George Lamming, “Foreword,” in Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 (Kingston, Jamaica: Heinemann, 1981), xvii-xxv, xix.
[17] Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World, (New York: Verso, 2018), 3.
[18] Ibid., 50.
[19] Ibid., 150.
[20] Ibid., 105.
[21] Ibid., 12.
[22] Ibid., 15.
[23] Ibid., 14.
[24] Ibid., 18. For a different example of the same line of inquiry, see Gabriel Rockhill, “The CIA & the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism,” Monthly Review, 27 June 2022. Available here.
[25] Rodney, Groundings with My Brothers, 66.
[26] Ibid., 67.
[27] Kelley, “Introduction,” xxviii.
[28] Ibid., xxviii.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Lamming, “Foreword,” Rodney, xvii.
[31] Verene A. Shepherd, “The Continued Relevance of Rodney’s Groundings,” In W. Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, 101-108.
[32] Rodney, A View from the Third World, 170.

What is Dialectical Materialism? An Introduction

By Curry Malott

After the deaths of Marx and Engels, socialists began taking up the important task of summarizing their work for popularization. In 1919, for example, Georg Lukács, the Hungarian Marxist, argued that the essence of Marx's project is not the correctness or incorrectness of his many theses, but rather, his dialectical method. Stressing the significance of Marx's method Lukács notes that it is a "weapon" of the proletariat and "an instrument of war" (1919/1971, 224). Marx never wrote a text on dialectics or even used the term "dialectical materialism," and so articulating Marx's dialectic was left to Engels and those who followed. There are, as a result, a great many debates about what exactly dialectical materialism is. There has also been a tendency to oversimplify dialectical materialism into a mechanical and deterministic dogma.

This article outlines Marx's method, dialectical materialism, a theory and manner of understanding change. It is a theory that grasps how many of the competing social forces driving the movement of society are often hidden or mystified, and that gives us a way of uncovering them. It is a method that understands that unveiling social forces must be done in such a way as to foster class-for-self-consciousness within the working class as a revolutionary force. Toward these ends this article introduces the major components of dialectical materialism, including the negation of the negation, sublation, the unity of opposites, and the transformation of quantity into quality.

What Is Marx's Method?

In developing his method, Marx challenged what he considered to be vulgar materialism for its tendency to ignore the totality and the relationship between consciousness and material reality. A philosophical term, the "totality" refers to the total of existence in any given moment. At the same time, Marx rejected pure idealism for substituting material reality with the idea of reality (i.e. with abstract thought). Idealism therefore leads to the false assumption that alienation or estrangement can be overcome in the realm of thought alone, as if we could change our material reality by changing our ideas and beliefs.

Rather, Marx's dialectical method is based on "the unifying truth of both" (1844/1988, 154). What this means is that "it is not enough that thought should seek to realize itself; reality must also strive toward thought." In other words, Marx's method entails the examination of the relationship between ideas and material reality, specifically as it pertains to class struggle and the emancipation of the proletariat. Marx's dialectics are called "dialectical materialism" in contrast with Hegel's dialectics. Marx wrote that he "discover[ed] the rational kernel within the mystical shell" (1867/1967, 29) of Hegel's dialectics.

To realize this revolution the working-class must not only understand the interaction of forces behind the development of society, but it must understand itself as one of those forces. The dialectic is a powerful weapon because it breaks through the capitalist illusion of individualism and atomism and disrupts the idea that isolated facts speak for themselves. Only by situating facts or ideas in the historical totality of society do they begin to make real sense. To comprehend this revolutionary movement we must conceive the interaction of forces as much more than the interaction of static and independent entities. When the parts of the totality change, their relationship to the totality changes, and they themselves change. Dialectics presents reality as an ongoing social process; nothing is ever static or fixed.

Dialectics is both a method-or a way of investigating and understanding phenomena-and a fact of existence. For Engels, what is most central to dialectics is the tendency toward perpetual "motion and development" (1894/1987, 131). What follows is a summary of the dialectical theory of movement and change. The concept around which the dialectical understanding of development revolves is the negation of the negation, which will be taken up first, before turning to the concept of sublation. The unity of opposites or the interpenetration of opposites, a central driving force of the dialectic is then explored. Finally, we look at the tendency toward the transformation of quantity into quality, which in turn allows us to understand the negation of the negation more deeply.

The Negation of the Negation

The tendency toward the negation of the negation is arguably at the heart of dialectical development. Engels, for example, notes that the negation of the negation is "extremely general-and for this reason extremely far-reaching and important" (1894/1987, 131). The negation of the negation refers specifically to the way that phenomena and structures produce their opposites.

For example, in the first volume of Capital, Marx (1867/1967) writes that capitalist private property is the negation of individual private property, or property held by the proprietor or individual laborer. Peasant proprietors, as small-scale industrial producers, tended to own private property and produced their own means of subsistence. This small-scale, scattered, petty industry of the peasants was limited in terms of its ability to foster economic growth. The advent of the capitalist era included the expropriation of the peasants from their means of production. The logic of the feudal system and exchange created the agencies of its own annihilation.

While feudalism was overcome in capitalism, aspects of it were preserved but reconfigured in a way to facilitate economic growth. For example, the private property of peasants was abolished, but private property itself was not.

Capitalism concentrates and centralizes property, tending towards monopoly. Bigger capitalists buy out or otherwise out maneuver smaller capitalists. At the same time, capitalism creates its antagonist: the working class. As capital grows so too does the working class. These contradictions provide the basis for the second negation: the expropriation of the expropriators, or the transformation of capitalism into socialism.

