The Party's Over: Beyond Politics, Beyond Democracy

By Crimethinc

Nowadays, democracy rules the world. Communism is long dead, elections are taking place even in Afghanistan and Iraq, and world leaders are meeting to plan the "global community" we hear so much about. So why isn't everybody happy, finally? For that matter-why do so few of the eligible voters in the United States, the world's flagship democracy, even bother to vote?

Could it be that democracy, long the catchword of every revolution and rebellion, is simply not democratic enough? What could be the problem?

Every little child can grow up to be President

No, they can't. Being President means occupying a position of hierarchical power, just like being a billionaire: for every person who is President, there have to be millions who are not. It's no coincidence that billionaires and Presidents tend to rub shoulders; both exist in a privileged world off limits to the rest of us. Speaking of billionaires, our economy isn't exactly democratic-capitalism distributes resources in absurdly unequal proportions, and you have to start with resources if you're ever going to get elected.

Even if it was true that anyone could grow up to be President, that wouldn't help the millions who inevitably don't, who must still live in the shadow of that power. This imbalance is intrinsic to the structure of representative democracy, at the local level as much as at the top. The professional politicians of a town council discuss municipal affairs and pass ordinances all day without consulting the citizens of the town, who have to be at work; when one of those ordinances displeases citizens, they have to use what little leisure time they have to contest it, and then they're back at work again the next time the town council meets. In theory, the citizens could elect a different town council from the available pool of politicians and would-be politicians, but the interests of politicians as a class always remain essentially at odds with their own-besides, voting fraud, gerrymandering, and inane party loyalty usually prevent them from going that far. Even in the unlikely scenario that a whole new government was elected consisting of firebrands intent on undoing the imbalance of power between politicians and citizens, they would inevitably perpetuate it simply by accepting roles in the system-for the political apparatus itself is the foundation of that imbalance. To succeed in their objective, they would have to dissolve the government and join the rest of the populace in restructuring society from the roots up.

But even if there were no Presidents or town councils, democracy as we know it would still be an impediment to freedom. Corruption, privilege, and hierarchy aside, majority rule is not only inherently oppressive but also paradoxically divisive and homogenizing at the same time.

The Tyranny of the Majority

If you ever found yourself in a vastly outnumbered minority, and the majority voted that you had to give up something as necessary to your life as water and air, would you comply? When it comes down to it, does anyone really believe it makes sense to accept the authority of a group simply on the grounds that they outnumber everyone else? We accept majority rule because we do not believe it will threaten us-and those it does threaten are already silenced before anyone can hear their misgivings.

The average self-professed law-abiding citizen does not consider himself threatened by majority rule because, consciously or not, he conceives of himself as having the power and moral authority of the majority: if not in fact, by virtue of his being politically and socially "moderate," then in theory, because he believes everyone would be convinced by his arguments if only he had the opportunity to present them. Majority-rule democracy has always rested on the conviction that if all the facts were known, everyone could be made to see that there is only one right course of action-without this belief, it amounts to nothing more than the dictatorship of the herd. But even if "the" facts could be made equally clear to everyone, assuming such a thing were possible, people still would have their individual perspectives and motivations and needs. We need social and political structures that take this into account, in which we are free from the mob rule of the majority as well as the ascendancy of the privileged class.

Living under democratic rule teaches people to think in terms of quantity, to focus more on public opinion than on what their consciences tell them, to see themselves as powerless unless they are immersed in a mass. The root of majority-rule democracy is competition: competition to persuade everyone else to your position whether or not it is in their best interest, competition to constitute a majority to wield power before others outmaneuver you to do the same-and the losers (that is to say, the minorities) be damned. At the same time, majority rule forces those who wish for power to appeal to the lowest common denominator, precipitating a race to the bottom that rewards the most bland, superficial, and demagogic; under democracy, power itself comes to be associated with conformity rather than individuality. And the more power is concentrated in the hands of the majority, the less any individual can do on her own, whether she is inside or outside that majority.

In purporting to give everyone an opportunity to participate, majority-rule democracy offers a perfect justification for repressing those who don't abide by its dictates: if they don't like the government, why don't they go into politics themselves? And if they don't win at the game of building up a majority to wield power, didn't they get their chance? This is the same blame-the-victim reasoning used to justify capitalism: if the dishwasher isn't happy with his salary, he should work harder so he too can own a restaurant chain. Sure, everyone gets a chance to compete, however unequal-but what about those of us who don't want to compete, who never wanted power to be centralized in the hands of a government in the first place? What if we don't care to rule or be ruled?

That's what police are for-and courts and judges and prisons.

The Rule of Law

Even if you don't believe their purpose is to grind out nonconformity wherever it appears, you have to acknowledge that legal institutions are no substitute for fairness, mutual respect, and good will. The rule of "just and equal law," as fetishized by the stockholders and landlords whose interests it protects, offers no guarantees against injustice; it simply creates another arena of specialization, in which power and responsibility are ceded to expensive lawyers and pompous judges. Rather than serving to protect our communities and work out conflicts, this arrangement ensures that our communities' skills for conflict resolution and self-defense atrophy-and that those whose profession it supposedly is to discourage crime have a stake in it proliferating, since their careers depend upon it.

Ironically, we are told that we need these institutions to protect the rights of minorities-even though the implicit function of the courts is, at best, to impose the legislation of the majority on the minority. In actuality, a person is only able to use the courts to defend his rights when he can bring sufficient force to bear upon them in a currency they recognize; thanks to capitalism, only a minority can do this, so in a roundabout way it turns out that, indeed, the courts exist to protect the rights of at least a certain minority.

Justice cannot be established through the mere drawing up and enforcement of laws; such laws can only institutionalize what is already the rule in a society. Common sense and compassion are always preferable to the enforcement of strict, impersonal regulations. Where the law is the private province of an elite invested in its own perpetuation, the sensible and compassionate are bound to end up as defendants; we need a social system that fosters and rewards those qualities rather than blind obedience and impassivity.

Who Loses?

In contrast to forms of decision-making in which everyone's needs matter, the disempowerment of losers and out-groups is central to democracy. It is well known that in ancient Athens, the "cradle of democracy," scarcely an eighth of the population was permitted to vote, as women, foreigners, slaves, and others were excluded from citizenship. This is generally regarded as an early kink that time has ironed out, but one could also conclude that exclusion itself is the most essential and abiding characteristic of democracy: millions who live in the United States today are not permitted to vote either, and the distinctions between citizen and non-citizen have not eroded significantly in 2500 years. Every bourgeois property owner can come up with a thousand reasons why it isn't practical to allow everyone who is affected to share in decision making, just as no boss or bureaucrat would dream of giving his employees an equal say in their workplace, but that doesn't make it any less exclusive. What if democracy arose in Greece not as a step in Man's Progress Towards Freedom, but as a way of keeping power out of certain hands?

Democracy is the most sustainable way to maintain the division between powerful and powerless because it gives the greatest possible number of people incentive to defend that division.

That's why the high-water mark of democracy-its current ascendancy around the globe-corresponds with unprecedented inequalities in the distribution of resources and power. Dictatorships are inherently unstable: you can slaughter, imprison, and brainwash entire generations and their children will invent the struggle for freedom anew. But promise every man the opportunity to be a dictator, to be able to force the "will of the majority" upon his fellows rather than work through disagreements like a mature adult, and you can build a common front of destructive self-interest against the cooperation and collectivity that make individual freedom possible. All the better if there are even more repressive dictatorships around to point to as "the" alternative, so you can glorify all this in the rhetoric of liberty.

Capitalism and Democracy

Now let's suspend our misgivings about democracy long enough to consider whether, if it were an effective means for people to share power over their lives, it could be compatible with capitalism. In a democracy, informed citizens are supposed to vote according to their enlightened self-interest-but who controls the flow of information, if not wealthy executives? They can't help but skew their coverage according to their class interests, and you can hardly blame them-the newspapers and networks that didn't flinch at alienating corporate advertisers were run out of business long ago by competitors with fewer scruples.

Likewise, voting means choosing between options, according to which possibilities seem most desirable-but who sets the options, who establishes what is considered possible, who constructs desire itself but the wealthy patriarchs of the political establishment, and their nephews in advertising and public relations firms? In the United States, the two-party system has reduced politics to choosing the lesser of two identical evils, both of which answer to their funders before anyone else. Sure, the parties differ over exactly how much to repress personal freedoms or spend on bombs-but do we ever get to vote on who controls "public" spaces such as shopping malls, or whether workers are entitled to the full product of their labor, or any other question that could seriously change the way we live? In such a state of affairs, the essential function of the democratic process is to limit the appearance of what is possible to the narrow spectrum debated by candidates for office. This demoralizes dissidents and contributes to the general impression that they are impotent utopians-when nothing is more utopian than trusting representatives from the owning class to solve the problems caused by their own dominance, and nothing more impotent than accepting their political system as the only possible system.

Ultimately, the most transparent democratic political process will always be trumped by economic matters such as property ownership. Even if we could convene everyone, capitalists and convicts alike, in one vast general assembly, what would prevent the same dynamics that rule the marketplace from spilling over into that space? So long as resources are unevenly distributed, the rich can always buy others' votes: either literally, or by promising them a piece of the pie, or else by means of propaganda and intimidation. Intimidation may be oblique-"Those radicals want to take away your hard-earned property"-or as overt as the bloody gang wars that accompanied electoral campaigns in nineteenth century America.

Thus, even at best, democracy can only serve its purported purpose if it occurs among those who explicitly oppose capitalism and foreswear its prizes-and in those circles, there are alternatives that make a lot more sense than majority rule.

It's no coincidence freedom is not on the ballot

Freedom is a quality of activity, not a condition that exists in a vacuum: it is a prize to be won daily, not a possession that can be kept in the basement and taken out and polished up for parades. Freedom cannot be given-the most you can hope is to free others from the forces that prevent them from finding it themselves. Real freedom has nothing to do with voting; being free doesn't mean simply being able to choose between options, but actively participating in establishing the options in the first place.

If the freedom for which so many generations have fought and died is best exemplified by a man in a voting booth checking a box on a ballot before returning to work in an environment no more under his control than it was before, then the heritage our emancipating forefathers and suffragette grandmothers have left us is nothing but a sham substitute for the liberty they sought.

For a better illustration of real freedom in action, look at the musician in the act of improvising with her companions: in joyous, seemingly effortless cooperation, they create a sonic and emotional environment, transforming the world that in turn transforms them. Take this model and extend it to every one of our interactions with each other and you would have something qualitatively different from our present system-a harmony in human relationships and activity. To get there from here, we have to dispense with voting as the archetypal expression of freedom and participation.

Representative democracy is a contradiction.

No one can represent your power and interests for you-you can only have power by wielding it, you can only learn what your interests are by getting involved. Politicians make careers out of claiming to represent others, as if freedom and political power could be held by proxy; in fact, they are a priest class that answers only to itself, and their very existence is proof of our disenfranchisement.

Voting in elections is an expression of our powerlessness: it is an admission that we can only approach the resources and capabilities of our own society through the mediation of that priest caste. When we let them prefabricate our options for us, we relinquish control of our communities to these politicians in the same way that we have ceded technology to engineers, health care to doctors, and control of our living environments to city planners and private real estate developers. We end up living in a world that is alien to us, even though our labor has built it, for we have acted like sleepwalkers hypnotized by the monopoly our leaders and specialists hold on setting the possibilities.

But we don't have to simply choose between presidential candidates, soft drink brands, television shows, and political ideologies. We can make our own decisions as individuals and communities, we can make our own delicious beverages and social structures and power, we can establish a new society on the basis of freedom and cooperation.

Sometimes a candidate appears who says everything people have been saying to each other for a long time-he seems to have appeared from outside the world of politics, to really be one of us. By persuasively critiquing the system within its own logic, he subtly persuades people that the system can be reformed-that it could work, if only the right people were in power. Thus a lot of energy that would have gone into challenging the system itself is redirected into backing yet another candidate for office, who inevitably fails to deliver.

But where do these candidates-and more importantly, their ideas and momentum-come from? How do they rise into the spotlight? They only receive so much attention because they are drawing on popular sentiments; often, they are explicitly trying to divert energy from existing grass-roots movements. So should we put our energy into supporting them, or into building on the momentum that forced them to take radical stances in the first place?

More frequently, we are terrorized into focusing on the electoral spectacle by the prospect of being ruled by the worst possible candidates. "What if he gets into power?" To think that things could get even worse!

But the problem is that the government has so much power in the first place-otherwise, it wouldn't matter as much who held the reigns. So long as this is the case, there will always be tyrants. This is why it is all the more important that we put our energy into the lasting solution of opposing the power of the state.

But what are the alternatives to democracy?

Consensus

Consensus-based decision-making is already practiced around the globe, from indigenous communities in Latin America and direct action groups in Europe to organic farming cooperatives in Australia. In contrast to representative democracy, the participants take part in the decision-making process on an ongoing basis and exercise real control over their daily lives. Unlike majority-rule democracy, consensus process values the needs and concerns of each individual equally; if one person is unhappy with a resolution, it is everyone's responsibility to find a new solution that is acceptable to all. Consensus-based decision-making does not demand that any person accept others' power over her, though it does require that everybody consider everyone else's needs; what it loses in efficiency it makes up tenfold in freedom and accountability. Instead of asking that people accept leaders or find common cause by homogenizing themselves, proper consensus process integrates everyone into a working whole while allowing each to retain his or her own autonomy.

