Whiteness As A Covenant

By John Kamaal Sunjata

White supremacy, whatever its latest evolution, whatever its latest iteration, ensures that one man’s apocalypse is always another man’s paradise. The blessings and promises that whiteness bestows upon its “chosen people” are inextricably linked to absolute, total, and seamless damnation of generations and generations of racialized people. Whiteness has fabricated itself in its own image; therefore, in its own eyes, whiteness is divinity. Whiteness is perfect, without spot, wrinkle, or blemish—whiteness is god. White people are thus imbued with power and dominion over the Earth and all its living creatures, especially inferior “species” of humanity that the racialized descend from. The mandate by which white people are empowered is the Covenant of Whiteness.

This Covenant is more than a simple social contract, as “contracts” always have a definite end, covenants are forever. It is not reducible to a ritualistic prostration of individual whites or even mere flagellation of racial capitalism, but it is a totalizing affair. It has created a planet hostile to racialized people, it has encircled not only our tangible realities but captured our imaginations. For us, salvation comes through death because only by reaching Heaven can we live a life comparable to what white people presently live on Earth. We live in a world of their creation and our souls are damned from birth—we are permanently forsaken, and we have inherited the original sin of darkness. Covenants are always solemnized through blood and every white person is covered in the blood—of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. The racialized have a permanent spiritual connection to the Earth because so much of our own blood cries out from the ground. The brutality of whiteness guarantees our mourning is ceaseless, it guarantees that our graveyards are evergreen from our tears. Our cries have no resting place because we never get a rest. Under whiteness, many are culled, but few are chosen.

When you are truly a god, you can never lose your anointing. When you are truly a god, your authority and capacity may never be extinguished by lesser “species” of being. The problem posed by whiteness is that white people—the instruments by which the racial-colonial project is maintained—are semipotent, not omnipotent. The prospect of lost “anointing” is a terrifying prospect for white people as it strikes at the heart of the Covenant they are conscripted under. It reveals that their blessings are not the result of good works; therefore, their overflow is not predestined. Their divinity is not destiny, but the latest destination of productive forces in the historical thrust of the racial capitalist political economy. It is only through the consistent deployment of violence and terror that whiteness has given its covenant form and substance. 

Whenever the racialized ingratiate ourselves to the production of whiteness, we uphold the moral superiority of a system premised on our enslavement and our genocide. We do the unthinkable by deifying a death-dealing regime that masquerades as a moral authority on “justice” and “righteousness.” No respect should be extended to any system of racial othering that instills fear and deploys wanton destruction. Whenever we worship whiteness, we declare fealty to its false gods: racism, consumerism, and militarism. The racialized are regularly sacrificed at the altar of white supremacy, our bodies and spirits are ritualistically broken to fortify the auspices of this racial-colonial project. The racialized may be “converted” to this tyrannical religion, but no amount of repentance will make our sins—our skins—“as white as snow.”

Whiteness does not require zealots for its expansion, but stable systems only. It is fortified by the ideological and repressive apparatuses of the state formation. So long as white supremacist institutions and technologies are not critically challenged or assailed by the racialized, whiteness will continue into perpetuity. Challenges from the racialized invokes revanchism disguised as righteous indignation because nothing is more threatening to the edifice—the fragile façade—of whiteness than decolonization. For a political economy structured and articulated by whiteness, decolonization feels like the Book of Revelation coming to life and the Chosen People know their actions are desperately wicked. Whiteness forestalls insurrection by reforming the presentation of its doctrine to deceive the racialized into being congregants, true believers in whiteness. Despite its attempts at reinventing itself, whiteness has at least one defining characteristic, an immutable property: a limitless capacity to inflict infinite harms with finite resources. It maximizes cruelty at every juncture: it is as arbitrary as it is petty and as petty as it is brutal. It is premised on a dehumanizing lie that keeps the racialized in constant search of the truth: the reality of our dignity and self-worth. 

We are a disillusioned people in constant search of new life-affirming consciousness to combat the death-dealing regime of whiteness. As whiteness was bought and ratified through the blood of racialized people, our freedom will also be bought with blood. The conditions of white supremacy produces its own antagonisms, generates its own resistance; therefore, mapping out the path to its own destruction. Whiteness has prefigured its own end: it may be the alpha, but the racialized are the omega. The racialized have no path to political salvation except by decolonization, it is the way, the truth, and the life for all racialized people. Decolonization is the process by which inferior “species” of humans are elevated, the process by which “the last shall be first.” Whiteness produces false gods, decolonization produces faithful servants. The racialized must shed the blood of our oppressors, overthrow the systems of our oppression and bring truth to the well-known phrase: “the meek shall inherit the Earth.” It is through decolonization that the Covenant of Whiteness is superseded and a new Covenant takes its place. Under this new Covenant, the racialized shall sign and seal our freedom and redemption once and for all, for all at once.

Critique of the Misunderstanding Concerning Marx’s Base-Superstructure Spatial Metaphor

By Carlos Garrido

Karl Marx’s 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [i] represents one of the clearest reflections of the development of his and Engels’ thought. In what amounts to a short four and a half pages, Marx concisely exhibits the resulting conclusions of more than two decades worth of studies – from his first encounter with the economic question in 1842-3 via the polemic over landed property and forest theft, to the latest decade and a half painfully spent in the British Museum in London (except for the short interruption of the 48 revolutions) divided between the political writings for the New York Tribune and his economic studies for this text and for Capital, which this text is a dress rehearsal for. Although endless work can be done on these four and a half pages, I would like to limit myself to a clarification of the famed and famously misinterpreted spatial metaphor of the economic foundation and the political-legal superstructure. 

The most common misunderstanding of this metaphor posits that the economic foundation absolutely determines the ideological superstructure. In this view, all legal, political, philosophical, and religious structures and forms of consciousness are reducible to a reflection of the present economic situation. This perspective, held primarily by various vulgar Marxists of the second international and by critics of Marx (esp. the Weberian conception of Marxism), has come to be labeled as economically reductive and subsequently critiqued by dozens of 20th century Marxist, e.g., Althusser, Gramsci, Lukács, Lenin.

On the other hand, as a reaction to this economic reductionism, some Marxists have rejected the conception that the economic foundation influences the superstructure any more than the superstructure influences the economic. This perspective holds that there is a mutual conditioning of the two spheres, a dialectical interpenetrative relation between the opposing poles of the economic foundation and the ideological superstructure, where, as Marcuse states, “ideology comes to be embodied in the process of production itself.”[ii] The various reactions to economic determinism may take different forms, generally, what they share is a refusal to describe the influence of the economic realm on the ideological as ‘determinist’ – unless couched within a framework that equalizes the determination of the superstructure on the economic in a dialectical fancy of interpenetrative determination.   

Funny enough, Marx’s preface presents the relation between the economic and the superstructural with an ambiguity which seems to foreshadow both misinterpretations. First, he states that “the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life,” then that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” (KM, 20-21). These two sentences chronologically follow each other but refer to two different (albeit synonymous) concepts for describing the relationship between material life and the ideological superstructure, viz., conditions and determines.

Although synonymous, ‘conditions’ carries conceptually an openness for a less rigid affecting relationship. To say that something conditions can range from meaning that it influences to determines. Given the conceptual ambiguity, it would seem that the economic reductionist group would read conditions qua determines while the group which reacts to the reductionists would read conditions qua influences. Between this binary of blue and red pill, can we ask for another color?

I think Marx offers us blue and red for us to make purple, indubitably the most beautiful color keeping with Plato. In essence, both misunderstandings are partly correct – the economic foundation determines the superstructure, but the superstructure can also influence the economic foundation.

As Althusser noted,[iii] in a seemingly contradictory manner the superstructure is determined by the economic base while nonetheless sustaining a “relative autonomy” in relation to it, effectively allowing it to have “reciprocal action” upon it. It is important to note that this Althusserian formulation is actually a reconceptualization of how Engels dealt with the issue in a 1890 letter response to Conrad Schmidt. In this letter from an aged Engels, we find an elucidation for this often-misunderstood spatial metaphor, and consequently, a clarification of the scope of rigidity the concept of determination carries in his and Marx’s works.

This letter, along with the others with which it was jointly published as Engels on Historical Materialism, gives a fascinating insight into how determination ought to be read in the Marxist tradition. Before Engels deals with the question of the economic foundation’s determination of the superstructure, he examines production’s (as in the moment, the “point of departure,”[iv] not the whole) determinative relation to the moment of exchange, and the moment of exchange’s determinative relation to the newly separated money market. He says,

Production is in the last instance the decisive factor. However, as soon as the commercial exchange of commodities separates itself from actual production it follows a movement which, although as a whole still dominated by production, in turn obeys in its particular details and within the sphere of its general dependence, its own laws.

