Geopolitics

Global Ruling Classes Welcome Fascist-Led Government in Italy

By Luca Tavan

Republished from Red Flag.

The Italian general election was a historic win for the far right. A coalition of the three major parties won 44 percent of the vote, enough in Italy’s byzantine electoral system to form a clear majority in both houses of parliament. Most importantly, it was driven by the meteoric rise of Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, a party rooted in the post-Mussolini fascist tradition, which secured 26 percent of the vote, making it the single largest party in parliament. 

For many, the ascension to power of a fascist party in the centre of Europe seemed unthinkable. But decades of grinding economic crisis, state-sponsored racism and the discrediting of parties of the neoliberal centre have created a dangerous situation of far-right advance. With Europe on the brink of yet another recession, the prospect of further descent into authoritarianism and barbarism is alarming. 

If you listen to the capitalist press and politicians, however, you would think that there’s nothing to worry about. A headline in the Australian exhorts: “Relax, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers aren’t fascist”. The Australian Financial Review carried the line, “Victory to Italian right is no lurch into extremism”. This is despite Meloni’s pledge to institute a naval blockade to stop refugee ships, roll back abortion and LGBTI rights and dismantle social welfare. 

Speaking to an Italian journalist at the Venice Film Festival, US former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton even praised Meloni: “The election of the first woman prime minister in a country always represents a break with the past, and that is certainly a good thing”. It’s remarkable to speak of “breaking with the past” as Mussolini-nostalgists return to power in the birthplace of fascism. 

A statement from Lorenzo Codogno, a former director-general of the Italian Treasury, reveals the real reason for establishment nonchalance in the face of fascism. “They want to be perceived as a party that you can do business with and can govern the country.” Business has taken a look at this coalition of far-right racists and fascists, and decided it’s a government they can deal with, potentially making a great deal of money. 

Aided by a wave of apologetics from the media, Meloni has attempted to sanitise her image to present a respectable face. During the election campaign, she reassured voters that her party had “handed fascism over to history for decades now”. But Meloni has maintained a commitment to fascist politics throughout her life. At the age of 15, she joined MSI (Italian Social Movement), the party founded by leading fascists who survived the fall of Mussolini’s regime in 1943 and wanted to work for its return. Along with a series of other former MSI leaders, Meloni founded Fratelli d’Italia in 2012 as the latest iteration of this project. 

In her autobiography, I am Giorgia, she espouses the “great replacement theory”, claiming that the left is attempting to destroy Western civilisation by flooding the continent with African and Middle Eastern migrants and undermining traditional family structures. In local government, Brothers politicians have passed legislation making it harder for migrants to access social housing, and proposed laws that would make it compulsory to bury aborted fetuses in cemeteries. 

Meloni will rule in coalition with the Lega, led by Matteo Salvini, who as interior minister in a previous government blocked the entry of NGO ships carrying rescued refugees to Italian shores, and Silvio Berlusconi, the infamously corrupt and venal media magnate whose Forza Italia was once the leading light of the populist right. 

While the far right has been advancing in Europe since the 2008 global financial crisis, Meloni’s victory is a significant milestone. It’s the first time a party with neo-fascist roots has led a government in a major European economy. This gives a boost to the rising tide of far-right politics internationally. 

Meloni’s victory comes in the immediate aftermath of the major win for the far-right Sweden Democrats. She has been a vocal supporter of the Spanish Vox Party and Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian government in Hungary. Both Meloni and Orbán were guests of honour at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the most important gathering of the American right.

Meloni’s victory was assured by the craven support that every party of the political mainstream gives to unpopular and brutal neoliberal policies, which have created massive poverty and youth unemployment and savaged living standards. The 25 September election was triggered by the collapse of the Draghi government, an unelected technocratic cabinet headed by a former European Central Bank president to oversee further cuts to social spending. 

Every major party from the centrist Democratic Party to the Lega participated in this “national unity” government. Meloni’s group was the only significant force that remained outside of the coalition. As the government slowly but inevitably collapsed, the Brothers gained credibility.

The high level of abstention in the election was another important factor in Meloni’s success. The rise of the right can be put down to widespread revulsion at the political mainstream, rather than a popular endorsement of Meloni’s program. Fewer than 64 percent of the eligible population voted, the lowest turnout in history and down from an average of 90 percent in the post-WWII period. Meloni increased her vote largely by winning voters from the other right-wing parties. 

Despite a history of shallow anti-establishment rhetoric, a hallmark of the far right, Meloni will likely continue Draghi’s economic agenda. Meloni has also reassured the capitalist class that her government will support NATO. Internal divisions could emerge within the coalition over the war in Ukraine—Salvini’s Lega has ties to Italian capitalists with heavy investments in Russia, and he has questioned the continuation of sanctions. Meloni will have to balance the fragile and conflicting interests of her coalition partners with her desire to remain a reliable ally of European capital at large.

What is certain is that the new right-wing coalition will intensify attacks on workers and oppressed people. It can’t be ruled out that they will attempt to curb civil and democratic rights. The Brothers have already signalled their desire for legislation to ban what they term “totalitarian” or “extremist” ideologies, by which they mean communism and Islam.

The far right’s victory is a harbinger of things to come. A recent opinion piece by Edward Luce in the Financial Times noted: “Western liberalism is still skating on thin ice”, with war and looming recession in Europe, a protracted energy crisis and far-right electoral advances making for destabilising factors in world politics. 

The capitalists realise that in a crisis-ridden and polarised world, far-right governments may increasingly be an option for defending their power and privilege. They think that they are playing a clever game by normalising the new government in Italy. They believe that they can keep the fascists under their thumb, use them to absorb discontent at unpopular austerity measures and advance their economic agenda. 

History tells us that fascists like Meloni, who are inspired by the monstrous dictatorships of the 1920s and ’30s, may harbour even darker aspirations for the future.

What is Nkrumahism-Touréism?

By All African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP)

Republished from Hood Communist.

The Africa which exists today, as well as the one we are struggling to build, is not the old Africa but a new emergent revolutionary society; a classless society in which a new harmony, a new cohesiveness, a new revolutionary African personality and a new dignity is forged out of the traditional African way of life which has been permanently changed by thousands of years of Euro-Christian and Islamic intrusions and by the historical development of the competing and conflicting slave, feudal, capitalistic and newly emergent socialist modes of production. A new emergent ideology is therefore required. That ideology is Nkrumahism-Touréism!

Nkrumahism-Touréism takes its name from the consistent, revolutionary, socialist and Pan-African principles, practices and policies followed, implemented and taught by Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah and Ahmed Seku Touré; two of the foremost proponents and practitioners of the scientific strategy to liberate and unify Africa under scientific socialism. These principles, practices and policies are recorded in their speeches, writings, actions, achievements and life. In a larger and more complete sense, Nkrumahism-Touréism is the synthesis of the accumulated practical and theoretical contributions and achievements of centuries and generations of mass, revolutionary Pan-African and larger socialist struggles. Nkrumahism-Touréism is the application of the universal laws of revolutionary growth and development of the particular conditions of Africa and her children. Its concrete living manifestation is to be found in the creative contributions of the present day African Revolution.

Nkrumahism-Touréism provides the masses of African People with a program of human transformation turning individual defects into qualities by living the ideology. It is a Pan-African ideology that breaks the web of complexes put on us by the dominant culture and enables us to reclaim our humanity, reassert our dignity, and develop a new Revolutionary African Personality. It provides a revolutionary view of Africa and the world applying the universal principles of scientific socialism in the context of African history, tradition, and aspirations. It gives us a set of analytical tools which enable the masses of Africa People to correctly interpret, understand, redeem African culture and reconstruct Africa by way of the Cultural Revolution. Nkrumahism-Touréism provides a complete social, political, philosophical and economic theory which constitute a comprehensive network of principles, beliefs, values, morals and rules which guide our behavior, determines the form which our institutions and organizations will take; and acts as a cohesive force to bind us together, guide and channel our revolutionary action towards the achievement of Pan-Africanism and the inevitable triumph of socialism worldwide. Nkrumahism-Touréism includes the following principles:

The Primacy and Unity of Africa

The concept of the primacy and unity of Africa has its origins in the emergence of the modern Pan African movement which was characterized by our Peoples resistance to foreign domination in the 15th century. This foreign domination was soon followed by the trans-Atlantic slave trade and full blown colonialism which culminated in the European partition of Africa agreed upon by the colonial powers at the Berlin Conference of 1884 – 1885. The primacy of Africa dictates that we reject these artificially imposed colonial borders. A united Africa, the concept of continental African unity is the source of our strength and the key to our liberation. As Nkrumah says:

“African Unity gives an indispensable continental dimension to the concept of the African nation…Unity is the first prerequisite for destroying neo-colonialism. Primary and basic is the need for a union government on the much divided continent of Africa.” (Neo-colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism p.253) We cannot accept any other version of our land, to define Africa as anything less than the entire continent including its islands is to accept the neo-colonial strategy to divide and conquer. The primacy of Africa also speaks to our primary identity as African people. We are African. Rather than promoting our micro-national identities such as Nigerian, Ivorian, Kenyan, Ethiopian, Jamaican, Brazilian, African-American, etc. we must focus on the common denominator which is African. For us as Africans and Pan-Africanists as Nkrumah says, “the core of the black revolution is in Africa and until Africa is united under a socialist government, the black man throughout the world lacks a national home… All people of African decent, whether they live in North or South America, the Caribbean or in any other part of the world are Africans and belong to the African nation.” (Nkrumah, K Class Struggle in Africa)

The Integrity Of The Revolutionary African Personality

The African personality is the product of the evolution of African people’s conception of the world, way of life, their ethics and moral principles which are a particular reflection of African culture. This African cultural personality has been under attack by capitalism /colonialism and its extension neo-colonialism which have developed in diverse and sometimes subtle ways a moral, intellectual, and cultural superiority complex towards us as an oppressed people. Sekou Touré says, ”the science of depersonalizing the colonized people is sometimes so subtle in its methods that it progressively succeeds in falsifying our natural psychic behavior and devaluing our own original virtues and qualities with a view to our assimilation”. (Touré A. S.The Political Leader Considered As The Representative Of A Culture p.3) We are clear that the assertion of the cultural personality of an oppressed culture becomes the catalyst for its national liberation movement. Nkrumah and Touré both call for the revival and integrity of the African personality, it is this re-personalization, which constitutes the successful affirmation of the cultural personality of the oppressed culture. Re-personalization for Africans means re-Africanisation to be accomplished through the Cultural Revolution. Nkrumah says that the revolutionary African personality “expresses identification not only with Africa’s historical past, but with the struggle of the African people in the African Revolution to liberate and unify the continent and to build a just society.”(Nkrumah,K Revolutionary Path p 206). The Revolutionary African Personality is a pan-Africanist concept which identifies us not by our language, religion or geographical location but in terms of our goals which are dynamic, just and noble. Thus, the Revolutionary African Personality puts emphasis on our ideological identity over anything else. It is this ideological identity for which we must consistently struggle which can only be ultimately realized through the success of the Cultural Revolution.

Humanism, Egalitarianism and Collectivism

Humanism, Egalitarianism and Collectivism are the cluster of humanist principles which underlie traditional African society and define the African personality. Respect for human beings and social solidarity, coupled with a keen sense of fraternity, justice and cooperation between men and women are the very foundation of traditional African society.

However, Sekou Touré adds to this that “ society has been marked by the existence of two natures of life, two natures transposing themselves in thought, action, behavior and in the options of (wo)men, whether political, economic, social or cultural. In other words there are two human natures in mankind and in each People; we have the People [interests] itself and the anti-People [interests], with a permanent struggle being waged between the two, the class struggle.”…(Touré A.S. Women In Society p26)

The imperialist incursion into Africa has exacerbated these contradictions, and the battle against the anti-people’s class has dictated that we incorporate in addition to our class analysis the national and gender aspects of the struggle to include the full scope of our Pan African reality. Our ideology teaches us that the first principle of the Revolution is that everything we have earned in life is a reflection of the struggles and contributions of the People and that the masses of People are the makers of history. Included in this principle is the understanding that (wo)man is not merely treated as a means to an end but also as an end in themselves. This is the revolutionary operational principle that forms the basis for the egalitarian, humanist and collectivist character of our ideology.

In fact the (dialectical) relationship between (wo)man and the People shows that the Peoples interests are (wo)man’s interest because it is the People that generate (wo)man. Further more the value and level of the historical evolution of a People is faithfully measured by the condition of the women in society.

Dialectical and Historical Materialism

Revolutionaries want Revolution because it means a qualitative change in the oppressive conditions of the status- quo of capitalist society. In order to bring about this change, revolutionaries must study the science of Revolution. Dialectical and historical materialism is the essence of revolutionary science. Through the study and application of revolutionary ideology, which includes the scientific laws of dialectical and historical materialism, revolutionaries are able to understand the most general laws of the development of nature, human society, and thinking. It is therefore an indispensable instrument of scientific analysis and revolutionary transformation of the world. Sekou Touré says dialectical materialism “studies the general connections between the elements of nature, the laws of evolution of the objective world and the action that these laws exercise on human consciousness.”.(Touré, A.S.Strategy and Tactics of the Revolution, 52) “Dialectics is the method of scientific analysis which all [people] Christians, Muslims and atheist alike can use. Historical materialism is scientific. It objectively proves the rule of historical evolution from the production system. The changes society experienced, the succession of different regimes from the primitive community to socialism can scientifically be explained by historical materialism. Here dialectics deals with the method of analysis and explanation of facts of social and historical phenomena. Historical materialism made it possible to enlighten the process of changes recorded in every man’s life and characterized by the existence of production systems with properties and features different from one another.”(Touré, A.S. Africa On The Move vol xxiv chapterVI,Revolution and Religion p185) 

Historical materialism is the dialectical method applied to history. Historical materialism analyzes and explains the historical processes of evolutionary and revolutionary changes in society characterized by the changes in production systems with properties and features which differ from one to another. Historical materialism does not list the stages of the evolution of society, it analyzes society to show the specific origin of every stage of it’ s evolution, how every qualitative change originates and the specific characteristics of every stage.

The Harmony between Religion/Spirituality and Revolution

For Nkrumahism-Touréism, a revolutionary ideology coming from African culture there is and cannot be any contradiction between Revolution and Religion. In fact Revolution and Religion/spirituality are in harmony and are complementary aspects of culture. Religion and spirituality are dominant features of the African Personality. Nkrumah points out that “The traditional face of Africa includes an attitude towards man which can only be described, in its social manifestation, as being socialist. This arises from the fact that man is regarded in Africa as primarily a spiritual being, a being endowed originally with a certain inward dignity and value” ( Nkrumah,K. Consciencism p68).

For African people there is essential harmony in our faith in the Creator and the African Revolution. To fulfill our obligations to our religion or spirituality we have an obligation to properly serve one another, Gods’ highest creation. Man and Woman, the true servants of God and the People, have the duty to fight for the liberation of those deprived of liberty, whether an individual or a People.

Revolution is the collective action and struggle of an oppressed People guided and supported by a consciously planned process (ideology) and determination to qualitatively change an old, backward and oppressive political-economic condition (capitalism), into a new progressive and just system that will work for the People’s interests (Socialism).

Religion is a set of beliefs and principles that affirm the existence of one or more supreme beings or God(s) which govern us all. Religion influences and motivates social behavior in the sense that it serves as a moral guide and provides reassurance to People that in spite of what may seem to be an overwhelmingly negative situation, through the practice of religion and serving God, peace, justice and prosperity will prevail. Religion holds respect for human dignity and human virtue. Religion can also project man’s existence onto the next world, and reserves for a future world positive or negative existence according to their life conduct in this world. However as Sekou Touré, a revolutionary who practices Islam,  points out “The Revolution does not intend to deny this future world; it only wishes that the struggle against evil be not `deferred` or postponed, and this is actually what all sincere believers and the dispossessed, regardless of race, sex or nationality are pressing for.” (A. S. Touré, Revolution and Religion, Africa On The Move volxxiv).

