Dialectics of Hope

(Photo: Ekaterina Bykova/Shutterstock.com)

By Yanis Iqbal

The situation of the world is grim. Decades of neoliberalism - marked by the privatization of social life, deregulation of markets, increasing income inequality, labor flexploitation - has finally culminated in a politically regressive wave of right-wing resurgence. What we have now is “neoliberal fascism” - a new social formation in which the principles and practices of a fascist past and neoliberal present have merged, connecting the worst dimensions and excesses of neoliberal capitalism with the fascist ideals of ultra - nationalism and racial supremacy. Thus, in contradiction with the Right’s populist discourse, brutal processes of surplus-value extraction still occur; it is just that they have been politically re-packed through the use of archaic religio-cultural symbols to whip up mass hysteria against manufactured enemies.

The rise of the Right reflects the relations of forces in today’s world. With the technocratization of the state and party as mere appendages of neoliberal regulation, the scope for alternatives within electoral competition was drastically reduced. This led to an inter-party consensus on neoliberal orthodoxy. In this way, parties were reduced to different shades of the same economic policy with slightly varying promissory propagandas. Electoral competition, therefore, was exponentially abridged to signify a process through which people could choose different parties, all geared towards imposing austerity packages. Aijaz Ahmad calls this phenomenon the emergence of “mature liberal democracy in the neoliberal age” in which competing parties “function as mere factions in a managing committee of the bourgeoisie as a whole”. 

In a context like this - characterized by a shift in the balance of forces within the state in favor of the bourgeoisie and the installation of “policies without politics” - many people on the Left are understandably pessimistic about the prospects for socialism. The primary question reverberating loudly through the terrain of struggle is this: what grounds do we have for continuing the hard labor of sustaining a revolutionary movement in highly adverse conditions? Insisting on the indispensable presence of hope is perceived as playing with fire. However, hope is what we need. Without hope, there is no possibility of sustained engagement in a revolutionary movement. Moreover, hope for a radical re-constitution of existing societal conditions is present in the very movements of capital. In other words, we need to discover the material determinations of hope in its present mode of existence as a hidden potentiality and turn it into actuality through conscious revolutionary action.

The Origins of Capitalism

A highly schematic look at the origins of capitalism helps us to ground hope in a material soil. The present system we have was not a result of the operation of quasi-supernatural forces. Rather, it was the outcome of a (continuing) conflict between the logic of capitalist accumulation and other logics stemming from the resistance of social forces that suffer the effects of such economic processes. The separation of the direct producer from the means of production, the consequent transformation of labor power into a commodity, and the concentration of the means of production in the hands of the buyer of labor power were the contingent results of concrete antagonisms and social struggles. The interpretation of capitalism as a social form composed of unstable conjunctions of domination and resistance is elaborated by Etienne Balibar in his preface to “Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities”.

In the preface, Balibar writes: “The capitalist division of labor has nothing to do with a complementarity of tasks, individuals and social groups: it leads rather…to the polarization of social formations into antagonistic classes whose interests are decreasingly ‘common’ ones. How is the unity (even the conflictual unity) of a society to be based on such a division? Perhaps we should then invert our interpretation of the Marxist thesis. Instead of representing the capitalist division of labor to ourselves as what founds or institutes human societies as relatively stable ‘collectivities’, should we not conceive this as what destroys them?... If this is so, the history of social formations would be not so much a history of non-commodity communities making the transition to market society or a society of generalized exchange (including the exchange of human labor-power) - the liberal or sociological representation which has been preserved in Marxism - as a history of the reactions of the complex of ‘non-economic’ social relations, which are the binding agent of a historical collectivity of individuals, to the de-structuring with which the expansion of the value form threatens them. It is these reactions which confer upon social history an aspect that is irreducible to the simple ‘logic’ of the extended reproduction of capital or even to a ‘strategic game’ among actors defined by the division of labor and the system of states.”

Insofar that class struggle has a primacy over classes, the structure of a mode of production is constituted by the antagonisms it contains, notably the systemic contradiction between the forces and relations of production, and the contradiction internal to the relations of production between exploiters and exploited i.e. social conflicts between classes generated by antagonistic relations of production. If we extrapolate from our understanding of capitalism’s origins as one unified not by the uniformity of its components, but through their contradiction, inconsistency, and incommensurability, we are given the following general statement about the motion of history: history is not the working out of some plan imprinted in the nature/essence of humans. It is the result of the struggles between different and opposed classes. These struggles are structurally conditioned, but history leaves their result open. There is no natural necessity which decides which class will be victorious.

Understanding Capitalist Society

As in the origins of capitalism, the workings of a capitalist society are also deeply cut by the friction and tensions of class struggle. Following the schema developed by Karl Marx in his book “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”, we can say that a capitalist society is made up of the economic “base” and the ideological “superstructure”. It needs to be emphasized that the base-superstructure metaphor is only a heuristic device; the division of capitalist society into these two segments is only present at the analytical level. In reality, base and superstructure are inseparably intertwined; one can’t be conceptualized without the other. Can capitalism’s predatory mechanisms of exploitation survive in the absence of specific ideological codes that make human subjects accept that exploitation as being in the “nature of things”? The answer is in the negative.

The inextricable intertwinement of base and superstructure was also stressed by Marx through the conceptualization of the economy as an essentially social and historical entity, the unity of the social relations of production and the productive forces, rather than that of the technological conditions of material production. Thus, in Capital, Volume I, Marx shows how the technological development of the productive forces, rather than providing the motor for the growth of capitalism was a result of the emergence of capitalist social relations of production. The inter-imbricatedness of base and superstructure means that capitalist society is a complex totality comprising various relatively autonomous yet interrelated structural instances. The economy (which is ultimately determinant) exercises its effects indirectly, by determining the specific efficacy of other instances.

Insofar that the political and ideological instances are relatively autonomous from the economy, the formative influence exercised by the functional requirements of reproduction is neither simple nor unilateral; it is mediated by the complex, uneven and contradictory logic of the class struggle. Therefore, what we define as “structures”, namely relations that tend to be reproduced, materialized and interiorized, are also internally contradictory because of the effectivity of class antagonism and antagonistic social relations. In other words, the state and various politico-ideological apparatuses used for the reproduction of capitalism are “fields” (to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term) of conflicts. In a field, agents and institutions constantly struggle, according to the regularities constitutive of this space. Those who dominate in a given field are in a position to make it function to their advantage, but they must always contend with the resistance and contentions of the dominated.

From what we have discussed so far, it is evident that a capitalist society is a social formation of conflicting, differential, and multilayered forces constantly in flux. Furthermore, the structure of society is immanent within that uneven balance of forces, rather than transcendent on them. There are no guarantees about any practice or variation in the formation. Changes in social formations over time develop unevenly through these forces, the movements of all the combined practices and articulations of practices. Rather than a transcendent or mechanical structure imposed upon individuals and groups, the social structure in this case is tightly contained within the practices individuals and groups enact. The structure emerges. There is thus no teleogy or supervening subject in history. This view of immanent change is opposed to an understanding of capitalist society as an “expressive totality”, which involves treating the different aspects of social life as expressions of some core or basic principle. The effect is reductionism: these different aspects possess no life and movement of their own, but merely exist as indices of their underlying essence.

