Hegemonic Silence and the Nuclear Question

By Marcus Kahn

Imagine a NASA rocket loaded with astronauts reaches another galaxy. They find a planet inhabited by billions of advanced sentient beings and begin to observe them from above. The scientists learn that these beings, delineated into warring factions, have developed a technology capable of destroying their world hundreds of times over, and have set those weapons up in such a way that not only can they be launched at a moment’s notice and detonated within minutes, but are also prone to error and entail massive risk. But when the scientists tune in to the planet’s communications, conversational and broadcasted, they become deeply perplexed. The inhabitants barely speak of the suicidal threat they pose to themselves. They hardly seem to be thinking about it. This is the conundrum posed by nuclear weapons. 

How can such extreme potentialities lie largely unquestioned and undiscussed? 

The term socialization captures our gravitation to conformity, how we acquire norms through the pressures of our environment. That first day of school is scary and unfamiliar, but by the time you reach high school you are sitting and getting up according to a bell schedule without a second thought. Indoctrination adds in a directional quality; socialization that occurs along the contours of norms prescribed by dominant forces, to be internalized and replicated as unconscious obedience. By the time you graduate high school, you have received a social science education that has prepared you to support the status quo. Both terms ring true.  It may be human to err, but in an imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy it is human to normalize the unconscionable and transmute it into a commonsense assumption. The comprehensiveness of this process is most evident in our apparent equanimity to the prospect of complete annihilation, in our hegemonic silence. 

The boundaries of debate around nuclear weapons are closely gatekept by the state, ostensibly in the interests of security. Information on oscillations in the nuclear weapons threat is classified, reserved for state actors with adequate clearance who distribute updates to select media outlets, if not directly to the public. What the public receives is highly filtered. 

The Kennedy administration’s public narrative around the Cuban Missile Crisis crystallized into typical presidential hagiography in the intervening sixty years despite being thoroughly contradicted by subsequent academic research (pro tip: don’t record everything you say in the Oval Office if you want to deceive the American public in perpetuity).   The visual trope of a mushroom clouds in a cartoon is more familiar than the destruction and confusion on the ground in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Our imagination lacks essential context when it comes to conceptualizing the nuclear threat. 

However, even in a coherent and powerful doctrinal system, dissent and counter-narratives can slip through chinks in the institutional armor. Much like the scientific consensus around climate change, members of the scientific community have stepped outside the invisible boundaries of dominant system-supportive narratives. But these boundaries can be ideologically policed. In the 1980s, Carl Sagan published a study alongside a group of well-reputed scientists that argued even a limited nuclear war would lead to a catastrophic nuclear winter. Because their conclusions would have galvanized the peace movement and altered public perception of nuclear war planning, the scientists were subsequently marginalized and their work dismissed.  

These narrative trends skew public perception away towards deterrence strategies and away from a critical abolitionist stance. New York Times columnist David Brooks, during an uncharacteristic foray into epistemology, unknowingly identifies the scope of a doctrinal system in an article titled “How to Destroy Truth.” Brooks argues that “propositional knowledge” that “we acquire through reason, logical proof, and tight analysis” constitutes one of two reservoirs of collective knowledge. This body of knowledge is produced by “a network of institutions — universities, courts, publishers, professional societies, media outlets — that have set up an interlocking set of procedures to hunt for error, weigh evidence and determine which propositions pass muster.” To read between the lines, Brooks implicitly argues that powerful institutions determine the nature of truth in modern society. That which “passes muster” is legitimized, and if broadly accepted, eventually internalized within the canon of collective assumptions.

What Is the Working Class?

By Kevin Van Meter

"The working class struggles against capitalism because its objective conditions of life force it to, not because it is educated to some "higher" consciousness by some outside force such as a political party. It would seem, also, that the struggle against capitalism includes all forms and levels of struggle, from individual to collective, from local to national (or international), from economic to political. In fact, it would be hard to conceive how the more general or radical forms of struggle, such as general strikes, factory occupations, or workers' councils, could occur without the preexistence of more limited forms of struggle: sabotage, local strikes, the organization of unions, and the like." [1]

-Martin Glaberman and Seymour Faber, Working for Wages: The Roots of Insurgency

Drawing on Autonomist Marxism, both in its American and European guises, the following excerpt from Guerrillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible (AK Press, 2017) offers a conception of the working class that seeks to augment vague definitions of class and reinvigorate class politics in contemporary US revolutionary movements. However, a substantive, broad, and grounded definition is insufficient in-itself. Rather, an expanded and enhanced conception of class will require a process of workers' inquiry and radical organizing to result in a strengthening of working class power vis-à-vis capitalism and the state-apparatus, or what autonomists call class recomposition. For the working class, as Glaberman and Faber's note, is already struggling and it is the role of the organizer, the revolutionary, the militant to encounter, record, amplify, and circulate these struggles.

[…] Autonomists define the working class as such: autonomous from both capitalism and the official organization of the Left [political parties, nonprofit organizations, progressive religious groups, foundations, etc.], broadly including all those who work under capitalism, based in relationships between workers rather than as a structural component of the economy or sociological category. Autonomists focus on the refusal of work and how the class is composed. Let us review each element in kind.

Workers' autonomy

"The working class," Glaberman and Faber suggest, "struggles against capitalism because its objective conditions of life force it to." [2] Since capitalism requires that individuals work for wages or access income through state or familial sources (partners and children access income indirectly through the wage earner), the working class must struggle against capitalism to obtain resources beyond its initial, meager wage. Class struggle emerges directly from the point of production of commodities, be it widgets or labor power, and in the battles around the length and intensity of the workday. But what does the working class confront?

Capitalists by definition control capital. Capital includes the means of production (tools, factories, raw materials, energy, etc.) and financial resources (money) that are part of the production cycle, which is set in motion in order to produce commodities. "The individual commodity," in Marx's assessment, "appears [as capitalism's] elementary form." [3] [Autonomist Harry Cleaver…] believes that "the generalized imposition of the commodity-form has meant that forced work has become the fundamental means of organizing society-of social control." [4] Since capitalists cannot create value with the means of production alone, even with automation and machinery, labor power must be employed in the production process. Labor power and means of production are brought together to act upon raw materials to produce commodities that contain both use-value (practical utility) and exchange-value (quantity of commodities that can be exchange for said commodity). Commodities are improved as labor power acts upon them, adding value to them in the process (which becomes surplus value). Then capitalists sell commodities in the sphere of circulation. The surplus value they obtain is the value produced by workers over and above the cost of production. And each commodity contains residue from deposited labor power, as if the commodity has captured bits of a worker's life force and energy in the production process. [5]

Marx's tenth chapter in Capital, volume 1, "The Working Day," provides the impetus for the focus on labor power: "Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labor-power he has bought from him. If the worker consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist."[6] In effect, without the deployment of labor power as living labor in the production process capitalism cannot produce commodities. To cite biblical scripture, "the blood is the life." [7] Thus, living labor is the principal, necessary force in the production process; it is the host that capital, as dead labor, must have in order to live. The working class can rob capitalists, become Sabbatarians, or living labor can escape capitalist command and expend itself in cooperative, common endeavors. In this sense, at the point of production, at the very moment that the commodity is being produced through the expenditure of human labor power, the working class as living labor is an independent force, in operation autonomous from capitalism. And there are other moments during which it breaks free of capitalist discipline and the imposition of work entirely.

Capitalism attempts to maintain control over labor power at the same time as it efficiently exploits workers' ability to work. [8] To extract surplus value and hence profit, capitalism must organize the means of production and raw materials (what Marx called constant capital) and labor power (variable capital) in appropriate ratios. Since constant capital is used up at a relatively consistent rate, capitalists must pay workers less than the value they transfer to commodities in the course of the workday. It is in capitalists' interest to deploy labor power efficiently, periodically using labor-saving technologies such as automation to decrease the number of workers needed or replacing skilled workers with machines and unskilled ones.

Marx argued that the workday could only "vary within certain limits" and that hence the struggle around the workday was grounded in working hours, a "normal working day," and wages due for the rent of labor-power. Capital's interest "is purely and simply the maximum of labor-power that can be set in motion in a working day. It attains this objective by shortening the life of labour-power" as part of its "unmeasured drive" to accumulate capital.[9] A conflict emerges over the length and intensity of the workday, what Marx called absolute and relative strategies for creating surplus value. Relative surplus value strategy covers both the efficient exploitation of labor power and the use of machinery and ways of reorganizing production to increase the intensity of the exploitation of labor power. At times the working class has been successful in limiting capitalism's absolute surplus value strategy (winning the eight-hour day and weekend) and addressing relative surplus value (preventing automation and the replacing of skilled workers with machines and unskilled ones). Additional conflicts erupt between the amount of time needed for workers to gain enough wages to ready themselves to work another day, in addition to how that time is spent, and the time capitalism rents the worker to produce surplus value. [10] At these points of conflict the working class is struggling against capitalist authority. But Marx is only speaking about commodities as products here. He does not adequately address a particularly important commodity for capitalism: that of labor power itself.

"In Marx's account," Federici argues, "No other work intervenes to prepare the goods the workers consume or to restore physically or emotionally their capacity to work. No difference is made between commodity production and the production of the workforce. One assembly line produces both. Accordingly, the value of labor power is measured by the value of the commodities (food, clothing, housing) that have to be supplied to the worker, to 'the man, so that he can renew his life process.'" [11]

In orthodox Marxist (and adjacent workerist traditions) the emphasis on the production cycle ignores the cycle of reproduction of labor power, which arguably is the most important commodity in the capitalist system. Autonomists since Wages for Housework focus not just on the production of widgets but on the commodity of labor power. While the reproduction of labor power might appear to be a realm of relative freedom in the privacy of the home, especially with the feminist initiatives that have sought to reorganize social reproduction along more cooperative lines, capitalism and the state apparatus have launched countless counterattacks (wage freezes and reductions, welfare cuts, etc.) to exert control over this sector.

For capitalism the working class is simply labor power. Cleaver argues in Reading Capital Politically that the "working class as working class-defined politically-exists only when it asserts its autonomy as a class through its unity in struggle against its role as labour-power. Paradoxically, then, on the basis of this distinction, the working class is truly working class only when it struggles against its existence as a class. The outcome … is not the creation of a pure working class after the revolutionary overthrow of capital but rather the dissolution of the working class as such. "[12]

Broadly defined working class

[There are three] ways that autonomists define the working class. First, the class can "craft new ways of being and new forms of social relations." [13] In this it can force capitalism and the state to develop along new lines in addition to causing crises in these systems. Second, the working class is the primary antagonist in class struggle rather than simply being reactive to capitalism, and it is autonomous from capital, the state, and the official organizations of the Left. There is also a third general attribute that requires attention.