Autonomy

To be free, you must have control over your immediate surroundings and the basic matters of your life. No one is more qualified than you are to decide how you live; no one should be able to vote on what you do with your time and your potential unless you invite them to. To claim these privileges for yourself and respect them in others is to cultivate autonomy.

Autonomy is not to be confused with so-called independence: in actuality, no one is independent, since our lives all depend on each other. The glamorization of self-sufficiency in competitive society is an underhanded way to accuse those who will not exploit others of being responsible for their own poverty; as such, it is one of the most significant obstacles to building community.

In contrast to this Western mirage, autonomy offers a free interdependence between people who share consensus.

Autonomy is the antithesis of bureaucracy. There is nothing more efficient than people acting on their own initiative as they see fit, and nothing more inefficient than attempting to dictate everyone's actions from above-that is, unless your fundamental goal is to control other people. Top-down coordination is only necessary when people must be made to do something they would never do of their own accord; likewise, obligatory uniformity, however horizontally it is imposed, can only empower a group by disempowering the individuals who comprise it. Consensus can be as repressive as democracy unless the participants retain their autonomy.

Autonomous individuals can cooperate without agreeing on a shared agenda, so long as everyone benefits from everyone else's participation. Groups that cooperate thus can contain conflicts and contradictions, just as each of us does individually, and still empower the participants. Let's leave marching under a single flag to the military.

Finally, autonomy entails self-defense. Autonomous groups have a stake in defending themselves against the encroachments of those who do not recognize their right to self-determination, and in expanding the territory of autonomy and consensus by doing everything in their power to destroy coercive structures.

Topless Federations

Independent autonomous groups can work together in federations without any of them wielding authority. Such a structure sounds utopian, but it can actually be quite practical and efficient. International mail delivery and railway travel both work on this system, to name two examples: while individual postal and transportation systems are internally hierarchical, they all cooperate together to get mail or rail passengers from one nation to another without an ultimate authority being necessary at any point in the process. Similarly, individuals who cannot agree enough to work together within one collective can still coexist in separate groups. For this to work in the long run, of course, we need to instill values of cooperation, consideration, and tolerance in the coming generations-but that's exactly what we are proposing, and we can hardly do worse at this task than the partisans of capitalism and hierarchy have.

Direct Action

Autonomy necessitates that you act for yourself: that rather than waiting for requests to pass through the established channels only to bog down in paperwork and endless negotiations, establish your own channels instead. This is called direct action. If you want hungry people to have food to eat, don't just give money to a bureaucratic charity organization-find out where food is going to waste, collect it, and share. If you want affordable housing, don't try to get the town council to pass a bill-that will take years, while people sleep outside every night; take over abandoned buildings, open them up to the public, and organize groups to defend them when the thugs of the absentee landlords show up. If you want corporations to have less power, don't petition the politicians they bought to put limits on their own masters-take that power from them yourself. Don't buy their products, don't work for them, sabotage their billboards and offices, prevent their meetings from taking place and their merchandise from being delivered. They use similar tactics to exert their power over you, too-it only looks valid because they bought up the laws and values of your society long before you were born.

Don't wait for permission or leadership from some outside authority, don't beg some higher power to organize your life for you. Take the initiative!

How to Solve Disagreements without Calling the Authorities

In a social arrangement that is truly in the best interest of each participating individual, the threat of exclusion should be enough to discourage most destructive or disrespectful behavior. Even when it is impossible to avoid, exclusion is certainly a more humanitarian approach than prisons and executions, which corrupt police and judges as much as they embitter criminals. Those who refuse to respect others' needs, who will not integrate themselves into any community, may find themselves banished from social life-but that is still better than exile in the mental ward or on death row, two of the possibilities awaiting such people today. Violence should only be used by communities in self-defense, not with the smug sense of entitlement with which it is applied by our present injustice system. Unfortunately, in a world governed by force, autonomous consensus-based groups are likely to find themselves at odds with those who do not abide by cooperative or tolerant values; they must be careful not to lose those values themselves in the process of defending them.

Serious disagreements within communities can be solved in many cases by reorganizing or subdividing groups. Often individuals who can't get along in one social configuration have more success cooperating in another setting or as members of parallel communities. If consensus cannot be reached within a group, that group can split into smaller groups that can achieve it internally-such a thing may be inconvenient and frustrating, but it is better than group decisions ultimately being made by force by those who have the most power. As with individuals and society, so with different collectives: if the benefits of working together outweigh the frustrations, that should be incentive enough for people to sort out their differences. Even drastically dissimilar communities still have it in their best interest to coexist peacefully, and must somehow negotiate ways to achieve this…

Living Without Permission

…that's the most difficult part, of course. But we're not talking about just another social system here, we're talking about a total transformation of human relations-for it will take nothing less to solve the problems our species faces today. Let's not kid ourselves-until we can achieve this, the violence and strife inherent in conflict-based relations will continue to intensify, and no law or system will be able to protect us. In consensus-based structures, there are no fake solutions, no ways to suppress conflict without resolving it; those who participate in them must learn to coexist without coercion and submission.

The first precious grains of this new world can be found in your friendships and love affairs whenever they are free from power dynamics, whenever cooperation occurs naturally. Imagine those moments expanded to the scale of our entire society-that's the life that waits beyond democracy.

It may feel like we are separated from that world by an uncrossable chasm, but the wonderful thing about consensus and autonomy is that you don't have to wait for the government to vote for them-you can practice them right now with the people around you. Put into practice, the virtues of this way of living are clear. Form your own autonomous group, answering to no power but your own, and chase down freedom for yourselves, if your representatives will not do it for you-since they cannot do it for you.

Appendix: A Fable

Three wolves and six goats are discussing what to have for dinner. One courageous goat makes an impassioned case: "We should put it to a vote!" The other goats fear for his life, but surprisingly, the wolves acquiesce. But when everyone is preparing to vote, the wolves take three of the goats aside.

"Vote with us to make the other three goats dinner," they threaten. "Otherwise, vote or no vote, we'll eat you."

The other three goats are shocked by the outcome of the election: a majority, including their comrades, has voted for them to be killed and eaten. They protest in outrage and terror, but the goat who first suggested the vote rebukes them: "Be thankful you live in a democracy! At least we got to have a say in this!"

This was originally published by Crimethinc.

Safe States, Inside-Outside, and Other Liberal Illusions

By Howie Hawkins

Bernie Sanders is on his way to an endorsement of Hillary Clinton, the candidate of War, Wall Street, and Wal-Mart. Sanders ran as a New Deal Democrat, but he will soon be campaigning for a plain old corporate New Democrat.

To keep his troops engaged through this transition, Sanders will stage a few rules and platform fights at the convention. But rule changes are irrelevant to the real party power structure of candidate organizations and their corporate investors. Any platform planks won will be irrelevant as well. No corporate Democrat will feel bound by them.

Faced with that demoralizing prospect, some Sanders supporters are recycling failed old strategies in an attempt to salvage Sanders' "political revolution" without opposing the Democratic Party.

Safe States

Seattle city councilor Kshama Sawant and her Socialist Alternativecomrades have called on Sanders to continue running as an independent, but only in non-competitive "safe states."

The Green Party tried this in 2004. After a controversial decision to nominate the safe states candidate, David Cobb, it quickly became clear that the approach was impractical. I compiled and contributed to a book about this experience where you can see the debate between safe states and independent politics evolve as the case for safe states collapses in the face of political realities. Cobb had to convert from "safe states" to "smart states," which meant running wherever local Greens wanted him to. That turned out to be every state, safe or battleground, with a Green Party. Cobb did not want alienate Greens in battleground states like Ohio and Pennsylvania who were knocking themselves out to overcome difficult ballot petitioning requirements and hoping for sufficient Green presidential votes to secure ballot access for local candidates in future elections.

It also became clear that few voters or reporters would take a candidate seriously in a non-competitive safe state who didn't believe his or her own third-party candidacy was important enough to carry into the competitive battleground states as well.

A hypothetical Sanders safe states run would face the same problems Cobb did on a larger scale. His supporters in battleground states would feel abandoned. That would split his base. And he would not be taken seriously by voters or the press because he would not be taking himself seriously enough to run in the battleground states and try to beat both Trump and Clinton.

Inside-Outside

Another liberal illusion is the inside-outside strategy toward the Democratic Party. The logic of an inside-outside approach leads increasingly inside in the party. To be accepted inside one must disavow outside options. Bernie Sanders conceded to this logic from the start of his campaign when he said would support the Democratic nominee and not run as an independent.

If Sanders had not made that pledge, he would not have been allowed on to Democratic ballots or debate stages. Soon after he pledged his Democratic loyalty, Sanders was signing fundraising letters on behalf of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Before long Sanders will be campaigning for Clinton.

When I wrote a critique of this idea in the Summer 1989 issue of New Politics, I was addressing the left wing of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, which proposed an inside-outside strategy of supporting progressives inside the Democratic Party and running progressive independents against corporate Democrats. By the time the next iteration of the inside-outside strategy was promulgated by the Progressive Democrats of America, which grew out of the Kucinich campaign in 2004, outside was now reduced to lobbying the Democrats for progressive reforms. Running independent progressives against corporate Democrats was not part of the outside strategy anymore.

The inside-outside proponents from the Rainbow Coalition believed their strategy would heighten the contradictions between progressive and corporate Democrats, leading to a split where either the progressives took over the Democrats or the progressives broke away to form a viable left third party with a mass base among labor, minorities, environmentalists, and the peace movement. But the logic of working inside meant forswearing any outside options in order to be allowed to inside Democratic committees, campaigns, primary ballots, and debates. Many of the Rainbow veterans became Democratic Party operatives and politicians whose careers depend on Democratic loyalty. Meanwhile, the corporate New Democrats consolidated their control of the policy agenda. And today the "outside" of the inside-outside strategy has been scaled down to pathetic attempts at political ventriloquism - clicking, lobbying, and demonstrating to try to get corporate Democrats to utter messages and enact polices that are progressive.

Party within the Party

The most longstanding liberal illusion is the party-within-the-party approach, an organized movement to take the Democratic brand away from its corporate sponsors. Some leaders of Labor for Bernie have beenexplicit about this. It is what Sanders has indicated he has in mind.

This approach is has been tried repeatedly by the liberal left since the 1930s and always failed. The inside path of "taking over" the Democratic Party has been tried by labor's PACs, waves of reform Democratic clubs, McGovern's new politics, Harrington's Democratic Socialists of America, Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, Dean's Democracy for America, Kucinich's Progressive Democrats of America, and many, many others, including the fusion parties in New York State over the decades that functioned as a second ballot lines for Democrats: American Labor, Liberal, and Working Families.

In every case, they failed. Worse, many of the reform Democrats went over to the other side and became career Democratic regulars. McGovern lieutenants like Gary Hart and Bill Clinton became leaders of the neoliberal New Democrats. The Jackson legacy is a Congressional Black Caucus stuffed with corporate money and almost universally in the Clinton camp.

The operatives and the pols backed by the fusion parties in New York State have not only become embedded in corporate-financed Democratic politicians' organizations, many have been corrupted. By the time it lost its ballot line in 2002, the Liberal Party had become the crassest of patronage machines, brazenly selling endorsements to the Democrats and Republicans alike in return for jobs and contracts. Its successor, the Working Families Party, kept backing Sheldon Silver, the fallen Speaker of the state Assembly (and Clinton Superdelegate), even after he was indicted for corruption. Silver was just sentenced to 12 years for selling his office for financial kickbacks and sexual favors. A top political aide to New York Mayor Bill De Blasio and former Working Families Party campaign manager, Emma Wolfe, has just been subpoenaed in a federal investigation of a scheme to skirt around New York State's campaign contribution limits. No doubt we'll be reading in the future about Sanders activists who became careerists and corrupt in corporate Democratic organizations.

Many are going to believe that this time it's different because the Sandernistas are stronger than earlier reform Democratic movements. Sanders is winning over 40% of the Democratic primary votes. These folks are going to pursue the party-within-the-party. Since it is inevitable that some large fraction of the Sandernistas are going to choose this path, the independent left should work with them in fighting for reforms like Improved Medicare for All even if we oppose their Democrats in elections. If they are smart, they will recognize that the independent left is their strategic ally. Without independent candidates giving progressive voters somewhere else to go, the reform Democrats will be taken for granted and lose their political leverage against the corporate Democrats.

Also if the reform Democrats are smart, they will fight for a membership-controlled party-within-the-party. The top-down mailing list left is the debilitating scourge of progressive politics today. Non-profits staffed by salaried professionals paid for by philanthropic capitalists decide what to mobilize people for, but don't help people organize to educate and make decisions themselves. If the mass base of small donors that the Sanders campaign has amassed is going to fund this reform effort, those same small donors should be organized into local clubs with membership rights to make decisions and elect and hold leaders accountable. For this to happen, Sanders will have to release his 2 million plus small donor list for local organizing. A party-within-the-party will have to demand that Sanders "Free the Lists!"

Vote for the Lesser Evil

The illusion of last resort for liberals is lesser evilism. They call on us to vote for the lesser evil Democrat to defeat the greater evil Republican.

