Corporate Dictatorship, Mass Incarceration, and Imperialism: The Nature of the American State

© Susan Walsh/AP Photo

By Yanis Iqbal

Republished from Dissident Voice.

“Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is  already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”

-George Jackson

USA’s President-elect Joe Biden’s cabinet picks have already deflated the hopes of lesser-evilists. Filled with deep-dyed neoliberals and unswerving imperialists, Biden’s cabinet will try its hardest to competently revive the murderous American empire. Externally, it would mean the professional management of an imperialist, interventionist and hyper-militarized foreign policy in the name of “humanitarianism”. Internally, it would signify the discursive re-packaging and ideological invisibilization of an interminable domestic war against Black communities. Whereas Donald Trump politically publicized this war as part of his white chauvinist campaign, the Democrats will cleverly cloak it in the hollow language of national unity and multiculturalism.

When confronted by the reality of Democrats openly defying some leftists’ expectation that they will be minimally better than Trump, we need to re-think our political categories and mode of conceptualization. One major concept in need of rectification is “fascism”. Through its repeated use by corporate democrats to create the Trumpist bogeyman, the word has totally lost any analytical value within the US political discourse. In opposition to the ruling elite’s propagandistic obscuration of fascism, we need to theorize it from a Marxist perspective which allows us to use it for revolutionary, tactical purposes. 

In his book Blood in my eye, the Black Panther party leader George Jackson wrote:

“One has to understand that the fascist arrangement tolerates the existence of no valid revolutionary activity. It has programmed into its very nature a massive, complex and automatic defense mechanism for all our old methods for raising the consciousness of a potentially revolutionary class of people. The essence of the U.S.A. totalitarian socio-political capitalism is, concealed behind the illusion of a mass participatory society. We must rip away its mask. Then the debate can end, and we can enter a new phase of struggle.”

From the above quotation, we can understand the structural nature of fascism in America. Instead of being confined to a right-wing faction of the political elites, fascism represents a superstructural tendency of capitalism, which helps the bourgeoisie to overcome the resistance of various social forces. Democrats and Republicans utilize these fascist tendencies in varying degrees to perpetuate the unending brutality inflicted on revolutionary forces through methods such as mass warehousing, repression and racist policing.

While Democrats and Republicans are firmly situated within a fascist framework, they are not wholly identical. While the former utilizes fascist tactics in an unobtrusive manner, the latter amplifies and foregrounds it as a central strategy. If the Democrats reproduce a dual system of political subjects - one group with “rights” and another consigned to zones of non-being - Republicans politically intensify it. Under Republicans, marginalization of those traditionally ghettoized by the former nominally “liberal” state is noticeably extended, giving a “visible” and “spectacular” character to the silent, structural violence of Democrats’ governmental apparatus.

As Gabriel Rockhill has written:

“While it is certainly true, from a tactical organizing perspective, that dealing with the histrionics of the good cop [Democrats] is usually far preferable to the barefaced barbarism of the bad cop [Republicans], it is strategically of the upmost importance to identify them for what they are: partners in capitalist crime.”

Thus, it is not the case that Democrats signify a radical break from the fascism of Republicans. Rather, both are concrete embodiments of a single phenomenon: fascism.

Whereas, the liberalism of the Democrats bases its administrative operations on an officially unannounced state of emergency (fascism) for dissident forces, the authoritarianism of the Republicans merely does the task of proclaiming aloud that state of emergency. Trump, for example, did nothing more than the aggressive declaration of a preexisting fascist formation through the creation of alliances with different social sectors - neo-confederates, declassed lumpenproletariat, socio-economically destabilized petty bourgeois and a historically privileged segment of white proletariat facing the specter of downward mobility.

Glen Ford, executive editor of Black Agenda Report, writes,

“the corporate Democrats…are the most dangerous because so few people conceive of them as fascists, despite their abject subservience to corporate dictatorship, the carceral state, and endless warfare.”

With the election of Biden, the “inconspicuous” fascism of Democrats has re-gained power, promising to return America back to its “natural” conditions of dehumanization: low-intensity, oligarchy-controlled democracy for whites; guns, prisons, murder and war for blacks. In a situation like this, it is of utmost importance that we comprehend the true nature of fascism in America.

Black Power in China: Mao’s Support for African American “Racial Struggle as Class Struggle”

By Ruodi Duan

Republished from Fairbanks Center.

With funding from the Fairbank Center this past summer [2017], I visited four archival and document centers in greater China: the Beijing and Shanghai Municipal Archives, the Guangdong Provincial Archives, and the University Services Center at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Through official state memos and event proceedings, my aim was to reach a more nuanced understanding of Third World internationalism as performed and construed in local, post-1949 Chinese contexts.

My earlier research of Chinese newspapers and other periodicals from the 1960s and early 1970s suggested that — contrary to Frank Dikötter’s argument — racial difference in Maoist China did not merely become subsumed under class categorization: it crystallized and defined it. As my research develops, however, I am beginning to see a more complex reality of rhetoric and action during the era.

The archival sources I examined this summer, for example, indicate that even as the Chinese state — in print, culture, and through performed acts of solidarity — fleshed out the dynamics of racial hierarchy within the U.S. and presented itself as a champion of anti-imperialism and racial nationalism, it ultimately threw its weight behind a strategy of “race struggle is class struggle.” In effect, the People’s Republic publicly acknowledged and denunciated the salience of race to world politics while attempting to harness that insight to a broader campaign for global socialism. The achievement of global socialism would therefore be the sole and inevitable path towards dissolving racial inequities.

The annotated itinerary of African American leftist leader Robert F. Williams’ 1964 trip to China most tellingly sheds light upon this dynamic; Chinese party officials kept detailed tabs on Williams’ “ideological progress,” remarking that a previous visit had first opened his mind to the correct notion that “[white] racial nationalism cannot be countered with [black] racial nationalism.”

“Proletariat of the world, unite,” propaganda poster by Chen Yanning, Lin Yong, Wu Qizhong, and Yang Xiaoming, 1968

At the Shanghai archives, the 144 pages of microfilm on a 1964 all-city conference to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Chairman Mao’s “Statement Supporting Black Americans in Their Just Struggle against Racial Discrimination”— featuring drafts of speeches from worker, student, and women leaders — also proved illuminating. This motley collection of speakers drew explicit parallels between Chinese historical experiences of semi-colonialism and contemporary black American movements; they decried race-based discrimination and lauded national liberation movements but nonetheless, frequently harkened back to Mao’s dictum that “racial struggle is fundamentally a matter of class struggle.”

This may not be as paradoxical as it might initially seem. Indeed, it was practical for China’s internationalist strategy to espouse deeply sensitive readings of racism in world affairs and history while advocating non-racial solutions. The inferences to racial semi-colonialism in pre-revolutionary China as a condition comparable to contemporary black America only heightened the desirability and efficacy of a certain political trajectory: working-class revolution as the antidote to the abuses of racial capitalism. It is precisely the yoke of racial oppression that would spur African Americans to take dominant roles in the anti-capitalist, anti-American campaign. The success of such an effort would allow for race to disappear in the U.S., just as it purportedly had in China. In effect, black nationalism would be refashioned into a weapon of international class struggle.

Robert F. Williams meeting Mao Zedong in 1964.

The Chinese endeavor to cultivate political alliance with the African American left was meticulous, targeted, and effective. In Inner Mongolia, Williams expressed his amazement as students and workers gathered to perform African American fight songs for him in factories and on the streets. At the National Minorities Institute in Beijing, he asked to be photographed with sacred Tibetan texts as testament that the Chinese way would continue to tolerate, if not honor, religious traditions. He and his wife made arrangements for their two children to study in China, and Robert carried on extensive political discussions with senior Chinese officials on the role of Cuba in the Sino-Soviet Split.

Members of the Black Panther Party hold up Mao’s “little red book.”

Huey P. Newton meeting with Premier Zhou Enlai in September 1971.

Moving forward, I plan to continue charting the depictions and functions of China in African American social movements for civil rights and Black Power, with sensitivity to the complexities and nuances within the Chinese receptions to black nationalism. This is a dynamic, ever-evolving story that roughly paralleled but did not absolutely correlate with either political currents within China (such as the Cultural Revolution) or African American civil movements. Teasing out these multi-faceted dimensions of black nationalism in China will expand our broader historical knowledge of racial nationalism as a force in the Cold War international arena, and especially of the civil rights movement as an event of truly global inspirations and consequences.

Ruodi Duan is a Ph.D. candidate in Harvard’s History Department researching race and ethnic studies in the Cold War, with a focus on Chinese depictions of African American social movements. This article received an “honorable mention” in the Fairbank Centers 2016 Travel Essay Competition.

The Rise and Fall of Trump and What It Means

(PHOTO CREDIT: Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

By Youssef Shawky Magdy

After Donald Trump won 2016 elections, many theorizations emerged about the rise of the right in the capitalist West. This was exacerbated by Boris Johnson's victory in Britain, and the vision became clear that there would be a tug of war between a US-British economic and political alliance against Europe under the leadership of Germany.  In addition to the rise of the right-wing movements in many European countries as Germany itself and France (some expected Marie Le Pen would win or that Le Pen will succeed Macron).  But what does the rise of the right mean basically?

Since the end of the nineteenth century, the period of competitive capitalism ended and capitalism has been entering the framework of monopoly capitalism, which was characterized by the close union of financial and industrial capital.  Lenin wrote about that stage, stressing its close connection with imperialism, and we still live in the highest stage of capitalism with the change of imperialism from a national situation to a globalized one.  The question here is when does "fascism" — or what can be called more broadly the "savior right" — rise?

The savior far right rises as a response to a comprehensive social crisis represented by an economic decline in the rate of capitalist profit that cannot be compensated for by "more foreign imperialism"(imperialism against others),  in addition to a political crisis represented by the dissolution of the ruling-class coalition and the collapse of its hegemony.  Besides the ideological crisis represented in the collapse of the principles and myths supporting the status quo. 

This is accompanied by an increase in the pace of progressive movements of a left-wing nature that offer popular and progressive solutions to the crisis, such as fair wages, a fair distribution of the surplus, and an increase in workers' power and authority within productive enterprises. Perhaps the solutions become more revolutionary that try to change the entire social system.

And when those progressive movements fail for subjective (strategic and tactical) and objective reasons, the fascist right rises up as the representative of the bourgeois class, which is in crisis.  So the right tries to fix the situation in favor of monopoly capitalism, but in a populist fashion.  So, the crisis is emptied of its content and the process of displacement is installed, which projects the problem to any demographic or cultural phenomenon, such as projecting the crisis on immigrants, for example.  The right represents the middle class but in a deceitful manner.

And now, after we knew the conditions and aspects of the savior right, are these conditions and appearances fulfilled in the current capitalist West?

Of course, the capitalist West has been going through an economic crisis since the 1990s, and the Iraq war was a temporary attempt to alleviate the crisis, but the opposite happened.  The goal of securing the oil wells was achieved, but the return was serious economic and political losses.  The crisis reached a dangerous stage in 2008, and with Covid-19 crisis, the severity of the crisis increased in several situations. The profit rate reached very low rates.

Regarding the political crisis, the United States has been suffering since the Iraq war from a decline in its hegemony over the world and the consumption of exorbitant resources in its wars, which has led to Trump's tendency to reduce those interventions and limit the intervention only to very necessary situations such as threatening to intervene in Venezuela or Iran.  In Western countries themselves, liberal democratic governmentality suffers from a deep problem represented in the vulgarization of the meaning of democracy and its focus on the representative type only.  The public’s distrust of that governmentality has been increasing.

Regarding the ideological crisis, liberal democratic values ​​are proving their failure day after day, from their forced application on the third world countries within the framework of pushing them towards economic openness (which is failing for various reasons, the most important of which is that these projects are completely unpopular) to the failure of that values in the West to achieve the desired happiness.

In addition to the neoliberal ideology that fuels religious and ethnic conflicts.

As for the signs that indicate the rise of the right, we find that they are available to a large extent; for example, Trump tells us that he is “the president of the peasants and workers!” Right-wing nationalism is spreading again, in addition to anti-immigrantism.  Racist crimes are increasing day by day.

The question here is whom the rising right represents now?

In the pre-globalization era, the right "truly" represented big monopoly capitalism that was still associated with "nation-state". That link was largely structural. So we find that the laws and rules regulating the economy were related to the framework of the nation.  The economic production cycles were deeply related to the state’s economic cycles, such as the payment of salaries, allowances, official holidays..etc. In addition, industrial capitalism prevailed, not financial capitalism.  The first, of course, needs an organization and a specific context in which to work.  In one word, capitalism was capitalist "statism". Consequently, when fascism escalated, it rose in a context that made it easier for it to perform its rescue tasks, and the statism turned into hyper-statism. The bailout has come in a national context to represent monopoly capital of a national character.

But in our time, the era of globalization, capital divorced from the national context; the globalized economic cycle, in all its complexities, has separated from the national context and Financial capital prevailed.  In fact, the crisis of global monopoly capitalism needs a solution of the same size and level of complexity, that is, it needs a global solution.

The savior right cannot provide solutions but national solutions, and thus its representation in that era is limited to capital, which is not so large as to leave the context of the nation-state.  In general, there is a conflict with those small capitalist strata, and the globalization project led by big capitalism, which seizes and controls the market and has relatively little production costs.  The protectionist measures (of all kinds) promoted by the right contradict the globalization project.

