Power Systems, Propaganda, and the Maintenance of Exploitation

 By Marcus Kahn

In biology class, I was taught that structure determines function. The respiratory system has a lot of surface area (structure) to absorb and distribute oxygen (function). The lungs may be built of the same basic substance as other parts of the body (carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, etc.) but the structural arrangement at an atomic, molecular, and cellular level determines how the larger system behaves. A sword and a scalpel may be built of the same metal, but they are designed and structured to accomplish completely different tasks.

With this in mind, we should evaluate the function of our existing power system according to its structure and determine what it is designed to accomplish. This involves stripping away its rhetoric and self-image, looking at the distribution of decision-making power, and determining whether the system is capable of being reformed into something fair and equitable, or whether it’s a sword that needs to be melted down and transformed using the same basic substances, people and law.

A democratic power system seeks to give everyone an equal voice in collective decisions, rooted in the underlying assumption that such a system of governance would tend towards justice and prosperity. If the atoms are horizontally structured through laws that provide equal access to decision-making, this will lead to an equitable distribution of resources and opportunity. If the system is hierarchically structured and decision-making emanates from the top, the system will function exploitatively to the benefit of those in power. Democratic (bottom-up flow of decision-making) and authoritarian (top-down flow of decision-making) power systems may be built of the same basic substance (people and rules to govern their behavior), but their differing structures determine who they ultimately serve. When decision-making power is concentrated in the hands of a few, a small minority becomes capable of systematically defending their interests by creating law and enforcing it through legally sanctioned violence.

There are examples of concentrated power in monarchies and theocracies throughout history whereby the labor of the majority is exploited for the profit of the powerful few, at the cost of human life and the ability to control that life. The ‘special interests’ of the powerful minority not only differ from the interests of the vast majority of the population. Their achievement depends on popular submission to the will of those in power. But popular submission to an exploitative power system is no easy task. It is difficult to convince people to work for you and hand over the fruits of their labor, whether that’s years of unpaid childcare or ten hours a day behind a desk. Power systems require a parallel system of belief to accomplish what they can’t enforce physically. You need to convince a substantial portion of the population, as well as yourself, that you are justified in dictating their behavior and demanding their obedience.

The way exploitative power systems are justified can usefully be termed as the ‘dominant ideology’ in a given society. Dominant ideologies have varied across time and geopolitical situation. In 14th century England you might have someone holding up a bible to justify taxing landless peasants, meanwhile an Aztec priest is across the ocean telling everyone why his divine right to rule justifies economic inequality and social control. In the more secular modern age, the dominant ideology has taken on a global and comparatively homogenous character. The modern dominant ideology, (the belief system that justifies exploitation) can be conceptually divided into four interdependent categories based off their inherent properties and historical development; patriarchy (oppression justified by gender and sexuality), state-corporate capitalism (oppression justified by property rights), imperialism (oppression justified by nationality) and white supremacy (oppression justified by perceived race).

History rarely provides neat watersheds, but much of their development and form can be explained by the residual power of fundamentalist religion, the ‘discovery’ of the New World and corresponding racist-imperialist colonial systems that extended from western Europe beginning in the 16th century, and the crystallization of the state-corporate capitalist economic system through the growth of multinational corporations and massive financial institutions since the late 19th century, accelerated after WWII and enforced by powerful Western nations, primarily U.S. military and economic power.

These forms of oppression are deeply interlinked, backed by the threat and execution of lawful violence, and justified by information distributed from powerful institutions directed by men, billionaires, powerful nations, and white people, most potently all four wrapped into one person like Zuckerberg, Bloomberg, Jobs, Bezos, Murdoch, Gates, or Trump.

The means of reproducing and distributing the dominant ideology changes in tandem with technological advances. The modern development of mass information distribution systems (e.g. standardized education, corporate mass media, the public relations and advertising industries, and more recently the Internet) has given a tiny minority historically unprecedented influence over the information people receive, and therefore how they behave. If people clearly understand universal rights to freedom, health, safety, and sustenance they will resist laws, ideas, and people that oppose those rights. If they pledge allegiance to a nationalist symbol before absorbing thirteen years of revisionist history or read the same newspaper every day, they are much more likely to uphold the existing power system because they are convinced it’s the right thing to do. In its essence, what has developed over the past century is a highly sophisticated propaganda system whose ideological production is distributed among powerful institutions in the public and private sectors. These institutions are controlled by a class of individuals who share similar, though not always identical interests.

The label ‘propaganda system’ may seem counterintuitive. When we hear the word ‘propaganda’ we tend to picture a tightly coordinated and centralized government-run agency that distributes pamphlets, radio broadcasts, etc. Chomsky notes an inverse relationship between a state’s ability to use violence on its own population, and the sophistication of the propaganda system in place. The more authoritarian the power system is, the more rudimentary its propaganda, the more democratic the more sophisticated. Within so-called “free” societies like the U.K. and the U.S., violence is not always an easy option for maintaining power. Through popular struggles over the centuries, these societies have made some limited progress in securing legal protections against state-sanctioned violence, and those in power have had to find new ways to ensure obedience.

This sincere fear of public disobedience and interference in public policy has been referred to as the ‘threat of democracy’ or more recently the ‘crisis of democracy’. But the need to structurally marginalize public influence is a priority James Madison understood when designing a constitutional framework put in place to protect the interests of the ‘minority of the opulent’, and a phenomenon those in power in the 1960s and 70s understood when facing popular resistance in the form of the civil rights, anti-war, labor, and feminist movements. In response to this threat, and enabled by developments in communications technology, those with a vested interest in maintaining and furthering the existing power system established control over new means of mass information distribution to marshal public behavior without the use of force and ‘manufacture consent’ for exploitative public policy.

This system of ideological control is not centrally coordinated or even fully understood by those who participate. Executives at ABC (Disney) and NBC (General Electric) do not call each other to compare notes on how to oppress the working class. But those with ultimate decision-making power atop these rigidly structured and powerful institutions (mostly rich white men from powerful countries) share similar interests on a range of public policy issues and independently manufacture a limited range of debate that tries to ignore or vilify ideas and people that threaten their power. Though slight variations in tactics and opinion reflect the distribution of power amongst distinct institutions, the output of corporate mass media institutions is ideologically consistent due to hierarchical and undemocratic internal structures, and is also influenced by mutualistic relationships with other centers of concentrated power (e.g. a government that supplies fresh official information or the corporate advertisers who help pay the bills). These inherent structural pressures orient public discourse towards the interests of the powerful.

Corporate media institutions help to reframe critical issues that have attracted popular concern such as climate change, wealth distribution, military intervention, health care, and police power in ways that maintain the integrity of the power system and ensure the continued exploitation of the global population for private gain without meaningful public interference. By appealing to widespread dissatisfaction and perhaps themselves using the language of ‘reform’, those with power avoid addressing the need for transformative deconstruction and the institution of democratic structures of governance that are upheld by popular consent and dictated by collective decision-making rather than violence and ideological management.

Teaching Politically and the Problem of Afropessimism

[Protesters at the Open Housing March, Chicago. Getty Images/Chicago History Museum]

By Nino Brown and Derek Ford

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

As teachers, we’re tasked with educating our students, students who are increasingly, like their teachers, becoming politically conscious and called to act. Yet the dominant political theories and forms of action are inadequate for real revolutionary transformation. In other words, the schools and universities in capitalist society are all too ready to accommodate and guide this consciousness and energy into forms it can accommodate. This is not a new phenomenon, but one that’s accelerated since the 1960s in particular.

For example, Charisse Burden-Stelly documents how Black Studies emerged in the 1960s “to fundamentally challenge the statist, imperialist, racist, and Eurocentric underpinnings of the traditional disciplines in westernized universities,” but that it was soon “more or less fully incorporated into the westernized university.”[1] What facilitated this absorption was the erasure of political and economic critique and action with cultural and literary analysis, which “reify the abstraction of Blackness” and divorce it from political struggle, not even questioning its relationship to and basis in the material conditions and struggles of the people.[2] As we wrestle with political pedagogy, then, our guiding orientation has to be one that resists such subsumption within capital.

Yet it’s not only that the “scholastic ideological apparatus” provides its own official pathways for “resistance” and “transformation,” from reading groups to Diversity and Equity Initiatives and intergroup dialogues. Perhaps a more fundamental problem for us--as our students participate in protest movements--are the academic theories and politics that they encounter there and often unconsciously absorb. We regularly hear students say “anti-Blackness” and, when we ask them what it means and what political orientation it comes from and reproduces, they’re not sure. Or we hear students say in regards to protests against particular forms of oppression that we have to “listen to and follow” the people who face that oppression. White and non-white students alike believe they have to “follow and listen to Black leaders” at protests against racist police terror and white supremacy. We’re told to cite Black scholars. In either case, the question of politics is completely effaced, as there’s almost a prohibition against asking: “which Black people?” Yet this is not a defect but a feature of Afropessimism, a feature that opens the arms of white supremacist imperialism.

The happy marriage of capitalism, Afropessimism, and liberal identity politics

We and our students want radical transformation, and so many often jump to the latest and seemingly most radical sounding phrases, slogans, and theories. In education, as in so many other disciplines, one of the increasingly dominant phrases is “anti-Blackness” and the theory of Afropessimism. The two foundational theorists here are Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton. For Wilderson, Afro-pessimism contends that “Blackness cannot be separated from slavery,” and that “the Slave’s relationship to violence is open-ended, gratuitous, without reason or constraint,” whereas “the human’s relationship to violence is always contingent.”[3]

There are crucial problems with this framework that make it perfectly acceptable to capitalism and perfectly antithetical to those who want to change the world. For one, they are completely Eurocentric in that Africa and the African diaspora are flattened into “Blackness” as a condition of the “human.” As Greg Thomas notes, this is “the [B]lackness and humanism of white Americanism, specifically and restrictively, an isolationist or exceptionalist Americanism.”[4] In other words, Afropessimism takes aim at a civil society and takes refuge in a Blackness that are both uniquely American. The U.S. historical and political experience is transformed into a transcendent, static, and universal ontological status or structure. More specifically, the theories of academics in highly prestigious and exclusive institutions in the U.S. are presented as ahistorical and global realities.

As identities, Black and Blackness are, in the U.S., fairly recent developments. The earliest recorded appearances are in Richard Wright’s 1954, Black Power and in 1966 as the first words spoken by Black Panther Stokely Carmichael when he left his jail cell after imprisonment for registering voters. White and whiteness are older but still relatively recent. Theodore Allen writes that he “found no instance of the official use of the word ‘white’ as a token of social status before its appearance in a Virginia law passed in 1691, referring to ‘English or other white women.’”[5] The point here, as Eugene Puryear observes, “is that the ideology of white supremacy emerged not because of timeless antagonisms based on phenotype differences, but in a precise historical context related to the development of racial slavery.”[6] This is precisely the historical context that Afropessimism erases and precisely the phenotypes they use to define Blackness.

Afropessimism addresses an apparent radical omission in the primary theory that oppressed people have utilized for liberation: Marxism. Wilderson’s work, however, is based on a fundamental misreading of Marxism, such as his contention that in “Marxist discourse” (whatever that is) “racism is read off the base, as it were, as being derivative of political economy.”[7] To be sure, there’s an unfortunate history of some Marxist groupings asserting “class first” politics, but Marx and Engels, and Lenin, together with the history of the international communist movement, always asserted the primacy of race.  Marx’s theory of class was a theory of race and colonialism, as was his communist organizing. As a historical-materialist, Marx understood that the base and superstructure of society change over time and are context-dependent. Neither the base nor superstructure are unified, static, or ahistorical. The relations of production in the U.S. are neither unified nor even strictly economic in the sense that they’re structured and divided by hierarchies of race, nationality, gender, dis/ability, sexuality, and other divisions.In an 1894 letter, Engels clarifies yet again the base-superstructure model, what it entails, how it works, and exactly what it’s supposed to do. First, he says that “economic conditions… ultimately determines historical development. But race itself is an economic factor.”[8]

Marx not only supported anti-colonial uprisings in India and China but even said that they might ignite the revolution in Britain. “It may seem a very strange, and very paradoxical assertion,” Marx wrote about the 1850-53 Taiping Rebellion in China, “that the next uprising of the people of Europe, and their next movement for republican freedom and economy of government, may depend more probably on what is now passing in the Celestial Empire.”[9]

Marx fought ruthlessly against racism and national chauvinism, particularly as he experienced the deep-seated racism of English workers against the Irish. He “argued that an English workers' party, representing workers from an oppressor nation, had the duty to support an oppressed nation’s self-determination and independence” and that “English workers could never attain liberation as long as the Irish continued to be oppressed.”[10] He recognized that the fate of Black slaves, Black workers, and white workers were bound together when he wrote in Capital that “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the [B]lack it is branded.”[11] Marx even organized workers to support the abolitionist struggle by galvanizing them to oppose a British intervention in the U.S. Civil War on behalf of the slaveocracy, an intervention that, because the British had the largest Navy in the world, could have altered the war drastically.[12]

Perhaps the real problem is that Marx treats race as a dynamic and contingent social production rather than a fixed and abstract ontological category. Black people face particular forms of oppression in the U.S. and elsewhere, as do other oppressed and exploited peoples. These change over time and are in a dialectical relationship with the overal social totality. Iyko Day got it right by equating economic reductionism to Afro-pessimism, insofar as it “frames racial slavery as a base for a colonial superstructure” and “fails to take into account the dialectics of settler colonial capitalism.”[13]

Why the neoliberal university loves Afropessimism

The reason anti-Blackness critique is welcome in schools is because it is devoid of praxis and politics, or, to be more precise, because it celebrates its lack of politics. The impossibility of praxis and the rejection of organizing are fundamental tenets for two reasons. The first is that there is no answer to the question “what is to be done?” and the second is that the mass movements necessary for transformation are “from the jump, an anti-black formation,” as Wilderson told IMIXWHATILIKE.[14] Of course, the only thing to do is to condemn every attempt at fighting oppression and improving material conditions. For example, when a student group at one of our schools staged a protest when Condoleeza Rice came to speak, they were denounced as “anti-Black.” There was no political criteria for such a denouncement, no defense of Rice, and likely no knowledge of the reasons behind the protest. It didn’t matter that Rice was a key figure of the white supremacist imperialist power structure, or that she played a major role in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the torture of thousands of Arab and African people.

Examples of “anti-Blackness” that often come up in organizing are that non-Black people of color are to be met with suspicion when organizing on issues that sharply affect Black people. One such issue is immigration. In the struggle for immigrant rights, which is often overcoded as a “Latinx” issue, some Black activists and organizers point to the fact that 44% of those caged by ICE, for example, are Haitians. Instead of directing their ire towards the racist state that holds many Black immigrants in horrendous conditions, the focus then becomes the irrevocable anti-Blackness that exists in Latinx communities. Ideologies like Afro Pessimism have working class people of color (Black people included) fighting amongst each other, with the same framework as liberal identity politics. They both reduce solidarity to checking one’s privilege and fashioning oneself as the consummate ally of Black people and their liberation. So, instead of building a united front against the racist state, the lack of corporate/mainstream media focus on the fact that there are many Black immigrants, and immigration is a “Black issue” unnecessarily shifts attention to other workers who are subjected to the same “anti-Black” ideology of the ruling class and it’s media apparatuses. Instead of calling out the “Latinx community” for their “anti-Blackness” a revolutionary perspective frames the issue as not one stemming from any said community, but from the ruling class which oppresses the vast majority of immigrants in this country.

Capital in these instances are let off the hook. The problem is no longer that the ruling class owns the means of production and thus the means of ideological production that reinforce anti-working class ideologies such as racism. The problem is the “anti-Blackness”--and the often posited “inherent” anti-Blackness--of non-Black communities. It’s a structural feature of society, but apparently one that can’t be changed. As a result, there’s no need to do anything except critique.

No wonder, then, that Afropessimism is so welcome in the neoliberal university and the increasingly corporatized public school system in the U.S. It’s incredibly easy to call something anti-Black, to condemn anti-Blackness, and to play more-radical-than-thou. It’s more than easy, it’s what academia is about. Moreover, and this is related to the Rice protest mentioned earlier, when “Black faces” do appear in “high places,” they’re immunized from any possible critique from any group that isn’t Black (enough). It doesn’t matter if the head of a school, corporation, or any other entity has the same politics as the imperialist and racist power structure, because they’re black and so to critique or challenge them would be an act of anti-Blackness.

