Currency Crisis In The West (1965)

By Hsiang Chung

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

Editor’s Note from BAR: This 1965 essay appeared in Kwame Nkrumah’s journal, The Spark. If it were around today, The Spark would probably carry a warning in the US that it was “state-affiliated media.” Its editors probably wouldn’t care. The Spark was published by Kwame Nkrumah’s Bureau of African Affairs and its explicit mission was to build socialism in Ghana and to aid in fomenting working-class revolution throughout Africa.

The Spark’s content reflected this mission. The weekly paper ran essays articulating the theory of Nkrumaism and published detailed analysis of neocolonialism and imperialism, and of socialism and development. It considered the class struggle in Africa and examined anti-colonial struggles across the continent. In its pages appeared statements of solidarity with Cuba, Algeria, and Black America, and contributions from Amilcar Cabral, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevera. When W.E.B. Du Bois passed away in 1963, an issue appeared in his honor.

For the US State Department, The Spark represented a dangerous tendency within Nkrumah’s Ghana.  In January, 1964 the US Central Intelligence Agency issued a classified report titled “The Leftward Trend in Ghana .” The report noted that the US Embassy in Ghana had characterized a recent speech of Nkrumah’s “as perhaps his most extreme anticapitalist and revolutionary performance.” The speech, according to the CIA, “included [Nkrumah’s] first known specific use of such phrases as ‘class interests’ and ‘class politics,’” it criticized the US “as the citadel of reactionary opposition to progressive forces everywhere,” and it aligned Ghana with “the international ‘socialist’ fraternity.” “Subsequently,” the report continued, “[Nkrumah]  has increasingly tended to mouth the Communist-derived jargon appearing continually in The Spark.”

In their summary of the situation in Ghana, the CIA concluded that, “Barring a successful coup against his regime, it will probably be increasingly difficult for the West to maintain an effective presence in Ghana.”

Nkrumah was overthrown by a CIA-backed military on February 24, 1966.

Below we reprint an article from The Spark titled “Currency Crisis in the West.” Its author is Hsiang Chung, a Chinese economist of whom, we admit, we know little more than his name. Even so, the essay has a crystalline analysis of how monetary policy has been used as a tool of imperial and neocolonial rule. Moreover, in charting the historical reasons for the rise of the dollar’s global supremacy in the twentieth century, it establishes the historical conditions precipitating the dollar’s imminent twenty-first century fall. This is being republished for both historical perspective and relative analysis to the current state of the US dollar. It is important to note that much has changed since this was written in 1965, most notably the varying methods of imperialism/colonialism that have developed by the US and West, the fall of the USSR, and the abandoning the gold standard in 1971.

***

Hsiang Chung, “Currency Crisis in the West,” The Spark: A Socialist Weekly of the African Revolution, January 29, 1965.

The imperialist scramble for world domination is usually marked by a struggle for financial supremacy, for monetary policy is one of the heavy weapons of the imperialist countries in their drive, for expansion--a weapon they use to strangle their rivals and extend their spheres of influence.

In the struggle for monetary supremacy, an imperialist country invariably uses its political and economic power to establish a monetary bloc in which its own currency is made to take a leading position while the currencies of its colonies and dependencies as well as other states associated with it are reduced to a subordinate status.

It has to link to currencies of the monetary bloc members with its own, and at the same time to make them keep their gold and foreign exchange reserves in its central bank to be used by them for “unlimited buying and selling” on foreign exchange market at fixed rates. Consequently, its commodity in capital exports will not have to suffer from the fluctuation of the currency of the monetary bloc members and it will not have to pay more for raw material imports because of the devaluation of its own currency.

Moreover, since the gold and foreign exchange reserves of its monetary bloc members are deposited in its own central exploitation, and this leads to the formation of a financial centre within its own sphere of influence over which it is able to establish its financial supremacy. That is why currency warfare in capitalist international finance is an important means in the imperialist scramble for markets, outlets, for investment and sources for raw materials, as well as an indispensable factor in their constant redivision of the capital of this world.

The Monetary System Crisis Sharpened

The deepening of the general crisis of capitalism, especially the emergence of the crisis in the capitalist monetary system, has intensified the monetary warfare among the imperialist powers. As a result of the world economic crisis of 1929–33, normal financial relations among the capitalist countries were disrupted as never before; the gold standard completely collapsed, and the monetary system of the capitalist countries became chronically unstable.

From that time onwards, in their efforts to maintain currency stability, and to ward off the crisis in the monetary system, monopoly capitalist groups in the imperialist countries were compelled to resort to government intervention on a larger scale than before and adopt such measures in the field of international finance as  moratoria on foreign debts currency depreciation, foreign exchange  restrictions and control etc., in order to consolidate their position in the better struggle for markets and spheres of influence. However, all the steps, which were designed to shift the crisis onto others failed to extricate the imperialists from their plight, but instead made the struggle still sharper and more complicated.

Following the end of World War II, as a result of the formation of the socialist camp and the upsurge of the national liberation movement the areas dominated or exploited by the imperialist countries have become smaller and smaller. In this predicament, the inter-imperialist struggle for markets and spheres of influence has become more acute and currency has been used on a still larger scale as an instrument in defeating their adversaries. Not only have they subjected the currencies of their colonies and dependencies to their own as in the past; they have also exerted great efforts to make their own currency the dominant one within the shrinking imperialist camp. At the same time, the deepening of the general crisis of capitalism has been accomplished by an intensified crisis in the monetary system, and the imperialist countries have been forced to take further steps to intervene in various forms in the field of international finance. However, whenever they are taken by the strong to bully the weak or the weak to counteract an adversary’s pressure, the steps are bound to aggravate the imperialist monetary struggle, and make it more severe than was the case before World War II.

