Against Ignoring Race: The Zanj Revolution as Black Slave Revolt

By Derek Ide

Numerous controversies exist surrounding one of the most historic uprisings in the pre-modern world. The Thawrat al-Zanj was a mass uprising in the area surrounding Basra against the Abbasid Caliphate from 869 to 883.[1] The Zanj revolt has been variously described as a "typical class war" and "proletarian movement based on a coherent politico-religious doctrine,"[2] a "state run by bandits," [3] a "semi-barbarian movement,"[4] and a "terrible revolt" which "sowed the seeds of Lower Mesopotamia's ruin." [5] Eventually, the Abbasids brutally crushed the rebellion, particularly after the leader of the Saffarid uprising in Persia declined a formal alliance with theSahib al-Zanj, Ali ibn Muhammad. [6] Despite prodigious bloodshed, the revolutionaries who revolted against their former masters, landlords, and the general class of Arab ruling elites were driven by a deeply-rooted egalitarianism, officially articulated by Ali ibn Muhammad, who at times borrowed from Kharijite slogans. There were certainly material and ideological limits to the revolution, limits that adherents of modernity's universal humanistic claims may find unsavory. One in particular was the unwillingness or inability to abolish slavery as an institution but instead to reverse the position of slave and slave-master. Yet, in spite of limited primary source material, enough evidence exists to understand the Zanj revolution as primarily a slave revolt first, and a racialized one at that. This neo-traditionalist analysis positions the former slave class in a vanguard role, even if other classes eventually joined the revolt.

There are a few distinct criteria that can be established in order to confirm that the Zanj revolution was a slave rebellion led by black slaves. First, we must trace the etymological lineage of the word "Zanj," a word of considerable disputation. Second, we must establish that the rulers of Abbasid Iraq did indeed utilize black slave labor, particularly in the marshy areas around Basra. Finally, we must establish that Ali ibn Muhammad specifically organized the black Zanj as the primary motor to lead the revolt against the Abbasid caliphate. After addressing these three variables, the second task of this essay will be to review existing literature on the topic, primarily split between those who assert the black slave character of the revolt and those who obscure or deny it. For the sake of simplicity, the labels "traditionalist" (or neo-traditionalist) will be used for the former while the term "revisionist" will be used for the latter. Despite the claims of revisionist historians who attempt to obscure the racialized nature of the revolt, [7] the Zanj revolution was certainly about slavery, even if its goals were not to abolish slavery as an institution but simply reverse the role of slave and slave master.

The Etymology and Use of the Word "Zanj"

There are several theses on the origin of the word Zanj. The one common denominator is that it is not an Arabic word in origin, but that its tri-consonant structure (z-n-j) allowed it to be easily adapted. At least one scholar asserts it is of Ethiopian origin, connected with " zenega" (to prattle, stammer, to barbarize). Another group of scholars claim it is of Persian origin, claiming zang/zangi is used to denote "Negro." [8] Others still claim it is Greek, coming from "zingis," although this is less likely. The more heated area of contestation focuses on the interpretation of the word and how contemporaries of the Zanj revolt employed it. In general, however, Popovic asserts that to talk about a "land of the Zanj," as it has sometimes been employed, to denote a general territory south of Abyssinia and along the Eastern coast of Africa, is misleading. This is due to the fact that the term "Zanj" include "blacks from numerous peoples bought or seized in all ports of call all along the coast." [9]

It is evident from both contemporaneous Arab commentators, as well as those who lived in the wake of the Zanj revolt, that racial tropes were regular elements of Arab thought. For instance, Arab cosmographer and geographer Kazouini attributes "fetid odor, limited intelligence, extreme exuberance, [and] cannibalistic customs" to the Zanj. [10] Masudi likewise notes the Zanj are of "smelly skin, excessive petulance, sparse eyebrows, [and] highly developed sexual organs." [11] Fourteenth century Arab writer Al-Bakoui notes the Zanj are characterized by their "odor, their quicknes ot anger, their lack of intellect, their habit of eating one another and their enemies." Finally, Arab geographer al-Kindi argues that the hot climate in the land of the Zanj causes the brain to lose "its balance, and the soul can no longer exert its complete action on it; the swell of perceptions and the absence of any act of intelligence are the result."[12] French translator L. M. Devic that amongst Arab authors of the Middle Ages, such commentaries were ordinary. The Zanj are variously: evil, "surpass brute animals in their unfitness and perverse natures," are "so hideous and so ugly," idolaters, etc.[13] It should be noted, however, that exceptions to such characterizations exist. For instance, centuries later Ibn Khaldun chastises Masudi, Galen, and al-Kindi for asserting that the Zanj character is dominated by a "weakness of the brain," which for Ibn Khaldun was a "worthless" explanation that "proves nothing." [14]

In 1976, M.A. Shaban argued that a distinction between the term sudan and zanj was integral to understanding the revolt around Basra. As he explains, this terminology was "not used at random; they were meant to define certain groups of mankind." The Zanj were from East Africa and extending into Central Africa, while the sudan indicated the Western Sudan of today to the shores of the Atlantic. [15] According to Shaban, the governor of Egypt Ibn Tulun enlisted tens of thousands of "negroid" Sudanese to fight against the Zanj, in order to capture certain port cities and restore lucrative trade routes that had been severed because of the uprising.[16] However, this binary etymological distinction is complicated when Shaban discusses the Qaramita revolt after the crushing of the Zanj. For instance, he suggests that the Qaramat first appeared to describe a "group who had supported the Zanj revolt, the reference being to the Qarmatiyyun and to Nubians who could hardly speak Arabic." [17] He notes that the geographer Maqdisi associates these two people with the Sudan. Shaban argues that the Qaramita were "remnants of the Zanj revolts who… were ready to take part in any revolt." [18]

In her 1986 work "Toward a Definition of the Term Zanj," Marina Tolmacheva makes a compelling and cohesive argument undermining the thesis that "Zanj" is etymologically associated only with a specific portion of the East African coast.[19] In many ways, she borrows from Talhami, who argues that there is an "overemphasis" on Arab commercial interactions with East Africa in the early Abbasid era, and that "the assumption that 'Abbasid writers used Zanj to mean specifically the East African coast, and that therefore the people they called Zanj originated in a specific part of that region, is completely unjustified."[20] Tolmacheva posits a new argument:

I would like to suggest that the history of the term Zanj, and the growth of its geographic and racial scope, may be more closely connected with the history of commercial ties between Africa, Arabia and the Persian Gulf than with political-military expansions, whether of Rome, Persia or the Islamic caliphate. Continually under certain constraints of navigation and temporarily focused under the Sassanids on the Red Sea area, these ties were eventually restored to include the East African coast. In this process the word formerly used to describe negroid slaves exported from north-east Africa may have developed a new connotation for peoples of the coast well past Cape Guardafui .[21]

Thus, while possibly weakening the idea that the slaves working in the marshy areas of Baghdad were specifically Southeast African in origin only, this reinforces the notion that these were likely black slaves from other areas of Africa.

The Class Economy of Basra in the Latter Half of the Ninth Century

The Zanj Revolt primarily occurred in what is modern day Iraq and a section of Iran (Khuzistan). Two regions in particular, Batiha and Maysan in lower Iraq's canal region, are of particular importance. [22] As Alexandre Popovic notes, this importance can be attributed to the "nature of their soil," which were largely marshy flatland areas that are regularly flooded with mud.[23] Swamp reeds and growths permeated the wide but shallow canals crossed the area. Only small, flat boats could navigate these canals, making navigation in al-Batiha extraordinarily difficult (and often a perfect hideaway for brigands and rebels of all sorts).[24] Lower Iraq's "Canal Region," especially the Nahr Abd al-Khasib where the Zanj capital of al-Mukhtara ("The Chosen") was established, facilitated guerrilla activity and acted as the base from which the rebels could launch raids.[25] While the reeds and rushes that naturally adorned the area were put to many uses by local inhabitants, the agrarian population also grew melons, onions, rice, barley, corn, and other grains. Yet, as al-Tabari noted, swarms of mosquitoes were a scourge on the population and malaria was an omnipresent threat.[26]

Prior to Umayyad governor al-Hajjaj and his successors, the Arabs of Iraq (either Bedouins or merchants) showed little care for land reclamation projects. The Abbasid Caliphs augmented the land revival projects, which were carried out by overseers (wakil) and freemen (mawla) who had been granted the land as rewards. As Popovic notes, four points are of significant interest: 1) the existence of "dead lands" around Basra, 2) the possibility of "acquiring these lands," 3) the presence in Basra of people with substantial capital, and 4) the presence of slave laborers to transform the land.[27]

The date of arrival for black slaves to Iraq from the East Coast of Africa is contested. One scholar, F. Al-Samir, suggests 720 as the date for Muslim trade outposts in East Africa. If, as it is believed, black slaves were captured, bought, or obtained from subject states on the coast as tribute, it can be surmised that slaves proliferated in Iraqi society after this date. Some scholars, such as Charles Pellat claim an earlier but indeterminate date of origin, noting that Arab historians reported general "Zanj revolts" (not the Zanj revolt of Basra) as early as 689-90 and 694-5. [28] As Jere L. Bacharach explains:

It was not unusual to find references to African slaves in Iraq without any warning of when and how they got there or what happened to them after the specific event was recorded; for example, a revolt of African Zanj slaves in Basra in 76/695 or the appearance of 4,000 Zanj military slaves in Mosul in I33/75I. Therefore, the silence in the Arabic chronicles on the numbers and activities of African military slaves in Iraq from 210/825 to the Zanj rebellion (255/869-271/883) may reflect their absence or, more likely, their relative unimportance in the eyes of the chroniclers. [29]

By the Abbasid era, as Bacharach argues, the "Muslim military reflected an organizational pattern more familiar to the pre-Islamic Fertile Crescent than to the Arabia of Muhammad." [30] Imported military slaves, notable Turkish cavalrymen and African infantry, were used by Arab rulers to control large swaths of territory. Africans were generally considered inferior to Turks due to a circular logic (infantry inferior to cavalry, Africans associated with the former and Turks with the latter) that was self-reinforcing. The kind of racialized and occupational inferiority assigned by Arab rulers and writers to Africans in a military context was grafted onto slaves utilized for extractive labor as well.

According to Tabari, the future rebels were employed as laborers ( kassahin) to prepare the land in lower Iraqi so that the area around Shatt al-Arab could be cultivated. The arduous objective was removing the top crust from the surface, transfer it by mule, and pile it in large heaps. These laborers were recruited from among black slaves, camped in groups of 500 to 5,000, [31] and forced to survive off handfuls of flour, semolina, and dates. In general, only the wealthy had access to such lands and could afford to purchase and exploit such large quantities of slaves. Al-Tabari suggests around 15,000 slaves were employed in such a manner. [32] Louis Massignon's description of Basra's "intense crisis" during this period is apt:

Basra was destined to furnish the first example of the destructive social crisis of the city in Islam, when social restraints were broken, when usury, indirect taxes, government borrowing were rampant, and the opposition was exasperated by the luxury of the wealthy… expensive clothes and jewelry, African ivory, pearls from the Gulf, precious wood from India made a mockery of the working proletariat's misery on the plantations. Canonically, the lands of Basra were "amwat" ("dead lands"), under their original crust of unproductive natron or sebakh, "revived" by the coolie labor of the Zanj… who were refused their claim to freedom following their conversion… in Basra it ended in a fight to the death between the privileged elite of the City that wanted everything for itself, and the starved proletariat of the plantations and sand-filled oases who pounced on the City to destroy it. Babel, which was alive as long as it was a place where the exogamous exchange of values and language was carried on, became Sodom, and burned. [33]

Yet for all the hyperbole regarding the "burning" and "destruction" caused by the Zanj, there is remarkably little information regarding the actual internal organization of the revolutionary state. It is also likely that the "destructive" nature of the event has been overemphasized by Arab commentators who were driven by a severe disdain for the black rebels.

Black Slaves as Revolutionaries under Ali ibn Muhammad

Information on Ali ibn Muhammad is quite scarce. The book of Ali ibn Muhammad's foremost biographer, Muhammad ibn al-Hasan ibn Sahl's Kitab Akhbar Sahib al-Zanj, which Tabari relies on for biographical information, has been lost to us. [34] It is likely that the Sahib al-Zanj was born in a village outside of Tehran, although he was probably of Arab descent. [35] His maternal grandfather had been a Kharijite involved in the struggle against the 10 th Umayyad caliph Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik, and had fled to al-Rayy outside of Tehran as an exile. [36] Ali ibn Muhammad spent some time as a court poet in Samarra, where he also taught writing, grammar, and astronomy.[37] In 863-4 he left Samarra for Bahrain, where he claimed to be a descendent of Ali.[38] In the Bahraini village of Al-Hajar, Ali ibn Muhammad attempts to galvanize a following, which he partially succeeds in doing. After acrimonious clashes between his supporters and detractors, he leaves al-Hajar and ended up in al-Ahsa (modern day Saudi Arabia), where he convinced certain tribes of his prophethood and collected taxes in his own name. Already he was mobilizing against the Abbasid caliphate. After some wayward clashes in the desert, where he loses many of his supporter, he decides to make his way to Basra. His attempts to organize there are quickly smashed by the ruling tribes, his supporters are jailed, and he is sent fleeing to Baghdad.

After a year, Ali ibn Muhammad snuck back into Basra, pretending to be a wealthy merchant who was selling land in the area. One of his first recruits was a man named Rayhan ibn Salih, who was a worker that transported flour from Basra for distribution to the Zanj slaves. Through Rayhan, Ali ibn Muhammad was able to begin organizing amongst the Zanj. [39] In the month of Ramadan, 869, Ali ibn Muhammad proclaimed the revolt. He began intercepting groups of slaves on their way to the worksites, bound the slave drivers, and compelled the slaves to join his uprising. Within days he had organized hundreds of slaves. Ali ibn Muhammad promised improved conditions, wealth, and to never deceive or fail the newly emancipated slaves. He condemned the former slaveholders, ordered the slaves to beat their former masters, and after a period of physical vengeance the former masters were allowed to leave after an oath of secrecy regarding the rebels' location. One of the former owners escaped and warned the overseer of a "large camp" where reportedly 15,000 slaves were employed. [40] Still, as others have noted, success brought more success: "there is no doubt that the blacks were quickly aided by poor peasants, Bedouins always eager to pillage… and finally, even black deserters from the Caliph's army." [41] Most scholars, including Popovic, Lewis, Cahen, and Noldeke assert that it is likely poor peasants joined the Zanj revolutionaries.

Popovic's reading of Tabari's narrative, in line with the traditionalist scholars, is one of a battle between slave and slavemaster. As he explains, "one after the other, successive detachments sent out by the 'people of Basra' were defeated and freed slaves swelled the ranks of the insurgents." [42] At one juncture, according to Tabari, the Abbasid general Rumays offered Ali ibn Muhammad five dinars for each slave returned and promised him free passage out of the territory. In response, Ali ibn Muhammad assembled the Zanj, and through an interpreter (as many of the slaves did not speak Arabic), swore that none would ever be returned to their former master. In one particularly moving line, Ali ibn Muhammad proclaims: "May some of you remain with me and kill me if you feel that I am betraying you." [43] As late as February, 881, two years from total defeat, Ali ibn Muhammad refused an absolute pardon and great rewards in exchange for capitulation. [44] It was clear that Ali ibn Muhammad's sincerity to the cause of Zanj liberation was genuine. We find another measure of his class and racial egalitarianism in the fact that of his two daughters, one was married to Sulayman ibn Jami'a, a black slave and measurer of grain from Hajar. [45] At one juncture, Hamdan Qarmat approaches Ali ibn Muhammad in order to negotiate an alliance. From Tabari's account, Qarmat purportedly met the "prince of the blacks" but decided they could "never agree" and refused to concretize any alliance.[46]

The task of outlining the internal organization of the Zanj state under Ali ibn Muhammad is a difficult task for two reasons. First, Arab chroniclers were significantly more interested in the minutiae of the battles between Abbasid generals and Zanj rebels. Second, the writers generally considered the Zanj enemies of religion and law, and as such any descriptions handed down are generally pejorative in nature. Either way, it is hardly accurate to describe Zanj social relations, as some earlier writers have, as "communistic" in nature. [47] It is far more likely that the social order was reversed, not abolished. One anecdotal passage from Al-Masudi is of importance in this regard. Masudi, who despises the Zanj, explains that their "insolence" was so great that at one point they "auctioned off the women of the Hasan, the Husayn, and the Abbas families, descendants of Hashem, of Quraysh and of the most noble Arab families… Each black owned ten, twenty, and even thirty of these women, who served them as concubines and performed humble tasks for their wives."[48] Thus, Masudi's consternation is in large part derived from his racial sensibilities. For him, it is inconceivable that blacks could hold noble Arab women as concubines, even though black women were regularly forced into concubinage by Arab masters.

The Divide Between Traditional and Revisionist Historians

For a long time the Zanj revolt was understood as a classic slave revolt. Both al-Tabari, an influential Persian contemporary of the Zanj episode, and al Mas'udi, an Arab historian and geographer born not long after the crushing of the Zanj, speak at length about the role of black slaves in the revolution.[49] Both scholars regularly asserted their disdain for what are variously described as Zanj, Sudan, 'abid, ghulam, or khawal.[50] As early as 1892, Theodore Nöldeke described the uprising as a "negro insurrection."[51] Much of the contemporary mid-20th century scholarship in Arabic confirms this thesis.[52] Marshall Hodgson, writing in the 1950s in his monumental magnum opus The Venture of Islam, describes the Zanj revolt as such: "the Negro slaves, called 'Zanj,' many of whom were used for labour in the marshy areas at the mouth of the Tigris, had risen in 869 under a Khariji leader and set up their own state, which tried to turn the tables on the former masters, enslaving the former slave-owners." [53] Zakariyau Oseni, in his more recent work "The Revolt of Black Slaves in Iraq Under the 'Abbasid Administration 869-883 CE," explicitly situates himself as a modern writer sympathetic to the Zanj. He writes that the primary agents were "Black slaves whose race, more than any other, had suffered the atrocities and humiliation inherent in that ancient institution throughout the course of known history."[54] More recently, Alexandre Popovic has asserted a "neo-traditionalist" analysis in his The Revolt of African Slaves in Iraq in the 3rd/9 th Century , an English translation of the work he carried out mostly in the 1970s. This approach stands in stark juxtaposition to a more recent wave of scholarship that has attempted to obfuscate the role of race in the Zanj revolution.

One of the earliest revisionist accounts of the Zanj revolt appeared in 1977. Ghada Talhami's "The Zanj Rebellion Reconsidered" does not strictly discount the role of race or black slaves in the revolt, but attempts to complicate the narrative by including the role of other social classes. Her account is fairly nuanced, moreso than other revisionist scholars like M. A. Shaban for instance, when she asserts that: "The slaves were merely one among several oppressed classes who participated in the rebellion, which was not an attack on the institution of slavery but on social inequality… If one group contributed more than others to the success of this drawn-out revolt, it was not the black slaves but the Bedouins from the surrounding region, who provisioned the fighters throughout the insurrection."[55] Her sub-thesis is that no major slave trade existed with the East African coast of Zanzibar during the ninth century (or else scholars would have noted it) and thus, it is unlikely that this was primarily a black slave revolt. [56] Although there are legitimate critiques of Talhami's approach, a rather absurd revisionist narrative is constructed by M. A. Shaban, who denies that the Zanj revolt was a slave revolt at all, and instead proclaims that it was a revolt primarily of Arabs and some East Africans. Slaves, he asserts, would have lacked the resources to challenge the Abbasid government for such an extended period of time. [57] Although they do so in distinct ways, in general these arguments tend to conceal the role that racially-based slavery played in fomenting the Zanj revolt.

One of the most prominent revisionist historians is M.A. Shaban, who counterpoises his analysis with Noldeke by asserting that the Zanj rebellion is "one of the most misunderstood episodes in Islamic history." [58] The notion that the Zanj episode represented a "slave revolt" has been "slavishly regurgitated by modern scholars" who were tempted by the "romantic idea of a slave revolt in a slave-ridden society" and could not be bothered with the "cumbersome task" of "wading through the considerable amount of valuable material" which would suggest a different narrative. [59] Shaban begins by noting correctly that the Zanj revolt occurred in conjunction with other serious forms of dissension in the Abbasid Empire. It was one of many revolts against the central government, including the prominent Saffarid rebellion as well as the Shia of Tabaristan, amongst others.

For him, however, the Zanj was not a slave revolt. It was a "Zanj, i.e. a Negro, revolt."[60] Shaban argues that equating Negro with Zanj is a nineteenth-century racial trope not applicable to ninth century Arabia. Salves rising against the wretched conditions of work in the salt marshes of Basra is a "figment of the imagination." For Shaban, a "few runaway slaves who joined the rebels" does not make a slave revolt. [61] Instead, the Zanj was an "Arab-Negro alliance" that represented Free East Africans who had made their home in the region alongside Arabs of the Persian Gulf. For Shaban, the fact that even "Jews were among the supports of the revolt" is proof that it was not slave revolt. [62] In a passage that perhaps most betrays his highly elitist conception of the incapacity of slaves to act as historical agents of change, Shaban argues:

If more proof is needed that it was not a slave revolt, it is to be found in the fact that it had a highly organized army and navy which vigorously resisted the whole weight of the central government for almost fifteen years. Moreover, it must have had huge resources that allowed it to build no less than six impregnable towns in which there were arsenals for the manufacture of weapons and battleships… Significantly the revolt had the backing of a certain group of merchants who persevered with their support on the very end. [63]

For Shaban the "bone of contention" was African trade with the Persian Gulf, not slavery.[64] The expansion of trade and the demand for African goods "stimulated the setting-up and growth of East African colonies in all the trade centers of the Gulf."[65] A high rate of taxation, as high as 20%, on imported goods imposed by the central government under Muwaffiq encouraged revolt by these East African merchants.[66] It was this combination of wealth and manpower that allowed the Zanj revolt to occur.

Whereas Shaban argues that in "the Islamic world slaves were mostly employed in domestic housework and of course as concubines," Alexandre Popovic acknowledges this fact but explains this is precisely the importance of the Zanj episode. [67] Popovic's thesis is that the Zanj revolt is significant because it "suppressed the unique attempt to transform domestic slavery into colonial slavery." [68] For him, it is clear that "the conditions of the Zanj slaves in Iraq were wretched, and there were two uprisings before the great revolt." [69] Yet, Popovic also sees in Ali ibn Muhammad nothing more than an "ambitious, totally unprincipled man."[70] As for his ideology, Popovic asserts that he had a "tendency to embrace difference doctrines" as a "powerful political tool." This allowed him to borrow variously from Shiite, Kharijite, and Azrakite tendencies. [71] Thus, in Popovic's final analysis, the Zanj revolt was "in part a social revolt, but it was not, as some have said, a true (modern) social revolution with a definite plan."[72] The revolt's most important consequence, other than its geopolitical assistance to other movements,[73] is that it forced the abandonment of Lower Iraq's barren lands, leading to a disappearance of the large slave work sites and their concomitant misery.

Conclusion

To conclude, the Zanj revolution was a slave rebellion led Ali ibn Muhammad, who rallied black slaves for the purpose of revolution. The etymological lineage of the word "Zanj," even if it does not denote black slaves of specifically East African origin, was used as a catchall for blacks more generally. Furthermore, the rulers of Abbasid Iraq did indeed utilize black slave labor. In particular, the ruling classes of Basra utilized them for transforming the "dead" lands of the marshes into agricultural land. Traditionalist and revisionist scholars differ over whether or not they view the revolt as racialized, and in particular whether the Zanj revolution was actually driven by black slaves. However, upon review of the evidence, the Zanj rebellion was certainly a racialized slave revolt, in which the Arab slave masters were subjugated by former slaves. In this sense it was not a modern social revolution, where the social structure was abolished and replaced with something totally new. Instead, the social order was inversed. The Zanj revolt, despite failing, was successful in warning Arab rulers against transitioning slavery from primarily domestic servitude to chattel slavery (in the way that Philip Cutin's "plantation complex" did first in the Mediterranean, then in the Canary Islands and finally the Caribbean and South America). [74] Slavery was not abolished, but the Zanj were no longer the ones who would be enslaved at the hands of Arab overlords.

Bibliography

Bacharach, Jere. "African Military Slaves in the Medieval Middle East: The Cases of Iraq (869-955) and Egypt (868- 1171)." International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 13 (1981).

Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex. Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Furlonge, Nigel D. "Revisiting the Zanj and Re-Visioning Revolt: Complexities of the Zanj Conflict (868-883 AD)," Negro History Bulletin (Vol 62, No. 4, 1999), 9-10.

Hodgson, Marshall G. S. The Venture of Islam, Conscience and History in a World Civilization, Vol. 1: The Classical Age of Islam. University of Chicago Press, 1974.

Nöldeke, Theodor. "A Servile War in the East," in Sketches from Eastern History, (Beirut: Khayats, 1963, originally printed in 1892).

Oseni, Zakariyau I. "The Revolt of Black Slaves in Iraq under the Abbasid Administration in 869-883 C.E.," Hamdard Islamicus (1989).

Popovic, Alexandre. T he Revolt of African Slaves in Iraq in the 3rd / 9th Century. Markus Weiner Publishers, 2011.

Shaban, M.A. Islamic History: A New Interpretation, Vol 2: A.D. 750-1055 (A.H. 132-448) . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Silkaitis, Emily Martha. "Modern Takes on Motivations Behind the Zanj Rebellion," Lights: The Messa Journal (Spring 2012, Issue 3, Vol. 1).

Talhami, Ghada Hashem. "The Zanj Rebellion Reconsidered," The International Journal of African Historical Studies (Vol. 10, No. 3, 1977).

Trimingham, Spencer. "The Arab Geographers and the East African Coast," H.N. Chittick and Robert I. Rotberg, eds., East Africa and the Orient (New York, 1975), 116-117, n. 4.

Tolmacheva, Marina. "Toward a Definition of the Term Zanj," Journal of the British Institute in Eastern Africa, 21:1 (1986).

Notes

[1] The first period, from 869-79, was characterized by the Abbasid Caliphate's inability to crush the revolt, partially because its attention was diverted to other pressing challenges. The second period, from 879-83, when the empire could address the revolt with its full coercive powers, was one of slow decline but terminal defeat for the Zanj. As Popovic argues, "In spite of Ya'qub b. Layth's rejection of Ali b. Muhammad's proposal for an alliance, there is no question about the Saffarid contribution to the Zanj cause… it was only when the Saffarid question was settled that al-Muwaffiq was able to undertake the large-scale operations that would eventually crush the revolt," See Alexandre Popovic, The Revolt of African Slaves in Iraq in the 3rd / 9th Century (Markus Wiener Publishers, 2011), 1. Furthermore, the Tulunid issue forced the Abbasid's to remove one of their best generals, Musa b. Buga, from the Zanj front and place him in Syria.

[2] Charles Pellat, quoted in Popovic, 2.

[3] C. Brockelmann, quoted in Ibid., 3.

[4] Bernard Lewis, quoted in Ibid., 3.

[5] G. Marcais, quoted in Ibid., 3.

[6] There is considering divergence on this question. M.A. Shaban laments that it "is a sad comment on research in Islamic history that, in spite of the proximity of the territories where these two movements took place, no attempt has been made to examine their relationship… It is a curious fact that the two movements never made any attempts to ally themselves against their common enemy, the central government, and instead actually fought each other." M.A Shaban, Islamic History: A New Interpretation, Vol 2: A.D. 750-1055 (A.H. 132-448) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 99.

[7] There is an entire intellectual lineage that attempts to surreptitiously avoid racialization in the Islamic world, particularly in the pre-colonial era. When racialization, and anti-black racism in particular, is addressed, it is usually done so as a colonial legacy, one that the British or French or some imperial power imposed upon the Muslim world. Although it is certainly true that colonial administrators and imperial powers augmented and exacerbated racial hierarchies, especially given the rigid racial categories in European society, it is hardly honest to dismiss claims of racialization in the Islamic world with a host of rhetorical tropes ("one of the sahaba, Bilal, was black," "Islam does not recognize race," etc.).

[8] Popovic, 15.

[9] Ibid., 16.

[10] Ibid., 16.

[11] Ibid., 17.

[12] Ibid., 17.

[13] Ibid., 18.

[14] Ibid., 18.

[15] Other terms, like Nubian, Habasha (Abyssinians), and Beja were also in use. Shaban, 110.

[16] It is important to note that Ibn Tulun sent this contingent of black soldiers to suppress the Zanj not on the orders of Muwaffiq, with whom Tulun was in competition over resources, but in order to augment Egypt's treasury. The leader of the expedition, who Shaban identifies as one Lu'lu, eventually switched sides and began working for Muwaffiq against the interests of Ibn Tulun. See Shaban, 133.

[17] Shaban, 130.

[18] Ibid., 130.

[19] See Tolmacheva, 105. "This paper addresses itself to the use of the word Zanj in relation to black people of East Africa in their domicile. The Zanj slaves of the Caliphate and the so-called Zanj of the Western Sudan! remain therefore outside its scope. This approach implies a basic distinction in cognitive perspective, to be repeatedly referred to later: specifically, that in the Caliphate the wordZanjusually refers to slaves and consequently sets the people called Zanj in a separate socioeconomic category, entailing connotations of dependence and inferiority." Marina Tolmacheva, "Toward a Definition of the Term Zanj," Journal of the British Institute in Eastern Africa, (Vol. 21, No. 1, 1986), 105.

[20] Ghada Hashem Talhami, "The Zanj Rebellion Reconsidered," The International Journal of African Historical Studies (Vol. 10, No. 3, 1977), 461.

[21] Tolmacheva, 112. Emphasis added.

[22] The Batiha Marshlands extend roughly from Kufa to Basra. Al-Mukhtarah, Ali ibn Muhammad's established fortress-city for the Zanj, was located east of Basra. At one point, the Zanj reached as far north as Jarjaraya, just southeast of Baghdad.

[23] Popovic, 10.

[24] Ibn Battuta mentions this region as a "forest of reeds surrounded by water" where "bandits of the sect of Ali" often "fortify themselves in these swamps and defend themselves against pursuers." Quoted in Popovic, 11.

[25] Popovic, 12.

[26] Ibid., 11.

[27] Ibid., 12-3. The first three contentions are generally accepted. On the fourth, the idea that a large slave market existed in East Africa where Arabs could purchase black slaves, is contested. This will be addressed later.

[28] Ibid., 20.1

[29] Jere L. Bacharach, "African Military Slaves in the Medieval Middle East: The Cases of Iraq (869-955) and Egypt (868-1171)," International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 13 (1981), 473. One of the reasons African slavers were "deemed unimportant" was due to the fact that they were not "directly involved in the power struggles consuming the Baghdad court," 474.

[30] Bacharach, 489.

[31] Likely an exaggerated figure.

[32] Popovic, 24.

[33] Louis Massignon, quoted in Popovic, 24-5.

[34] Muhammad ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Sahl (known as Shaylama), was one of Ali ibn Muhammad's supporters that had been pardoned after the crushing of the revolt. As such, in an effort to exonerate himself, his work is full of invective against his former leader and accuses him of the worst transgressions, which Tabari regularly exploits. Shaylama himself is eventually arrested for conspiring against the Caliph while in Baghdad. The stories of his execution differ. One explains he was "skewered on a long iron rod which penetrated him from his anus to his mouth; he was kept like this over a huge fire until he died." Another claims he was tied between three spears, placed above a fire and "turned and roasted like a chicken" before being tied to the gallows between the "two bridges in the eastern quarter of Baghdad." Popovic, 124. Tabari, Masudi, Ibn al-Nadim, and Ibn al-Jawzi all rely upon his work.

[35] Popovic argues that his birth place is what leads many authors to mistake him for Persian, 33, 41.

[36] Popovic, 34. Based on Tabari's telling.

[37] Ali ibn Muhammad was, according to Tabari, "eloquent, a superior mind, and a natural poet." One of his pieces that received significant attention read as follows:

It is a humiliating situation (to be forced) to live in frugality, accepting it all the while…

If the fire becomes lessened because of too many logs,

its progress will depend on their separation

If a saber remains in its sheath, another

Saber will be victorious on the day of combat

[38] Ali ibn Muhammad ibn al-Fadl ibn al-Hasan ibn Ubayd Allah ibn al-Abbas ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib.

[39] Popovic, 39-40.

[40] Ibid., 41. Tabari's figures are certainly inflated, but the general idea remains the same.

[41] Ibid., 137.

[42] Ibid., 45.

[43] Ibid., 48.

[44] Nigel D. Furlonge explains that on at least three separate occasions Ali ibn Muhammad refused to betray the Zanj. Nigel D. Furlonge, "Revisiting the Zanj and Re-Visioning Revolt: Complexities of the Zanj Conflict (868-883 AD)," Negro History Bulletin (Vol 62, No. 4, 1999), 7-14. Also see Popovic, 103.

[45] Popovic, 123.

[46] Ibid., 81-2.

[47] M. Gaudegroy-Demombyne writes, for instance, that the "principles that could best assure its authority over the black masses are those that we have seen repeated by all the Iranian agitators since Mazdak: wives and property in common." See Popovic, 129-30.

[48] Popovic, 132-3.

[49] For an explication of how various modern authors employ both al-Tabari and Mas'udi, see Emily Martha Silkaitis, "Modern Takes on Motivations Behind the Zanj Rebellion," Lights: The Messa Journal (Spring 2012, Issue 3, Vol. 1). Popovic notes that Ibn Al-Athir and Ibn Abd al-Hadid also provide some minor details about the Zanj revolt, but mostly drawn from al-Tabari and al-Masudi.

[50] For a delineation of these terms see Nigel D. Furlonge, "Revisiting the Zanj and Re-Visioning Revolt: Complexities of the Zanj Conflict (868-883 AD)," Negro History Bulletin (Vol 62, No. 4, 1999), 9-10. Furlonge describes each term as such: Zanj (denoting a slave from East Africa), Sudan (free African), 'abid (generic slave), ghulam (attendant or guard), khawal (generic slave).

[51] Theodor Nöldeke, "A Servile War in the East," in Sketches from Eastern History, (Beirut: Khayats, 1963, originally printed in 1892), 149-153.

[52] For a brief overview of the historiography in Arabic, see Popovic, 4. Abdul Karim Khalifa's unpublished thesis on the Zanj is dedicated to "all the oppressed in their struggles against their exploiters." Also see Faysal al-Samir's doctoral thesis, Thawrat al-Zanj (University of Cairo and published in Baghdad). Of interest here is also Ahmed S. Olabi's work, available in French, La revolte des Zanj et son chef Ali b. Muhammad (Beirut, 1961).

