The Question of Hierarchy: An Interview with Colin Jenkins

By Brenan Daniels

This is a recent email interview I did with Hampton Institute founder and Social Economics Dept. Chair, Colin Jenkins, on the nature and problems with hierarchical structures, which he discusses in his article entitled Deconstructing Workplace Hierarchies: On Contrived Leadership and Arbitrary Positions of Power .

Some people would argue that hierarchies are needed as people aren't really capable of leading themselves or that if they did, we wouldn't have a stable modern society. What is your response to that?

First, I would ask where this "stable modern society" is? For a majority of the world's population, life is incredibly unstable. For many, life is dire. Even in a so-called "advanced" society like the US, tens of millions of people suffer from homelessness, food insecurity, joblessness, a lack of reliable and affordable healthcare, and with no means to feed and clothe their children. Tens of millions must rely on government assistance. Tens of millions do not receive adequate education. Tens of millions live paycheck-to-paycheck and can't pay their bills. And millions are terrorized by police forces and government agents in their own neighborhoods. Most Americans have less than $1,000 in savings , if any, and studies have estimated that more than half of all working Americans are one paycheck away from being homeless . And even those who appear to be getting by just fine are actually buried in debt, with credit card debt averaging $16,000 per household , mortgage and car payments that are barely doable, and student loan debt averaging at $49,000 per borrower, many of whom are in no position to ever pay that back. Our collective existence, despite a general appearance of comfort, is extremely fragile. And this economic reality doesn't even begin to touch on the compounded social realities lived by historically marginalized sections of the working class - people of color, women, immigrants, etc… The US is a ticking time bomb on the verge of exploding at any moment. Stability is a mirage.

Second, the idea that "people aren't capable of leading themselves" stems from a need to maintain fundamentally unequal societies where a very small percentage of the population controls most of the wealth and power. This has become part of the dominant ideology of most of the modern world. Because, quite simply, when a very small percentage of a particular population controls everything, there must be various ways to justify and enforce this control.

One way is through brute force or the threat of such force, which the modern nation-state holds a monopoly on. This is accomplished through the mere construction of a criminal justice system that has laws and ways of enforcing those laws. Over time, these laws become equated with some vague form of morality that is not questioned by most. You see the effects of this everywhere. For instance, when people try to condemn political struggles for doing things that are "illegal," they have subconsciously bought into the idea that written laws which have been drawn up by millionaire politicians , who are directly influenced by billionaires, should be revered as some sort of moral code. In reality, many of these laws are constructed to keep our extremely unequal society intact, and are directly tied to protecting those who own this illegitimate wealth and power . They are designed to keep most of us powerless and stuck in our increasingly precarious lives. Under such a society, a person who does not have access to food for themselves or their family is punished for taking food. A person who is homeless is punished for squatting in an abandoned building. A person who does not have medical care is punished (financially, if not criminally) for seeking medical attention. So on and so on… and all of this takes place in a very strict hierarchical arrangement where the appearance of "stability" remains at the forefront. It's an inherently unjust arrangement for so many, and the threat of force is constantly held over our heads to maintain this façade of stability.

Another way to justify and enforce this control is through what Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci referred to as "cultural hegemony," or dominant culture. Ruling classes throughout history have relied on both formal and informal channels to mold a dominant culture (ideology) that supports their rule. This can be established through a formal education system, through media sources, through organized religion and churches, etc… Under capitalism, this doesn't have to be done in a conspiratorial kind of way because the basic inequities stemming from the economic system create a sociopolitical structure that mimics and protects these inequities through social, cultural, political, and "legal" avenues. One of the results of this is a widespread, conditioned belief that we are not capable of caring for ourselves, our families, and our communities; and thus need so-called "extraordinary" people (politicians) to do this for us. It is a lie.

In a social sense, why do you think that social hierarchies and larger societal norms still reign when we don't seem to need them anymore? (Social norms were important in the early days of humanity as if one wasn't part of the group, they often wouldn't survive, but now it is rather easy to flourish alone or find people who you link with.)

Social hierarchies still exist because they are a natural extension from the more tangible/structural economic hierarchy. The dominant culture in this type of society needs such social norms. The Marxist theory of base and superstructure is useful in this regard. A materialist conception of history tells us that society is constructed on an economic base, or is based on the modes of production, because it is this fundamental arrangement that ultimately determines how people fulfill their basic needs. Everything else builds off of that arrangement. In a capitalist system, a large majority of the population is forced to rely on wage labor. This is an incredibly fragile and unstable existence because we are completely dependant on a privileged minority to provide us with jobs and living wages, things that capitalism inherently cannot provide to all. So, most of us are set up for failure from birth. This is why Frederick Douglass recognized that a "slavery of wages [is] only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery." Hence, Marx's focus on exploitation and alienation. This structural oppression created by capitalism explains the need for a Welfare State, because societal unrest would be inevitable without the state supplementing these inherent and widespread inequities.

So, according to this analysis, there is a superstructure that builds from this unequal base, and this includes social, cultural, and political realities. Naturally, the superstructure mimics the base, while it also helps to maintain it. In doing so, these corollary developments tend to take on the same characteristics as the base, which, as already noted, consists of a high degree of alienation and exploitation. This basically means that social systems stemming from an inherently exploitative base tend to become exploitative themselves. One of the best examples of this is white supremacy, which is an artificial system of valuing human worth based on skin color. White supremacy is a modern cultural phenomenon that extends throughout the superstructure in both overt and undetected or insidious ways. And it is a valuable tool used by the capitalist/ruling class to create division within the working-class majority. This is why Malcolm X once proclaimed that "you can't have capitalism without racism."

Other cultural phenomena like patriarchy and homophobia work the same way. These things easily catch on within the working class because they are a source of empowerment for an otherwise powerless group. We're all economically disenfranchised, but poor and working-class white men can still grasp on to whiteness, "manliness," misogyny, and homophobia as sources of power and social dominance. You see this psyche develop not only in white people, but also throughout the working class. Some black men, despite their own intense structural oppression, will become misogynistic or homophobic as a source of empowerment. A particular immigrant community will dehumanize another immigrant community as a source of empowerment. American workers across the board will target and dehumanize immigrants. So on and so on. What we're seeing here is the formation of social hierarchies within the working class, all of which mimic the hierarchy created by the economic base. Tragically, this perceived power over others within the working class is easily accessible, and it's a cheap and toxic source of empowerment. But it is a good thing for the capitalist class, as it keeps working-class angst directed within its own ranks and away from the real culprits - the rich. It's the ultimate distraction.

On a related note, these social hierarchies are worthy of examination to all of us who oppose the capitalist system. When we look at developments within the superstructure, we can strategize and build liberation movements that will ultimately break them down, which will in turn allow us to build a formidable resistance against the economic base. This is why intersectionality is crucial. But intersectionality only works if it is based in a fundamentally anti-capitalist orientation. Because if we don't approach this with the ultimate goal of attacking and destroying the economic base, it won't matter in the end. We'll find ourselves in the same position, only under a multi-cultural, multi-sex, non-gender-descript boot, as opposed to a "white, cisgender, male" boot. And this is the pitfall that identity politics fall into. Capitalism has the ability to accommodate these types of political movements by simply allowing individuals from hyper-marginalized sections of the working class to assume positions of power within these hierarchies. This approach is only about assimilation; and because of this, it only demands that that the power structure become more inclusive, not that the power structure be eliminated. Capitalism can and will seek to appease this kind of tokenism without changing its inherently authoritative and exploitative structure.

People seem to be (at least somewhat) against hierarchy, from having an intense dislike of their bosses to wanting a level playing field. Why do we not see more people moving away or speaking out against hierarchy? So many times, it seems that the very people at the bottom are the ones who argue in favor of it.

Yes, definitely. This is a form of cognitive dissonance that we all experience from time to time, and I reflect on it briefly in the piece: "…organizations are often able to stoke a cognitive dissonance among its workforce, which simultaneously puts forth a healthy dose of faith in the 'team approach' by day while complaining about the incompetent and overbearing bosses by night."

This particular line refers to the contradictions we feel in the workplace. The daytime mentality is one that is a product of constant conditioning, which tells us that hierarchies are needed, that we are naturally dependent on bosses, and that we would be lost without them. The nighttime mentality is more natural and will creep into our heads at times, causing us to question everything we're conditioned to believe during the day. Daily interactions with bosses plant the seed for these realizations, as we recognize their incompetence or at the very least their lack of exceptionalism. This will inevitably bring us to consider that maybe we don't need them, maybe we are just as (if not more) competent, that there really is no meritocracy, and that if they happened to suddenly disappear one day they probably wouldn't be missed.

This is, of course, true. We don't need them. But the conditioning that we are subjected to in most aspects of our lives tells us otherwise, and this makes it difficult for many to realize that truth. To consider the very notion of "supervision" and "management" as anything but insulting is truly amazing, when you think about it, yet most struggle with this dissonance. And understandably so, since the conditioning is intense and begins at such a young age. This reminds me of the notion of " bullshit jobs " that David Graeber has talked about in length, and is in the process of writing a book about. His angle is more focused on working-class jobs throughout the system, but I think this same line of thinking can be applied to jobs that fill the hierarchy just for the sake of filling the hierarchy.

In addition to this conditioning, there is also a mentality that becomes fairly prevalent among those who exist on the lower end of the hierarchy, and it speaks to the old adage, "if you can't beat em, join em." It is the mentality that creates the toadies for bullies, that creates house slaves for the master, etc… it forms whenever someone has been psychologically beaten into submission. These are the folks who have given themselves completely to the system, to the powers, to their bosses and overseers because, quite frankly, they simply have no fight in them, no self-esteem, and no dignity left. They are the first to dish the dirt to the bosses, the first to scab during a strike, the first to call the police on their neighbor, the first to serve the powerful with whatever is needed, and always at the sake of their class peers on the lower end of the hierarchy. These folks will always argue in favor of hierarchy, despite their lowly position in it, because they've decided that it's easier to accept it, support it, and invest in it, rather than fight it. And, in many respects, they're right. Fighting power isn't easy. It often has disastrous personal consequences for those who partake in it. As the Russian anarchist Sergey Nechayez wrote in the opening of his famous Catechism of a Revolutionary, "The revolutionary is a doomed man." There is a lot of truth to this.

How do people reinforce hierarchy in their everyday lives and how can they fight back against it?

I think basic daily human interactions reinforce these cultural hierarchies that the base relies on. There is an ongoing debate within the Left about the power and usefulness of language. This debate is intimately connected with things like "privilege discourse," "political correctness," "call-out culture," and identity politics. Many leftists who are loyal to materialist analysis, and who spend a lot of time railing against post-new left discourse, minimize the importance of language. Many younger leftists, who are more inclined to intersectionality or who enter the Left through a lens of identity politics, place a premium on policing language. While I realize the dangers that are associated with this type of " post-new left discourse " (primarily when it is not based in anti-capitalism), I also agree that there is something to language and how it reinforces the hierarchies that we are ultimately seeking to bring down.

Dominant vernacular is rooted in dominant culture, no? If we are to believe in historical materialism and the reciprocal relationship between the base and superstructure, then it seems consistent to also believe that all of the societal norms that development within this cultural hegemony stem from this same base. Because of this, language tends to be misogynistic, homophobic, white supremacist, and classist. This is reflected in media, Hollywood, advertisement, talk radio, and sports, and as well as in our daily interactions with one another.

It can be very subtle. Using the n-word reinforces white supremacy. Using the f-word reinforces homophobia. Claiming that someone has "no class" reinforces bourgeois culture. Using the term "white trash" reinforces white supremacy by implying that "trash" is defaulted as being non-white. Calling women "hoes" and "whores," while at the same time basing their human value in attractiveness or sexuality, reinforces patriarchy. Praising someone as being "like a boss" reinforces capitalist hierarchy. Worshipping celebrities reinforces a capitalist culture that determines human value based in wealth, or the lack thereof. Being absorbed in consumerism reinforces a culture that determines human value on the brand of clothing or shoes one is wearing, or the kind of car they drive, or the house they live in. These types of things quite literally place varying degrees of value on human lives, thus reinforcing various forms of social hierarchy. And something as simple as language, or the ways in which we interact with one another, emboldens the power structure(s) that we as leftists seek to destroy.

In what ways do you see hierarchy expanding or intensifying now that the US has moved to a 'service economy,' apparently in which there will be an increase in hierarchical authority, compared to when the US was a manufacturing nation? How has the dismantling of unions aided (as of current) or helped to dissuade (in the past) workplace hierarchy?

I am not sure the service economy will necessarily expand or intensify hierarchical arrangements in any structural sense. But you're right in suggesting that a move away from an industrial/manufacturing economy has made workers more vulnerable and powerless within these hierarchies. Service-sector work is much more precarious, is typically low-wage with very few benefits, and often does not include any kind of healthcare coverage or retirement plan. And the service-sector environment leaves workers on a virtual island, in that it doesn't offer the same potential for collectivization as the traditional shop floor once did. Without collectivization, workers are basically powerless.

The dismantling of unions went hand in hand with the offshoring of manufacturing jobs. Since the neoliberal revolution that was ushered in by Reagan, the share of workers who belong to unions in the private sector has fallen from 34 percent to 7 percent. I believe 1 in 3 public sector workers are still in unions. Overall though, union membership has plummeted in the US, which is a very bad thing for the working class. Under capitalism, our only leverage against capital is either (1) the government, or (2) labor unions. The government is now owned by capital, and thus acts solely in its interest. So that's effectively out of the equation. And unions have not only eroded, but many that have endured have taken on a corporate hierarchical structure themselves, where union executives are often completely out of touch with membership. Union leaders tend to be in bed with corporate politicians, an arrangement that is contradictory to the purpose of unions.

We see this contradictory nature when unions routinely endorse corporate Democrats who represent capital. We see it when unions agree to no-strike clauses. We see it when so-called leadership gives concession after concession, year after year, until there's virtually nothing left to bargain for. And we see it in this bureaucratic, corporatized union culture of today, where demands have been replaced by requests. Unions will often take reactionary stands that defy international and universal solidarity. We saw this recently with the AFL-CIO endorsing the Dakota Access Pipeline. You see it with police unions or prison employee unions, all of which side with capital and the social hierarchies that extend from capital, ultimately oppressing large sectors of the working class.

With the erosion of authentic labor unions, we've become much more vulnerable to these extreme hierarchies as a whole. And without these types of unions, workers simply have no chance against the powerful interests of capital. So, yes, the degrees to which we are smothered by these hierarchies will only intensify in this environment, especially if we continue to place our hopes in the government, politicians, and corporatized labor unions. This is exactly why I'm a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, which is "one big union" that is rooted in revolutionary industrial unionism.

How does your argument regarding hierarchy creating a lack of trust square with this modern idea that work places need to be 'open areas' so that people can 'bond?'

That's a good question. We read a lot about this new-age sort of workplace organization stemming from Silicon Valley, Google, Apple, etc… This idea that workplaces should be more carefree, less constrained. I've read about such experiments where workers can take naps, bring their pets to work, have access to fun activities directly in the workplace. And when you look at workplace organization in some European countries, you see that many companies have attempted to do away with traditional hierarchical structures to make workers feel more "at home" in a relaxed environment.

The fact that companies are experimenting with these 'open areas' confirms, at the very least, that they are aware of the archaic and inhumane nature of traditional hierarchical workplaces. This move also reflects some studies that have been done regarding productivity, which have suggested that workers are more productive in environments that are less constrictive, and that workers typically are only productive for a few hours a day. So, if anything, it's an attempt by companies to adjust with the times and do away with old forms of organization.

Unfortunately, attempts like these only tend to create more internal contradictions to capitalism. Attempting to mask the inherent nature of capitalism only goes so far. And the "open-office model" that Google became known for is not really an effort to make hierarchical structures more horizontal. It is concerned only with literal workspace, not with the ways in which the hierarchy operates on a structural level. And while it may appear to be benevolent on the surface, it often has more insidious motives. A 2014 article by Lindsey Kaufman touched on some of these issues, pointing out that "these new floor plans are ideal for maximizing a company's space while minimizing costs," and that "bosses love the ability to keep a closer eye on employees," with less physical barriers obstructing them. Studies cited in the article suggested that these open-office experiments were not beneficial to workers, at least from the workers' point of view. A study found that many workers are "frustrated by distractions" and lack of privacy, both sound and visual. And workers reported that these new floor plans did not ease interactions with colleagues, as intended, because this was never viewed as a problem to begin with.

With these results in mind, it seems such attempts have been a failure. And it makes you wonder why they were attempted in the first place. Was it really to create a "friendlier" atmosphere, or was it rooted in something more sinister? Understanding the way capitalism operates, it's safe to assume the latter. Either way, despite the motivations, the capitalist structure still remains - which means that most workers are creating massive amounts of wealth for executives and shareholders in exchange for wages and salaries that do not equal their contribution. If they make enough to lead comfortable lives, they may be more willing to overlook this structural exploitation. But it still exists. Bosses still remain, and workers are still treated as commodities, no matter how glossed over the physical workplace appears. There are still those who make more, in many cases a whole lot more, for doing much less (the pursuit of "money and idleness" that I referenced in the piece). And some who rake in large amounts of money for doing absolutely nothing, and without even stepping foot in the workplace. That is the fundamental nature of both capitalism and hierarchies. No amount of makeup can change this.

What is your take on the literature and ideas surrounding employee relationship management? What do you think is the actual idea around it on a structural level?

This type of literature is designed to address the inequities by essentially covering them up as best as possible. Their purpose is two-fold: to teach bosses how to get the most from their workers; and to get workers to buy into a "team approach" that convinces them they're vested in the mission in some way. This is accomplished basically through propaganda, or a conscious effort to downplay the coercive nature of this relationship. On the one end it provides bosses, supervisors, and managers with tools and tactics rooted in persuasion, to get workers to think, behave, and perceive themselves in a way that is detached as far from reality as possible. Since human beings don't typically react well to being treated and used as tools, to be manipulated, prodded, directed, etc, employers find its useful to mask this reality as best as possible.