Marx was in favor of an immanentist theory of change. In Vol. 3 of Capital, Marx wrote: “[in] the division of…social labour and the reciprocal complementarity or metabolism of its products, subjugation to and insertion into the social mechanism, is left to the accidental and reciprocally countervailing motives of the individual capitalist producers. Since these confront one another only as commodity owners, each trying to sell his commodity as dear as possible (and seeming to be governed only by caprice even in the regulation of production), the inner law operates only by way of their competition, their reciprocal pressure on one another, which is how divergences are mutually counterbalanced. It is only as an inner law, a blind natural force vis-à-vis the individual agents, that the law of value operates here and that the social balance of production is asserted in the midst of accidental fluctuations.” Here, we can observe that structural patterns emerge not because of external regulation or command but as the result of the operation of an inner law - an immanent process. General trends, historical tendencies and regularities are not solid, law-like phenomena; they are constituted and reproduced by the daily activities of human beings. Capitalism perpetuates its existence not due to self-sustaining structures but due to the contradictory unity of myriad class-rooted practices performed by living individuals.

Reclaiming Hope

Our discussion of the origins of capitalism and nature of capitalist society should make it clear that (1) capitalism is a historically specific totality, a result of class struggle; (2) a capitalist society is a structured whole consisting of the economic base and other quasi-autonomous yet interrelated levels, with the interaction between these elements generating the matrix of the social formation. The interaction is made possible by acting individuals who reproduce structures through recursive social practices. Both these conclusions are situated in a common problematic: they emphasize the fact that history is ultimately made by individuals.

The material determinations of hope derive from this fundamental fact. Since individuals create their own history, structures can’t be considered as unsurpassable obstacles. Structures are themselves the result of social practices. To overcome structures, critical consciousness needs to be combined with revolutionary action; the glue binding them together is hope. In the current conjuncture, hope needs to be reclaimed so that the struggle to achieve socialism can be revitalized. Once this is done, the political praxis of the Left will gain the ability to appropriately problematize our structural conditionedness and pierce through the open-ended nature of history.

Calling On Action: A Review of Henry Giroux's 'Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis'

By Yanis Iqbal

Henry Giroux’s new book “Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis”, published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2021, is an informed, impassioned and insightful response to the politico-economic conjuncture in which we are living. Organized into four sections, the book discusses a variety of things: the significance of the COVID-19 pandemic for neoliberalism, the phenomenon of Trumpism, the continued relevance of fascism, and the role of education in bringing about a new world. Operating with a whole network of organically interpenetrating concepts, Giroux does not content himself with isolated terms and one-sided definitions. He is always trying to integrate the totality of particular points and phases in a dynamic movement without suppressing the existential vitality of the individual elements. It is this internal characteristic of the book which makes it a worthwhile read.

Pandemic Pedagogy

Pandemic pedagogy is one of the central themes of the book. It serves as a concentrated expression of the multiple modalities through which neoliberalism has created a reactionary ideological configuration to stabilize pandemic profiteering. Giroux writes: “Pandemic pedagogy is the enemy of critical pedagogy because it is wedded to reproducing a debased civic culture while renouncing democratic social and political relations. It is a pedagogy for which power functions in the cultural sphere to depoliticize people while replacing democratic forms of solidarity with a social order invested in ultra-nationalism, social atomization, hyper-masculinity, a war culture, and an unbridled individualism”. Pandemic pedagogy emerges directly from the various ways in which the pandemic has mapped onto existing inequalities and social injuries plaguing the American society.

Unlike liberals who consider the pandemic as a “great equalizer”, Giroux says that “Its disproportionate effects on the poor and vulnerable, especially black and brown communities, pointed to the widening chasm between the rich and powerful wealthy few and the vulnerable and precarious majority. The inequities that this crisis revealed made clear how disasters unfold through relations of power, making it easier to challenge the myth that major catastrophes such as pandemics that affect everyone equally.”

According to Giroux, the necropolitical reality of neoliberalism is concealed through the deliberate individualization of social problems: “As a politics of control, neoliberalism privatizes and individualizes social problems, i.e., wash your hands, do not sit on toilet seats, and practice social distancing, as a way to contain the pandemic. In this instance, we learned how to be safe while being depoliticized, or uninformed about the role that capitalist economies play in producing a range of ideological viruses that gut the social welfare state and public health systems, if not resistance itself”. Pandemic pedagogy is present at every level of society and has morphed into a seemingly unshakeable “common sense”. An example of this “common sense” is the discourse on pandemic education which, as Giroux says, “is dominated by a technocratic rationality obsessed with methodological considerations regarding online teaching and learning.”

Afraid that deteriorating material conditions would increase the appeal of socialist politics and strengthen the class cohesion of the proletariat, pandemic pedagogy uses conservative ideological tools to discursively decompose class. Trumpism is an example of such a tool wielded by the ruling class to continue to maintain a gap between the objective structure of class and its self-conscious subjective awareness among the people belonging to that class.

Trumpism

Giroux conducts the analysis of Trumpism in two steps. First, he posits that Trumpism is integrally interlinked to neoliberal capitalism. While reflecting on the movement of the pandemic through the medium of neoliberal social relations of production, Giroux writes: “neoliberalism could not be disconnected from the spectacle of racism, ultra-nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and bigotry that dominated the national zeitgeist as a means of promoting shared fears rather than shared responsibilities. Neoliberal capitalism created through its destruction of the economy, environment, education, and public healthcare a petri dish for the virus to wreak havoc and wide-scale destruction.”

The dense feeling of alienation engendered by the intensifying capitalist crisis provides the soil on which Trumpism grows. As the distinction between consumers and citizens is increasingly blurred by the marketization of each sphere of life, people become culturally deracinated. In a situation like this, Trumpism promised to supply these alienated masses with an identitarian anchorage, a cultural fixity witch which they can associate themselves. Insofar as Trumpism aims to satiate the emotive needs of its support base, it is based on irrationalism. Giroux delineates how such irrationalism manifests itself in Trump’s everyday performative politics: “Trump’s…language exhibited a mounting compulsion and hyper-immediacy that flattened out and vulgarized any viable notion of communication…Trump employed a pandemic pedagogy in which language became unmoored from critical reason, informed debate, and the weight of scientific evidence. Instead, it was tied to pageantry, political theater, and the consolidation of power, as well as the dictates of violence.”

Situating Trump’s politics within a wider panorama of historical processes allows us to confront it not as an individual problem but rather as a symptom of a sick society. As Giroux writes, “Cruelty is not something that can be simply personalized in the figure of Donald Trump. Neoliberalism produces its own forms of institutional cruelty through its austerity measures, its decimation of the welfare state, and its support for racialized mass incarceration.” Insofar that Trump is enmeshed in the structural conditions generated by neoliberalism, his authoritarian politics can neither be eliminated through the simple transfer of executive and legislative power to a thoroughly corrupt and corporate Democratic leadership nor through an impeachment process. Commenting on the latter, Giroux says: “The impeachment process with its abundance of political theater and insipid media coverage mostly treated Trump’s crimes not as symptoms of a history of conditions that have led to the United States’ slide into the abyss of authoritarianism, but as the failings of individual character and a personal breach of constitutional law.”

To prevent people like Trump from capturing power, we need to build robust movements capable of uprooting the conditions which make people vulnerable to the propaganda of demagogic leaders. Giroux is forthright in acknowledging this: “the criminogenic response to the crisis on the part of the Trump administration should become a call to arms, if not a model on a global level, for a massive international protest movement that moves beyond the ritual of trying Trump and other authoritarian politicians for an abuse of power, however justified. Instead, such a movement should become a call to put on trial neoliberal capitalism while fighting for structural and ideological changes that will usher in a radical and socialist democracy worthy of the struggle.”

