The "Manifesto of the Communist Party" 175 Years Later

By Derek Ford

Republished from Peace, Land, and Bread

There’s perhaps no better crystallization of the revolutionary origins of Marxism than the 1848 publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (later referred to simply as the Communist Manifesto to please the censors). There’s perhaps no better reason to re-read the text than today, on the 175th anniversary of its publication, on what we now celebrate, thanks to LeftWord Books, as Red Books Day.

The Communist League, a small underground group, tasked Marx and Engels to draft a manifesto that would not only serve as a program of the “party” or political organization but would also potentially intervene in the battles they anticipated coming. As the economic crisis intensified, those clashes did come out into the open, in fact just days after the Manifesto’s publication.

The plan to immediately translate the text into several languages, as indicated in the introduction, went unrealized, and the Manifesto didn’t have an impact on the 1848-49 revolutions (although perhaps it had some influence in Germany). After its initial run in February 1848, it was reprinted a few times by May; but, by then, the initial victories disintegrated. The revolutionary hopes of the bourgeois-democratic struggles were met with fierce counterrevolutionary violence against the workers and the general democratic forces of other exploited classes. Everywhere reaction set in, from France and Prussia (Germany) to Italy and Switzerland, a sequence that pushed developments in communist theory and organizing, affirmed the central tenets of the Manifesto (including the international nature of the class struggle), called for a refined approach to the tactics and strategies of struggle and the national question, and decidedly shifted the center of European revolutionary potential to England. [1]

With the counterrevolution cemented, the League’s leadership suspended its activities, some of which it resumed before officially disbanding in 1852. The text was read by a handful of revolutionaries at the time, most of whom were not in agreement with Marx and Engels, and was written for an even smaller grouping. It wasn’t until the early 1870s that the Manifesto appeared in Europe for widespread distribution. This is partly because of Marx’s prominent role in the First International, beginning in 1864, and his widely acclaimed analysis of the Paris Commune. The main reason, however, was more ironic. The German government put several leaders of the German Social Democratic Party on trial in 1872, and to make their case the prosecution ended up entering the Manifesto into court records. Doing so allowed radical publishers to “evade the censorship laws and embark upon the Manifesto’s republication.” [2] With the Social Democratic Party’s leadership fighting charges of treason, the conditions weren’t favorable to an open call for a communist party to achieve the objectives set out in Marx and Engels’ pamphlet. The new circumstances compelled publishers to change its title to Communist Manifesto. It wasn’t until the Soviet Union’s republication in the early 20th century that the original title came back.

The Manifesto eventually spread across the globe rapidly, from China and Japan to Latin America and the U.S., but only after the specter of communism materialized with the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. With state power, a dedication to worldwide liberation and socialism, concentration on theoretical study, and general education, among other duties, the Soviets translated it into numerous languages and sold it on the cheap. Since the Bolshevik Revolution, every revolutionary movement has adopted the text for its unique conjuncture, in keeping with the overall ethos of the Manifesto’s content.

Any expression of historical materialism–the method and guide of communists–is, it unfortunately needs to be stated, historical. Nothing holds for all time everywhere. Marx and Engels say as much when they close their preface to the 1872 reissue by listing what they wanted to update 25 years later, a list that is quite extensive especially given its brevity. They didn’t edit the text because it had, by then, “become a historical document which we have no longer any right to alter.” This presents a problem for some readers insofar as it is a very early text, written before Marx’s real study of political economy, and thus one from which the key theoretical developments of Marx are absent. However, in the same preface Marx and Engels also make it clear that “the general principles laid down in this Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever.” [3] Despite any deficiencies in political clarity or theoretical coherence, its precise, energizing, and careful formulations still exert force today.

Like any work, the Manifesto was determined by its particular context of production. The fact that its distribution and reception have only increased over time (and in ways favorable to our class) testifies to its ongoing relevance. It remains a foundational pillar in the development of Marxism—or revolutionary socialism, a mission we continue to realize on the global scale. The Manifesto comes to life whenever the class struggle intensifies or wherever rapid shifts in political consciousness occur, like in the radical transformation we’re undergoing in the U.S., where the fog of anti-communism is lifting—that’s why Red Books Day has, every year, expanded and flourished. Prompted by this opportunity to revisit the text afresh, this short article doesn’t summarize the content as a whole but rather contextualizes some of the Manifesto’s main principles within some of the later works of Marxism and the Marxist movement more generally, providing clarity and correcting some common misinterpretations of the work that oftentimes falsely justify premature dismissals of Marxism, socialism, and communism. [4] In conclusion, I place the key tasks we inherit from the Manifesto and how later developments in the radical Black and communist theory are absolutely pivotal to pursuing this project today in that they help us understand the links between anti-communism and white supremacy and aid our project in uniting all working and oppressed people for the common liberation of the many.

The Pedagogy and Form of the Manifesto

Marx and Engels met in 1842 on Engels’ way to Manchester, reuniting two years later after Engels returned to the city. Both were fellow travelers of the Young Hegelians. Marx edited a radical paper, Rheinische Zeitung, to which Engels contributed an article on political economy. The next few years of their collaboration were remarkably transformative: by 1846 they had decisively broken with the Young Hegelians and initiated their development of historical materialism and the origins of a more mature revolutionary theory, informed as it was by decades of ongoing practical struggle and study. While Marx and Engels broke with their younger Hegelian selves in 1845-46 to articulate the historical-materialist method of communism, the Manifesto links that method with its objective and organizational form.

The pamphlet was penned primarily by Marx in January 1848 in Brussels, although it was a collaborative project. Notwithstanding the debates about to what extent Engels’ initial drafts contributed to the final project—and in particular his “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith” for the Communist League’s First Congress in 1847—it was Engels’ overall writing, theorizing, and organizing that provided Marx with the requisite knowledge about modern industry and also that helped both formulate the historical materialist method, and it was largely Engels’ interventions that enabled him and Marx to join the League. [5]

Marx and Engels formally joined the Communist League after the spring 1847 conference agreed to the main points they advocated, which were formally adopted at another congress later that year. These points included the principle that members of the League act “in the interest of the Communist Party, the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.” Along with this, they agreed to change the name from the League of the Just—formed in 1837—to the Communist League. In an internal document on the congress, the change of name is granted significance insofar as communists “are not distinguished by wanting justice in general—anyone can claim that for himself—but by our attack on the existing social order and on private property, by wanting community of property, by being Communists.” [6] The Manifesto marked the first real distinction between communists, on the one hand, and utopian socialists (and social democrats), on the other, a distinction hinging on a systematic understanding of the capitalist class struggle, the need to overthrow our class enemy, and the seizure of power.

The Pedagogy and Conjuncture of the Manifesto

Attending to the Manifesto’s style and pedagogical form is important politically and educationally. By doing so, we prevent or inhibit misreading it ourselves, especially given the dominant and enduring role anti-communism plays in the modern U.S. state. Over the last few years, a multiplicity of differing factors and forces in the U.S. have no doubt radically advanced socialism in the battle of ideas. The popularity and acceptance of—or non-antagonism to—socialism is an incredible, promising, and progressive development. I can definitely divide my own life thus far along the lines of this shift, as it has radically impacted essentially all aspects of it. The waters are open for the word, idea, and even the movement of socialism, but that comes with an unavoidable muddying of those waters. Such conditions are openings for the necessary task of clarifying Marxism, giving definition to socialism, ideologically and organizationally reuniting us with the centuries-long class struggles against oppression and, for a much shorter time, against capitalist exploitation, of which we are a part.

Anti-communism’s role in the U.S. is too expansive to locate in one place; too broad to be reproduced in one form or by way of some other political orientation. Many well-meaning but ultimately insufficient, reformist, or ill-conceived “radical” theories today are premised on a rejection of Marxism and the historical project of socialism and liberation, the twists and turns and the heroism and tragedy of such class struggles. This rejection is reproduced by way of the repetition of incorrect critiques and caricatures, such that when Marx is read it comes through the glasses of an anti-communist orientation. In addition to contextualizing it within some aspects of Marxist theory and the movement, I’ve found that attending to the document’s pedagogical form helps me get what’s happening in these relatively few pages.

The work is, first of all, a manifesto, rather than a fleshed-out and fully developed systematic analysis, a comprehensive program of action, etc. As a specific literary genre, manifestos are “always addressed to the masses, in order to organize them into a revolutionary force.” [7] They are written for the yet-to-be subjects of history with no pretension as to what actual people and groups will occupy that subjecthood or what the outcome of the struggle will be. They are orientations and frameworks, not prescriptions or fixed formulas.

The Manifesto was a specific intervention in a concrete time and in a specific place and moment in history. For the Communist League, the pamphlet served as a preliminary program to organize revolutionaries of different stripes around a set of political aims and objectives—potentially into a party. Because we are part of the legacy it inaugurated, because our primary task is to continue the project to overthrow exploitation and eliminate oppression at the national and global levels, it is a pillar in maintaining our legacy and memory. It can also be a short and accessible introduction to Marxism we can read with others and those new to the struggle.

Manifestos, and this one in particular, embody a specific pedagogical form that utilizes several different tactics, all of which are important to acknowledge. The text is addressed to us: the masses of working and oppressed peoples of the world.

One main tactic employed is the didactical method, which for manifestos must be condensed, a kind of schematic and necessarily reductive account of centuries of history, time, and social formations. The didactic method appears as a quick narrative providing the lay of the land, a portrait that, while not exhaustive, is honestly more in alignment with capital today than in 1848.

For this reason, our enemies cite the Manifesto as evidence of Marxist “stageism”—or the accusation that Marx and communists adhere to a fixed, linear, developmental, and chronological conception of history that runs from lower to higher levels, that goes from the past to the future—that is often clumsily equated with “Eurocentrism.”

Stageism was often present before Marx and Engels severed ties with the Hegelians, a break that required creating an alternative conception of history and temporality, one without any destiny, predetermination, causality, or final conclusion. Thus, when Marx and Engels write about “pre-history” they don’t refer to a past and finished state of a society or the world. They employ it as a conceptual tool used to differentiate capital from previous modes of production, and the same goes with Marx’s later critique of “so-called primitive accumulation.” Differentiating theoretical containers from empirical declarations lets us stay true to the Marxist method and prevents us from reading their concepts—like formal and real subjection—as actual processes happening.

That in the 1840s they broke with the dominant Enlightenment frame of history is quite remarkable, and their response was spelled out most potently in the 1857 “Introduction” to the Grundrisse. Marx criticized bourgeois political economy for following the “rule, on the fact that the latest form regards the previous ones as steps leading up to itself” because, in particular, in capitalist societies contradictions are the rule rather than the exception, which means it is a development that is founded on “relations derived from earlier forms” that are still “found within it only in an entirely student form, or even travestied.” [8] Another way to think about it is that Marx acknowledged that the “present” isn’t an interregnum between a “past” and a “future,” but a time, place, and social location where various temporalities and histories play out in complex ways. The principle of unevenness is a primary element of Marxism, and it applies to development, production, struggle, and our sense of time. Capital, not Marx, tries to homogenize and synchronize time by presenting it as abstract and ahistorical, naturalizing capital and its structures. In the 1883 preface to the Russian translation of the Manifesto, Marx and Engels argue that the Russian Revolution, based on communes or the common ownership of land and resources, doesn’t need to go through a “stage” of capitalist development because “the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.” [9]

Another pedagogical tactic is the call-and-response. In the second section, Marx and Engels clarify the relationship between communists and the proletarians and address criticisms directed toward the former. They announce the charges against them and their defense, which sometimes validates the accusation through clarification. For example, the capitalists charge the communists with wanting to abolish private property, but under capitalism the vast majority don’t have any private property; “in one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.” [10] The reader is engaged in a conversation that is still happening today (including through Red Books Day), but with different coordinates.

The third section takes the form of a literature review, a comradely yet critical survey of different strands of socialist thought by which Marx and Engels can differentiate communism. By placing each in their historical context, we learn some of threads woven throughout the long history of the communist project, some of the different eras and forces that articulated the desire for emancipation and equality, and why their historical and material conditions of thought couldn’t set up the foundations for their fuller elaboration.

Another pedagogical tactic deployed is the rallying call to arms. Section four, the last and shortest part of the text, embodies a pedagogy of mobilization, providing immediate tactical decisions that entail engaging with non-communist forces to serve serve the pressing issues of the working and oppressed so that “in the movement of the present, they [the communists] also represent and take care of the future of that movement.” The Manifesto, addressed to us, the masses that make history, closes out by opening up a new horizon: “Let the ruling class tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!” [11]

A Clear Call for Global Emancipation and Liberation

Marx and Engels open the Manifesto with a sweeping declaration: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Struggles between the classes of the slavers and enslaved, lords and serfs, or “in a word, oppressor and oppressed” are generally latent but erupt into visible confrontations that lead to either “a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” [12]

As Marx openly acknowledged, he wasn’t the first to discover or theorize the existence of classes or the class struggle [13]; that the goal of the class struggle was the political supremacy of the proletarians, however, was a main point of contention between various socialist forces, particularly between the utopians and the communists, as the latter insisted that only through open struggle and the achievement of political power could we achieve equality.

The character of the class struggle changes under capitalism, as do its avenues of struggle. The capitalist epoch is distinct insofar as it generally simplifies class antagonisms. “Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.” [14] In this conjuncture of the class struggle, the latter class is revolutionary—or potentially revolutionary.

As a text written for the imminent European crises, its immediate horizon was the workers and militants across Europe. They were writing largely and somewhat schematically about Europe because it was the place, stake, and audience of the battles; but it is clear that the development of European capital wasn’t confined to the continent, that it included the colonization of the Americas and the opening up of the Indian and Chinese markets, as the overall development of production and distribution propelled new developments in communication and transportation, new railways, and created new markets for their commodities and new sources of raw materials and labor, etc. To power such production required new energy sources and inputs, and former ‘middle-class’ independent workers and middle-class operatives of capital were replaced by the modern capitalist class. Each technological revolution within the capitalist revolution cohered a capitalist class that, with its quickly increasing power and reach, captured “the modern representative State,” which “is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” [15] The state, that is, serves as a mechanism for the capitalist class to manage its internal and external contradictions.

