Romania: Thirty Years Removed From Socialism

By Patricia Gorky

Originally published at Liberation News.

Thirty years ago, the socialist government of Romania was overthrown in a military coup d’etat.

Industrialization had transformed the lives of millions of Romanians during the country’s socialist period. But the later years were marked by strict rationing and frequent shortages as the government sought to pay off its foreign debt. Romanian people hoped that their lives would improve after 1989. But life today is much worse than even the most economically-deprived times of the 1980s. A 2010 poll revealed that 63 percent of Romanians say that life was better under socialism.

Romania’s capitalist politicians search everywhere for a scapegoat to evade self-incrimination. The Financial Times states that “Romania has evolved into a democracy and strengthened ties with the West, joining EU and NATO. But its transition was always incomplete.” What is meant by “incomplete” is never defined.

Communists, and executed President Nicolae Ceausescu in particular, are the usual targets. As part of the ongoing demonization campaign, former military prosecutor Dan Voinea made a ludicrous statement to the Financial Times: “The communists remain in power until this very day, but without the names.”

A Marxist approach requires us to understand the struggle between the working and owning classes. When the communists came to power, they dispossessed the wealthy nobility, clerics and bourgeoisie of their property. Land was collectivized, as well as all major industries, and the economy was centrally planned. Millions of dwellings were built for workers, and everyone had the right to a job.

The socialist Romanian government transformed a largely agrarian society, and made great gains in industrial production. What’s more, they accomplished this feat within mere decades while under constant attack by the West. The capitalist account of Romania’s history ignores the vast achievements of socialism only to focus on its problems and shortcomings, many of which originated from the global situation at the time.

Romania’s socialist origins: Armed insurrection spurs Red Army’s arrival

Unlike the popular revolutions in Russia, China, Cuba and others that brought communists to power, the key factor to Romania’s socialist transformation was the victory of the Soviet Union in World War II.

During the war Romania had been ruled by a fascist military dictatorship in an alliance with Nazi Germany. General Ion Antonescu was not a passive supporter of Nazi Germany. His support was originally based on the fascist Iron Guard. Antonescu sent hundreds of thousands of ethnic minorities to their deaths in concentration camps. This included Jewish and Roma people, as well as communists. Romania’s military was a key participant in the fascist invasion of the Soviet Union, which eventually took 27 million Soviet lives.

As the war went on, internal resistance to the dictatorship grew even as communists were driven underground. The Soviet Union began to turn the tide of war, delivering defeat after defeat to the fascist alliance. On Aug 23, 1944, a broad anti-fascist coalition led by the Communist Party arrested the dictator-general and locked him in a safe. This insurrection sped the Red Army’s advance into Bucharest days later. The Romanian army switched sides in the war and now fought as an ally of the Soviet Union.

Like so many other countries in Eastern Europe, post-war governments were primarily shaped by the militaries that liberated them from fascism – the Soviet Union in the East and the U.S. / Britain in the West. The U.S. and British governments made clear that they would tolerate no governments other than those specifically chosen by the imperialists in their “sphere.” This was evident in the cases of Italy and Greece in particular, where the British military directly intervened to crush the communists, who had led the partisan resistance to fascism and were already in control of many areas.

But instead of a capitalist government, the Soviet Union oversaw the formation of socialist governments in Eastern Europe that would serve the interests of the working class.

The Soviet Union had been pushed to the verge of annihilation not just by the German military, but by the resources and industrial capacity of essentially all of continental Europe. The Nazi war machine had relied on the militaries of Romania, Italy, Hungary, Slovakia and Croatia, as well as key agricultural and oil output from Romania. Fascist resurgence was a possibility too deadly for the Soviet Union to allow.

After years of fascist dictatorship, there was no pre-war “democratic” government to go back to. The largely-discredited monarchy and bourgeois parties had the support of the West, but these very parties had been responsible for Romania’s fascist takeover.

Key support from the Soviets, whose Red Army remained in Romania after the defeat of the fascists, was given to the National Democratic Front, a coalition led by the Romanian Communist Party (PCR).

The Communist Party’s general secretary, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, had been a railway worker and PCR militant. He was born in 1901, and began working at the age of 11 years old, a situation all too common for youths of his time. For his part in organizing strikes in 1933 he was sentenced to 12 years’ hard labor. While in prison he was elected to the central committee of the PCR.

Nicolae Ceausescu, another party leader, was born in 1918, and was a shoemaker’s apprentice in Bucharest from the age of 10. He began revolutionary activity early, and was in and out of prison organizing strikes and sabotage against the Nazi-allied government. At age 22, Ceausescu was in Jilava prison when it was invaded by members of the fascist Iron Guard, who slaughtered 64 of the other prisoners before they were stopped.

In 1946, nearly 7 million people voted for the National Democratic bloc. This election had the highest number of participants in the country’s history. The new government forced the abdication of the reactionary monarchy. Two years later the PCR would merge with the social democrats to form the Romanian Workers’ Party (PMR).

‘Not just a dream’; industrializing an agrarian society

The tasks of the country were enormous. Industrial output was halved by the war and the population had been reduced from nearly 20 million to less than 16 million. More than 700,000 had died. The vast majority of the people were peasants who worked on farms, and had a life expectancy of 42 years.

At once the government set upon an electrification plan, and laid the foundation for the development of industry. Farmland owned by a small, rich minority was confiscated and collectivized. Extravagant castles and mansions were seized from the parasitic nobility and used for museums and other public institutions.

Four decades of socialist development would transform Romania from a country that imported 90 percent of machinery to a country that manufactured its own. Social services and education radically improved health: life expectancy increased by 30 years. More than 5 million jobs were created, and industrial output rose by more than 650 percent since 1950.

Housing was a major priority for the state. By 1980, the socialist government had built 4.6 million homes for people. Scanteia newspaper reported how a communist of the old underground “felt the need to touch and caress the bricks of the first apartment blocs to be built for steelworkers, so he could convince himself that they were not just a dream”.

Pregnant women and mothers were accorded rights that even bourgeois reviewers noted as “comprehensive and generous.” Women were given fully-paid maternity leave of 112 days. And with no loss to benefits, “mothers were permitted to take a leave of absence from work to raise a child to the age of 6, or they could request half-time work.”

Still a developing country suffering from centuries of underdevelopment, Romania strove to become a medium-developed country and narrow the gap between it and the West. For Gheorghiu-Dej and Ceausescu after him, lessening ties with Moscow was seen as necessary to attain that goal.

Division in the socialist camp

After the war the Soviet Union imposed war reparations on the country (along with other formerly fascist states) to repay part of the immense damage caused by the war. Although the aggregate reparations amounted to just one-fifth the actual cost of destruction suffered by the Soviet Union, these reparations strained the fragile economy of Romania. This likely did not improve the public view of the USSR. There were still Soviet troops in Romania, and Moscow exercised a direct intervention in the economy through the Sovrom joint-stock partnerships over Romania’s major industries.

Stalin’s death in 1953 and the subsequent shifts in the Soviet Union impelled the divide further. Gheorghiu-Dej and Ceausescu negotiated the buyout of the Sovroms at great cost.

But in 1955, Romania joined the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, also known as the Warsaw Pact, with the USSR and other countries of the eastern European socialist bloc.

At the same time, Romania’s leaders began to establish economic ties with capitalist and imperialist countries in order to lessen ties with the Soviet Union. In 1958 with Chinese support, Gheorghiu-Dej negotiated the removal of Soviet soldiers from Romanian soil, the only East European country to do so. As the Sino-Soviet split divided the Socialist Bloc between Moscow and Beijing, Bucharest maintained neutrality.

In 1964 the PMR adopted Gheorghiu-Dej’s theses that emphasized national independence and sovereignty, equal rights, mutual advantage, non-interference in internal affairs, and observance of territorial integrity. When Gheorghiu-Dej died in 1965, Ceausescu redoubled the steps towards nationalism. The PMR renamed itself the Romanian Communist Party (PCR), and the country became the Socialist Republic of Romania to signify a step forward.

1970s and 1980s; ‘Maverick’ Romania turns West

The 1970s was a period of tremendous growth and development for the country. Vast natural resources paired with Western trade concessions and foreign credit brought Romania’s most prosperous years since World War II.

But in many ways the country’s leadership held positions that were reactionary and opportunistic. The “independence” put forward by Gheorghiu-Dej and later Ceausescu became more and more allied with U.S. imperialism. Romania recognized West Germany, and became the only socialist country to maintain diplomatic relations with Israel. When the CIA overthrew the democratically-elected socialist president of Chile, many socialist countries severed diplomatic relations. Yet Romania maintained them.

These steps convinced the U.S. government that Ceausescu could be influenced and worked with to a certain extent. He was labelled a “maverick” by the U.S. press and internal CIA documents. They eagerly sought to distance Romania from the Soviet Bloc. In 1969, U.S. President Richard Nixon made a state visit to Romania, the first visit of a U.S. president to a socialist country, three years before his famed visit to China.

Romania would go on to join imperialist financial agreements including taking loans from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The U.S. welcomed each of these moves, but other than high interest loans they gave Romania nothing of substance in return. What the U.S. really wanted was the overturn of the progressive social system and the return of capitalist exploitation and oppression.

But the coup d’etat of 1989 could not have succeeded without an accumulation of errors on the part of the country’s leaders. The government’s vacillation between the imperialist and socialist camps was one such example.

The late 1970s and early 1980s ushered in a series of crises that rocked the Romanian economy. A devastating earthquake hit Bucharest in 1977, followed by the global economic crisis. For much of the 1970s the Romanian government had been able to export key commodities like oil at high prices. But when prices slumped, suddenly Romania lost a significant source of revenue. Foreign credit that had previously offered an attractive path to development became an obstacle to the country’s survival.

Romania borrowed from the IMF, whose loan terms are designed to enslave governments in a cycle of debt by imposing crippling interest rates and severe austerity on the people. They remain a key tool for imperialists today that limit a country’s development. For the Romanian government, foreign debt had become a trap from which they desperately worked to extricate themselves.

Beginning in the early 1980s, the Romanian government rationed electricity, heat, gasoline and food – the first time since the early postwar years. Agricultural goods were exported to pay down the loan, rendering certain food items like meat and milk scarce. People arrived home in the cold winter only to have the heat shut off after a few hours. Even radio and television transmissions were restricted to preserve energy.

These were difficult years for the Romanian people. Other countries like Poland and Hungary which had taken out similar loans were not even able to pay the interest. Romania paid back the principal as well.

Meanwhile the capitalist reforms in the Soviet Union gave fodder to reactionary elements across Eastern Europe. At the same time, the West’s cultural cold war continued, particularly enticing young people in the socialist camp with pro-capitalist propaganda.

December 1989 and the military coup d’etat

By April 1989, the Romanian government declared the country free of Western debt. The Grand National Assembly enacted a ban on taking on any further foreign credits. Yet the rationing of food and energy continued. Perhaps this was an effort to impel the economy further, but these austerity measures were self-defeating.

These decisions made by the country’s leaders could only have further isolated much of the working class.

The imperialist media seized upon any sign of discontent in the Socialist Bloc. So did the U.S. government, which had financed counterrevolutionary organizations throughout Eastern Europe since the end of World War II. The imperialists carefully studied each manifestation. A 1987 classified CIA document outlined a number of possible situations that would lead to the downfall of the Romanian government given the prospect of the coming winter. Stunningly, one of the scenarios in this “winter thinkpiece” would play out almost exactly as occurred two years later: In this scenario, a group of striking workers would establish a national organization to coordinate protests. “Pragmatic” opponents of the Ceausescus in leadership would remove him from office, with support of the Securitate or military. The new government would ease restrictions on food and energy to placate most workers.

Instead of a strike in a major factory, the disturbances would arise around a reactionary Hungarian cleric in the western city of Timisoara. And one such “Council of National Salvation” was formed not from any workers’ group but from the top military brass, who began operating as a council six months before the coup.

Timisoara is a cosmopolitan city in western Romania near the Hungarian border. In 1989 there were 1.7 million Hungarians who lived in the region. Bourgeois elements in Hungary long promoted counterrevolutionary propaganda, including alleged grievances against the Hungarian minorities.

The eviction of a counterrevolutionary cleric on Dec. 16 sparked protests in Timisoara. Confrontations ensued between rightwing protestors and security forces, but there were few casualties. There was no massacre as was repeated by the imperialist press. The New York Times published hysterical reports of “mass graves in Timisoara” holding thousands of people, and the Hungarian media claimed that 60,000 had been killed. All of this was later revealed to be false.

Protests grew around the country. On Dec. 20 the military, foreshadowing its coming betrayal, withdrew from Timisoara. This was a boon to the counterrevolution; mobs of people ransacked the local Communist Party headquarters. The unrest was serious enough for Ceausescu to cut short a state visit to Iran and return to the capital.

Up to this time, the clandestine counterrevolutionary Council of National Salvation had been operating for 6 months prior. Their pre-December activities are not known, and there were a number of such councils. The most prominent included a former ambassador to the United States; a disgraced PCR politician who would become the new government’s president; and at least 4 military generals, including a retired general who had made previous attempts against Ceausescu.

On Dec. 21, Ceausescu appeared before a mass rally in Bucharest. He announced considerable increases in the minimum salary, child subsidies and pensions. He denounced the actions in Timisoara of a group who wanted to place the country again under foreign domination. In what would be prophetic words, Ceausescu spoke: “Some would like again to reintroduce unemployment, to reduce the living standards of the people, and in order to dismantle Romania, to dismember Romania, to put our independent people and nation in danger.”

His speech was interrupted by protestors, and his disoriented response to the heckling was disproportionately publicized by the imperialist media. People remained in the streets, and clashes with the authorities took place. Imperialist propaganda outlets like Radio Free Europe broadcasted false reports of a “massacre” in Bucharest, and workers from around the city poured into the streets the next day. Many of the people protesting had legitimate grievances that were built up over years of austerity.

But the protests quickly devolved into fascist violence when the military defected. Rightwing mobs set fire to the National Archives and the university library. Crowds attacked Ceausescu’s home, forcing him and his wife Elena to flee the capital in a helicopter. Their pilot abandoned them on a country road where they were soon captured.

The military-led NSF seized control of the television stations and declared themselves the new government.

Military brass, a historical source of counterrevolution, were at odds with Ceausescu’s plan to integrate them into civilian work. “For years,” wrote rightwing academic Vladimir Tismaneanu in the New York Times, “troops have been forced to engage in such demeaning activities as raising crops and supplying manual labor for grandiose Ceausescu projects.”

Long held at bay by the socialist government, the terror of the bourgeoisie raised its head. On Dec. 25, 1989, a secret military tribunal charged Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu with fabricated crimes that included “genocide” and “destroying the country’s economic and spiritual values.” Moments later as he was led to his death, Nicolae Ceausescu sang the Internationale. He and his wife were executed by firing squad.

Chaos ensued in the following days. The entire leadership of the Communist Party was imprisoned. Communists were disappeared and even lynched in the streets. Some in the Securitate, whose origin came from the peasantry, put up an armed resistance to the military coup. They were hunted and executed.

Privatization and poverty, the American way

Within days the “socialist” NSF outlawed the Communist Party. Addendums to foreign treaties that called for states to guarantee full employment, housing and education were abolished.

The U.S. government was quick to intervene. As early as January 1990, Washington instructed its Bucharest envoy “to take preliminary actions to encourage the process [of privatization].” Special attention was given to the bourgeois media. The U.S. Embassy issued an urgent request for up-to-date video equipment for the television station. Prior anti-communist laws prevented the U.S. government from directly providing the equipment.

Embassy cables gloated over how the counterrevolution “has made it possible to pursue, in numerous heretofore unthinkable ways, our fundamental policy goals in Romania.”

One of those goals was the domination of Romanian polity by U.S. legal norms. The Embassy’s work plan included distributing 10,000 copies of the U.S. constitution in the Romanian language to all members of the new parliament after the elections. U.S. legal experts would “advise” Romania in the creation of the new constitution and legal codes. Newly-minted Romanian politicians would be exposed to representatives from U.S. political parties and private businesses.

Trade and economic meetings would convince Romanian officials that the economic benefits the U.S. can offer were contingent on the new government adhering to the American view of elections and the upholding of so-called individual rights to exploit the collective.

The U.S. military, which already had planned military-to-military contacts, would transform the Romanian armed forces into a “professional and non-political” corps based on a “commander – commanded” relationship.

Overnight, independent and sovereign Romania became a U.S. neocolony. A new law approved 100 percent foreign ownership of investments. State-owned enterprises, which had fueled the country’s generous social services, were sold to foreign capitalists.

Gone was the law banning foreign debt. Negotiations with the IMF began in 1993, with the requirement for the Romanian government to enter its currency into the world market, making Romania more susceptible to the tumult of global capitalism.

By 1994, half of the population lived on less than $160 a month. Price controls over food were removed. Inflation hit 300 percent. Unemployment, which previously did not exist, haunted millions. In desperation, 4 million people turned to a pyramid scheme called Caritas. The pyramid scheme was allowed to operate by the new government, and millions of families lost a collective $1 billion. The leu, Romania’s national currency, sank to 1,748 to one dollar.

Alleged discrimination of ethnic minorities was used to topple the socialist governments. But the new capitalist governments relied on the support of the racist right wing. Fascist violence against Roma, ethnic Hungarians and Jewish people erupted across the country. In a 1993 New York Times article, Henry Kamm detailed the quickly emerging racist attacks on the Roma. Using a slur for the Roma people, Kamm wrote: “The millions of Gypsies of Eastern Europe have emerged as great losers from the overthrow of Communism… Many of the economic and social protections that Gypsies enjoyed in Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia collapsed, permitting a revival of the open prejudice and persecution that have marked the history of the Roma, as Gypsies prefer to call themselves…”

Capitalism restored, social conditions deteriorate

The coup plotters’ aim, despite their claims of “democracy” and “freedom,” was never to improve the standard of living for Romanian workers.

As difficult as the years of rationing were, the quality of life for Romanians today is much worse.

More than 85 percent of all individual work contracts in Romania pay less than the minimum needed for survival, even as costs continue to climb. Many have left the country in search of an economic future. Since 1989 Romania experienced the highest levels of emigration of all European countries: 3.5 million people have fled, more than 5 times the number of deaths in World War II. Today, the diaspora represents one-fifth of the country’s own labor force.

Foreign corporations reap mega-profits from the artificially low wages of Romania. The restoration of capitalism promised wealth and freedom for the country, yet today Romania remains among the poorest countries in the European Union. Romania’s economy and natural resources have been completely opened to foreign capital for exploitation. Almost every industrial measure peaked in mid to late 1980s, and then bottomed out after the 1990s.

The Romanian government today is loyal to U.S. empire. There are now U.S. military bases in the countryside and in Romania’s principal ports. When the U.S. demanded that all NATO countries contribute 2 percent of their GDP, Romania was the first to raise military spending. By U.S. accounts, actions taken by the Romanian government in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks to support U.S. interests have been “almost too numerous to list”.

