On the Questions of Race and Racism: Revolutionary National Liberation and Building the United Front Against Imperialism

By Kevin “Rashid" Johnson

This was originally published in 2006 on the New Afrikan Black Panther Party's website.

The economic nature of racism is not simply an aside… Racism is a fundamental characteristic of monopoly capitalism.”
George L. Jackson, 1971

Introduction

Many people believe that racism – indeed the very concept of race itself – develops automatically when groups of people with different complexions, hair, and body types are brought together.  This is not so!  Actually, the concept of race is barely 500 years old.  The common people have been programmed into accepting “race” as a normal and natural thing, to prevent them from questioning, investigating, and challenging the ideas and roots of race and racism. Race and racism are the inventions of a specific social class, and devised to serve a specific social purpose.  The creators are the oppressor capitalist ruling class, and the purpose is to divide the laboring class that the capitalists exploit against themselves.  This is because, if united, the workers pose the single greatest threat to the capitalist class monopoly over social wealth, power, and control. A dispassionate study will show that in every situation where race has arisen to become a sharp dividing social factor, the hands of the capitalists can be seen pulling the strings, and it is only they who benefit from the conflicts.

George Jackson clearly recognized this.  He pointed out that while white racism, the dominant form of racism in Amerika, expresses itself as:

“…the morbid traditional fear of Blacks, Indians, Mexicans, [and] the desire to inflict pain on them when they began to compete in the industrial sectors.  The resentment and the seedbed of fear are patterned into every modern capitalist society. It grows out of a sense of insecurity and insignificance that is inculcated into the workers by the conditions of life and work under capitalism.  This sense of vulnerability is the breeding ground of racism.  At the same time, the ruling class actively promotes racism against the Blacks of the lower classes.  This programmed racism has always served to distract the huge numbers of people who subsist at just a slightly higher level than those in a more debased condition (in the 1870’s the strikes frequently ended in anti-Chinese or anti-Black lynchings)…Racism has served always in the U.S. as a pressure release…”

The sole concern of the capitalist class is to secure and increase their profits and power. They do not care whom or what they damage or destroy to accomplish this, nor do they care what nationality or complexion the people are whom they exploit, only that they keep the exploited workers unable to unite and mobilize against their conditions of exploitation.  Racism has been the capitalists’ most effective method of accomplishing this. Here in North Amerika, the game began in the late 1600’s.

The Creation of the White Race and Racism

The first laborers exploited in North Amerika under British colonialism consisted of Afrikan, European, and Indian slaves and indentured servants.  The concept of ‘race’ did not exist then. The laborers were all equally oppressed and exploited of their wealth-producing labor by the capitalist plantation owners and thus saw each other as equals. They lived, labored, loved, suffered, bred, bled, escaped, and died together. They also repeatedly rebelled and revolted together. But because they lacked a unifying leadership and vision or control over resources, they were unable to come together en masse to wage a united revolution to overthrow the plantation elite and the British colonial government that served and backed the elite. This all changed in 1676 when Bacon’s Rebellion occurred.

The leader of the rebellion, Nathaniel Bacon, was a young plantation owner. He had left England to settle in the British colonies in 1673, and was appointed to the Council of British Colonial Governor William Berkeley. The colonial government’s principal concern (as with any capitalist government) was to maintain stability in the colonies while protecting and expanding the holdings and wealth of the ruling class. To achieve this, Berkeley promoted developing trade relations and peace with the Indians who lived on surrounding lands. Bacon, however, promoted running the Indians off their land to expand the colonial settlements. In defiance of Berkeley’s policies, Bacon independently organized and led poor farmers who lived on the outskirts of the colonies (most of whom were recently freed indentured servants), on murderous terror raids against nearby Indian communities.  But instead of fleeing, the Natives responded with counter-raids against their attackers. Bacon, unable to match the Indian counter-attacks, sought but was denied military support from Berkeley.

Bacon then turned on the established colonial ruling class and Berkeley’s government. He armed and organized the colony’s Afrikan and English slaves with promises of freedom, and in 1676 led them in revolt against the colonial rulers. The revolt succeeded in overthrowing the colonial ruling class and government, and captured the capitol at Jamestown, Virginia.

However, six months into the revolt, and at the height of his power, Bacon died of influenza.  Bacon’s Rebellion, deprived of its leader and organizer, collapsed, and the colonial ruling class and Council quickly regained control, though not without a determined last stand by the core group of rebels, principally composed of Afrikan slaves. It was at this point that the plantation elite and their reinstated government realized the immense danger and power of a unified working class. Consequently they decided to ensure that no united revolt like Bacon’s Rebellion occurred again.  Their solution was to split the lower class by permanently enslaving one sector while winning the loyalty of another sector, inciting its fear and contempt against and using it to police the enslaved sector. To divide, agitate, and rule was the plan. This they accomplished by inventing the concept of race and dividing the lower class along racial lines.

Laws were immediately passed that established the categories of “negro” (Spanish for “black”), and “white” as distinct racialized social statuses. In 1682 legislation was enacted that made slavery a permanent and hereditary status for all “Blacks,” and over the next several decades slavery and indentured servitude of ‘whites’ were phased out. Further laws were passed that forbade and penalized positive social interactions between the races, particularly escapes, marriages, and procreation.

The poor white men made up the body of the colonial militias and, beginning in 1727, were conscripted into manning slave patrols under fines and other penalties if they refused. This plantation police force was the forerunner and grandparent of today’s urban police forces that continue to be concentrated against people of color to repress them across Amerika with violence and terror. In most areas, the slave patrols came to outnumber the black slaves.  A variety of minor privileges were also granted to the poor whites, including tiny plots of land to live on – at the Indians’ expense – a musket, the authority to kill rebellious Blacks, tax exemptions, and other benefits for manning slave patrols, greater leniency in the eyes of the law than Blacks, voting privileges, etc.

By inventing the social category of “white,” and granting the lower class Europeans a share in power over the super-exploited and enslaved Afrikans, the capitalists created a scheme that caused the poor Europeans a false sense of privileged class unity with, and a confused loyalty toward the ruling class which was the source of all of the lower classes’ poverty and misery.  By selling out their own class interests to the elite, the poor whites made a deal with the devil that saw them focus their frustrations on Blacks instead of the capitalists, and thus ensured that they would remain an impoverished and exploited class, just a step above the Blacks.

To ensure the dedication of the slave patrols, and whites in general, in repressing and containing the black slaves, the ruling class generated a paranoid fear of slave revolts and especially of “Negroes with guns.” From every pulpit, and every center of white social gathering and influence, Blacks were depicted as always plotting to revolt with the aim of murdering all whites indiscriminately (men, wimyn, and children), molesting white wimyn, and subverting  ‘good’ white Christian civilization with Black “heathenism.”  Both the political and religious institutions were, and remain today, proponents of racism and white fear of Black revolt.

The church hierarchy, which was tied in with the ruling elite, also added fuel to the fire of racism by theologizing the myth of white racial superiority over all other races, claiming that whites were the Creator’s “chosen people” destined to rule over all others as a divine right, and that slavery was a punishment ordained by the creator for Blacks as the “Curse of Canaan.”  It was through these combined methods that “white supremacy” and the very concept of the “white” and “black” races were born and spread, and remain today normalized concepts that divide the lower class to further the interests of the wealthy elite.

The capitalists found race and racism such effective tools for manipulating and undermining the working class that appeals to race and racism, (overtly and subliminally), have been their generalized method of subverting working class struggles and manipulating workers to serve as mercenaries and mindless cannon fodder in fighting capitalist wars. To solidify lower class support, the capitalists who were struggling to break free of British control appealed to poor whites to fight the Amerikan Revolutionary War (1775-1783), to achieve an independent “white nation.” The Declaration of Independence expresses this in its statement “When…it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another.”  Because of the racialized identity of “whiteness,” the colonists had come to identify themselves as a different “people” than the English.

From such wealthy elite notables and “Founding Fathers” as Benjamin Franklin (in 1751 to John Jay), James Madison, Jedediah Morse (to Andrew Johnson in 1864), they all emphasized in public and in private letters that Amerika was to be a “white nation.”  (See Steve Martinot, The Rule of Racialization, 2003). This was specified in one of the first legislative acts of the independent Amerikan government – the Naturalization Act of 1790 – that stated that the U.S. was to be a “white republic.” The “White” racialized identity which had its origins in the Virginia colony, was subsequently adopted into European thinking and served as it had in North Amerika, to rationalize European colonization of people of color in Asia, Afrika, Australia, and elsewhere, and to alienate the European working class from uniting with the super-oppressed peoples of color.

The Amerikan capitalists used the same device to justify their brutal and genocidal seizure of Indian and Mexican lands to expand their agricultural empire. They won the allegiance of the poor whites by promoting these actions as white “Manifest Destiny,” as the duty and calling of whites to conquer “inferior” peoples, and by giving out free land grants. These same appeals are used today in pursuit of U.S. conquest and repression of people of color, only the concept of white supremacy and” Manifest Destiny” have become so ingrained and normalized in the collective white Amerikan mind, that they need not be explicitly stated.  Moreover, to do so is politically incorrect and unwise in today’s world where people of color have proven unwilling to accept overtly expressed racist oppression, (witness the national independence struggles of the 20th century against European colonialism that swept Asia and Afrika; the urban uprisings, civil rights, and New Afrikan, First Nation, Mexican, and Puerto Rican liberation struggles in Amerika, the worldwide opposition to South Afrikan Apartheid, etc.).

Therefore, the white supremacist appeal today is made and pursued more clandestinely and with greater sophistication, using such code words as “spreading democracy,” “fighting terrorism,” “fighting crime,” “preventing the spread of Communism,” etc.  But any objective analysis quickly reveals that these policies, backed by extreme state violence, and demonizing labels such as “criminal,” “terrorist,” etc., are consistently applied to non-white peoples, and it’s the white U.S. population that’s appealed to in order to back these policies. That the national identity of Amerika remains that of a white nation is revealed by its population being still classified by race, with panic arising anytime the elites claim some ‘other’ race like Latin Amerikan immigrants are threatening to overrun the “white majority,” or that Blacks are a danger to the stability and moral integrity of Amerika.

White racism caused many whites, (especially of the lower class), to become so consumed and intoxicated with the myth of their racial superiority, their right to repress and contain Blacks and others’ ambitions, and the idea that their own poverty and lack of power was somehow the fault of Blacks, that they’ve resorted to confused, fundamentalist reactionary violence to subvert every effort of Blacks to improve or challenge their own conditions.  Thus, Black political and economic struggles and gains have frequently been followed by reactionary white violence, or the rise of far right-wing white terrorist groups, like the Ku Klux Klan and Knights of White Camellia for example, the white mobs that attacked Blacks in Massachusetts (1850) and Philadelphia, Boston, and Cincinnati (1830’s) to repress the Black vote; the frequent lynchings during Reconstruction (1865-77), white riots against Blacks communities when Blacks moved in large numbers to Northern and Western cities to fill industrial jobs in the early 1900’s, mob attacks and violence to repress civil rights struggles in the south during the 1950’s and 60’s, etc. This reactionary fanatical racial violence and conflict occurs always upon incitement of the ruling elite, to divert and neutralize the danger of revolt of any sector of the working class against their class exploitation and political impotence.

Division Created Within Racial Ranks

The divide and rule scheme was further refined based upon the claimed proposals of a Caribbean slave owner, Willie Lynch, to a gathering of plantation owners in Virginia in 1712.  Lynch proposed not only instigating sharp division between Blacks and whites, but among the Black slaves as well, by playing on minor differences between them to generate envy, fear and distrust.  He proposed that the “black slaves should trust no one except the plantation elite.  That they should be hostile toward themselves and that hostility should be maintained between them and the lower class whites.  Lynch put it this way:

“Gentlemen, I greet you here on the banks of the James River in the year of our Lord 1712. First, I shall thank you, the gentlemen of the Colony of Virginia for bringing me here. I am here to help you solve some of your problems with slaves.  Your invitation reached me on my modest plantation in the West Indies where I have experimented with some of the newest and still the oldest methods for control of slaves. Ancient Rome would envy us if my program was implemented. As our boat sailed south on the James River, named for our illustrious King, whose version of the Bible we cherish, I saw enough to know that your problem is not unique. While Rome used cords of wood as crosses for standing human bodies along its old highway in great numbers, you are here using the tree and the rope on occasion.

“I caught the whiff of a dead slave hanging from a tree a couple of miles back. You are not only losing valuable stock by hangings, you are having uprisings, slaves are running away. Your crops are sometimes left in the fields too long for maximum profit, you suffer occasional fires, your animals are killed. Gentlemen, you know what your problems are; I do not need to elaborate. I am not here to enumerate your problems, however, I am here to introduce you to methods of solving them.

“In my bag here, I have outlined a number of DIFFERENCES among the slaves, and I take their differences and make them bigger. I use FEAR, DISTRUST, and ENVY for control purposes. These methods have worked on my modest plantation in the West Indies and it will work throughout the South. Take this simple little list of differences, and think about them. On top of my list is “AGE,” but it is there because it starts with an “A”; the second is “COLOR” or “SHADE”, there is INTELLIGENCE, SIZE, SEX, STATUS ON PLANTATION, ATTITUDE OF OWNERS, WHETHER THE SLAVES LIVE IN THE VALLEY, ON THE HILL, EAST, WEST, NORTH or SOUTH, HAVE FINE HAIR or COARSE HAIR, or is TALL or SHORT. Now that you have a list of differences, I shall give you an outline of ACTION – but before that I shall assure you that distrust is stronger than trust, and envy is stronger than adulation, respect or admiration.

“The Black slave after receiving this indoctrination shall carry on and will become self-refueling and self-generating for hundreds of years, maybe thousands.

“Don’t forget you must pitch the OLD BLACK MALE vs. the YOUNG BLACK MALE, and the YOUNG BLACK MALE vs. the OLD BLACK MALE. You must use the DARK SKIN SLAVE vs. the LIGHT SKIN SLAVE and the LIGHT SKIN SLAVE vs. the DARK SKIN SLAVE. You must use the FEMALE vs. the MALE and the MALE vs. the FEMALE.

“You must also have your white servants and overseers distrust all Blacks, but it is necessary that your slaves trust and depend on us. They must love, respect, and trust ONLY US.

“Gentlemen, these kits are your keys to control. Use them. Have your wives and children use them. Never miss an opportunity – if used intensively for one year, the slaves themselves will remain perpetually distrustful. Thank you, gentlemen.”

These methods of dividing slaves and Blacks versus poor whites can clearly be seen still in operation today, and the effects still remain with us – the distrust, fear, and envy. While the lower classes have come to love, emulate, and depend on the predatory capitalist class, its wealth, luxury, and artificial prestige, are all obtained through the labor, powerlessness, and poverty of the working class. Yesterday’s chattel slaves are today’s wage slaves: only the slave class today has grown to include all races and nationalities.

Capitalism Creates Racism Abroad

Kwame Nkrumah observed that the same game of racial divide and rule was played when capitalism took root in Afrika:

“The close links between class and race developed in Africa alongside capitalist exploitation. Slavery, the master-servant relationship, and cheap labor were basic to it. The classic example is South Africa, where Africans experience a double exploitation – both on grounds of color and of class. Similar conditions exist in the U.S.A., the Caribbean, in Latin America, and in other parts of the world where the nature of the development of productive forces has resulted in a racist class structure. In these areas, even shades of color count – the degree of blackness being a yardstick by which social status is measured.

“…[A] racist social structure…is inseparable from capitalist economic development.  For race is inextricably linked with class exploitation; in a racist-capitalist power structure, capitalist exploitation and race oppression are complementary; the removal of one ensures the removal of the other…

“The effects of industrialization in Africa as elsewhere, has been to foster the growth of the bourgeoisie, and at the same time the growth of a politically-conscious proletariat. The acquisition of property and political power on the part of the bourgeoisie, and the growing socialist and African nationalist aspirations of the working class, both strike at the root of the racist class structure, though each is aiming at different objectives. The bourgeoisie supports capitalist development while the proletariat – the oppressed class – is striving towards socialism.

“In South Africa, where the basis of ethnic relationships is class and color, the bourgeoisie comprises about one-fifth of the population. The British and the Boers, having joined forces to maintain their positions of privilege, have split up the remaining four-fifths of the population into “Blacks,” “Coloreds,” and “Indians.” The Colored and Indians are minority groups, which act as buffers to protect the minority whites against the increasingly militant and revolutionary Black majority. In the other settled areas of Africa, a similar class-race struggle is being waged.

“A non-racial society can only be achieved by socialist revolutionary action of the masses. It will never come as a gift from the minority ruling class. For it is impossible to separate race relations from the capitalist class relationships in which they have their roots.

“South Africa again provides a typical example…It was only with capitalist economic penetration that the master-servant relationship emerged, and with it, racism, color prejudice and apartheid…

“Slavery and the master-servant relationship were therefore the cause, rather than the result of racism. The position was crystallized and reinforced with the discovery of gold and diamonds in South Africa, and the employment of cheap African labor in the mines. As time passed, and it was thought necessary to justify the exploitation and oppression of African workers, the myth of racial inferiority was developed and spread.

“In the era of neocolonialism, ‘underdevelopment’ is still attributed not to exploitation but to inferiority, and racial undertones remain closely interwoven with the class struggle.

“It is only the ending of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism and neocolonialism and the attainment of world communism that can provide the conditions under which the race question can finally be abolished and eliminated.”

