Origins of Modern Greed

By Steve Johnson

Greed is a strong and excessive desire for wealth, possessions, or power, often accompanied by an unwillingness to share or give to others. It is a trait characterized by an insatiable desire for more, often at the expense of ethical considerations or the well-being of others.

Dissecting the meaning of greed in the same manner that a word would be dissected in a legal document reveals that the entire definition is full of terrible human qualities that all point to an individual's choice to value their own life above all life. When we look at history, it’s important to remember that people have been capable of complex thought, compassion, empathy, and love for thousands of years. Early people were not hateful, fearful savages. They were as we are, but with different struggles and different technologies.

The Origin of Modern Greed, a Proletarian Theory

In an attempt to understand the origins of greed, I first looked at which civilizations have spread without pause and conquered the most throughout the previous 500 years of world history. It is easy to ascertain based on historical documents that it was the following nations: England, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Next, I looked at what these nations have in common: harsh winters, some of the earliest archaeological evidence of widespread cannibalism, reduced sun exposure due to latitude, and limited landmass and resources as populations grew. I will now attempt to guide you through my thought process that greed is not a basic human trait that exists in us all, but instead developed as a means of survival during the most desperate of times in human history. I propose that the early civilizations of Northern Europe suffered resource scarcity, limited sun exposure, and cannibalism as a way of ensuring individual survival above all else which would later foster a culture of materialism and greed. Jared Diamond has touched on many of these topics in his book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. We will also look at Cannibalism by Bill Schutt to explore the long-lasting psychological trauma that cannibalism can have on a population. World history and general psychology references are common knowledge and can be verified by a multitude of sources at the reader’s convenience.

Survival of the Warmest

When I was four, my family moved from sunny Florida to beautiful Michigan. The changing of the seasons is something magical, however, winters in Michigan caused me to be very aware that there are different needs for survival depending on geographical location and season. There are unique challenges of a harsh winter that are not present in a place like Florida. Needing wood for heat during the winter and ensuring adequate food supply to last the season are top priorities. The need for winter clothing to stay comfortable in colder climates is a distinctive feature of civilizations accustomed to frigid temperatures.  There is less exposure to the sun, resulting in a loss of vitamin D and serotonin. That alone has a hugely negative impact on the human psyche. Winter is harsh, and it can leave a lasting toll on populations forced to endure such a climate. Everything about lasting through winter involves having more than you need to ensure survival, a fact of life missing from the more temperate climates of Earth, with year-round sun and milder season transitions. You simply need less when the outside world is more forgiving.

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The more you have going into winter, the more likely you are to survive. Over time, the strong or desperate survive and the weak die, resulting in more resources for the survivors. After winter, the more you have remaining, the more you can trade for other goods and services to prepare for the inevitable coming of the following Winter. This simple exchange based on supply and demand is the basis of materialism that develops into capitalism. Greed developed as a means of individual and communal survival in a time of limited resources that ensured the wealthiest and most powerful would survive. Over an extended historical timeframe, the accumulation of sufficient wealth could elevate an individual to the status of a chief, king, or ruler. Fast forward through all of the muddied conflicts of kings and kingdoms in Europe up to 1500 CE, and now we look again at who the primary conquering nations of indigenous people of the world were. England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain claimed much of South America, North America, Africa, and portions of Asia. No other nations have overrun so much of the Earth at one time. Survival of the fittest would be false, but survival of the wealthiest, cruelest, and most immune would be true, which the longest surviving families would be the pinnacle of. It is these lineages that lead the populations and determine where to invade, for the betterment of themselves and their strongest supporters. “It is often government that organizes the conquest, and religion that justifies it.” (Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond p166)

Survival of the Maddest

The latitude that the majority of the conquering nations exist at directly implies a lack of sun exposure throughout the winter. This will result in a vitamin D deficiency, which in turn leads to a weakened immune system, reduced bone strength, mood disorders, and sleep problems. This could translate into much of the Northern European population being tired, crabby, depressed, sore, and malnourished. It is not difficult to imagine that early Northern Europeans may have turned on each other during the course of a harsh winter to survive. The extent to which they may have turned on each other could theoretically be evident in archaeological sites around Europe and even in Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America founded in 1607. Many human remains featured butchery marks that “were identical to the damage found on the bones of non-human animals that had presumably been used as food.” (Schutt, Cannibalism p 159) 

It may seem like quite the jump that I looked into the archaeological evidence of cannibalism in reference to greed. This stems from the knowledge of horrifically true stories of survival such as the Donner Party, the cruise ship Mignonette, and Flight 571. Nothing screams desperation to survive and valuing your own life above all else more than consuming your fellow man. A common theme in all of these scenarios is resource scarcity, harsh conditions, and desperation. Settings not unlike that which early civilizations of Northern Europe may have  been faced with in any given Winter.  This heinous act is often portrayed as very primitive, and usually is only referenced when it pertains to indigenous peoples, not caucasians. However, the vast majority of evidence of cannibalism discovered so far, has taken place in England and “many cultures share the belief that consuming another human is the worst (or close to the worst) behavior that a person can undertake.”(Schutt, Cannibalism p12)  For further reading on the history of cannibalism in Europe, I recommend Sarah Everts’ article here.

Survival of the Fittest Immune

During the time of Western conquest around the world, populations were surging in England, France, the Netherlands, and Germany. There was a lack of “food production, a major determinant of local population size and societal complexity —hence an ultimate factor behind the conquest.”(Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel) Much of Europe had taken to farming, while the populations in undiscovered lands were living in harmony with the earth as hunter/gatherer societies. The impact of Western colonization and imperialism on indigenous peoples worldwide was intense and devastating. Dispossession of land, loss of cultural heritage, introduction of diseases, violence, forced labor, and cultural assimilation were all common and terrible themes. Genocide, slavery, ecological damage were also prevalent. Indigenous people were no match for the diseases that farmers of Europe brought to the world. “The major killers of humanity throughout our recent history—smallpox, flu, tuberculosis*malaria, plague, measles, and cholera—are infectious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals, even though most of the microbes responsible for our own epidemic illnesses are paradoxically now almost confined to humans.”( Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel p196-197)

Survival of the Richest

If I could tell the entire world one thing, it would be this: Greed is an antiquated negative trait that arose out of a need for survival. By definition, it is only utilized to ensure the survivability of one’s self over others. We now live in a world of plentiful resources, deep philosophy, amazing technology, and a world population that craves peace, happiness, comfort, and autonomy above all else. Now is not only the time to ensure humanity’s survival, but also to allow humanity to truly thrive. To do so, we must turn away from the tragedies of the past and look to the future. We need to exchange our mirrors for windows, and look outside to our neighbors and offer assistance where needed. Continuing to hold more resources than any one person or family could use in multiple lifetimes is a luminous beacon to the world that you value your own life above all other life on this planet. The upper echelon view themselves as gods amongst men. But, the truth is, we have all survived equally and are here together, now.

Steve Johnson is a retired saltwater fisherman who has exchanged his rod and reel for pen and paper. His stories and articles range from observations of the world to fiction and back again. He enjoys spending time with his wife, kids, and grandkids in their hometown in Maine. Seeing the world through the eyes of children has added life and purpose to his writing.

Israel, Palestine, and Feeling Unsafe

By Kenn Orphan

I just watched a child’s last breath. Lying on a gurney, bloodied and terrified. Red pools forming under his head. Eyes glazing over with the unmistakable shroud of death. This is Rafah. This is what is happening now.

And yet, I keep seeing people say they feel “unsafe” because of the mere existence of encampments on university campuses. Feeling unsafe because others are protesting a genocide. And I think about what it actually means to be unsafe. Is there anything more unsafe than being displaced, starved, endlessly bombed, shot at, or buried alive?

I think of all the universities that have been obliterated in Gaza. Of all the professors that have been slaughtered. How safe are the students who once attended them? I think of the mass graves found in hospital courtyards. Bodies with zip-tied wrists, catheters, medical gowns covered hastily with waste and mud. Bodies of children, old people, the sick and the medical teams who once assisted them. If you’ve done any work in human rights, you understand the horror that the term “mass grave” imbues. They are the absolute markers of atrocity.

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Some have wasted no time reminding us that this is simply the “reality of war”. But is this really a war? I cannot recall another war where one side was able to so easily shut off the water mains, the electricity, the food and medicine shipments at will. If it is a war, I wonder where the soldiers on the other side are. Because I haven’t seen them either. I haven’t seen the other side’s tanks or drones or destroyers or aircrafts. I’ve only seen children, the elderly, the sick and the starving.

But I have seen soldiers. Soldiers from one side of this so-called “conflict”. They have been posting endless videos of themselves smashing children’s toys, defecating in kitchens, and parading around in the lingerie of women who have vanished. I’ve seen them making wedding proposals and holding podcasts on the rubble of bombed out apartment buildings. I’ve seen them hauling off jewelry, clothes and money. I’ve seen them firing on people waving white flags or who were simply crossing a road.

Much of the media, pundits and many politicians of all political persuasions have been wasting no time demonizing the student protests. They keep telling us how they make some people feel unsafe. And they continually tell us that this all started on October 7th. That this is a “retaliatory war”. And it’s true that terrible things were done on October 7th. But they never mention the 80 years prior to that day. They never mention apartheid and forced displacement and night raids and indefinite detention of children and home demolitions and settler attacks and a crippling blockade. Wouldn’t those things make anyone feel perpetually unsafe?

The assault on Rafah has begun. Millions of starving, sick and displaced civilians are in harms way with no where to go. And yet I keep hearing pundits, politicians and the media demonize students for simply demanding that their schools stop funding it. And wringing their hands over some people feeling unsafe because of those demands.

I cannot help but think of that little boy I just saw die on a gurney. I’m pretty sure he would’ve gladly traded places with any of the people who keep saying they feel unsafe because there are some nonviolent protests on some university campuses.

A Decolonial Approach to Mental Healthcare

By Aprotim C Bhowmik, Titilayo F Odedele, and Temitope T Odedele

Would the field of psychiatry hold firm against time and place? If the holy book, the DSM-5 [1], were written in a different century, in a different society, would the diagnosis and treatment of common psychiatric disorders be different? The answer, according to many, would be unequivocally in the affirmative, as psychiatry—and in particular, the DSM-5—is inextricably bound to politico-economic contexts and cultural norms/practices. So, perhaps a more specific and important question is—does the DSM-5, being a largely Western written text, contribute negatively to our understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of psychiatric disorders?

Psychiatric diagnosis

For those who have not cracked open a copy of the DSM-5, it consists primarily of diagnostic criteria for common psychiatric disorders—ranging from affective disorders (e.g., depression and bipolar disorder) to psychotic disorders (e.g., schizophrenia) to personality disorders, and the intersection thereof. Consider, for instance, the diagnosis of attention-deficit / hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which can be classified into two types: inattentive and hyperactive. Diagnostic criteria for the former include difficulty following instructions, distractibility, and disorganization; for the latter include excessive talkativeness, inability to sit still, and inability to remain quiet. These symptoms of inattention and/or hyperactivity can be viewed as interruptions of productivity, either of the person with ADHD or of the people around them.

Consider, again, the diagnoses of depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. The diagnosis and treatment of these conditions is often indicated when activities of daily living (ADLs) are interrupted. And while that threshold makes logical sense, it would also be reasonable to ask why that threshold exists. The answer is that ADLs are often considered individual tasks, not communal or shared ones. As such, the aforementioned disorders are often brought to the attention of clinicians when occupational function is reduced—causing a decrease in productivity of both the person and the associated workforce.

