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Palestine: The Human Cost of Capitalist Exploitation

By Peter S. Baron

 

As the genocide in Palestine continues, we must confront the stark reality of American involvement. American taxpayer money is funding a continuous supply of bombs and war technology to Israel, weapons that are being used to kill Palestinians. Despite the political posturing, the U.S. government’s unwavering stance isn't about moral high ground or justice — it's about cold, calculated geopolitical and capitalist interests.

 

Escalation and Brutality Since October 7th, 2023

Since October 7th, 2023, Israel’s brutality in Gaza has escalated to unimaginable levels. Families have been torn apart, homes reduced to rubble, and entire communities shattered. The death toll is over 45,000, including more than 41,000 civilians, 15,620 children, and 10,173 women, according to Euro Med Monitor. When including “indirect deaths,” the Lancet estimates the true death toll is likely upwards of 186,000 people. With countless bodies buried under 40 million tons of rubble, the true number may never be known.

Children, who should be playing and learning, are instead facing death and destruction. Roughly 80% of Palestinian children have reported emotional distress and trauma. Think back to when you were a child, say nine years old. Could you imagine living in such a dystopian reality? According to UNICEF, at least 17,000 children have been orphaned or separated from their families. Over 2,750 people have been detained or forcibly disappeared by the Israeli Defense Force, leaving families in anguish and communities in fear.

Israel’s constant bombardment has left over 86,200 injured, overwhelming Palestine’s already crumbling healthcare system. The injured and sick have been abandoned with nowhere to go as over 30 hospitals, 100 clinics, and 275 ambulances have been targeted and destroyed by Israeli strikes. Health professionals, who should be saving lives, are themselves becoming casualties, with over 486 killed and 640 injured. Civil defense workers, crucial for emergency response and rescue operations, have not been spared, with over 259 killed or injured.

Palestine is being suffocated under a wave of deliberate, calculated suffering. A million people are gasping for air with acute respiratory infections, 577,000 are writhing in agony with severe diarrhea, and 107,000 are battling acute jaundice. Over 100,000 people are being devoured by scabies, 65,000 are enduring the relentless torment of skin rashes, 12,000 are passing blood through their bowels in sheer agony, and 11,000 children are suffering from chickenpox in conditions that are nothing short of hellish.

And it doesn't stop there. Hundreds are gripped by mumps and meningitis, diseases that thrive in the chaos and despair deliberately inflicted upon this population. The threat of a polio outbreak looms, like a vulture waiting to feast on a community already pushed to the brink.

Gaza has tragically become a vast graveyard, a land where the living walk among the dead, buried hastily and in desperation as the relentless bombardment continues. Once vibrant neighborhoods have been reduced to fields of graves, where bodies are laid to rest in backyards, beneath staircases, and along roadsides. Cemeteries overflow, and morgues can no longer contain the sheer number of the dead. The ground is dug up repeatedly, with graves being made on top of graves as space runs out. In some places, graves themselves have been destroyed by Israeli airstrikes, leaving bones and remains scattered and exposed. The once sacred rituals of honoring the dead have been replaced by hurried, makeshift burials, often without the dignity of proper rites. Gaza has become not just a place of death, but a symbol of the utter devastation and inhumanity that has turned an entire territory into one massive, sorrow-filled cemetery.

Israel has completely destroyed over 141,920 Palestinian homes and partially damaged another 312,000, displacing at least 1.7 million people out of a population of 2.2 million. Can you fathom such enormous numbers? What about the terror of losing your home, your loved ones, and your sense of security, repeatedly over the course of eight long months? This mass displacement has left countless people without shelter, food, electricity, or basic necessities. Families are huddling in makeshift shelters, clinging to the hope of survival amidst relentless attacks.

Over 180 press headquarters, 2,500 industrial facilities, 460 schools, 690 mosques, 3 churches, and 200 heritage sites have been destroyed or damaged. This is the erasure of the history, culture, and identity of an entire people. This genocide has been the deadliest event on record for journalists in decades. Deliberately targeting reporters, killing over 140, aims to silence the truth and blind the world to the atrocities being committed.

The blockade on Palestine, which has been in place since 2007, has been elevated to a “complete siege,” significantly restricting the flow of food, water, electricity, humanitarian aid, and medical supplies ensuring that Palestinians remain trapped in a cycle of poverty, dependency, and despair. Israeli Minister of National Security, Ben-Gvir, even went so far as to assert, “The only thing that needs to enter Palestine are hundreds of tons of explosives from the Air Force, not an ounce of humanitarian aid.” This blockade, justified under the guise of security, is in reality a brutal economic stranglehold designed to cripple the region and maintain geopolitical dominance.

The justifications for the blockade of Palestine, particularly claims like those highlighted by commentator Steven Bonnell, known online as "Destiny," that Hamas uses sugar from imported soda and sweets to manufacture rockets, are patently absurd. They insult the intelligence of the global community. The implausibility of using common sugar for military rocket propulsion is glaring. It belies established chemistry.

The real motivation for blocking basic goods is to make Palestine uninhabitable. The tactic of deliberate deprivation carried out by Israeli elites with American support coerces the Palestinian population into leaving their homeland behind or suffering intolerable living conditions, thereby clearing the way for further territorial control. Israeli Colonel Yogev BarSheshet revealed as much, saying, “Whoever returns here, if they return here, will find scorched earth. No houses, no agriculture, no nothing. They have no future.”

The United States’ steadfast support of Israel’s manipulative use of basic human needs for geopolitical ends demonstrates a profound disregard, if not contempt, for the humanity of Palestinians. The death and devastation are not “mistakes.” This is a calculated campaign of destruction and control.

 

Economic Interests and Military-Industrial Complex

The United States’ unwavering funding for Israel’s actions in Palestine is driven by a web of economic, political, and ideological factors that prioritize profits and power over human lives.

The U.S.-Israel partnership is not just about direct military might; Israel's intelligence capabilities provide the U.S. with critical insights into Middle Eastern geopolitics, preempting threats to American economic dominance while generating profits for the elite.

Israel's advancements in cybersecurity, defense, and agriculture are exploited by U.S. industries to create profitable joint ventures and innovation hubs that benefit the wealthy few. The Iron Dome missile defense system, a joint U.S.-Israel project, is lauded for safeguarding Israeli cities, but it primarily serves to bolster the military-industrial complex, allowing U.S. defense companies to gain insights and innovations that they can apply to other projects. For example, the Iron Dome has introduced cutting-edge technology in missile interception, which the U.S. likely integrates into its own defense systems.

Of course, the production and maintenance of the Iron Dome system generate significant profits for U.S. defense contractors involved in the project. The Israeli corporation Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and the U.S. corporation Raytheon have joined up to produce Iron Dome components and systems within the U.S. The partnership is propped up by over $7 billion in U.S. investments allocated to Israeli missile defense programs since the early 1990s.

The U.S. provides Israel with billions of dollars in military aid annually, which Israel then uses to purchase advanced weaponry and technology from American defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing. Outside of corporate executives, major shareholders, and a limited number of employees directly involved in the defense industry, very few people benefit from investments in these companies.

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Overall, about 61-63% of Americans own some form of stock, either directly or indirectly through mutual funds, retirement accounts, and other investment vehicles. Given the widespread investment in major indexes and mutual funds, which often include shares of these large defense companies, it is likely that a substantial portion of Americans who own stock indirectly hold shares in defense companies. For instance, many popular index funds and ETFs that track the S&P 500 or other major indexes include shares of these top defense contractors. However, this figure is misleading when it comes to the actual distribution of wealth. As of the third quarter of 2023, the top 10% of Americans held 93% of all stocks — the highest level ever recorded. In stark contrast, the bottom 50% of Americans held just 1% of all stocks. This means that despite a majority of Americans technically owning stock, most people see very little financial benefit from the market, including any profits gained by defense companies. The economic and social costs of military engagements disproportionately impact the majority, who gain almost nothing from the stock market despite their indirect involvement.

 

The Stable-Unstable dynamic

More broadly, the relationship with Israel is vital for U.S. companies aiming to access, dominate, and control the Middle East's abundant resources — namely, oil and natural gas. Despite the U.S. achieving energy independence, regional “stability” remains crucial for the elite, because it allows them to maintain control over global energy prices, secure profitable trade routes, and preserve their geopolitical dominance, all of which protect their economic and strategic interests on a global scale.

Israel’s US funded military capabilities aims to prevent conflicts or political upheavals that could disrupt the U.S.’ dominance over the flow of oil and other goods through critical chokepoints like the Suez Canal and the Strait of Hormuz, which are essential for maintaining global trade routes. According to Israel, for example, Israel’s Shin Bet — its FBI equivalent —  has foiled adversarial plots aimed at key targets, preventing attacks that could have disrupted global oil supplies.

But let’s be clear, what the elites seek to foster is not peaceful stability, but rather controlled instability.

Regional stability is essential in key areas like oil flow and trade routes because it ensures that oil and goods keep moving smoothly, without sudden disruptions that could hurt the profits of the elite. Stability here means oil tankers safely passing through shipping lanes without threats of piracy or war, and goods flowing from factories to markets without delays. Governments in these regions need to be cooperative, keeping things calm and under control so that business can continue as usual.

But in other regions, controlled chaos is part of the strategy. By stirring up conflict and instability in countries like Iraq, Syria, and Libya, the U.S. prevents any one country or group from becoming powerful enough to challenge American dominance. This kind of instability looks like ongoing civil wars, governments struggling to maintain control, and communities torn apart by violence. These conditions keep local leaders too busy trying to survive to focus on resisting U.S. influence or forming alliances with America’s rivals.

In this way, the U.S. ensures that no single country in these regions becomes strong enough to disrupt American interests. Instead, these countries remain weak, divided, and dependent on U.S. military aid and economic support to stay afloat. The chaos keeps them in check, while the stable regions keep the oil and goods flowing—both serving to maintain U.S. power and control in the world.

Therefore, what the elites truly seek is a balance: stability where it protects their economic interests and controlled instability where it ensures their geopolitical dominance.

 

Selective Stability, Controlled Instability

The U.S.-Israel military presence in the Middle East serves as the iron fist behind the smooth flow of oil and goods, ensuring that nothing disrupts the relentless pursuit of profit. Oil tankers, loaded with crude, glide through the Persian Gulf under the ever-watchful eyes of American and Israeli warships, their safety guaranteed by the threat of overwhelming force. These tankers are the arteries of the global economy, and the military presence ensures that they deliver their cargo without interruption. The calm waters mask a brutal reality: this enforced stability exists solely to protect the profits of oil magnates, ensuring that every drop of oil fuels the capitalist machine, keeping the elite firmly in power.

On land, the same dynamic plays out with trade routes from factories in the East to markets in the West. U.S. and Israeli forces act as enforcers, maintaining a system where compliant governments keep their populations in check, ensuring no disruption disturbs the flow of goods. This military presence suppresses any threat to the status quo, propping up regimes that prioritize business as usual over human rights.

Simultaneously, the U.S. military presence in the Gulf keeps the Middle East in perpetual turmoil. Israel's airstrikes on Hezbollah targets aren’t about self-defense—they’re about throwing gasoline on the fire. When bombs rip through crowded neighborhoods, it’s not just militants who suffer; it’s entire communities—families gathered around dinner tables, children laughing in the streets—obliterated in an instant. This isn’t collateral damage; it’s a strategy. The more destruction, the more Hezbollah is provoked, ensuring a vicious cycle of retaliation that justifies yet another wave of attacks. This relentless violence keeps the region seething with rage, just the way the arms dealers like it. With every missile launched, stock prices for American defense contractors soar, profits stained with the blood of innocents.

Saudi Arabia’s onslaught against the Houthis is no different. These so-called "precision" airstrikes routinely tear apart schools, hospitals, and marketplaces—places where everyday people go to survive, to live. But that’s exactly the point: to turn Yemen into a landscape of despair, ensuring it remains a theater of war. The more catastrophic the situation becomes, the more Saudi Arabia clings to American military support, feeding into the U.S.'s grand design. The bombs don’t just destroy buildings—they destroy any chance for peace, ensuring Yemen remains a battlefield where only the arms dealers prosper.

When local governments are weakened by instability, they become more desperate, more willing to sign deals that favor U.S. companies, especially in resource extraction and trade. These companies swoop in, exploiting the disarray to secure access to valuable resources at bargain prices, all while the region burns. Meanwhile, the ongoing turmoil makes it nearly impossible for rival powers like Russia and China to establish a stable presence or secure long-term investments. Every time they try to establish a foothold, the instability disrupts their plans, forcing them to pull back or lose billions in failed ventures. This ensures that U.S. interests face no real competition in the region, keeping American dominance secure.

The paradox of U.S. policy lies in using instability to achieve a form of controlled stability. By periodically destabilizing the region, U.S. elites maintain a balance of power that prevents any one nation from becoming too powerful while ensuring ongoing dependence on U.S. support.

Palestine isn't just a footnote in this power-hungry game; it's a centerpiece. The capitalist elite know that crushing Palestinians will ignite resistance, not just in Palestine but across the entire Middle East. And that's exactly what they want. This turmoil becomes the perfect excuse for Israel to beef up its military, all under the guise of "security," funded by billions of U.S. dollars. Every act of Palestinian defiance is twisted into a justification for Israel's brutal military machine, which the U.S. gleefully supports because it keeps their imperial ambitions alive.

“Orientalism” (as understood by Edward Said) provides further pretext for the atrocities in Palestine. Arabs and Muslims are depicted by corporate media and bad-faith social media personalities as violent, backward, and a threat to Western civilization, which views itself as rational and enlightened. This dehumanization makes it easier to justify and carry out extreme violence against them. The Israeli government speaks of fighting “human animals,” making Palestine a “slaughterhouse,”  and “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.”

The skeptics among us might wonder, "Even if we are being overly destructive, isn't the core of this foreign policy in our best interests?" After all, our politicians constantly assure us that our military actions are meant to protect us and enhance our security.

No. This policy doesn't protect us; it undermines our security. The “stable instability” American elites create fosters resentment and extremism, breeding terrorist groups that then target innocent civilians, including us. The CIA has admitted that such actions generate significant "blowback," leading to increased threats that culminate in loss of lives. The fear and threats generated by our aggressive foreign policy lead to the erosion of our own civil liberties through measures like invasive airport security. One study demonstrated that despite spending over $550 million on TSA screening equipment and training, TSA agents failed to detect a threat in 67 out of 70 mock tests. This means that in 95% of the trials, the TSA missed planted threats. The elite are sacrificing our privacy and rights in the name of a security that remains elusive.

 

Elite Manipulation of Politicians

Historically, politicians have never hesitated to carry out the elite’s killing missions in exchange for political funding. The situation here is no different. The Israel lobby’s influence in the United States plays a significant role in maintaining this status quo. Powerful lobbying groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) exert tremendous influence over U.S. politicians. Through campaign contributions and political pressure, these groups ensure that U.S. policies remain staunchly pro-Israel. Politicians, driven by the need to secure campaign financing and re-election, often align their policies with the interests of these lobbies.

Despite its relatively small financial contributions compared to other donors, AIPAC strategically targets key lawmakers to maximize its impact. By lobbying, fostering close relationships with politicians, and forming strategic alliances and partnerships with various interest groups, political entities, and organizations to advance their policy goals and support for Israel, AIPAC ensures that legislators align with its pro-Israel agenda.

Furthermore, AIPAC uses intimidation tactics, threatening to support challengers against incumbents who do not toe the line, thereby coercing politicians to adopt its views. Recently, the anti-Zionist Democrat Jamal Bowman lost his primary to Zionist candidate George Latimer, who received over $15 million from AIPAC in the most expensive primary race ever. Politicians witness the political fallout in races like NY-16 and quickly learn the severe consequences of defying the Israel lobby. This creates an oppressive environment where fear of backlash forces compliance, transforming the political landscape into a monolithic echo chamber where Zionism is the only acceptable stance.

 

The Cycle of Violence and Exploitation

Remove all the moral platitudes and justifications for our actions and what we are really talking about here is an obscene, ruthless pursuit of power and money, where the deaths of children and the destruction of homes are built into the business model. The elite have their sights set on Gaza today, with plans that starkly illustrate their predatory strategies. Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former senior advisor, highlighted the "very valuable" potential of Gaza's waterfront properties. In a revealing interview at Harvard University, Kushner suggested Israel should remove civilians from Gaza to "clean up" the area.

Israeli real estate developers, such as Harey Zahav, have proposed building beachfront properties over the ruins in Gaza, which have been heavily bombarded. Constructing settlements on the remains of demolished Palestinian homes evokes the harrowing history of the Nakba, during which over 500 Palestinian towns and villages were systematically destroyed by Zionist militias. Israeli General Elad Peled described the war crimes he committed during the Nakba, saying “we entered the village [and] planted a bomb next to every house.”

Ultimately, the more successful Israel is in wiping out Palestinians, the stronger the U.S.-Israeli stranglehold on this region becomes. More land becomes available to exploit, to expand settlements, and to control strategic trade routes, such as the Suez Canal where 30% of the world’s shipping containers must pass through and the Bab el-Mandeb strait where six million barrels of oil pass through every day.

The Zionist leaders of years past were clear about their intentions. In 1948, the founder and first prime minister of Israel David Ben-Gurion said, “We must do everything to ensure [the Palestinians] never do return.” Moshe Sharret, the second prime minister, agreed, stating, “We… have come to conquer a country from the people inhabiting it.” Chaim Weizman, the first president of Israel, analogized Palestinians to “the rocks of Judea” — “obstacles that have to be cleared on a difficult path.”

At its core, Zionism is a capitalist project. It is about turning land — what should be communal — into a commodity for private profit. The Jewish State, a pamphlet written by the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, admits as much. He called for transforming previously non-commercial lands into productive economic zones through agriculture, urban planning, and infrastructure — efforts that would inevitably displace existing populations. Israeli authorities implemented this idea, strategically seizing and reclassifying Arab land to consolidate their control over it.

By forcibly removing Palestinians and appropriating their land, Zionism creates fertile ground for real estate ventures and new markets. This process is further bolstered by the military and security industries, cornerstones of capitalist economies, which profit from the instability and conflict.

The Zionist project does not merely parallel capitalism; it is a manifestation of it, embodying the drive to dispossess, commodify, and profit.

 

The Nauseating Reality

How sickening is this?

The endless churn of war keeps corporate profits soaring. Capitalism demands ever-growing profit margins, and the corporate overlords, with their iron grip on political power, won't let go. The U.S. must remain Israel's staunch ally, not for justice or security, but to keep the gears of the war machine turning, to keep the stock market fat, and to ensure the elite continue to float above the suffering they've engineered.