Second, Giroux frames Trumpism within the problematic of fascism. It is important to note that Giroux does not interpret fascism in the narrow way of the setting up of a police state. Instead, he perceives it as “a particular response to a range of capitalist crises that include the rise of massive inequality, a culture of fear, precarious employment, ruthless austerity policies that destroy the social contract, the rise of the carceral state, and the erosion of white privilege, among other issues.” Since fascism is invariably tied to specific social conditions, it will not be homologous to the state structures established in interwar Italy and post-WWII Germany. Giroux is spot-on here: “Fascism does not disappear because it does not surface as a mirror image of the past. Fascism is not static and the protean elements of fascism always run the risk of crystallizing into new forms…comparisons to the Nazi past withered in the false belief that historical events are fixed in time and place and can only be repeated in history books”.

Another important feature of Giroux’s conception of fascism is its dynamic nature. He writes: “Fascism is often an incoherent set of assumptions combined with anti-intellectualism, ultra-nationalism, and a demonizing rhetoric aimed at a group singled out as different and undeserving of human rights…Fascism does not operate according to an inflexible script. On the contrary, it is adaptive, and its mobilizing furors are mediated through local symbols, as it normalizes itself through a country’s customs and daily rituals”. This argument resembles Jairus Banaji’s assertion that “fascist ideology is actually only a pastiche of motifs, it is a pastiche of different ideological currents, it has very little coherence on its own.”

When the aforementioned two aspects of Giroux’s analysis of Trumpism are combined, we are presented with the concept of “neoliberal fascism” - “a new political formation…in which the principles and practices of a fascist past and neoliberal present have merged, connecting the worst dimensions and excesses of gangster capitalism with the fascist ideals of white nationalism and racial supremacy associated with the horrors of authoritarian states.” Neoliberal fascism is not the apogee of an empty struggle between authoritarianism and democratic ideals. Rather, it is a “fierce battle on the part of demagogues to destroy the institutions and conditions that make critical thought and oppositional accounts of power possible.” With this statement, Giroux delves into an incisive study of the deep impacts of neoliberal fascism on agency.

Agency and Hope

Agency, defined as conscious, goal-directed activity, is heavily impacted by neoliberal fascism. Agency is the condition for every struggle and hope is a prerequisite of agency. With the arrival of neoliberal fascism, “the connections between democracy and education wither, hope becomes the enemy of agency, and agency is reduced to learning how to survive rather than working to improve the conditions that bear down on one’s life and society in general.” The overwhelming of hope by “the sheer task of survival” is elaborated in the book “Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously”, where Brad Evans and Julian Reid develop the new category of resilience to capture the broad contours of neoliberal asociality and passivity. Resilience, the authors say, is not about overcoming or resolving a crisis but about the ways and means of coming to terms with it. They argue that resilience teaches us to “live in a terrifying yet normal state of affairs that suspends us in petrified awe.”

The re-molding of agency and loss of hope is fundamentally aided by ignorance which renders us incapable of problematizing our structural conditionedness and piercing through the open-ended nature of history. According to Giroux, “Ignorance has lost its innocence and is no longer synonymous with the absence of knowledge. It has become malicious in its refusal to know, to disdain criticism, to undermine the value of historical consciousness, and to render invisible important issues that lie on the side of social and economic justice. Ignorance has become the organizing principle of a pandemic pedagogy that collapses fact and fantasy, truth and lies, evidence and opinion.” Ignore needs to be combated by the constant utilization of history which will make it possible to de-naturalize hierarchies and intensely engage in a movement for social justice. Whenever history is used as a terrain of struggle for hegemony, as a space for opening up to a contextualized understanding of world and as a lens to re-think and constantly evolve our own views, a new politics of memory is developed. Memory becomes an act of moral witnessing and helps to counter what Giroux calls the “bankrupt white supremacist notion of nostalgia that celebrated the most regressive moments in U.S. history.”

Need for Action

Throughout his book, Giroux refers to the imperative need for concrete action. He is not satisfied with a mere shift in consciousness or an educative endeavor aimed at empty verbosity. He is unfailingly dedicated to the construction of a movement capable of fighting against the state’s repressive and ideological apparatuses.

In an extremely important passage, Giroux writes: “I do not want to suggest…that the strength of argument can change the political balance of power exclusively through an appeal to interpretation, rationality, and the force of dialogue… Ideas gain their merit, in part, through the institutions that produce them, and as such merit the importance of recognizing that the knowledge/power/agency connection is both a battle over ideas as well as over cultural apparatuses and institutions, and the power relations that create them…Matters of critique now merge with the imperative of actions bringing together not merely critical ideas and balanced judgment, but theory and informed action.”

 A major takeaway from Giroux’s book is that the politico-strategic logic of hegemony should occupy a central position in socialist organizing. Mere academicism is totally incapable of overthrowing the bourgeois state. What is needed is the constant re-interpretation of the world in the context of struggles. Whether this re-interpretation is correct or not is decided from the practical consequences that might conceivably result from that intellectual conception. In sum, knowledge and pedagogy need to be dialectically located in the ecology of struggle where they get endlessly embodied in concrete consequences and thus, help in consolidating the dynamic of action and reflection in conversation with each other. Giroux’s book is an example of precisely that kind of knowledge-in-struggle which is singularly committed to the goal of socialism.

Notes on Revolutionary Hope

By Yanis Iqbal

Humanity stands at a dangerous crossroads: a conflict between making profits and saving human life is clearly emerging, with the latter being sacrificed by the ruling class for the former. Even during a pandemic, the cogs of capitalism have not stopped working in their ruthless rhythm; hunger, wretched poverty, wealth concentration and vaccine imperialism have all moved in a frighteningly unified way, ripping apart the remaining semblances of a dignified existence. While earlier the political architecture carved by capitalists functioned as a democratic fig-leaf, it has become completely unresponsive today. The exigencies of an extremely monopolistic form of capitalism have corresponded to a centralized mode of authoritarian control aimed at containing class struggle. The political structures we currently have are aimed at invisibilizing the empty bellies of countless children and repressing the turmoil in the tin-shack settlements of the global poor.

Capitalism’s progressive putrefaction into a nakedly brutal system of pure oppression demands the discovery of new theoretical tools. Theory can’t maintain a sense of immunity from the cadences of changing conjunctures; it needs to be firmly tied to the specific concreteness of the existing period. Today’s situation calls for a powerful resurrection of revolutionary hope. One of the many functions of the bourgeoisie’s established order is to douse the dialectical fire of hope. Revolutionary hope threatens the fatalism and deterministic thinking so prevalent today. It foregrounds the inherent ability of the working class to vehemently destroy the zones of sheer exploitation built by capitalism. By showing to the subjugated subalterns the possibilities available to them, revolutionary hope binds them to the slogan raised by the Italian socialist weekly The New Order: “Educate yourselves because we will need all your intelligence. Rouse yourselves because we will need all your enthusiasm. Organize yourselves because we will need all your strength”.