Here is where Ralph Nader is invoked for "spoiling" the 2000 presidential election. In fact, as a major media consortium found in a thorough $1 million recount, Gore won Florida despite computerized racial profiling by the GOP that disenfranchised tens of thousands of black Democratic voters. The GOP stole the election and consolidated the coup by stopping the recount in a party line Supreme Court vote. But, like GOP climate change deniers, Democratic lesser evil proponents don't let facts get in their way. Instead of fighting the Republicans, they blame Nader.

Of course, a left third-party candidate could well be the margin of difference. The argument against lesser evilism is that voting for the lesser evil paves the way for greater evils. The classic example is the Social Democrats of Germany supporting the conservative Paul von Hindenberg in order to the defeat the Nazi Adoph Hitler in the 1932 German presidential elections. Von Hindenberg won and then appointed Hitler as Chancellor.

Hillary Clinton is the von Hindenberg of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Clintonite prevarication and triangulation will accommodate the right and bring us the greater evils we were afraid of. Hillary the Hawk trumps Trump for the neocons swarming to her campaign. She doesn't need the left to beat Trump. She's got the militarists and the corporate elites - and the lesser evil liberals - in a grand coalition for the status quo.

The lesser evilists call it strategic voting. It's really strategic suicide. The corporate center-right personified by Clinton will not defeat the hard right. She will use it to scare the liberal left into accepting her corporate and militarist agenda as the lesser evil. The most effective way to defeat the right is with a left that builds support and power by organizing and campaigning for its own distinct alternative.

Write In Bernie

The Bernie or Bust movement has raised another illusion. If Sanders doesn't win the nomination, then give him a write-in vote in the general election.

At least in this approach they do not lower their flag and disappear into the Democratic Party. But it has its own problems. A write-in vote for Bernie is a vote for Hillary Trump. It's a vote for Hillary because Bernie supports Hillary. It's a vote for Trump because it could be the margin of difference in a battleground state.

Fortunately, Bernie or Bust recently changed its pledge to "write-in Bernie Sanders or vote Green" and the number of pledgers quickly doubled to nearly 100,000.

A Left Third Party Without Illusions

Jill Stein's Green Party campaign for president ought to be the first stop for Sandernistas who refuse to vote for corporate Clinton. Stein will give voice to popular demands and movements and help shape political debate during the election. But more than anything, the Stein campaign is a party-building campaign. It's about securing ballot lines that can be used in future local elections for municipal, state legislative, and congressional seats. It's about creating campaign committees that continue after the election as local Green parties.

Local independent left candidates can win. Kshama Sawant has shown that in her Seattle city council races. Over 150 Greens have shown that in cities and towns across the country. These wins can be replicated all over the country.

Many states have non-partisan local elections where independents are not so hampered by partisan loyalties in the two-party system. Due to the gerrymandering of safe seats, most partisan election districts are in practice one-party districts where the other major party does not seriously compete. A left third party can very quickly become the second party in these districts on the road to becoming the first party. Running serious local election campaigns ought to be the second stop for independent Sandernistas.

Ballot access barriers, winner-take-all elections, private campaign financing, and inherited two-party loyalties are real obstacles to building a left third party. But the idea that they are insurmountable is just wrong because viable third parties have been built and independent candidates have won. The abolitionist, populist, and socialist parties from the 1840s to the 1930s garnered enough support to really affect American politics. Greens, socialists, and independent progressives, including Bernie Sanders himself, have won office in recent decades. What's been missing since the 1930s is a left that understands that independent politics is the road to power and change. Most of the self-described left today practices dependent politics. It depends on the corporate-sponsored Democrats to enact changes.

Sanders' campaign has revealed there is a mass base for left party that is ready to be organized. His campaign shows that millions are ready to vote for what public opinion polling has shown for decades - that there is majority support for progressive economic reforms like single-payer, progressive taxation, tuition-free public higher education, and climate action. Sanders' campaign also shows that millions will fund a campaign for these reforms with small donations at a level that can compete with the candidates of the corporate rich.

If the Greens are going to be the vehicle for an independent left political insurgency, they will need to reorganize as a mass-membership party with membership dues and local branches for sustainable self-financing, democratic accountability, and grassroots dynamism. The Greens will remain underfunded, weakly organized, and politically marginal if they continue to be organized like the Democrats and Republicans with an atomized base of voters who only have the right to vote in primaries, with no locally organized base to elect and hold leaders accountable, and with minimal funding from intermittent fund appeals.

It is no surprise that so many liberal illusions are being proposed in the wake of Sanders' campaign. The campaign itself was a liberal illusion that conflated liberal New Deal type reforms of capitalism with democratic socialism. It implied that the social, economic, and environmental crises we face are not systemic, but simply the result of bad leaders and policies that we can replace. Socialism means a radical restructuring of society that socializes and democratizes economic and political institutions. Without an independent left to articulate this socialist vision, "progressive" has come to mean a coalition of liberals and socialists behind a liberal program. The socialist left disappeared as an alternative voice and vision.

Working class independence has been the first principle of socialist politics since the pro-democracy uprisings of 1848 erupted across Europe and Latin America. Workers found they could not count on the professional and business classes to support their right to the franchise. They would have to fight for their rights themselves. Exiled "Red 48ers" were among the core of the American abolitionist and populist parties in the latter half of the 19th century.

The mass-membership working-class party was an invention of the labor left in the second half of the 19th century. It was how working people organized democratically to compete politically with the older top-down parties of the propertied elites, which had grown out of their competing legislative caucuses. In the U.S., the Greenback Labor and People's parties of the farmer-labor populist movement won hundreds of offices at all levels up to governors and U.S. senators. They forced their program - from greenback monetary reform and progressive income taxation to labor rights, cooperatives, and public ownership of railroad, telegraph, and telephone utilities - into the center of political debate. The Debsian Socialists, many of them former populists like Debs himself, continued this effective third-party tradition in the 20thcentury until 1936, when most of labor and the left collapsed into the New Deal Democrats' coalition. The left has yet to re-emerge as a distinct and visible voice that matters in American politics.

There is no shortcut through the Democratic Party to building a mass party on the left. That shortcut is a dead end. Hopefully, many new activists energized by the Sanders campaign will come to the realization that road to "political revolution" for "democratic socialism" lies not inside the Democratic Party but in an independent left party that is opposed to and starts beating the Democrats.

This piece was originally published at Counterpunch.

Brazil's Gramscian Moment: On Cultural Hegemony and Crisis

By Jacques Simon

With the Brazilian senate confirming Dilma Rousseff's impeachment procedure, it seems increasingly likely that Brazil could soon see the long-loved Workers Party (PT) out of office. Given the seemingly unshakable support that the party had up until a few years ago, the deep political crisis that Brazil faces today may seem a bit surprising. How is it that, after winning four consecutive elections, three by a landslide, the PT's Dilma Rousseff is now facing impeachment charges, and people are in the streets by millions? Why have Brazilians completely turned their backs on the PT, despite it having enjoyed fourteen years of political hegemony?

The mainstream media has identified two main causes to the current political turmoil in Brazil.

The first is corruption. Operacao Lava Jato (operation carwash), until recently led by the now famous Justice Moro, has shaken the political class to its core. Millions of reais flowing from top Petrobras executives into the pockets of the political elites have gotten widespread news coverage. Of course, this is not factually incorrect, but it disregards the fact that corruption has been the name of the game in Brazilian politics since the end of the military regime in 1985.

In fact, Lula's 2006 re-election happened in the midst of the Mensalão scandal, where the PT was accused of buying votes in congress. Transparency International has kept Brazil at a steady 76th on 167 in terms of global corruption between 2012 and 2015, even though the Petrobras scandal started in 2014.

Corruption is such a common occurrence in the country that a term has been created to describe Brazilian institutions' feeble reactions to shady business. In Brazil, when a scandal is said to "end in pizza," it means that charges where not laid out to the extent that they could or should have.

It seems that the corruptibility of the political elite is taken for granted by Brazilians. While it may have been an accelerating factor in the current crisis, it certainly does not seem to be the determinant variable in Rousseff's demise, who, in fact, is not even facing corruption charges unlike her opponents.

The second cause to the political crisis identified by the mainstream media has been the media itself.

Some have pointed the finger at the largely right wing and anti-PT bias of Brazil's largest news corporations. Once again, while not factually false, that position of the media is not a recent occurrence.

The same families have held the five main media companies for decades. Grupo Globo for instance, the country's largest media corporation, has been privately owned by the Marinho family since its creation in 1965. There has not been a recent change in the media's ideological affiliation: the right-wing mainstream media has been a constant throughout the PT rule.

Once again, it seems that this variable may be an accelerating factor in the PTs downfall, but it certainly does not seem to be the determinant variable.

In reality, two things have actively participated in Dilma's crash: an economic recession, and her turn away from the PT's traditional politics. All else is anecdotal.

Let's turn to an influential political theorist of the early twentieth century to further elaborate on that.

This conclusion can be reached by using Antonio Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony. It might be a bit of an overstatement to say that the Italian philosopher is making a come back. Undoubtedly, most people still do not know who he was, and few are aware of the importance of his theories. It is however, somewhat satisfying to see that Google searches for his name have been growing exponentially since the early 2000s and show no sign of slowing down.

It seems that the global capitalist crisis of 2008, which shook the entire world, has made a few people question the strength and general positive nature of the economic system we are living in. This kind of uncertainty creates a fertile ground for previously outlier positions. In Gramscian terms: such important events destabilize otherwise anchored cultural hegemony.

This concept-that of cultural hegemony-is perhaps Gramsci's most important contribution to the field of political science. The idea is the following: power, in all its forms, is rooted in popular consent. In order to successfully establish a specific way of organizing society, you must first get the local population on board. In fact, people need to be so convinced that that specific organization is the way things must be that they should not question its basis.

Rival ideologies should not compete on equal terms. To take the place of the cultural hegemon, they need first to contest its de facto legitimacy, and then successfully claim its place in the hearts and minds of the people.

In Gramscian literature, this struggle will take place as communism inevitably takes the place of global capitalism. This remains to be seen, but while we're waiting this theory can be applied to smaller instances of ideological shifts. Brazil is living just that.

In order to demonstrate this, let us first take a quick detour by Brazilian political history.

Until 1985, the country was ruled by a military dictatorship, which relied on brutal repression to get its way.

Things changed during the '80s, an active period when it comes to democratization worldwide. Some political scientists-Samuel Huntington in particular-have gone so far as to call that phase the "third-wave of democracy." Along with other South American countries, Brazil saw its military regime come to an end, and hosted its first democratic elections in over two decades.

Since the 1985 election, at least three tendencies have become abundantly clear.

First, the country has had a history of inflationary problems. If we consider the rate of inflation over the last three decades, we see two peaks. The first, in 1990, reached an astonishing 6,800%. The second, in 1994, culminated at 5,000% in June of that year. But even if we disregard these extreme cases, Brazil has had far from a stable economy throughout the end of the twentieth century. For instance, the average inflation in 1987 was 363% and in 1992 it was 1,119%.

The second clear tendency is that when Brazilians are unhappy with a governing party, they let it know with their ballots. The third is that they rarely offer a second chance: the results of the three presidential elections following the fall of the military regime led three different parties in office.

First, in 1985, Tancredo Neves of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (BDMP) was elected. Though, in a Hollywood-worthy turn of events he collapsed just before gaining office and died shortly after, his running mate and vice president, José Sarney, assumed the role of president.

Four years later, with inflation bordering 2,000%, Fernando Collar de Mello's Christian Labour Party (NRP) was elected with 53% in the second round. The BDMP only managed to secure 11.5%.

The following elections took place in 1994, just after the second inflationary peak. Once again, this economic fiasco led to the ruling party's political demise. The NRP secured an astounding 0.6% of the popular will, while the BDMP came fourth with 4.6%. The Brazilian people where still looking for their party: a whopping 95% of the population was not satisfied with what they had seen since the fall of the military regime a decade prior.

This time, Fernando Henrique Cardoso's Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) was elected in the first round with over 54% of the ballots: a landslide victory considering that the runner-up was Lula's PT with 27%. It is important to note here that this was the most left-leaning government elected since the end of the military regime. While all other parties had been right-of-center, Cardoso ran and governed in a clearly social-democratic manner.

FHC fought inflation tooth-and-nail (successfully-bringing it from an average of 3,000% in 1994 to 7% in 1997 by pegging the reais to the American dollar), opened the Brazilian economy to foreign investments (FDIs augmented threefold between 1995 and 2000), and privatized some industries in order to fund social projects. FHC is credited with creating social security and generalizing taxation in Brazil.

The Brazilian population responded positively to this newfound stability. A constitutional amendment was passed to allow Cardoso to run for a second term. In 1998, he was re-elected with a majority of 53.1% in the first round. During his four years in office, he had lost only one percentage point of support. He went from winning 25 out of 26 states, to 23. The surprising stability of the results of his two presidential campaigns shows how faithful his electoral base was. This popularity was not unconditional however. During his second term, the hens came back to roost: his desire to please both workers and capital created an influx in public debt.

During his 8 years as president, federal as well as state and municipal debt increased more than twofold. In an effort to save the national economy from an exponential debt crisis, and a freefalling export sector due to economic collapses around the world (Asia and Russia were seeing their economies crumble), he took a number of neoliberal measures. He liberated the reais from its US dollar parity, accepted a structural adjustment program from the IMF, and undertook a structural reforms of the economy in which privatization and austerity held a key role. The results where what one would expect: GDP per capita plunged, the value of the reais was cut in half, and capital flew out of the country at high rates.