Marx and Engels survey the revolutionary role played by the bourgeoisie in the struggle against feudalism in Europe, although this is sometimes more sarcastic than serious. The capitalist class overthrew feudal rule, abolishing small-scale patriarchal relations that could be explained away by the Church and replaced them with “naked self-interest” and “substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation” for previous labor relations clouded in personal relations and ideological mysticism or immediate dependency. [16] While capital cannot hide its exploitation, it can provide cover for it through abstract legal notions like equality and freedom.

Capital’s growing power also catalyzed the extent of crises of overproduction “because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.” [17] The capitalist’s only solution to their own crises is to lay the foundations for more intensive and protracted ones. Because of the competitive laws of capitalism, the bourgeoisie always looks upon the current productive and social relations as transitory and in need of constant change:

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away… All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned. [18]

Capitalism is dynamic; in order to expand—which is its modus operandi—it has to continually reinvest in changes to technologies, transportation, and communication, overcoming the isolation of feudal life and concentrating large numbers of workers in cities and factories, facilitating communication, and organizing. In 1848, this was still a minor and ascendant tendency, although today it is fully realized. The League couldn’t send a pamphlet across the globe in a manner of seconds.

The incessant revolutions in the forces, means, and relations of production “chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe,” a phenomenon bourgeois commentators only realized about 130 years later. As capital nestles everywhere, it brings “under the feet of industry the national ground… All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones.” [19]

Capital is a colonizing world power, and Marx and Engels recognized this as a contradictory and also forthcoming development:

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. [20]

This is not a welcoming reception but a warning signal, because “civilization” for Marx and Engels is British or European civilization, one founded on colonialism and slavery, theft and dispossession. The reference to the Chinese Wall is, similarly, not literal in terms of the actual wall nor how capital breaches it, as capital deploys both the “free market” and the coercive and repressive military power that backs that market up.

Marx and Engels certainly appreciate how the generation of productive forces provides the material basis for providing for all of the world, although they were referring to Western Europe in the text. The elimination of scarcity as an inescapable reality and the means to provide not only the basic necessities for the present but additional wants and even stocks of goods for the future is a historic accomplishment. They also celebrated the mixing of lives and cultures owed to urbanization and the dominance of the city over the country, as it “rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.” [21] The English translation “idiocy” refers to a lack of communication and brevity of social relations, rather than any “intelligence” status. In fact, the increasing comingling of people in cities and countrysides produced a broader and more sophisticated intellectual arena for all.

Moreover, Marx and Engels are responding to the utopian socialists’ critique of bourgeois society by demonstrating the structural reasons for the suffering of such “advanced civilizations” to which the utopians attributed the ills of society. The utopian socialists’ intentions were good but their understanding was guided by morality and their methods were limited to the construction of communes that would, by reason and rational argumentation, win the ruling class over to their side.

Capital’s Production of Our World

The accumulation of capital is the accumulation not only of production and property but of political power, producing a “national” being or a state entity by which the oppressed must conquer—and have conquered—to acquire political supremacy.

In this way, the Manifesto’s assertion that capital “creates a world after its own image” continues to explain much of our global situation today. [22] This is not because capital reproduces itself everywhere and in the same manner, but rather because capital is an inherently uneven system. Consider the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation that creates “accumulation of wealth at one pole” and “accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery,” and so on, at the other pole. [23] The accumulation of capital is simultaneously “increasing concentration of the means of production, and of the command over labour” and the “repulsion of many individual capitals one from another.” This, in turn, is offset by the centralization of capital, whereby many smaller capitals are combined into larger capitals. [24] The limit here is, of course, capital’s, insofar as capital can’t accept the complete centralization into a single entity.

The state is key to this and other processes of capital accumulation, which is evident with an example Marx gives of the productive capacity of capital’s centralization: “The world would still be without railways” so long as their production was in the hands of a large number of smaller capitalists, but centralization “accomplished this in the twinkling of an eye.” [25] Railways are forms of immobile and fixed capital, which “assigns it a peculiar role in the economy of nations.” Fixed capital is national capital because it “cannot be sent abroad, cannot circulate as commodities in the world-market.” [26] In order for capital to circulate, it must also be fixed in space; in order for capital to accumulate in one place, it must diminish somewhere else. Hence, the important economic function of war: it literally destroys capital to allow for renewed accumulation.

Marx and Engels articulate some of their knowledge at the time on the dynamics of capital, which never map onto history. The reason the world isn’t a complete image of capital is, additionally, due to the historic resistance of working and oppressed peoples who have achieved political supremacy, although in a different manner than the Manifesto and, later, Marx and Engels, held.

Proletarianization

About halfway through the first section, after discussing the developments of capital, Marx and Engels switch to how the bourgeoisie produced the class who can abolish it and class society: the proletarian class, one continually changing and faced with the task of political consciousness and organization. As capital increases, so too do the ranks of the proletariat, as even smaller independent capitalists can’t compete with modern industry while any unique skills are rendered redundant by technological transformations.

Returning to the opening lines, where they assert that class struggle is the motive force of history, and that capitalism increasingly polarizes society into two antagonistic classes or camps, can better clarify some of the central but often overlooked or misunderstood elements of this formulation.

The first is that the splitting up into two classes is a process rather than a finalized or even finalizable state. In other words, proletarians aren’t produced once and for all; capitalism divides society into two antagonistic groupings. The second is that they refer to both as classes and “camps.” Despite the absence of a fully worked-out definition of classes in the text or in Marx’s work overall, they perhaps called them camps to account for their non-exclusionary character. Indeed, what is remarkably notable in the opening lines are the reduction of various class struggles to that between the oppressor and the oppressed. Even as they acknowledge several classes, some of which include more complicated hierarchies and layers or levels, they recognize a continuity that is more than a repetition of the same and, perhaps, by equating the capitalist class struggle with the struggle between the oppressor and oppressed.

No more do special places in the social division of labor exist—they mention priests and lawyers, scientists and doctors—as a revered and privileged position; they too are reduced to proletarians. [27] Today, 175 years on, my colleagues at DePauw University, facing yet another invented “crisis” and another round of cuts and layoffs, realize that we are workers, not “professors” or “teachers.” Such surprise is explained by the withering away of any material basis for middle-class status and the increasing deskilling of our labor-power. Engels’ similarly accounted for any awe in his 1845 work, The Condition of the Working Class in England, where he recounts how capitalist development in colonial Britain deprived even workers of the illusion they could attain a decent standard of living, thereby collecting “together those vast masses of working men who now fill the whole British Empire.” [28]

The technological dynamism propelled by the need to increase the social productivity of labor through machinery, similarly, swells the ranks of the unemployed and “dangerous classes” and make all proletarians’ “livelihood[s] more and more precarious.” [29] Again, 175 years ago Marx and Engels located precarity as a primary condition we, as workers, are forced to grapple with—well before the “gig economy.”

Oppressor and Oppressed

In the first section, the discussion of the proletarian class comes immediately after Marx and Engels mention how capital tries to solve its contradictions through “the conquest of new markets.” This demonstrates that, even this early on, communists centered the colonial question, even if it wasn’t refined at this time. As Lucia Pradella, among others, has forcefully demonstrated, Marx gave increasing attention and weight to the anti-colonial revolutions happening in the mid-late 19th century. Colonization, for Marx, was not a ‘North-South’ or ‘East-West’ issue; it was, and is, an issue of domination and exploitation.

Neither Marx nor Engels only attended to Europe, nor did they abstract Britain or Europe away as self-enclosed entities. In the Grundrisse, for example, Marx addresses the concentration of labor-power into collective labor, which explains “the violent rounding-up of the people in Egypt, Etruria, India etc. for forced construction and compulsory public works.” [30] Over time, Pradella shows, they extended their position on national liberation and class struggle—both struggles between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie—to other colonial territories, including China and India. During the Taiping Revolution, “Marx changed his previous unidirectional view of international revolution, tracing a relation between proletarian struggle in the metropolis and anti-colonial movements in the colonies.” He welcomed the revolution and the detrimental impacts it would have on British colonialism, the same reason for which he supported—and “was probably the first major European intellectual and political activist to support the national liberation struggle in India.” [31] In a direct rebuttal to allegations of Eurocentrism and a privileging of the ‘working-class’ as the revolutionary subject, Marx argued that the anti-colonial rebellions would come before and would ignite the socialist revolutions in the colonizing countries. [32]

One could argue that the equation of the class struggle with the struggle between the oppressor and oppressed anticipated their forthcoming incorporation of the colonial question and the centrality of national liberation, something featured in the Manifesto itself.

The closing section of the pamphlet addresses how communists in different nations relate to other opposition parties. “In Poland,” they write, communists “support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation.” [33] Just a few lines up from the closing clarion call for “working men of all countries, unite!” we read that, wherever they are, communists “support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.” [34] Certainly, they didn’t have a fully fleshed out theory of national liberation and socialism, although later on they did. [35]

Same Objectives, Different Conjuncture: Anti-Racism and the Socialist Struggle

Marx and Engels open the Manifesto not with a preordained future but an indeterminate future that will be produced through struggle: if the proletarians don’t overthrow the bourgeoisie there is “the common ruin of the contending classes.” [36] These options are translated in various ways (e.g., barbarism or socialism; humanity or capitalism), but they are still the base options available to us today. The central question, then, is how do we ensure the victory of our class?

The Manifesto offers no prescriptions and, indeed, the League lacked the depth and breadth of experience from which to draw on to even reflect on their previous organizational forms. Yet it is clear that the proletarians can’t fight it out alone or even on the scale of the workplace, industry, community, or state.

Capitalism, as a system of oppression, requires a collective and organized revolutionary struggle to overthrow it by foreclosing any individualistic or particularistic forms of resistance. As capital grows, so too does its class enemy: “a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital.” [37] Independent artisans, shop-owners, peasants, and small producers are thrown into this lot through the production of machinery, which ultimately incorporates the workers’ skill and knowledge into a form of fixed capital. However we rebel and develop, we have to recognize that “every class struggle is a political struggle,” and whenever we fight the bosses and oppressors we’re engaged in the class struggle and in a political project. [38]

The key task, then as now, is to organize the working and oppressed peoples “into a class, and consequently into a political party” that, “organized as the ruling class” will implement a program for the oppressed. [39] This task is, to be sure, complex, sensitive, and contingent on time, place, and society. In the U.S., no communist party or communist movement can unite working and oppressed people into a class unless it represents the diverse characteristics of our class and fights tooth-and-nail for the national and racial liberation projects against white supremacy, settler-colonialism, and the emancipation of all oppressed identities.

By doing so, we confront head-on the ties between anti-communism and white supremacy that Gerald Horne makes clear. Racism to this day is linked with the emancipation of the formerly enslaved because Reconstruction–even after its counterrevolutionary overthrow—was “one of the largest uncompensated expropriations” until, that is, the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. As such, Horne asserts that “African Americans are living reminders of lost fortunes,” and so “the reaction to socialism–which has also involved expropriations of property—is difficult to separate from race and racism.” [40] For this reason, the primary obstacles to overcome are the long and ongoing legacies of racial slavery and white chauvinism. If we don’t understand their links with what Charisse Burden-Stelly calls “modern U.S. racial capitalism,” we can neither understand contemporary capitalism nor overthrow the capitalists class. [41]

The Communist Manifesto announced the need for the proletariat to win political supremacy and rule over their former oppressors without, however, saying how to pursue this task or what role the state played in it. It was precisely “the defeats of the revolutions in 1848 that allowed Marx to go beyond the Manifesto’s general formula and sum up that experience with greater clarity” rather than “an abstract formula.” [42] Marx and Engels admit as much in the 1872 Manifesto preface, as the Paris Commune made it clear that workers can’t use the existing state for our project but must smash that state and construct a new one in our interest. We can’t rely on the contemporary U.S. state, founded and maintained as it is by white supremacy, capitalist exploitation, imperialist plunder to provide either the avenue to socialism or the apparatus by which to achieve it.

Let’s read the Manifesto of the Communist Party today, and tomorrow, for our history, present, and our future common and universal emancipation and freedom.

Endnotes

[1] One of Marx’s main disputes with other members of the League was his assertion that, because the German bourgeoisie was so inactive and powerless, that country could undergo a bourgeois and subsequent proletarian revolution in 1848 (a “permanent revolution”).

[2] Jones, Gareth Stedman. “Introduction.” p. 17.

[3] Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto. pp. 198, 197.

[4] For more background and context, see The Peoples Forum. “History of The Communist Manifesto with Brian Becker.” Available here.

[5] Ireland, David. The Communist Manifesto in the Revolutionary Politics of 1848. pp. 37-68.

[6] Wolff, Wilhelm, and Schapper, Karl. “A Circular of the First Congress of the Communist League to the League Members. June 9,1847.” pp. 599, 595.

[7] Althusser, Louis. Machiavelli and Us. p. 17.

[8] Marx, Karl. Grundrisse. pp. 105, 106.

[9] Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto. p. 196.

[10] Ibid., p. 237.

[11] Ibid., p. 258.

[12] Ibid., p. 219.

[13] Marx, Karl. “Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer.” pp. 2-65.

[14] Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto. p. 220.

[15] Ibid., p. 221.

[16] Ibid., p. 223.

[17] Ibid., p. 226.

[18] Ibid., p. 222.

[19] Ibid., p. 223.

[20] Ibid., p. 225.

[21] Ibid., p. 224.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Marx, Karl. Capital (Vol. 1). p. 604.

[24] Ibid., pp. 586, 575.

[25] Ibid., p. 588.

[26] Marx, Karl. Capital (Vol. 3). p. 162.

[27] Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto. p. 228.

[28] Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. p. 30.

[29] Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto. p. 229.

[30] Marx, Karl. Grundrisse. p. 528.

[31] Pradella, Lucia. Globalisation and the Critique of Political Economy. pp. 120, 122.

[32] Marx, Karl. “Revolution in China and Europe.” p. 93.

[33] Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto. p. 257.

[34] Ibid., 258.

[35] La Riva, Gloria. “Lenin and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination.”

[36] Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto. p. 219.

[37] Ibid., p. 227.

[38] Ibid., p. 230.

[39] Ibid., p. 230, 242.

[40] Horne, Gerald. “White Supremacy and Anti-Communism.” pp. 282-283.

[41] Burden-Stelly, Charisse. “Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism Some Theoretical Insights.”

[42] Becker, Brian. “How the Ideas of ‘The State and Revolution’ Changed History.” p. 11.

