Flirting with Liberals: A Critical Examination of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)

By Andrew Dobbs

Should revolutionary Leftists join Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)? The group has added tens of thousands of members and become one of the fastest growing political organizations in the country since Bernie Sanders' historic campaign. Lenin said that we must go where the "millions" are, following the masses. Does that mean Leftists should join DSA?

No, we should not. Any such move is premature at best and doomed at worst, and all of the Left maneuvering in its midst amounts to opportunism, a choice that will lead to political compromise and ultimately either irrelevance or betrayal of our cause and class. The purpose of this essay is to dispel the confusion leading US revolutionaries to miss these clear facts.

DSA's Strategy and Left Idealism

DSA's politics are a material thing, and they are rooted in the shared pursuits of the organization's vanguard. DSA held its largest ever national convention in Chicago in August of 2017, open to any members that wished to attend. No one suggests that there was a large number of members that wanted to go but couldn't and whose votes would have changed the convention's outcomes. This convention represents the voice of DSA's most committed and influential leaders, its vanguard.

By an overwhelming margin--roughly three-to-one--this convention decided to focus on a national campaign for Medicare for All, to be won by electing pro-single payer Democrats to Congress, the White House, and other offices. DSA's vanguard chose a path that commits them to working within a bourgeois, imperialist political party.

This is no accident; it reflects DSA's class character. R.L. Stephens has said that 89% of DSA members are white , and in an colonialist country this indicates that DSA membership is either predominantly drawn from classes other than the proletariat or appealing disproportionately to white proletarians. Whether middle class or unconsciously white supremacist, it does not represent the politics of the US proletariat, and mere argument or good example will not shift that.

On the contrary, social democrats throughout history have, as a result of similar class politics, been quick to collaborate with the bourgeoisie on programs destructive to the lowest productive class, the proletariat. Harold Wilson deployed troops to Northern Ireland; Mitterrand took up an "austerity turn;" SYRIZA immediately capitulated to the central bankers; Ebert and the SPD helped the Freikorps kill Luxemburg and Liebknecht. The examples could, tragically, go for days.

Communists like those in DSA Refoundation or the DSA Communist Caucus--who may be consolidating at some point--should not ignore this history. DSA entry advocates should instead explain whether they believe DSA has a proletarian class character, and if so where the break with historical social democracy has occurred, particularly in light of their commitment to the Democratic Party. If they accept that it is not proletarian they should answer how they expect to overturn its class basis without destroying the organization altogether.

This impossible idealist task is precisely what social democrats claim to be able to do with the bourgeois state. If they are mistaken in that task, then how are the DSA Left factions possibly correct?

The Praxis of Actually Existing DSA

DSA supporters, nonetheless, are quick to point to the Serve the People-style programs they have undertaken in low income working class communities and communities of color, most famously their brake light campaigns. In actual practice DSA is far more diverse in its tactics than its formal goals and strategies would suggest, they argue. These efforts are then openings into which proletarian politics can enter the organization.

These efforts are indeed creative and worth commending, but as long as they are attempting to win proletarian workers over to a social democratic program they are doomed to failure, either by failing to attract any dispossessed workers to the program or by capturing some element of this class and then neutralizing them for an actual proletarian politics. This is the repeated history of social democracy around the world.

Also, how will DSA relate to these projects when election season comes and their stated strategic priorities are on the line? Will they co-opt these projects for their effort to elect pro-single payer Democrats? If so, then the Left factionalists that have joined on those grounds will find themselves campaigning for a bourgeois, imperialist political party--collaborating with the class enemies of the working class.

This question is even more urgent for "base-building" elements such as DSA Refoundation. They put forward excellent proposals around organizing worker centers, solidarity networks, and tenants unions. When elections come and DSA needs all hands on deck to elect Democrats for the sake of their broadly agreed-to and popular strategic goals do these projects become appendages of the Democratic Party or do they undermine DSA's strategy? They will become the enemies either of their class or their organization.

And make no mistake, withholding resources from the Democrat electoral push will be nearly impossible for DSA's rank-and-file to tolerate. The organization's vanguard, the vast majority of its membership, and its mass base will be focused on an electoral push. Do Left faction leaders hope that the organization's leading elements don't need those resources in taking on the entire US corporate establishment?

The only thing that would prevent the Democrat majority from going over the Left's heads and appropriating the resources for themselves would be their goodwill. The factions entering DSA right now will end up either shilling for Democrats or forced out of their own campaigns.

To the extent that these projects are good uses of revolutionaries' time, it seems that most DSA chapters are happy to bring in coalition partners from independent Left organizations, and such engagement seems to have all the benefits of working within DSA with none of the risks outlined above. When they bail to elect a Democrat to the White House we can keep projects alive and maintain a much stronger position from which to resist co-optation.

Four Basic Permutations of DSA's Future

Such a position of independence and tactical cooperation seems to be the best strategy in general when one considers the likely outcomes of DSA's project at hand. The Democratic Party is both out of power and largely hostile to DSA's politics at this time. To succeed at its project, DSA must gain a position of leading influence within the Democratic Party and the Democrats must take power in a way that lets them enact this vision.

The four basic permutations for DSA's future are therefore: they take power within the Democratic Party and the Democrats win, they take this power and the Democrats lose, they are kept marginal in the party and the Democrats win, or they are marginal in the party and the Democrats lose.

By "take power" in the party we have to acknowledge, of course, that the Democratic Party is liable to remain a very eclectic and diverse institution, but in this instance we mean that the party publicly campaigns on DSA's agenda--at least the Medicare for All piece--and actually makes plans to pursue it as policy. Knowing this, what are the likely outcome for DSA's historic undertaking?

Taking Power in the Party and Losing Anyways

One of these permutations has actually happened in the past--social democrats taking control of the party and then losing to a hated Republican reactionary criminal. In 1972 elements of the New Left won over the Democratic Party, nominating Left liberal George McGovern for president (McGovern went on to coin the phrase "Medicare for everyone") and even in a brief moment of levity entertaining Mao Tse-Tung as the nominee for Vice President.

Immediately following this takeover the party's key electoral elements--labor unions and big city political machines--sabotaged the campaign, deciding that even four more years (ultimately it was only about two-and-a-half) of the hated Richard Nixon would be better than giving the Left a foothold in the party. For 45 years since then McGovern's name has been a shorthand among Democrats reminding them that if they let themselves get too progressive they'll get embarrassed.

DSA and its allies are miles short of where the New Left was at that time, but even Bernie's upstart, not-that-radical campaign with all its approval of imperialism and disapproval of its global critics prompted concerted Democrat sabotage. Whether this costs them a future election or they overcome it and fuck things up anyways an electoral loss to the GOP will make their politics anathema for a generation or more. DSA's mass membership will flee, and whatever work is being done to try and capture this "fastest growing" Left formation right now will have been a waste.

Taking Over the Empire

But what if DSA members and Bernie Sanders supporters take over the Democratic Party and then win the Presidency? This is the claim that Bernie-ites have made since last November: if we were on the ballot, we'd win. If they did, however, DSA and its candidate and party will be forced to ask themselves: what do they do with the US empire?

The most likely answer is that they will go along to get along and betray all the working people of the world repressed by the US death machine. Their official Priorities Resolution had no mention of US foreign policy whatsoever. This is perfectly in keeping with social democracy's historic experience, and US social democrats have little choice, as the resources they need to pay for their proposed welfare state can only be generated through accumulation of super profits extracted from the Third World.

If, however, Left factions were able to convince DSA--now ascendant in the Democratic Party and in actual elected power--to reject US imperialism and to use that position to secure liberation for those under the yoke of North American repression, then all of the Left would need to rally to their side and THAT would be the precise time for revolutionaries to potentially join up with DSA. The deep state and their monopoly capitalist base will have knives out for the socialists at that point, and we will need to defend them by any means necessary.

But that actually recommends working to build political support and a mass base outside of DSA at this time. The regime will need capacity over and on top of what it took to take power. We will be able to do more good with organizations distinct from DSA built up between now and then than we would liquidating into a movement incredibly unlikely to take this course anyways.

When the Democrats Don't Need You

The next possible permutation is by far the most likely -- that the Democratic nominee owes little or nothing to DSA, disdains their values, and wins anyways. Should DSA then support the nominee as a "lesser evil" or because of some half-assed lip service to Medicare for All, or do they refuse to go along with a class enemy of the socialist movement?

In either case the left liberal petit bourgeois elements in the group are likely to shift their primary loyalty from DSA to the Democrats and the nominee themselves. This is precisely what these elements did with Barack Obama, and they were in fact one of the pillars of his campaign and governing coalition. This nominee will represent their class interests far more faithfully than DSA. The more effective the Left revolutionary tendencies in DSA are in the meantime, the more likely this abandonment will be then.

If DSA decides instead to play the "lesser evil" game it is hard to imagine many of the earnest young workers drawn to them today sticking around for very long. They may help beat Trump, but whether DSA quietly pushes irrelevant policies or begs pathetically for things they know they'll never get from a president and Congress that doesn't like them these young workers will have little reason to stick around. Whatever work Leftists are doing in DSA now will have been wasted as DSA returns to being a tiny faction for weak-tea labor aristocrat radicals.

Yet if DSA does decide to fight against the Democrat they will have the chance to form a substantial Left pole of opposition to the ruling administration and perhaps even a useful foundation for a Left party. The young workers--at least their most advanced and conscientious numbers--will have a good reason to stick around.

Revolutionaries should be preparing to reinforce whatever truly progressive forces come to bear in the future, and such a formation may amount to that. This would be a point to consider joining forces with DSA more formally, and again bringing our independent bases to bear at a moment when they will be sorely needed. As we will see, though, it may not be as revolutionary as we have been led to believe after all.

DSA as Double Losers

The final permutation is an extension of the status quo: DSA is kept out of power within the Democratic Party and the Democrats lose. If DSA's failure is by way of active suppression by party leaders (as badly as they treated Bernie or worse), then DSA will have a strong argument that the Democrats' failure was caused by the suppression, and will have a real shot at catapulting ahead of existing liberal leadership. At that point--again--the reinforcements from the revolutionary wing of the Left will be especially valuable and powerful if it makes sense to join.

It's also very possible that Leftists look at the fact that this outcome was able to happen at least twice as a sign that DSA and social democracy are incapable of overcoming this fate and unfit for the political needs of the moment, thus wiping out whatever work revolutionaries do in their midst until then.

If instead they are given a fair and square shot--at least arguably so--and they are simply rejected by a majority of the Democrat base, then they will be a marginal faction of a losing party. This is the definition of political irrelevance and whatever "explosive growth" they have experienced in the Bernie aftermath will likely evaporate. Yet again any Left efforts within the organization will have been wasted.

What Should We Do Instead?

After all of this there are three scenarios in which work within DSA will not have been wasted or profoundly compromised: if they take over the Democratic Party, win, and begin to dismantle US imperialism; if they don't take power within the party, the party wins, but they buck the Democrats and become an independent Left force contesting the administration; or if they are suppressed within the Democratic Party and the Democrats lose, and they stand and fight in the aftermath.

Each of the three would benefit from well-developed independent Left forces that can arrive as backup to support their efforts when those crucial moments are attained. But if we are being honest with ourselves we will have to acknowledge the present US revolutionary Left's total failure to build these very sorts of forces. Unless we have an answer to the failure we have nothing to lose in following the factions into DSA.

We will not solve this failure on paper. We will come to the solution through practice, but we can examine extant experiments and practices in the light of scientific socialist analysis to gain some ideas on where to start. In particular, we should consider practices outside of DSA's politics and perspective, opportunities we will miss if we all fall into their lines.

The Proletarian Subject and the Workers' Party Error

First things first, if their politics are wrong because of their class character, then we should instead seek out the politics of the proletariat. The problem with this is that in the United States the proletariat has no politics at this point, which should make it pretty easy to determine the revolutionary task at hand: building proletarian subjectivity.

The revolutionary Left errs on this question -- and thus ends up tailing DSA or other non-revolutionary elements -- because it believes that developing proletarian subjectivity is synonymous with founding a "workers party" or an even less specific "Left" alternative party. DSA Refoundation does this explicitly, calling their proposed network of organizations "the skeleton of a Workers Party." Some of the more left-wing veterans of the Bernie Sanders' campaign organized under the banner of the Movement for a People's Party announced in late January that they are now working in solidarity with DSA Refoundation.

Together they reflect a predominant idea in contemporary left politics, that a new leftist party is what we really need, despite the global failure of such parties to even so much as slow capitalism's advance in the last half century at least.

This yearning for a workers' party reflects an awareness of the need for a revolutionary subject that can confront capitalism, but it makes two important mistakes. First, it conflates the proletariat with the working class. In the United States in particular, however, capitalism and its historic expressions in settler colonialism and imperialism have created a productive class with widely varying levels of social and material assets, many of which distort their interests and political positions.

Engels observed this same phenomenon in England as far back as 1858, "The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable." White US workers' role in exploiting this country's internal colonies only amplifies this effect.

It is true still that over time "society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other - Bourgeoisie and Proletariat." It is for this very reason that the proletariat--the dialectical synthesis between absolute dispossession and absolute productivity--can represent the entire working class, as their emancipation will require the liberation of all workers and humanity at large. But rooting a political subject in any other fraction of the broader working class--those privileged by race or nationality or various sources of social capital, etc.--will ultimately favor maintaining those privileges at the expense of those exploited to produce them. In short, it will favor the pursuit of a merely gentler or more "progressive" class society, not the abolition of all class distinctions, the basic necessity of the proletariat and the essence of communist politics.

The second error giving rise to the "workers' party" hypothesis is the assumption that the subject here must necessarily take the party form. What we know is that the initial formations embodying proletarian subjectivity are likely to be too small and too narrowly focused to take on the tasks and responsibilities of a party, and so determining today that they must ultimately become that party is to supplant our judgment--divorced from real conditions--for the assessments of the organized proletariat themselves. This is another idealist error, and it may be the key error of Left organizing in this country, period.

The Mass Line and Its Obstacles

We will develop such proletarian subjectivity with skillful application of the mass line, and so the basic task at hand is to train and educate a core communist cadre that can then undertake mass line investigation, developing programs that proletarians can adopt as their own. It really is as simple as this, but there is a major obstacle standing between our existing small group Left and this seemingly simple outcome: we too are predominantly non-proletarian in our class character.

The proletariat in this country may not have a subjective program, but to survive each proletarian -- particularly the very advanced elements that will form the vanguard of any subject drawn from this class -- knows explicitly not to trust the classes and categories from which the typical US Leftist hails. These Leftists are well-versed in proletarian political analysis arrived at through sound scientific reasoning, but dropping into these dispossessed, colonized, disenfranchised, and exploited communities and waving the correct ideas for their liberation is guaranteed to fail.

Unfortunately many US Leftists have stopped there, unsure of where to move forward. They double down on that ideological development, forming study groups, or they form political groups and boutique parties with random, ineffective practices. DSA Refoundation's base-building document includes an uncanny description of this very sort of sectarian "vanguardism."

It is no wonder they see DSA's growth, strategic confidence, and creativity as very attractive compared to this -- indeed, it is probably better to join DSA than almost any other present US Left revolutionary formation. The question is whether their opportunism is better than struggling for something more difficult, but truly new.

Connecting to Social Movements

The resolution to this contradiction between existing revolutionaries and the revolutionary class-to-be can be found, I would argue, in the Third World. It is here that social democrats like those in DSA are unlikely to turn, but we should presume that proletarian revolution is unlikely to arise among the beneficiaries of global imperialism. When we look to the more advanced Left revolutionary forces around the world--in the Philippines, in Venezuela and the other Latin American Left experiments, formerly in Haiti under Fanmi Lavalas, in Morocco's Rif uprising and in South Africa -- we see that Left parties and revolutionary subjects have arisen amidst larger social movements.

We would be wise to follow that model, bringing our capacity to social movements working in proletarian communities in the US and engaging in a deliberate and patient mass line investigation there. The obstacle here is that the deepest reaches of the US proletariat have few authentic social movements engaging them, instead they are beset by parasitic or patronizing NGOs. NGOism captures social movements, drawing them into the foundation-driven, professionally-directed non-profit industrial complex. DSA Refoundation in particular calls this out, but then suggests that they will carry out a praxis guaranteed to draw them into these very orbits. How we should instead avoid these class enemies while engaging our potential allies is another key question for our work.

And it is here that we reach the boundaries of present knowledge; moving beyond which will require further social practice. Still, we can answer the question of what we should be doing instead of joining DSA: identifying social movements and material struggles in our communities with authentic entry points into the proletariat, serving them as we can and using the mass line to investigate unspoken demands that we can develop into real proletarian political programs.

Cases of Possible Success

This is an incredibly complicated task, but some apparently correct examples have already been undertaken. Philly Socialists have built one of the largest, most resilient non-DSA socialist organizations in the country, with roots first in Serve the People programs widely respected among some of the lowest-income, most dispossessed elements of that city -- especially their free ESL classes. They also established a Tenant's Union that has confronted landlords and forced eviction reforms at City Hall that should materially slow gentrification and displacement.

Regarding housing struggles, New York City's Maoist Communist Group (MCG) has demonstrated an entirely different set of tactics, eschewing any "policy" work. They have established some initial roots in low income housing complexes in Brooklyn where they have developed a theory and strategy they summarize in the slogan "Struggle Committees Everywhere!"

These committees arose out of their efforts to fight displacement in aggressively gentrifying neighborhoods, and are a pre-party vehicle for proletarian subjectivity that could be adopted elsewhere. Every Left group hoping to build towards revolution in this country must engage with their theoretical documents and summations .

In Austin, our work as Austin Socialist Collective has been much more uneven, and we are not yet prepared to sum up these experiences. We have, however, seen that shop-to-shop outreach done initially through the Fight for 15 campaign has been a quick way to immediately touch our local proletariat. Some specific direct actions confronting wage thief management have impressed these workers and very effectively demonstrated the class struggle for everybody on the shop floor. How we deploy these tactics and to what ends in the future remains to be seen.

Conclusion

Regardless of the firm judgments here, none of this should be read as calling for unnecessary hostility or animosity towards DSA. There are a number of earnest potential revolutionaries there that will either be strong allies in the unlikely event we need to rush in or strong recruits when they join the much more likely exodus to come. In the meantime we should sincerely explore all opportunities for effective united front work with DSA in our communities.

If all our best Left elements have liquidated into the organization we can't add to their capacity, and if they do fail we will be starting out from scratch at that point, even worse off than we are today. The notion that whatever work is being done under its auspices now can be carried forward unchanged even if DSA changes for the worse is an idealist mistake. As an institution it will act upon and move the people and organizations working within it, and it will move them in a direction away from proletarian politics.

Honest Leftists must, nonetheless, acknowledge that accomplishing our tasks is a far less clear path than DSA factional entryism, and we are probably no more likely to succeed than DSA is. The best way to guarantee our failure, however, is to fail to act at all, defaulting instead to the less threatening path offered by social democracy. If we do that we will get what the Left around the world has had for decades at least--a politics that claims a great deal and delivers only ruin.

In the short run, we can build outside of DSA to catch our comrades when they fall out from it, or perhaps to rush in when they really need our help. In either case we must build outside its boundaries. Their future is uncertain at best, and the opportunities too many are hastily seeking really are opportunistic. The true revolutionary path is one of patience; a lonely one in comparison for sure, but our true friends can only be found among those too low for opportunists to wait upon. Let's find one another in their midst.

Marxism and Nature: The Metabolic Rift

By Rebecca Heyer

This article is intended to be the first in a series that will provide an introduction to some of the concepts that provide the foundation for ecosocialism, a movement that develops and applies socialist solutions to the challenges of climate change and the environment. All of these will be an attempt to introduce the reader to the subject matter.

Many readers find the original works that have helped define the movement to be difficult to follow. Academics such as John Bellamy Foster and Ian Angus are highly respected, but use a language that many socialist organizers find somewhat inaccessible. I highly recommend their writing to anyone who wants to take the time and effort to read and understand them. I will not come close to their rigor and attention to detail here. I hope to inspire all people interested in building a socialist future to investigate further.

Marx's View of the Relationship between Humans and the Environment

Marx and Epicurean Philosophy

Karl Marx spent much of his life considering the relationship between the human race and the world they live in. He excelled in the study of philosophy, history and the natural sciences. Marx's world view was grounded in philosophy, particularly that of the ancient Greeks. The subject of his PhD thesis was a comparison of philosophy of two of the classic Greek scholars, Epicurus and Democritus. Both of them were materialists, in contrast to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle who were idealists. Idealism had dominated western thought for centuries and provided a foundation for much of Christian theology. The Enlightenment marked a revival of the materialist school. Marx saw the relationship between humans and the environment in materialist terms and saw humans as part of the world they live in. Marx's world was not populated by ideal forms. It was made up of matter, time and space. It existed independently of any deity, and humans did not govern it or maintain it as agents of God. They interacted with their environment in a dialectical relationship, with all participants affecting all other participants.

Labor as a Natural Process

Marx saw labor as a process that connected humans with their environment. In Volume I of Capital, Chapter Seven, Section One, he wrote:

" Labor is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature's productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labor that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labor-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labor was still in its first instinctive stage. We presuppose labor in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labor-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realizes a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman's will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be."

Labor is a dialectical process where humans impact the environment, but at the same time the changes in the environment made by humans impact humans.

The Metabolic Rift and Fertilizer

Marx and the Soil

Marx recognized the fundamental role of the soil in the labor process. He viewed agriculture as the basis for an economy. He included the following in the section of Capital cited above.

" The soil (and this, economically speaking, includes water) in the virgin state in which it supplies man with necessaries or the means of subsistence ready to hand, exists independently of him, and is the universal subject of human labor. All those things which labor merely separates from immediate connection with their environment, are subjects of labor spontaneously provided by Nature. Such are fish which we catch and take from their element, water, timber which we fell in the virgin forest, and ores which we extract from their veins. If, on the other hand, the subject of labor has, so to say, been filtered through previous labor, we call it raw material; such is ore already extracted and ready for washing. All raw material is the subject of labor, but not every subject of labor is raw material: it can only become so, after it has undergone some alteration by means of labor."