Supplementary to these diagnostic criteria is the biopsychosocial formulation, a construction often used by psychiatric clinicians to understand the intersection of biological, psychological, and social phenomena that result in a patient’s diagnosis. [2] Common biological components include genetic contributions to disease, such as the heritability of illnesses like bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder. And while the biological basis of these illnesses is evidence-based, there is also evidence for an environmental/social influence of these biological factors via epigenetics (i.e., the molecular silencing of DNA due to environmental factors). One example is the heritability of anxiety via epigenetic alteration, a phenomenon that has been connected to the presence of increased anxiety in the descendants of enslaved Black people in the US (dubbed “Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome”). [3] 

Other social factors within the biopsychosocial formulation that contribute to the pathophysiology of psychiatric disease include neglect (which could look different in societies where responsibility for children is shared beyond the biological parents); inaccessibility to health care (which could look different if profit was not a primary motive in service provision); drug use (which often perseveres due to lack of medical care); housing instability (which could also look different if a profit motive was not attached to a basic human need); and incarceration (rates of which are distinctly high in the US due to profit motives).

In short, in both the diagnostic criteria of and the biopsychosocial formulation for common psychiatric disorders, we see two common features: (1) interruptions to productivity as an indication for diagnosis/treatment, and (2) individual, rather than communal, systems of care that contribute to illness (e.g., privatization of services that address basic human needs, and/or lack of shared responsibility for different kinds of care).

Reconceptualization of psychiatric disease

How can our understanding of these two common features of psychiatric diagnostic criteria inform our approach to mental healthcare? We might ask why these common features exist, and when—if ever—they were different. The answer: We know that productivity and the relationship between the individual and the community were different at multiple times and places throughout the past and in the present:

Before the land known as the United States was colonized, many indigenous communities lived on it, and it is well-documented that these nations and communities cared for children together, with an emphasis on the extended family. Tasks like childcare, food production, and healthcare were shared responsibilities, and everyone would receive the healthcare that was available. In the case of wrongdoing, survivors were centered, and perpetrators were moved into alternative spaces where they were provided with food, shelter, education, and other necessary elements of rehabilitation— before eventually being reintegrated into society. [4]

In Burkina Faso, between 1983 and 1987, President Thomas Sankara emphasized communal systems of care. His tenure resulted in communal food distribution, an increase in the building of hospitals and access to healthcare, and the widespread construction of wells for clean water. And within these 4 years (before being ousted and murdered by a coup likely backed by France and other Western powers), he increased the literacy rate from 11 to 73%. [5]

Similar increases in communal food distribution and healthcare access were seen in times and places like Castro’s Cuba, and currently in Kerala state in India and in Vietnam, where increased healthcare access has been connected with low COVID rates, and increased safety net programs connected with improved food distribution. Cuba in particular is still famous for its medical programs, producing physicians who are trained in the quality provision of universal healthcare (in spite of US sanctions). [6]

Because the medical conceptualization and pharmacology of psychiatric disease is relatively recent and contextually informed, objective data on the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric disease before the present day is scarce—but we can confidently say that people across different times and places, such as those above, would not fit our current conceptualization. Their conceptions of productivity and individual vs. communal systems of care would result in a different need for and conceptualization of psychiatry, one that is informed by different thresholds for productivity, neglect, housing, healthcare, incarceration, etc.

Perhaps more important than highlighting the difference in conceptualization is the question of whether our current conceptualization is even appropriate? Are we over-diagnosing people due to inhumanly high expectations of productivity? Are we as a society increasing the incidence of psychiatric pathology by increasing the number of people who experience neglect, housing instability, lack of healthcare access, and incarceration? This reconceptualization of psychiatric disease is not a novel one: the field of Marxist psychiatry is one that identifies capitalism (via its emphasis on the primacy of productivity and individual, rather than communal, systems of care) as a key contributor in the incidence and perseverance of psychiatric disease. This approach has been pioneered by psychiatrists, sociologists, and anthropologists—including some who are widely published on the molecular basis of psychiatric disease. [7], [8]

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A Marxist approach to psychiatry is anti-capitalist and decolonial, and a reconceptualization of psychiatric disease using this approach asserts the following: 

1. A lack of communal care, welfare programs, healthcare access, etc. often precipitates and/or perpetuates psychiatric disease.

2. Psychiatric healthcare in the West perseveres as a means of control rather than care for people who are already disadvantaged by the state and the capitalist class.

3. Patients of psychiatric disease are given the lowest-cost treatment to allow the continued productivity of the state.

Another Marxist approach to psychiatry involves the recognition that it is essential to a people’s mental well-being that that they be the “owners of their own labor.” Brazilian scholar and educator Paulo Freire emphasizes in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, that labor “constitutes part of the human person,” and that “a human being can neither be sold nor can he sell himself.” [9] The capitalist mode of production compels all workers to “sell themselves” to survive. Many pre-capitalist polities and societies, such as those found on the African continent, had no knowledge or practice of capitalist phenomena (e.g., private property or excessive accumulation of wealth due to labor exploitation and privatization). [10], [11] Due to the ultimately unknowable violence perpetrated against Black and Brown peoples that began the global capitalist system [10], people have been transformed into workers who were, and are, sadistically coerced into believing that the construct of “earning wages” is normal, rather than understanding it as a method that facilitates their exploitation and destabilizes their personhood and well-being. Dr. Joseph Nahem spoke about the harm caused by the disconnection fundamental to all labor under capitalism:

Marx rooted alienation in the very process of capitalist production itself. Marx saw the worker as alienated from the product of his labor and from work itself. Since the product belongs to the capitalist, the worker's work is "forced labor . . . not his own, but someone else's." Further, workers are estranged from their true nature as human beings because their work and its product are alien to them. They cannot feel a oneness with nature and society. Alienation is, therefore, intrinsic to capitalism and the private ownership of the means of production. [12]

Human beings must be rooted to their source, to their land, to what they produce with their labor. If people are not or are not permitted to be connected to that which is theirs and that which they produce, psychiatrist Frantz Fanon wrote that there “will be serious psycho-affective injuries and the result will be individuals without an anchor, without a horizon, colorless, stateless, rootless.” [13] If mental healthcare professionals care about the psychological wellbeing of their patients, then they will 1) stand in solidarity with those who seek to own that which they produce  and 2) pending the former, seek to reconceptualize psychiatric disease and diagnoses according to a humanizing decolonial Marxist approach that does not prioritize bourgeois cultural values like individualism, productivity, and carcerality.

Seclusion, restraint, and incarceration for psychiatric disease

Illustrated below is just one example of how the critical assertions of Marxist psychiatry rear their ugly head in the US today:

We know that people with psychiatric disease are often diagnosed and treated when ADLs and productivity are interrupted, but what happens when a patient does not respond to treatment? For many disorders, a number of medications and/or therapies is attempted, but there is a point at which patients are viewed as refractory to treatment. And for patients who are disruptive and/or violent, seclusion and restraint in padded rooms is common, despite evidence showing that these patients have PTSD between 27 and 45% of the time, along with an increase in negative symptoms like anhedonia and self-imposed alienation. [14]  Seclusion and restraint are often seen as the lowest cost, lowest-effort treatment to allow the continuation of productivity of the psychiatric unit.

When seclusion and restraint prove ineffective, incarceration is considered. Notably, 43%/44% of people in state/local prisons have a mental illness, and 66%/74% of people in federal/state prisons do not receive any mental healthcare during their stay, suggesting that there is at the very least a significant role for psychiatric care for these people. This is not surprising given that the number of psychiatric beds has decreased from 339 to 22 per 100,000 people in the US from 1955 to 2000. [15], [16]

A profit-maximizing motive is certainly present, as a psychiatric bed is $864/day, while prison is $99/day. But is it actually true that psychiatric care could decrease incarceration, or do these statistics describe people who would be incarcerated by the state regardless? A recent study matched hospital referral regions (HRRs) by zip code with jails and prisons, and looked at abrupt increases/decreases in psychiatric hospital bed capacity (by about 80-90 beds). Decreases in psychiatric bed capacity were associated with an increase of 256 inmates; increases in psychiatric bed capacity were associated with a decrease of 199 inmates—suggesting that proper, non-profit-driven psychiatric care would likely be a good fit for many incarcerated people. [16]

Studies like this one make it difficult to believe that patient care is at the heart of the US medical industry—and make it even more compelling to consider a decolonial Marxist approach. And based on an understanding of the past and present of psychiatry, it would be incomplete to assert that current psychiatric diagnosis and treatment is informed by contextual and cultural norms/practices without noting the harm that these norms/practices cause. Current heuristics of psychiatric diagnosis and treatment—and the emphasis of productivity and individual systems of care—must be scrutinized and are incompatible with adequate patient care.

Aprotim C Bhowmik (he/him) is a third-year MD/MPH student at Hofstra/Northwell School of Medicine and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. His research interests include social determinants of health and carceral health systems.

Titilayo F Odedele (she/they) is a PhD student at Northeastern University, where they also received their MS in Criminology and Criminal Justice and MA in Sociology. Her research interests include political economy of the world system, decolonial Marxism, and Pentecostalism in the Global South. She enjoys spending time with her family and dog.

Temitope T Odedele (she/her) is a psychology and biology student at the University of Massachusetts Boston who plans on a career in medicine. She enjoys reading history books and watching telenovelas.

References

1.      Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSM-5 (2017). CBS Publishers & Distributors, Pvt. Ltd.

2.      Owen G (2023). What is formulation in psychiatry? Psychol Med. 2023 Apr;53(5):1700-1707. doi: 10.1017/S0033291723000016.

3.      Jiang S, Postovit L, Cattaneo A, Binder EB, Aitchison KJ (2019). Epigenetic modifications in stress response genes associated with childhood trauma. Front Psychiatry. 2019 Nov 8;10:808. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00808.

4.      First Nations Health Authority (n.d). Our history, our health.

https://www.fnha.ca/wellness/wellness-for-first-nations/our-history-our-health.

5.      Thomas Sankara and the stomachs that made themselves heard (n.d.). Wellcome Collection. https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/Y1FlZxEAAEolDkdA.

6.      Squires N, Colville SE, Chalkidou K, Ebrahim S (2020). Medical training for universal health coverage: a review of Cuba-South Africa collaboration. Hum Resour Health. 2020 Feb 17;18(1):12. doi: 10.1186/s12960-020-0450-9.

7.      Moncrieff J (2022). The political economy of the mental health system: A Marxist analysis. Frontiers in Sociology, 6. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2021.771875.

8.      Cohen BM (2016). Psychiatric hegemony – A Marxist theory of mental illness. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46051-6.

9.      Freire P (1972). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Penguin.

10.  Du Bois WEB (1947). The world and Africa: an inquiry into the part which Africa has played in world history. Viking Press.

11.  Rodney W (1982). How Europe underdeveloped Africa. Howard University Press.

12.  Nahem J (1982). A Marxist approach to psychology and psychiatry. International Journal of

Health Services, 12(1), 151-162.

13.  Fanon F (1967). The wretched of the earth. Penguin.

14.  Chieze M, Hurst S, Kaiser S, & Sentissi O (2019). Effects of seclusion and restraint in adult psychiatry: A systematic review. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 10.

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.0049.

15.  Initiative, P. P. (n.d.). Mental health. Prison Policy Initiative.

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/research/mental_health/.

16.  Gao YN. Relationship between psychiatric inpatient beds and jail populations in the United States. J Psychiatr Pract. 2021 Jan 21;27(1):33-42. doi: 10.1097/PRA.0000000000000524.