Kwame Nkrumah, Class Struggle in Africa, 1970

An Example of Racism Incited to Divert Working Class Struggle

World War I (1914 -1918) was a competition between the European imperialist countries for access to and control over the abundant natural resources and markets of the Third World colonies. The war generated a boom for the war industrialists, particularly the Amerikan steel and manufacturing industries that were producing and selling weapons, machinery, and spare parts needed by the European elite to supply their armies, (which were manned by the working class of course). When the U.S. entered the war in 1917, the mandatory draft created a large shortage of white industrial workers. Laborers were needed. With promises of plenty, southern Blacks were drawn by the industrialist’ job recruiters into the Northern and Western cities to fill the vacant jobs. The poor migrant Blacks were also a welcomed replacement, since they would accept work at much lower wages than the white workers would tolerate, thus increasing the capitalists’ profits by lowering labor costs.

The war’s end in 1918 saw the return of the whites in need of employment.  A strong working class movement was already underway in the U.S., which had the capitalists in a panic. They feared working class revolution, like the one that had just succeeded in overthrowing the capitalist class in Russia in 1917. To offset a united radical struggle of the working class poor, capitalist agents within the trade union movement incited the whites against the Blacks, diverting their attention away from challenging capitalist class oppression and toward the Blacks who’d “stolen” their jobs and were driving down wages.

This appeal to reactionary race hate to channel the anger of white workers away from challenging working class exploitation provoked racial violence against Blacks, which culminated in widespread white race riots in the “Red Summer” of 1919. These riots saw over 20 incidents of white mobs converging on Black neighborhoods to gang rape Black wimyn and girls, and murder and maim Black men, wimyn, children and the elderly indiscriminately.

Fast-forwarding to today, we now see an identical situation of competition over jobs along racial lines taking place between Blacks versus Mexican and Latin Amerikan migrants. Under centuries of colonial and neo-colonial policies, U.S. capitalists with government backing have robbed the fertile land and resources and crushed the economies of their countries, imposing imperialist policies that have violently driven millions upon millions off their native lands and into complete insecurity, poverty and beggary. In desperate need of jobs to provide for their families, many are forced to migrate to Amerika, to fill jobs that pay starvation wages or deprive them of benefits enjoyed by ‘legal’ workers. Their predicament duplicates that of Blacks who were forced to migrate to the northern and western cities from the south in search of employment upon being pushed off the land by Klan terror, and being otherwise compelled to live in impoverished servitude.

But instead of struggling alongside these migrant workers today, Blacks have been incited by imperialist agents and propaganda to assume much the same repressive role as the white workers during the early 1900’s. We perceive these migrants to be “stealing” “our” scarce jobs, government benefits and housing, and driving down wages. Consequently a virtual war has been taking place between Black versus Mexicans and Latin Amerikans on the streets and inside U.S. prisons. Much of the violence, which begins inside the prisons where these ‘races’ are forcibly confined in miserable close quarter, spills over into society.

In just 2005, over 300 race riots occurred in the California prison system alone, mostly between Black versus Mexican and Latin Amerikan prisoners. These conflicts have been exposed repeatedly as incited by the imperialist controlled prison guard unions. So, once again, the capitalists, whose greedy ambitions are the cause of massive poverty, job shortages, land theft, and forced migrations of both Blacks and the Native peoples of this region of the world, (who must risk their lives to cross borders created by the capitalists and white racism), have the commonly oppressed people, who are all victims of class and national oppression, warring amongst themselves.

The Race Game Played Between Whites

The game of racism was not only created and used to play working class whites against people of color. It was also used between whites, and with the same purpose of undermining working class struggles against capitalist class exploitation. Indeed it was the principal method of whipping up mass hysteria in support of fascism in Western Europe during the early 1900’s. And contrary to popular deception, the U.S. capitalist elite and government supported its purpose and function, which was to suppress working class revolution. There is an extensive although repressed record in proof of this.

The tendency in mainstream circles and of the ruling class propaganda industry has been to paint German Nazism, for example, as a sort of odd latent German anti-Semitism, which was brought to the surface by a “mad” leader (Hitler), who by luck and guile found himself in power. This, however, runs counter to the actual fact that the German and Amerikan capitalists consciously and deliberately financed and pushed Hitler into power to suppress a working class revolution that was threatening to take power. The capitalist Great Depression had disillusioned the workers across Europe about the promises of capitalism, and they were looking with hope to the example of Russia, (Socialist Russia being independent of the imperialist countries was not affected by the Depression). The capitalists also feared that the destabilized middle class would join forces with the lower class workers to overthrow their economic and political control. They opted to play the race card.

By inciting “Aryan” racism – blaming non-Aryans for Germany’s economic crisis, which was actually caused by the capitalists – the Nazis won over the confused German middle and lower class and youth to subvert the working class movement and re-channel its momentum toward attacking sectors of German society that were classified as non-Aryan (“inferiors” and “degenerates”). Violent repression was thus targeted against the German Communists and radical youth, who were leading and organizing the workers’ struggle, and the Jews, Slavs, Poles, Gypsies, gay and disabled people. Overt fascism, like pure racism, was a desperate political strategy of capitalist class control.

Just as the method of allying the majority white Amerikan working class to back the capitalist class’s designs has been, by rallying them under the banner of a racialized “white nation,” so too did the German capitalists do the same using the Nazis to rally the German workers’ support under the banner of a racialized “Aryan nation.” And as intended, this incitement of racist sentiments divided a once united working class against itself, whipped up hysterical and irrational mass support for the ruling class’s designs to smash working class struggle and to back the capitalists’ aims to expand and colonize other nations, in this case not only nations of colored people but Europeans as well. Under the spell of a purely invented racism, the German masses proceed to back the Nazi war machine that saw them kill and die by the millions and carry out acts of the most savage brutality recorded in history – and all by and against white working class people.  As said, the U.S. government and business community supported Hitler and Mussolini before World War II. See for example:

1. Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blonde Beast: Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995. pp. 46-64;

2. David Schmitz, Thank God They’re On Our Side: The United States and Right Wing Dictatorships, 1921-1965, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999, Chapters 1 and 3;

3. David Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922-1940, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988;

4. John P. Diggins. Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972.

U.S. government internal documents explain the class-based reasons for the warm Amerikan business support for fascism that are detailed in these books. In 1937, for example, a report of the U.S. State Department’s European Division described the rise of fascism as a natural and commendable response of “the rich and middle class, in self-defense” when the “dissatisfied masses, with the example of the Russian revolution before them, swing to the Left.”  Fascism, thus, “must succeed or the masses, this time reinforced by the disillusioned middle classes, will again turn to the Left.” The report also stated that “if Fascism cannot succeed by persuasion [in Germany], it must succeed by force.”  (See Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922-1940, p. 140).  U.S. Ambassador to Russia, William Bullitt “believed that only Nazi Germany could stay the advance of Soviet Bolshevism in Europe.” (Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State, Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin, 1977, p. 26).

The Amerikan charge d’affaires in Berlin wrote to Washington in 1933 that Amerika should back the Nazi Party as the hope for Germany. He stated that Nazi policies “appeal to all civilized and reasonable people.” Amerikan Ambassador Frederic Sackett noted that “it is perhaps well that Hitler is now in a position to wield unprecedented power.” (See Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922-1940, pp. 174, 133, and Chapter 9).

U.S. corporations like Ford Motor Company were totally approving of fascism; financed and profited from the Fascists states, and participated in plundering Jewish assets under Hitler’s Aryanization programs.

“Many U.S. companies bought substantial interests in established German companies, which in turn plowed the new money into Aryanizations or into arms productions banned under the Versailles Treaty. According to a 1936 report from Ambassador William Dodd to President Roosevelt, a half-dozen key U.S. companies – International Harvester, Ford, General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and DuPont – had become deeply involved in German weapons production…

“U.S. investment in Germany accelerated rapidly after Hitler came to power, despite the Depression and Germany’s default on virtually all of its government and commercial loans. Commerce Department reports show that U.S. investment in Germany increased some 48.5 percent between 1929 and 1940, while declining sharply everywhere else in continental Europe. U.S. investment in Great Britain…barely held steady over the decade, increasing only 2.6 percent.”

Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blonde Beast: Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, supra, p. 64.

The U.S. government did not in fact unanimously declare European fascism an avowed enemy until it attacked U.S. interests. And even then Amerikan business interests still backed the Fascists. In fact, Prescott Bush, (grandfather of George W. Bush), and his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, were the Nazi’s financers and traders through periods of the Jewish Holocaust, after their attacks on Britain and France, and even after the bombings of Pearl Harbor in 1941. It took the seizure of their Union Banking Corporation by the U.S. government in October 1942, under the Trading with the Enemies Act, to stop Bush and Walker.

Prior to WWII U.S. support for Italian Fascism was much the same. In December 1917, the Wilson administration expressed that the rising labor movement posed, “the obvious danger of social revolution and disorganization.”  Mussolini’s Black Shirts solved the problem with violence, referring to Mussolini’s October 1922 march on Rome, which smashed Italian democracy. The U.S. Ambassador noted with approval that the Fascists carried out “a fine young revolution.” With government backing, the racist thugs bloodily repressed working class agitation. The U.S. embassy noted, Fascism was “perhaps the most potent factor in the suppression of Bolshevism in Italy.” In a February 1925 report, the embassy also approvingly observed that the Fascists had smashed the workers struggle through “restricting the right of free assembly, in abolishing freedom of the press and in having at its command a large military organization.” It was also stated that “between Mussolini and Fascism and Giolliti and Socialism, between strong internal peace and prosperity and return to free speech, loose administration and general disorganization, Peace and Prosperity were preferred.” (See Schmitz, See Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922-1940, pp. 76-77). These approving pronouncements are as undemocratic as one could get. It should also be remembered that when these official champions of capitalism talk about “disorder,” and “peace” and “prosperity,” they’re speaking about these things from the perspective of their capitalist bosses in containing, repressing, and controlling the exploited workers, and against the workers’ struggles to gain control over the society’s economic and political institutions and power.

The U.S. business press spoke openly in support of Fascism. Fortune magazine, for example, devoted a special issue to Fascism in July 1934, and in its article “The State: Fascist and Total.” It commented approvingly that “the purpose and effect of Fascism is to un wop the wops,” and any views by Amerikan people that the Italians should resent Fascism, “is a confusion, and we can only get over it if we anesthetize for the moment our ingrained idea that democracy is the only right and just conception of government.”

The rise of counter-revolutionary racist Fascism in Europe was accompanied by an attendant rise of far right-wing racist counterrevolutionary elements in Amerika. The Klan for example saw a resurgence, and its membership swelled as never before in the 1920’s.

Clearly when any struggle arises from within the ranks of the working class, the capitalists incite a corresponding rise of racist elements to divide and counter the up-thrusting masses and their challenge to capitalist domination. In essence, racism, and its most fundamentalist political and military form (namely fascism) are purely counter-revolutionary tools of the capitalist class used to sabotage working class struggle by dividing, inciting and turning the working class against itself.

The Race Game Played Between Blacks

Racism has also been used to divide exploited Blacks against themselves to further imperialist interests. One outstanding example occurred among the people of Rwanda and resulted in the genocidal war of 1994, which saw hundreds of thousands murdered while the imperialists sat by and watched. Until the Belgians entered Rwanda with imperialist aims in 1916, the Rwandans were a united people. The various ethnic groups shared the same language and had for centuries cooperated, supported, and sustained each other. The Hutu were 85%, the Tutsis 14%, and the Twa 1% of the population. The Hutu raised crops, the Tutsis tended herds. Economic relations between them were based upon the Hutu exchanging their surplus of vegetables for surplus Tutsi livestock. Their economies also sustained each other in that the Hutus set aside land for the Tutsis to graze their animals on. The manure of the animals in turn provided fertilizer for the Hutu crops.

In 1918 the European imperialist League of Nations “awarded” Rwanda to Belgium as a colony. This Afrikan country presented a source of great wealth to the Belgian King Leopold, in the form of vast forests of rubber trees. Rubber was in high demand in the industrial countries due to the recent invention of the inflatable tire. Like the agricultural capitalists of Amerika, the Belgians needed a local slave class to work the rubber plantations and a local middle level force to police them. The colonial Belgian government, along with the Catholic Church played the race game to produce the desired result. They opened mission schools to only the Tutsi and forbade the Hutu from receiving an education.  In the schools, Rwandan history was rewritten to project the Tutsi as the racial superior of the Hutus. The myth was taught that the Tutsi were a partly Caucasian Hamitic people because of their having taller statures, thinner features, and lighter complexions than the Hutu. Identity cards were issued which classified the entire society as Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa.

The Belgians treated the Hutu with the most savage brutality to enforce their submission. Millions upon millions resisted and were massacred, while millions more had ears, noses, and limbs cut off. Tutsi chiefs were appointed by the Belgians over the Hutu to serve as agents to this brutality. The Tutsi, like whites in Amerika, were pleased to be identified as allies of the ruling powers and to believe the myth of their racial superiority. Consequently, the Tutsi also lived in perpetual fear of Hutu revenge if the Hutu ever came together in revolt.

When the national independence struggles against European imperialism began to sweep across Afrika in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the educated Tutsis took notice and agitated for Rwandan independence. In turn the Belgians backed the Hutu to repress the Tutsi. Rwanda still won independence from Belgium in 1962, but this saw the Hutu take control of the upper levels of government. The Tutsi remained in the lower ranks, continuing to control the educational system, church, and livestock. The Hutu however took much of the Tutsi land upon taking power. Many of the Tutsi fled.

A 1973 coup saw a new Hutu government take power which changed the status of the Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa from racial to ethnic groupings, and sought to democratically restructure the ethnic groups within social institutions according to their numbers. This meant a larger share for the Hutu in the economy, church, and educational institutions. Thousands of Tutsi lost their jobs and fled the country. A few years later the government turned sour, state property was privatized, and the economy collapsed. In addition to droughts and famines, the imperialist International Monetary Fund imposed a neo-liberal structural adjustment program that totally devastated the country. The Tutsi were repressed and another wave fled Rwanda, to refugee camps in Uganda.

The genocidal war of 1994 was the result of the exiled Tutsis returning and seeking to regain power in Rwanda. The imperialists, including Amerika, were fully aware of preparations for the genocide before it began, but sat by as events unfolded. This “race” war, like many other race based conflicts, saw “respectable” people engaged in the murderous frenzy: teachers, doctors, nurses, journalists, and clergy. Husbands killed wives, friends killed each other, gang rapes were frequent, etc. Such is the result of race hate, racism, and the violence they spawn. Over 500,000 were killed in a matter of just a few months.

The entire “racial” division in Rwanda was, like that here in Amerika, created by a ruling capitalist elite, whose power and profits were served by dividing a previously united people along racial lines, granting one sector a share of relative power and elevated social status, and a sense of racial connection to the ruling elite, so to use it to repress and control the other sector that is super-exploited by the ruling capitalist class. While in reality the entire divided people are collectively exploited by the ruling capitalist class.

Racism in Reverse

For a people, like Blacks in Amerika, who have endured centuries of brutality, degradation, disrespect, indignity, powerlessness, and being labeled “inferiors” based solely upon skin color, the desire for respect became and remains very strong. This desire for respect has left many Blacks vulnerable to the appeals of reverse racism. Reverse racism is here defined as a belief in Black superiority and white inferiority. But, for Blacks in Amerika, who have no independent access to or control over any institutions of power or productive wealth, the features of reverse racism take place primarily in their minds, as they lack the means to exercise any dominant or comparable power over those they claim to be their inferiors, namely whites.

Reverse racism first took root on a large scale with the teachings of Marcus Garvey, who preached the beauty and high culture of Blacks. In colonizing Afrika, beginning in the late 1800’s, the European imperialists used racism to alienate their country’s own oppressed working class from the super-exploited Afrikans, and to rationalize their brutal colonial oppression of Afrikans. To give a scientific gloss to their racism doctrines, the imperialists commissioned novelists and intellectuals to develop theories to support their claims of European racial superiority and African racial inferiority. These European and Amerikan writers claimed that Afrika, when discovered by the white man, was a land of backward, ignorant savages upon whom they had bestowed the benefits and blessings of Christianity and white civilization.  Garvey reversed these false and degrading European histories and views of Afrikans. He countered that ignorant, murderous, pillaging European savages attacked Afrika out of jealousy over our power, prosperity, and having achieved the highest level of civilization yet known. Neither version was objectively true. However, Garvey’s teachings had an electrifying effect on Amerikan Blacks. In only a few years millions of Blacks joined his universal Negro Improvement Association, supporting his “back to Afrika” movement. Garvey’s teachings offered Blacks a new basis for pride, self-esteem, self-confidence, and respect, all tied into a messianic notion of Black racial superiority. By turning the teaching of white supremacy on its head, Garvey brought together the largest Black organization in U.S. history.

Following his arrest and exile, and the collapse of his UNIA, Garvey’s doctrine and its Black capitalist underpinnings became the common doctrine of Black organizations that sought a large following. Most notable was the Nation of Islam, which was founded three years after Garvey’s deportation. Indeed, the NOI absorbed many who came under Garveyite influences, including some of the NOI’s most influential leaders like Malcolm X whose parents were Garveyites. The NOI, however, enhanced and gave a theological twist to Garvey’s doctrine, (much as the white church had done with white racism), by posing Blacks as the Creator’s chosen people and whites as spawns of the Devil. The NOI’s teachings were enhanced even further by its excommunicated member Clarence 13X, in his youth-based Nation of Gods and Earths, (formerly the 5% Nation), which promotes the Black man as god and whites as the actual devil.

