Marx, Ecology, and Politics: An Interview with Dr. Derek Wall

By Devon Bowers

This is the transcript of a recent email interview I did with Dr. Derek Wall where we discuss, in greater depth, his article entitled “Imperialism is the Arsonist: Marxism’s Contribution to Ecological Literatures and Struggles,” about Marx’s contribution to ecological thought, where current socialist governments are acting regarding the environment, and how EcoMarxists interact with electoral politics.

Devon: Where does this idea that Marx can be applied to the environment originate from? Kind of, if you can, give me sort of a history of Marxist thought being applied to the environment.

Derek: The ‘idea that Marx can be applied to the environment’ I think it comes from Marx and Engels. While both wrote a huge amount, within their vast output of they produced numerous statements of environmental concern. Engels, for example, wrote The Condition of the English Working Class in the 1840s. While this is near to the beginning of his writings it was already indicating that air and water pollution were an environmental threat. His notion of social murder encompassed hunger and poverty and such the effect of poisonous pollution, social murder is a concept that might cover the deaths from extreme weather we are already encountering from climate change.

In his ‘Letters from Wuppertal’ written back in 1839 Engels notes both air and water pollution as serious ills, ‘Work in low rooms where people breathe more coal fumes and dust than oxygen — and in the majority of cases beginning already at the age of six — is bound to deprive them of all strength and joy in life.’ He observed that red colour of the river was a product not of battle but industrial pollution, the result ‘simply and solely to the numerous dye-works using Turkey red.’

At various points in Capital Marx addresses problems that might be identified by environmentalists today such as food additives and deforestation. Capital provides perhaps the clearest application of Marxist thought to the environment, when Marx notes in volume three of our duty to future generations:

Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household].

In turn Engels, while not using the then newly coined term ‘ecology’, reveals his understanding of the science, based on relationships between species, that can lead to unexpected effects. This is from his text The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man:

‘Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries.’

I guess an early application of this Marxist ecology can be found via William Morris, the British poet, artist and revolutionary. Concerned initially with church conservation, which is perhaps far from radical environmentalism, he read Marx as a defender of the environment against the ravages of capitalism. Morris was active in Britain’s first Marxist organisation the Social Democratic Federation.

Also in Britain, excuse my bias as I live here, the Sporting organisation associated with the Communist Party undertook the Kinder Scout trespass in the 1930s. This was to demand that workers have access to countryside moorland that was monopolised by large landowners. 

During the 1950s and 60s rising awareness of global environmental problems, staring with atmospheric nuclear testing, led to a growing environmental movement. Organisations like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace originated in the late 1960s or early 1970s along with Ecology Parties in the same decade. A minority of writers made the connection between capitalism and environmental destruction. While an anarchist rather than a Marxist, New Yorker Murray Bookchin, writing under the pseudonym of Lewis Herber, drew upon a critique of capitalism to explain the origins of environmental problems, publishing Our Synthetic Environment in 1962, and other works in the 1970s and 80s. Anti-Marxist in his politics, Marxism did paradoxically inform his analysis of ecological problems.

The Frankfurt school of Western Marxists including Marcuse also began to consider ecological problems in this period. Erich Fromm, the psychoanalyst, associated with the Frankfurt school, argued for an ecological politics, which drew upon Marx’s early Paris Manuscripts, showing how work under capitalism alienated us from the rest of nature. This is explained most clearly in his book To Have or to Be?

There are many individuals who have made some kind of link between Marx and Engels work and environmental concerns, however perhaps the most significant intervention in the late 20th century came from Fidel Castro at the 1992 environmental Rio conference. Castro was the first leader of a socialist country to stress the importance of ecological matters, and wrote extensively on the climate crisis and similar threats.

You quote John Kovel who notes that socialism, due to its thought occurring during industrialization, focuses on "the technological optimism of the industrial world-view, and its associated logic of productivism." In what ways do socialist states still perpetuate this idea? Or have some come to include the environment as a meaningful part of political thought?

I feel there is room for cautious optimism. The Soviet Union throw everything into rapid industrial development, often with ecologically damaging effects, a logic that would have continued if Trotsky had replaced Stalin. Having said this, the logic of productivism did provide the Soviet Union the material and technological resources necessary to defeat Hitler. Nonetheless on the whole one gets the impression that a race to outdo the USA in terms of economic growth inspired much Soviet economic development with negative results in terms of pollution and loss of biodiversity.

China is advocating a policy of promoting ‘ecological civilisation’. Mao’s war on the sparrows sounds like a foolish aberration from a Communist sensitive to contradictions and well versed in philosophy! I have never visited China and I am loath to analyse a part of the world I am largely ignorant of. However, it is clear that the present Chinese government and Chinese people at all levels of society, like Engels, are aware that ecological problems can strike where they are least expected. It is good that China has agreed to stop funding foreign coal plants and huge efforts are going into expanding renewable energy. China is the world’s largest producer of solar panels too. Perhaps though this is a version of ecological modernism, expanding technological solutions, without working towards an economy that rejects ever increasing production. Electric cars, whose production and consumption, are rising faster in China than perhaps any other part of the world, are imperfect environmental solutions. Nonetheless environmental considerations are at the core of economic development plans in the country. The rapid expansion of high speed rail, shames countries like the US and the UK, where the dominance of cars is unquestioned.

Cuba is perhaps the country closest to managing to create ecologically sustainable development on our planet, and is worthy of close study. Much has been written on this. During the special period in the 1990s when the fall of the Soviet Union made it difficult for Cuban to get cheap oil, a crash programme that reduced dependence on fossil fuels was instigated, with much success. Cuba shows that socialist countries potentially can achieve far more than capitalist states, when it comes to serious action on climate change.

Recently Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro's book Socialist States and the Environment: Lessons for Ecosocialist Futures has reassessed thinking about the environmental record of socialist states, suggesting that their record was much better than once thought. In the shadow of Cold War propaganda, everything was distorted, despite some serious environmental damage in the Soviet Union, there was also a programme of nature conservation. Just this week I have seen an interesting discussion of how Soviet scientists and planners in the 1970s responded to the Limits to Growth report, produced by MIT “Limits to growth” in communism? - cibcom.

In summary, while capitalism is innately ecologically destructive, for much of the 20th century Socialist States also engaged in environmentally damaging practices, however learning has taken place since, while not unproblematic the practices in China are encouraging and those in Cuba lead the world when it comes to climate change action.

You write "Marx and Engels’ sustained meditations on the sciences including biology, brought them to consider environmental issues." Talk about Marx' and Engels' focus on the hard sciences. I find this interesting as they're oft portrayed as people focused on sociology and economics.

Yes it is easily forgotten that they were obsessive in their concern to keep up with the most important developments in the natural sciences in their day. John Bellamy Foster has explored this topic in exhaustive detail in his book Marx’s Ecology. For Foster, ecology (even the exact term was not coined until later), is at the heart of Marx’s materialism. You can’t separate the science from the philosophy, perhaps there is more to the term ‘scientific socialism’ that is often assumed?

Noting that the Germany Green Party has left its original, radical roots and moved broadly over the decades towards a more center right line and how with the Dutch Socialist Party, too, has become a run-of-the-mill Social Democrat party, do you think that EcoMarxists or those who hold such sympathies should become involved with electoral politics or just shun it all together? In what ways are EcoMarxists interacting with mainstream political parties and electoral politics more generally?

West European Green and Left parties have indeed had limited success and often moved to the centre or the right. The trajectory of both the German Greens and, as you note, the Dutch Socialist Party, is perhaps particularly sobering, organisations moving from Marxist-Leninist roots to the center ground today. It is a sad irony that the German Greens were born out of the peace movement but are advocates of war, and even promoting fossil fuel extraction, at least, in the short term, to deal with the energy crisis caused by the conflict in the Ukraine. In Britain, things are a little different, the Labour Party here, despite a short respite under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership has never been a radical party. Labour supported Empire, in the 1930s embrace the economics of austerity and at present under Keir Starmer are competing with the Tory government to show they are a pro-business party. 

I don’t think it is adequate to say abandon all electoral politics. Alternative socialist strategies haven’t been effective either in Western Europe, the generation that produced the German Greens were the generation involved in the Bader-Meinhof gang, which can hardly been seen as successful intervention. In other parts of the world, particularly Latin America, the left have made some progress through the electoral route. While this has not been uniform and has led to compromises, the success of left parties in Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela and more recently Colombia is encouraging.

Rudi Dutschke the German socialist, argued that there should be ‘a long march through the institutions’, in practice the institutions have generally marched over the left, crushing hopes…sadly this is largely the lesson of the German Greens. I am most inspired by the base building approach of groups like Philly Socialists and near to where I live the Welsh Underground Network. Building community revolutionary capacity through practical action and solidarity. Capacity building is also a means of creating community self-defence in the face of rising environmental crisis and the growth of the far right.

Ecosocialist engagement with electoral politics, where it has occurred, is varied. In Australia the Socialist Alliance have elected local councillors. The example of Nick Origlass, in the 1980s, a pioneering ecosocialists who left the Australian Labor Party, over toxic waste plans, has been an inspiration to such Australian ecosocialists. He was eventually elected Mayor of Leichhardt, Sydney. He defeated motorway building plans through a working class community, created participatory council meetings and reclaimed land for community use. There is a good account of his work in the Australian Dictionary of National Biography here.

So may be some progress is possible with electoral work but yes more often than not electoral politics has institutionalised those on the left rather than allowing institutional transformation. Some ecosocialists are involved in Green or Social Democratic Parties. The HDP in Turkey is a good example of where more radical electoral politics has been linked to popular struggles, although this mainly Kurdish Party has been subject to much repression. The situation is different in different parts of the world.

What are some of the responses of EcoMarxists to climate change, especially given the fact that we have very possibly hit the point of no return regarding major environmental changes? (For example, we hit that point with ocean temperatures in 2014.)

When I first became interested in green politics in the 1980s climate change seem to be a distant problem, now it is an immediate threat. Every day apparently brings news of more extreme weather, in the summer here where I live in Southern England, I witnessed the highest temperatures of my life time. The future is now.

One response from ecosocialists has been to go back to Lenin, if capitalism is destroying the world, a more strategic approach is surely necessary. Andreas Malm, Kai Heron and Jodi Dean and others have been arguing that Lenin provides inspiration in an age of climate crisis. There is a good outline of the debates around Lenin, climate change and ecosocialism here.

Andreas Malm in his recent book How to Blow up a Pipeline argues that the desperation of the situation demands that we take direct action against oil extraction.

There is perhaps an increasing realisation that climate change rather than being an accidental consequence of business as usual which can be approached with technocratic solutions is part of a war. With oil and fossil fuel companies on one side of the conflict and the rest of humanity and nature on the other. So, while not specifically ecosocialists the approach of the British organisation Just Stop Oil, using direct action against oil companies is to be applaud.

Of course, workers plans to convert ecological damaging mining and manufacturing into alternative sources of production is another element of ecosocialist strategy. The Lucas Plan in Britain and the Green Ban trade union campaigns in Australia are examples.

Where can people learn more about Ecosocialism? What are some good books, podcasts, or videos, you would recommend?

Kali Aukuno is a good source of ecosocialists activism, may be start with his interview here.

John Bellamy Foster, while he doesn’t use the term ecosocialism, feeling socialist traditions at least from Marx are innately ecological, has produced numerous books, articles, podcasts, etc. MR Online which he works with is a very good source for numerous articles on ecosocialism. Green Left Weekly in Australia and Climate and Capitalism are also excellent. 

Of the numerous books on ecosocialism, I still think, Alan Roberts The Self-Managing Environment from 1979 is the best, although a bit difficult to track down. People might also be interested in my biography of the great Latin American ecosocialist Hugo Blanco published by Merlin Press.

Finally I must mention Max Ajl’s work, rooting ecological socialism in the struggles of the South, breaking the Eurocentric and North American bias of much of the left. His book A People’s Green New Deal is essential reading. There is a useful interview with him from my comrades at Ebb Magazine here.

Of, By, and For the Elite: The Class Character of the U.S. Constitution

By Crystal Kim

Republished from Liberation School.

Contrary to the mythology we learn in school, the founding fathers feared and hated the concept of democracy—which they derisively referred to as “tyranny of the majority.” The constitution that they wrote reflects this, and seeks to restrict and prohibit involvement of the masses of people in key areas of decision making. The following article, originally written in 2008, reviews the true history of the constitution and its role in the political life of the country.

The ruling class of today—the political and social successors to the “founding fathers”—continues to have a fundamental disdain for popular participation in government. The right wing of the elite is engaged in an all-out offensive against basic democratic rights and democracy itself. This offensive relies heavily on the Supreme Court and the legal doctrine of constitutional “originalism”. Originalism means that the only rights and policies that are protected are ones that are explicitly laid out in the constitution, conforming with the “original” intentions of the founders. As the article explores, this was a thoroughly anti-democratic set up that sought to guarantee the power and wealth of the elite.

Introduction

In history and civics classrooms all over the United States, students are taught from an early age to revere the “Founding Fathers” for drafting a document that is the bulwark of democracy and freedom—the U.S. Constitution. We are taught that the Constitution is a work of genius that established a representative government, safeguarded by the system of “checks and balances,” and guarantees fundamental rights such as the freedom of speech, religion and assembly. According to this mythology, the Constitution embodies and promotes the spirit and power of the people.

Why, then, if the country’s founding document is so perfect, has the immense suffering of the majority of its people—as a result of exploitation and oppression—been a central feature of the U.S.? How could almost half of the population be designated poor or low income? Why would the U.S. have the world’s largest and most extensive prison system? If the Constitution, the supreme law of this country, was written to protect and promote the interests of the people, why didn’t it include any guarantees to the most basic necessities of life?

This contradiction between reality and rhetoric can be understood by examining the conditions under which the U.S. Constitution was drafted, including the class background of the drafters. Although it is touted today as a document enshrining “democratic values,” it was widely hated by the lower classes that had participated in the 1776-1783 Revolutionary War. Popular opposition was so great, in fact, that the drafting of the Constitution had to be done in secret in a closed-door conference.

The purpose of the Constitution was to reorganize the form of government so as to enhance the centralized power of the state. It allowed for national taxation that provided the funds for a national standing army. Local militias were considered inadequate to battle the various Native American nations whose lands were coveted by land speculators. A national army was explicitly created to suppress slave rebellions, insurgent small farmers and the newly emerging landless working class that was employed for wages.

The goal of the Constitution and the form of government was to defend the minority class of affluent property owners against the anticipated “tyranny of the majority.” As James Madison, a principal author of the Constitution, wrote: “But the most common and durable source of factions [dissenting groups] has been the various and unequal distribution of property” [1].

The newly centralized state set forth in the Constitution was also designed to regulate interstate trade. This was necessary since cutthroat competition between different regions and states was degenerating into trade wars, boycotts and outright military conflict.

The U.S. Congress was created as a forum where commercial and political conflicts between merchants, manufacturers and big farmers could be debated and resolved without resort to economic and military war.

Conditions leading to the U.S. Revolution

To understand the class interests reflected in the Constitution, it is necessary to examine the social and economic conditions of the time. In the decades leading up to the U.S. revolutionary period, colonial society was marked by extreme oppression and class disparities.

The economies of the colonies were originally organized in the interests of the British merchant capitalists who profited by trade with the colonies. These interests were guaranteed by the British monarchy headed by King George III. In the southern colonies like Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas, a settler class of slave-owning big planters grew rich providing the cotton that fed Britain’s massive textile manufacturing industry.