Discarding Determinism

For revolutionary hope to come into being, we need to discard determinism. Instead of dialectically locating an individual in the interconnected economic, political and cultural systems, institutions and structures, determinism considers him/her to be unilaterally influenced by it. A determinist conception is based on the dichotomous division of existence into an “external world” and “human consciousness”. In this conception, the external world and consciousness are two different components of human existence. They come in contact with each other only through causal and mechanical means. Both of them are individually isolated from one another, having been transformed into object in the technical sense G.W.F Hegel depicted as “rounded in itself as a formal totality and indifferent to determination by another.”

In response to the parcelized and static interpretation of existence offered by determinism, historical materialism offers us a framework where neither consciousness, nor the “exterior” world, has priority; we have no way of describing either of them prior to the moment of their encounter. The world is not “external” and distinct from human beings; the individual understood as “being-there” (to use Martin Heidegger’s terminology) belongs in the world by the very nature of its existence. Insofar as the world is integral to human existence, human beings can’t be understood apart from as a “being-in-the-world”. They are ensembles of social relations, closely intermeshed in their environment. Antonio Gramsci puts the point in the following way: “all hitherto existing philosophies [before Marxism]…conceive of man as an individual…It is on this point that it is necessary to reform the concept of man. It means that one must conceive of man as a series of active relationships (a process) in which individuality…is not…the only element to be taken into account. The humanity which is reflected in each individual is composed of…1. the individual; 2. other men; 3. the natural world.”

The composite constitution of an individual implies the interiorization of social determinations: interiorization of the relations of production, family background, the historical past, and the contemporary institutions. All these internalizations are then exteriorized in acts and options which necessarily refer us back to them. This means that economic structures do not cause human actions but become interiorized by humans as they act. Social relations are both the medium and the outcome of human interaction. Humans produce and reproduce social structures through their actions and these structures condition, enable and constrain human behavior and social action in society. Thus, abstract societal relations are instantiated, lived, enacted, reproduced and potentially challenged through processes of communication in everyday life.

The dynamic of interiorization-exteriorization highlights the fundamental fact that although human beings are affected by their circumstances, they are also the propelling force of history. As Jean Paul Sartre said, “Men make their history on the basis of real, prior conditions (among which we would include acquired characteristics, distortions imposed by the mode of work and of life, alienation, etc.), but it is the men who make it and not the prior conditions. Otherwise men would be merely the vehicles of inhuman forces which through them would govern the social world.” Since history has a subject (human beings), there always exists the possibility of breaking free from the shackles of contradictory forces. While structures do exist, EP Thompson states that their impact upon us can’t be understood “as pre-determined programming or the implantation of necessity, but as the ‘setting of limits’ and the 'exerting of pressures.’”

The tangible manifestations of the complex interaction between structure and agency are reflected in the base-superstructure metaphor deployed by Karl Marx in his book “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”. Widely misinterpreted as an instance of deterministic thinking, it is in fact a sophisticated conception of history, sensitive to the manifold movements of a societal totality. In a nuanced analysis of Marx’s topographical metaphor, Alasdair MacIntyre writes that the economic base of a society provides “a framework within which superstructures arise, a set of relations around which the human relations can entwine themselves, a kernel of human relationships from which all else grows…[in]creating the basis, you create the superstructure. These are not two activities but one.” In Marx’s view “the crucial character of the transition to socialism is not that it is a change in the economic base but that it is a revolutionary change in the relation of base to superstructure”.

A New Aim

Sartre defined a human being as “the totality of that he does not yet have, of all that he could have.” This definition emphasizes the centrality of the goal-directed life-activity of living individuals. A human being exists in the future, in the sense that it relates to itself in terms of the possibilities that it projects for itself. Sartre understands this to mean that human reality is limited by the aim it sets itself. It is by freely projecting the possibilities of one's existence that one determines how one sees things, what function they have, and their place in the world. This means that consciousness towards objects is made possible by consciousness’ transcendence, its power to see objects in the light of its own possibilities that it projects into the future. In other words, consciousness sees things in a particular light because of its project which surpasses current reality and, in so doing, approaches it through negation. I see the world in terms of what it could be because I see it not in terms of what I am but in terms of what I could be.

 In the current conjuncture, Marxism needs to intensively engage with the human being’s ability to engage in a conscious alteration (negation) and projection of that which is not yet real. Neoliberal capitalism has seeped into these spaces of an individual’s future-orientedness, ossifying it with its logic of fatalistic thinking. However, this does not signify a permanent closure of a radical future - in the words of Gramsci, “fatalism is nothing other than the clothing worn by real and active will when in a weak position.” Socialism needs to remove every iota of fatalism from the spaces of future so that a new aim can be constructed. This can happen only if the reality of revolutionary hope is fully recognized.

Reclaiming Hope in a Neoliberal Age

[Photo credit: Joe Brusky]

By Yanis Iqbal

In the second declaration of Havana - delivered on February 4, 1962 - Fidel Castro said, “It is the duty of every revolutionary to make the revolution.” Piercingly clear and searingly sharp - this statement demystifies our coldly scholastic and meek attitude toward socialism. In a world where leftists submissively mold themselves to the contingencies of history, Castro invites us to collectively dare for a firmly definite objective: overthrowing the bourgeoisie state. Such lucidity and precision - apart from organically integrating the ultimate goal of socialism into the planning of concrete action - foregrounds the little explored territory of hope - hope that love and solidarity will survive in the face of barefaced barbarism; hope that the masses will indignantly demand what is theirs; hope that the spirit of revolution will seep through the cracks of hunger and poverty.

Hope

The globalization of capital, the move toward post-Fordist economic arrangements of flexible specialization, and the consolidation of hyper-individualized culture has resulted in a shift from a politics of hope to one of despair. The drastic weakening of the Left has heralded a new age of defeatist literature, absolutely incapable of battling with shifting conjunctural equations. In sum, a historically informed understanding of capitalism and the immense power possessed by the wretched of the earth has given way to theoretical abstractions devoid of any sense of class struggle. What is urgently needed, therefore, is a re-affirmation of the potentialities for liberation and the crystallization of hope as an important element in the entire panorama of endless efforts.

In his book Pedagogy of Freedom, the great Brazilian educator Paulo Freire noted, “our being in the world is far more than just “being.” It is a “presence”…that can reflect upon itself, that knows itself as presence, that can intervene, can transform, can speak of what it does, but that can also take stock of, compare, evaluate, give value to, decide, break with, and dream.” Insofar that we constitute a living “presence”, we are capable of understanding structural conditionedness in depth, in its essence, detaching it from its contingent factuality, from its sheer concrete “being there”.

As human beings, we are conditioned by social relations, not determined by them; the past influences us and our actions, but does not determine those actions or what the future will bring. As soon as we grasp this fact and emerge out of our submersion in reality, we start to treat obstacles as problems rather than as givens and thus, gain the ability to act to change them as well as reflect on the consequences of that action. When we reclaim human agency, our day-to-day interaction with the existential universe acquires an element of hope: since the future is open-ended rather than closed, what we want to create always exists as a true possibility within the womb of our present society. The tomorrow which we want to see has yet to be fashioned by the transformation of today, the present reality. It is something not yet here but a potential, something beyond the barriers we face now, which must be created by us beyond the limits we discover.

