Study, Fast, Train, Fight: The Roots of Black August

By Joe Tache

Republished from Liberation School.

In August 1619, enslaved Africans touched foot in the first permanent English settlement in what is now the United States. The centuries since witnessed the development of a racial system more violent, extractive, and deeply entrenched than any other in human history. Yet where there is oppression, there is resistance. Since 1619, Black radicals and revolutionaries have taken bold collective action in pursuit of their freedom, threatening the fragile foundations of exploitation upon which the United States is built. These heroic struggles have won tremendous victories, but they have also produced martyrs—heroes who have been imprisoned and killed because of their efforts to transform society.

“Black August” is honored every year to commemorate the fallen freedom fighters of the Black Liberation Movement, to call for the release of political prisoners in the United States, to condemn the oppressive conditions of U.S. prisons, and to emphasize the continued importance of the Black Liberation struggle. Observers of Black August commit to higher levels of discipline throughout the month. This can include fasting from food and drink, frequent physical exercise and political study, and engagement in political struggle. In short, the principles of Black August are: “study, fast, train, fight.”

George Jackson and the origins of Black August

George Jackson was a Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party while he was incarcerated in San Quentin Prison in California. Jackson was an influential revolutionary and his assassination at the hands of a San Quentin prison guard was one of the primary catalysts for the inception of Black August.

A 19-year-old convicted of armed robbery, in 1961 George Jackson was sentenced to a prison term of “1-to-life,” meaning prison administrators had complete and arbitrary control over the length of his sentence. He never lived outside of a prison again, spending the next 11 years locked up (seven and a half years of those in solitary confinement). In those 11 years—despite living in an environment of extreme racism, repression, and state control—George Jackson’s political fire was ignited, and he became an inspiration to the other revolutionaries of his generation.

Jackson was first exposed to radical politics by fellow inmate W.L. Nolen. With Nolen’s guidance, Jackson studied the works of many revolutionaries, including Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, Mao Tse-Tung, and Frantz Fanon. Nolen, Jackson, and other  prisoners dedicated themselves to raising political consciousness among the prisoners and to organizing their peers in the California prison system. They led study sessions on radical philosophy and convened groups like the Third World Coalition and started the San Quentin Prison chapter of the Black Panther Party. Jackson even published two widely read books while incarcerated: Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye.

Unfortunately, if predictably, these radical organizers soon found themselves in the cross-hairs of the California prison establishment. In 1970, W.L. Nolen—who had been transferred to Soledad prison and planned to file a lawsuit against its superintendent—was assassinated by a prison guard. Days later, George Jackson (also now in Soledad Prison) and fellow radical prisoners Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette were accused of killing a different prison guard in retaliation for Nolen’s death. The three were put on trial and became known as the Soledad Brothers.

That year, when it was clear that George Jackson would likely never be released from prison, his 17-year-old brother Jonathan Jackson staged an armed attack on the Marin County Courthouse to demand the Soledad Brothers’ immediate release. Jonathan Jackson enlisted the help of three additional prisoners—James McClain, William Christmas, and Ruchell Magee—during the offensive. Jonathan Jackson, McClain, and Christmas were all killed, while Magee was shot and re-arrested. Ruchell Magee, now 80 years old, is currently one of the longest held political prisoners in the world.

On August 21, 1971, just over a year after the courthouse incident, a prison guard assassinated George Jackson. The facts regarding his death are disputed. Prison authorities alleged that Jackson smuggled a gun into the prison and was killed while attempting to escape. On the other hand, literary giant James Baldwin wrote, “no Black person will ever believe that George Jackson died the way they tell us he did.”

While the particular circumstances of Jackson’s death will likely forever remain contested, two facts are clear: his death was ultimately a political assassination, and his revolutionary imprint can’t be extinguished. Through the efforts and sacrifice of George and Jonathan Jackson, Nolen, McClain, Christmas, Magee and countless other revolutionaries, the 1970s became a decade of widespread organizing and political struggle within prisons. Prisoners demanded an end to racist and violent treatment at the hands of prison guards, better living conditions, and increased access to education and adequate medical care. Tactics in these campaigns included lawsuits, strikes, and mass rebellions. The most notable example may be the Attica Prison rebellion, which occurred in New York State just weeks after George Jackson was murdered. In protest of the dehumanizing conditions they were subjected to, about 1,500 Attica Prison inmates released a manifesto with their demands and seized control of the prison for four days, beginning on September 9, 1971. Under orders from Governor Nelson Rockefeller, law enforcement authorities stormed Attica on September 12 and killed at least 29 incarcerated individuals. None of the prisoners had guns.

This is the context out of which Black August was born in 1979. It was first celebrated in California’s San Quentin prison, where George Jackson, W.L. Nolen, James McClain, Willam Christmas and Ruchell Magee were all once held. The first Black August commemorated the previous decade of courageous prison struggle, as well as the centuries of Black resistance that preceded and accompanied it.

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Political prisoners and the prison struggle

Observers of Black August call for the immediate release of all political prisoners in the United States. That the US government even holds political prisoners is a fact they attempt to obscure and deny. In reality, dozens of radicals from organizations such as the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army, the American Indian Movement, and MOVE have been imprisoned for decades as a result of their political activity. As Angela Davis, who was at one time the most high profile political prisoner in the US, explains:

“There is a distinct and qualitative difference between one breaking a law for one’s own individual self-interest and violating it in the interests of a class of people whose oppression is expressed either directly or indirectly through that particular law. The former might be called criminal (though in many instances he is a victim), but the latter, as a reformist or revolutionary, is interested in universal social change. Captured, he or she is a political prisoner… In this country, however, where the special category of political prisoners is not officially acknowledged, the political prisoner inevitably stands trial for a specific criminal offense, not for a political act… In all instances, however, the political prisoner has violated the unwritten law which prohibits disturbances and upheavals in the status quo of exploitation and racism.”