Under socialism the means of production that existed under capitalism are preserved. Instead of being held in private they are held in common. In place of exploitation the means of production are put in the service of meeting the many needs of the producers. This process is called sublation. When something is sublated it is both overcome yet preserved. We can also see sublation at work in Marx's theory of monopoly. Monopolies create the material basis for socialism as they aggregate and concentrate productive forces. Socialist revolution expropriates these from the capitalists, but instead of breaking them up into smaller enterprises, the working class takes control of them as they are. If this is still a bit confusing at this point, it should be clearer after we go through the other components of dialectics.

Of course, capitalism is not going to automatically transform into socialism, even though its own internal logic orients its development in that general direction. Capitalist crises and contradictions are necessary for socialist revolutions but they are not sufficient. If they were sufficient, then we would already be living under socialism!

The Interpenetration of Opposites

What compels entities to be in a constant state of motion are their internal contradictions, or the forces generated by the unity of opposites. The most central or essential contradiction within capitalism is between labor and capital.

Labor and capital are opposites because they have contradictory drives. For example, historically, labor has spontaneously sought to decrease the rate of exploitation by collectively bargaining for higher wages, better conditions, benefits, and so on. When successful, these decrease profit margins. Capital, on the other hand, seeks to always increase the rate of exploitation. Labor and capital are therefore compelled by opposite and antagonistic drives. This antagonism can be managed and mediated by unions and state regulation, but it can only be overcome through the negation of the negation.

Labor and capital, as such, do not have an independent existence apart from each other. To be a worker is by definition to be exploited by capital, and to be a capitalist is by definition to exploit workers. The relationship between labor and capital is therefore internal and constitutes the totality. As a relation of exploitation, capital is a unity of contradictions. The dialectical development of this relationship over time is the movement of the balances of forces within capitalism.

A common mistake is to conceptualize the movement generated from antagonistically-related social classes as the interaction of separate forces external to each other. This leads to the false belief that the role of the working-class revolution today is to destroy capitalism and replace it with socialism. Socialism can only be created out of what already exists.

Marx and Engels believed that socialism would first emerge out of the most developed capitalist countries. This did not turn out to be true, as socialism emerged first in Russia, an underdeveloped, predominantly feudal-based country. Socialism, nevertheless, was ushered in by the producers and created out of an old society, not separate from it.

Quantity Into Quality

The tendency toward the transformation of quantity into quality offers deeper insight into the negation of the negation. So far, we have seen how the essential contradiction within capitalism is the labor/capital relationship, which is an example of the unity of opposites. We also saw the sublation of private property from one negated mode of production to the next. Investigating the interrelationship of these two issues will provide the basis for our example of the transformation of quantity into quality.

The inherently unequal relationship between labor and capital was established, in part, through the violence of expropriating peasants from their means of production. Without direct access to the means of production, former peasants were forced to sell their ability to work for a wage, thereby becoming part of the working class. Although beyond the scope of this short introduction, it's crucial to note that the violence of slavery, colonialism, and settler colonialism were equally important in establishing capitalism.

The competition between capitalists drives technological development. Because the price of any given commodity tends to center around the average amount of time its production requires, devising new technologies that can reduce the number of labor hours it takes to produce whatever commodity is a tendency internal to capitalism.

In the short term this gives the capitalist at the technological forefront a competitive advantage because they can sell the commodity below its social value. But as soon as the new technology gets integrated into the entire branch or branches of industry, the average amount of time that it takes to produce whatever commodity lowers, and the competition begins anew.

While new labor-saving technologies can be super profitable for individual capitalists in the short term, in the long term it reduces the number of labor hours simultaneously set into motion. It also means that more capital is invested into machinery rather than workers. And since workers produce value and machines do not, this contributes to the tendency of the falling rate of profit.

When the amount of labor hours it takes to transform a given quantity of raw materials into whatever commodity is reduced, the composition of capital shifts quantitatively, by degree. Historically, individual capitalists have countered the falling rate of their profit margins in many ways such as devising schemes to reduce the price they pay for labor even while its value remains the same thereby pushing the laborer into depravity and impoverishment. The capitalist, driven to counter the falling rate of profit by extracting more and more value from the laborer, thereby deepens capital's crisis.

The internal drive of capital to forever expand the accumulation of surplus value brings the unity of opposites, labor and capital, into growing conflict with each other. This movement is the developmental process at the heart of the dialectics of capitalism. While the capitalist has an interest in maintaining the contradiction and creating the illusion of capital's permanence, the objective interest of labor is to resolve the contradiction, thereby changing the quality of production relations. This is quantity into quality and the center of struggle between labor and capital. The quantitative changes provide the basis or possibility of qualitative change.

Conclusion

One of the reasons why dialectical materialism is so important is because it embodies a deep revolutionary optimism. Drawing attention to the fact that the future already exists as an unrealized potential within the present demystifies the seeming permanence of capitalism. In other words, it reveals the defeat of imperialism as a real potential and not a fantasy. For example, it is a fact that the most advanced means of production, labor saving technologies, as they currently exist, are able to meet the basic needs of every person in the world. In this way, the future liberation of humanity from exploitation and material oppression already exists.

The practicality of the aforementioned optimism resides in the fact that Marx's method correctly locates the agent of revolutionary transformation within the working class, the many.

This originally appeared at Liberation School .

References

-Engels, F. (1894/1987). Anti-Duhring. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works (vol. 25). New York: International Publishers.
-Lukács, G. (1919/1971). History and Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Cambridge: MIT.
-Marx, K. (1844/1988). Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. New York: Prometheus Books.
-Marx, K. (1867/1967). Capital: A critique of political economy (vol. 1). New York: International Publishers.