Following the footsteps of recent history, the government swapped hands in 2002, when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was running his fourth campaign for the Workers Party (PT), won two thirds of the votes against the PSDB candidate. This was the beginning of an era for Brazil, one that we haven't seen the end of-yet.

The PT was the most left-wing government since the fall of the military regime. Under Lula's presidency, real social programs were put in place, yielding real results. To name only a few, the 2003 Fome Zero program aimed at eradicating extreme poverty in the country, the Bolsa Família and Bolsa Escola programs provided impoverished working class Brazilians with an allowance if their children were vaccinated and attended school, and the Progama de Aceleraçāo do Crescimento (PAC) had a multibillion reais budget to invest in infrastructure.

Make no mistake: Lula's presidency was not that of a socialist. In fact, the left wing of the PT was so disappointed with his lack of defiance towards capital that they split to form a separate party called the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL). But Lula did provide working class families with a net increase in their material condition. During his two terms in office, the gini coefficient of country (measuring wealth inequality) fell continuously, the GDP per capita increased substantially, as did the GNI. 98% of people born after 1990 now have at least a secondary education, compared to 70% for those born in 1970.

It was with this kind of mindset that Lula was re-elected in 2006, winning close to 50% in the first round, and then by a more than 20 percentage point margin in the runoff. Constitutionally barred from a third presidency, his protégé Dilma Rousseff ran in 2010, and won by an over 10 percentage point margin. Running again in 2014, she got re-elected-albeit not with as impressive result as previously.

This brief recap of Brazilian political history demonstrates two things:

First, the kind of legitimacy that has been enjoyed by the PT is a one-of-a-kind instance since the fall of the military regime. However, the second lesson is that this support is quite logical. Lula and Dilma have provided the working class with what it has been asking for since 1985: a stable democracy, and material returns for the working class.

From a Gramscian perspective, this legitimacy is rooted in cultural hegemony. Indeed, PT rule and the political scene since Lula's arrival in power have been causally linked in popular conscience. This means that any opposing ideology has an uphill battle before it: that of discrediting PT's social democracy.

As of now, the PT has won four consecutive presidential elections in Brazil; half of all those that have taken place since the end of the military regime. For a time, Lula's party looked like it was the country's natural party, as if the PT and the Brazilian people had some sort of indivisible bond. So how did we arrive to the place where we are now?

According to Gramsci, cultural hegemony is essential for the ruling class. The PT has undoubtedly acquired something of that nature. It has offered Brazil social democracy. It promised a capitalistic system with real returns for the people, and, to some extent, has delivered. The material condition of a large amount of people increased impressively during the Lula era and, to a lesser extent, during Dilma's early days. But if there is one thing capitalism has shown, it is that these kinds of honeymoon periods are always finite, and at some point the economy contracts over its own weight.

The party's cultural hegemony rested on two things: a booming economy, and social democratic policies. Both fell apart in the last two years. First, the country's rise to economic prosperity came to a halt. The economy that the PT had created was highly dependant on exports to countries like China or the US. With these countries' economies contracting, the model ceased to work. Brazil's GDP growth was divided by two between 2011 and 2012. The reais has plummeted in face of the US dollar since 2011.

Between mid-August 2014 and today the Petrobras stock, Brazil's largest company worth about 10% of the country's GDP has fell from $23.35 to $8.44. Brazil, in other terms, is facing the harsh realities of capitalism.

This left Dilma with two options: either take a left-wing approach and handle the crisis by stimulating demand, nationalizing big industries, and reforming the tax code to take money where it is, or, take the right-wing path.

She chose the latter.

2015 was the year of austerity in Brazil. Budget cuts, backpedalling on investment programs, cuts to social security… the Rousseff government fell to right-wing pressure and implemented capital-friendly policies. This came after she had won the elections one-year prior with a left wing discourse. This shift in position was one of many blows to the PT's cultural hegemony. By disavowing her party's traditional positions, Dilma legitimized dissident opinions. It is thus unsurprising that the lion's share of her critics, Temer included, come from her political right.

Indeed, now that Dilma is, at least temporarily, out of office, the interim government has already called for widespread neoliberal policies, which include cuts in public spending, decreases in welfare, and cutting jobs from the federal government.

The Rousseff government has dug its own grave by coming back on settled questions. The president and her administration have broken the ideological continuity of the PT rule, which in turn destabilized the foundation of their authority. She opened a door to her right, which allowed contestation. With the hegemonic left-wing personalities turning to neoliberalism, nothing was keeping public opinion from going in that direction.

The demographic participating in the ongoing protests further proves this. One image speaks volumes about the kind of people fuelling these events. A visible rich, white couple is seen marching alongside a baby carriage pushed by a black nanny. This photo sparked mass criticism in Brazil-a country where the racial and wealth divide is still very much a reality. Some have even reported protesters drinking champagne at anti-PT events. This segment of the Brazilian population is the one represented in Temer's provisional government. Clearly, what is being witnessed is not an uproar from impoverished favela youths, but rather a movement that is largely dominated by white, upper-middle-class individuals, whose right-wing bias has been gaining traction through legitimization.

Worst of all, a specter is haunting Brazil-the specter of inflation. Granted, we are far from the four digit numbers that plagued the country in the late '80s and mid '90s. But nonetheless, since 2014, inflation has almost double from about 5.5% to 10.5%-well above the average of 4% that the country had become accustomed to during Lula's time. In fact, 2015 was the year with the highest rate of inflation since the country has been under PT rule. This has sparked some concern amongst the general population, who fear the return of hyperinflationary pressure.

The point is the following: The PT had acquired a cultural hegemony, which mechanically provided it with popular legitimacy. The schematic being used, however, was based on a capitalistic logic of economics, which is fragile and ultimately unsustainable. When the inevitable turmoil arrived, the PT could have taken measures to ensure that material benefits from the working class were not withdrawn, but decided to dive into neoliberal reforms instead. By backpedalling away from their own logic, which was the backbone of their cultural hegemony, the PT delegitimized their position, providing a fertile ground for ideological debate. This is why the right-wing media and corruption scandals are gaining traction today, even though they have always been around.

This leaves Brazil in quite an awkward situation. The population is disillusioned by the Left and is turning to the Right in order to solve their problems. Presumably, this is a bad idea. But not all hope is lost. The possibility of having a new Left rise from the old one's ashes is still possible. For that, however, there would need to be a conscious effort to establish a new cultural hegemony.

Jacques Simon is a French national, currently studying politics at the University of Ottawa in Canada. His interests include political economy, comparative politics, and the study of radical politics.

Panama Papers: Capitalism Working Well for Obscenely Rich

By John Passant

The Panama Papers show us, once again, that capitalism is a system of absolute greed. It is a system where capitalist governments help their mates to hide their income and wealth while all the time businesses pretend they are paying their "fair share" of tax.

The 11.5 million leaked documents from Mossack Fonseca contain details of the 14,000 clients of the Panama headquartered company and the 220,000 shell companies it has set up for them in tax havens around the globe.

Why tax havens? Not only do these countries have no or low tax rates they also have secrecy provisions which protect the income and assets of wealthy individuals and companies from the prying eyes of state bodies like tax offices and company regulators.

Shell companies mean that the ostensible owners of the companies are often front men and women for the real owners or are companies whose ultimate owners are untraceable. One senior tax officer many years ago summed up tax havens for me when he said they kill the paper trail.

Take Wilson Security here in Australia for example. It runs the "security" on Australia's asylum seeker and refugee gulags, Manus Island and Nauru. It is owned by Wilson Offshore Group Holdings (BVI) Limited, a British Virgin Islands company set up by Mossack Fonseca to protect the true identity of the owners from any governmental scrutiny.

Thomas Kwok, one of those true owners, is in jail for fraud in Hong Kong. The other, his brother Raymond Kwok, was acquitted of similar charges. They had resigned as the directors of Wilson Offshore Group Holdings (BVI) Limited shortly after the charges were laid. Two companies, Winsome Sky and Harmony Core, replaced them as directors. The Panama Papers show the brothers control those two companies.

The reason for these arrangements? Wilson Security would not have won Australian government contracts if it knew that one of the real owners was in jail for fraud.

By the way, Wilson Security also supplies the guards for various government bodies, including the Australian Tax Office (ATO).

It is not just Wilson Security. The ATO is investigating 800 Australian entities named in the leaked documents. The Panama Papers refer for example to Australian banks and BHP Billiton. Banks are involved because you have to get the money out of your jurisdiction and into the tax havens, often via more reputable tax haven countries that supposedly aren't, like Singapore, Hong Kong, Switzerland, The Netherlands or Luxembourg.

Ripples

Iceland's Prime Minister, in the face of big demonstrations, has gone on indefinite leave (resigned) after it was revealed his wife held shares through a shell company in the very banks her husband was negotiating a bail out with. UK Prime Minister David Cameron inherited wealth from his Dad whose Panama shell companies made tax free money for 30 years.

Australia's current Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, one of Australia's richest men, has what appear to be high earning investments in or through the Cayman Islands. He used to have an investment in a vulture fund (a hedge fund that buys distressed debt) based in the Cayman Islands. He sold out of that and bought into some hedge funds (unregulated funds that long and short the assets they hold).

The point here is not whether they are legitimate or not or that the investors pay their "correct" amount of tax. It is that they are part of the game the rich and powerful play to increase their individual wealth and that that game is rigged in their favour by governments too afraid to crack down on "legitimate" investments in tax havens.

So the problem is the tax havens is it? Before we get too carried away with colonial outrage, remember that many tax havens exist today as outposts or former outposts of empire set up to hide the money of British colonialists and capital. Some of them, like the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands and Bermuda, are British Overseas Territories, still under some form of British control. At the centre of these tax havens is the City of London, one of the main financial hubs of British, and indeed, global capitalism.

The US has its own equivalent tax havens, in particular Delaware where half of all Wall Street companies are incorporated for the low state taxes and slack company regulation.

So the traditional view of tax havens as sunny places for shady people is actually not correct, unless climate change has turned the City of London into a tropical paradise.

Tax avoidance

These revelations are not new. They are the latest in a range of leaked and other information about the dark underside of capitalism. We have had the Luxembourg leaks, the Tax Justice Network which estimated that between US $21 trillion and $32 trillion is held in havens (about twice US GDP and five times the wealth of Australia all up), the TJN/United Voice report into tax avoidance by Australian companies, and the ATO release recently of tax data of public and private big business companies which shows that well over one third pay no income tax and the majority pay less than the statutory rate of 30 per cent. Apart from a bit of huffing and puffing nothing has happened to address rampant tax avoidance by big business.

Big business tax avoidance gives the lie to the Turnbull mantra that we have to live within our means. This mantra will be the justification for the ongoing cuts to public health and education, to public transport and to social welfare. There would be no budget crisis if we addressed big business tax avoidance. Our mantra in response to Turnbull should be to tax big business and the rich.

Using tax havens and shell companies is part of a wider capitalist dynamic of hiding assets and arrangements from prying tax and other State body eyes. It reflects the business view that any profit is "theirs," rather than the reality that it arises from the unpaid labour of workers.

As Google Chair Eric Schmidt said about his company's tax avoidance activities around the globe, activities which have seen it funnel almost $10 billion into Bermuda, saving $2 billion in taxes:

"The company isn't about to turn down big savings in taxes. It's called capitalism. We are proudly capitalistic. I'm not confused about this."

The problem of tax avoidance is systemic. It requires a systemic solution, a democratic and socialist revolution o put the vast majority in control of the assets of the world and to organise production to satisfy human need, not to make a profit. In such a world we would not need tax havens and shell companies.

In the interim we on the left must continue to argue for taxing the rich and to build all the campaigns against the injustices social and economic that capitalism creates, including the austerity agenda which is about transferring wealth from labour to capital.

We could tax the rich to fund better services. None of the parties of neo-liberalism - the Liberals and Nationals and the Labor Party - are going to really do that. At best they will offer minor changes as part of a smokescreen to give the impression of doing something without actually doing anything major to upset the rich and powerful, the capitalists, whose system drives them to avoid tax and hide their affairs in secrecy jurisdictions.

Now I know none of this tax the rich stuff will in reality get on the agenda willingly of the ALP. The answer is that when the current or future governments attack funding for workers or the poor, attack public schools, public hospitals and public universities, the fightback against those attacks has the potential to challenge the ruling class and its systemic tax avoidance and secrecy. To tax the rich we must build the fight against austerity.

Originally published by Solidarity.

Capitalism's Depleted Reserves: Recognizing and Preparing for Systemic Breakdown

By Ben Peck

The capitalist crisis of 2008 was rescued by an enormous transfusion of public money into the banks. The system has been on life-support ever since.

Despite this, the bourgeois see little prospects of a recovery for their system. Rather, they wring their hands and impotently grimace in anticipation of another slump. Many consider this now a question of "when", not "if".

An organism in crisis will begin to burn off its reserves of fat in order to survive. Austerity has been capitalism's economic equivalent of this process. The system has eaten deeply into its reserves, particularly in the advanced capitalist countries. All the accumulated reforms conquered by the working class in the preceding historical period; relatively decent wages, the welfare state, pensions, etc; in order to pay for a system in crisis have been, or are in the process of being, burned away.