Even if an extremist right-wing project succeeds in a western country, it will be overthrown by the global system, as happened in the Second World War as When the right fails to manage the crisis, it turns to violence that is forcefully defeated.

This is how we should understand Trump's rise and fall.  The rise was a response to the crisis but an inadequate response. The new US administration is more homogenous with the world order.  Therefore, it will participate in the global solution to the crisis.

Biden's victory and the defeat of Trump have not signified the success of any progressive coalition, as some liberals think.

Some believed that Trump's rise would result in a counter-left movement, and that did happen with the rise of Bernie Sanders, but that movement was defeated. Ultimately Biden does the same job as Trump, but in a more understanding and rational way.

The Revolutionary Potential of Hope and Utopia

By Yanis Iqbal

We live in disconcerting times. The wealth of USA’s 643 billionaires has soared by 29% since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. On 13 August, 2020, the top twelve US billionaires had surpassed a combined wealth of $1 trillion. This year, the world’s 500 richest people have grown their fortunes by $871 billion, a 15% increase. All this while, the misery of the oppressed people has been increasing.  Due to the Coronavirus-caused intensification of income inequalities, an additional 132 million people will go hungry than previously predicted this year. Moreover, by the end of 2020 12,000 people per day could die from hunger linked to COVID-19, potentially more than will die from the disease itself. Brutally indifferent to the hunger of the oppressed masses, the transnational capitalist class has instead opted to maximize its profit. Between January and July 2020, eight of the biggest food and drink companies paid out $18 billion to shareholders - ten times more than has been requested in the UN COVID-19 appeal to stop people going hungry. While looking at the present-day conjuncture, one can’t help but remember Karl Marx’s incisive description of capitalism: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.”

The progressive deterioration of socio-economic conditions has created a situation which is objectively revolutionary. By forcing the subalterns into a state of semi-starvation and perpetual precarity, the ruling class is producing a chain of circumstances whose ultimate result will be the aggravation of capitalism’s protracted crisis. In order to understand the objective damage done to capitalism through the hyper-exploitation of the lower classes, the phenomenon of income squeeze can be briefly studied. Reduction of the working class’s income leads to a crisis of over-production since the purchasing power of the workers is not able to keep up with the pace of production. Consequently, the lack of money on the part of the working class results in a decrease in aggregate demand since the ratio of consumption to income is higher for wage earners than for those living off the surplus. Demand-reducing effects arising from the consumption side reduce output, capacity utilization and lower investment over time, further exacerbating the initial crisis of neoliberal capitalism.

Need for a New Narrative

Objective conditions in-themselves, however, don’t possess the capacity to bring about a revolution. To take an example, capitalism has temporarily and unsustainably fixed the crisis of overproduction-under-consumption through credit expansion and debt-financed spending. The fact that capitalism has continued to patch up its contradictions - in however an instable way - proves that objective conditions are inadequate for replacing capitalism. Therefore, objective conditions need the presence of another major element to produce the prerequisites of a revolution.

Proper objective conditions need to cohesively combine with subjective conditions to bring forth a revolution. Subjective conditions refer to the attainment of class consciousness by the proletariat and the consequent construction of hegemony. Class consciousness and the construction of hegemony together constitute the subjective dimension of a revolution through which bourgeoisie ideological apparatuses are subverted. Presently, the Left is primarily waging a battle on the subjective plane in order to build counter-hegemonic bases of resistance and refine the embryonic consciousness of the oppressed masses. While doing this task, it has encountered the hegemonic force of right-wing populism which is culturally re-defining the status of the subalterns and utilizing emotively expressive symbolic methods to over-power the ideological efforts of the Left. In order to institute the hegemony of socialist forces in the civil society, new cultural strategies need to be devised which can combat the influence of the ascendant Right.

Right-wing populism denotes a politico-cultural force capable of emotionally expressing the discontent of the subaltern classes with neoliberal globalization and simultaneously consolidating the power of capitalism. To do this, the Right uses a variety of tactics. It initiates a personalized politics of muscular leaders; divides society into ethnically polarized groups; and uses extra-institutional street violence and mobilizations to infuse politics with raw emotions. All these political methods share a common feature: they aim at aestheticizing politics. In his seminal essay “The Work Of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin, a German Marxist, had lucidly explained the relation between aesthetics and politics while talking about fascism: “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property.”

Right-wing populism’s emotionally energetic and politically persuasive practices are able to symbolically soothe the psychological wounds of neoliberalism. The Right’s visceral strategies stand in contrast to the emotionally dry politics of the Left. In its singular pursuit of emphasizing the economic defects of capitalism, socialist politics has renounced the effective use of varying emotions. While pointing out the contradictions of capitalism and focusing on economic issues, socialists tend to forget that the human being is incomplete, unfulfilled and laden with unrealized potentials which are the motor of human activity. Since humans are unfinished, they take recourse to repositories of subjective support comprising of emotions and ethics.

Bertolt Brecht, a communist and one of the most influential playwrights of the 20th century, had famously said: “Food comes first and then morality”. Today’s Left has misinterpreted and dogmatically followed this dictum and forgotten the dialectical unity in which food and morality co-exist. A lack of dialectical thinking on this issue has led leftists to believe that a person can exist without the presence of vivid emotions. Refuting this point, Ernst Bloch, a famous Marxist philosopher, had stated: “Human beings do not live by bread alone, particularly when they have none.” By not unifying the scientific critique of capitalism with the power of emotions, the Left has allowed the subalterns to be swindled by the expressive politics of right-wing populism which symbolically re-activates unfulfilled pasts and unrealized futures.

To counter-act the hegemony of right-wing populism, a new narrative of hope needs to be built which can soak the critique of capitalism in emotions, affections and feelings. Bloch had theorized this synthesis of critique and emotions in his magnum opus “Principle of Hope” where he made a distinction between two dominant strains of Marxism: cold stream and warm stream. The cold stream is concerned with the scientific critique of capitalism and the unmasking of mystifying ideologies. The warm-stream is concerned with a utopian revolutionary imagination which utilizes the power of emotions to produce a commitment to emancipation.

Both cold stream and warm stream should operate in a dialectical unity and the ruthless critique of capitalism should always be warmed up in the fire of emotions and affects, a fire that turns “reasons to act into imperatives to act.” As soon as both the streams are unified, a new knowledge structure is produced wherein reason speaks through the heart and guides the latter. The dialectical unification of heart and reason can be completed through the introduction of hope and utopia which produce a captivating vision of a desirable alternative, rooted in anger at the injustices of the world in which we live and infused with confidence about human possibilities.

Hope and Utopia

Utopia is omnipresent in capitalism. It is concentrated in works of mass culture and the bourgeoisie political system which many Marxists tend to flatly dismiss as concerned with “false consciousness” and thus, “manipulative”. Instead of such a uni-dimensional critique, a nuanced analysis of politico-cultural artifacts reveals that they are explicitly utopian. Fairy tales, films, theater and jokes not only mystify the consciousness of an individual but also express in abstract and idealist fashion the potentialities for a better future. On the political level, the bourgeoisie concept of citizenship not only blocks the emergence of class identities but also functions as a vision of a classless society where everyone would be politically and economically equal. A nuanced ideology critique, therefore, “is not merely unmasking…but is also uncovering and discovery: revelations of unrealized dreams, lost possibilities, abortive hopes - that can be resurrected and enlivened and realized in our current situation.”

The omnipresence of utopias in capitalism means that the oppressed classes have been silently struggling for a better world. Socio-cultural and political utopias are imperfect yearnings for what is more fully developed in Marxism and socialism. Leftists have to work with this contradictory subaltern consciousness which contains within itself the seeds of communism. By refining the nascent consciousness of the subalterns, leftist activists can form the utopia of communism. This form of constructing hegemony works with the pre-existing thought-systems to sharpen its edges and subvert it from within.  A letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge dated 1843 explicitly supports this method of constructing hegemony: “Our motto must therefore be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but through the analysis of mystical consciousness which is still unclear to itself. It will then become apparent that the world has long possessed the dream of a matter, of which it must only possess the consciousness in order to possess it in reality. It will become apparent that it is not a question of a great thought dash between past and future, but of the carrying-through of the thoughts of the past.”

The formation of a communist utopia is inevitably accompanied by the institution of hope as an important axis of struggle. A communist utopia anticipates a new future and rejects the existing state of affairs. Correspondingly, to maintain a conviction in the new future and keep on struggling against the status quo, hope needs to be firmly established as the fluid which constantly flows throughout the matrix of the communist utopia. Hope in a communist utopia is not synonymous with naïve optimism. If that was case, hope would merely become another form of voluntarism. In contrast to voluntarism, hope in a communist utopia is intertwined with the knowledge of material conditions and reaches out for a new global future while taking full account of all the pressures towards a civilizational collapse. Consequently, hope denotes a terrain of constant striving where the communist activists are familiar with the indeterminacy of their class struggle which has not yet been defeated but likewise has not yet won. In spite of this indeterminacy, communist militants continue to maintain a commitment to emancipation and derive hope from the immense power they posses. Their power emanates from a fundamental flaw at the heart of any system of domination: the dependence of the dominator on the dominated. Recognizing this fact, subaltern classes believe that they have the capability to challenge capitalism and steer historical processes in the direction of communism.

When communist utopia and hope are used as the cultural tools of a revolution, a resilient environment of social sensitivity and emotional energy is produced. In this environment, the rhythms of revolution are composed of a critique of capitalism and a forward-looking, hope-infused conceptualization of a communist society. By highlighting the obscenity of capital accumulation through a scientific critique of the existing system, rage, fury and indignation are generated among the masses. John Holloway, a Marxist sociologist, powerfully expresses the sentiment of “refusal” which is created as a result of fury and indignation: “We are the fury of a new world pushing through the foul obscenity of the old. Our fury is the fury of refusal, of stifled creation, of indignation. Who are these people, the politicians and bankers who think they can treat us like objects, who think they can destroy the world and smile as they do it? They are no more than the servants of money, the vile and vicious defenders of a dying system. How dare they try to take our lives away from us, how dare they treat us like that? We refuse.”

The loud refusal of capitalism is accompanied by the soft glow of revolutionary hope which moulds the anger of the masses into a communist utopia. With the help of this communist utopia, subaltern classes are suffused with the echoes of emancipation and act on the basis of what Marx had designated as “the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a debased, enslaved, neglected and contemptible being.” The act of overthrowing capitalism, therefore, becomes ethically grounded and rooted in the everyday emotions of subaltern people.

In the contemporary period, a re-invigorated leftist strategy – combining emotions and scientific critique – is indispensably needed as the Right intensifies its cultural techniques and effectively aestheticizes politics to satisfy the demands of the oppressed classes.  Today, more than ever, we need the presence of revolutionary hope and a well-built communist utopia capable of emotionally articulating the repressed desires and existential needs of the masses. A poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet of the Russian Revolution, beautifully expresses the revolutionary imagination which is needed to revitalize the global Left:

“We will smash the old world
wildly
we will thunder
a new myth over the world.
We will trample the fence
of time beneath our feet.
We will make a musical scale
of the rainbow.

Roses and dreams
Debased by poets
will unfold
in a new light
for the delight of our eyes
the eyes of big children.
We will invent new roses
roses of capitals with petals of squares”

Capitalist Immiseration, the Trump/Biden Effect, and the Fascist Tide

By Colin Jenkins

Things under Trump were not good for most of us. Same can be said for Obama and the Bushs, Clinton and Reagan, and so on. Things under Biden will not be good for most of us. Why? Because capitalism is not designed to be good for most of us. We are its commodities. Our lives are bought, sold, used, abused, disregarded, and discarded when no longer needed. We are not only alienated “appendages” of productive machinery, as Marx once brilliantly noted, but we are all-encompassing conduits for the upward flow of profit. Our labor, our existence, our lives, our actions, every move we make are all geared in a way to direct money to a minority class that sits at the top – the capitalists. This has never been more evident than with the advent of social media, where even our basic social interactions with one another are now monetized for the benefit of tech industry executives and their shareholders.

In the current era of neoliberalism, globalization, financialization, and automation, our lives have only become more expendable. Our labor is not needed as much anymore. Machines are filling that void. A fully globalized labor pool has, once and for all, put the international proletariat on the same track. We are now all in a race to the bottom. This isn’t to say the global South no longer falls victim to colonialism and imperialism (because it still does), but rather that a fully globalized economy has now set the former industrialized working classes in the imperial core on the same path as the super-exploited working classes of the global South. It is only a matter of time before this total immersion is realized. The combination of a broadening labor pool and rapid increase in technology has made machines (Marx’s “constant capital”) more prevalent and, in turn, human labor (Marx’s “variable capital”) obsolete in many industries. In a humane system, this would be something to celebrate, as people would be increasingly liberated from tasks that can be done by machines, thus freeing us up to spend more time with our families, communities, and to explore our creative and productive capacities away from capitalist coercion. Unfortunately, in an inhumane system like capitalism, which recognizes us as nothing more than commodities, it leaves us in a state of desperation – as “appendages” desperately seeking productive machinery to attach ourselves to so that we can properly serve our capitalist overlords.

