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

By Colin Jenkins

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

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

- Karl Marx (Capital: Volume One)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Helen Keller

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

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

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

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

Primitive Accumulation, Slavery, and "Old Wealth"

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

- Karl Marx

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Peter Kropotkin (The Conquest of Bread)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Property is Theft": On Private Property and Landlordism

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

- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (What is Property?)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Natural Resources: On Colonialism and Global Looting

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

- Michael Parenti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Trickery Behind "New Wealth"

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

- Eugene V. Debs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Currency and Debt as Means to Maintain Hierarchy

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

- Margaret Atwood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expropriation is not Theft; It's Justice

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

- C.L.R. James

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

[5] Blair (2000)

[6] Miller and Lapham (2012)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[15] Ibid

[16] Zinn, p. 65.

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

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

[19] Zinn, p. 90.

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

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

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

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

[24] Ibid

[25] Ibid

[26] Ibid

[27] Peter Linebaugh, Stop, Thief!

[28] Ibid

[29] Ibid

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

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

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

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

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

[35] Ibid

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

[37] Ibid

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

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

[40] Ibid

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

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

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

[44] Ibid

[45] Ibid

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

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

[48] Ibid, p. 311

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

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

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

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

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

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

[55] Ibid

[56] Ibid

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

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

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

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

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

[62] Graeber, Debt, p. 16

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

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

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

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

[67] Ibid

[68] Graeber, Debt, p. 8

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

[70] Graeber, Debt, p. 56

[71] Graeber, Debt, p. 60

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

[73] Ibid

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

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

[76] Ibid

[77] Ibid

[78] Ibid

[79] Ibid

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

Brazil's Gramscian Moment: On Cultural Hegemony and Crisis

By Jacques Simon

With the Brazilian senate confirming Dilma Rousseff's impeachment procedure, it seems increasingly likely that Brazil could soon see the long-loved Workers Party (PT) out of office. Given the seemingly unshakable support that the party had up until a few years ago, the deep political crisis that Brazil faces today may seem a bit surprising. How is it that, after winning four consecutive elections, three by a landslide, the PT's Dilma Rousseff is now facing impeachment charges, and people are in the streets by millions? Why have Brazilians completely turned their backs on the PT, despite it having enjoyed fourteen years of political hegemony?

The mainstream media has identified two main causes to the current political turmoil in Brazil.

The first is corruption. Operacao Lava Jato (operation carwash), until recently led by the now famous Justice Moro, has shaken the political class to its core. Millions of reais flowing from top Petrobras executives into the pockets of the political elites have gotten widespread news coverage. Of course, this is not factually incorrect, but it disregards the fact that corruption has been the name of the game in Brazilian politics since the end of the military regime in 1985.

In fact, Lula's 2006 re-election happened in the midst of the Mensalão scandal, where the PT was accused of buying votes in congress. Transparency International has kept Brazil at a steady 76th on 167 in terms of global corruption between 2012 and 2015, even though the Petrobras scandal started in 2014.

Corruption is such a common occurrence in the country that a term has been created to describe Brazilian institutions' feeble reactions to shady business. In Brazil, when a scandal is said to "end in pizza," it means that charges where not laid out to the extent that they could or should have.

It seems that the corruptibility of the political elite is taken for granted by Brazilians. While it may have been an accelerating factor in the current crisis, it certainly does not seem to be the determinant variable in Rousseff's demise, who, in fact, is not even facing corruption charges unlike her opponents.

The second cause to the political crisis identified by the mainstream media has been the media itself.

Some have pointed the finger at the largely right wing and anti-PT bias of Brazil's largest news corporations. Once again, while not factually false, that position of the media is not a recent occurrence.

The same families have held the five main media companies for decades. Grupo Globo for instance, the country's largest media corporation, has been privately owned by the Marinho family since its creation in 1965. There has not been a recent change in the media's ideological affiliation: the right-wing mainstream media has been a constant throughout the PT rule.

Once again, it seems that this variable may be an accelerating factor in the PTs downfall, but it certainly does not seem to be the determinant variable.

In reality, two things have actively participated in Dilma's crash: an economic recession, and her turn away from the PT's traditional politics. All else is anecdotal.

Let's turn to an influential political theorist of the early twentieth century to further elaborate on that.

This conclusion can be reached by using Antonio Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony. It might be a bit of an overstatement to say that the Italian philosopher is making a come back. Undoubtedly, most people still do not know who he was, and few are aware of the importance of his theories. It is however, somewhat satisfying to see that Google searches for his name have been growing exponentially since the early 2000s and show no sign of slowing down.

It seems that the global capitalist crisis of 2008, which shook the entire world, has made a few people question the strength and general positive nature of the economic system we are living in. This kind of uncertainty creates a fertile ground for previously outlier positions. In Gramscian terms: such important events destabilize otherwise anchored cultural hegemony.

This concept-that of cultural hegemony-is perhaps Gramsci's most important contribution to the field of political science. The idea is the following: power, in all its forms, is rooted in popular consent. In order to successfully establish a specific way of organizing society, you must first get the local population on board. In fact, people need to be so convinced that that specific organization is the way things must be that they should not question its basis.

Rival ideologies should not compete on equal terms. To take the place of the cultural hegemon, they need first to contest its de facto legitimacy, and then successfully claim its place in the hearts and minds of the people.

In Gramscian literature, this struggle will take place as communism inevitably takes the place of global capitalism. This remains to be seen, but while we're waiting this theory can be applied to smaller instances of ideological shifts. Brazil is living just that.

In order to demonstrate this, let us first take a quick detour by Brazilian political history.

Until 1985, the country was ruled by a military dictatorship, which relied on brutal repression to get its way.

Things changed during the '80s, an active period when it comes to democratization worldwide. Some political scientists-Samuel Huntington in particular-have gone so far as to call that phase the "third-wave of democracy." Along with other South American countries, Brazil saw its military regime come to an end, and hosted its first democratic elections in over two decades.

Since the 1985 election, at least three tendencies have become abundantly clear.

First, the country has had a history of inflationary problems. If we consider the rate of inflation over the last three decades, we see two peaks. The first, in 1990, reached an astonishing 6,800%. The second, in 1994, culminated at 5,000% in June of that year. But even if we disregard these extreme cases, Brazil has had far from a stable economy throughout the end of the twentieth century. For instance, the average inflation in 1987 was 363% and in 1992 it was 1,119%.

The second clear tendency is that when Brazilians are unhappy with a governing party, they let it know with their ballots. The third is that they rarely offer a second chance: the results of the three presidential elections following the fall of the military regime led three different parties in office.

First, in 1985, Tancredo Neves of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (BDMP) was elected. Though, in a Hollywood-worthy turn of events he collapsed just before gaining office and died shortly after, his running mate and vice president, José Sarney, assumed the role of president.

Four years later, with inflation bordering 2,000%, Fernando Collar de Mello's Christian Labour Party (NRP) was elected with 53% in the second round. The BDMP only managed to secure 11.5%.

The following elections took place in 1994, just after the second inflationary peak. Once again, this economic fiasco led to the ruling party's political demise. The NRP secured an astounding 0.6% of the popular will, while the BDMP came fourth with 4.6%. The Brazilian people where still looking for their party: a whopping 95% of the population was not satisfied with what they had seen since the fall of the military regime a decade prior.

This time, Fernando Henrique Cardoso's Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) was elected in the first round with over 54% of the ballots: a landslide victory considering that the runner-up was Lula's PT with 27%. It is important to note here that this was the most left-leaning government elected since the end of the military regime. While all other parties had been right-of-center, Cardoso ran and governed in a clearly social-democratic manner.

FHC fought inflation tooth-and-nail (successfully-bringing it from an average of 3,000% in 1994 to 7% in 1997 by pegging the reais to the American dollar), opened the Brazilian economy to foreign investments (FDIs augmented threefold between 1995 and 2000), and privatized some industries in order to fund social projects. FHC is credited with creating social security and generalizing taxation in Brazil.

The Brazilian population responded positively to this newfound stability. A constitutional amendment was passed to allow Cardoso to run for a second term. In 1998, he was re-elected with a majority of 53.1% in the first round. During his four years in office, he had lost only one percentage point of support. He went from winning 25 out of 26 states, to 23. The surprising stability of the results of his two presidential campaigns shows how faithful his electoral base was. This popularity was not unconditional however. During his second term, the hens came back to roost: his desire to please both workers and capital created an influx in public debt.

During his 8 years as president, federal as well as state and municipal debt increased more than twofold. In an effort to save the national economy from an exponential debt crisis, and a freefalling export sector due to economic collapses around the world (Asia and Russia were seeing their economies crumble), he took a number of neoliberal measures. He liberated the reais from its US dollar parity, accepted a structural adjustment program from the IMF, and undertook a structural reforms of the economy in which privatization and austerity held a key role. The results where what one would expect: GDP per capita plunged, the value of the reais was cut in half, and capital flew out of the country at high rates.

Following the footsteps of recent history, the government swapped hands in 2002, when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was running his fourth campaign for the Workers Party (PT), won two thirds of the votes against the PSDB candidate. This was the beginning of an era for Brazil, one that we haven't seen the end of-yet.

The PT was the most left-wing government since the fall of the military regime. Under Lula's presidency, real social programs were put in place, yielding real results. To name only a few, the 2003 Fome Zero program aimed at eradicating extreme poverty in the country, the Bolsa Família and Bolsa Escola programs provided impoverished working class Brazilians with an allowance if their children were vaccinated and attended school, and the Progama de Aceleraçāo do Crescimento (PAC) had a multibillion reais budget to invest in infrastructure.

Make no mistake: Lula's presidency was not that of a socialist. In fact, the left wing of the PT was so disappointed with his lack of defiance towards capital that they split to form a separate party called the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL). But Lula did provide working class families with a net increase in their material condition. During his two terms in office, the gini coefficient of country (measuring wealth inequality) fell continuously, the GDP per capita increased substantially, as did the GNI. 98% of people born after 1990 now have at least a secondary education, compared to 70% for those born in 1970.

It was with this kind of mindset that Lula was re-elected in 2006, winning close to 50% in the first round, and then by a more than 20 percentage point margin in the runoff. Constitutionally barred from a third presidency, his protégé Dilma Rousseff ran in 2010, and won by an over 10 percentage point margin. Running again in 2014, she got re-elected-albeit not with as impressive result as previously.

This brief recap of Brazilian political history demonstrates two things:

First, the kind of legitimacy that has been enjoyed by the PT is a one-of-a-kind instance since the fall of the military regime. However, the second lesson is that this support is quite logical. Lula and Dilma have provided the working class with what it has been asking for since 1985: a stable democracy, and material returns for the working class.

From a Gramscian perspective, this legitimacy is rooted in cultural hegemony. Indeed, PT rule and the political scene since Lula's arrival in power have been causally linked in popular conscience. This means that any opposing ideology has an uphill battle before it: that of discrediting PT's social democracy.

As of now, the PT has won four consecutive presidential elections in Brazil; half of all those that have taken place since the end of the military regime. For a time, Lula's party looked like it was the country's natural party, as if the PT and the Brazilian people had some sort of indivisible bond. So how did we arrive to the place where we are now?

According to Gramsci, cultural hegemony is essential for the ruling class. The PT has undoubtedly acquired something of that nature. It has offered Brazil social democracy. It promised a capitalistic system with real returns for the people, and, to some extent, has delivered. The material condition of a large amount of people increased impressively during the Lula era and, to a lesser extent, during Dilma's early days. But if there is one thing capitalism has shown, it is that these kinds of honeymoon periods are always finite, and at some point the economy contracts over its own weight.

The party's cultural hegemony rested on two things: a booming economy, and social democratic policies. Both fell apart in the last two years. First, the country's rise to economic prosperity came to a halt. The economy that the PT had created was highly dependant on exports to countries like China or the US. With these countries' economies contracting, the model ceased to work. Brazil's GDP growth was divided by two between 2011 and 2012. The reais has plummeted in face of the US dollar since 2011.

Between mid-August 2014 and today the Petrobras stock, Brazil's largest company worth about 10% of the country's GDP has fell from $23.35 to $8.44. Brazil, in other terms, is facing the harsh realities of capitalism.

This left Dilma with two options: either take a left-wing approach and handle the crisis by stimulating demand, nationalizing big industries, and reforming the tax code to take money where it is, or, take the right-wing path.

She chose the latter.

2015 was the year of austerity in Brazil. Budget cuts, backpedalling on investment programs, cuts to social security… the Rousseff government fell to right-wing pressure and implemented capital-friendly policies. This came after she had won the elections one-year prior with a left wing discourse. This shift in position was one of many blows to the PT's cultural hegemony. By disavowing her party's traditional positions, Dilma legitimized dissident opinions. It is thus unsurprising that the lion's share of her critics, Temer included, come from her political right.

Indeed, now that Dilma is, at least temporarily, out of office, the interim government has already called for widespread neoliberal policies, which include cuts in public spending, decreases in welfare, and cutting jobs from the federal government.

The Rousseff government has dug its own grave by coming back on settled questions. The president and her administration have broken the ideological continuity of the PT rule, which in turn destabilized the foundation of their authority. She opened a door to her right, which allowed contestation. With the hegemonic left-wing personalities turning to neoliberalism, nothing was keeping public opinion from going in that direction.

The demographic participating in the ongoing protests further proves this. One image speaks volumes about the kind of people fuelling these events. A visible rich, white couple is seen marching alongside a baby carriage pushed by a black nanny. This photo sparked mass criticism in Brazil-a country where the racial and wealth divide is still very much a reality. Some have even reported protesters drinking champagne at anti-PT events. This segment of the Brazilian population is the one represented in Temer's provisional government. Clearly, what is being witnessed is not an uproar from impoverished favela youths, but rather a movement that is largely dominated by white, upper-middle-class individuals, whose right-wing bias has been gaining traction through legitimization.

Worst of all, a specter is haunting Brazil-the specter of inflation. Granted, we are far from the four digit numbers that plagued the country in the late '80s and mid '90s. But nonetheless, since 2014, inflation has almost double from about 5.5% to 10.5%-well above the average of 4% that the country had become accustomed to during Lula's time. In fact, 2015 was the year with the highest rate of inflation since the country has been under PT rule. This has sparked some concern amongst the general population, who fear the return of hyperinflationary pressure.

The point is the following: The PT had acquired a cultural hegemony, which mechanically provided it with popular legitimacy. The schematic being used, however, was based on a capitalistic logic of economics, which is fragile and ultimately unsustainable. When the inevitable turmoil arrived, the PT could have taken measures to ensure that material benefits from the working class were not withdrawn, but decided to dive into neoliberal reforms instead. By backpedalling away from their own logic, which was the backbone of their cultural hegemony, the PT delegitimized their position, providing a fertile ground for ideological debate. This is why the right-wing media and corruption scandals are gaining traction today, even though they have always been around.

This leaves Brazil in quite an awkward situation. The population is disillusioned by the Left and is turning to the Right in order to solve their problems. Presumably, this is a bad idea. But not all hope is lost. The possibility of having a new Left rise from the old one's ashes is still possible. For that, however, there would need to be a conscious effort to establish a new cultural hegemony.

Jacques Simon is a French national, currently studying politics at the University of Ottawa in Canada. His interests include political economy, comparative politics, and the study of radical politics.

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

By Derek Ide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

[4] Stora, 171.

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

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

[7] See Ismael and El-Sa'id, 166-7.

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

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

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

The Bully's Pulpit: On the Elementary Structure of Domination

By David Graeber

In late February and early March 1991, during the first Gulf War, U.S. forces bombed, shelled, and otherwise set fire to thousands of young Iraqi men who were trying to flee Kuwait. There were a series of such incidents-the "Highway of Death," "Highway 8," the "Battle of Rumaila"-in which U.S. air power cut off columns of retreating Iraqis and engaged in what the military refers to as a "turkey shoot," where trapped soldiers are simply slaughtered in their vehicles. Images of charred bodies trying desperately to crawl from their trucks became iconic symbols of the war.

I have never understood why this mass slaughter of Iraqi men isn't considered a war crime. It's clear that, at the time, the U.S. command feared it might be. President George H.W. Bush quickly announced a temporary cessation of hostilities, and the military has deployed enormous efforts since then to minimize the casualty count, obscure the circumstances, defame the victims ("a bunch of rapists, murderers, and thugs," General Norman Schwarzkopf later insisted), and prevent the most graphic images from appearing on U.S. television. It's rumored that there are videos from cameras mounted on helicopter gunships of panicked Iraqis, which will never be released.

It makes sense that the elites were worried. These were, after all, mostly young men who'd been drafted and who, when thrown into combat, made precisely the decision one would wish all young men in such a situation would make: saying to hell with this, packing up their things, and going home. For this, they should be burned alive? When ISIS burned a Jordanian pilot alive last winter, it was universally denounced as unspeakably barbaric-which it was, of course. Still, ISIS at least could point out that the pilot had been dropping bombs on them. The retreating Iraqis on the "Highway of Death" and other main drags of American carnage were just kids who didn't want to fight.

But maybe it was this very refusal that's prevented the Iraqi soldiers from garnering more sympathy, not only in elite circles, where you wouldn't expect much, but also in the court of public opinion. On some level, let's face it: these men were cowards. They got what they deserved.

There seems, indeed, a decided lack of sympathy for noncombatant men in war zones. Even reports by international human rights organizations speak of massacres as being directed almost exclusively against women, children, and, perhaps, the elderly. The implication, almost never stated outright, is that adult males are either combatants or have something wrong with them. ("You mean to say there were people out there slaughtering women and children and you weren't out there defending them? What are you? Chicken?") Those who carry out massacres have been known to cynically manipulate this tacit conscription: most famously, the Bosnian Serb commanders who calculated they could avoid charges of genocide if, instead of exterminating the entire population of conquered towns and villages, they merely exterminated all males between ages fifteen and fifty-five.

But there is something more at work in circumscribing our empathy for the fleeing Iraqi massacre victims. U.S. news consumers were bombarded with accusations that they were actually a bunch of criminals who'd been personally raping and pillaging and tossing newborn babies out of incubators (unlike that Jordanian pilot, who'd merely been dropping bombs on cities full of women and children from a safe, or so he thought, altitude). We are all taught that bullies are really cowards, so we easily accept that the reverse must naturally be true as well. For most of us, the primordial experience of bullying and being bullied lurks in the background whenever crimes and atrocities are discussed. It shapes our sensibilities and our capacities for empathy in deep and pernicious ways.

