Late-Stage Capitalism and the Pedagogical Resurgence of Anti-Fascism

By Colin Jenkins

This essay originally appeared in Keywords in Radical Philosophy and Education: Common Concepts for Contemporary Movements (2019, BRILL)

Social unrest is a daily part of American life. Between the alarming regularity of mass killings and school shootings and the violent street clashes between right-wing fascists and left-wing anti-fascists, it seems as though America’s chickens are finally coming home to roost. Despite its uniqueness, the United States is heading down the same path as so many hegemonic empires of the past, quickly approaching its demise through a combination of exhaustive military campaigns abroad and chronic neglect of a majority of its citizenry at home. Mainstream American culture is inadvertently responding to its empire’s demise. Dystopian-based “entertainment” is on the rise again, millennials are abandoning the traditional American lifestyle en masse, virtual lives based in gaming culture and social media have seemingly grabbed a hold of many wishing to escape and withdraw from the drudgery of real life, and political poles are becoming more polarized as extremist centrism intensifies to protect the status quo.

While many recognize that something is wrong, most have difficulties pinpointing what it is, let alone what is causing it. The pronounced social unrest and emergence of mainstream nihilism have sparked a cavalcade of typical, cutesy, click-bait articles online, claiming “millennials are killing [insert here]” and pushing for “minimalist lifestyles” while hawking shipping-container homes, and superficial corporate news analysis which resembles more of tabloid “journalism” than anything approaching substance. Even so-called “progressive” movements that have formed within this climate, such as Black Lives Matter, the Poor People’s Campaign, and the Women’s March, have failed to reach a substantive level of resistance by ignoring the roots of the people’s problems while insisting on operating within the narrow confines of the mainstream political arena.

The good news is that these social phenomena are not mysterious forces rising out of thin air. They have roots. They have causes. And with multiple political forces coming to a head, many are starting to not only search for these causes, but are starting to identify them. The sudden resurgence of socialism in the United States – after laying dormant since the counterinsurgency of the US government during the 1960s, which resulted in violent state repression against radical resistance groups, the subsequent “Reagan revolution” and rise of the neoliberal era, and Francis Fukuyama’s infamous suggestion that “history had ended” — signifies a much-needed counter to capitalist culture. The wave of counter-hegemony that has come with it defies capitalism’s insistence that we are nothing but commodities — laborers and consumers born to serve as conduits to the rapid upward flow of profit — and has begun to construct a wall against the spread of fascism that is inevitable with late-stage capitalism, as well as a battering ram that seeks to bring this system to its knees once and for all.

Capitalism’s Destructive Path

Humanity has been on a collision course with the capitalist system since its inception. While Marx’s famous prediction that capitalists would eventually serve as their own gravediggers has been delayed by a multitude of unforeseen forces, most notably the overwhelming power and adaptability of the imperialist and capitalist state, it is nonetheless charging toward fruition. As the term “late-stage capitalism” has become widely used among the American Left, it is important to understand what it is referring to. This understanding may only come through systemic and historical analysis, and especially that of the basic mechanisms of capitalism, the social and economic conditions that birthed capitalism, and the subsequent stages of capitalism over the past few centuries.

Referring to capitalism as being in a “late stage” is based on the understanding that the system – with all of its internal contradictions, its tendency to concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a few, and its increased reliance on imperialism and domestic control – is nearing an inevitable implosion. However, the implication that capitalism naturally develops on a path toward fascism is both accurate and potentially misleading. On one hand, this idea suggests that capitalism, in its most basic state of operating, does not already possess inherent fascistic qualities. This is incorrect, and it’s important to understand this. Capitalism, in its orthodoxy, is a system that relies on authoritative, controlling, and exploitative relationships, most notably between that of capitalists and workers. The latter, in its need to survive, must submit itself to wage labor. The former, in its wanting to accumulate a constant flow of profit, uses wage labor as a way to steal productivity from the worker in a perpetual cycle that moves wealth upwards into a relatively tiny sector of the population, while simultaneously impoverishing the masses below. Scientific socialists have always known this to be true, and now that the trickery of “trickle-down economics” has been exposed, many others are beginning to realize it.

Capitalism’s authoritative tendencies are far-reaching throughout a society’s development. Because of this, the system has relied upon and reproduced social inequities that fortify its economic woes. Friedrich Engels touched on its effects for the family unit in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Silvia Federici brilliantly illustrated its reliance on patriarchy in Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, the emergence of social reproduction theory has provided insight on the layers of exploitation that effect women in the home, and many have written about the cozy relationship between capitalism and white supremacy, most importantly noting that the system’s birth in the Americas relied heavily upon the racialized chattel slave system. In fact, it is impossible to accurately discuss the inherent problems of capitalism without discussing its propensity to drive social oppression in a variety of forms. If oppression can be defined as “the absence of choices,” as bell hooks once said, then our default status as members of the proletariat is oppression. And when compounded with other social constructs such as patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, and able-bodiedness, this oppression becomes even more pronounced and marginalizing.

The inherent fascism built into capitalism is rooted in wage labor, which is maintained through coercive means. This coercion that drives capitalism comes from the dispossession of the masses of people from not only the means of production, but also from the means to sustenance and land. The Enclosure Acts tell us all we need to know about this foundation. The fact that feudal peasants had to be forced to participate in wage labor through a legislative destruction of the commons, which kicked them off the land and immediately transformed human needs from basic rights to commodities, says a lot about the requisite landscape of a capitalist system. As such, feudal peasants in Europe viewed capitalism as a downgrade. They were consequently prodded into factories and mills like cattle. In many other parts of the world, stripping entire populations of sustenance for the sake of private property was unheard of. Yet capitalism required this mass dispossession in order to proceed on its desired path. Thus, “between 1604 and 1914, over 5,200 individual enclosure acts were passed, covering 6.8 million acres of land,” all designed to systematically erase the idea of common land. (Parliament of UK)

Understanding that capitalism is a system built on a foundation of oppression, and that it operates on natural internal mechanisms of coercion and exploitation, allows us to also understand that its development has not created these qualities, but rather intensified them. Therefore, the idea of “late-stage capitalism” makes sense from an analytical point of view, as it simply refers to an evolutionary path that has brought its nature to the forefront and, most importantly, in doing so, has resulted in severe consequences for the majority of the global population. And whether we’re talking about late-stage capitalism, or monopoly capitalism, or corporate capitalism, or “crony capitalism,” it all refers to the same thing: capitalism’s natural conclusion. A natural conclusion that is a breeding ground for fascism.

Realizing Fascism

“When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto its privileges.” - Buenaventura Durruti

There are many definitions and aspects of and to fascism, but perhaps the best way to identify it is as an effect. In terms of capitalism, the development and strengthening of fascistic tendencies are tied directly to the sociopolitical structures that form in its defense. Or as Samir Amin puts it, “Fascism is a particular political response to the challenges with which the management of capitalist society may be confronted in specific circumstances.” (Amin, 2014) But this only describes one of the major aspects of fascism – that being the systemic and structural; or more specifically, the capitalist system and the capitalist state that naturally forms to protect and promote it. There is also a cultural aspect to fascism that forms from within the populace. It is shaped by structural operations, being the main force of culture, and it manifests as an emotional and defensive response from individuals within this system that naturally coerces, exploits, and dispossesses them from their ability to sustain. In other words, the mass insecurity that stems from capitalism naturally produces reactionary responses of misdirected angst from the people it serves, or rather disserves.  

During these late stages of capitalism, “fascism has returned to the West, East, and South; and this return is naturally connected with the spread of the systemic crisis of generalized, financialized, and globalized monopoly capitalism.” (Amin,2014) The reactionary, right-wing response to the capitalist degradation of society is to target the most vulnerable of that society, viewing them as “drains” on public resources without realizing that such resources have been depleted by the pursuit for profit from those above, and most intensely during the era of neoliberalism, which opened the door for rampant greed to extract nearly everything of value from society in the name of privatization. In this structural sense, fascism comes to its complete fruition through a blindness that develops under capitalist culture, whether intentional or subconscious; a blindness that seeks every type of remedy imaginable for the problems created by the system without ever questioning the system itself.

The fascist regimes that surface during these times of crisis “are willing to manage the government and society in such a way as not to call the fundamental principles of capitalism into question, specifically private capitalist property, including that of modern monopoly capitalism.” (Amin, 2014) And that is why fascism intensifies under this pretense of “managing capitalism” and not simply in “political forms that challenge the latter’s legitimacy, even if ‘capitalism’ or ‘plutocracies’ [are] subject to long diatribes in the rhetoric of fascist speeches.” (Amin, 2014) This shows how the fascist tide is fundamentally structural; and the cultural developments that parallel it do so as a byproduct of capitalism’s systemic failures. Because of this, analyses “must focus on these crises.” And any focus on these systemic crises must also focus on the fundamental coercion inherent in the system’s productive mechanisms — that which former slave and American abolitionist Frederick Douglass once referred to as “a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery,” and “a slavery of wages that must go down with the other.”

The notion of wage slavery has been all but lost over the course of the last century. Once understood among the masses as a common-sense recognition of capitalist coercion, it has given way to the insidious nature of capitalist propaganda, which intensified in a very deliberate way after the cultural revolution of the 1960s, culminating in a neoliberal wave that has dominated since. While the originators of anti-capitalist theory and scientific socialism had exposed this form of slavery inherent in the system – with Marx referring to workers as “mere appendages to machines,” and Bakunin illustrating its ever-shifting nomenclature, from “slavery” to “serfdom” to “wage earners” – there was a brief resurgence of this analysis in the 1960s and 70s, from a variety of leftist radicals. One of the most under-appreciated of these analyses was the one provided by the imprisoned Black Panther, George Jackson, who in his extensive works made reference to the condition of “neo-slavery” that plagued the working-class masses. In a rather lengthy excerpt from Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, Jackson uncovered the forgotten importance of this coercive element that drives capitalism:

“Slavery is an economic condition. Today’s neo-slavery must be defined in terms of economics… [in the days of chattel slavery], the slaveowner, in order to ‘keep it (the slave) and enjoy all of the benefits that property of this kind can render, he must feed it sometimes, he must clothe it against the elements, he must provide a modicum of shelter.’ The ‘new slavery (capitalism), the modern variety of chattel slavery updated to disguise itself, places the victim in a factory or in the case of most blacks in support roles inside and around the factory system (service trades), working for a wage. However (in contrast to chattel slavery), if work cannot be found in or around the factory complex, today’s neo-slavery does not allow even for a modicum of food and shelter. You are free – to starve.

…The sense and meaning of slavery comes through as a result of our ties to the wage. You must have it, without it you would starve or expose yourself to the elements. One’s entire day centers around the acquisition of the wage. The control of your eight or ten hours on the job is determined by others. You are left with fourteen to sixteen hours. But since you don’t live at the factory you have to subtract at least another hour for transportation. Then you are left with thirteen to fifteen hours to yourself. If you can afford three meals you are left with ten to twelve hours. Rest is also a factor in efficiency so we have to take eight hours away for sleeping, leaving two to four hours. But – one must bathe, comb, clean teeth, shave, dress – there is no point in protracting this. I think it should be generally accepted that if a man or woman works for a wage at a job that they don’t enjoy, and I am convinced that no one could enjoy any type of assembly-line work, or plumbing or hod carrying, or any job in the service trades, then they qualify for this definition of neo-slave.

…The man who owns the [business] runs your life; you are dependent on this owner. He organizes your work, the work upon which your whole life source and style depends. He indirectly determines your whole day, in organizing you for work. If you don’t make any more in wages than you need to live (or even enough to live for that matter), you are a neo-slave.” And most of us who find ourselves in this precarious position as a working-class person under capitalism have no mobility, whether in a literal or figurative sense. We are “held in one spot on this earth because of our economic status, it is just the same as being held in one spot because you are the owner’s property.” (Jackson, 1994)

The era of neoliberalism, with its insistence of re-imagining laissez-faire economics, has revved up the authoritarian and oppressive underpinnings of the capitalist system by loosening historical constraints stemming from the age-old social contract — the idea that bourgeois governments had a minimal degree of responsibility for the well-being of their citizenries. In the United States, this has amounted to private entities (individuals, corporations, conglomerates) accumulating unprecedented amounts of wealth and power over the course of a few decades, while the majority of people have been thrown to the wolves. During this process, the structural basis of fascism – the merger of corporate and governmental power – has been fully realized, buoyed by the internal coercion of the capitalist system.

The Pedagogical Resurgence of Anti-Fascism

As capitalism’s internal contradictions continue to drive us deeper into a fascist reality, counter-hegemonic movements have aptly pivoted into anti-fascist forces. The most visible of these forces has been the anarchist-led “antifa,” which cracked into the mainstream-US consciousness during its numerous street clashes with reactionary groups during and after Donald Trump’s electoral rise. By heeding to a strategic tactic known as “no-platforming,” these black-clad resistance fighters deploy offensive attacks against both fascist speakers/leaders and marches to prevent them from gaining a public platform and, thus, legitimacy and momentum.

In a 2017 piece for In These Times, Natasha Lennard explained the philosophy behind no-platforming, how it extends from an all-encompassing radical abolitionist movement, and how it differs from liberalism:

“While I don’t believe we can or should establish an unbendable set of rules, I submit that a best practice is to deny fascist, racist speech a platform. It should not be recognized as a legitimate strand of public discourse, to be heard, spread and gain traction. And we must recognize that when the far Right speaks, the stage becomes an organizing platform, where followers meet and multiply. For this, we should have no tolerance.

No-platforming is only useful if it is contextualized in a broader abolitionist struggle, which recognizes that white supremacy will not do away with itself by virtue of being ‘wrong.’ Surely by now liberals have realized the folly in assuming justice is delivered by ‘speaking truth to power’? Power knows the truth, and determines what gets to be the regime of truth. The ‘truth’ of racial justice will not be discovered, proved or argued into lived actuality, but fought for and established.” (Lennard, 2017)

The physical tactics carried out under “no-platforming” are only a small part of a broader movement. While anti-fascists continue to confront fascists in the streets, a pedagogical resurgence of anti-fascism must continue to guide the movement as a whole by providing an intellectual, philosophical, and strategic battle plan. This plan must include: (1) a deep understanding of systemic forces generating from capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy; (2) an understanding of power dynamics and the need to form and deploy power effectively; (3) an understanding of the two major fronts of the anti-fascist war, which include the systemic and upward-focused class war and the anti-reactionary, horizontally-focused culture war; (4)an understanding of anti-capitalist ideology, including but not limited to Marxism, socialism, and anarchism; and, most importantly, (5) a mass push for class consciousness.

Class Consciousness

Building class consciousness is the most crucial task of our time, being citizens within the capitalist and imperialist empire that is the United States, facing down the impending fascist tide, and attempting to confront and defeat this tide along with the capitalist and imperialist systems as a whole. Recalibrating a working class that has been deliberately detached from its role is imperative. Regardless of how one prefers carrying out this task, whether through the formation of a vanguard of trained cadre or a direct engagement toward mass consciousness, it must be carried out within the proletariat itself, where much of capitalist and reactionary culture has become blindingly influential. This must be done not by rejecting theory and deeming it “too elite and alien for the masses,” but rather by embracing the organic intellectualism that is inherent within the masses and serving as facilitators to awaken this abundance of untapped potential. This must be done by realizing the working class is more than capable of thinking, understanding, and comprehending our position in society, if only given the chance to do so, free from the capitalist propaganda that drowns and consumes us.

In creating a working-class culture that not only embraces its inherent intellectualism, but does so in a way that explicitly challenges the dominant intellectual orthodoxy that fortifies capitalist relations, we may look to Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who provided a clear and convincing relationship between counter-hegemony and working-class, or organic, intellectualism that is rooted in “spontaneous philosophy”:

“It is essential to destroy the widespread prejudice that philosophy is a strange and difficult thing just because it is the specific intellectual activity of a particular category of specialists or of professional and systematic philosophers. It must first be shown that all [people] are ‘philosophers,’ by defining the limits and characteristics of the ‘spontaneous philosophy’ which is proper to everybody. This philosophy is contained in:  (1) language itself, which is a totality of determined notions and concepts and not just of words grammatically devoid of content; (2) ‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’; and (3) popular religion and, therefore, also in the entire system of beliefs, superstitions, opinions, ways of seeing things and of acting, which are collectively bundled together under the name of ‘folklore.’” (Gramsci, 1971)

The formation of class consciousness, therefore, rests on this notion, sprouts from the lived experience of proletarian life in the capitalist system, and may essentially replace Gramsci’s already-existing third parameter of “popular religion,” by simply substituting “folklore” with a materialist perspective. This process reminds us of Fred Hampton’s insistence that we proceed in “plain, proletarian English,” which is not to say that revolutionaries must “dumb down” their message in order to appeal to the masses, but rather return revolutionary theory to where it belongs: within working-class culture. Prior to Gramsci and Hampton, Marx had already gone through this process of realizing the existence of organic intellectualism. This process, the subsequent views that developed within Marxist circles throughout the 20th century, and the sometimes-regressive ideology that formed from such is effectively illustrated by Raya Dunayevskaya’s critique of Jean-Paul Sartre in her book, Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre, and from Marx to Mao:

“Methodologically, Sartre’s organic petty-bourgeois inability to understand what it is that Marx meant by praxis has nothing whatever to do with the Ego, much less with not being able ‘to read’ Marx. It has everything to do with his isolation from the proletariat.

The very point at which Sartre thinks that Marx, because he had to turn to ‘clarifying’ practice, stopped developing theory is when Marx broke with the bourgeois concept of theory and created his most original concept of theory out of ‘history and its process,’ not only in the class struggles outside the factory but in it, at the very point of production, faced with the ‘automation’ which was dominating the worker transforming him into a mere ‘appendage.’ Marx’s whole point what that the worker was thinking his own thoughts, expressing his total opposition to the mode of labor instinctually and by creating new forms of struggle and new human relations with his fellow workers. Where, in Marx, history comes alive because the masses have been prepared by the daily struggle at the point of production to burst out spontaneously, ‘to storm the heavens’ creatively as they had done in the Paris Commune, in Sartre practice appears as inert practicality bereft of all historic sense and any consciousness of consequences. Where, in Marx, Individuality itself arises through history, in Sartre History means subordination of individual to group-in-fusion who alone know where the action is. Sartre the Existentialist rightly used to laugh at Communists for thinking man was born on his first payday; Sartre ‘the Marxist’ sees even as world-shaking an event as the Russian Revolution, not at its self-emancipatory moment of birth with its creation of totally new forms of workers’ rule – soviets – but rather at the moment when it was transformed into its opposite with Stalin’s victory, the totalitarian initiation of the Five-Year Plans with the Moscow Frame-Up Trials and forced-labor camps.” (Dunayevskaya, 2003)

Organic Intellectualism and Political Consciousness

The process of tapping organic intellectualism is perhaps best described by Paulo Freire in his crucial text, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. To Freire, revolutionary class consciousness can only be realized through an embrace of radicalism, or as Angela Davis once phrased it, “simply grasping things at the root.” Applying our intellectualism and relating it to our lived experiences is only a partial awakening on the revolutionary path. To complete the transition, understanding the roots, or systems, that represent the foundational causes of our problems is crucial, not only for identifying the magnitude of the ultimate solution, and thus avoiding spending time and energy on inconsequential activities, but also for understanding that there is a solution. “The more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it,” Freire tells us. “This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.” (Freire, 2014)

With this realization in mind, we can better understand the four levels of consciousness and identify the pedagogical route, or remedies, that can be applied to ourselves and others. From the “magical consciousness,” where political impotence is maintained by inconceivable forces like gods and mythology, through the “naive consciousness,” where the material world becomes realized, and our interactions with others, with nature, within society, begin to take on some semblance of control, to “critical consciousness,” which introduces four distinct qualities that may be applied to this material reality: power awareness, or knowing and recognizing the existence of power and who possesses power in society; critical literacy, which leads to the development of analysis, writing, thinking, reading, discussing, and understanding deeper meaning; de-socialization, which allows one to recognize and challenge forms of power; and self-organization/self-education, which amounts to taking initiative to overcome the anti-intellectualism and indoctrination of capitalist “education.” (Wheeler, 2016; Daily Struggles, 2018) And, finally, the realization of a “political consciousness,” or class consciousness, which brings us to the understanding of a shared reality with most others, as well as the need for collective struggle to break our interlocking chains of oppression.

Ultimately, the path through these levels of consciousness are about power; moving from an impotent position to a powerful position — a powerful position that can only be forged through the realization of collective struggle. Freire describes this transition as a break from the “banking concept of education” that is designed to perpetuate ignorance to a critical pedagogy that is designed to empower the oppressed; a pedagogical process that, again, can only be carried out in a proletarian environment:

“In their political activity, the dominant elites utilize the banking concept to encourage passivity in the oppressed, corresponding with the latter's ‘submerged’ state of consciousness, and take advantage of that passivity to ‘fill’ that consciousness with slogans which create even more fear of freedom. This practice is incompatible with a truly liberating course of action, which, by presenting the oppressors slogans as a problem, helps the oppressed to ‘eject’ those slogans from within themselves. After all, the task of the humanists is surely not that of pitting their slogans against the slogans of the oppressors, with the oppressed as the testing ground, ‘housing’ the slogans of first one group and then the other. On the contrary, the task of the humanists is to see that the oppressed become aware of the fact that as dual beings, ‘housing’ the oppressors within themselves, they cannot be truly human.

This task implies that revolutionary leaders do not go to the people in order to bring them a message of ‘salvation,’ but in order to come to know through dialogue with them both their objective situation and their awareness of that situation—the various levels of perception of themselves and of the world in which and with which they exist. One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding.” (Freire, 2014)

And this task must be done in a collective manner, with the clear intention of not only challenging power, but creating our own collective, working-class power that has the potential to destroy the existing power structure emanating from authoritative systems like capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. After all, “freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift,” and “nobody liberates themselves alone; human beings liberate themselves in communion.” (Freire, 2014)

Understanding Collective Power, Separating Radical from Liberal, and Exposing Centrist Extremism and Horseshoe Theory

“There is a whole apparatus that controls the presidency that is absolutely resistant to change. Which isn’t to excuse Obama from taking bolder steps. I think there are steps that he could have taken had he insisted. But if one looks at the history of struggles against racism in the US, no change has ever happened simply because the president chose to move in a more progressive direction. Every change that has happened has come as a result of mass movements – from the era of slavery, the Civil War, and the involvement of Black people in the Civil War, which really determined the outcome. Many people are under the impression that it was Abraham Lincoln who played the major role, and he did as a matter of fact help to accelerate the move toward abolition, but it was the decision on the part of slaves to emancipate themselves and to join the Union Army – both women and men – that was primarily responsible for the victory over slavery. It was the slaves themselves and of course the abolitionist movement that led to the dismantling of slavery. When one looks at the civil rights era, it was those mass movements – anchored by women, incidentally – that pushed the government to bring about change.” (Davis, 2016)

This excerpt is from an interview with Angela Davis, where she shares some knowledge on how to deal with power. Davis’s point is that people create and force change, collectively and from the bottom. This is an inherently radical perspective that comes from a development of political consciousness and the realization that representative democracy, in all of its supposed glory, is a reactionary system that has rarely if ever carried through on its “democratic” advertisement. It is a radical perspective that comes from a place of understanding why and how the founding fathers, in all of their land-owning, slave-owning elitism, chose this system of governing: “to protect,” as James Madison put it, “the opulent of the minority against the majority.” (Madison, 1787)

Davis’s point is reiterated by Noam Chomsky, in his peculiar declaration that Richard Nixon was “the last liberal President” of the United States — a statement that also comes from a radical perspective which realizes the systemic influence of capitalism and, more specifically, of the intensified capitalist period known as neoliberalism. And it comes from an understanding that Nixon the man, cantankerously racist and temperamentally conservative, did not create the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), set employment quotas on affirmative action programs, propose employer-funded healthcare, sign the Fair Labor Standards Act, and approve a series of regulations on big business because he personally championed these causes, or even believed in them. (Conetta, 2014; Fund, 2013) Rather, he was pressured from below, in the same way that Reagan, the Bushs, Clinton, and Obama have been pressured from above to enact and maintain the corporate stranglehold on politics ever since.

