Expropriation or Bust: On the Illegitimacy of Wealth and Why It Must Be Recuperated

By Colin Jenkins

This is dedicated to Kwame Somburu, scientific socialist, William F. Buckley-slayer, thorn in the side of "mental midgets," lifelong advocate of "herstory," mentor, and friend.

"Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated."

- Karl Marx (Capital: Volume One)

Election seasons bring with them a renewed interest in politics. For most that couldn't care less about such concerns, election season becomes, for at least a moment, a time to reflect on deeper issues. For those of us who spend a large portion of our lives thinking, writing, acting, and engaging in these larger-than-life matters, election seasons bring other questions: can we affect change through the electoral system, how effective is voting, and how can we overcome the corporate stranglehold over politics, to name a few.

However, beneath all of the political discussions lies an uncomfortable and overwhelming truth: Nearly all of our problems are rooted in the massively unequal ownership of land, wealth, and power that exists among the over-7 billion human beings on earth. More specifically, these problems are rooted in the majority of the planet's population being stripped of its ability to satisfy the most basic of human needs. This predicament did not happen overnight, and it is far from natural. Rather, it is the product of centuries of immoral, illegitimate, and unwarranted human activity carried out by a miniscule section of the world's people.

This realization leads to an even more unsettling and uncomfortable truth: If we are to ever establish a free and just society, mass expropriation of personal wealth and property will be a necessity. In other words, the few dozens of families who have amassed personal riches equal to half the world must be forced to surrender this wealth. And furthermore, those next 5% of the global population who have acquired equally obscene amounts of wealth, relatively speaking, must also be liquidated. And, in heeding Lucy Parson's warning that "we can never be deceived that the rich will allow us to vote their wealth away," we can presume that this inevitable process of mass expropriation will not be pretty. This is a harsh and discomforting truth, indeed. But it is an undeniable truth. It is a truth that we must recognize. It is a truth that, despite being conditioned to resist, we must embrace if we are to have a shot at constructing a just world for all.

We have reached a breaking point in the human experiment. After centuries upon centuries of being subjected to extreme hierarchical systems - from monarchies to feudalism to capitalism - we are on the precipice of making a final choice: economic justice through the mass expropriation of personal wealth or infinite slavery covered by illusionary spectacles of consumer joy and bourgeois political systems. Make no mistake, expropriation is not theft. It is not the confiscation of "hard-earned" money. It is not the stealing of private property. It is, rather, the recuperation of massive amounts of land and wealth that have been built on the back of stolen natural resources, human enslavement, and coerced labor, and amassed over a number of centuries by a small minority. This wealth, that has been falsely justified by "a vast array of courts, judges, executioners, policemen, and gaolers," all of whom have been created "to uphold these privileges" and "give rise to a whole system of espionage, of false witness, of spies, of threats and corruption" [1], is illegitimate, both in moral principle and in the exploitative mechanisms in which it has used to create itself.

It is in this fundamental illegitimacy where we must take the reins and move forward in a truly liberatory and revolutionary fashion. However, before we can take collective action, we must free our mental bondage (believing wealth and private property have been earned by those who monopolize it; and, thus, should be respected, revered, and even sought after), open our minds, study and understand history, and recognize this illegitimacy together. This understanding must be reached through a careful study of the various socioeconomic systems that have ruled the human race, how the accumulation of wealth, land, and power has been extended and maintained through these systems, and how such accumulation has been illegitimate in both the ways in which it is (and has been) acquired and the ways in which it has displaced, disenfranchised, and impoverished the large majority of human beings on earth in its process. With this understanding, we can move beyond the futile process of trying to reform systems that are rotted from the core, and move forward on deconstructing these formidable social hierarchies that have been built through illegitimate, immoral, and illegal means.

"Other People's Money": On Recycled, Cold-War Propaganda

"The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands - the ownership and control of their livelihoods - are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease."

- Helen Keller

For those who remain ignorant to history - and, more specifically, to understanding how capitalism has shaped the present - ideals rooted in socialism represent a fairy-tale bogeyman. As historical understanding gives way to corporate media and standardized education schemes, fewer and fewer seem to grasp not only the basic theories of each system (capitalism and socialism) but also the ways in which they relate to us. Reactionary talking points are built on this hollow foundation. Arguments against socialist ideas and principles, whether taught in American classrooms or disseminated on cable news, remain nothing more than conditioned and packaged responses that have been recycled from Cold War propaganda. This is evident in the mythological construction of, and obsession with, equating socialism to government authority. There simply is no substance because there has been literally no scholarship on these topics in compulsory U.S. educational settings. Instead, we continue to falsely associate capitalism with freedom, private property with liberty, and socialism with theft. This is done without any learning, any thought, any investigation, or any historical analysis. It is, by nature, the epitome of propaganda, designed for one purpose and one purpose only: to justify and maintain systems of hierarchy, oppression, and mass inequality. For as long as the victims of these systems are made to believe our victimization is not only justifiable but necessary, the longer such systems can operate with little scrutiny and minimal opposition.

One of the most common parroting routines regarding the demonization of socialism is taken from neoliberal champion Margaret Thatcher, who famously remarked, "The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." This one line has been used ad nauseam by proponents of capitalism. It is, after all, a perfect sound bite for those who do not want to take the time to read and learn, critically think, or chip away at their hardened cognitive dissonance. It also perfectly sums up the thoughtlessness of anti-socialist propaganda, which can be characterized by four basic presuppositions: (1) that capitalism equals freedom; or, at the very least, is the only alternative, (2) that capitalism naturally produces "winners" and "losers," (3) that capitalism is as meritocratic as possible, and thus everyone has an equal opportunity to become a "winner" or "loser," and your individual outcome is based solely on your "hard work" or lack thereof, and (4) that "winners" have earned their wealth through their own exceptionalism, and thus deserve it; while, in contrast, "losers" have earned their impoverishment through their own shortcomings, and thus deserve it.

These four ideas expose a problematic contradiction within anti-socialist propaganda: on one hand, they are ahistorical - in other words, they do not consider historical developments regarding the accumulation of wealth, property, and power, and therefore are unable to understand how these developments have shaped our modern existence. On the other hand, because they are ahistorical, they rely on a peculiar blank-slate theory - that human beings, as we exist today, have just appeared in our current state, and that this state (which is rife with inequality, impoverishment, hunger, homelessness, joblessness, etc.) is justified merely by its being, because it was not shaped by history, as history does not exist. With this blank-slate approach, investigation is not necessary. Inquiry is not necessary. Because finding the roots of these ills is a painstaking and overwhelming process that would rather be deemed unnecessary. For the world is as it is, the systems we live in are the best we can do, and emotion and instinct are all we need when reacting to the problems placed before us.

In reality, there are historical causes and effects that have created modern conditions. When we realize this, and take the time and effort to learn these layered epochs of wealth accumulation, we ultimately learn that "other people's money" is really not justifiably theirs to begin with. [2] Instead, things like personal wealth, land, and power are accumulated in only one fundamental way: through the murdering, maiming, coercing, stealing, robbing, or exploiting of others. This is not only a historically-backed truism (of which I will illustrate below), but it is also a fundamental truth rooted in human relations. There simply is no other way to amass the obscene amounts of personal wealth as have been amassed on earth.

Primitive Accumulation, Slavery, and "Old Wealth"

"In actual history, it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, and force, play the great part."

- Karl Marx

Deconstructing Thatcher's statement is not especially difficult. Even on face value, most of us can recognize that wealth is hardly earned on one's perceived exceptionalism. The contrasting (and correct) retort to Thatcher's is that "the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer." This has been the case throughout history, and is a constant trend within all socioeconomic systems that have been implemented. In Monarchial Europe, wealth was determined and sustained by bloodlines and nobility. In feudal times, this transformed into divisions between lords and peasants. With capitalism, this transitioned into owners and workers. In each case, the respective governmental systems that have complemented these economic bases have always used their power to keep these divisions intact, literally for the sake of keeping wealth with wealth, and thus, power with the powerful. The founding fathers of the United States, as wealthy landowners and aristocrats, had no intentions of swaying from this model. When constructing a unique federal system in the colonies, John Jay captured the consensus thought at the Constitutional convention in Philadelphia, proclaiming that "those who own the country ought to govern it." And, in the influential Federalist Papers, James Madison echoed this sentiment, urging that a priority for any governmental system should be to "protect the minority of the opulent (the wealthy, land-owning slave-owners) against the majority (the workers, servants, and slaves)."

For instance, take the case of Donald J. Trump. Like most wealthy individuals, Trump experienced an uber-privileged upbringing, worry-free and filled with private schools and immense economic and physical security. As a young man - during a time when most people are indebting themselves for life through college, juggling multiple, minimum-wage jobs with hopes of affording basic needs, or relegated to military duty - Trump was handed his father's real-estate empire and eventually inherited between $40 and $200 million in addition. [3] Trump wealth can be traced back to a family-owned vineyard in Bavaria. [4] Trump's grandfather (Frederich Trumpf) utilized the family's wealth to move to the United States, where he opened a bar in Seattle's Red Light District and relied on prostitution as a source of revenue. This continuous line of wealth allowed Donald's father, Fred, to start a real estate business with his mother, Elizabeth Christ Trump. [5] On the verge of collapse during the Great Depression, the government (Federal Housing Administration) stepped in and saved Trump's business by funding him to build a multitude of homes in Brooklyn. Continuing his relationship with the FHA, Trump was awarded contracts to build homes for US Navy personnel throughout the east coast. [6]

Through centuries of privilege, and crucial assistance from the federal government in times of near-collapse, Trump family wealth has been allowed to flourish. Donald himself, after being handed this empire, declared bankruptcy four times, was allowed to write off over a billion dollars of debt, and was rescued by the banking industry on at least two occasions. There's nothing remotely exceptional or innovative in any of this Trump wealth. It was built on the exploitation of land, labor, and (literally) prostitution; and was boosted, and even saved, on numerous occasions by the government. While the case of Trump is admittedly anecdotal, it does represent a very common trend in regards to how personal wealth is accumulated, maintained, and extended throughout history. Contrary to those favorite anti-socialist talking points, it is almost never meritocratic. It almost always relies on external protectors and facilitators. And it always feeds on the exploitation or displacement of the majority.

But in order to truly understand how things like wealth and land, and consequently power, have been accumulated by so few, there must be basic systemic understandings of historical processes, how old epochs have transitioned into new epochs, and most importantly, how capitalism operates. In most cases, personal wealth and power is nothing more than an extension from previous generations; inheritance after inheritance stemming from primitive forms of accumulation dating back many centuries. Old wealth is intimately tied to systems that may sound like ancient history - monarchies, feudalism, indentured servitude, chattel slavery - but are, in reality, only a handful of generations removed. By merely tracing wealth back a few generations, one can see how major companies that exist today used something like the Atlantic Slave Trade to emerge as viable businesses 150 years ago. It is well-documented that companies and financial institutions like Lehman Brothers, Aetna, JP Morgan Chase, New York Life, Wachovia Corporation, Brooks Brothers, Barclays, and AIG, among many others, directly profited from the enslavement of African people in the Americas and built their financial empires from this illegitimate process. Regardless of public apologies and recognition of these past transgressions (if these things ever materialize), these powerful institutions remain intact, hoping to gain and maintain a general appearance of legitimacy as their illegal foundations become further removed from time.

Whether speaking of caste systems, nobility, aristocracy, feudalism, indentured servitude, chattel slavery, or capitalism, all modern socioeconomic systems have carried one common trait: they all amount to a minority using the majority (through exploitation or displacement) as a source of wealth, and thus have enforced and maintained this causal relationship by the threat and use of physical force and coercion in order to protect their minority interests. In the European empires, the concentration of wealth gained by this privileged minority was done so through vicious colonial expeditions where millions were murdered or enslaved and multitudes of land and natural resources were claimed by force. In North America, a wealthy minority established their own colonial experiment that was "a carbon copy of the old English aristocracies," eventually leading to the birth of the United States, "a country that was not born free, but born slave and free, servant and master, tenant and landlord, poor and rich." [7] The foundation of the US was constructed in two distinct regions, both shaped significantly by transplanted 'old wealth' and towering hierarchies: the North, where a "commercial and religious oligarchy" sought to preserve in America "the social arrangements of the mother country" by exploiting the wage-dependent and landless masses through "control of trade and commerce, establishing political domination of the inhabitants through church and town meetings, and by careful marriage alliances among themselves" [8]; and the South, where a landed aristocracy used their inherited wealth to purchase large parcels of land and thousands of slaves from the Atlantic Slave Trade. Through the early colonial years, this exclusive landed-aristocracy "held control of government, including the elected assemblies, by wielding power over tenants and slaves, by disenfranchising most citizens, and by under-representing the back-country areas." [9]

The problem of slavery in the American colonies is well documented; but what is not often understood is that chattel slavery was the foundation of the country's modern economic system. This cannot be overstated enough - the practice of chattel slavery in the South was quite literally the lifeblood of the modern United States, in terms of finance, capital, infrastructure, and even global power. Or, as Public Seminar's Julia Ott succinctly put it, "racialized chattel slaves were the capital that made capitalism." [10] According to Sven Beckert, it was the "cotton empire" that transformed the United States into a global power:

"As this cotton boom violently transformed huge swaths of the North American countryside, it catapulted the US to a pivotal role in the empire of cotton. In 1791, capital invested in cotton production in Brazil, as estimated by the US Treasury, was still more than ten times greater than in the US. In 1801, only ten years later, 60 percent more capital was invested in the cotton industry of the US than that of Brazil. Cotton, even more so than in the Caribbean and Brazil, infused land and slaves alike with unprecedented value, and promised slaveholders spectacular opportunities for profits and power. Already by 1820, cotton constituted 32 percent of all US exports, compared to a miniscule 2.2 percent in 1796. Indeed, more than half of all American exports between 1815 and 1860 consisted of cotton. Cotton so dominated the US economy that cotton production statistics 'became an increasingly vital unit in assessing the American economy.' It was on the back of cotton, and thus on the back of slaves, that the US economy ascended in the world." [11]

A 2013 paper released by economists Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman illustrated not only the profound wealth generated by American slavery, but how it was significant in setting the United States apart from other industrialized nations. In contrast to its European counterparts, whose elites relied on land-wealth as their primary source of power, American elites were initially faced with a peculiar situation in regards to colonial land. Ironically, since land in the "new world" came so cheap (because it could simply be stolen from Native tribes), the true value of land became the mass agricultural production generated through slave labor. So, for American elites, wealth was not merely created by their violent land grabs, but more so by their access to free labor. Picketty and Zucman conclude,

"The lower land values prevailing in America during the 1770-1860 period were to some extent compensated by the slavery system. Land was so abundant that it was almost worthless, implying that it was difficult to be really rich by owning land. However, the landed elite could be rich and control a large share of national income by owning the labor force… In the case of antebellum U.S., the value of the slave stock was still highly significant. By putting together the best available estimates of slave prices and the number of slaves, we have come to the conclusion that the market value of slaves was between 1 and 2 years of national income for the entire U.S., and up to 3 years of income in Southern states. When we add up the value of slaves and the value of land, we obtain wealth-income ratios in the U.S. South which are relatively close to those of the Old World. Slaves approximately compensate the lower land values." [12]

The significance of slavery to the Southern economy is as obvious now as it was then. In an 1883 address to the Louisville Convention, Frederick Douglass observed this fact,

"The colored people of the South are the laboring people of the South. The labor of a country is the source of its wealth; without the colored laborer today the South would be a howling wilderness, given up to bats, owls, wolves, and bears. He was the source of its wealth before the war, and has been the source of its prosperity since the war. He almost alone is visible in her fields, with implements of toil in his hands, and laboriously using them today." [13]

But it was not just the South that thrived off the institution of slavery. It was the entire country. And it was the newly found institution of capitalism. This primitive form of accumulation amounted to an immense pool of capital which has since been utilized in layered schemes of exploitation, throughout generations, as the primary source of cyclical wealth development. Those who created it were never given access to even an ounce. Those who essentially stole it (through violent land grabs and human enslavement) have since built financial, retail, industrial, and real estate empires from it. Empires that have one common trait: they are completely illegitimate. And their connections run deep, transcending region. The tracing of this history has already been done. Take the case of 19th-century New York City banker James Brown and his family's investment bank, Browns Brothers & Co., which served as a substantial source of finance capital for over two centuries (and still exists today as Brown Brothers Harriman & Co). Upon tallying his wealth in 1842, Brown found that "his investments in the South exceeded $1.5 million, a quarter of which was directly bound up in the ownership of slave plantations." [14]

Northern bankers made fortunes from slavery. And Northern industries relied heavily on the cotton production to jump-start their own fortunes. Beckert and Seth Rockman describe these historical connections,

"Brown was hardly unusual among the capitalists of the North. Nicholas Biddle's United States Bank of Philadelphia funded banks in Mississippi to promote the expansion of plantation lands. Biddle recognized that slave-grown cotton was the only thing made in the U.S. that had the capacity to bring gold and silver into the vaults of the nation's banks. Likewise, the architects of New England's industrial revolution watched the price of cotton with rapt attention, for their textile mills would have been silent without the labor of slaves on distant plantations…

…to understand slavery's centrality to the rise of American capitalism, just consider the history of an antebellum Alabama dry-goods outfit called Lehman Brothers or a Rhode Island textile manufacturer that would become the antecedent firm of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

Reparations lawsuits (since dismissed) generated evidence of slave insurance policies by Aetna and put Brown University and other elite educational institutions on notice that the slave-trade enterprises of their early benefactors were potential legal liabilities. Recent state and municipal disclosure ordinances have forced firms such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wachovia Corp. to confront unsettling ancestors on their corporate family trees.

Such revelations are hardly surprising in light of slavery's role in spurring the nation's economic development. America's "take-off" in the 19th century wasn't in spite of slavery; it was largely thanks to it. And recent research in economic history goes further: It highlights the role that commodified human beings played in the emergence of modern capitalism itself." [15]

The United States, while advertised as the "new world" or the "free world," was nothing more than a breeding ground for age-old social hierarchies. "No new social class came to power through the door of the American Revolution. The men who engineered the revolt were largely members of the colonial ruling class." [16] There was nothing egalitarian about this experiment. "Roughly 10 percent of the American settlers, consisting of large landholders (the landed aristocracy) and merchants (the commercial aristocracy), owned nearly half the wealth of the entire country, and held as slaves one-seventh of the country's people." [17] The founding fathers and settlers sought to create a political and governmental system that avoided handing any meaningful sense of power or influence to the people, while also establishing a rule of law capable of protecting the extremely unequal distribution of land and wealth. As Cornel West explains, "American democracy emerged as a republic (representative government) rather than an Athenian-like direct democracy primarily owing to the same elite fear of the passions and ignorance of the demos (the masses). For the founding fathers - just as for Plato - too much Socratic questioning from the demos and too much power sharing of elites with the demos were expected to lead to anarchy, instability, or perpetual rebellion." [18] A general insecurity and fear of the masses, or "the mob," was a primary motivation in this birth. And this motivation was rooted solely in the material interests of a transplanted colonial ruling and owning class. Charles Beard's invaluable contribution, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1935), hammered this thesis home. In reflecting on this work, Howard Zinn tell us that,

"Beard found that most of the makers of the constitution had direct economic interests in establishing a strong federal government: The manufacturers needed protective tariffs; the money lenders wanted to stop the use of paper money to pay off debts; the land speculators wanted protection as they invaded Indian lands; slave owners needed federal security against slave revolts and runaways; bondholders wanted a government able to raise money by nationwide taxation, to pay off those bonds." [19]

These motivations have dominated the political, social, and economic landscape of the United States throughout its existence. As we can see, 150 years removed from the nation's founding, not much had changed. In 1937, investigative journalist Ferdinand Lundberg obtained tax records and other historical documents in order to expose this perpetual chain of concentrated wealth. His findings, duly titled "America's 60 Families," concluded that,

"The United States is owned and dominated today by a hierarchy of its sixty richest families, buttressed by no more than ninety families of lesser wealth. These families are the living center of the modern industrial oligarchy which dominates the United States, functioning discreetly under a de jure democratic form of government behind which a de facto government, absolutist and plutocratic in its lineaments, has gradually taken form. This de facto government is actually the government of the United States - informal, invisible, shadowy. It is the government of money in a dollar democracy." [20]

And today, two-and-a-half centuries later, still nothing has changed. As of 2010, " the top 1% of US households (the upper class) owned 35.4% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 53.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 89%, leaving only 11% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one's home), the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 42.1%." [21]

These unequal beginnings have remained consistent through history, and have been maintained through a governmental system designed to protect them. From slavery and the industrial robber-baron era to the modern forms of monopoly and neoliberal capitalism, each epoch has continued seamlessly by constantly replacing and rebranding forms of human exploitation - peasant, servant, slave, tenant, laborer - as sources of concentrated wealth.

Human Resources: Capitalism, Enclosure, and the Exploitation of Labor

"In virtue of this monstrous system, the children of the worker, on entering life, find no fields which they may till, no machine which they may tend, no mine in which they may dig, without accepting to leave a great part of what they will produce to a master. They must sell their labour for a scant and uncertain wage."

- Peter Kropotkin (The Conquest of Bread)

One of the basic mechanisms of capitalism is the relationship between capital and labor. No matter what argument one may make in support of capitalism, this fundamental relationship can never be denied. Everything from entrepreneurships to small, family-owned businesses to corporate conglomerates must rely on this foundational interaction inherent to this economic system. Whether branded as "crony-capitalism," "corporate-capitalism," "unfettered-capitalism" or any one of the many monikers used to distract from its inherent flaws and contradictions, proponents can't deny its lifeblood - its need to exploit labor. And they can't deny the fundamental way in which it exploits labor - by utilizing property as a social relationship. It is in this relationship where masses of human beings are commodified, essentially transformed into machines, and forced to work so they may create wealth for those who employ them. This fundamental aspect of capitalism is not debatable.

The epoch of capitalism and its reliance on mass exploitation of labor was described by Marx throughout his work. A most fitting summary is found in its transition from feudalism, which is explained by Marx in Capital, Volume One,

"As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialisation of labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralisation of capital." [22]

In the US, the exploitation of labor - whether free (chattel slavery) or surplus (wage slavery) - has been the primary source of wealth-building for centuries. When chattel slavery was officially brought to an end after the Civil War and Emancipation Proclamation, a transition to establish and protect new forms of exploitation began. During Reconstruction in the South, the newly freed slaves were immediately betrayed by the post-war government. This betrayal came in three basic components: "(1) the freedmen did not get 'the 40 acres and a mule' they were promised; (2) the old slave owners got back their plantations and thus the power to institute a mode of production to suit cotton culture; and (3) the crop lien system was introduced with 'new' form of labor: sharecropping." [23] This transition, hence, created a new form of slavery in the South; one where,

"…the cropper (former slave) had neither control of the nature of his crop nor the marketing of it. The cropper owned nothing but his labor power, and was thus forced to part with half of the crop for 'furnishings.' The rest of the crop was to go to the merchant upon whom he depends for his every purchase of clothing, food, implements and fertilizer. The cropper was charged exorbitant prices but could not question the word of the boss who keeps the books and makes the 'settlement,' at which time the cropper found himself in perpetual debt and thus unable to leave the land." [24]

As this rebranding of human exploitation was sweeping the South, federal soldiers directed their attention north, where wage laborers were engulfed in a battle to break their own form of slavery. This concerted effort on the part of the owning class (in both north and south) to suppress their exploited laborers showed how blurred the lines between chattel slavery and wage slavery really were. In her crucial essay, American Civilization on Trial, Raya Dunayevskaya explains,

"In 1877, the year the Federal troops were removed from the South, was the year they were used to crush the railroad strikes stretching from Pennsylvania to Texas. The Pennsylvania Governor not only threatened labor with "a sharp use of bayonet and musket," but the Federal Government did exactly that at the behest of the captains of industry. The peace pact with the Southern bourbons meant unrestrained violence on the part of the rulers, both North and South, against labor." [25]

The attack on Northern laborers intensified and was supported by a continuation of white supremacist tactics that divided the white and black labor force, mostly by keeping newly freedmen indebted and stuck in their new sharecropping roles on southern plantations:

"The ruthlessness with which capital asserted its rule over labor that worked long hours for little pay, which was further cut at the will of the factory owners every time a financial crisis hit the country, drove labor underground. The first National Labor Union had a very short span of life. The Knights of Labor that replaced it organized white and black alike, with the result that, at its height (1886) out of a total membership of one million no less than 90,000 were Negroes. Nevertheless, no Northern organization could possibly get to the mass base of Negroes who remained overwhelmingly, preponderantly in the South. For, along with being freed from slavery, the Negroes were freed also from a way to make a living. Landless were the new freedmen, and penniless." [26]

The transition from feudalism to capitalism, or from peasant to wage laborer, was facilitated through similar means. As European nations - and the American colonies - had built up primitive forms of capital through stolen resources and the enslavement of Africans, industrialization was coming into its own. The feudal systems of old were no longer sufficient for the owning classes, not because they weren't advantageous, but because the peasantry, despite its subordinate and often times subhuman existence, was relatively self-sustaining. Peasants had access to land and resources - access that allowed them sustenance and the means to produce basic necessities for themselves and their families during their free time. To them, industrial wage labor was nothing more than slavery - being stripped of access to land and resources, becoming completely reliant on labor power and the meager wages it brought (of lucky) as a source of income, and being doubly reliant on those wages to not only purchase goods, but to merely sustain. In other words, to the feudal peasant living under a lordship, the prospect of becoming a wage laborer in a "more free" capitalist society was viewed as a downgrade.