Another proponent of subjective reverse racism was Dr. Khalid Muhammad, another excommunicated member of the NOI, who led the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) up until his death in 2001. Dr. Muhammad steered the NBPP far away from the class-based ideological and political line of the original BPP and in the direction of race-based anti-white politics, the NBPP’s present path.

The New Afrikan Black Panther Party – Prison Chapter (NABPP-PC) distinguishes itself from such race-based politics as promoted by the NBPP, as we are proponents of class struggle and the revolutionary nationalist liberation struggles of those oppressed by imperialism. We recognize that the capitalists created and use race divisions to perpetuate conflict within the oppressed lower class sectors, and that racism and the race blame game serves the interests of the oppressor class and undermines the interests of the oppressed. This is proven historical fact. Furthermore, as revolutionary New Afrikan nationalists, we realize that there is a contradiction between race and nationalism, and moreover, that there is no nation composed of a single race. All existing nations, like the Indian Nations here in North Amerika, include whites and mixed bloods, even though there are contradictions. It was the policies of white colonialism created by the ruling class that produced these contradictions, and indeed the New Afrikan Nation. In this regard, we say all people of Afrikan heritage, regardless of skin tone, are part of a single Afrikan- New Afrikan Nation…A Pan-Afrikan Nation. Indeed most “Blacks” in Amerika are mixed bloods, mixed with white and/or Indian bloodlines.

We therefore move beyond the black and white dogmatism – Native Americans have always done this in adopting any “race” of people into their nations who embrace and respect their heritage and culture. All non-chauvinistic nations have done this. We also accept that nationalities can overlap and are not merely an either/or situation. People the world over embrace multiple nationalities, and so can New Afrikans. One can be Venezuelan and New Afrikan, or Lenape and New Afrikan, etc. This concept becomes practical revolutionary internationalism that has all oppressed nationalities struggling for both national self-determination and united multi-national anti-imperialist cooperation.

In the context of national liberation, we must remember that nationality is itself a temporary form of social organization and identity. It is a means to an end and not an end in itself. The nation is a product of social-historical development, and will wither away in time. Our orientation as genuine revolutionaries is to the whole of humynity and the future classless and nation-stateless society. Getting from here to there involves national liberation struggles and security issues. As Mao Tse Tung observed, “Proletarian nationalism is applied proletarian internationalism.” It involves uniting all who can be united at each stage of the struggle. From our point of view, the key question is building alliances between the oppressed nations within the U.S. and abroad and the multi-national proletariat.

Rising Above Race to Build Class-Based Alliances

World suffering and oppression, poverty, and want are not caused by race, but by national and class exploitation and oppression at the hands of the monopoly capitalist class. However, as repeatedly pointed out above, race and racism have been a principal tool and weapon of this class used to keep the oppressed workers of the world divided and warring among themselves, to  divide, agitate, and rule. Toward the end of their lives, both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. came to realize that basing struggle against oppression on race without challenging capitalist economic exploitation was a losing battle. And it was at that point when they began to agitate to have their followers struggle against capitalism, imperialism, and colonial oppression instead of exclusively focusing on race, (merely struggling against white oppression), that they were murdered.  George Jackson pointed this out:

“It’s no coincidence that Malcolm X and M. L. King died when they did.  Malcolm X had just put it together…You remember what was on his lips when he died, Vietnam and economics, political economy. The professional killers could have murdered him long before they did. They let Malcolm rage on Muslim nationalism for a number of years because they knew it was an empty ideal, but the second he got his feet on the ground, they murdered him.”

Fred Hampton, Sr. summed it up perfectly in his November 1969 speech delivered at the University of Northern Illinois and aptly entitled “It’s a Class Struggle Goddammit!” Fred stated:

“You know a lot of people have hang-ups with the [Black Panther] Party because the Party talks about a class struggle. And the people that have those hang-ups are opportunists, and cowards, and individualists and everything that’s anything but revolutionary. And they use these things as an excuse to justify and to alibi and to bonify their lack of participation in the real revolutionary struggle. So they say, ‘Well, I can’t dig the Panther Party because the Panthers they are engrossed with dealing with oppressor country radicals, or white people, or hunkies, or what have you.’  They say, these are some of the [reasons] why I am not in the struggle. We got a lot of answers for these people. First of all, we say primarily that the priority of this struggle is class. That Marx, and Lenin, and Che Guevara, and Mao Tse-Tung and anybody else that has ever said or knew or practiced anything about revolution, always said that a revolution is a class struggle. It was one class – the oppressed – against the other class, the oppressor. And it’s got to be a universal fact. Those that don’t admit to that are those that don’t want to get involved in a revolution, because they know as long as they’re dealing with a race thing, they’ll never be involved in a revolution. They can talk about numbers; they can hang you up in many, many ways…

“[We] never negated the fact that there was racism in Amerika, but we said… the by-product, what comes off of capitalism, that happens to be racism. That capitalism comes first and next is racism. That when they brought slaves over here, it was to make money. So first the idea came that we went to make money, then the slaves came in order to make that money. That means that ‘through historical fact, racism had to come from capitalism. It had to be capitalism first and racism was a by-product of that.”

Like Malcolm X and MLK, and not even a month after giving this speech, Fred Hampton was assassinated, shot in the head while asleep in bed, by Chicago police (in collaboration with the FBI), in a well-orchestrated hit.  Coincidence?

The imperialists’ hired guns made no pretenses about murdering Fred. No attempts were made to conceal their involvement by using puppets or agents. They used forces in government uniform, and a Black cop pulled the trigger at that. So what made Fred so threatening that the capitalists’ guns would go to such open extremes to neutralize him? It was because Fred proved to be a much greater danger to the ruling class than all other leaders of the Black Movement combined. He was not only an exceptional organizer and inspirational leader and teacher of New Afrikans, but he could turn the most reactionary of white workers into revolutionaries.

It was Fred’s work that led to the formation of the Young Patriot Party (YPP), a revolutionary party of poor redneck white Appalachian youth whose symbol was a confederate flag with a red star emblazoned on it. Fred’s approach was to appeal to class instead of being sidetracked by race. He walked into a redneck Hillbilly bar in Chicago when they asked, “What are you doing here?” he said, “I’m here to organize the Niggers.” They said, “No Niggers come in here,” and were ready to fight. He said, “Oh yeah?  Well the way I see it, they work y’all like Niggers, treat y’all like Niggers, and make y’all live like Niggers. So that makes y’all niggers in my book, and I say it’s time to get organized and deal with this shit!”

In another 1969 speech Fred pointed out:

“We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I’m talking about the white masses, I’m talking about the Black masses, and the Brown masses, and the Yellow masses, too. We’ve got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism – we’re gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don’t fight capitalism with no Black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism…

“We have to understand very clearly that there’s a man in our community called a capitalist. Sometimes he’s Black and sometimes he’s white. But that man has to be driven out of our community, because anybody who comes into the community to make profit off the people by exploiting them can be defined as a capitalist. And we don’t care how many programs they have, how long a dashiki they have. Because political power does not flow from the sleeve of a dashiki…”

From within the Chicago chapter of the BPP, Fred was the leader of a growing multi-racial, multi-national, anti-imperialist united front that included the BPP, the Puerto Rican Young Lords Party, the Students for a Democratic Society (before the Weathermen faction took over), and the Revolutionary Youth Movement II.  He even worked to politically develop apolitical street gangs. The imperialists realized, as did the southern plantation owners, in the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion, that the greatest threat to their power is the united resistance of all elements of the oppressed laboring class. “In order for capitalism to continue to rule, any action that threatens the right of a few individuals to own and control public property must be prohibited and curtailed whatever the cost in resources…whatever the cost in blood…The national repressive institutions (police, National Guard, army, etc.), are no less determined.” (George Jackson).  It was because of the genuine threat that Fred’s revolutionary practice posed in bringing together the divided “races” into a united movement to combat imperialism that he had to be liquidated.

New Afrikan Liberation and the Race Question

The position on race presented here is not to say that New Afrikans or “Blacks” should abandon or hand over our liberation struggle to the initiative or control of whites, nor that our struggle in this regard should depend or wait upon the cooperation of those who identify as “white.” Quite the opposite: We are our own liberators!

New Afrikans are an oppressed and colonized nation within Amerika. As such, reforms cannot secure racial and social equality for us. Nor can whites identify with and recognize the conditions we suffer under – no one knows our oppression, the forms it takes and the liberation we desire like we do. We are a people with a history, a culture, and an identity that is our own, and was forged over centuries of common experience and oppression. It is therefore our place and no one else’s to claim those things as uniquely our own and develop them to their highest potential as a people. In order to have any security as a people and not be dependent upon the whims of any other sectors, we must contest the basic means of our survival and governance. If we are not able to defend our own destiny and selves, we are not free.  And if we do not break free from the conditions of our colonization, we leave ourselves open to further colonization under any number of reformed conditions and methods.

Merely joining up with Amerikan whites cannot ensure this because our oppression exceeds theirs. We must be able to assert and protect our economic and political rights whether whites support us or not. Self-determination is the essence of our achieving liberation, and it is our right and duty to run our own organizations and liberation struggle. As the victims of racism only we know best how to resist it. But overall, we are oppressed as a nation and must free ourselves as a nation. In doing so we will destroy the basis of our colonized condition within the Amerikan Empire.

In aid of our struggle, the advanced sectors of white Amerika should work to destroy the notion of white skin privilege and white national chauvinism, which are the underlying national identity of Amerika. They must aid us in protecting our democratic rights and the democratic right of all peoples, including their own. In turn, we must join up with the entire multi-ethnic, multi-national, and multi-racial working class, radical youth, and progressive elements in a United Front Against Imperialism, to smash the overall imperialist system.

Imperialism is capitalism is colonialism. The defeat of imperialism requires the liberation of the colonized and neo-colonized nations on which imperialism feeds. But we must also remember that imperialism is capitalism, capitalism on a global scale that enslaves and profits off not only the workers of the non-industrialized nations and oppressed nationalities across the world, but also the workers of the industrially advanced capitalist countries. To defeat capitalism we must join together in a united struggle of the entire working class of all nations, ethnicities, and “races” in a United Front Against Imperialism, and to ultimately overthrow the capitalist political economy and its ruling class’s power, privilege, and domination over social labor and wealth. Without a repressed working class under its thumb, capitalism cannot exist. Therefore, the entire working class must deny the capitalists its labor power.

Political forms of organization to lead the whole working class are necessary, and we support them. The advanced and anti-imperialist whites must also struggle against the fanatical and backward white supremacist elements like the Klan, Neo-Nazis, etc. These elements represent overt fascism in embryonic form, who will be backed by or handed state power to suppress and divide any working class and national independence struggle that arises to challenge monopoly capitalism, as the elite are wont to do, (and Western Europe in the early 1900’s stands as a glaring example), when their power is threatened from below. They will move the most rabid racists into positions of political and military power to attack and smash revolutionary and progressive elements and incite and engage in a divisive race war. They will certainly also incite the fanatical Black reverse racists to turn on and attack Black revolutionary elements. They will justify such actions with claims that those who collaborate with any whites are “sell-outs.” To them all whites are the enemy, as they have no concept of class struggle and will back dictators and sub-fascists like Haiti’s Papa Doc Duvalier and the Congo’s Joseph Mobutu, so long as they have black skin.

To the reverse racists it’s all about a racial contest, and their backward thinking enables them to be used as imperialist agents to attack and kill the revolutionary elements. This is how Amilcar Cabral was assassinated in 1973.  Cabral was Afrika’s leading revolutionary, a Pan-Afrikan and anti-imperialist theorist and fighter of the 1960’s and 1970’s.  He effectively led the people of Guinea Bissau against the greatest odds, in a successful national independence struggle against Portugal’s colonialism.

Cabral emphasized that race must not be the basis of his country’s independence struggle; that he did not confuse imperialism and colonialism with the color of people’s skins, but desired to see economic, political, and military power in the hands of the working people so to free his country of all oppressive forces, be they white or black. In fact, his position and showing of solidarity with the white workers of Portugal generated a general uprising of the lower classes in Portugal that nearly saw a revolutionary overthrow of power there. He was also able to turn other white nations against Portugal’s colonial policies in his country. It was this uprising and international support coupled with the political and armed liberation struggle of the people of Guinea Bissau that ultimately forced the Portuguese military and colonial administration to abandon Guinea Bissau and return to Portugal to suppress the revolt there.

In turn, Portuguese agents inside of Cabral’s party assassinated him. Those Black agents, Cabral’s fellow countrymen, were opponents of his class-based struggle and were incited to murder Cabral because of his collaboration with “whites” and his being of mixed Afrikan and Portuguese blood. The Portuguese imperialists used proponents of reverse racism to kill the man who had led Afrika’s greatest national independence struggle, freed his people from a savage and brutal colonial existence, and even offered his country’s support to the struggles of New Afrikans here in Amerika. There are valuable lessons to be learned here.

The imperialists have used reverse racists many times in attempts to derail many other revolutionary movements of people of color and to assassinate key leaders. Such racialist elements were used to murder Malcolm X.  The FBI used such elements as the United Slaves Organization to assassinate key members of the BPP, Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and Jon Huggins in January 1969. Indeed in many cases, such as during the national independence struggles in Angola and Mozambique during the 1960’s and 1970’s, the elements who promoted anti-white ideology ended up becoming open collaborators with and agents of the very “white” imperialist powers they were supposed to be fighting. For example, Holden Robert’s UPA/FNLA (Uniao das Populacoes de Angola/Frente Nacional de Libertacao de Angola), became open agents of U.S. imperialism in Angola, and Jonas Sivimbi’s Unita became open agents of the Portuguese imperialists in Mozambique. These groups became agents of their imperialist sponsors and turned their arms away from fighting the colonial forces and declared war for them against their own people’s revolutionary forces, namely the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) and Frelimo (the Liberation Front of Mozambique).

At no time and in no place has playing the race card or the racial blame game ever won any people freedom from oppression. But what it has done is generate most every known major genocidal war that has occurred over the past several centuries, from the genocidal extermination of tens of millions of Native Amerikans to the genocidal attacks on Afrikans by Arabs in Southern Sudan today. The racial game produces only a back and forth cycle of bloodshed, carnage, and misery between competing racial groups. For its blind participants, racism offers nothing positive except a subjective and superficial sense of belonging to a group which professes to be “superior” to another group and the destruction of the natural compassion and sanity that would otherwise prevent humyns from brutalizing and massacring innocent people. And it’s a double-edged sword: one “race” victimizes another and is in turn victimized, or another “race” becomes the target of the victim. The complicity of many Jews today in Anglo-Zionist race-oriented genocidal policies against Palestinians and other Arabs is an outstanding example of a people who were once victims of racial violence in turn victimizing another innocent people in the name of race and claims of “God-given” right. And all to advance the wealth and power interests of a capitalist elite.

For white and Black supremacists here in Amerika, a race war would not prove beneficial to either “race!”  It would only produce a cycle of mutual slaughter of members of both races. No one would be “liberated” as a result, but multitudes of loved ones, friends, and colleagues on both sides would be brutalized, butchered, maimed, massacred, and displaced. In the race hate game no one wins – there is simply no way for a sane mind to romanticize it. But in a unified struggle of the oppressed classes and nationalities against imperialism, the very source of world suffering, misery, and racism itself can be uprooted and power turned over to those who can be trusted to use it properly, namely the oppressed masses.

In the fevered minds of racists, their fanatical howlings about violent repression or annihilation of “inferior races” sounds like fun: that is until the bloodshed begins and they find themselves on the receiving end of counter-violence that quickly spins out of control. To many racist southern whites, the brutal enslavement of New Afrikans seemed like a fun enterprise: that is until revolts like Nat Turner’s turned the guns back on them. At that point a massive Black and white abolitionist movement sprang to life to end slavery. There are simply no superior and inferior races. Indeed the very concept of race is an invention. A comrade put it this way in a letter to me:

“Racism is the spawn of colonialism and is based on lies. The technological edge the Europeans took advantage of came late in the game. Much of it was borrowed from other cultures like gunpowder from China, or the lanteen sail from Afrika, and potatoes from South Amerika. The combination of these elements and the ability to use them to establish global hegemony created the illusion of white supremacy.

“In reality, we’re all pretty damn equal. Even the difference between smart and dumb people is not so great. No one of us is really all that smart. Is capitalism smart? We let the nastiest men run the show by the nastiest means and hope that it will work out alright for the rest of us. Is that smart? We’ve got all these gadgets running, but the sum of it is we’ve burned a hole in the atmosphere and the ice caps are melting.

“Even the idea of Communism is not so brilliant. It is just common sense. Ants work together for their common welfare. The genius lies in overcoming our own stupidity to do what is necessary to survive, and this will be a big struggle and one we could lose. There is a time factor in our getting our collective act together.

“The good news is that all the elements necessary for our survival as a species are present. We just have to sort out our political-social organization, and deal with the nasty men.”