Claudia Gay and "First Ones" in an Empire of Lies and Annihilation

[Pictured: Harvard University. Credit: BLOOMBERG]

By Kwaku Aurelien

The January 2nd announcement of Claudine Gay’s resignation from the position of President at Harvard University has caused quite a stir in American society, especially in the context of our current historical moment and the immense pressure under which Gay made her decision. Black Americans of prominence such as Jemele Hill took to social media in the short aftermath of the news coming out to defend Gay’s credentials against those who would label her an “Affirmative Action hire,” someone who made it to their position on the basis of their race rather than on merit. There are also tweets such as the one by Marc Lamont Hill below, reading, “The next president of Harvard University MUST be a Black woman.”

In response, I have a few questions for Professor Hill. For one, after all the publicized scrutiny Claudine Gay was subject to, why should a Black woman, or any Black person for that matter, want to be President of Harvard University? Is it because of the name brand value of Harvard University? How much should that matter to Black people given the hell we just saw one of our own go through in what is supposed to be a position of power? But more importantly, what does a Black woman being President of Harvard University do for Black people, or for the Black student population at Harvard, one member of which wrote in this astounding piece for the Harvard Political Review how they’ve been questioned on how they got into the university, and on how they’ve called for Harvard to stop its commemoration of slave owners and profiteers.

Malcolm X is famous for saying, “The White man will try to satisfy us with symbolic victories rather than economic equity and real justice.” My question to Marc Lamont Hill is, will a Black woman being the President of Harvard guarantee real justice for its Black students by making it more inclusive and benevolent towards them, or will that Black woman be nothing more than a symbol? 

The below clip is from a 1992 lecture delivered at Florida International University by Kwame Ture. If you don’t know him by that name, you may know him by his original name, Stokely Carmichael. In the clip, Ture — a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Black Panther Party, a founder of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) during the Civil Rights Movement, and a member of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP) upon moving to Africa — points out a gross contradiction within the Black community which persists to this day. Black people, who historically protest and battle against injustice as a mass, advance in American society strictly as individuals. Ture is adamant that if Black people struggle as a mass, the way to measure the progress of Black people in America is to evaluate whether or not the Black masses have advanced.

Advancement is measured qualitatively, not quantitatively; it is measured by the quality of life enjoyed by the Black masses, not by how many Black people do X or do Y. If the masses have not advanced, there is no progress at all. As Ture sees it, the advancement of Black individuals to prestigious jobs and positions has caused wool to be pulled over the eyes of those individuals. They become big-headed, and come to believe that by virtue of them being in their prestigious position, they are advancing the entirety of Black America.

At first listen, you might hear Ture say that there has been no progress for Black people since the 60s and think it’s a gross exaggeration of where we are and how far we’ve come. But what if I told you that, in 2008, PBS released a four-hour series called Unnatural Causes and an accompanying Health Equity Quiz, which showed that Black males in Harlem, New York had a lower life expectancy than males in Bangladesh, one of the poorest nations in the world? Or what if I told you that the median wealth of Black Americans may fall to zero by 2053 assuming current trends continue?

Taking those, among other, things into consideration, was Ture really that far off? Even if he was, the individualist way of thinking he criticizes falls apart under close inspection, and it is a way of thinking we must collectively abandon in this new year. If Claudine Gay’s experience has taught us anything it is that, in 2024, Black people still have no institutional power in America. Gay took office as Harvard’s first Black President on July 1, 2023, and by the second day of 2024, she resigned amidst the internal and external scrutiny levied her way. No Black organization in this country has power comparable to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which put its own tweet endorsing Gay’s departure from Harvard. With no institutional control, there is no way for Black people in positions of power to effectively own those positions. The position is not a right, but a privilege that can be yanked away at a whim. A good example I can provide is the wave of corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives which came about as a direct consequence of the racial justice protests in the summer of 2020. Those initiatives are largely getting rolled back, corporations’ alibi for their withdrawal being that they have come under economic and political pressure from the right wing. I say none of what I say as an indictment of Claudine Gay, but rather as a call to action for my Black readers to demand better alternatives for themselves. Or alternatively, to put our heads together so that we may create better alternatives for ourselves.

There are Black faces in high faces worth condemning; however, therein lies the meaning of the title of this article: “Claudine Gay and ‘First Ones’ in an Empire of Lies & Annihilation.” Amidst a genocide in Gaza armed and funded by the United States government, within that government are the First Black Woman Vice President; the First Black Secretary of Defense, a Raytheon board member supposed to have been recused from the company for four years; and the First Black White House Press Secretary.

Palestinians, who have demonstrated solidarity with Black Americans against police violence on numerous occasions amidst their ethnic cleansing, had to listen to Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a Black woman and President Biden’s Ambassador to the United Nations, say that Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions has no place at the UN, and more recently to veto a UN resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza with an unconditional release of all hostages on behalf of the United Empire. They have had to watch Karine Jean-Pierre attack Benjamin Netanyahu and AIPAC when it was convenient only to now be the one of the most visible spokespeople for an administration whose belligerence against them is finally making Americans pay attention to their plight.

It behooves us to care about the Palestinians’ plight, because the violence visited on them comes back to do us harm here at home. Black activists in Atlanta against the construction of “Cop City” have for years highlighted the relationship between the Atlanta Police Foundation and the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program. GILEE is a policing exchange allowing for training between various sects of Georgia police and the IDF. One of the grosser tactics the IDF has exchanged with Georgia police under GILEE is firearm “racking.” To inspire fear, Israeli officers will draw the slide on their gun all the way back and then quickly release to send off a misfired round. This is what is being taught to Georgia officers, and you don’t have to be woke to know that Georgia’s Black residents are the ones who are going to be harassed the most with this behavior. Atlanta’s mayor, Andre Dickens, is a Black man, who identified as a progressive in the 2021 mayoral election, but who now pushes Cop City forward despite the sheer opposition to it from Weelaunee Forest communities, which are predominantly Black and/or low-income.

I tend to agree with the tweet below. The summer of 2020, which should have been an inflection point in this country’s history, became an opportunity upon which many Black people, middle class Black people especially, capitalized. “Black excellence,” which should have been a meaningful phrase illustrating the very best qualities of the Black community, became reason for Black individuals to perform acts they would nominally criticize White people for doing. These types will say that Black death has become commodified, and in the same vein become profiteers themselves.

“Black excellence” has become an effective tool in alienating Black individuals from the larger Black community. Take Claudine Gay; her role as university president effectively alienated her from the Black student population, members of which felt as though their right to free speech was unprotected and that they were easy targets of doxxing for their pro-Palestine advocacy. “Black excellence” has also made it exceedingly difficult for bourgeois Black folk to empathize with the plight of the Black poor and working class because they have developed opposing class interests and are unable or unwilling to put themselves in the shoes of those who don’t have what they have, and who bear the biggest burden of racism. I say this as a member of the Black middle class, mind you.

Too many of us have been or are all too eager to become Buffalo Soldiers for Empire, and we need to be called on it. Because if we intend on demonstrating true solidarity with Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Haiti and elsewhere, as so many are now claiming to do in their Instagram stories, it starts with us scrutinizing the role of Black faces in high places in perpetuating American imperial crimes.

We must acknowledge that our freedom fighters – which include names like Kwame Ture, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Ida B. Wells, Ella Baker, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur – never wanted this for us. These individuals opposed imperialism not only on the grounds that our struggle is interconnected with those the world over, but also on the grounds that making war is morally reprehensible. They understood that humanity is indivisible, and that one segment of humanity being discriminated against automatically diminished the rest. They fought to elevate us, so that we could elevate humanity. Proof of which, in his last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), Martin Luther King stated, “The wealthy nations of the world must promptly initiate a massive, sustained Marshall Plan for Asia, Africa and South America. If they would allocate just 2 percent of their gross national product annually for a period of ten or twenty years for the development of the underdeveloped nations, mankind would go a long way toward conquering the ancient enemy, poverty.” This would represent a constructive use of the United States’ vast resources, and it is indicative of the type of work we should be fighting for in the modern day. It is up to us now to follow the path our ancestors laid out for us, but we can only do it by honoring what they truly stood for, rather than just paying lip service to it.

We have to have the courage to speak truth to power, without regard for the consequences we think it may have in our social and professional lives. After what just happened to Dr. Claudine Gay, President of Harvard University, what excuse do any of us have to be afraid?

Kwaku Aurelien is a student at UConn School of Law and an intern for Friends of the Congo (@congofriends on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook), a Washington D.C. based advocacy organization for the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Art and Artificial Intelligence: A Pivotal Moment for Unions

[Pictured: Striking writers and actors picket outside Paramount studios in Los Angeles on Friday, July 14, 2023. Credit: AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)

By Bavand Karim

Last summer, the premiere episode of Marvel's Secret Invasion featured opening credits crafted by artificial intelligence. While reviews were mixed, the credits were objectively effective for exploring AI’s potential as a storytelling tool. Perhaps more importantly from the studio’s perspective, the production costs were likely much less than an agency like The Mill or an artist like Daniel Kleinman would demand.

It’s no coincidence that Marvel’s use of AI occurred amid union-led strikes by Hollywood’s writers and directors. And as studios were negotiating with creative unions, they were simultaneously rolling out the tools that might eventually replace many of those creatives. At the time of the negotiations, it was unclear what impact AI would have on the entertainment industry. But the prevailing wisdom seemed to support the general anxiety among insiders that an industry-wide shift was coming.

By November 2023, Dreamworks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg predicted that AI will replace 90% of artists on animated films within three years. It may even be sooner. In December, Google released Gemini, its most advanced AI tool to date. One of Gemini’s advancements is the ability to process up to an hour of video and 11 hours of audio in mere minutes. Although Google warns that processing times vary, their demonstration of long-context understanding analyzes a 44-minute video in under one minute. Earlier this month, OpenAI released Sora, a powerful new tool that generates one-minute video clips based on text prompts. Sora is what is known as a diffusion model. It converts text to videos that resemble static noise, and then removes the noise over several passes. While these emerging AI video tools are not perfect, they are compelling enough in their first-generation iterations to provoke meaningful questions about the future of all creative industries.

It was less than a year ago that we began speculating whether AI visualization tools would disrupt the artistic foundation of Hollywood. Now, it appears the event horizon is upon us.

Last year’s strikes were a watershed moment for unions who were forced to acknowledge the wide uncertainty that the looming threat of AI has introduced into Hollywood. The Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers’ (AMPTP) agreement with the the Director’s Guild of America (DGA) defines AI as “not a person” and clarifies that it will not replace the role of any DGA member. However, it allows studios to use AI as long as a “consultation” takes place with the director, which has stirred debate around the validity and integrity of the agreement.

The Writer’s Guild (WGA) similarly resolved their dispute with new guidelines prohibiting the use of AI in creating written source material such as scripts for films or TV shows.

No other artistic guild or technical union has yet defined how AI will be regulated within their respective domain. The Art Director’s Guild (ADG), which represents title and graphic artists, one of hundreds of International Association of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE) chapters nationwide that could potentially be impacted by AI, released a statement expressing concern over AI video generators, but the path forward remains unclear. While animation industry professionals are unionizing at a record rate, IATSE Local 839 — the Animation Guild — still has fewer than 10,000 members, meaning that the vast majority of the animation industry’s workforce of more than 200,000 artists, assistants, coordinators, and managers are not unionized.

As more major studios utilize AI, the inevitable result will be a wave of disenfranchised and marginalized artists. This industry shift will produce a flood of new independent content as those artists attempt to find their own audiences. While studios like Dreamworks and Pixar are cutting costs in the short term by exploring the benefits of AI, they are also creating a new generation of pissed-off indie competitors.

It feels nefarious of Disney, which owns Pixar, to use the stories most beloved by audiences to sideline workers. The most popular tentpole story franchises like Marvel and Star Wars likely won't be impacted too seriously by viewer backlash. Diehard fans love those stories and they pass that love through generations. So audiences will continue to watch those films and TV series even if they incorporate AI. Disney is surely hoping so. And they probably don't consider those disenfranchised artists, taken independently or collectively, to pose any kind of real economic threat to their business model.