Cuba's Achievements and the Imperialist Threat

By Curry Malott

The following speech was delivered by Curry Malott June 10th at the Paul Robeson house in West Philadelphia as part of a PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation) sponsored event featuring Cuban revolutionary Luisa Campos. Since 1996 Campos has been the Director of the Museum of the Literacy Campaign in Havana, Cuba. Around forty people attended the event, which also included a speech by leading figure in the Black radical tradition and resident of North Philly, Dr. Monteiro.

Needless to say, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the PSL, defends socialism in Cuba. In these short remarks I will explain why we defend socialism in Cuba and highlight some of what we defend in socialist Cuba.

Since the historic defeats suffered by the socialist movement in the late 80s and early 90s, it has become increasingly difficult for workers' states, such as Cuba, to survive. The struggle for socialism is a global struggle and as communists in the U.S. we naturally defend any gains in this movement. All oppressed people have a stake in defending socialist Cuba. Special economic reforms, beginning in the 1990s, have been enacted in Cuba to cope with this increasingly difficult period, driven by decades of strangulating U.S. sanctions, and we stand with them in solidarity.

Now as the stigma of socialism is beginning to dissipate in the U.S., due to the Occupy movement, the movement for Black Lives, and the Sanders campaign, which are responses to growing suffering stemming from the deepening crisis of capitalism itself, more and more people are interested in learning the truth about Cuba.

As we stand with Cuba, we acknowledge that the overturning of capitalism does not necessarily mean the end of the struggle. We know that anytime a capitalist class is displaced by a working class revolution, the former exploiters will become counter-revolutionaries and do everything in their power to restore capitalism, and ultimately their capacity to exploit. External imperialist forces will also direct their destructive power towards the restoration of capitalism wherever gains have been made toward the negation of the negating capitalism system.

The 1961 failed Bay of Pigs invasion is an example of Cuba's former capitalist class exiled in Florida working in cahoots with U.S. imperialists to violently restore capitalism in Cuba. The long history of economic sanctions, assassinations, including the assassination of literacy volunteers, sabotage, and other forms of U.S. terrorism aimed to overthrow Cuba's workers' state are further examples of how imperialists will always be an external threat to workers' states and movements wherever they exist in the world until they are defeated once and for all time.

We therefore support Cuba's workers' state and their right to self-defense and self-determination. We support the enormous gains that the Cuban people, through their revolution, have made correcting the extreme poverty, suffering, and depravation that marked the pre-socialist era.

At the core of the Cuban Revolution and the force behind transforming the country into a much more socially just society, we defend the Rebel Army that, became the embryo of the new state and was instrumental in carrying out the early revolutionary measures of land reform and other economic decrees

We therefore defend the institutions that the Rebel Army transformed into, such as the National Institute for Agrarian Reform and the National Institute of Housing and Savings. For example, only three months after the ousting of the Batista regime utilities and rents were cut in half and evictions were banned. The following year an advancement was made under the Urban Law Reform of 1960 transforming half of the nation's tenants into home owners and eliminating landlordism.

Similarly, the private ownership on a large scale of the means of production - the tools and material needed to create the wealth of society - was gradually ended. For example, under the Agrarian Reform Law of 1959 the amount of land that could be held by a private interest was reduced to 1,000 acres, and by 1963 that had been drawn down to 163 acres. At the same time large parcels of unused land were handed over to peasant collectives. As a result, over 15 million acres of land had been expropriated from foreign corporations by 1963, which marked the end of capitalism in Cuba and the strengthening of the global struggle for socialism.

These transformations allowed the Cuban Revolutionary government to use the wealth created by Cuban labor for the benefit of the Cuban people and to support workers and peasants in other parts of the world struggling for their own self-determination. Of course, this is one of the reasons why U.S. imperialism would like to see capitalism fully restored in Cuba, that is, as a blow to the global working class movement.

Contrary to popular belief, however, this process of transforming capitalist power into socialist power in Cuba was not carried out without widespread participation among the people. This stems from the Revolution itself where the overthrow of the Batista regime was not the sole product of Che, Fidel, and their small band of guerillas, but was a popular revolution where over 20,000 Cubans gave their lives fighting in it. From January 1st 1959 the end of the capitalist class in Cuba and its repressive regime was set in motion and carried out through a series of trials and well-defended policies.

For example, the early housing and land reforms were supported by massive mobilizations of one million or more taking to the streets to let the remaining capitalists know where the people stood.

Another example is the over one hundred thousand youth who came out to volunteer to transform Cuba from a nation of illiteracy to a nation of literacy. This task was accomplished relatively quickly as a result of the suspension of secondary education for a year. Rather than go to the schoolhouse, for a year the youth went to workers and peasants and taught them how to read. This was not only effective in defeating illiteracy, but it is reported to have helped foster a sense of unity across the country transforming the youth who had not fought in the Revolution into veterans of it anyway. It is surely not an exaggeration to assume that the post-1959 mass mobilization movements contributed as much psychologically as materially to the ongoing success of the revolution.

A major part of this has been the Committees in Defense of the Revolution that were organized block-by-block in 1960. These committees helped to protect the country against counter-revolutionaries while simultaneously contributing to the fostering of widespread political participation amongst workers and peasants. Today there are approximately 8.5 million members of the Committees in Defense of the Revolution in a country of 11.5 million. This is what people's democracy looks like.

Every two and a half years there are elections for the 186 municipal assemblies and every five years for the National Assembly of Peoples' Power. There are assemblies for all 15 provinces and a special assembly for the youth. Adding to the real power held by the Cuban people every public official is immediately recallable. To get elected a candidate must receive fifty percent of the vote plus one. If no candidate receives this, then a second round of votes are cast. Over 88 percent of Cubans participate in these elections. Undoubtedly contributing to this high voter turnout is the fact that Cuban elections are free from campaign spending.