Many of us are aware of the Oxfam reports that have come out over the past decade, especially those which highlight global inequality. A glance at their yearly analyses shows us the disastrous effects of a global capitalist system that has run its course, and in doing so has gone from the “predatory phase of human development,” as Thorstein Veblen once referred to it, to a seemingly full-blown cannibalistic stage of human regression:

• In 2010, the 388 richest individuals in the world owned more wealth than half of the entire human population on Earth.

• By 2015, this number was reduced to only 62 individuals.[1]

• In 2018, it was the 42 richest individuals.

• In 2019, it was down to only 26 individuals who own more wealth than 3.8 billion people.[2]

These numbers paint a damning picture, but do not necessarily illustrate the most important point: that Marx’s theory of immiseration is being realized. In other words, at a closer look, we can see the claim that “capitalism has lifted people out of poverty” is simply not true. Rather, as inequality has risen due to unfathomable amounts of wealth being funneled to the top, the lives of billions of people worldwide have worsened. Proponents of capitalism would like us to believe this is not a zero-sum game, or even worse that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” but in an era dominated by fiat currency, where wealth is represented by mere numbers in a computer program, created arbitrarily by capitalist governments, it is the wealthiest individuals who determine the value of that currency. And when a handful of individual capitalists command wealth in the hundreds of billions, it is clear that the 4.2 billion members of the global proletariat who must survive on less than $7.40 a day exist in a state of extreme poverty. In true zero-sum fashion, as more wealth has concentrated at the top, more poverty has developed among the bottom. In fact, between 1980 and 2015, the number of people living in this state of poverty increased by one billion.[3] And this does not begin to assess the new realities of the working classes within the imperial core, such as the United States, which have been artificially buoyed by unsustainable credit and debt schemes for the past three decades, all while real wages have stagnated, living-wage jobs have plummeted, and costs of living have skyrocketed. It is only a matter of time before this entire house of cards, which has been constructed and maintained to keep capitalism and extreme wealth inequality in place, comes crumbling down. This fragile arrangement is being tested like never before, as 40 million Americans are facing eviction, food pantries are being strained, and anywhere from a third to a half of working people in the US cannot pay their bills. The capitalist class knows their system is on the brink — not because of the pandemic but more precisely due to its historical trajectory and limitations — and are now tasked with maintaining their cushy positions at the top in the aftermath. In other words, as capitalism comes to its inevitable conclusion, they prefer a controlled demolition.

Governments, politicians, and international agencies have been put in place during the post-WW II era to maintain the global capitalist system and force it on peoples everywhere, whether through resource extraction or by opening new markets. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, capital has run roughshod over the world. Now, as we move toward the middle of the 21st century, it has run its course.  In the US, Presidents, Senators, Congresspeople, Supreme Court justices, politicians, and technocrats have one primary purpose in the system: to maintain the status quo by serving capital. Or, as James Madison once said, “to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority.” In these times, this means stomping anticipated unrest. It means overseeing this process of immiseration and degradation, and ensuring it takes place in an orderly way. Tangible examples of this are the US government (via the Federal Reserve) giving capitalist institutions upwards of twenty trillion dollars under the guise of “quantitative easing” and “stimuli” over the past decade, while at the same time pushing austerity measures, militarizing domestic police forces, and brutalizing working-class folks in the streets. Joe Biden has spent his life serving capital with this blueprint. He is a known commodity to capitalists and has served them well. And, as expected, he has already begun stacking his administration with corporate lackeys who have dedicated their lives to serving power by making the rich richer and the poor poorer (because the latter is required for the former). 

As bad as Trump was, especially regarding his rhetoric that emboldened millions of white supremacists nationwide, he was a bit of a wildcard to the capitalist ruling class (despite being a member of it). He was driven primarily by ego and has spent his entire life on the other end of this relationship between capital and the state, feeding politicians from both parties to serve his interests. He was unpredictable. He got into pissing matches with anyone and everyone, bucked military advisers, challenged media, and kept people guessing. He has no ideology, no belief system, no substantial opinions on anything. He loves himself, his money, his power, and anyone who loves him back; and he has learned over the course of his uber-privileged life (which was literally handed to him on a silver platter) that manipulation is the key to all of this. If there's one skill that he has, it's the ability to persuade others without really saying much. So, he built up a loyal following, especially among the petty bourgeoisie, a sector of society that has historically served as the embryo for fascism. In the US, this demographic is dominated by middle-aged white men who similarly had privileged lives handed to them upon birth. Granted, many have used this privilege to actually work their ways to increased financial success (unlike Trump, who has never had to work), but also many who are feeling the increased pressures being brought down on them from the same era that has catalyzed Trump’s rise – the neoliberal, globalized, late stage of capitalism, which has created unprecedented instabilities throughout the socioeconomic spectrum, especially in regards to race and class inequities. Trump spoke to these people as a last line of defense for that “great white America” in their heads. However, he did not instill the same amount of trust in the bourgeoisie. So, while the transition from capitalism to fascism is already here in many respects, the capitalist class is still not fully prepared to cement the move. To them, Trump was both ahead of the game and too loose to oversee the final transition. That — with the help of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Democrats — will come in the relatively near future, as a more polished version of Trump waits in the wings to accept the torch in this perpetual, right-wing slide of lesser-evilism that has dominated bourgeois politics for the past four decades.

Thus, the focus on Trump as some sort of aberration has always been dangerous. Because he was not created in a vacuum. He was created through four decades of neoliberalism – which has been characterized most importantly by a fusion of corporate governance, the very ingredient that Mussolini once referred to as a prerequisite to fascism – corporatism. This is the final stage of capitalism, and it is upon us. Both political parties are facilitators of this transition, with Democrats serving as a center-right buffer to obstruct any significant formations of socialism from the left, and Republicans as the forerunners of this fascist realization. Like any process, it is happening gradually, with mistakes, mishaps, regenerations, improvements, and steadying mechanisms. Both parties interplay in this process, learning from one another (often unknowingly), giving and taking in a reciprocal unity that represents capital and their class interests, which must be guaranteed a place at the table when the transition is fully realized. This takes time. And unseating Trump, with all of his liabilities, was part of this process. A Biden-Harris administration will bring more stability to the transition, allowing the capitalist class time to regroup and steady the ship, and allowing the army of petty-bourgeois white supremacists time to foment in the shadows, patiently awaiting the new and improved Trump to follow. The next Trump will be more grounded in ideology, more strategic, more under the control of the capitalist class as it continues to perfect corporate governance. And with Biden and the Democrats running interference for their far-right counterparts, by obstructing and repressing socialist movements from below, the transition will continue. Because the only two possible outcomes from capitalism are socialism or fascism, and the capitalist class will do everything in its power to avoid the former, thus embracing the latter.

The fact that a record number of Americans turned out for this latest presidential election is concerning because it suggests that not enough people understand the path we are currently set upon is a one-way street. We can not and will not be steered in a safe direction, no matter which politicians or presidents we choose. And while a few credible arguments can still be made for participating in bourgeois elections, especially within certain localities, this collective delusion that places a premium on voting remains a formidable obstruction to systemic change. Quite simply, the change we need will not come from voting. If anything, our continued faith in a system that was designed to fail us only delays our collective liberation. The fact that wealthy people, billion-dollar corporations, entertainers, athletes, mass media, and politicians themselves go out of their way to push massive “get-out-and-vote” marketing campaigns on us should give pause to anyone. This delusion benefits them. And it harms us. It will take a critical mass of proletarians to take a stand and push for systemic change. This means confronting the capitalist power structure, its immense wealth, and formidable death squads head on. This will require a significant increase in class consciousness, which in turn will lead to wholesale divestment from bourgeois politics, elections, and all politicians from the two capitalist parties, even those described as “progressive.” Shedding this delusion is crucial. And we are running out of time.

Notes

[1] January 18th, 2016. An Economy for the 1%. Oxfam. Boston, Massachusetts: Oxfam America. (https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/fileattachments/bp210-economy-one-percent-tax-havens-180116-summ-en_0.pdf).

[2] Elliot, Larry. January 20th, 2019. “World’s 26 richest people own as much as poorest 50%, says Oxfam.” The Guardian, March 5th.

[3] Hickel, Jason. 2015. “Could you live on $1.90 a day? That’s the international poverty line.” The Guardian, March 5th

A Brutal History: Slave Patrols and Building a Racist System with Political Power

By Kaity Baril

In the US, the modern context of ruthless policing or oppressive social control originated as far back as the 1790s. The Charleston City Watch and Guard controlled the movement of the slave population at the time. The Guard was armed with swords and pistols, and it imposed a nine o’clock curfew for Black residents of the city. White slave owners wanted to prevent uprisings and revolts. Patrols closely monitored those in captivity, especially when they were working outside of the sight or the control of the enslaver. 

The creation of the first publicly funded police force, in Boston, was in the 1830s. By the 1890s, every major city in the United States had a police presence, born from racist, slave patrols in the era of slavery and relied on through  Black Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era. 

Now, rather than upholding slavery, cops enforce laws and policies similarly meant to control the lives and movement of Black people. The late 1960s and early 1970s was a period of enormous social turmoil that raised the possibility of revolution. All fundamental institutions of society—the government, the “free” market, the military and war, the police, the nuclear family, white supremacy and others—were challenged. The elite, white, ruling class responded to these direct challenges to their power with Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Crime,” followed by Nixon’s “War on Drugs,” which were jumping off points for subsequent administrations to maintain their preferred social order. The “War on Drugs,” renewed with vigor by Ronald Reagan, still rages, and the U.S. has had the highest incarceration rate in the world since at least 2010. The increase of law enforcement in schools creates a “school to prison pipeline,” in which out-of-school suspensions, expulsions, and school-based arrests are increasingly used to deal with student misbehavior, especially for minor incidents, and huge numbers of children and youth are pushed out of school and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Not surprisingly, children of color (as well as children with disabilities and children from other vulnerable populations) are disproportionately targeted with these punitive measures.

During the 1980s, the ideology of “zero tolerance” school discipline originates from the “get tough on drugs and crime” policies of that era. This was also the dawn of mandatory minimum sentencing laws — fixed sentences for individuals convicted of a drug crime, with no judicial leniency allowed.  More than 1.6 million people are arrested, prosecuted, incarcerated, placed under criminal justice supervision, and/or deported each year on a drug law violation. “Three-strikes” laws, now in place in 28 states after first appearing in 1994, require anyone previously convicted of two or more violent crimes or serious felonies to receive a life sentence upon a third felony conviction,, regardless of the circumstances or, as in California, sometimes even the severity of the offense (e.g. felony petty theft).  

The Clinton Administration’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 was the largest crime bill in the history of the country. It provided 100,000 new police officers, $9.7 billion in funding for prisons, and $6.1 billion in funding for prevention programs.

The “War on Terror,” following the September 11, 2001 attacks, was a catalyst for the use of military grade weapons on protestors, most conspicuously in Ferguson in 2014, following the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown. So began the Black Lives Matter movement. 

Cops are Tools of Class Oppression and Mass Incarceration

For decades, starting in 1966, school districts across the country employed the “Officer Friendly” program that brought cops into local Elementary classrooms. Their goal was to indoctrinate children with the belief that the police are an indispensable part of society, who not only uphold the law but protect them. Perhaps this is because the police were established to protect the interests of the wealthy. Racial violence has always been a part of the mission to protect private, crooked institutions.

The institutions that the State has endowed with the most direct power over people’s lives, and a disproportionate share of tax dollars, are the police, prisons, courts, and the military. These enact forms of legalized punishment and repression under the guise of neutrality by being “bound to laws.” In reality, the laws primarily serve one class: the wealthy. Cops are the primary line of defense for a small fraction of the U.S. population – a handful of private corporate owners. A clear example of this is the role police played in the housing crisis. 

The number of empty, unsellable homes far exceeds the number of homeless. Based on currently available numbers, there are about 31 vacant housing units for every homeless person in the U.S. If policing served the people, cops would have arrested the bankers and the white collar criminals who made enormous profits by manipulating the housing market, even after their schemes created a massive global recession in 2008, and a spike in homelessness. Cops would be helping to seize homes to end, not create, homelessness. Yet evictions continue on a daily basis.

Who does policing target? Police are typically deployed to criminalize poverty, concentrating their efforts on criminalizing those with dark skin, forcing millions of people – primarily people of color, people with mental illness, and those in poverty – into the prison system, depriving them of voting and employment rights, and thereby preserving privileged access to housing, jobs, land, credit, and education for whites. Police are used to break strikes and assault picket lines, where workers are struggling for basic human rights and better conditions. Protests and uprisings during the Black Lives Matter movement have resulted in the use of military crowd control techniques. The political aim of the police is seemingly to silence the demonstrators and curtail their constitutional right to free speech and freedom of assembly, especially Black, Brown, Indigenous folks, and communities of color.

The Violent Military Industrial Complex Leaks into the U.S. Police State

The Military Industrial Complex is directly connected to policing and the Prison Industrial Complex in this country. American policing has become unnecessarily and dangerously militarized, in large part through federal programs that have armed state and local law enforcement agencies with the weapons and tactics of war, with almost no public discussion or oversight. The U.S. already acts as the police force of the world, enforcing authority through drone wars, proxy battles, and meddling. Black liberation is a global struggle, and there is a link between racial oppression internationally and domestically. A militarized police is only equipped to escalate situations.