Even mainstream sources now admit that the concept of race is today a scientifically unsustainable concept. That the “theories” invented centuries ago to validate the idea are invalidated by today’s science. The Merriam Webster Collegiate Encyclopedia (2000) defines and dismisses the notion of race thusly:

“Race: Term once commonly used in physical anthropology to denote a division of humankind possessing traits that are transmissible by descent and sufficient to characterize it as a distinct human type (e.g. Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid). Today the term has little scientific standing, as older methods of differentiation, including hair form and body measurement, have given way to the comparative analysis of DNA and gene frequencies relating to such factors as blood type, the excretion of amino acids, and inherited enzyme deficiencies. Because all human populations today are extremely similar genetically, most researchers have abandoned the concept of race for the concept of the cline, a graded series of differences occurring along a line of environmental or geographical transition. This reflects the recognition that human populations have always been in a state of flux, with genes constantly flowing from one gene pool to another, impeded only by physical and ecological boundaries. While relative isolation does preserve genetic differences and allow populations to maximally adapt to climatic and disease factors over long periods of time, all groups currently existing are thoroughly “mixed” genetically, and such differences as still exist do not lend themselves to simple typologizing. “Race” is today primarily a social designation, identifying a class sharing some outward physical characteristics and some commonalities of culture and history.”

This same text goes on to admit that racism is a creation and tool of colonialism:

“Racism:  Belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that some races are inherently superior to others. More broadly, the term refers to any racial prejudice or discrimination throughout the era of European colonialism, the British viewed imperialism as a noble activity (“the white man’s burden”) destined to bring civilization to the benighted races, while the French invoked the notion of mission civilistrace, their duty to bring civilization to backward peoples. An influential modern proponent was the Comte de Gobineau, who held that the so-called Aryan was the supreme race. His most important follower was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whom Adolf Hitler credited with supplying the “scientific” basis of the Nazi’s racialist philosophy, used to justify the persecution of Jews and other non-Aryans. South African society was built on the principle of apartheid, or racial “separateness.” Today the general trend is away from racism, though the problem of racist thinking remains intractable.”

Although this mainstream reference work totally avoids pointing out what social-economic class invented the entire racial concept and its birth and role here in North Amerika, it does make clear that both “race” and “racism” are today proven to be scientifically baseless and live on solely as psycho-social concepts. So why then do the Amerikan political and economic rulers still classify Amerikan citizens by race? It is obviously because they desire to maintain its role as a divisive undercurrent to be appealed to and whipped into hysteria when their power and privilege are threatened from blow. Thus, the national identity of Amerika remains that of a “white nation.”

The concepts of race and racism, like a deeply ingrained backward superstition, are so deeply embedded in the social psyche and are so deeply influential on social attitudes and behaviors, that they cannot be simply ignored. The oppressed “races” must collectively struggle against racial oppression and domination, while the conscious members of the oppressor races must struggle to conquer the myth of racial superiority within their own “racial” groups. Reverse racism must also be countered. In confronting racism we must be aware of its counterrevolutionary nature and the forms it takes in the minds of those who embrace it consciously or subconsciously. George Jackson gave an insightful analysis on this point. He stated:

“Racism is a matter of ingrained traditional attitudes conditioned through institutions. For some, it is as natural a reflex as breathing. The psychosocial effects of segregated environments compounded by bitter class repression have served in the past to render the progressive movement almost totally impotent.

“The major obstacle to a united left in this country is white racism. There are three categories of white racists: the overt, self-satisfied racist who doesn’t attempt to hide his antipathy; the self-interdicting racist who harbors and nurtures racism in spite of his best efforts; and the unconscious racist, who has no awareness of his racist preconceptions.

“As Black partisans, we must recognize and allow for the existence of all three types of racists. We must understand their presence as an effect of the system. It is the system that must be crushed, for it continues to manufacture new and deeper contradictions of both class and race. Once it is destroyed, we may be able to address the problems of racism at an even more basic level. But we must also combat racism while we are in the process of destroying the system.

“The self-interdicting racist, no matter what his acquired conviction or ideology, will seldom be able to contribute with his actions in any really concrete way. His role in revolution, barring a change of basic character, will be minimal throughout. Whether the basic character of a man can be changed at all is still a question.”

As Comrade George pointed out, our struggle demands that we acknowledge and recognize the three categories of racists. However, we must also acknowledge and recognize that the reverse racists also fit into these three categories. And in answer to George’s question whether there is a possibility of changing the basic character of the “self-interdicting racist,” we think yes. The Marxist recognizes that there is a dialectical relationship between our social practice and how we think. That reactionary thinking can be corrected through revolutionary social practice. But that practice must also in turn be guided by and committed to correct ideology.

Our Comrade Tom Big Warrior analyzed the process very well in a discussion we had some time ago concerning a New Afrikan brother with whom I was struggling to break out of a deeply ingrained hatred of whites. This brother’s views had been imbedded in him at a very young age by a now deceased grandfather, whose memory he held with the highest respect. While he could not refute my arguments against race-based hatreds, he also felt powerless to change his feelings. Here is Tom:

“I understand what you’re talking about with the brother who has deeply rooted hatred of whites. I’ve got brothers in my nation who have the same issues regarding Blacks, particularly among the hillbillies of mixed white-Native heritage. It was bred into them from a very young age and reinforced by their social practice (or lack of it) with Black folks.

“Hell, everybody in Amerika has been brainwashed on race. I know I have been affected by it, but I’ve got the advantage of both a theoretical understanding and a lifetime of positive social interaction with people of all ethnic backgrounds (and particularly Black Comrades), so I can identify and throw away feelings that come from racist programming as they come up.

“I think the key with this brother is to get him to see that his feelings are part of the slave mentality he (and his grandfather) were programmed to have to keep Black people from throwing off their oppression. If you can’t inspire meek submission and self-deprecation, you can inspire hate and fear, (which is the next best thing), and this leads to alienation and division.

“”The greatest threat in the South was unity between the Blacks and poor whites, who had common class interests. So the big landlords played them against each other by promoting blind hatred and racism.

“If he can grasp that his feelings are chains upon him causing him to act against the interests of Black people and working people in general, (that he is falling into the role of a “Nigger” set for him by “Mr. Charlie”), he will see that it must be overcome so he can be a “true Black Warrior” and a genuine revolutionary.

“We feel the way we feel because we think the way we think. Changing our thinking changes how we feel.  In fact our feelings expose how we think at the deepest levels. Sometimes we think we have something all sorted out and understood, but then a feeling pops up to show us that we are still in process, and we have to keep struggling to grasp the idea more firmly.

“If the brother wants to be a revolutionary, he can’t be liberal with himself. He has to recognize that white people must be won to support Black liberation and make proletarian revolution. Unless this is done, Black people will continue to be oppressed, and the imperialists will keep running the show.

“He has to decide if he wants to be part of the problem or part of the solution. The MC5, the house band of the White Panther Party, had a song where the singer shouts out, “It takes 5 seconds to decide and determine your purpose here on the planet, 5 seconds to decide if you are going to be a part of the problem or you are going to be a part of the solution – KICK OUT THE JAMS MOTHERFUCKER!”

“This is just what they were talking about – this mental/emotional programming that jams up our ability to make revolution. Ain’t nothing to do but kick it out, get rid of it, to get to what needs to be done.

“When you reason with him he says, “Yeah, yeah you’re right, Brother,” because you can’t reasonably argue for racism. But he’s not willing to let go and backslides right back into it. As if counter-revolution was his purpose on the planet.

“It’s time to invoke the 5 second rule. Time for him to make a commitment and stop being liberal with himself. The world can’t wait for us to get serious about revolution.

“If he really wants to honor his grandfather’s memory, he shouldn’t let the wounding that was done to him and other Blacks go on another generation. You can’t play the blame game and win.

“The pigs didn’t kill Fred Hampton because he was good at organizing Black people, but because he could turn redneck Hillbilly crackers into Red revolutionaries, which he did with the Young Patriot Party – that’s true history.

“He was a better revolutionary than Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver put together, and he is the one we should measure ourselves and our praxis by.

“It is our practice that determines our thinking, but there is a dialectic between theory and practice called praxis, in which theory becomes the determining factor.

“This is different than idealism, which Marx was struggling against. This is what Mao was talking about when he said ideological and political line will determine everything. It is the difference between Utopian socialism and our Scientific socialism.

“We begin with a concrete analysis of concrete conditions and from this developed theory, then apply our theory to practice, then sum up our practice to strengthen and advance our theory, then go back to practice, over and over getting sharper and sharper. That’s praxis.

“That’s how a bush-wah intellectual, or a peasant or a lumpen can transform into a proletarian revolutionary without working in a factory or even ever seeing one. It doesn’t happen spontaneously, it takes struggle.”

When we truly recognize that the capitalists are at the root of racism, that it is a tool and weapon invented and used by them to preserve their power and privilege and to keep the lower classes divided, oppressed, miserable, and powerless, then we must also recognize our revolutionary duty to rise above racist and reverse racist programming.  This is a difficult task that demands concrete practice.  It is because of the depth of race-conditioning that the liberation struggle of New Afrikans and other oppressed nationalities cannot be dependent upon white cooperation, however, that cooperation should be sought and developed in process to build a United Front Against Imperialism. True liberation from national oppression compels destruction of the imperialist system. Otherwise, the monopoly capitalists will continue to derail independence struggles by allying themselves with racialist and comprador elements within the bodies of the oppressed nationalities and races, push them into positions of power, and then use them to subvert the liberation struggles and bring the masses back under imperialist control. This is the essence of neocolonialism and the method used by the imperialists to undermine most all of the national independence struggles of the last century.

In that it’s the capitalist institutions that create, perpetuate, and benefit from racism, (indeed they need to preserve it to maintain their elevated power and status), they will assuredly mobilize resistance against all genuine efforts to build class-based racial solidarity. They will use the most rabid of white racists, and incite many New Afrikans, Natives and other people of color to fall out on the reactionary side, and the more intelligent reactionary, (reverse racist and comprador), leaders will encourage this. Our movement must be prepared to confront and counter such measures. We must set an example of promoting class unity and solidarity. It will also occur that some people will vacillate between the revolutionary and reactionary sides and that the dividing line won’t be static and clear-cut. The task of winning people politically will ultimately decide victory.

Conclusion

It should be clear by now that those of us who play into racism act as agents of our own imperialist oppressors, (whether consciously or not), and we aid in continuing our own oppression and want. In fact, we increase and intensify our own oppression and misery by inciting and perpetuating hatred, humiliation, insensitivity, and violence not only against the other race(s), but also in turn against our “own” race. It’s a cycle that no one benefits from except the oppressor class that sits at the top laughing at what fools we are, while their power and wealth remain secure form any real challenge. It is on this basis that the New Afrikan Black Panther Party – Prison Chapter promotes, unites with, and supports the White Panther Organization and all anti-imperialists of all nationalities and all oppressed peoples in a common struggle against imperialism. We welcome the WPO as fellow comrades and Panthers within the democratic centralism of our aspiring Vanguard Party.

All Power to the People!

The Portent of a Pandemic

By Kenn Orphan

Just months ago, few would have thought it possible that a submicroscopic ball of genetic coding could bring the world’s wealthiest powers to their knees. But it has. In the space of a few months the Covid-19 virus projected its spiky arms not only into the delicate cells of the human lung, but into the very membrane of the global economic and political order itself. The United States, being the emblem of this order, has also become the biggest example of its enormous failure. In desperation, the American Empire, the wealthiest and most powerful one humanity has ever known, is flailing in spasms and fits of insanity, denial and outright cruelty. It is robbing from its allies and client states masks and ventilators, as it lashes out even more furiously at nations which have defied its hegemonic control. And, while it bails out corporations and the richest industries, it has abandoned its citizenry to fend for themselves amidst a raging storm where nearly every “non-essential” business has been shut down, the for-profit healthcare system is beginning to buckle, the bodies of the dead are mounting, and the mass graves are being dug. Amidst this assault on humanity, there is a growing assault on the living earth itself. The US is rapidly stripping the last meager protections for the environment, accelerating climate change and the collapse of the biosphere itself.

Donald Trump, a leader that is rapidly approaching the malevolence of Caligula, presides over this plague-ridden stage of the American Empire. On his watch, nurses and doctors are left to wrap themselves in garbage bags as their only defense against the microbe’s merciless rampage. Governors are reduced to a bidding war against other governors for life saving medical equipment. Workers that are considered “non-essential” are left to figure out how to navigate the brutal landscape of capitalist predation, with few options available to them to maintain their health, food security or home. Immigrants and prisoners are being left in cages to die without any adequate medical assistance. Most Americans are now left in an impossible situation. “Shelter in place” even though they may lose their livelihoods and homes in a very short time. Millions are unemployed with millions more on the way. Millions have or will lose their health insurance since this fundamental human right has been tethered to employment and whims of the market economy, one that has been built on the mercurial and shifting sands of the so-called free market. Now that marketplace is in shambles. The government’s answer to their plight has been to toss them a laughable, one-time pittance of $1200, while hundreds of billions of dollars are allotted to the wealthiest corporations and industries.

As the United States outdoes the rest of the world in Covid-19 cases and deaths, the Trump administration is rapidly dismantling the last, anemic protections for its beleaguered ecosystems. Lands that protect besieged endangered species are now open to hunters and poachers. The largely defanged Environmental Protection Agency has, for all intents and purposes, been shuttered amidst this pandemic. Now corporations are free to pollute without fear of oversight or penalty. The air and water, so integral to human health, are in open season for these industries. Indeed, even as the pandemic seems to be clearing skies and waterways around the planet, the “titans of industry” seek to rapidly cloud them again with toxins for their profit margin. It is an omnicide for profit, encouraged by the corporate state, on full display. And as if to add yet another layer to this absurdity, Trump recently signed an executive order announcing that the US will mine the moon for minerals. Apparently, plundering our own celestial sphere isn’t enough.

With little doubt, the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed painful truths about the nature of capitalism itself. The sacrosanct liturgy of the “free market,” for so long lauded by its faithful adherents, now comes across as a vulgar joke in the face of the inhumanity we are witnessing. This should come as little surprise since it possesses no mechanisms to cope mercifully with the calamity of a pandemic in the first place, let alone the existential threats of climate change or nuclear war for that matter. It understands only mindless expansion of the accumulation of capital for a select few. But it is also encroaching even more aggressively into habitats where few human beings have been before. Forests are being felled at record pace, the ocean floor is being scraped away for minerals as I write this, along with a myriad of species we may never even see, and ships now ply the once frozen waters of the Arctic circle in search for petrol.  And with this reckless abandon comes our inevitable encounter with pathogens that are likely to be far more deadly and with which we will have no defense.

Indeed, as horrifying as it is, Covid-19 could have been a far more lethal plague, eviscerating any vestige of civilization in a matter of weeks. We may have been spared this time around. But with the ice caps and glaciers melting, coral reefs bleaching, locust swarms blanketing crops in Africa, and fires burning forests and fields to ash with more ferocity each year in Australia and California and along the Mediterranean, we are facing an even greater menace than a microbial killer. Climate change is an existential threat on a global scale, and it does not just threaten the human species, but all life in the biosphere. And given what we have witnessed in the past couple months, we should not hold any assurances that the economic and political order that runs the world’s affairs will be any better suited at addressing the harrowing predicament of a rapidly warming planet. True to form, they will continue business as usual only, as things get worse, they will ramp up brutal repression of civil rights and accelerate toward outright fascism.

Just this month, the US stopped issuing passports except in matter of “life or death,” a move that echoes past authoritarian regimes limits on the freedom of movement. While its population is reeling from a collapsing healthcare system and the economic aftershocks, it is continuing its cruel sanctions on Iran, Cuba and Venezuela, even as it threatens military action against those countries. And the echoes of its influence can be seen in many of its allies and client states. In India, Narendra Modi has ignored and sometimes encouraged the police who have persecuted and beaten the poor, Muslims and Dalits for non-compliance to quarantine restrictions which ignore their socioeconomic plight. It continues to ravage occupied Kashmir. In Israel, draconian surveillance technology is being used to track citizen’s movements. And it continues to collectively punish the open-air prison of Gaza. In Hungary, democracy has all but been dissolved, giving far right Victor Orban sweeping, dictatorial powers for an indefinite time period. In the Philippines, Duterte has ordered police and soldiers to shoot people who break the lock down, even if they are desperately searching for food. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro has flouted the urging of health officials, endangering the lives and health of millions of people, and has encouraged radical Christian evangelicals in their genocidal aspirations to minister to uncontacted tribes in the Amazon who have no immunity to most western diseases, let alone Covid-19. Indeed, this pandemic has demonstrated the incompetence, cruelty, and despotism of the today’s global economic and political arrangement in stark ways, and it has indicated how this order will respond to the escalating nuclear arms race, continuing destruction of ecosystems through habitat loss and pollution, and the climate change catastrophes that loom on the horizon.

If there is anything to be learned from the Covid-19 pandemic, it would be that it is a portent. A miniscule sphere packed with laces of genetic strands that perhaps symbolize the power of knowledge itself.  It offers us a glimpse at how some governments are acting responsibly, like Cuba, for instance, who has sent medical teams to China, Italy and Spain. And how others, ones driven by the despotism of the so-called “free market,” are incapable of responding in any manner that is even remotely humane. The United States being the prime example. It also gives us insight into the power of nature and its ability to halt the very machinery of human society. But in addition to this, it offers us an opportunity to organize and act collectively as a species, even in isolation.

From the streets of Paris and Santiago, to the rainforests and wetlands of the Amazon and the Niger Delta, we have seen how ordinary people can arise and unite in solidarity against the barbarism of the global corporate state, whose omnicidal demeanor endangers us and the living earth itself. They continue to fight for the world we all deserve, the world we desperately need. We should take note of them now because, without a doubt, their struggle will become everyone’s in the years to come.