So this type of literature is designed to give bosses ways to obstruct this reality. To interact with their workers in ways that mask the coercive power they wield over them. And they tend to be very successful in doing this… so much so that many workers truly believe they are vested in the businesses they work for, or at the very least will rep that business in a positive way to friends and family, if only to mask their shitty realities to themselves. A shitty reality that basically amounts to us spending most of our waking hours in a place we do not want to be in, doing something we would rather not be doing, so we can get a paycheck every few weeks, so we can pay our bills, so we can scrape out a living for another few weeks. For most of us, it's a never-ending cycle that we'll never escape. It's a miserable, inhumane existence where life is lived a week at a time, or two weeks at a time, essentially from one paycheck to the next. And the best we can hope for is to stay afloat until the next paycheck, so we can start over again. And to add insult to injury, we're told that we "should feel lucky to even have a job." That's the world capitalism brings us.

So this workplace literature, and the management tactics that come from it, plays into the cognitive dissonance that I mentioned earlier. On a structural level, the idea is merely to keep things churning by creating alternative realities that workers can be proud of. To use the plantation analogy, it really is a way to instill the house-slave mentality in each and every one of us. It won't work for some, but it works well enough for most. Even those struck with this cognitive dissonance will often lean toward that which makes them feel vested, secure, proud, respected, appreciated, etc… even though these feeling are not consistent with reality. It is a form of coping for many, and corporate literature will certainly exploit that and drill it home. And we as workers, stuck in our miserable realities, will often accept it if it helps us cope. Because we need that paycheck.

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss: Bracing for Trump's Anti-Worker Corporate Agenda

By Colin Jenkins

This was originally published by Social Justice: a journal of crime, conflict, and world order as part of a series titled, The Possible Futures of the US Under Trump .

Rich people don't have to have a life-and-death relationship with the truth and its questions; they can ignore the truth and still thrive materially. I am not surprised many of them understand literature only as an ornament. Life is an ornament to them, relationships are ornaments, their 'work' is but a flimsy, pretty ornament meant to momentarily thrill and capture attention.

-Sergio Troncoso

In a February speech on his campaign trail, then-candidate Donald Trump lambasted his opponents for their cozy relationships with Wall Street bankers. "I know the guys at Goldman Sachs. They have total, total control over [Cruz]," Trump said. "Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton." Trump's campaigns for both the Republican candidacy and the US Presidency were heavily themed on this inside-out approach to posing as a whistleblower of the elite, a billionaire businessman gone rogue, eager to feed other members of his exclusive club to the lions. Americans by the tens of millions-ravaged by decades of predatory loan schemes, joblessness, and unfathomable debt-gathered in the den, fevered by this angst-ridden anti-establishment message, thirsting for the flesh he was to heave from the castle on the hill.

Nine months later, Trump was elected to the office of President of the United States. Taking a page from George W. Bush, Trump successfully packaged his billionaire, elitist self into an average dude sitting on the bar stool across from us. Taking a page from Ronald Reagan, Trump successfully molded the chronic economic woes of the American working class into avenues for racial and xenophobic hatred. Trump's infamous wall is the modern-day version of Reagan's mythological "welfare queen"-both masterful mind tricks designed to avert the attention of the understandably ravenous working-class lions away from the ringmasters and toward others in the den. The oldest trick in the book: divide and conquer. The end result: a billionaire businessman buoyed to the highest office of the land by 63 million working-class voters during a time of unprecedented poverty and wealth inequality.

Predictably, Trump's ascension to the presidency has ended his inside-out shtick. Much like Barack Obama in 2008, Trump's anti-establishment marketing assault has culminated into an uber-establishment cabinet. Within six weeks of his election victory, Trump has proceeded to form what some have referred to as the General Billionaires Administration . As of December 7th, Trump's prospective cabinet topped a combined personal wealth of $14 billion , "more than 30 times greater than that of even President George W. Bush's White House." And that represents only half of the total appointees to come. Instead of "draining the swamp" as he promised to do on the campaign trail, Trump has called on his real-estate instincts to expand the swamp into a gargantuan monstrosity of a cesspool. For working-class Americans, this means the President and those surrounding him are even more out of touch with the common struggle than ever before.

Although personal wealth does not necessarily imply the embracing of a blatant anti-worker ideology, it almost always sets this tone through efforts to legitimize said wealth, promote false meritocracies, and push unrealistic narratives rooted in "personal responsibility" and "pulling up boot straps," all of which ignore the material realities of working-class people. Taken on their words and actions, there is no reason to believe that Trump and his cabinet will be anything but disastrous for working-class Americans.

Betsy DeVos, Trump's pick for Education Secretary, wants to privatize education and treat it as an industry among others in a competitive capitalist market. "Let's not kid ourselves that [public education] is not an industry," she told a crowd in Texas , "we must open it up to entrepreneurs and innovators." In other words, run it as a for-profit venture, which inevitably means lowering pay, benefits, and standards for employees (teachers) in order to maximize the bottom line. Not good for working-class Americans who teach for a living, and not good for working-class children whose educations will take a back seat to profit margins.

Andrew Puzder, Trump's pick for Labor Secretary, has proven to be fiercely anti-worker in his role as CEO of CKE Restaurants. NY's Attorney General Eric Schneiderman referred to this appointment as a " cruel and baffling decision by Trump " due to Puzder's presiding over a fast-food chain "that repeatedly stole workers' hard-earned wages." As an employee at one of Puzder's restaurants, Rogelio Hernandez called Puzder " one of the worst fast food CEOs ," adding that his appointment "sends a signal to workers that the Trump years are going to be about low pay, wage theft, sexual harassment and racial discrimination." Not good for tens of millions of working-class Americans who are desperate for living-wage employment.

Ben Carson, Trump's pick to run Housing and Urban Development, has been consistently opposed to government assistance programs like the one he is about to oversee. Rather than viewing such programs as necessities in a capitalist system that leaves many people without the means to fulfill basic needs, Carson sees them as "socialist experiments" that "attempt to infiltrate every part of our lives." Carson even said that trusting the government "to use housing policy to enhance the opportunities available to lower-income citizens" can be "downright dangerous." Ironically, he is now entrusted to do just that. Not good for the millions of working-class Americans who rely on public housing programs to shelter themselves and their families.

While most of Trump's own plans have been hidden in vague political rhetoric ("Making America Great Again," "create a dynamic booming economy" with "pro-growth tax plans" and "new modern regulatory frameworks"), they are mostly taken from the same neoliberal agenda that has shaped American policy for the past three decades, merely repackaged with Trump-speak. If his own business dealings are any indication of how he feels about working people, the Trump presidential agenda will most certainly be anti-worker. Workers have filed numerous lawsuits against Trump over the years, alleging everything from anti-union intimidation to paying below-minimum wages. " In one case , the Trump Organization paid $475,000 to settle a claim with nearly 300 Los Angeles golf club employees in a class-action suit alleging unpaid wages and age discrimination, among other offenses." In another case, the Trump Organization "settled for an unknown sum" regarding the employment of undocumented Polish immigrants who "were paid $5 an hour or less when they were paid at all," and "worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week with no overtime." Earlier this year, workers at Trump's Las Vegas hotel filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging they were "interfered with, restrained, and coerced" in an effort to avoid unionization. Dozens of similar complaints against Trump businesses have come to light over the years, including alarming trends of misogyny against women employees.

Like most marketing slogans, "Make America Great Again" has no real meaning in regards to concrete plans. Its call on some glorious past allows for an embrace of generic change, and its purposeful vagueness speaks to whatever is important to each individual who embraces it, essentially allowing for a wide range of beauties in the eyes of a wide range of beholders. Trump's "pro-growth tax plan" draws on the same neoliberal ideology that was implemented by Reagan and survived by every administration since, proclaiming that lowering corporate tax rates will incentivize American companies to stay in the US, which will create more jobs, and will inevitably allow the increased corporate wealth to trickle down to the rest of us. The only problem is that never happened. Ironically, the implementation of such policies actually paralleled the mass exodus of American companies, partly due to free trade agreements like NAFTA and partly due to the globalization of the capitalist system, which allowed for the formation of an international labor pool to replace the industrialized, unionized labor pools that once existed in countries like the US.

Between 1986 and 1988, Reagan lowered the corporate tax rate from 46% to 34%. To put this move in perspective, this rate had stayed between 46% and 52.8% since 1951. The Reagan rate has barely moved since, despite 16 years of Democratic administrations. And it has done nothing to keep American companies home; rather, it actually complemented massive outsourcing of American jobs. In fact, " manufacturing employment collapsed from a high of 19.5 million workers in June 1979 to 11.5 workers in December 2009, a drop of 8 million workers over 30 years. Between August 2000 and February 2004, manufacturing jobs were lost for a stunning 43 consecutive months-the longest such stretch since the Great Depression." This trend has continued as the US lost 5 million manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2016. According to the Center for American Progress, "US multinational corporations, the big brand-name companies that employ a fifth of all American workers… cut their work forces in the US by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million." All of this despite historically low corporate tax rates. Trump's solution: double down by cutting corporate tax rates even more.

Remaining consistent with the neoliberal agenda, Trump has also promised to "scale back years of disastrous regulations unilaterally imposed by our out-of-control bureaucracy." Yet another failed policy direction, tried and tested for decades, being recycled to give already reckless corporations even more maneuverability. Trump plans to repatriate trillions of dollars of corporate money that has been hidden in foreign banks for years. By allowing special immunity to these corporations (which have essentially evaded taxes through loopholes) with a temporary reduction in the tax rate (from 35% to 10%), Trump believes roughly $5 trillion will return to the US (although reports estimate closer to $2.5 trillion ). Unfortunately, the last time such immunity was granted, in 2004, "a congressional report noted that some companies used more than 90 percent of the repatriated cash to enrich shareholders , generally through stock buybacks. Corporations that brought home the most cash, in fact, cut jobs."

Trump's recycled economic agenda has proven time and time again to boost corporate wealth at the expense of working-class interests. The widely reported deal made with Carrier recently, which was facilitated by Trump and promises to keep 800 jobs in Indiana, is a perfect example of this misguided approach. The Carrier deal was said to include a tax giveaway, the main tool in Trump's corporate welfare tax plan, which stands to cost about $6.2 trillion in lost federal revenues over a decade. Not only does this approach " starve the beast ," as originally intended by Reagan, it simply does not create American jobs as promised. The past four decades have proven this. The corporate tax rate in the US (which is actually on par with G7 countries, whose rates average over 30% ) is not a tremendous factor in why companies move elsewhere. They avoid taxes because they can. There is no reason to believe they wouldn't avoid them just the same with a lower rate. They also relocate for the "cheap labor," which is near chattel-slavery levels in some places, and for preferable infrastructures. As the New York Times reported shortly after the Carrier deal, "Carrier's parent company, United Technologies , never mentioned taxes as the reason for the offshoring move. Instead, it cited its 'existing infrastructure' and 'strong supplier base' in Mexico. More revealing, United Technologies says it can save $65 million a year by moving operations to low-wage Mexico."

Trump's economic plan does nothing to stray from the corporate-friendly neoliberal agenda of the past three decades. In many cases, it doubles down on it. These strategies have never benefited the working-class majority, and they will continue to represent an abysmal failure for those of us who depend on wages and salaries to live-a reality that Trump and his cabinet have never faced. Their out-of-touch, fairy-tale lives will undoubtedly amount to out-of-touch policies, leaving most of us entrenched in our ongoing struggle for living wages, affordable housing, reliable healthcare, and meaningful educations for our children. This struggle must take place in our communities, at our jobs, and in our children's schools. Rejecting the corporate agenda embraced by Trump will not be easy-but it is a struggle we've inherited from decades ago, only with a new face at the helm.

Deconstructing Workplace Hierarchies: On Contrived Leadership and Arbitrary Positions of Power

By Colin Jenkins

Bosses don't grow on trees. They don't magically appear at your job. They aren't born into their roles. They are created. They are manufactured to fulfill arbitrary positions of power within organizational hierarchies. They possess no natural or learned talents, and they are not tried and tested through any type of meritocratic system. Rather, they gravitate to these positions of authority by consciously exhibiting attributes that make them both controllable and controlling - being punctual, highly conformist, placing a premium on appearance, knowing how to talk sternly without saying much of anything, blessed with the ability to bullshit.

Hierarchies aren't natural phenomena within the human race. Outside of parenting, human beings aren't born with the inclination to be ruled, controlled, "managed," and "supervised" by other human beings. Hierarchies are artificial constructs designed to serve a purpose. They are a necessity within any society that boasts high degrees of wealth and power inequities. They are a necessity for maintaining these inequities and ensuring they are not challenged from below. They exert control, conformity, and stability within a broader society that is characterized by artificial scarcity, widespread insecurity, unfathomable concentrations of wealth and power, and extreme inequality. Without such control, these societies would unravel from within as human beings would naturally seek autonomy and more control over their lives and the lives of their loved ones - control that would amount to nothing more than the ability to fulfill basic needs.

Despite the artificial and arbitrary nature of both bosses and hierarchies, they persist. They dominate our days from the time we wake until the time we go to sleep. They control our lives, our livelihoods, and our ability to acquire food, clothing, shelter, and all that is necessary to merely survive. If we do not subject ourselves to them, we run the risk of starving, being homeless, and being unable to clothe or feed our children. Despite this, we seldom examine them, seldom question their existence or purpose, and seldom consider a life without them.

Capitalism, Hierarchies, and "Management"

"People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds."

- Jeffrey Eugenides

While hierarchical human relations have existed in many forms throughout history, the dominant modern hierarchy stems largely from capitalist modes of production. Capitalism is a system that relies on private ownership of land and the means of production for the purpose of transforming capital and commodities into profit for the owners of said land. Under the predominant system of industrial capitalism, those with sufficient capital may purchase parcels of land, build means of production (i.e. factories) on that land, and employ masses of workers to create products which can be sold on the market for a profit. Owning this land, and accessing the capital required to transform it into a means to produce, is a privilege reserved for only a very few. When land is privately owned in this manner, it represents a social relationship between those privileged few (owners/capital) and the rest of us (workers/labor). It is not owned for personal use, but rather for use as a location to extract labor value for production and profit. The owners of private property do not use it to satisfy any personal needs, and rarely even step foot on or in it. Understanding the difference between personal property and private property is crucial in this regard, as the term "private property" is often misused to falsely associate capitalism with freedom. In reality, when private property is used as a social relationship, as it is in a capitalist system, it becomes antithetical to any sense of freedom or liberty. A large degree of the profit that is created in this process is done through the exploitation of labor, whereas the owner will pay each worker a set wage in exchange for labor that ultimately creates commodities worth much more than this wage. And with the legislative destruction of the commons that took place during the transition from feudalism to capitalism, performing labor for an owner essentially became a coercive proposition, not a voluntary one. For under capitalism, those of us who must sell our labor to survive essentially have two options: (1) work for someone or (2) starve (this reality is the exact reason why the welfare state became a necessity alongside industrialization).

Because the development of capitalism represents the latest form of coercive social relations between human beings, the need for industrial "management" and "supervision" is paramount. After establishing the coercive conditions necessary to compel workers to sell their labor to owners (through the legislative destruction of the commons), owners were left with figuring out how to maximize their exploitation of a workforce that was ultimately forced to spend half its waking hours (if not more) in a place they do not want to be in, doing something they do not want to do. This task has endured ever since. Not surprisingly, scientific management, or Taylorism, developed alongside industrial capitalism with this very purpose: to improve "economic efficiency" through the improvement of "labor productivity." Fordism also surfaced around this time, taking a more all-encompassing approach to issues of mass productivity and management under capitalism. The common denominator in these fields of "human management" was to figure out how to effectively commodify a human being; in other words, how to turn a human being into a machine in order to perform menial, repetitive tasks for several hours at a time. Capitalist management systems looked to slave plantations for ideas on how to best accomplish this task. "The plantation didn't just produce the commodities that fueled the broader economy; it also generated innovative business practices that would come to typify modern management," Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman write . "As some of the most heavily capitalized enterprises in antebellum America, plantations offered early examples of time-motion studies and regimentation through clocks and bells. Seeking ever-greater efficiencies in cotton picking, slaveholders reorganized their fields, regimented the workday, and implemented a system of vertical reporting that made overseers into managers answerable to those above for the labor of those below."

The hierarchies of slave plantation management have effectively been transferred to modern office buildings in both the private and public sectors. To this day, entire fields of study have been dedicated to "organizational management" and "workforce optimization." The hierarchies that exist today, whether in private or public organizations, stem from archaic forms of management designed to essentially make humans less human. The fact that the term "human resources" has been fully integrated into our vernacular highlights the inhumane nature of labor in this regard. Coercion is simply not enough to ensure productivity. Frederick Taylor's contributions made this clear, at times valuing workers as less than "intelligent gorillas;" while Henry Ford's assembly-line, mass-production operations carried out Marx's warning from decades prior, essentially turning workers into mere "appendages of machines." Ford even went as far as creating a Sociological Department designed to study and standardize workers' private lives in order to further streamline them into visages of machinery. Ultimately, these fields of study have developed the corporate culture that has become synonymous with capitalist society: extreme hierarchies, a total absence of autonomy, strict guidelines and rules, threats of disciplinary action, and complete submission to conformity. These organizational hierarchies have been placed everywhere - within most corporations, most companies, most schools, most non-profits, most NGOs, and most public agencies. Quite simply stated, they are a necessary component in maintaining the unnatural wealth and power inequities that are so rampant within the capitalist system. Without high levels of control to keep people in line, this system would inevitably collapse.

The Contradictions and Inefficiencies within Hierarchies

"Maybe it is not a coincidence that, even in heaven, under the perspective of the Bible, there is a hierarchy. After all, what better way to impose the "benefits" of accepting the power of a hierarchy in the human mind?"

- Miguel Reynolds Brandao ("entrepreneur, business developer, and investor")

While hierarchies serve a systemic purpose in regards to how they relate to broader society, they also develop internal cultures that mimic the unequal power relations that have come to characterize our society under capitalism. These internal cultures breed competition among workers by creating an exclusive, managerial class that must be filled by a select few. In order to satisfy the inherent power inequities that exist within all hierarchies, organizations create arbitrary positions of authority, advertise these positions as being available to those who "qualify," and encourage people to pursue these positions in exchange for material gain. In this pursuit, however, contradictions and inefficiencies naturally arise.