This transition was a futile sell for lords-turned-capitalists; the peasantry knew better than to accept these conditions. So, the "industrious men" of the time duplicated history and proceeded in the only way they could - by stripping the peasantry of their "common" land rights and corralling them into the factories and mills. This was accomplished through the construction of bankrupt philosophies, false justifications, new laws, and armed police forces to enforce these laws. In his book, Stop Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance, historian Peter Linebaugh identifies the brain trust behind this transition:

"Arthur Young was the advocate of land privatization; the earth became a capitalist asset. Thomas Malthus sought to show that famine, war, and pestilence balanced a fecund population. Patrick Colquhoun was the magistrate and government intelligence agent who organized the criminalization of London custom. Jeremy Bentham contrived the architectural enclosure of the urban populations with his 'panopticon.'" [27]

Their experiment was human engineering at its finest - a literal example of a capitalist conspiracy, if there ever was one, designed for the purpose of transforming masses of people into commodities without their consent. With a contrived philosophical approach in hand, the creation of artificial laws provided the mechanism to accomplish this,

"They present their policies as 'law.' The law of property with Bentham, the law of police with Colquhoun, the laws of political economy with Young, the laws of nature in Malthus. Bentham will have institutions for orphans and 'wayward' women. Malthus will recommend the postponement of marriage. Colquhoun inveighed against brothel and ale-house. Arthur Young takes the ground from under the feet of the women whose pig-keeping, chicken minding, and vegetable patch depended on common right. They are concerned with the reproduction of the working class." [28]

The 'legal' destruction of the common land and its subsequent privatization was a fundamental prerequisite for capitalist production. It amounted to land theft on a grand scale, falsely justified by laws passed by the very men who stood to gain from it. However, this legal transformation was not complete without the forced enclosure of the peasantry. It was in this development where masses of people, formerly allowed access to common lands, were stripped of whatever meager degrees of self-determination they once had under feudalism:

"By enclosure, we include the complete separation of the worker from the means of production - this was most obvious in the case of land (the commons) - it also obtained in the many trades and crafts of London, indeed it was prerequisite to mechanization. The shoemaker kept some of the leather he worked with ("clicking"). The tailor kept cloth remnants he called 'cabbage.' The weavers kept their 'fents' and 'thrums' after the cloth was cut from the loom. Servants expected 'vails' and would strike if they were not forthcoming. Sailors treasured their 'adventures.' Wet coopers felt entitled to 'waxers.' The ship-builders and sawyers took their 'chips.' The dockers (or longshoremen) were called 'lumpers,' and worked with sailors, watermen, lightermen, coopers, warehousemen, porters, and when the containers of the cargo spilled they took as custom their 'spillings,' ' sweepings,' or 'scrapings.' The cook licked his own fingers." [29]

The invention of capitalism and wage labor changed all of this. And, in this day and time, wage labor was widely recognized by former slaves and peasants as being not very different from that of chattel slavery. "Experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery," warned former slave, Frederick Douglass, "and this slavery of wages must go down with the other." [30] To ruling and owning elites, the invention of wage labor was intimately tied to that of chattel slavery, systemically. "While most theories of capitalism set slavery apart, as something utterly distinct, because under slavery, workers do not labor for a wage," Ott tells us, "new historical research reveals that for centuries, a single economic system encompassed both the plantation and the factory." [31]

Even in the field of "business organization" and "management," the southern slave plantation was viewed as an influential and beneficial model to be transplanted and deployed in northern factories and mills:

"The plantation didn't just produce the commodities that fueled the broader economy; it also generated innovative business practices that would come to typify modern management. As some of the most heavily capitalized enterprises in antebellum America, plantations offered early examples of time-motion studies and regimentation through clocks and bells. Seeking ever-greater efficiencies in cotton picking, slaveholders reorganized their fields, regimented the workday, and implemented a system of vertical reporting that made overseers into managers answerable to those above for the labor of those below." [32]

And because of this inherently exploitative and dehumanizing labor process found under capitalism, the state has been needed to act on behalf of those who accumulate the illegitimate wealth from this process. Without the state, this unequal social arrangement - where the majority is essentially born into bondage - would not survive. An especially useful anarchist analysis regarding the relationship between wage slavery and state force tells us,

"In every system of class exploitation, a ruling class controls access to the means of production in order to extract tribute from labor. Capitalism is no exception. In this system the state maintains various kinds of 'class monopolies' (to use Benjamin Tucker's phrase) to ensure that workers do not receive their 'natural wage,' the full product of their labor. While some of these monopolies are obvious (such as tariffs, state granted market monopolies and so on), most are 'behind the scenes' and work to ensure that capitalist domination does not need extensive force to maintain." [33]

Hence, the illegitimacy of primitive accumulation provided the foundation for the illegitimacy of the wage-labor system central to capitalism, whose exploitative arrangement is protected by the illegitimacy of the capitalist state.

"Property is Theft": On Private Property and Landlordism

"If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery? and I should answer in one word, It is murder!, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to remove a man's mind, will, and personality, is the power of life and death, and that it makes a man a slave. It is murder. Why, then, to this other question: What is property? may I not likewise answer, It is robbery!, without the certainty of being misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first?"

- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (What is Property?)

The prevailing mindset within capitalist society has been to place property above all else. Those of us who have grown up in the US have had this idea drilled into our heads at every turn. The materialistic nature of consumerism, which equates self-worth with the accumulation of wealth, land, and other material goods, has conditioned us to view our lives and the lives as others as being secondary, or at best equal, to the value of property. Our property becomes our identity, and for this reason, it becomes as sacred and revered as human life itself.

When American "pioneers," accompanied by federal soldiers, stole Native American land, forced Native American people out of those lands, corralled them into open-air prisons, and used that newly-claimed land to enrich themselves, this established a path of illegitimacy. It doesn't matter that - after multiple generations have partaken in the buying and selling of this same land - those who profit from said land today did not take part in the actual killing, maiming, and robbing of Native American peoples. Time and separation are irrelevant factors. Being distanced from the illegitimate roots of multi-generational theft for the sake of profit-making doesn't make one innocent in the process. The entire cycle has been built on a foundation of illegitimacy. This stolen land was never intended to be a source of wealth for European colonizers and their future bloodlines, or for anyone else for that matter. In using this modern scenario, this process of wealth accumulation can be applied to all such accumulation since the beginning of time.

That being said, condemning and exposing the forcible extraction of land, in itself, does not begin to address the philosophical illegitimacy of private property. In order to correctly point out this illegitimacy, we must dig deeper. We must understand the meaning of private property, how it came about, and what its sole purpose is. To being this inquiry, let's consider what Emma Goldman had to say about private property in her 1908 pamphlet, "What I Believe":

"'Property' means dominion over things and the denial to others of the use of those things. So long as production was not equal to the normal demand, institutional property may have had some raison d'être. One has only to consult economics, however, to know that the productivity of labor within the last few decades has increased so tremendously as to exceed normal demand a hundred-fold, and to make property not only a hindrance to human well-being, but an obstacle, a deadly barrier, to all progress. It is the private dominion over things that condemns millions of people to be mere nonentities, living corpses without originality or power of initiative, human machines of flesh and blood, who pile up mountains of wealth for others and pay for it with a gray, dull and wretched existence for themselves. I believe that there can be no real wealth, social wealth, so long as it rests on human lives - young lives, old lives and lives in the making." [34]

When one person, any person, acts on their individual power to acquire property that is to be used beyond their own means, they are doing so for the purpose of direct exploitation or residual dispossession. If it is not to be used as a means to live and sustain, it can either be (1) abandoned and restricted from those who have none, (2) used to extract natural resources for individual use beyond necessity, or (3) utilized as a social relationship to employ other human beings as a source of wealth-building (through the exploitation of labor). When one exercises this undue power (whether through force or unseen privilege), "It is conceded that the fundamental cause of this terrible state of affairs is: that man must sell his labor; and that his inclination and judgment are subordinated to the will of a master (the one who owns the land)." [35]

When considering this analysis, one that surely sounds alien to most living in the 21st century, it is important to understand basic notions of property, and most importantly, the difference between "personal property" and "private property."

The use of private property as a way to exploit others is unique to capitalism. For example, in contrast to feudalism, capitalists only allow workers access to their property during times when said workers are laboring to create wealth for said owners. In feudal times, as mentioned before, peasants were allowed to live on this land, and even use it as a means to sustain for themselves and their families, as long as this personal activity was done after the lord's work had been completed. Now, with capitalism, workers "punch in," proceed to labor for a specified amount of time in exchange for a fraction of the wealth they create, "punch out," and then are left to find their own means of housing, food, clothing, and basic sustenance with only the wage they receive. This latter task has proven to be difficult for a majority of the world's population for the past number of centuries, even in so-called industrialized nations, which is why welfare states have become prominent as a means to facilitate the mass exploitation of the working class. Capitalists, and their governments, learned long ago that workers must be able to survive, if only barely, so that they may continue to labor and consume.

In 1918, on the heels of Russian Revolution and subsequent birth of the Soviet Union, German socialist Rosa Luxemburg illustrated the glaring contrast between a society that allows for the concentration of property as a means to exploit a displaced and landless majority (capitalism) versus one that utilizes property as a communal, life-sustaining resource (socialism) for all of its members. In analyzing capitalist property relations and its consequences on society, she tells us,

"To-day all wealth, the largest and most fruitful tracts of land, the mines, the mills and the factories belong to a small group of Junkers and private capitalists. From them the great masses of the laboring class receive a scanty wage in return for long hours of arduous toil, hardly enough for a decent livelihood. The enrichment of a small class of idlers is the purpose and end of present-day society…

… To-day production in every manufacturing unit is conducted by the individual capitalist independently of all others. What and where commodities are to be produced, where, when and how the finished product is to be sold, is decided by the individual capitalist owner. Nowhere does labor have the slightest influence upon these questions. It is simply the living machine that has its work to do." [36]

In contrasting this with a socialist solution, she illustrates the alternative:

"To give to modern society and to modern production a new impulse and a new purpose - that is the foremost duty of the revolutionary working class…. To this end all social wealth the land and all that it produces, the factories and the mills must be taken from their exploiting owners to become the common property of the entire people. It thus becomes the foremost duty of a revolutionary government of the working class to issue a series of decrees making all important instruments of production national property and placing them under social control.

…Private ownership of the means of production and subsistence must disappear. Production will be carried on not for the enrichment of the individual but solely for the creation of a supply of commodities sufficient to supply the wants and needs of the working class. Accordingly factories, mills and farms must be operated upon an entirely new basis, from a wholly different point of view.

…production is to be carried on for the sole purpose of securing to all a more humane existence, of providing for all plentiful food, clothing and other cultural means of subsistence." [37]

While the ways in which such economic justice can and should be obtained, and how new systems should be arranged as an alternative, are debatable topics, Luxemburg's description of and contrast to capitalist property relations still remain the same. And it serves as an instructive analysis to why such property relations are fundamentally illegitimate. In Marx's explanation of potential transitions from the capitalist mode of property to the socialist, we see the same contrast. In Capital, he tells us,

"The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.

The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialised production, into socialised property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people." [38]

To complement the materialist analysis presented by an array of Marxist thinkers, anarchists have added equally-useful, philosophically-based arguments against the ownership of private property. Simply stated, to anarchists, private property must be opposed because it is "a source of coercive, hierarchical authority as well as exploitation and, consequently, elite privilege and inequality. It is based on and produces inequality, in terms of both wealth and power." [39] The unnatural and unequal distribution of power among human populations due to private property is a common-sense analysis that can be understood by simply imagining the start of any such society, where all would have equal footing, equal rights, equitable futures, and the basic will to satisfy needs (without taking that will away from others). However, if and when a member of that community decides to take more than they need, they immediately create a scenario where others will inevitably go without, be subjected to an exploitative social relationship, and/or rely on the illegitimate landowner for basic needs (in the form of some sort of exchange). As anarchist philosophy tells us, "those who own property exploit those who do not. This is because those who do not own have to pay or sell their labor to those who do own in order to get access to the resources they need to live and work (such as workplaces, machinery, land, credit, housing, and products under patents). [40]

Proudhon's assertion that "property is theft" was not hyperbolic. He elaborates,

"The proprietor, the robber, the hero, the sovereign -- for all these titles are synonymous -- imposes his will as law, and suffers neither contradiction nor control; that is, he pretends to be the legislative and the executive power at once . . . [and so] property engenders despotism . . . That is so clearly the essence of property that, to be convinced of it, one need but remember what it is, and observe what happens around him. Property is the right to use and abuse . . . if goods are property, why should not the proprietors be kings, and despotic kings -- kings in proportion to their facultes bonitaires? And if each proprietor is sovereign lord within the sphere of his property, absolute king throughout his own domain, how could a government of proprietors be anything but chaos and confusion?" [41]

Even bourgeois philosophers like Jean-Jacque Rousseau, someone whose ideas would now be relegated to the radical fringe, warned against the notion of private property, albeit from a moral viewpoint. In his 1755 "Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men," he touched on its consequences for humanity, writing,

"The first man who, having fenced off a plot of land, thought of saying, 'This is mine' and found people simple enough to believe him was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors might the human race had been spared by the one who, upon pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his fellow men: 'Beware of listening to this impostor; you are lost if you forget the fruits of the earth belong to all and that the earth belongs to no one.'" [42]

Ironically, the notion of private property is lauded by right-wing theories of "libertarianism" as the basis of liberty and freedom. In reality, private property accomplishes the opposite, and makes any semblance of human liberty obsolete and impossible. Legalistically, under capitalism and the state's enforcement of property law, the illegitimate ownership of land creates a scenario where land is monopolized by an extremely small and privileged group of people for the sole purpose of extracting wealth (essentially through force and coercion) from both natural and human resources. The anarchist analysis tells us,

"The land monopoly consists of enforcement by government of land titles which do not rest upon personal occupancy and use. It also includes making the squatting of abandoned housing and other forms of property illegal. This leads to ground-rent, by which landlords get payment for letting others use the land they own but do not actually cultivate or use. It also allows the ownership and control of natural resources like oil, gas, coal and timber. This monopoly is particularly exploitative as the owner cannot claim to have created the land or its resources. It was available to all until the landlord claimed it by fencing it off and barring others from using it." [43]

The natural consequence of this process is landlordism, "an economic system under which a few private individuals (landlords) own property, and rent it to tenants." This system, despite being a major affront to liberty, has become the norm. And, like the system of wage labor, it coerces the majority into an extremely subservient and dependent role by forcing them to rely on, and submit themselves to, a privileged minority which has gained control of the land. Returning to our anarchist analysis, we can see that,

"At a minimum, every home and workplace needs land on which to be built. Thus while cultivation of land has become less important, the use of land remains crucial. The land monopoly, therefore, ensures that working people find no land to cultivate, no space to set up shop and no place to sleep without first having to pay a landlord a sum for the privilege of setting foot on the land they own but neither created nor use. At best, the worker has mortgaged their life for decades to get their wee bit of soil or, at worse, paid their rent and remained as property-less as before. Either way, the landlords are richer for the exchange." [44]

The illegitimacy of this form of land ownership is found not only in its reliance on mass exploitation and dispossession, but also in the means in which it has been allowed to develop. This process of landlordism has complemented the development of the capitalist system, mimicking the social relationship between labor and capital, and consequently doubling down on exploitation through the creation of yet another relationship between tenant and landlord. Along with primitive forms of accumulation, like chattel slavery, which allowed for the influx of the raw capital needed to launch the capitalist system, the forceful acquisition and expansion of privately-owned land has been facilitated by the state. This facilitation has been delivered through both military force and legislative (legal) support:

"… The land monopoly did play an important role in creating capitalism. This took two main forms. Firstly, the state enforced the ownership of large estates in the hands of a single family. Taking the best land by force, these landlords turned vast tracks of land into parks and hunting grounds so forcing the peasants little option but to huddle together on what remained. Access to superior land was therefore only possible by paying a rent for the privilege, if at all. Thus an elite claimed ownership of vacant lands, and by controlling access to it (without themselves ever directly occupying or working it) they controlled the laboring classes of the time. Secondly, the ruling elite also simply stole land which had traditionally been owned by the community. This was called enclosure, the process by which common land was turned into private property." [45]

Much like the advent of wage labor, the notion of private property has undergone a complete transformation in the psychological imagination over the past few centuries. Both serve one purpose - to act as social relationships which allow for the accumulation and concentration of wealth via the exploitation of the majority. This understanding was once common sense, even among bourgeois philosophies that dominated the Enlightenment. Now, after generations of conditioning, this basic realization is alien to most. Not only are notions of wage labor and private property viewed as the natural order of things, but private property itself has become infused with the much different idea of personal property. This has led to the development of an exploited working-class majority which reveres such property, respects its existence without question, and even fights to protect it at all costs despite its sole purpose to exploit said majority. Thus, in the psychological imagination, the illegitimate has become legitimate. While, in reality, it remains as illegitimate as ever.

Natural Resources: On Colonialism and Global Looting

"The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force."

- Michael Parenti

In order for capitalists to utilize private property as a social relationship in their mass exploitation of the working class, they must have access to the natural resources - timber, gold, minerals, diamonds, shale, oil, etc… - that are necessary to fuel production and create commodities and goods to be bought and sold in a market. Since nations are, in theory, constricted to geographic boundaries, they often do not have access to all of the natural resources they need or desire. Throughout history, the remedy for this was the notion of trading - whereas one nation would trade their surplus resources to another nation in return for needed resources, and vice versa. However, as industrial capitalism began to grow exponentially, so did the need to transform agrarian land to industrial zones, as well as farmers to industrial laborers. As Karl Kautsky explained in his 1914 essay on "ultra-imperialism," the arrival of colonialism and, more specifically, imperialism, was an inevitable stage of global capitalist production. As capitalist governments, in representing their profit sectors, were forced to seek out new industrial zones, "the sweet dream of international harmony (free trade) quickly came to an end." Because, "as a rule, industrial zones overmaster and dominate agrarian zones." [46]

Modern European imperialism can be traced as far back as the 15th century, at the height of its trade with Asian territories. During this time, because of a lack of marketable goods, European nations turned to naval dominance as a means to an end. The Portuguese provided an example of this militaristic transition:

"…since Roman times, Europe had been exporting gold and silver to the East: the problem was that Europe had never produced much of anything that Asians wanted to buy, so it was forced to pay in specie for silks, spices, steel, and other imports. The early years of European expansion were largely attempts to gain access either to Eastern luxuries or to new sources of gold and silver with which to pay for them. In those early days, Atlantic Europe really had only one substantial advantage over its Muslim rivals: an active and advanced tradition of naval warfare, honed by centuries of conflict in the Mediterranean. The moment when Vasco da Gama entered the Indian Ocean in 1498, the principle that the seas should be a zone of peaceful trade came to an immediate end. Portuguese flotillas began bombarding and sacking every port city they came across, then seizing control of strategic points and extorting protection money from unarmed Indian Ocean merchants for the right to carry on their business unmolested." [47]

Around the same time, in perhaps the most influential development in the shaping of the modern world, European powers discovered the western hemisphere. The mass looting of the Americas, as they would come to be called, more than satisfied the Asian demand for precious metals via trade:

"At almost exactly the same time (as the Portuguese assault), Christopher Columbus - a Genoese mapmaker seeking a short-cut to China-touched land in the New World, and the Spanish and Portuguese empires stumbled into the greatest economic windfall in human history: entire continents full of unfathomable wealth, whose inhabitants, armed only with Stone Age weapons, began conveniently dying almost as soon as they arrived. The conquest of Mexico and Peru led to the discovery of enormous new sources of precious metal, and these were exploited ruthlessly and systematically, even to the point of largely exterminating the surrounding populations to extract as much precious metal as quickly as possible." [48]

For European powers during the 19th century, militarism also became the primary means of resource extraction from the continent of Africa. While Africa had faced problems with colonial settlers as far back as 550 BC (Greeks), the late-19th century pillaging of the continent was especially important to the modern system of global capitalism. As consistent with capital accumulation, Africa's natural resources proved to be a major source of wealth production for a tiny sector of Europe's capitalist class, while simultaneously leaving African peoples in dire circumstances. Britain's role in this process is especially notable. Claude Kabemba, of the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, tells us,

"British capital played a key role in extraction of resources during the colonial period, especially in southern and central Africa. The competition to find and control sources of raw materials, including minerals, was one of the main drivers of European penetration and eventual colonial partition of Africa in the last quarter of the 19th century. Africa's vast resources were plundered to support the development of Britain - and other European powers - while contributing minimally to the development of the continent. Indeed, Africans have little to show for centuries of exploitation of their mineral resources. Poverty on the continent is as bad as ever. Inequality is also just as severe, if not worse, and there are increasing conflicts between extractive companies and communities." [49]

Colonialism is inseparable from Capitalism. As the capitalist system became globalized over the course of a few centuries, in its constant search for new markets, the need to dominate unoccupied lands and "uncooperative" peoples became a necessity. Thus, "new markets" were established through occupation directed by capitalist militaries, the forcible removal of millions of human beings from their native lands, and the forcible extraction of natural resources. US Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler's account of his experiences in South and Central America at the turn of the 20th century gives invaluable insight on this process. Said Butler,

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents." [50]

Butler's honesty, while representing a rare act of integrity for a high-ranking US military officer, did little to help the millions of people who had been ransacked, looted, and displaced by the US military and subsequent corporate takeovers of land. Such occupations would reverberate for decades, if not centuries. For example, in Haiti, although the official military occupation ended in 1934, "the corporations that were given lands failed miserably, with the lone exception of the Haitian-American Sugar Company, which endured for over five decades until it closed its doors in 1989." With unfathomable amounts of resources and wealth being stolen and regenerated by the US capitalist class, "the people of Haiti were left landless and jobless," making mass migration through the western hemisphere a necessity. And these complicit actors (like Butler) who had long passed, and these dead entities, "live on as one collective in this ghost that continues to mold Haiti's policy" and modern reality. [51]

In expanding on, or correcting (in his view), Kautsky's analysis, Vladimir Lenin illustrated how it was not only the parasitic nature of industrial capitalism that led to imperialism, but more so the constant need of finance capital to regenerate itself through exposure to new markets. In this sense, explains Lenin, the illegitimacy of capitalist accumulation on a national level became at odds with itself, with various "core" nations attempting to outdo one another in their pillaging of "periphery" nations. Lenin tells us,

"Imperialism is a striving for annexations-this is what the political part of Kautsky's definition amounts to. It is correct, but very incomplete, for politically, imperialism is, in general, a striving towards violence and reaction. For the moment, however, we are interested in the economic aspect of the question, which Kautsky himself introduced into his definition. The inaccuracies in Kautsky's definition are glaring. The characteristic feature of imperialism is not industrial but finance capital. It is not an accident that in France it was precisely the extraordinarily rapid development of finance capital, and the weakening of industrial capital, that from the eighties onwards gave rise to the extreme intensification of annexationist (colonial) policy. The characteristic feature of imperialism is precisely that it strives to annex not only agrarian territories, but even most highly industrialised regions (German appetite for Belgium; French appetite for Lorraine), because (1) the fact that the world is already partitioned obliges those contemplating a redivision to reach out for every kind of territory, and (2) an essential feature of imperialism is the rivalry between several great powers in the striving for hegemony, i.e., for the conquest of territory, not so much directly for themselves as to weaken the adversary and undermine his hegemony. (Belgium is particularly important for Germany as a base for operations against Britain; Britain needs Baghdad as a base for operations against Germany, etc.)" [52]

The profit-making potential of war has become even more obvious in recent decades, exposing the intimate ties between capitalism, imperialism, finance, and the military industrial complex. False and contrived "calls to action," like the United States' so-called "War on Terror," provide the perfect justification for the endless production, use, and reproduction of immensely destructive weapons and munitions. A simple search on stock trends for the top weapons' manufacturers illustrates this. Lockheed Martin stock, which was worth $38.49 per share on 9/7/01 (4 days prior to the 9/11 attack), is now worth $238.01 (6/17/16). Raytheon went from $24.85 per share to $134.49. Northrup Grumman has increased from $40.95 per share pre-9/11 to $213.87. Halliburton ($16.08 per share in 2001 to $73.41 in 2014), Boeing ($68.35 to $129.60), General Dynamics (from $41.50 $138.94), Honeywell (from $35.75 to $115.93), and BAE Systems ($330.00 to $477.30) have all experienced similar profit gains during this period of massive bombing campaigns across the world. A 2016 report by the Netherlands-based peace organization, PAX, also found that 150 financial institutions, including JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America, have invested roughly $28 billion dollars in companies manufacturing internationally-banned cluster bombs. And, when considering that major US politicians, including John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, have owned stock in these companies, this quite literally represents a form of human sacrifice for monetary gain. Every dead body in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Pakistan, etc… equals more money in their personal bank accounts.