Prisons in the United States are a form of social control which serve to maintain the status quo of oppression. Over the last few decades, prisons have become an increasingly important tool for the US ruling class. Prisons not only quarantine revolutionaries, but also those segments of the population who have become increasingly expendable to the capitalist system as globalized production, deindustrialization, and technological automation decrease the overall need for labor-power. These shifts, which began in earnest in the 1970s, have hit Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities the hardest, as exemplified by the sky high unemployment and incarceration rates those communities face. These groups are also historically the most prone to rebellion. Angela Davis noted in 1971 that as a result of these trends, “prisoners—especially Blacks, Chicanos and Puerto Ricans—are increasingly advancing the proposition that they are political prisoners. They contend that they are political prisoners in the sense that they are largely the victims of an oppressive politico-economic order.”

Though that definition of political prisoner is unorthodox, it illustrates the political and economic nature of criminalization. This is why observers of Black August connect the fight to free “revolutionary” political prisoners to the broader struggle against US prisons. Mass incarceration is a symptom of the same system that political prisoners have dedicated their lives towards fighting.

As increasing numbers of the US working class are “lumpenized,” or pushed out of the formal economy and stable employment, the potential significance of political struggle among the unemployed and incarcerated increases. George Jackson wrote in Blood in My Eye that “prisoners must be reached and made to understand that they are victims of social injustice. This is my task working from within. The sheer numbers of the prisoner class and the terms of their existence make them a mighty reservoir of revolutionary potential.”

George Jackson’s own journey is a perfect example of that revolutionary potential. Jackson didn’t arrive in prison a ready-made revolutionary. He had a history of petty crime and was apolitical during his first years in prison. He would have been dismissed by many people in our society as a “thug.” But comrades who knew that he held the potential inherent in every human being found him and took him in. They helped him understand his personal experiences within the context of capitalism and white supremacy. In turn, George Jackson dedicated his life to doing the same for others incarcerated individuals.

Black August today

August, more than any other month, has historically carried the weight of the Black Liberation struggle. Of course, enslaved Africans were first brought to British North America in August 1619. Just over 200 years later, in August 1831, Nat Turner led the most well-known rebellion of enslaved people in US history. This historical significance carried into the 20th century, when both the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the Watts Rebellion—an explosive uprising against racist policing in Los Angeles—occurred in August during the 1960s.

Even today, the month remains significant in the struggle. John Crawford, Michael Brown, and Korryn Gaines were three Black Americans who were murdered in high-profile cases of police brutality; Crawford and Brown in August 2014, and Gaines in August 2016. Their deaths have been part of the impetus for a revived national movement against racist police brutality. Finally, on August 21, 2018, the 47 year anniversary of George Jackson’s death, thousands of U.S. prisoners launched a national prison strike. They engaged in work stoppages, hunger strikes, and other forms of protests. The strike lasted until September 9, 47 years after the Attica Prison Uprising began. Like the Attica prisoners, the 2018 prison strike organizers put forth a comprehensive list of demands that exposed the oppression inherent to the U.S. prison system, and laid out a framework to improve their conditions.

Each of these historical and contemporary events reveal a truth that the Black radical tradition has always recognized: there can be no freedom for the masses of Black people within the white supremacist capitalist system. The fight for liberation is just that: a fight. Since its inception in San Quentin, Black August has been an indispensable part of that fight.

In the current political moment, when some misleaders would have us bury the radical nature of Black resistance and instead prop up reformist politics that glorify celebrity, wealth, and assimilation into the capitalist system, Black August is as important as ever. It connects Black people to our history and serves as a reminder that our liberation doesn’t lie in the hands of Black billionaires, Black police officers, or Black Democratic Party officials. Those “Black faces in high places” simply place a friendly face on the system that oppresses the masses of Black people in the United States and around the world, often distorting symbols of Black resistance along the way. Black liberation lies, as it always has, in the hands of the conscious and organized masses. Study, train, fight, and in the words of George Jackson, “discover your humanity and your love of revolution.”

W.E.B. Du Bois and the Meaning of Progress: Revisiting "The Souls of Black Folk" on Its 120-Year Anniversary

By Carlos Garrido

Republished from Midwestern Marx.

Aristotle famously starts his Metaphysics with the claim that “all men by nature desire to know.”[1] For Dubois, if there are a people in the U.S. who have immaculately embodied this statement, it is black folk. In Black Reconstruction, for instance, Du Bois says that “the eagerness to learn among American Negroes was exceptional in the case of a poor and recently emancipated folk.”[2] In The Souls of Black Folk, he highlights “how faithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn.”[3] This was a stark contrast with the “white laborers,” who unfortunately, as Du Bois notes, “did not demand education, and saw no need of it, save in exceptional cases.” [4]

Out of the black community’s longing to know, and out of this longing taking material and organizational form through the Freedman’s Bureau, came one of the most important accomplishments of that revolutionary period of reconstruction – the public schools and black colleges. It was these schools and colleges, Du Bois argued, which educated black leaders, and ultimately, prevented the rushed revolts and vengeance which could have driven the mass of black people back into the old form of slavery. [5]

This year marks the 120th anniversary of Dubois's masterful work, The Souls of Black Folk. In this essay, I will be concentrating my analysis on the fourth chapter, titled "Of the Meaning of Progress," where I will peruse how the subjects of education and progress are presented within a greatly racialized American capitalism.

The Tragedy of Josie

The chapter retells a story which is first set a dozen or so years after the counterrevolution of property in 1876. It is embedded in the context of the previous two decades of post-emancipation lynchings, second class citizenship, and poverty for those on the dark side of the veil.