Cowardice Is a Cause, Too

Most people dislike wars and feel the world would be a better place without them. Yet contempt for cowardice seems to move them on a far deeper level. After all, desertion-the tendency of conscripts called up for their first experience of military glory to duck out of the line of march and hide in the nearest forest, gulch, or empty farmhouse and then, when the column has safely passed, figure out a way to return home-is probably the greatest threat to wars of conquest. Napoleon's armies, for instance, lost far more troops to desertion than to combat. Conscript armies often have to deploy a significant percentage of their conscripts behind the lines with orders to shoot any of their fellow conscripts who try to run away. Yet even those who claim to hate war often feel uncomfortable celebrating desertion.

About the only real exception I know of is Germany, which has erected a series of monuments labeled "To the Unknown Deserter." The first and most famous, in Potsdam, is inscribed: "TO A MAN WHO REFUSED TO KILL HIS FELLOW MAN." Yet even here, when I tell friends about this monument, I often encounter a sort of instinctive wince. "I guess what people will ask is: Did they really desert because they didn't want to kill others, or because they didn't want to die themselves?" As if there's something wrong with that.

In militaristic societies like the United States, it is almost axiomatic that our enemies must be cowards-especially if the enemy can be labeled a "terrorist" (i.e., someone accused of wishing to create fear in us, to turn us, of all people, into cowards). It is then necessary to ritually turn matters around and insist that no, it is they who are actually fearful. All attacks on U.S. citizens are by definition "cowardly attacks." The second George Bush was referring to the 9/11 attacks as "cowardly acts" the very next morning. On the face of it, this is odd. After all, there's no lack of bad things one can find to say about Mohammed Atta and his confederates-take your pick, really-but surely "coward" isn't one of them. Blowing up a wedding party using an unmanned drone might be considered an act of cowardice. Personally flying an airplane into a skyscraper takes guts.

Nevertheless, the idea that one can be courageous in a bad cause seems to somehow fall outside the domain of acceptable public discourse, despite the fact that much of what passes for world history consists of endless accounts of courageous people doing awful things.

On Fundamental Flaws

Sooner or later, every project for human freedom will have to comprehend why we accept societies being ranked and ordered by violence and domination to begin with. And it strikes me that our visceral reaction to weakness and cowardice, our strange reluctance to identify with even the most justifiable forms of fear, might provide a clue.

The problem is that debate so far has been dominated by proponents of two equally absurd positions. On the one side, there are those who deny that it's possible to say anything about humans as a species; on the other, there are those who assume that the goal is to explain why it is that some humans seem to take pleasure in pushing other ones around. The latter camp almost invariably ends up spinning stories about baboons and chimps, usually to introduce the proposition that humans-or at least those of us with sufficient quantities of testosterone-inherit from our primate ancestors an inbuilt tendency toward self-aggrandizing aggression that manifests itself in war, which cannot be gotten rid of, but may be diverted into competitive market activity. On the basis of these assumptions, the cowards are those who lack a fundamental biological impulse, and it's hardly surprising that we would hold them in contempt.

There are a lot of problems with this story, but the most obvious is that it simply isn't true. The prospect of going to war does not automatically set off a biological trigger in the human male. Just consider what Andrew Bard Schmookler has referred to as "the parable of the tribes." Five societies share the same river valley. They can all live in peace only if every one of them remains peaceful. The moment one "bad apple" is introduced-say, the young men in one tribe decide that an appropriate way of handling the loss of a loved one is to go bring back some foreigner's head, or that their God has chosen them to be the scourge of unbelievers-well, the other tribes, if they don't want to be exterminated, have only three options: flee, submit, or reorganize their own societies around effectiveness in war. The logic seems hard to fault. Nevertheless, as anyone familiar with the history of, say, Oceania, Amazonia, or Africa would be aware, a great many societies simply refused to organize themselves on military lines. Again and again, we encounter descriptions of relatively peaceful communities who just accepted that every few years, they'd have to take to the hills as some raiding party of local bad boys arrived to torch their villages, rape, pillage, and carry off trophy parts from hapless stragglers. The vast majority of human males have refused to spend their time training for war, even when it was in their immediate practical interest to do so. To me, this is proof positive that human beings are not a particularly bellicose species. [1]

No one would deny, of course, that humans are flawed creatures. Just about every human language has some analogue of the English "humane" or expressions like "to treat someone like a human being," implying that simply recognizing another creature as a fellow human entails a responsibility to treat them with a certain minimum of kindness, consideration, and respect. It is obvious, however, that nowhere do humans consistently live up to that responsibility. And when we fail, we shrug and say we're "only human." To be human, then, is both to have idealsand to fail to live up to them.

If this is how humans tend to think of themselves, then it's hardly surprising that when we try to understand what makes structures of violent domination possible, we tend to look at the existence of antisocial impulses and ask: Why are some people cruel? Why do they desire to dominate others? These, however, are exactly the wrong questions to ask. Humans have an endless variety of urges. Usually, they're pulling us in any number of different directions at once. Their mere existence implies nothing.

The question we should be asking is not why people are sometimes cruel, or even why a few people are usually cruel (all evidence suggests true sadists are an extremely small proportion of the population overall), but how we have come to create institutions that encourage such behavior and that suggest cruel people are in some ways admirable-or at least as deserving of sympathy as those they push around.

Here I think it's important to look carefully at how institutions organize the reactions of the audience. Usually, when we try to imagine the primordial scene of domination, we see some kind of Hegelian master-slave dialectic in which two parties are vying for recognition from one another, leading to one being permanently trampled underfoot. We should imagine instead a three-way relation of aggressor, victim, and witness, one in which both contending parties are appealing for recognition (validation, sympathy, etc.) from someone else. The Hegelian battle for supremacy, after all, is just an abstraction. A just-so story. Few of us have witnessed two grown men duel to the death in order to get the other to recognize him as truly human. The three-way scenario, in which one party pummels another while both appeal to those around them to recognize their humanity, we've all witnessed and participated in, taking one role or the other, a thousand times since grade school.

Elementary (School) Structures of Domination

I am speaking, of course, about schoolyard bullying. Bullying, I propose, represents a kind of elementary structure of human domination. If we want to understand how everything goes wrong, this is where we should begin.

In this case too, provisos must be introduced. It would be very easy to slip back into crude evolutionary arguments. There is a tradition of thought-the Lord of the Flies tradition, we might call it-that interprets schoolyard bullies as a modern incarnation of the ancestral "killer ape," the primordial alpha male who instantly restores the law of the jungle once no longer restrained by rational adult male authority. But this is clearly false. In fact, books like Lord of the Flies are better read as meditations on the kind of calculated techniques of terror and intimidation that British public schools employed to shape upper-class children into officials capable of running an empire. These techniques did not emerge in the absence of authority; they were techniques designed to create a certain sort of cold-blooded, calculating adult male authority to begin with.

Today, most schools are not like the Eton and Harrow of William Golding's day, but even at those that boast of their elaborate anti-bullying programs, schoolyard bullying happens in a way that's in no sense at odds with or in spite of the school's institutional authority. Bullying is more like a refraction of its authority. To begin with an obvious point: children in school can't leave. Normally, a child's first instinct upon being tormented or humiliated by someone much larger is to go someplace else. Schoolchildren, however, don't have that option. If they try persistently to flee to safety, the authorities will bring them back. This is one reason, I suspect, for the stereotype of the bully as teacher's pet or hall monitor: even when it's not true, it draws on the tacit knowledge that the bully does depend on the authority of the institution in at least that one way-the school is, effectively, holding the victims in place while their tormentors hit them. This dependency on authority is also why the most extreme and elaborate forms of bullying take place in prisons, where dominant inmates and prison guards fall into alliances.

Even more, bullies are usually aware that the system is likely to punish any victim who strikes back more harshly. Just as a woman, confronted by an abusive man who may well be twice her size, cannot afford to engage in a "fair fight," but must seize the opportune moment to inflict as much as damage as possible on the man who's been abusing her-since she cannot leave him in a position to retaliate-so too must the schoolyard bullying victim respond with disproportionate force, not to disable the opponent, in this case, but to deliver a blow so decisive that it makes the antagonist hesitate to engage again.

I learned this lesson firsthand. I was scrawny in grade school, younger than my peers-I'd skipped a grade-and thus a prime target for some of the bigger kids who seemed to have developed a quasi-scientific technique of jabbing runts like me sharp, hard, and quick enough to avoid being accused of "fighting." Hardly a day went by that I was not attacked. Finally, I decided enough was enough, found my moment, and sent one particularly noxious galoot sprawling across the corridor with a well-placed blow to the head. I think I might have cracked his lip. In a way, it worked exactly as intended: for a month or two, bullies largely stayed away. But the immediate result was that we were both taken to the office for fighting, and the fact that he had struck first was determined to be irrelevant. I was found to be the guilty party and expelled from the school's advanced math and science club. (Since he was a C student, there was nothing, really, for him to be expelled from.)

"It doesn't matter who started it" are probably six of most insidious words in the English language. Of course it matters.

Crowdsourced Cruelty

Very little of this focus on the role of institutional authority is reflected in the psychological literature on bullying, which, being largely written for school authorities, assumes that their role is entirely benign. Still, recent research-of which there has been an outpouring since Columbine-has yielded, I think, a number of surprising revelations about the elementary forms of domination. Let's go deeper.

The first thing this research reveals is that the overwhelming majority of bullying incidents take place in front of an audience. Lonely, private persecution is relatively rare. Much of bullying is about humiliation, and the effects cannot really be produced without someone to witness them. Sometimes, onlookers actively abet the bully, laughing, goading, or joining in. More often, the audience is passively acquiescent. Only rarely does anyone step in to defend a classmate being threatened, mocked, or physically attacked.

When researchers question children on why they do not intervene, a minority say they felt the victim got what he or she deserved, but the majority say they didn't like what happened, and certainly didn't much like the bully, but decided that getting involved might mean ending up on the receiving end of the same treatment-and that would only make things worse. Interestingly, this is not true. Studies also show that in general, if one or two onlookers object, then bullies back off. Yet somehow most onlookers are convinced the opposite will happen. Why?

For one thing, because nearly every genre of popular fiction they are likely to be exposed to tells them it will. Comic book superheroes routinely step in to say, "Hey, stop beating on that kid"-and invariably the culprit does indeed turn his wrath on them, resulting in all sorts of mayhem. (If there is a covert message in such fiction, it is surely along the lines of: "You had better not get involved in such matters unless you are capable of taking on some monster from another dimension who can shoot lightning from its eyes.") The "hero," as deployed in the U.S. media, is largely an alibi for passivity. This first occurred to me when watching a small-town TV newscaster praising some teenager who'd jumped into a river to save a drowning child. "When I asked him why he did it," the newscaster remarked, "he said what true heroes always say, 'I just did what anyone would do under the circumstances.'" The audience is supposed to understand that, of course, this isn't true. Anyone would not do that. And that's okay. Heroes are extraordinary. It's perfectly acceptable under the same circumstances for you to just stand there and wait for a professional rescue team.

It's also possible that audiences of grade schoolers react passively to bullying because they have caught on to how adult authority operates and mistakenly assume the same logic applies to interactions with their peers. If it is, say, a police officer who is pushing around some hapless adult, then yes, it is absolutely true that intervening is likely to land you in serious trouble-quite possibly, at the wrong end of a club. And we all know what happens to "whistleblowers." (Remember Secretary of State John Kerry calling on Edward Snowden to "man up" and submit himself to a lifetime of sadistic bullying at the hands of the U.S. criminal justice system? What is an innocent child supposed to make of this?) The fates of the Mannings or Snowdens of the world are high-profile advertisements for a cardinal principle of American culture: while abusing authority may be bad, openly pointing out that someone is abusing authority is much worse-and merits the severest punishment.

A second surprising finding from recent research: bullies do not, in fact, suffer from low self-esteem. Psychologists had long assumed that mean kids were taking out their insecurities on others. No. It turns out that most bullies act like self-satisfied little pricks not because they are tortured by self-doubt, but because they actually are self-satisfied little pricks. Indeed, such is their self-assurance that they create a moral universe in which their swagger and violence becomes the standard by which all others are to be judged; weakness, clumsiness, absentmindedness, or self-righteous whining are not just sins, but provocations that would be wrong to leave unaddressed.

Here, too, I can offer personal testimony. I keenly remember a conversation with a jock I knew in high school. He was a lunk, but a good-natured one. I think we'd even gotten stoned together once or twice. One day, after rehearsing some costume drama, I thought it would be fun to walk into the dorm in Renaissance garb. As soon as he saw me, he pounced as if about to pulverize. I was so indignant I forgot to be terrified. "Matt! What the hell are you doing? Why would you want to attack me?" Matt seemed so taken aback that he forgot to continue menacing me. "But . . . you came into the dorm wearing tights!" he protested. "I mean, what did you expect?" Was Matt enacting deep-seated insecurities about his own sexuality? I don't know. Probably so. But the real question is, why do we assume his troubled mind is so important? What really matters was that he genuinely felt he was defending a social code.

In this instance, the adolescent bully was deploying violence to enforce a code of homophobic masculinity that underpins adult authority as well. But with smaller children, this is often not the case. Here we come to a third surprising finding of the psychological literature-maybe the most telling of all. At first, it's not actually the fat girl, or the boy with glasses, who is most likely to be targeted. That comes later, as bullies (ever cognizant of power relations) learn to choose their victims according to adult standards. At first, the principal criterion is how the victim reacts. The ideal victim is not absolutely passive. No, the ideal victim is one who fights back in some way but does so ineffectively, by flailing about, say, or screaming or crying, threatening to tell their mother, pretending they're going to fight and then trying to run away. Doing so is precisely what makes it possible to create a moral drama in which the audience can tell itself the bully must be, in some sense, in the right.

This triangular dynamic among bully, victim, and audience is what I mean by the deep structure of bullying. It deserves to be analyzed in the textbooks. Actually, it deserves to be set in giant neon letters everywhere: Bullying creates a moral drama in which the manner of the victim's reaction to an act of aggression can be used as retrospective justification for the original act of aggression itself.

Not only does this drama appear at the very origins of bullying in early childhood; it is precisely the aspect that endures in adult life. I call it the "you two cut it out" fallacy. Anyone who frequents social media forums will recognize the pattern. Aggressor attacks. Target tries to rise above and do nothing. No one intervenes. Aggressor ramps up attack. Target tries to rise above and do nothing. No one intervenes. Aggressor further ramps up attack.

This can happen a dozen, fifty times, until finally, the target answers back. Then, and only then, a dozen voices immediately sound, crying "Fight! Fight! Look at those two idiots going at it!" or "Can't you two just calm down and learn to see the other's point of view?" The clever bully knows that this will happen-and that he will forfeit no points for being the aggressor. He also knows that if he tempers his aggression to just the right pitch, the victim's response can itself be represented as the problem.

Nob : You're a decent chap, Jeeves, but I must say, you're a bit of an imbecile.

Jeeves : A bit of a . . . what?? What the hell do you mean by that?

Nob : See what I mean? Calm down! I said you were a decent chap. And such language! Don't you realize there are ladies present?

And what is true of social class is also true of any other form of structural inequality: hence epithets such as "shrill women," "angry black men," and an endless variety of similar terms of dismissive contempt. But the essential logic of bullying is prior to such inequalities. It is the ur-stuff of which they are made.

Stop Hitting Yourself

And this, I propose, is the critical human flaw. It's not that as a species we're particularly aggressive. It's that we tend to respond to aggression very poorly. Our first instinct when we observe unprovoked aggression is either to pretend it isn't happening or, if that becomes impossible, to equate attacker and victim, placing both under a kind of contagion, which, it is hoped, can be prevented from spreading to everybody else. (Hence, the psychologists' finding that bullies and victims tend to be about equally disliked.) The feeling of guilt caused by the suspicion that this is a fundamentally cowardly way to behave-since it is a fundamentally cowardly way to behave-opens up a complex play of projections, in which the bully is seen simultaneously as an unconquerable super-villain and a pitiable, insecure blowhard, while the victim becomes both an aggressor (a violator of whatever social conventions the bully has invoked or invented) and a pathetic coward unwilling to defend himself.

Obviously, I am offering only the most minimal sketch of complex psychodynamics. But even so, these insights may help us understand why we find it so difficult to extend our sympathies to, among others, fleeing Iraqi conscripts gunned down in "turkey shoots" by U.S. warriors. We apply the same logic we did when passively watching some childhood bully terrorizing his flailing victim: we equate aggressors and victims, insist that everyone is equally guilty (notice how, whenever one hears a report of an atrocity, some will immediately start insisting that the victims must have committed atrocities too), and just hope that by doing so, the contagion will not spread to us.

This is difficult stuff. I don't claim to understand it completely. But if we are ever going to move toward a genuinely free society, then we're going to have to recognize how the triangular and mutually constitutive relationship of bully, victim, and audience really works, and then develop ways to combat it. Remember, the situation isn't hopeless. If it were not possible to create structures-habits, sensibilities, forms of common wisdom-that do sometimes prevent the dynamic from clicking in, then egalitarian societies of any sort would never have been possible. Remember, too, how little courage is usually required to thwart bullies who are not backed up by any sort of institutional power. Most of all, remember that when the bullies really are backed up by such power, the heroes may be those who simply run away.

Notes

[1] Still, before we let adult males entirely off the hook, I should observe that the argument for military efficiency cuts two ways: even those societies whose men refuse to organize themselves effectively for war also do, in the overwhelming majority of cases, insist that women should not fight at all. This is hardly very efficient. Even if one were to concede that men are, generally speaking, better at fighting (and this is by no means clear; it depends on the type of fighting), and one were to simply choose the most able-bodied half of any given population, then some of them would be female. Anyway, in a truly desperate situation it can be suicidal not to employ every hand you've got. Nonetheless, again and again we find men-even those relatively nonbelligerent ones-deciding they would rather die than break the code saying women should never be allowed to handle weapons. No wonder we find it so difficult to sympathize with male atrocity victims: they are, to the degree that they segregate women from combat, complicit in the logic of male violence that destroyed them. But if we are trying to identify that key flaw or set of flaws in human nature that allows for that logic of male violence to exist to begin with, it leaves us with a confusing picture. We do not, perhaps, have some sort of inbuilt proclivity for violent domination. But we do have a tendency to treat those forms of violent domination that do exist-starting with that of men over women-as moral imperatives unto themselves.