Systemic pressure always supplants personal philosophies, beliefs, ideologies, and preferences; and our systemic default, which is predetermined by the capitalist order, will always prevail over electoral and representative politics. Political consciousness exposes this fact, separating radical from liberal. The cases of Lincoln and Nixon, while signifying how pressure from below can force change, are outliers. They were chinks in the system. And since Nixon, these chinks have seemingly been fortified by the “whole apparatus that controls the presidency that is absolutely resistant to change.” The legislation passed by Nixon, as well as the legislation that came about through the New Deal era, the “Great Society,” and Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, have all been tamed by this apparatus. Our environmental crisis has intensified, white-supremacist terror remains prevalent in American streets, economic inequality has reached unprecedented levels, and our racialized prison industrial complex has grown by a rate of over 600 percent since the Civil Rights movement – all realities suggesting that “progressive” legislation is ultimately toothless. Thus, any reforms that develop through the electoral system, as a result of pressure from the bottom, are ultimately curtailed and circumvented by capitalism’s economic base, which always seeks to undermine a common good in the pursuit of never-ending growth and profit. The so-called “liberal reforms” that occurred during the Nixon years were largely rendered useless during the proceeding neoliberal era, which represents a deliberate plan to unleash the capitalist system.

This fact does not render grassroots power useless; it merely suggests that it needs to be redirected. Returning to Davis’s comments, the case of Abraham Lincoln is perhaps one of the best examples of the impotence built into the political system. Lincoln the individual had vacillated on his stance regarding slavery, expressing personal “dislike” for the institution and even displaying empathy for slaves (Lincoln, 1855) during a time when such empathy was often lost on many Americans. At the same time, Lincoln the president recognized his duty to protect the rights of slaveowners as the executive administrator of the United States and its constitution, and ultimately admitted that his institutional duty, which was to “save the Union” and maintain the power structures as created by the founders, even if it meant that slavery would stay intact, far outweighed any personal misgivings he may have had toward slavery. The same logic, when coming from cogs within the power structure, can be applied to capitalism and imperialism, and has been for centuries.

Both Nixon’s and Lincoln’s yield to external pressure illustrates two important points: (1) the personality, ideological leanings, and personal beliefs of a politician, even if the most powerful politician, have no real consequence within the US political system; and (2) the foundation of US politics and government, as arranged by the founders of the country, will never allow for genuine democratic elements to materialize. The first point often represents the most telling demarcation between radical and liberal, with the former realizing this fact, and the latter unable to realize and thus placing focus on individual identity. Because of the liberal’s inability to understand this systemic reality, damaging electoral strategies such as “lesser-evilism” have established a firm place in the American political arena, inevitably causing a gradual deterioration toward more reactionary political platforms designed to protect the decaying capitalist system, which in modern times translates to a very real fascistic slide. Hence, we now have modern Democratic Party politicians that resemble 1970s/80s conservatives, and Republicans that continue to push the envelope of fascism.

Since Nixon, the flock of modern presidents who have bent the knee to multinational corporate and banking power further illustrate the utter insignificance of identity; ironically, during a political era where “marketing personalities” is usually the only determinate for “success.” This contradiction cannot be understated, and it is an accurate barometer that can be used to measure class/political consciousness in the United States, or the lack thereof. Ironically, the fact that voter turnout throughout the country has maintained such low levels during the tail-end of the neoliberal era and late-stage capitalism is a sign that class and political consciousness are actually rising. For when the working class realizes en masse that there is no change coming through electoral politics, and thus have shed the capitalist elite’s “banking concept,” we know that revolutionary change is on the horizon. And any such period must include mass education and a mass movement toward political consciousness – an understanding once echoed by Lucy Parsons: “[radicals] know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals.” (Lewis, 2017) Self-thinking, in this case, simply means realizing our inherent political consciousness that is based in our material position in the socioeconomic system beyond the construction and obstruction of capitalist ideology and culture.

As we collectively separate ourselves from a mainstream political arena that has been established to ensure our continued demise as working-class people, we also must be wary of blowback from the system. The most common response to a delegitimizing of the power structure is an appeal to authority, safety, and stability. This defensive posture forms from within the power structure, with corporate-political unity between both major political parties, in an attempt to construct an extremist center. At this stage, the extremist center has one task at hand — to protect the status quo at all costs. In the US, this means keeping the white-supremacist capitalist/imperialist system intact, as well as the bourgeois class that both maintains these systems and benefits from them. To do so, this extremist center exploits the fear of instability in order to build mass support, labels both fascist and anti-fascist ground movements as enemies of the state (although does not necessarily respond to them in the same ways), indecipherable from one another in their mutual “extremism,” and proceeds with an all-out attack on civil liberties in order to suppress popular movements that may challenge the embedded systems.

We have seen this response materialize over the past decade. In the aftermath of 9/11, civil liberties have been systematically removed from members of both political parties. During the street clashes between white nationalists and anti-fascists, we witnessed politicians from both parties as well as media denounce “both sides” as extremists, creating a convenient false dichotomy that completely ignores the most common-sense discussion – what the two sides actually believe in or are trying to accomplish.  And we have seen “horseshoe theory” enter into the mainstream arena as “philosophical justification” for this false dichotomy.  “In the current state of things, the electoral successes of the extreme right stem from contemporary capitalism itself. These successes allow the media to throw together, with the same opprobrium, the ‘populists of the extreme right and those of the extreme left,’ obscuring the fact that the former are pro-capitalist (as the term ‘extreme right’ demonstrates) and thus possible allies for capital, while the latter are the only potentially dangerous opponents of capital’s system of power.” (Amin, 2014) The result of this has been a strengthening of the system as we know it, a virtual circling of the wagons around our reality of corporate politics, inequality, joblessness, homelessness, racism, misogyny, and all of the oppressive social phobias that accompany them.  Still, the resistance looms, it is radical in nature, and it is growing.

Conclusion

The current state of the world — socially, politically, economically, and environmentally — indicates that we have entered the late stages of the global capitalist system. In the heart of the capitalist empire, the United States, social unrest has become the norm. Capitalism’s systemic contradictions, as well as its coercive and authoritarian core, have become increasingly uncontrollable for the country’s capitalist political parties. Social inequities are becoming more pronounced, the political arena is showing irregularities like never before, and an overtly fascist tide is starting to rear its ugly head.

The American working class has responded in various ways. On one side, reactionary mentalities have intensified among hordes of newly-dispossessed whites, thus leading them into the arms of the state’s fascist slide. On another side, a mass awakening has developed among many who have decided instead to tap into our organic intellectualism, turn to radical analysis, and return to anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist class politics. In response to the fascist tide, a formidable wave of anti-fascist action has sprung to life. To bolster this, a pedagogical resurgence of anti-fascism has formed both organically and through the forging of this new collective political and class consciousness. Rosa Luxemburg’s 1916 ultimatum has suddenly reached the ears of many within the American working class – will we transition away from capitalism and toward socialism, or will we regress further into barbarism?

Capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy know where they stand. Politicians from both capitalist parties have regrouped to form and extreme center. Corporate executives, bankers, bosses, business owners, arms manufacturers, hedge-fund operators, landlords, military officials, police, and the prison industry have all placed their bets on barbarism. The ball is now in our court. The time is ripe for the people to seize power, but the process of a political awakening, anchored by a mass shaping of class consciousness, must gear up. And, most importantly, our army must be built from the ground-up, from within the proletariat, with the understanding that we are all leaders in this struggle.

A war for consciousness must continue, and must be won, while we proceed in building mass political power. And this must be done with an all-out rejection of capitalist culture and the conditioned mentality that comes with it, because the people’s struggle is doomed to fail if it does not develop “a consciousness of the insidious promotion of capitalist individualism.” In doing so, “it is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals in order for people today to recognize our potential agency as a part of an ever-expanding community of struggle.” (Barat, 2014) We are on the precipice. The world and its future literally rest on our collective shoulders.

All power to the people.

Bibliography

Amin, Samir (2014) The Return of Fascism in Contemporary Capitalism, Monthly Review, September 1, 2014. Accessed at https://monthlyreview.org/2014/09/01/the-return-of-fascism-in-contemporary-capitalism/

Barat, Frank (2014) Progressive Struggles against Insidious Capitalist Individualism: An Interview with Angela Davis, Hampton Institute. Accessed at http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/angela-davis-interview.html

Conetta, Christine (2014) Noam Chomsky: Richard Nixon Was Last Liberal President, Huffington Post, 2/21/14. Accessed at https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/21/noam-chomsky-richard-nixon_n_4832847.html

Daily Struggles Blog (2018) Paulo Freire and the Role of Critical Pedagogy. Accessed at http://daily-struggles.tumblr.com/post/18785753110/paulo-freire-and-the-role-of-critical-pedagogy

Davis, Angela (2016) Freedom is a Constant Struggle (Haymarket Books)

Dunayevskaya, Daya (2003) Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre, and from Marx to Mao (Lexington Books)

Freire, Paulo (2014) Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary edition (Bloomsbury)

Fund, John (2013) Nixon at 100: Was He America’s Last Liberal? (National Review online, January 11, 2013) Accessed at https://www.nationalreview.com/2013/01/nixon-100-was-he-americas-last-liberal-john-fund/

Gramsci, Antonio (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (International Publishers)

Hampton, Fred (1968) Speech at Northern Illinois Unversity. Accessed at http://www.lfks.net/en/content/fred-hampton-its-class-struggle-goddammit-november-1969

Jackson, George (1994) Soledad Brothers: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (Chicago Review Press)

Lennard, Natasha (2017) Don’t Give Fascism An Inch, In These Times, August 23, 2017. Accessed at http://inthesetimes.com/article/20449/no-platform-milo-free-speech-charlottesville-white-supremacy

Lewis, Jone Johnson (2017) Lucy Parsons: Labor Radical and Anarchist, IWW Founder (ThoughtCo. Online) Accessed at https://www.thoughtco.com/lucy-parsons-biography-3530417

Lincoln, Abraham (1855) Letter to Joshua Speed (Abraham Lincoln Online) Accessed at http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/speed.htm

Luxemburg, Rosa (1915) The Junius Pamphlet. Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/ch01.htm

Madison, James (1787) Federalist Papers, No. 10 (The Avalon Project) Accessed at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp

Parliament of UK. Managing and owning the landscape. https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/towncountry/landscape/overview/enclosingland/

Wheeler, Lauren (2016) Freire’s Three Levels of Consciousness, Participatory Performance Practices. Accessed at https://laurenppp.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/freires-3-levels-of-consciousness-25-1-16/

Socialist Revolution, Women’s Liberation, and the Withering Away of the Family

By Tatiana Cozzarelli

Originally published at Left Voice.

In college, I read a lot of theorists who called Marxism “class reductionist.” They claimed that socialism only attacks economic problems and ignores oppression. But, as I began to study Marxism, I found these oft-repeated tropes about Marx only addressing class are far from the truth. 

From the very beginning, Marxists have taken up the question of gender oppression — sometimes with more clarity, sometimes with less, but always discussing it. A brief overview: In 1879, August Bebel wrote Woman and Socialism. In 1884, Friedrich Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in which he traces the roots of gender oppression to the creation of private property. He argues that there is nothing biological about patriarchy, monogamy, or the two-parent family unit. Later, Clara Zetkin was the editor of the German Social Democratic Party’s women’s newspaper Equality. She fought for women to become subjects of the struggle against capitalism and patriarchy. 

But for me, it is the Russian Revolution that best illustrates Marxist ideas made reality in relation to the fight against sexism and for women’s rights. It demonstrates that for leading Marxist thinkers such as Lenin and Trotsky, revolution alone was insufficient to rid society of patriarchy. Rather, revolution was just the beginning of a profound social transformation of women’s role in society, as well as a transformation of all social values and culture. This is demonstrated by the laws enacted by the Bolshevik Party that led the revolution, as well as the broad debates about women’s rights within the party. 

Yet, as Lenin put it, equality in law does not mean equality in life. As a result of the civil war that followed the revolution, and the international isolation of the first workers’ state, the economic conditions for women’s equality did not exist. Under these dire circumstances, Stalinism took hold, erasing workers’ victories and especially women’s victories won in the Russian Revolution. The emergence of Stalinism created the false idea that Marxism, and socialism more broadly, are unconcerned with sexism and patriarchy. 

Women as the Spark for the Russian Revolution

The context of the Russian Revolution of 1917 is one of complete misery for the country and its people. Russia had gone through a series of wars: with Japan in 1904-05, a failed revolution in 1905, and World War I in 1914. During the World War, prices went up 131% in Moscow and women spent hours waiting in the biting cold for basic necessities like wheat and sugar. 

Marx believed that the socialist revolution would begin in advanced industrialized nations. Russia, however, lagged far behind the economic and productive power of countries such as Germany. Peasants made up 80% of the population — mostly illiterate and isolated from the political debates in the cities. Peasant life was based on a strict division of labor and women were taught to be obedient to their father and later their husband. It was only after 1914 that women were allowed to separate from their husband, but only with a man’s permission; likewise, women could only get a passport or a job with a man’s permission. 

There was a small but strong proletariat in Russia’s cities. World War I played an important role in increasing the weight of women workers in the Russian proletariat: as men went off to war, more and more women joined the workforce. Women made up 26.6 percent of the workforce in 1914, but nearly half (43.4 percent) by 1917. On top of the miserable working conditions, women industrial workers also faced gendered inequality. They earned lower wages and were not allowed to organize in the same unions as their male colleagues.

However, women were the spark that ignited the Russian Revolution which would topple the Tsar and create the conditions for the Bolsheviks to take power. In late February 1917, the women in Petrograd factories left their workplaces, going to neighboring factories calling on the men to also leave their jobs and join the strike. The Bolshevik newspaper Pravda stated, “The first day of the revolution — that is the Women’s Day, the day of the Women’s Workers International! All honor to the International! The women were the first to tread the streets of Petrograd on that day!”

After the February Revolution, workers organized delegate assemblies, called soviets, to make decisions about the burgeoning movement. Women participated in the soviets, although to a lesser degree than men. The Bolshevik paper Rabotnitsa (The Woman Worker) was relaunched in May 1917 and discussed equality of the sexes, as well as the need for the state to provide communal facilities for taking care of household chores, traditionally imposed on women. 

The stage for the October Revolution, which ended the provisional government and brought about the world’s first workers’ state, was prepared by women’s radical activism. It was the tireless organizing work of Bolshevik women such as Alexandra Kollontai that allowed the Bolsheviks to win over the majority in the soviets and take power in the October Revolution. Women also participated in the October Revolution by providing medical help and even joining the Red Guard. 

What Did the Bolsheviks Think About Women’s Issues? 

The Bolsheviks saw women’s role in a given society as a measure of the society as a whole; it wouldn’t be until women had achieved full equality that they could consider the socialist revolution ultimately successful. After the revolution, immediate measures for women’s liberation were taken. The Bolsheviks put forward four primary means to support women’s equality: free love, women’s participation in the workforce, the socialization of domestic work, and the withering away of the family.

The Bolsheviks believed that women should not be coerced to marry or to remain in a marriage as a result of family obligations or economic pressures. Relationships should be based exclusively on love, not social coercion. The Bolsheviks did not believe that they could immediately take up the task of building new types of relationships, recognizing that the revolution alone would not do away with centuries of patriarchal traditions, beliefs, and morals. Rather, they sought to destroy the  social basis of the bourgeois family and the inherited beliefs that keep women oppressed. Furthermore, they believed that women should have complete equality with men in the workplace and encouraged women to organize, vote, and run for positions of leadership in unions and soviets. 

Long before the Wages for Housework campaign, a global feminist movement that grew out of the International Feminist Collective in Italy in 1972, the Bolsheviks argued that there was nothing natural or biological about women doing domestic work or even raising children. This was an ideology perpetuated by capitalism that had no place in a socialist society. Liberating women from “domestic slavery” was a central discussion within the party. Trotsky writes,

The revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the so-called “family hearth” — that archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution in which the woman of the toiling classes performs galley labor from childhood to death. The place of the family as a shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to the plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, creches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations, hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organizations, moving-picture theaters, etc. The complete absorption of the housekeeping functions of the family by institutions of the socialist society, uniting all generations in solidarity and mutual aid, was to bring to woman, and thereby to the loving couple, a real liberation from the thousand-year-old fetters. 

Unlike the Wages for Housework campaign, the Bolsheviks sought to take housework out of the hands of individuals and put it in the hands of the workers state. The Bolsheviks did not want to maintain domestic work in the realm of the household, equally dividing those banal tasks between men and women. Rather, they wanted to divorce these tasks from the family unit and socialize domestic labor. In this way, the family and women in particular would shed much of their “reproductive” role. 

Equality in Law

The Bolsheviks put ideas into practice. In 1918, less than a year after the revolution, the Family Code was passed, which historian Wendy Goldman calls the “most progressive family legislation ever seen in the world.” It took the church out of the business of marriage and made matrimony a civil affair. It not only legalized divorce, but made it accessible to every married person without requiring a reason. The code ended centuries-old laws that assigned all property to men and provided equal rights to children born outside of a registered marriage. If a woman did not know who the father of her child was, all of her sexual partners would share responsibilities for child support. Importantly, it made women equal to men in law. A law as progressive as this has not been won to this day in the United States, as the Equal Rights Amendment was not confirmed by enough states. The author of the family code, Alexander Goikhbarg saw this law as transitory —it was not meant to strengthen either the state or the family, but to be a step towards the extinction of the family. 

In 1920, abortion was legalized, making the Soviet Union the first country in the world to do so. Prostitution and homosexuality were no longer banned in the USSR either. Additionally, the Bolsheviks opened public cafeterias, laundromats, schools, and day care centers as a step towards the abolition of women’s double shift at the workplace and at home. It was a step towards socializing domestic work, liberating individual women from the responsibility. 

Furthermore, the Bolsheviks saw women’s political participation as central to the advancement of the Soviet Union. They organized Zhenotdel, the women’s section of the party, made up of workers, peasants, and housewives who organized women at the local level. Delegates from Zhenotdel were elected for internships in the government as well. As Wendy Goldman argues, it was an important way for thousands of women to get involved in the party, as well as in politics more broadly. 

Equality in Life

Although the Bolsheviks made major advances by passing laws, they were very conscious that this was insufficient to guarantee true equality. Lenin says,

Where there are no landlords, capitalists and merchants, where the government of the toilers is building a new life without these exploiters, there equality between women and men exists in law. But that is not enough. It is a far cry from equality in law to equality in life. We want women workers to achieve equality with men workers not only in law, but in life as well. For this, it is essential that women workers take an ever increasing part in the administration of public enterprises and in the administration of the state… The proletariat cannot achieve complete freedom, unless it achieves complete freedom for women.

Although the Bolsheviks stressed the material basis for inequality, they also knew that a profound personal change would have to occur in members of the new Soviet society. However, this change in people’s ideas was not divorced from the changes in the organization of society — a social reorganization won by proletarian revolution. In this sense, it is a reminder to us that simply changing people’s ideas is insufficient to create true equality. Sexism does not only exist in people’s minds, but in institutions and the organization of society. 

The Struggles of a Young Worker’s State

The young workers’ state faced considerable challenges in its first years. It was attacked by 14 imperialist armies and survived because of sacrifices made by workers and peasants in the Red Army. After a world war and then a civil war, the people of the Soviet Union faced starvation and high unemployment. 

Women suffered the most under these conditions. Although under explicit orders not to do so, women were laid off before their male colleagues. The 13th Congress of the Bolshevik Party discussed this problem explicitly, making new regulations to protect women’s employment. They said, “that the preservation of women workers in production has political significance.” 

A tenet of communism — to each according to his need and from each according to his ability — can only work in a society of plenty. Advanced capitalist mass production provides such a basis. However, when there isn’t enough, a select group will decide who has and who does not — a bureaucracy. This is why Lenin and so many other Bolsheviks placed their hopes in a German revolution, which would ensure that the USSR would not remain isolated. It would put German industry and the goods it produced under the control of the working class. However, the German revolution was squashed, leaving the Soviet Union to fend for itself. It is from the conditions of scarcity that the counter revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy emerged, reversing the advances made during the early years after the Russian Revolution. Stalinism went on to play a counterrevolutionary role around the world, based on the theory of “socialism in one country.”

Stalinist Counterrevolution and Women’s Rights

The Stalinist bureaucracy staged a counterrevolution which murdered the Left Opposition inside the Bolshevik Party, locking up, exiling, or killing those who attempted to carry on the legacy of the 1917 revolution. Theorists who wrote about the withering away of the family such as Nikolai Krylenko were arrested and murdered, while the author of the 1918 Family Code was imprisoned in an asylum. 

At the same time that Stalin began to put forth the idea of socialism in one country, he also re-criminalized homosexuality and prostitution. In 1936, Stalin ended women’s right to an abortion, with Stalinist leaders arguing that women had the “honorable duty” to be mothers.

In order to put forward such reactionary ideas about gender, Stalin squashed the women’s department within the Central Committee of the Communist Party, as well as all women’s organizing on the local level. His government campaigned to bring back traditional gender roles, the very gender roles that the Bolsheviks had worked to break with. By 1944, Stalin had organized awards for women based on how many children they had. The “Order of Maternal Glory” was created for women with seven to nine children, and the title “Mother Heroine” for those with ten or more. 

The Left Opposition and the Bolshevik Legacy

As Stalin continued to play a counterrevolutionary role around the world, Trotsky created the Fourth International, a grouping of communists dedicated to the legacy of the Bolsheviks. The Fourth International was against the Soviet bureaucracy and for power to the working class, not just in one country — as Stalin wanted — but around the world. 