Both Revolution and Religion share common values which they want people to reflect, and even more they want People to become the uncompromising and faithful advocates of. Some of these values are justice, peace and freedom for mankind, the nation and the laboring masses. Revolution and Religion proclaim, organize and conduct a permanent struggle, a universal struggle which, for the former is class struggle, the clash between antagonistic interests represented by classes that are opposed in the process of production, distribution and utilization of goods. While for the latter it is a struggle between good and evil, good embodying truth, justice and beauty, and evil embodying exploitation, lies, oppression, in essence all that is contrary to good.

Suffering, sweat and sacrifice are considered by both Revolution and Religion as necessary and ongoing on the long road to freedom. An important part of Religion and Revolution involves the unity of the philosophy and the behavior it advocates. In other words, not only is there is a constant struggle for the honest adherents of both Revolution and Religion to live up to the principles of each, but both Revolution and Religion have also been misused by corrupt men and women as a tool of exploitation and oppression.

Hence we should judge Revolution and Religion primarily by its principles not necessarily by its adherents. We know that our People’s faith and belief in righteousness and justice, which is upheld by their religious and spiritual faith must reinforce the need to engage in revolutionary political activity to defeat the enemies of God and the People on earth. The essential harmony of Revolution and Religion can only be affirmed in the struggle to build a just society.

The Necessity For Permanent, Mass, Revolutionary, Pan-African Political Education, Organization and Action

Following the 5th Pan-African Congress in 1945, the mass political party emerged within the mass political movements as a qualitative leap and superior form of organized mass struggle, although mass political movement remained the dominant form of struggle. Some of these political movements can and do topple neo-colonialism, as most puppet regimes are weak. But generally speaking only mass-based revolutionary parties unified by a monolithic ideology will be strong enough to seize and sustain state power when confronted with imperialism’s counter-offensive of political, economic, military and psychological terrorism. Only mass-based parties with revolutionary ideology will maintain class struggle as a strategic principle and properly organize the class struggle along clear-cut class lines to defeat the internal and external enemies of the People’s class. Only ideological monolithic mass parties of conscious cadre are capable of organizing socialist transformation. 

A dialectical relationship exists between mass political movements and mass revolutionary parties. Revolutionary mass parties are a product of mass political movements. The mass movements remain relentless in struggle against oppression and for a better way of life. They serve as a source of sustenance and bulwark of defense for revolutionary party building. The wider mass movements stand as an inexhaustible reservoir of revolutionary mass potential, which ultimately must be tapped to realize our mass party. Revolutionary party building is integrally connected with and seeks to be a catalytic force with respect to ideologically transforming the broader mass movements into one revolutionary mass Pan-African party. Through ideological education and struggle, the Party seeks to progressively raise the level of class-consciousness. This transformation largely depends on acquiring the special Competence of ideologically recruiting and training cadre on a mass scale.

Revolutionary Ideology as The Greatest Asset

Nkrumahism-Touréism puts emphasis on the fact that the fundamental task facing Africa is the ideological transformation of man and woman. This transformation begins in the realm of morals and values:

“Africa needs a new type of citizen, a dedicated, modest, honest, informed man [and woman] who submerges self in service to the nation and mankind. A man [and woman] who abhors greed and detests vanity. A new type of man [and woman] whose humility is his [her] strength and whose integrity is his [her] greatness.” (Nkrumah,K. 1975 Africa Must Unite p.130).

Both Nkrumah and Touré held ideology as the crucial element and the greatest asset in the African revolution. Touré teaches us that “Culture is the framework of ideology. Culture is the container, which carries ideology as its contents.” Africa has her own culture and thus must have her own ideology thereby conforming to the African personality. Nkrumah informs us that philosophy is an instrument of ideology and must derive it’s weapons from the living conditions of African people and that it is from those conditions that the intellectual content of our philosophy must be created. Nkrumah teaches us further that…. “a united people armed with an ideology which explains the status quo and illuminates our path of development is the greatest asset we posses for the total liberation and complete emancipation of Africa. And the emancipation of Africa completes the process of the emancipation of man.” (Nkrumah, K. 1964 Why The Spark p.2).

Touré echoes Nkrumah’s position that political freedom is a prerequisite for economic freedom and adds that political revolution is part and parcel of the ideological revolution. Hence ideological revolution is the fundamental requirement for political and economic revolutions. Likewise, political independence is incomplete unless it is followed by an economic revolution. Touré shows revolutionary ideology as the critical element in developing revolutionary consciousness as he teaches us the laws of developing consciousness. When he says,

Without revolutionary consciousness there is no Revolution! All those who have had to conduct revolution have been able to verify this. But where does this revolutionary consciousness come from, since it is certain that it is not basic datum, nor does it come into being and develop spontaneously? History teaches that it is created and developed through ideological education and revolutionary practice. We can equally affirm that without ideological training and without revolutionary action, there can be no revolutionary consciousness.”

Sekou Touré

To achieve a decisive impact on or recruit from mass movements the Party must have ideologically strong cadre and a program of ideological development. With the mass party our masses can bring forth and strengthen the best attributes of the mass movement into the qualified expressions of the mass revolutionary party characterized by mass revolutionary consciousness and mass ideological power as the guiding force to revolutionary practice.

The All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP) is a permanent, independent, revolutionary, socialist, Pan-African Political Party based in Africa. Africa is the just homeland of African People all over the world. Our Party is an integral part of the Pan-African and World Socialist revolutionary movement. The A-APRP understands that “all people of African descent, whether they live in North or South America, the Caribbean, or in any other part of the world, are Africans and belong to the African Nation”. — (Kwame Nkrumah, Class Struggle in Africa, page 4)

Blood in the Bank: Hidden Profits of American Slavery and the Call for Reparations

By Youhanna Haddad

During the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, Senator Bernie Sanders declined to support reparations. He instead proposed instituting programs to help “distressed communities” in general, believing this indirect approach to compensation to be superior. “There are better ways to [repay blacks] than just writing… a check,” Sanders insisted.

But the patchwork of social-democratic reforms that comprised the Senator’s presidential platform are wholly insufficient to this task. To see why, we must scientifically analyze the role chattel slavery played in the construction of the United States. Doing this leads us to an obvious and inescapable conclusion. As Karl Marx himself observed, “Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.”

Origins of Bondage

In what is now the United States, chattel slavery developed primarily to produce agricultural commodities. Europeans constructed race to justify the creation of a class in permanent bondage, forced to work the vast estates they’d amassed through genocide of the indigenous population. Millions of slaves kidnapped and transported to the New World harvested cash crops like cotton, coffee, sugarcane, and tobacco. They did so, of course, under unimaginably toilsome and oppressive conditions. Sugarcane production, for example, entailed such dangerous conditions that deaths among slaves outnumbered births. Slaves were forced to produce sugar until their health crumbled, necessitating constant importation of additional slaves to keep plantations profitable. 

The need for labor pervaded the colonial economy. Even large portions of white immigrants came to address this demand through the system of indentured servitude. Nearly half of European immigrants arriving in the colonies came in this manner. Upon arrival, they began a stint of hard and often degrading labor for paltry wages. However, within several years of starting their contracts, these servants would become free citizens. They were then entitled to “freedom dues” from their masters, which typically included land or money. Despite the unsavory terms of the contract, servitude was largely an opportunity for Europeans seeking access to land and wealth unavailable in their homelands. Their contracts allowed them to become settlers without needing capital as a prerequisite.

Despite the exploitative character of indentured servitude, it is utterly incomparable to chattel slavery. Only the former included an element of voluntariness, and the chance to improve one’s economic situation. Indentured servants typically chose to sign their rights away. Of course, this was often done under coercive conditions. Nevertheless, indentured servants had opportunities that slaves were never granted. And the option to leave for the New World is one servants would have only chosen if they believed their life would improve in the colonies. Marxist historian Christopher Hill alludes to this in his 1967 book Reformation to Industrial Revolution:

“For many of the early settlers servitude was a temporary phase through which one worked one’s way from freedom to land-ownership.”

Indeed, many emancipated servants would go on to join the ranks of the rich and powerful. In 1629, for example, nearly 17% of members in “Virginia’s House of Burgesses [were] former indentured servant[s].” This mobility led Marx to remark that classes in early America “continually change[d] and interchange[d] their elements in constant flux.”

The ability to ascend economically, however, was enjoyed almost exclusively by whites. Conversely, Africans in the New World faced maximal exploitation, generation after generation. Aside from limited exceptions, until 1865, they could not escape enslavement and subsequently died in shackles. Europeans benefiting from this racial caste system were well aware of its titanic productive capacity. As British merchant Malachy Postlethwayt noted in 1745…

Is it not notorious to the whole World, that the Business of Planting in our British colonies, as well as in the French, is carried on by the Labour of Negroes, imported thither from Africa? Are we not indebted to those valuable People, the Africans for our Sugars, Tobaccoes, Rice, Rum, and all other Plantation Produce?”

Calculating the Theft

Scholars have spilled a lot of ink trying to estimate the dollar value of labor stolen from black slaves. Considering the breadth of industries involved, and the interconnected nature of markets, such a figure is exceedingly difficult to calculate. However, by summing the hours of labor performed by American slaves, policy scholar Thomas Craemer produced an estimate. He concluded that “the present value of U.S. slave labor… ranges from $5.9 to $14.2 trillion.” in 2009 dollars. Adjusted for 13 years of inflation, the range is $8.2 to $19.6 trillion in today’s money. The upper limit of Craemer’s estimate is therefore roughly equivalent to America’s entire gross domestic product!

If we utilize Craemer’s upper limit and think that black Americans today should be compensated for the value of their ancestors’ labor, they’re each owed a whopping $467,000. Even the lower limit still comes in at around $195,000. And this by no means covers all of the profits derived from the institution of slavery.

Banks, for example, lent vast sums of money to productive plantations and profited off the interest. The shipping industry got rich from building and selling slave ships. Insurance corporations grew wealthy from insuring the shipments of slaves and the products of slave labor. Furthermore, the explosion of the textile industry was facilitated by the abundant supply of cotton picked by slaves. Great Britain was considered the titan of textiles in the early industrial period with over half of British cotton imports produced from American slave labor.

We must recognize the variety of ways in which capitalist development benefited from chattel slavery. Ignoring them suppresses proper academic investigation of questions pertinent to racial justice. The colonial project as we know it would’ve been impossible without the forced labor of millions of African slaves. And that has strategic implications for how society should try to rectify the historical and ongoing oppression of black people.

 

Ramifications of Ignorance

Particularly since the deaths of Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr., the American political establishment has tried to co-opt the black liberation struggle. Every February, school children are taught that black leaders look down from heaven with approval at a nation that never went beyond piecemeal reforms to address gross historical injustices. This mischaracterization of the black liberation struggle and its leaders is only possible due to misunderstanding the function of slavery. From Bernie Sanders to Mitch McConnell, American politicians do not wish to see the reappropriation of stolen wealth to black people. To do so would acknowledge the incredible economic benefit slavery provided to the nation and, more importantly, force the beneficiaries to pay compensation.

In essence, the effort to downplay the role of slavery in American development is a matter of legitimacy to the United States regime. Obscuring the role of slavery in American development allows liberals to falsely assert that “liberal-democratic values” are the root of American exceptionalism. This erroneously whitewashes history with the self-congratulatory implication that European ideologies, rather than African labor and Native land, built the world’s most successful empire. In order to eradicate capitalist pseudo-history from the realm of fact, we need to tirelessly examine how exploitation is the real engine of growth in capitalist development.

While reparations alone would not end global capitalism, it is always necessary and beneficial to explore the economic contributions of every exploited group. The unrecognized domestic labor of women, the wage slavery in factories of the Global South, the historical theft of trillions of dollars in assets from the Global South — this is the hidden life force of capitalist states. Without recognizing these contributions, it is impossible to materially analyze history to the benefit of the masses.

In our mission to end capitalism, the vast majority of our allies are the highly exploited masses of Africa and Asia. Their exploitation is still financed through the reinvested wealth created by African slaves. Connecting these struggles is an essential prerequisite to building the durable, international, class solidarity of the colored masses needed to end capitalism once and for all.

What is Socialist Revolution?

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

By Nino Brown

Republished from Liberation School.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Political and social revolutions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Socialist revolution and the question of violence

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

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

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

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

Lessons from history

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making a socialist revolution in the U.S.

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

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

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

Building mass socialist consciousness

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

Know Your Enemy: What Capitalism Is and How to Defeat It

By Michael A. Lebowitz

Republished from LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal.

In a capitalist society, there is always a good explanation for your poverty, your meaningless job (if you have a job), your difficulties and your general unhappiness. You are to blame. It is your failure. After all, look at other people who do succeed. If only you had worked a little harder, studied a little more, made those sacrifices.

We are told that anybody who works hard can become a success. Anyone can save up and become your own boss, a boss with employees. And there is some truth to this. Often, any one person can do these things–but we can’t conclude from this that every person can. It is a basic fallacy to conclude that because one person can do something, therefore everyone can. One person can see better in the theater if he stands, but if everyone stands no one can see better. Anyone can get the last seat on the plane, but everyone can’t. Any country can cut its costs and become more competitive, but every country cannot become more competitive by cutting costs.

The lessons they want you to learn

So, what does this focus upon the individual tell you? It tells you that it’s your own fault, that you are your own worst enemy. But maybe you don’t accept that. Maybe what’s holding you back is those other people. The problem is those people of color, the immigrants, indeed everyone willing to work for less who is taking a job away from you. They are the enemy because they compete with you. They’re the ones who force you to take a job for much less than you deserve, if you are to get a job at all.

The prison

Think about what’s known as “The Prisoners’ Dilemma”. Two people have been arrested for a crime, and each is separately made an offer: if you confess and the other prisoner doesn’t, you will get a very short sentence. But if the other confesses and you don’t, you will be in jail for a long time. So, each separately decides to confess. That’s a lot like your situation. The Workers’ Dilemma is: do I take the low wage job with little security or do I stay unemployed? “If everything were left to isolated, individual bargaining,” argued the General Council of the International Workingman’s Association (in which Karl Marx was a central figure), competition would, if unchecked, “reduce the producers of all wealth to a starvation level.” Of course, if the prisoners were able to cooperate, they would be much better off. And so are workers.

Immigrants, people of color, people in other countries are not inherently enemies. The other prisoners are not the enemy. Something, though, wants you to see each other as enemies. That something is the prison–the structure in which we all exist. That is the enemy: capitalism.

The secret

The separation of workers in capitalism is not an accident. Capitalism, which emerged historically in a time of slavery, extermination of indigenous peoples and patriarchy, has always searched actively for ways to prevent workers from cooperating and combining. How better than to foster differences (real and imagined) such as race, ethnicity, nation and gender, and to convert difference into antagonism! Marx certainly understood how capital thrives upon divisions within the working class. That, he argued, is the secret of capital’s rule. Describing the antagonism in England at the time between English and Irish workers, he explained that this was the secret of the weakness of the English working class–“the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it.” It’s not hard to imagine what he would have said about antagonisms between white and Black workers in the United States; further, the effect of divisions between workers in different countries should not be a secret for workers.

To understand why separation of workers is so central for capitalists, we need to consider the characteristics of capitalism.