In a professional capacity, whether we're talking about a public or private organization, people climb the proverbial ladder for two reasons: 1) to make more money and 2) to work less. The narrow-minded pursuit of authority and power, whether conscious or subconscious, essentially lies within these two, fundamental objectives that are inherent to human beings who are placed within hierarchical (competitive, not cooperative) systems defined by capitalist/corporate culture. In other words, when forced into a top-down organizational structure, it becomes natural to want to make more (money) and work less (idleness). The often-subconsciously attractive idea of acquiring a position of authority is the singular casing around these material wants. While the uncivilized act of exerting power over another human being may boost self-esteem, this form of psychosis ultimately operates secondary to the material benefits that come with this power. Therefore, it is safe to assume that if material benefits did not accompany positions of authority, they likely would not exist.

Regardless of this inclination, there are still many people who have no interest in climbing the ladder. Ironically, these people, for one reason or another, are more beholden to the natural human attribute of cooperation. They are either able to see beyond the self-centered pursuit of power (money and idleness) and are simply turned off by it, or they are just not interested in climbing over (and eventually overseeing) others for personal gain. In turn, those who choose to seek power (money and idleness) - those who are willing to spend time and energy climbing the ladder - do so in a purely self-serving way. They simply want to make more and work less, have no qualms about taking positions of artificial superiority over their fellow workers, and thus do whatever it takes to obtain that status within the organization. This flow creates an interesting paradox, as the most self-serving members of an organization inevitably gravitate to the top of the hierarchy. Thus, while organizations theoretically consist of groups of people working toward a common goal, this natural phenomenon based in hierarchical ascendency inevitably destroys any hopes of a collective will, while also breeding a culture of incompetence (as those self-serving individuals take the reins).

This culture of incompetence almost always comes to the forefront, as a majority of workers will inevitably experience it through daily occurrences of redundancy, inefficiency, and frustration. When there is work to be done, bosses almost inevitably seek refuge in their offices. When crises arrive, bosses do not take it upon themselves to work, but rather demand more work from those below. In most cases, bosses become so far removed from the actual work and mission of an organization that they essentially alienate themselves. As this disconnect grows, so too does the culture of incompetency. And with the tendency for animosity to develop from the majority of the workforce that is perceived to be "at the bottom," the only option for those who seek to control, supervise, and "manage" other human beings is to instill fear in their subjects. At this stage, trust is non-existent, organizational problems are always reduced to workers not doing enough, and solutions are always rooted in disciplinary action.

Furthermore, this phenomenon creates a natural inefficiency as those who are paid more money are essentially contributing less to the mission. In the case of so-called "supervisory" and "management" positions, this inefficiency becomes two-fold by not only creating a scenario where the organization is getting less for more, but also seeking more for less from the majority of its workforce (since this void must be filled somewhere). With this realization, we can see that hierarchies are not only unnatural forms of organization, but also inefficient and incompetent ones. Their purpose for existing lies in controlling this unnatural environment predicated upon massive inequities of power and wealth. However, beyond this need to reinforce the coercive nature of society, they are useless from within. This paradoxical existence is thus forced to construct mythological purposes for the arbitrary power positions that serve no real purpose internally, yet must maintain and mimic the power relations that exist externally. Ironically, wielding fear through micromanagement and the constant threat of disciplinary action ultimately becomes this artificial purpose. And it convinces those who occupy these power positions that workers are inherently lazy and, therefore, must be prodded like cattle. The irony comes in the fact that any development of so-called laziness, or a lack of effort, that comes to fruition from below almost always is the result of widespread animosity toward those who exist "higher up" on the ladder for the sole purpose of making more and doing less. Human beings simply do not respond to arbitrary positions of authority (often candy-coated as "leadership positions") because such positions serve no purpose in any real sense of organizational operations. Frankly put, the mere existence of these positions is an insult to all of those who perform the brunt of the work from "below."

Corporate Doublespeak, Contrived Leadership, and Insecurity

"Corporations are totalitarian institutions. Board of directors at the top of managers give orders, everyone follows orders. At the very bottom of command, if you are lucky you can rent yourself to it and get a job, and if you are sufficiently propagandized you may even buy some of the junk they produce and so on."

- Noam Chomsky

The totalitarianism inherent in corporate structures is defined and preserved by the hierarchy, and these structures stretch far beyond for-profit, private enterprises. In an attempt to justify arbitrary positions of power, organizations often portray them as "leadership" positions, deploying corporate doublespeak like "team leaders" or "officers" in their hierarchical arrangement. The problem with this is that leadership, in any true sense, is an absolute contradiction from power; and especially from arbitrary power. The acquisition of money and idleness that becomes synonymous with climbing the ladder makes leadership roles impossible for those who fill these positions to obtain. Never mind that the term "leadership" itself often includes connotations of superiority, or at the very least attempts to differentiate oneself from "the pack." Leadership can never be arbitrarily assigned through "promotions" or self-proclamation. If leaders truly exist among people, they only do so through a form of facilitating. And it may only develop organically, as the result of unplanned developments springing from natural occurrences of facilitation from within a group. Leaders are facilitators who may provide organic direction in a group, and they are always those who exhibit a selfless willingness to take on a brunt of the effort, or at the very least their share of the collective effort, while expecting nothing of individual value in return. Dictating from behind a desk is not leadership. Screaming down from a supervisory booth is not leadership. Analyzing and calibrating labor productivity is not leadership. Those who climb the proverbial ladder to (1) make more and (2) work less can never be leaders. Thus, filling arbitrary positions in hierarchies can never produce any semblance of leadership. Coercion, yes. Fear, yes. But never leadership.

The fact that hierarchies remain the predominant organizational structure throughout capitalist society tells us two things: (1) they are the most effective structure for exerting control; and (2) control is most desirable characteristic of any organization existing under capitalism. The inherent cultures of incompetence and contradictions which develop within these structures remain a secondary concern to that of maintaining control. And by masking this controlled environment through corporate doublespeak, organizations are often able to stoke a cognitive dissonance among its workforce that simultaneously puts forth a healthy dose of faith in the "team approach" by day while complaining about the incompetent and overbearing bosses by night. This is accomplished through a rebranding of arbitrary power to justify it with the appearance of a (non-existent) meritocracy, and tame it by transforming self-serving overseers into "leaders." The insidious nature of this rebranding even goes as far as trying to convince those in arbitrary positions of power that they not only belong there, but invariably serve an important purpose there. The natural insecurities that develop within managers and supervisors, who are plagued with a never-ending paranoia about being exposed as the frauds they are, are put at ease with cycles upon cycles of "leadership courses" and mounds of self-help books that call on their inner-CEOs to seize the moment!

Despite these contrived efforts to establish competence and confidence, those in arbitrary positions of power within a hierarchy are undoubtedly reminded of their uselessness during daily operations. The material benefits that come with these positions are typically all that's needed to cope with this realization; however, the organizational contradictions and inefficiencies always remain, and with them enduring fissures seeping with animosity and fearfulness from below, and insecurity and paranoia from above. There is simply no getting past the fact that the mere act of "supervising" another person is inhumane, because its purpose is premised on the belief that people are inherently lazy, dishonest, irresponsible, and incompetent. Or, at the very least, the existence of supervision confirms the coercive and inhumane nature of both traditional labor and hierarchies. Supervision is only necessary in a world where workers are viewed as cattle to be prodded, pushed, "motivated," and directed. The fact that those placed with this task of supervision possess no special skills or talents only makes this relationship even more precarious, as those being supervised will almost always recognize the illegitimacy of their supposed superior. Whether through interviews or exams, there simply is no way to find people suitable for supervising others… because, quite frankly, they don't exist. The supervision or management of a human being is never a suitable proposition, no matter how many executives, boards, curriculum developers, trainers, and corporate planners try to make it so.

To Escape Trump's America, We Need to Bring the Militant Labor Tactics of 1946 Back to the Future

By lifelongwobbly.com

Back to the Future, Part 1:

The last general strike in the US was in Oakland in 1946. That year there were 6 city-wide general strikes, plus nationwide strikes in steel, coal, and rail transport. More than 5 million workers struck in the biggest strike wave of US history. So what happened? Why haven't we ever gone out like that again? Congress amended US labor law in 1947, adding massive penalties for the very tactics that had allowed strikes to spread and be successful - and the business unions accepted the new laws. In fact, they even went beyond them by voluntarily adding "no-strike clauses" to every union contract for the last 70 years, and agreeing that when they do strike in between contracts it will only be for their own wages and working conditions, not to support anybody else or to apply pressure about things happening in the broader society. When we allowed ourselves to lose our most important weapons 70 years ago, we took the first step towards Trump's America. We're stuck in the wrong timeline - if we want to get out, we have to bring the militant labor tactics of 1946 back to the future!

Back to the Future, Part 2:

The Oakland General Strike began early in the morning of December 3, 1946, when police were trying to break up a picket line of mostly female department store clerks who had been on strike since October 21 ("Back to the Future Day"). A streetcar driver saw it happening and stopped his car. This stopped all the cars
behind him. All of the passengers who were no longer going to work began immediately picketing at other businesses in Oakland, calling out those workers, and shutting down the businesses. The strike spread from there. Some important points:

1. The heroes of this story are the department store clerks who maintained an effective picket for 6 weeks, shutting down the operations of the business, refusing limitations on their ability to picket, and defending their picket when the cops were trying to break it. We need to re-learn how to organize "hard" pickets which actually disrupt commerce, and how to defend those pickets from our enemies. We also need to reject all of the limitations that courts, and the unions, will tell us we have to impose on our pickets.

2. The streetcar driver who stopped his car when he saw the cops breaking the picket deserves an honorable mention, like Peter Norman ("the white dude" at the Mexico City Olympics). He knew which side he was on, and he didn't just keep moving. He saw fellow workers under attack and he used his power as a worker to support the right side - despite the fact that the retail workers strike had no immediate tie to his own wages and working conditions. He didn't ask his union if it was OK. He didn't wait to go back to his union meeting and ask them to pass a resolution supporting the retail workers. Basically, it doesn't even matter whether he was a union member. It doesn't even matter if he abstractly thought that women should be quitting their jobs now that World War 2 was over, or if he abstractly supported Jim Crow - he supported fellow workers against the cops. Since 1947, "secondary strikes" like that have been illegal, and his union could have been attacked by the court - but the union probably would have been training him all along that he can only strike in between contracts, and definitely not for anyone else's cause. We need to reject any limitation on our ability to strike in support of fellow workers, or to strike about things beyond our own specific workplaces.

3. The passengers on his streetcar and the ones behind it also deserve credit for immediately forming mass pickets, reinforcing the retail workers' picket and also spreading throughout the city and pulling other workers out on strike. They didn't come up with this all in the moment, they learned how to do this over years of tough strikes, including the 1934 general strike in San Francisco that also shut down Oakland. Mass pickets have also been illegal since 1947, and we've lost those traditions. We urgently need to relearn them.

4. The unions didn't call the Oakland General Strike - but they sure as hell called it off, and left the retail workers alone in the cold. The general strikes that have happened in the US have almost never been called ahead of time by union. They've almost always happened by workers semi-spontaneously going on strike in solidarity with other workers, supporting the demands of the first group and adding their own. (I say "semi"-spontaneously because the working class had years of practice and preparation leading into each strike - something that's been forcibly removed from our culture over the past 70 years.) Yet by the third day of the Oakland General Strike, the local union leadership was already declaring that the strike was over and everyone except the retail workers should go back to work. As the streetcar drivers were told by their union president, " The International Brotherhood of Teamsters is bitterly opposed to any general strike for any cause. I am therefore ordering you and all those associated with you who are members of our International Union to return to work as soon as possible … No general strike has ever yet brought success to the labor movement. " Once the retail workers were left to keep striking alone, it was only a matter of time before they were beaten and had to give up. If we're serious about reviving strikes, we need to prepare people as much as we can for how quickly the union leadership and the Democratic Party will do everything they can to prevent strikes from the start, and to get workers back to work.

Back to the Future, Part 3:

The 70th anniversary of the Oakland General Strike is coming up in three weeks, on December 3rd. As all of our movements go into overdrive, and we all start networking and holding bigger events than we're used to, we should consider holding "Spirit of '46" events across the country on December 3rd to talk about the Oakland General Strike and the relevance of their tactics for today. This is obviously coming up very soon, but it seems do-able, and if it's presented right, could pull a lot of interest. What else can we start doing to prepare for the kind of labor movement we need - the kind that is ready to stand up to the state and the capitalists? What should we think about the calls that have already started circulating for a general strike to stop Trump's inauguration?

1. The "Labor for Bernie" initiative showed the potential for a cross-union, bottom-up movement that fought for big goals, overcame the separation that is built into the labor movement, and directly challenged the right of the Democratic party and the labor bureaucracy to speak for union members or the working class . We've all just seen that electoral politics are inadequate to stop fascism - it's time for union members and supporters to build a similar movement that is based on supporting all labor action, rejecting all limits on strikes and pickets whether they come from the government or the unions themselves, making all pickets effective, and spreading strikes when they occur (through so-called "secondary" strikes and pickets) - as well as driving police out of the labor movement. This movement should organize in city-wide groups independently of any union structure, inviting all workers to be involved, and then those groups could network nationally. The groups should be open to any worker, union member or not, but should keep union and non-profit staff and and high officers out. Once they get going, it is important that they consider themselves to have all of the legitimacy they need to organize pickets or call strikes, whether through calling for mass workplace meetings to organize action or through supporting minority action - these groups will need to do this because the existing labor structures will put brakes on all action by citing their no-strike clauses and respect for labor law. It's important for these groups to have a name that people can identify with, like "Labor United for All", "Labor Against Fascism", or "One Big Union."

2. The IWW is experiencing a sudden growth spike, as most radical left groups probably are right now. In particular, the IWW's General Defense Commitee, which focuses on defense of the working class and community self-defense, is seeing a lot of interest of people wanting to start new locals. The GDC has a picket training that began with the 2005 Northwest Airlines strike, when the union was trying to tell workers to keep the pickets tame and ineffective. The training focuses on the tactics needed to hold effective, disruptive pickets and to maintain them against scabs. These tactics have ended up being very useful for community self-defense. We should try to make sure that we spread this picket training to as many of these new locals as possible, and prepare as many trainers as possible. If we're going to have the labor movement we desperately need, we're going to have to re-learn how to hold effective pickets, and how to engage in community self-defense - very, very quickly.

3. The growth that we're seeing shows that people think we have something to offer now that electoral anti-fascism is discredited. We should double down on our efforts to recruit and to integrate these new members. We also need to prove that they are right when they think we have something to offer. We need to organize boldly, which will inspire our new members to become active and take leadership, and will also inspire hundreds and thousands of more people to join.

4. We absolutely need to double down on our support for Latino workers. We need to prepare to mobilize boldly against any repression that they face, and to support them when/if they take action. They've already proven through the May Day strikes of 2005 and 2006 that they know how to organize mass industrial action better than any other group of workers in this country. We also need to emphasize our Spanish-language materials and infrastructure in an effort to make our organization a useful tool for Latino workers.

5. Millions of union members, and workers, voted for Trump. A lot of factors went into this, including massive undercurrents of hatred and bigotry, but it also seems that there was an economic element - many white workers saw him as the only program offering anything different from decades of factory closures, social cuts, and poverty with no escape. Our best bet to win them away from fascism is if we show that we have a real program to fight for, and win , a better world. If we can't do that, we won't. (The business union leadership have already thrown themselves on the mercy of the victor and declared that they're ready to work with Trump - but it's debatable whether he'll have any use for them.) We're on the verge of being in a similar situation for organizing as radicals were during Jim Crow - and we will have to organize in the same way, focusing on the needs and defense of the most oppressed and vulnerable groups of workers and forcing bigots at work to decide whether they'll side with the boss or with their co-workers. Someone can vote based on abstract bigotry and still choose to side with their flesh-and-blood co-workers against the boss that yells at both of them every day. And if they don't, they're scabs, and we'll have to treat them as such. As CLR James and Grace Lee Boggs put it in 1958, " if a white worker or group of white workers after reading and contributing to the paper as a whole finds that articles or letters expressing Negro aggressiveness on racial questions make the whole paper offensive to him, that means that it is he who is putting his prejudices on the race question before the interests of the class as a whole. He must be reasoned with, argued with, and if necessary fought to a finish. "

6. It's good that people are already thinking in terms of how we can use our power at work to exert pressure on our lives outside of work. We're supposed to think that we only have power at the ballot box, every four years. It's just become much more obvious to a lot of people that we don't have any power there. We need to encourage workers to think about leveraging their power at work in new ways in every possible respect. As the old slogan goes, the National Guard can't dig coal with bayonets - if the government legislates against women's reproductive rights, it can only do so if healthcare workers accept it; if the government sends more police into schools, they will only find students to criminalize if the teachers have not gone on strike. We need to push as hard as we can to break through this limitation of self-confidence, where workers think that workplace action (if they even take it at all) can only be about their own conditions. Even the head of the Chicago Teachers' Union, one of the most confrontational and inspiring unions in the country, accepts copsin schools and does not challenge these limitations. When workers do break through on this - and they've got to, sometime, somewhere - we need to be ready to support them with everything we've got.

7. The initial discussion of a general strike points to the kind of labor movement that we've needed for a long time and we're going to desperately require now. We are entering a period where the state will bring on all ferocity against any oppositional movement. They've also made it clear that the very existence of unions is one of their targets - Reagan focused on crushing militant unions to scare the rest; the current Republican party, including Trump, want to completely abolish unions, as they basically have in Wisconsin since 2011.

8. A general strike will only ever happen over the ruins of labor law and workplace contractualism. As we saw in Wisconsin in 2011, the day after people began talking about general strike, the international unions came down hard saying that nobody in Wisconsin had the authority to call a general strike, since each union's contracts prohibited striking. Ironically, if the Republicans try to pass nationwide right-to-work laws or outlaw dues checkoff, the only way to stop it would be a general strike - but the union leadership is neither willing nor even capable of calling such a strike. At the end of the day, if we believe that workers can overcome capitalism - then we have to believe that they can overcome US labor law and workplace contractualism.

9. We will also need to be ready for minority strikes or action when and if they happen. Many workers and union members may have voted for Trump and may actually want him to take office. We still need to create a movement that encourages and supports action by any size group of workers, whether it's individual fast food workers refusing to serve cops , or groups of workers going on strike, for whatever reason, even if they aren't the entire workforce. We particularly need to support trends where workers are taking action at work over issues beyond just wages and working conditions, and to emphasize how much potential power we have if we only use it. As we all begin holding mass meetings in cities around the country and building new infrastructures, we should plan out some kind of "flying picket" infrastructure which can mobilize mass pickets in immediate defense of any minority workplace action especially.