Can human artists use AI to produce their own creative work? Sure. But they can't sell it in the same way. The independent market is nothing like a studio job, which typically offers long-term stability, training, networking and advancement opportunities, health and retirement benefits, and — most importantly — an audience. Copyright laws prevent indie artists from accessing the most desirable story franchises without the impending doom of litigation, and the privatization and monopolization of distribution outlets prevent all artists, disenfranchised or not, from ever being compensated equivalent to the true value of their labor. 

The next three years will be pivotal for the entertainment industry and will test the power of America’s labor unions. Will Disney’s move toward AI produce a greater awareness of, if not a fully-fledged social movement against, these AI tools exactly because of the threat that they pose to human labor? Right now, there is little stopping major studios like Disney from engaging AI across the range of artistic disciplines involved in media production — titles, graphics, story generation, script writing, character design, 3D modeling, environment design and lighting design, editing, visual effects, sound design, music composition — potentially impacting hundreds of thousands of people around the globe.

Disney’s strategy is nothing new. Corporations have always primed consumers to accept socially deleterious but profitable change. During the Industrial Revolution, automobile manufacturers sold individuals on independence and freedom, and gave them an entire infrastructure built around private individual transportation with little regulation resulting in disconnected, unwalkable, traffic-plagued communities. At the dawn of the information age, technology companies promised us enhanced efficiency, connectedness, and socialization. Now it’s apparent how modern electronics and software invade our privacy, harvest and sell our personal information, micromanage our productivity, and erode democracy. The proliferation of AI into mainstream life — even through such an innocuous injection point as entertainment — has the potential for much more destructive erosion of our personal freedoms. Will society nonetheless embrace it, only to later realize the damage done? Or is Disney betting that, as in the past, we will grow to love the chains that bind us?

Make no mistake: once major corporations establish a model for displacing human labor with AI, it will be a global phenomenon. Workforce reduction will occur in every industry to satisfy capitalism’s demand for infinite growth. The Big Four consulting firms will justify it and The Wall Street Journal will report that it was great for the economy while thousands of Americans find themselves unemployed. As they have throughout history, the powers that be are reforming the economy to their own benefit. The rest of us will be left to deal with the consequences.

Multinational corporate monopolies determined to undermine workers’ and human rights in the name of profit must be met with equivalent, equally resolved multinational resistance. Indie artists should leverage as much power as possible and cooperate with unions across the globe to foster government support against the ongoing exploitation and oppression of the working class. Society’s hope may be that in the face of continued oppression, America is able to form a new political party that represents and protects workers, and promises them an equal share of a company’s revenue as if they were shareholders.

We must fight for a world in which technology, including AI, is liberatory — socially and economically — and not corrosive. AI must be a tool for the greater good, not for the profit of the few at the expense of the many.

For an industry that markets and congratulates itself for telling authentic human stories, the result of film’s shift to AI will ironically be narratives about humanity produced with minimal human input through a process that economically disenfranchised as many humans as possible for the sake of profit. This cataclysm will force us to question not just the impact of late-stage capitalism on human creativity but whether creation is a uniquely human trait at all.

Soon, audiences will pack theaters to watch a film produced exclusively by AI. On the screen, a long-deceased Harrison Ford will star as a young Indiana Jones. As he holds up a copy of the original Raiders of the Lost Ark, written by a human and produced with practical effects, the AI Indy flashes a sardonic smile and says, “This belongs in a museum.”

Bavand Karim is a creative executive and academic residing in Los Angeles, California. He is the founder and chairperson of CINE and Lost Winds Entertainment, and co-director of the film program at the College of the Canyons.

Bob Dylan at the Villa Diodati

By David Polanski

Not traditionally understood as a gothic artist, the writings of Bob Dylan nonetheless embody what David McNally identifies as the genre’s most radical functions: to offer unsettling imagery and subversive narratives as a means to “disturb the naturalisation of capitalism” (a system wherein “individual survival requires selling our life-energies to people on the market”), and to counter Liberalism’s denial of such “quotidian horrors” by insisting instead “that something strange, indeed life-threatening, is at work in our world” – that “something is happening” and we need to know exactly what it is. From the depraved American landscape of 1965’s “Tombstone Blues” (wherein Jack the Ripper “sits at the head of the chamber of commerce,” and government officials seek to ritualistically resurrect Paul Revere’s horse), to the apocalyptic Eden of 2006’s “Ain’t Talkin” (whose Milton-esque protagonist wanders the world seeking vengeance against greedy speculators and the god-like elites who’ll “crush you with wealth and power”), Dylan has spent more than sixty years wielding the very same “armoury of de-familiarising techniques” that McNally attributes to Shelley, Marx and other gothic artists in an effort to undermine “the structures of denial that dominate conscious life in modernity,” and to remind his fans that life under capitalism will never be anything less than “bizarre, shocking, monstrous.”

As capitalism now lumbers through its most zombified phase, it is perhaps no coincidence that Dylan’s most recent engagement with the genre is also his most overt: 2020’s “My Own Version of You,” an unconcealed retelling of Frankenstein that mirrors Shelley’s allegorical use of the creation of physical life to represent the political construction of Liberal humanism (and its crude distinction between the “species of man” and the “race of devils” that must be annihilated if the bourgeoisie are to sleep well at night). Like Shelley’s “Victor,” Dylan’s narrator believes he has struck the ideal balance between dispassionate methodology and “decency and common sense” (that his naked self-interest is “for the benefit of all mankind”), and like Victor, Dylan’s narrator views human history as an arc that bends directly towards him, one whose greatest tragedies (which he and Victor both identify as slavery in the ancient world and the colonization of the Americas) could have been prevented had the leaders of such times felt “the way that I feel.” Most damningly, both characters freely confess their intent to create not merely a new human, but a new conception of what it means to be human – in Victor’s case, “a new species” possessed by a childlike devotion to him as their father; for Dylan’s narrator, someone akin to a “robot commando,” someone who’ll play the piano for him, make him laugh, then deliver the heads of his enemies on a silver tray.

Yet, whereas Shelley’s then-Modern Prometheus fixated on the corruption and politicization of the physiological sciences, Dylan’s target is more technocratic in nature, his narrator an embodiment of those today (such as Steven Pinker, Cass Sunstein, and the cast at Vox.com) who practice a reanimated form of 19th Century scientism. Scientism, as Jackson Lears explains, represents a grotesque “redefinition of science” from “an experimental way of knowing” to “a source of certainty,” one that that “ruthlessly pares down complex events to a single mechanistic causal explanation,” and whose disciples not only reject “the traditional tools of humanistic inquiry” (e.g. “archival research, close reading, attention to variety”) but also “any attempt to understand the mind through introspection.” These qualities are on abundant display in Dylan’s narrator, who believes his master plan to be free of “insignificant details,” who considers himself immune to the vulgar passions of the lowly masses, yet who cannot help but confess to the imperious urges that linger beneath the surface of his calculations and his spreadsheets (“I pick a number between one and two/and I ask myself what would Julius Caesar do”). Later, Dylan’s narrator indulges in a sadistic fantasy wherein Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx – two figures whose concepts clash violently with the scientistic approach – are being tortured in hell, whipped with a “raw-hide lash” until the skin is torn “from their backs.”

However, to focus solely upon Dylan’s forays into gothic terrain, or even upon his more overt critiques of our technocratic overlords (from the number-crunching imperialists marked for death in “Masters of War,” to the “Chicago-school” economists – also marked for death – in “Workingman’s Blues #2”) is to miss the haunted forest for the gnarled trees. As I demonstrate in a forthcoming article in Peace, Land, and Bread, the near-entirety of Dylan’s body of work has been infused with an artistic and a political consciousness that is diametrically opposed to the counter-revolutionary reformism at the heart of the Liberal tradition. Whereas the historical origins of Liberalism are “aristocratic” in nature (developed in response to the French Revolution and the events of 1848 as a means to discourage the “dangerous classes” at home and abroad from “interfering with the process of capital accumulation”), Dylan has spent his sixty-two year career casting his lot not with “ye gifted kings and queens,” but with “The Wretched of the Earth, My brothers of the flood,” composing songs that call upon the dispossessed masses to reject the political ideologies designed to defend the predominate order, to boldly and perpetually reinvent our personal and political perceptions of the world, and to accept the reality that violent resistance is required to liberate ourselves from a world that is (by design) “ruled by violence.” Although it is unlikely that Dylan embraces a revolutionary ethos as part of his personal identity (he’s become quite the corporate lackey in recent years, and his 1983 defense of the colonization of Palestine represents an ethical lapse impossible to ignore), he has nonetheless fulfilled his duty as an artist by exploring fields of perception and emotion that exist beyond his own intellectual and spiritual boundaries. As such, we can identify innumerable parallels between the anti-systemic, anti-authoritarian, and relentlessly unsettling spirit of Dylan’s six-decade body of work, and the “revolutionary consciousness” that voices such as Marx, Mariátegui, and George Jackson (to whom Dylan composed a loving ode in 1971) have all deemed a prerequisite to the invention of more communal forms of political relations.

That being said, a gothic approach to the topic of “Bob Dylan” allows us not merely to identify Dylan as a slayer of Liberal demons (a snake in the garden of the capitalist world order), but to cast a tormenting light upon the uniquely vampiric realm of Bob Dylan critical studies, a realm long haunted by un-dead practices and presumptions, and long teeming with bourgeois scholars who have spent decades draining the revolutionary spirit from Dylan’s body of work. Whereas, for example, my recent paper for Affirmations: of the Modern positions Dylan’s intertextual engagement with biblical and so-called “Classical” literature as a systematic critique of the autocratic beliefs that pervade such texts, tenured fuddy-duddies such as Raphael Falco, Richard Thomas, and Christopher Ricks depict Dylan’s relationship to ancient literature as fundamentally reverent (as Dylan honoring, rather than interrogating, the Western world’s imagined cultural heritage). Quite similarly, whereas my forthcoming paper for Peace, Land, and Bread identifies within Dylan’s writings a fundamental rejection of the American political project (demonstrating how Dylan frames American history as a “Godot-like nightmare,” and America itself as “exceptional only in its propensity for sadism”), Dylan Review founder Lisa O’Neill-Sanders depicts Dylan’s writings as concerned not with America’s systemic and foundational rot, but with mere acts of “injustice,” while Graley Herren imagines Dylan as waging a “battle” on behalf of something Herren terms the American “freedom movement” (an arch of history, Herren claims, propelled not by revolutionaries such as Dylan muse Jackson, but by reformist icons like “Lincoln, the Kennedys, and King”). Most damningly, whereas I identify “My Own Version of You” as a gothic critique of corrupt scientific inquiry and Liberal hubris, a who’s who of prominent “Bobcats” (Michael Gray, Paul Haney, Laura Tenschert, and Dr. Thomas yet again) have reduced it to a winking communiqué from Dylan to his fans as to the nature of his creative process (“a literary Frankenstein,” “Dylan’s ars poetica,” a “personal” reflection of “the obsessive pursuit” to “put the parts together and create something new,” as well as an opportunity for Dylan to vent his sadistic “grudges” against Freud and Marx).