In the northern colonies, merchant economies in the port cities and associated small manufacturing industries formed the basis for the division between rich and poor. In the countryside, huge landowners who owed their holdings to privilege in Europe squeezed the limited opportunities of small farmers.

In 1700, for example, 75 percent of land in colonial New York state belonged to fewer than 12 individuals. In Virginia, seven individuals owned over 1.7 million acres [2]. By 1767, the richest 10 percent of Boston taxpayers held about 66 percent of Boston’s taxable wealth, while the poorest 30 percent of taxpayers had no property at all [3]. Similar conditions could be found throughout the colonies. Clearly, there was an established ruling class within the colonies, although this grouping was ultimately subordinate to the British crown.

On the other hand, the majority of society—Black slaves, Native Americans, indentured servants and poor farmers—experienced super-exploitation and oppression. Women of all classes had, like their peers in Europe, no formal political rights.

With these growing class antagonisms, the 18th century was characterized by mass discontent, which led to frequent demonstrations and even uprisings by those on the bottom rung of colonial society.

Between 1676 and 1760, there were at least 18 uprisings aimed at overthrowing a colonial government. There were six slave rebellions as well as 40 riots like the numerous tenant uprisings in New Jersey and New York directed against landlords [4]. Many of these uprisings were directed at the local elite and not the British Empire.

This local elite in colonial society found itself squeezed between the wrath of the lower working classes, on one side, and the British Empire, on the other.

Following the 1763 British victory in the Seven Years’ War in Europe, which included the so-called French and Indian War in North America, the French position as a colonial power competing with Britain was seriously downgraded as a result of their defeat. The French did send troops and military aid to support the colonists in their war for independence from Britain a decade later.

Following the defeat of the French in 1763, George III attempted to stabilize relations with Native Americans, who had fought primarily alongside the defeated French, by issuing the Proclamation of 1763. This decree declared Indian lands beyond the Appalachians out of bounds for colonial settlers, thereby limiting vast amounts of wealth the settlers could steal from the indigenous people. Chauvinist expansionism thus became fuel for anti-British sentiment in the colonies.

Making matters worse for the colonists, the British Empire began demanding more resources from the colonies to pay for the war. In 1765, the British Parliament passed the fourth Stamp Act, basically increasing taxes on the colonists. The Stamp Act of 1765 incited anger across all class strata, including British merchants, and was ultimately repealed in 1766.

The struggle around the Stamp Act demonstrated a shift in power relations between the colonists and the British Empire. While the local American elites were in less and less need of Britain’s assistance, the British Empire was in ever growing need of the wealth and resources of the colonies.

In summary, there were at least four factors that would motivate the American “new rich” to seek independence from the British crown. First, the anger of the poor and oppressed against the rich could be deflected from the local elite and channeled into hatred of the British crown—developing a new sense of patriotism. Second, the wealth produced and extracted in the colonies would remain in the pockets of the local ruling class rather than being transferred to the British Empire. Third, the local ruling class would greatly increase its wealth through the confiscation of property of those loyal to Britain. And lastly, independence would nullify the Proclamation of 1763, opening up vast amounts of Native land.

Two points qualified the drive to independence, which ultimately manifested itself in the sizable “Loyalist” or pro-British population during the revolution. First, despite the conflict between the colonists and the British government over wealth, colonists and colonizers were united against the Native American population, whom both tried to massacre and loot. The revolutionary struggle was not against exploitation, but to determine who would do the exploiting.

Secondly, in spite of the disputes over who got how much of the wealth generated by the colonies, this wealth primarily depended on the integration of the economy with British merchant capitalism. While the revolutionists wanted political distance from the empire, they could not afford a complete break.

The leaders of the U.S. Revolution

Revolutionary sentiment among the lowest classes of colonial society was largely spontaneous and unorganized. Leadership of the anti-British rebellion, groups like the Sons of Liberty, originated from the middle and upper classes. Some poor workers and farmers did join their ranks, allowing their leadership to garner popular support.

These leaders were conscious of the fact that only one class would be really liberated through independence from Britain: the local ruling class. However, in order to carry this out, they would have to create a façade of liberating the masses.

This is why the 1776 Declaration of Independence—the document used to inspire colonists to fight against Britain—includes language that was so much more radical than that of the 1787 U.S. Constitution. In fact, Thomas Jefferson had originally drafted a paragraph in the Declaration of Independence condemning George III for transporting slaves from Africa to the colonies and “suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce” [5]. Jefferson himself personally owned hundreds of slaves until the day he died, but he understood the appeal such a statement would have.

Instead, the final draft of the Declaration accused the British monarchy of inciting slave rebellions and supporting Indian land claims against the settlers. “He [the king] has incited domestic insurrection amongst us,” the final version read, “and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages.”

Sixty-nine percent of the signers of the Declaration of Independence held colonial office under England. When the document was read in Boston, the Boston Committee of Correspondence ordered the townsmen to show up for a draft to fight the British. The rich avoided the draft by paying for substitutes, while the poor had no choice but to fight.

Slavery existed in all 13 British colonies, but it was the anchor for the economic system in the mid-Atlantic and southern states.

Thousands of slaves fought on both sides of the War of Independence. The British governor of Virginia had issued a proclamation promising freedom to any slave who could make it to the British lines—as long as their owner was not loyal to the British Crown. Tens of thousands of enslaved Africans did just that. Thousands managed to leave with the British when they were defeated, but tens of thousands more were returned to enslavement after the colonies won their “freedom” in 1783.

Following the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which established the independence of the colonies, vast amounts of wealth and land were confiscated from Loyalists. Some of this land was parceled out to small farmers to draw support for the new government.

While most Loyalists left the United States, some were protected. For instance, Lord Fairfax of Virginia, who owned over 5 million acres of land across 21 counties, was protected because he was a friend of George Washington—at that time, among the richest men in America [6].

The drafting of the Constitution

In May 1787, 55 men—now known as the “Founding Fathers”—gathered in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention to draft the new country’s legal principles and establish the new government. Alexander Hamilton—a delegate of New York, George Washington’s closest advisor and the first secretary of the treasury—summed up their task: “All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people… Give therefore to the first class a distinct permanent share in the government” [7]. Indeed, the task of the 55 men was to draft a document that would guarantee the power and privileges of the new ruling class while making just enough concessions to deflect dissent from other classes in society.

Who were the Founding Fathers? It goes without saying that all the delegates were white, property-owning men. Citing the work of Charles Beard, Howard Zinn wrote, “A majority of them were lawyers by profession, most of them were men of wealth, in land, slaves, manufacturing or shipping, half of them had money loaned out at interest, and 40 of the 55 held government bonds” [8].

The vast majority of the population was not represented at the Constitutional Convention: There were no women, African Americans, Native Americans or poor whites. The U.S. Constitution was written by property-owning white men to give political power, including voting rights, exclusively to property-owning white men, who made up about 10 percent of the population.

Alexander Hamilton advocated for monarchical-style government with a president and senate chosen for life. The Constitutional Convention opted, rather, for a “popularly” elected House of Representatives, a Senate chosen by state legislators, a president elected by electors chosen by state legislators, and Supreme Court justices appointed by the president.

Democracy was intended as a cover. In the 10th article of the “Federalist Papers”—85 newspaper articles written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay advocating ratification of the U.S. Constitution—Madison wrote that the establishment of the government set forth by the Constitution would control “domestic faction and insurrection” deriving from “a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal distribution of property, or for any other improper or wicked project.” During the convention, Alexander Hamilton delivered a speech advocating a strong centralized state power to “check the imprudence of democracy.”

It is quite telling that the Constitution took the famous phrase of the Declaration of Independence “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and changed it to “life, liberty and property.” The debates of the Constitutional Convention were largely over competing economic interests of the wealthy, not a debate between haves and have-nots.

The new Constitution legalized slavery. Article 4, Section 2 required that escaped slaves be delivered back to their masters. Slaves would count as three-fifths of a human being for purposes of deciding representation in Congress. The “three-fifths compromise” was between southern slave-holding delegates who wanted to count slaves in the population to increase their representation, while delegates from the northern states wanted to limit their influence and so not count slaves as people at all.

Furthermore, some of the most important constitutional rights, such as the right to free speech, the right to bear arms and the right to assembly were not intended to be included in the Constitution at all. The Bill of Rights was amended to the Constitution four years after the Constitutional Convention had adjourned so that the document could get enough support for ratification.

As a counter to the Bill of Rights, the Constitution gave Congress the power to limit these rights to varying degrees. For example, seven years after the Constitution was amended to provide the right to free speech, Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1798, which made it a crime to say or write anything “false, scandalous or malicious” against the government, Congress or president with the intent to defame or build popular hatred of these entities.

Today, many people look to the Constitution—and especially to the Bill of Rights—as the only guarantor of basic political rights. And while the Constitution has never protected striking workers from being beaten over the heads by police clubs while exercising their right to assemble outside plant gates, or protected revolutionaries’ right to freedom of speech as they are jailed or gunned down, the legal gains for those without property do need to be defended.

But defending those rights has to be done with the knowledge that the founding document of the United States has allowed the scourge of unemployment, poverty and exploitation to carry on unabated because it was a document meant to enshrine class oppression. A constitution for a socialist United States would begin with the rights of working and oppressed people.

During the period leading to the second U.S. Revolution, commonly known as the Civil War, militant opponents of slavery traveled the country to expose the criminal institution that was a bedrock of U.S. society. On July 4, 1854, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution before thousands of supporters of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. He called it a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” referring to its enshrining of slavery.

The crowd shouted back, “Amen” [9].

Although slavery has been abolished, the property that is central to the Constitution—private property, the right to exploit the majority for the benefit of the tiny minority—remains. In that sense, Garrison’s words still ring true.

References

[1] James Madison, Federalist Papers, No. 10. Availablehere.
[2] Michael Parenti,Democracy for the Few, 9th ed. (Boston: Wadsworth, 1974/2011), 5.
[3] Howard Zinn,A People’s History of the United States(New York: Longman, 1980), 65.
[4] Ibid., 59.
[5] Ibid., 72.
[6] Ibid., 84.
[7] Cited in Howard Zinn,Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology(New York: Harper Collins, 1990), 152.
[8] Zinn,A People’s History of the United States, 89.
[9] Zinn,Declarations of Independence, 231.

Why Is The Global South Still Poor?

By Allen Myers

Republished from Red Flag.

In the years following World War Two, as numerous direct colonies won formal independence, there was a widespread belief, or at least a hope, that political independence would lead fairly rapidly to significant economic progress. No longer under the control of foreign exploiters, the ex-colonies would be free to undergo economic development like that which had occurred in the wealthy capitalist countries. With assistance from benign international institutions and former colonisers who had seen the error of their ways, the “underdeveloped” global south, renamed “developing countries”, would soon “catch up”, and the huge economic differences between countries would be overcome.

As is obvious today, it didn’t happen. In 2015, not quite 1 billion people in twelve “first world” countries had a per capita GDP of US$44,392; 6.2 billion people in 148 “third world” countries had a per capita GDP one-tenth that size. Why, and how?

The “why” is relatively easy, while the “how” requires a bit more detail and analysis. Despite the nonsensical propaganda they produced, European imperialists didn’t colonise Africa, Asia and the Americas out of noble motives. Their motive, pure and simple, was greed. When a combination of their weakening in the world war and the uprisings of colonised peoples forced them to grant political independence, that didn’t make them stop being greedy. It just made them modify their techniques of exploitation.

The underdevelopment of the global south was not some kind of natural misfortune, like a drought or poor soil or geographical isolation. It was something inflicted on the colonies by their Western colonisers—something concisely summarised 50 years ago by the Guyanese Marxist Walter Rodney in the title of his book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

Of course, it was easier for imperialists to plunder the southern countries when they had direct political control over them. They could engage in what amounted to looting and piracy: forced labour or slavery, direct expropriation of land and other wealth, taxes remitted to the imperialist centres, destruction of industries that might compete against imperialist companies.

Forced to give up direct political control, the imperialists nevertheless continued exploiting the former colonies in more subtle ways. Capitalist competition, promoted as a pathway to growth, was in reality a deliberate dead end. The wealth extracted from colonies over decades or centuries had built large, technically advanced businesses in the imperialist centres. Conversely, the exploitation meant that the former colonies lacked the capital that would have been necessary to create industries that could compete with the imperialists.

No problem, declared the ideological servants of imperialism: the former colonies can borrow the capital they need in order to develop; then they can repay the loans from the profits of their new industries. One of several flaws in this argument was that many citizens of former colonies thought it a bit unfair that they should have to borrow money that had been stolen from them, and then pay interest to the thieves.

This is where international bodies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund come in. They pose as independent, well-meaning sources of capital for the “developing” economies. In reality, they are, and have always been, controlled by the governments of the wealthiest imperialist countries. This ensures that loans go only to governments that don’t rock the boat—the boat that is carrying the enormous interest payments that poor countries must make to both bilateral “donors” and to the IMF/WB mafia.

These interest payments are transfers from poor countries to wealthy ones, and are a significant part of what keeps the global south poor. A 2020 study of 63 “impoverished countries” by the Jubilee Debt Campaign, based on IMF and World Bank figures, found that their external debt servicing in 1998 consumed an average 16.6 percent of government revenue. Partial debt relief for some of the most indebted countries reduced that figure to 5.5 percent by 2011, but it then started rising again, reaching 11.1 percent in 2018. The COVID pandemic will have undoubtedly raised it further. The World Bank notes of the pandemic’s impact: “Low- and middle-income countries’ external debt-to-GNI [gross national income] ratio rose to 29 percent in 2020 from 27 percent in 2019, and the debt-to-export ratio increased to 123 percent from 106 percent in 2019”.

These figures stand like an ironic commentary on the idea that “development” loans would make it possible for poor countries to build industries that increased their incomes and repaid the loans. Even if these countries were to do the impossible for a year and devote all of their export revenues—that is, every cent of export sales, not just the profits—they would still not be able to pay off their full foreign debts.

The owners of the imperialist economies of course never intended for their governments to help poor countries create industries that could compete against them; imperialist corporations are not suicidal. So “development” in the poor countries is restricted to fields that continue the transfer of wealth to the rich countries: direct imperialist investment, the profits of which of course go to the investing corporations; and natural resource extraction and industries characterised by low- or at best medium-level technology, which have correspondingly low rates of profit.

Capitalists in the global south are confined to the least productive, and therefore least profitable, fields. As a result, much of the value created in the south is transferred to the imperialist countries in the course of trade: the poor countries import overpriced goods and sell their own products for less than their real value. The amounts of money transferred in this way, called “unequal exchange” by economists, are staggering. 

A recent article in the journal New Political Economy attempts to quantify the sum for the years 1960-2018. The authors write: “Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $62 trillion (constant 2011 dollars) ... Appropriation through unequal exchange represents up to 7% of Northern GDP and 9% of Southern GDP”. That is not a typo: the global south was deprived of $62 trillion. Such value transfers are the underlying cause of situations such as the current disaster in Sri Lanka.

If imperialist corporations seem to have arranged everything for their own benefit, it must be recognised that they can’t do it all on their own. Even in the time of direct colonies, to maintain control, the colonisers needed collaborators within the colonial population. After political independence, imperialism still required a social layer that would cooperate to keep the system ticking over profitably.

It found the components of that layer among local capitalists, large landowners and would-be capitalists. In some cases, they might have come from among the open collaborators. In others, they came out of the movements for independence, from those leaders whose visions didn’t go beyond a change of personnel at the top.