Without unwavering U.S. support, Israel would have to consider diplomacy, stripped of the military dominance that U.S. aid guarantees. This could finally reduce tensions, forcing other nations and groups in the region to soften their aggression, knowing the U.S. is no longer fueling the militarized madness.

However, in this late stage of capitalism, the elite cannot afford peace. Demand for weapons would plummet. The military-industrial complex, bloated by blood money, would see profits wither. Stock prices of defense companies would fall, dragging down the portfolios of the elite who thrive on this manufactured chaos.

The deep animosity between Israelis and Palestinians is a direct result of the calculated strategies employed by elites to maintain their stranglehold on power. This conflict is deeply rooted in the reality of Israel as a settler-colonial state, driven by a capitalist system that thrives on division and exploitation. The powerful deploy propaganda and systemic oppression to manipulate the masses into fighting each other, distracting them from uniting against their true oppressors — the elites themselves.

This situation mirrors the European settlers' ruthless exploitation and slaughter of Indigenous populations in North America. European elites indoctrinated and mobilized ordinary European settlers to commit genocide out of fear and hatred, but the elites were truly motivated by the opportunity to seize indigenous resources and grow obscenely wealthy. Similarly, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories is motivated by an elite community’s rapacious desire to control land and resources. The elites stoke hatred and fear among ordinary Israelis, framing the conflict as an inevitable clash where both sides must annihilate the other. They position themselves as indispensable protectors in this endless cycle of bloodshed, manipulating public opinion to cement their power.

Many Israelis may genuinely feel that their security is at risk, leading them to support their government’s aggressive policies as a form of self-defense. This fear is skillfully manipulated by the elite through a relentless stream of propaganda. Settlers are not inherently evil; they have been indoctrinated—through schools, media, and political discourse—to believe that their safety requires they have an exclusive right to the land.

The truth is, no one has an inherent right to any land. The earth belongs to all people. Israelis aren't wrong simply for living in Palestine; they're wrong for denying Palestinians the same right to live there.

Recognizing this common oppression is crucial for building solidarity and working towards an equitable resolution. Otherwise, we fall back into the same old power struggles that the elite have always used to divide and conquer.

 

The Real Struggle

The real struggle is not between Israelis and Palestinians but between the oppressed masses and the elite forces that divide them and facilitate their exploitation in the pursuit of profit and power. Israeli society, like any other, is divided by class. The elites, who benefit from the conflict, use their power to maintain control and increase their wealth, manipulating the fears and prejudices of the broader population to sustain the status quo. The average Israeli, despite being on the dominant side of the conflict, is still part of the oppressed mass under capitalism. They are manipulated into supporting policies that perpetuate the occupation and the conflict, believing it necessary for their survival and security.

On the other side, Palestinians' anger and resentment are understandable, if not inevitable. Such feelings are born from their experiences of dispossession, violence, and systemic brutality. Both populations are oppressed by the same capitalist system that prioritizes profit over human lives, using division and hatred to maintain control and suppress any potential unity against the true oppressors. There is a vast difference in degree, but not in kind.

The true enemy is not the individual Israeli or Palestinian but the elite-driven capitalist system that fuels the Zionist project. Recognizing this common oppression is crucial for building solidarity and working towards a just and equitable resolution.

This entire situation reflects a broader reality; a tiny elite class routinely manipulates global politics and economies to their advantage. The genocide in Palestine is a means to an end — ensuring that share prices climb and profits soar, all while innocent lives are taken. Millions are deemed expendable by an elite class that orchestrates these horrors from boardrooms and government offices, far removed from the bloodshed and despair their decisions cause.

This is murder for money.

 

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

A Decolonial Approach to Mental Healthcare

By Aprotim C Bhowmik, Titilayo F Odedele, and Temitope T Odedele


Would the field of psychiatry hold firm against time and place? If the holy book, the DSM-5 [1], were written in a different century, in a different society, would the diagnosis and treatment of common psychiatric disorders be different? The answer, according to many, would be unequivocally in the affirmative, as psychiatry—and in particular, the DSM-5—is inextricably bound to politico-economic contexts and cultural norms/practices. So, perhaps a more specific and important question is—does the DSM-5, being a largely Western written text, contribute negatively to our understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of psychiatric disorders?

 

Psychiatric diagnosis

For those who have not cracked open a copy of the DSM-5, it consists primarily of diagnostic criteria for common psychiatric disorders—ranging from affective disorders (e.g., depression and bipolar disorder) to psychotic disorders (e.g., schizophrenia) to personality disorders, and the intersection thereof. Consider, for instance, the diagnosis of attention-deficit / hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which can be classified into two types: inattentive and hyperactive. Diagnostic criteria for the former include difficulty following instructions, distractibility, and disorganization; for the latter include excessive talkativeness, inability to sit still, and inability to remain quiet. These symptoms of inattention and/or hyperactivity can be viewed as interruptions of productivity, either of the person with ADHD or of the people around them.

Consider, again, the diagnoses of depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. The diagnosis and treatment of these conditions is often indicated when activities of daily living (ADLs) are interrupted. And while that threshold makes logical sense, it would also be reasonable to ask why that threshold exists. The answer is that ADLs are often considered individual tasks, not communal or shared ones. As such, the aforementioned disorders are often brought to the attention of clinicians when occupational function is reduced—causing a decrease in productivity of both the person and the associated workforce.

Supplementary to these diagnostic criteria is the biopsychosocial formulation, a construction often used by psychiatric clinicians to understand the intersection of biological, psychological, and social phenomena that result in a patient’s diagnosis. [2] Common biological components include genetic contributions to disease, such as the heritability of illnesses like bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder. And while the biological basis of these illnesses is evidence-based, there is also evidence for an environmental/social influence of these biological factors via epigenetics (i.e., the molecular silencing of DNA due to environmental factors). One example is the heritability of anxiety via epigenetic alteration, a phenomenon that has been connected to the presence of increased anxiety in the descendants of enslaved Black people in the US (dubbed “Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome”). [3] 

Other social factors within the biopsychosocial formulation that contribute to the pathophysiology of psychiatric disease include neglect (which could look different in societies where responsibility for children is shared beyond the biological parents); inaccessibility to health care (which could look different if profit was not a primary motive in service provision); drug use (which often perseveres due to lack of medical care); housing instability (which could also look different if a profit motive was not attached to a basic human need); and incarceration (rates of which are distinctly high in the US due to profit motives).

In short, in both the diagnostic criteria of and the biopsychosocial formulation for common psychiatric disorders, we see two common features: (1) interruptions to productivity as an indication for diagnosis/treatment, and (2) individual, rather than communal, systems of care that contribute to illness (e.g., privatization of services that address basic human needs, and/or lack of shared responsibility for different kinds of care).

 

Reconceptualization of psychiatric disease

How can our understanding of these two common features of psychiatric diagnostic criteria inform our approach to mental healthcare? We might ask why these common features exist, and when—if ever—they were different. The answer: We know that productivity and the relationship between the individual and the community were different at multiple times and places throughout the past and in the present:

Before the land known as the United States was colonized, many indigenous communities lived on it, and it is well-documented that these nations and communities cared for children together, with an emphasis on the extended family. Tasks like childcare, food production, and healthcare were shared responsibilities, and everyone would receive the healthcare that was available. In the case of wrongdoing, survivors were centered, and perpetrators were moved into alternative spaces where they were provided with food, shelter, education, and other necessary elements of rehabilitation— before eventually being reintegrated into society. [4]

In Burkina Faso, between 1983 and 1987, President Thomas Sankara emphasized communal systems of care. His tenure resulted in communal food distribution, an increase in the building of hospitals and access to healthcare, and the widespread construction of wells for clean water. And within these 4 years (before being ousted and murdered by a coup likely backed by France and other Western powers), he increased the literacy rate from 11 to 73%. [5]

Similar increases in communal food distribution and healthcare access were seen in times and places like Castro’s Cuba, and currently in Kerala state in India and in Vietnam, where increased healthcare access has been connected with low COVID rates, and increased safety net programs connected with improved food distribution. Cuba in particular is still famous for its medical programs, producing physicians who are trained in the quality provision of universal healthcare (in spite of US sanctions). [6]

Because the medical conceptualization and pharmacology of psychiatric disease is relatively recent and contextually informed, objective data on the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric disease before the present day is scarce—but we can confidently say that people across different times and places, such as those above, would not fit our current conceptualization. Their conceptions of productivity and individual vs. communal systems of care would result in a different need for and conceptualization of psychiatry, one that is informed by different thresholds for productivity, neglect, housing, healthcare, incarceration, etc.

Perhaps more important than highlighting the difference in conceptualization is the question of whether our current conceptualization is even appropriate? Are we over-diagnosing people due to inhumanly high expectations of productivity? Are we as a society increasing the incidence of psychiatric pathology by increasing the number of people who experience neglect, housing instability, lack of healthcare access, and incarceration? This reconceptualization of psychiatric disease is not a novel one: the field of Marxist psychiatry is one that identifies capitalism (via its emphasis on the primacy of productivity and individual, rather than communal, systems of care) as a key contributor in the incidence and perseverance of psychiatric disease. This approach has been pioneered by psychiatrists, sociologists, and anthropologists—including some who are widely published on the molecular basis of psychiatric disease. [7], [8]

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A Marxist approach to psychiatry is anti-capitalist and decolonial, and a reconceptualization of psychiatric disease using this approach asserts the following: 

  1. A lack of communal care, welfare programs, healthcare access, etc. often precipitates and/or perpetuates psychiatric disease.

  2. Psychiatric healthcare in the West perseveres as a means of control rather than care for people who are already disadvantaged by the state and the capitalist class.

  3. Patients of psychiatric disease are given the lowest-cost treatment to allow the continued productivity of the state.

Another Marxist approach to psychiatry involves the recognition that it is essential to a people’s mental well-being that that they be the “owners of their own labor.” Brazilian scholar and educator Paulo Freire emphasizes in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, that labor “constitutes part of the human person,” and that “a human being can neither be sold nor can he sell himself.” [9] The capitalist mode of production compels all workers to “sell themselves” to survive. Many pre-capitalist polities and societies, such as those found on the African continent, had no knowledge or practice of capitalist phenomena (e.g., private property or excessive accumulation of wealth due to labor exploitation and privatization). [10], [11] Due to the ultimately unknowable violence perpetrated against Black and Brown peoples that began the global capitalist system [10], people have been transformed into workers who were, and are, sadistically coerced into believing that the construct of “earning wages” is normal, rather than understanding it as a method that facilitates their exploitation and destabilizes their personhood and well-being. Dr. Joseph Nahem spoke about the harm caused by the disconnection fundamental to all labor under capitalism:

Marx rooted alienation in the very process of capitalist production itself. Marx saw the worker as alienated from the product of his labor and from work itself. Since the product belongs to the capitalist, the worker's work is "forced labor . . . not his own, but someone else's." Further, workers are estranged from their true nature as human beings because their work and its product are alien to them. They cannot feel a oneness with nature and society. Alienation is, therefore, intrinsic to capitalism and the private ownership of the means of production. [12]

Human beings must be rooted to their source, to their land, to what they produce with their labor. If people are not or are not permitted to be connected to that which is theirs and that which they produce, psychiatrist Frantz Fanon wrote that there “will be serious psycho-affective injuries and the result will be individuals without an anchor, without a horizon, colorless, stateless, rootless.” [13] If mental healthcare professionals care about the psychological wellbeing of their patients, then they will 1) stand in solidarity with those who seek to own that which they produce  and 2) pending the former, seek to reconceptualize psychiatric disease and diagnoses according to a humanizing decolonial Marxist approach that does not prioritize bourgeois cultural values like individualism, productivity, and carcerality.

 

Seclusion, restraint, and incarceration for psychiatric disease

Illustrated below is just one example of how the critical assertions of Marxist psychiatry rear their ugly head in the US today:

We know that people with psychiatric disease are often diagnosed and treated when ADLs and productivity are interrupted, but what happens when a patient does not respond to treatment? For many disorders, a number of medications and/or therapies is attempted, but there is a point at which patients are viewed as refractory to treatment. And for patients who are disruptive and/or violent, seclusion and restraint in padded rooms is common, despite evidence showing that these patients have PTSD between 27 and 45% of the time, along with an increase in negative symptoms like anhedonia and self-imposed alienation. [14]  Seclusion and restraint are often seen as the lowest cost, lowest-effort treatment to allow the continuation of productivity of the psychiatric unit.

When seclusion and restraint prove ineffective, incarceration is considered. Notably, 43%/44% of people in state/local prisons have a mental illness, and 66%/74% of people in federal/state prisons do not receive any mental healthcare during their stay, suggesting that there is at the very least a significant role for psychiatric care for these people. This is not surprising given that the number of psychiatric beds has decreased from 339 to 22 per 100,000 people in the US from 1955 to 2000. [15], [16]

A profit-maximizing motive is certainly present, as a psychiatric bed is $864/day, while prison is $99/day. But is it actually true that psychiatric care could decrease incarceration, or do these statistics describe people who would be incarcerated by the state regardless? A recent study matched hospital referral regions (HRRs) by zip code with jails and prisons, and looked at abrupt increases/decreases in psychiatric hospital bed capacity (by about 80-90 beds). Decreases in psychiatric bed capacity were associated with an increase of 256 inmates; increases in psychiatric bed capacity were associated with a decrease of 199 inmates—suggesting that proper, non-profit-driven psychiatric care would likely be a good fit for many incarcerated people. [16]

Studies like this one make it difficult to believe that patient care is at the heart of the US medical industry—and make it even more compelling to consider a decolonial Marxist approach. And based on an understanding of the past and present of psychiatry, it would be incomplete to assert that current psychiatric diagnosis and treatment is informed by contextual and cultural norms/practices without noting the harm that these norms/practices cause. Current heuristics of psychiatric diagnosis and treatment—and the emphasis of productivity and individual systems of care—must be scrutinized and are incompatible with adequate patient care.

             

Aprotim C Bhowmik (he/him) is a third-year MD/MPH student at Hofstra/Northwell School of Medicine and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. His research interests include social determinants of health and carceral health systems.

Titilayo F Odedele (she/they) is a PhD student at Northeastern University, where they also received their MS in Criminology and Criminal Justice and MA in Sociology. Her research interests include political economy of the world system, decolonial Marxism, and Pentecostalism in the Global South. She enjoys spending time with her family and dog.

Temitope T Odedele (she/her) is a psychology and biology student at the University of Massachusetts Boston who plans on a career in medicine. She enjoys reading history books and watching telenovelas.

 

References

1.      Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSM-5 (2017). CBS Publishers & Distributors, Pvt. Ltd.

2.      Owen G (2023). What is formulation in psychiatry? Psychol Med. 2023 Apr;53(5):1700-1707. doi: 10.1017/S0033291723000016.

3.      Jiang S, Postovit L, Cattaneo A, Binder EB, Aitchison KJ (2019). Epigenetic modifications in stress response genes associated with childhood trauma. Front Psychiatry. 2019 Nov 8;10:808. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00808.

4.      First Nations Health Authority (n.d). Our history, our health.

https://www.fnha.ca/wellness/wellness-for-first-nations/our-history-our-health.

5.      Thomas Sankara and the stomachs that made themselves heard (n.d.). Wellcome Collection. https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/Y1FlZxEAAEolDkdA.

6.      Squires N, Colville SE, Chalkidou K, Ebrahim S (2020). Medical training for universal health coverage: a review of Cuba-South Africa collaboration. Hum Resour Health. 2020 Feb 17;18(1):12. doi: 10.1186/s12960-020-0450-9.

7.      Moncrieff J (2022). The political economy of the mental health system: A Marxist analysis. Frontiers in Sociology, 6. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2021.771875.

8.      Cohen BM (2016). Psychiatric hegemony – A Marxist theory of mental illness. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46051-6.

9.      Freire P (1972). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Penguin.

10.  Du Bois WEB (1947). The world and Africa: an inquiry into the part which Africa has played in world history. Viking Press.

11.  Rodney W (1982). How Europe underdeveloped Africa. Howard University Press.

12.  Nahem J (1982). A Marxist approach to psychology and psychiatry. International Journal of

Health Services, 12(1), 151-162.

13.  Fanon F (1967). The wretched of the earth. Penguin.

14.  Chieze M, Hurst S, Kaiser S, & Sentissi O (2019). Effects of seclusion and restraint in adult psychiatry: A systematic review. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 10.

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.0049.

15.  Initiative, P. P. (n.d.). Mental health. Prison Policy Initiative.

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/research/mental_health/.

16.  Gao YN. Relationship between psychiatric inpatient beds and jail populations in the United States. J Psychiatr Pract. 2021 Jan 21;27(1):33-42. doi: 10.1097/PRA.0000000000000524.

The Marxist Theory of the State: An Introduction

By Summer Pappachen


Republished from Liberation School.


Our understanding of the state lies at the heart of our struggle to create a new society and fundamentally eliminate the oppression, exploitation, war, and environmental destruction characteristic of capitalism. In a socialist state, people collectively manage society, including what we produce, how much we produce, and the conditions of our work, to meet the needs of the people and the planet. Under capitalism, the state is organized to maintain the capitalist system and the dictatorship of a tiny group of capitalists over the rest of us through the use (or threat) of violent force and a range of institutions that present capitalism as “common sense.” The primary function of the capitalist state is to protect itself, which means it manages contradictions within the capitalist class and between their class and the working class.

This article serves as an introduction to the state, an essential matter for all justice-minded people to understand, as it determines our objectives, strategies, and tactics. It begins by debunking the ideology of the capitalist state as an impartial mediator to resolve antagonisms between and among classes by explaining the Marxist theory of the state and its role in maintaining–and overthrowing–exploitation and oppression.

The U.S. state has always been “deep” in that it is a highly centralized and predominantly unelected organization with an expansive set of institutions that has facilitated the rule of capital in the face of a variety of changes and through centuries of turmoil. The foundational elements of the state are repressive, such as the police and prison system, while others are ideological in that they reproduce capitalist consciousness and social relations, such as the news media. Because not all capitalist states function in the same manner, we examine the different forms states can take as well as the foundational differences between capitalist and socialist states.

Creating a socialist state is necessary to realize our collective desire for an end to all forms of oppression and exploitation. The socialist state works to eliminate racist police oppression and mass incarceration, to protect the health of our planet against capitalist and imperialist pollution, and to create a society in which differences in all kinds of identities do not mean differences in power. We can’t defend, let alone advance, the world we need without state power, a power that not only represses the former exploiters and oppressors but also produces a new kind of society and consciousness—a state that protects the interests of the many over those of the few. Ultimately, for communists, the goal of the socialist state is to render itself obsolete, which is only possible after the elimination of class society.