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Far more troubling, however, are the attempts by influential ideologues such as Greil Marcus, Cass Sunstein, and Sean Wilentz to redirect (in a most Orwellian manner) Dylan’s anti-systemic, anti-authoritarian gaze away from the Liberal/capitalist order that has reigned predominate for the entirety of Dylan’s life and career, and subsequently towards those of us who have embraced the oft-criminalized perspectives of the anti-colonial and anti-capitalist Left. Wilentz, for example, begins his Bob Dylan in America with a tortured parallel between Dylan’s evolution as a songwriter and the personal journey of composer Aaron Copland (with whom Dylan has no substantial relationship) from youthful Communist flirt to “staunch political Liberal,” then spends the next three-hundred pages depicting Dylan as a kind of counter-revolutionary troll (as warning fans of the danger posed by “high-toned intellectualism,” as whitesplaining the true nature of inequality to the experienced activists at the “March on Washington,” and as hoisting an American flag in Paris in ‘66 so as to teach the future participants of May ‘68 a lesson about the real America). As for Sunstein, his recent keynote address at the 2023 World of Bob Dylan conference offered a strategically reductive portrayal of the revolutionary organizations active across the globe throughout the 1960s (one that erased their respective histories, methods, and goals), then positioned these now-indistinct “political movements” (many of whom were directly influenced by Dylan’s artistry) as the monochromatic antithesis to Dylan’s freewheelin’ spirit. Last, but never least, Marcus injected his influential The Old, Weird America with sentiments as jingoistic as anything uttered by the Trumpian Right, depicting the America of the 1960s as haunted by the spectre of nihilistic radicals hell-bent on rejecting democracy, rock n’ roll, apple pie, and the “covenant with God” established at Plymouth Rock, then portraying Dylan (in defiance of such devilry) as delving into the archives of the American folk tradition so as to resurrect a long-buried “national experience” without which (Marcus breathlessly warns) “all bonds” will be “dissolved,” and “people will begin to kill each other, even their own children.”

Like Edmund Burke before them, who co-opted gothic tropes in his Reflections on the Revolution in France so as to slander the radicals with “charges of cannibalism, sorcery, grave-robbing and alchemy,” Marcus, Sunstein, and Wilentz appropriate Dylan’s revolutionary spirit for counter-revolutionary ends – and like Burke, their arguments are a bluff, premised on the presumption that no one will call them out for their rhetorical distortions or dearth of historical or textual evidence. Unfortunately for Burke, that’s exactly what Thomas Paine did in his Rights of Man, offering what David McNally describes as a “deliberate provocation” wherein aristocratic landowners were portrayed as “cannibal-monsters,” and the revolutionary forces presented as “slayers” of such spoiled, snooty beasts. Fortunately for Marcus, Sunstein, and Wilentz, the realm of Dylan studies has long represented a safe haven for those harboring reactionary or otherwise counter-revolutionary sentiment (with nary a Jacobin, nor even a Girondin in sight).

It was not until recently, for example, that the decades of “racism, misogyny, [and] homophobia” espoused by influential biographer Clinton Heylin was met with a substantial public rebuke (by Laura Tenschert, in fact), and my forthcoming paper for Peace, Land, and Bread represents the first systematic rebuttal of the crude manner in which Gray, Heylin, Marcus, Wilentz, Peter Doggett, Will Kaufman, and others have for years sought to dismiss Dylan’s ode to George Jackson (and to delegitimize Jackson himself). More to the point, there exists within Dylan studies a creeping anti-intellectualism, as evidenced, in large part, by the growing antipathy among Dylan scholars towards the practice of critique. Critique, as Robert Tally notes, represents the rigorous, yet thoroughly joyous (and unabashedly political) practice of “careful reading, considered meditation, and creative speculation” through which we “affirm our collective and individual freedom,” and “imagine alternatives to our intolerable circumstances” (and without which we allow the “crassly utilitarian” opponents of the humanities “to set the terms of the debate”). Amid the political violence, existential risk, and “boundless mystifications” that mark these modern times, Tally rightly declares that the denizens of our scholarly institutions should be loudly and proudly calling for “more critique, more theory, and indeed more critical theory.” Within the un-dead dominion of Dylan studies, however, a parade of prominent figures have adopted postcritical postures centered around “surface reading,” “thin description,” and reader-response criticism, and all for the supposed benefits of the “ordinary” fan. Sean Latham, for example, has suggested there may be no “way of understanding” Dylan’s songs other than “within the moment and context of performance itself,” Anne-Marie Mai has offered a Felski-inspired call for scholars to produce “emotionally engaged,” chatroom-esque depictions of our relationship to Dylan’s music, Douglas Brinkley has decried (without offering a single example for us to scrutinize) “a new wave of over-intellectualized critical writing” that he believes has “mummified” Dylan’s artistry, and Raphael Falco has positioned his Dylan Review (the only peer-reviewed journal focused on Dylan studies) as an Edenic utopia devoted to the promotion of “coeval” perspectives as opposed to critical “quibbles” (with Falco going as far as to warn fellow scholars of the intrusion of devilish figures bearing “glozing promises” that we may yet obtain what Falco claims is “too much knowledge”). Even Heylin-slayer Tenschert has accompanied her otherwise laudable efforts to expand Dylan’s fanbase with vague denouncements of unnamed elites who have supposedly “over-intellectualized” Dylan’s music and rendered him inaccessible to younger fans (claims which echo the faux-populism of the postcritical crowd, along with the tendency of Felski and company to conjure elitist, tweed-suited strawmen with which to do battle).

So what is to be done?

In no uncertain terms, to consider the realm of Dylan studies by way of a gothic perspective is to cast aside any and all delusions of reform, and approach the matter instead as one would approach the nosferatu itself: with a sharp stake (“hardened by charring it in the fire”), a heavy iron hammer, and murderous intent. As such, my scholarly project aims not merely for the resurrection of Dylan’s long-buried revolutionary attributes (from his gothic inclinations, to his relationship to George Jackson, to his intertextual repurposing of ancient colonial and imperialistic texts for decolonial and decapitalist ends), but for the ruthless critique of the practices and practitioners most responsible for this act of critical and political vivisepulture. My recent article for Affirmations: of the Modern (one which analyzed Dylan’s six-decade engagement with the Garden of Eden motif in relation to the revolutionary theories of Franco Berardi) represented an initial volley, and my forthcoming paper on the intimate and multifaceted relationship between the respective writings of Dylan and George Jackson will pour copious amounts of fuel on this purifying fire. A monograph on such subjects will follow in due time, along with battles fought on other fronts (reviews, conferences, and online debates when appropriate), with the goal being nothing less than the utter decimation of Bob Dylan critical studies as we know it today.

To identify the spiritual and intellectual predecessor to this approach is to look no further than Huey Newton’s gothic-tinged depiction of “Ballad of a Thin Man” as a scathing deconstruction of the voyeuristic impulses of the white bourgeoisie toward Black America (as well as a celebration of the terror experienced by such oglers when they realize that those they gawk at view them as the real freaks), along with his portrayal of Dylan’s “Mr. Jones” as representative of the politicians, cops, and businessmen who “cause the conditions which make it necessary for people to go to these lengths to survive,” then “pay to see the performance the people put on.” Just as Newton rightly identified decolonial and decapitalist attributes that exist in Dylan’s writings regardless of Dylan’s awareness or intent (then thanked Dylan for all his music meant “to the Black Panther Party, and to [he and Bobby Seale] personally”), I seek to map the uncharted radicalism of Dylan’s artistry in a manner unbeholden to Dylan’s personal beliefs or approval, and I express my solemn debt to Newton for the still-smoldering critical trail he blazed. Along the same lines, the ideal modern model for this project is undoubtably Andrew Culp’s remorseless reclamation of the legacy of French theorist Gilles Deleuze from claws of reactionary factions such as the Israeli army, Silicon Valley shills, and Slavoj Žižek. Just as I aim to wrest Dylan’s artistry away from those who have recast him as a prophet of positivity, a guru of Liberal universalism, an apolitical humanist, and a bearer of the torch of Western civilization itself, Culp boldly confronts those who have reduced Deleuze to “a naively affirmative thinker of connectivity” (“the lava lamp saint of ‘California Buddhism’”) with the tormenting vision of “a different Deleuze, a darker one,” a Deleuze discovered only “when we escape the chapel choir of joy for the dark seclusion of the crypt” (a wild-eyed voice in the wilderness advocating a “revolutionary negativity” through which we wish “a happy death” upon the “calcified political forms” that sustain the capitalist world-system).

More to the point, the spiritual and intellectual antithesis to my project is undoubtably the postcritical utopia that is the Dylan Review. In addition to his pastoral vision for this particular publication, Raphael Falco actually had the nerve to ask fellow scholars (in the journal’s inaugural issue, no less) to consider whether the act of “systematic study” might hasten the “death” of Dylan’s influence as an artist, or would otherwise stifle the capacity of Dylan’s music to produce “spontaneous experiences of shared intimacy” between himself and his listeners. With such a reactionary foundation, it should surprise no one that the Dylan Review has come to embody a kind of intellectual “safe space” wherein amiable but critically mundane ruminations on Dylan’s artistry mingle with regressive efforts to immortalize the un-dead practices and presumptions that have long-haunted this critical realm (especially as they relate to Dylan’s intertextual practices and his relationship to political topics). It likewise came as no surprise to me (but I needed to be able to say that I tried) that when I submitted to the Dylan Review in 2020 an early draft of my forthcoming paper for Peace, Land, and Bread (an unapologetically “systematic study” of Dylan’s relationship to George Jackson, one which most assuredly met the journal’s stated expectations for rigor, structure, and originality, and which spoke directly to their call for papers regarding "the special topic of political authority and race in Dylan’s work"), I was informed by one of its editors that the draft had not merely been rejected, but had been deemed unworthy of even being sent out to reviewers. Far more telling than the rejection itself was the journal’s refusal to justify their decision, with the editor in question responding to my query with an assertion of the journal’s right to reject submissions (as if I was contesting such an obvious point), as well as a declaration of its desire for confidentiality. Evasions of this nature, of course, are reflective of the trepidation universal among those who construct such arcadian states, whose borders are invariably porous. To put it another way (to put it in terms that Falco might understand), such a fair foundation he has laid whereon to build their ruin.

Accordingly, I stand on the lookout for lost souls laboring within this fragile Xanadu whose minds might be excited by the prospect of the decimation of Dylan studies as we know it – and as always, I will continue to find allies among those on the front lines of the global struggle against climate change, fascism, and all the other horrid by-products of capitalist development. Although there is much to admire, for example, in the efforts of Tenschert, Harrison Hewitt, and Rebecca Slaman to use social media to cultivate a more youthful and diverse cohort of “Bobcats,” the (almost entirely) depoliticized manner in which they approach Dylan’s artistry flies rather brazenly in the face of the political awakening and radicalization that has transpired in recent years among this planet’s youngest generations (developments which have, unsurprisingly, caused ruling class elites such as Sunstein so much consternation, and which inspired no less than three Dylan scholars – Marcus, Wilentz, and Gregory Pardlo – to attach their names to the deeply reactionary 2020 “Harper’s Letter”). The youngest and most open-minded among us are increasingly recognizing that our species no longer has the luxury of mere political reform, and as such, are increasingly embracing (as the most direct and practical path towards a more humane, sustainable future) the kinds of “love-inspired,” thoroughly egalitarian, and unapologetically confrontational approaches associated with the decolonial and decapitalist traditions. Bluntly put, a radical Dylan is a relevant Dylan to the next generation of scholars and fans, and thoughtful, well-meaning folks like Tenschert, Hewitt, and Slaman would be wise to realize that no amount of social mixers, amiable podcasts, or Dylan-themed karaoke nights (however lovely such things may be) can compare to the comforts of revolutionary comradeship and the pleasure of knowing we will leave this world far better than we found it.

So, comrades (and future comrades), let us get on with it. Let us sharpen our stakes, and polish our pitchforks, and whatever other pointed metaphors may apply, and do the work that must be done (and do it together). Or as Dylan once so darkly declared, “this is how I spend my days – I came to bury, not to praise.”