Immanuel Wallerstein's World-Systems Theory (WST) is especially helpful in terms of macro-analyzing global relations based in the expansion of the capitalist system over the past few centuries. This approach "traces the rise of the capitalist world-economy from the 'long' 16th century (c. 1450-1640), which, according to Wallertsein, "was an accidental outcome of the protracted crisis of feudalism (c. 1290-1450)." In formulating this capitalist world order, "Europe (the West) used its advantages and gained control over most of the world economy and presided over the development and spread of industrialization andcapitalist economy, indirectly resulting in unequal development." [53]

Because of its Eurocentric organization, the global capitalist onslaught that has dominated the modern world has blatantly racial underpinnings. The "core nations" that make up WST's dominant group (US, England, France, Germany) tends to be "lighter" on the color scale, while the "periphery nations" that make up its dominated group (nations primarily in the global south) tend to be "darker." If anything, this oppression based in colorism makes it easier for core-nation ruling classes to justify their actions to their own subjects (the core-nation working classes). Despite a white supremacist agenda (see "Manifest Destiny," the "White Man's Burden," and the Roosevelt Corollary of the Monroe Doctrine) that has undoubtedly influenced this global looting on a mass scale, the primary development of modern capitalist imperialism remains economic. As world-systems theorist Samir Amin tells us, for the peoples who live within periphery nations, "colonization was (and is) atrocious. Like slavery, it was (and is) an attack on fundamental rights." However, its perpetuation is motivated by material gain. "If you want to understand why these rights were trampled on and why they still are being trodden on in the world today," explains Amin, "you have to get rid of the idea that colonialism was the result of some sort of conspiracy. What was at stake was the economic and social logic that must be called by its real name: capitalism." [54]

In echoing earlier assessments of colonialism and imperialism (from the likes of Kautsky and Lenin) as inherent capitalist mechanisms, Amin insists that,

"They are inseparable. Capitalism has been colonial, more precisely imperialist, during all the most notable periods of its development. The conquest of the Americas by the Spaniards and Portuguese in the 16th century, then by the French and the British, was the first modern form of imperialism and colonization: an extremely brutal form which resulted in the genocide of the Indians of North America, Indian societies in Latin America thrown into slavery and black slavery through the whole continent, north and south. Beyond this example, by following a logic of precise deployment through the different stages of its history, we can see that capitalism has constructed a consistent dichotomy of relations between a centre (the heart of the system of capitalist exploitation) and the periphery (made up of dominated countries and peoples)." [55]

In describing the real-life effects on populations of people, Amin tells us that this global order,

"…has been based on unequal exchange, that is, the exchange of manufactured products, sold very expensively in the colonies by commercial monopolies supported by the State, for the purchase of products or primary products at very low prices, since they were based on labour that was almost without cost - provided by the peasants and workers located at the periphery. During all the stages of capitalism, the plunder of the resources of the peripheries, the oppression of colonized peoples, their direct or indirect exploitation by capital, remain the common characteristics of the phenomenon of colonialism."[56]

In other words, "the plunder and hyper-exploitation of the global South," a region spanning dozens of countries and billions of people, has directly led to the enrichment of the west (European powers). And this enrichment, which expands well into the tens of trillions of dollars, has been claimed by a very small sector of the western capitalist and ruling classes. Much like how labor and private property are used as the primary means for the few to extract wealth from the many, colonialism and imperialism have represented more blatant and violent forms of robbing global wealth. Through the forced occupation of "unused" land (property not being utilized as a means to exploit), displacement of millions of communities, killing of masses of indigenous peoples, and utter destruction of more than half of the earth's infrastructure, "62 individuals have been allowed to amass the same amount of wealth as 3.6 billion people combined." [57]

Beyond the mass displacement and impoverished of billions of people, this process has also equaled a social cost that simply cannot be explained in numbers. It is the cost associated with the ravaging and utilization of earth's finite resources. In a modern inquiry into the concept and history of land ownership, Jeriah Bowser sums up the environmental consequences of the European colonization of North America:

"The cost of the North American land enclosure has been heavy. In less than 500 years, over four million square miles of land have been colonized, privatized, and commodified. Over 95% of the standing forests in the US are gone, the soils of the once-fertile breadbasket of the Midwest are extremely depleted, over 37% of the rivers in the US are declared 'unusable' due to pollution and contamination, over 1,000 species of plants and animals have become extinct, and the largest genocide in history took the lives of over 50 million indigenous people. The rich and promising 'land of opportunity' was apparently only an opportunity for a few, at the expense of many." [58]

These numbers apply to North America alone, which amounts to 9.5 million square miles. Multiply this by 54 to get a sense of the global consequences (over 510 million square miles).

The Trickery Behind "New Wealth"

"I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence."

- Eugene V. Debs

Most "new wealth" has been accumulated through financialization, a massive scheme of manipulating, speculating, and gambling on money and commodities. The modern form of speculation that has dominated financial markets is a brand of trickery on a scale like none before. While it represents a complete separation from traditional capitalist production schemes, it remains tied to capitalist wealth production in that it owns and controls the bloodline of this system: currency. And it uses this concentration of money to manage all aspects of the economic system that control us. In a damning summary of modern financialization, Chris Hedges explains,

"Once speculators are able to concentrate wealth into their hands they have, throughout history, emasculated government, turned the press into lap dogs and courtiers, corrupted the courts and hollowed out public institutions, including universities, to justify their looting and greed. Today's speculators have created grotesque financial mechanisms, from usurious interest rates on loans to legalized accounting fraud, to plunge the masses into crippling forms of debt peonage...

...They steal staggering sums of public funds, such as the $85 billion of mortgage-backed securities and bonds, many of them toxic, that they unload each month on the Federal Reserve in return for cash. And when the public attempts to finance public-works projects they extract billions of dollars through wildly inflated interest rates.

Speculators at megabanks or investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law -ostensibly put in place to protect the vulnerable from the powerful-to steal from everyone, including their shareholders. They are parasites. They feed off the carcass of industrial capitalism. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They just manipulate money. Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged." [59]

The 2008 global financial crisis was caused by these very practices which became commonplace on Wall Street - practices that were purposely deceitful, vague, and built for a short-term and surefire way to funnel massive amounts of wealth into the hands of very few. As has become clear in the aftermath, those who were in on this "scam of epic proportions" understood exactly what they were doing. Essentially, the massive amount of private wealth that was created during this first decade of the 21st century was completely reliant on one, gigantic, legalized Ponzi scheme. And this scheme had millions of victims - people who lost pensions, lost homes, were driven out of the workforce, driven off public protections through austerity, starved, and impoverished on mass scale. As David Graeber explains,

"…when the rubble had stopped bouncing, it turned out that many if not most of them had been nothing more than very elaborate scams. They consisted of operations like selling poor families mortgages crafted in such a way as to make eventual default inevitable; taking bets on how long it would take the holders to default; packaging mortgage and bet together and selling them to institutional investors (representing, perhaps, the mortgage-holders' retirement accounts) claiming that it would make money no matter what happened, and allow said investors to pass such packages around as if they were money; turning over responsibility for paying off the bet to a giant insurance conglomerate that, were it to sink beneath the weight of its resultant debt (which certainly would happen), would then have to be bailed out by taxpayers (as such conglomerates were indeed bailed out). In other words, it looks very much like an unusually elaborate version of what banks were doing when they lent money to dictators in Bolivia and Gabon in the late '70s: make utterly irresponsible loans with the full knowledge that, once it became known they had done so, politicians and bureaucrats would scramble to ensure that they'd still be reimbursed anyway, no matter how many human lives had to be devastated and destroyed in order to do it." [60]

The mortgage-backed securities scheme was not an outlier on Wall Street; it was its backbone for nearly a decade. It was as elaborate as it was enormous. And, as I wrote in a 2013 piece for the Hampton Institute, it was made possible through decades of deregulation during the first half of the neoliberal era:

"… [This trend] began during the 1980s and beyond, when widespread deregulation of the financial sector led to a new trend regarding home loans. Notable legislation was the 1982 Alternative Mortgage Transactions Parity Act (AMTPA), the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which essentially opened the door to free-game derivatives and the questionable use of credit default swaps. Ultimately, deregulation led to a virtual disappearance of accountability, and this disappearing act was made possible by a newly developed loan process that was characterized by a seemingly perpetual delegation of responsibility. Rather than hold a loan through its lifespan (common practice until this point), commercial banks began selling mortgages to investment banks, which in turn began pooling together hundreds and thousands of mortgages as mortgaged-backed securities. The investment banks then sold these mortgage-backed securities to hedge funds, pension funds, foreign investors, etc.., essentially 'passing the buck' of what were known by many to be toxic. Therefore, the 'originators' of mortgages (commercial banks and mortgage companies) no longer had a financial incentive to make sure the homebuyers were 'credit-worthy.' Instead, they issued the mortgages and sold them off through securitization." [61]

The scheme also involved bond rating agencies like Moody's and Standard and Poor's, which were complicit in awarding AAA ratings to these toxic securities in order to get in on the action themselves. The exact amount of wealth generated by this decade-long scheme is difficult to determine, but certain figures provide a glimpse of its magnitude. The most telling figure is the cumulative debt that derived from it, which "was larger than the combined Gross Domestic Products of every country in the world." [62] The initial bailout, approved by the W. Bush administration, provided over $204 billion in immediate relief to dozens of banks and financial institutions between October of 2008 and November of 2009 ( See the full list here). Through several rounds of quantitative easing - a process where central banks create money by buying securities from banks using "electronic cash" that did not exist before - the "US Federal Reserve's balance sheet (the value of the assets it holds) increased from less than $1 trillion in 2007 to more than $4 trillion in 2015." [63]

In layman's terms, this means that over $3 trillion was created and given to the private banking industry by the US government (via the Fed) between 2008 and 2015. Quasi-government agencies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were also given nearly $200 billion, and General Motors was awarded $50 billion. [64]

In an admission of guilt, at least five "big banks" - Goldman Sachs, Bank of American, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley - have agreed to settlements with the US Justice Department. The five settlements are for a combined $41.7 billion; however, after considering various factors, the actual payouts for all five institutions combined will be reduced to $11.5 billion. [65]

When considering that trillions of dollars were essentially ciphered from the American public (first through the banking schemes, then through government bailouts), this penalty amounts to virtually nothing. And, additionally, none of the people involved in this massive scheme have been sent to prison. Rather, they rode off into the sunset with unfathomable amounts of personal wealth, all of which remains completely illegitimate.

The elaborate and sometimes illegal schemes constructed by Wall Street, while detestable, are really only part of the story of financialization and investment banking. The most glaring illegitimacies regarding finance-generated wealth are speculation and common activities among shareholders and investors who buy and sell stocks. A prime example of exclusive shareholder schemes that allow wealthy investors guaranteed returns on their wealth is Apple's "Capital Return" program, which operates under the guise of attracting investors to provide "capital" in the form of stocks, and then issuing returns that are commiserate with profit growth. However, as in the case of billionaire investor Carl Icahn, we see that such schemes are hardly investments at all, but rather sure-fire ways for the wealthy few to regenerate their wealth without providing any form of capital or risk. In a June 2016 report for the Institute for New Economic Thinking, we're told that Icahn "purchased 27,125,441 shares of the publicly traded stock of Apple Inc. in August of 2013." And, "by the end of January 2014, Icahn had increased his stake in Apple to 52,760,848 shares, equal to 0.9% of the company's outstanding shares, at a total cost to Icahn of $3.6 billion." [66] When all was said and done, Icahn, "with ostensibly little mental effort," reaped a gain of some $2 billion in 32 months. He did this without providing any "capital" to Apple's supposed "capital return" program. Instead, he accomplished this simply because he was extremely wealthy and had the money to do so; or, as the report concludes, because he was "wealthy, visible, hyped, and influential." [67]

As these examples illustrate, the mortgage -backed securities scheme, along with other methods of financial trickery, have allowed the wealthy class to create massive gains on their already-illegitimate wealth. Even so-called "legitimate" investment activity, like Apple's "capital returns program," isn't much different in that they're essentially artificial systems of wealth enhancement that provide nothing of value, include no risk, and utilize phantom capital to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Not to mention, as with the case of Apple, these return on profits are also directly tied to the massive exploitation of modern slave labor abroad.

Currency and Debt as Means to Maintain Hierarchy

"In Heaven, there are no debts - all have been paid, one way or another - but in Hell there's nothing but debts, and a great deal of payment is exacted, though you can't ever get all paid up. You have to pay, and pay, and keep on paying. So, Hell is like an infernal maxed-out credit card that multiplies the charges endlessly."

- Margaret Atwood

In addition to the artificial social relationships formed through wage labor and private property, currency and debt have long been utilized as means of control, mostly to maintain systems of hierarchy, keeping wealth with the wealthy, and keeping the masses trapped in the proverbial rat race, on that never-ending chase for coin and paper. The metaphorical "hell" that Margaret Atwood describes above is, in all actuality, our collective reality. The history of currency and control-through-debt is a long and protracted one. David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" (2011) details this history in a way that questions and exposes fundamental relationships between ruling classes and their nationalized and colonial subjects throughout history. This history exposes our "living hells" as nothing more than artificial creations, designed by the few to fleece and control the many.

Like other forms of exploitation, currency and debt have an inherent connection with the state, in that the state facilitates and determines the value of currency and enforces debt collections through laws and the use of force and coercion. The Hegelian dialectic that Marx relied on in his analysis of capitalist relations (i.e. capital vs. labor) is also relevant to this broader struggle between rich and poor, which has historically been represented by a fundamental struggle between creditors and debtors. Graeber explains,

"For thousands of years, the struggle between rich and poor has largely taken the form of conflicts between creditors and debtors - of arguments about the rights and wrongs of interest payments, debt peonage, amnesty, repossession, restitution, the sequestering of sheep, the seizing of vineyards, and the selling of debtors' children into slavery. By the same token, for the last five thousand years, with remarkable regularity, popular insurrections have begun the same way: with the ritual destruction of the debt records - tablets, papyri, ledgers, whatever form they might have taken in any particular time and place. (After that, rebels usually go after the records of landholding and tax assessments). As the great classicist Moses Finley often liked to say, in the ancient world, all revolutionary movements had a single program: 'Cancel the debts and redistribute the land.'" [68]

States have been intimately involved in the coining, distribution, and facilitation of currency and debt as far back as the early Roman Empire. As time has transpired, this has become an undeniable fact, even more so during the past century where "metallism" - currency value based on precious metals - has been replaced by "chartalism" - currency whose value is created purely by law (or the state). For the United States, this system based solely in fiat currency became concretized when President Richard Nixon officially abandoned the gold standard in 1971. However, as economist John Maynard Keynes had suggested four decades prior in his "Treatise on Money," chartalism was already the international norm:

"The State, therefore, comes in first of all as the authority of law which enforces the payment of the thing which corresponds to the name or description in the contract. But it comes doubly when, in addition, it claims the right to determine and declare what thing corresponds to the name, and to vary its declaration from time to time-when, that is to say it claims the right to re-edit the dictionary. This right is claimed by all modern States and has been so claimed for some four thousand years at least. It is when this stage in the evolution of Money has been reached that Knapp's Chartalism - the doctrine that money is peculiarly a creation of the State - is fully realized . . . Today, all civilized money is, beyond the possibility of dispute, chartalist." [69]

While representing crucial subjects in regards to economic theory, these ideas go beyond their intended field of study to illustrate how power relations have been established and maintained in our world. The key concept in this understanding is not currency, but debt. Among many things, currency is nothing more than a convenient way to calculate and enforce debt onto people. And this enforcement, always directed by the owning and ruling classes throughout history, is primarily used to maintain hierarchies and wealth inequities. In fact, debt, as a societal ledger and form of control, has existed long before formal markets and states. Graeber tells us,

"The core argument [of primordial-debt theory] is that any attempt to separate monetary policy from social policy is ultimately wrong. Primordial-debt theorists insist that these have always been the same thing. Governments use taxes to create money, and they are able to do so because they have become the guardians of the debt that all citizens have to one another. This debt is the essence of society itself. It exists long before money and markets, and money and markets themselves are simply ways of chopping pieces of it up." [70]

Furthermore, as anthropologists like Graeber have discovered, primitive forms of currency were primarily used as a means to facilitate social relations, and not merely to buy and sell goods:

"Anthropologists do have a great deal of knowledge of how economies within stateless societies actually worked-how they still work in places where states and markets have been unable to completely break up existing ways of doing things. There are innumerable studies of, say, the use of cattle as money in eastern or southern Africa, of shell money in the Americas (wampum being the most famous example) or Papua New Guinea, bead money, feather money, the use of iron rings, cowries, spondylus shells, brass rods, or woodpecker scalps. The reason that this literature tends to be ignored by economists is simple: "primitive currencies" of this sort is only rarely used to buy and sell things, and even when they are, never primarily everyday items such as chickens or eggs or shoes or potatoes. Rather than being employed to acquire things, they are mainly used to rearrange relations between people. Above all, to arrange marriages and to settle disputes, particularly those arising from murders or personal injury." [71]

As with other forms of illegitimate accumulation and wealth-building, debt is exposed as not just a tangible facilitator of buying, selling, and owing, but rather as an intimately humanized system designed solely to act as a social relationship. It is in this relationship where personal wealth continues its illegitimate path through human history, and where the wealthy gain an even tighter grip on their subject masses, virtually guaranteeing the continuation of massive inequities. Under capitalism, the capitalist state has supplemented its chartalism by creating a "credit monopoly" that serves multiple purposes, both facilitating the inherent contradictions of capitalism and restricting alternative systems from forming in response to these contradictions. A modern anarchist analysis on capitalist credit explains its purpose in preventing alternatives to the capital-labor business model,

"The credit monopoly, by which the state controls who can and cannot issue or loan money, reduces the ability of working-class people to create their own alternatives to capitalism. By charging high amounts of interest on loans (which is only possible because competition is restricted naturally through accumulation and the inevitable facilitation of the state) few people can afford to create co-operatives or one-person firms. In addition, having to repay loans at high interest to capitalist banks ensures that co-operatives often have to undermine their own principles by having to employ wage laborr to make ends meet." [72]

Anarchists like Proudhon emphasized the importance of addressing the credit problem alongside the labor problem,

"Just as increasing wages is an important struggle within capitalism, so is the question of credit. Proudhon and his followers supported the idea of a People's Bank. If the working class could take over and control increasing amounts of money it could undercut capitalist power while building its own alternative social order (for money is ultimately the means of buying labour power, and so authority over the labourer - which is the key to surplus value production). Proudhon hoped that by credit being reduced to cost (namely administration charges) workers would be able to buy the means of production they needed." [73]

In modern times, with the arrival of globalized, neoliberal, and monopoly capitalism, the advent of consumer credit has become a crucial component in keeping this system afloat amidst extreme and widespread inequality and dispossession. Using Doug Henwood's analysis in his 1998 book, "Wall Street: How it Works and for Whom," we can see how consumer credit is being used (in very real ways) to maintain control of the exploited majority, thus solidifying systems of illegitimate wealth and power while also providing stabilizers to avoid total collapse:

"The 1980s were marked by a rising debt burden on households as well as the increased concentration of wealth in the US. The two are linked. Due to 'the decline in real hourly wages, and the stagnation in household incomes, the middle and lower classes have borrowed more to stay in place' and they have 'borrowed from the very rich who have [become] richer.' By 1997, US households spent $1 trillion (or 17% of the after-tax incomes) on debt service. 'This represents a massive upward redistribution of income.' And why did they borrow? The bottom 40% of the income distribution 'borrowed to compensate for stagnant or falling incomes' while the upper 20% borrowed 'mainly to invest.' Thus 'consumer credit can be thought of as a way to sustain mass consumption in the face of stagnant or falling wages. But there's an additional social and political bonus, from the point of view of the creditor class: it reduces pressure for higher wages by allowing people to buy goods they couldn't otherwise afford. It helps to nourish both the appearance and reality of a middle-class standard of living in a time of polarization. And debt can be a great conservatizing force; with a large monthly mortgage and/or MasterCard bill, strikes and other forms of troublemaking look less appealing than they would otherwise." [74]

Long before capitalist notions of private property and wage labor materialized, debt provided a fundamental way to maintain and facilitate power over large numbers of people. Since the advent of the capitalist system, debt, and its intimate relationship with the capitalist state, has proven to be the thread that holds this layered exploitation together. It safeguards illegitimate wealth accumulation by constructing a tangible mechanism to enforce the inherent indebtedness that comes with being born in systems of extreme hierarchy. In this way, it serves capitalism, and its illegitimate foundation, well.

Expropriation is not Theft; It's Justice

"The rich are only defeated when running for their lives."

- C.L.R. James

It's no secret that capitalism has run amok over the past three decades. This is not to say that it has been derailed or mutated in some way. In reality, it is acting as it should; creating massive amounts of wealth for a minority through the systematic dispossession and exploitation of the majority. The era of neoliberalism - where capitalist governments have been formerly acquired by private wealth - was inevitable in the natural progression of things. An economic arrangement that relies on structural unemployment (a "reserve army of labor"), mass labor exploitation, the concentration of private property via the displacement of the majority, the forced extraction of natural resources, and constant production for the sake of conspicuous consumption needs a coercive, powerful, and forceful apparatus to protect and maintain it. The capitalist state serves this need, simply because the blatant theft of over 7 billion human beings by mere hundreds cannot continue without a massive militarization of that global minority.

Global wealth inequality has reached unfathomable heights. And wealth inequality in the United States has surpassed that of the Gilded Age. This is not due to mythological or abused forms of capitalism, so-called "cronyism" or "corporatism," "unbridled" and "unfettered" forms, or any of the adjectives that mainstream analysts insist on using to describe this system. Yes, capitalism has invariably reached certain stages in its development - neoliberalism brought the inevitable fusion of public and private power, while monopoly capitalism has reached its pinnacle - but all of these modern epochs are rooted in the most fundamental mechanisms of the system, most notably its reliance on using private property as a social relationship to exploit labor. These mechanisms have always tended toward capital accumulation and concentrated wealth for a privileged minority; and, consequently, mass displacement, alienation, and disenfranchisement for the unfortunate majority. The world's problems are the result of capitalism, in its orthodox state. It is working exactly as it is supposed to work, intensifying as time goes on.