This last reason is why white people love Afropessimism so much. The vague calls to “follow Black people'' not only fulfill racist tropes that all Black people are the same (in, for example, their unruliness and “threat” to society) but moreover let white people off the hook for doing any real political investigation and work. The real response to “Follow Black people'' is: “Which Black people?” Should Derek follow his comrade Nino or John McWhorter? Should he go to the police protest organized by the local Black Lives Matter group or the one organized by the local Congress of Racial Equality? Should he get his racial politics from Barack Obama or Glen Ford? He certainly shouldn’t get his politics--or take his lessons in class struggle--from today’s Afropessimists.

None of this is to devalue Black leadership in the Black liberation movement, to be clear. Black people have and will lead the Black struggle and the broader class struggle. Nor is it to claim that random white people should show up to a Black Lives Matter protest and grab the microphone. Then again, how much of a problem is that really? Shouldn’t we forget the myth that we can learn all the proper rules before we struggle and instead just go out and struggle? And as we struggle, be conscientious of our actions and how they could be perceived; know that we’ll make mistakes and own up to them; and most importantly build with those whom this racist society has segregated us from so we can unite against a common enemy. Black people will lead the Black struggle and the class struggle. So too will Asian Americans, Indigenous people, and Latino/a/xs. So too will the child of an African immigrant and a Filipino domestic worker. So too will some white people. The key ingredients are unity, political clarity, and strategic proficiency.

Such a recipe entails a necessary risk in that, first, politics are divisive and draw lines between friends and enemies and that, second, achieving unity and strategic proficiency takes hard work without any guarantees of success. Educators who are or want to be radical, however, have no choice but to accept this risk. We need to be rooted in movements and resist incorporation into neoliberal structures, refusing to allow them to guide our political decisions. Only if we have hope and faith in the power of the masses to change the world does it make sense to struggle at all. We choose to struggle! And we hope our students do too.

Nino Brown is a public school educator and labor activist in Boston. He is also an organizer with the ANSWER coalition, the Jericho Movement and the Boston Liberation Center. He's a member of the Liberation School Collective and is an editor of the forthcoming book on Marxist pedagogy, Revolutionary Education: Theory and Practice for Socialist Organizers (2021).

Derek R. Ford is assistant professor of education studies at DePauw University, where he teaches and researches at the nexus of pedagogy and political movements. He’s written six books, the latest of which is Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy (2021). He’s also the lead editor of Liberation School’s “Reading Capital with Comrades ” podcast series.

Notes

[1] Charisse Burden-Stelly. “Black studies in the westernized university,” in Unsettling eurocentrism in the westernized university, ed. J. Cupples and R. Grosfoguel, pp. 73-86 (New York: Routledge, 2019), 73.

[2] Ibid., 74.

[3] Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2020), 217, 216.

[4] Greg Thomas, “Afro-Blue Notes: The Death of Afro-pessimism (2.0)? Theory & Event 21, no. 1 (2018): 291.

[5] Theodor Allen, The Invention of the White Race (vol. 2): The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (New York: Verso, 1997), 161-62.

[6] Eugene Puryear, “The U.S. State and the U.S. Revolution,” Liberation School, November 01, 2018. Available at: https://liberationschool.org/the-u-s-state-and-the-u-s-revolution/.

[7] Frank WIlderson III. “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (2003): 225.

[8] Friedrich Engels, “Engels to W. Borgius in Breslau.” In Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence (New York: Progress Publishers, 1894/1965), 441

[9] Karl Marx, “Revolution in China and Europe,” in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected works (vol. 12), 93-100 (London: Lawrence & Wisehart, 1979), 93.

[10] Gloria La Riva, “Lenin and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” in Storming the Gates: How the Russian Revolution Changed the World, ed. J. Cutter (pp. 75-83) (San Francisco: Liberation Media, 2017), 76, 77.

[11] Karl Marx, Capital: A critique of political economy (vol. 1): The process of capitalist production, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 284.

[12] ​​See Gerald Runkle, “Karl Marx and the American Civil War,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 6, no. 2 (1964): 117-141.

[13] Iyko Day, “Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and settler colonial critique,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 2 (2015): 112.

[14] Frank B. WIlderson III, “‘We’re Trying to Destroy the World’: Anti-Blackness and Police Violence After Ferguson,” in Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance: Danger, Im/mobility and Politics, ed. M. Gržinić and A. Stojnić (New York: Palgrave, 2018), 55.

Violence or Values? The Essence of Revolution

By Irik Robinson

Republished from Red Voice.

“When we look at a thing, we must examine its essence and treat its appearance merely as an usher at the threshold, and once we cross the threshold, we must grasp the essence of the thing; this is the only reliable and scientific method of analysis.”

- Mao Zedong

When most people think of the word "revolution," they think, almost instinctively and automatically, of violence. And of course, revolution is most definitely and very seriously a situation that necessitates and requires violence.

Malcolm taught us this:

“A revolution is bloody. Revolution is hostile. Revolution knows no compromise. Revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way. And you, sitting around here like a knot on the wall, saying, 'I’m going to love these folks no matter how much they hate me.' No, you need a revolution.”

Thus to associate violence with revolution isn’t necessarily or categorically wrong or incorrect. It is, however, a critical error, and a grave misrepresentation of the essence of revolution, if it is only viewed and understood strictly within a context of violence. Revolution must be waged not because of this incredible urge we seem to have for violence. It is waged because of the strong desire we have to live in a better, freer, more humane society. A society, if we can imagine, that is completely free of violence.

The capitalist press and other bourgeois institutions in America, however, will attempt to convince us that revolution is evil and bad and impractical, because it is too “violent.” They will attempt to convince us that “looting” and “rioting” and other militant forms of protests are too violent. Let’s get this straight though. As the oppressed, we will always be condemned by our oppressors for our acts of resistance. Capitalists are not opposed to using violence. They just want to be the only ones legitimized for using it. They wouldn’t have capitalism or America without violence.

It is not the oppressed who are “violent.” It is the very system we are attempting to change that is so. It is not violence or hate that we are motivated by. To the contrary, as Che Guevara once said:

“Let me tell you something at the risk of sounding ridiculous. A true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. Love of humanity. Love of justice, and truth. It is impossible to conceive of an authentic revolutionary without this quality.”

What revolutionaries desire through revolution is not this great opportunity for violence, but the greater opportunity of being able to change this society. The capitalist system is inherently vile and sick, it has no redeeming qualities that are worth preserving. In fact, it is a system that’s decaying, that's dying. As the great Trinidadian historian C.L.R James has written, “Mankind has obviously reached the end of something, the crisis is absolute. Bourgeois civilization is falling apart.”

Socialist revolution requires the overthrow of capitalism. It requires the destruction of neocolonialism and the freeing up of Indigenous lands. It requires a protracted struggle for control over the means of production and other productive forces. It requires a radical redistribution of resources. It means no more labor exploitation or class hierarchies. It means a completely new society. It means a greater sense of freedom and humanity.

Capitalism, like socialism, is not merely an economic system, isolated or separated from other societal forces that are connected to the formulation and restructuring of a given society. The economic system in a given society becomes the base on which the rest of the society is built or structured upon. Capitalism is an ideology, which means it comes with a set of core beliefs, particular ideas, and patterns of behavior, etc.

The former president of the Democratic Republic of Guinea, Sekou Toure, once said that "the material basis of social life is the mode of production." In other words, the economic system of a society shapes or determines the social mores, values and ideas of a given society. So the question must be asked, What is so wrong with the values and principles of the capitalist system that oppressed groups throughout the world are organizing against it?

Martin Luther King, Jr., began raising some serious questions about the capitalistic structure in a speech he delivered to The Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967:

“And one day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.’ When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society…”

In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech that he delivered earlier that same year, Dr. King said:

“...[W]e as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing‐oriented” society to a “person‐oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered…True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice, which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth…A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Dr. King began seeing quite vividly that in capitalist societies, what truly exists within people is a fundamental and profound sense of human emptiness and social shallowness. True and authentic human values, morals and principles are sacrificed at the altar of monopoly capital; they are commodified and vulgarized. Human principles such as love, happiness, justice, truth and freedom, are casually reduced to absolutely nothing, when it cannot benefit or advance another in the form of capital or some kind of material.

Capitalism teaches us how to be self-centered egotistical individuals, and thereby we learn how to treat one another very crudely and impersonally. We only seem to respect, value and appreciate human relationships insofar as they can help advance our own personal interests and/or ambitions. People in capitalistic societies learn how to lie without blinking an eye; learn how to sleep peacefully, no matter how brutally they have abused another human being  be that physically, emotionally, or psychologically. Yet these are the values and core principles of the capitalist system. Cut-throat competition, individualism, egotism, greed, lying, cheating, stealing, indifference to the suffering of others, hedonism, etc.

People living in capitalist societies like to delude themselves into believing that they can be human while following the moral and cultural dictates of an anti-human society. You can’t do it. “The man who thinks and acts exclusively for himself is a social parasite,” said Sekou Toure. “Capitalist society doesn't lie some of the time, it lies all of the time,” said Kwame Ture. And we know that whenever people are lied to for so long the truth sounds like a lie and a lie sounds like the truth.

However, the truth is that the entire system of global capitalism is toxic. This is not something that we can pray away or positively think away, deny, or act as if it doesn't exist. Instead we must confront it and eventually uproot it. We must out of a sense of love, duty, and responsibility become revolutionaries. Because we are desperately in need of generosity, honesty, transparency, and authenticity in this horrid anti-human capitalistic society. Thus we are speaking about a class struggle. We are struggling not only for the basic control of the means of production but over proper and correct ideas. Again, “[e]very ethic or moral struggle is a class struggle,” said Sekou Toure.

We must continue to struggle for socialism because it’s core principles of living and being and structuring a society are just and humane. In Socialism and Man in Cuba, Che Guevara addressed the moral aspect of organizing for socialist revolution when he wrote,

“That is why it is very important to choose the right instrument for mobilizing the masses. Basically, this instrument must be moral in character, without neglecting, however, a correct use of the material incentive — especially of a social character.”

Guevara continues,

“As I have already said, in moments of great peril it is easy to muster a powerful response with moral incentives. Retaining their effectiveness, however, requires the development of a consciousness in which there is a new scale of values. Society as a whole must be converted into a gigantic school.”

And it is we, the oppressed, who must turn this world into gigantic schools of liberation. America is a decadent society, completely deprived of any substantive human values or principles which can lead to proper human development and growth. The capitalist system is not designed to produce healthy and functional and intelligent human beings; only mindless zombies and heartless robots who go aimlessly through life, searching desperately for a happiness they will never know, for there is no such thing as happiness in this capitalistic wilderness. It can only be cultivated through the process of revolution:

“Black, brown and white are victims together. At the end of this massive collective struggle, we will uncover our new man…He will be better equipped to wage the real struggle, the permanent struggle after the revolution – the one for new relationships between men.” George Jackson

50 years since Attica Rebellion: Reflections on the Prisoners’ Paris Commune

By Sharon Black

Republished from Struggle La Lucha.

Including a special interview with Tom Soto, Prisoners Solidarity Committee observer. 

On Sept. 9, 1971, approximately 1,500 prisoners in Cell Block D seized the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York, after submitting a 27-point manifesto to the prison administration in an attempt to address the torturous conditions inside the prison.

At the time of the uprising, 2,300 prisoners were sandwiched into a prison built for barely 1,600 people. White supremacy behind the walls was evident everywhere, from how prisoners were housed to brutal work assignments. 

Prisoners were allowed one shower per week and one roll of toilet paper a month. They labored for five hours a day and were paid between 20 cents and $1 for the entire day. For 14 to 16 hours, they were locked in tiny 6-foot by 9-foot cells.

A revolutionary mood

It is critical to understand the broader historical context in which this rebellion took place. How could people who were so beaten down, whose lives hung in the balance at the whim of a guard, take such heroic action?

Outside of the jails and also inside many prisons, a battle was raging for the national liberation of Black, Puerto Rican, Indigenous and Chicanx people. A new revolutionary mood was sweeping the country to end all kinds of oppression. 

Millions of people were protesting the Vietnam War. The women’s liberation movement was beginning to blossom. The Stonewall Rebellion had sparked a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and Two Spirit (LGBTQ2S) liberation movement. Just two years later, the occupation of Wounded Knee by the American Indian Movement (AIM) took place. 

The McKay Commission (New York State Special Commission on Attica) later commented: “With the exception of Indian massacres in the late 19th century, the State Police assault which ended the four-day prison uprising was the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War.” 

Organizing behind the walls

Serious organizing was going on inside Attica prior to the rebellion. Many of the groups outside the prison were reflected inside, including the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, the Nation of Islam and the Five Percenters. Many had study groups. The Attica Liberation Faction developed in this period.    

In July 1971, the Attica Liberation Faction presented a list of 27 demands to Commissioner of Corrections Russell Oswald and Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. This list of demands was based on the Folsom Prisoners’ Manifesto crafted by Chicanx prisoner Martin Sousa in support of a November 1970 prisoner strike in California. (For more background, see Project NIA.)

Then, on Aug. 21, 1971, Black Panther leader George Jackson was gunned down by racist guards in California’s San Quentin prison. Prisoners all across the country, including several hundred in Attica, went on hunger strikes. The assassination of George Jackson became the glue that allowed the Attica prisoners to unite across religions, nationalities and political factions.

The prisoners’ Paris Commune

On Sept. 9, Attica prisoners seized the facility. They took corrections officers hostage to ensure that their protest would be heard, since they had received no response to their manifesto from the corrections commissioner or governor.

While the events that took place on Sept. 9 were spontaneous and began as a clash between guards and prisoners, the level of organizing and what became a full-scale uprising were the result of the revolutionary leadership and consciousness that had grown during this period.

What’s remarkable is the high degree of organization and discipline of the thousands of prisoners who took part. They elected a central committee, which rotated chairpeople; they organized a 33-person observers’ committee, which included not only attorney William Kunstler, Black Panther Bobby Seale, New York State Assemblymember Arthur O. Eve, and representatives of the Young Lords, but also Tom Soto of the Prisoners Solidarity Committee. 

Demands were continually being developed. A major one was amnesty for all prisoners.

Countless photos show the rows of tents, preparatory ditches and many of the other measures the prisoners organized. They voted on demands and rationed food and water for survival. During the entire occupation, the 40 hostages were treated humanely.  

The concrete demands that developed during the insurrection included all aspects of survival in the prison, including health, food, ending solitary confinement, the right to visitation and a list of labor rights, including the right to a union and an end to exploitation.

The first time the working class took power into its own hands was the insurrection known as the Paris Commune of 1871. The communards canceled rents, recognized women’s rights, abolished child labor, took over workplaces and set up their own form of government. The commune served as a historical example to many revolutionary socialists of the potential for a workers’ state. It was ultimately put down in blood, but the lessons remain.

A century later, on Sept. 13, 1971, Gov. Rockefeller ordered the storming of Attica prison. With helicopters flying overhead, close to 1,000 state troopers, national guard troops and prison guards fired into the yard, killing 39 people and wounding 85 in what can only be described as a massacre. This took place in just 15 minutes.

Many of those wounded received no medical care. The prisoners had no guns or bullets to defend themselves.

The press screamed that the 10 captive guards who died had their throats slit. But autopsies showed that all 10 had been shot to death by Rockefeller’s storm troopers. 

What happened in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter is too painful to fully describe.  Prisoners were stripped naked, beaten, made to run through gauntlets of guards and brutally tortured. Guards stormed into the yard chanting “white power.”

A battle cry for liberation 

Nevertheless, the Attica uprising and the massacre stirred prisoners everywhere. It’s estimated that 200,000 prisoners protested and held strikes in its aftermath. The number of prison rebellions doubled. 

It continues to serve as a beacon today for those fighting against racism and mass incarceration and for workers’ rights everywhere.

Paulo Freire’s Centennial: Political Pedagogy for Revolutionary Organizations

By Derek Ford

Republished from Liberation School.

All revolutionary processes are educational. From organizing meetings and study groups to writing protest speeches and propaganda before the revolutionary moment to creating new revolutionary educational and cultural institutions and training teachers and specialists after the seizure of power, revolution is educational through and through. Yet exactly what kind of educational operations does revolution entail, and how can we understand and practice them?

It is precisely these questions that Paulo Freire addressed in his classic work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

One hundred years after his birth in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, Freire’s name is widely recognized and, relatively speaking, so too is his canonical text. Yet the book is referenced or discussed more than it is deeply engaged. This is particularly evident when Freire’s work is severed from its revolutionary Marxist orientation [1].