Debunking the capitalist myth of the state

The state extends beyond what we think of as the “government” of a country and includes all of the structures the capitalist class uses to maintain its control. In the U.S., the capitalist class holds state power, whereas the working class holds state power in China and Cuba. To have “state power” does not mean that the ruling class, whether capitalist or working class, can meet its own needs perfectly or without limitation. Put simply, the state is the instrument through which class interests are pursued.

At its core, the capitalist state includes apparatuses like the police, the courts, the prisons, and the military, forces necessary for enforcing the will of a tiny clique of capitalists over the masses of workers. The capitalist state also includes administrative offices, social services, school systems, media, mainstream political parties, cultural institutions, and more [1]. If this view of the state seems broad, it is because Marxists do not define the state as capitalists do.

The U.S. capitalist class popularizes a particular view of the state, especially the democratic state, as “a neutral arena of debate” [2]. In this so-called neutral arena, the government arbitrates between the conflicting interests of society through a set of “fair” laws, and it enforces those laws evenly and rationally. According to this view, any violation of the law or injustice in society is simply a mistake to be corrected through the state’s existing avenues through, for example, presidential elections or the Supreme Court. This view is ultimately a fairytale, one that “lulls the ordinary person to sleep,” in the words of the leader of the world’s first socialist state, Vladimir Lenin. It lulls us to sleep “by obscuring the important and basic fact, namely, the split of society into irreconcilably antagonistic classes” [3].

Marxists recognize that our lives are shaped by one basic fact: society is divided into two classes with irreconcilable interests. The capitalist state is organized to protect the interests of the capitalist: the accumulation of ever-greater profits by increasing the exploitation of workers and preventing our class from uniting and fighting for a new system. The working class’s primary interest is reducing our exploitation and eliminating all forms of oppression and bigotry so we—alongside our families and communities—can flourish. The state is not a timeless or abstract entity governing a given territory. The state emerges at a certain point in human history: it arises alongside the division of societies into classes, between the rulers and the ruled, the owners and the workers, the slavers and the enslaved. The state develops from within a society, as Friedrich Engels wrote, when it “is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to exorcise.” The state emerged to mitigate such antagonisms, or “to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ‘order’” [4]. The capitalist ideology of the state guards these bounds of order to ensure it is the only available avenue for change.

The U.S. state’s history and present debunk the capitalist mythology of the state as a neutral arbiter, revealing that it is actually made up of organs, or institutions, designed to maintain the domination of capitalists. The U.S. state was established by slave-owning and merchant capitalist founders, later developed by industrial and monopoly capitalists [5]. The ruling class is not a homogeneous entity and the state manages the competing interests of different capitalists to protect capitalism and the existence of the state itself.

Currently, the U.S. capitalist class uses the democratic-republic state as its “organ” or form of governance. Instead of a path beyond capitalism, the democratic-republic form of the state offers the “best possible political shell for capitalism,” allowing the state to feign innocence while ensuring that “no change of persons, institutions, or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it” [6]. Lenin provides a lasting Marxist definition of the state:

“According to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of “order,” which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes” [7].

No matter its class character, the state is a tool of a class. For Marxists, the key distinction between types of states is their class character. For capitalist theorists, types of states are distinguished by their level of democracy versus authoritarianism, while ignoring the class character of both. They therefore cannot recognize the existence of capitalist authoritarianism within capitalist democracies, nor recognize working class democracy within so-called authoritarian socialist states. The U.S provides a clear example that debunks the myth of the state as a neutral arbiter and demonstrates the authoritarianism of capitalist-democratic states. It demonstrates that the state is made up of institutions designed to maintain the rule of capitalists.

Order is reserved for the wealthy since all working people live in a constant state of precarity, uncertainty, and insecurity to varying degrees. Chaos determines the life of the working person in the United States. For instance, the poor are terrified of the police and despise them for their abuses of power. The police murder over 1,000 people every year and most occur in non-violent situations like traffic stops or mental health crises. Racial oppression is part of the lived experience of the working class. As Stuart Hall put it, in many countries, “Race is the modality in which class is lived” [8]. In the U.S., Black people are not only more likely to be killed by the police but are also more likely to be unarmed and peaceful while being killed [9]. Instead of delivering justice when innocent Black people are killed, the courts often work with the police to legitimize the injustice done. The U.S. state only charges 2% of officers who commit murders with any sort of crime, and the courts convict officers in less than 1% of cases [10].

While the state’s prison system fails to take murderous police off our streets, it is efficient at jailing harmless working people. Despite having only 4.4% of the world’s population, the U.S. holds 22% of the world’s prisoners. Over 70% of those prisoners are either non-violent or have not yet been convicted of a crime [11]. And 38% of U.S. prisoners are Black, despite Black people only making up 12% of the population [12]. The social cost of the capitalist system’s violent state apparatuses is immeasurable: families are broken up; children are left without parents; generations become trapped in cycles of trauma, crime, and poverty. This is merely one example of how the capitalist class uses the state to legalize and perpetuate the oppression of working people in the U.S. Far from embodying the fairy tale of a “neutral arbiter” and enforcer of fair laws, the U.S. state is used by the capitalist class to hold down the working class, of which Black people are a crucial part.


Repressive and productive state organs

Marx, Lenin, and other revolutionaries often use the word “organ” to describe the state and its constituent elements. This bodily metaphor is helpful. The organs in our bodies are made up of cells, tissues, and arteries which work together to fulfill particular functions (e.g., the heart pumps blood, the lungs absorb oxygen, etc.). Each organ depends on and helps the other organs to achieve their objective—the body’s survival and reproduction. The pipes and chambers of the heart are made to pump blood, and the airways and sacs of the lungs are made to absorb oxygen in order to reproduce the body. Just like a bodily organ, the state is made up of various elements, or apparatuses, as well. State apparatuses are guided by the objective of the survival and reproduction of the ruling class and its system of domination and exploitation.

Marxists understand the State as primarily a repressive apparatus that uses the force of the courts, police, prisons, and military to ensure the domination of one class over others. The repressive state apparatus contains the violent institutions that work to maintain ruling class power. All in all, the repressive state apparatus functions by direct threat, coercion, and force.

The class in power does not only exercise its control by armed force and physical coercion. In addition to ruling the “material force of society,” as Marx and Engels wrote in 1845-1846, they also rule “the means of mental production,” such that they “rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas” [13]. Because the capitalist class owns the material forces of society, which include those that produce and distribute knowledge, they wield immense control over the overall consciousness of capitalist society, so “generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject” to capitalist ideology [14]. Marx and Engels do not mean that the oppressed are not intellectuals. A few paragraphs later, they write that “in ordinary life every shopkeeper” possesses intellectual capacities that “our historians have not yet won” [15].

Since the time of Marx and Engels’ writing on ideology, many capitalist states, particularly in their more developed forms, have generated and utilized more sophisticated and subtler means of maintaining the dominance of their ideology over society. Louis Althusser built on Marx and Engels’ work on ideology and class struggle by detailing many of their contemporary forms. These “Ideological State Apparatuses include all those elements that reproduce the dominance of the ruling-class ideology, like the school system, the media, mainstream parties, cultural organizations, think-tanks, and so on [16]. The same class that owns the means of production—the factories and banks, telecommunications networks and pharmaceutical corporations—also owns the newspapers, television stations, and movie studios. Globally, six parent companies control 90% of everything we listen to, watch, and read [17].


Schooling illustrates the vulnerability of capitalist rule

A key purpose of ideological state apparatuses is to make the prevailing order of things appear natural and timeless, to justify capitalism as the final stage of human history, and to normalize exploitation and oppression. In the U.S. and other capitalist states, the educational ideological apparatus is a central one in that it produces future workers with the necessary skills, knowledge, habits, and attitudes to fulfill their place in the overall social system. The school system “takes children from every class at infant-school age, and then for years, the years in which the child is most ‘vulnerable’… it drums into them, whether it uses new or old methods, a certain amount of ‘know-how’ wrapped in the ruling ideology” [18]. What this means is that the skills schools teach children—from arithmetic and literature to engineering and computer coding—are just as important as the “the ‘rules’ of good behaviour” and “morality, civic and professional conscience, and ultimately the rules of the order established by class domination” that they teach [19].

In their study of the relationship between schooling and capitalism in the U.S. in the mid-20th century, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis found that schools reproduce capitalist relations not by the deliberate intentions of individual teachers or administrators, but by how “the relationships of authority and control between administrators and teachers, teachers and students, students and students, and students and their work replicate the hierarchical division of labor which dominates the workplace. The rule orientation of the high school reflects the close supervision of low-level workers; the internalization of norms and freedom from continual supervision in elite colleges reflect the social relationships of upper-level white-collar work. Most state universities and community colleges, which fall in between, conform to the behavioral requisites of low-level technical, service, and supervisory personnel” [20].

Many U.S public and charter schools, especially those in working-class and oppressed neighborhoods, require students to enter school through metal detectors, use video surveillance in hallways and classrooms, and subject students to regular searches of their bodies and property. This is captured by the concept of the “school-to-prison pipeline” or even the “school-as-prison” given the criminalization of everything from talking loudly in class to minor pranks and the overwhelming presence of cops in schools [21].

The educational apparatus highlights two things. First, as the example of highly securitized and policed schools indicates, there is no hard, fast, or permanent line dividing repressive from ideological apparatuses. Second, the primary distinction between the ideological arms of the state and its repressive core is that the latter are permanent and secure whereas the former are more vulnerable and, therefore, more receptive to change in the face of class struggle.

Bowles and Gintis’ correspondence theory highlighted above is perhaps less important than their repeated affirmation that people’s intervention in education and society contributes to revolution. The book’s argument is against those who believe education is sufficient for revolutionary change and their theoretical, historical, and empirical analysis leads them to the finding “that the creation of an equal and liberating school system requires a revolutionary transformation of economic life” [22]. They conclude their study with strategies for socialist education and teachers and, importantly, frame the overarching aim of socialist education under capitalism as “the creation of working-class consciousness” to contribute to building a socialist revolution.

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Highlighting the fragility of ideological state apparatuses, Bowles and Gintis argue class-consciousness isn’t “making people aware of their oppression” because “most people are all too well aware of the fact of their oppression” [23]. The idea that if we study and focus on school, get into a good university, and “buckle down” will make our lives better lacks any material basis. Schools aren’t mechanically indoctrinating students into capitalist ideology or meritocracy. Students are thinking critically, increasingly open to the solutions required to eliminate oppression, and are even organizing against policing in schools on their own [24].


Democracy: The best possible organ for capitalism

The “organ” as a metaphor underscores the role of state apparatuses in maintaining stability for the ruling class. Organs are interdependent living and evolving entities that, together, each play a part in maintaining the body’s homeostasis, which means preserving stability in the face of changing external circumstances. It’s the same with the state, as the state’s goal is to maintain stability for the ruling class by adjusting to conflicts both within and between classes.

As Marx and Engels first put it in The Communist Manifesto, “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” [25]. Among the tasks of the bourgeois state is to manage conflicts within the capitalist class. This happens, for example, when there is a conflict between the interests of an individual capitalist and the capitalist system as a whole. If it were up to individual capitalists, they would destroy their source of surplus-value (workers) and the environment, which would be detrimental to the survival of capitalism. This is why the state also manages conflicts within the ruling class itself, stepping in to hold individual capitalists or firms “in check” in the interests of capital overall as an economic and political system..

The capitalist state also intervenes when it is faced with the threat of revolt. Legislation regulating the working day, for example, was meant to hold back “the passion of capital for a limitless draining of labour-power” and was motivated by “the working-class movement that daily grew more threatening” [26]. This is one reason why Marx, Engels, and Lenin argued that governance via bourgeois democracy was the most effective way to ensure capital’s rule. Far from inhibiting capitalism, the democratic republic is the most effective political form for capitalism insofar as power is exercised through complex mechanisms and several avenues for popular “participation” and “input.” The more secure the power of the ruling class is, the less it needs to rely on brute force.

This doesn’t mean that democracy is irrelevant to our revolutionary project. In fact, it is quite the opposite: historically, socialist struggles have always emerged from demands for basic democratic rights. Winning those rights helps us experience our power to change society. Socialist movements in the anti-colonial world and within the U.S. have often been waged in the name of a fake “democracy,” which reserves the rights it espouses for the rich. The distinguishing factor is the class character of democracy: there is the democracy of the capitalist class and the democracy of the working class, which is socialism. Revolutionaries are interested in democracy of, for, and by the working class.


From perfecting, to seizing, to smashing the capitalist state

In The Communist Manifesto, written in 1847-1848, Marx and Engels address the topic of the state in the communist project, but in an abstract sense. As historical-materialists, their conception of the state and its role in revolution evolved along with the class struggle. In particular, the defeats of the 1848 revolutions and the 1871 Paris Commune compelled them to refine their approach to the state.

The Paris Commune was the world’s first proletarian government which lasted for 72 days in 1871. Decades of war, discontent, and radicalization led to the working-class takeover of Paris. The Parisian workers elected a council from the various wards of the city and organized public services for all its two million city residents. Their first decree was to arm the masses to defend their new proto-state. They erected a “fuller democracy” than had ever existed before and instated deeply progressive, feminist, worker-centered decrees [27]. But before the Commune could develop into a state, they were overthrown by an alliance of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, whose armies killed tens of thousands of workers.

In the wake of this unspeakable tragedy, the martyrs of the Commune left behind a crucial lesson: after overthrowing the capitalist state, a new worker’s state must be developed, and it must be defended fiercely from the former ruling class. The next year, Marx and Engels wrote a new preface to The Communist Manifesto explicitly drawing out the lesson: “One thing especially was proved by the Commune: that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes” [28.] Lenin adds that “it is still necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and crush their resistance,” and the Commune’s failure to do this was “one of the reasons for its defeat” [29]. These lessons were pivotal in the later successes of the Bolshevik Revolution, as well as the subsequent revolutions of the colonized peoples.

Today, some people interested in alternatives to capitalism hope we can build socialism through the legislative and electoral arena, avoiding a large-scale social revolution altogether [30]. We can and should pass legislation to curb campaign financing, increase taxes on the rich, and grant universal healthcare, all of which would be welcome improvements to the majority of our class. Yet such piecemeal reforms cannot produce the wholesale social transformation we need; the capitalists will attack progressive reforms at every opportunity and our class doesn’t have the state to enforce such legislation. The capitalist class, like every ruling class, will not allow their replacement by another class through their own state. We saw, for instance, how the Democratic Party manipulated elections to keep Bernie Sanders out of the presidential race. Any transformation of the capitalist state via reforms will also be impermanent because the people’s hard-fought gains can always be stolen by undemocratic bodies like the Supreme Court. For instance, the abortion rights we won in the 1970s were stolen from us in 2022 by the Supreme Court. To root deep and permanent transformations, we need to set up a workers-state, and we need to defend it.

The “committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” cannot handle the tasks required to develop a new society for working and oppressed peoples. Just as the same bodily organ cannot perform two completely different tasks—the heart cannot be made to breathe, and the lungs cannot be made to beat—neither can the same state perform two completely different functions. The function of the socialist state in the U.S. will be to meet the needs of its people and the planet, and the function of the capitalist state is to meet the profit-seeking needs of the capitalists. Thus, the capitalist state cannot be transformed simply through seizure—it must be destroyed and replaced by a new workers’ state.


The socialist state and its withering away

The socialist state differs from the capitalist state in two crucial ways. First, it is the state of the majority and not of the minority, and second, it is a transitory apparatus unlike the capitalist state that, because it maintains class contradictions, foresees no end. To the first point, the capitalist state protects the material interests of a tiny fraction of society and holds down the vast masses of the people from revolting against them. The capitalist state must ensure that hundreds of millions of people endure their poverty and precarity without stopping production. Even though workers are the producers of all the value, we do not realize the fruits of our contributions. The capitalists do not produce any value, and so their status in society is structurally illegitimate. To maintain this lopsided situation, the capitalist state had to develop violent and ideological state apparatuses. The socialist state’s apparatuses will be drastically less violent, since they will need to repress only a tiny minority, while directing most of their energy to meeting the needs of the people.

To the second point of difference: the capitalist state claims to be at its final stage of history. By contrast, the final aim of the socialist state is to render itself irrelevant. It serves only as the transitory apparatuses that will deliver humanity to classless society. While the capitalist state has no plan for improving itself, or for solving the contradictions that envelop it, the socialist state is built with the self-awareness that it is not at the highest stage of humanity.

The transition from a workers-state to a classless society is important, given that class antagonisms and special oppressions do not disappear overnight. Remnants of the old order lay in wait for the opportune moment to rise up and counter-revolt, and they are often aided by imperialists abroad. The state must persist until “the resistance of the capitalists has been completely crushed, when the capitalists have disappeared, when there are no classes” [31]. Without exploitation and oppression, the state is no longer necessary. This transitional period will depend on the existing material conditions and can’t be determined in advance: “By what stages, by means of what practical measures humanity will proceed to this supreme aim we do not and cannot know,” Lenin wrote [32].

The main principle is that the socialist state would transform social relations, grow the productive forces of society, eliminate material scarcity, and then itself “wither away into the higher phase of communism” [33].  No socialist state, historical or present-day, has been able to move past the state.


Conclusion: Our role in the “belly of the beast”

The Soviet Union lived and died as a state, and Cuba and China have been states for 60 and 70 years. Because socialist revolutions occurred not in the imperialist or advanced capitalist countries but in the colonial, semi-colonial, and less industrially-developed ones, the process of building up the productive forces required for socialism was and is protracted. Further, given that the Bolsheviks faced imperialist interventions by 14 countries almost immediately, they had to strengthen their state. Throughout its existence, the USSR had to “defend its revolution from overthrow in a world still dominated by imperialist monopoly capitalism” [34]. Cuba has been under the most extreme trade embargo in existence at the hands of the U.S. since its birth and has withstood numerous counterrevolutionary attempts. The embargo is meant to suffocate and isolate the people of Cuba, and to incite a counterrevolution. Still, the people of Cuba support their government because of its tireless efforts to meet their needs under difficult circumstances which are outside of its control. The U.S.’s newest target for which it is preparing for military confrontation is China with the goal of overthrowing the Communist Party; to defend the gains of the Chinese Revolution, China must fortify their revolution through the state [35].

Despite immense pressure from the U.S. capitalist class, socialist states have been able to win immense victories. China, for instance, eradicated extreme poverty in what was “likely the greatest anti-poverty program achievement in the history of the human race” [36]. Cuba recently redefined the family through the passage of its new Families Code, written democratically and passed by popular referendum. The Code expands the rights of the most oppressed: women, children, LGBTQ people, and the elderly. For these socialist states to flourish, and to eventually wither away, imperialism must first be defeated.

Imperialism is blocking the development of socialist states and projects everywhere. As organizers in the U.S., it is our special duty to make socialist revolution in our country so that we may not only free ourselves, but also free our siblings around the world from the scourge of U.S. imperialism.  Once society is organized “on the basis of free and equal association of the producers,” we “will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong–into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze ax” [37]. This is the communist horizon, in which the people through their state organs fulfill our dreams of organizing society in our own name.