Du Bois is a student at Fisk and is looking around in Tennessee for a teaching position. After much unsuccessful searching, he finally finds a small school shut out from the world by forests and hills. He was told about this school by Josie, the central character of the narrative. Along with a white fellow who wished to create a white school, Du Bois rode to the commissioner’s house to secure the school. After having the commissioner accept his proposal and invite him to dinner, the “shadow of the veil” fell upon him as they ate first, and he ate alone. [6]

Upon arriving at the school, he noticed its destitute condition – a stark contrast to the schools he was used to. The students, while poor and largely uneducated, expressed an insatiable longing to learn – Josie especially had her appetite for knowledge “hover like a star above … her work and worry, and she,” Du Bois says, “studied doggedly.”[7] While certainly having a “desire to rise out of [her] condition by means of education,” Josie’s quest for knowledge also went deeper than that.[8] It was, in a sense, an existential longing for education – a deeply human enterprise upon which a life-or-death struggle for being fully human ensued. “Education and work,” as Du Bois had noted in the Talented Tenth, “are the levers to uplift a people;” but “education must not simply teach work-it must teach Life.”[9] “It is the trained, living human soul,” Du Bois argues, “cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American.”[10]

Josie understood this well. She strove for that kind of human excellence and virtue the Greeks referred to as arete. But her quest was stopped in its track by the shadow of the veil; by the reality of poverty, superexploited labor, and racism which characterized the dominant social relations for the black worker.

A decade after he completed his teaching duties, Du Bois returned to that small Tennessee town. What he encountered warranted the questioning of progress itself. Josie’s family, which at one point he considered himself an adopted part of, had gone through a “heap of trouble.”[11] Lingering in destitute poverty, her brother was arrested for stealing, and her sister, “flushed with the passion of youth … brought home a nameless child.”[12] As the eldest child, Josie took it upon herself to sustain the family. She was overworked, and this was killing her; first spiritually, then materially. As Du Bois says, Josie “shivered and worked on, with the vision of schooldays all fled, with a face wan and tired,—worked until, on a summer's day, someone married another; then Josie crept to her mother like a hurt child, and slept—and sleeps.”[13]

In his youth Du Bois had asked: “to what end” might “[we] seek to strengthen character and purpose” if “people have nothing to eat or, to wear?”[14] Josie’s insatiable thirst for knowledge required leisure time, i.e., time that is unrestricted by the labor one does for their subsistence, nor by the weariness and fatigue which lingers after. Aristotle had already noted that it “was when almost all the necessities of life and the things that make for comfort and recreation had been secured,” that philosophy and the pursuit of science “in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end… began to be sought.”[15] Josie’s quest for knowledge, her longing for enlightenment, was made impossible by capitalist relations of production, and the racialized form they take in the U.S. As dilemmas within her family developed, she was forced to spend every ounce of her energy on working to sustain the meagre living conditions of the household. Afterall, as Du Bois eloquently says, “to be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”[16]

It is true, as Kant said, that “all that is required for enlightenment is freedom;” but it is not true that, while being necessary, “the freedom for man to make public use of his reason in all matters” is sufficient![17] This freedom presupposes another – the freedom to have the necessaries of life guaranteed for oneself. What good can be made of the right to free speech by the person too famished to think properly? What good is this right to those homeless souls with constricted jaws and clenched teach in the winter? The artifices intended to keep people down, as Kant calls it, are also material – that is, they refer not only to the absence of opportunities for civic and political participation, but also to the absence of economic opportunities for securing the necessities of life.[18]

The great writer can emanate universal truths from their portraits of individuals. Du Bois accomplished this with Josie, who is a concrete manifestation of black folk’s trajectory post-emancipation. In both Josie and black folk at the turn of the century, the longing to learn, the thirst for knowledge, is met by the desert of poverty common to working folk, especially those on the dark side of the veil, where opportunity doesn’t make the rounds. As an unfree, “segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges,” it is not only the bodies, but the spirit and minds of black folk’s humanity which were under attack.[19] It is a natural result of a cold world – one that beats black souls and bodies down with racist violence, superexploitation, and poverty – that a “shadow of a vast despair” can hover over some black folk.[20] And yet, Du Bois argues, “democracy died save in the hearts of black folk;” and “there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes.”[21]

A Universally Dehumanizing System

Although intensified in the experience of poor and working class black folk – especially those in the U.S. – the crippling of working people’s humanity and intellect is a central component of the capitalist mode of life in general. This was already being observed by key thinkers of the 18th century Scottish enlightenment (e.g., Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, et. al.). For instance, in Smith’s magnus opus, The Wealth of Nations, he would argue that the development of the division of labor with modern industry created a class of “men whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations,” of which “no occasion to exert his understanding” occur, leaving them to “become as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”[22] “His dexterity at his own particular trade,” he argues, is “acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues.”[23] “In every improved and civilized society,” Smith observes, “this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.”[24]

Writing almost a century later, and hence, having the opportunity of observing a more developed capitalist social totality, Marx and Engels saw that the degree of specialization acquired by the division of labor in manufacturing had even more profound dehumanizing and stupefying effects on the working class. “A labourer,” Marx argues, “who all his life performs one and the same simple operation, converts his whole body into the automatic, specialized implement of that operation.”[25] In echoing similar critiques brought forth by Ferguson and Smith, Marx explains how the worker’s productive activity is turned into “a mere appendage of the capitalist’s workshop,” and the laborer themself is converted into “a crippled monstrosity.”[26] It is a form of relationality which reduces working people to “spiritually and physically dehumanized beings.”[27] As Engels noted, capitalist manufacturing’s division of labor divides the human being and produces a “stunting of man.”[28] Alongside commodity production is the production of fractured human beings whose abilities are reduced to the activities they perform at work.