Autonomists define the working class broadly to include not only those working for wages (waged workers) but also those who obtain income through state benefits (welfare recipients) or are striving to obtain wages or income (the unemployed, disenrolled welfare beneficiaries), those whose work is unwaged (including students and housewives), and those who work to directly obtain basic needs for subsistence (such as slaves and peasants). It is important to acknowledge that while slaves are included in the expanded definition of the working class, African slaves in the Americas, as black proletarians, to use W.E.B. Du Bois's apt phrase, had a fundamentally different relationship with capitalism due to their bondage. [14] And in the same sense, peasants and landowners comprise classes, as "peasants are exploited by capital in the sphere of production." [15] While slaves and peasants are not generally understood to be part of formal, normal class relations, at least to Americans, they have been incorporated into contemporary strategies for accumulating capital.

In effect, as Glaberman and Faber contend, "workers work for others, who control the means of production," which is a social relation, and, as the Zerowork collective clarified, the working class is " defined by its struggle against capitalism and not by its productive function."[16] That is, "from capital's perspective" the working class is only a "factor of production" but from a working-class perspective it is a dynamic and complex agent, capable of its own liberation.

To summarize: in addition to what is considered the traditional manufacturing base, the industrial proletariat, this expanded notion of the working class includes students, housewives, slaves, peasants, the unemployed, welfare recipients, and workers in the technical and service industries. Hence the working class is defined in relation to work -be it waged or unwaged, productive or reproductive, material, immaterial, or affective-and to one another. But of course the owners of the means of production, as the owners of capital (i.e., capitalists), and their representatives-overseers, supervisors, bosses, managers-are directly defined by their relation to work, whereas bureaucrats, tax collectors, police, and security guards play key roles in disciplining the workforce and hence impose work indirectly upon the class as a whole. To differentiate between social classes, the specific relation to work needs to be identified. And a few issues need to be resolved: How is the working class composed? How and in what way is the working class "defined by its struggle against capitalism"?

Is the working class a structure or category?

What Autonomous Marxists and others are trying to accomplish with the concept of the working class is to explain the complexities of a set of human behaviors using a social classification. The time, energy, and very lives of the majority of the human species over the past five hundred years have been converted into labor power. Some individuals purchase this labor power, others manage and discipline it, and still more reproduce it. In a recent attempt at a definition of "class," Joanna Brenner offered, "Although the concept of class has not dropped from use, its contemporary meaning has become restricted to describing social stratification. Even in this sense, in which 'class' denoted a hierarchy of 'differences' (e.g., of income, education, culture), there is no agreed-upon meaning of class categories."[17] To delineate social stratification-working, middle, and upper class, with sub-demarcations such as lower-middle class-produces definitional and empirical problems. In this sense, class becomes an unchanging, fixed structural element in the economy or a sociological category applied universally to complex relations. Conceptions of class can be applied too rigidly or too vaguely as a form of individual prejudice.

Notions of class privilege and classism can make class seem just another item on the list of constraints imposed upon individuals. Class, Brenner writes, "risks being enveloped in a liberal discourse that focuses on individual transformation (e.g., 'recognizing one's privilege') while advancing moral imperatives (e.g., achieving more equal relations among people)."[18] Hence a contingent concept of class that considers the working class's level of integration into the production process must account for "historical specificity and try to account for the struggles over class." [19]

To address these problems anarchists and Marxists have argued that class is about power. In a similar fashion, Kathi Weeks postulates in The Problem with Work that class "is not a sociological category but a political one, and its boundaries depend on its particular composition at specific times and places." [20]

Refusal of work

The image of the working class comprising manual factory workers, usually white and male, disappears upon recognizing the refusals of slaves, peasants, prisoners, housewives, students, and office and service workers. The stereotype has always been a fiction, a narrow misrepresentation that has historically limited the potential of class struggle. According to autonomists, the dynamic, broadly defined working class becomes a class, a social actor, in relation to work only insofar as it is refused. The class makes itself through refusal and self-activity, against and beyond capitalism's attempt to make workers into commodities, nothing but labor power and potential labor power. Hence autonomists are interested in how the working class is composed vis-à-vis its struggles. That is, through the refusal of work, the working class becomes autonomous from capitalist command, the state apparatus, the party, and the union. At times these refusals force capitalism to develop new technologies and strategies to attack working-class power. Crises erupt within capitalism, or a "new era of social relations" is instituted as capitalism is restructured (as happened after the US Civil War, during the Green Revolution, and with the onslaught of "neoliberalism"). [21]

Refusal specifically refers to acts of ignoring, disobeying, circumventing, countering, rejecting, or pilfering by employed and unemployed, waged and unwaged, and productive and reproductive workers, as well as those whose work is affective and immaterial. These workers neither control their work nor choose the what, when, where, and how of their work until they refuse it or decide to reorganize capitalist relations entirely.

However, questions arise: What about those who accept the regime of work or even relish it? Aren't there some workers who don't resist? What about structural unemployment? How can you refuse work when there isn't any? The concept of the refusal of work draws our attention to phenomena and is not a claim about all workers or all people everywhere. Within the social aggregate of the working class, as with any population, there is a diversity of opinions, experiences, and desires. The working class becomes more than labor power for capitalism when it refuses the imposition of work. Moreover, work is imposed on two scales: by the boss on the individual worker, as well as on the sector of the population that must access work to obtain income in a capitalist society. The individual worker must perform tasks in the course of the workday under the direction of the boss, but work is also imposed upon employed, unemployed, and those of piecemeal or precarious employment due to the need to obtain money to survive. The inability to access work and hence a wage is part of the imposition of a regime of work that requires an "unemployed reserve army of workers" or "relative surplus population." [22] To refuse work as an unemployed person is to refuse the imposition that requires one to receive a wage to obtain the necessities of life. Moreover, the refusal of work is not necessarily a conscious activity. Employees routinely work to rule (follow rules in minute detail) in order to slow down productivity, take longer than allowed lunch breaks, and ignore instructions from a supervisor in order to accomplish a work task. Each of these is an act of resistance.

If the working class is defined in part by its refusal of the imposition of work, then what can be said of those bosses and bureaucrats who impose work in one instance and refuse it in the next? Are these too part of the working class? The IWW adage that "the working class and employing class have nothing in common" is apropos here, and Wobblies exclude from membership those who have the power over wages and hiring or firing. In this definition an individual boss clearly imposes work upon individual workers, but bosses also impose work upon the general population as part of the aggregate capitalist class. Members of the working class, due to their position, have work imposed upon them that they cannot redistribute in the realm of production. (Historically, however, male workers were accustomed to redistributing work to wives, children, and unwaged workers performing the work of social reproduction. If working husbands' wages were cut, often wives were forced to do the same with less. Due to the struggles of women, gender-nonconforming people, and others against the patriarchal, nuclear family, this redistribution of household work has become less common.)

The working class becomes an active, possibly revolutionary subject, rather than simply an economic category or an inactive structural element in production, when it creates counter-communities and refuses work though everyday resistance, overt rebellions, and aboveground organizing. The working class as structure or category is made by capitalism, whereas the working class, in its own making, is a dynamic, active, and autonomous force.[23] But a worker's having relationships with other workers does not automatically include one in the class. If a worker is part of the structural imposition of work-not in the modest sense of setting schedules, taking breaks, or making minor production decisions but in the sense of imposing work and ensuring the effective exploitation of labor power-then they are not part of this autonomous class, regardless of relationships with other workers. Further, the relationships of the autonomous class are determined in situ: in relation to particular regimes of work, specific forms of resistance, and precise relationships between members of the class. The composition of the working class, where battle lines are drawn and positions are taken, is ascertained in the context of working-class struggle in particular times and spaces. Therefore, determining working class composition, its boundaries and limitations, in autonomist parlance begins with "reading the struggles" of the refusal of work and the kinds of relationships taking place therein, with due consideration to the divisions and forms of oppression.[24] In these contexts, the new society is established and recorded with the possibility of other arrangements of productive, reproductive, cooperative, and creative activities, ones that address real human needs and desires, can be forged.

Class composition

One of the larger questions before us, and which encompasses this definition of class, is how to understand everyday resistance under different regimes of power (potestas). Periodically systems are replaced with new forms and capitalism is reorganized, partly in attempts to attack working-class power (potentia). It is important to understand the relations of power, production, and social reproduction as capitalism and the state apparatus seek to coordinate, capture, and impose. To produce and expand upon an analysis of workers' activities, an approach has been developed from the perspective of the working class in struggle, that of class composition. "By political recomposition," the Zerowork collective states, "we mean the level of unity and homogeneity that the working class reaches during a cycle of struggle in the process of going from one political composition to another. Essentially, it involves the overthrow of capitalist divisions, the creation of new unities between different sectors of the class, and an expansion of the boundaries of what the 'working class' comes to include." [25]

In an article titled "Marxian Categories, the Crisis of Capital and the Constitution of Social Subjectivity Today," Cleaver grounds the concept of class in concrete social relations, and brings us closer to the contemporary period. Class composition, he writes, is "explicitly designed [by autonomists] to grasp, without reduction, the divisions and power relationships within and amongst the diverse populations on which capital seeks to maintain its domination of work throughout the social factory-understood as including not only the traditional factory but also life outside of it which capital has sought to shape for the reproduction of labor power."[26]

Autonomists begin with a workers' inquiry by "reading the struggles," recording everyday resistance and overt rebellions, as the working class creates new relationships and new subjectivities, escapes capitalist command (even temporarily), and is recomposed (and often decomposed) vis-à-vis its struggle with capitalism and the state apparatus. The working class politically recomposes itself through the refusal of work and the "craft[ing of] new ways of being and new forms of social relations." As the working class acts in its own interests it goes through a process of political recomposition. Then, as capitalism and the state attack working-class power, they seek to decompose the class through cutting wages, undermining union organizing efforts and worker legal protections, instituting technological developments, imposing "austerity," raising the costs of reproduction, and fomenting divisions along lines of race, gender, sexuality, national origin, age, and ability, among others.