Capitalist relations of production

All production begins with “the original sources of all wealth”–human beings and Nature, according to Marx. Production is a process of activity (labor) involving the use of the products of past labor (means of production, including that drawn directly from Nature) to achieve a particular purpose envisioned at the outset. But production under capitalist relations has particular characteristics. By considering the relation between the capitalist class and the working class, we can analyze it as a system and show the connection between many patterns.

Capitalist relations of production are characterized by the relation between the side of capitalists and the side of workers. On the one hand, there are capitalists–the owners of wealth, the owners of the physical and material means of production. Their orientation is toward the growth of their wealth. Beginning with capital of a certain value in the form of money, capitalists purchase commodities with the goal of gaining more money, additional value, surplus value. And that’s the point: profits. As capitalists, all that matters for them is the growth of their capital.

On the other hand, we have workers–people who have neither material goods they can sell nor the material means of producing the things they need for themselves. Without those means of production, they can’t produce commodities to sell in the market to exchange. So, how do they get the things they need? By selling the only thing they do have available to sell, their ability to work. They can sell it to whomever they choose, but they cannot choose whether or not to sell their power to perform labor … if they are to survive. In short, workers need money to buy the things they need to maintain themselves and their families.

The logic of capital

But why does the capitalist want to hire workers? Because by doing so, he gains control over the worker’s capacity in the workplace. Marx commented that once the worker agrees to sell his capacity to the capitalist, “he who was previously the money-owner now strides out in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labor-power follows as his worker.” Through his command over the worker, the capitalist is able to compel the extraction of more labor from the worker’s capacity than the labor he is paying for; or stated another way, he can get more value from the employment of the worker than he pays in the form of wages. A coercive relationship of “supremacy and subordination” of capital over workers is the basis for exploitation–surplus labor and surplus value.

Since the capitalist’s goal is the growth of his wealth, he is always searching for ways to achieve this. Nothing is fixed for him. So, he can try to increase exploitation of the worker by extracting more labor from her–for example, by extending the workday. Similarly, the pores of the given workday, when the worker pauses or takes a bathroom break, are a waste for the capitalist, so he does what he can to intensify the pace of work (“speed-up”). Every moment workers rest is time they are not working for capital.

Further, for workers to be able to rest away from work allows capital more room to intensify the pace of work. The existence of unpaid labor within the household reduces the amount of the wage that must be spent upon necessities and facilitates the driving down of the wage. In this way, capitalism supports the maintenance of patriarchy and exploitation within the household.

Both by intensification of work and by driving wages downward, surplus labor and surplus value are increased. Accordingly, it’s easy to understand why Marx commented that “the capitalist [is] constantly tending to reduce wages to their physical minimum and extend the working day to its physical maximum.” He continued, however, saying “while the working man constantly presses in the opposite direction.”

Class struggle

In other words, within the framework of capitalist relations, while capital pushes to increase the workday, both in length and intensity, and to drive down wages, workers struggle to reduce the workday and increase wages. Just as there is struggle from the side of capital, so also is there class struggle from the side of the worker. Why? Take the struggle over the workday, for example. Why do the workers want more time for themselves? Time, Marx noted, is “the room of human development. A man who has no free time to dispose of, whose whole lifetime, apart from the mere physical interruptions by sleep, meals, and so forth, is absorbed by his labor for the capitalist, is less than a beast of burden.” And the same is true if all your energy is consumed by the pace of work so that all you can do is collapse at home.

What about the struggle for higher wages? Of course, workers have physical requirements to survive that must be obtained. But they need much more than this. The worker’s social needs, Marx commented at the time, include “the worker’s participation in the higher, even cultural satisfactions, the agitation for his own interests, newspaper subscriptions, attending lectures, educating his children, developing his taste, etc.” Of course, our social needs now are different. We live in society and our needs are formed by that. While we struggle to satisfy those needs through higher wages, capital resists because it means lower profits.

What determines the outcome of this struggle between the capitalist and worker? We already have seen what determines the relative power of the combatants–the degree of separation of workers. The more workers are separated and competing against each other, the longer and more intense the workday and the lower the wages they get. In particular, the more unemployment there is, the more workers find themselves competing for part-time and precarious work in order to survive.

Remember, though, that Marx pointed out that “the working man constantly presses in the opposite direction.” Workers press in the opposite direction to capital by struggling to reduce the separation among them. For workers in capitalism to make gains in terms of their workdays, their wages and their ability to satisfy their needs, they need to unite against capital; they need to overcome their divisions and competition among workers. That was and is the point of trade unions–to strengthen workers in their struggle within capitalism.

Of course, capital doesn’t bow down and give up when workers organize. It does everything it can to weaken and evade trade unions. How does capital respond? By using racism and sexism to divide workers. It brings in people to compete for work by working for less–for example, immigrants, impoverished people from the countryside. It subcontracts and outsources so organized workers can be replaced. It uses the state–its state–to regulate, outlaw and destroy unions. It shuts down operations and moves to parts of the world where people are poor and unions are banned. Even threatening to shut down and move is a powerful weapon because of the fear that workers have of losing their jobs. All this is logical from the perspective of capital. The logic of capital is to do everything possible to pit workers against each other because that increases the rate of exploitation.

Why capital reorganizes production

The struggle between capitalists and workers, thus, is a struggle over the degree of separation among workers. Precisely because workers do resist wages being driven to an absolute minimum and the workday to an absolute maximum, capitalists look for other ways for capital to grow. Accordingly, they are driven to revolutionize the production process: where possible, they introduce machinery and organize the workplace to displace workers. By doing so, the same number of workers can produce more–increased productivity. In itself, that’s not bad. The effect of the incorporation of science and the products of the social brain into production offers the obvious potential to eliminate poverty in the world and to make possible a substantially reduced workday. (Time, after all, is room for human development). Yet, remember, those are not the goals of the capitalist. That is not why capital introduces these changes in the mode of production. Rather than a reduced total workday, what capital wants is the reduction in the portion of the workday that workers work for themselves, the reduction of “necessary labor”; it wants to maximize surplus labor and the rate of exploitation.

But what prevents workers from being the beneficiaries of increased productivity–through rising real wages as the costs of production of commodities fall? There are two reasons why these changes in the workplace tend to benefit capitalists rather than workers. One is the bias of those changes, and the other is the general effect upon the working class.

The bias of productive forces introduced by capital

Remember that the technology and techniques of production that capital introduces is oriented to only one thing: profits. The logic of capital points to the selection of techniques that will divide workers from one another and permit easier surveillance and monitoring of their performance. Further, the changes may permit the displacement of particular skilled workers by relatively unskilled (and less costly) workers. The specific productive forces introduced by capital, in short, are not neutral–capital has no intention of introducing changes that reduce the separation of workers in the workplace. They are also not neutral in another way: they divide mental and manual labor and separate “the intellectual faculties of the production process from manual labor.” Indeed, “all means for the development of production,” Marx stressed about capitalism, “distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him” and “alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process.”

But that’s not capital’s concern. Capital isn’t interested in whether the technology chosen permits producers to grow or to find any pleasure and satisfaction in their work. Nor about what happens to people who are displaced when new technology and new machines are introduced. If your skills are destroyed, if your job disappears, so be it. Capital gains, you lose. Marx’s comment was that “within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of labor are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker.”

The reserve army of labor

There is another way that capital gains by the changes it introduces in the workplace. Every worker displaced by the substitution of machinery and technology adds to the reserve army of labor. Not only does the existence of this body of unemployed workers permit capital to exert discipline within the workplace, but it also keeps wages within limits consistent with profitable capitalist production. And that’s the point–in capitalism, unemployment, the existence of a reserve army, is not an accident. If there’s full employment, wages tend to rise and capital faces difficulty in imposing subordination within the workplace. That’s unacceptable for capital, and it’s why capital moves to displace workers. The simultaneous existence of unmet needs and unemployment of workers may seem irrational, but it is perfectly rational for capital because all that matters for capital is profits.

Capital achieves the same result when it moves to other countries or regions to escape workers who are organized–it replenishes the reserve army and ensures that even those workers who do organize and struggle do not succeed in keeping real wages rising as rapidly as productivity. The value produced by workers rises relative to what they are paid because capital increases the separation of workers. Even with rising real wages, Marx argued that the rate of exploitation would increase–the “abyss between the life-situation of the worker and that of the capitalist would keep widening.”

In the absence of extraordinary successes on the part of workers, capital has the upper hand in the sphere of production. Through its control of production and over the nature and direction of investment, it can increase the degree of exploitation of workers and expand the production of surplus value. Yet, there is an inherent contradiction in capitalism: capital cannot remain in the sphere of production but must return to the sphere of circulation and sell the commodities that have been produced under these conditions.

The logic of capitalist circulation

Capitalists do not want these commodities containing surplus value. Their goal isn’t to consume those commodities. What they want is to sell those commodities and to make real the surplus value latent within them. They want the money.

Exploitation in the sphere of circulation

To turn commodities containing surplus value into money, capitalists need people to work in the sphere of circulation. Of course, they want to spend as little as possible in their circulation costs because those lower the potential profits generated in the sphere of production. So, the logic of capital dictates that it should exploit workers involved in selling these commodities as much as possible. The lower the wages and the higher the intensity of work, the lower capital’s costs and the higher the profits after sale. Thus, for distribution outlets and commodity delivery, capitalists have introduced elaborate methods of surveillance and punishment, paralleling what Lenin called early in the last century the scientific extraction of sweat in the sphere of production. Further, wherever possible, capital will use casual labor, part-time labor, precarious workers–this is how it can exploit workers in the sphere of circulation the most.

And it’s not simply the workers in the formal sphere of capitalist circulation that capital exploits. When there is very high unemployment, capital can take great advantage of this–it can transfer the risk of selling to workers. In some countries, a large reserve army of the unemployed makes it possible for capital to use what is called the informal sector to complete the circuit of capital. (The commodities sold in the informal sector don’t drop from the sky; for the most part, they are produced within capitalist relations.) These workers are part of the circuit of capitalist production and circulation, but they have none of the benefits and relative security of workers formally employed by capital. They look like independent operators, but they depend upon the capitalist, and the capitalist depends upon them to sell those commodities containing surplus value. Like unorganized workers everywhere, they compete against each other–and capital benefits by how little the sale of commodities is costing it.

Capital’s need for an expanding market

Of course, the proof of the pudding is whether those commodities that contain surplus value can be sold. They must be sold not in some abstract market but in a specific market–one marked by the specific conditions of capitalist production (that is, exploitation). In the sphere of circulation, capitalists face a barrier to their growth: the extent of the market. In the same way, then, that the logic of capital drives capitalists to increase surplus value within the sphere of production, it also compels them to increase the size of market in order to realize that surplus value. Once you understand the nature of capitalism, you can see why capital is necessarily driven to expand the sphere of circulation.

Creating new needs to consume 

How does capital expand the market? One way is by “the production of new needs”. The capitalist, Marx pointed out, does everything he can to convince people to consume more, “to give his wares new charms, to inspire them with new needs by constant chatter, etc.” It was only in the 20th Century, however, that the expansion of output due to the development of the specifically capitalist mode of production made the complementary sales effort so essential. Advertising to create new needs now was everywhere. The enormous expenditures in modern capitalism upon advertising; the astronomical salaries offered to professional athletes whose presence can increase the advertising revenues that can be captured by mass media–what else is this (and so much more like it) but testimony to capital’s successes in the sphere of production? Those commodities must be sold; the market must be expanded by creating new needs. There is, in short, an organic link between the poverty wages paid to workers who produce sports equipment and the million-dollar contracts of star athletes.

Globalization of needs

There’s another way that capital expands the market: by propagating existing needs in a wider circle. Whatever the size of market, capitalists are always attempting to expand it. Faced with limits in the existing sphere of circulation, capital drives to widen that sphere. “The tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself. Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome,” Marx commented. Thus, capital strives “to tear down every spatial barrier” to exchange and to “conquer the whole earth for its market.”

In this process, the mass media play a central role. The specific characteristics of national cultures and histories mean nothing to capital. Through the mass media, capital’s logic tends to conquer the world through the homogenization of standards and needs everywhere. Everywhere the same commercials, the same commodities, the same culture–unique cultures and histories are a barrier to capital in the sphere of circulation.

The accumulation of capital

Inherent in the nature of capital is the overwhelming tendency to grow. We see capital constantly attempting to increase exploitation by extending and intensifying the workday and by lowering the wage absolutely and relatively. When it comes up against barriers to growth–as in the case of worker resistance–we see capital drives beyond those barriers by investing in labor-saving machinery and by relocating to areas where workers accept lower wages. Similarly, when it comes up against barriers in terms of the limits of existing markets, capital does not accept the prospect of no-growth, but drives beyond those barriers by investing in advertising to generate new needs and by creating new markets for its commodities. With the profits it realizes through the successful sale of commodities, it expands its operations in order to generate more growth in the future. The history of capitalism is a story of the growth of large, powerful corporations.

Growth interruptus

Capital’s growth, however, is not consistent. It goes through booms and slumps, periods of acceleration and periods of crisis. Crises are inherent in the system itself. They flow from imbalances generated by the process of capital accumulation.

Consider what Marx described as “overproduction, the fundamental contradiction of developed capitalism.” He did not mean overproduction relative to peoples’ needs; rather, it was overproduction of commodities containing surplus value relative to the ability to realize that surplus value through sale of those commodities. But why did this happen periodically? Simply because there are inner structural requirements for the balance of production and realization of surplus value given by the rate of exploitation. However, those balance conditions tend to be violated by the actions of capitalists, who act as if no such conditions exist. Since capitalist production takes place, Marx pointed out, “without any consideration for the actual limits of the market or needs backed by the ability to pay,” there is a “constant tension between the restricted dimensions of consumption on the capitalist basis, and a production that is constantly striving to overcome these immanent barriers.”

In particular, capital’s success in driving up the rate of exploitation in order to grow tends to come back to haunt it when it comes to selling commodities. Sooner or later, the violation of the balance conditions produces a reckoning in which that apparent indifference to those conditions produces a crisis. Commodities containing surplus value cannot be sold; and if they cannot be sold, they will not be produced and thus the crisis spreads. However, “transitory over-abundance of capital, over-production and crises”, Marx stressed, do not bring capitalism to an end. Rather, they produce “violent eruptions that reestablish the disturbed balance for the time being.” The effect of the crisis is “to restore the correct relation between necessary and surplus labor, on which, in the last analysis, everything depends.” Until the next time. Such crises are inevitable, but they are not permanent.

There is a second systemic imbalance that interrupts the growth of capital. When capital tied up in means of production rises relative to that used for the purchase of the labor power–the source of surplus value–the rate of profit falls, dampening the accumulation of capital. This tends to occur when productivity in the production of means of production lags behind productivity gains in general. Marx, however, explicitly argued that there would be no tendency for the rate of profit to fall if productivity increases were equal in all sectors. So, why that productivity lag in the sector producing means of production? Although random patterns are always possible, there is no systemic reason for productivity change in that portion of means of production represented by machinery to fall behind; however, Marx identified an obvious reason for lags in productivity in the raw material portion of means of production.

After all, when it comes to agriculture and extractive industries, natural conditions, as well as social forces, play a role in productivity growth. Indeed, Marx argued that it is “unavoidable when capitalist production is fully developed, that the production and increase in the portion of constant capital that consists of fixed capital, machinery, etc. may run significantly ahead of the portion consisting of organic raw materials, so that the demand for those raw materials grows more rapidly than their supply and their price therefore rises.” Especially in boom periods, relative underproduction of raw materials and overproduction of fixed capital is predictable. Developed capital, he declared, “acquires an elasticity, a capacity for sudden extension by leaps and bounds, which comes up against no barriers but those presented by the availability of raw materials and the extent of sales outlets.” With relative underproduction of raw materials, the rate of profit falls; “the general law [is] that, with other things being equal, the rate of profit varies inversely as the value of the raw material.” And, as noted, falling profit rates bring accumulation to an end. These barriers explain why capitalism is characterized by booms, crisis and stagnation.