This mental and physical crippling of the worker under the capitalist process of production provides an obstacle not only to their human development, but to their struggle for liberation itself. No successful struggle against the dominant order can take place without educating, without changing the minds and hearts, of the masses being mobilized in the struggle. Education aimed at the acquisition of truth is revolutionary, that is why ignorance is an indispensable component of capitalist control. The “Socratic spirit,” as I have previously argued, “belongs to the revolutionaries;” it is in socialist revolutionary processes where education is prioritized as a central component of creating a new, fully human, people.[29] As Du Bois put it, “education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know.”[30] “The final purpose of education,” as Hegel wrote, “is liberation and the struggle for a higher liberation still.”[31]

“How shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie lies?”

In the capitalist mode of life, this contradiction between the un-development of human life and the development of the forces of production has always gone hand in hand. From the lens of universal history, this is one of the central antinomies of the system. Progress of a certain kind has always been conjoined with retrogression in another. Du Bois says that “Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly.”[32] He is quite correct in a dual sense. Not only has class society – and specifically, capitalist class society – always developed the productive forces at the expense of the un-development of human life in the mass of people, but also, when progress has been achieved in the social realm, it has never been thanks to the kindness and generosity of owning classes, it has never been the result of anything but an ugly, often bloody, struggle. As Fredrick Douglass famously said, “if there is no struggle, there is no progress.”[33]

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However, it is the first sense in which Du Bois’s statement on the ugliness of progress is meant. He asks, “how shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie lies?”[34] What is our standard for progress going to be? Human life and the real capacity for human flourishing? Or the development of industrial technologies and the accumulation of capital? Under the current order, all metrics are aimed at measuring progress in accordance with the latter. As I have argued before,

The economist’s obsession with gross domestic product measures is a good example. For such quantifiability to take place, qualitatively incommensurable activities must transmute themselves into being qualitatively commensurable... The consumption of a pack of cigarettes and the consumption of an apple loses the distinction which makes one cancerous and the other healthy, they’re differences boil down to the quantitative differences in the price of purchase.[35]

This standard for measuring progress corresponds to a mode of social life where, as the young Marx had observed, “the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion [to] the devaluation of the world of men.”[36] In socialist China, where the people – through their Communist Party – are in charge of developing a new social order, metrics are being developed to account for growth in human-centered terms. As Cheng Enfu has proposed, a “new economic accounting indicator, ‘Gross Domestic Product of Welfare,’”[37] (GDPW) is needed:

GDPW, unlike GDP, encompasses the total value of the welfare created by the production and business activities of all residential units in a country (or region) during a certain period. As an alternative concept of modernization, it is the aggregate of the positive and negative utility produced by the three systems of economy, nature, and society, and essentially reflects the sum of objective welfare.[38]

While forcing the reader to think critically about the notion of progress, it would be incorrect to suggest that Du Bois would like to entirely dispose of the notion. His oeuvre in general is deeply rooted in enlightenment sensibilities, in a belief in a common humanity, in the power of human reason, and in the real potential for historical progress. These are all things that, as Susan Neiman writes in Left is Not Woke, are rejected by the modern Heidegger-Schmidt-Foucualt rooted post-modern ‘woke left,’ and which stem, as Georg Lukács noted in his 1948 masterpiece, The Destruction of Reason, from the fact that capitalism, especially after the 1848 revolutions, had become a reactionary force, a phenomenon reflected in the intellectual orders by a turn away from Kant and Hegel and towards Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann, Nietzsche, and various other forms of philosophical irrationalism.[39]

Instead of rejecting the notion of progress, Du Bois would urge us to understand the dialectical character of history’s unfolding – that is, the role that the ‘ugly’ has played in progress. He would urge us to reject the mythologized ‘pure’ notion of progress which prevails in quotidian society and the halls of bourgeois academia; and to understand the impurities of progress to be a necessary component of it – at least in this period of human history.

Du Bois would also urge us to understand that, while progress in the sphere of the productive forces has often not translated itself into progress at the human level, this fact does not negate the genuine potential for progress in the human sphere represented by such developments in industry, agriculture, and the sciences and technologies. Progress in the human sphere that is left unrealized by developments in the productive forces within capitalist relations ends up taking the form, to use Andrew Haas’ concept, of Being-as-Implication.[40] As Ioannis Trisokkas has recently elaborated, beyond simply being either present-at-hand (vorhandenseit) or absent, implication is another form of being; things can be implied, their being takes the form of a real potential capable of becoming actual.[41]

It is true, under the current relations of production, that the lives of people get worse while simultaneously the real potential for them being better than ever before continues to increase. This is the paradoxical character of capitalist progress. When a new machine capable of duplicating the current output in a specific industry is introduced into the productive process, this represents a genuine potential for cutting working hours in half, and allowing people to have more leisure time for creative – more human – endeavors. The development of the productive forces reduces the socially necessary labor time and can therefore potentially increase what Martin Hägglund has called socially available free time.[42] This is the time that Josie – and quite frankly, all of us poor working class people – need in order to flourish as humans. The fact that it does not do this, and often does the opposite, is not rooted in the machines and technologies themselves, but in the historically constituted social relations which mediate our relationship with these developments.

We can have a form of progress which overcomes the contradictions of the current form; but this requires revolutionizing the social relations we exist in. It requires a society where working people are in power, where the telos of production is not profit and capital accumulation in the hands of a few, but the satisfaction of human needs – both spiritual and material. A society where the state is genuinely of, by, and for the people, and not an instrument of the owners of capital. In other words, it requires socialism, what Du Bois considered to be “the only way of human life.”[43]

References 

[1] Aristotle, Metaphysics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle (Chapel Hill: The Modern Library, 2001), 689 (980a).

[2] W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (New York: Library of America, 2021), 766.

[3] W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1986), 367-368.

[4] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 770.

[5] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 770.

[6] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 407.

[7] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 406-407.

[8] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 766.

[9] Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth, In Writings, 861.

[10] Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” 854.

[11] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 411.

[12] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 411.

[13] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 411.

[14] Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” 853.

[15] Aristotle, Metaphysics, 692 (982b).