Because of the huge sums of value appropriated by the global north, the capitalists of the global south generally cannot compete with the major imperialist industries. Aside from situations of natural monopoly (oil, for example), capitalists in the poor countries have to rely on low-profit areas such as manufacturing consumer goods that northern capitalists have abandoned or assembling electronics for high-tech imperialist companies. In these labour-intensive industries, the poverty and low wages of the south allow them to compete, and they are driven to maintain those low wages as a matter of their own survival.

So, while southern capitalists might sometimes feel that they are oppressed by imperialism and, if they have the opportunity, might put some pressure on imperialist corporations for improved terms of their collaboration, they know well that they share class interests with the imperialists and have a common enemy in the working class. If Marx called competing capitalists a “band of warring brothers”, we might call imperialists and southern capitalists a “band of squabbling big brothers, little brothers and occasional distant cousins”.

This is why southern capitalists are never reliable allies of working people and poor farmers in any struggle against imperialism. It is why the possibility of a radical popular movement forming government in a third world country always arouses the threat of imperialist intervention against it, to ensure that the country’s capitalists remain in charge.

Hunger and Poverty In India: A Case Study on Capitalism, Privatization, and Misleading Statistics

By Prabhat Patnaik

THE Global Hunger Index (GHI) for 2022 has just come out, which shows India occupying the 107th position among the 121 countries for which the index is prepared (countries where hunger is not a noteworthy problem are left out of the index). India’s score on the hunger index is 29.1 which is worse than the score of 28.2 it had in 2014. (The lower the figure the less is hunger). One is so bombarded these days by official talk about India being among the fastest-growing economies of the world, India within sight of becoming a $5 trillion economy, and India being an emerging economic power, that news such as the GHI brings one down to earth. Ironically, the only country in South Asia that is below India on the hunger index, and that too only marginally, is war-ravaged Afghanistan (rank 109); the rank of crisis-hit Sri Lanka is 64, of Nepal 81, of Bangladesh 84 and of Pakistan 99.

The GHI news however should come as no surprise. The fact that hunger in the country is acute and growing, has been pointed out by several scholars. They have used data on per capita daily calorie intake, and per capita annual foodgrain availability to make this point. And they have argued that since growing hunger is a symptom of growing poverty, a proposition that the Planning Commission had originally accepted, the period of neo-liberalism which has seen secularly growing hunger culminating in this year’s GHI, despite the much lauded high GDP growth, must also be a period of growing absolute poverty.

The evidence on secularly growing hunger in the neo-liberal period is quite overwhelming. If we take 1993-94 and 2011-12, the first an NSS “large sample” year closest to the beginning of neo-liberalism, and the second the last NSS “large sample” year for which data have been released by the government, we find that the proportion of the population below 2200 calories per person per day in rural India increased from 58 to 68 per cent; the corresponding figures for urban India where the benchmark was 2100 calories per person per day increased from 57 to 65 per cent. The figures for 2017-18, another NSS “large sample” year, were apparently so appalling that the government decided to suppress them altogether, and even to discontinue the NSS in the old form. But leaked data show that per capita real expenditure for rural India as a whole had fallen by 9 per cent between 2011-12 and 2017-18.

There is however a powerful view among many researchers that this apparently growing incidence of hunger should not be taken as evidence of people becoming worse off over time. There are two strands of this argument. One states that because of pervasive mechanisation, the drudgery of manual work has declined over time, so that working people these days do not need as many calories as they used to earlier. They spend less on food than they used to, and diversify their spending towards other ends. The second strand does not mention the decline in the extent of arduous work, but simply states that people are voluntarily diversifying their expenditure away from such elementary goods as foodgrains, towards both more refined and sophisticated food items, and also towards other commodities like children’s education and proper healthcare.

On both these counts according to them, the decline in per capita foodgrain absorption is symptomatic not of a worsening living standard as of an improvement in living standard; hence to draw conclusions about growing poverty from what appears at first sight as growing hunger (but in fact is a voluntary reduction of foodgrain consumption as part of a better life), is entirely illegitimate. The incidence of poverty, it follows, is not growing but declining, as the government and the World Bank have been claiming (though the latter has recently talked of a rise in poverty during the pandemic).

To repeat, there is no dispute about the decline in per capita foodgrain consumption in India, taking both direct and indirect consumption together, the latter through processed foods and animal feeds; nor is there any dispute about the decline in per capita calorie intake. The real difference is whether this signifies growing poverty or a diversification of consumption away from foodgrains that is symptomatic of a fall in poverty. The fact that an increase in poverty would cause greater hunger is not in doubt; the point is whether the reverse is true, whether reduced ingestion of foodgrains can be taken as proof of growing poverty. The Global Hunger Index becomes useful here.

If reduced food intake was indeed a symptom of an improvement in the condition of life, then we should be expecting many more countries whose growth-rates appear impressive to join India at the bottom of the GHI table. But the countries in India’s neighbourhood on the GHI table, where our rank is 107, are Rwanda (rank 102), Nigeria (103), Ethiopia (104), Republic of Congo (105), Sudan (106), Zambia (108), Afghanistan (109) and Timor-Leste (110). All these are countries that are generally regarded as poor countries, so that their being at the bottom of the table is no surprise. By contrast, countries with which we would like our economic performance to be compared, such as China, are at the top of the table. China appears within the top 17 countries which are collectively, rather than individually, ranked. Its GHI score of less than 5 is way better than India’s 29.1.

The fact that not a single one of the so-called high-growth economies figures alongside India underscores the complete vacuity of the arguments that emphasize a change in tastes (greater keenness for children’s education) or a reduction in “drudgery” (through mechanisation) as being responsible for a (voluntary) reduction in foodgrain consumption. The reduction in “drudgery” owing to mechanisation, or the desire for children’s education, are not characteristics specific to the Indian people; they are universal phenomena. Then why should India alone among the high-growth economies figure near the bottom of the GHI table?

It may be argued that while the desire for children’s education and proper healthcare may be common to people everywhere, in India these are expensive services while in China they may be cheaper. Because of this, parents in India enrolling their children in the more expensive schools may have to cut back on their food consumption, while in China schooling being less expensive, there is no need to cut back on food intake for educating children.

But that is precisely our point, and it has nothing to do with any “change of taste”. Everywhere, parents are keen on their children’s education, but if in a particular country putting them to school requires having to forego food, then this foregoing is symptomatic of an increase in poverty. It indicates an increase in the price of one of the goods in the basket consumed by the people, and hence an increase in the cost of living which is not accompanied by a corresponding increase in money incomes, and leads to a cut in foodgrain consumption. This cut in foodgrain consumption, which means an increase in hunger, is therefore a reflection of a rise in cost of living and hence of a reduced real income; and that exactly is what one means by an increase in poverty.

Put differently, any increase in real income must mean some increase in the consumption of every good in a basket of goods on which this income is spent (or some substitute good for one of these goods). An increase in real income, as cross-section data within India and across countries show, invariably means a rise in foodgrains consumption, not direct consumption alone but direct and indirect consumption taken together. But if there is a decline in the total direct and indirect foodgrain intake, as has been the case in India, then that must mean a decline in real incomes of the majority of the people, and hence a rise in poverty. The link between growing hunger and growing poverty therefore remains valid.

The reason why poverty according to official and World Bank estimates appears to have declined in India, on the basis of which it is claimed that the link between poverty and hunger no longer holds, is because they use a “poverty line”, a particular level of per capita money expenditure below which people are considered poor, which is updated by using a cost-of-living index. But the index as constructed in India does not reckon with the rise in cost of living owing to the privatisation of services like education and health. Therefore the true rise in cost of living is not taken into account, and the poverty line that is updated by using it, keeps falling below what it should have been. This underestimates the magnitude of poverty and the elite laps up this estimated, supposedly-declining, poverty ratio. The Global Hunger Index exposes the falsity of such poverty estimates.

Too Little, Too Late: Biden's Self-Congratulatory Marijuana Reform Falls Short

By Youhanna Haddad

On October 6th, 2021, President Joe Biden issued a blanket pardon of those federally convicted of marijuana possession, noting that “no one should be in jail just for using or possessing marijuana.” This pardon, while seeming huge, releases exactly zero prisoners as no American is in federal prison for simple marijuana possession. Biden further stated that the federal government’s classification of marijuana as more serious than fentanyl “makes no sense,” with the attorney general and Department of Health and Human Services reportedly initiating a process to review marijuana’s scheduling. “Too many lives have been upended because of our failed approach to marijuana,” Biden said. “It’s time that we right these wrongs.”

Biden’s pardon disrupted the more than a century-long history of anti-marijuana policy at the federal level. While the pardon affects but a small minority of total possession convictions, the potential rescheduling or even descheduling of marijuana has not been seriously considered in the United States since the late 1980s. This is thanks in large part to the Controlled Substances Act, which schedules drugs without any regard to their scientifically understood qualities.

To examine the eclectic legal quagmire that is marijuana prohibition, one must explore the history of the plant: its use over time and geography. While the first culture to use marijuana frequently changes as anthropologists continue uncovering older instances of use, it is widely acknowledged that the psychoactive variety of the plant has been consumed for over two millennia. Little to no scholarship has uncovered any historical use of marijauna leading to the decline of living standards anywhere near the level of drugs such as opium.

In the United States, the first marijuana regulations appeared in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War in the mid-19th century. Motivated by the white-supremacist ideology of Manifest Destiny, the United States government pushed westward, running into the then much larger nation of Mexico. After the Mexican-American War, thousands of Mexicans found themselves in newly “American” territory.

To avoid sharing resources, white-American settlers employed a mixture of vigilante and state-sponsored violence to subjugate the Mexican population. They fixated on Mexican use of “locoweed” — a slang term for marijuana — and used prohibition as a means of subjugation. Criminalization thus turned Mexicans into an outlaw class. This served to both reign in the Mexican population and reinforce settler propaganda regarding the “Mexican Menace.”

But it wasn’t just Mexicans who became associated with marijuana around this time. The global phenomenon of jazz music was well underway by the early 20th century. An art form with unmistakably black roots, the popularity of jazz in urban centers led to black male performers gaining fame across the United States.

Concerns over white women in jazz clubs potentially having sexual relations with these men incited panic, particularly in white, bourgeois families. Worrying their daughters might be mesmerized by the siren song of the performers, they sought to restrict the influence of the jazz wave. This manifested in a reinvigorated opposition to marijuana — a known favorite of many jazz performers such as Cab Calloway, whose song ‘Reefer Man’ lauds the drug’s benefits. 

White imagination thus associated Latino and black peoples with marijuana. This set the stage for white outrage at the drug in order to suppress both populations. Rhetoric focused on the potential of marijuana to be used by men of color to dull the inhibitions of white women, facilitating their seduction. While the reality may have been that white women were simply interested in relations with these men, or wanted to explore jazz nightlife, the settler masses adopted this hyper-sexualized rhetoric. The newly established Federal Bureau of Narcotics capitalized on these racist lies in the early 1930s, with leader Harry J. Anslinger proclaiming that marijuana use promoted interracial sex:

“There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others.”

This rhetoric, which ignored widespread white use in order to racialize the issue, was successful in convincing Congress to pass the first truly restrictive federal regulation of marijuana: The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which effectively made the drug illegal to possess or distribute. It took until 1969 for an infamous Supreme Court case to invalidate the law for its violation of 5th Amendment protections against self-incrimination. One year later, President Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act, which classified marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug, meaning the federal government did not recognize any medicinal value and recognized a high potential for abuse.

While obviously nonsensical, this scheduling seemed to make sense to John Ehrlichman, who served as domestic policy chief under Nixon. In a 1994 interview, Ehrlichman stated that there was significant political motivation from the Nixon administration to target certain communities through the Controlled Substances Act. He explained that:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate [them with drugs] we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Nixon’s presidency is widely recognized as a particularly embarrassing chapter in American history, largely due to the Watergate scandal. Only escaping the scandal through a presidential pardon, Nixon was caught red-handed by the nation and world. In light of his crimes, it is unsurprising that the administration sought to quell political opposition through the legal route provided by the Controlled Substances Act.

Today, arrests for marijuana possession follow the same racist logic that birthed prohibition. In 2018, black Americans were 3.64 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession. In Montana and Kentucky, they were over 9 times more likely to be arrested. This is despite the fact that black and white Americans use marijuana at similar rates.

There is no state, including all states where marijuana is legal, that arrests white and black citizens at equal rates. Even in Colorado — the first state to legalize recreational use — black people are 1.54 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession (even “legal” states have possession limits).

Incredibly, there are 19 counties in the United States where black people are more than 20 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana. In Georgia’s Pickens County, black people are over 97 times more likely to be arrested! These statistics demonstrate the racist nature of marijuana enforcement — an enforcement that has never separated itself from its roots as a tool of subjugation of nonwhite populations.

In the best-case scenario, Biden’s directive to reschedule marijuana would result in complete descheduling. That means marijuana would no longer be prohibited by the Controlled Substances Act. While this would undeniably be an overdue victory, it wouldn’t expunge or pardon any past convictions from draconian laws that unjustly decimated generations of black communities. Descheduling alone, therefore, does little to right the wrongs Biden claims to be so concerned about. In order to properly address this state-sponsored terror campaign, all prisoners whose charges derive from marijuana possession must be freed and their records expunged. Anything less is a frivolous distraction masquerading as a step toward justice while keeping the victims of prohibition in bondage.

The Power of Pull-Over Prevention Clinics ("POPs")

By Joseph Lobodzinski

Throughout many leftist circles, debates are taking place over the best way to achieve police abolition. Some insist that the most realistic path is through an electoral struggle, wherein police abolitionists run for local, state, and federal positions. Once elected, they can slash police budgets and implement different policies that will bring us closer to a society without military-like “peacekeepers.” Others put their faith in community-based action such as, but not limited to, abolition read-ins and food/clothing donation events. These efforts seek to model a community wherein social ills are eradicated through basic human compassion, rendering a police presence unnecessary.

Abolitionist inquiry has yielded many great proposals addressing the destructiveness of America’s current police apparatus. As we continue this inquiry, we must take stock of all the meaningful ways people have advanced abolition within their communities.

One particular mode of abolitionist praxis has proved especially successful. It has shown an ability to protect marginalized people not just from cops, but immigration officers as well. Pull-over prevention clinics — or “POPs,” as they’re sometimes called — are free, volunteer-run repair shops. Crews of off-duty mechanics and community handymen help fix tires, install lights and booster seats, and refill essential fluids. This work, of course, allows people to safely conduct their required daily travel. But it also does much more than that. By ensuring compliance with legal standards, pull-over prevention clinics preempt “unsafe [and] discriminatory interactions with law enforcement.”

Ypsilanti, Michigan — located in the Huron Valley between Ann Arbor and Detroit — is a hotspot for this sort of mutual aid. In a remarkable display of solidarity, individuals from all walks of life are banding together to help protect the most marginalized members of their community.

The Ypsilanti Mutual Aid Network is one of many organizations in the Huron Valley region conducting POPs. They explain their reasoning as follows: 

“Police and immigration officers use minor automotive issues as reasons to stop, search, fine, and deport people. POP volunteers provide repair and advice for these issues, share repair skills, and promote access to local resources.”

Since 2020, some local chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America have also assisted hundreds of motorists in the Huron Valley through POPs. In those two years, POP events have grown significantly in both scope and frequency.