Domination vs Independence

The characteristic of postwar inter-imperialist relations is that US imperialism has increasingly endeavored to consolidate and extend its dominant position while the other imperialist powers refused to reconcile themselves to US control from which they have done all they can to free themselves. This rivalry between US imperialism and the other imperialist powers struggle between domination and independence— is also reflected in capitalist, world finance.

During World War II, US imperialism amassed enormous wealth and greatly expanded  its productive capacity and export trade. In the early post-war years, Washington took advantage of the temporary disappearances of three fascist countries, Germany, Italy, and Japan from the capitalist world arena of competition and of the heavy destruction suffered by the two old imperialist powers, Britain and France; it went all out for economic expansion abroad and consequently had a huge surplus in its balance of international payments and piled up vast gold reserves. In 1938 the US gold reserves amounted to $14,594 million or 56.1 per cent of the gold reserves of the capitalist world. In 1948, they jumped to $24,399 million, or 70.3 per cent of the capitalist world’s total. During this period, the other capitalist countries incurred huge deficits in their international accounts with the United States, resulting in a serious “dollar shortage” and massive gold outflows to the United States.

In the decade between 1938 and 1948, the gold reserves of Britain, the sterling area and the West European countries dropped from $9,511 million to $5,707 million, and their share of the capitalist world's gold reserves fell from 36.6 per cent to 16.4 per cent. At that time the disruption of domestic production, the heavy increases in budgetary deficits, and the impact of deficits in the payment of international payments brought about serious currency depreciation in most of the capitalist countries except the United States. Under the circumstances, the governments of these countries were constrained to their foreign exchange restrictions and controls to achieve, and to stabilize the value of their currencies by artificial means. The result was that they’re currencies became “soft”, i.e., could not be freely converted into other foreign currencies, they were in no position to compete with the dollar, a hard currency which was freely convertible.

Shift in Economic Power

This shift in economic power was much to the advantage of US imperialism in its greedy bid for world leadership. It has made every effort to form a big dollar bloc to dovetail plans to build an unprecedentedly big empire in the world. In addition to adopting political, military, economic and other measures, US imperialism, in order to fulfill this grandiose plan, must take the following steps in the monetary field. On the one hand, it needs to consolidate the external value of the dollar and maintain its “free convertibility” so that fixed exchange rate between the dollar and other currencies can be preserved, and the dollar can have the same status as gold in the capitalist world's current reserves.

This would provide favourable conditions for New York to become the capitalist world’s sole international financial centre.

On the other measures both at home, and in the currency blocs, they control in order to check economic penetration by their competitors. US imperialism therefore found it necessary to do the utmost to intervene in their international financial policies and foreign exchange systems, thus enabling it to maintain normal trade relations with them, and paying the way for its further economic expansion.

In effect, this US imperialist rapid plan is nothing but a refurnished version of the currency blocs established by Britain, France, and other old imperialist powers in their colonies and spheres of influence. But in order to ward off the strong opposition of other imperialists, the United States had to resort to more covert and slyer tactics in pushing forward this plan in the capitalist world.

Price of Gold Kept Down

In the first place, relying on its substantial gold reserves, US imperialism artificially kept down the price of gold in its dealings with other governments or their central banks. It is common knowledge that as early as 1934 the US government prescribed the external value of the dollar, i.e., the parity between the dollar and gold, at $35 an ounce. But since the latter part of the 1930s and particularly since World War II, the value of the dollar has been frequently devalued internally because of inflation. In 1948 the purchasing power of the dollar was only 57.8 per cent of what it was in 1939. In 1963 it further dropped to 44 per cent. In order to stabilize the external value of the dollar by artificial means, the U.S. government, irrespective of the frequent devaluation of the dollar internally, has always exchanged it for gold at the official rate of $35 percent ounce in its dealings with other countries. And so the external value of the dollar has long been out of tune with the extent of its internal devaluation while the price of gold has been greatly kept down.

Other capitalist countries were then suffering from a widespread “dollar shortage” and they virtually had very little or no dollars with which to buy US gold. Therefore, keeping the price of gold down actually meant compelling other capitalist countries to sell gold cheaply to the United States in order to make good their dollar deficits. This increased the surplus in the US balance of international payments, and gave it the opportunity to rake in gold at a low price made it difficult for the latter to relieve their “dollar shortage”. And this also became a pressure under which they had to accept the Marshall plan and other types of “aid,” and thus subject themselves to enslavement by US imperialism.

Another major aim of US imperialism in keeping down the price of gold is to irrigate the same role as gold to the dollar, whose external value was artificially stabilized, and serving as a world currency. Since the currencies of most other capitalist countries were unstable and their foreign exchange reserves, along with, and in preference to pound sterling. This facilitated US imperialism control of their currencies in one way or another, and it’s becoming the biggest International exploiter in capitalist world finance.

Washington’s Building Tactics

In the second place, in the early post-war years, Washington spread such false ideas as “the elimination of foreign exchange control,” “the stabilization of exchange rates,” and “avoidance of competitive currency depreciation.” These were designed to compel other countries to abandon their foreign exchange restrictions and controls, and relatively stabilize their exchange rates in a way advantageous to the United States. It pushed this policy in order to ensure that the proceeds of America commodity exports and the remittance to the United States of profits from overseas investment may be protected from other countries’ foreign exchange restrictions.

It is true that US imperialism, at least on the surface, has not imposed downright control over the currencies of its “allies.” In reality, however, it did all it could to achieve this purpose by bullying tactics and cajolement. As mentioned above, Washington compelled the recipients of its “aid“ to accept such terms as the introduction of free convertibility within a certain period of time and the scrapping of their foreign exchange controls and restrictions.

A notable example of this took place when Britain received a big US loan amounting to $3,750 million in 1945 and two years later was compelled to introduce free convertibility for the pound sterling, which lasted for only five weeks. Of great importance is the fact that the International Monetary Fund set up in the early postwar years— a major instrument of US imperialism in the international monetary field— dangled the bait of short term loans before member states in order to induce them to accept conditions involving the loss of national sovereignty. These included the abolition of foreign exchange, controls and restrictions, the definition of the foreign exchange value of a currency in terms of the dollar containing a specific weight of gold and the obligation to obtain the funds agreement to specific changes in foreign exchange rates.