This article was originally published at The Baffler

Imperialist Feminism and Liberalism

By Deepa Kumar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article was originally published at Open Democracy

Latina Feminism: National and Transnational Perspectives

By Cherise Charleswell

Women's studies and the early waves of feminism were initially dominated by the experiences of white middle-class women, thus leaving Latinas, like other women of color, feeling excluded or not fully represented. Outside of women's studies, ethnic studies also left Latinas feeling the same, in that they focused on issues of racial and ethnic oppression and cultural nationalism, while ignoring the critical issues of sexism and heterosexism. Women and women's issues were only seen as "White," thus denying Latinas and other women of color their full identity. Eventually, Latina women joined other women of color in the introduction of gender issues into ethnic studies and critical race issues in women's studies. Their actions were taking a direct stance against not only the exclusionary practices of white middle-class feminism, but also against those within other social movements. These women helped to ensure that civil rights struggles transcended the US borders, and a number of Latina women have taken on leadership roles in the struggle for human rights. Thus, Latina Feminism, just like the Latino identity, is complex, and is oftentimes transnational in nature. For example, being a Latina means that one has a cultural identity and ethnicity, shared by those from or with origins in Latin America. Latinas can be of any racial group, or more likely a mix of various racial groups.

Origins of Latina Feminism

Latina Feminism in the United States really began to take shape following the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist movements, which saw all oppressed people - Gay, women, other ethnic groups - coming forward and using solidarity to spark social changes during the middle of the 20th century. Although Latina women took leadership roles in the other movements, their contributions have for the most part gone unnoticed or ignored. When scholars and community leaders speak about the legacy of these groups, they continue to excluded Latina women; and even well known iconic images do not include them.

Xicana (Chicana) Feminism

Chicana feminist thought and action really began to take shape during the late 1960s, with an increase in organizing during the 1970s. Chicana feminisms itself was an outgrowth or response to the male-dominated Chicano movements, which demanded access to education, as well as social, political, and economic opportunities and justice for Latino people; and took place primarily in the American South West. Like other women of color, Chicanas realized that discussions of women's issues, such as birth control, were being rejected, ignored, or side-lined; while mainstream White middle class feminism was also unwilling to speak out about the unique oppressions that Chicana women faced; particularly workplace exploitation or discrimination

The Women of the Young Lords

The Young Lords was a mostly Puerto Rican (African Americans and other Latinos were members) organization that was formed in the late 1960s by individuals who were primarily under the age of 20. What was so groundbreaking about this group of young people is that they redefined what is was to be Puerto Rican, openly exclaiming their pride in being Boricuans, not "Spanish", but Afro-Taino; and while fighting for basic human rights - clothing, shelter, food, access to healthcare and justice - they openly challenged machismo, sexism, and patriarchy. Women, such as Connie Cruz, Luisa Capteillo, Denise Oliver, and Bianca Canales, quickly emerged as leaders in the Young Lords. Their Ten-Point Health Program was ahead of its time, and it was clear that they understood early on that factors in one's environment (today referred to as social determinants of health by public health specialist) were important to health and wellbeing. Their Ten-Point Health Program was as follows:

We want total self-determination of all health services in East Harlem (El Barrio) through an incorporated Community-Staff Governing Board for Metropolitan Hospital. (Staff is anyone and everyone working at Metropolitan.)

We want immediate replacement of all Lindsay administrators by community and staff appointed people whose practice has demonstrated their commitment to serve our poor community.

We demand immediate end to construction of the new emergency room until the Metropolitan Hospital Community-Staff Governing Board inspects and approves them or authorizes new plans.

We want employment for our people. All jobs filled in El Barrio must be filled by residents first, using on-the-job training and other educational opportunities as bases for service and promotion.

We want free publicly supported health care for treatment and prevention. We want an end to all fees.

We want total decentralization--block health officers responsible to the community-staff board should be instituted.

We want "door-to-door" preventive health services emphasizing environment and sanitation control, nutrition, drug addiction, maternal and child care, and senior citizen's services.

We want education programs for all the people to expose health problems--sanitation, rats, poor housing, malnutrition, police brutality, pollution, and other forms of oppression.

We want total control by the Metropolitan hospital community-staff governing board of the budge allocations, medical policy along the above points, hiring, firing, and salaries of employees, construction and health code enforcement.

Any community, union, or workers organization must support all the points of this program and work and fight for that or be shown as what they are---enemies of the poor people of East Harlem.

#5 essentially calls for universal healthcare.

#7 focuses on prevention on disease and is forward-thinking in looking at addiction as not a criminal activity, but a disease.

#8 describes the need for programs to address the social determinants of health.

Unfortunately, despite their seemingly Progressive attitudes, the Young Lords was still governed by an all-male central committee and its initial 13-point platform advocated for "revolutionary machismo." The women members turned on the pressure and began to directly address this sexism, which resulted in the "machismo" line being dropped, and a new point was added to the program, stating, "We want equality for women. Down with machismo and male chauvinism"; and more importantly, attention and protest was turned to the issue of sterilization. In short, during the 1960s, Puerto Rican women were used as guinea pigs for the development of the birth control pill and later birth control and sterilization were used in some sort of twisted eugenics campaign as a tool of social policy and as a form of directed population control. Over a third of Puerto Rican women of child-bearing age were sterilized. The Young Lord's fight against this abusive practice inspired Ana Maria Garcia's 1982 documentary, La Operacion. The Young Lord's Women's Caucus was progressive and transformative in other ways: defending a woman's right to abortion and childcare, and establishing a women's union with a publication called La Luchadora; and their efforts helped to ensure that half of the content of the Young Lords' newspaper, Pa'lante, focused on women's issues.

Pioneering Latina Feminists in the US

Although "feminist" is being used to describe these women, we must keep in mind that many of them may have not considered or referred to themselves as feminists. Their actions - advocating for women's equality and challenging patriarchy and systems of oppression - indeed made them feminists.

Nina Otero-Warren was a Chicana educator, politician, suffragist, and first wave feminist. She worked for women's suffrage in New Mexico and, in 1918, became superintendent of public schools in Santa Fe County. Later, in 1923, she became Inspector of Indian Schools in Santa Fe County, where she was able to improve the education of indigenous populations.

Jovita Idar was a pioneering Chicana activist and feminist. As early as 1910 she was writing articles for her father's newspaper, covering stories on discrimination, lynching, and other violence committed by Texas Rangers - all issues that, unfortunately, remain relevant today as we continue to witness the same type of oppression. La Ligua Femenil Mexicanista (The League of Mexican Women), which she formed in 1911, is now recognized as the first attempt in Mexican-American history to organize a feminist social movement. These women formed free schools for Mexican children and provided necessities for the poor.

Maria Rebecca Latigo de Hernandez was not a self-described feminist; however, she was a pioneering Xicana activist, working for the improvement of civic, educational, and economic opportunities for Mexican-Americans. In 1929, she co-founded the Orden Caballeros of America, a civic and civil organization.

Sylvia Rivera was a bisexual trans Latina activist and feminist who advocated for the inclusion of queer and transgender people who were left out of the gay-rights movement. She co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.) in 1970.

Feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldua self-describes as a "Chicana/Tejana/lesbian/dyke/feminist/writer/poet/cultural theorist." Her writing focused on providing representations of women of color. Her 1987 book "Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza," her most famous work, focuses on overlapping issues of gender, race, sexual orientation, and class (factors which feminist scholar Kimberlee Crenshaw later referred to as intersections when speaking on the theory of intersectionality). Other notable works by Anzaldua include "This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color" (co-authored with Cherrie Moraga) and "Making Face Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color."

Although Cesar Chavez became the face of the United Farm Workers, has a national holiday in his honor, and was featured in the biographical film Cesar Chavez, much has been known about Dolores Huerta, labor leader, activist, feminist, awardee of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and co-founder of the United Farm Workers. Her lobbying efforts helped to bring about the Immigration Act of 1985. Her other political achievements include:

In 1961, she succeeded in obtaining the citizenship requirements removed from pension and public assistance programs.

In 1962, she was instrumental in the passage of legislation allowing voters the right to vote in Spanish, and the right of individuals to take the drivers license examination in their native language;

In 1963, she helped secure Aid for Dependent Families ("AFDC") for the unemployed and underemployed, disability insurance for farm workers in the State of California, and unemployment benefits for farm workers.

She continues her activism work as an active board member of the Feminist Majority Foundation.

Chicana second-wave feminist, Cherrie Moraga, began discussing "interlocking" oppressions early on in her activist, academic, and artistic career during the 1970s. She co-authored "This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color" with Gloria Anzaldua in 1981, and was a founding member of La Red Xicana Indigena, a network of Chicanas organizing nationally and internationally for social change, indigenous rights, and political education.

Pioneering Latina Feminists in Latin America

Leila Gonzalez was an intellectual involved in the Brazilian Black movement and is credited for being responsible for the development and practice of Black Feminism in Brazil (More to come on the topic of racial identity and Black feminism in Latin America and the US). Leila was born in 1935, just 47 years after the Lei Áurea ("Golden Act") abolished slavery in Brazil, and despite being a Black woman, she went on to earn university degrees in history, geography, philosophy, and a PhD in social anthropology.

Petra Herrera was a Soldadera, a female soldier who fought along the men during the Mexican Revolution. She initially disguised her gender and went by the name "Pedro Herrera." After not being credited for valor in battle and promoted to a General, Petra left Pancho Villa's forces and formed her own all-woman brigade.

In 1946, Felisa Rincon de Gautier was elected mayor of San Juan Puerto Rico, becoming not only the first woman to be elected mayor of San Juan, but of any mayor capital city in the Americas. She held this position from 1948 - 1968. She was an active participant in Puerto Rico's women's suffrage movement (won in 1932) and her efforts on child care programs inspired the United States' Head Start program.

Puerto Rican Nationalist, Blanca Canales, has been conveniently erased from history books, and is not greatly discussed in women's studies courses. She helped organize the Daughters of Freedom, the women's branch of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, and is one of the few women in history to have led a revolt against the United States, which was known as the Jayuya Uprising, taking place in 1950. The US government declared martial law to put down the uprising, sentencing the activists to life imprisonment and dismissing their protests as nothing more than an "incident between Puerto Ricans."

Afro-Puerto Rican poet, feminist and activist, Julia de Burgos, used her writings to openly contest the prevailing notion that womanhood and motherhood are synonymous. She courageously began challenging these notions in the 1930s.

Celia Sanchez was the woman at the heart of the Cuban Revolution, and although she was rumored to be the main decision-maker, more is known about her male counterparts Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. She was the founder of the 26th of July Movement and leader of combat squads throughout the Revolution.

Frida Kahlo was a Mexican artist born around the time of the Mexican Revolution. She is best known for her self-portraits filled with pain and passion, which mirrored her own life. She survived polio, a horrific and near-fatal bus accident, an amputation, multiple miscarriages, as well as rampant infidelity. Her work represents a celebration of indigenous traditions, as well as an uncompromising depiction of the female experience and form, the dichotomies, the personal and political, love and loss, physical and emotional pain.

Intersectionality and the Latina in the United States

For the most part, the Latina in the United States is still viewed as "The Other," a racial minority outside of the dominant White society (despite the growing Latino population), and at times as a stereotypical caricature, whether it is the Domestic or the Spicy oversexed Spanish Fly, whose presence is primarily for the pleasure and entertainment of men ( Sophia Vergara's public persona and willingness to be literally put on display during the 2014 Emmy Ward s best exemplifies this caricature). This status as "The Other" has historically left Latinas having to cope with not only gender oppression, but gender and discrimination based on their ethnicity. These are the intersections that impact their lives. Further, one has to understand how these varying intersections drive Latinas to feminism in different ways than their white counterparts. For example, reproductive justice for Latinas, expands beyond the need to control reproduction and ensure that there are no unwanted pregnancies, but includes the need to safeguard the right of women of color to have children.

In a 2013 Ms Magazine interview, Latina feminist blogger, Sara lnes Calderon, explained why feminism or women's issues often go undiscussed or are not viewed as urgent matters to Latinas:

"I find mainstream feminism to often be lacking in substance for myself. I can't relate to it, perhaps because to me feminism is often wrapped up with white privilege. I'm not sure why there aren't more Latinas discussing feminism online. I think one major reason is that, since Latinos are historically not the dominant class and are often immigrants, there are other, more important things that occupy their time. I know that's true for myself; I spend much more time talking about politics and structural issues in my blogging than just pure Latina feminism because I feel like, in the larger sense, it's more important."

Of course, one has to ask, why can't Latina women actively and simultaneously advocate for equality, whether it is racial, gender, or based on sexual orientation? The problem with saying that women's issues are not as important, or can wait, is that they will need to be given an opportunity to be addressed; and thus impeding any form of progress.

On Invisibility: Afro-Latinas in the US

The group often excluded from discussions about the Latina experience in North America are Afro Latinos, whose complex identities, renders them invisible. These women include actresses Rosie Perez, Rosario Dawson, Zoe Saldana, and Gina Torres. While also coping with gender inequality, Afro-Latinas also face discrimination (and racism) from other Latinos, the dominant white society, as well as African-Americans (who are often adamant that Afro-Latinos put their racial identity before their cultural or ethnic). Due to these varying degrees of invisibility and discrimination, alluding to intersectionality is not enough; instead, the experiences of Afro-Latinas can be viewed as a complex spider web.

"The Other": The Indigenous & Afro Latinas in Latin America

"I know that when I was working at the Spanish language television station, there was no one of color on television. And I knew this before, so it wasn't like I got there and I was like 'Whoa, there's nobody on TV.' You just realize that you know, when I go travel, and I go to Cuba, and I go to Puerto Rico, and I go to Peru. You go to these places and you see people who are brown, of indigenous descent. But then you look at the television and you go, 'How come what I see is not what I saw when I visited these places?'"

Kim Haas, founder of the Los Afro-Latinos, shared these sentiments during her interview for Feministing. Her statement speaks to the fact that while Latinos in North America are seen as a monolithic group, indigenous women and those of African descent in Latin America are explicitly seen as "The Other," and are marginalized. While Latinas in the Chicana movement and other Latino social movements in North America advocate for inclusion, fair representation, and civil and human rights, these marginalized groups - indigenous and Afro Latino - in Latin America have historically and continue to have to do the same. When it comes to the media, they remain invisible for the most part, and in comparison to their mestizo or "White" Latino counterparts, these marginalized groups disproportionately have higher rates of poverty and disease. Thus, indigenous and Afro Latina feminists in Latin America have to cope with these deeply rooted intersections - discrimination, racial prejudice, marginalization, poverty, and gender inequality. It is this ironic reality that marks the difference between Latina Feminism in North America and Feminism in Latin America. A mere crossing of the United States border automatically lumps these groups, the marginalized indigenous and Afro-Latino women, with the mestizo/"White" Latinas who represent the dominant society, in the same way that Middle Class, White women in North America were accused of harboring privilege in that they were members of the dominant society.

Acknowledging and addressing this reality has proven to be difficult in Latin America. During the 20th century, Latin American nations were moving towards Democratic forms of governance. By the 1980s, many spaces for debate and political analysis began to open up for different voices from the Latin American civil society; however, these organizations were still not addressing the issue of racism. Thus, during the 5th Latin America and Caribbean Feminist Encuentero taking place in San Bernardo Argentina, different Black women from throughout the region met for the first time and discussed the reality of Black women's lives and the need for their own spaces and having their own voice in Latin America. This initial meeting led to the 1st Latin American and Caribbean Black women's Encuentro in 1992, which took place in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Thus, Afro-Latin American feminism was built on the common experiences of Afro-Latinas who collectively experience gender and racial oppression.

Indigenous women, from various tribes in Latin America (Mayan, Quechuas, Quiche, etc.) have given rise to an indigenous feminism, which really began to take root in the 1990s. The Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) emerged in 1994, serving as a catalyst for indigenous women's organization in Mexico, and an example of indigenous feminism for the rest of Latin America. The Zapatista women created what was called the Women's Revolutionary Law, and made it public on January 1, 1994. The 10 point law called for the following rights for indigenous women: the right to political participation and to hold leadership posts within the political system, to a life free of sexual and domestic violence, to decide how many children they want to have, to a fair wage, to choose a spouse, to an education, and to quality health services. In looking at this law and the declaration of women of the Young Lords (previously discussed), it is clear that Latina women in Latin America and in North America - and of varying racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds - have been advocating for essentially the same rights. These issues - reproductive health, having to counteract patriarchy, having full representation, and so on, forms the basis of the commonality as feminists.

Indigenous feminists advocate not only for increased political, cultural, and civil rights, but also for a more equal society within their respective tribes. The following provides an overview of how indigenous feminism differs from the mainstream framework of feminism:

"Indigenous feminism differs from the western idea of the movement; indigenous feminist groups consider equality not just as a gender issue but also as an issue of equality between the human race and nature. Whilst the indigenous feminist groups are fighting their own battles regarding their ethnicity, class and gender, and the perceived exclusion they have experienced as both women and indigenous people, they also work within and for their own groups' overall struggles against issues such as climate change and deforestation." (Castillo, 2010)

Ultimately, ethnicity, class, and gender identity have shaped the struggle of indigenous women in Latin America, and they have opted to assert themselves into the broader struggles of their communities (against multinational organizations and the destruction of the environment and their homelands, exploitation by Latina American governments, as well as violence that accompanies the trafficking of narcotics), all while creating specific spaces to reflect on and speak out against their experiences with sexism and exclusion within their own societies.

