Ethical Consumption in the Socialist Imaginary

By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso

Since its advent in the 1990s, globalization has transformed the world. One of its many notable effects was the further siloing of consumers from the labor that produced their goods and services. Increasingly complex global supply chains alongside deceptive advertising make it nearly impossible to uncover every step in a product’s production and distribution. Of course, strategic clarification of these processes would come to represent its own form of advertising, as the professed “social and environmental values of consumer products” became reliable selling points in and of themselves. This was mainly due to an increase in consumer consciousness — spurred by globalization’s poster child, the internet — that begged for opportunities to consume “ethically.”

Though such “ethical consumption” marked an improvement over previous consumptive practices, a socialist lens reveals its limitations. As socialists understand, capitalist production relies on the exploitation of workers by capital owners, meaning that no level of consciousness or self-awareness on the part of traditional companies can shed their fundamentally unethical character. Even in instances where a worker’s experience with their employer is satisfactory — as can happen when receiving a high salary or wage, robust benefits, or other perks — the company’s simultaneous profiteering is more than just a harmless manifestation of mutual benefit. The very act of turning a profit beyond that which would sufficiently refinance operating costs is one of theft, particularly of the value that the worker has produced via their labor. This surplus value is not returned to the worker nor does it serve operational ends. It instead comprises the millionaire salaries of executives and further grows the capital to which the company can now claim legal rights. In other words, as socialists often argue, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. However, when considering the ethics of capitalist consumption, the analysis cannot stop there.

It is not so much ethical consumption but rather ethical purity which is impossible under capitalism. Moreover, beneath such a threshold of ethical purity, there lie two spectra upon which one’s capitalist consumption can and should still be measured: that of ethics and, more importantly, that of the consumer. 

The spectrum of ethics — henceforth referred to as the ethical spectrum — is that which the deliberately advertised “social and environmental values of consumer products” implies. In other words, a hierarchy of ethics in consumption does exist just shy of ethical purity. And, most pressingly, that hierarchy is primarily highlighted by the aspects of a good or service’s production and distribution that can be observed, analyzed, and understood. Of course, such aspects are most often only made publicly available for observation, analysis, and understanding at the behest of their corporate manufacturers but they are empirical points of ethical reference nonetheless. Take the purchase of a shirt, for example. When a consumer purchases a shirt, the ethical spectrum offers a host of consumptive options based on the available social and environmental factors at hand, ones which, for the sake of argument, will be boiled down here into three outstanding choices.

The first choice, which will be the optimal form of ethical consumption in this scenario, is one in which it is known to the consumer that the shirt is both the product of union labor and produced in an environmentally conscious way, be that through the use of reusable materials, renewable energy, waste minimization, etc. The second choice, which will be the middle-of-the-road, intermediate form of ethical consumption in this scenario, is one in which the shirt is still the product of union labor but environmental considerations are not present, meaning labor exploitation is minimized through the presence of unionized production but the sustainable nature of the product is lacking. The third and final choice, which will be the worst and least preferable form of ethical consumption in this scenario, is one in which the production of the shirt lacks both union labor and environmental considerations, making it an ethically lackluster product regarding its accommodations for both labor exploitation and sustainability. It is in determining which of the three choices one should pursue, if any at all, that the second spectrum — that of the consumer — becomes relevant.

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The spectrum of the consumer — henceforth referred to as the consumer spectrum — is one which makes an even deeper distinction between consumptive practices than that of the ethical spectrum, as it precedes the question of ethics with the question of ability. To consider consumption under capitalism as an exercise of solely ethical dimensions is to neglect the vital reality underlying such a society: inequality is rampant, poverty is ever-worsening, and the material conditions of the masses only become more dire by the day. As such, it is often the case that for many consumers, ethical considerations are an aspect of capitalist consumption in which they simply do not have the socioeconomic capacity to engage. After all, who is to blame a working-class family for neglecting the exploitative or unsustainable aspects of a good or service they’ve consumed when their socioeconomic conditions may not even allow them to ensure their most basic needs?

The consumer spectrum acknowledges this disparity and ensures that the degree of ethical consideration a consumer engages in is proportional to their socioeconomic standing, one best represented by the consumer’s income. However, conditions beyond those of financial earnings can determine whether disposable income in particular will fluctuate over time, a trend that would then require the consumer’s ethical considerations to similarly shift. These outstanding conditions can take on many forms, incorporating factors such as working conditions — a greater likelihood of on-the-job injuries could decrease disposable income prospects due to evermore frequent medical bills — immigration status — undocumented workers have less access to social safety nets and unemployment benefits than their documented counterparts — and living conditions — crumbling infrastructure could gradually increase the financial burden of maintenance faced by tenants, decreasing their disposable income over time. As such, the consumer spectrum adjusts the ethical considerations incumbent upon a consumer based both on their income and on the potential for their disposable income to fluctuate. In turn, the consumer spectrum ensures two important outcomes.

On the one hand, it makes sure that socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals are not burdened with the task of considering ethics when making consumptive decisions to survive. On the other, it holds socioeconomically advantaged individuals to a higher standard of ethical consumption, one in which they would be remiss to not undergo the kind of ethical considerations previously outlined in the shirt exercise. Admittedly, the former assurance has become more widely accepted in discourse regarding working-class consumption. The latter, on the other hand, risks not achieving the same, as the maxim that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism can serve as low-hanging fruit for socioeconomically advantaged individuals to conveniently justify knowingly unethical consumption. The consumer spectrum seeks to account for such co-optation and counter it head-on.

This layout of consumptive spectra can be useful on the individual level of consumption. For those with the appropriate socioeconomic bandwidth, it offers bountiful considerations that can inform the consumption of a given good or service. However, the utility of the model is perhaps best understood on the macro level. Beyond the pressure that socialists must continue to exert on the existing system — uprooting the power of capital owners and corporations in the process — these spectra provide greater nuance to the socialist perspective on individual accountability and action. Through the ethics and consumer spectra, we can better envision the untapped potential of individualized proactivity in creating a less exploitative and more sustainable society, while also accommodating the diversity of lived experiences and forms of exploitation endured under the current economic system.

Thus, the notion of ethical consumption under capitalism should not simply culminate in an indisputable law of impossibility. Rather, it should be understood as a range of activity that can be engaged in — just shy of ethical purity — based on the ethical considerations at hand and, more pressingly, those which directly pertain to the socioeconomic capacities of the consumer. Only in considering this reality can we better understand the role of individual consumption in the broader socialist project of radical change and revolutionary transformation.

Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso is a Colombian Marxist. In his writing, he seeks to interrogate the nuances of socialist thought and praxis.

The Marxist Theory of the State: An Introduction

By Summer Pappachen

Republished from Liberation School.

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

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

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

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

Debunking the capitalist myth of the state

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Repressive and productive state organs

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

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

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

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

Schooling illustrates the vulnerability of capitalist rule

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democracy: The best possible organ for capitalism

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

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

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

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

From perfecting, to seizing, to smashing the capitalist state

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

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

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

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

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

The socialist state and its withering away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

Pavlovian Socialism: How Metrics of Empire Can Ruin the Left

By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso

It has been roughly a year since Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in to replace Stephen Breyer and become the 116th Justice of the US Supreme Court. The appointment has been hailed by liberal figureheads far and wide since then. President Joe Biden called the nomination an act of “[preserving] freedom and liberty here in the United States of America.” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer celebrated the appointment as a “greater moment for America as we rise to a more perfect union.” In reality, the affair speaks to a vital yet often ignored aspect of sociopolitical oppression in the United States: metrics of empire. 

In the United States, like in any imperialist force, the powers-that-be employ many different tactics to preserve their rule. These tactics include Pentagon involvement in Hollywood filmmaking, the deliberate whitewashing of grade-school education, and the skewing of news coverage to manufacture consent for pro-elite policies. Metrics of empire fall under this same category, as they refer to a carefully curated incentive structure by which accomplishments and developments in American society are measured and rewarded. 

The structure itself can be further broken down into three subcategories: Government, Private and Public. The Government subcategory consists of exactly what its name suggests: governmental forms of legitimation and recognition. American society has been made to believe that prominent government positions carry an inherent degree of legitimacy and sophistication, such that they should be admired and revered simply for existing, rather than routinely interrogated as hotbeds of imperialist empowerment and corruption. Such positions — due to their aforementioned societal rank — thus become rewards in and of themselves, serving as markers of achievement that deserve public reverence and praise regardless of their occupants’ work or character. Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination exemplifies this perfectly.

As a black woman working within the American legal system, Jackson experienced no shortage of hardships and systemic obstacles in her professional journey. Considering demographic data alone, it is clear that Jackson was in largely uncharted territory, as just under 5% of first-year law students are black women while they make up just over 3% of associates and less than 1% of partners. In the end, however, what was her reward for surpassing these systemic hurdles and beating overwhelming odds? A seat on the Supreme Court, a grossly antiquated, inherently undemocratic, and historically oppressive institution that most often operates at the behest of capital and bends to the will of America’s most reactionary impulses.

The Private category consists of entities such as private universities and privately owned publications:

1.  Universities (ex: The University of Chicago): The school is considered one of the 10 best in the country and has historically boasted competitive rankings across a broad range of subject areas and specializations. Yet, it was the so-called “Chicago Boys” — a group of economics graduates — who cultivated and ultimately spearheaded the implementation of neoliberal economic policy abroad, namely in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. This cohort of Chicago alumni collaborated with the United States government to advance business interests by using Augusto Pinochet’s Chile as a testing ground for the economic models and policies they hoped to pursue domestically. 

2.  Publications (ex: The New York Times): Despite being heralded as the gold standard for journalism nationwide, the investor-owned New York Times routinely employs biased coverage and partisan language when discussing matters relevant to American foreign policy -- including Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and the Iraq War — whitewashing such atrocities to manufacture consent for the imperial project.  

The Public category consists of entities such as nonprofit organizations and public-facing awards:

1.  Nonprofits (ex: Doctors Without Borders): Though it is ranked 26th among America’s Top 100 Charities according to Forbes magazine, this organization is a hotbed of white saviorism and intraorganizational racism that perpetuates US hegemony abroad through the lens of healthcare and medical treatment. 

2.  Awards (ex: The Nobel Prize): The prize is widely considered to be the most prestigious recognition of achievement in the world. Yet, the awardees of the Peace Prize have included the likes of Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama. 

This state of affairs spells a particularly grim prognosis for the socialist movement across the United States. Metrics of empire have the very real potential to serve as direct inhibitors to tangible progress in the fundamentally socialist areas of social justice, economic transformation, and material improvement. As such, a sort of Pavlovian socialism can develop, one in which it is only through the awarding of such imperial accolades and symbols of legitimation that our work is perceived as successful, casting out all other achievements in the process.

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At best, this dynamic can create a qualitative hierarchy in which the work recognized by metrics of empire is considered superior. At worst, the dynamic can become a hegemonic enclosure fundamentally opposed to the radical dimensions of socialist praxis, eventually creating a scenario in which the metrics themselves become the sought-after achievements rather than the empirical progress made by the work that warranted the metrics’ awarding in the first place. 