10. And what about the ideas which have begun floating around about a general strike on January 20th to stop Trump's inauguration? I would say that we in the IWW should be cautiously optimistic, but should wait and see whether this catches on more broadly before we consider officially engaging with it - in the meantime, we should emphasize our efforts to build a sustained, pro-strike culture and infrastructure along the lines of what I've written above. I want to be clear, that I think it is absolutely correct to promote as much unrest as possible (including industrial unrest) to prevent the inauguration. If there is a lot of excitement around the country for a day, or a week, or a month of "no work, no school" to prevent the inauguration, that would be a fantastic development. There are some who think that the IWW can just ignore Trump because we do not take a stand on politicians - this is missing the point of what is happening in this country and would be a disastrous mistake. The biggest challenge towards any industrial action will be the union bureaucracy. The AFL-CIO is "ready to work with Trump", and would be incapable of calling for or organizing a general strike even if they wanted to. We need to build the kind of movements which can challenge the hegemony of the business unions and call for strikes over their heads. Maybe a starting point would be agitating hospitality and restaurant workers in DC to shut down all hotels and restaurants leading up to the inauguration, or agitating media workers to refuse to broadcast anything by Trump. The main point is that there won't be one general strike that saves us and then we all go back to normal - our focus has to be recreating a culture of militant, production-stopping strikes which seek to spread through secondary strikes and mass pickets, and which take aim at all injustice in society, not just workplace issues.

Nothing is a foregone conclusion, as bad as it looks right now. One day we will raise a cooperative commonwealth from the nightmare of capitalism, and one day there won't be any more presidents to inaugurate. As surprised as we all might be to have waken up on November 9 and found ourselves hurtling towards fascism, we have to remember that sometimes we will be surprised by spontaneous outpourings of solidarity that people will show as they create new movements which leave us struggling to catch up. The protests which began the night after the election are a very encouraging step in that direction, and they still have time to spread from the street to every aspect of society.

This was originally posted at lifelongwobbly.com.

The Price of Utopia: Abundance & Injustice

By Nick Partya

This is the third part of a multi-part series on "The Value of Utopia."

Part One: The American Tradition of Radical Utopianism

Part Two: The Bosses' Utopia: Dystopia and the American Company Town

On The Value of Utopia

For many centuries persons, peoples, and civilizations, have dreamed about what an ideal society (utopia) would look like, and worried about ways in which society could be much worse (dystopia). Utopian dreams and dystopian worries are powerful tools for thinking about what sorts of changes a society should pursue or avoid, and what underlying dynamics these proposed changes expose. This series examines the tradition of utopian and dystopian thought in western culture, beginning with the ancient Greeks, but continuing on into the modern period. Our focus in this series will be on the important social, political, and economic ideas and issues raised in different utopian stories. When we look into utopian stories, and their historical times, what we'll see reflected in the stories of utopia are the social, political, and economic concerns of the authors, their societies, and or their particular social class.

The meaning of the word 'utopia' comes to us from ancient Greece. In our modern world the word takes its current form because of Thomas More's 1516 book of the same name. Indeed, it is this book from which most of the modern western European utopian tradition takes its origin; or at least, this work inaugurates it most common trope. Where we have in our lexicon one 'utopia', the Greeks had two. The difference, even confusion, between them marks an essential cleavage. For the Greeks, there was both Eu- topia, and Ou-topia. Both are derived in part from the Greek word topos, which means "place", and the suffix 'ia' meaning land. Translated into English, 'Ou-topia' means something like, " No-place land", whereas 'Eu-topia' translates as "good-place land". More succinctly, the difference is between the idea of the best place, and an impossible place. It is the difference between a place which does not exist, because it has not yet been realized, and a place which cannot, and could not, ever exist.

Our modern word is pronounced as the Greeks pronounced 'Eutopia'. However, the meanings of these Greek words were confused by modern writers, who ended up with the spelling 'utopia', from the old English 'Utopie' as opposed to "Eutopia", as meaning "good place". This basic confusion about utopias, between "good place" and "no place", inserts an important ambiguity directly in the center of thinking about utopias. This ambiguity forces one to wonder of utopian writers, Are their visions supposed to be dreams of possible futures meant to incite us to action, or are they impossible dreams meant as reminders that the world is not easily re-shaped by human effort? Is a utopia supposed to be a good place or a no-place, is the author supporting or condemning the practices of the fictional societies they describe?

One qualification must be made right away. A utopia is not a paradise. There is a colloquial usage of 'utopia' and 'utopian' that seem to suggest that it is a paradise. And compared to the societies in which actual humans lives, many of the fictional utopias would have indeed been seen as paradises, relatively speaking. However, we must draw a technical distinction between a paradise or a golden-age, and a utopia. In a paradise or golden-age no work and no effort are required by humans to obtain the things they want and need. Perhaps the most famous golden-age many are familiar with would be the Biblical Garden of Eden. Another well-known paradise is described in the mid-14th century poem The Land of Cockaigne, where fully cooked turkey legs literally fly through the air and into one's mouth. In this place the only effort on need put in is to chew.

The whole idea of a Cockaigne, or a paradise, is that everything one would ever need is abundantly supplied without any effort. The natural world is just so constructed - either at random or by design - that there springs forth automatically an abundance of everything necessary for everyone, all the time, always. In this kind of society, or world, there never arises anything resembling what we - or most societies in the history of our world - a political problem. Everyone has enough of everything. So there is no cause for argument. There is no inequality, because everyone has everything everyone else has. Or at least, everyone has access to just as much of what others have whenever they would like it. In this kind of world what causes could there be for strife, or for civil war? A paradise, or a golden-age, is thus totally non-political, and not terribly interesting.

What this means is that utopias are enough like our own condition, our own world, that we can take inspiration from them. They are enough like the social conditions we know that we can learn lessons for and about ourselves and our societies by examining at them. This is exactly what makes utopias so interesting. As we will see, utopian literature has a long, very long, history with human beings. The enduring appeal of and, interest in utopias testifies to their relevance. This is the reason that we too are looking at utopias. We are all concerned with, or at least we are all effected by, the way our society is organized. By looking at how other ideal societies might be organized we can explore the merits, and demerits of various kinds of social institutions, and of the various ways of structuring those institutions. We are concerned to change our own society, and utopias allow us to think about the direction of that change.

We have a colloquial usage of the word 'utopia' and 'utopian' in contemporary society that works to prohibit much creative thought, and dismisses utopian thought as feckless, and as such, worthless. Part of the aims of this series is to demonstrate the value of this "worthless" endeavor. Dreaming, far from idle, far from impotent, is essential. Without wonder, without questions, the human imagination will atrophy. What is so valuable about thinking about utopias is that it allows us to both critique present societies, but also to articulate a vision of how we'd like our societies to be different. The deeper value of utopian thinking is that it sets us free, free to speculate and more importantly to give expression to our striving, to our desire for a better world. Everything human beings can be must be first be dreamed by human beings. This is the value of utopia and dystopia. Thus, the first pre-requisite for this series is the rejection of this colloquial notion of utopia and the utopian. Dismissed from the start, it will not be a surprise if we fail to learn anything from our utopian traditions.

Introduction

One important value of utopian thinking is that it permits one to think about themselves in relation to society, their place in the social order, to reflect on basic commitments and values of their societies, to consider the proper aims of their society. Few take time to consider the basic structure of the societies they live in, few notice the myriad of inter-connected systems of coordinated behavior, sometimes voluntary sometimes coerced, that create the often seamless appearance of the regularity and orderliness of society. In order for society to reproduce itself, certain kinds of work must be performed, and the more complex the society, the more sophisticated the system of internal coordination required to successfully reproduce the necessary elements of that reproduction. It is the duty of citizens to confront this basic structure, this way that society re-creates itself, and once confronted, one cannot help but adopt a moral attitude toward this basic structure. Utopian thinking allows us to think about our most basic moral orientations toward society and its mode of reproduction.

Ursula Le Guin's short story, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, offers an excellent opportunity for such reflection. [1] The main point of describing this utopian society as she does is to pose to the reader the questions, Would you stay or go? The point is to make the reader confront a moral dilemma, and test their moral intuitions, to see what kind of a person the reader is. The analogy to the dominant capitalist world economy is very clear. And the question posed in each case is very stark, How comfortable is one with enjoying a prosperity predicated on the intentional creation of suffering and injustice? This question is a kind of test, wherein one's answer reveals s deeper elements of one's character. In some ways the moral dilemma Le Guin constructs is similar to that in Robert Nozick's famous experience machine thought example. Nozick imagines a virtual reality machine that could be programmed to give you any set of experiences you wanted. You could live your ideal life in a virtual space that is identical to the real world in all sensory respects, one might think of the popular film The Matrix. Every five years or so, you would be woken up, so to speak, and asked if you wished to continue. Nozick asks, would you choose to stay in the machine, or not. If you choose not, the implication is that this must be because you value things other than hedonistic physical pleasures. One's response to this dilemma reveals something about one's underlying character, and in this case, what one values.

The Ones Who Walk Away

When Le Guin first introduces the reader to the town of Omelas an ostensibly important festival is set to begin. And people from a network of communities are making the journey to Omelas to participate in this festival, such is its importance to the community. The town is full of dancing, music, and gaiety. Young and old, everyone is joyful, thankful for the prosperity of the community, and everyone indulges in delicious food, festive music and dancing, as well as amiable conversation with family, friends, and neighbors. The residents are described as amiably conversing with each other, while various processions move through the city towards a field outside of town. In this field a kind of ceremonial horse race is to take place as a key part of the festival being celebrated. Le Guin describes a quaint, well-kept town by a bay, and with bountiful fields stretching out beyond. The general impression of this festival, and of the town celebrating it, is unmistakably one of universal joy and celebration of prosperity and abundance. What comes to mind is the New England, or Pacific Northwest fishing town on the coast. Indeed, 'Omelas' in reverse is 'salem O', and the town of Salem, Oregon is where Le Guin resides. In one's mind, one conjures the image of the kind of bucolic small town, the aesthetic of which many Americans continue to crave and to drape themselves in, and which loom so large in the American cultural imagination. The image conjured here is of the kind of place many Americans would associate with a "simpler" time, with a more virtuous and un-corrupted country both physically and morally.

And indeed, Omelas has many characteristics which have been typical of utopian communities since the time of Thomas More. The reader is given the impression of Omelas as an egalitarian, and democratic community, one that eschews violence, hierarchy, luxury, and avarice. The reader is told that in Omelas there are no police, no military, no wars, no civil conflict, there are only a few simple laws and so there is no need for lawyers, and there is full gender equality. The citizens of Omelas reject significant aspects of the capitalist economy, its structural imperative towards endless growth; its self-destructive pursuit of extreme luxury and decadence; its relentless exhortations to consume; its rationing of access to consumption goods by income. In Omelas, in contrast to the dominant characteristics of capitalist societies, there is no poverty, no homelessness, no one goes hungry, no one lacks medical care, access to education, or to productive employment. Everyone enjoys enough leisure time to be able to cultivate their talents, so that the arts, and other cultural productions, thrive in Omelas. The people of Omelas are rational people, spiritual without being rigidly moralistic, e.g. they seem to be less obsessed with guilt and shame the same way the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic traditions are, or about the same things. The prevalence and acceptability of public nudity, at least during the important festival, is a sign of a less repressive, more enlightened attitude towards body image and sexual morality.

Early on in Republic Glaucon and Adiemantus disagree with Socrates about his initial characterization of the best kind of community. Socrates describes a simple society with few needs, and Spartan sensibilities about décor, utensils, diet, et cetera. This kind of life, where virtuous people subsist on their "honest cakes and loaves" fails to appeal to Socrates' younger interlocutors, who insist on adding important elements to the ideal city, elements necessary for living the best kind of life. Yet, introducing these elements of luxury creates all the social and political problems that the Philosopher-Kings have to be created to solve. So too does Le Guin understand that when it comes to utopia, tastes will differ. Thus, while she offers important details, and creates a vivid impression of the life of the community at Omelas, she leaves much of it open ended, so as to suit individual tastes. She can do this since, what she wants is to get the reader to imagine Omelas in whatever way they need so as to think of it as the ideal kind of life, and the ideal kind of community. If an orgy would be necessary to make Omelas appealing enough to attract some, then add one in is Le Guin's attitude. Prefer less technology, less urban hustle-&-bustle, a more abstemious community, then so it is. Prefer the opposite of these, then that's fine too. For those who like intoxication, Le Guin describes Drooz, a kind of wonder-drug that offers all the appeal of psychotropic substances without being habit-forming or destructive to the body. She is also happy to have beer in Omelas. Omelas is to be the home of all good things, in whatever measure one thinks appropriate.

Yet, Omelas is not the place that many will have imagined it to be thus far. There is a dark side to the prosperity of Omelas. In the basement of one of the buildings in the town there is certain room. It is small, dark, and dank. The room has a bare dirt floor, a small window covered in grime and filth, and a couple of rusted buckets and old mops fouled by rot and mold. This is a room most do not visit, but that everyone in town knows about and thinks about. All things being equal the dilapidated condition, and lack of maintenance for this room would be unremarkable. Yet, all other things are not equal in this case. This is because a child lives in this room behind a locked door, and has lived in this room all its life, and will live the entirety of its life in this squalid little room. Periodically someone comes to empty the buckets filled with the child's excrement, and re-fill the child's water and food bowls. As one might imagine, as any child raised in such conditions, the child in this room in Omelas is malnourished, intellectually stunted, cannot read, write, has no conception of the world beyond that basement room. In short, the child lives a horrible and degrading life, full of deprivation, fear, and isolation. And to top it all off this child is as innocent as any, there are no circumstances that might be adduced to mitigate the sympathy the reader very likely naturally has for the child.

When each citizen of Omelas comes of age, between eight and twelve years old, they are told about the room, some even go to see the room. All are fully aware that there is a causal relationship between the child's suffering and the town's prosperity. Le Guin never specifies what this mechanism is, and does not need to. First, this is a work of utopian fiction, so it is not essential to include this, and second, the point of the story is to pose the reader a moral dilemma, not to describe how this mechanism could work. She is content to leave it to the reader's imagination as to how this causal connection works. Perhaps it is a kind of sacrifice to whatever god exists, or whatever, the details on this point are not essential. Without the suffering imposed on this child the town would not, indeed could not, be the place of joy and abundance that it is.

Some people are unable to live in Omelas, to enjoy its prosperity and abundance, knowing what the true cost of it is. These are the titular 'ones who walk away'. Sometimes the young children who go to see the child do not adapt to the necessity of its suffering, and they leave the town. Other times older adults, as Le Guin tells us, will suddenly become quiet for a couple days and then walk right out of town. All these people could not reconcile the joy and abundance enjoyed by all but one in Omelas, and the suffering of that one, when the latter is the pre-condition of the former. These people leave Omelas, and never return. Where these people go, the citizens of Omelas do not know. Le Guin tells us it is a place that would be even less imaginable for us than Omelas, a place that might not even exist. Are the ones who walk away going to their deaths? Are they going to a place where they can live without imposing suffering? All Le Guin tells us is that those who walk away seem to know where they are going.

An Omelas in the Modern World?

What makes Omelas unique is that everyone who lives there is acutely aware of the price of their prosperity. And each has made a deliberate and conscious choice to stay. Our modern world is very different from Omelas in this regard. Though not secret, the source of and true price of the material prosperity of those in the so-called "first" world, are usually hidden. Few Western consumers see behind the neatly arranged items on the shelves of their local stores, to the often long and sophisticated chains of interconnected operations that unite the production of raw materials and the consumption of finished goods. This is because many people do not care to know, others do not care how much others have to suffer for them to enjoy the things they want, and also because the large firms which produce these goods deliberately try to obscure the morally dubious origins of the ingredients that make their products possible. If we look at only a couple of some basic products that many people consume on a routine basis will expose the immense quantities of suffering that is produced in order to furnish these products to consumers. We can look to the basic cotton t-shirt, the cellular telephone, and the chocolate bar, for ample evidence of the outsized costs of 'simple' luxuries.

Consider the common t-shirt. They appear ready-made on store shelves, but in fact have a complex history. At every step in the production-process of a simple t-shirt involves many kinds of hidden costs, both human and ecological. Ecologically, cotton is a very greedy crop in terms of water requirements. Devoting vast tracts of land to cultivation of cotton can have serious effects on water supplies. In an era of climate change, when large-scale drought is quickly becoming a significant problem, this strain on water resources will become increasingly problematic. As with other kinds of farming, the use of pesticides and other chemicals to increase crop yields causes problems as it leeches into the water supply. Turning picked cotton into fabric involves a series of complex operations, many dispersed by thousands of miles geographically, and linked by the ability to cheaply ship bulk commodities using fossil fuels. Many of these operations are largely automated. The environmental costs of burning fossil fuels, the main source of energy for the machines that produce yarns and fabric, as well as the ships and trucks that transport the semi-finished product as is progresses through the production process, are well known.

The disaster at Rana Plaza in Bangladesh 2013 brought many in the world face to face with some of the most morally troubling aspects of the production of their clothing. The use of young children in sweatshops, the unsafe and unhealthy conditions in most factories, the low wages, long hours, and abuses by supervisors that workers experience were brought to the attention of a public that is all too eager to look away. The sub-contracting relationships that dominate the garment trade, that large retailers use to shed responsibility for the wages and work conditions of the workers who produce their products, enable a culture of don't ask, don't tell on the part of the retailers and the suppliers. These kinds of abuses have been documented over and over again by NGOs, human rights groups, investigative journalists, et cetera, in the third world countries where most of the world's garment production takes place. And despite the high-sounding pledges made by retailers, the kinds of abuses that lead directly to the Rana Plaza disaster, and many other tragically similar incidents, are still routine practices.