[16] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 368.

[17] Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment,” in Basic Writings of Kant (New York: The Modern Library, 2001) 136.

[18] Kant, “What is Enlightenment,” 141.

[19] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 390.

[20] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 368.

[21] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 40; Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 370.

[22] Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations Vol II (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1910), 263-264.

[23] Smith, The Wealth of Nations Vol. II, 264.

[24] Smith, The Wealth of Nations Vol. II, 264.

[25] Karl Marx, Capital Volume: I (New York: International Publishers, 1974), 339.

[26] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 360.

[27] Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), 86.

[28] Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1976), 291.

[29] Carlos L. Garrido, “The Real Reason Why Socrates Was Killed and Why Class Society Must Whitewash His Death,” Countercurrents (August 23, 2021): https://countercurrents.org/2021/08/the-real-reason-why-socrates-is-killed-and-why-class-society-must-whitewash-his-death/. In every revolutionary movement we’ve seen the pivotal role education is given – this is evident in the Soviet process, the Korean, the Chinese, Cuban, etc. As I am sure most know, even while engaged in guerilla warfare Che was making revolutionaries study. Education was so important that, as he mentioned in the famous letter Socialism and Man in Cuba, under socialism “the whole society… [would function] as a gigantic school.” For more see: Carlos L. Garrido and Edward Liger Smith, “Pioneros por el comunismo: Seremos como el Che,” intervención y Coyuntura: Revista de Crítica Política (October 11, 2022): https://intervencionycoyuntura.org/pioneros-por-el-comunismo-seremos-como-el-che/

[30] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 385.

[31] G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 125.

[32] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 412.

[33] Fredrick Douglass, Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. by Philip S. Foner (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1999), 367.

[34] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 414.

[35] Carlos L. Garrido, “John Dewey and the American Tradition of Socialist Democracy, Dewey Studies 6(2) (2022), 87.

[36] Marx, Manuscripts of 1844, 71.

[37] Cheng Enfu, China’s Economic Dialectic (New York: International Publishers, 2019), 13.

[38] Enfu, China’s Economic Dialectic, 13.

[39] Susan Neiman, Left is Not Woke (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2023). Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2021). For more on the modern forms of philosophical irrationalism, see: John Bellamy Foster, “The New Irrationalism,” Monthly Review 74 (9) (February 2023): https://monthlyreview.org/2023/02/01/the-new-irrationalism/ and my interview with him for the Midwestern Marx Institute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4uyNEzLlRw.

[40] Andrew Haas, “On Being in Heidegger and Hegel,” Hegel Bulletin 38(1) (2017), 162-4: doi:10.1017/hgl.2016.64.

[41] Ioannis Trisokkas, “Being, Presence, and Implication in Heidegger's Critique of Hegel,” Hegel Bulletin 44(2) (August 2023), 346: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/hgl.2022.3 Trisokkas here provides a great defense of Hegel from Heidegger’s critique of his treatment of being.

[42] Martin Hägglund, This Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 2019), 301-304.

[43] W. E. B. Du Bois, “Letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to Communist Party of the U.S.A., October 1, 1961,” W. E. B. Du Bois Archive: https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b153-i071

The Immovable Black Lumpenproletariat: The Futility of White-Supremacist, State-Sanctioned Indictments of Black Factions and Gangs

By Patrick Jonathan Derilus

“Though I cannot condone it, much of the violence inflicted on my gang rivals and other blacks was an unconscious display of my frustration with poverty, racism, police brutality and other systemic injustices routinely visited upon residents of urban black colonies such as south central Los Angeles. I was frustrated because I felt trapped. I internalized the defeatist rhetoric propagated as street wisdom in my hood that there were only 3 ways out of south central, migration death or incarceration. I located a fourth option: incarcerated death.”

— Stanley Tookie Williams,  Blue Rage, Black Redemption: A Memoir

It should be made clear, if in any case there was no critical observation of the phenomena, that in our (to use ancestor bell hooks’ phrase) ‘imperialist, colonial settler, white supremacist, capitalist, cisheteropatriarchal society,’ Black people (of all ages and gender identities) are under ceaseless exploitation and violence via surveillance, harassment, instigations, and so on. With attention to Black-led organizations, factions, collectives, and in this case particularly, Black gangs, there is unquestionably a white-supremacist outroar from racists (media or otherwise), who deem these communities a threat to the status quo.

Fuck respectability politics and fuck civility; and this is to say that regardless of the objective of a Black collective, be it as revolutionary as the Black Guerilla Family (BGF), a Marxist-Leninist group that originated in San Quentin State Prison and was founded by ancestor George Jackson in 1966 or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) founded by ancestor Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and several other members in 1909, we’re niggas at the end of the day.

While we can present arguments for what this statement means is not the point, but rather, the sociohistorical result of change that is assuredly established when Black people have long struggled for: Black Liberation. Black history is every day. Black history in itself chronicles resistance, togetherness, unfettered joy, solidarity, commonality, righteous insurgence, mutuality, love—humanism, notably the urgency for Black self-defense against the white-supremacist police state.

Let us also highlight that, in spite of these elements, we recognize the settler-fascistic entities that have been responsible for the many deaths, infightings, conspiracies, and consistent destabilizations of Black-led movements, organizations, and to this day, Black gangs. Prior to the Black Panthers — and what many of us know in modern day as Crips and Bloods, were their historical predecessors, The Slausons, The Businessmen, and The Gladiators, Black-led gangs that originated in Los Angeles during the 1940s. The sociopolitical function of these gangs were a direct response against white-supremacist gangs like the Spook Hunters, who regularly terrorized Black people because of the growing Black population at the time— white flight.

In the 1960s and 70s, an example of this is Kwanzaa’s founder, Ron Karenga, who was not only a violent, self-hating misogynist responsible for kidnapping and torturing Black women, but also, an agent of fascist J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO, who exacerbated the infighting between the Black Panthers and the US Organization. Subsequently, this led to the murders of four members of the Black Panthers, whose names went by John Huggins, Sylvester Bell, Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Savage.