Struggle Between Dollar and Pound

All these measures were naturally resented by other imperialist powers. However, West Germany and Japan were then dominated by Washington, and it was on the basis of formulas prepared by the US government that the exchange rates for the West German mark and the Japanese yen were established. Inflation of considerably serious proportions and a rapid deterioration in the balance of international payments overtook France and Italy; the franc and the lira were frequently devalued; it was difficult for them to compete with the dollar. Only the pound sterling could initiate limited counter- offensives against it. Although Britain’s power has declined since World War II, it still has the backing of the sterling area in international finance, the pound remains the reserve currency of sterling area countries and a number of other capitalist countries in the world network of overseas banks, which was set up by Britain in the last century, retains considerable influence. In these circumstances, the struggle between the dollar and the pound was naturally the most prominent one in the imperialist currency warfare.

The comprehensive system of foreign exchange restrictions and control set up by Britain in the sterling area was a powerful fulcrum strengthening British imperialist exploitation of the commonwealth countries and checking US economic penetration. And it was a serious handicap to US imperialist expansion in the capitalist world.

In the first few years since World War II, by means of loans, “aid” and pressure by different US controlled international organizations, Washington devised every possible means to compel Britain to open the door to the sterling area, and restore the free convertibility of the pound so as to pave the way for the control of the whole sterling area, including Britain itself. For a time British imperialism refused to take orders from Washington and adopted delaying tactics. But in 1949 a pound was devalued by 30.5 per cent against the dollar, followed by a corresponding currency to valuation by 35 other capitalist countries–to a large extent the result of pressure from Washington.

Nevertheless, Britain and other imperialist powers, wherever possible, dealt Washington’s high-handed policy, a rebuff. The sterling area and the currency blocs of other imperialist countries—such as the franc bloc—clung stubbornly to their spheres of influence. Moreover, on the question of the price of gold, because gold produced in the sterling area makes up more than 70 per cent of the total annual production of the capitalist world, Britain and South Africa have more than once battled for a rise in the gold price as a countermeasure to US control. They eventually succeeded in wrestling some concessions from Washington and were permitted to sell their gold for industrial purposes on the free market at a higher price than the official US price of $35 per ounce. The International Monetary Fund's demand for the abolition of foreign exchange controls, and for the institution of a fixed parity between the dollar and other currencies were ignored by many countries. France and Italy, for instance, did not institute fixed exchange rates until the mid-1950s. This shows that, despite Washington’s desperate efforts to put the capitalist world's monetary system under its control, other imperialist powers have been unwilling to accept permanent subordination, they have exerted every effort to free themselves from the claws of the dollar. With the shift in the balance of forces between the United States and other imperialist powers, both Washington’s efforts at domination in the monetary field, and the other imperialist’s resistance are growing more intense.

No More Dollar Dominance

With the advent of the 1950s and the aggravation of the uneven development of capitalism, new changes have taken place in the balance of forces among the imperialist countries. Propped up by the United States, West Germany, Italy, and Japan, have recovered from their position as defeated countries. The power of France has steadily increased, enabling it gradually to speak on equal terms with the United States. Although it keeps getting weaker, Britain too has no desire to be at the mercy of Washington. US dominance, which was attained during and immediately after World War II, has begun to falter.  

This shift in the balance of forces which is unfavorable to US imperialism is also reflected in international finance. After the war of aggression against Korea broke out in 1950, deficits began to appear in the US balance of payments and outflow of gold started, because its policies of war and aggression made it increasingly difficult for its trade surplus and proceeds from overseas investment to meet its huge military expenditures, foreign “aid” commitments and private capital export.

A similar situation recurred during US economic crisis of 1953–54. After 1956, taking advantage of the Anglo-French aggression against Egypt, the United States sold a large amount of oil and cotton to Western Europe, and this helped to bring about a turn for the better in the US balance of payments. However, from 1950 to 1957, the US gold flow to other countries amounted to $1,700 million. Added to this were mounting short term debts, and the annual rate of deficit in its balance of payments averaged about $1,200 million. During the same period the gold reserves of other capitalist countries increased by $3,700 million and their dollar reserves by $6,400 million. By the 1950s, the widespread “dollar shortage” of the early posts were years had virtually become a thing of the past.

A New State

After 1958, a new state was reached in the struggle between the United States and other imperialist powers to strengthen their respective positions in world finance. On the one hand, as a result of its intensified policies of war and aggression, US imperialism had to spend on an average more than $10,000 million a year for its overseas military expenditures, foreign “aid” and private capital export. This led to an increase in the serious dollar crisis, which was manifested in the form of balance of payment deficits, and of gold outflows. The dollar crisis and the recurrent economic crisis erupted either simultaneously or alternately.

Whatever methods it uses, it is impossible for US imperialism to prevent a continual deterioration in the position of the dollar. On the other hand, with the rapid growth in their political and economic power, the tremendous improvement in the balance of payment, and the big increase in their gold reserves, other major capitalist countries, and particularly several of the Common Market Six with France and West Germany as their nucleus, were able greatly to strengthen their currencies on the international finance market. From 1958 to 1962 the gold flowing from the United States to other countries totaled $6,800 million. These rises in the short term debts owed to other countries made for an average annual rate of deficits of about $3,000 million from 1950 to 1957. At the same time, the increase in the gold reserves of other capitalist countries amounted to $8,700 million. If increases in foreign exchange holdings are added to this the total increase in their gold and foreign exchange reserves during the period was $14,500 million. Most of these increases went to West European countries. France’s increases amounted to $3,400 million, Italy’s $2,200 million, and West Germany’s $1700 million. Next came Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium.