Bibliography

Althusser, Louis. Machiavelli and Us. Trans. F. Matheron. Verso, 2000.

Becker, Brian. “How the Ideas of ‘The State and Revolution’ Changed History.” In B. Becker (Ed.), Revolution Manifesto: Understanding Marx and Lenin’s Theory of Revolution. Liberation Media, 2015.

Burden-Stelly, Charisse. “Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism Some Theoretical Insights.” Monthly Review, Vol. 72, No. 3, pp. 8-20.

Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. Oxford University Press, 2009.

​​Horne, Gerald. “White Supremacy and Anticommunism.” Science & Society, Vol. 62, No. 2, 1998, pp. 282-283.

Ireland, David. The Communist Manifesto in the Revolutionary Politics of 1848: A Critical Evaluation. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.

Jones, Gareth Stedman. “Introduction.” In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. Penguin Books, 1967.

La Riva, Gloria. “Lenin and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination.” In J. Cutter (Ed.), Storming the Gates: How the Russian Revolution Changed the World. Liberation Media, 2017.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 1): The Process of Capitalist Production. Trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling. International Publishers, 1967.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 2): The Process of Circulation of Capital. International Publishers, 1967.

Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft). Trans. M. Nicolaus. Penguin Books, 1993.

Marx, Karl. “Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer.” In Marx and Engels Collected Works (Vol. 39): Letters 1852-1855, Lawrence & Wisehart, 2010.

Marx, Karl. “Revolution in China and Europe.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works (Vol. 12): Marx and Engels 1853-1854. Lawrence & Wisehart, 2010.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. S. Moore (New York: Penguin Books, 1967).

Pradella, Lucia. Globalisation and the Critique of Political Economy: New Insights from Marx’s Writings. Routledge, 2015.

Wolff, Wilhelm, and Schapper, Karl. “A Circular of the First Congress of the Communist League to the League Members. June 9,1847.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works (Vol. 6): Marx and Engels: 1845-1848. Lawrence & Wishart, 2010.

Reject Anti-Intellectualism

By Erica Caines

Republished from Hood Communist.

A disingenuous trend is reemerging, bastardizing concepts of “accessibility” to attack and suppress radical efforts at political education. The focus on consistent ongoing political education is shot down as disconnected from the needs of the people. But these critiques should be seen clearly for what they are: anti-intellectualism masquerading as a faux concern for the elusive “everyday person”. These are not genuine concerns for how people learn (ignoring the array of techniques like creating glossaries, audio recordings of written materials, visual aids or establishing group reading environments), these are attacks on the acts of learning and studying.

As an article in Studio Atao explains, anti-intellectualism is more than “mere hostility towards acquiring knowledge, or the byproduct of the lack of a formal education…it is a pervasive and popular mindset because it encourages us to cling to our most fervently held beliefs, with little or no supporting evidence.“ 

We are in the midst of a propaganda war. As such, the growing insistence on collapsing the structure and institution of academia with intellect and literacy (i.e. anyone who appears to be literate or “smart” are said to be beholden to the academy) feeds into anti-intellectualism, which mis-characterizes reading and study as elitism. 

After years of this narrative, the intellectual dishonesty about the necessity of reading is firmly being spearheaded by supposed leftists and prominent progressive figures. In a Vanity Fair article, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez remarked, “When people say I’m not Socialist enough, I find that very classist. It’s like, ‘What—I didn’t read enough books for you, buddy?’”.  AOC weaponized anti-intellectualism to subvert any and all criticisms of her support of US imperial aggression against sovereign global south nations decrying reading as a pastime of the elite and depicting foreign policy as too worldly for “the everyday person.”

The pushback against engaging theory is the summation that reading does not tackle one’s immediate needs under the primary contradiction of imperialism. Yet, books like Robin DG Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression gives great detail to how sharecroppers with little to no formal education engaged Marxist theory. The Black Liberation Army Study Guide, written and studied by lumpenproletariat and poor working class African youth expounds on how to put theory into practice. What of the many African revolutionaries that have centered political education to successfully carry out revolutions like Amilcar Cabral, Samoa Machel, and Thomas Sankara? What of the expansion of a literate masses post-revolutions because it was centered in the “new society”, like in Cuba, Grenada and Nicaragua? Or the emphasis on literacy during the reconstruction period post civil-war that served as a catalyst for what would become the civil rights movement as detailed in Ibram X. Kendi’s The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution? 

When 54% of U.S. adults 16-74 years old – about 130 million people – lack proficiency in literacy, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level, the aggressive anti-intellectualism increasingly growing online and spilling over should be cause for alarm. Anti-intellectualism is not simply informed by reactionary opinions, but shapes, constructs and upholds the ideas of those in power— the ruling class— ultimately undermining new knowledge and new ideas as “irrelevant”. This ultimately undermines our organizing capabilities. It is a counter-revolutionary agenda being cloaked under  the language of “accessibility”. As a result of that rejection, there has been an ushering in of unprincipled and reactionary opinions all given validity because it’s how someone feels.

The distortion of “accessibility” is evident through the prevalence of political education via memes, as well. Online, slides of bright words on carefully picked colorful Canva app backgrounds or a sassy 69 seconds or less AAVE spouting breakdown of current events becomes a substitute for historical and dialectical materialism. Nothing needs to be cited, it just needs to be emotionally appealing. So one can engage in hashtag activism and make claims about nations in the crosshairs of western imperialism without providing anything more than thoughts and opinions on the matter. They are not required to make a full argument, provide primary sources or define anything.  But because it is made “accessible”, it is taken in as fact and spread around like wildfire. 

It is a critical matter in organizing when aggressive anti-intellectualism is being normalized as radical. It speaks directly to our conditions as colonized Africans in the confines of the empire that applauds and encourages anti-intellectualism through a bogus colonial education system. It also speaks directly to the global north/ western chauvinism that is deeply embedded in this society of people who have never carried out a revolution, are nowhere near organized to carry out a revolution, very loudly opinionated on what it would take while refusing to read, study and engage revolution and its class characteristics. These actions are the remnants of a collectively non-literate people.

Surely colonized Africans have an understanding of their conditions to the extent that the US is a racist nation and thus acts accordingly. What is not understood are the ways that a grounded political education expands on the US not only being a racist nation, but a settler colonial one and what that means, how that manifests, and how we should organize to stop it. Logically, of course, one can understand that the pressure to survive under domestic imperialism interferes with the ability for many to understand what they are facing through collective political education and organizing. The material conditions are dire and need solutions, but much of the reason our conditions keep worsening is because we are collectively not nearly equipped to comprehend and verbalize the causes of our conditions that (collective) reading and organization helps us better understand and fight to win.

“There’s no such thing as neutral education. Education either functions as an instrument to bring about conformity or freedom.”

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Erica Caines is a poet, writer and organizer in Baltimore and the DMV. She is an organizing committee member of the anti war coalition, the Black Alliance For Peace as well as an outreach member of the Black centered Ujima People’s Progress Party. Caines founded Liberation Through Reading in 2017 as a way to provide Black children with books that represent them and created the extension, a book club entitled Liberation Through Reading BC, to strengthen political education online and in our communities.

Anti-Ableist Teaching Strategies and Disability Life Photography

[Cover Photo: Steve Darby. Licensed under Creative Commons 2.0.]

By Sarah Pfohl

The following text is from an invited talk shared at ‘Currents’, the 2022 Midwest Society for Photographic Education (MWSPE) Regional Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA on Friday, October 7, 2022.    

Welcome, folks. Thanks very much for being here this afternoon and to the conference organizers for creating space for these ideas and the artistic and pedagogical work I’m making inspired by ideas about ability, legibility, and representation. 

I’m a proudly dis/abled, chronically ill artist and teacher and about 15 years ago, as a graduate student studying education, I came into contact with ideas from disability liberation that completely turned inside out my thinking about myself as a sick person. Over time, these ideas have become foundational to me as both an artist and a teacher. I’ll share a few of those ideas with you, offer some ways you might bring them into your own work with people (in teaching or beyond), if you don’t already, and then talk about the photographic work I’ve been making inspired by the anti-ableist movement that is disability liberation. I’ll move in a couple different directions — teaching, theory, identity, artistic work. In my body-mind, life, and work, it’s all intertwined.

A few final contextualizing notes by way of introduction: 

First, notes on language. In this talk, I’ll refer to ableism, which is oppression based on real or perceived aspects of a person or group’s ability. The language I’ll use throughout this talk is specific and intentional, it may sometimes meet you as surprising. Next, I’ll draw ideas from lots of different arenas of thinking and action including disability studies, disability rights, and disability justice. This talk will provide a really quick, condensed introduction to a few pieces of a huge, rich terrain. I’m skating across the surface, please check out the resource guide for more information, if you’re so inclined, or reach out, I’m happy to chat further. 

I’m one person among so many within the disability community. Data estimate 1 in 4 U.S. adults under the of 65 manages a diagnosis. In other words, the disability community is huge, there are almost certainly disabled people in your midst, whether you realize it or not. The community encompasses billions of people worldwide. I’ll speak here through the lens of my own experiences and on behalf of myself, not on behalf of an entire group of incredibly diverse of people. 

Finally, a ‘why should you care’ note. Taken as a whole, the concepts I offer here mean to invite, increase, and normalize meaningful participation in our world from a huge group of individuals positioned as less than, a huge group of individuals whose separation from the non-disabled world is deeply rationalized, dominantly framed as humane, and in many cases currently legal. Disabled people deserve humane treatment, full participation, and have incredibly valuable perspectives and knowledge to contribute to our world. 

Anti-ableist teaching strategies 

First, I’ll cover three concepts in contemporary disability liberation that might be of use in teaching and learning contexts and beyond. I’ll define each one, or, in one case, paired set, and then talk a little bit about practical implications.

I’ll talk first about the intertwined concepts of the medical model of disability and the social model of disability.

The medical model and social model construct disability in 2 diametrically opposed ways, in particular they locate the origins of disability in 2 very different places. Taken together, the medical and social models can point toward ways in which contexts disable people.

Image source: FutureLearn (n. d.). Models of Disability. [cartoon]. Inclusive Education: Essential Knowledge for Success – Queensland University of Technology. https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/inclusive-education

Accessed via https://inclusiveeducation123.wordpress.com/2020/03/30/breaking-barriers/ on September 15, 2022.

The image above embodies one traditional way of introducing the medical and social models. We see in the center of the image a frowning person using a mobility assistive device (the crutch) and a prosthetic next to a step. On the left-hand side of the image, a medical professional says, “Your impairment is a problem we need to fix.” This speech bubble is labeled as ‘medical model’ On the right-hand side of the image a person using a wheelchair says in reference to the step, “This barrier is a problem we need to fix.” The speech bubble there is labeled as ‘social model’. A few things I want to activate your attention toward in this little cartoon:

Within the medical model perspective, we see disability defined as an impairement—through this it is referred to in deficit-centric, negative terms. This positioning of disability as a limitation, a disorder, a disadvantage is a key characteristic of the medical model. Additionally in the medical model perspective, disability is defined as a condition rooted within an individual, it’s a problem, located first and foremost within a person. By extension, the diagnosed person becomes the problem, especially if they can’t be “fixed”.

The social model perspective provides a counterpoint arguing that disability is not always and only located within the individual, rather it is socially agreed upon and produced out of the interaction between people and the world around them. Within the context of the social model of disability, inflexible, rigid, beliefs, attitudes, and physical structures produce what we call disability through the pathological unwillingness of those forces to shift or change such that they may accommodate a wider range of human diversity.

The social model doesn’t position the disabled person as a problem or as in need of fixing. Rather, it provides a perspective that normalizes human difference as a fact of human life, rather than pathologizing certain ways of being in favor of upholding existing, oftentimes-ableist social norms.

In dominant culture the medical model is normative, you probably have extensive experience with it just by being alive in the world, while the social model of disability reframes thinking and conversations about ability fundamentally. For the purposes of teaching, the paired models provide a number of possibly useful implications:

• Remember that there are a growing number of disabled people who view disability as a part of their identity that connects them to a rich, important, diverse culture with an exciting history and future. Disability pride is a real thing.

• Expect diversity in conceptualizing your teaching. Folks interested in realizing more ability-inclusive teaching moves might check out the Universal Design for Learning framework for suggestions. UDL encourages educators to provide multiple pathways into content engagement alongside multiple means of content representation and learning expression. Within a teaching context, flexibility can be a powerful anti-ableist teaching move. 

• Be thoughtful about the elements of your teaching practice designed to socialize students into an existing normative framework. If you are socializing students toward something, what is the lineage behind that something? I bring this up because when I’ve led PD on these topics previously, one of the most common pieces of push back I get is — but it’s my job to socialize my students even if that’s ability exclusive. Some teachers resist the social model lens because part of their mission is conforming their students into productivity relative to the existing social order. You might be mindful of this, as it can be ability-exclusive given the intense ableism present in our existing social order.  

A few critical notes here:

• The social model of disability, when present in public discourse, is poorly understood and often completely misconstrued. I strongly encourage you not to Google it, because the results bear little relation to the actuality of the concept. Check out the Rethinking Disability book I cite on the resource guide (see below for guide) for reliable information if you want to learn more.

• The social model doesn’t argue against medical intervention. It is not saying that one should stop going to the doctor or that medical support is a bad thing. It does argue that disability-related expertise can be located in many places, within and beyond medical practitioners.

• Finally, the social model doesn’t argue that disabled people must embrace, love, be happy about being disabled. It does challenge the idea that disability is always and only a negative thing, but doesn’t prescribe the feelings disabled people “should” have about themselves.

I’ll close this section with 2 quotes from disability liberation heroes that underscore the value of shifts in thinking connected to the social model construction of disability (both quotes pulled from this NYTimes article).

The first is from disability rights activist Judy Heumann: “The way society thinks about disability needs to evolve, as too many people view disability as something to loathe or fear. By changing that mentality, by recognizing how disabled people enrich our communities, we can all be empowered to make sure disabled people are included.”

The second is from disability justice activist, writer, author, and founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project, Alice Wong: “We [disabled people] should not have to assimilate to a standard of “normal” to gain acceptance.”

The next concept I wanted to bring into the room is much narrower in scope—I wanted to talk about presuming competence as a mindset and lens. I first encountered this concept in Kathleen Collins’ great book Ability Profiling and School Failure: One Child’s Struggle to Be Seen as Competent.