We’ve seen this play out already with organizations across the country, one such organization being the Sunrise Movement. While its founding principles contained more radical conceptions of action and changemaking — including sit-ins at government offices, Wide Awake demonstrations, and recognition by prominent leftist figures such as Noam Chomsky — Sunrise’s more recent activism has left much to be desired. Since the beginning of this decade, it has largely shifted away from direct action-based initiatives to focus on electoral endorsements and armchair advocacy. Most notably, these shifts have resulted in a severe lack of climate victories on the legislative front as well as serious organizational neglect of representation and empowerment of marginalized voices in the movement, particularly those of color.

The shift can be largely understood as a pragmatic change resulting from an outstanding reliance on big-money donations as well as ties to government officials and politicians. Through accepting and actively engaging with metrics of empire in this context, namely of the governmental and private varieties, the Sunrise Movement and organizations like it have provided a glimpse of what such a dynamic could mean for the socialist movement when applied to actual revolutionary praxis in the future.

This is not to suggest that socialist praxis should be entirely devoid of notable awards or recognitions. After all, acknowledgements of outstanding achievement can be an incredibly valuable way of qualifying motivated, focused, and effective work. These “metrics of the proletariat,” however, must have a carefully curated relationship to the doers of the work and to the empirical effects of it. The metrics themselves must never come to occupy the place of the work’s initial objective: substantive and revolutionary change. 

As such, “metrics of the proletariat” are a thing of the socialist future, an element of our aspirational imaginary that can come to occupy the dynamics of our work down the line, but not that of the present day. So long as systemic injustices and widespread oppression reign supreme — further emboldened by the unrelenting fervor of imperial capitalism — these metrics will inevitably reward advantaged and privileged socialists and, more pressingly, will run the risk of becoming metrics of empire in and of themselves.  

Thus, as the socialist movement carries on with its vital work of national and global changemaking, it cannot neglect the very real hurdle that metrics of empire can come to represent. Only by preemptively abolishing the air of legitimacy these metrics now hold — and looking toward a future in which new metrics of success and achievement that honor socialist ideals and avoid imperial capitalist corruption will be established — can the movement avoid existing structures of incentive and recognition that seek to counteract its aims at every turn.

Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso is a Colombian Marxist. In his writing, he seeks to interrogate the nuances of socialist thought and praxis.

A Fraternal Hand: The American Tradition of Socialist Democracy and Chinese Socialism

By Carlos Garrido

Republished from the Midwestern Marx Institute.

​There is a glaring paradox at the core of the American project. On the one hand, it proclaims its national self-determination with the values of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, right to revolution, and to a government of, by, and for the people. On the other hand, the rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness have never been guaranteed for anyone but the white, male, capitalist class (which is slowly being racially and sexually diversified). The leading thinkers of the American project, from Jefferson to Martin Luther King Jr., have warned about the corrupting influence the interests of capital can play in preventing the concretization of these rights.

Thomas Jefferson, for instance, understood that the ‘enormous inequality’ in property relations was the cause of the ‘misery [of] the bulk of mankind,’ and that, as Herbert Aptheker notes, this concentration of capital was ‘the central threat to democratic rights.’[1] In noticing how the interest of capital can turn a government of, by, and for the people into a government of, by, and for big business, Jefferson would go on to draw a distinction between the democratic man and the aristocratic man. The former, he argued, trusts the people’s will, the latter distrusts it and turns towards big business elitism. Jefferson believed the aristocratic man, if he came to dominate the American government, would undermine the ideals of the 1776 anti-colonial revolution. The first generation of home-grown socialists, flowering in the 1820s and 1830s, saw Jefferson’s prediction actualize itself in the embryonic industrialization period of the US. In the face of growing inequalities and disparities, thinkers like Langdon Byllesby, Cornelius Blatchley, William Maclure, Thomas Skidmore and others, developed the ideals of the declaration of independence into socialism, what they considered to be its practical and logical conclusion.

Throughout the ages, generations of American socialists have appealed to the declaration of independence to argue for socialism in a way that connects with the American people’s common sense. Leading historians and theoreticians of the American socialist tradition, thinkers like Staughton Lynd, Herbert Aptheker, W.E.B. Dubois, Eugene Debs, William Z. Foster and others, have elaborated on the subject, noting that regardless of the limitations encountered in the founding of the American experiment, it was a historically progressive event, whose spirit should be carried forth today by socialists and communists.

As the US is increasing tensions against China, leading to what many consider a ‘new cold war,’ it is important to look back at the values the American people accept, to the thinkers the American people consider their own, and to consider how different China’s practices – which our ruling class and its media constantly estrange to the American public – are from the ideals which founded our country. What we will find, I believe, is the values prioritized by the leading thinkers of the American experiment, from Jefferson to Dewey to Martin Luther King Jr., are best embodied today in Chinese socialism. This truth, in my view, should be brought forth to the American people. No longer should their consent continue to be manufactured to fight against peoples whose practices align with our ideals more than those we encounter in our own country.

John Dewey (1859-1952), known as ‘America’s philosopher of democracy,’ wrote that we must stop thinking about democracy as something ‘institutional and external;’ instead, we should treat democracy as a ‘way of life,’ one governed by the ‘belief in the common man.’[2] For Dewey, genuine democracy is a consistent practice; it has less to do with showing up to a poll every two to four years and more to do with the ability of common people – what in Spanish we call el pueblo – to steadily exert their collective power over the affairs of everyday life. Dewey understood that this genuine form of democracy was largely inexistent in the US, where the democratic spirit is reduced to voting every four years in political elections which, as he argued, function more as a ‘shadow cast on society by big business.’[3]

In line with the long tradition of home-grown American socialists, Dewey would conclude that the ideals of the founders – especially the radical flank commonly known as the ‘dissenters’ – would be realized ‘only as control of the means of production and distribution is taken out of the hands of individuals who exercise powers created socially for narrow individual interests.’[4] In the context of the US, Dewey held that this required ‘a radical change in economic institutions and the political arrangements based on them.’ ‘These changes,’ said Dewey, ‘are necessary in order that social control of forces and agencies socially created may accrue to the liberation of all individuals associated together in the great undertaking of building a life that expresses and promotes human liberty.’[5] For Dewey, in short, only socialism could make actual the radical, and for its time, deeply democratic, spirit of the declaration of independence.

A similar sentiment can be found in Martin Luther King Jr., the only American to have his own holiday (every third Monday of January). In one of his last sermons, whilst reflecting on the rights upheld in the declaration of independence, King would note that ‘if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life, nor liberty, nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.’ America, for King, had desperately failed to fulfill its promise, not just for the black souls it kept enchained for more than two centuries, but for all poor and working people who continued to ‘perish on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.’[6] This division was representative of what King called the ‘two Americas,’ the America of the poor working majority and the America of the few owners of big capital.[7]

Like Dives in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, King held that ‘if America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she, too, will go to hell.’[8] The stranglehold monopoly capital has over the American state turned the American dream – that is, the individual’s quest for life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness in harmony with the human community – into the American nightmare. No number of victories in the sphere of civil rights could change, in King’s view, the fundamentally polarizing character of the system. As King would argue years after the victories of the civil rights movement: ‘I have found out that all that I have been doing in trying to correct this system in America has been in vain… I am trying to get at the roots of it to see just what ought to be done… The whole thing will have to be done away with.’[9] For all its claims of being a beacon of democracy, for King, as Cornel West argues, ‘America’s two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative visions of oligarchic rule.’[10] Like Dewey and many others within the tradition of American socialism, King considered the values of the declaration of independence to only be universally applicable if America is able to move beyond the capitalist mode of life.

The American ruling class ignores and/or sanitizes this tradition of home-grown socialism which permeates even through the most universally admired of American figures. It wishes to hide the working class’s and oppressed people’s history of struggle in our country, for only in doing so can it perpetuate the McCarthyite lie that socialism and the values the American people accept are wholly incompatible. The truth is that, on the contrary, it is on the basis of the values the American people already accept that American socialism has developed. By showing the American people the positive role socialism has played in their national past – and how these struggles have seen themselves as continuations of the revolutionary tradition of 1776 –  the similarities in Chinese socialist construction and this unique tradition of American socialism become apparent. 

Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, found it condemnable to sustain poverty amidst material abundance; the rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness require the abolition of poverty for their genuine fulfillment. In just 40 years, Chinese socialism has been able to lift more than 800 million people out of poverty, abolishing that horrendous condition the capitalist mode of life makes necessary for the vast majority of people. While building a poverty-free world with common prosperity, China has been able to realize a condition for its people which looks a lot more like what the leading American minds (like Dr. King) stood for than what can be found in America itself.

As we approach the 55th anniversary of King’s assassination (which the FBI helped orchestrate), we should ask: has America – which celebrates King once a year – heeded to King’s concern for poverty and the condition of the working class? The answer is a resolute No! In no state of the US, for instance, is the federal minimum wage ($7.25) enough to survive; even if it is raised to $15 – as the democratic socialists and other progressives have called for – the minimum wage would still not be enough for a working class family to survive anywhere in the country. With stagnant wages and inflation at a 40 year high, almost 60% of Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck. Many of these people are on the brinks of joining the 600,000 homeless people wandering around in a country with more than 17 million empty homes. It is not surprising, in a country where there are 33 times more empty homes than homeless people, that 34 million people, including one in eight children, experience hunger while 30-40% of the U.S.’s food supply (40 million tons of food) is wasted every year. For all the tokenization of King we find in America’s political circus, we can say that after 55 years since his state-sanctioned death, America has still not listened, and much less realized, the demands of Dr. King. However, China has!

Likewise, Dewey, perhaps the most prominent philosopher America has produced, felt that to carry forth today the democratic creed of the declaration of independence, we must deepen our understanding and practice of democracy. A mode of life where the same small group of monopolists owns most of the property, controls most of the media, and decides who gets elected and what they do when elected, can hardly be called democratic. For Dewey, we are not living up to the democratic creed if ‘democracy’ only matters every two to four years when elections come about and working people are bombarded with reasons why they should vote for one puppet of the ruling class over another. Dewey would wholeheartedly agree with Xi Jinping in asserting that ‘democracy is not an ornament to be used for decoration; it is to be used to solve the problems that the people want to solve.’ As Xi has noted,​

If the people are awakened only at the time of voting and go into dormancy afterward; if the people only listen to smashing slogans during election campaigns but have no say afterward; if the people are only favored during canvassing but are left out after the election, such a democracy is not a true democracy.