While it’s often taken as an abstract guide-book for how to teach, Pedagogy of the Oppressed is really a theoretical reflection on his own experiences teaching peasants how to read and write, a theory he extends to revolutionary movements, leadership, and organization. After spending 70 days in prison for “treachery” [teaching poor peasants to read and write], he was exiled from Brazil following the military junta in 1964. He eventually settled in Chile, which is where he wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The book has been targeted by the right wing in the U.S. (it is currently banned from public schools in Arizona). It addresses the educational components of revolutionary movements and, as such, it is littered with references to Marx, Lenin, Fanon, and others. Specifically, the book is concerned with how the revolutionary leadership pushes the struggle forward, or how it teaches and learns from the masses in struggle.

The pedagogies of oppression and liberation

The pedagogy of the oppressed has two stages. During the first stage, “the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through praxis commit themselves to its transformation.” During the second stage, which is after the world of oppression has been transformed, “this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed and becomes a pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation” [2].

The first stage addresses how the oppressed view and relate to the world. It begins by acknowledging that the oppressed possess both an oppressed consciousness and an oppressor consciousness. The oppressor consciousness is the enemy that needs to be liquidated: “The oppressor consciousness tends to transform everything surrounding it into an object of its domination. The earth, property, production, the creations of people, people themselves, time—everything is reduced to the status of objects at its disposal” [3].

This is what capitalism does: it takes everything and makes it into private property, including our ability to labor. This has a profound impact on the world, even instilling the oppressor consciousness in the oppressed. Thus, we have to distinguish an oppressor consciousness from the oppressed person, and we have to transform that consciousness.

The way that we engage in that transformation is absolutely crucial, and this is where the question of pedagogy comes into play. Freire calls the traditional form of pedagogy “banking pedagogy.” In banking pedagogy, the teacher is the one who possesses knowledge and the students are empty containers in which the teacher must deposit knowledge. The more the teacher fills the receptacle, the better teacher she is. The content remains abstract to the student, disconnected from the world, and external to the student’s life. Banking pedagogy—which is what most of us in the U.S. experience—assumes that the oppressed are ignorant and naïve. Further, it treats the oppressed as objects in the same way that capitalism does.

For Freire, education must be rooted in the daily lives and experiences of students, who are subjects rather than objects. The correct educational method for revolutionaries is dialogue, which means something very specific. To truly engage in dialogue means becoming partners with the people. In this situation, “the teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow” [4]. This process is referred to as conscientização, or coming-to-critical-consciousness.

A decisive element to the location and direction of conscientização is the pedagogical relationship. This relates to Freire’s critique of the banking model of education and to his reconception of the teacher-student relationship. The dialogic model is a relationship between teacher and student, one which is more—but, and this is absolutely crucial, not completely—horizontal. In this schema, “people teach each other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in banking education are “owned” by the teacher [5]. The teacher does not relinquish authority or power, as if that was even possible. Instead, the teacher takes responsibility for producing new critical knowledge of reality with the student.

While the pedagogical relationship and process are important parts of Freire’s thought, they have tended to be isolated from Freire’s ideological commitments and have come to stand in for Freire’s entire work. As a graduate student in a fairly critical school of education, I was only assigned the first two chapters of the book, and I’m convinced this is common practice. These chapters are rich; they’re where he denounces banking pedagogy and formulates dialogical pedagogy in response. When we stop here, however, we don’t discover the reason why he bothered writing the book in the first place.

By selectively reading the book, Freire’s dialogic pedagogy is substituted wholesale for his broader conceptual and political work, his vocabularies and theories that generated new understandings of education and revolution. There is nothing inherent in dialogue or dialogic pedagogy that necessarily leads to progressive, critical understandings. For this to happen the content must be placed in a particular context by a teacher. Peter McLaren, one of the few U.S. educational theorists to insist on Freire’s revolutionary commitments (and a comrade of Freire’s), goes so far as to say that “political choices and ideological paths chosen by teachers are the fundamental stuff of Freirean pedagogy” [6]. We can’t divorce the methodology from the ideology, the theory from the method, or the critical from the pedagogy in Freire’s work.

The dangerous fourth chapter

Freire begins the last chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed with “Lenin’s famous statement: ‘Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement,’” which Freire rewords to insist that revolutions are achieved neither by verbalism nor by activism “but rather with praxis, that is, with reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed” [7]. It would be just as wrong to claim that reflecting on and helping name oppression is enough for revolution as to claim that activism is enough for revolution. The task of revolutionaries is to engage with our class and our people in true, authentic dialogue, reflection, and action. If we have dialogue and reflection without action, then we are little more than armchair revolutionaries. On the other hand, if we have only action without dialogue and reflection, we have mere activism.

Reflection and action are not divisions of labor between revolutionary leaders and the people, whereby the leaders think and direct and the people are only able to act on their orders. “Revolutionary leaders,” he writes, “do bear the responsibility for coordination and, at times, direction—but leaders who deny praxis to the oppressed thereby invalidate their own praxis” [8]. People and revolutionary leaders act together, building and acting in unity before, during, and after the revolution.

The prerequisite for such leadership is the rejection of the “myth of the ignorance of the people” [9]. Freire acknowledges that revolutionary leaders, “due to their revolutionary consciousness,” have “a level of revolutionary knowledge different from the level of empirical knowledge held by the people” [10].

The act of dialogue unites lived experience with revolutionary theory so that people understand what causes their lived experience to be as it is. This is a restatement of Lenin’s conviction that spontaneous knowledge of exploitation and oppression must be transformed through the Party into revolutionary consciousness of the relationship of our experience to the relationship of broader social, economic, and political forces at differing scales: within the factory, the city, the state, and the world.

This is a Marxist philosophy of education in that it rests on the presumption of competence. We can see it, for example, when Engels writes that he and Marx “cannot co-operate with men who say openly that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves, and must first be emancipated from above by philanthropic members of the upper and lower middle classes” [11]. We can also see it in What is to be Done? as Lenin argues against economist Marxists, who hold that the working class develops its own revolutionary consciousness spontaneously as a result of daily struggles with the bosses. Lenin argued that spontaneity was only consciousness “in an embryonic form,” and that something more was needed. Spontaneity is necessary but is ultimately limited to “what is ‘at the present time’” [12]. In other words, spontaneity by itself isn’t able to look beyond isolated daily struggles and forward to a new society. Lenin called the spontaneously generated mindset “trade union consciousness.”

Lenin believed that workers were capable of more than trade union consciousness. He actually derided those who insisted on appealing to the “average worker:” “You gentlemen, who are so much concerned about the ‘average worker,’ as a matter of fact, rather insult the workers by your desire to talk down to them when discussing labor politics and labor organization” (p. 153). He wrote that organizers had actually held workers “back by our silly speeches about what ‘can be understood’ by the masses of the workers” [13]. The economist organizers treated workers as objects rather than subjects. They didn’t believe in the people or their potential.

Freire actually calls on Lenin when he insists revolutionary leadership is open and trusting of the people. “As Lenin pointed out,” he writes, “the more a revolution requires theory, the more its leaders must be with the people in order to stand against the power of oppression” [14]. This isn’t a naïve acquiesce but a belief in the power of the masses to become not only agents of revolutionary movements but creators of revolutionary theory through the Party. As Lenin also observed, that the Party creates a particular group of theoreticians: In the Party “all distinctions as between workers and intellectuals… must be obliterated” [15].

There is no abstract celebration of “horizontalism” within such a pedagogy. The form of the revolution and its leadership isn’t accorded abstractly; it can be more horizontal or more vertical and triangular, depending on the circumstances. Here, Freire turns to Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution to argue that their historical conditions compelled them to revolt without building widely with the people. Yet the leadership pursued this task immediately after taking power through organization, specifically the party. Tyson Lewis is one of the few to observe that “Freire himself clearly saw his pedagogy as a tool to be used within revolutionary organization to mediate the various relationships between the oppressed and the leaders of resistance” [16]. This is why Freire looked so favorably upon Amílcar Cabral [17].

Uniting politics and pedagogy for revolution

Revolutionary organizers, therefore, are defined not just by the revolutionary ideals they hold or actions they take, but by their humility, patience, and willingness to engage with all exploited and oppressed people. It is not possible for us to “implant” the conviction to fight and struggle in others. Coming-to-critical-consciousness is a delicate and contingent process that can’t be scripted in advance. Still, there are a few general components to it.

First, we have to truly get to know our people, their problems, and their aspirations. This means that we have to actually learn from people, acknowledging that, even if this is their first demonstration, or even if they voted for a democrat in the last election, they actually have something to teach us. The more experiences we learn from the people the richer our theories are and the more connection they can have to the daily realities of workers and oppressed people today. Our class is bursting with creative and intellectual powers that capitalist society doesn’t allow us to express or develop. The revolutionary party is stronger the more it cultivates these powers.

Second, we have to provide opportunities for others to understand their problems in a deeper and wider context, and to push their aspirations forward. Freire gives a concrete and relatable example of this:

“…if at a given historical moment the basic aspiration of the people goes no further than a demand for salary increases, the leaders can commit one of two errors. They can limit their action to stimulating this one demand or they can overrule this popular aspiration and substitute something more far-reaching—but something which has not yet come to the forefront of the people’s attention… The solution lies in synthesis: the leaders must on the one hand identify with the people’s demand for higher salaries, while on the other they must pose the meaning of that very demand as a problem. By doing this, the leaders pose as a problem a real, concrete, historical situation of which the salary demand is one dimension. It will thereby become clear that salary demands alone cannot comprise a definitive solution” [18].

Through this process, both the people and the revolutionary leadership act together and collectively name the world. Genuine knowledge is produced, and authentic action is taken, and real conviction for the struggle is strengthened.

Freire’s popularity presents an opening to draw many into the struggle and, in particular, the communist struggle. By re-establishing the link between his pedagogy and politics, we can draw those who admire his work into the movement. At the same time, we can better understand, adapt, and practice his pedagogical principles in our day-to-day organizing. “Only in the encounter of the people with the revolutionary leaders,” Freire writes in the book’s last sentence, “can this [revolutionary] theory be built” [19].

References

[1] This process started with the advent of U.S. “critical pedagogy” in the early 1980s, and Freire’s later work might have played a role in it as well. See Malott, Curry S. (2015).History and education: Engaging the global class war(New York: Peter Lang), 63.
[2] Freire, Paulo. (1970/2011).Pedagogy of the oppressed(New York: Continuum), 54.
[3] Ibid., 58.
[4] Ibid., 80.
[5] Ibid.
[6] McLaren, Peter. (2015).Life in schools: An introduction to critical pedagogy in the foundations of education, 6thed. (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers), 241.
[7] Freire,Pedagogy of the oppressed, 125-126.
[8] Ibid., 126.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid., 134.
[11] Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. (1991). “Marx and Engels to August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Wilhelm Bracke and others (circular letter),” trans. P. Ross & B. Ross, inMarx and Engels collected works (vol. 45), ed. S. Gerasimenko, Y.Kalinina, and A. Vladimirova (New York: International Publishers), 408, emphasis added.
[12] Lenin, V.I. (1902/1987). “What is to be done?” inEssential works of Lenin, ed. H.M. Christman (New York: Dover Publications), 67.
[13] Ibid., 156.
[14] Freire,Pedagogy of the oppressed, 138.
[15] Lenin, “What is to be done?”, 137.
[16] Lewis, Tyson E. (2012). “Mapping the constellation of educational Marxism(s),”Educational Philosophy and Theory44, no. S1: 98-114.
[17] Malott, Curry. (2021). Amílcar Cabral: Liberator, theorist, and educator,”Liberation School, 20 January. Availablehere.
[18] Freire,Pedagogy of the oppressed, 183.
[19] Ibid.

Assata Shakur: The making of a revolutionary woman

By Rachel Domond

Republished from Liberation School.

In commemorating Black August, we commemorate the struggle of those who have fought before us and faced violent repercussions from the state. We uplift the revolutionary history of the Black working class and its fundamental position in forging and leading the struggle for liberation for all. And we recommit ourselves to the struggle for Black Liberation and for the freedom of all political prisoners.

When I think of political prisoners, and when I think of those who have relentlessly committed themselves to Black Liberation, I always think of Assata Shakur.

From Assata’s story, we are able to learn what it means to be motivated by a deep love for the people and the struggle for freedom—and what it means to embody a determined and unbreakable spirit in the face of crackdowns and government repression designed to stifle and destroy the movement. Account after account from Assata’s comrades and fellow revolutionaries describe Assata as a light, a positive spirit who remained disciplined and committed to the struggle despite incredible hardships.

‘I wanted a name that had something to do with struggle’

Born JoAnne Byron, and married as JoAnne Chesimard, Assata Shakur changed her name in order to fully identify with the revolutionary struggles of her African heritage, and to honor her comrade Zayd Malik Shakur, who was murdered by state forces in 1971. She writes in her autobiography:

“I decided on Assata Olugbala Shakur. Assata means ‘She who struggles,’ Olugbala means ‘Love for the people,’ and i took the name Shakur out of respect for Zayd and Zayd’s family. Shakur means “the thankful” [1].

Just as she was not born Assata, Shakur was not born a revolutionary. There is much to learn from her political development, and from the making of Assata into a revolutionary.

Born in Queens, NY, Assata Shakur was raised by her school teacher mother, her grandparents, and her aunt Evelyn A. Williams, a civil rights worker. From an early age, Assata’s family struggled financially, forcing her to run away frequently, often staying with strangers and working for short periods of time. After earning her GED, Assata went on to community college, and later The City College of New York, where she began her involvement in political activism. She participated in sit-ins, civil rights protests, and activism against the Vietnam War, first getting arrested with a hundred others after chaining herself to a building in protest of a lack of Black faculty and Black studies programs at the age of 20.

Coming of age in the 1960s and 70s, conditions were ripe with struggle on all fronts—from the Stonewall Rebellion to the Women’s Rights Movement to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements—conditions to politicize. After college, Assata moved to Oakland, CA, where she joined the Black Panther Party, participating in defense programs for the Black community. Some years later, she returned to NYC to lead the BPP in Harlem, coordinating programs like the famous Free Breakfast for Children program.

Assata studied the movements of oppressed and colonized people across the globe, and understood the common thread, as she elaborates on in her autobiography: that to rid the world of exploitation meant we must rid the world of capitalism. As she wrote about her radicalization:

“There was not a single liberation movement in Africa that was not fighting for socialism. In fact, there was not a single liberation movement in the whole world that was fighting for capitalism. The whole thing boiled down to a simple equation: anything that has any kind of value is made, mined, grown, produced, and processed by working people. So why shouldn’t working people collectively own that wealth? Why shouldn’t working people own and control their own resources? Capitalism meant that rich businessmen owned the wealth, while socialism meant that the people who made the wealth owned it” [2].

Assata knew that the internalized narrative that we, as oppressed peoples, and particularly Black people, just had to “make it” or “climb the ladder” could not and cannot be the basis of our total liberation as a people, because “anytime you’re talking about a ladder, you’re talking about a top and a bottom, an upper class and a lower class, a rich class and a poor class,” and “as long as you’ve got a system with a top and a bottom, Black people are always going to wind up at the bottom” [3].

Assata knew we cannot elect or reform our way to freedom. She teaches us that in order to win our freedom, we would need to fight in the same way people across the globe have fought throughout history—through a socialist revolution. A revolution in which the power is held in the hands of the majority, the workers who create the wealth of society, in order to create a world in which the needs and well-being of the people are planned for and prioritized.

Assata Shakur: Guilty of fighting for freedom

COINTELPRO, the government counterintelligence program of the 60s and beyond, was created with the intention to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize” Black nationalist and Black liberation organizations and their leaders [4]. It is now absolutely clear from FBI documents that since at least 1971, the FBI, in cooperation with the state and local law enforcement, conducted a campaign to specifically criminalize, defame, harass and intimidate Assata Shakur. The U.S. government saw Assata’s dedication to the cause and leadership within the Black sovereignty movement as a threat to the internal security of the United States.

In 1971, Assata and her two comrades Sundiata Acoli and Zayd Shakur were pulled over by state troopers for a faulty tail light. The state troopers quickly escalated the situation, likely because they knew exactly who they were pulling over, drawing their guns and pointing. With her hands up, Assata was shot in the stomach. A shootout ensued, and the night ended with Assata’s comrade Zayd Shakur and one of the state troopers dead.

