The Relevance and Failures of Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man

By Carlos Garrido

This year marks the 57th anniversary of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964). This text, although plagued with a pessimistic spirit, was a great source of inspiration for the development of the New Left and the May 68 uprisings. The question we must ask ourselves is whether a text that predates the last 50 years of neoliberalism has any pertinent take-aways for today’s revolutionary struggles. Before we examine this, let us first review the context and central observations in Marcuse’s famed work.

Review

Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man[i] (ODM) describes a world in which human rationality is uncritically used to perpetuate the irrational conditions whereby human instrumental ingenuity stifles human freedom and development. In the height of the cold war and potential atomic devastation, Marcuse observes that humanity submitted to the “peaceful production of the means of destruction” (HM, ix). Society developed its productive forces and technology to a scale never before seen. In doing so, it has created the conditions for the possibility of emancipating humanity from all forms of necessity and meaningless toil. The problem is, this development has not served humanity, it has been humanity that has been forced to serve this development. The instruments humans once made to serve them, are now the masters of their creators. The means have kidnapped the ends in a forced swap, the man now serves the hammer, not the other way around.

The observation that our society has developed its productive forces and technologies in a manner that creates the conditions for more human freedom, while simultaneously using the development itself to serve the conditions for our un-freedom, is not a new one. The Marxist tradition has long emphasized this paradox in the development of capitalism. Marcuse’s ODM’s novel contribution is in the elucidation of the depth of this paradox’s submersion, as well as how this paradox has extended beyond capitalism into industrialized socialist societies as well. Let us now examine how Marcuse unfolds the effects of modern capitalist instrumental rationality’s closing of the political universe.

Whereas the capitalism Marx would deal with in the mid-19th century demonstrated that along with clearly antagonistic relations to production, the working and owning class also shared vastly different cultures, modern one-dimensional society homogenizes the cultural differences between classes. Marcuse observes that one of the novelties of one-dimensional society is in its capacity to ‘flatten out’ the “antagonisms between culture and social reality through the obliteration of the oppositional, alien, and transcendent elements in higher culture” (HM, 57). This process liquidates two-dimensional culture and creates the conditions for social cohesion through the commodification, repressive desublimation, and wholesale incorporation and reproduction of these cultural elements into society by mass communication. In essence, the cultural differences the working and owning class had have dissipated, both are integrated in the same cultural logic. This does not mean there is no cultural opposition, but that the cultural opposition is itself “reduced” and “absorbed” into the society. Today, this absorption of the opposition is more visible than ever. Companies that donate millions to police departments post #BLM on their social medias, repressive state apparatuses who assaulted homosexuals in the 60s lavender scares now wave the LGBTQ+ flag, billion-dollar companies like Netflix who take loopholes to not pay taxes make a show on ‘democratic socialist’ Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, etc. All throughout our one-dimensional culture we experience the absorption of an ‘opposition’ whom in being absorbed fails to substantially oppose. This could be reformulated as, ‘all throughout our one-dimensional culture we experience the absorptions of any attempts at a great refusal, whom in being absorbed fail to substantially refuse.’

How did this happen? Well, in a way that paradoxically provides the material confirmation of Marxism as a science (according at least to Popper’s falsifiability requirement), while disconfirming one of its central theses, modern capitalism seems to have mended one of its central grave digging contradictions, the antagonistic contradiction between the proletariat and the owning class. According to Marcuse, modern industrial society has been able to do this because it provided the working masses (and society in general) a “comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom” (HM, 1). It superimposed on the working masses false needs which “perpetuate [their] toil, aggressiveness, misery,” and alienation for the sake of continuing the never-ending hamster wheel of consumption (HM, 5). In modern industrial society people are sold a false liberty which actively sustains them in a condition of enslavement. As Marcuse states,

Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear – that is, if they sustain alienation (HM, 8).

 In essence, that which has unnecessarily sustained their working life long, exploitative, and alienating, has made their life at home more ‘comfortable.’ This consumerist, Brave New World-like hellish heaven has perpetuated the prevalent ‘happy consciousness’ present in modern industrial society, where your distraction, comfort, and self-identification with your newly bought gadgets has removed the rebellious tendencies that arise, in a Jeffersonian-like manner, when the accumulation of your degradation reaches a certain limit where revolution becomes your panacea. The phenomenon of happy consciousness, says Marcuse, even forces us to question the status of a worker’s alienation, for although at work alienation might continue, he reappropriates a relation to the products through his excessive identification with it when purchased as a consumer. In this manner, the ‘reappropriation’ of the worker’s alienation to the product manifests itself like Feuerbach’s man reappropriating his species-being now that it has passed through the medium (alienated objectification) of God – the commodity here serving the mediational role of God.

The working mass, as we previously mentioned, is not the only one affected by the effects of one-dimensional society. Marcuse shows that the theorists are themselves participatory and promotional agents of this epoch. Whether in sociology or in philosophy, the general theoretical trends in academia are the same; the dominance of positivist thinking, and the repression and exclusion of negative (or dialectical) thinking. This hegemonized positivist thought presents itself as objective and neutral, caring only for the investigation of facts and the ridding of ‘wrongful thought’ that deals with transcendental “obscurities, illusions, and oddities” (HM, 170). What these one-dimensional theorists do is look at ‘facts’ how they stand dismembered from any of the factors that allowed the fact to be. In doing so, while they present their task as ‘positive’ and against abstractions, they are forced to abstract and reify the fact to engage with it separated from its context. By doing this these theorists limit themselves to engaging with this false concreteness they have conjured up from their abstracting of the ‘fact’ away from its general spatial-temporal context. Doing this not only proves to be futile in understanding phenomena – for it would be like trying to judge a fight after only having seen the last round – but reinforces the status quo of descriptive thinking at the expense of critical and hypothetical thought. As Marcuse states,

This radical acceptance of the empirical violates the empirical, for in it speaks the mutilated, “abstract” individual who experiences (and expresses) only that which is given to him, who has only the facts and not the factors, whose behavior is one-dimensional and manipulated. By virtue of the factual repression, the experienced world is the result of a restricted experience, and the positivist cleaning of the mind brings the mind in line with restricted experience (HM, 182).

Given that “operationalism,” this positivist one-dimensional thought, which in “theory and practice, becomes the theory and practice of containment,” has penetrated the thought and language of all aspects of society, is there an escape to this seemingly closed universe (HM, 17)? As a modest dialectician, Marcuse denies while leaving a slight ‘chance’ for an affirmation. On one end, the text is haunted by a spirit of pessimistic entrapment – not only has the logic of instrumental rationality that sustains one-dimensional society infiltrated all levels of society and human interaction, but the resources are vast enough to quickly absorb or militarily “take care of emergency situations”, viz., when a threat to one-dimensional society arises.

On the other end, he says that “it is nothing but a chance,” but a chance nonetheless, that the conditions for a great refusal might arise (HM, 257). Although he argues dialectical thinking is important to challenge capitalist positivism, he recognizes dialectical thinking alone “cannot offer the remedy,” it knows on empirical and conceptual grounds “its own hopelessness,” i.e., it knows “contradictions do not explode by themselves,” that human agency through an “essentially new historical subject” is the only way out (HM, 253, 252). The contingency of this ‘chance’ is dependent on the contingency of the great encounter between the “most advanced consciousness of humanity” and the “most exploited force,” i.e., it is the ‘barbarians’ of the third world to whom this position of possible historical subjectivity is ascribed to (HM, 257). Nonetheless, Marcuse is doing a theoretical diagnosis, not giving us a prescriptive normative approach. The slight moment where a glimpse of prescriptive normativity is invoked, he encourages the continual struggle for the great refusal. This is how I read the final reference to Walter Benjamin, “[critical theory] wants to remain loyal to those who, without hope, have given and give their life to the Great Refusal” (Ibid.). Even if we are hopeless, we must give our life to the great refusal. We must be committed, in Huey Newton’s terms, to “revolutionary suicide”, to foolishly struggling even when no glimpse of hope is to be found, for only in struggling when there is no hope, can the conditions for the possibility of hope arise.

Analysis

There are very few observations in this text to which we can point to as relevant in our context. The central thesis of a comfortable ‘happy consciousness’ which commensurates all classes under a common consumerist culture is a hard sell in a world in which labor has seen its century long fought for gains drawn back over the last 50 years.[ii] Neoliberalism has effectively normalized what William L. Robinson calls the “Wal-Martization of labor,”[iii] i.e., conditions in which work is less unionized, less secure, lower paid, and given less benefits. These conditions, along with the growing polarization of wealth and income, render Marcuse’s analysis of the post-WW2 welfare state impertinent. I lament to say that the most valuable take-away of ODM for revolutionaries today is where it failed, for this failure continues to be quite prevalent amongst many self-proclaimed socialist in the west. This failure, I argue, consist of Marcuse’s equating of capitalist states with socialist experiments.

 Marcuse’s ODM unites the socialist and capitalist parts of the world as two interdependent systems existing within the one-dimensional logic that prioritizes “the means over the end” (HM, 53). For Marcuse, the socialist part of the world has been unable to administer in praxis what it claims to be in theory; there is effectively a “contradiction between theory and facts” (HM, 189). Although this contradiction does not, according to him, “falsify the former,” it nonetheless creates the conditions for a socialism that is not qualitatively different to capitalism (Ibid.). The socialist camp, like capitalism, “exploits the productivity of labor and capital without structural resistance, while considerably reducing working hours and augmenting the comforts of life” (HM, 43). In essence, his argument boils down to 20th century socialism being unable to create a qualitatively new alternative to capitalism, and in this failure, it has replicated, sometimes in forms unique to it, the mechanisms of exploitation and opposition-absorption (through happy consciousness, false needs, military resistance, etc.), that are prevalent in the capitalist system.

There are a few fundamental problems in Marcuse’s equalization, which all stem, I will argue, from his inability to carry dialectical thinking onto his analysis of the socialist camp. In not doing so, Marcuse himself reproduces the positivistic forms of thought which dismember “facts” from the factors which brought them about. Because of this, even if the ‘facts’ in both camps appear the same, claiming that they are so ignores the contextual and historical relations that led to those ‘facts’ appearing similar.

For Marcuse to say that the socialist camp, like the capitalist, was able to recreate the distractingly comfortable forms of life that make for a smoother exploitation of workers, he must ignore the conditions, both present and historical, that allowed this fact to arise. Capitalism was able to achieve this ‘comfortable’ life for its working masses because it spent the last three centuries colonizing the world to ensure that the resources of foreign lands would be disposable to western capital. This process of western capitalist enrichment required the genocide of the native (for its lands), and the enslavement of the African (for its labor) and created the conditions for the 20th century struggle between western capital for dividing up the conquered lands and bodies of the third world. But even with this historical and contextual process of expropriation and exploitation, the fruits of this were not going to the working classes of the western nations because of the generosity of the owning class, regardless of how much they benefited from creating this ‘labor aristocracy.’ Rather, the only reason why this process slightly came to benefit the popular classes in the US was a result of century long labor struggles in the country, most frequently led by communists, socialists, and anarchist within labor unions.

The socialist camp, on the other hand, industrialized their backwards countries in a fraction of the time it took the west, without having to colonize lands, genocide natives, or enslave blacks. On the contrary, regardless of the mistakes that were made, and the unfortunate effects of these, the industrialization process in the socialist camp was inextricably linked to the empowering of the peripheral subjects, whether African, Asian, Middle-Eastern, or Indo-American, that had been under the boot of western colonialism and imperialism for centuries. The ‘third-world’ Marcuse leaves the potential role of historical subjectivity to, was only able to sustain autonomy because of the solidarity and aid – political, military, or economic in kind, it received from the socialist camp. Those who were unable, for various reasons, to establish relations with the socialist camp, replicated, in a neo-colonial fashion, the relations they had with their ‘previous’ metropoles. In fact, history showed that the ‘fall’ of this camp led the countries in the third world that sustained an autonomous position (thanks to the comradely relations they established with the socialist world), to be quickly overturned into subjected servitude to western capital.

By stating that the socialist camp was unable to affect a materialization in praxis of its theory, and as such, that it was not qualitatively different from capitalism (making the equating of the two possible), Marcuse effectively demonstrates his ignorance, willful or not, of the geopolitical situation of the time. Socialism in the 20th century could not create its ideal qualitatively new society while simultaneously defending its revolution from military, economic, and biowarfare attacks coming from the largest imperial powers in the history of humanity. Liberation cannot fully express itself under these conditions, for, the liberation of one is connected to the liberation of all. The communist ideal whereby human relations are based “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” is only realizable under the global totalizing disappearance of all forms of exploitation and oppression. It is idealist and infantile to expect this reality to arise in a world where capitalism exists even at the farthest corner of the earth, even less in a world where the hegemonized form of global relations is capitalistic.

Nonetheless, even Marcuse is forced to admit that the socialist camp was able to create a comfortable life for its working masses. But, unlike Marcuse argues, this comfort in the socialist camp cannot be equated with comfort in the capitalist camp. Not only are the conditions that led to the comfort in each fundamentally different (as just previously examined), but the comfort itself, as a fact, was also radically different. In terms of job security, housing, healthcare, education, childcare, and other forms of government provided social securities, the comfort in the socialist camp was significantly higher than the comfort experienced by the working masses in the welfare social democracies in Europe, and tenfold that of the comfort experienced by the working masses in the US. When to this you add the ability for political participation through worker councils and the party, the prevalent spirit of solidarity that reigned, and the general absence of racism and crime, the foolishness of the equalization is further highlighted. Nonetheless, the comparison must not be made just between the capitalist and socialist camp, but between the conditions before and after the socialist camp achieved socialism. Doing so allows one to historically contextualize the achievements of the socialist camp in terms of creating dignified and freer lives for hundreds of millions of people. For these people, Marcuse’s comments are somewhere between laughable and symbolic of the usual disrespect of western intelligentsia.