Mobilization & Organizing

Latin-American and Latina/Chicano feminism organization continues to evolve, as an increasing number of Latinas in Latin America and North America begin to define their own forms of feminism, which are distinctive and complex. Whether it is considering the Afro-Latina in North America, whose ethnic identity is often dismissed, or the Afro-Latina in Latin America who is faced with great racial discrimination despite their ethnic identity as a Latino, or the mestiza or "White" Latina in Latin America who holds a position of privilege in the dominant society, or the mestiza/"White" Latina in North America who is viewed as "The Other" and faces the same types of prejudice and discrimination. Peasant, poor, working-class, or professional Latina women, whether in the West or Latin America, often have a myriad of concerns, those dealing with survival (escaping violence and having ready access to shelter, food, and potable water). They strive for increased political participation, representation, and socioeconomic equality, as well as safeguarding reproductive justice health and rights (including access to contraception and safe abortions, and access to education.

These transnational Latina feminisms involve different methods of women's organization and mobilization. In the 21st century, these efforts highly rely on digital media, which is often touted as the 4th Wave of Feminism. This form of mobilization is carried out through blogs (L atina Feminista, Womanisms, Los Afro Latinos ), journals (Chicana/Latina Studies, Latin American Perspectives), and think tanks, social media group pages, electronic newsletters, discussion boards, and websites. However, grassroots efforts of organizing are still used, particularly in areas where women have greater economic uncertainty and may not readily have access to digital media. There are, of course, the professional conferences, symposiums, and political advocacy which bring together Latina women who engage in discussions that center on how much progress has been made towards gender equality and how much more work has to be done. They call attention to, draft needed policies, and engage legislators.

Here are various Latina Feminist Mobilization Efforts & Organizations:

Chicana por mi Raza : is an online archive project that focuses on recapturing and highlighting the contribution of Mexican American, Chicana, and Hispanic women to vibrant social, political, and economic justice movements in the United States; looking at the development of Chicana feminist thought and action from 1960 to 1990. The website will serve as a digital archive, and is set to launch later this year. Items that will be available in the archive includes: newspapers, reports, leaflets, out-of-print books, correspondence, and oral histories.

Mundo Afro Salto : A regional Black culture group, decided to profile women of African descent in Salto Uruguay, in recognition of the 2011 United Nations International Year for People of African Descent. This was done via video, where these women proclaim not only their black heritage, but touch on gender issues, declaring that house work is not only woman's work.

The Roundtable of Latina Feminism : Is a collective grounding hosted by John Carroll University, which provides a dedicated space to discuss all issues related to Latina and Latin American feminisms. These gatherings are held annually, and they represent a break from academic conferences, which founder Mariana Ortega believed prioritized competitive and agnostic discussions. Instead, the roundtable provides an example of an alternative enuentros, and centers on the idea of transnational coalition building.

Colectivo Feminista Sexualidade Saude (CFSS ): is a feminist health action group based in Brazil that provides health education and training for women and professionals. They encourage self-help and also have a focus on women's mental health, violence against women, and child mortality.

CEFEMINIA : is a non-profit women's organization founded in 1975 in Costa Rica, which focuses in five key areas: violence against women, women's health, women and the legal system, as well as housing and environmental justice. The organization promotes self-help and community-based efforts, including providing needed housing.

California Latinas for Reproductive Justice : is a state-wide organization that focuses on building Latinas' power and cultivating leadership through community education, policy advocacy, and community-informed research, in order to achieve reproductive justice.

Black Women of Brazil : is a website dedicated to Brazilian women of African descent, which features news, essays, reports and interviews spanning an array of topics including race, racism, hair, sexism, sexual objectification and exploitation, affirmative action, socioeconomic inequity, police brutality, etc. intended to give a more complete view of the experiences of black women in particular, and black people in general in Brazil with a goal of provoking discussion through the lens of race.

Conclusion

Despite their distinctive characteristics, Latina Feminisms are quite similar, and this may be due to the transnational interconnections and bidirectional contacts between North America and the countries of Latin America. The greatest similarities is that Latina feminisms all differ from the Western middle-class white construct, and remain deeply rooted in social movements that impact their communities. For this reason, much of Latina Feminist organizing is non-academic, where Latinas in women's movements often do not accept the label feminist. These women are self-taught, and their actions are not shaped by academic theory, but lived experiences with sexism, racism, marginalization, and inequality; which have contributed to their awakening and activism.

Latina feminists have collectively criticized white-dominated Western feminism for being too homogenous, particularly in the blogosphere, where Latina feminist issues are not believed to be discussed in a satisfactory manner on mainstream feminist blogs. However, Latina feminist blogs, websites, publications, and organizations must take their own advice and grow to be more inclusive; and create spaces for the voices of marginalized indigenous and Afro-Latina women.

Ultimately, Latina feminisms advocate for the recognition of the full humanity of women and girls, and the removal of sexism, racism, ableism, classism, and discrimination based on sexual orientation.

References

Castillo, R. A. (2010). The Emergence of Indigenous Feminism in Latin America. Chicago Journals, Vol. 35,(No. 3), 539-545.

Dropping the Bomb: A Historiographical Review of the Most Destructive Decision in Human History

By Derek Ide

The historiography of the atomic bomb can be roughly categorized into three camps: traditionalists, revisionists, and middle-ground "consensus" historians. [1] Traditionalists, also referred to as orthodox[2] historians and post-revisionists, studying the atomic bomb generally accept the view posited by the Truman administration and articulated most clearly in Henry Stimson's 1947 Harper's Magazine article.[3] In short, this argument assumes that the use of the atomic bombs against Japan was justifiable on military grounds in order to prevent a costly invasion of the Japanese home islands. Often attached to such analysis is the notion that insofar as the atomic bombs ended the war prior to an invasion and saved hundreds of thousands or millions of lives, the use of the atomic bombs was also a morally sound decision. There tends to be a remarkable level of homogeneity amongst the traditionalist arguments. Whereas they may emphasize certain facts or aspects of the debate, they tend to present strikingly similar arguments, with a few exceptions.

The revisionists, in contrast, tend to be far more heterogeneous. Revisionist historians are unconvinced by the official narrative, and tend to emphasize the alternatives to the atomic bomb not pursued by the Truman administration. Furthermore, most revisionists accept, on some level, the "atomic diplomacy" thesis articulated first by Gar Alperovitz in 1965. To one degree or another revisionists argue that the Truman administration purposefully chose not to pursue alternatives to ending the war and that post-war diplomatic concerns vis-à-vis the Soviet Union were germane to, and in some historian's view dictated, the use of the atomic bombs.

The third camp, the consensus historians, are those who J. Samuel Walker refers to as having "reached a broad, though hardly unanimous, consensus on some key issues surrounding the use of the bomb."[4] These include the fact that Truman and his advisers were aware of alternatives that seemed likely to end the war, that invasion would likely not have been necessary, and that the atomic bomb did not save hundreds of thousands or millions of lives. What distinguishes them from the traditionalists is the argument that the atomic bombs were not a military necessity. On the other hand, their rejection or hesitancy to incorporate atomic diplomacy into their analysis differentiates them from the revisionists.

Given the nature of the three camps, the organizational framework I have utilized includes three sections. The first section will deal with the debate between traditionalists and revisionists. It will focus on questions of atomic diplomacy, the Potsdam Conference, unconditional surrender, Soviet entry into the war, projected casualty figures, and certain key figures in the Truman administration, the Soviet Union, and Japan. The second section will examine the points of disagreement within the revisionist camp. Although revisionists all challenge the orthodox position, they are significantly less homogenous than the latter. The third section of the essay will explore the consensus historians and their disagreements with both the traditionalists and the revisionists. Given the level of unanimity amongst the traditionalist historians, it is unnecessary to dedicate a section exploring differences between them because with rare exceptions, which will be noted when appropriate, there is remarkably little disagreement. The essay will conclude with a brief analysis of the authors, such as Robert Newman and Paul Boyer, who have extended their chronological framework significantly beyond the actual use of the atomic bombs.

The Traditionalists vs. the Revisionists

The five monographs within the traditionalist camp that will be analyzed here are Robert James Maddox'sWeapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision (2004)[5], Robert P. Newman'sTruman and the Hiroshima Cult (1995), Richard B. Frank's Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (1999), Paul D. Walker'sTruman's Dilemma: Invasion or the Bomb (2003), and Wilson D. Miscamble's The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs, and the Defeat of Japan (2011). On the other side of the debate are four revisionist historians, including Gar Alperovitz's The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (1995)[6], Martin J. Sherwin's A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies (2003),[7] Ronald Takaki's Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb (1995), and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (2005). The positions of the traditionalists and the revisionists regarding atomic diplomacy, the Potsdam Conference, Japanese surrender, the unconditional surrender policy, Soviet entry into the war, projected casualty figures, and key individuals[8] involved in the decision to use the bomb and Japanese surrender are fundamentally at odds.

The question of atomic diplomacy is what creates the fundamental divide between the two camps. Although there is great variation between revisionist and traditionalist positions on unconditional surrender, the role and race and racism, and other factors, most questions tend to be subsumed within and intricately bound up with atomic diplomacy. Since the revisionists first posited this thesis, it is appropriate to adumbrate their arguments. Objecting to the official narrative that "Truman simply had no choice except to use the atomic bomb," Alperovitz argues that Truman, significantly influenced by Byrnes, used the bomb as a form of "atomic diplomacy" to pursue post-war U.S. interests in both Europe and Asia. In essence, Alperovitz argues that the U.S. government "generally understood" that "Japan was defeated and preparing to surrender before the bomb was used." [9] According to Alperovitz there was a "quite general" notion amongst U.S. officials at Potsdam that the bomb would strengthen U.S. diplomacy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. It was during this time that "a conscious decision not to encourage Soviet participation in the war" was undertaken. Attempts "to delay the Red Army's attack to the extent feasible" were meant to "limit Soviet political influence in Asia."[10] For Alperovitz atomic diplomacy is the crucial element in explaining the use of the bomb.

Martin Sherwin supplements Alperovitz's atomic diplomacy thesis by extending the importance of such diplomatic concerns backwards into the Roosevelt administration. Sherwin posits that the policies of the Roosevelt administration suggest "that the diplomatic value of the bomb began to shape his atomic energy policies as early as 1943."[11] Although Sherwin cites Roosevelt's elusive decision making process and sudden death as inhibitors to fully understanding his policy, he posits that Roosevelt "consistently opposed international control and acted in accordance with Churchill's monopolistic, anti-Soviet views."[12] Ronald Takaki, despite emphasizing the role of race and racism in the decision, also concedes that atomic diplomacy was indeed a factor. He notes the "incredible pressure" on Manhattan project scientists to complete the bombs prior to the Potsdam conference. Similarly, he explains how Truman purposefully postponed the conference to coincide with the bomb tests. Takaki maintains that two "schools of thought" dominated the thinking of U.S. officials, including the "quid-pro-quo" strategy, articulated by people like Henry Stimson,[13] and the "monopoly" strategy a la James Byrnes. [14] In Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's view, the Potsdam Proclamation was not a warning to Japan, but an attempt to justify the use of the bomb.

Hasegawa's argument aligns with Alperovitz's as well. He maintains that a "race" began at Potsdam between the United States and the Soviet Union when the Soviets set August 15 as their projected state of entry into the war. This "gave American policymakers a definite deadline to work for." [15] Thus, the timing of the Potsdam Proclamation was "integrally connected with the schedule for deployment of the atomic bombs."[16] The Truman administration desired to end the war via the atomic bombs in order to avoid Soviet entry and maintain hegemony in the Pacific in the post-war world. Therefore, the Truman-Byrnes commitment to unconditional surrender and the Potsdam declaration was simply a prelude to the use of the atomic bombs. Byrnes position was essentially: "if we insisted on unconditional surrender, we could justify dropping of the atomic bomb."[17] Concerned about the post-war political consequences of Soviet participation in the war, U.S. planners sought to bring about Japan's surrender before the Soviets could join. At best, Soviet participation in the war was an "insurance policy" in case the atomic tests failed.[18]

Thus, the revisionist position is quite clear. Officials in the United States were deeply concerned about post-war hegemony, particularly in the Pacific but in Europe as well, and saw the use of the atomic bomb against Japan as a way to contain the Soviet Union. Subsequently, any and all alternatives that could have ended the war, albeit not in time to prevent Soviet entry, were disregarded and not pursued. This conclusion is often premised on the fact that Japan was already defeated and near surrender. Alperovitz argues that "Japan was defeated and preparing to surrender before the atomic bomb was used. Though the question of timing was in dispute, it is also certain that this was general understood in the U.S. government at the time." [19] Hasegawa contends that the "Soviet entry into the war played a greater role than the atomic bombs in inducing Japan to surrender" and, as such, the Japanese would have quickly surrender upon Soviet entry even without the use of the atomic bombs.

It is on these grounds that the traditionalists most vehemently challenge the revisionists. Robert James Maddox challenged what he saw as "blatant revisionist distortions" in order to construct his argument that the single-most decisive factor in forcing the Japanese to surrender and preventing a costly land invasion of Japan was the use of the atomic bombs. Whereas Alperovitz maintained that the casualty figures for a land invasion were inflated as post-war justifications by the Truman administration, Maddox suggests that the half-a-million figure "cited by Truman, and even higher ones, were circulated within the upper echelons of government."[20] For Maddox bombs were utilized out of military necessity because the Japanese would not have surrendered without the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, according to Maddox the "very idea of surrender was alien to the Japanese samurai tradition."[21] Furthermore, ULTRA intercepts suggest surrender prior to an invasion was not even a serious option, let alone inevitable. Richard Frank goes even further, arguing that the conclusions the revisionist reach regarding the MAGIC are erroneous because they ignore the fact that Japanese peace feelers were completely "want of official sanction." [22] Thus, the "thesis that Japan was actively seeking to surrender in 1945, and that American policy makers knew this primarily from code breaking," is rejected by the traditionalists.[23]

Robert Newman concurs with this analysis, adding that most "Hiroshima cultists,"[24] including Gar Alperovitz, P. M. S. Blackett, Paul Boyer, the Smithsonian exhibit authors, and others who "swallow this conclusion of the [United States Strategic Bombing Survey][25] whole" are incorrect because the study itself was extremely flawed. [26] Information in the survey was purposefully distorted to support conclusions already arrived at a priori by Paul Nitze, and the testimony of most high-ranking Japanese officials "overwhelmingly indicated that Japan was not about to surrender before the bomb."[27] Thus, the "Truman bashers"[28] are incorrect to argue that the bomb changed no minds. In fact, according to Newman it "created a situation in which the peace party and the emperor could prevail." [29] Wilson Miscamble also views himself as "exploding permanently the myth of a Japan ready to surrender," a "myth" perpetuated by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946. [30]

Richard Frank furthers this argument by explaining that Japan's "fundamental policy," based on the Ketsu-Go defense plan, was a national resistance program intended to bloody the invading enemy enough to force political negotiations and ipso facto avoid unconditional surrender. Frank relies heavily upon the document produced by the Big Six entitled "The Fundamental Policy to Be Followed Henceforth in the Conduct of the War," which argued Japan "must fight to the finish and choose extinction before surrender."[31] In essence, Japan was "effectively locked on course for a fight to the last man, woman, and child."[32] Furthermore, Frank continues this theme, arguing that the goal was to "severely bloody the invaders" to the point of achieving political goals. Ultra documents, according to Frank, did much to "unmask their carefully wrought plans."[33] The forces on Kyushu far exceeded the 350,000 number given to Truman. Indeed, by November 1 Japanese strength would be 680,000, much closer to the 1:1 ration of American to Japanese soldiers that U.S. leaders desperately wanted to avoid. Paul Walker takes this argument to its logical extreme. He argues that due the 35 percent casualty rate of the Iwo Jima and Okinawa battles, as well as the "fanaticism of the Japanese military and their updated code of Bushido," casualties would have ranged from around 250,000 in the invasion of Kyushu alone, to over one million with the invasion of both Kyushu and Honshu.[34] Miscamble maintains that "retrospective castigations" like William D. Leahy's memoirs in 1950, which denounced the atomic bomb as a "modern type of barbarism not worthy of Christian man," can be dismissed since "no military officials counseled the president against using the weapons prior to Hiroshima."[35] Maddox concurs, explaining that despite the retroactive denunciations of the atomic bomb by top-ranking military officials, no military officials seriously attempted to guide Truman away from using the bomb prior to its deployment. The fact that the bomb was utilized out of military necessity dismisses the "gravest charge against Truman," namely that the atomic bomb was deployed "primary as a diplomatic weapon to intimidate the Soviet Union."[36]

The question of Soviet entry into the war preoccupies an important space in the discourse as well. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa maintains that "Soviet entry into the war played a greater role than the atomic bombs in inducing Japan to surrender."[37] Interestingly, Maddox claims the Soviets invaded Manchuria not to be "a good ally" but rather "to get in on the kill,"[38] an analysis Hasegawa would largely share. However, where the revisionists and the traditionalists differ, is that most traditionalists seriously downplay the role of Soviet entry into the war. In Frank's narrative, "Soviet intervention was a significant but not decisive reason for Japan's surrender… reinforcing but not fundamental."[39] Miscamble maintains that revisionist historians who emphasize Soviet entry in the war "distort history by overemphasizing" its importance.[40] According to Miscamble, Hasegawa's claim that Truman was disappointed at the Soviet entry into the war "are not substantiated by the historical evidence." [41] Paul Walker points out that when the emperor finally surrendered on August 15, 1945, the Russian invasion was not mentioned as a cause of surrender. Hasegawa counters this point by citing "another historic document" written by Sakomizu's [42] assistant and sanctioned by the emperor that was not issued until August 17. This rescript explained that if Japan continued fighting after the entrance of the Soviet Union into the war it would endanger "the very foundation of the empire's existence," [43] reinforcing Hasegawa's claim that Soviet intervention was key.

