Capitalist Contradictions and Revolutionary Struggle: An Introduction

By Derek Ford

Republished from Liberation School.

Hearing or reading about the “contradictions of capitalism” in an article or at a rally might be intimidating, like a foreign language or a term only a certain group can understand. While the contradictions of capitalism are complicated, working and oppressed people can easily understand them for the simple reason that we all live with and negotiate any number of contradictions every day. The contradictions we deal with that are the most confining, that most constrain our capacities and that keep us oppressed are specifically the contradictions of capitalism.

On any given day, we find abundant evidence that makes it clear that the capitalist system doesn’t work in practice. Examining the contradictions of capitalism and demonstrating how they are inherent in the system, proves that capitalism doesn’t even work in theory. Understanding capitalist contradictions heightens our agitation and accelerates political consciousness by cutting through capitalist ideology and the various excuses of capitalists, politicians, and their media. Knowing capitalist contradictions better informs our tactics and strategies in any given struggle and serves as a bridge to socialist reconstruction in the U.S.

This series examines some of the primary contradictions of capitalism, including those between use and exchange values, private ownership and social production, and the interests of individual capitalists and capital as a whole. Each entry will break the contradictions down in an accessible manner, explaining some of their more intricate details, and showing how they relate to other contradictions. We provide some general and concrete examples of how they enhance our understanding of capitalism and our struggle to overthrow that system and replace it with a new one. The reason Marx dedicated so much time to studying and analyzing capital was not because it was “interesting” but because its contradictions were and are opportunities for working and oppressed people to advance and create the world the Earth and its inhabitants need and deserve.

The general and specific contradictions we navigate

Our personal lives are riddled with any number of contradictions—or tensions—that we have to deal with daily. The term “guilty pleasure,” for example, names the contradictory situations we face when we are both attracted to and repelled by the same thing at the same time. Our guilty pleasure might be a “reality” show, for example, or a certain genre of books, or any other activity we engage in that brings us both positive and negative feelings.

Many of us despise social media yet still pick up our phones or check our computers throughout the day to use various social media apps. We also deal with the contradictions of our basic life processes like going to sleep. If we stay up late—to catch the end of a sporting event or spend extra time with our friends—while fully knowing we will have to wake up at the same early hour, we’re wrestling with a contradiction. Whenever we have negative and positive feelings at the same time about the same thing (a show), relation (social media), or process (sleeping), we’re dealing with a contradiction.

We’re also familiar with political contradictions. How many of us and the people we know have zero faith in the ruling-class parties but still vote for them? How many of us live in communities that regularly experience the brunt of racist police violence but, at the same time, see the police as a kind of “necessary evil” to combat the regular violence in our neighborhoods, and even might support campaigns for more police or surveillance cameras?

We experience economic contradictions as well, like the tension between doing the quality of work we can be proud of and the quality of work we are paid to perform. As a teacher, I constantly grapple with this contradiction. I truly want to set up the best possible class to educate students in a way they deserve, which requires spending the time necessary to get to know each student, to find the right content to teach, and do so by crafting a plan for each unique class. To do this, however, means I have to work beyond my contract hours.

Even when we’re thrown out of a job, we search out new work for a paycheck to survive even though we know that paycheck will barely let us survive long enough to show up to work to collect the next one.

Philosophy and our understanding of contradictions

Not all contradictions are the result of capitalism. The oldest religious traditions and cultural customs, for example, provide guidance on dealing with contradictions, like those between love and hate or living and dying. Marx didn’t “discover” contradictions, but he and Engels, built on and critiqued theories of capitalism available at the time. By doing so, Marx and Engels found that, while the best political economists often asked the right questions (like what is the source of profit), they couldn’t answer them because they didn’t grasp the historical specificity of capitalism as a contradictory system. They showed that capitalist contradictions are not inevitable or permanent, only that they are unsolvable within the capitalist system. Similarly, neither Marx nor Engels envisioned socialism or communism as a utopian place free of any tensions or contradictions. The socialist struggle doesn’t aim to solve all contradictions, only those that are intrinsic to the capitalist system and that produce the widespread suffering of the world’s majority.

We all have experience with contradictions, yet how we understand them—and therefore how and if we respond to them—depends on our philosophy, which refers generally to “our world outlook.” Just as we have experiences with various contradictions, we have our own philosophical outlooks, even if we aren’t aware of it or familiar with philosophical language. Philosophies are grounded in material reality, which means “that the various systems of the philosophers also always express a class outlook” [1]. The ruling class is the group that controls not only “the means of material production” but also “the means of mental production,” we’re all raised with their world outlook.

The capitalist philosophy we’re taught maintains that the world is made up of independent and fixed entities. Here, contradictions are the same as paradoxes, like the riddle of what came first, the chicken or the egg? This is only a paradox if we think about both as separate things, but there cannot be one without the other. Marxist philosophy explains that the world is made up of interrelated matter that is always in motion. The chicken and the egg are not independent or fixed but interrelated and always in motion. The reason there is no answer to the riddle is because it asks the wrong question [2].

Consider the common refrain that contemporary injustices like war or poverty are merely the result of “human nature.” Under this conception, humans have a nature that is independent of the world and any given social conditions. Humans have always been independent, competitive, self-seeking, etc. Capitalist philosophy thus explains the “failure” of alternative social systems by claiming they are simply “against human nature.” Human nature is presented as a thing, a static object remaining the same regardless of time, space, or society; this lets capitalism off the hook.

Many of us are taught to think that “humans” and “nature” are independent entities and there was once a pure “natural world.” Marx and Engels, addressing one of their contemporaries who adhered to this view, held that even if there was a “nature that preceded human history…. It is nature which today no longer exists anywhere” [3]. We’re taught that capitalism is natural and the way it structures society is nothing but “human nature;” that we are naturally independent of each other, competitive, and out for our own interests; that we are individuals isolated from each other first before we enter into relations with others. It’s always been this way, the myth goes: we’re all free individuals who choose to be either lazy or hard-working, wasteful or frugal, make bad or positive life choices, or choose the “right” or “wrong” crowd to hang out with. That explains why some of us end up rich and the rest end up as workers, how some workers end up in apartments and houses and others end up homeless, employed or unemployed, etc.

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Two worldviews in action: Education, testing, and the myth of meritocracy

In education, this myth takes the form of “meritocracy,” where the results of our test scores indicate how capable or incapable we are as individuals, how much time and effort we spent studying, etc… This assumes however, that standardized tests are “objective,” an assumption that, as educational theorist Wayne Au shows, allows the tests to be “used to compare students, teachers, and schools, and then make high-stakes decisions about being granted access to resources or subjected to punishment” [4]. These tests are far from value-neutral or objective because, in reality, test scores and educational outcomes are ultimately related to one’s zip code. Moreover, they are historically rooted in eugenics and racism.

In the U.S., IQ (or “Intelligence Quotient”) tests were based on the idea that one’s “intelligence” was static and based on their individual biology and heritage. IQ tests are still “used to sort and rank different people by race, ethnicity, gender, and class according to supposedly inborn, innate intelligence” [5]. The assumptions determine the results. If the language of the test is a certain kind of English, students from communities that speak a different kind of English or another language, like Spanish, will have less access to the questions. Regardless of the bias built into the test, however, those who can afford private tutors and do not have to work in the house or at a job, for example, are likely to perform better than those who can’t afford tutors and have to work to provide for their families, whether it be at a job or cooking dinner for their siblings while their parents are working three jobs.

If we understand the historical specificity of standardized tests, then, we understand they do not measure our “natural” or “individual” intelligence but our class standing. We then see that educational and economic success is not the product of an individual’s choices but rather the system that determines the choices available to us and our ability to access those choices. It disproves that we are “individuals” with our individual intelligence and shows that the very notion of “intelligence” is socially constructed under capitalism in a way that justifies capitalism’s inequalities as “human nature.” Individualism, as Marx showed in his critique of bourgeois political economists, was the product of “civil society” during a specific time and place that “appears as an ideal, whose existence [the bourgeois philosophers] project into the past” [6]. In other words, “intelligence” isn’t a static or independent thing but a process interrelated to social practices, including white supremacy, capitalism, racism, ableism, and other forms of oppression, as well as struggles against standardized testing.

Capitalism as an inherently contradictory process

When an economic crisis grips U.S. society, capitalists blame it on some external cause. They debate whether it is the individual characteristics of a president, a Federal Reserve policy or decision, “state intervention” or lack of legislative oversight. In some cases, they unite and blame it on another country.

Marx demonstrated that capitalist crises are the inevitable result of capital’s internal contradictions and, more fundamentally, that capitalism is defined by its contradictions. Capital is value in expanding motion, meaning that capitalism as a system is defined by the accumulation of more and more value.

The process of capital is, at heart, contradictory for at least two reasons. First, the value of any commodity is the social average of the time necessary for its production. Because capitalists compete with other capitalists for a limited market, they are forced to reduce their individual production time to remain competitive, yet eventually, this lowers the overall social production time and, hence, their ability to accumulate value. Second, surplus value for the capitalist is equivalent to the additional unpaid value produced by labor-power. Because capitalists must invest at least some of their surplus value back to expand their own productive capacity to accumulate more value, there is a constant disproportionality between the value produced and the value realized (or sold) [7].

As Marx puts it, “the ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their limit” [8]. What he means is that the “absolute law of value” that drives the accumulation of capital expands both the wealth of the capitalists and the poverty of the masses. Even if our wages equal the value of our labor-power, it is impossible for our class to buy the total value we produce.

Capitalism can only move crises around and to higher levels

Contradictions push and pull us between the opposite ends of the same thing or process. Generally, most of these contradictions bubble below the surface. Every few years, however, they boil over into a crisis. To survive, capitalism must continually try to “solve” its contradictions, but can only shift them to different places, delay them, and raise their intensity.

For example, one way capital tries to “solve” the contradiction of surplus value is by extending credit to workers. With credit, we can purchase more commodities than our wages allow. At some point, of course, the debt must be paid. This increases the extent of the contradiction because credit comes with additional costs for us, which ultimately reduces our capacity to purchase goods or pay for the goods we already “bought” on credit.

Another example is how capital tries to “solve” the contradiction between its need to expand and the geographical limitations of the globe. Colonialism and imperialism provide capital with additional outlets to sell their commodities and provide capital with cheaper (often stolen) raw materials and labor-power. Imperialism resulted mainly from this contradiction because, once the capitalists had colonized the world, they could only gain access to extra markets by redividing “their” colonized territories through war. This explains why Lenin’s analysis of imperialism provided the real rationale for World War I [9].

The role of capitalist contradictions in building a revolutionary movement and society

As an inherently contradictory system, as capital grows its own power it, at. the same time, creates and increases its opposing power: the poor and working classes. In this series, we’ll explore some of the most pertinent contradictions of capitalism so that we can seize on them and finally resolve them through socialism.

Contradictions do not unfold in any predetermined manner nor is there any single one that is the most important for all time. Yet a foundational contradiction that is always helpful in raising class consciousness and clarifying the real source of many struggles is the contradiction between use value and exchange value. Under capitalism, all commodities are contradictory unities of both forms of value and capitalists only care about the exchange value of the commodities we produce for them The rest of us, however, buy commodities for their use value.

We rent apartments or take out loans for houses because we need to use them. Capitalists, however, only organize the production of houses for exchange value, or the profit they can make from them. Because capitalists compete for as much exchange value as possible, they end up producing another contradiction examined in the third entry: the absurd crisis of overproduction.

Whenever we struggle to make or keep something as a public good—whether it be education, our libraries, healthcare, water, or utilities—while the capitalists try to privatize it, we’re taking a side in the contradiction between use value and exchange value. We’re saying: “This is important to keep public because society uses and needs it, not because a small group of capitalists can privatize it and profit from it.”

This clarifies that the interests of the masses are directly opposed to the interests of the capitalists and imperialists. When our elected (or unelected) officials still sell them off to corporations despite our protests, it shows our class whose interests the state represents. It further reveals that capitalism doesn’t care about what we need or want to survive, and that they don’t see us as anything other than exploitable and expendable sources of value. Additionally, it helps unite our historically divided class around our common interests, as access to basic public necessities impacts all working and poor people.

On our path toward building a revolutionary movement and society, understanding the contradictions of capitalism helps us accurately identify the cause of the crisis, show the class struggle in action, unite the broad masses, and reveal our common interests and, in general, provides us with the knowledge necessary for our political, tactical, and strategic decisions. The contradictory developments in any society are numerous and it is important to look for the contradictions that will most likely cause intense social conflicts, determining where to put our time and energy, who to reach out to and build connections with, and more.

In this series, we’ll examine multiple fundamental contradictions of capitalism. After examining the contradiction between use value and exchange value in greater detail, we’ll see how that in turn contributes to the absurd crisis of overproduction in the next entry. The series will address other contradictions as well, including the contradiction between technology and living labor, constant capital and fixed capital, and the production and realization of capital. For each, we’ll discuss how we can use them to advance the struggles we’re engaged in daily, promote socialist consciousness, and spread the fact that another world and system is possible and absolutely necessary. That way, we can have enough numbers on our side to seize a revolutionary opportunity: when capitalism’s contradictions pile up high enough that “the ‘lower classes’ do not want to live in the old way and the ‘upper classes’ cannot carry on in the old way” [10].

References

[1] Maurice Cornforth,Materialism and the Dialectical Method(New York: International Publishers, 1953/1971), 7, 8.
[2] For more on this see Curry Malott, “What is Dialectical Materialism? An Introduction,”Liberation School, 04 April 2020. Availablehere.
[3] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology: Part One, with Selections from Parts Two and Three and Supplementary Texts, trans. C.J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 63; see also Sohrob Aslamy, “Marxism, Capitalism, and Nature-Society Relations: An Introduction,”Liberation School, 12 October 2021. Availablehere.
[4] Wayne Au,Unequal by Design: High Stakes Testing and the Standardization of Inequality, 2nd. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2023), 98.
[5] Ibid., 49.
[6] Karl Marx,Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. M. Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Books, 1939/1993), 38.
[7] For an explanation of the first reason, see Mazda Majidi, “Relative Surplus Value: The Class Struggle Intensifies,”Liberation School, 18 August 2021. Availablehere; for an explanation of the second reason, see Derek Ford and Mazda Majidi, “Surplus Value is the Class Struggle,”Liberation School, 30 March 2021. Availablehere.
[8]. Karl Marx,Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 3): The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole, ed. F. Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1894/1967), 484.
[9] V.I. Lenin, “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline,” inLenin: Selected Works: Two Volume Edition (Vol. 1)(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1916/1963), 634-731. Availablehere. See also Brian Becker, “From Inter-Imperialist War to Global Class War: Understanding Distinct Stages of Imperialism,”Liberation School, 20 July 2018. Availablehere.
[10] V.I. Lenin, “‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder,” inV.I. Lenin Collected Works (Vol. 31): April-December 1920, trans. J. Katzer (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1920/1966). 85.

Capitalist Urbanization, Climate Change, and the Need for Sponge Cities

[Pictured: State-level pilot district of Sponge City in Yuelai, Chongqing.]