The transition from feudalism to capitalism was marked by a change in the relationship between humans and the soil.

Capitalism in Europe began to develop in the fourteenth century with the rise of capitalist agriculture. Feudal Europe had few cities or towns and agriculture was distributed across a multitude of feudal estates. Most were largely self-sufficient and trade was not a significant factor. As the population grew cities and towns became more important. This led to the practice of tenant farming and the development of markets for agricultural products. In Chapter Twenty-Nine of Capital, Volume I, Marx writes:

" Now that we have considered the forcible creation of a class of outlawed proletarians, the bloody discipline that turned them into wage laborers, the disgraceful action of the State which employed the police to accelerate the accumulation of capital by increasing the degree of exploitation of labor, the question remains: whence came the capitalists originally? For the expropriation of the agricultural population creates, directly, none but the greatest landed proprietors. As far, however, as concerns the genesis of the farmer, we can, so to say, put our hand on it, because it is a slow process evolving through many centuries. The serfs, as well as the free small proprietors, held land under very different tenures, and were therefore emancipated under very different economic conditions. In England the first form of the farmer is the bailiff, himself a serf. His position is similar to that of the old Roman villicus , only in a more limited sphere of action. During the second half of the 14th century he is replaced by a farmer, whom the landlord provided with seed, cattle and implements. His condition is not very different from that of the peasant. Only he exploits more wage labor. Soon he becomes a metayer, a half-farmer. He advances one part of the agricultural stock, the landlord the other. The two divide the total product in proportions determined by contract. This form quickly disappears in England, to give the place to the farmer proper, who makes his own capital breed by employing wage laborers, and pays a part of the surplus-product, in money or in kind, to the landlord as rent. So long, during the 15th century, as the independent peasant and the farm-laborer working for himself as well as for wages, enriched themselves by their own labor, the circumstances of the farmer, and his field of production, were equally mediocre. The agricultural revolution which commenced in the last third of the 15th century, and continued during almost the whole of the 16th (excepting, however, its last decade), enriched him just as speedily as it impoverished the mass of the agricultural people."

The Metabolic Rift

The development of capitalist agricultural alienated farmers, both from the soil, which was the source of their productivity, and their produce, which was the fruit of their labor. Marx did not call this alienation a "metabolic rift" but later writers have used this term to refer to the disruption of the relationship between humans and the environment described in Capital Volume I, Chapter 15, Section 10.

" Capitalist production completely tears asunder the old bond of union which held together agriculture and manufacture in their infancy. But at the same time it creates the material conditions for a higher synthesis in the future, viz., the union of agriculture and industry on the basis of the more perfected forms they have each acquired during their temporary separation. Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centers, and causing an ever-increasing preponderance of town population, on the one hand concentrates the historical motive power of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil, i.e., prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil. By this action it destroys at the same time the health of the town laborer and the intellectual life of the rural laborer. But while upsetting the naturally grown conditions for the maintenance of that circulation of matter, it imperiously calls for its restoration as a system, as a regulating law of social production, and under a form appropriate to the full development of the human race. In agriculture as in manufacture, the transformation of production under the sway of capital, means, at the same time, the martyrdom of the producer; the instrument of labor becomes the means of enslaving, exploiting, and impoverishing the laborer; the social combination and organization of labor-processes is turned into an organized mode of crushing out the workman's individual vitality, freedom, and independence. The dispersion of the rural laborers over larger areas breaks their power of resistance while concentration increases that of the town operatives. In modern agriculture, as in the urban industries, the increased productiveness and quantity of the labor set in motion are bought at the cost of laying waste and consuming by disease labor-power itself. Moreover, all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the laborer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the laborer."

Soil Depletion and the Use of Fertilizer

Capitalists often attempt to address problems created by a metabolic rift through technical changes in production methods. Marx was familiar with the attempt to mitigate soil depletion through the use of fertilizer. He was fascinated by the work of organic chemist Justus von Liebig on the subject of nutrients needed by plants. In large part due to Liebig's discoveries, the use of fertilizer in both Europe and America exploded during the nineteenth century.

The best available fertilizer available at the time was guano, the accumulated droppings of sea birds. Islands on the west coast of South America had an abundant supply. Demand for guano from Peru soared during the mid nineteenth century and the major agricultural producers of the time fought to control these resources. This led to the Chincha Islands War of 1864-1866. Marx saw this conflict as an example of the way imperial powers enter into conflict for the control of natural resources.

As is often the case, this metabolic rift led to another, as the capitalist system attempted to correct the problem by using new technology. Guano was carried from Peru to agricultural centers in Europe and North America by clipper ships. About the same time as the Chincha Islands War, shipping technology changed from wind driven vessels to steam driven vessels powered by coal. The mining and shipping of coal created a new, even more serious metabolic rift. Fossil fuels such as coal represent energy that was captured long ago by plants and has been sitting underground for millions of years. Plants use energy from solar radiation to convert carbon dioxide into other carbon compounds. This energy is stored in fossil fuels such as coal, petroleum, and natural gas. The stored energy is released when fossil fuels are burned, but at the same time carbon dioxide is also released. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas which, when released into the atmosphere, causes environmental systems like the oceans to retain heat and become warmer. The current warming trend that is driving global climate change began in the mid-nineteenth century and can be in, at least in part, traced back to the chain of metabolic rifts that was initiated by capitalist agriculture.

The Metabolic Rift Today

Agriculture

The chain of metabolic rifts in agriculture has continued. By the end of the nineteenth century, deposits of nitrates such as guano were becoming depleted. Capitalist agricultural, now dependent on nitrate fertilizer, needed a new technology. In 1909 an artificial way of fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere, called the Haber Process, was discovered. The Haber Process is still the dominate way of producing nitrates, which are used in the production of munitions and explosives as well as fertilizer.

The Haber Process is energy intensive, uses natural gas as a source of hydrogen and consumes three to five percent of the world's production of natural gas. Capitalist agricultural is also heavily dependent on the use of powered equipment, such as tractors, trucks and harvesters, which are also fueled by petroleum products. Although agricultural consumption of petroleum is dwarfed by other economic sectors such as transportation, according to the US Energy Information Administration about half a trillion BTU of petroleum is consumed by agricultural production in this country alone.

Energy

No where is a metabolic rift more apparent than in the capitalist production of energy. Fossil fuels such as coal, natural gas and petroleum represent solar radiation received by plants millions of years ago and captured through the process of photosynthesis which converts carbon dioxide and water into other hydrocarbons. Burning fossil fuels releases both energy and carbon dioxide. After almost two hundred years of burning fossil fuels, accelerated by capitalist agriculture and manufacturing processes, the portion of the atmosphere made up by carbon dioxide has gone from less than three hundred parts per million to over 400 parts per million. Changes of this magnitude typically take millions of years.

Manufactured Goods

In the same way that the globalization of agriculture creates metabolic rifts, the globalization of the production of manufactured commodities creates additional rifts. These may not be connected directly to the soil, but they still impact the connection between humans and environmental systems. In a globalized economy the sources of raw materials, the sites of manufacturing facilities and consumers are usually separated by large distances and national borders. The most obvious impact on environmental systems comes from the need to transport huge quantities of commodities and materials. Most of these are moved by cargo ships and most of these ships are powered by a petroleum product known as bunker fuel, the residual that is left after gasoline, kerosene, diesel oil and other lighter distillates are extracted. Bunker fuel is relatively inexpensive, but burning it emits large amounts of carbon dioxide compared to the amount of energy produced. The transportation of goods and materials needed to support a globalized economy contributes heavily to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and thereby to global climate change.

Conclusion

I hope this article has given the reader some idea of the meaning of the term metabolic rift and its place in the Marxian critique of capitalism. Metabolic rift is a key concept within ecosocialism and the understanding of how capitalism is responsible for global climate change.

This article originally appeared on the Socialist Party USA's official publication, The Socialist .

Rebecca Heyer graduated from Rice University with a BA in economics in 1977. Based in Texas, she worked as a systems analyst and consultant for 23 years, specializing in the management of very large data sets. Starting in 2000, she became active in politics, holding a county office in the Green Party and lobbying the Texas Legislature. She relocated to northwest Florida in 2006 where she served on the City of Pensacola Environmental Advisory Board. After the 2016 election she left the Green Party and joined the Socialist Party USA as an at large member. She currently serves on the Ecosocialist Commission. At the age of 62, she still enjoys the punk scene and living on the Gulf Coast.

Sources

Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature by John Bellamy Foster

The Ecological Rift: Capitalism's War on the Earth by John Bellamy Foster, Robert York and Brett Clark

The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophies in General - Karl Marx's Doctoral Thesis

Capital, Volume I by Karl Marx

Communist Study: Introduction to Partisan Educational Theory

By Derek R. Ford

This is the introductory chapter to Communist Study: Education for the Commons (2016), which argues that capitalism rests on a certain educational logic, and that political struggles looking to move beyond capitalism need to develop and practice oppositional modes of education .

While Margaret Thatcher tends to get the credit for saying that "there is no such thing as society," it was none other than Karl Marx who, in The Poverty of Philosophy, first-and for quite different reasons-contested that such a thing as society existed. For Marx the term society was too loose and static, too moralistic and jurisprudential; it wasn't dialectical or historical enough to account for the constantly changing state of things, for the complexity and dynamism of life. In its place, Marx proposed the concept of "social formation." [1] In the clear, careful, and patient manner that is characteristic of his work, Althusser spells out for us just what a social formation is, and why this concept is vital for Marx and for those of us who want to make a new world, a world that we deserve. In each social formation there exist multiple modes of production (at least two), one of which is always dominant, and others of which are either going out of or struggling to come into existence. A mode of production is, well, a way of producing things, an arrangement between the productive forces and the relations of production, between the objects and instruments of labor, on the one hand, and between those who relate to them and to each other, on the other.

Under the capitalist mode of production, the relations of production are inherently and unalterably relations of exploitation. There are those who work on the means of production and those who own the means of production, and the latter group appropriates what is produced, returning some to the worker in the form of wages and keeping the rest for themselves (and the landlord, the state, and the banker). There is always a struggle over how the value produced will be apportioned, what amount will return to the one who produced it and what amount will be taken by the owner; wages correspond to the level of class struggle at any given moment and in any given place. The relations of production under capitalism are therefore not of a technical or legal nature, but a social one. It is, then, the whole social and economic system that has to be overthrown: the working class has to have control over the productive forces and new relations of production have to be established.[2]

Althusser's presentation of social formations and modes of production is so appealing, for one, because of the way in which he makes clear that antagonistic modes of production co-exist along with as the capitalist mode of production. Thus, Althusser gives us a way to understand that the primary contradiction at the time of his writing was not necessarilywithin the capitalist mode of production but rather between the capitalist mode of production and the socialist mode of production, which in the early 1970s was a considerable portion of the globe.[3] For two, however, Althusser's formulation is appealing because of the way that it demonstrates the centrality of the social relations of production. Althusser states upfront that the relations of production aredeterminant in the reproduction of a social formation. [4] After all, that is why Althusser was interested in the ideological state apparatuses in the first place: they are "the number one object of the class struggle" because of their central role in the reproduction of the relations of production. [5]

The materialist method indicates that any new production relations and forces won't materialize out of thin air, which seems to me an important but fundamentally neglected insight when examining the history of the international communist movement. All too often socialist states are evaluated according to a checklist drawn up in the halls of academe by romantic, utopian intellectuals. But I digress. [6] The theory of immanence that is fundamental to the materialist method holds that it is only out of existing conditions that the future emerges, that we can glimpse alternative realities within the present, that hegemony is loosely stitched together, and composed of fabric and thread from the past. With the right alteration the whole thing can unravel. This is precisely why Althusser insists on the coexistence of multiple modes of production within any given social formation: multiple sets of production relations and forces can be blocked together, locked in struggles that are at times latent and at other times explosive. The question is how to locate and latch onto the germ of the future from within the present, at least that's the question for those of us who yearn for a different world.

That's also the question that motives this study. What I set out to do in this book is to locate antagonistic elements of subjectivity and modes of being that are immanent in the present, to understand these subjectivities in their necessary relationship to the mode of production, and to posit some ways that these elements can be seized upon by educators and political organizers. In this way, it's a political and intellectual book, and it's a deeply intimate one, too. This project embodies tensions that I have felt all of my life, tensions that Peter McLaren calls enfleshment, or "the mutually constitutive enfolding of social structure and desire… the dialectical relationship between the material organization of interiority and the cultural modes of materiality we inhabit subjectively." [7] This phrase, "the material organization of interiority" is a particularly profound one, for it so closely links politics to the subject, intimating two types of interiority: the interiority of the subject and the various forms of interiority that, together, we constantly construct (the domus, the collective, the classroom, etc.). [8] The co-intimacies are always experienced through the reigning mode of production, which is not external to social relations or to subjectivity itself.

The social and economic contradictions of capitalism run through us, as do the contradictions between the capitalist mode of production and other, ascending or descending modes of production. We can feel exploitation in our interior, but we can also feel solidarity there, nudging its way in. We organize with our fellow workers and students because our material conditions force us to, because we need more, want something else, but also because organizing, in its best moments, can produce a sublime feeling of being-in-common. While we are shoulder to shoulder with others fighting against a common enemy we experience a mode of collectivity that capitalism can never capture, a form of subjectification that exceeds any already existing conceptual framework. Now, anyone who has done even a quick stint as an organizer knows that a lot of other feelings can be produced, too, feelings that can divide us, make us anxious, cynical, and paranoid. Yet this is nothing but another testament to the blocking together of multiple forms of social relations that are vying for dominance.

I was an organizer and a communist before entering the field of education, and one of the reasons that I was drawn to the field was because of the ways in which I also got these sublime feelings when reading and thinking about, and wrestling with, ideas with others. When I harken back, the best educational experiences for me have been indistinguishable from the best political experiences. The research that I have done over the past several years has given me some tools, concepts, problems, and frameworks with which to theorize these feelings that I've had with others and how they relate to the social formation. This theorization resulted in the formation of a pedagogical constellation, and this book is a journey through that constellation.

In astronomy, a constellation is a way of grouping areas of the celestial sphere. The first constellations were determined by farmers who were looking for additional indicators of the changing of seasons, and today they are determined by the International Astronomical Union. Constellations are a way of framing and grouping the sky. Tyson Lewis has suggested that we should think of educational philosophy and practice as a constellation. A pedagogical constellation, then, "does not collapse differences between concepts, nor does it simply valorize one conceptual model over the other. Rather, they hang precariously together, maintaining an absent center." [9] Lewis is careful to note that this constellation can't be purely subjective, but has to "have an objective and necessary dimension." [10] Whereas Lewis argues that this dimension is the "exacting imagination," I hold that it is the social relations of production that fills the spaces and connects the relations between concepts, and the communist program that motivates the assembling of the constellation in the first place.

The communist educational program was in many ways the topic of my first book, Marx, Capital, and Education: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Becoming , which I penned with my comrade and colleague Curry Malott. [11] We wrote that book in a fever, egged on by the need to locate critical education within the history of actually existing struggles against imperialism, exploitation, and oppression. This meant that we had to go back to Marx, and that we especially had to do some systematic and educational readings of the three volumes of Capital. Everywhere in education, in every other journal article or conference paper, we encountered this term "neoliberalism." That was good, we thought, because there can be no doubt that we, in the U.S., are in an intense struggle over accumulation by educational dispossession. So much of this trajectory of educational research, however, left us dissatisfied: the disconnection of neoliberalism from capitalism, the dismissal and demonization of the actually-existing workers' struggle (and the social formations it produced), the lack of any real systemic engagement with marxism, the emphasis on analysis at the expense of action, the reluctance to formulate a political program, silence on imperialist war, and an embrace of essentialist identity politics. We composed the book as an intervention into the field. We provided an antidote to the bland critiques of neoliberalism in education; we centered the law and logic of value, the dialectic, and negation; read the Ferguson protests through the lens of Capital and Harry Haywood-the self-proclaimed "Black Bolshevik"-and his theory of the oppressed Black nation within the U.S.; located neoliberalism as a strategy within the global class war; and pushed back against the idealistic and anti-communist critiques of actually-existing socialism.

Sending a manuscript off to press is rarely a satisfying thing, because as soon as you click "send" you've already thought of too many things to add, tweak, or test. And so writing a book or an article is less about completing something and more about starting something, opening new lines of inquiry or starting new political projects. Marx, Capital, and Education was no exception to this, and before it had manifested as a physical object we were both our pursuing new themes. Curry ended up writing History and Education, which confronts the deep-seated anti-communism in critical pedagogy and the academic Left more generally by expanding on the concept of the global class war, which we dedicated a chapter to in our book and which was begging for more analysis. As for me, I started contemplating a word that we had placed in Marx, Capital, and Education's subtitle: pedagogy. "Just what the hell is pedagogy?" I kept asking myself. I had read and written the word countless times, had gone through a graduate program in education, but I didn't have a grasp on what it meant.

After some digging, I came to realize that I wasn't alone. Sure, some scholars and researchers used "pedagogy" in a very clear sense: to them it was a method of teaching. But that seemed not only boring, but also definitely at odds with the critical tradition (critical pedagogy insists that it is not a method, but a practice). [12] As I started to take the claim seriously, though, I started to come around a bit to the position that pedagogy is a method. In the opening pages of History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukàcs asks what orthodox Marxism is. He tells us that if all of Marx's theses were disproven, even then "every serious 'orthodox' Marxist would still be able to accept all such modern findings without reservation and hence dismiss all of Marx's theses in toto-without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment." [13] This, Lukàcs says, is so because "orthodoxy refers exclusively to method," which for a marxist is dialectical materialism. And dialectical materialism is all about processes and relations, both of which imply constant change.[14] Indeed, the dialectic is what allowed Marx to study capital, which he defined as a social relation. Given this, it makes little sense to institute a binary between a method and a practice, as the marxist method is the practice of applying dialectical materialism to understand processes and relations.

In the spirit of the dialectic, the best educational theorists use pedagogy to name an educational relation. Paulo Freire, in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, wrote at length regarding the dialogic relationship between teacher and student, the hyphen between what he termed the teacher-student and the student-teacher. [15] A central axiom of the book is that the teacher and the student must relate as agents who are encountering each other and, through dialogue, naming their world. This axiom, however, can't be divorced from another, which is the commitment to ending oppression and exploitation, what Freire called the process of humanization. What makes the relationship educational is this second axiom, for education always needs an end. [16] This is exactly what McLaren means when he insists, "ideological paths chosen by teachers are the fundamental stuff of Freirean pedagogy." [17] McLaren has been hard at work over the last two decades to theorize the ideological paths that lead toward the ends of this pedagogy by fleshing out a revolutionary critical pedagogy, upon which Marx, Capital, and Education was built.[18]

The pedagogical relation, in this tradition, is about opening ourselves up to the possibility that things can be otherwise than they are, that a world without exploitation and oppression can exist, and that, through struggle, we can create that world. As Antonia Darder writes, the purpose of pedagogy is to "engage the world with its complexity and fullness in order to reveal the possibilities of new ways of constructing thought and action beyond the original state."[19] Pedagogy, for McLaren, "is the telling of the story of the 'something more' that can be dreamed only when domination and exploitation are named and challenged."[20] This is a pedagogy that seeks a way out of the present through the cultivation of imagination and the formation of dissidence and resistance. The relationship between the present and the future was an animating theme of Marx, Capital, and Education, and it is why the book insisted on the process of becoming. What I came to realize, however, was that I needed something more here. As an educational theorist, I felt it was my duty to think more carefully and experimentally about how pedagogy bridges the gap between what is and what can be, while respecting the gap and its uncertainty and figurality. How can pedagogy respect the gap's ambiguity while remaining faithful to the communist project?

A pedagogical constellation

The pedagogical constellation constructed in the following pages is animated by these concerns. I demonstrate some ways that pedagogy can help materialize social relations and activate subjectivities that are not just antagonistic to capital, but conducive to the communist project. When I write about the communist project I mean something particular and something general, something old, something new, and something unknown. After the overthrow and dissolution of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc in 1989-1991, communism fell into disrepute. The Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and global economic crisis of 2007-2008, however, turned the tide, and history restarted. Communism reappeared once again as a Left sign. In response, a "new communism" has emerged as a pole to be struggled over. There are multiple takes on this new communism, from Alain Badiou's notion of communism as an Idea, an abstract truth procedure that synthesizes history, politics, and the subject, to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Spinozist communism as the absolute democracy of singularities.[21] Jodi Dean's take is that we mustn't equate communism with democracy. We live in the age of democracy, and so to organize around "radical" or "absolute" democracy implies an extension of the system as it is, signals that through inclusion democracy can be radically transformed. [22] While it is true, as Alex Means notes, that Lenin and Marx sometimes used the term "proletarian democracy" to describe communism, the situation today is considerably different.[23] Not only do the masses in capitalist countries today have access to the mechanisms of democracy, but democracy defines the contemporary moment. One could argue that we should struggle over the meaning of democracy, but this, I hold, is not only a dead end pragmatically (for it only reaffirms democracy's hegemony), but is incorrect politically. Democracy necessitates inclusion and participation and fails to name the exclusions and divisions that make politics possible.[24] Democracy names a commons; communism names a commons against.