Perhaps the most creative defense of the use of the atomic bomb from the traditionalist camp is the moral one. One of the primary objectives of Wilson Miscamble is to "confront the question regarding the morality of the atomic bomb."[44] Miscamble suggests that for Byrnes and Truman "moral complexity or future diplomatic implications failed to complicate their straight forward thinking." If the atomic bomb "might save American lives" then it must be used, and this "remained, throughout, the essential motivation that guided the decision." [45] Whereas revisionists argue that Japan was defeated, he makes a stark distinction between defeat and surrender, explaining that the U.S. would have eventually won the war by "continued obliteration bombing of Japanese cities and infrastructure, a choking blockade, the terrible invasions... [and these] would have meant significantly greater Allied casualties and much higher Japanese civilian and military casualties."[46] Likewise, the abrupt end to the war also brought an end to Japanese brutality in other parts of Asia. Furthermore, "indiscriminate bombing had become the norm for the Anglo-American forces well before 1945," indicating that any "moral Rubicon" had already been crossed prior to Hiroshima.[47] Thus, the bomb was the "lesser of the evils available," and subsequently Miscamble pleas that in "future anniversaries of the dropping of the atomic bomb… one might hope for less moralizing condemnation of Truman's decision… Perhaps there might even be some empathy for the man who felt required to make the decision and who carried the burden of it."[48]

Robert Newman makes a slightly less sophisticated moral defense, proclaiming that neither "Hiroshima cultists nor professional moralists had even considered the possibility that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legitimate retribution for the millions of deaths caused by Japan's fourteen-year rampage through China and the Pacific,"[49] an idea he apparently entertains. Newman suggests that the atomic bombs were moral actions taken in order to prevent greater evil. According to him the general arguments against Truman's choice to use the bomb come in four general varieties: first, atomic bombs are intrinsically evil and should not be used; second, their use violated the principle of noncombatant immunity; third, the bombs were used on invalid motives, including retribution, revenge, and reprisal; and fourth, no specific warning was given. To the first, Newman responds that "the case for immorality of today's overkill arsenals and war fighting doctrines is strong," but "to apply the same case retrospectively to 1945, however, is senseless."[50] To the second, Newman quotes Bamba Nobuya to suggest that the "Marxist interpretation of imperialistic war," namely that "the 'people' should have been innocent," is incorrect. The Japanese population did not just passively support imperialism, "on the contrary, most people competed to get front seats on the fascist bandwagon." [51] Thus, they were not noncombatants and to attack them was legitimate. To the third point Newman maintains that because the Japanese were involved in developing atomic weapons as well, even though U.S. leaders were not aware of this at the time, it retroactively justifies the decision. Since "upwards of 250,000 people… would have died each month the Japanese Empire struggled in its death throes beyond July 1945," and since the bomb had the ability to end the war early, it could not have been used for the wrong reasons.[52] To the last point, he responds that the shock value of the bomb was decisive in ending the war, and thus it would have been ineffective and prolonged the war to issue the warning.

Finally, the issue of culture and its relationship to policies of surrender are intricately bound up in the traditionalist narrative. For Paul Walker, a key element of the war was the "barbarism, savageness, and race hatred" of "an oriental enemy with a brutal heritage." [53] According to Walker, the Japanese in World War II "believed they were fighting in the proud traditions of their samurai ancestors."[54] This ideological reliance upon "a version of Bushido" meant that military schools taught "a perverted cult of death" which made "young Japanese men expendable numbers for the military's reckless and costly adventures." [55] Tracing Japanese history from the Forty Seven Ronin to the Meiji Restoration and beyond, Walker paints a picture of uniform brutality and aggression. This culminates in the period from 1894 to 1945, where "Japan was involved in almost constant warfare with her neighbors."[56] Since being a prisoner of war was "completely unacceptable, considered dishonorable or shameful, and contrary to the samurai code," the Japanese were essentially automatons that fought to the death. In contrast with U.S. imperialism, where "Filipinos had a positive image of America" and U.S. intervention in Vietnam "sorted itself out,"[57] Japanese imperialism was infinitely more brutal, according to Walker. This notion that the Japanese were imbued with fanaticism and the ideology of Bushido, which permeated their consciousness for centuries, is an important part of Walker's thesis because it attempts to reinforce the notion that the toll of casualties would be great in a U.S. invasion of Japan. Miscamble suggests a similar theme, explaining that the "the twisted neo-samurai … geared up with true banzai spirit to engage the whole population in a kind of national kamikaze campaign." [58] Maddox is slightly less crude, suggesting that that the "very idea of surrender was alien to the Japanese samurai tradition."[59]

Thus, within the traditionalist camp one finds a remarkable degree of unanimity. While some authors, such as Miscamble and Newman, focus on the moral argument, others, such as Maddox, implore the military aspect. Others still emphasize the "savage" culture of the "Oriental enemy" a la Paul Walker. Yet, all of the traditionalists tend to converge in their main analysis. There is little disagreement among them on any vital issues. In one way this greatly distinguishes them from the revisionist camp, which presents a quite heterogeneous and diverse array of analyses.

The Revisionist Camp

The traditionalists and revisionists part ways on the fundamental divide of atomic diplomacy. Within the traditionalist camp arguments are largely convergent, whereas within the revisionists camp the nuances are far more pronounced. All tend to agree that some level of atomic diplomacy was in play. Most, however, disagree on a variety of other issues. Gar Alperovitz and Martin Sherwin heavily emphasize the role of atomic diplomacy. In contrast, Takaki suggests race and racism as primary variables. Hasegawa maintains that an "international" perspective is vital, and criticizes past revisionists for heavily focusing on leaders in Washington. As Gar Alperovitz is the first and quintessential revisionist, much of the internal discussion amongst revisionists is characterized by correcting, expanding, or challenging certain assumptions Alperovitz has made.

The first distinction of analysis can be seen in the characterization of the Roosevelt and the Truman administration. Alperovitz imbues individual political actors, particularly Harry Truman and his adviser James Byrnes, with immense agency over the use of the bomb. He warns against "analyses which assert that a combination of factors-political, military, racial, and financial-produced the decision."[60] He also makes the case against "momentum theories," which may have "an odd feeling of seeming plausibility about them," but which go against the evidence that top U.S. military officials were against the bombing.[61] Throughout his work it is stressed that individual political actors were absolutely fundamental in the decision, and that no sort of "momentum theory" is capable of capturing the dynamics of the top-level discussions that led to the final decision. Alperovitz emphasizes the importance of the Truman-Byrnes relationship, implicitly suggesting that the outcome may have been different with Roosevelt in office.

Martin Sherwin articulates a somewhat distinct argument that draws a strong line of continuity between the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. For Sherwin, an "analysis of the policies [Roosevelt] chose…suggests that the diplomatic value of the bomb began to shape his atomic energy policies as early as 1943."[62] Although Sherwin cites Roosevelt's elusive decision making process and sudden death as inhibitors to fully understanding his policy, he posits that Roosevelt "consistently opposed international control and acted in accordance with Churchill's monopolistic, anti-Soviet views."[63] He concludes that Roosevelt's commitment to amicable postwar relations with the Soviets has "often been exaggerated," and that "his prescriptions for the diplomatic role of the atomic bomb… reveal a carefully guarded skepticism regarding the Grand Alliance's prospects for surviving the war intact."[64] Thus, Sherwin argues that Truman did not "inherit the question" of whether to employ the bomb as a means of atomic diplomacy, but he "inherited the answer" since by 1943 the diplomatic value of the bomb had already begun to shape atomic energy policies. The decision to use the bomb, and its diplomatic implications, were prescribed by Roosevelt. Truman's decisions were more or less technical, revolving around how specifically to use the bomb. Where Alperovitz has attempted to present a break or disconnect between what he perceives as Roosevelt's uncertain and wavering atomic policies, Sherwin presents a forceful analysis suggesting strong continuity between the two administrations.

A second point of contention amongst revisionists is the role of race and racism in the decision to use the bomb. Here Alperovitz argues that while "it is certainly possible" that racism amongst U.S. officials played a role in the decision to drop the bomb, "it is all but impossible to find specific evidence that racism was an important factor."[65] In contrast, while Takaki adopts Alperovitz's notion of atomic diplomacy, he drastically parts with him on the issue of race. Takaki's primary focus is understanding the decision within the trajectory of US racism. [66] In this regard, it seems his argument is best encapsulated when he declares, borrowing from John Dower, that "in this 'war without mercy,' Truman made the deadly mushroom cloud of 'Manhattan' appear over Japan in order to destroy an enemy he regarded as 'a beast'."[67] Takaki explicates upon the "racialization of the Pacific War," positioning it within the historic context of racism and US expansionism. After briefly addressing Japanese notions of racial superiority, Takaki attempts to place Truman's decision to use the atomic bombs within the "sociological imagination" of anti-Japanese racism in US society. In doing so, he links the war in the Pacific to earlier periods of conquest. His analysis focuses on the complex processes by which the US idea of democracy was intricately bound up with westward expansion and slavery, all institutions saturated with racialized notions of superiority. Citing the Chinese Exclusion Act, "Yellow Peril" hysteria, the American Federation of Labor anti-Japanese agitation, and the Asiatic Exclusion League, Takaki draws a long line of continuity culminating in the internment of Japanese Americans and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For Takaki, notions of racial superiority and anti-Asian racism were key variables in the "sociological imagination" which facilitated the bombing of hundreds of thousands of civilians. It is in this context of a society deeply permeated with both institutional and individual racism that Truman's actions must be analyzed. Takaki analyzes Truman's biography, emphasizing the implicit notions of racial superiority deeply embedded in him and his family of ex-slave owners. Takaki outlines Truman's broadly anti-Asian sentiments, such as in 1911 when he explained that he "does hate Chinese and Japs" and that the "yellow men [ought to be] in Asia." [68] By 1945, Truman referred to the "Japs" as "savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic." Thus, the "sociological imagination" was a highly racialized one that helped rationalize the slaughter of innocent Japanese civilians in the minds of men like Truman.

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa also takes Alperovitz to task on more than one occasion. Throughout Racing the Enemy he points out that he views his work as a corrective to the mistakes of revisionist historians. As he explains, the "sharp division between revisionist and orthodox historians in the Unites States" has failed to address the crucial international dimension because "the main point of contention is over American perceptions of Soviet intentions" that "depict Soviet actions as a sideshow and assign to Moscow a secondary role at best."[69] Furthermore, although Hasegawa is certainly not an orthodox historian, he is mildly critical of the revisionists who have preceded him: "Although much of what revisionist historians argue is faulty and based on tendentious use of sources, they nonetheless deserve credit for raising an important moral issue that challenges the standard American narrative of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."[70] Thus, Hasegawa strengthens the revisionist narrative by correcting some of the errors and increasing the attention to the international dynamic at work.

Alperovitz in large part bases his argument on the conclusions of the 1946 United States Strategic Bombing Survey which argued that Japan "would likely have surrender in 1945 without atomic bombing, without a Soviet declaration of war, and without an American invasion." [71] In contrast with Alperovitz and most other revisionist historians who uncritically accept the United States Strategic Bombing Survey's conclusion, Hasegawa maintains that "defeat and surrender are not synonymous," and Paul Nitze's "conclusion was repeatedly contradicted by the evidence in the Survey itself."[72] He largely accepts the critique of the USSBS findings put forward by Barton Bernstein. Instead, he argues that "even without the atomic bombs, the war most likely would have ended shortly after Soviet entry into the war-before November 1."[73] Strangely, Hasegawa tends to overemphasize his departure from Alperovitz on this point, or he must have simply overlooked Alperovitz contention that, even had the atomic bomb not been used, it is "almost a certainty that the Japanese would have capitulated upon the entry of Russia into the war."[74]

On a number of other points Hasegawa and Alperovitz certainly do disagree, however. Whereas Alperovitz characterizes the Sino-Soviet negotiations between Stalin and the Nationalists as a U.S. ploy to prolong Russian entry in the war, Hasegawa responds that in the Sino-Soviet negotiations, the "interests of Truman, Stalin, and Chiang Kai-shek all converged: the successful conclusion of a Sino-Soviet treaty could make everyone happy." [75] Hasegawa does not view the difficult negotiating by the Chinese as a concocted plot by the U.S. to keep the Soviets out of the war. "Revisionist historians are wrong," Hasegawa explains, "in asserting that Harriman's actions were meant to pressure Soong to resist Stalin's demand in order to prevent Soviet entry into the war against Japan."[76] Likewise, throughout his work Hasegawa repeatedly attempts to re-characterize Byrnes are someone not nearly as bent on geopolitical conflict with the Soviet Union as other revisionist historians have made him out to be. For instance, in response to the Soviet Kurils Operation as part of August Storm, Hasegawa argues that Byrnes, "though often regarded by revisionist historians as an ardent advocate for a tough stance against the Soviet Union… favored a conciliatory position on this issue."[77] Thus, the internecine differences amongst the revisionists exist. They are not nearly as pronounced or as heated as the differences between the traditionalists and the revisionists, but significantly more obvious than any real disagreement amongst traditionalist scholars.

Consensus Historians vs. The Traditionalists and the Revisionists

Between the traditionalist and revisionist historians lay a murky "middle ground" that encompasses a group of scholars who posit quite different arguments regarding the atomic bomb but tend to share in common a notion that alternatives existed. These "consensus" historians, as J. Samuel Walker refers to them, [78] in some way suggest that Truman and his advisers were aware of alternatives that seemed likely to end the war. The "consensus" historians reject the traditionalist argument that the atomic bombs were a military necessity and at the same time greatly distance themselves from the atomic diplomacy thesis. Samuel Walker'sPrompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of the Atomic Bombs Against Japan (1997), Dennis Wainstock'sThe Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb: Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1996), and Sean L. Malloy's Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb Against Japan (2008) form the core of this "consensus" or middle ground camp.

Dennis Wainstock argues that the policy of unconditional surrender was a "policy of revenge, and it hurt America's national self-interest." [79] He continues, suggesting that had the United States given Japan conditional surrender terms, including retention of the emperor, Japan would have surrendered significantly earlier than it did. This means that neither the atomic bombs nor Soviet intervention would have been required. By prolonging the war in Europe and East Asia the policy of unconditional surrender expanded Soviet power in both areas, thereby harming U.S. interests. The dropping of the atomic bomb only "hastened the surrender of an already defeated enemy." [80] Wainstock does not neatly align with either the traditionalist or revisionist camp. First, he aligns his critique of unconditional surrender within "U.S. national interests." His emphasis is that unconditional surrender unnecessarily prolonged the war, and Truman's commitment to it subsequently harmed U.S. interests since the prolonged war eventually allowed the Soviet Union to enter the arena and exercise increased influence in East Asia. This "policy of revenge [unconditional surrender]… hurt America's national self-interest" because it "prolonged the war… and helped to expand Soviet power."[81]

It is in this way that Wainstock differs sharply from all of the traditionalists who, in one way or another defend the policy of unconditional surrender. Whereas Paul Walker, Richard Frank, and Wilson Miscamble tend to be generally supportive of the unconditional surrender policy, James Maddox, in a rather reserved way, argues that "there is no way of telling whether the doctrine prolonged the war in any way." [82] Robert Newman is Wainstock's primary adversary in this regard, however. Newman argues two main points: first, Truman "had no good reason" to believe that permitting retention of the emperor would have led to early capitulation and, second, the "Potsdam Declaration defined surrender in a fashion acceptable to the Japanese peace forces."[83] To "those who insist that unconditional surrender was a purely punitive stance," he proclaims that the "leaders of the Japanese peace party… saw in the Potsdam terms an acceptable alternative to the destruction Japan would otherwise sustain."[84] The reason that Truman eventually accepted the condition that the emperor be retained was, according to Newman, because "peace was too tantalizing to resist." [85] In the end, however, Newman is sure that retaining the emperor, "what Hiroshima cultists insist was a viable alternative for Truman to end the war early… was really no alternative at all."[86] Furthermore, the conditions outlined at Potsdam were not unconditional surrender, and the Japanese knew it. Thus, for Newman the entire thesis constructed by Wainstock rests on dubious grounds.

Regarding his differences with the revisionists, Wainstock concedes that "perhaps Truman's decision to drop the bombs was an attempt to both impress the Soviets… and to end the war before the Soviets entered and seize the Far Eastern territories."[87] Even if this were true, however, it was totally counterproductive since in the end it prolonged the war and allowed Soviet entry, something that could have been prevented by altering the policy. This brief commentary is all the space that Wainstock provides for the atomic diplomacy thesis. In other words, despite accepting that atomic diplomacy may have played some minor role, Wainstock contends that a blind policy of unconditional surrender was of prime importance in the decision. This is where his greatest disagreement comes to the fore with the revisionists, and in particular Hasegawa. Hasegawa contends that even if Truman had "accepted a provision in the Potsdam declaration allowing the Japanese to retain a constitutional monarchy," it would "not have immediately led to Japan's surrender."[88] It is doubtful, Hasegawa maintains, "that Japan would have capitulated before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and the Soviet Union entered the war."[89] Thus, whereas the policy of unconditional surrender is the fundamental variable for Wainstock, it is significantly less so for Hasegawa. Wainstock significantly minimizes the significance of atomic diplomacy and inflates the importance of the unconditional surrender policy.

Sean Malloy, like Takaki, attempts to analyze the decision to use the atomic bomb through the "lens of biography." [90] Malloy attempts to approach "the use of the bomb through a conceptual framework he calls the "context of use," positioning the use of the bomb as a "compound product of a series of choices" rather than "the result of single decision." [91] Malloy makes the argument that Stimson, as secretary of war, unintentionally "presided over a set of policies that accelerated the budding nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union,"[92] despite his "deep concern with limiting the effects of war on civilians and fostering trust between nations as the foundation of the peace that followed." [93] In essence, realpolitik dominated Stimson's approach to the atomic bomb and undermined his moral commitments.

One example of this is Stimson's oversight of the 1945 Stassfurt operation intended to secure Anglo-American hegemony over uranium supplies. By the time of Strassfurt, when the U.S. moved in to seize the largest known stock of uranium in Europe, they "did as so as part of a one-sided nuclear arms race" in which, "by 1945, the Soviet Union was already America's primary nuclear rival."[94] Thus, while Stimson is the tragic hero with a fatal flaw, James Byrnes is his foil, presented as the bad apple in the administration who desires conflict with the Soviet Union. Malloy's key argument, then, is that "by his own actions during World War II, the secretary of war had helped to set in motion exactly the kind of destructive international competition in armaments that he had spent much of his long public career attempting to avoid." [95] The almost capricious nature of his rapidly changing positions, and the tenuous justifications which frequently accompanied them, indicates that Stimson's moral convictions were more often than not drown out for the sake of political expediency. Malloy's conception of the atomic bomb as a "tragedy" is the principle departure from the traditionalists who tend to glorify the use of the bomb and celebrate it for ending the war and saving lives.