References

[1] Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation,” inLenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. B. Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970/2001), 95-97. Availablehere.
[2] Martin Carnoy,The State and Political Theory(Princeton University Press, 1984), 10.
[3] V.I. Lenin “The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletarian Revolution” inLenin Collected Works (Vol. 25): June-September 1917, 385-487 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1918/1964), 394. Also availablehere.
[4] Frederick Engels,The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State(New York: International Publishers, 1884/1972), 229. Also availablehere.
[5] For an analysis of the U.S. state, see Eugene Puryear, “The U.S. State and the U.S. Revolution,”Liberation School,10 July 2022. Availablehere.
[6] Lenin, “The State and Revolution,” 398.
[7] Ibid., 392; For more context on why Lenin took up this study, see Brian Becker, “How the Ideas of ‘The State and Revolution’ Changed History,” inRevolution Manifesto: Understanding Marx and Lenin’s Theory of Revolution,ed. Ben Becker (San Francisco: Liberation Media, 2015), 8-9.
[8] Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, Brian Roberts,Policing theCrisis: Mugging, theState andLaw andOrder(London: Macmillan, 1978), 394.
[9] Mapping Police Violence, “2021 Police Violence Report” Availablehere.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Roy Walmsey, “World Prison Population List,” 12th ed.,Prison Policy Initiative, 2018. Availablehere; Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2022,”Prison Policy Initiative, 14 March 2023. Availablehere.
[12] Sawyer and Wagner, “Mass Incarceration.”
[13] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,The German Ideology: Part One, ed. C.J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1932/1970), 64; For more on Marx and ideology, see Derek Ford, “What is Ideology? A Marxist Introduction to the Marxist Theory of Ideology,”Liberation School, 07 September 202.1.
[14] Marx and Frederick Engels,The German Ideology,64, emphasis added.
[15] Ibid., 65.
[16] Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 96.
[17] Nickie Louise, “These 6 Corporations Control 90% of the Media Outlets in America. The Illusion of Choice and Objectivity,”TechStartups, 18 September 2020. Availablehere.
[18] Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 104.
[19] Ibid., 89.
[20] Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life(New York: Basic Books: 1976), 12.
[21] See, for example, William Ayers, “The Criminalization of Youth: Politicians Promote Lock-Em-Up Mentality,”Rethinking Schools12, no. 2 (1997/1998). Availablehere.
[22] Bowles and Gintis,Schooling in Capitalist America, 265.
[23] Ibid., 285.
[24] Tracey Onyenacho, “Black and Brown Students Are Organizing to Remove Police From Their Schools,”ColorLines, 21 July 2020. Availablehere.
[25] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,The Communist Manifesto, trans. S. Moore (New York: Penguin Books, 1888/1967), 221.
[26] Karl Marx,Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 1): The Process of Capitalist Production, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 229. Availablehere.
[27] For more on the Paris Commune, see: Richard Becker, “Vive La Commune! The Paris Commune 150 Years Later,”Liberation School,March 18, 2021. Availablehere.
[28] Marx and Engels,The Communist Manifesto, 194.
[29] Lenin, “The State and Revolution,” 424.
[30] For a definition of socialist revolution, see Nino Brown, “What Does it Take to Make a Socialist Revolution?”Liberation School, 29 September 2022. Availablehere.
[31] Lenin, “The State and Revolution,” 467.
[32] Ibid., 477.
[33] Richard Becker, “The Soviet Union: Why the Workers’ State Could Not Wither Away,” inRevolution Manifesto: Understanding Marx and Lenin’s Theory of Revolution,ed. Ben Becker (San Francisco: Liberation Media, 2015), 58.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Global Times, “Global Times interview: Brian Becker on socialism and the U.S. campaign against China,”Liberation News, 05 July 2022. Availablehere.
[36] Ibid.
[37] Engels,The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 232.

Our Freedoms Shrink as Our Military Expands

By Brad Wolf

Republished from Counterpunch.

The Merchants of Death even own our sidewalks. That’s what we were told when we arrived at Raytheon Technologies in Arlington, Virginia, on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, to issue a “Contempt Citation” for Raytheon’s failure to comply with a subpoena issued last November by the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, a People’s Tribunal scheduled for November of 2023.

Raytheon knew we were coming. The police were waiting and would not permit us to enter the enormous building even though other businesses and a public restaurant resided inside. “You’re not allowed in,” the police said. “The owner of the building said no to you.” Others were free to enter for lunch or to conduct business. The officers were polite. Respectful. “We are only doing our job,” they said, seeming more like a hired corporate police force than a public police force.

“And you cannot remain on the sidewalk,” the police said. We responded that it was a public sidewalk. “Not anymore,” the police said. “Raytheon bought the sidewalk. And the sidewalk across the street.” When asked how a private corporation can buy a public sidewalk, the officers shrugged not knowing the answer. “You can move down there,” they said, pointing to a corner across the busy street.

We asked to see a deed proving this bizarre acquisition of public property. Lo and behold, the police dutifully produced a deed stamped by the recorder of deeds office indicating Raytheon did in fact own the sidewalk all the way to the street.

Using US tax dollars, including the dollars of those of us who stood there, Raytheon bought up the very freedom they claim they’re building weapons to defend. Freedom of speech and assembly is drastically reduced when corporations as powerful as Raytheon control the halls of Congress, the Pentagon, the White House, and our corporate media.

In fact, in the belly of the beast of the Raytheon building was the corporate media itself, an ABC television affiliate which refused to talk to us last November. When we had approached an ABC spokesman outside, they refused to admit they worked for ABC despite wearing ABC attire. From corporate wars to corporate police to corporate media, all in one monstrous, taxpayer-funded building.

In 2023, approximately $858 billion will be taken from the paychecks of US citizens to help squelch our most fundamental Constitutional rights of privacy and assembly.

Across the street from Raytheon, we unfurled our banners and carried our signs. We held Raytheon in contempt for refusing to comply to a subpoena issued by the people of the world. We noted their shame of their own corporate behavior such that they purchased police and public sidewalks to keep public scrutiny away.

A young woman approached, noticing our signs. She was an Afghan refugee who had been there during the invasion. She and her family had suffered immensely from the US bombing. Her father barely made it out alive. She was crying as she spoke. Off to the side, a man in a suit carefully took pictures of each of us. We were photographed everywhere we went this Valentine’s Day.

To evidence Raytheon’s complicity in war crimes, we read the names of the 34 victims—26 of them schoolboys—killed in the horrific 2018 bombing of a school bus in Yemen. The bomb, a 500-pound Paveway laser-guided bomb was made by Lockheed Martin while Raytheon was responsible for the infrared system which targeted the bus.

Under the careful eye of our National Security State, we traveled to the Pentagon to deliver a subpoena compelling Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to testify before the Tribunal. Mr. Austin, before being Secretary of Defense was, of course, on the Board of Directors at Raytheon. This, after retiring from the military.

Mr. Austin had cashed in at Raytheon and was now in the catbird seat at the Pentagon sending billion-dollar contracts to his former employer. He is certain to cash in a second time when he leaves his current office. And so, we had a subpoena asking Secretary Austin to speak about these allegations epitomizing the “Revolving Door” between the military, defense contractors, and public office.

A dozen police waited. They counted the number in our group making hand signals between themselves. “You’ve just come from the Raytheon building,” they said to me. “And you plan on spending one hour here. And then you’re going to the Hyatt Hotel for a protest.” I asked how they knew that, especially the information about the Hyatt Hotel since that had not been made public, and the police officer smiled and said, “We have our ways.”

We were told we could protest in a small, fenced-in grassy area away from the metro stop, out of sight from most. We, the people, had been corralled behind a fence in a small grassy patch to peacefully exercise our freedom of speech as the billion-dollar behemoth of war and death, surveillance and repression, stood before us.

Similar actions of subpoena delivery had been carried out the same day in San Diego, California; Asheville, North Carolina; and New York City. Surveillance and corporate resistance had occurred at each location.

Valentine’s Day, this day meant for the opening of hearts, was one of recognizing the Orwellian state in which we live, funded by our own dollars. Our military not only consumes our money, but our freedoms as well.

We again read the names of the dead, sang, some prayed. As we were leaving, one of the police officers cheerfully said, “It’s 64° outside and a beautiful day. Why not enjoy it and go play golf.” A frightfully common thought in such perilous times.

Brad Wolf is a former prosecutor, professor, and college dean.  He is the Executive Director of Peace Action Network of Lancaster and writes for numerous publications.

Neoliberalism and the Crisis of Higher Education

By Beth Mintz

Republished from Marxist Sociology blog.

I recently published an article in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology that uses the “student as customer” to help understand why college is so expensive. I explore three factors that contribute to high costs:  1) contemporary understandings of education as a private, rather than a public, good; 2) the ways that schools are funded; and 3) the “marketization” of higher ed.  These processes produce students who are customers, but it is important to point out that this change is rooted in a set of neoliberal assumptions that frame the way that we think about, organize, and fund education, rather than any fundamental change in young people.

Neoliberalism is the dominant ideology of this historical moment. It includes a belief in the following:  the efficiency of the free market and the deregulation and privatization of the public sector that markets require; tax reduction; abandoning the welfare state; and replacing the notion of the public good with a personal responsibility for one’s own welfare.  It has informed public policy in every Democratic and Republican administration since the Reagan years, and it currently structures much of our economic and political lives. This includes the university, where it has shaped institutional practice and individual action.

Neoliberal thought considers higher education a financial investment for students, and it assumes that colleges and universities should compete for customers, just like any other sector. These beliefs have laid the foundation for formal higher educational policy and internal institutional procedure. They have not made the academy more efficient, however, but instead have contributed to the runaway expenses that we see today.

In the United States, ideas about the funding of education turn on whether it is considered a public good; that is, whether the whole community benefits from an educated population, or if it is an investment made by the individual, yielding a return in the form of future earnings. In recent years, the latter vision, that of a private good, has gained ascendancy and this has had a profound impact on financing. It helps explain why so much need-based financial aid takes the form of loans rather than grants, and why public colleges and universities are being systematically defunded.

Moreover, although theorists have long argued that schools reproduce the class system, the victory of the neoliberal agenda has intensified the role of education in solidifying advantage. That colleges and universities survive on those who can pay the bills translates into the structural requirement of privileging the affluent, with the needs of many low and middle-income students ignored.  It also has a profound effect on student behavior as education becomes a commodity to be used for competitive advantage in the labor market, turning students into customers to be pursued.

To attract students in a highly competitive environment, colleges and universities invest in all sorts of things to distinguish themselves from other institutions. The way markets work, however, everyone adopts successful practices, and this means that many very expensive innovations eventually become commonplace. This includes the fancy dorms, dining halls and cutting-edge classrooms so common on campuses these days. Indeed, academia has gone on a multi-decade building spree, often financed by long-term borrowing. Between 2002 and 2012, interest payments almost doubled, growing from  $6 billion to $11 billion for four-year (nonprofit) schools. The University of Colorado, for example, owed approximately $1.5 billion in 2019, with 3.6.% of its annual operating budget going towards debt servicing.

Expanded student services are also common recruitment vehicles, and although they do not typically require large capital outlays, they fuel the growth of administrators. Defined narrowly, about 8.4% of spending in private (nonprofit) four-year institutions and 4.9% for comparable publics is on student services. This contributes to the decline in instructional spending as a percentage of total expenses in both the public and private (non-profit) sectors which, in 2017-2018, accounted for 27% and 31%  of four-year schools’ budgets, respectively.  Add to this nearly a half a billion dollars spent on advertising each year, and the role of competition and marketization in tuition escalation becomes clearer.

Among upper middle-class families, prestige has become the centerpiece of college aspirations. When education is viewed as a vehicle for competitive advantage in a labor market – as a private good – and attending a prestigious school is believed to distinguish one from the large pool of competitors, students pursue prestige as a rational strategy for investment maximization.

Colleges and universities understand this well, and, thus, increasing one’s prestige rankings is a central part of many a recruitment strategy.  Indeed, this explains the attention that schools pay to the U. S. New and World Report lists. Attentive institutions have figured out ways to raise their scores and a very common — and expensive – tactic is tuition discounting, where merit scholarships are offered to high achieving customers who would contribute to a school’s selectivity profile. Over time, this practice has spread through academia, so much so that few students now pay full freight. On average, private nonprofits collected  55% of published figures in 2018, with nearly 82% of undergraduates receiving discounts.

Public universities, particularly flagships, use merit aid to recruit academically successful out-of-state students, who contribute to institutional prestige and – theoretically — also counter decreases in state funding by paying higher tuition rates than state residents. But, here again, once everyone has incorporated an innovation, it becomes less effective in distinguishing an institution from its competitors, while the practice remains.  Preliminary research  has found this approach is so pervasive, and the competition so intense, that it may lower total tuition revenue, suggesting that state universities have become particularly vulnerable to the market failure of tuition discounting.

Moreover, merit money privileges the wealthy; it has grown at the expense of need-based scholarships and it goes predominately to upper income students, with awards tending to increase with income levels. This has led to  decreases in the proportion of low income and minority undergraduates in college in general, with public sector schools especially hard hit.

Neoliberalism, the dominant ideology of this historical moment, has contributed to the rise of the “student as customer” with costly ramifications. The contemporary view of education as a private-good, for example, justifies the massive underfunding of higher education and helps explain why we are transferring its cost from the community to the individual. Given the belief in the power of the market, the non-profit world now follows the logic of the private sector, with colleges and universities developing institutional practices to help survive marketization and privatization. Dependence on students who can afford to pay the bills explains many of the strategies that have been widely adopted, but instead of providing advantage in the competition for revenue, they have created very expensive necessities. This contributes to skyrocketing tuition, while affecting the class and racial/ethnic composition of contemporary campuses. When compared to the conventional wisdom of trust the market, then, the conclusion is that corporatization and marketization are important drivers in tuition cost escalation.

Beth Mintz is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Vermont.  Her research interests include occupational segregation, corporate structure, gender, and health care.

To read more, see: Beth Mintz. “Neoliberalism and the Crisis in Higher Education: The Cost of Ideology” in The American Journal of Economic and Sociology 2021.

[Image by Kevin Dooley via Flicker (CC BY 2.0)]

Ecosocialism Versus Degrowth: A False Dilemma

By Giacomo D’Alisa

Republished from Undisciplined Environments.

In a recent article Michael Lowy ponders if the ecological left has to embrace the ecosocialist or the degrowth ‘flag’; a concern that is not totally new. Lowy is a French-Brazilian Marxist scholar and a prominent ecosocialist. Together with Joel Kovel, an American social scientist and psychiatrist, in 2001 he wrote An ecosocialist manifesto, a foundational document for several political organizations worldwide. Thus, entering into a discussion with Lowy is not a simple academic whim, but a demand that many politically-engaged people of the ecological left are wondering about.

Recently, members of an ecosocialist group within Catalonia en Comù, part of Unida Podemos (itself part of the centre-left coalition governing Spain), invited me to debate about the end of the economic growth paradigm. This hints that ecosocialists are interested in degrowth vision and proposals. On the other hand, during talks, speeches and discussions I have participated in, I also have noted that ecosocialist projects intrigue and inspire many degrowthers. Indeed, people on both sides feel they are sister movements. The following reflection is a first and humble contribution to making the two come closer.

In the above-quoted article, Lowy supports an alliance between ecosocialists and degrowthers, and I cannot but agree with this conclusion. However, before justifying this strategic endeavour, he feels the necessity to argue why degrowth falls short as a political vision. He narrows down his critical assessment to three issues. First, Lowy maintains, degrowth as a concept is inadequate to express clearly an alternative programme. Second, degrowthers and their discourses are not explicitly anti-capitalist. Finally, for him, degrowthers are not able to distinguish between those activities that need to be reduced and those that can keep flourishing.

Concerning the first critique, Lowy maintains that the word: “degrowth” is not convincing; it does not convey the progressive and emancipatory project of societal transformation that it is needed; this remark echoes with an old and unsolved debate for many. A discussion that Lowy should know, as well as those that have followed the last decade of degrowth debate. Sophisticated criticism has mobilized the American cognitive linguist and philosopher George Lakoff’s study about framing. Kate Rowarth, for example, suggested to degrowthers to learn from Lakoff that no one can win a political struggle or election if they keep using their opponent’s frame; and degrowth has in itself its antagonic vision: growth. Ecological economists supported the same argument in a more articulated way, suggesting that for this reason, degrowth backfires.

On the contrary, my intellectual companion Giorgos Kallis, back in 2015, gave nine clear reasons why degrowth is a compelling word. I want to complement them with one more. Looking at the search trends in Google, after ten years, degrowth keeps drawing higher levels of attention worldwide than ecosocialism. Perhaps ecosocialism can result clearer at a glance. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the populace will be immediately convinced. Indeed, the ecosocialist concept also has similar and possibly worse problems of framing, given the post-Soviet aversion to “socialism”, but this cannot mean we should abandon the term. The recent upsurge of popularity in the U.S. of “democratic socialism” suggests that the negative association of a term can be overcome.

Ecosocialists, as degrowthers, must keep explaining the actual content of their political dream, the label is not sufficient to explain it all. Our mission is un-accomplished; granted, in some contexts, ecosocialism will result in a more straightforward message, but in other degrowth could result more convincing. For the ecological left, more frames could be more effective than just one; and, using the most appropriate in different contexts and geographies is very probably the best strategy.

Noteworthy is that these different frames share core arguments and strategies. So let me move to Lowy’s second criticism, the supposed discrepancy between ecosocialists and degrowthers about capitalism. According to Lowy, degrowthers are not sufficiently or explicitly anti-capitalist. I cannot deny that not all degrowthers self-define as anti-capitalists and that for some of them stating it is not a priority. However, as Kallis already clarified, degrowth scholars are increasingly grounding their research and policies in a critique of capital forces and relations. Furthermore, Dennis and Schmelzer have shown that degrowthers widely share the belief that a degrowth society is incompatible with capitalism. And Stefania Barca has delineated how articulating ‘degrowth and labour politics toward an ecological class consciousness’ is the way forward for an ecosocialist degrowth society.

To these arguments, I want to add an observation. In their 2001 ecosocialist manifesto, Lowy and Kovel affirmed that in order to solve the ecological problem, it is necessary to set limits upon accumulation. They go on clarifying that this is not possible while capitalism keeps ruling the world. Indeed, as they and other prominent ecosocialists affirm, capitalism needs to grow or die. This effective slogan is probably the most explicit anti-capitalist sentence written in the ecosocialist manifesto, and I can maintain that most of the degrowthers would undersign this statement without hesitation –even more in pandemic times, when the existing capitalist system seems to be predicated upon the slogan: we (the capitalists) grow and you die! Indeed, it is ever-more evident that inequality is increasing dramatically during this period. If these observations are accurate, then degrowthers and ecosocialists agree more than disagree, and together with many others in the ecological left camp, share the same common sense: a healthy ecological and social system beyond the pandemic is not compatible with capitalism.