When the government was toppled in 1989, many Romanian people looked to the U.S. government as a source of hope. They were convinced that the years of austerity were finally over. Some believed that now, they too would have access to abundant consumer goods and an American lifestyle.

This false image of abundance was intentionally cultivated by the imperialists to weaken the Socialist Bloc. If the imperialists could convince workers in socialist states that the U.S. was the “land of opportunity,” they could seriously weaken the stability of socialism. Defeat of the socialists in the cultural war was an important factor in the overthrow of socialist governments.

Faced with the daunting task of industrializing agrarian societies, socialist governments in addition had to produce consumer goods for its population while under technological and economic embargo, and under constant threat of nuclear annihilation. Furthermore, they had to do this within the span of just decades. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, had enriched themselves through centuries of capitalist exploitation, including the enslavement of millions of Africans and the Indigenous.

History did not cease in 1989. Capitalism’s restoration in Romania and the former Socialist Bloc has brought with it all its inherent contradictions. It is bound to reignite mass struggle. The words of the socialist Internationale, written 150 years ago and translated into nearly every language, continue to inspire the fight of the oppressed for emancipation: “The earth shall rise on new foundations; we have been naught, we shall be all.”

Select Bibliography

Marcy, Sam. “Reactionary Coup in Romania”. 4 Jan. 1990. Workers’ World. www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/marcy/1990/sm900104.html. Accessed 16 Dec 2019

Oțetea, Prof. Andrei. A Concise History of Romania. English edition edited by Andrew MacKenzie. London, Unified Printers and Publishers. 1985.

Rotaru, Constantin. Socialism și capitalism în teorie și practică fiscală. Editura Karta-Graphic. Ploiești, 2011.

Serban, Rodica. “A Grand, Historic Accomplishment of the People, for the People––New Modern Homes”. Scînteia. 7 Apr 1989. Quoted in JPRS Report: Eastern Europe. Foreign Broadcast Information Service.

Capitalism and Mental Health

By David Matthews

Originally published at Monthly Review.

A mental-health crisis is sweeping the globe. Recent estimates by the World Health Organization suggest that more than three hundred million people suffer from depression worldwide. Furthermore, twenty-three million are said to experience symptoms of schizophrenia, while approximately eight hundred thousand individuals commit suicide each year.1 Within the monopoly-capitalist nations, mental-health disorders are the leading cause of life expectancy decline behind cardiovascular disease and cancer.2 In the European Union, 27.0 percent of the adult population between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five are said to have experienced mental-health complications.3 Moreover, in England alone, the predominance of poor mental health has gradually increased over the last two decades. The most recent National Health Service Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey illustrates that in 2014, 17.5 percent of the population over the age of sixteen suffered from varying forms of depression or anxiety, compared to 14.1 percent in 1993. Additionally, the number of individuals whose experiences were severe enough to warrant intervention rose from 6.9 percent to 9.3 percent.4

In capitalist society, biological explanations dominate understandings of mental health, infusing professional practice and public awareness. Emblematic of this is the theory of chemical imbalances in the brain—focusing on the operation of neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine—which has gripped popular and academic consciousness despite remaining largely unsupported.5 Moreover, reflecting the popularity of genetic reductionism within the biological sciences, there has been an effort to identify genetic abnormalities as another cause of mental-health disorders.6 Nonetheless, explanations based on genomics have also failed to generate conclusive evidence.7 While potentially offering illuminating insights into poor mental well-being in specific cases, biological interpretations are far from sufficient on their own. What is abundantly clear is the existence of significant social patterns that elucidate the impossibility of reducing poor mental health to biological determinism.8

The intimate relationship between mental health and social conditions has largely been obscured, with societal causes interpreted within a bio-medical framework and shrouded with scientific terminology. Diagnoses frequently begin and end with the individual, identifying bioessentialist causes at the expense of examining social factors. However, the social, political, and economic organization of society must be recognized as a significant contributor to people’s mental health, with certain social structures being more advantageous to the emergence of mental well-being than others. As the basis on which society’s superstructural formation is erected, capitalism is a major determinant of poor mental health. As the Marxist professor of social work and social policy Iain Ferguson has argued, “it is the economic and political system under which we live—capitalism—which is responsible for the enormously high levels of mental-health problems which we see in the world today.” The alleviation of mental distress is only possible “in a society without exploitation and oppression.”9

In what follows, I briefly sketch the state of mental health in advanced capitalism, using Britain as an example and utilizing the psychoanalytical framework of Marxist Erich Fromm, which emphasizes that all humans have certain needs that must be fulfilled in order to ensure optimal mental health. Supporting Ferguson’s assertion, I argue that capitalism is crucial to determining the experience and prevalence of mental well-being, as its operations are incompatible with true human need. This sketch will include a depiction of the politically conscious movement of users of mental-health services that has emerged in Britain in recent years to challenge biological explanations of poor mental health and to call for locating inequality and capitalism at the heart of the problem.

Mental Health and Monopoly Capitalism

In the final chapters of Monopoly Capital, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy made explicit the consequences of monopoly capitalism for psychological well-being, arguing that the system fails “to provide the foundations of a society capable of promoting the healthy and happy development of its members.”10 Exemplifying the widespread irrationality of monopoly capitalism, they illustrated its degrading nature. It is only for a fortunate minority that work can be considered pleasurable, while for the majority it is a thoroughly unsatisfactory experience. Attempting to avoid work at all costs, leisure frequently fails to offer any consolation, as it is also rendered meaningless. Rather than being an opportunity to fulfill passions, Baran and Sweezy argued that leisure has become largely synonymous with idleness. The desire to do nothing is reflected in popular culture, with books, television, and films inducing a state of passive enjoyment rather than demanding intellectual energies.11 The purpose of both work and leisure, they claimed, largely coalesces around increasing consumption. No longer consumed for their use, consumer goods have become established markers of social prestige, with consumption as a means to express an individual’s social position. Consumerism, however, ultimately breeds dissatisfaction as the desire to substitute old products for new ones turns maintaining one’s position in society into a relentless pursuit of an unobtainable standard. “While fulfilling the basic needs of survival,” Baran and Sweezy argued, both work and consumption “increasingly lose their inner content and meaning.”12 The result is a society characterized by emptiness and degradation. With little likelihood of the working class instigating revolutionary action, the potential reality is a continuation of the “present process of decay, with the contradictions between the compulsions of the system and the elementary needs of human nature becoming ever more insupportable,” resulting in “the spread of increasingly severe psychic disorders.”13 In the current era of monopoly capitalism, this contradiction remains as salient as ever. Modern monopoly-capitalist society continues to be characterized by an incompatibility between, on the one hand, capitalism’s ruthless pursuit of profit and, on the other, the essential needs of people. As a result, the conditions required for optimum mental health are violently undermined, with monopoly-capitalist society plagued by neuroses and more severe mental-health problems.

Erich Fromm: Mental Health and Human Nature

Baran and Sweezy’s understanding of the relationship between monopoly capitalism and the individual was significantly influenced by psychoanalysis. For one, they made references to the centrality of latent energies such as libidinous drives and the need for their gratification. Moreover, they accepted the Freudian notion that social order requires the repression of libidinal energies and their sublimation for socially acceptable purposes.14 Baran himself wrote on psychoanalysis. He had been associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in the early 1930s and was directly influenced by the work of Eric Fromm and Herbert Marcuse.15 It is within this broad framework that a theory of mental health can be identified in Baran and Sweezy’s analysis, with the contradictions between capitalism and human need expressing themselves chiefly through the repression of human energies. It was Fromm, most notably, who was to develop a unique Marxist psychoanalytical position that remains relevant to understanding mental health in the current era of monopoly capitalism. And it was from this that Baran, in particular, was to draw.16

While making explicit the importance of Sigmund Freud, Fromm acknowledged his greater debt to Karl Marx, considering him the preeminent intellectual.17 Accepting the Freudian premise of the unconscious and the repression and modification of unconscious drives, Fromm nonetheless recognized the failure of orthodox Freudianism to integrate a deeper sociological understanding of the individual into its analysis. Turning to Marxism, he constructed a theory of the individual whose consciousness is shaped by the organization of capitalism, with unconscious drives repressed or directed toward acceptable social behavior. While Marx never produced a formal psychology, Fromm considered that the foundations of one resided in the concept of alienation.18 For Marx, alienation was an illustration of capitalism’s mortifying physical and mental impact on humans.19 At its heart, it demonstrates the estrangement people feel from both themselves and the world around them, including fellow humans. Alienation’s specific value for understanding mental health lies in illustrating the distinction that emerges under capitalism between human existence and essence. For Marx, capitalism separates individuals from their essence as a consequence of their existence. This principle permeated Fromm’s psychoanalytic framework, which maintained that, under capitalism, humans become divorced from their own nature.

Human nature, Marx argued, consists of dual qualities and we “must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch.”20 There are needs that are fixed, such as hunger and sexual desires, and then there are relative desires that originate from the historical and cultural organization of society.21 Inspired by Marx, Fromm argued that human nature is inherent in all individuals, but that its visible manifestation is largely dependent on the social context. It is untenable to assume “man’s mental constitution is a blank piece of paper, on which society and culture write their text, and which has no intrinsic quality of its own.… The real problem is to infer the core common to the whole human race from the innumerable manifestations of human nature.”22 Fromm recognized the importance of basic biological needs, such as hunger, sleep, and sexual desires, as constituting aspects of human nature that must be satisfied before all else.23 Nonetheless, as humans evolved, they eventually reached a point of transcendence, from the animal to the uniquely human.24 As humans found it increasingly easier to satisfy their basic biological needs, largely as a result of their mastery over nature, the urgency of their satisfaction gradually became less important, with the evolutionary process allowing for the development of more complex intellectual and emotional capacities.25 As such, an individual’s most significant drives were no longer rooted in biology, but in the human condition.26

Considering it imperative to construct an understanding of human nature against which mental health could be evaluated, Fromm identified five central characteristics of the human condition. The first is relatedness. Aware of being alone in the world, humans strenuously endeavor to establish ties of unity. Without this, it is intolerable to exist as an individual.27 Second, the dominance of humans over nature allows for an easier satisfaction of biological needs and for the emergence of human aptitudes, contributing to the development of creativity. Humans developed the ability to express a creative intelligence, transforming this into a core human characteristic that requires fulfillment.28 Third, humans, psychologically, require rootedness and a sense of belonging. With birth severing ties of natural belonging, individuals constantly pursue rootedness to feel at one with the world. For Fromm, a genuine sense of belonging could only be achieved in a society built on solidarity.29 Fourth, humans crucially desire and develop a sense of identity. All individuals must establish a sense of self and an awareness of being a specific person.30 Fifth, it is psychologically necessary for humans to develop a framework through which to make sense of the world and their own experiences.31

Representing what Fromm argued to be a universal human nature, the satisfaction of these drives is essential for optimum mental well-being. As he contended, “mental health is achieved if man develops into full maturity according to the characteristics and laws of human nature. Mental illness consists in the failure of such development.”32 Rejecting a psychoanalytical understanding that emphasizes the satisfaction of the libido and other biological drives, mental health, he claimed, is inherently associated with the satisfaction of needs considered uniquely human. Under capitalism, however, the full satisfaction of the human psyche is thwarted. For Fromm, the origins of poor mental health are located in the mode of production and the corresponding political and social structures, whose organization impedes the full satisfaction of innate human desires.33 The effects of this on mental health, Fromm argued, are that “if one of the basic necessities has found no fulfillment, insanity is the result; if it is satisfied but in an unsatisfactory way…neurosis…is the consequence.”34

Work and Creative Repression

Like Marx, Fromm asserted that the instinctual desire to be creative had the greatest chance of satisfaction through work. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx strenuously argued that labor should be a fulfilling experience, allowing individuals to be freely expressive, both physically and intellectually. Workers should be able to relate to the products of their labor as meaningful expressions of their essence and inner creativity. Labor under capitalism, however, is an alienating experience that estranges individuals from its process. Alienated labor, Marx contended, is when “labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being…therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind.”35 Under capitalism, great efforts are made to ensure human energy is channeled into labor, even though it is often miserable and tedious.36 Rather than satisfying the need to express creativity, it frequently represses it through the monotonous and grueling obligation of wage labor.37

In Britain, there is widespread dissatisfaction with work. One recent survey of employees conducted in early 2018 estimated that 47 percent would consider looking for a new job during the coming year. Of the reasons given, a paucity of opportunities for career advancement was prominent, along with not enjoying work and employees feeling like they do not make a difference.38 These reasons begin to illustrate an entrenched alienation from the labor process. Many people experience work as having little meaning and little opportunity for personal fulfillment and expression.

From such evidence, a claim can be made that in Britain—as in many monopoly-capitalist nations—a substantial portion of the labor force feels disconnected from their work and does not consider it a creative experience. For Fromm, the realization of creative needs are essential to being mentally healthy. Having been endowed with reason and imagination, humans cannot exist as passive beings, but must act as creators.39 Nevertheless, it is clear that work under capitalism does not achieve this. Considerable evidence suggests that far from being beneficial to mental health, work is actually detrimental to it. Although the exact figures are likely to remain unknown due to the intangibility of such experiences, it can be inferred that, for many members of the labor force, it is commonplace for work to provoke general unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and despondency. Moreover, more severe mental-health conditions, such as stress, depression, and anxiety, are increasingly emerging as the consequences of discontentment at work. In 2017–18, such conditions constituted 44 percent of all work-related ill health in Britain, and 57 percent of all workdays lost to ill health.40 An additional study in 2017 estimated that 60 percent of British employees had suffered work-related poor mental health in the past year, with depression and anxiety being some of the most common manifestations.41

Rather than a source of enjoyment, the nature and organization of work under capitalism clearly does not act as a satisfactory means to fulfill an individual’s creativity. As Baran and Sweezy argued, “the worker can find no satisfaction in what his efforts accomplish.”42 Instead, work alienates individuals from a fundamental aspect of their nature and, in so doing, stimulates the emergence of varying negative states of mental health. With around half of the labor force in Britain having experienced work-related mental-health issues, and many more likely feeling a general sense of despondency, there exists what Fromm termed a socially patterned defect.43 It is no exaggeration to argue that the deterioration of mental well-being is a standard response to wage labor in monopoly-capitalist societies. Negative feelings become commonplace and, to varying degrees, are acknowledged as normal reactions to work. With the exception of severe mental-health disorders, many forms of mental distress that develop in response are taken for granted and not considered legitimate problems. As such, the degradation of mental well-being is normalized.

Meaningful Association and Loneliness

For Fromm, there existed an inherent relationship between positive mental health, meaningful personal relationships in the form of both love and friendship, and expressions of solidarity. Acutely aware of their “aloneness” in the world, individuals attempt to escape the psychological prison of isolation.44 Nonetheless, the operation of capitalism is such that it frequently prevents the satisfactory fulfillment of this need. The inadequacy of social relationships within monopoly-capitalist societies was identified by Baran and Sweezy. They argued a frivolity had descended over much social interaction, as it became typified by superficial conversation and a falsity of pleasantness. The emotional commitments required for friendship and the intellectual efforts needed for conversation were made largely absent as social interaction became increasingly about acquaintances and small talk.45 Contemporary monopoly capitalism is no exception. While difficulties in measuring its existence and nature abound, arguably one the most widespread neuroses to plague present-day capitalism is loneliness. It is increasingly considered a major public-health concern, perhaps most symbolically evident with the establishment of a Minister for Loneliness in 2018 by the British government.

As a neurosis, loneliness has debilitating consequences. Individuals may resort to alcohol and drug abuse to numb their misery, while persistent experience increases blood pressure and stress, as well as negatively impacts cardiovascular and immune-system functioning.46 A mental-health condition in its own right, loneliness exacerbates additional mental-health problems and is often the root cause of depression.47 In 2017, it was estimated that 13 percent of individuals in Britain had no close friends, with a further 17 percent having average- to poor-quality friendships. Moreover, 45 percent claimed to have felt lonely at least once in the previous two weeks, with 18 percent frequently feeling lonely. Although a close, loving relationship acts as a barrier to loneliness, 47 percent of people living with a partner reported feeling lonely at least some of the time and 16 percent often.48 Reflecting the dominant scientific constructs of mental health, recent efforts have been made to identify genetic causes of loneliness, with environmental conditions said to exacerbate an individual’s predisposition to it.49 However, even the most biologically deterministic analyses concede that social circumstances are important to its development. Nonetheless, few studies attempt to seriously illustrate the extent to which capitalism is a contributing factor.

Individualism has always reigned supreme as a principle upon which the ideal capitalist society is constructed. Individual effort, self-reliance, and independence are endorsed as the hallmarks of capitalism. As understood today, the notion of the individual has its origins in the feudal mode of production, and its emphasis on greater collectivist methods of labor—such as within the family or village—being surrendered to the compulsion of individuals, who have to be free to sell their labor power on the market. Prior to capitalism, life was conducted more as part of a wider social group, while the transition to capitalism developed and allowed for the emergence of the isolated, private individual and the nuclear, increasingly privatized family.50 Fromm contended that the promotion and celebration of the virtues of the individual means that members of society feel more alone under capitalism than under previous modes of production.51 Capitalism’s exaltation of the individual is made further apparent by its potent opposition to the ideals of collectivism and solidarity, and preference and incentive for competition. Individuals, it is said, must compete with each other on a general basis to enhance their personal development. More specifically, competition is, economically, one of the bases on which the market operates and, ideologically, corresponds to the widespread belief that, to be successful, one must compete with others for scarce resources. The consequence of competition is that it divides and isolates individuals. Other members of society are not considered as sources of support, but rather obstacles to personal advancement. Ties of social unity are therefore greatly weakened. Thus, loneliness is embedded within the structure of any capitalist society as an inevitable outcome of its value system.

Not only is loneliness integral to capitalist ideology, it is also exacerbated by the very functioning of capitalism as a system. As a result of capitalism’s inexorable drive for self-expansion, the growth of production is one of its elementary characteristics. Having become an axiomatic notion, rarely is the idea of expanded production challenged. The human cost of this is crippling as work takes precedence over investing in social relationships. Furthermore, neoliberal reforms have left many workers with progressively more precarious jobs and less protections, guaranteed benefits, and hours of employment—all of which have only aggravated loneliness. Amplifying the proletarianization of the labor force, with ever-more workers existing in a state of insecurity and experiencing increased exploitation, the centrality of work has become greater as the threat of not having a job, or being unable to secure an adequate standard of living, has become a reality for many in a “flexible” labor market.52 Individuals have no choice but to devote more time to work at the expense of establishing meaningful relationships.