Malloy's differences with the revisionist camp are rather nuanced, but significant. Once again, his conception of the bombs as a "tragedy," rather than a calculated diplomatic initiative, separates him from the revisionists. Second, he makes the argument that the secretary of war "was in a unique position to shape many of the decisions about the use of the bomb."[96] This is in direct contradistinction to other historians, such as Alperovitz, who emphasize the agency of actors such as James Byrnes at Stimson's expense. Second, Malloy attempts to put forward a sort of "momentum theory" that Alperovitz considers "seemingly plausible" but in reality historically bankrupt. During the various decisions that led to the atomic bombing, the morals and convictions of officials were often sublimated for political expediency. For Malloy, this was particularly true of Stimson. In this way, a sort of "momentum theory" is employed by Malloy to mitigate the pernicious intent of certain actors and explain away the "failures" of their decisions. Thus, the atomic bombs were not intentionally used as diplomatic tools by most of the Truman administration, but policy "failures" as individuals were swept up in events. Further modifying the arguments of Alperovitz and Hasegawa, Malloy argues that "American domestic politics" were a primary reason that Truman "failed at Potsdam" to use the "two potentially useful, if imperfect, diplomatic levers… in an effort to end the war." [97] Furthermore, whereas Hasegawa presents Soviet entry as vital, Mallow suggests that "neither the public threat of Soviet entry nor the lure of allowing the Japanese to retain the emperor after the war were diplomatic panaceas." [98] Thus, Malloy's differences with the revisionists are perceptible.

A slightly different approach is apparent in J. Samuel Walker's book. He sets out to answer two interrelated questions: was the bomb "necessary at all" and, "if so, what exactly did it accomplish?"[99] By the conclusion of the book, Walker asserts that the answer to the first question "seems to be yes and no. Yes, it was necessary to end the war as quickly as possible. No, it was not necessary to prevent an invasion of Japan."[100] Addressing the second question, he maintains that the bomb "shortened the war and saved the lives of a relatively small but far from inconsequential number of Americans."[101] By situating his thesis within these parameters, S. Walker avoids having to take a position regarding the morality of the atomic bombings and instead focuses on rather narrow notions of "military necessity." He presents a variegated list of reasons Truman dropped the bomb: "(1) the commitment to ending the war successfully at the earliest possible moment; (2) the need to justify the effort and expense of building the atomic bombs; (3) the hope of achieving diplomatic gains in the growing rivalry with the Soviet Union; (4) the lack of incentives not to use atomic weapons; and (5) hatred of the Japanese and a desire for vengeance."[102]

Walker's differences with the traditionalists are quite clear: Walker suggests three rectifications to the popular narrative, a narrative the traditionalists largely accept: first, "there were other options available for ending the war… without the bomb and without an invasion"; second, due to Japan's enervated capacity for war, Truman and his advisers did not regard invasion as inevitable; last, even if invasion was necessary to end the war, military planners "projected the number of American lives lost at far fewer than the hundreds of thousands that Truman and his advisers claimed after the war."[103] Furthermore, Walker relies on the USSBS, a point of divergence between himself and both the traditionalists and Hasegawa, to conclude "the war would probably have ended before an American invasion of Kyushu became necessary." [104] Walker essentially dismisses the entire traditionalist approach, with the caveat that Truman was indeed concerned with saving as many American lives as possible.

It is important to note that he is rather critical of the revisionist approach as well. First and foremost, Walker specifically outlines what Alperovitz disparages as an analysis asserting "that a combination of factors-political, military, racial, financial-produced the decision." Alperovitz's criticism of such an approach is that it "is easy to assemble fragments of evidence" that suggest such an analysis, but jumping from these "fragments to an explanatory conclusion about decision-making at the very top of the U.S. government is suspect."[105] Thus, Walker's "five fundamental considerations" are a significant departure from Alperovitz. More significantly, Walker actually considers the entire atomic diplomacy thesis as a sideshow. For instance, he maintains that "Truman did not drop the bomb primarily to intimidate the Soviets." It was at best an ancillary consideration, a "bonus."[106]

Thus, the "consensus" historians, largely agree that potential alternatives existed, that invasion may not have been necessary, and that the atomic bombs were probably not responsible for saving hundreds of thousands of lives. In other words, they were not a military necessity. At the same time, the atomic bombs were not deployed primarily as diplomatic mechanisms. Even if they eventually came to fulfill this role, it was either the unintentional result of "momentum" or a tertiary variable barely perceptible vis-à-vis other considerations.

Conclusion: The Myth, the Cult, Nuclearism, and Nuclear Consciousness

In the post-war era, the debate and discussion over the bomb has been of tremendous importance. Both the traditionalist and revisionist camps have plotted the trajectory of the discourse surrounding Hiroshima and Nagasaki in different ways. Gar Alperovitz has suggested that officials promulgated propaganda in a top-down manner in order to manufacture an "American myth" surrounding the use of the atomic bombs. Robert J. Lifton's preface to Martin Sherwin's A World Destroyed laments the emergence of "nuclearism," the ideology that the atomic bomb is a "deity" capable of both "destroying the world" and "capable of ruling and protecting the world, even of keeping the world going."[107] In contrast, Robert Newman denounces Alperovitz and other revisionists as "Hiroshima cultists," "Truman bashers," and a host of other pejoratives for creating a "cult" that worships at the altar of Hiroshima. Lastly, Paul Boyer, in his book By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (1994), suggests that a sort of "nuclear consciousness" has infused itself in the perceptions and ideology of Americans in the post-war era.[108] In fact, "nuclear reality" so deeply pervades our "consciousness that it is hard to imagine what existence would have been like without it." [109] In these various ways authors have interpreted the post-war world after the atomic bomb.

In the second part of his book, Alperovitz explores the creation of the mythology surrounding the ostensibly "inevitable" use of the bomb. He maintains that three decisions, including the rejection to provide enough time for Japan to surrender, the choice to not offer the Japanese emperor assurances, and the explicit decision not to test a Russian entry into the war, "set the terms of reference for the bomb's subsequent seemingly 'inevitable' use… [and] so tightly framed the remaining issues as to make it all but impossible thereafter to oppose the bombings." [110] This "framing of the bomb," alongside the top-down campaign of disinformation immediately after the war, were key factors that facilitated the permeation of American consciousness with the "inevitability" narrative.

Stimson, Truman, Byrnes, and Groves were key figures in this top-down propaganda campaign. Despite what Alperovitz argues was an ancillary role in the actual decision to drop the bomb, Stimson did play a vital role in propagating the official discourse, citing Stimson's 1947 Harper's article which was presented as "a mere recital of the facts." Stimson posited a rigid dichotomy later picked up by traditionalist historians: either a costly invasion or use of the bomb was required to end the war. As Alperovitz explains, the article was an "extraordinary success," with the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reader's Digest, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and an indeterminate number of other media outlets "decidedly uncritical and, indeed, often effusive in praise."[111] Truman's argument that "the dropping of the bombs stopped the war" and "saved millions of lives" was the main line of thought he propagated continuously after the war. He maintains that the "over a million" figure "became the essential source for a myth which has been repeated with only occasional challenge for much of the last half century" despite modern scholarship demonstrating "the estimate to be without any serious foundation in the documents of that period." [112] Byrnes systematically distorted and revised the past by shrouding himself in secrecy and meticulously managing his personal writings. Groves' role as "an expert public relations artist and news 'spin' master" also comes to light when he devised a strategy whereby U.S. officials would "saturate" the "huge market hungry for information with officially approved material from the only authoritative source available."[113] In Japan itself a Civil Censorship Division of the Occupation had some 8,700 staffers engaged in examining thousands of newspapers, magazines, textbooks, motion pictures, and even private mail to ensure they did not stray too far from the official discourse.[114] The most pernicious form of censorship was also the most ubiquitous; namely, government classification. Thus, as Alperovitz argues, "the 'normal' functioning of government… is even more effective than the occasional excesses which make the headlines."[115] In these ways the historical narrative from beginning to end was "managed" by U.S. officials.

Part of Martin Sherwin's work is intended to combat the legacy of nuclearism. In a world where humans have "infused [the atomic bomb] with a constellation of awe and mystery. That constellation has included tendencies to embrace the bomb, to become fiercely dependent upon it, indeed, to render it something close to a deity."[116] The "willful embrace of the cruelest weapon ever created is the essence" of nuclearism.[117] Suggesting a line of continuity with Paul Boyer, A World Destroyed suggests that an "idealistic aura of peacemaking was inseparable from the bomb's lure of ultimate technology and ultimate power-all of which became part of the transcendent technology of nuclearism."[118] Hence, "the bizarre emphasis on the bomb's ostensible function of 'saving lives' rather than destroying them, of rendering the world peaceful rather than bringing to it a specter of annihilation." [119] This "bizarre emphasis" has been the plaything of traditionalist scholars for decades.

In sharp contrast with Alperovitz and Sherwin, Robert P. Newman's thesis in Truman and the Hiroshima Cult is the paradigmatic post-revisionist account of the atomic bomb and its aftermath. In it he argues that a "cult," with attendant cultists, has arisen around Truman and the Hiroshima decision. These "Hiroshima cultists" argue, in a variety of forms, that Japan was on the verge of surrender, that the "unconditional surrender" formula unnecessarily prolonged the war, and that Truman's decision to drop the bomb was driven either by racism towards the Japanese or diplomatic concerns vis-à-vis the Soviets, or some combination thereof. Newman vehemently rejects what he refers to as the "Japanese-as-victim cult," suggesting that any and all of the above suggestions are fundamentally incorrect. Newman proclaims that neither "Hiroshima cultists nor professional moralists had even considered the possibility that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legitimate retribution for the millions of deaths caused by Japan's fourteen-year rampage through China and the Pacific."[120]

Newman traces the development and growth of what he maliciously and interchangeably refers to as the "Japan-as-Victim myth" or "Hiroshima cult." He begins by explaining how in the immediate aftermath of the war "the whole world viewed Japan as villainous." [121] After 1948, however, things began to change, in both Japan and the United States. In 1949 John Hersey's Hiroshima was published, which Newman credits with having the opposite but equally powerful impact that Anne Frank's diary had on Germany. Where Anne Frank's diary forced Germany to come to terms with its atrocities, Hiroshima shielded Japan from having to do so, and helped begin the "Japan-as-Victim" myth. Furthermore, in 1951 P. M. S. Blackett published Fear, War, and the Bomb, which argued that the bomb was not the last act of the Second World War but the first act of the Cold War. Finally, in 1954 when the U.S. tested the new H-bomb and the crew of a tuna trawler were affected by radioactive fallout, the "five most important Japanese newspapers took a common position: this was the third atomic bombing." [122]

Despite all this, however, in 1964 a public opinion poll suggested that 49 percent of the Japanese public viewed the United States as their "favorite foreign country." By 1973, after the U.S. atrocities in Vietnam and use of Japan to accomplish them, this "popularity" had dropped to 18 percent. [123] By the late sixties people were questioning earlier U.S. military endeavors, notably the dropping of the atomic bombs, as a reflection of the changing political tide and anti-Vietnam war sentiment. By 1989, the "majority opinion even among Japanese scholars" was accepting of both the Blackett thesis and racism as primary factors in the dropping of the atomic bomb. In the United States, the gradual buildup of anti-nuclear activism, starting with The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in the late 1940s to the "Scientists' Declaration on Nuclear Power" in 1975, had a major impact on retroactive views of the bombings. Thus, "accurate charges" of postwar "overkill… seemed to legitimate chargers of overkill levied at the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs."[124] Furthermore, many "who became disillusioned with the American terror bombing in Vietnam became converts to the Hiroshima guilt trip."[125] Newman also cites Ian Buruma's The Wages of Guilt, which explores the myriad of factors for why a "Japan-as-Victim" cult developed but no comparably "cult" developed around Germany. The key factor as Newman sees it, however, was Vietnam. Without it, "the Japanese-as-victims cult in the United States would still be puny."[126] Newman's work is a vicious attack on the legacy of revisionists like Gar Alperovitz and Martin Sherwin.

Paul Boyer's study, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age, addresses the "unsettling new cultural factor" of the atomic bomb that had been introduced in immediate post-war period from 1945 to 1950. [127] His contention is that the bomb "had transformed not only military strategy and international relations, but the fundamental ground of culture and consciousness" in the United States.[128] These five formative years shaped how Americans first "confronted the bomb, struggled against it, and absorbed it into the fabric of the culture." [129] In short, Boyer maintains that the 1945 to 1946 period was a time of "obsessive post-Hiroshima awareness of the horror of the atomic bomb," while in the period from 1947 to 1950 and after there was a "diminished cultural attention and uneasy acquiescence" as the "dread destroyer of 1945 had become the shield of the Republic by 1950."[130] In essence, Sherwin's "transcendent technology of nuclearism" permeated what Boyer calls America's "nuclear consciousness." This "nuclear consciousness" was infused into the very core of American ideology in the post-war era and so deeply pervades American "consciousness that it is hard to imagine what existence would have been like without it."[131] Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Boyer argues, "stand as signposts marking both a gash in the living flesh of our historical consciousness and a turning point in our ethical history." [132]

From 1945 to 1946 an "intense discourse" had surrounded the atomic bomb, where after 1947 this "diminished to scattered murmurs and faint echoes" and by 1950 "America's nuclear culture… would appear as a gray and largely deserted landscape."[133] Around this time the Atomic Energy Commission began a full throttle propaganda campaign to associate atomic energy with health, happiness, and prosperity. This campaign drew in scientists, educators, radio personalities, health workers, and others, directly reaching some four million Americans and indirectly affecting many more. A "policy of deep secrecy about atomic-bomb research and stockpiling," alongside the "pervasive official practice… of playing down the bomb's dangers" continued to condition the American public.[134] In this context, and with the ensuing Cold War schism that dominated international relations, the "civil defense" paradigm displaced the "international control" slogan dominant during 1945-6. This multifaceted propaganda campaign was so successful that by 1950 Americans had overwhelmingly, if not unanimously, embraced the atomic bomb. The mid-1950s saw a resurgence of debate over the atomic bomb and then a re-decline after 1963. He argues that the illusion of diminished risk, the loss of immediacy, the promise of a world transformed by atomic energy, the complexity and comfort of deterrence theory, and the importance of the Vietnam War led to the decline of atomic prominence. Interestingly, whereas Newman positions the Vietnam as the central feature in establishing the "Hiroshima cult," Boyer contends that the Vietnam War actually lessened discussion and debate over the atomic bomb.

Although Boyer aligns neatly with revisionist historians, he does refocus the chronological lens. Where other historians have drawn a line of continuity between the development of the bomb and its use, or between the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, Boyer furthers that line of continuity by exploring the state's role in managing post-Hiroshima public discourse. In this way Boyer's work partially overlaps and agrees with but significantly transcends Alperovitz "architecture of an American myth." By focusing on the state's institution of a broad, far-reaching propaganda campaign that helped shape popular opinion, Boyer repositions the role of the state not just as user of the atomic bomb, but also as manager of the dominant discourse after its use. In this way, Boyer provides a unique historiographical contribution by arguing that atomic policies "transformed not only military strategy and international relations, but the fundamental ground of culture and consciousness" in the United States.

Thus, not only is the discourse surrounding the actual use of the atomic bomb split into competing camps, the post-war discourse itself is a topic of debate. In this regard, Paul Boyer's work is the most thorough, sophisticated, and systematic cultural analysis of the post-war discourse. For those of us interested in challenging not only the excesses of war, but the inter-imperial rivalries that ultimately lead to the use of the bomb, understanding the nuances of the historiographical debate is vital. More importantly, in the wake of the 1995 Smithsonian controversy and the ever-expanding list of countries with access to nuclear armaments, those of us on the left must continue to wage war on the post-war discourse justifying and rationalizing the atomic bomb.

Bibliography

Alperovitz, Gar. The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.

Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

Frank, Richard B. Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.

Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi. Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005.

Maddox, Robert James. Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004.

Malloy, Sean L. Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb Against Japan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.

Miscamble, Wilson D. The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs, and the Defeat of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Newman, Robert P. Truman and the Hiroshima Cult. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995.

Walker, J. Samuel. Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of the Atomic Bombs Against Japan. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Walker, Paul D. Truman's Dilemma: Invasion or the Bomb. Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company, 2003.

Stimson, Henry L. "The Decisions to Use the Atomic Bomb." Harper's Magazine (1947).

Sherwin, Martin J. A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Takaki, Ronald. Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995.

Wainstock, Dennis. The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb. New York: Enigma Books, 2011.

Citations

[1] I borrow the term "consensus" from J. Samuel Walker.

[2] Tsuyoshi Hasegawa utilizes "orthodox" to describe this position.

[3] Henry L. Stimson, "The Decisions to Use the Atomic Bomb," Harper's Magazine (1947). See full article: http://classrooms.tacoma.k12.wa.us/stadium/mberggren-2/us-history/download/Stimson%2B-%2BHarper%2BFeb%2B1947%2B-%2BDecision%2Bto%2BUse%2Bthe%2BAtomic%2BBomb.pdf?id=230795

[4] J. Samuel Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of the Atomic Bombs Against Japan (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 105.

[5] Originally published in 1995.

[6] A reiteration and strengthening of his 1965 work Atomic Diplomacy.

[7] Originally published in 1973.

[8] Truman, Stimson, Byrnes, Stalin, Hirohito, and the Big Six in Japan are examples where disagreement is most pronounced.

[9] Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 19.

[10] Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 225.

[11] Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 6.

[12] Sherwin, A World Destroyed, 7.

[13] This argument maintained that the US should share atomic technology with the Soviet Union in exchange for political cooperation.

[14] This position stated that the US should maintain a monopoly over atomic technology as long as possible and advance its diplomatic aims through harsh bargaining from its position of atomic power.

[15] Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 140.

[16] Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy, 154.

[17] Ibid., 135.

[18] Ibid., 139.

[19] Alperovitz, 19.

[20] Robert James Maddox, Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004), xv.

[21] Maddox, Weapons for Victory, 146.

[22] Ibid., 113.

[23] Richard B. Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 104.

[24] This is Newman's term for revisionist historians.