[53] Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Conscience and History in a World Civilization, Vol. 1: The Classical Age of Islam (University of Chicago Press, 1974), 487-8.

[54] Zakariyau I. Oseni, "The Revolt of Black Slaves in Iraq under the Abbasid Administration in 869-883

C.E.," Hamdard Islamicus (1989), 65.

[55] Ghada Hashem Talhami, "The Zanj Rebellion Reconsidered," The International Journal of African Historical Studies (Vol. 10, No. 3, 1977), 455.

[56] This is a rather duplicitous and shortsighted claim that will be addressed later.

[57] Shaban, M.A. Islamic History: A New Interpretation, Vol 2: A.D. 750-1055 (A.H. 132-448) . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. This certainly must be news to the Haitian revolutionaries, or Spartacus.

[58] Shaban, 100.

[59] Shaban, 101.

[60] Shaban, 101.

[61] Ibid., 101.

[62] Ibid., 102.

[63] Ibid., 102.

[64] Ibid., 102.

[65] Ibid., 107.

[66] Shaban notes that this rate of taxation is not confirmed, but can be extrapolated from studying the taxation regimen imposed upon Egypt. It is questionable whether or not the same taxation rates were applied to the Arabian peninsula as to Egypt, where more a more formal and established administrative-extractive apparatus already existed. Shaban, 108.

[67] Shaban, 101.

[68] Popovic, 3.

[69] Ibid., 22.

[70] Ibid., 151.

[71] To claim to be an Alid was important for securing religious sympathy, while the egalitarian preaching of the Kharijites was a useful rally cry to organize black slaves.

[72] Popovic, 153.

[73] As Popovic notes, the Zanj certainly facilitated the rise of the Tulunids in Egypt, the Saffarid movement, and even some of Byzantium's military undertakings. Furthermore, some of the followers of the Qaramita appear to have made their debut amongst the Zanj. See 153.

[74] For more on this phenomenon see Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex (Cambridge University Press, 1988).

"The Ability to Define Phenomena": A Historiography of U.S. Empire in the Middle East

By Derek Ide

In November 1938, during the midst of the Japanese occupation of China, Mao Tse-tsung proclaimed what eventually became a lightning rod for revolutionaries around the world: "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."[1] Over three decades later, in June 1971, Huey Newton declared: "power is, first of all, the ability to define phenomena, and secondly the ability to make these phenomena act in a desired manner." [2] Although Newton had earlier drawn significant inspiration from Mao and the Chinese Revolution, these definitions could not be further apart. However, if one accepts that in the last instance coercive force is what determines power relations, but in intermediary periods of struggle power is defining phenomena and having an impact on the direction in which these phenomena move, then perhaps the chasm between the two definitions is not so wide.

This essay intends to explore academic engagement with the role that the United States has played in the Middle East, particularly the Arab world. I have delineated four distinct "camps" in the historiography: euphemism-as-elision, empire-as-celebration, imperial-as-lens, and the anti-imperialist camps. These four conceptual categories are predicated upon two variables: the manner the authors address (or, conversely, refuse to address) U.S. empire and imperialism and who they either explicitly or implicitly target as their audience. I defend the use of the word "camps," with all of its martial connotations, as opposed to other more moderating words like "traditions," because I contend those involved in these questions are not simply individuals who exist purely as part of a larger academic community where power ceases to exist and intellectual exchange is the sole modus operandi. Instead, they are, a la Newton, engaged in decisive battles over how to define phenomena (in this case U.S. empire) and struggle to make that phenomena act in a desired manner (via the audience they are attempting to influence).

As such, what follows is not a purely chronological historiography that traces the development of "U.S. in the Middle East" literature over the decades. Other scholars have completed this task exceptionally well. [3] Nor is it a comprehensive list of the most recent scholarship regarding the region. Rather, this essay explores the various relationships academics have to U.S. empire in the Middle East. Given that imperialism is a global phenomenon, however, it would be impossible to completely ignore the theoretical and historiographical contributions that have been made by scholars of imperialism who study areas outside of the Middle East. The essay will begin by defining imperialism. It will then provide a brief overview of the European forms of imperial knowledge production that the U.S. borrowed from in the aftermath of World War II. Finally, it will analyze the four delineated above.

U.S. Imperialism in the 20th century

A problem that arises in the study of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East is the mistaken assumption that imperialism functions exactly the same in all historical eras. Many academics continue to cling to the European imperialism of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, which were necessarily territorial empires. Julie Greene, in her work The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal, challenges the notion that the creation of the Panama Canal was "unconnected to imperialism" in order to provoke a "broader rethinking of America's 'new empire' in the aftermath of 1898." [4] She argues that the essence of this project involved the construction of a "global infrastructure" that required state intervention on an international level. This new global infrastructure laid the groundwork for an American empire that eschewed formal territorial control in favor of economic and commercial control, supplemented by regular doses of military intervention.

By laying out the logic of non-territorial empire in this way, academics are catching up to the kinds of analyses articulated by Arab political actors themselves as early as the 1950s and 1960s. For example, the Arab Nationalist Movement, a forerunner to George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, articulated their opposition to imperialism in the 1950s:

When we say imperialism… we mean direct imperialism such as the one imposed on South Arabia. We mean by it imperialism hiding behind treaties as in the case of Libya and some other Arab countries in the Maghreb. We mean by it masked imperialism embodied in alliances such as the Baghdad Pact and the Eisenhower project. And last but not least, we mean economic imperialism obviously represented in the monopoly exercised by the oil companies over our natural resources. Liberation means to be free from the shackles of foreign exploitation no matter what shape or form it takes. [5]

As the late Samir Amin argued, the "state of permanent war" in the Middle East is a cornerstone of Washington's project of global hegemony. As Amin explains, the "war of 1967, planned in agreement with Washington in 1965, pursued several goals: to start the collapse of the populist nationalist regimes, to break their alliance with the Soviet Union, to force them to reposition itself on the American trail, to open new grounds for Zionist colonization." Permanent war allows the United States to enervate the Arab world and denies the possibility of "a rich and powerful modernized" Arab bloc that could "call in question the guaranteed access of the Western countries to the plundering of its oil resources, necessary for the continuation of waste associated with capitalist accumulation." [6] Although Amin was writing in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, the interventions of 2011 onwards, notably in Libya and Syria, are a direction continuation of this policy.[7]

Political scientist Michael Parenti, who has written extensively on U.S. empire, provided a succinct working definition of imperialism in the 1990s: "The process whereby the dominant politico-economic interests of one nation expropriate for their own enrichment the land, labor, raw materials, and markets of another people." [8] As seen from this definition, territorial acquisition is simply one variable of imperialism. The insertion of "dominant politico-economic interests" as a qualifier is important in this definition and complicates the idea of "national interests," which so many writers in the euphemism-as-elision category rely upon.

A significantly more thorough definition of empire comes from Richard Drayton. Although he writes specifically about the historiography of British imperialism, his critiques can be broadened to include the literature addressing U.S. imperialism. Drayton argues that the "cultural turn" represented an "ascent of idealism" that was "remarkably compatible with the neo-liberal moment." [9] The literature became preoccupied with how the colonized were perceived by the colonizers or developed a "focus on subjectivity" and agency, where "how people in Africa, Asia, or Latin America thought about things, displaced examination of practical and material experience. Historians appeared to be more bothered by 'epistemic violence' than the real thing." [10] Drayton makes a clarion call for historians to be clear about the reality of imperialism, arguing that it is "a useful category through which we may make sense of a phenomenon which recurs in world history wherever a power gap allows one society to become predatory towards others." Indeed, Drayton's conception of imperialism is worth quoting in full:

Imperialism, in all its contexts, is a regime through which external entities derive maximum gain from the labour and resources within a territory. A foreign power, with or without formal colonization, although always with local collaborators, secures a protected and privileged sphere for its economic actors. There the relationship of labour to capital is manipulated via the suppression of taxes, wages, social or environmental protections, by forms of coercion which drive labour towards that direction of employment and limit its legal or practical ability to resist the regime, and from which tribute, commodities and profit may be freely expatriated. The social rent paid by capital is minimized, as both the costs of social reproduction (childhood, ill health, aging) are borne from the wages of labour and the costs of infrastructure through which the external actor derives extraordinary benefit - roads, deepwater harbours, airports, electricity networks, local policing and repression - are funded mainly out of taxation of the wages and consumption of the squeezed wages of labour… Violence is a constant and necessary corollary of such an order, needed to install, defend, discipline and replace local collaborators… But Imperialism always comes wearing the mask of community, promising that its form of domination is in the universal interest. To such a claim historians and their colleagues in the social sciences lend active help. [11]

Drayton's definition, emphasizing the material sinews of empire, points the historian to material forces underlying imperialism. This perspective includes both the processes of extraction, as well as its points of vulnerabilities. These functional definitions of imperialism inform the analysis of the historiographical traditions below.

Early knowledge production of the Middle East

Early American knowledge production about the Middle East is largely indebted to the British. Direct inter-imperialist collaboration was a routine occurrence, with American officials studying European colonial administrations to derive lessons about intelligence gathering, counterinsurgency, developing efficient models of colonial life, etc. As Karine Walther has pointed out in the context of the Philippines, "American military officers engaged in 'colonial tourism' in Egypt, India, Java, Borneo, and Malaysia."[12] This reliance upon British knowledge production about former colonial possessions did not disappear immediately at the end of World War II. It would take many years for the U.S. to develop adequate institutions of knowledge about its newly acquired spheres of influence. One indication of how deeply U.S. officials and academics relied upon British knowledge production about the Middle East could be seen in 1945, when the State Department had no alternative but to recommend only that the British be asked to invite position papers from both sides on the Palestine question. [13] Another example can be seen as late as 1951 from an annotated bibliography compiled by the American Council of Learned Societies about the Near East. The bibliography listed a total of fifteen books on the modern history of Egypt, three of which were written directly by British colonial officials. Nearly all of the anthropological works cited were completed by British and French researchers.[14]

American knowledge production about the Middle East during the first part of the twentieth century relied heavily upon American missionaries in the region, such as the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). The kind of knowledge produced about the region during this period was often racist and Orientalist, but allowed for the framing of "imperial expansion in the rhetoric of humanitarian intervention." [15] These ideas existed within a broader "hierarchy of heathenism" where American missionaries ranked cultures according to their receptiveness to the Christian imperial civilizing mission.[16] A second source came from Orientalist scholars in academic institutions, many of them who studied the ancient world and not the modern Middle East in any meaningful way. During World War I, a group of specialists came together to serve in Woodrow Wilson's think-tank called "The Inquiry." [17] This "team of experts" played a vital role in the Paris Peace Conference, and represented one of the first times that the former territories of the Ottoman Empire registered on the American radar. As such, the Inquiry represented an "early attempt by Washington to develop contemporary expertise on foreign areas."[18] Exemplifying the close missionary-state relationship, ABCFM members like James Barton submitted reports for the Inquiry arguing that "Islam was the central problem of Turkish rule and the spread of Christianity was the ultimate solution."[19] In the interwar period, Osamah Khalil posits that missionary universities like the American University in Cairo (AUC) and the American University in Beirut acted as "sheet anchors" that not only produced knowledge about the region but were also instrumental in acting as a bulwark against communist ideas in the Arab world.[20]

During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services and the Army Specialized Training Program acted as "precursors of university-based area studies programs."[21] In 1947, the British government created the Interdepartmental Commission of Enquiry on Oriental, Slavonic, East European and African Studies in Britain (also known as the Scarbrough commission). As Zachary Lockman notes:

…this body had been appointed by the British government to investigate how that country's teaching and research resources on various regions might be sustained and developed; the commission's report, issued that same year, recommended additional funding for universities to strengthen their capacities in this area… the meeting seems to have contributed to the determination of the [American Council of Learned Societies] and the Rockefeller Foundation to at long last get things moving in Near Eastern studies. [22]

President of the Social Science Research Council and first dean of Harvard's School of Public Administration, E. Pendleton Herring, openly called for a "national symphony" of "governmental, business, and academic elites."[23] The Korean War convinced U.S. policy makers of the dire need for area based studies programs. At the time the University of Michigan declared it was "ready to serve in the National Emergency." [24] This "national symphony" quickly developed into a broader national security state, with one of its integral functions being the production of knowledge about the Middle East. Given the increasingly vital role Arab oil to the U.S. economy, it was unacceptable for imperial planners that U.S. knowledge production about the region was so weak. Around 1950, Zachary Lockman suggests there were no more than half a dozen members of the American Political Science Association with a working knowledge of Arabic, Persian, or Turkish.[25] Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies was established in 1954 with William L. Langer, of OSS and CIA fame, serving as director. That center was created "after consultation with the State Department, the CIA, U.S. Army Intelligence, Standard Oil of New Jersey (later Exxon) and of New York (later Mobil) and Aramco." [26]

The Iraqi coup of 1958, which largely caught U.S. officials off guard, helped convince planners of the need for advanced language training. $61 million was quickly designated for Title VI language programs. [27] For Middle East Studies, the passage of the National Defense Education Act in 1958 was particularly important. Private corporations like the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations provided massive funding for area studies, viewing their interests as part and parcel of U.S. state expansion into other parts of the globe. In 1961 the Carnegie Corporation funded a program, run by Princeton, to train candidates at the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies (MECAS) in Lebanon. As Lockman explains, the Center was originally established "by the British Foreign Office at that location in 1947 to teach Arabic to its staff" and many "Lebanese often called it the 'spy school' because a substantial number of its graduates were reputed to work for British or other intelligence agencies." [28] Thus, from the outset of the Cold War academic institutions became directly bound to the U.S. state and its imperial apparatus. However, as Melani McAlister notes, for "various bureaucratic and intellectual reasons, however, Middle East studies in the U.S. did not become fully institutionalized until 1967, when the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) was founded." [29] But even MESA, early in its existence, launched an effort to solicit donations from a broad range of corporations, including oil companies and military contractors. [30]

The euphemism-as-elision camp

This category of literature situates U.S. actions in the Middle East within a series of euphemisms in order to elide the question of empire entirely. "Foreign relations," "diplomatic history," "international relations," "counterinsurgency," and "U.S. assistance" are some of the rhetorical devices employed to conceal the nature of U.S. action in the Middle East. Such rhetoric is meant to dissuade scholars from adopting imperialism as either a lens of analysis or challenging it as an actually existing entity. These authors also tend to write with an imperial audience in mind, including diplomats, policy makers, and other academics implicated in imperial policy-making.

At Columbia University's Bureau for Applied Social Research (BASR), responsible for evaluating U.S. propaganda in Western Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, "euphemism-as-elision" became a kind of official doctrine. In 1950, BASR's Paul Lazarsfeld and Charles Glock explained: "While it is inappropriate to talk about an American empire, it is entirely in place to discuss the large and growing sphere of American influence."[31] One BASR sociologist, Siegfried Kracauer, in his "Appeals to the Near and Middle East," argued that the "Arabs might prove sensitive to Communist intolerance if they get the impression that it is a variant of their own fanaticism."[32] Quintessential Cold War American historians like Walter Laqueur, in his Nationalism and Communism in the Middle East (1956), perpetuated such arguments, drawing direct comparisons between the legacy of Islam and the potential flourishing of communism in the Islamic world: "The exhilarating feeling of mission, of purpose, of being engaged in a collective adventure to accelerate the historically inevitable victory of the true faith over the evil infidels are common to classical Islam and to Communism."[33] Thus, in the 1950s and 1960s knowledge production about the Arab world necessarily travelled through imperial circuits while simultaneously denying U.S. empire as an existing phenomenon.

The trend of knowledge production intended to service empire without acknowledging its existence continued throughout the neoliberal decades (mid-1970s onward). These texts now had enough distance to begin producing knowledge on prior chronological eras. One representative text in this tradition is Phillip Baram's The Department of State in the Middle East, 1919-1945, which argued that the United States strategy in the interwar and World War II era was fourfold: 1) enervate the old European powers 2) do not openly engage with the Zionists 3) isolate the Soviets and 4) "encourage individual Arab states to be free, sovereign, and pro-American." [34] David Painter analyzed U.S. oil policy in the first decade of the Cold War, suggesting that the U.S. state developed a symbiotic relationship with the oil companies where the former combatted Third World nationalism while the latter ran quotidian extraction operations. He concluded by suggesting, despite ARAMCO occasionally presenting diplomatic difficulties for the U.S., that this business-government partnership was the most appropriate set-up for the Middle East in the early Cold War era. [35]

As Douglas Little notes, the "nature of Russia's intentions in the Middle East during the late 1940s and the appropriateness of America's response have sparked much scholarly controversy." [36] Whereas scholars like Bruce Kuniholm argued in 1980 that American military aid and diplomatic bravado fended off the Soviets, other scholars like Melvyn Leffler posited twelve years later that American officials exaggerated the Russian threat during the Truman years. [37] One cannot help but notice the timing of each monograph, with the former at the height of Soviet involvement in Afghanistan and the latter after the Soviet collapse. Scholars like Peter Hahn suggest that while London sought to maintain informal empire in the Middle East, U.S. aspirations were "anticolonial" in nature and meant to contain the Soviets. [38] One prominent scholar, Barry Rubin, suggested U.S. policy towards Iran was "paved with good intentions."[39] The question of U.S. imperialism does not arise at all.

In Egypt, early US contacts with the Nasser government appeared promising, and U.S. scholars have debated what soured relations. Barry Rubin argues it was Nasser's commitment to pan-Arab nationalism, while others blame variously the British, the Soviet Union, or Israel. [40] Something of a consensus had emerged in the 1980s that the Eisenhower administration had overestimated "American economic leverage in Egypt" and underestimated "Nasser's willingness to seek help from the Soviet bloc." [41] Even Douglas Little, who has the widest grasp of the literature discussing the U.S. role in the Middle East, often employs euphemisms that suggest the U.S. was a "stabilizer" in the region. [42] Little further suggests that Kennedy used "personal diplomacy" and American wheat to channel Nasserism into "constructive channels" while encouraging more conservative government to institute reforms. [43]

Little explains that every administration after Lyndon Johnson employed his "three pillars approach" (Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran) in order to "promote regional stability," "preserve Western access to Mideast oil," and "protect American interests."[44] Likewise, Little posits that the U.S. intervention in Lebanon in 1958 after the July 14 coup in Iraq was representative of "Ike's ability to restore law and order in Beirut without becoming mired down" in religious strife. [45] Utilizing the language of "national interests" and "law and order" in relationship to U.S. empire is a questionable technique that both conceals the nature of imperialism and discourages the basic question: cui bono? As his career progressed, Little inched closer to employing the word "empire," first in his text American Orientalism (2008), when he casually mentions "America's national security empire" once without any explication. [46] Even his use of "orientalism" is subject to many of the critiques that Melani McAlister levels against using orientalism as a framework in the U.S. context. [47] By 2014, however, Little had identified America's "Informal Empire in the Middle East" in an article for America in the World: The Historiography of US Foreign Relations since 1941 .[48] This kind of imperial knowledge production has instrumental value to U.S. imperial power and continues to represent a significant trend in academic fields like diplomatic history.[49]

A particularly pernicious development in recent years has been to appropriate and distort the concept of "agency" to obfuscate imperial reality completely. Perhaps the most infamous example of this kind of charlatanry is Roham Alvandi's Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah (2014). Alvandi's text seeks to challenge the well-established view, accepted more or less globally, that the Shah of Iran was simply a client state of the United States. Alvandi contends that the "American proxy" model accurately characterizes the US-Iran relationship of the 1950s, but that the early 1970s represented a brief period where the Shah was an "active agent of history who often abetted and manipulated the superpowers in the pursuit" of regional interests. [50] As with all post-modern academic phrases of dubious design and intent, Alvandi easily employs the "agency" brush to paint the Shah of Iran as something other than a client of US empire. The logic rests on tenuous grounds, notably on the fact that no "partner" can so seamlessly be reduced again to a "client" in a span of a few years, with the shifting of a few individuals in government. Furthermore, Alvandi's suggestion that the Shah took some small-scale prerogatives on his own hardly qualifies as a negation of client-state status.[51] While Kissinger and Nixon may have maintained a more personable relationship with the shah, Iran received nothing on either the scale or scope of the secret memorandum signed by the U.S. and Israel in 1975. [52] As such, his grandiose claims about the Shah's partner status are hardly warranted. Undoubtedly 1979 was a major blow to US imperial prerogatives. The shah's illusions aside, the empire lost a client state, not an imperial partner.

Although the various intellectuals and historians surveyed above have distinct specializations, varied and divergent opinions, and often times express serious disagreement both with each other and their predecessors, two consistencies bind them together: 1) they reject the idea of U.S. empire as an actually existing phenomenon and 2) they write with an imperial audience in mind (those capable of having some influence on imperial policy). As such, whether missionaries cementing American ideological hegemony, BASR sociologists employing Orientalist tropes, or historians analyzing policy while simultaneously denying empire, a vast tradition of knowledge production about the Arab world exists and continues to flourish that is directly bound to U.S. imperial power. By employing euphemism-as-elision, these historians both sanitize the past and project a sense of innocuousness onto policy during the present, stripping the U.S. of its imperialist content.

The empire-as-celebration camp

A more recent phenomenon, particularly after 9/11 and the emergence of the "War on Terror," has been the growth of a literature that explicitly celebrates and encourages U.S. empire. One of the defining features of this literature is that it forcefully asserts the reality of imperialism, positing it as the most auspicious path for the future instead of critiquing U.S. empire as a pernicious force. The distinction between this camp and the euphemism-as-elision camp is not just its emphasis on embracing the notion of empire, but also its audience. Whereas academics who deny the existence of empire service it by cleansing the past and appealing to the ostensibly noble or at least pragmatic intentions of policy makers, the "empire-as-celebration" camp maintains two different audiences. First, like their euphemism-as-elision counterparts, they seek to influence policy. Second, they seek to disperse the idea of the benevolence of U.S. empire amongst the U.S. population more generally. Their choice to publish in popular presses is one way they seek to have a wider impact than highly specialized academic monographs with high-price tags would normally allow. Although this camp may end up as a flash-in-the-pan, they have received a wide audience and it does a disservice to exclude them from the historiography of empire in the Middle East.

Three key figures in this emergence of "empire-as-celebration" camp at the turn of the twenty-first century were Max Boot, Robert Kaplan, and Niall Ferguson. Max Boot's Savage Wars of Peace (2002) is a chronologically broad analysis of U.S. economic and military intervention from 1800 to the early 2000s. Borrowing from Kipling, Boot argues that the U.S. has regularly engaged in small "savage wars of peace" intended to "suppress rebellions and guerilla warfare in all parts of the world." [53] These wars are, according to Boot, "imperial wars" that also require "chronicling the political course of American empire."[54] Robert Kaplan's Imperial Grunts (2006) is a much more contemporary account that describes the author's "odyssey through the barracks and outposts of American Empire."[55] Imperialism, according to Kaplan, is "but a form of isolationism, in which the demand for absolute, undefiled security at home leads one to conquer the world, and in the process to become subject to all the world's anxieties."[56] It is a muddy definition, one that hardly means anything or elucidates the actual motor forces of imperialism, but this kind of definition also lends itself to a sort of celebratory cause. Kaplan asserts that this definition of empire implies that those carrying it out are often in "half denial." Unlike the conscript armies of World War II, there now exists a "professional military that, true to other imperial forces throughout history, enjoyed the soldiering life for its own sake." [57] Truer to reality than many of the euphemism-as-elision camp, Kaplan argues that "the very opposition to imperial influence constitutes proof of its existence." [58] Afghanistan and Iraq form two of the core objects of imperial policy for Kaplan.

Niall Ferguson makes what is perhaps the most important intervention in this literature. The Oxford and Hoover Institution research fellow has earned himself a spot on Time's 100 most influential people list. While it is true that his scholarship is rife with errors, particularly with regard to the Middle East,[59] academics that dismiss his work do so at their own peril. Leaving the realm of popular engagement to the most reactionary and overtly imperialist scholars, even when they are objectively wrong about simple facts, entails sacrificing the possibility of engaging with a wider audience outside of the confines of the ivory tower. Ferguson's 2004 work Colossus posits a fourfold thesis: 1) the U.S. has always been empire, functionally if not self-consciously; 2) a self-conscious American imperialism might well be preferable to the available alternatives, but 3) financial, human, and cultural constraints make such self-consciousness highly unlikely, and 4) therefore the American empire will remain a somewhat dysfunctional entity.[60] Ferguson implores an American audience to embrace their imperialist role, and adopt a self-conscious and long-term form of empire building. To deal with the "manpower deficit" required to maintain a massive military presence overseas, particularly in the Middle East, Ferguson puts forward a solution: "If one adds together the illegal immigrants, the jobless and the convicts, there is surely ample raw material for a larger American army." [61] Simply because academics dismiss the empire-as-celebration camp does not render them politically impotent, as Niall Ferguson's advisory role to John "100 Years in Iraq" McCain in 2008 exemplifies.

The "imperial-as-lens" camp

The "imperial-as-lens" camp is also a relatively recent phenomenon, but one that has thus far remained a largely academic exercise. One of the most ardent proponents of this tradition is Paul Kramer, who in 2011 penned an important piece titled "Power and Connection: Imperial history of the United States and the World." In it, he argues forcefully for the "imperial-as-lens" analysis, arguing that older generations of both Marxists and Foucauldian scholars have employed either "structural" or "all-saturating" accounts of power, respectively. [62] This "thinning of empire" to only include its "exceptionally repressive" attributes mistakes a "part for a whole."[63] In its place, Kramer posits the need for:

….a category of analysis, not a kind of entity, something to think with more than think about… A language of the 'imperial' rather than 'empire' can help avoid connotations of unity and coherence-thingness-that tend to adhere to the latter term, and move to the side the mostly unproductive question of whether the United States is or has "an empire"-and if so, what type it is, and whether or not it measures up to the rubrics built to account for other empires. Far more is to be gained by exploring the imperial as a way of seeing than by arguing for or against the existence of a 'U.S. empire.' [64]

Kramer's "imperial-as-lens" framework thus eschews the question of whether or not the U.S. is an empire, rejecting generations of analysis by scholars and revolutionaries alike that have identified it as such.

Kramer's most renowned work, Blood of Government (2006), deals with the question of U.S. imperialism in the Philippines (a subject that hardly benefits from the "unproductive question" of whether the U.S. is an empire, given how blatant the imperial project was). The lack of theoretical rigor can be seen when Kramer describes empire as "exercising sovereignty and power over peoples denied the rights that were increasingly coming to define the modern nation-state: it meant inventing ideologies to calibrate inclusion in these expanding and hierarchical polities." [65] The reader quickly notices that imperialism is a fundamentally non-economic act for Kramer. Instead, empire is primarily a question of race and power. To what ends remains unclear; perhaps a reflex of modernity, perhaps as an end in itself. Nothing appears to actually drive empire in Kramer's narrative, given that he offers no explanatory power for the nature of imperial expansion. At his worst, Kramer makes assertions that mean virtually nothing at all, such as the following: "Along the multiple nodes that linked colonizing and colonized societies, simultaneous glances upward and downward along novel axes of power formed new symbolic economies of hope, terror, and identification." [66] Unintelligible passages such as these raise questions regarding the efficacy of the "imperialism-as-lens" approach.

Examples of the "imperial-as-lens" framework being applied to the Middle East exist, and represent various levels of usefulness. For instance, Karine Walther's Sacred Interests (2015) approvingly cites Kramer's "imperial-as-lens" framework in her introduction. She rather successfully explores how different American actors "justified their impingement on Muslim rulers' sovereignty as part of a broader imperial civilizing mission rather than a crude commercial or strategic grab for territory and power."[67] By noting how missionaries and non-state actors adopted an imperial mindset in their dealings with the Muslim world, she pushes the chronological boundaries of U.S. imperialism backwards and explains how these developments set the ideological stage for future material endeavors. Yet, as others have noted, with the exception of the section on the Moros of the Philippines, "the link between religion and diplomatic/imperialist action could be more fully substantiated." [68] Walther's emphasis on "the imperial" does not help the reader interpret calls for an interventionist foreign policy particularly when the U.S. did not pursue one, as in many of the book's case studies.

Osamah Khalil's America's Dream Palace (2016) is another text that fits within the imperial-as-lens camp. Although Khalil does acknowledge the U.S. as an empire, his primary focus is on the imperial gaze and how U.S. actors of varied stripes understood the Middle East. [69] Khalil contends that U.S. national security interests were a driving force in the emergence of Middle East expertise. A "mutually beneficial relationship" [70] developed between the national security establishment and academia that galvanized Middle East studies programs and area studies more broadly. Eventually, as the national security state relied less on academia, intelligence became privatized as think-tanks supplied state actors with "useful knowledge." Borrowing from Said, Khalil asserts that "Orientalism influenced the analysis, formation, and implementation of American policies" in the Middle East over the past century.[71] In short, the development of Middle East studies was "an articulation of American power, Orientalism and exceptionalism, as well as their limits." [72] One of the problems with Khalil's text is the framework of Orientalism that he employs does not always elucidate how the process of knowledge production informs actual policy. For instance, despite racial and religious tropes inherent in orientalist discourse (particularly vis-à-vis the inferiority of Islam), the reader never gets a sense from Khalil's book that U.S. imperial policy was frequently to support reactionary religious elements to stifle secular leftist politics.

One direction this "imperial-as-lens" analysis has taken more recently is to deal with the way non-state actors in the imperial center, particularly the Black liberation movement in the U.S., have engaged with the Arab and Muslim world. The text that opened the door for this new wave of scholarship was Black Star, Crescent Moon (2012) by Sohail Daulatzai. On Daulatzai's heels came two major academic works discussing the subject, Geographies of Liberation (2014) by Alex Lubin and A Shadow over Palestine (2015) by Keith Feldman. Notwithstanding some quality content, these works all suffer from the deficiencies intrinsic to esoteric academic postmodern discourse (a juncture where the question of audience is particularly vital). In this case, the intellectual frameworks designed to understand transnational solidarities and their anti-imperialist content lack theoretical rigor. Daulatzai's "Muslim International" relies heavily on Chatterjee's "fragments of the nation" concept.[73] Furthermore, the entire analysis is plagued by a sort of poststructuralist analysis that is both exhausting to read and largely meaningless. [74] Lubin's "geographies of liberation" introduces an entire lexicon of jumbled postmodern (occasionally "countermodern") jargon. [75] In Feldman there is much of the same.[76] Although the question of intellectual frameworks is possibly ancillary, it is also an area of the historiography that desperately needs clarity.

The anti-imperialist camp

Historians emphasizing the concrete realities of empire, what may be called the anti-imperialist camp within the historiography, stand in rather stark contradistinction to the "imperial-as-lens" camp and its obsession with discourse. These writers not only recognize U.S. empire, they tend to actively criticize it and, with varying levels of vigor, encourage resistance to it. Works like Rashid Khalidi's Resurrecting Empire (2004) and Sowing Crisis (2009) explicitly consider the U.S. as an empire. Some popular texts, such as Robert Dreyfuss' Devil's Game (2005), have also tried their hand at documenting the nuances of imperial policy. In Dreyfuss' case, this includes detailing the ways in which the United States "spent decades cultivating Islamists, manipulating and double-crossing them, cynically using and misusing them as Cold War allies," and explicitly calls for the U.S. to "abandon its imperial pretensions in the Middle East." [77] A few of the recent and representative texts include Lloyd Gardner's Three Kings (2009), Robert Vitalis' America's Kingdom (2006), and Timothy Mitchell's Carbon Democracy (2013).

In many ways, Lloyd Gardner's Three Kings sits most squarely in the intellectual lineage of William Appleby Williams and his critique of U.S. Empire as "tragedy." [78] In essence, Gardner argues that the Truman Doctrine was the "essential rubric under which the United States projected its power globally after World War II" and laid the foundation for the "imperial presidency." [79] The purpose was not to "fend off the Soviets" but to "shore up friendly governments in strategic areas." Finally, the doctrine addressed the problem of how to replace the British in Middle East. Although John Foster Dulles adopted "International Communism" as an ideological weapon, the principal purpose of American imperial policy was not to deter a Russian attack but to "ensure the loyalty of the countries receiving aid and to maintain their governments in power against internal threats." [80]

America's Kingdom by Robert Vitalis is a text that places "our understanding of ARAMCO… in the long history of empire" and challenges American exceptionalist accounts that purport "to prove American enterprise to be anything but agents of empire." [81] One of the ways he does this is by articulating the vital function of race to the organization of oil production. ARAMCO fought tooth and nail to perpetuate a system of racial discrimination, including significant differentials in wages, working conditions, and housing. In large part this system was intended to lower costs but also enervate the organizational capacities of workers. The American oil giant explained deportations of oil workers by suggesting they were adherents of the "'the Communist line, particularly as regards evils of capitalism and racial discrimination.'" [82] At other junctures ARAMCO's security department worked with Saudi forces to imprison and deport organizers. Unfortunately, Vitalis' understanding of the function that Israel plays as part of parcel of U.S. empire is flawed, and detracts from the analytical rigor of his work.

Timothy Mitchell's Carbon Democracy is a vital intervention in the historiography of oil and oil politics in the twentieth century, particularly as it relates to British and later U.S. imperialism. Challenging the older literature that focuses solely on the corrupting influence of oil money, Mitchell persuasively argues that oil as a commodity, including its physical properties, is fundamental to understanding political power. Mitchell posits that coal allowed, for a brief period of time at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the "era of the Mass Strike" (a la Luxemburg). In essence, Mitchell posits that "dependence on coal" provided the opportunity to "build more democratic forms of politics" [83] while the "conversion to oil provided imperialists like Churchill with the means to evade those democratic demands."[84] The transition to oil was a conscious effort on behalf of U.S. imperial planers in the post-World War II era, utilizing the Marshall plan (half of all oil supplied to Marshall plan countries was subsidized by U.S. companies during 1948-51, making U.S. oil companies the largest beneficiaries of Marshall Plan aid) to reconfigure European energy. [85] Most importantly, Mitchell departs from the three other camps by urging the reader to identify the "points of vulnerability" in the current "socio-technical system" in order to be able to leverage collective forms of power and reshape the world in a more egalitarian and democratic manner. [86]

As seen above, authors in the anti-imperialist tradition, whether they are analyzing specific U.S. policies in a more traditional diplomatic manner or discussing the socio-technical vulnerabilities of carbon politics in the Middle East, tend to both accept U.S. empire as an existing structure and encourage some kind of resistance to it. Mitchell, for instance, by citing the examples of coal workers attempting to engage in mass strikes at a time when such ventures were made possible by material conditions, encourages the readers of today to identify new points of vulnerability. By publishing in a popular press like Verso, Mitchell also avoids falling into the trap of reaching out only to other academics. While still engaging in mainstream academic life, Mitchell avoids, as per the warning of E.P. Thompson, becoming "wholly dependent upon establishing institutions." [87] The anti-imperialist tradition has done well describing the sinews of U.S. imperialism, analyzing some of its strengths and exposing some potential vulnerabilities. In the future, the anti-imperialist tradition must deal seriously with transnational anti-imperialist solidarities, their relationship to imperialism and U.S. empire more broadly, and potential vulnerabilities that could arise (outside of the realm of discourse alone) for anti-imperialist actors. Thus far, transnational solidarities have been largely left to the "imperial-as-lens" tradition, and as such remain relatively confined to the ivory tower.