Around the same time the Black Power movement was building momentum, the Gangster Disciples, founded by Larry Hoover, were a Black-led faction based in Chicago in the 1970s and 80s. In the same way, the Black Disciples, founded by David Barksdale, were another Black faction based in Chicago that was created at the grassroots, organizing projects such as the free breakfast program for the community and marching together with Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1966:

On Aug. 5, 1966, in Marquette Park, where King was planning to lead a march to a realtor’s office to demand properties be sold to everyone regardless of their race, he got swarmed by about 700 white protestors hurling bricks, bottles and rocks. One of those rocks hit King, and his aides rushed to shield him.

Stanley Tookie Williams, who co-founded the Crips alongside Raymond Washington in 1971, established a groundwork in which Black folk would defend themselves and their communities from neighboring adversaries in Los Angeles. Similarly, the Bloods, created by Sylvester Scott, were later created as a direct response in opposition to the Crips. Contrary to this occurrence, the remarkable moments in Black history where Bloods and Crips, despite their incendiary rivalries against each other, have come together in solidarity to protest state-sanctioned police violence against Black people. To echo the sentiment of George Jackson in his book, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson:

Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.

We highlight instances of collective protest in Atlanta, the unity of rival Bloods and Crips gangs taking place after the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1992, unity between Bloods, Crips, and the Nation of Islam in Baltimore, who banned together in honor and righteous vengeance against the state-sanctioned murder of Freddie Gray, Newark, New Jersey and a March For Peace in The Bronx that was led by rival gangs inspired by the wrongful murder of Nipsey Hussle.

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Bringing further attention to the history of white supremacist, State-sanctioned violence toward Black people in the US and across the world, we understand that surveillance and more specifically, indictment, an arbitrary charge or accusation of a crime, is no new concept to us. To be Black itself is a crime in the world. In the article, Black is Crime: Notes on Blaqillegalism, writer Dubian Ade states,

What a crime it is to be Black. To have the police be called on you for sitting in a restaurant, for grilling at a cookout, selling water, going to the pool, taking a nap, standing on the corner; to be Black and to have the presence of one’s very own body break the law and to know at any given moment a police officer can slam you to the ground and cuff you for resisting arrest, which is to say, arrest you for absolutely no reason at all. Blackness carries this implication that a law is or has been broken and is about to be broken in the future. It is the color and sign of criminal activity under white supremacist capitalism used to justify the mass incarceration and extra-judicial murder of Black people by and large. But what are the origins of this strenuous relationship between Blackness and the law? In what ways is Black criminalization constituted under the state? And if Blackness is already criminalized in the eyes of the law, what are the features of already existing Black illegal forms and what might the theoretical contours of Black illegalism (Blaqillegalism) that is principled and above all revolutionary look like?

Ancestor Huey P. Newton has already answered this question of Black criminality:

…existence is violent; I exist, therefore I am violent in that way.

To emphasize, the carceral State spares no Black human being. To name a few, learn about Mutulu Shakur, stepfather of Tupac Amaru Shakur and a member of the Black Liberation Army, who was just released from prison in December of last year after serving 60 years in prison; he was informed he only has a few months to live due to terminal cancer in April. Another is Marshall “Eddie” Conway, an elder of the Black Panther Party, who was sentenced to serving 43 years to life in prison for self-defense. Look to the instance of Tay-K, who was 19 at the time he was indicted and sentenced to 55 years in prison. 23-year old YNW Melly, who was indicted and is facing the death penalty. Look at the wrongful indictments of YSL and Young Thug and Gunna—Sheff G, Sleepy Hallow, 8 Trey Crips and 9 Ways — Woos and the Choos, the YGz and Drilly indictment and now 19-year old Kay Flock, who was just indicted with the death penalty being listed as a possible charge.

I repeat, the death penalty.

Where else have we heard the inhumane sentencing of young Black and Brown children and teenagers across AmeriKKKa?

Recall the wrongful conviction of 14-year old George Stinney in 1944, who the carceral State put to death by electric chair for allegedly murdering two white girls. The antiBlack State ritualistically likens itself to heroism and yet, their actions remain wickedly ironic because it has always been the State that has not been held accountable for its innumerable human rights violations against Black people. As long as the antiBlack State exists, there is no transformative recourse for Black lives (especially Black children and Black teenagers).

By the same token, it is far too reductive (and victim-blaming) to present cases that serve as counterarguments to the material reality in which Black children and adults are continuously subjected to. With Malcolm X’s truism, by any means necessary in mind, often many Black folk are left with no choice to navigate this colonial-settler, white-supremacist world in the best ways we can as a means of not only defending ourselves and our communities against the white-supremacist power structure, but also surviving under it. Black feminist and scholar, bell hooks, highlights the two-sidededness of this racial, socio-existential dilemma in her text, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity:

In today's world, most upwardly mobile educated black males from privileged class backgrounds share with their poor and underclass counterparts an obsession with money as the marker of successful manhood. They are as easily corrupted as their disenfranchised brothers, if not more so because the monetary stakes, as well as the rewards in their mainstream work world, are higher…assimilated black males who are “white identified” find it easier to submit to fickle arrogant white males (and white female bosses) in the workplace. However, most black males suffer psychologically in the world of work whether they make loads of money or low wages from overt and covert racially based psychological terrorism.

hooks continues,

Young beautiful brilliant black power male militants were the first black leftists to loudly call out the evils of capitalism. And during that call they unmasked wage slavery, naming it for what it was. Yet at the end of the day a black man needed money to live. If he was not going to get it working for the man, it could come from hustling his own people. Black power militants, having learned from Dr. King and Malcolm X how to call out the truth of capitalist-based materialism, identified it as gangsta culture. Patriarchal manhood was the theory and gangsta culture was its ultimate practice. No wonder then that black males of all ages living the protestant work ethic, submitting in the racist white world, envy the lowdown hustlers in the black communities who are not slaves to white power.