Moms For Liberty and the Classical School

By Chris Richards

The Nazis want to control American education, and it's scary. What's scarier is that the Nazis don't advertise themselves as Nazis. They advertise themselves as teachers, educators, parents, pastors, and intellectuals striving to connect your kids with the truth and beauty of Western civilization. They give their groups catchy names like "Moms for Liberty." In the end, however, they still want to segregate your kids' schools by race, economics, and religion. They want to promise you that your kids will grow up to be straight Christians and good citizens, not poor gay people in prison. They want you to believe this promise is something real, that they can deliver on, so that you help them spread their message to more communities.

This morning, while surfing some Substack headlines, I noticed the excellent journalists of Popular Information were reporting that a Moms for Liberty chapter in South Carolina has announced that they are opening the "Ashley River Classical School." It was the combination of "Moms for Liberty" and "Classical School" that particularly caught my attention because this reminded me of some research I started because of some OpEds praising Ron DeSantis back in 2023. I started a major project and started sharing what I was learning. Then the project went on hold because I was distracted by other things, but little things keep pulling me back.

The OpEd that got everyone's attention and briefly made cable news before disappearing, was credited to the byline "Cornel West and Jeremy Wayne Tate" in the pages of the Wall Street Journal*. The title of the OpEd, "DeSantis' Revolutionary Defense of the Classics," was very much in line with its content. The Washington Post, MSNBC, and the Guardian all carried commentary or journalism about the OpEd or the DeSantis policy inspiring the OpEd before the end of the year! Dr. West's name on the byline around the same time he was announcing that he was running for President was quite a big deal. The attention that Ron DeSantis's education policy had been getting in the media helped inspire Glenn Youngkin to run for Governor of Virginia in 2021 and fueled DeSantis's own presidential aspirations.

So who is Jeremy Wayne Tate?

Jeremy Wayne Tate is the CEO of Classics Learning Test, a company that publishes an alternative standardized test adopted by the state university system in Florida under Governor Ron DeSantis. The Guardian article references it directly and the company's public facing website includes a lot of information about who the organization is and what they want to achieve. He hosts the "Anchored" podcast, a show about education and culture that is strongly colored by Western chauvinism and conservative educational bias. He speaks at right wing educational conferences where keynote speakers are former Republican presidential candidates and religious zealots. In addition to Dr. West, the board of his organization includes  ultra-Catholic "American Solidarity Party" activist Patrick Deneen and professional queer-basher Christopher Rufo.

Most importantly for the purposes of the Popular Information news story, the board of CLT includes Moms for Liberty activist Erika Donalds. 

Mrs. Donalds is a former school board member from Naples, FL. She is the wife of Florida Congressman Byron Donalds, a vocal MAGA partisan openly aligned with Christian nationalists. She founded an organization for conservative school board members to provide an official sounding counterweight to the Florida School Boards Association. Most importantly, she is the CEO of the Optima Foundation... a non-profit that operates Christian charter schools as a franchise of pro-discrimination Christian institution Hillsdale College. Ron DeSantis appointed her to the board of trustees for Florida Gulf Coast University.

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So a prominent school choice activist affiliated with Moms for Liberty already owns a chain of schools in Florida. There are similar schools and organizations in other states. A friendly acquaintance who supported Dr. West when he was the only announced third party progressive in the race told me that I should take a closer look into the organization's president and that I might change my mind about the CLT being a right wing org.

It didn't. In fact, it scared me.

The board president, Dr. Angel Adams Parham, is the co-author of the sneakily titled "The Black American Intellectual Tradition." While the book does not use this language, instead using a lot of liberal language about Western culture and the education of great Black thinkers (who were grounded in "the classics") to essentially advance the argument that the Black American intellectual tradition is an outgrowth of the white American intellectual tradition. I can't accept that Black slaves in America learned the truth and beauty of Western civilization from their owners. While it is true that Black American thinkers were often very well educated in the classics, this was because the classics were the language of the white Academy. It is also true that it was necessary to refute classical arguments in defense of inequity and inequality with classical arguments for equality, equity, and democracy.

Yet I believe that it is wrong to accept the arguments of Dr. Adams Parham and her co-author (Dr. Anika Prather, who runs an online classical school herself) that Black and white intellectual traditions come from a shared culture. Black intellectuals were struggling against white academic culture to create an intellectual culture of their own. Is it accessible and understandable in a common language? Yes. However, the Black intellectual tradition in America is best understood (in my opinion) as an intellectual counter-culture in opposition to the white Academy. What we call "Western culture" was inherited from the Roman Empire by her bastard granddaughter, the Catholic Church, and grandma stole it from the Greeks in the first place. Yet the Greeks borrowed it from ancient Egypt and ancient Persia. So how "Western" is it?

Which brings us back to Erika Donalds. To her, "Western" means "Christian" in the sense of European Christendom. Which means it also means "white" because it is European. This is really just Enlightenment pan-Germanism (remember, the English and French are "German" too) cast in a new frame of reference for the 21st Century. It still leads to the same narrow set of liberal or reactionary conclusions. Unless one is willing to challenge it by studying its critics and rebels, the truth and beauty of Western civilization is where our crushing social and economic inequity come from.

The spirit of "Classical Education" is best exemplified by Plutarch's "Parallel Lives." Plutarch was writing short biographies of the "greatest" Greeks and Romans of history in which he included very pointed moral critiques.  He then had short passages comparing them to one another both morally and by terms of their accomplishments. Yet Plutarch's moral critique is very clearly biased on behalf of aristocratic republics as opposed to democracy, blaming democracy for tyranny and social disorder in an open manner. Plutarch would sympathize with Samuel Huntington's famous paper for the Tri-Lateral Commission, "The Crisis of Democracy," in which Huntington wrote that the Western crisis of democracy was that the West was too democratic to successfully compete with the Soviet "East."

Huntington was also a student of "the classics," after all.

The far right has a clear vision for an educational system they believe will unify us in happy obedience to the truth and beauty of capitalism and white supremacy. Moms for Liberty is selling that vision in a figurative sense, while Jeremy Wayne Tate is literally selling it. The problem is that too many stakeholders in our society are buying.

That's the problem with the marketplace of ideas. The market is regulated by the dictatorship of capital. It is not a "free market," just another liberal market.

* I apologize for the pay-walled link, it's WSJ content and I cannot currently find a free link to the full article. The WaPo op-ed by Karen Attiah is not pay-walled and its description of the article credited to West is accurate.

Santa Claus and the Contradictions of Bourgeois Ideology

By Carlos Garrido

Republished from Midwestern Marx.

A comrade recently pointed my attention to a comedy skit by Foil Arms and Hog called “Santa is Captured by the Russians,” where for two minutes Mr. Clauss is interrogated by the Soviet police. Below are some excerpts from the conversation: 

​Santa:  I think there has been some sort of a mistake. You see I have a very busy night tonight.
Soviet Police 1: He was found attempting to hide in a chimney.
Soviet Police 2: Chimney? What were you doing in Russian airspace?
Santa: I've already told you…
(Santa gets slapped): Ho, ho, ho... That was naughty.
Soviet Police: We found a list of names.
Santa: Ah my list.
Soviet Police: These are American spies?
Santa: No, no…
Soviet Police: There was also a second list.
Santa: Oh you don't want to be on that list.
Soviet Police: You plan to kill these people.
Santa: No, no, they just get a bad present… It used to be a bag of coal… but the whole climate change thing...
Soviet Police: We intercepted a communication from one of his assets.
“Dear Santa, I have been a good girl. I would like a Silvanian Family Cosy Cottage Starter Home.”
Soviet Police: This is clearly code.
Santa: No it's not code.
Soviet Police: Then who is Santa?
Santa: That's me.
Soviet Police: You said your name was Father Christmas.
Santa: Yes, I'm known by very many names.
Soviet Police: So you are spy?... How do you know my children's names?... What are you doing in Russia?
Santa: Presents, I deliver presents.
Soviet Police: Presents? For who?
Santa: Well, to all the children in the world.
Soviet Police: All the children in the world? In return for what?
Santa: Well, nothing.
Soviet Police: Nothing? So...You are communist?
Santa: Da (Yes)… Why do you think I wear red comrade?
Soviet Police: Signals to officer outside “Comrade, two vodka, one cookies and milk.”

This captures wonderfully the gap between reality and the values and narratives enunciated by the liberal capitalist world. Father Christmas is said to be this selfless gift-bringer, someone who enjoys seeing the smile on kids’ faces as they receive – assuming they weren’t naughty – their new toys. Santa Claus gives, in the traditional narrative, to all kids, irrespective of class (but especially the poor), race, nationality, and sex. He gives these gifts, most importantly, for free. He does not give in exchange for money. His purpose, telos, is not profit. He gives gifts to meet the playful needs of children. His goal is social good, not capital accumulation. He gives so that kids can play, so that they may fulfill what it means to be a kid. He does not give so that parents’ pockets are hollowed, and his North Pole bank account inflated.

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Santa Claus’s logic is completely antithetical to the capitalist system. A system premised on producing for the sake of capital accumulation and not social and common good is in contradiction with Father Christmas’s telos. Both the real St. Nicholas (270 – 342 AD) and the Santa Claus we consume in popular culture gift-give without any attempt at obtaining recognition. Unlike the charities in the capitalist West, Santa’s giving does not afford him major tax deductions, and neither does it boost his ‘humanitarian philanthropist profile’ through large, broadcasted events. Saint Nicholas’s giving was not some big spectacle, quite the opposite. He climbs in through the chimney when everyone is sleeping to leave gifts and go. He stands on the side of the poor and does his part in attempting to bring about social justice.

While this is the dominant narrative we operate with, the reality of our commodified Christmas, and of Santa Claus as the personified agent of such commodification, is directly opposed to the narrative itself. As Valerie Panne notes, modern capitalist Christmas has turned Santa Claus into a “decorative marketing tool…for hysterical shopping.” Santa’s commodified image – first used by Coca-Cola in the 1930s – has become instrumental in helping the capitalists realize profit. He has become an instrument used to, as Marx notes in volumes two and three of Capital, “cut the turn over time of capital… The shorter the period of turnover, the smaller this idle portion of capital as compared with the whole, and the larger, therefore, the appropriated surplus-value, provided other conditions remain the same.”

Here we see a clear gap in the enunciated values and the reality of capitalist society. At the ideological level, that is, at the level of how we collectively think about the story and figure of Santa Claus, we find heartwarming values of empathy, selfless giving, and community. However, this ideological level is rooted in the reality of a Santa Claus used to promote conspicuous consumption (as Thorstein Veblen notes), the commodification of family time, traditions, and relations, and the accumulation of capital in the hands of the few.

The ideological reflection of the real world provides an upside-down, topsy-turvy image of itself. This is the essence of bourgeois ideology qua false consciousness. It is a social order that necessitates the general acceptance of an inverted understanding of itself. We come to erroneously understand the “capitalist” Santa through the narratives of the “communist” Santa. Reality is turned on its head. But this is not, as Vanessa Wills notes, a problem of “epistemic hygiene”. The root of the ‘error’ is not in our minds, that is, in our reflection of the objective phenomena at hand. As I’ve argued previously, “it is much deeper than this; the inversion or ‘mistake’ is in the world itself… This world reflects itself through an upside-down appearance, and it must necessarily do so to continuously reproduce itself.” As Marx and Engels noted long ago,

If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

To understand the gap between how Santa Claus (or Christmas) is understood and how it actually functions in modern capitalist society it is insufficient to see the problem simply as one of subjective ‘misunderstandings’ held by individuals, classes, or whole peoples. One must investigate the political economy which grounds, that is, which reflects that erroneous image of itself. The gap between the actual “capitalist” Santa and the ideological “communist” Santa is objective, it is required by the existing material relations of social production and reproduction. Capitalist ideology must disguise the cut-throat values of bourgeois individualism with the universalist values of Santa’s socialistic humanism.