Think about your cell phone. It is probably in your pocket or purse right now, or maybe on a table or desk within one's reach. This item has become so ubiquitous in the last few years that we now taken them for granted. The so-called "smart" phone has established itself with the same ubiquity even faster. Yet, some of the basic components that make these devices work have rather problematic histories from a moral perspective. Most people use their cell phones every day, and hardly ever, if at all, think about the Rare Earth Minerals (REMs) that make them work. The production of these essential components causes much ecological and human damage, in both their mining and refining, as well as their recycling. Elements like Neodymium, Terbium, Cerium, Lanthanum, and Yttrium are all essential materials for making the components that make our "smart" phones work. And they all must be dug out of the earth, and processed into a form useable by industry.

Mining, for rare earths, or merely for gold and silver, is an inherently a physically destructive endeavor, and whole landscapes can be, and have been, wiped away in the quest for what lies underneath. In many poorer countries around the world, where the agents of trans-national capital extract much of the raw materials for their products, regulation is lax and corruption high. This combination leads quite naturally to wholesale environmental degradation through unrestrained avarice, as well as often crude technologies. These same conditions lead to large human costs, as mining techniques are both inherently dangerous, carried out with dilapidated and inadequate equipment, with no safety regulation or precaution, miles from medical help, and undertaken by desperate people willing to take risks others would deem unacceptable; in all too many instances mining work is done by slave labor, child labor, or child-slave labor. Mining is, of course, done differently in different places, and yet even in America mining is a dangerous occupation. Moreover, the use of toxic chemicals, especially mercury for gold mining, also contributes to both ecological damage and ill-health in humans. Once mined, these mineral must be transported, the same way cotton had to be, to the locations where they are to undergo the next stage of their transformation into products one will find in a store. This transportation process, as one that relies on burning fossil fuels, adds to the burden being placed on the earth's ecosystem.

Refining rare earth minerals is not only highly energy intensive, but also causes widespread harm to human beings, as the rare earths are toxic, as they are always found in nature next to radioactive elements. Exposure to radiation effects workers in, as well as the communities surrounding refining facilities. Moreover, irresponsible, if not in all cases illegal, dumping of the radioactive waste products of refining rare earths causes a myriad of health effects on the human beings exposed. In one community in Malaysia near a rare earth refining facility run by an Australian company, residents exposed suffered from a range of ill effects ranging from skin disorders, to high rates of miscarriages and birth defects including blindness, severe retardation, and leukemia.

Most rare earths are mined and refined in China and other Asian countries. Most are then sent to other Asian countries to construct sub-components, which are in turn shipped to another production facility, where they are fitted in larger sub-components, and so on, until all the sub-components reach the final assembly facility, from which the final product is shipped again, and not for the last time, on its way to the final destination on the shelves of local retail outlets. The human costs exacted during the assembly of the various sub-components of the myriad of electronic gadgets and gizmos that dominate our lives are appalling, and the rash of worker suicides at Foxconn factories testifies to the draconian nature of the work regime there. The companies, now notorious, response was to place nets around the factory buildings to prevent workers who successfully made it out the window from dying. Workers in China, and other low-wage, low regulation Asian countries are routinely subjected to brutal treatment, long hours, low wages, unsafe and unhealthy conditions, not to mention predatory behavior by the company in the form of mandatory residence in company housing -often cramped, ill maintained, and lacking basic amenities- the rent for which is automatically deducted from workers' pay.

One might think that the troubles involved in mining and refining could be mitigated if only we all recycled more of our electronics. Yet, even recycling has a nasty after-taste, once one looks into. The net flow of new products is into the developed world, but there is also a reverse flow of obsolete products back to the Asian countries, again predominantly China, from which the rare earths originated. The unfortunate reality is that the recycling process of obsolete electronic from the first world is very crude. Most "e-waste" is shipped, again using fossil fuels, to small Chinese villages where elderly people break down the components by hand, often using little but their bare hands, an open flame, and toxic chemicals, especially acids. This is how the people involved in this recycling work are exposed to the chemicals that result in detrimental health effects, including much higher rates of cancer. The link between the recycling work and the cancers is so strong that the places where this work is done have come to be called " cancer villages".

Even the unassuming, seemingly innocent, and above all delicious, chocolate bar has a decidedly bitter side, and a morally problematic history. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the production of chocolate is the apparent pervasiveness of child-slave labor on cocoa plantations in the West African countries where most of the world's cocoa is cultivated. Making the matter worse is that many of the child-slaves on these plantations have been kidnapped or hoodwinked by middle men and trafficked from neighboring countries for exactly this purpose. The world's major chocolate companies are aware of the presence of child-slave labor on these plantations, and continue to buy from wholesalers in these countries. Much like the garment industry, sub-contracting relationships allow the chocolate giants, like Nestle, to evade responsibility for and scrutiny about the nature of the labor practices of the producers.

These three examples are by no means the only products which most Western consumers use on a daily basis, taking entirely for granted, but which have a morally dubious origin and history. The amount of harm caused to both the environment, and to other people during the process of producing the goods we consume is hardly ever considered, let alone factored into the price of those items. From the frozen veggies in our freezers, to the coffee makers and sugar packets on our countertops, to the cleaning agents we use, to the paper products we over-utilize, we find that the production process that ends with our individual usage contains significant abuse of both the environment, and of the human workers at every stage. It is clear now that the modern world is an Omelas of sorts. The prosperity of the developed world is intrinsically linked with the under-development and poverty of the rest of the world, the latter being the pre-condition of the former. Our world has the equivalent of the dank, dark, neglected basement in Omelas. It is the sweatshop, the maquiladora, the Export Processing Zone factory, the illegal mining or logging camp, the plantation, the company town, the cancer village, the ghetto, and the favela.

What Does it Mean to Walk Away?

In Omelas, the ones who stay are able to rationalize the suffering of the child, those who cannot walk away. For the ones who stay, their rationale, as reconstructed by Le Guin, is very similar to the 'There Is No Alternative' (TINA) style argument. Indeed, Le Guin says that the place those who walk away go is almost unimaginable. Those who decide to stay, even if they recognize the child's condition as a bad thing, as deeply regrettable, as morally troubling, seem to eventually accept that there is nothing to be done. To let the child out now would do it no good, so they reason, since it is so stunted and maladjusted it could not possibly live anything like a flourishing life. This child has simply been too abused and neglected, too maligned and degraded, to live a decent life even in more comfortable circumstances. No one individual possess the power to abolish the mechanism linking the child's suffering to the communities' prosperity. So it is that after a period of days, or maybe weeks, those who stay come to reconcile the enjoyment of abundance with the price paid for that abundance. We have here another parallel with our modern capitalist world economy. Many Western consumers feel powerless to change the capitalist-imperialist system that delivers them the necessities and luxuries they require, even if they see this system as morally problematic. They feel that since there is no alternative to capitalist-imperialism, there is no choice but to just accept it.

The ones who walk away from Omelas are not able to reconcile the child's suffering with their own individual prosperity. But, What does it mean to walk away? Le Guin tells us that those who walk away seem to know where they are headed, but is very cryptic about the place they go. Clearly, if those who walk away are not simply going off to die, then wherever they are going it must be a place where the relationship between suffering and prosperity in Omelas no longer obtains. Perhaps the ones who walk away are going nowhere, as they would rather die than live a morally corrupted life. This would of course imply that there is indeed no alternative to the rule linking suffering and prosperity, and that the only real choice individuals have in deciding whether or not to walk away from Omelas is one between life and death. Thus, it seems terribly pertinent to ask, Is there an alternative? If there is another way of life possible, that severs the connection in Omelas, and in capitalist-imperialism, between the suffering of some and the prosperity of others.

The TINA argument that supports the decision of some to stay in Omelas, as well as the decision of people in our world to accept capitalist hegemony, simply does not hold up. One has little reason to think that there is no alternative, or that the only alternative is death. There is another way to live, and because there is an alternative, the choice to stay becomes less a bit of Stoic equipoise, or the British stiff upper lip, and more a self-serving excuse for complicity in imposing suffering. What is this alternative? How can we live, but at the same time, not depend on impoverishment, degradation, and oppression to furnish a standard of living most contemporary Westerners would consider minimally decent? The answer, in short, is socialism. In particular, a non-market participatory socialism centered on a scheme of de-centralized, participatory, democratic economic planning. One such model is called Participatory Economics, or Parecon, and has been developed by Robin Hahnel and Michael Albert.[2]

Many will still wonder whether such an economy is feasible. It is, of course, not possible here to fully describe and defend this model. Let me offer then a few words on feasibility. First, "free" markets are not only not free at all, but are much less efficient than is often supposed. [3] Even the notion of "efficiency" is not what it seems on its surface. The technical meaning of efficiency in a competitive, capitalist economy differs importantly from the colloquial usage most are familiar with. Markets are in fact rather inefficient. Not only are markets inefficient, but the achievements of planned economies have been consistently, and significantly distorted or ignored entirely. Today, the historical example of the former Soviet Union is massively misunderstood in America; the example of Yugoslavia all but forgotten in the wake of the wars of the early 1990s; and the example of Cuba has been so thoroughly ignored, it is as if maintaining the blockade erased its existence for most Americans. If the technical challenges to send human beings safely to, and then return from, the Moon, can be overcome, then constructing a economic system that meets at least the basic subsistence needs of everyone in terms of food, clothing, shelter, education, and healthcare can be overcome.

What may perhaps come as a real surprise to many is how close we are already to a planned economy. The oligopolistic firms which have increasingly dominated, through mergers and "creative destruction", the U.S. economy since the end of the Second World War already engage in large-scale economic planning; mostly it is a product of co-respective behavior, and long-term planning for the management of capital assets in the interest of shareholders. During the period from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the First World War, the U.S. economy was entirely re-made, and in the interests of capital and capitalists. Between the exigencies of fighting two World Wars sandwiched around the greatest economic crisis of the 20th century, forced the government and the private sector to come to terms with each other and cooperate to save liberalism and capitalism. Coming out of the Second World War the stature achieved by these firms was immense, and their ability to control, regulate, and manipulate all markets was unprecedented. Most importantly for today, the data these firms have accumulated over decades, on everything from production rates to consumer habits, et cetera, makes the technical challenges of economic planning much less daunting. Moreover, the kinds of inventory tracking systems that make retailers like Wal-Mart so efficient, are exactly the kinds of systems that will also make the technical challenges associated with production and distribution easier to manage. For now, all this data is propriety information, that is, it is the private property of the various firms themselves.

At present, the economic planning that occurs is planning for the enrichment of capitalists. That is indeed the raison d'être for firms in keeping records, and collecting data on consumers, and engaging in long-term planning. When this data is nationalized, when it all can be collected, the problems that many still see in the idea of a planned economy become far less formidable. Indeed, many of these problems become more issues of calculation rather than issues of conceiving how a solution could even be possible; as was the case in the 1930s, when the original socialist calculations debates took place.

Conclusion

Our world, like Omelas, is a place where prosperity and abundance co-exist with horrific and structural injustice. Indeed, things are much worse in the real world, as injustice here is not confined to a single individual in a single room. Quite the opposite, the majority experience toil and deprivation so that a minority may indulge in opulence. Even in Omelas, where brutal and unjustified suffering is imposed on only one individual, some cannot bear the price of their abundance and must walk away. Now let us revisit the question implied by the story, Would you (the reader) walk away from Omelas? Could you stay and live a utopian life, all the while knowing its true cost? If yes, if the thought of the child in the basement, abused, alone, half starved, and naked, makes you unable to enjoy the cornucopia on offer, then the same moral intuition applies a fortiori in the case of our modern capitalist economy.

The dark basement of contemporary capitalism can be found in the sweatshops, the favelas, and the factories of the so-called "developing" world. Only because the commodity chains, whose final link are the shelves of the local stores of Western consumers, are so internationally dispersed, that they are largely hidden from consumers. The moral imperative felt in the case of Omelas is in fact only more intense in the real world. We face a moral crisis many times the scale of the hypothetical choice in Omelas every single day. Every day one chooses to uncritically accept and consumer the goods on offer from capitalist imperialism, then one too become complicit in abuses far worse than anything described in Le Guin's story.

If yes, if one would walk away from Omelas, What then? Where would you go, and How would you get there? Walking away from Omelas, walking away from capitalism, does not mean choosing death, it does not mean refusing to eat because everything you can buy is tainted by association with the capitalist mode of production. Walking away from capitalism does not mean forsaking technology, or innovation, or even incentive. What is clear already is that the productive forces that nineteenth and early twentieth century socialists worried about not being insufficiently developed, are now quite ripe. The main question is no longer about production, that is, how to make enough, but rather, it is about distribution, or how to make sure everyone has enough. What is also very clear is that markets are a lot less efficient than they are alleged to be, and that the alternatives to markets are much more practicable than is commonly supposed. Given that markets fail in many important respects, and that more democratic alternatives are feasible, the destination of those walking away should be a form of participatory socialism incorporating democratic economic planning. Knowing that there is a place to walk away to, might hopefully give some the courage needed to leave Omelas, to reject capitalism.

Notes

[1] Le Guin, Ursula. "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas". The Wind's Twelve Quarters. 1975. William Morrow Paperbacks; 2004.

[2] See, Albert, Michael. Parecon: Life After Capitalism. Verso; 2004. Also see, Albert, Michael & Robin Hahnel. The Political-Economy of Participatory Economics. Princeton University Press; 1991.

[3] See Donnaruma, Colin & Nicholas Partyka. "Challenging the Presumption in Favor of Markets". Review of Radical Political Economics. Vol.44 no.1 (2012):40-61.

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

By Colin Jenkins

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

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

- Karl Marx (Capital: Volume One)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Helen Keller

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

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

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

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

Primitive Accumulation, Slavery, and "Old Wealth"

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

- Karl Marx

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Peter Kropotkin (The Conquest of Bread)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Property is Theft": On Private Property and Landlordism

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

- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (What is Property?)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Natural Resources: On Colonialism and Global Looting

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

- Michael Parenti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Trickery Behind "New Wealth"

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

- Eugene V. Debs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Currency and Debt as Means to Maintain Hierarchy

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

- Margaret Atwood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expropriation is not Theft; It's Justice

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

- C.L.R. James

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

[5] Blair (2000)

[6] Miller and Lapham (2012)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[15] Ibid

[16] Zinn, p. 65.

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

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

[19] Zinn, p. 90.

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

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

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

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

[24] Ibid

[25] Ibid

[26] Ibid

[27] Peter Linebaugh, Stop, Thief!

[28] Ibid

[29] Ibid

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

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

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

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

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

[35] Ibid

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

[37] Ibid

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

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

[40] Ibid

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

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

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

[44] Ibid

[45] Ibid

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

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

[48] Ibid, p. 311

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

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

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

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

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

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

[55] Ibid

[56] Ibid

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

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

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

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

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

[62] Graeber, Debt, p. 16

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

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

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

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

[67] Ibid

[68] Graeber, Debt, p. 8

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

[70] Graeber, Debt, p. 56

[71] Graeber, Debt, p. 60

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

[73] Ibid

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

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

[76] Ibid

[77] Ibid

[78] Ibid

[79] Ibid

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

Lying Down On the Job: The Ableist, Racist, Classist Underpinnings of 'Laziness'

By Lindsey Weedston

Hello, I'm a lazy Millennial.

In other words, I'm from a generation that has worked more hours for less money than any generation before me, but occasionally I eat a granola bar for breakfast instead of pouring myself a bowl of cereal. According to some, including many writers of online thinkpieces, that's enough to make me "lazy."

But the problem isn't me, or young people in general, or any group that's historically been decried for its idleness. Like Millennials, groups that are called "lazy" are often the hardest-working people around. They're just subject to ableism, racism, classism, and other bigotry that codes exploitation or exhaustion as "unwillingness to work."

I myself have had a very confusing relationship with "laziness" from a young age, often being called "lazy" for enjoying reading and video games by the same parents who praised me for always getting my homework done on time.

Needless to say, I became rather confused about the quality of my work ethic. Was I lazy or not? In my teens, I developed an anxiety disorder and a perfectionism that made academic shirking impossible, but the constant state of worry disrupted my sleep and left me so exhausted that I would often come home from school and go straight to bed for a nap. Sometimes, all I could do was lay in bed, awake, ruminating on everything I could possibly worry about.

But because I was in bed, this was called "laziness."

In adulthood, I encountered yet more inconsistencies about what it meant to be "lazy." Like many young adults, I started out working in the food and customer service industries, before I eventually got a job as a content writer for a digital marketing company.

I worked so little at that office job, I couldn't believe it. I could spend multiple hours each day scrolling through Tumblr or playing on social media. My "work" time involved reading articles vaguely related to my work-mostly because there wasn't much work for me to do. Compared to being on my feet all day, being expected to work every moment on the clock, it was nothing.

I worked three times as hard at my food and customer service jobs as I did at any of my digital marketing positions. And yet contemptuous thinkpiecers keep on describing people who work in those industries as "lazy." Why don't you get a REAL job? Like reading Tumblr while sitting at a desk, instead of busting your ass at McDonald's.

According to Dr. Alison Munoff, a licensed clinical psychologist, "laziness" is nothing more than a value judgement.

"'Laziness' is not a personality trait, it is simply a matter of a lack of proper motivation and reinforcement, as it is a behavioral pattern rather than a part of who we are," says Dr. Munoff. "The ability to actively approach a task in a time-effective manner changes depending on the task and its value in our lives. For example, in a situation of obtaining limited resources, people find themselves quite motivated and resourceful, meaning that this task is simply a priority based on its value and necessity, and has little to do with someone's personality. Unfortunately I find that when asked about the first time people were told they were being 'lazy,' it was from a parent or caregiver who was unsuccessfully attempting to motivate the child without a good understanding of the way this idea would be carried forward."

In nature, animals spend a lot of their time being idle. Most of the footage shot of big cats like lions are of them lazing around. Part of this is because many of them are nocturnal, but it's also because animals will hunt, forage, and eat until they're full, and then most of the rest of their time is spent conserving energy. Laying around doing pretty much nothing is completely natural. It's adaptive. Yet laziness has this negative connotation in many human societies. And that negative connotation is often deployed in ableist, racist, and classist ways.

Basically every race of color has been called "lazy" by white people in the U.S. at one time or another. This is completely absurd considering the fact that people of color built this nation with their bare hands. From the Chinese immigrants building our railroads to our entire economy being built on the backs of black slaves, the United States owes everything to exploited, underpaid, and incredibly hard-working people of color.