As Nick Dyer-Witheford notes, "The process of composition / decomposition / recomposition constitutes a cycle of struggle." [27] These cycles of struggle accumulate, furthering the contradictions and crises of capitalism. In this sense, according to Antonio Negri, the working class is a "dynamic subject, an antagonistic force, tending toward its own independent identity."[28] In this way, the working class is "defined by its struggle against capitalism." While it has thus far been implied, autonomists do not view the working class as a structure or category of social stratification. In the The Making of the English Working Class E. P. Thompson argued,

By class I understand a historical phenomena, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness. I do not see class as a "structure," nor even as a "category," but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships. More than this, the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. Like any other relationship, it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomize its structure.… A relationship must always be embodied in real people and in a real context.… If we stop history at a given point, then there are no classes but simply a multitude of individuals with a multitude of experiences. But if we watch these men [sic] over an adequate period of social change, we observe patterns in their relationships, their ideas, and their institutions. Class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition. [29]

Accordingly, class is neither a structural component of the economy nor a sociological category. Seeing class as structure limits the working class to a mere position within the economy rather than a dynamic force. Class as a category relegates it to income or education level, waged industrial work, or sector of the population defined by party apparatchiks, union bureaucrats, wonky academics, or nonprofit do-gooders. Perennially someone will yell out at a radical meeting or gathering, "We have to get workers involved!" While ignoring the simple fact that all those assembled are workers, this is using class as an a priori sociological category. To define the working class relationally requires a rigorous inquiry and analysis of the contingency, subjectivity, and internal dynamics of a social aggregate of individuals ("sectors of the class") that must obtain wages, income, or subsistence directly (waged work, welfare, payment in goods and services) or indirectly (children, partner's wage). Hence the working class can be seen as the sector of the population that experiences the imposition of conditions that make work necessary. Through the refusal of this imposition, internal class relations are furthered, the class politically recomposes itself, and the possibility of a new society beyond capitalism is fostered. Then, of course, the working class comes into conflict with forces that control the means of production (capitalists), manage these means (overseers, landowners, supervisors, bosses, and managers), and maintain larger social relations that enforce the mode of production in the society in which capitalism and the state are functioning (relations with the likes of bureaucrats, tax collectors, police, and security guards). All must work, even capitalists. As Henry Ford boldly declared, "I don't expect to retire. Every man must work, that's his natural destiny." [30] For the bourgeoisie, what was once referred to as the "professional-managerial class," escaping the worst violence of these relations is possible through the coordination and imposition of work on others, even as it is imposed upon their own bodies.[31] In order to better control the working class, police and security guards are drawn from among the working class. As police and rental cops, members of the working class gain authority and a small degree of escape from their own powerlessness. Through their management and control of the working class outside of the factory, work is imposed upon the population in addition to the on-the-job impositions. Each social class has a complex set of internal and external relations such as these.

To suggest that the working class is defined by its relationships requires three things: "reading the struggles," determining the divisions that exist within the class, and ensuring that sectors of the working class aren't omitted from our conceptions and organizing. Agricultural and domestic workers were excluded from the Wagner Act, which passed in 1935 and serves as the foundation for labor law in the US. The exclusion of agricultural workers was tacitly accepted by sectors of the union movement until the rise of the United Farm Workers, which eventually led to the passage of the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act in 1983. Domestic workers would have to wait until the development of a workers' center campaign that pushed for the 2010 Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights in New York State, with a few other states following. Housewives who did not earn a wage were also not considered working class. Autonomists sought to overcome these exclusions conceptually since the working class itself had endeavored to overcome these organizationally and politically. In this way, the concept of the working class can be carefully extended further to address other forms of exploitation and oppression, domination and control as it pairs with other conceptions in revolutionary theory.

An autonomist theory of class requires broad definitions of workers' autonomy and work refusal and an inquiry into the composition of the working class vis-à-vis capitalism. By beginning with a wide-ranging description and striving to understand class dynamics and struggles in particular contexts, revolutionaries can approach the working class as it is rather than as they imagine it or wish it to be.

Autonomists view the working class as all those who are refusing the imposition of work-employed and unemployed, waged and unwaged, productive and reproductive, material, immaterial, and affective. Not just those toiling in fields, factories, and workshops but those working in offices and coffee shops, kitchens, bedrooms, and classrooms. To review, work is simultaneously imposed on the population and upon individual workers. These workers face specific hours, wages or lack of wages, and pace on the job, and if they quit or are fired the need to work to obtain income is ever present. The "guerrillas of desire," as I see them, are those refusing the imposition of work on the terrain of everyday life both as individual workers and members of the working class. Theft of time and materials, feigned illness, sabotage, arson, murder, exodus, and the myriad of other forms this refusal takes-as well as the process of creating counter-communities-can be found in everyday life. In his classic Workers' Councils, Dutch Marxist Anton Pannekoek states that "every shop, every enterprise, even outside of times of sharp conflict, of strikes and wage reductions, is the scene of a constant silent war, of a perpetual struggle, of pressure and counter-pressure." [32]68 It is through Pannekoek's lens that we begin to see the guerrillas of desire not only as a historical subset of slaves, peasants, and workers in the industrial and social factory but as a subset of the working class today struggling against the general imposition of work. By subset I mean that these guerrillas do not represent all of the struggles of the working class or the entirety of the struggle against the imposition of work but resist outside the gaze or comprehension of capitalism and the state apparatus. It is from the concepts of the working class and everyday resistance that the metaphor of the guerrillas of desire is derived.

Kevin Van Meter is an activist-scholar based in the Pacific Northwest. He is coeditor of Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States (AK Press, 2010) and author of the recently released monograph Guerrillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible (AK Press, 2017).

Notes

[1] Martin Glaberman and Seymour Faber, Working for Wages: The Roots of Insurgency (New York: General Hall, 1998), 8.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990), 125.

[4] Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (Leeds: Anti/Theses; San Francisco: AK Press, 2000), 82.

[5] It should be noted that I am speaking about capitalist production in an abstract, ideal way. Furthermore, this immediate process of production does not address financial commodities or financialization.

[6] Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 342.

[7] Deuteronomy 12:23.

[8] For Mario Tronti, exploitation is necessary since "the conditions of capital are in the hands of the workers" as "there is no active life in capital without the living activity of labor power," hence "the capitalist class … is in fact subordinate to the working class." Mario Tronti, "The Strategy of Refusal," in Autonomia: Post-Political Politics (Los Angles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 31.

[9] Marx, Capital, vol. 1 1, 376-77.

[10] Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse (Brooklyn: Autonomedia; London: Pluto, 1991), 72; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 341. Negri is also referring to Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 282-89.

[11] Silvia Federici, "The Reproduction of Labor Power in the Global Economy and the Unfinished Feminist Revolution," in evolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2012) , 93. Federici is referring to Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 376-77.

[12] Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically, 83-84. Emphasis in original.

[13] Harry Cleaver, "Kropotkin, Self-Valorization, and the Crisis of Marxism," Anarchist Studies 2, no. 2 (1994): 119

[14] The phrase "black proletariat" is from W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935. For an autonomist take on the matter, see Ferruccio Gambino's "W. E. B. Du Bois and the Proletariat in Black Reconstruction," Libcom.org, https://libcom.org/library/w-e-b-du-bois-proletariat-black-reconstruction-ferruccio-gambino. Historian of slavery and capitalism John Ashworth suggests, "We may define class relationally in terms of the relationship between two groups at the point of production, where one group is seeking to appropriate to itself some or all of the labor of the other. On this definition slaves and slaveholders comprise classes." John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic , vol. 1, Commerce and Comprise, 1820-1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 13.

[15] Ann Lucas de Rouffignac, The Contemporary Peasantry in Mexico (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1985), 55.

[16] Glaberman and Faber, Working for Wages, 13; Zerowork Collective, "Introduction to Zerowork 1," in Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War 1973-1992, ed. Midnight Notes Collective (New York: Autonomedia, 1992), 111-12. Emphasis in original.

[17] Joanna Brenner, "Class," in Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle , eds. Kelly Fritsch, Clare O'Connor, and AK Thompson, (Chico: CA: AK Press, 2016), 80.

[18] Ibid., 85.

[19] Stanley Aronowitz, How Class Works: Power and Social Movement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 62.

[20] Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 94.

[21] Antonio Negri, "Potentialities of a Constituent Power," in Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 273.

[22] Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, trans. David McLellan, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 96; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 794.

[23] As Cleaver offered, "The struggle against the imposition of work has been central to the history of the making of the working class, from the initial resistance to the original imposition of work in the period of primitive accumulation through the long centuries of resisting and avoiding the expansion of work time (longer, harder hours) to the more recent aggressive struggles to reduce work time and liberate more open-ended time for self-determined activity." Harry Cleaver, "Theses on Secular Crisis in Capitalism: The Insurpassability of Class Antagonisms," paper presented at Rethinking Marxism Conference, Amherst, Massachusetts, November 13, 1992; https://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/secularcrisis.html.

[24] George Caffentzis has used the phrase "reading the struggles" in numerous public presentations over the past two decades (I can attest to this). See also Caffentzis, In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland: PM Press, 2013).

[25] Zerowork Collective, "Introduction to Zerowork 1."

[26] Harry Cleaver, "Marxian Categories, the Crisis of Capital and the Constitution of Social Subjectivity Today," in Revolutionary Writing: Common Sense Essays in Post-Political Politics , ed. Werner Bonefeld (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2003), 43. Originally published in Common Sense ("Journal of the Edinburgh Conference of Socialist Economists"), no. 14 (1993): 32-55.

[27] Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 66. Emphasis in original.

[28] Toni Negri, "Archeology and Project: The Mass Worker and The Social Worker," in Revolution Retrieved: Selected Writings of Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis and New Social Subjects, 1967-83 (London: Red Notes, 1988), 209.

[29] E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 9-11.

[30] Henry Ford, quoted by Willis Thornton, New York World-Telegram, July 24, 1933.

[31] Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich, "The Professional-Managerial Class," in Between Labor and Capital, ed. Pat Walker (Boston: South End Press, 1979).

[32] Anton Pannekoek, Workers Councils (Oakland: AK Press, 2002), 8.

The Question of Hierarchy: An Interview with Colin Jenkins

By Brenan Daniels

This is a recent email interview I did with Hampton Institute founder and Social Economics Dept. Chair, Colin Jenkins, on the nature and problems with hierarchical structures, which he discusses in his article entitled Deconstructing Workplace Hierarchies: On Contrived Leadership and Arbitrary Positions of Power .