One particularly rich reserve has been Chinese capitalism, which has been heavily depleted. In the wake of the crisis the Chinese pumped half a trillion dollars into their economy. It was one of the greatest Keynesian interventions the world has ever seen. Rather than merely propping up the banks, the intervention contributed markedly to the real economy. According to the former US treasury secretary Larry Summers, between 2010 and 2013 China poured more cement than America did in the whole of the twentieth century! Up until last summer a city the size of Rome was being built in China every two weeks. This intervention gave a clear impulse to the Chinese and world economy.

However, the Chinese reserve is now near exhaustion and the effects of the stimulus are turning into their opposite. Debt has ballooned from $7trn to $28trn - 282% of GDP. Imports and exports are falling. The massive economic stimulus has ended up in a massive crisis of overproduction, provoking a world-wide crisis of steel. In Redcar and Port Talbot in Britain steel works are closing, destroying communities. On the other side of the world, the same course is being taken in China itself.

Political reserves

The depletion of these "economic reserves" has had a corresponding effect on capitalism's "political reserves", which are also being burned away. The old political arrangements are falling apart, including many of the traditional workers' parties. According to a report in The Economist recently, the social democracies in Europe stand at their lowest level of support for seventy years.

The classic example is PASOK, which commanded forty-five percent of the electorate in Greece prior to the crisis. On the basis of its complete capitulation to the Troika and the collapse of the Greek economy it has been reduced to a mere four percent. PASOK is now hanging on to a place in parliament by its fingernails.

In Europe in 2015 the social democrats lost power in Denmark and recorded their worst ever results in Poland, Spain, Finland and also came very close in Britain.

In France the so-called Socialist President, Francois Hollande, is the most unpopular leader in seventy years. By attacking the labour laws his government has provoked a mass movement, which on March 31st carried out a general strike involving 1.2m French workers united against the socialist government.

The strike involved a significant participation of French youth, who now compose a very class conscious vanguard of the struggle. These youth did not go home, but stayed out in an occupation of the squares, the "Nuit Debout" movement, which is reminiscent of the Syntagma and Indignados movement in Greece and Spain. These movements were the basis for the rise of parties which have since supplanted the social democracies. It is not difficult to imagine the same process developing in France.

People are turning away from the social democrats in their droves everywhere, laments The Economist. The explanation is not complicated. Where the social democrats offer no alternative to austerity, but instead work hand-in-glove with the bosses to implement it, they completely undermine their reason for existence in the eyes of the working class.

Even in Britain, the two-hundred thousand-strong movement behind Corbyn is not necessarily enamoured with the Labour Party. In Greece, support for Syriza has collapsed to sixteen percent following its betrayal of the OXI movement and its resumption of the austerity programme of its predecessors.

This crisis of Social Democracy is part of the general crisis of bourgeois democracy, which is fast expending its political capital. This is a dangerous development for the ruling class, as noted by the Financial Times' Martin Wolf on February 2nd in an article entitled "Bring our elites closer to the people":

"...we already face the danger that the gulf between economic and technocratic elites on the one hand, and the mass of the people on the other, becomes too vast to be bridged. At the limit, trust might break down altogether. Thereupon, the electorate will turn to outsiders to clean up the system. We are seeing such a shift towards trust in outsiders not only in the US but also in many European countries."

The reference is to the Trump-Sanders phenomenon in the US, which was anticipated in Europe by the rise of Syriza, Podemos, the SNP and Corbyn on the left, and also the French NF and, more recently, the AfD in Germany, on the right. Class polarisation is tearing at the seams of capitalism's political veneer.

Consciously or unconsciously, when the bourgeois start to worrying about "outsiders" interfering in their system, what they actually express is the fear of the working class taking an interest in the way society is run, and interfering in their affairs.

When the next global downturn arrives, the period between that crisis and 2008 will mark a watershed period in the history of the capitalist system. It will be characterised as one in which the system, far from developing, burned away many of the reserve layers at its disposal, economically, socially and politically, which had acted as "cushioning" in 2008.

This will give the class struggles of the not-too distant future a far sharper character. The struggle on the part of the bourgeois will be far more desperate. The struggle on the part of the working class will take place after a period in which sick and enfeebled capitalism has been able to do nothing to solve its fundamental problems. Illusions that previously existed have been burned away, many defenders of the old system discredited. This is something we must prepare for, and intervene in, to build the forces of Marxism.

Originally published at In Defence of Marxism.

The Gathering Storm: Donald Trump and the Hollowed-Out American Heartland

By Sean Posey

During the winter of 2016, the ever-present visage of Donald J. Trump remained burned into television sets and computer screens across America. In the well-manicured lawns of the modest working-class homes of Austintown, Ohio, situated in long-struggling Mahoning County, "Team Trump. Rebuild America" signs began popping up everywhere.

Formerly a sparsely populated farming community, Austintown grew as a working-class suburb in the decades after World War II. Steel and autoworkers could commonly afford vacations and college tuition for their children; the community, in many ways, symbolized the working-class American Dream. By 1970, Austintown, along with the neighboring township of Boardman, was part of the largest unincorporated area in the state. [1] The township's population peaked in 1980 at 33,000. Today, however, it's a very different place. Job losses in the local manufacturing sector and the graying of the population led Forbes to label Austintown as the "fifth-fastest dying town" in the country in the midst of the Great Recession. The township's poverty rate had already reached nearly 14 percent in the year before the meltdown of Wall Street.[2]

The 2016 Ohio Republican primary in Mahoning County witnessed the largest shift of Democratic voters to the Republican Party in decades. "Most of them crossed over to vote for Donald Trump," remarked David Betras, Mahoning County Democratic Party Chairman.[3]

This used to be Democrat country. But like so many other places in America, the brash billionaire's message is remaking the local political landscape. Trump narrowly lost the Ohio primary to incumbent Governor John Kasich. However, he won the majority of Republican primary voters in Mahoning County and in neighboring Trumbull County, home to the city of Warren - one of the most embattled municipalities in the state. Winning his home state should have been a given for Kasich; instead, Trump pushed the twice-elected governor to the brink.

Ohio is not the only place in the heartland the Trump tornado is sweeping through. Scores of America's most insecure communities are joining the once prosperous Buckeye State in flirting with or joining the mogul's camp. Yet, for as much attention as has been paid to Trump and the often controversial movement behind him, far less has been said about the cracking core of a country that is currently looking for a savior, any savior, in such enormously troubled times.

Years before America's most famous real estate and reality television personality descended a gold escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for president, long-time journalists Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson began a cross-country journey to document America in the wake of the 911 attacks.

"On one trip," Maharidge writes, "I drove from Chicago to Johnstown, Pennsylvania. In places like this, the abandoned shells of factories, all broken windows and rust, make this country look like it was bombed in a war. In other places it's as if an economic neutron bomb hit-with trees and houses intact but lives decimated, gone with good jobs."[4]

Traditionally, this part of the heartland represented the economic engine of industrial America, filled with good-paying jobs in manufacturing. However, the great economic dislocations of the past forty-odd years have rendered much of this landscape a void, one more akin to the developing world than that of the United States. Even for the more outwardly normal communities, as Maharidge mentions, looks can be deceiving. Heroin is hitting the inner core of the country with a hammer force, destroying young lives already beset by economic insecurity and the end of upward mobility.

Perhaps even more disturbing is the declining life expectancy for a large swath of working-class whites, one of Trump's key constituencies. For the past sixteen years, death rates have risen for Caucasians between the ages of 45 and 54 and also for those between the ages of 25 to 34. [5] These are notable exceptions to the overall increase in life expectancy for all groups, regardless of race or ethnicity. While working class whites in Europe continue to experience increases in life expectancy, their counterparts in America are dying from drugs, suicide, and despair.[6]

The relationship between growing white death rates and support for Trump appears in the voting data. "Trump seems to represent a shrinking, in part dying segment of America," writes Jeff Guo in a detailed analysis of election results for the state of Iowa.[7] This holds true for other states as well. Guo goes on to demonstrate that, with the exception of Massachusetts, "the counties with high rates of white mortality were the same counties that turned out to vote for Trump." Many of these same voters are located in former industrial centers which themselves, in many ways, are also dying.

The deindustrialization of America first appeared in the Northeast and then in the former "Industrial Belt" (now dubbed the "Rust Belt" for the region's numerous decaying factories), stretching from Central New York to Illinois and Wisconsin. However, offshoring and free trade agreements have also severely damaged manufacturing centers in the "Right to Work" states of the South. Anger over free trade deals is driving much of Trump's populist economic rhetoric; a similar, though smaller effect, is being felt with Bernie Sanders's campaign on the Democratic side.

Despite regional changes, overall employment in manufacturing remained at a steady level until the end of the 1990s. Free trade agreements like NAFTA and the granting of "most favored nation" status to China (along with China's entry in the WTO in 2001) greatly undermined American manufacturing employment, which has almost continually declined over the past two decades. Aside for the traditional Rust Belt states, Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi are among the top ten states in terms of loss of total share of manufacturing jobs.[8] Trump won all but Kansas during the Republican primaries. His campaign also looks to be pursuing a "Rust Belt strategy" for the general election, which could see the wooing of disaffected former Reagan Democrats and independents who will never embrace the Clinton candidacy. So, if Trump were to falter in states with large Latino populations, he could (in theory) potentially take economically troubled swing states like Ohio (no Republican has won a general election without it) and Michigan. Trump's appeal with working class voters could put traditionally Democratic states such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in play as well in November.

Much is being made (rightfully) of the violent clashes at Trump rallies-often connected to the nativist and authoritarian overtones of the campaign itself. Yet far less attention is paid to the outlet Trump is providing by borrowing populist strains from the political left and right. With the exception of Bernie Sanders, who is facing increasing hostility from the party elite, the Democrats appear unwilling to tap into the mounting frustration over inequality, free trade deals, deindustrialization, and stagnant wages.

After their apocalyptic defeat in the 1972 presidential election, the Democratic elite began to push for the transition from a labor-oriented party to one rooted in the professional (upper) middle class. The process greatly accelerated under the auspices of the Democratic Leadership Council and Bill Clinton in the 1990s. It brought the party electoral success, but as the upper 10 percent of the country prospered-including the new elite professional class loyal to the Democrats-economic conditions deteriorated for the party's old base and for the majority of the country at large.

In Thomas Frank's latest book, Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People, the acerbic author takes a painful look at the effect of the unmooring of the Democratic Party from its roots in the working class: "Since 1992, Democrats have won the plurality of votes in every single election except one. For six of those years, they controlled Congress outright. But on matters of inequality they have done vanishingly little: They have stubbornly refused to change course when every signal said stop."[9]

It is indisputable that Republican policies during the same period also greatly increased inequality; however, the old liberal class of Franklin Roosevelt's party should have been the antidote to supply-side poison. They failed. And while the Republicans are paying the price for offering disaffected white workers the wages of identity politics (while advancing policies that destroy their livelihoods) the Democrats are likely next in line for the blowback.

"If you read mainstream coverage of Donald Trump, it's all focused on the bigotry and intolerance," Thomas Franks writes, "but there is another element, which is [he] talks about trade and he talks about it all the time."[10] Where is the Democratic Party on trade? It took the Democrats and Bill Clinton to succeed where George H.W. Bush failed and get NAFTA passed, which devastated whole regions and cost the country 700,000 jobs.[11] President Obama and Hillary Clinton both championed the Trans-Pacific Partnership-which will also cost working class jobs-over the objections of labor. (Clinton has since tried to walk back her initial support.) According to analysis by The Atlantic, "The trade pact will increase the importation of competing goods, which will drive down the cost of U.S.-made goods, putting downward pressure on wages." Even Breitbart News, a stalwart conservative publication, condemns the TPP for its likely effect on the working class, while the Obama Administration relentlessly pushes for its passage:

The question that conservatives must answer in the on-going debate over President Barack Obama's proposal to rewrite the rules for the world's economy through the Trans-Pacific Partnership is whether following General Electric's agenda to flatten the world's regulatory regimes to produce efficiencies in manufacturing and labor is in the interests of the United States? [12]

It is difficult to imagine President Obama ever uttering such words about a free trade deal.

Only Senator Sanders has rallied to the defense of labor and the sections of the country hard-hit by trade; Clinton by contrast is seemingly ready to turn her back on the traditional manufacturing heartland in the Midwest and parts of the South. In reality, the Democratic Party's record over the pasty twenty-five years on everything from trade to protections for labor is a fantastically dismal one.

The best strategy to counter Trump's rise would be to focus on the legitimate grievances of much of his constituency while countering his appeal to identity politics. Democratic elites who view the white working class as hopelessly racist are playing into Trump's hands (while also discounting the racism of the professional class). But while they dither, the thunder of a movement inspired by the storm that is Donald Trump continues to coalesce. And even if Trump disappears from the political radar tomorrow, the backlash he has inspired will live on.

From the crumbling factory walls of the Rust Belt to the shuttered main streets of the Deep South, a revolt is underway. The long forgotten "flyover country" is erupting in a paroxysm of anger and despair over the generations of decline that have battered once solid bastions of white working and lower-middle class America. With progressive voices replaced by neoliberal orthodoxy, no constructive outlets remain to channel the cacophony emerging from the heartland. With a fading Bernie Sanders and a rising Trump, the outcome might already be decided. If both parties fail to come up with economic solutions for decaying sections of the country's interior (and if no radical movements emerge from the grass roots), the potential for the worst possible right-wing backlash will remain. It is certain that America will never right itself until it deals with this crisis; if it does not, the forces of nativism and demagoguery will win the day. And from there, we will all reap the whirlwind.