Join in the Grand Industrial Band: Contextualizing Contemporary IWW Cultural Initiatives

By Jackson Mann

“The laboring of American culture” is how historian Michael Denning described the aesthetic effects that Popular Front cultural organizing had on mainstream U.S. performing, visual, and media arts in his sweeping 1997 history of U.S. left-wing culture in the 1930s and 40s. According to Denning, these were the first decades in which the experience, ideas, and language of the working classes came to be represented in mainstream U.S. culture, which was “labored” as a result. This cultural victory was achieved through a coalition of workers’ arts organizations, associations of socialist and communist émigré artists fleeing Fascism in Europe, and industrial unions of creative laborers in the newly-developing Hollywood film industry, all of which were grouped around the then-ascendent labor movement, specifically the political bloc formed by the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (CIO) association with the American Communist Party. Denning shows that this coalition understood itself as a “cultural front” within the broader Popular Front movement. 

But while “the age of the CIO” may have been the first time the US working class was able to enter mainstream cultural production and discourse, subaltern, working-class culture in the US had been developing for much longer. The organization that contributed the most, perhaps, to the development of pre-CIO, subaltern working-class culture was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a militant industrial labor union founded in 1905 by a coalition of labor movement leaders that included Lucy Parsons, Eugene Debs, Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, Daniel De Leon, Thomas Hagerty, and William “Big Bill” Haywood, who represented the union’s original institutional backbone, the Western Federation of Miners. Over the next three decades, the IWW became famous for producing an extensive roster of what Daniel Gross calls “worker-scholar-poets,” rank-and-file organizers who doubled as theorists, songwriters, poets, authors, playwrights, and cartoonists. The IWW cultivated this milieu by operating a nationwide cultural-production apparatus that included dozens of newspapers, journals, and the extensive publication and distribution of sheet music and songbooks. Music was the spearhead of the IWW’s own cultural front, and it is through music that the IWW made its most durable impact on Leftist culture in the United States. Songs written by its organizers and members, and produced by the IWW cultural apparatus through its publications, became anthems of the US labor movement, and remain so to this day. Joe Hill, the Swedish-American IWW organizer, songwriter, cartoonist, and theorist, who was executed by the state of Utah under dubious circumstances in 1915, has become a revered icon in even the most conservative circles of US labor. His songs, written or commissioned for specific strikes or actions undertaken by the IWW, continue to resonate with left-wing labor activists today. Without the IWW, what Denning would later call the laboring of US culture in the 1930s and 40s would not have been possible.

In the popular imagination, the IWW has become the stuff of legend. The distance of history has transformed it into mythology, a process which has been exacerbated by the fact that most scholarship on the union has been conducted by folklorists. And indeed, by 1937, a little over 30 years after its founding, the IWW had become “a shell of an organization…” One would not be wrong to assume that soon after this the IWW disintegrated entirely, hastening its entrance into folklore. 

However, like its music, the IWW persisted, albeit mostly in the form of a perpetual rump organization. In 2016, the IWW had a membership of just under 4,000. Given that at its height it could boast a membership of 100,000, this may be seen as representative of the union’s complete marginality. Due to its legacy of cultural organizing, the IWW transformed from a militant industrial labor union into a small, left-wing cultural organization as its ability to organize workers at an industrial scale declined. 

The IWW’s most recent cultural initiative was the Greater Chicago chapter’s curation and release of a punk and hardcore music compilation, titled We Don’t Work May 1st, on May 1st, 2019. Because IWW music is the most enduring aspect of its labor culture, this release is a particularly interesting nodal point for analysis. In fact, this cultural commodity, i.e. this compilation of new original music, represents the possibility of a transformation in the cultural strategy of the contemporary IWW. While the IWW has, for the past several decades, been an organization concerned with re-interpreting and preserving its early-20th-century cultural legacy, the release of We Don’t Work May 1st, an album of contemporary, popular music, might be speculatively connected to the union’s renewed commitment to involvement in long-term labor organizing campaigns, and speak to the resulting changes in the structure, size, and make-up of its membership given the nature of these campaigns, themselves. To show this transformation, however, necessitates a brief overview of IWW cultural history, particularly its music, after the union’s first period.

IWW’s First Period & Second Period Folklorization

In 1948, the CIO had just experienced a disastrous electoral failure in its support for Henry Wallace and the collapse of its organizing initiatives in the South. It was also under increasing pressure due to the “Non-Communist Affidavit Requirement” of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, and the growing right-wing radicalism of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Moderate elements in the CIO leadership responded to this political climate by initiating a massive anti-socialist and anti-communist purge of CIO leadership, staff, and rank-and-file members. Over the next two years, one million members were expelled from the organization.

While the CIO remained a powerful force even after this self-imposed blow, the IWW was almost entirely obliterated by the same events. Beginning in the 1920s, when the union’s first generation of leaders were either exiled, imprisoned, forced underground, or murdered, the IWW gradually lost strength and the organization seemed doomed to obsolescence by the 1930s. In 1946, however, the union still had a membership of over 20,000, most of whom were metalworkers concentrated in Cleveland, Ohio. But, between 1947, when the national leadership refused to sign the Non-Communist Affidavit, and 1950, the IWW’s remaining locals all voted to leave the union, fearing that the national leadership’s refusal to comply with Taft-Hartley would lead to a crackdown on their ability to organize. In 1955, the IWW “celebrated its fiftieth anniversary unable to engage in collective bargaining anywhere.” 

While it is tempting to see the end of the IWW’s first period as occurring  in the 1920s, when its original leadership was destroyed, it is more helpful to see 1947-50 as marking the end of this period. At this time, the IWW was transformed from a militant, industrial labor union with  a mass-membership, into a left-wing cultural organization. Without the institutional backbone of a working class mass-membership, all that remained of the IWW was its cultural apparatus. And without a mass-membership, even this infrastructure had withered to almost nothing. This distinction is important to understanding second period IWW music because without a mass-membership, the IWW represented no-one and, more importantly, produced culture for nobody in particular. This change in the nature of the organization left the cultural legacy of the IWW open to re-interpretation.

According to Franklin Rosemont, it was not until the 1960s that the IWW saw even a minimal resurgence in membership due to the interest it held for a subset of the youth counterculture movements of the era.  Even with this influx it remained a small, cadre organization. At this time, the IWW leadership began to push these newcomers to compose new songs for the Little Red Songbook, which had grown stale with an “overall lack of contemporary relevance.” Following precedent, attempts were made to write new lyrics to the melodies of contemporary popular songs, though these failed to achieve the mass appeal of the songs produced by previous generations of songwriters.

It was also during this period that the ‘folklorization’ of IWW culture began in both the academic and popular spheres. As a result of the work of prominent re-interpreters of IWW history, particularly folklorist Archie Green and singer-songwriter-activist Utah Phillips,IWW culture became associated with an academic definition of folklore that emphasized pre-industrial, non-economic musical production and oral transmission across generations.

The leaders and members of the IWW’s first period, according to Green, “paid little attention to academic issues in defining their music” which signaled its proximity to a form of extra-institutional cultural production that he would term “laborlore.” Though he never defines the meaning and scope of this designation, Green's insistence on the status of IWW musical production, and its cultural production more generally, as 'lore' paradoxically aligns it with the pre-industrial past.

This project was simultaneously carried out in the popular sphere by Phillips, who recorded or was featured on IWW repertoire records and wrote original songs in the stripped-down style of Woody Guthrie, the Popular Front songwriter-turned-folk-hero whose image would be iconic for the 1960s folk-revival movement from which Phillips emerged. Over the course of his life, Phillips became the most popular outwardly-facing representative of the IWW and its cultural legacy. His emphasis on working within the semblance of an oral folk tradition where he and his collaborators “can’t or won’t read music” had the effect of aesthetically-framing first period IWW music, itself, as folklore. In his reinterpretation of early IWW songs, Phillips also cast the strategy of contrafactum in IWW songs as universal, ignoring numerous songs that had both original lyrics and music. In doing so, Phillips misinterpreted the function that contrafactum originally performed. In his afterword to The Big Red Songbook, Phillips quotes a rank-and-file member who states that first period IWW songwriters “used common tunes that you might have heard in a church or in a bar.” From this quote it might seem obvious that IWW contrafactum should be understood as a use of then-contemporary popular standards as a building block in forging a militant left-wing subculture. However, by interpreting contrafactum as naive, unschooled creativity, Phillips comes to an entirely different conclusion. IWW songwriters were not engaging with the popular culture of the time, but were instead tapping into a pre-existing oral tradition. Therefore, according to Phillips, today’s activist-songwriters and activist-musicians should “learn these songs. Use them. Change them. Put them to work,” referring to a mostly-static repertoire of first period IWW music, itself conceived of as oral tradition.

One particular strategy that both Green and Phillips utilize to bolster this way of framing IWW music is to universalize the experience of one particular subset of the IWW’s mass membership during the height of the first period: the American “hobo.” Hoboes, migrant laborers that were common in the 1910s, were one of the “unorganizable” groups that the IWW worked with and they made up a large chunk of the IWW membership during the union’s most successful period (1910-1920). Much of Hobo culture, which should not be conflated with IWW labor culture, could indeed be described as folkloric owing to the oral nature of its transmission.

While labor leader and early member of the IWW Elizabeth Gurley-Flynn did once refer to Joe Hill’s music as “folk songs,” this was probably in reference to its mass-appeal among working-class audiences rather than the nature of its production, distribution, and transmission. Both Green and Phillips obscure the IWW’s modernist, world-building project by mapping folkloric notions, such as oral transmission, onto music that was semi-professionally composed and professionally published and distributed with the intention of creating a cohesive militant working-class subculture that could contest for subaltern economic power. The IWW music of the second period, then, is marked by the absence of this large-scale production and distribution of new music. Rather, the figures of the second period were engaged in an anti-materialist project of folklorization, which sought to transform the modernist, subaltern culture of the IWW into an oral tradition of folklore. With this historical context regarding the history of IWW music, how it has been framed, and how it has functioned in the popular imagination, in mind, it is possible to see the Greater Chicago IWW chapter’s release of We Don’t Work May 1st as a pivot away from the folkloric project of the past 60 years.

Contextualizing We Don’t Work May 1st

On May 1st, 2019, the Greater Chicago IWW released a 25-song compilation of local Chicago punk and hardcore bands titled We Don’t Work May 1st. The project was spearheaded by Paul Scanty, the Greater Chicago IWW’s Director of Education and Outreach, and Danny “Cheap Date,” the founder of Don’t Panic Records & Distro and a rank-and-file member of the IWW. The compilation was sold through the music distribution website Bandcamp.com and profits from the sales went directly towards a strike fund on reserve for future industrial actions by the Greater Chicago IWW. During an interview with Scanty and Cheap Date conducted by the author of this article, however, Scanty traced the genesis of the project to a period before either he or Cheap Date were IWW members. In fact, Cheap Date had been developing the idea of a Chicago punk and hardcore compilation, to be released by his record label, for several years prior to his joining the union and had mentioned the idea to Scanty at the time. In February 2019, Scanty, who by that point had joined the union, “approached [Cheap Date] about doing the comp [sic] for the IWW.” 

Cheap Date had already designated a number of bands for the compilation before it had transformed into an IWW-affiliated project. After deciding to make it an IWW initiative, however, Scanty and Cheap Date focused on contacting groups whose music was politically-aligned with the IWW’s beliefs. According to Cheap Date: 

“when we [Scanty and Cheap Date] first discussed this it was definitely… well, we want all these songs to be labor songs or, like, political songs or something that’s going to be left-leaning but… we really didn’t have time to ask bands to record songs specifically for this so the guidelines were… we want this to be new music and… we were reaching out to bands that had political songs.”

The majority of the songs do contain explicitly-political themes. These range from topics such as feminist empowerment (Underwire’s ‘Not Dating’ and Payasa’s ‘Muñeca’), anti-fascism (La Armada’s ‘Fire’), anti-racism, and LGBTQ+ inclusion (2Minute Minor’s ‘Unite the Crew’). There is even a song, ‘Written in Red’ by The Ableist, a band in which Scanty sings, written as a tribute to anarchist activist Voltairine de Cleyre, whose writings and oratory were in dialogue with the ideas of other turn-of-the-20th-century leftists, including the first period IWW.

Many of the songs also contain themes specific to labor. For example, pop-punk singer-songwriter Davey Dynamite’s ‘380 Times’ deals with the disparity between the wages of average employees and the giant sums given to corporate CEOs and shareholders:

Well I think this is going too far, I think they are getting away

with our future, our past, everything that we once had

And I work, and I like it, I haven’t had it bad so far

but my degree seems to be worth less than the paper it was printed on

And my friends, and my family, stuck working dead end jobs

what did they do to deserve it, a minimum wage barely helping at all?

Pull yourselves up by your bootstraps, is what they always say

they always forget to tell you, just how the boots get made

They are products of thievery, of telling the poor to be grateful

they are fine with you starving, as long as you’re willing and able

to work, three hundred and eighty times more than they do

to know, three hundred and eighty times more than they do

to starve, three hundred and eighty times more than they do

to make, three hundred and eighty times less than they do

Other songs deal with specific labor rights violations endured on contemporary job sites. For instance, The Just Luckies ‘Bossman’ deals with sexual harassment of workers by management:

Why do you think that you own me

and know me enough to touch my hair?

Creepy bossman with your ancient, ancient hands

creepy bossman with your ancient, ancient hands, oh

Don’t fucking touch me

don’t fucking touch me

keep your hands off my body

don’t fucking touch me

Cheap Date’s own group, The Cheap Dates, are also featured on the compilation. Their contribution, like Dynamite’s song, deals with the poverty wages earned by today’s working class, focusing specifically on the health issues that result.

Aspects of this initiative reveal a break from the folkloric framework that has dominated conversations about IWW music, and its culture generally, since the 1960s. Certain elements of this break represent a return to the modernist project of the first period, which sought to appropriate contemporaneous popular culture for political ends, while others break from it entirely. This is most obviously shown in the formal aesthetic qualities of the music itself. In his press release in the newly-reconstituted version of the IWW’s flagship publication, the Industrial Worker, Cheap Date claims that there “are bands of nearly every style of punk on here. Ska bands, hardcore bands, pop bands, folk bands, and crust bands.” In fact, Cheap Date understates the stylistic diversity of the compilation, which spans the numerous post-punk and -hardcore styles that have proliferated since the early 1980s, most of which remain culturally relevant today. The project’s engagement with culturally relevant musical styles signals a return to the goals of the first period. While we cannot be sure how, exactly, first period songs were performed in terms of instrumentation and performance arrangements, we can be sure that IWW songwriters of this era were attempting to work in contemporary and culturally-relevant styles since IWW contrafactum was “almost all… set to popular song hits of the 1900-1915 period, or to familiar gospel and revival hymns…”

The cultural relevance of the styles represented on We Don’t Work May 1st is the project’s most obvious break with the second period’s folkloric notions of repertoire and the resulting predilection for a historical performance practice that maintained anachronistic stylistic elements. However, while this focus on contemporaneity creates a bridge between We Don’t Work May 1st and first period IWW songwriters and composers, it also produces an element that is entirely novel. While contrafactum was an enormously popular trend in the first period, all of the songs on We Don’t Work May 1st (except for Shots Fired Shots Fired’s cover of Life Sentence’s ‘Problem’) are entirely original. This break in IWW tradition (though it must be stated that this tradition was never an institutionalized facet of the IWW cultural apparatus and was only articulated as such during the second period) can be attributed to the nature of post-World War II musical culture up until the present day, in which the popularity of original musical compositions over “standard” songs has increased.

These breaks were not conscious decisions made by Scanty and Cheap Date. When asked about how the IWW tradition of songwriting and musical composition, with all of its folkloric baggage, had influenced this initiative, Scanty stated that neither he nor Cheap Date had thought about this at all: 

“Did we see it in the context of, like, you know, new songs, or, a future generation of songs for the Little Red Songbook? No… Did our heads even go to a place of, like, ‘Oh, hey, this is a part of the history of making music that’s such a big part of the IWW…’ continuing that tradition? No.”

For Scanty and Cheap Date, it was not loyalty to continuing an organizational tradition, but their general knowledge of the IWW’s history of cultural production that led to their decision to transform what began as a general punk and hardcore compilation CD into an IWW initiative. In fact, the only other function of the compilation that was explicitly mentioned by Scanty and Cheap Date, besides raising money for the IWW’s strike fund, was to grow the Greater Chicago IWW’s roster of musically- and artistically-inclined members and organizers. 

Scanty and Cheap Date were not consciously deciding to break with precedent, but the idea that these changes in the cultural framing of IWW musical production were mere chance is unconvincing. A stronger theory pivots back to the earlier argument for placing the transition from the first- to the second-period IWW at the 1947-50 mark: it is changes in organizational activity and membership size and demographics that might be seen as initiating the re-evaluation of the function of cultural production in labor organizing by the IWW. 

Indeed, the past 5 years have seen the IWW actively organize workers for the first time in decades. As recently as October 2019, the IWW-affiliated Burgerville Workers Union, made up of employees of a large Pacific Northwest fast food chain, went on a four-day strike over failed wage negotiations. In addition to organizing workers in the fast-food industry, the IWW, through its Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC), was instrumental in supporting and publicizing attempts by incarcerated workers within the United States’ gargantuan (and now significantly privatized) prison system to go on strike in 2018.