Dollar Crisis— Incurable Disease

By 1963, the incurable disease of the dollar crisis remained serious. The deficit in the US balance of payments in that year still stood at $3,000 million. At the end of December, its gold and foreign exchange reserves totaled $32,179 million, of which gold accounted for $19,790.million, or 47% of the capitalist world's total. Thus US gold reserves are far below their pre-war level while those of the West European countries are far above it.

Bourgeois Education and the Reproduction of Common Sense

By Christian Noakes

Republished from Peace, Land, and Bread.

Despite right-wing conspiracy theories depicting universities as a communist threat to capitalist society, academia serves as a primary institution in the reproduction of the bourgeois common sense on which capitalism relies. Furthermore, it presents its own version of knowledge as not only self-evident but “progressive,” while denouncing any effective attempt to confront capitalism and imperialism.

With a few flips of intellectual gymnastics, it often asserts that Marxism is the “master’s tools.” As such, it presents Marxism as an oppressive force and bourgeois thought as a force of liberation—albeit one in need of periodic reforms. Fundamental to this inversion is the complete misunderstanding—or at least misrepresentation—of both Marx and the larger historical tradition of Marxism.

Marx is typically treated as a class reductionist who never addressed the interrelated issues of racism, colonialism, and slavery. However, all three of these are given significant attention by Marx and were in fact treated as fundemental to the capitalist processes of accumulation, dispossession, and exploitation. One needn’t delve deep into Marx’s writings to begin to see this. In the first pages of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels state:

“The discovery of America, the rounding of the cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie... The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.”[1]

Elsewhere they state:

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of negroes, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.”[2]

Marx and Engels do not equivocate the role of racial oppression and colonialism which are both a means of capitalist expansion and an outgrowth of it. Not only are these pervasive forms of oppression central to the birth of capitalism, but confronting these twin evils of racism and colonialism are essential to combating capitalism today. This is no doubt what Marx means when he noted that, “labor in the white skin cannot emancipate itself where the black skin is branded.”[3] In other words, capitalist exploitation cannot be eradicated so long as racial oppression remains intact.

To even talk about class within the hallowed walls of the academy is too often assumed to be a “white issue”—a convenient assumption that obscures the material reality of racial oppression. The explicitly anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-slavocratic sentiments in the writings of Marx suggest that many who, in good faith, claim Marxism is implicitly “white”—and therefore conserving racial oppression—are drawing such conclusions without doing the readings. Under the influence of bourgeois thought that pervades capitalist educational institutions, “one knows it is absurd without reading it and one doesn't read it because one knows it is absurd, and therefore one glories in one's ignorance of the position.”[4]

This fundemental misunderstanding—premised on hubristic ignorance—goes far beyond Marx and Engels to encompass all of Marxism. The Guyanese guerrilla intellectual Walter Rodney argued that the perennial debate on the relevance of Marxism across time and place is both an outgrowth of the dominant bourgeois ideology and a fundamental misunderstanding of Marxism.[5] Contrary to an understanding of Marxism as a static manual of revolution, Rodney points out that Marxism is a living thing—a methodology and ideology which concerns itself with material relations in the service of the oppressed and exploited classes.

As a methodology or a scientific lens of analysis, Marxism concerns itself with the material conditions of society, the relations of production which exist—in various forms—across time and place. Marx, and the Marxist tradition which has developed from his contributions to the revolutionary struggle, give considerable attention to the particular relations of production under capitalism—a system into which the Global South has long been forced at gun point. Rejecting Marxism as irrelevant to any context outside of 19th Century Europe follows the same logic as if one were to claim that the theory or relativity—and other developments in physics built on such understandings—only applies to the world Einstein inhabited.[6]

To deny the relevance of Marxist methodology is to inadvertanly suggest that relations of production (especially the predominant capitalist relations) do not exist—a bourgeois position that serves to preserve capitalist exploitation and the racial/colonial relations which underpin it. Despite the often good intentions, such assertions are inevitably in line with bourgeois ideology in that they serve to reproduce the common sense of capitalism which both naturalizes and obscures the social relations of capital. Such academic positions also ignore the historical role of Marxism in national liberation struggles throughout the Global South—an historical fact that makes the question of the relevance of Marxism itself irrelevant.

However, the relationship between Western academia and the Global South is not simply a matter of the erasure of national liberation struggles; it is also openly antagonistic in that the former provides the intellectual justification for imperialism under a facade of progress.

For the sake of brevity, we will limit ourselves to recent events in Bolivia.

On 10 November 2019, the Indigenous President Evo Morales was ousted in an apparent coup. Support for this coup—which would quickly reveal itself as deeply anti-Indigenous and reactionary—included a letter signed by several US academics. Signatories included the anthropologist Devin Beaulieu, a vocal opponent of the Movement for Socialism (MAS) party. Beaulieu—like many other academics—framed their opposition to MAS in pro-Indigenous language. Central to this position has been the reduction of Indigeneity to a monolith in opposition to Morales.[7] This has, in a sense, included the construction of the Indio permitido (the authorized Indian). Under a progressive facade, academics like Beaulieu sit comfortably in the imperial core, deciding for themselves which Indigenous voices are legitimate. Not unlike their colonial predecessors, they rely on a deeply imperialist conception of progress as a modern “white man’s burden.”

Other academics are not so blatantly imperialist. For instance Fabricant and Postero correctly point out how treating Indigenous peoples as a monolith is akin to defining Indio permitido and Indio prohibido (the prohibited Indian).[8] Their acknowledgement of heterogenous Indigeneity is markedly different from the treatment seen in the likes of Beaulieu. However, despite this difference they too fall into the dichotomous thinking which frames MAS as both a capitalist movement for the mestizo and an opposition to Indigenous Bolivians. Despite their apparent attempts to provide balanced analysis, they conflate efforts toward self-determination via the utilization of the country’s natural resources and the fostering non-US trade relations as “capitalist” and “neoliberal,” when in reality not utilizing national resources means a continued subjugation of Bolivia to the imperial core—a position these academics ponder from relative comfort. These (not-so-blatant) imperialist academics also refer to concerns of Indigenous groups over national development as a concern of “further colonisation by Andean coca growers.”[9] Where these coca growers are, in fact, Indigenous, this position only succeeds in weaponizing anti-colonial rhetoric against the colonized.