Notes

[1] Charles Etlinger, "Mahoning Valley Faces 70s Crisis," Youngstown Vindicator, September 27, 1970.

[2] "Austintown 5th-Fastest Dying Town in U.S. Says Forbes," Vindicator, December 20, 2008.

[3] Peter H. Milliken, "The Elephant in the Room," Vindicator, March 20, 2016.

[4] Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, Homeland (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004), xlii.

[5] Wonkblog, Jeff Guo, "The Places That Support Trump and Cruz are Suffering. But That's Not True of Rubio," Washington Post, February 8, 2016.

[6] Olga Khazan, "Middle-Aged White Americans are Dying of Despair," The Atlantic, November 4, 2015.

[7] Wonkblog, Jeff Guo, "Death Predicts Whether People Vote for Donald Trump," Washington Post, March 4, 2016.

[8] Economic Policy Institute, "The Manufacturing Footprint and the Importance of U.S. Manufacturing Jobs," January 22, 2015.

[9] Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2016),9.

[10] CBC Radio, "It's not Bigotry but Bad Trade Deals Driving Trump Voters, Says Author Thomas Frank," CBC online site. http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-march-16-2016-1.3493397/it-s-not-bigotry-but-bad-trade-deals-driving-trump-voters-says-author-thomas-frank-1.3493433 (accessed March 22, 2016).

[11] Economic Policy Institute, "NAFTA's Impact on U.S. Workers," December 9, 2013.

[12] Rick Manning, "A Rebuttal to National Review's Claim that White Working Class Communities Deserve to Die," Bretibart News, March 17, 2016.

Socialism, Popular Education, and the Fight Against Racism in the Soviet Union

By Derek R. Ford

While in the U.S. the veil of anti-communism is beginning to lift and the word "socialism" isn't as dirty as it once was, the Left still has a lot of recuperating to do. The virulent campaign against communism in the U.S. is deep and multi-faceted, and it has taken on many different forms. And it seems like we constantly forfeit one of our greatest assets in the struggle to recuperate communism: our own history. Instead of critically appreciating the history of the actually-existing workers struggle and the social formations it has produced, we instead seek to separate ourselves from that legacy, to claim that they weren't and aren't really communists. This is an easy way of dealing with the propaganda that is delivered through our media and schools on a regular basis, for we can tell people, "Well, what your teachers were talking about wasn't really socialism." This is, however, just another form of American exceptionalism, left American exceptionalism.

I'm not going to make an argument about the economic and social systems of various social formations throughout history (if you are interested in that argument, read Albert Szymanski's book, Is the Red Flag Flying?), but I am going to demonstrate that the history of socialist struggle provides us with inspiring and effective examples of how we can fight against oppression. In particular, because we are enjoying our month-long relief from another white history year, I want to give two examples of the way that the Soviet Union mobilized popular education to confront racism.

Harry Haywood was recruited into the Communist Party USA in the early 1920s, and was soon sent to the Soviet Union, first to study at KUTVA (the University of the Toilers in the East named for Stalin) and later at the Lenin School. During his time in the Soviet Union Haywood participated in the Sixth Congress of the Communist International, witnessed the debates between Trotsky and Stalin, and played a pivotal role in theorizing the Black Belt Thesis, the concept that Black people in the U.S. constituted an oppressed nation.

Haywood, a Black man originally from South Omaha, Nebraska, spent several years in the Soviet Union. In his autobiography, Black Bolshevik, he recounts a few instances of racial encounters and racist actions. For the racial encounters, Haywood writes that he and his fellow delegation of Black communists from the U.S. would attract attention for their skin color in the Moscow streets. "If we paused to greet a friend," he writes, "we found ourselves instantly surrounded by curious crowds… It was a friendly curiosity which we took in stride" (169).

Haywood notes that during his stay he only encountered one instance of racist hostility. While on a streetcar one evening to visit a friend, a drunken passenger stepped aboard and said "something 'about Black devils in our country'" (170):

A group of outraged Russian passengers thereupon seized him and ordered the motorman to stop the car. It was a citizen's arrest, the first I had ever witnessed. "How dare you, you scum, insult people who are the guests of our country!"

What then occurred was an impromptu, on-the-spot meeting, where they debated what to do with the man. I was to see many of this kind of "meeting" during my stay in Russia.

Some passengers wanted to excuse the passenger's behavior, blaming it on his drinking. Ultimately, however, it was decided that they would take him to the militia station to press charges. The motorman proceeded to drive everyone to the station, where he spent the night in jail.

In 1930, Haywood's last year in the Soviet Union, an incident took place in Stalingrad that, he writes, "forcibly brought home to me the contrast between the socialist world which I was leaving and the racist world which I was about to re-enter" (339).

Unlike the capitalist world, which was in the throes of the Great Depression, the Soviet Union was suffering from a labor shortage. As a result, U.S. workers were flocking to the Soviet Union for jobs. Several hundred white technicians were brought to work in a tractor factory in Stalingrad, and they had their own restaurants and shops in the area surrounding the factory, forming something of a small colony. One day, Robert Robertson, a Jamaican native and U.S. citizen, joined the colony. He was brought over from Detroit to train workers in tool-grinding. His first morning there he entered the American dining room for breakfast and was accosted, beaten up, and thrown out of the restaurant by two white U.S. workers.

This attempt to transplant American racism to Soviet soil was met with outrage. It was made a political issue of high order by the Soviet trade unions and Party organizations. Factory meetings were called throughout the Soviet Union which denounced this crime and expressed the outrage of Soviet workers… The slogan of the day became, "American technique yes! American prejudice no!" It was given the widest publicity; the culprits were arrested immediately, not for assault and battery but for white chauvinism, a social crime and therefore far more serious.

A mass public trial, with delegations sent from factories all over the country, was held. The white technicians were sentenced to two years imprisonment which was commuted to deportation to the United States. (340)

Robertson remained in the Soviet Union, where he eventually gained citizenship.

These two examples document the seriousness with which the Soviet Union-its people and its state-took racism. When racist incidents occurred, they were not explained away or swept under the rug. Instead, they were put in the spotlight, becoming the subject of dialogue, deliberation, and justice. The state apparatus was wielded to snuff out racism and national chauvinism, and the masses were mobilized-the masses self-mobilized-to address racism head-on. They give educators a perfect example of what popular education is. Imagine what they would have done to a George Zimmerman!

References

Harry Haywood. (1978). Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American communist. Chicago: Liberator Press.

Albert Szymanski. (1979). Is the Red Flag Flying? The political economy of the Soviet Union today. London: Zed Books.

Derek R. Ford is a teacher, organizer, and writer living in Philadelphia. He earned his PhD in cultural foundations of education at Syracuse University in 2015. He is co-author (with Curry Malott) of Marx, Capital, and Education: Towards a critical pedagogy of becoming (Peter Lang, 2015), and his latest book, The Secret Struggle of Study: For a commonness against is forthcoming through Lexington Books later this year. He is Co-Chair of the Education Department at The Hampton Institute and an organizer with the ANSWER Coalition.

From Chiapas to Rojava: The Rise of a New Revolutionary Paradigm

By CIC

" Power to the people" can only be put into practice when the power
exercised by social elites is dissolved into the people.

- Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism

The largely unknown until recently Kurdish city of Kobane managed to attract the attention of the world with its fierce resistance [i] against the invasion of the Islamic State and became an international symbol, compared to the defence of Madrid and Stalingrad. The bravery and heroism of the People's Defence Units and the Women's Defence Units (YPG and YPJ) were praised by a large spectrum of groups and individuals - anarchists, leftists, liberals and even right-wingers expressed sympathy and admiration for the men and women of Kobane in their historical battle against what was often seen as IS "fascism." The mainstream media was forced to break the silence over the Kurdish autonomy and soon numerous articles and news stories were broadcasted and published, often depicting the "toughness" and determination of the Kurdish fighters with a certain dose of exotisation, of course. However, this attention was very often selective and partial - the very essence of the political project in Rojava (Western Kurdistan) was left aside and the media preferred to present the resistance in Kobane as some weird exception to the supposed barbarism of the Middle East. Without surprise, the red star, shining on the victorious flags of the YPG/J was not a pleasing image in the eyes of the Western powers and their media. The autonomous cantons of Rojava represent a home-grown solution to the conflicts in the Middle East, encompassing grassroots democracy, ethnic, social and gender rights and all this in rejection both of IS terror but also of liberal democracy and capitalist economy . Although the West preferred to stay silent on this issue, this ideological foundation is the key for understanding the spirit that wrote the Kobane epopee and fascinated the world, as the Kurdish activist and academic, Dilar Dirik, claimed recently[ii].

As the battles for every street and corner of the city were intensifying, Kobane managed to captivate the imagination of the left and specifically of the libertarian left as a symbol of resistance and struggle and soon it was placed on the pantheon of some of the most emblematic battles for humanity, such as the defence of Madrid against the fascists in the 1930s. It was not by accident that the Turkish Marxist-Leninist group MLKP, which joined the YPG/J in/on the battlefield, raised the flag of the Spanish republic over the ruins of the city in the day of its liberation and called for the formation of International Brigades[iii], following the example of the Spanish revolution. It was not the battle for Kobane itself, but the libertarian essence of the cantons of Rojava, the implementation of grassroots direct democracy, the participation of women and different ethnic groups into the autonomous government that gave ground to the comparisons with the Spanish revolution. Another association was mentioned briefly in several articles - the revolution in Rojava and its autonomous government were compared to the Zapatistas and their autonomy in the south of Mexico. The importance of this comparison might be crucial in order to understand the paradigm of the revolutionary struggle in Kurdistan and what it means for those who believe another world is possible.

The Zapatista movement is probably one of the most symbolic and influential elements of the revolutionary imaginary in the world after the fall of the state-socialist regimes in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the morning of January 1, 1994, an unknown guerrilla force, composed of indigenous Mayas, took over the main towns of the southern-most Mexican state - Chiapas. The military operation was carried out with strategic brilliance and combined with the innovative back then use of the internet to spread the message of the revolutionaries, it echoed around the globe to inspire international solidarity and the emergence of the Alter-Globalisation movement. The Zapatistas rebelled against neoliberal capitalism and the social and cultural genocide of the indigenous population in Mexico. Ya Basta, Enough is enough, was their war cry that emerged from the night of "500 years of oppression", as the First Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle stated. The Zapatistas rose up in arms when global capital was celebrating the "end of history" and the idea of social revolution seemed to be a romantic anachronism that belonged to the past. The Zapatista Army for National Liberation was forced out of the cities in twelve days of intense battles with the federal army but it turned out that the deep horizontal organisation in the indigenous communities could not be eradicated by any military intervention or terror. The masked spokesperson of the rebel army, Subcomandante Marcos, challenged the notion of historical vanguard as opposed to revolution from below, which does not aim to take power but to abolish it and this concept became central to the most mass anti-capitalist movements since - from Seattle and Genoa to the Syntagma and Puerta del Sol occupations and even the Occupy Movement.

Where are the similarities with the Rojavan revolution?

From Marxism-Leninism to Autonomy - a shared historical trajectory

The roots of the democratic autonomy in Rojava can be understood only through the history of the Workers' Party of Kurdistan (PKK), the organisation, which has been central to the Kurdish liberation movement since its creation in 1978. The PKK was established as a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla organisation in Northern Kurdistan, part of the Turkish state, combining the ideologies of national and social liberation. It grew to a substantial guerrilla force under the leadership of Abdullah Ocalan and managed to challenge the second biggest army in NATO in a conflict that claimed the lives of more than forty thousand people. The Turkish state displaced hundreds of thousands and reportedly used torture, assassination and rape against the civilian population but did not manage to break the backbone of the Kurdish resistance. Since its inception, PKK has expanded its influence both in Turkey and in the other parts of Kurdistan. The leading political force in the Rojavan revolution - the Democratic Union Party (PYD) is affiliated with it through the Kurdistan Communities' Union, KCK, the umbrella organisation that encompasses various revolutionary and political groups sharing the ideas of the PKK. The ideology, which unites the different civil and revolutionary groups in the KCK is called democratic confederalism and is based on the ideas of the US anarchist Murray Bookchin, who argued in favour of a non-hierarchal society based on social-ecology, libertarian municipalism, and direct democracy.

Although the Zapatistas are famous for their autonomous government and rejection of the notion of historical vanguard, the roots of the organisation were also related to Marxism-Leninism and just like in the case of the PKK, the idea of self-governance and revolution from below were a product of a long historical evolution. The EZLN was founded in 1983 by a group of urban guerrillas, predominantly Marxist-Leninists, who decided to start a revolutionary cell among the indigenous population in Chiapas, organise a guerrilla force and take power through guerrilla warfare. Soon they realised that their ideological dogma was not applicable to the indigenous realities and started learning from the communal traditions of governance of the indigenous people. Thus, Zapatismo was born as a fusion between Marxism and the experience and knowledge of the native population that has been resisting both against the Spanish and later the Mexican state.