Although Marcuse was unable to live long enough to see this, the fall of the socialist camp, and the subsequent ‘shock therapy’ that went with it, not only devastated the countries of the previous socialist camp – drastically rising the rates of poverty, crime, prostitution, inequality, while lowering the standard of living, life expectancy, and the opportunities for political participation – but also the countries of the third world and those of the capitalist camp themselves! With the threat of communism gone, the third world was up for grabs again, and the first world, no longer under the pressure of the alternative that a comfortable working mass in the socialist camp presented, was free to extend the wrath of capital back into its own national popular classes, eroding century long victories in the labor movement and creating the conditions for precarious, unregulated, and more exploitative work.

Works like One-Dimensional Man, which take upon the task of criticizing and equating ‘both sides,’ do the work of one side, i.e., of capitalism, in creating a ‘left’ campaign of de-legitimizing socialist experiments. This process of creating a ‘left’ de-legitimation campaign is central for the legitimation of capital. This text (ODM) is the quintessential example of one of the ways capitalism absorbs its opposition by placing it as a midpoint between it and the real threat of a truly socialist alternative. It is because the idealistic and non-dialectical logic of capital infiltrates these ‘left’ anti-communist theorists that they can condemn and equate socialist experiments with capitalism. If there is a central takeaway from Marcuse’s text, it is to guard ourselves against participating in this left-anticommunism theorizing that prostitutes itself for capital to create the conditions whereby the accidental ‘faults’ of pressured socialist experiments are equated with the systematic contradictions in capitalist countries. In a world racing towards a new cold war, it is the task of socialists in the heart of the empire to fiercely reject and deconstruct the state-department narratives of socialist and non-socialist experiments attempting to establish themselves autonomously outside of the dominion of US imperialism. Acknowledging how Marcuse failed to do this in ODM helps us prevent his mistake.

Carlos L. Garrido is a philosophy graduate student and assistant at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. His specialization is in Marxist philosophy and the history of American socialist thought (esp. early 19th century). He is an editorial board member and co-founder of Midwestern Marx  and the Journal of American Socialist Studies. 

Notes

[i] Reference will be to the following edition: Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. (Beacon Press, 1966).

[ii] Perhaps even longer, for The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 had already began these drawbacks. Nonetheless, 1964 is a bit too early to begin to see its effects, especially for an academic observing from outside the labor movement.

[iii] Robinson, L. William. Latin America and Global Capitalism. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)., p. 23.

Null Space and Null Existence Under the Spectacle

By Mike Templeton

Exit any stretch of interstate and you will immediately be confronted with the mass of business which defines contemporary American existence. From the multi-lane interchange that draws you off the interstate highway to the seemingly endless retail and restaurant chains, life is one continuous stretch of consumer destinations. Gas stations are full-service outlets selling roller food, beer and wine, lottery tickets, trinkets, ball caps, etc. The gas pumps now have video screens so you can watch sports update videos and some kind of corporate version of the news while you pump gas. From this point onward it is nothing but consumption. Consumer existence is human existence.

The full-service gas stations are generally the first places you encounter upon exiting the highway. BP, Speedway, Pilot—it really does not matter which specific brand you choose they all offer the same things. There are hotdog rollers with taquitos and three or four forms of processed meat tubes. Gourmet coffee and “cappuccino” machines that pour frothy French Vanilla and Caramel flavored hot drinks loaded with high-fructose corn syrup are available at stations with glossy images of crafted Starbuck’s-style drinks. There are generally two walls of coolers stocked with every known soft drink. They have a section for a dozen or so brands of beer ranging from the common American corporate brands to the so-called craft brews (all of which are owned and brewed by the corporate American brands). Row upon row of food-substances the origins of which are unknown and unknowable. Then you move to the microwavable food stations. Many of these service stations have now partnered with fast food chains so some sort of drive-through fare is also available. The entire panoply of consumer choice and consumer life are contained under these multi-purpose service stations designed to make your stop from the interstate as seamless and convenient as possible. Of course, the most important commodity on offer is gasoline: the blood that is the life of contemporary life.

Surrounding these service stations, stretching for miles in any direction, are fast food and restaurant chains of all types and varieties. The obvious McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Wendy’s, etc. are punctuated by the more elaborate fare found in Outback, Cracker Barrell, and Chilie’s. Food of every known kind can be obtained either in drive through or take out, or in the form of an actual dine-in experience with wait staff. Along with food, these thoroughfares will feature Target, Walmart, Home Depot, etc. Each of these big-box retail stores will anchor an entire strip of other retail stores such as Staples and Home Goods. Within these plazas there are also stores with shorter lives: Chinese and Indian take-out, used video game stores, Hallmark stores, Christian bookstores, etc. None of these last long, and each is replaced with something equally transient. Not only is the merchandise consumable and disposable, so are the retail outlets which provide the merchandise.

Nearly any exit off an American interstate will look like what I describe above. Each will be identical. The only changes will be local versions of the same thing—White Castle in the north turns into Krystal in the south. The local fare will reflect the regional identities to the extent that regional identities are easily identifiable across all regions. This is to say that a restaurant in Tennessee will offer something unique to the state of Tennessee only insofar as anyone from outside the region would be able to understand the image. “Hillbilly” will be packaged and marketed so that people from Maine, Minnesota, and California are not in any way mystified by the image of Tennessee. All big-box retail stores are the same in every state and region. Stand in a Target in Ohio and you are standing in the same Target as the one in Nevada. You are effectively in the same place since the place itself is as interchangeable and exchangeable as everything in the store.

Beyond the retail strip and restaurant chains, housing developments stretch off into the distances. Farmland may well still exist, but the developments of new housing will invariably stretch along or through the rural landscape. Each subdivision differs only in the most superficial ways. These are houses which are built in precisely the same way as all mass-produced commodities. Within each subdivision, all individual structures will be virtually identical, differing only in superficial details. These housing developments are arranged so as to create the illusion of a neighborhood. Streets arranged in rows or semi-circles all of which join a central street which is connected to the main artery of retail and commercial sprawl. The neighborhoods are generally named after local features such as trees and geological forms none of which can be seen since all of these things were removed to make way for the retail, restaurant, and housing complexes and sprawls which now occupy the terrain.

Some areas off the interstates are devoted primarily to commercial development. These consist mostly of information processing industries, transportation of goods and services, and corporate headquarters for companies which may still be in the business of manufacturing goods, but the actual manufacturing takes place miles away, often in different countries altogether. Shipping companies occupy large areas in order to facilitate the transfer and movement of consumer goods. Office parks occupy massive geographical areas with enormous parking lots. Surrounding all of the commercial plots are carefully landscaped grounds complete with circulating lakes and manicured greenspaces. The natural environment which once defined these areas, the rural landscapes and natural terrain were completely cleared and replaced by these artificial landscapes which give rise to an industry of landscaping and lawncare all to itself.

The images described above have overtaken the American landscape. Various regions of the country will differ according to the climate, but the basic layout of consumer life, commercial development, and suburban development will remain constant. There is no place that is significantly different than any other place. Place itself is interchangeable and exchangeable so that individual places no longer exist except insofar as places have been commodified and branded. Neighborhoods exist because land developers have named them as neighborhoods. Regional identities exist to the extent that they are marketable brands of regional identities. Individual places are unrecognizable, and the space between individual places exists only to be overcome with the greatest speed and convenience. Even the fundamental identity of the rural world and rural culture has been effaced by the encroachment of consumer life and suburban development. The only remnant of rural life is the brand of rural life found in Cracker Barrell where one can buy “farm-style” breakfast plates stuffed with every example of breakfast food imaginable. These feed people who sit in cars and work in offices and only walk as far as the front doors of their newly constructed pre-fab homes to their cars.

Although all of this development takes place within the domain of civic authority, the actual force of authority are the capitalist ventures which own the land and the points of consumption. This is to say that all actual power and authority remains squarely within the realm of capitalist ownership. Civil law and the concept of a civic arena are subordinate to the private ventures which fuel these forms of consumer developments and the consumer culture which drives the private ventures. It is a reciprocal system to the extent that individual demand drives corporate development and corporate development creates the space and conditions for consumer demand. This is a purely spectacular world, one which is driven by forms of authority which far exceed the civic domain. The cultural conditions of contemporary American terrain are defined by the capitalist drives which fuel consumer culture, and this finds its most extreme expression in landscape I have described above. As Debord explains:

At the core of these conditions we naturally find an authoritarian decision-making process that abstractly develops any environment into an environment of abstraction. The same architecture appears everywhere just as soon as industrialization begins. (The Society of the Spectacle, 122-123)

American geography has become an environment of abstraction. The Real—any idea of the Real—which may have once existed has been plowed under and replaced by abstract forms of geography designed entirely to facilitate a culture of pure consumption, a culture which produces nothing but consumption and waste. The lives of individuals who live in these regions are defined in terms of consumption and waste. All commodities lose value the moment they are purchased and must endlessly be renewed with new versions of the same thing. This is culture abstracted from material life and rendered entirely in the form of consumption.

Consumer capital is all there is, and virtually all of life is subsumed by consumer capital. Basic needs are provided through a diffuse network of supply which is so far removed from the sources of food, fuel, electricity, and water that all of these things appear to simply appear ex nihilo. The massive waste generated by this world is also removed and landfilled in regions largely cut-off from the lives and businesses which generate the waste. Once dumped, it no longer exists. The super-highway interstate system makes all of this possible. A vast system of interstates connects the entire country via a network of space which provides nothing but the means to move past it. The space of the interstate system is nothing but space to be overcome. The sole reason for its being is to pass it behind. The interstate system and the worlds which develop along their length and breadth are heterotopias, abstract spaces on which abstract lives are lived in relation to a world which grows ever more abstract. What is the highway but a space of abstraction in which “(t)he undifferentiated daily flow is punctuated only by the statistical, foreseen, and foreseeable series of accidents, about which THEY keep us all the better informed as we never see them with our own eyes—accidents which are never experienced as events, as deaths, but as a passing disruption whose every trace is erased within the hour” (This is Not a Program, 152). As the highway effaces all difference through its endless uniformity and totalizing program of mathematical planning and control, everything else becomes undifferentiated to the point that what marks one “thing” apart from another is lost. Accidents and real deaths are experienced only as transitory moments in which the ceaseless flow becomes momentarily interrupted. And as all space becomes continuous in a seamless flow of undifferentiated space, space itself is lost. Designed to facilitate the movement over distances, “the pure space of the highway captures the abstraction of all place more than all distance” (152). This “all place” is also the multiple “places” in which everyday life is now lived in the abstraction of space. Suburban sprawl is pure abstraction laid out in accordance with the abstraction of the highway.

The places which emerge at every exit and on-ramp off and onto the highway are completely interchangeable and exchangeable places. They are nothing but forms of abstract space. The housing developments are abstractions based on a flimsy reference to what once occupied actual places. Where there were farms, expanses of woodland, and even small towns, there are now abstractions of those places that bear metonymical links with what once marked those places as real. The woodland that was clear-cut and plowed under is replaced with a pre-fab development of completely indistinguishable housing units arranged in some geometric pattern and then named after a species of tree which once grew in the woodland. It may be named after a native American tribe wiped out centuries ago, and now the local school system takes its name. The lost Lakota Indians become Lakota High School and the people who live in this abstract no-place can find a point of identification with the linguistic representation of an idea no one knows anything about and suture that linguistic representation to a life which unfolds amid absolutely nothing but things to be consumed. Words and individual identities are evacuated of all meaning and re-filled with exchangeable meanings that can be traded along the interstate corridor of abstraction. Consumption is life, and life takes place in the abstract space of pure nullity.

All of life is “presided over in unmediated fashion by the requirements of consumption” (Debord, 123). What of the culture of this world? What emerges within this landscape of nullity is a new form of peasantry, one which is conditioned entirely by the logic of consumer society. Unlike the old peasantry in which natural ignorance was a function of an isolated world, the new peasantry is conditioned to their ignorance by a cultural logic which denies anything exterior to consumer culture. In this landscape of consumerism,

Natural ignorance has given way to the organized spectacle of error. The “new towns” [subdivisions] of technological pseudo-peasantry are the clearest indications, inscribed on the land, of the break with historical time on which they are founded: their motto might well be: “On this spot nothing will ever happen—and nothing ever has.” (124)

An organized spectacle of error is the inevitable result of a population who derive all knowledge of the world from the spectacle of the image and the mediation of the commodity. Nothing can be known except insofar as it is represented in a consumable form that is exchangeable with any other commodity. Therefore, knowledge itself is a commodity, and if it is not commodified knowledge, it is not knowledge. The break with historical time comes about, at least in part, from the ex nihilo fashion in which these communities spring up around consumer culture and consumer culture springs up around these communities. The process is one of expressive causality. One aspect of consumer life does not precede the other. The entire landscape and culture of the American landscape now simply appears on the horizon complete with everything I described above and much more. Any history of the regions which may have preceded the creation of the consumer landscape is denuded with the very land on which the spaces are built. Since this historical narrative is completely negated, any narrative of the existence of these regions is created from within the same cultural logic by which they come into being. Nothing ever happened here because everything happens exactly the same way every minute of every day. Nothing will ever happen here because everything that could happens is a reproduction of everything else that has ever happened. The term peasantry is perfect since what we see in the people whose lives are defined by these regions and the forms of culture which define these regions consists of a population which lives in total ignorance of what is beyond the society of the spectacle.