But barriers are not limits. They can be transcended. In particular, capital is not passive when faced by relative underproduction of raw materials. Marx noted that among the effects of rising raw material prices are that (1) these raw materials are supplied from a greater distance; (2) their production is expanded; (3) substitutes are now employed that were previously unused; and (4) there is more economical use of waste products. Precisely because relative underproduction of raw materials produces rising prices and relatively rising profit rates in those sectors, capital inevitably flows to those sectors.  Indeed, “a condition of production founded on capital”, Marx stressed, is “exploration of the earth in all directions” and of all of Nature to discover new raw materials. Capital, in short, responds to this barrier by seeking ways to posit its growth again; and, to the extent it is successful, it enters a phase (whether cycle or long wave) characterized by relatively declining raw material values and a rising rate of profit.

Because capital is an actor, left to itself it has a tendency to restore the disturbed balances. While economic crises are inevitable, that does not mean–as some believe–that capitalism will collapse. Again, every apparent limit to capitalism is a barrier to be overcome. Crises produce interruptions but growth continues.

The tendency for capitalist globalization

We have already seen the underlying basis for imperialism. Capital’s drive for profits leads it to search for new, cheaper sources of raw materials and new markets in which to sell commodities. Further, we’ve seen that capital will move in order to find workers who can be exploited more: workers who are unorganized and weak, workers willing to work for low wages and under poor working conditions and, in particular, separated from organized workers. When you understand the logic of capital, you understand that global capitalism is inherent in capital itself; that it drives “to tear down every spatial barrier” to its goal of profits.

Wherever possible, capital will try to get what it needs through the market–for example, as the result of the competition of primary producing countries to sell or the availability of a large pool of workers to exploit in production. However, capital follows the motto of “as much market as possible, as much state as necessary”. If necessary, it draws heavily upon the coercive power of the state.

Capital’s state 

The state is not neutral. It reflects the dominant forces in society, and within capitalism (except in extraordinary circumstances) it belongs to capital. Accordingly, it functions to support capitalist exploitation and the production and realization of surplus value. Thus, its institutions will foster scientific and technical development at public expense that can increase profits. And, when needed to support its rule, capital will use the power of the state to enact “bloody legislation” and “grotesquely terroristic laws” that keep workers in the capitalist prison. That state will use its police and judicial powers to keep the working class at the desired level of dependence. It will act to alleviate economic crises, will accept reforms that do not threaten capital, and will remove those that do. Thus, it will put an end to what at some point may seem to be a social compact when conditions change, so it no longer needs that appearance. As long as the state belongs to capital, that state is your enemy.

Capital’s state and globalization 

Capital’s state plays a central role in the process of globalization. For one, capital uses its state to create institutions which ensure that the market will work to achieve its desired goals: international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and so-called “free trade agreements” (which are really “freedom for capitalists” agreements) all have been created to enforce the logic of capital internationally. By itself, though, this would not be enough, given the desires of people around the world for their own self-development. In particular, once capital has decided to generate surplus value directly in the periphery, it demands the assurance that its investments will be protected. Thus, capital uses the imperialist state to intervene militarily and to support, both by subversion and through financial and military resources, colonial states that act to produce conditions for the reproduction of the capitalist world order.

Imperialism and the colonial state

With the support of local oligarchies and elites, these colonial states are assigned the function of creating the framework in which the market serves capital best. By separating agricultural producers from the land and providing special economic zones for capital to function freely, these instruments of global capital make available the reserve army of labor that capital wants. Further, they are there to police; to use their coercive power to outlaw or otherwise prevent independent trade unions, and to apply grotesquely terroristic laws to support conditions for the growth of capital within their regimes. And, although capitalists speak much about “democracy”, support for undemocratic and authoritarian regimes that will make life (and profits) easier for capital is no accident. Of course, if these colonial states are unable to carry out this function, capital is always prepared to intervene internationally for “humanitarian” purposes. It is not a mere coincidence, for example, that so many United States foreign military bases are located near sources of energy and other raw material supplies.

Imperialism, in short, will stop at nothing. Its history of barbarism demonstrates this over and over again. As Che Guevara pointed out, it is a bestiality that knows no limits–one that tries to crush under its boots anyone who fights for freedom.

What keeps capitalism going?

Think about capitalism: a system in which the needs of capital stand opposite the needs of human beings. The picture is that of an expanding system that both tries to deny human beings the satisfaction of their needs and also constantly conjures up new, artificial needs to seduce them into a pattern of consumerism. A system which both leaves people always wanting more and at the same time threatens life on this planet. It is a Leviathan that devours the working lives of human beings in pursuit of profits, that destroys the skills of people overnight, that fosters imperialist domination of the world, and that uses the coercive power of the state to attack every effort of people to support their own need for development.

What other economic system can you imagine that could generate the simultaneous existence of unused resources, unemployed people, and people with unmet needs for what could be produced? What other economic system would allow people to starve in one part of the world, while elsewhere there is an abundance of food and the complaint is that “too much food is being produced”?

If it is possible to see the social irrationality of capitalism, why is this abomination still around?

The mystification of capital 

Capital continues to rule because people come to view capital as necessary. Because it looks like capital makes the major contribution to society, that without capital there would be no jobs, no income, no life. Every aspect of the social productivity of workers necessarily appears as the social productivity of capital. Even when capital simply combines workers in production, the resulting increase in their social productivity is like a “free gift” to capital. Further, as the result of generations of workers having sold their labor-power to the capitalist, “the social productivity of labour” has been transposed “into the material attributes of capital”; the result is that “the advantages of machinery, the use of science, invention, etc…. are deemed to be the attributes of capital.”

But why does the productivity of workers necessarily look like the productivity of capital? Simply because capital purchased labor-power from the worker and thus owns everything the worker produces. We lose sight of the fact that productivity is the social productivity of the collective producers because of the way the sale of labor-power looks. This act, this central characteristic of capitalism, where the worker surrenders her creative power to the capitalist for a mess of pottage, necessarily disguises what really happens.

When the worker sells the right to use her capacity to the capitalist, the contract doesn’t say “this is the portion of the day necessary for you to maintain yourself at the existing standard and this is the portion the capitalists are getting”. Rather, on the surface, it necessarily looks like workers sell a certain quantity of labor, their entire workday, and get a wage which is (more or less) a fair return for their contribution; that they are paid, in short, for all the labor they perform. How else could it possibly look? In short, it necessarily appears as if the worker is not exploited–that no surplus labor has been performed.

If that’s true, profits must come from the contribution of the capitalist. It’s not only workers, the story goes, the capitalist also makes a contribution; he provides “machinery, the use of science, invention, etc,”, the results of the social productivity of labor over time that appear as “the attributes of capital.” Thus, we all get what we (and our assets) deserve. (Some people just happen to make so much more of a contribution and so deserve that much more!) In short, exploitation of workers is hidden because the buying and selling of the worker’s capacity appears to be a free transaction between equals and ignores the “supremacy and subordination” in the capitalist workplace. This apparent disappearance of exploitation is so significant that Marx called it the source of “all the notions of justice held by both worker and capitalist, all the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production, all capitalism’s illusions about freedom.”

The exploitation of workers is at the core of capitalism. It explains capital’s drive to divide workers in order to grow. Exploitation is the source of the inequality characteristic of capitalism. To fight inequality, we must fight capitalist exploitation. However, inequality is only one aspect of capitalism. In and by itself, exploitation is inadequate to grasp the effects of capital’s drive and thus the products of capitalism. Focus upon exploitation is one-sided because you do not know the enemy unless you understand the double deformation inherent in capitalism.

The double deformation 

Recall that human beings and Nature are the ultimate inputs into production. In capitalist production, they serve specifically as means for the purpose of the growth of capital. The result is deformation–capitalistically-transformed Nature and capitalistically-transformed human beings. Capitalist production, Marx stressed, “only develops the technique and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth–the soil and the worker.” But why?

The deformation of Nature 

By itself, Nature is characterized by a metabolic process through which it converts various inputs and transforms these into the basis for its reproduction. In his discussion of the production of wheat, for example, Marx identified a “vegetative or physiological process” involving the seeds and “various chemical ingredients supplied by the manure, salts contained in the soil, water, air, light.” Through this process, inorganic components are “assimilated by the organic components and transformed into organic material.” Their form is changed in this metabolic process, from inorganic to organic through what Marx called “the expenditure of nature.” Also, part of the “universal metabolism of nature” is the further transformation of organic components, their deterioration and dying through their “consumption by elemental forces”. In this way, the conditions for rebirth (for example, the “vitality of the soil”) are themselves products of this metabolic process. “The seed becomes the unfolded plant, the blossom fades, and so forth”–birth, death, renewal are moments characteristic of the “metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.”

This universal metabolism of Nature, however, must be distinguished from the relation in which a human being “mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.” That labor process involves the “appropriation of what exists in nature for the requirements of man. It is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature.” This “ever-lasting nature-imposed condition of human existence,” Marx pointed out, is “common to all forms of society in which human beings live.”

As we have indicated, however, under capitalist relations of production, the preconceived goal of production is the growth of capital. The particular metabolic process that occurs in this case is one in which human labor and Nature are converted into surplus value, the basis for that growth. Accordingly, rather than a process that begins with “man and his labor on one side, nature and its materials on the other,” in capitalist relations the starting point is capital, and “the labor process is a process between things the capitalist has purchased, things which belong to him.” It is “appropriation of what exists in nature for the requirements” not of man but of capital. There is, as noted, “exploration of the earth in all directions” for a single purpose–to find new sources of raw materials to ensure the generation of profits. Nature, “the universal material for labor,” the “original larder” for human existence, is here a means not for human existence but for capital’s existence.

While capital’s tendency to grow by leaps and bounds comes up against a barrier insofar as plant and animal products are “subject to certain organic laws involving naturally determined periods of time”, capital constantly drives beyond each barrier it faces. However, there is a barrier it does not escape. Marx noted, for example, that “the entire spirit of capitalist production, which is oriented towards the most immediate monetary profit–stands in contradiction to agriculture, which has to concern itself with the whole gamut of permanent conditions of life required by the chain of human generations.” Indeed, the very nature of production under capitalist relations violates “the metabolic interaction between man and the earth”; it produces “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.”

That “irreparable” metabolic rift that Marx described is neither a short-term disturbance nor unique to agriculture. The “squandering of the vitality of the soil” is a paradigm for the way in which the “metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself” is violated under capitalist relations of production. In fact, there is nothing inherent in agricultural production that leads to that “squandering of the vitality of the soil”. On the contrary, Marx pointed out that a society can bequeath the earth “in an improved state to succeeding generations.” But this requires an understanding that “agriculture forms a mode of production sui generis, because the organic process is involved, in addition to the mechanical and chemical process, and the natural reproduction process is merely controlled and guided”; the same is true, too, in the case of fishing, hunting, and forestry. Maintenance and improvement of the vitality of the soil and of other sectors dependent upon organic conditions requires the recognition of the necessity for “systematic restoration as a regulative law of social production.”

With every increase in capitalist production, there are growing demands upon the natural environment, and the tendency to exhaust Nature’s larder and to generate unabsorbed and unutilizable waste is not at all limited to the metabolic rift that Marx described with respect to capitalist agriculture. Thus, Marx indicated that “extractive industry (mining is the most important) is likewise an industry sui generis, because no reproduction process whatever takes place in it, at least not one under our control or known to us.” Given capital’s preoccupation with its need to grow, capital has no interest in the contradiction between its logic and the “natural laws of life itself”. The contradiction between its drive for infinite growth and a finite, limited earth is not a concern because, for capital, there is always another source of growth to be found. Like a vampire, it seeks the last possible drop of blood and does not worry about keeping its host alive.

Accordingly, since capital does not worry about “simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth–the soil and the worker,” sooner or later it destroys both. Marx’s comment with respect to capital’s drive to drain every ounce of energy from the worker describes capital’s relation to the natural world precisely:

Après moi le deluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and every capitalist nation. Capital therefore takes no account of the health and the length of life of the worker, unless society forces it to do so.

We are seeing the signs of that approaching deluge. Devastating wildfires, droughts, powerful hurricanes, warming oceans, floods, rising sea levels, pollution, pandemics, disappearing species, etc are becoming commonplace–but there is nothing in capital’s metabolic process that would check that. If, for example, certain materials become scarce and costly, capital will not scale back and accept less or no growth; rather, it will scour the earth to search for new sources and substitutes.

Can society prevent the crisis of the earth system, the deluge? Not currently. The ultimate deformation of Nature is the prospect, because the second deformation makes it easier to envision the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

The deformation of human beings 

Human beings are not static and fixed. Rather, they are a work in process because they develop as the result of their activity. They change themselves as they act in and upon the world. In this respect there are always two products of human activity: the change in circumstances and the change in the human being. In the very act of producing, Marx commented, “the producers change, too, in that they bring out new qualities in themselves, develop themselves in production, transform themselves, develop new powers and new ideas, new modes of intercourse, new needs and new language.” In the process of producing, the worker “acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.”

In this “self-creation of man as a process,” the character of that human product flows from the nature of that productive activity. Under particular circumstances, that process can be one in which people are able to develop their capacities in an all-rounded way. As Marx put it, “when the worker co-operates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species”. In such a situation, associated producers may expend “their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force”, and the means of production are “there to satisfy the worker’s own need for development”.

For example, if workers democratically decide upon a plan, work together to achieve its realization, solve problems that emerge, and shift in this process from activity to activity, they engage in a constant succession of acts that expand their capacities. For workers in this situation, there is the “absolute working out of his creative potentialities,” the “complete working out of the human content,” the “development of all human powers as such the end in itself”. Collective activity under these relations produces “free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on their subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth.” In the society of the future, Marx concluded, the productive forces of people will have “increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly”.

But that’s not the character of activity under capitalist relations of production, where “it is not the worker who employs the conditions of his work, but rather the reverse, the conditions of work employ the worker.” While we know how central exploitation is from the perspective of capital, consider the effects upon workers of what capital does to ensure that exploitation. We’ve seen how capital constantly attempts to separate workers and, indeed, fosters antagonism among them (the “secret” of its success); how capital introduces changes in production that divides them further, intensifies the production process and expands the reserve army that fosters competition. What’s the effect? Marx pointed out that “all means for the development of production” under capitalism “distort the worker into a fragment of a man,” degrade him and “alienate him from the intellectual potentialities of the labour process”. In Capital, he described the mutilation, the impoverishment, the “crippling of body and mind” of the worker “bound hand and foot for life to a single specialized operation”, which occurs in the division of labor characteristic of the capitalist process of manufacturing. But did the subsequent development of machinery end that crippling of workers? Marx’s response was that under capitalist relations, such developments complete the “separation of the intellectual faculties of the production process from manual labour”. Thinking and doing become separate and hostile, and “every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity” is lost.

In short, a particular type of person is produced in capitalism. Producing within capitalist relations is what Marx called a process of a “complete emptying-out,” “total alienation,” the “sacrifice of the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end”. Indeed, the worker is so alienated that, though working with others, he “actually treats the social character of his work, its combination with the work of others for a common goal, as a power that is alien to him”. In this situation, in order to fill the vacuum of our lives, we need things–we are driven to consume. In addition to producing commodities and capital itself, capitalism produces a fragmented, crippled human being, whose enjoyment consists in possessing and consuming things. More and more things. Capital constantly generates new needs for workers, and it is upon this, Marx noted, that “the contemporary power of capital rests”. In short, every new need for capitalist commodities is a new link in the golden chain that links workers to capital.