The Transitional Program, which laid out the tasks for the Fourth International, argues that women’s rights are central for the socialist revolution. Trotsky says, 

Opportunist organizations by their very nature concentrate their chief attention on the top layers of the working class and therefore ignore both the youth and the women workers. The decay of capitalism, however, deals its heaviest blows to the woman as a wage earner and as a housewife. The sections of the Fourth International should seek bases of support among the most exploited layers of the working class; consequently, among the women workers.

Far from any class reductionism, Trotsky sees the organization of women in a revolutionary party as a central task for communists.

What Can We Learn?

One hundred years have passed since the Russian Revolution and it has been decades since a revolution has been able to shake capitalism. Some believe that revolution is impossible. Others believe that a workers’ revolution will create laws based on the racist, sexist, or homophobic attitudes that some workers hold today. Many equate Marxism with the struggle against exploitation, not the struggle against oppression. 

Yet when the Bolsheviks took power and immediately made laws supporting women’s rights, they knew the revolution did not and should not stop there. They had no illusions about even the most progressive gender legislation in the history of the world, on its own, ending patriarchy. The Bolsheviks knew that these laws created the foundation for liberation, but were not libration in itself. Instead, they had lively debates about how to organize the material conditions of the new society to root out oppression against women. They wanted to make sure women had full participation in work, education and politics— but not by taking on a double or triple burden of housework, childcare and paid work. They discussed socialized childcare and domestic work, as well as the withering away of the family as an organizing unit of society. Even the young workers’ state did not yet have the material conditions to realize this dream, but they took real and substantive steps in that direction. Stalinism put an end to all these dreams, reverting the Soviet Union to patriarchal norms. 

It’s been a long time since the Russian Revolution. There are a lot of thinkers who have made key contributions to socialist feminist thought since then, especially in the realm of sex, sexuality and queer theory. Social reproduction theory builds on key Marxist ideas, and there have been huge developments in a discussion of desire, sexuality and queer theory. These are all important to thinking about a socialist revolution in the 21st century, which would create the material foundations for the liberation of gender and sexuality. 

But we cannot leave the legacy of Marxism to those who pervert its meaning to crude class reductionism. We cannot allow Marx’s legacy to be mired by Stalinism and the patriarchal, counterrevolutionary view of gender and society that it upheld. We should draw lessons from the Bolshevik’s revolutionary tradition for women’s liberation. 

Chicago’s Unemployed Rebellion

[Artwork by Mara Garcia, @magavitart]

By Eric Kerl

Originally published at Rampant Magazine.

he social, political, and economic crisis currently unfolding, shaped by a global pandemic, is a damning indictment of modern capitalism. In its first two months, more than 30 million people in the United States have lost their jobs. While business leaders cavort with the Trump administration and right-wing states’ rights advocates demand to reopen the economy, the crisis will only deepen. Indeed, many economists predict that the fallout will be the worst since the Great Depression.

The crisis of the 1930s culminated in the rise of fascist power in Europe. In the United States, it ushered in the New Deal coalition and the expansion of the welfare state. But, by the end of the decade, only the slaughter of World War II finally jumpstarted the global economy through sheer barbarism and unrestrained weapons production.

Like Donald Trump and the rest of today’s ruling class, leading capitalists of the 1930s had little to offer the majority of people after the stock market crashed in 1929. Unemployment, poverty, hunger, and homelessness mushroomed. As the crisis deepened, the industrial overlord, notorious anti-Semite, and failed presidential hopeful Henry Ford advised poor people to take up sharecropping to feed themselves. With paid advertisements in newspapers across the country Ford claimed, “Stocks may fail, but seedtime and harvest do not fail.”[1] Meanwhile, ecological catastrophe devastated the dustbowl-ravaged Great Plains and displaced more than 3.5 million people. By 1934, the Yearbook of Agriculture announced:

Approximately 35 million acres of formerly cultivated land have essentially been destroyed for crop production. . . . 100 million acres now in crops have lost all or most of the topsoil; 125 million acres of land now in crops are rapidly losing topsoil.

While millions went hungry, Ford partnered with the growing Nazi war machine. During the first six months of 1932, Ford’s meagre operations in Germany struggled to make money. Although the plants were ridiculed as “foreign” by the wave of German nationalism, Ford swooned over Hitler’s new plans to shift automobile manufacturing into overdrive, fueled by government cash.  By 1937, Ford was a certified manufacturer of trucks and cars for the Nazi regime’s military.

Back in the United States, Ford summoned the police and National Guard against unemployed workers. During the spring of 1932, three thousand unemployed workers protested outside Ford’s behemoth River Rouge complex in Detroit demanding relief. Police attacked the protesters, injuring dozens. Four workers were shot and killed, including Joseph York, a twenty-three-year-old unemployed worker. The following day, York’s girlfriend, Mary Grossman, faced down the murderous cops:

Yes, I was there. I’m not sorry. I did it for starving millions. Blame capitalism which is the cause of all suffering. Now don’t talk to me![2]

Similar protests erupted in cities around the world, often organized and led by Communist Party members and other radicals. Politicians and media outlets routinely decried the reds and riots of unemployed. International headlines of the time read: “Spanish Jobless Riot,” “Canadians Attack City Hall,” “British Hunger Army Ready to Invade Commons,” “Police Battle Reds with Tear Gas at Detroit Factory,” “Police Protect President from Hunger Parade,” “German Jobless Charge Cabinet, Plunder Dole,” “Red Rebellion Flares in Spain,” and “Batons of Police Halted Red Mob in Washington Riot.”

Yet, as the American Civil Liberties Union noted at the time, “It is a matter of common knowledge among relief workers that vigorous demonstrations—so-called ‘riots’ by the unemployed, produce an almost miraculous effect in loosening the public purse-strings.”[3]

Chicago’s Unemployed Rebellion

During the first month of 1928, nearly two years before the stock market crash of 1929, the entertainment industry magazine Variety expressed its anxiety for Chicago’s theater business. Unemployment, the article noted, was the highest since 1922. And theater-goers had reason to be uncomfortable: “The horde of ’boes and panhandlers infesting the Loop makes New York Times Square parasites seem like a coterie of philanthropists in comparison.” Still, the article remained naively optimistic. “Because of sound financial qualities, it is believed by authorities here the unemployment wave will be relieved considerably this year.”[4]

Instead, the number of unemployed Americans surged from 3 million to 15 million. By 1932, half of Illinois’s workers were jobless. In Chicago, where 60 percent of the state’s unemployed lived, a deep social crisis was underway. One report noted at the time,

There are several Chicago garbage dumps, some of which are under city supervision and some private. About a dozen places where garbage is dumped were visited by different members of the committee; and in every place where “soft” garbage, such as the remains of food, were found, people were reported to be picking it over and eating from it at the dump or taking it home to cook.[5]

The influence of communists and revolutionaries helped galvanize the unemployed into a fighting force, and authorities grew panicked about the increasing militancy and organization of the movement. While cops beat marchers in Detroit and New York City, Chicago police ransacked offices of unemployed and radical organizations throughout the city. Despite the repression, 50,000 workers mobilized in Chicago streets on March 6, 1930, for a national day of action billed as International Unemployment Day.

Less than a week later, three policemen were shot and eleven “communists” were arrested at the north end of Michigan Ave during a “riotous demonstration.” Those arrested included Bryan Moss, Ben Koblentz, Mrs. Anna Rejba, Martin Rich, Evelyn Weiner, William Bart, Frank Cordisco, William Bart, Morris Krivin, Anna Grossman, and Ida Mittelman. Their defense lawyer was Albert Goldman, an antifascist organizer who later emerged as a leader of the fledgling US Trotskyist movement, lead counsel for the Teamsters during the 1934 Minneapolis strike, and a mayoral candidate in Chicago. Ultimately, a “communist parade” preceded their acquittal, “in which several thousand men and women, half of them Negroes, participated.”[6]

The following July, the Communist Party’s Trade Union Unity League initiated a call for a national conference of unemployed councils.[7] More than 1,300 delegates from CP-affiliated organizations and unions met in Chicago. Black workers comprised an important number of the representatives and the conference highlighted racial justice demands in the unemployed movement.

As unemployed workers flooded into Chicago from the Midwest and South in search of jobs, unemployed councils blossomed in neighborhoods across the city. Rent strikes, anti-eviction blockades, and street mobilizations occurred across the city and demonstrations targeted the role of cops in carrying out the evictions and repression. One Chicago Tribune article described a typical action;

300 men and women gathered outside the stations. Policeman Dominick Varsetto, assigned there, closed the door. Members of the group pounded upon it until they broke the glass, but no further damage was done. At that moment Liet. Make Mills of the industrial squad and Capt. Phil Parodi of the Maxwell street stations arrived with eight police squads. Leaders of the crowd made soapbox speeches before the gathering dispersed. Liet. Mills arrested five alleged ringleaders: Joseph Shoster, no address; Edward Van Horn, 642 Liberty street; Joseph Bebko, 1717 West Madison street; and James Adams, no address.[8]

Still, aid to one hundred and forty-three thousand Chicago families was cut by 25 percent, and perishable food supplies were slashed by half in 1932.[9] In neighborhoods across the city, Chicago’s poor rebelled in a firestorm of organizing and riots.

On a cold, rainy Halloween, 2,500 unemployed gathered at the corner of 22nd and Wentworth. On the city’s West Side, 3,000 gathered at Union Park. In Washington Park on the South Side, 2,000 protesters gathered. Along with thousands from other parts of the city, they converged in the Loop, wearing red armbands, red dresses, and carrying red umbrellas and red flags. One journalist reported,

As the singing, shouting, hunger armies moved toward the meeting place from north, west and south, their forces were constantly increased. Detachments joined on the end of the lines until, by the time the three groups were a few blocks apart in the loop, a total of some 15,000 persons was moving.[10]

Military veterans carried a banner that read, “Wilson’s heroes; Hoover’s hoboes.” Other contingents included a group of Italian antifascists and “a platoon of children, 7 to 10 years old, carrying empty milk bottles.” Unemployed Black workers highlighted the case of Scottsboro and pressed the issue of racial justice.

Less than a month later, “a genuine united front of working class organizations was constituted” in Chicago to fight the 50 percent reduction of relief. Unemployed organizations from across the city, along with the Communist Party, Socialist Party, and the Workers League, organized the event. As one participant described:

The call for the conference signed by the three organizations met with a huge response everywhere. The masses reacted as never before, and the conference bore testimony of this fact. 750 delegates representing 350 organizations made up the conference. Included in the conference were over 40 church organizations composed entirely of unemployed workers, the Farmer-Labor Party, the A.F. of L., fraternal organizations, the TUUL.[11]

The city’s authorities responded with a wave of repression, arrests, and deportations of unemployed and radical organizers. While the Chicago Police Department flaunted its racism and brutality routinely, the frequent deployment of cops also provided opportunities to exhibit their bumbling idiocy. On a Saturday afternoon in 1934, just four days before Thanksgiving, four thousand Chicagoans marched to City Hall with demands for unemployment and relief benefits. Nearly two hundred cops were stationed inside the building “in case trouble developed.” When none developed, one of the jackass cops “tossed a few firecrackers under the feet” of a Black cop. A frenzy of gunfire erupted inside the building and seven cops were shot in the barrage of friendly fire.[12]

Winning relief

Like Henry Ford’s sharecropping schemes, government and business leaders had no genuine relief to offer millions of poor and hungry workers. Genuine programs, of course, were organized and advocated by the unemployed themselves. In Pennsylvania, insurgent rank-and-file coal miners pressed their demands for the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill.[13] In Charlotte, North Carolina, the unemployed council organized militant, interracial demonstrations in support of the bill.[14] In Chicago, hundreds of delegates from the Illinois Workers Alliance, Emergency Workers Union, and other organizations of the unemployed—representing about 750,000 workers—endorsed the bill in the fall of 1934.

The Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill was unveiled by the Communist Party in the summer of 1930 and quickly won the endorsement of three thousand five hundred local unions. As Chris Wright described the bill,

In the form it would eventually assume, it provided for unemployment insurance for workers and farmers (regardless of age, sex, or race) that was to be equal to average local wages but no less than $10 per week plus $3 for each dependent; people compelled to work part-time (because of inability to find full-time jobs) were to receive the difference between their earnings and the average local full-time wages; commissions directly elected by members of workers’ and farmers’ organisations were to administer the system; social insurance would be given to the sick and elderly, and maternity benefits would be paid eight weeks before and eight weeks after birth; and the system would be financed by unappropriated funds in the Treasury and by taxes on inheritances, gifts, and individual and corporate incomes above $5,000 a year. Later iterations of the bill went into greater detail on how the system would be financed and managed.[15]

The bill was eventually co-opted and presented to Congress by the self-described “La Follette Republican” Ernest Lundeen of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, a rabid isolationist and Nazi sympathizer.[16] Like the homegrown fascist radio personality Father Charles Coughlin he railed against the crimes and inequality of capitalism. But his neck swelled over the threat of communism and its advocacy for racial justice.

Nevertheless, the groundswell of action and organizing by socialists, communists, and unemployed workers—Black and white—ensured that Lundeen’s bill would “extend to all workers, whether they be industrial, agricultural, domestic, office, or professional workers, and to farmers, without discrimination because of age, sex, race, color, religious or political opinion or affiliation.”[17] Indeed, a New York Post poll showed that 83 percent of its readers preferred the more radical Lundeen bill over the Social Security Act.

The strength and popularity of the unemployed movement and genuine relief coincided with a massive strike wave that reached from San Francisco to Minneapolis, Toledo, and the textile mills of the South. While sectarian squabbles often counteracted the potential for solidarity in other areas of work, the Communist Party and Socialist Party both appealed for common, united front approaches to unemployment. For the CP, their united front demands included:

1. Decisive wage increases and reduction in hours, supporting a bold strike movement to win them

2. For the immediate enactment of the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill

3. For the immediate enactment of the Farmers’ Emergency Relief Bill to secure for the farmers the possession of their lands and tools, and to provide abundance of food to the masses

4. For the immediate enactment of the Bill for Negro Rights

5. For the united struggle against war and fascism

6. For the broadest possible united action in localities, in factories, in trade unions, and on every question affecting the workers and toiling masses, to win better conditions[18]

Ultimately, the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill was defeated in favor of Roosevelt’s watered-down policies of the second New Deal. But it was not a foregone conclusion that something more radical—genuine relief—was within the grasp of the unemployed movement.

And, the current crisis of unemployment and poverty will not be magically solved by today’s politicians. Only our own self-activity can win genuine relief from this most recent and profound crisis of capitalism.

Notes

[1] “Henry Ford on Self-Help,” advertisement prepared and paid for by the Ford Motor Company as a contribution to public welfare, Chicago Tribune, June 1, 1932, 14.

[2] “15 Arrested After Police Slay Four in Unemployed Riot,” The Pantagraph, March 8, 1932, 1.

[3]  Quoted in Edgar Bernhard, Ira Latimer, and Harvey O’Connor, Pursuit of Freedom: A History of Civil Liberty in Illinois, 1787–1942 (Chicago: Chicago Civil Liberties Committee, 1942), 158, accessed at: http://hdl.handle.net/10111/UIUCOCA:pursuitoffreedom00chic.

[4] “Chicago’s Heavy Breadline Tells of Unemployment,” Variety, February 1, 1928, 12.

[5] Quoted in Edgar Bernhard, Ira Latimer, and Harvey O’Connor, Pursuit of Freedom: A History of Civil Liberty in Illinois, 1787–1942 (Chicago: Chicago Civil Liberties Committee, 1942), 157, accessed at: http://hdl.handle.net/10111/UIUCOCA:pursuitoffreedom00chic.

[6] “Jurors Acquit 11 Alleged Reds; Fired by Judge,” Chicago Tribune, April 20, 1932, 19.

[7] Solomon, Mark, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 148.

[8] “Seek to Raise Cash Pending U.S. Relief Loan,” Chicago Tribune, July 21, 1932, 2.

[9] “Relief to 143,000 Chicago Families Is Cut 25 Percent,” Alton Evening Telegraph, October 27, 1932, 1.

[10] Robert T. Loughran, “Radicals Parade under Guise of ‘Hunger March’,” Freeport Journal-Standard, October 31, 1932, 1–12.

[11] Albert Glotzer, “Stalinists Make Right About Face in Chicago Unemployed United Front,” The Militant, Vol. V, No. 28 (November 26, 1932), 1–2.

[12] “Hunger March is Peaceful but 7 Policemen Hurt,” Jacksonville Daily Journal, November 25, 1934, 8.

[13] Walter Howard, Anthracite Reds Vol. 2: A Documentary History of Communists in Northeastern Pennsylvania During the Great Depression (iUniverse, 2004), 152.

[14] Gregory S. Taylor, The History of the North Carolina Communist Party, University of South Carolina Press, 2009, 73–74.

[15] Chris Wright, The Hidden History of American Radicalism: The Campaign for the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill” Counterfire, April 25, 2020, https://www.counterfire.org/articles/history/21138-the-hidden-history-of-american-radicalism-the-campaign-for-the-workers-unemployment-insurance-bill.

[16] B.W. Hart, Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States (New York: St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2018).

[17] M. Poole, The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 22.

[18] United States Congress House Committee on Un-American Activities, Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-Fourth Congress, Second Session (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1956), 231.

Beneath Conspiracy Theories, the Class War

[Illustration by Anastasya Eliseeva]

By Aragorn Eloff

It is unsurprising that, as we confront the black swan event of the global pandemic, there has been an upsurge in the spread of conspiracy theories. Historically, narratives around malevolent, all-powerful forces controlling reality in various ways have often emerged in times of social unrest and uncertainty, where large numbers of people find themselves socially adrift or unable to control fundamental aspects of their lives.

While the typical response to conspiracy theories is to view them as the product of ignorance or delusional thinking, this is complicated by the fact that history is full of many real instances of powerful people colluding in secret at the expense of society. The numerous price-fixing scandals uncovered in South Africa in recent years surely also constitute conspiracies, as do corporate cover-ups around the world, many of which we know about only as a result of people questioning the presentation of reality and correctly connecting the dots to map out underlying truths.

It is clear though that what we more commonly describe as conspiracy theories – exemplified in the current period by the linking of 5G networks to Bill Gates, vaccination and microchip implants, for instance – are markedly different from these real-world examples. As social and psychological research has shown, conspiracy theories of this kind are not amenable to empirical enquiry and subsist for long periods of time in the absence of any reasonable evidence. Those adhering to such theories tend to exhibit little interest in testing their underlying claims and will often simultaneously believe in conspiracy theories that outright contradict each other.

As The Conspiracy Theory Handbook published by George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication observes, this suggests that conspiracy theories function in a similar way to ideology, with belief being more a case of underlying psychological motivators – dealing with feelings of powerlessness, coping with threats or explaining confusing events – than the result of careful research and reflection. If this is true, it becomes important to understand these drives and the social contexts within which they tend to arise. This is especially vital when we acknowledge that many conspiracy theories contain, albeit figuratively, a kernel of intuitive truth.

Indeed, as Marxist group Aufheben writes in an article titled “The rise of conspiracy theories: Reification of defeat as the basis of explanation”, conspiracy theory, like left politics, often has a sense “that the world is structured by unequal power relations, and that the powerful act in their own interests and against the interests of the majority”. Distinct from the kinds of concrete political analyses that are able to explain these unequal power relations in terms of complex dynamics involving myriad social, political, economic and historical forces, however, conspiracy theories operate with a highly simplified understanding of these aspects of social reality, turning social forces into individual Bond villains and systemic conditions into cabals of all-powerful evildoers. This simplified narrative structure, which tellingly reflects dominant modes of subjectivity and the cult of the personality that has arisen under neoliberalism, also partly explains the appeal of conspiracy theories for large numbers of people looking for a stable foothold in an increasingly complex world.

As simplistic as they may be, it is through empathetic and nuanced engagement with conspiratorial narratives that we can perhaps best grapple with, and nurture meaningful collective responses to, the problems conspiracy theories suggestively outline. For instance, while casting Gates as an evil billionaire who wants to control people with 5G networks via microchips implanted in their bodies through mandatory vaccination is clearly absurd, there are many legitimate reasons to be concerned by the technocratic and paternalistic approach of the Gates Foundation towards addressing malnutrition, malaria and viral pandemics in Africa and, more broadly, the lack of control we have over the actions of the plutocrat class.

Anxieties around being controlled by technology may also be based on intuitions about the extent to which states and big technology companies – Google, Microsoft, Amazon and so forth – have infiltrated, influenced and benefitted from our private lives while remaining almost entirely unaccountable, something researcher Shoshana Zuboff explores in her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

Similarly, the recent fears expressed by people who are convinced that the Covid-19 pandemic is part of a nefarious plot by global leaders acting in unison to push agendas that diminish our freedoms have at least some basis in what Naomi Klein calls disaster capitalism. Here, we would be quite unreasonable if we weren’t acknowledging that numerous states and corporate actors have leveraged the crisis to push forward anti-social agendas, the recent spate of illegal evictions of shack dwellers across South Africa and the loosening of environmental laws around the globe being just two examples.

Covert agendas

More broadly, we can discern the vague stirrings of a genuinely radical politics in some conspiracy theories. As Aufheben observes, these theories often express a genuine sense of estrangement from – and dissatisfaction with – capitalism, the state and other dominant social forces. While the world is not, of course, completely controlled by the Illuminati, the Rothschilds or lizard people, it’s not difficult to see the hints of a class analysis here. And when the staggering inequalities of wealth and power in the contemporary world have allowed the ruling class to live fantasy lives so utterly alien from our own, is it any wonder some of us have come to see them as almost inhuman?

Whatever truths they may loosely allude to, however, it remains the case that conspiracy theories, whatever short-term existential relief they may provide by assuring us that everything is easily understandable and under control, even if not in our interests, are deeply disempowering. If we set out with an incoherent understanding of how the world works, we quickly find ourselves unable to take much effective action to tackle its fundamental injustices or equalise its vast disparities of power, which is why the spreading of conspiracy theories usually results in apathy and fatalistic resignation.

More concerning, the same psychological drivers that make conspiracy theories so appealing also leave people susceptible to the influence of anyone – fascists, sociopaths, corporations and insincere spiritual gurus among them – offering an easy, comforting narrative that explains how things are and what we can do to make them better, usually in ways which, ironically, serve covert agendas.

Our approach to conspiracy theories should therefore be at least twofold. On the one hand, we can gently challenge the fallacious elements of conspiratorial thinking and encourage a more thorough interrogation of those aspects that correctly intuit real problems in the world. In practice, this takes the form of political outreach and radical pedagogy, the creation of collective spaces of learning and teaching through which we can tackle the problems we face at their roots without becoming tangled in them. The more we empower ourselves and each other with knowledge about how science, medicine, technology, politics and so forth function, the more we simultaneously hone our critical thinking skills, in turn cultivating personal agency – the sense that we can be meaningful participants in creating social change.