By Tina Landis

Republished from Liberation School.

According to the United Nations Population Fund’s 2009 report, 2008 was the first time in history that over 50 percent of the world’s population resided in cities instead of rural areas. Because of the different ways countries define cities, others date the qualitative shift to as recently as 2021 [1]. Regardless, across the spectrum it’s undisputed we now live in an “urban age” and, as such, transforming the relationship between cities and the natural world is essential for climate change adaptation and mitigation. The international capitalist institutions like the World Bank that are increasingly taking up the issue of cities and climate change can’t explain the various factors behind urbanization nor can they pose real solutions to its impact on or relationship to climate catastrophes. Cities consume 78 percent of the world’s energy resources and produce 60 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2022 UN Habitat report [2]. Under the capitalist model, urban planning lacks a holistic approach, leaving human well being and ecological needs as an afterthought, which will continue to have a degenerative effect on the environment and global climate.

Marx and Engels lived during a time in which capitalist urbanization was a nascent phenomenon concentrated mostly in some European cities, like Manchester, the English city about which Friedrich Engels wrote his first and classic book, The Condition of the Working Class in England. Engels demonstrates how the “great town” of Manchester, the first major manufacturing center in England, was great only for capitalist profits. The concentration of capital required for the invention and adoption of machinery outproduced independent handicraft and agricultural production, forcing both into the industrial proletariat of the city. There, they had to work for the capitalists, whose wages were so low they could, if they were lucky, live in overcrowded houses and neighborhoods just outside the city limits. Because the city was produced chaotically for capitalist profits, no attention was given to accompanying environmental impacts [3]. As the masses were driven from their land into the urban factories, the ancestral ties to the land and ecological knowledge of how to live sustainably on that land was lost.

It was not the “industrial revolution” that produced the new sources of power needed for machinery, but the need for new sources of power that produced the industrial revolution. For the machinery required more powerful and reliable sources of energy than wind or the water wheel, animals or humans could provide. They were replaced at first by coal and the steam engine, “whose power was entirely under man’s control, that was mobile and a means of locomotion, that was urban and not, like the water wheel, rural, that permitted production to be concentrated in towns” [4]. Capital was thus not bound to any particular place and free to move and establish new “great towns” wherever they could accumulate the greatest profits, and with this came increasing detrimental effects on people and the planet.

Today’s crisis

We see the result of centuries of unfettered capitalist development in the climate crisis today. Atmospheric rivers, bomb cyclones, hurricanes, heat waves, and drought are all becoming more frequent and extreme with climate change. This summer, with the onset of El Nino, these extremes are amplifying [5].

The first week of July 2023 was the hottest week on Earth ever recorded, with one-third of the United States under excessive-heat advisories. Sweltering heat domes brought triple-digit temperatures across the northern hemisphere from the U.S. to Europe and Asia, while countries in South America experienced record-high temperatures during their winter months [6]. Annually, around 1,500 people die of heat-related deaths in the U.S. States, a count that is likely low since many extreme-heat deaths aren’t documented as such. As of early August, extreme heat in the United States had killed at least 147 people in just five counties in 2023.

As air and water temperatures increase globally, the frequency of extreme weather increases. In the 1980s, billion-dollar disasters occurred every 60 to 120 days on average. In the last decade, they have occurred every 20 to 30 days [7]. Intensifying extreme weather includes more extreme flooding and extreme drought, as the air and water currents globally are becoming destabilized due to the increasing heat in the atmosphere.

Cities were, generally speaking, built near rivers or coastlines. Often, wetlands and floodplains were drained and blockaded with dams and levees to direct water away from population centers. As flooding and drought increase with climate change, these systems are creating even more detrimental conditions in the short and long term.

The U.S. has experienced an urban flooding event every two to three days for the past 25 years, costing $850 billion since 2000. Heavier rains are causing flooding in many parts of the globe, and the eastern U.S. has seen a 70 percent increase in heavy rain events annually [8]. Sea level rise also contributes to flooding events. While the 6.5-inch increase in sea level in the United States may seem minimal, this increase impedes gravity-fed drainage from working during storms and high tides, bringing water into the streets.

Capitalist cities and the surrounding urban sprawl are major contributors to climate change and environmental degradation. The majority of the world’s cities today were built for profit and speculation in mind, with little to no consideration given to negative impacts on either ecology or humanity. They were premised on the idea that nature could be controlled and dominated instead of the proven conception that construction should work collaboratively with natural cycles. Vast hardscapes—sidewalks, roads, parking lots, buildings—and gray infrastructure that channels water away as it falls, places these urban centers at odds with biodiversity and the natural cycling of water through the landscape. Green spaces that are created within urban environments are often highly managed areas separate from the rest of the city, filled with non-native ornamental plants and thirsty grasses that require intensive irrigation, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides, while providing little to no benefit to native species of birds, insects, and others.

With climate change, the existing city-structures are becoming increasingly disastrous for all residents. The heat island effect that adds more warming to the atmosphere has accelerated deadly implications as the climate warms, making heat waves and droughts even more severe. Hardscapes, such as pavement, buildings, and rooftops, as well as bare earth, absorb solar radiation and continue to radiate heat long after the sun has set. Vehicles, air conditioning units, buildings, and industrial facilities also heat the atmosphere.

The heat island effect results in daytime temperatures in urban areas to be 1-7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than temperatures in outlying areas, and nighttime temperatures about 2 to 5 degrees higher [9].

What can be done? China leads the way

To cool and rebalance the climate, we need to not only eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, but also reduce ecological impacts and restore what has been lost.

Just 40 percent tree cover in a city can reduce temperatures by up to 9 degrees F [10]. Trees and other vegetation not only provide shade from the sun but reduce surrounding air temperatures. Plant leaves are like miniature solar panels and transform solar radiation into sugars and oxygen. Unlike human made structures, plants do not add heat to the surrounding atmosphere; they actually cool the atmosphere when they get hot by releasing water vapor

Water also has a cooling effect on the surroundings due to evaporation. When water bodies are integrated within the landscape they not only cool air temperatures, but also supply hydration to surrounding soil and vegetation, and recharge groundwater. Global heat dynamics regulated by water are between 75-95 percent, so creating more space for water throughout landscapes and urban areas is a key climate change mitigation tool.

Wetlands, floodplains, and bioswales act as flood prevention giving water space to flow and be absorbed into the ground when heavy rains fall, unlike concrete structures that increase the power of water and cause flooding downstream or down the coast from where these structures exist. By allowing water to pool within the landscape, rather than channeling it away into storm drains, rivers and oceans as it falls, makes water available during times of drought. Gray infrastructure flood control mechanisms often fail, with greater frequently in the U.S., which received a “D” on its Infrastructure Report Card from the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2021.

These increasing challenges from climate change are happening globally, but one country in particular is taking comprehensive action to address how urban areas impact the environment and how climate impacts are demanding more resilience in urban planning.

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China is one of the countries most severely impacted by floods globally due to geographic and environmental conditions, as well as experiencing increasing droughts and heat waves. To minimize the impacts of climate change, China has implemented their sponge cIty model that aims to retrofit and create 30 cities by 2030 as climate resilient population centers. At a cost of $1 trillion, or around $33.3 billion each, transforming these cities will save billions in annual flood recovery costs and save thousands of lives [11]. For comparison, the U.S. government spends $1 trillion annually just on military expenditures. Imagine what we could accomplish if those funds went to things like sponge cities that improve our lives and the health of the planet!

Sponge cities utilize green infrastructure so that surfaces act as a sponge absorbing water. They integrate space for water to collect such as wetlands and bioswales, create vegetative cover and trees throughout including green roofs and vegetation integrated into building structures, and porous pavement and roads so water can infiltrate soil and catchments underneath to be available during dry times. These cities have areas integrated throughout that have a dual purpose, such as parks adjacent to water bodies that can be enjoyed in dry times, which then act as wetland areas during heavy rains. These sponge cities can deal with four times the amount of rainwater than a normal city, reducing flooding by 50 percent. These cities, when complete, can absorb and reuse 70 percent of rainfall.

How the sponge city movement emerged

China, over the past few decades, has seen major achievements in development. From a mainly agrarian society at the time of the 1949 revolution, China has seen the rapid industrial growth and development of urban centers and has made great achievements in overcoming the legacy underdevelopment imposed by colonial and imperialist powers that the country was plagued with for centuries. At the time of the revolution, extreme poverty, floods and famine plagued the country.

Since that time, China has made major advances, improving the quality of life of the population. In 2020, China eradicated the last vestiges of extreme poverty through the mobilization of Communist Party cadres to the countryside to investigate the needs of the people and bring services and economic opportunities to those most in need [12]. This process which began in 1949 has lifted 850 million out of dire poverty, an unparalleled achievement for humanity.

Chinese culture has historically had a deep connection with nature and connection to ancestral lands. Through rapid development and misunderstanding of the environmental impacts, Chinese cities, as with most cities of the world, have created a separation of the people from nature.

Renowned ecologist and landscape architect, Kongjian Yu, has been the driving force behind the sponge city movement within China and globally, taking inspiration from traditional Chinese irrigation systems [13]. Yu recognized the shortcomings of China’s development path and spearheaded a new way of looking at cities – “big feet” versus “little feet” aesthetics and negative planning [14].

Little feet aesthetics references the debilitating foot binding practices of imperial China that viewed unnaturally small feet on women as beautiful. Yu compares this practice to modern China’s urban development, which often mimics western architecture and imperial Chinese styles with grand plaza and parks that do not serve the general population or ecological needs. These urban parks integrate exotic plants requiring intense irrigation and other inputs with little to no ecological or human benefits.

Yu instead promotes big feet aesthetics, creating green spaces throughout cities using native plants for all populations to interact with in their daily lives that integrate urban areas into the ecosystem rather than inserting a manufactured version of nature for aesthetics only. His argument for big feet aesthetics is to bring people and nature back into coexistence for the well-being of all, which also improves biodiversity and air and water quality, and cools air temperatures. These methods also alleviate flooding and drought, which are increasing with climate change.

Using big-feet aesthetics, Yu has led the eco-city and sponge city movements in China and leads similar projects across the globe. He first made his appeals to local leaders within China and later won over President Xi Jinping to the need to marry development with ecological sustainability. The need to address environmental impacts received broad support within China’s Communist Party which included the goal of building an ecological civilization in their constitution in 2012 [15]. Sponge cities are one of many tools that China is utilizing to achieve that goal [16].

How sponge cities aid in climate change mitigation and adaptation

Yu’s promotion of eco-cities and sponge cities stems from the concept of negative planning, which has its roots in the early Chinese practice of feng-shui and focuses on urban growth based on ecological infrastructure. Rather than a city with green space included here and there, Yu’s eco-city model looks more like a natural area with urban infrastructure woven in.

It is crucial with increasing droughts and floods for urban areas to allow space for water to sit rather than trying to drain it away, which in the end gives water more power and creates flooding in other areas. Slow water systems are being embraced globally as populations experience the negative impacts of gray infrastructure and rains become more intense and erratic.

While water consumption and waste must also be addressed, particularly regarding industrial agriculture and lawns—the single most irrigated crop in the United States—we must also shift away from gray infrastructure to green. Damming of rivers and draining of floodplains and wetlands, not only decimate river ecosystems and harm biodiversity, but inhibit the recharging of groundwater resources. Aquifers are being drained at an alarming rate and as the world warms, water resources are becoming scarcer [17].

Urban development, the creation of hardscapes, and the damming of rivers only continues this trend of a drying landscape, blocking natural water cycling that replenishes groundwater and supports biodiversity.

Yu’s projects aim to work with nature instead of against it, shifting past practices of creating parks as ornamental spaces to ones that mimic wild landscapes filled with native plant species. The use of native plants is crucial to conserve water resources in dry times by greatly reducing or eliminating the need for irrigation and creating a more climate resilient system. Birds, insects and other wildlife benefit from native plant species for food and shelter, increasing overall biodiversity, which in turn increases ecosystem resilience.

A few examples of how detrimental the introduction of non-native plants can be are the example of California and Hawaii. The recent wildfires in Maui were not fueled solely by climate change-induced drought, but also due to the introduction of non-native grasses for livestock feed that dry out quickly and become tinder during drier months [18]. The same is true in California, where early colonizers replaced perennial grasses (which have deep roots and stay green even through the dry season) with annual grasses for livestock feed, which die in early summer, drying out soil and greatly increasing drought and fire risk [19].

The vegetation and bodies of water integrated throughout sponge cities also addresses the heat island effect, lowers air temperatures, and improves air and water quality.

If left to thrive, vegetation captures carbon from the atmosphere aiding in climate change mitigation. Trees absorb carbon dioxide and transpire water vapor and microbes that seed cloud formation and maintain a healthy, balanced small water cycle bringing moderate rainfall rather than deluges. Trees also transpire chemicals that are beneficial to human health, immunity, mental health, and stress reduction. They also act as windbreaks and shelter for animals during storms.

Conclusion

Sponge cities are a crucial tool to address climate change and minimize the negative impacts of urban areas on the overall health of the planet and its inhabitants. Other nature-based solutions such as reforestation of native tree species, a return to agro-ecological methods for food production, and restoration of marine habitats are also key to our survival. None of these solutions will be profitable for corporations to implement, which is why there is a lack of widespread implementation of sponge cities outside of communist China. Only under a socialist planned economy, like that of China, can real solutions to climate change be implemented on a mass scale, as resources are directed to projects not according to the needs of profit, but to those of humanity and the planet.

Tina Landis is the author of the book Climate Solutions Beyond Capitalism, for which Liberation School has a study and discussion guide. Additionally, they host a 4-part video course Landis taught on the relationship between climate change, capitalism, and socialism.