We are left with a geography of homogeneity and a population which mistakes this homogenous nullification of life for life itself. There are no spaces to be; only spaces to have…

Michael Templeton is an independent scholar, writer, and musician. He completed his Ph.D. in literary studies at Miami University of Ohio in 2005. He has published scholarly studies and written cultural analysis, creative non-fiction, and poetry published in small independent publications. He currently works as a freelance writer providing articles for a non-profit called the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition. He is also the lead guitar player for the IdleAires, a communications service and information dissemination apparatus operating as a Rock n' Roll trio. I live in Cincinnati, Ohio with my wife who is an artist.

Works Cited

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone           Books,1995.

The Invisible Committee. This is Not a Program. Tr. Joshua David Jordan. Cambridge:

Semiotext(e). 2011.

Capitalism and Identity: A Review of Ashley J. Bohrer’s 'Marxism and Intersectionality'

By Carlos Garrido

In her 2020 text Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism, Ashley J. Bohrer sets out to demystify the erroneous conception that the traditions of Marxism and Intersectionality are incompatible. In finding that in academia the interactions between these two traditions have been “grounded more in caricature than in close reading,” Bohrer sets out to expose and correct what she calls the “synecdochal straw person fallacy” present in the way each tradition has interacted with the other (AB, 14, 20). In noting that both traditions represent active ways of “reading, understanding, thinking, and dreaming beyond the deep structures of exploitation and oppression that frame our world,” her starting point is historical, i.e., she begins by outlining the historical precursors of the intersectional tradition (AB, 21). In doing so, she situates the origins of intersectional thought in spaces inseparably linked to communist and socialist activism, organizations, and parties. Nonetheless, it is important to note before we continue that her goal is not to ‘synthesize’ the two traditions, or to subsume the one under the other, but to articulate a ‘both-and’ approach, in which the conditions for the possibility of “theoretical coalitions between perspectives, in which the strengths of each perspective are preserved” arises (AB, 23).

Bohrer sets the groundwork for her project by situating the historical unity of the intersectional tradition and socialism. She begins by examining the 19th century thinkers Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Bohrer argues that these three central foremothers of the intersectional tradition had concerns not limited to the dynamics of race and gender, i.e., the three understood that concerns of “labor, class, capitalism, and political economy” were inseparable from concerns of race and gender (AB, 35). In Stewart she demonstrates the presence of an early (1830s) notion of surplus value at hand in the analysis of enslaved black women’s work, who she saw as performing the labor that allowed for the profits of the owner. In Truth she examines her lucid development of the structural role reproductive labor played for capitalism, and more specifically, how the exploitation of this reproductive labor takes a variety of forms according to race. Lastly, in Wells-Barnett she examines how her groundbreaking work on lynching not only demystifies the narrative of the black male rapist, but postulates that “lynching was predominantly a tool of economic control,” used to keep the black community economically subordinated to white capitalist (AB, 40).

Bohrer proceeds to examine the three key intersectional forerunners of the first half of the 20th century: Louise Thompson Patterson, Claudia Jones, and W.E.B. Du Bois, all which were at some point members of the Communist Party. In Patterson we see the development of the concept of ‘triple exploitation’ used to describe the unique position black working-class women have under capitalism, placing them in a context in which they are exploited as workers, women, and blacks. Influenced by Patterson’s notion of ‘triple-exploitation’ and the Marxist-Leninist concept of ‘superexploitation,’ Claudia Jones refurnishes and expands on both – reconceptualizing the former as ‘triple-oppression,’ and redefining the latter to account for the uniquely exploitative position black women occupy under capitalism. In postulating black women’s position as ‘superexploited,’ Jones considers black women, not the white industrial proletariat, the “most revolutionary segment of the working class” (AB, 50). Lastly, in Du Bois we see expressed a profound understanding that race, class, and gender are tied with “simultaneous significance” to the structural contradictions of capitalism (AB, 51). This simultaneous significance of the three requires an individual and systematic understanding of oppression to be fully comprehended.

Bohrer closes out her historical contextualization by looking at the last half of the 20th century. She begins by looking at the three approaches to thinking about the relations of class, race, and gender that arise in the 1960s-80s. These three are: double and triple jeopardy, standpoint theory, and sexist racism. Bohrer argues that although these three played a great role in the development of the intersectional tradition, they are still “distinct from a full theory of intersectionality,” for they contain, in different ways, the reifying, homogenizing, and essentializing ways of thinking of race, class, and gender that intersectionality attempts to move beyond (AB, 35). Bohrer then examines the anti-capitalist critiques present in the intersectional thought of the Combahee River Collective, Patricia Hill Collins, Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde. In the Combahee River Collective, we see the inclusion of class, race, gender, and sexuality as interlocking systems of oppression that “permeate all moments of capitalist exploitation” (AB, 74). The same sentiment, conceptualized in various ways, permeates throughout the work of Collins (matrix of domination), Davis, hooks (white supremacist capitalist patriarchy), and Lorde (white male heterosexual capitalism).

Having contextualized the historical unfolding of the intersectional tradition, Bohrer moves on to examine what she considers to be the best forms of intersectionality, i.e., the ones that do not leave class behind, and the best forms of Marxism, i.e., the ones that do not consider race, sex, and other forms of oppression secondary and epiphenomenal to class-based exploitation. Beyond this, she also examines the disputes each side has with the other, and how these end up being largely based on synecdochal straw person fallacies.

Bohrer begins by attempting to lay out as refined a definition as possible to the question ‘what is intersectionality?’. To get to the refined, Bohrer starts with the general, stating that broadly “intersectionality is a term that brings together a variety of positions on the relationships between modes of oppression and identity in the contemporary world” (AB, 81). From here, Bohrer goes on to postulate five definitions of intersectionality as presented by some of its key theorists: Kimberlé Crenshaw, Leslie McCall, Patricia Hill Collins, Ange-Marie Hancock, and Vivian May. By showing there is disputes between intersectional thinkers on how intersectionality should be thought of, Bohrer breaks the conceptions of intersectionality as a homogenous theoretical approach, and demonstrates that there is plurality, disputes, and discussion actively happening within the tradition. Nonetheless, she marks six central postulates of intersectional thinking that permeate in most intersectional theorists. These are: 1- anti single axis thinking – the various forms of oppression are enmeshed within each other and inseparable; 2- anti ranking oppressions – no one oppression is any more important than another, i.e., being constructed relationally, you cannot solve one without solving the others; 3- Think of oppression in multiple registers – structurally, individually, representationally, etc.; 4- Identity is politically and theoretically important – identity is never pure, it is always “multi-pronged, group-based, historically-constituted, and heterogenous;” 5- Inextricable link of theory and practice – activism and the theoretical are linked; and 6- Power is described and attacked – intersectionality is not neutral, it is both “descriptive and normative,” it describes and critiques power (AB, 93, 95).

Having laid out the plurality of approaches, and also the unifying central postulates of intersectionality, Bohrer proceeds to examine the ways in which some Marxist theorists distort and fallaciously critique intersectionality. I will here lay what I take to be the six (out of eight) most important and frequent critiques of intersectionality, and the responses Bohrer gives to each. The first critique argues that intersectionality is individualistic, and thus, in line with the ethos of capitalism. But, as we saw in the previous postulates, identity for the intersectional theorist is group based and historically constructed. The second critique reduces intersectionality to postmodernism and poststructuralism. In doing so, Bohrer references Sirma Bilge in arguing that what is taking place is the “whitening of intersectionality,” i.e., a framework originated and guided by black women is subsumed under a white man predominated field (AB, 107). The third critique postulates intersectionality as liberal multiculturalism, falling within the logic of neoliberalism. Bohrer argues that although intersectional discourse is whitewashed and misused by neoliberal representationalism, intersectional theorists are ardent critics of this and fight to sustain the radical ethos of intersectionality. The fourth critique argues that intersectionality does not sufficiently account for issues of class. Bohrer contends, through Linda Alcoff, that in order to properly understand class, one must understand it enmeshed in race, sex, and gender. The fifth critique argues that intersectional theorists fail to account for the historical causes of that which they describe and critique. Bohrer responds that the intersectional theorists do account for the historical causes of the matrices of domination, but that instead of attributing the cause to one thing, they take a multi-dimensional approach. The last critique we will examine states that intersectionality multiplies identities and makes it harder for solidarity to arise. Bohrer’s response to this is that we must refrain from thinking of solidarity as the lowest common denominator of sameness, solidarity must be thought of as the building of coalitions of difference, united by a sameness in interest, not identity.

Bohrer now embarks on repeating with Marxism what she just did with intersectionality. She begins by devoting her time to demonstrating that what she calls the reductive ‘orthodox story’ of Marxism, which postulates Marxism “as a fundamentally class-oriented, economically-reductionist, teleological theory of waged factory labor,” is not the only form of Marxism (AB, 124). Bohrer approaches this task by postulating seven assumptions the ‘orthodox story’ makes, and then responds to each in a way that demonstrates how Marx, Engels, and queer, feminist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist Marxists have addressed these questions free of the reductive assumptions of the ‘orthodox story.’ Some of these non-reductive approaches include: 1- looking beyond waged labor to examine the labor that is structurally necessary but unpaid; 2- looking at how the division of labor is racialized and sexualized; 3- examining the necessary role violence and oppression attendant in colonialism, land expropriation, and slavery played in the development of capitalism, not just as a function, but as an integral structural part of the system; 4- looking at the non-homogeneity of capitalism, i.e., examining how it can take different forms; and 5- looking at the politico-social apparatuses developed to reinforce these practices.

Building on the non-reductive forms of Marxism she just espoused, Bohrer now embarks on the task of showing how many critiques of Marxism coming from the intersectional tradition, like the Marxist critique of intersectionality previously examined, are based largely on misunderstandings or understandings limited to the reductive ‘orthodox story.’ Concretely, Bohrer examines four common criticisms of Marxism from intersectional theorist:

1-“Marxism is economically reductive”…; 2-“it necessarily treats all other forms of oppression as mere epiphenomena of the ‘true’ oppression of class”; 3-“Marxism is inherently a male, Eurocentric form of analysis that can therefore never speak to the oppression of women, people of color, and people from the Global South”; 4-“a Marxist understanding of exploitation is founded on the binary opposition of capitalist and proletarian, making it incapable of thinking through the complex and nuanced organizations of exploitation and oppression” (AB, 159).     

Bohrer argues these critiques are largely limited in scope to the ‘orthodox story’ of Marxism which she has already established is merely one form out of many in the Marxist tradition. These intersectional critiques of Marxism become unwarranted when the form of Marxism examined is of the non-reductive type she appraised in chapter three.

The theoretically novel portion of her text begins by her looking at the relationship between exploitation and oppression. She argues that instead of reducing one onto the other, like has been done by the intersectional and Marxist traditions in the past, we must conceive of the two as having an ‘elective affinity,’ i.e., a “kind of consonance or amenability.” (AB, 200) This means, she argues, that we must think of the two as ‘equiprimordial’, i.e., related to each other as “equally fundamental, equally deep-rooted, and equally anchoring of the contemporary world” (AB, 199). In order to fully understand a phenomenon in capitalism we must understand how exploitation and oppression “feed off and play into one another as mutually reinforcing and co-constituting aspects of the organization of capitalist society” (AB, 201). Beyond this, she argues that “a full understanding of how class functions under capitalism requires understanding how exploitation and oppression function equiprimordially” (Ibid.). Therefore, four central points must be understood to capture capitalism non-reductively: “1) capitalism cannot be reduced to exploitation alone; 2) capitalism cannot be reduced to class alone; 3) class cannot be reduced to exploitation alone; 4) race, gender, sexuality cannot be reduced to oppression alone” (AB, 204).

Although the equiprimordial lens Bohrer introduces for thinking of the relationship between oppression and exploitation may be helpful, the development of the concept is stifled by her limited understanding of the notion of class in Marx’s work. Bohrer argues that instead of limiting class to being constituted only through exploitation, like in Marx, thinking of class equiprimordially allows us to see it constituted through exploitation and oppression. To expand on her point Bohrer references Rita Mae Brown who states that, “Class is much more than Marx’s definition of relationship to the means of production. Class involves your behavior, your basic assumptions about life[…]how you are taught to behave, what you expect from yourself and from others, your concept of a future, how you understand problems and solve them, how you think, feel, act…” (AB, 202). Although Marx never provides an explicit systematic study of class, for when he attempts the task in Ch. 52 of Capital Vol 3 the manuscript breaks off after a few paragraphs, we can nonetheless see his conception of class throughout his political works. Examining how Marx deals with class in his 18th Brumaire on Louis Bonaparte shows the previous sentiment from Brown and Bohrer to be problematic. In relation to the French peasantry, he states that,

Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class.[i]

This constitutes a notion of class that although influenced, is not reducible to the group’s relation to the means of production. It would seem then, that Marx’s notion of class is fundamentally relational in two ways, first as a relation a group bears to the means of production, and second as the relation a group’s mode of life and culture bears to another. Thus, unlike Bohrer states, already in Marx’s conception of class, when understood fully and not synecdochally, class can already be constituted through exploitation and oppression.