While forensic evidence backed up her account, Assata Shakur was sentenced to life plus 33 years in prison for the murder of a police officer, a crime she didn’t commit. Her trial and conviction were a result of the government conspiracy to destroy Black freedom fighters and the movement for liberation from capitalism. Along with her comrade Sundiata Acoli, Assata was thrown into prison—a men’s prison—where she faced, according to her attorney, the worst conditions that a woman prisoner had ever faced in the history of New Jersey. To this day, Acoli remains a political prisoner. The next time he’s eligible for parole he’ll be 94 years old.

Assata’s revolutionary spirit was not broken. She ultimately escaped from prison, and today lives in exile under the protection of socialist Cuba. The government crackdown on Assata Shakur and others who struggle for liberation makes clear one of the hardest lessons necessary for revolutionaries to learn: the revolutionary struggle must be scientific, rather than emotional. This does not mean decisions can’t be influenced by love or anger; Assata and others were guided by a deep love for the people. Rather, our struggle must be based on the objective conditions, rooted in analysis of the historical and contemporary contexts.

Assata taught me, Assata taught we

Assata learned that no one has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to their oppressor; she learned that our oppressors are never going to give us the education needed to overthrow them. She learned that socialism isn’t just a white man’s concoction, because she studied the works of African revolutionaries and the goals of African liberation movements, as well as those of other colonized places. She learned that socialism was not an evil ideal designed to strip us of our freedoms, as we are told; because Assata knew that under capitalism, we don’t have any freedoms but to starve, to be homeless, or to be thrown in jail for being poor. Assata teaches us all that socialism can and will be achieved when the oppressed peoples of the world join together in struggle for a future free of exploitation.

This Black August, we are challenged to honor, learn from and continue the work of those who have struggled before us. In order to win, as Assata taught us, we must understand the role of discipline, the role of organization, and the need to stay in the streets to demand and fight for the society we want to see. As Assata herself said

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains” [5].

References

[1] Shakur, Assata. (1987/2001).Assata: An autobiography(New York: Lawrence & Hill), 186.
[2] Ibid., 190. For other related excerpts in her autobiography curated by the blogInvent the Future, see Liberation Staff. (2016). Assata Shakur on capitalism, socialism and anti-communism,Liberation News,16 January. Availablehere.
[3] Shakur,Assata, 190.
[4] Flint, Taylor G. (2013). How the FBI conspired to destroy the Black Panther Party,In These Times, 04 December. Availablehere.
[5] Shakur,Assata, 52.

The Unbearable Emptiness of Voting

By Roger Williams

Election season makes me feel like the kid who doesn’t have a stuffed animal on “bring your teddy bear to school” day. Everyone else has a favorite who they can tell good stories about and cuddle with, but I don’t so I feel left out. But then I remember that there are good reasons to resist getting pulled down by the undertow of elections.

Like cute stuffed animals, politicians make people feel good while having a marginal effect on positive social change. The main differences between stuffed animals and politicians are that 1) stuffed animals are actually cuddly, and 2) people don’t invest vast amounts of political hope and agency in stuffed animals. I recognize that arguing against what many people hold dear makes me kind of a grump, but I at least aspire to be one who is not stuck in idle criticism but is proposing alternative ideas. The particular variety of grumpiness that I espouse is one grounded in grassroots social movements that focus on direct action independent of party politics.

The prickly issue of politicians relates fundamentally to questions of the leftist orientation to the state. The cheery reformer smiles big and promises to make the system work for you. The grouchy revolutionary rolls their eyes and gets back to trying to transform the system from the ground up. The recent prominence of social democratic politicians on the left, like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has provided a big platform for the cheery reformers to make their case to the public. They speak of universal healthcare, free college, and many other nice things.

What of the curmudgeons? In rejecting electoralism do they abhor healthcare and cherish student debt? Do they ignore the plight of the masses by focusing only on long-term goals at the expense of the need for immediate material reforms? Are the grouches ruining socialism? As a card-carrying grouch myself, let me soothe your fears and dispel some mistaken notions about political crankiness.

First, grouches like free and universal health care as much as starry-eyed reformers. It’s just that the grumps think that running election campaigns are a much less effective strategy to secure positive reforms. The grouches drastically de-center voting and object to giving time or money to political candidates and instead focus on building grassroots organization to be able to take mass disruptive actions like work stoppages and civil disobedience to win demands. Second, while less the focus of this article, building grassroots social movements is the only way to increase raw working class power that makes more complete social transformation possible in the long-term.

Granted, the state is an enigmatic beast, and politicians are strange and unwitting creatures. The level of discourse in movement spaces about the merits of electoral strategy often regrettably devolves into sparring aphorisms such as “all politicians are sellouts”, “we can’t ignore political power”, “The Democratic Party is the graveyard of social movements”, “Do you want Trump to win?”

This essay attempts to spell out the revolutionary grump’s critique of electoralism by showing how the institutions of voting, election campaigns, and politicians make citizens into political bystanders and undermine their ability to effectively implement popular reforms. These critiques are distinct from but complimentary to the much more widespread objections of how electoral politics under capitalism are dominated by the wealthy through corporate lobbying and shady campaign funding. I contend here that such movements comprise the true architecture of positive social change that lies behind the shimmering facade of electoralism.

Representative democracy? Harumph

The ideal of representative democracy is that elected officials govern in the interests of the population or at least in the interests of their constituents and voters. In practice, there is an immense gap found between polls of public opinion and existing policy. The reformers think the state can be fixed and made to embody the public interest, while the revolutionaries are unconvinced. Before getting to the heart of the critique of electoralism, it’s worth briefly reviewing the evidence that our government does not embody the democratic rule of the people.

In a recent paper, political scientists Miles Gilens and Benjamin I. Page perform a large-scale quantitative analysis of public opinion data compared to legislative policy and conclude “that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens.. have little or no independent influence.”

To take just one important example, why is the US the only wealthy industrialized country in the world that doesn’t offer universal healthcare? From 2008-10, the only time when major healthcare reform seriously made it on the table in over 50 years, 77% of Americans polled said that it was the government’s responsibility that everyone’s basic healthcare needs be met, 73% supported a public option for the government to compete with private insurance plans, and 60-70% across a series of polls showed support for single-payer healthcare.

The resulting Affordable Care Act produced none of these basic and overwhelmingly popular reforms. Instead, the continued defectiveness of our healthcare system is evident today with 30 million Americans still lacking health insurance, 44 million additional Americans remaining under-insured, and an average of 20% of all people with health insurance forgoing or delaying treatment each year for a “serious condition” because of high costs. Healthcare offers a stark illustration of the public opinion-policy gap, but similar discrepancies can be found across the most important policies in the country, including defense spending and wars, higher education funding, and climate change.

Despite the insistence by some that the high school civics class theory of politics holds true, most Americans have a pretty low (and perhaps accurate) estimate of the quality of our governing institutions. Public approval for Congress over the recent decades has mostly oscillated between 10-30% and only 34% of Americans think the two major parties adequately represent the people.

While public opinion data alone provides neither a sufficient analysis nor a coherent vision for leftist politics, it’s often considerably more reasonable than the policies actually in place and provides a useful starting point for understanding the inequalities of power in society. That voting for mainstream politicians as a way to implement popular policies is not what it’s advertised to be is the unifying starting point for the buoyant reformer and grave revolutionary alike. That voting can not be fixed is the less obvious but central thrust of the grump’s grumpiness.

Voting? Phooey

Voting is a tactic for creating social change that involves expending virtually no effort. Yet, the common-sense notion that if you want something you have to work for it holds true in the realm of social change as much as anywhere else. When people tell me that all (or much of what) we need to do to change the world is check a box for a few minutes at a time once every 2-4 years, I wonder how that actually works. The pen may at times be mightier than the sword, but is the fill-in-the-bubble quiz called a ‘ballot’ really mightier than all of society’s billionaires, militarism, structural racism, and gender violence?

“But what about all the deliberation, debate, and discourse that goes into voting? Surely that’s an effortful endeavor?” Surely, but deliberation, debate, and discourse are prerequisites for political action of any kind, so the only distinguishing feature of voting is that the act itself requires no effort.

“But by engaging in debate with others and also encouraging people to vote, doesn’t voting then become a kind of mass collective action that’s exactly what’s needed to change society?” Mass collective action is not inherently progressive or effective, even if collective action of a certain kind is precisely what’s needed to create social change. I find little conceptual distinction between the millions of people who buy Coca-Cola (over the greater evil of Pepsi) every day as a collective action from those millions who vote. Individuals buying and drinking Coca-Cola is not the cause of society’s problems, but neither is it the solution. If anything, millions of people acting as mere aggregated sums through the institutions of the status quo is a prime way the status quo is perpetuated, not challenged.

“But don’t we need some way for the population to interface with governing institutions to influence their functioning and to ensure that they are run according to the desires of the citizens?” Yes, but the best way to make that mode of interfacing as meaningless as possible is to make the form of interaction between the government and the citizens as narrow as possible, such as voting. I agree that we need to interface with existing governing institutions, but voting is the least effective way of doing so.

“But if we don’t vote, the bad guys will take over!” Scaring people into voting is no way to create change nor prevent disaster but rather glosses over deeper problems of the political system that voting doesn’t address. However, for those who truly believe some politician is not as bad as the other one, it’s not that I disagree. Despite my many grumblings, I don’t insist that voting is entirely futile, just that it’s mostly so. If you think it’s worth the minuscule effort, go for it and don’t feel bad about it. I’m just critical of the widespread belief that voting will have more of a positive effect than a normal effort-to-reward calculus would indicate. The degree that voting is overvalued as a form of political engagement is the degree it displaces other more effective forms and forestalls social change.

“People died for the vote.” More than just that, they fought for the vote. The point that people fought and died for the vote and then won is less an argument about how voting is the most important thing. Rather, it’s more an argument that when people expend effort to build social movements to fight for a better world, then they win things.

“Social movements aren’t magic pixie dust that you can just sprinkle on every social-historical problem and expect it to go away.” As a tentative definition of social movements to ground these critiques of electoralism, let’s try this: Social movements are rooted in webs of mass-oriented organizations that build bases in communities and move with those communities towards direct action that disrupts the status quo, such as the strikes of the 1930s labor movement and the mass civil disobedience of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. They are characterized by a disconnect between official policy and shifting popular sentiments, where a significant (but not necessarily majority) degree of public sympathy gives mass actions legitimacy. Such mass action is channeled towards those in power demanding that they alter formal policy but also is channeled towards the base by reshaping ideas and practices of political agency and self-determination.

So are social movements magic pixie dust? “Yes” in that they actually are the source of past positive social change and have the potential to create such change in the future, but “No” in that they are in any sense a cheap short-cut. Social movements take a lot of work, but it’s the actual work of making a difference. Voting, on the other hand, might more fully be characterized as magical in that it doesn’t have any real-world effect of its own and its presumed consequences are based on misperception.

Elections? Bah humbug

There’s a number of defining elements of electoral campaigns that are inimical to social change. These elements are the same ones that corporations use to create markets of passive consumers focused around brand identities, shallow exchange transactions, and individualized consumption.

Every political campaign relies on constructing a branded cult of personality around a candidate. Because sound-bites are an inadequate medium for presenting policy ideas, political campaigns come to revolve more around a candidate’s personality than their policy proposals and political records. This isn’t the fault of any individual politician; it’s the logic that all political campaigns have to apply if they want to maximize their appeal and exposure to fit the requirements of using mass media.

So the vast majority of voters come to know a politician through a picture of their smile as plastered across mailers and TV ads, a couple slogans like “tough on crime” or “tax the rich”, and a few labels such as “experienced”, “outsider”, “bipartisan”, “progressive”, “movement-oriented”, and so on. This political packaging comes to stand in for actual policy records and political relationships that might be indicative of future governance. Biden’s recent presidential campaign had little to say about his role in financial deregulation that paved the way for the 2008/9 financial collapse or the 1994 Crime Bill that helped super-charge mass incarceration. While I am more sympathetic to many of Bernie Sanders’ policy proposals, his campaign ads certainly didn’t focus on some of the less flattering parts of his political record, such as his past symbiotic relationship with an arms manufacturer or close friendship and political alliance with a Vermont billionaire developer. As corporations know very well, the best way to maximize appeal and exposure to mass markets (millions of voters are treated like millions of any other kind of customer) is to build a brand around a simple object that is injected with surface-level emotional appeal, however loosely that is tied to the rational interests of the consumer.

The most devious and disastrous aspect of the individualizing nature of the election campaign is that it encourages people to outsource their political agency to a politician. It’s the politician who has to promise they’ll fix things, and the citizens come to see themselves as largely passive consumers whose only meaningful participation is choosing one political brand over another. All of the laziness entailed in merely voting is converted into a mindset that it’s the politician’s responsibility, and not ours, to fix things. Rather than expressions of the general will of the citizenry, elections are mass disavowals of political responsibility.

Since the vote itself is such a narrow form of political engagement, and it’s the quantity of votes that determines the victor of the contest, election campaigns are organized around maximizing narrow engagement. A former long-time political campaign consultant commented:

[Obama for America (OFA)] organizers would often counsel campaign volunteers to stay away from engaging in discussions about specific issues and instead focus on sharing the “story of self,” the “story of us,” and the “story of now.” This methodology is intended to engage the prospective voter at an affective level much like a 12-step group speaker or a born-again Christian sharing her story of how she found Jesus…. I am critical of the manner that OFA used [this] methodology to short-circuit a perfectly legitimate way of facilitating the raising of critical consciousness (a long-term proposition) for the short-sighted aim of mobilizing the electorate for an election-night win.

The democracy-lessness of such frothy conversation has also been studied academically, as this study found that TV ads, campaign mail, and even the gold standard of door-to-door canvassing in the context of an election campaign were found to have virtually no persuasive effect on changing people’s minds about candidates or issues. The only thing it does have an effect on is the likelihood that the person will show up at the polling station on election day. This makes the dominant interface between election campaigns and citizens into a short-term transaction to get a commitment from someone that they’ll vote, just as corporations need to get you to the cash register or the Amazon check-out page. This kind of shallow interaction with complex issues as the primary form of campaign communication displaces institutional possibilities for deeper intellectual engagement with and political organizing around issues.

The other dominant form of “action” around political campaigns is the rally. Like voting, attending political rallies doesn’t involve much active participation. Whether it’s the candidate themselves or one of their surrogates who’s speaking, attendees typically sit or stand around for an hour or two while somebody talks at them. The content of the rally is typically an embellished verbalizing of the politician’s platform decorated with the occasional jab at rival candidates. This kind of event further encourages the projection of values and hopes onto an aspiring public servant who “does stuff” while the citizen-voter doesn’t have to.

The fact that electoral campaigns happen in short bursts in between long intervals of 2-4 years means that the infrastructure formed around these political candidates is fleeting and ill-suited for creating meaningful change. Furthermore, all the other groups and communities that get sucked into electioneering see their primary concerns and activities momentarily shoved aside while getting so-and-so into City Hall or the White House is prioritized.

An example from my personal experience comes from time I spent in 2013-14 in Occupy Homes Minnesota (OHMN), an anti-eviction group that used direct action to keep banks and sheriffs from forcibly taking people’s houses. When a local socialist ran for a seat on the city council and claimed to be a part of the grassroots movement, much of the paid and unpaid leadership of OHMN diverted resources away from home defense and towards neighborhood canvassing for his election, depriving the org of much of what it needed to actually fight off the banks in a tense period when eviction rates were still high. The candidate ended up losing, but that hardly mattered as the OHMN leadership’s decision to neglect its own mission and base for a few crucial months severely weakened an already struggling group. The organization collapsed and dissolved shortly after.

Politicians? Baloney

Just as the market is only one part of the economy over which corporations wield power, so are election campaigns just one stage of the life-cycle of the politician where leftist forces are systematically weakened. Even when the less shitty politician does win the election, they are immediately put under the extreme constraints of trying to govern in a capitalist society and many of their campaign promises are instantly hollowed out despite a politician’s best intentions.