All of the above is emphasized to say that bourgeois academia’s primary social function is to reproduce capitalist common sense and to reinvent capitalist society with ever-new, illusory facades of progress and liberation. As a central institution of the capitalist superstructure, the university as a whole cannot help but be anything else.

As Jose Carlos Mariategui observed:

“Vain is all mental effort to conceive the apolitical school or the neutral school. The school of bourgeois order will continue to be a bourgeois school. The new school will come with the new order.”[10]

This is not to say that individuals or groups cannot exist in opposition in such institutions or that no revolutionaries should attend university. Institutions of higher learning can and should be treated as sites of struggle from which guerilla intellectuals can, in a sense, redistribute the resources and means of knowledge production otherwise kept from the public.

Following in the footsteps of revolutionaries such as Marx and Rodney, Marxists should utilize capitalist institutions to better understand and combat capitalism. However, the bourgeois academy should never be treated as something that can be adequately reformed under capitalism; or, further, that bourgeois academia is the only source of knowledge production under capitalism. Indeed, a true guerrilla intellectual need not be of the academy at all, and, in fact, cannot be a true guerrilla intellectual if they are confined to the bourgeois institutions which serve only to reproduce capitalist common sense in opposition to the true struggles of liberation.

Endnotes

[1] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. In The Marx-Engles Reader (2nd ed.) Robert C. Tucker (ed), 275-276.

[2] Karl Marx. Capital, Vol. 1. (Chicago 1952), P.372.

[3] Karl Marx: On America and the Civil War (New York, 1972) p. 275.

[4] Walter Rodney (1975). “Marxism and African Liberation.” https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney- walter/works/marxismandafrica.htm.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Jose Carlos Mariategui. “The World Crisis and the Peruvian Proletariat.” in Selected Works of José Carlos Mariátegui.

Anarchism, Paganism, and Resistance: An Interview with Rhyd Wildermuth

By Brenan Daniels

Below is a recent interview I had with Rhyd Wildermuth, the editor of the website Gods & Radicals, where we discuss the origins of the organization, paganism, and religion in anarchism.

What led to the creation and found of Gods and Radicals? How did the entire group get together?

Gods & Radicals was started by myself and my friend Alley Valkyrie two years ago. We're both anarchists, the self-educated 'street-variety' as it were, living much of our lives working with homeless and other mostly-invisible victims of capitalism. And we also talked to other mostly-invisible things, like trees and dead people and land spirits and gods. So we were the self-educated street-variety of Pagans, too.

For us, our anti-capitalism and our Paganism seem to flow into each other seamlessly. Our desire to protect the natural world and our desire to protect the vulnerable were both rooted in the same soil. And we knew lots of other Pagans who were also anarchists, and lots of other anarchists who were also Pagans, but noticed that few were ever talking about what seemed pretty self-evident to all us. Because of the overwhelming response we got after a presentation together at a Pagan conference in California, we realized there was massive desire to talk more about this. So we started the site, named it after the presentation we gave, and put out a call for writers, and we got flooded pretty quickly with offers to help. It was pretty amazing.

Tell us about the journal A Beautiful Resistance. What led to its founding and what is the goal of the journal?

Gods & Radicals is both a website and a non-profit publisher, and A Beautiful Resistance is one of our publications. The idea behind the name is pretty simple: we tend to forget what we're resisting for in the midst of all thing things we're resisting against. Resistance can be ugly, exhausting, full of sorrow and misery and pain. It can also be beautiful, and should be, because we're not just struggling against capitalism, against patriarchy, against racism, and against authority. Instead, we're resisting for something, for ideas and for people and for ways of being that are beautiful.

Also, we wanted to challenge an unchallenged idea in both anarchist and Pagan publishing: we wanted to pay all our writers, to re-establish writing and art as labor that must be compensated. With A Beautiful Resistance and our other publications, we split all the revenue after costs 50% with all the contributors, with the other half going back into the organization to start new publishing projects. We've been pretty successful so far on this.

How did you personally come to paganism and what exactly is paganism as it doesn't seem to be well understood in the general culture?

I can't and won't define Paganism for everyone, but I'll happily tell you how I define it for myself.

Paganism is the moment I lose my words at the sight of wildflowers breaking through sidewalk cracks in the poor areas of a city; the resurgence of the wild into the disciplined misery of the oppressed. It's the body that doesn't fit into the machine, the dream of buried rivers and streams under pavement. It's the tears I shed and the rage I feel when I see a river poisoned by an oil spill or see a mountain blown to bits to get at the coal underneath.

For me, it's all about relation to not just the human-world but the other-than-human world. The mountain that gets blown apart so industrialized capitalism can grind on, the river that gets poisoned so people can have cars-I'm in relationship with them. Just like when a trans friend is harassed or a Muslim neighbor is terrorized, I cannot stand by and accept that violence, because we are related, we relate to each other, and our existence is all bound up together.

I've always been like this, I think, but I didn't always identify the way I relate with the world as "Pagan." Animism and witchcraft also describe it just as well. The words matter less to me than the worlds of meaning they attempt to describe.

Many anarchists reject any religion, especially organized religion. How do you square your anarchist political beliefs with your paganism?

I've always wanted to answer this question. More often than not, the question I am asked is how I square my pagan beliefs with generally atheistic anarchist political theory.

First off, I-and Gods & Radicals-strongly rejects clericalism. Anyone who sets themselves up as a mediator between humans and the world is trying to control people. In fact, most of our political systems derive from earlier religious-authority forms, evolving from priestly-control of society to king- or politician-control with the advent of monotheism. What both secular Liberal Democracy and theocratic empires have in common is authority: that others (priests, kings, politicians, bosses) can and do have the authority to define the world for you. We reject that in all its forms.