Throughout US history, the police (including federal policing agencies like the FBI) have attacked and undermined social justice organizations and efforts, at home and abroad, through various forms of surveillance, infiltration, sabotage, and assassination. The political function of the police destroys any form of revolution, so it’s no surprise that in the 10 years of anti-establishment social unrest between 1965 and 1975, the number of police officers grew by roughly 40 percent nationally. In 1974, $15 billion was spent on criminal justice, 57 percent going directly to police expenditures4. With this increase of spending, the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO “neutralized” political dissidents and threats, like the Black Panther Party, through subterfuge and extreme violence. In league with local police units, the FBI declared war on radicals and groups from nationally oppressed communities. Then, the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams were first formed in Los Angeles in 1968. Fifty years later, the US still holds these political prisoners captive, like Mumia Abu-Jamal. The Free Them All Campaign continues to advocate for their release, even as the police continue to use these tactics against protestors today

Using federal funds, state and local law enforcement agencies have amassed military arsenals to wage the failed “War on Drugs,” disproportionately in communities of color. Aggressive enforcement of this mandate from decades ago has lost its public mandate, as 67 percent of Americans think the government should focus more on treatment than on policing and prosecuting drug users. Aggressive drug arrests and prosecution has impacted millions of lives , disproportionately in communities of color, though drug use rates are quite similar across race and class. Law enforcement agencies’ routine use of heavily armed SWAT teams to search people’s homes for drugs is the same hyper-aggressive form of domestic policing that killed Breonna Taylor.  

The militarization of American policing is evident in police officer training, which encourages them to adopt a “warrior” mentality and view the people they are supposed to serve as enemies. It’s also evident in the equipment they use, such as battering rams, flashbang grenades, and APCs. The 1033 Program transferred surplus military equipment to civilian police departments. Only 45 days after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Congress effortlessly passed the Patriot Act , which George W. Bush signed less than a month after the United States invaded Afghanistan, as part of the “War on Terror”. It broadly expanded law enforcement powers to search, surveil, investigate and indefinitely detain people. Among its effects, the Patriot Act has been used to expand the racist war on drugs. 

Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security, created in 2002 to coordinate government intelligence gathering in order to improve counterterrorism efforts,  has set up centers with the FBI and local police that have been used to spy on protest movements, from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter. More than 7,000 people were arrested during the Occupy movement over the course of just a few months. These arrests, alongside incidents of police brutality, were intended to stamp out a movement that took aim at the face of class oppression from the rich, elite of Wall Street.

Since May 2020, the uprising spurred by the police lynching of George Floyd, has intensified the militarized mobilization of law enforcement. The police forces are equipped in full riot gear and use weapons designed for war. Black and Brown activists in the United States, especially during the Ferguson protests, have described domestic police departments as “occupying forces,” much like those in Afghanistan or Yemen or Palestine. In fact, allowing Israeli forces and U.S. participants to learn from each others’ violent practices and tactics results in the violation of the human rights of Black and Palestinian people, but there are efforts to end this through a campaign called, “End the Deadly Exchange.” Our police, at the behest of local government, wield not only military arms, but what they’ve learned from the military’s formal joint training, tactics (both street combat and psychological operations), and other means of  suppression. At least 200 cities in the U.S. had imposed curfews by early June, while more than 31 states and Washington, D.C. activated over 75,000 National Guard personnel, arresting over 10,000 people. Yet widespread police brutality and the mobilization of military law enforcement tactics, like kidnapping protestors, have only furthered massive civil unrest. 

The Case for Revolutionary Optimism: A Path towards Abolition

So, how do we fight an institution doing what it has been designed to do, one that’s protected by government leaders and employment contracts, and is therefore incapable of reform?  The problems of punitive, racist policing are cultural — ingrained in our society — and cannot be solved by merely identifying a couple murderers or “bad apples,” if you will. 

Given how corrosive policing has historically been and continues to be, it shouldn’t be surprising that with alternatives, our society could flourish without cops. Policing could, and should, be defunded and abolished.

A society that prioritizes human needs ahead of profit means communities that have sufficient housing, food, health care workers, prisoner re-entry services, and community practices that hold all of its members accountable for any harm and enact restorative justice. Mutual aid, rather than one-time giving events, would allow us to share our skills collectively and all contribute. 

It may seem implausible or unreachable. It requires divesting from police, prisons, and the military, and instead, investing in communities of color and supporting the public policies that encourage, not inhibit, family-sustaining wages, job development, education, and the equitable distribution of resources. We cannot accept corporate, private interests to define our way of living. The ruling, capitalist class is in power, controls our government policies, and we must not capitulate to the world they want us to live in. It is one with an illegal slave system that is the Prison Industrial Complex. A society with an abolitionist as a focus will not be built on the violence of a capitalist state designed to defend property and capital, but one in which the people are empowered to provide for each other. 

We must build class unity and solidarity through organizing within our communities to protect one another. There are few tools within the system to fight the State’s abuse politically and legally, but we can ask for the immediate release of inmates in this country’s tortuous prison system; the end of three strikes and overly harsh sentencing guidelines; changing the 13th Amendment to eliminate the clauses that allow for slavery and “involuntary servitude” for people who are convicted; the end of qualified immunity for officers; the repeal of federal programs that send military equipment to local police; the end of “Broken Windows” policing tactics, including stop-and-frisk and other police harassment tactics; the prohibition of no-knock entry; and laws that make it harder for the police to obstruct free speech activity. 

While these are only reforms, we can also strengthen community accountability models that critique punitive systems that maintain repressive, colonial ideology.  Together, we can connect movements, groups, and individuals to transgress the boundaries of institutions. These alternatives must include continuing critiques to improve social conditions, as well as provide accessible, sustainable levels of resources that are consistent with anti-capitalism, anti-racism, and anti-colonialism principles. This is how we can transform and empower communities towards justice and abolition.

Black American Apathy and Internationalism

By Erica Caines

Republished from Hood Communist.

“…There is no “American dilemma” because Black people in this country form a colony, and it is not in the interest of the colonial power to liberate them. Black people are legal citizens of the United States with, for the most part, the same legal rights as other citizens. Yet they stand as colonial subjects concerning the white society. Thus institutional racism has another name: colonialism.”

-Black Power: Politics of Liberation.

For those organizing African people towards Revolutionary Pan-African Socialism, a Joe Biden presidency is not a win. It’s a detriment. Understanding neoliberalism breeds fascism would mean that it is a mistake for anyone alleged to be of a “radical politic” to celebrate Biden becoming the president-elect and, by extension, celebrating his running mate, Kamala Harris. Unfortunately, many Africans in the US have strapped themselves in willingly for a presidency that will attempt to be even more hawkish than the Barack Obama administration in every warmongering, drone-dropping, coup-backing, militarized-policing way.

Much of the issues around internationalism stems from a communal lack of political maturity, which helps one analyze their material conditions as they are. Furthermore, a lack of political education obstructs international solidarity with Africans and oppressed people globally. African people in the US make up a colonized nation not dissimilar to colonized nations always under attack by the strongarm of US imperialism and their western allies.

The US military and its 400 bases worldwide serve as occupiers in the same way the (overt) police state does in our neighborhoods. What is the difference between the US African Command (AFRICOM), which is said to “combat the War on Terror,” and militarized policing units like Operation Relentless Pursuit and Operation LeGend, both used in multiple cities across the country to “combat crime and domestic terrorism”? What is the difference between the murderous Israeli occupation of Palestine and the occupation of a colonized neighborhood in the US using IDF trained police units?

There is no difference.

The primary contradictions of imperialism have been distorted by dishonest conversations around “anti- Blackness,” as well as a new sense of American ‘pride’ found in Black Americans that assists in framing all geopolitical issues from an ‘us vs. them’ lens. Global and domestic imperialism are counterparts. African people’s allegiance to the US, and military enlistment, has always existed as a contradiction within the community. While it may be true historically African people were the least favorable to war, Obama’s presidency set the stage for a bold backing of US imperialism by way of patriotism from ‘Black America.’

Although most unite under hating Trump, many earnestly believe the US is worth saving. Mass “get out the vote” mobilizations across the country ensued to “stop full-blown fascism” by asserting a false sense of power in electing a majority unfavorable democratic candidate. The mainstream media announcement of Biden as the 46th president has caused a mass reactionary hysteria and sighs “of relief” that things may return to normal.

As the celebrations have been going on, despite Donald Trump not formally conceding, Biden’s team has been busy, too. Names for potential cabinet members who range from the center to the right have been circling the internet. Jim Clyburn and other democratic centrist moderates are currently vowing to protect the country from going “socialist” by pushing back against the messaging of “defund the police.” 

Benjamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi have congratulated the presumed  president-elect and madame vice president-elect, promising even closer ties and relations. Both Netanyahu and Modi are fascists, in their own right, and part of a more extensive global expansion of fascist leadership, yet neither Biden nor Harris find an issue in continuing the existing relationships despite the very real murderous actions of both men in their prospective countries against Muslims. Coincidentally, alleged crimes against Muslims is the same propaganda use to be actively aggressive towards China and President Xi Jinping that Biden intends to continue with through the Indo-Pacific Command. 

Reactionary Internationalism: Fascists Narendra Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu congratulate Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on their presumed electoral victory.

With rumors of Dick Cheney potentially being an advisor to Biden on foreign policy, a majority conservative Supreme Court and a majority GOP senate would be a convenient cover for Biden’s actual geopolitics and non-plan for the poor working-class. Biden has built a career in the US government on criminalizing Africans and other colonized people in the US with the racialized “War on Drugs” through policy measures like the crime bill (domestically) and Plan Colombia (globally).

The “open-letter left,” which includes characters like Noam Chomsky and Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK, has decided, as a predominately white and economically stable coalition of signatures, to ignore historical materialism for the sake of ousting Trump. They have agreed that any policies that will place colonized people the most at risk, here and abroad, would be worth it so long as it’s not policies signed off on by Trump. Just like during the Obama era, the US left is proving itself useless in not only helping the masses comprehend imperialism but fighting against it by not voting for the man who has never seen a war he disapproved.

“Imperialism, which is the highest stage of capitalism, will continue to flourish in different forms as long as conditions permit it.  Though its end is certain, it can only come about under pressure of nationalist awakening and an alliance of progressive forces which hasten its end and destroy its conditions of existence.”  

- Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism

‘Black American’ apathy through American exceptionalism creates that “sigh of relief” people express now. The indifference to wars and occupation is the result of a rupture in the ability for African people to make the connections between a man promising more policing as a campaign strategy during the height of mass uprisings against the police to his aggressive rhetoric towards nations like Venezuela, China, Iran, etc. Nor the US’ role in establishing brutal neocolonial leadership in the Global South and on the Continent.

It is becoming more and more evident that despite the strengthening calls to ‘Free Palestine’ and more recent actions to ‘End Sars,’ internationalism will again become a backburner issue. How will Africans in the US combat this and re-establish the anti-war internationalism politics that cemented the Black Radical Tradition and politics of the past?

First, we must ruthlessly attack the aversion to political education. The lack of understanding of the Third World struggles adjacent to the struggles of Africans in the US has resulted in liberal reactionary responses to anti-imperialism. Imperialism can not continue to be a vacuum issue by Africans living within the empire of the US. This isolated framing of the world prevents the practice of revolutionary internationalism – international solidarity against the same white supremacist forces that oppress Africans domestically. We are witnessing the frantic reactionary calls to “let people enjoy things” for the sake of identity reductionism.

A #BlackLivesMatter solidarity action in occupied Palestine drawing connections between the murders of George Floyd and autistic Palestinian youth, Eyad Al-Hallaq

Online discourse centered around anti-imperialism is met with push back primarily because people do not possess the political maturity to comprehend the ways imperialism materially affects their everyday lives and the importance of internationalism. Once Africans in the US understand themselves as colonized people on stolen land, there will be a more precise analysis of how liberation is sought and gained through tactics not tied to revolutionary internationalism – not to continuously voting for one’s demise.

For colonized people within the imperial core, there should be no allegiance to America.

"Forcible Hindrances": On the Structural Violence of Capitalism and How People Respond To It

By Yanis Iqbal

In his 1845 book “The Condition of the Working Class in England”, Friedrich Engels wrote:

“When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another, such injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessities of life, places them in conditions in which they cannot live,—forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence—knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual.”

Engel’s abovementioned remarks remain as pertinent today as they were when he wrote them. The Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report 2020 (PSPR2020) estimates that Covid-19 will likely push between 88 and 115 million people into extreme poverty i.e. those living under $1.90 a day. It is important to remember that the International Poverty Line (IPL) of $1.90 a day is ridiculously low — in 2011 in the US, $1.90 would have just been sufficient to buy a cup of coffee. Therefore, the magnitude of the process of existential erosion unleashed by the pandemic is likely greater than those being predicted by various financial institutions. The impoverishment of the majority is not solely due to the negative effects of the pandemic. It is closely linked to the brutal logic of neoliberalism capitalism which has instituted austerity-ravaged health infrastructures, precarized the everyday lives of workers through “flexible” jobs and detached itself from productive economic sectors through frenzied financialization. While innumerable people get mired in the vortex of poverty and endless suffering, billionaires are amassing unprecedented amounts of wealth, creating lagoons of affluence and privilege surrounded by oceans of mass misery.