References

[1] United Nations Population Fund,Annual Report 2008(New York: UNFP, 2009), 20. Availablehere; Megha Mukim and Mark Roberts (Eds.),Thriving: Making Cities Green, Resilient, and Inclusive in a Changing Climate(Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 2023), 75. Availablehere.
[2] Nicola Tollin, James Vener, Maria Pizzorni, et. al. (2022).Urban Climate Action: The Urban Content of the NCDs: Global Review 2022(Nairobi: United Nations Human Settlements Programme, 2022), 6. Availablehere.
[3] Friedrich Engels,The Condition of the Working Class in England(Oxford: Oxford University Press,1845/2009). Availablehere.
[4] Karl Marx,Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 1): A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 361.
[5] Tina Landis, “Atmospheric Rivers, Weather Whiplash and the Class Struggle,”Liberation News, 14 January 2023. Availablehere; Evan Branan and Tina Landis, “Heat Waves Bake the World: Workers Don’t Have to Bear the Brunt,”Liberation News, 13 July 2023. Availablehere.
[6] Ayesha Tandon, “Record-Breaking 2023 Heat Events Are ‘Not Rare Anymore’ Due to Climate Change,”Carbon Brief, 25 July 2023. Availablehere.
[7] Climate Matters, “Billion-Dollar Disasters in 2022,”Climate Central, 11 October 2022. Availablehere.
[8] Flood Defenders, “America’s Most Frequent and Expensive Disaster.” Availablehere.
[9] Sara Dennis, “Heat Island Effect,”Moody Engineering, 28 September 2022. Availablehere.
[10] Tamara Iungman, Marta Cirach, Federica Marando, et. al. “Cooling Cities Through Urban Green Infrastructure: A Health Impact Assessment of European Cities,”The Lancet401, no. 1076 (2023): 577-589.
[11] Tom Carroll, Sponge Cities: A Solarpunk Future by 2030,”Freethink, 28 April 2022. Availablehere.
[12] Tings Chak, Li Jianhua, and Lilian Zhang, “Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China,”Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, 23 July 2021. Availablehere.
[13] See, for example, Xu Tao, Yu Kongjian, Li Dihua, and Miao Wang, “Assessment and Impact Factor Analysis on Stormwater Regulation and Storage Capacity of Urban Green Space in China and Abroad,”China City Planning Review32, no. 1 (2023): 6-16; Kongian’s website ishere.
[14] Kongjian Yu,Letters to the Leaders of China: Kongjian Yu and the Future of the Chinese City(New York: Terreform, 2018).
[15] The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, “Document: Responding to Climate Change: China’s Policies and Actions,”China Daily, 28 October 2021. Availablehere.
[16] Ken Hammond, “China’s Environmental Problems: Beyond the Propaganda,”Liberation School, 08 December 2020. Availablehere.
[17] Tina Landis, “Colorado River Water Deal: A Bandaid or Real Progress?”Liberation News, 27 May 2023. Availablehere.
[18] Simon Romero and Serge F. Kovaleski, “How Invasive Plants Caused the Maui Fires to Rage,”The New York Times, 15 August 2023. Availablehere.
[19] Masanobu Fukuoka,Sowing Seeds in the Desert: Natural Farming, Global Restoration, and Ultimate Food Security(Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012).

Study, Fast, Train, Fight: The Roots of Black August

By Joe Tache

Republished from Liberation School.

In August 1619, enslaved Africans touched foot in the first permanent English settlement in what is now the United States. The centuries since witnessed the development of a racial system more violent, extractive, and deeply entrenched than any other in human history. Yet where there is oppression, there is resistance. Since 1619, Black radicals and revolutionaries have taken bold collective action in pursuit of their freedom, threatening the fragile foundations of exploitation upon which the United States is built. These heroic struggles have won tremendous victories, but they have also produced martyrs—heroes who have been imprisoned and killed because of their efforts to transform society.

“Black August” is honored every year to commemorate the fallen freedom fighters of the Black Liberation Movement, to call for the release of political prisoners in the United States, to condemn the oppressive conditions of U.S. prisons, and to emphasize the continued importance of the Black Liberation struggle. Observers of Black August commit to higher levels of discipline throughout the month. This can include fasting from food and drink, frequent physical exercise and political study, and engagement in political struggle. In short, the principles of Black August are: “study, fast, train, fight.”

George Jackson and the origins of Black August

George Jackson was a Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party while he was incarcerated in San Quentin Prison in California. Jackson was an influential revolutionary and his assassination at the hands of a San Quentin prison guard was one of the primary catalysts for the inception of Black August.

A 19-year-old convicted of armed robbery, in 1961 George Jackson was sentenced to a prison term of “1-to-life,” meaning prison administrators had complete and arbitrary control over the length of his sentence. He never lived outside of a prison again, spending the next 11 years locked up (seven and a half years of those in solitary confinement). In those 11 years—despite living in an environment of extreme racism, repression, and state control—George Jackson’s political fire was ignited, and he became an inspiration to the other revolutionaries of his generation.

Jackson was first exposed to radical politics by fellow inmate W.L. Nolen. With Nolen’s guidance, Jackson studied the works of many revolutionaries, including Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, Mao Tse-Tung, and Frantz Fanon. Nolen, Jackson, and other  prisoners dedicated themselves to raising political consciousness among the prisoners and to organizing their peers in the California prison system. They led study sessions on radical philosophy and convened groups like the Third World Coalition and started the San Quentin Prison chapter of the Black Panther Party. Jackson even published two widely read books while incarcerated: Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye.

Unfortunately, if predictably, these radical organizers soon found themselves in the cross-hairs of the California prison establishment. In 1970, W.L. Nolen—who had been transferred to Soledad prison and planned to file a lawsuit against its superintendent—was assassinated by a prison guard. Days later, George Jackson (also now in Soledad Prison) and fellow radical prisoners Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette were accused of killing a different prison guard in retaliation for Nolen’s death. The three were put on trial and became known as the Soledad Brothers.

That year, when it was clear that George Jackson would likely never be released from prison, his 17-year-old brother Jonathan Jackson staged an armed attack on the Marin County Courthouse to demand the Soledad Brothers’ immediate release. Jonathan Jackson enlisted the help of three additional prisoners—James McClain, William Christmas, and Ruchell Magee—during the offensive. Jonathan Jackson, McClain, and Christmas were all killed, while Magee was shot and re-arrested. Ruchell Magee, now 80 years old, is currently one of the longest held political prisoners in the world.

On August 21, 1971, just over a year after the courthouse incident, a prison guard assassinated George Jackson. The facts regarding his death are disputed. Prison authorities alleged that Jackson smuggled a gun into the prison and was killed while attempting to escape. On the other hand, literary giant James Baldwin wrote, “no Black person will ever believe that George Jackson died the way they tell us he did.”

While the particular circumstances of Jackson’s death will likely forever remain contested, two facts are clear: his death was ultimately a political assassination, and his revolutionary imprint can’t be extinguished. Through the efforts and sacrifice of George and Jonathan Jackson, Nolen, McClain, Christmas, Magee and countless other revolutionaries, the 1970s became a decade of widespread organizing and political struggle within prisons. Prisoners demanded an end to racist and violent treatment at the hands of prison guards, better living conditions, and increased access to education and adequate medical care. Tactics in these campaigns included lawsuits, strikes, and mass rebellions. The most notable example may be the Attica Prison rebellion, which occurred in New York State just weeks after George Jackson was murdered. In protest of the dehumanizing conditions they were subjected to, about 1,500 Attica Prison inmates released a manifesto with their demands and seized control of the prison for four days, beginning on September 9, 1971. Under orders from Governor Nelson Rockefeller, law enforcement authorities stormed Attica on September 12 and killed at least 29 incarcerated individuals. None of the prisoners had guns.

This is the context out of which Black August was born in 1979. It was first celebrated in California’s San Quentin prison, where George Jackson, W.L. Nolen, James McClain, Willam Christmas and Ruchell Magee were all once held. The first Black August commemorated the previous decade of courageous prison struggle, as well as the centuries of Black resistance that preceded and accompanied it.

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Political prisoners and the prison struggle

Observers of Black August call for the immediate release of all political prisoners in the United States. That the US government even holds political prisoners is a fact they attempt to obscure and deny. In reality, dozens of radicals from organizations such as the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army, the American Indian Movement, and MOVE have been imprisoned for decades as a result of their political activity. As Angela Davis, who was at one time the most high profile political prisoner in the US, explains:

“There is a distinct and qualitative difference between one breaking a law for one’s own individual self-interest and violating it in the interests of a class of people whose oppression is expressed either directly or indirectly through that particular law. The former might be called criminal (though in many instances he is a victim), but the latter, as a reformist or revolutionary, is interested in universal social change. Captured, he or she is a political prisoner… In this country, however, where the special category of political prisoners is not officially acknowledged, the political prisoner inevitably stands trial for a specific criminal offense, not for a political act… In all instances, however, the political prisoner has violated the unwritten law which prohibits disturbances and upheavals in the status quo of exploitation and racism.”

Prisons in the United States are a form of social control which serve to maintain the status quo of oppression. Over the last few decades, prisons have become an increasingly important tool for the US ruling class. Prisons not only quarantine revolutionaries, but also those segments of the population who have become increasingly expendable to the capitalist system as globalized production, deindustrialization, and technological automation decrease the overall need for labor-power. These shifts, which began in earnest in the 1970s, have hit Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities the hardest, as exemplified by the sky high unemployment and incarceration rates those communities face. These groups are also historically the most prone to rebellion. Angela Davis noted in 1971 that as a result of these trends, “prisoners—especially Blacks, Chicanos and Puerto Ricans—are increasingly advancing the proposition that they are political prisoners. They contend that they are political prisoners in the sense that they are largely the victims of an oppressive politico-economic order.”

Though that definition of political prisoner is unorthodox, it illustrates the political and economic nature of criminalization. This is why observers of Black August connect the fight to free “revolutionary” political prisoners to the broader struggle against US prisons. Mass incarceration is a symptom of the same system that political prisoners have dedicated their lives towards fighting.

As increasing numbers of the US working class are “lumpenized,” or pushed out of the formal economy and stable employment, the potential significance of political struggle among the unemployed and incarcerated increases. George Jackson wrote in Blood in My Eye that “prisoners must be reached and made to understand that they are victims of social injustice. This is my task working from within. The sheer numbers of the prisoner class and the terms of their existence make them a mighty reservoir of revolutionary potential.”

George Jackson’s own journey is a perfect example of that revolutionary potential. Jackson didn’t arrive in prison a ready-made revolutionary. He had a history of petty crime and was apolitical during his first years in prison. He would have been dismissed by many people in our society as a “thug.” But comrades who knew that he held the potential inherent in every human being found him and took him in. They helped him understand his personal experiences within the context of capitalism and white supremacy. In turn, George Jackson dedicated his life to doing the same for others incarcerated individuals.

Black August today

August, more than any other month, has historically carried the weight of the Black Liberation struggle. Of course, enslaved Africans were first brought to British North America in August 1619. Just over 200 years later, in August 1831, Nat Turner led the most well-known rebellion of enslaved people in US history. This historical significance carried into the 20th century, when both the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the Watts Rebellion—an explosive uprising against racist policing in Los Angeles—occurred in August during the 1960s.

Even today, the month remains significant in the struggle. John Crawford, Michael Brown, and Korryn Gaines were three Black Americans who were murdered in high-profile cases of police brutality; Crawford and Brown in August 2014, and Gaines in August 2016. Their deaths have been part of the impetus for a revived national movement against racist police brutality. Finally, on August 21, 2018, the 47 year anniversary of George Jackson’s death, thousands of U.S. prisoners launched a national prison strike. They engaged in work stoppages, hunger strikes, and other forms of protests. The strike lasted until September 9, 47 years after the Attica Prison Uprising began. Like the Attica prisoners, the 2018 prison strike organizers put forth a comprehensive list of demands that exposed the oppression inherent to the U.S. prison system, and laid out a framework to improve their conditions.

Each of these historical and contemporary events reveal a truth that the Black radical tradition has always recognized: there can be no freedom for the masses of Black people within the white supremacist capitalist system. The fight for liberation is just that: a fight. Since its inception in San Quentin, Black August has been an indispensable part of that fight.

In the current political moment, when some misleaders would have us bury the radical nature of Black resistance and instead prop up reformist politics that glorify celebrity, wealth, and assimilation into the capitalist system, Black August is as important as ever. It connects Black people to our history and serves as a reminder that our liberation doesn’t lie in the hands of Black billionaires, Black police officers, or Black Democratic Party officials. Those “Black faces in high places” simply place a friendly face on the system that oppresses the masses of Black people in the United States and around the world, often distorting symbols of Black resistance along the way. Black liberation lies, as it always has, in the hands of the conscious and organized masses. Study, train, fight, and in the words of George Jackson, “discover your humanity and your love of revolution.”

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.

The “Powell Memo” and the Supreme Court: A Counteroffensive Against the Many

By Derek Ford

Republished from Liberation School.

Introduction: The domestic right-wing counteroffensive

By the early 1970s, the global revolutionary tide of socialist and national liberation struggles was at its apex, and the tide was washing over the U.S., with expanding and increasingly militant social movements and political organizations. The beginning of “neoliberalism” was a domestic aspect of the coming global counterrevolution, which devastated the world for decades.

This article tells the story of how the right wing of the capitalist class came to drive a new set of reactionary Supreme Court rulings, government policies, and ideological battles against democracy and the basic democratic rights our class won and that the right wing soon started rolling back. A key figure in this anti-democratic turn was Lewis F. Powell Jr., a tobacco company executive turned Supreme Court Justice. In the transition between the two roles, he wrote his infamous “Powell Memo.”

In hindsight, the private memorandum Lewis F. Powell Jr. sent to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on August 23, 1971—known as the “Powell Memo”—in many ways represents the inaugural moment in this counteroffensive. Titled, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” the Memo clearly expressed the sharpness of the class struggle at that time and encapsulated the capitalist class’ fear that they were losing the battles of ideas and the world. It undoubtedly laid the groundwork for some key components of U.S. imperialism’s new offensive against the global revolutionary upsurge that characterized the immediate post-World War II environment, an offensive that is still with us today.

Understanding the background, context, and content of the Memo helps us get a sense of the right-wing counteroffensive against domestic people’s movements. Powell eventually entered the Supreme Court and helped usher in a wave of reactionary rulings against the people and for corporate profits. Thus, while the exact impacts of the Memo are hard to ascertain, they eventually made their way into the law books, attacking affirmative action and establishing a theory of corporate speech and “personhood.” More immediately, after the Memo’s circulation, the Chamber of Commerce “expanded its base from around 60,000 firms in 1972 to over a quarter of a million ten years later,” spending almost $1 billion annually to promote their interests [1].

The ideological stakes at play in the Powell Memo

Powell wrote and sent the confidential memo at the request of one of his colleagues, Eugene B. Sydnor, Jr., who chaired the education committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for a high-level discussion with the Chamber’s Vice President Arch Booth the next day. The Chamber of Commerce is not, as the name might imply, a government agency, but is the largest private pro-business lobbying group in the country. Because the Memo was written for the capitalist class by one of their most fervent ideologues, it displays the fears and ambitions of the imperialists in the most blatant manner, revealing exactly how they speak to each other when they don’t have to feign decorum or decency, providing a glimpse into how much they feared progressive movements.

“No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack,” the Memo begins [2]. The problem is not so much with the usual suspects like “the Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system, both political and economic.” Although such “extremists of the left” are growing in numbers, support, and legitimacy in unprecedented fashion, Powell continues, they are still relatively minor players on their own.

Powell’s primary fear was that revolutionaries, the usual suspects, were now influencing “perfectly respectable elements of society” such as “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.” In essence, Powell expresses how the global tide of revolutionary and progressive struggles sweeping the world during that period were normalizing and popularizing radical political change and demands [3]. As he puts it, the issue is that respectable institutions like the campus were hijacked “by minorities” who “are the most articulate, the most vocal, the most prolific in their writing and speaking.”

Powell’s insistence on the influence of vocal minorities—a prelude of sorts to the “silent majority”—was more than just a rhetorical flourish. Although the “Marxist doctrine that the ‘capitalist’ countries are controlled by big business” had widespread currency at the time, for Powell, nothing could be further from the truth. Simply put, Powell’s memo claimed that in capitalist countries capitalists had no influence or control over the government or society. This ridiculous claim is phrased frankly:

“…as every business executive knows, few elements of American society today have as little influence in government as the American businessman, the corporation, or even the millions of corporate stockholders. If one doubts this, let him undertake the role of ‘lobbyist’ for the business point of view before Congressional committees. The same situation obtains in the legislative halls of most states and major cities.”