In stark contrast to this is capitalist democracy, as practiced in the U.S., where recent successful presidential campaigns have cost nearly 4 billion dollars and senatorial campaigns between 80 and 90 million. Consequently, workers tend to feel so alienated from any real sense of political power that the average voter turnout in the U.S. is between 50 and 60 percent. In some of the most impoverished and oppressed cities in the U.S. voter turnout can be as low as 22 percent of registered voters as is the case with Trenton, NJ.

Perhaps what Cuba is most known for in the U.S. is universal health care and advances in vaccine research. Cuba is also an international leader in training doctors throughout the so-called third-world, and sending thousands of doctors around the world wherever they can help to alleviate suffering. This is solidarity, and this is why Cuba has so many friends around the world and in the U.S.

What all of this points to is the fact that the class that rules in Cuba is not the capitalist class, but the workers, and we stand with them shoulder to shoulder.

While U.S. imperialist forces have been working to restore capitalism in Cuba since the day after the ousting of Batista, current signs suggest that they are once again ramping up their efforts. The U.S.'s movement toward normalizing relations is a great victory and a testament to the strength of the revolution, but in the eyes of the U.S. government this is viewed as a new tactic designed to undermine socialism in Cuba. That is, if U.S. corporations and banks, and the C.I.A., can get a foothold in Cuba, they can foster the emergence of a new capitalist class.

All the gains of the Cuban revolution-its independence from U.S. imperialism as well as the social gains like literacy, full employment and health care-are guaranteed by the strength of the Cuban working class. We are confident that they can succeed in the face of any threat, and we are fully committed to supporting this fight from the belly of the beast.

Curry Malott is Associate Professor of Educational Foundations at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the author of multiple books, including most recently, History and Education: Engaging the Global Class War.

Drawing Class Lines Through Critical Education: History, Education, and the Global Class War

By Derek R. Ford

The following is the foreword to Curry S. Malott's new book, History and Education: Engaging the Global Class War , just published through Peter Lang.

There is a common belief out there that capitalism is so totalizing, so all-subsuming, that even the most radical scholarship can be accommodated with its circuits of production and consumption. Curry Malott, in his newest book, History and Education: Engaging the Global Class War, seems to be out to disprove that belief. He succeeds, and in his success, he demonstrates that this belief reveals nothing about contemporary capitalism, and everything about what passes as radical scholarship today. At the base of this book, then, is a critique of-and corrective to-the deep-seated anti-communism that permeates much of the western and academic Left, especially within the U.S. Thus, it isn't just the global bourgeoisie and its representatives who will despise the contents of this book; it's likely to upset quite a few self-proclaimed and celebrated "critical scholars" inside and outside of education. One thing is for sure: after reading this book it's hard to look at the field of critical education-especially critical pedagogy-the same way. With biting critique and careful historical and theoretical analysis, Malott lays bare what he, following Sam Marcy, calls the "crossing of class lines" that characterizes so much critical scholarship. The crossing of class lines is, simply, when one finds oneself shoulder to shoulder with imperialism, shouting the same slogans ("down with authoritarianism!") and attacking the same enemy (communism).

Bringing communist theoreticians and revolutionaries into the educational conversation, Malott begins to develop a "communist pedagogy" in this book, and this pedagogy offers the field needed clarifications, historical contexts, conceptual frameworks, organizational imperatives, and future possibilities. Malott begins by tackling a question that is, for any organizer, presently absent in academia writ large today: the state. He clarifies for us what the state is and what role it plays in the revolutionary process, reminding us along the way that revolutions are, by definition "one of the most authoritarian human actions possible." Revolutions take place when one segment of society imposes its will absolutely on another segment; there is no revolution without repression. As Marx (1867/1967) put it in Capital, "Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one" (p. 703). It is only through utilizing the state and its repressive and productive powers that a new society can arise, for the bourgeoisie, as history has shown, doesn't go without a fight.

Once deposed they count their losses, regroup, find new allies, and launch campaigns of terror. The history of the communist movement has proved this without exception. Thus, to forfeit or bypass the state "is to surrender before the final battle has even begun." Just months after the exploited masses of Russia took power in 1917 they were under attack from 14 imperialist armies, each of which was in coordination with the White Army that served Russia's former capitalists and landlords. When Cuban guerrillas overthrew the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship in their country, it wasn't long before the U.S. invaded the island. The CIA's forces were repelled by the armed Cuban masses, but the campaign against Cuba continued with assassinations and terrorist attacks. There were plans for another U.S. military intervention, and these plans were changed only when the Soviet Union sent medium-range ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads to the country. There is a reason that imperialist politicians constantly denounce any attempt by an independent government to acquire a nuclear weapon-and it isn't because they hate bombs. They don't care that Israel has a nuclear weapons arsenal and that it has never allowed international inspection of its nuclear capabilities, and they aren't dismantling their own nuclear weapons. Instead, they are attacking the DPRK for its nuclear capability, and they are denouncing Iran's alleged attempts at a nuclear weapons program (which isn't documented). They bully countries into dismantling nuclear weapons programs, imposing deathly sanctions and threatening more war. It is interesting to note that the two governments who have complied with U.S. dictates to abandon nuclear weapons development were Iraq and Libya. Both governments were overthrown after they complied. What is the lesson here?

The establishment of the Soviet Union in 1917 and the Communist International in 1919 provided a new hope for the world's oppressed. This hope wasn't merely ideological, but was also material. As Malott shows, the Soviet Union was the center of gravity in the proletarian struggle for much of the 20th century. It was the armory from which the world's oppressed drew their weapons to overthrow their oppressors and it fertilized a counter-hegemonic bloc to imperialism, allowing the class war against the bourgeoisie to take on a truly global character for the first time in history. On the one side of the war stood the imperialist states and their puppet governments, and on the other side stood the socialist states and the anti-colonial states.