An increasing number of organizations in the Huron Valley go beyond car repair to provide other types of community-care work. Roughly once a month, residents of southeast Michigan can receive free COVID and flu shots, test kits, and masks provided by the Washtenaw County Health Department and Packard Health. Free lunches are given away by FedUp Ministries, free pet food and other supplies are provided by Pet Pals Mutual Aid, and clinics often have volunteer DJs and other entertainment for children to enjoy while their parents’ cars are being fixed. While not directly tied to policing, these services nonetheless help build the abolitionist project by drawing in more people who — whether they realize it or not — become part of an effort to eradicate social ills through community action rather than criminalization.

To increase accessibility, information on POPs is always published in both English and Spanish.  This allows word to travel quickly, increasing turnout and thus broadening the impact of POPs. That should encourage organizers, whose efforts will almost surely create positive ripple effects throughout their locale.

In a society with little sense of community, alienation is a staple of American life. It is therefore hard to organize aid efforts with quick, direct, and long-lasting effects — especially when the intended goal is abolition. While the notion of a society without police has gained traction since the murder of George Floyd, much of America is still tentatively supportive of the current approach to law enforcement. As liberal reforms continue to fail, and cities like New York shovel billions of dollars into their police departments, we must show those on the fence that there are better ways to promote public safety. Pull-over prevention clinics might be an integral part of an overall strategy to do just that.

A Marxist Concept of Politics

By Yanis Iqbal

Under capitalism, political violence is not constantly required for the extraction of surplus-value and the maintenance of capitalist social relations. The separation of direct producers from the means of production in capitalist social formations means that surplus-value can be appropriated by economic mechanisms without the repeated deployment or threat of deployment of politico-military force in the battle between classes. In Mute Compulsion: A Theory of the Economic Power of Capital, Søren Mau writes: “The characteristic thing about the power of capital is precisely that it has an ability to reproduce itself through economic processes, or, put differently, that the organization of social reproduction on the basis of capital gives rise to a set of powerful structural mechanisms which ensure its reproduction all by itself, as it were.” Capitalism constructs a new social relationship between the employer and the employed, one that allows the former to gain full control over the immediate environment of the latter. It needs workers to be “free” in a double sense: “free” to sell their own labor-power (not legally tied to a landlord or master) and “free” of any possession of the means of production, so that their material survival is dependent on becoming a wage-laborer. It is important to note here that the “freedom” to sell labor-power is rooted in “the mystified/mystifying moment of the wage contract and the freedom-of-contract rhetoric of nineteenth-century liberal individualism.”

Such a notion of “freedom” refers not to the actual independence of workers but to the ideological concealment of the coerciveness of the wage contract through a discourse of legal voluntarism. It denotes the process whereby proletarianized masses – separated from the means of production – are given the legal ability to enter the abstract sphere of bourgeois-juridical formalism and participate in the capitalist labor market. Thus, the economic power of capitalism exists as a form of exploitation that appears as the agential and self-driven decision of the individualized worker. This appearance is supported not only by the ideology of liberal contractualism but by the operational modality of economic power, which involves the application of indirect, structural pressures upon the material environment of subaltern classes. As Mau comments: “Whereas violence and ideology directly address the subject, economic power addresses it only indirectly through the manipulation of its socio-material environment. Economic power thus has to do with the way in which social relations of domination reproduce themselves by being inscribed in the environment of the subject.”

Insofar that the economic power of capital renders superfluous the need for political coercion in the labor process, there emerges a separation of the economic from the political. This concept of separation, while analytically true, applies to the individual labor process of capitalists, not to the social totality of the capitalist social formation. At the level of the individual capitalist, the need to simply survive, to avoid starvation, surely impels subalterns to join the rank of the proletariat. However, when we look at this issue from the collective standpoint of the capitalist totality, the process that institutes wage slavery as the only economic way of ensuring subsistence is brought about by a political closure of alternative employment options. This situation differs significantly from the one that prevails in pre-capitalist societies. In these societies, direct producers are not yet deprived of the means of production. Given this fact, the surplus labor of the exploited classes has to be appropriated in a form other than the economic coercion of the market found under capitalism. This form is provided by the political power and naked violence of pre-modern ideologies, which use religious prejudices and primitive attitudes to ensure subservience to the exploiters.

What is evident here is the fact that in pre-capitalist societies, individual owners of property have to continually use political violence to maintain control over property, a situation that is different from capitalism, where individual capitalists as capitalist property-owners do not have to use extra-economic force for the reproduction of their class status. But the capitalist class as a whole – in the form of the capitalist state – does utilize political and ideological violence to perpetuate the monopolization of the means of subsistence of the masses and the forcible destruction of non-capitalist livelihoods that may weaken the economic power of capital. Hence, both pre-capitalist and capitalist social formations are dependent upon political violence for their social reproduction. What differentiates the one from the other is the fact that capitalists, unlike pre-capitalist exploiters, don’t have to use violence at the individual level to ensure their dominance since that role is served by the economic compulsion of the market. However, the absence of violence at the individual level is propped up by the presence of violence at the collective level, embodied in the capitalist state. The systematic construction of public apparatuses that can perform repressive tasks for the bourgeoisie ensures that the working class has no choice not to work for a wage, being unable to choose between capitalist and non-capitalist employers.

This state of structural oppression – brought about through the political subjugation of non-capitalist subsistence options – demonstrates that in capitalism, what emerges is not so much the separation of the economic and the political but their functional division wherein individual capitalists possess economic power and the capitalist state possesses political power. Raju J Das writes: “the capitalist state and the capitalist class…are two arms of the social relationship called capitalist class relation. One arm signifies the exploitation of the majority and its (near) separation from property, and wealth-accumulation in the hands of the capitalists. Another arm signifies the political oppression/subjugation of the majority by the state. In other words, one arm signifies the capitalist class as a whole, and another arm signifies the state which is, above all, the coercive instrument to reproduce the capitalist class relations”. 

The capitalist relationship of dialectical mediation between the economic power of capital and the political power of the bourgeois state – distinguished from the sole presence of political power in pre-capitalist social formations – means that the immediate capitalist labor process appears to be free from violence and coercion. This appearance has a material basis in social reality because it reflects how the economic power of capital is structurally imbricated with the political power of the state. When acting as exploited workers in the capitalist civil society, it is only natural for proletarian human beings to perceive their engagement with the labor process as an economic one, as one that allows them to receive wages and satisfy monetary requirements.

Viewed from the perspective of the human imagination, which concerns itself with the affective workings of the senses, the capitalist civil society is a representation of the act of economic exchange and nothing more. The interconnection of this economic sphere with the coercive logic of the state is ignored because the ideas of the proletariat are interwoven with the material practice of wage slavery to such an extent that they are strongly limited by the horizons of the latter. Workers experience the economic mechanisms of capitalism as the immediate apprehension of objective forms that lie outside their subjective being, as mere methods of subsistence to which one has to conform. In this way, the proletariat’s material relation with the economic logic of the capitalist civil society is transformed into an ethereal relation to external forms. The visibility of the capitalist economy arises out of the structural invisibility of the political violence that generated its foundational framework, as well as of the overarching network of socio-cultural relations that serves the bourgeoisie through its manifold cruelties. This inability of human imagination to understand the interdependence of capitalist economy on the political violence of the state is part and parcel of the way in which ideology operates. It limits the mental capacities of human beings by socially constructing a collective sensorium that carries out processes of routinized sense-making and shapes comprehension, interaction, and practice. Gabriel Rockhill and Jennifer Ponce de León elaborate: 

Rather than there being a real, given world outside of ideology, that is then simply distorted through inversion, the world materially delivers itself to us upside down, and this is the primary datum of our ideological experience…material practice formats our perceptual matrix in such deep and fundamental ways that the world is “naturally” delivered to us through the lens of ideology. Instead of simply being a set of illusions or false ideas, ideology operates as an all-encompassing sensorium that emerges from the actual life-processes of homo faber. It composes an entire universe through the collective and historical production of a shared world of sense that is at one and the same time physical and mental. It is the collective historical life-process (der historische Lebensprozess) that forges this sensorium in such a seamless fashion that it is largely rendered imperceptible.

The human imagination is thus essentially entwined with an ideological imaginary i.e. “a collectively produced practical mode of intelligibility that assembles self-evident givens, being at one and the same time a way of thinking, feeling, being, perceiving, and acting. Far from remaining purely conceptual, it is affective, practical, perceptual, and axiological. An imaginary is thus the anchored modus operandi of social agents, which is flexible and varies across the social field depending on the agencies involved in its precise configuration.” In contrast to the ideological nature of human imagination, the rational faculties of human beings interact with reality by constructing adequate ideas that theoretically totalize the given facts through their contextualization in a historical movement of fluid social relations. This means that reason will comprehend the bourgeois political society as a necessary component of capital in which its essence as an exploitative dynamic is expressed, reinforcing the conditions of possibility of surplus-extraction through the repression of non-capitalist possibilities in the realm of civil society. Furthermore, reason understands that the one-sided representation of the capitalist civil society as a sphere of “free”, non-political wage contracts is essential for the continuous expansion of capital, for without this ideological illusion – that relationships in bourgeois civil society are representations of strictly economic exchanges – the commodity-form will fail in forcing subalterns into the entire circuit of capitalist reproduction that generates surplus-value.

Now, taking into account that the separation of the economic and the political under capitalism is primarily an ideological one, we need to examine what impact this separation has upon the logic of politics in a capitalist social formation. From the bourgeois viewpoint, politics actually functions as the invisible background of capitalist economics, as the violent underside of the abstract legalism of the market. The centrality of political violence to the field of economic production demands that it be ideologically mystified so that the dialectical linkages between the political power of the state and the economic power of capital can be broken and the character of the labor process can be normatively described as non-coercive and voluntary. This act of normative description is carried out by taking the capitalist separation of economics and politics at face value, without questioning the essence that lies beneath this appearance. As I have already noted, economic capital, unlike the ideological deployment of violence in pre-capitalist social formations, interpellates the subalterns in a matrix of subordination that works indirectly through the molding of their socio-material surroundings and conditions. Once the proletariat has been politically separated from the preconditions of its sustenance, the realization of its life can be carried out only through the presence of capital as a mediator. Thus, instead of an external power, the working class’s own interests with regards to survival force it to sell its labor-power. Todd McGowan writes:

“In the capitalist epoch, a bizarre inversion occurs: one’s obedience occurs through one’s isolated particularity…One obeys not by submitting to the domination of an authority’s command but by following one’s own self-interest…Capitalism does not eliminate obedience, though it does eliminate the act of submission to a structure of mastery. Individuals continue to participate in a structure that guides their existence, but they cease to experience it as a structure of mastery.”

The coincidence of the proletariat’s individual interest for sustenance with capital’s profit-driven interest for surplus extraction – rooted in the political separation of the immediate producers from their means of production – means that the economy comes to assume a veneer of depoliticized neutrality, with the state’s function of political violence in the capitalist market fading into the background. As soon as the appearance of the capitalist market as a technocratic arbiter of individual interests emerges, bourgeois ideologists discursively entrench this appearance by reconfiguring political society, so that it no longer signifies the coercive complement of capital’s economic power but a synthetic zone of abstract legalism that aids the ostensible market rationalism of bourgeois civil society. Politics no longer refers to the inner component of extra-economic violence that inevitably accompanies the economic power of capital but to a juridified political society that speaks only through the language of the formal equality of otherwise unequal citizens – a language that is itself a reflection of the capitalist market that organizes commodity exchange in terms of the abstract equivalence of qualitatively unequal market actors. The juridical concept of the equality of all citizens before the law, the equal respect for the life and property of each citizen, the equal freedom of association and contract, forms a necessary legal-institutional basis for a system of commodity production that posits materially unequal social agents as abstractly equal “rational” actors that are pursuing their individual interests through the medium of the market. Under a social structure of capitalist accumulation, the representative liberal state enforces this formal contractual equality only to cloak the very real inequalities that exist between the propertied capitalists and the property-less wage-laborers. 

For the proletariat, the natural-law contractualism that undergirds politics in a capitalist society – founded upon the ideological depoliticization of the economy and the technocratic erasure of the violent antagonistic social relations inherent to the field of production – results in the systemic delimitation of politics: in its status quoist version, politics sets its boundaries of intervention in an external fashion with regards to the field of production. It considers its area of operation to be the juridified political society of capitalism – a sphere of political existence that is wholly internal to the constraints of the bourgeois state and its institutional apparatuses, functionally bounded by the field of reproduction of the strategic political and social interests of the bourgeois class. Here, we can observe how the apparent alienation and separation of this sphere of bourgeois politics from the material intercourse that takes in bourgeois civil society actually facilitates their ever close intermeshing.

The claims of bourgeois political society to a juridical status of an abstract entity that can’t interfere with the market rationalism of civil society leads to a paradoxical non-interventionist stance: state-supported political violence consistently intervenes against opposition to the scientific pretensions of the market so that it can maintain the space within which the ostensibly non-political and self-sustaining mechanisms of the market can work. Political intervention creates the conditions of possibility for a supposedly non-political market that is touted as an entity capable of sustaining itself without further intervention. The lack of intervention of the capitalist state in the free market is based upon political interventions that create the conditions of possibility for that non-interventionism through the elimination of any form of opposition. Bourgeois ideologists want to drive out the paradoxical character of the political state by forgetting the political coercion that constitutes the condition of possibility for the self-regulating market and ideologically consecrating the bourgeois state as a legal guarantor of the rationalism of capitalist civil society. The proletariat demolishes this façade by showing how the rationalism of the market requires as its dialectical counterpart the irrationalism of the political state, how the realization of working class survival through market exchanges is produced by the destruction of non-capitalist options, how the juridified political society’s respect for the so-called scientific nature of the market is actually a mask for coercively eliminating the class antagonisms found in the capitalist labor process. From this, it is clear that the bourgeoisie’s hegemonic project is conflictual: to gain consent, the ruling class has to interact with the proletarian hostility arising from the class conflicts that are constitutive of capitalist society. In this process, the collective structures of civil society are given a bivalent character. On the one hand, they serve as the instruments through which the elite exercises economic and ideological power. On the other hand, insofar that the bourgeoisie has to maintain a power equilibrium through the creation of apparatuses that deal with subaltern opposition, the organisms of civil society also function as the principal vehicle for the actions of these oppressed classes.

The existence of this duality causes the emergence of two different conceptions of politics: bourgeois politics, which revels in the abstractness of legal contractualism, and proletarian politics, which constantly overflows the barriers of bourgeois politics to highlight the violence that forms an essential substratum of economic exchange. While the former resides in the realm of political society, unwilling to explore how the state is not a legal guarantor of juridical equality but a capitalist enforcer of material inequality, the latter resides in the connective terrain between political society and civil society, constantly highlighting the internality of the bourgeois state’s political violence to the supposedly “neutral” economic power of capital. This form of proletarian politics understands that the enrichment of the political equality promised by the bourgeois state cannot lead to the eradication of exploitation from the economic arena of bourgeois civil society. On the contrary, it reinforces the social legitimacy of the state institutions that are responsible for hiding the essentially violent and oppressive nature of the capitalist economy. Bourgeois ideologists have combatted the counter-hegemonic thrust of proletarian politics by portraying it as an unscientific remainder of pre-capitalism that attempts to politically disrupt the non-political stability of the free market’s invisible hand. As Etienne Balibar notes: 

The fundamental point is that from Adam Smith onwards, ‘economic’ discourse, by presenting itself as science and radically divorcing itself from ‘politics’, represented as a remnant of pre-capitalism, and thus instituting the distinction of civil society and the State, provides the different factions of the bourgeoisie with the means of considering, and thus of organizing the unity of their interests as just so many conditions of the accumulation of capital. Everything opposing their mutual interests is called ‘politics’, and everything which leads back to the logic of accumulation, that is, to the command of capital (or money) over labour, is called ‘economics’ At last this provides the means, albeit theoretical, of preventing the interests of labour, or rather of workers, from entering into the conflict of interests between different bourgeois factions, so as to disturb its ‘arbitrations’ (as we say nowadays) and to undermine the mass bases of the State. 