Despite the extremes we've experienced, wealth and greed continue to rule the day; and the wealthy are not only unapologetic, they're also incredibly bold. There is an entire financial "asset protection" industry built with the sole purpose of instructing wealthy individuals on how to hide their money and avoid paying taxes. And this is done in plain sight, for all to see. A simple online search brings up dozens of companies offering these services, and "experts" offering their advice. From tutorials on how to repatriate your Offshore Funds without paying taxes to "everything you need to know about bringing your money back to the United States," the wealthy are not shy about their illegal activities. Business executives have become so bold that they've publicly admitted to stashing "hundreds of billions of dollars" in foreign banks to avoid paying taxes in the United States. And rather than prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law for tax evasion, the US government continues to "negotiate" with them to bring their money back to the US. For example, on December 15, 2010, a group of business executives met with President Obama at the White House to ask for "a tax holiday" that would allow them to "tap into over $1 trillion of offshore earnings, much of which was sitting in island tax havens." [75]

Hiding money to avoid taxation has become an elaborate and extremely lucrative business. And everyone, including the President, the IRS, Senators and members of Congress, are fully aware. According to Edward D. Kleinbard, a law professor at USC, "U.S. companies overall use various repatriation strategies to avoid about $25 billion a year in federal income taxes." [76] Despite these negotiations with the government, corporations have already figured out "legal" ways to bring the hidden money back. For example, in 2009, Merck & Co Inc., the second largest drug-maker in the U.S., "brought more than $9 billion from abroad without paying any U.S. tax to help finance its acquisition of Schering-Plough Corp., securities filings show." [77] That same year, "Pfizer Inc. imported more than $30 billion from offshore in connection with its acquisition of Wyeth, while taking steps to minimize the tax hit on its publicly reported profit." [78] Between 2009-2010, "Cisco reported $31.6 billion of undistributed foreign earnings, on which it had paid no U.S. taxes" and Merck "tapped its offshore cash, tax-free, to pay for just over half the cash portion of its $51 billion merger with Schering-Plough" and then "lent $9.4 billion to a pair of Schering-Plough Dutch units" without paying any US taxes. [79] These examples are endless. And they are, essentially, unethical, if not illegal. Negotiating with the government to bring back money (over a trillion dollars by conservative estimates) that was intentionally hidden to avoid paying taxes is the equivalent of someone stealing $200 from you, admitting they did it, and then offering to give you $20 back to let bygones be bygones.

Of course, even if these businesses paid their taxes under a stringent tax system, capitalism would still exist, and with it all of its illegitimacies. During the so-called "golden age" of the United States, where effective tax rates for the higher-income brackets were consistently in the 90th percentile (they were cut in half in the '80s and are now in the 30th percentile), mass exploitation and dispossession still remained. Globally - through traditional colonialism, military force, and the construction of modern international finance systems - the United States and other industrialized nations supplemented their higher standards of living by ravaging foreign lands, peoples, and resources. Domestically, despite the emergence of an exclusively white middle-class, masses of citizens consisting of ethnic minorities, the rural and urban poor, and women remained disenfranchised both socially and economically. In other words, the golden age was nothing more than a mass sacrifice of hundreds of millions of people abroad and at home, carried out in order to supplement a burgeoning (and relatively small) sector of the white working class in U.S.. Taxation was the compromise the owning class once agreed upon in an attempt to legitimize their illegitimate wealth. In a capitalist system built on immoral foundations, taxation isn't theft - it's a plea bargain. And, even when this deal is adhered to and effectively processed, it is not enough to undo the massive injustice that it seeks to appease. Just as reforms are not enough; and government regulations are not enough.

The leak of the Panama Papers in early 2016 showed what many of us have known all along - that wealthy individuals have not only built massive personal fortunes through illegitimate means, but that they have also constructed elaborate "asset management" schemes which allow them to hide their money, avoid paying taxes, and hoard what amounts to be trillions of dollars from the public. [80] Thoughtless, ahistoric, and emotional responses to this (like those coming from USAmerican "libertarians") may include a disdain for taxation - something that, to them, represents a form of theft, whereas the government embezzles money from individuals through the threat of force or coercion (tax laws, the IRS, law enforcement). This would be a plausible argument if the wealth and land being taxed wasn't already created through widespread embezzlement of the majority. The fact of the matter is that all personal wealth in the world has been built on a foundation of murder, extortion, exploitation, theft, illegal banking and debt schemes, colonialism, racism, slavery, and various artificial systems of hierarchy.

Just as taxation, reforms, and regulations are not enough, reparations would also fall short. For example, reparations for the descendants of American slavery, while warranted and certainly needed, would not adequately address the power dynamics created by centuries of accumulation. Giving 40 acres and a mule to one of George Washington's slaves would do nothing to address the illegitimate and residual wealth and power owned by George Washington and his family, especially when society (via the government) is the payer of such monetary justice. Rather, true justice would amount to cutting Washington's land and wealth into parcels, divvying it up amongst his slaves, and removing Washington from society (as with all criminals). These three steps are the only way to effectively expropriate illegitimate wealth: (1) liquidate the benefactor(s) of such wealth, (2) place it in a societal pool to be used for a common good, (3) and remove those who took part in the stealing of such wealth from society. This same logic and approach applies today. This is the only way to recuperate our stolen collective-wealth, while also addressing the inequities of power rooted in this theft.

The wealthy few have stolen from the world; and have enslaved, impoverished, and indebted the rest of us (over 7 billion people) in the process. They have no right to their wealth. It belongs to us - it belongs to global society. Not so we can all live extravagant lifestyles, but rather so we can satisfy the most basic of human rights and needs - food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, education - and thus carry on our lives as productive and creative human beings. Taxation is a pathetic compromise to thousands of years of mass extortion. Reforms and regulations have tried and failed. Reparations even fall short of justice. And voting for representatives from the ruling class (who are directly employed and controlled by the owning class) with hopes of them voting away their own wealth has been proven to be a perpetual act in futility. The only just solution is to recuperate this stolen wealth; to destroy these extreme systems of hierarchy and control; to allow human beings the dignity and self-determination they deserve; and to expropriate the expropriators once and for all. Righting centuries of wrongs is not "theft," it's justice.

Colin Jenkins is founder and Social Economics chairperson at the Hampton Institute.

Notes

[1] Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, Chapter 1 (1892)

[2] "Justifiable" defined as "being able to be shown to be right or reasonable; defensible."

[3] Gwenda Blair (2000). The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire. Simon and Schuster.

[4] Brian Miller and Mike Lapham (2012) The Self-Made Myth: The Truth About How Government Helps Individuals and Businesses Succeed. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

[5] Blair (2000)

[6] Miller and Lapham (2012)

[7] Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, p. 50.

[8] Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971)

[9] Daniel Vickers, A Companion to Colonial America (Blackwell Publishing, 2003, p. 289)

[10] Julia Ott, Slaves: the capital that made capitalism, 4/9/14 http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/04/slavery-the-capital-that-made-capitalism/

[11] Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History, p. 119

[12] Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman, Capital is Back: Wealth-Income Ratios in Rich Countries 1700-2010, Paris School of Economics: July 26, 2013 http://www.parisschoolofeconomics.com/zucman-gabriel/capitalisback/PikettyZucman2013WP.pdf

[13] Fredrick Douglass address to the Louisville Convention, 1883, http://people.ucls.uchicago.edu/~cjuriss/US/Documents/US-Jurisson-Unit-2-Douglass-Address-to-Louisville-Convention-1883.pdf

[14] Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, How Slavery Led to Modern Capitalism, 1/24/12 https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2012-01-24/how-slavery-led-to-modern-capitalism-echoes

[15] Ibid

[16] Zinn, p. 65.

[17] Jackson Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America.

[18] Cornel West, Democracy Matters, pp. 210-211

[19] Zinn, p. 90.

[20] Ferdinand Lundberg, America's 60 Families. http://www.pdfarchive.info/pdf/L/Lu/Lundberg_Ferdinand_-_America_s_60_Families.pdf

[21] G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? On Wealth, Income, and Power. University of California at Santa Cruz. http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

[22] Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One. Chapter 32, Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm

[23] Raya Dunayevskaya, American Civilization on Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard.

[24] Ibid

[25] Ibid

[26] Ibid

[27] Peter Linebaugh, Stop, Thief!

[28] Ibid

[29] Ibid

[30] August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Along the Color Lines: Explorations in the Black Experience, p. 18

[31] Julia Ott, Slaves: the capital that made capitalism, 4/9/14 http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/04/slavery-the-capital-that-made-capitalism/

[32] Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, How Slavery Led to Modern Capitalism, 1/24/12 https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2012-01-24/how-slavery-led-to-modern-capitalism-echoes

[33] An Anarchist FAQ: Why are anarchists against private property? Infoshop.org. Accessed at http://www.infoshop.org/AnarchistFAQSectionB3

[34] Emma Goldman, What I Believe (1908) Accessed at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-what-i-believe

[35] Ibid

[36] Rosa Luxemburg, What is Bolshevism? (1918) Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/20-alt.htm

[37] Ibid

[38] Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One (1867) Chapter Thirty-Two: Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation. Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm

[39] An Anarchist FAQ: Why are anarchists against private property? Infoshop.org. Accessed at http://www.infoshop.org/AnarchistFAQSectionB3

[40] Ibid

[41] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property? (1840) Accessed at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/pierre-joseph-proudhon-what-is-property-an-inquiry-into-the-principle-of-right-and-of-governmen

[42] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Discourse on Inequality," The Social Contract and Discourses. Everyman Paperback (1993), p. 84.

[43] An Anarchist FAQ: Why are anarchists against private property? Infoshop.org. Accessed at http://www.infoshop.org/AnarchistFAQSectionB3

[44] Ibid

[45] Ibid

[46] Karl Kautsky, Ultra-imperialism (1914) Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1914/09/ultra-imp.htm

[47] David Graeber (2011) Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Melville House: NY, p. 311.

[48] Ibid, p. 311

[49] Claude Kabemba, Undermining Africa's Wealth, the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, 3/2/14, http://www.osisa.org/economic-justice/blog/undermining-africas-wealth

[50] Smedley Butler, War is a Racket (1935) Accessed at http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

[51] Alain Martin, Haiti and the Ghost of a hundred years, 7/30/15, http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/haiti-and-the-ghost.html

[52] VI Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), Chapter 7, Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch07.htm#fwV22P268F01 )

[53] Frank Lechner, Globalization theories: World-System Theory, 2001

[54] Lucien Degoy, Samir Amin: Colonialism is Inseparable from Capitalism, IHumanite, 1/28/06, http://www.humaniteinenglish.com/spip.php?article70)

[55] Ibid

[56] Ibid

[57] Andrew Soergel, 5 Takeaways from the world's widening wealth gap, US News, 1/19/16, http://www.usnews.com/news/slideshows/top-1-percent-get-richer-as-world-wealth-gap-widens-says-oxfam

[58] Jeriah Bowser, An Inquiry into the Origins and Implications of Land Ownership, 12/27/13. Accessed at http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/implications-of-land-ownership.html

[59] Chris Hedges, Overthrow the Speculators. Common Dreams, December 30, 2013. Accessed at http://www.commondreams.org/views/2013/12/30/overthrow-speculators

[60] Graeber, Debt, pp. 15-16

[61] Colin Jenkins, A Predictable Disaster: Exposing the Roots of the 2008 Financial Crisis, 6/7/13. Accessed at http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/preddisaster.html

[62] Graeber, Debt, p. 16

[63] What is Quantitative Easing, The Economist, 3/9/15 http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/03/economist-explains-5

[64] Bailout List, Propublica.org https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/list

[65] David Dayen, Why the Goldman Sachs Settlement is a $5 Billion Sham, New Republic, 4/13/16, https://newrepublic.com/article/132628/goldman-sachs-settlement-5-billion-sham

[66] Lazonick, Hopkins, Jacobson, Institute for New Economic Thinking, 6/6/16 http://ineteconomics.org/ideas-papers/blog/what-we-learn-about-inequality-from-carl-icahns-2-billion-apple-no-brainer

[67] Ibid

[68] Graeber, Debt, p. 8

[69] John Maynard Keynes (1930) A Treatise on Money. Republished by AMS PR, Inc, 1976.

[70] Graeber, Debt, p. 56

[71] Graeber, Debt, p. 60

[72] An Anarchist FAQ: Why are anarchists against private property? Infoshop.org. Accessed at http://www.infoshop.org/AnarchistFAQSectionB3

[73] Ibid

[74] Ibid, referencing Doug Henwood, Wall Street: How it Works and for Whom (1998), Verso, p.64-66

[75] Jesse Drucker, Dodging Repatriation Tax Lets U.S. Companies Bring Home Cash, Bloomberg Technology, 12/29/10 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-12-29/dodging-repatriation-tax-lets-u-s-companies-bring-home-cash

[76] Ibid

[77] Ibid

[78] Ibid

[79] Ibid

[79] Eric Lipton and Julie Creswell, Panama Papers Show How Wealthy Americans Made Millions. NY Times, 6/5/16, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/06/us/panama-papers.html?_r=0

The History of Education as Colonial Apologist: A Marxist Critique

By Curry Malott

The three interrelated premises of historical development (i.e. the satisfaction of needs, the creation of new needs, and with them, the growth of the size and complexity of society), for Marx and Engels, are universal aspects of history that always exist despite mode of production, mode of cooperation, or degree and form of productive development.

Within capitalism the creation of new needs is driven by the capitalists' quest for expanding capital. The global expansion of capital was already presupposed by its emergence. The colonization of what would become the U.S., for example, represents one of capital's chief moments of primitive accumulation. This paper examines the way history of education texts have dealt with this fundamental aspect of the global expansion of capitalism. I argue that the genocide of America's Indigenous peoples and the theft of their lands have been downplayed in the history of education, even within Marxist approaches. This paper therefore argues that this shortcoming represents an unfortunate distortion of Marx who wrote extensively on how the European capitalist conquerors ruthlessly waged war on Native North America. Marx's last works, his ethnographic notebooks, focused on Native American societies and what they have to offer in terms of social existence after capitalism. The correction of so-called Marxist and traditional history of education texts is fundamental for building a socialist movement in the twenty first century based on the self-determination of oppressed nations and national minorities (i.e. true to the international solidarity of the Marxist-Leninist tradition). However, in responding to history of education texts that align themselves with the work of Marx I do not address their most common charges (i.e. functionalist economic reductionism), but rather, I focus on what I believe is their capitulation to the capitalist conquest of the Americas. As a result, this work, in my estimation, departs from some of Marx's more relevant and important insights for transforming capitalist relations into socialist ones in the contemporary era.

Marx's dialectical approach to constructing historical narratives always takes as its place of departure a critical engagement with existing narratives refracted through the light of empirical evidence and systematic reasoning. The error made by most history of education texts is that the connections between the settler-state, colonialism, and the uniquely capitalistic quest to perpetually expand capital are either loose and undeveloped or they are treated as separate, mostly unrelated spheres or aspects of human society. What follows is a critique of history of education texts' engagement with the colonial era. The following critique of history of education textbooks demonstrates the fields' disconnection with Indigenous studies. I present the analysis as a chronological history of the history of education and point to how its shortcomings can be overcome through an engagement with Indigenous studies (see, for example, Coulthard, 2014; Mohawk, 1999; Venables, 2004).

The Colonial Era

The discovery of America was another development of the desire for travel and discovery awakened by the Crusades. (Cubberley, 1919, p. 11)

This quote from Elwood Cubberley's 1919 history of education book represents a combination of what the late educational historian Michael Katz (1987) describes as an approach that seeks "superficial causes" (p. 140). Katz argues that this approach "signals a retreat from any attempt to find a principle or core within a social system," consequently, "the levers of change remain obscure" (p. 140). Clearly, Cubberley's explanation for European expansion and colonial pursuits as the result of a thirst for adventure can be described as "superficial." Cubberley's larger discussion of the history of education is unapologetically Euro-centric. We can observe this legacy of pro-capitalist Euro-centric apology reproduced in history of education textbooks in the decades following Cubberley. Vassar's (1965) history of American education text offers an example:

The missionary organizations were far more successful in their endeavors among the Negroes than among the Indians…in this great crusade…developing honest hard working Christian slaves…A large population [of Native Americans were] not slaves [adding to the difficulty of educating Indians]. (pp. 11-12)

While Cubberley's (1919) Euro-centrism stems from his glaring omission of even the mention of a Native American presence, Vassar's (1965) narrative is equally Euro-centric implying that the assimilation of Native Americans and Africans into bourgeois society represents a "great crusade." That is, Vassar presents colonialism, a process that led to centuries of physical, biological, and cultural genocide, as a positive force. Unfortunately, the racism and white supremacy of traditional bourgeois historians was either not discussed by the Marxist historians, or they themselves reproduced it. Consider:

The Western frontier was the nineteenth-century land of opportunity. In open competition with nature, venturesome white adventurers found their own levels, unfettered by birth or creed. The frontier was a way out-out of poverty, out of dismal factories, out of crowded Eastern cities. The frontier was the Great Escape. (Bowles and Gintis, 1976, p. 3)

I present Cubberley (1919) and Vassar (1965) next to Bowles and Gintis (1976) to demonstrate both the difference and continuity between traditional education historians and so-called Marxist education historians on the issue of colonialism/Westward expansion. As previously suggested, Bowles and Gintis' somewhat apologetic statement on the colonization of the Americas is not a position they borrowed from Marx for Marx was well aware of the barbaric destructiveness the expansion of capital had on the non-capitalist and non-Western societies it expanded into.

What is most obvious here is Bowles and Gintis' empathy for the children and grand-children of the expropriated peasant-proprietors of Europe who were "chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers" (Marx, 1867/1967, p. 734). The acknowledgement of the destructive and oppressive nature of capitalism here represents a clear break from the corporate apologist narratives that have dominated before and since Bowles and Gintis (1976). However, at the same time, there is a haunting silence within Bowles and Gintis' narrative seemingly more interested in the fate of immigrant laborers than the ancient tribes and confederacies that continue to struggle for national sovereignty within a colonial present that can too easily seem perpetual or permanent. This exclusionary tendency within much of the Marxist tradition, despite the contrary testimony of Marx's own work, has contributed to an unfortunate misunderstanding of the contributions of Marx.

Even progressive education historians in the 1980s and beyond continued to reproduce colonialist narratives. Button and Provenzo (1983/1989), for example, after explaining the colonization of the Americas as the result of a growing middle-class gaining wealth from a period of "peace, prosperity and trade" (p. 6), portray Native Americans as the helpless, primitive victims of progress:

The Native Americans…belonged to hundreds of tribes with almost as many different languages. In general, they had little in common with one another and did not unite to resist the settlement of their lands by the early colonists. The existence of numerous rivers and harbors, of a moderate climate, and natives unorganized for resistance, made North America splendid for colonization, if not for immediate exploitation. (p. 6)

Button and Provenzo (1983/1989) seem to offer this short passage as their explanation for the disappearance of Native Americans on the Eastern seaboard-an assumption that is patently false. Even more recent history of education texts written from progressive, constructivist perspectives too often reproduce the old colonial narratives. For example, it is astonishing that a book published in 2013 called Education and Social Change (Rury, 2013) would continue to depict American Indians or Native Americans as primitive victims helpless against the powerful onslaught of Europe's superiority.

Fortunately, there exists other history of education texts offering some diversity of narrative. For example, and to their credit, Wayne Urban and Jennings Wagoner (2009), in the fourth edition of their text, American Education: A History, reassess the old narrative reproduced by Boers (2007), arguing, instead, that the colonies were not established with the intention of building a new society, but rather, were a business venture, that is, an investment opportunity. To understand the first New Englanders' relationship with pre-existing indigenous confederacies, it is important to remember that the colonists faced the continent and its communities as religiously-mediated investors who came from a pre-existing English capitalist society that had long been primitively accumulated and normalized and naturalized traditions of private property and a market in human labor.

In Jamestown, VA, the continents' first permanent English settlement established in 1607, relied on a friendly relationship with the local Powhatan Confederacy for their own survival and for the success of their investment. However, the capitalist purpose of the colony, and thus its very existence, presented a major barrier to peace. At the same time, renowned American Indian historian, Robert Venables (1994), makes a compelling case that, before dissolving, the relationship between the colony and the Powhatan Confederacy was mutually beneficial.

…The London Company's investment in the highly profitable tobacco plantation business relied on peaceful relations with the local Powhatan Confederacy. Tobacco farmers supplied Powhatans with trade goods in exchange for food, which allowed colonists to invest their labor in the cash crop not worrying much about food. Powhatan's access to trade goods allowed them to grow stronger and defeat their rivals to the west thereby gaining access to trade with the copper-producing Indians of the Great Lakes (Venables, 2004, pp. 81)

Clearly, Venables does not see the Powhatans' as helpless victims, but as savvy negotiators committed to their own national interests. However, because of the labor-intensive nature of tobacco production and because of its profitability as a use-value, by 1619 a Dutch ship brought the first shipment of African slave-laborers to Virginia to keep pace with the demand for labor. Because of these reasons, it also made more sense to focus labor on tobacco production and continue to rely on the Powhatans for food. Consequently, fifteen years after their arrival, the colonists continued to rely on the Native communities for food, which might not have been a problem, but their numbers were forever growing, therefore placing increasing pressure on the Powhatan's food supply.

The colonists also came to the Americas with an old racist ideology stemming from an invented, Christian-related, European identity (Mohawk, 1999), which resulted in a long legacy of colonists viewing and treating Native Americans as inferior. Consequently, it was not uncommon for colonists to disregard Powhatan national authority and settle land without compensation or consultation, leading to tension and conflict with Native communities. Perhaps one of the last straws was the colonialists' plans to establish an Indian college, which American Indians saw for themselves no advantages. It was understood that adopting the settlers capitalistic ways would give the elites among the new settlers a major advantage by stripping the Powhatans of their own economy and means to satisfy and expand their needs. If the foreign capitalist becomes the ruler of the land, then the American Indians would forever be subordinate in the relationship. Eventually, having their land-base, food supply, culture, and very existence threatened, the Powhatans decided to terminate the colony. Commenting on this decision Venables (2004) explains:

In 1622 Powhatan warriors, intimately familiar with colonists routines from being their primary food vendor, simultaneously struck 31 locations across a 70 mile area killing nearly 350 of a population of 1200. (Pp. 81-82)

In the aftermath, hundreds of settlers sailed back to England. Cut off from their food supply as many as five hundred more colonists died of starvation that winter. As a result, James I took over the London Company's investment. That is, having been operated as a private venture for the first 17 years, Virginia, "became a royal colony in 1624 and control transferred to the Crown appointed governor" (Urban & Wagoner, Pp. 18). While this was an important development, following Venables and other historians, the ten years of bloody war that followed and the ways Indian policy were forever transformed (from co-existence to extermination), have had far more serious implications for the fate of the indigenous communities in North America. According to Venables (2004), "the 1622 attack did more than merely define future Indian policy in Virginia as one of conquest…It encouraged an already existent English colonial attitude of racial superiority" (p. 84). For example, after learning of the Powhatan war, the Pilgrims in Massachusetts erected a fort fearing the Narragansetts. However, the struggle for the Eastern seaboard was ultimately determined in 1633/1634 as smallpox wiped out Indians in a massive epidemic. Puritans, as might be expected, viewed this unintentional genocide as an act of God. Governor Winthrop:

If God were not pleased with our inheriting these parts, why did he drive out the natives before us? And why does he still make room for us by diminishing them as we increase? (Quoted in Venables, 2004,Pp. 89)

Following conquest, which was not the result of European superiority, but was made possible by an accident, settler-state policy toward indigenous communities has consistently eroded indigenous independence/sovereignty. A new Marxist history of education must therefore not only rethink the past, but it must embrace the national sovereignty of Americas' first nations as part of the movement for a socialist alternative to capitalism.

References

Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. New York: Basic Books.

Boers, D. (2007). History of American Education Primer. New York: Peter Lang.

Button, H.W. & Provenzo, E. (1983/1989). History of Education & Culture in America: Second Edition. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.

Coulthard, G.S. (2014). Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Minnesota University Press.

Cubberley, E. (1919). Public Education in the United States: A Study and Interpretation of American Educational History. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Marx, K. (1867/1967). Capital. Volume 1. New York: International Publishers.

Mohawk, J. (1999). Utopian Legacies: A History of Conquest and Oppression in the Western World. Sante Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishing.

Rury, J. (2013). Education and Social Change: Contours in the History of American Schooling. New York: Routledge.

Urban W. & Wagoner, J. (2009). American Education: A History (Fourth Edition). New York: Routledge.

Vassar, R. (1965). Social History of American Education: Volume I: Colonial Times to 1860. Chicago: Rand McNally & Company.

Venables, R. (2004). American Indian History: Five Centuries of Conflict & Coexistence: Volume I: Conquest of a Continent 1492-1783. Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light.

Who's Afraid of Mazdak? Prophetic Egalitarianism, Islamism, and Socialism

By Derek Ide

The year was 1974. Algeria's National Liberation Front (FLN) had liberated their country from the French occupying forces and the pieds noirs (French settlers) only twelve years prior. Under the leadership of Ahmed Ben Bella (1962-5) and then Houari Boumédiène (1965-78), Algeria underwent a series of state-building initiatives immediately following independence. The Algerian leadership operated within the parameters of a loosely defined "socialism" that became the organizing ethos under which they constructed the newly independent state.