Today, we can all enjoy reasonably priced produce thanks to the many exploited Latin undocumented immigrant workers picking our fruit and vegetables-labor that is so intensive that we "non-lazy" white people simply can't handle it. And let's not forget that all of this land was stolen from the Indigenous tribes that were here before we floated over and laid claim to it all. Isn't stealing other people's hard work supposed to be lazy?

Or is it just that it's easier to call people lazy than admit that you exploited them?

Even if you're not racist, you've probably used the idea of laziness in a way that hurts a lot of people. I still struggle with an anxiety disorder and go through bouts of depression, and a lot of what's involved in these mental illnesses looks like what people call "laziness." Depression saps your energy and makes everything seem pointless. Anxiety is paralyzing, making even some of the simplest tasks (like calling people on the phone) seem daunting, so I avoid them.

Combine the two and you've got me huddled into a ball on the bed, unable to do anything but listen to Netflix playing in the background. It looks like laziness, but I'm actually engaged in an exhausting war in my own head. Anxiety is like pushing a giant boulder in front of you wherever you go, and depression is like dragging a giant boulder attached to your legs by chains.

People with physical illness and disability are also prone to being accused of laziness, especially if that illness or disability is not visible to others. There are people who are nearly constantly in pain or constantly fatigued, but you would never know by looking at them. These individuals work much harder than able-bodied and "healthy" people. Not only do they often have to work to survive because disability payments (if they can get them) are not nearly enough, they have to navigate a world that caters to able-bodied people, and they have to navigate that world while their bodies work against them. But article after article decries the "laziness" of people who use motorized carts or take elevators up one floor instead of using the stairs, not for a second thinking that there are people who wouldn't be able to shop or go up floors at all without these "conveniences."

It's not just articles, either. Politicians demonize people who are too sick or disabled to work, calling them "lazy" as justification for taking away the meager allowance our government gives them-which is not enough to live on, let alone cover medical bills. That ableism intersects with classism, with people assuming that those living in poverty or on welfare must be too lazy to go to school or get a better job. Racism shows its face here, as well, particularly in the myth of the "welfare queen." And the hatred leveled at fat individuals under the guise of thinking them "lazy" can be very intense.

It's easier to think of someone as "lazy" than to face the fact that school costs too much, that better jobs are inaccessible, that childcare is unaffordable, that people are forced to work so hard for so little that there's no way they could have enough energy to attempt schooling or finding better work, and that what we give to people who can't work is insufficient to the point of being shameful. I could say that calling people lazy is, in itself, lazy, but it's not just an intellectual shortcut. It's a defense mechanism.

Everyone has a finite amount of energy. Some of us have greater drains on our pool of energy than others, whether it comes from the stress of racial microaggressions, the stress of poverty, or mental or physical illness. Needing more time to recover isn't laziness. Having less time or energy to make breakfast than the previous generation isn't laziness. When you take a second to look into the reasons behind the behavior, you'll never end up finding laziness. Because laziness isn't real.

This was originally published at The Establishment.

Revolutionary Shop Stewards and Workers Councils in the German Revolution

By Kevin Van Meter

The following is a review essay of Ralf Hoffrogge's Historical Materialism Series book Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard Müller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement .

If Ralf Hoffrogge were writing within an American context rather than a German one, he would be situated between two important developments in the United States. A new cohort of social movement historians is addressing the gaps in anarchist, anti-authoritarian, and left-communist historiography. Neighboring this is a resurgence of interest in workers' councils historically and in the contemporary period. With the recent translation and subsequent publication of Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard M üller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement in two editions, Hoffrogge enters this discourse with a extremely detailed political biography of a nearly unknown militant whose finest years coincided with the German Revolution and workers' council movement of 1918. Communists of various stripes have laid claim to Rosa Luxemburg and anarchists to Gustav Landauer, both murdered as the revolution was suppressed with the latter yelling "to think you are human" as he was stomped to death. Council communists and autonomists have been gifted Richard Müller, who was forgotten in part because he survived.

Revolutions often begin in desertion: sailors, not shop stewards, led the German uprisings of 1918. The end of the Great War steered into the Russian Revolution with soldiers, worn through their boots, joining upheavals rather than returning to their old lives; resulting in the Bolshevik government of October 1917. A year later on October 29th, in a port city 250 miles northwest from Berlin, seamen rebelled, forming sailors councils that later joined with those of workers. Rebellions led by sailors quickly spread across the coast. By November 9th, workers in Berlin left the factories, though daily meetings and shop floor deliberations had begun amongst various revolutionary factions as early as the 2nd. German sailors and workers joined Russians, Greeks, Irish, Mexicans, Egyptians, and Poles as revolutions, often incorporating councils modeled on Russian soviets, emerged across the planet. The Red Scare in the United States prevented circulation of struggles to the American context. Elsewhere in Germany, the Bavarian Council Republic arose November 7th, though it would be defeated electorally in January 1919 with the left parties and radicals pushed out of the government.

There was a constellation of left parties and organizations in Germany leading up to the revolution. The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) had sought a parliamentary avenue to repair the country following economic crises and war; winning the war was viewed as a step toward parliamentary democracy. Karl Liebknecht, like Luxemburg (whom he was eventually killed alongside), was expelled from the SPD due to his antiwar agenda, resulting in the formation of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD). The Spartacus League, led by Liebknecht and Luxemburg, initially functioned as the left wing of of the SPD before merging with the USPD as they increasingly sought revolution through parliamentary means using the vehicle of the workers' councils. Then the Spartacists founded the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in December 1918. After the revolution of November they attempted to consolidate the left wing of the workers movement and bring the workers' councils and shop stewards under their auspices. Launching their own ill-fated insurrection on January 4th, in what is now referred to as the Spartacist uprising, the KPD was suppressed on the 19th; the arrest and execution of its leadership quickly followed. Meanwhile, outside of these shifting allegiances and political wrangling, the sailors and workers' councils persisted as the democratic, organizational expression of working-class abilities and needs.

As with Antonio Gramsci, Liebknecht and Luxemburg enter into the historical record. What is less recognized is how these party formations sought to capture the democratic and revolutionary impulses of the councils in order to form a workers' state. Müller and the shop stewards stood in opposition to these attempts, even as they participated in governing bodies. There is a fundamental political disagreement here. With regard to the shop stewards, Hoffrogge writes, "Their forum was the factory and their form of political action was the general strike" (p. 62). As a young unionist Müller struck out against the imposition of Taylorism. He was to go from a lathe operator to become the temporary head of state for the revolutionary republic. Meanwhile, as a delegate he was the workers' representative in the daily operations of the revolution. Reflecting on Müller's views, Hoffogge offers,

The councils were the original representation of the working class. In the eyes of his opponents, the mass mobilization, which turned every street and factory into a parliament, was 'pure anarchy,' the opposite of politics. The councils' potential for a different structure of representation was opposed and suppressed by the coalition of traditional elites purporting to represent the 'people' (p. 91).

Müller served as workers' council delegate to the Executive Council of the Council of People's Deputies, the governing body of the councils and hence post-revolutionary Berlin. His position as chair meant he was in charge of the Council and in turn the government. The experiment of the Executive Council was to be short-lived since on December 16th the machinery of state was subsumed under the Central Council; the Executive Council, with its direct relationships to sailors and workers' councils, was jettisoned. These maneuvers from above would mark the decline of the November Revolution. Before a year had past, in August 1919, the constitution that would become the guiding document of the Weimer Republic was instituted. Nevertheless workers in central Germany launched rebellions during March 1921 and again in Hamburg throughout October 1923. With the end of the Hamburg uprising the romance of the Germany Revolution was extinguished.

Hoffrogge details the process of revolutionary upheaval, followed by the innumerable ways it disintegrated. Hoffrogge observes that workers' councils, drawing on Müller's own writing of 1913, "had to work out collective practices, like refusal of overtime or slow-downs, gradually and painstakingly" (p. 18). These machinations do not translate into parliamentary politics. Two key political lessons result. First, as delegates and members of councils, ordinary workers are ill-equipped to jostle with party bureaucrats and professional politicians in government bodies. In fact, it is not only the structural incorporation of workers' councils into the government that lead to their defeat. The very day-to-day mechanisms of government dominated by the party and politicians erode the democratic impulses of delegates while replacing their spontaneous enthusiasm with proceduralism. As a result, and secondly, preparing for governing post-revolutionary conditions is an important area for future theorization and organizing. However, Hoffrogge has produced an intellectual history not a genealogy or strategic manual for potential workers' councils. The book suffers for lack of a proper introduction and overview for those unfamiliar with the German Revolution. The first such summary appears in chapter five. Many readers will have trouble acclimating to the context Müller was operating within.

There are two ways to read Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: as a social movement history or as a biography. Readers looking for the former will stop at chapter nine and forgo the final three chapters, which address Müller's developments after leaving politics. But for those looking for the arc that is a political life will discover Hoffrogge's excruciatingly detailed account of the lathe operator who was to become temporary head of the German Republic before "returning to obscurity" (p. 230).

Read as a social movement history, Hoffrogge joins the resurgence of interest in workers' councils following the 2008 planetary economic crisis. Edited collections, including, Ours to Master and to Own: Workers' Control from the Commune to the Present (where Hoffrogge's writing on Müller first appeared in English), New Forms of Worker Organizing: The Syndicalist and Autonomist Restoration of Class-Struggle Unionism, and An Alternative Labor History: Worker Control and Workplace Democracy have reintroduced the concept of the workers' council to contemporary labor organizers, although, a new edition of labor historian Peter Rachleff's out-of-print Marxism and Council Communism would provide a historical overview of these ideas and practices. As social movement scholars, Hoffroge and others will have to contend with the short twentieth century where workers' councils appeared as part of revolutionary upheavals. When considered chronologically, these include: Russia, Poland, Germany, Italy, Ireland, China, Spain, Hungary, France, Chile, and Iran. Did what began in 1905 conclude in 1978?

While Hoffrogge addresses missing historiography, I am afraid that the specificity of the subject matter - Müller, shop stewards, Berlin in 1918 - will draw readers away from the considerable details of day-to-day organizing and operations of workers' councils. Admittedly this is a criticism of the reader rather than the author. The Brill edition is a pricy hardback suitable for academic libraries. Historical Materialism has corrected this initial error by providing a softcover version at just over the cost of buying a round of bier for Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Landauer, and Müller.

Hoffrogge, Ralf. Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard M üller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement. Joseph Keady, trans. Chicago: Haymarket Books. 2015. 253 pp. $28.00 softcover. ISBN 978-16-08-46550-7; and, Leiden & Boston: Brill. 2015. 253 pp. $141.00 hardback. ISBN 978-90-04-21921-2.

The Bosses' Utopia: Dystopia and the American Company Town

By Nick Partyka

This is the second part of a multi-part series. Read Part One here.

On The Value of Utopia

For many centuries persons, peoples, and civilizations, have dreamed about what an ideal society (utopia) would look like, and worried about ways in which society could be much worse (dystopia). Utopian dreams and dystopian worries are powerful tools for thinking about what sorts of changes a society should pursue or avoid, and what underlying dynamics these proposed changes expose. This series examines the tradition of utopian and dystopian thought in western culture, beginning with the ancient Greeks, but continuing on into the modern period. Our focus in this series will be on the important social, political, and economic ideas and issues raised in different utopian stories. When we look into utopian stories, and their historical times, what we'll see reflected in the stories of utopia are the social, political, and economic concerns of the authors, their societies, and or their particular social class.

The meaning of the word 'utopia' comes to us from ancient Greece. In our modern world the word takes its current form because of Thomas More's 1516 book of the same name. Indeed, it is this book from which most of the modern western European utopian tradition takes its origin; or at least, this work inaugurates its most common trope. Where we have in our lexicon one 'utopia', the Greeks had two. The difference, even confusion, between them marks an essential cleavage. For the Greeks, there was both Eu- topia, and Ou-topia. Both are derived in part from the Greek word topos, which means "place", and the suffix 'ia' meaning land. Translated into English, 'Ou-topia' means something like, " No-place land", whereas 'Eu-topia' translates as "good-place land". More succinctly, the difference is between the idea of the best place, and an impossible place. It is the difference between a place which does not exist, because it has not yet been realized, and a place which cannot, and could not, ever exist.

Our modern word is pronounced as the Greeks pronounced 'Eutopia'. However, the meanings of these Greek words were confused by modern writers, who ended up with the spelling 'utopia', from the old English 'Utopie' as opposed to "Eutopia", as meaning "good place". This basic confusion about utopias, between "good place" and "no place", inserts an important ambiguity directly in the center of thinking about utopias. This ambiguity forces one to wonder of utopian writers, Are their visions supposed to be dreams of possible futures meant to incite us to action, or are they impossible dreams meant as reminders that the world is not easily re-shaped by human effort? Is a utopia supposed to be a good place or a no-place, Is the author supporting or condemning the practices of the fictional societies they describe?

One qualification must be made right away. A utopia is not a paradise. There is a colloquial usage of 'utopia' and 'utopian' that seem to suggest that it is a paradise. And compared to the societies in which actual humans lives, many of the fictional utopias would have indeed been seen as paradises, relatively speaking. However, we must draw a technical distinction between a paradise or a golden-age, and a utopia. In a paradise or golden-age no work and no effort are required by humans to obtain the things they want and need. Perhaps the most famous golden-age many are familiar with would be the Biblical Garden of Eden. Another well-known paradise is described in the mid-14th century poem The Land of Cockaigne, where fully cooked turkey legs literally fly through the air and into one's mouth. In this place the only effort on need put in is to chew.

The whole idea of a Cockaigne, or a paradise, is that everything one would ever need is abundantly supplied without any effort. The natural world is just so constructed - either at random or by design - that there springs forth automatically an abundance of everything necessary for everyone, all the time, always. In this kind of society, or world, there never arises anything resembling what we - or most societies in the history of our world - recognize as a political problem. Everyone has enough of everything. So there is no cause for argument. There is no inequality, because everyone has everything everyone else has. Or at least, everyone has access to just as much of what others have whenever they would like it. In this kind of world what causes could there be for strife, or for civil war? A paradise, or a golden-age, is thus totally non-political, and as such not terribly interesting.

What this means is that utopias are enough like our own condition, our own world, that we can take inspiration from them. They are enough like the social conditions we know that we can learn lessons for and about ourselves and our societies by examining at them. This is exactly what makes utopias so interesting. As we will see, utopian literature has a long, very long, history with human beings. The enduring appeal of and, interest in utopias testifies to their relevance. This is the reason that we too are looking at utopias. We are all concerned with, or at least we are all effected by, the way our society is organized. By looking at how other ideal societies might be organized we can explore the merits, and demerits of various kinds of social institutions, and of the various ways of structuring those institutions. We are concerned to change our own society, and utopias allow us to think about the direction of that change.

We have a colloquial usage of the word 'utopia' and 'utopian' in contemporary society that works to prohibit much creative thought, and dismisses utopian thought as feckless, and as such, worthless. Part of the aims of this series is to demonstrate the value of this "worthless" endeavor. Dreaming, far from idle, far from impotent, is essential. Without wonder, without questions, the human imagination will atrophy. The value of this is that thinking about utopias allows us to both critique present societies, but also to articulate a vision of how we'd like our societies to be different. The deeper value of utopian thinking is that it sets us free, free to speculate and more importantly to give expression to our striving, to our desire for a better world. Everything human beings can be must first be dreamed by human beings. This is the value of utopia and dystopia. Thus, the first pre-requisite for this series is the rejection of this colloquial notion of utopia and the utopian. Dismissed from the start, it will not be a surprise if we fail to learn anything from our utopian traditions.

Introduction

In another part of this series I discussed the American tradition of radical utopianism. Owenites, Fourierists, as well as various and sundry religious sects, all attempted experiments in communal living inspired by utopian political or spiritual ideologies. By removing themselves from the world, these groups sought to re-make society in miniature, as an example that could be replicated throughout the country as an alternative to the ascendant bourgeois society. American history also contains a dystopian tradition. Some individuals who came under the sway of certain utopian idea also happened to have large amounts of money, and or were proprietors of large business concerns. Several very wealthy businessmen cum would-be philanthropists embarked on many now forgotten utopian experiments. In some ways their schemes resemble Owen's original New Lanark project, in that a firm's profit-motive was used to argue for less abusive working conditions for workers. I am talking, of course, about the company town.[1] A term now, and for good reason, loaded with connotations of anti-democratic forms of dependence and surveillance, a modern industrial feudalism, that galled observers and greatly angered many worker-residents.

At many points in American history wealthy capitalists saw it as beneficial to construct planned communities for their workers. These ran the gamut from unsanitary ramshackle slums and ghettoes with little planning or services, to highly elaborate planned communities designed according to the proprietors' ideology of choice, in which even small details were prescribed and regimented. In some of these capitalist-inspired utopian experiments, designed to 'elevate' workers, one can see clear examples of many dystopian themes manifested in real-life. Looking at the experience of company towns one readily discerns significant dystopian elements, e.g. some rather reminiscent of George Orwell's now famous Big Brother. The high-handed, obtrusive, and moralistic scrutiny of private life; the regimentation of work and social life; the uniformity of living standards; strictly imposed and enforced moral codes, are all dystopian elements one can find in the work of the most well-known dystopian writers, e.g. Orwell, Huxley, and Zamyatin.

The United States has had a unique experience with company towns, quite different from the experience of European countries. America saw both a greater number of company towns, as well as greater diversity among them. The uniqueness of the American experience has to do mainly with the size of America and the prominence of the frontier, and the small-government sensibilities of the founding generation. That the country was expanding geographically, and that the government was typically disposed to take a laissez-faire stance on interference with the private undertakings of businessmen and entrepreneurs. These factors combined to allow private sector actors wide latitude in their ability to construct ideal communities, that is, communities that were ideal for the bosses in that they served the bosses' interests more than those of workers. This freedom for the private sector has sometimes resulted in neo-feudal conditions, e.g. like those that were found in many Appalachian coal towns, and other times in the more bucolic and rural utopian project of magnates like Milton Hershey.

In the Beginning There Was Lowell

The Pilgrims who came to North America had designs to create a 'city on a hill', a symbol to all the world of how to live justly and righteously. There is a certain obvious utopian aspect to this view. The chartered basis of these colonies, and their need to make a profit gave them some of the shades of the company town. They remained for many years trapped in a cycle of debt, always needing to consume more in supplies to sustain themselves than the value of their exports would purchase. This is one reason that the early colonists pursued whaling, as well as fur trading and trapping right from the start. Beaver pelts in particular were extremely lucrative, and it was the expressed intention of many colonial leaders to use export of pelts to pay for not only the debts incurred for the initial transportation to the American continent, but also the provision, supplies, and other goods the colonists would eventually want and need to import.