Bohrer also develops what she refers to as the ‘dialectics of difference’ present in both traditions as the way of understanding capitalism as a “structure and a logic” (AB, 208). In demonstrating how both traditions show capitalism developing contradictions in the real world, Bohrer’s first move is rejecting the reductive Aristotelean binary logic that finds contradiction to designate falsehood and which attributes normative statuses of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ to the polarities. Instead, Bohrer argues that in both traditions the world is understood dialectically, i.e., in a way in which the plurality of the ‘middle’ that binary logic excludes is included, and in a way in which the polarities of the binary are taken to be in a dynamic tension, not a static opposition. Dialectics of difference does not ignore or flatten polarities and contradictions but engages with them and resists through the inclusion of the excluded middle. This dialectic has nothing to do with the simplified and progressivist triad (thesis-antithesis-greater synthesis) present in popular conception. Instead of the beaten down reductive triad, Bohrer concludes by offering three metaphors for modeling dialectics: Collins’ matrix, the Frankfurt school’s constellation, and the prism metaphor. These three metaphors, to be effective, must be used together as “overlapping on one another” (AB, 229).

Having examined the descriptive potential of a non-reductive dialectic, Bohrer proceeds to espouse its prescriptive implications, i.e., “how do we organize from these contradictions?

how do we put the dialectic of difference into transformative practice?” (Ibid.) Bohrer begins by postulating that we must develop a theoretical framework that accounts for the intergroup differentiation logic of capitalist incommensurability (the inconsistent logics of racialization: logic of elimination – natives, logic of exclusion – blacks, and the logic of inclusion – latino/a) and that accounts for the intragroup homogenization logic of capitalist commensurability. Her response is a redefinition of how we conceive of solidarity. Solidarity must not be understood as the lowest common denominator of identity sameness, but as based on coalitions of difference and incommensurability united by mutual interest in transcending a system in which life is suppressed and molded in and by structures of exploitation and oppression. These coalitions, she argues, are to be built from the structural interconnectedness that capitalism already provides. It is, therefore, solidarity based on unity, not uniformity. As she states:

Capitalism thus links us together, in a tie that binds us, often painfully, in relation to one another. This moment of relation is the true ground of solidarity. Solidarity does not require the erasing our differences or the rooting of our political projects in the moments that our interests are aligned. Solidarity is thus the name for affirming the differences that exploitation and oppression produce within and between us; it is also the name for recognizing that every time I fight against anyone’s oppression or exploitation, I fight against my own, I fight against everyone’s (AB, 259).

Notes

[i] Marx, Karl. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” In The Communist Manifesto and Other Writings. (Barnes and Nobles Classics, 2005), p. 159.

The Desire To Get Back To Normal Post-COVID-19 Ignores Black Girls

(Mike Siegel/The Seattle Times)

By Chetachukwu Agwoeme and Christopher M. Wright

In the past year, we have dealt with a global pandemic as well as the violent murders of Black people at the hands of law enforcement. In response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and countless others, activists, and organizers have rallied people to the streets to protest for justice and awareness to the terrorism Black people face in America, and ultimately a call to defund the police. As a result of these protests, there are calls to adopt an ideology of anti-racism. For example, there have been posts of Black squares in “solidarity” with Black Lives on social media, as well as a surge of corporations suddenly advocating for “Black Lives Matter.” Although institutions, including schools, have pledged a commitment to anti-racism, things have not fundamentally changed, specifically for Black girls.

Black girls — who have experienced multiple forms of vanishment, violence, and utter disregard in schools — are now having to face another form of harm in the school building, COVID-19. This crusade to “get back to normal” ignores yet again how harmful our “normal” has been for Black girls in schools. As Black men, we believe it is important to focus on Black girls, because of the multiple forms of violence they face due to their intersecting identities that are overlooked with a “race first” analysis of Blackness.

The desire to get back to normal not only shows how Black girls’ experiences are ignored in what is considered “normal”, but also reveals a lack of attention on how COVID-19 has impacted the Black community. According to the CDC, Black people are 1.1x more likely to catch the virus, 2.9x more likely to be hospitalized by it, and 1.9x more likely to die from it.

The vaccine rollout has also worked to expose inequities in public health. The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) found that in every state in the U.S., Black people are getting vaccinated at rates significantly lower than their white counterparts. The lack of access to the vaccine while schools continue to open presents larger realities of public apathy for Black people by school policy makers. Protection and safety for Black children are not being considered when reopening schools because it was never considered prior to the virus. Therefore, “getting back to normal” as a process means to resume the physical and spiritual violence in the lived experiences of Black girls in schools.

In January of 2021, a Black girl was tased in a high school in Florida by a school resource officer (SRO) in the attempt to break up a fight. In the same week, another Black girl was body slammed head first into the concrete by a school resource officer in a separate Florida school. These examples of violence against Black girls by SROs are unfortunately not new. In 2015, a SRO body slammed a 16-year-old Black girl in a South Carolina high school for refusing to leave the classroom after being accused of classroom disruption by her teacher. In 2019, a 16-year-old Black girl in Chicago was pushed and dragged down a set of stairs by police officers before being punched and shocked with a stun gun multiple times by officers because the girl was accused of being disruptive by her teacher. These instances of violence that have happened pre-and post COVID-19, are not only assaults on the bodies of Black girls, but on their spirits.

Spirit Murdering, a term coined by legal scholar Patricia Williams and expanded to the field of education by Bettina Love, refers to the complete denial of inclusion, protection, safety, nurturance, and acceptance —all things a person needs to be human and to be educated—due to systemic forms of racism undergirded by antiblackness. In schools, SROs participate in the systemic, institutionalized, anti-black state-sanctioned violence that damages the souls of Black girls. With SROs as part of the school environment, this extends the prison state, leaving Black students vulnerable to state sanctioned violence under the guise of student safety. SROs are law enforcement officers who are often not trained to work in school contexts. Because of this unfamiliar environment, SROs force the school environment to adapt to the needs of law enforcement, thus opening a learning space to security cameras, metal detectors, and drug-sniffing dogs.

The forms of violence Black girls face in schools are unique because of the intersecting oppressions they face due to their race and gender. In Monique Morris’s “Pushout,” she found Black girls were punished for displays of Black girlhood and overall agency. Things such as falling asleep, standing up for themselves, asking questions, wearing natural hair, wearing “revealing” clothing, and in some cases engaging in traditional teenage angst resulted in their punishment. When Black girls display behaviors typical of all youth, it is viewed as threatening or disruptive by teachers because of the lack of understanding of Blackness or Black girlhood.

Blacks girls get framed as “loud,” “ghetto,” and “thirsty for attention” by teachers and fellow peers, which trivializes the violences they face in schools, thus positioning Black girls as the problem. When framed as “problems,” Black girls are then adultified. The adultification of Black girls is a form of dehumanization rooted in anti-blackness, intentionally meant to rob them from their girlhood — often leaving them unprotected. When robbed of this crucial milestone of growth, Black girls are vulnerable and unequipped to deal with adult forms of punishment at such a young age.

Overall, we need to be critical during this moment of transition, and ask ourselves what are the non-negotiables that must be attended to in order for us to send our Black girls back into schools? What is “antiracist” about getting back to normal? What does this mean when “under normal circumstances” Black girls experience violence in their schools by SROs, teachers, and fellow students? As we’ve mentioned, schools were already enclosures of anti-blackness through their punitive policies and practices. Is the desire to get back to normal worth the sacrifice of Black girls’ safety? This moment is one for deep reflection, reimagining, and organizing around these questions so that we can chart a path of resistance for Black students and their education. With a path toward resistance against this desire for normalcy, we must center Black girls who are often invisible and ignored. While the rest of the world is looking to rebuild the world they knew, Black people must continue to resist the violence that necessitates this rebuilding.

Chetachukwu U. Agwoeme, MA is a PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh studying Urban Education. Chetachukwu’s scholarship is dedicated to interrogating our current practices around school safety in regards to Black students. Ideally, he wants to change schools (which have been sites of suffering for most minoritized students) to places where students learn how to free themselves and free each other. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Maryland, College Park respectively.

Christopher M. Wright is a PhD student in the Urban Education program at The University of Pittsburgh. His research centers Black spaces as geographic sights of political struggle and worldmaking. He engages patterns of Black displacement and Black organized struggle. Chris holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from The University of Oklahoma.

The Hidden Violence of Immigration Bureaucracy

By Daniel Melo

There are obvious forms of violence in the US migration system--the longstanding brutality of Border Patrol; migrant deaths in the desert; the conditions in detention centers. These are all recognizable facets of enforcing borders and immigration restrictions. But there is a subtler, less understood violence that is pervasive in its bureaucracy, one that impacts the many thousands of people who are funneled through it.

The late anthropologist/anarchist scholar David Graeber took a compelling look into the nature of bureaucracy in his book The Utopia of Rules. This went beyond our usual disdain towards the absurdity of bureaucracy to peer inside its heart. There, he found violence. In a series of essays, Graeber lays out how deeply bureaucratized modern life has become, from one’s ability to get a bank transaction performed overseas to obtaining the ability to handle an ill loved one’s affairs, to immigration, to opening a barbershop. For him, this “bureaucratization” of daily life is “the imposition of impersonal rules and regulations . . .” which “can only operate if they are backed up by the threat of force.” Throughout, Graeber hones key point—no matter how innocuous or well-intentioned both regulations and regulators are, they possess significance and weight precisely because they are backed by the real physical force of the state.

Graeber goes on to argue that bureaucracy and its attendant violence have “become so omnipresent that we no longer realize we’re being threatened . . . .” This violence is so thoroughly present that it’s boring; it hardly ever enters our consciousness. He also points out that the creation and sustenance of systemic violence require very little work. In fact, incredible violence can be done to people with almost no affirmative action at all, such as the horrors of solitary confinement.

The violence Graeber identifies is present in our immigration system--preventing human movement, confining people to cages, or throwing them off “our” land. These all require force or the threat of it. The mere existence US immigration law perpetuates violence. Consider the simple example of the harm done to separated families because of visa quotas where the wait can range from years, up to decades. But statutory schemes aside, there is enough violence to go around in the pure administration of the law, independent of its unjust nature. To stretch Graeber’s analysis further--immigration bureaucracy possesses violence beyond the direct application of force on migrant bodies to more subtle, hidden forms of violence.

By way of example, consider the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the least outwardly hostile of the immigration agencies that exist under the Department of Homeland Security. USCIS is the agency charged with “adjudicating requests for immigration benefits.” In practice, this means that it reviews the common kinds of applications and processes for migrants transitioning from one form of immigration status to another, e.g., spousal green card applications, DACA applications, and citizenship, to name a few. Despite this rather innocuous, paper-pushing semblance, USCIS has real power over a migrant’s future. It is the bureaucratic equivalent of Border Patrol in its own right, a gatekeeper to forms of lawful status for many migrants both within and without the US. And in its own way, is just as violent as the officers with guns at the border.

The 18-24 months it takes to process a refugee resettlement case leaves already displaced people in life-threatening precarity. Bureaucratic mix-ups and slowness result in prolonged family separations and government detainment of children at the border. Even delays in the ability to get a work permit present a migrant with the choice of breaking the law and working without authorization or being unable to sustain herself. The same is true of denials. USCIS, under the auspices of the Attorney General, has broad discretion to deny applications, even those that otherwise meet the letter of the law. In many instances where migrants, especially the undocumented, are unable to adjust their status, a denial opens them up to the violence of removal from the country. This is of course separate and apart from how delays and denials perpetuate the precarious nature and violence of living somewhere without status. It recently reached an absurd height when USCIS began rejecting applications (including those for asylum) if every box on the application was not filled in with “N/A,” even when a question was clearly inapplicable or irrelevant to the benefit sought (e.g., a 2-year-old won’t have any children).

To argue that these are not forms of violence is precisely how the system gets away with it—it paints over the real harm inflicted by the system as purely administrative and lacking in either the significance or intensity to amount to real violence. To the contrary, much like solitary confinement or the neglect of a child, these are expressions of violence, just in their least obvious form. They impart real harm to real people and do so on a largely arbitrary basis. To Graeber’s point about the bureaucratization of life, this violence not only escapes our view but the view of almost everyone who interacts with the immigration system. It is both mundane and pervasive thus has lost significance, only jarring us every now and again when we see children in cages or a father and daughter face down in the Rio Grande having drowned in an attempt to cross.

Perhaps what is most troubling about this violence is that it is completely displaced from any one person or even one entity. There is no one to hold directly responsible for it, and in this way, all escape responsibility. Its casualness is both its alibi and its greatest weapon—-to be able to ignore the harm it wreaks on others, its lawful ability to do nothing. As Slavoj Zizek points out in his book on violence—the holocausts that stem from capitalism all seem “just to have happened as the result of an ‘objective’ process, which nobody planned and executed and for which there was no ‘Capitalist Manifesto.’” It is precisely because these systems appear as both “objective” institutions that produce similarly “objective” results that gives them moral and political ground to justify themselves, often as anything but violent.