Some people would argue that hierarchies are needed as people aren't really capable of leading themselves or that if they did, we wouldn't have a stable modern society. What is your response to that?

First, I would ask where this "stable modern society" is? For a majority of the world's population, life is incredibly unstable. For many, life is dire. Even in a so-called "advanced" society like the US, tens of millions of people suffer from homelessness, food insecurity, joblessness, a lack of reliable and affordable healthcare, and with no means to feed and clothe their children. Tens of millions must rely on government assistance. Tens of millions do not receive adequate education. Tens of millions live paycheck-to-paycheck and can't pay their bills. And millions are terrorized by police forces and government agents in their own neighborhoods. Most Americans have less than $1,000 in savings , if any, and studies have estimated that more than half of all working Americans are one paycheck away from being homeless . And even those who appear to be getting by just fine are actually buried in debt, with credit card debt averaging $16,000 per household , mortgage and car payments that are barely doable, and student loan debt averaging at $49,000 per borrower, many of whom are in no position to ever pay that back. Our collective existence, despite a general appearance of comfort, is extremely fragile. And this economic reality doesn't even begin to touch on the compounded social realities lived by historically marginalized sections of the working class - people of color, women, immigrants, etc… The US is a ticking time bomb on the verge of exploding at any moment. Stability is a mirage.

Second, the idea that "people aren't capable of leading themselves" stems from a need to maintain fundamentally unequal societies where a very small percentage of the population controls most of the wealth and power. This has become part of the dominant ideology of most of the modern world. Because, quite simply, when a very small percentage of a particular population controls everything, there must be various ways to justify and enforce this control.

One way is through brute force or the threat of such force, which the modern nation-state holds a monopoly on. This is accomplished through the mere construction of a criminal justice system that has laws and ways of enforcing those laws. Over time, these laws become equated with some vague form of morality that is not questioned by most. You see the effects of this everywhere. For instance, when people try to condemn political struggles for doing things that are "illegal," they have subconsciously bought into the idea that written laws which have been drawn up by millionaire politicians , who are directly influenced by billionaires, should be revered as some sort of moral code. In reality, many of these laws are constructed to keep our extremely unequal society intact, and are directly tied to protecting those who own this illegitimate wealth and power . They are designed to keep most of us powerless and stuck in our increasingly precarious lives. Under such a society, a person who does not have access to food for themselves or their family is punished for taking food. A person who is homeless is punished for squatting in an abandoned building. A person who does not have medical care is punished (financially, if not criminally) for seeking medical attention. So on and so on… and all of this takes place in a very strict hierarchical arrangement where the appearance of "stability" remains at the forefront. It's an inherently unjust arrangement for so many, and the threat of force is constantly held over our heads to maintain this façade of stability.

Another way to justify and enforce this control is through what Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci referred to as "cultural hegemony," or dominant culture. Ruling classes throughout history have relied on both formal and informal channels to mold a dominant culture (ideology) that supports their rule. This can be established through a formal education system, through media sources, through organized religion and churches, etc… Under capitalism, this doesn't have to be done in a conspiratorial kind of way because the basic inequities stemming from the economic system create a sociopolitical structure that mimics and protects these inequities through social, cultural, political, and "legal" avenues. One of the results of this is a widespread, conditioned belief that we are not capable of caring for ourselves, our families, and our communities; and thus need so-called "extraordinary" people (politicians) to do this for us. It is a lie.

In a social sense, why do you think that social hierarchies and larger societal norms still reign when we don't seem to need them anymore? (Social norms were important in the early days of humanity as if one wasn't part of the group, they often wouldn't survive, but now it is rather easy to flourish alone or find people who you link with.)

Social hierarchies still exist because they are a natural extension from the more tangible/structural economic hierarchy. The dominant culture in this type of society needs such social norms. The Marxist theory of base and superstructure is useful in this regard. A materialist conception of history tells us that society is constructed on an economic base, or is based on the modes of production, because it is this fundamental arrangement that ultimately determines how people fulfill their basic needs. Everything else builds off of that arrangement. In a capitalist system, a large majority of the population is forced to rely on wage labor. This is an incredibly fragile and unstable existence because we are completely dependant on a privileged minority to provide us with jobs and living wages, things that capitalism inherently cannot provide to all. So, most of us are set up for failure from birth. This is why Frederick Douglass recognized that a "slavery of wages [is] only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery." Hence, Marx's focus on exploitation and alienation. This structural oppression created by capitalism explains the need for a Welfare State, because societal unrest would be inevitable without the state supplementing these inherent and widespread inequities.

So, according to this analysis, there is a superstructure that builds from this unequal base, and this includes social, cultural, and political realities. Naturally, the superstructure mimics the base, while it also helps to maintain it. In doing so, these corollary developments tend to take on the same characteristics as the base, which, as already noted, consists of a high degree of alienation and exploitation. This basically means that social systems stemming from an inherently exploitative base tend to become exploitative themselves. One of the best examples of this is white supremacy, which is an artificial system of valuing human worth based on skin color. White supremacy is a modern cultural phenomenon that extends throughout the superstructure in both overt and undetected or insidious ways. And it is a valuable tool used by the capitalist/ruling class to create division within the working-class majority. This is why Malcolm X once proclaimed that "you can't have capitalism without racism."

Other cultural phenomena like patriarchy and homophobia work the same way. These things easily catch on within the working class because they are a source of empowerment for an otherwise powerless group. We're all economically disenfranchised, but poor and working-class white men can still grasp on to whiteness, "manliness," misogyny, and homophobia as sources of power and social dominance. You see this psyche develop not only in white people, but also throughout the working class. Some black men, despite their own intense structural oppression, will become misogynistic or homophobic as a source of empowerment. A particular immigrant community will dehumanize another immigrant community as a source of empowerment. American workers across the board will target and dehumanize immigrants. So on and so on. What we're seeing here is the formation of social hierarchies within the working class, all of which mimic the hierarchy created by the economic base. Tragically, this perceived power over others within the working class is easily accessible, and it's a cheap and toxic source of empowerment. But it is a good thing for the capitalist class, as it keeps working-class angst directed within its own ranks and away from the real culprits - the rich. It's the ultimate distraction.

On a related note, these social hierarchies are worthy of examination to all of us who oppose the capitalist system. When we look at developments within the superstructure, we can strategize and build liberation movements that will ultimately break them down, which will in turn allow us to build a formidable resistance against the economic base. This is why intersectionality is crucial. But intersectionality only works if it is based in a fundamentally anti-capitalist orientation. Because if we don't approach this with the ultimate goal of attacking and destroying the economic base, it won't matter in the end. We'll find ourselves in the same position, only under a multi-cultural, multi-sex, non-gender-descript boot, as opposed to a "white, cisgender, male" boot. And this is the pitfall that identity politics fall into. Capitalism has the ability to accommodate these types of political movements by simply allowing individuals from hyper-marginalized sections of the working class to assume positions of power within these hierarchies. This approach is only about assimilation; and because of this, it only demands that that the power structure become more inclusive, not that the power structure be eliminated. Capitalism can and will seek to appease this kind of tokenism without changing its inherently authoritative and exploitative structure.

People seem to be (at least somewhat) against hierarchy, from having an intense dislike of their bosses to wanting a level playing field. Why do we not see more people moving away or speaking out against hierarchy? So many times, it seems that the very people at the bottom are the ones who argue in favor of it.

Yes, definitely. This is a form of cognitive dissonance that we all experience from time to time, and I reflect on it briefly in the piece: "…organizations are often able to stoke a cognitive dissonance among its workforce, which simultaneously puts forth a healthy dose of faith in the 'team approach' by day while complaining about the incompetent and overbearing bosses by night."

This particular line refers to the contradictions we feel in the workplace. The daytime mentality is one that is a product of constant conditioning, which tells us that hierarchies are needed, that we are naturally dependent on bosses, and that we would be lost without them. The nighttime mentality is more natural and will creep into our heads at times, causing us to question everything we're conditioned to believe during the day. Daily interactions with bosses plant the seed for these realizations, as we recognize their incompetence or at the very least their lack of exceptionalism. This will inevitably bring us to consider that maybe we don't need them, maybe we are just as (if not more) competent, that there really is no meritocracy, and that if they happened to suddenly disappear one day they probably wouldn't be missed.

This is, of course, true. We don't need them. But the conditioning that we are subjected to in most aspects of our lives tells us otherwise, and this makes it difficult for many to realize that truth. To consider the very notion of "supervision" and "management" as anything but insulting is truly amazing, when you think about it, yet most struggle with this dissonance. And understandably so, since the conditioning is intense and begins at such a young age. This reminds me of the notion of " bullshit jobs " that David Graeber has talked about in length, and is in the process of writing a book about. His angle is more focused on working-class jobs throughout the system, but I think this same line of thinking can be applied to jobs that fill the hierarchy just for the sake of filling the hierarchy.

In addition to this conditioning, there is also a mentality that becomes fairly prevalent among those who exist on the lower end of the hierarchy, and it speaks to the old adage, "if you can't beat em, join em." It is the mentality that creates the toadies for bullies, that creates house slaves for the master, etc… it forms whenever someone has been psychologically beaten into submission. These are the folks who have given themselves completely to the system, to the powers, to their bosses and overseers because, quite frankly, they simply have no fight in them, no self-esteem, and no dignity left. They are the first to dish the dirt to the bosses, the first to scab during a strike, the first to call the police on their neighbor, the first to serve the powerful with whatever is needed, and always at the sake of their class peers on the lower end of the hierarchy. These folks will always argue in favor of hierarchy, despite their lowly position in it, because they've decided that it's easier to accept it, support it, and invest in it, rather than fight it. And, in many respects, they're right. Fighting power isn't easy. It often has disastrous personal consequences for those who partake in it. As the Russian anarchist Sergey Nechayez wrote in the opening of his famous Catechism of a Revolutionary, "The revolutionary is a doomed man." There is a lot of truth to this.

How do people reinforce hierarchy in their everyday lives and how can they fight back against it?