The same is true for the money market. Just as soon as dealing in money is separated from commodity exchange, it acquires a development of its own, special laws determined by its particular nature, and its own phases. Yet they all take place within the given limits and conditions of production and commodity exchange

The same relational function of determination/conditioning is sustained with the economic foundation and the political superstructure (and afterwards with the legal, philosophical, and scientific aspects of the superstructure):

While the new independent power must, on the whole, submit to the movement of production, in turn it also reacts, by virtue of its immanent, i.e., its once transmitted but gradually developed relative independence, upon the conditions and course of production. There is a reciprocity between two unequal forces; on the one side, the economic movement; on the other, the new political power which strives for the greatest possible independence and which having once arisen is endowed with its own movement. The economic movement, upon the whole, asserts itself but it is affected by the reaction of the relatively independent political movement which it itself had set up. This political movement is on the one hand the state power, on the other, the opposition which comes to life at the same time with it.

These passages not only demonstrate with utmost clarity how a determinative relation can sustain within it a relative independence (what Althusser later calls ‘relative autonomy’) which allows the determined variable a capacity to react and influence that which determines it, but in demonstrating the translatability into various spheres of how this relationship functions, Engels is providing a general formulative understanding of the question on determination. In essence, the variable which determines (or conditions) sets the parameters for the determined variable, such that the determined variable presupposes the other’s boundaries for its activity. Concretely, the superstructure presupposes a specific economic foundation which has set a historical boundary on it. Within this determined space, the superstructure is relatively autonomous, enough so that it becomes capable of emergent qualities which can have a reactive or “counter-active influence” upon that which determines it.

Philosophically, the position can be labeled as compatibilist, i.e., there is a soft determination which allows for the conditioned autonomous expression of that which is determined. Therefore, although the determination of the economic foundation on the superstructure is not absolute (hard determinism), neither is it nonexistent. Engels critiques both positions: he argues it is “altogether pedantic to seek economic causes for all” things, asserting that in doing so Paul Barth is “contending against windmills,” while also criticizing the position which altogether either denies determination or places the primary source of determination on the wrong variable as participating in “ideological conceptions” whereby the real relationship is inverted and placed on its head, making one take the “effect for the cause.”

Why do these misunderstandings arise? As the conclusion in Engels’ letter states,

What all these gentlemen lack is dialectics. All they ever see is cause here, effect there. They do not at all see that this is a bare abstraction; that in the real world such metaphysical polar opposites exist only in crises; that the whole great process develops itself in the form of reciprocal action, to be sure of very unequal forces, in which the economic movement is far and away the strongest, most primary and decisive. They do not see that here nothing is absolute and everything relative. For them Hegel has never existed. Yours, etc.

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] All subsequent quotes from this text will be from this edition: Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. (International Publishers, 1999).

[ii] Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. (Beacon Press, 1966), p. 189.

[iii] In his essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

[iv] In the appendix to the above edition of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, a drafted introduction called ‘Production, Consumption, Distribution, Exchange (Circulation)’ provides an analysis of the relation each of the four moments has with the other. Here he calls production the “moment of departure.” This draft is included in the introduction of a series of manuscripts now known as Grundrisse.

Countless Charter Schools Hire Many Uncertified Teachers

By Shawgi Tell

Privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools[1] run by unelected officials are legal in 45 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam. About 7,400 charter schools currently enroll roughly 3.3 million students.

According to a 2018 state-by-state information chart from the Education Commission of the States, more than 25 states (including Washington, DC) either do not require charter school teachers to be certified or allow charter schools to hire a large portion of teachers with no teaching certification.[2]

It should also be noted that, on average, charter school teachers have fewer years of teaching experience and fewer credentials than their public school counterparts. They also tend to work longer days and years than public school teachers while generally being paid less than them. Further, many charter school teachers are not part of an employee retirement plan and are treated as “at-will” employees, which is linked to why 88% of charter school teachers are not part of any organization that defends their collective interests.

A few examples of charter schools with uncertified teachers are worth noting. A May 30, 2019 article in The Palm Beach Post titled, “Underpaid, undertrained, unlicensed: In PBC’s largest charter school chain, 1 in 5 teachers weren’t certified to teach,” points out that the Renaissance Charter School chain in Florida routinely employed large numbers of substitute teachers and operated many schools where a quarter to a third of the teachers were not certified to teach.

Several years ago, one of the main charter school authorizers in New York State unilaterally further lowered teaching qualifications for teachers in charter schools. It willfully ignored numerous public demands to not further dilute teaching standards, prompting a lawsuit against its arbitrary actions. An October 18, 2019 press release from New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) titled, “Court rejects fake certification scheme for charter school teachers,” reads in part:

After the union fought back against “fake” certification for some charter school teachers, a midlevel appeals court this week ruled the SUNY Charter Schools Committee does not have the authority to set its own standards for certifying teachers. NYSUT President Andy Pallotta said the court ruling is a big win for the union and the profession. “This is about preserving what it means to be a teacher in New York State,” Pallotta said. “This would have created a two-tiered certification system and allowed unqualified educators to practice in some charter schools.”

While public school teachers in North Carolina have to be trained and certified to teach in public schools, charter schools are exempt from such requirements and can hire uncertified non-educators to teach. And while they enroll a significant percentage of youth, in Arizona “Teachers at charter schools are not required to have any certification.” Importantly, privately-operated charter schools are notorious for relying heavily on the infamous Teach for America (TFA) program which has come under fire for many reasons over the years. Much of this criticism comes from formers TFA’ers themselves. Many other examples from across the nation could be given.

Taken together, these facts help explain why there is such persistently high teacher turnover rates in the crisis-prone charter school sector—a situation that increases instability and does not serve students and families well. Given the broad disempowerment and marginalization of charter school teachers, it is no accident that there has been an uptick in recent years in the number of charter school teachers striving to unionize. The most recent example comes from Chicago.

It is not possible to build a modern society and nation by creating more corporatized schools that are segregated, non-transparent, deregulated, created by private citizens, run by unelected officials, and staffed with a large number of uncertified teachers. Who thinks this is a great idea? Such neoliberal arrangements lower the level of education and are a slap in the face of thousands of teacher education students across the country who spend years and thousands of dollars training to become effective certified teachers.

Notes

[1] The “non-profit” versus “for-profit” distinction is generally a distinction without a difference: both types of entities engage in profit maximization. Charter school promoters always downplay the fact that there are many charter schools, including “non-profit” charter schools, run by for-profit entities.

[2] Public schools sometimes hire uncertified teachers as well, but what makes the corporatized charter school sector different is that many charter school laws are intentionally and explicitly set up to evade certified teachers. This usually has to do with the neoliberal goal of “cost-cutting” and profit maximizing. Such a set-up lowers the level of education.

Rock-A-Bye Baby: On the State's Legitimation of Juneteenth and Liberal Concessions as Political Anesthetization In Slavery's Afterlives

(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

By Joshua Briond

“Everything has changed on the surface and nothing else has been touched[...] In a way, the state is more powerful than ever, because it has given us so many tokens.”

—James Baldwin

On Thursday, June 17th, President Joe Biden signed a bill establishing June 19 as Juneteenth National Independence Day, a US federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. According to CNN, the holiday will become the first federal law holiday established since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was signed into law in 1983. Ultimately, the bill will allow a fragment of the nations’ surplus populations —excluding much of the largely racialized lumpenproletariat and underclass— a day ‘free’ from the capitalist exploitation and alienation that comes with the traditional day-to-day of the laboring class. The timing of the implementation of the national holiday—amidst rebellions, particularly in Minneapolis, in the aftermath of Winston Smith’s clearly politically-motivated, state-sanctioned assassination—cannot be understood as anything other than yet another attempt at anesthetizing the captive Black colonies in sentimentality and symbolic gestures. 

"this is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. i, too, am the afterlife of slavery."

—saidiya hartman, lose your mother: a journey along the atlantic slave route (2006)

The institution of Black slavery, that rendered Black captives as chattel, capital, productive property, was economically, culturally, and politically ubiquitous. Yet, despite its legacies and afterlives, there has been no material reckoning, or atonement for its anti-Black psychosexual and physical terror and violence. In fact, the ghosts of what is largely understood as slavery’s past, have continued to manifest in the economic polity, modern policing and prisons, and social, cultural, and ideological underpinnings, etc. Descendants of Black captives whom, in many ways, remain hyper-surveilled, overpoliced, hyper-exploited, underpaid, alienated, and often succumbed to occupation of our communities and premature death, have little-to-nothing to show for being major instruments in assembling and maintaining the global capitalist economy since we were trafficked to the Euro-Americas. But you are damn sure we have one month per year, and now an extra day, to learn about and hashtag-celebrate the most whitewashed and bleak articulations of Black historical events—events that have largely only taken place because of Black resistance to white terror, violence, and domination. 

“A critical genealogy of White Reconstruction requires close examination of the non-normative—nonwhite, queer, non-Christian, and so on—iterations of white supremacy within contemporary institutionalizations of diversity, inclusion, and multiculturalism. Such non-normativities are constitutive of (rather than incidental or exceptional to) the protocols, planning, and statecraft of contemporary counterinsurgency/domestic war, extending and complicating rather than disrupting or abolishing the historical ensembles of anti-Black and racial-colonial state violence.” 