Traditionally, atheist anarchism and Marxism make the mistake of defining non-European, non-white, and indigenous spiritualities as 'superstitious' or even primitive. Post-colonialists like Dipesh Chakrabarty have helped unravel that as European exceptionalism, the continued notion that mostly-white leftists are somehow more superior in their atheist views because they've progressed past religion. They're enlightened, the rest of the world is not, and all that.

So I see the insistence that leftists must always be atheists to be little more than that same European exceptionalism that led to colonial suppression of indigenous beliefs in the Americas and Africa. Re-embracing our own spiritual existences-and our ability to create new ways of being outside Capital and the state-is a key to our own liberation and also ongoing anti-colonialist efforts around the world. Otherwise, we're no different from the French in Haiti who tried to suppress indigenous African beliefs so the Blacks would make better slaves, or the Spanish and English who tried to wipe out First Nation's beliefs to 'civilize' them.

To use an anarchist term, we're expropriating our meaning back, or in Marxist terms, we're seizing the means of the "production" of meaning.

In what way does Gods and Radicals create and change the narrative surrounding paganism, as a religious belief, and anarchism as a political belief? What are the unique/new ideas or ways of thinking that G&R brings to the table?

Our primary influence has thus far been within Paganism, and it's also where we get the majority of our critics. There are racist elements in American Paganism particularly that don't like us. Also, our anti-clerical stance has made us a few enemies with the plastic-shaman, media-hungry elements that see us as a threat to their greed. And we've helped expose a few charlatans and leaders sympathetic to fascism and the alt-right. So, lots of enemies, but even more friends: we get emails weekly from people who thought they were maybe the only Pagan anarchists around. I like those emails a lot.

I think the way we change the anarchist narrative is precisely in what I mentioned earlier: we are undermining the European exceptionalism that crept into anarchism, and reminding people we can all create our own meaning.

One thinks of the way anti-Enclosure resistance movements in England and Wales adopted Pagan language and mysticism in their resistance: the Luddites, for instance, claimed to be led by a ghostly 'captain' who lived under a hill in a forest. That's a land spirit. Likewise, the Whiteboys in Ireland gave eviction notices to landlords in the name of an ancient land-goddess, and the Rebeccas claimed to have gotten their costumes from an ancient crone in the mountains. The narrative of those resistance movements is remarkably similar to the spiritual stories of indigenous and slave resistance in the Americas. Likewise, the ritual to Erzuli Dantor at Bois Cayman which sparked the Haitian Revolution, or the women's resistance to factory owners in Cambodia through possession by land spirits call the Neak Ta-resistance to oppression has very often been spiritual as well as physical.

By telling those stories, and by telling our own, we open up more space for these kinds of resistances, and also challenge the insistence that European-secular atheism is the natural, final evolution of humanity.

Such a view also helps us navigate away from the appropriative nature of Western spirituality. The capitalist creation of whiteness stripped people of their relationship to land and culture. "Hurt people hurt people," as they say, and that whiteness manifests now in a voracious theft of the culture and spiritual expressions of others. Dismantling that whiteness and healing the damage that was done (and that it does) will require creating new relationships to land and culture in which everyone engages in their own meaning-making.

Also, we're trying to provide a bulwark against the alt/new/fascist right. They gain power significantly by playing to that lost sense of meaning; they've been able to make so much headway on this precisely because many leftists demean spiritual expression. We're trying to fix that.

How can people support G&R and are there orgs/groups that G&R is allied with?

A few ways. First, we are always excited to meet new writers and artists. We pay for writing on our site now, and welcome as many diverse voices as want to write with us. Secondly, we are a non-profit and accept donations to help us pay our writers. Buying our books helps a lot as well-that's how we pay our print writers. And sharing our stuff, of course, is always really helpful, especially now that most social media sites throttle views in order to get their users to buy advertizing.

Other groups that we work with but aren't affiliated with directly, groups that might be of great interest to others, are Heathens United Against Racism and Appalachian Pagan Ministry, both of which are doing a lot of work to fight fascist organizing within Heathenry. And we have great relationships with quite a few Pagan communities elsewhere in the world fighting these same struggles, particularly against fascists.

ESPN'S Journal of Black Respectability Politics: The Undefeated, and the Surrender of the Black Middle Class

By Jon Jeter

". . . before you know it, we'll have Negro Imperialists."

- Fred Hampton

In a June 1st article for ESPN's new African-American focused property, the Undefeated, celebrity intellectual Michael Eric Dyson takes darker-skinned blacks to task for their begrudging refusal to exalt in the accomplishments of lighter-skinned blacks such as the National Basketball Association's two-time Most Valuable Player, Steph Curry.

"The resentment by darker blacks of the perceived and quite real advantages accorded to lighter blacks has sometimes led to a wholesale repudiation of all fairer-skinned blacks. There is, however, a big difference between asking for racial transparency in light privilege, and the unvarying treatment of fairer-skinned blacks as automatically guilty of exploiting their status."

As a work of either reportage or critical inquiry, Dyson's 2,000-word essay is an abysmal failure. Didactic, artless and populated with misshapen straw-men, it fails to identify a single African American who articulates anything resembling envy or disdain for Curry, let alone anyone whose resentment is grounded in his fair complexion. In fact, the two African Americans who Dyson quotes at length, current NBA player Kevin Durant, and the retired Hall-of-Famer Allen Iverson, are effusive in their praise of Curry.

But as a written reprimand to blackness, or a textbook example of how a feckless Black elite has corroborated the white settler state's attempt to alibi its criminal enterprise by manufacturing the Other, Dyson's critique is a singular achievement.