Despite its perniciousness, there might be hope yet for bureaucracy. Or better said, for the creation of institutions that are accountable for how they affect people’s lives. Even Graeber, an anarchist, readily acknowledges that certain kinds of bureaucracies have done a great deal of good in the world—“European social welfare state, with its free education and universal health care, can just be considered . . . one of the greatest achievements of human civilization.” In addition to his scathing analysis, Graeber also offers up a profound critique of what is “realistic”. Drawing on Marx, Graeber notes that “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” If bureaucracy, particularly the one that lays claim over migrant bodies, is a human construct, it’s time to do it differently.

While Heartening, the Chauvin Verdict Is Still an Outlier

By Matthew John

A pleasant surprise arrived on the annual stoner holiday known simply as 4/20. After a tumultuous year of monumental protests during the deadliest pandemic in recent history, a verdict on the Derek Chauvin case was finally reached. As CNN reported, “Former Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin has been convicted on all charges in the death of George Floyd,” and “faces up to 40 years in prison for second-degree murder, up to 25 years for third-degree murder and up to 10 years for second-degree manslaughter.” 

Understandably, celebrations ensued.

But before the dust had settled, we received heart-wrenching news that another Black American had been killed by police. Sixteen-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant was gunned down by an officer in Columbus, Ohio 30 minutes before the Chauvin verdict was delivered. The celebrations seemed to fizzle out shortly after they began. This tragic incident is not only a microcosm of the larger systemic issue of police violence, but a lesson in the naïveté of expecting “justice” from this system in the first place. 

The ubiquitous phenomenon of American police killing Black people can be historically traced back to the very inception of policing as slave patrols in the antebellum South. Continuing through the Black Codes, Jim Crow, and the War on Drugs, American policing has always maintained a close bond with white supremacy. A ProPublica analysiseven found that young Black males in recent years were 21 times more likely to be shot and killed by the police than their white counterparts.

In fact, 64 Americans were killed by police during the trial of Derek Chauvin alone. While attention is hyper-focused on high profile cases like that of George Floyd, is it easy to forget that American police officers kill at least 1,000 people each year — a body count higher than all annual mass shooters combined. This nationwide massacre is clearly out of control and primarily encompasses an ongoing genocide against Black and Brown people that is consistent with American history more broadly. As many are reluctantly realizing, there is a good chance that this institution cannot be reformed.

While Democratic Party politicians gave disingenuous speeches exploiting the memory of George Floyd, I reflected on the fact that Floyd was killed in a blue state and in a city with a Democratic mayor. I thought about how Democratic president Joe Biden proposed increasing police funding by $300 million and sent the military to Minneapolis to further brutalize and terrorize those who dared to protest this continuous state violence against people of color. This is a systemic issue — not a partisan one. Both parties are complicit. Yet Democrats positioned themselves as the “good guys” and took credit despite upholding literally the same racist policies as Republicans.

Possibly the worst offender was House speaker Nancy Pelosi, who said that George Floyd “sacrificed” himself for the cause of justice. This was an absurd and disgusting remark — Floyd didn’t choose to be murdered. In reality, by convicting him of murder, Derek Chauvin was sacrificed to prop up an unfounded belief in justice within this inherently racist system. And this belief is indeed an extension of the American exceptionalism that is crucial to the ideological survival of this white supremacist, settler-colonial nation on the brink of collapse.

When anyone - especially an agent of “the law” - is filmed conducting a sadistic murder in broad daylight, they should be convicted every single time. The insincere gloating by the political establishment in the wake of the Chauvin verdict reveals precisely how rare anything approaching “justice” is found in the United States. We can show this empirically; between 2005 and early 2019, only 35 killer cops were convicted of a crime (a rate of far less than one percent). Based on these statistics and what we know about the profoundly corrupt culture of American policing, it is clear that the vast majority of violent crimes committed by cops go unpunished.

None of this means we shouldn’t celebrate the Chauvin verdict. We absolutely should. Seeing the Floyd family’s reaction to the news brought tears to my eyes. Although nothing can bring George Floyd back, this outcome is far better than the flagrant dismissal of justice that usually occurs in similar situations. In addition to the prospect of a fraction of justice being served, another heartening aspect of this development is the realization that activism works, that mass movements work, and — as much as the establishment doesn’t want to admit it — that property destruction works. Especially under capitalism, where human need is commodified and private property is valued more than life itself, threatening almighty property is one of the only tactics that catches the attention of the ruling class.

As Frederick Douglass famously said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” Without the massive protest movement (likely the largest in U.S. history) in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, that vicious thug Derek Chauvin would likely still be roaming free in the streets of Minneapolis. While we can recognize the significance of this verdict, we must also recognize that we have a long way to go to organize a multi-racial, working-class movement capable of enacting systemic change. If this is what it took to convict an obvious murderer, imagine what it will take to build the kind of society we want.

American Antipodes: Tales of Discord and Unity

By Jason Hirthler

A few weeks ago an image surfaced on social media. It featured three convergent triangles, their central nexus including parts of all three. Each triangle represented a prominent characteristic of what the right call, “Mask Nazis.” The first triangle represented the virtue signaler aspect of this group. Millions of social selfies feature individuals with their masks over their mouths, or lately their arms bandaged after their vaccine shot. The second triangle represented the patronizing element of the group, when they indicate they are “more informed and intelligent” than you. The final triangle represented the martyrdom mentality of the group, in which they claimed to be masking and vaccinating on your behalf, not theirs.

The Backstory

It is admittedly an amorphous and inexact thing to use the word, “right” to describe the community of people that would like the above diagram, versus the community of those who would revile it. But more than ever in modern memory the sides have been starkly divided. It was partially initiated by the Gingrich ‘revolution’ in the late 90s when Republicans adopted an attitude of intransigence and noncompliance toward their Democratic colleagues, an attitude sparked largely by a deep-seated antipathy and animus for Bill Clinton. Clinton had used his ‘triangulation’ model to successfully appropriate Republican policy positions and claim them as his own. This was part of Clinton’s effort to penetrate the deep-pocketed donor class that has previously been the province of the conservative right. It worked and Clinton shifted the Democrats away from a party that at least plausibly represented the working class toward one that served monied constituencies and retained only a patina of pathos for empty-handed workers. This led to the Republican revolt.

The presidency of George Bush further divided a once-collegial Congress and its national segments of popular support. The 2000 election scandal, 9/11, the Iraq War, Afghanistan, the 2004 election, climate change, the collapse of the housing market all provided blistering talking points for liberals and conservatives as they blamed one another for these traumatizing events.

The presidency of Barack Obama further polarized the left from right, when shrieking Tea Party zealots, in an eerie foretaste of resistance liberals, clamored for their guns, sure that the Hawaiian-born Obama was a closet Marxist Muslim scheming to infect America with theocratic socialism. But it was the election of Donald Trump that delivered the hammer blow to any thoughts of reconciliation. The Covid19 pandemic that followed at the end of the Trump era gave the citizenry fuel to continue the partisan bickering once Trump had been ejected from the Oval Office, to the delight of 80 million, the fury of 75 million, and the frustrated resignation of the rest. 

Now, Joe Biden has assumed the mantle of power, and opened his presidency by supposedly dashing off 72 revisions to Trump’s egregious policies. It’s all enough to convince even the most cursory observer that the left and the right are eternal enemies.

Perceptions of Fascism and Mutual Complicity

Searching Google’s text corpora through its Ngram Viewer reveals that the usage of the word ‘facism’ has seen a 100 percent rise this century in American English. This will surprise few, but questions of what fascism is and who embodies it will immediately trigger quarreling between left and right. For the liberal and left sides of the spectrum (they are not the same), Donald Trump is the de facto embodiment of modern fascism. For the right and libertarian side of the spectrum (they are not the same), fascism is better represented by censorious tech monopolies and the global public health apparatus that has led the battle against the coronavirus.

Could both sides have a point? Not if you ask either side. A recent poster on leftist Twitter warned of the dangers of dramatically dichotomizing the left/right ideological divide and argued that neither side had a monopoly on truth. Many readers liked a reply that dismissively claimed that “yeah, no, the right is categorically wrong on [just] about everything.”

But might it be true that neoliberalism, a class-based project to dismantle representative government, as described by David Harvey, is fascist at its core and animites Trump Republicans but alo Biden Democrats?

An article by Joshua Briond published by the Hampton Institute makes the interesting observation that, “The misunderstanding of fascism begins with the deliberate political positioning of [neo]liberalism as in opposition or an alternative to the fascist order.” This false opposition expects to see an older, imagined fascist order (principally Nazism or Italian fascism with its telltale nationalistic trappings) rather than what some describe as a corporate fascist order that exists now in less visibly overt fashion.

As Briond continues, “It has never been more apparent that liberal democrats are the stabilizers and upkeepers of fascist rule--who exist to provide an illusion of “opposition” to the material actualities and consequences of liberal democracy, western capital(ism), and the white power structure at-large--while actively upholding the neoliberal fascist order and inhibiting even the slightest possibilities of progress. Left radicals, or anyone who has divested from bourgeois electoralism, are constantly punched down on and condescended to for daring to demand more than mild concessions (“reforms” that’ll just be poked, prodded, weakened and rendered obsolete the moment the next Republican gets into office) and milquetoast, uninspiring, career-imperialist Democrat candidates.”

“The White liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. The liberal is more hypocritical than the conservative. Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro’s friend and benefactor. And by winning the friendship, allegiance, and support of the Negro, the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or tool in this political ‘football game’ that is constantly raging between the white liberals and white conservatives.”

-        Malcolm X

Briond here unmasks the quiet complicity of liberals in the stabilizing of corporate fascism. This is partly owing to the fact that Boomer liberals, a huge contingent of the political active, see the values they sometimes bravely supported in the tumult of the Sixties--anti-racism, anti-war, anti-establishment--have been enshrined or otherwise spun by the establishment, cleverly enough to convince most liberals that their original war has been won. After all, we’ve had a black president, the #MeToo movement has outed countless misogynists in positions of power, gay rights are further along than we’d ever have imagined before Stonewall, and a new generation of Social Justice Warriors are manning the barricades of bigotry by the day.

Yet look at the subtlety with which an imperial capitalist establishment has incorporated these elements. Racism is alive and well. Blacks have a penny in a jar for every dollar in the calf-skinned wallet of a white man. Obama was only elected by internalizing the hegemonic ideals of establishment ideology. Jennifer Matsui notes how the #MeToo movement diverts attention from institutional foundations of sexism and retrains our focus on individual cases, which can be profitably resolved without addressing the larger structural barriers to equality of the sexes. Indeed, gays have made progress, but they are embraced by a corporate world that merely sees another wallet to mine. It makes no difference to WalMart whether the man or woman in the checkout line is LGBTQ+ or a racist cis homophobe. A dollar is a dollar.

What we see here is that the imperial establishment will actively co-opt any value set that does not meaningfully threaten its bottom line. If profits are unaffected, or if new revenue streams can be viably pioneered, a popular or trending movement will be absorbed by the corporate facist establishment for just that purpose.

Obscure and Abjure

This co-optation is mirrored in the identitarian politics that fuel the left-right divide and consume so much activist fuel. In the drafts for a lecture series that cultural theorist Mark Fisher was to give before his suicide in 2017, he unearthed the sinister root of the left-right war: it buried class as the bedrock subjugation on which all other forms of oppression were built.

“In disarticulating class from the identitarian struggles of the day, capitalism no longer appeared to be the enemy. We were, instead, all too prone to impotently turning on one another.”

He anticipated the lynch mob mentality of social media whose current dimensions Fisher himself might find unimaginable: “As individuals squabble over who has the most privilege on Twitter, for instance, turning on each other, the true enemy — capitalism itself — is left completely off the hook.”

This regrettable disarticulation of class leads well-intentioned citizens on left and right to battle over identity gains that, while often majestic and necessary, will doubtless founder on the shores of economic inequality. They do not cut into the profit potential of the monolithic imperial system that underpinned the identitarian subjection in the first place.

Undervalued, Overlooked

Briond returns to drive home this point about liberal complicity even as the state undermines the communities it campaigns on behalf of: “The fact that so much state-sanctioned violence, political repression, mishandling and neglect of the most marginalized--especially incarcerated, immigrant, and houseless populations--in the face of COVID-19, an ongoing housing crisis, unemployment, and economic turmoil, is happening in “liberal” cities and cities led by Democrats nationwide, should very much inform our understanding of the situation at hand.”

It is no small thing to point out that liberals typically have what appears to be a naive faith that the government cares about them, prioritizes their health above profits, that Big Pharma does the same (at least in times of crises), and that their cherished mainstream media would not knowingly deceive them. This despite the volumes of evidence that the government and media have wittingly lied to and misled populations for decades. (See Taking the Risk Out of Democracy and Manufacturing Consent for foundational works on media bias in favor of corporate interests.)

This almost surreal and childlike trust in the good intentions of government is reminiscent of Josef K., in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, who when arrested without apparent cause is relieved to finally have an opportunity to address himself to the chief inspector, fully confident this is a reasonable man with whom he will have a reasonable conversation, quickly resolving the misunderstanding of his arrest. The conversation quickly reveals to K. the confounding absurdity of the apparatus in which he is ensnared.

One might suspect this naive faith is the consequence of, as journalist Cory Moringstar has said, the monetization of left-liberal activism since the untutored riot of the Sixties. After which capital rightly surmised that activism ought not to be suppressed but co-opted. Hence the explosion of NGOs and their role as a kind of para-state reifying the conditions of the corporate state. Liberals have too much skin in the game to meaningfully resist. A rhetoric of empathy eases them into compliance.