Lowy’s last criticism is that degrowthers cannot differentiate between the quantitative and the qualitative characteristics of growth. At first sight, it seems a step back to the lively discussion in the 1980s about the difference between growth and development. However, I am sure that Lowy and other ecosocialists are well aware of the critical assessment many Latin America thinkers have done of development and its colonial legacy (see here and here, for example). So, I will interpret this criticism in a more general term: it is essential to be selective about growth, and clarify what sectors need to grow and which need to degrow or even disappear. Nothing new under the sun, I could say. Peter Victor in 2012, when he was developing no-growth scenarios for facing the threat of climate change, discussed the selective growth scenario showing its modest and short-term effects for mitigating climate change. Serge Latouche, in his 2009 book Farewell to growth, argued that the decision about selective degrowth cannot be left to market forces. And Kallis explained that growth is a complex and integrated process, and thus it is mistaken to think in terms of what has to increase and what has to decrease.

It is an error to use degrowth as synonymous of decrease (as Timothée Parrique discussed extensively), and to think that what is considered ‘good’ things (hospitals, renewable energy, bicycles, etc.) need to increase without limits as the growth imaginary commands. Those that perpetuate this logic, as Lowy seems to do, stay in the growth camp. Doing so, Lowy did not follow his suggestion of paying more attention to a qualitative transformation.

In an ecosocialist society, orienting production towards more hospitals and public transport, as Lowy suggests, does not imply overcoming the growth logic and its predicaments. A degrowth society, with a healthier lifestyle and more ecological care, probably would not need so many more hospitals. Indeed, as Luzzati and colleagues found, the increase in per-capita income correlates significantly with the increase in cancer morbidity and mortality. In a degrowth society, people would fly very much less, and this could help to diminish the speed of pandemic contagions. Agro-ecological systems will encroach fewer habitats; both these qualitative changes in societal arrangement could imply less necessity to increase the number of intensive care units.

On the other hand, increasing more and more of a ‘good thing’ such as bikes in a city is not entirely positive: as in the case of Amsterdam, where walkers felt lack of space because of the enormous number of bikes in public spaces; or China , where tens of thousands of bike have been dumped because the growth-led prospect of the shared bike in cities resulted socially and ecologically problematic, the city counsellor decided to cap bike growth and regulate the share sectors. In sum, the idea of selective (de)growth does not help to unlearn the growth logic that still persists amongst many in the ecological left camp. What is needed is, indeed, a qualitative change in our mind, in our logic and our performative acts.

Ecosocialists and degrowthers are less far apart than Lowy’s article hints. Both visions are moving forward along the same path, learning from each other in the process. Discussing some thesis or policies that one or the other is proposing will help to improve and clarify their visions, and make them less questionable at the eyes of the sceptics and indifferent people. A meaningful dialogue will help us to make our arguments and practices widely commonsensical. Ecological leftists have not to decide which is the best and the most comprehensive discourse between ecosocialism and degrowth. These visions, I tried to argue above, indeed share core arguments, and both contribute to building persuasive discourse and performative actions.

On the contrary, creating a false dilemma is not very useful for our everyday struggles. In 2015, with some colleagues, we suggested exploring the redundancy of six different frameworks (Degrowth, Sustainable Community Movement Organizations, Territorialism, Commons, Social Resilience and Direct Social Actions) for relaunching more robust and comprehensive initiatives against the continuous expansion of capitalism and environmental injustices. We concluded that fostering redundancy more than nuance should motivate the promoters of these approaches if the general aim is to effectively relaunch robust and less aleatory alternatives to capitalism. In other words, we call for focusing on the consolidation of what all these approaches have in common, not just what they diverge on. This suggestion is also valid for ecosocialists and degrowthers.

It is undoubtedly crucial that both ecosocialists and degrowthers continue refining their discourses, practices and policies for advancing toward an ecologically-sound and socially-fair world free from patriarchal, racial and colonial legacy. Nevertheless, it is equally important that they map the redundancies of their views to improve the effectiveness of their shared struggle at various scales.

Giacomo D’Alisa is a FCT postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, Portugal, where is part of the Ecology and Society Working Group. D’Alisa is founding member of the Research & Degrowth collective in Barcelona, Spain.

From Neoliberalism to Nowhere

By Thomas McLamb

 

From 1932-1945, FDR responded to the Great Depression by way of the New Deal to temporarily put a bandage on the crises of capital. This creation of the American Welfare State served as the response to the occasional short-term downturns of capitalist expansion. From FDR’s term until the Oil Crisis in the early 70s, the United States capitalist system enjoyed a period of steady growth and a stable rate of profit, whose occasional declines were solved by way of a variety of government programs that sent one clear message; the government existed to serve the people.

When Nixon took office, the processes of persistent economic inflation became apparent, indicating that this long period of economic expansion and stability was changing. That said, Marxist analyses of economic patterns of expansion, contraction, and long-term growth should stray away from the use of inflation as an economic pattern. Inflation is merely the process by which bourgeois economists summarize the degeneration of working-class buying power and strengthening of capitalist class buying power. In one short phrase – the dollar is fundamentally worth less to the worker than it is to the capitalist. While the capitalist is able to purchase more money with less, an exponential process depending on how much capital has been accumulated, the worker is dependent on purchasing essential life commodities, healthcare, food, housing, etc. with their dollar; the worker does not enjoy the luxury of purchasing more money with less, a process that inevitably leads to the phenomenon neoclassical economists refer to as inflation. Regardless of the actual relationship of inflation and the working-class, the aforementioned cycle of profits and growth from the post-war periods came to an end with the ’73-75 recession. The long wave of capitalist expansion had begun to wane, signaling the forthcoming period of long-term stagnation of working-class wages still underway today.

The end of the doctrine of the Welfare State led directly into a new doctrine of economic policy. The dominant economists of the period suggested that government welfare was wasteful and inefficient, that the occasional patterns of economic recession could be solved by allowing the markets to regulate themselves. The general assumption of these economists, i.e. Friedman et. al., was that government welfare resulted in an exponential process of inflation that could be remedied by a revival of liberal economics. This renascent adoration of laissez-faire capitalism came to serve as the genesis and framework of neoliberalism – the doctrine of cutting government expenses by any means necessary. Following the birth of neoliberalism, austerity quickly set in. The government responded to crises by allowing the bottom to hit the bottom, and externalizing and outsourcing previously domestic forms of labor that had now suffered from a declining rate of profit.

Alongside the externalization and outsourcing of labor from the United States, a process that signaled the shift of the U.S. to a strictly service and information economy, came a renascent nationalism and patriotism within the United States. This renascent nationalism served as the popular justification for the endless oil wars in the middle east, the incessant and undemocratic CIA-backed military coups in Latin America, and the continuous starving acts of tariffs and embargoes against foreign governments who refused to kneel to the imperialist war cry of neoliberalism. In industries where the rate of profit waned in the United States, the government merely cut popular welfare programs to fund the imperialist war machine to appropriate resources, governments, and economies of foreign governments, continuing the accumulation of capital and comfortable seat of influence of America.

Away from the wars, coups, and starvation acts outside of American borders, American workers waded through an ever-changing industry of employment in the United States. The neoliberal response to the discovery of ‘inflation,’ better understood as another symptom of the declining rate of profit, resulted in the same outcome the neoliberal economists and politicians believed they would be avoiding – a period of long-term stagnation of working-class wages and the devaluation of the buying-power of the working-class by large-scale privatization and imperialist efforts to sustain the total economic growth of the U.S. economy. Of course, these solutions worked to create more wealth than ever and higher profitability that ever before in the United States, but the measure of the total economy and its exponential growth ignores the continuous struggle of the non-propertied class. Marx’s theories of surplus value provide us with the truth that all profit is derived solely from labor. With that understood, wherever labor costs can be reduced, they will be, and profits will increase. Additionally, the buying-power of those wages themselves have been structurally diminished long-term by the neoliberal doctrine. This process of the stagnation of working-class buying power can be observed in the history of wages since the beginning of the neoliberal period. Real per capita wealth in the U.S. has more than doubled since 1964 while average real wages have barely increased. From 1964 to 2018, the buying power of the average worker in the United States increased by only 11.7% while the actual average wages themselves have increased by 806%. This mass rate of inflation is not an aberration of capitalist market economies – it is precisely a function of the long and short waves of capitalist development; all of which is accelerated and exaggerated by neoliberal austerity.

Over the past 50 years, over 90% of all growth in income has gone directly to the top 5% of households in the United States. Just short of 3% of total economic growth went to the bottom 20% of households, while more than half went to the wealthiest 20%. Wealth inequality from the late sixties throughout the development of the neoliberal period can be described in one sentence – the rich got richer and the poor get poorer.

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The bottom 95% of families have experienced within themselves disproportionate rates of economic growth relative to productivity. While workers are producing more than ever for their bosses, hikes in productivity in the neoliberal period haven’t resulted in higher wages at all. Drew DeSilver has pointed out in his work through the Pew Research Center that while productivity amongst workers has increased by 80% over the past 30 years, the data will show that the buying power of the wages those workers earned has moved up barely a percent and a half.  Despite this near doubling in productivity, neoliberal austerity and market purism have made more money than ever for those at the top, and stolen more than ever from those at the bottom. The general tendency of money to move upwards on the capitalist market has resulted in exponential gains for the ultra-rich, which as mentioned before, creates an exponential increase in the buying-power of the rich and a stagnating or decreasing buying-power of the poor.

Alongside the hikes in productivity and slow growth of wages, nearly 80:1 from 1987-2017, there has been a drastic shift in employment by major industry sector amongst the total workforce. From 1948-1975, the total employees in the United States increased by 65.67%, around 2.43% annually. From 1975-2017, total employees increased by 79.23%, or 1.89% annually. Even though productivity and total wealth increased exponentially over the neoliberal period, employment decreased in growth year after year.

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Amongst the general change in total employment, specific industries saw drastic changes during the neoliberal period compared to the period of government intervention policy stemming from the FDR era. Manufacturing jobs have disappeared in mass numbers since the beginning of the neoliberal era. Manufacturing has been pushed abroad to keep up with the ‘cutting costs’ doctrine of neoliberalism, while more workers than ever are forced into low-paying service and information jobs, since these are the only jobs that exist anymore. Retail positions have increased proportionally with total employment, but many of these positions are occupied by formerly well-employed manufacturing jobs. The shift in employment by major industry sector can be observed as a primary vehicle for the slow-growth of working-class buying power, as well as an expression of ever-disappearing manufacturing jobs.

In terms of buying power of the working-class, the numbers represent a similar transformation of shares of economic expansion, though the buying-power can illuminate a more concrete examination that accounts for the bourgeois notion of inflation and market behaviors.

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From 1967 to 2017, the buying power of the lowest 80% of families grew at a similar rate to the actual dollar amount in the previous data set. From a sliding scale of the least to most wealthy in terms of economic expansion, the buying-power of the poor increased by around half compared to their dollar-amount wages while the buying-power of the wealthiest percentile classes increased by around 2.1 times. Though these numbers from the census do adjust buying power to examine the market behaviors and adjust the wages to paint a more accurate picture using consumer price indexes, these numbers are not adjusted to account for factors that only affect growth amongst the ultra-rich, i.e., debt, investments, property, etc. Furthermore, the tendency of capital upwards results in exponential increases in the buying-power of those at the top, but commodities can only grow so expensive before those at the bottom can no longer pay for them, thus the tendency of the rate of profit to fall despite exponential levels of expansion for the most-high spheres of capital.

Of course, the most wealth 5% of households in the United States have enjoyed economic expansion that dwarfs that of those at the bottom, a near 60-40 split. This is largely due to the existing ownership of the means of production and investment spheres by the ultra-rich maintaining their positions through one of the largest hikes in productivity in the history of capital itself.  The bureau of labor statistics provides us with a catalogued measure of productivity increases by major industry sector, though some catalogs only go back as far as 1987. Despite this, the numbers are still useful to examine the production and profitability levels of economic industry relative to real wage increases.

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There are data series on productivity in the manufacturing sector using the same measuring scale as the data set above, though the historical series only date back to 1987, presenting several problems, but the data itself is still very useful. The data is included in the above chart, though 1967-1986 are omitted for mentioned reasons.

Referring to the real average household incomes of the same time-set discussed above, we can build a relationship by percentile class of the wage-productivity increase from 1967-2017. Listed below are both the data from 1967-2017 as well as a smaller section from 1987-2017 to include manufacturing data relative to the other major industry sectors.

mclamb5.jpg

Regardless of year and industry, there is a general tendency both within the latent capitalist mode of production as well as the neoliberal tendency for exponentially disproportionate ratios of growth to productivity depending on income class. Since 1987, there has been a harsh stagnation of wages especially amongst the poorest 20% of households in the United States that was not shared in years prior. Following the tendency of the income-productivity relationship upwards can illuminate the fact that the neoliberal period has resulted in the richest few in the United States have received the overwhelming majority of money and buying-power from the bottom. The philosophy of trickle-down economics combined with the furthering development of the capitalist tendency towards class-monopoly has resulted in both the longest period of wage stagnation in the history of American capitalism as well as the largest wealth inequality in the history of this country. Hikes in productivity are useful for examining the rate at which working-class wages are outpaced by economic growth, but these productivity measures also help illuminate the mass-level of accumulation and theft that the billionaire class has taken part in over the past 50 some-odd years.

In all industries, sans manufacturing, the highest 20% of household incomes have reaped the rewards of the increased productivity of the bottom 80%. The outsourcing and evisceration of American manufacturing deals primarily with the need for a higher profitability from labor by those who own the manufacturing means, as well as the systemic decline in union membership and labor solidarity from Reagan to present. Furthermore, the top 5% of families have almost exclusively reaped the rewards of hikes in productivity, being the only percentile class in the country that has achieved a level of economic growth that is even barely comparable to the growth of productivity. Again, this wage-productivity relationship only grows more dramatic and exponential as you examine those higher and higher up on the wealth ladder. For those at the very top, their economic growth makes that of those of the bottom 99% seem like raindrops in the vast open ocean.

In the period of FDR, there were three solutions to the crisis of capitalism across the world – Bolshevism, fascism, and social-democratic government policy. If the policy of FDRs social-democratic platform was to sustain the rate of profit through bailing out the worker through mass government programs, the policy of neoliberalism was to simply allow the economy to bottom out, so that the rate of profit could be restored organically in the market. The neoliberal period which proceeded from the welfare state allowed for mass accumulation of capital by the ultra-rich at exponential levels. In the early 20th century, bailing out the ultra-rich would not allow for an organic recovery of the rate of profit since the raw inequality between the rich and poor paled in comparison to that of the 21st century. However, in 2020, the capitalist system has been able to sustain its profits by doing precisely what couldn’t be done 100 years ago – bailing out the 1% of the 1% time after time. The capital that has been accumulated in disproportionate amounts over the past 100 years has facilitated this very process of the reintroduction of mass government programs that serve the market, only this time, they serve those at the top instead of those at the bottom. The program of neoliberalism is the death knell of capital, whose only defense is to consume its very mechanism of its own creation and sustenance.

The rate of profit is in decline. There are two paths forward from neoliberalism. The first path is the possibility that capital can save itself through the false-promises of several decades of social-democratic reform, recreating the conditions that led to the development of neoliberalism. The second path is the dissolution of capital by its own hand. Capitalism has dug its own grave through the doctrine of neoliberalism, resulting in the greatest wealth inequality in the history of capital and the ever-growing contradictions of labor and productivity. The path forward from the death knells of capital cannot be understood as some sort of communist eventuality. Capital will certainly die, but what takes is place is certainly indeterminate.

Neoliberalism has wreaked havoc on the worker for half a century now. Corporate tax cuts, the starvation of the worker, and the greatest wealth inequality the country has ever seen – these are the legacies of neoliberalism. Its doctrine has been nothing but the largest heist in the history of capitalism, with the ultra-rich stealing more every day from the pockets of the worker. The path forward must address these concerns, lest we allow the economy to bottom out, and leave authoritarianism and failed bourgeois economics to dominate the world as it has for the past century.

Thomas McLamb is a Lebanese-American Marxist writer, historian, and graduate student residing in the so-called United States. Thomas has spent the last few years researching historic wages, economic expansion, recession, and the currents of capitalism both in the so-called United States as well as internationally.

As the Global Hegemon Collapses, Can Private Property Be Far Behind?

[PHOTO: Al Drago/Getty]

By Steven Miller

Tuesday’s Presidential debate showed the world how the politics of collapse are determining the election of the next President of the US. It was reminiscent of the Roman Senate when the Goths sacked Rome in 410 AD. Senators gathered in the Forum, protected by the Praetorian Guards. Suddenly one Senator would leap up and cry, “I propose a law making sacking the city illegal.” Everyone voted and the resolution passed unanimously.

The world was watching Tuesday and was shocked at how low the politics have sunk in the US.

There are actually real issues these days — COVID, systemic economic collapse, institutional racism, rampant police murder. But instead we saw the leadership of the most powerful country in the world, the global hegemon for the last 70 years, collapsing in real time right there on television. The candidates could not have an intelligent discussion of the tremendous issues that face the country. No vision, no ideas, no dialogue, no programmatic solutions. The Democrats, of course, agree with Trump on 80% of the issues and therefore dare not make programmatic attacks. The debate proved nothing more than the old adage that when you lay down in the gutter, you do not wind up smelling like a rose.

Meanwhile the organs of the State are fighting themselves. This is characteristic of an objectively revolutionary situation. The FBI openly counters and reports to the American people to disprove the President. The President constantly usurps authority he does not legally have, including creating his own private police force aided and abetted by the most privatized elements of ICE and Homeland Security. The CDC, the Post Office and the Justice Department, every organ of the State, are politicized and coerced into being part of Trump’s election campaign.

The Senate and the House are in stalemate and cannot figure out how to help the American people now that 50 million are unemployed, have lost their healthcare, and are facing a looming Rent Apocalypse. Paralysis is another characteristic of an objectively revolutionary situation. The Republicans are risking losing the Senate as they try to jam through a new Supreme Court Justice before the election. People are beginning to see that these “honored institutions of democracy” are far from neutral.

Twenty-six million people hit the streets in righteous wrath over the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and so many others. Their demands crystalized around defunding or abolishing the police, which acts like an occupying army in a country that treats non-violent civilians with the tactics of the War of Terror, while white supremist vigilante gangs stalk them in the dark.