It remains speculative to connect the IWW’s current, renewed commitment to industrial labor organizing campaigns with the reframing of its musical tradition evidenced by the We Don’t Work May 1st project. However, if the IWW begins to transform, through its organizing, from the cadre organization it has been for almost 60 years to a mass-membership, working class organization, it seems logical to assume that new attempts to reframe the IWW's cultural legacy in light of both contemporary political projects and the specificity of contemporary cultural production, consumption, and distribution will arise from within the ranks of the IWW's membership.

Conclusion

IWW culture, its framing, production, and the way it has functioned strategically in the union’s activities has changed immensely over time. This was due to changes in both the size and demographic composition of its membership, going from a 100,000 strong mass-membership working class institution at its height in the 1910s, to a regionally-bound but still robust labor union in the 1940s, to an isolated cadre organization which for decades had, at most, a few thousand members. 

As we have seen, two major cultural frameworks resulted from these periods. From the mass-membership industrial labor union there emerged a modernist project of culture-building which resulted in an enormous alternative cultural apparatus that produced newspapers, journals, and songbooks to disseminate a wealth of literature, visual art, and music produced by rank-and-file members, organizers, and union leaders across the country. From the cadre organization emerged a project of folklorization and invented tradition, where the artifacts of IWW culture were collected and transformed into static repertoires.

What makes We Don’t Work May 1st such an exciting release is that it represents the possibility of a third period of the IWW. The possibility of the IWW’s re-building itself as a mass-membership, working class organization committed to the labor struggle in the long term contains the further possibility for a reframing of its cultural tradition and a change in its contemporary cultural production strategy. Within these changes exists the potential for an entirely new type of militant, working class culture. The particular musical style, content, and formal qualities of first period IWW music were the result of IWW songwriters’ engagement in contemporaneous popular culture. Subaltern intervention into mainstream US culture today, which has changed considerably since the IWW’s heyday, may produce entirely novel results. If the We Don’t Work May 1st project is any indication, this culture has already begun to emerge. 

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Coronavirus and the Path Beyond Post-Industrial Society

By Connor Harney

“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, we must justify our right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

- Richard Buckminster Fuller

It has been a little over a week since President Trump deemed my co-workers at Whole Foods and I critical infrastructure during the global Coronavirus pandemic, and already, any sense of appreciation that title conferred—both in being categorized as essential in combating COVID-19 and better everyday treatment by customers—has already dissipated. In the place of that gratitude, our customers seem as entitled as ever toward the labor we thanklessly provide.  At the same time, any supply-chain issue or corporate-rationing policy out of our control means we face their ire, rather than the faceless executives and middle management responsible.

Taking aside that this global outbreak has everyone on edge, this sort of behavior is not at all surprising given the highly-stratified nature of class in the United States. There is a massive gulf in wealth, even among those that work. That is, the pay differential between say a software engineer and grocery stocker like myself is immense: the stock clerk can expect a median pay of just over 12 dollars an hour and the software developer, on the other hand, can expect just under $58. Even the lowest paid developer makes twice that of the clerk. Of course, none of this takes into account benefits connected to employment in the U.S. like healthcare and retirement, which widens this gap even further.

As Zizek wrote recently, “the impossible has happened, our world has stopped,” and yet, as we are expected to provide a sense of normalcy for the rest of country during what can only be described as a breakdown of all norms, workers in the service sector still struggle for basic human dignity. It was only after public shaming that my company offered paid sick leave, and only for the extent of the pandemic. Even our hazard pay is laughable, two dollars more an hour to put ourselves and our families on the front lines of this biological battle.

Given that, it has been nearly a decade since Fight for $15 began their campaign to raise wages and unionize typically-unorganized workers. And as the minimum still sits at under eight dollars, it should come as no surprise that conceptions of the nature of the work constitute a major dividing line among American workers. As a society, we fetishize technology, and its presence looms large over our national consciousness. For that reason, those who work in that sector of the economy find themselves held in high esteem by the public.

Unfortunately, this reverence is almost always accompanied by a zero-sum view, whereas only certain workers deserve dignity. Just like the literal wealth of the nation, there is only so much goodwill to go around—low-skilled workers, or the ones that make sure that everyone is clothed, fed, and sheltered, are barred from pride in their work that those in other sectors are allowed. This belief in the lowly nature of the service worker is by no means a new one.

Dolores Dante, a waitress interviewed by Studs Terkel in the early-1970s for his famous book Working, speaks to this long-standing state of affairs when she described her response to those who would say she was “just a waitress.” According to Dolores, “people imagine a waitress couldn’t possibly think or have any kind of aspiration other than to serve food,” but for her the job fulfilled a sense of purpose to the point that: “I don’t feel lowly at all. I myself feel sure. I don’t want to change the job. I love it.”

As human beings, we need to engage with the material world for our survival. Under capitalism, the way we meet our material needs is determined by factors like where we live, our level of education, skills we have, jobs available on the labor market, as well as the social networks we are a part of.  All of these things set the stage for where and how we work. That a game of chance governs our career trajectories should highlight how arbitrary the barriers to respectability we create are: the Dolores Dantes of the world should find dignity in their work.

However, the strongly-held belief in the connection between “skill” and compensation remains an obstacle to a world where such self-worth for service workers is publicly embraced. In many ways, this problem comes out of the notion of the United States as reaching a new level of economic development—a concept that would not have been foreign to our waitress. During the 1970s, manufacturing began to shift from the core to the periphery of the capitalist world system, and what are often called the service and knowledge economies emerged as the dominant growth sectors. With a certain optimism, Daniel Bell and other thinkers responded to these changes by predicting the coming of the Post-industrial society.

Under these new social arrangements, making things no longer mattered. That the U.S. could provide the bare necessities of life was a foregone conclusion. The focus of the new economy would be on ideas and technical know-how. What this view did not consider is that, rather than a transcendence of industrial society in one country, it represented more its international universalization. This was at least Harry Braverman’s response to the idea of Post-industrial society. In Labor and Monopoly Capital, released in the same year as Bell’s book, he argues that the theory is just another in a long line of “economic theories which assigned the most productive role to the particular form of labor that was most important or growing most rapidly at the time.”

Most importantly, rather than a decline in Taylorism or scientific management in the world of work, the rise of the service economy symbolized its universal application. He describes the segmentation of work similar to that used on an assembly line as “a revolution…now being prepared which will make of retail workers, by and large, something closer to factory operatives than anyone had ever imagined possible.” Not only was American society still reliant on that manufacture of commodities, other workplaces were beginning to look more like the shop floor.

Even so, the link between knowledge and the so-called new economy placed a certain import on those with higher levels of education—as it was often assumed the technology used in the growth sectors of the American economy required more formal learning. Such a view still prevails, but considering the level of technology that has been integrated into our daily lives and the abundance of people with advanced degrees working behind Starbucks counters and driving for Uber, it should be left in the past along with the myth of the post-industrial society the current pandemic has clearly laid bare.

Instead, we should use the current crisis to break down barriers between working people—highlighting the work of all that keeps our economy in motion.  Moving past these antiquated notions, we can come together to forge new social bonds to fight for an economy that works for the working class and not just the rich.

Under Capitalism, a Pandemic Is a Time of Political Awakening

By Matthew Dolezal

To say that the Trump administration responded inadequately to the COVID-19 pandemic would be the understatement of the decade. Trump’s response was chock-full of misinformation, racism, dangerous proposals, dangerous policies, and a strain of conservative anti-intellectualism that ignores public health experts. It has even been compared to former president Ronald Reagan’s botched response to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. This comparison also contains an important historical lesson: Reagan and Trump represent the beginning and end points of the American political tradition marked by deregulation, austerity, and corporate-funded governance.

Though many liberal pundits decry him as an uncharted divergence from “normalcy”, Trump is simply the hideous, unmasked expression of neoliberalism — a ghastly gremlin our decaying society has vomited up after four decades of germination. In short, neoliberalism created Trump. Year after year we witnessed the dismantling of unions, the passing of job-killing trade deals, the gutting of social services, and the continued stagnation of wages. These policies tilled the political soil for an outgrowth of right-wing populism that attempts to harken back to the “great” white supremacist legacy of America. It is a faux-populism that scapegoats immigrants and minorities, blaming the most marginalized for the societal rot produced by the implementation of free market fundamentalist ideology. Trumpism as specific historical phenomenon is certainly new. But, in terms of the systemic nature of this barbarism, Trump is not an “aberration” — he is an inevitable extension of the existing system.

During the spread of the coronavirus and the subsequent economic crisis, Americans are learning the true nature of neoliberal disaster capitalism, or what journalist Naomi Klein has referred to as “Coronavirus Capitalism.” This current iteration is part of a disturbing historical trajectory. In short, corporate entities and powerful individuals have repeatedly exploited crises by swiftly implementing policies that further enrich the ruling class at the expense of everyone else — a phenomenon Klein has elucidated more broadly in her 2007 book “The Shock Doctrine.”

As we are quickly realizing, the entire system is callous and predatory, and the tattered safety net that once existed has vanished long ago. But, just like the virus itself, political consciousness is rapidly spreading. Every day on social media, I am heartened to be reminded of the true heroism of cashiers, sanitation workers, first responders, warehouse workers, grocery stockers, and delivery drivers during these perilous times. While these seemingly undesirable jobs are proven to be essential by this crisis, it has also become evident that the captains of industry don’t have any verifiable role other than extracting profit from our labor. As Jasmine Duff reminded us in a recent Hampton Institute column, “these so-called wealth creators can spend months isolated in their mansions or country estates without this having any impact on the basic functioning of society.”

During a time of crisis, the wealthy can hibernate in the midst of their infinite resources. But to average workers, every dollar counts. Many will have to decide which bills to pay in order to leave enough money for groceries and other essentials. Because of this traumatic situation, the very concept of a student loan payment is being re-examined. People are realizing that education should be a right, and that it is profoundly immoral to enslave college graduates with insurmountable debt simply for the crime of seeking knowledge to improving their life prospects. There are currently 45 million Americans saddled with a cumulative $1.6 trillion in student loan debt — an enormous burden on both individuals and the economy as a whole. In times like these, the burgeoning student debt strike has the potential to gain significant momentum toward its ultimate goal of student debt cancellation and free public college. 

In addition to the inherent injustices of the student debt crisis, our current pandemic is also laying bare the glaring inhumanity of a for-profit healthcare system. As Senator Bernie Sanders is fond of pointing out, the U.S. is the wealthiest country in the world, yet we are the only major industrialized country that doesn’t guarantee healthcare as a human right. This “profit over people” mentality leads to tens of thousands of annual deaths and immeasurable suffering. But, when a deadly virus is expanding across the nation, these realities are magnified. When young people are dying of COVID-19 simply because they lack insurance, and when people are continuing to work because they don’t have guaranteed sick leave, we realize the terrifying truth of the old labor slogan “an injury to one is an injury to all.”

During a pandemic that is exacerbated by neoliberal capitalism, people are quickly becoming radicalized. We are realizing that we don’t actually need landlords, or bosses, or CEOs — these parasites that bleed the working class dry. They are, in other words, “non-essential.” In any civilized society, housing, healthcare, food, and education would be provided as a prerequisite to the mere concept of justice. As Oscar Wilde once wrote, “The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.” This means industrial production and technology should be directed toward meeting human need first and foremost. We are human beings, and our lives can no longer be commodified.

One concrete action American workers can participate in is an ongoing, nationwide general strike beginning March 31. Organizers and activists are committed to withholding their labor, their rent payments, and their student loan payments until their demands are met. As the General Strike 2020 website explains, “We are a grassroots, decentralized, non-hierarchical movement of the working class. We are a diverse, inclusive organization dedicated to building a coalition of organizations and individuals of various political tendencies to save the lives of vulnerable, marginalized people in the USA and around the world.”

The demands of the general strike include:

• paid leave for all non-essential workers through the duration of the pandemic

• personal protective equipment and hazard pay 

• the suspension of rent, loan payments, utility payments, and interest accrual

• the distribution of free meal assistance, free medical care, and free protective equipment for all — prioritizing those most at risk, including front-line healthcare workers

• an end to immigration raids and sweeps of homeless camps

• the release of all occupants of detention camps and holding facilities 

• guaranteed housing for all persons lacking shelter to self-quarantine

At this pivotal time, American workers are once again realizing the power of our labor and our strength in numbers. We’re realizing that our participation is literally essential to the functionality of our society and that simply withholding that labor, that rent check, that student loan payment, can bring the entire system to its knees. 

Indeed, there is great revolutionary potential in this time of heightened class consciousness and political awakening. Even Britney Spears gets it.

The Future of Unions During COVID-19

(Pictured: Railroad workers in Chicago)

By Cameron Mancini and Brendan Muckian-Bates

When the pressure of the moment becomes untenable, it is the working class that has continued to muster the strength to hold the business class accountable. Strength in numbers alongside the panic of immediate loss of income and employment are an organizer’s best weapons. However, meeting the challenge of the present means that we must be strategic about what type of world we want to see once COVID-19 is over.

One hundred and one years ago, as American soldiers returned to the US following the end of the Great War, the pandemic of the H1N1 strain of influenza, known as “Spanish Flu” at the time, began ravaging the world. Between 1918 and 1920, it is estimated that around 17 to 50 million people died from this pandemic.

At the same time that millions were dying, workers began striking across major industries. The 1919 Steel Strike was one of the first attempts to organize basic industry by the mainstream labor movement, with the assistance of radicals like William Z. Foster and Mother Jones. In Seattle, WA, “nothing moved but the tide” as workers took over the city for a week. Coal miners struck and won a 14% wage increase.  In all, 1919 saw 4 million workers - 1/5 of the workforce - walk off the job in the US. But it did not end there; Winnipeg, Canada saw a massive General Strike, and in Italy and Germany, workers struck in the industrial centers of their nations, seized factories, and declared socialist republics.

At times of economic and social crisis, mass labor actions are not uncommon. Workers demand immediate changes to their living conditions when those conditions become unstable. Already in 2020, we’ve seen wildcat strikes shut down the Big 3 automakers, longshore workers threaten a walk out in Bay Area ports unless there is proper sanitary conditions in the port, grocery workers demand and win hazard pay in the Puget Sound area, Pittsburgh area sanitation workers refusing unsafe working conditions until they have proper protective gear, and tenants in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood threaten a rent strike.

It’s impossible to say how long or the effects to which COVID-19 will have on the US economy, but here’s what we know so far:

• On March 17th, White House officials briefed Senate Republicans that the unemployment rate could reach 20 percent. For context, at the height of the Great Depression, the unemployment rate was around 25%.

• Two weeks ago, the Imperial College of London released their model for how to combat the spread of COVID-19. Without severe disruptions to our daily routines, and the possibility of long-term, periodic quarantines, COVID-19 could return, killing an estimated 2.2 million people in the US alone.

• The Dow Jones dropped almost 10,000 points in the span of a month, from a high of 28,992 on February 21 to 19,173 on March 20. The percentage of the drop on March 16th is on par with that of the infamous Black Thursday of 1929.

The likelihood of COVID-19 disrupting the everyday living habits of Americans, not to mention the profound and unexpected impact it has had on everyday workers, would have been impossible only a month ago. Now, it is all but certain to have unforeseen, devastating impacts on everything it touches.

At times like these, we often remark with platitudes such as, “If only there was something we could’ve done.” It is clear at this point that President Trump’s handling of the situation has been abysmal. Every morning briefings are given downplaying the impact of this crisis, as though you can cover your eyes and ears and see no evil, hear no evil. The two capitalist parties in government haggle over relief efforts, each trying to outflank the other for electoral gains in the upcoming general election. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve doles out trillions of dollars to attempt to keep the economy afloat. It all amounts to covering up the reality that the economy is simply a juggernaut of immiseration for the working class. Keeping this juggernaut from sinking is the primary objective of the capitalist elites, which is obvious from the framing of the debate around what to do: keep the economy going -- but human needs and comfort are complete outside the scope of understanding for those in control of society. We need a cooperative commonwealth governed by the principle, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.”

While political pundits are seeking to negotiate policy proposals to mitigate this disaster, unions are organizing workers in the here and now. Take, for example, some of the recent actions by members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Just last week, IWW members in Portland, Madison, and Milwaukee took direct action against their bosses to demand specific changes in their workplace conditions. In Madison and Milwaukee, union members at CapTel Industries engaged in a one-day sickout over pay. Although these workers are classified by the state of Wisconsin as Telecommunications Service Priority Level 3, the same level designated for state and local first responders, their pay is far below those of other essential personnel. In Portland, when workers at the historic Crush Bar were told they would be laid off during the city’s lockdown, members of the Crush Bar Worker’s Collective marched on their boss, demanding they be paid their sick time and provide half-pay for their scheduled shifts. Instead of meeting their demands, management called the Portland Police Department on their former employees, despite the order from PPD that they would not respond to calls unless for severe, life-threatening emergencies. Following this action in the city, Wobblies at Voodoo Doughnuts, a popular tourist attraction, formally announced their plans to unionize. This coincided with management’s recent decision to temporarily lay off over a dozen employees. According to one member, management at Voodoo doughnuts is not paying out accrued paid time off in accordance with their store’s own policy.

In each of these cases, workers won some or all of their demands.

CapTel workers won a ninety percent adherence at work, meaning they have less time they need to be on call at their desks. Crush Bar workers won their accrued sick time after the bar closed. Voodoo Doughnuts workers are pushing for, and winning the fight on, union recognition, despite Trump’s NLRB suspending union elections.