Powell goes further still, in a sentence that constructs the corporation not only as a person, but as a minority person in need of protection: “One does not exaggerate to say that, in terms of political influence with respect to the course of legislation and government action, the American business executive is truly the ‘forgotten man.’”

This dire situation, in which the very existence of capitalism and imperialism are at stake—claims that are, to say the least, exaggerated—calls for drastic and wide-ranging responses. To address the supposed exclusion of corporations in the U.S. government and the attack on the capitalist system, Powell included a vast list of recommendations for pursuing their ideological agenda, in which the Chamber of Commerce would play a central and organizing role. Powell’s upbringing and professional career account for his deep concern for the position of the corporation in U.S. society and politics.

Powell: A fighter for “oppressed” tobacco companies

With a family lineage traced back to “one of the original Jamestown settlers,” Powell graduated from an elite prep school, McGuire’s University School in Richmond, Virginia in 1925 [4]. From there, he ascended the ranks of the political elite, earning a Master of Laws degree from Harvard Law School in 1932 before returning to Virginia and starting a long career with a Richmond law firm. After a brief stint as an intelligence officer in the Army, Powell integrated himself into Virginia’s political scene and rose through the ranks of the American Bar Association, becoming the ABA’s president in 1965.

Powell served on over a dozen boards, including the Colonial Williamsburg Museum and, most pertinently, the tobacco giant Philip Morris. Powell joined Philip Morris’ Board of Directors in 1964 at a time when, historian Jeffrey Clements notes, “the corporation sought to mitigate the US Surgeon General’s report about the grave dangers of smoking” [5].

When he penned his infamous memo, Powell was in the trenches defending Philip Morris and other tobacco corporations through their lobbying group, the now-discredited Tobacco Institute. He was also busy defending big tobacco when Richard Nixon asked him to serve on the Supreme Court in 1971 (although his appointment went into effect in 1972).

During his tenure at the Tobacco Institute, he fought against the “radicals” and liberals in public health and education who were increasingly sounding the alarm on the dangers of tobacco and nicotine addiction. In their 1967 annual report, issued on behalf of Powell and the rest of the Philip Morris board, they deplored how “unfortunately the positive benefits of smoking which are so widely acknowledged are largely ignored by many reports linking cigarettes and health, and little attention is paid to the scientific reports which are favorable to smoking” [6].

Powell was nothing if not a champion of free-enterprise, facts be damned.

The ideological counteroffensive

It’s not hard to draw the line between Powell’s defense of big tobacco and the broader capitalist system, on the one hand, and his derision of public health, education, and the public interest, on the other. For Powell, it was a small and logical step to move from attacking health researchers to attacking other “revolutionaries” and those they influenced in “respectable” places like universities.

In addressing “what can be done about the campus,” Powell outlines an array of tactics and strategies to beat back the insurgent student tide and revert educational institutions away from  critical inquiry. He called for the Chamber of Commerce to establish a cadre of “highly qualified” pro-capitalist scholars, a full-time paid staff of speakers, and a Speaker’s Bureau that would advocate for capitalists.

The Chamber’s “faculty of scholars” should be given “incentives” to publish prolifically in scholarly journals because “one of the keys to the success of the liberal and leftist faculty members has been their passion for ‘publication’ and ‘lecturing.’” Powell wasn’t concerned with the number of leftist faculty per se, and his memo only cited one by name: Herbert Marcuse, one of the few remaining critical theorists who remained committed to organizing and who supervised, among other important revolutionaries (and against the advice of his colleagues), the doctoral work of Angela Davis [7].

Those like Marcuse “need not be in a majority” because “they are stimulating teachers… prolific writers and lecturers,” according to Powell [8]. In fact, “as his attention to charismatic teaching, textbooks, and other writings shows, Powell based his strategy for ideological warfare on the intellectual productivity that he observed among progressive thinkers” [9].

The historical context for Powell’s ire is instructive, as it was during this time that oppressed nationalities were forcing changes in hiring practices, curricular content, and even creating physical spaces dedicated to the study of radical politics and oppressed nationalities and successfully fighting for open admissions.

The militant organized movements of students, workers, Black people, Chicano people, women, the LGBTQ community, and others—many of whom were openly Marxists—forced open some space within universities and society, legitimizing their grievances, proposals, and knowledge [10]. Importantly, the demands of the student movements “were organized around the redistribution of outcomes in the university and in US society generally” [11]. They helped, in part, to fundamentally restructure what and whose knowledge counted by positioning oppressed groups as central knowledge producers.

Unable to captivate audiences with their ideas or teaching, Powell urged the Chamber to ensure capitalist ideologues would gain audiences on campus. He called on the Chamber to “insist upon equal time on the college speaking circuit” between critics and proponents of capitalist exploitation and oppression. Importantly, they must be “attractive, articulate and well-informed speakers” who “exert whatever degree of pressure—publicly and privately” to ensure equal speaking opportunities” [12].

Powell’s focus on “equal speaking opportunities” denies the larger political and historical context of the times, as if socialists and capitalists get equal time and space in the mainstream news outlets or corporate papers. At the same time, within the universities, they’re still mobilized to promote right-wing ideologues. Today, it’s clear to growing numbers of people in the U.S. that “freedom of speech” policies are intended to limit the dissemination of and engagement with revolutionary ideas.

The Supreme Court: Defending white supremacy and corporate speech

Powell’s disdain for revolutionaries wasn’t personal (or wasn’t primarily personal); it was political. Take, for example, his role in the 1978 Supreme Court case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, a ruling that was a significant step on the way to undoing affirmative action. Although the ruling sustained affirmative action, it declared racial quotas for university admissions to be unconstitutional and, specifically, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In his majority opinion, Powell claimed that “the United States had become a Nation of minorities” and the U.S. Constitution was meant “to overcome the prejudices not of a monolithic majority, but of a ‘majority’ composed of various minority groups” [13]. White people were, according to his ruling opinion and his own beliefs, minorities deserving protection [14].

In 1982, he issued the majority opinion in Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corporation v. Public Service Corporation of New York, declaring that private utility and energy corporations could, with the protection of the right-wing activist court, dominate the imaginary “marketplace of ideas.” The case revolved around the prohibition of energy corporations from promoting their services during and after the 1973 oil crisis. Powell’s opinion affirmed that corporate “expression not only serves the economic interest of the speaker, but also assists consumers and furthers the societal interest in the fullest possible dissemination of information.” The opinion “rejected the ‘highly paternalistic’ view that government has complete power to suppress or regulate commercial speech” [15].

With the backing of a new barrage of pro-capitalist think tanks and institutes, Powell led the Supreme Court on a pro-corporate rampage that was based on an illegitimate precedent. As discussed in the Liberation School article on Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the 1886 Supreme Court case has been falsely interpreted as setting the “precedent” for corporate personhood [16]. The case did not rule on the question of corporate personhood. Rather, a statement on corporate personhood was included in a headnote added to the case. Headnotes are not legally binding and therefore do not impact the establishment of legal precedent.

Nevertheless, the same year that Powell led the court to undo affirmative action in the Regents of the University of California, he also established “corporate speech” as protected under the First Amendment. That case, First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, for the first time held that corporations are protected by the First Amendment and therefore are entitled to “free speech.” Powell delivered the majority opinion in the case, stating “the Court has not identified a separate source for the right when it has been asserted by corporations.” In the footnote accompanying the statement, he claims that “it has been settled for almost a century that corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment,” incorrectly citing Santa Clara as legal precedent [17].

With Powell’s new theory of corporate speech, “the Court struck down law after law in which the states and Congress sought to balance corporate power with the public interest” [18].

Conclusion: The struggle for socialism and liberation today

Powell’s Memo and interventions in the Supreme Court were part of an overall strategy to defeat or at least de-radicalize the revolutionary movements of the time, especially the radical transformations they achieved in education. A central element in the capitalist state, education always plays an important role in the class struggle, as it is a primary place where we form our ideology or worldview, whether we know it or not.

The struggle wasn’t—and isn’t—confined to the university, and in fact, its radical edge comes from its ability to link the university to broader social struggles, from anti-imperialism and socialism to anti-racism and sexism, then and now. As the Powell Memo shows, for the ruling class at the time, the balance of forces tipped too far toward the exploited and oppressed. In response, the capitalists launched a virulent counteroffensive in all areas of society, and Powell, his role on the Supreme Court, and his Memo were integral parts of this reactionary wave we need to, and will, push back.

References

[1] David Harvey,A Brief History of Neoliberalism(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 43.
[2] Lewis Powell, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,”PBS. Availablehere.
[3] See Brian Becker, “From Inter-Imperialist War to Global Class War: Understanding Distinct Stages of Imperialism,”Liberation School, 28 July 2018. Availablehere.
[4] Tinsley E. Yarbrough, “Powell, Lewis F., Jr. (1907-1998), Supreme Court Justice,”American National Biography, 01 January 2001.
[5] Jeffrey D. Clements,Corporations are Not People: Reclaiming Democracy from Big Money and Global Corporations(San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2014), 21.
[6] Cited in Ibid., 22-23.
[7] Gabriel Rockhill, “Critical and Revolutionary Theory: For the Reinvention of Critique in the Age of Ideological Realignment,” inDomination and Emancipation: Remaking Critique, ed. D. Benson (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021).
[8] Powell, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.”
[9] Roderick A. Ferguson,We Demand: The University and Student Protests(Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 44.
[10] See Stephen Ferguson II,Philosophy of African American Studies: Nothing Left of Blackness(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 16.
[11] Ferguson,We Demand, 40.
[12] Powell, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.”
[13] Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S., 265 (1978), 292. Availablehere.
[14] Ibid., 295.
[15] Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. v. Public Service Commission, 447 U.S., 557 (1980), 561, 562. Availablehere.
[16] Curry Malott, “Corporate Personhood, Monopoly Capital, and the Precedent that Wasn’t: The 1886 ‘Santa Clara’ Case,”Liberation School, 09 February 2023. Availablehere.
[17] First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 435 U.S. 765 (1978), footnote 15. Availablehere.
[18] Clements,Corporations are Not People, 25.

Corporate Personhood, Monopoly Capital, and the Precedent That Wasn't: The 1886 "Santa Clara" Case

By Curry Malott

Republished from Liberation School.

Editor’s note: Beginning with overturning Roe v. Wade, the ultra right-wing Supreme Court continues to attack hard-won and elementary democratic rights in the United States, from affirmative action to the Indian Child Welfare Act. The following article is the third in our series “Crimes of the Supreme Court,” which demonstrates the fundamentally reactionary and anti-democratic nature of the Supreme Court. By examining key decisions in the Court’s history, we explain their historical and political context, the legal concepts and frameworks used to justify their decisions, and lay out their implications for later cases. This entry focuses on an 1886 Supreme Court ruling that is often cited as the precedent guaranteeing corporations the same protections as “natural persons,” although it did no such thing. Nonetheless, this case and several preceding ones demonstrated how the struggle for corporate personhood—particularly under the “Equal Protection Clause” of the 14th Amendment—was intimately bound up in the transition to U.S. monopoly capitalism.

How do the actual people in charge of corporations manage to remain protected from the consequences of the countless crimes they commit year after year? How is it that when CEOs make clear and obvious decisions that habitually violate every existing worker-won regulation, from the Clean Air Act to the Civil Rights Act, with very few exceptions, they charge the corporation—the “artificial” or “unnatural” person—instead of the CEO—the actual, “natural person” who made those decisions?

The legal grounds that corporations have the same protections and rights as “natural persons” is commonly justified by the 1886 Supreme Court ruling in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. As we’ll see, the Court’s decision in the case didn’t establish any precedent for corporate personhood, nor did the Court make any ruling on it. To the extent that the Supreme Court even debated “artificial,” “corporate,” and other kinds of personhood, they did so to facilitate the transition from “free competition” to monopoly capitalism in the country.

In this article, we explore the Santa Clara case before turning to debates within the institutions of power in the U.S. over the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. These debates can only be understood if situated within their historical, political, and economic context: the transition to monopoly capital in the U.S. To conclude, we explore the case’s destructive legacy, or the way it was illegitimately used to set precedent for the growth of monopoly capital.

The facts and outcome of the case

During the 1878-79 California Constitutional Convention, the state enacted a new tax code that, in part, prevented railroad corporations from factoring existing debts and mortgages into their total taxable value. The Southern Pacific Railroad Company, along with the Central Pacific Railroad Company, refused to follow the new code. They did not pay the additional tax, nor did they pay the back taxes they subsequently owed.

The first point of contention were back taxes—including the interest on them—that railroad companies refused to pay in California, specifically the taxes being levied on the fencing along the railroads’ right-of-way. Among the handful of complaints brought forth, lawyers representing the railroads argued that it was the county and not the state that should have assessed the value of the fencing. As Thom Hartmann points out, “the railroad was refusing to pay taxes of about $30,000,” which is “like having a $10,000 car and refusing to pay a $10 tax on it—and taking the case to the Supreme Court” [1].

Faced with the loss of revenue, a number of counties in California, including San Mateo County, filed suit against the railroad companies in an attempt to collect the taxes that the railroads refused to pay. According to Southern Pacific’s executives, they were being treated unfairly relative to “legal” or “natural” persons who could deduct debts and mortgages from their taxable income or value. The cases were consolidated before reaching the California Supreme Court, which ruled mostly in favor of the counties and against the railroad companies. The one exception concerned the fences constructed around the railroads. The Court affirmed that the fences “were improperly included by the State Board in its assessments” and, as a result, there was no legal basis for the counties to collect additional taxes [2].

The origins of corporate personhood?

Interestingly, however, the Santa Clara decision is rarely remembered for the issue of taxation and, more specifically, the role of railroad monopolies, and is instead mostly cited as the first instance of the Supreme Court upholding “corporate personhood.”

One of the railroad’s defenses at the Supreme Court hearing included arguing that the “Equal Protection Clause” of the 14th Amendment applied to corporations, so therefore the state couldn’t tax them differently from other citizens. Yet this was only a minor point among the six arguments presented by the railroads.

Moreover, it seems Chief Justice Morrison Waite quickly dismissed the argument in the case by stating that it is a general, agreed upon principle that the clause applies to corporations.  According to the ruling’s “headnote,” Waite stated the Court would not even consider “whether the provision in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does” [3].

Did the Supreme Court, then, establish a legal precedent that corporations have the same legal protections as natural persons? Despite the Supreme Court citing it as precedent for a century, and despite that it was routinely taught to law students as precedent, the ruling did no such thing.

Waite’s comment above was not part of the official ruling. Instead, it was included in a headnote written by the Court’s Reporter of Decisions, journalist J.C. Bancroft Davis, former president of the Newburgh and New York Railway Company. Headnotes are introductory summaries of cases added to Court rulings to make it easier for legal professionals and others to sift through cases.