Accordingly, rather than producing a working class that wants to put an end to capitalism, capital tends to produce the working class it needs, workers who treat capitalism as common sense. As Marx concluded:

The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws. The organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance.

To this, he added that capital’s generation of a reserve army of the unemployed “sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker”. That constant generation of a relative surplus population of workers means, Marx argued, that wages are “confined within limits satisfactory to capitalist exploitation, and lastly, the social dependence of the worker on the capitalist, which is indispensable, is secured”. Accordingly, Marx concluded that the capitalist can rely upon the worker’s “dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them.”

However, while it is possible that workers may remain socially dependent upon capital in perpetuity, that doesn’t mean that capital’s incessant growth can continue in perpetuity. In fact, given that workers deformed by capital accept capital’s requirement to grow “as self-evident natural laws”, their deformation supports the deformation of Nature. In turn, the increase in flooding, drought and other extreme climate changes and resulting mass migrations that are the product of the deformation of Nature intensify divisions and antagonism among workers. The crisis of the earth system and the crisis of humanity are one.

If we don’t know our enemy 

To put an end to that double deformation, we must put an end to capitalism. To do that, we must know the enemy: capital. We will never defeat that enemy if we do not understand it–its effects, its strengths and weaknesses. If, for example, we don’t know capital as our enemy, then crises within capitalism due to overaccumulation of capital or the destruction of the environment will be viewed as crises of the “economy” or of industrialization, calling for us all to sacrifice.

The nature of capital comes to the surface many times. In recurring capitalist crises, for example, it is obvious that profits–rather than the needs of people as socially developed human beings–determine the nature and extent of production within capitalism. However, there’s nothing at all about a crisis that necessarily leads people to question the system itself. People may struggle against specific aspects of capitalism: they may struggle over the workday, the level of wages and working conditions, against the unemployment brought about by a crisis of overaccumulation, over capital’s destruction of the environment, over capital’s destruction of national cultures and sovereignty, against neo-liberalism, etc. But unless they understand the nature of the system, they are struggling merely for a nicer capitalism, a capitalism with a human face. If we don’t understand the nature of capital, then every attempt to make life better will ultimately end up being what Marx called “a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system”.

Indeed, so long as workers do not see capital as their own product and continue instead to think of the need for healthy capitalists as common sense (and in their own interest), they will hold back from actions that place capital in crisis. Even if we are successful in struggling to gain control of the state, even if we manage to take government away from capital, we’ll continue to think of capital as necessary if we don’t understand it.

For this reason, faced with threats by capital, we will always give in rather than move in. That is the sad history of social democracy. While it presents itself as proceeding from a logic in which the needs and potentialities of human beings take priority over the needs of capital, social democracy always ends up by reinforcing the logic of capital. It does because it does not know the enemy.

Knowing your enemy, though, is no guarantee that you will be prepared to go beyond capital.

Know yourself

Consider this picture of you. It’s a picture of you against the world. You are separated from everyone else, and you are all that matters. You’ll lie, cheat and steal as long as you can do that without being caught.

Do you recognize yourself? Certainly, it’s the you that capital constantly tries to produce–the separated, atomistic, selfish maximizer. It’s the way the economic theorists of capital picture you as well

But that’s not really you (or, at least, all of you). Something stops you from always lying, cheating and stealing even if you can get away with it. It’s not fair. Not fair to other people. You don’t do that to members of your family. And you don’t do that to your neighbors because you have to live with them. In fact, if they need your help, you will gladly help them because some day you may need their help. And if there is a threat (like floods, fire, predators) to the neighborhood, you’ll join with them because you know that people need each other.

It’s the same at work. You enjoy seeing and joking with the people you work with. And you know that if you are facing the same problems, such as low wages and horrible working conditions (no time for bathroom breaks, etc.), you’re not going to solve them by yourself. In fact, when you join together to fight for what is fair, you feel strong. That is why capital is always trying to divide you. It doesn’t want to face workers who are strong. And it’s not only in the workplace. Capital wants to be able to continue to produce profits without fear that people will organize against the pollution and destruction of the earth it generates. It wants you separate, prepared to turn away if you’re not yourself directly affected, and that, even if you are affected, you won’t act. Why? Because you feel that you are too weak by yourself to fight.

Capital counts on you deciding that there’s nothing you can do. It takes your lack of action as proof that you really are what it wants: a separated, selfish maximizer. But it’s not that you are acting selfishly; rather, it’s because you lack confidence that others will join with you to do what is right. Holding you back is not that you are separate but that you are afraid that you will be alone.

There’s a saying, “You can’t fight City Hall”. You may also think you can’t fight capital and the capitalist state. It’s true–you can’t fight them and win if you are alone. But you can fight and win if you are not alone. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is only a dilemma if the prisoners are kept separate. When you join together with other people, it’s quite different.

Something important happens when you struggle along with others. You win sometimes, and you learn the importance of uniting. But it’s not only that your prospect for victory improves. You also change. You begin the process of shedding those sides of yourself that capital has produced. You are changing your social relations: in place of separation, there is solidarity. You know yourself as part of a community and you come to recognize others as part of that community too.

You change in another way in the process. You develop new capacities. It’s what Marx called “revolutionary practice”–the simultaneous changing of circumstances and human activity or self-change. And, that process of increasing your capacity through practice is not limited to any specific sphere. When you change, the changed you can enter into new spheres of struggle. Whether you struggle collectively against exploitation in the workplace, against racism, against sexism and patriarchy, against all the divisions among people that capital fosters, against inequality and injustice, against the deformation of Nature both locally and globally, you remake yourself in the process (in Marx’s words) to be someone fit to build a new world. Through your protagonism, you come to know yourselves as the person you want to be.

You learn to recognize the importance of community and solidarity. That’s part of the “secret” capital doesn’t want you to know. That concept of community is always there; it’s why you think about what is fair. It’s why you are bothered by injustice, why you enjoy cooperating and take pleasure in helping others. Fully developed, the system of communality is one, Marx proposed, where “instead of a division of labour… there would take place an organization of labor”; one where “working with means of production held in common”, the activities undertaken by associated producers are “determined by communal needs and purposes”. In short, production for social needs, organized by associated producers, and based upon social ownership of the means of production (three sides of what Hugo Chávez called “the elementary triangle of socialism”) correspond to the developed system of community.

This goal of communality is, we understand, largely subordinated by capitalism with its emphasis upon individual self-interest. Nevertheless, you may begin to get glimpses of community in the process of collective struggle. There are many possibilities, for example, within municipalities and cities: struggles for tenant rights, free public transit, support for public and co-op housing, increasing city-wide minimum wages, initiating community gardens, climate action at the neighborhood and community level, immigrant support, and opposition to racial profiling and police oppression, all have the potential for people to develop our capacities and a sense of our strength.

By learning to work together, we strip off (in Marx’s words) the “fetters” of our individuality. We begin to envision the possibility of a better society, one in which people can develop all their potential. The possibility of a society (in the words of the Communist Manifesto) where the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all–a society based upon solidarity and community.

That won’t happen overnight. Building the new human being is a process, and it takes more than good ideas. To develop that potential, practice can make those ideas real. Institutions based upon democratic, participatory and protagonistic practice and solidarity are an important part of that process. Neighborhood government, communal councils, workers councils and cooperative forms of production are examples of what Chávez called “the cells” of a new socialist state, where you change both circumstances and yourselves.

Local institutions by their very nature, of course, do not directly address problems at regional, national and international levels. However, local activity is the form that allows for the combination of nationwide struggles with the process of building capacities. Thus, struggles to end capitalist ownership of particular sectors or to end the destruction of the environment, for examples, are strengthened by being rooted in local organization that simultaneously builds a basis for further advances. In the process, you develop further, too, by knowing yourself as part of a larger community.

Know your enemy and know yourselves 

If we don’t know ourselves, we are disarmed: we will never grasp our collective strength nor the possibility of a better world, that of community. If we know ourselves but not capital, we will not understand why capitalism seems like common sense and we will at best create barriers to capital that it transcends and grows beyond. In both cases, it will appear that capitalism is “guaranteed in perpetuity”. In both cases, we will be unable to take advantage of capital’s inevitable crises and, most significantly, will not prevent the ultimate crisis of the earth system.

To know capital is to understand its strengths and the effects of its activity. To know ourselves is to know our strengths and the effects of our activity. To know both is to recognize the necessity for taking the state away from capital and to build the new state from below through which we develop our capacity. We need, in short, to learn to walk on two legs to transform the state from one over and above us into one that Marx called for, “the self-government of the producers”.

But we will never learn this spontaneously. Rather than discovering all secrets overnight, knowing our enemy and ourselves is a process. Understanding the links between all struggles, too, is an important part of that process. Given the mystification of capital and the divisions that capital has fostered, it’s important to have a body of people who can teach and guide us (while learning from us at the same time). It means that we need to think seriously about building a political instrument that can help us all to learn to walk on two legs, to help us to know the enemy and ourselves. Once we do, as Sun Tzu taught, we will win every battle and the war. In place of capitalism, we will build community.

Note:

[1] Citations and extended arguments may be found in Michael A. Lebowitz, Between Capitalism and Community (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020). The concept of “The Double Deformation” is developed explicitly here.

A Primer on the Radicalization of the Ecuadorian Left: 1959-1983

[Pictured: Workers and indigenous communities rising up against President Lenin Moreno’s economic assault in 2019]

By Sofia Lanchimba Velastegui

Republished from Scottish Centre for Global History.

During the 60s and 70s, a process of radicalization took place within the left-wing tradition that would reconfigure the militant camp and political identities. Beginning in 1959 with a massacre in Guayaquil, the increase and radicalization of protests in a scenario of economic crisis and the formation of URJE (Revolutionary Union of Ecuadorian Youth) culminated around 1983, when most of its expressions disappeared, divided, or transformed.

Political activation produced an organizational explosion. Several parties were created located to the left of the Socialist Party (PSE) and the Communist Party (PCE) that had been present in Ecuadorian history since 1926 and 1931 respectively. At the same time, important processes of social mobilization took place. In the 60s the main actor was the student movement and, in the 70s, the trade union movement.

These new parties emerged around debates on revolutionary strategy and realignments regarding Stalinism, the Sino-Soviet conflict, the Cuban revolution, Vatican politics, and anti-colonial revolutions. Thus, there was a multiplication within the left-wing family: communists, socialists, Guevarists, Trotskyists, Maoists, left-wing Christians, etc.

The banana crisis [1] that occurred at the end of the 50s  generated a situation of extreme urban and rural poverty with the growth of poverty belts, especially in Guayaquil. The general discontent of the population was evident in Portoviejo in May 1959, and a few days later in Guayaquil. The response of the government, ruled by then-Social Christian President Camilo Ponce Enríquez, was brutal repression. Under the order to “shoot to kill” there was a massacre of between 600 and 800 people [2] which has been silenced in the collective memory.

The massacre of June 2 and 3, 1959 in Guayaquil was the catalyst that ignited revolutionary spirits. One of the flyers drawn up by the Strike Committee the day after the massacre read: “May the blood shed in the streets of Portoviejo and Guayaquil, by our brothers in the cause, be the germ that makes the glorious seed of the Revolution”. Likewise, one of the then-militants claims: “from June 3, 1959, I took an option together with the exploited.” One of the survivors of the massacre, Jaime Galarza Zavala, became one of the most prominent leaders of the radicalized left and one of the notorious targets of the CIA. After the massacre, young militants from the Communist and Socialist Parties, as well as the Concentration of Popular Forces formed URJE.

A generation of militants was radicalized the same year that the Cuban Revolution had taken place. They were not the only ones, the same happened in other parts of the continent. These were years in which the international political markers of the Cold War had a greater weight in the definition of the political field and caused its polarization in a friend-enemy logic. A world divided between the Soviet Union and the United States offered greater possibilities for the strengthening of transnational identities. On the one hand, communism, and the radical left, and on the other, anti-communism and dictatorships were signs of polarization. The different expressions of the left felt more comfortable with their international families than with their countrymen. The Cold War upset the internal balances of force and gave the left the impression of having more weight and strength than they had.

Although URJE was influenced by the Communist Party, it acted with a margin of autonomy. Inside it, a radicalization was brewing against the socialist and communist parties because they demanded the abandonment of the revolutionary project. Linked to URJE, the first attempt to organize a rural guerrilla occurred. In 1962 URJE militants were arrested in the first attempt to reunite what became known as the “Toachi Guerrilla”.

The repression and the failure of the attempts to detonate the guerrilla forced a reorganization of the left and a change of strategy. During the 1970s, the organizations turned towards a mass insurrectionary policy. It was no longer about the guerrilla vanguard. All parties were committed to quantitative growth through the creation of mass fronts. At the same time, the trade union movement gained strength in the 70s, because of incipient industrialization processes. Between 1975 and 1983, the most important national strikes took place.

During the two decades, the left faced dictatorships, counterinsurgent strategies and strong anti-communism whose target was not only the members of the Communist Party or leftist militants, but all expressions of popular discontent. However, the repression only affirmed the revolutionary spirit. The biggest blow came through the legal-political reform of 1979 when Ecuador returned to constitutional order. The entrance to institutional life disarmed the revolutionary organizations. Most of its expressions entered formal political life and those that did not gradually disappeared.


Sofia Lanchimba Velastegui is an Ecuadorian sociologist and lawyer. She investigates mobilization and leftist militancy in Ecuador between the 1960’s and 90’s.


References

This article is based on the review of declassified CIA files, flyers and oral interviews with militants collected for the doctoral thesis of the Political and Social Sciences Program, UNAM.


Endnotes

[1] Ecuadorian banana exports fell. The price of essential items increased.

[2] There is no official death toll. The newspaper “El Comercio” recognizes eight dead people, however, testimonies and flyers speak of 500, 700 or 800 dead.

Black Nationalism Meets Proletarian Internationalism: Revisiting Robert F. Williams's 1966 Speech in China

[Pictured: Robert F. Williams meets with Mao Zedong in China]

During the 1960s, Robert F. Williams and his wife, Mabel, spent time in Cuba, North Vietnam, and China, setting up long-term residencies in both Cuba and China. Williams, who had made a name for himself as a proponent of black liberation via armed self-defense in the United States, spent this time abroad speaking about his experiences (and the experiences of all black people) within the US, as well as the broader topics of black liberation, internationalism, black nationalism, communism, imperialism, and racism. The following is the full text of a speech he gave in China's Great Hall of the People in 1966 on the third anniversary of Mao Zedong's speech against racial discrimination in the United States:

[beginning of speech]

Brothers, Sisters, Patriots, Revolutionaries….

Once again, I want to thank Chairman Mao Zedong and our brothers, the great Chinese people, for their support of our struggle. Commemorating the third anniversary of Chairman Mao Zedong’s statement calling upon the people of the world to unite against racial discrimination by U.S. imperialism and support the American Negroes in their struggle against racial discrimination, the greatest tribute that can be paid to the correctness of his immortal words lie in a current analysis and assessment of the present development of struggle being waged by the Afro-American people.

Chairman Mao Zedong’s statement of August 8, 1963 gave inspiration to a people long and brutally oppressed and dehumanized, then laboring under the masochist-like philosophy of neo-Gandhism. His words gave impetus to a floundering and feeble movement of armed self-defence. And today all of the reactionary world is shocked and terrified by the turbulent winds of ever increasing armed resistance now sweeping the mighty fortress of savage imperialism and beastly racism. In racist America’s mighty northern cities, in the small towns, in the countryside, in the dark and deep jungle wilderness of the southland, from coast to coast, oppressed and dehumanized black people are meeting oppressive racist terrorist’s violence with revolutionary violence.