To summarize, from the standpoint of the bourgeoisie, there are two definitions of politics: one is the legalistic one that ideologically reflects the apparent alienation of political society from civil society and the other is the revolutionary one that emphasizes their real interdependence and interpenetration. While the former is based on legal respect for the market rationalism of supposedly scientific bourgeois economics, the latter is based on radical hostility to the scientific and rationalist pretensions of capitalist surplus extraction, highlighting their irrational interrelation with the coercive logic of state-sponsored political violence. These two forms of politics, however, don’t exist in neat separation from one another. To be more precise, revolutionary politics itself has suffered the ideological invasion of bourgeois elements, taking from the latter the notion of the separation of economics and politics under capitalism and radicalizing it in an anti-capitalist direction. This ideological hybridity manifests itself in the form of ultra-leftism, which opposes any form of participation in the movement for reforms. Such opposition emerges from the specific discursive order of that ideology.

The appearance of the division of the extra-economic state from the economic labor process – embodied in the ideological mystification of juridical abstractness – is accepted with a radical twist: the separation is now construed no longer as the juridical respect for market rationalism but as the violent subjection of civil society to the dictates of political society. In the case of bourgeois ideologists, the separation of economics (civil society) and politics (political society) is affirmed to maintain the hierarchical subjection of the former to the latter. In the case of ultra-leftwing ideologists, the same separation is affirmed in favor of civil society. It is said that the hegemonic perpetuation of the power of capital over labour requires a state machinery which is divorced from the mass of the people and beyond their democratic control, so the working class, in order to remove the bourgeoisie from their position of dominance and set up a Communist order, requires a form of government through which political society can be reabsorbed into civil society. The privileging of civil society produces a form of anti-politics that regards as futile any kind of participation in the political system of capitalism. In both the bourgeois and ultra-leftwing cases, the terms – economics and politics, civil society and political society – continue to exist in their static state of separation, only their relational ordering is changed.

Unlike these two ideologies, Communism destroys the strict isolation of state and society and points out how it is their particular dialectical nexus that constitutes the essence of the capitalist arrangement. Contrary to the propositions of ultra-leftists, capitalism does not involve the separation of civil society and political society, and the subjection of the former to the violence of the latter. Instead, it involves the inextricable intermeshing of the political power of the state and the economic power of capital – the former ensuring the preconditions for the continued existence of the latter. The role of proletarian politics consists in advancing a class struggle in such a way that the working class comes to expose the essential violence of the labor process, showing how it is tethered to the coercive closure of non-capitalist alternatives and is full of irreconcilable class antagonisms. In the normal conditions of bourgeois hegemony, the civil war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie remains latent, or invisible, unavailable to the consciousness of the subaltern, which continues to think of economics and politics in terms of market rationalism and juridical equality, respectively.

When the normal exercise of bourgeois hegemony breaks down, when the apparent separation of economics and politics weakens, the confrontational edge of class struggle comes to the fore, with the proletariat openly criticizing political society and civil society as two moments of a dialectical whole, geared towards their exploitation. Politics in the Marxist sense refers precisely to the transition that is effected by the proletariat from one phase of class struggle to the other, the becoming visible of the latent struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat through the destruction of the antinomies of politics and economics. To use the words of Balibar, for the workers’ movement, the reality of politics “is nothing other than the development of the contradictions of the economy...To transgress the limits of the recognized – and artificially separated – political sphere, which are only ever the limits of the established order, politics has to get back to the ‘non-political’ conditions of that institution (conditions which are, ultimately, eminently political). It has, in other words, to get back to the economic contradictions, and gain a purchase on these from the inside.” This “pattern of referring back to the material conditions of politics, which is in turn required for the internal political transformation of those conditions,” means that the proletariat cannot refrain from engaging with the political dynamics of capitalist society. On the contrary, to destroy the separation of economics and politics, the working class has to consistently build a mass movement that defends the living standards of workers and activates the latent class antagonisms in the field of economic production.

As part of this, the Communist Party has to also participate in elections so that it can displace the ostensible neutrality of bourgeois political society from within that sphere. Expressed in more general terms, while ultra-leftism privileges civil society and attempts to voluntarily proclaim a space of proletarian autonomy within that sphere, Marxism recognizes the structural embeddedness of subalterns in the dialectical nexus of political society and civil society and thus builds proletarian autonomy through a concrete movement of political practices that can dissolve that nexus. Bearing in mind how the apparent separation of economics and politics under capitalism weakens the independence of the proletariat, the Communist Party always tries to overcome this separation through all possible means. Insofar that Communism has as its goal the unification of economics and politics, it is both hyper-political, highlighting the intense antagonisms found in both political society and civil society, and anti-political, overcoming bourgeois restrictions to articulate an expansive notion of politics. Once this separation has been overcome, class struggle can replace the capitalist totality, whose dialectical moments are political society and civil society, with Communist totality, whose dialectical moments are formed by the free association of human beings working toward their self-actualization through democratically managed production. 

Laundering Black Rage

By Too Black

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

"Black rage is founded on blatant denial

Squeezed economics, subsistence survival

Deafening silence and social control

Black rage is founded on wounds in the soul" [1]

- Lauryn Hill, “Black Rage”

"Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks." [2]

- Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1

For stolen lands to remain colonized, for investments to remain profitable, for white capital to remain ruthless, Black Rage must be neutralized. Black Rage—the omnipresent force radiating throughout the anxieties of the State—is a boundless threat to the capitalist order.

Like a Big Bang, Black Rage began its expansion into colonial existence at the exact moment the first African was plucked from their roots and cast down into the sunken dungeon of the European slave ship. Its expansion is the survival of the human spirit, serving as a potential death knell to oppression—ringing its bell with smoldering waves of resistance quietly hissing in infamy. Black Rage finds expression in the assisted asphyxiation of the slave trader (accompanied by the seizure of their ship), the alleviation of the slave master's heartbeat (seasoned by the enslaved maid), the transformation of the settler city-state into a community fireplace (the riot of the unheard).

When politicized against white capital, Black Rage blossoms into an anti-colonial weapon. Black Rage harmonizes the anger that the colony tunes out, it synchronizes our struggles, it is an ode to the bold notion that our discontent is undeniably justified. Black Rage is justice—outlawed by the State.

The State, as defined by Dr. Rasul Mowatt, geography and American Studies scholar in his book The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence, is the “configuration of the power of government, corporate interests, classes of elites, and upper levels of a bureaucratic management class that implements the ruling class’ goals and aims that sits atop an accumulated economic base." [3] Thus, the State is incapable of coexisting with Black Rage in its most potent form. It's too combustible of a substance to tolerate in the open market. When unleashed on white capital’s economic base, Black Rage sets aflame all its market principles: genocide, dispossession, slavery, and profit.

Attempts to outright suppress this substance only further stoke the flames of rebellion. Conversely, supporting its unfettered spread is State suicide. So, whether it's suppressed or supported, explosion is imminent. As a result, Black Rage cannot be entirely controlled, only managed.

To manage Black Rage, it must be laundered like the Blood Money that birthed it. To launder Black Rage into the market, its potency must be defanged. The social capital it produces, the clarion call by the Black masses for a free and equitable world, must be snatched and funneled into the hands of the State; "cleaned" of the original people and conditions that manufactured its existence but still recognizable enough to appear untraced. 

Laundering may manifest in a litany of forms including tax havens ,[4] structural adjustment ,[5] non-profiteering, municipal bonds ,[6] drug dealing, etc. but ultimately laundering is the logic of the State. Historically, as white capital was looting people, land, and resources, they gradually erected competing institutional fronts including government, commerce, media and religion to manage and codify their conquests i.e., the State. Henceforth, practically everything built under the rule of the western State is a front for white capital.

Ergo, what first appears to be inspired by Black Rage is reduced to simulacra: the self-determination of Black power is pigeonholed to front Black capitalism ,[7] the anger and suffering of the Black poor is liquidated to front rich Black entertainers' ambitions ,[8] the courage of Black militancy is strangulated to front State repression ,[9] and on the laundering flows.[10] At the helm of nearly each sheep-herding front squats the Black elite, feeding off the breadcrumbs bribed to them by white capital.

With each commodity, laundering repurposes the crimes of white capital and the opposing threats against their rule—to legitimate their rule. The imperial laundering strengthens with every cycle as the "illegitimate" crimes of the past fund the "legitimate" crimes of the present. Black Rage is the repercussion of each crime, the deafening echo from the past roaring into the decadence of the present.

To muzzle the roar, the State dispossesses the labor of Black Rage and harnesses it into a commodity that can be consumed harmlessly as if its original potency is retained. Stated plainly, Black people do not own our rage. More precisely, we are robbed of our rage with the coercive aim to legitimize the State.

This process supersedes everyone of good or bad faith, spilling its blood on all involved. A grand conspiracy need not be necessary when our immediate material interests are linked to the maintenance of the State. To further understand this metamorphosis of Black Rage an examination of money laundering itself is first required.

Laundering Deconstructed

According to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FCEN) of the US Treasury Department : “Money laundering is the process of making illegally-gained proceeds (i.e. "dirty money") appear legal (i.e. "clean").”[11] In accordance with FCEN, expert forex trader and head of content for wealth management at J.P. Morgan, James Chen explains how the dirty money must “appear to have come from a legitimate source. The money from the criminal activity is considered dirty, and the process "launders" it to make it look clean [emphasis added]."[12]

Hence, dirty money is never truly "cleaned," nor are the questionable activities done to accumulate it, just manipulated to make it appear as such. An undirting occurs. So, laundering is making something “clean” by simply moving the dirt or debris away, not by actual scrubbing. Thus, the original source of the funds cannot be redeemed.

To achieve concealment, the process of money laundering occurs in three steps: placement, layering, and integration. Chen explains the purpose of each step:

"Placement puts the "dirty money" into the legitimate financial system.

Layering conceals the source of the money through a series of transactions and bookkeeping tricks. In the final step, integration, the now-laundered money is withdrawn from the legitimate account to be used for whatever purposes the criminals have in mind for it."[13]

Each step is consummated to distance the source away from its questionable origins. Famously, we see this process transpire in the critically-acclaimed TV drama, Breaking Bad, when the meth chef, Walter White a.k.a. Heisenberg buys a literal car wash to conceal his "empire business ." We also see Walter try to redeem the source of his empire with the now infamous excuse , "everything I do, I do for my family." This type of rationalization of harm is common considering that money laundering is predicated upon an appearance of legitimacy. Yet again, the source cannot be redeemed.

Similar to Breaking Bad, money laundering is generally depicted as the actions taken by the morally corrupt who break bad from a flawed but otherwise "legitimate financial system." This conception of money laundering, like that of FCEN, Chen and even the United Nations with their emphasis on terrorists,[14] has its limitations. The pitfalls lie not in the description of the process, but in the amorphous categories that are ascribed to it. Typically, definitions of money laundering assume a clear line between good and bad that is easily identified: legal vs illegal, citizen vs criminal, clean vs dirty. Although so-called criminals may conceal their illicit activity, the definitions assume criminality—both the criminal and criminal behavior—is neatly defined.

These definitions fail to acknowledge how the State socially constructs the rigid categories of good and bad, and the subsequent laws that govern them. For example, the U.S. often facilitates the very activity it claims to criminalize such as laundering money to fund an anti-communist war in Nicaragua while outlawing laundering at home.[15] [16] Yet, since the State creates the law, it can pardon its own activity to make it look clean. So, what gives it legitimacy? What source makes capitalism a legitimate financial system?

The irredeemable source at the core of capitalism, endlessly breeding the entire structure, is conquest. As Pan-Africanist, psychiatrist and political philosopher Franz Fanon makes strikingly clear in his text Toward the African Revolution: "The colonial situation is first of all a military conquest continued and reinforced by a civil and police administration."[17] Put differently, the continuation and reinforcement of the colony is to launder the spoils of imperial conquests. With each conquest, industries were built and expanded around the globe with resources pillaged from the previously conquered. As expansion occurred, the integration of colonial production became inevitable. When speaking of European imperialism throughout the globe, Walter Rodney highlights this phenomenon in his seminal text, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,

"...sugar production in the West Indies was joined in the colonial period by cocoa production within Africa, so that both merged into the chocolate industry of Europe and North America. In the metallurgical field, iron ore from Sweden, Brazil, or Sierra Leone could be turned into different types of steel with the addition of manganese from the Gold Coast or chrome from Southern Rhodesia. Such examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely to cover the whole range of capitalist production in the colonial period."[18]

Conquest begets conquest; crimes enacted on one population became seed capital for the next crime of capitalist production on another. Without stolen resources from stolen land, stolen people would be unaffordable, and vice versa. Laundering arises as the colonial act of legitimizing each conquest.

At its base, money laundering is capitalism. Early-stage merchant capitalists primitively accumulated wealth from "criminal" activities via slavery, genocide, and dispossession. As land, people and resources were being stolen, capitalists invested their felonious profits into constructing a State of fronts to do the laundering/management (Placement). These fronts established the necessary laundering institutions such as government, law, banking, commerce, education, tax collecting, media, etc. as well as the violent enforcement agencies of police and military, thereby concealing capitalists' crimes and making their blood money appear clean through reinvestment (Layering). By capitalists legitimizing themselves via the organized crime of State-making,[19] their nefarious behaviors disappeared through Heisenbergian rationalizations such as "a more perfect union" or "The White Man's Burden." Invaders became founding fathers, thieves became businessmen, human beings became chattel and indigenous lands became colonies (Integration).

Emerging from laundering is what Mowatt identifies as a spatially fabricated society, "built upon the indigenous, the enslaved, and that which is crafted by the labourer."[20] The enclosed cities of the State create a racialized and gendered division of labor alienating people from themselves and the source of fabrication. However, laundering conquest as a legitimate enterprise is no easy task to fabricate.

Whereas wealth is being accumulated, so is suffering and death. This contradiction eventually bleeds through the eyes of the conquered. It is in this colonial process of conquest, the dialectic between wealth and death, that Black Rage finds its form and which all Black Rage originates.

As Fanon articulated in: "The people come to understand that wealth is not the fruit of labor but the result of organized, protected robbery."[21] Black Rage, uninterrupted, is the opposition to conquest which is the protected robbery of white capital managed by the State. Consequently, in the inevitable moments when Black Rage migrates to the surface of the colony, laundering is set in motion.

Laundering Black Rage: A Short Case Study

In early June 2020, as contagious Black Rage was charring US cities in response to the enkindling police murder of George Floyd,[22] a sea of capital flooded the streets to cool off the raging heat.[23] On the government front, the Democratic Party broke their one-month online fundraising record raising $392 million just in the month of June alone via Act Blue, including a massive $115 million in the first four days of June, thereupon capitalizing on the rage from Floyd's murder which occurred only a week prior on May 25th. Posing as the "opposition" to Black Rage, and the hotbed for white rage, the Republican Party also saw a huge bump in the same month raising a respectable $131 million. On the philanthropic front, "racial equity " funding nearly tripled from $5.7 billion in 2019 to $16 billion in 2020.[24] On the corporate front ,[25] roughly $50 billion was suddenly pledged by "America’s 50 biggest public companies and their foundations" to fight so-called "racial inequality.”