On the other hand, there is the more difficult task of offering assurance and support to those who find themselves drawn to conspiracy theories to make sense of a reality that seems to be slipping through their fingers. Here, we need to develop frameworks that offer sustainable forms of material, psychological and spiritual care. That the world is increasingly complex and uncertain means that very little is, or ever could be, orchestrated in the contrived ways conspiracy theorists propose, but it also means we have to become better equipped to deal with that complexity and uncertainty. While this may seem like a relatively solitary existential pursuit, a genuine sense of security is grounded in healthy, thriving communities of friends, lovers, families and comrades.

Building such communities is no simple task: they are at odds with the alienated and impoverished forms of social belonging that have become so prevalent in capitalist society and they require patient and careful interpersonal and political work. However, if we commit ourselves to learning more and communing more, we can slowly build herd immunity to the impoverished thinking of the present, whether it takes the form of conspiracy theories or dominant ideologies, and begin to cultivate something stronger than the multiple pandemics we currently face.

Covid-19 is a virus that attacks the lungs and many of those infected with it struggle greatly to breathe. Capitalism is an economic relation that attacks the social body and most of us forced to participate in it struggle greatly to live. The deep sense of existential disempowerment wrought by these conditions, especially when experienced together, renders us highly susceptible, however rational we think we are, to conspiratorial thinking and noxious ideologies.

When those around us fall prey to these insidious but increasingly endemic forms of magical thought we should, instead of ridiculing, judging or chastising them, remind ourselves that the word “conspiracy” comes from the old Latin term conspiraire, which means, simply, to breathe together. Breathing together, conspiring, we can create something far better than what currently passes for life.

This article was originally published at New Frame.

Profitability, Investment, and the Pandemic

[Photo Credit: REUTERS]

By Michael Roberts

Originally published at the author’s blog.

Last week’s speech by US Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington was truly shocking.  Powell told his audience of economists that “The scope and speed of this downturn are without modern precedent”. One shocking fact that he announced was that, according to a special Fed survey of ‘economic well-being’ among American households, “Among people who were working in February, almost 40% households making less than $40,000 a year had lost a job in March”!!!

Powell went on to warn his well-paid audience sitting at home watching on Zoom that “while the economic response has been both timely and appropriately large, it may not be the final chapter, given that the path ahead is both highly uncertain and subject to significant downside risks”. Indeed, if the continual downgrading of forecasts of global growth are anything to go by, then the number of optimists about a V-shaped recovery are beginning to dwindle to just the leaders of governments and finance.

Another study projects that US GDP will decline by 22% compared to the pre-COVID-19 period and 24% of US jobs are likely to be vulnerable. The adverse effects are further estimated to be strongest for low-wage workers who might face employment reductions of up to 42% while high-wage workers are estimated to experience just a 7% decrease.

And Powell was worried that this collapse could leave lasting damage to the US economy, making any quick or even significant recovery difficult.  “The record shows that deeper and longer recessions can leave behind lasting damage to the productive capacity of the economy.”, said Powell, echoing the arguments presented in my recent post on the ‘scarring’ of the economy.

Powell reckoned the main problem in achieving any recovery once the pandemic was over was that “A prolonged recession and weak recovery could also discourage business investment and expansion, further limiting the resurgence of jobs as well as the growth of capital stock and the pace of technological advancement. The result could be an extended period of low productivity growth and stagnant incomes.”  See here.

And there was a serious risk that the longer the recovery took to emerge, the more likely there would be bankruptcies and the collapse of firms and eve n banks, as “the recovery may take some time to gather momentum, and the passage of time can turn liquidity problems into solvency problems.”

Indeed, last week, the Federal Reserve released its semi-annual Financial Stability Report, in which it concluded that “asset prices remain vulnerable to significant price declines should the pandemic take an unexpected course, the economic fallout prove more adverse, or financial system strains re-emerge.”  The Fed report warned that lenders could face “material losses” from lending to struggling borrowers who are unable to get back on track after the crisis. “The strains on household and business balance sheets from the economic and financial shocks since March will probably create fragilities that last for some time,” the Fed wrote.  “All told, the prospect for losses at financial institutions to create pressures over the medium term appears elevated,” the central bank said.

So the coronavirus slump will be deep and long lasting with a weak recovery to follow and could cause a financial crash.  And working people will suffer severely, especially those at the bottom of the income and skills ladder. That is the message of the head of the world’s most powerful central bank.

But the other message that Jay Powell wanted to emphasise to his economics audience was that this terrifying slump was not the fault of capitalism.  Powell was at pains to claim that the cause of the slump was the virus and lockdowns and not the economy. “The current downturn is unique in that it is attributable to the virus and the steps taken to limit its fallout. This time, high inflation was not a problem. There was no economy-threatening bubble to pop and no unsustainable boom to bust.  The virus is the cause, not the usual suspects—something worth keeping in mind as we respond.”

This statement reminded me of what I said way back in mid-March when the virus was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation. “I’m sure when this disaster is over, mainstream economics and the authorities will claim that it was an exogenous crisis nothing to do with any inherent flaws in the capitalist mode of production and the social structure of society.  It was the virus that did it.”  My response then was to remind readers that “Even before the pandemic struck, in most major capitalist economies, whether in the so-called developed world or in the ‘developing’ economies of the ‘Global South’, economic activity was slowing to a stop, with some economies already contracting in national output and investment, and many others on the brink.”

After Powell’s comment, I went back and had a look at the global real GDP growth rate since the end of the Great Recession in 2009.  Based on IMF data, we can see that annual growth was on a downward trend and in 2019 global growth was the slowest since the GR.

And if we compare last year’s 2019 real GDP growth rate with the 10yr average before, then every area of the world showed a significant fall.

The Eurozone growth was 11% below the 10yr average, the G7 and advanced economies even lower, with the emerging markets growth rate 27% lower, so that the overall world growth rate in 2019 was 23% lower than the average since the end of the Great Recession.  I’ve added Latin America to show that this region was right in a slump by 2019.

So the world capitalist economy was already slipping into a recession (long overdue) before the coronavirus pandemic arrived.  Why was this?  Well, as Brian Green explained in the You Tube discussion that I had with him last week, the US economy had been in a credit-fuelled bubble for the last six years that enabled the economy to grow even though profitability has been falling along with investment in the ‘real’ economy.  So, as Brian says, “the underlying health of the global capitalist economy was poor before the plague but was obscured by cheap money driving speculative gains which fed back into the economy”.  (For Brian’s data, see his website here).

In that discussion, I looked at the trajectory of the profitability of capital globally. The Penn World Tables 9.1 provide a new series called the internal rate of return on capital (IRR) for every country in the world starting in 1950 up to 2017. The IRR is a reasonable proxy for a Marxian measure of the rate of profit on capital stock, although of course it is not the same because it excludes variable capital and raw material inventories (circulating capital) from the denominator.  Despite that deficiency, the IRR measure allows us to consider the trends and trajectory of the profitability of capitalist economies and compare them with each other on a similar basis of valuation.

If we look at the IRR for the top seven capitalist economies, the imperialist countries, called the G7, we find that the rate of profit in the major economies peaked at the end of the so-called ‘neoliberal’ era in the late 1990s.  There was a significant decline in profitability after 2005 and then a slump during the Great Recession, matching Brian’s results for the US non-financial sector.  The recovery since the end of the Great Recession has been limited and profitability remains near all-time lows.

The IRR series only goes up to 2017.  It would be possible to extend these results to 2019 using the AMECO database which measures the net return on capital similarly to the Penn IRR.  I have not had time to do this properly, but an eye-ball look suggests that there has been no rise in profitability since 2017 and probably a slight fall up to 2019.  So these results confirm Brian Green’s US data that the major capitalist economies were already significantly weak before the pandemic hit.

Second, we can also gauge this by looking at total corporate profits, not just profitability.  Brian does this too for the US and China.  I have attempted to extend US and China corporate profit movements to a global measure by weighting the corporate profits (released quarterly) for selected major economies: US, UK, China, Canada, Japan and Germany.  These economies constitute more than 50% of world GDP.  What this measure reveals is that global corporate profits had ground to a halt before the pandemic hit.  Marx’s double-edge law of profit was in operation.

The mini-boom for profits that began in early 2016 peaked in mid-2017 and slid back in 2018 to zero by 2019.

That brings me to the causal connection between profits and the health of capitalist economies.  Over the years, I have presented theoretical arguments for what I consider is the Marxian view that profits drive capitalist investment, not ‘confidence’, not sales, not credit, etc.  Moreover, profits lead investment, not vice versa.  It is not only the logic of theory that supports this view; it is also empirical evidence.  And there is a stack of it.

But let me bring to your attention a new paper by Alexiou and Trachanas, Predicting post-war US recessions: a probit modelling approach, April 2020. They investigated the relationship between US recessions and the profitability of capital using multi-variate regression analysis.  They find that the probability of recessions increases with falling profitability and vice versa.  However, changes in private credit, interest rates and Tobin’s Q (stock market values compared with fixed asset values) are not statistically significant and any association with recessions is “rather slim”.

I conclude from this study and the others before it, that, although fictitious capital (credit and stocks) might keep a capitalist economy above water for a while, eventually it will be the profitability of capital in the productive sector that decides the issue. Moreover, cutting interest rates to zero or lower; injecting credit to astronomical levels that boost speculative investment in financial assets (and so raise Tobin’s Q) and more fiscal spending will not enable capitalist economies to recover from this pandemic slump.  That requires a significant rise in the profitability of productive capital.

If we look at investment rates (as measured by total investment to GDP in an economy), we find that in the last ten years, total investment to GDP in the major economies has been weak; indeed in 2019, total investment (government, housing and business) to GDP is still lower than in 2007. In other words, even the low real GDP growth rate in the major economies in the last ten years has not been matched by total investment growth.  And if you strip out government and housing, business investment has performed even worse.

By the way, the argument of the Keynesians that low economic growth in the last ten years is due to ‘secular stagnation’ caused by a ‘savings glut’ is not borne out.  The national savings ratio in the advanced capitalist economies in 2019 is no higher than in 2007, while the investment ratio has fallen 7%.  There has been an investment dearth not a savings glut.  This is the result of low profitability in the major capitalist economies, forcing them to look overseas to invest where profitability is higher (the investment ratio in emerging economies is up 10% – I shall return to this point in a future post).

What matters in restoring economic growth in a capitalist economy is business investment.  And that depends on the profitability of that investment.  And even before the pandemic hit, business investment was falling.  Take Europe. Even before the pandemic hit, business investment in peripheral European countries was still about 20 per cent below pre-crisis levels.

Andrew Kenningham, chief Europe economist at Capital Economics, forecast eurozone business investment would fall 24 per cent year on year in 2020, contributing to an expected 12 per cent contraction in GDP. In the first quarter, France reported its largest contraction in gross fixed capital formation, a measure of private and public investment, on record; Spain’s contraction was also near-record levels, according to preliminary data from their national statistics offices.

In Europe, manufacturers producing investment goods — those used as inputs for the production of other goods and services, such as machinery, lorries and equipment — experienced the biggest hit to activity, according to official data. In Germany, the production of investment goods fell 17 per cent in March compared with the previous month, more than double the fall in the output of consumer goods. France and Spain registered even wider differences

Low profitability and rising debt are the two pillars of the Long Depression (ie low growth in productive investment, real incomes and trade) that the major economies have been locked into for the last decade.  Now in the pandemic, governments and central banks are doubling down on these policies, backed by a chorus of approval from Keynesians of various hues (MMT and all), in the hope and expectation that this will succeed in reviving capitalist economies after the lockdowns are relaxed or ended.

This is unlikely to happen because profitability will remain low and may even be lower, while debts will rise, fuelled by the huge credit expansion.  Capitalist economies will remain depressed, and even eventually be accompanied by rising inflation, so that this new leg of depression will turn into stagflation.  The Keynesian multiplier (government spending) will be found wanting as it was in the 1970s.  The Marxist multiplier (profitability) will prove to be a better guide to the nature of capitalist booms and slumps and show that capitalist crises cannot be ended while preserving the capitalist mode of production.

Conspiracy Theory vs. Socialist Logic

Originally published by Socialist Standard.

Conspiracy-theory, or conspiracism, has it that much of the world today is to be understood in terms of ‘conspiracy’ be it by scientists, extra-terrestrials, masons, or whoever.

Currently gaining credence among many is the idea that all accepted science is a conspiracy, for relativity theory and quantum physics are specialised subjects. Einstein is difficult to understand and the majority of us are not astrophysicists, or other types of scientist, but that is no reason to dismiss these theories.

Many in society seek solace in pseudoscience, and therefore in conspiracism, whereby they can feel in control over what they cannot understand. Conspiracism absolves you from having to undertake painstaking research where you are not willing to trust those who actually have expertise in a difficult subject. Conspiracism attracts people from an entire spectrum, eager to feel that they belong to something: right or left in their leanings, dependent on what they were before becoming conspiracist. The phenomenon appears to attract ‘truthers’ – those who know the ‘truth’ despite the facts. Some are avowedly Christian, others not. Some dally with other rehashed mythologies, interpreted to fit in with their modern conspiracism. Many are, in fact, as members of the working class, confused and vulnerable, and want to feel significant; which they feel modern scientific thinking cannot help them with.

It is tempting to draw some similarity in all of this to the declining years of the Roman Empire, so brilliantly shown in the film Agora, about the last days of the great Library of Alexandria. Science and learning were then the property of a privileged few, and this is largely how they are seen today by many attracted to conspiracism and ‘truthism’. Today we are bombarded, flooded, with ideas and theories via the internet, whilst actual reading has declined.  Some conspiracy theorists tend to deride books which contradict them, dismissing them as the propaganda of those ‘in on’ the ‘great conspiracy.’ Book-learning becomes associated with closeted academia and so is deemed irrelevant. So refutation of a conspiracist’s ideology from facts outlined in books is futile.

With many people feeling disenfranchised from intellectual life, as they are in fact disenfranchised economically (being born in the wage-slave class), old and new-style forms of fanaticism win converts. Conspiracism is an obstacle to socialist awareness. Vital to the spread of socialist awareness is the materialist conception of history and recognition of human scientific progress.

Marx knew this when he wrote welcoming and applauding the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, recognising science as the necessary ally of socialism. Above all, the scientific study of history is vital and paramount, as history is an evolutionary process.

Capitalism is not a conspiracy. It is a system that evolved through social and economic processes, just as socialism will have done. Capitalism, and class societies as a whole, do by definition encourage ‘conspiratorial’ behaviour, but they are historically, not ‘conspiratorially’, produced.

Everything grows from an antecedent and does not appear out of the blue.

Conspiracy theory backs up the bourgeois myth of an evil human nature (‘Original Sin’ rehashed for the modern age). To paraphrase Karl Marx, the morality of a given age is the morality of its ruling class. The cut-throat values of the capitalist class have us believing in a human cut-throat nature in which everyone is a potential conspirator, a potential thief, a potential brigand. Thus an ideology of brigandage, sustained by the viciously competitive nature of capitalism, leads people to see their fellow beings as either real or potential brigands.

Conspiracism reduces everything to a school playground view wherein everything is viewed as the machinations of some cartoon-like gang independent of history. Those who attempt to spread conspiracy theory do a disservice to the cause of achieving a better world, by further confusing already confused workers and by giving ammunition to those who label socialists as cranks and claim capitalism to be the end of history.

We urge our fellow workers to face reality, embrace knowledge, and recognise for what it is the ridiculous zealotry known as conspiracy theory. Emancipation from the system of wage-slavery, poverty, prices and profits requires a grasp of social history and of social and natural realities.

Coronavirus Capitalism and the Neoliberal Crisis Playbook

Illustration by Ajay Mohanty

By Gaspar Zapata

While much of the ongoing global pandemic remains unpredictable, the response of the current administration suggests a future of violent economic insecurity, especially for the working class. Covid-19 has ushered in death and destruction as well an economic crisis the scale of which continues to expand. Unemployment figures are now double the levels of joblessness during the peak of the 2007-8 Great Recession and are only expected to rise. The basic needs of working people (food, shelter, healthcare) seem increasingly unattainable. An estimated one-third of tenants could not pay rent last month and an already weak social safety net means that the number of food insecure Americans is set to surpass 40 million. Yet, the U.S. is home to nearly half of the world’s high-net worth individuals.

This extraordinary wealth combined with generalized poverty is not by accident; it was historically created by decades of neoliberal policies that yielded socialism for the rich and predatory financial capitalism for the working class. The Trump administration will only intensify this social stratification if it continues along its current path.

Neoliberalism refers to a set of ideas, beliefs and practices that promote improving human well-being through individual freedom, free markets and free trade. Since the 1970s this utopian vision has served to justify attacks on organized labor and to build support for waves of corporate deregulation. It has also been used to legitimize the destruction of welfare programs. Reagan advanced neoliberalism by tapping into racist and sexist tales of “welfare queens” to rationalize cutting programs for the poor. Clinton did his part by deregulating banking and finance and thereby set the stage for the predation of middle- and low-income households during the sub-prime crisis twelve years ago.

Source: https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

Gradually, workers have seen wages stagnate while the cost of living keeps rising. Overall economic productivity and GDP have risen but workers have not been given a fair share of this output. The rich, on the other hand, have enjoyed historically low tax bills. These trends have generated a “double squeeze” on workers where their livelihoods are being directly exploited through low-wage, insecure work while their social safety nets have eroded and their debts have accumulated.

For the past forty years government officials, corporate lobbyists, investment bankers, and free-market intellectuals armed with neoliberal ideas have led us into a world of grave inequality, mass incarceration and what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has called organized abandonment. They have designed a political-economic system where the richest 1% own half of the wealth in the world and where the rest of us are saddled with trillions of dollars in student and credit card debt because our wages our low and our benefits practically non-existent.

During times of crisis the internal contradictions of this system become glaringly clear, but leaders dogmatically continue to apply the same inadequate solutions.

In 2008 we witnessed the neoliberal crisis playbook in action as Congress authorized billions upon billions of relief funds to rescue a collapsing financial sector. In a strategy consistent with neoliberal philosophy, experts and politicians made the protection of troubled markets their top priority. What we must remember, however, is that “markets” are people; they are ordinary borrowers and workers but also CEOs, top executives and elite investors.

Source: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/asset-ownership-and-the-uneven-recovery-from-the-great-recession-20180913.htm

When the Great Recession was said and done, distressed working-class homeowners saw only an insignificant slither of those relief funds. It should be no shock, then, that the only income group who gained wealth since the crash has been the top ten percent income bracket. To say that “we” have recovered from the subprime crash is misleading. Only the very wealthy recovered; the rest of us are struggling to keep up.

Covid-19 is revealing the persistence of neoliberal thinking and the colossal failures of our present and past political leadership. In this cruel historical drama politicians have embraced neoliberal solutions to solve social problems created by decades of neoliberal policies to begin with. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act is more of the same.

A provision in the CARES Act includes a potential $1.7 million tax break for high-earning individuals, or an estimated 43,000 U.S. taxpayers. Individuals with annual incomes below $75,000 will only receive a one-time $1,200 stimulus check. For those most in need of immediate relief the stimulus check pales in comparison to the relief being offered to the millionaire class. Moreover, the billions potentially lost through these tax breaks could be used to support hospitals, schools and other social services.

The Trump administration is fiercely embracing neoliberal solutions to the pandemic, even using it to deregulate environmental protections. This approach has not and will not work. The global pandemic and its aftermath will not be solved by extending aid to the rich while leaving the rest of us vulnerable to the brutal cycles of finance capitalism. It is already worsening food insecurity for working families and disproportionately claiming Black, Indigenous and Latinx lives. It will require bold actions like nation-wide rent strikes and pro-worker legislation like the proposal for a rent and mortgage freeze and the bill proposed to forgive student debt. Finding a way out of our shared predicament requires waging a united struggle against the murderous system which threatens our collective well-being.

All power to the people!

Art Without a Place, Labour Without an End

By Petar Jandrić

New roads and old milestones

When the coronavirus hit the world, many of us dusted our high-school or college sciences. What is a virus? What are the main differences between linear and logarithmic curves? What does it mean to flatten the curve? We also remembered our history. Spanish Flu, Black Death… how did our ancestors deal with these threats? We suddenly rediscovered movies such as Contagion, and ‘relaxed’ ourselves from horrifying news reports with equally (and often more) horrifying fiction. Those locked in their homes, without access to work, found themselves thinking how to pay the next rent. Those who could transfer their work online, such as teachers and computer programmers, faced various challenges pertaining to working from home. Those whose work was deemed necessary, such as doctors and firemen, found themselves working 24/7 while isolated from their families. We all discovered how to home-school our children, and we all faced the challenge of retaining our sanity locked between our four walls in an increasingly insecure world. We re-learned how to wash our hands. The world, according to social networks and news reports, seemed to breathe as one.   

While we collectively discovered new realities pertaining to our specific positions within the society, an ‘old’ reality just waited to be rediscovered. Those working from lush homes have it much better than those working from cramped apartments. Those working in companies with strong social provisions have it much better than freelancers. Those working in Third Wold countries face dilemmas such as ‘corona or hunger’ (Sanjai and Naqvi 2020). Class matters. Property ownership matters. Social provisions matter. Race matters. On our brand-new road towards discovering what is now popularly termed as ‘a new normal’, we found a good old milestone – Karl Marx.

The coronavirus has created the biggest social science experiment in our lifetimes (and I do hope that it will not be replaced by an even bigger one in near future). Diverse, contextual, and nuanced global experiences of lockdown will surely be described, classified, and neatly foldered in journals, book, project reports, and other academic formats. Together with this painstaking analytic breakdown of the pandemic into it smallest detail, we also need some ‘grand’ over-arching theories to help us make sense of all this. And here I don’t aim at old-concepts-new-clothes semi-prepared attempts such as Žižek’s (2020) Pandemic! Covid-19 shakes the world, but something along the lines of Struggle in a Pandemic: A Collection of Contributions on the COVID-19 Crisis (Workers Inquiry Network 2020). Of course, the latter “collection of short summaries and critical reflections of the policies taken in different countries to deal with the coronavirus pandemic that affect workers and the unemployed” (dВЕРСИЯ 2020) is just an initial take on the problematic. Yet we do need a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches and theories; it is only at their intersections, that we can make sense out of this global pandemic mess.  