What is happening today because of the fusion of epidemiological and economic crises is merely a stark manifestation of the endless murders being committed by capitalism for hundreds of years. Through accelerated capital accumulation and expanded exploitation, capitalism has cold-bloodedly reduced the state of existence to a process of rotting whose final destination is a harrowing death. This “structural violence” of capitalism is not an inadvertent byproduct of a perfectly functioning economic regime; it is an inseparable internal mechanism with the help of which capital satisfies its insatiable reproductive needs. Under neoliberalism, capital’s economic exigencies have displayed themselves in ever more acute forms like permanent unemployment, job insecurity, cuts in public spending and dispossession as a socially ravaged system desperately attempts to stave off economic crises. 

When confronted by the massive structural violence of capitalism, the subalterns inevitably search for alternative ways of living which would shield them from the ruination wreaked by the existing system. This conscious experience of the objective oppressiveness of capitalism leads to social conflicts between classes generated by antagonistic relations of production. These instances of class struggle act as subjective interventions in the structural conflict between forces and relations of production. As the forces of production develop, the relations of production, which once had facilitated their expansion, slowly began to impede further development. Through the direct action of subaltern subjects, the contradiction between the centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor is finally solved, leading to a revolution.

Understanding Bourgeois Democracy

While a revolution need not necessarily be violent, historical circumstances under capitalism have operated in such a way as to render violence the only viable method to overthrow the ruling class. Even after the establishment of parliamentary institutions and a “democratic” state, revolutionary violence has continued to act as a last resort for those who are the victims of globalization and necropolitical neoliberalism. In an 1878 article written by Karl Marx on the Anti-Socialist Law in Germany, we can find rough explanations regarding the conflictual presence of revolutionary violence and bourgeois democracy:

“An historical development can remain “peaceful” only so long as no forcible hindrances are placed in its path by those holding power in society at the time…the peaceful movement could become a "violent" one on encountering the resistance of those interested in the old state of affairs…In fact the government tries to crush by force development which is inimical to it although legally invulnerable.”

The “forcible hindrances” are constituted by the state under capitalism. The capitalist state is not an autonomous entity working outside the logic of accumulation; it a highly complex terrain of class struggle embodying the conflict between accumulation and legitimacy. On the one hand, the political power of state is incapable of independently organizing production — property is private and the productive sectors of the economy are in the hands of private companies to whose activities the state has to continually react. In so far as the state is unable to construct a self-supporting productive base and depends on revenues from surplus extraction, its capacities are indirectly determined through private productivity and profitability. This means that politicians and officials have to strengthen capital accumulation to be able to exist within the state. On the other hand, the ruling dispensation brought to power through electoral means has to maintain hegemony within the citizenry if it does not want a crisis of legitimacy to destabilize its tenure.

The conflict between accumulation and legitimacy is maintained and balanced by using coercive power against those political forces which raise issues that cannot be structurally accommodated within the limits of capitalistic democracy that only allows for insufficient and gradual changes. When the subalterns become cognizant of this structural limitation of bourgeois democracy, they are compelled to utilize revolutionary violence to regain agency and put forth their demands in a visible way.

In the current conjuncture, the internal disjunctions of bourgeois democracy are increasingly coming under stress under as the subalterns articulate new demands which are opposed to the murderous mechanisms of capitalism. In the US, for example, the George Floyd uprising — one of the largest movement in US history — highlighted the racist veins of capitalism and explicitly foregrounded the structural violence of capitalism. Since the American rebellion expressed demands which transcended the delimited area of bourgeois democracy, it was met with heavy state repression. Apart from the US, sustained protests have also occurred in Colombia where the concentrated anger of the subalterns against neoliberalism coalesced around the issue of police brutality — identified as one of the constitutive components of a wider picture of injustice. Like the Black rebellion in America, the Colombian protests, too, were violently subdued through the sheer use of force.

Revolutionary Violence: The Ethical Dimension

As class struggle continues to intensify across the world, a theory of revolutionary violence which is able to build the foundations of politico-ethical hegemony for the Left will likely form. If a coherent theory of revolutionary violence is formed, leftist forces worldwide will get access to a tool which is capable of breaking the cycle of parliamentary violence and consolidating a new constellation of social forces. The application of revolutionary violence against class enemies has always acted as an addendum to politics and has historically been invariably interwoven with and subordinated to careful efforts aimed at forming ideological bases of counter-hegemony within the womb of capitalist society.

In the last instance, revolutionary ideology acts as the primary factor behind the overthrow of capitalism. To use the words of Fidel Castro,

“Just ideas have greater power than all the reactionary forces put together… ideas are and always will be the most important weapon of all…There is no weapon more powerful than a profound conviction and clear idea of what must be done. It is with these kinds of weapons, which do not require enormous sums of money, but only the capacity to create and transmit just ideas and values, that our people will be increasingly armed. The world will be conquered by ideas, not by force”.

While giving a speech to the Hanover Congress of the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1899, Rosa Luxemburg had remarked that the proponents of revolution “are the last to take up violent means, the last to wish a brutal, violent revolution on ourselves…such matters do not depend on us, they depend on our opponents”. Violence, therefore, has been a tactical necessity forced upon the proletariat by counter-revolutionary offensives throughout modern history. And while violence has certainly been one functional aspect of revolution, it is also a mode of struggle having ethical ramifications i.e. it is itself constitutive of the new humans that emerge from the revolutionary process. In so far that revolutionary violence has an ethical dimension, a moral framework has often been provided for its exercise. The basic structure of this moral framework can be outlined through two points.

Firstly, revolutionary violence has been performed strictly in keeping with the moral goal of destroying capitalism and correspondingly cleansing the world of structural violence and gratuitous deaths. This means that violence itself is ethically molded by the goal of revolution and is exercised to prevent further violence. In the concluding sentences of his essay “Tactics and Ethics”, Georg Lukacs had expressed this point eloquently: “only he who acknowledges unflinchingly and without any reservations that murder is under no circumstances to be sanctioned can commit the murderous deed that is truly - and tragically - moral.” From this statement, it is quite clear that revolutionary violence can be carried out only when individuals realize that the brutalization and degradation of human life under capitalism has to end. When revolutionary violence is conceived as such, it becomes an endeavor to replace moral narcissism —preservation of the purity of one’s soul at the expense of humanity as a whole — with a collectivist struggle for the destruction of a social order which constantly violates the right to life of an individual.

Secondly, since revolutionary violence has been guided and regulated by the moral ideals of socialism, it also has an internal code of ethics which balances the ends (socialism) with the means (violence). The unification of means and ends has been necessary in so far that revolutionary violence has a direct bearing on the subjectivities of the individuals produced through class struggle. Furthermore, if violence is not mediated by ethical codes consonant with the goals of socialism, the process of struggle is emptied of its political meaning and deforms the goal itself. As Herbert Marcuse has said:

“No matter how rationally one may justify revolutionary means in terms of the demonstrable chance of obtaining freedom and happiness for future generations, and thereby justify violating existing rights and liberties and life itself, there are forms of violence and suppression which no revolutionary situation can justify because they negate the very end for which the revolution is a means. Such are arbitrary violence, cruelty, and indiscriminate terror.”

In order to understand the historical, ethical edifice of revolutionary violence, we need to differentiate between specific types of destruction. In Albert Camus’ play “The Just Assassins”, a leading character, Dora, asserts: “even in destruction there is a right way and a wrong way – and there are limits”. The right way is constituted by prefigurative methods of violence which act as embryonic expressions of the future. Through these prefigurative practices, a politico-ethical fabric of hegemony is woven which allows the subalterns to struggle in the present and at the same time experience the socialist future. Slavoj Zizek accurately outlines the contours of such a prefigurative struggle:

“Revolution is experienced not as a hardship over which the future happiness and freedom already cast their shadow – in it, we are already free even as we fight for freedom; we are already happy even as we fight for happiness, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Revolution is…its own ontological proof, an immediate index of its own truth.”

According to Norman Geras, ethical practices within the field of revolutionary violence comprise primarily of (1) the distinction between direct agents of class oppression and everybody else and (2) a notion of minimum force: “one's weapons must be capable of stopping enemy combatants, which in the given circumstances involves killing them; but they should not, beyond this, seek gratuitously to accentuate suffering.” Camilo Guevara — Che Guevara’s son — reiterates similar points and writes that “revolutionaries, even if they are being massacred sadistically, should invoke the use of force only when absolutely necessary, and even then, should never accompany it with cruelty. This idea is directly proportional to the condition of being a revolutionary”. When these kinds of ethical arrangements are integrated into revolutionary violence, a form of class struggle is produced which contributes towards the development of a subjectively enriching process of socialist humanization.

With the exacerbation of material conditions and rising subaltern resistance, the legitimacy of bourgeois democracy is constantly coming under threat. This tense period of disequilibrium is similar to past times, when revolution through the politically circumscribed use of violence has been one among the many tactics of revolution. The rationale behind the tactical use of violence was explained by Marx as thus: “the governments are opposed to us: we must answer them with all the means that are at our disposal…We must declare to the governments: we will proceed against you peaceably where it is possible and by force of arms when it may be necessary.” While revolutionary violence is underway in many parts of the world, it has not typically made its way into the imperial core. However, as capitalism’s contradictions come to a head, we are seeing more and more people flooding the streets, even within the US. Though revolutionary violence has historically functioned as a tactic, it also has moral aspects which need to be ethically structured to construct socialist hegemony among the subaltern classes. In the contemporary period, if it is to come about organically in response to capitalism’s structural violence, it can be visceral in nature (and thus misplaced at times) or ethically-informed, and thus utilized as a part of a broader organized movement to replace capitalism with socialism.

Paulo Freire and Popular Struggle in South Africa

By Zamalotshwa Sefatsa

Republished from The Tricontinental.

Paulo Freire was a radical educator from Brazil whose work was tied to struggles for human freedom and dignity. He constantly experimented with and thought about how to connect learning and teaching among the poor and oppressed with the radical transformation of society. For Freire, this meant struggling for a world where everyone counts equally and is treated with dignity–a world in which economic and political power are radically democratised.

This dossier, which draws on interviews with participants in a range of struggles in South Africa, shows that Freire’s ideas have been an important influence in the Black Consciousness Movement, the trade union movement, and some of the organisations associated with the United Democratic Front (UDF). His ideas remain influential today, from trade unions to grassroots struggles.

From Brazil to Africa

Freire was born in Recife, a city in north eastern Brazil, in 1921. After his university studies, he became a schoolteacher and began to develop an interest in radical approaches to education, including projects to teach adult literacy. Freire saw the role of community and worker organisations and struggles as vital in the formation of the critical conscience that is required to overcome the domination and dependence of the oppressed.

In Freire’s early works, he wrote that the fundamental goal of radical pedagogy is to develop a critical conscience in individuals. The method of dialogical engagement that he developed from the 1950s onwards became an emancipatory and progressive alternative to the dominant school programmes sponsored by the U.S. government through agencies such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an organisation that is notorious for backing coups against elected governments in Latin America and elsewhere.

In 1964, the Brazilian military seized control of the country with the backing of the United States and imposed a brutal right-wing dictatorship. Freire was among the many people arrested by the dictatorship. After seventy days in prison, he was released and forced to leave the country.

During his years in exile, he continued to carry out his practical work in other countries in Latin America, such as Chile, where he wrote his most important book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and developed adult literacy programmes. He also had significant contact with African freedom struggles. During this time, he visited Zambia, Tanzania, Guinea-Bissau, Sao Tome and Principe, Angola, and Cape Verde. He met with The People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo), and the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). He developed adult literacy programmes in Guinea-Bissau, Tanzania, and Angola.

Freire read extensively about colonisation and its effects on the people, including the writings of African revolutionary intellectuals like Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral. He felt a special connection to Africa and wrote that ‘[a]s a man from north-eastern Brazil, I was somewhat culturally tied to Africa, particularly to those countries that were unfortunate enough to be colonised by Portugal’.

Freire was also deeply critical of the capitalist system, which exploits and dominates the bodies and minds of the oppressed, and is a major force generating the material and ideological conditions that shape the domination of consciousness. This domination–which, of course, is entwined with racism and sexism–can seep into our being, our actions, and the way that we see the world. Freire argued that learning to fight to overcome domination is difficult but essential political work that requires constant learning.

Freire’s emphasis on the importance of dialogue as the basis for critical consciousness, and his stress on the essential role of popular struggle and organisation, both became important tools in grassroots struggles in Brazil during the 1970s and 1980s. In this period in Latin America in general, and Brazil in particular, popular education became synonymous with popular movements that used it as their main educational strategy, uniting political practice and learning processes.

In 1980, Freire returned to Brazil, where he became active in the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores). When the party took control of São Paulo (one of the largest cities in the world) in 1988, he was appointed as the city’s secretary of education. He remained in this position until 1991. He died in 1997.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

In 1968, whilst he was in exile in Chile, Freire wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed. During that year, youth revolts took place around the world. In France, where the revolt was most intense, many young people began to look at the intellectual work produced in the armed struggles against French colonialism in Vietnam and Algeria —including Fanon’s work on the Algerian revolution. This turn to Fanon influenced Freire too. In 1987, Freire recalled that ‘[a] young man who was in Santiago on a political task gave me the book The Wretched of the Earth. I was writing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and the book was almost finished when I read Fanon. I had to rewrite the book’. Freire was deeply influenced by Fanon’s radical humanism, his thinking about the role of university-trained intellectuals in popular struggles, and his warnings about how an elite among the oppressed could become new oppressors.