Now, workers in several other industries are calling for actions to shut down their workplaces, too.

Whole Worker, a grassroots movement seeking to unionize Whole Foods stores across the country, are calling for a mass sick out on March 31st to protest lack of protection for workers and consumers.

On March 23rd, workers with the Starbucks Solidarity Movement called a nationwide sick out to protest corporate’s desire to keep stores open despite being deemed “non-essential personnel.”

First, these actions signify a shift in the thinking of many low-income workers. For workers in low-wage industries like food and beverage production or distribution, a missed paycheck can mean the difference between making end’s meet and skipping bills. Fast food and distribution workplaces are notoriously difficult to unionize. Few workers in these settings have connections to unions, and fewer attempt to help organize them. The mass surge in workplace actions in these industries shows that workers are beginning to understand the motto that, “Direct action gets the goods.”

Second, building unions that can continue organizing after a major crisis, continue to win demands, and continue to accelerate class consciousness need a legal framework from which to win. Many unions are bogged down by “no strike” clauses in their contract. A “no strike” clause means that during the duration of the contract, no union member is allowed to engage in a strike or sympathy strike against the employer. If they fail to abide by that, the union is legally required to denounce the action or face stiff fines and penalties. This can quickly drain union coffers, making union leaders more like business bureaucrats negotiating with management rather than with membership. Yet, these actions are often done without the use of these union contracts, and are therefore not subject to the same rules. Strikes and slowdowns can be called almost immediately, leaving management in a more vulnerable position.

Lastly, working people need institutions that can provide organizing capabilities in the most hard-to-organize industries. Around 36% (57 million)  Americans participate in the “gig economy” in some way, and around 10% of them work full time in this sector. A decade ago, the AFL-CIO dedicated almost thirty percent of its budget to organizing. In its internal budget for 2018-2019, however, the AFL-CIO dedicated less than ten percent of its budget to organizing. Its largest budget by-line is for political activities, which account for more than 35 percent of the budget. The #RedForEd movement that saw impressive statewide and citywide strikes across more than five states and multiple cities, winning millions of dollars from intransigent, conservative legislators and boards of education is a stark reminder that direct action gets the goods, while political lobbying is an expensive and distant form of organizing.

Too few workers are in formal unions at the moment. Only about ten percent of the overall workforce in the US is currently a dues-paying member of a union. Of this, over one in three public employees are in a union, but only around six percent of private sector employees are unionized. As COVID-19’s outbreak has shown, low-income private sector workers are the most at-risk for any financial or biological crisis that can strike at a moment’s notice, yet are also the most underrepresented unionized workforce.

A massive revival of the US labor movement is needed to circumvent the impending crisis we’re facing. An astounding three million Americans submitted unemployment applications in just the first week of major federal, state, and municipal actions designed to flatten the curve. If the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic continues as it has, we can expect even starker unemployment numbers to rise. As this happens, the strain placed on those deemed “essential” will continue. The federal government could, in all likelihood, place a federal restriction on strike actions in those industries deemed essential for the continued health of the country, as happened during WWII. Should this take place, these workers could be placed in greater risk of contamination, placing their well-being at risk for the sake of company profits.

We must be prepared for the coming crisis. We must be building for something better in the here and now. The working class is already showing how to do that. C.L.R. James wrote in his classic book Facing Reality that it was the duty of radicals to “observe and record” the actions by the working class. Given the stark reality we are facing, we can observe, record, and now take action. Here is what you can do:

1. Find out what your coworkers issues are concerned about. Meet together (perhaps a phone or video conference to be safe) and make a plan with them to get concessions from our boss. Get in the habit of practicing democracy with your coworkers.

2. Do a petition, or get a group of coworkers together and confront your boss as a group.

3. Walk off the job as a group, but state clearly you are not quitting, but you are refusing unsafe working conditions under section 502 of the National Labor Relations Act.

4. Contact the local IWW branch in your area, or our Organizing Department. Organizers from the union are ready to walk you through the steps of organizing something immediate, but also for the long haul. After the Coronavirus pandemic settles the crisis of unfair treatment, low wages, understaffing, and more remain. Organizing your coworkers into a militant, independent  collective action based union is the best chance to have power over your life at work and beyond.

Cameron Mancini is the General Secretary Treasurer of the IWW.

Brendan Muckian-Bates is the National Press Officer of the IWW.

COVID-19 Proves Workers Are Essential and Capitalists Are A Drain

(Photo: Johnny Louis / Sipa USA via AP)

By Jasmine Duff

Republished from Red Flag.

The Marxist argument that it’s the labour of workers, and not the supposed intelligence and entrepreneurial spirit of bosses, that keeps society running, has long been ridiculed by defenders of capitalism. In the conditions created by the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the truth of Marx’s claim has been brought into sharp relief.

Those whose work has been deemed essential under the current restrictions aren’t the CEOs, bankers, mining executives – or the politicians who serve them. It will come as no surprise, perhaps, to anyone but themselves, that these so-called wealth creators can spend months isolated in their mansions or country estates without this having any impact on the basic functioning of society.

The rest of us would be better off without them. The people we depend on in this crisis are those whose labour we depend on in everyday life: nurses, teachers, those who grow our food and those who transport it to the supermarket shelves, and the people who, despite the health risks, continue to serve us in the supermarkets and chemists.

We’re told that corporate bosses like Qantas CEO Alan Joyce and mining magnate Gina Rinehart deserve their immense wealth because they play a special role in the economy. Typical of this perspective is the argument made by Forbes columnist and “leadership strategy” expert Rainer Zitelmann in a 2019 article. “For entrepreneurs, who usually earn far more than top-tier managers, high earnings are usually a reward for particularly good ideas”, he wrote. “The richest people in the world are those who have the best ideas.”

The ideologues making these arguments want us to believe that workers are unimportant and replaceable – nothing more than a “human resource” to be exploited at the whims of the capitalists. If you’re a worker, they think, it’s because you’re not smart, creative or driven enough to have climbed through the ranks. That’s why you deserve low wages, poor job security, a shitty education in chronically underfunded schools and a lack of decent health care.

The COVID-19 crisis has torn this argument to shreds. The global economy is grinding to a halt because many workers have to stay home. The CEOs self-isolating in their mansions can do nothing to save the situation. All their supposed creativity and intelligence is useless without the labour force that their wealth was built on.

The actions of our political leaders confirm this. The only creative and intelligent thing they’ve thought of to do to stave off the prospect of a deep recession is to keep as many workers as possible at their posts – recklessly sacrificing our health to protect the profits of their corporate masters. Prime minister Scott Morrison gave the game away when he said in a press conference on 24 March that while all “non-essential” workers would be sent home “everyone who has a job in this economy is an essential worker”.

As Morrison put it, “It can be essential in a service whether it’s a nurse or a doctor or a schoolteacher, or a public servant who is working tonight to ensure that we can get even greater capacity in our Centrelink offices, working until 8:00pm under the new arrangement in the call centres, these are all essential jobs. People stacking shelves – that is essential.”

When the basic functioning of society is on the line, it’s not the Alan Joyces or Gina Rineharts who are deemed essential. It’s the shelf stackers. Without workers, the capitalists are nothing.

The flipside of this equation is expressed in Marx’s description of the working class as the gravediggers of capitalism. Workers are the engine that keeps society running. When our labour stops, society comes to a halt.

Already, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen numerous examples that illustrate this potential. Thousands of Italian workers in the auto and metal industries have walked out in wildcat strikes to enforce social distancing, refusing to risk their health and the health of their families for Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte. Conte had made clear his desire to keep profits flowing despite the country having a 10 percent mortality rate from COVID-19 infections – tweeting on 14 March that “Italy doesn’t stop”. Workers, however, had other ideas.

Workers in Argentina who took over a factory in 2017 that previously sewed police uniforms are now using it to produce surgical masks. Another group of Argentinian workers who in 2011 took over one of the largest printing presses in Latin America are now using it to print 3D protective masks and produce hand sanitiser.

There has even been some action by workers here in Australia. Early in the morning on 27 March workers at a Coles warehouse in Melbourne’s western suburbs walked out in protest management’s refusal to provide adequate protective equipment. The industrial power of these workers is immense. A three-day strike at the same warehouse in 2016 resulted in supermarket shelves across Victoria and Tasmania lying empty for weeks.

Workers have the power to prevent capitalists exploiting our skills as pickers in warehouses, shelf stackers in supermarkets or as truck drivers. In a world without bosses, we could collectively and democratically decide how our skills should be used to advance the interests of everyone. We could distribute food, for example, according to human need. This would end the barbaric reality that exists under capitalism, where millions starve to death every year despite enough food being produced to feed the world 1.5 times over.

We could use our skills as construction workers to rapidly build hospitals, rather than, as this the case today, endless luxury apartments and shopping malls for the rich – so that in any future health crisis no one would be forced to go without a bed.

Working class solidarity, democracy and collectivity: these are building blocks of socialism. Socialism is a society in which workers can democratically decide, using all our skills and creativity, what kind of world we want to live in, rather than allowing a wealthy minority of capitalists to run society in the interests of profit. The bosses need us. We don’t need them.

Right now, capitalism is in crisis. Workers have more power than ever, but we’re being forced into more barbaric conditions every day. To quote German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, writing in the context of the of the epochal slaughter of World War One, we now stand at a crossroads, “Either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.”

Every day, new sacrifices are made at the altar of corporate profits – whether it’s the destruction of the environment, or the destruction of human health. The task of organising for a socialist future has never been more urgent.

Resistance in the Time of Cholera: Preliminary Notes on Viral Dialectics

By Bryant William Sculos

In Gabriel García Márquez’s classic Love in the Time of Cholera, cholera is both literal and metaphorical. So too is COVID-19. Not the virus itself necessarily (though its complicated emergence and uneven spread and effects surely implicates our current system), but the massive and largely preventable or treatable harms of the virus that have thus far gone largely unprevented and untreated are the metaphor. Not merely a metaphor, of course. Not a metaphor in the sense of being immaterial or unreal. Metaphor in the sense of representing something much more than itself, symbolizing that which is beyond itself.

Metaphor. Representation. Microcosm. Heuristic. Epitome. Choose your label. The key point is that we must pay attention to the important reality that if we focus exclusively on the COVID-19 pandemic from a medical or public health perspective we are going to miss most of what we must learn from and through this crisis. Unlike the bacterial cholera, the viral COVID-19 is not as easily treatable or preventable, though with an eventual vaccine it can become more preventable. Cholera persists for the same systemic reasons why COVID-19 and the flu persist. This is what global capitalism’s demands of sadistic efficiency and perverse profit-seeking produce. What these infections share is their dialectical imbrication within the same system that contains the potential technical means to humanely resolve various harms, but profits off of their continuation.

COVID-19 is only on our radar such as it is because of the inability of our unjust, unequal, irrational, sadistic, and undemocratic political economic system to care for all the people who need and deserve care in this world. It is the match on an accelerant-soaked woodpile. We should be paying attention less to the match and more on the precursory conditions. And this isn’t a suggestion we don’t also pay attention and attempt to organize around the specifics of the harmful effects of COVID-19 and the systemic failures specifically related to the current crisis. To not prioritize these immediate concerns would be ethically unconscionable and politically unsound. People have immediate needs. This is instead a call, as I’ve written before in a different context, to focus on the forest and the trees.

What can resistance look like before we regain the option to gather in public together and protest and lead campaigns for the necessary radical reforms needed in the short-term? What can it look like given that we then must necessarily aim towards the more systemic, revolutionary changes needed to produce a democratic, egalitarian post-capitalist world – a genuinely democratic, socialist world?

Theodor Adorno wrote of the splinter in the eye that becomes a magnifying glass. Who has the splinters in their eyes right now (beyond the everyday splinters that all precarious workers, poor, and oppressed peoples have in their eyes)? The immunocompromised. The elderly. Those without insurance or are underinsured. The otherwise at-risk. The already-infected. Our healthcare workers. Logistics, factory, and warehouse workers.

These people are already facing the tip of the spear. For many, the spear has already pierced the skin. These are the best sites of contestation and struggle at the moment. For those in other industries who are not on the front lines of the current crisis, what can we do? We can prepare for the post-social distancing struggles. We can support those who are in need and in struggle today. And we can engage in a wider array of solidarity-building activities that reach those people who are waking up politically during this pandemic. These are our best tools—and they are tools that are not unique to this crisis.

Right now, basically all forms of conventional public resistance would do more harm than good—perhaps with the exception of strikes (or preferably, strong strike-threats that are more likely than ever to be acceded to without need to resort to an actual work stoppage). It is hard to imagine a more sympathetic group of workers at the moment, with greater power to inspire fundamental systemic change, than our front-line healthcare workers. So long as they are put at disproportionate risk, not wholly different from their pre-pandemic workplace experiences no doubt, they could and should demand the world.

This isn’t just about leveraging this crisis to win previously needed workplace safety reforms and benefit increases though, while “essential workers” have much more power that they have ever had before (or at least experiencing a greater awareness of their latent political-economic power). The fights that were on-going before the crisis remain. In the US, we have immigrants in concentration camps. We have a racialized mass incarceration system. Endless warfare remains endless. Most people are struggling week-to-week to make ends meet, often to no avail. We are also seeing states like Texas and Ohio prohibit abortion procedures under the guise of bans on non-essential medical procedures. Shove a fetus inside one of these wealthy white, straight male GOP lawmakers and see if they don’t think its removal is essential. We need to keep our eyes open and voices loud, however we can.

While there are many aspects of the variable and uneven government responses to stopping the spread of COVID-19 (“flattening the curve” through differentially enforced “social distancing” and “test, track, and trace” approaches) that are absolutely vital to avoiding a more massive death toll than anyone wants to think about; they should not be viewed as permanently inviolable rules that all should follow as long as they’re told. They are also not innocuous, even so long as we are participating. Even a necessary policy is not necessarily wholly virtuous. There are questions of privacy and data-profiteering to be concerned about. While we should always be skeptical of enhancements to the power of the national security state, it does seem like compliance is the lesser evil at the moment. That may change, if things get far worse and governments fail to response adequately and justly. I write this not be produce this outcome sooner. I write it so you will be prepared to think differently about the current public health demands being placed on billions of people around the world. No one must stay home to die when acting publicly can save lives.

That said, people won’t—or shouldn’t—long withstand the demand from the capitalist class and their ideological snake oil salespeople that people go to work and die for the short-term profits of corporations, nor will they stay home and suffer, perhaps to death. At least, I see enough reason to be optimistic that people will not tolerate either of these developments. People have been made—conditioned—to withstand much over many, many decades of capitalist violence and exploitation, suffering irrationally without any sense of what possible alternatives are achievable in practice. While it is possible people will “choose” to suffer more, I have hope that this time things will be different. Either genuine socialist demands are won, or capitalism should not be allowed to be resuscitated. Either the people are resuscitated and healed, made more whole than capitalism ever allowed before, or capitalism should be allowed to die—and a new order built on its ungrievable ashes.

We are in a paradoxical, indeed dialectical, moment (though, within capitalism, when aren’t we?). The response we need to this crisis—the twin-crisis of COVID-19 and capitalism—is organized, collective, mass democratic action. Yet this is precisely what good public health guideline compliance prohibits. Still, we must comply. Compliance today is solidarity. Even if that may change, today it is undeniably true. Stay home. Wash your hands. Use the technologies available to check-in on others. This is what we can do. But the contradictions of organizing within capitalism, the extreme difficulty in getting people to show up and stand out, are not particular to the COVID-19 pandemic. We cannot do what must be done, but too many people weren’t doing what was politically necessary two months ago either. This is something we must reflect on and be honest about. This is not an indictment. It is a call for political growth.

We can use technologies to do some things, but not what is fully-required in this moment. If you’re reading this right now and are thinking, “he is wrong and I have the answer,” please speak up. We need questions and critique as ever before, but we also need answers and alternatives perhaps more than ever before. At least as much as before.

Of course, it is a cruel irony that for many people for whom work is a major time and energy occupier during “normal” times, for whom work is the primary barrier to more fully committed organizing and activist, that these people who have more time to spend on political activities are now required to stay home. I know for many people there is no irony at all; either their work responsibilities have remained unchanged (or increased) or their care and home labor obligations have increased in precise quantity to the amount their waged work requirements have diminished. For many, both sides have increased. This is not a cruel irony. It is, simply, a cruelty.

However, the cruelest irony is that we continue to live in a global society that could, actually quite easily provide for all the basic needs, and possibly beyond, for all people on this planet, and yet we are compelled to live within a system that prevents that from becoming a reality; a system that actively undermines that possibility at nearly every turn.

Postscript

I was wrong several weeks ago when I compared COVID-19 to the flu (though at that time the data was so sketchy and testing so incomplete, the 1% morality rate seemed like an exaggeration. Globally, today the percentage is closer to .5%, which is still roughly five times higher than the flu). When I said what I said, it was not to diminish the suffering or severity of COVID-19, but a somewhat misguided attempt to highlight just how many people die from the flu every year. Compare the typical response and outrage to annual flu death to that of COVID-19, and you would be left with the sad truth that no one fucking cares if people die from the flu, apparently. COVID-19 is both more contagious and deadly, but at some point we should probably have a conversation about why so many people die unnecessarily from the flu….