Promising big transformative change,[26] the Democratic Party rode the 2020 wave of Black Rage to seize control over the White House and the halls of Congress. On brand, the Democrats failed to pass any legislation to address police violence including their own lukewarm George Floyd Policing Act. This need not matter since the toothless bill would not have saved Floyd's life anyway.[27] Still, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi merrily thanked Floyd for "sacrificing his life for justice."

This "sacrifice" also proved beneficial to the white rage party, as Republican controlled states exploited the fear of Black Rage by passing repressive anti-protest laws that criminalized protesters for assembling in the streets while granting immunity to the drivers who ran them over.[28] Skillfully, Republicans used the fear of what was already washed diversity programming to attack K-12 education with anti-critical race theory bills .[29] Obviously, neither CRT nor any critical Black history was taught in schools prior. Thus, Black Rage was but another commodity to bolster their racial fascism. Notwithstanding, bipartisanship proved to still be alive and well as frolicking party leaders vied to demonstrate their love for police.[30]

Ostensibly, Black Rage was raining down rewards for everyone but the ones who suffer and die for exercising it. Following a $90 million windfall of manna from the co-opt cosmos,[31] Black Lives Matter Global Foundation Network laundered and embezzled Black Rage to buy a mansion and enrich the family members of their top celebrity-activist leaders.[32] [33] Meanwhile, many local BLM chapters and Black families of slain police victims were initially left destitute despite it being the families and chapters who create the pressure for a donation to be sent to BLMGFN in the first place.[34] [35] As of this writing, the BLMGFN director is currently being sued by BLM Grassroots for stealing $10 million.[36] Whether the allegations prove true or false, these Spider-Man meme level conflicts obscure the fact that philanthropic foundations are repository fronts of “twice-stolen wealth”[37] for capital to avoid the taxation of their profits stolen from workers; what remains left is a struggle over crumbling bribes.

Quietly, Black legacy organizational fronts like the NAACP and the Urban League received more "racial equity"[38] bribes than BLMGF as they steered Black Rage towards enfeebled outlets already debunked by professor of communication studies, Dr. Jared Ball such as "buying Black "[39] and Black banking .[40] Prominent historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs ) also gobbled up bribes as some of their students slept in tents to avoid their molded dorms.[41] [42] [43]

Most of the funds pledged were about undirting the rage rather than scrubbing the problem. Of the $50 billion pledged by the top fifty corporations, only $70 million directly went to fight so-called criminal justice reform.[44] In comparison, $45 billion was "allocated as loans or investments they could stand to profit from." Much of this blood money intersected as the principal State fronts funneled their funds through their Black subsidiary fronts including the above-mentioned entities.

Often, the charge is made that said institutions are "profiting off Black death." This is only half true since Black people are killed daily with impunity yet not a single donation, grant, loan or thought is generated on most days. It is the threatening response to death—Black Rage—that activates the laundering. Black death is merely an ingredient.

At the core, Black Rage was the source indirectly financing the entire heist. The failure here is not in any one fronts inability to deliver but in the extractive structure that funnels the money in their direction at all. The general public may have believed a donation to these State carve-outs was a net positive for Black people, but white capital undoubtedly knew any serious resistance to their rule ceased with the first transaction.

Laundering Black Rage phases

As established prior, laundering is the maintenance and perpetuation of imperial conquests administered by the white capitalist State. Rage is an inescapable outcome of conquest. To enslave, steal, and kill is to become your own gravedigger. This is not lost on the conquering class of white capital. As Walter Rodney once said to a crowd of Guyanese comrades, "when you dedicate yourself to oppressing others, you cannot sleep."[45] This means long before police precincts scorch the stolen earth or the colony is amassed with revolution, mechanisms are developed to bring Black Rage to heel.

Therefore, what many call co-optation is the regularly scheduled laundering of the State developed over centuries of conquests. Materializing from this development are the three primary phases to laundering Black Rage: Incubation, Labor, and Commodification.

Incubation, via the State, places Black Rage in circulation by setting both the oppressive conditions for rage to be expressed and seeding the contradictions for it to be cleaned. Labor, sets mass uprisings in motion. Threatened by the Black masses, the State layers the narcissistic rage of the Black elite overtop the illegal militant rage of the masses to conceal class interests and collapse the labor of Black Rage into the grips of capital. Commodification, the now-laundered Black Rage— managed by the Black elite—is integrated within the State, ready to be withdrawn as a labor-crushed commodity to be bought, sold, or repressed by white capital for the next cycle.

"The settler keeps alive in the native an anger which he deprives of outlet..."[46]

- Franz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth

"Black is a classification of domination, and Black is a response to being dominated."[47]

- Rasul Mowatt, The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence: The State and the City Between Us

The specter of Black Rage pervades inside the colony like the calamitous ambitions of the runaway slave who eagerly plots their return to the plantation by raiding it of its human property and jarring it into a can of ashes. Black Rage is a grand marronage spreading the remains of oppression about as the wheezing flames wave goodbye to its blood shaving whips. Haunted by this specter, white capital hides behind the laundering body of the State as it attempts to transform the rebellious nature of Black Rage into submissive capital.

Incubation

The State provokes Black Rage by engineering the inhumane conditions that place it in motion. As Black Rage incubates, so do the guardrails to keep it from swarming to an unmanageable scale. This dialectic defines the laundering process.

In Avengers of the New World, historian Laurent Dubois chronicles how prior to the Haitian revolution ,[48] noticing the potential for small slave uprisings to balloon larger, the French crown instituted various reforms (1685 Code Noir , 1780s royal decrees) to curb the barbarism of plantation managers in the colony of Saint Domingue. The reforms provided the enslaved with off days, food and shelter, and limitations on the beatings they could receive. Reforms proved ineffective as French colonists in Saint-Domingue rejected them in favor of more bloodthirsty cruelty. Apparently, as historian C.L.R. James documented in Black Jacobins, pouring burning wax on enslaved bodies and roasting them on slow fires was seen as the best means of social control.[49] These tactics inflamed Black Rage, leading to the defeat of the most profitable colony in the Caribbean and the establishment of the first Black republic.

The colonial world took notice. Historian Gerald Horne documented the fear of the U.S. via Vice President of the time, Thomas Jefferson in Confronting Black Jacobins: "If something is not done, and soon done,” he advised darkly, “we shall be the murderers of our own children,” as “the revolutionary storm now sweeping the globe will be upon us.”[50] Thomas’s fears proved real as a revolutionary storm of Black Rage via slave uprisings incubated worldwide, particularly in the U.S. post-1804.

To manage this colonial pandemic and “foster a new image” of power, white capitalist empires slowly began transitioning their rule from the iron fist of hard power to the unseen hand of soft power, as Mowatt describes “for the sake of capitalism.”[51] Mowatt also comments: “While the capabilities of hard power (force, coercion, and warfare) were always ready, the use of soft power (culture, values, and ideals) had become the preferred method of moving forward.”[52]

White capital embarked on the mission of stabilizing territories for smoother laundering. Among a few examples is the Congress of Vienna from 1814-1815 which balanced territory among warring European States,[53] the 1823 Monroe Doctrine which declared U.S. hegemony over the Americas landmass,[54] the U.S. Civil War from 1861-1865 which settled slavery and westward expansion,[55] and the “Scramble for Africa” via the Berlin Conference[56] from 1884-1885 in which white capital met “on long tables during catered meals” where, as Mowatt notes, “the continent of Africa was carefully carved up and re-designed for the purposes of extraction…”[57] Following these mobster-like parlays was an inflation of State power that better absorbed the opposition.

State-fabricated society expanded through now conquered territories, centralized in cities. The city builds the fronts—law, schools, media, religion, government, business, etc.—for the State of white capital that reaches to the countryside. The capitalist State, through the indoctrination of its fronts, becomes what Italian Marxist revolutionary, Antonio Gramsci described as the hegemonic “educator ,"[58] thereby establishing the norms that govern the ambitions of the people. Correspondingly, State fronts also collectively act as the “organizer,”[59] performing as pre-existing institutions of consent disciplining the will of Black Rage over time. Fronts may serve legitimate human needs but their entanglement with the State jeopardizes any liberatory outcome.

Accordingly, when U.S Black liberal organizations of the 1940s and 50s colluded with the government to purge their organizations of alleged communists it later weakened the potential radicalism of the civil rights movement.[60] Similarly, when elite philanthropic foundations created African Studies fronts throughout Nigeria and west Africa to induce pro-western sentiments, subsequent anti-colonial struggles were compromised.[61] Thus, when Black Rage is structured by State fronts the primary frustrations may not always be with the rule of white capital but with exclusion from rule, the limited crumbs received underneath rule, or internal disputes over which group of Black folk deserves more crumbs leftover from rule.

Nevertheless, workers employed by State fronts or those with ambitions of managing one do not need to morally align with the interests of white capital to serve them. To feed ourselves we all must participate in the maintenance of the State to a degree because it controls the resources we require to attend to our material needs such as housing and food. Political theorist, Dr. Joy James astutely reminds us of this contradiction when speaking on the captive maternal ,[62] "as you stabilize your family , you are also stabilizing this predatory structure ." [63]

These contradictions effectively reduce everyone to launderers for the predatory State. Our pursuit to stabilize nourishes the State-fabricated society with our labor. We become socialized to launder simply by living our lives surviving the day-to-day mundanity of capitalism.

Bribes become a precondition for stability. That is to say, the more we stabilize the more susceptible we are to the bribes of the State. Bribes as wages. Bribes as property. Bribes as wealth. White capital shares these crumbs of theft to help stabilize the laundering.

Our pursuit of stability conditions us to greedily accumulate and hoard like white capital. We hope to accumulate enough bribes that eventually we can become the bribers i.e., capitalists. Predictably, this aimless lottery to achieve stability rarely involves jackpots for the conquered as the betting odds are not in our favor. The State is the house, and as they say in gambling, the house always wins.

Ultimately, the State cannot bribe everyone effectively with profit as the motive. To remain kicking capitalism requires the super-exploitation of cheap labor while it increasingly cranks out a global surplus labor population whom receive absolutely no bribes.[64] With this being the case, certain populations will never sniff stability which inevitably requires the State to still rely upon hard power methods of social control, such as police and military, as unstable populations jostle for basic needs. Recognizing it is their unbridled rage that could radically sunder the entire flow of capital, violence work stands as a stalwart for policing the crisis .[65] Constituted as an all-suffocating monopoly, white capital comes to own both the wealth we produce and our visceral response to their hoarding of it.

Labor

Similar to how workers do not own their labor, Black people do not own our rage. After white capital seized the means of production—land, technology, raw materials, and labor power—conquest did not neatly bleed to an end. Instead, by monopolizing these productive forces, white capital not only controlled the material resources for economic creation but also mutated to possess the domains in which the self-actualization of our rage is naturally expressed.

In this sense, Black Rage is labor that can either be exploited or liberated. Nonetheless, at the moment that Black people collectively respond to oppression—no matter the form—labor is exercised. Labor was exercised when Afro-Cubans led the revolution against the Spanish,[66] it dawned on the British as the Mau Mau rebels of Kenya attacked settler-colonialism,[67] it occupied Ferguson , Missouri by relentlessly protesting throughout the blood-stained streets after the police killing of Mike Brown.[68] Labor is exercised anywhere Black people rage against our oppression.

Problem is that this type of revolutionary labor is also illegal. Yet, while the State outlaws the explicit practice, it still exploits our labor to fuel its conquest economy like a Black-market drug that funds a "legitimate" business. Herein lies the laundering. To break our labor, the State funnels our rage through their fronts, pacifying it with bribes and crushing it with repression. The internal contradictions the State-fabricated society creates serve as perfect fodder for this process to occur.

Although Black Rage universally burns throughout the diaspora, the motivations and actions that arise from the debris when an uprising occurs tend to be shaped by class interests. The Black masses (unemployed, proletarian poor and working class), receiving minimal to no bribes while experiencing the constant exhaustion of instability are the most likely to unleash their rage against the State like prisoners at their wits’ end taking hostages and occupying the prison. The Black elite (petit-capitalists, upper-level professionals, and middle-class aspirants), the most bribed and stabilized by the State are the most likely to repress their rage and/or sell it for more enhanced bribes and stability like jailhouse snitches copping to a plea.

bell hooks, the late Black feminist author and cultural critic, lamented a similar observation in her book, Killing Rage: Ending Racism. She describes two distinct forms of rage: militant rage and narcissistic rage. She defines the militant rage of the Black masses as, "the rage of the downtrodden and oppressed that could be mobilized to mount militant resistance to white supremacy." She juxtaposes it with the narcissistic rage of the Black elite as, "not interested in fundamentally challenging and changing white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. They simply want equal access to privilege within the existing structure."[69] This critique of the Black elite echoes Malcolm X's condemnation of this class, "These Negroes aren’t asking for no nation. They’re trying to crawl back on the plantation."[70]

The Black Elite function as double agents with dual access to contradictory classes. They function as a professionalized buffer for white capital, and as it follows the unelected leaders of the Black masses. Their shared racial identity with the masses lends them legitimacy. When the labor of Black Rage produces social capital for any type of change, they become the benefactors. It is this social capital that grants them dual access and makes them valuable to the State.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, defines capital as "accumulated labor" that allows "groups of agents" to "appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor."[71] He later defines social capital as the "aggregate" that "provides each of its members with the backing of the collectively owned capital, a 'credential' which entitles them to credit..." In the case of Black Rage, the "accumulated labor" of it creates a "credential" that credits Black people to its fruits.

Bourdieu goes on to discuss the implications of representation "when the group is large and its members weak" their social capital "contain the seeds of an embezzlement or misappropriation of the capital which they assemble." Therefore, the Black elite is a "subgroup" existing as a "nobility" that "may speak on behalf of the whole group, represent the whole group, and exercise authority in the name of the whole group."[72] Per their nobility, the Black elite possesses the capacity to embezzle the social capital of the masses.

By owning the means of this embezzlement, State fronts utilize shared Black social capital by layering the narcissistic rage of the Black elite over the militant rage—the "dirty" money—of the Black masses to conceal the transfer of wealth. Thus, when the masses perform the bulk of the labor—organizing, rioting, revolting, rebelling,[73] thereby igniting the fear of God in the State—the Black elite inherit the chunkiest crumbs of the surplus value. They arrive at the scene of the fire, like scab labor reps, flaunting their State-sponsored credentials. Next comes the bribes in the form of token jobs, flag independence, loans, investments, donations, grants, sponsorships, property rights, and sometimes even semi-protection from the rabid right-wing who will punish the masses for their dignifying audacity.

The Black Elite shriek at the fate of the rebellious slaves, the western-backed coups and assassinations of Black leaders like Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, and Malcolm X, but still recognize the need to project a similar militancy for popular appeal. They are incentivized to crave freedom without sacrifice, so they legitimize their bribes as Black liberation. To maintain the delusional front, this labor aristocracy bullishly appeals to racial kinship.[74]

As the fallen soldier, Jonathan Jackson wrote to his brother and political prisoner, George Jackson in Blood in My Eye, "what better way is there for them to sell themselves to us than to scream Black, Black, Black, Black." Observing the laundering of Kenyan independence,[75] Jackson warned how vague appeals to Blackness can shield State collusion: "Like Tom Mboya, whose whole service for the C.I.A. was to redirect the revolutionary rage of the people into a thing more compatible with the interests of Western Businessmen."[76] Perhaps, this type of State-sponsored embezzlement is why years prior the Mau Mau did not limit their rage to the British but extended it to the African British loyalists as well.[77] Racial kinship is useless when the proclaimed "kinfolk" is colluding with the enemy.