While far from a radical platform, Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign literature sounds surprisingly progressive with his message of expanding many social programs, reforming the health care system and making health care a “right”, and taxing the rich. A few days before Clinton’s inauguration, his chief economic advisor Robert Rubin, a former co-chairman of the board of Goldman Sachs, and Federal Reserve head Alan Greenspan, a committed Ayn Rand acolyte, told Clinton that the budget deficit was too big and that the only way to avert a debt crisis was to slash government spending, causing him to temper some campaign promises and reverse others. In 2008 Obama campaigned on a popular message of getting people through the deepest economic recession in 80 years, but upon entering office he bailed out the banks and corporations while barely lifting a finger to save homeowners or aid the unemployed.

While we’ve come to expect such disappointment from Democrats, the same dynamic plays out repeatedly among socialist politicians in advanced capitalist countries. In France, Socialist Party President Francois Hollande won the presidency in 2012 on a message of anti-austerity reform, but upon entering office and even having a majority in parliament, turned around and cut corporate taxes and slashed social spending. Before him, France’s other most recent socialist president Francois Mitterand (1981-95) attempted to implement steep reforms early in his first term but then under pressure from international finance and a lagging economy he instituted a nation-wide wage-freeze, cut social spending, and came to symbolize the normalization of austerity within formerly left European political parties.

The Greek Socialist Party Syriza’s time in power from 2015-19 is perhaps the most famous illustration of the abject failure of left politics in the electoral arena, as it repeatedly caved to austerity demands of the European Union, gouging out social programs and privatizing many of Greece’s public assets. The social democracies of Northern Europe have been in retreat since the 1970s as social democratic parties make concessions to austerity and are increasingly losing parliament seats to centrist and even right-wing parties, turning their backs on the social movements that provided the pressure that led to their enviable social programs in the first place. While socialist politicians and political parties have never really controlled governments in the US to the extent they have occasionally in European countries, the evidence across the pond suggests that even if socialists were able to take over the US government, only disappointment would follow.

While the electoral contest tends to reward those who highlight style over substance, at bottom it’s not an issue of a politician’s individual moral integrity but rather of the way the whole electoral and political system is constructed to remove as far as possible the vote from actual governance in the form of determining and implementing policy. Despite good intentions, politicians have given socialism a bad name.

Political parties? Pffft

“If a politician betrays their constituents, they’ll vote them out and get someone who truly represents them.”

That sounds reasonable, but there are a number of reasons this is ineffective as a lever of meaningful democracy. First, with most terms of political office lasting 4 years, that’s a tremendously long time to wait and for politicians to have free reign before they’re “voted out next time”. Second, there’s no official way in the US for citizens to directly recall politicians. There are highly bureaucratic and lengthy methods for other politicians to unseat a particular politician, but they are very rarely used and almost always for scandals instead of the routine betrayal of the very campaign promises that got them elected in the first place. Lastly, politicians aren’t stand-alone agents but belong to political parties whose interests they are both beholden to and charged with safeguarding, and these political parties exert strong control especially within a rigid two-party system. More often than not, if one politician goes away there’s a “next-in-line” who’s not substantially different because the party is a moderating force. Think of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden coming after Obama, all of whom advocate largely the same unpopular policies, such as private health insurance.

“But people also choose which politicians stand for election through primaries and caucuses, ensuring democratic principles are maintained.”

The further one gets away from general elections and into intra-party politics, the deeper one gets into other mechanisms for choking democracy, such gatekeeping, rules-manipulation, and back-door dealing. Sure, a few committed super-citizens can go to every caucus meeting and try to out-politic the entrenched politicking careerists, but the deck is stacked here as it is at every other level of the process. It’s a lonely path as the further you go into the machine the further you get from the actual communities you live and work in.

“But this is where politics happens and so this is the necessary terrain of struggle. You have to struggle somewhere, and the deck is stacked everywhere, so why not direct our efforts at the parties that control the government?”

The labyrinth backwaters of political parties are where a certain kind of politics happens, but it’s an elite kind of politics, where functionaries compete for the approval of party funders and power-brokers. Occasionally an insurgent politician can make it through the maze and get into office, but what alternative forms of politics are sacrificed in the process?

Grassroots social movements focus their politics in the workplaces, the neighborhoods, and the streets. These are the spaces and communities where people are rooted, where their relationships are organic, and where the exercise of power is most impactful. Unions, strikes, community groups, pressure campaigns, civil disobedience, these are the forms and tactics of and for the grassroots. Yes, much of this power needs to be directed at political parties and the government, but it’s more effective to do so from the outside where grassroots movements find fertile soil rather than from inside where the toxic sludge corrodes all it touches.

Social movements? Aww man, do we have to?

“All of the good policies that have come into the world were by definition written into law by some politicians at some point, right? What was it those politicians did that we need our politicians to do today?”

That’s true. But if our purpose is to answer the bigger question of how to make the world a better place and not to confine ourselves to smaller questions of which politician to praise and vote for, then we have to re-frame things. Do politicians cause social change? They’re a part of the overall vehicle of social change, but are they a major and irreplaceable part like the engine or a minor and interchangeable part like the ashtray?

The conjuring trick here is that politicians make it look like they do most of the work that leads to policy change. When a popular policy is passed they get a photo op and put pen to paper though it was actually the hard work and struggle of thousands of community activists that actually made the policy possible. Politicians are paid fine salaries and benefits, get their own offices in fancy buildings, and receive a lion’s share of the credit when something positive happens. Grassroots organizers are often acting without being paid for it, doing so in much less glamorous settings, facing much higher risks, and are mostly nameless and faceless outside of the communities they are fighting alongside. Despite appearances, whether a politician works hard or not has negligible influence on policy outcomes compared to the vibrancy of the social movement and the communities where 99.9% of the actual important work gets done.

Consider two pivotal moments that fundamentally altered social relations in the US and led to era-defining legislation on labor unions and civil rights. The labor movement didn’t acquire rights by voting for politicians to give them rights: Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidential campaign in 1933 didn’t even mention worker rights, he supported an auto industry proposal in March 1934 that allowed company-run worker “unions”, and even refused to endorse Senator Robert Wagner’s collective bargaining legislation circulating in Congress in early 1934. Roosevelt’s labor secretary Frances Perkins said, “I’d rather get a law than organize a union” to address worker grievances and keep them from striking, preferring paternalistic government over the idea of allowing workers to have their own independent organization and power. Only after the largest sustained strike wave in US history rocked the country in mid-1934 and was threatening to go even bigger in what was already a crisis of profit of the Great Depression were major concessions granted for union rights in the National Labor Relations Act signed by Roosevelt in 1935.

It wasn’t the politicians who led the charge that resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but rather a social movement of community activists in the black freedom movement. Before becoming president and signing those bills, Lyndon B. Johnson spent two decades as a reliable pro-segregationist congressman of the Southern Democratic faction and was known for using the n-word profusely. Upon entering national politics, where he’d have to appeal to a broader social base than was needed to be elected as a Texas congressman, black social movements had by then shifted the national consciousness on race to the degree that he needed to become more tolerant publicly and willing to compromise with movement demands. Even then, Johnson was constantly at odds with civil rights leaders over the timing and priorities of these pieces of legislation.

In contrast, what’s notable about the failure of European socialist politicians mentioned above in the period from the 1970s to the present is that there were not social mobilizations and uprisings comparable to earlier periods of the 1930s and 1960s. That lack of robust popular struggle independent of the state is largely responsible for the failures of European socialist politics of the last 50 years.

While it may not be uniquely the fault of socialist politicians that there weren’t ground-shaking social movements in the streets during their time in power, radical politicians have always helped foster the superstition that elections are an important and essential part of social change, thus directing away emphasis and energy from grassroots activity. Every social gain and loss can be summarized in the same broad strokes, where politicians always have played bit parts behind the lead of mass movements.

“Well, you’re just describing the worst parts of elections, but not all politicians have to use that playbook. Good politicians can run campaigns in a way that uses only the good and none of the bad.”

While political campaigns that look and feel like a McDonald's ad campaign are the norm, certainly some politicians have tried to break the mold to be a “different” and “good” politician. They try to focus on deep rather than shallow engagement, to center ideas about society and policy instead of surface-level emotional manipulation, to emphasize longer-term engagement and give people meaningful ways to participate beyond merely voting. But do these politicians ever succeed in living up to this ideal?

“But shouldn’t we keep trying til we get it right?”

That’s what a lot of people will do. But there’s an alternative. If we take the prototype of the bad electoral campaign and turn it inside-out by doing exactly the opposite of everything that’s bad about them, what we end up with is not a good political campaign but rather a grassroots social movement without the unavoidable electoral focus on elevating a single person’s ideas and character and without succumbing to the pressures placed on us by playing by the rules of pacifying state institutions.

There’s obviously a wide spectrum of opinion on how useful politicians are. Kind of like my arguments above about voting, I don’t think politicians are in themselves bad and I recognize that occasionally they can have a small effect on things. But just like many people see voting as the most important part of social change and I see it as among the least important parts of social change, so many see politicians as the most important factors of social change and I see them as among the least important factors. Despite my crankiness I’m not anti-politician in the strict sense that I think they’re bad people as individuals, I just can’t discover any historical evidence or theoretical argument to be pro-politician either.

“But can’t we combine the best elements of social movements with the best elements of political campaigns and do them together?”

Certainly politicians that want to present themselves in a progressive light will try to attach themselves to social movements and will say that they are part of the movement. But if the arguments presented here have any validity, electoral campaigns have almost nothing to add to social movements because social movements are already all the good things we want and need to create social change.

Each element of an election campaign is just a worse version of that element of a social movement: Elevating the individual politician vs. community agency; the narrow engagement of the vote vs. kinds of community engagement and collective action needed to disrupt the status quo and win demands; investing resources in political ad campaigns vs. grassroots organizational infrastructure and support; etc… No matter how much a politician tries to be the exception, there are underlying institutional pressures baked into the rules of the game for electoral campaigns that are of a fundamentally opposite nature to the best practices needed to build effective grassroots movements.

Of course, left politicians are aware of anti-electoral sentiments, and so they, without fail, will claim that they’re “community-oriented”, “a servant of the people,” “in it for the right reasons”, “committed to social movements”, and so on. Or to take a famous recent campaign slogan, “Not me, us.” Good intentions aside, that’s not how elections work. Politicians get people to give them thousands or millions of dollars for staff and campaign ads about them and ask everyone to give them access to immense state power for which there are few formal mechanisms of accountability to voters.

I’m not claiming these politicians are Machiavellian but just that by trying to squeeze the rhetoric of a social movement within an electoral campaign they end up losing all the parts of a social movement that make it meaningful and then succumb to all of the authoritarian forces that make government slimy and coercive. I can recognize that not all politicians are the same, but I can also recognize that they are all seeking entry into the same political system and are subject to all the same constraints. Social movements, on the other hand, are the dominant form that democratic politics takes outside of the state and are the major determinant of the constraints within which all politicians operate.

“But we need state power to allocate resources. That’s why we need to run politicians so that they can work the inside track while we work the outside track.”

If politicians caused good policy, this would be sensible. But just as prominent examples were noted above of supposedly better or left politicians doing bad things in office, there are plenty of examples of politicians rightly considered bad by the left being forced into doing good things. That Republican Dwight Eisenhower’s political platform in 1956 contains striking similarities with Bernie Sanders’ in 2020 is not because Eisenhower was a radical but because the social movements that created the best of the New Deal reforms, many of which remained wildly popular, circumscribed the political boundaries that all politicians had to act within. The difference between Eisenhower winning in 1956 and Bernie losing in 2020 is far less an illustration of individual political acumen or ineptitude but of the relative power of social movements in those eras.

That Richard Nixon spent his first years as president in the late 1960s trying to pass a version of universal basic income which would have been the largest redistribution of wealth to the poorest citizens in US history is not because old Dick had a big heart, but because he was staring down the largest and most militant social movements since the 1930s and needed to pander to and compromise with more radical demands. That Nixon also created the Environmental Protection Agency via executive order and signed the act that created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is again a tribute to the grassroots activists of the 1960s and 70s and has little to do with Nixon’s personal qualities as a politician. Once again, social movements are the dominant, short-term, and long-term cause of better policy, to which politicians are not even second fiddle but perhaps the ninth or tenth.

Even though the historical examples I draw from are mostly at the federal level, it’s merely for the convenience of using widely known reference points. Against the claim that one can have more of an effect on policy by engaging elections at the local level, all of the anti-electoral arguments made here apply equally to all levels of government because, despite differences in scale, the mechanisms and elements of elections are largely the same (voter as passive consumer, politicians as corporate brands). School boards are one of the most local levels of government and the school board members in my city almost all belong to the same party and yet routinely violate their own stated principles on issues such as school privatization and unions. When local activists and groups have mobilized and shut down meetings in protest, school board members have consistently caved to grassroots pressure and reversed their votes.

Just because I don’t think leftists should focus on elections doesn’t mean there won’t always be a constantly replenishing pool of political candidates maneuvering to be the next social movement darling. If you, like me, can’t entirely erase the notion that politicians have some effect, even if very small, there’s still no reason to invest energy in politicians. Left politicians need social movements but social movements don’t need politicians. If social movements are strong, politicians will come begging for support and will consult movements for fear of incurring their wrath. Social movements don’t have to give anything up in return for this or that politician doing what social movements demand.

In summary, social movements are not only the cause of good policy, but obedient left politicians are a side-effect of strong, independent social movements anyway. Social movements should focus on building a base and moving towards collective disruptive action, and if politicians want to tag along they can but social movements shouldn’t divert any of their precious attention away from their true object.

Social Movements? Ugh, okay fine

Many people see general critiques of politicians as valid but still maintain that sometimes there are some good politicians worth supporting. As I said above, I’m not inherently anti-politician when looking at the individual themselves. But here’s the rub: leftist forces in society have a limited amount of resources to put into efforts for social change, and so the campaigns of politicians compete directly with grassroots organizations for volunteer time and donations.

While not anti-politician at an individual level, I’m anti-giving resources to election campaigns of politicians at the social level because politicians will always be less effective at creating change than social movements. This point belies the common excuse made for electoralism as a form of harm reduction. If harm reduction is supposed to have a positive net effect by decreasing the amount of bad in the world, actual harm reduction would come from engaging social movements because only they are actually effective.

I don’t consider a vote a resource at any meaningful level because voting takes so little effort, and so I’m not against voting for politicians because you think one’s better than another. But when it comes to actual resources, every donation or afternoon committed to social movements will do more to shift the balance of power in society to create change than commitment to a political campaign can do.

“But power! You’re forgetting power! If political office were so ineffectual why do politicians wield so much power?”

It may seem confusing that politicians both have lots of power and are virtually useless at creating positive social change. Why is this? Despite appearing as contradictory claims, the idea that politicians are powerful and can’t create change are two sides of the same coin. Much of what gives politicians their power is precisely the passivity with which the masses interact with the state, as described above in relation to voting, election campaigns, and political parties. Rather, those parts of society that do have influence on the state, such as the wealthy and other elites, maintain that influence because of all the active ways they engage with the state formally and informally. Such active elite practices include more above-ground methods such as campaign spending, lobbying, and corporate-politician partnership organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council, but also more below-ground mechanisms such as overlapping social and professional networks, capital strikes against government initiatives, and the revolving door between corporate and political careers.

It’s not just that the elites are “doing it right” in their active engagement with the state while masses are “doing it wrong” in their passive engagement with the state. When the masses are directed to engage politics through voting and attending a political rally, while elites get round-the-clock back-door access to politicians, we can start to see how the very structures of the state that appear natural and democratic are rather manufactured and imbalanced. The state structures discussed here are not peripheral or tangential to the functioning of the state, but rather voting, elections, and politicians are the foundational and governing institutions of the state. If those institutions are shown to be vacuous or at the very least disempowering, what are we to make of pretensions to representative democracy?

Manufactured imbalance against democracy is the state, and all attempts to use the state for positive change are constricted by this stark fact. Social democratic and socialist politicians largely accept these structures of the state and seek to use them, as undemocratic as they are, for good things. But the anti-electoralism critique advanced here suggests that it isn’t possible to create positive change using undemocratic methods. Rather the deeper kind of democracy that fuels social movements through mass participation is what really harnesses popular power for social change.

In spite of the official notion that the government is a reflection of the wants and needs of its citizens, in reality it is not a neutral tool that can be applied effectively to any task that the population or elected officials seek. A screwdriver is very bad at pounding in a nail. So while the state is a very powerful tool for elites to govern in their interest, it is a very shoddy tool for trying to create a better society that benefits everyone. With some strain even a screwdriver can pound a nail partway into a board, but the limits are real and severe. The many failures of socialist politicians recently in power in Europe are illustrative.