This was a beautiful period of struggle for humanity, although it wasn't without its setbacks and its errors. Yet Malott argues that there is a crucial difference between critiquing the leadership or policy of a socialist state and critiquing that state's social system. And here is where his criticism of critical pedagogy is most severe: critical pedagogy turned its weapons of critique against the social systems of the proletarian class camp, thereby crossing class lines. Malott provides several historical and contemporary examples of pedagogues such as Henry Giroux who not only denounce the proletarian camp, but even go so far as to equate the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany-its literal opposite. Democracy is opposed to totalitarianism in critical pedagogy, which is exactly how Winston Churchill framed the world struggle in his famous "Iron Curtain" speech in Missouri on March 5, 1946. Talk about crossing class lines!

There is a material basis for such class collaboration, and a history of it that stretches back over 100 years with the betrayal of the Socialist International, which was the grouping of mass socialist parties. In 1912, the Socialist International met in Basel, Switzerland for an emergency meeting. The outbreak of an inter-imperialist war was imminent, and the socialist movement needed an orientation. The outcome of the meeting was clear: in the outbreak of inter-imperialist war all socialists should oppose the war and refuse to fire on workers of other countries. For those parties with representatives in parliament this meant that they had to vote against any war credits. When push came to shove, however, the overwhelming majority of the socialist parties capitulated to imperialism, and united with their national ruling classes. The Socialist International collapsed.

Why did this happen? How was it that the parties of working class revolution united with their class enemies? Lenin answered these questions in his work on imperialism. Monopoly profits extracted by imperialist powers, those profits "obtained over and above the profits which capitalists squeeze out of the workers of their 'own' country" made it "possible to bribe the labour leaders and the upper stratum of the labour aristocracy" (p. 9). These monopoly profits provided the material basis for national chauvinism and reformism, the latter of which can be defined as sacrificing the gains of the entire working class for the short-term gains of a particular section of the working class. The socialist parties that betrayed the working class, like the German Social Democratic Party, were able to keep their offices, their newspapers, their positions in parliament, and so on. The Bolsheviks, who stayed loyal to the proletarian revolution, were driven underground and their parliamentary representatives were arrested.

It's not too hard to see, then, why what Malott calls "anti-socialist socialism" is so prevalent in the academy. We are back at the limits of what counts as radical today. There are limits. You can be a socialist in the academy, but only after you denounce every socialist country and the history of the communist movement. All you need to do is add a few quick lines dismissing the Soviet Union as "totalitarian" and you will be all set, no need to worry about your tenure and promotion. It will help, too, if you stick to teaching and writing about this critical stuff, and refrain from organizing and agitating.

We should hope that these critical scholars will engage with Malott's ideas and arguments, and do the only logical thing: repudiate their previous writings and actions. This is what Malott has done in and with this book, which is an honest political self-critique. He writes of his "long journey of self-reflection and de-indoctrination." Malott's work has been heavily influenced by the revolutionary critical pedagogy of Peter McLaren. More than anyone else, McLaren has been instrumental in bringing Marx into the field of education, and this book is certainly situated within the opening at McLaren's work has created. McLaren turned to Marx at the height of the post-al era, and it was an uphill battle all the way. But, as Malott notes, the "fog and bigotry of anti-communism in the U.S. slowly dissipating." Indeed, the crises of capitalism and imperialism have aroused new mass movements in the U.S., from Occupy in 2011 to Black Lives Matter today. The campaign of Bernie Sanders has both capitalized on and furthered the acceptance of the word "socialism." It's now safe(r) for communists to come out of the shadows and boldly organize, and that is precisely what this manuscript represents.

Malott doesn't just formulate his program through critique, however, for he also points to several examples of organizations in the U.S. that have refused to cross class lines. Chief among these is the Black Panther Party, which clearly located itself within the context of the global class war. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was explicitly a Marxist-Leninist Party that saw itself as part of an international communist movement. Panthers distributed Mao's little red book at rallies, travelled to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and aligned themselves with all foreign anti-imperialist governments. They developed their own application of Marxism-Leninism particular to the contours of U.S. capitalism, and they did not follow orders from any foreign communist Party, but they militantly defended all socialist formations and all people's governments. A modern day example that he gives is the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which has unflinchingly stood against imperialism.

While it is common to hear dismissals of the Soviet Union as "authoritarian" or "totalitarian," there are also the quite puzzling designations, "state socialist," or "state capitalist," or "deformed workers' state" that pop up. They are labels that intellectuals in capitalist countries put on socialist governments, because they know better. The way that one arrives at these designations is by drawing up what an ideal socialist society would look like and then comparing that to actually-existing socialism. As Malott carefully shows us, however, this is idealism pure and simple. A materialist analysis acknowledges that "the tension within the co-existence of the past, present, and future represents an unavoidable, dialectical reality that carries with it the contested curriculum of struggle." The Soviet Union, for example, erected socialism not out of advanced capitalism but out of feudalism. But socialism was constructed. It wasn't perfect, there were ebbs and flows, but capitalism was never restored. There were income differentials, sure, but there was no bourgeoisie in the Soviet Union, labor-power wasn't a commodity to be bought and sold, and the relations of production were not relations of exploitation (see Szymanski, 1979 for empirical proof of this).

When the wave of counterrevolutions in 1989-1991 overthrew socialist governments throughout Europe it was celebrated as an advance for democracy and freedom. And for the world's bourgeoisie, it was: they moved in and gobbled up the countries, making private all that was held publicly before. Isn't odd that, whenever privatization happens in the U.S. critical intellectuals decry it as "neoliberalism," but when it happens in formerly socialist states it is seen as "democratization?" Malott's analysis here cuts through this mystification, helping us see that these are just two sides of the same coin, two of global capital's strategies for accumulation. We have to resolutely oppose both.