—Dylan Rodriguez, White Reconstruction 

Since 1776 and the founding of the United States of America, the white power structure has been in a constant state of attempting to—arguably, at times, successfully—ideologically and politically sedate the most wretched, particularly the Black colonies, through incremental concessions and symbolic gestures while ultimately supplementing white rule. As Gerald Horne has taught us, this founding itself was brought into being after a successful power struggle against the British rulers to preserve the institution of Black slavery. As noted by Dylan Rodriguez in the epigraph above, and throughout his book White Reconstruction, the white settler-colonial state has had to “undergo substantive reform to remain politically and institutionally viable.” This includes, but is not limited to, incremental (neo)liberal reform as sedation and the multicultural diversification of settler-colonial, surveillance-capitalist, and imperialist apparatuses.

If we are to understand the American project itself as a consequence of intra-European counterrevolution to preserve the institution of slavery. The civil war as described by Frederick Douglass, “[starting] in the interest of slavery on both sides[...]both despising the Negro, both insulting the Negro.” The Reconstruction era as an attempt to establish a workers-democracy—in the aftermath of the countless slave revolts across North America and the Civil War ultimately ending chattel slavery—only to be defeated by ruling class forces. Jim Crow as an inevitability of the settler state and its individual deputized upholders’ idiosyncratic anxieties surrounding the collapsing synonymity of Blackness and the slave positionality. The Civil Rights Movement as an understandably decentralized reformist effort toward Black freedom, through attempts to expand the civil liberties of Black people within the American colony, co-existence with whites within the white power structure that became co-opted by the state ordained Black bourgeoisie and US intelligence leading to mild concessions. Then, we—as Black people—have to understand that we have been in an outright war of attrition with the white power structure for nearly half a millennium.

It is important to recontextualize major historical events — from the Civil War, to the crushing of the Reconstruction era, to Jim Crow, to the Civil Rights Movement, to the rise of neoliberalism and the expansion of the carceral regimes posited as the solution to Black rebellion in the 1980s, to modern policing and prisons, etc. — are all distinct types of “reforms” to politically sedate Black surplus populations and sustain white settler-capitalist hegemony. 

In an interview at Howard University, Gerald Horne discusses the weakening and marginalization of Black radical independent institutions, publications, and leaders, such as Shirley Graham, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, as a trade-off to disintegrate Jim Crow in return for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and “other examples of legislation meant to chip away at Jim Crow.” Horne goes on to question whether the price for political “freedom,” in the electoral arena (which many Black radicals would argue, in the age of neocolonialism and pseudo-independence was never actually freedom) was substantial enough to warrant celebration as a form of Black progress without the economic infrastructure and self-determination needed for true liberation and justice. Just like in the 60s, as Horne notes, we are still performing uneven trade-offs with white power. We demand an end to police terror with Defunding the Police at the outset; they give us painted Black Lives Matter streets, while celebritizing, commodifying, and cannibalizing the names and faces of Black martyrs like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. We demand healthcare, living wages, and erased student loans; they give us a federal holiday. In the post-Civil Rights era, and the state’s crushing of Black Power, there has been a depoliticization, if not outright assassination, of Black politics: all symbolism, uneven trade-offs, bare-minimum concessions, and identity reductionist representation as a substitute for actual Black power and self-determination. In the era of neo-colonialism, with the expansion and symbolic inclusion into the plantation economy through our coerced [lumpen]proletarization, we have been anesthetized to our continued exploitation, alienation, destruction, and genocide. Liberal multiculturalism, reform, or as I would call it, political anesthetization, at the very least, temporarily, has been able to halt the “problem” of black resistance.

“The understanding that modern policing has emerged out of the dreadful history of Black enslavement brings with it an urgent need to acknowledge what is not yet behind us. The plantation isn’t, as so many of us, Black and otherwise, think or at least wish to believe, a thing of the past; rather, the plantation persists as a largely unseen superstructure shaping modern, everyday life and many of its practices, attitudes, and assumptions, even if some of these have been, over time, transformed.”

- Rinaldo Walcott, “On Property” 

Though there has been a virtual erasing of our chains and the physical plantation (at least for those of us who are not “legally” incarcerated), the plantation economy has expanded and the mere logics and ideological production have remained the same: keep the slave(s) in check. The white power structure has always been concerned with keeping its thumb on the pulse of its slave population. There has been a non-stop, coordinated counterinsurgent effort by the white power apparatus to divert energy away from the inevitable radical potentialities of the slave, colonized, dispossessed, and superexploited classes—especially as capitalism’s contradictions become far too blatant to disguise. The marking of Juneteenth National Independence Day is just a continuation of the settler society’s legacy of empty promises and symbolic gestures to supplant material gains and maintain their hegemony. 

The United States is incapable of bringing about true justice or accountability for the crimes of its psychosexual and political economy beyond these hauntingly insulting and psychopathic attempts at state recognition of its own historical aberrations through moral symbolism. True justice and accountability must be avoided at all costs by this power structure, as this would inevitably expand the political imaginations of people, leading to the incrimination of every cop, soldier, politician, wall street hack, ceo, etc., and exposing itself for what it is: illegitimate and obsolete. Once you realize that all of the violence being exported everyday in and around the US are not individual aberrations that could be changed with a shift in political leadership, but an inevitable and continual outcome of superstructures built on and sustained through anti-Black slavery, capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, everything begins to make sense. It is liberatory. Heartbreaking. Infuriating, even. Because the solution becomes clear. It is the solution that everyone—whether subconsciously or not—is doing everything in their power to avoid coming to. It is the solution the United States and its propaganda networks spend billions of dollars every year to shield from the psyches of its captives. It is what Black captives in Haiti realized circa 1791, and are still being punished for ‘till this day. 

There is a special, psychopathic irony in the legitimation of Juneteenth through the colonial-capitalist state’s immortalizing of the liberation of the slaves through the very structural foundations in which said slaves were rendered productive property as captives, in which the legacies of slavery remain pervasive across social, cultural, political, and economic lineages. Not to mention the colonial and imperialist technologies inspired largely by the events of (anti-)Black slavery and colonialism, exported across the imperialized world for the purposes of land, capital, and resources—under the guise of (white) freedom and democracy. To paraphrase Frederick Douglass, what is the state’s recognition of Juneteenth to its Black captives? To the Afro-Palestinians living under the world’s largest open-air prison on the United States’ dime? Or the slave-labor of mineral miners in the Congo supplying the U.S. resources? How can visualizations of Nancy Pelosi and Black lawmakers singing Lift Every Voice and Sing in ceremony for the bill making Juneteenth a federal holiday—while actively rejecting Black organizers’ rallying cries that could improve Black people’s material conditions and save lives, such as Defunding the Police— signal anything other than yet another colonial lullaby to anaesthetize our dreams and efforts toward Black liberation and self-determination? While openly and unapologetically pledging their allegiance to multiculturalist white supremacy in the age of neocolonialism? 

“Let me put it this way, that from a very literal point of view, the harbors and the ports, and the railroads of the country, the economy, especially of the southern states, could not conceivably be what it has become, if they had not had and do not still have, indeed, for so long and for so many generations, cheap labor. I am stating very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: I picked the cotton, and I carried it to the market, and I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing[...] This, in the land of the free, and the home of the brave. And no one can challenge that statement, it is a matter of a historical record. In another way, this dream is at the expense of the American Negro.”

—James Baldwin, 1965

From Black Wall Street to Black Capitalism

By Too Black

Republished from Hood Communist.

“As word of what some would later call the “Negro uprising” began to spread across the white community, groups of armed whites began to gather at hastily-arranged meeting  places, to discuss what to do next.”

Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921

“For far too long, Black liberal, you have been allowed to domesticate Black radicalism. Because our oppressors prefer you to us and at any sign of trouble, rush out to find you to speak on behalf of all Black people, you have eagerly taken the chance to hog all of the mics and silence us. You weaken our revolt with your narration.”

- Yannick Giovanni Marshall, Black liberal, your time is up

“Black capitalism is still capitalism.” – Terrell

The Tulsa Massacre began 100 years ago on May 31st, 1921 when an angry white mob accused a 19-year-old Black man, Dick Rowland, of raping a 17-year-old white girl, Sarah Page. Flustered by the perceived “Negro Uprising” of Black men armed to defend and protect Dick Rowland outside the Tulsa courthouse, the inflamed white mob, sanctioned by the state, responded with brute terror — burning down the Black segregated neighborhood of Greenwood destroying 1,256 homes, nearly 191 Black businesses and the death of roughly 300 (likely more) people by the morning of June 1st, 1921.

100 years since these 16 hours of white barbarism occurred, suppressive forces have steadily worked to delete this tragedy from scribing its crimson pages into the books of American history. But, as history shows, bloodstains prove difficult to remove. Recently, decorating over these stains as “blemishes” of an otherwise promising American Dream towards Black capitalism has proven to be a more sufficient means to quell dissent. What has materialized is an emphasis on what was destroyed over who was destroyed. Effectively, redeeming the state — the combined authority of government (elected), the bureaucracies (positions), corporate control, and private interests — in the process.