A famed British historian writes, "Whoever says Industrial Revolution says cotton".[2] Thus, we should not be surprised to see cotton, the company town, and utopianism come together in the early phase of American industrialization. As such, one must look first to Lowell, Massachusetts where its eponymous founder Francis Cabot Lowell established one of America's first water-mill operations, as well as one its first well-known company towns. Indeed, the town, famous for its past, continues to drawn large numbers of tourists year after year.

Francis certainly had some utopian ideas behind his designs in business, and community building plans. A wealthy Boston merchant, Lowell, toured England in 1811 where he saw first-hand the conditions in the mill-towns of industrializing Britain. What he saw there, especially in places like Manchester, shocked him, as it would many others including Friedrich Engels. The poverty, degradation, squalor, misery, disease, and "moral corruption", which was perceived to run rampant in the new large urban industrial city, disturbed Lowell. Those few capitalists who did have qualms about industrialization, and the rise of industrial society, tried to find ways to achieve the social benefits of industrialization, but to avoid the crushing desperation of life in industrial cities like Manchester. This is the inspiration for Robert Owen's brand of utopian socialism. His New Lanark mill-town was a model of reform, and saw the material improvement of workers and their living conditions as the basis of the transformation of society. It is in this same spirit that Francis Cabot Lowell conceived his American mill-town. Lowell sought to create the opposite of what he saw in Manchester, a bright, healthy and virtuous community. Yet, he also certainly sought the immense profits to be made in the textile industry. He certainly had no intention of operating his business at a loss. Owen, for instance, while certainly a prosperous businessman, had a moral and ideological mission, which balanced his quest for profits, and New Lanark was profitable.

Lowell imagined his mill-town as an intellectually and morally uplifting community, which would fit into the needs of American society at large, and in this way help form the economic basis of an American capitalist utopia. His community would help create that 'city on a hill' so many different groups had hoped to turn America into. Lowell's plan was to recruit his workforce from the younger women living and working on the farms in the area. These young New England ladies would come to work seasonally in Lowell, not become full-time proletarian toilers. In order to attract these workers Lowell advertised the intellectually stimulating, culturally vibrant, and moral upright way of life that characterized the community. He wanted these young women, and especially their parents, to think of their time in Lowell as a kind of preparation for adult life and for marriage. Francis was always keen to point out in his pitch that his lady workers had access to such essential icons of "middle class" life as books and pianos. He also highlighted the presence of older women who acted as supervisors of the boardinghouses where these young women were housed, and who enforced a strict 10pm curfew. Between studying music, or literature and poetry, attending free lectures or other amusements, life in Lowell was supposed by Lowell himself to be as good for the workers, their families, and even the country, as it was profitable for himself and his business partners.

The reality of the life of the town, and the experience of the people who resided in it, differed in several large respects from Cabot Lowell's intentions. Some aspects of the life of the community at Lowell we will see re-appear in company-towns throughout American history. The most important of these is despotism, in one or another of its many forms. The control wielded over the life of the town, and thus over the residents, by the company's owners would work to foster several dystopian and despotic elements in Lowell, as well as in later company towns. The company regimented the rhythms of life in town, fitting it to the needs of the production process, and it announced the progression of each day's routine through the sounding of bells. Workers were woken at 4:30am, and required to be to work by 4:50am. The working day ended at 7pm, and there was a 10pm curfew in town. The bells marked the transition from each part of the day to the next, when to get up, when to work, when to eat, when to rest. This regime was no doubt onerous to many. Lowell's vision of where his workforce would come from soon crumbled, as he failed to attract as many young New England ladies as he hoped. Thus, very soon Lowell and his partners had predominantly immigrant workforce in their town.

On the job, workers were subject to the personal discipline of the foreman. This was usually entirely arbitrary, and workers lacked any recourse against such depredations. Off the job, workers were subject to the scrutiny and censure of a system of "moral police" operating in the town. The older women boardinghouse-keepers were some of the main agents in this network of spies and informants, of which other workers might well also be a part. The company, i.e. its officials, could fine or fire any workers for immoral conduct, like consuming alcohol. Any employee that failed to fulfill their contractual one year of service, because they quit without the contractually mandated two weeks' notice or were not "honorably discharged", would be blacklisted from employment in the area. Workers were required to attend church services, and to pay a mandatory fee to support this church. They also had to pay a fee to stay in the boardinghouses, which apparently not lacking in food, were over-crowded, poorly ventilated, and lacking entirely in privacy. Workers came to live and work at Lowell despite these kinds of conditions because the pay was too good to pass up.

A striking vision of the lives of the women who toiled in the factories like these in antebellum America can be found in a lesser-known work by famed American author Herman Melville. In his short-story, The Paradise of the Bachelors & the Tartarus of the Maids, Melville paints a vivid picture of the drudgery of the actual work of producing cotton textiles in these early factories.[3] Though the workers in his story are making paper and not textiles, the main outlines of the workers' experience would have been much the same. Melville describes the entrance to his fictional, yet all too real, mill in the most daunting imagery, invoking the idea of "Dantean gate" one must pass through. In describing the operations, and workers of this mill Melville uses language that evokes the toil, degradation, over-bearing foremen, the sexism, being beholden to the whims and demands of the company on whom one depends. Melville is just one rather famous example of a common view at this time, that factory work, wage work, was a kind of slavery. At a time of rising sentiment of opposition to slavery, this was a potent objection to capitalism, and to the plans of capitalists, that it was slavery by another means, and not acceptable treatment for white people. This sentiment was also part of the inspiration for two strikes in Lowell in 1834 and 1836 largely in response to wage cuts announced by the company in reaction to falling prices for textile goods.

Utopian Paternalism

Francis Cabot Lowell was not to be the last American capitalist to dream of creating a model community where the vices and sins of the rapidly modernizing world would be excluded, and a more idyllic life re-created. First and foremost of these new modern ills, in the minds of capitalist utopian visionaries like George Pullman, Milton Hershey, and Henry Ford, among others, was labor strife, that is, labor unions. Thus, one of the main foci of the efforts of capitalist utopian was preventing workers from organizing and bargaining collectively. What we will see in each of the examples mentioned above is that these attempts at creating a more ideal kind of life within modernizing, and industrializing American society share certain dystopian elements. The most apt way to characterize the main themes of these capitalist - led efforts at building and operating planned communities is as utopian paternalism. Capitalists like Pullman and Ford certainly saw themselves as advancing the workers' own good, even when those workers' views about their own good were to the contrary. These men thought they knew better than workers what was in their best interests. Unsurprisingly, none of these utopian experiments was successful from the point of view of their founders, since they all failed to prevent the rise of labor unions.

In 1880 George Pullman, maker of the famous Pullman Palace Car, the ubiquitous sleeping car which made transcontinental rail travel more comfortable, began to construct an ideal community on the outskirts of Chicago.[4] The town of Pullman would feature several lavish public buildings, including a library and theater. The residences were supposed to be more commodious, most were connected to natural gas and running water, some even featured bathrooms. There was a wide array of shops housed in public buildings to accommodate the needs of the town's residents. Much effort was made to create a pleasant aesthetic in the town, from the design of the buildings to the layout of the community. Pullman desired to re-create a more bucolic atmosphere to contrast with the grit and grime of the cities. Pullman, based on a firm profit motive, believed that treating workers better would make them more loyal, harder working, and less likely to want to join a labor union. His model community would not only save money by locating workers near their place of work, but also would help to forge a new kind of worker. This new worker would be more dependable, more docile, more compliant, et cetera. This change would of course be more conducive to capitalists' accumulation of wealth.

One thing every building in Pullman had in common, from the work buildings, to the residential buildings, was that they were all owned by the Pullman company. Workers were compelled to be renters, and not permitted to own their homes. The rent payments for which were deducted automatically from workers' paychecks. Not just workers, but also all community organizations, were prohibited from owning buildings, and anyone could be evicted with a mere ten days warning. Moreover, what came to pass for a municipal government in the town of Pullman was completely under the control of the Pullman company. The foundations of community life were only further eroded by the use of "inspectors' by the Pullman company in its town, whose job it was to report on the workers, their activities, affiliations, and opinions. These inspectors were to report any resident who was found to have undesirable or immoral views, attitudes, or habits. The atmosphere of the town of Pullman was best described as a kind of, "benevolent, well-wishing feudalism" with George Pullman as its king.[5] Discontent with conditions in the town of Pullman contributed to the desire of workers to unionize, and helped spark the famous 1894 strike of the Pullman company by the American Railway Union led by Eugene V. Debs. [6]

Inspired to some extent by the example of Pullman, the man and the town, in 1903 Milton Hershey began work on his own planned industrial community. [7] His was to be modeled to a degree after the Mennonite villages familiar in the area of Pennsylvania Hershey chose. The area had one key virtue for him, lots of dairy farms nearby to provide the critical ingredient he needed for his chocolate, i.e. milk. Like Pullman, and others, Hershey was a critic of the growing urban society. The urban environment was seen as morally corrupting and physically unhealthy for the people who lived in them. Thus, Milton thought that by re-creating a more pastoral, healthier kind of life workers lives would be improved. What could also be improved was his profits, by reducing labor agitation. In the same profit-first motive of Pullman and Lowell, Hershey thought that contented works would be more productive, more loyal, workers. In a further echo of the Amish who lived in the area, Hershey envisioned a prosperous community full of clean-living residents. Even more than Pullman, Hershey invested in public buildings in his town, including the now famous Hershey Industrial School which housed and educated orphaned boys. His eponymous town would in this way, and others, serve as a living advertisement for his product, the wholesomeness of the one reinforcing that of the other.

The town of Hershey would also experience many dystopian elements, despite it is founders' intentions, though perhaps less intensely than in Pullman. In contrast to Pullman and Lowell, the high-handed moral despotism in Hershey would be doled out by the proprietor himself. In the town of Hershey, Milton was the moral police; he was also the mayor, chief of police, and fire chief, as there were no elected officials. The comfortable life available to worker-residents of Hershey came as part of a trade-off in which one sacrificed democracy. In exchange for having no control over their community, worker-residents received several benefits, medical coverage and a retirement plan; free garbage pick-up and snow removal; public buildings like churches and schools, including a junior college with free tuition for workers; and, despite having all this, there were no local taxes.

In many ways Hershey's plans came to fruition, and the town enjoyed a fairly harmonious existence for many years. Indeed, it was not long before the town achieved notoriety as a tourist attraction, both the chocolate factory as well as the "Hershey Park" amusement park. The modern world caught up to Hershey eventually, leaving a large black mark on the town's reputation. In 1937 labor violence in the town made all the wrong kind of headlines. Local dairy farmers dependent on selling to the Hershey factory brawled with striking workers. Outnumbered four to one, the strikers were badly beaten and chased away from company grounds by the mob of dairy farmers.

Henry Ford also fancied himself a philanthropic businessman, someone who could help educate workers and elevate their lives. His famous $5 a day plan was built on the same kind of hard-headed, profit-oriented logic we've seen in both Pullman and Hershey, as well as the capitalist utopian visions of the moral improvement of workers. And just like both of these others, Ford's generosity came at price. There was a rather dark side to Ford's desire to improve the lives of his largely immigrant workers. In exchange for a higher wage, workers had to pledge to live wholesome lives, that is, conduct themselves both on and off the job according to Ford's moral precepts. Just as we saw with Lowell, higher than average wages attracted an enormous glut of applicants. Workers came and they stayed, despite the brutish tactics of Ford's anti-union henchmen in the Service Department and the condescending racism of Ford's Sociological Department, because of the higher pay and benefits offered.[8]

The infamous Service Department at Ford was headed by Harry Bennett, a vicious enforcer whose egregious abuses of workers remained mostly secret from the public. He used fear, intimidation, and a paramilitary gang to pressure workers into doing as they were told. The main job of this secret police force was to prevent and disrupt and potential union organizing activity by Ford workers, by any means necessary. Surveillance and beatings were to main tactics Bennett and his thugs applied to suspected union activists. Bennett also constructed a huge network of spies within the company, so that potential agitators never knew if they were talking to one of his informers. Ford's Sociological Department was responsible for turning his immigrant workers into "real" Americans. In a racist and very insensitive way, workers were to be stripped of their foreign customs and beliefs, and then re-made to be as American as apple pie. Employment was conditional on workers learning English and American civics at company provided classes. Intentionally symbolically, the highly choreographed graduation ceremony for the Ford school began with workers in their native dress, and ended with them in American-style clothes. After graduating workers were supposed to have gotten rid of their old ways, and completely adopted American ideals and values.

Ford's Sociological Department was also responsible for a highly intrusive regime of surveillance of workers and their personal lives. Members of the Sociological Department interviewed workers, and their family members, often several times, asking extremely invasive questions about many different aspects of workers' lives. Though billed as a project aimed at social reform, the operatives of this department collected massive amounts of information about Ford employees and their families. How many times they were married, how much debt they had, how much money they remitted to relatives, and whether they had bank accounts, were all questions Sociological Department agents asked workers. These interviews were not one-off affairs. Two, three, even four, interviews would not have been uncommon, and this applies to the workers' family members as well. Workers were lectured by these company-men to maintain a certain standard of cleanliness and order at home. Naturally they were heavily discouraged from the vices of drinking, smoking, and gambling.

Industrial Feudalism

The darkest side of the American experience with the company town can be found in the example of coal and steel towns, as well as oil boom-towns. Hardy Green concisely describes this variety of the company town as, "exploitationville".[9] This title is largely self-explanatory. This is because the image of the coal town, especially the Appalachian coal town, has remained such a vivid part of America's popular consciousness. The reign of the company, its officials and its store, is legendary for its ruthlessness, brutality, arbitrary punishment, and oppression through debt. The famous song "Sixteen Tons" by Tennessee Ernie Ford affixes in the popular imagination the tyranny of the company in the coal town; the drudgery of the work; the inadequate pay; company theft of that pay; reliance on debt, and corresponding servitude to it, as well as the despair and despondency this way of life created. Often times these 'towns' were little more than camps or agglomerations of shacks, shanties, and hovels. There were often few or no public services, and when they did exist workers were usually forced to pay exorbitant prices for the most basic services, e.g. garbage collection and sanitation infrastructure.

Like other company towns, workers in coal towns were not allowed to own property, and thus forced to rent from the company at the prices it set. Workers were often paid in 'scrip', a form of local money only good at the company store. They were thus dependent on the company for everything they needed. As one might expect, workers were routinely bilked of their hard-earned wages by their unscrupulous employers through inflated prices for staple goods, as well as taxes and fees for basic services. Like in other company towns, there were usually no elected officials, and all law enforcement was overseen by the company. The 1871 Coal Creek War in Tennessee is a prominent example of the kind of reaction workers had to the many ways their employers dominated, oppressed, and robbed them. It is also a characteristic example of how employers in many different sectors dealt with organized labor in similar ways. Nor were such practices limited to the coal mining industry. Mining communities all over the country endured conditions, to one degree or another like those of the coal towns, from the omnipresent surveillance and spies, to the tyrannical foremen and threats of violence.

In many cases steel towns were not much better, though the housing might be better than the notoriously poor housing afforded workers in mining towns, particularly the coal towns. Gary, Indiana, and Homestead, Pennsylvania are two prominent examples of company towns in the steel industry. Both projects were motivated by the same utopian capitalist logic about making workers materially better off enough to reject union membership. The broad outlines of the story in both communities are familiar: inadequate, unsanitary, and or over-crowded housing; housing allocated by status; housing dependent upon employment; over-priced rents automatically deducted from wages; abusive foremen acting with impunity; workers forced to sing "yellow dog" contracts promising not to join a union as a condition of employment; no independent stores; workers paid in company 'scrip'; over-bearing moral codes imposed on workers by "moral police". Conditions at Homestead, in addition to issues like wages and hours, were one of the most significant factors in sparking the infamously bloody strike in 1892. Labor strife would come to Gary in a big way in 1919. Workers striking for improves wages, and reduced hours, were certainly also very upset about the living conditions in town. In both cases, the owners, with help from the state, used violence to disperse the workers and repress their demands and their organizations.

American Dystopias

It should be clear, after a look at the historical experience of company towns in America, that, in many, if not most, instances this experience contains many distinctly dystopian elements. Indeed, the experience of workers in company towns across America forms a unique American dystopian tradition, which contrasts sharply with its robust utopian tradition. When we look to the works of some of the great dystopian writers, we will notice the same themes that we saw in the real-life, historical experience of American company towns. George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Evgeny Zamyatin, all present visions of future dystopian societies which embody - in some cases to a fantastic extreme- the abusive treatment and horrible living conditions that characterized the life of many American company towns.

All three dystopian authors depict future societies in which an authoritarian government, composed of an elite minority, rules despotically over the rest of the population. Moreover, in all three, the activities of the dominated population are structured in a way that furthers the social, economic, and political aims of the ruling elite. All three of these dystopian societies make use of some particular combination of omnipresent surveillance, brutal and violent repression and torture, or some form of psychological conditioning to compel the population into compliance with the government's policies. The people of these dystopian societies are led, or forced, to believe that the current order of things is actually for everyone's benefit; though clearly some benefit more than others. All three are portrayed by their leaders as peaceful and harmonious societies, despite the fact that violence and repression, of one kind or another, are needed to maintain order in society.[10]

Whether Orwell's Big Brother in Oceania, Huxley's Alphas in the future London, or The Benefactor in Zamyatin's the One State, features from all three of these dystopian societies find analogs in American company towns: a single-minded and ideologically motivated founder or leader; the enforced dependence of the population on the state, that is the elite minority who run it; the abusive treatment of the population by the officials of the state; an unrelenting and intrusive propaganda offensive against the enemies of the state; monopoly on the press, and censorship of rivals as a form of persecution; universal surveillance of the population by the ruling elite, including an extensive network of spies and informers; unhealthy and degrading living conditions for the majority of the population, but opulence for the elite; systematic theft from, or exploitation of, the population to meet the needs of the ruling elite; thoroughly rational, totally invasive, and frustratingly stultifying regimentation of life both on and off the job.