Canary in a coal mine

I am an academic researcher in a transdisciplinary field which is hard to pin-down, epistemologically and practically. Yet my transdisciplinary approaches, just like many others, still pretend towards ‘science’ – while many of us understand that the arts are just as important as the sciences, it is a well-hidden fact that even the most open transdisciplinary approaches often do not give enough importance to the arts (Jandrić and Kuzmanić 2020). At a very personal level, however, I am blessed with a partner who is an active artist. We share our ideas, topics, and interests; our works often intersect at some level which is invisible to our audience but formative for our works. At the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic I wrote an urgent editorial for Postdigital Science and Education (Jandrić 2020) and invited post-digital scholars to engage with our present crisis. I issued calls for 500-word testimonies, for shorter commentary articles, for full-length original articles… And at the same time, Ana Kuzmanić issued her own call. She had a previously signed contract to do an artist book for her forthcoming exhibition, and she decided to base her book on testimonies by artists, curators, and cultural workers about the future of the cultural sector after Covid-19. Her call, entitled Art Without Place, starts with following words:   

While the Covid-19 pandemic spreads all over the world, the ban of public gatherings has drastic consequences to many occupations including arts and culture. This is a frightening situation; our lives are endangered directly, but also our material and political existence has quickly become uncertain. Reality has become more fiction than fiction, and the idea of the arts in concert halls, cinemas, and white cubes, has become uncertain. Our profession as artists and cultural workers face major challenges. The idea of radical change in the political economy of the arts is no longer merely a utopian construction; it has become a real and urgent question. In this collective project, we would like to hear about the ways in which you—artists, curators, art critics and all workers in the cultural sector—experience this shift in the moment here and now. (Kuzmanić 2020)

Reading the call, one cannot help but recall conditions in the cultural sector before the pandemic. Artists in precarious positions, moving from one project to another, mostly without permanent employment or social security. Curators, some institutionalized and some not, fighting at the battlefield of commodified ‘cultural industry’. Steep winning curve, in which only a few can make a living from their work. Already before the pandemic, workers in cultural sector were amongst the most exposed to global capitalism. To add insult to injury, some of the strongest sources of income for these people, such as live performances (theatre, music…), exhibitions and showings (visual arts, film), and so on, are heavily place-based. Immediately after lockdown, many of these precarious workers have been left without income. While it is impossible to speak of exact numbers at this stage, global lockdown has put a large percent of the cultural sector on its knees. This can be depicted in a very simple equation:

No music, film, exhibition + no social security = quick bankruptcy   

Ana, and other workers in the cultural sector, are personally interested in their own futures. But for the rest of us working in other fields, it would be foolish to think that we are exempt from their fate – our world is too global, too connected, too intertwined. With their extremely high level of exposure to corona-related disruptions, workers in the cultural sector are not merely an unlucky group to be pitied. More importantly, for all of us, they are canaries in the corona-mines – when the artists stop singing, that means that breathing air for the rest of us is getting thinner and thinner.

Art without a place, labour without an end

All over the Internet, those who are lucky to still have access to paid labour report unimaginable levels of stress, fatigue, and overwork. Artists frantically polish their funding bids; researchers publish more than ever, teachers’ workloads have gone over the roof. While we do all that in our homes, using often inadequate equipment in often inadequate workplaces, employers – who admittedly suffer from significant drops in income – are paying less and less. Only few months into the pandemic, it has become clear that the ‘new normal’ for most of us consists of more work for less pay. For those interested in social justice, the pandemic is an opportunity to rethink our society towards more social solidarity. For those interested in profits, the pandemic is an opportunity to add even more to their already unbelievably large piles of money. Unfortunately, this is not my paranoia but our global reality – as the likes of Amazon now see their profits increase at an incredible speed (Evelyn 2020), billions of people lose their sleep over paying next months’ rent and groceries.

While we try to imagine the new post-corona normal, social sciences should finally expand its scope to take the arts seriously. Our friends and family from cultural industries are more than victims of collateral damage from the coronavirus pandemic – they are also the corona-mine canaries who clearly point towards our global future. There is some truth in these social media memes that we are all in the same social, political, and economic storm of the coronavirus pandemic – and this is where this naïve truism ends. Some of us ride fancy new boats which can sail the current storm smoothly, while others ride old rickety barges suitable for ship scrap-yards. But the sea is always stronger from the strongest boat, and effects of our current crisis are stronger than any protection offered by luckier labour niches (such as tenured positions at state universities). Taking care of cultural industries is taking care of all of us. So let us hear our canary friends’ song, and let us join together in a struggle against those who want to turn word’s increased misery into their profits.

Submissions to Arts Without Place project will be open by the end of May 2020. Please click here to leave your submission: http://artwithoutplace.com/.

References

dВЕРСИЯ (2020). Covid-19: Workers archive. https://dversia.net/5757/covid-19-workers-archive/. Accessed 11 May 2020. 

Evelyn, K. (2020). Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos grows fortune by $24bn amid coronavirus pandemic. The Guardian, 15 April. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/15/amazon-jeff-bezos-gains-24bn-coronavirus-pandemic. Accessed 11 May 2020. 

Jandrić, P. (2020). Postdigital research in the time of Covid-19. Postdigital Science and Education, 2(2), 233–238. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00113-8.

Jandrić, P., & Kuzmanić, A. (2020). Uncanny. Postdigital Science and Education, 2(2), 239-       244. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00108-5.

Kuzmanić, A. (2020). Art Without Place. http://artwithoutplace.com/. Accessed 11 May 2020. 

Sanjai, P.R., & Naqvi, M. (2020). ‘We will starve here’: Why coronavirus has India’s poor fleeing the cities. The Independent, 3 April. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/coronavirus-india-poor-fleeing-cities-starvation-a9438401.html. Accessed 28 April 2020.

Workers Inquiry Network (2020). Struggle in a Pandemic: A Collection of Contributions on the COVID-19 Crisis. Workers Inquiry Network.

Žižek, S. (2020). Pandemic! Covid-19 shakes the world. New York: OR Books.

COVID-19 Discussions Over The U.S. Healthcare System

Pictured: Volunteers from the International Christian relief organization Samaritan’s Purse set up an Emergency Field Hospital for patients suffering from the coronavirus in Central Park across Fifth Avenue from Mt. Sinai Hospital on March 30, 2020 in New York. (Bryan R. Smith / AFP)

By Ekim Kılıç

Since the beginning of January 2020, COVID-19, aka Coronavirus, has continued to devastate peoples’ lives, specifically working classes across the world. Internationally, a prominent aspect of the pandemic is that all working people feel a similar level of fear and anxiety, even to some extent petty-bourgeois classes despite their considerable economic privileges. It has created an unprecedented platform in which more working people and intellectuals tend to see and discuss the inability of capitalist political economic system to address itself to a health crisis and its understanding of public health system.

One of the most affected countries is the United States, which has almost one-third of the international cases, with 815,491 as an outcome of 4,162,922 tests by April 21. On this date, the number of death reached 45,097. The total number of recovered patients is 82,620. This means that there are 2,464 cases and 136 deaths per 1M people.[1] One-third of the national cases are from the State of New York.[2] In the U.S., the primary reason that the epidemic spread like a wildfire is the weak healthcare system along with several other political and social problems here. Especially, the pandemic shook the base, revealed lack of organized working class, fetishism over individualism combined with puritan work ethic, a healthcare system abandoned at the mercy of banks and companies, widespread and dire mental health problems, homelessness, structural racism, a violent prison-industrial complex, a divided American political system over extremely libertarian federal system, and the discourses of nationalist functionalism and blind petty bourgeois ethicism.

The pandemic came as if a “god’s gift” in a time when economic measures have been taken by and for capital to prevent the deepening consequences of the 2008 financial crisis and the present galvanizing crisis. The extortion of abortion rights in several states and the elimination of union elections by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), escalating interventionist moves against Venezuela, cutting financial support to World Health Organization (WHO), and expectation for the presidential executive order to suspend immigration reveals for whose benefit the pandemic process was used.[3][4][5][6][7] Even American exceptionalists face stark contradictions, as countries such as China, Vietnam, South Korea, and Cuba have effective attitudes towards the epidemic, Russia’s military aircraft to aid the US with medical equipment, then from Vietnam, and the US’s seizure of medical equipment to Barbados, called modern piracy.[8][9][10][11][12]Also, President Trump’s attempts to blame the pandemic on Chinese conspiracy remark their unpreparedness and desperation to get away with their responsibilities, later framed COVID-19 as “Chinese Virus.”[13]

Although unions, which have a strong bureaucracy, cannot lead the workers, and the government disregards urgent measures for “essential workers,” they, especially healthcare and logistics workers, feel compelled to struggle for vital, urgent demands.[14] In that sense, the working class politics’ wave of the last years definitely shows its effect. Coinciding with the Bernie Sanders campaign in a country where even the limited healthcare demand of “Medicare for All” was almost a joke, universal healthcare became a major part of public agenda. However, in a country where nurses have to make protective uniforms out of big garbage bags due to lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), it turned out that the lives of workers and laborers, who are called “essentials,” hypocritically, are worthless. One has to remember that political elites have always been shamelessly outspoken with their disdain for workers.[15][16][17]

Even after the $2 trillion stimulus package is distributed, details reveal the gap between what was promised and what the reality is. For example, $1,200 aid for individuals and $2,400 for couples is much more meaningful in the Southern states, where the taxes are lower than the states like New York and California. It has to be said that these checks will almost certainly go for student loans, and rent, besides given the fact that almost 1/3 of the country didn’t pay rent for the last month and has that rent due.[18] Students that were graduated last summer or winter, are not be able to get checks. In this regard, and in these new and challenging times, it is a calamity that will trigger millennials and generation Z to question “meaning, morality and mortality in ways they never did before.” This generation has experienced life-altering disruptions, such as 9/11, the Great Recession, the decline of American prestige to a housing affordability crisis, global warming to crushing student debt according to academics at the University of Southern California.[19]

An Overview of the U.S. Healthcare System

The U.S. has always been named as the most developed capitalist country with a liberal democracy that has been perceived alongside western European liberal democracies.[20] Relying on individual liberty in a libertarian sense, the U.S. understanding and structure of organizing daily affairs leave everything to the individual, including healthcare services. Healthcare is a responsibility of the individual, not the state and society. Because of this individualistic conception, it can be said that the U.S. is the most developed country with the worst skewed and insufficient healthcare system.

Becoming an emergent discussion in the wake of former Democratic 2020 presidential primary candidate Bernie Sanders’ campaign, healthcare has been a privilege in the U.S. for a long time except for some reforms called Obamacare, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which became law on March 23, 2010. Nevertheless, the main requirement of having health insurance with sufficient coverage is to have a full-time employment.

After emerging from the 1929 Great Depression, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) government and state institutions utilized the conditions of World War II to provide opportunities for the social democratic expansion of capital. In 1942, the Stabilization Act “limited the amount of wage increases employers could grant, but at the same time permitted the adoption of employee insurance plans.”[21] By 1949, employers benefits programs became common in collective bargaining agreements.[22] In the meantime, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) decided that, “employer contributions to health insurance premiums were tax free, which meant workers paid less out of their pocket.”[23] After FDR, President Harry Truman signed the National Mental Health Act, which called for the establishment of a National Institute of Mental Health.[24] Under the Johnson presidency, Medicare and Medicaid programs were set up in 1965. By accepting the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973, the Nixon government unleashed healthcare as a profitable industry.[25]

The Obama presidency evoked hope among the US people over the crumbling healthcare system. However, insurance companies were the one which benefited from a developing market, although his reforms alleviated the situation a little by extending children on their parents coverage and mandating mental health coverage one very plan, those without insurance were burdened with the tax penalties and forced into high deductible plans.[26] Since 2016, the Trump government began to repeal Obamacare by redoing the enabling acts.[27] While it is claimed that it lessens the tax burden coming from healthcare payments, it is also constricting the accessibility to healthcare.[28]

Recently, there were around 800,000 people with “freelance contracts” working in New York. According to the contract, the employer does not have to make a person’s health insurance because the character of their job is temporary and in a limited time. If the person works at or above the 32-33 hour limit, it is considered full-time. Therefore, bosses are able to force flexible employment without any reservations, being aware of the fear of unemployment or underemployment that dominates the US job market. This exemplifies how the messy system has worsened the crisis substantially.

federal As another example, unemployment climbed by another 5 million people this week, increasing the total number of people who have applied for unemployment to 22 million in the last month. According to the Economic Policy Institute, “approximately 9.2 million workers have likely lost their employer-provided health care coverage in the past four weeks.”[29]

Neo-liberal policies in the healthcare system have left the working class and laborers vulnerable to the epidemic. However, the Trump administration focused on the economy to function as smoothly as possible, rather than taking measures that could be taken more or less against approaching epidemic. They refrained from taking the necessary precautions. Even then, for example, the statements of Trump continue to insist for reopening country on May 1, despite major obstacles from authorities.[30] His persistence on reopening the country was also a matter on April 12.[31] Several expressions of political and economic elites are supportive of this: “I’d rather die’ from coronavirus ‘than kill the country.”[32][33][34] As one of the countries that experienced the 2008 crisis deeply, the sensitivity of the USA to the capitalist capital accumulation in the face of the epidemic caused more people to die.

 An article from the American prospect addresses, for example, the share in the stimulus package for businesses. Out of $2 Trillion package, $500 billion will be used for companies. $75 billion goes to the airline industry and the mysteriously named “businesses critical to national security.” The rest $425 will be used to capitalize a $4.25 trillion, leveraged lending facility at the Federal Reserve.[35] Additionally, seven other industries are lobbying for more stimulus, such as tourism, restaurants, mortgage servicers, hotels, airlines, franchises, and distillers.[36]

Other Aspects of the Crisis

Although we have listed the other problems that have accelerated the severity of the crisis, once again, those have to be elaborated to make sense in their context. To begin with, fetish over individualism elicits an “I don’t care, no-one can decides for me” mentality, which disregards social well-being and solidarity. This fundamental bourgeois idea frustrated many people at the beginning due to its ignorance of the crisis, and refusal to heed the advice of healthcare workers. Different aspects of this same idea might be felt over the larger, individual based healthcare system: “It is every (hu)man for himself.”

Similar to this “I don’t care” individualism, even the excessive mental health problems have been treated “as an individual’s incapacity to function normally within a given setting” by serious academic researches. These problems can be found mostly among poor whites and blacks who are more prone to mental disorders than richer classes.[37] Combining with homelessness, and other problems stemming from unemployment, the mental health question requires urgent social attention, especially during the crisis. People, who are relying on social circles, families, and solidarity, are isolated, trapped, and helpless. On the other hand, homelessness, specifically student one, made states hesitate to cancel schools at the beginning. Many college students were also thrown out of their dorm, with nowhere else to go.

Over all these, as another aspect of “American” values, nowadays, right-wing demonstrators have called to end quarantine by blocking roads with caravans, carrying Confederation and Nazi flags, utilizing the 18th century American revolutionary slogan of “Give me liberty, or give me death!” The other, “liberal” side of American nationalism is not innocent in weaponizing the crisis and its human costs, framing healthcare workers as “heroes,” food and workers from other vital industries as “essentials,” “frontliners,” “soldiers,” who are, fundamentally, expendable. Even the liberal call for “stay home” and “practice social distancing” is full of lack of consideration and clarity, solely blind ethicism, a performative virtue.

Workers’ and the lives of the poor are at the stake, which involves racial and gender issues, too.[38] In the center of epidemic in the country, New York City, most of cases and deaths are coming from poor working class neighborhoods.[39] According to formal data, those who have died have been 34% Hispanic, 28% blacks, 27% white and 7% Asian.[40] Economically and racially segregated neighborhoods are particularly vulnerable in this crisis. These groups’ share in the population are 29%, 22%, 32%, and 14%, respectively. The prison-industrial complex also has figured prominently in the crisis. According to activist and journalist Shaun King, the U.S. is the only nation in the world with 250% more prison cells than hospital beds.[41] That complex is another example of structural racism: “These racial disparities are particularly stark for Black Americans, who make up 40% of the incarcerated population despite representing only 13% of U.S residents.”[42] In other words, it is not surprising that places where COVID-19 has been most devastating, are generally black neighborhoods and towns.[43] Beyond racial lines, the rate of incarceration for women incarceration follows that of the black population: “The same is true for women, whose incarceration rates have for decades risen faster than men’s, and who are often behind bars because of financial obstacles such as an inability to pay bail.”[44] During the pandemic, the issue of rising domestic abuse of women trapped at their home receive almost no public or media attention. Additionally, the LGBTQ population is not independent from same abusive behavior. They are also vulnerable to discrimination, homelessness and other economic problems that increase the likelihood of contracting COVID-19.[45]

There are a considerable amount of cases and deaths especially among transportation, food and market workers.[46] Lack of protective equipment and the government’s token appreciation to workers has pushed many workers to take several actions, from warehouses to hospitals. Until now, over 100 workers’ actions are recorded since the beginning of the pandemic.[47] The most unique one is that General Electric workers’ struggle for their company to shift to produce ventilators.[48] Beyond all, the common quality of workers actions are mostly led by millennial generations. In that sense, it can be counted as a sign which generation of the working class might lead advanced struggles post-pandemic. However, in terms of youth struggle, it is hard to say what might happen, because online education may continue in fall 2020, and beyond.

All in all, other aspects of the crisis are complex and entangled, and reflect all the emergent demands of the US people and working class. However, the struggle against pandemic has been shaped by the political struggle between democrats and republicans towards the 2020 Presidential Elections. The governors of Illinois, New York and several other state governors’ have critiqued president Trump for not utilizing the Defense Production Act exemplifies the tension between democrats and republicans along with federal and state fault lines.[49] For instance, while some smaller states have made commitments to end quarantine on May 1, New York and California are against that, and the federal government doesn’t necessarily intend for imposing an extension to quarantine.

Conclusion

It has been discussed that the working class as we know it is gone, especially by the liberal intellectuals of all spectrum in defense of cold war theories. There was also an illusive reality, in which public spaces has been dominated by petty bourgeoisie and some upper sections of working class. It should be noted that another reason to this for the USA and Western Europe is the surplus value they transfer from the dependent countries through the imperialist exploitation mechanism. While this post-cold war argument has lost credibility for a long time now, it is shattered with the COVID-19 crisis.

The U.S. is experiencing a moment of “the king is naked,” where petty bourgeois classes retreated from streets, and left working class people to fulfill busses, train cars, factories, warehouses, workplaces, and unemployment lines. On the one hand, framing some sections of working class as “essentials,” primarily “hero” healthcare workers, and on the other, failing to provide essential protective equipment to these “essentials,” shows one certain aspect in the contradictions of classes: “Workers’ lives do not matter.”

Due to the same reason, it can be said that president Donald Trump is backing up right-wing demonstrators, who wants to lift the quarantine. Concurrent with deepening polarization of the U.S. political system through several impasses between the Democrats and Republicans, the presidency plays with the libertarian positioned citizen-against-the-government to take advantage of the crisis to gather and energize its avid supporter base for the upcoming elections. However, the statements of the government to end quarantine aim to make people reconcile the situation, while continuing to infuriate workers and saturate the air with fear and resentment.

Ekim Kilic is a Kurdish journalist from Turkey, and regularly reporting to the daily working-class newspaper of Turkey, Evrensel Daily. He also takes an active role as a member of the NY steering committee at the National Writers' Union UAW Local 1981. He is an MA graduate from International Affairs and Global Justice major at CUNY Brooklyn College / New York. He wrote a master thesis on a comparative analysis of working class support for right-wing nationalism in the U.S. and Turkey.

Notes

[1]  United States. (n.d.). Retrieved April 21, 2020, from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

[2] Ibid.

[3] Smith, K. (2020, March 25). Abortion-rights groups sue Texas over abortion ban amid coronavirus outbreak. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/abortion-rights-planned-parenthood-lawsuit-texas-non-essential-ban/?fbclid=IwAR2biSYvfz_dejWzV5P1bzlwQBCm24yeV5zmrmt9klpVFcoE8-tpUynR8hI

[4] In Midst of a Pandemic, Trump’s NLRB Makes it Nearly Impossible for Workers to Organize a Union. (n.d.). Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://portside.org/2020-04-02/midst-pandemic-trumps-nlrb-makes-it-nearly-impossible-workers-organize-union?fbclid=IwAR24Xbuzw2sHuLdM155e96xVuX6RntvpQgsDLOMIxbMhLM57Z2H570q8M7I

[5] Borger, J. (2020, March 31). US ignores calls to suspend Venezuela and Iran sanctions amid coronavirus pandemic. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/us-ignores-global-appeals-suspend-sanctions-coronavirus-pandemic-iran-venezuela

[6] Sullivan, P. (2020, April 15). Trump WHO cuts meet with furious blowback. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/492997-trump-who-cuts-meet-with-furious-blowback

[7] Stelloh, T., Welker, K., Pettypiece, S., & Bennett, G. (2020, April 21). Trump says he is suspending immigration over coronavirus, need to protect jobs. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-he-suspending-immigration-over-coronavirus-need-protect-jobs-n1188416?fbclid=IwAR1GpqyKHb9TJHPDs4f5yQSq8jAu9ui4N-S2CByFRp9mdVE_qGy9sADrYwM

[8] Lisnoff, H. (2020, April 6). American Exceptionalism in the Face of Covid-19. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/04/09/american-exceptionalism-in-the-face-of-covid-19/

[9] Kuttner, R. (2020, March 24). The End of American Exceptionalism. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://prospect.org/coronavirus/the-end-of-american-exceptionalism/

[10] (n.d.). Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-01/putin-sends-military-plane-with-coronavirus-aid-to-help-u-s

[11] Sweeney, S. (2020, April 16). Vietnam ships 450,000 protective suits for U.S. health care workers. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/vietnam-ships-450000-protective-suits-for-u-s-health-care-workers/?fbclid=IwAR3cV9CBQMWO-TS1ehCi_rXl5jhmqXDO31gv35qz9P9oSYupMg6Ki6a49Lg

[12] Steve SweeneyMonday, A. 6. (2020, April 6). US accused of ‘modern piracy’ after seizing ventilators bound for Barbados. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/w/us-accused-modern-piracy-after-seizing-ventilators-bound-barbados

[13] Tisdall, S. (2020, April 19). Trump is playing a deadly game in deflecting Covid-19 blame to China. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2020/apr/19/trump-is-playing-a-deadly-game-in-deflecting-covid-19-blame-to-china

[14] Chediac, J. (2020, April 20). Essential worker strike wave: ‘We fight COVID-19 for ourselves &… Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.liberationnews.org/essential-worker-strike-wave-we-fight-for-ourselves-and-for-the-public/?fbclid=IwAR3aVocvBL2JZCLrY04peKRVpMR3UyHc2fbgqfw6OATRFp7IYc0JVWONzz4

[15] Montanaro, D. (2016, September 10). Hillary Clinton’s ‘Basket Of Deplorables,’ In Full Context Of This Ugly Campaign. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.npr.org/2016/09/10/493427601/hillary-clintons-basket-of-deplorables-in-full-context-of-this-ugly-campaign

[16] Gruenberg, M. (2019, April 25). GOP lawmaker’s idiotic remark about nurses goes viral and backfires. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/gop-lawmakers-idiotic-remark-about-nurses-goes-viral-and-backfires/

[17] Alternet. (2019, April 9). When the GOP uses the word “bartender” to mock Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, it shows its ugly classism. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.salon.com/2019/04/09/when-the-gop-uses-the-word-bartender-to-mock-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-it-shows-its-ugly-classism_partner/

[18] Bahney, A. (2020, April 11). New data shows more Americans are having trouble paying their rent. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/09/business/americans-rent-payment-trnd/index.html

[19] Polakovic, G. (2020, April 3). How does coronavirus affect young people’s psyches? Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://news.usc.edu/167275/how-does-coronavirus-affect-young-people-psyches/

[20] The Economist Intelligence Unit. (n.d.). Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.eiu.com/topic/democracy-index

[21] Scofea, L. A. (1994). The development and growth of employer-provided health insurance. Monthly Labor Review, 3–10. Retrieved from https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1994/03/art1full.pdf

[22] Ibid.