​One could see words like these coming out of the mouths of a John Dewey or a Martin Luther King Jr. These ideas governing China’s socialist whole-process people’s democracy should seem anything but foreign to Americans – it is what our leading democratic theorists hoped the US system would develop into. If Americans are faithful to the democratic creed of the declaration of independence, and to the leading theorists of our country who’ve developed these into notions of socialist democracy with American characteristics, then we should be praising China for how incredibly comprehensive their socialist democracy (which is still humbly considered a work-in-progress) is. Far from thinking about democracy in the reductive, election-only sense, China’s system of socialist democracy is embedded in ‘seven integrated structures or institutional forms (体制tizhi): electoral democracy; consultative democracy; grassroots democracy; minority nationalities policy; rule of law; human rights; and leadership of the Communist Party.’ A comprehensive study of this whole-process people’s democracy would lead any unbiased researcher to the conclusion Roland Boer has (along with a plethora of Chinese scholars) arrived at: namely, that ‘China’s socialist democratic system is already quite mature and superior to any other democratic system.’
​
Not only does the US lack this seven-tiered democratic system, but even in the one realm it does have, namely, electoral democracy, the results it produces could hardly be called ‘democratic.’ For more than a decade studies from bourgeois institutions have themselves confirmed what Marxists have known since the middle of the 19th century, namely, that the essence of capitalist ‘democracy’ is ‘democracy for an insignificant minority –  democracy for the rich.’[11] The U.S., which spreads its blood soaked hands around the world plundering in the name of democracy, has been outed as a place where the dēmos (common people) do anything but rule (kratos). As a Princeton study headed by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page shows,

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagree with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.[12]

​In societies divided by class antagonisms we can never talk about ‘pure democracy,’ or abstract democracy in general; we must always ask - as Lenin did - ‘democracy for which class’?[13] The ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic freedoms’ of capitalist to exploit and oppress will always be detrimental to working and oppressed peoples. Only an all-people’s democracy (a working and popular classes democratic-dictatorship) can be genuinely democratic, for it is the only time ‘power’ (kratos) is actually in the hands of ‘common people’ (demos).
​
To claim – as American capitalists, their puppet politicians, and their lapdog media does – that the US is a ‘beacon of democracy,’ and China an ‘authoritarian one-party system,’ is to hold on to a delusional topsy turvy view of reality. Only by holding explicitly the idea of democracy as democracy for the rich – an oxymoronic truth which they must continue to conceal from the American public – would any part of their assessment contain truth. If democracy is considered from the standpoint of the capitalist’s ability to arbitrarily exert their will on society at the expense of working people and the planet, then, of course, the US is a beacon of this form of so-called ‘democracy,’ and China an ‘authoritarian’ regime. If instead, democracy is considered from the standpoint of common people’s ability to exert their power successfully over everyday affairs, that is, if democracy is understood in the people-centered form it etymologically stands for, and in the way leading American thinkers like Jefferson, Dewey, and Dr. King understood it, then it would be indubitable that China is far more democratic than the US (and any other liberal-bourgeois ‘democracy’).

As the US increases its anti-China rhetoric and actions – a symptom of its empire’s moribund stage – it becomes an imperative for all sane people to counter the propaganda setting the stage for, at best, a new cold war, and at worst, a third world-war. As Julian Assange – whose treatment reminds us everyday of how much the West cherishes its so called ‘individual rights’ to speech and press – once eloquently stated: ‘if wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.’

It is the duty of American communists, socialists, and progressives, to show the American people the truth; to show them that China is not the enemy of the American people, that the real enemy of the American people are those who would like us to see China as an enemy. It is not China who has our country surrounded by military bases. It is not China who is funding and inciting separatist movements in our autonomous regions. It is not China who is slandering us with baseless accusations of the most heinous crimes of genocide humanity can imagine. It is not China who is creating international military alliances a la global NATO to militarily threaten us. It is the US empire who is doing this to China. The only interests which China threatens are those of our finance capitalists, who have spent the last century impoverishing both our people at home and our brothers and sisters in the global south. China is a friend of the American working men and women; just like it is a friend of the African peoples, and the peoples in the Middle East and in Latin America, whose win-win, mutually beneficial relations in international trade with China have afforded them the ability to turn away from predatory neoliberal debt-trapping loans which have been systematically forced on them for half a century by the capitalist West.

In sum – to be faithful to the democratic creed of the declaration of independence and of the greatest minds our country has produced, we must realize today that China is not our enemy; instead, it is the place wherein the ideals which guide this democratic creed are best embodied. Instead of buying into the easily confuted lies of Western pundits, who hope we are foolish enough to accept them and dance to the drums of a war to sustain Western capitalist-imperialist hegemony, we must learn from China and work together to build a peaceful, cooperative, and ecological shared future for mankind.

References
​
[1] Herbert Aptheker, The American Revolution: 1763-1783 (New York: International Publishers, 1960), 105.

[2] John Dewey, The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, ed. by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990), LW 14:228.

[3] Dewey, LW 6:163.

[4] Dewey, LW 11:28.

[5] Dewey, LW 11:28.

[6] Martin Luther King Jr, The Radical King, ed. and introduced by Cornel West (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 246- 247. 248.

[7] King Jr, The Radical King, 236.

[8] King Jr, The Radical King, 248.

[9] King Jr, The Radical King, xi.

[10] King Jr, The Radical King, xiii.

[11] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 26 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977) 465. 

[12] Gilens, M., & Page, B. (2014). Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. Perspectives on Politics, 12(3), 564-581. doi:10.1017/S1537592714001595
​
[13] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 28 (Moscow: Progress Publishers,1974), 249.

Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American PhD student and instructor in philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (with an M.A. in philosophy from the same institution). His research focuses include Marxism, Hegel, early 19th century American socialism, and socialism with Chinese characteristics. He is an editor in Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis and in the Journal of American Socialist Studies. Carlos edited and introduced Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview: An Anthology of Classical Marxist Texts on Dialectical Materialism (Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2022). 

What is Socialist Revolution?

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

By Nino Brown

Republished from Liberation School.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Political and social revolutions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Socialist revolution and the question of violence

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

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

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

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

Lessons from history

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making a socialist revolution in the U.S.

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

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

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

Building mass socialist consciousness

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

[1] V.I. Lenin, “Letters on Tactics,” in V.I. Lenin,Lenin Collected Works (Vol. 24): April-June 1917, ed. B. Isaacs (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1918/1980), 44.
[2] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,The Communist Manifesto, trans. S. Moore (New York: Penguin Books, 1888/1967), 232.
[3] V.I. Lenin, “The Collapse of the Second International,” in V.I Lenin,Lenin Collected Works (Vol. 21): August 1914-1915, trans. J. Katzer (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1915/1980), 213-214.
[4] Ibid., 214.
[5] Andrew Prokop, “Bernie Sanders’s Political Revolution, Explained,”Vox, 28 January 2016. Availablehere.
[6] Social revolutions make a sharp break from one social system to another, although not all social revolutions aresocialistrevolutions. The 1979 Iranian Revolution, for example, overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah, installed in a 1953 coup that overthrew the democratically-elected Mossadegh government. In the period before the revolution, millions of people took to the streets and eventually won much of the armed forces to their side. Again, however, because of the intense repression of trade unions and the communists under the Shah’s brutal rule, socialist forces were unable to turn the revolutionary opportunity into a socialist revolution. At the same time, by overthrowing the U.S.’s primary colonial outpost in the region and establishing an independent and anti-colonial government, the Iranian Revolution did significantly change the makeup of the social system.
[7] Karl Marx,Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 1): The Process of Capitalist Production, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 715.
[8] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Preface to the German Edition of 1872,” in Marx and Engels,The Communist Manifesto, 194.
[9] V.I. Lenin, “The State and Revolution,” in V.I. Lenin,Lenin Collected Works (Vol. 25): June-September 1917, ed. S. Presyan and J. Riordan (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1917/1980), 491.
[10] See Eugene Puryear, “Nations and Soviets: The National Question in the USSR,”Liberation News, 06 June 2022. Availablehere.
[11] Valentine Moghadam,Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East(Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993), 78-79.
[12] Ho Chi Minh,Selected Writings (1920-1969)(Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2001), 37.
[13] V.I. Lenin, “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” in V.I. Lenin,Lenin Collected Works (Vol. 22): December 1915-July 1916), ed. G. Hanna, trans. Y. Sdobnikov (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1916/1977), 144.
[14] V.I. Lenin, “Speech at a Presnya District Workers’ Conference,” in Lenin,Lenin Collected Works (Vol. 28), 361.
[15] See Party for Socialism and Liberation, “The Paralysis Ends: Trump, Fascism, and the Capitalist State,”Liberation News, 13 January 2021. Available here.

What would be different about a socialist economy?

By Ben Hillier

Republished from Red Flag.

The New York Stock Exchange is perhaps the premier institutional expression of the capitalist economy. It’s hard to conjure an image of American capitalism without including the Wall Street sign at the corner of Broad, or the stone streetscape of the exchange with its US flags, or the bronze “charging bull” statue at Bowling Green. 

Wall Street is for some a wondrous emblem of American exceptionalism. For most of us, it is a picture of moral desolation and criminality. Indeed, since it became the centre of US finance in the nineteenth century, Wall Street has repeatedly been the target of protests by workers who recognise it as a place where their enemies organise to rip them off and destroy their lives. 

So when you think “socialism”, you might, not unreasonably, conjure images of the storming and burning of stock exchanges everywhere. Yet a socialist economy would likely retain the machinery of Wall Street, albeit for refashioned ends. To understand why, and how a socialist economy might work, it’s important first to grasp just how remarkable the capitalist economy is. No human society before it has come close to developing the science, technologies and industrial capacities that we now take for granted.

Take the production of one of the most important things for human survival: food. Prior to capitalism, economies were primarily agrarian, the continued existence of any given population being almost entirely dependent on seasonal crop yields. Survival was a year-by-year proposition, famine just one flood, one drought, one failed harvest away. “A bad year such as 1817 could, even in tranquil Switzerland, produce an actual excess of deaths over births”, the late historian Eric Hobsbawm noted in his 1962 book The Age of Revolution. 

Today, thanks to capitalism, scarcity is a thing of the past. The amount of food available to an individual in France, for example, is estimated to be more than double what it was prior to the revolution of 1789, even though the population has more than doubled, from 28 million to 68 million. Across the world, the volume has increased by nearly 50 percent in the last 60 years, from fewer than 2,200 calories per person per day to more than 2,900, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. The recommended daily caloric intake being between 2,000 and 2,500 per day suggests that there is more than enough food available for everyone on the planet.

There’s an obvious problem, though, isn’t there? All around the world, billions of people are going hungry. At the extreme end, the humanitarian organisation Action Against Hunger estimates that more than 800 million people are undernourished. Even in the richest of countries, there’s an issue. In Australia, for example, more than one in six adults and more than 1 million children routinely miss meals, according to Foodbank, a charity.

This minor detail—more than enough being produced but billions of people struggling—is replicated in almost all areas: housing, incomes, health care, education etc. The problem is that, while capitalism excels in producing masses of things, it fails dismally in distributing them in any equitable way. 

“The workman is the source of all wealth”, an article in the Lancashire Co-operator noted of nineteenth century England. “Who has raised all the food? The half fed and impoverished labourer. Who built all the houses and warehouses, and palaces, which are possessed by the rich, who never labour or produce anything? The workman. Who spins all the yarn and makes all the cloth? The spinner and weaver ... [Yet] the labourer remains poor and destitute, while those who do not work are rich.”

Things haven’t changed much from those early years of capitalism. According to the financial group Credit Suisse, the richest 1 percent of adults on the planet together own nearly A$300 trillion in personal wealth—which is about 46 percent of the world’s total personal wealth. But the poorest 55 percent, close to 3 billion people, have just 1.3 percent of the wealth—on average less than A$2,000 per person.

It’s not just that the distribution of personal wealth is unequal, it’s that the productive infrastructure—the factories, the mines, the office blocks, the arable land, the telecommunications systems, the transport networks and so on—is owned and controlled by the rich and used to enrich them further.