The Invisible Horizon

Add to this domestic squall the almost incomprehensibly vast horizon of foreign aggressions perpetrated by a U.S. establishment whether led by Democrats or Republicans. Hence a scenario arises with Donald Trump repeating conjuring nationalistic and racist tropes reminiscent of the great fascist scourges of the 20th century, while at the same time the lockdown regimes cheered on by liberals and perpetrated by western governments in the name of public health have come to mirror characteristics of what one might call ‘public health fascism’ or ‘medical tyranny.’ In a further irony, Trump appeared to express a desire to continue to promote imperial hegemony and capitalist exploitation through the less public apparatus of drone war and special forces, much like Democrats have done.

“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

-        Abraham Lincoln, debate with Stephen Douglas, Sept. 18, 1858

End Games

If both left and right have been in some sense co-opted by the subtle ideology of the neoliberal establishment, is there not now reason to at least temporarily shelve the policy disputes that animate their hatred of one another, in the service of a collective effort to deny the realization of an authoritarian plutocracy as described above? Set aside the horizontal perspective of a left-right war and consider the world from the verticality of a top-down class war, that missing ingredient Fisher perceptively identified.

Yet the human urge to dichotomize and demonize is almost uncontrollable in our modern moment. Each side sees the other as a herd of rule breakers: conservatives break all the pandemic rules established to keep people safe; but in obeying these rules, liberals trash the bill of rights. In spite of, or amplified by, the relentless efforts of advertisers to sound social rallying cries meant to bring people together (while simultaneously opening their wallets), there now exists a continental divide between two halves of the country. It is a yawning crevice not likely to be mended by an American grit Bruce Springsteen Jeep commercial claiming that “the very soil we stand on is common ground,” as though sophomoric platitudes penned by 25-year old copywriters will heal us (but we can dream). Efforts like these only illuminate the abyss.

Violating the Myth

This is this collective void—a void of collective spirit—that Fisher laments. He argues that perhaps the ultimate subjugated group is “group consciousness,” that prevents the collective from seeing the totality of the system at large—capitalism—while at the same time being too divided to propose a full-scale replacement system.

As part of Fisher’s solution, he proposed “implementing a counterlibido to capitalist desire — a postcapitalist desire.” He was principally interested, “in the ways that radical political messages could be smuggled into collective consciousness through popular culture.” Considering that popular culture is where huge swathes of common opinion tend to coalesce around cultural figures and trends, it is an interesting proposition. After all, one simply can’t compete at the level of invective--the assembled armories of the mainstream media are too plentiful, ranged too far and wide, and are too able to actively suppress counter-narratives. And artificial cultural tropes spawned by Madison Avenue only salt the wound.

But what if Michael Jackson had been a communist? What if Elvis had befriended Castro? What if more films smuggled into the cinema the anti-consumerist manifesto of Fight Club? Could a graphic novel whose hero was a BIPOC socialist gain traction? One would expect the blind avarice of corporate capitalism to allow these ideas so long as the product produced significant return on investment. A recent graphic novel called The Ministry of Truth mines the deep vein of discontent with American media-propagated mythologies. It proposes that belief has more to do with reality than fact, a theme that is both comical and somehow true. It makes one think of how much more effective fiction might be than invective in a post-truth world.

Such works are at least potentially profitable avenues of discovery, their potential guided by their profit. (You see how even the language is co-opted.)

Paradoxically it seems to be the hidden factor of class that inhibits social cohesion around a narrative of collective uplift. As author John Steppling (frustratedly) noted on his excellent podcast Aesthetic Resistance, propaganda cuts across class lines. Workers are often hugely skeptical of MSM storylines. Haute bourgeoisie, white, liberal, educated professionals tend to buy the official line uncritically. A large up-from-below shift in consciousness, from individuated consumer desire to a potentially militant desire for collective prosperity, would doubtless frighten the haute bourgeoisie and elite capital into the kind of concessions obtained in the New Deal era. It has often struck me as not categorically necessary to take power--and that often wielding power beyond the official precincts is not a bad place to be. To be pitted against overwhelming odds is also of course the root scenario of great fiction.

Someone whose name I’ve forgotten once perceptively noted that communism out of power is galvanized by a collective vision that has a clear enemy that must be toppled for that vision to be realized. Once they’ve taken power, the original force of will continues for a time and produces great positive change, but as one generation slides into the next, the militancy and urgency of that original class consciousness bleeds out, lacerated by the very surplus it distributed. The material lived experience of the next generations is simply different than the original generation. The revolutionary urgency fades as a kind of bureaucratic and defensive mentality ascends. What is gained must be defended rather than gained.

One sees the same dynamic at work in capitalist societies. Small fledgling entrepreneurial businesses, always a few weeks away from running out of money, produce tremendous innovations in different industries and roar into market share and wealth on the backs of their inventions. But once they are market leaders, their entire attitude changes: they become principally interested in defending and growing market share, not through innovation, but through the mass dissemination of their original invention. They begin to act as border guards, patrolling the limits of their empire, ready to acquire and absorb any entrepreneurial challengers to their dominance. They become the staid, status-quo establishment they once sought to overthrow.

It is the same with politics. The principled antiwar activists and civil rights fighters from the Sixties made inroads into the national consciousness and won concessions from the establishment, but were then absorbed into it, undergoing a transformation that eventually spat out those longhairs and militant marchers as comfortable liberals who merely rehearsed a well-memorized lexicon of labor-friendly rhetoric, while the machinery of exploitation they once abhorred marches on under cover of the co-opted language of progressivism.

And so, staying out of power is perhaps a way to avoid the corruptions of power and retain the power of first principles, a persistent vital threat to authority, which must ultimately acknowledge that its power is, at best, nominal.

In that light, a bottom-up class consciousness aiming at collective prosperity could isolate the fake partisanship of the neoliberal duopoly as a permanent enemy of the people, exerting a permanent pressure and threat against it that would force the kinds of vast concessions necessary for it retain even a semblance of power. It would have to be a permanent threat in a way that taking power undoes. And perhaps that class consciousness is best transfused into the popular mind through scripts rather than screeds, drawn stories instead of funded studies. And best perpetuated by a marginal class far from the precincts of power, not the “rogue” vehicles sold to bourgeois families but rogue narrators wildly at odds with the fictions pumped out of the imperium. Apolitical and peripheral—a strange place to pen an origin story of revolution. But maybe not so strange in a cultural wasteland overrun with mainstream half-truth.

After all, until the war of the top against the bottom is recognized and the diversionary spectacle of right-left combat is set aside, we will continue on a horizontal plane, never climbing in metrics of prosperity or equality. Only by recognizing the ladder of prosperity has been kicked away—supposedly for our benefit—will we begin to invoke the “great weapon” of mass dissent, which is the hinge point of an awakening world.

Jason Hirthler is a writer, social critic, and veteran of the media industry. He has published widely on the progressive left including at Dissident Voice, The Greanville Post, and CounterPunch. His latest essay collection is The Conquest of Reality.

Automation Represents the Second — Not ‘Fourth’ — Industrial Revolution: Just as the First Necessitated Capitalism, the Second Necessitates Socialism

By Ted Reese

Republished from the author’s blog.

Humans have longed to be free from toil. The Greek poet Antipater, a contemporary of the Roman statesman Cicero, welcomed the invention of the water mill, which worked “without labour or effort”, as the foundation of a “Golden Age” and the liberator of slaves.

Now in the epoch of late-stage capitalism, after a long and painful evolutionary road, the possibility of a ‘post-work’ world — with the ongoing development of robotic machinery, artificial intelligence (AI) and other forms of increasingly sophisticated automation — seems like a tangible reality. Decades of relatively small, quantitive innovations (with computing power, for example, tending to double every two years) have led up to a point now promising huge qualitative technological leaps.

At the same time, the global workforce has been increasingly ‘deindustrialised’ — moved from manufacturing to services. The proportion of manufacturing workers in the total workforce in the US fell from 26.4% in 1970 to 8.51% in 2018.[2] Even Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa have been deindustrialising in the past decade, from a much lower starting point than Asia.[3] Whereas industrialisation peaked in western European countries at income levels of around $14,000, India and many Sub-Saharan African countries appear to have reached their peak manufacturing employment at income levels of $700 (both at 1990 levels).[4]

As McKinsey Global Institute Director James Manyika said in June 2017: “Find a factory anywhere in the world [our emphasis] built in the past five years — not many people work there.”

The ‘fourth’ industrial revolution?

The bourgeois (capitalist) narrative trumpets the automation revolution as the ‘fourth’ industrial revolution.[5] Is this accurate?

The evolution of production is a process of developing man’s mastery over nature, of harnessing nature to serve our needs. New technologies give rise to new needs. For centuries — comprising the primitive communal, slave-owning and feudal systems — manual labour determined the technological basis of society. As the continual improvements and specialisations of the implements of labour reached their limits and slavery and feudalism became fetters (restraints) on the further development of the productive forces (technology and humans) as a whole, mechanisation (machine-aided production) necessarily replaced manual labour. Man was no longer the source of power which wielded the implements of labour.

Consolidating capitalist relations of production, this was the first industrial revolution — it marked a radical change in the technological mode of production, i.e. the mode of combining man and technology. Where man had controlled and wielded the inanimate elements of work, machines now dictated the inputs of man and relieved him as, in Marx’s words, “chief actor”;[6] but, in creating a division of labour, did not free him. “The hand tool makes the worker independent — posits him as proprietor. Machinery — as fixed capital — posits him as dependent, posits him as appropriated.”[7]

Dominant versions of history tell the story that — since it was the most obvious contrast between machine production and the handicrafts and ordinary manufacture of small ‘cottage industry’ workshops — the upgrade of the steam engine made by Scottish engineer James Watt around 1775 was the fundamental catalyst of the first industrial revolution. By extension, it was considered the primary factor behind the rise of British capitalism and the ensuing industrial and economic dominance of its Empire. All thanks to the supposed individual genius of Watt (or was it his ‘Britishness’?).

This is an example of idealism, the theory that man’s ideas or ever-improving rationality determine the course of history. Marx’s method of dialectical materialism — that history is driven by ongoing conflict or interaction between material and social forces — enables the understanding of history per se, rather than individual versions of it. (Indeed, it also explains man’s ever-improving rationality.) That it was Watt who made this innovation is merely a ‘historical accident’ — if he had never been born someone else would have realised this inevitable evolutionary development.

Behind this ‘accident’ lay the driving necessity to develop machinery and liberate industry from the confines imposed by nature in terms of a power source. The development of steam power removed the reliance on water power and therefore enabled industry to be moved to other locations more freely. With steam power, the primary factor became access to coal, the source of the energy needed to generate steam, which in turn enabled greater access to coal. With the development of electrical power, industry was further liberated, and has therefore invariably moved to wherever the cheapest labour can be found.

The origins of the steam engine can actually be traced back to the ancient Greek mathematician Hero of Alexandria. Within a system of slavery, though, it could not be utilised. Marx therefore argues:

“The steam-engine itself, such as it was at its invention during the manufacturing period at the close of the 17th century, and such as it continued to be down to 1780, did not give rise to any industrial revolution. It was, on the contrary, the invention of machines that made a revolution in the form of steam engines necessary. As soon as man, instead of working on the object of labour with a tool, becomes merely the motive power of a machine, it is purely accidental that the motive power happens to be clothed in the form of human muscles; wind, water or steam could just as well take man’s place.”[8]

In his 1967 book Era of Man or Robot? The Sociological Problems of the Technical Revolution, Russian Soviet philosopher Genrikh Volkov writes that what made an industrial revolution for Marx

“pivoted on finding the correct methodological approach. His examination focused on changes in the joint working mechanism and the combination of the inanimate and human elements of the process of production. Whether the machine is driven by an animal, a man or steam, Marx showed, is immaterial. The source of power, being part of the machine, only serves the system of working machines.”[9]

What is defined as the second industrial revolution by bourgeois scholars was therefore merely the ongoing development of the first. Taking place in the decades before World War I, it saw the growth of existing industries and establishment of new ones, with electric power enabling ever-greater mass production. Major technological advances included the telephone, light bulb, phonograph and the internal combustion engine.

The ongoing digital revolution — with the emergence of digital record-keeping, the personal computer, the internet, and other forms of information and communications technology — is considered to be the third industrial revolution. This is, perhaps, more arguable. The instruments described certainly amplify man’s mental capacity. But the digital revolution is a technological revolution and actually part of the automation revolution; not an industrial revolution by itself:

“Mechanisation begins with the transference to technology of basic physical working functions, while automation begins when the basic ‘mental’ functions in a technological process actually materialise into machines. This becomes possible with the appearance in production of supervising, controlling or programming cybernetical installations.”[10]

The productivity of machines is slowed down by the physiological limits of human bodies, and so automation becomes necessary; man is increasingly excluded from direct production and now works alongside fully mechanised machines, calling forth a radical change in the man-technology relationship. As Marx said of automation:

“Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself.”[11]

This therefore means that capitalism “works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production,”[12] says Marx, since capital’s exploitation of human labour is the source of profit and exchange-value (the worker keeps less value than they create, with the surplus value appropriated by the capitalist and realised as profit through commodity sales).

