Ideology and Hypocrisy Amid Slavery and Democracy - Strange Bedfellows from Time Immemorial

By Stephen Joseph Scott

The history of the existence of slavery as an institution in antiquity and beyond is one of the most common; and, at the same time, one of the most complex tales to be told. Virtually every society, touching almost all the continents of the world, has had its own form of enslavement. The implication being that, nearly, every group of humankind whether racially, ethnically, or culturally categorized as diverse, unattached, or essentially separate, has been marked by the legacy and tradition of human bondage geographically and/or ancestrally. This work will be focusing on the origins and culturally supportive underpinnings of ancient Greek identity, its philosophy, law, ideology, and ethnicity; and, those extant essentialist elements, such as class, that not only made slavery in the ancient Greek world possible but normalized its place within a societal hierarchy that helped define who and what an ancient Athenian was - pitched against a broader Mediterranean ethos. Beyond that, this work will address how ancient Greek thought, as to what essentially constituted a slave versus a free person, later ignites a heated counterpoint which asserts hypocrisy lies at the core of ancient Greek thinking when it comes to the fundamental differences: physical, psychological, and emotional, that inexorably lie between free-persons and human-beings in captivity – made evident by how that debate rages to this day in contemporary historiography….

It is best that we start at the beginning with Homer: ancient Greek storyteller and legendary poet, who lived as early as the 8th century BCE; and, is still considered one of the most celebrated and influential writers of antiquity - for good reason. Homer is brought to the fore because his illustration as evidenced below reveals the essential deleterious effect of human bondage, which, poignantly foreshadows the debate mentioned above by millennia, ‘For Zeus who views the wide world takes away half the manhood of a man, that day he goes into captivity and slavery’ (Homer, Odyssey 17.367-9). Homer is explicitly defining the enslavement of a man as the diminishment, in a purely ontological sense, of one’s inherent human dignity. Aristotle, on the other hand (ancient aristocratic Greek philosopher and polymath extraordinaire), who penned his work in the latter 4th century BCE, some four hundred years after Homer, sets a foundational opposition and enduring precedent of his very own when it comes to the quality, status, value, and condition of enslaved persons.

Aristotle, as is broadly known, defined an enslaved person (doulos), that is, a human-being held in bondage, as ‘a live article of property’ (Aristotle, Pol. 1253b33). The great thinker himself, speaking on behalf of his class interests, goes on to define the value he derived from such persons defined as property, ‘Of property, the first and most indispensable kind is that which is … most amenable to Housecraft; and this is the human chattel.’ He then goes on, with a decisively imperialist tone, ‘Our first step therefore must be to procure good slaves (doulous)’ (Arist. Oec. 1344a23-26). Aristotle makes clear his essentialist views which not only defined a slave as property, but goes further, stating that the value, status, utility, and material condition of persons classified as slaves is not only a useful one, but a natural one:

These considerations therefore make clear the nature of the slave and his essential quality; one who is a human being (anthrôpos) belonging by nature not to himself but to another is by nature a slave, and a human being belongs to another if, although a human being, he is a piece of property (ktêma) (Arist. Pol. 1254a14-18).

Aristotle’s proposition is an important one given this work’s purpose which is to bring forth these precise notions, or conflicting theories, that have significantly undergirded, influenced and/or reinforced conceptions of class, personhood, value, and status interwoven within western thought throughout the ages.

Which brings us inevitably to the longstanding property versus domination argument spearheaded, in modern scholarship, by Orlando Patterson in his 1982 book entitled Slavery and Social Death. Patterson delivers a scathing rebuke to Aristotle’s customary formulation of slavery in terms of property. He unequivocally argues that slavery, from his learned vantagepoint, is, in fact, ‘the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons’[i]. Which poignantly parallels Homer’s description that human beings, held in captivity against their will, are not only persons dominated physically, but are individuals essentially diminished morally, emotionally, and psychologically. The conventional view, as presented by Aristotle, is unsound, according to Patterson based on two distinct factors. Firstly, Patterson argues, ‘to define slavery … as property fails as a definition, since it does not really specify any distinct category of persons.’ Because everyone, whether ‘beggar or king, can be the object of a property relation.’ One can only construe that what Patterson is saying, when it comes specifically to slavery, is that the term ‘property’ obscures, diminishes or diverts one’s attention away from the overt and brutal nature of an enslaved person’s everyday lived experience. Secondly, Patterson contends that the term property is inconsistent in substance when it comes to diversity of culture - meaning many societies, however archaic, lacked the very concept of ownership. Denoting that slavery has accompanied mankind through time immemorial, from primitive village societies to ancient Mesopotamia and beyond, where, he argues, the laws and social mores of any given society didn’t precisely match that of Aristotle’s definition of property – therefore it generally fails as a classification of slavery [ii].

David M. Lewis counters Patterson’s argument on the ‘property point’ as stated above by proclaiming that during the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods, the evidence clearly demonstrates in abundant detail, that the circumstance between slave and master, in legal terms, was ‘a relationship based on the fact that the slave was the property of his or her owner’-exhibiting all the elementary features necessary, per legal theory, to reach the standard of ‘property’ [iii]. Lewis challenges Patterson’s stance further by stating:

[The popular] view that esteems private property rights to be an advanced development of Roman legal theory ignores the findings of almost a century of legal anthropology, which has observed private property systems in a variety of tribal social systems that were far less advanced in terms of technological and social complexity than even the society imagined in Homer’s epics [iv].

While Lewis’ examination proves ‘slavery as a form of property’ in a legal context, there is still validity in Patterson’s position given the fact that persons in bondage (from a humanist perspective) reduced to the level of property in a solely ‘legal sense’ nullifies their individual agency and all that essentially makes them human.

In fact, slavery, and democracy, in ancient Athens and beyond is a multidimensional and multifaceted story of innate human capacity and agency, dignity, adaptability, fortitude, and resistance. Meaning, ‘…slaves were not passive objects, whose identity and existence was completely dominated by their masters.’[v]  As described by Xenophon (Greek military leader and philosopher), there were without a doubt slaves forced into strenuous domestic work: ‘baking, cooking, spinning’ and scrubbing under their owner’s will (Xen. Oec. 9.9). That said, we are also told of others that gained valuable skill-sets outside the home, coinciding with their inherent intelligence and creativity, from potters to builders to bankers and shoemakers (Hyperides, 3.1-9; and Aeschines, 1.97)[vi]. These slaves participated in communal undertakings (such as workshops and spiritual associations) together with other free and enslaved persons. Even Aristotle, who had little love (agape) for the underclasses, had to acknowledge, albeit cautiously, the inherent democratic nature (and/or threat thereof) made evident by the sheer numbers of this uniquely collective phenomenon - what the great theorist himself branded as koinônia, simply defined as fellowship of the masses. But the politikê koinônia (he warns) was specifically formed for the benefit of its members (Arist. Eth. Nic. 1160a4-6). Influenced by his celebrated teacher, renowned philosopher Plato, who argued that the limits of citizenship and its influence correlate with ‘the precise form of constitution and law’ in place (Plato, Laws 714c) - Aristotle’s well-known anti-democratic discourse on ‘mob-rule’ and the necessity for the ‘rule of law’ as fundamental to ‘the natural order of things’ thus becomes most evident. While in agreement with Pericles’ famed proclamation on the importance of the ‘rule of law’ in the ancient Greek city-state; when it came to what Pericles professed as the virtues of democracy defined, the two-men parted ways in dramatic fashion. In what is considered the ideal of a democratic philosophical vision, Pericles outlines demokratia (in his famed funeral speech of 431 BCE), as follows:

Its administration favors the many instead of the few…equal justice to all…class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way. The freedom which we enjoy in our government…[teaches] us to obey the magistrates and the laws, particularly as regard [to] the protection of the injured (Thucydides, 2.37).

On the contrary, Aristotle’s depiction of a ‘democratic regime’ and/or constitution is one with an inherent propensity toward ‘license and lawlessness.’ He defines, ‘radical democracy,’ in that of Athens for example, as having two critical flaws: firstly, the influence of the demos can potentially supersede the law (Arist. Pol. 1292a4ff.); and secondly, the demos hold the power to impeach magistrates for wrongdoing (such as malfeasance) which Aristotle intimates are both a step too far (Arist. Pol. 1292a30, and cf.1298a29-35). That said, as threatening as he might have interpreted it, the concept of koinônia permits us to observe enslaved persons actively utilizing their intrinsic agency within a broader collective milieu.

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Returning to the question as stated at the outset of this work, Lewis’ focus on the laws of ancient societies, in lieu of the contention outlined above, is immensely valuable when it comes to understanding the conventions per Athenian slave society and their ramifications. Broadly viewed as a protection mechanism for slaves, given a singular example, the Greek law on ‘hybris,’ in ancient Athens, expressly defined as the negation of the deliberate implementation of violence to humiliate, demean, or degrade - is not as straightforward as it might appear. Yet again, hypocrisy abounds as evidenced: to presume that the Athenian law pertained to an owner’s mis-conduct toward his ‘property’ obliges us to disregard the ‘abundant proof’ of regular and generally habitual violence toward slaves by their masters.[vii] Beyond that, it is difficult to correlate the law as ‘protectionary’ given this evocative assertion by Plato, ‘[a slave] when wronged or insulted, is unable to protect himself or anyone else for whom he cares’ (Plato, Gorg. 483b). The following statement is as definitive as it gets when revealing the underlying deceit interwoven within Athenian law itself when it came to enslaved persons and their standing, ‘[the] law included slaves [simply] because the lawgiver wished to curtail the spread of hubristic [or anti-social] behaviour among the citizens tout court … the hubris law was designed to engender respect and orderly conduct among citizens not to protect slaves’ [viii] [ix]. Meaning, that the Athenian lawgivers were not overly concerned with the physical wellbeing of persons classified as slaves, but perhaps were more intent on curtailing their judicial workload.

The reality was that the right of masters to physically abuse their slaves in ancient Athens was, if not absolute, certainly extensive. Xenophon affirms the practical necessity on behalf of owners to punish their slaves, but simply asks for them not to do so in a state of rage (Xen. Hell. 5.3.7; cf. Hdt. 1.137). Demonstrating that, violence toward persons in bondage in ancient Athens was perfectly acceptable if it was executed in a manner of equanimity. According to Xenophon, however, slaves should never resist. He goes on to say, that masters could, or should, ‘clap fetters on them so that they can’t run away’ (Xen. Mem. 2.1.16). Hence, so it is argued, in summary, that what helps clarify, or defend, Aristotle’s assertion that ‘the slave [is] an article of property imbued with a soul’ (Arist. Pol. 1253b32), is justified due to the fact that ‘this view of the slave as an article of property’ was a generally held belief of society at large when it came to the status of enslaved persons within the ancient Greek ethos [x].

That said, when it comes to hypocrisy, the law and excessive abuse – domination, as defined by Patterson permeates the historical record.  A poignant example of the common acceptance in ancient Athens of emotional and physical abuse (or the threat thereof) cast upon slaves, and the like, is provided by Lysias, where he describes in detail the testimony of a plaintiff in an Athenian court recounting the brutal (and pervasive) threat of torture (and even death) that hung over the heads of enslaved mill workers - commonly known ‘as mill-roaches’ (Lysias 1. 18-22). In addition, owners of enslaved persons were generally granted legal leeway, under the authority of judges, to sexually abuse their slaves.[xi] Signifying that when a slave was purchased, they were in fact the owners’ possession to do with as they desired - which helps lend even more credence to Patterson’s analyses of domination as described.

A question of further importance is what defined, or signified, a slave and their station in ancient Athens? Was it one of ideology or innate difference that helped delineate the distinction between a Greek and a non-Greek? As understood in the broadest sense of the term, barbarian is the word used to describe not only a non-Greek speaking immigrant, but in fact, a definitional term which explicitly portrayed an enslaved person of foreign origin, as, ‘non-Greeks imported from foreign lands via the slave trade’[xii]. An Athenian essentialist view, as noted, between native slave and foreign slave, (that is, between natural born Greeks and outsiders) is underscored by Aristotle’s description of an enslaved Greek as ‘an accident contrary to nature’ (Arist. Pol. 1255a1). These Greek essentialist views, of one people’s ethnic superiority over another, are noteworthy because they significantly impact western thought and societal conditions throughout the ages – emphasizing race and class as inherent points of difference develop into a clear normative of class hierarchy.

Fast forwarding to the 18th century Anglo-world for example, Francis Hutcheson (elite 18th century British moral philosopher) proclaimed that permanent enslavement should be ‘the ordinary punishment of … idle vagrants.’ ‘Idle vagrants,’ being defined as most anyone with what Hutcheson considered, ‘slave like attributes,’ from the idle poor and indigent to confiscated and subjugated human cargo - principally Africans [xiii]. Conversely, in something of a confessional, Thomas Jefferson (slave owner, philosopher, and 18th century American statesman) recognized and voiced the odious elements of the dominion argument, as defined, some two hundred years prior to Orlando Patterson, ‘[the] commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of … the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.’ He then goes on in a revelatory tone, to inform just how these elite classes, throughout the millennia, bequeathed attitudes of dominion from one generation to the next. Stating that, the children of the elite were thus ‘nursed, educated and exercised in the daily art of tyranny.’ Virginia’s slave plantations as he describes, were by their very nature, ‘schools of iniquity and domination’[xiv]. Consequently, Aristotle’s, early, and pervasive, theory of the ‘natural order of things,’ when it comes to class and ethnicity, is made brazenly evident (Arist. Pol. 1252a-1253b).

Finally, how common place was slave society in the ancient Greek world and what was its magnitude? It is said that the importation of slaves was a lasting one, being that Greek slave society lasted enduringly throughout both the archaic and classical periods until its absorption by Rome in 146 BCE. Although the Roman slave trade surpassed that of the Greek numerically, given Rome’s imperial might over the Mediterranean world, it is said that ‘the Greek slave system was both the elder and the longer-lived.’ The Greeks had helped set a historic precedent by perfecting their own imperial prowess through the conquering of their neighbors [xv]. But, where in fact were these subjugated and enslaved persons extracted from and how common were they in ancient Greece? Ancient Greek inscriptions help make evident that enslaved peoples, represented a wide breadth of humanity throughout the known world at the time. These people included men, women, and children in a variety of hues, from such far-off places as Thrace, Phrygia, Syria, Caria in southwest Anatolia, Illyria on the western Balkan Isthmus, Scythians from eastern Iran; and, Colchians from the eastern Black Sea [xvi] - depicted by Herodotus, in the 5th century BCE, as a ‘dark-skinned and woolly haired’ people (Hdt. 2.104.2). What Herodotus’ quote helps to highlight for us is an ancient Athenian social construct. That being, the prevalent belief (when it came to the stature of imported slaves), of a clear and innate delineation based on race (and/or phenotype), accentuating a natural taxonomic classification or difference between indigenous Greeks and all others – especially slaves.