I have strong abolitionist sympathies and feel as though a potential alternative to the futility—the inherent uselessness of incarceration—of imprisoning Black children—Black people, is divesting money from state to state and putting the funds toward building transformative rehabilitation centers across the country similar to the Success Stories Program. As stated in their mission and values statement, the primary focus of the Success Stories program is this:

Our mission is to provide an alternative to prisons that builds safer communities by delivering feminist programming to people who have caused harm.​ We envision a world free of prisons and patriarchy as the dominant culture. We build a world where harmful behavior is seen as a symptom of patriarchy to be transformed, in the community, by our program and others like it.

What happens when the State persistently (and wrongfully) indicts Black women, men, queer folk, and children for so-called “crimes” will never resolve anything — it will never curtail anything. We are looking at a generational passing down of Black factions (of the newer generation) that will continue to repeat itself. These factions, which are defined as a group or clique within a larger group, party, government, organization, or the like, typically having different opinions and interests than the larger group, are often born out of an aversion to episodic, economic violence, impoverishment, governmental negligence, fascist police violence, —the white establishment and a yearning—a desperation to belong (commonly by homosocial bonding) to establish camaraderie between one another. In other words, regardless of how many indictments the State puts on Black people, the lumpenproletariat collectives that the State has destabilized will naturally be reborn out of generational factions in our continued struggle against the deathly whims of the US Empire.

What is social class?

By Danica Rachel

Republished from Red Flag.

A recent Essential poll found that 79 percent of Australians believe social classes still exist in Australia. This is unsurprising, given the distribution of wealth. For example, the Australia Institute’s Inequality on Steroids report estimates that the top 10 percent of Australian income earners received 93 percent of the benefits from all economic growth in the decade from 2009 to 2019.

Of Essential poll respondents, 49 percent consider themselves to be middle class, 30 percent self-identify as working class and 4 percent as upper class. This raises a question: what is a social class? 

Definitions typically revolve around income. “Middle class”, we’re often told, means earning something like the median income—about $65,000 a year according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. There’s no consensus on how much below or above this figure someone can earn while still being in the middle. 

This is a vague way to define class and is ripe for misinterpretations and distortions. An article published in the Australian last year described yearly earnings between $120,000 and $160,000 as “middle income” in an attempt to defend the high-end tax cuts due to be implemented by the federal Labor government next year. 

In reality, according to the most recently available statistics from the Australian Taxation Office, people making this much money are comfortably in the top 15 percent of Australian income earners.

More sophisticated classifications refer to education levels, cultural interests and family occupations as well as income. But again, the outcome is imprecise. Anyone with a university degree becomes middle class, and “working class” often becomes a synonym for “lower class”—that is, anyone economically worse off or with lower formal education levels than those in the “middle”.

 Socialists are more precise. While income can often be an indicator of social class, we define the latter in terms of people’s relationship to society’s economic infrastructure. That gives us three categories: the capitalist class, the working class and the middle classes.

Capitalists are the parasites at the top. They’re the executives, CEOs and board members who own and/or control the big companies, and with them the machinery, farmland, office buildings, media outlets, electricity grids, telecommunications infrastructure, ports and so on. They own the “means of production”, which they put to use with the singular purpose of generating profit.

Workers, on the other hand, don’t own any means of production. They might own personal property such as a car, a phone, maybe a house. But while workers use their personal property to meet their daily needs, capitalists use their private property as capital—a means to generate wealth through exploiting workers. 

A worker might grow some veggies in their garden to cut grocery costs; an agricultural capitalist uses thousands of acres of farmland to turn a profit. A house owned by a worker is just a home, but it becomes capital when owned by a real estate investor, used to generate wealth on the market.

The threat of poverty, homelessness and starvation gives workers no choice but to sell the only thing they can: their capacity to labour. They are deprived of control over much of their daily lives, having little say over the work they do or the workplaces in which they are employed. Even simple dignities like meals and bathroom breaks in many places can be taken only when allowed by the boss. 

The number of people fitting this definition of “working class” is difficult to quantify. Diane Fieldes, writing in the 2005 anthology Class and struggle in Australia, estimated that the working class makes up a substantial majority of the population—more than double the 30 percent figure in the Essential poll. 

“Middle class” also takes on a different meaning in this framework. It describes those who sit between the working class and the class of big capitalists. There are many different categories that fit in here: small business owners, middle managers, union officials, academics and state bureaucrats, to name a few. They can have different and contradictory relationships to the means of production—some are small capitalists, others just bureaucrats. What they generally have in common is that they control their own work or the work of others. They certainly make up a lot less than 49 percent of the population.

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The Marxist definition of class is much more useful than loose definitions based on income or education. 

First, it gives us an understanding of how capitalism works. Workers and bosses don’t exist in isolation; they are intimately connected through exploitation. Capitalists own the means of production, but need workers to operate machines, maintain infrastructure, harvest crops, serve customers and so on. The workers are the ones who produce the goods or services that their bosses sell for profit.

But there’s the rub. For the boss to make a profit, they have to sell the products for more than the costs of production, which crucially includes what they pay their workers. So the workers have created value, but that value has been seized from them by the capitalist, and only a fraction returned as a wage. This isn’t just the case with blue-collar workers, but also applies to workers in retail, hospitality, healthcare, IT, administration and elsewhere. 

Whether a business is successful depends on how much profit it can make, and therefore how much its workers are exploited. Profits are the lifeblood of capitalism—and every cent of them comes from exploited labour. By understanding exploitation, we can understand how 93 percent of wealth went to the top 10 percent last decade.