I think basic daily human interactions reinforce these cultural hierarchies that the base relies on. There is an ongoing debate within the Left about the power and usefulness of language. This debate is intimately connected with things like "privilege discourse," "political correctness," "call-out culture," and identity politics. Many leftists who are loyal to materialist analysis, and who spend a lot of time railing against post-new left discourse, minimize the importance of language. Many younger leftists, who are more inclined to intersectionality or who enter the Left through a lens of identity politics, place a premium on policing language. While I realize the dangers that are associated with this type of " post-new left discourse " (primarily when it is not based in anti-capitalism), I also agree that there is something to language and how it reinforces the hierarchies that we are ultimately seeking to bring down.

Dominant vernacular is rooted in dominant culture, no? If we are to believe in historical materialism and the reciprocal relationship between the base and superstructure, then it seems consistent to also believe that all of the societal norms that development within this cultural hegemony stem from this same base. Because of this, language tends to be misogynistic, homophobic, white supremacist, and classist. This is reflected in media, Hollywood, advertisement, talk radio, and sports, and as well as in our daily interactions with one another.

It can be very subtle. Using the n-word reinforces white supremacy. Using the f-word reinforces homophobia. Claiming that someone has "no class" reinforces bourgeois culture. Using the term "white trash" reinforces white supremacy by implying that "trash" is defaulted as being non-white. Calling women "hoes" and "whores," while at the same time basing their human value in attractiveness or sexuality, reinforces patriarchy. Praising someone as being "like a boss" reinforces capitalist hierarchy. Worshipping celebrities reinforces a capitalist culture that determines human value based in wealth, or the lack thereof. Being absorbed in consumerism reinforces a culture that determines human value on the brand of clothing or shoes one is wearing, or the kind of car they drive, or the house they live in. These types of things quite literally place varying degrees of value on human lives, thus reinforcing various forms of social hierarchy. And something as simple as language, or the ways in which we interact with one another, emboldens the power structure(s) that we as leftists seek to destroy.

In what ways do you see hierarchy expanding or intensifying now that the US has moved to a 'service economy,' apparently in which there will be an increase in hierarchical authority, compared to when the US was a manufacturing nation? How has the dismantling of unions aided (as of current) or helped to dissuade (in the past) workplace hierarchy?

I am not sure the service economy will necessarily expand or intensify hierarchical arrangements in any structural sense. But you're right in suggesting that a move away from an industrial/manufacturing economy has made workers more vulnerable and powerless within these hierarchies. Service-sector work is much more precarious, is typically low-wage with very few benefits, and often does not include any kind of healthcare coverage or retirement plan. And the service-sector environment leaves workers on a virtual island, in that it doesn't offer the same potential for collectivization as the traditional shop floor once did. Without collectivization, workers are basically powerless.

The dismantling of unions went hand in hand with the offshoring of manufacturing jobs. Since the neoliberal revolution that was ushered in by Reagan, the share of workers who belong to unions in the private sector has fallen from 34 percent to 7 percent. I believe 1 in 3 public sector workers are still in unions. Overall though, union membership has plummeted in the US, which is a very bad thing for the working class. Under capitalism, our only leverage against capital is either (1) the government, or (2) labor unions. The government is now owned by capital, and thus acts solely in its interest. So that's effectively out of the equation. And unions have not only eroded, but many that have endured have taken on a corporate hierarchical structure themselves, where union executives are often completely out of touch with membership. Union leaders tend to be in bed with corporate politicians, an arrangement that is contradictory to the purpose of unions.

We see this contradictory nature when unions routinely endorse corporate Democrats who represent capital. We see it when unions agree to no-strike clauses. We see it when so-called leadership gives concession after concession, year after year, until there's virtually nothing left to bargain for. And we see it in this bureaucratic, corporatized union culture of today, where demands have been replaced by requests. Unions will often take reactionary stands that defy international and universal solidarity. We saw this recently with the AFL-CIO endorsing the Dakota Access Pipeline. You see it with police unions or prison employee unions, all of which side with capital and the social hierarchies that extend from capital, ultimately oppressing large sectors of the working class.

With the erosion of authentic labor unions, we've become much more vulnerable to these extreme hierarchies as a whole. And without these types of unions, workers simply have no chance against the powerful interests of capital. So, yes, the degrees to which we are smothered by these hierarchies will only intensify in this environment, especially if we continue to place our hopes in the government, politicians, and corporatized labor unions. This is exactly why I'm a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, which is "one big union" that is rooted in revolutionary industrial unionism.

How does your argument regarding hierarchy creating a lack of trust square with this modern idea that work places need to be 'open areas' so that people can 'bond?'

That's a good question. We read a lot about this new-age sort of workplace organization stemming from Silicon Valley, Google, Apple, etc… This idea that workplaces should be more carefree, less constrained. I've read about such experiments where workers can take naps, bring their pets to work, have access to fun activities directly in the workplace. And when you look at workplace organization in some European countries, you see that many companies have attempted to do away with traditional hierarchical structures to make workers feel more "at home" in a relaxed environment.

The fact that companies are experimenting with these 'open areas' confirms, at the very least, that they are aware of the archaic and inhumane nature of traditional hierarchical workplaces. This move also reflects some studies that have been done regarding productivity, which have suggested that workers are more productive in environments that are less constrictive, and that workers typically are only productive for a few hours a day. So, if anything, it's an attempt by companies to adjust with the times and do away with old forms of organization.

Unfortunately, attempts like these only tend to create more internal contradictions to capitalism. Attempting to mask the inherent nature of capitalism only goes so far. And the "open-office model" that Google became known for is not really an effort to make hierarchical structures more horizontal. It is concerned only with literal workspace, not with the ways in which the hierarchy operates on a structural level. And while it may appear to be benevolent on the surface, it often has more insidious motives. A 2014 article by Lindsey Kaufman touched on some of these issues, pointing out that "these new floor plans are ideal for maximizing a company's space while minimizing costs," and that "bosses love the ability to keep a closer eye on employees," with less physical barriers obstructing them. Studies cited in the article suggested that these open-office experiments were not beneficial to workers, at least from the workers' point of view. A study found that many workers are "frustrated by distractions" and lack of privacy, both sound and visual. And workers reported that these new floor plans did not ease interactions with colleagues, as intended, because this was never viewed as a problem to begin with.

With these results in mind, it seems such attempts have been a failure. And it makes you wonder why they were attempted in the first place. Was it really to create a "friendlier" atmosphere, or was it rooted in something more sinister? Understanding the way capitalism operates, it's safe to assume the latter. Either way, despite the motivations, the capitalist structure still remains - which means that most workers are creating massive amounts of wealth for executives and shareholders in exchange for wages and salaries that do not equal their contribution. If they make enough to lead comfortable lives, they may be more willing to overlook this structural exploitation. But it still exists. Bosses still remain, and workers are still treated as commodities, no matter how glossed over the physical workplace appears. There are still those who make more, in many cases a whole lot more, for doing much less (the pursuit of "money and idleness" that I referenced in the piece). And some who rake in large amounts of money for doing absolutely nothing, and without even stepping foot in the workplace. That is the fundamental nature of both capitalism and hierarchies. No amount of makeup can change this.

What is your take on the literature and ideas surrounding employee relationship management? What do you think is the actual idea around it on a structural level?

This type of literature is designed to address the inequities by essentially covering them up as best as possible. Their purpose is two-fold: to teach bosses how to get the most from their workers; and to get workers to buy into a "team approach" that convinces them they're vested in the mission in some way. This is accomplished basically through propaganda, or a conscious effort to downplay the coercive nature of this relationship. On the one end it provides bosses, supervisors, and managers with tools and tactics rooted in persuasion, to get workers to think, behave, and perceive themselves in a way that is detached as far from reality as possible. Since human beings don't typically react well to being treated and used as tools, to be manipulated, prodded, directed, etc, employers find its useful to mask this reality as best as possible.

So this type of literature is designed to give bosses ways to obstruct this reality. To interact with their workers in ways that mask the coercive power they wield over them. And they tend to be very successful in doing this… so much so that many workers truly believe they are vested in the businesses they work for, or at the very least will rep that business in a positive way to friends and family, if only to mask their shitty realities to themselves. A shitty reality that basically amounts to us spending most of our waking hours in a place we do not want to be in, doing something we would rather not be doing, so we can get a paycheck every few weeks, so we can pay our bills, so we can scrape out a living for another few weeks. For most of us, it's a never-ending cycle that we'll never escape. It's a miserable, inhumane existence where life is lived a week at a time, or two weeks at a time, essentially from one paycheck to the next. And the best we can hope for is to stay afloat until the next paycheck, so we can start over again. And to add insult to injury, we're told that we "should feel lucky to even have a job." That's the world capitalism brings us.

So this workplace literature, and the management tactics that come from it, plays into the cognitive dissonance that I mentioned earlier. On a structural level, the idea is merely to keep things churning by creating alternative realities that workers can be proud of. To use the plantation analogy, it really is a way to instill the house-slave mentality in each and every one of us. It won't work for some, but it works well enough for most. Even those struck with this cognitive dissonance will often lean toward that which makes them feel vested, secure, proud, respected, appreciated, etc… even though these feeling are not consistent with reality. It is a form of coping for many, and corporate literature will certainly exploit that and drill it home. And we as workers, stuck in our miserable realities, will often accept it if it helps us cope. Because we need that paycheck.

Violence, Counter-Violence, and the Question of the Gun

By Devon Bowers and Colin Jenkins

In June 2016, the Democrats had a sit-in on the House floor to push for gun legislation that had been blocked. It has been noted by numerous writers the myriad of problems with this bill[1][2] [3] as well as the hypocrisy of the sit-in itself.[4] However, this article is to talk about something deeper: the question of violence, so-called "gun control," and how these issues relate to politics and the working-class majority in its place within the socio-capitalist hierarchy.

There are arguably three main types of violence which will be premised in this analysis: state violence, group violence, and revolutionary violence. The first two forms of violence, coming from the state and groups empowered by the status quo, are designed to oppress. The third form, coming from revolutionaries and the systematically oppressed, is designed to strike back at this oppression for the purpose of liberation. The first two types (state and group) are violent, or offensive, by nature. The last type (revolutionary) is counter-violent, or defensive, by nature.