When it comes to how common slaves were, Josiah Ober estimates the slave population of fourth-century BCE Athens to be around 35 per cent of the total population of roughly 227,000 [xvii]. Which made slavery quite pervasive throughout ancient Athens and helps to explain the essentialist Greek/Other dichotomy as such. As Vincent Rosivach makes evident, ‘[When] Athenians thought about slaves, they habitually thought about barbaroi, and when they thought about barbaroi they habitually thought about slaves’[xviii]. Suggesting that this was commonplace in classical Athens - legislatively undergirded by the proposed law of Pericles of 451 BCE which confined citizenship solely to persons of Athenian birthparents on both sides. Ultimately defining in ethnocentric terms, an essentialist difference (between Greeks and others), based on birth lineage and cultural origin (Arist. Const. Ath. 26.3). In paralleling slave societies throughout the epochs, ‘the slave system of the fourth-century Greek world was of roughly the same numerical magnitude as that of the United States ca. 1800.’ By the early 19th century, in the South, ‘30-40 percent of the population’ was made up of chattel slavery under the brutal control of concentrated wealth and political power, land, and resources… [xix]. Both societies (separated by millennia) became indulgently rich and hegemonically powerful in their respective spheres of influence – primarily based on the wealth created by their slave societies thus implemented. As mentioned, due to the commonality of the everyday interaction between slave and non-slave, and its oblique dangers in ancient Athens, elite class interests reinforced ‘the construction of local and wider Hellenic ethnicities, as well as of non-Greek ethnicities, must have been fundamentally imbricated with the ideological needs of the slave trade…’[xx] [xxi]. The main point being that the possibility of a unifying or coming together of freeborn citizens, of lower-class status, and slaves, posed a direct structural (and numerical) threat to the established order of things. Ideology, woven within Greek identity, plays a key role in the hegemonic control of social norms, but not an absolute one.

The understanding by the masses (and a small number of elites alike) that extreme concentrations of wealth played a destabilizing role in the Athenian political and social realms, when it came to privilege, power and class, is made obvious by the following quote from Demosthenes, ‘for the demos to have nothing and for those who oppose the demos to have a superabundance of wealth is an amazing and terrifying (thaumaston kai phoberon) state of affairs’ (Ober, 1990, 214; Dem. Ex. 2.3). Which helps make evident an ancient Athens as not only the well-known paradigm of direct democracy (or rule by the many), but also its intrinsic contradictions (or threats thereof) when it came to status, class, and wealth – which has echoed, as argued, throughout the centuries. As presented, Lewis and Canevaro, bring to the fore, a carefully crafted top-down societal prejudice designed to sow division amongst the masses using class distinctions and/or differences as its exclusionary tool of choice:

Since it was in fact slaves who were more naturally associated with manual labor—they were the prototypical manual laborers— elitist writers and reformers found in this proximity a productive avenue for attacking their suitability for political participation—for having a voice. For elite Greeks and Romans this was a productive strategy for denigrating and dehumanizing ‘the poor’ in political as well as daily life [xxii].

Paradoxically, these notions of disdain toward the poor (or the slavish), defined (mostly) by the ancient Greek elite as, ‘anyone who had to work for living’ (Arist. Pol. 1277b5-7; 1255b23-38), were not limited to the Athenian upper classes. In fact, as Lucia Cecchet suggests, due to the sheer force of elite ideological thought and its pervasive influence (in the 4th and 5th centuries), even within the jury courts of democratic Athens, the repulsion of poverty (including slaves) became commonly offered as a widely conventional view, ‘a communis opinio that the rich and poor shared alike’ [xxiii]; attitudes that permeate western societies to this day, making evident, the powerful effects of elite capture through hegemonic cultural influence in ancient Athens and beyond.

In conclusion, throughout western history, ancient Athens has been viewed as the ultimate model of democracy in a political, ideological, philosophical, and ethical sense – as presented in this work. At the same time, hypocrisy, pertaining to these epitomes of democracy (demokratia – or rule by the many – as outlined by Pericles), adversely permeated its upper classes and beyond with lasting ramifications. Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle and Xenophon, for example, were all critical of democracy, focusing their ire upon the populous; the possibility of its bad decision making; and (what they believed to be), as ‘the [intrinsic] ignorance … of the demos, demagoguery and civil strife’ [xxiv]. Again, these great theorists thought of democracy not as the rule of the many (which was the general Athenian ideal of demokratia), but they portrayed it in a more threatening or hostile sense, such as, ‘the rule of the poor or the mob,’ which helps taint Athenian demokratia within recorded history with a prejudicial top-down class perspective throughout the millennia [xxv]. The proximity between, slave and poor within the democratic confines of ancient Athens, made them susceptible, in both high-level institutional deliberation and, sometimes, in daily collaborations, to manipulative stratagems which ‘aimed to denigrate and even disenfranchise them by stressing the “slavish” nature of their occupations, as incompatible with the virtue required for political participation’ [xxvi]. Furthermore, enslavement, as implemented in ancient Athens and across time, populations and locations could differ enormously or, in fact, possess significant similarities. As is inferred, by ancient Greek scholars throughout this work, the characteristics which helped mold Greek slave culture and its expansion comprised, but were in no way limited to, the amount of prosperity slavery added to the fundamental aspects of that society’s supposed wellbeing, especially its economic growth and military strength. In most instances, throughout the ancient world and beyond, the capturing and subjugation of persons classified as salves was meant to possess, chastise, and/or diminish an economic rival. Thus, as noted, chattel slavery was quite widespread throughout the ancient world and beyond. That said, the agency and humanity, as offered by Orlando Patterson, of subjugated persons, and their relentless struggle for freedom, permeates the historical record (from Athens to Virginia) - which cannot and should not be ignored. Enslaved human beings left behind a powerful legacy of opposition and struggle to free themselves and the family members they so loved. Through the common bond (of unrelenting misery) they forged powerful alliances of resistance and revolt, despite the cultural forces arrayed against them – their historical age or geographical setting.

Stephen Joseph Scott is an essayist associated with The University of Edinburgh, School of History; a singer/songwriter, humanist/activist – a self-taught musician, and performer. As a musician, he uses American Roots Music to illustrate the current American social and political landscape.

Notes

[i] Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Harvard University Press, 1982), 13.

[ii] Patterson, 20–21.

[iii] David M. Lewis, Greek Slave Systems in Their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC, First edition. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018), 34.

[iv] Lewis, 39.

[v] Kostas Vlassopoulos, “Greek Slavery: From Domination to Property and Back Again,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 131 (2011): 195.

[vi] Edward E. Cohen, Athenian Economy and Society: A Banking Perspective (Princeton University Press, 1992), 61–109.

[vii] Lewis, Greek Slave Systems in Their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC, 43.

[viii] Mirko Canevaro, “The Public Charge for Hubris Against Slaves: The Honour of the Victim and the Honour of the Hubristēs,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 138 (2018): 100–126.

[ix] Lewis, Greek Slave Systems in Their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC, 42–43.

[x] Lewis, 54.

[xi] Lewis, 42.

[xii] David M. Lewis and Mirko Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” in A Cultural History of Poverty in Antiquity (500 BCE – 800 AD), ed. Claire Taylor (Bloomsbury, 2022), 14.

[xiii] Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1995), 324.

[xiv] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition, Notes on the State of Virginia (Yale University Press, 2022), 249.

[xv] Lewis and Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” 7.

[xvi] Lewis and Canevaro, 4.

[xvii] Josiah Ober, “Inequality in Late-Classical Democratic Athens: Evidence and Models,” in Democracy and an Open-Economy World Order, ed. George C. Bitros and Nicholas C. Kyriazis (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017), 129–129.

[xviii] Vincent J. Rosivach, “Enslaving ‘Barbaroi’ and the Athenian Ideology of Slavery,” Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte 48, no. 2 (1999): 129.

[xix] Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 242.

[xx] Lewis and Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” 15.

[xxi] Thomas Harrison, “Classical Greek Ethnography and the Slave Trade,” Classical Antiquity 38, no. 1 (2019): 36–57.

[xxii] Lewis and Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” 29–30.

[xxiii] Lucia Cecchet, “Poverty as Argument in Athenian Forensic Speeches,” 2013, 61, https.

[xxiv] Ober quoted in Mirko Canevaro, “Democratic Deliberation in the Athenian Assembly: Procedures and Behaviours towards Legitimacy,” Annals HSS 73, 2019, 3.

[xxv] Mogens Herman Hansen, The Tradition of Ancient Greek Democracy and Its Importance for Modern Democracy, Historisk-Filosofiske Meddelelser 93 (Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 2005), 8.

[xxvi] Lewis and Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” 29–30.

Bibliography 

Canevaro, Mirko. “Democratic Deliberation in the Athenian Assembly: Procedures and Behaviours towards Legitimacy.” Annals HSS 73, 2019.

———. “The Public Charge for Hubris Against Slaves: The Honour of the Victim and the Honour of the Hubristēs.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 138 (2018): 100–126.

Cecchet, Lucia. “Poverty as Argument in Athenian Forensic Speeches,” 2013.

Cohen, Edward E. Athenian Economy and Society: A Banking Perspective. Princeton University Press, 1992.

Hansen, Mogens Herman. The Tradition of Ancient Greek Democracy and Its Importance for Modern Democracy. Historisk-Filosofiske Meddelelser 93. Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 2005.

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Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition. Notes on the State of Virginia. Yale University Press, 2022.

Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery, 1619-1877. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.

Lewis, David M. Greek Slave Systems in Their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC. First edition. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Lewis, David M., and Mirko Canevaro. “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity.” In A Cultural History of Poverty in Antiquity (500 BCE – 800 AD), edited by Claire Taylor. Bloomsbury, 2022.

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: Norton, 1995.

Ober, Josiah. “Inequality in Late-Classical Democratic Athens: Evidence and Models.” In Democracy and an Open-Economy World Order, edited by George C. Bitros and Nicholas C. Kyriazis, 125–46. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017.

———. Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology and the Power of the People. Second print., with Corrections. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Harvard University Press, 1982.

Rosivach, Vincent J. “Enslaving ‘Barbaroi’ and the Athenian Ideology of Slavery.” Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte 48, no. 2 (1999): 129–57.

Vlassopoulos, Kostas. “Greek Slavery: From Domination to Property and Back Again.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 131 (2011): 115–30.

What Latin America Can Teach About Political Instability

[Pictured: A group of fascists march in Brazil in 2019, with hopes of reviving Brazilian Integralism]

By Diego Viana

For a Latin American like me, a certain anxiety currently expressed by liberals and social democrats in the wealthy West is intriguing. Op-eds in the mainstream media and book titles in political science set off the alarm: democracy, often designated our democracy, is in danger. Why? Because centrist political forces are gradually losing their capacity to determine the terms of the debate and the universe of what is possible, election after election, opinion poll after opinion poll. Meanwhile, the social landscape is transformed by an increasingly aggressive far Right and the return of the Left to the streets around 2011, after a somewhat dormant decade. It is true that political, economic, and social leaderships with little esteem for a democratic veneer are clearly on the rise. It is also true that mass protests and barricades are back in the game. Yet, seen from my part of the world, these trends are remarkably familiar.

It is tempting to reduce the complexity of current political tendencies by jamming them all into the single narrative of “rising populism,” as mainstream political scientists and journalists in the West so often do. It is comfortable, but hardly elucidating, to melt such names as Marine and Jean-Marie Le Pen, Éric Zemmour, Donald Trump, Georgia Meloni, Vox, Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the United Kingdom Independence Party, but also Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Bernie Sanders, Podemos, Jeremy Corbyn, and others, into a single political concept, and then contrast them with a liberal center deemed democratic in essence. 

Comfortable, of course, for those who only aspire to lament the slow corrosion of liberal democracy, as witnessed in Eastern European countries like Poland or Hungary. The framework that delimits the trend as a rise of populism or illiberalism conveniently leaves aside the traditional Right's consistent drift further right. France is a good example. While the suburbs burn in protest against police brutality, the traditional Republicans (formerly “Union for a Popular Movement”) send out xenophobic and racist messages and policy proposals. President Emmanuel Macron, in turn, who was once a minister under socialist president François Hollande, then was elected in 2017 with a strictly neoliberal platform, places himself increasingly in the orbit of rightist ideas, hoping to keep right-wing voters within reach. In 2021, he adopted the notion that universities are dominated by “Islamo-leftism.” This year, he repeated far-right novelist Renaud Camus's diagnosis of a “decivilization” of France.

And yet, someone like Macron, who bypassed Congress to sign a pension reform into law despite overwhelming popular opposition, is considered a symbol of liberal democracy. Is it simply because, unlike Le Pen's Right or Mélenchon's Left, he remains a free market champion? Or, likewise, is the Conservative British government, which installed a prison boat to detain immigrants, liberal-democratic because they don't subscribe to the recoil of economic nationalism characteristic of their Brexiteer predecessors under Boris Johnson? If (neo)liberalism itself develops into a strict surveillance/police state, with a distinctly authoritarian horizon, are we still speaking about democracy?

I believe the Latin American experience suggests that the most significant aspect of the current political trend is neither its “populism” [1] nor its “illiberalism,” but its instability. While the usually nationalistic, sometimes ultraliberal, occasionally religious, and often openly fascist New Right has been rising relentlessly, by creating new parties or caucuses inside the traditional ones, the process has not been as steady as it might seem. In the last decade, the Right, Left, and Center have all seesawed vertiginously between victory and defeat. Think of how the AfD in Germany grew during the refugee crisis of 2016, then lost popularity in the aftermath of the pandemic, then grew again. Or how the traditional Left won the French 2012 elections, only to be practically wiped out in 2017, replaced by Mélenchon's France Insoumise, which has now become the centerpiece of the left-wing coalition NUPES (New Ecological and Social People’s Union) in Congress. Or how the Labour Party reached 40% of the vote that same year with Corbyn as leader, before the debacle [2] that led to the rise of Keir Starmer. Or even the rise of young socialists in the United States, while the obscurantist Right took over the Supreme Court. More recently, in Spain, the Right's inability to form a government with the neofascists from Vox, immediately following a significant victory in local elections, shows that the game is not as linear as is often depicted. Quite the opposite: it oscillates wildly.