Decorating a Utopia that never was

As the summer of 2020 was steaming from protests against continued racialized state violence, the attention economy suddenly rediscovered the blood of 1921 by pivoting to what Booker T. Washington reportedly called “Negro Wall Street” or what is now known as Black Wall Street — the historic Black business district of the segregated Greenwood neighborhood destroyed in the massacre. According to Google Trends, the term “Black Wall Street” was googled more in June of 2020 than within the last 5 years.

Posited within 3-4 Blocks of the Greenwood neighborhood, this business district, disparagingly referred to by Tulsa whites as “Little Africa,” was the home to a number of Black-owned enterprises including a fifty-four room hotel, a public library, two newspapers, a seven-hundred, and fifty seat theater, multiple cleaners, and two dozen grocery stores among more. Through these efforts, Black Wall Street produced a prosperous Black business class fancying “some of the city’s more elegant homes” and successful Black businesses in the state.

Faced with only these facts, it’s understandable why one would view Black Wall Street as a wealthy “self-sustaining” utopia violently interrupted by a white vigilante mob as it’s widely reported to have been. However, a much more complicated narrative scrubbed from decorated legend lies underneath the folklore of a Black American Wakanda.

Although Black Wall Street certainly brought pride to the Black residents of Greenwood, that pride failed to translate to a prosperous economic status for most. A report by the American Association of Social Workers on the living conditions of Black folks in Tulsa at the time stated, “95 percent of the Negro residents in the Black belt lived in poorly constructed frame houses, without  conveniences, and on streets which were unpaved and on which the drainage was all surface.” Furthermore, most Greenwood residents were not only living in substandard housing but were employed outside of Black Wall Street according to the Oklahoma Commission study on the Tulsa Race Riot:

“Despite the growing fame of its commercial district, the vast majority of Greenwood’s adults were neither businessmen nor businesswomen but worked long hours, under trying conditions, for white employers [emphasis added]. Largely barred from employment in both the oil industry and from most of Tulsa’s manufacturing facilities, these men and women toiled at difficult, often dirty, and generally menial jobs — the kinds that most whites consider beneath them—as janitors and ditch-diggers, dishwashers, and maids, porters and day laborers, domestics and service workers.  Unsung and largely forgotten, it was, nevertheless, their paychecks that built Greenwood,  and their hard work that helped to build Tulsa. [Emphasis added]“

Truthfully, as the report makes clear, Tulsa and Black Wall Street were both consequences of de jure segregation. Segregation operated as a public policy purposely made to suppress Black wages for the benefit of white capital while simultaneously limiting where those suppressed wages could be spent — inadvertently creating a monopoly for a petite Black professional class. Put differently, it was the super-exploitation of poor Black labor that facilitated both the function of Tulsa as a whole and the Black Wall Street District. Neither could have existed without the presence of poor Black people. Yet, their presence is rarely acknowledged in the revisionist plot. The suffering of the Black poor typically only matters when it can be used to bolster the class position of the Black Elite — the appointed political, cultural, and social representative and a moneyed class of Black people — and reinforce the state.

Decorating Blackness

As previously indicated, last summer, while police precincts became bonfires illustriously lighting up the night sky, the terms “Black Wall Street” and “Black business” were receiving more Google searches than ever before. The presuppositions of the searches call for questioning: Will a world on fire be resolved by the memory of a business district burnt down by a white mob? What is the correlation between a cop kneecapping a poor Black man’s neck and buying Black? How can I buy my way out of a chokehold? Do corporate pledges to “support Black business” deflect the oncoming bullets of State violence?

All Black people are subject to a degree of state violence but in today’s post-civil rights era, those flung to the bottom of the capitalist ladder  *George Floyd* experience the worst fate — police murders, stop and frisk, incarceration, poverty, homelessness, and worse. In essence, LeBron James’ sons could not be Kalief Browder because not only can LeBron afford to bail his sons out of jail but Brentwood, CA is far from the overpoliced neighborhood Browder was originally profiled in. Despite her same race and gender, Oprah is not Breonna Taylor. No knock warrants are unheard of in Montecito, CA, and gentrification does not work in reverse.

The point here is not to diminish the racism experienced by the Black Elite but to challenge the universalizing of Blackness. Universalizing Blackness as a flat experience allows Amazon to proclaim #BlackLivesMatter, create a Black-owned business page but crush the unions organized by its Black workers. It allows the NBA to paint BLM on its hardwoods, highlight Black business during the NBA finals but pay its predominantly Black and temp workers dirt wages. Universalizing Blackness distorts Blackness itself. It is decorating at its worst.

A repercussion of universalizing Blackness is elite capture — what philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò defines as “how political projects can be hijacked—in principle or effect—by the well-positioned and resourced.” This begins to explain how a radical demand such as abolishing the police either becomes dismissed or co-opted while the state offers its full cosmetic support behind Black business and representation. The class of Black people most well-positioned to make demands upon the state is better situated to benefit from Black business creation and corporate diversity hires than police abolition or the unionization of Amazon. They are considerably less afflicted by the problems of the people they claim to represent.

Universalizing Blackness collapses the interests of Black people as if we’re all equally invested in the same solutions. It’s precisely how the knees of killer cops on Black necks correlate with buying Black because as Táíwò notes, “When elites run the show, the “group’s” interests get whittled down to what they have in common with those at the top.” It’s how the poverty of Greenwood ceases to appear in documentaries or presidential speeches when the Black wealth of a few needs attention. Commenting on sociologist E. Franklin Frazier’s groundbreaking 1954 text The Black Bourgeoisie, Táíwò observes how two seemingly opposing ideas continue to find continuity, “Why did the myth of a Black economy as a comprehensive response to anti-Black racism survive when it was never a serious possibility? In Frazier’s telling, it did because it furthered the class interests of the Black bourgeoisie.” The class interests remain.

Black Capitalism, the Ultimate Decoration

The elite capture of a movement requires a series of decorative myths — ideas that obscure the nature of the problem for the maintenance of the status quo. Last Summer Black capitalism emerged once again as the most decorated myth. The revisionism of Black Wall Street, as an extension of Black capitalism, neatly fits the narrative of universal Blackness. It utilizes the universality of a tragedy suffered by an entire Black population to advocate for a solution (Black capitalism) that has shown to primarily benefit a particular class of Black people.

Black capitalism is a concatenation of propaganda. It relies on complementary myths such as Black buying power and Black dollar circulation that are premised upon shaming Black people, particularly the poor ones, for their alleged frivolous spending. Besides the fact that Black people spend their money no more recklessly than anyone else, Black capitalism feeds on stereotypes of broke Black people foolishly buying Jordans and weaves they cannot afford to justify its existence. The saying typically goes “if we spend with our own then we can have our own” as if Black people’s spending habits are moral barometers.

This decorative myth is exemplified in the creation of the Greenwood banking app. Popularized by rapper Killer Mike and actor Jesse Williams this app is “inspired by the early 1900’s Greenwood District, where recirculation of Black wealth occurred all day, every day, and where Black businesses thrived.” The website, littered with unsubstantiated claims of Black dollar circulation, conveniently fails to discuss the rampant Black poverty in the “1900’s Greenwood District” they claim to want to recreate. To highlight such a contradiction would ruin their business model.

Businesses such as Greenwood use the history of how collective Black wealth has been systematically destroyed by capitalism to leverage (guilt) white investors for funding. In the case of Greenwood, receiving 40 million dollars from banking institutions including JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and Trust among others. The billions of corporate dollars injected into “racial equity” campaigns this last year were all sparked by the militant response to the blatant murder of a poor Black man who was allegedly arrested for purchasing items with a counterfeit bill. Disturbingly, the death of poor Black people is a lucrative fundraising drive for everybody but the ones experiencing death.

Decorating an Empire

What rests at the heart of these issues is the Black Elite’s general unwillingness to confront the state and all the violence it subsumes. As a class, they are much more invested in collaborating — either for perceived survival and/or personal gain. What tends to go unsaid is that when they collaborate with the state they often lose even on their terms. The police still confuse them for poor “thugs.” They remain underrepresented and underpaid in their respective fields. Laws that sustain their lifestyle are constantly eroded. Yet, historically, they have made the most “progress” in periods where the masses of Black people dissented. Due to their economic instability, they are unable to exist as a class by themselves — hence the need for the symbolic support of the masses analogous to how Black Wall Street needed the paychecks of the Black poor to thrive as a business district.

The state uses these decorators of empire, knowingly or not, to maintain its legitimacy. White supremacy may have obliterated Black Wall Street — 1st through violence, 2nd through policy — nevertheless “if that massacre never happened who knows how that shapes America today.” The bloodshed of the past is decorated by the false promise of “a more perfect union.” Organizing for a world beyond American hegemony is scolded as unrealistic and sophomoric. The most moderate of Black radical demands such as “defund the police” are derided and blamed unfairly for costing congressional seats as if Democratic party success is synonymous with Black liberation.