Hope acts as the bond between the utopia we desire and the obscenely harsh reality we live in. It is a response to an existential reality that pushes a person forward in anger, indignation and just rage, forcing him/her to negate the ugliness of everyday life. Without hope, there is no possibility for resistance, dissent, and dialogue. It is the prerequisite for all forms of critical agency which aim to radically reconstitute our society. Hope expands the space of the possible, and becomes a way of recognizing and naming the incomplete nature of the present while providing the foundation for informed action. While despair is passive - we are the objects, closed in on by time in a way that we see as inevitable, hope is active - we exercise agency, piercing through time by seeing the alternatives, the possibilities available to us in moving beyond a particular obstruction.  

In Pedagogy of Hope, Freire says, “We need critical hope the way a fish needs unpolluted water… After all, without hope there is little we can do. It will be hard to struggle on, and when we fight as hopeless or despairing persons, our struggle will be suicidal. We shall be beside ourselves, drop our weapons, and throw ourselves into sheer hand-to-hand, purely vindictive, combat.”

Hope can never be divorced from practice and action. It is effective only when undergirded by struggle. Freire writes: “Hope, as an ontological need, demands an anchoring in practice. As an ontological need, hope needs practice in order to become historical concreteness. That is why there is no hope in sheer hopefulness. The hoped-for is not attained by dint of raw hoping. Just to hope is to hope in vain.” Thus, hope, rigorous and intellectual, requires struggle and action. It is not naïve optimism; it is critical and reflective action.

Hope must be concrete, a spark that not only reaches out beyond the surrounding emptiness of capitalist relations, anticipating a better world in the future, but a spark that also speaks to us in the world we live in by presenting tasks based on the challenges of the present time. In The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, the German philosopher Ernst Bloch argues that hope cannot be removed from the world. Hope is not “something like nonsense or absolute fancy; rather it is not yet in the sense of a possibility; that it could be there if we could only do something for it.”

The inseparability of hope from concrete struggle necessitates that it always be social in nature, rather than individual. Hope is not about individual aims, desires, or ambitions; it is beyond simply dreaming of a better day and into consciously thinking about how to work toward a collective vision. Hoping is not tied to having hope-for something, a state of mind that is closer to desire. Hope is concerned with a collective act of hope-in something, rather than with an individual future. It must be capable of producing people willing and able to expand and deepen their sense of themselves, to think of their socio-economic environment critically, to imagine something beyond their own self interest and well-being, to serve the public good, and struggle for an egalitarian future.

Utopia

Without hope, humans would despair in the face of their unfinishedness and would become immobilized. It is hope that helps in leading the incessant pursuit of the oppressed towards humanization. It is hope, in other words, that drives us ever onwards as travelers, wayfarers, seekers, in pursuit of completeness. In this pursuit of completeness, in this hope-driven search for fully realized humanity, education is extremely important. For Bloch, hope left to itself is undisciplined and “easily led astray”, taking the form of wishful, magical “meaningless hope” or, when manipulated by the bourgeoisie, a domesticated, privatized and “fraudulent hope”.

Hope may also manifest itself as passive patience while on the other it may take the form of an unfocused rebelliousness. Since such impatient hope is at risk of turning into defeatism, it needs to be bolstered by careful attention to and analysis of material data. A reckless false hope, an over-zealous hope fails to consider counter-acting forces and ends up in a welter of immobilizing frustration.

Education is, therefore, required in order to provide “contact with the real forward tendency into what is better”. By means of utopian images, hope can be educated, taught, “trained unerringly, usefully, on what is right”. Freire, too, argued that undisciplined, naïve, spontaneous hope needed education in order to connect it tightly to the project of humanization - to sharpen, clarify and illuminate its objective. The need for utopian, humanizing education is rendered all the more important because of the continual operation of dehumanizing forces. As the dominators “have nothing to announce but the preservation of the status quo”, they invariably try to cage the future and make of it “a repetition of the present”. In this context, “the struggle for the restoration of utopia [is] all the more necessary. Educational practice itself, as an experience in humanization, must be impregnated with this ideal”.

In The Politics of Education, Freire outlined what such a utopia can look like: “Revolutionary utopia tends to be dynamic rather than static; tends to life rather than death; to the future as a challenge to man's creativity rather than as a repetition of the present; to love as liberation of subjects rather than as pathological possessiveness; to the emotion of life rather than as cold abstractions; to living together in harmony rather than mere gregariousness; to dialogue rather than silence; to praxis rather than ‘law and order’; to men who organize themselves reflectively for action rather than men who are organized for passivity; to creative and communicative language rather than empty verbosity; to reflective challenges rather than enslaving slogans; and values which can be lived rather than to myths which are imposed.”

Informed by utopia, the language of hope becomes a medium of struggle of those who refuse to lose their grip on reality. This is the language of sound and sober hope, an educated hope grounded in a careful study of material conditions. Educated hope demands that the fact in which it believes be abandoned the moment concrete experience is against it. This method requires continual alertness to indicators that call hope into question and entail a change in praxis.

Faith in Class Struggle

In his book Beyond US Hegemony: Assessing the Prospects for a Multipolar World, Samir Amin states: “There are no ‘laws of capitalist expansion’ that assert themselves as a quasi-supernatural force. There is no historical determinism prior to history itself. Tendencies inherent in the logic of capital encounter the resistance of forces that do not accept its effects. Real history is therefore the outcome of this conflict between the logic of capitalist expansion and other logics stemming from the resistance of social forces that suffer the effects of such expansion.”

As is evident from the quotation, capitalism is not an essentially closed and immutable phase of history, standing above the vagaries of class struggle. Rather, it is a hegemonic arena of constant push-and-pull, open to the possibility of hope. When that hope is recognized by socialists, there emerges a “weak teleological force of open possibilities” - the belief that the collective struggle of the masses will steer the undecidedness of the world process toward a better future. Today, we need to reclaim hope so that we can navigate through the indeterminacy of history and prepare the working class for a revolutionary upheaval.

Yanis Iqbal is an independent researcher and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India and can be contacted at yanisiqbal@gmail.com

The Revolutionary Potential of Hope and Utopia

By Yanis Iqbal

We live in disconcerting times. The wealth of USA’s 643 billionaires has soared by 29% since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. On 13 August, 2020, the top twelve US billionaires had surpassed a combined wealth of $1 trillion. This year, the world’s 500 richest people have grown their fortunes by $871 billion, a 15% increase. All this while, the misery of the oppressed people has been increasing.  Due to the Coronavirus-caused intensification of income inequalities, an additional 132 million people will go hungry than previously predicted this year. Moreover, by the end of 2020 12,000 people per day could die from hunger linked to COVID-19, potentially more than will die from the disease itself. Brutally indifferent to the hunger of the oppressed masses, the transnational capitalist class has instead opted to maximize its profit. Between January and July 2020, eight of the biggest food and drink companies paid out $18 billion to shareholders - ten times more than has been requested in the UN COVID-19 appeal to stop people going hungry. While looking at the present-day conjuncture, one can’t help but remember Karl Marx’s incisive description of capitalism: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.”

The progressive deterioration of socio-economic conditions has created a situation which is objectively revolutionary. By forcing the subalterns into a state of semi-starvation and perpetual precarity, the ruling class is producing a chain of circumstances whose ultimate result will be the aggravation of capitalism’s protracted crisis. In order to understand the objective damage done to capitalism through the hyper-exploitation of the lower classes, the phenomenon of income squeeze can be briefly studied. Reduction of the working class’s income leads to a crisis of over-production since the purchasing power of the workers is not able to keep up with the pace of production. Consequently, the lack of money on the part of the working class results in a decrease in aggregate demand since the ratio of consumption to income is higher for wage earners than for those living off the surplus. Demand-reducing effects arising from the consumption side reduce output, capacity utilization and lower investment over time, further exacerbating the initial crisis of neoliberal capitalism.