The thunder of BLACK POWER echoes throughout the land. A mighty firestorm sweeps through the ghettoes rife with rebellion. In their paradise of stolen wealth, ringed by massive arsenals of horrible death weapons, the tyrannical kings of imperialism tremble from the terrifying shock of a confrontation with wretched and angry slaves, armed with a common household match and a bottle of gasoline.

What is the meaning of this cry BLACK POWER in a land dominated by the unmerciful power of white intruders who murdered and all but exterminated the rightful owners, the American Indians? Black Power means that black men want to have some control over their own lives, to have a respected voice in public affairs that affect them. We resent being a colonial people, treated as third class citizens in our native land.

We resent being forbidden to speak for ourselves, even in black belts where we constitute as much as 85 percent of the population. We resent being deformed by a white man’s mold in a degenerate white supremacy society that derides and belittles our African heritage and make us ashamed of our ethnic characteristics. Black Power is the vehicle by which we hope to reach a stage wherein we can be proud black people without the necessity of an apology for our non-Anglo-Saxon features.

The dominant society in racist America is reactionary, imperialist, racist, and decadent and we wish to disassociate ourselves from it.

Black Power is a dissident force challenging the racist white power structure that is so heinously exterminating the people of Vietnam and threatening the world with nuclear destruction.

We have been victims of white racism for 400 years in the new world. We have been victims of racist barbarism for almost 200 years under the present form of government. Our people are slaughtered like swine on the main streets of racist America. Our churches and homes have been bombed. Our women raped with impunity. Our men have been emasculated. We are hated and murdered for no other reason than being born black and because we refuse to commend and love our savage oppressors, we are called racists.

We are oppressed people. Our objective is to destroy the hurtful stranglehold of our enemy oppressors. An opponent without the courage to designate his enemy by his true characteristics cannot expect to confront and defeat him. We propose to call our enemies what they are. We propose to rally our people and fight on this basis. We do not propose to mince our words for the sake of peaceful coexistence. It is a natural law that a humble lamb cannot peacefully coexist with a rabid wolf in close proximity.

Yes, we have some white Americans with us in our struggle. They are our true brothers. These revolutionaries understand and share our anger. They know it is justified. Their spirit is an extension of the glorious spirit of the great and noble antislavery fighter, John Brown. Yes, they too are a hated and persecuted minority people in Johnson’s majority mob rule Hitlerite jungle society. Yes, and like all other peoples we have enemies in our ranks. We have black traitors who practice treason for 30 pieces of silver. We have black Judases, insensate running dogs for the Johnson administration and its racist white power structure. Like their white puppet masters, these black puppets too have days that are numbered.

Our wrath is as intense against the black lackeys of our white oppressors as it is against the white supremacy oppressors themselves. These mercenary Uncle Toms are the most vocal nonviolent peace peddlers in the storm centers of racist America today. The ghettoes are ablaze but they advocate peaceful submission to continued tyranny and oppression.

Johnson, the great civil rights advocate, the former senator from the racist state of Texas, who as senator voted against every civil rights bill that came before the U.S. Senate, claimed to be a modern day Moses to black Americans so long as they passively allowed themselves to be mauled and maimed by white supremacy brutes and thugs. But now, with brutal white supremacy Federal Power, he threatens those who defend themselves, their homes, and their women and children. Mr. Johnson, the big daddy white supremacist, would remind our people that we are a minority and the brutal racist white savages are a majority. Like his fellow-traveling Ku Klux Klansmen, he endeavors to frighten and intimidate us by the mere numbers of our eternal oppressors.

In the same fashion that Mr. Johnson would like to intimidate the Chinese people with a massive arsenal of nuclear weapons, he is endeavoring to intimidate the black American by alluding to great hordes of white supremacists who are ready and willing to exterminate our people. We say to Mr. Johnson that intimidation, violence, and brutality will not stop the raging fires in the people’s liberation struggle. The only force on earth powerful enough to halt the flames engulfing ghettoes and main streets of racist America consists of fair play, brotherhood, equality, and justice.

We serve notice on big daddy Texas Lyndon B. Johnson that he can no more intimidate the Afro-American people with his threat of unleashing his great hordes of mad-dog racists than he can intimidate the Chinese people with the threat of unleashing a nuclear attack. The day when brutal white racist oppressors and imperialists can frighten colored peoples into submission by threats of savage violence are gone forever!

We revolutionary Afro-Americans respond to Mr. Johnson and his Ku Klux Klan fraternity of white supremacy with the cry of BLACK POWER, FREEDOM NOW! JUSTICE! We proclaim our inalienable right to live as human beings and we shall implement our demand with blood and fire. Yes, Mr. Johnson, we are a minority but more than that we are an oppressed minority determined at all costs to be free, and we are resolved to pay any price, to perform any task, and to go to any length for our freedom.

Yes, we are a minority but we are a minority with the power of a righteous cause and justice on our side. We are a minority marching in the endless files of the great multiracial masses of the invincible anti-imperialist and antiracist forces of the world. For the benefit of Mr. Johnson, who puts so much stock in numbers, we remind him once again, in the words a great people’s leader a liberator whose words, thought, and teachings stand as impeccable in the turbulent winds of time as the mighty Rock of Gibraltar, yes, we remind him once again that our great leader and teacher, Chairman Mao Zedong has said:

“... We are in the majority and they are in the minority. At most, they make up less than ten percent of the three thousand million population of the world. I am firmly convinced that, with the support of more than ninety percent of the people of the world, the American Negroes will be victorious in their just struggle. The evil system of colonialism and imperialism arose and throve with the enslavement of Negroes and the trade in Negroes, and it will surely come to its end with the complete emancipation of the black people.”

Today, in the social jungle of racist America the rights of colored people are less respected than those of common street dogs. The law and the kangaroo courts of the so-called free world of “Christian” democracy protect the rights of common street dogs and other dumb animals but there is not a single court of law that dispenses even-handed justice and unbiased constitutional and human rights to colored Americans. The long, brutal, and miserable plight of our people throughout the history of barbaric America encompasses one of the most shameful and savage chapters in the history of slavery and man’s injustice to man.

The dominant class in racist America is one of the most hypocritical the world has ever seen. It captured the African in Africa, enslaved him, ripped his culture from him, raped him, reproduced from him, completely dehumanized him, and reduced him to the level of beast of burden and stamped him with the name Negro as a tribute to the white man’s creation and invention of a new implement of agriculture and an instrument of labor. And all the while, he promoted this brutal slavery, he proclaimed himself architect of democracy and a Christian society.

All the while, he brutally and savagely exterminated the American Indian and piously proclaimed Thanksgiving to his white god for being so generous in blessing him with the bounty of the Indian’s rich land and paradise. He built a brutal imperialist prison wall around the peoples of Latin America and piously named it the protective Monroe Doctrine. He stretched his bloody hand to Asia and arrogantly called it an “Open Door Policy.”

The Open Door Policy was the policy of an armed bandit at the door of a peaceful man. Today, the same bandit rapes and plunders the land the Vietnam, murders defenseless women and children and exterminates the people in the name of “free world Christian democracy”.

The same bandit who exterminated and starved the American Indian on his own native soil now piously proclaims to practice charity to the nation of India in a hypocritical effort to use them in his campaign to subdue and enslave the peoples of Asia. What is the nature of his democracy? What does such a beastly, imperialist, racist savage know about democracy? Should not democracy, like charity, start first at home, and then spread abroad? What is the democracy of the Black American captives in the miserable ghettoes, in the cotton fields of Mississippi, battered by the savage policeman’s club in Washington, D.C.? What is the democracy of the Puerto Ricans, of the Mexicans, and of the American Indians in racist America? Only the most naive can believe the empty words and promise of such a morally bankrupt charlatan.

Deceptive American white supremacy is personified by hypocrites like Bobby Kennedy, a sophisticated huckster and charlatan of the first magnitude who struts and sways into the hotbed of African white supremacy and colonialism, hugging and kissing black babies and masquerading as a great white father and savior of the black Africans. Mr. Kennedy’s actions in racist America are quite a contrast to his deceitful conduct in Africa. When Mr. Kennedy served as the attorney general of the U.S.A. he was sworn to uphold the right of equal protection under law, yet he collaborated with the most barbaric racists in the nation. He entered into a “white gentleman’s agreement” with the notorious racist governor of Mississippi, Ross Barnett.

Defenseless and helpless black women and children were bombed, gassed, clubbed, raped, and murdered on the main streets of racist America and Mr. Kennedy is yet to punish a single white supremacist heathen transgressor. As attorney general he did nothing about the fact that Africans were being beaten in the United States, even the diplomats assigned to the United Nations.

It is strange indeed how Mr. Kennedy can perform in the racist chorus of those who chant slogans of hatred, vilification, and dehumanization for black people in America while proclaiming his pretended great love for black humanity in Africa. Such is the nature of a deceptive and barbaric Yankee.

In America, Mr. Kennedy publicly proclaims himself to be opposed to black nationalism. In his white supremacy logic, he calls it racism in reverse. Black nationalism is a survival reaction to white nationalism. White nationalism transcends religious, class, social, and political lines. The reason that no massive black-white unity on a national scale exists today is that the white supremacy ruling class has poisoned the minds of white workers. Most white workers identify with their white imperialist rulers. White liberals insist on paternalism. Even bourgeois minded so-called socialists are more and more identifying and grouping on a racial basis rather than on a class basis.

We Afro-American revolutionaries have discovered that some so-called socialists, we thought to be our comrades and class brothers have joined the international Ku Klux Klan fraternity for white supremacy and world domination. To our consternation, we have discovered that the bourgeois orientated power structure of some socialist states, even one with a black and white population, would prefer to preserve the white reactionary anti-communist power structure in racist America, their natural national enemy, than to see a just, democratic, fraternal socialist state brought about by the revolutionary action of oppressed blacks that would serve the best interests of all peoples and races. Like their Yankee counterparts that they love to ape so well, even to the point of emulating their racism, they are moving might and main to frustrate and defeat the revolutionary movements of the oppressed peoples throughout the world.

We of the Afro-American liberation movement resolutely condemn and oppose all counterrevolutionaries and purveyors of white supremacy whether they cloak their treachery in the garb of Marxist-Leninist phraseology or the hideous bed sheets of the Ku Klux Klan and its phoney Christian doctrine.

We who are engaged in the struggle for liberation and survival vehemently condemn the use of black dehumanized troops as cannon fodder in a white man’s war of imperialism in Vietnam. We oppose Johnson’s vicious crusade to dehumanize, emasculate, and enslave the great Vietnamese people.

Black boys — from the slum housing of black ghettoes, ill-educated in segregated schools, emasculated and dehumanized by police brutality and a savage white power structure — yes, black, boys who cannot find employment, black boys who are victims of white racists who hate them because of the color of their skin — black boys who mothers, sisters, and loved ones are being savagely clubbed, gassed, raped, maimed, lynched, and railroaded to prison in racist kangaroo courts simply for begging and praying for elementary justice are forced to share foxholes and and shed their blood alongside racist Negro haters in Vietnam, who like in racist America refuse to fraternize with them in places of amusement in Tokyo and Saigon.

Even out of proportion to the self-styled master race, vast numbers of black soldiers are forced to suffer and die in that vain effort to prolong and extend the brutal racist white man’s imperialism. They are forced to suffer and die in the cause of a racist power structure that is as much the enemy of black people in America as it is the people of peace and freedom loving Vietnam.

And why do we call the massive Ku Klux Klan type action in Vietnam a racist white man’s war of imperialism while many black men are fighting there? It is because in racist America no black man is part of Johnson’s policy-making clique. The United State is governed by white power. The Pentagon is a white-dominated repressive arm of a ruthless elite white power structure. Wall Street is an exclusive club of the great white chiefs of business and industry. Black Americans are resisting the racist and imperialist lily-white power structure. How can a people who are fighting and dying simply to wrest the most basic of human rights from an intransigent and tyrannical power structure be said to be partners of that power structure and willing participants in its racist and imperialist ventures and crimes against humanity?

The United States today is a fascist society more brutal than any the world has ever known. It has all but exterminated a whole people.

It has robbed and raped an entire continent with impunity. It has divided the peoples of the world into national factions and set them against themselves and their brothers. With no more authority than the wave of its bloody imperialist hand it has abrogated the right of self-determination of small nations. It has appointed and crowned itself both king and armored knight of the whole universe. It threatens the globe with annihilation. It is a super colonial power that is colonializing the colonials.

The world famed and brilliant philosopher, Lord Bertrand Russell has justifiably stated that racist America has exterminated more black people than Hitler exterminated Jews in Nazi Germany. Lord Russell and many other fair-minded humanists throughout the world have justifiably stated that the U.S. military aggression in Vietnam is executed in a more cruel and barbarous manner than even the horrible campaigns of aggression, genocide, and conquest carried out by Hitler’s fascist Germany.

Yet, there is a mighty tendency, promoted by the sinister American devil himself, to engender more sympathy and fraternalism for the so-called “good reasonable Americans” than for the wretched victims of vicious and brutal U.S. imperialism. The U.S. constitutes one of the greatest fascist threats ever to cast its ugly shadow across the face of the earth. When the butchers of Nazi Germany were on the plunder, the world cry was “Crush Nazism!” “Crush the Fascist Power Structure!” “Crush Germany!” Total war was unleashed without deference to any who may been considered “good Germans” inside Nazi Germany. No sane person opposed to fascism pleaded for a soft policy toward Nazi Germany or pleaded for victims to wait for deliverance through the benevolence of “good German workers and liberals.” Racist America didn’t give a damn about sparing the good Japanese people when they dropped their horrible and devastating atom bombs.

What is the motive of those who plead for the exemption of liberal Americans, whose feigned liberalism merely serves as a cloak and shield around the naked power of savage and racist U.S. imperialism? The time is fast approaching when the so-called good reasonable American must make a decision either to overtly side with American chauvinism and jingoism or to take a resolute anti-imperialist and anti-racist stand that will be a firm basis for a just and lasting world peace.

We who are brutally oppressed and victimized cannot forever afford to spare the fortress of social reaction and tyranny because there are allegedly silent dissenters within its gates. Those who are without righteous cause of the oppressed must be prepared to suffer the consequences of the gathering storm of the violent and turbulent winds of retribution. A good man who is silent and inactive in times of great injustice and oppression is no good man at all.

He is no ally to freedom and justice but is a silent partner to tyranny and condemnation. He does not deserve exemption from the condemnation and the vengeance of those whom his silence allows to be victimized. The myth of the good reasonable American who is yet to be heard is a ruse perpetrated by the psychological arm of the imperialist forces of tyranny. It is one minute to zero in racist America. Four hundred bloody and gruesome years have passed. For 400 years, our good silent partners have remained silent and inactive. Time is running out and they stand at the dividing line still beseeching patience, still beseeching the slave to leave his fate to his silent friends ever infected with inertia. They plead for deference on behalf of the good people who yet stand at one camp. We call to them to separate themselves from the devil’s legions. We inform them that they have not 400 more years to make a decision but one minute before the hour of zero, before the Armageddon between the slavemaster and the slave.

Once again, in closing, let me thank our great leader and teacher, the architect of people’s warfare, Chairman Mao Zedong, for his great and inspiring statement in support of our struggle. And to our great Chinese brothers and true revolutionaries throughout the world, we revolutionary Afro-Americans vow that we shall take the torch of freedom and justice into the streets of racist America and we shall set the last great stronghold of Yankee imperialism ablaze with our battle cry of Black Power!

FREEDOM! FREEDOM! FREEDOM! NOW OR DEATH!

For our people, for our country, and for our compatriots throughout the world, we shall reclaim the nobility of the American Revolution. We shall raise our flag in honor, true peace, and brotherhood to all the world!