[25] The USSBS maintained that in all likelihood Japan would surrender prior to November 1, 1945 without the atomic bombing or the entrance of the Soviet Union into the war. It further states that had Japan not surrendered by November 1, it would definitely have surrendered prior to the end of 1945.

[26] Robert P. Newman, Truman and the Hiroshima Cult (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995), 36.

[27] Newman, Truman and the Hiroshima Cult, 47.

[28] This is one of Newman's other terms for revisionists.

[29] Ibid., 49.

[30] Wilson D Miscamble, The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs, and the Defeat of Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 91.

[31] Frank, 95.

[32] Ibid., 96.

[33] Ibid., 197.

[34] Paul D. Walker, Truman's Dilemma: Invasion or the Bomb (Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company, 2003), 171.

[35] Miscamble, 115. Original emphasis.

[36] Maddox, 153.

[37] Hasegawa, 5.

[38] Maddox, 131.

[39] Frank, 348.

[40] Miscamble, 89.

[41] Ibid., 91.

[42] Sakomizu was chief secretary to the cabinet of Japan during World War II.

[43] Hasegawa, 250.

[44] Miscamble, 3.

[45] Ibid., 44.

[46] Ibid., 113.

[47] Ibid., 119.

[48] Ibid., 124.

[49] Newman, xiii. Emphasis added.

[50] Ibid., 120.

[51] Ibid., 130.

[52] Ibid., 138. Emphasis original.

[53] Paul Walker, 15.

[54] Ibid., 17.

[55] Ibid., 18-19.

[56] Ibid., 27.

[57] Ibid., 43-44.

[58] Miscamble, 120-1.

[59] Maddox, xv.

[60] Alperovitz, 656.

[61] Ibid., 657.

[62] Sherwin, 6.

[63] Ibid., 7.

[64] Ibid., 8.

[65] Alperovitz, 655.

[66] Ronald Takaki, Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995), 8.

[67] Takaki, Hiroshima, 100.

[68] Ibid., 94.

[69] Hasegawa, 2.

[70] Hasegawa, 300.

[71] Alperovitz, 4

[72] Hasegawa, 295.

[73] Ibid., 296.

[74] Alperovitz, 85.

[75] Hasegawa., 129.

[76] Ibid., 188

[77] Ibid., 275

[78] Samuel Walker cites Barton Bernstein as one of the pioneering "consensus" historians of Hiroshima.

[79] Dennis Wainstock, The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb (New York: Enigma Books, 2011), 178.

[80] Wainstock, The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb, 178.

[81] Ibid., 178.

[82] Maddox, 8.

[83] Newman, 57.

[84] Ibid., 71.

[85] Ibid., 73.

[86] Ibid., 77.

[87] Wainstock, 171

[88] Hasegawa, 290

[89] Ibid., 291

[90] Sean L. Malloy, Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb Against Japan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 7.

[91] Malloy, Atomic Tragedy, 8.

[92] Ibid., 81.

[93] Ibid., 11.

[94] Ibid., 67.

[95] Ibid., 70.

[96] Ibid., 9.

[97] Ibid., 129. Here he is referring to retention of the emperor (modifying unconditional surrender) and the public threat of Soviet entry into the war.

[98] Malloy, 129

[99] Samuel Walker, 6.

[100] Ibid., 109.

[101] Ibid., 109.

[102] Ibid., 92.

[103] Ibid., 5-6.

[104] Ibid., 89.

[105] Alperovitz, 656.

[106] Walker, 95.

[107] Sherwin, xi.

[108] Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994), xix.

[109] Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light, xx.

[110] Alperovitz, 631.

[111] Ibid., 455.

[112] Ibid., 466.

[113] Ibid., 598.

[114] Ibid., 610.

[115] Ibid., 613.

[116] Sherwin, xi.

[117] Ibid., xi.

[118] Ibid., xii.

[119] Ibid., xi.

[120] Newman, xiii.

[121] Ibid., 153.

[122] Ibid., 161.

[123] Ibid., 164.

[124] Ibid., 177.

[125] Ibid., 183.

[126] Ibid., 184.

[127] Boyer, xxi.

[128] Ibid., xxi.

[129] Ibid., xx.

[130] Ibid., 352 and 349.

[131] Boyer, xx

[132] Ibid., 182.

[133] Ibid., 291.

[134] Ibid., 303.

Transformation of Fascism in the Twentieth Century: A Comprehensive Theory

By Fazal Rahman

The following paper was presented at the Pacific Northwest Marxist Scholars Conference in Seattle, Washington, on April 11, 1986, under a different title, "Some Aspects of the Developing Dialectic of U. S. Capitalist Democracy and International Imperialism". It is being reproduced here without any changes, except in the title. The paper was type-written and was scanned and transferred to the MS Word with some difficulty. There was an abstract diagrammatic presentation of the theory in the original paper. However, its scanned copy could not be transferred to the word processor. So, that has been excluded.

As predicted theoretically in the paper, enormous further erosions of capitalist democracy and conditions of the working class have taken place in the US and other imperialist centers since its writing and presentation in 1986, which are continuing and are going to get worse. Great changes have also occurred in the world politico-economic situation and balance of forces. Socialism has been betrayed in the former socialist giants, Peoples Republic of China and the USSR, as well as in majority of the other socialist countries. They are now turning into capitalist and imperialist countries, further fueling and exacerbating the inter-capitalist and inter-imperialist rivalries and competition. The former dominant imperialist countries of the US, Japan, and in Europe are now facing powerful and successful competition from the newly emerging capitalist and imperialist (or wannabe imperialist) powers, especially the countries of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). The 1986 paper had focused on the negative effects of the crumbling of fascist-type dictatorships in the periphery-established and sustained by the center-and their replacement with the democratic types, on the capitalist democracies in the imperialist centers. The great changes in the distribution of world resources, wealth, and balance of power, associated with the emergence of BRICS and other actors on the world stage, will inevitably produce further huge and powerful negative effects on the economies and political superstructures of the rapidly receding imperialist powers that have been dedicated and addicted to dominance and exploitation of the periphery for centuries. The effects, pressures, and forces of these newer changes in the world reality, on the political economies and systems of the imperialist centers, are combining with those of the earlier changes of abolition of fascist-type dictatorships and multiplying and compounding them. These effects, pressures, and forces are objective; but subjectively, in both cases, the imperialist capital and its political representatives in the government, congress, and other institutions are channeling them through the erosion of capitalist democracy and attacks on the rights, living conditions, employment, and wages of the working class and other working people, in attempts to maintain the class inequalities, privileges, and domination. Large parts of the Third World periphery were subjected to fascism of the imperialist center for a long time. Now those externalized forces and pressures are returning to that center itself. The newer changes mentioned above are also greatly adding to those.

The fundamentals of world balance of economic, political, and military forces, as well as the relations of production and classes, have been changing for quite sometime; and, recently, the pace of these changes has greatly accelerated. The super-profits extracted from the super-exploitation of the Third World had made it possible for the ruling capitalist classes in the US and other imperialist countries to bribe the working classes into class collaboration, from which the latter, especially their leaderships and technically skilled sections, had benefited significantly in financial terms, on the expense of the political positions of the working classes as a whole. Due to the changes in the fundamentals, large parts of the working classes in the imperialist countries are now not only being excluded from the benefits of the bribery, but are also being subjected to greatly enhanced exploitation and exclusion, in order to compensate for losses in the international areas. As the leaderships and privileged sections of the working classes continue to reap the benefits of bribery and class collaboration, they continue the same policies, callously and conscienceless ignoring and disregarding the plight of large parts of their classes, numbering tens of millions, and on the expense of the political positions of their classes, relative to the capitalist and imperialist classes. Needless to say that continuation of these policies by the working classes of imperialist countries, at this stage of the evolution of their politico-economic and social systems, has now become a great threat to their own welfare-as well as to that of the overwhelming majority of other people-, domestic and international peace, and capitalist democracy itself. These policies are greatly contributing to the blow-back of fascism from the Third World periphery-where it has been replaced with the democratic types-to the imperialist centers, and its establishment there. As a result of its rapidly weakening international economic position and resources, prolonged and irresolvable economic and all-round crises, and becoming the greatest debtor nation in history, US imperialism's ability to bribe its own working class and the capitalist and feudal leaders and other elites of the Third World countries has greatly diminished. In spite of all these great objective changes, it continues to allocate huge parts of its national budget and GDP to military expenditures, spending more on these than all the rest of the world combined. This policy is also now feeding into the developing domestic fascism. All these multiple international and national interacting factors, forces, and pressures, within the context of a new and changed global reality, are producing powerful macro- and micro-level objective and subjective effects, which are eroding the capitalist democracy and transforming it into the most dangerous masked fascism in history. Sooner or later, the mask itself will be eroded, if the system and society continue to move in the same directions.

An overwhelming part of the working class in the US is unorganized. It is in such a dismal state that only 7.2 percent of it is organized into unions in the private sector (2009 figures) and it does not even have its own working class political party. This situation is very different from 1945, when almost 36 percent of American workers were represented by the unions. Its leadership has been complacent with the capitalist class throughout much of the 20 th Century, as well as currently. During the last part of 19th Century, first two decades of 20th Century, and during the 1930s, large and important parts of the American working class had become politically conscious and revolutionary. They aimed at wrestling political power from the capitalist class, which is the only way for the transformation of the relations of production to bring them into harmony with the level of development of the productive forces and to establish a system of social justice, domestic and international peace, real democracy-the socialist democracy-, and universal well-being for everyone. However, they were brutally repressed and crushed. For example, the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), a militant socialist organization, was crushed between 1903 and 1907, and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a powerful socialist revolutionary working class organization with large membership, was crushed during the second decade of the 20th Century. Twenty percent of the unions of Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) were controlled by the Communist Party (CP) after the Second World War. It was forced to purge them in 1949 and 1950 due to repressive legislation, government pressure, and American Federation of Labor (AFL) red baiting. The AFL has a long history of capitulation to the capitalist class and class collaboration. When the radical unions were being destroyed, AFL was being praised and rewarded. After purging all the communists from their unions, the AFL and CIO merged in 1955. The AFL-CIO has since been engaging in only industrial unionism. The radical unionism of WFM, IWW, and CP controlled unions of CIO was destroyed by brutal repression and repressive legislation. All the other radical political parties and organizations suffered the same fate in the long history of repression in this country. The worst repression was unleashed on CP, shortly after its formation in September 1919, and continued unabated, with brief intervals and ever-increasing ferocity, until its influence in the working class and unions was almost completely destroyed by 1950s. After the betrayal of socialism in the USSR, the CP has also betrayed socialism under its current leadership. Among other things, it has been attempting to act as Obama's tail! Before the betrayal, CP, under the leadership of Gus Hall, had intellectually become one of the best and most principled communist parties of the world.

Another important change during that period has been in the nature and operations of the United Nations Organization (UNO), its various agencies, and personnel. They no longer conduct the type of important objective and critical studies that were cited in the article. The UNO has essentially become a tentacle of imperialism and its various agencies and officials have lost their former relative intellectual, political, and ethical independence. They have now submitted to the masters that feed them. This is the age of the worst form of prostitution: the intellectual, spiritual, and politico-economic prostitution, and the UNO, like almost everyone else, has also become a part of the chain reaction, mutating into a different element.

Introduction

Much has been written about the nature and history of fascism between the two world wars. However, there is a great void in theory as well as in the objective documentation of the development of fascism after the Second World War. Moreover, in spite of extensive studies of the earlier period, there continues to be very widespread confusion and misunderstanding about the class nature and state structure of the phenomenon of fascism, due to the dominance of bourgeois deformation of social knowledge and psychology in the capitalist societies. Although Marxist-Leninists developed the most scientific analysis of fascism in the earlier period, and several profound communist thinkers and fighters discovered and revealed its most essential features [e.g. R. Palme Dutt (1), Georgi Dimitrov (2), Palmiro Togaliati (3) etc.], no comparable insightful theoretical advance has been made in the development of knowledge of the forms of fascism and their transformations after the Second World War. Two major reasons for this crippling lack have been:

(1) The entirely inadequate and meager understanding of nature, forms, and evolution of fascist forces and tendencies inherent within the frameworks of bourgeois democracy in the imperialist centers.

(2) The artificial division and restriction of the phenomenon of fascism within the national boundaries of the center and the periphery in the historical and politico-economic analyses. Superficial appearances that have indicated the overwhelming dominance of bourgeois democracy over forms of fascism inherent in the advanced imperialist center, have been generally accepted for their face value. The flow of fascist pressures and tendencies from the center to the periphery has largely gone unnoticed. Such arbitrary and narrow fragmentation of the forms of fascism prevalent in the center from those in numerous areas of the periphery has already done immeasurable damage to the possibility of development of a comprehensive theory and knowledge of fascism as an integrated, interconnected, and continuous whole evolving in the center as well as in the periphery of imperialism simultaneously. In political circles, it is hardly understood at all that the contemporary existence of fascism in large areas of the periphery has been the result of, more than anything else, the evolution, transformation, and externalization of fascist forms and pressures of the imperialist center. Such a gap of understanding has inevitably retarded the discovery of the real and continuing dialectic of bourgeois democracy and fascism and of the passing of one into the other, as well as their mutual conditioning and flow between the center and periphery within the international system of imperialism under contemporary conditions.

In the current international political situation, characterized by intense fascist upsurge in the center as well as sharp polarization of international class forces, it is of utmost importance to grasp the correct structure of the above-mentioned dialectic. This paper is devoted to such an effort.

Evolutionary Dialectic of Fascism: An Outline

The most concise and yet profound and often-quoted definition of the rule of fascism was arrived at during the 13th Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International in 1933 as "the open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital" (4), which continues to be accepted as the essence of fascism by contemporary Marxist-Leninist circles throughout the world. Due to limitations of space, we cannot go into the details of the historical developments of this definition or of why this is the only scientific understanding of the class essence of fascism as compared to the confusionist and obscurantist theories of the apologists of capitalism. Here the focus is on the dialectical developmental processes of fascism.

There has been both continuity and discontinuity in the various historical types and forms of fascism. These will be briefly dealt with in the following four phases of fascism and its molting.

The First Phase

In the first phase, which started in the earlier part of this century and reached its zenith between the two world wars, the bourgeois democratic form of capitalist class rule was replaced by the fascist form of capitalist class rule in certain parts of the imperialist centers, e.g. Germany and Italy. There were colossal efforts to establish the rule of fascism universally. These efforts were crushed after the unprecedented destruction of human lives and material resources.

The Second Phase

The second phase, which started soon after the Second World War and continues into the present, constituted a major shift in the strategy of fascism as well as in the geographical location of its headquarters. As this phase is central to the theory, and as its various international connections between the imperialist center and the periphery have been effectively obscured for so long, this needs to be elaborated upon in some detail.

The strategy of fascist forces in the imperialist centers after the Second World War changed fundamentally while the basic objectives remained the same, i.e. maximization of profits for the big finance capital, brutal and militarist suppression of the international working class and its unions through fascist-type political superstructures, and economic, political, and military subjugation of the periphery in forms consistent with the new historical conditions. However, in this phase a dichotomy came into existence. While formerly, in the first phase, fascist superstructures were established in some parts of the imperialist centers themselves, in the second phase, the inherent fascist pressures and tendencies of capitalist democracies in the imperialist center were directed towards and channeled into numerous areas of the Third World periphery, while maintaining the bourgeois democratic types of superstructures in the center itself. As a result, numerous fascist-type superstructures sprang up in the periphery during that period. The nature of interactions and mutual conditioning between the imperialist center and periphery in this phase has been the most obscure in modern history. In the diagrammatic representation of this phase, it is shown that, while fascism flowed out of the center into the periphery, bourgeois democracy in the center was reinforced and enhanced by the super-exploitation and imperialist-fascist plunder of the human and natural resources of the periphery and the transfer of the resulting wealth to the center, which made it possible to establish, consolidate, and enhance the bourgeois democratic superstructures in the center. In fact, such a neocolonial process is coextensive with similar mechanisms during the colonial period.

The geographical headquarters of the fascist forces in this period shifted to the U.S. from Germany. It must be pointed out here that fascist tendencies and pressures are inherent in all the imperialist countries and grow out of, as well as against, the bourgeois democratic state apparatus under certain crisis situations. In the U.S., these tendencies and forces were already extremely well-developed and powerful even before the second phase. Fortunately, the inter-imperialist contradictions and rivalries and the uneven developments during the first phase prevented the international simultaneity and coordination of fascist conquest of political power and divided the capitalist world into two opposing camps. In the second phase, the fascist pressures and tendencies inherent within the bourgeois democracy of the imperialist center were externalized onto the numerous areas of the periphery wherever it was possible. The U.S., because of its unparalleled development of an international network of political, economic, and military domination during the post-Second World War period, played the determining central role in the developments of the second phase. As has been scientifically well documented, e.g. in Gromyko's work (5), in the first phase too it was the U.S. monopoly capital that had provided the essential industrial, economic, and military foundations for the establishment of a militarist and fascist Germany in the hope of directing that military power against the U.S.S.R. Although U.S. monopoly capital operates under all forms of political superstructure internationally, the focus of this essay is on its operations under the fascist types. If we examine the foundations of the latter, the following elements stand out clearly as of a determining nature:

(1) The economic, political, and military structures and forces provided by the imperialist center.

(2) The native military apparatus dominated by pro-imperialist elites, many of whom are trained for their roles in the center.

(3) Powerful sections of native big bourgeoisie closely tied to the imperialist metropolitan bourgeoisie.

(4) Big landowners also closely linked to monopoly capital of the center.

The foundations of fascist-type superstructures in the periphery have been permeated through and through with the powerful and vital components of imperialism, primarily of the U.S. Some sociologists and political economists in the periphery, intimately familiar with the situation, are already arriving at the conclusion that the U.S. metropolitan bourgeoisie can in no realistic sense be considered external to the class structure of fascist-type superstructures under discussion, but on the contrary it constitutes the most dominant class among the various native classes there. This, for example, is the conclusion of veteran progressive Pakistani sociologist Hamza Alavi (6) and various others in their analysis of the fascist-type dictatorships in Pakistan. A more or less similar class situation has existed in numerous other countries of the periphery where fascist-type dictatorships came into being during the second phase. U.S. imperialism has been the connecting thread, the international coordinator and manager of all these dictatorships spread all over the Third World periphery.