For laundering to be most effective, Black Rage must be flattened to reflect the class interests of narcissistic rage while cosplaying as militant rage. When labor is strong, flattening fails. When the French tried to offer equal rights to free people of color in Haiti to control the rebellious slaves, it backfired immensely.[78] The rebels were too organized to succumb to any flattening other than the total demolition of slavery. But when labor is weak and engulfed in contradictions incubated by conquest, Black Rage is flattened, its militancy demolished with its ashes valorized into commodity form.[79]

Commodification

Now that the labor of Black Rage is broken its only exit valve is in the marketplace. This commodification occurs due to the initial colonial act that inspired Black Rage—conquest. Returning to the means of production, white capital holds a monopoly on the use of force necessary to overthrow them (weapons, police, military) and the resources necessary to build independence beyond them (land, machinery, raw materials,). If labor is unable to wrestle away a sufficient share of these resources, it has no immediate option other than to sell itself back to capital for material subsistence.

Following an uprising, the State either constructs or upgrades outlets for the people to exercise their rage. To avoid war during slavery in the Caribbean, occasionally colonial administrators granted amnesty to hand-picked maroon camps—communities of runaway slaves—in exchange for them capturing fresh runaways for the colony.[80] Thus, when the enslaved exercised their rage by escaping the plantation, certain maroon camps became fronts for their recapture.

Fronts for recapture (State fronts) are essential to understanding the conversion from rage to commodity. It demonstrates how the rage ignited by the knee of the State compressed ten minutes on a poor Black man's neck transformed into corporate pledges for diversity and consumerist slogans to "buy black " almost immediately.[81] Of course, not too dissimilar from runaway slaves, some Black people naively ran towards these fronts to exercise our rage. Unfortunately, the narcissistic rage of the Black elite was already waiting on the other side with iron collars and keys to recapture our rage and hand us back to politicians, corporations, and nonprofits.

Fronts for recapture go by another name too—reform. Reform is when the boot tells the neck that oxygen is on the way. Reform is also when the neck is forced to believe it. George Jackson named the necessity of the facade: "Each economic reform that perpetuates ruling-class hegemony has to be disguised as a positive gain for the upthrusting masses."[82] Thus, when the neck begins to remove the boot, the boot may loan the neck oxygen to recapture its foothold, but if the boot slips the floodgates of rage pour into the colony.

As a red sea of Black Rage grew to an almost insurmountable threat—colonial dams bursting at the seams, Black revolution drowning empires, social movements sinking racial apartheid—neocolonialism emerged as the fundamental front to withstand the tidal waves of Black Rage.[83] Post World War II, White finance capital gradually began conceding puppet control to Black elites in the form of political and corporate representation while still maintaining control over the resources that govern the institutions Black elites purportedly represent. In Africa, the bribe of flag independence absorbed Black Rage while International Monetary Funds and World Bank loans flowed through the client-states of the continent and out-flowed commodities to power phones and drill oil.[84] In the US, Black Rage was squeezed by token integration as the State poured brain drain funds into Black communities and out-flowed neo-colonial "First Black s"[85] as human commodities selling consumptive commodities of Blackness in media and entertainment. Civil rights activist and current political prisoner, Jamil Al-Amin formerly known as H. Rap Brown, said it best : "White folks will co-opt dog sh*t if it's to their advantage!" [86]

Once Black Rage is recaptured and the commodities are produced, they become ideological tools i.e., propaganda for incubating against the next uprising. The more white capital can use these commodities to convince the masses there's hope in the imperial State and/or that it is simply too powerful to overcome, the less likely the masses to destroy it when Black Rage inevitably boils over again. Each cycle differs in character depending on the historical conditions, but conquest remains the end result.

Conclusion

At the root, Black Rage is the logical response to being conquered. All other targets of rage—discrimination, inequality, bigotry, bias, poverty—emerge from the initial colonial act of conquest. Laundering throws Black Rage off the scent. The red herrings of this State-fabricated society either obscure that conquest ever occurred or imply reconciliation through the same apparatus that set conquest in motion. No matter, the source cannot be redeemed.

Laundering is unsustainable. The State-fabricated society cannot continue to legitimize its death-marching actions without collapsing on itself and crushing the rest of us beneath it. The growing multi-polarity, creeping techno-feualism and looming climate chaos guarantee so. Hence, notable ancestors prophetically warned against integrating into a burning house . [87] They understood there was no reasoning with firefighting arsonists.

By continuing to reason, the Black elite of today is more subdued by elite capture than prior generations.[88] They are tranquilly bribed to confuse arson for firefighting. Thus, they peddle racial patriotism amidst white nationalists’ reawakening, Black luxury amidst financial collapse, and escapist Black joy amidst mass suffering and death. Their only redemption comes by vacating their narrow class interests and locking up arms with the masses they are otherwise bribed to propagandize.[89]

The struggle for Black Rage is an exercise in class warfare. White capital is not some mythical force oppressing us from the heavens but a ruthless ruling class that perpetuates itself via the State. As Mowatt remarked, "(State) Power repeats itself, not history."[90] Unlike the mythmaking of history, State power can be seized and forged to wither away towards a post-western world . As Black studies scholar, Dr. Yannick Marshall argues: "We need the rage we feel after looking out at the charred remains of our earth under centuries of Western rule to mature into an act. The act of putting the West aside."[91]

To put the west aside we must reverse launder what it has stolen. That is to flip the bribes of the capitalist State and fund the anti-colonial, anti-imperial measures it so religiously outlaws. The instructions for such acts lie beyond the mission statement of a white liberal non-profit front or the "decolonizing" syllabus of a bromidic academic. We cannot formalize what is illegal. The answers rest in our collective Black Rage, the conspiring rage of every conquered and oppressed people, and our ability to organize it all towards a life-affirming post-western communist world. Anything less is a reconstruction of fronts.

Too Black is a poet, host of the Black Myths Podcast , member of Black Alliance For Peace , and communications coordinator for the Defense Committee to Free the Pendleton 2 . He is based in Indianapolis, IN and can be reached at tooblack8808@gmail.com or @too_black_ on Twitter.

References

[1] Lauryn Hill, “Black Rage,” YouTube (YouTube, August 22, 2014), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_sdubWaY5o&ab_channel=GO .

[2] Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1. (London: Penguin Books, 1976) 341.

[3] Rasul Mowatt, The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence: The State and the City Between Us. (New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis, 2021.), 2.

[4] Vanessa Ogle, "The end of empire and the rise of tax havens: How decolonisation propelled the growth of low-tax jurisdictions, with lasting economic implications for former colonies." The New Statesman. 09 September 2021. Retrieved from https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2020/12/end-empire-and-rise-tax-havens .

[5] York W. Bradshaw, and Jie Huang, "Intensifying Global Dependency: Foreign Debt, Structural Adjustment, and Third World Underdevelopment." The Sociological Quarterly 32 no. 1 (1991) 321-342. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4120911 .

[6] Destin Jenkins, The Bonds of Inequality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021)

[7] In Black Awakening in Capitalist America Robert Allen lays out how in the late 1960s co-opting American state fronts such as the Ford Foundation, the Urban Coalition, and National Alliance of Businessmen were attempting “to equate black power with black capitalism.” By reducing Black Rage to a failure of the exclusionary market Black Power could be redefined. Robert L Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1969.)

[8] For a clearer view on how the contemporary Black poor provide involuntary labor for the Black elite and Hollywood see Bertrand Cooper, "Who Actually Gets to Create Black Pop Culture?"Current Affairs, July 25th, 2021. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/07/who-actually-gets-to-createblack-pop-culture .

[9] The FBI COINTELPRO Ghetto Informant program, although minimally effective, provides insight into how spaces for radical gathering were turned into fronts for capture. Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, Ghetto Informant Program 75-76, by Frank Church and John G. Tower, https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/94755_II.pdf

[10] Fedaral Bureau of Investigation. Black Identity Extremists Likely Motivated to Target Law    Enforcement Officers. Fedaral Bureau of Investigation, by FBI Counter Terrorism

[11] Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, “History of Anti-Money Laundering Laws,” FinCEN.gov, accessed August 26, 2022, https://www.fincen.gov/history-anti-money-laundering-laws .

[12] James Chen, "Money Laundering." Investopedia, May 18, 2022, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/moneylaundering.asp .

[13] Ibid

[14] For UN definition on money laundering see “Money Laundering Overview,” United Nations: Office on Drugs and Crime, accessed August 26, 2022, https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/money-laundering/overview.html .

[15] From 1981-1986 top officials in the Regan administration were secretly selling Arms to Iran to “illegally” fund the right wing contras in Nicaragua against the communist Sandinistas. This is also known as reverse laundering where “legitimate” funds are used to fund illicit activity. For more on Iran Contra see Robinson, Teresa Simons. 1991. "FBI knew BCCI financed Iran-Contra deal, bank official says." United Press International. 22 October. https://www.upi.com/Archives/1991/10/22/FBI-knew-BCCI-financed-Iran-Contra-deal-bank-official-says/3522688104000/ .

[16] The Money Laundering and Control Act of 1986 was apart of the larger War on Drugs bill, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. The Anti-Drug Abuse act disproportionately criminalized crack-cocaine. Coincidently or not, much of the cocaine used to make crack was imported by CIA sponsored Contras. For more see William J. Hughes, “Money Laundering Control Act of 1986,” Money laundering control act of 1986 §, accessed June 15, 2022, https://www.congress.gov/bill/99th-congress/house-bill/5077 .

[17] Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays (New York: Grove, 2004), 84.

[18] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Verso, 2018), 357.

[19] For how capitalist states monopolize the force of “crime" see Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge etc: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 169-191.

[20] Mowatt, Geographies of Threat, 108

[21] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2021), 191.

[22] Derrick Bryson Taylor, “George Floyd Protests: A Timeline,” The New York Times, May 30, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/article/george-floyd-protests-timeline.html .

[23] Elena Schneider, “Record Cash Floods Democrats, Black Groups amid Protests and Pandemic,” Politico, July 7, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/01/actblue-june-protests-coronavirus-347492 .

[24] “Foundation Maps Racial Equity,” Foundation Maps, July 24, 2022, https://maps.foundationcenter.org/#/advancedsehttps://maps.foundationcenter.org/home.php .

[25] Jena McGregor and Tracy Jan, “Corporate America’s $50 billion promise,” The Washington Post, August 23, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2021/george-floyd-corporate-america-racial-justice/ .

[26] Cassella, Megan. 2021. "‘Part of the fabric’: Democrats say Biden’s sweeping changes will be hard to undo." Politico. 28 April. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/28/biden-100-days-lbj-public-life-484830 .

[27] For the uselessness of the George Floyd Policing Act read, Derecka Purnell, “The George Floyd Act Wouldn't Have Saved George Floyd's Life. That Says It All ,” The Guardian (Guardian News and Media, March 4, 2021), https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/04/the-george-floyd-act-wouldnt-have-saved-george-floyds-life-thats-says-it-all .

[28] Adam Gabbatt, “Republicans Push 'Tsunami' of Harsh Anti-Protest Laws after BLM Rallies,” The Guardian (Guardian News and Media, April 12, 2021), https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/12/republicans-push-anti-protest-laws-blm-demonstrations  

[29] Kiara Alfonseca, “Map: Where Anti-Critical Race Theory Efforts Have Reached,” ABC News (ABC News Network, March 24, 2022), https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/map-anti-critical-race-theory-efforts-reached/story?id=83619715 .

[30] Eric Bradner, Sarah Mucha, and Donald Judd, “Biden Says He Doesn't Support Defunding Police,” CNN (Cable News Network, June 8, 2020), https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/08/politics/joe-biden-defund-the-police/index.html .

[31] Nicholas Kulish, “After Raising $90 Million in 2020, Black Lives Matter Has $42 Million in Assets,” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/business/blm-black-lives-matter-finances.html .

[32] Sean Campbell, “Black Lives Matter Secretly Bought a $6 Million House,” NY Mag (Intelligencer, April 4, 2022), https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/04/black-lives-matter-6-million-dollar-house.html .

[33] Morrison, Aaron. 2022. "AP Exclusive: Black Lives Matter has $42 million in assets." Associated Press. 17 May. https://apnews.com/article/government-and-politics-race-ethnicity-philanthropy-black-lives-matter-5bc4772e029da522036f8ad2a02990aa .

[34] BLM 10, “Tell No Lies, Statement from the Frontlines of BLM,” Statement From The Frontlines of BLM, July 8, 2021, https://www.blmchapterstatement.com/no2/ .

[35] Imani Perry, “Stop Hustling Black Death,” The Cut, May 24, 2021, https://www.thecut.com/article/samaria-rice-profile.html .

[36] Orlando Mayorquin, “Activists Accuse BLM Foundation Leader of Siphoning $10 Million in Donations, Lawsuit Says,” USA Today (Gannett Satellite Information Network, September 6, 2022), https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/09/06/black-lives-matter-foundation-10-million-lawsuit/8003798001/ .

[37] Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “In the Shadow of the Shadow State,” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 41-51.

[38] Black Lives Matter Leaders Defend BLM's Decision To Buy $6M Home, Condemn Claims Of Mismanaged Funds, YouTube (Roland Martin Unfiltered , 2022), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSndlf8kPF0&t=923s&ab_channel=RolandS.Martin .

[39] Jared A. Ball, The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2020).

[40] Jared Ball, “Buying Power and Black Banking Revisited!,” iMWiL!, May 5, 2020, https://imixwhatilike.org/2020/05/05/buying-power-and-black-banking-revisited .

[41] Black Alliance for Peace - Mid-Atlantic, “The Neocolonial Collusion of Hbcus and the State,” Hood Communist, October 28, 2021, https://hoodcommunist.org/2021/10/28/the-neocolonial-collusion-of-hbcus-and-the-state/amp/ .

[42] Tracy, McGregor, and Hoyer, “Corporate America’s $50 billion promise,” Education

[43] Hannah Joy, “Atlanta HBCU Students Protest, Sleep in Tents for Better Campus Conditions,” TheGrio, October 22, 2021, https://thegrio.com/2021/10/20/atlanta-hbcu-students-protest-sleep-in-tents-for-better-campus-conditions/ .

[44] Tracy, McGregor, and Hoyer, “Corporate America’s $50 billion promise,” Criminal Justice

[45] Walter Rodney, “The Struggle Goes on by Walter Rodney,” History as Weapon, September 1979, https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/rodnstrugoe.html .

[46] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2021), 54.

[47] Rasul A. Mowatt, The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence: The State and the City Between Us (New York: Routledge, 2022), 46.

[48] Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (London; Cambridge: Belknap, Harvard University, 2004), 61-63

[49] C.L.R. James, Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1989), 12.

[50] Gerald Horne, Confronting Black Jacobins: The United States, the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015), 79.

[51] Mowatt, Geographies of Threat, 130.

[52] Ibid

[53] Harold Nicolson, The Congress of Vienna: A Study in Allied Unity: 1812-1822 (New York: Grove, 2001).

[54] James Monroe, “Monroe Doctrine (1823),” National Archives and Records Administration, accessed August 10, 2022, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/monroe-doctrine#:~:text=The%20Monroe%20Doctrine%20is%20the,further%20colonization%20or%20puppet%20monarchs .