Need for a New Narrative

Objective conditions in-themselves, however, don’t possess the capacity to bring about a revolution. To take an example, capitalism has temporarily and unsustainably fixed the crisis of overproduction-under-consumption through credit expansion and debt-financed spending. The fact that capitalism has continued to patch up its contradictions - in however an instable way - proves that objective conditions are inadequate for replacing capitalism. Therefore, objective conditions need the presence of another major element to produce the prerequisites of a revolution.

Proper objective conditions need to cohesively combine with subjective conditions to bring forth a revolution. Subjective conditions refer to the attainment of class consciousness by the proletariat and the consequent construction of hegemony. Class consciousness and the construction of hegemony together constitute the subjective dimension of a revolution through which bourgeoisie ideological apparatuses are subverted. Presently, the Left is primarily waging a battle on the subjective plane in order to build counter-hegemonic bases of resistance and refine the embryonic consciousness of the oppressed masses. While doing this task, it has encountered the hegemonic force of right-wing populism which is culturally re-defining the status of the subalterns and utilizing emotively expressive symbolic methods to over-power the ideological efforts of the Left. In order to institute the hegemony of socialist forces in the civil society, new cultural strategies need to be devised which can combat the influence of the ascendant Right.

Right-wing populism denotes a politico-cultural force capable of emotionally expressing the discontent of the subaltern classes with neoliberal globalization and simultaneously consolidating the power of capitalism. To do this, the Right uses a variety of tactics. It initiates a personalized politics of muscular leaders; divides society into ethnically polarized groups; and uses extra-institutional street violence and mobilizations to infuse politics with raw emotions. All these political methods share a common feature: they aim at aestheticizing politics. In his seminal essay “The Work Of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin, a German Marxist, had lucidly explained the relation between aesthetics and politics while talking about fascism: “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property.”

Right-wing populism’s emotionally energetic and politically persuasive practices are able to symbolically soothe the psychological wounds of neoliberalism. The Right’s visceral strategies stand in contrast to the emotionally dry politics of the Left. In its singular pursuit of emphasizing the economic defects of capitalism, socialist politics has renounced the effective use of varying emotions. While pointing out the contradictions of capitalism and focusing on economic issues, socialists tend to forget that the human being is incomplete, unfulfilled and laden with unrealized potentials which are the motor of human activity. Since humans are unfinished, they take recourse to repositories of subjective support comprising of emotions and ethics.

Bertolt Brecht, a communist and one of the most influential playwrights of the 20th century, had famously said: “Food comes first and then morality”. Today’s Left has misinterpreted and dogmatically followed this dictum and forgotten the dialectical unity in which food and morality co-exist. A lack of dialectical thinking on this issue has led leftists to believe that a person can exist without the presence of vivid emotions. Refuting this point, Ernst Bloch, a famous Marxist philosopher, had stated: “Human beings do not live by bread alone, particularly when they have none.” By not unifying the scientific critique of capitalism with the power of emotions, the Left has allowed the subalterns to be swindled by the expressive politics of right-wing populism which symbolically re-activates unfulfilled pasts and unrealized futures.

To counter-act the hegemony of right-wing populism, a new narrative of hope needs to be built which can soak the critique of capitalism in emotions, affections and feelings. Bloch had theorized this synthesis of critique and emotions in his magnum opus “Principle of Hope” where he made a distinction between two dominant strains of Marxism: cold stream and warm stream. The cold stream is concerned with the scientific critique of capitalism and the unmasking of mystifying ideologies. The warm-stream is concerned with a utopian revolutionary imagination which utilizes the power of emotions to produce a commitment to emancipation.

Both cold stream and warm stream should operate in a dialectical unity and the ruthless critique of capitalism should always be warmed up in the fire of emotions and affects, a fire that turns “reasons to act into imperatives to act.” As soon as both the streams are unified, a new knowledge structure is produced wherein reason speaks through the heart and guides the latter. The dialectical unification of heart and reason can be completed through the introduction of hope and utopia which produce a captivating vision of a desirable alternative, rooted in anger at the injustices of the world in which we live and infused with confidence about human possibilities.

Hope and Utopia

Utopia is omnipresent in capitalism. It is concentrated in works of mass culture and the bourgeoisie political system which many Marxists tend to flatly dismiss as concerned with “false consciousness” and thus, “manipulative”. Instead of such a uni-dimensional critique, a nuanced analysis of politico-cultural artifacts reveals that they are explicitly utopian. Fairy tales, films, theater and jokes not only mystify the consciousness of an individual but also express in abstract and idealist fashion the potentialities for a better future. On the political level, the bourgeoisie concept of citizenship not only blocks the emergence of class identities but also functions as a vision of a classless society where everyone would be politically and economically equal. A nuanced ideology critique, therefore, “is not merely unmasking…but is also uncovering and discovery: revelations of unrealized dreams, lost possibilities, abortive hopes - that can be resurrected and enlivened and realized in our current situation.”

The omnipresence of utopias in capitalism means that the oppressed classes have been silently struggling for a better world. Socio-cultural and political utopias are imperfect yearnings for what is more fully developed in Marxism and socialism. Leftists have to work with this contradictory subaltern consciousness which contains within itself the seeds of communism. By refining the nascent consciousness of the subalterns, leftist activists can form the utopia of communism. This form of constructing hegemony works with the pre-existing thought-systems to sharpen its edges and subvert it from within.  A letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge dated 1843 explicitly supports this method of constructing hegemony: “Our motto must therefore be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but through the analysis of mystical consciousness which is still unclear to itself. It will then become apparent that the world has long possessed the dream of a matter, of which it must only possess the consciousness in order to possess it in reality. It will become apparent that it is not a question of a great thought dash between past and future, but of the carrying-through of the thoughts of the past.”

The formation of a communist utopia is inevitably accompanied by the institution of hope as an important axis of struggle. A communist utopia anticipates a new future and rejects the existing state of affairs. Correspondingly, to maintain a conviction in the new future and keep on struggling against the status quo, hope needs to be firmly established as the fluid which constantly flows throughout the matrix of the communist utopia. Hope in a communist utopia is not synonymous with naïve optimism. If that was case, hope would merely become another form of voluntarism. In contrast to voluntarism, hope in a communist utopia is intertwined with the knowledge of material conditions and reaches out for a new global future while taking full account of all the pressures towards a civilizational collapse. Consequently, hope denotes a terrain of constant striving where the communist activists are familiar with the indeterminacy of their class struggle which has not yet been defeated but likewise has not yet won. In spite of this indeterminacy, communist militants continue to maintain a commitment to emancipation and derive hope from the immense power they posses. Their power emanates from a fundamental flaw at the heart of any system of domination: the dependence of the dominator on the dominated. Recognizing this fact, subaltern classes believe that they have the capability to challenge capitalism and steer historical processes in the direction of communism.