One of the first goals of a socialist economy would be to put all of these important economic resources under the collective ownership and control of workers. By doing so, the majority of the population would gain the ability to decide what the priorities of production and distribution should be.

This brings us back to those stock exchanges. Every day, the Australian Securities Exchange in Sydney executes nearly 2 million trades. The system is remarkably efficient in pairing buyers and sellers of a diverse array of financial instruments. By and large, this is just wealthy people making themselves wealthier by buying and selling claims to the ownership of companies and other things. They, or their brokers, simply get online, look at what’s available to purchase, and trade away. 

In a socialist economy, this sort of technology, instead of being used to link capitalist traders around the world, could be used to link every workplace and every suburb in a city, every city in a country, and every country in the world. Instead of endlessly trading claims to ownership of different companies, the trades would be simple declarations of needs and availabilities. That is, any given region would let the system know how much it had produced of certain goods and how much of certain other goods its population needed for the week (or the day, whatever the case may be). The system would then balance out all the claims and society would immediately know where there were excesses and where there were shortages and alter production accordingly.

It sounds so simple as to be utterly utopian. But this is basically the way the world works already. Take the extensive global supply chains linking farms with ports with food manufacturers with warehouses with supermarkets—everything is coordinated down to the last kilogram between buyers and sellers. When it comes to this sort of distribution, capitalism is in general incredibly efficient. 

So as you read this, somewhere a supermarket line manager is scanning a series of barcodes and entering a corresponding quantity of units for each item; tomorrow a truck will turn up with several pallets of whatever it was that they ordered. It’s as simple as that. If you went back in time 200 years and tried to explain this to someone, they would likely consider you utterly mad. Yet here we all are, living in a world in which a stranger in a truck turns up with a mountain of goods after someone points a laser gun at a series of black lines on a small piece of paper. Marvelous. 

The process today is overseen by the small number of owners of the production and distribution chains who allow their workers to make orders and process deliveries only if they believe their company will make money. That’s the limit to the capitalist economy and its efficiency. But there’s no technical reason that this operation couldn’t be run instead to meet human need. The whole process is already carried out by workers—from producing the food to driving the trucks to stacking the shelves in the shops. All that would need to happen is for production and distribution to be put under the democratic control of the people who do all the work. 

Under capitalism, bosses like Jeff Bezos reap the rewards of their impoverished, exploited workers, then turn around and say, “I want to go to space”—and it happens. Under socialism, working people would reap the rewards of their own labor and communities would turn around and say, “We need a hospital”—and it would happen. It’s not materially or technically different; it’s just a different set of priorities and beneficiaries.

Along with its inability to distribute things equitably, capitalism generates a huge amount of waste. First is the mountain of things that are thrown out because they aren’t sold. Again take food. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, nearly half of all fruit and vegetables produced globally are wasted. In the United States, it’s about 30 percent of all food. Of that, up to a third of wastage happens at the farm and one-quarter at the retail level. It’s actually extra work to keep people starving—food producers and sellers have to put extra time into organizing to dump or remove unsold produce, rather than simply allow it to be distributed, in the usual way, to those who need it. Plus they wasted all the labor producing it in the first place only to see it rot. It was also a massive waste of soil nutrients and precious water resources. 

Second is the huge amount of planned obsolescence in capitalist production: many things are designed to fall apart or with short lifespans so that people come back and buy them over and over again. Industrial-scale planned obsolescence reportedly originated in the early twentieth century with the Phoebus Cartel in light globe manufacturing, which decided to limit the lifespan of bulbs to around 1,000 hours. The idea is now embedded in pretty much every industry. It’s such a waste of labor and resources, but it’s the production model that makes companies the most money. In many cases, it is cheaper to drive wages lower and just produce more and more new things than it is to create durable or serviceable products. (Did you know that some 24 billion pairs of shoes are sold every year?) 

Third is the monumental waste of entire industries and the labor associated with them: things like the legal profession or sales and marketing. One estimate of the cost to end global hunger (using existing capitalist economic means) is about US$33 billion per year over ten years. Compare that to the investment in marketing: US consulting and research firm Forrester predicts that it will reach US$4.7 trillion in 2025. That’s trillions of dollars and millions of labour hours, every year, outlaid by companies trying to convince us to buy their products, which will soon fall apart, rather than their competitors’ products, which are generally the same and also fall apart.

It’s madness.

A socialist economy would get rid of most of this waste almost overnight by starting with simple questions that the whole population can respond to: “First, what do we all need? Second, what do we want? Third, how many resources do we have? Fourth, what are our priorities?” A huge amount of office space, factory space, fertile land, machinery and, above all, labour time, would be freed up by starting with those questions, rather than the capitalists’ questions (“How do I make people want to buy this product, how can I generate a profit?”). 

Think of all the millions of hours of wasted labour that could otherwise be used to increase the production of things in short supply, or to reduce the working week by either producing things to last (therefore reducing the need to produce so much) or by bringing in a greater number of workers into productive industries and reducing everyone’s working hours, while still providing for everyone’s needs. 

Finally, a socialist economy would be more rational. Defenders of capitalism always talk about how innovative their system is. As noted above, it is. But again, this has serious limitations. Take the ongoing economic addiction to oil, coal and gas. How innovative is it, really, to be wedded to energy sources from the nineteenth century? The problem again is profits: the huge companies already invested in and determined to squeeze every cent out of the fossil fuel economy just won’t let go. A socialist economy, being run by the majority in the interests of all, simply would not allow our planet to be trashed so that a few of us could live better than the rest.

Getting to a socialist economy will not be simple—we need a workers’ revolution to get past capitalism. But once we are there, it will be quite easy using existing technologies and processes to run the world according to the maxim, “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need”. The poet Bertolt Brecht put it best in his poem “In praise of communism”:

It is reasonable. You can grasp it. It’s simple.

You’re no exploiter, so you’ll understand.

It is good for you. Look into it.

Stupid men call it stupid, and the dirty call it dirty.

It is against dirt and against stupidity.

The exploiters call it a crime.

But we know:

It is the end of all crime.

It is not madness but

The end of madness.

It is not chaos,

But order.

It is the simple thing

That’s hard to do.

Ben Hillier is the author of Losing Santhia: life and loss in Tamil Eelam and The art of rebellion: dispatches from Hong Kong.

Organizing in the “Inferno of Misery”: Jewish Workers’ Struggles in Britain Between 1900 and 1914

By Panos Theodoropoulos

Introduction: Why study the history of migrant workers’ movements?

When Rudolf Rocker, one of the central theorists of anarcho-syndicalism, began exploring London in the turn of the 20th century, he witnessed “an abyss of human suffering, an inferno of misery” (Rocker 2005: 25). Eager to get acquainted with the workers and the movements in his new city, he started going to the East End to attend meetings and socialize with fellow migrant socialists and anarchists. Many recent Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe had congregated in the area, which was “a slum district”. He remembers “a church at the corner of Commercial Street, at the Spitalfields end, where at any time of the day you would see a crowd of dirty, lousy men and women, looking like scarecrows, in filthy rags, with dull hopeless faces, scratching themselves. That was why it was called Itchy Park”. The Jewish working-class Londoners who attended these meetings, primitive cells of what would soon become a powerful migrant trade union movement, “looked sad and worn; they were sweatshop workers, badly paid, and half starved” (Rocker 2005: 26-27). The destitution he saw in London led him to conclude that, contrary to popular beliefs that revolution is triggered by a worsening of living conditions, “there is a pitch of material and spiritual degradation from which a man can no longer rise. Those who have been born into misery and never knew a better state are rarely able to resist and revolt” (2005: 25). A social movement in these locations, targeting these specific circumstances, had to be based on more than abstract theory. It had to directly fight for the improvement of living conditions, while at the same time providing resources for the masses of Jewish (and English) workers to expand their horizons, emerge from the alienation of daily life, and imagine alternatives. This is a conclusion that remains relevant today.

The history of migrant workers’ movements in the United Kingdom remains, largely, unwritten. Plenty of books have been written focusing on specific ethnic groups or on specific time periods. However, no singular book or study exists that specifically surveys the historical struggles of migrant populations as migrants and as workers, attempting to draw connections between the experiences of different ethnic migrant groups and, ultimately, lessons for movements wishing to organize with migrant and marginalized people today. This is, however, an incredibly important task, as these groups not only had been organizing along broadly intersectional lines long before these concepts were formally introduced in the 1970s, but also because their methods of organizing offer fruitful suggestions for working around the effects of precarity, transience, alienation, language and cultural difficulties, and disorientation that frequently debilitate attempts by migrant solidarity movements to organize (with) these populations. Broadly speaking, despite the innumerable differences that stem from different ethnic groups’ cultural backgrounds, positions within the labor and social hierarchy in their host countries, locations on the gradient of whiteness, etc., all the migrant groups that managed to organize themselves in the UK did so by acting on at least three crucial ideas.

Primarily, they understood that, rather than fight for acceptance within the dominant structures of society and trade unions (which were often outright racist and exclusionary), their exclusion necessitated their autonomous organization. Critically, this autonomy emerges historically not as detrimental, but actually beneficial to, the empowerment of the working class as a whole. Secondarily, their autonomy and continuous empowerment depended on their physical embeddedness within the communities that they represented. Third, this embeddedness, and their wider analysis and praxis, had to extend beyond the narrow domain of class politics; they understood that cultural symbols play a key role in maintaining the illusion of disempowerment amongst oppressed groups, and thereby operationalized a broad, non-economistic conception of capitalism which recognized its multi-faceted, culturally dependent character. The example of the Jewish workers’ activities in London, specifically those coalitions that were established around the Arbeter Fraint group, is one small but inspiring instance of how a completely marginalized, hated, divided, and alienated mass of migrant workers managed to not only disprove Rocker’s initial pessimism, but also support the very same British local working class that excluded them.

The wider context: Struggling in a hostile environment

While migrant worker groups in the UK during the 1900s varied in countries of origin, occupations, and specific experiences, they shared some characteristics in terms of the social exclusion and exploitation they faced upon arrival. These characteristics bear significant resemblance to those experienced by migrant populations currently in the West. In the early 1900s, minorities in the UK consisted mainly of West Indian, Caribbean, Asian and Irish populations, all of which arrived through the networks fostered by Britain’s expansive imperial activities (Ramdin 2017; Virdee 2014; Freyer 1984). Migration in Britain is deeply historically structured by imperialism, and the role of Empire cannot be ignored when analyzing migrant lives and trajectories. As such, the experiences of migrant groups have been determined by an interplay of both the demands of British capitalism and an imperial ideology of racial difference and superiority, which enabled and justified their exploitation and socio-political exclusion (Virdee 2014; Tabili 1994).

Migrants were swiftly inserted in those occupations that demanded workers or were otherwise kept as a reserve army of labor until demand rose again (Ramdin 2017; Virdee 2014; Tabili 1994). Located in the most insecure and exploitable segments of the labor hierarchy, a variety of interrelated factors impeded migrants’ chances of joining trade unions. Perhaps the biggest contributor to this were the attitudes of the British trade union movement, which was active in anti-immigration campaigns under the claim that migrant workers represented “unfair competition” to British labor. Lack of familiarity with the English language and culture, spatial segregation, de-skilling, and the unwillingness of many bosses to employ migrants pushed them to the lowest paid and most exploitative occupations; importantly, these occupations were usually not covered by the union victories that had been gained by many British workers in the course of their historic struggle. These same characteristics, alongside a necessity to constantly fight for one’s survival stemming from their precarious circumstances, were also a contributor in migrant workers being used as strike-breakers in various instances of labor struggle. For example, when the skilled tailors from the West End of London went on strike in 1911, the owners turned to Jewish labor from small and mostly unskilled East End workshops (Rocker 2005: 127).