The global proletariat today is more fragmented and dispersed as a result of this freedom and democracy. With the framework of the global class war that Malott provides we can more deeply appreciate the transformations that have taken place since 1991. There are two primary phases here. The first is an all-out imperialist offensive against all socialist and independent states and peoples. Without an effective counterweight against imperialism many independent and socialist states found themselves under the immediate threat of military and economic attack. The economic blockades on Cuba and the DPRK were immediately expanded and intensified. A new war was started against Iraq-first by military means, then by economic means, and then again by military means. Thousands of bombs were dropped on Yugoslavia, Bosnia, and Kosovo to break up the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, sending the different nations within the federation into turmoil and chaos. Panama was invaded and its President was kidnapped and taken hostage in a U.S. prison. This is the context in which the recent wars on Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Yemen must be seen (in fact, the war on Afghanistan was the first step in a new war against independent states in the Middle East). It is similar with the U.S.'s policies toward states such as Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Iran, Sudan, China, Ukraine, Zimbabwe, and Russia.

But we are in a new historical moment, and it is a vulnerable and exciting one. The U.S.-led imperialist offensive has waned; the era of uni-polar imperialism seems to be over and new counter-hegemonic blocs are forming. While the war on Iraq did overthrow the nationalist Ba'athist government, it wasn't as easy as the imperialists had imagined it. The Iraqi people waged a heroic insurgency against occupation forces, and the project of installing a new puppet government ultimately failed. In 2007-2008 the capitalist economic crisis shook the world. With the U.S. bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, a socialist tide gathered in Latin America, bringing socialist and anti-imperialist governments into power, most notably with the election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. At the same time, independent powers like China and Brazil have emerged as real economic forces. True, these states are characterized by capitalist relations of production (although that's not 100 percent true in China's case), but they are not imperialist. China, in particular, has opened up an avenue for anti-imperialist and independent governments to emerge. Chinese economic relations with the Bolivarian revolution, for example, have been critical in Venezuela's independence from U.S. imperialism.

The emergence of a counter-hegemonic bloc has thrown imperialism into crisis. The strategy of installing puppet governments is no longer feasible, for these governments can easily abandon the U.S., as happened in Iraq. In the face of this reality, Dan Glazebrook (2013) argues that the strategy of imperialism today is to generate failed and weakened states. This is a compelling way in which to understand imperialist strategy in Syria since 2011. When protests against the Syrian government began that year, imperialism seized the opportunity to initiate regime change. The West had been funding opposition groups in Syria for some time, and these groups as well as radical Islamists quickly emerged as the opposition leadership (all progressive opposition groups quickly sided with the government, as they were satisfied with the reforms instituted-including a new constitution-and aware of the threat of imperialist intervention). But Russia and China vetoed a UN Security Council resolution to wage war on the country. So for five years now the West has been waging a proxy war against Syria, and in the process has created the material basis for the emergence of Daesh-or the Islamic State in the Levant-and has facilitated weapons and money transfers to them and the al-Nusra Front, which is affiliated with al-Qaeda. Russian military intervention in Syria, which began on Sept. 30, 2015, has been essential in turning the tide of the war, allowing the Syrian Arab Army to liberate key cities from the terrorist forces. Of course, the U.S. doesn't want Daesh to get too powerful, and it can't have Daesh threatening U.S. geopolitical interests. The U.S. is flailing around trying to stay balanced on a tightrope it strung across the Middle East. If the U.S. were really interested in ending terrorism, it would immediately fall back and join in an alliance with Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah, the three groups that have actually been fighting Daesh and the terrorist groups for five years.

This is the state in which we find ourselves: imperialism is in crisis, a new counter-hegemonic bloc has formed, and social movements in the United States are gaining ground and becoming more and more militant. The veil of anti-communism is lifting. What are we to do? The question, as Malott puts it, is: "will education support the basic structures of capitalist hegemony and its domination over the Earth, or will it strive to uproot them?" This book provides us with an essential framework for understanding our history our present and, thus, for formulating the tasks ahead for critical educators. By drawing a clear class line through critical pedagogy he has offered up a new space in which to theorize and enact the possibilities of critical education.

References

Glazebrook, D. (2013). Divide and ruin: The West's imperial strategy in an age of crisis. San Francisco: Liberation Media.

Lenin, V.I. (1920/1965). Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism: A popular outline. Peking: Foreign Languages Press.

Malott, C.S. (2016). History and education: Engaging the global class war. New York: Peter Lang.

Marx, K. (1867/1967). Capital: A critical analysis of capitalist production (vol. 1). New York: International Publishers.

Syzmanski, A. (1979). Is the red flag flying? The political economy of the Soviet Union today. London: Zed Press.

The History of Education as Colonial Apologist: A Marxist Critique

By Curry Malott

The three interrelated premises of historical development (i.e. the satisfaction of needs, the creation of new needs, and with them, the growth of the size and complexity of society), for Marx and Engels, are universal aspects of history that always exist despite mode of production, mode of cooperation, or degree and form of productive development.