The point of automation, therefore, says Volkov,

“should be to remove the contradiction between the inanimate and human elements, between man and machine, to break the shackle that made man and machine a single working mechanism, to act as Hercules setting Prometheus free to perform his great deeds. Potentially, automation can enable man to become Man with a capital letter, and the machine to become Machine in the full sense of the word. Freedom for man’s development is, at the same time, freedom for technological progress.”[13]

Defining automation

In Automation and Social Progress (1956), English socialist Sam Lilley defined automation provisionally as “the introduction or use of highly automatic machinery or processes which largely eliminate human labour and detailed human control”.[14]

The term is of course applied to a very broad field ranging from semi-automatic machinery to automatic factories. These are qualitatively different notions and so must be understood carefully. Volkov writes:

“Semi-automatic technology (semi-automatic machine-tools and lines, so-called cyclic automatons) represents a transitional form from ordinary to automatic machines. In this form, ‘automation’ is usually affected by mechanical means without, as a rule, recourse to cybernetical devices. The worker is still directly included in the process, which he supplements with his nervous system, intellect and, partly, muscular energy (loading and unloading of machines). At this stage, the new technology does not yet constitute automation proper and lacks its most characteristic features. As a matter of fact, semi-automatic technology stretches to the limit the adverse aspects of mechanisation by simplifying things still more, robbing working operations of all their creative content and contributing to their further fragmentation.”[15]

Automation proper can therefore be subdivided into three stages:

1. Initial or partial automation (separate machine-tools fitted with programme control, separate cybernetically controlled automatic lines). Here, the worker has relative freedom of action. They are included in the process only in so far as their duties include the overall supervision of operations, maintenance and adjustment of the machines.

2. Developed automation, e.g., automatic factories equipped with overall electronic control of all production processes, regulation of equipment, loading and unloading, transportation of materials, semi-finished and finished products. In this stage of automation the worker takes no direct part in the production process.

3. Full automation, which ensures automatic operation of all sections of production, from planning to delivery of finished products, including choice of optimum conditions, conversion to a new type of product, and auto-planning in accordance with a set programme. The planning of production as a whole and the overall control of its operation are also to a considerable extent transferred to automatic installations. “Automation of this kind is equivalent to automatic production on the scale of the entire society,” says Volkov. “Here, not only the labour of workers, but that of technicians and, to a considerable extent, of engineers as well, is excluded from the direct technological process. This does not mean, of course, that such work disappears altogether. It is only shifted to another sphere, becomes more creative and closer related to scientific work.”[16]

Base and superstructure

Under capitalism in the first part of the 21st century, we are still a fair way from achieving a singular fully automated system of production (The production process includes the transport of commodities to the point of sale/consumption, so workers who transport commodities (such as Deliveroo and other courier drivers) and check-out/till-point workers add value to a commodity. Drones, autonomous vehicles and self-serving tills are therefore automating the last stage of production.) That does not mean we are not moving relatively rapidly towards that outcome or witnessing an industrial revolution. McKinsey and Co expects “the near-complete automation of existing job activities” somewhere between 2060 and 2100, with the “most technologically optimistic” scenario putting the date at 2045.[17]

The first industrial revolution began before and necessitated the rise of capitalism (the printing press being the first generalised example of machine-aided mass production), just as the second begins before and necessitates the rise of socialism.

Marx recognised that the technological-economic base of a society determines its political and class superstructure. (Although the two of course interact and influence each other, the former dominates.) An industrial revolution has far-reaching consequences that go beyond the framework of technology and even beyond that of material production.

The first affected the character of labour (manual to mechanised); social structure (artisan and peasant turning into worker/proletarian);[18] the correlation of economic branches (agriculture being supplanted by industry); and, finally, the political and economic field (capitalist relations superseding feudal relations). Volkov spells out the most characteristic features of the second industrial revolution.

1) The production of material wealth has a tendency to turn into fully automated production “on a society-wide scale”. The second industrial revolution therefore “marks the completion of the establishment of industry”. At first, large-scale machine industry had a relatively limited area of diffusion, having taken the place of handicrafts and ordinary manufacture. But with the second industrial revolution, “industrialisation tends to spread also to the whole of agriculture, beginning with mechanisation, followed by comprehensive mechanisation and, eventually, by automation. Industrialisation is spreading to house-building, distribution, the community services (eg public catering) and even intellectual, scientific work. In this way, industry becomes the universal form of producing material wealth.”

2) While the first industrial revolution was local in character, being limited to a few developed European countries, the second industrial revolution “tends to involve all the countries of the world” as newly industrialising countries begin by installing the most up-to-date industrial equipment involving comprehensive mechanisation and automation. “This presents features of the first and second industrial revolutions at one and the same time. Consequently, the second industrial revolution is global in character, laying the groundwork for a subsequent economic and social integration of nations.”[19] (Our emphasis .)

3) The modern industrial revolution leads to substantial structural changes in the various spheres of social activity. Because of the ever-decreasing need for manpower for material production, scientific production increases both quantitatively and qualitatively and tends to assume priority over the direct production of material wealth. “Hence, science is the helmsman of the modern industrial revolution.”[20]

4) The dominant feature of the automation revolution concerns its social implications. As we know, the first industrial revolution led to the consolidation of capitalist exploitation. Large-scale industry spelt wholesale ruin for artisans and peasants, longer working hours, intensification of labour and narrow specialisation (the breaking down of the production process into a series of repetitive, monotonous tasks). In contrast, the modern industrial revolution in the socialist nations “leads to a shortening of working hours, an easing of labour, a modification of its nature (work becoming more creative and free), and to the elimination of the essential distinctions between town and countryside, and between mental and manual labour. While yielding the industrial basis for an abundance of material wealth and to distribution according to need, it also opens up possibilities for unlimited spiritual improvement of man’s personality.”

Volkov adds:

“The second industrial revolution resolves the contradiction between the machines and those who operate them, i.e. the contradiction within the joint working mechanism. By completing the automation of production, it paves the way for the implementation of the principles of socialist humanism in society. Hence, the very logic of the second industrial revolution strengthens man’s personality and humanism.

“In capitalist countries, however, this logic and the above-mentioned features of the second industrial revolution contradict the very essence of the relations of exploitation. All the same, mechanised labour gives way to automation, the antithesis between mental and physical labour tends to disappear. And the cultural and technical standard of the workers tends to rise. Substantial changes also occur in the social structure and in the relation between the various economic branches. In other words, many of the essential elements of an industrial revolution are distinctly on hand.

“The fundamental difference between the revolution in capitalist countries and its counterpart in the socialist states consists in its leading to the breakdown, [our emphasis] instead of the consolidation, of the existing relations under the conditions of the private ownership of the means of production. The modern industrial revolution has strained to the utmost all the contradictions of capitalism…. It does not reform capitalism. Instead, it creates the material preconditions for a social revolution and paves the way for the eventual replacement of capitalist relations of production by communist relations.”[21]

The automation revolution cannot be consummated under capitalism — socialism must be established to finish what capitalism started.[22]

The technological determinists who see automation as the ‘fourth’ industrial revolution do not put the development of technology in its proper socio-historical context, but instead in isolation from the human component of the productive forces. They fail to see “the genuine dialectics [interactions] of the forces and relations of production, [and] deny the inverse influence of the relations of production on the productive forces and the development of science and technology”.[23]

Recap

To summarise: over many centuries, manual labour determined the technological basis of society. The technological mode of production, the mode of combining inanimate and human elements, was subjective.

The next stage, paved by the specialisation of implements in manufacture, began when the main working function — control of partial implements — of the ‘living mechanism’, the worker, transferred to the mechanical mechanism, the machine. From human-inanimate, the working mechanism became inanimate-human. The technological mode of production became objective and labour became mechanised. This is then the first industrial revolution.

Finally, the third historical stage in technological development is ushered in by automation. The working mechanism becomes fully technical and the mode of combining man and technology becomes free and labour itself is automated. This then is the second industrial revolution.

Marxists therefore reject the bourgeois definition that posits the automation revolution as the fourth industrial revolution.

Towards a Single Automatic System

The maturity of technology that socialism will inherit in the 21st century means that the problems of planning associated with the 20th century Soviet Union will be much easier to overcome. (Indeed, in hindsight it is arguable that the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 proved to be somewhat ‘premature’, given that the Bolsheviks thought capitalism was entering its final crisis at that time.)[24] Thanks to contemporary computing power, ‘big data’ and stock coding, the dominant ‘command and control’ military style planning that overlooked the finer details is no longer necessary.

As Volkov writes:

“Let us anticipate the future and suppose that it has attained its zenith and that its characteristic features… have reached full development. We shall then have a society with fully automated production of material wealth, ensuring abundance. Such production will form a Single Automatic System which, for the sake of maximum efficiency, will incorporate all the branches of industry and agriculture, centrally controlled according to a single plan.

“From the social point of view, this will be a single society, because there will no longer be any workers or peasants previously associated solely with physical labour, and because the distinction between mental and manual labour, and between town and countryside, will have vanished. Creative work incorporating intellectual, emotional and manual activities will predominate. The life of society will be governed by the laws of free, instead of working, time, and so on.”[25]

The direction of history towards turning world productivity into a Single Automatic System shows that the final stage of socialism before the higher stage of communism is a de facto single world state. To get there each nation-state obviously needs to become socialist, with its own governing structure and centrally planned system working towards full automation in that country. A Communist International would be required to oversee development and trade between each socialist state — making sure, for one thing, that the plan incentivises the sharing of technologies and material wealth (including human resources) — which would act with the same semi-autonomy in relation to the International as a region of a country does to its central government or a state to federal level (or a local soviet to its regional soviet, and so on).

As this system develops, the Single Automatic System and a de facto one-state world would come into being, with borders being rejected as fetters on productivity — there being no transfer of ownership when it comes to trade in a socialist political union, anyway — and individual nation-states withering away in all but regional name.

We can see then that, whereas capitalism in the long run has a historically centralising tendency, socialism in the long run has a historically decentralising tendency. This then is the path to a borderless, stateless world, not the fantasy anarchist one, which, with its desire to introduce federations of fully autonomous communes, would effectively introduce new borders and undermine internationalism. The necessary aim of communism is to unite — to un-divide — the working class and humanity as a whole.

Conclusion

The essential point that must be grasped about automation is that it is abolishing the source of profit and exchange-value, i.e. capital’s exploitation of commodity-producing labour. This process is not reversible. Innovation and the tendency for machinery to grow relative to labour continues throughout history, under any mode of production. Under capitalism, the process is driven by the needs of capital accumulation.

Commodity-producers must continually expand production to overcome the inherent contradiction contained in the commodity: it is both a use-value, a utility; and an exchange-value, containing surplus value and sold for profit. The quicker and more abundantly commodities are made, the less labour, exchange-value and therefore profit tends to be contained in each commodity, compelling the capitalist to expand production yet further, only to continually intensify the contradiction. All production under capitalism is governed by this, the law of (exchange-)value.

This contradiction is also expressed in an overaccumulation of capital (a surplus that cannot be (re)invested profitably, resulting also in the equivalent surplus labour (unemployment)) and a contraction in economic output. This is at the same time an underproduction in surplus value. The necessary reaction for capital is to expand and cheapen the labour base and raise its productivity through innovation, only to increase the underproduction of surplus value in the long-run, since the amount machinery and capital employed tends to rise relative to the total surplus-value-producing labour employed.

Commodity-producers continually have to attract greater investment to turn a profit. As a company gets bigger, though, its costs get larger and more unsustainable, and so greater profits need to be generated than before (hence the dominant tendency towards the ever-greater monopolisation of industry, for economies of scale (efficiency)).

Since wages eat into thinning profit margins, expenditure on wages must be slashed. Robots do not need toilet/rest/lunch breaks, sick or holiday pay, and are therefore much more productive and cheaper to employ. (There is no such thing as ‘technological unemployment’, though; people go unemployed when capital can no longer afford to employ them (so socialism, capable of permanent full employment, would take advantage of automated production by training and employing far more scientists, doctors, teachers, etc). Even police and soldiers, who do not produce surplus value and are therefore paid out of the surplus produced by commodity-producing workers, are increasingly being replaced by surveillance technology and autonomous weapons, since one effect of shrinking profit margins is shrinking government tax bases, at least in relative terms per capita.)

Innovation is necessary to continually raise the productivity of labour, to meet the demands of accumulation — only the size of the ever-expanding total capital eventually becomes too large for the ever-dwindling pool of surplus-value-producing labour to renew and expand. The underproduction of surplus value becomes insurmountable. The system comes up against a historical limit of accumulation and breaks down into barbarism, necessitating socialist revolution.[26] Indeed, interest,[27] GDP and general profit rates have all trended historically towards zero,[28] along with commodity prices.[29]

As with previous modes of production, the contradictions between the productive forces (the means of production) and the productive relations (the ownership of production) are being driven into irreconcilable conflict by sheer historical force. While this contradiction has always been expressed under capitalism by the private appropriation of the products of collective, socialised labour, it is now increasingly expressed by automated labour and a diminishing source of profit, tending ever-closer towards the self-abolition of the law of value.

Just as capitalism matured in the womb of feudalism through the concentration of industry, socialism has matured in the womb of capitalism through the further concentration and monopolisation of industry and the deindustrialisation, servicisation, automation and digitalisation of labour. The new technological-economic base demands a new, applicable superstructure; ie public ownership of the means of production; an all-socialist state (a people’s democratic republic); centrally planned production on a break-even basis; and the replacement of money by digital (non-transferable) vouchers pegged to labour time.