This shared ideological trajectory demonstrates a historical turn in the understanding of revolutionary process. The Zapatista uprising and establishment of the autonomy in Chiapas marked a break with traditional guerrilla strategies, inspired predominantly by the Cuban revolution, this was made more than clear in the letter EZLN spokesman, Subcomandante Marcos, wrote to the Basque liberation organisation ETA:

"I shit on all revolutionary vanguards on this planet. [iv]"

It was not the vanguard to lead the people now; it was the people themselves to build the revolution from below and sustain it as such. This is the logic PKK has been shifting towards in the last decade under the influence of Murray Bookchin and this shift demonstrates an evolution of the organisation from movement for the people to a movement of the people.

Cantons and Caracoles - freedom here and now

Probably the most important similarity between the revolution in Rojava and the one in Chiapas is the social and political reorganisation that is taking place in both places that is based on the libertarian ideology of the two organisations.

The Zapatista autonomy in its current form originates from the failure of the peace negotiations with the Mexican government after the uprising in 1994. During the peace negotiations the rebels demanded the government to adhere to the accords of San Andres, which give the indigenous people the right to autonomy, self-determination, education, justice and political organisation, based on their tradition as well as communal control over the land and the resources of the areas that belong to them. These accords were never implemented by the government and in 2001 president Fox backed an edited version that was voted for in congress but did not meet the demands of the Zapatistas and the other groups in resistance. This event was labelled as "treason" and it provoked the EZLN to declare two years later the creation of the five rebel zones, centred in five Caracoles (or snails in English) that serve as administrative centres. The name Caracoles came to show the revolutionary concept of the Zapatistas - we are doing it ourselves, we learn in the process and we advance, slowly, but we advance. The Caracoles[v] include three levels of autonomous government - community, municipality and Council of the Good Government. The first two are based on grassroots assemblies whereas the Councils of the Good Government are elected but with the intention to get as many people as possible to participate in the Government over the years through a principle of rotation. The autonomy has its own educational system, healthcare and justice, as well as cooperatives, producing coffee, cattle, handcrafts etc.

We learn as we make things, we did not know about autonomy and that we were going to build something like it. But we learn and improve things and learn from the struggle - told me my Zapatista guardian Armando, when I visited the autonomous territory at the end of 2013. Freedom could only be practiced here and now and revolution was a process of constantly challenging the status-quo and building alternatives to it.

The Rojavan cantons indeed resemble the autonomy in Chiapas. They were proclaimed by the dominant PYD in 2013 and function through the established popular assemblies and democratic councils. Women participate equally in the decision-making and are represented in all elected positions, which are always shared by a man and a woman. All ethnic groups are represented in the government and its institutions. Healthcare and education are also guaranteed by the system of democratic confederalism and recently the first Rojavan university, the Masepotamia Academy, opened it's doors with plans to challenge the hierarchical structure of education, and to provide a different approach to learning.

Just as it is in the case with the Zapatistas, the Revolution in Rojava envisions itself as a solution to the problems in the whole country, not as an expression of separatist tendencies. This genuine democratic system, as claimed by the delegation of academics from Europe and North America [vi], that visited Rojava recently, points to a different future of the Middle East, based on direct participation, women's emancipation and ethnic peace.

Women's revolution

Gender has always been central to the Zapatista revolution. The situation of women before the spread of the organization and the adoption of women's liberation as central to the struggle, was marked by exploitation, marginalization, forced marriages, physical violence and discrimination. This is why Marcos claims that the first uprising was not the one in 1994 but the adoption of the Womens' Revolutionary Law in 1993, setting the framework for gender equality and justice and guaranteeing the rights of the women in the rebel territory to personal autonomy, emancipation and dignity. Today women participate in all levels of government and have their own cooperatives and economic structures to guarantee their economic independence. Women were and still form a large part of the ranks of the Zapatista guerilla force and take high positions in its commandment. The takeover of San Cristobal de las Casas, the most important city the Zapatista troops captured during the uprising in 1994, was also commanded by women, headed by comandanta Ramona, who was also the first Zapatista to be sent to Mexico city to represent the movement.

It is not difficult to compare the mass involvement of indigenous women in Chiapas in the Zapatista ranks to the participation of women in the defense of Kobane and in the YPJ - the Women's Protection Units, both depicted in a sensationalist manner[vii] by the Western media in the last months. However, their bravery and determination in the war against ISIS is a product of a long tradition of women participation in the armed struggle for social liberation in Kurdistan. Women have played a central role in the PKK and this is undoubtedly connected with the importance of gender in the Kurdish struggle. The Rojava revolution has a strong emphasis on women's liberation as indispensable for the true liberation of society. The theoretical framework that puts the dismantling of patriarchy at the heart of the struggle is called "jineology", a concept developed by Abdullah Ocalan. The application of this concept has resulted in an unseen empowerment of women not only in the context of the Middle East but also in the context of western liberal feminism. The women's assemblies, cooperative structures and women's militias are the heart of the revolution, which is considered incomplete if it does not destroy the patriarchal structure of society, which is one of the fundamentals of capitalism. Janet Biehl, an independent writer and artist, wrote after her recent visit to Rojava that women in the Kurdish revolution have the ideological role of the proletariat in the XXth century revolutions.

The ecology of freedom

The Ecology of Freedom is probably the most important among Bookchin's works and his concept of social ecology has been adopted by the revolutionaries in Rojava. His idea that "the very notion of the domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by human" links patriarchy, environmental destruction and capitalism and points at their abolition as the only way to a just society. Such a holistic approach has been advocated and implemented by the Zapatistas as well. Sustainability has also been an important point of emphasis, especially after the creation of the caracoles in 2003. The autonomous government has been trying to recuperate ancestral knowledge, related to the sustainable use of the land and combine it with other agro-ecological practices. This logic is not only a matter of improving the living conditions in the communities and avoiding the use of agrochemicals, it is a rejection of the whole notion that large-scale industrial agriculture is superior to the 'primitive' way the indigenous people work the land and as such it is a powerful defiance of the logic of neoliberalism.

The road to Autonomy - the new revolutionary paradigm

The similarities between the system of democratic confederalism that is being developed in Western Kurdistan and the Autonomy in Chiapas go far beyond the few points I have stressed in this article. From slogans such as Ya Basta, adapted in Kurdish as êdî bes e to the grassroots democracy, communal economic structures and participation of women, the similar path the Kurdish movement and the Zapatistas have taken demonstrates a decisive break with the vanguardist notion of Marxism-Leninism and a new approach to revolution, which comes from below and aims at the creation of a free and non-hierarchal society.

Although both movements have received some bitter criticism[viii] from sectarian elements on the left, the very fact that the only major and successful experiments in radical social change originate from non-western, marginalised and colonised groups, comes as a slap in the face to the white and privileged dogmatic "revolutionaries" of the global north who have hardly been successful on challenging oppression in their own countries but tend to believe it is their judgement what is and what is not a real revolution.

The revolutions in Rojava and Chiapas are a powerful example for the world, demonstrating the enormous capacity of grassroots organisation and the importance of communal links as opposed to capitalist social atomisation. Last but not least, Chiapas and Rojava should make many on the left, including some anarchists, trash their colonial mindset and ideological dogmatism.

A world without hierarchy, domination, capitalism and environmental destruction or as the Zapatistas say, the world where many worlds fit, has often been depicted as "utopian" and "unrealistic" by the mainstream media, education and political structures. However, this world is not some future mirage that comes from the books - it is happening here and now and the examples of Zapatistas and Kurds are a powerful weapon to reignite our capacity to imagine a real radical change in society as well as a model we can learn from in our struggles. The red stars that shine over Chiapas and Rojava shed light on the way to liberation and if we need to summarize in one word what brings these two struggles together, it would definitely be Autonomy.​​

Originally published by the Cooperativa Integral Catalana.

Notes

[i] Dicle, Amed (2015) Kobane Victory, How it Unfolded

http://kurdishquestion.com/index.php/insight-research/analysis/kobane-victory-how-it-unfolded.html

[ii] Dirik, Dilar (2015) Whi Kobane Did Not Fall
http://kurdishquestion.com/index.php/kurdistan/west-kurdistan/why-kobani-did-not-fall.html

[iii] International Brigades Form in Rojava (2014)
http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2015/01/international-brigades-form-in-rojava-no-pasaran-video-3100250.html

[iv] Marcos (2003) I Shit on All Revolutionary Vanguards on This Planethttp://roarmag.org/2011/02/i-shit-on-all-the-revolutionary-vanguards-of-this-planet/

[v] Oikonomakis, Leonidas (2013) Zapatistas Celebrate 10 Years of Autonomy With Escuelitahttp://roarmag.org/2013/08/escuelita-zapatista-10-year-autonomy/

[vi] Joint Statement of the Academic Delagation to Rojava
https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/joint-statement-of-the-academic-delegation-to-rojava/

[vii] Dirik, Dilar (2014) Western Fascination With "Badass" Kurdish Women
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/10/western-fascination-with-badas-2014102112410527736.html

[viii]

Anarchist Federation Statement on Rojava (2014)
http://www.afed.org.uk/blog/international/435-anarchist-federation-statement-on-rojava-december-2014.html

A Long-War Strategy for the Left

By William T. Hathaway

As the viciousness of capitalism engulfs ever more of us, our yearnings for change are approaching desperation. The system's current leader, Barack Obama, has shown us that the only change we can believe in is what we ourselves create.

To do that, we need to know what is possible in our times and what isn't. The bitter probability is that none of us will see a society in which we'd actually want to live. Even the youngest of us will most likely have to endure an increasingly unpleasant form of capitalism. Despite its recurring crises, this system is still too strong, too adaptable, and has too many supporters in all classes for it to be overthrown any time soon. We're probably not going to be the ones to create a new society.

But we can now lay the groundwork for that, first by exposing the hoax that liberal reforms will lead to basic changes. People need to see that the purpose of liberalism is to defuse discontent with promises of the future and thus prevent mass opposition from coalescing. It diverts potentially revolutionary energy into superficial dead ends. Bernie Sanders' "long game" campaign is really only a game similar to that of his reformist predecessor, Dennis Kucinich, designed to keep us in the "big tent" of the Democratic Party. Capitalism, although resilient, is willing to change only in ways that shore it up, so before anything truly different can be built, we have to bring it down.

What we are experiencing now is the long war the ruling elite is fighting to maintain its grip on the world. The current phase began with the collapse of Keynesian capitalism, which flourished from the 1950s into the '70s, when the primary consumer market was in the capitalist headquarter countries of North America and Western Europe. Corporations were able to stimulate domestic consumption and quell worker discontent there by acceding to labor's demands for better wages and conditions. That led to a 30-year bubble of improvement for unionized workers, predominantly male and white, that began to collapse in the '80s as capitalism gradually became globalized.

Then to maintain dominance Western corporations had to reduce labor costs in order to compete against emerging competition in low-wage countries such as China, India, Russia, and Brazil. Also international consumer markets became more important than the home market, but reaching them required low prices. So capitalist leaders reversed hard-won reforms, forcing down paychecks and working conditions in the West. And they tried to keep control of crucial Mideast oil resources by tightening their neo-imperialist hold on that region: overthrowing governments, installing dictators, undermining economies.

This aggression generated armed resistance: jihadist attacks against the West. Our response has been the current holy war against terror. All of this horrible suffering is just one campaign in capitalism's long war for hegemony. Any dominator system -- including capitalism, patriarchy, and religious fundamentalism -- generates violence.

Since we are all products of such systems, the path out of them will include conflict and strife. Insisting on only peaceful tactics and ruling out armed self defense against a ruling elite that has repeatedly slaughtered millions of people is naïve, actually a way of preventing basic change. The pacifist idealism so prevalent among the petty-bourgeoisie conceals their class interest: no revolution, just reform. But until capitalism and its military are collapsing, it would be suicidal to attack them directly with force.

What we can do now as radicals is weaken capitalism and build organizations that will pass our knowledge and experience on to future generations. If we do that well enough, our great grandchildren (not really so far away) can lead a revolution. If we don't do it, our descendants will remain corporate chattel.

Our generational assignment -- should we decide to accept it -- is sedition, subversion, sabotage: a program on which socialists and anarchists can work together.

Sedition -- advocating or attempting the overthrow of the government -- is illegal only if it calls for or uses violence. Our most important job -- educating and organizing people around a revolutionary program -- is legal sedition, as is much of our writing here on The Hampton Institute.

For subversion we could, for example, focus on institutions and rituals that instill patriotism in young people. School spirit, scouts, competitive team sports, and pledges of allegiance all create in children an emotional bond to larger social units of school, city, and nation.

Kids are indoctrinated to feel these are extensions of their family and to respect and fear the authorities as they would their parents, more specifically their fathers, because this is a patriarchal chain being forged. It causes us even as adults to react to criticism of the country as an attack on our family. This hurts our feelings on a deep level, so we reject it, convinced it can't be true. It's too threatening to us.

This linkage is also the basis of the all-American trick of substituting personal emotion for political thought.

Breaking this emotional identification is crucial to reducing the widespread support this system still enjoys. Whatever we can do to show how ridiculous these institutions and rituals are will help undermine them.

For instance, teachers could refuse to lead the pledge of allegiance, or they could follow it with historical facts that would cause the students to question their indoctrination. When a teacher gets fired, the resulting legal battle can taint the whole sacrosanct ritual and challenge the way history is taught in the schools.

Subversive parenting means raising children who won't go along with the dominant culture and have the skills to live outside it as much as possible.

Much feminist activism is profoundly subversive. That's why it's opposed so vehemently by many women as well as men.