Headnotes, therefore, are not legally-binding and hold no legal authority. It wasn’t until the 1906 ruling in United States v. Detroit Lumber Co. that the Supreme Court officially ruled in its majority opinion that headnotes aren’t part of the Court’s rulings or findings. As then-Chief Justice David Brewer wrote, “the headnote is not the work of the court, nor does it state its decision… it is simply the work of the reporter, gives his understanding of the decision, and is prepared for the convenience of the profession in the examination of the reports” [4]. This, however, hasn’t prevented the U.S. courts in general, and the Supreme Court in particular, from citing the headnote as precedent.

The headnote is significant in a few ways. First, the report of Waite’s comments didn’t include any legal or constitutional justification; it was a mere assertion. As a result, since 1886 the status of corporations as “people” protected under the Constitution has been a source of controversy. Moreover, “the concept of the corporate person lacks a principled definition and, therefore, seems to expand, or contract, depending on the circumstances and on the personal predilections of the speaker” [5].

The headnote is especially significant because of Waite’s sweeping acceptance that corporations are protected by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. This differs from a previous Court ruling in the 1873 Slaughterhouse Cases that made their way to the U.S. Supreme Court after an 1869 Louisiana legislature decision to issue a charter confining slaughterhouse operations in New Orleans to a single corporate entity, the Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company.

Crescent City’s charter required the company to run its waste downstream, ordered other slaughterhouses, most of which were much smaller, to close, and forbid the establishment of any new slaughterhouses in the area for the next 25 years. In effect, the legislature produced a monopoly on slaughterhouses for the time period. This meant that all workers, including butchers, had to work for Crescent or find work elsewhere. As a result, hundreds of members of the Butchers’ Benevolent Association, which represented smaller or independent slaughterhouses, filed suit in the Louisiana Supreme Court on the basis that the monopoly violated the 13th and 14th Amendments by forcing butchers into “involuntary servitude” and taking away their property without compensation or due process.

When the U.S. Supreme Court took up the cases, the majority opinion explicitly stated that the Amendments did not apply in this instance. The dissenting opinion by Justice Stephen Field proposed a broad definition of the Amendments at stake, one that would become more expansive as the overthrow of Reconstruction solidified. The crucial issue, he stated, was “whether the recent amendments to the Federal Constitution protect the citizens of the United States against the deprivation of their common rights by State legislation.” Field closed the dissenting opinion by asserting that the 14th Amendment applies to corporations and monopolies. He wrote that the Amendment “does afford such protection, and was so intended by the Congress which framed and the States which adopted it” [6].

Between his time on California’s Ninth Circuit Court and the Supreme Court, “Field worked tirelessly to expand the 14th Amendment to include the rights of corporations.” He was driven by careerism and a desire to reach the country’s highest court and maybe even the presidency “with the support of railroad money” [7].

In his dissenting opinion in a related railroad case, Fields expressed his outrage that the Court was neglecting the crucial question, which was if “an unlawful and unjust discrimination was made . . . and to that extent depriving it of the equal protection of the laws” [8].

Whether or not the original drafters of the post-Civil War amendments explicitly considered if and how the 14th Amendment—or the 13th— could apply to corporations or any group other than Black people is unclear. Based on available records, some argue that Congress may indeed have considered or intended for corporations to be included in the 14th Amendment, as the original drafters “were inundated with petitions from insurance companies and railroads complaining about protectionist state measures” [9]. That the 14th Amendment makes a distinction between “persons” and “citizens” is also significant, as the former “are entitled to due process and equal protection” while the latter are only “guaranteed the privileges and immunities of national citizenship” [10].

What is certainly true, however, is that almost none of the 14th Amendment cases heard by the Supreme Court concerned the rights of Black people. The Supreme Court itself affirmed this in 1938. In his dissenting opinion on Connecticut Gen Life Ins C. v. Johnson, Justice Hugo Black cited Miller’s majority opinion in the 1873 Slaughterhouse cases, doubting that the 13th and 14th Amendments would include anyone except Black people. “Yet,” he continued, “of the cases in this Court in which the 14th Amendment was applied during the first fifty years after its adoption, less than one-half of 1 per cent. invoked it in protection of the negro race, and more than 50 per cent. asked that its benefits be extended to corporations” [11].

Further, recent history affirms that the U.S. ruling class considers and treats corporate entities much more humanely than they treat Black people.

Corporate personhood and a new phase of U.S. capitalism

The period leading up to the 1886 case was characterized by monumental shifts in the political, social, economic, and racial order of the U.S. This included the heroic Reconstruction era as well as its tragic defeat and the rapid growth of monopoly capital in the country.

In the decade leading up to Santa Clara case, railroad barons emerged as a new faction of the capitalist class that provided the model for monopoly capital. This is why, just before the 1878-79 California Convention, California allowed the Southern Pacific Railroad Company to absorb several other corporations. Prior to that, Congress granted 11 million acres of land to Southern Pacific, although for their expansion the company acquired additional debts through a mortgage on its construction, equipment, railcars, and so on. Southern Pacific was also granted the legal authority to construct a line connecting San Francisco to Texas.

The trend toward monopoly predated the Civil War and coincided with the ongoing conquest of the continent. Large corporations, with state funding, facilitated the expanding interstate commerce through railways and canals, which in turn led to a larger and more integrated national economy. Federal and state legislatures promoted this centralization of capital insofar as it took the economic burden off the state while still allowing the state to use the new networks for postal and military purposes.

The pressing question for the U.S. ruling class was whether or not the government-backed monopolists would ultimately represent a unique and temporary phenomenon or provide a model for capital as a whole.

There was a clear struggle between the ideologues of small enterprises that formerly dominated the economic landscape and operated similarly to the idealistic “free competition” phase of capitalism and those of monopoly capital, where the various enterprises dispersed throughout different entities were consolidated into large ones.

As Morton J. Horowitz details in his account of how legal structures raced to keep up with the latest changes in capital, in the 1880s there wasn’t any precedent about “natural” or “corporate” persons because these categories threatened individualism and free-market competition. By the turn of the century, however, the struggles over “political economy between small entrepreneurs and emergent big business over the legitimacy of large scale enterprise” erupted [12].

The debates taking place within the ruling class had to do with whether or not there was an inherent tendency for capital to centralize. At the time, most political economists didn’t give credence to the inevitability of monopolization, seeing the railroads as exceptional. It didn’t take long until politicians, bourgeois economists, and others rightly interpreted the railroad’s economic trajectory as a precursor to a coming phase of industrial monopolization.

There was a shift in power and influence within the capitalist class from the old “free enterprise” capitalists to the new monopolists:

“By the late nineteenth century in America, fundamental changes had already taken place in the legal treatment of the corporation. First, and by far the most important, was the erosion of the so-called ‘grant’ or ‘concession’ theory of the corporation, which treated the act of incorporation as a special privilege conferred by the state for the pursuit of public purposes. Under the grant theory, the business corporation was regarded as an ‘artificial being’ created by the state with powers strictly limited by its charter of incorporation. As we shall see, a number of more specific legal doctrines were also derived from the grant theory in order to enforce the state’s interest in limiting and confining corporate power” [13].

From this point of view, the rise of monopoly capitalism, or the centralization of larger and larger sectors of the means of production into fewer and fewer hands, is driven by the self-expansive and competitive nature of capitalist production. The Supreme Court provided the legal grounds for facilitating this transformation.

Legacy of the case

In the immediate aftermath of Santa Clara, “the Court did away with 230 state laws that had been passed to regulate corporations” [14]. It was clear evidence monopoly capital was in control of politics. Supreme Court decisions in the years between 1908 and 1914, often citing corporate personhood, struck down minimum-wage laws, workers’ compensation laws, utility regulation, and child labor laws—every kind of law that a people might institute to protect its citizenry from abuses” [15].

For over a century now, the state has continued to take power and rights away from working and oppressed people and transferred it to capital. They have even perverted the hard-won gains won by people’s movements into justifications for increasing corporate power, perhaps none more disgusting than the misuse of the 14th Amendment.

While even to this day there is no clear legal basis for corporate personhood, that hasn’t stopped the Supreme Court from waging class war against the people on behalf of corporations. Because the nine unelected judges determine the law, they can legally justify whatever tactics they deploy against us.

The misuse of Santa Clara’s headnote has not only severely inhibited the ability to regulate corporations, but it has created a space for CEOs and shareholders to operate with near impunity. For example, Joel Bakan notes that “corporate illegalities are rife throughout the economy…By design, the corporate form generally protects the human beings who run corporations from legal liability, leaving the corporation, a ‘person’…the main target of criminal prosecution” [16].

The Supreme Court was created to serve the interests of the capitalist class. Its very existence stands as a barrier to the working and oppressed peoples’ desire for a true democracy. As the Supreme Court unleashes its most current wave of attacks on our basic democratic rights, we will continue to fight for a new system.

References

[1] Thom Hartmann,Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became People–and How You can Fight Back(San Francisco: ‎ Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2010), 18.
[2] Santa Clara County. v. South Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394 (1886), 411. Availablehere.
[3] Ibid., 396.
[4] United States v. Detroit Lumber Co., 200 U.S. 321 (1906). Availablehere.
[5] Malcolm J. Harkins III, “The Uneasy Relationship of Hobby Lobby, Conestoga Wood, the Affordable Care Act, and the Corporate Person: How a Historical Myth Continues to Bedevil the Legal System,”Saint Louis University Journal of Health Law & Policy7, no. 2 (2014): 204.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Nicholas S. Paliewicz, “How Trains Became People: Southern Pacific Railroad Co.’s Networked Rhetorical Culture and the Dawn of Corporate Personhood,”Journal of Communication Inquiry43, no. 2 (2019): 204-205.
[8] Cited in Ibid.
[9] Matthew J. Zinn and Steven Reed, “Equal Protection and State Taxation of Interstate Business,”The Tax Lawyer41, no. 1 (1987): 89-90.
[10] Ibid., 90.
[11] Connecticut General Life Ins. Co v. Johnson, 303 U.S. 77 (1938). Availablehere.
[12] Morton J. Horowitz, “Santa Clara Revisited: The Development of Corporate Theory,”West Virginia Law Review88, no. 2 (1986): 187.
[13] Ibid., 181.
[14] Howard Zinn,A People’s History of the United States(New York: Perennial Classics, 1980/1999), 261.
[15] Hartmann,Unequal Protection, 24.
[16] Joel Bakan,The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power(New York: The Free Press, 2004), 75-79.

Of, By, and For the Elite: The Class Character of the U.S. Constitution

By Crystal Kim

Republished from Liberation School.

Contrary to the mythology we learn in school, the founding fathers feared and hated the concept of democracy—which they derisively referred to as “tyranny of the majority.” The constitution that they wrote reflects this, and seeks to restrict and prohibit involvement of the masses of people in key areas of decision making. The following article, originally written in 2008, reviews the true history of the constitution and its role in the political life of the country.

The ruling class of today—the political and social successors to the “founding fathers”—continues to have a fundamental disdain for popular participation in government. The right wing of the elite is engaged in an all-out offensive against basic democratic rights and democracy itself. This offensive relies heavily on the Supreme Court and the legal doctrine of constitutional “originalism”. Originalism means that the only rights and policies that are protected are ones that are explicitly laid out in the constitution, conforming with the “original” intentions of the founders. As the article explores, this was a thoroughly anti-democratic set up that sought to guarantee the power and wealth of the elite.

Introduction

In history and civics classrooms all over the United States, students are taught from an early age to revere the “Founding Fathers” for drafting a document that is the bulwark of democracy and freedom—the U.S. Constitution. We are taught that the Constitution is a work of genius that established a representative government, safeguarded by the system of “checks and balances,” and guarantees fundamental rights such as the freedom of speech, religion and assembly. According to this mythology, the Constitution embodies and promotes the spirit and power of the people.

Why, then, if the country’s founding document is so perfect, has the immense suffering of the majority of its people—as a result of exploitation and oppression—been a central feature of the U.S.? How could almost half of the population be designated poor or low income? Why would the U.S. have the world’s largest and most extensive prison system? If the Constitution, the supreme law of this country, was written to protect and promote the interests of the people, why didn’t it include any guarantees to the most basic necessities of life?

This contradiction between reality and rhetoric can be understood by examining the conditions under which the U.S. Constitution was drafted, including the class background of the drafters. Although it is touted today as a document enshrining “democratic values,” it was widely hated by the lower classes that had participated in the 1776-1783 Revolutionary War. Popular opposition was so great, in fact, that the drafting of the Constitution had to be done in secret in a closed-door conference.

The purpose of the Constitution was to reorganize the form of government so as to enhance the centralized power of the state. It allowed for national taxation that provided the funds for a national standing army. Local militias were considered inadequate to battle the various Native American nations whose lands were coveted by land speculators. A national army was explicitly created to suppress slave rebellions, insurgent small farmers and the newly emerging landless working class that was employed for wages.

The goal of the Constitution and the form of government was to defend the minority class of affluent property owners against the anticipated “tyranny of the majority.” As James Madison, a principal author of the Constitution, wrote: “But the most common and durable source of factions [dissenting groups] has been the various and unequal distribution of property” [1].

The newly centralized state set forth in the Constitution was also designed to regulate interstate trade. This was necessary since cutthroat competition between different regions and states was degenerating into trade wars, boycotts and outright military conflict.

The U.S. Congress was created as a forum where commercial and political conflicts between merchants, manufacturers and big farmers could be debated and resolved without resort to economic and military war.

Conditions leading to the U.S. Revolution

To understand the class interests reflected in the Constitution, it is necessary to examine the social and economic conditions of the time. In the decades leading up to the U.S. revolutionary period, colonial society was marked by extreme oppression and class disparities.

The economies of the colonies were originally organized in the interests of the British merchant capitalists who profited by trade with the colonies. These interests were guaranteed by the British monarchy headed by King George III. In the southern colonies like Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas, a settler class of slave-owning big planters grew rich providing the cotton that fed Britain’s massive textile manufacturing industry.

In the northern colonies, merchant economies in the port cities and associated small manufacturing industries formed the basis for the division between rich and poor. In the countryside, huge landowners who owed their holdings to privilege in Europe squeezed the limited opportunities of small farmers.

In 1700, for example, 75 percent of land in colonial New York state belonged to fewer than 12 individuals. In Virginia, seven individuals owned over 1.7 million acres [2]. By 1767, the richest 10 percent of Boston taxpayers held about 66 percent of Boston’s taxable wealth, while the poorest 30 percent of taxpayers had no property at all [3]. Similar conditions could be found throughout the colonies. Clearly, there was an established ruling class within the colonies, although this grouping was ultimately subordinate to the British crown.

On the other hand, the majority of society—Black slaves, Native Americans, indentured servants and poor farmers—experienced super-exploitation and oppression. Women of all classes had, like their peers in Europe, no formal political rights.

With these growing class antagonisms, the 18th century was characterized by mass discontent, which led to frequent demonstrations and even uprisings by those on the bottom rung of colonial society.

Between 1676 and 1760, there were at least 18 uprisings aimed at overthrowing a colonial government. There were six slave rebellions as well as 40 riots like the numerous tenant uprisings in New Jersey and New York directed against landlords [4]. Many of these uprisings were directed at the local elite and not the British Empire.