Algeria was still in the midst of its "socialist" transformation when, a year earlier in 1973, the president of Egypt, Anwar al-Sadat (1970-81), embarked upon his neoliberal Infitah ("Opening") program. This nascent economic program significantly augmented Western capitalist institutions control over Egypt and would eventually overhaul the "Arab Socialism" that had been arduously built from the top-down by his predecessor, the pan-Arab nationalist hero Gamal abd Al-Nasser (1954-70). To deal with the remnants of the Nasserist and Communist left in Egypt, Sadat slowly released many members of the Ikhwaan (Muslim Brothers) from prison. While they had been locked up under Nasser, Sadat viewed the Islamists, including al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya (Islamic Group), as a counterweight to the still active Egyptian left, especially on university campuses. Violence against the left was often encouraged, and the Islamists eventually came to dominate many university settings.[1]

While the Islamists engaged in violence against the left in Egypt on behalf of the state, the Islamists of the Maghrib launched a new ideological war against the "socialist" states in North Africa. In 1974 Abdellatif al-Soltani published what historian Benjamin Stora called the "first manifesto of the Islamist movement in Algeria." This "virulent critique" of the "Socialism of the Algerian leaders" invoked the name of none other than the 6th century Zoroastrian prophet and Iranian reformer Mazdak. Al-Soltani's polemic was titled "Mazdakism is the Origin of Socialism" [2] and it denounced the moral decay of the "destructive principles imported from abroad." All political action must emanate from "within the framework of the party of God, as opposed to the party of Satan," it proclaimed, implicating that the "socialist" policies of the Algerian state as deriving from the latter. Al-Soltani continued that there must be a "single state with a single leader, founded on Muslim principles."[3] For the Islamists like al-Soltani, socialism was something foreign, a contaminant that could not be reconciled with the all-encompassing totality that was Islam.

Yet, the Algerian state during its "socialist" stage was far from secular in any sense of the word. Even at the peak of these state-building and industrialization exercises, the Islamic lexicon was dominant and the state was heavily adorned in religious garb: Islam was the official state religion, no future law could ever "target the state religion," jumaa became the official day of rest, gambling and alcohol sales to Muslims were illegal, Muslims couldn't raise pigs, the president had to be a Muslim, the amount of masajid more than doubled (2,200 to 5,829) from 1966 to 1980, and government sponsored seminars on Islamic thought took place annually.[4] Thus, critiques of the Algerian state on the basis of any perceived secularism were relatively desiccated. Instead, the primary enemy for the Islamists was the socialist model of development; their issue was with "socialism" in any form or degree, not with the professed religiosity of the state. Not only was Marxism an "imported" ideology foreign to Islam, socialism was also an ideological descendent of Mazdakism, a dangerous heresy against God that any good Islamist ought to struggle against.

But who was Mazdak, and why was this pre-Islamic Iranian prophet's name being pejoratively drug into Islamist political discourse in 20th century Algeria? Mazdak was a Zoroastrian prophet who lived and preached during early 6th century. Although details of his life are tenuous at best, a few tenants of his ideology and religious teachings have been established. Mazdak claimed to be a prophet of Ahura Mazda, the monotheistic god of Zoroastrianism. However, Mazdak's Zoroastrianism was an egalitarian rejection of the mainstream clerical establishment and most of his teachings were considered heresy by the Zoroastrian clergy. A significant element of Mazdak's religious thought focused on economic egalitarianism, including an emphasis on developing communal property and community work where all people benefited. Although Mazdak himself was a Zoroastrian Mobad (priest), his teachings were radically anti-clerical in the fact that they accused the mainstream Zoroastrian clergy of oppressing the Persian population and causing poverty through excessive accumulation.

Mazdak's socially conservative critics accused him of extending "communal property" to the point of "sharing wives" and "free love." Despite these allegations, Mazdak's real crime was his economic message. It was his radical egalitarianism that caused him to become a target of the state. Zoroastrian scholar M.N. Dhalla articulated the core teachings of Mazdakism:

"The account of Mazdak's system is very meagre; but it is known that he accounted Jealousy, Wrath, and Greed as the three main causes of all evil in the world. Everyone, according to Mazdak's teachings, should be given equal opportunity and equal share of the enjoyment of the earthly possessions of God. So it was originally ordained by God, but that natural order has been upset by the aggressive strong for their own self-aggran­dizement. Society should therefore return to that original ideal state. These revolutionary teachings thrilled for a time Iran, and exercised a powerful fascination on the masses. The crisis was brought to a head when, far from taking any initiative to stamp out the heresy, the king encouraged it, and finally embraced it. His son, Prince Noshirvan, summoned the Dasturs and Mobads to consider the situation. It was certain that the cult would spread and the young prince adopted severe measures to suppress it, lest it should menace the public peace. The clergy who viewed the new heresy with great alarm, advised rigorous measures to extirpate the threatening creed. Mazdak did not live long to preach his doctrine, for the prince arranged a banquet for him and his followers and put them all to the sword in A.D. 528."[5]

Thus Mazdak and his followers were executed by the state and the religious establishment for the "excitement" they encouraged amongst the Iranian masses. A variety of accounts of Mazdak's death show the gruesome hatred ruling elites harbored for Mazdak. One narration suggests that Mazdak was presented with the spectacle of a "human garden" by his executors when three thousand of his followers were buried alive with their feet sticking from the ground. According to this account Mazdak himself was then hanged upside down and shot with arrows. Other stories of his execution employ equally morbid methods of torture.

Overtime Mazdak and "Mazdakism" became a common pejorative utilized by religious scholars, both Zoroastrian and Islamic, to denigrate any radically egalitarian religious philosophies within their respective traditions. While medieval Muslim historiography often condemned the "socialist" aspects of Mazdakism, this critique was carried over effectively into the 20th century, and not just by way of al-Soltani and the Algerian Islamists. As early as 1919 the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Mohammed Bakheet, was vehemently condemning Mazdakism as a predecessor of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Bakheet wrote that the communists in Russia represented an "ancient 'way' and it is the creed of a Persian hypocrite named Zoroaster." [6] But this "ancient way" was only spread to the masses by a "man from Mazria called Mazdaq" who "taught communism of property and of persons, and put it in their mind that this, although it might not be from religion, was at least honorable in the doing." Mazdak's "heresy" furthermore articulated the idea that "God furnished the means of living to be divided equally among the people… [so] they decided to take from the rich and give to the poor… [and] the masses seized this opportunity wholeheartedly with Mazdaq and their followers aiding them in all their views." After condoning the slaughter of Mazdak and his followers, the Grand Mufti goes on to explain that "Islam was introduced and swept this false way aside." Furthermore, Bakheet proclaimed, God himself had "undertook the distribution of the means of living among His creatures by saying 'We divided up their livelihood among them' and 'God gives the livelihood to whom He wishes from among His servants,' and so on." Thus God had ordained prodigious inequality, and it was no place for mere humans to challenge God's will in this regard. Bakheet furthers his critique of the Bolsheviks, proclaiming that their "way" is:

"…one which destroys all Divine laws… it legalizes blood-shedding, allows trespass upon the property of others, treachery, lies, and rape… demolishes human society, destroyed the order of the world, leads to apostasy from religion, threatens the whole world with horrible distress and bitter troubles, and instigates the lower classes against all systems founded upon reason, morals, and virtue.

Accordingly, every true Moslem ought to avoid such people and their misguided views and false doctrines and deeds, because they are undoubtedly apostates." [7]

Indeed, it is this historical memory that al-Soltani and other Islamists drew upon in 1974 to validate their "Socialism as Mazdakism" critique of the Algerian state.

It is no wonder then that the United States and other imperialist powers often viewed the Islamists as appropriate vehicles through which they could combat pan-Arab nationalism and left-wing movements in the Middle East. At nearly every turn the Islamists presented themselves as enemies of left-wing and progressive movements and as such could be readily absorbed into the larger imperialist framework. When the Islamic Salvation Front (ISF) finally took power in Algeria in the 1990s, they hastened the privatization of the state sector and the dismantling of any remnants of the socialist project. But examples of the Islamist movement serving the interests of imperialism go far beyond Algeria. Islamists of the Maghrib undermined the legitimacy of anti-imperialist states like Libya and Syria. Egyptian leaders used the Ikhwaan to undermine the pan-Arab and nationalist left. While the Palestine Liberation Organization, including its second largest party the communist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), engaged in militant guerrilla war against Israel, Palestinian segments attached to the Egyptian Muslim brothers (those that would eventually become Hamas) refused to fight for decades. Instead they opted to try to "Islamicize" Palestinian society before engaging in the struggle and focused on developing enough cadre to position themselves at the forefront of the Palestinian national liberation movement. During the events of "Black September," the Jordanian Muslim Brothers sided with the Hashemite monarchy, originally installed by the British, in its brutal repression against and expulsion of the secular Palestine Liberation Organization. Most explicitly, the "brave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan" (as they were infamously eulogized in the Rambo film) worked in tandem with the United States to overthrow the revolutionary communist government of Afghanistan established in 1978. Thus, wherever the modern incarnation of "Mazdakism" needed to be undermined, the Islamists were there to do it.

Not all Islamic theology has been predicated upon disdain for radically egalitarian messages, however. For some Mazdak was even a religious figure that could be rehabilitated within the framework of a sort of "Islamic liberation theology," one shares some characteristics with its Catholic counterpart in Latin America. For instance, as Shireen Hunter notes the Iranian scholar Ali Shariati "believed the Iranian mind has always been attracted to ideas of social activism for the sake of justice." Shariati, who spiritualized Marxist notions of class conflict and social struggle within the lexicon of Shia Islam, appeared to have held an interest in Mazdak himself.[8] Shariati brilliantly satirized the arguments put forward by the class of religious elites, such as the Grand Mufti quoted above, who perpetually told the poor to be content with their lot in life.

"Have patience, my religious brother. Leave the world to those who are of it. Let hunger be the capital for the pardon of your sins. Forebear the hell of life for the rewards of paradise in the Hereafter. If you only knew the reward of people who tolerate oppression and poverty in this world! Keep your stomach empty of food, O brother, in order to see the light of wisdom in it. What is the remedy? Whatever befalls us. The pen of destiny has written on our foreheads from before: The prosperous are prosperous from their mother's womb and the wretched are wretched from their mother's womb. Every protest is a protest against the Will of God. Give thanks for His giving or non-giving. Let the deeds of everyone be accounted for on the Day of Reckoning. Be patient with oppression and give thanks for poverty. Do not breathe a word so that you do not lose the reward of the patient in the Hereafter. Release your body so as not to require clothes! Do not forget that the protest of a creature is protest against the Creator. The accounting of Truth and justice is the work of God, not the masses. In death, not in life. Do not pass judgment for the Judge of the judgment is God. Do not be shamed on the Day of Resurrection when you see that God, the Merciful, the Compassionate forgives the oppressor who you had not forgiven in this world. Everyone is responsible for his own deeds." [9]

Thus, for Shariati these views that condemn the poor to a life of misery were mere religious facades intended to placate the population and perpetuate economic inequality. The religious leaders who tell the masses to wait for their pie in the sky and dare not shake the foundations of social inequality while on Earth were the real scoundrels.

In stark contradistinction to the Sunni Islamists who condemned "Socialism as Mazdakism," Shariati laid forth his revolutionary and radically egalitarian theology in the quintessential work The Philosophy of History: Cain and Abel. There Shariati posited that "History represents an unbroken flow of events that, like man himself, is dominated by a dialectical contradiction, a constant warfare between two hostile and contradictory elements that began with the creation of humanity and has been waged at all places and at all times, and the sum total of which constitutes history." This "contradiction" began with the origin of human history, the struggle between Cain and Abel. Abel, as the manifestation of pastoralism, represents a sort of "primitive communism" where accumulation is impossible. Alternatively, Cain is a reflection of agricultural modes of production and represents the first schism between social classes in human society. Thus:

"In my opinion, the murder of Abel at the hands of Cain represents a great development, a sudden swerve in the course of history, the most important event to have occurred in all human life. It interprets and explains that event in a most profound fashion scientifically, sociologically, and with reference to class. The story concerns the end of primitive communism, the disappearance of man's original system of equality and brotherhood, expressed in the hunting and fishing system of productivity (equated with Abel), and its replacement by agricultural production, the creation of private ownership, the formation of the first class society, the system of discrimination and exploitation, the worship of wealth and lack of true faith, the beginning of enmity, rivalry, greed, plunder, slavery and fratricide (equated with Cain). The death of Abel and the survival of Cain are objective, historical realities, and the fact that henceforth religion, life, economy, government and the fate of men were all in the hands of Cain represents a realistic, critical and progressive analysis of what happened…

The wing represented by Abel is that of the subject and the oppressed; i.e., the people, those who throughout history have been slaughtered and enslaved by the system of Cain, the system of private ownership which has gained ascendancy over human society. The war between Cain and Abel is the permanent war of history which has been waged by every generation. The banner of Cain has always been held high by the ruling classes, and the desire to avenge the blood of Abel has been inherited by succeed­ing generations of his descendants‑the subjected people who have fought for justice, freedom and true faith in a struggle that has continued, one way or another, in every age. The weapon of Cain has been religion, and the weapon of Abel has also been religion…

This inevitable revolution of the future will be the culmina­tion of the dialectical contradiction that began with the battle of Cain and Abel and has continued to exist in all human societies, between the ruler and the ruled. The inevitable outcome of history will be the triumph of justice, equity and truth.

It is the responsibility of every individual in every age to determine his stance in the constant struggle between the two wings we have described, and not to remain a spectator. While believing in a certain form of historical determinism, we believe also in the freedom of the individual and his human responsi­bility, which lie at the very heart of the process of historical determinism. We do not see any contradiction between the two, because history advances on the basis of a universal and scientif­ically demonstrable process of determinism, but "I" as an individual human being must choose whether to move forward with history and accelerate its determined course with the force of knowledge and science, or to stand with ignorance, egoism, opportunism in the face of history, and be crushed."[10]

Whereas Bakheet condemned Mazdak for inciting revolution amongst the masses and Al-Soltani issued his invective of "Socialism as Mazdakism," Shariati invites the revolutionary and egalitarian struggle. Far too many Islamists have lent their services to the "system of Cain" contra the socialist and left-wing "system of Abel." Naturally, Mazdak was a manifestation of the latter. It is imperative for the future of humanity that we follow in the footsteps of Mazdak and Shariati's Abel, not the oppressive forces of Cain and their religious interlocutors.

Notes

[1] See Hossam El-Hamalawy, MERIP, http://www.merip.org/mer/mer242/comrades-brothers

[2] Alternatively translated as "Socialism is the Descendent of Mazdakism."

[3] See Benjamin Stora, Algeria 1830-2000: A Short History, 171-2.

[4] Stora, 171.

[5] M.N. Dhalla, History of Zoroastrianism, http://www.avesta.org/dhalla/history5.htm

[6] See Tareq Ismael and Rifa'at El-Sa'id, The Communist Movement in Egypt, 1920-1988, 164.

[7] See Ismael and El-Sa'id, 166-7.

[8] Shireen Hunter, Reformist Voices of Islam: Mediating Islam and Modernity, 54.

[9] See Ali Shariati, Religion vs. Religion.

[10] Ali Shariati, The Philosophy of History: Cain and Abel.

Salt in the Wounded Knee: Psychopathy in the Commemoration of Genocide

By Sonasha Braxton

Hannibal Lecter, Jason Voorhees, Norman Bates. What do these people have in common? They tormented us in our dreams. There was something particularly callous in the way that they engaged in their homicidal acts, which left us shuddering. Cold, calculated, without remorse or feeling, we might casually call them psychopathic. But what actually is "psychopathy"? Psychopathy assessed with the PCL-R 9 [1] includes a grandiose sense of self-worth, lack of remorse or guilt, lack of empathy, and failure to accept responsibility for actions. Does anything about the history of the United States, more specifically its celebration of holidays, makes sense within the context of this symptomology? While we could most certainly name quite a few, let us take for example just two holidays, Columbus Day and Thanksgiving Day. To understand how the celebration of each of these holidays resembles psychopathy, then we must have a clear comprehension of the history and reason for celebration.

Columbus Day

The Myth: In fourteen hundred ninety-two,/Columbus sailed the ocean blue/ He had three ships and left from Spain/ He sailed through sunshine, wind and rain … /Ninety sailors were on board;/ Some men worked while others snored … / Day after day they looked for land;/ They dreamed of trees and rocks and sand./ October 12 their dream came true,/ You never saw a happier crew!/ " Indians! Indians!" Columbus cried;/His heart was filled with joyful pride./ But "India" the land was not;/ It was the Bahamas, and it was hot./ The Arakawa natives were very nice;/ They gave the sailors food and spice./ Columbus sailed on to find some gold/To bring back home, as he'd been told./ He made the trip again and again,/ Trading gold to bring to Spain./ The first American? No, not quite./ But Columbus was brave, and he was bright. [2]

Exclusionary Detailing

Many of us may be familiar with this poem. I remember learning it at some point in my actually quite progressive elementary school. Columbus's first voyage had about 90 men. Some men probably snored. It is possible they dreamed of sand. It is more than likely they were quite happy when they reached land. They were not in India. The indigenous Arawak population gave them gifts and Columbus did come back. I deny none of the veracity of the poem. But I do have questions, like why it exists. Why is it taught to children in an educative setting? While it is only a children's rhyme, it is the omissions, and the implied "happily ever after" that beyond problematic, are in fact quite insidious. Almost immediately after meeting the "very nice" Arawak natives, the rhyme conveniently ends, thus implying that this is the conclusion, when it most certainly is not. It is selective, exclusionary detailing, where the most important facts simply are not there. One might argue that a children's rhyme should not include a story about mass murder, and therefore the rhyme appropriate as-is. To this I would reply that there should be no children's rhymes about mass murderers. For those of us who best understand the deplorability of such when compared to the Jewish experience, allow me to ask, were you ever taught a delightful ditty about Hitler in primary school, which talked about his mustache, what he dreamed about, and how smart he was, and then conveniently left out the Holocaust?

A Truth

In Columbus and his crew's multiple interactions with the Indigenous People, the word "discovery", while now admittedly less widely circulated, is still used erroneously in describing Columbus's encounters with several Caribbean islands, and countries in Central America. Columbus never saw the present day United States. He embarked on four different voyages while looking for the "East Indies", in search of King Solomon's gold mines, riches, and a route to India. By accident, he stumbled upon the Bahamas, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Trinidad, and parts of North Eastern Central America. Much of what we know about the atrocities Columbus committed against the indigenous Arawak/Taino populations was documented by Bartolome de Las Casas, a Spanish Historian and Dominican Friar in A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. [3] Take for example the following quotes from the book:

" The Christians with their horses and swords and lances, began to slaughter and practice strange cruelty among [the Arawak]. They penetrated into the country and spared neither children nor the aged, nor pregnant women, nor those in child labour, all of whom they ran through the body and lacerated as though they were assaulting so many lambs herded in their sheepfold "

" In this Kingdom or (I'm certain) in some Province of New Spain, A Spaniard Hunting and intent on his game, phancyed that his Beagles wanted food; and to supply their hunger snatcht a young little Babe from the Mothers breast, cutting off his Arms and Legs, cast a part of them to every Dog, which they having devour'd, he threw the remainder of the Body to them. "

" [The Spaniards] made bets as to who would slit a man in two or cut off his head at one blow: or they opened up his bowels. They tore the babes from their mother ' s breast by their feet and dashed their heads against the rocks … They ' spitted ' the bodies of other babes, together with their mothers on their swords … They made a gallows just high enough for the feet to nearly touch the ground … they put wood underneath and with fire, they burned the Indians alive " .

In one incident, a member of Columbus's crew "drew his sword. Then the whole hundred drew theirs and began to rip open the bellies, to cut and kill a group of Taino … roasted them, cut off their hands and burned them alive"

" [the Spanish] rode the backs of the Indians as if they were in a hurry, " and they " thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades. "

As if this were not enough, rape too was a common occurrence. In 1493, Columbus had already began rewarding members of his crew with Arawak/Taino women to rape. This was not simply confined to women, but extended to pre-pubescent girls. In Columbus's own words he stated "… girls… from 9-10 … are … in demand" .[4] In one single day, de Las Casas saw Columbus's soldiers "dismember, behead or rape 3,000 natives". It is clear that the Arawak/Taino population were not considered sufficiently human to be treated as such. And distant from the eyes of the crown, no one policed Colmbus nor his crew's despicable moral engagement with the people he miraculously discovered and subsequently made extinct.

The Tribute and Encomienda Systems

In 1495 Columbus created the "tribute system" in Haiti and the Dominican Republic (Hispaniola). Columbus at this time, still seeking the source of gold that he had not yet managed to find, implemented a system in which non-compliance, resistance, or inability to produce the expected results, bore the consequence of torture and capital punishment. According to Ferdinand Columbus, Columbus's son, "[The Indians] all promised to pay tribute to the Catholic Sovereigns every three months, as follows: In the Cibao, where the gold mines were located, every person of 14 years of age or upward was to pay a large hawk's bell of gold dust; all others were each to pay 25 pounds of cotton. Whenever an Indian delivered his tribute, he was to receive a brass or copper token which he must wear about his neck as proof that he had made his payment. Any Indian found without such a token was to be punished" . [5] The punishment was that those who did not provide sufficient gold every three months, had their hands cut off, and were left to bleed to death. Columbus had grossly overestimated the amount of gold that existed and it soon became clear that he had to exploit the Arawak/Taino by other means in order to reap profit. By then over 10,000 Arawak/Taino had been killed this way. Thus the encomienda system was created around the time of Columbus's third voyage.

There are a variety of arguments which examine if the encomienda system was actually slavery. These become important because this distinction contributed directly to the total extinction of the Arawak/Taino population; encomienderos did not own the Arawak/Taino, so they could not be bought or sold. The encomiendas were not inheritable by subsequent generations. And the Indigenous populations could not be moved from one geographical location to another. [6] Because the Arawak/Taino were not inheritable under the encomienda system, there was no impetus for the conquistadors to keep the Indigenous people alive. If the Arawak/Taino attempted to escape, they were hunted and killed. Thus the system thus sought to regulate Indigenous labor and behavior, in order to profit the conquistadors. Under the encomienda system, encomienderos received grants of a number of Arawak/Taino, from whom they could exact "tribute" in the form of gold or labor. In turn, the benevolent encomienderos were supposed to "protect" the physical bodies of the Indigenous population on the very land they had stolen from them, as well as "protect" their immortal souls by Christianizing them. This was a lose-lose for the Indigenous people who in an exchange under duress, gained the bible, and lost their land, many spiritual concepts, language, history, and lives.

Another untold story is that of the Indigenous resistance. Even when aspects of the true history of Columbus's genocide are told, the narrative is one written in the passive voice, in which Indigenous people, are not the agents, rather the objects, and one which excludes their narratives of resistance and survival. The Arawak/Taino fought back frequently in multiple uprisings and even the "Indian wars" on Hispaniola. However, the conquistadors had the advantage of "advanced" weaponry. The conquistadors deterred future uprisings by torturing and killing prisoners of war in the way de Las Casas described. This was by no means unfamiliar to the conquistadors as the exact same system had been used against the Black Moors in Spain.

Slavery and Capitalism

Columbus, who had already been engaged in slave trade on the West African coast years prior, familiar with systemic dehumanization, and the encomienda system's success against the Moors in Spain, became one the most "successful" European slave traders in the Americas. The Spanish, under the leadership of Columbus, selected 500 Arawak/Taino to be sent to Spain as enslaved people (of whom less than half survived the journey). In 1493 there were approximately 8 million Arawak/Taino. The disease that the conquistadors brought with them, combined with the destruction of the ecosystem by European livestock and rodents and the intentional systemic genocide of the Arawak/Taino people resulted in a population of 100,000 remaining by 1504.

Having nearly totally depleted the Arawak/Taino population, and the conquistadors unwilling to do the work themselves, Columbus continued to look for an alternative work force to exploit in the gold and silver mines and in agriculture. The "protector of the Indians" Bartolome de Las Casas initially supported the idea that African enslaved people be used to replace the massacred Arawak/Taino. Columbus had created the perfect model for other Europeans who were fast on his heels to guarantee their own wealth in the "New World". The same method of dehumanizing, destroying, murdering, and enslaving Arawak/Taino was used with the enslaved African population. The encomienda system was done away with and the trans-Atlantic slavery system erected in its place. Capitalism built on the backs of Arawak/Taino and African populations became a leading source of Spain's wealth for centuries. By 1555, not a single Arawak/Taino remained.

How it Became a Holiday

In 1828 Washington Irving, perhaps best known for his fictional, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, with the same imaginative zest, constructed a purely fictitious account of Christopher Columbus, in A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. In the book Columbus was a brave and benevolent leader who treated the Arawak/Taino with respect, kindness and dignity. This book was responsible for much of the myth-making around who Columbus was, and the ever-present invented version of the man and his legacy. In 1892, president Benjamin Harrison established the day as one to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus's landing in the Bahamas to spite the British. And in the 1890s large swells of Italian immigrants, who at the time were facing ethnic discrimination in the United States, held tightly to and propagated the image of the great Italian Columbus who had "discovered America" and used it as a way to ease their integration into the United States. By 1972, President Nixon, well-known for his incredibly honest and scrupulous behavior, made it a holiday.