Moreover, in most of these countries, opinion polls do not show a clear preference for the nationalist, xenophobic, ultraconservative ideas these groups profess. It is true that they usually don't tip towards left-wing ideas either, such as redistribution or public ownership. Nevertheless, if people in Europe and the United States tend to view the world with a more "centrist" lens, then the loss of steam by the centrist forces becomes puzzling in its own right. Which leads to the good old materialistic interpretation: the political oscillation and the ultra-conservative call may reflect economic insecurities, or, more widely, deeper anxieties concerning living conditions.

The relation between the worsening living conditions and the odd mix of nationalism, racism, bigotry, religious fanaticism, and libertarianism we are becoming used to is not immediately obvious. Sadly, structural relations are rarely obvious. But it is not hard to notice that, in the absence of factors that foster social cohesion — through common experiences, such as work relations and opportunities to consume, which give people a feeling of participation in economic life, and public services, pensions, unemployment benefits etc. — those yearning for belonging may recourse to confrontational forms of religiosity, a renewed strength of white supremacy, or the extreme demands of a neoliberal ethics as it appears in the Silicon Valley way of life, where every aspect of existence is monetized. All of these seem to be fusing as the contemporary face of fascism.

Which brings us back to Latin America, this old periphery of the Western colonial powers (the United States came up with a much cruder term: “backyard”). Here, political oscillation has been the rule in most countries, not in the sense of what in the region is usually called the “healthy alternation of power,” but violent swings between oligarchic (and, more recently, neoliberal) and progressive forces, with a constant risk of authoritarian slides. The 1990s were a nearly monolithic neoliberal period in the region, succeeded by two “red (or pink) tides,” when a series of somewhat left-wing parties took power in many countries almost simultaneously. In between, a conservative interregnum took hold, either via elections or coups — explicit or not (Honduras in 2009 [3], Paraguay in 2012, Brazil in 2016, Bolivia in 2019).

The Argentinian case is probably the most extreme, as the country is still grappling with financial asphyxiation due to the insistence on a one-to-one parity between the peso and dollar from 1991 to 2001, and the  “rescue” packages from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that followed. In the last decade, the left-wing “Peronista” president Cristina Kirchner was followed by the businessman Mauricio Macri in 2015. Macri then fell out of favor with the electorate due to an inflationary hike intensified by yet another IMF package, and the left-leaning Peronistas [4] regained the Casa Rosada in 2019 with the current president Alberto Fernández.

This year's electoral process has a particularity. In the primaries (where voting is open to all and mandatory), the libertarian, discreetly fascist candidate, Javier Milei, received 30% of the vote, ahead of the traditional right-wing opposition (28.3%) and the governing coalition (27.3%). This means that Milei's prospects of actually becoming president by the end of the year are far from unrealistic. At the time of writing, he’s the betting favorite.

In Brazil, a decade of turmoil ended the relatively stable period associated with the post-1988 “New Republic.” This era of stability, whose hallmark is the adoption of an economic stability plan in 1994, was punctuated by the presidencies of center-right Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002) and center-left Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva (2003-2010), whose tenures marked a particularly optimistic time, when Brazilians genuinely felt that the country had reached a new stage of political maturity — if there is such thing. The following decade, which began hopefully and the expectation of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, would turn out to be marked by a series of mass protests beginning in 2013 and political strife.

The apex of this instability came in 2016, when a poorly justified impeachment process sacked Lula's successor, Dilma Rousseff, who faced increasingly vitriolic opposition in Congress, the media, and even heavily astroturfed protests in the streets. The process, which has consistently been denounced as a coup by the Left, installed her conservative vice president, Michel Temer, in her seat. The traditional political forces of Brazil, which includes large landowners, bankers, the very few families that control the media, the high bureaucracy, the military, and what is left of the manufacturing sector, believed this would obliterate the Workers' Party (PT) and lead to many years of center-right governments.

Instead, the 2018 election brought what felt like a preordained victory for a caricatural far-right candidate who promised to “clean up” the country of leftists and, during the pandemic, mocked the victims and imitated a person suffocating to death. COVID killed more than 700.000 Brazilians. Four years later, Lula was back in office, elected by an insignificant margin of 1.8% of the vote, and riding on the widest imaginable alliance.

In the last few years, the oscillation intensified and accelerated. Peru, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Ecuador have faced protests, impeachments, jailed ex-presidents, fascist presidents, and strikes [5]. Chile — historically the most stable South American country — caught fire.

The 2019 “estallido social” (social blowup) during the presidency of neoliberal Sebastián Piñera led to the formation of a remarkably progressive constituent assembly. The 2021 election pitted the young left-wing activist Gabriel Boric against the neofascist José Antonio Kast, with a victory for Boric that may have been his last. Since then, the project of a new constitution suffered a resounding defeat and his approval rates have sunk. 

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In Colombia last year, Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla fighter and mayor of the capital, Bogotá, was the first left-wing candidate to reach the presidency, with Francia Márquez, a black female environmentalist, as vice president. Petro's party, Humane Colombia (formerly “the Progressive Movement”), is small and had to rely on a heterogenous alliance (Historic Pact for Colombia) to achieve victory. In government, as the alliance shattered with some of the parties failing to vote with the government, Petro and Márquez came under fire from all sides: the regional agricultural elites, the traditional parties (such as ex-president Álvaro Uribe's Democratic Center) and, of course, the media — which, as in many of the neighboring countries, is highly concentrated. As usual, accusations of corruption are the first tactics employed. In Petro's case, they involve illegal drug money in the electoral campaign and spying on his enemies.

In sum, except for Uruguay, where the Left governed for 14 years and was succeeded last year by a traditional, “normal,” neoliberal president, the politics of Latin America are unstable and often nasty. Progressive, conservative, and neofascist governments have been coming and going in many of the key Latin American countries. No particular set of policies seems to be able to take hold. One group reaches power when the others have disappointed their constituencies.

Why are they disappointed? Once again, because of living conditions, which have largely stagnated for at least two generations, beginning in the early 1980s and leading to rural and urban conflicts, underemployment, and that same permeability of the middle classes to neofascist messages as we are witnessing in the West. As the social tissue increasingly frays, those with a certain level of property and wellbeing feel threatened, and it is hardly a surprise that they resort to “saviors” and “punishers.”

And what makes the Latin American case so instructive for the developed West? I would argue that Latin America, being a “fragile” satellite of the Western world, is particularly exposed to the fluctuations that reveal a crack in the edifice of liberal democracy, in the way this form of government has developed over the last half-century.

While a significant portion of humanity has been living under the aegis of neoliberalism since the late 1970s and particularly after the fall of the Soviet Union, it seems that everywhere in the world the mental model of political stability is still the social-democratic system of the post-WW2 period, particularly in Europe, and known in France as “Les Trente Glorieuses,” the three “glorious” decades of growth with distribution, well-paid manufacturing jobs, widespread unionization, and a managed form of capitalism that guaranteed a comparatively high level of social participation in policymaking. In other words, we seem to expect a kind of world, with the living conditions it implies, that belongs to a bygone era. Our grandparents took a certain political security and quality of life for granted, and we still long for that. But it is not within our reach.

Social-democratic parties promise to reconstitute this historical structure, and occasionally win with that message. But they cannot deliver and lose face, support, and credibility. Then come the conservatives, who intensify the neoliberal agenda, only to cause more precariousness and financialization. Then come the neofascists, who generate horror, social conflict, and brutality. And the cycle repeats.

The illusory character of this somewhat rosy depiction of the mid-20th century is well-documented and nowhere more evident than in what was then called the “Third World.” In Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, the voracious quest for raw materials and cheap labor left a trail of civil wars, coups, and massacres. This probably reminds you of the Vietnam War, but the military dictatorships in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile etc., all of which were supported by the CIA, are also part of the story. The colonial grip over these parts of the world far outlasted the formal colonial ownership or “protection,” as we see from the Western interventions following independence wars in African countries. To a large extent, the comfortable lifestyle that the West associates with liberal democracy was built on the exploitation of the rest of the world, in a renewed form of colonialism.

What made possible the political balance that characterized the “Trente Glorieuses,” with strong trade unions, rising manufacturing wages, and social mobility (in French again: the “ascenseur social,” or “social elevator”), was the possibility and necessity of class negotiations and agreements. Neither capital nor organized labor could expect to have their way in full — even taking into account the strong communist parties of Europe, whose revolutionary flame was kept as low as possible most of the time. Political systems could remain stable and successful due to this delicate equilibrium. However, the equilibrium in turn was maintained thanks to a fear of the Soviet bloc, an unimpeded flow of cheap oil, easy access to resources and markets in the “Third World,” and the absence of serious economic competition from non-Western countries.

As we know, this model was progressively eroded by several factors. The quick rise in productivity that accompanied the industrial advance waned off, making it harder to keep the wage increases. The rise of neoliberalism eliminated the redistributive mechanisms that could have extended the balance of power between capital and labor for a few more years. The capacity of China and other Asian countries to attract manufacturing jobs with ever higher skill profiles, in part due to the opening of markets known as globalization, broke unions' bargaining power. Neoliberalism first emerged and reached power as a response to the exhaustion of the post-war welfare state, the social-democratic model. But it never truly replaced, even among the Left, the notion of a nearly ideal state of affairs where a certain level of democracy was guaranteed by what the German philosopher Theodor Adorno called “managed capitalism” [6].

What makes Latin America a particularly relevant place to understand where the structural power relations are heading elsewhere is that many of the countries mentioned above have been experiencing a post-industrial kind of stagnation for several decades already, after an incomplete process of economic development undertaken precisely in the period of late colonialism, Cold War, and the belief that industrialization was an infallible catalyst of development. Latin America, which never quite developed the institutions of Western social democracy, has to cope with swollen cities, underemployment and informal work, capital imbalances, crumbling infrastructure, but has poor political means to respond. And it was, after all, the site of the first experiment in neoliberal governance: Augusto Pinochet's Chilean dictatorship.

As a result, neoliberal, progressive, and fascist governments replace each other continually, not always in the smooth manner one expects from the ideals of liberal democracy. Occasionally, promises of improved living conditions can be fulfilled, but only to a limited extent, which is why the success stories are quickly followed by a period of frustration and revolt, leading to power changing hands again.

In this context, it is not hard to see that the authoritarian far Right has an edge. Its advantage comes at a low cost. By promising the past over the future, the known over the unknown, the neofascists of our time are always able to delay satisfaction and simultaneously keep their position by blaming someone else. The worse it gets, the easier it is to repeat the process. While an ultraconservative government cannot provide the quality of life that subsists in people's imagination as a mark of the 20th century — the economic and even environmental conditions are incompatible — it can still renew its promise by blaming non-conforming groups for the slowly worsening conditions of life. Hence, the ghost of communism, the widespread xenophobia, the justifications of racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc. that have become so common in our time. 

The post-WW2 model tends toward utter unattainability. It should no longer be our horizon of expectations. Bleak as this may sound, it is safe to say that the edifice of multi-party democracy is crumbling before our eyes. In a world where energy is no longer abundant, manufacturing does not guarantee safe jobs for the working class, unions are busted, climate change puts crop yields at risk, and the neocolonial control over the rest of the world can no longer be expected, the social-democratic balance is hardly tenable.

The greatest risk is that the dominant classes give up the pretense of democracy and revert to a more explicit authoritarian regime. This is most certainly already underway, if we think of the Republican Party under Donald Trump, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's reforms, the British Conservatives, the Spanish People’s Party, or Macron. Once again, Latin America provides a clear-cut example of this choice, as the Right turns to military and religious leaders in their attempts to regain or extend control over the state.

If we can still hope for democracy, we have to accept that it will not be social democracy and certainly not liberal democracy. Whatever it will turn out to consist in, it must be built from the ground up, and the very process of construction needs to be as democratic as the expected final result. In this respect, the bright side — and it is always advisable to conclude from the bright side — of the Latin American landscape is that this part of the world is also a vibrant cluster of the grassroots political and social experimentation we must nurture. The plurinational constitution of Bolivia, the ecosocialism being developed by the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement, the strength of solidarity economy schemes in Argentina, and the articulation of indigenous movements in many of the countries show that the authoritarian conservative turn is not a matter of necessity. New models of collective life and social organization are being forged, and this is where we should turn to find inspiration.

Diego Viana is a Brazilian economic journalist. He earned his PhD in political philosophy from the University of São Paulo and covers Brazilian politics, economy, and social conflict.

Footnotes

[1] In its contemporary form, the concept is most often used in a way that corresponds to Jan-Werner Müller's definition as pitting a “pure and unified people” against a “morally corrupt elite.” This is, of course, not a helpful definition if we are trying to understand the inherent instability of the period. I will not discuss this definition, and also leave aside the appropriation of the concept of populism by Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, and Pierre Dardot, as the question of defining populism is beside the scope of this text.

[2] The main instrument of Corbyn's downfall was a report that accused him of not handling antisemitism accusations within the Labour Party appropriately. Later, Al Jazeera revealed that the party bureaucracy actively worked to undermine his leadership, which included drafting the antisemitism report. Corbyn was later suspended from the party.

[3] In 2009, the Honduran president Manuel Zelaya was forcefully removed from office by the army, in a traditional coup d'état. In Paraguay, President Fernando Lugo was ousted after a summary impeachment process with only two hours to prepare his defense. The cause was allegedly the insecurity in the country after a bloody conflict between landless workers and the police. This inaugurated the series of “parliamentary coups” that reached Brazilian Dilma Rousseff in 2016. The Bolivian case is different in that it involves the questionable decision by the Supreme Court to allow President Evo Morales to run for a fourth term. After he won the election, accusations of electoral irregularities emerged and the military forced him to resign.

[4] “Peronista” designates the political groups that claim the legacy of Juan Domingo Perón, president in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The reason why one must specify that these “Peronistas” are left-leaning is that there are “Peronistas” of all tendencies, including the conservative Carlos Menem, who introduced neoliberalism to the country in the 1990s. Perón himself tended to favor the right-wing Peronistas. In the 1960s, when exiled in Spain, Perón gave an interview where he was asked to explain how he saw the Argentinian political landscape. He listed the parties but did not include “Peronista” as a category. The reporter reminded him of that, to which he replied: “Oh, but they are all Peronistas.”

[5] I will leave aside the cases of Venezuela, El Salvador and Nicaragua, whose paths are outliers.

[6] A possible reason for this is that the neoliberal agenda transformed living conditions gradually — except in transitioning countries subjected to “shock doctrine” — progressively eroding labor's position in the distributive conflict, in order to uphold Western capitalism's competitive edge. The slow, but sure erosion of the Welfare State and the possibility of what the International Labour Organization names “decent work” seems to sustain the hope for a return to managed capitalism.