Not all of the cartographers that travel with me to chart this communist constellation fit within the communist tradition, and in fact some of my co-thinkers have made explicit breaks from the communist movement. While I don't let them off the hook so easily, neither do I attempt to force them neatly into the communist project. There is a resulting tension that runs through the book, a tension that I hope readers find both productive and troubling. I'm familiar with the rash of Marxist/post-al debates that dominated so much of academia during 1990s. To be quite honest, I'm not especially interested in them, or in rehearsing the arguments, or in drawing up some sort of balance sheet on the matter. It's not so much that the categories and stakes of these debates aren't significant (they certainly are), but that the debates became so narrowed and debilitated, so narrowing and debilitating. They are, if I may say so, played out. My position is that we shouldn't allow ideological disagreements to prevent us from communicating with, or culling insights from, one another. It's not to say that ideological unity and clarity aren't important, but that this unity is always the result of struggle and practice, not a priori literary battles. So I chose my co-thinkers in this book because they have helped me conceptualize the relations that pedagogy can engender, how these relations relate to the varying kinds of social relations of production, and how we can link the educational relation to the struggle for a new social formation.

Foundational to this project is the idea that subjectivity is historical and material, that subjectivity changes, and that these changes have a relationship to production relations. The predominant form of the subject today, it appears, is the individual. Dean thus writes that "our political problem differs in a fundamental way from that of communists at the beginning of the twentieth century-we have to organize individuals; they had to organize masses." [25] This book begins with an inquiry into the individualized state of subjectivity today. The first chapter brings Judith Butler's theory of normative and performative constitution of the subject into the field of capital. I elaborate the social, juridical, and economic conditions of industrial capital accumulation and, reading Butler with Marx, I argue that the norms through which the subject comes to be constituted as an individual in the modern era are fundamentally connected with modern capitalism. In other words, the subjectivity of the individual is required for capitalist accumulation in the industrial era. The individual, however, is just one way in which subjectivity is produced under capitalism, for capitalism atomizes people at the same time as it concentrates them in space, alienating people from each other while developing sophisticated means of transportation and communication. These contradictions of capital are contradictions that are played out on the field of the subject, which both acts on and reacts to the mode of production. As a result, when I move to an examination of recent transformations that have taken place in capitalism, the move away from the industrial era, I pay special attention to the interaction between subjects and the means of production, although I also bring the economic contradictions of capitalism-overaccumulation and the falling rate of profit-into play.

These recent transformations have to do with the incorporation of subjectivity into capitalism as an element of fixed capital-what Marx labeled the "general intellect"-and the increasing importance of subjectivity and sociality in the production and realization of value. Following Maurizio Lazzarato I define the contemporary phase of capitalism as the "immaterial era." The immaterial era of capitalism, I claim, follows from the industrial era, and it represents a transformation within the capitalist mode of production, not a new mode of production. I caution against fetishizing immaterial production, a charge I level against Hardt and Negri, who recognize the corporeality of immaterial production but still harp on its "infinite reproducibility." This isn't just an esoteric distinction, for recognizing the inherently material nature of immaterial production directs our attention to the necessity of seizing the state and other forms of power. Power is not everywhere and nowhere. The bourgeoisie takes up specific spaces-they have names and addresses. After articulating what I mean by immaterial production as a transformation within the capitalist mode of production in the second chapter, I show how as the mode of production transitions into the immaterial era the norms that render the subject an individual become challenged. Here I return to Butler to show that instead of sovereign, autonomous, and atomized, in immaterial production we begin to experience ourselves and each other as dependent, opaque, and relational. Butler's conception of the subject becomes rooted as part of the capitalist mode of production, providing a material basis for her conception. While I agree with Dean that the individual is a dominant form of subjectivity today, I take issue with its prevalence, contending instead that it is constantly being challenged, both in the realm of production and in the "everyday."

Butler gives us a rich theorization of subject constitution and contemporary subject formation. Her descriptions of the ways in which we are unendingly and irretrievably bound up with each other, the ways that we are permanently dependent on each other and, as a result, forever other to ourselves, powerfully illustrate the commonness that communism is about. These attributes of contemporary subjectivity both correspond with and trouble the capitalist mode of production. Maybe they signal the emergence of an ascendant mode of production. But there is a primary contradiction within contemporary subject formation and between it and operations of capital: while a new commonness is being forged through the productive networks of society, society is increasingly polarized along lines of class and identity. Communist pedagogy, in turn, has to offer theorizations of commonness that are rooted in the material realities of everyday life. Moreover, the rule of private property bears a particular relationship to the political form of democracy, and taken together capitalism and democracy have a definite educational logic. The rest of the book gets at this knot by turning to the concept of study, which I figure as not just an alternative educational logic, but an oppositional educational logic, as a way of forging not just commonness, but commonness against.

In the third chapter I begin developing the concept of study, the central pedagogical concept in this book's constellation. The philosopher who has most richly developed study is Lewis, who takes Agamben's notion of potentiality and positions it against biocapitalism and its educational logic: the logic of learning. Biocapitalism is a form of capitalism that doesn't use up labor-power so much as it continually reinvests in it, remaking it over and over again. This reinvestment takes place through lifelong learning, in which we continually remake ourselves to fit the ever-changing demands of global capitalism. "Learning is," as Lewis formulates it at one point, "the putting to work of potentiality in the name of self-actualization and economic viability… Learning has thus become a biotechnology for managing and measuring the nebulous force, power, or will of potentiality." [26] Potentiality, of course, is only good for capital if it is actualized. Otherwise it is wasted potential. Agamben provides Lewis with another notion of potentiality, a potentiality not to be, and Lewis develops his theory of studying on this notion.

Whereas learning is always directed by predetermined and measurable ends, studying is about pure means, about exploring, wandering, getting lost in thought, forgetting what one knows so that one can discover that the world exists otherwise than the way that one knows it. Studying is, I think, the educational equivalent of flirting. When flirting with another, I and that other sway between "we can, we cannot." Each gesture, touch, or phrase proposes potential as it withdraws into impotential. We are neither committed nor un-committed to each other; we are not not-committed. Like flirting, studying is a contradictory feeling of exhilaration and dismay, anxiety and excitement, the pleasure of exploration and the pain of the unfamiliar. Studying can't be graded or measured; it is concerned only with use and not with exchange. Studying isn't only a wandering about, however, it's also a fleeing from, a stateless state of fugitivity, as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten put it. Harney and Moten more radically politicize studying by linking it to the undercommons, the label that they give to the spaces and relations that resist capitalist enclosures. In the undercommons we study together, bonded by our mutual indebtedness, or what Butler would call our mutual and inescapable dependency.

To further develop the concept of study, how studying can be in opposition to capital, and how educators can enact study, I turn to the thought of Jean-François Lyotard in chapters four, five, and six. While Lyotard's work has ignited more than a few debates in education and in critical theory, these debates have focused almost exclusively on his short book, The Postmodern Condition, a book that Lyotard refers to as "an occasional one," as nothing more than a "report." [27] The almost exclusive focus on this book in education has drawn our attention away from the rich body of Lyotard's work, which is rife with educational lessons. In chapter five I connect The Postmodern Condition to Lyotard's larger philosophical endeavors, revealing why a focus on that particular book has created misunderstandings in educational thought. The connecting point here is Lyotard's writing on "the system," which for Lyotard is the economic system of capitalism and the political system of liberal democracy. Lyotard helps us see how certain forms of difference and alterity can circulate quite productively within capitalism, including postmodernism itself. While many have noted that today capitalism thrives on difference and individuality, they have missed the mark: difference and individuality-alterity-have to first be brought to signification, have to be made public. There are very real limits to what signified subjectivities and beliefs can be accommodated within capitalism, of course, that Lyotard and some of his followers haven't appreciated because of their political commitments. But the central insight is that, like the demand for actualization, capital demands that the subject be made public, express itself.

While the demand for actualization represses the potentiality not to be, the demand for publicity represses the subject's secret life. The subject's internal alterity, a "no-man's land" where we can meet ourselves and others, is the place from where thought comes. The secret is, by definition, incommunicable, but this in no way prevents it from being a common region. The alterity that I am after here is not about individualized difference but about solidarity, forms of togetherness that capital can't capture, forms of collectivity that perpetually resist. The secret is a region, then, that we can't exactly know, that we can only encounter: it's a place of study. The political thrust behind the demand for constant communication and for endless articulation is at the heart of the democratic project, and a critique of democracy is the subject of the fifth chapter. Lyotard's problem is not with expression itself, but rather when the general-or public-life seeks to take hold of the secret life. Democracy, by compelling the subject to babble endlessly, by fashioning subjects that compel themselves and others to communicate, inaugurates what Lyotard calls terror. This is a terror to which pedagogy, as something that necessarily involves communication, is susceptible. I spend part of this chapter demonstrating how complicit critical pedagogy and its critics have been in this terror.

There is an irreducible antagonism between democracy and the secret, for the former requires transparency, dialogue and deliberation, and visibility, while the latter is opaque, mute, and concealed. And there is crucial link between democracy and capitalism, for the latter has an insatiable appetite for anything that can be input into its circuits of value production and realization. It is not just that the neoliberals have succeeded in equating democracy with capitalism; there is actually an intimate relationship between the two. The secret, which stands in opposition to both democracy and capital, breaks free from this nexus. Democracy is about learning; communism is about studying.

An attentiveness to and orientation toward the secret, which is always already present within and between us, can help open us up to the event, to the revolutionary rupture within the existing dominant order of things and subjects. The secret is a rearguard, always operating outside of and against democracy and the logic of exchange-value. One question for politics is how we can embrace the secret life and mobilize it as part of a vanguard project against capital. Such an embrace, I suggest, can help us realize not just what we want out of politics, but to where we are and what we have that we want to keep. In the sixth chapter I continue my conversation with Lyotard to offer a method of education, a way of attending to the secret, accommodating alterity, and cultivating receptivity toward the new without abandoning history and materialism; a way of thinking through the relationship between learning and studying. Developing what I call a figural education, I present an educational mode of engagement that has three heterogeneous and synchronous processes: reading, seeing, and blindness. This is a process of opening the world beyond how it appears to us, and of opening ourselves to a world that we can't conceptually understand.

The political question, of course, is how to conduct that negotiation. For pedagogy, the question is: on what criteria does the negotiation process between learning and studying pivot? When and on what basis should repression take place? When should studying itself be suspended? These are questions that haven't been answered by the new communists. Neglecting or refusing to answer these questions can leave education and politics permanently disoriented, a state that is altogether favorable to capitalism and imperialism. We have to develop such criteria, and in the seventh chapter I present some evidence in support of this injunction. I refer to three key battles that have left important marks on the Left: China in 1989, Hungary in 1956, and Libya in 2011. The struggles within each of these countries were presented as "the people" versus "the state," as "rebels" versus a "dictatorship," and the each state's repressive measures were (almost) universally condemned. Indeed, for Agamben the Chinese state's response to the Tiananmen Square protests represents the ultimate assault on whatever singularity. If we actually examine what took place in Tiananmen and elsewhere, however, if we look at the events themselves and-perhaps more importantly-at the social forces involved in the conflicts, then we draw a different conclusion. Although each is obviously unique, I demonstrate that in each instance the state moved to repress not a revolution but a counterrevolution. Such repression wasn't ideal, but that's the whole point: history and reality are never ideal.

This move to history is meant to counter what I call the new orthodoxy of the new communism, an orthodoxy that, in the last instance, frames the discussion. Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek make this clear on page two of their introduction to The Idea of Communism: "The left which aligned itself with 'actually existing socialism' has disappeared or turned into a historical curiosity." [28] Dean militates against this by insisting on the continuity of communism as a horizon that has never disappeared and her asserting "communism succeeded." [29] Further, she writes about the necessity of repression and "the bloody violence of revolution." [30] Yet she doesn't engage the historical and existing global communist struggle. There are good philosophical reasons for such abstractions, and politically they prevent the immobilization that can result from debates about particular policies in particular social formations at particular moments in time. Returning to some key moments like I do in this chapter, however, provides nuance to discussions around repression, exclusion, division, and value production, nuance that has interestingly been relatively absent from the new communist discussions. It injects some old communism into the new communism.

Imperialism wears many masks; it transcends space, time, and identity. Its forces and agents are highly organized, centralized, and conscious. How many revolutions have been crushed under the weight of its reaction? How many revolutions have been aborted or turned back by its police, its military, its propaganda, and its agent provocateurs? The ruthlessness and savagery of imperialism renders organization itself a political principle for communists. As such, in the eighth chapter I move to an examination of the Party-form, which I submit is, at base, a pedagogical project. I argue that a foundational task of the Party is to orchestrate the educational process, to navigate the communist pedagogical constellation developed in the book. Revolutions are by definition radically uncertain and unpredictable events. All scripts are thrown out the window as dynamics rapidly shift about. In the midst of this uncertainty, the forces of capital have, historically, been quite well prepared. Without tight, disciplined organization, revolutionary moments result in restoration (a return to before) or counterrevolution. To prepare for revolution, the Party studies the mass movement, learns its lessons, teaches what it doesn't know, and produces us as new, collective subjects. Capital thrives on diversity, complexification, and difference. All sorts of oppositional movements can be coopted, absorbed within the game of profit maximization. When the limits to what capital can accommodate are tested, then repression is unleashed. Studying forges a commonness against that, if organized, can weather that repression, becoming a true political force. The following pages propose a series of educational concepts, frameworks, and modes of engagement that, taken together, form a partisan educational theory: a theory of communist study.

Notes

[1] Louis Althusser, On the reproduction of capitalism: Ideology and ideological state apparatuses , trans. G.M. Goshgarian (London and New York: Verso, 1995/2014).

[2] Althusser makes this point for the social democrats, who hold that mere technical and legal changes within the capitalist totality will usher in socialism-a critique that is just as important today as it was in the 1960s and 1970s.

[3] Thus, the contradiction was between the capitalist and the imperialist camp, the latter of which contained the socialist states and the anti-colonial states that emerged during the socialist and national liberation struggles of the 20th century.

[4] Louis Althusser, On the reproduction of capitalism, 21.

[5] Ibid., 161. In light of just this, it is quite remarkable that the founding theorists of critical pedagogy dismissed Althusser as an economic determinist and as a theorist who strips agency from the subject. See, for example, Henry Giroux, Ideology, culture, and the process of schooling (Philadelphia and London: Temple University Press and Falmer Press, 1981).

[6] For a brilliant and careful argument about this idealism, see Curry Malott, History and education: Engaging the global class war (New York: Peter Lang, 2016).

[7] Peter McLaren, Schooling as ritual performance: Toward a political economy of educational symbols and gestures (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1986/1999), 273-274.

[8] For more on this latter type of interiotiy, see Peter Sloterdijk, The world interior of capital, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005/2013), Spheres I: Bubbles: Microsphereology, trans. Weiland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1998/2011); and Derek R. Ford, "The air conditions of philosophy of education: Toward a microsphereology of the classroom," in In E. Duarte (Ed.), Philosophy of education 2015 (Urbana: Philosophy of Education Society, 2016).

[9] Tyson E. Lewis, "Mapping the constellation of educational Marxism(s)," Educational Philosophy and Theory 44: no. s1: 112.

[10] Ibid., 113.

[11] Curry S. Malott and Derek R. Ford, Marx, capital, and education: Towards a critical pedagogy of becoming (New York: Peter Lang, 2015).

[12] Henry Giroux, On critical pedagogy (New York and London: Continuum, 2011), 155.

[13] Georg Lukàcs, History and class consciousness: Studies in Marxist dialectics , trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1968/1971), 1. Marx's theses, of course, have on the whole only been repeatedly validated.

[14] See, for example, parts I and II of Bertell Ollman, Dialectical investigations (New York and London: Routledge, 1993).

[15] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York and London: Continuum, 1970/2011).

[16] This is one of the primary ways that Gert Biesta distinguishes education from learning. See Gert J.J. Biesta, Beyond learning: Democratic education for a human future (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2006); and Good education in an age of measurement: Ethics, politics, democracy (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2010).

[17] Peter McLaren, Life in schools: An introduction to critical pedagogy in the foundations of education , 6th ed. (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2015), 241.

[18] Ibid.; Capitalists & conquerors: A critical pedagogy against empire (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005); Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the pedagogy of revolution (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000); Pedagogy of insurrection: From resurrection to revolution (New York: Peter Lang, 2015).

[19] Antonia Darder, A dissident voice: Essays on culture, pedagogy, and power (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 207.

[20] Peter McLaren, Life in schools, 196.

[21] Alain Badiou, The communist hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran (London and New York: Verso, 2010); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2000).

[22] Jodi Dean, The communist horizon (London and New York: Verso, 2012).

[23] Alex J. Means, "Educational commons and the new radical democratic imaginary," Critical Studies in Education 55, no. 2: 132.

[24] This is why Hardt and Negri "smash the state on page 361 only to resurrect it on page 380." David Harvey, Rebel cities: From the right to the city to the urban revolution (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 152.

[25] Jodi Dean, The communist horizon, 196.

[26] Tyson E. Lewis, On study: Giorgio Agamben and educational potentiality (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 5.

[27] Jean-François Lyotard, The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1979/1984), xxv.

[28] Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek, "Introduction: The idea of communism," in Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek (Eds), The idea of communism (London and New York: Verso, 2010), viii.

[29] Jodi Dean, The communist horizon, 58.

[30] Ibid.

Commentary on the Concept of Enlightenment

By Spenser Rapone

Despite years of supposed progress, both technological and social, we remain slaves to capital, subjected to a dull, daily routine within a prescribed division of labor. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment outlines how the desire to "enlighten" human beings merely reproduced domination and oppression, leading to our current alienated state. Contextualizing their work specifically, its dour tone of course reflects that of its publication in 1947; nonetheless, I insist that it remains relevant, given the political precipice we currently find ourselves. Regarding the first chapter, of which I examine in this piece, the authors aspire to turn enlightenment on its head, conceptualizing a critical enlightenment that rejects absolute power and domination. [1] Of course, enlightenment remains a rather nebulous concept. To be enlightened, at face value, seems to conjure up an image of self-actualized thought. The Enlightenment, as we know it from the eighteenth through nineteenth centuries, sought the progress of our collective human existence. Yet, at what cost do we seek progress? Herein lies Horkheimer's and Adorno's focus. While enlightenment sought to assert the human race as masters of our domain, by the 1940s, "the wholly enlightened earth [was] radiant with triumphant calamity." [2] Specifically, the 20th century had brought about two devastating world wars, the rise of fascism, and widespread destitution and alienation. How did the desire for an enlightened human race produce such barbarism?

Adorno and Horkheimer's work demonstrates how the likes of Hitler, Mussolini, et al. were in many ways the logical conclusion of enlightenment thought. They did not exist as an aberration, but were in the spirit of other oppressive enlightenment figures and regimes (when one takes into account the genocidal impulses of the British Empire in India, or the same of the United States with regards to indigenous peoples, this picture becomes much more clear). Francis Bacon's edict of "knowledge is power" is far more than a pithy musing; Horkheimer and Adorno insist that when it comes to knowledge and power, the two are synonymous, within the Baconian framework. [3] Thus, enlightenment did not seek out knowledge for the sake of knowledge; knowledge was only useful insofar as its utility in the pursuit of power. In other words, knowledge became the object of instrumental reason; that is, knowledge was used to achieve a certain end, in this case, power. [4] Resultantly, knowledge itself existed as a crude, empirical framework to arrange, observe, and dominate objects; inevitably, this process further entrenched the capitalist mode of production. [5] Yet, the enlightenment's regressive tendencies under the guise of human progress, did not appear out of thin air; it traces its lineage to and draws from the various mythologies of the western canon.

More than anything else, I seek to emphasize that both Horkheimer and Adorno wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment as a warning against the cult of "progress." In other words, we ought to see to it that in the process of liberating ourselves from the shackles of our miserable existence, we do not lose sight of what it means to truly carry out an emancipatory movement. Enlightenment merely perpetuated myth under a veneer of scientism and technocratic impulses, existing as manipulator of things as dictator exists as manipulator of human beings. [6] Enlightenment was not a movement in the spirit of liberty, but in the spirit of control, domination, and sovereignty. I claim that the most critical line of this opening chapter lies in the assertion that "a true praxis capable of overturning the status quo depends on theory's refusal to yield to the oblivion in which society allows thought to ossify." [7] An authentic emancipatory movement must not fall prey to instrumental reason; revolutionary thought must both liberate but also recognize the inherent value of thought itself.

Although Dialectic of Enlightenment was published nearly 70 years ago, many of its concepts, particularly the fetishization of technological advancement, can be examined in the current day. Let us take a brief foray into Silicon Valley, where progress narratives and TED Talk "solutions" serve as an idol to which lanyard dicks such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and many others, bow down. Horkheimer and Adorno contend that the maxim of western civilization lies with Spinoza's claim that virtue is ultimately motivated by self-preservation. [8] While self-preservation itself is not irrational, it becomes profoundly alienating when the capitalist mode of production and bourgeois division of labor organizes society. [9] Peter Thiel believes that he can achieve permanent self-preservation, essentially immortality, through the use of blood transfusions from the youth. [10] A terrifying prospect, his absurd proposal has its origin in the advancement of technology and empiricist, "scientific" thought.

The "massive rejuvenating effect" that Thiel desires at the expense of human beings also contains another implication: that the lives of the ruling class, especially those of the so-called "innovator" class, hold more value than those of the poor. [11] Is this not the ultimate "reification of human beings in factory and office?" [12] Thiel's dystopic, obscene vision carries with it the legacy of eugenicist, fascistic thought. Yet, in a world where Thiel vehemently endorsed the likes of Donald Trump, [13] further confirming the Republican Party's status as a white ethno-nationalist cabal, the Democratic Party, through propping up Hillary Clinton, doubled-down on neoliberalism in the face of neofascism. Thus, in keeping with the enlightenment traditions of the guiding star of trusting a lesser evil, [14] the American political system failed, and continues to fail, to produce an alternative. Progressivism, positivism, and technocracy rule the day in late stage capitalist society. Much like how the United States recruited Nazi scientists in the postwar period, valuing scientific "progress" over any sort of authentic political commitment to antifascism, so too do current establishment political figures and parties value technological efficiency over human empowerment.