The growing attention given to work can be illustrated in relation to working practices. Despite the fact that the average length of the working week increased in Britain following the financial crisis of 2007–09, the broader picture over the last two decades has officially been one of decline. Part-time workers, however, have witnessed the number of hours they work increase, along with the number of part-time jobs. Additionally, between 2010 and 2015, there was a 15 percent rise in the number of full-time members of the labor force working more than forty-eight hours per week (the legal limit; additional hours must be agreed upon by employer and employee).53 Furthermore, in 2016, one employee survey illustrated that 27 percent worked longer than they would like, negatively impacting their physical and mental health, and 31 percent felt that their work interfered with their personal life.54 Significantly, loneliness is not just a feature of life outside of work, but a common experience during work. In 2014, it was estimated that 42 percent of British employees did not consider any coworker to be a close friend, and many felt isolated in the workplace.

Greater engagement in productive activities at the expense of personal relationships has been labeled the “cult of busyness” by psychiatrists Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz.55 While they accurately identify this trend, they nonetheless evaluate it in terms of workers freely choosing such a life. This elides any serious criticisms of capitalism and the reality that the cult of busyness has largely been an outcome of the economic system’s inherent need for self-expansion. Furthermore, Olds and Schwartz fail to accept the trend as a reflection of the structural organization of the labor market, which makes more work a necessity instead of a choice. The avoidance of loneliness and the search for meaningful relationships are fundamental human desires, but capitalism suppresses their satisfactory fulfillment, along with the opportunities to form common bonds of love and friendship, and to work and live in solidarity. In response, as Baran and Sweezy argued, the fear of being alone drives people to seek some of the least fulfilling social relationships, which ultimately result in feelings of greater dissatisfaction.56

Materialism and the Search for Identity and Creativity

For monopoly capitalism, consumption is a vital method of surplus absorption. In the era of competitive capitalism, Marx could not foresee how the sales effort would evolve both quantitatively and qualitatively to become as important for economic growth as it has.57 Advertising, product differentiation, planned obsolescence, and consumer credit are all essential means of stimulating consumer demand. At the same time, there is no shortage of individuals willing to consume. Alongside the acceptance of work, Fromm identified the desire to consume as an integral characteristic of life under capitalism, arguing it was a significant example of the uses to which human energies are directed to support the economy.58

With consumer goods valued for their conspicuity rather than their intended function, people have gone from consuming use values to symbolic values. The decision to engage in popular culture and purchase a type of automobile, brand of clothing, or technological equipment, among other goods, is frequently based on what the product is supposed to convey about the consumer. Frequently, consumerism constitutes the principal method through which individuals can construct a personal identity. People are emotionally invested in the meanings associated with consumer goods, in the hope that whatever intangible qualities items are said to possess will be passed on to them through ownership. Under monopoly capitalism, consumerism is more about consuming ideas and less about satisfying inherent biological and psychological needs. Fromm contended that “consumption should be a concrete human act in which our senses, bodily needs, our aesthetic taste…are involved: the act of consumption should be a meaningful…experience. In our culture, there is little of that. Consuming is essentially the satisfaction of artificially stimulated phantasies.”59

The need for identity and creative fulfillment encourages an insatiable appetite to consume. Each purchase, however, regularly fails to live up to its promise. Rarely is satisfaction truly achieved through consumption, because what is being consumed is an artificial idea rather than a product that imbues our existence with meaning. In this process, consumerism as a form of alienation becomes evident. Instead of consuming a product designed to satisfy inherent needs, consumer goods exemplify their synthetic nature via their manufactured meanings and symbolisms, which are designed to stimulate and satisfy a preplanned response and need.60 Any identity a person may desire, or feel they have obtained, from consuming a product, as well as any form of creativity invoked by a consumer good or item of popular culture, is false.

Rather than cultivating joy, the affluence of the monopoly-capitalist nations has bred a general widespread dissatisfaction as high value is placed on amassing possessions. While consumerism as a value exists in all capitalist societies, in those of greater inequality—with Britain displaying wider wealth disparities than most—the desire to consume and acquire greatly contributes to the emergence of neuroses, as the effort to maintain social status and emulate those at the top of society becomes an immense strain. The impact of this has been demonstrated within British families in recent years. In 2007, UNICEF identified Britain as having the lowest level of child well-being out of twenty-one of the most affluent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development nations. In response, an analysis of British families was conducted in 2011 comparing them to those in Spain and Sweden, countries that ranked in the top five for child well-being.61

Of the three nations, the culture of consumerism was greatest in Britain, as it was prevalent among all families regardless of affluence. British parents were considered more materialistic than their Spanish and Swedish counterparts and behaved accordingly toward their children. They purchased the most up-to-date, branded consumer goods, largely because they thought it would ensure their child’s status among their peers. This was a value shared by the children themselves, with many accepting that social prestige was based on ownership of branded consumer goods, which, evidence suggests, contributed to arising worry and anxiety, especially for children from poorer households who recognized their disadvantage. While a compulsion to purchase new goods continuously for themselves and their children was identified among British parents, many nonetheless also felt the psychological strain of attempting to maintain a materialistic lifestyle and caved to such pressures. Across all three countries, children identified the needs for their own well-being as consisting of quality time spent with parents and friends, and opportunities to indulge their creativity, especially through outdoor activities. Despite this, the research showed that, in Britain, many were not having such needs satisfied. Parents struggled to spend enough time with their children due to work commitments and often prevented them from participating in outdoor activities due to safety concerns. Subsequently, parents compensated for this with consumer goods, which largely failed to meet their children’s needs. As such, the needs of British children to form and partake in meaningful relationships and act creatively were repressed, and efforts to satisfy these needs through consumerism failed to bring them happiness.

Resistance as Class Struggle

While not denying the existence of biological causes, the structural organization of society must be recognized as having serious repercussions on people’s mental health. Monopoly capitalism functions to prevent many from experiencing mental well-being. Yet, despite this, the medical model continues to dominate, reinforcing an individualistic conception of mental health and obscuring the detrimental effects of the present mode of production. This oppresses users of mental-health services by subordinating them to the judgment of medical professionals. The medical model also encourages the suspension and curtailment of individuals’ civil rights if they experience mental distress, including by legitimizing the infringement of their voluntary action and excluding them from decision-making. For those who suffer mental distress, life under capitalism is frequently characterized by oppression and discrimination.

Aware of their oppressed status, users and survivors of mental-health services are now challenging the ideological dominance of the medical model and its obfuscation of capitalism’s psychological impact. Furthermore, they are increasingly coalescing around and putting forward as an alternative the need to accept the Marxist-inspired social model of mental health. The social model of disability identifies capitalism as instrumental to the construction of the category of disability, defined as impairments that exclude people from the labor market. Adopting a broadly materialist perspective, a social model of mental health addresses material disadvantage, oppression, and political exclusion as significant causes of mental illness.

In 2017 in Britain, the mental-health action group National Survivor User Network unequivocally rejected the medical model and planted social justice at the heart of its campaign. As part of its call for a social approach to mental health, the group explicitly denounces neoliberalism, arguing that austerity and cuts to social security have contributed to the increasing prevalence of individuals who suffer from poor mental health as well as to the exacerbation of existing mental-health issues among the population. Recognizing social inequality as a contributor to the emergence of poor mental health, National Survivor User Network proposes that the challenge posed by mental-health service users should be part of a wider indictment of the general inequality in society, arguing that “austerity measures, damaging economic policies, social discrimination and structural inequalities are causing harm to people. We need to challenge this as part of a broader social justice agenda.”62 Furthermore, the action group Recovery in the Bin positions itself and the wider mental-health movement within the class struggle, pushing for a social model that recognizes capitalism as a significant determinant of poor mental health. Moreover, representing ethnic minorities, Kindred Minds vigorously campaigns on an understanding that mental distress is less a result of biological characteristics and more a consequence of social problems such as racism, sexism, and economic inequality “pathologised as mental illness.”63 For Kindred Minds, the catalyst for deteriorating mental health is oppression and discrimination, with ethnic minorities having to suffer greater levels of social and economic inequality and prejudice.

Capitalism can never offer the conditions most conducive to achieving mental health. Oppression, exploitation, and inequality greatly repress the true realization of what it means to be human. Opposing the brutality of capitalism’s impact on mental well-being must be central to the class struggle as the fight for socialism is never just one for increased material equality, but also for humanity and a society in which all human needs, including psychological ones, are satisfied. All members of society are affected by the inhumane nature of capitalism, but, slowly and determinedly, the fight is being led most explicitly by the most oppressed and exploited. The challenge posed must be viewed as part of the wider class struggle, as being one front of many in the fight for social justice, economic equality, dignity, and respect.

David Matthews is a lecturer in sociology and social policy at Coleg Llandrillo, Wales, and the leader of its degree program in health and social care.

Notes

1. ↩ World Health Organization, Fact Sheets on Mental Health (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2017), http://who.int.

2. ↩ World Health Organization, Data and Resources (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2017), http://euro.who.int/en.

3. ↩ World Health Organization, Data and Resources.

4. ↩ Sally McManus, Paul Bebbington, Rachel Jenkins, and Traolach Brugha, Mental Health and Wellbeing in England: Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey 2014 (Leeds: NHS Digital, 2016).

5. ↩ Brett J. Deacon and Dean McKay, “The Biomedical Model of Psychological Problems: A Call for Critical Dialogue,” Behavior Therapist 38, no. 7 (2015): 231–35. Pharmaceutical companies who have identified it as a market opportunity have been the primary beneficiaries of this approach, exemplified by the proliferation of anti-depressants as illustrated by Brett J. Deacon and Grayson L. Baird, “The Chemical Imbalance Explanation of Depression: Reducing Blame at what Cost?,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 28, no. 4 (2009): 415–35.

6. ↩ As exemplified by Jordan W. Smoller et al., “Identification of Risk Loci with Shared Effects on Five Major Psychiatric Disorders: A Genome-Wide Analysis,” Lancet 381, no. 9875 (2013): 1371–79. In this study, five of the most common mental-health disorders, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression, were associated with genetic variations.

7. ↩ Deacon and McKay, “The Biomedical Model of Psychological Problems,” 233.

8. ↩ Social class is one of the most significant indicators of mental health, as evidenced by research within the social sciences dating back to the earlier part of the twentieth century. The first most notable study of this kind is Robert E. L. Farris and Henry W. Dunham, Mental Disorders in Urban Areas (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1939), which identified higher rates of mental disorders in the poorest districts of Chicago. This was followed by, among others in both Britain and the United States, August B. Hollingshead and Frederick C. Redlich, Social Class and Mental Illness (New York: John Wiley, 1958); Leo Srole, Thomas S. Langer, Stanley T. Michael, Marvin K. Opler, and Thomas A. C. Rennie, Mental Health in the Metropolis: The Midtown Manhattan Study (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962); and John J. Schwab, Roger A. Bell, George J. Warheit, and Ruby B. Schwab, Social Order and Mental Health: The Florida Health Study (New York: Brunner-Mazel, 1979).

9. ↩ Iain Ferguson, Politics of the Mind: Marxism and Mental Distress (London: Bookmarks, 2017), 15–16.

10. ↩ Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 285.

11. ↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 346–47.

12. ↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 346.

13. ↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 364.

14. ↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 354–55.

15. ↩ Paul A. Baran, The Longer View (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 92–111; Paul M. Sweezy, “Paul A. Baran: A Personal Memoir,” in Paul A. Baran: A Collective Portrait (New York: Monthly Review Press, 32–33. The unpublished chapter of Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital, entitled “The Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society II,” drafted by Baran, had included an extensive section on mental health. That chapter, however, was not included in the book because it was still unfinished at the time of Baran’s death. Nevertheless, some elements of the mental-health argument were interspersed in other parts of the book. When “The Quality of Monopoly Capitalism II” was finally published in Monthly Review in 2013, almost sixty years after it was drafted by Baran, the section on mental health was excluded due to its incomplete character. See Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, “The Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society: Culture and Communications” Monthly Review 65, no. 3 (July–August 2013): 43–64. It is worth noting that the treatment of mental health in Monopoly Capital did not go unnoticed and was subject to criticism by Robert Heilbroner in a review in the New York Review of Books, to which Sweezy responded in a letter, defending their analysis in this regard. See Robert Heilbroner, Between Capitalism and Socialism (New York: Vintage, 1970), 237–46; Paul M. Sweezy, “Monopoly Capital” (letter), New York Review of Books, July 7, 1966, 26.

16. ↩ The influence of Fromm is evident in Baran’s work and correspondence. He studied Fromm’s The Sane Society, together with Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and One Dimensional Man (in manuscript form). He was undoubtedly familiar with the wider body of work by both thinkers. While Baran was not in complete agreement with the details of Marcuse’s analyses, he openly acknowledged the importance and significance of his work, identifying Eros and Civilization as having great relevance to U.S. society and recognizing a psychoanalytical analysis as vital to understanding monopoly-capitalist society. See Nicholas Baran and John Bellamy Foster, The Age of Monopoly Capital: Selected Correspondence of Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, 1949–1964 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 127, 131. See also the “Baran-Marcuse Correspondence,” Monthly Review Foundation, https://monthlyreview.org.

17. ↩ Erich Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Freud and Marx (London: Continuum, 2009), 7.

18. ↩ Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, 35.

19. ↩ Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in a Capitalist Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 131.

20. ↩ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (1867; repr. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), 571.

21. ↩ Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 23–24.

22. ↩ Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (London, Routledge, 2002), 13.

23. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 65.

24. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 22.

25. ↩ Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, 27.

26. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 27.

27. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 28–35.

28. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 35–36.

29. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 37–59.

30. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 59–61.

31. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 61–64

32. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 14.

33. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 76.

34. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 66.

35. ↩ Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1932; repr. Radford, Virginia: Wilder Publications, 2011).

36. ↩ Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, 63.

37. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 173.

38. ↩ Investors in People, Job Exodus Trends: 2018 Employee Sentiment Poll (London: Investors in People, 2018), http://investorsinpeople.com.

39. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 35.

40. ↩ Health and Safety Executive, Work Related Stress, Depression or Anxiety Statistics in Great Britain, 2018 (Bootle, UK: Health and Safety Executive, 2018), 3, http://hse.gov.uk.

41. ↩ Business in the Community, Mental Health at Work Report 2017 (London: Business in the Community, 2017), http://bitc.org.uk.

42. ↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 345.

43. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 15.

44. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 29.

45. ↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 347–48.

46. ↩ Jo Griffin, The Lonely Society? (London: Mental Health Foundation, 2010), 6–7.

47. ↩ Griffin, The Lonely Society?, 4

48. ↩ David Marjoribanks and Anna Darnell Bradley, You’re Not Alone: The Quality of the UK’s Social Relationships (Doncaster: Relate, 2017), 17–18.

49. ↩ Luc Goossens, Eeske van Roekel, Maaike Verhagen, John T. Cacioppo, Stephanie Cacioppo, Marlies Maes, and Dorret I. Boomsma, “The Genetics of Loneliness: Linking Evolutionary Theory to Genome-Wide Genetics, Epigenetics, and Social Science,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 10, no 2 (2015): 213–26.

50. ↩ Michael Oliver, The Politics of Disablement (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Press, 1990); Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life (London: Pluto Press, 1976).

51. ↩ Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, 93.

52. ↩ See Ricardo Antunes, “The New Service Proletariat,” Monthly Review 69, no. 11 (April 2018): 23–29, for an analysis of the evolving insecurity of labor markets within the advanced capitalist nations and the hardening of proletarian divisions.

53. ↩ Trade Union Congress, “15 Per Cent Increase in People Working More than 48 Hours a Week Risks a Return to ‘Burnout Britain’, Warns TUC,” September 9, 2015; Josie Cox, “British Employees are Working More Overtime than Ever Before—Often for No Extra Money,” Independent, March 2, 2017.

54. ↩ David Marjoribanks, A Labour of Love—or Labour Versus Love?: Our Relationships at Work; Relationships and Work (Doncaster: Relate, 2016).

55. ↩ Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz, The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009).

56. ↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 347–48.

57. ↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 115.

58. ↩ Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, 63.

59. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 129-130.

60. ↩ Robert Bocock, Consumption (London: Routledge, 2001), 51.

61. ↩ United Nations Children’s Fund, Innocenti Report Card 7: Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries (Florence: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, 2007), http://unicef-irc.org.

62. ↩ National Survivor User Network, NSUN Manifesto 2017: Our Voice, Our Vision, Our Values, (London: National Survivor User Network, 2017), http://nsun.org.uk.

63. ↩ Raza Griffiths, A Call for Social Justice: Creating Fairer Policy and Practice for Mental Health Service Users from Black and Minority Ethnic Communities (London: Kindred Minds, 2018).

Never Forget the Real MLK

As our state-sponsored celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. commences, let’s not forget some important facts about this great man:

1. He was against the Vietnam War during a time when many Americans were not. Decades later, this view against the war has developed into a mainstream narrative, but in the 1960s, those who spoke out and marched against it (students, Civil Rights leaders) and refused to serve (Muhammad Ali) were beaten, hosed down, killed, and jailed. He would undoubtedly be railing against the US imperialist state and its perpetual war machine today

2. He condemned issues like poverty, inequality, and racism as systemic ills, not merely individual shortcomings. To this day, such broad analyses (those touching on capitalism and white supremacy) are rejected and disregarded by most as “fringe” or “too radical.” In this way, Dr. King would still be viewed as “too radical” by the current mainstream media (the same folks who whitewash and co-opt his legacy, and then celebrate this watered-down version of the man).

3. He was hated and despised by a majority of white America. In 1966, he had a 63 percent negative poll rating. He had rocks thrown at his head and was routinely spat on during marches. This hatred still exists today. Simply turn on TV stations or radio shows or peruse social media comments to see how black liberation movements are ridiculed, loathed, and detested by the thousands. Nazis and white supremacists are marching in US streets and congregating on social media. There is no doubt that Dr. King would be on the front lines of current movements; and, therefore, would still take the brunt of this hatred, ignorance, and disrespect - even today.

4. He was considered to be “an enemy of the state” by various government agencies. The FBI tapped his phone calls, blacklisted him as a “suspected Communist,” and sent anonymous letters demeaning him and encouraging him to commit suicide. Various levels of the government, from the FBI to the Memphis Police Dept, have been found to have some involvement in his death.

5. He initiated the “Poor People’s Campaign” and put forth an economic and social bill of rights that espoused “a national responsibility to provide work for all.” Dr. King advocated for a jobs guarantee and would end unemployment by requiring the government to provide jobs to anyone who could not find one. The bill of rights also included “the right of every citizen to a minimum income," regardless of whether they are employed. Today, these proposals would be laughed at by media pundits, and he would be written off as "crazy" by many of the same folks who pretend to celebrate him.

6. He supported the Planned Parenthood Federation and believed that things like “family planning and contraception” should be fully funded by the government – ideas that are despised by modern conservatives who have no shame in calling on their whitewashed version of Dr. King’s legacy to use for their own agendas.

Celebrating Dr. King’s life and role in the struggle is important, but learning and considering the real man and his real ideas is even more crucial in a time that still needs them.