Why Didn’t the Revolution Happen?: A Critical Assessment of Marx and Class Struggle

By K. Wilson

There has been a perceptible shift in how Marxists discuss the revolution in the past decades.  Marx insisted that a revolution in industrialized Europe was not just inevitable, but imminent.  The process of “proletarianization,” he wrote, had divided the world into workers who sell their labor and employers who own the means of production, all but eradicating other class distinctions.  This state of affairs would incubate “class consciousness” among European workers, a rational understanding that their interests as a class consisted of seizing the means of production – leading inexorably a socialist revolution.  Marxists in the early twentieth century matched this confidence that the world was on the cusp of revolution.  Lenin, writing in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s 1917 February revolution, proclaimed that “[t]his first stage of our revolution will certainly not be the last.”[1]

But as economic development progressed in western Europe and North America – the countries with advanced industrial economies seemingly ripest for revolution – the revolution simply didn’t occur.  Capitalism and bourgeois democracy remain the dominant economic and political modes in the industrialized west.  And although some socialist revolutions really did occur throughout the twentieth century, most took place in pre-industrial agrarian economies, and almost all of the resulting governments have since collapsed.

In the mid-twentieth century, thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School – most notably Herbert Marcuse – tried to explain the absence of revolution while maintaining a broadly Marxist framework.  Marcuse argued that mass media and consumerism had eliminated the proletariat’s political imagination, thereby sapping the West of its revolutionary potential; in lieu of positive revolutionary activity, he urged a purely negative “great refusal” to participate in consumerism.[2]

Most contemporary Marxist thought tacitly adopts Marcuse’s pessimism about an imminent revolution.  When Marxist literature mentions revolution at all – a rarity – it discusses revolution as a pipe dream, or a hazy and contingent possibility, or sometimes even a strategically unsound goal.  In a rather frank article from 2019, apropos of the 100th anniversary of the First Communist International, Jacobin editor Loren Balhorn wrote that “[a]t least for the time being, it would appear unwise to emulate the Comintern’s strategic perspectives” – that is, the pursuit of an international proletarian revolution – “for working class power.”[3]

For a Marxist, these answers are both unsatisfying and strategically unhelpful.  It is time to return to the very basic question that the events of the twentieth century raise: why didn’t the revolution happen?  The question is of vital strategic importance to contemporary socialism, but there are few attempts to formulate a square answer.

This essay focuses on one aspect of that question – the failure of class consciousness to take hold in western industrialized countries.  A close analysis of the economic and social changes in the industrialized west since Marx wrote reveals several interrelated reasons why class consciousness hasn’t developed.  The disruptive global events of the twentieth century, especially World War II and its aftermath, slowed the “proletarianization” of workers and created breathing room for the growth of a large, relatively prosperous middle class.  The middle class has since served as a buffer between the antagonistic interests of labor and capital.  Further, the transition of many advanced economies from manufacturing-based models to information-based models has blurred the hard line between capital and labor that Marx identified.  These conditions have given rise to a mode of politics on the left based on personal identity rather than class solidarity.  The essay concludes with some strategic observations based on these constraints.

Forces of Convergence

In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, French economist Thomas Piketty established a helpful framework for evaluating conditions that affect income and wealth inequality.  He distinguished between “forces of divergence,” which render society more unequal, and “forces of convergence,” which reduce inequalities.  After conducting an exhaustive analysis of these forces in the twentieth century, Piketty found that three forces of convergence impeded the growth of wealth and income gaps – contrary to Marx’s prediction.

First, Piketty noted that the populations of advanced countries grew dramatically since Marx wrote.  Population growth tends to diminish the importance of inherited wealth, since large family fortunes dilute when the family grows, so this trend reduced wealth inequality.  Second, Piketty observed that the total output of industrial economies grew much more quickly than Marx anticipated.  This reduced income inequality, as rapid economic growth provides more opportunities for people born in poverty to accumulate significant wealth.  Third, Piketty pointed out that the twentieth century was rife with major geopolitical events – World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II – all of which produced massive inflation in the developed world.  Although inflation can cause serious privations in the short term, over the long run, it reduces economic inequality.  This is because debts are measured in specific units of currency, so as currencies lose value, debts become easier to escape.

Due to this confluence of historical phenomena, the mid-twentieth century experienced an unprecedented reduction in economic inequality.  The geopolitical, social, and economic chaos resulting from two World Wars and a global financial crisis created breathing room for genuine upward economic mobility.[4]

The “Middle-Class” Buffer

The result of this upward mobility was the growth of a large and relatively prosperous middle class in most advanced economies, rather than the stark division of bourgeoisie and proletarian that Marx predicted.  The prominence of the middle class has significantly inhibited class consciousness.  Class consciousness, as Marx defined it, is an understanding of the world in terms of “relations . . . not [] between one individual and another, but between worker and capitalist, tenant and landlord, etc.”[5] 

The more stratified the economy becomes, the easier it is for workers to develop a rational understanding of their interests as a class – and a corresponding realization that their interests are antagonistic to the capitalists’.

But without a stark, binary division between workers and capitalists, these antagonisms become murky.  An upper-middle-class worker – say, a corporate middle-manager – is still a worker because she doesn’t own the assets the corporation uses to produce value.  But if she’s wealthier than her neighbors, has a cushy and reasonably fulfilling job, and enjoys a comfortable lifestyle, she has little reason to perceive her interests as hostile to her employer’s.

Throughout the last century and a half, neoliberal institutions have exploited that strategic reality by using the middle class as a “buffer” for class antagonisms.  Howard Zinn’s leftist history textbook, A People’s History of the United States, is rife with enlightening examples of this strategy.  For instance, in his discussion of the Progressive era at the beginning of the twentieth century, Zinn notes that many states began to pass laws providing for compensation for injured workers and otherwise limiting abusive employment practices.  These laws improved conditions for the flood of working-class immigrants arriving from Europe and allowed just enough immigrants to prosper to form “a middle-class cushion for class conflict.”  Later, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, a wave of protests drew attention to the woeful inadequacy of urban schools attended predominantly by Black children.  Boston’s government developed an insidiously clever solution to this problem: rather than fixing the urban schools, it implemented a policy of “busing Black children to white schools, and whites to Black schools.”  The result, Zinn explains, was “an ingenious concession to protest.  It had the effect of pushing… whites and poor Blacks into competition for the miserable inadequate schools.”[6]

These examples illustrate how capital has – more or less consciously – allowed the middle class to thrive in order to pit it against the poor.  The tactic has been remarkably successful.  In America, nearly 90% of people consider themselves “middle-class,”[7] and politicians on the left and right obsessively appeal to middle-class anxieties when seeking election.  Obviously, the middle-class doesn’t actually encompass 90% of the population.  And even if it did, a person in the 95th percentile of income (the top of this purported “middle-class”) and a person in the 5th percentile (the bottom) probably don’t share many tangible interests.  But if both of those folks think of themselves as “middle-class,” they likely won’t perceive their interests as antagonistic.

This tactic works in part because it appeals to a basic human psychological tendency: the fear of relative deprivation.  A person is “relatively deprived” if she is less materially wealthy than her community.  Behavioral psychology shows that a relatively deprived person is likely to feel anger, envy, and resentment even if she is perfectly well-off from an “absolute” perspective.[8]  People’s sense of satisfaction depends on feeling materially better-off than other members of their community, or at least not feeling worse-off.  Due to the various economic strata in the industrialized west, most workers have people slightly worse-off to fear, and people slightly better-off to envy – which makes it easy to divide and conquer folks with similar interests.

The Eroding Distinction between Capital and Labor

Efforts to foment class consciousness in the twenty-first century are complicated by the fact that “capital” and “labor” are harder to pinpoint than when Marx wrote.  In Marx’s world, poor laborers survived by selling their labor and rich capitalists got rich by possessing the means of production.  There were few (if any) rich laborers or poor capitalists.

Not so in the America of today.  As of 2020, over half of Americans owned stock, and many of them – even those who earn relatively low wages – have a significant amount of stock.  Stockholders in the 50th to 90th percentile of income owned an average of $132,000 in stock, while those in the bottom half still owned a healthy $54,000 on average.[9]  A little under half of American adults own mutual funds,[10] while three quarters have a retirement account that rises or falls in value with the stock market.[11]

All of these assets are forms of capital because they represent either a direct (in the case of stock) or indirect (in the case of mutual funds and retirement accounts) ownership interest in the means of production.  Many Americans thus have a tangible interest in the success of corporations – which is why incumbent presidential administrations are much more likely to win reelection when the stock market is strong,[12] and why voters tend to conflate the success of the stock market with the health of the economy.  The notion that laborers and capitalists always have antithetical interests is a harder sell to Americans whose wealth depends on capitalists succeeding.  As it turns out, there are some poor capitalists.

There are also some rich laborers. Socialists often discuss professional athletes as laborers, even though many of them are astonishingly wealthy.  For instance, a Jacobin article celebrated NBA players as “highly-skilled workers” who are in a “position to build working-class solidarity across different groups of workers and extract concessions from management.”[13]

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But this example illustrates why the labor/capital distinction has become harder to draw in late capitalism.  In one sense, calling athletes “laborers” makes sense because they’re paid to train and play games, which is a form of labor.  But many professional athletes make a lot more money from endorsements and advertising than they do from playing.  Are those athletes really “laborers” when most of their income derives from their image, rather than any specific work they perform?  Is an athlete’s personal image really “labor” rather than “capital”?  More fundamentally, would rich professional athletes tangibly benefit from a socialist revolution?

Just as it’s difficult to isolate “labor,” it’s also sometimes hard to locate the means of production with any precision. In Marx’s world, the means of production were concrete: industrial machines that laborers operated to make products.  That’s still true in some industries, like manufacturing, but what about information-based industries?  Picture a software developer.  The “product” she makes is computer code.  What are the “means of production” for computer code?  The simplest answer is a computer, coupled with a programming language and a code editor.  But most software developers probably have their own computers, and most programming languages and code editors are open-source.  In that sense, software engineers own the “means of production” for the product they make – whereas an assembly-line worker doesn’t own the assembly line.  Yet software developers are undoubtedly “laborers” under a traditional Marxist analysis.

None of this undermines Marx’s basic point that labor and capital have antagonistic interests.  But the existence of the middle class, coupled with the transition of advanced economies from manufacturing-based to information-based industries, has made it more difficult to figure out who’s the capitalist and who’s the laborer.  That necessarily inhibits the development of class consciousness.

A Politics of Personal Identity

These conditions have made it difficult for the American left to organize around class.  Instead, throughout modern American history, most leftist political movements have centered on identity – race, ethnicity, gender, gender orientation, sexuality, etc.  Of course, there have been some exceptions; Eugene Debs, the brief prominence of the Industrial Workers of the World in the ‘20s and ‘30s, and more recently, Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign spring to mind.

But in terms of both numbers and influence, class-based leftist movements pale in comparison to identity-centric efforts like the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, and the Black Lives Matter protests.  Because Americans don’t strongly perceive themselves in terms of class, it’s difficult to organize class-based leftist political activity.  This trend is especially stark in the twenty-first century.  By far the biggest left-leaning political movement in America in the past few decades is the Black Lives Matter protests against racially-motivated police violence.  The largest confluence of protests occurred in the summer of 2020 and involved around 20 million participants – making the protests one of the largest social movements in American history.[14]  Other contemporary rallying points for the left include abortion and LGBTQ rights, which are identity-centric issues.

To give credit where it’s due, identity politics has produced some remarkable results.  Although the Black Lives Matter protests haven’t achieved much tangible progress on police violence – police shootings per capita have actually increased since the protests began[15] – the movement galvanized a generation of Americans into leftist politics.  And thanks to relentless activism by the LGBTQ community, in the past twenty years, Americans’ views on gay rights underwent an astonishing reversal; in 2004, 60% of Americans opposed gay marriage, while in 2019, 61% favored it.[16]

It’s also worth noting that approaches to leftist politics that emphasize only class, to the exclusion of other predicates of oppression, alienate potential supporters and ignore the manifold forms of structural violence that afflict society.  For example, some socialists have tried to reframe police violence as a primarily class-based issue.  But while police are more likely to kill poor people, class explains a mere 28% of the disproportionately high rate of police violence against Black people.[17]  By the numbers, police violence is primarily a race issue.

For that reason, proponents of identity politics often accuse socialists of “class-reductionism.”[18] But while this is sometimes fair criticism, more often than not, the exact opposite is true – movements centered around one type of personal identity conceptualize every political struggle in terms of that identity, replacing “class-reductionism” with race- or gender- or sexuality- reductionism.  That tendency both inhibits class consciousness and causes a fundamental misunderstanding of key political issues, to the strategic detriment of the left.

The “school-to-prison pipeline” is a case in point.  The phrase refers to the tendency of some schools to apply harsh disciplinary policies and refer students who break the rules to law enforcement.  This is pervasive at low-income, predominantly Black and Latinx schools, and was the subject of one of the most widely-read leftist books this century – Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.  Following in Alexander’s footsteps, virtually every framing of the school-to-prison pipeline fixates on race-based disparities in school discipline and incarceration.  Google “school-to-prison pipeline,” and you’ll find that one of the first results defines it as “practices and policies that disproportionately place students of color into the criminal justice system.”[19]  Class doesn’t even get a mention.

But while there are doubtless real differences in the outcomes Black and white adolescents face in school and the justice system, the majority of those differences are attributable to class, not race.  According to one comprehensive study, about a third of the discipline gap between Black and white students cannot be explained by poverty, disciplinary histories, and school district characteristics.[20]  Obviously this indicates that a disturbing share of the gap in school discipline stems from pure racism, but don’t miss the forest for the trees: two-thirds of the gap is attributable to the material economic conditions of the students.  Another study found that although Black men are significantly more likely to face incarceration than their white counterparts, a majority of that disparity (between 54 and 85%, depending on the definition of “incarceration”) is attributable to class.[21]  In sum, most of the people who traverse the school-to-prison pipeline – and face subsequent terms of incarceration – do so because they’re poor, not because they’re Black.

The way we talk about these issues has strategic consequences.  A poor white person hearing about the school-to-prison pipeline might decide that the issue isn’t important to him because it’s unlikely to affect his kids – an incorrect conclusion founded on an inaccurate framing of the issue.  The school-to-prison pipeline is a class issue, but because leftist politics centers on personal identity, discourse on the school-to-prison pipeline doesn’t promote class consciousness.