“So how can mass-based social movements acquire influence over state resources needed for large-scale popular reforms in the short- and medium-term if the state has built into it a bias against democracy?”

A useful analogy can be made between the grassroots fight against corporate abuse and the grassroots fight against government abuse. The modern-day corporation is a nakedly anti-democratic institution where shareholders give dictatorial powers to top executives to run things while employees are expected to do what they’re told. No one suggests that the left should focus on trying to seize higher-level management positions at WalMart in order to change WalMart’s policy from the inside and from the top down. Rather, unions and direct action by workers and affected communities are correctly identified as the effective way to fight corporate harm. Similarly, the fight against harms imposed by our government is better led by grassroots social movements than by trying to install in the government higher-level managers who will fix the problems from the inside and from the top down.

Do we want our movement towards social change and the content of social transformation to be based on the idea of choosing the right leader to give executive and legislative power to, who promises to fight on our behalf? Or do we want to concentrate our forces on the base, to build a movement rooted in the self-determination and collective action of whole communities? Should we be spectators or agents in the struggle for making a better world? In the words of civil rights organizer Ella Baker, “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.” That quote, especially as applied to politicians, encapsulates everything this essay is trying to articulate.

“You’ve been swooning over social movements this whole time but haven’t even shown how they do all these supposedly great things.”

The good news is that learning about social movements is more exciting than scrutinizing all the ins-and-outs of why voting isn’t effective. The best place to learn about what social movements are and what they’ve accomplished is by learning about their history. While I’ve used the labor movement of the 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1960s as examples, every major beneficial historical change in the US has been accomplished through social movements in some form.

It’s true that all social movements are multidimensional and have elements within them that have tended towards political elections, but all social movements have also had strong anti-electoral tendencies as well. There’s a reason why narratives about social change in the 1930s that came about from labor struggle highlight strikes and unions and not the various left and labor political parties of the day. Similarly, while some in the Civil Rights Movement, like Bayard Rustin, wanted to reorient the struggle towards working within the Democratic Party, many in the base and the leadership were resistant. Neither Martin Luther King Jr. nor Ella Baker were opposed to electoralism in the strong sense I’m advocating, but they were at pains to keep their movement independent of political parties and instead focus on mass direct action. King held a press conference in 1967 to put down rumors and push back against the pressure he faced from his more electorally-focused friends and supporters about running for president, “I have come to think of my role as one which operates outside the realm of partisan politics.”

Rather than seeing electoralism as a necessary part of social movements, it is better seen as an extraneous factor when we recognize how social movements have actually produced change. Social movements are complex and no one has the power to design them exactly to their own liking, but we can engage with and boost those parts of social movements that we find most effective.

Conclusion

Have the grumps won you over? With people so polarized on this issue, I hardly aim to change anyone’s mind. But if low approval ratings of our governing institutions and low voting rates are indicative of a popular discontent with politics as usual, maybe there’s a broad audience willing to entertain ideas about why politicians aren’t hot stuff.

We’ve looked at allegedly progressive politicians passing good reforms (FDR and labor rights, LBJ and civil rights), bad politicians passing good reforms (Eisenhower maintaining New Deal social spending, Nixon implementing the EPA and OSHA), supposedly better politicians passing bad reforms (Clinton, Obama, Mitterand, Hollande), and have just glossed over the more obvious cases of bad politicians passing bad reforms (like Trump’s tax cuts for the rich). In each case closer inspection reveals that the specific person in office had a profoundly insignificant impact on the overall trajectory of positive change compared to the size and assertiveness of social movements that existed alongside them.

Rather than continuing to buy into the myth that voting “does anything”, we’d be better off trying to make a better world by getting together with others to do something. The art of social movements obviously involves more than just “doing something”, but recognizing that “doing something” is going to be what it takes is a good first step. With actual effort and a little practice, doing something as a strategy for change might actually work. Politicians pee into the wind while social movements drop anvils from the sky.

Philosophizing With Lightning?: A Review of 'Metamodernism: The Future of Theory'

By Peter Fousek

In the opening of his recently published third book, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory, philosopher Jason Josephson Storm writes that, in his latest text, he intends “to philosophize with lightning” (Storm 5). An endnote clarifies the meaning of his metaphor: lightning is both powerfully destructive and brilliantly illuminating. That simultaneously negative and positive character is an apt analogy for the project of Metamodernism, which works to expose the shortcomings of established intellectual practice while creating a new, progressively rooted and analytically oriented theory of the social world as a guide for future scholarship and activism. Writing an academic book review is outside of my normal wheelhouse; nonetheless, having worked as a research assistant for Storm, and as a result having had the opportunity to speak with him about the inspiring implications of Metamodernism, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to write about the book on a political platform. Because, at its essence, Metamodernism is revolutionary philosophy, culminating in a liberating political imperative.

Transformative social movements require united mass support in pursuit of a collectively held goal. For a progressive, justice-oriented campaign to be effective, it needs a solid theoretical foundation capable of producing a shared understanding of society in the minds of its members, and a corresponding conviction about why and how they should build a better world. The highly influential revolutionary praxis of Marxism is rooted in the theoretical basis of historical materialism; that theory has provided the impetus for wide-scale activism and mobilization, has guided the organization and direction of countless movements around the world. Storm’s theory possesses similar strengths: Metamodernism provides a comprehensive understanding of the social world, motivated by a fervent and fundamental belief in radical compassion, social justice, and egalitarian mutualism. From these values, it establishes a rigorously systematic philosophical mode, with which we may not only analyze and understand our world, but also learn how best to change it in pursuit of those underlying motivations.

Storm’s project is broken up into four different parts: Metarealism, Process Social Ontology, Hylosemiotics, and Knowledge and Value. To demonstrate how the book builds into a call for political action, it may be most effective to work backwards from its final chapters to the theoretical basis for their claims. Metamodernism’s Chapter 7, “The Revaluation of Values,” is its most explicitly political. His focus there is on the role of morals and ethical values in the scholarship of the “human sciences” (Storm 1)–Storm’s umbrella term for disciplines in the humanities and social sciences—as well as the role played by those values in political society more broadly. Breaking from the position that the moral relativism of the postmodern movement has ushered in a post-moral era, he shows that ethical values are a foundational element of the social world, and, consequently, that the study of that world necessitates their consideration and implementation.

When studying processes of social formation and the people who take part in them, it is imperative to analyze the values held by individuals and groups, which motivate their behaviors and influence the beliefs through which they come to understand themselves and their world. Further, Storm argues, if academic and intellectual projects within the human sciences are to offer meaningful commentary and critique, capable of honestly informing us about the nature of our world, they must reflectively acknowledge the ethical values that form the basis of their scholarly position. According to Metamodernism, “we need to bring our values to the surface and submit them to further scrutiny and refinement” in order “to make progress” (Storm 238). This is because moral values are inseparable from the social world, and any attempt to eliminate them only “drove ethics underground,” (Storm 238), thereby concealing a hugely influential element of society and its dynamics. On that basis, anti-moral arguments often serve reactionary political ends, e.g. “attacking social justice as incompatible with scientific objectivity,” (Storm 238) and thereby giving an ostensibly intellectual justification for the silencing of progressive voices.

Storm goes beyond an exposition of the importance of values and the need for their acknowledgement, however. He proceeds to make the claim that, given their centrality, they should serve as both motive and guide for future scholarship in the human sciences, orienting that scholarship towards the creation of a better world rather than towards a deconstructive or otherwise limited understanding of an arbitrarily delineated category of study. In other words, Storm argues that the study of society should be a morally rooted endeavor, with ethically constituted goals. It should not take place in the isolation of ivory towers, but instead should engage and interface with the subject of its study. Scholarship, in the metamodernist view, should be openly and unabashedly political, providing the knowledge and inspiration behind future political action.

The project of Metamodernism is itself an excellent example of such politically invested scholarship. Its first six chapters are dedicated to the establishment of a Grand Theory, a new and comprehensive philosophical mode that attempts to explain the nature of the social world. To that end, Storm opens with a chapter that works to produce an understanding of reality, moving beyond ideological debates disguised as existential arguments in its investigation. The “metarealist” position which Storm arrives at demands a nuanced, multi-modal understanding of reality, which allows for his subsequent study of social construction. Part II of Metamodernism, containing chapters two through four, begins by demonstrating the inadequacies of existing scholarly modes to produce sufficiently meaningful and valid scholarship. These inadequacies stem from a failure to recognize the dynamic, processual nature of the social world and the elements that make it up, which Storm labels “social kinds” (Storm 106). Social kinds are determined by anchoring processes: causal relations which produce a set of characteristics, or power-clusters, that are shared by members of a given social kind. Those power-clusters then endow their corresponding social kinds with causal-relational roles in broader processual networks. Socioeconomic class, for instance, could be thought of as a social kind determined by its relations of production (a causal anchoring process), and characterized by certain economic, social, or political attributes (power-clusters relating to and explained by the anchoring process). Viewing the world through the lens of social kinds enables a thorough, reflective, and progressive method of analysis and understanding, which resists imposed or inherited beliefs and assumptions and works to de-reify social formations and their constituent elements.

Having established an understanding of social kinds, Storm goes on to produce a corresponding theory of meaning in Metamodernism’s Part III. Chapter 5 proposes a “minimal metaontology,” (Storm 164) which pairs ontology with semiotics, language with material reality. The metaontology of Chapter 5 considers language to be a medium in which the mind interfaces with the world, facilitating a dialectically constitutive relationship between the two. The sentient mind, according to Storm, understands the world semiotically. From the interaction and engagement between the mental and physical emerge concepts of meaning, as the mind, through experience, comes to recognize certain signs as the signifiers of power-clusters, and thus of social kinds. Thus, meaning and understanding are predicated on mind-body interdependence, rather than dualism. Further, because people can externalize the contents of their consciousness via the materialization of cognitive signs, thought is a collective process which utilizes “public concepts,” (Storm 201): the already materialized signs that influence and inform our individual understandings of self and social world.

This brings us to Part IV, which crescendos into Chapter 7. Chapter 6, “Zetetic Knowledge,” (Storm 209), establishes a theory of “humble, emancipatory knowledge” (Storm 215) which allows for the possibility of uncertainty while resisting a denial of our ability to know things at all. Storm’s theory of knowledge incorporates doubt, but resists the kind of crippling skepticism which refuses to move past an initial stage of doubting. His incorporation of doubt is a subversion of certainty; this means that we cannot assert that we do not know. Rather, using the metamodernist mode of analysis based on causal anchoring and processual power-clusters, we can evaluate the relative truthfulness of any knowledge claim by analyzing it using evidence-based abductive reasoning, working backwards from hypothesis to cause while ruling out any alternative explanations. This abductive method of knowledge creation enables us to discover the unobservables which underlie the evidence which we attempt to explain.

Metamodernism is worth reading in full; the depth and systematic construction of Storm’s latest monograph make it difficult to summarize. Nonetheless, the outline above at least hints at the underlying revolutionary motivation of the metamodernist project. In the latter sections of Chapter 7, Storm explicitly states the values that have inspired and guided his philosophy. He argues that our sociopolitical activity should be motivated by a central, collective conviction: to promote universal human flourishing through collectivism and equity. “This,” Storm asserts, “has concrete implications for the kind of state or community we need to call into being…I want to call for a politics dedicated toward compassion, so that injustice can truly be overcome” (Storm 269). In a society presently dedicated to callous individualism, a compassionate politics is necessarily revolutionary. It demands that we work to alleviate the suffering of all those who go this journey of life alongside us, that we prioritize the wellbeing of all above any other concern.

This revolutionary political imperative, the pursuit of universal human flourishing, progresses naturally from the theory outlined earlier. It provides a guiding motive value to situate and inspire work in philosophy, the human sciences, and more broadly in our social formations and activity in general. If values are an omnipresent element of the social world, then we must reflect on those that influence us. If certainty of knowledge is impossible, then our values ought to reflect a corresponding humility; if the social world is dynamic, composed of innately processual social kinds, then our morals should be similarly accommodating, striving to cultivate the multiplicity of sentient life and the societies that it produces. Most importantly, metamodernism provides us with a critical-reflective lens through which we may arrive at a deeper understanding of our world and our positions in it.

That understanding is one which compels us to engage in a continuous, dynamic process of personal and societal cultivation and therefore demands empathy, egalitarianism, and the pursuit of collective good. It allows us to recognize the economic and political elements that reinforce injustice and inequality, and offers us the ability to overcome those elements by exposing and deconstructing detrimental social kinds and establishing alternative ones instead, rooted in metamodernist values. In Storm’s own words, “in order to actually produce meaningful change, we need to know how social kinds come into being and how their properties are glued together” (Storm 275). Metamodernism seeks to do just that, integrating an extensive knowledge of past and present, history and thought, with a moral imperative meant to goad and guide sociopolitical activism in pursuit of a more equitable, humane society. To transform the world, we must first understand it, and, in addition, understand what it could be.

The "Green New Deal" Means More Public-Private Partnerships and, Thus, More Economic and Social Destruction

By Shawgi Tell

These days there is no shortage of hype surrounding the “Green New Deal” (GND). The “Green New Deal” has become a major buzz-phrase that has ensnared many along the way.

Like so many top-down schemes, the GND is being promoted by many world leaders in unison. This alone should be worrisome. History shows that this is usually a red flag. Few pro-social things come out of movements that are not real grass-roots movements. These world leaders are the main representatives of the international financial oligarchy—a tiny ruling elite obsessed with maximizing private profit no matter the damage to society and the environment. These are the same forces responsible for tragedies such as high levels of inequality, poverty, unemployment, under-employment, inflation, debt, homelessness, hunger, racism, war, occupation, pollution, de-forestation, anxiety, despair, alienation, depression, and suicide worldwide.

The GND is being presented by the rich and their political and media representatives as something great for society and humanity; everyone is under pressure to “just embrace it.”

The GND uses the “New Deal” language of the 1930s and ostensibly addresses climate change, inequality, energy efficiency, job creation, labor rights, racial injustice, and other social aims. This includes a GND for public schools, healthcare, and housing as well.

The GND is supposed to improve conditions for humanity and help us all “build back better”—a major slogan of the World Economic Forum (WEF), which is dominated by millionaires and billionaires. Alongside this disinformation, the WEF is also promoting disinformation about “reinventing capitalism” to fool the gullible. The GND is supposedly rooted in the principles of economic justice, puts the planet ahead of profits, and provides a “blueprint for change.” It is said that Green Projects will cost hundreds of billions of dollars annually.

Europe has its own version of the GND. “Variations of the [“Green New Deal”] proposal have been around for years,” says the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/climate/green-new-deal-questions-answers.html). The so-called Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions was introduced more than 20 years ago, for example. In 2007, the imperialist journalist, Thomas Friedman, wrote the following in the New York Times:

If you have put a windmill in your yard or some solar panels on your roof, bless your heart. But we will only green the world when we change the very nature of the electricity grid – moving it away from dirty coal or oil to clean coal and renewables. And that is a huge industrial project – much bigger than anyone has told you. Finally, like the New Deal, if we undertake the green version, it has the potential to create a whole new clean power industry to spur our economy into the 21st century. (https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/19/opinion/19friedman.html)

Pollution, inequality, and 50 other problems have worsened since this observation was made 14 years ago. The quote rejects economic science and fails to help workers, youth, students, women, and others make sense of the economy in a way that favors their interests.

GND Means More PPPs and Tragedies

“Green New Deal” goals are to be attained through “joint” public sector and private sector “investments.” The disinformation from the rich is that the public can’t achieve the lofty goals of the GND on its own and that “investors” from the so-called “efficient,” “entrepreneurial,” “innovative,” and “smart” private sector are needed to achieve these big goals. It is by working “together” that “we” will supposedly achieve what the GND sets out to do. “New Deals” are purportedly too big for either sector to pull off alone and thus some sort of “partnership” or “alliance” is “needed.”

In reality, private competing owners of capital are unwilling and often unable to pay for major infrastructure projects and want the government to guarantee them big investments and returns using the public purse. PPPs essentially guarantee risk-free profits for various monopolies and further diminish control of the economy by workers and the public. PPPs enable major owners of capital to seize more of the added-value produced by workers through “infrastructure projects” guaranteed by the state at public expense. This further enriches a handful of people, intensifies inequality, and leaves workers and the public with less wealth and less control over the economy.

This is not how “partners” work. This is how an unequal relationship works.