The concept of intellectual thought, in capitalist society, exists as a mythological construct. Horkheimer and Adorno contend that we are subjected to an "autocratic intellect," one which has standardized what it means to be an intellectual itself. [15] Here, Gramsci's analysis of the intellectual subject must be consulted. Horkheimer and Adorno speak of how the aforementioned standardization produces a supposed cleavage between sensuous, lived experience, vis-à-vis more conceptual, abstract thought. [16] Yet, as Gramsci notes, "[a]ll men are intellectuals, one could therefore say; but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals." [17] Thus, capitalist society establishes tenured professors, technological innovators, and various other positions of authority of having sole access to the intellectual function. This, of course, is elitism at its finest.

A factory worker's labor requires just as much intellectual thought as physical exertion. Gramsci insists that "homo faber cannot be separated from homo sapiens," [18] meaning man-the-maker and man-the-thinker exists as one complete being. We can see then the ruling class's domination persists in large part due to the manufactured separation of intellectual thought from the wretched of the earth. The "new form of blindness" exhibited by the working class [19] manifests itself through widespread anti-intellectualism, racism driven by economic insecurity, et al. Of course, while many of the conservative punditry takes pride in such behavior, the liberal solution amounts to sanctimonious moralizing that only further entrenches widespread anxiety wrought by social immobility. Gramsci's proposition of the organic intellectual who arises through lived experience, organization, and critical pedagogy offers a compelling solution to the stagnation of mass movements which desire social change. [20] Indeed, as the existing society asserts its dominance further, workers resultantly become even more so powerless to overcome its regressive function. [21] However, there always remains even the slightest glimmer of hope to reverse the cycle of oppression, and one of the first steps can be found in redefining what constitutes an intellectual, through both thought and action, joined together as one.

Enlightenment, that notion of the progressive advancement of human thought, to this day bends to the whim of the ruling class. Yet, despite the underlying pessimism to their work, both Horkheimer and Adorno admit that all is not lost, even with the concept of enlightenment itself; its ideal of human emancipation can still be realized, only if we completely and unabashedly reject the principle of blind power. [22] In doing so, not only would we abolish enlightenment's empiricist cruelty and technocratic impulses, but we would then break away with its mythological tendencies, unlike the past 300 years, which has only served to replace one mythology with another. I believe that there is a meta-narrative present in this text, most readily accessible in one of the closing statements of the first chapter. Horkheimer and Adorno observe that the bourgeois economy has grown so powerful that ruling elites alone cannot maintain its function; in fact, "all human beings are needed" to ensure its continuation. [23] Indeed, the blindness wrought by late stage capitalism leads to some of the most downtrodden elements of our current society complicit in their own exploitation and oppression, sometimes enthusiastically so. Yet, herein lies the revolutionary subtext, exemplified by that simple line of thought, "all people are needed." The moment that the masses of people stir from their false consciousness and channel their desires towards a mass movement, the cycle of oppression can be broken. Yes, enlightenment has produced an "outright deception of the masses." [24] But, in requiring all people for its continuation, we once again affirm the quintessential adage of all emancipatory movements: power lies with the people. Horkheimer and Adorno provide us with hope, for while the attempt to enlighten human beings produced some of the darkest moments of our history, the people, collectively, still have within them the power to bring about a liberated world.

Notes

[1] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xviii.

[2] Ibid., 1.

[3] Ibid., 2.

[4] Curtis Bowman, Odysseus and the Siren Call of Reason: The Frankfurt School Critique of Enlightenment . http://www.othervoices.org/1.1/cubowman/siren.php .

[5] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 3.

[6] Ibid., 6.

[7] Ibid., 33.

[8] Ibid., 22.

[9] Ibid., 23.

[10] J.K. Trotter, "What Does Peter Thiel Want?" Gawker. http://gawker.com/what-does-peter-thiel-want-1784039918#_ga=1.142753974.240915375.1460756871 .

[11] Ibid.

[12] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 23.

[13] Dan Primack, "Peter Thiel Gives Full-Throated Endorsement of Donald Trump," Fortune. http://fortune.com/2016/07/21/peter-thiel-gives-full-throated-endorsement-of-donald-trump/ .

[14] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 24.

[15] Ibid., 28.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 9.

[18] Ibid., 9.

[19] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 28.

[20] Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 10.

[21] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 29.

[22] Ibid., 33.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid., 34.

In Defense of the Hammer and Sickle: On Symbolism and Struggle

By Charles Wofford

According to Cultural Hegemony Theory, often attributed to Antonio Gramsci but also developed by Edward Said and Nicos Poulantzas among others, the ruling class maintains its power by deliberately shaping the cultural discourse to which the populace is exposed. The hegemony theorists recognized that no ruling class can survive by constant application of violence; it must obtain some degree of legitimacy among the oppressed populace. This means normalizing the oppressive status quo. Cultural hegemony is therefore the structure through which the ruling maintains the day-to-day domination, and may be seen as the complement to the deliberate application of violence, which is reserved for those moments when hegemony fails to marginalize the populace.

A major part of maintaining cultural hegemony is controlling language. In American political discourse, that movement whose policies may destroy the world is referred to as "conservatism;" the party openly sneering at democratic processes is the "Democratic" Party; those who advocate a total tyranny of private corporations call themselves "libertarians;" and advocating increasing the number of private bank owners ("break up the banks!"), rather than advocating socialized control of banking, is enough to earn you the title "socialist." This kind of distortion (or actual political correctness) is like the footprint of cultural hegemony.

A different aspect of the control of language is the control of symbols. Given the effort of the Left toward popular democracy (or as we might call it, "democracy"), what are the hegemonic distortions of the symbols of democracy? And does the pattern of turning terms into their opposites (as exemplified above) give us a clue into that distortion?

Obviously I think the answer to the second question is, "yes," and to answer the first question: the hegemonic distortion of the symbols of democracy is to turn those symbols into symbols of anti democracy. What is the word for the purest anti democracy in political theory? The word is totalitarianism. Which society is mostly widely and immediately regarded as totalitarian in the United States? Answer: the Soviet Union.

There are many theories of democracy. If we look at the etymology, we find the Greek "demos," (people) and "kratos" (power). A democracy, taken in perhaps its most literal and broad sense, is a state of affairs where power resides in the populace. Exactly how that state of affairs obtains may vary widely; plenty of arrangements may qualify as "democracies."

But pure democracy, democracy in its most terrifying and effective moment, is revolutionary practice. What is more democratic than a populace so agitated, so politically conscious, that they have decided en masse to forcefully dispose of their ruling class? What is more revolutionary than a class conscious populace that organizes its own communities independently of the dominant organizations, to such an extent that they replace them?

The demonization of the hammer and sickle is part of the demonization of genuine democratic, populist impulses in defense of capitalism. The hammer and sickle, as a symbol of the greatest revolution in history, is therefore a symbol of the purest ecstasy of democracy. We ought to embrace it, reclaim it, make it ours again on the left, and not be scared to be associated with it.

But there is another intersection here: as noted Marxist political scientist Michael Parenti has pointed out, democracy itself is an invention of the people of ancient history to guard against the abuses of wealth. A quick survey of the history of Ancient Greece confirms this: prior to Athenian democracy, Athens was ruled by wealthy aristocrats. Political scientist Cynthia Farrar writes in that "The beginnings of Athenian self-rule [i.e. democracy] coincided with Solon's liberation in the 6th century B.C. of those who had been 'enslaved' to the rich." Enslaved to the rich! Athens, the ancestral society whence we trace our democratic lineage as Americans, developed that early democratic structure in order to defend the People from being

! It was a weapon against the abuses of wealth; a fact that today is being thoroughly distorted; where capitalism, a system that emphasizes private concentration of wealth and which posits an ideology that justifies a wealth-accumulating politic, is thought of as synonymous with democracy.

Class struggle is the crucible which forged democracy. Democracy is most purely expressed in popular revolution. The most powerful popular revolution in history is the Russian revolution of 1917, and the emblem of that revolution is the hammer and sickle. The hammer and sickle is closely related to Marxism, a doctrine of class struggle.

To return to the opening point, the demonization of that symbol is immensely useful in the hegemonic battle over the legitimacy or de-marginalization of the Left. Due to a number of factors, the Left is no longer marginal in the United States. That is not to say the Left is portrayed positively in most media, but it is recognized and it is covered. We ought to recognize this battlefield and seize the imagery of our heritage as Leftists.

What Is the Working Class?

By Kevin Van Meter

"The working class struggles against capitalism because its objective conditions of life force it to, not because it is educated to some "higher" consciousness by some outside force such as a political party. It would seem, also, that the struggle against capitalism includes all forms and levels of struggle, from individual to collective, from local to national (or international), from economic to political. In fact, it would be hard to conceive how the more general or radical forms of struggle, such as general strikes, factory occupations, or workers' councils, could occur without the preexistence of more limited forms of struggle: sabotage, local strikes, the organization of unions, and the like." [1]

-Martin Glaberman and Seymour Faber, Working for Wages: The Roots of Insurgency

Drawing on Autonomist Marxism, both in its American and European guises, the following excerpt from Guerrillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible (AK Press, 2017) offers a conception of the working class that seeks to augment vague definitions of class and reinvigorate class politics in contemporary US revolutionary movements. However, a substantive, broad, and grounded definition is insufficient in-itself. Rather, an expanded and enhanced conception of class will require a process of workers' inquiry and radical organizing to result in a strengthening of working class power vis-à-vis capitalism and the state-apparatus, or what autonomists call class recomposition. For the working class, as Glaberman and Faber's note, is already struggling and it is the role of the organizer, the revolutionary, the militant to encounter, record, amplify, and circulate these struggles.

[…] Autonomists define the working class as such: autonomous from both capitalism and the official organization of the Left [political parties, nonprofit organizations, progressive religious groups, foundations, etc.], broadly including all those who work under capitalism, based in relationships between workers rather than as a structural component of the economy or sociological category. Autonomists focus on the refusal of work and how the class is composed. Let us review each element in kind.

Workers' autonomy

"The working class," Glaberman and Faber suggest, "struggles against capitalism because its objective conditions of life force it to." [2] Since capitalism requires that individuals work for wages or access income through state or familial sources (partners and children access income indirectly through the wage earner), the working class must struggle against capitalism to obtain resources beyond its initial, meager wage. Class struggle emerges directly from the point of production of commodities, be it widgets or labor power, and in the battles around the length and intensity of the workday. But what does the working class confront?

Capitalists by definition control capital. Capital includes the means of production (tools, factories, raw materials, energy, etc.) and financial resources (money) that are part of the production cycle, which is set in motion in order to produce commodities. "The individual commodity," in Marx's assessment, "appears [as capitalism's] elementary form." [3] [Autonomist Harry Cleaver…] believes that "the generalized imposition of the commodity-form has meant that forced work has become the fundamental means of organizing society-of social control." [4] Since capitalists cannot create value with the means of production alone, even with automation and machinery, labor power must be employed in the production process. Labor power and means of production are brought together to act upon raw materials to produce commodities that contain both use-value (practical utility) and exchange-value (quantity of commodities that can be exchange for said commodity). Commodities are improved as labor power acts upon them, adding value to them in the process (which becomes surplus value). Then capitalists sell commodities in the sphere of circulation. The surplus value they obtain is the value produced by workers over and above the cost of production. And each commodity contains residue from deposited labor power, as if the commodity has captured bits of a worker's life force and energy in the production process. [5]

Marx's tenth chapter in Capital, volume 1, "The Working Day," provides the impetus for the focus on labor power: "Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labor-power he has bought from him. If the worker consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist."[6] In effect, without the deployment of labor power as living labor in the production process capitalism cannot produce commodities. To cite biblical scripture, "the blood is the life." [7] Thus, living labor is the principal, necessary force in the production process; it is the host that capital, as dead labor, must have in order to live. The working class can rob capitalists, become Sabbatarians, or living labor can escape capitalist command and expend itself in cooperative, common endeavors. In this sense, at the point of production, at the very moment that the commodity is being produced through the expenditure of human labor power, the working class as living labor is an independent force, in operation autonomous from capitalism. And there are other moments during which it breaks free of capitalist discipline and the imposition of work entirely.

Capitalism attempts to maintain control over labor power at the same time as it efficiently exploits workers' ability to work. [8] To extract surplus value and hence profit, capitalism must organize the means of production and raw materials (what Marx called constant capital) and labor power (variable capital) in appropriate ratios. Since constant capital is used up at a relatively consistent rate, capitalists must pay workers less than the value they transfer to commodities in the course of the workday. It is in capitalists' interest to deploy labor power efficiently, periodically using labor-saving technologies such as automation to decrease the number of workers needed or replacing skilled workers with machines and unskilled ones.

Marx argued that the workday could only "vary within certain limits" and that hence the struggle around the workday was grounded in working hours, a "normal working day," and wages due for the rent of labor-power. Capital's interest "is purely and simply the maximum of labor-power that can be set in motion in a working day. It attains this objective by shortening the life of labour-power" as part of its "unmeasured drive" to accumulate capital.[9] A conflict emerges over the length and intensity of the workday, what Marx called absolute and relative strategies for creating surplus value. Relative surplus value strategy covers both the efficient exploitation of labor power and the use of machinery and ways of reorganizing production to increase the intensity of the exploitation of labor power. At times the working class has been successful in limiting capitalism's absolute surplus value strategy (winning the eight-hour day and weekend) and addressing relative surplus value (preventing automation and the replacing of skilled workers with machines and unskilled ones). Additional conflicts erupt between the amount of time needed for workers to gain enough wages to ready themselves to work another day, in addition to how that time is spent, and the time capitalism rents the worker to produce surplus value. [10] At these points of conflict the working class is struggling against capitalist authority. But Marx is only speaking about commodities as products here. He does not adequately address a particularly important commodity for capitalism: that of labor power itself.

"In Marx's account," Federici argues, "No other work intervenes to prepare the goods the workers consume or to restore physically or emotionally their capacity to work. No difference is made between commodity production and the production of the workforce. One assembly line produces both. Accordingly, the value of labor power is measured by the value of the commodities (food, clothing, housing) that have to be supplied to the worker, to 'the man, so that he can renew his life process.'" [11]

In orthodox Marxist (and adjacent workerist traditions) the emphasis on the production cycle ignores the cycle of reproduction of labor power, which arguably is the most important commodity in the capitalist system. Autonomists since Wages for Housework focus not just on the production of widgets but on the commodity of labor power. While the reproduction of labor power might appear to be a realm of relative freedom in the privacy of the home, especially with the feminist initiatives that have sought to reorganize social reproduction along more cooperative lines, capitalism and the state apparatus have launched countless counterattacks (wage freezes and reductions, welfare cuts, etc.) to exert control over this sector.

For capitalism the working class is simply labor power. Cleaver argues in Reading Capital Politically that the "working class as working class-defined politically-exists only when it asserts its autonomy as a class through its unity in struggle against its role as labour-power. Paradoxically, then, on the basis of this distinction, the working class is truly working class only when it struggles against its existence as a class. The outcome … is not the creation of a pure working class after the revolutionary overthrow of capital but rather the dissolution of the working class as such. "[12]

Broadly defined working class

[There are three] ways that autonomists define the working class. First, the class can "craft new ways of being and new forms of social relations." [13] In this it can force capitalism and the state to develop along new lines in addition to causing crises in these systems. Second, the working class is the primary antagonist in class struggle rather than simply being reactive to capitalism, and it is autonomous from capital, the state, and the official organizations of the Left. There is also a third general attribute that requires attention.

Autonomists define the working class broadly to include not only those working for wages (waged workers) but also those who obtain income through state benefits (welfare recipients) or are striving to obtain wages or income (the unemployed, disenrolled welfare beneficiaries), those whose work is unwaged (including students and housewives), and those who work to directly obtain basic needs for subsistence (such as slaves and peasants). It is important to acknowledge that while slaves are included in the expanded definition of the working class, African slaves in the Americas, as black proletarians, to use W.E.B. Du Bois's apt phrase, had a fundamentally different relationship with capitalism due to their bondage. [14] And in the same sense, peasants and landowners comprise classes, as "peasants are exploited by capital in the sphere of production." [15] While slaves and peasants are not generally understood to be part of formal, normal class relations, at least to Americans, they have been incorporated into contemporary strategies for accumulating capital.

In effect, as Glaberman and Faber contend, "workers work for others, who control the means of production," which is a social relation, and, as the Zerowork collective clarified, the working class is " defined by its struggle against capitalism and not by its productive function."[16] That is, "from capital's perspective" the working class is only a "factor of production" but from a working-class perspective it is a dynamic and complex agent, capable of its own liberation.

To summarize: in addition to what is considered the traditional manufacturing base, the industrial proletariat, this expanded notion of the working class includes students, housewives, slaves, peasants, the unemployed, welfare recipients, and workers in the technical and service industries. Hence the working class is defined in relation to work -be it waged or unwaged, productive or reproductive, material, immaterial, or affective-and to one another. But of course the owners of the means of production, as the owners of capital (i.e., capitalists), and their representatives-overseers, supervisors, bosses, managers-are directly defined by their relation to work, whereas bureaucrats, tax collectors, police, and security guards play key roles in disciplining the workforce and hence impose work indirectly upon the class as a whole. To differentiate between social classes, the specific relation to work needs to be identified. And a few issues need to be resolved: How is the working class composed? How and in what way is the working class "defined by its struggle against capitalism"?

Is the working class a structure or category?

What Autonomous Marxists and others are trying to accomplish with the concept of the working class is to explain the complexities of a set of human behaviors using a social classification. The time, energy, and very lives of the majority of the human species over the past five hundred years have been converted into labor power. Some individuals purchase this labor power, others manage and discipline it, and still more reproduce it. In a recent attempt at a definition of "class," Joanna Brenner offered, "Although the concept of class has not dropped from use, its contemporary meaning has become restricted to describing social stratification. Even in this sense, in which 'class' denoted a hierarchy of 'differences' (e.g., of income, education, culture), there is no agreed-upon meaning of class categories."[17] To delineate social stratification-working, middle, and upper class, with sub-demarcations such as lower-middle class-produces definitional and empirical problems. In this sense, class becomes an unchanging, fixed structural element in the economy or a sociological category applied universally to complex relations. Conceptions of class can be applied too rigidly or too vaguely as a form of individual prejudice.

Notions of class privilege and classism can make class seem just another item on the list of constraints imposed upon individuals. Class, Brenner writes, "risks being enveloped in a liberal discourse that focuses on individual transformation (e.g., 'recognizing one's privilege') while advancing moral imperatives (e.g., achieving more equal relations among people)."[18] Hence a contingent concept of class that considers the working class's level of integration into the production process must account for "historical specificity and try to account for the struggles over class." [19]

To address these problems anarchists and Marxists have argued that class is about power. In a similar fashion, Kathi Weeks postulates in The Problem with Work that class "is not a sociological category but a political one, and its boundaries depend on its particular composition at specific times and places." [20]

Refusal of work

The image of the working class comprising manual factory workers, usually white and male, disappears upon recognizing the refusals of slaves, peasants, prisoners, housewives, students, and office and service workers. The stereotype has always been a fiction, a narrow misrepresentation that has historically limited the potential of class struggle. According to autonomists, the dynamic, broadly defined working class becomes a class, a social actor, in relation to work only insofar as it is refused. The class makes itself through refusal and self-activity, against and beyond capitalism's attempt to make workers into commodities, nothing but labor power and potential labor power. Hence autonomists are interested in how the working class is composed vis-à-vis its struggles. That is, through the refusal of work, the working class becomes autonomous from capitalist command, the state apparatus, the party, and the union. At times these refusals force capitalism to develop new technologies and strategies to attack working-class power. Crises erupt within capitalism, or a "new era of social relations" is instituted as capitalism is restructured (as happened after the US Civil War, during the Green Revolution, and with the onslaught of "neoliberalism"). [21]

Refusal specifically refers to acts of ignoring, disobeying, circumventing, countering, rejecting, or pilfering by employed and unemployed, waged and unwaged, and productive and reproductive workers, as well as those whose work is affective and immaterial. These workers neither control their work nor choose the what, when, where, and how of their work until they refuse it or decide to reorganize capitalist relations entirely.

However, questions arise: What about those who accept the regime of work or even relish it? Aren't there some workers who don't resist? What about structural unemployment? How can you refuse work when there isn't any? The concept of the refusal of work draws our attention to phenomena and is not a claim about all workers or all people everywhere. Within the social aggregate of the working class, as with any population, there is a diversity of opinions, experiences, and desires. The working class becomes more than labor power for capitalism when it refuses the imposition of work. Moreover, work is imposed on two scales: by the boss on the individual worker, as well as on the sector of the population that must access work to obtain income in a capitalist society. The individual worker must perform tasks in the course of the workday under the direction of the boss, but work is also imposed upon employed, unemployed, and those of piecemeal or precarious employment due to the need to obtain money to survive. The inability to access work and hence a wage is part of the imposition of a regime of work that requires an "unemployed reserve army of workers" or "relative surplus population." [22] To refuse work as an unemployed person is to refuse the imposition that requires one to receive a wage to obtain the necessities of life. Moreover, the refusal of work is not necessarily a conscious activity. Employees routinely work to rule (follow rules in minute detail) in order to slow down productivity, take longer than allowed lunch breaks, and ignore instructions from a supervisor in order to accomplish a work task. Each of these is an act of resistance.

If the working class is defined in part by its refusal of the imposition of work, then what can be said of those bosses and bureaucrats who impose work in one instance and refuse it in the next? Are these too part of the working class? The IWW adage that "the working class and employing class have nothing in common" is apropos here, and Wobblies exclude from membership those who have the power over wages and hiring or firing. In this definition an individual boss clearly imposes work upon individual workers, but bosses also impose work upon the general population as part of the aggregate capitalist class. Members of the working class, due to their position, have work imposed upon them that they cannot redistribute in the realm of production. (Historically, however, male workers were accustomed to redistributing work to wives, children, and unwaged workers performing the work of social reproduction. If working husbands' wages were cut, often wives were forced to do the same with less. Due to the struggles of women, gender-nonconforming people, and others against the patriarchal, nuclear family, this redistribution of household work has become less common.)