Within capitalism the creation of new needs is driven by the capitalists' quest for expanding capital. The global expansion of capital was already presupposed by its emergence. The colonization of what would become the U.S., for example, represents one of capital's chief moments of primitive accumulation. This paper examines the way history of education texts have dealt with this fundamental aspect of the global expansion of capitalism. I argue that the genocide of America's Indigenous peoples and the theft of their lands have been downplayed in the history of education, even within Marxist approaches. This paper therefore argues that this shortcoming represents an unfortunate distortion of Marx who wrote extensively on how the European capitalist conquerors ruthlessly waged war on Native North America. Marx's last works, his ethnographic notebooks, focused on Native American societies and what they have to offer in terms of social existence after capitalism. The correction of so-called Marxist and traditional history of education texts is fundamental for building a socialist movement in the twenty first century based on the self-determination of oppressed nations and national minorities (i.e. true to the international solidarity of the Marxist-Leninist tradition). However, in responding to history of education texts that align themselves with the work of Marx I do not address their most common charges (i.e. functionalist economic reductionism), but rather, I focus on what I believe is their capitulation to the capitalist conquest of the Americas. As a result, this work, in my estimation, departs from some of Marx's more relevant and important insights for transforming capitalist relations into socialist ones in the contemporary era.

Marx's dialectical approach to constructing historical narratives always takes as its place of departure a critical engagement with existing narratives refracted through the light of empirical evidence and systematic reasoning. The error made by most history of education texts is that the connections between the settler-state, colonialism, and the uniquely capitalistic quest to perpetually expand capital are either loose and undeveloped or they are treated as separate, mostly unrelated spheres or aspects of human society. What follows is a critique of history of education texts' engagement with the colonial era. The following critique of history of education textbooks demonstrates the fields' disconnection with Indigenous studies. I present the analysis as a chronological history of the history of education and point to how its shortcomings can be overcome through an engagement with Indigenous studies (see, for example, Coulthard, 2014; Mohawk, 1999; Venables, 2004).

The Colonial Era

The discovery of America was another development of the desire for travel and discovery awakened by the Crusades. (Cubberley, 1919, p. 11)

This quote from Elwood Cubberley's 1919 history of education book represents a combination of what the late educational historian Michael Katz (1987) describes as an approach that seeks "superficial causes" (p. 140). Katz argues that this approach "signals a retreat from any attempt to find a principle or core within a social system," consequently, "the levers of change remain obscure" (p. 140). Clearly, Cubberley's explanation for European expansion and colonial pursuits as the result of a thirst for adventure can be described as "superficial." Cubberley's larger discussion of the history of education is unapologetically Euro-centric. We can observe this legacy of pro-capitalist Euro-centric apology reproduced in history of education textbooks in the decades following Cubberley. Vassar's (1965) history of American education text offers an example:

The missionary organizations were far more successful in their endeavors among the Negroes than among the Indians…in this great crusade…developing honest hard working Christian slaves…A large population [of Native Americans were] not slaves [adding to the difficulty of educating Indians]. (pp. 11-12)

While Cubberley's (1919) Euro-centrism stems from his glaring omission of even the mention of a Native American presence, Vassar's (1965) narrative is equally Euro-centric implying that the assimilation of Native Americans and Africans into bourgeois society represents a "great crusade." That is, Vassar presents colonialism, a process that led to centuries of physical, biological, and cultural genocide, as a positive force. Unfortunately, the racism and white supremacy of traditional bourgeois historians was either not discussed by the Marxist historians, or they themselves reproduced it. Consider:

The Western frontier was the nineteenth-century land of opportunity. In open competition with nature, venturesome white adventurers found their own levels, unfettered by birth or creed. The frontier was a way out-out of poverty, out of dismal factories, out of crowded Eastern cities. The frontier was the Great Escape. (Bowles and Gintis, 1976, p. 3)

I present Cubberley (1919) and Vassar (1965) next to Bowles and Gintis (1976) to demonstrate both the difference and continuity between traditional education historians and so-called Marxist education historians on the issue of colonialism/Westward expansion. As previously suggested, Bowles and Gintis' somewhat apologetic statement on the colonization of the Americas is not a position they borrowed from Marx for Marx was well aware of the barbaric destructiveness the expansion of capital had on the non-capitalist and non-Western societies it expanded into.

What is most obvious here is Bowles and Gintis' empathy for the children and grand-children of the expropriated peasant-proprietors of Europe who were "chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers" (Marx, 1867/1967, p. 734). The acknowledgement of the destructive and oppressive nature of capitalism here represents a clear break from the corporate apologist narratives that have dominated before and since Bowles and Gintis (1976). However, at the same time, there is a haunting silence within Bowles and Gintis' narrative seemingly more interested in the fate of immigrant laborers than the ancient tribes and confederacies that continue to struggle for national sovereignty within a colonial present that can too easily seem perpetual or permanent. This exclusionary tendency within much of the Marxist tradition, despite the contrary testimony of Marx's own work, has contributed to an unfortunate misunderstanding of the contributions of Marx.

Even progressive education historians in the 1980s and beyond continued to reproduce colonialist narratives. Button and Provenzo (1983/1989), for example, after explaining the colonization of the Americas as the result of a growing middle-class gaining wealth from a period of "peace, prosperity and trade" (p. 6), portray Native Americans as the helpless, primitive victims of progress:

The Native Americans…belonged to hundreds of tribes with almost as many different languages. In general, they had little in common with one another and did not unite to resist the settlement of their lands by the early colonists. The existence of numerous rivers and harbors, of a moderate climate, and natives unorganized for resistance, made North America splendid for colonization, if not for immediate exploitation. (p. 6)

Button and Provenzo (1983/1989) seem to offer this short passage as their explanation for the disappearance of Native Americans on the Eastern seaboard-an assumption that is patently false. Even more recent history of education texts written from progressive, constructivist perspectives too often reproduce the old colonial narratives. For example, it is astonishing that a book published in 2013 called Education and Social Change (Rury, 2013) would continue to depict American Indians or Native Americans as primitive victims helpless against the powerful onslaught of Europe's superiority.