The simple yet revolutionary argument embedded within presuming competence is that disabled people have capacity. Disabled people are often always and only framed around what they can’t do, especially educationally, and the list of can’t dos becomes the center column of that individual’s identity for others. We see this happen educationally especially when the terms of someone’s accommodation rub up against the teaching norms already in place in a particular instructor’s teaching and learning context/teaching practice. Years ago, I worked with an art history professor who very emphatically didn’t allow students to have screens of any kind in their classes but received, during the first week of school, an accommodation letter from a student indicating that they required the use of a laptop for note-taking during class meetings. Of course, an ADA accommodation is a legally-binding document and violating the terms of an accommodation is a violation of the student’s federally-mandated civil rights under the ADA. The student became “the student who can’t write their own notes by hand” and instead of finding a creative solution the professor pushed the student out of the class. They told the student to either stop using the screen or sit in the back of the classroom so that they didn’t “distract” their peers with the screen. The student dropped the class in response. 

Disabled people can do a lot of things! We carry so much capacity. Finding creative ways to align existing circumstances with an individual’s existing capacities to in turn promote more full participation can produce more ability-based inclusion for all. An argument for teaching from disability liberation is to keep the learning goals the same, but increase the pathways toward them. A couple years ago I worked with a sculpture professor who had a project that included chop saw use. He knew several incoming students would not be able to use the chop saw as it was installed in the wood shop. In conversation, it turned out that the primary project learning goal was centered around creating a modular object, so in that particular case increasing the number of materials with which students could work, allowing students to work with both wood and paper, increased accessibility while maintaining the project objectives. 

The last concept that I want to talk about is language associated with disability. Here the literature has a couple different suggestions. The first suggestion has to do with ability-related identifiers people use. Here’s a list of preferred ability-identifiers of some of my friends: 

disabled, dis/abled, Disabled, sick, crip, Mad, neurodivergent, chronically ill, ability non-normative, disabled person, person with a disability, physically ill, mentally ill, Sick

Which ones are right? There are no monolithically correct identifiers that I know of at this time. 

Don’t most of these words mean the same thing? No, they don’t. Disability as an identity and cultural category is incredibly diverse, one person’s relationship to a particular identifier may be totally different than another person’s relationship to the same word. 

Here’s what I can offer: People’s identifiers are highly specific and personal, use the language offered by individuals as they offer it. In the same way that you wouldn’t correct a student on the spelling of their name or pronoun use, don’t correct someone’s ability-related identifiers—accept what they tell you. Different identifiers do connect to different movements and spheres of thinking within disability liberation. Assume people use the language with which they identify themselves intentionally and honor it. SLIDE

In my own case, I use dis/abled and chronically ill. I use the word disabled to name the social conditions under which I live my life. What I mean by that is that I live in a world that constantly, tens of times each day, reminds me that I don’t belong here and I should normalize or get out because the diversity I embody isn’t important.

I write dis/abled with a back slash between dis and abled to connect myself back explicitly back to disability studies. Dis/abled is how some folks in disability studies write disabled to underscore the socially constructed nature of disability at a formal, linguistic level and that resonates for me, so I use it. Disability studies is also where I first encountered ideas that fundamentally reframed my thinking about ability and illness, so my use of a term anchored there as an identifier does honor to others’ works and points toward my affiliations. 

I say ‘chronically ill’ to hold up and foreground my biological reality as a person engaged in the constant labor and care associated with managing multiple, incurable diagnoses. 

And all of these will grow and change as the movement grows and changes, which is a beautiful thing.

Second, relative to disability-related language I wanted to be sure to identify the distinction between person-first and identity-first language. Many folks have heard of person-first language as it pertains to ability. To summarize, the idea is that one says ‘individual with a disability’ or ‘person with [insert diagnosis]’ foregrounding the person first and ability status second, rather than the inverse—foregrounding the ability status first and the person second. Folks who prescribe to person-first linguistic patterns argue that by naming first the individual, the individual becomes less defined by their ability status. 

Identity-first language turns that around and argues that linguistically foregrounding ability-related identity by saying ‘disabled person’ promotes disability pride and de-stigmatizes oftentimes-negative preconceptions of the word disabled. Some proponents of identity-first language also argue that in using that language pattern they name disabled people’s life experiences as they more truly are—an ableist world reminds disabled people that they do not belong. A common argument against person-first language from a disabled person is, “I’ll use person-first language when I start getting treated like a person.” As you may have noticed, I’m using identity-first language throughout this presentation.

For a long time person-first language (person with a disability) was far more common and that linguistic norm is very present in many fields, especially medical and educational spheres. It isn’t a bad approach, especially if you’re non-disabled and talking about disability or you find yourself in the position of having to choose one or the other. In those moments, person-first works great. 

However, if you encounter someone, like a student, who is disabled and uses identity-first language honor that. Again, use the identifiers someone supplies you and assume identifiers used are used intentionally. Resist the urge to teach a disabled person who identifies as a disabled person about person-first language.

The final perspective from the intersections between language and ability I wanted to offer into this space is an invitation to use and model anti-ableist language. 

Ableist slurs are quite common and often used unintentionally. They might emerge as language patterns that position a diagnosis category or way of being in general in a negative light or from a deficit standpoint. A few examples and how they would be corrected: 

• I was engaged in a blind struggle to move forward. — I was engaged in a careless struggle to move forward. 

• He’s stuck in a wheelchair. — He uses a wheelchair.

• That’s a lame excuse. — That’s an inadequate excuse.

It seems subtle, but it’s a big deal. I find that more and more of my students know this content and read the world around them, looking for mentors and allyship, informed by the subtle hints provided by the gatekeepers in their lives. Lots of disabled young people in higher education don’t and won’t disclose but need help and actively decreasing ableist slur use helps vulnerable students find folks who can provide critical support. Again, the tip of a huge iceberg but a brief outline of ideas I’ve come into contact with that have been useful to me as a teacher.

As I mentioned, statistically 1 in 4 U.S. adults under the age of 65 fall into the category of disabled. Which would mean, if, for example, you’re a teacher in higher education, that in a class of 20 students you should statistically receive 5 accommodation letters. Of course, there are many reasons people don’t self-identify formally through disability services. I share these numbers to underscore that ability-related non-normativity may be far more present in the spaces within which you move than you realize. These ideas, aimed at promoting the humanity and humane treatment of people historically treated terribly (Google ‘Willowbrook’ for more information) can have a big impact even if you think they might not pertain to you.

Imaging what’s wrong with me

I’ll shift now to the artistic work I’ve been making precipitated by the ideas I just shared and start with some facts about my body. 

The primary biological diagnosis with which I was born is currently called osteogenesis imperfecta, abbreviated as OI. As a diagnosis category, OI is characterized by the OI Foundation, the primary US-based advocacy body associated with it, as “complicated, variable, and rare” in appearance. Statistically, worldwide, around 1 in every 15,000-20,000 people lives with osteogenesis imperfecta. Within the context of my own life, I’ve never knowingly met in person someone else with OI. 

With OI, which is incurable, I have less of a particular protein in my body than deemed medically normal and within that, the smaller amount of that protein I do have is designated, in medical terms, as “qualitatively abnormal”, which is one of the many fun things I get to hear medical professionals I’ve just met call me—“qualitatively abnormal”. 

More specifically, parts of my body—my bones, heart, lungs, eyes, and ears—work differently than most other people’s. My bones break, sometimes for little or no discernible reason. I’ve broken bones in my legs, arms, hands, feet, fingers, and toes, I’ve fractured my pelvis, my skull, and both clavicles. I can have trouble with the mechanics of my body, my ability to walk ebbs and flows.

I also manage now OI’s offshoots and degenerative progressions, as a diagnosis it proliferates over time. I manage Deaf gain (referred to as hearing loss in hearing culture), early-onset osteoporosis, anxiety, depression. So that’s a brief description of the nature of my body-mind from a medicalized, biological, diagnosis-label perspective.

I share this not in an attempt to evoke sympathy or pity, but to outline what counts as normal within the context of my own experience. As a site, my body requires constant management and care. I share information also to cure any deniers—I don’t usually read as disabled and chronically ill, it’s common for people to question me on that, so specifics and disclosing can help build my credibly. 

As a dis/abled, chronically ill artist coming into contact with ideas from disability liberation, I started to wonder what implications they might have for my artistic work. As I worked to shift my consciousness away from medical model thinking and toward social model interpretations of the world around me, I began to notice and become more critical of the negative representational tropes associated with illness and disability that permeated the world around me. Experiences of disability are incredibly diverse but, due to ableism, the visual language commonly associated with disability was narrow and unimaginative.

As I started to photograph toward my own representation of disability, I wanted to visually push back against these norms. A question I started to chew on often was, “Can I make a representation of disability that feels true to my lived experience, that doesn’t include the body, and that goes beyond the common, deficit-centric narrative?”

I looked around for some inspiration. I started to notice also that the representations of disability that presented the most complex, nuanced portraits of diagnosis management and ability non-normative life were first-person. By ‘first-person’ I mean they were crafted by an individual with first-hand experience of diagnosis management. I had been reading within the field of disability life writing, an approach to writing that argues for the value of diverse narratives about disability written by disabled people, and started to look for examples of disability life photography. 

Through the lens of the social model of disability, a disabled person is positioned as the primary expert on their own life and body-mind. A disabled person is, through the social model lens, a knowledgeable authority on what it is to be sick. This social model perspective overturns dominant medical model thinking which locates disability-related expertise in basically anyone expect the disabled individual. For example, it’s quite common for a medical professional’s perspective on an illness they have never experienced to be held in higher regard than the perspective of an individual in medical care literally experiencing that particular illness; an insidious norm that extends historical positioning of the disabled person as helpless and wholly reliant when in reality, of course, the person who knows the most about a particular body is the one living within it.

Within photography, I came into contact with work by artists like Jaklin Romine, Megan Bent, Sara J. Winston, and Frances Bukovsky. I gained so much inspiration from this work, and it really gave me the steam and permission I needed to believe first-person ability-related representations were both critical and far more rare than ideal.

With a bit of visual footing, I moved forward. As a diagnosis management strategy, I am prescribed daily walks. I walk often in a forested, public park near my home in Indianapolis and I began to take my camera with me and photograph botanical forms during my walk.

I work very intuitively and started to photograph in the forest without any particular ambition for the images in mind. Strategically, I did want to photograph while walking to combine two necessary tasks in my life—these prescribed walks, as required by my doctor, and producing artistic work, as required by my job and spirit.

Being disabled and chronically ill, my time is structured toward preserving my life in a very specific, calculated way. I spend a lot of time on diagnosis management and care each day, stewarding my body, and then far more time dealing with the MIC, the medical industrial complex—spending my precious time engaged in tasks like the following: on the phone with healthcare providers, driving to appointments, engaged in appointments, on the phone with co-pay programs and my health insurance, trying to recover emotionally from the ups and downs of medical news and receiving surprise medical bills to the tune of thousands of dollars. 

Folding diagnosis management and making together, pairing 2 things I had to do, helped me feel more in control of my time and body. I also wanted to take a demand from and limitation of my diagnosed body, it’s need for these walks, and reframe it as a generative space by building photographing into the ritual practice of care rooted in these walks. 

As I reviewed the work I made in the park, I found myself most drawn to the blurry, indistinct backgrounds in the images and I began to lean into that. Again and again, as I looked through the photographs, paying closer attention to the blurred out components over the sharp ones the phrase, “That looks like me.” popped unbidden into my mind. Over time, the phrase grew into a conviction and I’ve found that for me, one of the most important parts of growing into an artist has been learning to take seriously and interrogate the weird, unexplainable truths my body-mind unbidden offers. 

As I investigated my identification with blurry botanical forms, I realized my photographs contained visual continuities with the medical imagining I encountered in my daily life. They looked like microscopic versions of medical evidence related to my diagnoses. 

They looked like x-ray enlargements, the thready-ness of bone, the haziness of tissue. 

Over the course of my life as a multiply-diagnosed person I have likely been medically- and diagnostically-imaged more than I have been photographed for memory’s sake. Put another way, I think there are probably more representations of me in the form of diagnostic evidence like x-rays than there are pictures of me traveling, with friends, at parties, etc. This isn’t to say I don’t go out, it is to underline that my experience as patient in medical settings is extensive and life-long.

I found tremendous power in creating my own weird version of diagnostic-ish imagery. I can’t underline that enough. After years as subject to medicalized imaging practices, for the first time I was the person making the x-ray, taking the scan, in effect pressing the shutter release from within my radiation-protected bubble rather than the individual lying prone and covered with lead on a cold plastic table while a device circled my body as it emitted a series of beeps.

Osteogenesis imperfecta model no. 45

Visually, I think of the work as messy, a resolved but wild tangle that flickers between clarity and ambiguity. Born into a body that carries multiple non-visible diagnoses, my external appearance and my internal reality rarely coincide, especially within the world of the general public imagination. In other words, I don’t look like one of the most foundational aspects of who and what I am, I pass for fine but am pretty sick, and that tends to trip people up. I continued to think into that phrase, “That looks like me.” and realized the flora I trained my lens toward and then intentionally rendered out through the camera as disorienting, messy thickets punctuated by moments of clarity aligned with the illegibility foundational to my lived experience of non-visible illness.

On one hand, I can say my visible appearance misdirects, a symbol for lived experiences I have never known and will never know. My external body feels like a costume that doesn’t fit or a deception. On the other hand, common ideas of what disability looks like bear very little relationship to the hugely diverse ways in which disability actually presents. Though this, I become clear in flashes.

Osteogenesis imperfecta model no. 97

Being read and socially positioned as non-disabled is, of course, at times a privilege but in some circumstances can be incredibly dangerous. My life has been put in danger many times because people assumed I wasn’t sick and ascribed abilities to me I didn’t have or expected performance from me I could not provide. In these moments of illegibility my choice is disclosure or danger.