The working class becomes an active, possibly revolutionary subject, rather than simply an economic category or an inactive structural element in production, when it creates counter-communities and refuses work though everyday resistance, overt rebellions, and aboveground organizing. The working class as structure or category is made by capitalism, whereas the working class, in its own making, is a dynamic, active, and autonomous force.[23] But a worker's having relationships with other workers does not automatically include one in the class. If a worker is part of the structural imposition of work-not in the modest sense of setting schedules, taking breaks, or making minor production decisions but in the sense of imposing work and ensuring the effective exploitation of labor power-then they are not part of this autonomous class, regardless of relationships with other workers. Further, the relationships of the autonomous class are determined in situ: in relation to particular regimes of work, specific forms of resistance, and precise relationships between members of the class. The composition of the working class, where battle lines are drawn and positions are taken, is ascertained in the context of working-class struggle in particular times and spaces. Therefore, determining working class composition, its boundaries and limitations, in autonomist parlance begins with "reading the struggles" of the refusal of work and the kinds of relationships taking place therein, with due consideration to the divisions and forms of oppression.[24] In these contexts, the new society is established and recorded with the possibility of other arrangements of productive, reproductive, cooperative, and creative activities, ones that address real human needs and desires, can be forged.

Class composition

One of the larger questions before us, and which encompasses this definition of class, is how to understand everyday resistance under different regimes of power (potestas). Periodically systems are replaced with new forms and capitalism is reorganized, partly in attempts to attack working-class power (potentia). It is important to understand the relations of power, production, and social reproduction as capitalism and the state apparatus seek to coordinate, capture, and impose. To produce and expand upon an analysis of workers' activities, an approach has been developed from the perspective of the working class in struggle, that of class composition. "By political recomposition," the Zerowork collective states, "we mean the level of unity and homogeneity that the working class reaches during a cycle of struggle in the process of going from one political composition to another. Essentially, it involves the overthrow of capitalist divisions, the creation of new unities between different sectors of the class, and an expansion of the boundaries of what the 'working class' comes to include." [25]

In an article titled "Marxian Categories, the Crisis of Capital and the Constitution of Social Subjectivity Today," Cleaver grounds the concept of class in concrete social relations, and brings us closer to the contemporary period. Class composition, he writes, is "explicitly designed [by autonomists] to grasp, without reduction, the divisions and power relationships within and amongst the diverse populations on which capital seeks to maintain its domination of work throughout the social factory-understood as including not only the traditional factory but also life outside of it which capital has sought to shape for the reproduction of labor power."[26]

Autonomists begin with a workers' inquiry by "reading the struggles," recording everyday resistance and overt rebellions, as the working class creates new relationships and new subjectivities, escapes capitalist command (even temporarily), and is recomposed (and often decomposed) vis-à-vis its struggle with capitalism and the state apparatus. The working class politically recomposes itself through the refusal of work and the "craft[ing of] new ways of being and new forms of social relations." As the working class acts in its own interests it goes through a process of political recomposition. Then, as capitalism and the state attack working-class power, they seek to decompose the class through cutting wages, undermining union organizing efforts and worker legal protections, instituting technological developments, imposing "austerity," raising the costs of reproduction, and fomenting divisions along lines of race, gender, sexuality, national origin, age, and ability, among others.

As Nick Dyer-Witheford notes, "The process of composition / decomposition / recomposition constitutes a cycle of struggle." [27] These cycles of struggle accumulate, furthering the contradictions and crises of capitalism. In this sense, according to Antonio Negri, the working class is a "dynamic subject, an antagonistic force, tending toward its own independent identity."[28] In this way, the working class is "defined by its struggle against capitalism." While it has thus far been implied, autonomists do not view the working class as a structure or category of social stratification. In the The Making of the English Working Class E. P. Thompson argued,

By class I understand a historical phenomena, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness. I do not see class as a "structure," nor even as a "category," but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships. More than this, the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. Like any other relationship, it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomize its structure.… A relationship must always be embodied in real people and in a real context.… If we stop history at a given point, then there are no classes but simply a multitude of individuals with a multitude of experiences. But if we watch these men [sic] over an adequate period of social change, we observe patterns in their relationships, their ideas, and their institutions. Class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition. [29]

Accordingly, class is neither a structural component of the economy nor a sociological category. Seeing class as structure limits the working class to a mere position within the economy rather than a dynamic force. Class as a category relegates it to income or education level, waged industrial work, or sector of the population defined by party apparatchiks, union bureaucrats, wonky academics, or nonprofit do-gooders. Perennially someone will yell out at a radical meeting or gathering, "We have to get workers involved!" While ignoring the simple fact that all those assembled are workers, this is using class as an a priori sociological category. To define the working class relationally requires a rigorous inquiry and analysis of the contingency, subjectivity, and internal dynamics of a social aggregate of individuals ("sectors of the class") that must obtain wages, income, or subsistence directly (waged work, welfare, payment in goods and services) or indirectly (children, partner's wage). Hence the working class can be seen as the sector of the population that experiences the imposition of conditions that make work necessary. Through the refusal of this imposition, internal class relations are furthered, the class politically recomposes itself, and the possibility of a new society beyond capitalism is fostered. Then, of course, the working class comes into conflict with forces that control the means of production (capitalists), manage these means (overseers, landowners, supervisors, bosses, and managers), and maintain larger social relations that enforce the mode of production in the society in which capitalism and the state are functioning (relations with the likes of bureaucrats, tax collectors, police, and security guards). All must work, even capitalists. As Henry Ford boldly declared, "I don't expect to retire. Every man must work, that's his natural destiny." [30] For the bourgeoisie, what was once referred to as the "professional-managerial class," escaping the worst violence of these relations is possible through the coordination and imposition of work on others, even as it is imposed upon their own bodies.[31] In order to better control the working class, police and security guards are drawn from among the working class. As police and rental cops, members of the working class gain authority and a small degree of escape from their own powerlessness. Through their management and control of the working class outside of the factory, work is imposed upon the population in addition to the on-the-job impositions. Each social class has a complex set of internal and external relations such as these.

To suggest that the working class is defined by its relationships requires three things: "reading the struggles," determining the divisions that exist within the class, and ensuring that sectors of the working class aren't omitted from our conceptions and organizing. Agricultural and domestic workers were excluded from the Wagner Act, which passed in 1935 and serves as the foundation for labor law in the US. The exclusion of agricultural workers was tacitly accepted by sectors of the union movement until the rise of the United Farm Workers, which eventually led to the passage of the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act in 1983. Domestic workers would have to wait until the development of a workers' center campaign that pushed for the 2010 Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights in New York State, with a few other states following. Housewives who did not earn a wage were also not considered working class. Autonomists sought to overcome these exclusions conceptually since the working class itself had endeavored to overcome these organizationally and politically. In this way, the concept of the working class can be carefully extended further to address other forms of exploitation and oppression, domination and control as it pairs with other conceptions in revolutionary theory.

An autonomist theory of class requires broad definitions of workers' autonomy and work refusal and an inquiry into the composition of the working class vis-à-vis capitalism. By beginning with a wide-ranging description and striving to understand class dynamics and struggles in particular contexts, revolutionaries can approach the working class as it is rather than as they imagine it or wish it to be.

Autonomists view the working class as all those who are refusing the imposition of work-employed and unemployed, waged and unwaged, productive and reproductive, material, immaterial, and affective. Not just those toiling in fields, factories, and workshops but those working in offices and coffee shops, kitchens, bedrooms, and classrooms. To review, work is simultaneously imposed on the population and upon individual workers. These workers face specific hours, wages or lack of wages, and pace on the job, and if they quit or are fired the need to work to obtain income is ever present. The "guerrillas of desire," as I see them, are those refusing the imposition of work on the terrain of everyday life both as individual workers and members of the working class. Theft of time and materials, feigned illness, sabotage, arson, murder, exodus, and the myriad of other forms this refusal takes-as well as the process of creating counter-communities-can be found in everyday life. In his classic Workers' Councils, Dutch Marxist Anton Pannekoek states that "every shop, every enterprise, even outside of times of sharp conflict, of strikes and wage reductions, is the scene of a constant silent war, of a perpetual struggle, of pressure and counter-pressure." [32]68 It is through Pannekoek's lens that we begin to see the guerrillas of desire not only as a historical subset of slaves, peasants, and workers in the industrial and social factory but as a subset of the working class today struggling against the general imposition of work. By subset I mean that these guerrillas do not represent all of the struggles of the working class or the entirety of the struggle against the imposition of work but resist outside the gaze or comprehension of capitalism and the state apparatus. It is from the concepts of the working class and everyday resistance that the metaphor of the guerrillas of desire is derived.

Kevin Van Meter is an activist-scholar based in the Pacific Northwest. He is coeditor of Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States (AK Press, 2010) and author of the recently released monograph Guerrillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible (AK Press, 2017).

Notes

[1] Martin Glaberman and Seymour Faber, Working for Wages: The Roots of Insurgency (New York: General Hall, 1998), 8.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990), 125.

[4] Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (Leeds: Anti/Theses; San Francisco: AK Press, 2000), 82.

[5] It should be noted that I am speaking about capitalist production in an abstract, ideal way. Furthermore, this immediate process of production does not address financial commodities or financialization.

[6] Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 342.

[7] Deuteronomy 12:23.

[8] For Mario Tronti, exploitation is necessary since "the conditions of capital are in the hands of the workers" as "there is no active life in capital without the living activity of labor power," hence "the capitalist class … is in fact subordinate to the working class." Mario Tronti, "The Strategy of Refusal," in Autonomia: Post-Political Politics (Los Angles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 31.

[9] Marx, Capital, vol. 1 1, 376-77.

[10] Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse (Brooklyn: Autonomedia; London: Pluto, 1991), 72; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 341. Negri is also referring to Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 282-89.

[11] Silvia Federici, "The Reproduction of Labor Power in the Global Economy and the Unfinished Feminist Revolution," in evolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2012) , 93. Federici is referring to Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 376-77.

[12] Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically, 83-84. Emphasis in original.

[13] Harry Cleaver, "Kropotkin, Self-Valorization, and the Crisis of Marxism," Anarchist Studies 2, no. 2 (1994): 119

[14] The phrase "black proletariat" is from W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935. For an autonomist take on the matter, see Ferruccio Gambino's "W. E. B. Du Bois and the Proletariat in Black Reconstruction," Libcom.org, https://libcom.org/library/w-e-b-du-bois-proletariat-black-reconstruction-ferruccio-gambino. Historian of slavery and capitalism John Ashworth suggests, "We may define class relationally in terms of the relationship between two groups at the point of production, where one group is seeking to appropriate to itself some or all of the labor of the other. On this definition slaves and slaveholders comprise classes." John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic , vol. 1, Commerce and Comprise, 1820-1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 13.

[15] Ann Lucas de Rouffignac, The Contemporary Peasantry in Mexico (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1985), 55.

[16] Glaberman and Faber, Working for Wages, 13; Zerowork Collective, "Introduction to Zerowork 1," in Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War 1973-1992, ed. Midnight Notes Collective (New York: Autonomedia, 1992), 111-12. Emphasis in original.

[17] Joanna Brenner, "Class," in Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle , eds. Kelly Fritsch, Clare O'Connor, and AK Thompson, (Chico: CA: AK Press, 2016), 80.

[18] Ibid., 85.

[19] Stanley Aronowitz, How Class Works: Power and Social Movement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 62.

[20] Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 94.

[21] Antonio Negri, "Potentialities of a Constituent Power," in Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 273.

[22] Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, trans. David McLellan, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 96; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 794.

[23] As Cleaver offered, "The struggle against the imposition of work has been central to the history of the making of the working class, from the initial resistance to the original imposition of work in the period of primitive accumulation through the long centuries of resisting and avoiding the expansion of work time (longer, harder hours) to the more recent aggressive struggles to reduce work time and liberate more open-ended time for self-determined activity." Harry Cleaver, "Theses on Secular Crisis in Capitalism: The Insurpassability of Class Antagonisms," paper presented at Rethinking Marxism Conference, Amherst, Massachusetts, November 13, 1992; https://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/secularcrisis.html.

[24] George Caffentzis has used the phrase "reading the struggles" in numerous public presentations over the past two decades (I can attest to this). See also Caffentzis, In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland: PM Press, 2013).

[25] Zerowork Collective, "Introduction to Zerowork 1."

[26] Harry Cleaver, "Marxian Categories, the Crisis of Capital and the Constitution of Social Subjectivity Today," in Revolutionary Writing: Common Sense Essays in Post-Political Politics , ed. Werner Bonefeld (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2003), 43. Originally published in Common Sense ("Journal of the Edinburgh Conference of Socialist Economists"), no. 14 (1993): 32-55.

[27] Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 66. Emphasis in original.

[28] Toni Negri, "Archeology and Project: The Mass Worker and The Social Worker," in Revolution Retrieved: Selected Writings of Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis and New Social Subjects, 1967-83 (London: Red Notes, 1988), 209.

[29] E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 9-11.

[30] Henry Ford, quoted by Willis Thornton, New York World-Telegram, July 24, 1933.

[31] Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich, "The Professional-Managerial Class," in Between Labor and Capital, ed. Pat Walker (Boston: South End Press, 1979).

[32] Anton Pannekoek, Workers Councils (Oakland: AK Press, 2002), 8.

Black Bolsheviks and White Lies: Reflections on the Black Radical Tradition

By Peta Lindsay

A lot of nonsense has been written about the role of Putin's Russia in subverting "our democracy." As though our democracy had been functioning perfectly (even reasonably) well, until these shadowy Russian forces purchased a few Facebook ads that sent us all into the streets. It's a laughable concept. I'm sorry, did Putin acquit George Zimmerman or Jason Stockley? Did Putin shoot 12-year-old Tamir Rice? Russia did not carry out the drug war against African Americans or implement policies of mass incarceration, or pass voter ID laws in the U.S. - all of which have contributed to disenfranchising millions of African Americans over the years. The U.S. has a lot to answer for with regard to systematically denying the democratic rights of African Americans and this is not the first time they've tried to deflect criticism for that by blaming Russia. As a student of history I've mostly just rolled my eyes this time around while the Democrats attempt to make red-scare tactics that are very old, new again. But a recent entry in this canon of "Black activists are pawns of Moscow" writing is so insulting and patently false, that, as we approach the hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, it seems very important to reply.

Last month an author named Terrell Jermaine Starr wrote a piece for The Root entitled, " Russia's Recent Facebook Ads Prove the Kremlin Never Loved Black People ."

I've enjoyed entries from The Root before, particularly in chronicling racist attacks against African Americans that are underreported in the mainstream media. But their willingness to toe the Democratic Party line, uncritically in most circumstances, has been noted.

Starr's piece is supposedly historical in scope but is premised upon a huge, glaring, historical fallacy: that of conflating the Russian Federation with the Soviet Union. In one sentence, Starr describes the two as essentially the same (showing you the level of material historical analysis he's interested in engaging in) and then for the rest of the article proceeds to whitewash the history of Black communism, using the favorite arguments deployed by racists - that Blacks who supported socialism did so because they were duped, and that the Soviet Union was only interested in Black liberation insofar as it meant spiting their enemies in the White House.

These assertions deny the agency of African Americans, many of whom were amongst the most prominent Black intellectuals of their time, who looked to the Soviet system as an alternative to American racism and exploitation. This interpretation also denies the real solidarity and support that the Soviet Union expressed in their assistance to liberation movements of many Black, brown and oppressed people all over the world. Since anti-communist propaganda is easily promulgated without evidence in this country, allow me to present some of the evidence that exposes these racist lies for what they are.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was birthed via a revolution in 1917 and overthrown via counter-revolution in 1991. While Russians were in the majority of the population, the USSR itself was actually an extremely diverse and vibrant society for all of its existence. The Soviet Union spanned 14 time zones and comprised many independent nationalities and ethnic groups, such as Tajiks, Kazakhs, Lithuanians, Tartars - all of whom spoke different languages, practiced different religions - and suffered terrible racist oppression under the Tsar. The triumph of the socialist revolution and the very existence of this unique political formation was the result of a revolution carried out by united oppressed peoples, who rose up as one and took control of society away from their Tsarist and capitalist exploiters. The Bolsheviks always took the task of uniting oppressed people and elevating their struggle very seriously. This was a key to their success and a guiding principle in their work. It was Lenin who pioneered communist opposition to imperialism and he who changed the Marxist formulation, "Workers of the World Unite" to "Workers and oppressed people of the world unite" as an expression of the priority they placed on the struggle of colonized people against imperialism.

Around the world, the 1919 triumph of Lenin and the Bolsheviks was greeted by the imperialists with great dismay and by oppressed/colonized peoples with great enthusiasm, inspiration and hope. In America, 1919 was an infamous year, known for its "Red Summer" of intense lynchings, race riots and gruesome violence against African Americans at the hands of white mobs. The Black American political movement had entered a new era of militancy, as veterans returning from WWI were less inclined to submit to Jim Crow and more inclined to fight for their dignity, wages and rights. A new wave of radical Black intellectuals all but took over the Black political scene, many from the Caribbean and mostly based in Harlem in the 1920s and 30s. These men and women were considered some of the premier thinkers and writers of their time and of the majority of these radical African American leaders-regardless of political orientation- held the Russian Revolution in very high esteem.

According to historian Winston James, in his work Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, the appeal of the Russian Revolution to Black people in America at the time lay not in their having been "recruited" by Russia as the Root article asserts, but in their own independent evaluation of the Bolshevik government and where it stood with regard to equality for oppressed and colonized people.

James wrote about three major factors that attracted Black people to Bolshevism in the 1920s and 1930s. The first was the domestic policies promoting national minorities and oppressed groups that were put in place almost immediately after the triumph of the revolution. After the revolution the Bolshevik government undertook what can be described as the most far reaching and thorough affirmative action plan that any government has ever attempted, dedicating much in the way of their limited resources towards raising the standard of living for groups who had been historically oppressed and creating conditions that could facilitate greater equality for those groups.

To Black Americans, the most convincing example was the swiftness and seriousness with which the Soviets began redressing historical inequality suffered by the Jews, including immediately outlawing discrimination against them and putting an end to the violent pogroms that had plagued them under the Tsar. In 1923 Claude McKay, the young Black intellectual, writer and poet wrote: "For American Negroes the indisputable and outstanding fact of the Russian Revolution is that a mere handful of Jews, much less in ratio to the number of Negroes in the American population, have attained, through the Revolution, all the political and social rights that were denied to them under the regime of the Czar (166)."

The other two factors explored by James were the "uncompromising rhetoric of anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and the right of self-determination for oppressed nations (165)" espoused by the Bolshevik government and the creation of the Third Communist International, an international body that openly encouraged colonized (often Black or Brown) people to rise up against their (mostly European) exploiters all over the world.

At a point when the U.S. government had systematically ignored the pleas of Black people to pass even one federal law against lynching, when city and state governments all over the country were colluding in lynchings, race riots and allowing whites who attacked Blacks to go free, or even reap rewards - it doesn't take a genius to figure out why many Black thinkers were genuinely excited that such a different kind of government, one that spoke to them and had taken action to support and defend its own national minorities, had come into the world.

Black and white (film)

Langston Hughes was a Black intellectual of this generation, this being the same generation that we associate with the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro. Of all the insults buried in that heinous Root article, the disrespect to Langston Hughes, inarguably one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, is one of the most difficult to endure. Starr paints Hughes as a dupe, someone "recruited" to champion the Soviet Union, as if the man had not traveled all over the world, studied and written extensively and was not capable of genuinely supporting a government that he believed to be on the right track. We revere Hughes' poetry that celebrates Black beauty, he is the jazz poet laureate of Black America and we love to recite his words that affirm our deep history and continued struggle in the face of white American racism. But what about his poetry celebrating the Soviet Union? Here's a link to a poem that he wrote praising Lenin . Did they break that one out at your school's Black history month event? Probably not. But that doesn't change the fact that Langston Hughes was extremely sympathetic to the Soviet Union, as is abundantly evident in his autobiographical writing, including in the chapter of I Wonder As I Wander, "Moscow Movie."

The Root provides perhaps the most cynical and shallow reading of this chapter possible, though I hesitate to affirm that that author of that piece has even actually read it. "Moscow Movie" tells an important story about a time in 1932 when Langston Hughes was invited to the Soviet Union by the government, to work on a major film production. This film was called "Black and White" and it was supposed to highlight the struggle of Black workers in the South and give an international showcase to the racism and oppression experienced by Black people in America. According to Langston Hughes, it was "intended to be the first great Negro-white film ever made in the world (80)," though unfortunately it did not come to fruition.

Hughes accompanied a delegation of 22 young African Americans who were supposed to star in the film, though it was odd that most in that group were not actors or performers by trade. Starr erroneously attributes this casting to racism, saying that Hughes determined that the Soviets were so racist that they assumed that all Black people could sing and dance (and play sports?) and so didn't bother to check the backgrounds of the people they hired for the film.

In fact, Hughes said nothing of the sort. He addressed the peculiar composition of the delegation early in the chapter, stating, "That most of our group were not actors seems to have been due to the fact that very few professional theater people were willing to pay their own fares to travel all the way to Russia to sign contracts they had never seen. Only a band of eager, adventurous young students, teachers, writers and would-be-actors were willing to do that, looking forward to the fun and wonder of a foreign land as much as to film-making. There were a few among them who wanted to get away from American race prejudice forever, being filled up with Jim Crow (70)."

It's important that Hughes highlighted their motives as traveling to seek a reprieve from American racism. So high was the esteem for the Soviet Union in the group, that "When the train stopped beneath this banner for passports to be checked, a few of the young black men and women left the train to touch their hands to Soviet soil, lift the new earth in their palms, and kiss it (73)," according to Hughes.