Decorators of empire must corral dissent. This type of agency reduction has a footprint leaping back to the Cold War and much further. Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly, assistant professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton College, thoroughly documents how the Black Elite of the time — Black Cold War liberals, “reduced the collective agency of other African Americans by marginalizing or maligning the panoply of liberation strategies emanating from the Black left.” This was a necessary strategy because the Black Cold War Liberals “formed important relationships with powerful Whites to procure goods and services for the Black community while offering no challenge to exploitative economic and social relations.” Modes of thinking outside of these brokered relationships threatened to bring backlash from the state. Faced with the mounting repression of the anti-communist McCarthy era,

“…Black Cold War liberals began to distinguish themselves from the left by rejecting militant agendas that might align them with those deemed “communist fronts,” including the Council on African Affairs (CAA), the Peace Information Center (PIC), and the National Negro Labor Council. Black Cold War liberals signaled such rejection by casting their platform in anti-communist terms and by constructing Black people as loyal, trustworthy Americans who deserved to be recognized as full citizens.”

Consistent with elite capture, Black Cold War liberals corralled the ideologies of the Black masses. “Seditious” communist ideas and “backward” social behavior would not earn the acceptance of the state. Irrespective of the oppression they faced, Black people of the time were corralled to focus their aspirations on proving to the state they were just as American as everyone else.

Today, building on a similar logic, Black American suffering is promoted as a badge of honor — a “justice claim” made because “we built this country.” Black people are “the Soul of the Nation” who “saved American democracy.” Again, the bloodshed of the past is used to redeem the present. President Biden, in his speech for the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre, leveraged this Black American exceptionalism to bolster the empire, “we should know the good, the bad, everything. That is what great nations do. They come to terms. With their dark side. We are a great nation.” Only in America can a nation be “great” for acknowledging a single massacre 100 years later with no reparations to show — decorating at its finest.

Conclusion

Remembering the Tulsa Massacre not as a violent white response to Black self-defense and determination but instead as the destruction of property and mythical Black wealth favorably leaves space for American redemption. It reduces the violence to a tragic interruption of the American dream and Black capitalism while minimizing other race massacres that did not include a well of black business class.

Wall Street is a parasitic model we should not emulate — still, I empathize with Black  people’s desire for Black ownership and self-determination. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this desire. However, positioning slogans like #BuyBlack and #SupportBlackBusinness as the respectable alternative to radical transformative demands is decorating for the state — particularly when these slogans are attached to faulty concepts like trickle-down economics and universal Blackness. Black ownership is elite capture without the correct redistribution and collective ownership of the wealth we create.

Lastly, it need not be stated that the victims of the Tulsa Massacre — as well as their descendants and all African people — deserve their reparations. That is not in question. We should question the state’s legitimacy to define our collective goals. We must be vigilant towards the state’s attempts to use the atrocities committed against us as a means to redeem itself by decorating its crimes. The world we deserve is irreducible to a Black Wall Street and abundantly superior to anything America currently has to offer. It’s on us and those in solidarity to fight for it.

Too Black is a poet, writer, and host of The Black Myths Podcast based in Indianapolis, Indiana. He can be reached at tooblack8808@gmail.com or @too_black_ on Twitter.

On Police Abolition: Decolonization Is The Only Way

(Photo taken by Jordan Gale for The New York Times)

By John Kamaal Sunjata

The United States is a project of both anti-Blackness and racial-colonial power. From the founding of this white supremacist settler-colonial state, Black people have endured 250 years of slavery, ninety years of Jim Crow, sixty years of “separate but equal” legal doctrine, and thirty-five years of explicitly anti-Black housing laws among other insidious forms of de jure and de facto racial discrimination. The racial capitalist state and its policing functionaries employ state violence as a means of containing and controlling the working-class, especially racialized and colonized domestic peripheries. The late political prisoner and revolutionary ancestor George Jackson (1971, p. 99) writes the following:

The purpose of the chief repressive institutions within the totalitarian capitalist state is clearly to discourage and prohibit certain activity, and the prohibitions are aimed at very distinctly defined sectors of the class- and race-sensitized society. The ultimate expression of law is not order—it’s prison. There are hundreds upon hundreds of prisons, thousands upon thousands of laws, yet there is no social order, no social peace. …Bourgeois law protects property relations and not social relationships.

The United States is a punitive carceral state with 25 percent of the world’s population behind bars despite comprising only 5 percent of the world’s population (Collier, 2014, p. 56; Hayes, 2017, p. 17). The American criminal so-called “justice” system holds almost 2.3 million people in 1,833 state prisons, 110 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile prisons, 3,134 local jails, 218 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. settler-colonies (Sawyer & Wagner, 2020). U.S. incarceration is disproportionately racialized, targeting Black and brown people who represent 60 percent of the incarcerated (Marable, 2015). If Black and Latino people were incarcerated at the same rate as whites, their imprisoned and jailed populations would decline by almost 40 percent (NAACP, 2019). The problems are not rooted in crime but policing itself which constructs, (re)produces, and institutes white supremacy and anti-Blackness through racial capitalism. The police have been waging asymmetric domestic warfare on Black people, encircling, and capturing their prospects for self-determination and self-actualization. From the Greensboro Massacre of 1979 to the murder of Marcus Deon Smith of 2018 to the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the only solution for Black liberation is abolishing the police and freeing what is essentially a semi-colony of peripheral peoples.

This essay has five sections. This first section discusses the problems of policing. The second section explains the history of U.S. policing and its development. The third section lays out the failure of liberal reforms to grapple with policing as an institution. The fourth section argues the case for police abolition. The last section concludes.

The History of U.S. Policing

The earliest origins of policing in the United States evolved from directly slavery, settler-colonialism, and brutal control of an emergent industrial working-class (Vitale, 2017, p. 34). The organization of police forces within the United States was modeled after that of England. In the early colonial forms, policing was informal and communal, which is referred to as the “Watch” or private-for-profit policing, also known as the “Big Stick.” These policing models had little with fighting crime and more to do with “managing disorder and protecting the propertied classes from the rabble” (Vitale, 2017, p. 35). Strike-breaking and labor surveillance were among the most important services provided by private-for-profit policing, the Pinkerton’s were among the more notable agencies (Spitzer, 1979, p. 195). The “Big Stick” dissolved when 1) company towns declined, 2) labor costs grew more socialized, 3) organized labor grew in its militancy and strength, and 4) major changes happened in U.S. socioeconomic infrastructure (1979, p. 195).

The watch system was not particularly effective at halting crime as watchmen were often drunk or asleep on duty (Potter, 2013, p. 2). As a method of process improvement came the implementation of a system of constables—official law enforcement officers—who were normally paid according to the warrants they served (2013, p. 2). Informal policing models persisted until 1838 when Boston implemented a centralized municipal police force based on the London Metropolitan Police force and New York followed suit in 1845 (Vitale, 2017, p. 36). The main functions of the London Metropolitan Police Force were “protect property, quell riots, put down strikes and other industrial actions, and produce a disciplined industrial work force” (Vitale, 2017, p. 36).

In Southern states, modern U.S. policing developed from the “Slave Patrol” (Potter, 2013, p. 3; Vitale, 2017, p. 46). Slave patrols were tasked with developing terroristic infrastructure designed to prevent slave revolts (Hadden, 2001, p. 20; Vitale, 2017, p. 46; NAACP,  2019). They were vested with the power to “ride from plantation to plantation, and into any plantation” taking up slaves who did not have a ticket from their masters (2001, p. 20). The slave patrols could forcibly enter any private property[ii] solely on the suspicions of harboring runaway slaves (Vitale, 2017, p. 46; NAACP, 2019). The slave patrols had three primary functions: 1) chase, apprehend, and return runaway slaves to their owners; 2) organize terror squads to deter slave rebellions, and; 3) maintain legal and extralegal disciplinary measures for slaves who violated plantation rules to produce desired behavior (Potter, 2013, p. 3; NAACP, 2019).

White people had “tremendous social anxiety” about large groups of unaccompanied slaves and free Blacks intermingling. The police responded by regulating their behavior through the “constant monitoring and inspection of the [B]lack population” (Vitale, 2017, p. 47). After the Civil War, slave patrols were replaced by modern Southern police departments who controlled freed slaves who were now entering the workforce which was primarily agricultural (Potter, 2013, p. 3). The work of the modern police force included enforcing Jim Crow segregation laws and denying Black people equality de jure and de facto (2013, p. 3). The primary concern during this period was forcing Black people into sociopolitical docility (Vitale, 2017, p. 47). More than a response to crime, the police are for instituting a social order that is safe for capital penetration for the sake of capital accumulation, especially from the Black masses (Marable, 2015, p. 94). Capital accumulation requires a stable and orderly workforce for a predictable order of business (Potter, 2013, p. 4). The racial capitalist state, therefore, absorbs the costs of the private sector, protecting its enterprises. The environment must be made safe for capital through an organized system of social control (Potter, 2013, p. 4; Vitale, 2017, p. 34; Marable,  2015, p. 95). Under a system of racial capitalism[i], Black people are among the most brutalized by the carceral state.