Identity politics – or, more accurately, “identity-only politics” – also leaves oppressed groups vulnerable to divide-and-conquer tactics by the right, which further inhibit class consciousness.  The artificial tension between Black people, gay and lesbian people, and trans people is a good example of these tactics.  In the early 2010s, the National Organization for Marriage, an anti-gay advocacy group, circulated an astonishingly frank internal memo on how to use gay marriage as a wedge issue.  An excerpt reads:

The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and Blacks – two key Democratic constituencies.  Find, equip, energize, and connect African American spokespeople for marriage; develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right; provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots… Find attractive young Black Democrats to challenge white gay marriage advocates electorally.[22]

Later, when trans rights came to prominence in the cultural discourse, right-wing groups pivoted to manufacture another “wedge” between women plus gay and lesbian folks, on the one hand, and trans people on the other.  In 2017, Meg Kilgannon, the executive director of Concerned Parents and Education, spoke at a summit hosted by the Family Research Council – a Christian rightist, anti-LGBT organization.  Kilgannon laid out a strategy for opposing measures expanding trans rights in schools: portray trans rights as anti-feminist and anti-gay.  This would be effective, Kilgannon argued, because “the LGBT alliance is actually fragile and the trans activists need the gay rights movement to help legitimize them.”  But for many LGB activists, “gender identity on its own is just a bridge too far. If we separate the T from the alphabet soup we’ll have more success.”[23]

Wedge issues are an insidiously effective way to blunt the efficacy of identity-based leftist politics.  Promulgating wedge issues pits oppressed groups against one another, which inhibits the members of those groups from perceiving themselves as part of a single economic class with united interests.

Of course, practitioners of identity politics are not to blame for this unfortunate reality.  Most of those folks are sincere advocates for marginalized groups who simply use the most effective political strategies they can muster – and sometimes achieve real progress in their communities.  But while leftist politics in America remains centered on personal identity, class consciousness is unlikely to develop.

Conclusion

This analysis of class consciousness in modern America gives rise to several strategic observations.  First and foremost, the delicate balance of factors that has allowed the middle class to remain viable for almost a century may be deteriorating.  Although factors of convergence have supported the existence of the middle class for the past century or so, those trends seem to be reversing.  Near the end of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty suggests that population and economic growth are slowing, inflation is slowly declining, and economic inequality is on the rise in the western world.  If the forces of convergence turn into forces of divergence, the classes will slowly stratify, and a degree of class consciousness will probably develop on its own.  Socialists should exploit this reality by advancing a class-centric analysis directed at members of the middle class suddenly cast into poverty by these economic trends.

By the same token, leftist generally should recognize that, given the competing substrata of the economy and the multifarious forms of oppression, neither class nor personal identity furnishes a comprehensive answer to all social ills.  As discussed, class alone doesn’t provide a satisfactory explanation of police violence, and race alone doesn’t provide a satisfactory explanation of the school-to-prison pipeline.  Instead, we should take an empirical approach to confronting specific problems.

Relatedly, leftists should spot wedge issues – which thrive in the areas where two oppressed groups believe their interests are in tension – and avoid schismatic arguments.  Instead, leftist analysis should begin with the tangible interests that most oppressed people share.  For instance, it is routine to point out that Black women face significant and unfair disparities in pay; women tend to be paid less than men and Black people tend to be paid less than white people, meaning that Black women face compound inequities in their salaries.   But discussing pay disparity in terms of identity pits these groups against each other, implying that Black women have different interests from white women and Black men.  A better way to frame the issue is to focus on an enemy common to all of those groups – employers, which have overly broad discretion to set their employees’ salaries – and the common problem that results, namely, that workers as a whole are paid too little and unfairly.

By framing issues in terms that take into account both identity and class, socialists can take advantage of rising economic inequality to promote class consciousness.  And then, perhaps, we can prove that the revolution was merely deferred – not denied.

Sources

[1] Vladimir Lenin, “Letters from Afar: The First Letter,” Pravda, March 21, 2017, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/lfafar/first.htm.

[2] Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (New York: Routledge Classics, 2007), 21-51, available at https://www.cs.vu.nl/~eliens/download/marcuse-one-dimensional-man.pdf.

[3] Loren Balhorn, “The World Revolution that Wasn’t,” Jacobin, March 2, 2019, https://jacobin.com/2019/03/comintern-lenin-german-revolution-ussr-revolution.

[4] Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Bellknap Press, 2014), 13-15, 20-27, 69-85, 99-109, 377-393.

[5] Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Paris, 1847), available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/index.htm.

[6] Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 349, 467.

[7] Jeffrey Wenger and Melanie Zaber, “Most Americans Consider Themselves Middle-Class.  But Are They?”, Rand Corporation Blog, May 14, 2021, https://www.rand.org/blog/2021/05/most-americans-consider-themselves-middle-class-but.html.

[8] Heather J. Smith and Yueh J. Juo, “Relative Deprivation: How Subjective Experiences of Inequality Influence Social Behavior and Health,” Policy Insights from Social and Personality Psychology 1, no. 1 (October 1, 2014), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2372732214550165.

[9] “What Percent of Americans Own Stocks?”, FinancialSamurai, 2021, https://www.financialsamurai.com/what-percent-of-americans-own-stocks/.

[10] “Share of Households Owning Mutual Funds in the United States from 1980 to 2019,” Statistica, November 9, 2020, https://www.statista.com/statistics/246224/mutual-funds-owned-by-american-households/.

[11] Alicia Adamczyk, “25% of Americans Have No Retirement Savings,” CNBC, May 24, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/24/25-percent-of-us-adults-have-no-retirement-savings-fed-finds.html.

[12] Paul Vigna, “The Stock Market Is a Strong Election Day Predictor,” The Wall Street Journal, September 7, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-stock-market-is-a-strong-election-day-predictor-11599490800.

[13] Barry Eidlin, “Last Week’s Pro Athletes Strikes Could Become Much Bigger Than Sports,” Jacobin, August 30, 2020, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/08/sports-strikes-kenosha-racial-justice.

[14] Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui, and Jugal Patel, “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History,” New York Timesx, July 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html.

[15] “National Trends,” Mapping Police Violence, last modified September 30, 2022, https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends.

[16] “Attitudes on Same-Sex Marriage,” Pew Research Center, May 14, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/.

[17] 3P Staff, “Class and Racial Inequalities in Police Killings,” People’s Policy Project, June 23, 2020, https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/project/class-and-racial-inequalities-in-police-killings/.

[18] Tatiana Cozzarelli, “Class Reductionism Is Real, and It’s Coming from the Jacobin Wing of the DSA,” LeftVoice, June 16, 2020, https://www.leftvoice.org/class-reductionism-is-real-and-its-coming-from-the-jacobin-wing-of-the-dsa/.

[19] “Who is Most Affected by the School to Prison Pipeline?”, American University School of Education Blog, February 24, 2021, https://soeonline.american.edu/blog/school-to-prison-pipeline/.

[20] Maithreyi Gopalan and Ashlyn Nelson, “Understanding the Racial Discipline Gap in Schools,” American Educational Research Association Vol. 5, No. 2 (April 23, 2019), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2332858419844613.

[21] Nathaniel Lewis, “Mass Incarceration,” People’s Policy Project, 2018, https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/MassIncarcerationSummary.pdf.

[22] Brett LoGiurato, “Read The Leaked Anti-Gay Marriage Memo Whose Authors Wanted To ‘Drive A Wedge Between Gays And Blacks’”, Business Insider, May 27, 2012, https://www.businessinsider.com/nom-gay-marriage-memos-drive-a-wedge-between-gays-and-Blacks-2012-3.

[23] Hélène Barthélemy, “Christian Right Tips to Fight Transgender Rights: Separate the T from the LGB,” Southern Poverty Law Center, October 23, 2017, https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/10/23/christian-right-tips-fight-transgender-rights-separate-t-lgb.

40 Differences Between Public Schools And Charter Schools

By Shawgi Tell

Public schools and charter schools are apples and oranges. They differ profoundly from each other, including in organizational, fiscal, philosophical, and legal ways.

Below is an annotated comparison chart of some of the differences between public schools and charter schools. Each annotation could be extended to show more nuances and how deep the dissimilarities go.

Three Important Notes

1. Charter schools have been around for 31 years while public schools have existed for over 150 years. Today there are 7,800 charter schools and 91,000 public schools in the U.S. About 45 million youth attend public schools while 3.7 million youth attend charter schools.

2. When comparing public schools and charter schools, scale, scope, and proportion have to be considered, both quantitatively and qualitatively. For example, if a problem exists in a public school, it is typically much worse or more serious in a charter school. For instance, teacher turnover occurs in both public schools and charter schools, but, pound for pound, in terms of scale and proportion, the teacher turnover rate is usually far greater and more serious in charter schools than public schools. The fact that problems in charter schools are more severe than problems in public schools given the numbers in note number one is revealing.

3. For decades neoliberals have painstakingly set up public schools to fail while simultaneously promoting failed charter schools and dividing people.

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A Feature, Not a Bug: How Henry Kissinger is a Symbol of a Broader American Imperial Rot

By Sudip Bhattacharya

As legendary English metal band Iron Maiden sang in a 1988 track, “Only the good die young. All the evil seem to live forever.” Enter Henry Kissinger.

On May 27th, 2023, the former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor turned 100 years old. As Kissinger begins his second century on this planet, he remains a beloved figure within America’s political class. His multiple birthday parties were attended by many A-listers including Democrats John Kerry and Michael Bloomberg, and Republican James Baker. Yes, the elite outpouring for Dr. K — as Kissinger is affectionately known in establishment circles — is a bipartisan affair. But the exploited and colonized masses hold a much different view of the so-called diplomat.

Across the Third World, Kissinger’s legacy is that of a heartless war criminal. In the Nixon administration, Kissinger supported some of the world’s most brutal right-wing regimes in places like Argentina and Chile. He also greenlighted mass slaughters of Bangladeshis and the Timorese.

In a groundbreaking piece for The Intercept, Nick Turse analyzes formerly classified documents to uncover mass killings of Cambodian civilians during the Nixon era. Transcripts of calls unearthed by Turse prove Kissinger’s direct role in these massacres. In one particularly ominous phone conversation, Kissinger ordered a general to kill “anything that moves” with “anything that flies.”

This savage commitment to expanding American hegemony at all costs has left an indelible mark. Kissinger’s ideology is now a feature — not a bug — of the United States foreign policy establishment. So much so, in fact, that many of his diplomatic successors are even more extreme than him.

Revitalizing Empire

Henry Kissinger emerged at a time of mounting skepticisim toward American empire and the institutions that uphold it. In 1975, the Senate almost unanimously approved the creation of the bipartisan Church Committee — a body investigating security state abuses. At the same time, the Republican Party was home to the late Representative Paul Findley. The congressman from Illinois was fiercely pro-Palestine and anti-war. Findley couldn’t exist in today’s radicalized GOP, where support for Israeli apartheid and the war machine are prerequisites for membership.

Kissinger, alongside other odious characters like the Dulles brothers, represented a backlash to these currents. Dr. K was a staunch cold warrior. He believed strongly in using American military might to eliminate communism and defend corporate profitability at all costs.

And he found ideological allies in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The agency’s upper echelons were full of anti-communist stalwarts and other extremist elements. As Stephen Kinzer writes in Overthrow, leaders of the CIA outright dismissed anything that might interfere with the aims of American multinationals.

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While occupying America’s most powerful diplomatic posts, Kissinger was a steward of this tendency. In fact, he accelerated and intensified some of the worst pattens already bubbling within the security state. While preaching diplomacy publicly, Kissinger showed an unnerving stomach for bombings and the so-called collateral damage they caused. This earned him favor among the morally bankrupt conservative and liberal elite. In 1973, they awarded Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize despite him never meeting a war he did not like.

This underscores a reality that is fundamental to understanding Kissinger’s place in history. While Dr. K was a reaction to some currents within the American foreign policy scene, he was an intensification of others. In this sense, Kissinger was no anomaly. So much of the political establishment agreed with his ideas and participated in their implementation.

American Imperialism As a Bipartisan Project

After Nixon resigned in disgrace, and Gerald Ford lost the 1976 election, it became clear Kissinger had made an impression. On January 1st, 1977, Democratic President Jimmy Carter took office. Despite not occupying a spot in the opposition party’s new administration, Kissinger’s foreign policy proceeded apace. Carter even appointed Zbigniew Brzezinski — a sort of Democratic Kissinger — to be his Secretary of Defense.

Together, Carter and Brzezinski instituted policies Kissinger would have been proud of — and probably was. The duo funded the Mujahideen — and, by extension, Osama bin Laden — to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Anti-communism was the overriding imperative, even if it involved supporting theocratic armies who threw acid on women learning to read.

But the Carter administration was short-lived. The Georgia native lost the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan. But, while Carter and Brzezinski left office, Kissinger’s legacy most certainly did not.
The hard-right Reagan personified authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and American exceptionalism on steroids. While he claimed to want dialogue with the Soviets, Reagan funded extreme anti-communist groups throughout Central America. He also invaded Grenada and toppled its government following the country’s socialist revolution.

Kissinger’s imperial fervor continued into the Clinton years. The Democratic administration of the 1990s subjected Iraq to a brutal sanctions regime, killing thousands of Iraqis through deprivation. Clinton also opted to continue the Cuban embargo, which remains in place to this day.

After Clinton came George W. Bush, whose War on Terror exemplified the Kissinger protocol: non-stop intervention and destabilization with overtures to diplomacy and the proliferation of rights and freedom. Obama then advanced this protocol further still, albeit less intensely, but was nonetheless very much beholden to military intervention. He punished the Middle East in particular with drone strikes, sanctions, and alliances with Islamic militants and the Israeli state. Not to mention that fact that Obama turned a blind eye to Saudi war crimes against innocent Yemeni civilians.

Essentially, Kissinger’s views carried forth in spirit with every subsequent administration. Ironically, too, the “Kissinger effect” has led to elements within the foreign policy establishment becoming even more radicalized than him. Contemporary US-China relations provides seemingly endless examples of this.

Both Biden and Trump officials often signal their willingness to rachet tensions with China. Mike Pompeo, who Trump appointed to head the CIA and State Department, claims Xi Jinping seeks world domination. The current Secretary of State Antony Blinken has voiced similar sentiments. During his confirmation hearing, Blinken told the Senate that “China posed the most significant challenge… of any nation.” He has also accused the country of “crimes against humanity,” “genocide,” “repression,” and “crackdown[s] of basic rights.”

Kissinger sounds dovish by comparison. In a recent interview with The Economist, he stressed the importance of maintaining friendly US-China relations. Kissinger also poured cold water on some of the more gauche sinophobic hysterics. He insists Xi Jinping is not the next Hitler and that China has no plans of world domination. According to Kissinger, the Asian powerhouse does not even seek to impose its culture abroad.

a cog in a rotten system

In the end, Henry Kissinger must face justice. But we should aso view him as part of a broader network of war criminals. And that network is both continually expanding and a revolving door. Recently, President Joe Biden nominated Elliot Abrams — a man notorious for atrocities in Central America — to a federal diplomacy commission. Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump had made Abrams his Special Representative for Iran and Venezuela.