These factors combined in making it easy for unions, bosses, British workers, the local media and politicians to draw a fictitious connection between migrant labor and the threat to established labor rights, which was used to establish and expand a climate of hostility and exclusion that further cemented migrant disempowerment, and therefore, exploitability (Fishman 2004). Migrant workers mostly found themselves outside the organizing priorities of the major unions and were regularly directly blamed for the wider economic difficulties of the British working class. Their exclusion from mainstream unions combined with the aforementioned cultural and subjective factors to create a highly vulnerable and exploitable population.

The Arbeter Fraint and the organization of London’s Jewish workers

Williams (1980) locates the beginning of significant numbers of Jewish migration to the UK in the 1840. However, in response to an increase in pogroms and wider anti-Semitic activity in Europe, Jewish migration to the UK peaked between the 1880s and 1914, with the Jewish population increasing from 60,000 to approximately 300,000 (Virdee 2014). Between 1881 and 1882 more than 225,000 Jewish families fled Russia, with many settling in the East End of London (Fishman 2004). Newly arrived Jewish workers were predominantly absorbed by the tailoring industry, finding themselves in a complex network of independent workshops, many of which were sweatshops (Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004; Buckman 1980;). Over time, Jewish workers became fully connected in popular imagination to these workshops, which further curtailed their chances of finding other types of employment (Fishman 2004). Caught between being heavily exploited by wealthier members of their own communities, known as Masters (the owners of the workshops), and being excluded from most significant trade unions while facing intense racism from wider society, Jewish workers were forced to organize themselves and struggle for both labor and social rights (Virdee 2014; Fishman 2004; Buckman 1980). In so doing, they engaged with and directly aided the wider working-class movement, with individuals such Eleanor Marx playing key organizing roles in the social struggles of the time.

The competition inherent in capitalism combined with the general poverty of migrant Jewish communities to create a constant race to the bottom in terms of working conditions in the workshops. Rocker (2005: 89) writes that “the clothing industry in the East End was run by hundreds of small master-tailors who were sub-contractors for the big firms in the City and the West End. In order to get the contract they under-bid each other mercilessly, thus creating their own hell. They passed that hell on of course to their workers. The new immigrants, the greeners, as they were called, who had just arrived from Poland or Russia or Romania and had to earn their bread, went to these small sweatshops to learn to be pressers of machinists. They started as under-pressers or plain-machinists, working for about six months for a skilled presser or machinist, doing the first preparatory work for him, till they learned to work for themselves.”

To further complicate matters, the skilled presser or machinist was usually responsible for paying and organizing the labor of the workers under him, while he was being paid directly by the master. This is illustrative of the wider chain of relationships that created the adverse labor conditions experienced by Jewish workers: large firms and industries, themselves engaged in competition with each other, constantly demanded lower prices from masters; therefore, masters demanded more work for less remuneration by the skilled workers; who, in turn, demanded the same from the “unskilled” workers under them. Jewish workers, especially the newer arrivals, were poor and willing to accept whatever conditions saved them from starvation. According to Rocker, “the evil of the sweating system was that it was so contrived that each drove everybody else” (2005: 89). There were frequent attempts by individual workers to amass the money required to open a private workshop and join the ranks of the masters; however, this proved very difficult and only a few managed to sustain their businesses. Most workers remained workers (Fishman 2004).

The unionization of Jewish workers was rendered difficult due to a variety of factors, including the fact that organizers had to contend with the exploitation stemming from within the community as well as hostility from without. Class divisions quickly solidified as Jews were simultaneously excluded from the wider labor market and therefore pushed to find work within their communities (Buckman 2008; Fishman 2004). Jewish masters were adept at forming coalitions amongst themselves when threatened by strike or other activity and were supported by other industrialists (Williams 1980; Buckman 1980). To further problematize matters, early arrivals were unacquainted with the traditions of English unionism, exasperating local organizers when they attempted to engage with them (Buckman 1980). Furthermore, the structure of the industry meant that there was a high degree of mobility; workers moved between sweatshops as well as gradually gaining skills and rising up the hierarchy. The oscillations of the trade meant that during one season there could be a large pool of workers ready for union activity, while in the next season the majority of those workers could be unemployed (Rocker 2005; Buckman 1980). This precarity also acted as a barrier to workers’ readiness to engage in potentially risky oppositional actions. However, the most significant barrier to Jews joining unions were the unions themselves: despite some notable exceptions, generally unions were unwilling to work with Jews and were active campaigners in favor of stricter migration controls (Virdee 2014; Rocker 2005).

Despite the difficulties, the exclusion and exploitation experienced at all levels of social existence led Jewish workers to approach some local unions and to eventually begin organizing themselves autonomously as migrant workers (Virdee 2014; Buckman 1980). The efforts of the Socialist League, which included the Jewess Eleanor Marx in its ranks, were instrumental in providing an initial impetus for organization as well as material support. The Socialist League was one of the few British socialist formations of the late 19th century that explicitly rejected refused to subscribe to a myopic, white and British-centered view of the working class, instead promoting internationalism, anti-imperialism and migrant solidarity (Virdee 2017; 2014). The Jewish working class, which already had members with highly developed radical ideas, resonated with the SL and began organizing. Crucially, the SL managed to forge alliances between Jewish and British elements of the working class. In 1889, for example, the Socialist League pressured for an alliance between the Leeds Jewish tailors and the anti-immigration Gasworkers union. The tailors joined the struggle for the eight-hour movement, which culminated in a successful strike that won the demands within days (Buckman 1980). This, and subsequent victories by the Leeds Jewish Tailor’s Union made a significant contribution in the battle against anti-immigrant sentiment, while at the same time advancing the interests of the wider working class in the UK (Buckman 2008).

The years between 1900 and 1914 also witnessed a period of intense organizing and victories by Jewish workers in the East End of London (Virdee 2014; Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004). The first seeds for radical activity in the region had been sown in the 1870s through the establishment of the Hebrew Socialist Union, led by Aron Lieberman (Fishman 2004). The HSU was involved in a plethora of campaigns, its main purpose being to spread socialism amongst the Jewish working class and assist in their organization in trade unions. While the group was short lived, it set the stage for subsequent actions. A variety of Jewish unions began emerging in the late 19th century, including “the Hebrew Cabinet Makers’ Society, Stick and Cane Dressers’ Union, International Furriers’ Society, Tailor Machinist union, Tailors and Pressers Union, Amalgamated Lasters; Society, United Cap Makers’ Society and International Journeymen Boot Finishers’ Society” (Fishman 2004).

In the early 1900s, a group of Jewish radicals and anarchists centered around the radical Yiddish newspaper Arbeter Fraint expanded these attempts (Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004). The existence of the newspaper was fundamental in unionization processes because, since most British trade unions were unwilling to organize Jews, it was imperative that they organize themselves. For that, political education was of paramount importance (Rocker 2005). The paper’s readership increased significantly through the years, gaining thousands of readers and becoming firmly embedded in both local and international movement circles. Most importantly, it was read and supported by the working-class, with Rocker (2005: 96) remembering that “young girls who slaved in the sweatshops of a weekly pittance of ten or twelve shillings, literally took the bread from their mouths to give the movement a few pennies.”

In 1906, the Arbeter Fraint group opened a social club in Jubilee Street which was to play a major role in the East End Jewish workers’ movement (Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004). It quickly became one of the centers of community life, organizing events that connected Jewish workers to their culture as well as maintaining a commitment to political education and providing meeting spaces for workers to organize. It consisted of an 800-capacity gallery, some halls with space for meetings and various events, and a library. It offered classes in English, history and sociology, as well as hosting a range of cultural events, including debates, live music, and poetry readings. Importantly, most of these provisions were open for everyone regardless of club membership or background (Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004). An example of the club’s activities which illustrates the organizers’ priorities is the annual trip to Epping Forest, regarded by many workers as “the highlight of their lives, in contrast with the everyday gloom and drudgery of the sweatshop” (Fishman 2004: 262). People would bring their families, and, following a long walk, would then congregate to listen to Rocker lecture on topics ranging from literature to history and politics (Fishman 2004). Rather than simply viewing workers as faceless units in need of strict labor organization, emphasis was placed on substantial empowerment, experience of beauty, and the destruction of the alienation experienced in the course of their daily occupations.

The constant agitation and work inside the community eventually led to a wave of militant union activity, extending beyond the narrow spaces of East London (Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004). At its peak, Rocker (2005: 6) claims that the East End had “the most powerful migrant movement that had developed in Britain.” Years of political education had resulted in the mass meetings of the Federation of Jewish Anarchists being attended by “five, six, seven thousand people” (2005: 6). Crucially, and in contrast with many other immigrant communities, Jewish immigrants had no intention of returning to their countries of origin, which resulted in them becoming fully invested in the improvement of their daily lives in the UK (Rocker 2005). When, in 1912, the skilled tailors of the West End commenced strike activity, the Arbeter Fraint group used the opportunity to agitate for a general strike amongst East End Jewish tailors, many of whom were being used as strike breakers.

Thousands attended the general meeting that was called, and more than 13,000 workers participated in the strike in the first 2 days. They attempted to permanently do away with the sweatshop system, demanding a normal working day, the abolition of overtime, higher wages, and the closure of small workshops with unhygienic conditions. As this community was not wealthy, many participated in the strike without strike pay. They forged alliances with the contemporaneous London dockers’ strike and held joint meetings and demonstrations. The strike was ultimately successful after 3 weeks: the masters conceded shorter hours, no piecework, better conditions, and committed to only employ unionized workers. Emerging victorious, the Jewish workers didn’t stop there: seeing the dockers’ strike drag on, they decided to ask Jewish families to care for the dockers’ children, and over 300 were taken in Jewish homes. This strike represented the culmination of decades of organizing, its results ranging far beyond narrow material gains: it succeeded in abolishing sweatshops in the East End, while at the same time challenging the dominant British perceptions about Jewish workers and establishing strong bonds of solidarity with the local workers’ movement (Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004).

Between the East End and the future

This wave of radicalization ultimately faded away with the onset of the First World War and the British government’s crackdown on all radical activity. Rocker and many of his comrades were imprisoned, and the legacy of the East End Jewish workers was largely forgotten as it was erased from most accounts of history emanating from British trade unions. However, despite the vast differences that exist between the 1900s and now, there are several crucial lessons that can be drawn from the Jewish workers’ methods of organizing. They address structural barriers to organization that are shared by many migrant groups today: namely, their exclusion from most mainstream trade unions (despite the lip service paid to notions of “equality” and diversity”), their precarity and transience in the job market, their spatial segregation in specific neighborhoods and areas, and their exclusion from the host society more generally.