The Failure of Liberal Reforms

Liberal efforts at reforming the police have largely been adject failures mostly because liberals misunderstand the role of the police. They ignore that policing itself is an inherently anti-Black institution that is premised on the repression of the domestic Black periphery for the purposes of capital penetration for capital accumulation. The role of the police has served to protect white supremacy and wealth creation for white people while denying Black people essential human rights (Vitale, 2017, p. 33). In the face of 400 years of anti-Black policing institutions that have, through every evolution, maintained a systemic logic of settler-colonialism that relegates the Black masses to a semi-colony within white America, liberals have proposed more training, more diversity, and community policing (Vitale, 2017, p. 33; Samudzi & Anderson, 2018,  p. 13; Rodríguez, 2021, p. 45).

The push for more police training is well-intentioned but it misses the point. Whenever a Black person is killed by police, a common refrain from liberal reformers is “improve use-of-force training.” If these same reformers were around during slavery, there is no doubt they would have called for slave masters to employ more ethical whip deployment techniques. Despite the racial bias training that many officers have undergone, researchers have found that outcomes remain unchanged with respect to racial disparities in traffic stops and marijuana arrests (Vitale, 2017, p. 8). Racist policing is not merely a matter of individual bigotry but institutionalized racism. Asking for increased training of police so police learn “restraint” ignores how the police already exercise restraint against populations that are not marginalized and not targeted. The Capitol Hill riots were illustrative of the police’s ability to show remarkable restraint. The mostly white rioters were not subjected to nearly as much force as Black protestors are for nominally peaceful protests (Henderson & Alexander, 2021). Any training that justifies the institution of policing will only strengthen its white supremacist and anti-Black logics, even if there is a rhetorical shift from “Warrior mentality” to “Guardian mentality.”

Another common liberal reform to policing involves diversity hires, in hopes this will result in communities of color being treated with “greater dignity, respect, and fairness” (Vitale, 2017, p. 11). There is no evidence that diversifying police forces affects, much less reduces, their use of force (Friedrich,  1977; Garner, Schade, Hepburn, & Buchanan, 1995; Brown & Frank, 2006;  Lawton, 2007). This tactic of reform is even more insidious because it is a method of counterinsurgency through promiscuous inclusion (Rodríguez, 2021, p. 45). Through political warfare against the domestic Black periphery, the racial capitalist state seeks to (neo)colonize its colonized subjects within their own communities.

Diversity is a tool for manufacturing credibility, increasing external institutional legitimacy without dramatically changing internal institutional formations or technologies of repression (2021, p. 45). Diversity changes the presentation of the white supremacist order, but it does not change its outcome: domestic warfare (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, p. 13; Rodríguez,  2021, p. 51). White supremacy is a multicultural enterprise: just because the beneficiaries of the racial-colonial order are primarily white does not preclude the use of semi-colonized peoples to accomplish white supremacist ends. Diversity hires will not solve the problems of policing, but they will ensure the white supremacy runs through a sepia filter.

Liberal reformers may present “community policing” as possible reform and prima facie, it sounds reasonable. Who would not want neighborhood persons, known and respected by the communities they live, as officers? The answer to that question maybe someone who understands the role and the institution of policing. Police are tasked with criminalizing disorderly conduct, using up to and including lethal force, and responding to populist resistance with state-sanctioned assertiveness. This is well illustrated in the city of Greensboro, North Carolina by its City Council. At a Greensboro City Council meeting from July 31, 2020, the members of the City Council spoke favorably of community policing. Councilwoman Marikay Abuzaiter is on record saying, “[I]f we ever did consider incentivizing [police officers to live in the neighborhoods they work]. I would think the Chief would need a big raise in his police budget because you are looking at money there.” In the same session, Councilwoman Sharon Hightower said:

In reading articles about ‘community policing,’ it never emphasizes resident, it always talked about relationships. And we can start to build relationships, so we can eradicate this distrust in my community because right now, a lot of people I talk to in my community see a police car and their hair stands up on their neck. So, let’s start to work on that. Build that trust, and if somebody moves in the neighborhood? Great, that’s fantastic. …Let’s spend our resources where we get the most bang for our buck. As community talks about more investment in community problems, let’s do that.

It was certainly admirable that Councilwoman Sharon Hightower wanted to “eradicate distrust” and “build relationships,” but the solutions to the problems for the domestic Black periphery of Greensboro are rooted in anti-Black racism and racial capitalism more broadly, not a lack of police presence. What tools do the police possess for “community”? Punitive enforcement actions such as arrests and ticketing (Vitale, 2017, p. 16). Community policing is only possible as a solution if the police do not have police powers. Attempts at community policing, as demonstrated by the Greensboro City Council members, prioritizes giving more resources to the police to live in neighborhoods than giving resources directly to the marginalized members of the communities. Community policing does not empower the domestic Black periphery, but it strengthens the tools of repression and suppression on the part of the police by increasing their proximity to the territories they occupy.

Recently, the #8CantWait campaign has gathered significant support from liberal reformers who wish to address “police brutality.” It is a set of ideas from the nonprofit Campaign Zero, with policy proposals such as ban chokeholds, change reporting standards for use of force incidents, require police officers to warn before they shoot, and more (Murray, 2020). The #8CantWait campaign is not trying to solve racist policing, it is trying to reduce police killings by 72 percent (2020). Mayor Nancy Vaughan endorsed the #8CantWait proposals (Greensboro City Council, 2020):

I have been looking at some resolutions, I have been looking at one from the city of Memphis who is codifying the #8CantWait, we are looking at making it for the City of Greensboro. It has not been finalized but I would like the City Council to look at, once we get it all written up for the City of Greensboro, passing a resolution for the #8CantWait. I don’t want to wait until [the] next meeting because it’s quite a ways [sic] out, so maybe we could have a meeting and a work session because our next meeting is quite a ways away and the #8CantWait and I don’t think we should wait.

After a similar comment from Councilwoman Sharon Hightower, Greensboro Police Chief Brian L. James responded, “In reference to the #8CantWait and looking at that, we are almost there with some of the things that I have recently [done] and some of the things that I did previously as well as our regular policies and there’s one on the #8CantWait that I would like to have some conversation with y’all around the specific wording…” This underscores not only the uselessness of the #8CantWait campaign but the overall failure of liberal reforms to produce meaningful structural change.

The Argument

The concrete historicity of the United States’ state-imposed, state-promoted, and state-tolerated anti-Black racial-colonial violence and white supremacist domination has perpetuated a consistent and persistent situation of Black devalorization, disinvestment, devastation, destruction, and dislocation. White supremacy articulates and structures the American polity; race as a social construct articulates and structures every social relation and institution. This reality produces a domestic Black periphery, an underclass—a subproletariat—that exists as mere residents of a settler-colony (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, p. 6). The Black community itself exists as semi-colony within the United States wherein the police are an occupying army (Allen, 1969).

The police have consistently represented (and erected) institutional barriers to Black agency, equality, self-determination, and political expression. That is because policing within the United States is inherently white supremacist and extends the logics of racial-capitalism and anti-Blackness throughout the political economy. With the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865, slavery was only abolished as “except as punishment for crime [emphasis added]” (Gilmore, 2020). Black people have been subjected to targeted police surveillance, coercion, force, and incarceration. Slavery was never abolished, it was reformed.

For the domestic Black periphery, the American carceral state and its functionaries have always been in a state of permanent asymmetrical warfare against them (Vitale,  2017, p. 27; Burden-Stelly, 2020, p. 8; Rodríguez, 2021, p. 42). James Baldwin compared policing Black communities to settler-colonial occupation (Baldwin, 1966):

And the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function. They are, moreover—even in a country which makes the very grave error of equating ignorance with simplicity—quite stunningly ignorant; and, since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty. … Occupied territory is occupied territory, even though it be found in that New World which the Europeans conquered, and it is axiomatic, in occupied territory, that any act of resistance, even though it be executed by a child, be answered at once, and with the full weight of the occupying forces.

Black people are not citizens, we are residents of settler-colonial occupation. Black lives do not matter under a regime of racial capitalism and ironically enough, Black people were at our most valuable (i.e. most insulated from public executions and imprisonment) when we were legal chattel. In that sense, doing irreparable damage to property-in-chattel was bad for business and few slave patrollers wanted to foot the bill (Marable, 2015, p. 97). A citizen would have a Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial, but the residents of the domestic Black periphery can be legally and extralegally murdered by police with impunity (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, p. 14; Briond, 2020).

The regime of racial capitalism has at its heart, private property ownership, an institution fiercely protected by the carceral state and its settler-colonial agents in policing. Racial capitalism reproduces and buttresses itself and the white supremacist order through a series of supposedly race-neutral policies (Stein, 2019, p. 44). Race-neutral policies themselves have been used to both “discredit and rationalized practices that perpetuate racial stratification” (Siegel, 2000, p. 106). Hence why white supremacy and the anti-Black order it entails can “coexist happily with formal commitments to objectivity, neutrality, and colorblindness” (Harris, 1994, p. 759). The earliest origins of property rights are rooted in racial domination and the interactions between race and private property have played a critical role in subordinating the domestic Black periphery within the American political economy (Harris C. , 1993, p. 1714). Whiteness itself, as a historized social and legal construct, marks power and domination over non-white others (Mumm, 2017, p. 103). Whiteness is valorized and private property ownership is an expression of whiteness; thus, property ownership is conflated with (white) personhood under racial capitalism (Safransky, 2014, p. 238; Bhandar & Toscano,  2015, p. 8). That is why in American society it is perfectly acceptable for white people to kill Black people in defense of private property; however, the domestic Black periphery can never destroy private property in response to the murder of a Black person. Blackness itself represents powerlessness, enslavement, and dispossession (Burden-Stelly, 2020).