Thanksgiving

The Myth: One hundred two passengers on the ship,/ Sixty-five days was a very long trip./ 'Twas November 11 when there was a shout./ "Land ho! We've made it!" a voice yelled out./ Their very first winter was cold and was gray./ The Pilgrims worked hard in the new land each day./ People got sick and some even died./ Still others continued to work side by side./ To the Pilgrims, Squanto was a teacher and friend./ He helped them from sunrise until each day's end./ He told them to plant corn in rows long and narrow./ He taught them to hunt with a bow and an arrow./ When the leaves once again turned gold in the fall,/ Enough food for the winter was stored up for all./ The Pilgrims felt joy they wanted to share./ They wanted their Indian friends to be there./ There were tables piled high with fish and with meat./ Vegetables, fruits, and good things to eat./ The Pilgrims gave thanks for all that they had. / Pilgrims and Indians together were glad.

Another Truth

Like Irving's account of Columbus, this poem goes beyond exclusionary detailing, and is almost pure invention. We can acquiesce certain details like the date, the coldness of the winter, and Squanto's teaching the Pilgrims how to plan corn. But Squanto's relationship to the Pilgrims, how Thanksgiving came about, and most certainly the idea that the "Indians" were somehow "glad" is pure fallacy. Prior to the Pilgrims' arrival John Smith and the colony at Jamestown had already set an early precedent for the Indigenous encounter. In summation, the English colonists who arrived in the United States, were always wholly unprepared for the harsh conditions they would find upon arrival, and in their times of desperation, reverted to animalistic means of survival, including cannibalism. Captain John Smith wrote, "So great was our famine that a savage we slew and buried, the poorer sort took him up again and ate him; and so did divers ones another boiled and stewed with herbs. And one amongst the rest did kill his wife, powdered her and had eaten part of her" [7]

For the Pilgrims in particular, after a series of successions of the throne, feeling that their religious beliefs were resulting in persecution, and seeking potential wealth and a fresh start in the "New World," they left South Hampton, England in the Mayflower with a total of 102 people. After about two months the ship landed in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. On December 16, 1920, according to the dark humor of Will Rogers, the Pilgrims "fell upon their knees… then fell upon the aborigines". [8] The Pilgrims, unused to the harsh winter, incapable of finding food on their own, with little idea how to engage in agriculture, lost about half of their population. At that time, the Pilgrims were half-crazed from loss, grief, hunger, and their unpredictable and consistent deaths. George Thorpe, wrote a first-hand account of what he witnessed, stating "more do die here of the disease of the mind than of the body" [9]

Enter Squanto (Tisquantum), whose existence is highly contested. If and when the "friendly savage" appeared, he was not seen as a teacher and friend but rather a clear sign of God's deliverance, as Squanto was a baptized, educated, English-speaking Christian. What more lucid sign of God's favor? Squanto, who had been formerly enslaved by John Smith's men was able to escape to England and return to the U.S. to find most of his tribe had been wiped out by the Plague. Members of the Pokaoket and other tribes, having lived in the area over 10,000 years were also able to communicate with the Europeans as they had already had interactions with European fishermen. They taught the colonists how to plant and where to hunt fish and beaver. In fall of 1621, Governor Bradford of Massachusetts issued a proclamation calling for a three-day feast to commemorate the first harvest and survival throughout the winter, to which the Wampanoag were invited in order to negotiate a treaty that would secure the lands of the Plymouth Plantation for the Pilgrims and to be placated to ensure the Pilgrims' survival.[10] Perhaps it was a feast in the name of brotherhood, but with dual and duplicitous intentions.

More ships came. The Pilgrim settlement expanded exponentially. European-borne diseases spread rampantly through the Indigenous population, killing them off with precision. There were multiple tribes living in the area, each with particular alliances with one another. As tribes engaged in numerous alliances with the Pilgrims, relations were ruptured amongst the other Indigenous American tribes living in the area, and power differentials substantially altered.

In 1637, when the first, officially proclaimed "Thanksgiving" took place another event was actually celebrated. At that feast, the New England colonists celebrated their massacre of the Pequots in the Connecticut Valley. William B. Newell, a Penobscot Indian and former chairman of the Anthropology department at the University of Connecticut, says that the first official Thanksgiving Day celebrated the massacre of 700 Indian men, women and children during their annual Green Corn Dance…[11] William Bradford, the former Governor of Plymouth and one of the chroniclers described it in the following detail:

" Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so that they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire … horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory. " [12]

Once the Pilgrims had become self-sufficient, their reliance on the Indigenous population dwindled. In 1675, continued aggression by the European invaders led to King Phillip's war, resulting in the massacre of over 3000 Indigenous people and about 1000 Pilgrims. At the end of the conflict most of the surviving Indigenous population were either hung, burned, killed or sold into slavery in the Carolinas. The enslavement of Indigenous people was highly successful, but raiding the Ivory Coast of Africa to enslave Africans and sell to the Southern colonies proved even more successful, and thus perpetuated the trade of enslaved Africans and their uncelebrated Holocaust.[13]

While in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday, it had already been celebrated annually for centuries. Dr. Ishakamusa Barashango sums up what Thanksgiving celebration is quite nicely, describing it as "a holiday celebrating the beginning of the almost total extermination of an entire race of people, commonly called "Indians" and the enslavement, continued oppression and genocide of the Afrikan, by European settlers". [14]

Whitewashing Genocide

Article 2 of the The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm; (c) deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births; (e) forcibly transferring children from one group to another group". [15] Given the history of the calculated intent of destroying in whole or in part both Indigenous and African people, there is no doubt that both of these holidays are based in historical genocide. The colonists cut off hands, fed babies to dogs, raped and sold children, and burned people alive. The Indigenous Holocaust and even embryonic stages of the African Holocaust, are the epitome of genocide. However, the truth is conveniently erased from the rhymes that are taught in class, and in its place a revisionist victor's history, which not only scrubs away the horrendous war crimes perpetrated by the English and Spanish invaders, but takes a white paintbrush and layers it finely in a beautiful coat of glorification. In celebration, the U.S. not only honors genocide, but its literal whitewashing as well.

Colonization of Narrative

The idea that we live in a post-colonial society, is perhaps as ridiculous as the thought that we live in a post-racial society. We cannot separate the repercussions and systemic infrastructure built as a result of the exploitative nature of the European encounter, from colonialism itself. Colonialism is a dynamic process, not simply a static moment in time that has now passed. And just as colonialism exists as the exploitation and subsequent domination of a people, it is just as assuredly a domination of history and narrative. To the victor goes the spoils and the rights for the victor to write history however he likes. The loss of ownership of one's own narrative, a narrative of genocide and resistance, especially in favor of one that honors the sordid actions of the victor's in triumph over the defeated, is surely salt in the wound of an already grotesque injury. The narrative represents an interactive relationship between the teller and the listener. The teller (dominant U.S culture) exercises its power over the controlled narrative and to some extent the audience, by legitimizing 1) its right to tell the story and 2) the truthfulness of the narrative [16]. The colonization of the Indigenous and African destruction and resistance narrative, using the fallacious "discovery narrative" thus honors manifest destiny, imperialist occupation, and dehumanization of "the other".

Collective Memory and American Identity

The way in which events are remembered has particular importance, especially within the context of celebratory ritual within American (U.S.) cultural memory. Cultural memory relates to fixed points of the past… "whose memory is maintained through cultural formation (texts, rites, monuments) and institutional communication (recitation, practice, observance)" called figures of memory. [17] These figures of memory, the observance of celebration, Columbus and Thanksgiving poems, festivals, parades, etc., create "islands of a completely different temporality suspended from time" which maintain preservation. The memory is not questioned, as the narrative, dominated by the conquerer, is clear. This cultural memory provides "concretion of identity or the relation to the group… from which a group derives an awareness of its unity and peculiarity" [18]. Thus the reconstructed narrative supports the cultural memory which supports the construction of American identity and our normative self-image as independent, brave, righteous and benevolent. This is then reinforced by the ritual celebration.

Equally important are the existence of various forms of denial and silence. In response to blatant historical violence, the U.S. has exercised both literal and interpretive denial in collective forgetting. This manifests on a spectrum from wholesale literal denial, "that genocide never happened" to the deliberate construction of historical violence "in ways that make them appear less atrocious". [19] " Silence and forgetting also result from particular forms of presence or mention that transform potentially threatening events into transgression-denying objects" . [20] This is calling genocide an "encounter" or using "meeting" to replace "massacre". Perhaps most reprehensible continues to be the anti-silence, which is the commemorative glorification of genocide exercising both literal and interpretive denial.

That Country Crazy.

In the DSM-V "antisocial personality disorder" has replaced the "psychopathy" diagnosis. It provides multiple areas of dysfunction which meet the criteria for this particular psychopathology. Let's see how the U.S. fares with respect to just the two discussed holidays:

"Ego-centrism; self-esteem derived from personal gain, power, or pleasure. Goal-setting based on personal gratification; The colonists (to be Americans) came to the "New World" for gold, the acquisition of a different socio-economic level, or power their religion did not allow them to exercise in England.

Empathy: Lack of concern for feelings, needs, or suffering of others; lack of remorse after hurting or mistreating another. The colonists exterminated millions of Indigenous people, and initiated the Indigenous and African slave trade as well as the Indigenous and African Holocausts and didn't seem too concerned about it.

Antagonism, characterized by: Manipulativeness, dishonesty, callousness and disinhibition:

The colonists used the Indigenous population's assistance for their own survival…then killed them. They created narratives which became holidays that destructed truth and reconstructed a collective cultural memory of benevolence as well as a cultural amnesia around the genocide. The U.S. continues to celebrate and commemorate these genocides annually with turkey and parades.

So What...?

The influence of American (U.S) culture is not always obvious. Many of us fully embrace it and many of us deliberately remove ourselves from it, denouncing citizenship, changing our last names, consider ourselves part of it solely by hyphenation, or understand ourselves as distinct from it due to lack of legal recognition of citizenship. But we cannot escape from it. We drive to work in it. We must operate in its systems. We use its currency. We breathe its air. We pay its bills. We bury our heads in work that funds it. We get lost in its distractions. We depend on its functionality for our survival. We celebrate its holidays. Yet if we think critically about why we engage in celebration we might consider also calling these reasons crazy, insane, pathological, and an affront to both indigeneity and humanity.

The narrative of resistance exists, but is rarely told. There are numerous active Global Indigenous Advocacy networks.There have been multiple Indigenous-led movements which have successfully changed Columbus Day to Indigenous People's Day, such as in Seattle, Washington. Similarly cities and towns in the United States have adopted resolutions to change the day's name. On October 12th, Venezuela celebrates the Day of Indigenous Resistance. Thousands march in Chile in what the people celebrate as the Day of Mapuche Resistance. The American Indian Movement (AIM) has been actively engaged in petitioning government to make Thanksgiving a day of mourning. Colonialism has evolved from slavery and small pox blankets. It now unashamedly offers neo-liberal policies in the name of economic globalization, which continue to result in illegal acquisition of land, deprivation of resources and human casualties. And there continue to be countless examples of both armed and unarmed Indigenous resistance occurring throughout America, from Canada to the Cape Horn. Indigenous people did and are resisting occupation of their lands and transnational exploitation of resources, despite the frequent disproportional militarized response to their demands.

So sitting in traffic at the Columbus Day parade, or even while we are having a huge meal with our families, let's take a few seconds to be a little pensive. If perhaps, we are not willing to give up the perks of our day off, or if we use the celebration as a time to be with family or reflect on gratitude, we can also be curious about how we do so in a way that acknowledges that the struggle for Indigenous liberation is pulsing vigorously. We can challenge the dominant narrative, our distorted cultural memory and resultantly our own (inextricably) American identities, and we can reshape them. If indeed practices of commemoration "provide a unified sense of who we are now and project a sense of collective purpose into the future" [21] then we must approach psychopathy with the intention of constructing an identity that is both principled and "sane", and a future purpose which is directed towards being honest in this world by honoring complete truths however vicious or painful these may be.

Oh yeah. Happy Thanksgiving.

Notes

[1] Hare Psychopathy Checklist Revised. http://www.minddisorders.com/knowledge/Hare_Psychopathy_Checklist.html

[2] http://www.teachingheart.net/columbus.htm

[3] Casas, B., & Griffin, N. (1992). A short account of the destruction of the Indies. London, England: Penguin Books.

[4] Loewen, J. (1995). Lies my teacher told me: Everything your American history textbook got wrong. New York: New Press

[5] ibid

[6] Yeager, T. J.. (1995). Encomienda or Slavery? The Spanish Crown's Choice of Labor Organization in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America. The Journal of Economic History, 55(4), 842-859. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2123819

[7] The General History of Virginia Fourth Book p. 294 (1606-1625)

[8] Deloria, V. (2002). The Indian Reorganization Act: Congresses and bills. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

[9] Rogers, J.A. Africa's gift to America: the Afro-American in the making and saving of the United States : with new supplement, Africa and its potentialities. (1961). St. Petersburg, FL: Helga Rogers Publishing

[10] http://historyofmassachusetts.org/squanto-the-former-slave/

[11] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/10176871/ns/msnbc-the_ed_show/t/thanksgiving-day-time-mourn/#.Vkko7q6rQXo

[12] Donald, G. (2009). Lies, damned lies, and history: A catalogue of historical errors and misunderstandings. Stroud: History Press.

[13] Jennings, F. (1975). The invasion of America: Indians, colonialism, and the cant of conquest. Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press.

[14] Barashango, I. (1979). Afrikan people and European holidays: A mental genocide. Silver Spring, MD: IVth Dynasty Pub.

[15] United Nations General Assembly. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html

[16] Anna De Fina and Alexandra Georgakopoulou. (2011). Narrative power, authority and ownership. In: Analyzing Narrative. pp. 125-154. [Online]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Available from: Cambridge Books Online <http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139051255.008> [Accessed 15 November 2015].

[17] Collective Memory and Cultural Identity Jan Assmann; John Czaplicka New German Critique, No. 65, Cultural History/Cultural Studies. (Spring - Summer, 1995), pp. 125-133.

[18] ibid

[19] Kurtiş, T., Adams, G., & Bird, M. (2010). Generosity or genocide? Identity implications of silence in American Thanksgiving commemorations. Memory, 18(2), 208-224

[20] ibid

[21] ibid

Imperialist Feminism and Liberalism

By Deepa Kumar

In a recent CNN interview, religion scholar Reza Aslan was asked by journalist Alisyn Camerota if Islam is violent given the "primitive treatment in Muslim countries of women and other minorities." Aslan responded by stating that the conditions for women in Muslim majority countries vary. While women cannot drive in Saudi Arabia, elsewhere in various Muslim majority countries, women have been elected heads of states 7 times. But, before he could finish his sentence pointing out that the US is yet to elect a woman as president, he was interrupted by co-host Don Lemon who declared: "Be honest though, Reza, for the most part it is not a free and open society for women in those states."

How is it that people like Camerota and Lemon, who very likely have never travelled to "free and open" Turkey, Lebanon or Bangladesh, or read the scholarship on women's rights struggles in Morocco, Iran and Egypt, seem to know with complete certainty that women are treated "primitively" in "Muslim countries"? On what basis does Lemon believe that he has the authority to call Aslan out for supposed dishonesty? How is it that with little or no empirical evidence on women's rights in Muslim majority countries (which vary widely based on country, regions within a country, social class, the history and nature of national liberation movements, the part played by Islam in political movements etc.) Western commentators routinely make such proclamations about women and Islam?

The answer lies in a ubiquitous, taken-for-granted ideological framework that has been developed over two centuries in the West. This framework, referred to by scholars as colonial feminism, is based on the appropriation of women's rights in the service of empire. Birthed in the nineteenth century in the context of European colonialism, it rests on the construction of a barbaric, misogynistic "Muslim world" that must be civilized by a liberal, enlightened West; a rhetoric also known as gendered Orientalism.

Colonial/imperialist feminism has taken new and old forms in the US. The immediate context for a resurgence of imperialist feminism in the US is the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. Borrowing a trope from Britain in India and Egypt, and France in Algeria, the US argued that it was going to liberate Afghan women. Liberals and feminists in the US, going against the wishes of Afghan feminist organizations such as RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan) who opposed US intervention, linked arms with the Bush administration and supported the Afghan war.

In the Obama era, liberalism became even more intertwined with empire. Despite mountains of evidence to show that the US/NATO occupation had done little for women's rights, Amnesty-USA conducted a campaign in support of the continued occupation of Afghanistan. In 2012, ads appeared in public places of Afghan women in burqas with the caption: "Nato: Keep the Progress Going!" Amnesty further organized a summit that rearticulated through the voices of powerful women, such as Madeline Albright, imperialist feminist justifications for war.

What explains this tendency among liberals to take positions that go against the interests of Muslim women and women of color? While there are numerous factors, two are worth noting-racism and empire.

As several Third World Feminists have argued, a historical weakness of liberal feminism in the West has been its racist, patronizing attitude towards women of color who have been seen less as allies/agents and more as victims in need of rescue. This attitude prevails both in relation to women of color within Western nation states, as well as women in the global South. This is what allows figures such as Madeline Albright and Hillary Clinton to be viewed as feminist saviors even while both, in their roles as Secretary of State, have advanced US imperialism. It is liberalisms understanding of the state as a neutral body, rather than as a coercive apparatus used to advance capitalism and empire, which is at the root of such perspectives.

In the cultural sphere, TV shows such as Homeland reproduce imperialist feminism not only through its plot line and female lead character (Carrie Mathison), but also through its ad campaigns. In the lead up to Season 4, the publicity campaign featured Mathison "far from home" fighting the righteous war. Mathison's red hood, blue gown and white face stand in for the American nation against a sea of Eastern darkness. Her unique clothing and her active posture mark her as the embodiment of liberal individualism in contrast to the passive, indistinguishable Muslim women in black. The larger narrative is the construction of "us" as a society that values women and their agency, and of them as misogynistic in a classic reproduction of the "clash of civilizations" colonial argument.

Yet, imperialist feminism has not been the province only of white elites in the West; comprador intellectuals in the global South have always played a productive role. Today, in the "post-racial" era, it is not only white liberals and feminists that have bolstered imperialist feminism, middle and ruling class brown and black women in the West and the global South have actively contributed to the articulation of new forms and new agents of imperialist feminism.

One recent example of how imperialist feminism can occasionally incorporate Muslim female agency is the widespread media attention in the West focused on the UAE female pilot Maryam al-Mansouri. Widely praised by liberals and conservatives in the US (not withstanding the "boobs on the ground" comment), al-Mansouri became a means by which to paper over the gulf monarchies' atrocious human rights record. Even while the image of a Muslim female pilot served to disrupt the standard victim imagery, the larger narrative was one which cast the US as savior leading a coalition of "good Muslims" in a righteous war against ISIS. In place of T. E. Lawrence, we have Barack Obama.

Liberal feminism has routinely viewed women's participation in the military as positive. In 1991, after the first Gulf war, feminist Naomi Wolf praised US female soldiers for eliciting "respect and even fear" and for taking the struggle for women's rights forward. What she failed to discuss is the over 200,000 Iraqis, men, women and children, who were killed in that war. US women cannot achieve their liberation on the bodies of the victims of empire any more than Arab women can by raining bombs on Syrians. Empire does not liberate, it subjugates.

Deepa Kumar is an associate professor of media studies and Middle Eastern studies at Rutgers University (New Jersey). She is the author of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire and Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization, and the UPS Strike.

This article was originally published at Open Democracy

Rediscovering Dialogue: An Interview with Son of Baldwin

By Devon Bowers

The following is an interview with the founder and facilitator of Son of Baldwin: "The literary, socio-political, sexual, pop culture blog. Live from Bedford-Stuyvesant."

Why have you named the page Son of Baldwin? What kind of impact has James Baldwin had on you personally?

James Baldwin was the first black gay male intellectual I had ever encountered. His work was really the first time I had seen myself, my identity (as a black gay male), and my point of view represented in art and public discourse in a way that was not meant to be mocked, dismissed, minimized, or dehumanized. His was the first work that started me on the path to thinking critically about myself, the world around me, and my place in it. In tribute to that consciousness raising (which may have come much later, if at all, had it not been for him) and in an effort to answer his final call to dig through the wreckage and use what he left behind to continue the work of trying to make the world a more just, livable, peaceful place, I named the blog "Son of Baldwin." I have been told by friends of Baldwin's family that the family is quite pleased by the work being done and they believe that I am indeed honoring his legacy. That is overwhelming and I am overjoyed.

What made you want to make a Facebook page in the first place?

Son of Baldwin originally started out as a blog via blogspot. But that space wasn't really conducive to conversation. Facebook allows for a kind of direct and extended interaction and dialogue that many other sites, including other social media, don't. And for me, the conversation is the most important part. Despite how I may sometimes come across, this isn't about me. This isn't about being able to proselytize from on high and have everyone applaud the pronouncement. This is about starting conversations and engaging other people in various communities about these causes and concerns in the effort of finding solutions to some of our most pressing social justice issues.

You talk about a number of topics, from LGBTQ rights to racism, through a critical progressive lens. How did you come to this political awakening of sorts?

I think this awakening started in my childhood. I grew up during the 70s, 80s, and 90s-a child of both Black Southern Baptist and Nation of Islam traditions-in a section of Brooklyn called Bensonhurst (infamous for the racist attack against and murder of Yousef Hawkins in 1989).

Bensonhurst, at least at that time I grew up there, was a neighborhood of primarily Italian and Irish first- and second-generation immigrants. In this neighborhood, I lived in a housing project of mostly black and Latin@ peoples right in the middle of things. We were thus surrounded, if you will, in hostile enemy territory. This made everything tenuous.

As a child and a teen, I had to plot routes home from school that would help me avoid running into the mobs of white children, teens, and adults who--with bats in hand, violence in heart, and death in mind--made a regular ritual of chasing kids of color back to the projects.

What was different for me when I got back to the projects, having often but not always escaped the battering from racists, is that the battle didn't end there. I had to then contend with the other black and Latin@ peoples who wanted to pound on my head because they perceived me as gay.

When you are not safe in any of the worlds you inhabit, you sort of don't have a choice but to become politicized. You kind of don't have a choice but to "wake up" because if you don't, you'll be murdered. Reading the works of authors like Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, and others helped to direct these concerns and grievances, and made me feel less alone and more empowered to do something about my circumstances.

Something that I have noticed about you is that you actively allow yourself to be called out by others and acknowledge when you messed up and allow yourself to be corrected. Why do you think that this does not exist in larger political circles, especially liberal or progressive spheres?

My opinion is that this willingness to be wrong and be corrected doesn't happen in larger political circles and spheres because many of the people working within those areas actually think this work is about them. They believe that in order to be trusted and effective, they have to feign perfection and position themselves as above reproach. Can you imagine?

Many people doing this work think that in order to be trusted they have to lie. The truly sad thing about this contradiction of a strategy is how often it works, and how often complicit audiences are willing to believe the lie if it confirms their system of reality. I guess what I'm saying is that many people doing this work are politicians in the most cynical sense of the word, and that occupation is not something I have any interest in whatsoever. I'm a writer by purpose, training, and profession, and I've never pretended to be anything other than that.

In short, I think ego is at the center of this unwillingness to be incorrect.

You recently made it a requirement that people who post photos on the page to provide a written description. What prompted this?

This comes from a desire to ensure that as many people as possible are able to participate, as fully as they can, in the conversations and discourses happening in the space. Blind and Deaf/Hard of Hearing people are active members of the Son of Baldwin community and this policy makes it possible for them to be even more vibrant participants in discussions. This is one of the ways I'm trying to address my own collusion in institutionalized ableism/disableism.

What are your thoughts on online social justice work? Do you think that it can make a serious difference in people's lives and on a larger scale? (I often hear people saying that tweeting or writing doesn't really do anything.)

For starters, I think online social justice work has been a blessing in the sense that it has given a voice to many peoples and communities whose voices were often missing, excluded, or silenced in sociopolitical discussions. Additionally, the Internet has made it possible for many more people to have access to these debates and discussions, such as disabled people/people with disabilities who are often unable to access on-the-ground events because many organizers are unwilling to make accommodations, or poor peoples who simply cannot afford to travel to these events.