Additionally, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve disclosed in an attempt to pull myself out of danger but have been denied (literally told things like “That’s not possible.”, “No, you don’t.”) because I don’t live up to someone else’s version of what a disabled person looks like. It’s this strange struggle to be seen and I found image-making processes that I could use to render visually these feelings. The anti-ableist teaching implications here are to two-fold: 1) trust what people tell you about their circumstances, even if they don’t/can’t provide medical documentation, 2) don’t forget that interior and exterior circumstances don’t always align

Osteogenesis imperfecta model no. 76

I started to think of the work as my body without my body, as non-traditional self-portraits. A piece of useful context here is that I grew up in rural New York, 2 miles outside of a village of about 650 people. I spent my first 18 years surrounded by far more plants and trees than people and, this isn’t a joke, my first best friends were the wild grasses and greenery around my parents’ house. That, within the context of this particular body of work, I’ve located botanical forms as a stand-in for my innermost physical realities and psychological experiences aligns with the deep flora connections I witnessed and cultivated within the rural culture I know best.

I don’t prescribe to the medical model idea of disability as a monolithically bad thing. Like many folks in the disability liberation community, I wouldn’t take a cure were I offered one, and I locate some of the aspects of my personality that have become the most valuable to me as originating in and inseparable from my lived experiences as a disabled person. My incurable body is my superpower and in spite of powerful, oftentimes-eugenic societal messages to the contrary it has never served me to believe I’m less-than, that there’s something “wrong with me” because of the diagnoses I manage. I wanted to make a representation of disability that contained moments of beauty to honor the power and value of disability as I know it.

Osteogenesis imperfecta model no. 5

The last framing note I’ll share relative to this on-going work—many disabled, chronically ill people maintain a dossier of critical medical information. This dossier might include hundreds of pages of content like care information and instructions, health insurance documents (if one has health insurance), diagnoses, or emergency information. My dossier is a 3-inch, blue, 3-ring binder that I take with me to medical facilities to prove myself and direct my care, especially in emergency situations. Because the primary diagnosis I manage is rare and medical professionals are taught that common diagnoses are common (when you hear hooves think horses, not zebras) I often have to tell the people taking care of me what to do. Sometimes, I am the first person with OI a medical professional I’m working with has ever met in person.

Osteogenesis imperfecta model no. 55

Taken together the images in this ongoing project operate as a slant dossier. They are my models of my lived experiences of rare, non-visible diagnoses. They are evidence of my internal genetic reality as I imagine it models of my social experiences of sickness in a deeply ableist world. Sometimes I wonder what would happen it I could take my pictures to a medical professional and be like, “Here, this is my version of what’s wrong with me. Diagnosis this.” Finally, I will just mention quickly, my idea right now is for the project to include, in its final form, 206 individual images, one for each bone in most adult human bodies.

Sarah Pfohl is a dis/abled, chronically ill artist and teacher, currently serving as Assistant Professor of Photography and Art Education Coordinator in the Department of Art & Design at the University of Indianapolis. You can read more about her and her work here.

Resource guide

Some very good books:

Rethinking disability: A disability studies approach to inclusive practices, Jan W. Valle and David J. Connor, 2019 (2nd ed.), Routledge (disability studies)

Any text by Eli Clare. A great starting point: Brilliant imperfection: Grappling with cure, Eli Clare, 2017, Duke University Press (disability justice)

Being Heumann: An unrepentant memoir of a disability rights activist, Judith Heumann with Kristen Joiner, 2021, Beacon Press (disability rights)

Disability visibility: First-person stories from the twenty-first century, Alice Wong (Ed.), 2020, Knopf Doubleday (disability justice)

Academic ableism: Disability and higher education, Jay Timothy Dolmage, 2017, University of Michigan Press (disability studies)

Ability profiling and school failure: One child’s struggle to be seen as competent, Kathleen M. Collins, 2012 (2nd ed.), Routledge (disability studies)

Disability and difference in global contexts: Enabling a transformative body politic, Nirmala Erevelles, 2011, Palgrave Macmillian

What can a body do? How we meet the built world, Sara Hendren, 2020, Riverhead Books

Academic journal articles:

Collins, K. & Ferri, B. (2016). Literacy education and disability studies:

Reenvisioning struggling students. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy,

60(1), 7-12.

Ferri, B. A. & Connor, D. J. (2005). Tools of exclusion: Race, disability, and

(re)segregated education. Teachers College Record, 107(3), 453-74.

Netflix: Special, Crip Camp

YouTube:

Mia Mingus, opening keynote, 2018 Disability Intersectionality Summit

Substack:

CripNews by Kevin Gotkin

Instructional strategy:

Universal Design for Learning

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

By Crystal Kim

Republished from Liberation School.

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conditions leading to the U.S. Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The leaders of the U.S. Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The drafting of the Constitution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The crowd shouted back, “Amen” [9].

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

References

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

Derek R. Ford’s “Encountering Education:” Bridging Marxist Educational Theory and Practice

By Peter McLaren

It was almost seven years ago that I participated in Derek R. Ford’s dissertation defense at Syracuse University. In that work—later published as Education and the Production of Space—Ford built on my own revolutionary critical pedagogy by further experimenting with the exact educational logics at work in revolutionary struggles and their spatial relations and implications.[1] After many twists and turns, for the last several decades I’ve worked to enlarge the scope of critical pedagogy into social movements because Marxist pedagogy is nothing unless it’s contributing to a social universe outside of capitalist value production.[2] Ford is one of several who continue to take that project in new directions, and since his dissertation he’s continued his work as a communist organizer at the local, national, and global levels and, just as importantly, has continued to write and theorize at the intersections of Marxism, pedagogy, and revolutionary struggles today. His seventh book, Encountering Education: Elements for a Marxist Pedagogy continues this trend in important and provocative ways.[3] The book is an incisive intervention in the fields of educational and political theory, yet it’s also one that’s relevant to organizers and activists today.

Ford begins by observing the frequency with which Marx’s eleventh Theses on Feuerbach—that “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it”—is cited. From here he launches into his own intervention by noting that what is rarely mentioned is “the direction toward which he wanted to change it,” something that is inseparable from what he studied and the theory he articulated.[4] In other words, Marxist theory isn’t merely about changing the world but about advancing the class struggle toward the eventual abolition of class society. This is the transformation from the capitalist mode of production to the communist mode of production via socialism, which “as a social formation” is a combination “of elements of both modes of production in which communist relations and means of production are ascending through the class struggle.”[5] The novelty of Ford’s work is the way he sees pedagogical processes as absolutely central to not only the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production but, more importantly, as key yet neglected aspects of the struggle for a new mode of production. Ford contends that we have to both explain the political context of our moment and the pedagogical philosophies of marxist education appropriate to that conjuncture, while insisting that neither are reducible to the other.

An Overview of Ford’s Latest Riffs

The first chapter begins where his last book, Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy, left off: with Ford’s unique and bold excavation of two latent pedagogical logics in Marx’s own works.[6] This is a theme he’s developed elsewhere in various ways, and in this sense Encountering Education is another extended riff on this theory. This is not mere repetition, but rather the result of Ford’s sprawling research that refuses to follow a linear trajectory. In this book, it serves as the foundation for the “elements of a marxist pedagogy” that Ford organizes around the “disinterpellative encounter,” a concept first proposed by another former student of mine, Tyson E. Lewis. Whereas Althusser articulated interpellation as the material process through which subjects are inaugurated into the mode of production, Lewis and Ford theorize disinterpellation as the disruption of that process. “The pedagogical encounter,” Ford writes here, “is ‘an exposure to an outside,” and an excess or surplus gap within the lesson.’”[7]

For Ford, Marx’s distinction between the method of presentation and inquiry serves as the starting points for a marxist pedagogical philosophy of learning and studying, the former of which is linear and guided by predetermined ends and the latter of which is open-ended and guided by a ceaseless wondering and wandering to and fro. Ford innovatively reads work by Marx and his commentators as gesturing toward but never reaching this pedagogical dialectic Marx articulates.

The next chapter develops a theory of “errant learning” in which both pedagogies are blocked together, and the political context here are anti-colonial and decolonial struggles. He begins with John Willinsky’s Learning to Divide the World, which looks at how education was and is fundamental to colonialism.[8] Ford attends to Willinsky’s neglect of learning and colonialism while at the same time contributing to revolutionary work on studying that has focused primarily on neoliberalism. He does this through a highly unique—and for some, probably, controversial—turn to Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Space and Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres project. Here, Ford identifies “the grasping drive as the educational foundation of the colonizing apparatus. I argue that the grasping drive positions opacity as a potential that must be realized—as a thought that must be known—an orientation that ends up sacrificing opacity as such.”[9] Ford turns to the question of form through Sloterdijk, linking the grasping drive to “lordly imagining,” before drawing out the revolutionary potential of Sloterdijk’s work on foams. He develops his theory of “errant learning” as “another form of dialectically blocking together the methods of inquiry and presentation, but one that shows the necessity of presentation and the existing historical material conditions in which we engage in inquiry.”[10]

After exploring the colonial and imperial context of our times, Ford turns next to the urban coordinates of our struggle and our present. He shows how the grasping drive is the pedagogical logic of today’s urbanism, which he justifies and then develops a pedagogical response to by turning to Jean-François Lyotard’s later work. Indeed, here we will note Ford’s highly unorthodox marxism that, while it’s unapologetically committed to the proletarian class camp and the struggle for communism, looks for philosophical allies everywhere he can, even in the most unsuspecting of places. Today’s urbanism—the megalopolis—is one in which everything is put into circuits of communication and exchange and “is ‘an economy in which everything is taken, nothing received,’” and is thus illiterate. Ford takes illiteracy as a positive element for marxist pedagogy insofar as such illiteracy “is not the negation or suppression of literacy, but instead a development of literacy as grasping, through which forms and concepts constitute objects under the mind’s direction and the subject’s will.”[11] Instead of presenting what this looks like, he inquiries into examples, one of which is the use of “scare quotes.” When we write or read square quotes, we “create a margin around the words and prevent any firm links between the words inside and outside to be drawn. While we can produce uncertain connections (“what is it about ‘this’ word?”), these always slip out of our grasp.”[12]

Urbanism isn’t only about steel and pavement, bounded densities of population and production, but is also virtual and material at the same time. In the fourth chapter, he builds on Curry Malott’s work on the postdigital, which Malott sees as a struggle “over what form the postdigital will take, which will be determined,” Ford urges, “by what mode of production prevails.”[13] While there is much of interest in this chapter, what is perhaps most politically and theoretically important is Ford’s argument against marxist theorists who have abandoned Marx’s theory of value today on the basis that “immaterial” and “knowledge” or “cognitive” work and products are immeasurable. “Marx’s law of value,” he reminds us, “is precisely immeasurable” insofar as both aspects of socially-necessary labor time are “dynamic,” “unpredictable,” and at times even outside of even our individual and collective consciousness.[14] The main problem he identifies with capitalist postdigital pedagogy is “that it limits individuation to the capitalist form of individuality and reinforces our conception and experience of individuality as a finalized starting point rather than an endpoint.”[15] Capital needs the individual subject-form to produce commodities (like knowledge). Yet rather than argue for the collective alone, Ford proposes—in postdigital fashion—for the pedagogical and political process of individuation through incalculable thought.

Ford begins the conclusion by noting that “there’s an immense power that comes from hearing an explanation for one’s oppression and our collective poverty and misery,” but that “explanation is only one part of the marxist pedagogical dialectic. The other part—inquiry—is a different kind of power: the power of wonder.”[16]  Here he summarizes the political and pedagogical distinctions between inquiry and presentation beautifully:

“If one side of the marxist pedagogical dialectic is about knowing and presentation, then we have to attend to the other side, which is about thought and inquiry. Such a distinction turns on the dialectic between exchange-value and use-value, between abstraction and differentialization, between capitalism and communism. The dialectic itself is here, in the present, in the global capitalist world, but in the world in transition. Understanding or knowing involves a determinate judgment that takes place when given data comes under the mind’s order and comprehension is a faculty of determination in which data comes under the mind’s comprehension. Thinking, by contrast, is an exposure to stupor, an experience with immeasurable concepts that the mind can never grasp.”[17]

After an important presentation and study of interpellation, counterinterpellation, and disinterpellation, Ford turns to the role of noise and music in anti-colonial struggles to tie together the various riffs produced in the book, ending with the example of technologies that mediate the voice such as autotune, which show us that vocalization is a ‘process without a subject’ insofar as they prevent us from linking the sound of a voice to an essence of an individual subject or a piece of fixed capital.” These technologies produce a “sonic surplus” that we have to listen to both synchronically and diachronically as well in order to “receive an immersive education in the wonder as well as the theory of class struggle, a struggle that is advanced ideologically and materially through the forces of opposition and swerve.”[18] The swerve is the unpredictable but nonetheless intended action of the marxist pedagogue.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt in my mind that Ford’s book—and this review—will be challenging to some. Yet for those who are confused, I can only urge you to spend time with Encountering Education, which makes these dense and difficult theories accessible and makes them come to life with real-world examples. That the book is available as an affordable paperback and a free online PDF will hopefully contribute to the essential ideas in this book proliferating throughout our movements. The pedagogical elements of the book aren’t recipes or dictates, but rather resources for us to use in all of our revolutionary educational endeavors.

Peter McLaren is Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire Democratic Project and International Ambassador for Global Ethics and Social Justice. In 2005, a group of scholars and activists in Northern Mexico established La Fundacion McLaren de Pedagogía Critica to develop a knowledge of McLaren's work throughout Mexico and to promote projects in critical pedagogy and popular education. On September 15, 2006 the Catedra Peter McLaren was inaugurated at the Bolivarian University of Venezuela.

Notes

[1] Derek R. Ford, Education and the Production of Space: Political Pedagogy, Geography, and Urban Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2017).

[2] Peter McLaren, Pedagogy of Insurrection: From Resurrection to Revolution (New York: Peter Lang, 2016), 373.

[3] Derek R. Ford, Encountering Education: Elements for a Marxist Pedagogy (Madison: Iskra Books, 2022).

[4] Ibid., 1.

[5] Ibid., 94.

[6] Derek R. Ford, Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

[7] Ford, Encountering Education, 14.

[8] John Willinsky, Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire’s End (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

[9] Ford, Encountering Education, 43.

[10] Ibid., 44.

[11] Ibid., 76.

[12] Ibid., 85.

[13] Ibid., 86. See also Curry S. Malott, “Capitalism, Crisis, and Educational Struggle in the Postdigital,” Postdigital Science and Education 1, no. 2 (2019): 371-390.

[14] Ibid., 93.

[15] Ibid., 99-100.

[16] Ibid., 102.

[17] Ibid., 103.