The domestic Black periphery exists at the nexus of indispensability and disposability (Burden-Stelly, 2020), subhumanity and superhumanity. The technologies of white supremacy and their accompanying legal strictures and structures reify white supremacist ideologies into the carceral state. Black people represent 28 percent of all people killed by police in 2020 despite being 13 percent of the United States population (Sinyangwe, 2021). Black people are three times more likely to be killed by the police than white people are, and Black people are 1.3 times more likely to be unarmed as well (2021). This demonstrates that “[a]t any given time our government can utilize and maneuver the boundaries of legality and illegality as applicable to the material interests of the ruling class” (Briond, 2020).

Freedom for the domestic Black periphery poses an existential threat to white supremacy as a political economy within the United States because “free[ing] Black people necessitates a complete transformation and destruction of this settler state” (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, p. 13). The United States cannot exist without the predominant systems of domination and oppression of Black people; it cannot exist without the hyper-policing and hyper-regulation of Blackness. For an internal semi-colony to be free across a geospatial territory, it must be decolonized. For an enslaved people to be free, they must not reform slavery’s conditions but abolish it in its totality. Police abolition is but one step, but a necessary step, in the Black liberation struggle.

Conclusion

The domestic Black periphery can never know freedom so long as policing exists within this settler-colonial state. So long as the Black masses exist as mere residents, citizens in name only, as a semi-colony of white America, constantly surveilled and brutalized by arms of the state, the United States will exist. The United States as a carceral nation begets anti-Black oppressive systems and institutions and that is best exemplified through the police, who act as an occupying army in Black territories, rather than guardians within Black communities. The ideological resistance to police abolition within Greensboro is in part informed by the “racialized colonial logics of the biologically determined criminal, slave, and savage” (Briond, 2020).

There is a Hobbesian assumption that the domestic Black periphery will descend into “the state of nature” unless they are constantly patrolled, surveilled, and policed according to the logics of settler-colonial occupation. The underlying fear has been a constant feature of white supremacist anxieties, a justification for ceaseless instances of anti-Black violence by police who see Blackness as a synthesis of subhumanity and superhumanity incarnate. The amazing feat of political economy has been the militarization of police, the multiculturalism of white supremacy via diversifying the police force, and the escalation of wanton violence against semi-colonized subjects. The central contradiction of the United States is settler-colonialism, the structural location of the domestic Black periphery as simultaneous indispensable and disposable. If Black masses are semi-colonized, the solution is decolonization. If slavery was merely reformed, slavery must be abolished in all its iterations. The U.S. police are the representation and manifestation of modern-day slave patrols. For these reasons and others, the police must be abolished in their entirety and other carceral institutions as well.

Bibliography

Allen,   R. L. (1969). Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History.  Trenton: Africa World Press.

Baldwin, J.   (1966, July 11). Report from Occupied Territory. Nation, pp. 39-43.

Bhandar, B.,   & Toscano, A. (2015). Race, Real Estate and Real Abstraction. Radical Philosophy, 8-17.

Briond, J.   (2020, June 6). Understanding The Role Of Police Towards Abolitionism: On   Black Death As An American Necessity, Abolition, Non-Violence, And Whiteness.  Clifton Park.

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Burden-Stelly,   C. (2020). Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism: Some Theoretical Insights. Monthly Review, 8-20.

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[i] Racial capitalism does not describe a distinct permutation of capitalism or imply there exists a non-racial capitalism, but rather emphasizes that, in the words of Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines.” As a system of political economy, it depends on racist practices and racial hierarchies because it is a direct descendent of settler-colonialism. It is a translation of the “racial, tribal, linguistic, and regional” antagonisms of European feudal society, reconstituted for the American context. It profits off the differentiated derivations of human values, non-white people are especially devalorized and their exploitation is a justifiable and profitable enterprise (see Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

[ii] Private property is not the same as personal property, which is almost exclusively wielded for its use value, it is not a personal possession, it is social relation of excludability. It is the ownership of capital as mediated by private power ownership that removes legal obstacles for one’s existence and provides an unalloyed right to violence. It is “the legally-sanctioned power to dispose” of the factors of production and “thus dispose of [labor-power]: property as synonymous with capital.” Toscano, Alberto, and Brenna Bhandar. “Race, real estate and real abstraction.” Radical Philosophy 194 (2015): 8–17.

Bourgeois Education and the Reproduction of Common Sense

By Christian Noakes

Republished from Peace, Land, and Bread.

Despite right-wing conspiracy theories depicting universities as a communist threat to capitalist society, academia serves as a primary institution in the reproduction of the bourgeois common sense on which capitalism relies. Furthermore, it presents its own version of knowledge as not only self-evident but “progressive,” while denouncing any effective attempt to confront capitalism and imperialism.

With a few flips of intellectual gymnastics, it often asserts that Marxism is the “master’s tools.” As such, it presents Marxism as an oppressive force and bourgeois thought as a force of liberation—albeit one in need of periodic reforms. Fundamental to this inversion is the complete misunderstanding—or at least misrepresentation—of both Marx and the larger historical tradition of Marxism.

Marx is typically treated as a class reductionist who never addressed the interrelated issues of racism, colonialism, and slavery. However, all three of these are given significant attention by Marx and were in fact treated as fundemental to the capitalist processes of accumulation, dispossession, and exploitation. One needn’t delve deep into Marx’s writings to begin to see this. In the first pages of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels state:

“The discovery of America, the rounding of the cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie... The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.”[1]

Elsewhere they state:

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of negroes, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.”[2]

Marx and Engels do not equivocate the role of racial oppression and colonialism which are both a means of capitalist expansion and an outgrowth of it. Not only are these pervasive forms of oppression central to the birth of capitalism, but confronting these twin evils of racism and colonialism are essential to combating capitalism today. This is no doubt what Marx means when he noted that, “labor in the white skin cannot emancipate itself where the black skin is branded.”[3] In other words, capitalist exploitation cannot be eradicated so long as racial oppression remains intact.

To even talk about class within the hallowed walls of the academy is too often assumed to be a “white issue”—a convenient assumption that obscures the material reality of racial oppression. The explicitly anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-slavocratic sentiments in the writings of Marx suggest that many who, in good faith, claim Marxism is implicitly “white”—and therefore conserving racial oppression—are drawing such conclusions without doing the readings. Under the influence of bourgeois thought that pervades capitalist educational institutions, “one knows it is absurd without reading it and one doesn't read it because one knows it is absurd, and therefore one glories in one's ignorance of the position.”[4]

This fundemental misunderstanding—premised on hubristic ignorance—goes far beyond Marx and Engels to encompass all of Marxism. The Guyanese guerrilla intellectual Walter Rodney argued that the perennial debate on the relevance of Marxism across time and place is both an outgrowth of the dominant bourgeois ideology and a fundamental misunderstanding of Marxism.[5] Contrary to an understanding of Marxism as a static manual of revolution, Rodney points out that Marxism is a living thing—a methodology and ideology which concerns itself with material relations in the service of the oppressed and exploited classes.

As a methodology or a scientific lens of analysis, Marxism concerns itself with the material conditions of society, the relations of production which exist—in various forms—across time and place. Marx, and the Marxist tradition which has developed from his contributions to the revolutionary struggle, give considerable attention to the particular relations of production under capitalism—a system into which the Global South has long been forced at gun point. Rejecting Marxism as irrelevant to any context outside of 19th Century Europe follows the same logic as if one were to claim that the theory or relativity—and other developments in physics built on such understandings—only applies to the world Einstein inhabited.[6]

To deny the relevance of Marxist methodology is to inadvertanly suggest that relations of production (especially the predominant capitalist relations) do not exist—a bourgeois position that serves to preserve capitalist exploitation and the racial/colonial relations which underpin it. Despite the often good intentions, such assertions are inevitably in line with bourgeois ideology in that they serve to reproduce the common sense of capitalism which both naturalizes and obscures the social relations of capital. Such academic positions also ignore the historical role of Marxism in national liberation struggles throughout the Global South—an historical fact that makes the question of the relevance of Marxism itself irrelevant.

However, the relationship between Western academia and the Global South is not simply a matter of the erasure of national liberation struggles; it is also openly antagonistic in that the former provides the intellectual justification for imperialism under a facade of progress.

For the sake of brevity, we will limit ourselves to recent events in Bolivia.