But this is nothing new. Santa Claus is just another particular instant of a universal bourgeois phenomenon. The capitalist class has never been able to fully realize, to make actual, the values it enunciates with its appearance in the arena of universal history as a dominant force. Its universal appeals to liberty, equality, fraternity, etc. have always been limited within the confines of their class. As Marx had already noted in 1843, “the practical application of the right of liberty is the right of private property;” “the necessary condition for whose existence,” he and Engels write in 1848, “is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.” The phrasing of ‘all men’ used to formulate rights under capitalism is always with the understanding, as Marx notes, of “man as a bourgeois,” it is “the rights of the egotistic man, separated from his fellow men and from the community.” Its values, and their reflection in their judicature, always present their narrow class interests embellished by abstract language used to appeal to the masses and obtain their consenting approval for a form of social life which they’re in an objectively antagonistic relation with.

The ideologues of the bourgeoisie always provide the masses with a “bad check,” as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would say. But eventually, as King notes, the masses will come in to cash that check somehow. They’ll notice that within the confines of the existing order, the prosperity that checked promised is unrealizable. Capitalism has never, and will never, fulfill the universal values it pronounces as it breaks out of the bonds of feudal absolutism. Only socialism can.

The values embedded in the narrative surrounding Santa Claus, Father Christmas, Saint Nicholas, or whatever else you want to call him, will never be actual within capitalist society. Only socialism can universalize the form of selfless relationality we have come to associate with Santa. 


Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). 

How Capitalism Killed Nutrition: A Review of 'Ultra-Processed People'

By Luka Kiernan

Republished from Red Flag.

Review of Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food ... and Why Can’t We Stop? By Chris van Tulleken. Cornerstone Press; 384 pages.

The maiden voyage of the Terra Grande, also known as Nestlé Até Você a Bordo (Nestlé takes you on board), set sail from the Brazilian port city of Belém in July 2010. The barge was described as a “floating supermarket” as it embarked on an eighteen-day circuit up the rivers of the Amazon lowlands, providing 800,000 people in impoverished riverside towns with the glories of the modern Western diet. The best-sellers were Kit-Kats, an 80-gram serving of which contains 38 grams of sugar. 

The products rapidly infiltrated the communities. To compete, local stores began stocking the ultra-processed junk food peddled by Nestlé. In its wake, the Terra Grande left dietary chaos. High sugar, ultra-processed food became a core food group. Childhood obesity rates rose as high as 30 percent in some communities, and cases of Type 2 diabetes have since been reported in large numbers, a disease that was previously unheard of.

Nestlé complemented the floating supermarket with another program, Nestlé Até Você (Nestlé Comes to You), to better access Brazil’s urban slums. Seven thousand women were employed as door-to-door salespeople, and the program now visits 700,000 low-income households each month with its ultra-processed goodness. As one company supervisor put it: “The essence of our program is to reach the poor”. 

This story of a multinational food company destroying the health of impoverished populations is recounted in Chris Van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People. The book is an insightful scientific, political and economic look into capitalism’s global destruction of nutrition and health. It points the finger squarely at the profiteering multinationals and complicit governments, regulatory bodies and NGOs. Van Tulleken contends that the rise of “ultra-processed food” (UPF), defined as any food containing synthetic additives, has led to the deterioration of people’s health. Today, in Australia, the UK, the US and Canada, UPF constitutes up to 60 percent of the average diet.

A tendency has emerged across the world over the last 50 years regarding health that contradicts the rest of human history. In most countries, the poorest people eat the most calories. They are also the most nutritionally malnourished. “Diet quality and associated health outcomes follow a social gradient in Australia, and internationally,” concluded a recent VicHealth study. In the UK, working-class children are getting shorter on average, at the same time that they are getting fatter. Rich children continue to grow. 

From the 1950s onwards, savvy food companies figured out ever more novel ways of using additives and synthetic ingredients to mimic more expensive foods. Modified starches from potatoes or corn were far cheaper than dairy fats, and, once packed with bulking agents, flavouring and colouring, could appear close enough to the real thing. The cheapest forms of fats, proteins and carbohydrates could be processed in any number of ways to create a lucrative mass product. With added preservatives, food was much more suited to the logistics of the market. Beyond just reducing ingredient costs, these chemicals and methods of processing were used to “extend shelf life, facilitate centralised production and, as it turns out, drive excess consumption”, according to Van Tulleken. Excess consumption became increasingly central to the profitability of these products.

There are an estimated 10,000 additives in modern food production, according to a study published in the journal Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety: flavouring, colouring, foaming and anti-foaming agents, bulking and anti-bulking agents, preservatives, emulsifiers and gums, among many others. Some of these have known serious health effects, but the overwhelming majority haven’t been researched enough to determine their consequences conclusively. The average UK resident consumes eight kilograms of these substances a year. 

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These additives are also incredibly effective at subverting the body’s natural regulatory system. Van Tulleken writes about studies that have shown that, when infants are given full access to a variety of nutritious foods, they feed themselves a nutritionally balanced diet, without over- or under-eating. This indicates that the body’s regulation of nutritional intake is as sophisticated as that for temperature or blood pressure. But the rise of UPF has disrupted these processes.

For instance, a 2019 study by the US National Institutes of Health found that even when UPF and unprocessed foods have identical nutritional profiles (in terms of calories, and macro and micronutrients), people will overeat the processed food. 

According to Van Tulleken, there has been “an evolutionary selection process over many decades, whereby the products that are purchased and eaten in the greatest quantities are the ones that survive best in the market. To achieve this, they have evolved to subvert the systems in the body that regulate weight and many other functions”. That is, getting people addicted to calorie-dense, nutritionally lacking, additive-loaded products—to the immense detriment of their health—is the food industry’s main game. 

Coca-Cola, for example, is packed full of sugar: ten teaspoons per can. To make it palatable (because spoonfuls of raw sugar don’t taste good) Coca-Cola adds bitter flavouring that cancels out some of the sweetness, so that consumers get the unnatural sugar and caffeine hit without their body rejecting it. 

Like the quantity of additives in their products, the profits of these companies are immense. Nestlé, the biggest of them all, grossed US$45 billion last year, PepsiCo $46 billion, Mondalez $11 billion, Archer-Daniels-Midland $7.5 billion.

Van Tulleken makes a series of compelling arguments throughout the book regarding the social and economic factors behind the health crisis. He rejects the individualist, personal responsibility framework that dominates mainstream discussions of nutrition and health. The book is explicitly not a self-help guide. 

He writes that, across the West, “there was a dramatic increase in obesity, beginning in the 1970s. The idea that there has been a simultaneous collapse in personal responsibility in both men and women across age and ethnic groups is not plausible”. 

Over the past 30 years, childhood obesity in England has increased by 700 percent, and severe obesity by 1,600 percent. This can be explained only by tectonic shifts in the diets made available. 

In Australia, the number of people living with Type 2 diabetes has tripled (or doubled when adjusted for population growth and age structure) over the last twenty years, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Comprehensive meta-analysis has demonstrated a conclusive link between UPF consumption and Type 2 diabetes. Multiple studies have indicated that higher consumption of UPF also leads to massively increased risks of heart attack and stroke.

Consistent with this structural approach, the book centres inequality as a major factor in health outcomes. The consumption of UPF is directly correlated with income, the poorest eating the most. This can largely be explained by pretty simple personal economics. In the UK, a study by the Food Foundation charity shows that the poorest half of the population would need to spend a third of their disposable income on food to meet the minimum nutritional guidelines. The bottom 10 percent would need to spend 75 percent. There are twice as many fast-food outlets in the poorer suburbs of England as in the richer, and advertising is most concentrated in those areas. 

In Australia, age-standardised rates of Type 2 diabetes are more than twice as high in the lowest socioeconomic areas as in the highest. Van Tulleken makes the case that diet and access to quality food are major transmitters of the “health-wealth” gap, alongside smoking and access to health care.

The book also decries the crimes of the major food companies that get rich by destroying the health of billions. For instance, in the 1970s Nestlé was accused of getting mothers in sub-Saharan Africa hooked on free samples of baby formula to the point where they stopped lactating. Mothers were then compelled to purchase baby formula or have their children starve—which thousands of the poorest did. 

In Ghana, one of the poorest countries in the world, obesity rates have risen from 2 percent to 13.6 percent since 1980, as fast-food outlets and UPF companies have expanded their territory. Former CEO of YUM!, KFC’s parent company, justified their intervention by saying: “It’s so much safer to eat at a KFC in Ghana, than it is to eat, obviously, you know, pretty much anywhere else”.

The agricultural system that serves the modern food industry is equally as destructive. Brazilian rainforests are chopped down to grow soybeans, which are used to force-feed factory-raised animals and produce various proteins and fats in their cheapest forms. Indonesian peat forests are burned to clear land for palm oil production, generating thick blankets of smoke and unfathomable amounts of pollution. In 2015, the burning of these forests emitted more CO2 in just a couple of months than the entire German economy that year. Modern agriculture is one of the biggest contributors to global warming, fuelled by the demands of the industrial food sector. 

There are broader dynamics at play than just the individual wickedness of CEOs. As Van Tulleken puts it, each company “is in an arms race with other companies ... all vying for that real estate in the shops that maximises sales. If Kellogg’s decided to take a stand [by making their food healthier and less profitable], the space would instantly be filled by another product from another company”. The nutrition crisis is a built-in product of modern capitalism, stemming from its competitive economic structures.

In this way, Van Tulleken approaches an anti-capitalist perspective. He argues that “shame and outrage are clearly inadequate to limit the survival of companies that are complicit in atrocities” and “their behaviour only changes when the flow of the money is diverted”.

Van Tulleken also lacerates the useful idiots and the actively complicit of the health NGO world. He slams the growth of “healthwashing”, whereby the worst offenders of the obesity crisis fund research about the very crisis that they are causing. He puts it firmly: “Organisations that take money from, for example, Coca-Cola, and claim to be fighting obesity are simply extensions of the marketing division of Coca-Cola ... the interests of [these companies] and those of obesity campaigners are not, and cannot be, aligned”.

However, Van Tulleken stops short of the full-blooded anti-capitalism that is required really to tackle the systemic issues he describes so clearly. While rejecting regressive proposals, such as sugar taxes, he falls back on milquetoast technocratic solutions. His proposals for policies like limits on fast food advertising and better regulated health research to prevent corporate influence would be welcome, but will not even scratch the surface of the structural causes behind the obesity epidemic. 

Elsewhere, Van Tulleken devolves into utopianism, arguing for a “fixing” of the agricultural system which today is based on monoculture crops, mass use of antibiotics and massive environmental destruction. But without a way to fight for such a system, the suggestions remain, as Marx put it 150 years ago, “recipes for the cookshops of the future”.

Ultimately, what Ultra-Processed People clearly demonstrates, but does not actually say, is that there is no solution to the health crisis under capitalism. For business, even the most essential of products, food, is just another way to make obscene amounts of money. The health of billions is sacrificed in the interest of profit.