[18] Ibid., 122.

'No Royal Road' to Revolutionary Education

By Patricia Gorky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Emergence of Neoliberal Education and Its Deteriorating Effects For the Working Class

[Photo credit: Megan Jelinger/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images]

By Yanis Iqbal

Under neoliberal capitalism, the commodification of education has accelerated. Before the establishment of the current accumulation regime, the educational sector was predominantly controlled by an interventionist state, committed to countercyclical macroeconomic management. The labor process of teaching within a state-owned domain followed the general pattern of any other production process. According to Michael Heinrich, such a general form – which is independent of any social determinations – comprises a distinction “among functional activity (labor), the object of labor (which is modified by labor), and the means of labor (the tools with which this process of modification is made possible) as elements of the labor process.”

In the educational setting, labor is the teacher’s intellectual labor-power, the object of labor refers to students, and the means of labor comprises various teaching resources, equipment etc. The state organizes these factors into a particular set of relationships of production. Through the interaction between the elements of the production process, knowledge is generated, which is ultimately crystallized in the new labor power of educated and enculturated students. Thus, as Karl Marx stated, “education produces labor capacity”. Through the production of knowledge-enhanced labor power, the teachers contribute to an increase in labor productivity and facilitate the expansion of capital. In this pedagogical operation, teachers not only aid the reproduction of capital but create surplus-value. David Harvie explains: 

“[T]he exchange value of school, college or university graduates’ labor power (i.e. the wage they can command) may reflect the cost of their education; that is, the value of their educators’ labor power, rather than the value produced by their educators and embodied in the graduates. Yet graduates are, at least potentially, more productive by virtue of their education: by employing these graduates, capital is thereby able to appropriate not only the surplus value produced by them, but also that produced by their teachers.”

As is evident, public education meets certain demands of capitalist development. By skilling and socializing the future labor force, mass homogenous education enables the extensive mobility of personnel which is required under capitalism, in contrast to the feudal era, when people rarely went out of their villages or local areas. In this way, a person is equipped to serve the needs of capital, no matter where s/he is. The mass of working people that is to be educated is dependent on the degree of development of the productive forces. Marx remarked: 

“In order to modify the human organism, so that it may acquire skill and handiness in a given branch of industry, and become labor-power of a special kind, a special education or training is requisite, and this, on its part, costs an equivalent in commodities of a greater or less amount. This amount varies according to the more or less complicated character of the labor-power [emphasis mine]. The expenses of this education (excessively small in the case of ordinary labor-power), enter pro tanto into the total value spent in its production.”

In the post-World War II period, provisions for universal education were made by the state in both the Global North and Global South. For the Global North, the reasons for universalizing education were: a) the need for an educated workforce to promote dynamic economic growth, particularly in science, technology and other white-collar job categories; and b) the threat of communism – represented by the Soviet Union – which forced the Western ruling classes to create a class collaborationist social contract aimed at the fulfillment of workers’ basic needs. For the Global South, the reasons for universalizing education were: a) the need to produce urban pockets of semi-skilled and high-skilled laborers for the smooth execution of import-substitution industrialization; and b) the political dynamics of post-colonial national compacts which required Third World elites to alleviate mass poverty through welfarist methods. 

The promise of universal, state-sponsored education began to wither from the late 1960s. This was caused by the recession that both Global North and South economies faced due to distinct reasons and which forced them to dismantle public education in order to open new opportunities for capitalist expansion. In the Euro-Atlantic world, the economic crisis was the result of a falling rate of profit. According to Edwin N Wolff, the rate of profit decreased by 5.4% from 1966 to 1979 – a downfall precipitated by an increase in the organic composition of capital, and the contradictions of permanent arms economy and growing international competition. In the Global South, the economic crisis was caused by a drop in commodity prices which made the states borrow heavily. To recover, they turned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In return for offering short-term credit, the IMF demanded “structural adjustments” – a euphemism for austerity and the destruction of public utilities. 

Disinvestment of state sector equity and privatization of state sector assets, invariably at throwaway prices, put an end to public education. This process symbolized the thorough commodification of education. In the words of Prabhat Patnaik, this means “not only that the labor power of those who are the products of the education system becomes a commodity, but that the education itself that goes into the production of this commodity [knowledge] becomes a commodity. The education system becomes in other words a process for the production of a commodity (the labor power of those who receive education) by means of a commodity (the education they receive).” In other words, education itself becomes a source of profit-making. 

Marx had predicted this when he wrote the following in Volume one of “Capital: A Critique of Political Economy”: 

“That laborer alone is productive, who produces surplus-value for the capitalist, and thus works for the self-expansion of capital. If we may take an example from outside the sphere of production of material objects, a schoolmaster is a productive laborer, when, in addition to belaboring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation.” 

In “Theories of Surplus Value”, he similarly said: 

“[T]he teachers in educational establishments may be mere wage workers for the entrepreneur of the establishment; many such educational factories exist in England. Although in relation to the pupils such teachers are not productive workers, they are productive workers in relation to their employer. He exchanges his capital for their labor power, and through this process enriches himself.”

The privatization of education is not just another tactical decision taken by capital to overcome barriers to surplus-extraction. It represents a qualitatively developed version of capitalism, one in which capital directly produces socially reproductive processes. As Marx elaborated in the “Grundrisse”: 

“The highest development of capital exists when the general conditions of the process of social reproduction are not paid for out of deductions from the social revenue, the state’s taxes—where revenue and not capital appears as the labor fund, and where the worker, although he is a free wage worker like any other, nevertheless stands economically in a different relation—but rather out of capital as capital. This shows the degree to which capital has subjugated all conditions of social reproduction to itself, on one side; and, on the other side, hence, the extent to which social reproductive wealth has become capitalized, and all needs are satisfied through the exchange form; as well as the extent to which the socially posited needs of the individual, i.e. those which he consumes and feels not as a single individual in society, but communally with others— whose mode of consumption is social by the nature of the thing—are likewise not only consumed but also produced through exchange, individual exchange”.

When private accumulation through an expropriation of state assets meets vigorous resistance, public sector activities themselves are cheapened through exploitative methods. In the case of education, the state either lowers labor costs by devaluing the work of teaching or asks teachers to do more with the same or fewer resources. This predictably leads to systematic casualization and forced flexibilization. Budgetary cuts to government institutions lead to problems of underfunding, encouraging the university administration to seek the help of external funders, such as well-resourced corporations. In this way, universities get reconstructed as an educational equivalent of joint-stock companies, subject to the ruthless and coercive logic of competition for research grants and student numbers. 

While in the initial period of neoliberalization the gutting of public education functioned as a conjunctural move to shore up profit rates, over the succeeding years it became structurally tethered to the economic requirements of a reworked productive base. In Northern countries, neoliberalism has led to three developments. First, investments have decreased due to overproduction, weak demand (caused by wage depression) and low profit rates in the productive sectors. Consequently, asset accumulation by speculative means has replaced actual accumulation or productive investment as a route to the increase of wealth, generating a system whose growth is based on financial bubbles and unsustainable explosions of credit/debt. 

Second, given the already high organic composition of capital, new productive investments have relied on automation, thus giving a temporary market advantage to the capitalist who is the first to introduce the technology. This technology allows him/her to squeeze out more value from each worker in a given period of time. But when the labor-saving technology becomes generalized in a sector, the benefits accruing to the capitalist are eliminated since everyone now produces commodities with the same automated labor process. Third, Northern capital has shifted the locus of value creation from the core to the periphery, outsourcing jobs to Third World where wages are very low. In other words, giant multinational monopolies are using differential rates of national exploitation to gain super-profits. 

All in all, the net effect of the aforementioned three changes is to reduce the number of individuals who are needed as trained workers in the Global North and thus, progressively deskill work. This, in turn, eliminates the need for an architecture of public education. In his book “The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame”, David Blacker explains: 

“The situation with production has changed due to its automation and globalization such that proportionately far fewer of the individuals once comprising the working classes of the global North are needed as workers. These people are being cut out of the economic loop altogether through a variety of proximal means: outsourcing, attrition, layoffs etc. They are being “casualized,” which is to say rendered ever-more precarious as forced participants in an increasingly stressful, dangerous, less stable and less remunerative subsistence “informal” economy. The autoworker becomes a service attendant who becomes a street vendor or worse…How much education do these latter really need? How much will elites tax themselves for such “waste”?

In Southern countries, neoliberalism has signified the assassination of the Third World project and the attendant blockage of autocentric development. This has translated into the entrenchment of extroverted economies. Countries rich in natural resources export primary goods to the Global North, and then tend to re-import manufactured products from these same countries. The value added to these manufactured commodities – typically constructed from the primary inputs imported earlier – generates profit for Northern countries while maintaining the Southern countries in a perpetual trade deficit. Other countries have soldered their economic engine to giant multinational corporations who through outsourcing operations and subcontracting chains extend parts of their productive processes to the South in search of abundant and cheap labor. 

The twin processes of primarization and global labor arbitrage have converted the Third World into an impoverished arena of labor-intensive activities such as extractivism, production, processing, and assembly, with export-oriented industrialization never going beyond the production of simple parts in mass quantities. Performing relatively unspecialized operations for multinationals, the jobs of peripheral workers generally feature low wages, high labor intensity, long working hours, and poor working environments. The global tendency toward deskilling, however, has not completely erased skilled labor. Financialization and the revolution in communications and digitalized technology have given rise to elitist and exclusive high-tech education training for high-skilled and knowledge workers. William I. Robinson notes: 

“[W]ork is increasingly polarized between unskilled and low-skilled labor on the farms and in the factories and office and service complexes of the global economy (as well as in the armed and security forces of the global police state), and on the other hand, high skilled technical and knowledge workers. While it is still too early to draw a final conclusion, it is likely that the revolutions just getting underway in nanotechnology, bio-engineering, 3D manufacturing, the Internet of Things, and robotic and machine intelligence—the revolutionary technologies of the immediate future, the so-called fourth industrial revolution—will only heighten this tendency towards bifurcation in the world's workforce between high-skilled tech and knowledge workers and those relegated to Mcjobs, at best, or simply to surplus labor.”

Taking into account the inextricability of neoliberal capitalism and a deregulated-commodified education, any struggle for public education has to strike at the very roots of economic exploitation. If the grotesque wealth inequalities inflicted by neoliberal savagery upon the working masses are allowed to remain, then a proliferation of public institutions providing inexpensive education would result only in the subsidization of upwardly mobile social classes. Therefore, a growth in government spending on education has to be accompanied by a strategy of nationalizations, wealth taxation, capital controls etc. Even then, the sustainable spread of socially progressive and universal education can be ensured only when the decision-making on investment and jobs has been taken out of the hands of the capitalist sector. For all of this to happen, we need to build a radical movement that is willing to abolish capitalism and pave the way toward communist experiments.

No Letup In Economic And Social Decline: How Capitalism is Pushing the U.S. and World to the Brink of Disaster

By Shawgi Tell

Economic and social conditions have been worsening for decades at home and abroad, especially in the context of the neoliberal antisocial offensive which was launched more than 40 years ago by the international financial oligarchy. But they have been getting even worse in recent years and over the past two years in particular.

Inequality, poverty, and debt, along with homelessness, unemployment, and under-employment are on the rise in an increasingly interconnected globe. It is no surprise that suicide, depression, illness, and anxiety persist at very high levels. There is an unbreakable connection between economic, social, and personal conditions. As economic and social conditions decline, so too do people’s mental, emotional, and physical well-being.

Below is a current snapshot of deteriorating economic and social conditions in the U.S. and elsewhere. The U.S. population currently stands at 332,403,650. The world population is 7,868,872,451 (December 30, 2021. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/news-years-day-2022.html). 

CONDITIONS IN THE U.S.

American student loan debt increased at a rate of 20 percent in the last ten years, leaving college graduates with hefty payments. The student loan debt in the US is a growing crisis with college graduates owing a collective $1.75 trillion in student loans. In 2021, there are 44.7 million Americans who have student loan debt averaging about $30,000 at the time of receiving their undergraduate degree (December 22, 2021. https://www.the-sun.com/money/4271983/how-many-americans-have-student-loan-debt/). 

The number of Americans living without homes, in shelters, or on the streets continues to rise at an alarming rate (December 28, 2021. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/whats-behind-rising-homelessness-in-america). 

The $5 trillion in wealth now held by 745 billionaires is two-thirds more than the $3 trillion in wealth held by the bottom 50 percent of U.S. households estimated by the Federal Reserve Board (October 18, 2021. https://inequality.org/great-divide/billionaires-2-trillion-richer-than-before-pandemic/). 

The official poverty rate in 2020 was 11.4 percent, up 1.0 percentage point from 10.5 percent in 2019. This is the first increase in poverty after five consecutive annual declines. In 2020, there were 37.2 million people in poverty, approximately 3.3 million more than in 2019 (September 14, 2021. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-273.html). 

After the longest period in history without an increase, the federal minimum wage today is worth 21% less than 12 years ago—and 34% less than in 1968 (December 21, 2021. https://www.epi.org/blog/epis-top-charts-and-tables-of-2021/). 

CEOs were paid 351 times as much as a typical worker in 2020 (August 10, 2021. https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2020/). 

[F]or seven months of 2021, workers have been quitting at near-record rates (December 8, 2021. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-many-why-workers-quit-jobs-this-year-great-resignation-2021-12). 

More than 4.5 million people voluntarily left their jobs in November [2021], the Labor Department said Tuesday. That was up from 4.2 million in October and was the most in the two decades that the government has been keeping track (January 4, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/04/business/economy/job-openings-coronavirus.html). 

According to a report by UCLA’s Latino Policy & Politics Initiative, Latinas are leaving the workforce at higher rates than any other demographic. Between March 2020 and March 2021, the number of Latinas in the workforce dropped by 2.74%, meaning there are 336,000 fewer Latinas in the labor force (December 28, 2021. https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2021/12/10759406/latinas-leave-jobs). 

The adult women’s labor force participation rate remains blunted at 57.5%—well below pre-pandemic levels. In fact, it’s worse than pre-pandemic levels (January 5, 2022. https://www.fastcompany.com/90710355/where-are-all-the-women-workers). 