Those serious about overturning American imperium must address Kissinger and the forces beyond him — many of which he has inspired. True justice for the victims of United States foreign policy means nothing short of wholesale change to the entire apparatus. It is not just about punishing Kissinger but also stopping future Kissingers from ascending to power and harming more innocents.

This is a daunting task. United States progressives are already struggling to confront domestic issues, let alone global ones. Still, the task remains. To create a free and friendly world for the working class and the oppressed globally, the American empire must crumble. Its Kissingers must fall. While Dr. K may celebrate another birthday soon enough, it’s our responsibility to create a landscape that celebrates humanity instead.

Sudip Bhattacharya is a doctoral candidate in political science at Rutgers University. He also has a background as a reporter and continues to write for major outlets from Current Affairs to Protean and The Progressive.

Elias Khoury is the managing editor of the Hampton Institute.

The Appalling Reality Of Child Labor

By Josh Crowell

Republished from Socialist Alternative.

Child labor has been on the rise since at least 2018. The recent New York Times article ignited a firestorm that has led the Biden administration to create a task force within the Department of Labor as an attempt to deal with this crisis. However, the reasons these children are being exploited is due to a lack of government oversight to begin with. The Department of Health and Human Services has failed to keep proper records of unaccompanied minors as they are placed with sponsors quickly to try to get them out of shelters. Only a third of these minors have any follow-up after placement with a sponsor, and even that limited support ends after a few months.

Hyper-exploitation Of Child Immigrant Labor

This is a crisis of poverty and immigration. Families and unaccompanied minors are fleeing desperate situations in Latin America to find only different conditions of desperation in the States. All families in the US right now are experiencing the pressures of our current economic crisis, from high inflation and the cost-of-living crisis, to the ending of the child tax credit and the rollback of the COVID social safety net leaving many without access to food stamps and Medicaid benefits. While many minors who haven’t migrated are being put in situations where they have to work, many more immigrant minors, with or without their family, are forced to take up work once they arrive in the States, sending money back to their families in their home country or just to afford to survive in America. US immigration policy – under Trump and continued under Biden – criminalizes border crossings. The threat of deportation still hangs over the heads of immigrants and their families. With this stress, many unaccompanied minors also have debts accrued from their border crossing due to fees owed to those who helped them cross the border and additional money owed to their sponsors once they have been relocated out of the government’s custody. 

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This has led many children to take up jobs in very dangerous industries like meat processing plants, commercial bakeries, and construction. These children – some as young as 13 – work upwards of 14-hour shifts doing jobs that are classified as too dangerous for anyone under 18. While these jobs are difficult for any worker, these children must balance their school course load and full-time employment with the additional stresses of worrying about their families back in Latin America and knowing they are already burdened with debts they must pay. Some of these children are forced to drop out of school, many of which drop out unnoticed due to the lack of HHS oversight into their care once placed with a sponsor, if their sponsor enrolled to begin with.

As inflation continues to rise, especially with increases in rents, children and their families are forced to find ways to make ends meet, regardless of whether these survival methods skirt that law. While it is illegal for children to be working in these jobs, the bosses use these desperate circumstances to exploit these minors who are just trying to survive. With the Great Resignation, many sections of the working class no longer accept poverty wages which leads companies to look for workers who will accept these conditions as a way to continue to keep wages low and produce higher profits. Many immigrant children fit this role perfectly due to their need to assist their families back home and pay down their debts to sponsors here in the States. 

This Is A Fight For The Labor Movement

While this crisis is one of true desperation by these children and their families, it highlights the overall weakening of the US and Latin American labor movements. Almost a century ago, child workers and their families fought for an end to child labor and guaranteed education for all minors. This fight was won through mass action, with child workers and their families going on strike and protesting the intense conditions they were being forced to labor under. The bosses are not interested in enforcing labor law, especially when it comes to the hyper-exploitation that comes with migrant labor. The US labor movement must organize to protect all workers and that means fighting back against these trends of increasing child labor. If an injury to one is an injury to all then workers must stand up for these children and demand that they have adequate resources, safe sponsorships, and the ability to go to school and learn, not work as if they were an adult. 

While it is positive that the government is taking some action due to public scrutiny from the media, it will not solve this crisis. A lack of government oversight and the continuation of brutal immigration policies that set up immigrant workers for hyper-exploitation has led us to this situation. It will take courageous strike action from these child workers and their families, joined by the masses of organized labor, to win back what had been won a century ago. These children’s desperation cannot be used by the bosses to continue to exploit them. Workers should fight for guaranteed education for all minors, resources for unaccompanied immigrant children like food stamps and stipends, and for a process within HHS that actually protects children, not simply pushes them through the system.

Educators Must Help Defeat the New Racist and Imperialist 'Red Scare'

By Derek R. Ford

Originally published on PESA Agora

Introduction: Racism and imperialism unite ‘both sides of the aisle’

Responding to criticism of the political system of the newly-independent Tanzania, the great African teacher, revolutionary, and theorist Julius Nyerere responded, observing ‘the United States is also a one-party state, but with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.’ He was and is right. Rhetorical differences and popular presentation aside, the two ruling-class parties effectively function as a dictatorship domestically and globally. For concrete and contemporary evidence, look no further than the New McCarthyism and Red Scare promoted by media outlets and politicians on ‘both sides of the aisle,’ from Fox News and Marco Rubio to The New York Times and Chuck Schumer.

On August 5, The New York Times released a report that, in essence, boldly and baselessly suggests groups and other organisations advocating for peace with China are part of an international conspiracy by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Despite the absence of any substantive proof, politicians are already using it as ammunition in their broader ‘new McCarthyism’ agenda, which could potentially have devastating consequences for the globe. Fortunately, a variety of institutions and networks are already mobilising against it by building a fight-back movement in which education plays a key role, and you can too.

Their presentation opens with the racist logic guiding their investigation as they try to discredit the multitude of spontaneous global actions against anti-Asian racism in 2021. They narrate a single action in London where a scuffle broke out, they contend, after activists with No Cold War (one of the event’s organisers) ‘attacked activists supporting the democracy movement in Hong Kong.’ They offer only two words to back up this narrative: ‘witnesses said.’

No Cold War is dedicated to promoting peaceful relations between the US and China, organising in-person and virtual events to advance the global peace movement. Having spoken on their panels and attended others, I can confirm they are educational, generative and productive intellectually and politically. They include a range of perspectives, given they are working toward peace. This principle is unacceptable for the Times and the New McCarthyites, however, as the journalists ‘reveal’ that No Cold War is merely ‘part of a lavishly funded influence campaign that defends China and pushes its propaganda.’ So too, it seems, is any group advocating for peace.

The investigators construct an international conspiracy centred on Neville Roy Singham, a millionaire sympathetic to peace and socialism who donates his millions to left-wing non-profits who, in turn, help finance very active and crucial anti-war, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist organisations. This is where the most dangerous suggestion emerges, one upon which pro-war forces quickly seized: that groups receiving funding from Singham could be agents of the Chinese Communist Party and thus in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

These suggestions are completely unfounded. The only ‘evidence’ presented are statements made by a handful of former employees and members of some organisations partly funded and supported directly or indirectly by Singham, including the Nkrumah School, the media outlet New Frame, and the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party in South Africa. Then, of course, there is the fact that Singham supported Hugo Chávez, has relationships with some of the million members of the Chinese Communist Party, is pictured at a CCP meeting (excuse me, ‘propaganda forum’) taking notes in a book ‘adorned with a red hammer and sickle.’ And I almost forgot the nail in the hammer: a plaque of Xi Jinping hanging in Singham’s office.

Fox News and other right-wing outlets and politicians are at the helm of the bandwagon as well. For years they promoted propaganda alleging China is influencing US schools and universities as a method of attacking freedom of inquiry and speech in the US, including in my state of Indiana. In August 2021, Indiana’s Attorney General Todd Rokita (whom most Hoosiers don’t support) threatened to investigate the Confucius Institute at a small college, Valparaiso University, saying it operates ‘to spread propaganda and circulate the mantra of the CCP at both the university and in several K-12 schools in Indiana.’ The University closed the Institute but, importantly, maintained Rokita was lying about its function, which is to promote cross-cultural understanding and dialogue. Unfortunately, almost all such institutes have shuttered.

Old or new, ‘McCarthyism’ is reality, not hyperbole

On August 9, Senator Marco Rubio officially called on the Department of Justice to investigate a range of progressive organisations in the US for violating FARA and acting as unregistered Chinese agents. Rubio’s evidence? The Times ‘investigation.’ Rubio includes but adds to the groups smeared in the Times article. The strategy is to discredit anti-war groups, grassroots movement hubs, and anti-imperialist and anti-racist organisations as CCP operatives, thereby silencing opposition to their foreign policy strategy, part of which includes funding separatist movements in places like Hong Kong. In their opening, the Times journalists neglect to mention that most people in that region of China actually oppose the ‘freedom movement,’ partly because of its political character, exemplified by its leaders such as Joshua Wong, a close collaborator of Rubio, who led the charge to nominate Wong for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Rubio’s letter to the Biden Administration’s Attorney General names nine entities, including the anti-war group Code Pink, the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, and The People’s Forum, amongst others. This list will likely expand to include numerous others who either didn’t respond to the journalists’ red-baiting or who maintain some connection to the groups identified.

Already serious, it could potentially be devastating. I don’t know a peace or social justice activist, let alone an anti-imperialist or anti-racist revolutionary organisation, with a substantial base, membership, or level of activity, that isn’t somehow related to one of these organisations and networks. The People’s Forum should be of particular concern for educators, as it is the most active and pedagogically innovative popular education institute in the US. Academic journals and publishers work with them to host events and book launches, and a range of professors, including myself, teach classes for them (without getting a paycheck, let alone a ‘lavish’ one, I should add).

There are several continuities between the anti-communist and anti-Black witch-hunts of the 1940s-50s and the new McCarthyism. In both cases, the same ruling-class parties united as outlets like The New York Times recklessly promoted their campaign, slandering heroic Black figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston, Hughes and Paul Robeson. Newspaper headlines alone facilitated this work, such as the 1949 Times headline calling Robeson a ‘Black Stalin’ who “Suffered ‘Delusions of Grandeur.”’ This continued with the Civil Rights Era and was a major factor stalling its militancy and has again resurfaced. They never apologised for their role in spreading such racist propaganda.

Imperialism and white supremacy: More than and predating McCarthy

Labeling this wide historical period and its complex political configurations as ‘McCarthyism’ is useful in speaking popularly, but educators should note it can be misleading. The anti-Black and anti-communist/radical crusade preceded Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Historian Gerald Horne cogently locates the foundations of contemporary racist US capitalism in the imbrication of white supremacy and anti-communism insofar as it

‘is undergirded by the fact that slave property was expropriated without compensation.… [O]ne of the largest uncompensated expropriations before 1917 took place in this nation: African-Americans are living reminders of lost fortunes.’

Similarly, Charisse Burden-Stelly’s concept of modern US racial capitalism specifically designates a ‘political economy constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination and labour superexploitation.’ Like Horne, the system ‘is rooted in the imbrication of anti-Blackness and antiradicalism.’

History proves their theses correct. For one example, take Benjamin J. Davis, the first Black communist ever elected to public office in the US. He served as a New York City Councilman from 1943 until 1949, when he and other Communist Party leaders were arrested under the Smith Act. In Davis’ set of ‘autobiographical notes’ penned while captive in an apartheid federal prison in Terre Haute, an hour’s drive from where I’m writing, the Black Party leader recounts how, following the end of the US’s alliance with the Soviet Union, ‘the pro-fascist, Negro-hating forces which had been held in check during the war, began to break loose.’ The Republicans, Democrats, FBI, and other state elements sat idly by as racist attacks, including a mass lynching in Atlanta by the Klan, intensified.

Communists, on the other hand, responded immediately, with the Party’s Black leadership uniting and mobilising broad sectors of society. It was only then that the state responded, and not to the racist lynching but to those fighting them. In other words, while the US state passively accepted racist and fascist groups in the US, they turned to active repression when Black people and their supporters and comrades fought back.

The 1949 conviction and imprisonment of Davis and other Party leaders for violating the anti-communist Smith Act was an example of this repression. The US imprisoned and suppressed hundreds of communist leaders and fellow travelers, with countless others driven underground, blacklisted, and deported.

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It was not only their organising that threatened the state; it was also their ideology. Thus, prison administrators prevented the publication of Davis’s book for a decade after he was released. Physically and ideologically repressing communism was part of a project to exterminate the revolutionary, internationalist, and Black Liberation movements and traditions just as a new wave of US imperialist aggression was kicking into high gear.

Decolonisation and anti-colonialist struggle: A matter of survival, not academic fodder

This leads to one other glaring connection between the Red Scare of today and then, one that demonstrates the historical and ideological continuity of racist US imperialism, helps define the current conjuncture, and might convince academics we don’t need new words and more language but action: the US war against the Korean national liberation and socialist struggle.

Seventy years ago, on July 27, the resistance of the Korean masses forced the US to sign an armistice agreement, ceasing the US’s horrendous violence against the peninsula. Despite their military might, new chemical and biological weapons, and bombs that even the Air Force admits inflicted ‘greater damage than German and Japanese cities firebombed during World War II,’ they couldn’t defeat the freedom fighters in the Korean People’s Army (many of whom were from the south).

Before the armistice signing on February 2, Trinidadian-born Black communist Claudia Jones, who at 37 years of age was a high-ranking Party member and leading organiser and theorist, stood before Judge Edward J. Dimrock in a New York courtroom along with a dozen other Party leaders They were all convicted of several charges, including conspiring to overthrow the US government. The pre-sentencing statement is generally used to plea for leniency, but, as a revolutionary communist, Jones saw another opportunity to agitate and raise consciousness.

Jones opened by making it clear it wasn’t meant for the Judge or the state. No, Jones addressed the real power in the world: the global revolutionary movement. ‘If what I say here,’ she began, ‘serves even one whit to further dedicate growing millions of Americans to fight for peace and to repel the fascist drive on free speech and thought in our country, I shall consider my rising to speak worthwhile indeed.’

Overall, this and other trials that persecuted communists and progressives weren’t about specific articles or actions, although, as Denise Lynn notes, in 1947, J. Edgar Hoover directed the FBI to surveil ‘her every speech, radio interview, mention in the Daily Worker, and all of her written work as well as party functions she attended or hosted.’