[23] How did we end up with health insurance being tied to our jobs? (2019, April 29). Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.marketplace.org/2017/06/28/how-did-we-end-health-insurance-being-tied-our-jobs/

[24] National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). (2017, February 17). Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/nih-almanac/national-institute-mental-health-nimh

[25] Gruber, L. R., Maureen, S., & Polich, C. L. (n.d.). From Movement To Industry: The Growth Of HMOs. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.7.3.197

[26] Amadeo, K. (n.d.). Pros and Cons of Obamacare. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.thebalance.com/obamacare-pros-and-cons-3306059

[27] Simmons-Duffin, S. (2019, October 14). Trump Is Trying Hard To Thwart Obamacare. How’s That Going? Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/10/14/768731628/trump-is-trying-hard-to-thwart-obamacare-hows-that-going

[28] Gonzales, R. (2019, October 5). Trump Bars Immigrants Who Cannot Pay For Health Care. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.npr.org/2019/10/04/767453276/trump-bars-immigrants-who-cannot-pay-for-health-care

[29] 9.2 million workers likely lost their employer-provided health insurance in the past four weeks. (n.d.). Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.epi.org/blog/9-2-million-workers-likely-lost-their-employer-provided-health-insurance-in-the-past-four-weeks/

[30] Trump’s plans to reopen the country face major obstacles. (n.d.). Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/18/trump-reopen-country-coronavirus-193182

[31] Harris, J. F. (n.d.). ‘I’d love to have it open by Easter’: Trump says he wants to restart economy by mid-April. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/24/trump-wants-to-restart-economy-by-mid-april-146398

[32] Samuels, A. (2020, April 21). Dan Patrick says “there are more important things than living and that’s saving this country”. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.texastribune.org/2020/04/21/texas-dan-patrick-economy-coronavirus/

[33] Fredericks, B. (2020, April 15). Congressman says US should reopen economy – even if more would die. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://nypost.com/2020/04/15/lawmaker-says-us-should-reopen-economy-even-if-more-will-die/

[34] Concha, J. (2020, March 25). Glenn Beck: ‘I’d rather die’ from coronavirus ‘than kill the country’ from economic shutdown. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://thehill.com/homenews/media/489472-glenn-beck-id-rather-die-from-coronavirus-than-kill-the-country-from-economic

[35] Dayen, D. (2020, March 25). Unsanitized: Bailouts, A Tradition Unlike Any Other. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://prospect.org/api/amp/coronavirus/unsanitized-bailouts-tradition-unlike-any-other/

[36] Gangitano, A. (2020, April 2). 7 industries lobbying for more stimulus. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/business-a-lobbying/490736-7-industries-lobbying-for-more-stimulus

[37] Baran, P. A. & Sweezy P. M. (2020, March). The Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society: Mental Health. Monthly Review. Volume 71. Pg. 41-43.

[38] Conn, M., Kelly, J., & Heimpel, D. (2020, April 3). Lack of Shelter Beds in New York for LGBTQ Youth During Pandemic. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://chronicleofsocialchange.org/coronavirus/lgbtq-youth-struggle-for-shelter-from-coronavirus/41999?fbclid=IwAR0Rko479SG4K9eBvZZTWNXVZxo0Xa4HYpxoyUSNYc-xhWUD2Ri0GO35B80

[39] Virus Hits NYC Hardest in a Few Working-Class Neighborhoods. (n.d.). Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2020-04-02/coronavirus-hits-harder-in-poorer-nyc-neighborhoods

[40] Workbook: NYS-COVID19-Tracker. (n.d.). Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://covid19tracker.health.ny.gov/views/NYS-COVID19-Tracker/NYSDOHCOVID-19Tracker-Fatalities?:embed=yes&:toolbar=no&:tabs=n

[41] SHAUN KING: The United States is the Only Nation in the World with 250% More Prison Cells Than Hospital Beds. (2020, March 30). Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.thenorthstar.com/shaun-king-the-united-states-is-the-only-nation-in-the-world-with-250-more-prison-cells-than-hospital-beds/

[42] Sawyer, W., & Wagner, P. (n.d.). Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html

[43] Johnson, A., & Buford, T. (n.d.). Early Data Shows African Americans Have Contracted and Died of… Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.propublica.org/article/early-data-shows-african-americans-have-contracted-and-died-of-coronavirus-at-an-alarming-rate

[44] Ibid.

[45] Conn, M., Kelly, J., & Heimpel, D. (2020, April 3). Lack of Shelter Beds in New York for LGBTQ Youth During Pandemic. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://chronicleofsocialchange.org/coronavirus/lgbtq-youth-struggle-for-shelter-from-coronavirus/41999?fbclid=IwAR0Rko479SG4K9eBvZZTWNXVZxo0Xa4HYpxoyUSNYc-xhWUD2Ri0GO35B80

[46] Chediac, J. (2020, April 20). Essential worker strike wave: ‘We fight COVID-19 for ourselves &… Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.liberationnews.org/essential-worker-strike-wave-we-fight-for-ourselves-and-for-the-public/?fbclid=IwAR3aVocvBL2JZCLrY04peKRVpMR3UyHc2fbgqfw6OATRFp7IYc0JVWONzz4

[47] Elk, M. (2020, April 23). COVID-19 Strike Wave Interactive Map. Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://paydayreport.com/covid-19-strike-wave-interactive-map/?fbclid=IwAR0hqgq8wEeYT-Y8VRFcaJocbzRNd4vb_13bd32_3fZFxqYv3OO7gf6uynQ

[48] GE Workers Protest, Demand to Make Ventilators. (2020, April 16). Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://labornotes.org/blogs/2020/04/ge-workers-protest-demand-make-ventilators?fbclid=IwAR2_qnmATx97jmyVzESlZ_B7KGce1YtQV4uH86rHXxHEOs3s1G0r-ygXF1w

[49] Trump, Facing Criticism, Says He Will Increase Swab Production. (2020, April 19). Retrieved April 25, 2020, from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/19/us/coronavirus-updates.html

On the Questions of Race and Racism: Revolutionary National Liberation and Building the United Front Against Imperialism

By Kevin “Rashid" Johnson

This was originally published in 2006 on the New Afrikan Black Panther Party's website.

The economic nature of racism is not simply an aside… Racism is a fundamental characteristic of monopoly capitalism.”
George L. Jackson, 1971

Introduction

Many people believe that racism – indeed the very concept of race itself – develops automatically when groups of people with different complexions, hair, and body types are brought together.  This is not so!  Actually, the concept of race is barely 500 years old.  The common people have been programmed into accepting “race” as a normal and natural thing, to prevent them from questioning, investigating, and challenging the ideas and roots of race and racism. Race and racism are the inventions of a specific social class, and devised to serve a specific social purpose.  The creators are the oppressor capitalist ruling class, and the purpose is to divide the laboring class that the capitalists exploit against themselves.  This is because, if united, the workers pose the single greatest threat to the capitalist class monopoly over social wealth, power, and control. A dispassionate study will show that in every situation where race has arisen to become a sharp dividing social factor, the hands of the capitalists can be seen pulling the strings, and it is only they who benefit from the conflicts.

George Jackson clearly recognized this.  He pointed out that while white racism, the dominant form of racism in Amerika, expresses itself as:

“…the morbid traditional fear of Blacks, Indians, Mexicans, [and] the desire to inflict pain on them when they began to compete in the industrial sectors.  The resentment and the seedbed of fear are patterned into every modern capitalist society. It grows out of a sense of insecurity and insignificance that is inculcated into the workers by the conditions of life and work under capitalism.  This sense of vulnerability is the breeding ground of racism.  At the same time, the ruling class actively promotes racism against the Blacks of the lower classes.  This programmed racism has always served to distract the huge numbers of people who subsist at just a slightly higher level than those in a more debased condition (in the 1870’s the strikes frequently ended in anti-Chinese or anti-Black lynchings)…Racism has served always in the U.S. as a pressure release…”

The sole concern of the capitalist class is to secure and increase their profits and power. They do not care whom or what they damage or destroy to accomplish this, nor do they care what nationality or complexion the people are whom they exploit, only that they keep the exploited workers unable to unite and mobilize against their conditions of exploitation.  Racism has been the capitalists’ most effective method of accomplishing this. Here in North Amerika, the game began in the late 1600’s.

The Creation of the White Race and Racism

The first laborers exploited in North Amerika under British colonialism consisted of Afrikan, European, and Indian slaves and indentured servants.  The concept of ‘race’ did not exist then. The laborers were all equally oppressed and exploited of their wealth-producing labor by the capitalist plantation owners and thus saw each other as equals. They lived, labored, loved, suffered, bred, bled, escaped, and died together. They also repeatedly rebelled and revolted together. But because they lacked a unifying leadership and vision or control over resources, they were unable to come together en masse to wage a united revolution to overthrow the plantation elite and the British colonial government that served and backed the elite. This all changed in 1676 when Bacon’s Rebellion occurred.

The leader of the rebellion, Nathaniel Bacon, was a young plantation owner. He had left England to settle in the British colonies in 1673, and was appointed to the Council of British Colonial Governor William Berkeley. The colonial government’s principal concern (as with any capitalist government) was to maintain stability in the colonies while protecting and expanding the holdings and wealth of the ruling class. To achieve this, Berkeley promoted developing trade relations and peace with the Indians who lived on surrounding lands. Bacon, however, promoted running the Indians off their land to expand the colonial settlements. In defiance of Berkeley’s policies, Bacon independently organized and led poor farmers who lived on the outskirts of the colonies (most of whom were recently freed indentured servants), on murderous terror raids against nearby Indian communities.  But instead of fleeing, the Natives responded with counter-raids against their attackers. Bacon, unable to match the Indian counter-attacks, sought but was denied military support from Berkeley.

Bacon then turned on the established colonial ruling class and Berkeley’s government. He armed and organized the colony’s Afrikan and English slaves with promises of freedom, and in 1676 led them in revolt against the colonial rulers. The revolt succeeded in overthrowing the colonial ruling class and government, and captured the capitol at Jamestown, Virginia.

However, six months into the revolt, and at the height of his power, Bacon died of influenza.  Bacon’s Rebellion, deprived of its leader and organizer, collapsed, and the colonial ruling class and Council quickly regained control, though not without a determined last stand by the core group of rebels, principally composed of Afrikan slaves. It was at this point that the plantation elite and their reinstated government realized the immense danger and power of a unified working class. Consequently they decided to ensure that no united revolt like Bacon’s Rebellion occurred again.  Their solution was to split the lower class by permanently enslaving one sector while winning the loyalty of another sector, inciting its fear and contempt against and using it to police the enslaved sector. To divide, agitate, and rule was the plan. This they accomplished by inventing the concept of race and dividing the lower class along racial lines.

Laws were immediately passed that established the categories of “negro” (Spanish for “black”), and “white” as distinct racialized social statuses. In 1682 legislation was enacted that made slavery a permanent and hereditary status for all “Blacks,” and over the next several decades slavery and indentured servitude of ‘whites’ were phased out. Further laws were passed that forbade and penalized positive social interactions between the races, particularly escapes, marriages, and procreation.

The poor white men made up the body of the colonial militias and, beginning in 1727, were conscripted into manning slave patrols under fines and other penalties if they refused. This plantation police force was the forerunner and grandparent of today’s urban police forces that continue to be concentrated against people of color to repress them across Amerika with violence and terror. In most areas, the slave patrols came to outnumber the black slaves.  A variety of minor privileges were also granted to the poor whites, including tiny plots of land to live on – at the Indians’ expense – a musket, the authority to kill rebellious Blacks, tax exemptions, and other benefits for manning slave patrols, greater leniency in the eyes of the law than Blacks, voting privileges, etc.

By inventing the social category of “white,” and granting the lower class Europeans a share in power over the super-exploited and enslaved Afrikans, the capitalists created a scheme that caused the poor Europeans a false sense of privileged class unity with, and a confused loyalty toward the ruling class which was the source of all of the lower classes’ poverty and misery.  By selling out their own class interests to the elite, the poor whites made a deal with the devil that saw them focus their frustrations on Blacks instead of the capitalists, and thus ensured that they would remain an impoverished and exploited class, just a step above the Blacks.

To ensure the dedication of the slave patrols, and whites in general, in repressing and containing the black slaves, the ruling class generated a paranoid fear of slave revolts and especially of “Negroes with guns.” From every pulpit, and every center of white social gathering and influence, Blacks were depicted as always plotting to revolt with the aim of murdering all whites indiscriminately (men, wimyn, and children), molesting white wimyn, and subverting  ‘good’ white Christian civilization with Black “heathenism.”  Both the political and religious institutions were, and remain today, proponents of racism and white fear of Black revolt.

The church hierarchy, which was tied in with the ruling elite, also added fuel to the fire of racism by theologizing the myth of white racial superiority over all other races, claiming that whites were the Creator’s “chosen people” destined to rule over all others as a divine right, and that slavery was a punishment ordained by the creator for Blacks as the “Curse of Canaan.”  It was through these combined methods that “white supremacy” and the very concept of the “white” and “black” races were born and spread, and remain today normalized concepts that divide the lower class to further the interests of the wealthy elite.

The capitalists found race and racism such effective tools for manipulating and undermining the working class that appeals to race and racism, (overtly and subliminally), have been their generalized method of subverting working class struggles and manipulating workers to serve as mercenaries and mindless cannon fodder in fighting capitalist wars. To solidify lower class support, the capitalists who were struggling to break free of British control appealed to poor whites to fight the Amerikan Revolutionary War (1775-1783), to achieve an independent “white nation.” The Declaration of Independence expresses this in its statement “When…it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another.”  Because of the racialized identity of “whiteness,” the colonists had come to identify themselves as a different “people” than the English.

From such wealthy elite notables and “Founding Fathers” as Benjamin Franklin (in 1751 to John Jay), James Madison, Jedediah Morse (to Andrew Johnson in 1864), they all emphasized in public and in private letters that Amerika was to be a “white nation.”  (See Steve Martinot, The Rule of Racialization, 2003). This was specified in one of the first legislative acts of the independent Amerikan government – the Naturalization Act of 1790 – that stated that the U.S. was to be a “white republic.” The “White” racialized identity which had its origins in the Virginia colony, was subsequently adopted into European thinking and served as it had in North Amerika, to rationalize European colonization of people of color in Asia, Afrika, Australia, and elsewhere, and to alienate the European working class from uniting with the super-oppressed peoples of color.

The Amerikan capitalists used the same device to justify their brutal and genocidal seizure of Indian and Mexican lands to expand their agricultural empire. They won the allegiance of the poor whites by promoting these actions as white “Manifest Destiny,” as the duty and calling of whites to conquer “inferior” peoples, and by giving out free land grants. These same appeals are used today in pursuit of U.S. conquest and repression of people of color, only the concept of white supremacy and” Manifest Destiny” have become so ingrained and normalized in the collective white Amerikan mind, that they need not be explicitly stated.  Moreover, to do so is politically incorrect and unwise in today’s world where people of color have proven unwilling to accept overtly expressed racist oppression, (witness the national independence struggles of the 20th century against European colonialism that swept Asia and Afrika; the urban uprisings, civil rights, and New Afrikan, First Nation, Mexican, and Puerto Rican liberation struggles in Amerika, the worldwide opposition to South Afrikan Apartheid, etc.).

Therefore, the white supremacist appeal today is made and pursued more clandestinely and with greater sophistication, using such code words as “spreading democracy,” “fighting terrorism,” “fighting crime,” “preventing the spread of Communism,” etc.  But any objective analysis quickly reveals that these policies, backed by extreme state violence, and demonizing labels such as “criminal,” “terrorist,” etc., are consistently applied to non-white peoples, and it’s the white U.S. population that’s appealed to in order to back these policies. That the national identity of Amerika remains that of a white nation is revealed by its population being still classified by race, with panic arising anytime the elites claim some ‘other’ race like Latin Amerikan immigrants are threatening to overrun the “white majority,” or that Blacks are a danger to the stability and moral integrity of Amerika.

White racism caused many whites, (especially of the lower class), to become so consumed and intoxicated with the myth of their racial superiority, their right to repress and contain Blacks and others’ ambitions, and the idea that their own poverty and lack of power was somehow the fault of Blacks, that they’ve resorted to confused, fundamentalist reactionary violence to subvert every effort of Blacks to improve or challenge their own conditions.  Thus, Black political and economic struggles and gains have frequently been followed by reactionary white violence, or the rise of far right-wing white terrorist groups, like the Ku Klux Klan and Knights of White Camellia for example, the white mobs that attacked Blacks in Massachusetts (1850) and Philadelphia, Boston, and Cincinnati (1830’s) to repress the Black vote; the frequent lynchings during Reconstruction (1865-77), white riots against Blacks communities when Blacks moved in large numbers to Northern and Western cities to fill industrial jobs in the early 1900’s, mob attacks and violence to repress civil rights struggles in the south during the 1950’s and 60’s, etc. This reactionary fanatical racial violence and conflict occurs always upon incitement of the ruling elite, to divert and neutralize the danger of revolt of any sector of the working class against their class exploitation and political impotence.

Division Created Within Racial Ranks

The divide and rule scheme was further refined based upon the claimed proposals of a Caribbean slave owner, Willie Lynch, to a gathering of plantation owners in Virginia in 1712.  Lynch proposed not only instigating sharp division between Blacks and whites, but among the Black slaves as well, by playing on minor differences between them to generate envy, fear and distrust.  He proposed that the “black slaves should trust no one except the plantation elite.  That they should be hostile toward themselves and that hostility should be maintained between them and the lower class whites.  Lynch put it this way:

“Gentlemen, I greet you here on the banks of the James River in the year of our Lord 1712. First, I shall thank you, the gentlemen of the Colony of Virginia for bringing me here. I am here to help you solve some of your problems with slaves.  Your invitation reached me on my modest plantation in the West Indies where I have experimented with some of the newest and still the oldest methods for control of slaves. Ancient Rome would envy us if my program was implemented. As our boat sailed south on the James River, named for our illustrious King, whose version of the Bible we cherish, I saw enough to know that your problem is not unique. While Rome used cords of wood as crosses for standing human bodies along its old highway in great numbers, you are here using the tree and the rope on occasion.

“I caught the whiff of a dead slave hanging from a tree a couple of miles back. You are not only losing valuable stock by hangings, you are having uprisings, slaves are running away. Your crops are sometimes left in the fields too long for maximum profit, you suffer occasional fires, your animals are killed. Gentlemen, you know what your problems are; I do not need to elaborate. I am not here to enumerate your problems, however, I am here to introduce you to methods of solving them.

“In my bag here, I have outlined a number of DIFFERENCES among the slaves, and I take their differences and make them bigger. I use FEAR, DISTRUST, and ENVY for control purposes. These methods have worked on my modest plantation in the West Indies and it will work throughout the South. Take this simple little list of differences, and think about them. On top of my list is “AGE,” but it is there because it starts with an “A”; the second is “COLOR” or “SHADE”, there is INTELLIGENCE, SIZE, SEX, STATUS ON PLANTATION, ATTITUDE OF OWNERS, WHETHER THE SLAVES LIVE IN THE VALLEY, ON THE HILL, EAST, WEST, NORTH or SOUTH, HAVE FINE HAIR or COARSE HAIR, or is TALL or SHORT. Now that you have a list of differences, I shall give you an outline of ACTION – but before that I shall assure you that distrust is stronger than trust, and envy is stronger than adulation, respect or admiration.

“The Black slave after receiving this indoctrination shall carry on and will become self-refueling and self-generating for hundreds of years, maybe thousands.

“Don’t forget you must pitch the OLD BLACK MALE vs. the YOUNG BLACK MALE, and the YOUNG BLACK MALE vs. the OLD BLACK MALE. You must use the DARK SKIN SLAVE vs. the LIGHT SKIN SLAVE and the LIGHT SKIN SLAVE vs. the DARK SKIN SLAVE. You must use the FEMALE vs. the MALE and the MALE vs. the FEMALE.

“You must also have your white servants and overseers distrust all Blacks, but it is necessary that your slaves trust and depend on us. They must love, respect, and trust ONLY US.

“Gentlemen, these kits are your keys to control. Use them. Have your wives and children use them. Never miss an opportunity – if used intensively for one year, the slaves themselves will remain perpetually distrustful. Thank you, gentlemen.”

These methods of dividing slaves and Blacks versus poor whites can clearly be seen still in operation today, and the effects still remain with us – the distrust, fear, and envy. While the lower classes have come to love, emulate, and depend on the predatory capitalist class, its wealth, luxury, and artificial prestige, are all obtained through the labor, powerlessness, and poverty of the working class. Yesterday’s chattel slaves are today’s wage slaves: only the slave class today has grown to include all races and nationalities.

Capitalism Creates Racism Abroad

Kwame Nkrumah observed that the same game of racial divide and rule was played when capitalism took root in Afrika:

“The close links between class and race developed in Africa alongside capitalist exploitation. Slavery, the master-servant relationship, and cheap labor were basic to it. The classic example is South Africa, where Africans experience a double exploitation – both on grounds of color and of class. Similar conditions exist in the U.S.A., the Caribbean, in Latin America, and in other parts of the world where the nature of the development of productive forces has resulted in a racist class structure. In these areas, even shades of color count – the degree of blackness being a yardstick by which social status is measured.

“…[A] racist social structure…is inseparable from capitalist economic development.  For race is inextricably linked with class exploitation; in a racist-capitalist power structure, capitalist exploitation and race oppression are complementary; the removal of one ensures the removal of the other…

“The effects of industrialization in Africa as elsewhere, has been to foster the growth of the bourgeoisie, and at the same time the growth of a politically-conscious proletariat. The acquisition of property and political power on the part of the bourgeoisie, and the growing socialist and African nationalist aspirations of the working class, both strike at the root of the racist class structure, though each is aiming at different objectives. The bourgeoisie supports capitalist development while the proletariat – the oppressed class – is striving towards socialism.

“In South Africa, where the basis of ethnic relationships is class and color, the bourgeoisie comprises about one-fifth of the population. The British and the Boers, having joined forces to maintain their positions of privilege, have split up the remaining four-fifths of the population into “Blacks,” “Coloreds,” and “Indians.” The Colored and Indians are minority groups, which act as buffers to protect the minority whites against the increasingly militant and revolutionary Black majority. In the other settled areas of Africa, a similar class-race struggle is being waged.

“A non-racial society can only be achieved by socialist revolutionary action of the masses. It will never come as a gift from the minority ruling class. For it is impossible to separate race relations from the capitalist class relationships in which they have their roots.