Let’s celebrate Dr. King for who he really was: a radical people’s champion who confronted the power structure, faced down the defenders of this structure, challenged capitalism, challenged poverty, challenged white supremacy, challenged militarism and war, and challenged the status quo that engulfs all of these elements – a status quo that still exists. A status quo that now shamelessly co-opts his legacy for its own use.

Never Forget.

Ending the Epoch of Exploitation: Pantherism and Dialectical Materialism in the 21st Century

By Chairman Shaka Zulu

Lots of people aren’t familiar with the term “bourgeoisie” or for that matter with thinking in terms of the different classes—even though we live in a class-based society. Moreover, we live in an epoch of history that is based upon class exploitation and class dictatorship. In this “Epoch of Exploitation,” there have been different ages each with their own distinctive class structures based upon the relationship each class had to the mode and means of production.

These can basically be defined as: Slavery, Feudalism, and Capitalism. In each of these periods, there was an exploiting ruling class, an exploited laboring class, and a middle class. Under slavery, there were Freemen as well as Slaves and Slave Owners. These might even be slave traders or hired men of the slave owners.

Under Feudalism, the lower class were the Serfs or poor peasants, and the ruling class were the landed nobility, the Lords, and Ladies. The middle class were the Burgers or Bourgeoisie, who lived in independent towns or burgs, which were centers of trade and manufacturing. These “freemen,” who governed their towns more or less democratically, waged a struggle with the Lords to maintain their independence and this culminated in a wave of Liberal Bourgeois Democratic Revolutions that overthrew Feudalism and replaced kingdoms with republics.

The bourgeoisie became the new ruling class and the petty bourgeoisie (little capitalists) became the new middle class, and a new class--the Proletariat—the urban wage workers and the poor peasants were the lower class. As the Industrial Revolution took off, the bourgeoisie got richer and the petty bourgeoisie more numerous, while the proletariat were formed into industrial armies to serve in the struggle with Nature to extract raw materials like coal and iron ore and transform them into steel and goods of all type.

In this Bourgeois Era, the bourgeoisie reconstructed society in their own image and interest. Under this Bourgeois Class Dictatorship, the state exists to maintain the inequality of the class relations and protect the property and interests of the ownership classes. Bourgeois Democracy is basically a charade to mask over the reality of class dictatorship. The masses may get to vote, but the ruling class calls the tune. Money talks and the government obeys.

The charade is for the benefit of the Petty Bourgeoisie who are the voters and hopers that the government can be made to serve their class interests. The dream that they will one day climb into the upper class and share in the privilege and opulence motivates them to subordinate their own class interests to those of the bourgeoisie. A greater challenge to the bourgeois class dictatorship is getting the working class to adopt its world view and politics that clearly do not serve their interests.

This is where the middle class are of use, and where some proletarians find their niche and a point of entry into the petty bourgeoisie as promoters of bourgeois ideology and politics. I’m talking about all manner of jobs and positions from union boss to preacher and news commentator to teacher. These hacks and hucksters sell us the illusion that this is the best of all possible systems and all is right with the world so long as we do as we are told.

They serve the ruling class by playing the game of “divide and rule” and throwing water on any sparks of resistance. They feed the masses disinformation and “fake news” and feed people’s idealism and false hopes to prevent them from identifying and thinking about their true class interests.

The job of our Party is to help the masses cut through this BS and to arm the people with an understanding of revolutionary science on which our political-ideological line is based. We call this Pantherism, and it is based on application of revolutionary science—dialectical materialism—to the concrete conditions we face in the 21st Century.

We make no bones about it, we are revolutionary socialists determined to bring the Epoch of Exploitation to and end and empower the common people. In other words to advance the evolution of human society to Communism.

DARE TO STRUGGLE DARE TO WIN… ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

Shaka Zulu is chairman of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party's prison chapter.

How the Rich Plan to Rule a Burning Planet

By James Plested

Originally published at Red Flag News. Republished from Monthly Review.

The climate crisis isn’t a future we must fight to avoid. It’s an already unfolding reality. It’s the intensification of extreme weather–cyclones, storms and floods, droughts and deadly heat waves. It’s burning forests in Australia, the Amazon, Indonesia, Siberia, Canada and California. It’s melting ice caps, receding glaciers and rising seas. It’s ecosystem devastation and crop failures. It’s the scarcity of resources spreading hunger and thirst. It’s lives and communities destroyed, and millions forced to flee.

This crisis is escalating at a terrifying rate. Every year, new temperature records are set. Every day, new disasters are reported. In Australia, we’re living through a summer of dust and fire. Hot winds from the desert are sweeping up dirt from the parched landscape and covering towns and cities hundreds and thousands of kilometres away. Creeks and riverbeds are being baked dry. Our cities are shrouded in smoke from fires burning for weeks on end, while on the hottest and windiest days the flames grow, devouring everything in their path.

Do our rulers–the political leaders and corporate elites who, behind the facade of democracy, make all the important decisions about what happens in our society–understand the danger we face? On the surface they appear unconcerned. In September, after millions of school students participated in the global climate strike and Greta Thunberg gave her “How dare you!” speech at the United Nations, prime minister Scott Morrison responded by cautioning “against raising the anxieties of children”. And when, in November, hundreds of homes were destroyed and four people killed by bushfires in New South Wales and Queensland, he told the ABC there was “no evidence” that Australia’s emissions had any role in it and that “we’re doing our bit” to tackle climate change.

Is Morrison stupid? Somewhere along the line it appears his words have become unmoored from reality, and are now simply free-floating signifiers, spinning out of control in a void of unreason. As the empirical evidence of the devastation being caused by climate change in Australia and around the world mounts, so too does the gulf between this reality and the rhetoric of conservative coal-fondlers like Morrison grow into a seemingly unbridgeable chasm.

But something is wrong with this picture. To believe that someone in Morrison’s position could genuinely be ignorant of the dangers of climate change is itself to give up on reason. The prime minister of Australia is among the most well-briefed people on the planet, with thousands of staff at his beck and call to update him on the latest developments in climate science or any other field he may wish to get his head around.The only rational explanation is that Morrison and his like are aware of the dangers posed by climate change but are choosing to act as though they’re not.

On first appearances, this might seem like a fundamentally irrational standpoint. It would be more accurate, however, to describe it as evil.Morrison is smart enough to see that any genuine effort to tackle the climate crisis would involve a challenge to the system of free market capitalism that he has made his life’s mission to serve. And he has chosen to defend the system. Morrison and others among the global political and business elite have made a choice to build a future in which capitalism survives, even if it brings destruction on an unimaginable scale.

They are like angels of death, happy to watch the world burn, and millions burn with it, if they can preserve for themselves the heavenly realm of a system that has brought them untold riches. This is language that Morrison, an evangelical Christian, should understand. What might be harder for him to grasp is that he’s on the wrong side.

When seen from this perspective, everything becomes clearer. In the face of the climate crisis, the main priority of the global ruling class and its political servants is to batten down the hatches. Publicly, they’re telling school kids not to worry about the future. Behind the scenes, however–in the cabinet offices, boardrooms, mansions and military high commands–they’re hard at work, planning for a future in which they can maintain their power and privilege amid the chaos and destruction of the burning world around them.

**********

We’re not, as some in the environment movement argue, “all in this together”. There are many ways in which the wealthy minority at the top of society are already protected from the worst climate change impacts. Big corporations can afford to spend millions on mitigating climate change risks–ensuring their assets are protected so they can keep their business running even during a major disaster. Businesses and wealthy individuals can also protect themselves by taking out insurance policies that will pay out if their property is damaged in a flood, fire or other climate-related disaster.

The rich are also protected from climate change on a more day to day level. They tend to live in the leafiest suburbs, in large, climate-controlled houses. They have shorter commutes to work, where, again, they’re most often to be found in the most comfortable, air-conditioned buildings. They’re not the ones working on farms or construction sites, in factories or warehouses–struggling with the increasing frequency of summer heatwaves. They’re not the ones living in houses with no air conditioning, sweating their way through stifling summer nights. They have pools and manicured lawns and can afford their own large water tanks to keep their gardens green in the hot, dry summer months.

What about in the most extreme scenarios, where what we might call the “natural defences” enjoyed by the wealthy are bound to fail? What happens when the firestorms bear down on their country retreats or rising seas threaten their beach houses? Money, it turns out, goes a long way. In November 2018, for instance, when large areas of California were engulfed in flames, and more than 100 people burned to death, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian hired their own private firefighting crew to save their US$50 million Calabasas mansion.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the city’s wealthiest residents evacuated well in advance and hired a private army of security guards from companies such as Blackwater to protect their homes and possessions from the mass of poor, mainly Black residents who were left behind. Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill went to the city in the aftermath of the hurricane and witnessed first-hand the highly militarised and racialised nature of the response. One security contractor, hired by a local businessman, told Scahill his team had been fired on by “Black gangbangers”, in response to which the contractors “unleashed a barrage of bullets in the general direction of the alleged shooters … ‘After that, all I heard was moaning and screaming, and the shooting stopped. That was it. Enough said’”.

In the event of disaster, the response of the rich hasn’t been to work with others to ensure the collective security of all those affected. It has been to use all resources at their disposal to protect themselves and their property. And increasingly, as in New Orleans, this protection has come in the form of armed violence directed at those less well off–people whose desperation, they fear, could turn them into a threat.

The most forward thinking of the super-rich are aware that we’re heading toward a future of ecological and social break-down. And they’re keen to keep ahead of the curve by investing today in the things they’ll need to survive. Writing in the Guardian in 2018, media theorist and futurist Douglas Rushkoff related his experience of being paid half his annual salary to speak at “a super-deluxe private resort … on the subject of ‘the future of technology’”. He was expecting a room full of investment bankers. When he arrived, however, he was introduced to “five super-wealthy guys … from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world”. Rushkoff wrote:

After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own … Which region will be less affected by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? … Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked: ‘How do I maintain authority over my security force after the Event?’

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr Robot hack that takes everything down … They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for survival.

There’s a reason these conversations go on only behind closed doors. If your plan is to allow the world to spiral towards mass death and destruction while you retreat to a bunker in the south island of New Zealand or some other isolated area to live out your days in comfort, protected by armed guards whose loyalty you maintain by threat of death, you’re unlikely to win much in the way of public support. Better to keep the militarised bunker thing on the low-down and keep people thinking that “we’re all in this together” and if we just install solar panels, recycle more, ride to work and so on we’ll somehow turn it all around and march arm in arm towards a happy and sustainable future.

The rich don’t have to depend only on themselves. Their most powerful, and well-armed, protector is the capitalist state, which they can rely on to advance their interests even when those may conflict with the imperative to preserve some semblance of civilisation. This is where people like Morrison come in. They’re the ones who have been delegated the task, as Karl Marx put it in the Communist Manifesto, of “managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”. In the context of climate change, this means taking the steps necessary to ensure the continued ability of the capitalist class to profit even if the world may be unravelling into ecological breakdown and social chaos.

There are three main ways in which Australia and other world powers are working toward this. First, they’re building their military might–spending billions of dollars on ensuring they have the best means of destruction at their disposal to help project their power in an increasingly unstable world. Second, they’re building walls and brutal detention regimes to make sure borders can be crossed only by those deemed necessary to the requirements of profit making. Third, they’re enhancing their repressive apparatus by passing anti-protest laws and expanding and granting new powers to the police and security agencies to help crush dissent at home.

Military strategists have been awake to the implications of climate change for a long time. As early as 2003, in a report commissioned by the Pentagon, U.S. researchers Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall argued that “violence and disruption stemming from the stresses created by abrupt changes in the climate pose a different type of threat to national security than we are accustomed to today. Military confrontation may be triggered by a desperate need for natural resources such as energy, food, and water rather than conflicts over ideology, religion, or national honor. The shifting motivation for confrontation would alter which countries are most vulnerable and the existing warning signs of security threats”.

More recently, a 2015 U.S. Department of Defense memorandum to Congress argued: “Climate change is an urgent and growing threat to our national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over basic resources such as food and water. These impacts are already occurring, and the scope, scale and intensity of these impacts are projected to increase over time”.

The Australian military has also been preparing for an increasingly unstable geopolitical environment driven in part by the impact of climate change. The 2009 Defence White Paper included a section, “New Security Concerns: Climate Change and Resource Scarcity”, which pointed to the vulnerabilities of many countries in our region. The paper was explicit in linking these to a possible increase in “threats inimical to our interests” and suggested that military capabilities would need to be strengthened accordingly. A 2018 Senate inquiry into the implications of climate change for “national security” drew similar conclusions.

Although discussions about military preparedness are often pitched in terms of the need for increased development assistance, disaster relief and so on, the practice of the U.S., Australian and other military powers over the past few decades leaves little room for doubt as to what their role will be. When they’re not invading countries on the other side of the world–killing hundreds of thousands, reducing cities to rubble and imprisoning and torturing anyone who opposes them–to secure access to fossil fuels, they’re acting as the enforcers of capitalist interests closer to home.

The response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 is again a good example. When troops from the U.S. National Guard joined the army of private contractors sent to establish “security” amid the death and destruction of the hurricane’s aftermath, the Army Times described their role as quashing “the insurgency in the city”. The paper quoted brigadier general Gary Jones as saying, “This place is going to look like Little Somalia. We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control”. A similar dynamic was at work in Australia when, in 2007, the Howard government sent troops to establish “order” in remote Indigenous communities as part of the racist Northern Territory Intervention.

The idea that the military could be a force for good in the context of environmental catastrophe and social breakdown is laughable. Whatever the rhetoric, the role of the military is to secure the interests of a nation’s capitalist class amid the competitive global scramble for resources and markets. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had it right when he argued in 1999: “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist–McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps”. The military are gangsters for capitalism. And in the future, they’re likely to double down on savagery.

The next way in which the world’s most powerful capitalist states are preparing for climate catastrophe is by massively increasing what’s euphemistically called “border security”. In 2019, Germany celebrated 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event supposedly ushering in a new age of freedom and democracy. In the decades since, however, European countries have built around 1,000 kilometres of new border walls and fences–six times the length of that hated symbol of totalitarianism in Berlin. Most have been constructed since 2015, when millions of Syrians were forced to flee and seek sanctuary in Europe amid a brutal civil war that was triggered in part, at least, by climate change.

A 2018 report by the World Bank, Groundswell–Preparing for Internal Climate Migration, found that just three regions (Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South-East Asia) could generate 143 million climate migrants by 2050. Australia’s immediate neighbourhood will be affected severely, with several Pacific island nations forecast to disappear completely under rising seas. Already, in response to the relatively small numbers of refugees who have managed to reach Australia by boat in the past few decades, the Australian government has established one of the world’s most barbarous detention regimes. Other governments are now following suit.

So far, the measures discussed have been those primarily directed outwards by states seeking to defend the interests of their capitalist class in the international sphere. This is in part designed to create an “us and them” mentality within the domestic population. In Australia, this has been a staple of both Labor and Liberal governments for decades–the idea that the outside world is dangerous, full of terrorists and other bad people whom we should trust the government to protect us from. In the context of growing global instability associated with climate change, we can expect governments everywhere to double down on these xenophobic scare campaigns.

This should be resisted at every step. Not only for the sake of those “others”–civilians in Afghanistan, refugees imprisoned on Manus Island and so on–whose lives the government is destroying in the name of our security. But also because the racist fear of the outsider promoted by our governments is designed in large part to draw our attention away from the increasingly direct and open war being waged against the “others” within.

In the years since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, Western governments have expanded and strengthened the state’s repressive apparatus. Today we’re seeing, as many predicted, how the crackdown on basic freedoms carried out in the name of the “war on terror” has created a new normal in which anyone opposing the government’s agenda becomes a target. Environmental protesters, and anyone else standing up against the destructive neoliberal order, are now firmly in their sights.

In the U.S., the battle to halt the construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline provides the most extreme example to date. In November 2016, the Native American blockade at Standing Rock was broken up by a police operation so heavily militarised that it looked like something out of the invasion of Iraq. In sub-zero temperatures, blockaders were attacked with water cannons, tear gas, rubber bullets and concussion grenades. Hundreds were injured and many hospitalised. Two women who were involved in the blockade and who later vandalised the pipeline are now facing charges under which they could be jailed for up to 110 years.

In Australia, we’ve seen those protesting peacefully outside the International Resources and Mining Conference in Melbourne face an unusual level of police violence and mass arrests. In Queensland, the state Labor government has passed new laws targeting environmental activists. In early December, three members of Extinction Rebellion were jailed when a magistrate refused them bail–something without precedent for charges related to acts of non-violent civil disobedience.

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Perhaps nothing provides a better metaphor for the future our leaders are steering us towards than a picture, taken during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, of the New York city skyline shrouded in the darkness of a blackout–all except one building, which remained lit up like a Christmas tree. That building was the headquarters of global banking giant Goldman Sachs, where, protected by a mountain of sandbags and using a back-up generator, the company was able to keep the lights on and the profits flowing even while the city was inundated by a three-metre storm surge and hospitals, schools, the subway and most other services were forced to close.

If you imagine this picture as the world, and the Goldman Sachs building as the gilded realm inhabited by the world’s super-rich and the political class that serve them, all you’d need to add is some heavily armed guards around the building and you’d get a pretty good sense of what’s ahead.Our rulers’ apparent lack of concern about climate change is a ruse. They hope that, if they can just head off dissent for long enough, they will succeed in building this future, brick by brutal brick, and there will be nothing the rest of us can do about it.

We need to fight for something different: a system in which our economy isn’t just a destructive machine grinding up human and natural resources to create mega-profits for the rich. One in which the productive life of society is managed collectively by those who do all the work, and where decisions are made not in the interests of private profit, but in the interests of human need. We need socialism–and the fight for it is the great challenge of our generation. At stake is nothing less than the world itself.

The Importance of Political Education and Class Analysis in the Struggle for Black Liberation

By Erica Caines

This piece was originally published at Hood Communist.

What does organizing look like when Black radicals are being pushed out of spaces for ‘progressiveness’ that makes uncontested room for the centrist, right-wing and fascist narratives driving most platforms?  When examining the conflicts between those fighting oppression under capitalism and the capitalist state’s ruling class alongside those who subscribe to “success” and riches obtained at the expense of the oppressed, few things strike me as obvious disconnects and contradictions.

I am often asked about my relationship with the analytical science of Marxism-Leninism as it pertains to my studies, teachings, and praxis because it’s somehow shocking that a Black woman would align herself with a political ideology that’s been presented as predominantly white and male. I once used these moments as opportunities to flex my knowledge on the historical relationship between socialism/ communism and Black people (particularly Black women) as if I were a fact sheet. While it is important to highlight how many of those we’ve come to know as simply “civil rights activists” were politically and ideologically aligned with socialism/communism, what does that mean? Furthermore, why is that important? 

“Knowledge is power” is a familiar mantra. The Marxist Theory of Knowledge describes knowledge, or the idea of it, as socially constructed. Karl Marx details “power” (economic, intellectual and political) as something that stems from the ownership of the means of production. Simply put, a lot of what we *know* is predicated on the interests of the ruling class. It is in this country’s best interest to keep us ignorant. 