Conclusion

The four camps delineated in this essay represent fundamentally distinct historiographies. Two variables, the author's relationship to U.S. empire and their audience, help determine these conceptual categories. The euphemism-as-elision camp denies the existence of U.S. empire and generally sets as its audience other academics, policy makers, diplomats, etc. (in order to tweak certain policies and make U.S. empire function more smoothly). The empire-as-celebration camp gleefully embraces U.S. imperialism, and sets as its audience both policy makers as well as the general population (who it attempts to convince of the merits of self-conscious imperial subjects). The imperial-as-lens camp tacitly accepts the existence of U.S. empire, or at least embraces the need for an "imperial historiography," but often does so primarily with other academics in mind (and as such this camp remains largely confined to academia). Finally, the anti-imperialist camp not only accepts the existence of U.S. Empire, especially its structural form, but actively encourages resistance to it, both by academics and those outside of academia. Given that academics lack the sort of political power which grows from the barrel of the gun, our definition of the phenomenon of U.S. imperialism is one of the most powerful weapons we possess. As such, the camp we choose to align ourselves with, in order to make the phenomenon of empire act in the manner we desire, is a question of significant strategic importance.

Notes

[1] "Problems of War and Strategy" (November 6, 1938), Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 224. Available here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/ch05.htm

[2] Huey Newton, "Black Capitalism Re-analyzed I," June 5, 1971 in David Hilliard, The Huey P. Newton Reader (Seven Stories Press, 2002). Newton's definition came in the midst of his schism with Eldridge Cleaver, who continued to cling to the more militant Black internationalist path while Newton attempted to redirect the Black Panther Party along communitarian and reformist lines. See Sean Malloy, "Diverging Directions in Oakland and Algiers, 1970-1" in Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism during the Cold War (Cornell Press, 2017).

[3] See Douglas Little, "Gideon's Band: America and the Middle East Since 1945," in Michael J. Hogan, America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941 (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

[4] Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal (New York: Penguin, 2009), 9-10.

[5] Quoted in Walid W. Kazziha, Revolutionary Transformation in the Arab World: Habash and his Comrades from Nationalism to Marxism (St. Martin's Press, 1975), 61.

[6] Samir Amin, "The US Imperialism and the Middle East."

[7] For more on Syria see Patrick Higgins, "The Enemy at Home: U.S. Imperialism in Syria," Viewpoint Magazine (Feb. 2018) and "The War on Syria," Jacobin (Aug. 2015).

[8] Michael Parenti. Against Empire (City Lights, 1995), 1. Two decades later, Parenti modifies this definition slightly: "The dominant investor interests in one country bring to bear military and financial power upon another country in order to expropriate the land, labor, capital, natural resources, commerce, and markets of that other country." The Face of Imperialism (Routledge, 2011), 7.

[9] Richard Drayton, "Where Does the World Historian Write From? Objectivity, Moral Conscience and the Past and Present of Imperialism." Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 46, no. 3 (July 2011), 679.

[10] Ibid., 680.

[11] Ibid., 680-1.

[12] Karine Walther, Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 170.

[13] Lloyd Gardner, Three Kings: The Rise of an American Empire in the Middle East after World War II (The New Press, 2009). See Chapter 2, "The United States Moves into the Middle East."

[14] Zachary Lockman, Field Notes: The Making of Middle East Studies in the United States (Stanford University Press, 2016), 101.

[15] Walther, Sacred Interests, 9.

[16] Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (Cornell Press, 2015).

[17] See Osamah Khalil, America's Dream Palace: Middle East Expertise and the Rise of the National Security State (Harvard University Press, 2016), 10-22.

[18] Khalil, 38.

[19] Walther, 297.

[20] Khalil, 117-120. Ironically, these missionary schools often exercised a level of independence from U.S. policy that their stateside counterparts, the real "Cold War Universities" of the 1950s and 1960s, were unable to maintain. AUC, for instance, seriously challenged Truman's position on Palestine in 1947-8, while AUB was derided by British officials as a "center of communist activity in the Middle East." Ibid., 125.

[21] Khalil,40.

[22] Lockman, Field Notes, 82.

[23] Khalil., 97.

[24] Ibid., 92.

[25] Lockman, 102.

[26] Lockman, 134.

[27] Khalil, 165.

[28] Lockman, 158.

[29] McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (University of California Press, 2005), 36.

[30] However, as Lockman points out, its only positive response came from Northrop Grumman. By the 1980s, however, MESA did receive modest donations from other large oil companies, 194-5.

[31] Khalil, 187.

[32] Ibid., 190.

[33] Walter Laqueur, Nationalism and Communism in the Middle East (Routledge Kegan Paul, 1956), 347. See footnote 19.

[34] Philip Baram, The Department of State in the Middle East, 1919-1945 (KTAV Publishing House, 1978), 56-7

[35] David S. Painter, Oil and the American Century: The Political Economy of U.S. Foreign Oil Policy, 1941-1954 (John Hopkins University Press, 1986).

[36] Little, "Gideon's Band ," 467.

[37] Bruce R. Kuniholm, The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East: Great Power Conflict and Diplomacy in Iran, Turkey, and Greece (Princeton, 1980) and Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, 1992).

[38] Peter L. Hahn, United States, Great Britain, and Egypt, 1945-1956: Strategy and Diplomacy in the Early Cold War (Chapel Hill, 1991).

[39] Barry Rubin, Paved with Good Intentions: The American Experience and Iran (New York, 1980).

[40] Barry Rubin, "America and the Egyptian Revolution, 1950-1957," Political Science Quarterly, vol. 97, no. 1 (Spring, 1982).

[41] Little, "Gideon's Band," 479. Here Little cites Gail E. Meyer's Egypt and the United States: The Formative Years (Fairleigh Dickinson, 1981) and Geoffrey Aronson, From Sideshow to Center Stage: U.S. Policy toward Egypt, 1946-1956 (Lynne Rienner, 1986).

[42] "After Eisenhower's dollar diplomacy forced Britain out of Egypt… the United States stood ready to try its hand at stabilizing the Middle East." Ibid., 485.

[43] Douglas Little, "The New Frontier on the Nile: JFK, Nasser, and Arab Nationalism," Journal of American History 75 (September 1988)

[44] Little, "Gideon's Band," 497.

[45] Little, "Gideon's Band," 489. Little rather uncritically borrows from Alan Dowty's 1984 work Middle East Crisis: US. Decision-Making in 1958, 1970, and 1973 to praise Eisenhower for "wisely relying on a tightly knit and level-headed group of decision makers who shared an 'operational code' that placed a high premium in July 1958 on ensuring American credibility with pro-Western regimes in the Middle East."

[46] Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2008). It is fairly easy to dismiss this as a kind of metaphor or simply rhetorical flair.

[47] See McAlister, Epic Encounters. These critiques can in some ways be leveled against Osamah Khalil's work America's Dream Palace as well.

[48] "Impatient Crusaders: The Making of America's Informal Empire in the Middle East," in America in the World: The Historiography of US Foreign Relations since 1941, edited by Frank Costigliola and Michael J. Hogan, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2014, pp. 212-35.

[49] Many of these articles read like policy briefs. See, for instance, Eric Jacobsen, "A Coincidence of Interests: Kennedy, U.S. Assistance, and the 1963 Iraqi Ba'th Regime," Diplomatic History, vol. 37 (November 2013). One notices the neutrality of the term "monarchy," the ambivalent use of "regime," and the quite pejorative employment of "dictatorship." For more on the 1963 coup, see Matthews, Weldon C. "The Kennedy Administration, Counterinsurgency, and Iraq's First Ba'thist Regime." International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 43 (November 2011). Writing about 1968 Ba'athist coup against the Nasserist 'Abd al-Rahman 'Arif, Avneri Natenal argues that the "State Department was too sanguine regarding the Ba'th approach towards the IPC and its neighbors."[49] Furthermore, while some U.S. actors may have had connections with opponents of the 'Arif government, Avneri assures the reader that "the American government tried to move away from foreign intervention at this time." See Avneri, Netanel. "The Iraqi Coups of July 1968 and the American Connection," Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 51, no. 4 (2015), 659.

[50] Oddly, the author presents the Shah as a "third world actor," hardly a title the Shah would willingly apply to himself. Roham Alvandi. Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War (Oxford University Press, New York, 2014), 3.

[51] Nearly all client states have some autonomy to pursue small-scale initiatives. Furthermore, on most things of importance to grand imperial strategy, the Shah was forced to receive U.S. backing. . The shah's selling of the Kurds down the river was, in the long term, negligent to US empire, who a few years prior cared little about the Kurdish question. To Alvandi's credit, his chapter on the Kurds is by far the most intriguing, as it details the Iranian-Israeli-US intervention in (and facilitation of) the Iraqi-Kurdish conflict. In essence, Alvandi argues that the US was reluctantly drug into the Kurdish situation by the Shah. Both the Mossad and SAVAK had ties with Barzani and the Iraqi Kurds as early as 1958, with both intelligence agencies bent on destabilizing the revolutionary Qasim government and, later, the Ba'ath government. The "reluctant Americans" were brought in only later, and US aid started flowing in large quantities in 1972. As late as September 1974, Ford approved Israeli support in the form of anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles of Soviet manufacture.

[52] Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, vol. 26, Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1974-1976, Memoranda of Agreement, September 1, 1975 (Document 227).

[53] Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Military Power (Basic Books, 2002). E-copy (read in Microsoft Edge), no page numbers available.

[54] Ibid.

[55] Robert Kaplan, Imperial Grunts: The American Military On The Ground (Vintage, 2006).

[56] Ibid.

[57] Ibid.

[58] Ibid.,

[59] See, as one example, Ferguson's sloppy chronology and merging of fundamentally distinct organizations (with widely disparate strategies and ideologies) into a kind of monolithic threat: "Though the PLO had been struck a severe blow by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the 1980s saw the emergence of new groups such as the Abu Nidal Organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Hezbollah and Hamas. Whereas the PLO had owed more to nationalism and Marxism, this new generation of terrorists identified themselves primarily with Islam." Neither Abu Nidal nor the PFLP were founded in the 1980s, and in fact the PFLP's strength was already waning by then (their heyday in the 1970s). Neither could Abu Nidal or the PFLP be associated with a new generation of Islamists. Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (Penguin, 2005). E-copy, read in Microsoft Edge, no page numbers available.

[60] Ferguson.

[61] Ferguson continues: "One of the keys to the expansion of the Roman Empire was, after all, the opportunity offered to non-Romans to earn citizenship through military service. One of the mainsprings of British colonization was the policy of transportation that emptied the prison hulks of eighteenth-century England into ships bound for Australia. Reviving the draft would not necessarily be unpopular, so long as it was appropriately targeted."

[62] Paul Kramer, "Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World," American Historical Review (December 2011), 1378.

[63] Ibid., 1378.

[64] Ibid., 1350.

[65] Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

[66] Ibid., 3.

[67] Walther, 9.

[68] Jay Sexton. Review of Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921 by Karine V. Walther. The American Historical Review, Vol. 122, Issue 2 (April 2017), 472-4.

[69] Still, he provides no definition of empire, and it is unclear exactly what he means by this.

[70] Khalil, 3.

[71] Ibid., 5

[72] Ibid., 8

[73] Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), xxiii. For a rather convincing and forceful demolition of Chatterjee and his brand of subaltern studies, see Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre of Capital.

[74] For Daulatzai the "Muslim International" is "not geographically located." Furthermore, it "is not universalist, nor is it cosmopolitan in the European humanist tradition." It "recognizes that there is no space outside of domination and that power is omnipresent." He claims that since universalizing claims and grand narratives "have the potential to warp our sense of how power works and operates, the Muslim International also sees the local and everyday as potential sites for movement, activity, and subversion." Power, then, is "far from being static and top-down" but is instead a "process that is activated and actualized everywhere." Finally, the Muslim International is a "space where the very idea of the 'political' can come under scrutiny" by the fact that "all activity is political." As such, the Muslim International "can be a shadow or parallel space to the state." Daulatzai, xxii-xxvii.

[75] See Alex Lubin, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (The University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 7-8. For his reading of intersections as "countermodern" see the following: "In this project, I read modern histories of black Americans, Palestinians, and Jews relationally and in terms of shared histories of exclusion, exile, and countermodern political imaginaries." Lubin, 13.

[76] Keith P. Feldman, A Shadow Over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 7-16. Despite his convoluted prose when explicating his primary framework "U.S. imperial culture," the idea is generally intelligible and coherent; other frameworks not so much. His sections "On Racial Relationality" and "On Comparativity" are significantly more convoluted and, hence, significantly less useful.

[77] Robert Dreyfuss, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Metropolitan, 2006), 1 and 15. Mitchell articulates a new portmanteau "McJihad" used to explain why the "more closely a government is allied with Washington, the more Islamic its politics." See Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 201.

[78] See William Appleby Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. Williams, from UW-Madison, was a prominent New Left historian who would eventually inspire a generation of historians to rethink the Cold War, including Gar Alperovitz (best known for his revisionist thesis on the use of the Atomic bomb in Hiroshima), Walter LaFeber (who has been highly critical of U.S. empire in Central America, for instance), and Lloyd Gardner.

[79] Lloyd Gardner, Three Kings: The Rise of an American Empire in the Middle East after World War II (The New Press, 2009), 3.

[80] Ibid., 14

[81] Robert Vitalis, America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Stanford, 2006), Vitalis, xiv.

[82] Ibid., 118. Although occasionally officials did admit that not all the workers "followed the communist line" and that some were "not even aware of the communist line." See 104 and 152.

[83] The fact that coal required an immense concentration of human labor for extraction, transportation, and conversion to energy was one factor. Coal also faced important bottlenecks in transportation due to the dendritic transit routes it relied upon. Finally, coal was largely delimited by the geographic region it was mined in and was not easily transportable across oceans. These factors combined allowed for workers to leverage these points of vulnerability and make society-wide social and economic demands.

[84] Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (Verso, 2013), 61. In contrast with coal, the transition to oil was meant partially to permanently disempower workers in the post-World War II era. The reasons for this are many. First, oil requires less human labor, and is significantly more capital than labor intensive. Whereas coal was confined geographically, oil is a fundamentally global commodity, with production points all over the world controlled by a handful of corporations. Oil is easily moved via pipelines and tankers, and as such moves more along a grid-like system then the dendritic networks of coal. This grid-like system of movement means oil is significantly less vulnerable when stoppages or sabotage occurs, significantly weakening the power of organized labor.

[85] Ibid., 29-30.

[86] Ibid., 241.

[87] E. P. Thompson argued that radical academics had to occupy "some territory that is, without qualification, their own: their own journals, their own theoretical and practical centers - places where no one works for grades or for tenure but for the transformation of society." Quoted in Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 459-60. It is my hope that the Hampton Institute continues to contribute to that objective for a long time to come.

Who's Afraid of Mazdak? Prophetic Egalitarianism, Islamism, and Socialism

By Derek Ide

The year was 1974. Algeria's National Liberation Front (FLN) had liberated their country from the French occupying forces and the pieds noirs (French settlers) only twelve years prior. Under the leadership of Ahmed Ben Bella (1962-5) and then Houari Boumédiène (1965-78), Algeria underwent a series of state-building initiatives immediately following independence. The Algerian leadership operated within the parameters of a loosely defined "socialism" that became the organizing ethos under which they constructed the newly independent state.

Algeria was still in the midst of its "socialist" transformation when, a year earlier in 1973, the president of Egypt, Anwar al-Sadat (1970-81), embarked upon his neoliberal Infitah ("Opening") program. This nascent economic program significantly augmented Western capitalist institutions control over Egypt and would eventually overhaul the "Arab Socialism" that had been arduously built from the top-down by his predecessor, the pan-Arab nationalist hero Gamal abd Al-Nasser (1954-70). To deal with the remnants of the Nasserist and Communist left in Egypt, Sadat slowly released many members of the Ikhwaan (Muslim Brothers) from prison. While they had been locked up under Nasser, Sadat viewed the Islamists, including al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya (Islamic Group), as a counterweight to the still active Egyptian left, especially on university campuses. Violence against the left was often encouraged, and the Islamists eventually came to dominate many university settings.[1]

While the Islamists engaged in violence against the left in Egypt on behalf of the state, the Islamists of the Maghrib launched a new ideological war against the "socialist" states in North Africa. In 1974 Abdellatif al-Soltani published what historian Benjamin Stora called the "first manifesto of the Islamist movement in Algeria." This "virulent critique" of the "Socialism of the Algerian leaders" invoked the name of none other than the 6th century Zoroastrian prophet and Iranian reformer Mazdak. Al-Soltani's polemic was titled "Mazdakism is the Origin of Socialism" [2] and it denounced the moral decay of the "destructive principles imported from abroad." All political action must emanate from "within the framework of the party of God, as opposed to the party of Satan," it proclaimed, implicating that the "socialist" policies of the Algerian state as deriving from the latter. Al-Soltani continued that there must be a "single state with a single leader, founded on Muslim principles."[3] For the Islamists like al-Soltani, socialism was something foreign, a contaminant that could not be reconciled with the all-encompassing totality that was Islam.

Yet, the Algerian state during its "socialist" stage was far from secular in any sense of the word. Even at the peak of these state-building and industrialization exercises, the Islamic lexicon was dominant and the state was heavily adorned in religious garb: Islam was the official state religion, no future law could ever "target the state religion," jumaa became the official day of rest, gambling and alcohol sales to Muslims were illegal, Muslims couldn't raise pigs, the president had to be a Muslim, the amount of masajid more than doubled (2,200 to 5,829) from 1966 to 1980, and government sponsored seminars on Islamic thought took place annually.[4] Thus, critiques of the Algerian state on the basis of any perceived secularism were relatively desiccated. Instead, the primary enemy for the Islamists was the socialist model of development; their issue was with "socialism" in any form or degree, not with the professed religiosity of the state. Not only was Marxism an "imported" ideology foreign to Islam, socialism was also an ideological descendent of Mazdakism, a dangerous heresy against God that any good Islamist ought to struggle against.

But who was Mazdak, and why was this pre-Islamic Iranian prophet's name being pejoratively drug into Islamist political discourse in 20th century Algeria? Mazdak was a Zoroastrian prophet who lived and preached during early 6th century. Although details of his life are tenuous at best, a few tenants of his ideology and religious teachings have been established. Mazdak claimed to be a prophet of Ahura Mazda, the monotheistic god of Zoroastrianism. However, Mazdak's Zoroastrianism was an egalitarian rejection of the mainstream clerical establishment and most of his teachings were considered heresy by the Zoroastrian clergy. A significant element of Mazdak's religious thought focused on economic egalitarianism, including an emphasis on developing communal property and community work where all people benefited. Although Mazdak himself was a Zoroastrian Mobad (priest), his teachings were radically anti-clerical in the fact that they accused the mainstream Zoroastrian clergy of oppressing the Persian population and causing poverty through excessive accumulation.

Mazdak's socially conservative critics accused him of extending "communal property" to the point of "sharing wives" and "free love." Despite these allegations, Mazdak's real crime was his economic message. It was his radical egalitarianism that caused him to become a target of the state. Zoroastrian scholar M.N. Dhalla articulated the core teachings of Mazdakism:

"The account of Mazdak's system is very meagre; but it is known that he accounted Jealousy, Wrath, and Greed as the three main causes of all evil in the world. Everyone, according to Mazdak's teachings, should be given equal opportunity and equal share of the enjoyment of the earthly possessions of God. So it was originally ordained by God, but that natural order has been upset by the aggressive strong for their own self-aggran­dizement. Society should therefore return to that original ideal state. These revolutionary teachings thrilled for a time Iran, and exercised a powerful fascination on the masses. The crisis was brought to a head when, far from taking any initiative to stamp out the heresy, the king encouraged it, and finally embraced it. His son, Prince Noshirvan, summoned the Dasturs and Mobads to consider the situation. It was certain that the cult would spread and the young prince adopted severe measures to suppress it, lest it should menace the public peace. The clergy who viewed the new heresy with great alarm, advised rigorous measures to extirpate the threatening creed. Mazdak did not live long to preach his doctrine, for the prince arranged a banquet for him and his followers and put them all to the sword in A.D. 528."[5]

Thus Mazdak and his followers were executed by the state and the religious establishment for the "excitement" they encouraged amongst the Iranian masses. A variety of accounts of Mazdak's death show the gruesome hatred ruling elites harbored for Mazdak. One narration suggests that Mazdak was presented with the spectacle of a "human garden" by his executors when three thousand of his followers were buried alive with their feet sticking from the ground. According to this account Mazdak himself was then hanged upside down and shot with arrows. Other stories of his execution employ equally morbid methods of torture.

Overtime Mazdak and "Mazdakism" became a common pejorative utilized by religious scholars, both Zoroastrian and Islamic, to denigrate any radically egalitarian religious philosophies within their respective traditions. While medieval Muslim historiography often condemned the "socialist" aspects of Mazdakism, this critique was carried over effectively into the 20th century, and not just by way of al-Soltani and the Algerian Islamists. As early as 1919 the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Mohammed Bakheet, was vehemently condemning Mazdakism as a predecessor of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Bakheet wrote that the communists in Russia represented an "ancient 'way' and it is the creed of a Persian hypocrite named Zoroaster." [6] But this "ancient way" was only spread to the masses by a "man from Mazria called Mazdaq" who "taught communism of property and of persons, and put it in their mind that this, although it might not be from religion, was at least honorable in the doing." Mazdak's "heresy" furthermore articulated the idea that "God furnished the means of living to be divided equally among the people… [so] they decided to take from the rich and give to the poor… [and] the masses seized this opportunity wholeheartedly with Mazdaq and their followers aiding them in all their views." After condoning the slaughter of Mazdak and his followers, the Grand Mufti goes on to explain that "Islam was introduced and swept this false way aside." Furthermore, Bakheet proclaimed, God himself had "undertook the distribution of the means of living among His creatures by saying 'We divided up their livelihood among them' and 'God gives the livelihood to whom He wishes from among His servants,' and so on." Thus God had ordained prodigious inequality, and it was no place for mere humans to challenge God's will in this regard. Bakheet furthers his critique of the Bolsheviks, proclaiming that their "way" is:

"…one which destroys all Divine laws… it legalizes blood-shedding, allows trespass upon the property of others, treachery, lies, and rape… demolishes human society, destroyed the order of the world, leads to apostasy from religion, threatens the whole world with horrible distress and bitter troubles, and instigates the lower classes against all systems founded upon reason, morals, and virtue.

Accordingly, every true Moslem ought to avoid such people and their misguided views and false doctrines and deeds, because they are undoubtedly apostates." [7]

Indeed, it is this historical memory that al-Soltani and other Islamists drew upon in 1974 to validate their "Socialism as Mazdakism" critique of the Algerian state.

It is no wonder then that the United States and other imperialist powers often viewed the Islamists as appropriate vehicles through which they could combat pan-Arab nationalism and left-wing movements in the Middle East. At nearly every turn the Islamists presented themselves as enemies of left-wing and progressive movements and as such could be readily absorbed into the larger imperialist framework. When the Islamic Salvation Front (ISF) finally took power in Algeria in the 1990s, they hastened the privatization of the state sector and the dismantling of any remnants of the socialist project. But examples of the Islamist movement serving the interests of imperialism go far beyond Algeria. Islamists of the Maghrib undermined the legitimacy of anti-imperialist states like Libya and Syria. Egyptian leaders used the Ikhwaan to undermine the pan-Arab and nationalist left. While the Palestine Liberation Organization, including its second largest party the communist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), engaged in militant guerrilla war against Israel, Palestinian segments attached to the Egyptian Muslim brothers (those that would eventually become Hamas) refused to fight for decades. Instead they opted to try to "Islamicize" Palestinian society before engaging in the struggle and focused on developing enough cadre to position themselves at the forefront of the Palestinian national liberation movement. During the events of "Black September," the Jordanian Muslim Brothers sided with the Hashemite monarchy, originally installed by the British, in its brutal repression against and expulsion of the secular Palestine Liberation Organization. Most explicitly, the "brave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan" (as they were infamously eulogized in the Rambo film) worked in tandem with the United States to overthrow the revolutionary communist government of Afghanistan established in 1978. Thus, wherever the modern incarnation of "Mazdakism" needed to be undermined, the Islamists were there to do it.

Not all Islamic theology has been predicated upon disdain for radically egalitarian messages, however. For some Mazdak was even a religious figure that could be rehabilitated within the framework of a sort of "Islamic liberation theology," one shares some characteristics with its Catholic counterpart in Latin America. For instance, as Shireen Hunter notes the Iranian scholar Ali Shariati "believed the Iranian mind has always been attracted to ideas of social activism for the sake of justice." Shariati, who spiritualized Marxist notions of class conflict and social struggle within the lexicon of Shia Islam, appeared to have held an interest in Mazdak himself.[8] Shariati brilliantly satirized the arguments put forward by the class of religious elites, such as the Grand Mufti quoted above, who perpetually told the poor to be content with their lot in life.

"Have patience, my religious brother. Leave the world to those who are of it. Let hunger be the capital for the pardon of your sins. Forebear the hell of life for the rewards of paradise in the Hereafter. If you only knew the reward of people who tolerate oppression and poverty in this world! Keep your stomach empty of food, O brother, in order to see the light of wisdom in it. What is the remedy? Whatever befalls us. The pen of destiny has written on our foreheads from before: The prosperous are prosperous from their mother's womb and the wretched are wretched from their mother's womb. Every protest is a protest against the Will of God. Give thanks for His giving or non-giving. Let the deeds of everyone be accounted for on the Day of Reckoning. Be patient with oppression and give thanks for poverty. Do not breathe a word so that you do not lose the reward of the patient in the Hereafter. Release your body so as not to require clothes! Do not forget that the protest of a creature is protest against the Creator. The accounting of Truth and justice is the work of God, not the masses. In death, not in life. Do not pass judgment for the Judge of the judgment is God. Do not be shamed on the Day of Resurrection when you see that God, the Merciful, the Compassionate forgives the oppressor who you had not forgiven in this world. Everyone is responsible for his own deeds." [9]

Thus, for Shariati these views that condemn the poor to a life of misery were mere religious facades intended to placate the population and perpetuate economic inequality. The religious leaders who tell the masses to wait for their pie in the sky and dare not shake the foundations of social inequality while on Earth were the real scoundrels.

In stark contradistinction to the Sunni Islamists who condemned "Socialism as Mazdakism," Shariati laid forth his revolutionary and radically egalitarian theology in the quintessential work The Philosophy of History: Cain and Abel. There Shariati posited that "History represents an unbroken flow of events that, like man himself, is dominated by a dialectical contradiction, a constant warfare between two hostile and contradictory elements that began with the creation of humanity and has been waged at all places and at all times, and the sum total of which constitutes history." This "contradiction" began with the origin of human history, the struggle between Cain and Abel. Abel, as the manifestation of pastoralism, represents a sort of "primitive communism" where accumulation is impossible. Alternatively, Cain is a reflection of agricultural modes of production and represents the first schism between social classes in human society. Thus:

"In my opinion, the murder of Abel at the hands of Cain represents a great development, a sudden swerve in the course of history, the most important event to have occurred in all human life. It interprets and explains that event in a most profound fashion scientifically, sociologically, and with reference to class. The story concerns the end of primitive communism, the disappearance of man's original system of equality and brotherhood, expressed in the hunting and fishing system of productivity (equated with Abel), and its replacement by agricultural production, the creation of private ownership, the formation of the first class society, the system of discrimination and exploitation, the worship of wealth and lack of true faith, the beginning of enmity, rivalry, greed, plunder, slavery and fratricide (equated with Cain). The death of Abel and the survival of Cain are objective, historical realities, and the fact that henceforth religion, life, economy, government and the fate of men were all in the hands of Cain represents a realistic, critical and progressive analysis of what happened…

The wing represented by Abel is that of the subject and the oppressed; i.e., the people, those who throughout history have been slaughtered and enslaved by the system of Cain, the system of private ownership which has gained ascendancy over human society. The war between Cain and Abel is the permanent war of history which has been waged by every generation. The banner of Cain has always been held high by the ruling classes, and the desire to avenge the blood of Abel has been inherited by succeed­ing generations of his descendants‑the subjected people who have fought for justice, freedom and true faith in a struggle that has continued, one way or another, in every age. The weapon of Cain has been religion, and the weapon of Abel has also been religion…

This inevitable revolution of the future will be the culmina­tion of the dialectical contradiction that began with the battle of Cain and Abel and has continued to exist in all human societies, between the ruler and the ruled. The inevitable outcome of history will be the triumph of justice, equity and truth.

It is the responsibility of every individual in every age to determine his stance in the constant struggle between the two wings we have described, and not to remain a spectator. While believing in a certain form of historical determinism, we believe also in the freedom of the individual and his human responsi­bility, which lie at the very heart of the process of historical determinism. We do not see any contradiction between the two, because history advances on the basis of a universal and scientif­ically demonstrable process of determinism, but "I" as an individual human being must choose whether to move forward with history and accelerate its determined course with the force of knowledge and science, or to stand with ignorance, egoism, opportunism in the face of history, and be crushed."[10]

Whereas Bakheet condemned Mazdak for inciting revolution amongst the masses and Al-Soltani issued his invective of "Socialism as Mazdakism," Shariati invites the revolutionary and egalitarian struggle. Far too many Islamists have lent their services to the "system of Cain" contra the socialist and left-wing "system of Abel." Naturally, Mazdak was a manifestation of the latter. It is imperative for the future of humanity that we follow in the footsteps of Mazdak and Shariati's Abel, not the oppressive forces of Cain and their religious interlocutors.

Notes

[1] See Hossam El-Hamalawy, MERIP, http://www.merip.org/mer/mer242/comrades-brothers

[2] Alternatively translated as "Socialism is the Descendent of Mazdakism."

[3] See Benjamin Stora, Algeria 1830-2000: A Short History, 171-2.

[4] Stora, 171.

[5] M.N. Dhalla, History of Zoroastrianism, http://www.avesta.org/dhalla/history5.htm

[6] See Tareq Ismael and Rifa'at El-Sa'id, The Communist Movement in Egypt, 1920-1988, 164.

[7] See Ismael and El-Sa'id, 166-7.

[8] Shireen Hunter, Reformist Voices of Islam: Mediating Islam and Modernity, 54.

[9] See Ali Shariati, Religion vs. Religion.

[10] Ali Shariati, The Philosophy of History: Cain and Abel.

Retracing Toledo's Radical History

By Derek Ide

It is not difficult to sense the alienation and demoralization that impinges upon so many people as they drive through the streets of Toledo, Ohio. These are streets that were constructed to be driven on and nothing else. Unlike many of the cities in Europe, or even some in the United States, it is not a walkable city. The haphazard urban planning, or lack thereof, and the complete lack of any public transit system, with the exception of TARTA buses and private cabs, combine to make Toledo more than inhospitable to those without their own private vehicle. Those who can afford it have spent the past five decades fleeing to outlying suburbs, and those who cannot remain trapped within the confines of a "Little Detroit" which, after the 1970s, has witnessed the gutting of its manufacturing base. Since 2000, Toledo area poverty has risen faster than any other U.S. city. [1] In 2009, nearly 30% of the population of Toledo lived below the poverty line. Over 11% lived below half the poverty line.[2]

In Toledo, isolation is the rule rather than the anomaly. While the Occupy Wall Street movement rocked the United States in 2011, Toledo's Occupy Wall Street was anemic and enervated. Responses exist but they are individual, small-scale, and incapable of drawing the numbers that such dire conditions warrant. Aside from a few key activists and organizers, most individuals, even those who have lived here their whole lives, have taken the state of things for granted, or at least feel powerless to change them. No mass movement exists, in spite of the abject conditions, that people can plug themselves into. Toledo, as someone recently put it, is "a hard place to love if you didn't grow up here."

This has not always been the case, however. Toledo was once a center for economic activity, a hub of material exchange through which goods and labor moved rapidly. More importantly, however, Toledo has a long and radical history, one that has often been hidden away by the quotidian drudgery and daily grind of life. From the 1934 Auto-Lite Strike to the Black Panther Party headquarters on Door St., the city has not always been bereft of a culture of resistance. This once-proud resistance was not only manifest in one of the few general strikes to every rock a major U.S. city, or in the sheer violence and force brought down against the Panthers, it was also located on the campus of the University itself. From UT's Students for a Democratic Society in the early 1970s to the Black Student Union, which spearheaded the divestment movement from South Africa in the mid-1980s, Toledo students have always been engaged in the struggles of the day. The purpose of this article is to recount these struggles, but more importantly to provide as much space as possible to the voices that engaged in them. It should be noted that while what comes below is not an all-encompassing account of every radical initiative and movement in Toledo's history, plenty of which remain to be written about and exceed the knowledge of the author, this is a brief attempt to retrace as much of Toledo's radical history as possible. It is a history that every Toledo worker, student, and citizen should know.

The 1934 Auto-Lite Strike

By 1934, Toledo was in the midst of the depression. While the crisis was astute on the national scale, in Toledo it was catastrophic. Whereas 25 percent of all workers and 37 of all nonfarm workers were unemployed in 1933,[3] Toledo faced an unemployment rate of over 50% in 1934.[4] As Rebecca E. Zietlow[5] and James Gray Pope explain:

Without an economic safety net, people literally struggled to survive. Toledoans told stories about families eating nothing but apples, and burning their furniture to warm themselves during the harsh upper Midwest winters. These conditions were devastating for those workers without jobs, but they also had a profound impact on employed workers. The managers at industrial plants such as the Auto-Lite plant treated unskilled and semi-skilled workers as fungible and disposable.