Consider that at no point in his polemic does Dyson mention the word "rape," for doing so would be tantamount to handing up an indictment for a 500-year-old crime spree that is unlike anything the world has ever seen. Virtually from the moment they alighted in the Americas, European expatriates set upon indigenous and African women, creating, from whole cloth, a language of sexual defilement - -mulattoes, octoroons, quadroons and Latinos - and giving birth, quite literally to the New World, and the Steph Currys that populate it.

"God, forgive us," writes a Civil-War era diarist wed to a South Carolina planter, "but ours is a monstrous system, a wrong and an inequity! Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattos one sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all mulatto children in everybody's household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds."

It is unfathomable that the Ivy-League educated and employed Dyson, is unfamiliar with this history, or unaware that skin-tone has played no discernible role in the radical black political movements that are the sine qua non of liberal democracy in the US. Hence, the reddish-colored, first black mayor of Dyson's hometown of Detroit, the late Coleman Alexander Young, is as revered by African Americans in the Motor City as much - if not more - than the blue-black former mayor of Washington DC, Marion Barry.

Dyson's cognitive dissonance is hardly accidental and these clumsy but willful misrepresentations are a staple of the Undefeated, which is not an online chronicle of the African American experience so much as a literary journal of black respectability politics, or better yet, a declassified dossier of tribal dysfunction. Since it debuted in mid-May, the Undefeated´s virtually-all black staff has consistently trafficked in narratives in which history is inert, racism exists only inasmuch as it vexes Obama, and no injustice is so grave that it cannot be resolved by black folks pulling up their pants.

In his groundbreaking 1978 book, the late Edward Said posited that the West has historically sought to qualify its imperialism by assigning men of science and letters the exercise of shifting the blame for colonialism, from the colonizer, to the colonized.

Said named this brand of racist pseudo-science for the unfortunate term coined by the West to describe the Arab world to its East - - Orientalism - -and dated its practice as far back as France's 1798 invasion of Egypt, when Napoleon encouraged artists, writers, and anthropologists to re-imagine the Nile's inhabitants, or to Orientalize the Orient.

Of the famed French novelist's depiction of a 19th-century dancer, Said writes:

Flaubert's encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely influential model of the Oriental woman; she never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence, or history. He spoke for and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess (her) physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was "typically Oriental."

It does not require a postcolonial scholar to recognize the elasticity of Said's theory and how it provides a framework for contextualizing Rudyard Kipling's poetry, DW Griffith's landmark 1915 film, Birth of a Nation, King Baudouin extolling the civilizing virtues of Belgian colonialism on the eve of Congo's liberation in 1960, or the 2009 Sandra Bullock vehicle, the Blind Side. Orientalism even explains the 2003 remarks made by former Harvard College President Lawrence Summers when he sought to exorcise patriarchy from the body politic by wondering aloud if women aren't underrepresented in American laboratories because they lack the "aptitude" to succeed in math and science professions.

They do not, and the scientific consensus had said so for nearly 50 years.

Yet, if scholars define Orientalism as white people writing about people of color for white people, then the rise of a Black Jacobin class that is all-too-eager to validate a hierarchy in which they are invested has reformulated the colonial syntax. With the American Empire at its nadir and seeking both absolution and scapegoats, black journalists, academics, police, filmmakers and philanthropists in the Obama age are increasingly charged with Niggerizing the Nigger.

Orientalism is the new Black.

A May 18 Undefeated profile of the African American quarterback Robert Griffin III practically rebukes readers for believing their lying eyes. In 2012, Griffin set NFL rookie records for passer rating, and led the league in rushing yards-per carry. But his play tailed off sharply after the Washington Redskins' January 6, 2013 playoff loss when even a casual fan could plainly see that the rookie was hobbled and playing on an injured knee. And yet the veteran coach, Mike Shanahan - who once suggested in an interview that an All-Pro black quarterback was too dumb to understand the playbook - - refused to substitute for him until late in the contest.

"Look at his face, Daddy," former Washington Wizards center Etan Thomas quoted his seven-year old son, Malcolm, asking him in a Washington Post editorial published the day after the playoff game. "Why is he still playing if he is in that much pain?"

Seemingly intent on helping Shanahan land another coaching job, however, the Undefeated posited that Griffin is the real villain in this sporting drama, because, he's, well, uppity.

"Talk to people who worked with Griffin in Washington, and most will tell you he had chances - too many - to salvage his starting position and that many of his problems started with him. Griffin was too focused on his endorsements. He overindulged in social media. He alienated teammates by deflecting blame for his poor performances and ran his mouth too much in interviews. He should have spent more time in the film room and less on enhancing the cult of RG3."

Why would African-Americans traffic in such seditious caricatures, particularly at a moment when dehumanizing stereotypes conspire with wrenching austerity policies to produce material circumstances reminiscent of 1930s Germany when a demagogue blamed that country's immiseration on a population he categorized as nonwhite?

I was first confronted with the notion of black Orientalists when I read a fawning 2005 New York Times profile of Harvard Economist Roland J. Fryer, whose research explores genetics as a critical factor in racial disparities in intelligence. That no such disparities exist did little to discourage former New York City Public Schools Chancellor Joel Klein from hiring the African American Fryer as a consultant to help untangle the student achievement gap.

Fryer was followed in quick succession by the likes of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, Dyson, and most recently, the historical illiteracy of Ta-nehisi Coates who asserts that Obama is the heir to Malcolm X's political legacy, and that blacks should eschew the game-changing traditions of political resistance for a monthly reparationscheck, cut by the US Treasury.

To be sure, financial remuneration partly explains the phenomena of Black Orientalists, but more than anything, the defection of the Black Vichy class is grounded in the twilight of the American century, and the post-industrial epoch that Gramsci refers to as the interregnum, in which the "old is dying, and the new cannot be born."

This was also the case a century ago when a precarious new economy and social order was beginning to take shape and mobs of alienated white youths terrorized the country in waves, climaxing in 1919 when racial violence washed over the country like a foamy, heaving sea.