The institutions of the US State were forged in slavery and infused with structural racism. One of these, the Electoral College, was established to prevent the popular vote from determining the President. It will begin to tear itself apart after election day on November 3. No one knows whether or how the institutions of government will hold up in the coming months before a President is inaugurated on January 20… or after.

A major indicator of how things are going will be the actions of the corporate media industrial complex, perhaps the most sophisticated thought-control apparatus ever devised. These corporations have given Trump billions of dollars of free advertising, and give credence to his slightest whim. They now work in tandem with social media, which openly operates with malign intent to confuse the situation even more. It was therefore significant that one day before the debate, the New York Times, released information about Trump’s taxes that reveal he doesn’t pay any.

Property Depreciation as a Legal Invention

Now the political exposures are beginning to enter the sacred zone of private property, an issue the capitalist class prefers to keep in the dark. The very State, legal system and tax code that is coming under public scrutiny is designed to give uber privileges to private property. This is what the Trump crime family exploits, as does every corporation in America.

Tax laws allow tangible private property, used for business, to be depreciated. Personal property, like a home, cannot be depreciated, but a landlord can depreciate rental property because the theory is that tangible property is “used-up” over time, so the property owner can “depreciate” it.

But depreciation is simply a legal figment. How do we know? When an owner sells business property, the depreciation starts all over again from the top! And anyone who is forced to rent knows quite well that the value of property appreciates and gets more expensive over time. It doesn’t depreciate at all.

Then the property owner gets to deduct the cost of maintaining the property, so s/he gets a double dip. And since depreciation is a business expense, it is a deduction from business income. The law allows the owner to get cash generated in the current year without paying any tax on an amount of income equal to the amount of depreciation.

The legal scam then is elaborated. Trump (and every corporation) borrows money to purchase property, like a golf course, say for $100 million. They take the depreciation of course. Then they get an appraisal of the property that claims the property is actually worth $300 million. The appraisal, say, is three times what it should be, but the inflated appraisal can be used to provide collateral for additional loans.

In other words, the happy capitalist buys property with other peoples’ money, gets paid in tax breaks, ie public money, to depreciate it, and then falsely appreciates the value, to borrow more money to buy more property, etc etc. What a deal!

Inanimate private property in itself has these rights, not people. They are not the rights of the owner, because if the owner sells the property, they no longer get the privilege of depreciating it. So private property is a legal entity that has far more rights than human beings, just because the law says so. OMG – if ordinary citizens can challenge a system of legal institutions that are infused with systemic racism, how far can they go? That is part of the transformative power and the danger to the capitalists of this moment.

Alone in the world in its COVID response, the US put private property in control of the emergency. America is learning the hard way that there are issues that absolutely need a federal government to take control, propose a single strategy and coordinate resources. This is something that private property can never do.

Extractive Capitalism

Since the capitalist system collapsed in 2008, it has been sustained on life support by public money. US corporations, especially the financial sector, have received $25 trillion to $39 trillion in direct payments (David Sirota, Jacobin, “We've Always Had the Money for Medicare for All - We've Just Given It to Corporations Instead”, 18 June 2020). Capitalists got to onshore $23 trillion of profit two years ago. Add in direct subsidies through the military budget of $1+ trillion a year and massive billion-dollar subsidies to the petroleum and pharmaceutical industries.

Yet the economy collapsed after the advent of the virus in one week, the biggest collapse in history. Add in the actions of a criminal President and suddenly the wheels are coming off the bus. Or are they?

Is it really true that the most powerful capitalist class in history, with an unsurpassed military and three centuries of experience in maintaining its rule both legally and illegally, is so inept that they can do nothing about an unpredictable leader that destabilizes everything?

The government is clearly the last profit center left in capitalism. Just as with depreciation, the actions of government alone can create the legalities that create markets for private property. Hence the battles within the government and the State apparatus. The various capitalist gangs do not have real strategic differences, but they certainly differ tactically on whether to maintain bourgeois democracy to achieve their goals.

Corporations merged with the government long ago; now they are rapidly merging with the State, as the provision of police services are increasingly under the control corporations. Since 2003, the Department of Homeland Security has been spending billions a year to affect this change. Private property is unified in the vision of disaster capitalism: take advantage of the situation to re-organize society to augment private profits. They are not moving slowly. They are re-creating the economy as an extractive industry.

Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, for example, was instrumental in creating the “rentership society”. After 2008, financiers understood that there could never be broad home ownership again in the United States. So they evicted millions from their homes, while graciously letting some stay as long as they paid rent, a sum that was dramatically higher than what they paid before. These policies drove millions out of the communities they had lived in for decades even as large amounts of new housing was built. But that housing was built to be empty, to be speculative property that supported hedge funds and not people. That is an extractive industry that sucks wealth out of communities, just as petroleum corporations extract wealth out of the ground.

US capitalism has big plans to transform other branches of the economy into an extractive machine. Constant privatization of every aspect of life is the method. Serious observers of England’s Brexit insanity recognize that when the dust settles, US-style privatized health care intends to invade and try to take over. Trump’s new Supreme Court nominee will likely vote to end Obamacare, and eliminate health care for another 25 million people or so. What can possibly arise to fill the void? What can allow US corporations to further invade public European health care systems?

Maybe it’s the new Apple watch?

Apple released the latest device during all this turmoil, and proudly stated that it was after long discussions with their “partners” in the insurance industry. Why? Could it be because the insurance industry is the main organizer of health care in the US? What is the connection here?

Haim Israel is a strategic director of Bank of America and head of the report, “The World After Covid Primer.” (www.bofaml.com/.../the_world_after_covid.pdf)

The report notes that 1/3 of the world’s data resides in the healthcare industry. It notes that value of data to the economy will increase from 30l billion euros in 2018 to 829 billion euros in 2025.

“We found that while the data generated is rising exponentially, just 1% of it is analysed or monetised effectively. The post Covid era could benefit technology companies who can analyse and monetise such data, but adoption is likely to vary by region owing to privacy concerns and regulations.”

And..  

“Big Government: a new social contract -- Growing surveillance, inequality and the current inadequacy of some healthcare systems versus others highlighted by the current crisis will act as a catalyst for change in politics, furthering populism trends and increasing the risk of social unrest. Covid-19 has handed governments a new social mandate to protect their citizens. Governments will exert greater influence on businesses with shareholder supremacy potentially eroding in favour of stakeholders. Further, this crisis has made the technology industry useful – if not vital – for implementing government power. We think this is unlikely to reverse…”

How far can this go? Vandanta Shiva reports in her article, “The Pandemic Is a Consequence of the War Against Life” (September 21, 2020):

On March 26, 2020, at a peak of the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic and in the midst of the lock­down, Microsoft was grant­ed a patent by the World Intel­lec­tu­al Prop­er­ty Orga­ni­za­tion (WIPO). Patent WO 060606 declares that ​“Human Body Activ­i­ty asso­ci­at­ed with a task pro­vid­ed to a user may be used in a min­ing process of a cryp­tocur­ren­cy system….”

The ​“body activ­i­ty” that Microsoft wants to mine includes radi­a­tion emit­ted from the human body, brain activ­i­ties, body flu­id flow, blood flow, organ activ­i­ty, body move­ment such as eye move­ment, facial move­ment, and mus­cle move­ment, as well as any oth­er activ­i­ties that can be sensed and rep­re­sent­ed by images, waves, sig­nals, texts, num­bers, degrees, or any oth­er infor­ma­tion or data.

Intellectual property rights, which is what a patent is, are just as much a creation of government as depreciation. It is another form of privilege for private property.

This step turns health care based on bio-data, especially privatized health care, into an extractive industry. We see this approach as well as corporations racing to develop vaccines. Corporations have long developed vaccines for pets and farm animals, but have resisted developing human vaccines, since they do not produce much profit as compared to “treatments” that you pay for across your lifetime.

One reason that government becomes the market of last resort is because economic production is increasingly done by computer systems and robots. As machines replace human labor, that labor cannot be exploited, which is the source of capitalist private profit. But maybe monetized data and data devices allow humans to be exploited for their information, not dissimilar to the exploitation of animals.

So — given these very real developments, with future potential for private profit, is it really likely that the financial industry, which is the major shot-caller in capitalist planning, going to put up with an incompetent, narcissistic, erratic fool for a US President? These boys have run the world since the advent of the Marshall Plan that re-built Europe after World War II. Are they going to give up now? Without even hardly trying?

Unlikely.

The battles we are living through today are a prelude to the battles that will ensue, regardless of who wins the election. The capitalist agenda will remain on the table. They fully intend to culminate their strategy of total privatization. But the story is not over, and the man behind the curtain is private property. The US hegemon is truly fumbling. The rising global popular movement to hold government accountable for public safety and the basic necessities of life in a time of collapse may be diverted for a bit, but it cannot be stopped.

All it requires is class consciousness and abandoning the notions that the status quo will maintain, that incrementalism and piecemeal solutions work and that we can reform our way into a world that puts healing at the top of the agenda.

Systemic Racism and the Prison-Industrial Complex in the 'Land of the Free'

[Image by Keith Negley via NY Times]

By Holly Barrow

Following the tragic murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on 25th May, the world has erupted into protest to demand an end to the vicious racism which continues to infiltrate society. At the forefront of this crucial public discourse on race lies the criminal justice system as it has disproportionately targeted and traumatized BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) communities for decades.

Systemic racism and inequality is intrinsic to law enforcement in the US, with mass incarceration riddled with racial disparities. From the thirteenth amendment loophole to the War on Drugs, Black communities have suffered exponentially under this facade of ‘justice’, with families torn apart as a result. The War on Drugs is in fact one of the plainest and most brazen examples of heavily racialized laws borne out of a desire to incriminate Black communities. When looking at initial federal sentences for crack cocaine offenses, such inequalities within law enforcement become strikingly clear: conviction for crack selling - more heavily sold and used by people of color — resulted in a sentence 100 times more severe than selling the same amount of powder cocaine — more heavily sold and used by white people.

This is no coincidence and just one example of a system patently stacked against low-income, Black communities. We need only look at some key statistics to recognize how deeply this goes: African Americans are more likely than white Americans to be arrested, are more likely to be convicted and are more likely to experience lengthy prison sentences. Beyond this, African American adults are 5.9 times as likely to be incarcerated as white adults.

In light of such disproportionate arrest and convictions of Black people in the US, dismantling the current prison system - particularly the prison-industrial complex - is key in the fight against racism. The prison-industrial complex describes the overlapping interests of government and industry; essentially, it refers to the corruption at the heart of the criminal justice system in the use of prisons as a mechanism for profit.

This is a system that abolitionists and activists have been attempting to eradicate for decades as it has become increasingly clear over the years that there is a very real and dangerous incentive to incarcerate human beings. With the rise of for-profit prison systems has come further exploitation of predominantly African-American men and other ethnic minorities. With regards to class, this system additionally hurts low-income citizens at a significantly higher rate, with many recognizing the harrowing reality that, in the US, poverty is often treated as a crime.

Poor and minority defendants are typically unable to access the same level of protection and defense as their wealthier counterparts. Similarly, the state recognizes the likelihood of their inability to afford bail, with over 10 million Americans in prison as they await trial on low-level misdemeanors or violations simply because they cannot afford the bail set for them. This keeps prisons filled; a key proponent of the prison-industrial complex.

With police officers incentivized to make arrests as they are aware that police departments will not be funded adequately if there is no motive to do so, and billion-dollar corporations having stakes in the private prison system - from technology such as tagging to hospitality for inmates - incarceration has become a means to generate wealth and boost local economies. This comes at the expense of the most marginalized groups, namely poor people of color.

Regrettably, this line between ‘justice’, ‘protection’ and corporate interest is becoming comparably distorted across immigration removal centers. And again, it is BIPOC who largely fall victim to this. Detention, surveillance and border wall construction have all become big business, with approximately two-thirds of all detainees being held in for-profit facilities. Tech companies have thrived off of tracking migrants, with software company Palantir holding a $38 million contract with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

To provide further insight into just how money-oriented the detention of predominantly vulnerable individuals - such as asylum seekers - has become, we can observe the distressing rise in shares in the largest prison company in the world. Shares in CoreCivic — which runs both private prison facilities and detention centers — spiralled by 40% when Trump was elected as president. This came following his promises to deport thousands and demonstrates a clear recognition that this would see private, for-profit immigration detention facilities boom.

To deny the concerning correlation between incarceration - both within prisons and detention facilities - and investment suggests willful ignorance. The treatment of prisons and detention facilities as money-making machines is of detriment to democracy and makes a mockery of those who hail America as the ‘land of the free.’

In fighting systemic racism, we cannot neglect to tackle the prison-industrial complex. Its roots and very mechanisms are rooted in the oppression of the most marginalized.

Holly Barrow is a political correspondent for the Immigration Advice Service; an organization of immigration lawyers based in the UK and the US

Racial Justice is Climate Justice: Racial Capitalism and the Fossil Economy

By Julius Alexander McGee and Patrick Trent Greiner

“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be...This is the inter-related structure of reality.”

- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Letter From Birmingham Jail

The narrative of oppression moves through dialectical pressures. Capitalism evolved from the feudal order that preceded it, creating new forms of racial oppression that benefited an emerging ruling class[1]. Racial tensions evolve alongside economic oppression that subjugates labor to capital. The preceding racial order molds to emerging mechanisms of expropriation and exploitation by way of force and resistance. Beneath the surface of these tensions lies the interconnected threads of ecological and human expropriation. At the heart of all oppression, lies the manipulation of reproduction. The social processes necessary to reproduce black and brown communities, the ecological processes necessary to reproduce various species, and the dialectical processes that exist between humans and nature that are necessary to reproduce societies; the history of oppression is a tapestry of exploitation and expropriation interwoven so as to reproduce the means of maintaining the ruling class lifestyle. From afar this tapestry looks like a single garment; enslavement, capitalism, colonialism, etc. all coming together to produce the image of modernity, but on close examination one can see the interlocking threads of history weaving together a tapestry of oppression.

Fossil fuel consumption is a ubiquitous form of oppression that intersects with other oppressive structures, empowering those who call upon them to more efficiently extract surplus from various processes of social and ecological reproduction. As Malm writes, “The fossil economy has the character of totality... in which a certain economic process and a certain form of energy are welded together[2]” (12). We must not ignore, however, the ways in which oppressive structures and processes of social reproduction are welded into this totality as well. The expropriation of Black bodies cannot be reduced to mere economic relations, nonetheless racial oppression has always served economic interests. Thus, it is our goal to identify how the ongoing process by which fossil fuels and racial oppression are fused to one another and how that fusion changes the economic character of racial capitalism. This will not be a detailed narrative. Our goal is to develop a heuristic to better understand the connection between racial justice and climate change. To this end, we start with the claim that racial justice is climate justice.

Fossil fuels are the loom that weaves the tapestry of oppression into a functioning whole, systematically influencing the lives of the enslaved, imperialized, colonized, and exploited. Fossil fuels have become the bedrock of economic growth and the basis of most social reproduction. By social reproduction we mean human institutions that maintain the genealogical infrastructure of society. The family, schools, food, language, all of these are essential to reproducing a community's way of life. The dialectical bounding of economic growth and social reproduction is mediated through the consumption of fossil fuels. The family uses energy derived from fossil fuels to survive; schools use electricity to reproduce knowledge; food is produced and transported via networks of fossil fuel consumption; language is increasingly tailored to the needs of economic production.  Economic growth is itself a process of reproduction. Growth within the tapestry of oppression reproduces the conditions of much of contemporary social life, but its primary function is the protection and improvement of ruling class livelihoods. The legitimacy of the capitalist class derives from their ability to sustain economic growth. Economic growth is maintained by fossil fuel consumption. The residual impact of this pairing is the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, as well as the transformation of any earth systems that don’t readily lend themselves to the perpetuation of such emission.

All oppression is unsustainable. Oppression produces contradictions that undermine the mechanisms of both social and ecological reproduction. In the case of fossil fuels, humans burn the buried remains of plant and animal species that lived millions of years ago to change the landscape of the living. Fossil fuels embody the death that was essential to our life; they have already contributed to the reproduction of lifecycle processes. When humans use fossil fuels as the basis of social reproduction, they are choosing to live based on death instead of life. The reproduction of economic growth, which is essential to the capitalist classes' rule, is undermined by climate change. Carbon dioxide emissions are the largest contributor to climate change, which threatens the reproductive capacity of the tapestry of oppression. Changes in weather patterns contradict the ecological and social processes that the capitalist class expropriates and oppresses to reproduce their way of life. However, because fossil fuels weave together all forms of reproduction, it is not just the reproduction of the capitalist class that is threatened by climate change, but that of all subjects composing the weft and warp bound together by fossil fuels to create the great tapestry of oppression.

Economic growth is mediated by fossil fuels through the exploitation and expropriation of labor. Exploitation is labor that reproduces the conditions of the capitalist class. The surplus derived from labor exploitation reproduces class dynamics within the tapestry of oppression. Expropriation is the process of confiscation that yields the labor and natural resources that reproduce the existence of those living within the tapestry of oppression- particularly those most deeply exploited. Ecological processes, subsistence living, culture, etc., these forms of reproduction are often tailored to the needs of the ruling class. In order to reproduce their means, the oppressed must pay tribute to the capitalist class. However, the tapestry of oppression is not totalizing. The oppressed resist subjugation through the development of new forms of social reproduction.

There have always been alternative modes of social reproduction. However, reproduction outside the tapestry of oppression threatens the existence of the capitalist class. Therefore, the capitalist class views these forms of reproduction as disposable. Those who are expropriated are disposable insofar as the mode of social reproduction they rely upon, and in many instances their very existence is determined by the whims of the capitalist class. When the mechanisms of reproduction fall outside the realm of what can feasibly be expropriated, the capitalist class corralls processes of social reproduction from geographically and culturally distant populations into the service of capital accumulation. This process is known as primitive accumulation.

Primitive accumulation operates on the color-line as piezas de indias. Piezas de indias was a term used during African enslavement to quantify the productive capacity of enslaved peoples[3]. Specifically, piezas de indias measures qualities and characteristics of enslaved Africans that were developed prior to their enslavement. The term denotes a measurement of the value of a theft. “Marx had meant by primitive accumulation that the piezas de indias had been produced, materially and intellectually, by the societies from which they were taken and not by those by which they were exploited[4]” (121). Primitive accumulation, like all forms of oppression, is a process that is productive of contradictions. These contradictions contain legacies of opposition to the tapestry of oppression. It is here that one finds the germ and trajectory of the Black radical tradition. Primitive accumulation occurs on a spectrum. Material and intellectual theft is not homogenous, though it does often take shape around the color-line[5]. Piezas de indias is primitive accumulation specific to Black folks. In this essay, we identify the ongoing transformation of piezas de indias through three major shifts in the distribution and production of fossil fuels: 1) the first industrial revolution, 2) the second industrial revolution, 3) the neoliberal revolution.  