Over one-third of Toledo's population lived on meager emergency relief during the depression. Willys-Overland employed 28,000 in 1929, out of a total population in Toledo of 290,000. By 1932, it employed only 3,000 people.[6] As Willys-Overland and other automobile plants shut down or significantly reduced production, so too did auto parts manufacturers, a significant component of Toledo's industrial base.

The Electric Auto-Lite Company, an auto parts manufacturer, was the site of one of the most heroic and historic strikes in not only Toledo, but U.S. history. At Auto-Lite, workers were treated contemptuously, and supervisors exercised arbitrary power over all aspects of their work life. Although Congress had enacted the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in 1933 which, under Section 7(a), provided workers with the right to organize, Roosevelt's insertion of merit clauses "granted employers the right to establish open shops and discriminate against militants." [7] As Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward explain:

Early in 1934, demands for union recognition at the Electric Auto-Lite Company and several smaller firms were rejected, and 4,000 workers walked out. The workers returned to the plants after federal officials secured a commitment from the employers to "set up a machinery" for negotiations. But Auto-Lite then refused to negotiate, and a second strike was called on April 11. Only a minority of the workers joined the walkout this time, however, and the company determined to keep its plant open, hiring strikebreakers to reach full production.

Toledo was a stronghold of A. J. Muste's radical Unemployed Leagues, and the Musteites rapidly mobilized large numbers of unemployed workers to reinforce the picket lines. On April 17 the company responded by obtaining a court order limiting picketing and prohibiting league members from picketing altogether. But the Musteites decided to violate the restraining order, and some local Communists joined in with the slogan "Smash the Injunction by Mass Picketing" (Keeran, 168). A handful of militants then began picketing. They were quickly arrested, but upon their release, they returned to the picket lines, their numbers now enlarged by workers emboldened by the militants' example. More arrests and further court injunctions seemed to only galvanize the strikers, and the numbers of people on the picket lines grew larger day by day. Sympathy for the strikers in Toledo was such that the sheriff could not use the local police to protect the strikebreakers and instead deputized special police, paid for by Auto-Lite.

By May 23, the crowd massed outside the plant had grown to some 10,000 people, effectively imprisoning the 1,500 strikebreakers inside the factory. The sheriff then decided to take the initiative, and the deputies attacked. The crowd fought back, several people were seriously wounded, and a contingent of the Ohio National Guard was called in. Armed with machine guns and bayoneted rifles, the Guardsmen marched into the Auto-Lite plant in the quiet of dawn and succeeded in evacuating the strikebreaking workers. But the next day, the crowd gathered again, advanced on the Guardsmen, showering them with bricks and bottles. On the third advance, the Guard fired into the crowd, killing two and wounding many more. The crowd still did not disperse. Four more companies of Guards men were called up, and Auto-Lite agreed to close the plant. Then, with the threat of a general strike in the air, the employers finally agreed to federal mediation which resulted in a 22 percent wage increase and limited recognition for the union. [8]

The AWP skillfully utilized the language of slavery and emancipation to inspire the strikers:

Its banner equated the end of chattel slavery in 1865 with the end of wage slavery through collective action in 1934. AWP flyers produced at the time made this connection more explicit. One leaflet proclaimed, "Toledo workers will not work at the points of bayonets like craven slaves." Another declared, "[T]he workers of Toledo . . . have starved and sweated and cried in their misery while waiting for this hour. Now they have shaken off the chains of their masters." A leaflet produced by the Auto Workers Union Organization Committee agreed, "It now remains the task of completely closing this slave pen of Minniger."[9]

One of the most important elements of the strike was the influence of A.J. Muste, a leader of the American Workers Party, who helped organize the Lucas County Unemployed League.[10] Charles Bogle explains the vital importance of this development:

The strike would have ended… had it not been for the actions of a committee of Auto-Lite workers who asked for assistance from the Unemployed League. The Unemployed League, affiliated with the socialist American Workers Party (AWP), had formed in 1933 to organize mass actions by Toledo unemployed workers to obtain cash relief. More important for the fate of the Auto-Lite striking workers, the League's policy was to unify the employed and unemployed. [11]

This policy of unification was a vital component of the strike, and allowed a limited, plant-based battle to transform into one of the most important industrial city-wide struggles in U.S. history.[12]

The success of the Toledo strike was a significant factor that contributed to the formation of the United Auto Workers, one of the few remaining unions of any significance in the United States. More importantly, it acted as a catalyst for passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935, which codified the legality of trade unions, collective bargaining, elected labor representation, and the right to strike. Although the plant was demolished in 1999, the entrance was left standing, with an inscription that reads: "This stone doorway will stand forever as a symbol of the Toledo Auto-Lite workers' commitment, loyalty, and solidarity, which enabled them to break with the past, and enter a better future." As Zeitlow and Pope maintain, "That future has now receded into the past, and the example of the Auto-Lite strikers affirms to a new generation that with commitment, loyalty, and solidarity, a better future can be won."[13]

National Committee to Combat Fascism (Black Panther Party)

On July 25, 1967, Dorr Street, dubbed "Black Mecca" for the array of black-owned shops, restaurants, and nightclubs, had been the site of a large-scale uprising that came on the heels of an even larger rebellion in Detroit two days prior.[14] One witness to the riots proclaimed "The reasons for the riots, I think, were to achieve some kind of justice - we just didn't have it all the time." [15] Three years later, an organization had arisen to politically direct the energy and frustration manifest in 1967. By 1970, the 1300 block of Dorr Street was home to the Toledo chapter Black Panther Party headquarters. The Toledo Panthers, at this time operating under the name the National Committee to Combat Fascism (NCCF), had organized a nascent Free Clothing program and [16] a Free Breakfast program, in step with other chapters across the country.

Already at this time across the country, Black Panther Party headquarters had been attacked and raided, and the 21-year old martyr Fred Hampton had been pulled out of his bed and shot in the head less than a year before. In the early morning hours of September 18, 1970, a man approached Toledo Police Officer William Miscannon, stationed outside the Party headquarters at Junction and Dorr. The stories differ as to what happened next. One source suggests Miscannon asked the man what was going on, to which the man responded "This is what's going on," before pulling a silver handgun and shooting Miscannon in the head.[17] Yet another source suggests the man approached and shouted "Hey baby, I've got something for you!" before shooting.[18] Either way, Miscannon was killed and the murder was blamed on local Panther John McClellan. Although McClellan was charged, two different trials ended in hung juries, and no new evidence was able to be presented against him.

The Toledo Police, however, took no qualms in using the killing as a pretext for attacking the Panther headquarters. Within hours, some forty officers surrounded the headquarters and "riddled… [the] Panther headquarters with bullets during a five-hour battle," in what Mike Cross, the Panther defense minister in Toledo, called "an unprovoked attack by racist pigs."[19] The guns were apparently procured by John McClellan's brother, Larry, who took "about 20 rifles" from a shooting range at Bowling Green State University, near Toledo. [20] Sixteen year old Troy Montgomery was seriously wounded. When the ambulance arrived, the police refused to allow the black ambulance driver Leroy Hardnett to take the boy to the hospital. Hardnett reported at the time that "They told us to leave him in the streets and die."[21] The boy was eventually taken to Mercy Hospital and survived. The Panthers stockpile of weapons was confiscated by the police. The assault did not end that night, however. One Black Panther article titled "Toledo Piggery Continues" detailed how "Two members of the Toledo N.C.C.F. (brothers Conrad and Kenneth) were kidnapped, while on their way to the office, and illegally held for eight days in the Toledo Pig Pen. The brothers were unable to make a phone call to let anyone know what had happened to them." [22] Although Panther operations were hampered by this attack, this was not the end of the Toledo chapter.

The thugs of the state continued their war on Toledo's Panthers. On November 28, 1970 an article entitled "The Dungeon" appeared in the Black Panther party newspaper exposing the conditions that prisoners faced in Toledo's Lucas Country jail. The report was signed by ten prisoners, five Black and five white, and immediately they faced retaliation for their political commitments to the struggle. This excerpt from the Black Panther detailing the attack deserves to be quoted at length:

The Inmates knew that their lives would be in grave danger because of this, but they felt that getting the truth to the people about what was happening in this fascist pig pen was much more important than their own personal safety. This was clearly shown in the last paragraph of the article which stated "All the men (five Black and five White) incarcerated in this jail's maximum security section have signed this report being well aware of the physical and mental repression that will follow from the jail's administration. They wish the people to know that no matter what happens to them they have stood up and are resisting as men."

Tuesday Dec. 8. 1970, under pretense of conducting a weapons search, more than 25 racist pigs and their bootlicking flunky nigger pigs, launched an unprovoked, brutal attack against the men in the maximum security section of the Lucas County Jail. When the pigs started brutalizing and beating them, the brothers righteously began to defend themselves. Within minutes the rest of the inmates on all three jail floors began to join in the resistance against the pig deputies. For 2 hours the prisoners of the dungeon resisted heavily armed pigs from the Sheriffs Dept. and city Police… 17 prisoners were beaten, stripped of their clothes and sent to the hole (A 10' × 12' windowless room in the basement). Included among them was a sick 73 year old Black man and two members of the N.C.C.F., John and Larry McClellan. All 17 prisoners remained in this room for 2 days and were literally covered with their own wastes. The only food they received was one cup of water and one slice of bread a day per person.

…[On] Thursday Dec. 10, incarcerated N.C.C.F. member John McClellan, accused of offing racist pig Miscannon Sept. 18th, 1970, stopped a pre-trial motion in his defense to expose the conditions that he and 16 other men had been subjected to for over 48 hours in the hole. He refused to participate any further in the court proceedings until the cruel and unusual punishment was immediately ended.

Presiding Judge, Wiley, adjourned the court and visited the jail along with newsmen and attorneys, from 1:30 P.M. to 2:30 P.M. When court was re-convened he ordered that John McClellan released from the hole immediately. This brother again showed that he is a true servant of the people when he said. "The constitutional rights of the other 16 men are also being violated. I will not leave those other men in the hole to die. If we are not all released together, then I will return to the hole with my friends, many, who are sick and will die it not released immediately." Judge Wiley then ordered Sheriff Metzger to release all the men held in the hole. This racist pig Judge had seen with his own eyes, the degradation of 17 naked human beings covered with their own wastes and visibly very sick. Yet, all he could relate to was releasing John McClellan. This brother exposed the true-nature of this pig and backed him up against the wall, where in order not to show his fascist nature, he had to recognize the rights of the other prisoners held in the hole…

Now a prisoner can remain in the hole for only 12 hours at a time and then be released for 6 hours before returning again. Still this rule doesn't stop his said constitutional rights against cruel and unusual punishment from being violated. It just determines how long his rights will be violated.

A prisoner will still he stripped naked, forced to sleep on a concrete floor if its not too crowded, have no toilet facilities or running water and receive bread and water to eat. Actually, nothing has changed regarding the way the prisoners are treated in the hole. only the length of time they are to be kept in there. To end the sham. Pig judge Wiley had the nerve to dink the following statement' "This is an unsatisfactory solution, but I had to balance the necessity for security against a minimum of decency."

The pigs have always put their security and profits before the desires and needs of the people. The crimes being committed daily in the "Dungeon" are comparable to the horrendous war crimes committed by the Nazis against their victims in the concentration camps.

Today, the barbarous ruling class of America far surpasses the Nazis in Germany. They are making and implementing plans for the total extermination of Black people in America, and waging a genocidal war on the rest of the poor and oppressed in the world. We are not going to rid ourselves of the brutality and murder waged daily against the people of the world by the Nixon-Agnew-Mitchell-Hoover fascist clique, unless all people rise up and begin to wage revolutionary armed struggle within every oppressed community of the world. In essence, we must relate to the social and political ideology of inter-communalism so that all people of the world can no longer be manipulated along racial, cultural, and national lines by the fascists of America.

ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

THROUGH REVOLUTIONARY INTERCOMMUNAL SOLIDARITY!

Toledo N.C.C.F.

1334 Dorr St.

Toledo, Ohio[23]

In stark contrast, The Byran Times presented the "disturbance" as an "attempt to free two Black Panthers." This revolt was "quelled" by the "authorities."[24] But the Panthers and McClellan were not demonized by the Black community, despite how the press sought to malign them. Indeed, in July of 1972 the Toledo NCCF held a "Community Day of Justice." Some "6,000 people, mostly Black, attended Community Day for Justice to show support for Comrade John McClellan." The John McClellan Free Food Program distributed "1,000 free full bags of groceries (with a chicken in every bag)" and over 1,000 Sickle Cell Anemia tests were given. A "massive number" of people were registered to vote. When the bags of food arrived, "everyone felt as one beautiful, Black sister did: 'Lord knows, those Panthers are really going to do it'." [25]

Campus Activism from the Black Student Union to Students for Justice in Palestine

As the Black Panthers were organizing on Door Street, just a mile or so west students were organizing around a variety of issues on the "Toledo University" (now University of Toledo) campus. Both the Black Student Union as well as the Students for a Democratic Society became politically active at the college. Toledo's SDS, while small, ruffled a lot of feathers on campus and were even the target of extensive FBI surveillance. Recently declassified documents reveal their tactics were extremely dirty. One COINTELPRO operative, Gene Foder, recalled how he "would attend an organization's meeting and wait for speakers to denounce law enforcement, as they often did. Then, with a burst of apparent outrage, he would rise and point out his fellow undercover officers. The groups would kick out those officers and often welcome Mr. Fodor into their ranks, grateful for his watchful eye and unaware that he too was a part of the system they opposed."[26] The BSU, for its part, was also quite militant. At one point it occupied University Hall, the iconic building on campus,[27] in the aftermath of the the Jackson State shooting:

At 6:00 a.m. on Monday May 18, Black students blocked the entrances to University Hall for five hours. A crowd of about 2,000 gathered when they could not get into the building to attend classes, some angry and some supportive of the BSU. Their demands, very similar to those of Black students at San Francisco State College and Cornell, were as follows: "$200,000 for a Black studies programs, manned and directed by Blacks; the hiring of a full time coordinator of Black studies; first priority placed on hiring of Black professors in each department; a Black student enrollment commensurate with the population of Blacks in the City of Toledo; a minimum of three Black graduate students in every department" ("The Declaration," 1970, May 18). These demands arose after the BSU perceived that the UT administration did not respond to the deaths at Jackson State.[28]

The BSU continued this confident, militant approach throughout the 1980s. In 1985, at the age of 43 years old, co-founder of the Black Panther Party Huey P. Newton broke ten years of silence by addressing a crowd at the University of Toledo. He had been invited by the University of Toledo Black Student Union (BSU), which was in the midst of its struggle to get the University of Toledo to divest from its holdings in apartheid South Africa. He told the audience he had "thought BSUs had gone the way of my organization of SNCC," but instead that explained that the BSUs represented a "structure to start to build a national organization freedom." He maintained that students in general, and black students in particular, were becoming politically conscious largely through the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.[29] The BSU also brought former Black Panther, Communist Party leader, and prison scholar Angela Davis to campus. She, like Newton, engaged the issue of the divestment movement on campus: "I hear that there is a pretty strong divestment movement on this campus… Well, I think that you should keep on pushing for full and immediate divestment." [30]

The BSU at UT in the 1980s was at the forefront of radical student politics with leaders like Mansour Bey who not only brought figures like Newton and Davis to Toledo, but militantly challenged the administration on issues like divestment from South Africa, even in the face of intimidation. [31] Throughout 1984 and 1985 the BSU brought anti-apartheid activists and native South Africans to campus to raise awareness and in June 1985 circulated a divestment petition. In October 1985 the BSU organized a march with over 100. Chants like "Long Live the African National Congress!" and signs such as "Apartheid is dead… may it rest in hell" characterized the march. [32] When protests alone did not accomplish their goals, the BSU erected mock shanties in protest, calling for total divestment. As The Blade reported at the time, the student action "placed TU [UT] on the crest of the biggest wave of protests on college campuses since the Vietnam War."[33] The shanty they erected was not removed until Mansour Bey, president of the BSU at the time, had secured a meeting with UT's president James McComas, who explained that UT would make its position on divestment public in three weeks.

Throughout this entire process the university administration harassed and threatened BSU leaders. As one statement explains, on the same day that they finally received a telephone call from the president in July of 1985, another call "came into the Black Student Union to tell us that campus security was investigating the records" of BSU leaders, including president Anthony Muharib and vice-president Mansour Bey. Then, Chief of Campus security Frank Pizzulo confronted Mansour Bey about some "old bench warrants" on the activists, which they claimed may "prove embarrassing if we, as student leaders were to be arrested." The BSU's July 31, 1985 remained defiant, however:

What we are concerned with here today is the double standard that prompted today's press conference [regarding divestment]. On the one hand, James [McComas] establishes a committee to study U.T.'s investments in South Africa, while on the underhand, the U.T. Security Forces launches an investigation and surveillance of those campus activists who have led the campaign to raise the political and moral consciousness of U.T.'s students and faculty… We are also very concerned with the overall implications of these police tactics which remind us of the very oppressive and inhumanitarian policies of the South African government which we are protesting against. Why these police tactics? Are they intended to intimdate all students into backing away from getting involved in controversial and unpopular issues? If so, it is not working! Therefore, we are today calling upon the support of the progressive elements of the Toledo community to stand with the Black Student Union in solidarity for our right as students and citizens of the United States to express our constitutionally guaranteed rights of freedom of speech. And furthermore, that we be permitted to continue our campaign to educate and motivate this campus to speak out on the evils and injust practices of the Botha regime in South Africa. Finally, we demand that the university's campus police forces cease and desist their harassment, investigations, and surveillance of U.T. students.[34]

In the end the University of Toledo convened an ad hoc South African Investments Study Committee that eventually called for divestment from South African apartheid. By August 1989, on the midnight hour of the apartheid regime, UT and two related private organizations completed their divestment from South Africa, totaling some $4.7 million in investments.[35]

Today the BSU is a far cry from the militant organization of the 1980s. Instead, some of the BSU's responses to the rampant murder of young black men has been paltry, acquiescent, and cowardly, not to mention their refusal to challenge US imperialism and militarism. [36] Part of this stems from the social composition of the current Black Student Union. In 2014 the BSU president refused to sign on to a statement linking the #BlackLivesMatter movement with Israel's summer assault on Gaza. The president of the BSU cited that with four of seven of their executive board members serving in armed forces via the University of Toledo's ROTC program, the BSU could not critique US policies. UT itself has recently been "recognized as a top school for military education,"[37] with one of the categories of qualification being "military culture," as can be obscenely witnessed by the disproportionate amount of students roaming the campus in their fatigues and the various training and combat simulation drills that regularly occur on campus grounds.

The BSU is not alone in this transformation from radicalism to acquiescence, however. The Latino Student Union, with radical Mexican-American working class roots, has largely devolved into a social organization that occasionally parrots US propaganda against radical states in Latin America. In 2014, for instance, the LSU become the marionette of a small but influential group of Venezuelan expats at the University of Toledo when they willingly spread vicious lies against the Venezuelan state.[38] The malicious campaign of propaganda continued in 2015, with one prominent Venezuelan student calling for US sanctions against her own country in an effort to oust Nicolas Maduro, the inheritor of Hugo Chavez's legacy, and the radical PSUV.[39] To combat this a collective of students interested in challenging the narrative of the powerful and privileged Venezuelan elites came together to form the University of Toledo Friends of Venezuela Society. Their first public statement called for "Hands off Venezuela, no to sanctions":

Aside from the delusions of wealthy Venezuelan expatriates in Toledo and other U.S. cities, there is nothing the Venezuelan government has done that warrants sanctions. The primary reason they want to apply sanctions is because Chavez, Maduro, and the PSUV have threatened both the cupidity of the ruling class in Venezuela and challenged US hegemony in the region. As scholar George Ciccariello-Maher has argued in Jacobin magazine, "While the Venezuelan opposition in Venezuela is almost as delusional as the Venezuelan self-exiles in Miami [or Toledo], there's one big difference: opposition leaders on the ground have to live with the consequences of their catastrophic decisions… [Thus] while radical right-wingers in Florida [or Ohio] may be celebrating the sanctions, it would be suicidal for the opposition in Venezuela to do the same. They would simply prove what Chavistas already believe: that they are treasonous lapdogs of imperial power."

Indeed, students at UT and people of conscience should not fall for the narrative espoused by "treasonous lapdogs of imperial power." It is imperative, now more than ever, that progressive forces here in the US and around the world stand up and say "No to Sanctions!" and "Hands Off Venezuela!" Within just over a week four million Venezuelans signed a petition condemning sanctions against their country. We ought to listen to the millions of urban workers and campesinos, not the spawn of the elite here at UT.

Perhaps the most important political development on UT's campus in the past few years, however, has been the advent and augmentation of the Palestine solidarity movement. Inspired by the upsurge in Palestine solidarity organizing around the country, a group of students came together to form Toledo's first organization dedicated to Palestinian solidarity in the summer of 2011. After four years of organization, education, and agitation on the issue, UT Students for Justice in Palestine led one of the most high profile divestment campaigns in the country. Calling on UT to divest from corporations that profited from the occupation of Palestine, UTSJP spearheaded an initiative modeled on the BSU's successful anti-apartheid divestment initiative. [40] In September, 2014 UTSJP paired with UT's Student African American Brotherhood to celebrate the resistance to police violence in Ferguson and the resistance to Israeli occupation in Gaza. Furthermore, they called "for the immediate end to police militarization and violence aimed at black communities in the U.S. and an immediate cessation of the $3 billion provided to Israel annually by our government to oppress the Palestinian people."[41]

By early 2015 UTSJP had pushed divestment to the forefront of campus life. In what was called "the craziest stories we've ever reported" by prominent commentator Phillip Weiss, the UT administration and Student Government originally colluded to shut down the UT Divest movement in a kangaroo court that ruled divestment "unconstitutional."[42] After a massive campaign led by a strong coalition of student groups at UT and solidarity organizations from around the country, the Student Government was eventually forced to reverse its position and voted 21 to 4 in favor of divestment on March 3, 2015.[43] Just over a month later, in late April, UT Divest won a major victory in the form of a student-wide referendum in which 57.13% of students voted to divest. Despite all of this, the university has refused to divest against the will of a majority of its students. As UTSJP's post-referendum victory letter explains, however, the struggle continues:

We do not believe divestment is "contentious" or "incredibly difficult." Society's intolerable injustices do not require the search for a full consensus on what perfect justice looks like. We support divestment because we believe in human rights and international law. We believe UT should strive to actually implement its ethical and moral commitments, and adhere to its own mission statement of "improving the human condition." The majority of UT students agree with us. #UTDivest has created a movement on campus, a movement so resilient that it will continue to grow, to learn, to evolve, and to win. We will continue to work with and organize alongside all organizations that support social justice, and will struggle to ensure that UT is a place where human life is more important than profit. Consciousness has been raised, bodies have been moved, hearts and minds have been won. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. #UTDivest will continue to move forward in the struggle for justice. [44]

The 2005 Toledo Rebellion and #BlackLivesMatter

One of the moments Toledo captured national media attention was in 2005 when a small group of neo-Nazis from outside of Toledo came to the city, ostensibly protest "crime." The neo-Nazis successfully utilized the state security apparatus to protect and shield themselves from mass popular resentment, invoking first amendment rights in order to acquire police protection. Hundreds of antiracists forced the city to cancel the attempted march by the neo-Nazi group, called the "National Socialist Movement," through a mostly black neighborhood in North Toledo. Instead, hundreds of residents faced off with 15 Nazis standing in "formation" on the lawn of Woodward High School. After escorting the neo-Nazis away from the anti-racist demonstration, riot police clashed with local residents angry over the neo-Nazi presence and the police protection provided by the city of Toledo. These clashes made national headlines. The city spent over $100,000 protecting the Nazis in 2005. As one local community activist, Washington Muhammad, explained at the time: "Everybody else does without a police escort. The Nazis should have had a banner behind them that said, 'Sponsored by the City of Toledo.'" [45] Anger spilled over into a small uprising, with some shops and local establishments being broken into and looted. Many of the black youth who clashed with police were arrested and sentenced, some for prison terms. In all some 114 protesters were arrested, with charges ranging from "assault, vandalism, failure to obey police, failure to disperse and overnight curfew violations." [46] The neo-Nazis were not only protected by the city of Toledo, they were successful in using the repressive apparatus of the state to arrest and then imprison black youth.

A decade later, on the tenth anniversary of their original visit, the same neo-Nazi organization, this time with a few more members, decided to attempt the same routine as before. This time, however, the city of Toledo confined them to a small section of downtown Toledo, and all of the surrounding blocks were shut down. Hundreds of on-duty, over-time, and volunteer police officers protected the small group of neo-Nazis. A highly militarized riot squad had dozens of police, some armed with assault rifles. These riot police were paired with hundreds of regular police officers. Armored vehicles were present, as well as an elaborate identification system that required facial photographs of any individual entering the area near the neo-Nazis. Although no clashes took place this time, largely due to the efforts of local organizers who held a well-attended Black Lives Matter Day in a separate location, the city of Toledo spent some $76,000 in overtime pay to protect the Nazis.[47]

Thus, the tactics of the neo-Nazi groups who came to Toledo suggest that these small extremist organizations make full use of the resources of the repressive state apparatus. The tentacles of the state not only shield the racists from popular anger, they are also used, as in 2005, to assault targeted populations and further the strategic goals of the neo-Nazis. Thus, as one local organizer proclaimed after the 2015 visit, there were around 300 fascists in Toledo that day; only 25 of them were neo-Nazis.

It is not coincidental that both visits by the Nazis were preceded by events in which the Toledo Police Department were involved in the deaths of black men. In February of 2005 TPD had electrocuted 41-year-old Jeffery Turner to death after shocking him nine times with a taser. His crime had been "loitering" near the Art Museum. Two years later a judge promptly dismissed the lawsuit his family brought against the TPD. [48] In March, 2015 34 year-old Aaron Pope died under police custody. Karen Madden, Pope's mother, explained that the police did not call for an ambulance and used excessive force against Pope. "I want justice. This has gone on too long," she exclaimed, her words not unlike those of the many mothers who have lost their sons to police violence.[49] The TPD is not alone in exercising immense state violence against black bodies. In Ohio alone many high-profile murders of black men and boys have occurred including John Crawford in Beavercreek, 12 year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Samuel DuBose in Cincinnati, among others. The first two had been holding toy guns, the later was stopped in traffic for not having a front license plate. All were murdered in "unprovoked attack by racist pigs," to harp back to the language of the Toledo Panthers. In the United States a black person is murdered every 28 hours by police. By early June some 500 people had been killed by police in 2015 alone, nearly 30% of them black.[50] In response a collective of Toledo residents and long-standing community activists have formed the Community Solidarity Response Network. CSRN has been on the forefront of challenging police violence against black communities in Toledo.

Conclusion

In summation, then, Toledo is not without its radicalism. Toledo has been the site of social, economic, and political struggle for decades. From the Auto-Lite Strike to #BlackLivesMatter, the Palestine Solidarity movement to the Black Panthers, those of us residing in Toledo have a prodigious amount of inspiration to draw from. Toledo is represents more than just social isolation and neoliberal deindustrialization. Toledo is also the Polish, Hungarian, and Italian immigrant workers who led the Auto-Lite strike, the Black prisoners and "lumpen-proletariat" that formed the Black Panthers and fought back against state repression, the activists who stood alongside their South African counterparts to end apartheid in South Africa, the Palestinian students in the diaspora who fight Israel's occupation. It is them and so much more. As the great Marxist historian and professor at the University of Toledo proclaimed in his final speech at UT: "We have the World to gain, the Earth to recuperate."[51] We in Toledo have always been and must continue to be part of the struggle to recuperate the Earth.

Notes

[1] http://www.toledoblade.com/Economy/2011/11/03/Toledo-area-poverty-rate-worst-in-U-S.html

[2] http://www.city-data.com/poverty/poverty-Toledo-Ohio.html

[3] http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/GreatDepression.html

[4] See Zeitlow and Pope, 843.

[5] University of Toledo, College of Law.

[6] http://libcom.org/history/us-industrial-workers-movement

[7] http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/05/tole-m27.html

[8] http://libcom.org/history/us-industrial-workers-movement

[9] See Zeitlow and Pope, 846-7.

[10] On the divide between the Musteites and the Communists, and the role of radical workers in the strike, see Roger Keeren, The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Unions. https://libcom.org/history/communist-party-socialists-during-1934-toledo-auto-lite-strike

[11] http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/05/tole-m27.html

[12] For more on the Auto-Lite Strike and other struggles during the period, see Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941.

[13] See Zeitlow and Pope, 854.

[14] Patrick Dyer, http://socialistworker.org/2007-2/639/639_10_Detroit.shtml

[15] http://www.toledofreepress.com/2006/08/30/residents-recall-dorr-streets-black-mecca-days/

[16] https://iheartthreadbared.wordpress.com/2011/10/17/body-and-soul/

[17] http://www.toledoblade.com/Police-Fire/2007/02/21/Toledo-police-officer-killed-in-1970-shooting.html

[18] The Times - Sep. 18, 1970, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1665&dat=19700918&id=wxsaAAAAIBAJ&sjid=iCQEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5985,3714699

[19] The Times - Sep. 18, 1970, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1665&dat=19700918&id=wxsaAAAAIBAJ&sjid=iCQEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5985,3714699

[20] The Bryan Times - Dec 9, 1970

[21] The Times - Sep. 18, 1970, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1665&dat=19700918&id=wxsaAAAAIBAJ&sjid=iCQEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5985,3714699

[22] http://www.negroartist.com/writings/BLACK%20PANTHER%20NEWSPAPERS/5%20no%207.htm

[23] http://www.negroartist.com/writings/BLACK%20PANTHER%20NEWSPAPERS/5%20no%2030.htm

[24] The Bryan Times - Dec 9, 1970 - http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=799&dat=19701209&id=nVEwAAAAIBAJ&sjid=TVIDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3745,4165846

[25] http://www.negroartist.com/writings/BLACK%20PANTHER%20NEWSPAPERS/8%20no%2021.htm

[26] http://www.toledoblade.com/Police-Fire/2012/07/15/Surveillance-records-from-60s-70s-found.html#IVhTrVSb05tOu1gs.99

[27] For more on University Hall from one of Toledo's most radical professors, see Peter Linebaugh, http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/16/how-did-we-get-here-university-hall-at-this-point-of-time-the-anthropocene/

[28] For more on unrest at UT in the 1965-72 period, see Matthew J. Deters, Preventing Violent Unrest: Student Protest at the University of Toledo, 1965-1972. MA Thesis, University of Toledo.

[29] Newspaper clipping, "Newton Ends 10-Year Silence With Talk at TU," Canaday Center, University of Toledo.

[30] Newspaper clipping, John Nichols, Toledo Blade, Canaday Center, University of Toledo.

[31] Add in BSU Statement here.

[32] Newspaper clipping, "Over 100 protestors march against apartheid," The Collegian.

[33] Newspaper clipping, Tanber, "TU Students Erect Shanty in Protest of Apartheid, Ask Total Divestitute," The Blade.

[34] Press Statement, Black Student Union, July 31 1985. Canaday Center.

[35] Newspaper clipping, "UT, 2 groups divest holdings in South Africa," The Blade.

[36] It should be noted that this may be shifting in the 2015-6 academic year, as the BSU is under a new leadership that appears more willing to confront this issue head-on.

[37] http://independentcollegian.com/2015/01/28/news/ut-recognized-as-a-top-school-for-military-education/

[38] http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/latino-student-organizations.html#.VcQHJPlVhBc

[39] http://independentcollegian.com/2015/03/25/opinion/letter-venezuela-benefits-from-sanctions/

[40] For a resevior of video, statements, etc. on #UTDivest, see http://utdivest.blogspot.com/

[41] http://independentcollegian.com/2014/09/16/opinion/letter-to-the-editor-solidarity-for-human-rights/

[42] http://mondoweiss.net/2015/02/divestment-officials-federation

[43] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkT2RTndz-c

[44] https://www.facebook.com/UTDivest/posts/866974650049245

[45] http://socialistworker.org/2005-2/562/562_12_Toledo.shtml

[46] http://www.foxnews.com/story/2005/10/16/neo-nazi-march-causes-riots/

[47] http://www.toledonewsnow.com/story/28883577/city-neo-nazi-rally-cost-taxpayers-76767-in-overtime?clienttype=generic

[48] http://www.toledoblade.com/Courts/2012/05/16/Taser-death-suit-dismissed.html

[49] http://www.toledoblade.com/Police-Fire/2015/03/30/Family-of-Toledo-man-who-died-in-police-custody-seek-answers.html#EiPD6bCw4z4b9qHk.99

[50] http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/10/the-counted-500-people-killed-by-police-2015

[51] http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/16/how-did-we-get-here-university-hall-at-this-point-of-time-the-anthropocene/

The Universal and the Particular: Chomsky, Foucault, and Post-New Left Political Discourse

By Derek Ide

Postmodern theory was a relatively recent intellectual phenomenon in 1971 when Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault sat down to discuss a wide range of topics, including the nature of justice, power, and intellectual inquiry. At one point Chomsky, who Peter Novick suggests as an example of left-wing empiricism in post-war academia, engages the concrete issue of social activism and invokes the notion of "justice," to which Foucault asks poignantly: "When, in the United States, you commit an illegal act, do you justify it in terms of justice or of a superior legality, or do you justify it by the necessity of the class struggle, which is at the present time essential for the proletariat in their struggle against the ruling class?" After a brief period he quickly reiterates the question again: "Are you committing this act in virtue of an ideal justice, or because the class struggle makes it useful and necessary?" Chomsky attempts to situate a notion of justice within international law, to which Foucault replies: "I will be a little bit Nietzschean about this… the idea of justice in itself is an idea which in effect has been invented and put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power or as a weapon against that power… And in a classless society, I am not sure that we would still use this notion of justice." In other words, for Foucault justice is only intelligible within a relative framework of class antagonisms. Meanings of justice may differ, but they are only understandable vis-à-vis certain class positions. Chomsky responds: "Well, here I really disagree. I think there is some sort of an absolute basis--if you press me too hard I'll be in trouble, because I can't sketch it out-ultimately residing in fundamental human qualities, in terms of which a 'real' notion of justice is grounded."[1]

Foucault's position appears correct, at least on the surface, because it is deeply rooted in the recognition of class-based power, hegemony, and contestation. Chomsky, on the other hand, has trouble sketching out any "pure form" or "absolute basis" of justice. Instead, it appears to be an abstraction to which he has some, perhaps understandably, visceral attachment. Yet, Foucault's position seems at odds with the stance that Patricia O'Brien attributes to him when she explains that, for Foucault, "culture is studied through technologies of power-not class, not progress, not the indomitability of the human spirit. Power cannot be apprehended through the study of conflict, struggle, and resistance… Power is not characteristic of a class (the bourgeoisie) or a ruling elite, nor is it attributable to one… Power does not originate in either the economy or politics, and it is not grounded there."[2] Instead, it is an "infinitely complex network of 'micro-powers,' of power relations that permeate every aspect of social life."[3]

In one way, the adoption by "critical" leftists (the proliferation of critical race theory, whiteness studies, etc. may be a reflection of this) of this notion that power is an "infinitely complex network of micro-powers" may help to explain the rise of the post-New Left vocabulary and the political orientation of those who engage in privilege discourse. Thus, institutional "oppression" as a "pattern of persistent and systematic disadvantage imposed on large groups of people" becomes sublimated by "privilege," where the criticism is centered on "set of unearned benefits that some individuals enjoy (and others are denied) in their everyday lives." Likewise, "liberation," referring to ultimate victory against systems of exploitation and oppression, is abandoned in favor of fighting for "safe spaces," where "the attempt to create occasions or locations wherein the adverse effects of privilege on marginalized people are minimized in everyday interpersonal interactions."[4] Thus, Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob characterize postmodernists as "deeply disillusioned intellectuals who denounce en masse Marxism and liberal humanism, communism and capitalism, and all expectations of liberation."[5] The persistence of postmodernist intellectual parameters on the post-New Left political discourse could not be clearer.