Conclusion

The company towns in America all seem to share one thing in common, a pattern of boom and bust. This might be separated by decades, but all company towns seem to share a common fate. Namely, when the business dries up, or the industry collapses, the town dies. Sometimes the death is quick, other times long, drawn-out, and painful. The oil or gold boom-towns would be on one extreme, as they could disappear entirely over-night, and re-established at the next site in rapid order. Closer to the other end of the spectrum, company towns collapse because the industry changed or relocated, e.g. Lowell or Pullman. Other company towns collapse because their reason for existing disappears, e.g. the coal seam, or silver vein is tapped out. Sometimes company towns survive the collapse of the firms that dominate them, but as mere ghosts of their former selves, e.g. Gary. Only a very small successful few remain in operation, like Hershey. It is in light of this history of the company town in America that one should see the collapse of Detroit. One industry so dominated employment in that city, that as it fortunes flagged, so too did those of the city. Just as the industry declined, and resorted to new methods to remain competitive and continue to generate the profits shareholders expect, indeed demand, so too did Detroit decline. And, as a result, the city was forced to resort to measures that accelerated the city's decline by encouraging disinvestment, diminishing public services, and eroding quality of life.

To many Americans, fascism, as represented in regimes like Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy, is the ultimate real-life dystopia. Many Americans also think that this is a foreign problem, something embedded in the cultural DNA of the Old World. Many think of this kind of ideology is not, and cannot be, indigenously American. Hence the extreme xenophobia that arose during both world wars, and the antipathy many Americans felt towards the early labor movement. Yet, the historical experience of the company town in America demonstrates that these conceptions are quite misleading. When given freest reign, capitalists, have created social environments that resemble quite closely the kinds of literary dystopias that most haunt our imagination. Fascism, in fact, has an American pedigree in the legacy of the company town. The legacy of the company town also quite nicely illustrates that fascism is not only bigoted hate-groups waving swastika flags. It also comes in more patriotic, more benevolent and well-meaning forms, like the kind of utopian paternalism that was evident in most company towns. It can also be seen, naked and direct, in the violent and authoritarian regimes that dominated some company towns, especially those associated with the mining industry.

Notes

[1] For an interesting history of the company town, see; Green, Hardy. The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills that Shaped the American Economy. Basic Books, 2010.

[2] Hobsbawn, Eric. Industry & Empire. 1968.The New Press, 1999; 34.

[3] Melville, Herman."The Paradise of the Bachelors and the Tartarus of the Maids". 1849. Great Short Works of Herman Melville. Perennial Classics, 2004.

[4] See Green (2004): 27-35.

[5] Richard T. Ely quoted in Green (2004):31.

[6] For an interesting insight into the living conditions in Pullman, and the how they contributed to the 1894 strike see; Ginger, Ray. The Bending Cross. 1947. Haymarket Books, 2007.

[7] See Green (2004): 35-41.

[8] See Grandin, Greg. Fordlandia. Picador, 200: Ch.2 & 4.

[9] Green (2004); Ch.3

[10] See Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1949.; Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. 1932; Zamyatin, Evgeny. We. 1924.

"Why Don't You Just Get a Better Job" and Other Dumb Shit People Say to Low-Income Earners Stuck in Precarious Work

By Chloe Ann King

For most of my working life I have been stuck in the hospitality industry which is lowly paid, painfully precarious and poorly regulated. In New Zealand, where I live, hospitality employers mostly treat you as nothing more than an easily replaceable unit to turn-over-profit. I have spent over a decade in this industry and as such I have become acutely aware of the fact that no matter how many shifts I work or how many poorly paid jobs I undertake; I will never have enough money to meet rising living costs.

Sometimes, my life is a bit depressing. You know what I mean? I get up, I go and work one of my multiple jobs and I come home. Each week I check my bank balance and I feel pretty put-out about how low my pay is as compared to how hard I worked for it.

Obviously, working hard at minimum wage jobs is never going to land me economic security. No matter how hard I have worked in the hospo industry I have never ever received a pay-rise, not once. The lie of "hard work" serves to convince us that if we fail to achieve happy, healthy and joy filled lives which are economically secure thanks to well paid jobs, it is because we failed to work hard enough for it. Constantly we are told that external factors do not affect us. This type of pervasive 'positive' rhetoric isendlessly used by many self-help Gurus such as Tony Robbins, one of America's most well-known motivational speakers.

The lie of "hard work" is pitched to us - those from the working and lower classes, by not only self-help gurus and spiritualists but politicians and well intentioned high school teachers and even our parents, as being one of the best paths to prosperity. This myth is perpetuated and disseminated by the mainstream media as motivational newsworthy 'human interest' stories. However, there is very little which is human about these types of stories. The core of these news pieces has nothing to do with humanity or being human and everything to do with selfishness and individualism and play on insecurities and our need to compare our lives to others who we think or we are passive aggressively told, have it better than us.

A few months ago the NZ Herald (New Zealand's most read newspaper which controls the national narrative) ran yet another one of these "motivational" articles on a young landlord named Gary Lin. Who has managed to buy up a staggering eleven properties citing "hard work" as a reason for his success. He told the NZ Herald,

"Work hard, work smart, save hard, and invest smart. Wealth creation is not rocket science - perseverance and hard work can get you there."

As if wealth creation is something we should as young people, be aspiring to. In times of great wealth inequality, we should be demanding wealth dispersal not setting out to create and covet wealth for ourselves. Gary, unlike most of us, was given a hefty "leg up" or what we poor folk call a "handout" by his father in the sum of $200,000 as a wedding gift which allowed him to buy his first home which cost him $175,000. I guess for some people money really does grow on trees.

I hate to break it to you Gaz - can I call you Gaz? But "hard work" had nothing to do with your successes in life.

Gaz got lucky. He won the genetic lottery and was born into wealth - he did not earn the money that helped him buy his first home. It was given to him. Instead of using his unearned wealth to help others he made the choice to punch-down and profit off the growing number of people stuck in the rental trap by hoarding properties. Gaz has engaged in predatory behavior by renting his properties out at market rental rates. In an unregulated rental market the odds are never in favor of tenants. As George Minbiot wrote for the Guardian, "Rent is another term for unearned income."

People like Gaz rarely acknowledge their economic success is at the expense of those from the lower and working classes. To recognize this Gaz, might have to feel a little bit bad about how he came into his millionaire property portfolio. He might have some kind of world shattering epiphany that he is not as smart as he believes and his successes are owed more to an ability to stomach the ruthless actions and attitudes needed to 'make it' in a society that is quickly turning into a dystopian one. Which makes The Hunger Games, look like child's play. Sociopathy and luck had more to do with Gaz's successes in life than actual "hard work", talent and intelligence.

Lawyer and anti-poverty activist David Tong, responded to Gaz's flawed belief that anyone can own property if they just "work hard" enough, with these words:

"Motivational read from the NZ Herald: You too can be a rich property investor. If dad gives you a $200,000 gift"

"Hard work" and motivation don't mean shit in a broken economy that was built on the blood, backs and bones of the working class and the most marginalized and vulnerable. Increasingly, accessing upward mobility - which buying property can help you obtain as well as a better quality of life, is becoming an impossible task because of low wages, insecure work and a flooded job market. People are just struggling to get off minimum wage let alone save for a house.

***

The New Zealand Council of Trade Unions states that "At least 30% of New Zealand's workers - over 635,000 people - are in insecure work. We believe it may well cover 50% of the workforce." No matter how hard you work it is impossible to get ahead when your employer only offers you inconsistent hours and denies your basic right to a guarantee of minimum hours.

Casual contracts are used widely within the hospitality and service industries and state that your employer owes you "no minimum of hours." But the expectation is that you will cover and come in when needed and if you refuse you are often faced with penalties. Such as having your shifts cut the next week. Having the stability of a salary as opposed to waged work is a far off dream for so many of us. You can't budget let alone save money for a house when you never know what your pay-check is going to be from one week to the next.

Economic insecurity because of cut shifts and insecure hours has been a major feature of my working life. For example, last year just before Christmas I had my shifts cut in half. I went from working between four and five shifts a week down to only two. I was given six days' notice and when I pointed out how hard this would hit me economically to a Duty manager I was told, "I should go and find a second job" and reminded that "I was only on a casual contract so there was not much I could do about it."

For the last few months I had been back-breakingly flexible for this employer. I had come in whenever I was needed and covered shifts at short notice. I had worked hard to make every customer's experience an enjoyable one, all this for minimum wage. I spent most of December desperately scrounging around for a second job, as did two other workers who had suffered the same fate.

I popped into the same work soon after my shifts had been cut to collect my tips and one of the regulars who had been drinking, accosted me verbally and demanded to know why I was in such vocal support of the recent rolling strikes of Bunnings Warehouse workers. These workers had been subject to Zero Hour contracts, eternal bullying and harassment from managers and no guarantee of shifts or rosters. He said "why don't these Bunnings workers just go out and get a better job". This statement coming from a white male Baby Boomer who enjoyed free tertiary education and did not start his working life off in debt. All is crimson and gold in middle class Whiteywood, I guess.

"Why don't you just go and get a better job?" This singular narrative epitomizes the ignorant attitudes of people like Gaz and the regular from my work whose name is ironically Gary, as well. It also puts the sole responsibility of finding well paid and meaningful work onto the worker, while absolving a government's responsibility to push for job creation which serves their citizenry and the environment and to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, in New Zealand.

If over 30% of the workforce is stuck in precarious work and large sectors of the workforce earn below Aotearoa's living wage of $19.25 an hour, finding "better work" is statistically impossible for a vast majority of us. There are thousands of hospitality businesses in Auckland, New Zealand, and only a handful pay a living wage and nearly none offer a guarantee of hours. As such telling people to "get a better job" is like telling them to buy a lotto ticket and live in hope they take out the jackpot.

***

No matter what the Gaz's, Gary's and the self-help superstars such as Tony Robbins of this world have to say on the myth of "hard work" and perseverance paying off one day, the reality is our ability to access upward mobility; buy a house; obtain a decent standard of living is tied to what type of work you can access. External factors not only deeply impact people's lives they oppress those who do not benefit from certain types of privilege. Not all roads lead to Rome. More often than not for us poor folk they lead to roadblocks and hurdles that increase based on the colour of your skin, the class you were born into and/or your gender, how bodily abled you are and your sexuality or a combination of all of these.

People's situations are complicated and difficult and cannot be curtailed into passive aggressive motivational "one liners" that nearly always punch-down and not up. Our working class struggles cannot be solved by a set of self-help rules or keys or steps which are meant to guide anyone to economic stability and lead you to the life of your dreams and a perfect job. In the book, The New Soft War on Women, the chapter entitled 'Doing Well May Not Work Out So Well', Caryl Rivers and Rosaling C. Barnett, write,

"We like to believe that the workplace is fair and that if we do a good job, we will be rewarded. After all, that's the American way. But this belief is less true for women than it is for men. Indeed, too often women's performance which is stellar gets fewer rewards than men do - even men who are less than outstanding."

During a major speech at Wellesley College, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, talked about the role women can play in politics and public life, she said,

"We know we've got to keep pushing at that glass ceiling. We have to try and break it… Obviously. I hope to live long enough to see a woman elected president of the United States."

Encouraging women to break the glass ceiling is all well and good but what if moving off minimum wage and accessing a living wage, is no easy feat? In America alone, 6 out of every 10 women are stuck on minimum wage.

The Glass Ceiling is so high up most of us can barely even see it. Researchers at the non-profit group Catalyst point out, "[…] when you start from behind, it's hard enough to keep pace, never mind catch up-regardless of what tactics you use." Both Rivers and Barnett went on to write,

"Doing all the right things to get ahead-using those strategies regularly suggested in self-help books, coaching sessions and the popular press-pays off much better for men than it does for women."

As women, we do not struggle to "get ahead" because of personal failings but this struggle is born from structural sexism which creates gendered inequality.

Telling white women and women of colour to be more ambitious and just "work harder" if they want to smash the Glass Ceiling and obtain a decent standard of living is almost laughable. Considering many women, in particular, indigenous women and women of colour, are still struggling to make it out of the basement. Still, self-help gurus such as Tony Robbins preach to millions that none of what I am writing about actually matters: race, gender… whatever you were born as, and into, does not have to hold you back. You just have to believe in yourself and follow the Tony Robbin's step-by-step guide to snagging a life beyond anything you could ever dream of. Which he has called: '12 Keys to an Extraordinary Life'. You couldn't make this shit up. He said at a recent event:

"I don't care if you are young or old, I don't care what your colour is, what your gender is, what country you come from, if you understand the science of building wealth you can have an abundance of it. If you violate those rules [of the 12 keys to an Extraordinary Life] either because you're ignorant to them or you don't apply then, you are going to have financial stress"

Tony, who sounds uncomfortably like Gaz in his belief anyone can become a millionaire, may as well have just said "we are all one"! "Everyone can make it no matter what grinding and economically depressive situations you come from"! And be done with it.

Financial stress is not brought about because you have unknowingly violated one or more of the '12 Keys to an Extraordinary Life' which Tony has made tens of millions off. Violating female stereotypes of passivity have a lot more to do with our failure or success in the workplace than how hard we do, or do not, hustle for top positions and top earning brackets. Rivers and Barnett write, "Competent women violate the traditional female stereotype of passivity. And that violation can trigger a reaction of fear and loathing [in the workplace]."

Financial stress is brought about because of injustices such as the pay-gap and the coloured pay-gap. Something Tony, has clearly gone out of his way to ignore. Self-help gurus and people like Gaz and Gary tend to, "displace questions of social justice and frame their rhetoric by the individualist and corporatist values of a consumer society," as both Jeremy Carrette and Richard King wrote in the book, Selling Spirituality: the silent take over of religion.

Both Rivers and Barnett point out in relation to the American pay gap,

"Hispanic/Latino women have the lowest median earnings, earning just 55 percent of the median weekly earnings of white men; black women have, median weekly earnings of 64 percent of those of white men."

The pay gap for America's first nation indigenous women also sits at 55 cents in the dollar compared to white men, as non-profit AAUW reports. Indigenous women are faced with earning nearly half of what white men do in America.

Similarly, in Aotearoa indigenous Maori and Pasifika women, face significant coloured/indigenous pay-gaps compared to white men and women. TheDominion Post, reported last year, "Maori and Pasifika women are more likely to be in the lowest paying jobs, which increases the poverty in their lives and communities." The Human Rights Commission has been tracking unfairness and inequality at work and cites that Pasifika women on average earn $57,668 while white men earn $66,900. What this data shows us is that, "Men are paid more than women overall and within ethnic groups. The effects increase when combining several factors as is the case between New Zealand European men and Pacific women. These patterns have persisted over time."

These "patterns" of women of colour and Indigenous women being paid significantly less than white men and women, to do the same damn jobs have "persisted" all over the world from America to Aotearoa. Injustice and oppression is locally and globally connected.

A more accurate description of what the aspirational metaphor of the Glass Ceiling is made out of is to say it is made from lead. So many women are much more likely to fall off what Rivers and Barnett have labelled the "glass cliff" than triumphantly smash the glass ceiling into a million little pieces. Following Tony Robbin's guide to obtaining some magical, fairy-tale life, or any other pseudo bullshit glittery guides to financial freedom, aren't going to be very effective for women born into a system which was built to silence and eradicate them.

The only thing I am aspiring to "smash" is white imperial patriarchal systems that at best disempower women and at worst, brutally and often violently oppress them.

***

As workers we are criticized for our behavior whether we are told we need to be "more ambitious" or we "just need to work harder" in response to our perceived failure to land a great job with good pay and consistent hours. I am so tired of listening to people who endlessly tell me to go and get a "better job" or a "real job" (what does that even mean?!). And I have lost count of the times I have been told by people who hold anti-protester positions to "go and get a job" while I am on the picket line or the protest ground. As if the low waged work I do counts for absolutely nothing. As if service industry work is some kind of phantom job.

This is for anyone who has ever told a service worker to go and get a "job" or a "real job": why don't you make your own double shot soy latte, flip your own burgers and pour your own damn beer and make your own designer espresso martini, which costs more than I make in an hour.

When as a worker, I refuse to put up with horrible workplace conditions and hit the picket line or call the Union as a form of resistance I have been called a "trouble maker", "dirty hippy" and an "inconvenience". I am proud to be all of those things. I am glad I stood up and was brave and risked job loss (sometimes I have lost my job for speaking out) and arrest in an attempt to better my workplace conditions. The only people who are "dirty" are those who seize on disaster capitalism and economically benefit from the oppression of others… I am looking at you Tony Robbin's and Gaz.

We need more workers collectively rising up and following the lead of Health Care workers, Bunning Warehouse and Supermarket workers and more recently Bus drivers. Who have all relentlessly hit union backed picket lines to demand 'fair pay for fair work' and better work conditions, in New Zealand. And less people thinking magically one day their lives will get better if they just play by the rules and perform their duties at work without complaint. This is nothing but blind faith. It is like believing in god: no matter how long you patiently wait he is not going to come and save you.

People from the working classes and those who have been in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, disenfranchised from the middle and upper-classes can save each other. But we need to refuse to allow those who hold power to continue to pit us against one another in some kind of Capitalist Death Match. Where the only prize you get is some demeaning job where the wages are so low you have to pick between buying food or paying the electricity bill. Starving or freezing does not sound like much of a "win" to me. It sounds like bullshit.

The more people who push against injustice in staggering numbers the harder it is for the media to ignore us and distort our messages of resistance.

Many people's grinding situations have nothing to do with individual 'bad choices' or laziness or you know, violating the '12 Steps to an Extraordinary Life'. No matter how many times we hear rotten rhetoric like this we must refuse - absolutely - to accept these types of pervasive and dominant narratives. At their core these narratives use shame and ruggedly focus on the individual as a method to pacify and silence. We must disrupt language that is designed to disempower and divide workers while seeming to empower. We need to seek out ways to elevate the voices of our most vulnerable and the messages of people of conscience who can envision a better world and whose political imaginations outstretch the dominant reality.

Lastly, we need to fight and stand with other workers against employers who exploit their employees and view them as nothing more than units to turn-over capital. Jeremy Carrette and Richard King, went on to write in their before mentioned book:

"We are never obliged to accept the dominant version of reality (however conceived throughout history) without question."