At this point, it would be desirable to cite some contemporary data on the global economic operations of imperialism, as ultimately it is on this basis that all other forms of relationships develop.

The U.N.Center on Transnational Corporations reported that the parent transnational corporations (TNCs) have 100,000 affiliates in other countries, out of which one-third belong to the parent TNCs in the U.S. and one-fifth to those in the U.K. U.S. and U.K. TNCs account for over 60 percent of all foreign affiliates in the developing countries (7). Of the 10 largest TNCs in the world, 8 are US corporations which account for 76 percent of the group's total sales and 75 percent of its total profits (8). In 1985, the 10 largest U.S. industrial TNCs had sales of more than $522.5 billion (9). A sample of the largest TNCs, in a U.N. study, showed that the ratio of sales by their foreign affiliates to total sales rose from about 30 percent in 1971 to about 35 percent in 1976 and to about 40 percent in 1980, indicating the rapid pace of the transnationalization of monopoly capital (10).

At the Tenth World Trade Union Congress in 1982, it was estimated that, by transfer of profits and other forms of plundering, international monopolies swindle the Third World countries of $200 billion annually (11). Certainly this conservative estimate must have gone up considerably by this time.

For more than a decade now, the main form of the export of capital has been loan capital, which, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) data, made up 90 percent of the financial flow to the periphery in 1980 (12). In 1984, the debt of the periphery to the imperialist banks and corporations of the center reached the astronomical figure of $833 billion, on which $120 billion was extracted as debt service (13).

Transnational corporations from the center control 80 to 90 percent of the main commodities exported by the periphery and 40 percent of the industrial production in the latter (14). Fifteen largest among them, for example, controlled the marketing of 90 percent of the world's pineapples; 80 to 90 percent of the wheat, coffee, corn, cocoa, tea, forest products, cotton, tobacco, jute, copper, tin, bauxite; 90 to 95 percent of the iron ore; 75 percent of the crude petroleum; 60 percent of the sugar; 70 to 75 percent of the rice, bananas, and natural rubber; and 50 to 60 percent of the phosphates during 1980. In most cases, only 3 to 6 TNCs dominate bulk of the above-cited market (15). Although foreign direct investment and ownership is relatively lower in the agricultural economy than in mining, petroleum, and other industries of the periphery, the returns to the producers in the former sector, in terms of the proportion of the final product value, are much lower because of the TNC controls at the processing, transportation, and marketing levels (16). In one pioneering study, the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) revealed that, in the case of global banana trade, dominated by 3 large TNC's, 88 percent of the gains went to the TNC's while the producing countries got only 12 percent (17). It is estimated that the price manipulations by TNC's alone cause the Third World to lose between $50 billion and $100 billion annually (18).

The cumulative foreign direct investment (FDI) of TNC's at the end of 1983 was estimated to be around $625 billion, of which TNC's based in the U.S. accounted for over 40 percent. About a quarter of the total FDI was in developing countries (19). During the 1960's and 1970's, U.S. TNC's accounted for more than half of the total flow of FDI, and in 1979 their share was 59 percent of the total (20).

Another U.N. study revealed that between 1956 and 1968 the operations of U.S. TNCs were twice as profitable in the Third World as in the industrially developed countries (21).

The share of income from FDI in the total income of 8 of the top 10 U.S. TNC's varied from 49 to 87 percent in 1979 (22).

In UNCTAD's statistics, it was shown that for every dollar invested in the Third World between 1970 and 1980, TNCs repatriated approximately $2.20 to their home bases (23). U.S. TNCs invested $12,450 million and repatriated $48,847 million during 1970-1979, getting $3.92 return for every dollar invested in the developing countries (24). In 1980, there was a disinvestment of $3,454 million in the Middle East, and profits repatriated to the U.S. amounted to $7,326 million (25), reducing the net flow of FDI by U.S. TNCs to the periphery to $8,996 million and increasing the profits repatriated to the U.S. to $56,173 million between 1970 and 1980, indicating that $6.24 were repatriated as profits to the U.S. for every dollar invested in the Third World. Total income of U.S. TNCs between 1970 and 1980, from the above-mentioned net flow of $8,996 million during the same period, amounted to $78,934 million or a ratio of $8.77 income for every dollar invested in the periphery. During the same period, U.S. TNCs FDI net flow to developed capitalist countries was $35,218 million, profits repatriated to the U.S. from them $63,138 million and income $134,818 million. Hence the ratios of repatriated dollars and total profits to dollars invested in the developed capitalist countries were 1.79:1 and 3.83:1, respectively, between 1970 and 1980, while, as noted above, these ratios were 6.24:1 and 8.77:1 in the case of developing countries. While 46.8 percent of the total profits made in the developed capitalist countries were repatriated to the U.S. and 53.2 percent were reinvested there, from the Third World 71 percent of the profits were remitted to the U.S. and 29 percent reinvested. Moreover, the profit rate on the U.S. cumulative FDI investments in the developed capitalist countries in 1980 was 16.6 percent, while the corresponding profit rate in the developing countries amounted to 24.1 percent. The total profits of U.S. TNCs from FDI in all areas abroad between 1970 and 1980 added up to the colossal sum of $219,472 million. The total net inflow of FDI to these areas in the same period was $44,928 million (26).

UNCTAD estimated that technological contributions by the skilled personnel who emigrated from the Third World to the U.S., Canada, and U.K. between 1960 and 1972 amounted to $51 billion in terms of capital. The total amount of development assistance during the same period to the Third World was $46 billion. Hence, brain drain alone caused a net loss of $5 billion to the Third World in 12 years (27).

Such is the economic framework that has both been the result and the cause of numerous fascist superstructures in the periphery which constitute the overwhelming proportion of the data cited above for the periphery.

The above analysis of the second phase has shown that both bourgeois democracy and international fascism have been the essential attributes of U.S. monopoly capital in the post-Second World War period. The relevance of this relationship can hardly be overstated when applied to the developments and transformations in the present and future periods discussed in connection with the third and fourth phases.

The Third Phase

In the third phase of fascist molting, the initial processes of which started in the mid-1970s and the definitive shapes of which have been established in the 1980s, the imperialistically established fascist superstructures in the periphery are crumbling down rapidly, one after the other, like a house of cards, under the pressures of mass democratic movements. In this phase, the fascist pressures externalized so skillfully for so long onto the periphery are returning home to the imperialist center itself. This should be quite understandable, as once certain amounts of energy and pressures are generated and circulated in different channels of a system, any blockage in one of them would cause corresponding increases in the others to accommodate the total original volume, if a change in the system itself is not made. As indicated in the diagram, the third phase is a transitional phase which involves the present and immediate future periods and in which, as the fascist-type superstructures are breaking down in the periphery and being replaced by the democratic types, in the center the bourgeois democratic apparatus is being eroded, and there is a rapid upsurge of fascist and militarist tendencies on all levels of society, most importantly on the political level.

There are two diametrically opposed types of movement of forces and processes within the center inherent in the third phase:

(1) Mass opposition and resistance to the transformation of bourgeois democracy into fascism in the center. Such an opposition will only succeed if it sets before itself the task of transforming the imperialist system itself. Otherwise it will be absurdly self-contradictory and ineffective. To be effective and successful, it will have to be organized under the leadership of the working class and will involve the revolutionary transformation of the imperialist system into a socialist democracy, eliminating the source of fascism once and for all.

(2) Spontaneous movement of forces and processes, leading to ever-increasing erosion of bourgeois democracy, without the effective and consciously organized massive opposition mass movement in the center.

The Fourth Phase

The two alternative outcomes in the fourth phase would flow out of the two alternative developments of the movements described above and their conflict and outcome.

(1) As a result of the first alternative of the third phase, socialist-oriented democracy is likely to result in the present imperialist center, which will have complementary democratic relationships with the periphery. As shown in the diagram, democracy will flow in both directions if this alternative is materialized.

(2) If the second alternative of the third phase emerges victorious, fascism, in one form or another, is certain to be established in the imperialist center. It will be like the first phase, but with a different geographical nucleus, i.e. the U.S., and on an incomparably higher level of development and force. There will be renewed efforts for the establishment of universal fascism, even under the label of "democracy".

Foundations of Fascism in the U.S

Within the U.S. imperialist center, various objective and subjective processes, described below, that are prerequisites for the upsurge and consolidation of fascism, have accumulated and matured to unprecedented levels. Although some of the same objective processes, in themselves, also constitute the maturity of conditions for transition into socialism, the incredibly regressive and distorted development of the subjective factor counteracts movement in that direction.

(1) The highest degree and the most gigantic concentration of monopoly capital, under the control of relatively few large monopolies, in the world history.

(2) The highest state of militarization of the economy in world history.

(3) The most colossal buildup of material-technical military apparatus, constructed with the aid of the most advanced scientific and technological techniques in the world's history.

(4) Unparalleled increase in the economic and political power of the military-industrial complex headed by the most bestial, reactionary, chauvinistic, imperialistic, and nuclear-weapons-intoxicated sections of monopoly capital.

(5) A triple-layered economic crisis which U.S. imperialism is incapable of resolving within its present framework.

(6) Sharp increase in the well-integrated and aggressive attacks of monopoly capital on the working class and labor unions.

(7) An astounding lack of political unity, low political level of struggle, and predominance of class-collaborationist, opportunist, and pro-imperialist elements and sentiments in the working masses, which have made them extremely vulnerable to the attacks against them. Although a high degree of polarization of class forces is ensuing as a consequence of these brutal attacks, it is not clear whether it will develop rapidly enough and deeply enough to check the further advance of monopoly capital in the direction of fascism.

(8) A general dehumanization, followed by monsterization of human nature, decadence, callousness, spiritual-emotional atrophy, and perversion of the mass psychology and personality structure in the population at large, primarily the result of being under the prolonged rule of the most intensified and sinister forms of capitalism in history, have all created a social environment in which extreme reactionary forces can and have risen to the top levels of political state power with an ease which only appears surprising if one has entertained delusions about social reality in the U.S. To be sure, such objective social reality is denied and covered up by a thin and superficial layer of solipsistic-mechanical forms of linguistic and other social behavior that are culturally produced and reproduced. However, objective facts constantly burst forth and explode the fragile and phony bubble of this secondary layer which, nevertheless, is again automatically inflated. There is an incessant contradiction and tension between the objective social reality on the one hand, and social subjective manipulation, rationalization, and denial of it on the other, producing a sort of social schizophrenic mental apparatus in this society.

Due to the existence of various objective and subjective circumstances, "the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital" have gained control of the political and state apparatus, albeit in a bourgeois democratic form. Whether they will need to or attempt to resort to the "open terrorist dictatorship" will largely depend upon the scale and strength of the opposition mass movement.

Summation

The staggering successes of national liberation movements in the periphery constitute the major causal factor in the chain of events leading to the all-out offensive of monopoly capital against the working class and the bourgeois democratic rights in its center. This could not be otherwise within the sinister system of imperialism. The main point here is that although the imperialist bourgeoisie has taken short-term measures to make up for the losses and has, in fact, increased its profits in face of the successes of national liberation movements in the periphery, it has no viable and reliable intermediate or long-term solutions to the problems thus being generated and is more and more resorting to naked militarism, irrationality, and rapidly increased levels of measures towards fascism.

At this point, it is possible to formulate the central thesis of this paper, which is that within the present U.S. imperialist politico-economic structure, an increase in the politico-economic independence and democracy in the periphery has a reducing effect on the existing version of bourgeois democracy in the center, and conversely the existence and expansion of fascist-type dictatorships in the periphery tend to maintain and enhance the specific version of bourgeois democracy under discussion in the center. On the other hand, the level and stability of bourgeois democracy in the center is dependent upon the continuation of fascist-type dictatorships, either direct or camouflaged through surrogates, in the periphery

The class nature and contradictions of democracy under capitalism have long been understood and analyzed by communists. Lenin, in his address to the First Congress of the Communist International in 1919, had presented a thorough analysis of the extremely limited and contradictory nature of bourgeois democracy in response to the class collaborationist, opportunist, and confusionist nonsense of the leadership of some European social democratic parties, in which they were attempting to identify bourgeois democracy with democracy in general. He conclusively demonstrated that bourgeois democracy was little more than a legal form of cover for the actual state of affairs characterized by the dictatorship of capitalists. He also pointed out that the "Marxists have always maintained that the more developed, the 'purer' democracy is, the more naked, acute, and merciless the class struggle becomes, and the 'purer' the capitalist oppression and bourgeois dictatorship" (28). These were prophetic words, the truth of which was never more self-evident, more applicable, than in the contemporary U.S. The inverse relationship between the progress of bourgeois democratic political super-structural form in the center and of any kind of democracy worth the name in the periphery, as discussed in this essay, is consistent with the Marxist-Leninist understanding of the problem of bourgeois democracy and follows from it under current international conditions. The dialectical logic also requires such an analysis of the interconnected movement, interactions, and mutual conditioning of the basic economic structures and political superstructures of the center and the periphery.

I will not attempt to deduce all the strategic and tactical implications of the analysis of this paper. However, one such implication is of fundamental importance: that under contemporary international conditions, the effective struggle against fascism requires a new strategy in which it is inseparably linked with the fight against the present structure of imperialism and the dependent nature of its bourgeois democracy in the center on fascism in the periphery. This means that the mere struggle to preserve the present form of bourgeois democratic apparatus in the center, within its current imperialist context, would be futile and self-defeating. To be effective, the mass struggle against fascism would have to aim at the radical transformation of the current form of bourgeois democratic apparatus in the center as well as of the structure of international imperialism itself. This would only be possible under the leadership of the working class and its vanguard party. The bourgeoisie itself is completely bankrupt and incapable of providing such leadership at this stage. The theory and practice of united and popular front against fascism, developed during the first phase of fascism, will continue to be the basic guide at the new stage. However, the new features in the new phase of fascism also demand new measures and some modifications in the strategic objectives as well as in the strategy and tactics themselves. The highly contradictory and ambiguous role of progressive sections of the bourgeoisie became clear in their involvement in the popular front during the Spanish people's war against fascism, as well as during other revolutionary struggles throughout the world. Some of them, entrusted with leadership positions, caused immeasurable damage to the revolutionary movements. In the present-day imperialist centers, the bourgeoisie has decayed even further, and although its progressive sections will become part of the united and popular front against fascism, their capacity for leadership is extremely contradictory and limited. Another feature of the contemporary fight against fascism is the struggle against the danger of nuclear war, both problems being the organically linked, dominant forms that modern monopoly capital is passing through in its morbid historical development.

The immense and fundamental importance of the existence of socialist-bloc countries for the development of international events has not been discussed in this writing. However, this has been taken for granted as the foundation on which historical movement in the progressive directions has the possibility to advance at this phase.

Originally published on http://imperialismandthethirdworld.wordpress.com.

Notes

1. Dutt, R. P. Fascism and Social Revolution. International Publishers, New York, 1934. World Politics. 1918-1936. Random House, New York, 1936.

2. Dimitrov, G. The United Front Against Fascism. Speeches delivered at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International, July 25-August 20, 1935. New Century Publishers, New York, 1950.

3. Togliatti, P. Lectures on Fascism. International Publishers, New York, 1976.

4. Dimitrov, op. cit. Seldes, G. Facts and Fascism. In Fact, Inc., New York, 1943.

5. Gromyko, A. The Overseas Expansion of Capital. Progress Publishers, Moscow (English translation), 1985.

6. Alavi, H. "Class and State". Gardezi and J. Rashid (eds.), Pakistan: The Roots of Dictatorship: The Political Economy of a Praetorian State, pp. 40 Zed Press, London, 1983.

7. United Nations. "The Global Foreign Affiliate Network", The CTC Reporter, No.15, p. 8. U.N. Centre on Transnational Corporations (UNCTC), 1983.

8. Fortune. Time, Inc., New York, May 3 and August 23, 1982.

9. Fortune. Time, Inc., New York, April 28, 1986.

10. United Nations. "TNCs in World Development: Third Survey". The CTC Reporter, No. 15, p. 3. UNCTC, 1983.

11. Tenth World Trade Union Congress, Commission No. 4, "Trade Union Strategy Against the Transnational Corporations". Havana, 1982.

12. Castro, F. The World Economic and Social Crisis. Report to the Seventh Summit Conference of Non-Aligned Countries, p. 141. Oficina de Publicaciones de Consejo de Estado, Havana, 1983.

13. OECD. External Debt of Developing Countries in 1984, pp. 20-21. OECD, Paris, 1985.

14. Castro, F., op. cit., pp. 16, 142.

15. Clairemonte, F. F. "Reflections on Power: TNCs in the Global Economy". The CTC Reporter, No. 15, pp. 37-39. UNCTC, 1983.

16. Zorn, S. "TNC-Government Relations in Agriculture". The CTC Reporter, No. 20, pp. 45-47, 50. UNCTC, 1985.

17. Clairemonte, op. cit.

18. Castro, op. cit.

19. United Nations. "Policy Analysis and Research. Foreign Direct Investment and Other Related Flows". The CTC Reporter, No. 19. pp. 6-9 UNCTC, 1985.

20. United Nations. Salient Features and Trends in Foreign Direct Investment. UNCTC, 1983.

21. United Nations. Multinational Corporations in World Development, p. 36. U.N., 1973.

22. Bergsten, C. F., T. Horst, and T. H. Moran. American Multinationals and American Interests, pp. 10-13. Brookings Institution, 1978.

23. U. N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Handbook of International Trade and Development. Supplement. 1981.

24. Whichard, 0. G. "U.S. Direct Investments Abroad in 1979", Survey of Current Business, pp. 24-25. U.S. Department of Commerce,, August 1980.

25. Whichard, 0. C. "U.S. Direct Investments Abroad in 1980", Survey of Current Business, pp. 21, 23, 27, 34. U.S. Department of Commerce, August 1981.

26. Ibid., and Whichard, 1979, op. cit.

27. Castro, op. cit., p. 131.

28. Lenin, V. I. "Theses and Report on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat", First Congress of the Communist International, March 2-6, 1919. Selected Works, Vol. 3, pp. 150-163. Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971.