“South Africa again provides a typical example…It was only with capitalist economic penetration that the master-servant relationship emerged, and with it, racism, color prejudice and apartheid…

“Slavery and the master-servant relationship were therefore the cause, rather than the result of racism. The position was crystallized and reinforced with the discovery of gold and diamonds in South Africa, and the employment of cheap African labor in the mines. As time passed, and it was thought necessary to justify the exploitation and oppression of African workers, the myth of racial inferiority was developed and spread.

“In the era of neocolonialism, ‘underdevelopment’ is still attributed not to exploitation but to inferiority, and racial undertones remain closely interwoven with the class struggle.

“It is only the ending of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism and neocolonialism and the attainment of world communism that can provide the conditions under which the race question can finally be abolished and eliminated.”

Kwame Nkrumah, Class Struggle in Africa, 1970

An Example of Racism Incited to Divert Working Class Struggle

World War I (1914 -1918) was a competition between the European imperialist countries for access to and control over the abundant natural resources and markets of the Third World colonies. The war generated a boom for the war industrialists, particularly the Amerikan steel and manufacturing industries that were producing and selling weapons, machinery, and spare parts needed by the European elite to supply their armies, (which were manned by the working class of course). When the U.S. entered the war in 1917, the mandatory draft created a large shortage of white industrial workers. Laborers were needed. With promises of plenty, southern Blacks were drawn by the industrialist’ job recruiters into the Northern and Western cities to fill the vacant jobs. The poor migrant Blacks were also a welcomed replacement, since they would accept work at much lower wages than the white workers would tolerate, thus increasing the capitalists’ profits by lowering labor costs.

The war’s end in 1918 saw the return of the whites in need of employment.  A strong working class movement was already underway in the U.S., which had the capitalists in a panic. They feared working class revolution, like the one that had just succeeded in overthrowing the capitalist class in Russia in 1917. To offset a united radical struggle of the working class poor, capitalist agents within the trade union movement incited the whites against the Blacks, diverting their attention away from challenging capitalist class oppression and toward the Blacks who’d “stolen” their jobs and were driving down wages.

This appeal to reactionary race hate to channel the anger of white workers away from challenging working class exploitation provoked racial violence against Blacks, which culminated in widespread white race riots in the “Red Summer” of 1919. These riots saw over 20 incidents of white mobs converging on Black neighborhoods to gang rape Black wimyn and girls, and murder and maim Black men, wimyn, children and the elderly indiscriminately.

Fast-forwarding to today, we now see an identical situation of competition over jobs along racial lines taking place between Blacks versus Mexican and Latin Amerikan migrants. Under centuries of colonial and neo-colonial policies, U.S. capitalists with government backing have robbed the fertile land and resources and crushed the economies of their countries, imposing imperialist policies that have violently driven millions upon millions off their native lands and into complete insecurity, poverty and beggary. In desperate need of jobs to provide for their families, many are forced to migrate to Amerika, to fill jobs that pay starvation wages or deprive them of benefits enjoyed by ‘legal’ workers. Their predicament duplicates that of Blacks who were forced to migrate to the northern and western cities from the south in search of employment upon being pushed off the land by Klan terror, and being otherwise compelled to live in impoverished servitude.

But instead of struggling alongside these migrant workers today, Blacks have been incited by imperialist agents and propaganda to assume much the same repressive role as the white workers during the early 1900’s. We perceive these migrants to be “stealing” “our” scarce jobs, government benefits and housing, and driving down wages. Consequently a virtual war has been taking place between Black versus Mexicans and Latin Amerikans on the streets and inside U.S. prisons. Much of the violence, which begins inside the prisons where these ‘races’ are forcibly confined in miserable close quarter, spills over into society.

In just 2005, over 300 race riots occurred in the California prison system alone, mostly between Black versus Mexican and Latin Amerikan prisoners. These conflicts have been exposed repeatedly as incited by the imperialist controlled prison guard unions. So, once again, the capitalists, whose greedy ambitions are the cause of massive poverty, job shortages, land theft, and forced migrations of both Blacks and the Native peoples of this region of the world, (who must risk their lives to cross borders created by the capitalists and white racism), have the commonly oppressed people, who are all victims of class and national oppression, warring amongst themselves.

The Race Game Played Between Whites

The game of racism was not only created and used to play working class whites against people of color. It was also used between whites, and with the same purpose of undermining working class struggles against capitalist class exploitation. Indeed it was the principal method of whipping up mass hysteria in support of fascism in Western Europe during the early 1900’s. And contrary to popular deception, the U.S. capitalist elite and government supported its purpose and function, which was to suppress working class revolution. There is an extensive although repressed record in proof of this.

The tendency in mainstream circles and of the ruling class propaganda industry has been to paint German Nazism, for example, as a sort of odd latent German anti-Semitism, which was brought to the surface by a “mad” leader (Hitler), who by luck and guile found himself in power. This, however, runs counter to the actual fact that the German and Amerikan capitalists consciously and deliberately financed and pushed Hitler into power to suppress a working class revolution that was threatening to take power. The capitalist Great Depression had disillusioned the workers across Europe about the promises of capitalism, and they were looking with hope to the example of Russia, (Socialist Russia being independent of the imperialist countries was not affected by the Depression). The capitalists also feared that the destabilized middle class would join forces with the lower class workers to overthrow their economic and political control. They opted to play the race card.

By inciting “Aryan” racism – blaming non-Aryans for Germany’s economic crisis, which was actually caused by the capitalists – the Nazis won over the confused German middle and lower class and youth to subvert the working class movement and re-channel its momentum toward attacking sectors of German society that were classified as non-Aryan (“inferiors” and “degenerates”). Violent repression was thus targeted against the German Communists and radical youth, who were leading and organizing the workers’ struggle, and the Jews, Slavs, Poles, Gypsies, gay and disabled people. Overt fascism, like pure racism, was a desperate political strategy of capitalist class control.

Just as the method of allying the majority white Amerikan working class to back the capitalist class’s designs has been, by rallying them under the banner of a racialized “white nation,” so too did the German capitalists do the same using the Nazis to rally the German workers’ support under the banner of a racialized “Aryan nation.” And as intended, this incitement of racist sentiments divided a once united working class against itself, whipped up hysterical and irrational mass support for the ruling class’s designs to smash working class struggle and to back the capitalists’ aims to expand and colonize other nations, in this case not only nations of colored people but Europeans as well. Under the spell of a purely invented racism, the German masses proceed to back the Nazi war machine that saw them kill and die by the millions and carry out acts of the most savage brutality recorded in history – and all by and against white working class people.  As said, the U.S. government and business community supported Hitler and Mussolini before World War II. See for example:

1. Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blonde Beast: Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995. pp. 46-64;

2. David Schmitz, Thank God They’re On Our Side: The United States and Right Wing Dictatorships, 1921-1965, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999, Chapters 1 and 3;

3. David Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922-1940, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988;

4. John P. Diggins. Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972.

U.S. government internal documents explain the class-based reasons for the warm Amerikan business support for fascism that are detailed in these books. In 1937, for example, a report of the U.S. State Department’s European Division described the rise of fascism as a natural and commendable response of “the rich and middle class, in self-defense” when the “dissatisfied masses, with the example of the Russian revolution before them, swing to the Left.”  Fascism, thus, “must succeed or the masses, this time reinforced by the disillusioned middle classes, will again turn to the Left.” The report also stated that “if Fascism cannot succeed by persuasion [in Germany], it must succeed by force.”  (See Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922-1940, p. 140).  U.S. Ambassador to Russia, William Bullitt “believed that only Nazi Germany could stay the advance of Soviet Bolshevism in Europe.” (Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State, Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin, 1977, p. 26).

The Amerikan charge d’affaires in Berlin wrote to Washington in 1933 that Amerika should back the Nazi Party as the hope for Germany. He stated that Nazi policies “appeal to all civilized and reasonable people.” Amerikan Ambassador Frederic Sackett noted that “it is perhaps well that Hitler is now in a position to wield unprecedented power.” (See Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922-1940, pp. 174, 133, and Chapter 9).

U.S. corporations like Ford Motor Company were totally approving of fascism; financed and profited from the Fascists states, and participated in plundering Jewish assets under Hitler’s Aryanization programs.

“Many U.S. companies bought substantial interests in established German companies, which in turn plowed the new money into Aryanizations or into arms productions banned under the Versailles Treaty. According to a 1936 report from Ambassador William Dodd to President Roosevelt, a half-dozen key U.S. companies – International Harvester, Ford, General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and DuPont – had become deeply involved in German weapons production…

“U.S. investment in Germany accelerated rapidly after Hitler came to power, despite the Depression and Germany’s default on virtually all of its government and commercial loans. Commerce Department reports show that U.S. investment in Germany increased some 48.5 percent between 1929 and 1940, while declining sharply everywhere else in continental Europe. U.S. investment in Great Britain…barely held steady over the decade, increasing only 2.6 percent.”

Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blonde Beast: Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, supra, p. 64.

The U.S. government did not in fact unanimously declare European fascism an avowed enemy until it attacked U.S. interests. And even then Amerikan business interests still backed the Fascists. In fact, Prescott Bush, (grandfather of George W. Bush), and his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, were the Nazi’s financers and traders through periods of the Jewish Holocaust, after their attacks on Britain and France, and even after the bombings of Pearl Harbor in 1941. It took the seizure of their Union Banking Corporation by the U.S. government in October 1942, under the Trading with the Enemies Act, to stop Bush and Walker.

Prior to WWII U.S. support for Italian Fascism was much the same. In December 1917, the Wilson administration expressed that the rising labor movement posed, “the obvious danger of social revolution and disorganization.”  Mussolini’s Black Shirts solved the problem with violence, referring to Mussolini’s October 1922 march on Rome, which smashed Italian democracy. The U.S. Ambassador noted with approval that the Fascists carried out “a fine young revolution.” With government backing, the racist thugs bloodily repressed working class agitation. The U.S. embassy noted, Fascism was “perhaps the most potent factor in the suppression of Bolshevism in Italy.” In a February 1925 report, the embassy also approvingly observed that the Fascists had smashed the workers struggle through “restricting the right of free assembly, in abolishing freedom of the press and in having at its command a large military organization.” It was also stated that “between Mussolini and Fascism and Giolliti and Socialism, between strong internal peace and prosperity and return to free speech, loose administration and general disorganization, Peace and Prosperity were preferred.” (See Schmitz, See Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922-1940, pp. 76-77). These approving pronouncements are as undemocratic as one could get. It should also be remembered that when these official champions of capitalism talk about “disorder,” and “peace” and “prosperity,” they’re speaking about these things from the perspective of their capitalist bosses in containing, repressing, and controlling the exploited workers, and against the workers’ struggles to gain control over the society’s economic and political institutions and power.

The U.S. business press spoke openly in support of Fascism. Fortune magazine, for example, devoted a special issue to Fascism in July 1934, and in its article “The State: Fascist and Total.” It commented approvingly that “the purpose and effect of Fascism is to un wop the wops,” and any views by Amerikan people that the Italians should resent Fascism, “is a confusion, and we can only get over it if we anesthetize for the moment our ingrained idea that democracy is the only right and just conception of government.”

The rise of counter-revolutionary racist Fascism in Europe was accompanied by an attendant rise of far right-wing racist counterrevolutionary elements in Amerika. The Klan for example saw a resurgence, and its membership swelled as never before in the 1920’s.

Clearly when any struggle arises from within the ranks of the working class, the capitalists incite a corresponding rise of racist elements to divide and counter the up-thrusting masses and their challenge to capitalist domination. In essence, racism, and its most fundamentalist political and military form (namely fascism) are purely counter-revolutionary tools of the capitalist class used to sabotage working class struggle by dividing, inciting and turning the working class against itself.

The Race Game Played Between Blacks

Racism has also been used to divide exploited Blacks against themselves to further imperialist interests. One outstanding example occurred among the people of Rwanda and resulted in the genocidal war of 1994, which saw hundreds of thousands murdered while the imperialists sat by and watched. Until the Belgians entered Rwanda with imperialist aims in 1916, the Rwandans were a united people. The various ethnic groups shared the same language and had for centuries cooperated, supported, and sustained each other. The Hutu were 85%, the Tutsis 14%, and the Twa 1% of the population. The Hutu raised crops, the Tutsis tended herds. Economic relations between them were based upon the Hutu exchanging their surplus of vegetables for surplus Tutsi livestock. Their economies also sustained each other in that the Hutus set aside land for the Tutsis to graze their animals on. The manure of the animals in turn provided fertilizer for the Hutu crops.

In 1918 the European imperialist League of Nations “awarded” Rwanda to Belgium as a colony. This Afrikan country presented a source of great wealth to the Belgian King Leopold, in the form of vast forests of rubber trees. Rubber was in high demand in the industrial countries due to the recent invention of the inflatable tire. Like the agricultural capitalists of Amerika, the Belgians needed a local slave class to work the rubber plantations and a local middle level force to police them. The colonial Belgian government, along with the Catholic Church played the race game to produce the desired result. They opened mission schools to only the Tutsi and forbade the Hutu from receiving an education.  In the schools, Rwandan history was rewritten to project the Tutsi as the racial superior of the Hutus. The myth was taught that the Tutsi were a partly Caucasian Hamitic people because of their having taller statures, thinner features, and lighter complexions than the Hutu. Identity cards were issued which classified the entire society as Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa.

The Belgians treated the Hutu with the most savage brutality to enforce their submission. Millions upon millions resisted and were massacred, while millions more had ears, noses, and limbs cut off. Tutsi chiefs were appointed by the Belgians over the Hutu to serve as agents to this brutality. The Tutsi, like whites in Amerika, were pleased to be identified as allies of the ruling powers and to believe the myth of their racial superiority. Consequently, the Tutsi also lived in perpetual fear of Hutu revenge if the Hutu ever came together in revolt.

When the national independence struggles against European imperialism began to sweep across Afrika in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the educated Tutsis took notice and agitated for Rwandan independence. In turn the Belgians backed the Hutu to repress the Tutsi. Rwanda still won independence from Belgium in 1962, but this saw the Hutu take control of the upper levels of government. The Tutsi remained in the lower ranks, continuing to control the educational system, church, and livestock. The Hutu however took much of the Tutsi land upon taking power. Many of the Tutsi fled.

A 1973 coup saw a new Hutu government take power which changed the status of the Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa from racial to ethnic groupings, and sought to democratically restructure the ethnic groups within social institutions according to their numbers. This meant a larger share for the Hutu in the economy, church, and educational institutions. Thousands of Tutsi lost their jobs and fled the country. A few years later the government turned sour, state property was privatized, and the economy collapsed. In addition to droughts and famines, the imperialist International Monetary Fund imposed a neo-liberal structural adjustment program that totally devastated the country. The Tutsi were repressed and another wave fled Rwanda, to refugee camps in Uganda.

The genocidal war of 1994 was the result of the exiled Tutsis returning and seeking to regain power in Rwanda. The imperialists, including Amerika, were fully aware of preparations for the genocide before it began, but sat by as events unfolded. This “race” war, like many other race based conflicts, saw “respectable” people engaged in the murderous frenzy: teachers, doctors, nurses, journalists, and clergy. Husbands killed wives, friends killed each other, gang rapes were frequent, etc. Such is the result of race hate, racism, and the violence they spawn. Over 500,000 were killed in a matter of just a few months.

The entire “racial” division in Rwanda was, like that here in Amerika, created by a ruling capitalist elite, whose power and profits were served by dividing a previously united people along racial lines, granting one sector a share of relative power and elevated social status, and a sense of racial connection to the ruling elite, so to use it to repress and control the other sector that is super-exploited by the ruling capitalist class. While in reality the entire divided people are collectively exploited by the ruling capitalist class.

Racism in Reverse

For a people, like Blacks in Amerika, who have endured centuries of brutality, degradation, disrespect, indignity, powerlessness, and being labeled “inferiors” based solely upon skin color, the desire for respect became and remains very strong. This desire for respect has left many Blacks vulnerable to the appeals of reverse racism. Reverse racism is here defined as a belief in Black superiority and white inferiority. But, for Blacks in Amerika, who have no independent access to or control over any institutions of power or productive wealth, the features of reverse racism take place primarily in their minds, as they lack the means to exercise any dominant or comparable power over those they claim to be their inferiors, namely whites.

Reverse racism first took root on a large scale with the teachings of Marcus Garvey, who preached the beauty and high culture of Blacks. In colonizing Afrika, beginning in the late 1800’s, the European imperialists used racism to alienate their country’s own oppressed working class from the super-exploited Afrikans, and to rationalize their brutal colonial oppression of Afrikans. To give a scientific gloss to their racism doctrines, the imperialists commissioned novelists and intellectuals to develop theories to support their claims of European racial superiority and African racial inferiority. These European and Amerikan writers claimed that Afrika, when discovered by the white man, was a land of backward, ignorant savages upon whom they had bestowed the benefits and blessings of Christianity and white civilization.  Garvey reversed these false and degrading European histories and views of Afrikans. He countered that ignorant, murderous, pillaging European savages attacked Afrika out of jealousy over our power, prosperity, and having achieved the highest level of civilization yet known. Neither version was objectively true. However, Garvey’s teachings had an electrifying effect on Amerikan Blacks. In only a few years millions of Blacks joined his universal Negro Improvement Association, supporting his “back to Afrika” movement. Garvey’s teachings offered Blacks a new basis for pride, self-esteem, self-confidence, and respect, all tied into a messianic notion of Black racial superiority. By turning the teaching of white supremacy on its head, Garvey brought together the largest Black organization in U.S. history.

Following his arrest and exile, and the collapse of his UNIA, Garvey’s doctrine and its Black capitalist underpinnings became the common doctrine of Black organizations that sought a large following. Most notable was the Nation of Islam, which was founded three years after Garvey’s deportation. Indeed, the NOI absorbed many who came under Garveyite influences, including some of the NOI’s most influential leaders like Malcolm X whose parents were Garveyites. The NOI, however, enhanced and gave a theological twist to Garvey’s doctrine, (much as the white church had done with white racism), by posing Blacks as the Creator’s chosen people and whites as spawns of the Devil. The NOI’s teachings were enhanced even further by its excommunicated member Clarence 13X, in his youth-based Nation of Gods and Earths, (formerly the 5% Nation), which promotes the Black man as god and whites as the actual devil.

Another proponent of subjective reverse racism was Dr. Khalid Muhammad, another excommunicated member of the NOI, who led the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) up until his death in 2001. Dr. Muhammad steered the NBPP far away from the class-based ideological and political line of the original BPP and in the direction of race-based anti-white politics, the NBPP’s present path.

The New Afrikan Black Panther Party – Prison Chapter (NABPP-PC) distinguishes itself from such race-based politics as promoted by the NBPP, as we are proponents of class struggle and the revolutionary nationalist liberation struggles of those oppressed by imperialism. We recognize that the capitalists created and use race divisions to perpetuate conflict within the oppressed lower class sectors, and that racism and the race blame game serves the interests of the oppressor class and undermines the interests of the oppressed. This is proven historical fact. Furthermore, as revolutionary New Afrikan nationalists, we realize that there is a contradiction between race and nationalism, and moreover, that there is no nation composed of a single race. All existing nations, like the Indian Nations here in North Amerika, include whites and mixed bloods, even though there are contradictions. It was the policies of white colonialism created by the ruling class that produced these contradictions, and indeed the New Afrikan Nation. In this regard, we say all people of Afrikan heritage, regardless of skin tone, are part of a single Afrikan- New Afrikan Nation…A Pan-Afrikan Nation. Indeed most “Blacks” in Amerika are mixed bloods, mixed with white and/or Indian bloodlines.

We therefore move beyond the black and white dogmatism – Native Americans have always done this in adopting any “race” of people into their nations who embrace and respect their heritage and culture. All non-chauvinistic nations have done this. We also accept that nationalities can overlap and are not merely an either/or situation. People the world over embrace multiple nationalities, and so can New Afrikans. One can be Venezuelan and New Afrikan, or Lenape and New Afrikan, etc. This concept becomes practical revolutionary internationalism that has all oppressed nationalities struggling for both national self-determination and united multi-national anti-imperialist cooperation.

In the context of national liberation, we must remember that nationality is itself a temporary form of social organization and identity. It is a means to an end and not an end in itself. The nation is a product of social-historical development, and will wither away in time. Our orientation as genuine revolutionaries is to the whole of humynity and the future classless and nation-stateless society. Getting from here to there involves national liberation struggles and security issues. As Mao Tse Tung observed, “Proletarian nationalism is applied proletarian internationalism.” It involves uniting all who can be united at each stage of the struggle. From our point of view, the key question is building alliances between the oppressed nations within the U.S. and abroad and the multi-national proletariat.

Rising Above Race to Build Class-Based Alliances

World suffering and oppression, poverty, and want are not caused by race, but by national and class exploitation and oppression at the hands of the monopoly capitalist class. However, as repeatedly pointed out above, race and racism have been a principal tool and weapon of this class used to keep the oppressed workers of the world divided and warring among themselves, to  divide, agitate, and rule. Toward the end of their lives, both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. came to realize that basing struggle against oppression on race without challenging capitalist economic exploitation was a losing battle. And it was at that point when they began to agitate to have their followers struggle against capitalism, imperialism, and colonial oppression instead of exclusively focusing on race, (merely struggling against white oppression), that they were murdered.  George Jackson pointed this out:

“It’s no coincidence that Malcolm X and M. L. King died when they did.  Malcolm X had just put it together…You remember what was on his lips when he died, Vietnam and economics, political economy. The professional killers could have murdered him long before they did. They let Malcolm rage on Muslim nationalism for a number of years because they knew it was an empty ideal, but the second he got his feet on the ground, they murdered him.”

Fred Hampton, Sr. summed it up perfectly in his November 1969 speech delivered at the University of Northern Illinois and aptly entitled “It’s a Class Struggle Goddammit!” Fred stated:

“You know a lot of people have hang-ups with the [Black Panther] Party because the Party talks about a class struggle. And the people that have those hang-ups are opportunists, and cowards, and individualists and everything that’s anything but revolutionary. And they use these things as an excuse to justify and to alibi and to bonify their lack of participation in the real revolutionary struggle. So they say, ‘Well, I can’t dig the Panther Party because the Panthers they are engrossed with dealing with oppressor country radicals, or white people, or hunkies, or what have you.’  They say, these are some of the [reasons] why I am not in the struggle. We got a lot of answers for these people. First of all, we say primarily that the priority of this struggle is class. That Marx, and Lenin, and Che Guevara, and Mao Tse-Tung and anybody else that has ever said or knew or practiced anything about revolution, always said that a revolution is a class struggle. It was one class – the oppressed – against the other class, the oppressor. And it’s got to be a universal fact. Those that don’t admit to that are those that don’t want to get involved in a revolution, because they know as long as they’re dealing with a race thing, they’ll never be involved in a revolution. They can talk about numbers; they can hang you up in many, many ways…

“[We] never negated the fact that there was racism in Amerika, but we said… the by-product, what comes off of capitalism, that happens to be racism. That capitalism comes first and next is racism. That when they brought slaves over here, it was to make money. So first the idea came that we went to make money, then the slaves came in order to make that money. That means that ‘through historical fact, racism had to come from capitalism. It had to be capitalism first and racism was a by-product of that.”