Although it is still common for historians to refer to a single industrial revolution (much like it is common to refer to a single agricultural revolution[6]), many U.S. historians refer to a second industrial revolution as well[7] [8]. The second industrial revolution occurred during the early and mid 20th century with the electrification of rural and urban towns, increases in railroad use, and the emergence of the automobile industry. This is distinct from the first industrial revolution, which started in Britain in the late 18th century, gradually spread across Europe and the U.S., and is defined by the increased use of steam engines and the rise of textile manufacturing in cities. For our purposes, both of these industrial revolutions are understood as forms of primitive accumulation perpetuated by piezas de indias. By this, we mean that primitive accumulation during the first and second industrial revolutions functioned through uneven and combined development, creating unique dynamics of interdependence within the tapestry of oppression.

The First Industrial Revolution: King Cotton and Racial Capitalism

If fossil fuels are “a train put at a point in the past on the current perilous track2”, African enslavement is the track by which the train moves. The bulk of the fossil economy, which emerged in Britain during the 18th and 19th centuries, was initially centered on textile production. The raw materials that made industrial production of textiles economically preeminent were extracted by enslaved bodies on cotton plantations in the United States. As competitive capitalism grew in British towns, largely a result of innovations related to the steam engine, enslavement grew to meet the productive demands of the emerging industries. By the mid-19th century, the United States accounted for three quarters of global cotton production[9]. The majority of the southern states’ cotton was sent to Britain and the northern U.S.to be manufactured into clothing in industrial factories. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin drastically increased the productive capacity of cotton plantations, and thereby accelerated enslavement[10]. From 1790 until the United States’ congress banned the importation of slaves from Africa in 1808, southern plantations imported around 80,000 enslaved Africans. In fact, so powerful was the economic imperative of expropriation, that despite the ban on the import of enslaved peoples to the U.S. slave ships continued to find their way to American shores until 1860- when the slave ship, Clotilda, brought 110 west Africans to the coast of Alabama[11].

Racial capitalism as a concept is synonymous with the Black radical tradition. Enslaved Black folks played a pivotal role in resisting the fossil economy from its inception, as their labor was essential to the rise of industrial capitalism. Slave rebellions, such as the German Coast Rebellion and Nat Turner’s Rebellion, threatened the hegemony of the southern bourgeoisie[12], which in turn threatened the flow of cotton to industrial centers. The Southern bourgeoisie were aware of their influence on industrial capitalism. King Cotton Diplomacy was implemented during the Civil War to coerce European nations into supporting the South’s secession efforts. These efforts failed for many reasons; the British and French had stockpiles of cotton due to previous surpluses, and the British were able to expand cotton extraction via their colonies. However, an often ignored factor that contributed to the failure of King Cotton Diplomacy was the general slave strikes throughout the South, where hundreds of thousands of enslaved Black folk fled plantations to support the war effort. The general slave strikes also provided the Union army with much needed reinforcements, which helped end the war swiftly[13] [14].   

Although the British refrained from taking an explicit “side” during the war, which was in part fueled by their reliance on grain produced in northern states[15], they partook in many efforts to support the southern states’ secession. This included efforts by the British bourgeoisie, who built the majority of ships used by the confederate navy[16]. It is clear that the British had a vested interest in maintaining enslavement in the United States. Although the British had previously outlawed slavery across its empire, the Black radical scholar Eric Williams made it clear that this was not due to a moral shift in British sentiment toward enslavement. The abolition of slavery in the empire served the interest of the emerging industrial bourgeoisie, who used reparations paid to indebted plantation owners to finance industrialization[17] [18].

Following the abolition of slavery, millions of Black folk were denied just compensation for the socially and environmentally destructive contradictions of enslavement, which had manifested in the early fossil economy. Instead of choosing a path toward healing, the United States government ceded power back to plantation owners, who in turn developed systems of debt peonage, sharecropping, and convict leasing, which restructured the tapestry of oppression and further tangled the oppressive threads of the fossil economy and the expropriation of Black bodies. All three of these systems of expropriation (debt peonage, sharecropping, and convict leasing) helped the United States regain its place as a global leader in cotton exports. In fact, the South’s new systems of expropriation increased the efficiency of cotton exportation to industrial centers[19]. Black folk who resisted these changes and attempted to integrate into white society became the target of new Jim Crow laws, which, among many other things, prevented Black and poor White folk from constructing their own communities. In the tapestry of oppression, the threads that bind the oppressed are mediated by the policy and ideology of the ruling class. If fossil fuels are the loom, then these forces of hegemony are the shuttle- weaving the weft of ecological devastation into the warp of social domination- the product is the legitimated mode of social reproduction and control; the tapestry of oppression. Jim Crow laws- one such shuttle- were a form of continuous primitive accumulation that disrupted communal efforts by Black folk to resist expropriation via debt peonage, sharecropping, and convict leasing. Without these efforts, it would have been difficult to corral Black bodies back into servitude in support of the fossil economy. A loom is rendered useless without a shuttle.

After surviving and resisting decades of expropriation in the southern United States, ecological and economic pressures changed the interdependent dynamics within the tapestry of oppression. The Boll Weevil epidemic of the late 19th and early 20th century decimated the South’s cotton economy creating a push factor for Black migration out of the South. Further, the reduced flow of European immigrants to the United States due to World War I, created distinct pull factors for Black migration to industrial cities[20]. From the late 19th to mid-20th century hundreds of thousands of Black folks migrated out of the South to industrial cities across the United States in what is known as the Great Migration[21]. Black migration out of the south coincided with a dramatic change in the structure of the fossil economy. While in 1860 cotton still reigned supreme as the U.S’s leading industry, by 1890 cotton was surpassed by machinery manufacturing as well as steel and iron production[22]. The new jobs in these expanding sectors were filled by Black migrants. To be clear, the cotton economy still played a prominent role in industrial manufacturing throughout the late 19th early 20th centuries, however the influx of Black workers to industrial cities provided the industrial bourgeoisie with leverage over workers by way of racial segregation.

During the early years of the Great Migration, White industrial workers in the United States formed the first national labor unions in response to the economic imbalances produced by the second industrial revolution and World War I. These unions organized mass resistance to the changing dynamics of the fossil economy, however their efforts were undermined by bourgeois racial hegemony. For example, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, which resisted a central component of the fossil economy, freight train transit fueled by fossil fuels, was a response to wage cuts onset by the end of the Great War[23]. Black railroad workers were actively denied membership to railroad unions, stoking hostility and resentment between Black and White workers. Specifically, White workers saw the lower wages paid to Black workers as a threat to union efforts and demanded that Black workers be replaced with White workers who would be paid higher wages[24], rather than demanding equal pay for White and Black workers. The active discrimination against Black workers by unions resulted in what could be viewed as Black workers crossing the picket line, however the only accurate assessment of these events would lead to the conclusion that it was the color-line that crossed unions and the picket line that crossed Black workers. Similarly, the Homestead Strike of 1892 pitted oppressed workers against the fossil economy’s emerging juggernauts, steel and iron manufacturing. The strike was undermined by the color line and Black workers were, once again, denied union membership. In November 1892, 2,000 White workers on strike violently attacked Black workers who crossed picket lines as well as their families[25]. Ultimately, at the end of the month, the White worker's strike was brought to a close and they were left reapplying for their jobs. Resistance to the fossil economy was undermined by racial tensions. Again, instead of walking down the path of healing by building a cohesive resistance, industrial workers chose to further entrench the expropriation of Black folks and fossil fuels.     

The second industrial revolution: fossil fuels as a basis for social reproduction

If piezas de indias during the first industrial revolution is defined by enslavement, Jim Crow, and industrial labor disenfranchisement, in the second industrial revolution it is defined by political coercion and the uneven distribution of fossil fuel-based amenities.

In the early 20th century, as the U.S. emerged as a global economic hegemon, electrification became a means to expand the fossil economy through coerced consumption. Mass electrification of towns started with the construction of Pearl Street Station in New York City in 1882[26]. The first residential house to receive electricity in the U.S. was occupied by J.P. Morgan (the famous financial capitalist), who was a large financial backer of residential electrification24. Morgan was responsible for the eventual merger of Edison Electric Company and rival company Thomson-Houston, into the economic giant General Electric, which persists today as one of the largest multinational corporations. Electrification did not become ubiquitous until it braided together the ability to increase the efficiency of reproductive labor with the production of culture. Specifically, inventions such as the electric iron, washing machine, and refrigerator all increased leisure time in the home for many workers and families. This newly afforded leisure time was replaced by the culture industry[27], which used electricity to create commodities, such as the radio and eventually the television to mass produce culture.

Mass distribution of electrification was slow due to its infrastructural needs. Little is known about the first working class households to receive electricity. What is known is that early distribution was contingent on whether or not households could afford electricity24. This leads us to suspect that early on, electrification in U.S. cities was implemented along the color-line, however more research is needed to understand the totality of these effects.

Following the Great Depression, rural electrification was implemented by the Roosevelt administration as part of the New Deal in the 1930s. In his research on rural electrification in the U.S. south, geographer Conor Harrison identified the ways in which Jim Crow laws influenced rural electrification and disadvantaged Black households in the rural spaces of the region. It must be remembered that, in the 1930s, more than half of the previously enslaved Black population in the U.S. lived in the rural South[28]. Harrison argues that analyses carried out to determine where the efforts of electrification should be directed relied on a “correction factor”, which was used by federal agents in the rural electrification program to underestimate potential electricity use in Black households. Ultimately, this served to prioritize electrification of White households throughout the region. In this sense, the correction factor, similar to other New Deal policies such as redlining[29], was used to systematically disadvantage Black folk. Harrison concludes, “New energy systems do not emerge into places devoid of social order. Rather..., energy systems deployed in already uneven and racialized landscapes tend to perpetuate marginalization” (pp. 928). Again, fossil fuels were used to further wrap Black folk into the tapestry oppression. In general, one can see how many New Deal policies, such as the National Housing Act of 1934  and the Rural Electrification Act of 1935, encouraged expropriation by more tightly bounding social reproduction (in this case the need for shelter and reproductive labor necessary to maintain that shelter) with economic life. The New Deal relief efforts were implemented on the color-line. This meant that processes of expropriation, which New Deal policies facilitated, were inherently uneven. As such, the continued use of these amenities, at best, functioned to maintain the color-line.

The rise of the automobile industry is a more explicit example of uneven development during the second industrial revolution. The automobile was developed through a series of  inventions using internal combustion engines to propel horseless carts[30]. The mass production and consumption of automobiles is most commonly associated with Henry Ford, the Model T car, and “Fordism.” Fordist production combined the fragmented tasks of “Taylorism” with industrial processes to produce assembly lines of so-called “low skilled workers.” This process increased labor productivity such that working class incomes rose alongside the profits of the capitalist class. The subsequent increase in working class disposable income encouraged mass consumption, which was structured around the automobile[31] [32]. Automobiles expanded the scope of the fossil economy by making oil paramount in industrial development. This expansion was supported by the discovery of large oil reserves in the southern United States in the Spindletop oil fields during the late 19th century[33].

Automobile expansion is inexorably linked to racial segregation in the United States. The phenomenon of White flight, which led to mass suburbanization in the U.S., was encouraged by New Deal housing policies that facilitated the expansion of the automobile market. In order to pass New Deal legislation during the Great Depression, the Roosevelt administration pandered to Southern Democrats by excluding Black folks from many of the amenities granted by the New Deal policies[34] [35]. Prior to the Great Depression, many industrial cities were already heavily segregated due to racial hostilities during the first Great Migration of Black folks out of the South. Federal agencies constructed during the New Deal, such as the Federal Housing Administration and Home Owners Loan Corporation, furthered racial segregation through racial covenants and new underwriting standards that discouraged home loans in racially mixed and predominantly Black neighborhoods. New Deal legislation also disproportionately affected Black farmers through rural restructuring efforts that pushed Black farmers in the South off their land (a legacy that continues today in HUD financing to Black farmers, see NYT 1619 Project[36]). This in combination with new labor opportunities in industrial cities due to World War II, prompted the second Great Migration of Black folks out of the rural south and into urban centers.    

During World War II, the automobile industry grew exponentially due to government purchases related to the war effort30. Following the war, the United States Congress continued to support the automobile industry through legislation, such as the Federal Aid Highway Acts of 1944 and 1956. Further, after the war many Black workers who migrated into industrial cities were put out of work and replaced by White workers who had recently returned from the war. Newly constructed highways and new mortgage schemes, both of which were backed by the U.S. government, combined with the booming automobile industry to encourage White families after war to move out of the city and into suburban sprawls.

The phenomenon, known as White Flight[37], was facilitated by preexisting racial oppression, newly institutionalized racist policies, and government support for the automobile industry. In the end, White flight further tangled the reproductive needs of the capitalist class with the reproductive needs of the oppressed. In post-World War United States, the automobile became the opiate of the White working class; it liberated White folks from the drudgery of city life that had befallen Black folks and simultaneously bound them to the whims of the capitalist class. Through automobile proliferation, the fossil economy effectively weaved together the social reproductive needs of the oppressed with the reproductive needs of the capitalist class such that oppression is perpetuated through myriad dimensions of social reproduction. Where one chooses to live, and how one chooses to live, is tethered to the automobile and the mechanisms that led to its widespread use. Thus, one’s life chances- largely determined by where one is born[38]- are, in effect, patterned by the historical structures and relations that compose the fossil economy. These impacts can even be seen today, as research has shown a clear link between race in the United States and carbon emissions from transportation[39], race and access to solar energy technologies[40], and ties between life expectancy and zip code of birth[41]. Such historically produced associations have created a reality wherein Black liberation is often negotiated under the looming shadow of the fossil economy. The long Civil Rights Movement saw Black communities advocating for better schools, better housing, better access to transit, and better working conditions. Due to the second industrial revolution, most of these amenities became inexorably linked to the fossil economy. While it would be inappropriate to define the Civil Rights Movement as Black folk simply seeking better access to the fossil economy, many of the ‘rights' granted to Black folks during the Civil Rights Movement benefited the fossil economy due to the structural changes that occurred during the second industrial revolution. For example, access to public transit increasingly became a necessity for life within the city, particularly after transit funding was shifted away from cities and towards the suburbs[42]. Actions taken by Civil Rights activists, such as the Montgomery bus boycotts, were negotiated under the framework of the fossil economy. Further, legislation, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, included policies that undermined unions’ ability to discriminate against Black folks. However, by this time many industrial unions were seeking to share in the benefits of the fossil economy, rather than deconstructing the mechanisms of capital accumulation[43] [44]. A key point here is that many of the social, political, and economic gains made during the Civil Rights Movement were premised on the unjust allocation of fossil fuel-based amenities.   

In the aftermath of primitive accumulation during the second industrial revolution, a new Black radical tradition emerged that sought to control social reproduction outside the framework of the tapestry of oppression; this movement came to be known as the Black Power Movement. Influenced by the radical teachings of Malcom X, the Black Power Movement in the United States sought liberation through controlling the means of social reproduction. The crowning achievements of the Black Panther Party, which was one of the most successful organizations in the Black Power Movement, were the free breakfast programs, free health clinics, and resistance to police brutality. These efforts actively resisted the expropriation of Black folk in the tapestry of oppression. The Black Panthers sought liberation through re-appropriating various mechanisms of social reproduction. For example, the free breakfast program was supported by local grocery stores, who donated food to the Black Panther Party[45]. The cost of this food captured the embedded cost of the fossil economy (i.e. the fossil fuels used to produce and transport the food to local communities). The cost and relative inaccessibility of this food for Black folk was a product of the uneven distribution of fossil fuel amenities, which at this point had become the basis of social reproduction in the tapestry of oppression. Thus, the re-appropriation of this food into free breakfast for hungry Black children resisted the inequality embedded in the tapestry of oppression. However, as we mentioned earlier, social reproduction outside the tapestry of oppression is a threat to the ruling class. The Black Power movement was actively targeted and opposed by the state, not because they were a violent threat, but because they undermined the internal mechanisms of social reproduction inside the tapestry of oppression; they were actively pulling at the threads, unweaving the tapestry as it wrapped around them. The ruling class was successful at corralling the oppositional social reproduction within the Black Power Movement. To resist this new threat, the ruling class implemented a new form of piezas de indias that combined the tactics used during the first and second industrial revolution -- this new form of primitive accumulation would come to be known as neoliberalism.

The neoliberal revolution: mass incarceration, gentrification, and the rise of color-blind environmentalism

Under neoliberalism, piezas de indias functions through political coercion and economic restructuring. Neoliberalism is a political and economic project that reframes the crisis of stagflation, which plagued monopoly capitalism, as a worker-induced problem[46]. Economically, neoliberalism functions through the state, which facilitates the redistribution of wealth from workers to the ruling class. Politically, neoliberalism works as a narrative to justify legislation that seeks to recapture wealth distributed by the state to workers through programs such as welfare. The mechanisms through which these processes occur are often violent. However, this violence is typically mystified through political coercion[47]. For instance, the carceral state in the U.S., which has emerged as an extension of the neoliberal state, is often viewed apolitically and ahistorically. This allows the carceral state to operate with impunity, as its violent actions are viewed as a necessary and normal response to political dissent. For our purposes, we will explore neoliberalism in the U.S. as it relates to 1) economic restructuring in the wake of deindustrialization and 2) political restructuring in the wake of the declining welfare state.

One of the first neoliberal efforts to restructure a society’s processes of social reproduction occurred in Chile in 1973, when the United States backed a coup d'état against the democratically elected socialist leader– Salvador Allende. This event is significant in that it sparked a restructuring of the fossil economy (first in Chile but eventually across most of the world), as well as the restructuring of the state’s role in managing political dissent. After being elected, Allende nationalized Chile’s copper industry, which at the time was the nation’s largest export, and Chile’s private utilities. The coup that ousted Allende was led by Augusto Pinochet, who installed a brutal military dictatorship to replace Chile’s democratic government. In addition to re-privatizing Chile’s newly nationalized copper market and public utilities, Pinochet also employed a violent military regime that was hostile to political dissent[48]. With respect to the fossil economy, one of the more significant changes that followed the re-privatization of Chile's utilities was the creation and installation of a wholesale energy market system. The wholesale energy market was a trading scheme developed by economists trained at the University of Chicago, which was an early breeding ground of neoliberal economic policies and ideology. The economic restructuring of Chile was an experiment of racial capitalism– akin to the experiments others have examined in Puerto Rico[49] and Flint Michigan[50] more recently.  