In the example of the East end workers and their club in Jubilee Street, the issues of patience and embeddedness emerge as paramount to organizing the excluded. The first noteworthy attempts at unionization and collective resistance from Jewish workers in Britain can be located at least as far back as the mid-1800s, slowly sowing the seeds for the powerful movement that emerged in the early 1900s. These consistent efforts laid the groundwork for establishing physical entities which the workers could access outside of their workplaces: this was critical for their capacity to organize because, 1) being based close to where they lived, it provided a space to come together despite the transitory and precarious nature of their labor trajectories, 2) it was a safe space to organize away from the masters and their cronies, and 3) far from myopically attempting to organize workers purely on the basis of their class status, it was a space which enabled the generation of various activities that aimed at substantial empowerment.

These elements were all undoubtedly impacted, to some degree, by the Arbeter Fraint’s broad, non-economistic conception of capitalist oppression. Their analysis, informed by anarchism, Marxist economics, but also sociology and philosophy, was able to understand how marginalization and alienation not only debilitate oppressed groups’ capacities for action now, but also penetrate deep into their psyches and foreclose those possibilities for the future as workers begin to naturalize their circumstances. The Arbeter Fraint’s patient agitating work, and the existence of a physical space that became a beacon of hope in the East End, were direct, tangible examples that another world is possible. And that we can collectively begin crafting this world today, in our daily interactions.

The combination of embeddedness and a broad conception of capitalist oppression is perhaps the most critical lesson the East End movement has to offer in terms of organizing (with) oppressed groups today. In the West’s hyper-precarious realities, where social bonds have generally grown weaker and liquified, where migrant workers are not only marginalized and exploited but are actively hunted and imprisoned, where worker transience has expanded to almost all sectors of the lower rungs of the labor hierarchy, and where capitalism is increasingly becoming naturalized as an unalterable quasi-natural phenomenon, social movements and those wishing to organize with oppressed groups must focus on becoming rooted in the communities they claim to represent. Furthermore, they must offer imaginative, inspiring alternatives that engage with workers as full human beings, rupturing the sterile and literally depressing one-dimensionality of capitalist realism. Recall how the Jubilee Street club’s annual retreat to Epping Forest represented, for many workers, the highlight of their year.

These activities are inseparably connected to the movement’s militant success: as anarchists and socialists, we are not simply fighting for improvements in our socioeconomic statuses. We are fighting to develop the conditions for all humans to have the resources, space, time, and ideas to fully actualize themselves, to emerge from the drudgery of daily alienation into an empowered state where everything is possible, as long as we work towards it together. Although we are workers, our outlook is geared towards the emancipation of labor, and towards emancipation from the status of wage laborers. In response to capitalism’s tendency to minimize, regiment, and direct the complexity of human existence purely towards the production of surplus value, the Jewish migrant workers in the East End foregrounded culture, education, community, and, crucially, having fun. These characteristics were vital in inspiring others to join their ranks as empowered individuals uniting for a collective cause, and can be equally powerful and inspirational today. To reach these horizons, community embeddedness, especially through the establishment of autonomous, open, and radical social spaces, emerges as an inescapable necessity.

This article includes segments of Panos’s PhD thesis on the barriers to the organization of precarious migrant workers in Scotland, available in full and for free here.

References

Buckman, J. (1980) Alien Working-Class Response: The Leeds Jewish Tailors, 1880-1914. In: Lunn, K. (ed.) (1980) Hosts, Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Responses to Newcomers in British Society 1870-1914. Kent: Dawson

Fishman, J. (2004) East End Jewish Radicals. Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications

Freyer, P. (1984) Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto Press

Ramdin, R. (2017) The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain. London: Verso

Rocker, R. (2005) The London Years. Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications

Tabili, L. (1994) “We Ask for British Justice”: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain. New York: Cornell University Press

Virdee, S. (2014) Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider. London: Palgrave Macmillan

Williams, B. (1980) The Beginnings of Jewish trade Unionism in Manchester, 1889-1891. In: Lunn, K. (ed.) (1980) Hosts, Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Responses to Newcomers in British Society 1870-1914. Kent: Dawson

About the author:

Panos Theodoropoulos is a sociologist based in Athens, Greece, and is currently active with the Libertarian Syndicalist Union (ESE). His Ph. D thesis was focused on examining the barriers that precarious migrant workers in Scotland experience in regard to labor organization. Previously active with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), he has been involved in various organizing campaigns as a migrant worker in the UK and is currently focused on using sociology to develop theoretical tools that can practically assist social movements organizing towards our complete liberation.

Why Western Marxism Misunderstands China’s Usage of Markets

By Carlos Garrido

I have elsewhere argued that at the core of Western Marxism’s[1] flawed analysis of socialist states lies a “purity fetish” which is grounded in a Parmenidean fixation of the ‘true’ as the one, pure, and unchanging. For this disorder, so I have contended, the only cure is dialectics. With the aid of Roland Boer’s prodigious new text Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, I wish to show how this purity fetish, or, in its negative formulation, how this lack of dialectical thinking, emerges in Western Marxists’ analysis of China’s usage of markets.

In V.I. Lenin’s ‘Conspectus to Hegel’s Science of logic’ he states that,

It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx![2]

For anyone familiar with G.W.F. Hegel’s 700+ page arguably impenetrable monster this daunting task alone seems harder than making a revolution. However, the central message in Lenin’s audacious statement is this: without a proper understanding of the dialectical method, Marxism is bound to be misunderstood. A century later and still, Western Marxists struggle to understand Marx. The paradox is this: “Western Marxists, although claiming to be the ones who rekindle the spirit of Hegel into Marxism, are the least bit dialectical when it comes to analysis of the concrete world.” This is lucidly seen in their treatment of China’s usage of markets, where they dogmatically accept Ludwig von Mises’ stale binary which states  – “the alternative is still either Socialism or a market economy.”[3]

As Boer highlights, already in Capital Vol 3 (specifically chapter 36 on “Pre-Capitalist Relations”) Marx shows how markets existed in the slave economies of the ancient world, e.g., Rome and Greece, and in the feudal economies of the Middle Ages. Were the markets in each of these historical periods the same? Were they commensurable to how markets exist under capitalism? No, as Boer states “market economies may appear to be similar, but it is both the arrangement of the parts in relation to each other and the overall purpose or function of the market economy in question that indicates significant differences between them.”[4] As Boer points out, Chinese scholars, following the analysis of Marx’s Capital Vol 3, understand that “market economies have existed throughout human history and constitute one of the significant creations by human societies.”[5][6] If markets, then, predate the capitalist mode of production, why would a socialist mode of production not be able to utilize them?

Chinese Marxism, following upon the tradition of Eastern European socialism, was able to ‘de-link’ markets from capitalism and utilize them as a method (fangfa) and means (shouduan) to serve (fuwu) the ends of socialism, that is, to liberate the forces of production and guarantee collective flourishing.[7] If the last four decades – wherein China has drastically raised its population’s living standards and lifted 800 million out of poverty – has taught us anything, it is that China’s usage of markets as a shouduan to fuwu socialism works.

Considering the plethora of advances China has been able to make for its population and the global movement for socialism, why have Western Marxist continuously insisted that China’s market reforms are a betrayal of socialism and a deviation down the ‘capitalist road’? Unlike some of the other Western misunderstandings of China, this one isn’t merely a case of yixi jiezhong, of “using Western frameworks or categories to understand China,”[8] for, if the dialectical framework and categories the Marxist tradition inherits from Hegel were properly applied, there would be no misunderstanding here. Instead, it is precisely the absence of this dialectical framework which leads to the categorical mistakes.

In Hegel, but formulated clearer in Engels and Lenin, we come to know that universals are empty if not immanently negated by its particular (and individual) determinate form.[9] Since markets have existed throughout various modes of production, within the dialectic of universal, particular, and singular, markets stand as the universal term. Markets, Boer argues, as a “specific building block or component of a larger system” are a “universal institutional form” (tizhi), which can only be brought into concrete existence via a particular socio-economic system (zhidu).[10] When the particular zhidu through which the universal institutional form of a market comes into existence is a “basic socialist system” (shehuizhuyi jiben zhidu), the fundamental nature of how the tizhi functions will be different to how that tizhi functioned under the particular zhidu of slave, feudal, and capitalist modes of production. In short, as Huang Nansen said, “there is no market economy institutional form that is independent of the basic economic system of society.”[11]

As was the case with the planned institutional form in the first few decades of the revolution, the market institutional form has been able to play its part in liberating the productive forces and drastically raising the living standards of the Chinese people. However, because 1) China took this creative leap of grounding the market institutional form in socialism, and because 2) Western Marxists retain an anti-dialectical purity fetish for the planned institutional form, 3) the usage of markets in China is taken as a desecration of their Western Marxist pseudo-Platonic socialist ideal. It is ultimately a categorical mistake to see the usage of markets as ‘taking the capitalist road’ or as a ‘betrayal of the revolution.’ It is, in essence, a bemusing of the universal for the particular, of the institutional form for the socio-economic system. As Boer asserts, “to confuse a market economy with a capitalist system entails a confusion between commonality and particularity.”[12]

At a time when US aggression against China is moving the world into a new cold war,[13] these theoretical lapses carry an existential weight. The world cannot afford any more categorical mistakes which set the ground for an imperialist centered ‘left-wing’ critique of China. These, as has been seen in the past, merely give the state department’s imperialist narrative a socialist gloss.

Instead, it is time for the global left, and specifically the hesitant western left, to get behind China and its efforts to promote peace and international cooperation. The western left must stop being duped by propaganda aimed at weaponizing their sentiments to manufacture consent for a war that will only bring havoc and an unaffordable delay to the ingenious forms of global collaboration necessary to deal with the environmental crisis. It is the duty of every peace-loving individual to counter the US’ and former western colonial countries’ increasingly pugnacious discourse and actions against China. We must not allow the defense of their imperialist unipolarity to bring about any more death and suffering than what it already has.

Notes

[1] By Western Marxism I am referring specifically to a broad current in Marxism that comes about a quarter into the last century as a rejection of the Soviet Union and Marxism-Leninism. It is today, the dominant form of ‘Marxism’ in western academia. It encapsulates everything from the Frankfurt school, the French Marxists of the 60s-70s, the New Left, and the forms of Marxism Humanism that arise alongside these. Often, they phrase their projects as a Marxism that ‘returns to its Hegelian roots’, centering the Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and reading the mature Marx only in light of the projects of the younger Marx. Some of the main theorists today include Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Kevin Anderson etc. Although it might be tempting to just refer to this block as ‘Non-Marxist-Leninist Marxists’, I would urge against doing so, for there are many Marxist currents in the global south which, although drinking from the fountain of Marxism-Leninism, do not explicitly consider themselves Marxist-Leninists and yet do not fall into the same “purity fetish” Western Marxists do. It is important to note that a critique of their “purity fetish” does not mean I think their work is useless and shouldn’t be read. On the contrary, they have been able to make great theoretical advancements in the Marxists tradition. However, their consistent failure to support socialist projects must be critiqued and rectified.

[2] V.I. Lenin. Collected Works Vol 38. (Progress Publishers, 1976)., pp. 180.

[3] Ludwig von Mises. Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. (Jonathan Cape, 1936)., pp. 142.

[4] Roland Boer. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. (Springer, 2021)., pp. 119.

[5] Ibid.