What O'Brien says is "most challenging of all is the realization that power creates truth and hence its own legitimation," [6] a position which seemingly aligns with Foucault's comment to Chomsky that justice is an "invented idea...put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power or as a weapon against that power." The notion that "power is not characteristic of a class" or that it "does not originate in either the economy or politics" seems far from the position Foucault takes when discussing the issue of justice and class power with Chomsky. Thus, at best one finds a level of disconnect between Foucault's position a la O'Brien and the position he seemed to be articulating vis-à-vis Chomsky. At times it seems that Foucault is even at odds with himself. Contradictions aside, others such as Daniel Zamora have posited that the very questions Foucault asks are incorrect, and have "disoriented the left." The problem for Zamora is "not that [Foucault] seeks to 'move beyond' the welfare state, but that he actively contributed to its destruction, and that he did so in a way that was entirely in step with the neoliberal critiques of the moment."[7]

Despite such contradiction and critique, one of the most recognizable transitions in history that occurred with the advent of postmodernism was the so-called "linguistic turn." Thus, as O'Brien explains, "one of Foucault's recognized contributions, which a wide variety of the new cultural historians embrace, lie in the importance he attributed to language/discourse as a means of apprehending change."[8] Clifford Geertz, albeit in a very different way, also posited the importance of linguistic and textual interpretation. For Geertz, "materialism of any kind" was "an implicit target."[9] Conversely, action is text and "the real is as imagined as the imaginary."[10] Thus, "man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he has himself spun." [11] In many ways, language and discourse came to dominate and displace discussions of power and oppression for postmodernists. This "interpretative turn," as Aletta Biersack refers to it, is a sort of hyper-hermeneutics, where etymology in essence becomes epistemology.

This linguistic turn may also have some relevance to the post-New Left discourse as well. As the radical left retreated into academia, and in the absence of social movements in the first world on a large scale, power become viewed as an infinitely complex web of micro-powers which permeate everyday life. Likewise, the political-linguistic discourse reflected a by now largely alienated intellectual leftist community. Thus, for critical postmodern left-wing academics language and every-day, small scale interactions sublimate material reality and large-scale, institutional structures.

This has been explored in detail by Steve D'Arcy's "The Rise of Post New-Left Political Discourse," which asks the poignant question of whether activists from the New Left era would even find the discourse of today's left intelligible. Juxtaposing words like "oppression" vs. "privilege," "exploitation" vs. "classism," "alliances" vs. "being an ally" (a fundamental distinction!), and "consciousness-raising" vs. "calling out," D'Arcy explicates upon the seismic shift that has gripped leftist discourse.[12] Strategic alliances between oppressed groups or blocs are replaced with hyper-individualized conceptions of being an ally, economic and structural analyses associated with words like exploitation are replaced with "classism," suggesting personal prejudice against members of certain economic backgrounds, etc. This "post-New Left" lexicon is fundamentally different than the language utilized by groups and organizations spanning the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, or even the old left of the 1930s and before. It is also a language keenly peculiar to the first world, and in particular North America and a few European states. The implications of this shift are contentious, but however one views the linguistic transition it is clear that both the political goals and results have been restructured with its advent.

More generally, poststructuralists have put forward a "theoretical critique of the assumptions of modernity found in philosophy, art, and criticism since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries."[13] They "argue against the possibility of any certain knowledge… [and] question the superiority of the present and the usefulness of general worldviews, whether Christian, Marxist, or liberal… there is no truth outside ideology."[14] For them "no reality can possibly transcend the discourse in which it is expressed" and while scientists or empiricists may think certain practices "bring them closer to reality… they are simply privileging the language that they speak, the technologies of their own self-fashioning."[15] Thus, historical truth, objectivity, and the narrative form of history have all been targets of the postmodernist critique. Jacques Derrida, for instance, advocated deconstruction "to show how all texts repressed as much as they expressed in order to maintain the fundamental Western conceit of 'logocentrism,' the (erroneous) idea that words expressed truth in reality."[16] Since "texts could be interested in multiple, if not infinite, ways because signifiers had no essential connection to what they were signified."[17] In this way, language was a barrier to truth and precluded human capacity to know truth.

The effect this has had on history is complex. For instance, "the history of what postmodernists called 'subaltern' groups-workers, immigrants, women, slaves, and gays-in fact proved difficult to integrate into the story of one American nation."[18] Partha Chatterjee, for instance, is one of the intellectual founders and banner holders for postcolonial and subaltern studies. Chatterjee, in his study of the "nationalist imagination" in Asia and Africa, The Nation and Its Fragments, cites Foucault as helping him recognize how "power is meant not to prohibit but to facilitate, to produce."[19] For Chatterjee, colonial rule created "a social order that bore striking resemblance to its own caricature of 'traditional India': late colonial society was 'nearer to the ideal-type of Asiatic Despotism than anything South Asia had seen before.'"[20]Specifically referring to search for pre-European capitalism in India, Chatterjee asserts that the "development of industrial capital in… Western Europe or North America, was the result of a very specific history. It is the perversity of Eurocentric historical theories that has led to the search for similar developments everywhere else in the world." [21] Thus, for postcolonial scholars, and implicit in the subset of subaltern studies, totalizing and universal theories are an intellectual and historical impossibility.

This has not permeated all of academia, however. There has been a spirited defense of the radical Enlightenment tradition, especially from the left, as the heated exchanges between Vivek Chibber and Partha Chatterjee have shown. Chibber, in his magnum opus Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, demonstrates the intellectual inconsistences and failures of subaltern studies and offers a comprehensive critique of postcolonial theory. His argument is that it is possible, indeed necessary, to posit a totalizing, universal theory without succumbing to Eurocentrism or reductionism (economic or otherwise). In his work he takes to task Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha Chatterjee, three scholars who he considers emblematic of postcolonial theory. Thus, the battle was pitched between Chatterjee, who rejects universal discourses, and Chibber, who asserts a nuanced and sophisticated Marxist analysis. Chatterjee laid out the battlefield in his response, suggesting that Chibber implores a "plea for continued faith in the universal values of European Enlightenment." He acknowledges that "the debate between universalism and its critics continues and will not be resolved in a hurry. The choice between the two sides at this time is indeed political." Indeed, while he claims the "greatest strength of the universalist position is the assurance it provides of predictability and control over uncertain outcomes," he argues that the critics of universalism, a category he places himself in, "argue that the outcomes are unknown, indeterminate, and hence unpredictable. They accept the challenge of risky political choices, based on provisional, contingent and corrigible historical knowledge." His main contention, then, is that "the working classes of Europe and North America and their ideologues can no longer act as the designated avant-garde in the struggles of subaltern classes in other parts of the world… Historians of Subaltern Studies have only attempted to interpret a small part of these struggles. And changing the world, needless to say, is a job that cannot be entrusted to historians."[22]

In response, Chibber argues in favor of universalizing categories when applicable, suggesting that the "motivation for my intervention was to examine a common charge that postcolonial theory levels at the Enlightenment tradition, that its universalizing categories obliterate all historical difference. They do so, we are told, because they homogenize the diversity of social experience by subsuming it under highly abstract, one-dimensional categories." Here he cites the example of Marx's concept of abstract labor, which he argues postcolonial theories have simply misunderstood. Therefore, "while it is certainly true that some universalizing categories might be problematic, it is sheer folly to insist that this is a necessary flaw in all such categories. Postcolonial theory's broadside against Enlightenment universalisms is vastly overdrawn." Instead, he argues postcolonial and subaltern studies have been an immense failure both intellectually, in understanding the actual conditions of their subjects, and politically, not only by failing to facilitate radical change in any direction but by actually constraining and enervating radical analysis and transformation of society.

Indeed, Chibber proclaims that "Chatterjee's essay [against Chibber's book] is designed to allay any anxieties that his followers might have about the foundations of their project... It is a palliative, a balm, to soothe their nerves." Not only was this meant to boost morale in the wake of political failure, however, it was also meant to be an attack on the radical Enlightenment tradition, particularly Marxism: "Subaltern Studies was not just supposed to offer a rival framework for interpreting colonial modernity; it was also supposed to have internalized whatever was worth retaining from the Marxian tradition, thereby inheriting the mantle of radical critique. For years, the Subalternists have focused just about everything they have written on the irredeemable flaws of Marxism and the Enlightenment -- how they are implicated in imperialism, their reductionism, essentialism, etc." [23] Thus, the battle between postmodernism, of which postcolonial theory and subaltern studies are intellectual legacies, and modernity are not over. This is particularly true in the realm of history, where the debate between Chatterjee and Chibber is only the most recent manifestation.

For leftists, this battle is of immense importance. The words we utilize, the discourse we construct, and the movements which both manifest from and shape our language are at stake. The political implications of these choices are dire, especially at a time when the forces of reaction are winning everywhere across the world. Yet, there are perhaps few places on Earth where the left is weaker than the first world. This is particularly true where post-modern discourse and post-new left political vocabulary has emerged victorious. Without ignoring the insights of the particular, and without exaggerating the past victories and potential of the universal, it would appear that post-new left political discourse has left our side stranded. It has failed to facilitate growth and shown itself incapable of capturing the masses, all the while forcing us to feed upon ourselves, augmenting isolation and alienation from each other. Perhaps the time for a renegotiation of this development is in order; perhaps the left requires a discourse rooted more in the universal and less in the particular.

Notes

[1] "Human Nature: Justice versus Power, Noam Chomsky debates with Michel Foucault" (1971), accessed March 15, 2014. http://www.chomsky.info/debates/1971xxxx.htm.

[2] Patricia O'Brien, "Michel Foucault's History of Culture," The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: Univerisity of California Press, 1989), 34.

[3] O'Brien, "Michel Foucault's History of Culture," 35.

[4] Stephen D'Arcy, The Public Autonomy Project, "The Rise of the Post-New Left Political Vocabulary." Last modified January 27, 2014. Accessed March 15, 2014. http://publicautonomy.org/2014/01/27/the-rise-of-the-post-new-left-political-vocabulary/.

[5] Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 206.

[6] O'Brien, "Michel Foucault's History of Culture," 35.

[7] Daniel Zamora, "Foucault's Responsibility," https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/michel-foucault-responsibility-socialist/

[8] Ibid., 44.

[9] Aletta Biersack, "Local Knowledge, Local History: Geertz and Beyond," The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: Univerisity of California Press, 1989), 75.

[10] Biersack, "Local Knowledge, Local History," 78.

[11] Ibid., 80.

[12] Steve D'Arcy, "The Rise of Post-New Left Political Discourse." http://publicautonomy.org/2014/01/27/the-rise-of-the-post-new-left-political-vocabulary/

[13] Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, 201.

[14] Ibid., 202-3.

[15] Ibid., 204.

[16] Ibid., 215.

[17] Ibid., 215.

[18] Ibid., 217.

[19] Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 15.

[20] Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 32.

[21] Ibid., 30.

[22] Chatterjee Partha, "Subaltern Studies and Capital," Economic and Political Review Weekly, XLVIII, no. 37 (2013), http://www.epw.in/notes/subaltern-studies-and-capital.html (accessed March 15, 2014).

[23] Vivek Chibber, Verso Books, "Subaltern Studies Revisited: Vivek Chibber's Response to Partha Chatterjee." Last modified February 25, 2014. Accessed March 15, 2014. http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1529-subaltern-studies-revisited-vivek-chibber-s-response-to-partha-chatterjee.

Dropping the Bomb: A Historiographical Review of the Most Destructive Decision in Human History

By Derek Ide

The historiography of the atomic bomb can be roughly categorized into three camps: traditionalists, revisionists, and middle-ground "consensus" historians. [1] Traditionalists, also referred to as orthodox[2] historians and post-revisionists, studying the atomic bomb generally accept the view posited by the Truman administration and articulated most clearly in Henry Stimson's 1947 Harper's Magazine article.[3] In short, this argument assumes that the use of the atomic bombs against Japan was justifiable on military grounds in order to prevent a costly invasion of the Japanese home islands. Often attached to such analysis is the notion that insofar as the atomic bombs ended the war prior to an invasion and saved hundreds of thousands or millions of lives, the use of the atomic bombs was also a morally sound decision. There tends to be a remarkable level of homogeneity amongst the traditionalist arguments. Whereas they may emphasize certain facts or aspects of the debate, they tend to present strikingly similar arguments, with a few exceptions.

The revisionists, in contrast, tend to be far more heterogeneous. Revisionist historians are unconvinced by the official narrative, and tend to emphasize the alternatives to the atomic bomb not pursued by the Truman administration. Furthermore, most revisionists accept, on some level, the "atomic diplomacy" thesis articulated first by Gar Alperovitz in 1965. To one degree or another revisionists argue that the Truman administration purposefully chose not to pursue alternatives to ending the war and that post-war diplomatic concerns vis-à-vis the Soviet Union were germane to, and in some historian's view dictated, the use of the atomic bombs.

The third camp, the consensus historians, are those who J. Samuel Walker refers to as having "reached a broad, though hardly unanimous, consensus on some key issues surrounding the use of the bomb."[4] These include the fact that Truman and his advisers were aware of alternatives that seemed likely to end the war, that invasion would likely not have been necessary, and that the atomic bomb did not save hundreds of thousands or millions of lives. What distinguishes them from the traditionalists is the argument that the atomic bombs were not a military necessity. On the other hand, their rejection or hesitancy to incorporate atomic diplomacy into their analysis differentiates them from the revisionists.

Given the nature of the three camps, the organizational framework I have utilized includes three sections. The first section will deal with the debate between traditionalists and revisionists. It will focus on questions of atomic diplomacy, the Potsdam Conference, unconditional surrender, Soviet entry into the war, projected casualty figures, and certain key figures in the Truman administration, the Soviet Union, and Japan. The second section will examine the points of disagreement within the revisionist camp. Although revisionists all challenge the orthodox position, they are significantly less homogenous than the latter. The third section of the essay will explore the consensus historians and their disagreements with both the traditionalists and the revisionists. Given the level of unanimity amongst the traditionalist historians, it is unnecessary to dedicate a section exploring differences between them because with rare exceptions, which will be noted when appropriate, there is remarkably little disagreement. The essay will conclude with a brief analysis of the authors, such as Robert Newman and Paul Boyer, who have extended their chronological framework significantly beyond the actual use of the atomic bombs.

The Traditionalists vs. the Revisionists

The five monographs within the traditionalist camp that will be analyzed here are Robert James Maddox'sWeapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision (2004)[5], Robert P. Newman'sTruman and the Hiroshima Cult (1995), Richard B. Frank's Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (1999), Paul D. Walker'sTruman's Dilemma: Invasion or the Bomb (2003), and Wilson D. Miscamble's The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs, and the Defeat of Japan (2011). On the other side of the debate are four revisionist historians, including Gar Alperovitz's The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (1995)[6], Martin J. Sherwin's A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies (2003),[7] Ronald Takaki's Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb (1995), and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (2005). The positions of the traditionalists and the revisionists regarding atomic diplomacy, the Potsdam Conference, Japanese surrender, the unconditional surrender policy, Soviet entry into the war, projected casualty figures, and key individuals[8] involved in the decision to use the bomb and Japanese surrender are fundamentally at odds.

The question of atomic diplomacy is what creates the fundamental divide between the two camps. Although there is great variation between revisionist and traditionalist positions on unconditional surrender, the role and race and racism, and other factors, most questions tend to be subsumed within and intricately bound up with atomic diplomacy. Since the revisionists first posited this thesis, it is appropriate to adumbrate their arguments. Objecting to the official narrative that "Truman simply had no choice except to use the atomic bomb," Alperovitz argues that Truman, significantly influenced by Byrnes, used the bomb as a form of "atomic diplomacy" to pursue post-war U.S. interests in both Europe and Asia. In essence, Alperovitz argues that the U.S. government "generally understood" that "Japan was defeated and preparing to surrender before the bomb was used." [9] According to Alperovitz there was a "quite general" notion amongst U.S. officials at Potsdam that the bomb would strengthen U.S. diplomacy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. It was during this time that "a conscious decision not to encourage Soviet participation in the war" was undertaken. Attempts "to delay the Red Army's attack to the extent feasible" were meant to "limit Soviet political influence in Asia."[10] For Alperovitz atomic diplomacy is the crucial element in explaining the use of the bomb.

Martin Sherwin supplements Alperovitz's atomic diplomacy thesis by extending the importance of such diplomatic concerns backwards into the Roosevelt administration. Sherwin posits that the policies of the Roosevelt administration suggest "that the diplomatic value of the bomb began to shape his atomic energy policies as early as 1943."[11] Although Sherwin cites Roosevelt's elusive decision making process and sudden death as inhibitors to fully understanding his policy, he posits that Roosevelt "consistently opposed international control and acted in accordance with Churchill's monopolistic, anti-Soviet views."[12] Ronald Takaki, despite emphasizing the role of race and racism in the decision, also concedes that atomic diplomacy was indeed a factor. He notes the "incredible pressure" on Manhattan project scientists to complete the bombs prior to the Potsdam conference. Similarly, he explains how Truman purposefully postponed the conference to coincide with the bomb tests. Takaki maintains that two "schools of thought" dominated the thinking of U.S. officials, including the "quid-pro-quo" strategy, articulated by people like Henry Stimson,[13] and the "monopoly" strategy a la James Byrnes. [14] In Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's view, the Potsdam Proclamation was not a warning to Japan, but an attempt to justify the use of the bomb.

Hasegawa's argument aligns with Alperovitz's as well. He maintains that a "race" began at Potsdam between the United States and the Soviet Union when the Soviets set August 15 as their projected state of entry into the war. This "gave American policymakers a definite deadline to work for." [15] Thus, the timing of the Potsdam Proclamation was "integrally connected with the schedule for deployment of the atomic bombs."[16] The Truman administration desired to end the war via the atomic bombs in order to avoid Soviet entry and maintain hegemony in the Pacific in the post-war world. Therefore, the Truman-Byrnes commitment to unconditional surrender and the Potsdam declaration was simply a prelude to the use of the atomic bombs. Byrnes position was essentially: "if we insisted on unconditional surrender, we could justify dropping of the atomic bomb."[17] Concerned about the post-war political consequences of Soviet participation in the war, U.S. planners sought to bring about Japan's surrender before the Soviets could join. At best, Soviet participation in the war was an "insurance policy" in case the atomic tests failed.[18]

Thus, the revisionist position is quite clear. Officials in the United States were deeply concerned about post-war hegemony, particularly in the Pacific but in Europe as well, and saw the use of the atomic bomb against Japan as a way to contain the Soviet Union. Subsequently, any and all alternatives that could have ended the war, albeit not in time to prevent Soviet entry, were disregarded and not pursued. This conclusion is often premised on the fact that Japan was already defeated and near surrender. Alperovitz argues that "Japan was defeated and preparing to surrender before the atomic bomb was used. Though the question of timing was in dispute, it is also certain that this was general understood in the U.S. government at the time." [19] Hasegawa contends that the "Soviet entry into the war played a greater role than the atomic bombs in inducing Japan to surrender" and, as such, the Japanese would have quickly surrender upon Soviet entry even without the use of the atomic bombs.

It is on these grounds that the traditionalists most vehemently challenge the revisionists. Robert James Maddox challenged what he saw as "blatant revisionist distortions" in order to construct his argument that the single-most decisive factor in forcing the Japanese to surrender and preventing a costly land invasion of Japan was the use of the atomic bombs. Whereas Alperovitz maintained that the casualty figures for a land invasion were inflated as post-war justifications by the Truman administration, Maddox suggests that the half-a-million figure "cited by Truman, and even higher ones, were circulated within the upper echelons of government."[20] For Maddox bombs were utilized out of military necessity because the Japanese would not have surrendered without the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, according to Maddox the "very idea of surrender was alien to the Japanese samurai tradition."[21] Furthermore, ULTRA intercepts suggest surrender prior to an invasion was not even a serious option, let alone inevitable. Richard Frank goes even further, arguing that the conclusions the revisionist reach regarding the MAGIC are erroneous because they ignore the fact that Japanese peace feelers were completely "want of official sanction." [22] Thus, the "thesis that Japan was actively seeking to surrender in 1945, and that American policy makers knew this primarily from code breaking," is rejected by the traditionalists.[23]

Robert Newman concurs with this analysis, adding that most "Hiroshima cultists,"[24] including Gar Alperovitz, P. M. S. Blackett, Paul Boyer, the Smithsonian exhibit authors, and others who "swallow this conclusion of the [United States Strategic Bombing Survey][25] whole" are incorrect because the study itself was extremely flawed. [26] Information in the survey was purposefully distorted to support conclusions already arrived at a priori by Paul Nitze, and the testimony of most high-ranking Japanese officials "overwhelmingly indicated that Japan was not about to surrender before the bomb."[27] Thus, the "Truman bashers"[28] are incorrect to argue that the bomb changed no minds. In fact, according to Newman it "created a situation in which the peace party and the emperor could prevail." [29] Wilson Miscamble also views himself as "exploding permanently the myth of a Japan ready to surrender," a "myth" perpetuated by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946. [30]

Richard Frank furthers this argument by explaining that Japan's "fundamental policy," based on the Ketsu-Go defense plan, was a national resistance program intended to bloody the invading enemy enough to force political negotiations and ipso facto avoid unconditional surrender. Frank relies heavily upon the document produced by the Big Six entitled "The Fundamental Policy to Be Followed Henceforth in the Conduct of the War," which argued Japan "must fight to the finish and choose extinction before surrender."[31] In essence, Japan was "effectively locked on course for a fight to the last man, woman, and child."[32] Furthermore, Frank continues this theme, arguing that the goal was to "severely bloody the invaders" to the point of achieving political goals. Ultra documents, according to Frank, did much to "unmask their carefully wrought plans."[33] The forces on Kyushu far exceeded the 350,000 number given to Truman. Indeed, by November 1 Japanese strength would be 680,000, much closer to the 1:1 ration of American to Japanese soldiers that U.S. leaders desperately wanted to avoid. Paul Walker takes this argument to its logical extreme. He argues that due the 35 percent casualty rate of the Iwo Jima and Okinawa battles, as well as the "fanaticism of the Japanese military and their updated code of Bushido," casualties would have ranged from around 250,000 in the invasion of Kyushu alone, to over one million with the invasion of both Kyushu and Honshu.[34] Miscamble maintains that "retrospective castigations" like William D. Leahy's memoirs in 1950, which denounced the atomic bomb as a "modern type of barbarism not worthy of Christian man," can be dismissed since "no military officials counseled the president against using the weapons prior to Hiroshima."[35] Maddox concurs, explaining that despite the retroactive denunciations of the atomic bomb by top-ranking military officials, no military officials seriously attempted to guide Truman away from using the bomb prior to its deployment. The fact that the bomb was utilized out of military necessity dismisses the "gravest charge against Truman," namely that the atomic bomb was deployed "primary as a diplomatic weapon to intimidate the Soviet Union."[36]

The question of Soviet entry into the war preoccupies an important space in the discourse as well. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa maintains that "Soviet entry into the war played a greater role than the atomic bombs in inducing Japan to surrender."[37] Interestingly, Maddox claims the Soviets invaded Manchuria not to be "a good ally" but rather "to get in on the kill,"[38] an analysis Hasegawa would largely share. However, where the revisionists and the traditionalists differ, is that most traditionalists seriously downplay the role of Soviet entry into the war. In Frank's narrative, "Soviet intervention was a significant but not decisive reason for Japan's surrender… reinforcing but not fundamental."[39] Miscamble maintains that revisionist historians who emphasize Soviet entry in the war "distort history by overemphasizing" its importance.[40] According to Miscamble, Hasegawa's claim that Truman was disappointed at the Soviet entry into the war "are not substantiated by the historical evidence." [41] Paul Walker points out that when the emperor finally surrendered on August 15, 1945, the Russian invasion was not mentioned as a cause of surrender. Hasegawa counters this point by citing "another historic document" written by Sakomizu's [42] assistant and sanctioned by the emperor that was not issued until August 17. This rescript explained that if Japan continued fighting after the entrance of the Soviet Union into the war it would endanger "the very foundation of the empire's existence," [43] reinforcing Hasegawa's claim that Soviet intervention was key.

Perhaps the most creative defense of the use of the atomic bomb from the traditionalist camp is the moral one. One of the primary objectives of Wilson Miscamble is to "confront the question regarding the morality of the atomic bomb."[44] Miscamble suggests that for Byrnes and Truman "moral complexity or future diplomatic implications failed to complicate their straight forward thinking." If the atomic bomb "might save American lives" then it must be used, and this "remained, throughout, the essential motivation that guided the decision." [45] Whereas revisionists argue that Japan was defeated, he makes a stark distinction between defeat and surrender, explaining that the U.S. would have eventually won the war by "continued obliteration bombing of Japanese cities and infrastructure, a choking blockade, the terrible invasions... [and these] would have meant significantly greater Allied casualties and much higher Japanese civilian and military casualties."[46] Likewise, the abrupt end to the war also brought an end to Japanese brutality in other parts of Asia. Furthermore, "indiscriminate bombing had become the norm for the Anglo-American forces well before 1945," indicating that any "moral Rubicon" had already been crossed prior to Hiroshima.[47] Thus, the bomb was the "lesser of the evils available," and subsequently Miscamble pleas that in "future anniversaries of the dropping of the atomic bomb… one might hope for less moralizing condemnation of Truman's decision… Perhaps there might even be some empathy for the man who felt required to make the decision and who carried the burden of it."[48]

Robert Newman makes a slightly less sophisticated moral defense, proclaiming that neither "Hiroshima cultists nor professional moralists had even considered the possibility that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legitimate retribution for the millions of deaths caused by Japan's fourteen-year rampage through China and the Pacific,"[49] an idea he apparently entertains. Newman suggests that the atomic bombs were moral actions taken in order to prevent greater evil. According to him the general arguments against Truman's choice to use the bomb come in four general varieties: first, atomic bombs are intrinsically evil and should not be used; second, their use violated the principle of noncombatant immunity; third, the bombs were used on invalid motives, including retribution, revenge, and reprisal; and fourth, no specific warning was given. To the first, Newman responds that "the case for immorality of today's overkill arsenals and war fighting doctrines is strong," but "to apply the same case retrospectively to 1945, however, is senseless."[50] To the second, Newman quotes Bamba Nobuya to suggest that the "Marxist interpretation of imperialistic war," namely that "the 'people' should have been innocent," is incorrect. The Japanese population did not just passively support imperialism, "on the contrary, most people competed to get front seats on the fascist bandwagon." [51] Thus, they were not noncombatants and to attack them was legitimate. To the third point Newman maintains that because the Japanese were involved in developing atomic weapons as well, even though U.S. leaders were not aware of this at the time, it retroactively justifies the decision. Since "upwards of 250,000 people… would have died each month the Japanese Empire struggled in its death throes beyond July 1945," and since the bomb had the ability to end the war early, it could not have been used for the wrong reasons.[52] To the last point, he responds that the shock value of the bomb was decisive in ending the war, and thus it would have been ineffective and prolonged the war to issue the warning.

Finally, the issue of culture and its relationship to policies of surrender are intricately bound up in the traditionalist narrative. For Paul Walker, a key element of the war was the "barbarism, savageness, and race hatred" of "an oriental enemy with a brutal heritage." [53] According to Walker, the Japanese in World War II "believed they were fighting in the proud traditions of their samurai ancestors."[54] This ideological reliance upon "a version of Bushido" meant that military schools taught "a perverted cult of death" which made "young Japanese men expendable numbers for the military's reckless and costly adventures." [55] Tracing Japanese history from the Forty Seven Ronin to the Meiji Restoration and beyond, Walker paints a picture of uniform brutality and aggression. This culminates in the period from 1894 to 1945, where "Japan was involved in almost constant warfare with her neighbors."[56] Since being a prisoner of war was "completely unacceptable, considered dishonorable or shameful, and contrary to the samurai code," the Japanese were essentially automatons that fought to the death. In contrast with U.S. imperialism, where "Filipinos had a positive image of America" and U.S. intervention in Vietnam "sorted itself out,"[57] Japanese imperialism was infinitely more brutal, according to Walker. This notion that the Japanese were imbued with fanaticism and the ideology of Bushido, which permeated their consciousness for centuries, is an important part of Walker's thesis because it attempts to reinforce the notion that the toll of casualties would be great in a U.S. invasion of Japan. Miscamble suggests a similar theme, explaining that the "the twisted neo-samurai … geared up with true banzai spirit to engage the whole population in a kind of national kamikaze campaign." [58] Maddox is slightly less crude, suggesting that that the "very idea of surrender was alien to the Japanese samurai tradition."[59]

Thus, within the traditionalist camp one finds a remarkable degree of unanimity. While some authors, such as Miscamble and Newman, focus on the moral argument, others, such as Maddox, implore the military aspect. Others still emphasize the "savage" culture of the "Oriental enemy" a la Paul Walker. Yet, all of the traditionalists tend to converge in their main analysis. There is little disagreement among them on any vital issues. In one way this greatly distinguishes them from the revisionist camp, which presents a quite heterogeneous and diverse array of analyses.

The Revisionist Camp

The traditionalists and revisionists part ways on the fundamental divide of atomic diplomacy. Within the traditionalist camp arguments are largely convergent, whereas within the revisionists camp the nuances are far more pronounced. All tend to agree that some level of atomic diplomacy was in play. Most, however, disagree on a variety of other issues. Gar Alperovitz and Martin Sherwin heavily emphasize the role of atomic diplomacy. In contrast, Takaki suggests race and racism as primary variables. Hasegawa maintains that an "international" perspective is vital, and criticizes past revisionists for heavily focusing on leaders in Washington. As Gar Alperovitz is the first and quintessential revisionist, much of the internal discussion amongst revisionists is characterized by correcting, expanding, or challenging certain assumptions Alperovitz has made.

The first distinction of analysis can be seen in the characterization of the Roosevelt and the Truman administration. Alperovitz imbues individual political actors, particularly Harry Truman and his adviser James Byrnes, with immense agency over the use of the bomb. He warns against "analyses which assert that a combination of factors-political, military, racial, and financial-produced the decision."[60] He also makes the case against "momentum theories," which may have "an odd feeling of seeming plausibility about them," but which go against the evidence that top U.S. military officials were against the bombing.[61] Throughout his work it is stressed that individual political actors were absolutely fundamental in the decision, and that no sort of "momentum theory" is capable of capturing the dynamics of the top-level discussions that led to the final decision. Alperovitz emphasizes the importance of the Truman-Byrnes relationship, implicitly suggesting that the outcome may have been different with Roosevelt in office.

Martin Sherwin articulates a somewhat distinct argument that draws a strong line of continuity between the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. For Sherwin, an "analysis of the policies [Roosevelt] chose…suggests that the diplomatic value of the bomb began to shape his atomic energy policies as early as 1943."[62] Although Sherwin cites Roosevelt's elusive decision making process and sudden death as inhibitors to fully understanding his policy, he posits that Roosevelt "consistently opposed international control and acted in accordance with Churchill's monopolistic, anti-Soviet views."[63] He concludes that Roosevelt's commitment to amicable postwar relations with the Soviets has "often been exaggerated," and that "his prescriptions for the diplomatic role of the atomic bomb… reveal a carefully guarded skepticism regarding the Grand Alliance's prospects for surviving the war intact."[64] Thus, Sherwin argues that Truman did not "inherit the question" of whether to employ the bomb as a means of atomic diplomacy, but he "inherited the answer" since by 1943 the diplomatic value of the bomb had already begun to shape atomic energy policies. The decision to use the bomb, and its diplomatic implications, were prescribed by Roosevelt. Truman's decisions were more or less technical, revolving around how specifically to use the bomb. Where Alperovitz has attempted to present a break or disconnect between what he perceives as Roosevelt's uncertain and wavering atomic policies, Sherwin presents a forceful analysis suggesting strong continuity between the two administrations.

A second point of contention amongst revisionists is the role of race and racism in the decision to use the bomb. Here Alperovitz argues that while "it is certainly possible" that racism amongst U.S. officials played a role in the decision to drop the bomb, "it is all but impossible to find specific evidence that racism was an important factor."[65] In contrast, while Takaki adopts Alperovitz's notion of atomic diplomacy, he drastically parts with him on the issue of race. Takaki's primary focus is understanding the decision within the trajectory of US racism. [66] In this regard, it seems his argument is best encapsulated when he declares, borrowing from John Dower, that "in this 'war without mercy,' Truman made the deadly mushroom cloud of 'Manhattan' appear over Japan in order to destroy an enemy he regarded as 'a beast'."[67] Takaki explicates upon the "racialization of the Pacific War," positioning it within the historic context of racism and US expansionism. After briefly addressing Japanese notions of racial superiority, Takaki attempts to place Truman's decision to use the atomic bombs within the "sociological imagination" of anti-Japanese racism in US society. In doing so, he links the war in the Pacific to earlier periods of conquest. His analysis focuses on the complex processes by which the US idea of democracy was intricately bound up with westward expansion and slavery, all institutions saturated with racialized notions of superiority. Citing the Chinese Exclusion Act, "Yellow Peril" hysteria, the American Federation of Labor anti-Japanese agitation, and the Asiatic Exclusion League, Takaki draws a long line of continuity culminating in the internment of Japanese Americans and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For Takaki, notions of racial superiority and anti-Asian racism were key variables in the "sociological imagination" which facilitated the bombing of hundreds of thousands of civilians. It is in this context of a society deeply permeated with both institutional and individual racism that Truman's actions must be analyzed. Takaki analyzes Truman's biography, emphasizing the implicit notions of racial superiority deeply embedded in him and his family of ex-slave owners. Takaki outlines Truman's broadly anti-Asian sentiments, such as in 1911 when he explained that he "does hate Chinese and Japs" and that the "yellow men [ought to be] in Asia." [68] By 1945, Truman referred to the "Japs" as "savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic." Thus, the "sociological imagination" was a highly racialized one that helped rationalize the slaughter of innocent Japanese civilians in the minds of men like Truman.