One way we combat ignorance is through active study and dialogue. One of the more frustrating things is the way reading is discussed as a pastime of the elite. That, in itself, highlights how comfortably ahistorical we’ve all become. We discuss accessibility and ability to study —-and by extension, obtain knowledge—- in bad faith. We fail to admit to our own intellectual laziness. It also highlights a misunderstanding of how knowledge and education should be used. 

Marx’s Dialectics of Theory and Practice assumes that none of us are “all-knowing”, but the practice of becoming politically educated, both understanding theories and using them in praxis to better conditions, ultimately improve and transform our conditions. One of the more famous examples of having done this can be found by studying members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. 

The BPP implemented collective actions that not only included providing much-needed resources but, more importantly, a political education. They believed in active study and debate and with that belief, went on to educate others enough to advocate for themselves. 

When communities advocate for themselves through breakfast programs, liberation schools and providing healthcare (the more prominent examples of the BPP’s work), ‘the group’ is prioritized over the individual. These small actions that result in transforming realities (material conditions) are what the practice and principle of collectivism are rooted in.

This differs from individualism, which is dependent solely on the best interest of the individual. Black people, in mass, seem to be engulfed in a state of individualism. Many have actively disconnected from our history of collectivism (and other tenets of socialism/ communism). This is made obvious with ‘celebrity culture’, the fixation on Black Capitalism as liberation and blatant misrepresentations of our “ancestors wildest dreams”. 

The lack of implementing class analysis (recognizing the significance of class) to understand our material conditions are major factors of the collective distortion of our material realities. I am not speaking on the problematic and dangerous ways white leftists ignore “whiteness” as a class issue to generically state “race and class” and ignore their innate racial prejudices. I am speaking on how our confrontations with racism, as Black people, have disallowed us to interrogate the Black people that exist within different class statuses. 

We live in a white supremacist capitalist imperialist patriarchy so Black people are, undoubtedly, confronted with how oppressions manifest, particularly racism. Unfortunately, we do not leave room to have any introspection on how oppressions manifest through class. All Black people may experience racism, but not all Black people experience poverty. When overwhelming many experience poverty, combatting racism, solely, causes us to turn a blind eye to capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism.That “blind eye” results in a failure to [not want to] understand or implement a class analysis.

The purpose of class analysis is to clarify the agendas between classes. When we discuss the class structure of capitalism in Marxist theory, the capitalist stage of production consists of two main classes: the bourgeoisie (the capitalists who own the means of production) and the proletariat ( the working class who must sell their own labor power). If we are applying class analysis to our material conditions we are acknowledging how these class groups work and function within our realities. When applying it to our communities it is evident that the [almost non-existent] middle class would much rather align with the bourgeoisie (the rich) than the working class. This presents huge contradictions. Not just in organizing, but the way that we view liberation. 

In order for the bourgeois class to thrive, there must be an oppressed working class to exploit. If there are Black people who would much rather align with the rich, what does that mean for the Black people under the thumb of economic oppression? How does that manifest when we are talking about Black political power? 

Capitalist state ruling classes resist change. They disguise their arbitrary privileges and power behind lies, dogma, half-truths, and fallacies. This is most evident through the use of celebrity-driven and identity reductionist activism that uses “socialist” rhetoric to push neoliberal agendas that don’t seek to transform realities but make them easier to digest and not disrupt the status quo. 

In a society plagued by communities of individualists, how can we approach collectivism in substantial ways? We must have a principled commitment to political education, cooperation, and concern for the welfare of each other. 

Workers Unite. 

Passing Judgement: A History of Credit Rating Agencies

By Devon Bowers

Credit rating agencies can be useful institutions as ideally they allow lenders to know the likelihood of a borrower repaying loans or if they should even be loaned to at all. In the current era, though, such agencies now have global power and can affect economies the world over, most notably with the 2007 financial crisis where bundled mortgages that were junk received AAA ratings.[1] Given that, it would be prudent to understand their history, how they operate, and the effects that they have had historically and currently, especially as a new financial crisis may be looming.[2]

Credit scores began to form somewhat in the 1800s due to the risks of borne by creditors. This led to several attempts to standardize creditworthiness. One of the most successful experiments occurred in 1841 with the formation of the Mercantile Agency, founded by Lewis Tappan. Tappan wanted to “systematize the rumors regarding debtors’ character and assets,”[3] utilizing correspondents from around the nation to acquire information, report back, and then organize and disseminate that information to paying members. Yet, this was done in response to the Panic of 1837, an economic calamity that would have wide-reaching effects not only for Tappan, but the nation as a whole.

The Bank of the United States

Before delving into the Panic of 1837, there needs to be an examination of The Bank of the United States [BUS], as it set in motion events that would create the Panic.

Alexander Hamilton was the Treasury Secretary under President Washington at the time the idea of a national bank was being floated, with a report being done on the matter in 1790. He supported the creation of a government bank on the grounds that it would allow for the US to ascend economically and therefore politically on the international stage.[4] This didn’t come out of thin air, however, there was some precedent regarding such a bank, found in the Bank of North America, established in Philadelphia in 1781.

Hamilton was primarily concerned with the fact that the Bank of North America “had made money for its investors and [had] operated under a charter granted by the Continental Congress, whose funds had made its establishment possible,”[5] yet, there were severe issues with the bank that would be a foreshadowing of the problems to come decades later, mainly regarding speculation. While the bank enjoyed support from businessmen, farmers were staunchly opposed to it as not only were they forced to deal with high interest rates on loans, which could range from 16 to as high as 96 percent annually, but there was also criticism of the bank being rather flagrant in loaning out money for land speculation.  

In Congress, debates began over the question of creating a national bank. James Madison, representing Virginia’s 15th district, argued that the entire idea was unconstitutional as he couldn’t find anywhere in the Constitution which allowed Congress to grant charters or borrow money. Strangely enough, he had previously proposed an amendment to the Article of Confederation which explicitly noted implied powers. His amendment read:

A general and implied power is vested in the United States in Congress assembled to enforce and carry into effect all the articles of the said Confederation against any of the States which shall refuse or neglect to abide by such determinations.[6] (emphasis added)

This was a rather serious about-face on the issue for Madison.

Massachusetts Congressman Fisher Ames countered those who were against the bank by echoing the findings of Hamilton’s report, “that the bank would improve commerce and industry, [insure] the government's credit, [and aid] in collecting taxes.” He “saw no purpose in the power of Congress to borrow if the agency of borrowing was not available and if the power to establish such an agency was not implied.”[7]

Opposition to the bill proved in vain and it passed Congress and was signed by President Washington, being approved for a 20-year charter, until 1811.

During its initial run, the bank’s purpose was to “make loans to the federal government and [hold] government revenue.”[8] (This was all in the context of a gold and silver-backed currency system.) When state banks were presented with notes or checks from BUS, state banks would exchange the amount noted in gold and silver, something rather unpopular due to making it more difficult for state-based banks to issue loans.

Many in the business community supported the BUS on the grounds that it kept state banks in check by preventing them from making too many loans “and helping them in bad times by not insisting on prompt redemption of notes and checks.”[9] New businesses would finance themselves by borrowing money from the BUS and when economic hardships occurred, the businesses would have some breathing room as the government didn’t demand repayment on scheduled times.

After the bank’s charter expired in 1811, the push to create another bank would be caught up with the War of 1812 and the financial circumstances that it had placed the country in.

In the first year of the War of 1812, the US saw $7 million of foreign investment leave and about a 161% increase in the amount of bank note circulation (from $28.1 to $45.5 million) due to the increase in state banks (from 88 to nearly 200).[10] The US was seeing large amounts of inflation in a war that had just begun.

Businesses were generally concerned about the amount of inflation and lack of a stable currency to the point that some began to become intimately involved with arguing for a renewal of the BUS, among them David Parish, Stephen Girard, John Jacob Astor, and Jacob Barker. There was also the politician John C. Calhoun, the Congressional Representative of South Carolina’s sixth district, who would become involved with creating a second national bank.

In addition to financiers and politicians, there was Alexander James Dallas, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and friends with Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin. Dallas had help to coordinate a meeting in April 1813 between Parish, Astor, Girard, and Gallatin which resulted in them closing out a deal in which the financiers formed a syndicate and purchased $9,111,800 of government bonds at $88 a share, which allowed the government to obtain the $16 million it needed to continue funding the war.[11] Still, many businessmen were concerned about the general economic situation of the country so heartily pushed for the creation of a second BUS.

Initially, there was a bit of stumbling about. In January 1814, Calhoun proposed a poorly received scheme in which the bank would be set up in Washington D.C. and that each state would be able to buy into it voluntarily, with the number of bond subscriptions corresponding with each state’s respective representation in the House, as a way of getting around those who saw the BUS as unconstitutional.

Seeing Calhoun’s failed attempt only made Barker push harder for the establishment of a national bank, arguing such in the National Intelligencer, a daily newspaper read by many in the nation’s capital. This pushed Astor, Parish, and Girard to discuss the situation in greater detail via correspondence and, after writing up an outline, they began to quietly disseminate it among other capitalists and urging Congressional representatives to take up the cause.

In April 1814, the Madison Administration, realizing that the impossibility of raising $25 million for the war effort, reluctantly gave in to the creation of a second BUS, with the House passing a motion with a 76 to 69 vote..[12] Shortly after this was announced, Parish and Astor corresponded with one another, with Parish noting that the time to increase the pressure on politicians was ripe.

Both men followed through, but kept their contacts quiet until they knew that the administration was all in. Parish contacted Dallas who offered his services as to defend the constitutionality of the Bank, doing so in the form of writing letters to Senators as well as  Acting Treasury Secretary William Jones, who had become such after Gallatin went to help aid in establishing a peace treaty with the British.

Dallas, in part, wrote that the constitutionality of the bank was disputed “only by a few raving printers and rival banks”[13] and that it should be established. However, within one week of the aforementioned House motion, rumors began to circulate that Britain was looking to negotiate an end to the war. This provided an opening for Madison, who only passively supported the implementation of the Bank, the opportunity to withdraw his support, as did the House promptly afterward.

In February 1813, Acting Treasury Secretary William Jones, working on behalf of the President, offered Dallas the full position of Treasury Secretary, which he declined on the basis of it being too much of a financial sacrifice to do so. The situation changed however in 1814, as with knowledge of Astor’s plan to base the new bank’s capital in real estate, Dallas contacted Secretary of War James Monroe to say that he was now interested in the position, if it were still available and in letters with Jones pushed heavily for the creation of a national bank to predict and collect revenue.

While this conversation was going on, Jones “predicted that the government would have a deficit of almost $14,000,000 by the end of 1814, declared that $5,000,000 more revenue must be provided if the war were to continue through 1815, but made no recommendation as to sources of additional revenue.”[14] This was quickly followed by his resignation. Realizing that Dallas was one of the few people who were on good terms with both his administration and the business community, Madison submitted Dallas’ name for Treasury Secretary on October 5, 1814, with Congress ratifying his nomination the following day.

Immediately after Dallas got into the position, he began to plan for the creation of a national bank that was similar to its predecessor, but with some significant differences: it would be chartered for 30 years, operate out of Philadelphia, and it’s capital would be $50 million of which $20 million would be owned by the government with the rest being up for grabs. In addition, the government would choose only 5 of the banks 15 directors, the remainder being chosen by those private individuals holding government stocks.

When presented before the House Ways and Means Committee, though, there were some minor changes made to accommodate the financial and political realities, with the proposal that the bank be charted for 20 years, $6 million of the bank’s capital being in coins, and that the bank would immediately loan the government $30 million. Dallas moved to garner support not only with the House Committee, but also talking to a special Senate committee on the matter of the bank along with Parish and Girard going to Congress to lobby in favor of it.

Strangely enough, one of the bank’s biggest opponents was Congressman John C. Calhoun, who devised his own plan that he thought would unite both sides.

The Calhoun plan called for the creation of a national bank with a capital base of $50 million, one-tenth of which was to be paid in specie and the remainder in new treasury notes. […] To satisfy the Calhoun supporters, the bank would have to pay in specie at all times, and would not be required to make loans to the government. To gain the support of the Federalists, the government was prohibited from participating in the direction of the bank, and there was to be no provision that subscriptions be made only in stock that was issued during the war.[15]

It would seem that the situation had come to an impasse, yet Dallas had a trump card: maturing Treasury bonds. He announced to Congress “that the government would have $5,526,000 due in Treasury notes on January 1, 1815, with at most $3,772,000, including unavailable bank deposits to meet them.”[16] This convinced the Senate to pass the bill, but it failed in the House due to the anti-bank elements, led by New Hampshire Congressman Daniel Webster, pushed back heartily against the bill and killed it.

On February 13, 1815, news reached Washington that the US and Britain had signed a peace treaty at Ghent, Belgium the past December. The ending of the war allowed the differences between Treasury Secretary Dallas and Congressman Calhoun to thaw as there was now not a need to try to unite everyone, but rather push forward with the bank. The two men got together and hammered out an outline and plan for the bank, which soon passed in Congress and was signed into law on April 10, 1816, with the bank being chartered for 20 years.

The Death of the Second Bank

The bank was set to expire in 1836. Yet it was when the Bank was nearing the end of its life, did a struggle occur over its renewal, led by Andrew Jackson.

In his earlier years, Jackson had a business situation involving paper currency go south, leaving him with a bad taste in his mouth. In 1795, Jackson sold 68,000 acres to a man named David Allison in hopes of establishing a trading post, taking his promissory notes as payment and then using the notes as collateral to buy supplies for the trading post. When Allison went bankrupt, Jackson was left with the debt of the supplies.[17] It would take him fifteen years to finally return to a stable financial situation.

There were also deeper reasons for his anti-bank stance than personal animosity. Jackson was among those people who thought that banking

was a means by which a relatively small number of persons enjoyed the privilege of creating money to be lent, for the money obtained by borrowers at banks was in the form of the banks' own notes. The fruits of the abuse were obvious: notes were over-issued, their redemption was evaded, they lost their value, and the innocent husbandman and mechanic who were paid in them were cheated.[18]

This mistrust of banks would put him in a direct, confrontational path with the BUS and its president, Nicholas Biddle.

Nicholas Biddle was a former Pennsylvania state legislator who became President of the BUS in 1823. Considered a good steward of the bank, he ensured that it “met its fiscal obligations to the government, provided the country with sound and uniform currency, facilitated transactions in domestic and foreign exchange, and regulated the supply of credit so as to stimulate economic growth without inflationary excess.”[19] However, he was also undemocratic as he “not only suppressed all internal dissent but insisted flatly that the Bank was not accountable to the government or the people."[20] Actions such as these simply reinforced Jackson’s disdain for the institution.

Jackson became vehemently anti-Bank in 1829 when Biddle, attempting to gain Jackson’s friendship, proposed a quid pro quo deal. The Bank would purchase the remaining national debt, thus eliminating it, something Jackson greatly wanted done and in exchange, the bank would be re-charted years earlier than expected. An early re-charting would allow for stocks to grow and thus provide a major increase in the dividends of the shareholders.[21] Instead of seeing this as an olive branch though, Jackson viewed it as the institution attempting to utilize bribery and corruption to ensure its continued existence, turning Jackson wholly against the Bank.

It was in 1832 where both these individuals would come to a head over the continued existence of a federal bank.

The National Republicans, a group that split off from the Democratic Party due to anti-Jackson sentiment, nominated a Kentucky Senator by the name of Henry Clay as their presidential candidate in 1831. Convinced that he could utilize the issue of the Bank to beat Jackson, Clay convinced Biddle to seek renewal of the Bank’s charter in 1832 rather than 1836.

Clay did have some backing as the House’ and Senate’s respective financial committees issued reports in 1830 “finding the Bank constitutional and praising its operations[.It should be noted that] Biddle himself had drafted the Senate report[and the] Bank paid to distribute the reports throughout the country.”[22] Clay supporters and allies pushed a bill through in both the House and Senate which would reauthorize the bank, but on July 10, 1832, Jackson vetoed the bill, with the Senate failing in an attempted override.

The Bank was now no more, but what of the Treasury surplus?

After the re-chartering of the Bank of the United States was successfully vetoed, Jackson decided to take the Treasury surplus and split it up among certain favored banks, ‘pet banks’ as they came to be known. However, such a term isn’t fully accurate as while funds did go primarily to banks that were friendly to the administration, “six of the first seven depositories were controlled by Jacksonian Democrats,”[23] there were also banks that whose officers were anti-Jackson that received funds such as in South Carolina and Mississippi.

This divvying up of the Treasury’s surplus funds would set the stage for the Panic of 1837.

Panic of 1837

Due to the massive cash influx, people began to set up their own banks, hoping to get a slice of the government pie. From 1829-1837, the number of banks increased by 56%, from 329 to 798. Many of these new banks were wretched, being “organized purely for speculative purposes [with] comparatively little of the capital required by law [actually being paid and] many of the loans [being] protected by collateral of fictitious or doubtful value[.]”[24]

This led to a fight between banks for deposits and meant that large amounts of money was going all over the country, with no regard for if those funds were being put in places with viable markets and stable economies, where the money could be lent out with confidence that it would be invested and repaid.

With the debt being paid off in January 1835, a surplus created due to rising cotton prices, and an increase in public land sells,[25] and newly collected tax money being sent to banks, it created a situation where these banks were effectively getting an interest free loan which they could make money off of by lending at interest.

Such lending practices would have major repercussions in the western US. Due to the Indian Removal Act of 1830, huge swaths of land were opened up to settlers to come and claim, but it was also open to speculators. These individuals would go westward and purchase large amounts of land to sell to new coming settlers at massively marked up rates. They found themselves empowered by the banks as due to the Treasury giving funds to state banks, banks loosened their lending policies, thus giving speculators the access to credit needed to buy up much of the land. So much had the west become infested by speculation that one Englishman went so far as to say “The people of the West became dealers in land, rather than its cultivators.”[26]

There also existed the problem of professional land agents who worked for capitalists in the East. These agents would go out west, charging some type of fee, whether it be a share of the transactions to take place or a flat five percent fee, and purchase land for their employers, in some cases not even physically seeing the land and basing it off of books. This land would then be rented out and in the meanwhile, further money would be made by loaning funds to frontiersmen at rates ranging from 20 to 60 percent.

This real estate bubble was heavily impacting the nation’s currency. The recognized currencies were gold and silver coin, known as specie. Seeing as how there wasn’t enough of such coinage to go around, paper money supplemented the money supply, which was technically redeemable for specie. Effectively, the US dollar was backed by gold and silver.[27] Due to the moving of money from the US Treasury to state banks which in turn loaned it to western speculators, there was a major increase in the paper money supply to the point that it there wasn’t enough specie to back it and created inflationary concerns, thus prompting the Specie Act of 1836 in an attempt to curtail the problem.