The prosecution, Jones highlighted, introduced her articles as evidence but did not read them; actually, they could not read them aloud because, in the first place, doing so would affirm ‘that Negro women can think and speak and write!’

Jones then called attention to the second piece of evidence they could not read: her historic speech delivered at an International Women’s Day rally and published in Political Affairs under the title ‘Women in the Struggle for Peace and Security’ in March 1950, the same year the state obtained her deportation order.

In that speech, delivered months before the ‘barbaric’ war against Korea, as she called it, Jones proposed that ‘a fundamental condition for rallying the masses of American women into the peace camp is to free them from the influence of the agents of imperialism’ by linking them with the new phenomenon of a global anti-imperialist women’s movement spanning 80 countries. This would ‘inspire the growing struggles of American women and heighten their consciousness of the need for militant united-front campaigns around the burning demands of the day.’ Thus, the prosecution could not read it aloud because

‘it urges American mothers, Negro women and white, to emulate the peace struggles of their anti-fascist sisters in Latin America, in the new European democracies, in the Soviet Union, in Asia and Africa to end the bestial Korean war … to reject the militarist threat to embroil us in a war with China, so that their children should not suffer the fate of the Korean babies murdered by napalm bombs of B-29s, or the fate of Hiroshima.’

How terrifyingly presciently Jones’s words resonate with us here today, 70 years on. We face ongoing imperialist aggression against the Korean people and their struggle for peace, national liberation, and reunification, the ramping up of US militarism as they prepare for a war against China, and the accompanying ‘Red Scare’ to produce consent, silence dissent and inhibit solidarity efforts.

The US is a … Pacific power?

The US’s ‘Pivot to Asia’ dates at least back to 1898 when they waged a war against and occupied the Philippine Republic, but its current iteration emerged in November 2011, when then-President Barack Obama told the Australian Parliament ‘The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay.’ That month, his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, published an article in Foreign Policy (the unofficial organ of the US State Department) articulating the US’s new line, that first and foremost entailed ‘a substantially increased investment – diplomatic, economic, strategic and otherwise – in the Asia-Pacific region.’

We all know what Clinton meant by ‘otherwise,’ as did the Chinese people, government, and governing Party. For some context, recall that this came out one month earlier Clinton erupted in joy during a CBS interview after hearing of African revolutionary Muammar Gaddafi’s brutal assassination by reactionary forces (whose campaign was based on disproven propaganda and racism against migrant workers from the southern part of the continent). ‘We came, we saw, he died,’ she said laughingly after destroying an independent African nation and its widely popular government.

As the US was waging dozens of wars, occupations, covert military operations, and more, China followed the CCP’s line of a ‘peaceful rise.’ They did so as long as they could, and when it was clear the US wasn’t stopping, both China and Russia finally stood up to the US.

Especially since the election of Xi Jinping to the position of General Secretary of the CCP, China has made a sharp shift to the left and now, after decades, finally offers an alternative pole for the world order so the people of the world can finally be freed from the colonial rule of the US through military occupations and other mechanisms like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. This is why the Belt and Road initiative is critical to formerly colonised states, and why it is falsely labeled ‘colonialist’ by ruling-class figures from Steve Bannon to Clinton.

What would you do then? Do it now! Resisting intimidation is the path to victory

Rubio ended his letter to the DOJ by proclaiming: ‘The CCP is our greatest adversary, and we cannot allow it to abuse our open system to promote its malign influence any longer.’ The threat of war is not rhetoric. The Department of Defence’s new military doctrine is explicitly guided by ‘Great Power Rivalry, a euphemism for an all-out war to recolonise and redivide China.

As US imperialist occupations expand, as they continue conducting military exercises in the South China Sea, China remains remarkably restrained. Can you imagine what the US would do if, say, China sent nuclear-armed submarines to the shores of California, patrolled the Atlantic waters off the coast of New York City, or stationed military bases throughout Mexico and Canada?

It is irrelevant wherever one stands on China, its political system, or any issue or policy. In terms of internationalist solidarity, the least that educators in the imperialist core can do is restrain our government. Even if one of your colleagues supports US imperialism, however, they will hopefully at least stand against attempts to intimidate and silence opposition and free speech. As the petition against the New McCarthyism states:

‘This attack isn’t only on the left but against everyone who exercises their free speech and democratic rights. We must firmly resist this racist, anti-communist witch hunt and remain committed to building an international peace movement. In the face of adversity, we say NO to xenophobic witch hunts and YES to peace.’

Read, sign and, share the petition now. Don’t be intimidated. The heroic freedom fighters we teach and write about, the ones we admire, never gave in despite their extraordinary oppression and unthinkable suffering.

For those of us committed to ending white supremacy, capitalism, imperialism, or at the very least, to protecting the freedom of speech and dissent, one small thing to do now is to talk with everyone about it, to sign this petition and affirm that you won’t be silenced or intimidated. Let’s follow the words and deeds of Jones, not Marco Rubio.

Our enemies aren’t in Russia or China, North Korea or Cuba. They are right here in the US, from the Pentagon and Wall Street to the cops who routinely murder and harass the exploited and oppressed. What the police do here, the US military does across the globe. Together, we can defeat them.

Full Citation Information:

Ford, D. R. (2023). Educators must help defeat the new racist and imperialist ‘Red Scare.’ PESA Agora. https://pesaagora.com/columns/educators-must-help-defeat-the-new-racist-and-imperialist-red-scare/

Study, Fast, Train, Fight: The Roots of Black August

By Joe Tache

Republished from Liberation School.

In August 1619, enslaved Africans touched foot in the first permanent English settlement in what is now the United States. The centuries since witnessed the development of a racial system more violent, extractive, and deeply entrenched than any other in human history. Yet where there is oppression, there is resistance. Since 1619, Black radicals and revolutionaries have taken bold collective action in pursuit of their freedom, threatening the fragile foundations of exploitation upon which the United States is built. These heroic struggles have won tremendous victories, but they have also produced martyrs—heroes who have been imprisoned and killed because of their efforts to transform society.

“Black August” is honored every year to commemorate the fallen freedom fighters of the Black Liberation Movement, to call for the release of political prisoners in the United States, to condemn the oppressive conditions of U.S. prisons, and to emphasize the continued importance of the Black Liberation struggle. Observers of Black August commit to higher levels of discipline throughout the month. This can include fasting from food and drink, frequent physical exercise and political study, and engagement in political struggle. In short, the principles of Black August are: “study, fast, train, fight.”

George Jackson and the origins of Black August

George Jackson was a Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party while he was incarcerated in San Quentin Prison in California. Jackson was an influential revolutionary and his assassination at the hands of a San Quentin prison guard was one of the primary catalysts for the inception of Black August.

A 19-year-old convicted of armed robbery, in 1961 George Jackson was sentenced to a prison term of “1-to-life,” meaning prison administrators had complete and arbitrary control over the length of his sentence. He never lived outside of a prison again, spending the next 11 years locked up (seven and a half years of those in solitary confinement). In those 11 years—despite living in an environment of extreme racism, repression, and state control—George Jackson’s political fire was ignited, and he became an inspiration to the other revolutionaries of his generation.

Jackson was first exposed to radical politics by fellow inmate W.L. Nolen. With Nolen’s guidance, Jackson studied the works of many revolutionaries, including Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, Mao Tse-Tung, and Frantz Fanon. Nolen, Jackson, and other  prisoners dedicated themselves to raising political consciousness among the prisoners and to organizing their peers in the California prison system. They led study sessions on radical philosophy and convened groups like the Third World Coalition and started the San Quentin Prison chapter of the Black Panther Party. Jackson even published two widely read books while incarcerated: Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye.

Unfortunately, if predictably, these radical organizers soon found themselves in the cross-hairs of the California prison establishment. In 1970, W.L. Nolen—who had been transferred to Soledad prison and planned to file a lawsuit against its superintendent—was assassinated by a prison guard. Days later, George Jackson (also now in Soledad Prison) and fellow radical prisoners Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette were accused of killing a different prison guard in retaliation for Nolen’s death. The three were put on trial and became known as the Soledad Brothers.

That year, when it was clear that George Jackson would likely never be released from prison, his 17-year-old brother Jonathan Jackson staged an armed attack on the Marin County Courthouse to demand the Soledad Brothers’ immediate release. Jonathan Jackson enlisted the help of three additional prisoners—James McClain, William Christmas, and Ruchell Magee—during the offensive. Jonathan Jackson, McClain, and Christmas were all killed, while Magee was shot and re-arrested. Ruchell Magee, now 80 years old, is currently one of the longest held political prisoners in the world.

On August 21, 1971, just over a year after the courthouse incident, a prison guard assassinated George Jackson. The facts regarding his death are disputed. Prison authorities alleged that Jackson smuggled a gun into the prison and was killed while attempting to escape. On the other hand, literary giant James Baldwin wrote, “no Black person will ever believe that George Jackson died the way they tell us he did.”

While the particular circumstances of Jackson’s death will likely forever remain contested, two facts are clear: his death was ultimately a political assassination, and his revolutionary imprint can’t be extinguished. Through the efforts and sacrifice of George and Jonathan Jackson, Nolen, McClain, Christmas, Magee and countless other revolutionaries, the 1970s became a decade of widespread organizing and political struggle within prisons. Prisoners demanded an end to racist and violent treatment at the hands of prison guards, better living conditions, and increased access to education and adequate medical care. Tactics in these campaigns included lawsuits, strikes, and mass rebellions. The most notable example may be the Attica Prison rebellion, which occurred in New York State just weeks after George Jackson was murdered. In protest of the dehumanizing conditions they were subjected to, about 1,500 Attica Prison inmates released a manifesto with their demands and seized control of the prison for four days, beginning on September 9, 1971. Under orders from Governor Nelson Rockefeller, law enforcement authorities stormed Attica on September 12 and killed at least 29 incarcerated individuals. None of the prisoners had guns.

This is the context out of which Black August was born in 1979. It was first celebrated in California’s San Quentin prison, where George Jackson, W.L. Nolen, James McClain, Willam Christmas and Ruchell Magee were all once held. The first Black August commemorated the previous decade of courageous prison struggle, as well as the centuries of Black resistance that preceded and accompanied it.

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Political prisoners and the prison struggle

Observers of Black August call for the immediate release of all political prisoners in the United States. That the US government even holds political prisoners is a fact they attempt to obscure and deny. In reality, dozens of radicals from organizations such as the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army, the American Indian Movement, and MOVE have been imprisoned for decades as a result of their political activity. As Angela Davis, who was at one time the most high profile political prisoner in the US, explains:

“There is a distinct and qualitative difference between one breaking a law for one’s own individual self-interest and violating it in the interests of a class of people whose oppression is expressed either directly or indirectly through that particular law. The former might be called criminal (though in many instances he is a victim), but the latter, as a reformist or revolutionary, is interested in universal social change. Captured, he or she is a political prisoner… In this country, however, where the special category of political prisoners is not officially acknowledged, the political prisoner inevitably stands trial for a specific criminal offense, not for a political act… In all instances, however, the political prisoner has violated the unwritten law which prohibits disturbances and upheavals in the status quo of exploitation and racism.”

Prisons in the United States are a form of social control which serve to maintain the status quo of oppression. Over the last few decades, prisons have become an increasingly important tool for the US ruling class. Prisons not only quarantine revolutionaries, but also those segments of the population who have become increasingly expendable to the capitalist system as globalized production, deindustrialization, and technological automation decrease the overall need for labor-power. These shifts, which began in earnest in the 1970s, have hit Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities the hardest, as exemplified by the sky high unemployment and incarceration rates those communities face. These groups are also historically the most prone to rebellion. Angela Davis noted in 1971 that as a result of these trends, “prisoners—especially Blacks, Chicanos and Puerto Ricans—are increasingly advancing the proposition that they are political prisoners. They contend that they are political prisoners in the sense that they are largely the victims of an oppressive politico-economic order.”

Though that definition of political prisoner is unorthodox, it illustrates the political and economic nature of criminalization. This is why observers of Black August connect the fight to free “revolutionary” political prisoners to the broader struggle against US prisons. Mass incarceration is a symptom of the same system that political prisoners have dedicated their lives towards fighting.

As increasing numbers of the US working class are “lumpenized,” or pushed out of the formal economy and stable employment, the potential significance of political struggle among the unemployed and incarcerated increases. George Jackson wrote in Blood in My Eye that “prisoners must be reached and made to understand that they are victims of social injustice. This is my task working from within. The sheer numbers of the prisoner class and the terms of their existence make them a mighty reservoir of revolutionary potential.”

George Jackson’s own journey is a perfect example of that revolutionary potential. Jackson didn’t arrive in prison a ready-made revolutionary. He had a history of petty crime and was apolitical during his first years in prison. He would have been dismissed by many people in our society as a “thug.” But comrades who knew that he held the potential inherent in every human being found him and took him in. They helped him understand his personal experiences within the context of capitalism and white supremacy. In turn, George Jackson dedicated his life to doing the same for others incarcerated individuals.

Black August today

August, more than any other month, has historically carried the weight of the Black Liberation struggle. Of course, enslaved Africans were first brought to British North America in August 1619. Just over 200 years later, in August 1831, Nat Turner led the most well-known rebellion of enslaved people in US history. This historical significance carried into the 20th century, when both the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the Watts Rebellion—an explosive uprising against racist policing in Los Angeles—occurred in August during the 1960s.

Even today, the month remains significant in the struggle. John Crawford, Michael Brown, and Korryn Gaines were three Black Americans who were murdered in high-profile cases of police brutality; Crawford and Brown in August 2014, and Gaines in August 2016. Their deaths have been part of the impetus for a revived national movement against racist police brutality. Finally, on August 21, 2018, the 47 year anniversary of George Jackson’s death, thousands of U.S. prisoners launched a national prison strike. They engaged in work stoppages, hunger strikes, and other forms of protests. The strike lasted until September 9, 47 years after the Attica Prison Uprising began. Like the Attica prisoners, the 2018 prison strike organizers put forth a comprehensive list of demands that exposed the oppression inherent to the U.S. prison system, and laid out a framework to improve their conditions.

Each of these historical and contemporary events reveal a truth that the Black radical tradition has always recognized: there can be no freedom for the masses of Black people within the white supremacist capitalist system. The fight for liberation is just that: a fight. Since its inception in San Quentin, Black August has been an indispensable part of that fight.