Terms such as “alliance” or “partnership” are designed to fool the gullible and hide the enormous financial gain made by a handful of billionaires through PPPs that purport to advance the goals of the GND. In this, way the door is nonchalantly and pragmatically opened to imposing private alien claims on the wealth produced collectively by workers. The rich are given greater access to public funds and resources that belong to the public, all in the name of “partnership.” We are to believe that without a “Public-Private-Partnership” the GND will not become reality, meaning that the GND is possible only if the ultra-rich pocket more public wealth and resources. This is cynically called a “win-win.”

“Public-Private-Partnerships” promote the illusion that the public sector and the private sector can harmonize their philosophies, interests, aims, operations, activities, and results when in fact PPPs are antisocial, antiworker, and undercut a modern nation-building project.

The public and private sectors cannot be partners; they rest on different foundations, goals, world outlooks, operations, and legal frameworks; they are different categories and phenomena with different properties and characteristics. These differences are not trivial and cannot be reconciled or harmonized. Don’t believe neoliberals and privatizers whey they self-servingly claim that the two distinct spheres can “work together.”

Public and private are antonyms; they mean the opposite of each other; they are not synonymous. Public refers to everyone, non-competition, transparency, the common good, and society as whole (e.g., public parks, beaches, and roads). The public is pro-social and human-centered. It approaches life and relations with a big modern vision. Private refers to exclusivity, for a few, not for everyone, and usually involves rivalry and hierarchy. Private is also often associated with secrecy, not transparency, especially in business. The private sector pertains to relations between private citizens, whereas the public sector has to do with relations between individuals and the state. This distinction is critical. These spheres represent two profoundly different domains. The rights belonging to each sector are different.

Blurring the critical distinction between public and private should be avoided at all costs. It is irresponsible and self-serving to treat the public and private as being synonymous and easy to harmonize without big disadvantages for the public. The public does not benefit from blurring this distinction. The public suffers when the dissimilarity between public and private is obscured and not grasped in its depth.

PPPs conceal harsh irreconcilable class differences and interests in society. They reinforce a “no-class” outlook of society and, in doing so, distort reality at the ideological level, leaving many disoriented, unclear, and confused about their interests, which makes them vulnerable to disinformation from the rich and their media. In the world of PPPs, everyone is merely a “stakeholder.” There are no workers or owners of capital. There are no antagonistic irreconcilable social class interests. There are no classes and class struggle. There are no millionaires and billionaires on one side and workers on the other side who produce all the wealth of society.

Not surprisingly, PPPs form a big part of the antisocial “Great Reset” agenda of the world’s billionaires, which has been publicly articulated by the main leaders of the World Economic Forum such as Klaus Schwab. Many prime ministers, presidents, and prominent state leaders around the world continue to parrot the same tired slogans of the “Great Reset” agenda.

In practice, PPPs use the neoliberal state to funnel more public funds than ever to the private sector under the banner of “partnerships” and “making the world better for everyone.”

This funneling of more public funds to narrow private interests will not only solve no problems, it will intensify many problems that are already serious. The existing all-sided crisis will keep deepening under such a set-up.

As a main form of privatization, the “Green New Deal” will significantly intensify inequality, increase costs for everyone, reduce efficiency and quality, lessen accountability and transparency, increase corruption, and diminish the voice and wealth of workers and the public. It will not enhance democracy or improve the environment in any way because it will further concentrate greater economic and political power in even fewer hands, if that is even possible at this point in history. Funneling more public funds, assets, and authority to competing private interests in a highly monopolized economy is a disaster for the social and natural environment. It is the claims of workers, the public, and society that must be expanded and affirmed, not the narrow claims of competing owners of capital obsessed with maximizing their own profits at the expense of everyone and everything else.

The “Green New Deal” will not challenge the entrenched class privilege of the rich. It will not increase the power of workers or give them greater control of the wealth they produce. It will not make the economy more pro-social, balanced, diverse, and self-reliant. Pollution and de-forestation will still persist under the GND. Experience has repeatedly borne out that capital-centered environmental plans and activities ensure that things keep going from bad to worse.

A 2016 United Nations report highlights many ways that PPPs undermine the public interest and produce more problems (https://www.un.org/esa/desa/papers/2016/wp148_2016.pdf). Global Policy Forum states that:

PPPs are used to conceal public borrowing, while providing long-term state guarantees for profits to private companies. Private sector corporations must maximize profits if they are to survive. This is fundamentally incompatible with protecting the environment and ensuring universal access to quality public services. (https://www.globalpolicy.org/en/article/why-public-private-partnerships-dont-work)

Public and private simply do not go together. The organization In The Public Interest offers many reports, articles, and documents that expose how PPPs harm the public interest and benefit major owners of capital at the public expense (https://www.inthepublicinterest.org/). Numerous other organizations around the world have also described and explained how PPPs make things worse for the public while enriching a handful of people.

In the context of a continually failing economy, competing owners of capital have no choice but to cloak their egocentric drive to maximize private profit by seizing public funds from the state as a “win-win” for everyone, as something great for the natural and social environment. The neoliberal state is increasingly being used to divert public funds and assets to major owners of capital as they compete with each other for domination of the economy in an increasingly unstable and dangerous environment. The old ways of profit-taking are no longer as lucrative as before, so the rich have to use PPPs to seize public funds for private financial gain under the banner of “working together” to “build back better.”

As always, the rich will not brook any opposition to their narrow private interests. They will not support anything that places a greater portion of the social wealth in the hands of those who actually produce the wealth of society: workers. They will continue to act like they have a natural right to the wealth produced collectively by workers.

Major owners of capital have no human-centered interest in improving the environment or social conditions. They pragmatically strive for what will best serve their narrow private interests and class privilege without any consideration for the well-being of all sectors of the economy as a whole. Modern nation-building cannot take place in such a context. The human-centered resolution of social, economic, and environmental problems requires confronting powerful private interests and their outdated economic system if humanity is to have a bright future.

To fix the economy and to reverse social and environmental problems requires a public authority worthy of the name. There is no reason why a real public authority cannot use the wealth and resources produced by workers to improve the social and natural environment for the nation. Planned public investment for the public and for modern nation-building is not possible under the direction and influence of competing owners of capital obsessed with maximizing private profit. Such forces are only looking out for their narrow interests, not the needs of a balanced self-reliant crisis-free economy that consistently and responsibly raises the material and cultural well-being of all.

There is no need to involve powerful private interests in social programs, social investments, or green projects. The rich are not only the cause of many problems the GND ostensibly seeks to remedy, they also have no valid and legitimate claim to any public funds, resources, and assets. The rich mainly seize and control the wealth produced by workers; they themselves do not produce the wealth of society.

The rich are an historically superfluous and exhausted force blocking social progress. Without the rich, their entourage, and their outdated political and economic system, the social product could be wielded by people themselves for the benefit of the natural and social environment. The impact of this shift and change on time and space would be monumental.

Shawgi Tell, PhD, is author of the book “Charter School Report Card.” His main research interests include charter schools, neoliberal education policy, privatization and political economy. He can be reached at stell5@naz.edu.

Walter Rodney on Marxism in Africa (1975)

By Walter Rodney

Republished from Red Sails.

Walter Rodney was born in Guyana in 1942, acquired his doctorate in England at the age of 24, and then traveled widely in the Caribbean and Africa. In 1972 he published his legendary work How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. He was assassinated via a car-bomb in Georgetown in 1980, and the crime is widely believed to have been orchestrated by Forbes Burnham, the president of Guyana at the time. Rodney gave this speech at Queen’s College in New York, USA in 1975. [1]

First of all, we must understand the background for this kind of debate. When one is asked to speak of the relevance of Marxism to Africa at this particular point in time one is being asked to involve oneself in a historical debate, an ongoing debate in this country, particularly among the Black population. It is a debate which has heightened over the last year and, from my own personal observations, is being waged in a large number of places across this country. Sometimes it appears in the guise of the so-called Nationalist versus the Marxist; sometimes it appears in the guise of those who claim to espouse a class position as opposed to those who claim to espouse a race position. Thus it would not be possible for us in a single session to enter into all the ramifications of that debate, but it does form the background for our discussions.

It is an important debate. It is an important fact that such issues are being debated in this country today, just as they’re being debated in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, and in many parts of the metropolitan world — in Western Europe and in Japan — because the widespread nature of the debate and its intensity at this time is a reflection of the crisis in the capitalist-imperialist mode of production. Ideas and discussion do not simply drop from the sky. It is not simply a plot on the part of certain individuals to engage others in a meaningless debate. Whatever the outcome of the debate, whatever the posture the different participants adopt, the very fact of the debate is representative of the crisis in capitalism and imperialism today and, as the crisis deepens, people find it more and more difficult to accept the old modes of thought which rationalize the system which is collapsing. Hence the need to search for new directions and, quite clearly, Marxism and Scientific Socialism pose themselves as one of the most obvious of the available options.

The question is not new to Africa or to the Black people as a whole — that is perhaps essential to understand. Many of us have before raised the question of the relevance of Marxism to this or that. Its relevance to Europe; many European intellectuals debated its relevance to their own society. Its relevance to Asia was debated by Asians; and, to look at it geographically, its relevance to Latin America was debated by Latin Americans. Individuals have debated the relevance to Marxism to their own time. Was it relevant to the 19th century? If so, was it still relevant to the 20th century? One can debate its relevance to a given facet of the culture of a society, or to its law or culture as a whole. These are all issues that have been debated before, and we should have some sense of history when we approach the question today, because with that sense of history we can ask, “Why is it that the question of the relevance of Marxism to society always crops up?” And — a very brief answer — I would suggest that what is common to the application of the question is, first of all, a condition of crisis, a condition of struggle, a condition in which people are dissatisfied with the dominant mode of perceiving reality. At that point they ask about the relevance of Marxism.

More than that, the second condition is people do ask the question because of their own bourgeois framework. Because one starts out located within the dominant mode of reasoning, which is the mode of reasoning that supports capitalism, and which we will call a bourgeois framework of perception. Because one starts out that way, it becomes necessary to raise the question about the relevance of Marxism. After one is advanced, it is probably more accurate to raise the question of the relevance of bourgeois thought, because the shoe would be on the other foot! But initially it is true that however much the bourgeoisie disagree, there is one common uniting strand to all bourgeois thought: they make common cause in questioning the relevance, the logic and so on, of Marxist thought. And therefore, in a sense, unfortunately, when we ask that question, we are also fitting into that framework and pattern. We are also, in some way, still embedded to a greater or lesser extent in the framework of bourgeois thought, and from that framework we ask with a great degree of hesitancy and uncertainty, “What is the relevance of Marxism?”

It is particularly true in our parts of the world — that is, the English-speaking parts of the world — because the Anglo-American tradition is one of intense hostility, philosophically speaking, towards Marxism. A hostility that manifests itself by trying to dissociate itself even from the study of Marxism. If you were to check on the continental tradition in Europe, you would find it is not the same. French, German, and Belgian intellectuals, whatever their perspective, understand the importance of Marxism. They study it, they relate to it, they understand the body of thought which is called Marxism, and they take a position vis-à-vis that body of thought. In the English tradition — which was also handed down to this part of the world, to the Caribbean, to many parts of Africa — it is fashionable to disavow any knowledge of Marxism. It is fashionable to glory in one’s ignorance, to say that we are against Marxism. When pressed about it one says “But why bother to read it? It is obviously absurd.” So one knows it is absurd without reading it, and one doesn’t read it because one knows it is absurd. And therefore one, as I said, glories in one’s ignorance of the position. It is rather difficult to seriously address the question about the relevance of Marxism unless one does the basic minimum of accepting that one should attempt to enter into this full body of thought — because it is a tremendous body of literature and analysis. And from the outside as it were, addressing the question is extremely difficult. Indeed, I would say it is pointless. Strictly from the outside, without ever having moved towards trying to grapple with what it is, to ask “What is its relevance?” is almost an unanswerable question. And I think in all modesty, those of us who come from a certain background — and we all come from that background — one of the first things we have to do is establish a basis of familiarity with the different intellectual traditions, and, as we become familiar with them, we can then be in a better position to evaluate Marxism’s relevance or irrelevance, as the case might be.

Now I will proceed on the assumption that what we are trying to discern in this discussion is whether the variants of time and place are relevant. Or, let me put it another way: whether the variants of time and place make a difference to whether Marxism is relevant or not. In a sense, we would almost have to assume its validity for the place in which it originated, Western Europe. We don’t have the time to deal with that in detail. But we can then ask, assuming that Marxism has a relevance, has a meaning, has an applicability to Western Europe — or had, in the 19th century — to what extent does its validity extend geographically? To what extent does its validity extend across time? These are the two variables: time and place. And those can be translated to mean historical circumstances — time — and culture, which means the place, and what social and cultural conditions exist in each particular place. For us — to make it more precise: Black people — no doubt well-meaning Black people will ask the question whether an ideology which was historically generated within the culture of Western Europe in the 19th century is today, in the third quarter of the 20th century, still valid for another part of the world — namely Africa, or the Caribbean, or Black people in this country [United States]. Whether it is valid to other societies at other times. And this is the kind of formulation which I wish to present [for discussion].

The Methodology of Marxism

I would suggest two basic reasons why I believe that Marxist thought — scientific socialist thought — would exist at different levels, at different times, in different places, and retain its potential as a tool, as a set of conceptions which people should grasp. And the first is to look at Marxism as a methodology, because a methodology would virtually, by definition, be independent of time and place. You will use the methodology at any given time, at any given place. You may get different results, of course, but the methodology itself would be independent of time and place. And essentially, to engage in some rather truncated presentation of Marxism, inevitably oversimplifying, but nevertheless necessary in the context of limited time, I would suggest as one of the real bases of Marxist thought that it starts from a prespective of man’s relationship to the material world; and that Marxism, when it arose historically, consciously dissociated itself from and pitted itself against all other modes of perception which started with ideas, with concepts and with words, [and adapted itself] to the material conditions and the social relations in society. This is the difference with which I will start: a methodology which begins its analysis of any society, of any situation, by seeking the relations which arise in production between men. There are a whole variety of things which flow from that: man’s consciousness is formed in the intervention in nature; nature itself is humanized through its interaction with man’s labour, and man’s labour produces a constant stream of technology which in turn creates other social changes. So this is the crux of the scientific socialist perception. A methodology that addresses itself to man’s relationship in the process of production on the assumption — which I think is a valid assumption — that production is not merely the basis of man’s existence, but the basis for defining man as a special kind of being with a certain consciousness. It is only through production that the human race differentiates itself from the rest of the primates and the rest of life.

What does it [Marxism] pose itself against? It poses itself against a number of hypotheses, a number of views of the world which start with words and concepts. For those who are familiar with Marx’s own evolution, it is well known that he started by looking first at Hegel, a very plausible and perceptive analyst of the 19th century who was guilty, in Marx’s own estimation, of putting forward an entirely idealist position, one that placed ideas in the centre of the universe and saw the material world virtually deriving from those ideas. In thinking about this, I felt that I wouldn’t go into Hegel, I would go further than Hegel for a classic exposition of the idealist world view. I take it from the New Testament, the Book of John, where he stated:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. And the Word was God.”

That is the classic exposition of the idealist position. You take every other thing from there: the Word was God! But we are suggesting that the word is itself an emanation from people’s activity as they attempt to communicate with each other, as they develop social relations out of production, and that we shouldn’t be mystified with words. Naturally enough we will have to deal with concepts and with the force of consciousness, which is a very powerful force, which even some Marxists have been tempted to underestimate.

Now Marx, taking that broad framework of methodology, tried to apply it to Western Europe. He applied it to a range of societies in different places and at different times, but he concentrated his attention to Western Europe. If you examine the body of literature produced by Marx and Engels you will find that they speak about slavery, about communal society, about feudalism, but by and large they concentrate on capitalism. They hardly even talk about socialism. Marx’s great contribution was his fantastic critique of an existing society, capitalist society. How did it come into being in a particular part of the world? The vast proportion of their literature concerns this question.