Spiritually, whatever undercuts the concept of God as daddy in the sky will help break down patriarchal conditioning and free us for new visions of the Divine.

Sabotage is more problematic. It calls to mind bombing and shooting, which at this point won't achieve anything worthwhile. But sabotage doesn't need to harm living creatures; systems can be obstructed in many ways, which I can't discuss more specifically because of the police state under which we currently live. They are described in my book Radical Peace.

We'll be most successful by using both legal and illegal tactics but keeping the two forms separate. Illegal direct action is sometimes necessary to impair the system, impede its functioning, break it in a few places, opening up points of vulnerability for coming generations to exploit. This doesn't require finely nuanced theory or total agreement on ideology, just a recognition of the overriding necessity of weakening this monster, of reducing its economic and military power. It does require secrecy, though, so it's best done individually with no one else knowing.

As groups, we should do only legal resistance. Since we have to assume we are infiltrated and our communications are monitored, illegal acts must be done alone or in small cells without links to the group. Security is essential. Police may have the identity of everyone in the group, but if members are arrested and interrogated, their knowledge will be very limited. The principles of leaderless resistance provide the most effective defense for militants.

Using these tactics, we can slow down this behemoth, curtail its expansion, make it a less effective murderer. The government will of course try to crush this resistance. But that very response can eventually seal its doom because it increases polarization and sparks more outrage. People will see the rich have not only taken away our possibility for a decent life, but now they are taking away our freedom. Then the masses revolt.

When the police and military have to attack their own people, their loyalty begins to waver. They realize they too are oppressed workers, and they start disobeying their masters. The power structure grinds down, falters, and falls. At this point the revolution can succeed, hopefully with a minimum of violence. Then the people of that generation, with the knowledge and experience we have passed on to them, can build a new society.

This is not a pleasant path of action, and those whose first priority is pleasantness are repelled by it. That's why reformism is so popular: it's an illusion that appeals to cowards. But when their backs are to the wall, which will inevitably happen, even they will fight back. And there's something glorious in that revolutionary fight even in its present stage -- much more vivid and worthwhile than the life of a lackey.

William T. Hathaway is an adjunct professor of American studies at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. His new book, Lila, the Revolutionary, is a fable for adults about an eight-year-old Indian girl who sparks a world revolution for social justice. Chapters are posted onwww.amazon.com/dp/1897455844. A selection of his writing is available at www.peacewriter.org.

American Cartel: How America's Two Major Parties Helped Destroy Democracy

By Frank Castro

Cartel: An association of manufacturers or suppliers with the purpose of maintaining prices at a high level and restricting competition.

A little over two decades ago, on December 2, 1993, the principle engineer of Colombia's infamous cocaine empire, Pablo Escobar, was killed while fleeing police on the barrio rooftops of his hometown, Medellin. Before he died he had amassed an organization of state-like power, challenging, in fact, the government of Columbia itself over the question of its extradition policies-and winning. Dubbed the Medellin drug cartel, his international cocaine operation grew to prominence functioning similarly to the corporations which dominate today's global economy. Escobar knew, by controlling every possible link in the drug chain from production to retail, he could corral suppliers under a single umbrella, dictate the price of his product, and severely limit any would-be competitors from challenging his power.

Escobar was not alone in learning from the strategies of corporate giants. If anything he was late. Few organizations have pervasively and durably monopolized a market as well as America's Republican and Democratic parties. The two dominant machines steering the U.S. electorate have consistently diminished the potential for a freer America. That's because the reality is, rather than arch rivals, liberals and conservatives are two factions of the same team. Both are capitalist. Both are imperialist. Both are white supremacist surrogates. And both are controlled by a plutocratic elite who have discovered what Escobar learned in his early twenties, that competition is best neutralized by eliminating all possible outliers. We merely perceive the two parties as markedly different because of the degree to which the spectrum of possibilities has been narrowed.

American Cartel

Politics, at its barest, is a market characterized by power-and the struggle for how power will be distributed. As CrimethInc illustrated some time ago, in this market ideas function similar to currency. Delineated by ideas which can build capital enough for the acquisition of more power, and those which might unbind power, political parties are tethered to the same basic operating principles of any capitalist enterprise. They must solidify market share in the realm of ideas and grow, wherever and whenever possible, or go bankrupt. Incubated within this constant power play, self-preservation becomes the party's central priority; and it does not matter if the ideas which accomplish this outcome are beneficial to the electorate or detrimental, so long as it achieves the imperative to survive.

Political organizations which maintain growth long enough to survive often do so by normalizing their ideological framework. When they have obtained a disproportionate amount of influence over their immediate surroundings, they can metastasize into monopolies and control large swaths of the idea-economy. New ideas about how society ought to function can enter the market to contest old ideas, but usually encapsulated within reforms incapable of unseating the dominant paradigm. Characteristic of any capitalist system, once market monopolies are established "power tends to flow upward to the top of a hierarchy, from which the masters, the ones qualified to employ it, decide matters for everyone else."

Remember the age-old question, what do all those with power want? More power. As such, two monopolies have dominated American politics for over 150 years-the Democratic Party, founded in 1828, and the Republican Party, founded in 1854. Together, they form a political cartel, or an association of political parties with the purpose of maintaining concentrated power and restricting or repressing competition. Throughout the past century its loosely managed agreements, often wholly unofficial, but embedded deep within its standard operation, have been the quasi-coordinated production, distribution, and enforcement of a set of normalized choices which reflect only the range of needs of private corporate power.

Essentially, to solidify and gain greater control, the two parties staked out a set of positions within a predetermined and standardized framework which express the basic ideas of the status quo. This way any "new" solutions about what might be possible tend toward ideas which pose no serious danger to the framework itself, which produce reforms only capable of gutting radical resistance while leaving the underlying problems intact. Any outliers are assimilated or positioned to enhance the strength of current institutions. In other words, all ideas must first be filtered through the umbrella of the Democrat-Republican cartel, which dictates the pedigree of ideas both old and new, and therefore severely limiting any competition from threatening its hegemony.

American Sicarios

Central to the project of any cartel is control. And within most drug cartels there is an armed group responsible for carrying out violence in an effort to maintain it. In Colombia they were called sicarios. Though the violence is systematically different, American sicarios are most accurately found in state institutions like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Such an observation should not be seen as hyperbole. Even the most marginally informed American should know their government frequently has been involved in shameful acts of violence, whether it was the assassination, framing, and political neutralization of black, brown, indigenous, and left-radical movements and their leaders, or organized coups in the Middle East, Africa, and Central or South America.

Without enforcers America's political cartel simply could not exist. As I wrote in Gangs Of The State: Police And The Hierarchy Of Violence , our society operates on a clearly defined, yet often unarticulated, hierarchy of violence; and the function of politicians and police agencies is to normalize and enforce that violence. As an institution, these agencies act as state-sanctioned gangs, or, in this instance, the sicarios of America's political ideology, charged with the task of upholding the violent, racist hierarchy of white supremacist capitalism. Wherever and whenever possible, they are tasked with solidifying a monopoly of power where all violence from/by those higher on the hierarchy upon those lower can be normalized into business as usual. Any deviation from the status quo, any resistance whatsoever, is met with brutal repression.

For those familiar with United States history, the record of repression against anti-capitalist groups has been a source of considerable alliance between Democrats and Republicans. In A People's History of the United States, recounting America's anti-leftist atmosphere after Russia's Bolshevik Revolution, Howard Zinn wrote:

"In early September 1917, Department of Justice agents made simultaneous raids on forty-eight IWW [International Workers of the World] meetings across the country, seizing correspondence and literature that would become courtroom evidence. Later that month, 165 IWW leaders were arrested for conspiracy to hinder the draft, encourage desertion, and intimidate others in connection with labor disputes. One hundred and one went on trial [en masse] in April 1918; it lasted five months, the longest criminal trial in American history up to that time… [T]he jury found them all guilty. The judge sentenced [IWW president William "Big Bill"] Haywood and fourteen others to twenty years in prison; thirty-three were given ten years, the rest shorter sentences. They were fined a total of $2,500,000. The IWW was shattered."

Commonality between the United States' two major political parties has been most visible when viewed through its historically imperialist and anti-communist foreign policy. Beginning with the expansion of Soviet influence, the relationship is best described by a popularized euphemism of the Cold War Era: Partisanship ends at the water's edge, meaning, if the two factions of the cartel could ever totally agree, it must be on the dismembering of communism everywhere. As the growth of nationalist and anti-colonialist movements abroad strengthened in concert with labor movements in America, a fierce need for bipartisan crackdown to preserve the dominant regime emerged. Zinn once again lends clarity:

"The United States was trying, in the postwar decade [of World War II], to create a national consensus-excluding the radicals, who could not support a foreign policy aimed at suppressing revolution-of conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, around the policies of the Cold War and anti-Communism. Such a coalition could best be created by a liberal Democratic President, whose aggressive policy abroad would be supported by conservatives… [I]f the anti-Communist mood became strong enough, liberals could support repressive moves at home which in ordinary times would be seen as violating the tradition of liberal tolerance."

Repressive moves were exactly what happened. Imperialist consensus not only generated cohesion on issues of foreign policy, it refined a coordinated relationship of narrowed domestic power between Democrats and Republicans, providing the groundwork to enact an increasingly clandestine police-state. Repression of previous magnitude would continue against not only anti-capitalists, but against movements for self-determination throughout the '60s and '70s among black people, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, and indigenous populations, most notably through the FBI's COINTELPRO operations. The tactics for gutting competing political currents pioneered by police agencies then became standard operating procedure, evolved into pervasive surveillance apparatuses, and have been deployed in both recent uprisings against Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter protesters.

American Crime Lords

If there is a position within the cartel's classic hierarchy embodied by most liberal and conservative politicians, it would not be the rank of crime lord, but rather that of lieutenant, the second highest position. Lieutenants are responsible for supervising the sicarios within their own territories-in our case, their respective states. They are allowed discretion to carry-out the day-to-day operations of the cartel, to ensure its smooth operation. Crucial duties include voting on legislation filtered through existing idea-monopolies, which remain firmly rooted within the sanctioned political spectrum, and policing the spectrum's established borders by criminalizing outliers, especially ones that cannot be assimilated and must be repositioned to reinforce the existing framework. If they perform well enough, they become the focus of investigative inquiry and obscure the higher authority they serve.

The rank of real crime boss goes to richest of the rich. The multi-billionaires of America who-in recent years-have given up to 42 percent of all election contributions, and captured the state in the process. Brothers Charles and David Koch, owners of Koch Industries, the second largest privately owned company in the United States, are known for funding the Republican political machine, giving over one hundred million dollars to far-right causes. But the Kochs are no more alone in their policy purchasing than Republicans are in begging the super wealthy for campaign funds. Democrats have increasingly relied on it too. Money awarded to Democrats from corporate PACs now far outstrips what used to come from labor unions and trial lawyers. For instance, corporate PACs donated $164.3 million to Republicans during the 2010 election season and $164.3 million to Democrats also. Unions gave $59-$79 million.

Owning a cartel may not seem cheap, but it pays dividends. It accomplishes this not only through generating enormously disproportionate wealth, or even through buying elections, but by imposing upon the impoverished a set of values which ensure their continued exploitation. Karl Marx himself pointed this out, explaining that "the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force." For the poor American voter this means individuals are made to develop in such a fashion that their development fosters the strength of the capitalist state. At their core, working class people are constantly being sold and resold their own disempowerment, until finally we sell it to ourselves-over and over again. It is a sinister, but brilliant, stroke of genius-what better way to destroy the possibility of expropriation than to make disparity gold.

Michel Foucault described this process of perpetually re-inscribing within ourselves, and each other, the relation we have to power as the effect of unspoken warfare, a war where we build within our social institutions, and our very bodies, an ultimate disequilibrium. We self-police so thoroughly that when power's effects upon us begin self-reproducing "there is no need for arms, physical violence, [or] material constraints," just an inspecting gaze, "which each individual under its weight will end by interiorisation to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself." In short, we become our own worst enemies. The rules and values of the rich become the self-inflicted rules and values of the poor. But they never benefit us. And we quit asking why.

American Plutocracy

Democracy describes today's America by only the most facile standards. It has never really described America anyway. Plutocracy is the accurate word. And our plutocratic overlords keep us in a hamster-wheel choosing which lieutenant we will take orders from next for practical reasons. It gives them, and the political parties they own, a sort of object permanence. We understand the prescriptions of those in power even when we cannot observe them directly; because we have been inundated by their surrogates and transformed into a passive body meant only to ratify our subjugation. Imagine waking up in a prison cell with the choice to continue sleeping on an unpadded iron bench or a concrete floor. No matter what "decision" you make, neither can destroy the cage. This is the reality of our political climate, a series of non-decisions masquerading as choice.

Ultimately, the emergence of plutocracy has not been the fault of the working class. Even though we have internalized many of the mechanisms used to exploit us, we constantly have been outpaced, outgunned, and outright demoralized. And in our attempts at democracy we have fundamentally failed to understand that political freedom cannot exist in the absence of economic freedom. They are inextricably linked, like a tree to its roots. Now that many Americans are beginning to see how capitalism has been the physical incarnation of inequality, we must move forward in this moment and reconcile with another unassailable truth: That capitalism's relation to democracy will always be characterized by adversary, not coexistence. In such an environment, America's major political parties remain henchmen to a perverse and morally bankrupt distribution of power.