State Violence

Violence and politics are historically intertwined, so much so that the definition of the state is "a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory." [5] Due to this monopoly of violence, the state is able to put restrictions on what kinds of weapons people can have, and if they can have any at all. Because of the state's monopoly on the use of violence, which is directed at citizens of that state whenever deemed necessary, the issue of "gun control" is rather peculiar. It is also fairly unique to the United States, a country that was born at the hands of the gun, and a country that has been largely shaped by the degrees of "liberty" reflected in gun ownership among the populace. In modern society, gun control seems like a common-sense measure as it is quite obvious to many that people shouldn't have the right to possess tanks, Javelins, Scuds, nuclear weapons, and other military-grade weaponry. However, as technology in weaponry increases, so too does the power of the state in its monopoly of violence. Because of this natural progression of state power based solely in military hardware, a side effect of gun control is that it creates a polarization of power between the state and its citizenry. In other words, the state continues to build its arsenal with more powerful and effective weaponry, while the citizenry continues to face restrictions on access to weaponry. While this scenario may seem reserved for the Alex-Jones-watching, prepper-obsessed fringes, the reality is that, within an economic system (capitalism) that naturally creates extreme hierarchies and masses of dispossessed people, it is (and has been) a serious problem in the context of domestic political and social movements.

In the U.S. (as with many countries), there are underlying class and racial issues related to the state's monopoly of violence and its restriction of access to guns for its citizens. Looking from a historical perspective, when it comes to violence at the hands of the state, it is regularly used on the side of capital. One only need look at the history of the American labor movement during the first half of the twentieth century, which was an extremely violent time. Within the context of class relations under capitalism, whereas the state represents moneyed interests and a powerful minority, the working-class majority has faced an uphill battle not only in its struggle to gain basic necessities, but also in its residual struggle against an increasingly-armed state apparatus that is inherently designed to maintain high levels of dispossession, poverty, and income inequality. A primary example of the state using violence to aid capital is the Ludlow Massacre.

In the year 1913, in the southern Colorado counties of Las Animas and Huerfano, miners (with the help of the United Mine Workers of America) decided to strike. They argued for union recognition by the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, an increase in wages, and an eight-hour work day, among other things. In response, the company kicked a number of miners off of the company land, and brought in the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency which specialized in breaking coal strikes. The Agency initiated a campaign of harassment against the strikers, which "took the form of high-powered searchlights playing over the colonies at night, murders, beatings, and the use of the 'death special,' an improvised armored car that would periodically spray selected colonies with machine-gun fire." The purpose of this harassment "was to goad the strikers"[6] into violent action so the National Guard could be called out to suppress the labor strike. It worked.

In October 1913, Governor Elias A. Ammos summoned the National Guard, under the command of General John Chase, who declared martial law in the striking area. Under control of the National Guard, a state-controlled militia, a number of atrocities took place against the striking workers, such as the "mass jailing of strikers, a cavalry charge on a demonstration by miners' wives and children, the torture and beating of 'prisoners,' and the demolition of one of the [workers'] tent colonies."[7]

The situation came to a gruesome ending when on April 20, 1914 gunfire broke out between the striking miners and National Guard troops. When miners who had taken up arms to protect themselves and their families went to a railroad cut and prepared foxholes in an attempt to draw the National Guard away from the colony, Guard troops sprayed the colony with machine gun and rifle fire and eventually burned the tent colony to the ground. An estimated 25 people died that day, "including three militiamen, one uninvolved passerby, and 12 children."[8] Unfortunately, this example of the state using its monopoly of violence to represent the minority interests of capital against the majority interests of workers. The state had previously come down hard on the side of union-busting with violence in the 1892 Homestead Massacre in Pennsylvania, and in 1894 when President Cleveland sent out over 16,000 U.S. Army soldiers to handle the railroad strikers in Pullman, Chicago.[9]

In 1932, state violence targeted a large group of war veterans who had assembled in Washington, D.C. demanding payment from the federal government for their service in World War I. The Bonus Army, an assemblage of roughly 43,000 people consisting primarily of veterans, their families, and affiliated activists, marched on D.C. to demand payment of previously received service certificates only to be met with violent repression. First, two veterans were shot and killed by Washington, D.C. police, and then, after orders from Herbert Hoover, Douglas Macarthur moved in on the veterans with infantry, cavalry, and six tanks, forcing the Bonus Army, their wives, and children out of their makeshift encampment and burning all of their belongings and shelter. "Although no weapons were fired, cavalry advanced with swords drawn, and some blood was shed. By nightfall, hundreds had been injured by gas (including a baby who died), bricks, clubs, bayonets, and sabers."[10]

Later in the 20th century, state violence continued, yet it had switched targets from union members and striking workers to political activists. An example is the Kent State shootings, where on May 4, 1970 "members of the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of Kent State University [antiwar] demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine."[11] Kent Mayor Leroy Satrom had requested Ohio Governor James Rhodes to summon the Guard due to "threats had been made to downtown businesses and city officials as well as rumors that radical revolutionaries were in Kent to destroy the city and the university."[12]

The rhetoric of Governor Rhodes escalated the situation as he called the protesters "the worst type of people in America and [stated] that every force of law would be used to deal with them," which created a perception among both soldiers and university officials that "a state of martial law was being declared in which control of the campus resided with the Guard rather than University leaders,"[13] and on top of this, all rallies were banned. This helped to foster an increase of tension in an atmosphere that was already extremely tense.

On the day of May 4th, around 3,000 students gathered to protest the Guard's presence on the campus. At noon, it was announced the General Robert Cantbury, the leader of the Ohio National Guard, had made the decision that the rally was to disperse; this message was delivered to the students via the police. When this was met with shouting and some rock throwing, the Guard was sent in to break up the protest and, due to the students retreating up a hill and on to a portion of the football field, the soldiers who followed them ended up somewhat trapped between the football field's fence and the protesters. The shouting and rock throwing continued as the soldiers began to extract themselves from the football field and up a hill, and when they reached the top, the soldiers fired their weapons back toward the crowd, with a small amount firing directly into the crowd.

No matter how one looks at it, the entire point of the National Guard being deployed to Kent State University was to squash the protesters who had gathered under their perceived constitutional rights to express their collective displeasure with the Vietnam War. The state chose to deploy its monopoly of violence as a tool to end these public protests.

Assassination campaigns by the state, directed by the FBI or CIA, and often times carried out by local police departments, have also been deployed under this monopoly of violence. There is the notably disturbing case of Chicago Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton, who was assassinated by Chicago police due to his political views and membership in the Black Panther organization.[14] There is also speculation and credible evidence that the U.S. government was involved in both the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. [15] and Malcolm X.[16]

Today, state violence has manifested itself in daily public displays of police brutality and violence against citizens. This endemic use of state force has become so bad that a recent report from the UN Human Rights Council noted concerns "for police violence and racial discrimination" in the U.S. [17] Yet, despite this widespread recognition of state terror being directed at citizens, we see that the federal government (the highest level of state) is protecting its enforcers, with President Obama signing into law what is effectively an Amber Alert for the police[18], and states such as Louisiana passing 'Blue Lives Matter' bills which designates "public safety workers" (a clever euphemism for police) as a specially protected class of citizens, opening the door for possible "hate crime" legislation that further protects those who carry out state repression.[19]

This rampant use of state violence against U.S. citizens has also gone international. In the age of the Global War on Terror, the U.S. government has gone so far as to decide it has the power to use its monopoly of violence on its citizens abroad. The case of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who was killed via drone strike in Yemen in 2011, provides a notable example of this.[20] The significance of this extension to the parameters of "international warfare" or the often vague "fight against terror" is that any U.S. citizen deemed to be under suspicion of associating with "terrorists" may be immediately executed without due process. Since al-Awlaki, the U.S. government has officially acknowledged that it has killed four American citizens abroad, while claiming that three of those deaths were by accident.[21]

In looking at the state's (in this case, the U.S. state at multiple levels) monopoly of violence and its continued use against its own citizens, we see that this deployment of violence is always done in the favor of capital (a small minority) in order to expand and strengthen capital's influence, through its state surrogate, over the working-class majority with no regard for life.

Group Violence and Its Enablers

Group violence manifests itself in numerous citizens joining together in a common cause to perpetrate violence against other citizens who in some way fit the intended target of that cause. When discussing group violence, it should be noted that the subjects are non-state actors. While these groups may be directly or indirectly supported by the state, they essentially carry out their acts of violence as groups autonomous from the state apparatus.

The Ku Klux Klan (which is currently attempting to make a comeback[22]) has for decades engaged in numerous acts of group violence, from public lynchings to terrorism and coercion to bombing churches.[23] The purpose of this group violence has been to maintain a social order in which Anglo-Saxon, Protestant white men are able to keep their hands on the reins of power in the U.S., if not systematically, then culturally and socially.

In many cases, because they may share interests, group violence intertwines with and complements state violence. During Reconstruction following the U.S. Civil War, the KKK had well-known ties to the more official southern state apparatus of power. In the modern era, white supremacists who adhere to notions of group violence have purposely and strategically infiltrated formal arms of state violence, including both the U.S. military and many local police departments around the country.[24][25] A similar group that is making major headway today is the Neo-Fascists, who can be seen in Europe being legitimized and assimilating into mainstream political parties such as Greece's Golden Dawn, the UK's UK Independence Party, Austria's Freedom Party, and France's National Front. Like the Klan, these groups seek to maintain a race-based, social status quo that benefits their own group. In the polls, they seek to gain some influence on the use of state violence, whereas on the streets they adhere to group violence and domestic terrorism.

A difference worth noting between the old-school group violence of the Klan and the new-school group violence (or at least contributing to an atmosphere of violence) that neo-fascists encourage and enact is that the new-school violence has been legitimized in many ways by both the media and the public at-large. In other words, we now have large segments of the population who are openly defending the neo-fascists through legitimizing means.

Back in the heyday of the Klan, there was violence, yet no one defended it under the banner of free speech or attempted to legitimize it through mainstream channels. It was certainly supported by mainstream power structures, and even gained steam through the insidious white supremacy which characterized American culture, but it wasn't openly defended. The KKK often carried out its operations in a clandestine manner, attacking and terrorizing at night, and wearing hoods to maintain anonymity. And many black people actively took up arms to defend themselves against it. [26][27] Today, the situation has been turned on its head, with many people arguing that fascists have the right to free speech and that they should be protected.