Long live the People’s Republic of China!

Long live Chairman Mao Zedong!

Long live the people’s resistance to imperialism, racism, and tyranny!

Long live the militant friendship between the Chinese and revolutionary American people!


[end of speech]

The Real Dragon: George Jackson and the Black August Tradition

By Alieu Bah

Republished from This Is Africa.

“I don’t want to die and leave a few sad songs and a hump in the ground as my only monument. I want to leave a world that is liberated from trash, pollution, racism, nation-states, nation-state wars and armies, from pomp, bigotry, parochialism, a thousand different brands of untruth and licentious, usurious economics.”

— George Jackson 

The dragon never physically flew out, but his thoughts, writings, and practice encircled the black globe in the fire-spitting style of a true and living dragon — the metaphor gains sharpness the deeper we delve in the many variants of the lives and afterlives of the man. George Jackson was the compañero who wasn’t afraid; a righteous brother who frightened and shook the empire whiles locked up in her deadly dungeons for all his adult life. What conditions create a man so beautiful, cold, calculated, and brilliant as George? Why was the system so afraid of a young black brother such as this? Why did he stand out and continue to do so after all this time? To look at George’s life is to see a body in motion, racked with questions of the impossible and a near denial that such a man really did walk amongst us; nay, caged amongst us.

Studying the life and times of brother George is to come to certain hard conclusions that are ever necessary in the grand scheme of things. It is to look at the prison system that kept him captive and see a slave plantation whose abolition has become an ever-important need in the age of mass-incarceration of black and African people in the US settler colony. The criminalization of black existence and the glaring contradictions of the capitalist dystopia as African lives continue to be in primitive accumulation. It is to see the enduring human spirit, despite captivity and slavery, flourishing and blossoming and yearning for nothing short of liberation and the human right to dignity. His life speaks across the times in a transhistorical encounter with our times when so many like him continue to suffer the privation of white supremacy and commodification of the human being.

At a personal, intimate level, to look at his life is to see a studious, steadfast and consistent life given to the liberation of black people, and all toiling people, under the yoke of capitalism-imperialism. A life lived in love of the people — a true ox for the people to ride. He laid no claims to grandeur or greatness, his preoccupation was with how we get free! How can the unconsoled be consoled and the last become first. But George comes from a tradition, a living lineage that inspired his whole life as a revolutionary black man in the hellhole of the imperial state. For we recognize that the individual is a social being who’s becoming and fullness is only realized through the people. He knew this too, hence his constant emphasis on taking Revolution back to the masses; the sufferer, the fella, the captured and the odds job man.

Black August started as a commemoration of George’s defiant spirit, but more than that, it is testimony to that radical, revolutionary tradition that never quenches. The August of our lives as a global African humanity stretches back to Touissant and the Haitian Revolution, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, the birth of Garvey and Fred Hampton and many many more. August is indeed very august and replete with our glorious struggles for liberation and self-determination. In connecting George Jackson to this living and breathing tradition, we honor him truly as he would have wanted to be. Constantly in his letters we are reminded that he is with the progressive forces of the African world, that his sustained inspiration came from giants of the struggle the likes of Kwame Nkrumah, Lumumba, Fanon, etc. What this means for us today is to go back to that source from whence he was drinking from and deduce lessons and learnings in advancing this unfinished project of national liberation.

Nkrumah, like many others from his time, emphasized in no uncertain terms the need for African unification under scientific socialism. This is an integral part of the tradition we have inherited today and is linked intimately with the just and righteous struggles of black people in America. The home of black people in the diaspora and at home remains in Africa, and until such a time when this homeland of blackness is liberated and free from the machinations of domination, black people everywhere will be powerless, disrespected, and oppressed at will. And today, as Africa grapples with failed neocolonial states, black people continue to be the skunk of the planet wherever you might go around the world.

This then calls for a shared internationalism that is grounded foremost in revolutionary Pan-Africanism in the continuity provided to us by the likes of Kwame Ture and the All African People’s Revolutionary Party. In times gone by, in the callings of Marcus Garvey and UNIA to rally Africans all over the world and to build alliances where needed to advance our cause.

Beyond Pan-Africanism, the struggle to dismantle the neocolonial conditions in which black folks continue to live in the United States, like George Jackson brilliantly told us decades ago, has to be linked to an international struggle of the oppressed, and as such it will be won when the global struggle, which Afro America is an integral part of, will see the end of the empire with her tentacles cut off from all over the oppressed world. Fascism in America is trained and perfected on black bodies, then transferred and expertly translated as policy around the world. At the same time, military killers in Iraq go home to terrorize black lives in the streets of Minneapolis. Many locations, one enemy. This too must be understood clearly and the lessons applied for our inevitable victory.

Ultimately, it’s a recognition of the sheer power and possibilities that lay in the hands of Afro America that will give Black August it’s due place as an institution for self-determination and radiant new beginnings. Those millions of beaten down, imprisoned, overworked and back-bent workers and peasants that make America’s machines run are the only true vanguard of the humane struggle to change the conditions of humanity and halt an empire whose barbarism has outshone all other empires before her.

Oppressed humanity continues to look to Africans in America as they lock horns with the devil. Knowing this contending class of people will determine the course of human history — the one who emerges victorious moves the old hands of the human story, either to prosperity for all, or perdition. But knowing the arc of history, in the end it’s the oppressed who win since they have nothing to protect and everything to gain in this glorious fight. A protracted and long struggle, but victory being assured for the long-suffering fella who embodies the truth in her very being.

To truly honor George Jackson and the Soledad brothers is to struggle for what they stood for; it is to study their bequeathal to this generation and make it come to life. To organize and study hard as they did, and never for once cower before the elemental forces of oppression. To never be counted amongst the broken — George died victorious and unbroken in the harshest of places, in the hands of the most vicious. To know that eventually the prison gates will open and the real dragon will fly out.

Walter Rodney: A People's Professor

By Curry Malott and Elgin Bailey

Republished from Liberation School.

In a recent book on the ongoing relevance of Walter Rodney’s work, Karim F. Hirji notes that, “as with scores of progressive intellectuals and activists of the past, the prevailing ideology functions to relegate Rodney into the deepest, almost unreachable, ravines of memory. A person who was widely known is now a nonentity, a stranger to the youth in Africa and the Caribbean” and the U.S. [1]. Rodney’s theoretical and practical contributions to the socialist movement warrant an ongoing engagement with his life story and major texts.

Rodney’s most recent, posthumously-published text, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World, offers an important perspective on the time period in which it was written and the internal position of the author. Rodney’s family worked with Robin Kelley in taking Walter’s extensive lecture notes on the Russian revolutionary era and forming them into a complete manuscript.

This essay, which complements our new study guide on The Russian Revolution, offers a brief overview of Rodney’s background historical context. Highlighting aspects of Rodney’s individual life demonstrates that his commitments were not just the result of his own individual experiences and conclusions, but were part of and emerged from the revolutionary crisis ripping through the world at the time. To better comprehend A View from the Third World, we turn to Groundings with My Brothers, which Rodney produced as a relatively new professor in Jamaica. In that book, Rodney reflects on the dialectical pedagogy he developed to make his academic labor part of the global movement against capitalist imperialism, which he also called the white power structure [2].

What is clear throughout Rodney’s work is the influence of the materialist insight that, while people make history, they cannot make it as they please, but it in the context of existing material conditions. Rather than start with abstract slogans or formulas, Rodney’s place of departure is an assessment of concrete conditions. For example, Rodney begins Groundings with a political assessment of the situation in Jamaica and he begins A View from the Third World with his analysis of the historical situation that gave way to Russia’s revolutionary era.

Raised in struggle

Walter Rodney was born March 23, 1942 into a working-class Guyanese family. According to Walter’s partner, Dr. Patricia Rodney, his parents introduced him to community activism at an early age. Growing up in Guyana in the 1950s, when the socialist movement was influential, “sociopolitical engagement was not uncommon among Guyanese youth” [3]. This was an incredibly exciting era to be a part of. It was a time of qualitative changes as the people of Guyana set out to build a whole new social and political system. “Walter and I, and our peers,” Patricia writes, “were strongly influenced by the political climate and the infectious spirit for independence that called and moved Guyanese of all generations to action” [4].

In contemporary U.S. society—a society that has been gripped by a deep reactionary counter-revolutionary force in response to the era of Walter Rodney’s generation—critical education tends to be viewed as something that can assist students in developing a critical consciousness. During the era that preceded the current one, when the colonized and oppressed world was in rebellion against colonialism and imperialist capitalism, it was the people, as Patricia Rodney alludes to above, who brought revolutionary commitments to education, not the other way around.

Walter Rodney was therefore one of countless students who took a sense of possibility with him to Queens College in Guyana. While at Queens College, Rodney became president of the historical society and deepened his interest in activism. In 1960, he won an Open Arts scholarship to the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica. Patricia notes that “it was as a student in Jamaica that Walter first felt the disconnect between his life on campus and the grassroots community that surrounded the university” [5]. Rodney then attended the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, earning a doctorate in history in 1966 at the age of 24.

While in London Rodney deepened his political commitments through a deep study of Marxism with a group of Caribbean students who would meet at the home of C. L. R. James on Friday evenings for hours on end.

Becoming a people’s history professor

Rodney accepted his first teaching position at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in 1966, but only stayed a year. However, Rodney would return to Tanzania for five years in 1969. Vijay Prashad says that Tanzania at the time was at the “highpoint” of its “experiment with self-reliance and non-alignment, which was then called ‘African socialism’” [6].

Shortly after beginning teaching in Tanzania, “the radical students from across the region formed the University Students’ African Revolutionary Front” as a response to Tanzania’s president Dr. Julius Nyerere’s Arusha Declaration of 1967, which called for a more direct move to socialism [7]. Nyerere was the leader of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), one of the post-WWII independence movements under British-controlled Tanganyika. Support for TANU grew and by 1960 the first elections were planned for the East African country. On December 9, 1961, Tanganyika became an independent republic and changed its name to Tanzania. In 1969, C. L. R. James concluded that, as a result of these developments, Tanzania stood “as one of the foremost political phenomena of the twentieth century” [8].

James specifically points to Nyerere’s focus on rethinking secondary and higher education as Tanzania’s “most revolutionary change of all…in order to fit the children and youth…for the new society which the government…seeks to build” [9]. Many of the students from across the continent Rodney encountered at the University of Dar es Salaam brought transformative, revolutionary determination, optimism, and organizational capacities with them. As a product himself of this revolutionary era, Rodney was well positioned to not just learn from, but contribute to, the radical student movement.

In 1967, Rodney was offered a position as a history professor in Jamaica at the University of the West Indies (UWI), where his contributions flourished. As a professor in Jamaica, Rodney was “torn by the lack of connection between academia and the working class” and having “a strong desire to bridge these worlds” [10]. It is fitting then that “unlike other professors at UWI, he chose to live with his young family outside the insular university compound housing” [11]. Rodney continued to use his position as a university professor to untether his academic labor (e.g., writing and teaching) from the white power structure of bourgeois state forces to contribute to the liberation struggles of the oppressed. Refusing to put the narrow self-interest of his academic position before the broader interests of the working class, Rodney’s commitment to revolution represents not only a recurring theme throughout his work (including A View from the Third World) but of the broader liberatory atmosphere of the times.

Rodney developed a practice for bridging the gap between academia and the working class called groundings. Groundings are a dialectical process of dialogue and exchange aimed at building the revolutionary movement. Rodney saw his studies, travels, and experiences as contributions to groundings, which he shared informally in working-class public spaces and privately through formal lectures.

Groundings with My Brothers is a collection of lectures developed for their practical relevance. These lectures include tidbits of reflections on practice and pedagogy, but mostly include the content that contributed to the process of groundings. In offering a class analysis of Jamaica and various contributions to the Black Power movement, Rodney situates the Soviet example within this broad framework. His interest in revolutionary Russia was part of this larger project of charting “a new direction for Black Studies and African studies” [12]. As he writes in the second essay in Groundings:

Since 1911, white power has been slowly reduced. The Russian Revolution put an end to Russian imperialism in the Far East, and the Chinese Revolution, by 1949, had emancipated the world’s largest single ethnic group from the white power complex. The rest of Asia, Africa and Latin America (with minor exceptions such as North Korea, North Vietnam and Cuba) have remained within the white power network to this day. We live in a section of the world under white domination—the imperialist world. The Russians are white and have power, but they are not a colonial power oppressing black peoples. The white power which is our enemy is that which is exercised over black peoples, irrespective of which group is in the majority and irrespective of whether the particular country belonged originally to whites or blacks [13].

For Rodney, the Russian Revolution represented the first major victory in the global movement against racist capitalism and imperialism, which he experienced in various forms as a young person in Guyana and as an adult in Tanzania. Since capitalism is essentially a globally interconnected system, all progressive movements in the capitalist era are also related to and connected with others, while unavoidably maintaining their context-specific uniqueness. Beyond the larger historical interconnections of popular uprisings in the capitalist era, Rodney draws parallels between the experiences of poor peasants in tsarist Russia and the formerly enslaved of the Third World. The practical lessons gleaned from these connections, as highlighted below, are the raw materials for his groundings.

The Third World’s perspective

Reflecting on his own position as a professor, Rodney asks if “people like us here at the university” will follow the example of Cuba and join the Soviet and Chinese-led struggle against white power, against capitalism/imperialism? Even though most who have studied at the University of the West Indies are Black, reasons Rodney, “we are undeniably part of the white imperialist system” and “a few are actively pro-imperialist” and therefore “have no confidence in anything that is not white.” Even if the professoriate is not actively and openly anti-Black but still “say nothing against the system…we are acquiescing in the exploitation of our brethren” [14]. This silence, Rodney points out, is secured through an individualistic approach to progress, displacing the long tradition of collective struggle. As a result, “this has recruited us into their ranks and deprived the [B]lack masses of articulate leadership.” Part of the answer to the question, what is to be done is for Rodney, “Black Power in the West Indies” which “aim[s] at transforming the intelligentsia into the servants of the [B]lack masses” [15].

Like his other works, Rodney’s approach in A View from the Third World is an example of what commitments to Black liberation looked like in practice. In the Foreword to Rodney’s first posthumously published book, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905, George Lamming offers some crucial insights into the practical lessons Rodney saw in past movements, relevant to our understanding of his approach in A View from the Third World: “every struggle planted a seed of creative disruption and aided the process that released new social forces” [16].

Groundings and the Russian Revolution

Revolutionary Russia was an important source of hope in Rodney’s groundings. A View from the Third World deepens the practical relevance of his groundings on the subject by offering a thorough rebuttal and exposure of bourgeois propaganda aimed at discrediting the Russian Revolution as authoritarian, anti-democratic, and so on. Rodney also speaks to the practicality of revolution by engaging the questions of organization, assessment, and tactics and by examining, for example, the differences between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Finally, while demonstrating the correctness of the Bolsheviks, Rodney does not shy away from surfacing their mistakes, highlighting the insights their successes and mistakes offer contemporary organizers.

Rodney engages these tasks through the method of historiography. A View from the Third World compares and contrasts bourgeois, Soviet, and independent socialist writings on the Russian revolutionary era with an eye toward underscoring relevant lessons for the liberation struggles of his time and place. For example, in the first chapter, Rodney points to the international context to situate his “dialectical materialist” approach to historiography noting that, “there is every reason to be suspicious of the Western European (and American) view of the Soviet Revolution, and there is every reason to seek an African view” [17]. Rodney argues for the necessity of historical accounts that advance the view of the oppressed, of those systematically underdeveloped by the capitalist-imperialist system from which Russia was the first to make a break. In developing this view, he addresses various accusations that the Russian revolutionary era was anti-democratic or authoritarian.