This local elite in colonial society found itself squeezed between the wrath of the lower working classes, on one side, and the British Empire, on the other.

Following the 1763 British victory in the Seven Years’ War in Europe, which included the so-called French and Indian War in North America, the French position as a colonial power competing with Britain was seriously downgraded as a result of their defeat. The French did send troops and military aid to support the colonists in their war for independence from Britain a decade later.

Following the defeat of the French in 1763, George III attempted to stabilize relations with Native Americans, who had fought primarily alongside the defeated French, by issuing the Proclamation of 1763. This decree declared Indian lands beyond the Appalachians out of bounds for colonial settlers, thereby limiting vast amounts of wealth the settlers could steal from the indigenous people. Chauvinist expansionism thus became fuel for anti-British sentiment in the colonies.

Making matters worse for the colonists, the British Empire began demanding more resources from the colonies to pay for the war. In 1765, the British Parliament passed the fourth Stamp Act, basically increasing taxes on the colonists. The Stamp Act of 1765 incited anger across all class strata, including British merchants, and was ultimately repealed in 1766.

The struggle around the Stamp Act demonstrated a shift in power relations between the colonists and the British Empire. While the local American elites were in less and less need of Britain’s assistance, the British Empire was in ever growing need of the wealth and resources of the colonies.

In summary, there were at least four factors that would motivate the American “new rich” to seek independence from the British crown. First, the anger of the poor and oppressed against the rich could be deflected from the local elite and channeled into hatred of the British crown—developing a new sense of patriotism. Second, the wealth produced and extracted in the colonies would remain in the pockets of the local ruling class rather than being transferred to the British Empire. Third, the local ruling class would greatly increase its wealth through the confiscation of property of those loyal to Britain. And lastly, independence would nullify the Proclamation of 1763, opening up vast amounts of Native land.

Two points qualified the drive to independence, which ultimately manifested itself in the sizable “Loyalist” or pro-British population during the revolution. First, despite the conflict between the colonists and the British government over wealth, colonists and colonizers were united against the Native American population, whom both tried to massacre and loot. The revolutionary struggle was not against exploitation, but to determine who would do the exploiting.

Secondly, in spite of the disputes over who got how much of the wealth generated by the colonies, this wealth primarily depended on the integration of the economy with British merchant capitalism. While the revolutionists wanted political distance from the empire, they could not afford a complete break.

The leaders of the U.S. Revolution

Revolutionary sentiment among the lowest classes of colonial society was largely spontaneous and unorganized. Leadership of the anti-British rebellion, groups like the Sons of Liberty, originated from the middle and upper classes. Some poor workers and farmers did join their ranks, allowing their leadership to garner popular support.

These leaders were conscious of the fact that only one class would be really liberated through independence from Britain: the local ruling class. However, in order to carry this out, they would have to create a façade of liberating the masses.

This is why the 1776 Declaration of Independence—the document used to inspire colonists to fight against Britain—includes language that was so much more radical than that of the 1787 U.S. Constitution. In fact, Thomas Jefferson had originally drafted a paragraph in the Declaration of Independence condemning George III for transporting slaves from Africa to the colonies and “suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce” [5]. Jefferson himself personally owned hundreds of slaves until the day he died, but he understood the appeal such a statement would have.

Instead, the final draft of the Declaration accused the British monarchy of inciting slave rebellions and supporting Indian land claims against the settlers. “He [the king] has incited domestic insurrection amongst us,” the final version read, “and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages.”

Sixty-nine percent of the signers of the Declaration of Independence held colonial office under England. When the document was read in Boston, the Boston Committee of Correspondence ordered the townsmen to show up for a draft to fight the British. The rich avoided the draft by paying for substitutes, while the poor had no choice but to fight.

Slavery existed in all 13 British colonies, but it was the anchor for the economic system in the mid-Atlantic and southern states.

Thousands of slaves fought on both sides of the War of Independence. The British governor of Virginia had issued a proclamation promising freedom to any slave who could make it to the British lines—as long as their owner was not loyal to the British Crown. Tens of thousands of enslaved Africans did just that. Thousands managed to leave with the British when they were defeated, but tens of thousands more were returned to enslavement after the colonies won their “freedom” in 1783.

Following the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which established the independence of the colonies, vast amounts of wealth and land were confiscated from Loyalists. Some of this land was parceled out to small farmers to draw support for the new government.

While most Loyalists left the United States, some were protected. For instance, Lord Fairfax of Virginia, who owned over 5 million acres of land across 21 counties, was protected because he was a friend of George Washington—at that time, among the richest men in America [6].

The drafting of the Constitution

In May 1787, 55 men—now known as the “Founding Fathers”—gathered in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention to draft the new country’s legal principles and establish the new government. Alexander Hamilton—a delegate of New York, George Washington’s closest advisor and the first secretary of the treasury—summed up their task: “All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people… Give therefore to the first class a distinct permanent share in the government” [7]. Indeed, the task of the 55 men was to draft a document that would guarantee the power and privileges of the new ruling class while making just enough concessions to deflect dissent from other classes in society.

Who were the Founding Fathers? It goes without saying that all the delegates were white, property-owning men. Citing the work of Charles Beard, Howard Zinn wrote, “A majority of them were lawyers by profession, most of them were men of wealth, in land, slaves, manufacturing or shipping, half of them had money loaned out at interest, and 40 of the 55 held government bonds” [8].

The vast majority of the population was not represented at the Constitutional Convention: There were no women, African Americans, Native Americans or poor whites. The U.S. Constitution was written by property-owning white men to give political power, including voting rights, exclusively to property-owning white men, who made up about 10 percent of the population.

Alexander Hamilton advocated for monarchical-style government with a president and senate chosen for life. The Constitutional Convention opted, rather, for a “popularly” elected House of Representatives, a Senate chosen by state legislators, a president elected by electors chosen by state legislators, and Supreme Court justices appointed by the president.

Democracy was intended as a cover. In the 10th article of the “Federalist Papers”—85 newspaper articles written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay advocating ratification of the U.S. Constitution—Madison wrote that the establishment of the government set forth by the Constitution would control “domestic faction and insurrection” deriving from “a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal distribution of property, or for any other improper or wicked project.” During the convention, Alexander Hamilton delivered a speech advocating a strong centralized state power to “check the imprudence of democracy.”

It is quite telling that the Constitution took the famous phrase of the Declaration of Independence “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and changed it to “life, liberty and property.” The debates of the Constitutional Convention were largely over competing economic interests of the wealthy, not a debate between haves and have-nots.

The new Constitution legalized slavery. Article 4, Section 2 required that escaped slaves be delivered back to their masters. Slaves would count as three-fifths of a human being for purposes of deciding representation in Congress. The “three-fifths compromise” was between southern slave-holding delegates who wanted to count slaves in the population to increase their representation, while delegates from the northern states wanted to limit their influence and so not count slaves as people at all.

Furthermore, some of the most important constitutional rights, such as the right to free speech, the right to bear arms and the right to assembly were not intended to be included in the Constitution at all. The Bill of Rights was amended to the Constitution four years after the Constitutional Convention had adjourned so that the document could get enough support for ratification.

As a counter to the Bill of Rights, the Constitution gave Congress the power to limit these rights to varying degrees. For example, seven years after the Constitution was amended to provide the right to free speech, Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1798, which made it a crime to say or write anything “false, scandalous or malicious” against the government, Congress or president with the intent to defame or build popular hatred of these entities.

Today, many people look to the Constitution—and especially to the Bill of Rights—as the only guarantor of basic political rights. And while the Constitution has never protected striking workers from being beaten over the heads by police clubs while exercising their right to assemble outside plant gates, or protected revolutionaries’ right to freedom of speech as they are jailed or gunned down, the legal gains for those without property do need to be defended.

But defending those rights has to be done with the knowledge that the founding document of the United States has allowed the scourge of unemployment, poverty and exploitation to carry on unabated because it was a document meant to enshrine class oppression. A constitution for a socialist United States would begin with the rights of working and oppressed people.

During the period leading to the second U.S. Revolution, commonly known as the Civil War, militant opponents of slavery traveled the country to expose the criminal institution that was a bedrock of U.S. society. On July 4, 1854, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution before thousands of supporters of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. He called it a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” referring to its enshrining of slavery.

The crowd shouted back, “Amen” [9].

Although slavery has been abolished, the property that is central to the Constitution—private property, the right to exploit the majority for the benefit of the tiny minority—remains. In that sense, Garrison’s words still ring true.

References

[1] James Madison, Federalist Papers, No. 10. Availablehere.
[2] Michael Parenti,Democracy for the Few, 9th ed. (Boston: Wadsworth, 1974/2011), 5.
[3] Howard Zinn,A People’s History of the United States(New York: Longman, 1980), 65.
[4] Ibid., 59.
[5] Ibid., 72.
[6] Ibid., 84.
[7] Cited in Howard Zinn,Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology(New York: Harper Collins, 1990), 152.
[8] Zinn,A People’s History of the United States, 89.
[9] Zinn,Declarations of Independence, 231.

What is Socialist Revolution?

[Pictured: Thomas Sankara meets with Fidel Castro in the early 1980s]

By Nino Brown

Republished from Liberation School.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. and other imperialist countries have repeatedly declared that history is over, meaning that humanity cannot transcend the capitalist system, which is elevated as the pinnacle of human development. As Margaret Thatcher claimed “there is no alternative” to capitalism, and the best we can hope for is a kinder, gentler, and more “humane” form of it. According to the capitalist class, the fall of the Soviet Union demonstrated that “socialism doesn’t work” and socialist revolution is foolhardy, so we shouldn’t preoccupy ourselves with fighting for it.

Despite this prognosis, socialist revolution is very much on the table in the U.S. and all over the world. As we are facing multiple existential crises for humanity and the planet, socialist revolution is not just possible, but an absolute necessity to ensure our collective future.

Wherever there’s exploitation and oppression, there’s resistance, and the capitalist system generates the conditions for this continued resistance. However, while resistance ebbs and flows, there are particular moments when, as Marx and Engels put it, the broad masses are “sprung into the air” [2]. Today, resistance to capitalism, imperialism, and all systems of oppression is increasing. However, to make a socialist revolution, resistance is not enough. Socialist revolution requires the class-conscious intervention of the working and oppressed classes to dislodge the political power of the bourgeoisie, collectivize and plan production, and create a new state in which the masses of people are in control.

This article introduces what a socialist revolution is—in contrast to anti-communist and bourgeois mythologies that caricature it as an impossible and hopeless project. Socialist revolution anywhere cannot be prescribed and certainly is not an automatic development of any single or foundational contradiction; it requires explicit mass socialist consciousness and organizing.

Further, a socialist revolution cannot take place without society entering into a profound crisis. The Russian leader V.I. Lenin, whose Bolshevik Party led the first successful socialist revolution in 1917, put it this way:

“A revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; furthermore, it is not every revolutionary situation that leads to revolution. What, generally speaking, are the symptoms of a revolutionary situation? We shall certainly not be mistaken if we indicate the following three major symptoms: (1) when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is a crisis, in one form or another, among the ‘upper classes’, a crisis in the policy of the ruling class, leading to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth. For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for ‘the lower classes not to want’ to live in the old way; it is also necessary that ‘the upper classes should be unable’ to live in the old way; (2) when the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute than usual; (3) when, as a consequence of the above causes, there is a considerable increase in the activity of the masses” [3].

Revolutionary opportunities arise neither as a result of the objective conditions of society nor the class consciousness of the masses alone. Instead, revolutionary situations open when the cascading contradictions of capitalism, imperialism, and oppression force the current order to a standstill. Such objective conditions can emerge from economic, political, social, military, or ecological crises: such as the cascading crises of automation and the resulting job losses, the delegitimation of basic institutions of U.S. bourgeois democracy like presidential elections, the climate catastrophe, and the U.S. war drive against Russia and China. But by themselves the contradictions of capitalism, which inevitably lead to crisis, do not make a revolution.

There are many revolutionary situations but fewer revolutions. This is because revolutions require the combination of the above-mentioned objective conditions as well as the subjective forces capable of seizing on the revolutionary opening. The Party for Socialism and Liberation is dedicated to building a party that can seize these revolutionary openings when they appear in the United States.

When society enters into a revolutionary crisis, it presents the opportunity for socialist revolution but, as Lenin points out, there have been many revolutionary crises that did not become successful socialist revolutions. What was missing in virtually all those cases was “the ability of the revolutionary class to take revolutionary mass action strong enough to break or dislocate the old government, which never, not even in a period of crisis, ‘falls’, if it is not toppled over” [4]. This for example, is what happened in Egypt in the wake of the popular uprising that overthrew the U.S.-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak in early 2011. The revolution was led by working and poor people—especially young people—who created new organizational forms during the course of the uprising. Because of the systematic repression of the Left, however, there was no working-class party capable of transforming the revolutionary opportunity into a revolution. In the absence of such a party, the most well-organized forces assumed leadership.

Political and social revolutions

When Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders first declared his run for presidency in 2014-15, he announced that his campaign would spark a “political revolution to transform our country economically, politically, socially and environmentally” [5]. His campaign resonated with a broad progressive base of the working class and some elements of the middle class.

Sanders was calling for major changes in society, many of which would have benefited the working masses, but was this really calling for a “revolution”? From a Marxist point of view, what Sanders proposed was actually a series of major reforms. Reform movements are often large and powerful, pulling vast numbers of people into struggle against the ruling class for basic democratic rights. The movements for health care, affirmative action, better wages, union representation, expanded marriage rights, and abortion rights are examples of powerful reform movements that have won important victories. All of these movements led to progressive changes to the political and legal superstructure of society; while progressive reform movements can change how society is run and operated, they do not fundamentally alter the economic system as a whole and are always resisted by the ruling class.

In order for us to realize such popular and necessary democratic and progressive reforms we need an entirely new social system, a socialist system, in which the working class has political, social, and economic power. To do this, a social revolution must dislodge the bourgeois ruling class from power.

Marxists use the term “social revolution” in a very precise way. Whereas political revolutions change the form of social rule and can bring important gains for the oppressed, they leave the fabric of the capitalist mode of production intact: private ownership of the means of production and capitalist control over the state apparatus. Political revolutions are significant shifts in political leadership, such as those that took place during the Reconstruction Era and the Civil Rights and Black Liberation movements of the 1950s-70s. Each brought about substantial changes in the political and social order but stopped short of changing the underlying structure of the economy [6].

Distinguishing between political and social revolutions doesn’t mean that we view them as separate and unrelated. In fact, historically, socialist revolutions have combined struggles for political and social transformation. Think, for example, of how central the struggle for a legally-regulated working day was to the Bolshevik’s line of march toward socialist revolution.

A socialist revolution in the U.S. would end the private ownership of the means of production, factories and mines, transportation systems and communication networks, banks and agriculture, etc., by a tiny clique of capitalists. Such a change in the mode of production would also have far-reaching consequences for the social hierarchies of exploitation, altering—and providing the material basis for eliminating—the social subjugation of all oppressed groups.