In general, wholesale energy trading is best understood as a neoliberal project that was developed to further efforts to extract surplus from the oppressed. Rather than using the traditional monopoly structure of energy production and consumption that was developed during the second industrial revolution– an approach which saw electricity monopolies profit by reducing the cost of production relative to that of consumption– wholesale energy markets break down monopolies into smaller, more competitive producers and distributors. Electricity producers compete with one another by selling energy to distributors at variable rates. Under this scheme, households often pay a fixed rate for electricity, which further normalizes the ubiquity of fossil fuel consumption while also rendering the cost of production invisible to consumers within the tapestry of oppression. The habits of electricity consumers under this new scheme create the conditions for a more rapid, efficacious mode of accumulation by dispossession. The term accumulation by dispossession was developed by Harvey to describe how capitalist policies under neoliberalism result in a centralization of wealth and power by dispossessing public and private entities of their wealth or land43. We employ it here to highlight that, if producers believe consumption will be higher during certain hours of the day they can alter the price of electricity sold to distributors to turn a greater profit. As a result, wealth is increasingly concentrated into the hands of energy producers- being transferred from the energy distributors and, when left unprotected by policy makers, consumers that are woven into these market mechanisms. Put differently, implementation of the wholesale market system allows for the more rapid accumulation of wealth by energy producers via a process of dispossession, or expropriation, of both the natural world and the populations who must rely on their products in order to reproduce their life cycles in the system of neoliberal capital– that most recent pattern of oppressive structures and relations being woven across the tapestry that tangles our fates.

The wholesale energy market exacerbates the tendency towards uneven development within the tapestry of oppression by making energy saving techniques carried out within the home mutually beneficial to electricity distributors and consumers. The ability to reduce electricity consumption– at least during certain hours of the day– becomes a market in and of itself that is supported by electricity distributors[51]. For example, energy distributors such as Pacific Gas and Electric[52], and Portland General Electric[53] have created incentive programs to increase energy savings within households in their distribution network. While on the surface these incentives appear to be potential points of disruption to the fossil economy, in actuality they represent an alliance between energy distributors and wealthy home owners who work in tandem to shift the burden of the accumulation by dispossession carried out by energy producers onto poorer and disproportionately Black households. The accessibility of energy efficient appliances and energy saving techniques operate on the color-line. Black folk in the U.S. are more likely to rent their homes, to be rent stressed[54], and live in fuel poverty[55]. The material conditions of Black life prevent Black folk from accessing the energy saving techniques that are available to consumers, such as energy efficient refrigerators, modern insulation, and energy efficient heating and air conditioning. For example, renters in the U.S., which is disproportionately made of Black folks, are unable to implement many energy saving techniques– such as insulation, and energy efficient heating and air conditioning– because the choice to make such improvements is typically only accessible to homeowners, investment property owners and landlords. Beyond accessibility, the incentive structure of these types of home ‘upgrades,’ are generally expected in the long-term savings over years and decades; a cost-savings timeline which is not applicable to renters whose housing security is far more precarious (even if renters did purchase an energy efficient refrigerator, their rent may increase prohibitively in the coming months, making the investment in an energy efficient appliance more of a nuisance than a benefit.). Further, using these amenities works to alleviate the cost of electricity, which disproportionately benefits White households. Similar to the White Fight of the second industrial revolution, energy saving techniques are an opiate of the White middle class, one that works to alleviate the cost of energy consumption by further tangling the threads within the tapestry of oppression.

An important condition of these relationships, one that is unique to the neoliberal epoch of the fossil economy, is the apparent color-blindness of environmental sustainability. Household energy saving techniques that are supported by energy distributors, and many other markets as well, are touted as environmentally sustainable and are a central part of strategic climate mitigation planning. Nonetheless, these narratives are also part of a hegemonic discourse of color-blindness that masks the reality of racial oppression in the United States. Here, again, instead of walking a path that heals the planet and unravels the threads of Black expropriation, the White middle class is being coerced into an alliance with an industry that perpetuates uneven development throughout the fossil economy.

The development of neoliberalism in the United States coincided with the rise of the carceral state. In his book, Incarcerating the crisis: Freedom struggles and the rise of the neoliberal state, Jordan T. Camp argues that the carceral state emerged by creating racial enemies out of those resisting neoliberal efforts to restructure the economy. Specifically, Camp contends that the “transformation of the [carceral] state was legitimated in response to the organic crisis of U.S. Jim Crow capitalism, a transition that represented a rupture in a ‘total way of life’ characterized by Fordism’s purportedly high wages, mass production, industrial factories, assembly lines, bureaucratized unions, and mass-based popular culture44.” Black folks were disproportionately affected by what Camp calls the ‘crisis of Jim Crow capitalism[56]’. The various rebellions that spawned from this crisis, including the Harlem Revolt of 1964, the Watts Rebellion of 1965, and the Detroit Rebellion of 1967 germinated grassroots resistance to the tapestry of oppression, inducing class-consciousness. This created a crisis of capitalist hegemony, as the ideological threads that protected the policies underlying racial capitalism began to strain. These rebellions– as rebellions so often do– breached the color-line, as White and Black workers united in resistance to the economic restructuring of neoliberalism. Carceral policies emerged in response to these rebellions. It was through these new policies and discourses that the capitalist class attempted to recapture its hegemonic influence. Our metaphorical loom–fossil fuels– was fit with a new shuttle– the ideological tenets of colorblind racism and the policies of mass incarceration– to intricately interweave Black folk, Black life, and U.S. understandings of criminality in a way that maintained the tapestry’s coherence[57]. Taken together these changes culminated in the current wave of mass incarceration, a phenomena which represents the neoliberal state’s political and economic response to the rebellions of Black folk.

The political upshot of all this is that mass incarceration has effectively restructured the color-line in the United States. People of color are confronted by the police, charged with crimes, and incarcerated at disproportionately higher rates than Whites within the U.S. carceral state49. This has occurred against the backdrop of color-blind racism, and it is through the use of color-blind rhetoric that the racialized outcomes of carceral policy have come to be viewed as essential to maintenance of ‘law and order’ in the U.S.– which further disguises the raced palette of mass incarceration. Simply put, the color-line has been established around a coded language of race, which helps to legitimate piezas de indias through incarceration. Further, this process has also helped efforts to reorganize the fossil economy, making its machinery more suitable for weaving together the social and cultural structures of modernity into the totality that is the tapestry of oppression.

In a forthcoming study, we have found that mass incarceration significantly increases carbon emissions from industrial production. While on the surface the relationship between mass incarceration and climate change appears disparate, the interconnected threads of the tapestry of oppression reveal a direct relationship between mass incarceration and the fossil economy. This relationship is an artefact of the prison industrial complex, which represents a collection of political, bureaucratic, and economic interests that benefit from mass imprisonment. Economically, the prison industrial complex profits from industrial development that is interconnected with mass incarceration. Specifically, since 1980 more than 1,000 prisons have been constructed in the U.S[58]. The construction and maintenance of prisons have become a source of revenue for over 3,000 private U.S. corporations. These companies are funded through government contracts, which provide an avenue for industrial expansion. Sociologist Natalie Deckard, argues that mass incarceration works as a “locus for the coercion of demand and consumption”, compelling those who would otherwise marginally participate in markets to become active consumers[59]. Moreover, the prison industrial complex has effectively enacted policies that allow the state and private entities to profit from incarcerated labor. Prison work programs, such as the U.S. government owned corporation Unicor, pay prisoners as little as a dollar an hour for industrial labor, which helps to expand industrial development by reducing the cost of labor. Further, Unicor has a monopoly on government contracts for textile production. Fascinating here, is the reality that black enslavement is yet again being used to support the textile industry, bringing us full circle.

While the fossil economy did not encourage mass incarceration, it has benefited from mass imprisonment through the prison industrial complex. In its current state, mass incarceration, which is nothing more than a modern form of enslavement, is woven into the tapestry of oppression through the use of hegemonic ideology and policy– though, yet again, it is only the use of fossil fuels that has made such complex weaving possible. The economic crisis of the 1970s, which disrupted the structure of the fossil economy that was developed during the second industrial revolution, produced mass unrest. Neoliberal policies are a response to this unrest, which seek to further entrench Black folk into the tapestry of oppression through coerced demand and consumption. The seemingly ever-expanding carceral state creates a cycle of coerced production and consumption. Incarcerated people simultaneously consume and produce industrial goods, which benefits a small number of entities within the prison industrial complex.     

                                     

Conclusion

Black folk have been at the center of the fossil economy since its inception. At each moment of change within the tapestry of oppression, when the threads hang loose and are in need of mending, the opportunity for organized resistance has been squandered by the shuttles of white hegemony; reconstruction following the civil war, mass migration fueled by emerging industries, civil unrest after the economic crisis of the 1970s. All of these moments are defined by primitive accumulation-- by piezas de indias. The emerging renewable energy economy once again presents us with an opportunity to resist the tapestry of oppression. However, the interlocking threads of the tapestry must be opposed if renewables are going to be effective at alleviating oppression. Such resistance requires that we craft new shuttles– by introducing policies that serve as a redress to past forms of expropriation– while simultaneously constructing a new loom– one energized not by the death embodied in the carbonaceous form of fossil fuels, but by the productive, immediate, and life giving (if also fleeting) power of our Sun. Such dramatic changes require purposeful, community-based action, as the inertia of the historical forces described here is formidable. Consider a recent study published in the journal Nature Energy[60], which finds that the expansion of renewable energy consumption disproportionately burdens Black households in the southwestern United States with higher energy bills, demonstrating the long-term effects of Black expropriation within the tapestry of oppression. The expropriation of Black folk is so deeply woven into the tapestry of oppression that pulling on a loose thread without considering the structure of the whole risks disproportionately unraveling the tapestry, which has been carefully woven by way of racialized policy implementation and fossil fuel-based technologies. Combating climate change requires more than simply opposing the fossil economy; we must resist the oppression that fossil fuels have facilitated for over 100 years. The question is: will we seize this moment and unite to carefully unravel this tapestry, weaving it anew into something more just and sustainable, or will we yet again squander an opportunity for healing in favor of further entangling the threads that constitute the tapestry of oppression?   

John Kay’s 1733 Patent for the “New Engine or machine for Opening and Dressing Wool”. This patent introduced the “flying shuttle” to the loom. The introduction of the shuttle allowed looms to be operated by a single laborer, and made loom production…

John Kay’s 1733 Patent for the “New Engine or machine for Opening and Dressing Wool”. This patent introduced the “flying shuttle” to the loom. The introduction of the shuttle allowed looms to be operated by a single laborer, and made loom production fast and efficient enough to facilitate its role in the industrial revolution. https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Kay

Notes

[1] Kelley, Robin DG. "What did Cedric Robinson mean by racial capitalism." Boston review 12 (2017).

[2] Malm, Andreas. Fossil capital: The rise of steam power and the roots of global warming. Verso Books, 2016.

[3] Rodriguez, Junius P. The historical encyclopedia of world slavery. Vol. 1. ABC-CLIO, 1997.

[4] Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. Univ of North Carolina Press, 2000.

[5] Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. The souls of black folk. Oxford University Press, 2008.

[6] Foster, John Bellamy. "Marx's theory of metabolic rift: Classical foundations for environmental sociology." American journal of sociology 105, no. 2 (1999): 366-405.

[7] Pirani, Simon. "Burning Up." University of Chicago Press Economics Books (2018).

[8] Mokyr, Joel. "The second industrial revolution, 1870-1914." Storia dell’economia Mondiale 21945 (1998).

[9] Beckert, Sven. "Emancipation and empire: Reconstructing the worldwide web of cotton production in the age of the American Civil War." The American Historical Review 109, no. 5 (2004): 1405-1438..

[10] Green, Constance M. Eli Whitney and the Birth of American Technology. (1965)

[11] Zanolli, Lauren. “'Still fighting': Africatown, site of last US slave shipment, sues over pollution.” The Guardian (2018).

[12] The southern bourgeoisie should be contrasted with their industrial counterparts in the northern U.S., specifically due to their use of enslavement wage labor to derive surplus.

[13] Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt, ed. Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a history of the part which black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America, 1860-1880. Routledge, 2017.

[14] Roediger, David R. Seizing freedom: Slave emancipation and liberty for all. Verso Books, 2014.

[15] Ginzberg, Eli. "The Economics of British Neutrality during the American Civil War." Agricultural History 10, no. 4 (1936): 147-156.

[16] Blackett, Richard JM. Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War. LSU Press, 2000.

[17] One should also not forget that it was the rift in soil metabolism between plantation and town that made the sugar trade a volatile market in need of economic restructuring.

[18] Williams, Eric. Capitalism and slavery. UNC Press Books, 2014.

[19] Woodman, Harold D. King cotton and his retainers: Financing and marketing the cotton crop of the south, 1800-1925. Beard Books, 1999.

[20] Higgs, Robert. "The boll weevil, the cotton economy, and black migration 1910-1930." Agricultural History 50, no. 2 (1976): 335-350.

[21] United States Census, “The Great Migration, 1910 to 1970”. 2012. https://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/020/ (accessed 3/20/20)

[22] Economics 323-2: Economic History of the United States Since 1865 http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~jmokyr/Graphs-and-Tables.PD

[23] Foner, Philip Sheldon. History of the Labor Movement in the United States: The TUEL to the end of the Gompers Era. 9. Vol. 9. International Pub, 1991.

[24] Davis, Colin J. "Bitter conflict: The 1922 railroad shopmen's strike." Labor History 33, no. 4 (1992): 433-455.

[25] Adamczyk, Joseph. “Homestead Strike: United States History.” Encyclopedia  Britannica 2020. https://www.britannica.com/event/Homestead-Strike (accessed 3/22/20)

[26] Jonnes, Jill. Empires of light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the race to electrify the world. Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2004.

[27] Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, and Theodor W. Adorno. The culture industry: Selected essays on mass culture. Psychology Press, 2001.

[28] Motion, In. "The African-American Migration Experience." URL: http://www. inmotionaame. org/about. cfm (data obrashcheniya: 13.07. 2014) (2009).

[29] Coates, Ta-Nehisi. "The case for reparations." The Atlantic 313, no. 5 (2014): 54-71.

[30] Gartman, David. Auto opium: A social history of American automobile design. Psychology Press, 1994.

[31] Vroey, Michel De. "A regulation approach interpretation of contemporary crisis." Capital & Class 8, no. 2 (1984): 45-66.

[32] Florida, Richard L., and Marshall MA Feldman. "Housing in US fordism." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 12, no. 2 (1988): 187-210.

[33] Walker, Judith, Ellen Walker Rienstra, Jo Ann Stiles, Ward Morar, and Kara Medhurst. "Giant Under the Hill: A History of the Spindletop Oil Discovery at Beaumont, Texas in 1901." (2002).

[34] Lowndes, Joseph E. From the new deal to the new right: Race and the southern origins of modern conservatism. Yale University Press, 2008.

[35] Cowie, Jefferson. The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics. Vol. 120. Princeton University Press, 2017.

[36] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html

[37] Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. American apartheid: Segregation and the making of the underclass. Harvard University Press, 1993.

[38] Wasserman, Miriam. “The Geography of Life's Chances” Federal Reserve Bank Boston. 2001. https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/regional-review/2001/quarter-4/the-geography-of-lifes-chances.aspx (accessed 3/24/20)

[39] McGee, Julius Alexander, Christina Ergas, and Matthew Thomas Clement. "Racing to Reduce Emissions: Assessing the Relation between Race and Carbon Dioxide Emissions from On-Road Travel." Sociology of Development 4, no. 2 (2018): 217-236.

[40] Sunter, D.A., Castellanos, S. & Kammen, D.M. Disparities in rooftop photovoltaics deployment in the United States by race and ethnicity. Nat Sustain 2, 71–76 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0204-z

[41] Macintyre, S., Ellaway, A., & Cummins, S. Place effects on health: How can we conceptualise, operationalise and measure them? Social Science & Medicine, 55(1), 125-139.).

[42] Taylor, Brian D., and Mark Garrett. 1999. “Reconsidering Social Equity in Public Transit.” Berkeley:

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[43] Obach, Brian K. "New labor: slowing the treadmill of production?." Organization & Environment 17, no. 3 (2004): 337-354.

[44] Schnaiberg, Allan, David N. Pellow, and Adam Weinberg. "The treadmill of production and the environmental state." The environmental state under pressure 10 (2002): 15-32.

[45] Austin, Curtis J. Up against the wall: Violence in the making and unmaking of the Black Panther Party. University of Arkansas Press, 2006.

[46] Harvey, David. A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, USA, 2007.

[47] Camp, Jordan T. Incarcerating the crisis: Freedom struggles and the rise of the neoliberal state. Vol. 43. Univ of California Press, 2016.

[48] Fourcade-Gourinchas, M. and Babb, S. 2002. The rebirth of the liberal creed: Paths to neoliberalism in four countries. American Journal of Sociology, 103: 33–579.

[49] Klein, Naomi. The battle for paradise: Puerto Rico takes on the disaster capitalists. Haymarket Books, 2018.

[50] Pulido, Laura. "Flint, environmental racism, and racial capitalism." (2016): 1-16.

[51] Wang, Ucilia. “Utility companies start hawking appliances” The Guardian. 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/may/13/utility-rebate-sdge-xcel-energy-simple-energy (accessed 3/24/20)

[52] See http://www.pgecorp.com/corp_responsibility/reports/2017/cu02_cee.html

[53] See https://www.portlandgeneral.com/residential/energy-savings/special-offers-incentives 

[54] According to a 1981 modification of the Urban Development Act of 1969, rent stressed, or burdened, households are those paying more than 30% of their income on housing. As of 2015, 24% of Black households in the U.S were bearing such a burden, while 20% of White households were. The numbers highlight the disparity more clearly when looking at households that experience a severe rent burden- defined as spending more than 50% of income on housing. In 2015 23% of Black U.S. households were severely burdened, compared to 13% of White U.S. households. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2018/04/american-families-face-a-growing-rent-burden

[55] “Fuel poverty, is often defined as a situation where low-income households are not able to adequately provide basic energy services in their homes and for their transport at affordable cost” https://www.enerdata.net/publications/executive-briefing/fuel-poverty.html

[56] What Camp cites as ‘Jim Crow Capitalism’ encompassess the economic restructuring of the second industrial revolution.

[57] Alexander, Michelle. The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press, 2020

[58]Lawrence, Sarah, and Jeremy Travis. 2004. “The new landscape of imprisonment: Mapping America's prison expansion”. Urban Institute, Justice Policy Center.

[59] Deckard Delia, Natalie. 2017. “Prison, coerced demand, and the importance of incarcerated bodies in late capitalism.” Social Currents 4(1): 3-12.

[60] White, Lee V., and Nicole D. Sintov. "Health and financial impacts of demand-side response measures differ across sociodemographic groups." Nature Energy 5, no. 1 (2020): 50-60.