Rodney describes many of the critiques against the Soviet Union, from multiple political positions, as idealist, deterministic, or stageist, because they do not deal with the concrete, materialist balance of class forces but rather with abstract concepts of the ideal, such as predetermined stages of development. Rodney engages the question of Marx and Engels’ predictions regarding where socialism would first emerge as a point mobilized to discredit either Marx and Engels or to claim the Russian revolution was a departure from Marxism.

Marx and Engels’ predictions of the socialist future—which were far and few in between—were informed by dialectical or historical materialism rather than idealism, since they were based on the information they had available rather than on predetermined, universal stages of development. Rodney writes that “historical or dialectical materialism is a method that can be applied to different situations to give different answers. Marx’s comments on Western Europe were based on a thoroughly comprehensive study of the evidence that he had before him… Hence to say anything about Russia would also require close study of what was going on in Russia” [18].

The practical relevance of Rodney’s groundings work to build a mass movement is readily apparent here: without an assessment of concrete conditions, organizers are left with irrelevant and/or incorrect abstractions and formulas not likely to gain much traction. Driving home the practical implications of this point for organizers, Rodney is instructive:

Marxism is not a finished and complete product contained in a given number of texts… Marxism is a method and a worldview. Neither Marx nor Engels believed their interpretations were unassailable given the limited amount of scientific and accurate data available to them, as well as their own limitations. Furthermore, new situations arising after their time required new analysis. This is where Lenin made his major contributions” [19].

From questions of spontaneity in the February Revolution to the issue of dissolving the Constituent Assembly in the October Revolution, Rodney makes a strong case for supporting the Russian Revolution and its Bolshevik leadership. He refutes the claim that the U.S., for example, was more democratic than the Soviet Union because it had two major parties. The difference, Rodney points out, is that the U.S. had a bourgeois democracy where the major parties represented the interest of the capitalist class, while the Soviet Union had a proletarian democracy whose ruling party was responsible to–and largely emerged from–the working class and peasantry.

Rodney also addresses the major debates within the international socialist movement. For one example, he foregrounds the international significance of the harsh condemnation of the Bolsheviks by the German socialist Karl Kautsky, “who had known both Marx and Engels since his youth, and after their deaths he became their principal literary executor” [20]. Kautsky argued that Marx’s conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat as proletarian democracy was not yet possible in Russia since the proletariat were not the majority. Consequently, Kautsky concluded that the Bolsheviks’ seizure of state power represented an anti-democratic dictatorship that imposed its will on the peasantry. Rodney summarizes Lenin’s response to Kautsky, setting the record straight that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the political domination of the exploited classes over their former exploiting ones.

Groundings against reactionary academia

Rodney exposes the counter-revolutionary role of academia as one of the primary locations producing anti-Soviet propaganda. Explaining the hegemony or dominance of the bourgeois approach to revolutionary Russia and history more generally, he interrogates “the university institutions that are responsible for the vast majority of research and publications in the field” as “an important element in the superstructure.” Elite universities exist to “serve the interests of the capitalist or bourgeois class” [21]. At the individual level, for example, “the conservative historians always expose themselves by their contemptuous attitude toward the working people” [22].

Even more explicitly exposing the role of universities in serving the larger interests of the bourgeoisie, Rodney points to a 1957 publication by R.N. Carew Hunt, who was “widely believed to be a British intelligence agent” parading as a “scholar and authority on the Soviet Union” [23]. Beyond individual professors, Rodney implicates entire university projects such as Stanford University’s Hoover Institution for War and Peace, which “is notorious for its connections with the CIA, the Pentagon and the State Department” [24].

Using himself as an example to deepen the practical relevance of his critique, Rodney rhetorically asks, “what is my position? What is the position of all of us because we fall into the category of the black West Indian intellectual, a privilege in our society? What do we do with that privilege? The traditional pattern is that we join the establishment…How do we break out of this…captivity” [25]. He offers three suggestions for academics: 1) to confront pro-imperialist and racist knowledge production; 2) to challenge the idea that racial harmony defines our “post-racial society” by moving beyond the intellectual division of labor in bourgeois academies; and 3) to connect with the masses of Black working and poor people.

Expanding on these directives, Rodney makes an important pedagogical statement that, in challenging the many myths of white supremacist imperialism in the process of connecting with the masses, “you do not have to teach them anything. You just have to say it, and they will add something to what you are saying” [26]. As a result of engaging the Jamaican working class as subjects with valuable knowledge, “Rodney encountered a Black Power movement in Jamaica that was already well underway” [27]. But it was a two-way street, and what Rodney contributed was “a framework that critically examined the impact of slavery and colonialism and that gave a foundation for interpreting the current situation of Black and oppressed peoples in these newly independent countries, who continued to be marginalized” [28]. In the Introduction to A View from the Third World, Robin Kelley affirms this contention, writing that “the way Rodney engaged society as a university lecturer was considered ‘strange’ and even dangerous that it was interpreted as a challenge to the establishment” [29]. Outlining what this pedagogy, this practice, looked like in motion, in action, Rodney elaborates:

“I lectured at the university, outside of the classroom that is. I had public lectures, I talked about Black Power, and then I left there, I went from the campus. I was prepared to go anywhere that any group of [B]lack people were prepared to sit down to talk and listen. Because that is Black Power, that is one of the elements, a sitting-down together to reason, to ‘ground’ as the brothers say. We have to ‘ground together.’…[T]his…must have puzzled the Jamaican government. I must be mad, surely; a man we are giving a job, we are giving status, what is he doing with these guys, [people they call] ‘criminals and hooligans’[?]…I was trying to contribute something. I was trying to contribute my experience in  , in reading, my analysis; and I was also gaining, as I will indicate” [29].

Rodney’s groundings emerged from this powerful combination of research and teaching with his eagerness to learn from, and be taught by, those looked down on by mainstream academia. Committed to the revolutionary fervor of the times, the resulting perception and treatment of Rodney as a threat to the establishment was not an effective deterrent. Rodney’s remarkable and unyielding achievements are among the fruits of the post-WWII revolutionary crisis. As the crisis of capitalism and of the white power structure deepens, so too does the influence of Rodney’s life and legacy.

Conclusion

By the age of 38, Rodney had become part of the same “tradition of intellectual leadership among Africans and people of African descent in the Americas” that includes “Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois, George Padmore and C. L. R. James” [30]. It is important to note that for Rodney, scholarship was not simply an academic exercise but one central to making the academy relevant to the liberation of the oppressed. Jamaican professor Verene A. Shepherd argues that it is Rodney’s pedagogy that is the model for the activist academic, a model that remains relevant because activists in academia are still rare and still desperately needed [31].

A recurring theme throughout not only A View from the Third World, but throughout all of Rodney’s work, is  Marx and Engels’ caution against “applying the dialectic mechanically” because the specific historical development of the balance of competing class interests does not proceed in predetermined, inevitable ways, and that what people do matters [32].

The Liberation School study guide for A View from the Third World will help today’s organizers and activists do just that.

References

[1] Karim F. Hirji, The Enduring Relevance of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (New York: Daraja Press, 2017), xi.
[2] For a more in-depth analysis of Rodney’s pedagogy see Jesse Benjamin and Devyn Springer, “Groundings: A Revolutionary Pan-African Pedagogy for Guerilla Intellectuals,” in Keywords in Radical Philosophy and Education: Common Concepts for Contemporary Movements, ed. D. Ford, (Boston: Brill, 2019), 210-225. For more on Rodney’s life, legacy, and pedagogy, see Devyn Springer and Derek Ford, “Walter Rodney’s Revolutionary Praxis: An Interview with Devyn Springer,” Liberation School, 12 August 2021. Available here.
[3] Patricia Rodney, “Living the Groundings–A Personal Context,” in W. Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, ed. A.T Rodney and J. Benjamin (New York: Verso, 2019), 77-85, 77.
[4] Ibid., 77-78.
[5] Ibid., 78.
[6] Vijay Prashad, “Foreword,” in W. Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World (New York: Verso, 2018), vii-xiii, viii.
[7] Ibid., viii.
[8] C.L.R. James, A History of Pan-African Revolt (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), 118.
[9] Ibid., 128.
[10] Rodney, “Living the Groundings,” 80.
[11] Robin D. G. Kelley, “Introduction,” in W. Rodney, The Russian Revolution, xix-lxxiii, xxviii.
[12] Carole Boyce Davies, “Introduction: Re-grounding the Intellectual-Activist Model of Walter Rodney,” in W. Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, xi-xxii, xvi.
[13] Walter Rodney, Groundings with My Brothers (New York: Verso, 1969/2019), 11.
[14] Ibid., 28.
[15] Ibid., 29.
[16] George Lamming, “Foreword,” in Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 (Kingston, Jamaica: Heinemann, 1981), xvii-xxv, xix.
[17] Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World, (New York: Verso, 2018), 3.
[18] Ibid., 50.
[19] Ibid., 150.
[20] Ibid., 105.
[21] Ibid., 12.
[22] Ibid., 15.
[23] Ibid., 14.
[24] Ibid., 18. For a different example of the same line of inquiry, see Gabriel Rockhill, “The CIA & the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism,” Monthly Review, 27 June 2022. Available here.
[25] Rodney, Groundings with My Brothers, 66.
[26] Ibid., 67.
[27] Kelley, “Introduction,” xxviii.
[28] Ibid., xxviii.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Lamming, “Foreword,” Rodney, xvii.
[31] Verene A. Shepherd, “The Continued Relevance of Rodney’s Groundings,” In W. Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, 101-108.
[32] Rodney, A View from the Third World, 170.

Is the Iran Nuclear Agreement Dead?

By Mazda Majidi

Republished from Liberation News.

On Aug. 6, Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian called on the United States to have a “realistic response” to Iran’s proposals in the ongoing negotiations on the JCPOA, or Iran nuclear agreement. Meanwhile, the Europeans, who are acting as intermediaries in the U.S.-Iran negotiations said in a statement: “The text is on the table. There will be no re-opening of negotiations. Iran must now decide to conclude the deal while this is still possible.”

If we follow U.S. media coverage, it is easy to adopt the false narrative that the ongoing negotiations are at a standstill because the new “hardline” administration of Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi is not really negotiating in good faith. The Europeans, supposedly the impartial deal brokers, have done much to bolster this narrative, obfuscating the obvious reason why the deal needs to be renegotiated to begin with. 

Russian and Chinese officials, the other signatories to the agreement, have made realistic statements throughout, pointing to the fact that the United States broke the agreement and the onus is on the U.S. to make amends for it. But, as portrayed in the U.S. media, Russia and China are pariah states whose words are unreliable, while the friendly European junior imperialists are to be trusted.

And then, there is the U.S. sponsored settler state in the Middle East, Israel, a nuclear-powered state whose every statement of concern about Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons is taken as legitimate.

What is the JCPOA?

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is an agreement signed on July 14, 2015, under the Obama administration. The signatories are Iran, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — Germany and the European Union.

According to the JCPOA, the United States and others recognized Iran’s right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. This is a right guaranteed by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but one that imperialist powers had effectively refused to recognize up until then. Iran would implement the “Additional Protocol,” giving the International Atomic Energy Agency more powers to monitor its nuclear facilities. 

Additionally, Iran would reduce two-thirds of its uranium enrichment activity and ship out all of its enriched uranium above 300 kg abroad. The Fordow facility, built inside a hollowed-out mountain and virtually impenetrable by aerial bombardment, would remain operational, but only as a research center. The heavy water plant at Arak would continue operating, but redesigned to make it impossible to produce weapons-grade plutonium, if that were the intent.

Once the IAEA confirmed that these steps were taken, the United States would lift all nuclear-related economic sanctions, including oil embargos and financial restrictions.

The JCPOA worked for the remainder of President Obama’s administration. By all accounts, Iran complied with the agreement throughout. But, in October 2017, the administration of President Donald Trump unilaterally and illegally pulled out of the JCPOA and re-imposed sanctions on Iran in direct violation of the agreement.

How did Biden approach the JCPOA once elected?

Following the 2020 U.S. elections, many were hoping that President Joe Biden would quickly undo the Trump violation of the JCPOA, have the United States live up to its commitments and remove the sanctions on Iran as required by the agreement. It didn’t take long, however, until it became clear that the Biden administration was going to play hard ball.

First, Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanded that Iran return to compliance before the United States would. This was a ridiculous demand on its face as it was incontestable that it was the Trump administration that had violated the agreement, not Iran. In fact, even after Trump’s violation of the agreement, Iran had remained in compliance for about a year in a show of good faith.

In subsequent months, the United States raised the issue of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Iran has made scientific advances, making its missiles capable of reaching Israel. To the U.S. and Israel, this is unacceptable.

It is certainly fine for Israel to own nuclear bombs and missiles capable of delivering them to Iran any time. It is also perfectly acceptable for Israeli officials to threaten Iran day and night. But for Iran to have any means of defending itself, or showing that it can strike back, is unacceptable in imperialist circles.

In the next stage of the negotiations, the United States and Europe have continuously raised the objection that Iran is raising demands that are outside of the JCPOA, specifically Iran’s demand that the United States drop Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. If the United States dropped its demands that were outside of the JCPOA framework, the line goes, Iran should drop the demand of the United States dropping the IRGC from the terrorist list.

In an April 24 call with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Biden conveyed that the U.S. decision to maintain the IRGC on the terrorist list is final and that the U.S. would make no more concessions to Iran.

But this goes to the very heart of the JCPOA. Removal of sanctions was Iran’s sole incentive for entering the agreement. The designation of the IRGC as a terrorist organization enables the United States to impose widespread economic sanctions on Iran, irrespective of the JCPOA. In fact, on March 20, 2017, the Trump administration formally certified that Iran was in compliance with JCPOA, but added that the country will be subject to non-nuclear, terrorism-related sanctions. The Trump administration refused to recertify Iran’s compliance in October 2017, however, citing multiple violations.

Economic importance of Revolutionary Guards

The IRGC is a major wing of Iran’s military. Much like the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, but on a much larger scale, the IRGC is involved in construction projects all around the country. In fact, as sanctions have driven out foreign investments and put a damper on domestic investments, the economic prominence of the IRGC has increased.

Without the removal of the IRGC from the U.S. terrorist list, Iran will effectively have to return to compliance, agreeing to restrictions on its nuclear program that other countries do not, while getting nothing in return. Pointing to the role of the IRGC in various economic projects, there will be no meaningful relief of sanctions.

Which side is hardline?

What the United States is presenting to Iran is this: Return to compliance with the JCPOA, allow unannounced inspections of your nuclear facilities to take place on demand, allow cameras to monitor some of your military sites 24/7, ship your enriched uranium out of the country, shut down the Fordo uranium enrichment facility — the only one that is impenetrable to a U.S./Israeli bombing. In return, the United States will see what it can do about removing sanctions on entities that it does not perceive as being in any way related to the IRGC. And, by the way, if a Republican administration gets elected in 2024, we are going to pull out of the JCPOA again.

With these being the effective terms of the negotiations to revive the JCPOA, it speaks to the highly biased coverage of the corporate media that the dominant narrative is that Iran’s new hardline administration does not want an agreement.

The task of socialists and other antiwar activists in the United States is to expose our government’s criminal foreign policy, whether it comes in the form of invasions, occupations and other military interventions, sanctions, coups, or funding right-wing opposition forces in targeted countries.

The U.S. imperialist ruling class is not there to benefit the working class, but to benefit its sponsors, big capital. The enemies of the Pentagon and the State Department are not the real enemies of the American people. The danger of future war and annihilation does not come from Iran, which has no nuclear weapons and a small fraction of the military might of the terrifying U.S. military. It is the U.S. government that is the primary danger to peace among the people on earth and to life on the planet itself.