A socialist revolution, a radical rupture with the capitalist system, would mean many things, but principally it would mean that working class and oppressed peoples would, among other tasks:

1. Dismantle the old bourgeois state machinery and replace it with a new type of state, a workers’ state where working class people would govern society at every level.

2. Collectivize the means of producing and sustaining life. These would be controlled by the working class and its organizations, making them public property to be administered in the interests of the many and not just a tiny clique of unelected capitalists.

3. Implement a planned economy where production would be geared towards meeting people’s needs and sustaining the planet’s ecosystem, not for maximizing profit.

Socialist revolution and the question of violence

Capitalist politicians, media, and educational institutions portray socialist revolutionaries as bloodthirsty idealists, and revolutions are popularly described as incidents of mass violence. The capitalist ruling class, which itself came to power through violent revolutions and state-sanctioned and individual acts of conquest and dispossession, aims to foreclose the revolutionary path of the proletariat by presenting it as blood-soaked and misguided.

It is true that figures like Marx, Engels, and Lenin sometimes foregrounded the inevitability of violence in social revolutions. However, this is not because socialist revolutions necessitate violence in an abstract way.

In fact, Marx once suggested that, compared to the immense violence that brought the capitalist class to power, the socialist revolution would be relatively peaceful. The reason is that the capitalist revolution entailed “the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers,” whereas the socialist revolution entails “the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people” [7].

If violence is often a feature of social revolutions it is not due to the preference of the workers. On the contrary, it is because the capitalist ruling class will resort—and, in fact, already does resort—to the most extreme forms of violence as a means of protecting its property interests.

Lessons from history

No successful socialist revolution occurred during Marx and Engels’ lifetimes. However, they did witness and support the Paris Commune of 1871, when workers seized control of Paris and established, for a limited time, a revolutionary government based on workers’ self-rule. The bourgeoisie allied with the aristocracy against the rising revolutionary class—the proletariat—in order to brutally crush the Commune, killing tens of thousands of workers. This led Marx and Engels to reconsider the revolutionary proposals included in The Communist Manifesto. In the preface to the 1872 German edition, they wrote that they would formulate these differently because of “the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months.” “One thing especially was proved by the Commune,” they continue, which is “that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes’” [8]. This lesson would be vital in the success of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent socialist revolutions across the colonial world.

The inter-imperialist rivalry of WWI created a unique opportunity for the Bolsheviks to break the weakest link in the imperial chain, seizing state power in Russia and establishing the world’s first sustained workers’ state. “Revolution,” Lenin put it in 1917, “consists in the proletariat destroying the ‘administrative apparatus’ and the whole state machine, replacing it by a new one consisting of the armed workers” [9]. In order to do so, the working and toiling masses need to be organized to successfully combat the highly disciplined armies of the ruling class. A vanguard party of revolutionary cadres provides the leadership necessary to guide the organized workers to a successful revolution.

The Russian Revolution was a social revolution in the sense that it changed the social relations of production and the overall class order of society. It is essential to recognize, however, that this project was not simply economic, in a reductive sense, as some of its uninformed detractors have proclaimed. In order to begin building an egalitarian society, the Bolsheviks pursued the project of socializing the means of production and redistributing land, slowly but surely building up a society in which everyone had the right to housing, education, healthcare, and employment, and more. At the same time, they directly confronted the legacies of social chauvinism, nationalism and racism by introducing a substantive democracy in which all nations had the right to self-determination and the plethora of cultures and languages within the USSR was celebrated [10].

In addition to directly combating dehumanizing practices, which are so integral to capitalism, the Soviet leadership undertook to dismantle the system of domestic slavery that subjugated women. “Under Alexandra Kollantai, people’s commissar for social welfare,” Valentine Moghadam explains, women were granted “an eight-hour day, social insurance, pregnancy leave for two months before and after childbirth, and time at work to breast-feed,” in addition to the legal codification of marital equality, the right to divorce, and more [11].

A socialist revolution is a total transformation that reorganizes, in the name of equality, the entire socioeconomic system, which includes—among other elements—its class, racial, gender, and national orders. It is significant, in this regard, that the successful socialist revolutions that occurred in the wake of the Russian Revolution took place in the colonial world rather than in the capitalist core.

Lenin himself had anticipated that the revolutionary storm would move eastward as colonized peoples rose up against imperialist domination. Vietnamese revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh was among them. He described how he yelled out with joy as he read aloud and slowly came to understand Lenin’s message to the colonies. “Lenin,” he wrote, “was the first to realize and assess the full importance of drawing the colonial peoples into the revolutionary movement. He was the first to point out that, without the participation of the colonial peoples, the socialist revolution could not come about” [12].

Making a socialist revolution in the U.S.

We should take inspiration from the history of the struggles for socialist revolution, knowing that our party is situated squarely within this lineage. The tradition that we are part of is the one that has practically demonstrated its ability to make real, substantive gains for the working class, and notably for the most oppressed and exploited members of the international proletariat. In spite of what the capitalist ruling class would like us to believe, decay in the advanced capitalist countries is daily on display, and the socialist movement continues to grow around the world.

We find ourselves, however, in a unique situation since we in the belly of the beast, the U.S. Empire, which has over time built up a political system and broader culture that is profoundly reactionary. All of our creativity, insight, and revolutionary enthusiasm will be necessary to find effective ways of bringing the working class into the struggle for socialism. While there is no road map to revolution, there is a deep, international tradition of revolutionary organizing from which we need to learn, while also adapting it to our unique circumstances. In doing so, we can take hope and inspiration from the fact that, as we each do our own part, we are contributing to a collective struggle for the future of humanity and planet Earth.

“The socialist revolution is not one single act, not one single battle on a single front,” Lenin wrote, “but a whole epoch of intensified class conflicts, a long series of battles on all fronts, i.e., battles around all the problems of economics and politics, which can culminate only in the expropriation of the bourgeoisie” [13]. As we contribute to these battles, developing new tactics to edge out our opponents, let us never lose sight of the global class war that will decide the future of us all. For this is what is ultimately at stake in the question of revolution: shall we continue to live under an exploitative and oppressive system that is destroying humanity and the biosphere, or should we reorganize society to satisfy the needs and aspirations of the overwhelming majority?

Building mass socialist consciousness

There is no formula, blueprint, or silver bullet to get us to socialism. We know that the class struggle is a school for the working class in organizing itself to do battle with the bourgeoisie and win social gains here or there, but the class struggle in and of itself does not automatically lead to socialism. We can study and learn from socialist revolutions in history, but the conditions under which those revolutions were won are fundamentally different from the conditions that face us today in the U.S. No serious Marxist would argue that the socialist revolution develops the same way in every country. Lenin reminds us that “in different countries, the revolution develops differently. It always proceeds over a long time and with difficulty. Bad is the Socialist who thinks that the capitalists will abdicate their rights at once” [14].

So how do we get from here to there? From capitalist society to socialist society? For starters, economic, political, and social struggles are schools through which we can build the subjective forces necessary for revolution. Socialism can only develop out of the class struggle against the capitalists; it will not fall from the sky or come from the minds of some “ingenious” individuals. But, as we stated before, just recognition of and even appreciation for the class struggle does not end up with socialism or even socialist consciousness. The ruling class owns and operates an immense state apparatus and has access to tremendous resources to crush the resistance of the working class and hold back revolutionary consciousness. In order to overcome this, the working class and oppressed need their own political instrument(s) to fight the bourgeoisie. This means mass organizations of our class, in various forms from labor unions tenant associations to broad-based coalitions and single-issue organizations. Ultimately, the key instrument in socialist revolutions is a revolutionary Marxist party that’s able to unite the different mass organizations together under a coherent political program and strategic outlook.

The historical task of the working class is not just to emancipate itself, but all of humanity, from the shackles of capitalist exploitation and oppression. However, the path to victory inevitably goes through setbacks, defeats, and retreats, materially and ideologically. Conceiving of revolution today requires acknowledging this reality, but also proposing an organizational form that can readily assist the class and guide the struggle towards victory: the capture of state power by the working class. It is here where Leninism provides a battle-tested theory and practice to help revolutionaries battle with the capitalist class and build the revolutionary power and unity vital for defeating the capitalists and building socialism. For revolutionaries in the Leninist tradition, history has demonstrated with numerous examples that it is not the task of the revolutionary party to “make” the revolution with independent action divorced from the masses. In order to overcome the political and ideological indoctrination by the capitalist class, which has only strengthened over time with the rise of mass media and communications, it is necessary for revolutionaries today to embed themselves within workers’ struggles so as to help workers connect the concrete and specific contradictions of capitalism (police brutality, housing struggles, workplace fights) to its general functioning and motion.

As capitalism continues generating compounding crises affecting both the ruling class and the ruled, as spontaneous rebellions and revolts emerge, it is vitally necessary to continue building class consciousness of workers’ struggles. The organizational independence of the working class, through its own political party, is indispensable. For after all, a revolutionary crisis, while invoking chaos and confusion among the ruling class and oppressed classes, does not automatically lead to socialism. Reactionary elements, for example, may seize the time during a crisis; the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol to overturn the election results, the first phase of a coup attempt, are an indication of this possibility [15].

To make a socialist revolution requires more than spontaneous rebellions, more than idly waiting for the objective conditions to ripen; it requires working-class mass organization, discipline, unity of the oppressed, and a political party that can provide theoretical, strategic, and tactical clarity throughout the course of our various struggles. Socialism does not arrive ready-made: it is a result of the class struggle for state power, and thus requires socialists, but most importantly of all a revolutionary socialist party to guide, learn from, and organize the working class and its allies on the path to victory.

The time to build the revolutionary party is now. There is no time to waste. The extreme problems and contradictions of U.S. society mean that a deep crisis is inevitable, though neither revolutionaries nor the ruling class can determine when a revolutionary situation will develop. As many historical experiences have shown, it is difficult but not impossible to create the party needed to turn a revolutionary opportunity into a revolutionary victory once the crisis is underway. For all those who hope for revolution and a new socialist society, building the party is the key task.

References

[1] V.I. Lenin, “Letters on Tactics,” in V.I. Lenin,Lenin Collected Works (Vol. 24): April-June 1917, ed. B. Isaacs (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1918/1980), 44.
[2] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,The Communist Manifesto, trans. S. Moore (New York: Penguin Books, 1888/1967), 232.
[3] V.I. Lenin, “The Collapse of the Second International,” in V.I Lenin,Lenin Collected Works (Vol. 21): August 1914-1915, trans. J. Katzer (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1915/1980), 213-214.
[4] Ibid., 214.
[5] Andrew Prokop, “Bernie Sanders’s Political Revolution, Explained,”Vox, 28 January 2016. Availablehere.
[6] Social revolutions make a sharp break from one social system to another, although not all social revolutions aresocialistrevolutions. The 1979 Iranian Revolution, for example, overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah, installed in a 1953 coup that overthrew the democratically-elected Mossadegh government. In the period before the revolution, millions of people took to the streets and eventually won much of the armed forces to their side. Again, however, because of the intense repression of trade unions and the communists under the Shah’s brutal rule, socialist forces were unable to turn the revolutionary opportunity into a socialist revolution. At the same time, by overthrowing the U.S.’s primary colonial outpost in the region and establishing an independent and anti-colonial government, the Iranian Revolution did significantly change the makeup of the social system.
[7] 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), 715.
[8] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Preface to the German Edition of 1872,” in Marx and Engels,The Communist Manifesto, 194.
[9] V.I. Lenin, “The State and Revolution,” in V.I. Lenin,Lenin Collected Works (Vol. 25): June-September 1917, ed. S. Presyan and J. Riordan (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1917/1980), 491.
[10] See Eugene Puryear, “Nations and Soviets: The National Question in the USSR,”Liberation News, 06 June 2022. Availablehere.
[11] Valentine Moghadam,Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East(Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993), 78-79.
[12] Ho Chi Minh,Selected Writings (1920-1969)(Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2001), 37.
[13] V.I. Lenin, “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” in V.I. Lenin,Lenin Collected Works (Vol. 22): December 1915-July 1916), ed. G. Hanna, trans. Y. Sdobnikov (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1916/1977), 144.
[14] V.I. Lenin, “Speech at a Presnya District Workers’ Conference,” in Lenin,Lenin Collected Works (Vol. 28), 361.
[15] See Party for Socialism and Liberation, “The Paralysis Ends: Trump, Fascism, and the Capitalist State,”Liberation News, 13 January 2021. Available here.

'No Royal Road' to Revolutionary Education

By Patricia Gorky

Liberation School's new book Revolutionary Education is edited by Nino Brown.

Capital was a formidable book from the moment it was published in 1867. In an attempt to make the content more accessible, Capital's first French publisher published the book in multiple pieces.

Karl Marx wrote to the publisher and commended him for the new teaching method used to present Capital. "I applaud your idea of publishing the translation of Das Kapital as a serial," he wrote. "In this form the book will be more accessible to the working class, a consideration which to me outweighs everything else."

The first three chapters, however, had a unique structure that were harder to understand split apart. Despite this tradeoff, Marx approved of the approach since the most important metric for him was whether people would understand his analysis of capitalism.

So as in 1872, so today: Socialism must be understood to be accepted. Socialism is a system where the working class wields control over the productive forces of society, and the economy is planned in a scientific manner according to the needs of the people and planet. Socialism unleashes the potential of the highest creativity and flowering of the working class.

Although the demonization in recent years has faded, socialism remains a badly-misunderstood topic. Teaching, therefore, is a critical skill that socialist organizers can and must hone and master.  Different situations calls for different teaching methods, or pedagogies. How do we know which method to use? How do we improve our own efficacy in presenting information? 

Liberation School's fresh book, Revolutionary Education: Teaching and practice for socialist organizers, explores these questions from the viewpoints of history, theory, and practice. Edited by Nino Brown, the book compiles essays from educators, organizers, and journalists on revolutionary education and socialist educational methods.

Brown explains in his essay on building organizations and developing cadre that organizers have much to learn from the suffering, sacrifices and victories of our comrades in struggle all over the world. "We are all linked by our common oppression under imperialism," he writes. The job of a revolutionary is to help make the revolution. To do that, socialists need to make more revolutionaries.

How do socialists win people over? Socialists are actually in the most favorable moment for socialists in the U.S. in decades. Organizer Walter Smolarek explains that organizers have the opportunity to make connections with working people and build a base of support through different tactics, including provisioning direct services.

Provisioning direct services, commonly referred to as "mutual aid", can be a way to make inroads with communities. Even an inherently nonrevolutionary activity can be used as an opening to bring people into the political struggle for socialism, but the tactic itself cannot be confused with the strategy. When a current approach does not work, organizers must recalculate and find new tactics to reach people.

The goal of Revolutionary Education, after all, is the emancipation of humankind.

Guinea-Bissau's struggle for independence led by the liberator, theorist, and educator Amilcar Cabral is one such example.

Curry Mallot traces the history of how the small west African country became a world leader in decolonial education, in large part due to the leadership of revolutionary Amílcar Cabral. For more than 400 years Guinea-Bissau was a colony of the vicious Portuguese empire, Mallot writes, whose colonial mode of education was "designed to foster a sense of inferiority in the youth." Colonial educators set predetermined outcomes sought to dominate learners by treating them as if they were passive objects.