To this end, the Specie Circular of 1836 was introduced which  “required that only gold or silver be accepted from purchasers of land, except actual settlers who were permitted to use bank notes for the remainder of the year.”[28] The entire structure, which was based on paper currency and credit, came tumbling down, with land speculation halting almost immediately.

The credit collapse caused a run on the banks as the citizenry, “alarmed by the money stringency, by the numerous failures in the great commercial centers, by reports that the country was being drained of its specie by the English, and convinced by the Specie Circular that the paper money which they held would soon become worthless,”[29] led people to go to banks and redeem their paper money for specie. Due to so many people wanting specie, banks didn’t have enough to meet demand and suspended all such payments.

All of this caused the Panic of 1837 to come about which shattered credit markets as the nation fell into a painful recession, primarily due to the aforementioned lending policies where literally anyone could get a line of credit given to them.

It was in the aftermath that led to the creation of some of the first credit reporting agencies.

Credit Reporting

Early 19th merchants relied mainly on personal ties to decide with whom to conduct business as many of them would travel from the west and south to eastern coastal cities and purchase goods from the same people again and again. As trade and the economy increased, merchants began to want to give lines of credit to people they didn’t know and in order to get some information on the creditworthiness of these individuals, they “would turn to traveling salesmen to appraise those asking for loans, however, this proved to be a problem as the salesmen, wanting to increase his sales, would paint bad creditors as good, thus allowing for loans to be given.”[30] This led some businesses to, in searching for less biased reports, seek out information from agents whose only job was credit reporting. Baring Brothers was the first to do this in 1829 and were followed by another international banking house, Brown Brothers, both of whom developed systematic credit reports.[31]

The first person to start up an agency where the only objective was credit reporting was Lewis Tappan, “an evangelical Christian and noted abolitionist who ran a silk wholesaling business in New York City with his brother Arthur.”[32] Coming out of the Panic of 1837 almost bankrupt, Tappan decided to launch the Mercantile Agency in 1841 in order to create a national system of credit checking, which utilized both residents and credit agents to judge a person or company’s creditworthiness.

Tappan began the work of his agency by sending a circular to lawyers and others in faraway locations, inviting them to become his correspondents with the hope of  ”[securing] sufficient data regarding the standing of traders in other cities, towns, country hamlets, and trading posts to enable New York City wholesalers to determine what amount of credit, if any, could safely be accorded."[33]

There were credit problems for New York wholesalers. They would generally give a line of credit to local distributors to distribute their product(s) in a given area. Rather than asking for cash payment for the goods, wholesalers gave distributors a discount price and the wholesaler would be reimbursed with the money made from the difference of the discounted and regular pricing, which included an interest rate and covered the wholesaler for risk.

In order to get the risk correct, wholesalers relied on agents reports to their employers about the financial trustworthiness of local borrowers, but they could be deceived as the agent could be falsify information regarding the employer or both the agent and shop could conspire against the creditor.

Tappan’s Mercantile Agency gave a slight fix to these problems in the form of being a de facto surveillance system on borrowers by being an independent source of information from which creditors could gauge the reliability of borrowers. Correspondents would send bi-annual reports to the Tappan’s New York office in early August and February, ahead of the spring and fall trading seasons, which were then copied into large ledgers. Those who subscribed to the ledgers would call the Mercantile Agency’s office to inquire of a current or potential recipient, where the clerk would read the report aloud.[34]

While this helped, there were major weaknesses in the system as the “correspondents [many of them part-time] relied on their general, personal knowledge of businessmen and conditions in the town or area of their responsibility,”[35] which was subject to being influenced by gossip and rumor. During the 1860s changes were made which increased professionalism by bringing on paid, full-time reporters and by the 1870s most major cities had full-time reporters. Methods also changed and was based on direct interviews and financial statements that were signed by borrowers, the latter improving greatly in the 1880s after the courts ruled that such individuals could be charged with fraud if they knowingly provided false information to credit reporters.

The industry would evolve with the ushering in of the 20th century, which would see the origins of the current three major ratings agencies: Moody’s, Standard and Poor’s, and Fitch Group.

Notes

[1] Matt Krantz, “2008 crisis still hangs over credit-rating firms,” USA Today, September 13, 2013 (https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/09/13/credit-rating-agencies-2008-financial-crisis-lehman/2759025/)

[2] Larry Elliot, “World economy is sleepwalking into a new financial crisis, warns Mervyn King,” The Guardian, October 20, 2019 (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/oct/20/world-sleepwalking-to-another-financial-crisis-says-mervyn-king)

[3] Sean Trainor, “The Long, Twisted History of Your Credit Score,” Time, July 22, 2015 (https://time.com/3961676/history-credit-scores/)

[4] H. Wayne Morgan, “The Origins and Establishment of the First Bank of the United States,” The Business History Review 30:4 (December 1956), pg 479

[5] Ibid, pg 476

[6] Sheldon Richman, TGIF: James Madison: Father of the Implied-Powers Doctrine, https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/tgif-james-madison-father-of-the-implied-powers-doctrine/ (July 26, 2013)

[7] Morgan, pg 485

[8] Jean Caldwell, Tawni Hunt Ferrarini, Mark C. Schug, Focus: Understanding Economics in U.S. History (New York, New York: National Council on Economic Education, 2006), pg 187

[9] Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, A History of Central Banking in the United States, https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about/more-about-the-fed/history-of-the-fed/history-of-central-banking

[10] Raymond Walters Jr., “The Origins of the Second Bank of the United States,” Journal of Political Economy 53:2 (June 1945), pg 117

[11] Walters Jr., pg 118

[12] Walters Jr., pg 119

[13] Ibid

[14] Walters Jr., pg 122

[15] Edward S. Kaplan, The Bank of the United States and the American Economy (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999) pg 50

[16] Walters Jr., pgs 125-126

[17] The Leherman Institute, Andrew Jackson, Banks, and the Panic of 1837, https://lehrmaninstitute.org/history/Andrew-Jackson-1837.html

[18] Bray Hammond, “Jackson, Biddle, and the Bank of the United States,” The Journal of Economic History 7:1 (May 1947), pgs 5-6

[19] https://lehrmaninstitute.org/history/Andrew-Jackson-1837.html

[20] Ibid

[21] Daniel Feller, “King Andrew and the Bank,” Humanities 29:1 (January/February 2008), pg 30

[22] John Yoo, “Andrew Jackson and Presidential Power,” Charleston Law Review 2 (2007), pg 545

[23] Harry N. Scheiber, “The Pet Banks in Jacksonian Politics and Finance, 1833–1841,” The Journal of Economic History 23:2 (June 1963), pg 197

[24] Vincent Michael Conway, The Panic of 1837, Loyola University, https://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1469&context=luc_theses (February 1939), pg 21

[25] https://lehrmaninstitute.org/history/Andrew-Jackson-1837.html

[26] Paul Wallace Gates, “The Role of the Land Speculator in Western Development,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 6:3 (July 1942), pg 316

[27] Robert Samuelson, “Andrew Jackson Hated Paper Money As Is,” RealClearMarkets, April 27, 2016 (https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2016/04/27/andrew_jackson_hated_paper_money_as_is_102137.html)

[28] Gates, pg 324

[29]Conway), pg 22

[30] James H. Madison, “The Evolution of Commercial Credit Reporting Agencies in Nineteenth-Century America,” Business History Review 48:2 (Summer 1974), pg 165

[31] Madison, pg 166

[32] Josh Lauer, “From Rumor to Written Record: Credit Reporting and the Invention of Financial Identity in Nineteenth-Century America,” Technology and Culture 49:2 (April 2008), pg 302

[33] Lewis E. Atherton, “The Problem of Credit Rating in the Ante-Bellum South,” The Journal of Southern History 12:4 (1946), pg 540

[34] Madison, pg 167

[35] Madison, pg 171

How Many Types of "Good" Capitalism Are There?

By Shawgi Tell

It is no secret that capitalism has been in trouble for some time. This outmoded economic system constantly increases tragedies and inequalities of all kinds and cannot extricate itself from the perpetual crisis it finds itself in. It is thus no surprise that in the recent period many writers have produced books and articles that discuss alternatives to capitalism.

It is also unsurprising that, in an attempt to prettify, legitimize, and extend the life of this transient economic system, many capital-centered thinkers have put forward various types of “good” capitalisms to disinform the polity. These include:

1. accountable capitalism

2. managed capitalism

3. ethical capitalism

4. progressive capitalism

5. conscious capitalism

6. friendly capitalism

7. people’s capitalism

8. regulated capitalism

9. stable capitalism

10. fair Capitalism

11. sustainable capitalism

12. inclusive capitalism

In reality, these are oxymorons, irrational conceptions, false dichotomies, and apologies for the status quo. They are an attempt to portray capitalism as something other than capitalism - as something desirable and worth preserving. Such descriptors reveal an aversion to theory.

While capitalism has evolved and changed over time, it has always been about major owners of capital exploiting labor-power to maximize profit as fast as possible for themselves, resulting in economic and political power becoming more concentrated in the hands of fewer people. This is what is at the base of the capitalist mode of production. Capitalists cannot accumulate capital without exploiting labor-power, which is the only source of new value. Redistributing profits is not possible without new value produced in the productive sector, simply because what is not produced cannot be distributed.

While capitalists constantly invent new ways to counter the law of the falling rate of profit, there are no new economic models of capitalism per se. The laws of value, accumulation, and profitability all stand; they have not disappeared. Greater monopolization of economic sectors, more “financialization,” casino capitalism, disaster capitalism, and the rise of the so-called “rentier” economy are not new forms of capitalism as such, but direct products of the fundamental contradiction of capitalism between social production and private ownership. “Financialization,” irrational stock market speculations, printing phantom money, and toxic and exotic financial instruments that bear no relationship to the productive sector of the economy are natural expressions of capitalism at a particular stage of economic development, not aberrations or anomalies.

The aforementioned oxymorons and false dichotomies are largely ideological devices which strive to hide the fact that capitalism as a system is exhausted and cannot be “reset,” “renewed,” or “improved.” 

As the end draws nearer for capitalism, irrationalism, disinformation, parasitism, violence, and all manner of treachery will intensify. In futile attempts to save capitalism, bizarre ideas and arguments will increase. Twisted logic and absurd statements is all the ruling elite can offer in the final and highest stage of capitalism. The rich are compelled by inexorable circumstances to continue escalating disinformation about capitalism so as to convince people that there is no alternative to this outdated system that cannot provide for the needs of the people. Indeed, major owners of capital and their political and media representatives work hard every day to persuade everyone that, while capitalism is rotten in many ways, it is still “the best” history has to offer humanity. They want everyone to believe that capitalism is the only future for humanity. This is why it is easier for capitalists to imagine the end of the world than it is for them to imagine the end of capitalism. A good example of this retrogressive tendency is the work of  Branko Milanovic, a leading “expert” on inequality. Milanovic was a former chief economist at the World Bank. He recognizes that capitalism has serious problems but believes that the task at hand is to “improve” capitalism and make it “sustainable.” Milanovic has no interest in an alternative to capitalism and believes one does not exist.

To be sure, global, national, and local private interests are not going to cede power voluntarily and support an alternative to capitalism. They are not going to suddenly become enlightened and embrace democracy and affirm the rights of all, including the right of the working class and people to reorient the economy to serve society and the people. This is not how things work in class-divided societies filled with many forms of violence, chaos, and vicious rivalries. The rich are concerned only with their narrow egocentric financial interests, no matter the cost to society and the environment. They are opposed to a pro-social agenda that fosters social consciousness, unleashes the human factor, modernizes the human personality, and humanizes the natural and social environment.

In this dangerous context that keeps deteriorating, the working class and people need to become more vigilant, organized, and pro-active in order to fend off present and future attacks on their rights. The working class and people must use well-established methods, as well as new and creative ways to deprive the rich of the power to deprive everyone else of their rights. 

A society made up of an empowered polity directing the economy and all the affairs of society is urgently needed, a historical necessity. Decision-making power must not rest with the financial oligarchy if society is to move forward and human rights are to be affirmed. Major owners of capital are unfit to rule and care only about their own narrow economic interests.

The working class and people are not interested in this or that type of capitalism. It is not about “bad” capitalism versus “good” capitalism. The working class and people are the negation of this anachronistic economic system. 

People want and need an alternative to capitalism, an alternative to perpetual crisis and instability. At home and abroad, capitalism is certainly working for some people, but not the majority. The need for change that favors the people will intensify as a massive amount of social wealth and power becomes even more concentrated in the hands of a tiny ruling elite. History is demanding new pro-social, human-centered relations free of exploitation and injustice. 

Shawgi Tell, Ph.D., is author of the book, Charter School Report Card. He can be reached at stell5@naz.edu 

The War on Poverty in Austin, Texas

By Camille Euritt

Austin, Texas recently undertook a policy change, the reversal of bans on behaviors which affected the homeless population, that has great potential for ending the costly cycle of incarcerating and disenfranchising the homeless with tickets for living in public places. Unfortunately, the individuals opposing the change focus on their aversion towards poverty rather than on any benefits for the homeless under their “decriminalization.” The recommendation of this brief if for the calculation of an exact estimate on affordable housing which would end Austin’s homeless problem, the utilization of outreach workers as first responders, and the formation of a task force in city government on ending homelessness.  

The War on Poverty in Austin, Texas

Despite the stigma of undeservingness towards the visibly homeless, no one wants the abject poverty of an unsheltered existence for themselves or loved ones. Yet, city codes on public spaces effectively criminalize the indigent for their socioeconomic status. Considering homelessness a choice is unreasonable, because homelessness results in lowered life expectancy, increases the risk of criminal victimization, and contributes to worsened symptoms of mental illness (Henwood et al., 2015). Unfortunately, the rising cost of living, stagnating wages, and the disappearance of affordable housing for low-income people all contribute to the financial instability positioning many individuals on the verge of losing their housing (Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, 2019). In addition to economic conditions, family violence, mental illness, and job loss are all evidenced as reasons for loss of permanent housing (Henry et al., 2018). The reality is that the criminalization of homelessness does not increase the welfare of men and women in need, but further disenfranchises individuals whose circumstances leave them with no choice but violating municipal law. 

Policy Landscape

The decriminalization of homelessness in Austin, Texas in 2019 made the welfare of the community members in extreme poverty more visible which is uncomfortable and fearful for many people. Concerns about homelessness’ adverse effects on business and tourism are the impetus for those opposing the reversal of the city’s ban on sitting, lying down, and camping in public (Goard, 2019). Ortiz, Dick and Rankin (2015) also posit that a fear of responsibility for the welfare of others when the obvious nature of their need is so visible undergirds the laws on public spaces and marginalized groups. Furthermore, a social innovator employed by the city of Austin noted that the backlash toward the repeal is a result of the offense many people feel when sensing homelessness as a violation of the norms on public space (D. Cullota, personal communication, October 22, 2019). Additionally, Homes Not Handcuff’s lead organizer, the advocacy group which campaigned for decriminalization, Chris Harris, spoke about how widespread public disapproval influenced policing behaviors to an even greater degree than the new policy (Goard, 2019; personal communication, October 19, 2019). Accordingly, the actions and inactions of police exacerbated the backlash against the city’s new position on homelessness. For example, Harris described how police now neglect enforcing even legitimate sanctions against the homeless like public urination and intoxication, often responding to concerned citizens to the tune of “blame it on the city council.” 

These attitudes at the local level are analogous with a statement from President Trump on homelessness in West Coast cities: “We have people living in our best highways, our best streets, our best entrances to buildings, where people in those buildings pay tremendous taxes” (Bittle, 2019). Subsequently, Texas’ governor proposed a “sweep” of homeless camps in Austin dependent upon what action the city takes in responding to complaints. Both the attitude of the elected officials and incensed locals in Austin indicate the desire for the removal of the homeless, because homelessness affronts the status quo and housed people do not consider the homeless equal members of the community.    

Political scientist Stone (2011) presents a framework on policy that contrasts the different political ideologies in conflict on any issue as fundamentally different perspectives about the means of reaching the five major goals of all policy: equitability, efficiency, public security, liberty, and welfare. One’s position is either underscored by an approach that every person’s opportunity is equal in a free market and therefore civic intervention is unnecessary for public welfare or that there are social determinants of quality of life that necessitate intentionally providing opportunities for the disenfranchised. Opponents of the city’s “No sit, lie, and camp” ban reversal have claimed that homelessness is a choice which justifies the existence of the criminalization laws, because homeless individuals had the freedom of choosing from alternatives, but preferred the transient lifestyle (D. Cullota, personal communication, October 22, 2019). Analysis of Stone’s framework on political thinking is useful in this case, because the “equal opportunity” ideology underscores this emphasis on “choice” while the recognition of systemic causes of homelessness like poverty and mental illness lend support for treating the issue as a common problem concerning all in the community.     

Policy Implementation

The Supreme Court once ruled that homeless criminalization’s first predecessor, Vagrancy Laws or prohibitions on transient behaviors during the colonial period, violated peoples’ rights to freedom from “cruel and unusual punishment,” because sanctioning a homeless person’s public existence is the same as punishing individuals for their socioeconomic status, a complex circumstance not totally in personal control. Furthermore, the justices ruled that these laws gave policing authorities too much discretion in enforcement to the point where citizens could not realistically comply thereby delimiting the right to “due process” (Ortiz, Dick, & Rankin, 2015). The modern form of Vagrancy Laws, which criminalize the homeless, have become more specific which has generally distanced regulation further from the obvious unconstitutionality of the preceding era while maintaining the same discriminatory effects. However, a recent ruling in the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the constitutional rights of homeless men and women in Western states and negated many of the criminalization ordinances in city codes influencing the policy making in Austin (D. Cullota, personal communication, October 22, 2019; Egelko & Fagan, 2018).          

Recommendation

The city should determine the exact amount of affordable housing needed to end homelessness in Austin. Studies have shown that the cost of housing is less to taxpayers than the cost of the emergency services and incarceration of the chronically homeless (Chalmers McLaughlin, 2011). Besides, definitive city action may mitigate the public’s strong feelings of outrage. Secondly, outreach workers rather than police are the first responders to all matters of the homeless. These workers will have the benefit of crisis intervention training as well as expertise in directing individuals towards services. Also, utilizing an alternative to police helps diversion from the criminal justice system. Finally, Austin should create a task force to end homelessness. Currently, there is only one position on homelessness with the city and a task force is a best practice of problem-solving in city governments (D. Cullota, personal communication, October 22, 2019). 

Conclusion

The fact of the matter is that neither visible homelessness nor displacement under criminalization is the best solution for society. Regardless of a homeless individual’s complicity in their status as a displaced person, there is a shortage of more than 800 beds in Austin’s emergency shelters which leaves this many without even the option of a nonpublic setting. Besides, ticketing the homeless creates criminal records preventing an exit from homelessness further exacerbating the issue (Herrera, 2018). Clearly, the unfortunate fate of the many visible homeless necessitates a greater tolerance as well the legal protection providing a better outcome for society’s most vulnerable. 