Freire would write many books in the years to come, but it is Pedagogy of the Oppressed that quickly became and has remained a revolutionary classic. This book has had a powerful impact on popular movements around the world and remains the best introduction to Freire’s ideas.

In a talk given in Durban in 1988, Neville Alexander, who was an important radical intellectual in many fields, including education, explained that: ‘[f]or Freire, the decisive difference between animals and human beings consisted in the ability of the latter to reflect directly on their activity. This ability is, for him, the unique attribute of human consciousness and self-conscious existence and is what makes it possible for people to change their situation’. In other words, for Freire, all people are capable of thought, and critical thought, undertaken collectively, is the basis of organisation and struggle.

Freire argued that oppression dehumanises everyone–both the oppressed and the oppressor–and that emancipatory forms of politics–the strivings of the oppressed for freedom and justice–are, ultimately, a demand ‘for the affirmation of men and women as persons’. He would write that ‘[t]his, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well’.

But, for Freire, there is a danger that the person who is oppressed and wants to be free can come to believe that, to be free, she or he must become like the oppressor: ‘Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors’.(1) Freire believed that political education during a struggle is important in order to help prevent the elites among the oppressed from becoming new oppressors, warning that ‘[w]hen education is not liberatory, the dream of the oppressed is to be the oppressor’.

For Freire, the point of freedom is to allow everyone to be fully human; the struggle for freedom must end all oppression. It must be for the liberation of everyone, everywhere, and not just for some. But, he said, there are many different reasons why the oppressed do not always see this clearly. Sometimes the oppressed do not see that they are oppressed because they have been taught to believe that the way things are is ‘normal’ or is their fault. For example, they are taught to believe that they are poor because they do not have enough education, or that others are rich because they have worked harder. Sometimes, they are taught to blame something else (such as ‘the economy’) or someone else (such as ‘foreigners’) for their poverty.

True liberation must start by seeing clearly how things really are. For Freire, this is why radical and collective questioning, discussion, and learning are so important. He argued that, by thinking carefully and critically about how things really are (our actual lives and experiences), we can come to see oppression more accurately so that we can fight more effectively to end it.

The political work of encouraging critical thinking about our situation does not mean encouraging people to just criticise everything; it means always going beyond how things seem by constantly asking questions–especially by asking ‘why?’–to understand the root causes of why things are the way they are, especially things we feel strongly about. Asking questions allows people to draw on their own lived experience and thinking to find their own answers to the question of why they face situations of oppression or injustice. This is very different from traditional education that tries to fill the (apparently empty!) heads of the learners with knowledge that the powerful teacher thinks they need. Freire wrote that ‘[p]rojecting an absolute ignorance onto others [is] a characteristic of the ideology of oppression’. He called the model of education that assumes that the teacher has all the knowledge and the students have none the ‘banking’ concept of education and likened it to a teacher making deposits into an empty bank account. Freire wrote that:

The man or woman who proclaims devotion to the cause of liberation yet is unable to enter into communion with the people, whom he or she continues to regard as totally ignorant, is grievously self-deceived. The convert who approaches the people but feels alarm at each step they take, each doubt they express, and each suggestion they offer, and attempts to impose his ‘status,’ remains nostalgic towards his origins.

This is very different from many political education programmes organised by NGOs or small sectarian political groups which assume that the oppressed are ignorant and incapable of thought and that they will bring knowledge to the people. Freire argued that ‘[l]eaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organise the people–they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress’.

Freire also realised that people cannot change situations of oppression and injustice on their own. This means that the struggle for liberation must be collective. He suggested that what he called an ‘animator’ could help. An ‘animator’ may come from outside the life situation of the poor and oppressed but plays a role that helps to encourage the thinking and the life and strength of the people who are in that situation. An animator does not work to assert their own power over the oppressed. An animator works to create a community of inquiry in which everyone can contribute to developing knowledge, and the democratic power of the oppressed can be built. To do this effectively requires humility and love; it is crucial that an animator enters into the lives and world of the poor and oppressed and, in doing so, enters into a true dialogue as equals.

Freire wrote that:

[T]he more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.

In genuine dialogue, both the animator and the learners from among the oppressed bring something to this process. Through this dialogue, and through careful, collective, and critical reflection on lived experience, both the learners from among the oppressed and the animator come to be ‘conscientised’; in other words, they come to really understand the nature of oppression. But, for Freire, it is no good to just understand the world; ‘[i]t is necessary that the weakness of the powerless is transformed into a force capable of announcing justice’.

This action against oppression must always be tied together with careful thinking (reflection) on action, and what has happened as a result of action. Action and reflection are part of an ongoing cycle of transformation that Freire, following Karl Marx, called ‘praxis’.

The Importance of Freire’s Thought in South Africa

Paulo Freire was the key theoretician if you like. But we needed to bring Paulo Freire back from Brazil to the South African context. We knew nothing about Brazil of course except what we were reading. I don’t know of any similar text that we could have used in South Africa then as a way of understanding and engaging the South African context.

— Barney Pityana, a leading intellectual in the Black Consciousness Movement

Though Freire visited many countries in Africa, the apartheid state would not have allowed him to visit South Africa. However, he does discuss South Africa in his books and describes how South African anti-apartheid activists came to see him to talk about his work and what it meant in the South African context. Many of the organisations and movements involved in the anti-apartheid struggle used Freire’s thinking and methods.

The Black Consciousness Movement

Although the apartheid state banned Pedagogy of the Oppressed, underground copies circulated. By the early 1970s, Freire’s work was already being used within South Africa. Leslie Hadfield, an academic who has written about the use of Freire’s work by the Black Consciousness Movement, argues that the Pedagogy of the Oppressed first arrived in South Africa in the early 1970s via the University Christian Movement (UCM), which began to run Freire-inspired literacy projects. The UCM worked closely with the South African Students’ Organisation (Saso), which was founded in 1968 by Steve Biko, along with other figures like Barney Pityana and Aubrey Mokoape. Saso was the first of a series of organisations that, together, made up the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM).

Anne Hope, a Christian radical from Johannesburg and a member of the Grail, a Christian women’s organisation committed to ‘a world transformed in love and justice’, met Freire at Harvard University in Boston in 1969, and then again in Tanzania. After she returned to South Africa in 1971, Biko asked her to work with the Saso leadership for six months on Freire’s participatory methods. Biko and fourteen other activists were trained in Freirean methods in monthly workshops. Bennie Khoapa, a significant figure in the BCM, recalled that ‘Paulo Freire … made a lasting philosophical impression on Steve Biko’.

Between these workshops, the activists went out to do community-based research as part of a process of conscientisation. Barney Pityana remembers that:

Anne Hope would run what essentially was literacy training, but it was literacy training of a different kind because it was Paulo Freirean literacy training that was really taking human experience into the way of understanding concepts. It was drawing from everyday experience and understanding: what impacts it makes in the mind, the learning and understanding that they had.

For some of us, I suspect it was the first time that we came across Paulo Freire; for me it certainly was, but Steve, Steve Biko was a very diverse reading person, lots of things that Steve knew, we didn’t know. And so, in his reading he came across Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and began to apply it in his explanation of the oppressive system in South Africa.

Echoing Freire’s argument that it is only the oppressed who can liberate everyone, the BCM emphasised the importance of black people leading the struggle against apartheid. Freire had also stressed that, ‘[w]ithout a sense of identity, there can be no real struggle’. This, too, resonated with the BCM, which affirmed a proud and strong black identity against white supremacy.

The movement drew directly on Freire as it developed a constant process of critical reflection, part of an ongoing project of conscientisation. Aubrey Mokoape, who had a background in the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) and became an older mentor to the students who founded Saso, explains that the link between Black Consciousness and ‘conscientisation’ is clear:

The only way to overthrow this government is to get the mass of our people understanding what we want to do and owning the process, in other words, becoming conscious of their position in society, in other words … joining the dots, understanding that if you don’t have money to pay … for your child’s school fees, fees at medical school, you do not have adequate housing, you have poor transport, how those things all form a single continuum; that all those things are actually connected. They are embedded in the system, that your position in society is not isolated but it is systemic.

The Church

In 1972, Biko and Bokwe Mafuna (who had been part of the training in Freirean methods) were employed as field officers by Bennie Khoapa. Khoapa was the head of the South African Council of Churches (SACC) and the Christian Institute’s Black Community Projects (BCP) and had also been trained in Freirean methods. The BCP’s work was heavily influenced by Freire. Both the BCM and the Christian Churches in South Africa drew on liberation theology, a school of radical thought which Freire had both been influenced by and contributed to. Rubin Phillip, who was elected as deputy president of Saso in 1972, and went on to become an Anglican archbishop, explains that:

Paulo Freire is considered one of the founders of liberation theology. He was a Christian who lived his faith in a liberating way. Paulo placed the poor and oppressed at the centre of his method, which is important in the concept of the preferential option for the poor, a trademark of liberation theology.

In South Africa, ideas drawn from liberation theology were–together with the black liberation theology developed by James H. Cone in the United States–a powerful influence on various currents of struggle. Bishop Rubin recalls that:

The one thing I took away from our conversation was a need to be critical thinkers. … Liberation theologians allude that theology, like education, should be for liberation, not domestication. Religion made us subservient, has made us lazy to use our critical faculty and connect knowledge to our everyday reality. So, education for him is about …. a critical way of life and about connecting knowledge to how we live.

The Workers’ Movement

The Black Consciousness Movement included workers’ organisations like the Black Workers’ Project, a joint project between the BCP and Saso. The workers’ movement was also influenced by Freirean ideas through worker education projects that started in the 1970s. One of these was the Urban Training Programme (UTP), which used the Young Christian Workers’ See-Judge-Act methodology, which had influenced Freire’s own thinking and methodology. The UTP used this method to encourage workers to reflect on their everyday experiences, think about what they could do about their situation, and then act to change the world. Other worker education projects were started by left students in and around the National Union of South African Students (Nusas). Saso had split from Nusas in 1968 but, although largely white, Nusas was a consciously anti-apartheid organisation that was also influenced by Freire, primarily through members who were also part of the UCM.

During the 1970s, Wages Commissions were set up at the University of Natal, the University of the Witwatersrand, and the University of Cape Town. Using the resources of the universities and some progressive unions, the Commissions helped to set up structures that led to the formation of the Western Province Workers’ Advice Bureau (WPWAB) in Cape Town, the General Factory Workers’ Benefit Fund (GFWBF) in Durban, and the Industrial Aid Society (IAS) in Johannesburg. A number of left students supported these initiatives, as did some older trade unionists, such as Harriet Bolton in Durban. In Durban, Rick Turner, a radical academic whose teaching style was influenced by Freire, became an influential figure among a number of students. Turner was committed to a future rooted in participatory democracy and many of his students became committed activists.

David Hemson, a participant in this milieu, explains that:

Two particular minds were at work, one [Turner] in a wood and iron house in Bellair; and another [Biko] in the shadow of the reeking, rumbling Wentworth oil refinery in the Alan Taylor residence. Both would become close friends and both would die at the hands of the apartheid security apparatus after bursts of energetic writing and political engagement. Both were influenced by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and these ideas and concepts infused and were woven into their writings striving for freedom.

Omar Badsha was one of the students who was close to Turner and participated in setting up the Institute for Industrial Education (IIE). He recalls that:

Rick Turner was very interested in education, and like any intellectual we began reading, and one of the texts we read was Paulo Freire’s book that had just come out not so long ago at the time. And this book resonated with us in the sense that here were some valuable ideas about teaching and an affirmative way of teaching–taking into account the audience and how to relate with the audience.

In January 1973, workers across Durban went on strike, an event that is now seen as a major turning point in worker organisation and resistance to apartheid. Hemson recalls that:

Out of the dawn they streamed, from the barrack-like hostels of Coronation Bricks, the expansive textile mills of Pinetown, the municipal compounds, great factories, mills and plants and the lesser Five Roses tea processing plant. The downtrodden and exploited rose to their feet and hammered the bosses and their regime. Only in the group, the assembled pickets, the leaderless mass meetings of strikers, the gatherings of locked out workers did the individual expression have confidence. The solid order of apartheid cracked and new freedoms were born. New concepts took human form: the weaver became the shop steward, a mass organised overtook the unorganised, the textile trainer a dedicated trade unionist, the shy older man a reborn Congress veteran, a sweeper a defined general worker.

After the Durban Moment

The period in Durban before and during the 1973 strikes came to be known as the Durban Moment. With Biko and Turner as its two charismatic figures, this was a time of important political creativity that laid the foundations for much of the struggle to come.

But in March 1973, the state banned Biko and Turner, along with several BCM and Nusas leaders, including Rubin Phillip. Despite this, as unions were formed in the wake of the strikes, a number of university-trained intellectuals, often influenced by Freire, began working in and with the unions, which made rapid advances. In 1976, the Soweto revolt, which was directly influenced by Black Consciousness, opened a new chapter in the struggle and shifted the centre of contestation to Johannesburg.