An example of this changing paradigm regarding right-wing extremism and group violence could be seen after a recent fight between Neo-Nazis and antifascists in Sacramento, California in late June 2016.[28] The incident brought out many defenders. Sacramento police chief Sam Somers stated that "Regardless of the message, it's the skinheads' First Amendment right to free speech." [29] Debra J. Saunders, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote in an article that "the bullies who were protesting against fascists seemed to have a lot in common with fascists - they're also thuggish and simpleminded" and that "An informal army of anarchists uses violence to muzzle unwanted speech."[30] The Los Angeles Times editorial board wrote that they agreed with Antifa Sacramento that racism shouldn't be tolerated, but "What we disagree with is the idea that skinheads and neo-Nazis, or anyone else with a wrongheaded view, shouldn't have a 1st Amendment right to free speech." [31]

There are a number of problems with these statements. First, by defending fascists through arguments couched in free speech, such commentators are not only ignoring the underlying group-violence historically perpetrated by these groups, but also misusing the First Amendment itself. The First Amendment states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." [32] Note, the Amendment says nothing about how other citizens may respond to free speech, nor does it say that groups of citizens can't abridge free speech; rather, it specifically applies to Congress and its prospective legislation. In other words, the Constitution of the United States applies strictly to the government and how it relates to its citizens, whereas the laws created by the government apply to the individuals and how they relate to the government.

Then there is the matter of ignoring power dynamics and creating a false equivalence. These responses create the illusion that each side is doing something negative and so neither side should be supported. This ignores the fact that one side (the neo-nazis and fascists) are assembling with the purpose of oppressing others, while the other side (the anti-fa and anarchists) are assembling to stop (violently, if necessary) the one side from oppressing. While the former adheres to violent means to oppress people based on the color of their skin, or their sexuality, or their Jewish heritage, the latter adheres to violent means to resist this oppression, or essentially oppress the oppressor. To equate their motivations is irresponsible and dangerous. This false equivalence that has been deployed by much of the media, both liberal and conservative, amounts to placing a murderous and whip-lashing slave owner in the same light as a rebelling slave who murders the slave owner to gain freedom. By using this hypothetical, it is easy to see that there is a fundamental difference between violence and counter-violence.

Another side effect of this public defense of the oppressor, and subsequent legitimization of group violence, is that it is used to increase state violence. Marcos Brenton, a writer at The Sacramento Bee, argued that "I would bet that future demonstrations will see a shared command center between the CHP and Sac PD instead of what we saw Sunday: CHP officers overwhelmed by warring factions. […]Law enforcement wasn't ready this time, but they have to be next time. In a climate where life isn't valued, life will be lost."[33] This is an argument that is implicitly in favor of an increase in state violence from an already hyper-militarized police force. And, when used in this context, the deployment of state violence will almost always be directed at those who assemble to stop oppressive group violence, because arguments housed in free speech and false equivalencies erase any and all distinctions between violence and counter-violence.

This is where the connection between state and group violence often manifests itself. As mentioned before, there is a rather long history of the police and the KKK being connected: On April 2, 1947, seven black people in Hooker, GA were turned over "to a Klan flogging party for a proper sobering up" by Dade County Sheriff John M. Lynch. In Soperton, GA in 1948, "the sheriff did not bother to investigate when four men where flogged, while the sheriff of nearby Dodge County couldn't look into the incident"[34] due to his being busy baby-sitting.

There is also the famous case of the Freedom Riders, three Civil Rights activists who were killed by the Klan, which amounted to three individuals being "arrested by a deputy sheriff and then released into the hands of Klansmen who had plotted their murders." [35]

This connection has yet to end. In 2014, in Florida, two police officers in the town of Fruitland Park were linked to the Klan [36] and in 2015 in Lake Arthur, LA, a detective was a found to be a Klan member and even attended one of the group's rallies.[37]

These connections allow for the state, and all the power and resources it wields, to be used directly to further the ends of white supremacy and empower fascistic, racist group violence in the streets. It also puts racial minorities from within the working class at greater risks since many of these bigoted individuals who carry out group violence on their own time are also allowed to carry out state violence while on the job. As agents of the state, they can kill, terrorize, harass, and imprison racial minorities with impunity vis-à-vis their roles as state enforcers and are further empowered by the public's and media's reverence of oppressive forms of assembly and "free speech," as well as the police officers who defend this.

Revolutionary Violence

Revolutionary violence is realized in two distinct forms: self-defense and/or counter-violence. It is a type of violence in which the goal is either self-defense for an oppressed people and/or full liberation for a people, whether that liberation take the form of autonomous communities, a nation state, or something else. It is also resistance to encroachment on the land by oppressive forces, such as in the case of indigenous resistance to expansionist Americans. Revolutionary violence may come in different forms and be carried out through various means. It includes everything from individual acts of "propaganda by the deed" to large-scale revolutions against a state.

Examples of revolutionary violence are abound throughout history, and include the slave revolts of Spartacus and Nat Turner, the Reign of Terror against the French monarchy, the Spanish revolt against the fascist Franco regime, Alexander Berkman's attempted murder of Carnegie Steel manager Henry Clay Frick, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Reconstruction-era blacks taking up arms against the KKK, the Mau Maus in Kenya [38], the Cuban revolution[39], and a number of national liberation movements in the mid-twentieth century that occurred around the world.

Revolutionary violence is different from state and group violence in that it manifests itself as a response to violence often stemming from one of these two opposing sources. For this reason, it is strictly counter-violent (or defensive) in nature, designed to break the violent oppression that its adherents find themselves under. The benefit of being able to deploy revolutionary violence is obvious in that it allows the oppressed to strike back at their oppressors. It is in this beneficial scenario where the question of guns and "gun control" come back into the mix. How are people supposed to free themselves, or even defend themselves from state and group violence, if they are unable to have guns? How are people able to protect themselves from oppressive violence if they do not have access to the same weaponry used by their oppressor?

When faced with systemic violence that is rooted in either a direct extension of the state (police, military) or an indirect extension of the power structure (the KKK, the Oath Keepers, neo-Nazis, neo-fascists), written laws constructed by the same state and power structure aren't typically useful. And when doubled-down on by media and liberal establishment cries of free speech and false equivalencies, oppressed sectors of the population become even more vulnerable to state and group violence. Often times, armed self-defense becomes the only option to protect oneself, one's family, and one's community from these deeply embedded, existential threats.

Formulating revolutionary counter-violence and self-defense measures became a staple of the American Civil Rights movement. From Malcolm X's calls to defend the black community "by any means necessary" to the original Black Panther Party's organizational emphasis on armed self-defense, the Civil Rights movement as a whole gained strength due to these more militant strains centered around revolutionary violence. In 1956, after a "relentless backlash from the Ku Klux Klan," Robert F. Williams, a Marine Corps vet, took over the Monroe, North Carolina chapter of the NAACP and strengthened it with militancy by "filing for a charter with the National Rifle Association (NRA)," forming the Black Guard, "an armed group committed to the protection of Monroe's black population," and delivering weapons and physical training to its members.[40] In 1959, following the acquittal of a white man who was accused of attempting to rape a black woman, Williams summed up the need for oppressed people to take up arms in their own self-defense. "If the United States Constitution cannot be enforced in this social jungle called Dixie, it is time that Negroes must defend themselves even if it is necessary to resort to violence," responded Williams. "That there is no law here, there is no need to take the white attackers to the courts because they will go free and that the federal government is not coming to the aid of people who are oppressed, and it is time for Negro men to stand up and be men and if it is necessary for us to die we must be willing to die. If it is necessary for us to kill we must be willing to kill." [41]

Revolutionary violence often finds itself up against difficult odds, being deployed by marginalized peoples with limited resources against powerful state and group entities with seemingly unlimited resources, professional military training, and advantageous positioning within the given power structure. The 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising reflected this exact scenario, as a Jewish resistance in the hundreds, armed with handguns, grenades, and Molotov cocktails faced off against the powerful Nazi paramilitary Schutzstaffel (SS). When reflecting on the uprising over two decades later, one of the Jewish survivors, Yitzhak Zuckerman, encapsulated the need for an oppressed and degraded people to strike back:

"I don't think there's any real need to analyze the Uprising in military terms. This was a war of less than a thousand people against a mighty army and no one doubted how it was likely to turn out. This isn't a subject for study in military school. (...) If there's a school to study the human spirit, there it should be a major subject. The important things were inherent in the force shown by Jewish youth after years of degradation, to rise up against their destroyers, and determine what death they would choose: Treblinka or Uprising."[42]

This human spirit referred to by Zuckerman is the same that compelled Nat Turner to take up arms against slave-owning whites, the same that led to the formation of the original Black Panther Party, and the same that motivated Robert F. Williams in 1950s North Carolina. Without access to weapons, this human spirit would result in nothing more than gruesome massacres at the hands of state and group violence. With weapons in hand, this spirit is presented with a chance to stunt pending attacks of physical oppression and terrorism, if not repel them.

Conclusion

The modern gun control debate has taken on two, stereotypical, opposing sides. The first side is representative in the Congressional sit-ins on the House floor this past June. They represent a common liberal viewpoint that gun-control measures should be taken to restrict or, at the very least, delay the acquisition of guns by citizens. Popular demands coming from this side include the banning of all automatic or semi-automatic weapons, the blacklisting of certain people (including those suspected of "associating with terrorists," the mentally ill, and felons), and the implementation of more stringent forms of clearances. The other side is represented by a reactionary right, mostly white, that is backed by both the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its surrogate, the Republican Party. These who oppose the liberal attempt to stifle the Second Amendment historically come from privileged strata of the status quo, including whites of all classes and those occupying advantageous positions in the socioeconomic hierarchy.

Both sides of the modern gun-control debate cling to very problematic positions and ideologies that are tantamount to their respective arguments. Both sides, in their own ways, reinforce the embedded racial and class privileges that repress much of the working class, the poor, and people of color - in other words, those sectors of the population that are most likely faced with extremely dire economic situations, occupying police forces that resemble foreign armies, and (literally) daily, life-or-death interactions with both police (state violence) and vigilantes (group violence). The liberal or Democrat argument for gun control, like those represented by the Congressional sit-in, almost always target extremely marginalized groups, like felons who have been victimized by the draconian "drug wars" of the '80s and '90s, as well as those who have been victimized by the "war on terror" and find themselves on terrorist watch lists for little more than their chosen religion or Islamic-sounding name. The reactionary opposition to gun control, represented by the NRA and Republicans, remains embedded in white supremacy, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and classism, and thus also ends up targeting these same marginalized populations. This latter group's motivation is evident in the overlap between fringe groups that historically adhere to group violence, like the KKK and Oath Keepers, and the more "mainstream" operations of the NRA.