[55] James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, 1st ed., vol. 6 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

[56] Matthew Craven, “Between Law and History: the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 and the Logic of Free Trade,” London Review of International Law 3, no. 1 (March 10, 2015): pp. 31-59, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1093/lril/lrv002 .

[57] Mowatt, Geographies of Threat, 122.

[58] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Dehli: Aakar Books, 2018), 260.

[59] In Policing the Crisis: Mugging the State and Law and Order, Stuart Hall and his co-authors rebuke overly simplistic explanations of the capitalist State that reduce it to the ‘executive committee of the ruling class.' For them this proved too conspiratorial and obscured the independence of competing capitals under capitalism. Thus, for Hall and his co-authors the State functions as the organizer of capital by mediating the conditions for capital to succeed. The capitalist state governs the masses through popular consent with the looming threat of coercion. The State universalizes the interests of capital as the interests of all through economic, legal, social, ideological, and political hegemony, thereby building consensus. For more see Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging the State and Law and Order, 2nd ed. (New York: ‎Red Globe Press, 2013), 202-203.

[60] Charisse Burden-Stelly, “Black Cold War Liberalism as an Agency Reduction Formation during the Late 1940s and the Early 1950s,” International Journal of Africana Studies 19, no. 2 (2018), 77-112.

[61] Inderjeet Parmar, Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 266.

[62] Joy James, “The Womb of Western Theory: Trauma, Time Theft and the Captive Maternal,” Challenging the Punitive Society: Prison Notebooks 12 (2016): pp. 253-296, https://www.thecarceral.org/cn12/14_Womb_of_Western_Theory.pdf .

[63] Joy James, "We Are Not Our Ancestors' PT. 3 w/ Joy James," August 26th 2020, Black Myths Podcast, produced by Black Myths Pod, MP3 Audio, 10:27, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-not-our-ancestors-pt-3-w-joy-james/id1504205689?i=1000489212555 .

[64] Homi Kharas, Kristofer Hamel, and Martin Hofer, “The Start of a New Poverty Narrative,” Brookings (Brookings Institute, March 9, 2022), https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2018/06/19/the-start-of-a-new-poverty-narrative/ .

[65] For police as a counterinsurgency force see Micol Seigel, Violence Work State Power and the Limits of Police (Durham: Duke Universities Press, 2018).

[66] Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

[67] David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005).

[68] Associated Press, “Ferguson Protests Erupt in Violence as People Lob Molotov Cocktails, Police Use Tear Gas (Slideshow) (Video),” Cleveland, August 14, 2014, https://www.cleveland.com/nation/2014/08/ferguson_protests_erupt_in_vio.html .

[69] bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006), 27-29.

[70] Malcolm X, “Message to Grassroots,” Teaching American History, transcript of speech delivered at King Solomon Baptist Church  in Detroit , Michigan , November 10, 1963, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/message-to-grassroots/ .

[71] Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York: Greenwood, 1986), pp. 241-258

[72] Ibid

[73] Joshua Clover notes how the riot is “the other of incarceration.” A response to the “othering” of racialized surplus populations, Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot.: The New Era of Uprisings (London: Verso, 2019), 162. For a scientific comprehension on rioting see; For scientific distinctions between rebellion, revolt, insurrection, and coup d'etat see James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs, Revolution And Evolution In The Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008).

[74] During an outtake conversation on the web show The Last Dope Intellectual Africana studies professor, Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly referred to the Black elite as a “labor aristocracy” and in further correspondence through messages with author. Charisse Burden-Stelly, text message to author, July 15th, 2022.

[75] Gerald Horne , “Barack Obama's Father Identified as CIA Asset in U.S. Drive to ‘Recolonize’ Africa during Early Days of the Cold War,” MR Online, February 10, 2022, https://mronline.org/2022/02/10/barack-obamas-father-identified-as-cia-asset-in-u-s-drive-to-recolonize-africa-during-early-days-of-the-cold-war/

[76] George Jackson, Blood in My Eye (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1990), 37.

[77] Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 200

[78] Dubois, Avengers of the New World. 89.

[79] Borrowing from Karl Marx description of the valorization of labor in chapter 7 of Capital Vol. 1. For Marx the laborer transforms nature and them self through work. The capitalist intervenes in this process and extracts the surplus value of the labor by valorizing it into a commodity. This is exactly what happens to Black Rage. White capital extracts it’s value to serve as a commodity and then sells it back to us to be consumed for their interests. Here Black Rage is transformed from labor to the commodity of labor power. Marx, Capital: Volume 1. 283-305.

[80] Dubois, Avengers of the New World. 54.

[81] In the summer of 2020 and 2021 the centennial of the Tulsa Massacre was used as a front to promote “Black wealth” and buying Black despite the actual community of Greenwood having little to no wealth in 1921. For more see Too Black, “From Black Wall Street to Black Capitalism,” Hood Communist, June 3, 2021, https://hoodcommunist.org/2021/06/03/from-black-wall-street-to-black-capitalism/ .

[82] Jackson, Blood In Eye. 118.

[83] Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (New York: International Publishers, 1984).

[84] York W. Huang. Intensifying Global Dependency.

[85] Too Black, “‘The First Black,’” Hood Communist, February 25, 2021, https://hoodcommunist.org/2021/02/25/the-first-black/ .

[86] Jamil Al-Amin, Die Nigger Die!: A Political Autobiography (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2002), 132.

[87] In his memoir, Harry Belafonte said Dr. Martin Luther King believed Black people in America were “integrating into a burning house.” In response on what to do he said “I guess we’re just going to have to become firemen.” Malcolm X had been warning about the volcanic nature of America years prior. Harry Belafonte and Michael Shnayerson, My Song: A Memoir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), Epub, 806.

[88] Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi O., “Identity Politics and Elite Capture,” Boston Review, May 7, 2020, https://bostonreview.net/articles/olufemi-o-taiwo-identity-politics-and-elite-capture/ .

[89] For analysis on class suicide see Amilcar Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory,” Marxist.org, January 1966, https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1966/weapon-theory.htm .

[90] Mowatt, Geographies of Threat, 64.

[91] Yannick Giovanni Marshall, “The Future Is Post-Western,” Al Jazeera (Al Jazeera, May 20, 2022), https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/5/20/the-future-is-post-western .

Biden Lies at the United Nations

By Margaret Kimberley

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

It takes a special kind of hubris for a president of the United States to speak at the United Nations, the place where international law is supposed to be upheld and defended. Yet the representative of the worst violator of international law predictably shows up every September when the United Nations General Assembly holds its annual session. The late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez got it right when he spoke in 2006:

“Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world. I think we could call a psychiatrist to analyze yesterday’s statement made by the president of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation, and pillage of the peoples of the world.”

Chavez is no longer with us, and Joe Biden is the third man to serve as U.S. president since George W. Bush was compared to the devil. But the words are as true now as they were then. This year Biden’s speech was replete with the usual drivel about the United States being some sort of guarantor of peace. Among other things, he said that permanent members of the Security Council should “...refrain from the use of the veto, except in rare, extraordinary situations, to ensure that the Council remains credible and effective.”

Perhaps Biden thinks that the rest of the world has amnesia. Every time the members of UN General Assembly condemn Israeli apartheid it is the U.S. that predictably steps in with a Security Council veto to protect its ally and partner in crime. Twelve of the 14 U.S. vetoes since 2000 were made on behalf of Israel. Any U.S. proposal calling for change in the Security Council structure is intended to weaken China and Russia’s veto power and to bring in its own puppets such as Germany and Japan.

Of course, Russia bashing was the focus of Biden’s speech with false claims of a nuclear threat, unprovoked attack, and accusations of war crimes. He didn’t mention well documented Ukrainian war crimes such as the shelling of civilians in Donetsk. Worse yet, there was no acknowledgement that Ukraine and Russia were negotiating until the U.S. and the U.K. intervened and scuttled the talks. Biden’s speech was full of projection and every condemnation leveled against Russia or Iran or Venezuela was instead an indictment of U.S. behavior in the world.

The world has changed but American administrations don’t. They continue behaving as if the U.S. is still the all-powerful hegemon that will always get what it wants. It does have the world’s reserve currency and the biggest military, but it can’t control the world without doing harm to itself and its allies. The United States cynically used the United Nations to call for a “no fly zone” over Libya, which allowed it to destroy that nation. Partnerships with jihadists brought destruction to Libya and to Syria, causing a humanitarian disaster which displaced millions of people. The 2014 coup against the elected government of Ukraine has turned into all out war. The sanctions targeting Russian gas and oil have raised prices all over the world and damaged European economies more than any others. The ruble has risen in value and the euro has declined. Even hegemons don’t always get their way.

While Biden mouthed platitudes and falsehoods at the United Nations, Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov met with representatives from China, Cuba, Eritrea, Serbia, Laos, Jordan, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Algeria, Burkina Faso, India, Mali, Sudan, South Sudan, Equatorial Guinea, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Mexico among others. So much for Washington’s claims that Russia is an isolated pariah.

While Washington rails against Moscow, it continues to ignore UN votes to end sanctions against Cuba. This year Cuba will again submit a resolution calling on the U.S. to end its trade embargo. During the 2021 vote only the U.S. and Israel voted no. The next vote will have the same result, and reveal Biden’s words, “The United States will always promote human rights and the values enshrined in the U.N. Charter in our own country and around the world,” as a sham.

The United Nations is in serious need of reform. It is part of the Core Group which chooses presidents for Haiti and acts against the will of its people. Biden mentioned Haiti in passing and called for an end to gang violence. But that violence is the direct result of U.S. interventions there. The 75-year history of allowing the permanent Security Council members to dictate to the rest of the world should change. But who should do the changing? Not the U.S., which always has ulterior motives and dirty hands.

Biden did make one valid statement. “Because if nations can pursue their imperial ambitions without consequences, then we put at risk everything this very institution stands for.” It is unfortunate that the U.S. ignores the consequences of its own actions.

Global Ruling Classes Welcome Fascist-Led Government in Italy

By Luca Tavan

Republished from Red Flag.

The Italian general election was a historic win for the far right. A coalition of the three major parties won 44 percent of the vote, enough in Italy’s byzantine electoral system to form a clear majority in both houses of parliament. Most importantly, it was driven by the meteoric rise of Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, a party rooted in the post-Mussolini fascist tradition, which secured 26 percent of the vote, making it the single largest party in parliament. 

For many, the ascension to power of a fascist party in the centre of Europe seemed unthinkable. But decades of grinding economic crisis, state-sponsored racism and the discrediting of parties of the neoliberal centre have created a dangerous situation of far-right advance. With Europe on the brink of yet another recession, the prospect of further descent into authoritarianism and barbarism is alarming. 

If you listen to the capitalist press and politicians, however, you would think that there’s nothing to worry about. A headline in the Australian exhorts: “Relax, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers aren’t fascist”. The Australian Financial Review carried the line, “Victory to Italian right is no lurch into extremism”. This is despite Meloni’s pledge to institute a naval blockade to stop refugee ships, roll back abortion and LGBTI rights and dismantle social welfare. 

Speaking to an Italian journalist at the Venice Film Festival, US former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton even praised Meloni: “The election of the first woman prime minister in a country always represents a break with the past, and that is certainly a good thing”. It’s remarkable to speak of “breaking with the past” as Mussolini-nostalgists return to power in the birthplace of fascism. 

A statement from Lorenzo Codogno, a former director-general of the Italian Treasury, reveals the real reason for establishment nonchalance in the face of fascism. “They want to be perceived as a party that you can do business with and can govern the country.” Business has taken a look at this coalition of far-right racists and fascists, and decided it’s a government they can deal with, potentially making a great deal of money. 

Aided by a wave of apologetics from the media, Meloni has attempted to sanitise her image to present a respectable face. During the election campaign, she reassured voters that her party had “handed fascism over to history for decades now”. But Meloni has maintained a commitment to fascist politics throughout her life. At the age of 15, she joined MSI (Italian Social Movement), the party founded by leading fascists who survived the fall of Mussolini’s regime in 1943 and wanted to work for its return. Along with a series of other former MSI leaders, Meloni founded Fratelli d’Italia in 2012 as the latest iteration of this project. 

In her autobiography, I am Giorgia, she espouses the “great replacement theory”, claiming that the left is attempting to destroy Western civilisation by flooding the continent with African and Middle Eastern migrants and undermining traditional family structures. In local government, Brothers politicians have passed legislation making it harder for migrants to access social housing, and proposed laws that would make it compulsory to bury aborted fetuses in cemeteries. 

Meloni will rule in coalition with the Lega, led by Matteo Salvini, who as interior minister in a previous government blocked the entry of NGO ships carrying rescued refugees to Italian shores, and Silvio Berlusconi, the infamously corrupt and venal media magnate whose Forza Italia was once the leading light of the populist right. 

While the far right has been advancing in Europe since the 2008 global financial crisis, Meloni’s victory is a significant milestone. It’s the first time a party with neo-fascist roots has led a government in a major European economy. This gives a boost to the rising tide of far-right politics internationally. 

Meloni’s victory comes in the immediate aftermath of the major win for the far-right Sweden Democrats. She has been a vocal supporter of the Spanish Vox Party and Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian government in Hungary. Both Meloni and Orbán were guests of honour at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the most important gathering of the American right.

Meloni’s victory was assured by the craven support that every party of the political mainstream gives to unpopular and brutal neoliberal policies, which have created massive poverty and youth unemployment and savaged living standards. The 25 September election was triggered by the collapse of the Draghi government, an unelected technocratic cabinet headed by a former European Central Bank president to oversee further cuts to social spending. 

Every major party from the centrist Democratic Party to the Lega participated in this “national unity” government. Meloni’s group was the only significant force that remained outside of the coalition. As the government slowly but inevitably collapsed, the Brothers gained credibility.

The high level of abstention in the election was another important factor in Meloni’s success. The rise of the right can be put down to widespread revulsion at the political mainstream, rather than a popular endorsement of Meloni’s program. Fewer than 64 percent of the eligible population voted, the lowest turnout in history and down from an average of 90 percent in the post-WWII period. Meloni increased her vote largely by winning voters from the other right-wing parties. 

Despite a history of shallow anti-establishment rhetoric, a hallmark of the far right, Meloni will likely continue Draghi’s economic agenda. Meloni has also reassured the capitalist class that her government will support NATO. Internal divisions could emerge within the coalition over the war in Ukraine—Salvini’s Lega has ties to Italian capitalists with heavy investments in Russia, and he has questioned the continuation of sanctions. Meloni will have to balance the fragile and conflicting interests of her coalition partners with her desire to remain a reliable ally of European capital at large.

What is certain is that the new right-wing coalition will intensify attacks on workers and oppressed people. It can’t be ruled out that they will attempt to curb civil and democratic rights. The Brothers have already signalled their desire for legislation to ban what they term “totalitarian” or “extremist” ideologies, by which they mean communism and Islam.

The far right’s victory is a harbinger of things to come. A recent opinion piece by Edward Luce in the Financial Times noted: “Western liberalism is still skating on thin ice”, with war and looming recession in Europe, a protracted energy crisis and far-right electoral advances making for destabilising factors in world politics. 

The capitalists realise that in a crisis-ridden and polarised world, far-right governments may increasingly be an option for defending their power and privilege. They think that they are playing a clever game by normalising the new government in Italy. They believe that they can keep the fascists under their thumb, use them to absorb discontent at unpopular austerity measures and advance their economic agenda. 

History tells us that fascists like Meloni, who are inspired by the monstrous dictatorships of the 1920s and ’30s, may harbour even darker aspirations for the future.