Atlanta's Black unwashed rescued the city's Black elite from marauding white mobs in 1906, dutifully patrolling segregated neighborhoods with pistols and shotguns a-ready. When the smoke cleared, Atlanta's Urban League sought to reassure their white patrons of their fealty by organizing neighborhood clubs to teach "better housekeeping" practices to black maids and washerwomen, Karen Ferguson wrote in her book, Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta.

The domestics complied initially, listening intently to lectures on cleanliness and punctuality. But when, they began to wonder, would the forum address the subject of pay raises for making an extra effort? Told that no pay raises would be forthcoming, the black domestics bolted, giving their Urban League sisters the side-eye as they left.

Similarly, an effort to organize black workers at the cigarette-maker RJ Reynolds in 1919, was met with opprobrium by Black mercantilists in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. According to Robert Rodgers Korstad, author of Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth Century South, one Black banker, J.H. Hill, implored "my people" not to be tempted by "strangers. . . There is no need for a poor laboring class of people to try to make demands on any rich corporations. We are dependent upon these corporations for employment"

Underwhelmed, black tobacco workers boycotted stores that did not support the union, and threatened to withdraw their money from Hill's bank if he didn't relent. Conversely, Reynolds management tried to slow the employees' momentum by proposing a company or "yellow dog" union, recruiting another black merchant, Simon Atkins, to champion its advantages at a meeting with workers. But, Rodgers Korstad wrote, "Black workers. . .did not look to the middle class for their cues" and responded with "hoots and jeers."

Blacks' frustration with what W.E.B. DuBois famously heralded as the Negro's most "talented tenth" detonated following the 1931 arrest of nine black teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white women on a freight car just outside of Scottsboro, Alabama. The NAACP's timid, ineffective legal defense paled in comparison to that of the Communist Party who hoped to make inroads in the country by defiantly putting American racism itself on trial, organizing rallies as far away as Chicago, New York, London, Moscow and Johannesburg, and featuring as actors rather than victims, the plain-spoken but sympathetic mothers of the accused teenagers.

Initially reluctant to even accept the case for fear of tarnishing their brand, the NAACP's attitude towards the mothers was one of condescension; they soon withdrew from the case, leaving the Communists' to eventually win the release of all 9 accused.

Six days after excoriating Griffin, the Undefeated published an article by the veteran sportswriter Michael Wilbon that parrots the NAACP's gradualist approach in the Scottsboro case. Too clever by half, Wilbon's essay laments black indifference to the the new analytics methodology that is all the rage in NBA front offices. Wilbon dismisses out-of-hand the trope that blacks are incapable of understanding mathematical concepts, and while he stipulates that there is no demonstrable value-added to analytics in evaluating players, he still urges blacks to assimilate.

"For more than a few moments I felt guilty as hell for hating the intrusion of advanced analytics as much as I generally do. Because even though the reliance on this stuff seems to be a new safe haven for a new "Old Boy Network" of Ivy Leaguers who can hire each other and justify passing on people not given to their analytic philosophies, an entire group of people can't simply refuse to participate in something as important as this phenomenon. The cynical me can easily make the argument this is a new path to exclusion, intentional or not. Or is it creating an entirely new way of approaching sports that's reserved for the few?"

In Ferguson's book, Black Atlanta professionals wrote to New Deal bureaucrats to offer their services as race interlocutors in an effort to "help the Negro masses to adjust themselves to the type or world in which they must live."

The problem is that the Negro masses had no intention of living in such an immutable world, and in the days, months and years following the Scottsboro Boys' arrest, began to join Communists, and other working-class white allies to turn bad jobs into good ones, democratize the state, and create the singular achievement of the Industrial Age: the American middle class.

During World War 2, the Black RJ Reynolds employees who the Winston Salem elite had earlier scolded, collaborated with their white co-workers to integrate the union, but they didn't stop there, using the reconstituted collective as a springboard to produce what is likely the closest iteration this country has ever seen to the Paris commune. Led by an African-American, lesbian Marxist named Moranda Smith, Local 22 promptly proceeded to register thousands of African American voters, who in turn helped elect a black minister to the City Council, the first since Reconstruction to win an election in the Deep South against a white candidate. With their proxies at City Hall, Local 22 spearheaded efforts to build public housing, adopt price controls, improve schools, and expand bus service and jobless benefits.

Wilbon's call for black acquiesce mirrors that of his antecedents in Atlanta, North Carolina and Scottsboro, and like the Undefeated itself, does not account for the laboring classes' cycle of resistance, triumph, reversal, replayed endlessly as if on loop.

In the Orientalist war of narratives, the Undefeated, ironically enough, views African Americans as a thoroughly defeated people, and the Black elite as a kind of advance squadron trapped behind enemy lines, its reportage a kind of Morse code, tapped out daily on fiber-optic cables to warn the rear encampments that we are hopelessly outgunned.

"Do-Stop-Not-Stop-Attempt-Stop-A-Stop-Counteroffensive-Stop."

But Wilbon, the staff of the Undefeated, and the Black middle class writ large would be wise to revisit the words of an African American named William H. Crogman, who in the days following the 1906 Atlanta riots, wrote a letter to a northern white liberal crediting the Black proletariat-lumpen and otherwise- for coming to the defense of the black elites who lived in an aspirational neighborhood known as Dark Town.

"Here we have worked and prayed and tried to make good men and women of our colored population, and at our very doorstep the whites kill these good men," wrote Crogman, who would go on to become president of Clark College. "But the lawless element in our population, the element we have condemned fights back, and it is to these people that we owe our lives."

This was originally posted on Jon's personal blog.

Jon Jeter is the author of 'Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People,' and the co-author of 'A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Bright Nights and Dark Days in Obama's Postracial America.' He is a former Washington Post Bureau Chief in southern Africa and South America, a former producer for This American Life, and twice a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.