When communist utopia and hope are used as the cultural tools of a revolution, a resilient environment of social sensitivity and emotional energy is produced. In this environment, the rhythms of revolution are composed of a critique of capitalism and a forward-looking, hope-infused conceptualization of a communist society. By highlighting the obscenity of capital accumulation through a scientific critique of the existing system, rage, fury and indignation are generated among the masses. John Holloway, a Marxist sociologist, powerfully expresses the sentiment of “refusal” which is created as a result of fury and indignation: “We are the fury of a new world pushing through the foul obscenity of the old. Our fury is the fury of refusal, of stifled creation, of indignation. Who are these people, the politicians and bankers who think they can treat us like objects, who think they can destroy the world and smile as they do it? They are no more than the servants of money, the vile and vicious defenders of a dying system. How dare they try to take our lives away from us, how dare they treat us like that? We refuse.”

The loud refusal of capitalism is accompanied by the soft glow of revolutionary hope which moulds the anger of the masses into a communist utopia. With the help of this communist utopia, subaltern classes are suffused with the echoes of emancipation and act on the basis of what Marx had designated as “the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a debased, enslaved, neglected and contemptible being.” The act of overthrowing capitalism, therefore, becomes ethically grounded and rooted in the everyday emotions of subaltern people.

In the contemporary period, a re-invigorated leftist strategy – combining emotions and scientific critique – is indispensably needed as the Right intensifies its cultural techniques and effectively aestheticizes politics to satisfy the demands of the oppressed classes.  Today, more than ever, we need the presence of revolutionary hope and a well-built communist utopia capable of emotionally articulating the repressed desires and existential needs of the masses. A poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet of the Russian Revolution, beautifully expresses the revolutionary imagination which is needed to revitalize the global Left:

“We will smash the old world
wildly
we will thunder
a new myth over the world.
We will trample the fence
of time beneath our feet.
We will make a musical scale
of the rainbow.

Roses and dreams
Debased by poets
will unfold
in a new light
for the delight of our eyes
the eyes of big children.
We will invent new roses
roses of capitals with petals of squares”

DeRay Mckesson's Misguided Case for Hope

By Devyn Springer and Zellie Imani

There are two histories which have always battled each other, publicly and loudly: domination's history-the history of the class in position to dominate the masses-and the people's history, which is the history of colonized and oppressed peoples struggling and triumphing from the ground up. Between these two histories, narrative and autobiographical writings have been a key tool in correctively challenging the historical narratives placed onto oppressed and colonized people, from the era-defining writing found in Malcolm X's autobiography, to the consciousness-shaping contours of Assata Shakur's Assata. And still, one must wonder if such a definitive, important piece of autobiographical writing has come from our generation yet, or if any attempts have been made. However, as we move into a new generation characterized by celebrity activists steeped in social media rather than intellectual study, it seems domination's recent history finds a comfortable bedfellow in the work of some high-profile activists, including activist DeRay Mckesson's On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope.

Who Is DeRay Mckesson?

In an incredibly short time, DeRay Mckesson - in his branded blue vest - has become almost synonymous with the Black Lives Matter movement for many outside observers.

Mckesson is, as Mychal Denzel Smith recently put it , a frustrating figure. To people on almost all places on the political spectrum, aside from the liberal center, he is controversial. On the left he's often described as a "neoliberal" whose entanglement with celebrities and Hollywood signify a covert love affair with capitalism, and whose oversimplification of inequalities seems to be designed to cater to white liberals. In addition, those on the left have critiqued Mckesson's practice of consistently perching himself above the Ferguson Uprising, contrary to the wishes of Ferguson residents . For those on the right, DeRay's very existence as a Black, gay activist speaking against police violence has opened him up to the violence of racist trolls, harassment and ad hominem diatribes.

In the thick aftermath of the Ferguson uprising, Mckesson and other celebrity activists like Shaun King and Johnetta Elzie became online beacons who shared images, videos and articles related to protests taking place around the country. As their followings grew, organizers around the country waited for something; a manifesto, a plan, a political framework, a radical beginning. Years later, upon the announcement of the publication of On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope, many believed this would be it - an etching of futures imagined.

The False Dichotomy of Reform vs. Revolution

Black resistance has occurred at every stage in American history. Liberty, the right to act according to one's own will, was denied to Black people, and the conditions Black people suffered from the state during the periods of slavery and its afterlife have developed radical tendencies within our community. As C.L.R. James said, "What Negro, particularly below the Mason-Dixon line, believes that the bourgeois state is a state above all classes, serving the needs of all the people? They may not formulate their belief in Marxist terms, but their experience drives them to reject this shibboleth [principle] of bourgeois democracy." Ultimately, the Black Experience is one which constitutes an ongoing struggle by Black people to both ideologically and physically challenge and free themselves from exploitation and domination. The goal of many social struggles is freedom, but, for McKesson, the "goal of protest" is simply "progress."

In his collection of essays, McKesson limits the radical capacity of protest by merely defining it as an activity that "creates space that would otherwise not exist, and forces conversations and topics into the public sphere that have been long ignored." But protest, or more accurately direct action, is more than that. Direct action can refer to various forms of activities that people themselves decide upon and through which they organize themselves against injustice and oppression. They are processes of self-empowerment and self-liberation. Through direct actions individuals collectively seek to end, or at the very least, reduce harm inflicted by oppression and exploitation. For example, what W.E.B Du Bois described as a "general strike against slavery" was not an attempt to create space for further national debate on the humanity of enslaved Africans, but an extraordinary attempt by enslaved Africans to be actors in their own liberation. The Harlem rent strikes of 1934, the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Mississippi Summer Project were not about forcing conversations, but forcing concessions and transformations of society.

Unfortunately, McKesson consistently both romanticizes and ill-defines protest. By narrowly reducing direct action to "protest" and divorcing it from its rich legacy of revolutionary theory and tactics, he boldly makes assertions that are at odds with both history and reality.

In the essay, "Taking the Truth Everywhere," Mckesson confuses criticisms of reformism with criticisms of reforms. He first claims his more radical opponents "decry reform as a weakening of the spirit of protest." He then goes on to say, "A radicalism that at its heart is about dismantling the status quo in favor of an unimagined 'better future' is not in fact radicalism but a cold detachment from reality itself."

However, the struggle around immediate issues and reforms is not the same as reformism. Within both the Marxist and broad anarchist traditions are views that stress the necessity of creating popular movements built through struggles around reforms: concrete changes in policy and practices that improve people's lives and mitigate harm. Reforms that are won from below can not only improve popular conditions, but also strengthen radical mass movements by developing confidence and building capacity among individuals and political organizations. Nineteenth-century Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta said, "We shall carry out all possible reforms in the spirit in which an army advances ever forwards by snatching the enemy-occupied territory in its path." Revolution isn't a spontaneous event. It's a process of self-realization, self-organization and self-liberation through education, community building and direct action. The pursuit of incremental reforms absolutely has a place in radical activism.

Not only does he seem to intentionally misunderstand the concepts of protest and "radicalism," Mckesson also seeks to utterly delegitimize the entire idea of revolution or revolutionary action. By painting an image of the left that sets up a false dichotomy between leftist organizing and reforms, he makes the opposite of reformism seem idealistic, unrealistic, sophomoric. The distinction he misses, however, is simple: to support immediate reforms is not the same as being reformist.

In the recent nationwide prison strike, for example, the most vocal and ardent supporters of the strike were prison abolitionists such as ourselves who are against the notion that prisons can be reformed in a way that would turn them into a positive force. Instead, we struggle to win what abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls non-reformist reforms - reforms that produce "systemic changes that do not extend the life or breadth of deadly forces such as prisons."