On 10 November 2019, the Indigenous President Evo Morales was ousted in an apparent coup. Support for this coup—which would quickly reveal itself as deeply anti-Indigenous and reactionary—included a letter signed by several US academics. Signatories included the anthropologist Devin Beaulieu, a vocal opponent of the Movement for Socialism (MAS) party. Beaulieu—like many other academics—framed their opposition to MAS in pro-Indigenous language. Central to this position has been the reduction of Indigeneity to a monolith in opposition to Morales.[7] This has, in a sense, included the construction of the Indio permitido (the authorized Indian). Under a progressive facade, academics like Beaulieu sit comfortably in the imperial core, deciding for themselves which Indigenous voices are legitimate. Not unlike their colonial predecessors, they rely on a deeply imperialist conception of progress as a modern “white man’s burden.”

Other academics are not so blatantly imperialist. For instance Fabricant and Postero correctly point out how treating Indigenous peoples as a monolith is akin to defining Indio permitido and Indio prohibido (the prohibited Indian).[8] Their acknowledgement of heterogenous Indigeneity is markedly different from the treatment seen in the likes of Beaulieu. However, despite this difference they too fall into the dichotomous thinking which frames MAS as both a capitalist movement for the mestizo and an opposition to Indigenous Bolivians. Despite their apparent attempts to provide balanced analysis, they conflate efforts toward self-determination via the utilization of the country’s natural resources and the fostering non-US trade relations as “capitalist” and “neoliberal,” when in reality not utilizing national resources means a continued subjugation of Bolivia to the imperial core—a position these academics ponder from relative comfort. These (not-so-blatant) imperialist academics also refer to concerns of Indigenous groups over national development as a concern of “further colonisation by Andean coca growers.”[9] Where these coca growers are, in fact, Indigenous, this position only succeeds in weaponizing anti-colonial rhetoric against the colonized.

All of the above is emphasized to say that bourgeois academia’s primary social function is to reproduce capitalist common sense and to reinvent capitalist society with ever-new, illusory facades of progress and liberation. As a central institution of the capitalist superstructure, the university as a whole cannot help but be anything else.

As Jose Carlos Mariategui observed:

“Vain is all mental effort to conceive the apolitical school or the neutral school. The school of bourgeois order will continue to be a bourgeois school. The new school will come with the new order.”[10]

This is not to say that individuals or groups cannot exist in opposition in such institutions or that no revolutionaries should attend university. Institutions of higher learning can and should be treated as sites of struggle from which guerilla intellectuals can, in a sense, redistribute the resources and means of knowledge production otherwise kept from the public.

Following in the footsteps of revolutionaries such as Marx and Rodney, Marxists should utilize capitalist institutions to better understand and combat capitalism. However, the bourgeois academy should never be treated as something that can be adequately reformed under capitalism; or, further, that bourgeois academia is the only source of knowledge production under capitalism. Indeed, a true guerrilla intellectual need not be of the academy at all, and, in fact, cannot be a true guerrilla intellectual if they are confined to the bourgeois institutions which serve only to reproduce capitalist common sense in opposition to the true struggles of liberation.

Endnotes

[1] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. In The Marx-Engles Reader (2nd ed.) Robert C. Tucker (ed), 275-276.

[2] Karl Marx. Capital, Vol. 1. (Chicago 1952), P.372.

[3] Karl Marx: On America and the Civil War (New York, 1972) p. 275.

[4] Walter Rodney (1975). “Marxism and African Liberation.” https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney- walter/works/marxismandafrica.htm.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Jose Carlos Mariategui. “The World Crisis and the Peruvian Proletariat.” in Selected Works of José Carlos Mariátegui.

Workers and Communities Must Control COVID Relief Funds: A View From Detroit

By Jerry Goldberg

Republished from Liberation News.

The Biden Coronavirus Relief Bill offers significant funding that could alleviate at least in part the poverty faced by millions of people in the United States. An article in Bridge Michigan summed up the potential benefits for poor people in Michigan.

• An estimated 1.97 million children under 18 in Michigan — and 65.7 million across the United States — could benefit from the expansion of the child tax credit. This constitutes 92% of all children in the state.

• The bill includes an $880 million increase for food assistance, including a 15% increase in food stamp benefits. This potentially could help alleviate hunger for the more than 430,000 adults in Michigan who reported they can’t afford food to adequately feed their children.

• Some $25 billion in rental assistance and housing vouchers could provide assistance to the 139,000 families at risk of eviction in the state.

• There is $25 billion in aid to help child-care providers reopen safely and $15 billion in additional child-care assistance to help families return to work, as well.

All these benefits will be squandered if the workers and oppressed people rely on the capitalist state, a state set up to serve the interests of the corporations and the rich, to deliver these benefits to the people for whom they are intended. This is especially so in oppressed cities like Detroit.

Detroit’s poor completely alienated from capitalist state apparatus

In Detroit, years of grinding poverty and austerity imposed by finance capital have deprived hundreds of thousands of people of the resources to know about and take advantage of benefits, on the rare occasion when they are offered. The following statistics bear out the depth of poverty and lack of accessibility from any basic resources for tens of thousands of Detroiters.

• In Detroit, 40% of the population has no access to any type of internet, 57% lack a high-speed connection, and 70% of school-aged children have no connection at home.

• A 2011 report noted that 47% of Detroiters were functionally illiterate. In 2020, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held that Detroit schools deprive their students of basic access to literacy.

• The median household income for Detroiters in 2018 was $31,283 compared to $61,973 nationally.

The effect of this lack of online access and basic literacy among Detroit’s poor means that even when grandiose programs are announced, those who could benefit the most are not in a position to take advantage of them.

• While Detroit’s Black community suffered some of the highest COVID rates in the state, only 34.5% of Detroiters have been vaccinated compared to 54.5% of the statewide population.

• As of January 2020, 11,297 homes lacked water service. Despite a plan being announced to restore service after the pandemic hit in March 2020, in fact there were only 1,250 water restorations as of May 17, 2021.

• Between 2011 and 2015, one in four properties in Detroit was foreclosed on for unpaid property taxes by the Wayne County treasurer.

• A survey conducted in 2019, found that of the 25,000 homeowners behind on paying their property taxes, 55% were unaware of the Homeowner Property Tax Assistance Program tax exemption, a program which exempts families earning less than $26,780 per year from paying any property taxes. And in 2017, only 197 families benefitted from the $760 million in federal hardest hit funds given the state to stop foreclosures. Instead, $380 million of the funds were diverted to contractors to tear down homes in a program laced with corruption.

Let the workers and community run things

One of the aspects of the Coronavirus Relief Bill is that it is expected to provide $10 billion for governments across Michigan: $4.4 billion for local governments plus another $5 billion for the state. The City of Detroit will be receiving $826.7 million. These funds must be spent by 2024 or be returned to the federal government.

The people must organize to make sure these funds aren’t squandered as they too often are in the capitalist United States, diverted to crony contractors and nonprofits. Instead, these funds should be used to set up community centers in every neighborhood of cities like Detroit, staffed and run by residents from the communities they serve.

The centers should have computer stations, and aides trained in helping individuals learn about and get access to all benefits they are entitled to. They should sponsor literacy classes. They should employ workers who go out into the community every day, to make sure those who are homebound are reached out to.

The workers and community members staffing these centers should be from the communities they are serving where they are known by their neighbors. They should take stock of basic items like access to electricity, heat and safe non-lead-poisoned water, so families are not afraid to report the lack of basic necessities for fear of having their children taken away.

They should also make sure that undocumented workers, who often are afraid to request aid for fear of deportation, get the services they need regardless of their so-called “residency status.”

Each center should include a health clinic, staffed by doctors, nurses and medical students who live in the community and can provide holistic and environmentally sensitive healthcare that really meets people’s needs.

Cuba shows the way

A model for community-based services can be found in socialist Cuba. An article by Ronn Pineo published in the Journal of Developing Societies described Cuba’s community-based health care system. As early as 1984, Cuba began implementation of its “one doctor plus one nurse team” approach — called Basic Health Teams — with each team unit caring for 80 to 150 families. The healthcare teams live in the communities that they serve so that they can better understand the local health issues.

The doctor/nurse/public health official teams are supported, in turn, by local Group Health Teams, which meet regularly to scout for common issues facing the populations they serve, keeping very careful records of their findings and reporting to the Ministry of Public Health.

Rather than waiting for people to get sick and come into doctors’ offices — the common practice elsewhere in the world — the Cuban doctor/nurse/public healthcare worker groups spend their afternoons walking about their assigned districts, medical bags in hand, dropping in unannounced on the homes of those living in the communities. As a result, they are in a position to notice medical conditions of the people they serve before most afflictions can grow to become too serious. The teams use their house calls as opportunities to remind residents to take their medications — supplied free or at very low price-controlled costs — to exercise more and usually quiz their patients closely about their daily diets.

Demand worker/community control the of relief funds

For the Coronavirus Relief Bill to really make a dent in poverty, hunger and homelessness, it will be up to workers and oppressed people to organize to demand control of the funds to ensure they serve the people for whom they are supposed to be intended. We cannot leave it to the capitalist state, an organ for repression of the people on behalf of the corporate elite, to do the job.

Ultimately, the only way to take the vast wealth of U.S. capitalism, produced by the working class and stolen by the bosses, is to overthrow this rotten system and replace it with a socialist system where the needs of the people in the United States and worldwide could easily be met.

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.