In his accusations of racism what Starr may be referring to is where Hughes says at one point, "Europeans as well as Americans, seem to be victims of that old cliche that Negroes just naturally sing (80)." That is hardly an indictment of any particularly Russian racism and more of a complaint on how African Americans are represented on the world stage.

Lack of specific cultural knowledge about African Americans was a problem throughout the film's production and that is what Hughes believes ultimately damned the film. Hughes was given an early copy of the script and let them know that he did not think it was usable because there were so many errors with regard to what racism and working class struggle actually looked like in the American South. Hughes said that the author of the script was well intentioned but had never been to America. He also said that information from or by Black Americans was rarely translated into Russian in those days. Even with these critiques, it's nearly impossible to interpret Hughes as being at all bitter or resentful at the Soviets for their attempt at making this film. On the contrary, Hughes wrote with unmistakable good humour throughout the chapter and also repeatedly mentioned that they were all paid in full and well taken care of, even when it became clear the film wouldn't be made.

The reception that the students received in Moscow is really remarkable, especially considering the historical context - none of which The Root brings up, of course. The students were "wined and dined" in Hughes' own words, they were put up in the most lavish hotels and treated to free tickets to the theater, the opera, the ballet and dinners and parties with dignitaries and important people, almost every night. They were official guests of the state and treated with the highest honors. No Black delegation has ever been received in America with such grace. Hughes says that they were always introduced as "representatives of the great Negro people (82)" and after describing the incredible amenities at one of the elaborate resorts they were housed in, he adds "I had never stayed in such a hotel in my own country, since, as a rule, Negroes were not then permitted to do so (93)."

On their reception by ordinary Soviet citizens, Hughes writes:

"Of all the big cities in the world where I've been, the Muscovites seemed to me to be the politest of peoples to strangers. But perhaps that was because we were Negroes and, at that time, with the Scottsboro Case on world-wide trial in the papers everywhere, and especially in Russia, folks went out of their way there to show us courtesy. On a crowded bus, nine times out of ten, some Russian would say, "Negrochanski tovarish - Negro comrade - take my seat!' On the streets queueing up for newspapers or cigarettes, or soft drinks, often folks in line would say, "Let the Negro comrade go forward." (74)

This is in 1932! Nowhere in America were Black people treated like this in 1932. Hell, many of us could not get that treatment today, if our lives depended on it (and they sometimes do). This account echoes many others by African Americans who visited or moved to the Soviet Union. In William Mandel's Soviet but Not Russian, Muhammad Ali is quoted as saying of his 1978 visit to the Soviet Union:

"I saw a hundred nationalities. No such thing as a Black man, or a white man, or 'you nigger,' or get back. People say, 'Oh well, they just showed you the best.' You mean all of those white folks rehearsed, said: 'Muhammad Ali's coming!' .. 'All hundred nationalities, pretend you get along. Muhammad Ali's coming!'…'They just took you where they wanted to go.' I know that's a lie. I got in my car and told my driver where to go. Lying about the Russians.. I jogged in the mornings in strange places where they hardly ever saw a Black man. I ran past two little white Russian ladies who were walking to work. They didn't look around and ask what I was doing. I can't go jogging in some streets in America in the morning in a white neighborhood." (85)

The Root tries to paint a picture of a USSR where the same racism that existed in Jim Crow America infected everyone there, but there simply is not enough evidence to say that was the case. They cite the experiences of one Black American man (Robert Robinson), thoroughly. But what about the experiences of the estimated 400,000 African students who were educated for free in the Soviet Union between 1950-1990? These Black youth attended technical schools, Lumumba University and the special Lenin school for leadership, they lived and traveled all over the Soviet Union and upon graduation, they would return to their homelands with skills necessary to aid in the new independence governments. Mandel interviewed quite a few Black Soviets for his book, including other African Americans who moved to the Soviet Union- and the picture they paint is very different from the one in Robinson's account. Providing no evidence, Starr also asserts that interracial relationships would naturally be a problem in the Soviet Union, saying "both Russian and white American men weren't cool with their women messing with black men." Since he introduced the term "bullshit" just before that line, I'm going to call bullshit on that.

Langston Hughes' account features many stories of the men in his group dating Soviet women and not a word about anyone batting an eye at such pairings - which in 1932, would have gotten someone lynched in the United States. Please stop projecting American racism onto the Soviet Union, when you just don't have the evidence to back that up. As W.E.B. Dubois wrote on his third visit to the USSR in 1949, "of all countries, Russia alone has made race prejudice a crime; of all great imperialisms, Russia alone owns no colonies of dark serfs or white and what is more important has no investments in colonies and is lifting no blood-soaked profits from cheap labor in Asia and Africa." The material basis for widespread Jim Crow style racism just wasn't there.

Hughes was aware that the western press celebrated the failure of the movie and spread many rumours that they knew to be false concerning the Soviet government maneuvering against the Black students. He writes that Western journalists, who saw them spending money and carousing in Moscow nightclubs, filed stories in the U.S. about how they were going unpaid and neglected.

Hughes wrote that some in his group suspected that the movie was scrapped because the Soviets were sacrificing the Black struggle to appease the American government - but Hughes himself did not believe that. He was one of the only members of the group who saw the script and he was unequivocal in stating that more than anything else, it was the script that caused the project's failure. Hughes also repeatedly mentioned the context of the international campaign in defense of the Scottsboro Boys, a Black struggle that was most certainly not being dropped by the Soviets, as all this was going on.

The Root miscasts this excerpt from the life of Langston Hughes to support their conclusion that "the Soviets' attempts to curry favor with the black struggle" was "insincere and downright fraudulent." I would counter that this anti-communist propaganda is actually "insincere and downright fraudulent" but allow me to present further evidence on the genuine solidarity expressed by the Soviet Union. Sticking with the theme, let's keep talking about film.

Focus on Africa in film

In the book Focus on African Film, noted film scholar Josephine Woll describes "The Russian Connection" between the Soviet Union and African film, an invaluable alliance in making postcolonial African cinema a reality. As alluded to in the previous section, the Soviet Union expended a lot of resources on aid and development for African nations, who were in the process of throwing off their own colonial oppressors and beginning their independence after World War II. These countries were severely underdeveloped, as chronicled by Walter Rodney and the Soviet Union was a key ally in providing material support, education and technology to allow these countries to thrive without being beholden to their former colonial masters. It's worth noting that the greatest victory for Black liberation to occur in my lifetime, the fall of apartheid in South Africa, involved a great deal of material and political support from the Soviet Union, which was integral to the success of that movement.

Film was another area in which the Soviet Union provided Africans with crucial foundational support. Ousmane Sembene of Senegal, widely considered the "father of African film" was educated in the Soviet Union. This was also the case for other pioneering African filmmakers, like Souleymane Cissé of Mali and Abderrahmne Sissako of Mauritania/Mali and Sarah Maldoror, the French daughter of immigrants from Guadeloupe who made many films about African liberation. In addition to technical know-how, the Soviet Union also provided the essential film and production equipment, distribution and promotion, to bring African cinema onto the world stage.

Dr. Woll seems to believe that the motives of the Soviets were clearly political, but also genuine. Woll wrote: "The Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath, radically altered how, why, and for whom films were made. Financial profit still mattered but it competed with other goals: educational, political, promotional. The new regime in post-tsarist Russia, like the new leaders of post-colonial African nations, willingly allocated part of its budget to subsidizing cinema because it recognized how effective the medium could be as an instrument of propaganda; and most Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s, though they had individual and often compelling aesthetic agendas, readily supported the politics of revolution (225)." In the U.S. we tend to be very cynical of the word "propaganda" but in revolutionary times, propaganda is necessary and the Africans needed aid in producing theirs. Ousmane Sembene clearly agreed; he was adamant about telling compelling political stories through his films and he fully recognized the potential for his films to "help decolonize Africa (225)."

The Soviet Union trained and equipped these African directors, so that they could bring the beauty and the struggle of their people to the world stage. The work of these revolutionary African filmmakers can be seen as a happy ending to the saga that was begun with "Black and White." While we never got the Soviet sponsored film about Black struggle in the U.S. that they wanted to produce, we have since seen a variety of films out of different African countries that highlight their struggle in similar, but undoubtedly much more accurate, ways.

Conclusion

I realize that this was a lot to write in response to a small article that was probably not even this carefully considered by the author himself. But the legacy of the Soviet Union with regard to Black struggle is unique and inspiring and should be celebrated, not horrifically distorted and denied. In Paul Robeson Speaks, the great Black American actor says:

"Mankind has never witnessed the equal of the Constitution of the U.S.S.R. . . . Firstly, because of the significance it has for my people generally. Everywhere else, outside of the Soviet world, black men are an oppressed and inhumanely exploited people. Here, they come within the provisions of Article 123 of Chapter X of the Constitution, which reads: "The equality of the right of the citizens of the U.S.S.R. irrespective of their nationality or race, in all fields of economic, state, cultural, social, and political life, is an irrevocable law. Any direct or indirect restriction of these rights, or conversely the establishment of direct or indirect privileges for citizens on account of the race or nationality to which they belong, as well as the propagation of racial or national exceptionalism, or hatred and contempt, is punishable by law." (1978, 116)

While our current President appoints KKK members to the Department of Justice and calls Nazi murderers "very fine people," while his opponent Hillary Clinton called our children "super predators" and campaigned for them to be locked up en masse- we have to appreciate how significant it is that a national government - in 1919 - put laws on the books like the ones described above. They outlawed racism. They invested heavily in Black education and Black artistic expression. They gave guns to those fighting imperialists and fascists all over the world. What more could you want? Terrell Jermaine Starr and The Root may be confused about which government cares about Black people, but I can't say that I am. I'm proud to be a socialist and I'm proud of the legacy of friendship between my people and the USSR.

As I mentioned in the start of this article, calling Africans who fight for their liberation "Commies" or "dupes" is nothing new. John Hope Franklin referred to this in From Slavery to Freedom, saying that the response to Black self-defense against race riots in 1919 caused such speculation: "Many American whites freely suggested that foreign influences - especially … Bolshevik propaganda after the 1917 Russian Revolution - had caused blacks to fight back. Perhaps there is some truth to that… However, black Americans all along the political spectrum (from conservative, to moderate, to radical left) ridiculed the claim that their new assertiveness was the result of 'outside agitation.' American blacks needed no outsiders to awaken their sense of the tremendous contradiction between America's professed beliefs and its actual practices (362)".

That remains as true today as it was when written. Additionally, I'll close with one more statement from that time, which also remains true, for myself at least. The militant Black Harlem publication The Crusader, under the leadership of fiery Black Communist Cyril Briggs declared in 1919: "If to fight for one's rights is to be Bolshevists, then we are Bolshevists and let them make the most of it!"

This article originally appeared at Liberation School .

References

Hughes, Langston. (1984). I wonder as I wander: An autobiographical journey. New York: Hill and Wang.

Robeson, Paul. (1978). Paul Robeson speaks: Writings, speeches, interviews 1918-1974, ed. by P.S. Foner. New York: Citadel.

The Syrian Revolution of 1925: A Gramscian Redemption

By Spenser Rapone

Revolutionary movements bring societies to a precarious moment of truth: either radical change takes hold, or a reversion to the status quo subjugates the potential for change. Syrians found themselves at this junction during the Great Revolt of 1925. Walter Benjamin believed that the historian's work presents "a revolutionary chance in the struggle for a suppressed past,"[1] and this work seeks to examine that suppressed past which chronicles the lived experience of 1925 revolutionaries. Many Arabs spilled their blood in the Great War, only to face imperial encroachment in its aftermath. France occupied Syria in 1920, and five years later, a militant, radical movement took place in the hopes of escaping occidental domination. [2] This momentous occasion neither happened overnight, nor did the aftermath of World War I alone account for the spilling over of tensions. Joyce Miller argues that "[t]here have been two major interpretations of this [1925 Syrian] revolt - one linking it romantically with the rise of Syrian nationalism, the other dismissing it as an unsuccessful, unimportant rebellion." [3] I reject both of these claims. Instead, following Michael Provence's popular outline and Philip S. Khoury's two-volume, encyclopedic account of the era, I will argue that one can best understand the Great Syrian Revolt as a radical, emancipatory movement through the application of Antonio Gramsci's theoretical corpus.

To understand the Great Syrian Revolt, one must examine the previous hegemonic structure instituted by the Ottoman Empire. Specifically, the imperial edicts of the 19th century demonstrate a desire for the reformation and reorganization of rule in the region. These reforms aided the entrenchment of imperial prerogatives, but also set into motion their eventual unraveling. Khoury's characterization of Arab nationalism progressing through three stages of "loosely structured Arabism," the Arab Revolt of 1916, and finally a concerted movement in the wake of French occupation proves useful, albeit reductive, in understanding the socio-political currents of 1925. [4] Provence effectively expands upon this elitist modality of historiography by focusing on the grass roots of the rebellion, and how the masses of Syria embraced and transformed European-inspired nationalism into their own ideological movement.[5] Moreover, Provence downplays the dominant politics of the urban notables in characterizing a radical, collective action that comprised nearly all of Syrian inhabitants from the rural frontier to the urban centers. [6] This type of broad-based movement was unheard of up until its time. Revolutionaries aside, so too were there collaborators, in this case the aforementioned urban notables, who aspired to secure their aims through "an incremental process of negotiation with the French." [7] Nationalist sentiments espoused by the upper classes of Syria never appeared to acquire a revolutionary content.[8] In spite of the urban notables' passive resistance to the French, the Syrian masses challenged western imperialism; in turn, they called the economic and ideological agendas themselves into question. France, as well as Britain, Germany, and other western powers exported finance capital in the 19th century in order to maximize profits and consolidate gains; competition among the Great Powers trended inexorably towards war after 1870.[9] Yet, while the economic base provides a vector for analyzing western, colonial expansion, the superstructures of this mad race for domination cannot be ignored. With respect to the French Mandate of Syria, while this work seeks to emphasize that the Syrians rose up against their economic exploitation, 1925 also showed (if only momentarily) an attempted rejection of the ideological domination wrought by the Mandate period.

Since 1920, Syria lay under the umbrella of French imperial hegemony in the crudest sense of the word, but also in 20th century Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci's sense of "cultural hegemony." [10] Thus, while many battles were fought with bullets and bombs, there too existed a profound struggle of ideas, cultural variances, values, and other abstract notions. Gramsci himself primarily dealt with the analysis of European countries, but Gramsci's work illuminates colonial rule and anticolonial resistance. In describing the Great Syrian Revolt, its early successes and its eventual failure, Gramsci's notions of a "war of position" and "war of maneuver," (i.e. the ideological war and the armed struggle itself), will be the lens in analyzing these historical events. [11] According to Provence, this mass uprising was undoubtedly a "heroic episode in the colonial history of Syria."[12] Initially, the mass mobilization of the rebels undermined the ideological dominance of the French; the rebels' efforts were exemplified in political efforts best understood as a war of position. Yet, while the ideological war of position was waged successfully at first, the fierce response by French forces generated cracks in the Syrian popular opposition, which suddenly lost ground. With the restoration of elite-driven politics, and a newfound cooperation between the urban notables (who were previously the power brokers within the Ottoman system) and the French, the rebellion soon failed and French imperialists quashed the revolt. [13] While the masses of Syrian rebels continuously proved tenacious and courageous, by 1928 the lack of a clearly articulated and established alternative to the hegemonic power of the French proved ruinous. [14] The elitist ideology formed by the Franco-Syrian notable alliance once again subjugated the region, and resultantly, armed resistance only lasted a short while before reactionary forces secured their victory.

Until 1946, Syria would suffer under colonialist rule. Above all, this work seeks to embody Michel Rolph-Trouillot's maxim that "historical representations cannot be conceived only as vehicles for the transmission of knowledge."[15] A committed Gramscian analysis of the 1925 revolution is one way to redeem the most radically transformative and emancipatory aspects of this moment that Provence and others have sought to explicate. The Great Syrian Revolt of 1925 was a concentrated movement carried out by the Syrian Arab masses that ultimately failed due to the rebels' inability to fundamentally alter the ideological and societal constructs of Syrian society. This further engendered the capitulation of urban notable elites in their attempts to maintain status and power, leaving the hopes for a new society extinguished not only by European imperialism, but the existing traditional structures favorable to notable rule.

Gramscian Approach to History

Antonio Gramsci developed his theoretical contributions to Marxist thought and revolutionary struggle primarily through the study of history. First, though, the role of his predecessors, Karl Marx, followed by Vladimir Lenin, must be discussed. In looking at the development of human events, Marx's historical materialism argues for an understanding of the "economic structure of society," otherwise known as the base, in conjunction with a superstructure, upon which varying levels of social consciousness are then derived.[16] In the early 20th century, Lenin expanded upon Marx's theory, seeking to explain the colonialistic/imperialistic aims of countries like France and Great Britain.[17] Simply put, capitalist aspirations gave birth to the colonialist venture. Yet, while both Marx's and Lenin's indictment of the capitalist system remained salient, Gramsci sought to emphasize the superstructural elements of society to further develop a robust theory of revolutionary change. Gramsci insisted that the political aspect of a revolutionary movement was far more complex,[18] and this complexity manifests itself in the ideological struggle, or "war of position," whereas the armed resistance itself comprises the "war of movement."[19] These dual strategic approaches attempt to reconcile both the contradictions of the state and civil society encompassing the larger superstructure itself. [20] Civil society is the mode of economic behavior, or as Gramsci saw it, the "cultural hegemony of a social group over the entire society." [21] In order for civil society to conform to specific economic relations, the state necessarily exists to carry out legislation and coercion. [22] Thus, Gramsci declares the task of radically transforming civil society most critical, accomplished through a seizure of the state structure, in order to effectively transform the mores of old. [23] To effect such change, one must engage in a political, and eventually an armed, struggle. In sum, the war of movement cannot be won until the war of position is first secured.

Resistance movements require the support of the greater population. In the face of an entrenched civil society, the war of position finds its strength in the social foundations of an emancipatory movement. [24] Mass movements that win the war of position secure a clear victory. [25] The decisive nature of the struggle manifests itself in what Kathleen Bruhn describes as a "counterhegemonic cultural bloc," wherein the cultural hegemony of the now deposed ruling class ceases to exert effective control or ideological dominance.[26] Innovation and subversion are also key tasks for revolutionary moments according to Gramsci, who declares that "in political struggle one should not ape the methods of the ruling classes, or one will fall into easy ambushes." [27] Furthermore, revolutionaries must also recognize their inherent disadvantage from the moment they take up arms, as "one cannot choose the form of war one wants, unless from the start one has a crushing superiority over the enemy." [28] Upon such a foundation of a dialectical historical analysis, Gramsci insists that changing society exists in a dual sense: materially and ideologically. Given France's status as a colonial power in the 1920s, it follows that their nationalism manifested itself through colonialist and imperialist aspirations. Yet, among certain Syrians, primarily those of the urban notables, there existed the profit and power motives similar to those of the European aggressors. Therefore, revolutionaries who took up arms in 1925 not only differentiated their nationalist aspirations from the French, but also from their urban notable countrymen.

The revolution of 1925 demonstrated a rush to a war of maneuver without preparatory success in a war of position. Depending on the class relationships, certain tactics may be more or less beneficial; in any case, politics is the heart and lifeblood of revolutionary praxis. [29] Yet, as the events from the Late Ottoman period up until 1925 demonstrates, no alternative society or institutions were effectively articulated by the rebellion's leaders. In conjunction with Provence's work, Marxian-Gramscian thought provides an analytical vehicle through which "historical change is understood as, to a substantial degree, the consequence of collective human activity."[30] In other words, Gramsci's historical approach properly rejects any notions of Great Man theory, or the idea that particularly influential individuals turn the axis of history. With respect to Syria, one can certainly recognize how individuals, e.g. Amir Faisal (1885-1933), General Maurice Sarrail (1856-1929), and Sultan al-Atrash (1891-1982) were significant. Yet, to merely focus on the exploits of individuals is to engage with hagiography, not history. By way of outlining a specific narrative, detailing economic interests of the French vis-à-vis Syria, or examining the influx of capitalist ideology first through Ottoman hegemony and then later French, the Gramscian line of thought remains present throughout this work. Provence's claim that "[o]rderly categories and tidy theories exist principally in the minds and representations of intellectuals" rings true, as theory is not a be-all and end-all, but rather an analytical aid. [31] The starting point for such an analysis begins in the Late Ottoman period of the 19th century.

The Late Ottoman Period in Syria

Long before the Mandate period, Ottoman Syria and the Lebanon came under the watchful eye of French financial interests. No other European power invested more of its financial capital in the Ottoman Empire than France during the nineteenth century, and by 1900, French interests honed in on Syria itself.[32] While Greater Syria (Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and Lebanon) came under the Ottoman yoke in 1516, the later Ottoman period marked the series of events that set the stage for imperial ventures. [33] Egypt occupied Syria from 1831 to 1860, and instituted "centralization and modernization" schemes, which also had the dual effect of curtailing the influence of theulama or religious establishment. [34] This time period also saw the Tanzimat reforms (1839-1876), which established a fixed taxation system, property rights, and equal citizenship for all Ottoman subjects[35], in an attempt to centralize Ottoman authority through a nationalist platform. [36] The Syrian people were forced to respond to changing social and material conditions in the face of Egyptian and Ottoman interests. Such actions cultivated an "Ottoman Patriotism" in which an imperial elite experience state-sponsored schooling, training, and therefore, ideological conditioning. [37] By mid-1860, in keeping with the mosaic of peoples who populated Syria (such as the Bedouin, Druze, Kurds, and other ethnic and cultural groups) took part in a series of brutal uprisings throughout Damascus for over a week, leveling the ancient Christian quarter of Bab Tuma. [38] Seizing opportunity in the chaos, the Ottomans reasserted imperial authority over the city, and subsequently, Greater Syria itself. [39] This reassertion of authority provided a fertile ground for cultivating a specific Ottoman ideology.