Biko was murdered in police custody in 1977, after which the Black Consciousness organisations were banned. In the following year, Turner was assassinated.

In 1979, a number of unions were united into the Federation of South African Trade Unions (Fosatu), which was–in the spirit of the Durban Moment–strongly committed to democratic workers’ control in unions and on the shop floor, as well as the political empowerment of shop stewards.

In 1983, the United Democratic Front (UDF) was formed in Cape Town. It united community-based organisations across the country with a commitment to bottom-up democratic praxis in the present and a vision of a radically democratic future after apartheid. By the mid 1980s, millions of people were mobilised through the UDF and the trade union movement, which became federated through the ANC-aligned Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) in 1985.

Throughout this period, Freirean ideas absorbed and developed in the Durban Moment were often central to thinking about political education and praxis. Anne Hope and Sally Timmel wrote Training for Transformation, a three-volume workbook that aimed to apply Freire’s methods for developing radical praxis in the context of emancipatory struggles in Southern Africa. The first volume was published in Zimbabwe in 1984. It was swiftly banned in South Africa but was widely circulated underground. Training for Transformation was used in political education work in both the trade union movement and the community-based struggles that were linked together through the UDF.

Salim Vally, an activist and academic, recalls that ‘literacy groups of the 80s, some pre-school groups, worker education and people’s education movements were deeply influenced by Freire’. The South African Committee for Higher Education (Sached) also came to be strongly influenced by Freire. The Committee, first formed in 1959 in opposition to the apartheid state’s enforcement of segregation at universities, provided educational support to trade unions and community-based movements in the 1980s. Vally notes that ‘Neville Alexander always discussed Freire in Sached–he was the Cape Town director–and in other education circles he was involved in. John Samuels–the national director of Sached–met Freire in Geneva’.

From 1986, the idea of ‘people’s power’ became very important in popular struggles, but practices and understandings of what this meant varied widely. Some saw the people as a battering ram clearing the way for the ANC to return from exile and the underground and take power over society. Others thought that building democratic practices and structures in trade unions and community organisations marked the beginning of the work required to build a post-apartheid future in which participatory democracy would be deeply entrenched in ordinary life–in workplaces, communities, schools, universities, etc. This was what was meant by the trade union slogan ‘building tomorrow today’.

Though there were strong Freirean currents in this period, they were significantly weakened by the militarisation of politics in the late 1980s, and more so when the ban on the ANC was lifted in 1990. The return of the ANC from exile and the underground led to a deliberate demobilisation of community-based struggles and the direct subordination of the trade union movement to the authority of the ANC. The situation was not unlike that described by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth:

Today, the party’s mission is to deliver to the people the instructions which issue from the summit. There no longer exists the fruitful give-and-take from the bottom to the top and from the top to the bottom which creates and guarantees democracy in a party. Quite on the contrary, the party has made itself into a screen between the masses and the leaders.

Paulo Freire Today

Freirean ideas continued to thrive after apartheid in some of the fissures of the new order. For instance, in the early years of the democratic dispensation, the Workers’ College in Durban, a trade union education project, included some teachers who were committed to Freirean methods. Mabogo More, a philosopher with a background in the Black Consciousness Movement, was one of these teachers. He recalls that he first came to know about Freire as a student at The University of the North (also known as ‘Turfloop’) in the 1970s ‘through Saso’s concept of “conscientisation” used during formation winter schools organised by Saso. Later, S’bu Ndebele, a Turfloop librarian at the time, smuggled a copy of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which, together with Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, we surreptitiously read among ourselves as conscientised students’.

In 1994, More was able to attend a lecture by Freire at Harvard University in the United States. He says that ‘Freire’s lecture was fascinating and helped in modelling my teaching practice in line with the precepts articulated in Pedagogy of the Oppressed’.

Today, a number of organisations remain committed to Freirean methods, such as the Umtapo Centre in Durban. The Centre was started in Durban in 1986 as a response to the rise of political violence within black communities. It has roots in the Black Consciousness Movement and its work is explicitly based on Freire’s methodology.

Another organisation that uses Freire’s ideas is the Church Land Programme (CLP) in Pietermaritzburg, which has its roots in the liberation theology tradition and is closely linked to Bishop Rubin, Abahlali baseMjondolo, and a number of other grassroots organisations and struggles. CLP was established in 1996 in response to the land reform process taking place in South Africa and became an independent organisation in 1997. By the early 2000s, CLP realised that the struggle against apartheid had not led to an end to oppression, that the state’s land reform programme was not taking an emancipatory direction, and that its own work was not helping to end oppression. Therefore, CLP decided to incorporate Freire’s idea of animation and enter into solidarity with new struggles.

Zodwa Nsibande, an animator with CLP, says that:

In our engagements, we let people think because we do not want to take their agency. We ask probing questions to get people to think about their lived experiences. We embrace Paulo Freire’s thinking when he said that ‘problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming’. When we engage with communities using problem-posing methodologies, we seek to give them their power. Sibabuyisele isithunzi sabo, ngoba sikholwa ukuthi ngenkathi umcindezeli ecindezela ususa isthunzi somcindezelwa. Thina sibuyisela isithunzi somcindezelwa esisuswa yisihluku sokucindezelwa [We restore their dignity, for we believe that when the oppressor oppresses, he takes the dignity of the oppressed. We restore the dignity of the oppressed that is taken by the cruelty of oppression].

In recent years, connections to the Landless Workers’ Movement, or the Movimento Sem Terra (MST), in Brazil have reenergised the potency of Freire’s ideas in South Africa. Formed in 1984, the MST has mobilised millions of people and organised thousands of occupations of unproductive land. The organisation has built close relationships with the National Union of Metalworkers in South Africa (Numsa), the largest trade union in South Africa, and with Abahlali baseMjondolo, the country’s largest popular movement. This has meant that a number of activists from Numsa and Abahlali baseMjondolo have been able to participate in the programmes at the Florestan Fernandes National School (ENFF), the MST’s political education school.

There are direct connections between activists’ experiences at the ENFF and the establishment of political schools in South Africa, such as The Frantz Fanon Political School built and managed by Abahlali baseMjondolo on the eKhenana Land Occupation in Durban.

Vuyolwethu Toli, who is the Numsa JC Bez Regional Education Officer, explains that:

The schooling systems in South Africa and throughout the world use the banking method of education where there aren’t reciprocal or mutual learning processes. The teacher, or whoever is facilitating, positions themself as the dominant knowledge disseminator where they see themself as having a monopoly of wisdom. As comrades responsible for popular education in the trade union, we do not operate like this. We make sure there is collective knowledge production and that all sessions are informed by workers’ lived experiences. Our point of departure is that worker knowledge informs the content and not the other way around. We don’t believe in the banking method of education.

Freire’s ideas, first generated in Brazil, have influenced struggles all over the world. Almost fifty years after they began to influence intellectuals and movements in South Africa, they remain relevant and powerful. The work of conscientisation is a permanent commitment, a way of life. As Aubrey Mokoape said, ‘[c]onsciousness has no end. And consciousness has no real beginning’.

Acknowledgements

This dossier was researched and written by Zamalotshwa Sefatsa.

We would like to thank the following people for agreeing to be interviewed for this dossier:

Omar Badsha, Judy Favish, David Hemson, Aubrey Mokoape, Mabogo More, Zodwa Nsibande, David Ntseng, John Pampallis, Bishop Rubin Phillip, Barney Pityana, Patricia (Pat) Horn, Vuyolwethu Toli, Salim Vally, and S’bu Zikode.

We would also like to thank the following organisations for contributing to the research that informed this dossier:

Abahlali baseMjondolo, The Church Land Programme, Levante Popular da Juventude (‘Popular Youth Uprising’), The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, The Paulo Freire National School, and The Umtapo Centre.

We would also like to thank Anne Harley, whose pioneering work on Freire’s ideas in South Africa opened the door for much of the work done here, and who offered generous support to the production of this dossier.

Further Reading

Biko, Steve. I Write What I Like. Johannesburg: Raven Press. 1996.

Friedman, Steven. Building Tomorrow Today: African Workers in Trade Unions, 1970-1984. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.1987

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin. 1976.

Freire, Paulo. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin. 1993.

Freire, Paulo and Macedo, Donaldo. (1987). Literacy: Reading the Word and the World. Routledge. 1987.

Hadfield, Leslie. Liberation and Development: Black Consciousness Community Programs in South Africa. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. 1996

Macqueen, Ian. Black Consciousness and Progressive Movements under Apartheid. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008

Magaziner, Dan. The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968-1977. Johannesburg: Jacana. 2008

More, Mabogo. Philosophy, Identity and Liberation. Pretoria: HSRC Press. 2017.

Pityana, Barney; Ramphele, Mamphele; Mpumlwana, Malusi and Wilson, Lindy (Eds.) Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko & Black Consciousness. David Philip, Cape Town. 2006.

Turner, Rick. The Eye of the Needle: Towards Participatory Democracy in South Africa. Johannesburg. Ravan Press. 1980.

Notes

1. In reading Freire’s writings and his use of gendered language such as ‘men’ to mean ‘human’, which was still common in the late 1960s, we must undertake the intellectual exercise of entering into dialogue with his gendered forms of expression with the aim of critical reflection and developing emancipatory alternatives.

About The Tricontinental

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is an international, movement-driven institution that carries out empirically based research guided by political movements. We seek to bridge gaps in our knowledge about the political economy as well as social hierarchy that will facilitate the work of our political movements and involve ourselves in the “battle of ideas” to fight against bourgeois ideology that has swept through intellectual institutions from the academy to the media.

How the Poor Continue to Die

By Kevin Van Meter

Republished from The Institute for Anarchist Studies.

Humanity has entered a period “where every day people are dying among strangers.”[1]  

Daily life itself has become “strange” and isolating as social distancing and quarantine measures are being lifted, then reenacted.  Federal troops operating as secret police in an attempt to occupy American cities, are repelled by protestors and the populace.  News cycles shriek and squall with nearly every pontification from the political class as they continue to carry out their “sacred mission,” which in recent memory is accompanied by squealing ineptitude in regard to improving the actual conditions of life.  Or, maybe they are not inept.  Months ago, at the onset of the pandemic, pundits and politicians had already declared that testing, treatments, and vaccines would not be offered to everyone.    

A pervasive level of violence, of frivolous intrusions into the routine behaviors of people of color, of a cruel disgust directed toward unhoused and poor peoples, of an impulsive need to regulate the expressions of those outside the gender binary, of a paranoid animosity toward immigrants and “antifa” and the “other” is being expressed by a particular sector of the population.  This sector – overwhelmingly good Christians, white, and middle-class – have been expressing this violence to such an extent that everyday life has been saturated by it.  For us “others” it is omnipresent, for many “others” it has been this way for five hundred years.  Yet, the poor continue to die, often “among strangers.”                      

In 1929 George Orwell was down and out in Paris and witness to the goings-on at a hospital that served the poor.  Seventeen years later he drew on his initial observations along with scribbled notes to complete the article “How the Poor Die.”  These words, published during the aftermath of the second World War, deserve our full attention in this moment: “However great the kindness and the efficiency, in every hospital death there will be some cruel, squalid detail, something perhaps too small to be told but leaving terribly painful memories behind, arising out of the haste, the crowding, the impersonality of a place where every day people are dying among strangers.”[2]  Then, as now, the gallant efforts of medical personnel, front-line and essential workers are often performed with kindness and efficiency, and with haste.  Nonetheless, the poor died in 1929 and 1946 in the ways they have continued to die, have always died.  In hospitals amongst strangers and in the streets, shanty towns and derelict apartments, in asylums and prisons, reservations and Bantustans. And if at all possible, in these same places, amongst relations, chosen as well as blood.    

Currently the cruelty of COVID-19 is compounded not just by social isolation but the realization that those who will die from this disease will do so among strangers.  On ventilators, in isolation units, in nursing homes, without the comfort of loved ones or human touch.  If the projections are correct, even with the recommended medical and social interventions, the dead will overwhelm the living.  It is likely that you, the humble reader, will be called upon to bury the departed, deceased, dead.        

As the dead overwhelm the living, dead labor will attempt to overcome living labor. “Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour,” Karl Marx notoriously quipped, “and lives the more, and more labour it sucks.”[3]  What has become clear to large swaths of the populace, not just devotees to hundred and fifty year old texts, is that value and wealth in a capitalist society (the portion consumed in production and reproduction is dead labor) are produced only through the efforts and expended capacities of the working-class (which is living labor).  As Marx offered, “We mean by labour-power, or labour-capacity, the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being, capabilities which [they] set in motion whenever [they produce] a use-value of any kind.”[4]  And the great promise of Marx, of all revolutionaries, is that we will produce ‘goods and services’ useful to human beings in accordance with their needs and all of our abilities collectively.   