Like Malcolm X and MLK, and not even a month after giving this speech, Fred Hampton was assassinated, shot in the head while asleep in bed, by Chicago police (in collaboration with the FBI), in a well-orchestrated hit.  Coincidence?

The imperialists’ hired guns made no pretenses about murdering Fred. No attempts were made to conceal their involvement by using puppets or agents. They used forces in government uniform, and a Black cop pulled the trigger at that. So what made Fred so threatening that the capitalists’ guns would go to such open extremes to neutralize him? It was because Fred proved to be a much greater danger to the ruling class than all other leaders of the Black Movement combined. He was not only an exceptional organizer and inspirational leader and teacher of New Afrikans, but he could turn the most reactionary of white workers into revolutionaries.

It was Fred’s work that led to the formation of the Young Patriot Party (YPP), a revolutionary party of poor redneck white Appalachian youth whose symbol was a confederate flag with a red star emblazoned on it. Fred’s approach was to appeal to class instead of being sidetracked by race. He walked into a redneck Hillbilly bar in Chicago when they asked, “What are you doing here?” he said, “I’m here to organize the Niggers.” They said, “No Niggers come in here,” and were ready to fight. He said, “Oh yeah?  Well the way I see it, they work y’all like Niggers, treat y’all like Niggers, and make y’all live like Niggers. So that makes y’all niggers in my book, and I say it’s time to get organized and deal with this shit!”

In another 1969 speech Fred pointed out:

“We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I’m talking about the white masses, I’m talking about the Black masses, and the Brown masses, and the Yellow masses, too. We’ve got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism – we’re gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don’t fight capitalism with no Black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism…

“We have to understand very clearly that there’s a man in our community called a capitalist. Sometimes he’s Black and sometimes he’s white. But that man has to be driven out of our community, because anybody who comes into the community to make profit off the people by exploiting them can be defined as a capitalist. And we don’t care how many programs they have, how long a dashiki they have. Because political power does not flow from the sleeve of a dashiki…”

From within the Chicago chapter of the BPP, Fred was the leader of a growing multi-racial, multi-national, anti-imperialist united front that included the BPP, the Puerto Rican Young Lords Party, the Students for a Democratic Society (before the Weathermen faction took over), and the Revolutionary Youth Movement II.  He even worked to politically develop apolitical street gangs. The imperialists realized, as did the southern plantation owners, in the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion, that the greatest threat to their power is the united resistance of all elements of the oppressed laboring class. “In order for capitalism to continue to rule, any action that threatens the right of a few individuals to own and control public property must be prohibited and curtailed whatever the cost in resources…whatever the cost in blood…The national repressive institutions (police, National Guard, army, etc.), are no less determined.” (George Jackson).  It was because of the genuine threat that Fred’s revolutionary practice posed in bringing together the divided “races” into a united movement to combat imperialism that he had to be liquidated.

New Afrikan Liberation and the Race Question

The position on race presented here is not to say that New Afrikans or “Blacks” should abandon or hand over our liberation struggle to the initiative or control of whites, nor that our struggle in this regard should depend or wait upon the cooperation of those who identify as “white.” Quite the opposite: We are our own liberators!

New Afrikans are an oppressed and colonized nation within Amerika. As such, reforms cannot secure racial and social equality for us. Nor can whites identify with and recognize the conditions we suffer under – no one knows our oppression, the forms it takes and the liberation we desire like we do. We are a people with a history, a culture, and an identity that is our own, and was forged over centuries of common experience and oppression. It is therefore our place and no one else’s to claim those things as uniquely our own and develop them to their highest potential as a people. In order to have any security as a people and not be dependent upon the whims of any other sectors, we must contest the basic means of our survival and governance. If we are not able to defend our own destiny and selves, we are not free.  And if we do not break free from the conditions of our colonization, we leave ourselves open to further colonization under any number of reformed conditions and methods.

Merely joining up with Amerikan whites cannot ensure this because our oppression exceeds theirs. We must be able to assert and protect our economic and political rights whether whites support us or not. Self-determination is the essence of our achieving liberation, and it is our right and duty to run our own organizations and liberation struggle. As the victims of racism only we know best how to resist it. But overall, we are oppressed as a nation and must free ourselves as a nation. In doing so we will destroy the basis of our colonized condition within the Amerikan Empire.

In aid of our struggle, the advanced sectors of white Amerika should work to destroy the notion of white skin privilege and white national chauvinism, which are the underlying national identity of Amerika. They must aid us in protecting our democratic rights and the democratic right of all peoples, including their own. In turn, we must join up with the entire multi-ethnic, multi-national, and multi-racial working class, radical youth, and progressive elements in a United Front Against Imperialism, to smash the overall imperialist system.

Imperialism is capitalism is colonialism. The defeat of imperialism requires the liberation of the colonized and neo-colonized nations on which imperialism feeds. But we must also remember that imperialism is capitalism, capitalism on a global scale that enslaves and profits off not only the workers of the non-industrialized nations and oppressed nationalities across the world, but also the workers of the industrially advanced capitalist countries. To defeat capitalism we must join together in a united struggle of the entire working class of all nations, ethnicities, and “races” in a United Front Against Imperialism, and to ultimately overthrow the capitalist political economy and its ruling class’s power, privilege, and domination over social labor and wealth. Without a repressed working class under its thumb, capitalism cannot exist. Therefore, the entire working class must deny the capitalists its labor power.

Political forms of organization to lead the whole working class are necessary, and we support them. The advanced and anti-imperialist whites must also struggle against the fanatical and backward white supremacist elements like the Klan, Neo-Nazis, etc. These elements represent overt fascism in embryonic form, who will be backed by or handed state power to suppress and divide any working class and national independence struggle that arises to challenge monopoly capitalism, as the elite are wont to do, (and Western Europe in the early 1900’s stands as a glaring example), when their power is threatened from below. They will move the most rabid racists into positions of political and military power to attack and smash revolutionary and progressive elements and incite and engage in a divisive race war. They will certainly also incite the fanatical Black reverse racists to turn on and attack Black revolutionary elements. They will justify such actions with claims that those who collaborate with any whites are “sell-outs.” To them all whites are the enemy, as they have no concept of class struggle and will back dictators and sub-fascists like Haiti’s Papa Doc Duvalier and the Congo’s Joseph Mobutu, so long as they have black skin.

To the reverse racists it’s all about a racial contest, and their backward thinking enables them to be used as imperialist agents to attack and kill the revolutionary elements. This is how Amilcar Cabral was assassinated in 1973.  Cabral was Afrika’s leading revolutionary, a Pan-Afrikan and anti-imperialist theorist and fighter of the 1960’s and 1970’s.  He effectively led the people of Guinea Bissau against the greatest odds, in a successful national independence struggle against Portugal’s colonialism.

Cabral emphasized that race must not be the basis of his country’s independence struggle; that he did not confuse imperialism and colonialism with the color of people’s skins, but desired to see economic, political, and military power in the hands of the working people so to free his country of all oppressive forces, be they white or black. In fact, his position and showing of solidarity with the white workers of Portugal generated a general uprising of the lower classes in Portugal that nearly saw a revolutionary overthrow of power there. He was also able to turn other white nations against Portugal’s colonial policies in his country. It was this uprising and international support coupled with the political and armed liberation struggle of the people of Guinea Bissau that ultimately forced the Portuguese military and colonial administration to abandon Guinea Bissau and return to Portugal to suppress the revolt there.

In turn, Portuguese agents inside of Cabral’s party assassinated him. Those Black agents, Cabral’s fellow countrymen, were opponents of his class-based struggle and were incited to murder Cabral because of his collaboration with “whites” and his being of mixed Afrikan and Portuguese blood. The Portuguese imperialists used proponents of reverse racism to kill the man who had led Afrika’s greatest national independence struggle, freed his people from a savage and brutal colonial existence, and even offered his country’s support to the struggles of New Afrikans here in Amerika. There are valuable lessons to be learned here.

The imperialists have used reverse racists many times in attempts to derail many other revolutionary movements of people of color and to assassinate key leaders. Such racialist elements were used to murder Malcolm X.  The FBI used such elements as the United Slaves Organization to assassinate key members of the BPP, Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and Jon Huggins in January 1969. Indeed in many cases, such as during the national independence struggles in Angola and Mozambique during the 1960’s and 1970’s, the elements who promoted anti-white ideology ended up becoming open collaborators with and agents of the very “white” imperialist powers they were supposed to be fighting. For example, Holden Robert’s UPA/FNLA (Uniao das Populacoes de Angola/Frente Nacional de Libertacao de Angola), became open agents of U.S. imperialism in Angola, and Jonas Sivimbi’s Unita became open agents of the Portuguese imperialists in Mozambique. These groups became agents of their imperialist sponsors and turned their arms away from fighting the colonial forces and declared war for them against their own people’s revolutionary forces, namely the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) and Frelimo (the Liberation Front of Mozambique).

At no time and in no place has playing the race card or the racial blame game ever won any people freedom from oppression. But what it has done is generate most every known major genocidal war that has occurred over the past several centuries, from the genocidal extermination of tens of millions of Native Amerikans to the genocidal attacks on Afrikans by Arabs in Southern Sudan today. The racial game produces only a back and forth cycle of bloodshed, carnage, and misery between competing racial groups. For its blind participants, racism offers nothing positive except a subjective and superficial sense of belonging to a group which professes to be “superior” to another group and the destruction of the natural compassion and sanity that would otherwise prevent humyns from brutalizing and massacring innocent people. And it’s a double-edged sword: one “race” victimizes another and is in turn victimized, or another “race” becomes the target of the victim. The complicity of many Jews today in Anglo-Zionist race-oriented genocidal policies against Palestinians and other Arabs is an outstanding example of a people who were once victims of racial violence in turn victimizing another innocent people in the name of race and claims of “God-given” right. And all to advance the wealth and power interests of a capitalist elite.

For white and Black supremacists here in Amerika, a race war would not prove beneficial to either “race!”  It would only produce a cycle of mutual slaughter of members of both races. No one would be “liberated” as a result, but multitudes of loved ones, friends, and colleagues on both sides would be brutalized, butchered, maimed, massacred, and displaced. In the race hate game no one wins – there is simply no way for a sane mind to romanticize it. But in a unified struggle of the oppressed classes and nationalities against imperialism, the very source of world suffering, misery, and racism itself can be uprooted and power turned over to those who can be trusted to use it properly, namely the oppressed masses.

In the fevered minds of racists, their fanatical howlings about violent repression or annihilation of “inferior races” sounds like fun: that is until the bloodshed begins and they find themselves on the receiving end of counter-violence that quickly spins out of control. To many racist southern whites, the brutal enslavement of New Afrikans seemed like a fun enterprise: that is until revolts like Nat Turner’s turned the guns back on them. At that point a massive Black and white abolitionist movement sprang to life to end slavery. There are simply no superior and inferior races. Indeed the very concept of race is an invention. A comrade put it this way in a letter to me:

“Racism is the spawn of colonialism and is based on lies. The technological edge the Europeans took advantage of came late in the game. Much of it was borrowed from other cultures like gunpowder from China, or the lanteen sail from Afrika, and potatoes from South Amerika. The combination of these elements and the ability to use them to establish global hegemony created the illusion of white supremacy.

“In reality, we’re all pretty damn equal. Even the difference between smart and dumb people is not so great. No one of us is really all that smart. Is capitalism smart? We let the nastiest men run the show by the nastiest means and hope that it will work out alright for the rest of us. Is that smart? We’ve got all these gadgets running, but the sum of it is we’ve burned a hole in the atmosphere and the ice caps are melting.

“Even the idea of Communism is not so brilliant. It is just common sense. Ants work together for their common welfare. The genius lies in overcoming our own stupidity to do what is necessary to survive, and this will be a big struggle and one we could lose. There is a time factor in our getting our collective act together.

“The good news is that all the elements necessary for our survival as a species are present. We just have to sort out our political-social organization, and deal with the nasty men.”

Even mainstream sources now admit that the concept of race is today a scientifically unsustainable concept. That the “theories” invented centuries ago to validate the idea are invalidated by today’s science. The Merriam Webster Collegiate Encyclopedia (2000) defines and dismisses the notion of race thusly:

“Race: Term once commonly used in physical anthropology to denote a division of humankind possessing traits that are transmissible by descent and sufficient to characterize it as a distinct human type (e.g. Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid). Today the term has little scientific standing, as older methods of differentiation, including hair form and body measurement, have given way to the comparative analysis of DNA and gene frequencies relating to such factors as blood type, the excretion of amino acids, and inherited enzyme deficiencies. Because all human populations today are extremely similar genetically, most researchers have abandoned the concept of race for the concept of the cline, a graded series of differences occurring along a line of environmental or geographical transition. This reflects the recognition that human populations have always been in a state of flux, with genes constantly flowing from one gene pool to another, impeded only by physical and ecological boundaries. While relative isolation does preserve genetic differences and allow populations to maximally adapt to climatic and disease factors over long periods of time, all groups currently existing are thoroughly “mixed” genetically, and such differences as still exist do not lend themselves to simple typologizing. “Race” is today primarily a social designation, identifying a class sharing some outward physical characteristics and some commonalities of culture and history.”

This same text goes on to admit that racism is a creation and tool of colonialism:

“Racism:  Belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that some races are inherently superior to others. More broadly, the term refers to any racial prejudice or discrimination throughout the era of European colonialism, the British viewed imperialism as a noble activity (“the white man’s burden”) destined to bring civilization to the benighted races, while the French invoked the notion of mission civilistrace, their duty to bring civilization to backward peoples. An influential modern proponent was the Comte de Gobineau, who held that the so-called Aryan was the supreme race. His most important follower was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whom Adolf Hitler credited with supplying the “scientific” basis of the Nazi’s racialist philosophy, used to justify the persecution of Jews and other non-Aryans. South African society was built on the principle of apartheid, or racial “separateness.” Today the general trend is away from racism, though the problem of racist thinking remains intractable.”

Although this mainstream reference work totally avoids pointing out what social-economic class invented the entire racial concept and its birth and role here in North Amerika, it does make clear that both “race” and “racism” are today proven to be scientifically baseless and live on solely as psycho-social concepts. So why then do the Amerikan political and economic rulers still classify Amerikan citizens by race? It is obviously because they desire to maintain its role as a divisive undercurrent to be appealed to and whipped into hysteria when their power and privilege are threatened from blow. Thus, the national identity of Amerika remains that of a “white nation.”

The concepts of race and racism, like a deeply ingrained backward superstition, are so deeply embedded in the social psyche and are so deeply influential on social attitudes and behaviors, that they cannot be simply ignored. The oppressed “races” must collectively struggle against racial oppression and domination, while the conscious members of the oppressor races must struggle to conquer the myth of racial superiority within their own “racial” groups. Reverse racism must also be countered. In confronting racism we must be aware of its counterrevolutionary nature and the forms it takes in the minds of those who embrace it consciously or subconsciously. George Jackson gave an insightful analysis on this point. He stated:

“Racism is a matter of ingrained traditional attitudes conditioned through institutions. For some, it is as natural a reflex as breathing. The psychosocial effects of segregated environments compounded by bitter class repression have served in the past to render the progressive movement almost totally impotent.

“The major obstacle to a united left in this country is white racism. There are three categories of white racists: the overt, self-satisfied racist who doesn’t attempt to hide his antipathy; the self-interdicting racist who harbors and nurtures racism in spite of his best efforts; and the unconscious racist, who has no awareness of his racist preconceptions.

“As Black partisans, we must recognize and allow for the existence of all three types of racists. We must understand their presence as an effect of the system. It is the system that must be crushed, for it continues to manufacture new and deeper contradictions of both class and race. Once it is destroyed, we may be able to address the problems of racism at an even more basic level. But we must also combat racism while we are in the process of destroying the system.

“The self-interdicting racist, no matter what his acquired conviction or ideology, will seldom be able to contribute with his actions in any really concrete way. His role in revolution, barring a change of basic character, will be minimal throughout. Whether the basic character of a man can be changed at all is still a question.”

As Comrade George pointed out, our struggle demands that we acknowledge and recognize the three categories of racists. However, we must also acknowledge and recognize that the reverse racists also fit into these three categories. And in answer to George’s question whether there is a possibility of changing the basic character of the “self-interdicting racist,” we think yes. The Marxist recognizes that there is a dialectical relationship between our social practice and how we think. That reactionary thinking can be corrected through revolutionary social practice. But that practice must also in turn be guided by and committed to correct ideology.

Our Comrade Tom Big Warrior analyzed the process very well in a discussion we had some time ago concerning a New Afrikan brother with whom I was struggling to break out of a deeply ingrained hatred of whites. This brother’s views had been imbedded in him at a very young age by a now deceased grandfather, whose memory he held with the highest respect. While he could not refute my arguments against race-based hatreds, he also felt powerless to change his feelings. Here is Tom:

“I understand what you’re talking about with the brother who has deeply rooted hatred of whites. I’ve got brothers in my nation who have the same issues regarding Blacks, particularly among the hillbillies of mixed white-Native heritage. It was bred into them from a very young age and reinforced by their social practice (or lack of it) with Black folks.

“Hell, everybody in Amerika has been brainwashed on race. I know I have been affected by it, but I’ve got the advantage of both a theoretical understanding and a lifetime of positive social interaction with people of all ethnic backgrounds (and particularly Black Comrades), so I can identify and throw away feelings that come from racist programming as they come up.

“I think the key with this brother is to get him to see that his feelings are part of the slave mentality he (and his grandfather) were programmed to have to keep Black people from throwing off their oppression. If you can’t inspire meek submission and self-deprecation, you can inspire hate and fear, (which is the next best thing), and this leads to alienation and division.

“”The greatest threat in the South was unity between the Blacks and poor whites, who had common class interests. So the big landlords played them against each other by promoting blind hatred and racism.

“If he can grasp that his feelings are chains upon him causing him to act against the interests of Black people and working people in general, (that he is falling into the role of a “Nigger” set for him by “Mr. Charlie”), he will see that it must be overcome so he can be a “true Black Warrior” and a genuine revolutionary.

“We feel the way we feel because we think the way we think. Changing our thinking changes how we feel.  In fact our feelings expose how we think at the deepest levels. Sometimes we think we have something all sorted out and understood, but then a feeling pops up to show us that we are still in process, and we have to keep struggling to grasp the idea more firmly.

“If the brother wants to be a revolutionary, he can’t be liberal with himself. He has to recognize that white people must be won to support Black liberation and make proletarian revolution. Unless this is done, Black people will continue to be oppressed, and the imperialists will keep running the show.

“He has to decide if he wants to be part of the problem or part of the solution. The MC5, the house band of the White Panther Party, had a song where the singer shouts out, “It takes 5 seconds to decide and determine your purpose here on the planet, 5 seconds to decide if you are going to be a part of the problem or you are going to be a part of the solution – KICK OUT THE JAMS MOTHERFUCKER!”

“This is just what they were talking about – this mental/emotional programming that jams up our ability to make revolution. Ain’t nothing to do but kick it out, get rid of it, to get to what needs to be done.

“When you reason with him he says, “Yeah, yeah you’re right, Brother,” because you can’t reasonably argue for racism. But he’s not willing to let go and backslides right back into it. As if counter-revolution was his purpose on the planet.

“It’s time to invoke the 5 second rule. Time for him to make a commitment and stop being liberal with himself. The world can’t wait for us to get serious about revolution.

“If he really wants to honor his grandfather’s memory, he shouldn’t let the wounding that was done to him and other Blacks go on another generation. You can’t play the blame game and win.

“The pigs didn’t kill Fred Hampton because he was good at organizing Black people, but because he could turn redneck Hillbilly crackers into Red revolutionaries, which he did with the Young Patriot Party – that’s true history.

“He was a better revolutionary than Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver put together, and he is the one we should measure ourselves and our praxis by.

“It is our practice that determines our thinking, but there is a dialectic between theory and practice called praxis, in which theory becomes the determining factor.

“This is different than idealism, which Marx was struggling against. This is what Mao was talking about when he said ideological and political line will determine everything. It is the difference between Utopian socialism and our Scientific socialism.

“We begin with a concrete analysis of concrete conditions and from this developed theory, then apply our theory to practice, then sum up our practice to strengthen and advance our theory, then go back to practice, over and over getting sharper and sharper. That’s praxis.

“That’s how a bush-wah intellectual, or a peasant or a lumpen can transform into a proletarian revolutionary without working in a factory or even ever seeing one. It doesn’t happen spontaneously, it takes struggle.”

When we truly recognize that the capitalists are at the root of racism, that it is a tool and weapon invented and used by them to preserve their power and privilege and to keep the lower classes divided, oppressed, miserable, and powerless, then we must also recognize our revolutionary duty to rise above racist and reverse racist programming.  This is a difficult task that demands concrete practice.  It is because of the depth of race-conditioning that the liberation struggle of New Afrikans and other oppressed nationalities cannot be dependent upon white cooperation, however, that cooperation should be sought and developed in process to build a United Front Against Imperialism. True liberation from national oppression compels destruction of the imperialist system. Otherwise, the monopoly capitalists will continue to derail independence struggles by allying themselves with racialist and comprador elements within the bodies of the oppressed nationalities and races, push them into positions of power, and then use them to subvert the liberation struggles and bring the masses back under imperialist control. This is the essence of neocolonialism and the method used by the imperialists to undermine most all of the national independence struggles of the last century.

In that it’s the capitalist institutions that create, perpetuate, and benefit from racism, (indeed they need to preserve it to maintain their elevated power and status), they will assuredly mobilize resistance against all genuine efforts to build class-based racial solidarity. They will use the most rabid of white racists, and incite many New Afrikans, Natives and other people of color to fall out on the reactionary side, and the more intelligent reactionary, (reverse racist and comprador), leaders will encourage this. Our movement must be prepared to confront and counter such measures. We must set an example of promoting class unity and solidarity. It will also occur that some people will vacillate between the revolutionary and reactionary sides and that the dividing line won’t be static and clear-cut. The task of winning people politically will ultimately decide victory.

Conclusion

It should be clear by now that those of us who play into racism act as agents of our own imperialist oppressors, (whether consciously or not), and we aid in continuing our own oppression and want. In fact, we increase and intensify our own oppression and misery by inciting and perpetuating hatred, humiliation, insensitivity, and violence not only against the other race(s), but also in turn against our “own” race. It’s a cycle that no one benefits from except the oppressor class that sits at the top laughing at what fools we are, while their power and wealth remain secure form any real challenge. It is on this basis that the New Afrikan Black Panther Party – Prison Chapter promotes, unites with, and supports the White Panther Organization and all anti-imperialists of all nationalities and all oppressed peoples in a common struggle against imperialism. We welcome the WPO as fellow comrades and Panthers within the democratic centralism of our aspiring Vanguard Party.

All Power to the People!