There are many absolutely amazing and brilliant online social justice activists doing work that honestly, truly matters, and are, despite narratives to the contrary, affecting the discourse and changing minds.

But like everything else, there is a deeply disturbing dark side to online social justice work.

One of the things I deeply dislike about much of the social justice activism and social justice spaces I've encountered is how intentionally vicious they are. And I'm not talking about viciousness between social justice activists and trolls. I'm talking about the viciousness between peoples with the same goals, but who might have different strategies for obtaining those goals. I've seen some really hateful, ugly, deeply dishonest and self-serving stuff happening in conversations in these spaces-including my own. I'm not talking about disagreements or even heated disagreements. I'm talking about full-on attempts at destroying each other-from credibility to personhood. I'm talking about people who truly get off on making others feel as small as possible so they can feel big.

I'm talking about intentionally committing violence against and silencing other people. I'm talking about people lying and slandering others with the intent of spiritually murdering them as though they were opposing a concept rather than a person. The Internet often helps with the depersonalization of people.

When you think you're arguing with, and trying to obliterate, digitized images and typed words instead of a living being, it's easier to be joyfully inhumane, spiritually toxic, and intellectually genocidal, then reward yourself by calling it "social justice." It's easy to be gleeful about shitting on an opponent (an opponent that you, yourself, manufactured for your own dubious purposes, by the way) and high-five each other about the havoc you wreaked when you can treat the carnage as a concept rather than reality.

I'm talking about people who wear the cloak of victimhood like a Trojan horse in order to sneak into the village, get close to you and- surprise- become the victimizers you never expected. There are people who use their marginalized identities and communities not for the purposes of liberation, but as a hustle, as masturbation, as a way to elevate themselves to a place where they are above reproach. I'm talking about the people who have the audacity to use "trigger" not as a real expression and sign post of lived trauma, but as a strategic pretense to silence any opinions they don't like.

It's like they play this game where the more marginalized identity boxes they can check off, the more they can't be criticized for any behavior they engage in, no matter how abusive and counterrevolutionary. Therefore, the goal is to check off as many marginalized identity boxes as they can-even if they have to invent them or pretend to belong to them. Whoever has the most, wins.

To me, that's the original pimp strategy and I guess what I'm saying is that I don't like pimps. But I have discovered that there are so many of them in this arena. Some folks are out here big pimpin' and calling it "radical" of all things.

I don't know why, but that shocked me. I did some research to determine whether this was a new phenomenon brought on by the anonymity of the Internet. What I discovered is this behavior pre-dates the Internet. Shirley Chisholm, for example, was the target of disgusting attacks by people who should have been in solidarity with her. Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison said such despicable things about James Baldwin that it would make your skin crawl. Much to my dismay, I learned this in-fighting and hostility isn't novel in any respect.

Sometimes, I've been accused of being egotistical, which, okay, fine if that's your opinion. But the truth of the matter is that I'm not trying to be a pimp at this stuff. Part of why I don't do public speaking gigs, etc. is because I'm not trying to become some kind of object of celebrity or fame. I'm not trying to become some kind of some kind of commercial figure or commodity.

I'm not trying to be that person who maneuvers themselves closer to the president in group photo opportunities because they are trying to climb some political ladder. Those people want to be "The One." Not me, though. I'm not trying to be the "go-to" expert. I'm not trying to be in the spotlight. I'm not trying to be anyone's leader. I'm not trying to make money off of this work. I'm not trying to play like I'm perfect and have all the answers. I'm learning right alongside everyone else. I'm not here to be worshiped like some god-thing, but regarded as a human being who is growing and evolving, falling down and getting back up again with increased knowledge. I'm a participant in this conversation.

But increasingly, these aren't conversations anymore. Increasingly, these are encounters with people with not-always-legit agendas trying to push those agendas as liberation strategies. These people are about switching places with the oppressor and will use whichever of the"master's tools" (as Audre Lorde called them) is necessary to do so. However, I'm not interested in being chained and I'm not interested in chaining anyone else. That, for me, is the politics of inertia and I'm interested in progress. I want everyone to be liberated.

Part of the genius of this violence-strategy that some people who call themselves marginalized employ is that it's difficult for the victim of the violence to discern whether the violence is legitimate or illegitimate. Because many of the people in this work are so committed to justice, they err on the side of it being legitimate even when it isn't. So they endure the emotional, psychic, psychological, spiritual, and sometimes even physical abuse because they're afraid if they don't, they will be labeled as a part of the problem. Speaking for myself, I've allowed people to abuse me, even flat-out lie about me on an ongoing basis, just so I wouldn't be perceived as an oppressor and anti-justice (because of the ways in which my identities intersect, in and out, with privilege and oppression and marginalization). To save my "reputation" among the social justice crowd, I've been a masochist. It's so incredibly complicated. And I do not have the answers for it. But I do have the bruises.

So, I'm no longer engaging the brutality. I'm moving away, not from the difficult and needed conversations, but from the egotistical violence. If your concept of social justice is about amassing power at the expense of other victims of hegemonic abuse, I cannot be down for your cause. And if that makes me "bad" at doing this social justice stuff, then so be it. If you need me to be the villain so you can feel like the hero in your own story, play on playa. But you'll be playing sans me. I won't give you the attention you're seeking. I will absolutely refuse to see you no matter what tricks you employ. I've got other work to do.

You are quite critical of the race and class politics of the mainstream LGBT community. Due to this split on multiple levels, from racism to ignoring transgender people, would you say that there is even a real LGBT community? How can people work towards having more inclusive spaces for marginalized LGBT members?

I would say, currently, that there may be LGTBQIA communities, plural. But the singular community that is commonly addressed in media and conversations is one that is actually serving the needs of one particular subset of the communities-namely, white, middle-to-upper class, cisgender, non-disabled, gender conforming men.

James Baldwin said back in 1984 that the gay movement was really about white people who lost their white privilege struggling and petitioning to get it back. I see no lies in that statement if the national platforms and conversations, if the faces of the movement are any indication.

I witness tons of conversations about why "black people are so homophobic" (which we can actually trace, ironically, to white colonial intervention) but relatively few to none about why "why white gay people are so racist." The answer, as Baldwin surmised, was because white gay people are still, at heart, white and Whiteness, which is inextricably linked to the idea of racial superiority, is at the root of most of our problems.

To get to a more inclusive space, people (of all races and creeds) have to give up their addiction to Whiteness and white supremacy. People (or all genders and sexualities) have to give up their addiction to patriarchy and narrow-minded views of masculinity, femininity, gender identity, and sexuality. People of all physical realities have to give up capitalism and incessant materialism, which are commodifications of humanity, and stop treating human bodies as machines that are valuable only for what they can produce for the State-a deeply ableist point of view.

The problem is convincing people to give up the things that define their current comforts. We have to get people to be willing to be uncomfortable, at least for a while, until we can figure all of this out. This may be a continuous journey, rather than a destination.

At the end of the day, what do you want people to get out of your Facebook page?

My dream for Son of Baldwin is that it serves as a place where we can have uncomfortable conversations about social justice issues without dehumanizing one another. We might occasionally yell at one another. We might occasionally have to be corrected for our errors and apologize for them. But I hope out of the consternation come viable solutions and a greater respect for each other's humanity.

Visit Son of Baldwin and get in the conversation.

Whiteness in the Psychological Imagination

By Jonathan Mathias Lassiter

“My project is an effort to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the serving to the served”  (Morrison, 1992, p. 90).

“Well I know this, and anyone who’s ever tried to live knows this. What you say about somebody else – anybody else – reveals you. What I think of you as being is dictated by my own necessity, my own psychology, my own fears and desires. I’m not describing you when I talk about you, I’m describing me” (James Baldwin, 1963).

Imagine a person. How tall is this person? What is the gender? How does this person dress? How does this person speak? Now, imagine the skin color of this person. As you pictured this person, was it a white person? If it was, you are not alone. For many, person is synonymous with white person. However, too often little attention is given to this fact. White people just are. Their race and embodiment of whiteness is seldom analyzed or is done narrowly. Furthermore, the psychological implications of whiteness for white people remain largely unexamined. This lack of detailed and nuanced study about white people and whiteness uneases me. There is a dearth of discourse about white people as a racial subject and whiteness as a pathological system with psychological consequences for white people. This essay is an attempt to address that (dis)ease and move toward an understanding of white people and whiteness, as racial subjects and a pathological system, respectively, in the field of psychology and beyond.

I begin this essay with a discussion of definitions for terms that will be used throughout. I transition to an overview of the racial origins of psychotherapy and the subsequent erasure of those origins. The remainder of the essay will present a discussion of whiteness in the psychological imagination and its implications, first for people of color and then white people.

Terminology

It is important to have a common understanding of the three critical terms that will be used repeatedly throughout this essay. These terms include psychological imagination, white people, and whiteness.Psychological imagination is used to describe the formulations and definitions of ideas and ideals that pertain to psychology-in the mainstream-as an academic discipline, and to psychological phenomena in general. This imagination influences people who work or study in that discipline as well as those who do not. The term white people refers to people who, regardless of national origin or cultural background, have white skin, consider themselves to be white and/or are treated by the majority of people in society as such, and personally benefit from resources and privileges associated with whiteness. This term is used in this essay to discuss the general populace of white people in America regardless of socioeconomic status. No disclaimer should be needed but to increase the likelihood that the points of my essay are understood and not clouded by defensiveness, this author knows that not all white people embrace and actively collude in whiteness. Furthermore, it should be understood that whiteness can be and is internalized by both white people and people of color. One does not have to have white skin to perpetuate whiteness. However, the perpetuation of whiteness is only beneficial to white people. People of color, no matter their collusion or protest, are still systematically and systemically oppressed by whiteness.

Whiteness is defined as

“a complex, hegemonic, and dynamic set of mainstream socioeconomic processes, and ways of thinking, feelings, behaving, and acting (cultural scripts) that function to obscure the power, privilege, and practices of the dominant social elite. Whiteness drives oppressive individual, group, and corporate practices that adversely impacts…the wider U.S. society and, indeed, societies worldwide. At the same time whiteness reproduces inequities, injustices, and inequalities within the…wider society” (Lea & Sims, 2008, pp.2-3).

It should be noted that whiteness is not monolithic or immutable. Its meaning is constantly shifting and being constructed through an array of discourses and practices in various arenas of society (Wray & Newitz, 1997). In this way, white people either directly or indirectly benefit from their positioning at the top of a hierarchy that preferences their ways of thinking, feelings, behaving, and acting above those of others. This positioning of whiteness is held consciously, subconsciously, and unconsciously by both people of color and white people. It is enacted in both subtle and overt ways. Too often the white human being is the person who is really being considered when one is discussing or writing about the human being. Yet, the whiteness of the human being is obscured and painted as an every(wo)man.

White-washed Psychology

Psychology, as many understand it, in the western world is grounded in whiteness. Plato’s thoughts, in 387 BCE, on the brain and mental processes and René Decartes’ ideas about dualism of mind and body in the 1600s are taught in most, if not all, History of Psychology courses to be some of the earliest foundational writings about psychological processes. Psychological science is thought to have its beginnings in Wilhelm Wundt’s experimental laboratory in psychology at the University of Leipzig, Germany that opened in 1879. Furthermore, it is commonly taught that the origins of psychotherapy are found in Sigmund Freud’s and his students’ work beginning in 1886.

It should be noted that Freud, himself, was a Jewish person. His approach to conducting psychotherapy with his patients was aligned with many characteristics of Jewish culture. These characteristics included being exceedingly verbal, emotionally expressive, trusting of reputable strangers, and believing in the “expert opinion” of a professional (Langman, 1997). The Jewish traits were the underpinning assumptions of patients’ behaviors in the psychotherapy room. Freud and other early members of the psychotherapy movement, such as Sandor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, Otto Rank, and Hans Sachs taught their students to approach psychotherapy and their patients in this manner (Langman, 1997). In many ways, western psychotherapy in the early 20th century was a secularization of Jewish mysticism (Bakan, 1958).

However, the ethnic foundation of psychotherapy rooted in Jewish culture was eroded with the shift toward an empirical approach ushered in by white Americans John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner with their theories of behaviorism (Langman, 1997). Behaviorism focused on objective and measurable behaviors while rejecting the subjective domains of human experiences such as thoughts and emotions. This shift was a step toward the whitening of psychotherapy in that it centralized many characteristics of white culture including rugged individualism, competition, mastery, and control over nature, a unitary and static conception of time, and a separation of science and religion (Sue et al, 1998). This shift highlights the mutability of whiteness and its tendency to leech the essence from its counterparts. British colonists were once defined by their Christianity and Europeanness but their Christianity and Europeanness became subsumed by their whiteness in the Americas. In a similar way, Jewish cultural contributions to western psychology and psychotherapy were subsumed under the whiteness of American white people.

However, more obscured than the Jewish underpinnings of psychotherapy and psychology, is its earliest ethnic foundation. The African roots of psychology predate all others. In-depth scholarly research reveals that the origins of what is now called psychology can be found in the philosophical, scientific, and mystical practices of the Anunian and Kemetic civilizations dating back to 4,000 BCE (Bynum, 2012). In these traditions, psychology is considered as the study of the human spirit (Nobles, 1986). It is the study of how people understand and define their humanness within the context of a community (Piper-Mandy & Rowe, 2010). Anunian and Kemetic psychology preferences a view of the self as primarily a spiritual entity projected into the physical realm (McAllister, 2014). Meyers (1988) proclaimed that the African worldview is an optimal one in which encompasses viewing the spiritual, mental, soulful, and physical aspects of being as one; knowing one’s self through symbolic imagery and rhythm; valuing interpersonal harmony and interconnectedness; embracing self-worth as an intrinsic value that derives from one’s very being; and viewing life as a plane that is unlimited (Karenga, 1993; Meyers, 1998). Life is thought to be trifold operating on three planes that are before-life, earth-life, and after-life (Fu-Kiau, 1993, 2001 as cited by Piper-Mandy & Rowe, 2010). The human spirit is thought to move through “seven moments” which are “before, beginning, belonging, being, becoming, beholding, and beyond” (Piper-Mandy & Rowe, 2010, p. 14). As can be seen, the earliest conceptualizations of psychology were not limited to the physical realm bounded by empiricism with which white-washed psychology has become identified. It was more encompassing of the seen and unseen, the before, now, and beyond. This type of psychology is a more complete assessment of the human experience that acknowledges the knowable and unknowable. (See Piper-Mandy & Rowe, 2010 for more details.) It is rooted in Africa and predates any other thought on the study of humanness. However, whiteness has recast psychology in its imagination. From this perspective, the image of the purveyors and consumers of psychology are tacitly assumed to be white or, if not white, approached in their relation to whiteness. Psychology is limited by whiteness-informed ideals of quantification, denial of the spiritual, and biomedical preoccupation.

White People and Whiteness in the Psychological Imagination

Psychology, much like all fields of human inquiry, often defines white people and whiteness in relationship to what it is not. Guthrie (2004) points out that some of the earliest studies of racial differences related to psychological abilities attempted to define white people as separate, and as members of a “higher” form of human being than people of color. For example, a series of psychological studies from as early as 1881 and 1895, reportedly “proved” that people of color, namely Japanese, American indigenous, and African-American people, had quicker reaction times to sensory stimuli and thus were more “impulsive,” while white people were more “reflective” (Guthrie, 2004). The interpretation of the results of such studies is interesting. These results were interpreted to imbue white people with a presumed desirable quality of reflectivity and people of color with a presumed undesirable quality of impulsivity. Other early studies conducted by white psychologists also found “evidence” of African-Americans’ lack of ability for abstract thought but prowess in sensory and motor skills (Guthrie, 2004). This type of psychological imagining defines white people as mentally adept and physically underdeveloped; implicitly, and sometimes overtly, suggesting that white people’s intellectual skill should be valued over the physical capacities of people of color. And thus, this intellectual value sets white people as the standard in the realm of intellectual functioning. These interpretations of research highlight that scientific findings can be used for the uplift and humanizing of people, or for their pathologizing and dehumanizing of them. Such interpretations by pioneering white scientists in the field of psychology point to an imagining of white people as superior and people of color as inferior.

One may protest that findings of early psychological studies are outdated and do not reflect mainstream contemporary psychology. I agree that such blatant racist interpretations of research findings are almost nonexistent in today’s world. However, it has been replaced with a colorblind mentality that does not address these racist underpinnings and subconsciously positions white people as the default against which all others are measured. One does not have to look far to find evidence of this point. It is common practice for editors of peer-reviewed psychological journals to publish articles with titles such as“Millennials, narcissism, and social networking: What narcissists do on social networking sites and why,”“Finding female fulfillment: Intersecting role-based and morality-based identities of motherhood, feminism, and generativity as predictors of women’s self satisfaction and life satisfaction,” and“Friendship between men across sexual orientation: The importance of (others) being intolerant”(Barrett, 2013; Bergman, Fearrington, Davenport, & Bergman, 2011; Rittenour & Colaner, 2012). The broad language in the titles (i.e. “millennials,” “female,” “women,” “men”) of these articles suggest that the authors of these studies have recruited and conducted research with a sample of diverse participants who represent a microcosm of the diverse human family. These articles’ titles suggest that the findings of the studies are, with a margin of error of course, applicable to all men, women, and millennials. A glance at the Methods sections proves otherwise. Not the least offense, the samples are virtually racially homogenous. These studies included 6.8%, 8.8%, and .08% people of color. While any findings from these studies are an addition to the understanding of psychology, they should be clearly understood as an examination of psychological concepts among white people in America, not as universal concepts or even American concepts. No journal editors required that the authors change their titles to reflect the predominantly white culture of their participants. While some readers might not understand the significance of these titles and the titling practice in psychology, the absence of reference to white people is commonplace and this small sample of studies is unfortunately representative of the type of widespread branding of the psychology of white people as the psychology of people. This type of branding obscures the culture of white people and the interplay of whiteness with psychological phenomena. It makes it hard for one to understand the essence of whiteness because this type of branding erases whiteness and elevates the psychological experiences of white people to be those of the human race. Dyer (1997, p. 2) wrote “there is no more powerful position than that of being ‘just’ human. The claim to power is the claim to speak for the commonality of humanity…whites are people whereas other colours are something else.” In this way, white people implicitly set themselves as the arbiters of humanity and maybe even the only true embodiment of it.

From this point of view, whiteness in the psychological imagination is conflated with humanness in the psychological imagination. Therefore, whiteness is superior and centered in the psychological imagination. It is often obscured yet powerful in its organization of the field of study in a way that revolves around itself and thus maintains its power. It positions itself as the pure, unbiased presentation of scientific phenomena that explains what it means to be human. This imagining of whiteness is erroneous and dangerous.

Whiteness and Its Implications for Psychology Students of Color

Students of color often experience the psychology field as an unwelcoming and dehumanizing space. Research indicates that psychology students of color report experiencing stereotyping, alienation and isolation, cultural bias, prejudice, and challenges to their academic qualifications and merit in their educational programs (Gonzalez, Marin, Figuerosa, Moreno, & Navia, 2002; Johnson-Bailey, 2004; Lewis, Ginsberg, Davies, & Smith, 2004; Vazquez et al., 2006; Williams, 2000; Williams et al., 2005). Psychology students of color do not see themselves or the communities they represent reflected in the image of psychology. Researchers (Maton et al., 2011) found that African Americans were 12.6 times more likely, and Asian American and Latina/o American each 5.1 times more likely to report stereotypical rather than fair and accurate representation compared to white students. In turn, Asian Americans were 49 times more likely, African Americans 23.7 times more likely, and Latina/o Americans 19.9 times more likely to report that their group was not represented at all than to report fair and accurate representation as compared to white students (Maton et al., 2011). Students of color are overwhelmingly presented a curriculum that paints whiteness as humanness. They are deprived of an image of humanity that includes them and are thus dehumanized in their educational process.

Experiences of dehumanization and disempowerment in a system of whiteness leaves students insecure in their academic abilities, unsure of their sense of belonging in academia, emotionally battered by racial insensitivity, and feeling impotent to address these issues. Thus, students engage in self-censorship, assimilation to whiteness-centered academic program norms, and abandonment of scholarly pursuits of interest and use to communities of color (Gildersleeve, Croom, & Vasquez, 2011). Whiteness in psychology often leaves students of color feeling isolated and treated unjustly.

My colleagues and I are intimate with the types of experiences that the empirical research on students of color elucidates. One day during my third year in graduate school, I had an African American female, let’s call her “Natasha,” start crying when I asked her how she was feeling. She told me, “I don’t feel like I belong here. These students say some of the most offensive, racist shit and the professors agree with them. Then when I speak up and call them out, I’m told that I should respect everyone’s opinion. It feels like they don’t want me to succeed.” Listening to Natasha, who was a first year student, I remembered my own experience of feeling racially assaulted in academic and clinical training settings. I felt her pain and the confusion that accompanied it. Boiling with empathy, I said “it’s because they don’t want you here.” Natasha looked at me with an expression of astonishment. “Look around,” I continued, “how many professors of color do you see here? Don’t you know that when they created the first programs in psychology, you and I were not the students they had in mind? We were not meant to be here. But we are. And it is up to you to make sure that you stay here, against all odds. The world needs your brilliance. The world needs your intelligence and the perspective that only you can offer. So cry, get mad, but use that to push you forward, to the top.” While, I admit that I might have been emotional when I responded to my friend, the overall message was one of resilience. Scholarly research on the history of psychology support my statement and illuminates the struggles of people of color who were the pioneers in graduate education in psychology (Guthrie, 2004). It has often been the case that in a system of whiteness students of color have had to generate their own power from within and use adversity to propel them forward. It is an uneasy and unjust position to be in but unfortunately, often, the reality. Resilience is the cornerstone of the foundation that students of color must build upon when facing whiteness in the psychological imagination.

Multicultural sensitivity and diversity are popular topics in psychology training programs. While the American Psychological Association and many APA-accredited schools and internship training programs tout diversity on paper, many students of color find there to be little in reality. I often heard at clinical training sites that “there are several different forms of diversity and too often people get hung up on race.” This is a true statement, of course. However, the tone with which it was often spoken and the number of times that it was mentioned whenever someone mentioned diversity or race highlighted an unsettling thought for me. Was this comment an excuse to not discuss race? Was this comment their get-out-of-the-race-question-free-card? In my experience, discussions about race and ethnicity were rarely undertaken in any sustained or formal manner. At one site, there was only one formal discussion of race throughout the whole year. Particularly egregious about that discussion was that an African American psychologist who was unaffiliated with the organization was engaged to conduct it. This was troubling because one of the only two times a psychologist of color presented a didactic was when the topic involved race and ethnic diversity. That psychologist was recruited for this one time only event. An implicit message is that the only topic people of color are qualified to discuss is race. And as evidence of the lack of diversity in the organization, it had to reach beyond its walls to find a qualified speaker on the topic. Furthermore, race and ethnicity was boiled down to one presentation and not discussed in any formal manner during the rest of the year. In addition, the focus of that site’s approach race and ethnicity was limited to African Americans. I am not opposed to people of color’s unique and similar experiences as human beings being highlighted in the study of psychology. It should be a foundational component of psychology education. It is the manner in which the spotlight is shined on people of color that is troublesome. People of color are often discussed in psychology as if they are outside of society and in some cases, outside of the species. People of color are presumed to diverge from the default of whiteness and thus are the special cases. They are often examined and presented in a consumable manner to onlookers who, with scientific and objective perspectives, try to understand them. If people of color are the special cases, then who are the people to whom their exotification is being explained? Who does this type of racial and ethnic diversity training serve and whom does it not serve? Furthermore, white people and their race and ethnicities are rarely included in conversations about race and ethnicity. Their racial and ethnic heritages are erased by whiteness and they are placed outside of the paradigm into a separate and implicitly elevated position. Thus, reinforcing whiteness in the psychological imagination.

“Diversity is more than race” seemed to be code for “let’s not talk about race.” This silence around race often seemed to come up in case presentations. I have often found myself as one of the only psychological trainees of color in organizations that served predominately people of color. Many of my white peers often presented clients of color in similar ways: “she’s so angry;” “he won’t talk to me.” However, many never questioned how their race might be influencing the client’s behavior or their conceptualization of and approach to the client. Or if they did so, it was with a “yeah, but” dismissive quality. Many of my white counterparts have tried to wish away race. During one group supervision session one colleague commented that the only way to decrease racism and fully incorporate men of color into society was to stop treating them with “kid gloves.” I was unsettled by this colleague’s statement and either the sheer ignorance or blatant racism that it demonstrated. I could not help but respond. I commented that men of color most often experience the exact opposite of what she was suggesting and that in fact they are treated with iron fists. “Men of color,” I said, “are often subjected to punishment for behaviors that their white counterparts are not and are punished harsher than their white counterparts when they do commit crimes.” This colleague responded with an expression of discomfort that proved she had no real understanding of the experience of people of color and yet all she wanted was to “help” these young men who came from unfortunate circumstances. While I don’t think this particular colleague had malevolent intentions, inequality and injustice often stem from the blind spots of well meaning people. Students of color in psychology programs often experience a barrage of microaggressions and blatant ignorance that assault their racial and ethnic identities and, sometimes, their humanity.