Both sides of the gun-control debate, whether consciously or subconsciously, are motivated by what Noam Chomsky (paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson) recently referred to as a fear of "the liberation of slaves, who have 'ten thousand recollections' of the crimes to which they were subjected." These "fears that the victims might rise up and take revenge are deeply rooted in American culture" (in racialized institutions of slavery and white supremacy) with reverberations to the present."[43] The liberal insistence on preaching strictly non-violent and pacifist tactics to poor, working-class, people of color exposes their privileged, white-supremacist leanings. The fact that they do this while also passing draconian legislation that has led to the virtual genocide of an entire generation of blacks (through drug laws and mass incarceration), and in the face of brutal, daily murders of black citizens by police, further exposes them. The recent silence from the NRA regarding the police killing of Philando Castile [44], who was licensed to carry a gun in Minnesota and properly identified his status to officers before being shot for no reason, has exposed the NRA's white supremacist leanings. Also, the split that occurred within the Oath Keepers when one of their members in the St. Louis chapter, Sam Andrews, encouraged black residents in Ferguson and Black Lives Matters protestors to practice their Second-Amendment rights [45] has exposed their own white supremacist leanings which they regularly disguise as "constitutionalism."

While white supremacy has an intense and insidious hold on every aspect of American culture - social, economic, political, etc. - it is especially strong within the gun-control debate. So much so that it drove then-California governor, Ronald Reagan, in 1967, to sign extensive gun control legislation under the Mulford Act[46] in response to armed patrols by members of the Black Panther Party. The classist nature of gun control can be found in the targeting of the most marginalized of the working class, along with the historically brutal state repression against workers collectively striking or standing up for their rights against bosses. The most common argument from the authentic, anti-capitalist left (not liberals or Democrats) against the idea of workers collectively exercising their constitutional right to bear arms has been housed in the insurmountable strength and technology owned by the government's military. Left-wing skeptics claim that an armed working-class will simply have no chance against an overpowering military. The problem with this is that it is preoccupied with a large-scale, pie-in-the-sky revolutionary situation. It ignores the reality faced by many working-class people who find themselves in small-scale, daily interactions with police and vigilantes, both of whom are heavily armed and not afraid to use their weapons to kill. It is in these very interactions, whether it's a black citizen being racially profiled and harassed by police or an activist being terrorized by reactionary groups, where the access to a gun may become vitally important and life-saving.

Advocating for disarming those who need protection the most simply doesn't make sense, especially in an environment such as the modern U.S. - a heavily racialized, classist landscape with over 300 million guns in circulation. Nobody wants to be drawn into a violent situation that may result in the loss of life, but our current reality does not allow us that choice. Unfortunately, we live a society where police oppress rather than protect; where violent reactionary groups are allowed freedom to carry out their terrorizing of marginalized people; and where politicians readily use their monopoly of violence to enforce capital's minority interests against masses of workers. Because of this, modern gun control can only be viewed as anti-black, anti-woman, anti-immigrant, anti-poor, and anti-working class because it leaves these most marginalized and vulnerable of groups powerless in the face of a violent, patriarchal, white-supremacist power structure that continues to thrive off of mass working-class dispossession. The conclusion is simple: If the oppressor cannot be disarmed, the only sane option is to arm the oppressed. In the U.S., the Constitution makes this a practical and legal option.

"Sometimes, if you want to get rid of the gun, you have to pick the gun up."

-Huey P. Newton

Notes

[1] Philip Bump, "The Problem With Banning Guns For People On The No-Fly List," Washington Post, June 13, 2016 ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/12/07/the-no-fly-list-is-a-terrible-tool-for-gun-control-in-part-because-it-is-a-terrible-tool/ )

[2] Alex Pareene, The Democrats Are Boldly Fighting For A Bad, Stupid Bill, Gawker, http://gawker.com/the-democrats-are-boldly-fighting-for-a-bad-stupid-bil-1782449026 (June 22, 2016)

[3] Zaid Jilani, "Dramatic House Sit-In on Guns Is Undercut by Focus on Secret, Racist Watchlist," The Intercept, June 22, 2016 ( https://theintercept.com/2016/06/22/dramatic-house-sit-in-on-guns-is-undercut-by-focus-on-secret-racist-watchlist/ )

[4] Tom Hall, "Congressional Democrats stage 'sit-in' stunt on gun control," World Socialist Website, June 25, 2016 ( https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/06/25/dems-j25.html)

[5] Fact Index, Monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force, http://www.fact-index.com/m/mo/monopoly_on_the_legitimate_use_of_physical_force.html

[6] Mark Walker, "The Ludlow Massacre: Class Warfare and Historical Memory in Southern Colorado," Historical Archaeology 37:3 (2003), pg 68

[7] Walker, pgs 68-69

[8] Walker, pg 69

[9] Ronald J. Barr, The Progressive Army: U.S. Army Command and Administration, 1870-1914 (New York, N.Y.: St. Martin's Press, 1998), pg 7

[10] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/macarthur/peopleevents/pandeAMEX89.html

[11] Thomas R. Hensley, Jerry M, Lewis, "The May 4 Shootings at Kent State University: The search for historical accuracy," The Ohio Council of Social Studies Review 34"1 (1998), pg 9

[12] Hensley, Lewis, pg 11

[13] Ibid

[14] Ted Gregory, "The Black Panther Raid and the death of Fred Hampton," Chicago Tribune, July 3, 2016 ( http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/chi-chicagodays-pantherraid-story-story.html )

[15] The King Center, Assassination Conspiracy Trial, http://www.thekingcenter.org/assassination-conspiracy-trial

[16] Garrett Felber, "Malcolm X Assassination: 50 years on, mystery still clouds details of the case," The Guardian, February 21, 2015 ( https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/21/malcolm-x-assassination-records-nypd-investigation )

[17] Natasja Sheriff, "US cited for police violence, racism in scathing UN review on human rights," Al Jazeera, May 11, 2015 ( http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/5/11/us-faces-scathing-un-review-on-human-rights-record.html )

[18] Gregory Korte, "Obama signs 'Blue Alert' law to protect police," USA Today, May 19, 2016 ( http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/05/19/obama-blue-alert-law-bill-signing/27578911/ )

[19] Elahe Izadi, "Louisiana's 'Blue Lives Matter' bill just became law," Washington Post, May 26, 2016 ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/05/26/louisianas-blue-lives-matter-bill-just-became-law/?tid=sm_tw&utm_term=.6d262fdb3218 )

[20] Joshua Keating, "Was Anwar Al-Awlaki Still A US Citizen?" Foreign Policy, September 30, 2011 ( http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/09/30/was_anwar_al_awlaki_still_a_us_citizen )

[21] Adam Taylor, "The U.S. keeps killing Americans in drone strikes, mostly by accident," Washington Post, April 23, 2015 ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/04/23/the-u-s-keeps-killing-americans-in-drone-strikes-mostly-by-accident/ )

[22] John Bazemore, "Ku Klux Klan dreams of making a comeback," The Columbus Dispatch, June 30, 2016 ( http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/national_world/2016/06/30/0630-is-klan-making-a-comeback.html )

[23] Southern Poverty Law Center, Ku Klux Klan, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/ku-klux-klan

[24] Hampton Institute, Rising Nazism and Racial Intolerance in the US. A report gathered and submitted to the United Nations, http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/Rising-Nazism-and-Racial-Intolerance-in-the-US.pdf (April 30, 2015)

[25] FBI report on white supremacists infiltrating law enforcement agencies in the US. http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/402521/doc-26-white-supremacist-infiltration.pdf

[26] Rebecca Onion, "Red Summer," Slate, March 4, 2015 ( http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/03/civil_rights_movement_history_the_long_tradition_of_black_americans_taking.html )

[27] Akinyele K. Umoja, "1964: The Beginning of the End of Nonviolence in the Mississippi Freedom Movement," Radical History Review 85:1 (2003)

[28] Ellen Garrison, Stephen Magagnini, Sam Stanton, "At least 10 hurt at chaotic, bloody neo-Nazi rally at Capitol," The Sacramento Bee, June 26, 2016 (http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/crime/article86099332.html)

[29] Ibid

[30] Debra J. Saunders, "Saunders: Freedom of speech stifled by Capitol rally fracas," San Francisco Chronicle, July 2, 2016 ( http://www.recordnet.com/article/20160702/OPINION/160709984)

[31] Los Angeles Times Editorial Board, "How anti-racists play into the skinheads' hands," Los Angeles Times, June 28, 2016 ( http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-neo-nazi-rally-20160627-snap-story.html )

[32] Legal Information Institute, First Amendment, https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment

[33] Marcos Brenton, "Madness came to Sacramento, and the cops weren't ready," The Sacramento Bee, June 29, 2016 ( http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/marcos-breton/article86556112.html )

[34] David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan, 3rd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), pg 336

[35] Civil Rights Movement Veterans, Mississippi Civil Rights Martyrs, http://www.crmvet.org/mem/msmartyr.htm

[36] Michael Winter, "KKK membership sinks 2 Florida cops," USA Today, July 14, 2014 ( http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/07/14/florid-police-kkk/12645555/ )

[37] Bill Morlin, Police Chief Demands Resignation of KKK Cop, https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015/09/01/police-chief-demands-resignation-kkk-cop (September 1, 2015)

[38] "Mau Mau Uprising: Bloody history of Kenyan conflict," BBC, April 7, 2011 ( http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-12997138)

[39] Andres Suarez, "The Cuban Revolution: The Road to Power," Latin American Research Review 7:3 (1972)

[40] PBS Independent Lens, A synopsis on the film, "Negroes with Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power," http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/negroeswithguns/rob.html

[41] Ibid

[42] A. Polonsky, (2012), The Jews in Poland and Russia, Volume III, 1914 to 2008, p.537

[43] Hampton Institute, On the Roots of American Racism: An Interview with Noam Chomsky, http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/chomsky-on-racism.html (April 22, 2015)

[44] Brian Fung, "The NRA's internal split over Philando Castile," Washington Post, July 9, 2016 ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/09/the-nras-internal-revolt-over-philando-castile/?utm_term=.b0f673e3221c )

[45] Alan Feur, "The Oath Keeper Who Wants To Arm Black Lives Matter," Rolling Stone, January 3, 2016 ( http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-oath-keeper-who-wants-to-arm-black-lives-matter-20160103 )

[46] Wikipedia, Mulford Act, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act