U.S. job openings jumped in October to the second-highest on record, underscoring the ongoing challenge for employers to find qualified workers for an unprecedented number of vacancies. The number of available positions rose to 11 million from an upwardly revised 10.6 million in September (December 8, 2021. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-08/u-s-job-openings-rose-in-october-quits-rate-dropped#:~:text=Meanwhile%2C%20the%20quits%20rate%20fell,to%2010.5%20million%20job%20openings).  

As of November [2021], 15.6 million workers in the US are still being affected by the pandemic’s economic downturn; 3.9 million US workers are out of the labor force due to Covid-19, 6.9 million workers are still unemployed, 2 million workers are still experiencing cuts to pay or work schedules due to Covid-19, and another 3 million workers are misclassified as employed or out of the labor force, according to the Economic Policy Institute (December 17, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/17/americans-coronavirus-unemployment-holidays). 

About 2.2 million Americans remain long-term unemployed — about 1.1 million more than in February 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (December 3, 2021. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/03/long-term-unemployment-fell-again-but-at-slowest-pace-since-april.html). 

[I]n 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated in November that more than 100,000 people died of drug overdoses in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, May 2020 to April 2021, with about three-quarters of those deaths involving opioids — a national record (December 27, 2021. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/opioid-crisis-2021-insys-kapoor-sackler-purdue-record-deaths/). 

U.S. death rate soared 17 percent in 2020, final CDC mortality report concludes (December 22, 2021. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/us-death-rate-soared-17-2020-final-cdc-mortality-report-concludes-rcna9527). 

Life Insurance CEO Says Deaths Up 40% Among Those Aged 18-64 (January 3, 2022. https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/life-insurance-ceo-says-deaths-40-among-those-aged-18-64-and-not-because-covid). 

Suicide rates increased 33% between 1999 and 2019, with a small decline in 2019. Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States. It was responsible for more than 47,500 deaths in 2019, which is about one death every 11 minutes. The number of people who think about or attempt suicide is even higher. In 2019, 12 million American adults seriously thought about suicide, 3.5 million planned a suicide attempt, and 1.4 million attempted suicide. Suicide affects all ages. It is the second leading cause of death for people ages 10-34, the fourth leading cause among people ages 35-44, and the fifth leading cause among people ages 45-54 (https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/index.html#). 

Alarming Anxiety & Depression Toll making All Time Record Highs Impacting 30% of all Americans (December 29, 2021. https://www.einnews.com/pr_news/559441306/alarming-anxiety-depression-toll-making-all-time-record-highs-impacting-30-of-all-americans). 

[Depression] has been rising for well more than a decade in teens and hiked further during the pandemic. And after a pandemic-induced spike, depression symptoms now plague more than a quarter of U.S. adults. More than 13% of Americans were taking antidepressants before Covid hit and during the pandemic, prescriptions shot up 6% (June 17, 2021. https://elemental.medium.com/the-real-problem-with-antidepressants-898e83133bbc). 

At least 12 major U.S. cities have broken annual homicide records in 2021 (December 8, 2021. https://abcnews.go.com/US/12-major-us-cities-top-annual-homicide-records/story?id=81466453). 

Private health insurance coverage declined for working-age adults ages 19 to 64 from early 2019 to early 2021, when the nation experienced the COVID-19 pandemic (September 14, 2021. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/09/private-health-coverage-of-working-age-adults-drops-from-early-2019-to-early-2021.html). 

In 2020, 4.3 million children under the age of 19 — 5.6% of all children — were without health coverage for the entire calendar year (September 14, 2021. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/09/uninsured-rates-for-children-in-poverty-increased-2018-2020.html). 

INTERNATIONAL CONDITIONS

Even as tens of millions of people were being pushed into destitution, the ultra-rich became wealthier. Last year, billionaires enjoyed the highest boost to their share of wealth on record, according to the World Inequality Lab (December 26, 2021. https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/26/business/global-poverty-covid-pandemic-intl-hnk/index.html).

Global wealth inequality is even more pronounced than income inequality. The poorest half of the world’s population only possess 2 percent of the total wealth. In contrast, the wealthiest 10 percent own 76 percent of all wealth, with $771,300 (€550,900) on average (December 9, 2021. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/12/09/sfpa-d09.html). 

The pandemic has pushed approximately 100 million people into extreme poverty, boosting the global total to 711 million in 2021 (December 9, 2021. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/12/09/sfpa-d09.html). 

More than half a billion people pushed or pushed further into extreme poverty due to health care costs (December 12, 2021. https://www.who.int/news/item/12-12-2021-more-than-half-a-billion-people-pushed-or-pushed-further-into-extreme-poverty-due-to-health-care-costs). 

World leaders urged to halt escalating hunger crisis as 17% more people expected to need life-saving aid in 2022 (December 2, 2021. https://reliefweb.int/report/world/world-leaders-urged-halt-escalating-hunger-crisis-17-more-people-expected-need-life). 

33% of Arab world doesn't have enough food: UN report. The Arab world witnessed a 91.1 per cent increase in hunger since 2000, affecting 141 million people (December 17, 2021. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20211217-33-of-arab-world-doesnt-have-enough-food-un-report/). 

The 60% of low-income countries the IMF says are now near or in debt distress compares with less than 30% as recently as 2015 (December 15, 2021. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/12/how-to-spare-low-income-countries-from-economic-collapse/). 

According to a recent Gallup poll, 63 percent of Lebanese would like to permanently leave the country in the face of worsening living conditions (December 15, 2021. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/12/15/lebanese-look-to-cyprus-as-local-economy-crumbles). 

25% of households in Israel live in poverty (December 21, 2021. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20211221-25-of-households-in-israel-live-in-poverty/). 

Turkey's annual inflation rate is expected to have hit 30.6% in December, according to a Reuters poll, breaching the 30% level for the first time since 2003 as prices rose due to record lira volatility (December 28, 2021. https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/turkish-inflation-seen-above-30-december-amid-lira-weakness-2021-12-28/). 

Kazakhstan government resigns amid protests over rising fuel prices (January 5, 2022. https://www.ft.com/). 

Pakistanis squeezed by inflation face more pain from tax hikes (December 13, 2021. https://www.reuters.com/markets/rates-bonds/pakistanis-squeezed-by-inflation-face-more-pain-tax-hikes-2021-12-13/). 

November saw inflation rise by 14.23 percent, building on a pattern of double-digit increases that have hit India for several months now. Fuel and energy prices rose nearly 40 percent last month. Urban unemployment – most of the better-paying jobs are in cities – has been moving up since September and is now above 9 percent (December 28, 2021. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/28/india-economy). 

Sri Lanka is facing a deepening financial and humanitarian crisis with fears it could go bankrupt in 2022 as inflation rises to record levels, food prices rocket and its coffers run dry (January 2, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/02/covid-crisis-sri-lanka-bankruptcy-poverty-pandemic-food-prices). 

Index shows South Africa’s economy is shrinking (December 14, 2021. https://businesstech.co.za/news/finance/546978/index-shows-south-africas-economy-is-shrinking/). 

COVID-19 spike worsens Africa's severe poverty, hunger woes (December 24, 2021. https://www.npr.org/2021/12/24/1067772373/covid-19-spike-worsens-africas-severe-poverty-hunger-woes). 

Latin America’s biggest economy [Brazil] is seen remaining stuck in recession as it confronts double-digit price increases (December 11, 2021. https://www.wsj.com/articles/brazil-grapples-with-old-nemesis-inflation-amid-pandemic-11639234804). 

Japan admits overstating economic data for nearly a decade (December 15, 2021. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/12/15/japan-admits-overstating-economic-data-for-nearly-a-decade). 

New Zealanders are feeling pessimistic about the economy, worried about rising interest rates and the prospect of new Covid-19 variants, Westpac’s latest consumer confidence data shows (December 20, 2021. https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/300482163/pessimism-reigns-as-nz-ponders-2022-economy-without-elimination-strategy). 

Canadians’ optimism towards their financial health and the economy at large reached its lowest point in more than a year during the final work week of 2021, according to Bloomberg and Nanos Research (January 5, 2022. https://www.mpamag.com/ca/mortgage-industry/market-updates/canadian-financial-and-economic-sentiments-reach-new-low/321010). 

Polish Inflation to Rise Sharply in 2022, Central Bank Boss Says (December 30, 2021. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-30/polish-inflation-to-rise-sharply-in-2022-central-bank-boss-says?srnd=economics-vp). 

Inflation is at its highest level in the UK since 2011 (December 21, 2021. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/12/22/cost-d22.html). 

The Resolution Foundation predicts higher energy bills, stagnant wages and tax rises could leave [U.K.] households with a £1,200 a year hit to their incomes (December 30, 2021. https://www.businessghana.com/site/news/Business/253660/UK-cost-of-living-squeeze-in-2022,-says-think-tank). 

Air travel in and out of UK slumps by 71% in 2021 amid pandemic. Report from aviation analytics firm Cirium shows domestic flights were down by almost 60% (December 29, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/dec/29/air-travel-in-and-out-of-uk-slumps-in-2021-amid-pandemic). 

Annual inflation in Spain rises 6.7% in December, the highest level in nearly three decades (December 30, 2021. https://english.elpais.com/economy-and-business/2021-12-30/annual-inflation-in-spain-rises-67-in-december-the-highest-level-in-nearly-three-decades.html). 

Germany's Bundesbank lowers 2022 economic growth forecast (December 17, 2021. https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-bundesbank-lowers-2022-economic-growth-forecast/a-60156000). 

OECD predicts Latvia to have the slowest economic growth among Baltic States (December 2, 2021. https://bnn-news.com/oecd-predicts-latvia-to-have-the-slowest-economic-growth-among-baltic-states-230531). 

While deteriorating economic, social, and personal conditions define many other countries and regions, the main question is why do such horrible problems persist in the 21st century? The scientific and technical revolution of the last 250 years has objectively enabled and empowered humankind to solve major problems and to meet the basic needs of all humans while improving the natural environment. There are a million creative ways to affirm the rights of all safely, sustainably, quickly, and on a constantly-improving basis. There is no reason for persistent and widespread instability, chaos, and insecurity. Living and working standards should be steadily rising everywhere in the 21st century, not continually declining for millions. Objectively, there is no shortage or scarcity of socially-produced wealth to meet the needs of all.

Under existing political-economic arrangements, however, systemic instabilities and crises will persist for the foreseeable future, ensuring continued anxiety and hardship for millions. The rich and their political representatives have repeatedly demonstrated that they are unable and unwilling to solve serious problems. They are out of touch and self-serving. As a result, the world is full of more chaos, anarchy, insecurity, and violence of all forms. The rich are concerned only with their narrow private interests no matter how damaging this is to the natural and social environment. They do not recognize the need for a self-reliant, diverse, and balanced economy controlled and directed by working people. They reject the human factor and social consciousness in all affairs.

It is not possible to overcome unresolved economic and social problems so long as the economy remains dominated by a handful of billionaires. It is impossible to invest socially-produced wealth in social programs and services so long as the workers who produce that wealth have no control over it. Every year, more and more of the wealth produced by workers fills the pockets of fewer and fewer billionaires, thereby exacerbating many problems. Wealth concentration has reached extremely absurd levels. 

It is extremely difficult to bring about change that favors the people so long as the cartel political parties of the rich dominate politics and keep people out of power. Constantly begging and “pressuring” politicians to fulfill people’s most basic rights is humiliating, exhausting, and ineffective. It does not work. No major problems have been solved in years. More problems keep appearing no matter which party of the rich is in power. The obsolete two-party system stands more discredited with each passing year. Getting excited every 2-4 years about which candidate of the rich will win an election has not brought about deep and lasting changes that favor the people. It is no surprise that President Joe Biden’s approval rating keeps hitting new lows every few weeks. People want change that favors them, not more schemes to pay the rich in the name of “getting things done” or “serving the public.” “Building Back Better” should not mean tons more money for the rich and a few crumbs for the rest of us.

A fresh new alternative is needed that actually empowers the people themselves to direct all the affairs of society. New arrangements that unleash the human factor and enable people to practically implement pro-social changes are needed urgently. All the old institutions of liberal democracy and the so-called “social contract” disappeared long ago and cannot provide a way forward. They are part of an old obsolete world that continually blocks the affirmation of human rights. This law or that law from this mainstream party or that mainstream party is not going to save the day. The cartel parties of the rich became irrelevant long ago.

We are in an even more violent and chaotic environment today that is yearning for a new and modern alternative that affirms the rights of all and prevents any individuals, governments, or corporations from depriving people of their rights. People themselves must be the decision-makers so that the wealth of society is put in the service of society. Constantly paying the rich more while gutting social programs and enterprises is a recipe for greater tragedies.

Shawgi Tell, PhD, is author of the book “Charter School Report Card.” His main research interests include charter schools, neoliberal education policy, privatization and political economy. He can be reached at stell5@naz.edu.

The Base-Superstructure: A Model for Analysis and Action

By Derek Ford

Although Marx himself only mentioned the “base” and “superstructure” in (by my count) two of his works, the base-superstructure “problem” remains a source of serious contention for Marxists, our sympathizers, and our critics. Despite its outsized role in Marxist debates, the model can, when contextualized and understood in its nuances, be quite useful for analyzing capitalist society and organizing for socialism [1].

Marx explicitly introduces the distinction between the base and superstructure in the preface to his 1859 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In the preface, Marx builds on his previous work with Engels, The German Ideology, writing:

“In the social production of their existence, humans inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” [2].

The base of society—which is also translated as “infrastructure”—includes the relations of production and the productive forces. Productive forces name labor-power, instruments or tools used by workers, and the materials workers transform in the production process. The relations of production entail the social organization of production and reproduction, or how the re/production of life is structured. It’s important to emphasize that the base isn’t just the forces of production but production relations, which are not only economic but social.

The superstructure comprises the political-legal system of the state and consciousness—or ideology—in general, which manifests in culture and art, religion and spirituality, ethics and philosophy, etc. The superstructure emerges from the totality of the relations of production. Political activity and intellectual processes and products are conditioned by the mode of production (the relations and forces of production). And as we’ll see below, elements of the superstructure in turn impact the base.

According to Engels, he and Marx laid so much emphasis on the importance of the base because of their historical and material context, because they were responding to those who denied the importance of production. In an 1890 letter to the German socialist Joseph Bloch in which Engels clarifies their model, he notes that “we had to emphasize the main principle vis-à-vis our adversaries, who denied it” [3]. Earlier in the letter, he writes that “the ultimately determining factor in history is the production and reproduction of real life,” and that “if somebody twists this into saying that the economic factor is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, absurd phrase” [4].