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa also takes Alperovitz to task on more than one occasion. Throughout Racing the Enemy he points out that he views his work as a corrective to the mistakes of revisionist historians. As he explains, the "sharp division between revisionist and orthodox historians in the Unites States" has failed to address the crucial international dimension because "the main point of contention is over American perceptions of Soviet intentions" that "depict Soviet actions as a sideshow and assign to Moscow a secondary role at best."[69] Furthermore, although Hasegawa is certainly not an orthodox historian, he is mildly critical of the revisionists who have preceded him: "Although much of what revisionist historians argue is faulty and based on tendentious use of sources, they nonetheless deserve credit for raising an important moral issue that challenges the standard American narrative of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."[70] Thus, Hasegawa strengthens the revisionist narrative by correcting some of the errors and increasing the attention to the international dynamic at work.

Alperovitz in large part bases his argument on the conclusions of the 1946 United States Strategic Bombing Survey which argued that Japan "would likely have surrender in 1945 without atomic bombing, without a Soviet declaration of war, and without an American invasion." [71] In contrast with Alperovitz and most other revisionist historians who uncritically accept the United States Strategic Bombing Survey's conclusion, Hasegawa maintains that "defeat and surrender are not synonymous," and Paul Nitze's "conclusion was repeatedly contradicted by the evidence in the Survey itself."[72] He largely accepts the critique of the USSBS findings put forward by Barton Bernstein. Instead, he argues that "even without the atomic bombs, the war most likely would have ended shortly after Soviet entry into the war-before November 1."[73] Strangely, Hasegawa tends to overemphasize his departure from Alperovitz on this point, or he must have simply overlooked Alperovitz contention that, even had the atomic bomb not been used, it is "almost a certainty that the Japanese would have capitulated upon the entry of Russia into the war."[74]

On a number of other points Hasegawa and Alperovitz certainly do disagree, however. Whereas Alperovitz characterizes the Sino-Soviet negotiations between Stalin and the Nationalists as a U.S. ploy to prolong Russian entry in the war, Hasegawa responds that in the Sino-Soviet negotiations, the "interests of Truman, Stalin, and Chiang Kai-shek all converged: the successful conclusion of a Sino-Soviet treaty could make everyone happy." [75] Hasegawa does not view the difficult negotiating by the Chinese as a concocted plot by the U.S. to keep the Soviets out of the war. "Revisionist historians are wrong," Hasegawa explains, "in asserting that Harriman's actions were meant to pressure Soong to resist Stalin's demand in order to prevent Soviet entry into the war against Japan."[76] Likewise, throughout his work Hasegawa repeatedly attempts to re-characterize Byrnes are someone not nearly as bent on geopolitical conflict with the Soviet Union as other revisionist historians have made him out to be. For instance, in response to the Soviet Kurils Operation as part of August Storm, Hasegawa argues that Byrnes, "though often regarded by revisionist historians as an ardent advocate for a tough stance against the Soviet Union… favored a conciliatory position on this issue."[77] Thus, the internecine differences amongst the revisionists exist. They are not nearly as pronounced or as heated as the differences between the traditionalists and the revisionists, but significantly more obvious than any real disagreement amongst traditionalist scholars.

Consensus Historians vs. The Traditionalists and the Revisionists

Between the traditionalist and revisionist historians lay a murky "middle ground" that encompasses a group of scholars who posit quite different arguments regarding the atomic bomb but tend to share in common a notion that alternatives existed. These "consensus" historians, as J. Samuel Walker refers to them, [78] in some way suggest that Truman and his advisers were aware of alternatives that seemed likely to end the war. The "consensus" historians reject the traditionalist argument that the atomic bombs were a military necessity and at the same time greatly distance themselves from the atomic diplomacy thesis. Samuel Walker'sPrompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of the Atomic Bombs Against Japan (1997), Dennis Wainstock'sThe Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb: Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1996), and Sean L. Malloy's Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb Against Japan (2008) form the core of this "consensus" or middle ground camp.

Dennis Wainstock argues that the policy of unconditional surrender was a "policy of revenge, and it hurt America's national self-interest." [79] He continues, suggesting that had the United States given Japan conditional surrender terms, including retention of the emperor, Japan would have surrendered significantly earlier than it did. This means that neither the atomic bombs nor Soviet intervention would have been required. By prolonging the war in Europe and East Asia the policy of unconditional surrender expanded Soviet power in both areas, thereby harming U.S. interests. The dropping of the atomic bomb only "hastened the surrender of an already defeated enemy." [80] Wainstock does not neatly align with either the traditionalist or revisionist camp. First, he aligns his critique of unconditional surrender within "U.S. national interests." His emphasis is that unconditional surrender unnecessarily prolonged the war, and Truman's commitment to it subsequently harmed U.S. interests since the prolonged war eventually allowed the Soviet Union to enter the arena and exercise increased influence in East Asia. This "policy of revenge [unconditional surrender]… hurt America's national self-interest" because it "prolonged the war… and helped to expand Soviet power."[81]

It is in this way that Wainstock differs sharply from all of the traditionalists who, in one way or another defend the policy of unconditional surrender. Whereas Paul Walker, Richard Frank, and Wilson Miscamble tend to be generally supportive of the unconditional surrender policy, James Maddox, in a rather reserved way, argues that "there is no way of telling whether the doctrine prolonged the war in any way." [82] Robert Newman is Wainstock's primary adversary in this regard, however. Newman argues two main points: first, Truman "had no good reason" to believe that permitting retention of the emperor would have led to early capitulation and, second, the "Potsdam Declaration defined surrender in a fashion acceptable to the Japanese peace forces."[83] To "those who insist that unconditional surrender was a purely punitive stance," he proclaims that the "leaders of the Japanese peace party… saw in the Potsdam terms an acceptable alternative to the destruction Japan would otherwise sustain."[84] The reason that Truman eventually accepted the condition that the emperor be retained was, according to Newman, because "peace was too tantalizing to resist." [85] In the end, however, Newman is sure that retaining the emperor, "what Hiroshima cultists insist was a viable alternative for Truman to end the war early… was really no alternative at all."[86] Furthermore, the conditions outlined at Potsdam were not unconditional surrender, and the Japanese knew it. Thus, for Newman the entire thesis constructed by Wainstock rests on dubious grounds.

Regarding his differences with the revisionists, Wainstock concedes that "perhaps Truman's decision to drop the bombs was an attempt to both impress the Soviets… and to end the war before the Soviets entered and seize the Far Eastern territories."[87] Even if this were true, however, it was totally counterproductive since in the end it prolonged the war and allowed Soviet entry, something that could have been prevented by altering the policy. This brief commentary is all the space that Wainstock provides for the atomic diplomacy thesis. In other words, despite accepting that atomic diplomacy may have played some minor role, Wainstock contends that a blind policy of unconditional surrender was of prime importance in the decision. This is where his greatest disagreement comes to the fore with the revisionists, and in particular Hasegawa. Hasegawa contends that even if Truman had "accepted a provision in the Potsdam declaration allowing the Japanese to retain a constitutional monarchy," it would "not have immediately led to Japan's surrender."[88] It is doubtful, Hasegawa maintains, "that Japan would have capitulated before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and the Soviet Union entered the war."[89] Thus, whereas the policy of unconditional surrender is the fundamental variable for Wainstock, it is significantly less so for Hasegawa. Wainstock significantly minimizes the significance of atomic diplomacy and inflates the importance of the unconditional surrender policy.

Sean Malloy, like Takaki, attempts to analyze the decision to use the atomic bomb through the "lens of biography." [90] Malloy attempts to approach "the use of the bomb through a conceptual framework he calls the "context of use," positioning the use of the bomb as a "compound product of a series of choices" rather than "the result of single decision." [91] Malloy makes the argument that Stimson, as secretary of war, unintentionally "presided over a set of policies that accelerated the budding nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union,"[92] despite his "deep concern with limiting the effects of war on civilians and fostering trust between nations as the foundation of the peace that followed." [93] In essence, realpolitik dominated Stimson's approach to the atomic bomb and undermined his moral commitments.

One example of this is Stimson's oversight of the 1945 Stassfurt operation intended to secure Anglo-American hegemony over uranium supplies. By the time of Strassfurt, when the U.S. moved in to seize the largest known stock of uranium in Europe, they "did as so as part of a one-sided nuclear arms race" in which, "by 1945, the Soviet Union was already America's primary nuclear rival."[94] Thus, while Stimson is the tragic hero with a fatal flaw, James Byrnes is his foil, presented as the bad apple in the administration who desires conflict with the Soviet Union. Malloy's key argument, then, is that "by his own actions during World War II, the secretary of war had helped to set in motion exactly the kind of destructive international competition in armaments that he had spent much of his long public career attempting to avoid." [95] The almost capricious nature of his rapidly changing positions, and the tenuous justifications which frequently accompanied them, indicates that Stimson's moral convictions were more often than not drown out for the sake of political expediency. Malloy's conception of the atomic bomb as a "tragedy" is the principle departure from the traditionalists who tend to glorify the use of the bomb and celebrate it for ending the war and saving lives.

Malloy's differences with the revisionist camp are rather nuanced, but significant. Once again, his conception of the bombs as a "tragedy," rather than a calculated diplomatic initiative, separates him from the revisionists. Second, he makes the argument that the secretary of war "was in a unique position to shape many of the decisions about the use of the bomb."[96] This is in direct contradistinction to other historians, such as Alperovitz, who emphasize the agency of actors such as James Byrnes at Stimson's expense. Second, Malloy attempts to put forward a sort of "momentum theory" that Alperovitz considers "seemingly plausible" but in reality historically bankrupt. During the various decisions that led to the atomic bombing, the morals and convictions of officials were often sublimated for political expediency. For Malloy, this was particularly true of Stimson. In this way, a sort of "momentum theory" is employed by Malloy to mitigate the pernicious intent of certain actors and explain away the "failures" of their decisions. Thus, the atomic bombs were not intentionally used as diplomatic tools by most of the Truman administration, but policy "failures" as individuals were swept up in events. Further modifying the arguments of Alperovitz and Hasegawa, Malloy argues that "American domestic politics" were a primary reason that Truman "failed at Potsdam" to use the "two potentially useful, if imperfect, diplomatic levers… in an effort to end the war." [97] Furthermore, whereas Hasegawa presents Soviet entry as vital, Mallow suggests that "neither the public threat of Soviet entry nor the lure of allowing the Japanese to retain the emperor after the war were diplomatic panaceas." [98] Thus, Malloy's differences with the revisionists are perceptible.

A slightly different approach is apparent in J. Samuel Walker's book. He sets out to answer two interrelated questions: was the bomb "necessary at all" and, "if so, what exactly did it accomplish?"[99] By the conclusion of the book, Walker asserts that the answer to the first question "seems to be yes and no. Yes, it was necessary to end the war as quickly as possible. No, it was not necessary to prevent an invasion of Japan."[100] Addressing the second question, he maintains that the bomb "shortened the war and saved the lives of a relatively small but far from inconsequential number of Americans."[101] By situating his thesis within these parameters, S. Walker avoids having to take a position regarding the morality of the atomic bombings and instead focuses on rather narrow notions of "military necessity." He presents a variegated list of reasons Truman dropped the bomb: "(1) the commitment to ending the war successfully at the earliest possible moment; (2) the need to justify the effort and expense of building the atomic bombs; (3) the hope of achieving diplomatic gains in the growing rivalry with the Soviet Union; (4) the lack of incentives not to use atomic weapons; and (5) hatred of the Japanese and a desire for vengeance."[102]

Walker's differences with the traditionalists are quite clear: Walker suggests three rectifications to the popular narrative, a narrative the traditionalists largely accept: first, "there were other options available for ending the war… without the bomb and without an invasion"; second, due to Japan's enervated capacity for war, Truman and his advisers did not regard invasion as inevitable; last, even if invasion was necessary to end the war, military planners "projected the number of American lives lost at far fewer than the hundreds of thousands that Truman and his advisers claimed after the war."[103] Furthermore, Walker relies on the USSBS, a point of divergence between himself and both the traditionalists and Hasegawa, to conclude "the war would probably have ended before an American invasion of Kyushu became necessary." [104] Walker essentially dismisses the entire traditionalist approach, with the caveat that Truman was indeed concerned with saving as many American lives as possible.

It is important to note that he is rather critical of the revisionist approach as well. First and foremost, Walker specifically outlines what Alperovitz disparages as an analysis asserting "that a combination of factors-political, military, racial, financial-produced the decision." Alperovitz's criticism of such an approach is that it "is easy to assemble fragments of evidence" that suggest such an analysis, but jumping from these "fragments to an explanatory conclusion about decision-making at the very top of the U.S. government is suspect."[105] Thus, Walker's "five fundamental considerations" are a significant departure from Alperovitz. More significantly, Walker actually considers the entire atomic diplomacy thesis as a sideshow. For instance, he maintains that "Truman did not drop the bomb primarily to intimidate the Soviets." It was at best an ancillary consideration, a "bonus."[106]

Thus, the "consensus" historians, largely agree that potential alternatives existed, that invasion may not have been necessary, and that the atomic bombs were probably not responsible for saving hundreds of thousands of lives. In other words, they were not a military necessity. At the same time, the atomic bombs were not deployed primarily as diplomatic mechanisms. Even if they eventually came to fulfill this role, it was either the unintentional result of "momentum" or a tertiary variable barely perceptible vis-à-vis other considerations.

Conclusion: The Myth, the Cult, Nuclearism, and Nuclear Consciousness

In the post-war era, the debate and discussion over the bomb has been of tremendous importance. Both the traditionalist and revisionist camps have plotted the trajectory of the discourse surrounding Hiroshima and Nagasaki in different ways. Gar Alperovitz has suggested that officials promulgated propaganda in a top-down manner in order to manufacture an "American myth" surrounding the use of the atomic bombs. Robert J. Lifton's preface to Martin Sherwin's A World Destroyed laments the emergence of "nuclearism," the ideology that the atomic bomb is a "deity" capable of both "destroying the world" and "capable of ruling and protecting the world, even of keeping the world going."[107] In contrast, Robert Newman denounces Alperovitz and other revisionists as "Hiroshima cultists," "Truman bashers," and a host of other pejoratives for creating a "cult" that worships at the altar of Hiroshima. Lastly, Paul Boyer, in his book By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (1994), suggests that a sort of "nuclear consciousness" has infused itself in the perceptions and ideology of Americans in the post-war era.[108] In fact, "nuclear reality" so deeply pervades our "consciousness that it is hard to imagine what existence would have been like without it." [109] In these various ways authors have interpreted the post-war world after the atomic bomb.

In the second part of his book, Alperovitz explores the creation of the mythology surrounding the ostensibly "inevitable" use of the bomb. He maintains that three decisions, including the rejection to provide enough time for Japan to surrender, the choice to not offer the Japanese emperor assurances, and the explicit decision not to test a Russian entry into the war, "set the terms of reference for the bomb's subsequent seemingly 'inevitable' use… [and] so tightly framed the remaining issues as to make it all but impossible thereafter to oppose the bombings." [110] This "framing of the bomb," alongside the top-down campaign of disinformation immediately after the war, were key factors that facilitated the permeation of American consciousness with the "inevitability" narrative.

Stimson, Truman, Byrnes, and Groves were key figures in this top-down propaganda campaign. Despite what Alperovitz argues was an ancillary role in the actual decision to drop the bomb, Stimson did play a vital role in propagating the official discourse, citing Stimson's 1947 Harper's article which was presented as "a mere recital of the facts." Stimson posited a rigid dichotomy later picked up by traditionalist historians: either a costly invasion or use of the bomb was required to end the war. As Alperovitz explains, the article was an "extraordinary success," with the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reader's Digest, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and an indeterminate number of other media outlets "decidedly uncritical and, indeed, often effusive in praise."[111] Truman's argument that "the dropping of the bombs stopped the war" and "saved millions of lives" was the main line of thought he propagated continuously after the war. He maintains that the "over a million" figure "became the essential source for a myth which has been repeated with only occasional challenge for much of the last half century" despite modern scholarship demonstrating "the estimate to be without any serious foundation in the documents of that period." [112] Byrnes systematically distorted and revised the past by shrouding himself in secrecy and meticulously managing his personal writings. Groves' role as "an expert public relations artist and news 'spin' master" also comes to light when he devised a strategy whereby U.S. officials would "saturate" the "huge market hungry for information with officially approved material from the only authoritative source available."[113] In Japan itself a Civil Censorship Division of the Occupation had some 8,700 staffers engaged in examining thousands of newspapers, magazines, textbooks, motion pictures, and even private mail to ensure they did not stray too far from the official discourse.[114] The most pernicious form of censorship was also the most ubiquitous; namely, government classification. Thus, as Alperovitz argues, "the 'normal' functioning of government… is even more effective than the occasional excesses which make the headlines."[115] In these ways the historical narrative from beginning to end was "managed" by U.S. officials.

Part of Martin Sherwin's work is intended to combat the legacy of nuclearism. In a world where humans have "infused [the atomic bomb] with a constellation of awe and mystery. That constellation has included tendencies to embrace the bomb, to become fiercely dependent upon it, indeed, to render it something close to a deity."[116] The "willful embrace of the cruelest weapon ever created is the essence" of nuclearism.[117] Suggesting a line of continuity with Paul Boyer, A World Destroyed suggests that an "idealistic aura of peacemaking was inseparable from the bomb's lure of ultimate technology and ultimate power-all of which became part of the transcendent technology of nuclearism."[118] Hence, "the bizarre emphasis on the bomb's ostensible function of 'saving lives' rather than destroying them, of rendering the world peaceful rather than bringing to it a specter of annihilation." [119] This "bizarre emphasis" has been the plaything of traditionalist scholars for decades.

In sharp contrast with Alperovitz and Sherwin, Robert P. Newman's thesis in Truman and the Hiroshima Cult is the paradigmatic post-revisionist account of the atomic bomb and its aftermath. In it he argues that a "cult," with attendant cultists, has arisen around Truman and the Hiroshima decision. These "Hiroshima cultists" argue, in a variety of forms, that Japan was on the verge of surrender, that the "unconditional surrender" formula unnecessarily prolonged the war, and that Truman's decision to drop the bomb was driven either by racism towards the Japanese or diplomatic concerns vis-à-vis the Soviets, or some combination thereof. Newman vehemently rejects what he refers to as the "Japanese-as-victim cult," suggesting that any and all of the above suggestions are fundamentally incorrect. Newman proclaims that neither "Hiroshima cultists nor professional moralists had even considered the possibility that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legitimate retribution for the millions of deaths caused by Japan's fourteen-year rampage through China and the Pacific."[120]

Newman traces the development and growth of what he maliciously and interchangeably refers to as the "Japan-as-Victim myth" or "Hiroshima cult." He begins by explaining how in the immediate aftermath of the war "the whole world viewed Japan as villainous." [121] After 1948, however, things began to change, in both Japan and the United States. In 1949 John Hersey's Hiroshima was published, which Newman credits with having the opposite but equally powerful impact that Anne Frank's diary had on Germany. Where Anne Frank's diary forced Germany to come to terms with its atrocities, Hiroshima shielded Japan from having to do so, and helped begin the "Japan-as-Victim" myth. Furthermore, in 1951 P. M. S. Blackett published Fear, War, and the Bomb, which argued that the bomb was not the last act of the Second World War but the first act of the Cold War. Finally, in 1954 when the U.S. tested the new H-bomb and the crew of a tuna trawler were affected by radioactive fallout, the "five most important Japanese newspapers took a common position: this was the third atomic bombing." [122]

Despite all this, however, in 1964 a public opinion poll suggested that 49 percent of the Japanese public viewed the United States as their "favorite foreign country." By 1973, after the U.S. atrocities in Vietnam and use of Japan to accomplish them, this "popularity" had dropped to 18 percent. [123] By the late sixties people were questioning earlier U.S. military endeavors, notably the dropping of the atomic bombs, as a reflection of the changing political tide and anti-Vietnam war sentiment. By 1989, the "majority opinion even among Japanese scholars" was accepting of both the Blackett thesis and racism as primary factors in the dropping of the atomic bomb. In the United States, the gradual buildup of anti-nuclear activism, starting with The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in the late 1940s to the "Scientists' Declaration on Nuclear Power" in 1975, had a major impact on retroactive views of the bombings. Thus, "accurate charges" of postwar "overkill… seemed to legitimate chargers of overkill levied at the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs."[124] Furthermore, many "who became disillusioned with the American terror bombing in Vietnam became converts to the Hiroshima guilt trip."[125] Newman also cites Ian Buruma's The Wages of Guilt, which explores the myriad of factors for why a "Japan-as-Victim" cult developed but no comparably "cult" developed around Germany. The key factor as Newman sees it, however, was Vietnam. Without it, "the Japanese-as-victims cult in the United States would still be puny."[126] Newman's work is a vicious attack on the legacy of revisionists like Gar Alperovitz and Martin Sherwin.

Paul Boyer's study, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age, addresses the "unsettling new cultural factor" of the atomic bomb that had been introduced in immediate post-war period from 1945 to 1950. [127] His contention is that the bomb "had transformed not only military strategy and international relations, but the fundamental ground of culture and consciousness" in the United States.[128] These five formative years shaped how Americans first "confronted the bomb, struggled against it, and absorbed it into the fabric of the culture." [129] In short, Boyer maintains that the 1945 to 1946 period was a time of "obsessive post-Hiroshima awareness of the horror of the atomic bomb," while in the period from 1947 to 1950 and after there was a "diminished cultural attention and uneasy acquiescence" as the "dread destroyer of 1945 had become the shield of the Republic by 1950."[130] In essence, Sherwin's "transcendent technology of nuclearism" permeated what Boyer calls America's "nuclear consciousness." This "nuclear consciousness" was infused into the very core of American ideology in the post-war era and so deeply pervades American "consciousness that it is hard to imagine what existence would have been like without it."[131] Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Boyer argues, "stand as signposts marking both a gash in the living flesh of our historical consciousness and a turning point in our ethical history." [132]

From 1945 to 1946 an "intense discourse" had surrounded the atomic bomb, where after 1947 this "diminished to scattered murmurs and faint echoes" and by 1950 "America's nuclear culture… would appear as a gray and largely deserted landscape."[133] Around this time the Atomic Energy Commission began a full throttle propaganda campaign to associate atomic energy with health, happiness, and prosperity. This campaign drew in scientists, educators, radio personalities, health workers, and others, directly reaching some four million Americans and indirectly affecting many more. A "policy of deep secrecy about atomic-bomb research and stockpiling," alongside the "pervasive official practice… of playing down the bomb's dangers" continued to condition the American public.[134] In this context, and with the ensuing Cold War schism that dominated international relations, the "civil defense" paradigm displaced the "international control" slogan dominant during 1945-6. This multifaceted propaganda campaign was so successful that by 1950 Americans had overwhelmingly, if not unanimously, embraced the atomic bomb. The mid-1950s saw a resurgence of debate over the atomic bomb and then a re-decline after 1963. He argues that the illusion of diminished risk, the loss of immediacy, the promise of a world transformed by atomic energy, the complexity and comfort of deterrence theory, and the importance of the Vietnam War led to the decline of atomic prominence. Interestingly, whereas Newman positions the Vietnam as the central feature in establishing the "Hiroshima cult," Boyer contends that the Vietnam War actually lessened discussion and debate over the atomic bomb.

Although Boyer aligns neatly with revisionist historians, he does refocus the chronological lens. Where other historians have drawn a line of continuity between the development of the bomb and its use, or between the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, Boyer furthers that line of continuity by exploring the state's role in managing post-Hiroshima public discourse. In this way Boyer's work partially overlaps and agrees with but significantly transcends Alperovitz "architecture of an American myth." By focusing on the state's institution of a broad, far-reaching propaganda campaign that helped shape popular opinion, Boyer repositions the role of the state not just as user of the atomic bomb, but also as manager of the dominant discourse after its use. In this way, Boyer provides a unique historiographical contribution by arguing that atomic policies "transformed not only military strategy and international relations, but the fundamental ground of culture and consciousness" in the United States.

Thus, not only is the discourse surrounding the actual use of the atomic bomb split into competing camps, the post-war discourse itself is a topic of debate. In this regard, Paul Boyer's work is the most thorough, sophisticated, and systematic cultural analysis of the post-war discourse. For those of us interested in challenging not only the excesses of war, but the inter-imperial rivalries that ultimately lead to the use of the bomb, understanding the nuances of the historiographical debate is vital. More importantly, in the wake of the 1995 Smithsonian controversy and the ever-expanding list of countries with access to nuclear armaments, those of us on the left must continue to wage war on the post-war discourse justifying and rationalizing the atomic bomb.

Bibliography

Alperovitz, Gar. The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.

Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

Frank, Richard B. Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.

Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi. Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005.

Maddox, Robert James. Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004.

Malloy, Sean L. Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb Against Japan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.

Miscamble, Wilson D. The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs, and the Defeat of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Newman, Robert P. Truman and the Hiroshima Cult. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995.

Walker, J. Samuel. Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of the Atomic Bombs Against Japan. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Walker, Paul D. Truman's Dilemma: Invasion or the Bomb. Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company, 2003.

Stimson, Henry L. "The Decisions to Use the Atomic Bomb." Harper's Magazine (1947).

Sherwin, Martin J. A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Takaki, Ronald. Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995.

Wainstock, Dennis. The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb. New York: Enigma Books, 2011.

Citations

[1] I borrow the term "consensus" from J. Samuel Walker.

[2] Tsuyoshi Hasegawa utilizes "orthodox" to describe this position.

[3] Henry L. Stimson, "The Decisions to Use the Atomic Bomb," Harper's Magazine (1947). See full article: http://classrooms.tacoma.k12.wa.us/stadium/mberggren-2/us-history/download/Stimson%2B-%2BHarper%2BFeb%2B1947%2B-%2BDecision%2Bto%2BUse%2Bthe%2BAtomic%2BBomb.pdf?id=230795

[4] J. Samuel Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of the Atomic Bombs Against Japan (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 105.

[5] Originally published in 1995.

[6] A reiteration and strengthening of his 1965 work Atomic Diplomacy.

[7] Originally published in 1973.

[8] Truman, Stimson, Byrnes, Stalin, Hirohito, and the Big Six in Japan are examples where disagreement is most pronounced.

[9] Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 19.

[10] Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 225.

[11] Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 6.

[12] Sherwin, A World Destroyed, 7.

[13] This argument maintained that the US should share atomic technology with the Soviet Union in exchange for political cooperation.

[14] This position stated that the US should maintain a monopoly over atomic technology as long as possible and advance its diplomatic aims through harsh bargaining from its position of atomic power.

[15] Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 140.

[16] Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy, 154.

[17] Ibid., 135.

[18] Ibid., 139.

[19] Alperovitz, 19.

[20] Robert James Maddox, Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004), xv.

[21] Maddox, Weapons for Victory, 146.

[22] Ibid., 113.

[23] Richard B. Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 104.

[24] This is Newman's term for revisionist historians.

[25] The USSBS maintained that in all likelihood Japan would surrender prior to November 1, 1945 without the atomic bombing or the entrance of the Soviet Union into the war. It further states that had Japan not surrendered by November 1, it would definitely have surrendered prior to the end of 1945.

[26] Robert P. Newman, Truman and the Hiroshima Cult (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995), 36.

[27] Newman, Truman and the Hiroshima Cult, 47.

[28] This is one of Newman's other terms for revisionists.

[29] Ibid., 49.

[30] Wilson D Miscamble, The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs, and the Defeat of Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 91.

[31] Frank, 95.

[32] Ibid., 96.

[33] Ibid., 197.

[34] Paul D. Walker, Truman's Dilemma: Invasion or the Bomb (Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company, 2003), 171.

[35] Miscamble, 115. Original emphasis.

[36] Maddox, 153.

[37] Hasegawa, 5.

[38] Maddox, 131.

[39] Frank, 348.

[40] Miscamble, 89.

[41] Ibid., 91.

[42] Sakomizu was chief secretary to the cabinet of Japan during World War II.

[43] Hasegawa, 250.

[44] Miscamble, 3.

[45] Ibid., 44.

[46] Ibid., 113.

[47] Ibid., 119.

[48] Ibid., 124.

[49] Newman, xiii. Emphasis added.

[50] Ibid., 120.

[51] Ibid., 130.

[52] Ibid., 138. Emphasis original.

[53] Paul Walker, 15.

[54] Ibid., 17.

[55] Ibid., 18-19.

[56] Ibid., 27.

[57] Ibid., 43-44.

[58] Miscamble, 120-1.

[59] Maddox, xv.

[60] Alperovitz, 656.

[61] Ibid., 657.

[62] Sherwin, 6.

[63] Ibid., 7.

[64] Ibid., 8.

[65] Alperovitz, 655.

[66] Ronald Takaki, Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995), 8.

[67] Takaki, Hiroshima, 100.

[68] Ibid., 94.

[69] Hasegawa, 2.

[70] Hasegawa, 300.

[71] Alperovitz, 4

[72] Hasegawa, 295.

[73] Ibid., 296.

[74] Alperovitz, 85.

[75] Hasegawa., 129.

[76] Ibid., 188

[77] Ibid., 275

[78] Samuel Walker cites Barton Bernstein as one of the pioneering "consensus" historians of Hiroshima.

[79] Dennis Wainstock, The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb (New York: Enigma Books, 2011), 178.

[80] Wainstock, The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb, 178.

[81] Ibid., 178.

[82] Maddox, 8.

[83] Newman, 57.

[84] Ibid., 71.

[85] Ibid., 73.

[86] Ibid., 77.

[87] Wainstock, 171

[88] Hasegawa, 290

[89] Ibid., 291

[90] Sean L. Malloy, Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb Against Japan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 7.

[91] Malloy, Atomic Tragedy, 8.

[92] Ibid., 81.

[93] Ibid., 11.

[94] Ibid., 67.

[95] Ibid., 70.

[96] Ibid., 9.

[97] Ibid., 129. Here he is referring to retention of the emperor (modifying unconditional surrender) and the public threat of Soviet entry into the war.

[98] Malloy, 129

[99] Samuel Walker, 6.

[100] Ibid., 109.

[101] Ibid., 109.

[102] Ibid., 92.

[103] Ibid., 5-6.

[104] Ibid., 89.

[105] Alperovitz, 656.

[106] Walker, 95.

[107] Sherwin, xi.

[108] Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994), xix.

[109] Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light, xx.

[110] Alperovitz, 631.

[111] Ibid., 455.

[112] Ibid., 466.

[113] Ibid., 598.

[114] Ibid., 610.

[115] Ibid., 613.

[116] Sherwin, xi.

[117] Ibid., xi.

[118] Ibid., xii.

[119] Ibid., xi.

[120] Newman, xiii.

[121] Ibid., 153.

[122] Ibid., 161.

[123] Ibid., 164.

[124] Ibid., 177.

[125] Ibid., 183.

[126] Ibid., 184.

[127] Boyer, xxi.

[128] Ibid., xxi.

[129] Ibid., xx.

[130] Ibid., 352 and 349.

[131] Boyer, xx

[132] Ibid., 182.

[133] Ibid., 291.

[134] Ibid., 303.

How Capitalism Underdeveloped Hip Hop: A People's History of Political Rap (Part 2 of 2)

By Derek Ide

Disclaimer: The language expressed in this article is an uncensored reflection of the views of the artists as they so chose to speak and express themselves. Censoring their words would do injustice to the freedom of expression and political content this article intends to explore. Therefore, some of the language appearing below may be offensive to personal, cultural, or political sensibilities.

Read Part 1 here.

West Coast Projects, the Rise of Gangsta Rap, and Congress's War on the Youth

Gangsta Rap burst forth in its nascent form in the late 1980's in the heart of Los Angeles. To comprehend how this subgenre of rap developed, however, the ruthless conditions which originally produced the gang epidemic must be recognized. Institutionalized racial segregation, economic deprivation, and social degradation, enforced by hegemonic government and business structures, had historically plagued communities of color in the area and produced a distinct history which would give rise in the 1980's to a prodigious spike in gang activity and violence. Historically marginalized groups would be pitted against one another in despondent economic conditions and forced to compete amongst themselves for the paltry scraps that fell from society's table. Government departments, banking agencies, and the real estate industry would play into the game of get-rich-quick racial segregation. Redlining, the practice of denying or increasing costs of housing and insurance to economically segregate communities along racial lines, played a fundamental role in the homogenous racial composition of west coast urban areas. In 1938, the Federal Housing Administration released an underwriting manual which all lenders were forced to read, explaining that areas should be investigated in order to determine "the probability of the location being invaded" by "incompatible racial and social groups" and, more importantly, that for a "neighborhood is to retain stability" it must "be occupied by the same social and racial classes" because a change in these would lead to "instability and a decline in values." [1] Some entrepreneurs "figured out how to hustle racial fear" [2] by buying at low prices from whites fleeing their homes and selling to blacks at prices significantly higher than market level. This effectively kept blacks and whites segregated into different neighborhoods.