[6] It is also important to note that this realization is common knowledge in economic anthropology since the 1944 publication of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, where, while holding that “there is hardly an anthropological or sociological assumption contained in the philosophy of economic liberalism that has not been refuted,” nonetheless argues markets have predated the capitalist mode of production, albeit usually existing inter, as opposed to intra, communally. Karl Polanyi. The Great Transformation. (Beacon Press, 1957)., pp. 269-277.

[7] Boer. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics., pp. 118.

[8] Ibid., pp. 13.

[9] For Hegel the individual is also a determinate universal – “the particular, because it is only the determinate universal, is also an individual, and conversely the individual, because it is the determinate universal, is just as much a particular.” G.W.F. Hegel. The Science of Logic. § 1343.

[10] Boer. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics., pp. 122-3.

[11] Ibid., pp. 124. Quoted from: Huang, Nansen. 1994. Shehuizhuyi shichang jingji lilun de zhexue jichu. Makesizhuyi yu xianshi 1994 (11): 1–6.

[12] Ibid., pp. 124.

[13] Although with the emergence of AUKUS a warm one does not seem unlikely.

Martin Luther King Jr. and the Socialist Within

By Stephen Joseph Scott

To date, the image and memory of Martin Luther King Jr., social justice warrior, peace activist and civil rights icon in the United States, and around the world, has been manipulated, watered-down or diminished of meaning to serve the very forces of capitalist power and domination that the man spent his life in opposition to. In school textbooks in the U.S. for example, young people are taught about King the moderate man of peace, but not the radical King who, criticized by other civil-rights-leaders for speaking out against the Vietnam war, proclaimed, on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City, the U.S. to be, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” By sanitizing the image of the man, they, corporate and governmental powers, not only control the narrative, but they dumb-down and oversimplify the message by lobotomizing the historical record. As W.E.B. Du Bois, American intellectual, asserted: “The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example: it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.” What Du Bois was saying is that by stripping, containing and distorting historical narratives the learner is robbed of the substance, nuance and otherness that history should provide. Each year in January as King is honored in the eyes of the public, there is little mention of the demands of the man and his mission: his fight for economic justice in a society that was built on inequality from the very start, “We can’t have a system where some of the people live in superfluous, inordinate wealth while others live in abject, deadening poverty.” King the radical has been passed-over and neutralized in order to make a moderate image of the man more digestible, not only to whitewash the general public and students alike, but to also pacify the capitalist and white supremacist power structures that he so fiercely opposed.

In an early and intimate correspondence, written in 1952, to his then jeune amour Coretta Scott, King declared “I am more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic.” When addressing a book sent to him by Coretta: Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887, King expressed: “On the negative side ... Bellamy falls victim to the same error that most writers of Utopian societies fall victim ... idealism not tempered with realism.” King was a pragmatist who understood fully the cause and effect of a capitalist system that pushed aside the needs of its populous in the name of profit, “So today capitalism has outlived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. So I think Bellamy is right in seeing the gradual decline of capitalism.” This letter reveals that King was an admitted Socialist and firm in his agreement with Bellamy’s prediction of the inevitable degeneration of capitalism.

Reflecting upon his longtime hero and mentor, Norman Thomas, King espoused the 1932 Socialist Presidential nominee’s views as an inspiration to his own antiwar stance concerning Vietnam in an article published in Pageant magazine in June 1965, “Thomas, a Presbyterian minister, found his interest in socialism stimulated by the antiwar declaration of the Socialist Party in 1917.” It was to President Franklin Roosevelt’s acclaim, that he, once in office, took on much of Thomas’ socialist platform when putting together his well-known New Deal program: “Old-age pensions for men and women 60 years old; Abolition of child labor; The six-hour day, five-day week with no wage reductions; Health insurance and maternity insurance; and, Adequate minimum wage laws.” King inspired by Thomas’ unorthodox socialist approach to the issues of his day, steadfastly admired his principled stand calling him “The Bravest Man I’ve Ever Met,” and embodied Thomas’ following sentiments in words and deeds, “The hope for the future lies in a new social and economic order which demands the abolition of the capitalist system.” The seeds were planted; the capitalist opponent and unyielding guardian of socialist values stood evident throughout King’s ministry.

January 10, 1957 marked the birthday of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, founded by Martin Luther King Jr. and his father, to fight for civil rights and economic fairness. Increasingly throughout the 1960s, King became more anticorporate; and, more explicitly judgmental of capitalism as a system of innate inequality. In May 1967, while speaking at a SCLC staff meeting, King pushed radical against the injustices baked into the fundamental structure of capitalism, as well as the corrupt and unethical political system that allowed it to ride roughshod over its own population, “We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power.” Meaning, the movement had to demand a radical-paradigm-shift in the administrative and monetary structures that undergirded the American system of capitalism, “We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together you cant [sic] really get rid of one without getting rid of the others the whole structure of American life must be changed.” Again, in August 1967, at a SCLC annual conference, King asked, “Why are there forty million poor people in America? ... When you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth ... you begin to question the capitalistic economy.” King was insistent that the resistance to an unjust system of inequality had to arise. In fact, in that same speech, in defense of workers’ rights, King invoked Walter Reuther, leader of organized labor, founder of the United Auto Workers of America and civil rights activist, “Walter defined power one day. He said, power is the ability of a labor union like UAW to make the most powerful corporation in the world, General Motors, say ‘Yes’ when it wants to say ‘No.’ That’s power.” King, the supporter of cooperative ethics, denoted unions and the ability of workers to bargain collectively against corporate supremacy as an essential tool in checkmating capital and its abuses.

As explained by historian Thomas Jackson, in his work From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice, King was definitive as to where public policy in the U.S. needed to go, “Policy must ‘reduce the gap’ between the poor and the majority by making the poverty line a percentage of median income." King argued, raising the poverty line, which was inordinately low in 1964, would bring a response to millions of working poor that President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty overlooked. In King’s estimation, the inadequacy of the government’s solution to the War on Poverty coupled with the war in Vietnam equaled a travesty that disproportionately punished the disenfranchised:

[T]he war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons ... to die.... So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools ... I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

The war in Southeast Asia, in King’s view, was not only a brutal attack on a distant and poor “third-world” country half way around the globe, but a direct assault on America’s poor and working class populace. Again, what King was asserting was that race, war and economics were inextricably woven within the fabric of the U.S. political economy.

A New York Times editorial, dated April 7, 1967, published just three days after King’s powerful antiwar declaration above, encapsulated the prevailing counter assessment of the time. By ignoring class altogether, the conservative view of the day was camouflaged by “temperance,” insisting that the war in Vietnam and racial injustice in the United States had nothing to do with each other, “The moral issues in Vietnam are less clear-cut than he suggests; the political strategy of uniting the peace movement and the civil rights movement could very well be disastrous for both causes.” The point this editorial avoided was the enormous sums of public funds spent on the war, and their violent social and economic impact domestically, which King defined as wasteful and destructive, “I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money.” In place of King’s economic mandate, the editorial used an erroneous conflation designed to convince the reader that melding the anti-war movement with civil rights was more about coupling the issues of race and militarism rather than King’s actual emphasis, economic justice.

King first announced his Poor People's Campaign (a multiracial non-violent crusade focused on jobs and dignity for the poor) at a staff retreat for the SCLC in November 1967. After having crisscrossed America building an alliance for his PPC, gathering support through a coalition of Blacks, farm workers, Native Americans and poor Whites, King delivered a speech, on March 10, 1968, in NYC (just a month prior to his assassination), entitled “The Other America.” King sermonized before a union, Local 1199, mostly comprised of African Americans, “If all of labor were to follow your example of mobilizing ... our nation would be much closer to a swift settlement of that immoral, unjust, and ill-considered war.” It was this kind of tutelage, this kind of unifying, enlisting and organizing of King’s multiracial army of the poor and working class, that threatened the establishment, i.e., government officials, corporate elites and mainstream media. Furthermore, in that same speech, King challenged not just the establishment and its propaganda, but also those among his ranks that doubted the efficacy of his mission to end the war:

I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war.

King, the theologian, in defense of his anti-war stance, harkened back to the teachings of the social gospel as his grounding – itself, a radical pacifist document; and, a passionate plea for the rights and dignity of the poor.

On a prior date, April 14, 1967, at Stanford University, King had given a different version of the same speech, one in which he invoked Frederick Douglass, abolitionist, author and former slave. King publicly attacked the United States and its long vicious history of elite control, systematic racism and unjust class bigotry:

This is why Frederick Douglas [sic] could say that emancipation for the Negro was freedom to hunger ... freedom without roofs to cover their heads. He went on to say that it was freedom without bread to eat, freedom without land to cultivate. It was freedom and famine at the same time.

King’s acknowledgement of Douglass helps to clarify his radical view of the long and inhumane historical narrative, which defined America. He was telling his audience that in a system founded on greed, white supremacy and inequality, freedom was not “freedom” if one was Black or poor. Written from his cell years earlier, in 1963, in his now celebrated Letter From a Birmingham Jail, King penned, “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” In a top-down system of cascading violence King, the shepherd, attempted to give voice to the voiceless and consciousness to the beleaguered masses.

When matching the inequities of the American economic system against other systems, in May 1965, while speaking before the Negro American Labor Council, King lauded the Scandinavian modus of democratic socialism and demanded a fair and just redistribution of America’s affluence: “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.” Again, years earlier, from his jail cell in Birmingham, King, the radical humanist, had elegiacally weaved together the socialist values of the collective within faith, race and socioeconomic condition, “I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states ... We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” Additionally, public statements like, “I think black people and poor people must organize themselves ... we must mobilize our political and economic power,” congealed King’s position as a “Communist,” as well as a dangerous man whose every move needed to be tracked. Even if one publicly condemned communism as King certainly did, as far back as his Atlanta sermon, given on September 8, 1953, asserting, “Let us begin by stating that communism and Christianity are at the bottom incompatible. One cannot be a true Christian and a true Communist simultaneously.” A open denunciation of communism of this sort mattered little to the foundations of power that were bitterly opposed to the rights and unification of Blacks, the poor and the working class, “Perhaps the quintessential example of a target of state surveillance was Martin Luther King Jr. The surveillance of King was carried out with great intensity by the FBI, in concert with local police forces.” The powers of the State were now solidified and King was the target of that solidification, “[King was] subject to increasing scrutiny and harassment from the FBI, which had wiretapped his phones since 1963,” however, it did not begin under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations; it began much earlier, as early as the first freedom marches in Montgomery Alabama in the mid-1950s.

The FBI directive, dated January 4, 1956, is proof positive that the U.S. government was purposefully investing manpower and resources into tracking King as early as 1955: “On 7 December [1955], the FBI’s Mobile Office began forwarding information on the bus boycott to FBI director J Edgar Hoover.” The document, although redacted, reveals that the FBI’s Special Agent in Charge was working closely with a Montgomery Police Officer gathering, with intent, as much defamatory evidence as possible against King in order to take him and his non-violent call for social-justice down.