An economic system hell bent on endless growth has seemingly been replaced, possibly only temporarily, by shortsighted kleptocracy.  Extending well beyond the current administration, bourgeois society has embraced law breaking for themselves and harsh, hard-hearted punishment of the poor for minor property and drug “crimes.”  While this has always been, the contemporary American political class now flaunts its wrongdoings in full view.  With the endless accumulation of capital cast aside for the immediate acquisition of wealth, the imposition of work has become more malicious.  Front-line and essential workers and those in the service industry are being forced back to work at the threat of being destitute, with mass evictions looming.  The tiny deaths of exhaustion and daily injury have been replaced by the alternating certainty of death by starvation or death by pandemic.  Major retailers call them “heroes” as they take away their hazard pay.  And even school children, the sacrificial but essential workers of the future, are being sent back to their desks as home instruction and homework has not been sufficiently disciplinary.  All of this is evident with the return of a slogan, a capitalist maxim: Arbeit macht frei, or work will set you free. 

Pandemic and poverty is becoming plague and privation; those who are penniless will soon face famine. Without work there are no wages, without wages there are few ways to obtain the means of survival, the means of reproducing life itself.  Nevertheless, social reproduction is essential, and the work required – often unwaged, racialized, and gendered – is indispensable.  Since workers expending labor-power in the production process is how capitalism produces value, social reproduction is central to the capitalist mode of production.  As a result, the worksite where this is produced has become of key interest to the bourgeoisie.  Feminist scholar Silvia Federici noted this in the historical record: “The body, then, came to the foreground of social policies because it appeared not only as a beast inert to the stimuli of work, but also as the container of labor-power, a means of production, the primary work-machine.”[5]  The body as machine has been a central metaphor of our capitalist society, now the cogs are being discarded willy-nilly with automation and information computational processes that require fewer and fewer workers.  

Of the numerous realities the pandemic has uncovered, few are as stark as how front-line, essential, service industry workers are not just seen as replaceable but as expendable.  And many are out of work.  When a member of the working-class is without wages and the paltry handouts from the government vanish, reproduction of one’s biological functions and faculties are still required.  Working in front-line, essential, service industries is work as is seeking to obtain work in such sectors.  Working to reproduce one’s own capacities is work as is working without a wage to reproduce waged workers along with the “nonwaged, underwaged, not-yet waged, and no-longer waged,” to quote a contemporary feminist scholar.[6]  Hence, all of life has become work, with its simultaneous, and seemingly contradictory absence and total permeation.  Returning to Marx again:      

“the working day contains the full 24 hours, with the deduction of the few hours of rest without which labour-power is absolutely incapable of renewing it services.  Hence it is self-evident that the worker is nothing other than labour-power for the duration of [their] whole life, and that therefore all [their] disposable time is by nature and by right labour-time, to be devoted to the self-valorization of capital.”[7]  

Our whole lives have been subsumed by capitalism, and now, for far too many of our fellow human beings, death has become just as alienating.  

* * *

In collective, common, liberatory moments of ‘great kindness and efficiency,’ ‘amongst relations, chosen as well as blood,’ we are given a glimpse of “a paradise of unbroken solidarities.”[8]  However, the means of communication, mutual aid, and social relations required to build such a paradise are often destabilize by the very forces that should be constructing them.  

Another underling reality exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic is final confirmation that the Left in the United States has been historically defeated, the working-class decomposed.  Although generalized austerity, violent repression, mass incarceration, direct attacks on unions and community-based organizations, restructuring of everyday life toward neoliberal and individualistic ends, culture wars, drug wars, endless wars against the populace are partially to blame.  But the Left must take responsibility for its internal operational failures, nonsensical squabbles, unprincipled and self-servingly middle-class politics.  This has left working-class and poor people to their own defenses, with limited material resources, against the pandemic and unfolding crises.  In effect, the poor continue to die in part due to this ineptitude, purity politics, and too often defenses of middle-class ideals and irrelevant academic ideas.  

To define such a sector of the body politic would take many more words than can be allotted here.  Simply put, this includes those who are “practically minded” members of the Democratic Party establishment all the way leftward to include some of the newly articulated Democratic Socialist alternatives, along with much of organized labor, the non-profit sector, as well as do-gooders and providers of social services.  Where the formal Left begins and the bureaucrats, bourgeoisie, social workers, and middle managers of our misery end is unclear, as they are often indistinguishable and hence what that follows is imprecise.  Beyond the established Left there are ongoing mutual aid efforts, wildcat and rent strikes, and uprisings amongst everyday people, often led by young Black insurgents.  These radical, revolutionary, and daring, spontaneous but still organized, abolitionists, anti-capitalists, and commoners are outside of the formal body politic.

Defensive and self-serving reactions in the guise of “What about small landlords?” and “What about family owned businesses?” have erupted on the Left in response to calls for rent strikes, paid sick leave, hazard differentials, and a little workplace democracy with the same veracity as “What about good cops?” and “Don’t all lives matter?” on the right.  Universal demands for income, healthcare, and housing seemingly require an addendum that first we must distinguish between who are the deserving and who are the undeserving poor.  Then, typed into the social media fields of too many who know better: “I support unions but just not at my business or workplace,” “I support tenants’ rights but just not my tenants,” “I support Bernie but what about these horrible ‘__________.’”  While I am paraphrasing, we will get to those who fill these blanks shortly.  Since we have addressed how the middle-class Left and the bourgeoisie defends itself against the rabble informally, we must look at their formal practices.                 

Saving “establishments,” from restaurant chains to retail stores, “public infrastructure” from universities to the library and post office, “private associations” from business improvement districts and landlord lobbying groups to social service non-profits, as well as the facades of representative democracy and private property, are being managed by grinning neoliberal “little Eichmann’s.”  Or, possibly worse, those who wish they were.  Deep austerity measures have been instituted by and throughout these establishments, infrastructures, and associations while money flowing into them has been accumulated by bureaucracies impervious to worker or citizen demands.  

All of life has become work, and to manage this all of life has been infected by bureaucracy.  What is bureaucracy and why is it so pervasive?  Member of the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie, Claude Lefort, has an answer: “one overlooks the fact that in one and the same movement the bureaucracy establishes itself at the heart of social life and presents itself as an end, that it responds to a technical need and subordinates it to the imperative of power.”[9] Bureaucracies, even progressive and liberal ones, have sought to silence working-class voices: in social services they sought to silence those of unemployed people and welfare recipients, in trade unions expressions of working-class self-activity, political parties those of the masses, universities those of faculty and student shared governance, corporations those of workers initiatives and demands, healthcare those of the ill and infirm, landlords those of their tenants, the legal system and prisons those of prisoners, and then there are others.  At the moment you can hear bureaucrats mumbling out of the side of their mouths, a proverb: “we have effectively silenced them in life, how dare they not be silent in death.”              

Moreover, the desperate need to feel “right” and “moral” is cover for those who ignore structural inequalities and stark differentials of power that exist and are now amplified in our society.  Far worse, after five hundred years of struggle against capitalism and the state most of the Left is willfully ignorant how social change occurs.  Nearly immeasurable personal choices and consumerist acts – such as voting, buying local, eating vegan or organic, riding bikes, being sustainable or peaceful or mindful or, which is by far the worst, conscious – are held as the apex of political action.  Or, maybe by appealing to the “better natures” of bosses and landlords, billionaires and politicians or “speaking truth to power,” things will progress, improve, change.  Worst still, if our arguments are right and true, clear and concise, we will win in the free marketplace of ideas.  And finally, as a great comedic mind once offered, “rights are the last resort of a [person] with no argument” and the Left’s call for “rights” ignore how often they are suspended in times of crisis or have never existed for large swaths of the planet’s populace.  This should be absolutely apparent to anyone who has been on the streets of a supposedly liberal Pacific Northwest city over the past few weeks, or has simply been observing.  Now, that we have considered how the Left views how the actual lives and deaths of working-class and poor peoples as externalities in formal ways, the maliciousness of their informal practices should be noted too.  

A self-serving and moralistic politics has dominated the Left as of late, where faux outrage meant to condemn the personal lifestyles and decisions of the target while holding one’s own personal lifestyles and decisions as morally superior.  Meaning, the illusion of choice and free will results in a working-class bartender being scolded by their middle-class customer, who is in the midst of guzzling down another twenty-dollar cocktail, for taking a cheaper Uber / Lyft home after a twelve hour shift rather than the more expensive local cab company.  Notions of self-care, GoFundMe campaigns for medical bills, Buzzfeed articles and similar lists given as commandments – “20 Books You Must Read this Year,” “6 ways to be antiracist, because being ‘not racist’ isn’t enough” – are individual solutions, often impossible ones, to what are social problems.  These developments are often coupled with a crises of representation and measure along with the disappearance of class as an operating category.  ‘Interlocking oppressions’ and ‘identity’ were to augment and complement class as “new measures of oppression and inequality,” to use the apt words of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, rather than replace it.[10]  Or, in fact, it is the middle-class assumptions of the contemporary Left and radical forces that have placed various issues outside of, above, and primary to class because it allows the middle-class to claim legitimacy within a fundamentally unjust and undemocratic system at the expense of working-class and poor peoples.  It is as if the Left has forgotten that, “Immigrant issues, gender issues and antiracisms are working-class issues.”[11]  Nevertheless there are issues neighboring these too.              

Behind call outs, privilege politics, and reinvigorated essentialisms, one can hear the tired slogans: “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win!” and “Fight the People!”  According to various factions that splintered the Students for a Democratic Society in 1969, of which the Weather Underground is the most pernicious, the American war in Vietnam was bad, so the Vietcong was good; politically conscious radicals were good, white working-class people were bad.  Purges, purity tests, self-criticism, or better off self-flagellation, immediately followed such recitations.  

Not then, and certainty not now, have such measures resulted in strong liberatory movements much less substantive, material or otherwise, gains for oppressed and working-class people.  Nor have movements themselves found transformative ways to address internalized oppression and behaviors, even with the gallant efforts led by women and trans people of color.  After fifty-years of such politics, one would think with the clearly observable historic defeat of Left and radical forces with the rise of incipient fascism other avenues would be explored, other ideas rediscovered and developed, other strategies and tactics deployed.  

In the streets many revolutionaries now call forth “fire from heaven,” not out of revenge or resentment but for our very survival.  Emile Zola was not so forgiving in Germinal: “There he stood with arms raised like an inspired prophet of old, calling down the wrath of God upon the murderers, foretelling the age of justice and the coming extermination of the bourgeoisie by fire from heaven, since it has committed the foulest crime of all and caused the workers and the penniless of the world to be slain.”[12]  Though, what is to be done when those who “caused the workers and the penniless of the world to be slain” are not just the political class, the bourgeoisie, Republican governors and liberal mayors but our fellow citizens?  Fellow citizens refusing to wear masks, coughing in the faces of essential workers and spitting on cashiers, setting up roadblocks to harass those fleeing wildfires, driving through crowds of protestors and arming themselves against their neighbors.  And, with particular vitriol, calling for and in some cases actively exterminating Black and Indigenous people of color, trans women of color, immigrant children, the elderly and infirm.  

As I have claimed herein, the Left not only lacks a concept of social change, it is entirely unprincipled.  But even without principles the Left is being educated nightly as it is struck over the head by police batons.  And the radical and revolutionary movements are discovering its principles and power in concert with thousands of others who have set the fires from heaven upon police stations. Banks, bosses, landlords will burn too.  

Where does one find prospects and possibilities within this plague?  Now, as always, in the new struggles that are emerging, and new social antagonisms being expressed.  As I sat down to write this it is the multitudinous mutual aid projects growing in barren landscapes, then those standing “with arms raised.”

For those of us who are radicals and revolutionaries, we will be called to do immoral things in this crisis. Immoral by the standards of the Left and progressive moralists and possibly immoral by our own standards.  It is clear that the Democratic Party establishment and Left which aligns itself with it has made peaceful revolution impossible.  Whereas the Left is more interested in its own self-preservation and defense of its position in the capitalist, white supremacist, heteronormative, settler colonial, property owning systems then a substantive redistribution of wealth, land, power.  Whereas much of the radical Left would rather confront each other over perceived slights than directly confront power and construct counterpowers.  Currently the streets of Portland, Chicago, New York along with the streets of rural towns are all bursting with protestors. They are refusing to delegate responsibility for their futures to agencies outside of themselves, to representatives and non-profits, to the so-called official organizations of the working-class.  However, now, rather than dying amongst strangers, thousands of unhoused, poor, women, trans and gender non-conforming people, people of color, Indigenous, immigrant, imprisoned, “others,” and militant accomplices who accompany them have chosen the possibility of death rather than certain death so that they may live. So that we all may live.     

An organizer, autonomist, and author, Kevin Van Meter is the author of Guerrillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible (IAS/AK Press, 2017), co-editor of Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents (AK Press, 2010), and is currently writing his next book Reading Struggles: Autonomist Marxism from Detroit to Turin and Back Again (Forthcoming, AK Press, 2021-2022).  Van Meter can be reached via his website: www.readingstruggles.info.   

Notes

[1] George Orwell, “How the Poor Die” in In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds. (Boston: David R. Goodine, 2000), 232.

[2] Ibid. 

[3] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Ben Fowkes, trans. (London and New York: Pengiun Books, 1990), 342. 

[4] Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 270. 

[5] Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004), 137-138. 

[6] Kathi Weeks, The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham and London” Duke University Press, 2011), 121.  

[7] Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 375. 

[8] Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Build in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 3. 

[9] Claude Lefort, “What is Bureaucracy?” in The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, John B. Thompson, ed. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986), 119-120.

[10] Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (ed.), How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 4.

[11] Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 216.

[12] Emile Zola, Germinal (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 413.