Examining the Role of Anti-Communist Rhetoric in the Growth of Reactionary Cult Movements

By Oskar Kaut

Amidst America’s increasingly polarized political climate, there has been growing concern regarding the emergence of reactionary groups that display cult-like behaviors and tactics, posing vital questions about the impact these groups have on individuals as well as mainstream political discourse. Cults can be broadly defined as groups or movements that share a set of philosophical, spiritual, or political beliefs that are by and large considered to be extremist or deviant by mainstream society. On the other hand, the label “reactionary” is typically given to individuals or organizations that oppose social change and desire a return to “traditional” values and practices. Such beliefs have been on the steady rise for several years, and the conception and popularization of affiliated organizations and movements have followed (Rodrik 162). Many fringe reactionary groups such as the Proud Boys and Patriot Front have come under scrutiny for some of their practices, which are often highly secretive and can involve physical and psychological manipulation (Ashland 37). In recent years, there has been a concerning rise of far-right movements worldwide, providing an opportunity for reactionary groups to amplify their message and reach a much larger audience. Many of these groups display clear cult-like behaviors, as demonstrated by their deference to authority and distorted sense of reality. These groups often use anti-communist rhetoric to infiltrate mainstream political discourse, which serves as a gateway to legitimizing and normalizing the extremist ideology of far-right cults. Resultantly, it is crucial to recognize and address the presence of these cults within right-wing movements and the impact their rhetoric can have on broader society. 

A cult is a group or movement centered around a given (typically extremist) belief system that uses coercive tactics to maintain its hold over followers. Sociological research has shown that cults utilize tactics of social influence in order to manipulate their followers into submission (Corvaglia 9). Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard divided the concept of social influence into two subcategories. Informational social influence refers to humans’ intrinsic desire to be “right”, whereas normative social influence refers to the desire to be liked by others. Both of these concepts can be aptly applied to cults. Cults use normative social influence (known colloquially as “peer pressure”) to recruit new members. In an increasingly isolated society, cults offer some individuals an opportunity to be a part of something that they see as larger than themselves. The propagation of this form of influence can lead to cult members partaking in practices that they would normally oppose in an attempt to gain favor with other members (Deutsch & Gerard 14). Similarly, in a world where misinformation is increasingly rampant and it can be difficult to know which sources to trust, cults make use of informational social influence to develop genuine conformity to their beliefs and practices. Cults attempt to create a hegemony of “accurate information” for their followers, thus justifying even private conformity in which individuals truly believe that the group is right or justified in their struggle (Corvaglia 18).  

Many reactionary organizations and movements embody the aforementioned cult characteristics. Stanley Milgram’s classical experiments in conformity shed light on the willingness of individuals to obey those whom they view as authority figures and perform actions that go against their own conscience (Slater 32-63). The experiments found that test subjects were willing to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to another person (who they believed to be a fellow test subject) even to the degree where they believed the shocks to be lethal. Reactionary cults (like other cults) often exert substantial social influence over their members and rely on a hierarchical structure of authority that leaves them vulnerable to pressures similar to those exhibited in Milgram’s experiments. Oftentimes–as can be seen in the cults of personality surrounding Gavin McInnes within the Proud Boys or Nazi-collaborator Stepan Bandera in Ukrainian nationalist organizations–members of far-right movements are subject to pressures to conform to the extreme beliefs and practices of groups under the direction of authoritative leaders (Rabotyazhev 525). In many ways, this demonstrates the presence of normative influence within reactionary groups and movements. Moreover, members of fringe right-wing movements are also frequently subject to constant messaging from the group’s ideological leaders and even cut off from external sources of information (Jurg & Tuters). This can be clearly seen as an application of informational social influence, in which far-right organizations appeal to their members’ intrinsic desire to be right by bombarding them with their subjective version of reality accompanied by statements such as “facts don’t care about your feelings”. The intent of this process is to present their extreme viewpoints as objective truths that cannot be challenged, thereby working to shift members’ worldviews over time. The existence of such cult-like behavior in reactionary groups and movements presents real issues for mainstream society as the prevalence of these cults continues to grow. 

In recent years, the presence of reactionary groups has risen sharply both in the United States and globally (Rodrik 162). The attention given to these cults has also increased in the wake of sustained political polarization and social unrest. Large rallies such as the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” march and the January 6th, 2021 attack on the United States capitol demonstrate the power that these fringe movements now hold as well as their capacity for violence and contribution to the erosion of democratic norms and social stability. The prevalence of right-wing cults can also be seen through the drastically increased proliferation of disinformation and conspiracy theories. Now more than perhaps ever in modern history, mainstream American politics are characterized by a general rejection of the notion of objective reality (Bleakley 1). One of the main causes of this rejection can be attributed to the prominence of echo chambers among political extremists on social media, in which aligning beliefs are reinforced and dissenting viewpoints are actively suppressed (Bleakley 12). This phenomenon hints at a bleak reality: the influence of reactionary cults and movements is not limited to their own movements. Rather, their extremist views and tactics can be observed slipping into mainstream political discourse. 

The growth of reactionary cults within far-right politics has drastically influenced mainstream political discourse. These cults both directly participate in mainstream political campaigns and employ a number of more indirect methods to influence political dialogue. As previously mentioned, the rise of fringe, right-wing cults has coincided with a sharp increase in the prevalence of disinformation and harmful conspiracy theories (Bleakley 2). Reactionary groups have used their growing platforms to disseminate propaganda promoting their fringe ideology and undermining that of their political opponents. Much of this is centered around tactics of fear-mongering in an attempt to create a feeling of urgency for action. Additionally, fringe-right cults are able to methodically slip into mainstream political discourse through media coverage of contentious issues as well as through the actions of individual politicians. Over the past several years, a large number of far-right politicians have adopted language that echoes the beliefs held by reactionary cults in attempts to appeal to certain voters. For example, both Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rep. Lauren Boebert are former followers of the QAnon cult and continue to espouse much of the same rhetoric supported by the group today, even as they hold some of the highest elected offices in the country. Powerful politicians and media figures’ adoption of framing similar to that propagated by reactionary cults has led to a dramatic shift in the “Overton Window”—the frame of what beliefs are considered socially acceptable within mainstream society. 

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The Overton Window is a concept designed to describe the range of ideas that are considered largely acceptable within conventional society at a given time. Joseph Overton (for whom the term is named) conceptualized that ideas outside the window (i.e., politically unacceptable) may later fit within the realm of acceptable ideas because the “window” can “either move or be transformed in size” (Oleksandr 52). It is through this process that reactionary cults are able to slip their ideas into conventional political discussions. Even over relatively short periods of time, one can observe how views that were previously unthinkable become widely adopted within the mainstream. Similar to the concept of the Overton Window is that of deviance, which refers to the idea of departing from generally accepted standards present in society. According to Hewitt, “Deviance…represents a real or imagined threat to social order, and the deviant is accorded a special and discredited position in relation to it,” (214). Thus, views outside of the Overton Window at a given point in time typically also fall under the umbrella of deviant views. The concepts of the Overton Window and deviance (and the relationship therewithin) are crucial to understanding the strategic importance of falling within the views accepted by mainstream society for far-right organizations. As Zuckerman puts it, “Stray outside the sphere of legitimate debate into the sphere of deviance, and your position becomes invisible to mainstream media dialog,” (16). Essentially, in order to reach a larger audience, reactionary cults have to struggle to fit within the established norms of society at any given point in time. Because of the tactical need to infiltrate mainstream political discourse, many right-wing, reactionary cults seek to normalize their own viewpoints by falsely equivocating their views with those held on the left. 

Reactionary groups often use anti-communist rhetoric to slip into mainstream political discourse by framing their opposition to communism as a defense of democracy, individual liberties, and freedom. One of the simplest means by which fascists can achieve their ultimate goal of consolidating power is by utilizing anti-communism as a tool to create a common enemy. By depicting socialism as a threat to national security, reactionaries can silence opposition, suppress meaningful dissent, and legitimize their authoritarian system. Another means by which reactionary groups seek to utilize anti-communist rhetoric is to equivocate fascism (and oftentimes Nazism) and communism. This is of course, on its face, absurd: while communism promotes the seizure of the means of production by the workers (Marx & Engels 38), Nazism is characterized by its emphasis on racial purity and antisemitism. The false equivalence of communism and Nazism is often propagated by far-right cults and media figures alike as a means to both discredit left-wing ideas and shift the Overton Window in favor of their own ideology. Making the comparison between communism and Nazism serves to downplay the severity of the crimes of one of the worst atrocities in human history and silence legitimate criticisms of capitalism and neoliberalism. The conjoined propaganda tools of finding a common enemy around which to unite and equating communism to the atrocities of Nazism allow reactionary cults to both delegitimize leftist movements and slip their own beliefs into conventional political discourse, ultimately serving their own end goal of consolidating power within mainstream institutions. 

  Fictitious tropes equating communism to Nazism have been widely disseminated and adopted within transnational mainstream political discourse, perpetuating misinformation, reinforcing negative stereotypes about leftist political movements, and legitimizing the views of reactionary cults. While the degree to which such attempts varies, in some parts of the world (especially in former Soviet states), reactionary cults have been able to “...[capitalize] on decades of anti-communism mainstream discourse built-up to develop a full-blown populist radical right narrative and politics,” (Popescu & Vesalon 5). In practice, this means that fascist sects such as the AUR in Romania and the OUN/UPA cult in Ukraine have been able to normalize their own beliefs and have massive impacts on public opinion and public policy (Crstocea). As previously discussed, cults have a tendency to rely on (among other things), informational social influence. In many instances, this can include followers accepting blatantly false information and shaping their perceptions of reality around lies (Corvaglia 9). Naturally, it’s not difficult why it would be undesirable for distorted worldviews to slip into mainstream politics, but in many instances, it already has. One such example can be seen in The Black Book of Communism (Courtois et al, 1999), which coined the “100 million deaths by communism” myth that has since been thoroughly debunked (Francois et al 4). Despite being categorically disproven, this myth is still perpetuated within mainstream conservative (and even many liberal) circles. As the views of reactionary cults with distorted worldviews gain traction within mainstream political discourse, they are enabled to both expand their influence and increase their numbers. 

The presence of anti-communist rhetoric in mainstream political discourse has led to the growth of reactionary cults characterized by informational isolation and a deference to authority. The use of anti-communist rhetoric fosters an atmosphere of apprehension and widespread suspicion toward leftist ideologies, which renders individuals more vulnerable to the perspectives of reactionary groups. The fear-mongering and demonization of communism that has pervaded Western political discourse for decades has created a fertile breeding ground for reactionary cults and movements that espouse radical anti-communist ideologies. These groups oftentimes promise protection against a supposed communist threat and frame themselves as protectors of freedom and traditional values. By stoking fears of a communist takeover of institutions, these cults and cult-like movements are able to tap into the anxieties of ordinary people who are disillusioned with mainstream neoliberal politics and searching for a sense of belonging and purpose. Further, the adoption of fictitious anti-communist tropes by mainstream political leaders and media figures can also serve as a means of legitimizing the views of these movements, leading to a further increase in their membership and influence. As reactionary cults continue to gain traction in mainstream political discourse, the consequences of anti-communist rhetoric are becoming increasingly evident. The aforementioned groups are given steadily more and more massive platforms to promote fringe ideologies and often resort to violence, as seen in the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina, and the storming of the United States Capitol on January 6th, 2021. Additionally, the dissemination of anti-communist disinformation and conspiracy theories among these cults creates a pipeline toward radicalization and a complete rejection of objective, factual information, facilitating the exacerbation of societal divides. The normalization of radical, anti-communist rhetoric also perpetuates narrow-minded perspective ideologies, discouraging both critical thought and nuanced discussions about complex societal issues. In conclusion, the prevalence of anti-communist rhetoric in mainstream political discourse has led to a sharp rise in reactionary cults, posing a threat to the very institutions that underpin Western so-called “liberal democracy”. Acknowledging and rectifying the adverse consequences of the normalization of anti-communist rhetoric is vital in averting the proliferation of reactionary cults and the further degradation of the material conditions of everyday Americans.

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