The security state not only tracked King’s every movement, but it also harassed him for years using an array of methods from penetrating surveillance to psychological coercion. The foundations of power were deeply distressed by King’s radical decrees, and, his non-violent movement of civil disobedience, “The FBI was so concerned about King’s radicalism and potential for inciting a black revolution that it deemed his activities a threat to national security.” In fact, the FBI sadistically mocked, taunted and provoked King to commit suicide in an anonymous letter sent to him November 21, 1964 - just nineteen-days prior to his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway:

You are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that ... like all frauds your end is approaching ... your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you ... It is all there on the record, your sexual orgies ... you are done ...  there is only one thing for you to do ... and you know what it is.

This FBI missive proves that the forces within government were willing to stop at nothing to end, what they considered, an imminent threat to the status quo. In fact, by April 3, 1968, after returning to Memphis (one day prior to his assassination), King’s hostility toward the U.S. political economy and its endemic inequalities grew into an overt attack on corporate America, “We are asking you tonight ... to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis ... Tell them not to buy–what is the other bread? Wonder Bread.” This direct challenge to the pecuniary interests of American business only intensified the image of King as a menace.

Governmental forces so loathed King the man and what he stood for, that they pursued the diminution of his persona for years after his murder in Memphis, Tennessee, “While the FBI did intensely track King through his death, it actually continued to besmirch his name even after he was assassinated,” but what authoritarian forces working on behalf of capitalist interests could not completely eviscerate they inevitably subsumed. During his speech on the creation of a national holiday for King - November 2, 1983, some fifteen-years after King’s brutal assassination, Ronald Reagan was one of the first conservatives to publically confiscate, misappropriate and alter King’s image to that of the “extraordinary” American, “In the fifties and sixties, one of the important crises we faced was racial discrimination. The man whose words and deeds in that crisis stirred our nation to the very depths of its soul was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” In spite of the fact that Reagan, and most reactionaries in the U.S., long considered King a traitor, a communist subversive, and, an adversary to corporate and state power, Reagan used King’s words not only to support conservative ideals and policies, but also for his own political gain. Facing re-election in 1984 and waning poll numbers, “[Reagan and] his political advisers hoped for some positive effect among black and moderate white voters.” Reagan, in what can be considered a public-relations-coup, exalted King’s words through a histrionic burst of American exceptionalism, "All of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning ... land where my fathers died ... from every mountainside, let freedom ring," which, as preformed before the nation, deliberately sanitized, ignored and diminished the purpose of King’s mission which stood in direct opposition to the destructive forces of corporate greed.

Finally, what this conservative, and later neo-liberal, approach to King’s views conveniently overlooked, whether in political-thought or school textbooks, is King’s class oriented fight for justice. Throughout his brief life, King affirmed, in private and in public, his socialist beliefs – from his stance on race, war and poverty, to his evaluation of the global political economy. What the foundations of power have attempted to subvert, at all costs, was King’s clarion-call for the unification of the poor, “There is amazing power in unity. Where there is true unity, every effort to disunite only serves to strengthen the unity.” Again, Martin Luther King Jr. was a Socialist and radical humanist at his core, a resolute teacher of the social gospel, a committed supporter of cooperative principles and a firm champion of collectivist values. As a result of his commitment to those ethics, principles and values - he, not only fell victim to the pernicious and menacing powers of the capitalist state, but he also steadfastly and resolutely sacrificed his own life.

Stephen Joseph Scott is  a singer/songwriter, humanist/activist, record producer and actor – a self-taught musician, writer and performer; now living in Philadelphia.  As a musician, He uses American Roots Music, a blend of influences including Country, Soul, Rock, Rhythm and Blues, Bluegrass and Folk to illustrate the current American social and political landscape.  In the tradition of Woody Guthrie, Steve explores the inward and outward fragility of the human condition within a decimated working class – to which far too many fall victim. Emanating from his own humble origins, Steve expresses what he calls the “wrenching torment” of common folk: abuse, neglect, regret, struggle, sacrifice and loss! His latest video: "We Know They Lied" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4_oSycHBCM

Bernie Sanders and the Left: What Happened?

By Mick Armstrong

Republished from Red Flag.

Bernie Sanders inspired hope among millions of working-class Americans appalled by the dire state of US politics. With his attacks on the billionaire class, his talk of socialism and his program of Medicare for all, a $15 minimum wage and free university tuition at last, there seemed to be an alternative to far-right Republicans like Trump and despised pro-big business Democrats like Hillary Clinton.

Sanders tapped into a mood for change in an increasingly polarised US society. On the one hand, there was the growth in support for Trump and various far-right conspiracy theorists and outright fascist groups. On the other hand, there was a sustained increase in the number of people favouring some sort of socialist alternative to capitalism. As early as 2011, a Pew Research Center poll showed that most young people had a more positive view of socialism than of capitalism.

Sanders’ two presidential campaigns built on and reinforced these sentiments. His support was particularly strong among young people, a majority of whom now reject capitalism. This was an important development in a country where there is no equivalent to the Australian or British labour parties and where socialist ideas of all stripes had long been marginalised by the Cold War anti-communist consensus. A further reflection of this trend was the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America, which now claims something like 70,000 members.

Socialists and Biden: an exchange

You don’t have to scratch too deeply beneath the surface to understand why this shift occurred. The 2007-08 global financial crisis resulted in millions of US workers losing their jobs and/or their homes. But the banks and the giant financial corporations that caused the crisis were bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars by Democratic President Barack Obama. Workers’ taxes paid for those handouts. The US, like most of the Western world, has become an incredibly unequal society. The minimum wage is derisory. Today’s young people are set to be worse off than their parents’ generation. Compounding all that are endemic racism and militarism: the unrelenting police shootings of Blacks and the long decades of murderous wars from Iraq to Afghanistan, justified by rampant Islamophobia.

The bind was that there were limits to Sanders’ politics, which constrained and eventually reversed the radical potential of his campaign. By the standards of most other Western capitalist societies, Sanders was a moderate social democrat. He was, for example, nowhere near as left wing as Jeremy Corbyn in Britain. Sanders could seem much more radical than he actually was because of the abysmally right-wing nature of US politics. While his program put forward important individual reforms, it was not an anti-capitalist program and Sanders never called for getting rid of capitalism.

Sanders is not an opponent of US imperialism. He is a strong advocate of a hardline US stance against China, is pro-Israel and has longstanding connections with sections of the military industrial complex. From early in his political career in Burlington, Vermont, Sanders was a strong backer of the police. So, unsurprisingly, he has refused to support the Black Lives Matter demand to defund the police.

These serious limitations of Sanders’ politics were glossed over or apologised for by most of his supporters on the left. Such an approach meant that newly radicalising young people were not educated in clear-cut anti-imperialist politics—vital for socialists in the US, which remains the number one imperialist power in an increasingly conflict-ridden world.

Furthermore, while Sanders called for building a movement, it was a movement aiming to get him and other progressive Democrats, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, elected to office, not a movement of workers and youth to fight in the workplaces and on the streets for major reforms or to challenge capitalism.

Is this the most important election ever?

The bigger problem limiting the radical potential of the Sanders’ campaign was that it remained trapped within the framework of the Democratic Party—the number two party of US imperialism. Born as the party of the southern slaveholders, the Democrats have always served the interests of the rich and powerful and of US military might. From Wilson to Roosevelt to Truman to Kennedy to Johnson to Clinton to Obama, Democratic presidents have waged war after war of pillage and plunder.

Attempting to reform the Democrats is an utter dead-end for socialists. What is vitally needed in the US is a genuinely radical working-class political alternative to the Democrats. Sanders could have helped build such an alternative if, after his defeat in the 2016 primaries, he had run as a social democrat against both Clinton and Trump. But despite facing a brutal dirty tricks campaign by the Democrats’ corporate establishment, Sanders offered no alternative to his many supporters. He called on them to back the despicable Clinton.

Despite his supposed “independent” status, Sanders incorporated himself deeper and deeper into the Democratic mainstream after the 2016 elections. He tried to build, not a left-wing alternative to the Democrats, but a mildly progressive faction very much loyal to this party of big business.

To prove his loyalty in the 2018 midterm elections, Sanders campaigned for liberal, centrist and right-wing Democratic candidates. And from the outset of the presidential primaries, Sanders made it clear that he would back whoever won the Democratic nomination, even a hardline conservative like Joe Biden. Although he was again savagely done over by the Democratic establishment, Sanders remained true to his word. Indeed, Sanders and the likes of Ocasio-Cortez have gone out of their way to praise Biden.

In order to get on board left-wingers hostile to Biden, Sanders and other liberal Democrats have painted Biden as some sort of saviour of workers’ interests against Trump. This is despite Biden making it crystal clear that he will not back any of Sanders’ policies and focusing his campaign on making concessions to right-wing Republicans worried that Trump’s behaviour discredits US imperialism’s standing in the world.

So rather than working for a break from the Democrats, Sanders and the likes of Ocasio-Cortez have acted as a safety valve for US capitalism’s B team. They have tried to channel a growing radicalism, especially among young people, back into the discredited Democrats. Following this same trajectory, the Democratic Socialists of America have been increasingly incorporated as the progressive wing of the Democrats.

Sanders has joined a long line of past liberals, progressives and social democrats who have helped prop up the Democratic Party in the face of mass upsurges of disaffection by giving it a seemingly radical face. These various progressives have played and continue to play a vital role in maintaining the stability of US capitalism. Their role is one of the key factors in explaining why US workers don’t have their own party independent of the two mainstream capitalist parties, even a pathetically inadequate one like the British or Australian labour parties.

Socialists should not vote for Joe Biden

The other significant negative impact of the Sanders’ campaign has been on the politics of sections of the socialist left. Thrown off balance by the surge of support for Sanders, important sections of the socialist left threw themselves largely uncritically into his campaign. They embraced it as a get-rich-quick scheme for mass influence. Softening their socialist politics to fall in behind Sanders did nothing to advance working-class struggle or mass campaigns like Black Lives Matter or to build the revolutionary left. It strengthened the hand of the reformists and liberals who dominated and set the political terrain of Sanders’ campaign.

Numerous leftists abandoned the longstanding stance of the radical and revolutionary left in the US—from the syndicalists of the Industrial Workers of the World to Eugene Debs’ Socialist Party to the early US Communist Party to the Trotskyist movement—of not voting for candidates of either of the two dominant capitalist parties. Initially many on the left, including leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America, proclaimed that it was “Bernie or bust”—that they would campaign only for Sanders and not for a right-wing corporate Democrat like Biden.

But abandoning the socialist principle of not supporting candidates of openly capitalist parties in order to back Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez became a slippery slope. If you were prepared to vote for Sanders running as a Democrat on a mild social democratic program against Trump, it is no great further stretch to vote for the lesser evil Biden against the “fascist” Trump. Indeed, many of the former supporters of “Bernie or bust” have now caved in to the relentless campaign of the Democrats and the liberal establishment to back Biden.

But falling in behind Biden and the Democrats will do nothing to strengthen the hand of workers and the oppressed to resist the harsh attacks they will inevitably face, whoever sits in the White House after the presidential elections. Moreover, it will do nothing to counter the threat from the right, which has grown in the very soil of the harsh neoliberal capitalism championed by Democrats such as Biden.

What is vitally needed in the US is a fighting socialist movement to champion mass struggles like the Black Lives Matter movement and to build broader working-class resistance. Those struggles won’t be advanced by tailing the Democrats, no matter how seemingly progressive, but only by building a militant working-class political alternative.