The Scholarly and Pedagogical Centering of Whiteness in Psychology

Researchers have found that the majority of participants in research studies are citizens of western, industrialized, rich, and democratic nations and most of them are highly educated (WEIRD; Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). Thus, the knowledge about the psychological experiences is incredibly first-world and neglects the experiences of the majority of people on earth who do not inhabit such WEIRD spaces. Even within these WEIRD spaces, whiteness further constricts psychological knowledge. As in a previous section of this essay, many of the titles of published research papers purport to describe universal psychological phenomena but in actuality only present a white-centered description of it, as most psychological study samples are predominately composed of white people.

Three recent critical reviews of the racial composition of participants of studies published in scholarly psychology journals provide statistical information about the centering of whiteness in psychological research. In 2005, researchers found that among all the studies published in the top three counseling psychology journals from 1990 to 1999, 57% of them reported the races or ethnicities of their samples (Delgado-Romero, Galvan, Maschino, & Rowland, 2005). This means that 43% of the studies failed to present data about race or ethnicity and implied that either 1) race and ethnicity is not important enough to report or 2) that the sample was homogenous in its whiteness. Furthermore, the authors of this study found that when race was reported, it was often in relation to whiteness. For example, many studies referred to their participants’ race as “white” or “other.” Again, this sets whiteness and white people as the default stand-in for humanity and people of color as deviations from the norm. Among studies that did report specific racial and ethnic characteristics, overall samples were composed of 78.2% white people, 5.8% Asian Americans, 6.7% African Americans, 6.6% Latino/as, 0.9% Indigenous people, and 0.1% multiracial people (Delgado-Romero et al., 2005). Compared to the overall population of the United States, whites and Asian Americans were overrepresented and African Americans, Latino/as, and Indigenous people were underrepresented in counseling psychology research. In an analysis of the races and ethnicities of participants in studies that were published in the top six American Psychological Association journals in 2007, authors found that 60-82% of them were white (Arnett, 2008). Furthermore, 7-60% of the studies published in these journals did not report the racial and ethnic composition of their samples (Arnett, 2008). An examination of the race and ethnicity reporting in four social science/psychology journals focused specifically on ethnic and racial minorities found much more inclusion of people of color. Specifically, of participants of studies published in these journals from 1990 to 2007, 38.7% identified as Latino/a, 22.5% identified as Black, 17.8% identified as white, 9.0% identified as Asian/Pacific Islander, 1.6% identified as Indigenous, 0.4% identified as multiracial/biracial; 8.3% were categorized as “nonrespondent” (i.e., the study did not provide information), and 1.7% were categorized as “other” (i.e., individuals did not identify as any of the listed classifications) (Shelton, Delgado-Romero, & Wells, 2009). It seems that people of color are only included in the psychological literature when the topic of study is race or ethnicity. These three critical reviews provide empirical evidence of the frequent exclusion of people of color from the psychological imagination.

When race and ethnicity are included in research studies, these constructs are usually approached in three distinct ways. These include the universalist, culture assimilation, and culture accommodation approaches (Leong & Serafica, 2001). The universalist approach ignores race and ethnicity. Race and ethnicity are deemed unimportant and not worthy of incorporating in the empirical process. Research studies that use this approach do not even ask participants about race or consider how it may interact with or influence the manifestation or expression of the psychological phenomena under study. The culture assimilation approach relegates people of color to the margins and they are conceptualized as deviations from whiteness and white people. Studies that use this approach are usually comparative in nature; they assess the difference of the racial and ethnic groups on various psychological phenomena with white people positioned as the reference group. People of color are assessed based on whether or not they significantly differ from white people. Conclusions from these types of studies often focus on how people of color can or should adjust to become more assimilated with whiteness to better match the performance of white people in the psychological domains under study. The culture accommodation approach more fully considers the influence of the race and ethnicity (and how race and ethnicity influences the sociological context of people) on the expression of psychological phenomena. Studies that utilize this approach move beyond ignoring and comparing people of color to white people. They seek to understand how race and ethnicity influences how people define, experience, and make sense of psychological phenomena in a culturally specific manner. Beyond culture accommodation approaches, many psychologists of color have developed culture-specific schools of psychological thought. The advent of Asian American Psychology, Latino/a Psychology, Black Psychology, and African-centered Psychology illustrate a move away from an assimilationist stance to an indigenous focus. Specifically, these fields of study center the humanity of people of color and examine all psychological phenomena from a perspective that is inextricably tied to one’s cultural context.

The centering of whiteness is engrained in the academy and those seeking to de-center it often find it difficult. When scholars try to emancipate their scholarship from the confines of whiteness, they are often met with opposition from the gatekeepers of psychology (i.e. journal reviewers and editors, funding agencies, and colleagues). There is empirical evidence of academics of color facing barriers in their universities due to racial discrimination, both at the individual and structural levels. The devaluing of scholarship that does not privilege whiteness is a particularly troubling occurrence. A recent study found that it is hard for the research of scholars of color to be funded (Ginther et al., 2011). Ginther and her colleagues found that Asian Americans and Black applicants were less likely to receive investigator-initiated research funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH; the largest governmental funder of scientific research in the United States) compared to their white counterparts. Even after statistically holding constant differences in the applicants’ educational backgrounds, countries of origin, training, previous research awards, publication records, and employer characteristics, Black scholars were still found to be at a disadvantaged in receiving funding from the NIH. If this disadvantage is found at the national level at an institution that has a long history of creating programs to increase diversity (Ginther et al. 2011), the racial disparity in research funding at other organizations (e.g. local, institution-based, or private) is likely to be greater. When scholars of color are able to conduct their research, either with or without funding, they often find that it is not deemed as scholarly legitimate or scientifically rigorous (Harley, 2008; Kameny et al., 2014; Stanley, 2007; Turner, Gonzalez, & Wood, 2008). There are many times when scholars of color find themselves at odds with journal reviewers when they attempt to publish scholarship outside of whiteness. Stanley (2007) wrote about the clash between counter and master narratives in the academy. She explains:

“A master narrative is a script that specifies and controls how some social processes are carried out. Furthermore, there is a master narrative operating in academia that often defines and limits what is valued as scholarship and who is entitled to create scholarship. This is problematic, because the dominant group in academia writes most research and, more often than not, they are White men. Members of marginalized groups, such as women and people of color, have had little or no input into the shaping of this master narrative. Therefore, research on marginalized groups by members of marginalized groups that reveals experiences that counter master narratives is often compared against the White norm…” (Stanley, 2007, p. 14).

In contrast, counter narratives: “…act to deconstruct the master narratives, and they offer alternatives to the dominant discourse in educational research. They provide, for example, multiple and conflicting models of understanding social and cultural identities. They also challenge the dominant White and often predominantly male culture that is held to be normative and authoritative” (Stanley, 2007, p. 14). Researching and publishing the research of counter narratives that de-center whiteness and more fully embrace the diversity of humanity often requires assertiveness and perseverance. Presenting a non-pathological, non-comparative, and non-deficit representation of people of color in the scholarly literature is a revolutionary act.

One would think that in a field like psychology where so much lip service and written policy is focused on diversity this would not be the case. Research findings, which have been discussed throughout this essay, prove otherwise. Unfortunately, I have personally experienced the sting of gatekeepers who are invested in perpetuating master narratives. Recently a reviewer had this to say about a manuscript of mine that focused on an all Black sample of men who have sex with men (BMSM): “In this paper, the population of black gay men is treated almost as a universe unto itself…the author seems to make conclusions about how religious BMSM are without making explicit comparisons to white men who have sex with men or to other groups.” These particular remarks from this reviewer are indicative of an investment in the centering of whiteness. When the reviewer comments that I treat the population of BMSM as “a universe unto itself,” it implies that there is something inaccurate about or amiss with the notion that BMSM could possibly be of scholarly (maybe even human) value in and of themselves. He also suggested that I make a comparison between the Black men in my sample and white men and that no conclusions can be made about the religiosity of BMSM without such a comparison. His suggestion is indicative of the assimilationist approach that was explained by Leong & Serafica (2001). In other words, in his opinion, whiteness is the standard. Without whiteness to measure the experiences of people of color against, how can one know what is real? In his critique, this reviewer strips away the legitimacy, worth, and humanity of BMSM. In his imagination, BMSM cannot possibly exist in the absence of whiteness. The reviewer goes on to comment that the “…questions of how and why the relationship between religiosity and sexuality may be different among black men than among white men are indeed fascinating questions.” I question, “fascinating to whom?” Too often, researchers of all races whose scholarship focuses on people of color are subjugated to journal reviewers’ fascination with whiteness. Publishing and presenting research about people of color that is not pathology-focused or comparative, while not impossible, is challenging in mainstream scholarly outlets.

The Psychological Wage

Thus far the research reviewed in this essay has been persuasive in its accounting of the narrowing and repressive effects of whiteness for knowledge production and for the experiences of students and faculty of color in the field of psychology. However, it would be a mistake to believe that whiteness in the psychological imagination only has implications for people of color or only for people who work and study in the field of psychology. Taking the widespread influence of whiteness into account, the remainder of this essay seeks to explore two questions. These two questions are related to the quotes that opened this essay. The first quote is taken from Toni Morrison’s groundbreaking work, Playing the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination. In that book, she undertakes the task of trying to understand the people who have crafted the image of whiteness (and blackness) that she sees abound in American literature. In her view, whiteness in American literature is parasitical, nourishing itself on the imagined oppositeness of blackness. Whiteness is made superior by the supposed inferiority of blackness. It is made great by the degradation of its counterparts. Whiteness has the same function in the psychological imagination. It penetrates the psyches of all people, regardless of race and ethnicity, with white supremacy. White people-whether or not they internalize this cultural domination, actively engage in racism or racial microaggressions, or exploit people of color for economic prosperity-benefit from the image of whiteness in the psychological imagination. However, what does the other side of the coin look like. In other words: “What are the benefits and costs of whiteness in the psychological imagination for white people?”

Whiteness in the psychological imagination offers white people purpose, power, and protection. It offers purpose by making white people’s mental health and lived experiences foundational. White people are constructed as prototypes whose psychological experiences are the starting point from which all other people’s experiences begin to be understood and the desired endpoint, which all other people must reach to be considered healthy or human. This purpose intersects with the power bestowed upon them.

Whiteness in the psychological imagination imparts an authority to and a preferencing of white people’s experiences. Even when the topic of study is pathology, white people’s pathology is still held as the standard for what deviations from “normative” behavior should look like. Therefore, even white people’s unhealthy behaviors are considered more desirable. No matter what they do, prosocial, asocial, or antisocial, it is still considered better. Therefore, there is no way for white people to ever be in any position but at the top of a constructed psychological hierarchy. Psychology has given white people power through its empirical support for the demonization, marginalization, and stigmatization of people of color. It is a shackle for people of color and a throne for white people.

Whiteness in the psychological imagination protects white people from grappling with how their embodiment of whiteness is cancerous. It does not require them to consider the lives of people of color and the deleterious effects of whiteness. Their survival is not dependent on such knowledge. The centering of white people’s experiences allows white people to be blind to the experiences of people of color. They can remain oblivious to, ignore, forget about, erase or render historical-and thus, make irrelevant-the exploitation, domination, and disenfranchisement of people of color. This privilege of ignorance perpetuates their focus on themselves and the marginalization of others. White people have the option to advance in a world delusionally believing there are no consequences for their actions.

The belief that whiteness does not scar the person who embraces it is erroneous and perverted. The costs of the psychological imbuement to whiteness of purpose, power, and protection are a sense of heightened threat/defensiveness, emptiness, and loneliness/disconnection. People at the top of a hierarchy need others to be placed beneath them. Otherwise, their status at the top is meaningless. A surplus of exploited and disenfranchised people is a necessity for whiteness to have any benefit. It is the exploited and disenfranchised people who white people measure their whiteness against. It is these people through whom they can work out their own self-image and put to work for their own financial, psychological, and social benefit. However, this positioning is tenuous and always will be, as human nature is not meant to be exploitatively hierarchal. Imbedded in whiteness is a zero-sum mentality that believes that if one person or group possesses a thing or trait the other person or group cannot also share that possession or trait. Thus, there is a heightened sense of threat that the benefits of whiteness can be taken away at any time. Defensiveness develops to guard those benefits. This defensiveness is seen in the backlash against psychological research that attempts to move away from white-centered discourses and racial comparative research to an indigenous paradigm that preferences narratives of people of color. It is seen in the psychological genocide that is carried out by whiteness in its centering of definitions and policies-in media, educational institutions, financial markets, health services, and governmental agencies-that are diametrically opposite and detrimental to peoples’ of color images and interests (Kambon, 1980). A constant sense of heightened threat and defensiveness-conscious, subconscious, or unconscious-keeps people at arms-length. People with such defensiveness find themselves living a life of paranoia and hypervigilance.

The sense of purpose that whiteness in the psychological imagination provides for white people is empty. It is inextricably tied to the meaning of their whiteness. However, the centrality of whiteness is a distorted mental machination. It is a superficial prize that inflates the ego with a fictitious substance. If a purpose and identity is built upon a distortion that sets it as opposite and superior to others, what happens when whiteness is discovered to be a fraud? Again Toni Morrison’s words come to mind. In an interview with Charlie Rose in 1993 she spoke about the hollowness of race and its racist use. She stated,

“But if the racist white person-I don’t mean the person who is examining his consciousness and so on-doesn’t understand that he or she is also a race, it’s also constructed, it’s also made, and it also has some sort of serviceability. But when you take it away, if I take your race away, and there you are, all strung out, and all you’ve got is your little self. And what is that? What are you without racism? Are you any good? Are you still strong? Are you still smart? You still like yourself?”

White people who embrace whiteness are completely dependent on it and they are seldom aware of their addiction and delusion, and if aware constantly suppressing and denying it. In its attempted cooptation of humanity, whiteness renders white people inhuman. It transforms white people into an ideal of perfection. This ideal is unrealistic and hollow.

Whiteness in the psychological imagination deprives white people of a concept of themselves as interdependent members of a human family with many diverse members. Critical psychological elements of whiteness such as competitiveness, power-dominance drive, assertiveness-aggression, and anxiety avoidance pit them against their human brethren (Kambon, 1992, 1998). These values foster loneliness/disconnection. This is because, often, whiteness erases itself from the psyche of white people and replaces it with a universalism that centers their experiences as the only legitimate experiences. Therefore all they see are reflections or iterations of themselves. When confronted with people of color, they view these folks as people to be ignored, appropriated, or eliminated (Lorde, 1984) and not as human beings with whom to commune as equals. Whiteness in the psychological imagination alleges that people can survive on their own with rugged individualism and materialism, separated from the spiritual and psychological collective.

The second question, to be addressed in this section, is inspired by James Baldwin’s quote at the beginning of this essay. Baldwin’s quote highlights the reflective nature of definitions. The qualities and worth that one confers to someone else is of direct proportion to the qualities and worth one confers to her/himself. If one marginalizes another’s experience, in actuality she/he is forcing something of her/his own experience (own being) out of view and possibly out of consciousness. This is a detrimental thing because it creates fractional, unhealthy human beings that are narrowed and egotistic, cut off from themselves and others. It seems, to me, that this is only remedied when one values her/himself enough to recognize the humanity of another as just as inextricably tied to her/his own and just as significant. So my second question is, “How does one go about freeing her/himself from whiteness in the psychological imagination to live a more whole, integrated life?” While, I have posed this question, I will not answer it. Too often, people of color are as asked to provide the suggestions for how white people can begin to grapple with and overcome their whiteness. I refuse to do the work for people who are afflicted (willingly or otherwise) with whiteness. I will leave that work to them.

If white people knew who they were, they would not need to define themselves in relation to others. They would not feel a need to stifle the breath of others to suck in air. They would let go of their zero-sum mentality and realize that their survival is inextricably related to the survival of all of the colored peoples of the world. White people are a statistical minority. There is no way that they can survive through sheer whiteness alone. Whiteness is a delusion that has created a race of schizophrenics separated from themselves and others. But that is because so many white people do not recognize their inherent worth. Their ideas of supremacy are grounded in the machinations of their whiteness and separateness, not their humanness or connectedness. There is no need for this. If white people can let go of their whiteness, educate themselves-and not rely on or requests that others do so-commune without ulterior motives, they can begin to embody the fullness of humanity that is based in the reality of community and not the illusion of superiority and materialism. When white people can let go of whiteness, they will recognize themselves as human and not need to dehumanize others and co-opt people of color identities, land, and cultural creations to lionize themselves. White people are not dumb; they are not evil. Whiteness, however, is evil. It is an arrogant ignorance. It is a poison that must be rejected in the psychological imagination and in the minds of all people-those with white and melanized skin.

The centering of whiteness in psychology is not only a cancer to society but also a detriment to the field of study. It renders psychology fraudulent in its claims to understand the human psyche. As discussed before, the overwhelming body of psychological research marginalizes people of color who constitute the majority of the human species. Whiteness in the psychological imagination paints an erroneous picture of psychological phenomena, limits the psychological knowledge base, and stifles a more true understanding of the complex, multifaceted experience of the human.

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Confronting Columbus: Revisionism Versus Reality

By Colin Jenkins

Regarding the painstaking process of historiography, someone of relative importance once remarked, "History is written by the victors." A statement which echoes Plato's dictum that, "those who tell the stories also hold the power," its modern source is unclear. Still, many do not hesitate to attach these words to Winston Churchill, Britain's renowned Prime Minister during the Second World War. Considering Churchill's own history - born into an aristocratic family; his grandfather the 7th Duke of Marlborough; his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, a wealthy British statesman; his mother, Jennie Jerome, an "American socialite," herself the daughter of a financier, speculator, and mass landowner - and the fact that he made an early living overseeing the mass killing of indigenous Africans and Indians located everywhere from Bombay to Sudan to South Africa, such a statement would hardly come as a surprise. If "victory" is defined in terms of deploying one's immense privilege - whether socioeconomic, "racial," or national - to enslave, oppress, and murder others who lack such privilege in order to maintain that very system for oneself and generations to come, then Winston Churchill was certainly one of history's "victors."

The act of whitewashing history - whether literally through the domination of Eurocentric perspectives, or figuratively through blatant omission and revisionism - is certainly common practice. It is the "victors" main tool in shaping history. Historical revisionism has been defined as "a consciously falsified or distorted interpretation of the past to serve partisan or ideological purposes in the present;" "a collective task in a nation's cultural development, the full significance of which is emerging only now: to redefine a nation's status in a changing world;" or the act "of 'truth-seekers' finding different truths to fit the needed political, social, or ideological context." In the United States of America, such revisionism becomes immediately apparent when one steps into a public school classroom - where histories of indigenous genocide and human enslavement are, at best, minimized; and, at worst, utilized to stroke a false sense of superiority and exceptionalism; and where the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity are magically transformed from conquerors to "explorers," from murderers to "adventurers," and from slave masters to "patriots" and "founding fathers," all in the stroke of a pen or the voice of a lecture.

The act of historical revisionism has deep-seated cultural effects. Essentially, it creates two worlds:

1. The first based in quasi-fiction, informed on selective data and historical accounts from either the actual "victors" or the direct beneficiaries of the perceived "victory;" and one that enjoys unquestioned dominance through manipulation and a process of layered assimilation where commonly accepted "knowledge" is constantly reproduced through academia and seamlessly delivered to its intended audience.

2. The second based in reality, informed on factual data and historical accounts from not only the "victors," but also from the supposed "losers;" and one that faces almost certain or near-extinction through numerous acts of manipulation and/or omission which are carried out over a number of years, decades, or even centuries.

Historiography is the proving ground for this ongoing struggle between revisionism and reality. The ruling classes deploy their army of "traditional intellectuals," born and bred of privilege and churned through the most prestigious schools and universities, to protect the dominant ideology through a sophisticated presentation of revisionism. The working classes, struggling to maintain actualities, look upon their own ranks to create a semblance of reality as the torchbearers of truth. Hanging in the balance is the direction of society: towards continued polarization, inequities, and dehumanization; or towards a sense of being - something that cannot be realized without truth.

Revisionism gives us Columbus Day; a federal holiday "in commemoration of Christopher Columbus's historic 1492 voyage," for which, in 1934, the U.S. Congress "duly requested the President proclaim the second Monday of October of each year as such"

Reality gives us Indigenous People's Day; "a holiday celebrated in various localities in the United States, begun as a counter-celebration to Columbus Day, with the "purpose of promoting Native American culture and commemorating the history of Native American peoples."

Revisionism gives us the following announcement from the White House: "When the explorers laid anchor in the Bahamas, they met indigenous peoples who had inhabited the Western hemisphere for millennia. As we reflect on the tragic burdens tribal communities bore in the years that followed, let us commemorate the many contributions they have made to the American experience, and let us continue to strengthen the ties that bind us today."

Reality gives us the words of Columbus himself: "(The natives) are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone."

Revisionism gives us the words of Michael Berliner of the Ayn Rand Institute: (Western civilization) brought "reason, science,self-reliance,individualism, ambition, and productive achievement" to a people who were based in "primitivism, mysticism, and collectivism," and to a land that was "sparsely inhabited, unused, and underdeveloped."

Reality gives us yet another dispatch from Columbus: "I promise this, that if I am supported by our most invincible sovereigns with a little of their help, as much gold can be supplied as they will need, indeed as much of spices, of cotton, of mastic gum, also as much of aloes wood, and as many slaves for the navy as their Majesties will wish to demand."

Revisionism gives us this official statement from the U.S. government: "In the centuries since that fateful October day in 1492, countless pioneering Americans have summoned the same spirit of discovery that drove Christopher Columbus when he cast off from Palos, Spain, to pursue the unknown. Engineers and entrepreneurs, sailors and scientists, explorers of the physical world and chroniclers of the human spirit -- all have worked to broaden our understanding of the time and space we live in and who we are as a people."

Reality gives us Columbus' words: "They (the Arawak Indians) brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned.... They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane.... They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."

Revisionism gives us this:

Reality gives us this:

The "whitewashing" of history has an intended purpose -to control information and knowledge, to keep the "huddled masses" ignorant, and to maintain the status quo. The Churchills of the world and their keepers would have it no other way. For if history were reality-based, the immense wealth and power they have enjoyed and continue to enjoy - of which has been accumulated through the stolen resources of indigenous peoples, and multiplied on the backs of the enslaved, the imprisoned, the working classes and the peasantry - would cease to exist. If history were reality-based, the hierarchical systems that keep this illegitimate wealth and power intact, and the government watchdogs that protect these systems, would cease to exist.

On this day, reality begins with recognizing the real consequences of Christopher Columbus' "expeditions," which continued far beyond the hallowed year of 1492. "In 1493, Columbus returned with an invasion force of seventeen ships, appointed at his own request by the Spanish Crown to install himself as 'viceroy and governor of [the Caribbean islands] and the mainland' of America, a position he held until 1500," explains Ward Churchill. "Setting up shop on the large island he called Espa-ola (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic), he promptly instituted policies of slavery (encomiendo) and systematic extermination against the native Taino population." In all, "Columbus' programs reduced Taino numbers from as many as eight million at the outset of his regime to about three million in 1496. Perhaps 100,000 were left by the time of his departure" some seven years later.

As working class women and men, we have an intimate connection with indigenous peoples who were "so free with their possessions" that "they would offer to share with anyone," just as we do with our neighbors. We have a bond with those whose only wish was to be left alone, to live and carry on as they please, to progress their livelihoods, and to care for their families, loved ones and neighbors, just as we do. The conditioned need to possess "worldly goods" at the expense of enslaving and murdering other human beings does not exist for our benefit, and should not be celebrated. Reality does and should mean something.

Reject revisionism. Embrace reality. We have nothing to lose but our chains.

References

James McPherson, Revisionist Historians. Perspectives, 2003. American Historical Association.

Harold D. Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in World War I (1927), MIT Press, pp. xxii-xxvii.

Matthew d'Ancona, History men battle over Britain's future. The Times, May 9, 1994.

Presidential Proclamation, Columbus Day 2012. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/10/05/presidential-proclamation-columbus-day-2012 . Accessed on 10/13/13.

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