After World War II, public housing projects were constructed, giving Watts the highest concentration of public housing on the West Coast. [3] Combined with this historic segregation, the 1980s brought with it "deindustrialization, devolution, Cold War adventurism, the drug trade, gang structures and rivalries, arms profiteering, and police brutality" which would combine to "destabilize poor communities and alienate massive numbers of youth." [4] In the same decade 131 manufacturing plants closed their doors, Los Angeles's official unemployment was at 11 percent in 1983 and in South Central youth unemployment was over 50 percent, one quarter of Blacks and Latinos lived below the poverty line, and living conditions had drastically declined. [5] Even when gangs attempted to make peace and establish long-standing treaties with one another, no infrastructure was in place to maintain stable communities with jobs and social services. In fact, when the leaders from seven rival gangs called a truce and marched to City Hall to request funding for social services, they were told they could apply for a paltry $500 grant. [6] This denial was on top of the conservative economic agenda dominating the political domain at the time which had already cut spending on subsidized housing by 82 percent, job training and employment by 63 percent, and community service and development programs by 40 percent from post-World War II era progressive spending policies. [7]

It was within these conditions that by the 1980s, after the dismantling of political organizations such as the Black Panthers and Young Lords, 155 gangs would claim over 30,000 members across the city. [8] Gangsta rap, as it was labeled, would attempt to articulate, and in some instances glorify, the street life so common in Los Angeles. Immortal Technique points out that a "factoid of information probably purposely forgotten through the years is that before it was labeled 'Gangsta Rap' by the industry itself it was called 'Reality Rap' by those individuals that created it." [9] Political prisoner and former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal explains that the music was spawned by young people whom felt "that they are at best tolerated in schools, feared on the streets, and almost inevitably destined for the hell holes of prison. They grew up hungry, hated and unloved. And this is the psychic fuel that seems to generate the anger that seems endemic in much of the music and poetry." [10] This anger would shine through on tracks such as "Straight Outta Compton" by N.W.A., where rapper Ice Cube explains that he's "From the gang called Niggaz With Attitudes" and "When I'm called off, I got a sawed off, squeeze the trigger, and bodies are hauled off!" [11]

Their rhymes signified a shift from the revolutionary programs set forth by previous political rappers and instead focused on a complete self-indulgence in instant gratification; drugs, women, the murder of enemies and assassination of police, everything was fair game. It was N.W.A.'s track entitled "Fuck tha Police," released in 1988, which garnered national media attention. The rather prophetic song would become a universal slogan in ghetto communities just four years later with the police beating of Rodney King and subsequent urban uprisings. Disgusted with the police brutality they witnessed regularly, N.W.A. would take up the issue, not politically, but with an individual vengeance and wrath previously unmatched. Beginning with fictitious court hearing in which "Judge Dre" would preside "in the case of NWA versus the police department," the "prosecuting attorneys" MC Ren, Ice Cube, and Eazy E would each lay out their case against the Los Angeles Police Department. Ice Cube's opening lines, brimming with unparalleled virulence, would set the tone: "Fuck the police comin' straight from the underground, young nigga got it bad cuz I'm brown, and not the other color so police think, they have the authority to kill a minority." Reminiscent of Paris's earlier fantastical verbal assassination of President Bush, MC Ren would warn police "not to step in my path" because "Ren's gonna blast," and, turning the tables, he confidently proclaims his hatred towards the police "with authority, because the niggas on the street is a majority." Eazy E finishes the last verse, emphasizing that fact that cops should not be perceived as immune to violent resistance: "Without a gun and a badge, what do ya got? A sucka in a uniform waitin' to get shot." [12] The controversy revolving around this song would push the album it was featured on, Straight Outta Compton, to double platinum status. By June of 1989, the right-wing backlash against N.W.A. would be front page news, an entertainment manifestation of the "War on Gangs" which L.A. Police Chief Darryl Gates had already brought to South Central.

The atmosphere of late 1980's was dictated by punitive measures explicitly directed at youth and relentless attacks on youth culture. The Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act was passed in 1988 and enhanced punishments for "gang-related offenses," created "new categories of gang crimes," and gave up to three years in state prison for even claiming gang membership. [13] This piece of legislation had profoundly harmful repercussions for youth who identified with, or even may have displayed certain characteristics of, being involved with a gang; police considered any combination of two of the following examples to constitute gang membership: "slang, clothing of a particular color, pagers, hairstyles, or jewelry." [14] Within a decade most major cities and at least nineteen states had similar laws. [15] The crossover into what became a congressional attack on Gangsta rap was facilitated by opportunistic politicians who pounced excitedly on the chance:

Tipper Gore, the wife of former vice president Al Gore, and Susan Baker, the wife of Bush's former campaign manager, James Baker, formed Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) which called for, and received, a congressional hearing on record labeling. Every song listed by the PMRC and presented at the congressional hearing as being too explicit and obscene and in need of censorship labeling was done by a Black artist. [16]

While politicians and networks of Christian fundamentalist groups had already begun anti-hip-hop campaigns under a guise of protecting morality, what Thompson labeled the "cultural civil war," [17] it was failed liberal politician and head of the National Political Congress of Black Women, C. Delores Tucker, who spearheaded the congressional war on Gangsta rap. Teaming up with cultural conservatives, Tucker, through a façade of feminism and racial pride, organized a concerted campaign against rap in order to push through legislation that strengthened juvenile-crime laws and crackdowns on youth. Inverting cause and effect, she argued that the hip-hop generation would become internalized "with the violence glorified in gangster rap" and that rap music created a "social time bomb" which would "trigger a crime wave of epidemic proportions," only to be stopped by smothering the cultural and musical developments of ghetto youth. [18]

Among some of her chief targets was Tupac Shakur (2Pac), who was not quiet in his opposition to Tucker and her political opportunism. Tupac, staying true to his roots on "Nothin' But Love," outlines the composition of his family tree as one of "Panthers, pimps, pushers, and thugs;" [19] this unique mixture helped him to articulate a conception of the rebellious ghetto lifestyle blended with the legacy of black struggle into what he termed "Thug Life." An acronym, which stood for "The Hate U Gave Little Infants Fucks Everybody," [20] his idea of "Thug Life" was a "new kind of Black Power" [21] that young black males were forced to live through:

These white folks see us as thugs, I don't care if you a lawyer, a man, an 'African-American,' if you whatever…you think you are, we thugs and niggas [to them]…and until we own some shit, I'ma call it like it is. How you gonna be a man when we starving?... How we gonna be African-Americans if we all need a gun? [22]

Tupac, whose mother Afeni Shakur was a prominent Black Panther and political activist, would utilize his connections with the streets and balance his music with historical connections to political organizers such as Huey Newton and chilling urban tales of despondent situations such as the fictitious tale of the teenage mother Brenda and the ever-present black-on-black violence. Through this unification of social commentator and street participant, Tupac would authenticate his image to millions of youth, black and white alike. Tupac's response to Tucker's critique of the lyrical content of his music was redolent of Chuck D's interpretation of rappers as journalists who help to show the world the gruesome reality of urban street life; as he argued, "I have not brought violence to you. I have not brought Thug Life to America. I didn't create Thug Life. I diagnosed it." [23]

Furthermore, according to Dyson, the attempt to suppress "gangsta rap's troubling expressions" is manipulated for "narrow political ends" that fail to "critically engage…artists and the provocative issues they address." [24] While dialogue concerning rampant homophobia, sexism, and other dehumanizing aspects of certain rap artists should be challenged, it should be done so in a way that does not alienate and isolate, but engages and allows for the artist to transcend both actions that reflect the dominant ideology and the use of oppressive language. Rapper and activist Son of Nun summarizes his position:

Some real rappers spit truth every night, but say stupid shit when it comes to gay rights. They talk about the Panthers, but they never knew that Huey woulda' called their asses out for what they do…So, in my music, I try not to call out specific emcees…[because] I realize that I have more in common with them, then I'll ever have in common with the label head or the corporate people putting that music out… [Despite sexist or homophobic remarks] when you read the interview and listen to some lyrics, you'll see that there's a revolutionary consciousness that's there at the same time…and I'd rather see those brothers as my comrades whom I can build with, as opposed to people I need to chop down and diss… [25]

This extension of the right-wing economic attack on working class and poor youth into the cultural realm, as exemplified by politicians like Tucker, should not be viewed in isolation from the larger historical trends occurring at the same time; it operated within a certain political economy and aided the perpetuation the dominant ideology required in order to push through neoliberal economic policies.

The mental framework in which Gangsta rap functions is articulated by Immortal Technique, drawing on the theoretical contributions to education outlined in Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he explains, "Our youth and young adults see these gangstas and other ruthless men [famous gangsters, drug kingpins, etc.] as powerful beyond the scope of a government that holds them prisoner. People emulate their oppressor and worship those that defy him openly." [26] This does not, however, mean that Gangsta rap is devoid of a political foundation or that it should be ostracized by the Hip-hop community. As Dyson argues, "While rappers like N.W.A. perform an invaluable service by rapping in poignant and realistic terms about urban underclass existence, they must be challenged…[to understand] that description alone is insufficient to address the crises of black urban life." [27] Thus, this fusion of gangster and rebel, a sort of misguided revolutionary, groping in the darkness of urban decay and abandonment for a way to challenge oppressive, hegemonic institutions, finds its musical expression in the West Coast rap scene. Today, gangsta rap has spread far beyond the streets of L.A. and into every neighborhood, ghetto, suburb, country, to every corner of the world. The rebellious, gangster appeal, devoid of social content and reality, continues to be marketed on every street corner; a sort of "manufactured, corporate bought thug image" is pushed to the youth while "the Revolutionary element is for the most part completely sanitized by the corporate structure."[28]

Corporate Consolidation and the Telecommunications Act

This rejection of the revolutionary and embrace of the thug caricature so common in contemporary hip-hop is, in large part, a result of corporate monopolization of radio airwaves and dismantling of independent record labels. For years, questions concerning rap's viability as a musical genre and it's viability as a pop music sensation surrounded the relatively young art. Industry executives looked upon rap with disdain, viewing it as a niche market unsuitable for broad consumption. This allowed the genre to slip under corporate radar and maintain a sense of independence from major pop labels for a significant period of time. After the innovative development in 1991 of SoundScan that utilized bar-code recording to garner hard data on music sales and replaced the previous "archaic method" which had relied on the retail personnel who compiled weekly, subjective reports of sales trends "open to interpretation," [29] rap was found to have a much broader appeal than originally thought. With this new, more objective methodology of measuring music consumption, rap jumped from the relative obscurity of being a subcultural phenomenon to a major competitor with rock and pop music on the Billboard charts. [30] The "underreporting of rap was a result of long-standing cultural sensibilities and racial assumptions" [31] on the part of retail personnel. Subsequently, industry executives who still may have "harbored ill feelings toward the genre" could no longer "ignore the sales data SoundScan provided…[or] the huge financial payoff it offered." [32] As hip hop observer and critic Craig Watkins explains, "In an industry that had long ago sold its soul to the guardians of capitalism, the commercial compulsions that operate among culture industry executives are a powerful force." [33] The music, however, would have to be tamed considerably.

These commercial compulsions galvanized industry executives to tighten their stranglehold on rap music. In order to protect their status within the capitalist framework and pop music industry, executives were forced to marginalize and reject progressive, dissident, revolutionary, socialist, or any other form of independent and autonomous rap that may present a systemic critique of the established relations of power in society. Corporate hip-hop, as exemplified with the rise of rappers like 50 Cent in 2003, "rested almost entirely on its ability to sell black death" where "guns, gangsterism, and ghetto authenticity brought an aura of celebrity and glamour to the grim yet fabulously hyped portraits of ghetto life." [34] Statistics are not conclusive, but Mediamark Research Inc. estimates that whites constitute around sixty percent of the consumer market for rap in the United States. [35] Other sources, such as Def Jam CEO Russell Simmons, place the number somewhere closer to eighty percent. [36] Regardless, it is obvious that hip-hop is not an exclusively black culture; the composition of the consumer market facilitates a sort of "cultural tourism" where a "staged authenticity" [37] filled with racial stereotypes of black culture can be marketed to white youth.

Corporate consolidation of media outlets has galvanized this process of promoting a certain image of ghetto youth while downplaying the revolutionary or counter-hegemonic sentiments expressed in the music. Major labels and corporate conglomerates have very little interest in promoting artists who question capitalism or the free market fundamentalism. After all, it was that very system which originally granted them the ability to garner the enormous capital required to build their constantly expanding media empire. Immortal Technique articulates this concept:

The hood is not stupid, we know the mathematics / I make double what I would going gold on Atlantic / 'Cause EMI, Sony, BMG, Interscope / Would never sign a rapper with the white house in his scope / They push pop music like a religion / Anorexic celebrity driven / Financial fantasy fiction. [38]

Without an understanding of the significant role that major media outlets play in promoting a specific paradigm, especially in the case of a popular musical juggernaut such as rap, the rise of the glorified, gangster image cannot be concretely analyzed. Chang comments that "a lot of times people will talk about 50 Cent, but they won't talk about the structures that have made a 50 Cent possible." [39] The structures Chang refers to are multifaceted, and include broad neoliberal market deregulations that, since the 1970s, allowed for massive corporate takeovers of independent record labels and a consolidation of radio and other media outlets. For instance, by 2000, five companies - Vivendi Universal, Sony, AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann, and EMI - dominated eighty percent of the music industry. [40] One act in particular, however, the Telecommunications Act passed by Congress in 1996, presented "a landmark of deregulation," a "legal codification of the pro-media monopoly stance" that allowed the free market to shift power "decisively in the direction of the media monopolies." [41] The passage of this act had a percussive impact on the artists' creative control over their music.

The Telecommunications Act relaxed ownership limits over radio and television for corporate entities, essentially creating fewer corporate conglomerates with concentrated control over various media outlets. Congress ostensibly passed the act under the tenuous postulation that "a deregulated marketplace would best serve the public interest." [42] As to be expected, its passage spurred a rapid absorption of smaller, local radio stations into the hands of large, already established companies such as Clear Channel,[43] Cumulus, Citadel, and Viacom. [44] The result was that hundreds of jobs were decimated, community programming was abandoned, and radio playlists became standardized across the country. [45] For a stations like KMEL-FM in the Bay Area, whom prided themselves on being a "people's station" by engaging in social issues affecting the San Francisco community, this meant being bought out and merged with competing stations; playlists became nearly identical, specialty shows were cut, local personalities were fired, and local or underground artists "unable to compete with six-figure major label marketing budgets" were left without a venue. [46] Artists like Binary Star, who challenged the gangster caricature, would become, even more than before, systematically excluded by these corporate structures. Rhymes, such as those displayed on one of Binary Star's most well-known tracks "Honest Expression," [47] would be consistently ostracized from airplay.

Conglomerates like Clear Channel, unlike locally controlled radio, had no community affairs department to foster dialogue or promote local artists with fresh sounds or unique lyrics. [48] Companies downsized to maximize profits and regional programmers overtook local ones, signifying a further shift from local interests of listeners. [49] The ever-present need to increase profitability also galvanized some stations to replace live disc jockeys with prerecorded announcers who would create localized sound bites and patch together entire shows based upon a master copy that was filtered down through regional and local distributors; [50] radio truly became top-down. Subsequently, the public sphere in which artists could contest the image of the apolitical gangster or socially devoid party-goer shrunk rapidly. Corporate rap became a medium through which content was filtered and sterilized while dissident voices were marginalized or shut out completely. Even political rap was reworked into a specific consumer niche; "defanged as 'conscious rap,' and retooled as an alternative hip-hop lifestyle," the prefix became "industry shorthand for reaching a certain kind of market" instead of an authentic, organic title. [51]

Thus, as is the trend in a capitalist society where the "market...does not assure that all relevant views will be heard, but only those that are advocated by the rich [and can market a product of mass appeal that will attract advertisers, which dominate the programming message]," the Telecommunications Act has had profoundly negative implications upon hip-hop's autonomy and ensured that the media landscape was "dominated by those who are economically powerful."[52] Likewise, the prodigious increase in corporate consolidation facilitated the process by which consumption could be artificially managed and manipulated by the "mass media's capacity to convey imagery and information across vast areas to ensure a production of demand." [53] Therefore, the exclusion of particular forms of musical expression, especially those deemed political or controversial, are replaced with corporate-driven, marketed images of young black males adhering to a socially constructed thug stereotype. Fokami explains:

Corporations which dominate the media, have heavily marketed (to influence consumer demand), produced and perpetuated, the gangsta image by, among other things, playing gangsta rap lyrics, almost to the exclusion of other alternative voices that would contest such lyrics or image... The Act has made it virtually impossible for alternative voices in rap (either by the gangsta rappers themselves through their alternative "positive" tracks or by other "positive" rap artists) to be heard on the radio, since corporate conglomerates are less concerned with diversity in ideas but in meeting market created consumer demand for such lyrics. [54]

Thus, while congressional attacks were pummeling rap music for degrading lyrical content and demeaning music videos, the same politicians were simultaneously passing laws which facilitated the crystallization of apolitical, socially devoid gangsta rap into mainstream pop culture. This apparently blatant contradiction is, when viewed in the context of the capitalist state, much more consistent than at first glance; the political establishment sought to promote corporate consolidation and media monopolization, thus limiting public space for dialogue and debate in the hip-hop community, which, in turn, allowed them to pursue a the preferable path of blaming the victims for society's woes. Avoiding an uncomfortable and possibly incriminating dialectical analysis which would address the root cause, namely the dominant political and economic system, that perpetuates many of the social blights expressed in rap music, politicians attack the youth, and especially Black and Latino youth, for problems that plagued urban communities long before rap music hit the scene.

Bursting Onto the Mainstream Scene and Contemporary Political Rap

Hip-hop stepped forward into the mainstream political establishment in 2004 when it had a brief, rather superficial media campaign targeting youth voters. Rap mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs used hip-hop as a platform to organize a campaign under the sensationalist title "Vote or Die" as an attempt to register younger voters, garner youth participation, and generate excitement about the elections. While registering voters was only a marginal success, [55] it was clear the goals were decidedly apolitical with little actual political motivation for urban youth who, for years, had felt alienated from mainstream political discourse. The two candidates put forward by America's ruling elites, George Bush and John Kerry, had platforms so similar it was challenging to generate enough interest for young people to mobilize within the context of the two-party duopoly. Four years later, however, hip-hop would emerge as an unimaginably powerful advertisement for Barack Obama. His 2008 campaign sparked immense interest within the hip-hop community and debate flourished over whether or not hip-hop should stand behind Obama. It was little more than a decade prior that Tupac hopelessly exclaimed "although it seems heaven sent, we ain't ready, to see a Black president" on the song "Changes." [56] Now, energized by a candidate whom, for the first time, they felt would reach out to the hip-hop generation, many artists, such as Jay-Z, took center stage in fundraising concerts and spoke proudly of their involvement in his campaign. Nas, one of hip-hops "most brilliant orators" [57] whose own political trajectory involved going from conscious gangster with his first album Illmatic (1994) to passionate revolutionary with his latest release Untitled (2008), "captures the gambit of fears, hopes and doubts that swirl together in the consciousness" [58] of the black community on the track "Black President:"

KKK is like "what the fuck," loadin' they guns up / Loadin' mine too, ready to ride / Cause I'm ridin' with my crew / He dies--we die too / But on a positive side / I think Obama provides hope and challenges minds / Of all races and colors to erase the hate / And try and love one another, so many political snakes / We in need of a break / I'm thinkin' I can trust this brotha / But will he keep it way real? / Every innocent nigga in jail gets out on appeal / When he wins--will he really care still? [59]

Nas is not alone in his critical support for Obama; Mary J. Blige and rapper Big Boi from Outkast compose a song of solidarity for the working class and poor in "Something's Gotta Give," which challenges Obama to truly listen to the concerns and pressures of urban communities while earnestly calling for desperately needed social change. Big Boi articulates his working class consciousness when he rhymes, "You know the common folk, blue collar, day-to-day workers that squeeze a dollar / so maybe they can swallow a little, not a lot, just enough to fill that bottle / But it's a million dollars a gallon for gas to get to work tomorrow." [60] Unapologetically political, well-known artists creatively maneuvered political dialogue and discussion into the mainstream discourse.

Still, these odes to Obama were able to push through corporate outlets partly because their content and message remained safely within the established political borders. Obama, after all, garnered large support from many of the capitalist classes ruling elites, whom viewed the Republicans eight-year run as disastrous for the United State's economic power and image abroad. Despite this brief stint within mainstream circles, political hip-hop did not begin, and it will not end, with Obama. Radical hip-hop and revolutionary artists like Immortal Technique, Dead Prez, Paris, Lupe Fiasco, Son of Nun, and an innumerable amount of other artists remain marginalized and embroiled in the struggle to spread their message in the face of a competitive, cut-throat jungle of corporate conglomerates and consolidated, top-down radio. Often, hip-hop artists formulate unique narratives or relay stunningly academic critiques of society that tie together seemingly separate issues and help the listener foster a more critical, holistic analysis of larger societal forces.

On his latest single, "3rd World," Immortal Technique utilizes a percussive, hard-hitting instrumental produced by DJ Green Lantern to expose U.S. imperialism and militarism across the globe, brilliantly explicating on the concept of contemporary war as a natural outgrowth of capitalism. Born in Peru and representing his "Third World" roots, Technique explains that he is:

From where the only place democracy's acceptable, is if America's candidate is electable… from where they overthrow Democratic leaders, not for the people but for the Wall Street journal readers… So I'ma start a global riot, that not even your fake anti-Communist dictators can keep quiet!

On "Ghetto Manifesto," The Coup humorously outline ghetto conditions, sardonically utilizing hip-hop lingo to emphasize their point, "Got a house arrest anklet but it don't bling bling, got a homie with a cell but that shit don't ring!" Later, they put out a call for organization and mobilization, explaining "even renowned historians have found that, the people only bounce back when they pound back." They simultaneously challenge nationalist ideology, "the trees we got lifted by made our feet dangle, so when I say burn one I mean the Star-Spangled." A plethora of underground and independent rap artists express similar themes which address the need for autonomous political organization and present alternative, more humane visions for society.

Hip-Hop at a Crossroads: Conditions Today and Where Do We Go From Here?

Hip-hop was cultivated in the streets as an innovative response of urban minorities, traditionally marginalized by dominant political and economic structures, seeking a voice of their own. Alienated by harsh conditions imposed upon them by an advanced capitalist society, these urban youth sought an outlet where they could foster their own conceptions of identity and challenge institutional oppression, whether individually or collectively. Poverty, unemployment, a decrepit educational system, cuts in social services, and capitalism's inherent need to maintain a permanent underclass blended together to create a matrix in which a new, counter-hegemonic culture would emerge with the dialectically opposed characteristics of both the oppressor and the liberationist. Today, the devastating conditions which birthed hip-hop remain a reality and, in some instances, have intensified. The recent crisis capitalism has found itself in continues the downward spiral and the world economy appears close to collapse. The conditions for the working-class and the poor, however, have only worsened over the thirty years since hip-hop established itself as a cultural entity. Unemployment is skyrocketing nationally across color lines but in many cities, such as Milwaukee, Detroit, and Chicago, black unemployment is at or near 50 percent. [61] Already claiming the highest rates of poverty in the industrial world, U.S. poverty statistics have risen drastically since the onset of the world banking crash, placing both Blacks and Latinos at or above 20 percent; youth minority statistics are often much higher. [62] The loss of jobs, combined with the collapse of the housing market and sub-prime predatory lending, has pushed an immense amount of working-class residents out of their homes[63] and left nearly fifty million people without healthcare. [64] Schools, after a brief glimmer of hope with post-civil rights integration, have become more segregated now than they were thirty years ago with public school systems in Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and many other urban areas 80-95 percent Black and Hispanic. [65]

Thus, the conditions in which hip-hop originally arose have not improved. Social commentator and activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor postulates these are rational outcomes of the dominant political economy:

The material impact on the lives of Black workers should be clear enough, but ideologically, the systematic and institutional impoverishment of African American communities perpetuates the impression that Blacks are inferior and defective. These perceptions are perpetuated and magnified by the mass media, Hollywood and the general means of ideological and cultural production in bourgeois society. The recurrence and persistence of racism in this economic system is not accidental or arbitrary. American capitalism is intrinsically racist. [66]

Like Taylor, independent hip-hop has, throughout its existence, maintained a critical approach to the capitalist mode of production and the material conditions resulting from it. On "Window to My Soul," Stic.man of Dead Prez painfully professes the emotional trauma he experienced as he watched his older brother develop a serious drug addiction. Rather than blame the individual, an old rhetorical tactic utilized to conceal social inequality and displace blame, even more prevalent now that a Black man occupies the Whitehouse, [67] Stic.man addresses the larger socioeconomic forces which often dictate and limit choices for the urban poor:

The same conditions that first created the drug problems still exist… / And on days off, we blow off them crumbs like nothing / Getting high cause a nigga gotta get into something / But we get trapped in a cycle of pain and addiction / And lose the motivation to change the condition… / How did Black life, my life, end up so hard? [68]

He questions the entire wage system and bourgeois morality with piercing lines such as "got to go to the job or starve, without a gun every day employees get robbed." Questioning whose interests are served in the perpetuation of the current system, he concludes that it's "the police, lawyers, and judges, the private owned prison industry with federal budgets." He ends with an unapologetic proclamation that the oppression of blacks is systemic, but oppressed communities cannot turn to individualized forms of escapism and instead must discuss the organization of society as it currently exists, "I blame it on the system but the problem is ours, it's not a question of religion; it's a question of power." [69] The call to a revolutionary alternative, although not always explicitly detailed, has been a persistent theme in the language of political rap. This, undoubtably, is due to the fact that many within the oppressed communities share Taylor's conviction that the dynamic interrelationship between wealth, power, poverty, and the institutional forms in which oppression is manifested.

The landscape of independent, political hip-hop is constantly changing, progressing, and evolving. In the last few years, the augmentation of revolutionary hip-hop which aims to combat traditionally oppressive societal institutions and entrenched corporate structures provides a glimpse of the potential for the art's future. Hip-hop's place in politics extends far beyond a presidential election or congressional debates on explicit content; hip-hop, in the words of Dead Prez's M-1, "means sayin' what I want, never bitin' my tongue / hip-hop means teachin' the young." [70] Immortal Technique tells it like this, "I live and breathe Revolution, Rebellion is in my blood and Hip Hop is the heart that pumps it." [71] Two decades into the rap game, Paris provides a way forward with the newest single, "Don't Stop the Movement," from his independently owned label Guerrilla Funk:

Givin' power to the people to take back America / Panic in the head of the state, pass the Derringer / Aim and shoot, Beruit to Bay Area… / Panther power, acid showers/ This land is ours, stand and shout it… / Hard truth revolutionary black militant / Death to the Minutemen, checks to the immigrants / Streets still feelin' it, we still killin' it / We still slaughterin' hawks, feed the innocent / Read the imprint / Guerrilla Funk was birthed outta' necessity, collectively / Respectively, to behead the beast / On behalf of the left wing scared to speak, NOW GET UP! [72]

Expressing the need for solidarity between the struggles against militarism in the Middle East, black oppression in the U.S. and dehumanizing anti-immigration policies, the chorus warns activists to not stop the movement for social justice and liberation. It ends with a recording of the common protest chant which proclaims that "the people, united, will never be defeated." KRS-One comments that hip-hop is the only place Dr. Martin Luther Kings dream is visible, "black, white, Asian, Latino, Chicano, everybody. Hip-hop has formed a platform for all people…that, to me, is beyond music." [73] As underground rap artist Macklemore urges his listeners, "to my real hip-hop heads, please stand up, because the only ones who can preserve this art is us." [74]

The battle continues to rage over hip-hop's soul. Two contradictory forces clash to gain dominance: one representing the great wealth and power of the established order, the other struggling for independence, autonomy, and social change. Black intellectual Manning Marable makes the argument that "cultural workers," such as hip-hop artists, "must be able to do more than rhyme about problems: they have got to be able to build organizations as well as harness the necessary monetary resources and political power to do something about them." [75] To answer the question of what role hip-hop will play in the formation of such revolutionary organizations and movements depends on which side wins, the power of profit or the power of the people. For hip-hop activists to rescue the art form from capitalism's corporate clutches it will take dedication, organization, and education; time will tell if the hip-hop generation is up to this onerous task. The very essence of the culture is at stake.

Notes

[1] Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, "Origins of Housing Discrimination," International Socialist Review, Issue 59, (May-June 2008), accessed 5 April 2009; available from http://www.isreview.org/issues/59/letters.shtml; Internet.

[2] Chang, 307.

[3] Ibid., 308.

[4] Ibid., 315.

[5] Ibid., 314-5.

[6] Ibid., 367-8.

[7] Ibid., 279.

[8] Ibid., 314.

[9] Immortal Technique, "Gangsta Rap is Hip Hop," HipHopDX.com, accessed 5 April 2008; available from http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/columns-editorials/id.692/title.is-gangsta-rap-hip-hop-by-immortal-technique ; Internet.

[10] Mumia Abu-Jamal recording on Immortal Technique, "Homeland and Hip Hop," Revolutionary Vol. 2, 2003, Viper Records.

[11] N.W.A., "Straight Outta Compton," Straight Outta Compton, 1988, Ruthless/Priority.

[12] N.W.A., "Fuck tha Police," Straight Outta Compton, 1988, Ruthless/Priority.

[13] Chang, 388.

[14] Ibid., 388.

[15] Ibid., 388.

[16] Folami, 263.

[17] Chang, 292.

[18] Ibid., 453.

[19] Tupac Shakur, "Nothin' But Love," R U Still Down? (Remember Me), 1997, Jive.

[20] Urban Dictionary, accessed 5 April 2009; available from http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=thug+life; Internet.

[21] Shakur, "Tupac Resurrection Script."

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid.,

[24] Dyson, 414.

[25] Son of Nun, "Son of Nun - Hip Hop Artist and Activist," SleptOn Magazine, accessed 5 April 2009; available from http://www.slepton.com/slepton/viewcontent.pl?id=1955; Internet.

[26] Immortal Technique, "Gangsta Rap is Hip Hop."

[27] Dyson, 407.

[28] Immortal Technique, "Gangsta Rap is Hip Hop."

[29] Watkins, 36-7.

[30] Ibid., 39.

[31] Ibid., 39.

[32] Watkins, 41-2.

[33] Ibid., 42.

[34] Ibid., 2-3

[35] Manning Marable, "The Politics of Hip Hop," World History Archives, accessed 5 April 2009; available from - http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/594.html; Internet.

[36] Carl Bialik, "Is the Conventional Wisdom Correct in Measuring Hip Hop Audience?" The Wall Street Journal, accessed 5 April 2009; available from http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB111521814339424546.html; Internet.

[37] Dean MacCannell, In The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Schocken Book 1976), 153.

[38] Immortal Technique, "Watch Out," The 3rd World, 2008, Viper Records.

[39] Chang quoted in Jones, "Politics of Hip-Hop."

[40] Chang, 443.

[41] Ibid., 440-1.

[42] Anastasia Bednarski, From Diversity To Duplication Mega-Mergers And The Failure of

the Marketplace Model Under The Telecommunications Act of 1996 , (2003), 273, 275.

[43] Adam J. Van Alystyne, Clear Control: An Antitrust Analysis Of Clear Channel's Radio And Concert Empire, (2004), 627, 640.

[44] Folami, 291-2.

[45] Chang, 441-2.

[46] Folami, 300.

[47] Binary Star, "Honest Expression," Masters of the Universe, 2000, Infinite Rhythm/Subterraneous/L.A. Underground. Lyrics such as these present a challenge to the corporate gangster image: "I ain't hardcore, I don't pack a 9 millimeter / Most of y'all gangster rappers ain't hardcore neither… So what you pack gats and you sell fiend's crack / You ain't big time, my man / You ain't no different from the next cat in my neigberhood who did time."

[48] Chang, 442.

[49] Eric Boehlert, "Radio's Big Bully," Salon.com Arts & Entertainment, accessed April 5 2009; available from http://archive.salon.com/ent/feature/2001/04/30/clear_channel/print.html; Internet.

[50] Van Alystyne, Clear Control, 660.

[51] Chang, 447-8.

[52] Owen Fiss, Free Speech and Social Structure, 71 Iowa L. Rev. 1405 (1986), 340.

[53] Rosemary J. Coombe, Objects Of Property And Subjects Of Politics: Intellectual Property Laws And Democratic Dialogue, 69 Tex. L. Rev. 1853 (1991), 1862-3.

[54] Folami, 301.

[55] Mark Boyer, "What Happened to 'Vote or Die'?" Fresh Cut Media, accessed 5 April 2009; available from http://getfreshcut.com/2008/02/04/what-happened-to-vote-or-die/; Internet.

[56] Tupac Shakur, "Changes," 2Pac's Greatest Hits, 1998, Interscope Records.

[57] Zach Mason, "Hip Hop Speaks Out for Obama," Socialist Worker, accessed 5 April 2009, available from http://socialistworker.org/2008/10/28/hip-hop-speaks-for-obama; Internet.

[58] Mason, "Hip Hop Speaks Out for Obama."

[59] Nas, "Black President," Untitled, 2008, Def Jam.

[60] Lyrics quoted in Mason, "Hip Hop Speaks Out for Obama."

[61] Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, "Race in the Obama Era," accessed 5 April 2009; available from http://socialistworker.org/2009/04/03/race-in-the-obama-era; Internet. Taylor cites a study by social scientist Marc Levine from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

[62] Sylvia A. Allegretto, "U.S. Government Does Relatively Little to Lessen Child Poverty Rates," Economic Policy Institute, accessed 5 April 2009; available from http://www.epi.org/economic_snapshots/entry/webfeatures_snapshots_20060719/ ; Internet. *Research by Rob Gray. After taxes, child poverty rates in the U.S. are 26.6 percent. Black and Latino minor poverty rates are higher.

[63] Taylor, "Race in the Obama Era." Taylor notes that "Black homeownership has dropped from 49 percent to 46 percent… By 2007, 30 percent of Black households had zero net worth, compared to 18 percent of white households… Households of color lost between $164 billion and $213 billion over the past eight years… Combined, this could lead to a one-third reduction in the Black middle class."

[64] "Facts on Health Insurance Coverage," National Coalition on Healthcare, accessed 6 Dec 2008; available from http://www.nchc.org/facts/coverage.shtml; Internet.

[65] Jonathan Kozol, "Still Separate, Still Unequal: America's Educational Apartheid," Harper's Magazine, Vol. 311, September 2005, accessed 5 April 2009; available from http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2005/American-Apartheid-Education1sep05.htm; Internet.

[66] Taylor, "Race in the Obama Era."

[67] Dinesh D'Souza, "Obama and Post-Racist America," To The Source, accessed 5 April 2009; available from http://www.tothesource.org/1_21_2009/1_21_2009.htm; Internet. Pundits have already used Obama's election as an example that institutional racism does not exist in America. For instance, author Dinesh D'Souza wrote after his victory: "As I watched Obama take the oath of office…I also felt a sense of vindication. In 1995, I published a controversial book The End of Racism. The meaning of the title was not that there was no more racism in America…My argument was that racism, which once used to be systematic, had now become episodic…racism existed, but it no longer controlled the lives of blacks and other minorities. Indeed, racial discrimination could not explain why some groups succeeded in America and why other groups did not...for African Americans, their position near the bottom rung of the ladder could be better explained by cultural factors than by racial victimization."

[68] Dead Prez, "Window to my Soul," Turn off the Radio: The Mixtape, Vol. 2: Get Free or Die Tryin', 2003, Landscape Germany.

[69] Dead Prez, "Window to my Soul."