In a stroke of calculated diplomacy, Ottoman foreign minister Fuʿad Pasha (1814-1869) effectively spread the burden of responsibility amongst all Damascenes, even Muslim urban notables, to curtail any thought the French might have in terms of intervening on behalf of Christendom. [40] Ottoman authorities executed a number of the leading figures of local majlis (councils), but preserved the more prestigious figureheads; accordingly, balance of power shifted back to the Ottomans from the locals. [41] Interestingly enough, this episode was not a mere lingering effect of Crusader-era animosities. As Khoury notes, most Christians felt betrayed due to Muslims shirking sharia law in failing to protect Syrian ahl al-kitāb .[42] One can deduce that the betrayal Syrian Christians perceived speaks to a previously established sense of trust, lending credence to the existence of a proto-Syrian Arab nationalistic identity, or at least to an identity of a non-confessional variety. Despite this crisis, in which one may examine the existence of a sense of shared identity, the urban notable dominance, under the auspices of Ottoman control, persisted.

Ottoman focus on Damascus demonstrated the growing stratification of a structure that asserted urban officials as the ruling class of Syria. The notables, or ʿayan, served as "intermediaries" in carrying out the dual interests of (urban) Syria and the Ottoman Empire itself. [43] By 1880, these notables had so distanced themselves from lower class urban dwellers, not to mention those of the countryside, that they possessed certain "aristocratic" pretenses, according to Khoury. [44] This notion of "aristocratic" seems to be anachronistic; more accurately, the notables functioned as a developing, Syrian bourgeoisie. Urban notables, the Syrian elite, occupied a position of secular status with their role as the facilitators of Ottoman policy in Syria. Ottoman centralization in the nineteenth century eroded the role of religious authority, with spiritual leaders steadily losing their once prestigious authority. [45] By the turn of the century, prominence once held by religious leaders gave way to those of a secular variety. Conscripting Syrians into the army, coupled with "elite state education," provided the ideological conditioning necessary to transform the region.[46] Of course, religious rhetoric, leaders, and ideology would still factor into the dealings of the region, but the nineteenth century secularized many Syrian political dealings.

Land reforms of the Tanzimat period critically altered the material conditions in Syria. European capitalist ideology, and one of its most powerful subsets, commercialization, creeped into Syrian life during the late Ottoman period. [47] Even more so than the growing secularization, the influx of capitalist ideology manifested itself in an ever-growing prevalence of European interest. From cash cropping to the manufactured products of mainland Europe, the basis of local modes of production shifted from the community to private ownership and profit. [48] With the Land Code of 1858, Ottoman policy sought to empower peasants in allowing private land registration; however, a series of inefficient bureaucratic features led to prominent notable families acquiring said lands outright. [49] Moreover, these policies proved critical in that they extended the imperial reach to "geographical terrains that it had never before touched." [50] Resultantly, the urban notables grew even more powerful and influential.

While the urban notables basked in their burgeoning status as Europeanized elites of the Ottoman court, those of the Syrian hinterlands felt differently. Despite how far the tentacles of capitalist ideology reached, the "frontier warrior ethos" of the rural populace appeared to remain untouched.[51] Peasants lost their land to urban notables who seized communal property under the guise of registering it under individual peasants' names. [52] While the urban modes of production became thoroughly Ottomanized, the rural economy remained independent, leading to the establishment of partnerships with the mercantile urban class.[53] In terms of trade, culture, and ideology, the rural inhabitants of Syria thoroughly perplexed and frustrated the Ottoman state and its urban notable emissaries.

Eventually, the obstinacy of Syrian frontiers people reached a critical mass. The Ottomans spared little time in the process of carrying out violence against the rural peoples in an attempt to suppress their recalcitrance.[54] Additionally, the prevalence of Ottoman schools increased greatly, in an effort by Istanbul to further indoctrinate its Syrian subjects. [55] When Ottoman strategy bore little fruits outside the city, their directives changed; the turn of the century saw a shift best described as "enticement rather than punishment."[56] The Ottoman state attempted to use infrastructure to lure impressionable youths from the rural areas. These improvements were met with intense scrutiny by the rural Syrians, especially the state-sponsored scholarships that Istanbul proposed.[57] Even so, these newly implemented measures attracted substantial numbers, linking the rural inhabitants with the fate of the urban centers in these final traumatic, but hopeful, decades of Ottoman rule. [58] Yet while the Ottoman state grappled with internal issues, the supposed "sick man of Europe" would soon enter into global conflict.

Syria and the Great War

World War I marked a turning point in the growing nationalist sentiment and class consciousness of Syrian peoples. Certainly, the "war to end all wars" catalyzed the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, and brought about incomprehensible carnage and suffering for the Ottoman subjects of Syria. [59] Yet, this period also marked the beginnings of a rejection of Ottoman identity in favor of a Syrian-Arab construct.[60] The Arab Revolt of 1916 played a key role in such developments. Thus, in terms of imperial aggressors within this analysis, while France remains the primary agent, its actions have improper context without examining those of the British, as well.

To begin, the promises of the Great Powers to the Arab peoples of an independent state proved false. The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, in declaring that "France and Great Britain are prepared to recognize and protect an independent Arab State or a Confederation of Arab States," seems to speak to an authentic commitment by the West. [61] From the start, such claims were carried out in bad faith. Historians such as Zeine N. Zeine claim that the Great Powers negotiated from a position of honesty and goodwill,[62] insisting that both la mission civalisatrice of the French and the "good order" of the British were rooted in an attempt to uplift their colonial subjects.[63] Such notions were merely hollow justifications. Even imperial agent T.E. Lawrence admits that "these promises would be dead paper," [64] going so far as to maintain "had I been an honest adviser of the Arabs I would have told them to go home."[65] Sykes-Picot, coupled with other secret, contradictory agreements, such as the Husayn-McMahon Correspondence, dealing with the fate of the Ottoman Empire following the First World War, indict Western perfidy when it came to supporting Arab independence. [66] Western motivations for influence in Syria and other former Ottoman territories could be seen as the policy manifestation of what Edward Said calls "positional superiority."[67] Largely due to "French initiative," the Great Powers sought to exploit the Arab peoples from the beginning. [68] Much like the Ottoman reforms of the 19th century, the chaos of the post-war years fundamentally altered the social and material conditions for Syrians.

After the Allied victory in 1918, France and Britain arbitrarily carved borders into the Arab domains of the Ottoman Empire. Amir Faisal, one of the key leaders of the Arab Revolt, was crowned Syria's king. [69] Yet, the relevance of the Arab Revolt warrants further examining beyond Hashemite aspirations. Despite what its lasting legacy might suggest, Faisal did not command the loyalty of all Arabs, let alone the other peoples of Syria. [70] Many did support him, at any rate, including Druze Leader Sultan al-Atrash who triumphantly marched alongside the Hashemite prince into Damascus in 1918. [71] As Provence indicates, Hawran Druze involvement in the Arab Revolt was key, as they provided the grain supplies to feed Faisal's army. [72] By the time of Faisal's independent Syria, the Damascene were divided into two camps: junior and mid-grade officers who tended to support him, and the urban elites who were inclined to oppose the quasi-populist leader. [73] At any rate, while in part the product of imperial machinations, this newly-formed Syrian state was founded, according to Khoury, on the tenets of (Arab) national unity and independence.[74]

As stated previously, a sense of Syrian-Arab identity became more widespread during, and after the war. Particularly, the four towns of Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo all seemed to possess a sense of cohesion that sloughed away "Ottomanism" for Arabism after the war. [75] This particular brand of nationalism, while distinct from the previous Ottomanism, was primarily embraced by the upper classes. [76] Not long after his coronation in March 1920, the French ousted the British-supported Faisal, and by July 1920, had established their imperial, mandatory occupation. [77] French forces achieved this task relatively easily, as the main power brokers of society, the urban notable elites, stood idly by as Faisal's loyalists led a futile resistance against a major world power. [78] Finally, with this moment, the stage was set not only for an anti-imperial struggle, but for a contest of ideologies. While nationalist fervor had gripped Syria, the European-imported, moderate, urban notable version remained the dominant ideology.

In many ways, the removal of Faisal from power spoke to the cultural hegemony of urban elites. That Hawrani grain suppliers had played such a role in supplying Damascus and other urban centers during the Arab Revolt solidified a new paradigm of commercial relations that linked the "perennially rebellious Jabal Hawran to Damascus much more firmly than ever before."[79] This economic link led the masses of the urban and rural centers to offer soon an alternative voice, for as Khoury describes, the French Occupation of Syria represented a "conflict between bourgeois and radical nationalism." [80] Consciousness had changed dramatically after the Great War. Lower urban and rural centers alike begot a new generation of nationalists comprised of dispossessed groups of veterans.[81] The bourgeois nationalists of the urban elite now faced a growing segment of the population who had re-appropriated these European-inspired beliefs in a far different sense. This radical consciousness encouraged the Syrian masses to secure victory in the war of position against their own "veteran nationalist elite."[82] Before the radical moment of 1925, however, French Mandatory policies and structures must be examined, in how they interplayed with both urban elites and the urban/rural populations.

Mandatory Syria, French Policy, and Growing Consciousness

The initial French occupation of Syria produced policies that only intensified the radical aspirations of the urban and rural subaltern class. This intensification was in large part due to the myopia of French policymakers themselves, who perceived of such an emancipatory movement as an unimaginable prospect or a veritable fantasy. [83] That the French organized Mandatory Syria along sectarian lines speaks to their shortsightedness.[84] The official League of Nations document outlining the French Mandate of Syria prescribed a "progressive development" for the peoples of Syria." [85] In terms of spiritual and religious questions, the document also stated: "[r]espect for the personal status of the various peoples and for their religious interests shall be fully guaranteed." [86] Article 11 of the Mandate Law provided Mandatory authority with a carte blanche access to natural resources and an ability to tax the trade and transportation of goods.[87] Finally, the designation of French and Arabic as the major languages of state confirmed Mandatory Syria's status as little more than a satellite of the greater French imperial project. [88] Such was the French strategy of imperial rule: divide and conquer, allow the local population a degree of religious autonomy, and ensure that economic control remained firmly within imperial grasp.

Early on, occupation as outlined by Mandate Law had a number of implications that seemed to trend inexorably towards the unraveling of French authority. As Khoury notes, the French Mandatory paradigm did little to alter an already established political life; what changed however, was that France possessed no legitimacy to rule. [89] While the Ottomans were occupiers as well, the status of the Sultan-Caliph's legitimacy and authority ran deep for both the majority Sunni population and minorities alike.[90] And for all the talks of infrastructural investment outlined by the Mandate Law, France proved "unwilling to promote any recognizable financial interests, other than her own."[91] Any infrastructural improvements were intended only, Daniel Neep argues, to facilitate mobility, which he describes as the driving force of colonial warfare.[92] French authorities did not build roads to benefit the locals; on the contrary, they, according to Neep, "set about creating an infrastructural network along which the violent pulse of power could pound at any time." [93] The lifeblood of French colonial policy in Syria was violence. Through violence, France hoped to siphon wealth, goods, and services from Syria. Yet, in order to maximize violence, France needed to meet its infrastructural demands. Roads, then, allowed imperial forces to penetrate the country and conduct military movements across its surface. [94] Of course violence is seldom carried out for violence alone, and usually exists as a means to an end. French Syria fits what Michel Foucault articulates as panopticism.[95] In other words, French infrastructure increased imperial presence. This panoptic structure was not power for power's sake, but, in the words of Foucault, "to strengthen the social forces - to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply." [96] Urban notables occupied a crucial mediatory place in the French imperial panopticon, and such harshly repressive measures would illicit responses. Colonial violence would soon be met with anticolonial violence. French violence and dominance sowed the seeds of rebellion.

The Syrian Revolution of 1925

Resistance to French rule had its origins in a number of economic, social, and ideological factors. French policies had brought about crisis and instability in Syria.[97] Specifically, southern Syria experienced severe inflation due to France's own monetary issues, in addition to intense drought for roughly four years, increased taxes despite declining harvests, and growing distaste of the "illegality and illegitimacy" of French rule. [98] To invoke Fanon, the course of an anti-colonial movement "implies the urgent need to thoroughly challenge the colonial situation." [99] The developments of the 1925 revolt validated this assertion, accordingly shattering the sectarian myth propagated by the French. Imperialist propaganda painted the early Jabal Druze resistors as "bandits" or "extremists," in a manner which is similar, as Provence notes, to the use of "terrorist" today as a blanket pejorative for subversive activity. [100] The Druze and other rebels would need to wage a fierce war of position to counter the claims of the French. At first, the rebels' ideological struggle would prove relatively easy, due to the ignorance and arrogant intransigence of imperial authority. As noted earlier, the Hawran Druze had already penetrated Damascene life since the late 19th century, eroding the lines between a supposed urban/rural divide. [101] The most prominent tribe, the Atrash, had effectively "formed commercial bonds with newly prominent Damascene commercial families," showing little interest in cultivating a relationship with urban elites. [102] Hawran Druze tribesmen were not viewed as barbaric or uncouth rural dwellers, but a respected and integral part of a changing commercial relationship between city and countryside. [103] Thus, through developments regarding trade and production, as well as the shared state-sponsored military education that linked the lower classes of both urban and rural Syrians, the revolt acquired a strong mass base. [104] This is not to say that differences were nonexistent, but merely that by 1925, French efforts to foster sectarian divide between different religious groups were failing. [105] Syrians had formed an inextricable bond, and imperial aggression only served to tighten the shared experience of the dispossessed.

The aims, motives, and goals of the 1925 revolt fluctuated initially. Though the mass base of the revolution was lower class, even a number of well-off Syrians would join in the uprising. Khoury outlines the participants as follows: the urban absentee landowning class, the commercial bourgeoisie/artisanal class, the middle class intelligentsia, the Muslim religious establishment, the peasantry, and a number of Bedouin tribes as well.[106] He also emphasizes the primary non-participants: non-nationalist urban notables, and certain swaths of Syrian Christians (as noted earlier, however, many in did fact take up arms alongside the rebels). [107] At the forefront of these various walks of life was the revolutionary vanguard of the countryside.[108] Syrian resistance was also able to draw on past movements to further bind the classes together. When France arrived to oust Faisal in 1920, Damascenes of numerous social classes took up arms to defend their independence; the countryside also answered the call, but arrived too late. [109] In any case, this shared past experience established a legitimacy for unity in the face of a colonial aggressor. Syrians of all persuasions, from the frontier to the urban centers, took up a common effort.

Certain key events pushed the region towards violent response. The first major beginnings were the actions taken by French officers, particularly General Sarrail and Captain Gabriel Carbillet. Interestingly, both officers were considered "leftists" for their time, yet appear to have harbored chauvinist tendencies that were far more imperialist than socialist. [110] French officials perpetuated a fantasy of "Druze feudalism," which served as a justification for heavy-handed interference in local governance and life of the Jabal Druze.[111] Despite a peaceful petition, followed by demonstrations, Sultan al-Atrash and his Druze comrades were unable to get French officials to budge. [112] Sarrail then took part in a deception that marked the flashpoint of the revolt. He invited five prominent Atrash chiefs, Mitʿib, Hamad, Nasib, ʿAbd al-Ghaffar, and Sultan al-Atrash himself to discuss peace negotiations. [113] Upon arriving at their Damascus hotel, Hamad, Nasib, and al-Ghaffar were immediately arrested; Sultan al-Atrash did not attend as he had suspected a trap, and Mitʿib declined to appear under the guise of illness. [114] Without hesitation, Sultan al-Atrash began the organization and mobilization of resistance forces, as word spread among Syrians and Europeans alike of Sarrail's treachery.[115] While the revolt was in its nascent stage and its goals not explicitly articulated, Sultan al-Atrash demonstrated his guile in linking the cause of the Druze to Damascus.[116] Shortly thereafter, the first pitched battle of the revolt took place, with the Druze revolutionaries routing the unprepared French at the Battle of al-Kafr.[117] Word of the early victory galvanized other Druze tribesmen and further exposed the repressive French policies of martial law, censorship, executions, and violent military tactics. [118] As Provence notes, even in its early, localized stages in the south, the revolt included Druze as well as Muslim Bedouins and Christian villagers. [119] Thus, from the beginning, a localized revolt had the characteristics of a popular movement. Brutal French policies had only further exposed the repressive nature of the Mandate, and in reaching out to vast swaths of Syrian walks of life, Druze rebel leaders effectively had begun to consolidate gains in the war of position.

A radicalizing of Damascus soon followed these early successes. While there was a nationalist political persuasion of Damascenes seen in the People's Party, its members did not initially have any notions of carrying out armed struggle against the French. [120] Abd al-Rahman Shahbandar, an established Syrian nationalist, represented one of the few Damacene radicals, and had already reached out to Sultan al-Atrash and other Druze leaders in the hope of eventually mobilizing resistance. [121] With the stage set on the backdrop of early victories, the French launched a final attempt to negotiate with the rebels, but it was too late. [122] Both Druze and Damascenes felt compelled towards independence. If there were any lingering doubts among urban nationalists, when the French began to jail Damascenes suspected of revolutionary sympathies, the movement's radical, popular nature was secured. [123] As Khoury notes, the Druze-People's Party connection led a revolutionary vanguard, "calling upon the popular classes to revolt in the name of the nation, but also in the name of Allah, the Prophet, and religious solidarity."[124] The ability of the vanguard leadership to inspire such inclusive sentiments cannot be emphasized enough. Indeed, such proclamations proved compelling, but as Miller notes, the traditional power structure of Syrian society was not directly challenged, at least for Damascenes. [125] That Shahbandar displayed a "willingness to work through the traditional local power structure" demonstrated a flaw in the rebels' war of position. [126] While seizing the opportunity of armed struggle proved timely, the lack to fundamentally break down established power structures factored in substantially to the revolt's eventual failure.

Revolutionary fervor and rebellious ambition spread across Syria. In Hamah, renegade French-Syrian Army officer Fawzi al-Qawuqji led an uprising against French authorities, striking not only a tactical, but a psychological blow to French authorities. [127] Thereafter, the focus shifted once again to Damascus. Nasib al-Bakri dispatched a contingent of insurgent forces, led by Hasan al-Kharrat, who launched an assault on ʿAzm Palace, the seat of Damascene power. [128] The implications of the victory were profound, for soon after al-Bakri's entire force arrived, the city began to fall to the rebels, who were virtually unopposed. [129] In keeping with revolutionary praxis, Muslim leaders amongst the rebel forces, qabadayat, circulated through the Christian and Jewish sectors of the city, ensuring their protection and maintaining their connection to the greater Syrian cause. [130] Much to the chagrin of the French, Islam had secured the confidence and protection of the Christians, not the Mandatory Power. [131] Revolutionary fervor could not be contained. In its inability to counter the Syrian rebels' war of position, the imperial power turned to its one remaining advantage: overwhelming force. Unhesitatingly, Sarrail ordered an aerial bombardment of Damascus, which lasted two days, killing 1,500. [132] With the bombardment, the French reasserted dominance over Damascus, and the nationalist fervor of the city had changed; however, the rebellion further intensified in the regions surrounding the city. [133] Aerial bombardment would become a major French tactic throughout the revolt. What remains significant, to this day, as Provence notes, is that the uprising of 1925 was "the first time in history that civilian populations were subjected to daily systematic aerial bombardment," and consequently gruesome collateral damage.[134] Urban nationalist leadership, among whom Shahbandar was prominent, proved their ineffectiveness in the wake of the bombings. By not constructing an alternative to the elite-driven structure of urban centers, French pacification efforts proved successful. Precisely because of this failure to establish a robust war of position and premature rush to armed struggle, as Provence points out, the French aerial strike "ended any organized mobilization in [Damascus]." [135] While the fight continued until 1928, the movement would steadily lose ground.

Despite the initial tenacious commitment of rebel forces, certain feuds within the revolutionary ranks would aid the French in crushing the movement. Even with the best efforts of the French, villagers routinely supported and joined the rebels, or at least supplied them with food and shelter.[136] Yet, the loss of Damascus loomed over the revolutionaries. While sectarian narratives propagandized by the French and West at large were fantasies, certain moments of divide did take place. By late 1925, in a stunning moment, the dashing rebel leader, Ramadan Shallash, surrendered to the French, becoming a collaborator, [137] and providing the French with more ideological ammunition against the fledgling revolt. The French launched a counteroffensive, far more prepared than the previous year, in mid-1926.[138] Also in 1926, a feud between the Akash Clan and Syrian Kurds nearly dealt a serious blow to the revolt's popular status. [139] A war of position required utmost solidarity amongst its ranks. With the French closing its jaws on the rebels, the movement sputtered and splintered. Shallash took money from the French to send his sons to school, later penning a letter instructing his fellow revolutionaries to acquiesce. [140] The French counteroffensive had pushed the most militant and dedicated of the rebel leaders, to include Sultan al-Atrash himself, out of the country. [141] Thus, the strongest counterrevolutionary force, the urban elites, seized an opportunity. With French military dominance firmly established, the Damascene notables entered into a deal that secured Franco-notable hegemony for the foreseeable future.[142]

Miller claims that there was a lack of unity and common purpose from the outset of the revolt. [143] Given the unity of the early stages, this claim is problematic in that it undermines the popular nature of the struggle. The ordinary rebels themselves carried the success of the revolutionary vanguard. It was not until the leadership itself gave into factionalism that Miller's assertion becomes valid. Provence's testimony that the ordinary Syrian masses "fought and often defeated the mandate army day after day for more than a year," demonstrates even in the dying days of the movement, the radical spirit remained. [144] Unfortunately, that effort only went so far, and the war of position became irretrievable. Thereafter, the French, alongside the urban elite, dictated the country's future, shrouding Syria in the darkness of imperialism for years to come.