Fortunately, there exists other history of education texts offering some diversity of narrative. For example, and to their credit, Wayne Urban and Jennings Wagoner (2009), in the fourth edition of their text, American Education: A History, reassess the old narrative reproduced by Boers (2007), arguing, instead, that the colonies were not established with the intention of building a new society, but rather, were a business venture, that is, an investment opportunity. To understand the first New Englanders' relationship with pre-existing indigenous confederacies, it is important to remember that the colonists faced the continent and its communities as religiously-mediated investors who came from a pre-existing English capitalist society that had long been primitively accumulated and normalized and naturalized traditions of private property and a market in human labor.

In Jamestown, VA, the continents' first permanent English settlement established in 1607, relied on a friendly relationship with the local Powhatan Confederacy for their own survival and for the success of their investment. However, the capitalist purpose of the colony, and thus its very existence, presented a major barrier to peace. At the same time, renowned American Indian historian, Robert Venables (1994), makes a compelling case that, before dissolving, the relationship between the colony and the Powhatan Confederacy was mutually beneficial.

…The London Company's investment in the highly profitable tobacco plantation business relied on peaceful relations with the local Powhatan Confederacy. Tobacco farmers supplied Powhatans with trade goods in exchange for food, which allowed colonists to invest their labor in the cash crop not worrying much about food. Powhatan's access to trade goods allowed them to grow stronger and defeat their rivals to the west thereby gaining access to trade with the copper-producing Indians of the Great Lakes (Venables, 2004, pp. 81)

Clearly, Venables does not see the Powhatans' as helpless victims, but as savvy negotiators committed to their own national interests. However, because of the labor-intensive nature of tobacco production and because of its profitability as a use-value, by 1619 a Dutch ship brought the first shipment of African slave-laborers to Virginia to keep pace with the demand for labor. Because of these reasons, it also made more sense to focus labor on tobacco production and continue to rely on the Powhatans for food. Consequently, fifteen years after their arrival, the colonists continued to rely on the Native communities for food, which might not have been a problem, but their numbers were forever growing, therefore placing increasing pressure on the Powhatan's food supply.

The colonists also came to the Americas with an old racist ideology stemming from an invented, Christian-related, European identity (Mohawk, 1999), which resulted in a long legacy of colonists viewing and treating Native Americans as inferior. Consequently, it was not uncommon for colonists to disregard Powhatan national authority and settle land without compensation or consultation, leading to tension and conflict with Native communities. Perhaps one of the last straws was the colonialists' plans to establish an Indian college, which American Indians saw for themselves no advantages. It was understood that adopting the settlers capitalistic ways would give the elites among the new settlers a major advantage by stripping the Powhatans of their own economy and means to satisfy and expand their needs. If the foreign capitalist becomes the ruler of the land, then the American Indians would forever be subordinate in the relationship. Eventually, having their land-base, food supply, culture, and very existence threatened, the Powhatans decided to terminate the colony. Commenting on this decision Venables (2004) explains:

In 1622 Powhatan warriors, intimately familiar with colonists routines from being their primary food vendor, simultaneously struck 31 locations across a 70 mile area killing nearly 350 of a population of 1200. (Pp. 81-82)

In the aftermath, hundreds of settlers sailed back to England. Cut off from their food supply as many as five hundred more colonists died of starvation that winter. As a result, James I took over the London Company's investment. That is, having been operated as a private venture for the first 17 years, Virginia, "became a royal colony in 1624 and control transferred to the Crown appointed governor" (Urban & Wagoner, Pp. 18). While this was an important development, following Venables and other historians, the ten years of bloody war that followed and the ways Indian policy were forever transformed (from co-existence to extermination), have had far more serious implications for the fate of the indigenous communities in North America. According to Venables (2004), "the 1622 attack did more than merely define future Indian policy in Virginia as one of conquest…It encouraged an already existent English colonial attitude of racial superiority" (p. 84). For example, after learning of the Powhatan war, the Pilgrims in Massachusetts erected a fort fearing the Narragansetts. However, the struggle for the Eastern seaboard was ultimately determined in 1633/1634 as smallpox wiped out Indians in a massive epidemic. Puritans, as might be expected, viewed this unintentional genocide as an act of God. Governor Winthrop:

If God were not pleased with our inheriting these parts, why did he drive out the natives before us? And why does he still make room for us by diminishing them as we increase? (Quoted in Venables, 2004,Pp. 89)

Following conquest, which was not the result of European superiority, but was made possible by an accident, settler-state policy toward indigenous communities has consistently eroded indigenous independence/sovereignty. A new Marxist history of education must therefore not only rethink the past, but it must embrace the national sovereignty of Americas' first nations as part of the movement for a socialist alternative to capitalism.

References

Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. New York: Basic Books.

Boers, D. (2007). History of American Education Primer. New York: Peter Lang.

Button, H.W. & Provenzo, E. (1983/1989). History of Education & Culture in America: Second Edition. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.

Coulthard, G.S. (2014). Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Minnesota University Press.

Cubberley, E. (1919). Public Education in the United States: A Study and Interpretation of American Educational History. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Marx, K. (1867/1967). Capital. Volume 1. New York: International Publishers.

Mohawk, J. (1999). Utopian Legacies: A History of Conquest and Oppression in the Western World. Sante Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishing.

Rury, J. (2013). Education and Social Change: Contours in the History of American Schooling. New York: Routledge.

Urban W. & Wagoner, J. (2009). American Education: A History (Fourth Edition). New York: Routledge.

Vassar, R. (1965). Social History of American Education: Volume I: Colonial Times to 1860. Chicago: Rand McNally & Company.

Venables, R. (2004). American Indian History: Five Centuries of Conflict & Coexistence: Volume I: Conquest of a Continent 1492-1783. Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light.