[70] Dead Prez, "It's Bigger Than Hip Hop," Let's Get Free, 2000, Relativity.

[71] Immortal Technique, "About Immortal Technique," Myspace, accessed 5 April 2009; available from http://www.myspace.com/immortaltechnique; Internet.

[72] Paris, "Don't Stop the Movement," Acid Reflux, 2008, Guerrilla Funk.

[73] Manning Marable, "The Politics of Hip Hop."

[74] Macklemore, "B-Boy," The Language of My World, 2008, Integral Music Group.

[75] Marable, "The Politics of Hip Hop."

How Capitalism Underdeveloped Hip Hop: A People's History of Political Rap (Part 1 of 2)

By Derek Ide

Disclaimer: The language expressed in this article is an uncensored reflection of the views of the artists as they so chose to speak and express themselves. Censoring their words would do injustice to the freedom of expression and political content this article intends to explore. Therefore, some of the language appearing below may be offensive to personal, cultural, or political sensibilities.

Introduction: Historical Phenomena, Hip-Hop Culture, and Rap Music

Historical phenomena never develop in a vacuum, isolated from reality; nor are they mechanistically manifested from the historical material conditions lacking the direction of human agency. Rather, historical phenomena are products of a specific environment at a particular time period that have been molded, processed, and transformed by human beings who attempt to define and control their own destiny. The culture fostered in the grimy streets of the South Bronx during the 1970s is no different. Heavily influenced by the economically and socially oppressed ghettoes, along with the echoes of the last generation's movements for liberation and the street gangs that filled in the void they left, the South Bronx provided the perfect matrix in which marginalized youth could find a way to articulate the story of their own lives and the world around them. In this historically unique context, a culture would be created through an organic explosion of the pent-up, creative energies of America's forgotten youth. It was a culture that would reach every corner of the world in only a couple decades; this is hip-hop.

Many people mistakenly narrowly define hip-hop as a particular style of music. The reality, however, is that Hip-hop is an extremely multifaceted cultural phenomenon. As hip-hop pioneer DJ Kool Herc explains, "People talk about the four hip-hop elements: DJing, B-Boying, MCing, and Graffiti. I think that there are far more than those: the way you walk, the way you talk, the way you look, the way you communicate." [1] Indeed, each component presents its own unique history, heroes, and tales of resistance; each acts as a distinct piece of a larger puzzle. Viewed in its totality, hip-hop is undoubtedly a global phenomenon, reaching across the borders of nation-states and touching entire generations. One integral aspect of this culture, familiarly labeled rap, is the musical element which combines MCing and DJing; it is "is the act of speaking poetically and rhythmically over the beat." As Black intellectual Michael Eric Dyson eloquently explains, "Rap artists explore grammatical creativity, verbal wizardry, and linguistic innovation in refining the art of oral communication." [2] The characteristic east coast sounds of New York City, the intricate Hip-hop scene in France, the nascent grime subgenre in London, and the politically charged rap developing in Cuba demonstrate just how global the influence of rap music truly is.

Hip-hop was born from the ashes of a community devastated by a capitalist economic system and racist government officials. At first independent and autonomous, it would not be long before corporate capitalism impinged upon the culture's sovereignty and began the historically familiar process of exploitation. Within a few years the schism between the dominant, mainstream rap spewed across the synchronized, consolidated radio waves and the dissident, political, and revolutionary lyrics expressed throughout the underground network would develop, separating hip-hop into two worlds. Rapper Immortal Technique frames this dichotomy in a political context emphasizing the opposition between the major label "super powers of the industry" and the "underground third world of the street." [3] Indeed, the stark difference between the commodified songs and albums pumped out by the mainstream rap industry and the creativity and resistance exemplified in the underground movement cannot be overemphasized.

Hip-hop's glamorized, commercialized image, made familiar through every aspect of pop culture and privately centralized radio stations, is viewed by some as a justification for the prevailing "boot strap" ideology derived from thirty years of neoliberal economic policies and the dominant ideological formulations supporting them. Time argues capitalism allowed for "rap music's market strength [to give] its artists permission to say what they pleased." [4] Indeed, some argue that one's ability to market a product in a capitalist society is what has allowed rap music to flourish and become as large of an industry as it is today.[5] This simplistic view, however, ignores one crucial aspect; the culture has been manipulated by a handful of industry executives for capital gain. Meanwhile, hip-hop activists who advocate for social change, formulate political dissent, and fight for economic redistribution have been systematically marginalized and excluded from the mainstream discourse. Corporate capitalism, aided by neoliberal deregulation and privatization, have stolen the culture, sterilized its content, and reformatted its image to reflect the dominant ideology. Independent, political rap containing valuable social commentary has been replaced with shallow, corporate images of thugs, drugs, and racial and gender prejudices filled with both implicitly and explicitly hegemonic undertones and socially constructed stereotypes. Hip-hop has been underdeveloped by the mainstream industry in the same sense that third world countries were underdeveloped by traditionally oppressive first world nations: it has been robbed of its content like a nation is robbed of its resources, its artists exploited like a country's labor is exploited, and its very survival hinged upon complete subservience to an established political, economic, and social institution. The following is an outline of a culture's musical resistance to subjugation by the economic, political, and social authority of American capitalism and its ruling elites.

The South Bronx in the 1970's and Material Conditions in Hip-Hop's Birthplace

Until 1979 with the release of Sugarhill Gang's six minute track titled "Rapper's Delight," hip-hop's musical component, rap, had not spread far beyond the South Bronx where it originated. To highlight 1979 as the year rap music began, however, would be a disservice to not only historical accuracy, but to any serious understanding of the roots through which hip-hop music blossomed. Comprehending the rise of a culture inevitably entails a holistic approach where the political, economic, and social institutions and conditions are analyzed to derive an understanding of their effects on the thoughts, ideas, and actions of the generation who created the culture. Therefore, the rise of hip-hop is inevitably linked with a host of changes during the 1970s to the political economy and the dominant ideology supporting it. These changes include the fading of the nonviolent civil rights movement and the subsequent black power movement, a massive restructuring from the failed Keynesian economic policies of state-interventionism to neoliberal, trickle down economics, the prodigious deindustrialization and the resulting unemployment, and the abandonment of urban spaces by government divestment and white flight. The Bronx of the early 1970s provides a paragon for such conditions and how they impacted the residents of these urban spaces; these conditions, however, were not limited to one area but were widely represented in many urban areas during this decade. Hip-hop culture, springing from such a particular set of conditions, would spread like wildfire into other areas where a similar combination of political and economic changes was rapidly advancing.

As Akilah Folami explains, "Historically, Hip-hop arose out of the ruins of a post-industrial and ravaged South Bronx, as a form of expression of urban Black and Latino youth, who politicians and the dominant public and political discourse had written off, and, for all intent and purposes, abandoned." [6] These youth were alienated from decent employment opportunities and confined to under funded schools with little community resources; New York would suffer immense job losses coupled with decreased local and federal funding for social services. [7] The South Bronx alone would lose:

600,000 manufacturing jobs; 40 percent of the sector disappeared. By the mid-seventies, average per capita income dropped to $2,430, just half of the New York City average and 40 percent of the nationwide average. The official youth unemployment rate hit 60 percent. Youth advocates said that in some neighborhoods the true number was closer to 80 percent.[8]

Such conditions would leave "30 percent of New York's Hispanic households...and 25 percent of black households…at or below the poverty line. [9] This massive loss of employment was not the only contributing factor, however. Urban renewal programs, such as the one directed by elite urban planner Robert Moses, helped fuel white flight and suburban sprawl along with subsequent capital divestment from the city. Moses would go on to plan and build the Cross Bronx Expressway, which would "cut directly through the center of the most heavily populated working class areas in the Bronx," tearing apart the homes of some 60,000 Bronx residents. [10] Utilizing "urban renewal rights of clearance," Moses and local legislators would effectively enforce economic and legal segregation of poor and working-class Blacks and Latinos whom were pushed into "tower-in-a-park" model public housing units where they "got nine or more monotonous slabs of housing rising out of isolating, desolate, soon-to-be crime-ridden 'parks'."[11] Thus, it was deep within these hellholes of poverty, unemployment, segregation, and desperation that hip-hop's first birth pangs would be felt. As hip-hop historian Jeff Chang poignantly explains, it's "not to say that all hip-hop is political, but hip-hop comes out of that particular political context." [12]

The enormous influence of material conditions on hip-hop are lucidly illuminated with the 1982 release of a song titled "The Message" by pioneering rap group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Hesitant at first to record such a "preachy" rap song by a self-titled "party group," eventually Melle Mel, the lead rapper of the group, decided to give it a try.[13] Thus, the group helped to pioneer "the social awakening of rap into a form combining social protest, musical creation, and cultural expression."[14] Although not the first to provide social commentary on institutional racism and abject living conditions, as evidenced by earlier rappers such as Kurtis Blow, Brother D and the Collective Effort, and Tanya "Sweet Tee Winley,[15] "The Message" would provide the first mainstream, commercial success to speak seriously on these issues. The immense frustration and alienation of being confined to run-down ghettoes presents itself repeatedly throughout the song. Wrapped in each and every line is piercing social commentary on the condition of America's rotting inner city slums. The song opens by describing the horrendous conditions found specifically in the South Bronx during this period but could also be applied most the nation's abandoned urban centers:

Broken glass, everywhere / People pissing on the stairs, you know they just don't care / I can't take the smell, I can't take the noise / Got no money to move out, I guess I got no choice / Rats in the front room, roaches in the back / Junkies in the alley with a baseball bat / I tried to get away, but I couldn't get far / Cause the man with the tow-truck repossessed my car [16]

The sentiment expressed in the last two lines of being unable to escape the projects is one that runs consistently throughout the history of Hip-hop. Tupac, nearly a decade later, would articulate this despair further in his song "Trapped" where he speaks to the agonizing feeling of hopelessness and anger at being segregated into ghettoes and harassed by police.[17]

Dyson notes that as rap evolved it "began to describe and analyze the social, economic, and political factors that led to its emergence and development: drug addiction, police brutality, teen pregnancy, and various forms of material deprivation."[18] The Message takes up many of these issues and more, commenting repeatedly on the terrible state of education children in the projects are confined to. One line provides an explanation of how in the ghetto one rarely gets more than "a bum education" alongside "double-digit inflation." Another verse tells the story of a young boy who exclaims to his father that he feels alienated and dumb at school, due at least in part to his teachers' attitudes towards him; as the child explains, "all the kids smoke reefer, I think it'd be cheaper, if I just got a job, learned to be a street sweeper." In this succinct rhyme, the postulation put forth by educational theorist Jean Anyon that working-class and poor students are pushed into occupations which perpetuate the existing class structure is brilliantly summarized.[19] The despair and bleakness of abject ghetto life is articulated in a rather percussive manner in the last verse, "You grow in the ghetto, living second rate, and your eyes will sing a song of deep hate, the places you play and where you stay, looks like one great big alley way."[20]

Although "The Message" was not the first social commentary on ghetto life to be produced, it was the first mainstream success to reach a broader layer of listeners and proved that socially conscious rap had an audience. By the early 1980's hip-hop had already exploded onto the scene through particular mediums in certain areas. Graffiti had already provided a way in which alienated and seemingly invisible youths could make themselves visible outside the Bronx through creative, counter-hegemonic acts that signaled to the ruling authorities they were claiming their own space. Break dancing, or B-Boying, provided an outlet for youths to engage each other in peaceful competition and while it "did not dissolve the frustrations of being poor, unemployed, and a forgotten youth, it certainly served… as a catalyst to increasing the youth led community based peace effort." [21] However, it was rap music that, arguably, would have the largest impact in the future:

At a time when budget cuts lead to a reduction in school art and music programs, and when vocational training in high schools lead to jobs that had significantly decreased or no longer existed, "inner city youth transformed obsolete vocational skills from marginal occupations into the raw materials for creativity and resistance," with "turntables [becoming] instruments and lyrical acrobatics [becoming] a cultural outlet." [22]

This cultural outlet would not remain isolated in the South Bronx for long. Neither would it be confined to simply describing the harsh reality of living in the projects.

Afrocentricity, Black Power, and Hip-Hop's New School

Hip Hop was originally honed in house parties, parks, community centers, and local clubs by pioneers such as DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash. Independent record labels were quick to pick up on the enormous buzz generated by this new street sound. Small record executives, with their ears to the street, realized that "there were potentially many more millions of fans out there for the music," but they needed a way to push it from the traditional arenas where spontaneity reigned into the lab where Hip-hop could be researched, developed, and put into radio rotation. [23] Rap had to "fit the standards of the music industry" and labels had to pursue methods which in which they could "rationalize and exploit the new product" to "find, capture, package, and sell its essence…Six-man crews would drop to two. Fifteen-minute party-rocking raps would become three-minute ready-for-radio singles. Hip-hop was refined like sugar."[24] The laws of capitalism dictated that the art form had to be commodified, manufactured, and sold to a market. After the initial commercial success of "Rapper's Delight" and "The Message," corporate encroachment would quickly invade Hip-hop sovereignty. This seminal musical format would act as a medium through which two distinct worlds would mesh; young, black youth who aspired to spit rhymes and find a way out of their seemingly despondent condition would be introduced to nascent white record executives, opening what ostensibly appeared as new, untested feasibilities to previously marginalized artists. As early Hip-hop head and B-boy Richie "Crazy Legs" Colon would comment, "it was getting us into places that we never thought we could get into. So there was an exchange there... [but] that was also the beginning of us getting jerked…that's a reality." [25]

The struggle over control of the culture would be a reminiscent theme for the next decade. Dissident rap presenting a critique of the political economy would briefly touch mainstream society in the early and mid 1980's before being stifled and ostracized. In the next few years, the crossover of rap acts like Run-D.M.C. and the rise of overtly political rap groups such as Public Enemy, along with lesser known but highly controversial artists such as Paris, would trigger intense debate over the nature of Hip-hop and the direction it was headed. Passing from the pioneering old-school, a new era of Hip-hop would develop consisting of a fresh blend of Afrocentricity, cultural nationalism, calls for a neo-Black power, and a focus on the African diaspora. It would delve into the questions of race and racism and the legacy of slavery, along with a critique of institutionalized forms of oppression and ideas of what methods could adequately challenge them. It also presented artists with the first taste of corporate control over creative expression, a tension that would remain a prominent theme throughout the history of rap music. Any definite time frame would only succeed in confining the progression of Hip-hop into arbitrary, categorical stages that lack accurate representation of the often overlapping and dynamic evolutionary process of the art. However, in the mid 1980s it became apparent that rap was burgeoning into uncharted territory.

Afrocentric rap, advocating a unique mix of cultural nationalism and Pan-Africanism, can trace its roots to Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation, an organization of reformed gang members who attempted to take back their streets through the creation of innovative cultural outlets, many of which would develop into early Hip-hop culture. Bambaataa "started to believe that the energy, loyalty, and passion that defined gang life could be guided toward more socially productive activities…he saw an opportunity to combine his love of music and B-boying with his desire to enhance community life." [26] After some initial musical success, however, tensions began to mount between Bambaataa and the man who signed him, Tom Silverman, founder of the independent label Tommy Boy Records. Bambaataa recounts, "The record companies would try to tell us what we should make, what we should do…We said, 'Listen, we're the renegades, we sing what we want to sing, dress how we want to dress, and say what we want to say."[27] This sort of outright resistance to artist manipulation worked for a time, when artists dealt primarily with small, independent stations during the nascent stages of Hip-hop's development. Later, however, when the corporate structures completely enveloped the art, it would be nearly impossible to individually challenge such enormous institutions.

Queens rap trio Run-D.M.C. "is widely recognized as the progenitor of modern rap's creative integration of social commentary, diverse musical elements, and uncompromising cultural identification"[28] into what would become known as the New School of Hip-hop. [29] Fueled by Jam Master Jay' complex, percussive beats and brilliant lyrical deliverance, Run-D.M.C. would burst into the mainstream by signing a distributing deal with Colombia records.[30] Bridging the gap between rap and rock, Run-D.M.C. appealed to a wide range of audiences from rugged, street hustlers to well-to-do white kids in a desperate search to branch out from the cultural confinement of suburbia. As their album Raising Hell rushed to platinum status, they catapulted rap music into mainstream discourse and charted a new path for commercial success. The group presented an interesting dynamic where, challenging corporate-driven consumerism with lines such as "Calvin Klein's no friend of mine, don't want nobody's name on my behind," [31] they simultaneously promoted a specific style of apparel with tracks such as "My Adidas" that would break with previous, flashily clad rap artists and forever tie Hip-hop's look to the styles of the street. Raising Hell would end with "Proud to Be Black," a track emphasizing African history and the struggle against slavery while documenting the historical progress of black people. Involving themselves in specific struggles or causes, such as doing benefit performances for the anti-Apartheid struggle, [32] they did not shy away from political issues.

On "Wake Up," the trio echoed calls for democratic participation of the masses, full employment, fair wages, and an end to racial prejudice that would be familiar to any socialist activist. They provided a glimpse of the shape a truly humanizing society could take:

There were no guns, no tanks, no atomic bombs / and to be frank homeboy, there were no arms… / Between all countries there were good relations / there finally was a meaning to United Nations / and everybody had an occupation / 'cause we all worked together to fight starvation… / Everyone was treated on an equal basis / No matter what color, religion or races / We weren't afraid to show our faces / It was cool to chill in foreign places… / All cities of the world were renovated / And the people all chilled and celebrated / They were all so happy and elated / To live in the world that they created… / And every single person had a place to be / A job, a home, and the perfect pay…[33]

The song is haunted by the chorus proclaiming that all the hopes and desires for the fanciful world articulated are "just a dream." The group switches gears on "It's Like That," citing unemployment, atrocious wages, ever-increasing bills, and the struggle to survive within the confines of a capitalist political economy. At the end of each verse they communicate their prodigious frustration manifested from the despair and helplessness prevalent in oppressed communities, leaving the listener with little hope for change: "Don't ask me, because I don't know why, but it's like that, and that's the way it is!"[34] Grand ideals aside, Run-D.M.C. ultimately did not pursue a confrontational approach to the dominant institutions in society and, thus, their commercial success in part reflects their desire to integrate into the established system rather than attempt to dismantle the established structures.

Ideas of collective social change would be articulated more thoroughly by artists such as Public Enemy. Coming from a relatively well-to-do, although still highly segregated, post-white flight neighborhood, Public Enemy's ambitions were to "be heard as the expression of a new generation's definition of blackness."[35] As opposed to artists who may record a political song or sneak a witty, politically charged punch line into a mainstream hit, Public Enemy would focus entire albums around counter-hegemonic themes reflecting their constantly evolving political philosophy. Their Black Nationalist ideology did not go unnoticed in their first album, but it would augment over time as the group developed their own conception of a new Black Power. On It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Fear of a Black Planet they delved deeply into race relations, the oppression of the black community at home and abroad, and brought into question entire institutions of society they viewed as perpetuating racism. The group also spoke openly of their support for Palestinian liberation and against U.S. imperialism. On "Bring the Noise," they challenged black radio to play their music and on "Party for Your Right to Fight" they evoked images of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and the Black Panther Party in a "pro-Black radical mix"[36] while aiming verbal invectives at J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI for their historically repressive roles against the black community.

Public Enemy undoubtedly pushed political hip-hop to a new level. Their intense, in-your-face rhymes promoted a historical revival amongst black youth previously separated from prior cultural developments and struggles of the past. However, as Dyson points out, this can lead to rappers hoping to emulate the methods of the past without a critical analysis of its strengths and weaknesses or, worse yet, to promoting vacuous calls to past movements' cultural icons intended to draw reverence without attempting to augment the organizational infrastructure required to proactively challenge oppressive institutions. Still, given the tyrannical nature of the society in which they lived, the group labeled themselves "the Black Panthers of rap" [37] as a symbolic expression of their hostility towards the system. However, the framework within which they operated, borrowing large portions of their theoretical interpretation of society to the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan, did not allow them to adopt the Panthers' revolutionary, socialist critique of the political economy. It was replaced instead with a form of black militancy aligned primarily with a narrow conception of Black Nationalism. Public Enemy would drastically differ from the Panthers who had come to reject Black Nationalism as a racist philosophy, aiming their crosshairs more broadly on capitalism[38] and arguing racism was a byproduct of that particular economic mode of production.[39] Regardless, Public Enemy's prodigious contributions to political hip-hop cannot be ignored. They fostered political discussion and pushed hip-hop to embrace black liberation. Yet, they would fail propose a cohesive, theoretical alternative or method through which this could be achieved.

Other times, political hip-hop took the form of cathartic, impulsive depictions of violence stemming from the wrath manifested within oppressed black communities. One example, Oakland rapper Paris, who adhered early in his career to a form of Black Nationalism similar to Public Enemy's, would seek a sort of lyrical revenge against individuals and institutions he found oppressive and exploitative. Through songs like "Bush Killa," where he fantasized about assassinating then President George H. Bush, he would decisively embrace a black militancy that challenged the past legacy of King's non-violence: "So don't be tellin' me to get the non-violent spirit, 'cause when I'm violent is the only time you devils hear it!" Later in the song he goes on to poignantly express his disgust with the predatory nature of military recruitment while uniquely mimicking the famous line from Muhammad Ali, [40] "Yeah, tolerance is gettin' thinner, 'cause Iraq never called me nigger, so what I wanna go off and fight a war for?" [41] Presumably due to the radical nature of his music, Paris was dropped from his record label, Tommy Boy, after parent company Time Warner reviewed the content of his album.[42] He distanced himself from the Nation of Islam, and thought that they were "more concerned with what was wrong with society than with how to change it." [43] Nearly two decades later, and still rapping under his own label, Paris would go on to develop a political stance that, while still bonded to certain aspects of his previous Black Nationalist thought, would become decidedly more working-class in its orientation, emphasizing class struggle and interracial solidarity rather than a simple black-white dichotomy.

The 1980's were, undoubtedly, a time of creativity, diversity, and cultural exploration within the musical realm of Hip-hop. Artists even tested the waters with politically significant album covers. Paris placed a potent photo of riot police choking a black protestor in his 1989 releaseBreak the Grip of Shame.[44] Rapper KRS-One, paraphrasing Malcolm X on his album title By All Means Neccesary (1988), poses on the front cover in a fashion reminiscent of Malcolm's famous photograph; Malcolm, standing with AK-47 in his right arm and peering out of the drapes with his left, symbolized the vision of armed self-defense and intellectual self-determination. KRS-One, adorned in a fashionable outfit and carrying a more contemporary Uzi, personified these principles Malcolm so vehemently defended throughout his life. [45] Chuck D of Public Enemy explains, given the group's extensive list of politically charged album covers, that sometimes "the covers were thought out more than the songs."[46] Corporate control was illuminated in this artistic arena as well when hip-hop trio KMD attempted to release an album titled Black Bastards which featured a "Little Sambo"[47] character being hung; Elektra, their label, quietly rejected the album and its politically charged album artwork.[48]

Some rappers, such as Rakim, toyed with abstract ideas of personal and spiritual development, meshed with political Islam and the elitist vision of the Five Percenters, a group who believed that a gifted five percent of the world's population was destined to fight against the exploitative ten percent on behalf of the ignorant, backwards eighty-five percent.[49] Others, like rap group Naughty by Nature, found unique ways to tie in urban culture and style to the historic legacies of the past. On one of the group's most political tracks, "Chain Remains," rapper Treach vividly explicates on the cultural significance of the chain commonly worn by black, urban youth, tying it into the past history of slavery and the prison-industrial complex:

Bars and cement instead of help for our people / Jails ain't nothin' but the slave day sequel / Tryin' to flee the trap of this nation / Seein' penitentiary's the plan to plant the new plantation… / Free? Please, nigga, ain't no freedom! / Who's locked up? Who's shot up? Who's strung out? Who's bleeding? Keep reading / I'm here to explain the chain remain the same / Maintain for the brothers and sisters locked / The chain remains…[50]

The last verse ends with an incendiary call to revolution, although the terms for which are not specifically outlined: "the only solutions revolution, know we told ya', the chain remains 'til we uprise, stuck in a land where we ain't meant to survive." Despite calls for racial solidarity and social empowerment, the violence found in poverty-stricken urban areas often followed artists into the realm of entertainment.

When violence broke out at various rap venues in 1987, the hip-hop community was quick to respond with a Stop the Violence Movement. A group of artists organized a project "that would include a benefit record, video, book, and a rally around the theme."[51] On the record "Self Destruction," a wide assortment of rappers came together to urge black youth to "crush the stereotype" and "unite and fight for what's right,"[52] by stopping the senseless violence that plagued the black community. Unfortunately, it was not a sustained political campaign and, as Jeff Chang argues, Stop the Violence "was always less a movement than a media event." [53] KRS-One, re-launching the Stop the Violence 2008 campaign in a similar fashion, disagrees, claiming Chang's interpretation is "inaccurate history and fake scholarship."[54] Regardless, media event or movement, Stop the Violence provided another example of rappers attempting to take control of their communities and control their own destinies.

New School Hip Hop was defined by its seminal, independent spirit of artists' attempts to maneuver within the confines of an ever-increasing hierarchal, corporate, top-down structure. Indeed, as Chang notes, "Rap proved to be the ideal form to commodify the hip-hop culture. It was endlessly novel, reproducible, malleable, and perfectible. Records got shorter, raps more concise, and tailored to pop-song structures." [55] The infrastructure needed to solidify corporate power over the culture was being rapidly built but originality and autonomy would not yet be completely shattered. The day would soon come, however, when creativity and free political expression would be stomped out and replaced with denigrating images of black men, as self-destructive gangsters and intellectually bankrupt drug-pushers, and black women, whose sole contribution is their sexual appeal, vigorously promoted by the dominant ideology. Generally, during this period artists would attempt to hold on "to the Black Panther ethic of remaining true to Blackness… to the people in the lower classes" while, on the other hand, rejecting the Party's anti-capitalist stance; "Rappers wanted a piece of the American pie while staying grounded to the urban culture, and wanted to speak in their own voice and on their own terms."[56] Given the political, social, and economic conditions of the mid-1980s, this was no surprise.

The sort of individualistic response exemplified by New School artists was developed within the context of a detrimental political vacuum left by the simultaneous failure and systematic repression of revolutionary left groups of the 1960s and early 1970s. Instead of political organizers, rappers would view themselves as reporters whose primary vocation was to give the voiceless a form of expression and relay the conditions of ghetto life to the rest of the world. Public Enemy articulated this concept when he explained that rap was "Black America's CNN, an alternative, youth-controlled media network." [57] Tupac would echo this concept, "I just try to speak about things that affect me and our community. Sometimes I'm the watcher, and sometimes the participant," he commented, and likening himself to reporters during the Vietnam War, he explicated on his role, "That's what I'll do as an artist, as a rapper. I'm gonna show the graphic details of what I see in my community and hopefully they'll stop it." [58] Rather than broad-reaching, collective social change achieved through organized resistance, rap music would act as a means to express counter-hegemonic, yet radically individualized forms of resistance that captured the very essence of the urban youth existence. This concept would be carried further into the realm of musical performance:

Rap…found an arena in which to concentrate its subversive cultural didacticism aimed at addressing racism, classism, social neglect, and urban pain: the rap concert, where rappers are allowed to engage in ritualistic refusals of censored speech. The rap concert also creates space for cultural resistance and personal agency, losing the strictures of the tyrannizing surveillance and demoralizing condemnation of mainstream society and encouraging relatively autonomous, often enabling, forms of self-expression and cultural creativity. [59]

It was this anti-authoritarian impulse, fostered in the hard streets of Los Angeles where police brutality was rampant and socioeconomic conditions were dire, that galvanized the next phase of Hip-hop which would take the nation by storm.

How Capitalism Underdeveloped Hip Hop: A People's History of Political Rap (Part 2 of 2)

Notes

[1] DJ Kool Herc quoted in Jeff Chang, Can't Stop Won't Stop, (New York City: St. Martin's Press, 2005), xi.

[2] Michael Eric Dyson, The Michael Eric Dyson Reader, (New York City: Basic Civitas Books, 2004), 408.

[3] Immortal Technique, "Death March" The 3rd World, 2008, Viper Records. DJ Green Lantern makes the opening remarks.

[4] Ta-Nehisi Coates, "Hip-hop's Down Beat," Time, accessed 5 April 2009; available from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1653639,00.html; Internet.

[5] David Drake, "The 'Death' of Hip-Hop," Pop Playground, accessed 5 April 2009; available from http://www.stylusmagazine.com/feature.php?ID=1525; Internet. Implicit in Stylus's 2005 article about the "death" of hip-hop is the idea that capitalism allowed for hip-hops growth. They argue the history of hip-hop cannot be separated and "well-behaved politicos with either leftist or moralist agendas" only "imagine a fictional past" since "capitalism was involved from the second it spread, from the moment a rhyme was laid to wax capitalism was there." While this is partly correct, as hip-hop developed within the confines of a capitalist society, and was thus influenced by the dominant ideological forces that perpetuate such a society, the early independence and autonomy from corporate capitalism and the art form that developed without the profit incentive, but instead for reasons of pure enjoyment (Kool Herc house parties) or political and social transformation (Zulus) shows that hip-hop and capitalism can not only be separated, but at it's earliest stages were separate entities.

[6] Akilah N. Folami, "From Habermas to 'Get Rich or Die Trying': Hip Hop, The Telecommunications Act of 1996, and the Black Public Sphere," Michigan Journal of Race and Law, Vol. 12(June 2007) (Queens, NY: St. John's University School of Law, 2007), 240.

[7] Folami, Habermas to "Get Rich or Die Trying," 254.

[8] Chang, Can't Stop Won't Stop, 13.

[9] Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America 27 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 28.

[10] Rose, Black Noise, 31.

[11] Chang, 11-12.

[12] Jeff Chang interviewed by Brian Jones, "Interview with Jeff Chang, Hip Hop Politics," International Socialist Review, Issue 48, (July-August 2006), accessed 5 April 2009; available from http://www.isreview.org/issues/48/changinterview.shtml; Internet.

[13] Craig Watkins, Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 21.

[14] Dyson, Michael Eric Dyson Reader, 402.

[15] Chang, 179.

[16] Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, "The Message," The Message, 1982, Sugar Hill.

[17] Tupac Shakur, "Trapped," 2Pacalypse Now, 1991, Jive. Tupac, who, originally just repeating stories from his peers, would have a violent run in with police not long after he released the song. Accused of jaywalking, Tupac would be knocked to the ground and have his face slammed into the concrete, leaving life-long scars across his right cheek bone. After a long court battle, he finally settled with the police department for a small sum. "You know they got me trapped in this prison of seclusion / Happiness, living on tha streets is a delusion… / Tired of being trapped in this vicious cycle / If one more cop harrasses me I just might go psycho / And when I get 'em / I'll hit 'em with the bum rush / Only a lunatic would like to see his skull crushed / Yo, if your smart you'll really let me go 'G' / But keep me cooped up in this ghetto and catch the uzi… / They got me trapped / Can barely walk the city streets / Without a cop harassing me, searching me / Then asking my identity… / Trapped in my own community / One day I'm gonna bust / Blow up on this society / Why did ya' lie to me? / I couldn't find a trace of equality…

[18] Dyson, 402.

[19] Jean Anyon, "Social Class and the Hidden Cirriculum." Journal of Education, 162(1), Fall, 1980. Online version available here http://cuip.uchicago.edu/~cac/nlu/fnd504/anyon.htm; Internet.

[20] Flash, "The Message."

[21] Folami, 258.

[22] Ibid., 257.

[23] Chang, 133.

[24] Ibid., 134

[25] Ibid., 177

[26] Watkins, Hip Hop Matters, 23.

[27] Chang, 190.

[28] Dyson, 402.

[29] Chang, 255.

[30] Ibid., 204.

[31] Run-D.M.C., "Rock Box," Run-D.M.C., 1983, Profile/Arista Records.

[32] Chang, 218.

[33] Run-D.M.C., "Wake Up," Run-D.M.C., 1983, Profile/Arista Records.

[34] Run-D.M.C., "It's Like That," Run-D.M.C., 1983, Profile/Arista Records.

[35] Chang, 249.

[36] Public Enemy, "Party For your Right to Fight," It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, 1988, Def Jam/Columbia/CBS Records.

[37] Chang, 248.

[38] Bobby Seale, Seize the Time (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1997), 23, 256, 383.

[39] Fred Hampton, "Murder of Fred Hampton, Reel 1," accessed 5 April 2009; available from http://mediaburn.org/Video-Priview.128.0.html?uid=4192; Internet. In this clip, Hampton is talking to a church crowd about how Blacks and the Black Panther Party should interact with Whites and White radicals.

[40] In 1966 Muhammad Ali, in his denunciation of the Vietnam War and U.S. attempts to draft him, explained "I ain't got no quarrel with the Vietcong… No Vietcong ever called me nigger." For more information, see here: http://www.aavw.org/protest/homepage_ali.html; Internet.

[41] Paris, "Bush Killa," Sleeping With the Enemy, 1992, Scarface.

[42] Peter Byrne, "Capital Rap" San Francisco News, accessed 5 April 2009; available from http://www.sfweekly.com/2003-12-03/news/capital-rap/2; Internet.

[43] Byrne, "Capital Rap," 2.

[44] Andrew Emery, The Book of Hip Hop Cover Art, (Mitchell Beazly, 2004), 95.

[45] Emery, Hip Hop Cover Art, 133.

[46] Ibid., 81.

[47] "Sambo" is a racial slur for African-Americans in the United States but the image of the Little Black Sambo became famous after a children's book by Helen Bannerman was published in London in 1899. The original story can be found here: http://www.sterlingtimes.co.uk/sambo.htm

[48] Emery, 112.

[49] Chang, 258-9.

[50] Naughty by Nature, "Chain Remains," Poverty's Paradise, 1995, Warner.

[51] Chang, 274.

[52] Lyrics for the song can be found here: http://www.lyricsmania.com/lyrics/krs-one_lyrics_3454/other_lyrics_10824/self_destruction_lyrics_125592.html

[53] Chang, 274.

[54] KRS-One interviewed by Brolin Winning, "KRS-One: You Must Learn," MP3.com, accessed 5 April 2008; available from http://www.mp3.com/news/stories/9464.html; Internet.

[55] Chang, 228.

[56] Folami, 263.

[57] Chang, 251.

[58] Tupac Shakur, "Tupac Resurrection Script - The Dialogue," Drew's Script-O-Rama, accessed 5 April 2008; available from http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/t/tupac-resurrection-script-2pac-Shakur.html ; Internet.

[59] Dyson, 403.