Conclusion and Parting Thoughts

With the failure of the Great Syrian Revolt, reactionary forces seized the initiative. Moderate politics took control in Syria up to and during independence, in the form of what Provence calls a "new variation" upon the "old pattern," with the elites operating "under the auspices of, and in cooperation with, the imperial power." [145] The greatest tragedy of the 1925 revolution was not merely in France reasserting colonial dominance, but the symbiotic relationship cultivated between the urban notables and the French, which colored national independence in 1946. As Khoury notes, independence was ultimately a restoration of the status quo, giving notables their autonomy to govern affairs; that these elites sought British support in the process as well shows just how completely substantive change had been subsumed. [146] Only with the eventual rise of Baʿthism would Syria overturn the rule of the local elites and bring about more radical social change. [147] Trouillot claims that while the historian seeks to understand the past, "our authenticity resides in our struggle for the present." [148] Today, the struggle for freedom and independence in the Middle East carries on against imperialism and other forms of oppression. Recognizing the radical, transformative implications of the Great Syrian Revolt will help to propel current and future generations towards the aspiration of an authentically just society.

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Notes

[1] Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, trans. Dennis Redmond, 1940, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm (accessed March 18, 2016).

[2] Michael Provence, The Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 12-13.

[3] Joyce Laverty Miller, "The Syrian Revolt of 1925," International Journal of Middle East Studies 8, no. 4 (1977): 546.

[4] Philip S. Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus, 1860-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 97-98.

[5] Provence, Great Syrian Revolt, 8.

[6] Ibid., 12-13.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920-1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 6.

[9] Provence, Great Syrian Revolt, 32.

[10] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks , trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 333.

[11] Ibid., 229.

[12] Provence, Great Syrian Revolt, 14.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid., 139-141.

[15] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 149.

[16] Karl Marx, Preface to "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy," in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2 nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 4.

[17] Vladimir I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline , (New York: International Publishers, 1917), 108.

[18] Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 229.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid., 206-209.

[21] Ibid., 208.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Robert W. Cox, "Gramsci, Hegemony, and International Relations: An Essay in Method," in Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations , ed. Stephen Gill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 53.

[25] Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 239.

[26] Kathleen Bruhn, "Antonio Gramsci and the Palabra Verdadera: The Political Discourse of Mexico's Guerrilla Forces," Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 41, no. 2 (1999): 41.

[27] Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 232.

[28] Ibid., 234.

[29] Ibid., 232.

[30] Stephen Gill, "Epistemology, Ontology and the 'Italian School,'" in Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations , ed. Stephen Gill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 22.

[31] Provence, Great Syrian Revolt, 22.

[32] Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, 30-31.

[33] Provence, Great Syrian Revolt, 5.

[34] Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism, 23.

[35] Stephen F. Dale, The Muslim Empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 283-284.

[36] Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism, 17.

[37] Provence, Great Syrian Revolt, 9.

[38] Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism, 8.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Ibid.

[41] Ibid., 9.

[42] Ibid.

[43] Ibid., 9.

[44] Ibid., 11.

[45] Ibid., 13.

[46] Provence, Great Syrian Revolt, 9.

[47] Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism, 26.

[48] Ibid.

[49] Ibid., 27.

[50] Provence, Great Syrian Revolt, 9.

[51] Ibid., 10.

[52] Ibid.

[53] Ibid.

[54] Ibid.

[55] Ibid.

[56] Ibid., 10-11.

[57] Ibid.

[58] Ibid.

[59] Ibid.

[60] Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, 19.

[61] Sykes-Picot Agreement, World War I Document Archive, 1916. http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Sykes-Picot_Agreement (accessed March 18, 2016).

[62] Zeine N. Zeine, The Struggle for Arab Independence: Western Diplomacy & the Rise and Fall of Faisal's Kingdom in Syria , (Beirut: Khayat, 1960), 222-223.

[63] Ibid.

[64] T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph, (Salisbury: J. and N. Wilson, 1922), 8.

[65] Ibid.

[66] Provence, Great Syrian Revolt, 11-12.

[67] Edward Said, Orientalism, (New York: Vintage, 1979), 7.

[68] Zeine, Struggle for Arab Independence, 12.

[69] Provence, Great Syrian Revolt, 12.

[70] Ibid., 42.

[71] Ibid.

[72] Ibid., 43-44.

[73] Ibid., 45-46.

[74] Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, 19.

[75] Ibid.

[76] Ibid.

[77] Provence, Great Syrian Revolt, 12.

[78] Ibid., 45.

[79] Ibid., 46.

[80] Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, xiii.

[81] Provence, Great Syrian Revolt, 47.

[82] Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, xiii.

[83] Provence, Great Syrian Revolt, 47.

[84] Ibid., 48.

[85] "French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon," in The American Journal of International Law 17, no. 3 (1923): 177.

[86] Ibid., 178.

[87] Ibid., 179-180.

[88] Ibid., 182.

[89] Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, 4-5.

[90] Ibid.

[91] Ibid.

[92] Daniel Neep, Occupying Syria under the French Mandate , (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 103.

[93] Ibid., 107.

[94] Ibid.

[95] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 207-209.

[96] Ibid., 208.

[97] Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, 5.

[98] Provence, Great Syrian Revolt, 27.

[99] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 2.

[100] Provence, Great Syrian Revolt, 29.

[101] Ibid., 33-34.

[102] Ibid., 35.

[103] Ibid.

[104] Ibid., 46-47.

[105] Ibid.

[106] Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, 205.

[107] Ibid., 206.

[108] Provence, Great Syrian Revolt, 48.

[109] Ibid., 49.

[110] Ibid., 50-51.

[111] Ibid., 51-52.

[112] Ibid., 53-55.

[113] Ibid., 56.

[114] Ibid.

[115] Ibid., 57.

[116] Ibid., 58.

[117] Ibid., 60.

[118] Ibid.

[119] Ibid., 61.

[120] Ibid., 69.

[121] Ibid., 70-71.

[122] Ibid., 74-80.

[123] Ibid., 86.

[124] Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, 218.

[125] Miller, "Syrian Revolt of 1925," 559.

[126] Ibid.

[127] Provence, Great Syrian Revolt, 95-99.

[128] Ibid., 103.

[129] Ibid.

[130] Ibid.

[131] Ibid.

[132] Ibid., 104.

[133] Ibid., 106-108.

[134] Ibid., 128.

[135] Ibid., 109.

[136] Ibid., 121.

[137] Ibid., 138.

[138] Ibid.

[139] Ibid., 120.

[140] Ibid., 138-139.

[141] Ibid.

[142] Ibid., 141.

[143] Miller, "Syrian Revolt of 1925," 563.

[144] Provence, Great Syrian Revolt, 139.

[145] Ibid., 141.

[146] Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, 617-618.

[147] Ibid., 626-630.

[148] Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 151.

Women Workers Versus Intersectional Exploitation: Striving for Working-Class Feminism

By Tatiana Cozzarelli

This article originally appeared at Left Voice .

Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi, an Indian American, is the CEO of PepsiCo, the second largest food and beverage business in the world. It produces products such as Pepsi, Lay's, Quaker, Dorito, Starbuck's Ready-to-Drink, 7UP, Cheetos, Aquafina, Mountain Dew, Gatorade and Tropicana. In 2016, it made $62.8 billion in sales, had a market value of $159.4 billion, and employed an estimated 264,000 workers. It is no wonder that as CEO of such an important global corporation, Nooyi was ranked among the world's most powerful women more than once.

Not only has Nooyi been able to achieve the highest levels of business success as an individual, but she opens doors to people of color and women within the corporation. Currently, 27 percent of senior executives at PepsiCo are women and 36 percent are people of color- more diverse than the average corporation without a doubt. In the UK, PepsiCo has been ranked one of the top 50 companies for women to work over six times. The Times and Opportunity Now say that PepsiCo "is leading the way in gender equality in the workplace," in part due to a Strategies for Success program that helps female middle managers reach senior management positions.

For some, Nooyi is a model of female empowerment, evidence that women, and even women of color, can knock down the barriers of racism and sexism to achieve anything they set their minds to. Some may go further to argue that her empowerment is not just an individual achievement because she opens the doors for other women as well, a model feminist.

Some would argue that Nooyi's life demonstrates that the barriers of the past that limited our grandmothers from the highest positions are long gone and that we have entered a new era of equality. Based on this logic, there are still difficulties women face, but women like Nooyi are shining examples that women can overcome these difficulties.

This kind of feminism is a meaningless dead end. While Nooyi stands as a beacon of progress, women all over the world suffer from illiteracy, violence, low wages, horrible working conditions. For every Nooyi, there are thousands of women whose bodies and spirits are crushed by the literal and symbolic weight of heavy machinery used to produce the products that make Nooyi a billionaire.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of PepsiCo in Argentina, a factory where a majority female staff are currently organizing a struggle against layoffs. This struggle highlights the faults of lean-in feminism and exemplifies a different kind of feminism - one that points to a real way forward for women around the world.

The Women of PepsiCo

For years, PepsiCo hyper exploited workers in the factory, hiring an overwhelmingly subcontracted female workforce that worked 12 hour days. Catalina Balaguer, a 10 year veteran of the factory and militant of the Partido de Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS) says, "A lot of us women didn't say that we had kids, because we thought they would fire us. In time, we learned that having kids, being single mothers was in some cases a guarantee that we would be even more exploited. They knew we needed the money." She describes the horrible working conditions - 12 hour days, working over the weekend, short breaks, low wages, and dangerous conditions. "If you got pregnant, you had to work just like any other worker to make sure you kept your job. We spent years doing the same monotonous motions; years of our bodies bent in the same position. We are an extension of the machines. The machines spit bags of chips at us that we pack into boxes over and over again until we die. Every day, the same work that ruins our bodies."

In 2001, Katy, along with several other co-workers, was fired for organizing in the factory. For a year and a half, Katy fought for her job with the help of a fellow PTS militant who is a lawyer. They took the fight outside the courtroom, seeking solidarity from universities and other sectors of workers. Katy says, "We did an investigation with people at the university, psychologists, and sociologists, where we talked about what it was like to be a woman worker. We were able to put out good material about the complexity of being a woman worker - how much you spend and how much you make, how much time we work at the factory, how much time we work at home, and it was a good way to talk to other women workers… It made other women workers de-naturalize the work conditions we had."

Katy not only won her job back, but forced PepsiCo to take measures to save face. They stopped super exploiting subcontracted workers and began to make special donations to charities and to hire people with disabilities etc. Yet the real victories were in the understanding of workers at PepsiCo. "The struggle cost us suspensions, firings and threats, but we would do it again a million times if it changes the consciousness of tons of women who are not willing to resign themselves to the misery of this system," said Katy.

"The abuse, the anger, and the pain taught us to fight and to organize" said Katy. She and other workers, some of whom are members of the Trotskyist Party PTS organized and won leadership of the shop floor committee. As shop floor leaders, they won several concessions: leave for pregnant co-workers, better and safer work conditions and the end of subcontracting. The shop floor committee organizes regular assemblies to vote and decide on actions, promoting internal democracy and participation in the factory.

PepsiCo Workers for Women's Rights

PepsiCo particularly fought for the rights of women workers at PepsiCo and at other factories. For example, in 2010, along with the women's commission at Kraft Foods, they organized a road blockage, holding a sign that said "Subcontracting and Precarious Work are Violence." The workers also organized a work stoppage on March 8 for the International Women's Strike, as well as every June 3 for the Ni Una Menos march. At Tuesday's massive march for PepsiCo workers, Katy wore a sweater that said "Ni Una Menos Sin Trabajo" - Not one more without work.

She says, "We working women know that violence doesn't just happen in the domestic sphere. It also happens at workplaces and at the hands of people who are supposed to represent us in the government. The government just defends their own interests and submits families to the worst humiliation and the worst living conditions."

In the workplace, men and women organize together for women's rights, as well as for their rights as workers. "We have advanced with unity between male and female workers because we understand that our enemy is the boss who has demonstrated, with a sign on the door, that gender doesn't matter when it is time to fire us. We decide, we organize ourselves, we have assemblies, we vote (in the assemblies) and fight alongside our male co-workers: not ahead of them, not behind them. At their side, standing firm for our rights." Male co-workers who regularly witness the discrimination, humiliation, and violence suffered by women struggle side by side their co-workers against the managers and the bosses.

The Battle at PepsiCo

In the midst of an economic crisis, government austerity measures, and a constant increase in layoffs, PepsiCo decided to close the factory in Buenos Aires. The 600 workers arrived at work to find a sign that fired them from the job that they had worked and organized in for years, the factory that many had given their body to, leaving them with aches, pains, and injuries that will never go away. These workers decided to do what they have always done in the factory: fight back.

Despite the lack of support from the union bureaucrats, PepsiCo employees voted to occupy the factory, defying the American multinational led by Nooyi. They won over support from the community, engaging in pickets, roadblocks, interviews, solidarity concerts and more, with hundreds of workers, academics, and students expressing solidarity within Argentina and around the world. They organized a high profile boycott campaign and movement of international solidarity (including a petition in support that you can sign here). Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, figures from the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the massive Ni Una Menos movement, and thousands of activists from human rights, student, and worker organizations have come out in support of PepsiCo workers.

In mid July, the PepsiCo workers were violently evicted from their occupation. Armed with tear gas, rubber bullets, and batons, the cops attacked the workers and their supporters. The police attacks on workers and students was broadcast live on TV. A private consulting firm has estimated that the eviction of PepsiCo was livestreamed, tweeted, and read about by upwards of 20 million people - nearly half the total population of Argentina.

Two hours after the eviction and with media attention and public pressure mounting, a Labor Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the workers and ordered the company to reinstate them. However, PepsiCo has yet to comply with the court's decision.

The workers continue their struggle, even without the factory occupation. On July 18, 30,000 people marched to the National Congress representing combative union locals, student organizations, human rights activists, and the globally known #NiUnaMenos feminist collective. The hashtag #TodosConPepsicoEnLucha (Everyone With Pepsico in Struggle) was a trending topic for six hours. The workers set up a tent to coordinate the struggle against PepsiCo, as well as against austerity and layoffs.

Working Class Women on the Front Lines

The women of Pepsico demonstrates that women in the highest positions of society, whether they be in the government or in corporations, do not mean the liberation of working women; Nooyi of PepsiCo may be a woman of color, but that didn't make the conditions at PepsiCo any less exploitative. Changing the gender of those in power is merely a symbolic gesture, with no material consequences for the vast majority of women.

Nooyi's position as the CEO of PepsiCo, her super salary of $25,168,597, and the super salaries of all the women and people of color she seeks to put in management positions are built on the broken backs of Katy and workers like her around the world. Nooyi is wealthy because Katy is overworked and underpaid; Nooyi keeps her position as CEO by guaranteeing profits for shareholders, profits made by the labor of Katy and her co-workers. The longer Katy works, the lower her wages, the more precarious her job, the more PepsiCo makes a profit and the more Nooyi is a "good" CEO.

When Forbes ranked PepsiCo one of the best places for women employees, did they take into account the hundreds of thousands of women around the world like Katy who break their backs and spend their lives as the human extensions of machines?

Just last year, Hillary Clinton tried to convince American women that she was a symbol of female empowerment and that a Clinton Presidency was a victory for all women. It's the empowerment represented by the CEO of PepsiCo and the governor of Buenos Aires. It's empowerment that means nothing to the women workers of PepsiCo, to the partners of male workers, and to the women all over the world who are oppressed and exploited by "empowered women".

Yet, the PepsiCo struggle also highlights a different kind of feminism, a feminism rooted in the working class, in combativeness, and in refusing to accept symbolic gestures of equality. It is a feminism that understands that working women's enemies are the bosses, whether male or female, and their allies are their male co-workers who labor in the same working conditions as women PepsiCo workers. Today, there are more women than ever in history in the labor market. This can be a source of tremendous strength, as working class women organize themselves against labor abuses and sexism.

PepsiCo workers show a different kind of feminism, a feminism rooted in working class solidarity. A feminism that defends the working class and women against all violence by individual men, the capitalists, and the government. A feminism that does not seek individual empowerment but the empowerment of the working class as a class in defense of their rights and the rights of all oppressed people in society. A kind of feminism that understands that an injury to one is an injury to all; while one of us is oppressed and exploited, all of us are in chains. The kind of feminism that organizes in shop floor committees along with male co-workers for the rights of pregnant workers and for safer conditions for everyone.

While some argue that this kind of feminism is marginal, idealistic, impossible to take hold, I argue that this is the only kind of feminism that can realistically win rights for women - all women. This is the kind of feminism that wants actual victories, not symbolic ones; a feminism that wants to win the world for the working class and oppressed, not just crumbs for a lucky few.

Marx's Capital for the 21st Century

By Susan Williams

This year marks the 150th anniversary of Volume I of Marx's Capital, a book with the most profound impact on human society of any political work in history. Marxist economic analysis has inspired the freedom struggles of billions of people.

By the 1990s, however, the profit system was staging a comeback in the USSR and China, thanks to decades of Western hostility from the outside and bureaucratic repression and betrayal from within. Socialism was passé; capitalism was the pinnacle of human development. As the world continued to change rapidly - with computers, robotics, the World Bank, hedge funds - Karl Marx seemed even more anachronistic.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the dustbin of history. The global devastation of the 2008 Great Recession underlined accelerating poverty and inequality. It showed that the capitalist monster may have changed its spots, but it was still vicious and hardwired for explosion. Capital turns out to have everything to say to rebels of the 21st century.

Ruthless Criticism of all that Exists

The mid-1800s, when Marx developed his economic theories, was a period with many similarities to ours. People were outraged at injustice, destitution, state violence, the lack of civil rights, and heavy taxation due to governmental debt, conditions caused at that time by the rise of industrial capitalism and the oppressive remnants of feudalism.

In 1848, a revolutionary wave surged across Europe. But the outcome was a series of defeats that left workers and radicals beaten down and believing the capitalist rulers were invincible. Striving to understand why the revolts were crushed and what victory would require, Marx began the economic studies that would occupy the rest of his life.

Before Marx, socialist thought was dominated by utopianism. This was the dream of an ideal society which only had to be imagined "to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power," as Marx's collaborator Frederick Engels wrote. In contrast, Marx and Engels took a scientific approach. Rather than springing from ungrounded wishes and hopes, Marxism analyzes what actually exists in the social and material world.

In his introduction to the first volume of his seminal work, Marx says, "It is the ultimate aim of this work to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society, i.e., capitalist, bourgeois society." He was embarking on the ultimate "know thy enemy" campaign.

Capital begins with the individual cell of the capitalist organism: the commodity (an object made to be sold). Marx explains step by step the process by which human labor-power adds economic value to commodities above and beyond the owner's costs. And he shows how this process inherently steals from the worker. If you know in your gut that you are being robbed at work even though you get a paycheck, Marx demonstrates logically why you are absolutely correct.

Marx laid out how capitalist economy would unavoidably suffer periodic crises worsening over time while the general rate of profit would slow. These factors would drive the ruling class to take from workers an ever greater share of the wealth they produce. The environment would be despoiled. Economic inequality and poverty would grow drastically. Small business owners and family farmers would lose their livelihoods.

In short, Marx predicted conditions today, with nearly half of the world's population living on less than $2.50 a day. His analysis also showed that there is no possibility of bringing into being a kinder, gentler profit system, because every capitalist is subject to a brutal, take-no-prisoners law of competition.

Class Consciousness to the Rescue

Marx wrote his analysis when the industrial revolution was just setting capitalism on its feet. He foresaw the inevitable globalization of the profit system, and concluded that it was then that its nature would be most fully expressed. With the advent of computerization, instant communication, and an international division of production and distribution, the "free market" became truly a world phenomenon.

From the start, capitalism was set on a trajectory leading to the growth of monopolies, dominance of finance capital (banks, stock markets, etc.), and hyper-concentration of wealth. Case in point: over the last several decades, all the additional wealth created by increased labor productivity has gone into the pockets of the owning class, while the share going to the workers has fallen. Capital is even more a book for our time than for the moment in time it was written, because capitalism has grown into a full-blown system dominating the planet.

Perhaps most of all, this is a book for the 21st century because of how desperately people seeking change in our time need to understand class.

This is a time of anger and revolt, but resistance is fractured. The clannish mentality of identity politics too often prevails, traceable ultimately to the racism, sexism, and all the other "isms" fostered by the ruling class to divide and conquer. But the Black activist fighting police brutality, the Trump supporter frustrated with job conditions in a "right to work" state, the teenager who slings hamburgers by day and is an environmental warrior by night: if they all depend on a paycheck to survive, they share much more than they may know. The beauty of Capital is that by understanding its ideas we can come to understand our common exploitation and the power that we have in fighting back together.

More than ever, those who believe a better world is possible need Marx. Scientific socialism offers a reality-based understanding of how capitalism works and the relationships among the people trapped in its net. This makes it possible to develop an effective plan of attack, including, for example, the need for revolutionary parties.

Capital is not an easy read for current generations. But take heart. Marx was writing for the average educated worker of his time, not the ivory tower elite. The early sections are challenging. Once grasped, however, they lay the foundation for an understanding of everything from the meaning of the fight over the length of the working day to why robots are displacing human employees.

David Harvey's A Companion to Marx's Capital is one of several excellent reading guides to Volume I, the most famous and fundamental of the three-volume series. And Freedom Socialist Party educational retreats have developed a detailed introduction to the Marxist analytical method and a study plan for Volume I that you can find at socialism.com; look for "Trotsky School 2015 Curriculum."

The best way to tackle Capital is in a group. If you would like help setting up a study circle, get in touch! And, before too many more anniversaries go by, let's realize the potential of this amazing book as a tool for winning a liberating future.

This was originally published in the Freedom Socialist newspaper, Vol. 38, No. 4, August-September 2017 (www.socialism.com)

Send feedback to Susan Williams, doctors' union organizer and student and teacher of Marxist economics, at drsusan762@gmail.com.