But, as I said when I talked about pre-capitalist society, especially feudalism, they talked about some other parts of the world. Occasionally Marx mentions the “Asiatic mode of production.” Occasionally he came across to look at the data concerning the United States. So he had something of a geographical span and a long time span. But it was so minimal in comparison with the bulk of his work that it is true that a lot of people have taken Marx’s method and his conclusions and have seen them as one and the same thing, that Marxism is not merely a certain methodology applied to Western Europe, but that Marxism is itself an ideology about Western Europe, about capitalism in the 19th century, and it cannot transcend those boundaries. When, clearly, Marx was doing the job he had to do: he was looking at his own society, he was doing it under some of the most adverse conditions, he was doing it by mastering bourgeois knowledge and putting it to the service of change and revolution. I would suggest, then, that the method was independent of time and place. It is implicit in Marx and it becomes explicit in post-Marxian development, using Marxian in the literal sense of the life of Marx himself. After Marx’s death you will get the evolution or the development of scientific socialist thought with other individuals recognizing that the methodology can be applied — must be applied — to a different time, must be applied to a different place.

Again, presenting our history in a very abbreviated form, we can look at Lenin, at his application of Marxist theory to Russian society. That is one of his principal contributions. The young Lenin, the first major thesis which he wrote, was the Development of Capitalism in Russia. He had to deal with his own society. He had to take those formulations out of the specific cultural and historical context of Western Europe and look at Eastern Europe, at Russia which was evolving differently, and to apply it to his own society. This he did. He had at the same time to consider the time dimension. That in the 19th century Marx was writing about what has now come to be called the classic period of capitalism, the entrepreneurial version of capitalism, and by the latter 19th century this had given way to monopoly capitalism. It had given way to imperialism.

So Lenin had to deal with method by applying it to a new dimension in time. So he wrote about capitalism in its imperialist stage. So those are the two variants operating: the ideology, the methodology of it (we’ll stick to the methodology for the time being) being applied to different societies at different times. Having made the point for Lenin, I hope it becomes clear for a number of people: Mao Zedong applying it to Chinese society, which was a different society from Russian society. Understanding the inner dynamics of Chinese society, relating to the question of the peasantry in a different and more profound way than any previous writer, because that was the nature of Chinese society, and he had addressed himself to that. And finally, for our purposes the most important example, the example of Amilcar Cabral. Because he was dealing with Africa. Cabral, in one of his essays, the one entitled The Weapon of Theory, if I recall correctly, one of his most important essays, began by making it clear that the best he could do was to return to the basic methodology of Marx and Engels. But it was not possible for Cabral to begin the analysis of the history of Guinea-Bissau by saying: “I am going to look for classes,” for example. He said, “If I say this I will be denying that my people have any history, because I do not perceive classes for a long period in the genesis of my own people.” Then he referred back to Marx and Engels’ classic statement that “the history of all existing societies is the history of class struggle.” To which Engels had appended a note saying that “by all history we mean all previously recorded history.” It so happens that the history of the people of Guinea-Bissau has not been recorded, and Cabral says: “I want to record that history. We will use the Marxian method. We will not be tied by the concept which arose historically in Western Europe when Marx was studying that society.”

Marx uses the method, and he discerned the evolution of classes and of the phenomemon of classes itself as being a major determinant — the major determinant — in western European history at a particular point in time. Cabral says, “We will begin at the beginning. We will not even concern ourselves initially with classes. We will simply look at men in the process of production. We will look at modes of production in the history of Guinea, and we will see how our society evolved.” So, without much of a fanfare, he was showing the relevance of that methodology to African society. If and when in the history of Guinea-Bissau the aspect of class appears to have historical importance, then Cabral dealt with it. Until such time, he simply stuck to the basis of Marxian methodology which was to look at Guinean people in the process of production, social formations, cultural formations which arose historically, and the direction in which the society was tending.

In many respects, when we today ask the question about the relevance of Marxism to Black people, we have already reached a minority position, as it were. Many of those engaged in the debate present the debate as though Marxism is a European phenomenon and Black people responding to it must of necessity be alienated because the alienation of race must enter into the discussion. They seem not to take into account that already that methodology and that ideology have been utilized, internalized, domesticated in large parts of the world that are not European. That it is already the ideology of eight hundred million Chinese people; that it is already the ideology which guided the Vietnamese people to successful struggle and defeat of imperialism. That it is already the ideology which allows North Korea to transform itself from a backward quasi-feudal, quasi-colonial terrain into an independent industrial power. That it is already the ideology which has been adopted on the Latin American continent and that serves as the basis for development in the Republic of Cuba. That it is already the ideology which was used by Cabral, which was used by Samora Machel, which is in use in the African continent itself to underline and underscore struggle and the construction of a new society.

It cannot therefore be termed a European phenomenon, and the onus will certainly be on those who argue that this phenomenon which has already universalized itself somehow is inapplicable to some Black people. The onus will be on those individuals, I suggest, to show some reason, perhaps genetic, why the genes of Black people reject this ideological position.

When we investigate and try to concentrate or keep central the concept of relevance, we must ask ourselves questions abut the present. What kind of society do we live in today? What kind of societies do Black people live in today in different parts of the world? And while of course we as Black people in this country, in the Caribbean and in different parts of Africa, have our own independent historical experience, one of the central facts is that we are all, in one way or another, located within the capitalist system of production. The society about which Marx wrote, through a process of outgrowth, dominated Africa and the Americas in the era of mercantilism, which was the period that capitalism was growing to maturity. It dominated these parts of the world. It created slave society in the Americas. Subsequent to the slave era, capitalism, even more powerful, was able to incorporate the whole world into a global network of production which derived from Western Europe and North America, a system which had a metropolitan centre or set of metropolitan centres, and a separate set of peripheries, colonies, and semi-colonies. So that we have all, historically, been incorporated within the capitalist system of production, and that is another dimension of the relevance of Marxism.

Even without the translation in terms of time and place, it seems to me that if we have become part of the capitalist-imperialist world, then we owe it to ourselves to relate to, to follow, to understand, and to hopefully adopt and adapt a critique of that capitalist system, because that is essentially what Marx’s writing is about. He was criticising that capitalist system. He did it more effectively than any bourgeois writer, and if we want to understand the world in which we live, which is a world dominated by capitalism, then we must understand the centre of that system, the motor within that system, types of exploitation which are to be found within the capitalist mode of production. So that is yet another factor.

Marxism as Revolutionary Ideology

I had originally suggested there were two basic things, and one was the methodology. My second consideration after methodology is to look at Marxism as a revolutionary ideology and as a class ideology. In class societies all ideologies are class ideologies. All ideologies derive from and support some particular class. So for all practical purposes we have grown up in capitalist society, and bourgeois ideology is dominant in our society. These institutions in which we function were created to serve the creation of ideas as commodities, ideas which will buttress the capitalist system. Now I would suggest historically, as Marx suggested himself, that the set of ideas we call “scientific socialism” arose within capitalist society to speak to the interest of the producers in that society, to speak to the interest of those who are exploited and expropriated, to speak to the interest of the oppressed, of the culturally alienated, and we must understand that, of the two major sets of ideas before us — idealism and materialism, bourgeois philosophy and Marxist philosophy — that each of the two is representative of a particular class. I don’t have the time to go into all the historical roots of the formation of socialism but, briefly, in the 19th century it was with the rise of capitalist society that conditions were created for the development of socialist ideas.

Out of the diverse and unsystematized socialist ideas, Marx was able to formulate a clear and systematic theory: scientific socialism. It had a particular class base and because it had this particular class base, it was revolutionary. It sought to transform and upend the relations in society. Bourgeois ideology is of necessity status quo preserving. It seeks to conserve, it seeks to buttress the given system of production, the relations which flow, the relations which flow from a certain system of production. A scientific socialist position remains revolutionary because it aims — consciously aims — at undermining that system of production and the political relations which flow from it. This is what I mean by revolutionary.

From time to time there are Marxists who have arisen who have attempted to deny or denude Marxism of its revolutionary content. That is true. There are Marxists who have become legal or armchair Marxists, who would like to see Marxism as merely another variant of philosophy, and who treat it in a very eclectic fashion as though one is free to draw from Marxism as one draws from Greek thought and its equivalents, without looking at the class base and without looking whether an ideology is supportive of the status quo or not.

Nevertheless, by and large, we can see Marxism and scientific socialism as subversive of and antithetical to the maintenance of the system of production in which we live. Because ideas, let me repeat, do not float in the sky, they do not float in the atmosphere, they are related to concrete relations of production. Bourgeois ideas derive from bourgeois relations of production. They are intended to conserve and maintain those relations of production. Socialist ideas derive from the same production, but they derive from a different class interest, and their aim is to overthrow that system of production.

Africa and Scientific Socialism

There again I will suggest that African people, like other Third World people, have virtually a vested interest in scientific socialism, because it offers itself to them as a weapon of theory. It offers itself to them as that tool, at the level of ideas, which will be utilized for dismantling the capitalist imperialist structure. This is its concern.

What I will attempt to deal with, as best I can, are certain questions arising from individuals who might say “yes” to most of what I’ve said, and then will ask the question, “Is there no other alternative? Is there no other ideological system which is neither capitalist not socialist, but is anti-capitalist, but addresses itself more humanely, if you like, to the interest of African people wherever they are?” These questions are worth looking into because there are Black people asking these questions, and we have to try and resolve them. My own formulation will be to suggest that we look at concrete examples of African or Black people who have attempted to devise systems which they consider to be non-capitalist and non-socialist. Systems they consider are valid alternatives to scientific socialism for the emancipation of African people.

In this regard we have a number of Pan-Africanists, a number of African nationalists in Africa, in the Caribbean and in this country, who have taken that road. George Padmore did this at the end of his life, and made a sort of distinction — not a sort, he made a distinction between scientific socialism and Pan-Africanism. He said this is the road we will follow: Pan-Africanism. We do not want to go that road which is capitalist; we do not want to go the socialist road; we will derive for ourselves something that is Pan-African.

In a sense Nkrumah followed up upon this and, although at one time he called himself a Marxist, he always was careful to qualify this by saying that he was also a Protestant. He believed in Protestantism at the same time. So simultaneously he was trying to straddle two worlds; the world which says in the beginning was matter and the world which says in the beginning there was the word. And inevitably he fell between these two. It’s impossible to straddle these two. But there he was, and we must grant his honesty and we must grant the honesty of many people who have attempted to do this impossible task and follow them to find out why they failed. They failed because their conception of what a variant different from bourgeois thought and different from socialist thought inevitably turned out to be merely another branch of bourgeois thought. And this was the problem: that bourgeois thought — and indeed socialist thought, when we get down to it — can have a variety of developments or roads and aspects or paths. Bourgeois thought, because of its whimsical nature and because of the way in which it promotes eccentrics, can have any road. Because, after all, when you are not going any place, you can choose any road!

So for bourgeois thought it was possible for these individuals to make what I consider to be a genuine attempt to break with the dominance of bourgeois thought, and yet find in the final analysis that they have merely embraced another manifestation of that which they themselves at the outset had suggested that they were confronting.

There are a number of examples, some more apt than others. Some of the examples actually are Africans who I think, were blatantly dishonest from the beginning. I do think that most of the ideologues of African socialism claiming to find a third path are actually just cheap tricksters who are attempting to hoodwink the majority of the population. I don’t think they’re out to develop anything that addresses itself to the interests of the African people. But, nevertheless, it is part of the necessity of our times that our people no longer are willing to accept anything that is not put to them in the guise of socialism.

And therefore I shan’t in fact go on to African socialism. What I’ll do is take examples of those who were, in my opinion, being serious, being honest. And certainly Kwame Nkrumah was one of these. Nkrumah spent a number of years during the fifties and right up to when he was overthrown — that would cover at least ten years — in which he was searching for an ideology. He started out with this mixture of Marxism and Protestantism, he talked about Pan-Africanism, he went to consciencism and then Nkrumahism, and, there was everything other than a straight understanding of socialism.

What were the actual consequences of this perception? That is what matters to us. Let us assume that he was searching for something African and that he was trying to avoid the trap of adopting something alien. What were the practical consequences of his attempt to dissociate himself from an international socialist tradition? We saw in Ghana that Nkrumah steadfastly refused to accept that there were classes, that there were class contradictions in Ghana, that these class contraditions were fundamental. For years Nkrumah went along with this mish-mash of philosophy, which took some socialist premises but in which he refused to pursue it to its logical conclusion, in which he would accept that one either had a capitalist system based upon the private ownership of the means of production and the alienation of the product of people’s labour, or one had an alternative system which was completely different and that there was no way of juxtaposing and mixing these two to create anything that was new and viable.

A most significant test of this position was when Nkrumah himself was overthrown! After he was overthrown, he lived in Guinea-Konakry and before he died he wrote a small text, Class Struggle in Africa. It is not the greatest philosophical treatise but it is historically important, because it is there Nkrumah himself in effect admits the consequences, the misleading consequences, of an ideology which espoused an African cause, but which felt, for reasons which he did not understand, a historical necessity to separate itself from scientific socialism. It indicated quite clearly the disastrous consequences of that position. Because Nkrumah denied the existence of classes in Ghana until the petty bourgeoisie as a class overthrew him. And then, in Guinea, he said it was a terrible mistake. Yes, the petty bourgeoisie is a class with interests fundamentally opposed to workers and peasants in Africa. Yes, the class interests of the petty bourgeoisie are the same or at least are tied in with the class interests of international monopoly capital and therefore we have in Africa a class struggle within the African continent and a struggle against imperialism. And if we are to aim at transcending these contradictions, of bringing victory and emancipation to the working peoples, the producers of Africa, we will have to grapple with that ideology, which first of all recognizes and, challenges the existence of exploiting and oppressing classes.

It’s a very important historical document. It is the closest that Nkrumah comes to a self-critique. It is the record of a genuine nationalist, African nationalist, who wandered for years with this assumption and feeling that somehow he must dissociate himself in one way or another from scientific socialism because it originated outside the boundaries of his own society and he was afraid of its cultural implications. That is putting it in the most charitable way. But the fear is due, in fact, to aspects of bourgeois ideology. Due to the fact that he made a distinction between social theory and scientific theory, which is not a necessary distinction. That is the distinction which comes out of the history of bourgeois thought.

People seem to have no difficulty in deciding that they are going to use facets of the material culture that originated in the West, whether it originated in capitalist or socialist society. People have no difficulty relating to electricity but they say: “Marx and Engels, that’s European!” They don’t ask the question, “Was Edison a racist?” but they ask the question, “Was Marx a racist?” They genuinely believe that they are making a fundamental distinction, whereas, in fact, this is obscuring the totality of social development. And the natural sciences are not to be separated from the social sciences. Our interpretation of the social reality can similarly derive a certain historical law and hence scientific law of society which can be applied irrespective of its origin or its originators. Of course, it is true, and this is the most appropriate note on which to end, that any ideology, when applied, must applied with a thorough grasp of the internal realities of a given African society.

Marxism comes to the world as a historical fact, and it comes in a cultural nexus. If, for instance, Africans or — let us go back to Asians; when the Chinese first picked up the Marxist texts, they were European texts. They came loaded with conceptions of the historical development of Europe itself. So that method and factual data were interwoven obviously and the conclusions were in fact in a specific historical and cultural setting. It was the task of the Chinese to deal with that, and to adapt it, and to scrutinize it, and see how it was applicable to their society. First and foremost to be scientific it meant having due regard for the specifics of Chinese historical and social development.

I have already cited Cabral in another context, and he reappears in this context. The way in which he is at all times looking at the particularities of class development in contemporary Guinea-Bissau, looking at the potential of classes in Guinea-Bissau at this point in time. And therefore he is, of course, making sure that Marxism does not simply appear as the summation of other people’s history, but appears as a living force within one’s history, and this is a difficult transformation. This is the task of anybody who considers himself or herself a Marxist. However, because it is fraught with so many difficulties and obstacles, many people take the easy route, which is to take it as a finished product rather than an ongoing special product which has to be adapted to their own society.

One finds that in looking at this Marxist theory, at its relevance to race, looking at the relevance of Marxist theory to national emancipation, we come up with a very important paradox, and it is this: that the nationalist, in the strict sense of the word, that is the petty bourgeois nationalist, who aims merely at the recovery of national independence in our epoch, is incapable of giving the peoples of the Caribbean any participation in liberal democracy. The petty-bourgeoisie cannot fulfill these historical tasks, for national liberation requires a socialist ideology. We cannot separate the two. Even for national liberation in Africa, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique very clearly demonstrated the necessity for an ideological development — for consciencization, as they say in Latin America — and, the nationalist struggle was won because it came under the rubric of a scientific socialist perspective.

As Cabral said, “There may be revolutions which have had a revolutionary theory and which have failed, but there have certainly been no revolutions which have succeeded without a revolutionary theory.”

Notes

Walter Rodney, 1975. Marxism and African Liberation. [web] ↩