Engels infers that Bloch’s questions come from his study of secondary literature only, and he asks Bloch to read the primary sources, referring him in particular to Marx’s 1852 book, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, perhaps the only other place Marx mentioned the superstructure explicitly (although he alludes to it elsewhere). In this earlier work, Marx formulates the superstructure like this:

“Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought, and views of life. The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding relations” [5].

Classes, that is, collectives defined by their location in the totality of social production, produce ways of feeling, thinking, and understanding life.

The context and relations of the base and superstructure

That the model isn’t a mechanical formula—in which the base unidirectionally produces the superstructure—is evident when we consider the context in which it appears.

A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy was the product of Marx’s ongoing work on Capital. What were some of Marx’s main critiques of political economy? First, it took appearances for granted and didn’t ask about the underlying structures that generated such appearances. Second, it viewed political economy and the world as a series of independent objects and subjects, when they were interconnected and interrelated parts of a unity or totality that was in constant motion. Third, and as a result of the first two critiques, it didn’t take a historical-materialist approach to understanding these transformations, projecting present categories back into the past and the future, so that capitalism as a social system was figured as eternal.

Those who take the base as independent and static thus side with Marx’s bourgeois adversaries. It’s not an economistic formula in which changes in the economy automatically and predictably lead to changes in society. The base-superstructure is a “spatial metaphor” that serves descriptive purposes [6]. While it can lend itself to a reading whereby what happens below determines what happens on top, if read as a Marxist model it’s helpful for understanding and analyzing the dynamics of the class struggle.

This is why Marx used the superstructure in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: to “distinguish still more the phrases and fancies of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality” [7]. He goes on to partially locate the failure of the 1848 Paris revolution and the success of the 1851 coup of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in the emergence of social-democracy, which

“is epitomized in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not of doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labor, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony. However different the means proposed for the attainment of this end may be, however much it may be trimmed with more or less revolutionary notions, the content remains the same” [8].

The social-democratic forces, while using revolutionary phrasings, didn’t seek to overthrow the existing relations of production but to manage them in a more equitable manner through the capitalist political and legal superstructure.

Marxism and the base-superstructure model

Given the above, it’s clear that the model is dialectical. As a historical-materialist, Marx understood that the base and superstructure of society change over time and are context-dependent. Neither the base nor superstructure, nor the relationship between the two, are unified, static, or ahistorical.

The relations of production in U.S. capitalism are neither unified nor even strictly economic in the sense that they’re structured and divided by race, nationality, gender, dis/ability, sexuality, and other hierarchies. Engels affirms that the relations of production are social (and racial) in an 1894 letter to the German anarchist Walther Borgius. Responding to Borgius’ request for clarification on the role of the base, Engels acknowledges that “economic conditions… ultimately determine historical development. But race itself is an economic factor” [9]. Clearly race is part of the base, yet it’s obviously superstructural as well, in that 1) race is a historically constructed and evolving category and 2) it’s maintained and ordered not just by economic forces and relations but by elements like culture, the media, and the legal system.

In fact, Engels soon after says that “political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development is based on economic development. But all these react upon one another and also upon the economic base” [10]. The boundaries between the base and superstructure are not static or fixed, and superstructural elements in society work to reproduce elements of the base.

Capitalism requires, for example, the legal system of the state to enforce private property rights. In this instance, it’s crucial to the reproduction of the base. Because the capitalist legal system arises from capitalist relations of production, changes in the legal system might alter the existing relations of production, but they can’t fundamentally overthrow them, for that requires the creation of a new social and economic system.

Although Marx didn’t spend much time studying the political economy of cultural activity, another example of the dynamism of the model appears in his argument that artists and other cultural workers are productive agents. He distinguishes those who produce surplus value from those who don’t, although both can be forms of wage-labor (for example, working for the state doesn’t produce surplus value but is a form of labor-power sold to another). Marx conceptualizes intellectual work, dancing, writing, singing, and other “artistic” or “cultural” actions, when performed through the commodity of labor power, as forms of wage labor [11]. Such forms of work can thus be viewed through the prism of the base or superstructure.

All of this highlights that the base and superstructure is a metaphor and model for Marxists, a way to analyze and approach society and social transformation rather than an easy explanation.

Smart phones: An example

To get a better handle on the relationship between material production and ideas or mental conceptions, think about the proliferation of “smart phones.” When, in order to e-mail, we used to have to sit at a computer and connect via cables to the internet, we had a different idea of time and communication than we do now that many of us can e-mail wherever and whenever. A 2021 Pew Research Poll found that 85 percent of people overall (and 73 percent of people earning less than $30,000 annually) in the U.S. have smart phones, so this isn’t a minor phenomenon [12].

The technology makes it possible for your boss to require you to respond to e-mails (e.g., to work) at night. It blurs the distinction between work and life, let alone between work and leisure. How many of us respond to work e-mails on vacation? The smart phone makes it possible for me to ask you a minor question or a series of them throughout the day, rather than wait and type one single e-mail. We begin to think of time differently, and we begin to relate to each other differently. When I was a student, for example, it was normal for teachers to respond to e-mails within a few days. Now the expectation is that teachers respond within hours.

Even our feelings and bodies change. Have you ever felt your phone vibrate in your pocket only to realize it didn’t? This is called “phantom vibration syndrome.” A 2011 study of 290 undergraduate students found that around “89% of the sample had experienced phantom vibrations, and 40% experienced these vibrations at least once a week” [13]. Yet the smart phone didn’t arise spontaneously, it wasn’t dropped from the heavens. Workers conceived of it, designed it, produced it, and made it all possible. It’s a productive material force that changes our forms of consciousness, ways of feeling, senses of time, and more. Yet the reason smart phones were produced and subsequently distributed throughout society is because they increase the productivity of labor. The same object that, when used for work, enters into the base, when used for non-work purposes, enters into the superstructure.

Utilizing the model for the revolutionary movement

The socialist revolution can’t come without changing the base of society, as it entails transforming private ownership into collective ownership, abolishing capitalist relations and constructing socialist relations. But the superstructure reacts on the base and informs it. There’s a dynamic interplay between the two, and the question is not so much what is located in which part of the model as what is the most strategically significant for advancing the class struggle in a particular setting? The abolition of wage labor—the socialist revolution—has to focus on the superstructure and the base and understand their composition, contradictions, and potentials.

In the chapter on the working day in Capital, Marx describes the decades-long struggle for a “normal” working day. He quotes horrific details about the abuses of industrial capitalism on workers from factory inspectors. At the end of the chapter he declares that “the labourers must put their heads together, and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall prevent the very workers from selling, by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death.” In other words, the tactical objective is to establish “a legally limited working-day” [14].

This is a clarion call for a change in the superstructure, for a legal reform. It’s a significant fight to reduce the working day, not only to protect workers from the abuses of bosses but also to give workers more time to organize. At the same time, it impacts the base of society as well, because given a limited working day, capital has to pursue other avenues to accumulate extra surplus value. In fact, it’s with these limitations that capital turns to the production of relative surplus value, which is when capitalism as a mode of production properly comes into being [15].

Another example is Marx’s critique of Alfred Darimon, a follower of Proudhon, who wanted to introduce a “socialist form” of money that would represent the actual time that workers labored. While Marx acknowledged that “one form [of money] may remedy evils against which another is powerless… as long as they remain forms of money” they’ll reproduce these evils elsewhere in the same way that “one form of wage labour may correct the abuses of another, but no form of wage labour can correct the abuse of wage labour itself” [16]. Capitalism can’t be overthrown without changing the relations of production.

Revolutions require objective and subjective conditions. Without changes in mass consciousness—which are superstructural but relate to and impact the base—no crisis of capitalism will lead to a new mode of production. A crisis in the capitalist system can, in turn, help change that consciousness, but is not in itself sufficient. Neither can be viewed or approached in isolation, and have to be approached as interacting within the shifting totality of capitalist society. In response to these approaches, our tactics and strategies change.

References

[1] Thanks to Jon Greenway for feedback on an earlier draft of this article.
[2] Marx, Karl. (1859/1970).A contribution to the critique of political economy(New York: International Publishers), 20-21.
[3] Engels, Friedrich. (1890/1965). “Engels to Joseph Bloch.” InMarx-Engels selected correspondence(New York: Progress Publishers), 396.
[4] Ibid., 394, 396.
[5] Marx, Karl. (1852/1972).The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte(New York: International Publishers), 47.
[6] Althusser, Louis. (1995/2014).On the reproduction of capitalism: Ideology and ideological state apparatuses, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (New York: Verso), 54.
[7] Marx,The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 47.
[8] Ibid., 50.
[9] Engels, Friedrich. (1894/1965). “Engels to W. Borgius in Breslau.” InMarx-Engels selected correspondence(New York: Progress Publishers), 441.
[10] Ibid., 441-442.
[11] Marx, Karl. (1939/1990). “Appendix: Results of the immediate process of production.” In Karl Marx,Capital: A critique of political economy (vol. 1), trans. B. Fowkes (New York: Penguin), 1044.
[12] Pew Research Center. (2021). “Mobile fact sheet.”Pew Research center, April 7 Availablehere.
[13] Drouin, Michelle, Daren H. Kaiser, and Daniel A. Miller. (2012). “Phantom vibrations among undergraduates: Prevalence and associated psychological characteristics.”Computers in Human Behavior28, no. 4: 1493.
[14] Marx, Karl. (1867/1967).Capital: A critique of political economy (vol. 1): A critical analysis of capitalist production, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers), 285, 286.
[15] See Majidi, Mazda. (2021). “Relative surplus value: The class struggle intensifies.”Liberation School, 18 August. Availablehere.
[16] Marx, Karl. (1939/1973).Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy (rough draft), trans. M. Nicolaus (New York: Penguin), 123.

The Decarceral Possibilities of Political Education

By John Kamaal Sunjata

We must confront the carceral structures mechanistically embedded in our methods of education. Unfortunately, school as a social formation reflects the deeper, carceral logics animating the racial capitalist state. Therefore, we must take an abolitionist approach to education that subverts its institutional patterning—the acquiescence of our collective will, the subordination of our critical faculties, and the total indoctrination of the masses for the purposes of status-quo reproduction. The current style of education (re)fabricates racial capitalist social relations and extends the racial-coloniality of white supremacy. Part of revolutionary political education then must cultivate an environment wherein educators are not mere fonts of carceral authority, but authoritative fulcrums in the invention of decarcerated learning. The student is not an object where “knowledge” is deposited, rather both the student and educator are subjects in the process of learning. Paulo Friere identified the banking model of education, the one we are most intimately familiar with, in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and advocated for what he called the “problem-posing method.” Learning is the process where we gather useful data and construct information in reflective participation and reflexive equilibrium with material reality. Knowledge is the result of this dynamic feedback, a culmination of exertions where we engage our critical faculties and weigh numerous rationales against material reality; material reality itself is an active participant in the process of knowledge-creation. The individualized struggle against the obstacles of intellectualism becomes a shared, collectivized struggle when all concerned parties are partnered together in pitched, dialectical motion as its functionaries.

Education must not be an exercise in the domination of the vulnerable, but an exercise in the liberation of the oppressed. We don’t want to reproduce carceral forms, we want learning environments where freedom flourishes edenistically. The dominant convention supports racial capitalism, racial-colonialism, and white supremacism; the dominant convention is ultimately the state of ordinary and extraordinary oppressions due to the machinations of political economy. If we endeavor to overturn the dominant convention, we must design the learning environments where revolutionaries are created. For education to be a force that produces revolutionaries, we must curate intellectual creativity, curiosity, and critique. Collapsing the relationship of carceral authority that educators hold over students is crucial to creating a shared struggle, and a shared struggle is crucial for mutual respect. As such, mutual respect only springs forth once unjustified hierarchies are directly confronted and vigorously resisted. The natural advantage the educator tends to hold above the student is intellectual experience in the form of crystalized and fluid knowledge. However, despite this, there is still space for shared struggle to occur.

Shared struggle is a necessary and sufficient condition for liberation for, as Chairman Fred Hampton once said, “If [we] dare to struggle, [we] dare to win. If [we] dare not struggle, then…[we] don't deserve to win.” Shared struggle is only possible in the presence of opposition. Opposition always presents a reactionary resistance inversely related to any new sociopolitical currents. Reactionary resistance cannot be overcome without a greater revolutionary opposition or an escalation in the level of shared struggle. So, shared struggle itself is necessary for dramatic ruptures from dominant convention. Protracted relationships of mutual respect transform into relationships of true solidarity. When an educator engages in an abolitionist politic, they will develop true solidarity with their students. When the educator is in true solidarity with their students, their institutional authorities will be utilized to protect the students from the carceral logics of schooling. The educator in democratic consultation with the students will develop ethical and sensible ways to solve interpersonal conflicts without soliciting any part of the carceral state.

An epistemic dialogue is the set of relations dialectically forged between educator–students and student–educators as subjects in learning through the shared struggle within an educational environment, inherited or developed. The communities within the sphere are affected by these dynamics as the subjects engage their material realities based upon new discoveries. True solidarity directly engages everyone with the epistemic dialogue required to collectively transform our material realities. The interactions that take place within the epistemic dialogue can be regarded as epistemic discourses. When we develop our capacities to critically approach epistemic discourses, we are equipping ourselves with tactics and strategies to subvert the dominant convention that defines our current epistemic dialogue. Our capacities are bolstered by sharpening our reflective participation and reflexive equilibrium.

Reflexive equilibrium requires we balance theory against intuitive convictions; develop general principles of ideas alongside their moral judgments, and balance ethical statements with opposing or antagonistic ethical concepts against the moral conceptions undergirding the general principles motivating so-called “common sense.” We must consider the logical corollaries of every decision and anticipate the decisions that our decisions may make. In short, we think, learn, and adjust accordingly through an interactive process.

We must also hone our reflective participation, or our investigation of phenomenon from our experiments and reflecting upon generated insights. Without an abundance of active reflection, in the presence of passive participation, people will default on the side of the dominant capitalist–imperialist paradigm. Counterrevolutionary forces will (re)create what we currently have: a society of pawns. Hence, it is the responsibility of educators and students to prefigure the ecosystem conducive for producing revolutionaries.