Recommended Resources

Bauman, T., Rosen, J., Tars, E., Foscarinis, M., & Fernandea, J. (2014). No safe place: the criminalization of homelessness in US cities. National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty.

Henry, M., Mahathey, A., Morrill, T., Robinson, A., Shivji, A., & Watt, R. (2018). The 2018 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress, part 1: Point-in-time estimates of homelessness. Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Herrera, N. A. (2018). Homes not handcuffs: How Austin criminalizes homelessness. Austin, TX: Grassroots Leadership. 

Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. (2019). The state of the nation’s housing: 2019. Retrieved from https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Harvard_JCHS_State_of_the_Nations_Housing_2019.pdf

National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. (2018, July). Scoring points: How ending the criminalization of homelessness can increase HUD funding in your community. Washington, DC: Author. 

National Low Income Housing Coalition. (2019). Out of reach. Washington, DC: Author

References

Bauman, T., Rosen, J., Tars, E., Foscarinis, M., & Fernandea, J. (2014). No safe place: the criminalization of homelessness in US cities. National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty.

Bittle, J. (2019, September 18). Trump’s plan to solve homelessness is horrifying. The Nation. Retrieved from http://www.thenation.com

Chalmers McLaughlin, T. (2011). Using common themes: Cost-effectiveness of permanent supported housing for people with mental illness. Research on Social Work Practice, 21(4), 404-411.

Egelko, B. & Fagan, F. (2018, September 5). Homelessness ruling: Sleeping on streets can’t be a crime when on shelters are available. Governing. Retrieved from http://www.governing.com 

Goard, A. (2019, July 1). Starting Monday, homeless people will be able to sleep on city sidewalks. KXAN. Retrieved from http://www.kxan.com

Henry, M., Mahathey, A., Morrill, T., Robinson, A., Shivji, A., & Watt, R. (2018). The 2018 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress, part 1: Point-in-time estimates of homelessness. Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Henwood, B.F., Wenzel, S.L., Mangano, P.F., Hombs, M.,Padgett, D.K., Byrne, B., Rice, E., & Uretsky, M.C. (January 2015). The Challenge of Ending Homelessness. Grand Challenges for Social Work Initiative, Working Paper No. 9, 1-22, American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare.

Herrera, N. A. (2018). Homes not handcuffs: How Austin criminalizes homelessness. Austin, TX: Grassroots Leadership. 

Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. (2019). The state of the nation’s housing: 2019. Retrieved from https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Harvard_JCHS_State_of_the_Nations_Housing_2019.pdf

Lurie, K., Schuster, B., & Rankin, S. (2015). Discrimination at the Margins: The Intersectionality of Homelessness & Other Marginalized Groups. Available at SSRN 2602532. 

Ortiz, J., Dick, M., & Rankin, S. (2015). The Wrong Side of History: A Comparison of Modern and Historical Criminalization Laws. Available at SSRN 2602533.

Stone, D. (2011). Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making. (3rd ed.). New York: Norton.

Pacifying the Moral Economies of Poverty in an Era of Mass Supervision: An Interview with Brendan McQuade

By Nick Walrath

Dr. Brendan McQuade is an Assistant Professor of Criminology at the University of Southern Maine. His work centers on the study of police power, abolitionist politics, pacification, and the critique of security. McQuade's first book Pacifying the Homeland - Intelligence and Mass Supervision, released through UC Press, provides an in-depth look into the secretive, often poorly-understood world of intelligence fusion via a radical critique of the discourse that informs and guides the culture and ideology of security-what he terms the "prose of pacification." McQuade's overarching point is that pacification as both process and theory involves not only instances of brute force including tear gas and the bludgeon of the police baton on the one hand and softer tactics such as "negotiated management" of protest on the other, but also draws upon a specialized discourse of depoliticizing language. This terminology -including security advice such as "If you see something, say something," "Report suspicious activity," "We are all on duty," and "Be vigilant"- seeks the consent and participation of the pacified in the own subjugation as well as in the hunting of the enemies of capital. I thank Dr. McQuade for his thorough responses to my questions regarding the contemporary landscape of political policing, mass incarceration, the politics and ideology of security, and the logic that guides and informs its never-ending police-wars of accumulation.

What is the critique of security and what are the key concepts of this discourse?

The critique of security is an effort to understand and write about security without being subsumed by security. We often talk about security as if it was an unassailable good. Who doesn't want to be secure? How could anyone possible have a problem with security? But the problem isn't so much what "security" promises but how it packages that problem. If we buy into the premise of "security," then we accept the idea that the world is dangerous … that crime and terrorism are real threats. It's then a logical step to say we need some entity-the state-to protect us by providing this magical entity called "security."

When we talk about security, we often to forget to ask why people are driven to the violence we call crime or terrorism. Rather than accepting these assumptions, my goal was to examine how a particular security practices emerged and with what effects. Rather than assuming that security is good and asking how it can be more effective or more sensitive to the limits of law, I sought to examine what "threats" are being targeted and whose "security" they preserve. While security discourses rest on assumption of risk and mutual hostility (a war of one against all, waged among both individuals and nations), the critique of security invites to us consider what relations produce these conflicts and how they have been managed.

Here, I build on the work a group of scholars, the anti-security collective organized by Mark Neocleous and George Rigakos. One the key concepts we use is pacification. The basic idea here is that capitalism is an order of insecurity-"all that is solid melts to air"-that demands a politics of security. Instead of talking about security as transcendental good, we view it as an ideological claim articulated within particular types of societies, capitalist societies. To avoid the trap of security, we talk about pacification. The turbulence and conflict created by capitalism must be pacified. This isn't just the work of repressing rebellions and resistance of those on the losing end of capitalist society polarizations of wealth and power. It's more subtle work of continually reproducing capitalist social relations. In other words, the work pacification entails consent and participation as much as it connotes coercion and repression.

One the key mechanisms of pacification is policing. We usually think of policing as the police, the uniformed men that enforce law and order. However, the actual history of the police idea is something different. Policing was a pre-disciplinary discourse that united English liberals and Continental philosophers in a shared discussion about how to build strong states and wealthy societies. It was one of the most important concerns of political theory and philosophy in the early modern period, the time between the Renaissance and the French Revolution. At this time, policing meant a comprehensive science of social order that tried to cover all of life, from the minutiae of personal behavior to the loftiest affairs of state. By end of the 19th century, however, the meaning of "police" contracted to the police, the uniformed officers "enforcing the law." This narrowed meaning reflected the growing influence of liberalism, in which the individual and the market supplanted the sovereign and the state as the theoretical wellspring of social order. These philosophical shifts masked capital's reliance on the state to fabricate social relations, but it did not end the structural necessity of such work. In this context, police science gave way to criminology, public health, urban planning, and various other administrative discourses, which sought to regulate different domains of life in a manner consonant with the class biases of the old "police science." In this sense, the different genres of social policy are also and always police discourses.

Many Marxists have made similar points, though they have not connected it all back to to the deeper history of policing. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis in Schooling in Capitalist America, for example, detail what they call the "correspondence principle" where the nature of social interaction and individual rewards in public schools mirror the workplace. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, in Regulating the Poor likewise, conclude that social welfare policy regulates the labor market. Public benefits expand during economic crisis to dampen working class militancy and contract during times of economic expansion to cheapen the cost of labor. Howard Waitzkin in The Second Sickness analyzes healthcare from the same perspective. He shows access to healthcare expands and contracts with the ebb and flow of popular unrest, creates capitalist markets through public subsidies, and depoliticizes politics of health with an individual approach to health and reductionist biomedical paradigm. In other words, your teacher is cop. Your social worker is a cop. Your doctor is a cop.

For this reason, I use the term the prose of pacification. As I mentioned earlier, pacification isn't just about physical violence. It's also about popular participation in the politics of security. This is what the prose of pacification is all about. We're constantly told every day to participate in the politics of security. It's not just ham-fisted campaigns like "if you see something, say something." It's also the buying into that idea of security. It's the culture and ideology of security: the belief that the world is dangerous and the state is here to protect us from ourselves and others. This idea totally pervades popular culture and political discourse so that it can be hard to even acknowledge it, let alone think past it. The prose of pacification is my attempt to name this aspect of the problem. There's a huge body of ideas that constitute security cultures. It's the rituals of bureaucratic compliance: the documents created to administer us from cradle to grave. It's the lyrical exaltation of security in popular culture and political discourse. It's the internalization of the politics of fear that cause many of us to greet each other with fear and distrust or lend our energies to the police wars against our official enemies: so-called criminals, terrorists, illegals, delinquent youth, and whatever else.

You studied two fusion centers for this book -New Jersey's Regional Operations Intelligence Center (ROIC) and the New York State Intelligence Center (NYSIC). How has the prose of pacification been essential in guiding their mission, but first, what exactly are fusion centers? What work do they -or do they not- perform and how have they shaped the criminal legal system including policing?

As a general concept, fusion centers are interagency intelligence hubs. Intelligence analysts at fusion centers "fuse" together disparate pieces of information in order to provide useful analysis for state managers. Much of the data comes from government records, chiefly data from the criminal legal system but also from other entities like the DMV or social service agencies. This information will be supplemented by the records of private data brokers, social media, and other forms of "open source intelligence." New technologies like automated license plate readers, and facial recognition also create new forms of data that are often accessible to or managed by fusion center staff.

Fusion center analysts will analyze and combine this data in all sorts of ways. Often times, it can be simple case support, analysts will perform basic searches for police investigators who call into the fusion center to get more information about suspect: address, criminal histories, known family members and friends. This is fusion centers as Google for cops. Sometimes, case support is more technical. With specialized software, analysts can take wiretap data-unintelligible and interminably long lists of phone calls-and turn it into a pattern of use, and, from there, a social network analysis. They can transform cumbersome masses of data, such as geospatial data drawn from police files, the census, and other public records, into useful information like "predictive" heat maps to anticipate where the next shooting is likely to occur. Sometimes analysts will work with police teams for weeks and months as part of longer term investigation. For these projects, fusion center analysts will complete multiple rounds of data analysis and may even get deeply involved in intelligence collection. I'm not just talking about trolling social media platforms or working on wiretaps either. Some fusion center personnel are involved the collection of what's called "human intelligence" or the information that's obtained by working with informants or interrogating persons of interest. This is fusion centers as an outsourced intelligence division, a little CIA or NSA on call for the cops.

At the same time, it's important not to overhype fusion centers. They bring together all this data but how it is all used? No doubt, all of it isn't used. Fusion center analysts complained to me that their police supervisors didn't make full use of their capabilities. A lot people on receiving end of fusion center products claim that a lot the intelligence produced isn't that useful. "Intelligence spam" is term that I heard from quite a few interviewees. There's also a lot of liberal hand wringing about data retention, concerns that fusion centers are holding on too much information for too long.

At the end of the day, understanding what a given fusion center is an empirical question that requires investigation. Each fusion center has their own mission, which orients their work. The term "fusion center" is associated with what's called "the National Network of Fusion Centers" recognized by DHS. There are 79 of these fusion centers. The first were set up for counterterrorism, although their mission quickly broadened out to an "all crimes, all threats, all hazards orientation." These fusion centers will do counterterrorism analysis and all hazards preparedness in addition to criminal intelligence work. There's another set of fusion centers created in the 1990s for the drug war-the 32 investigative support centers set up under the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Program. There's even older interagency intelligence centers like the DEA's El Paso Intelligence Center and the six multistate Regional Intelligence Sharing Centers administered by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which date back to the 1970s. All of these fusion centers sit in their own little political space of interagency coordination and conflict. There's a phrase in the fusion center community: "if you've seen a fusion center, you've seen a fusion center." Each one has their own dynamics. Some might be doing very aggressive criminal intelligence work, supercharging the drug war with high tech surveillance and intelligence analysis. Others might be spamming state and local officials with counterterrorism intelligence of limited value.

How have fusion centers changed the criminal legal system? The first important point to know is that fusion centers aren't just a story about DHS and the war on terror. What we can retroactively call the institutionalization of intelligence fusion is part of much longer larger story of change in policing, the criminal legal system, and political economy. Fusion centers are part of the same general punitive turn in the criminal legal system that we associate with the war on drugs and mass incarceration. Scholars like Reuben Miller have started to talk about "mass supervision," as a complementary set of legal, policing, and administrative arrangements that developed alongside mass incarceration and manages "problem populations"-the poor, racial, religious, and sexual minorities, formerly incarcerated and otherwise criminalized people-outside of the prison. I argue that intelligence fusion is now the center of gravity of mass supervision. The varied fusion centers pull policing, community supervision, and the courts together in shared project to pacify criminalized surplus populations. Mass supervision has become more important in the recent period bookended by the Dot Com Crash of 2001 and the Great Recession of 2008. Meanwhile, mass incarceration is now viewed as too expensive. Prison populations are contracting, but we're not getting a return to any rehabilitative ethos of punishment. Instead, we get more massive supervision, a police - and surveillance - intensive form of control turns disinvested communities into open air prisons. The change is not just limited to how the state manages surplus populations.

The rise of intelligence fusion is also part of new pattern of administration. Intelligence fusion subjects police agencies to a new form of workplace discipline, the same systems of statistical management and algorithmic decision making that increasingly manage labor across sectors. Rank and file cops are now chasing numbers and trying to meet quotas. Investigators are increasingly the human link in automated networks of surveillance and data analysis. It's the era of "big data policing." Things have changed in some real and significant ways. Still, these changes are institutionally and politically mediated. We're not living in 1984 ¸ even though we now have the technical capacities to make Big Brother look quaint. To understand exactly how these changes institutionally and politically mediated, I consider the institutionalization of intelligence fusion in relation on-going processes of state formation and related shifts in political economy.

I see fusion centers as part of what the Greek Marxist Nicos Poulantzas called authoritarian statism. By this he means new type of state and practice of administration that curtails formal liberties, expands the executive, and creates special bodies that make the decisions outside of democratic channels. Fusion centers are part of this trend in the general sense that they're a product of this post-9/11 security surge that restricts the freedoms that ostensibly provide liberal democracies their legitimacy. In so doing, they also expand the powers of executive bodies like the police departments. Fusion centers are also an example of authoritarian statism in the sense that they take political power away from popular control. Fusion centers are a product of a distinct era of public policy formation, where efficiency is considered to be more important than the standardization. The key policies that shape fusion centers are not binding regulations written by legislators or agency heads. They were drafted as "recommendations" and "baseline capabilities" in large working groups of "stakeholders," including the police professional associations.

These changes in the state are, of course, grounded in wider shifts in political economy. Here, the basic argument is that globalization and financialization have decisively shifted power to global capital at the expense not just of the working class, but also at the expense of the state itself and other segments of capital. In this hyper competitive economy, where money moves quickly and everyone competes in a global economy, it's hard to have a welfare state, the type of strong state that can both protect less competitive sectors of capital and provide a good bargain with workers. Instead, the hegemonic compact shifts toward coercion and more disciplinary aspects of security take over. Under authoritarian statism, we get more prisons and cops and less "social security" measures like investments in welfare, public health, and education. Pacifying the Homeland situates the institutionalization of intelligence fusion in relation to these trends. From the 1970s to the 2000s, authoritarian statism consolidated, in large part, through the punitive turn in criminal justice that produced what we now call mass incarceration. One of my claims -the balance of police strategies to administer population has shifted away from incarceration and more toward surveillance and intelligence-led policing- I'd like to think this passing development, a morbid stage as authoritarian statism withers and dies and we build a new type of economy and society. Whether it's the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning, however, is a matter of politics.

The recourse to privacy is a common argument and familiar appeal within liberal discourse to not only ostensibly combat the ramifications of surveillance technologies' tendency to mission creep beyond their stated intent and purpose, but to reign in the way these objects and practices strengthen the edifice of authoritarian statism. However, the parameters of the private sphere have always been shifted and made malleable to the requirements of capital [as well as police]. In your book, Pacifying the Homeland, you make very clear the point that, as part of liberal ideology, privacy functions as pacification. Would you elaborate upon this critique?

Privacy is an insufficient response to concerns about surveillance and police power. Scholars of surveillance often focus narrowly on the implementation of privacy policies and their inadequacy. Civil libertarians assert privacy as a universal right that can be defend against the encroachment of outside parties. They position "the right to privacy" or "the state" as independent entities that stand apart from the social relations and political processes that, historically, created them and still imbue them with meaning.

This way of thinking turns historically specific social relations and the ideas that animate them into abstract "things." "Privacy" is not a natural condition that is always and already in opposition to "the public." Instead, "privacy" is a particular claim made within a particular context: 16th century liberal theory. A concession that the consolidating administrative state made to "the public," privacy has no essential essence. Instead, its boundaries set and reset by the state.

Rather than a basis of resistance, privacy is a tool of regulation: privacy as pacification. In a social world already governed by the commodity form and wage relation, privacy reinforces the very divisions between people that make capital accumulation and its security regimes possible. Privacy promises a life of individuals who live apart and choose to do so. Since we lack access to the means to any autonomous means of subsistence, we're coerced into selling our labor and buying our lives back at price that we don't set. Ideas of like privacy are part of a liberal ideology that tell us this is a natural and desirable state of affairs.

For this reason, privacy, as sole or even primary means of defense against surveillance and police power, is a politically counterproductive. Consider the stance of the premier civil liberties organization, the ACLU, toward fusion centers. In 2008, they identified a series of problems with fusion centers-ambiguous lines of authority, private sector and military participation, and wholesale datamining and excessive secrecy. They recommended that US Congress and state legislatures work to increase oversight of fusion centers, regulate the flow of information between fusion centers and the private sector, clarify "how and when" military personnel can collect intelligence for law enforcement purposes, and strengthen open records laws. The ACLU did not demand an end to these problematic practices. Instead, they sought to regulate and, thus, codify them. Challenging intelligence fusion on these terms will, at best, produce limited public oversight (an ACLU representative on the fusion center's executive board) and some modest restrictions on intelligence gathering (three month retention periods for certain kinds of data), which would only be contravened in exceptional circumstances (an emergency warrant or administrative subpoena).

Getting back to intelligence fusion. In what manner has it shaped a key ritual of the police power, the power of the manhunt in capturing, documenting, and dominating the enemies of capital? Who are these enemies, or "terror identities," that garner the most attention from intelligence analysts?

The order of capital is predicated on the imposition of the necessity of a particular kind of work, work for the wage. In a capitalist economy, you're not offered a great job. Instead, you're denied access to the means of subsistence and forced to find some way to survive. The first proletarians resisted the imposition of work. They clung to the last vestiges of the feudal economy or tried to find some way to survive beyond submitting to new regime of labor. For their refusal to work, they were criminalized as vagabonds and forced to labor through by a series of state interventions that Marx famously described as "grotesquely terroristic laws" that imposed "the discipline necessary for the system of wage-labour."