In the current political moment, when some misleaders would have us bury the radical nature of Black resistance and instead prop up reformist politics that glorify celebrity, wealth, and assimilation into the capitalist system, Black August is as important as ever. It connects Black people to our history and serves as a reminder that our liberation doesn’t lie in the hands of Black billionaires, Black police officers, or Black Democratic Party officials. Those “Black faces in high places” simply place a friendly face on the system that oppresses the masses of Black people in the United States and around the world, often distorting symbols of Black resistance along the way. Black liberation lies, as it always has, in the hands of the conscious and organized masses. Study, train, fight, and in the words of George Jackson, “discover your humanity and your love of revolution.”

Artificial Intelligence and the Class Struggle

By Chris Fry

Republished from Fighting Words.

Since the earliest days of the industrial revolution, workers have fought company owners over their use of automated machinery to step up the pace of exploitation.

“Programmable” looms in textile mills allowed owners to hire children to work 12 to 14 hours a day at half pay.

Famously, workers used to throw their wooden shoes called “sabot” into the machine gears to force them to stop, hence the word “sabotage”.

At the Flint sit down strike in 1936, workers barricaded the doors to prevent General Motors from removing the assembly line machinery and setting it up at another location. This tactic helped the workers win the strike and force union recognition.

Today, the focus of automation has moved from mechanical to digital, particularly with the advent of AI (Artificial Intelligence).  Webster’s dictionary provides two related definitions for AI: “1) a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers; and 2) the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior.”

Current AI applications depend on vast databases of different fields of knowledge (e.g., street maps, pictures, languages, literature, etc.) plus powerful computer hardware and software to interact with those databases to allow applications to simulate human intelligence, speech, behavior, appearance and more.

The incredible pace of AI’s increased use has even alarmed some of its developers, so much so that 1,000 of them wrote an open letter calling for a six month pause for AI’s most powerful technologies, as a May 1 New York Times article reports:

In late March, more than 1,000 technology leaders, researchers and other pundits working in and around artificial intelligence signed an open letter warning that A.I. technologies present “profound risks to society and humanity.”

“Powerful A.I. systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable,” the letter said.

“Our ability to understand what could go wrong with very powerful A.I. systems is very weak,” said Yoshua Bengio, a professor and A.I. researcher at the University of Montreal. “So we need to be very careful.”

These systems can generate untruthful, biased and otherwise toxic information. Systems like GPT-4 get facts wrong and make up information, a phenomenon called “hallucination.”

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Automated weapons systems – the Pentagon’s “Terminator” syndrome

The most dangerous application of AI to humanity is its use in modern imperialist warfare. On July 9, PBS held an interview with Paul Scharre, Vice President and Director of Studies at the Center for a New American Security, a war industry “think tank”, who said that the Pentagon is already preparing autonomous weapons in its proxy war in Ukraine:

Well, we’re already seeing drones being used in Ukraine that have all of the components needed to build fully autonomous weapons that can go out over the battlefield, find their own targets, and then all on their own attack those targets without any further human intervention. And that raises very challenging legal, and moral and ethical questions about human control over the use of force of war.

Of course, these “questions” have not stopped the war industry’s head-long rush to implement AI technology. Scharre complained in his interviewer that the Pentagon is moving too slowly:

Well, they’re not keeping up. That’s the short version, they’re woefully behind because the culture is so radically different. And the bottom line is, you can’t buy AI the same way that you might buy an aircraft carrier. The military is moving too slow. It’s mired in cumbersome bureaucracy. And the leadership of the Pentagon has tried to shake things up. They had a major reorganization last year of the people working AI and data and software inside the Defense Department.

But we haven’t seen a lot of changes since then. And so the Pentagon is going to have to find ways to cut through the red tape and move faster if they’re going to stay on top of this very important technology.

In the famous Terminator movies, autonomous robot weapons destroy their own creators before attacking humanity in general. In a recent blog from the British Campaign for Nuclear disarmament, that scenario was described in a U.S. military simulation:

Also in May, the Royal Aeronautical Society hosted the ‘Future Combat Air & Space Capabilities Summit’ conference that brought together over 200 delegates from around the world to discuss the future of military air and space capabilities. A blog reporting on the conference mentioned how AI was a major theme and a presentation from Col Tucker ‘Cinco’ Hamilton, the Chief of AI Test and Operations, USAF, warned against an over reliance on AI systems and noted that they were easy to trick and deceive. They can also create unexpected strategies to achieve their goals, and he noted that in one simulated test an AI-enabled drone was told to identify and destroy ground-based missile sites.

The final firing decision was to be made by a human, but the system had been trained that destruction of the missile site was the top priority. The AI decided therefore that ‘no-go’ decisions from the human were interfering with its higher mission and, in the simulation, it attacked the operator. Hamilton was reported as saying that the human operator would tell it not to kill the threat, “but it got its points by killing that threat. So, what did it do? … It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective.” Although the system was trained not to kill the operator, it started destroying the communication tower used to connect with the drone.

The Pentagon excuses itself for developing these dangerous weapons AI applications by saying that the People’s Republic of China is also developing these systems. But it must be pointed out that it is the U.S. fleet that is parading its nuclear-armed warships just off the coast of China in its arrogant and provocative “freedom of navigation” campaign, giving China no warning time to respond to an attack. U.S. Imperialism has no such justification.

AI and the strike by the Writers and Screen Actors Guilds

Artificial Intelligence is a major issue  in the ongoing strike by writers and movie production workers, including actors, and the entertainment industry’s corporate owners, called the Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Producers (AMPTP). This “alliance” includes such giants as Amazon, Netflix, Paramount, Sony, HBO and The Walt Disney Company, the parent company of ABC News.

This is the first combined strike by these two groups of workers since 1960. The real pay for these workers after inflation has greatly declined in the last decade while the pay for owners and executives has skyrocketed. Along with demanding higher pay, these unions are demanding that AI applications not be used against them to lower their compensation.

AI applications like ChatGPT can “scrape” millions of documents from the internet without the writers’ permission to create new documents, or in this case, new story scripts. The writers call AI “plagiarism machines.”

For the writers, they demand that their writing not be used to “train” AI applications, and they not be tasked to correct AI generated scripts, for which they would receive less pay.

As one striking worker put it:

On Twitter, screenwriter C. Robert Cargill expressed similar concerns, writing, “The immediate fear of AI isn’t that us writers will have our work replaced by artificially generated content. It’s that we will be underpaid to rewrite that trash into something we could have done better from the start. This is what the WGA is opposing, and the studios want.”

The Screen Actors Guild has parallel demands regarding AI as their fellow strikers from the Writers Guild. As ABC News reported on July 19:

In addition to a pay hike, SAG-AFTRA said it proposed a comprehensive set of provisions to grant informed consent and fair compensation when a “digital replica” is made or an actor’s performance is changed using artificial intelligence. The union also said it proposed a comprehensive plan for actors to participate in streaming revenue, claiming the current business model has eroded our residual income for actors.

These AI issues may seem obscure to many members of the working class and oppressed communities. But it is important to remember that artificial intelligence in the hands of the Wall Street billionaires and Pentagon generals will lead to more and more exploitation for our class and increase the chances of a global nuclear catastrophe for our planet.

AI could offer tremendous social benefits, such as medical cures and economic scientific planning, but only if it is controlled by the workers through a socialist system.

Burkina Faso’s New President Condemns Imperialism, Quotes Che Guevara, and Allies with Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba

[Pictured: Burkina Faso’s Revolutionary President, Ibrahim Traoré (center), attends the closing ceremony of the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou on March 4, 2023. OLYMPIA DE MAISMONT / AFP]

By Ben Norton

Republished from Geopolitical Economy Report.

The new president of Burkina Faso, Ibrahim Traoré, has vowed to fight imperialism and neocolonialism, invoking his country’s past revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara and quoting Che Guevara.

The West African nation has also formed close diplomatic ties with the revolutionary governments in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, as well as with NATO’s arch-rival Russia.

In January 2022, a group of nationalist military officers in Burkina Faso toppled the president, Roch Kaboré, a wealthy banker who had fostered close ties with the country’s former colonizer, France, where he was educated.

The military officers declared a government run by what they call the Patriotic Movement for Safeguard and Restoration (MPSR), led by a new president, Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba.

They pledged to seek true independence from French hegemony, condemning the neocolonial policies and economic, political, and military control that Paris still exercises over Francophone West Africa.

Burkina Faso ended its decades-long military agreement with France, expelling the hundreds of French troops that had been in the country for years.

The new president, Damiba, was initially popular. But support waned as he was unable to defeat the deadly Salafi-jihadist insurgents that have destabilized the country.

In September 2022, discontent led to a subsequent coup in Burkina Faso, which brought to power another nationalist military leader named Ibrahim Traoré. He was just 34 at the time, making him one of the world’s youngest leaders.

Traoré has pledged to carry out a “refoundation of the nation” and comprehensive “modernization”, to quell violent extremism, fight corruption, and “totally reform our system of government”.

The charismatic Burkinabè leader frequently ends his speeches with the chant “La patrie ou la mort, nous vaincrons!”, the French translation of the official motto of revolutionary Cuba: “Patria o muerte, venceremos!” – “Homeland or death, we will prevail!”

As president, Traoré has brought back some of the revolutionary ideas of Thomas Sankara.

Sankara was a Marxist Burkinabè military officer and committed pan-Africanist who ascended to power in a 1983 coup.

Sankara launched a socialist revolution, transforming the impoverished country through land reform, infrastructure development, and expansive public health and literacy programs.

Under Sankara’s leadership, Burkina Faso also challenged French neocolonialism and pursued an anti-imperialist foreign policy, forming alliances with revolutionary struggles across the Global South.

These leftist policies were reversed in 1987, when Sankara was overthrown and killed in another coup, led by his former ally Blaise Compaoré – who subsequently moved hard to the right and allied with the United States and France, ruling through rigged elections until 2014.

Today, Ibrahim Traoré is drawing heavily on the legacy of Sankara. He has made it clear that he wants West Africa, and the continent as a whole, to be free of Western neocolonialism.

This July, the Russian government held a Russia-Africa Summit in Saint Petersburg. Traoré was the first African leader to arrive to the conference. There, he delivered a fiery anti-imperialist speech.

“We are the forgotten peoples of the world. And we are here now to talk about the future of our countries, about how things will be tomorrow in the world that we are seeking to build, and in which there will be no interference in our internal affairs”, Traoré said, according to a partial transcript published by Russian state media outlet TASS.

TASS reported:

In his speech, the Burkinabe head of state also focused on sovereignty and the struggle against imperialism. “Why does resource-rich Africa remain the poorest region of the world? We ask these questions and get no answers. However, we have the opportunity to build new relationships that will help us build a better future for Burkina Faso,” the president said. African countries have suffered for decades from a barbaric and brutal form of colonialism and imperialism, which could be called a modern form of slavery, he stressed.

“However, a slave who does not fight [for his freedom] is not worthy of any indulgence. The heads of African states should not behave like puppets in the hands of the imperialists. We must ensure that our countries are self-sufficient, including as regards food supplies, and can meet all of the needs of our peoples. Glory and respect to our peoples; victory to our peoples! Homeland or death!” Traore summed up, quoting the words of legendary Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara. The 35-year-old president of Burkina Faso was attired in a camouflage uniform and red beret during the summit.

On July 29, Traoré had a private meeting in Saint Petersburgh with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In their talks, the Burkinabè leader praised the Soviet Union for defeating Nazism in World War II.

Burkina Faso strengthens ties with Latin American revolutionary movements

The new nationalist government in Burkina Faso has also sought to deepen its ties with revolutionary movements in Latin America.

In May, the West African nation’s prime minister, Apollinaire Joachim Kyélem de Tambèla, traveled to Venezuela.

Tambèla met with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who pledged to “advance in cooperation, solidarity, and growth… building a solid fraternal relation”.

In July, the Burkinabè prime minister traveled to Nicaragua to celebrate the 44th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution.

Tambèla attended the July 19 celebration of the revolution in Managua, at the invitation of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.

Following the September 2022 coup in Burkina Faso, the new president, Traoré, surprised many observers by choosing as his prime minister a longtime follower of Thomas Sankara, Apollinaire Joachim Kyélem de Tambèla.

Tambèla was an ally of Sankara during the Burkinabè revolution. When Sankara came to power in the 1980s, Tambèla organized a solidarity movement and sought international support for the new leftist government.

Tambèla is a pan-Africanist and has been affiliated with communist and left-wing organizations.

Traoré said in a speech in December that Tambèla will help to oversee the process of the “refoundation of the nation“.

By appointing Tambèla as prime minister, Traoré tangibly showed his commitment to reviving the revolutionary legacy of Sankara.

In his remarks at the anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution, Tambèla discussed the historical legacy of solidarity between the revolution in Burkina Faso and that of Nicaragua.

Burkina Faso’s President Thomas Sankara with Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega in 1986.

Tambèla recalled that Sankara visited Nicaragua in 1986, and the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega visited Burkina Faso that same year.

When he spoke at the United Nations General Assembly in 1984, Sankara declared,

I wish also to feel close to my comrades of Nicaragua, whose ports are being mined, whose towns are being bombed and who, despite all, face up with courage and lucidity to their fate. I suffer with all those in Latin America who are suffering from imperialist domination.

In 1984 and 1986, Sankara also visited Cuba, where he met with revolutionary President Fidel Castro.

“For people of my generation, there are things that unite us with Nicaragua, Augusto César Sandino, the Sandinista National Liberation Front and Commander Daniel Ortega”, Burkinabè Prime Minister Tambèla said in his speech in Managua on July 19, 2023.

“We have learned to know Nicaragua. When the liberation struggle began, I was small, but we followed, day by day, the context of Nicaragua’s liberation. I went in July of ’79, and when they entered Managua we were happy, people of my age celebrated that”, he recalled.

And then, when Thomas Sankara came to power, Daniel Ortega and the Sandinista Revolution was something happy for us; we as students studied a lot the history of Nicaragua, we followed its evolution.

Tambèla added that Burkina Faso supported Nicaragua in its International Court of Justice case against the United States. Washington was found guilty of illegally sponsoring far-right “Contra” death squads, which waged a terror war against the leftist government, as well as putting mines in Nicaragua’s ports. (Yet, although Nicaragua won the case in 1986, the U.S. government has still to this day refused to pay the Central American nation a single cent of the reparations that it legally owes it.)

“Nicaragua’s struggle is also that of our people”, Tambèla stressed.

In his July 19 speech, the Burkinabè prime minister also sent special greetings to the diplomatic delegations from Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran.

“We have very close relations with Cuba”, Tambèla added.

President Fidel Castro has been and was a very important person for the revolution in Africa; we have excellent memories, both of Cuba and of President Fidel Castro.

Ben Norton is an investigative journalist and analyst. He is the founder and editor of Geopolitical Economy Report, and is based in Latin America. (Publicaciones en español aquí.)