As abolitionists, we also understand the need to meet the immediate needs of those facing the brunt of violence from the prison machinery, and thus we support each demand from the prison strike organizers while knowing we must continue to build momentum toward its abolition.

The Choreography of Racism Is Structural, Not Just Interpersonal

The book, which is a collection of mostly brief essays composed into chapters, covers a wide range of subjects in a surprisingly narrow scope, with personal experience rather than researched analysis guiding each topic. Throughout its entirety, glaringly oversimplified and intentionally reductive descriptions are put forth on several key topics.

"I understood whiteness before I had the language to describe it," Mckesson states early into the book. However, most of what follows shows the opposite. He describes whiteness as an "idea made flesh", and confers that the lifeblood of this "idea" is situated within a power dynamic. Moreover, even while mentioning the idea of whiteness being sustained by "manipulating systems and structures," Mckesson promotes a notion that whiteness, and thus race, are mostly a relation of individual problems and choices.

This "understanding" of whiteness leads to Mckesson reducing the entirety of whiteness to one main point: white privilege. Whiteness, for Mckesson, is a set of mostly interpersonal privileges manifest in communities that sets white people as "the norm" and others as deviation from that norm. Using an analogy of purchasing rulers for a middle school classroom to describe how whiteness "perpetuates harm," Mckesson illustrates a story of two sets of kids in the same classroom: those who had defective rulers, and those who had the correct ones. From there, he moves on to portray racial economic or social gaps as a case of happenstance or accidental defectiveness rather than intentional alignment of oppressive structures. This analogy, one of many throughout the book, simply falls flat, and we're shown a fatally flawed understanding of whiteness as something that is personal and possibly even coincidental, not structural or oppressive.

The most basic look into the works of David Roediger, W.E.B Du Bois, bell hooks, Theodore W. Allen and Nell Irvin Painter, as well as Toni Morrison and James Baldwin (names that appear in any serious inquiry into whiteness studies), will elucidate the many flaws with understanding whiteness in these terms. Whiteness is not just an idea, nor is it the phenomenal response to a set of choices; it's a construct rooted in the legacies of Western colonization, chattel slavery and capitalism. If those are the sets of choices Mckesson vaguely refers to when he says that "white people benefit from a set of choices in the past that still have an impact today," then the lack of mention of what those "choices" actually were, is wildly belittling. Moreover, speaking of such grand and oppressive structures such as chattel slavery and colonization in terms of "choices" reduces the harm of these things to the level of personal guilt and eclipses the fact that these were not chosen options but rather the bases our entire current capitalist state is built on. Above all else, whiteness is a relation to the means of production - the mechanisms, land, capital and resources to produce goods - and a more distant proximity to state violence. As intellectual Theodore W. Allen put it, whiteness is a "ruling class social control formation," not just a "privilege." Why are these terms all missing from his text?

In one of the more lucidly misguided moments of the text, Mckesson bases his definitions of racism and white supremacy on this (mis)understanding of whiteness. He states that racism is "rooted in whiteness," while rejecting the notion that class interests could play a chief role in racism's roots.

To assert that racism is rooted in whiteness is to completely misunderstand both the beginning and current reasons of racism. As Mckesson previously states, whiteness is situated within a power dynamic. Under capitalism, what is the actual "power" of that dynamic? Capital. Racism is not "rooted in whiteness." It is rooted in exploitation and domination, which are predicated on capital. As historian Walter Rodney put it, "it was economics that determined that Europe should invest in Africa and control the continent's raw materials and labor. It was racism which confirmed the decision that the form of control should be direct colonial rule."

Troublingly, Mckesson flat-out denies the instance of "self-interest or economics" as being foundational to white supremacy or racism. He states:

"There was a time when I believed that racism was rooted in self-interest or economics-the notion that white supremacy emerged as a set of ideas to codify practices rooted in profit. I now believe that the foundation of white supremacy rests in a preoccupation with dominance at the expense of others, and that the self-interest and economics are a result, not a reason or cause. I believe this because of the way that white supremacy still proliferates in contexts where there is no self-interest other than the maintenance of power."

Mckesson attempts to define the large ideas of racism and whiteness without interrogating the decades of work that has been done in this field. Discussing structures of oppression without mentioning their roots in capitalism-while simultaneously mentioning "power dynamics" and perpetually unnamed "systems"-is both bewildering and dishonorable.

First is the notion that racism and white supremacy act independent of class, which is simply untrue. To mention the maintenance of "power" under capitalism is to mention class; to mention a claim to domination is to mention class interests. The places where Mckesson engages with terms like "economics," "self-interest" and "power" could be instances of insight, but instead intentional vagueness takes place. He never names what racism's "power" actually is under capitalism, which is to own property, to own capital, to exploit workers, to dispose of or "disappear" those deemed as surplus laborers, and to define and name violence. As revolutionary writer Frantz Fanon once put it, racism's power is in its ability to achieve "a perfect harmony of economic relations and ideology."

Second, the omissions in the approach to these passages on race and racism are glaring. The truth is that there exists a wealth of work that Mckesson never cites, engages, or even challenges. While reading, one wonders why the crucial works of so many activists, authors, scholars and thinkers who've struggled in this field of work over the years have been completely disregarded by Mckesson.

So why, then, is Mckesson fixated on the notion that racism is a purely individual set of choices rather than an intentional division of class and tool of social control? Racism is a potent means of codifying the interests of white capital, and white people are "preoccupied with dominance" because dominance carries social and financial benefits. However, the wages of whiteness are that, even when it defies the class interests of the ones seeking to uphold it, it will still be maintained; white people will vote and act against their own class interests for the sake of maintaining whiteness, as seen in the last presidential election.

Hope for What?

The most frustrating part of the book may be the constant pithy messages of hope and liberation. Not that hope is a bad thing, and that optimism of the will, as Antonio Gramsci once stated, shouldn't be the founding blocks of our political organizing. What does become apparent throughout the entire book, though, is that Mckesson doesn't quite know what he's "hoping" for, if anything at all. "The case for hope" remains a vague, aimless case that he never articulates beyond self-aggrandizing Instagram-caption-friendly lines.

Hope, as a vehicle for change, as an organizing tool, as a rallying cry and connecting force, is only as powerful as it is defined and aimed. Some are organizing for socialism, others specifically for a living wage, prison abolition, ending US imperialism, free education or health care, environmental justice, and so forth. So, what is it that Mckesson's "case for hope" is aiming toward?

In the chapter, "The Problem of Police," a well-written and standout chapter in the book, we're given a detailed look into Mckesson and others' work chronicling instances of police violence into a national database, and we're shown the massive faults of our policing system, from body cameras to a lack of a database for recording instances of police violence or a mandatory process for reporting them. Still, the essay ends with a message on "making different choices" and no mention of abolition, or even any relevant reforms to the policing system Mckesson spent the previous pages dissecting.

Is this the future of our movements? Naming problems without creating solutions and calling for hope, but a hope that is empty - void of optimism, of the will to do, to change? Maybe Mckesson doesn't name what he is "hoping" for because he's afraid it will alienate some portion of his massive-and growing-following. Maybe what he is hoping for is too radical for many, or too reformist for many others. Either way, if this book was meant to outline the "other side of freedom" as the name entails, it misses the mark by a long shot.

This article was originally published at Truthout . Reprinted with permission.