Indeed, fiat money is becoming more and more worthless — pound sterling having lost more than 99.5% of its purchasing power during its lifetime, for example. Worldwide hyperinflation is already on the horizon.[30]

The age-old arguments about which system works better, capitalism or socialism, are quite redundant — the answer has of course always been socialism, but the point that now has to be stressed is that, for the first time, socialism is becoming an economic necessity.

As Volkov concludes:

“As the mass of exploited manual workers decreases due to scientific and technological progress, particularly automation, the mass of exploited intellectual workers, i.e. white collar employees, engineers and scientists [who increasingly contribute to commodity production] also increases in reverse proportion (or even more rapidly)…[31]

“Capitalism in the age of automation increasingly turns the majority of the population into proletarians and, in doing so, creates all economic, social and political prerequisites for the system’s downfall.”[32]

Ted Reese is author of Socialism or Extinction: Climate, Automation and War in the Final Capitalist Breakdown.

The Commercialization of Music: How Rock Lost Its Roll

By John Mac Ghlionn

For years now, the world of hip hop has received a lot of attention. From Kendrick Lamar’s lessons on humility, to Cardi B’s damp nether regions, to Lil Nas X’s molestation of Satan, hip hop is very much alive.

The same, sadly, can’t be said for the world of rock. It’s thirty years since the release of two of the finest rock albums ever created: The Black Album, Metallica’s magnum opus, and Nevermind, Nirvana’s work of existential art. In fact, 1991 was very much rock’s year. Pearl Jam released Ten, another thoroughly exceptional album; U2 released Achtung Baby; R.E.M released Out of Time; and Dinosaur Jr. released Green Mind.

Fans of rock were spoiled for choice.

Thirty years on, rock music is on life support, or maybe it’s dead. Who knows? A more gifted writer would surely insert a joke involving Schrodinger’s cat, but we have more pressing matters to discuss.

What happened to rock music? Well, to answer that question, one needs to ask another question: what are the ingredients needed to make great rock music?

Originality is a must.

Sadly, musicians are no longer awarded for originality. Today, as I have written elsewhere, an artist is more likely to be judged on the quality of their video, rather than the quality of their music.  Quality music takes time to write. Could the likes of “Sad but True” and “Nothing Else Matters,” two of the finest rock songs ever written, thrive in today’s market?

Perhaps, but I have my doubts, and these doubts are justified.

This is the attention economy, and our attention spans continue to shrink dramatically. To truly appreciate the artistry of a band like Metallica requires dedication and commitment. Most importantly, it requires a level of deep concentration. No distractions, just you and the band. Interestingly, songs are now well over a minute shorter in duration than they were two decades ago.

Furthermore, rock music requires an element of roguishness. The history of rock is replete with stories of musicians doing the wildest of things. Mötley Crue, Black Sabbath, Guns N Roses, to name just three bands, had reputations that preceded them, and these reputations, along with the music, helped cement their legacies.

Now, though, a “bad” reputation is no longer desirable, nor is it permissible. In March of this year, Mumford & Sons’ Winston Marshall announced that he would be stepping away from the band. Why? The banjoist praised a book authored by Andy Ngo, a controversial cultural commentator.

Today’s culture is tame and lame, and that’s a genuine shame.

However, there is also another factor at play, and it involves a dilution of authenticity. Let me explain.

In the world of rock, 1994 was the year things really started to change.  A handful of multinational companies took control of the music industry. Interestingly, the likes of Sony and EMD, two of the biggest players in the music industry, also had very close ties with the movie industry. All of a sudden, suit and tie executives were using different metrics to judge music.

In the animal kingdom, mutualism describes a type of mutually beneficial relationship between organisms of different species. By the mid-90s, mutualism was an integral part of the entertainment industry, with music and movies, and to a lesser extent TV, engaged in a symbiotic, commercially driven romance.

In 1995, Batman Forever became the highest grossing movie of the year. Of all the song’s to feature on the movie’s soundtrack, U2’s Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me was by far the most popular. Though it’s a fantastic song in its own right, it blurs the line between pop-rock and pure rock. Nevertheless, the success of the movie helped the song, and vice versa. This was commercial mutualism in its purest form. Movies and music had always enjoyed a relationship, but now they were inextricably linked.

However, what was good for profit wasn’t necessarily good for authentic artistry. The mid 90s, I argue, was when authentic artistry began to wither away.

It’s important to remember that moves like Mission Impossible (1996) and Independence Day (1996) were made with an international audience in mind.

This explains why soundtracks had a manufactured, generic sound. Nuance, the very thing that bands like Metallica and Pearl Jam prided themselves on, was rendered redundant. As music is a cultural carrier of sorts, it became much easier to sell movies with “safe” soundtracks.

The mid 90s also saw the explosion of manufactured pop groups; The Backstreet Boys, N-Sync, and The Spice Girls started to dominate the musical landscape. At the same time, the dilution of rock music continued. Bands like Sum 41 and Good Charlotte arrived on the scene, and it wasn’t long before they, along with Blink-182 and Green Day, became the representatives of rock. The unkempt rock stars of the late 80’s and early 90’s were replaced by young men who could have easily formed boybands of their own.

Yes, genuine rockers still existed, but the purification process was in full effect. A band like System of a Down, as popular as they were (and still are), simply couldn’t compete with Maroon 5. This was the age of colorful clothing, rollerblading, and Tamagotchis. Such inanity was incompatible with angst ridden lyrics. It became far more profitable to sing about generic things like “hooking-up” and finding “the one.” Why be serious when you could be silly?

Shows like Friends and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air dominated the airwaves, and movies like Dumb and Dumber and Happy Gilmore lit up cinema screens around the world. This was silly-season, and in many ways a negation of the early 90s, when the rawness of rock music truly resonated.

The erosion of rock music’s authenticity carried on from there. With the arrival of Snowpatrol and Nickelback, rock came in the form of catchy, radio-friendly tunes. Then, in 2005, with the creation of YouTube, the commercialization of music was complete. Videos now mattered just as much, if not more, than the music itself.

Some 15 years later, what are we left with?

Whatever it is, it’s nothing like 1991. Of course, rock music can still be found, but it’s a pale reflection of what it once was. If in doubt, just ask Winston Marshall, a man who had the audacity to read a book.

Paywall or Open Book?: Power Dynamics in Academia and Higher Education

By Marcus Kahn

Academic spheres have a reputation among progressive and radical groups as being out-of-touch and disconnected from grassroots activist efforts. There is a long and troubling history of exclusion and deference to power leading right up to the present that lends weight to this perspective. Academic culture is deeply entrenched within networks of institutional decision-making power and is structured in ways that reinforce interlinking brands of elitism (classist, patriarchal, nationalist, ableist, and racist), despite optimistic rhetoric to the contrary. There are obvious systemic flaws in the U.S. higher education system, from the racial and socioeconomic inequities that selectively distribute resources and access, to the ways in which prestigious universities are implicated in the reproduction, growth, and maintenance of concentrated power. These sharp divisions rely upon the impermeability of academic spheres and the public’s inability to access knowledge and participate in knowledge production. By breaking down the physical, digital, and cognitive walls that keep knowledge contained, and opening doors for the public to participate in the closely guarded world of ‘intellectuals’, academic work can start to disentangle and detach from the constraints on perspective and action that limit its social relevance and reinforce social division, and take concrete steps towards the transformative deconstruction of existing power systems.

Barriers to Entry

The National Center for Education Statistics noted that in the U.S., “Of all full-time faculty in degree-granting postsecondary institutions in fall 2018, some 40 percent were White males; 35 percent were White females; 7 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander males; 5 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander females; and 3 percent each were Black males, Black females, Hispanic males, and Hispanic females.” Furthermore, “among full-time professors, 53 percent were White males, 27 percent were White females, 8 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander males, and 3 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander females. Black males, Black females, and Hispanic males each accounted for 2 percent of full-time professors.”

To enter into academic discussion, individuals need to ascend through a series of clear-cut stages. Attaining a PhD is a prerequisite for participation in academic discourse, which takes an investment of time and money most cannot afford. Of course, to get a PhD you need to have at least a bachelor’s or master’s degree. Huge segments of the population are effectively filtered out at each successive stage based off of the closely intertwined pressures surrounding wealth, gender, ability, nationality, and race, or else face the prospect of a completely unsustainable lifestyle.

Academic discourse tends to exist in its own world apart from the general public, filtering only indirectly into public awareness. Noam Chomsky cites the work of an early 20th century ‘pioneer’ in the field of communications often referred to as the ‘father of public relations’, Edward Bernays. Bernays distinguished the ‘bewildered herd’ (the public) from a ‘specialized class’ who understands their needs and the ways to provide for them. This viewpoint may not always be articulated as explicitly as it was by Bernays but emblemizes common attitudes within ‘intellectual’ circles.

Needlessly complex language and highly theoretical content can further serve to ostracize people who don’t devote their time to deciphering dense and convoluted academic texts. Chomsky has suggested that for the most part, core concepts and arguments in the social sciences can be conveyed at a high school level. The supposed complexity and impenetrability of social issues serves to exclude the majority of the population that isn’t highly versed in academic jargon, so that ‘laymen’ are unable to participate in the discussion of issues that pertain directly to their lives. This separation ultimately serves to disempower the public in determining its own affairs, since elites can justify their decisions and leadership roles through claimed ‘expertise’.

Institutional Interlocking

Academic research and higher education often conform to and serve the interests of dominant configurations of power. To take a few symbolic examples, Stanford was founded by a proto-Bezos, construction at UC Berkeley was funded by William Randolph Hearst, Princeton’s policy school is named after Woodrow Wilson, and Harvard’s political science school is named after John F. Kennedy. Academic institutions interlock with other dominant institutions in the public and private sectors, maintaining a mutualistic relationship which limits the ability of researchers and educators to examine institutional power with critical clarity and work towards meaningful social transformation.

Centers of concentrated power directly impact the research objectives of even the most seemingly ‘objective’ or value-free sciences. Highly technical fields such as physics, engineering, and computer science require intensive years-long training in university education systems. Major consulting firms, financial institutions, multinational corporations, and government agencies recruit talent from what essentially serves as a farm system to fill institutional ranks. Curriculum and the dominant intellectual culture that guides it are heavily instrumentalist, preparing students to enter uncritically into institutional roles with the ‘correct’ skills and mindset, so that by the time an engineer is developing ICBMs or an economist is assessing trade policy they have learned not to question or resist the ultimate impact of their work.

Research questions are often determined by the needs of these interlinked institutions, and research efforts within universities have consistently and directly informed the development of high-octane tools of oppression. Scientists trained and employed in U.S. universities have played critical roles in developing military and communications technology, as resources are continuously re-devoted to the pursuit of institutional objectives. Fields such as political science, history, economics, communications, and sociology are far from immune to the distorting effects of power on the trajectory of research and pedagogy. In the Science of Coercion, Christopher Simpson investigates the parallel development of communications research and government efforts to fine-tune methods of psychological warfare. Simpson maintains that “the U.S. government’s psychological warfare programs between 1945 and 1960 played either direct or indirect roles in several of the most important initiatives in mass communication research of the period.” He identifies a “positive feedback cycle” of funding, prestige, and participation that “tends to confine intellectual innovation to established formats.”

Breaking Down Silos

Library Genesis, an open-access online repository of books, published a Letter of Solidarity in 2015 that reads, “This is the time to recognize that the very existence of our massive knowledge commons is an act of collective civil disobedience.” This sentiment reflects the critical role of knowledge distribution and knowledge production in effecting transformative social change. Opening access to education and knowledge is a vital aspect of participatory public spheres in a democratic society. The artificial scarcity of instruction and resources is a means of enabling and exacerbating preexisting social divisions in a society that purports to provide equal opportunity, but ultimately filters out marginalized groups from attaining not only wealth and prestige, but also knowledge and participation in knowledge production. To continue quoting LibGen, “We have the means and methods to make knowledge accessible to everyone, with no economic barrier to access and a much lower cost to society.” In their critique of limited access, LibGen further argues that the current system “devalues us, authors, editors, and readers alike. It parasites on our labor, it thwarts our service to the public, it denies us access.” With these points in mind, there are very direct ways to increase public access to academia to the benefit of both academics and the public.

1.      Universal access to higher education

2.      Aggressive affirmative action in both admissions and faculty hiring processes

3.      Open-access digitized libraries like LibGen

4.      Lowering paywalls on academic journals and databases

5.      Recording and uploading all lectures onto the Internet

6.      Public participation in review and publication of articles and books

7.      Reducing technical language when unnecessary or simultaneously publishing parallel versions for public consumption

It’s no secret that higher education is artificially expensive and highly exclusive. This seemingly a priori late-stage capitalist reality is even more apparent in an era of skyrocketing college debt and overpriced digital education. Paywalls serve to reinforce barriers to entry and maintain the rigid stratigraphy of a society that can easily afford to distribute knowledge. The profit-driven world of academic publishing works in tandem with academic institutions that thrive on exclusion. Yet the focused and systematic pursuit of knowledge is critical to our collective well-being, and the resources of universities and publishers can be redirected to the benefit of the population. In order to advance transformative change, we need to enable knowledge redistribution, and take pragmatic steps towards enhancing the discourse between academics and the public, rather than allowing the public to remain the passive object of inquiry. Academic work can be invaluable or profoundly harmful depending on the interests driving research and pedagogy. At its worst, academia has unabashedly and effectively served elites. Increasing public access and participation can help flatten intersectional social hierarchies and transform how the public goes about solving its most pressing problems.