In other words, capital was formed through a manhunt for pliant laborers and it was the police powers of the state that organized this hunt. It's not just manhunts against vagabonds in this early moment. It's the witch hunts in both Europe and Americas that Silva Federici wrote about, the slave trade (and the attempts to re-capture runaways and destroy maroon societies) and the lynch mobs and pogroms that historically have kept marginalized groups at the bottom of different societies. It's the perpetual police-war against "the criminal element." Today, the newest enemies are so-called terrorist, migrants, and refugees.

In many ways, intelligence fusion just puts a high-tech gloss over this old conflict. The main target of fusion centers are poor people, just like the main target of policing remains poor people. Plain and simple. Intelligence fusion is not about fighting terrorism, whatever that even means, and it's only about combating drugs insofar as the so-called "war on drugs" is just the contemporary manifestation of capital's police-war against labor. As a project of police power, intelligence fusion is about terrorizing the population into accepting the conditions of wage labor. This is the main claim of Pacifying the Homeland. The book details the particulars of today's intelligence-led manhunts: compliance checks, warrants weeps, chronic offender initiatives, and saturation patrols. All of these are police operations that begin with intelligence analysis and end with teams of police hunting the population that lives of the borders of the formal and informal economies and bounces back and forth between sites of imprisonment and disinvested, hyper-policed communities.

The poor may be the main subject of intelligence fusion but they're not the only ones. Fusion centers are mixed up in political policing but not in the way that many people imagine. Fusion centers aren't the center of a new COINTELPRO, an aggressive and centrally coordinated crackdown on dissent. The attack on dissent in the US today is no were near what happened in the 1960s and 1970s and it's not possible for someone to step in and play the role of a 21st century J. Edgar Hoover.

Of course, there is political policing happening the US today. The book traces the evolution of political policing. It starts with this new concern with "terrorism" that first became salient not after 9/11 but in the 1980s. The opening act was the FBI's creation of the Joint Terrorist Task Forces to go after the ultra-left splinters of the mass movements of the long 1960s, the urban guerilla movements like May 19th communist organization. Also immediately, the JTTFs targeted non-violent movements like the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, Witness for Peace, and AIDs Coalition to Unleash Power. In the 1990s, the big concern was eco-terrorists. In the last two decades, more "terror identities" have proliferated: anarchist extremists, black identity extremists and the like.

Most of what's happening is surveillance and reporting. There haven't been too many examples of active counter-subversion, where infiltrators sow discord and do everything they can to destroy movements and organizations. There have dramatic confrontations like the crackdown on Occupy and the showdown at Standing Rock, but even these are organized through different means. Rather than J. Edgar Hoover's centrally directed countersubversion campaign, we have a complicated patchwork. Political policing operates through overlapping interagency intelligence networks, including the DHS-recognized National Network of Fusion Centers. This decentralized model is more permeable to local political pressures. Indeed, private interests-not politicians or government officials-appear to have been the leading actors during the crackdown on Occupy and the showdown over the Dakota Access Pipeline. In many other cases, secrecy and organizational complexity complicate a clear parsing of events and actors. This decentralized system produces diverse outcomes. It is also harder to expose and redress than the highly centralized COINTELPRO program and, as a more supple system, may be a more effective means to pacify class struggle.

In any case, what we often talk about as "political policing" only targets the self-conscious mobilization of a class-for-itself, the efforts of organized movements. Intelligence fusion-and police power in general-also attends to less explicit manifestations of class struggle: the ill-understood and often illegible survival strategies of disarticulated segments of the working class. These practices are usually dismissed as the moral failings of the "criminal element." The varied genres of the prose of pacification code it as "crime" or "the street economy." Sometimes, it explodes as a "riot." Here, we find the surplus populations who are not (fully) incorporated within capitalist social relations, the structurally excluded people whose needs and desires cannot be (fully) satisfied within the constraints of capitalist social relations. This social space is privileged domain of police power, where the state's role in producing and maintaining the most basic social relations that define capitalism are laid bare. I think this is one of central contradiction of capitalist civilization and I try to discuss and develop in terms a dialectic between police power and moral economies of poverty.

Would you elaborate upon this central contradiction of capital that exists between the police power and the moral economies of poverty it targets under the aegis of the war on drugs? What is the moral economy of poverty and what does this tension illustrate about not only state formation, but the state's active engagement in the (re)production of the working class?

I use the concept of moral economy to try to understand "crime" without reproducing the class biases of security. I ended up here to make sense of the war on drugs. From the outside and from a certain class position, the drug trade might looks like pathological violence that is so harmful to poor communities. Today, the illegal trade in drugs is huge business that provides real incomes for a lot people. This means there are entire communities where the drug trade is tacitly accommodated because it's understood as some of the best work available. The book opens with the example of Camden, NJ, a city where a third of population lives below the poverty line and, at one point, there was one open air drug market for every 440 residents. The violence of drug trade, paradoxically, produces a particular kind of social order, it's a moral economy of poverty. A lot of Camden residents don't like but many still recognize that the drug trade helps keep the city afloat.

The moral economies are dialectically related to police power. The prose of pacification codes the unauthorized violence of moral economies as pathological violence-"bad neighborhoods filled with bad people"-and invites a security response. As always, the politics of security erases the history that produced problem. Scholars have long established that segregation and discrimination first and later the uneven impacts of deindustrialization and welfare state retrenchment produced the de-facto apartheid boundaries of American city but we ignore all that and reduce it down to a simple problem for the cops and courts to manage. The police can't resolve these social problems but that's not the point. Instead, the current police-war against them provides legitimacy to police-"they're protecting us from violent drug traffickers"-and organizes how the state administers the working class.

The war on drugs is a mechanism to regulate and tax criminalized labor in an era where inequality is increasing and huge swaths of population participate in informal economies. Asset forfeiture laws allow police to tax these illicit economies. Money and property seized in criminal investigations can be expropriated by police agencies. For example, police in New York State, from 1990 to 2010, seized nearly $244 million in cash alone and distributed over $88 million of these assets to police agencies. In some jurisdictions, the conflict of interest generated by this for-profit policing is blatant. In New York's Nassau County, the intelligence center, the Lead Development Center (LDC), sits under the Asset Forfeiture and Intelligence Unit of the Nassau County Police. The LDC operates at no budgetary cost for the department. It is funded exclusively through asset seizures and grants. This is an extreme example but it underscores the role drug operations play in regulating a criminalized market that cannot be suppressed.

The deeper issue here, however, is a structural one: the administration of particular form of the working class. The war on drugs isn't about stopping drugs. It's about regulating criminalized labor. We have all these people who are involved in the accumulation of capital and circulation of goods but it's happening outside of legal channels. When the police arrest people for drugs they impose legal forms of subjectivity on surplus populations that are weakly connected to formal labor markets. Historically, the recognition of organized labor pacified the working class by incorporating them within capitalist states. This administrative subsumption of labor is one the primary ways state administration continually (re)produces capitalist social relations. Policing accomplishes this same process for the criminalized workers of the drug economy. Instead of subsuming legal labor within the confines of "labor law," it envelopes criminalized labor within the "drug war." Police surveillance and intelligence gathering track the drug trade and identify its key players. Arrest and prosecution imposes legal subjectivities on both individual and collective actors: people involved in the drug economy and the "criminal conspiracies" they create. The prohibition of drugs creates a caste of criminalized labor that policing regulates and taxes. Cumulatively, these efforts pacify class struggle by dividing the working class into a profaned "criminal element" and "decent" people.

Returning to your comments on the extent of contemporary political policing -or lack thereof- through intelligence fusion, can you speak to any scenarios where fusion center staff took a noninterventionist, hands-off approach toward a political movement and/or protest in conflict with local law enforcement?

During Occupy, some fusion centers did want anything to do with monitoring the protest. They viewed it as political speech and steered clear. During fight over Dakota Access Pipeline, some local law enforcement agencies wouldn't arrest people for trespassing, which bothered the private sector company that had been hired to crush the protests. The reasons for these incidents, and several others which the book also details, is a shift in the nature of political policing.

After the exposure of COINTELPRO and Watergate, there were investigations and some reforms. The investigations paradoxically re-legitimized security agencies by demonstrating their apparent accountability, while simultaneously allowing controversial practices to continue by covering them with a patina of legality. The result was a seemingly limited version of human rights compliant political policing, a strategy that endeavors to protect political rights and facilitate peaceful protest, while still combating "extremism."

As I mentioned earlier, we don't see the aggressive infiltration and active countersubversion that characterized COINTELPRO. However, we do see wholesale surveillance and intelligence gathering, including the use of informants (who often work to entrap people in manufactured terrorism plots). I fear all of this may be more subtle and effective mode of political policing. Instead heavy headed repression-the whip of the counterrevolution that polarizes and escalates the struggle-we have a more subtle repression-accommodation dialectic. A certain amount of protest is allowed and even encouraged. The police are here to help you exercise your rights and weed out the troublemakers who may be planning more militant action that can be criminalized as terrorism or violence.

Just by way of an anecdote: In 2017, Los Angeles Police Department was revealed to have spied on the anti-Trump group Refuse Fascism with an informant attending meetings ostensibly to gather intelligence that would tip authorities off to any upcoming freeway shutdowns. No violent, far-right groups were spied on by LAPD during this time. Granted, we know little to the extent of fusion center involvement in this particular instance, but it wouldn't surprise me given the numerous cases of law enforcement collaborating with neo-Nazis and white nationalist types.

Have fusion centers taken the threat of far-right violence seriously (given that the FBI seems more predisposed to spy on Black Lives Matter, "Black Identity Extremists," anarchists and other leftist persuasions than neo-Nazis)? How aware and/or vigilant are they of this threat in the age of Trump and a resurgent white nationalism?

This is a difficult question to answer because events are still unfolding and information is spotty. I think there is an important political struggle happening within the security apparatus over the status of white supremacists and other extreme right formations. My sense is that the liberal reformers-the professionalizers, people who want "better" policing-are losing power to fascists or proto-fascists-the people who to hunt for enemies.

Before we get into the specifics of any example, however, it should go without saying that the police are the police. They're the physical embodiment of the state's monopoly on violence. As an institution, there's a baseline conservativism that's ingrained in the police. In more conventional sociological terms, they're a hierarchy-reinforcing institution. We should never expect the police to be anything but enemies of the project revolutionary social transformation. It should never surprise us when the individual police officers or whole departments become surveillance and disrupt social movements. It should never surprise us when individual officers or departments conspire with individuals or groups on the extreme right. These are expected.

At the same time, the specificities of how these dynamics occur matter tremendously. We can't just string together the crimes of the state and assume that it all means that it's a seamless machinery of oppression and that is ready to squelch all political challenges. We're talking about many headed administrative apparatus that's often beset by organizational pathologies and riven by internal conflicts. How the state really operates and this more specific question about the position of the security apparatus toward the extreme right is tremendously very important because it gets at two important points: a theoretical one about the nature of state apparatus and political one about the strategic alignment of power. What's at stake is our understanding of social power and change and how assess the political opportunities of the moment. That said, there are two dynamics that explain much of what we're seeing: the constraints of human rights compliant political policing, and the internal struggle within state around the far right and their efforts to infiltrate the security apparatus.

First, human right's compliant political policing. This what liberals and politics of privacy and legality gets you. If we look at policing in relation to the rest of security apparatus and not just prisons, then, we see that the period of mass incarceration is also this post-Watergate, post-Vietnam period, where liberal professionalizes sought to legitimate the security apparatus through reform. This reform current extended into policing with measures like the Handschu guidelines, which constrained political policing in New York City. Later, it became generalized as response to police brutality in the 1990s, when the DOJ began taking over police departments and overseeing reforms to eliminate racial profiling and police brutality. It continues with calls for procedural reforms and technocratic solutions like body cameras. A lot of the people involved may be earnest and some of these policy changes may blunt some of the sharper edges of oppression but they're structural effect is to reaffirm the legitimacy of the state security and preserve its power and discretion.

So let's get into specifics, human rights compliant political policing, as a general rule, treats all political activity the same, regardless of its content. White supremacists advocating genocide and an ethnostate have the same rights to freedom of speech and assembly as leftist calling for a borderless world and a transition to socialism. This ethos is entrenched in police agencies. It was even put forward as official policy, when I observed a Fusion Liaison Officer training conducted by one of the senior managers at New Jersey's fusion center. The section of the training on civil liberties demonstrated showed a high degree of self-awareness. The officer explained many of the concerns with fusion centers, citing the 2007 ACLU report on the subject. He then discussed how the fusion center dealt with large protest actions. He referenced their monitoring of Occupy to show how limited reporting for situational awareness and officer safety was appropriate but anything more would have violated constitutional rights and ROIC's privacy policy. He also brought up a 2011 Neo-Nazi rally in Trenton as an example. While the trooper presented Occupy in a neutral tone, he described Neo-Nazis as "scum" and "the worst people you can possibly imagine." However, he noted that their protest was permitted and, even though the rally was advocating odious positions, the fusion center could only take the same limited measures they took toward Occupy. With both examples, the intended point was that investigation required a "nexus" to crime or terrorism.

This dynamic provides perspective on recent clashes between Antifascists and far right groups. When left counter-protesters disrupt a white supremacist rally, this registers as an attack on white supremacists right of assembly. After all, the title of the controversial intelligence report on "anarchist extremists" released days before the infamous Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville was "Domestic Terrorist Violence at Lawfully Permitted White Supremacists Rallies Likely to Continue." In short, humans compliant political policing is real. It's a different form of CONTELPRO-era countersubversion and it can help explain why police tolerated both Occupy encampments and Neo-Nazi rallies.

At the same time, there is also a political struggle within the state around the far-right. Throughout the Obama Administration, the status of far-right movements as domestic terrorists was point of bitter controversy. In April 2009, DHS predicted an increase in far-right violence and identified four causes: prolonged economic downturn, the election of a Black president, renewed debates over gun control and the return of military veterans to civilian life. The report was leaked to the press and right-wing media had a field day. Eventually, then-DHS secretary Janet Napolitano shut down the unit that produced the report, leaving DHS with no analysts focusing on the far-right. Primary author of report eventually went public. Some Congressional Representatives pressured the Obama Administration to do more and they threw some money at counter-radicalization but did not re-commit DHS to reporting on the far right. As expected, the Trump Administration quickly rolled back this half measure.

That said, DHS-the federal agency-has no or at least very few analysts reporting on the far right but the fusion centers, which are run by state and local law enforcement, still are reporting on neo-Nazis, White Supremacists and other far right groups. The FBI is also still actively investigating the far right. There's lots of documents that journalist have obtained through FIOA that show this and the book gets into some of these examples and finer detail.

What these episodes underscore, however, is that there is a real battle happening within the state over the meaning of "domestic terrorism." There's plenty of people in law enforcement who want and are going after the far right but there's probably just as many or even more that sympathize with the far right. In 2006, the FBI produced an internal intelligence assessment document concerning the far-right's attempts to infiltrate police agencies and influence officers. While almost nothing is known about the FBI's efforts to address this issue, it is apparently a cause of some concern.

The limitations of human rights compliant political policing and efforts of the far-right to infiltrate law enforcement cast an ominous shadow over the violence in Charlottesville and similar clashes. Although there is no evidence that white supremacist infiltrated the Charlottesville Police or the Virginia State Police, the lead agency at the Virginia Fusion Center, an independent review of the response to the Unite the Right Rally by a former federal attorney shows that police downplayed the white supremacist threat. The report documents several intelligence analyses received by the Charlottesville Police that predicted violence from far-right militants. It also provides some anecdotes of individual law enforcement officers downplaying the threat from the far-right and positioning left counter-protestors as more problematic.

These battles are important because help us understand the political dynamics of our moment. To return to an earlier point, the implication for our understanding of the state is that the state is arena of this struggle but it's not the agent of the struggle in any direct and simple way. The institutional condensation of political power. It's continually reshaped by struggles within and outside the state apparatus to define policy and distribute resources. It's also shaped by larger forces, as I tried to explain in my comments on authoritarian statism and globalization. In short, the state is neither a thing to be seized nor smashed. It's an institutional condensation of power to approached, politically, at the level of strategy. This returns me to my other point about the strategic alignment of power. These battles of over status of white supremacists within the security apparatus and related questions of police collaboration with far-right groups speaks to wider political process. The balance of social forces since the 1970s-call it neoliberalism, the carceral state, whatever-is clearly unraveling. There's a three-way fight going on right now between the collapsing neoliberal center, the fascist right and the nascent left. We need to think about the security apparatus, we confront hard questions. The left position isn't to demand the police go after the fascists. Both the police and the fascists need to be defeated politically.

To conclude, one overarching imperative I noticed while reading your book -one the key struggles abolitionists must surmount- is to abolish not only the police, but the police power. How might we challenge a purposefully vague, capillary, patriarchal power that occupies nearly every nook and cranny of the state and that permeates the broader society down to the level of individual subjectivity?

To come up with solutions, it necessary to understand the specific nature of the problem and Pacifying the Homeland is my effort to name some the very particular problems of our times. You're right that one of the main problems the book names is police power. It's not just the police, the bodies of armed men in squad cars and frisking black and brown people on street corners. It's the way the police powers of the state administer our lives in ways to the benefit of capital. I think taking this expanded concept of police power expands the horizon of abolitionist politics.

Consider the divest-reinvest strategy toward abolition that came out The Vision for Black Lives policy report and was endorsed by the Democratic Socialist of America. Divesting from the police and the military and reinvesting in education and social services sounds great but I think it could be easily co-opted. Reinvest into what exactly? Social services as they currently exist? Shrink the armed uniformed police and expand soft social police? While such efforts certainly would make a meaningful difference in the lives of those most victimized by police, it would hardly challenge the rule of capital and the modern state. Instead, abolishing police power requires rethinking "social services" on terms that explicitly challenge the basic social relations that police power, in its myriad forms, maintains: private property, the commodity form, and the wage relation. In other words, the positive project of abolition would require a "reinvestment" in care and reconstruction the commons.

From this perspective, Medicare for All should be advanced as an abolitionist demand. By de-commodifying healthcare and transforming into a universal public good it could be part of reinvigorated social democratic commons Left organizations could organize political power to redirect resources from police, prisons, and the security apparatus and reinvestment in a series of socialist programs, a "common" decency that should afforded to all by virtue of their inalienable humanity: universal right to cradle-to-grave care (universal healthcare, free education, etc.), and basic right to life (housing, a job or basic income guarantee).

The horizons of what we could call "abolition socialism" could also help confront other difficult questions that historically have plagued socialist movements. The reconstitution of the commons would also require requires a reckoning with histories of colonial violence and dispossession. Capital emerged through the disproportionate destruction of particular cultures. It created hierarchy of peoples. The modern capitalist world-system created through various the projects of policing and pacification is also and always racial capitalism. In other words, a meaningfully abolishing police power and recreating the commons would also require addressing historic injustices that divided the global working class into mutually antagonistic nations and races. In this way, reparations for slavery, for colonial dispossession, and for unequal North-South relations can be thought of as necessary part of both the transition to socialism and abolition of police power.