Bryant William Sculos, Ph.D. is a Visiting Assistant Professor of global politics and theory at Worcester State University and also teaches as an adjunct professor at Florida International University. He is a contributing editor for the Hampton Institute and founding curator of  LeftHooked, a monthly socialist media aggregator and review powered by the Hampton Institute. Bryant is also the Politics of Culture section editor for the open-access journal Class, Race and Corporate Power. He is the co-editor (with Mary Caputi) of Teaching Marx & Critical Theory in the 21st Century (Brill, 2019; Haymarket 2020), and author of “Dialectical Ends and Beginning: Why Barbarism at the End of Capitalism Means Barbarism Beyond Capitalism” in Postcapitalist Futures: Political Economy Beyond Crisis and Hope (eds. Adam Fishwick and Nicholas Kiersey, forthcoming with Pluto Press).

The Wall Street Journal's Pitch for Mass Murder is Catching on in Capitalist Circles

By J.E. Karla

Not even two weeks into an extraordinary response to the novel coronavirus outbreak, the upper echelons of capital are wondering whether saving millions of lives is really worth the damage being done to their investment portfolios. According to reports, the debate among the ruling class is over whether or not to walk back some of the measures taken to slow the spread of the virus -- efforts already considered tardy and inadequate by public health experts -- in order to minimize business losses. 

Like many elite notions, this idea was first launched in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. An unsigned editorial there is the most visible the vanguard of the bourgeoisie ever really make their deliberations, and this one last week (behind a paywall, of course) was especially candid.

After opening paragraphs congratulating the response to date, hoping that “with any luck” the nation’s health care system won’t collapse, they lay out their basic thesis:

“Yet the costs of this national shutdown are growing by the hour, and we don’t mean federal spending. We mean a tsunami of economic destruction that will cause tens of millions to lose their jobs as commerce and production simply cease. Many large companies can withstand a few weeks without revenue but that isn’t true of millions of small and mid-sized firms.”

After some attempts at pulling heart strings over the entrepreneurs that will eat the most shit in the months to come -- using the petit bourgeoisie as human shields for big business, as is custom -- and some other telling admissions we’ll return to, they end with this:

“Dr. (Anthony) Fauci (Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) has explained this severe lockdown policy as lasting 14 days in its initial term. The national guidance would then be reconsidered depending on the spread of the disease. That should be the moment, if not sooner, to offer new guidance on what might be called phase two of the coronavirus pandemic campaign.” 

They do not have the guts to explicitly state that this “phase two” would mean allowing most normal activity -- the contact the virus needs to continue its spread -- to return, but their weasel word description of “substantial social distancing… in some form” (emphasis mine) says it all. “This should not become a debate over how many lives to sacrifice against how many lost jobs we can tolerate… But no society can safeguard public health for long at the cost of its overall economic health.”

They don’t want to debate how many lives to sacrifice in the name of saving “jobs,” -- a euphemism for the fortunes of employers, the bourgeoisie -- but that’s a great way to describe dialing back the only measures so far demonstrated to work against this plague in the name of economic “health.” 

How many lives are we talking about? As I write, 565 people have died of the disease in the United States, with fatalities doubling every 2-3 days. The experience in Europe and China indicates that response measures take roughly a week to slow the virus down. That means that we should see 2-3 more doublings before last week’s actions finally take effect, 2260 to 4520 dead people this week. The Journal and their allies are suggesting that we should let those effects last a week, and then ratchet up the spread of the virus again. 

Even assuming a very optimistic scenario where the doubling drops by half -- i.e. to once every 4-6 days -- and then lands somewhere in the middle -- say 3-5 days -- that would mean somewhere between 72,000 and nearly 600,000 dead people just a month from now. 

But it’s worse than that, because there are about 5 times as many critical cases as there are fatalities. The absolute best case scenario puts us at more than 360,000 critical cases in a country with less than 100,000 intensive care beds. The worst case puts us at 3,000,000. 

You can then add thousands of deaths from non-coronavirus causes that could not get adequate treatment -- car accidents, allergic reactions, heart attacks, etc. And that month cut off is arbitrary; the deaths would continue after that. In the New York Times Nicholas Kristof quoted a British epidemiologist as estimating a best case of 1.1 million. That best case involves much more distancing than what the Journal and company are proposing. They are calling for hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions, to be sacrificed for the sake of “economic health.” 

This blood thirsty logic is precisely the sort of thing capitalists project onto communists. This, however, brings us to the admission I alluded to above, buried in the middle of the editorial:

“Some in the media who don’t understand American business say that China managed a comparable shock to its economy and is now beginning to emerge on the other side. Why can’t the U.S. do it too? This ignores that the Chinese state owns an enormous stake in that economy and chose to absorb the losses. In the U.S. those losses will be borne by private owners and workers who rely on a functioning private economy. They have no state balance sheet to fall back on.”

We don’t need to debate the class character of the Chinese state -- even the Communist Party of China will admit that “socialism with Chinese characteristics” accommodates global capital. Regardless, the Wall Street Journal openly admits that the options at hand are a state-controlled economy capable of stemming the plague’s advance or letting potentially millions of people die for the sake of sustaining a privately-owned one. 

The US government could easily freeze all debts, rents, and other contractual payments, guarantee a short-term income for all families, and take all necessary measures to maintain provision of food, medicine, utilities, and vital services until the virus has run out of steam. But even a momentary economy run on the basis of human need and not the accumulation of profit poses the threat of a good example. It’s bad enough that China does it incompletely, hence official bellicosity against them even in this hour of mutual need. 

There is no amount of human lives the ruling class wouldn’t trade to prevent that risk, especially when they know they are the least likely to die.  

The only silver lining is that one way or the other most of us will come out on the other end of this nightmare, and when we do the argument we must make is clear: capitalism will continue to kill us by the millions and billions until it is stopped. You don’t even have to take our word for it -- you can read it in the paper. 

Everyone's a Socialist in a Crisis

By Tom Bramble

Republished from Red Flag.

One of the most prevalent ideological mantras of Western capitalism is that the market should rule. But as the latest health and economic crises demonstrate, capitalists soon forget their worship of the market when times get tough. They scream for government money, and plenty of it. It turns out that “the market” is fine when it comes to whipping workers to accept lower wages, but when it comes to lower profits, the market can go hang.

Every student with the misfortune to have studied economics at school or university will know that “the market” is the god before which we must all kneel. Markets bring consumers and producers together to ensure an equilibrium of supply and demand, the textbooks tell us. We may all be individuals each pursuing our own private interests, but this selfish endeavour miraculously results in an optimum outcome for all.

You don’t even have to step inside a classroom to have received this lesson. It’s rammed home in normal times in every newspaper, in every news bulletin on the TV, in every politician’s speech. Just listen to them. Governments can’t expand spending on Newstart because “the markets” won’t allow it. Governments shouldn’t ramp up public housing because that will throw property markets into a spin. Competition should be opened between universities because a market in education will sift out the bad providers from the good.

The champions of the market, if challenged to explain how it is that markets consistently result in supplies of goods lurching from shortages to gluts, point to the economic dysfunction of the old Soviet Union as proof that if “planning” replaces the market, a much bigger disaster ensues.

It doesn’t take an Einstein to see what rubbish this is. The last thing any capitalist wants is “free competition”, because that might squeeze their profits. Just look at how the supermarkets have destroyed small shops or how any new industry that emerges is soon dominated by three or four companies globally.

But there’s another angle to this. Capitalists preach “the market” for the working class – stand on your own two feet, don’t rely on the government – but themselves sponge off the public big time. Just look at the billions in subsidies and tax concessions the fossil fuel companies, huge enterprises for the most part, extract from state and federal governments in Australia. The vehicle manufacturers raked in hundreds of millions a year from the Australian government for decades until deciding it wasn’t enough and went overseas. This is why big companies and industry groups hire armies of former politicians to lobby on their behalf in the offices of premiers and prime ministers – there’s money in government coffers and they want it.

And while the capitalists talk about “the market” setting wages for workers, in reality, they don’t really allow the market to do the job. They use the whole apparatus of state repression, the industrial tribunals, the police, the courts to suppress workers’ rights to organise to pursue their demands.

But when a crisis hits all the bullshit about the market is thrown to the winds. And that is just what we are seeing now. Faced with the collapse of the capitalist economy, for the second time in a dozen years, with massive bankruptcies on the table and the stock market plunging by more than 30 percent and more to come, fervent advocates of the free market are now embracing government intervention to save their skins. As the Financial Times put it on 18 March, “World leaders have been forced to tear up the traditional economic playbook in response to the historic jolt to the global economy”.

In the United States, the heart of free market capitalism, capitalists and politicians alike are demanding huge government handouts. As the New York Times explained on 17 March: “Business groups, local and state leaders and a growing chorus of lawmakers and economists begged the federal government to spend trillions of dollars to pay workers to stay home and funnel money to companies struggling with an abrupt end to consumer activity”.

Politicians and their advisers who just a week ago were scorning the idea of “helicopter money”, government payments to businesses and consumers to stimulate the economy, are now trying to outbid each other to push the figure up. The Trump administration, proclaiming a state of war in the fight against coronavirus and the economic crisis, will shortly launch a huge fiscal stimulus program pumping more than US$1 trillion into the economy in two stages, including potentially $1,000 handouts to spur spending. And there will be more to come.

In other times, Trump might have denounced his proposals as “socialism”. Not today. He now boasts that his new package will be “big and bold”. His chief adviser, Larry Kudlow, says that Trump has agreed to do “whatever it takes” to address the crisis. Senator John Cornyn, second highest ranking Republican in the Senate, for whom government intervention is normally anathema, explained: “Our economy, our whole economy is in jeopardy”. Some in the Democratic Party, which in recent years has become the favoured party of Wall Street, are proposing a monthly payment to every American for the duration of the crisis. Alongside this direct injection of funds into the economy, the US Federal Reserve Bank is pumping trillions of dollars into the banks.

As in the US, so too in the rest of the world. The European Commission, which has long insisted that member states keep their budget deficits to 3 percent of GDP, has lifted limits on government borrowing. In 2015, it refused to allow the Greek government to hike spending when faced with unemployment of 20 percent, but is now telling governments it’s open slather. The future of European capitalism is at stake, so nothing is off the table. The Swedish government is allowing businesses to defer tax payments for up to a year at a cost equivalent to 6 percent of GDP. Britain has unveiled a £330 billion package of emergency loan guarantees to business and £20 billion in fiscal support.

Tory chancellor (treasurer) Rishi Sunak, said: “This is not a time for ideology or orthodoxy, this is a time to be bold ... I’ll do whatever it takes”. Pedro Sanchez, Spanish prime minister, triggered what he called “the biggest mobilisation of resources in Spain’s’ democratic history”, including €100 billion in state loan guarantees. French finance minister Bruno Le Maire, who has put up €300 billion in state loans to business, told the press: “I will not hesitate [to use] all the means available to me”.

The European Central Bank, which estimates that the crisis might result in the euro area economy shrinking by more than 4 percent this year, is set to inject more than €1 trillion into the European banks in the next nine months. “Extraordinary times require extraordinary action”, says ECB president Christine Lagarde.

In Australia, the Coalition government which has made “balancing the budget” a central feature of its platform, is now spending $18 billion, three-quarters of which will go to business. It is now lining up a new wave of spending commitments for business, both of a general nature, valued at more billions, and also to specific sectors like tourism, sports, arts and entertainment and the airlines which will total more than $1 billion.

The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry is urging the federal government to provide wage subsidies to workers, equivalent in value to Newstart to all businesses experiencing a sharp downturn. It is also asking the government to provide concessional loans of up to half a million dollars, with 80 percent of the debt guaranteed by government, as well as wage subsidies to cover sick leave entitlements. Nothing but corporate welfare of a kind that they have long decried when applied to workers themselves.

In the short term, working class households will get some benefits from this cash splash. In Australia welfare beneficiaries will be getting $750 in their bank accounts. In the United States it is likely that Americans will receiving close to $1,000. But this is just short term relief to get the economy moving. The long term benefits will go to the capitalist class in the form of tax cuts and other financial concessions.

The current crisis demonstrates not only that all the ideological nonsense about the virtues of the free market is quickly thrown overboard when capitalist interests are threatened, but also that the idea that governments are essentially powerless in the face of the markets is rubbish.

Governments are not helpless victims who cannot do anything in the face of “economic reality”. In the normal course of events, when we demand things like better welfare, health care or education, governments tell us that it isn’t possible.

Workers every day face their own personal crises – lack of money to pay the rent or the possibility of defaulting on their mortgage because the boss didn’t call them in for work this week, overdue utility bills that must be paid or risk being cut off, expenses for children’s education that fall due, the fear of redundancy. These are crises that are experienced personally but are really a collective crisis of everyday life for working class people. But when we ask for governments to respond, we are told that addressing these things collectively is not possible, and that this is just the way things are.

But when the capitalist system goes into crisis, governments act promptly. It turns out that political decisions about the economy are possible and it is wholly possible for governments to tell the markets to go jump. The president of the eurozone financial ministers committee summed up the prevailing attitude today: “Rest assured that we will defend the euro with everything we have got”. European finance ministers are looking at deploying a firefighting fund set up during the last eurozone crisis, with €410 billion of capacity. In the case of Spain, the Financial Times reports that an inner circle of government has assumed “command economy powers”. The Spanish government will take responsibility for guaranteeing medical, food and energy supplies.

Most of the time we’re told that “the economy” can’t afford a decent standard of living for workers – higher minimum wages, liveable Newstart allowances, a massively expanded public housing program to get people out of the private rental market, free university education. Budgets have to balance. Businesses have to be competitive. Taxes have to be kept low.

And now, all of a sudden, we’re finding that the economy can, apparently, afford things that we have long demanded. Governments around the world are now laying out money on things that just weeks ago they would have attacked as unaffordable.

The Morrison government has been attacked even by the Business Council for not lifting the Newstart allowance. And now it’s spending $4.7 billion on a one-off $750 payment to millions on welfare. State governments too are ramping up health spending. In Western Australia, the government is freezing utility bills and public transport charges, doubling energy assistance payments and making sick and carers’ leave more available for public sector workers who either have the virus themselves or who need to care for others.

The Hong Kong government has handed out $1,000 payments to citizens. The Italian government, faced with one of the worst outbreaks of COVID-19, is suspending mortgage payments. In New Zealand, the government has raised all welfare benefits, permanently, by NZ$25 a week and doubled winter energy payments to beneficiaries and age pensioners. In France also, benefits are being hiked and made more widely available.

It’s not that governments have suddenly discovered a big pot of gold in the basement of the central banks. They say that they are taking these measures to both protect public health and to save the economy. But it’s obvious which takes priority. The new measures constitute the largest bailout bonanza in world history, carried out through state-administered transfers of public wealth and current and future debt to billionaires and big business: socialisation of losses, privatisation of profits. The outcome will be to further transfer, consolidate and concentrate wealth, just as has occurred since the GFC. While there is discussion about small handouts, nothing serious is being proposed to halt the mass layoffs now gathering steam.

In pretty much every spending package, subsidies to business, government loans and tax concessions account for two-thirds or more of the funds outlaid. Things that directly benefit workers – the big majority of the population – account for only one-third of the money. Just think of Australia: $13 billion to business, $4.7 billion to those on welfare.

When you think of the humiliating restrictions imposed on Centrelink clients, business is being showered with money with no strings attached. In Australia, the federal government is offering subsidies to bosses to keep apprentices and trainees. But all that does is encourage bosses to sack the trainee at the end of the six months and take on another one, with another government subsidy. No real jobs created, just a steady flow of money flowing into the bosses’ pockets.

But it’s not just a question of the money being disbursed. Other sacred cows are being slaughtered. The sanctity of private property, for example. The Spanish government has announced that it is requisitioning private hospitals and healthcare providers for the duration and developing plans to house and feed the homeless.

President Trump announced a series of extraordinary measures on 18 March, seizing on the powers vested in him by the Defence Production Act to steer production by private companies to overcome the shortage of masks, ventilators and other health supplies. Playing catchup on testing for COVID-19, Trump is deploying two Navy hospital ships to New York City and the West Coast. Astonishingly for the United States, whose president made his fortune in real estate, the Housing and Urban Development department will suspend foreclosures and evictions until at least the end of April. The federal government is also requiring employers to provide sick leave to workers infected with the virus. In California, the governor has announced plans to buy hotels to house some of the state’s 150,000 homeless people.

In Austria, healthcare workers with children are provided access to free childcare to allow them to continue working. In South Korea, the government is offering emergency child care to parents still at work, with class sizes limited to ten and supervised by trained teachers. In Australia, according to the Guardian, discussions are underway to underwrite home mortgages and even employment guarantees.

It turns out that these things, too, can be done.

So, in an economic emergency, few of the usual rules apply. Governments can marshal the resources and can threaten the narrow interests of private businesses. Hardcore libertarians despise these measures as rampant socialism. From their perspective, they’re right: the very existence of such programs is condemnation of the free market capitalist model that they promote. But they are best seen only as another approach to the management of the capitalist economy.

The fact that governments across the OECD are now prepared to spend trillions of dollar to save the financial system from collapse only confirms that the world economy cannot be left safely in the hands of “the market”. And, the situation clearly confirms that when the capitalist class and governments deem it necessary to save their system, lots of measures they once denounced as “unaffordable”, not permitted by the condition of “the economy”, are actually affordable and permitted. Governments can act when required. The ideological justifications of yesterday are revealed as threadbare. But nor are government interventions of this nature geared towards the interests of the working class, only the interests of the bosses.