Militant historian Sónia Vaz Borges, the child of Cape Verdean immigrants, grew up in Portugal. Vaz Borges experienced firsthand the colonial education taught to the African diaspora in the colonial center. In an interview with Breaking the Chains, she recounts how the African community "does not see themselves reflected in official versions of Portuguese history." Political education is not abstract.

Socialists must be able to explain the class character of all events. Organizers know socialist revolution is the only path to survival, yet how do we convince others of its necessity? Revolutionary teaching has to give the person all of the keys needed to be able to interpret events. "Every event has an origin and a process of development," explains Frank González, director of Cuba's Prensa Latina news agency in a 2006 interview with Gloria La Riva.

Television overwhelms us with images, González notes, but the same media denies space to interpret events. The development of social media has only exacerbated these effects. In the end, bourgeois media leaves people with nothing but confusion.

In a separate essay, Mallott explores Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky's ground-breaking work that shows how people's development corresponds to their past and present experiences. Thought emerges from engagement with the concrete world. "While all of us have been shaped by this racist, sexist, capitalist society," Mallott writes, "we never lose the ability to grow, change and think differently."

Intelligence is an attribute but also a social construct. How do you tell children facing hunger, homelessness, and police brutality to be more "gritty", when in fact they already put in tremendous effort to survive? Organizer Jane Cutter in her essay on comradeship emphasizes that all progressive people must be willing to learn from experience and work in collaboration. 

Revolutionary Education closes with two practical appendices for day-to-day organizing. "Formulating study and discussion questions" explains how to break out of a linear mode of education. The sample questions are in and of themselves instructive for the tactics they represent in addition to the thought that they provoke. Learning facts and timelines goes hand-in-hand with discussion with others, reflection on ideas and combining those with our own experiences.

Comprehension questions, for example, help distill dense texts down to their key points. Questions that focus on the identification of significance help people understand why the author themselves highlighted portions as key. For revolutionaries, perhaps the most important types of questions are those that apply and extend our knowledge of the world. How can revolutionary pedagogy sharpen our ability to educate and reach people?

The second appendix covers teaching tactics that can be applied in study groups or classrooms. Some material is best presented in a lecture form, while other situations call for more interactive engagement through having participants draw out concept maps.

How do we best reach people? How do we make sure that our message is getting across? Each situation calls for its own tactics. Revolutionaries must be flexible and adaptable according to the needs of the moment. Learning is an endeavor that requires effort on the part of both participant and teacher.

Marx closes his 1872 letter with an encouragement to work through such difficulties. "There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits."

Those in the struggle for socialism will find in Revolutionary Education a worthy climbing tool indeed.

Patricia Gorky co-hosted the podcast Reading Capital with Comrades.

Paulo Freire’s Centennial: Political Pedagogy for Revolutionary Organizations

By Derek Ford

Republished from Liberation School.

All revolutionary processes are educational. From organizing meetings and study groups to writing protest speeches and propaganda before the revolutionary moment to creating new revolutionary educational and cultural institutions and training teachers and specialists after the seizure of power, revolution is educational through and through. Yet exactly what kind of educational operations does revolution entail, and how can we understand and practice them?

It is precisely these questions that Paulo Freire addressed in his classic work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

One hundred years after his birth in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, Freire’s name is widely recognized and, relatively speaking, so too is his canonical text. Yet the book is referenced or discussed more than it is deeply engaged. This is particularly evident when Freire’s work is severed from its revolutionary Marxist orientation [1].

While it’s often taken as an abstract guide-book for how to teach, Pedagogy of the Oppressed is really a theoretical reflection on his own experiences teaching peasants how to read and write, a theory he extends to revolutionary movements, leadership, and organization. After spending 70 days in prison for “treachery” [teaching poor peasants to read and write], he was exiled from Brazil following the military junta in 1964. He eventually settled in Chile, which is where he wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The book has been targeted by the right wing in the U.S. (it is currently banned from public schools in Arizona). It addresses the educational components of revolutionary movements and, as such, it is littered with references to Marx, Lenin, Fanon, and others. Specifically, the book is concerned with how the revolutionary leadership pushes the struggle forward, or how it teaches and learns from the masses in struggle.

The pedagogies of oppression and liberation

The pedagogy of the oppressed has two stages. During the first stage, “the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through praxis commit themselves to its transformation.” During the second stage, which is after the world of oppression has been transformed, “this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed and becomes a pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation” [2].

The first stage addresses how the oppressed view and relate to the world. It begins by acknowledging that the oppressed possess both an oppressed consciousness and an oppressor consciousness. The oppressor consciousness is the enemy that needs to be liquidated: “The oppressor consciousness tends to transform everything surrounding it into an object of its domination. The earth, property, production, the creations of people, people themselves, time—everything is reduced to the status of objects at its disposal” [3].

This is what capitalism does: it takes everything and makes it into private property, including our ability to labor. This has a profound impact on the world, even instilling the oppressor consciousness in the oppressed. Thus, we have to distinguish an oppressor consciousness from the oppressed person, and we have to transform that consciousness.

The way that we engage in that transformation is absolutely crucial, and this is where the question of pedagogy comes into play. Freire calls the traditional form of pedagogy “banking pedagogy.” In banking pedagogy, the teacher is the one who possesses knowledge and the students are empty containers in which the teacher must deposit knowledge. The more the teacher fills the receptacle, the better teacher she is. The content remains abstract to the student, disconnected from the world, and external to the student’s life. Banking pedagogy—which is what most of us in the U.S. experience—assumes that the oppressed are ignorant and naïve. Further, it treats the oppressed as objects in the same way that capitalism does.

For Freire, education must be rooted in the daily lives and experiences of students, who are subjects rather than objects. The correct educational method for revolutionaries is dialogue, which means something very specific. To truly engage in dialogue means becoming partners with the people. In this situation, “the teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow” [4]. This process is referred to as conscientização, or coming-to-critical-consciousness.

A decisive element to the location and direction of conscientização is the pedagogical relationship. This relates to Freire’s critique of the banking model of education and to his reconception of the teacher-student relationship. The dialogic model is a relationship between teacher and student, one which is more—but, and this is absolutely crucial, not completely—horizontal. In this schema, “people teach each other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in banking education are “owned” by the teacher [5]. The teacher does not relinquish authority or power, as if that was even possible. Instead, the teacher takes responsibility for producing new critical knowledge of reality with the student.

While the pedagogical relationship and process are important parts of Freire’s thought, they have tended to be isolated from Freire’s ideological commitments and have come to stand in for Freire’s entire work. As a graduate student in a fairly critical school of education, I was only assigned the first two chapters of the book, and I’m convinced this is common practice. These chapters are rich; they’re where he denounces banking pedagogy and formulates dialogical pedagogy in response. When we stop here, however, we don’t discover the reason why he bothered writing the book in the first place.

By selectively reading the book, Freire’s dialogic pedagogy is substituted wholesale for his broader conceptual and political work, his vocabularies and theories that generated new understandings of education and revolution. There is nothing inherent in dialogue or dialogic pedagogy that necessarily leads to progressive, critical understandings. For this to happen the content must be placed in a particular context by a teacher. Peter McLaren, one of the few U.S. educational theorists to insist on Freire’s revolutionary commitments (and a comrade of Freire’s), goes so far as to say that “political choices and ideological paths chosen by teachers are the fundamental stuff of Freirean pedagogy” [6]. We can’t divorce the methodology from the ideology, the theory from the method, or the critical from the pedagogy in Freire’s work.

The dangerous fourth chapter

Freire begins the last chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed with “Lenin’s famous statement: ‘Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement,’” which Freire rewords to insist that revolutions are achieved neither by verbalism nor by activism “but rather with praxis, that is, with reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed” [7]. It would be just as wrong to claim that reflecting on and helping name oppression is enough for revolution as to claim that activism is enough for revolution. The task of revolutionaries is to engage with our class and our people in true, authentic dialogue, reflection, and action. If we have dialogue and reflection without action, then we are little more than armchair revolutionaries. On the other hand, if we have only action without dialogue and reflection, we have mere activism.

Reflection and action are not divisions of labor between revolutionary leaders and the people, whereby the leaders think and direct and the people are only able to act on their orders. “Revolutionary leaders,” he writes, “do bear the responsibility for coordination and, at times, direction—but leaders who deny praxis to the oppressed thereby invalidate their own praxis” [8]. People and revolutionary leaders act together, building and acting in unity before, during, and after the revolution.

The prerequisite for such leadership is the rejection of the “myth of the ignorance of the people” [9]. Freire acknowledges that revolutionary leaders, “due to their revolutionary consciousness,” have “a level of revolutionary knowledge different from the level of empirical knowledge held by the people” [10].

The act of dialogue unites lived experience with revolutionary theory so that people understand what causes their lived experience to be as it is. This is a restatement of Lenin’s conviction that spontaneous knowledge of exploitation and oppression must be transformed through the Party into revolutionary consciousness of the relationship of our experience to the relationship of broader social, economic, and political forces at differing scales: within the factory, the city, the state, and the world.

This is a Marxist philosophy of education in that it rests on the presumption of competence. We can see it, for example, when Engels writes that he and Marx “cannot co-operate with men who say openly that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves, and must first be emancipated from above by philanthropic members of the upper and lower middle classes” [11]. We can also see it in What is to be Done? as Lenin argues against economist Marxists, who hold that the working class develops its own revolutionary consciousness spontaneously as a result of daily struggles with the bosses. Lenin argued that spontaneity was only consciousness “in an embryonic form,” and that something more was needed. Spontaneity is necessary but is ultimately limited to “what is ‘at the present time’” [12]. In other words, spontaneity by itself isn’t able to look beyond isolated daily struggles and forward to a new society. Lenin called the spontaneously generated mindset “trade union consciousness.”

Lenin believed that workers were capable of more than trade union consciousness. He actually derided those who insisted on appealing to the “average worker:” “You gentlemen, who are so much concerned about the ‘average worker,’ as a matter of fact, rather insult the workers by your desire to talk down to them when discussing labor politics and labor organization” (p. 153). He wrote that organizers had actually held workers “back by our silly speeches about what ‘can be understood’ by the masses of the workers” [13]. The economist organizers treated workers as objects rather than subjects. They didn’t believe in the people or their potential.

Freire actually calls on Lenin when he insists revolutionary leadership is open and trusting of the people. “As Lenin pointed out,” he writes, “the more a revolution requires theory, the more its leaders must be with the people in order to stand against the power of oppression” [14]. This isn’t a naïve acquiesce but a belief in the power of the masses to become not only agents of revolutionary movements but creators of revolutionary theory through the Party. As Lenin also observed, that the Party creates a particular group of theoreticians: In the Party “all distinctions as between workers and intellectuals… must be obliterated” [15].

There is no abstract celebration of “horizontalism” within such a pedagogy. The form of the revolution and its leadership isn’t accorded abstractly; it can be more horizontal or more vertical and triangular, depending on the circumstances. Here, Freire turns to Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution to argue that their historical conditions compelled them to revolt without building widely with the people. Yet the leadership pursued this task immediately after taking power through organization, specifically the party. Tyson Lewis is one of the few to observe that “Freire himself clearly saw his pedagogy as a tool to be used within revolutionary organization to mediate the various relationships between the oppressed and the leaders of resistance” [16]. This is why Freire looked so favorably upon Amílcar Cabral [17].

Uniting politics and pedagogy for revolution

Revolutionary organizers, therefore, are defined not just by the revolutionary ideals they hold or actions they take, but by their humility, patience, and willingness to engage with all exploited and oppressed people. It is not possible for us to “implant” the conviction to fight and struggle in others. Coming-to-critical-consciousness is a delicate and contingent process that can’t be scripted in advance. Still, there are a few general components to it.

First, we have to truly get to know our people, their problems, and their aspirations. This means that we have to actually learn from people, acknowledging that, even if this is their first demonstration, or even if they voted for a democrat in the last election, they actually have something to teach us. The more experiences we learn from the people the richer our theories are and the more connection they can have to the daily realities of workers and oppressed people today. Our class is bursting with creative and intellectual powers that capitalist society doesn’t allow us to express or develop. The revolutionary party is stronger the more it cultivates these powers.

Second, we have to provide opportunities for others to understand their problems in a deeper and wider context, and to push their aspirations forward. Freire gives a concrete and relatable example of this:

“…if at a given historical moment the basic aspiration of the people goes no further than a demand for salary increases, the leaders can commit one of two errors. They can limit their action to stimulating this one demand or they can overrule this popular aspiration and substitute something more far-reaching—but something which has not yet come to the forefront of the people’s attention… The solution lies in synthesis: the leaders must on the one hand identify with the people’s demand for higher salaries, while on the other they must pose the meaning of that very demand as a problem. By doing this, the leaders pose as a problem a real, concrete, historical situation of which the salary demand is one dimension. It will thereby become clear that salary demands alone cannot comprise a definitive solution” [18].

Through this process, both the people and the revolutionary leadership act together and collectively name the world. Genuine knowledge is produced, and authentic action is taken, and real conviction for the struggle is strengthened.

Freire’s popularity presents an opening to draw many into the struggle and, in particular, the communist struggle. By re-establishing the link between his pedagogy and politics, we can draw those who admire his work into the movement. At the same time, we can better understand, adapt, and practice his pedagogical principles in our day-to-day organizing. “Only in the encounter of the people with the revolutionary leaders,” Freire writes in the book’s last sentence, “can this [revolutionary] theory be built” [19].

References

[1] This process started with the advent of U.S. “critical pedagogy” in the early 1980s, and Freire’s later work might have played a role in it as well. See Malott, Curry S. (2015).History and education: Engaging the global class war(New York: Peter Lang), 63.
[2] Freire, Paulo. (1970/2011).Pedagogy of the oppressed(New York: Continuum), 54.
[3] Ibid., 58.
[4] Ibid., 80.
[5] Ibid.
[6] McLaren, Peter. (2015).Life in schools: An introduction to critical pedagogy in the foundations of education, 6thed. (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers), 241.
[7] Freire,Pedagogy of the oppressed, 125-126.
[8] Ibid., 126.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid., 134.
[11] Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. (1991). “Marx and Engels to August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Wilhelm Bracke and others (circular letter),” trans. P. Ross & B. Ross, inMarx and Engels collected works (vol. 45), ed. S. Gerasimenko, Y.Kalinina, and A. Vladimirova (New York: International Publishers), 408, emphasis added.
[12] Lenin, V.I. (1902/1987). “What is to be done?” inEssential works of Lenin, ed. H.M. Christman (New York: Dover Publications), 67.
[13] Ibid., 156.
[14] Freire,Pedagogy of the oppressed, 138.
[15] Lenin, “What is to be done?”, 137.
[16] Lewis, Tyson E. (2012). “Mapping the constellation of educational Marxism(s),”Educational Philosophy and Theory44, no. S1: 98-114.
[17] Malott, Curry. (2021). Amílcar Cabral: Liberator, theorist, and educator,”Liberation School, 20 January. Availablehere.
[18] Freire,Pedagogy of the oppressed, 183.
[19] Ibid.