Second, the Marxist definition shows that classes have counterposed interests. What’s good for capitalists is whatever makes their profits go up. This often means, for instance, paying workers less, cutting costs wherever possible and lowering workplace safety standards. What’s good for workers is the opposite: being paid more and having more rights at work. Thinking of class simply as where someone sits on the spectrum from “low income” to “high income” obscures this tension.

Third, defining classes by their relation to the means of production tells us who has power in society. The capitalists own the most important section of the economy, so they make all major decisions about what society produces and how it will be produced. And because of this control, governments must keep them onside. Otherwise, they might move their investments overseas, threaten the economy, or even outright depose governments.

But profits are generated by workers, which gives them a different kind of power. When a workplace goes on strike, its production stops, and therefore profits cannot be made. The bosses go to great lengths to avoid this happening. They’ll pit workers against each other and spread lies about unions to stop workers organising.

Finally, we can see who is needed to run society—and who runs it day to day. The capitalists portray themselves as the deserving few who are indispensable. But their profits and wealth are the fruits of workers’ labour. Workers, not bosses, construct buildings, run hospitals, and stock shelves. Workers run the world, but under capitalism they are forced to run it for the capitalist class.

Another world is possible, where workers run the world for ourselves, because of the simple fact that the bosses need us, but we don’t need them.

Pavlovian Socialism: How Metrics of Empire Can Ruin the Left

By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso

It has been roughly a year since Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in to replace Stephen Breyer and become the 116th Justice of the US Supreme Court. The appointment has been hailed by liberal figureheads far and wide since then. President Joe Biden called the nomination an act of “[preserving] freedom and liberty here in the United States of America.” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer celebrated the appointment as a “greater moment for America as we rise to a more perfect union.” In reality, the affair speaks to a vital yet often ignored aspect of sociopolitical oppression in the United States: metrics of empire. 

In the United States, like in any imperialist force, the powers-that-be employ many different tactics to preserve their rule. These tactics include Pentagon involvement in Hollywood filmmaking, the deliberate whitewashing of grade-school education, and the skewing of news coverage to manufacture consent for pro-elite policies. Metrics of empire fall under this same category, as they refer to a carefully curated incentive structure by which accomplishments and developments in American society are measured and rewarded. 

The structure itself can be further broken down into three subcategories: Government, Private and Public. The Government subcategory consists of exactly what its name suggests: governmental forms of legitimation and recognition. American society has been made to believe that prominent government positions carry an inherent degree of legitimacy and sophistication, such that they should be admired and revered simply for existing, rather than routinely interrogated as hotbeds of imperialist empowerment and corruption. Such positions — due to their aforementioned societal rank — thus become rewards in and of themselves, serving as markers of achievement that deserve public reverence and praise regardless of their occupants’ work or character. Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination exemplifies this perfectly.

As a black woman working within the American legal system, Jackson experienced no shortage of hardships and systemic obstacles in her professional journey. Considering demographic data alone, it is clear that Jackson was in largely uncharted territory, as just under 5% of first-year law students are black women while they make up just over 3% of associates and less than 1% of partners. In the end, however, what was her reward for surpassing these systemic hurdles and beating overwhelming odds? A seat on the Supreme Court, a grossly antiquated, inherently undemocratic, and historically oppressive institution that most often operates at the behest of capital and bends to the will of America’s most reactionary impulses.

The Private category consists of entities such as private universities and privately owned publications:

1.  Universities (ex: The University of Chicago): The school is considered one of the 10 best in the country and has historically boasted competitive rankings across a broad range of subject areas and specializations. Yet, it was the so-called “Chicago Boys” — a group of economics graduates — who cultivated and ultimately spearheaded the implementation of neoliberal economic policy abroad, namely in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. This cohort of Chicago alumni collaborated with the United States government to advance business interests by using Augusto Pinochet’s Chile as a testing ground for the economic models and policies they hoped to pursue domestically. 

2.  Publications (ex: The New York Times): Despite being heralded as the gold standard for journalism nationwide, the investor-owned New York Times routinely employs biased coverage and partisan language when discussing matters relevant to American foreign policy -- including Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and the Iraq War — whitewashing such atrocities to manufacture consent for the imperial project.  

The Public category consists of entities such as nonprofit organizations and public-facing awards:

1.  Nonprofits (ex: Doctors Without Borders): Though it is ranked 26th among America’s Top 100 Charities according to Forbes magazine, this organization is a hotbed of white saviorism and intraorganizational racism that perpetuates US hegemony abroad through the lens of healthcare and medical treatment. 

2.  Awards (ex: The Nobel Prize): The prize is widely considered to be the most prestigious recognition of achievement in the world. Yet, the awardees of the Peace Prize have included the likes of Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama. 

This state of affairs spells a particularly grim prognosis for the socialist movement across the United States. Metrics of empire have the very real potential to serve as direct inhibitors to tangible progress in the fundamentally socialist areas of social justice, economic transformation, and material improvement. As such, a sort of Pavlovian socialism can develop, one in which it is only through the awarding of such imperial accolades and symbols of legitimation that our work is perceived as successful, casting out all other achievements in the process.

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At best, this dynamic can create a qualitative hierarchy in which the work recognized by metrics of empire is considered superior. At worst, the dynamic can become a hegemonic enclosure fundamentally opposed to the radical dimensions of socialist praxis, eventually creating a scenario in which the metrics themselves become the sought-after achievements rather than the empirical progress made by the work that warranted the metrics’ awarding in the first place. 

We’ve seen this play out already with organizations across the country, one such organization being the Sunrise Movement. While its founding principles contained more radical conceptions of action and changemaking — including sit-ins at government offices, Wide Awake demonstrations, and recognition by prominent leftist figures such as Noam Chomsky — Sunrise’s more recent activism has left much to be desired. Since the beginning of this decade, it has largely shifted away from direct action-based initiatives to focus on electoral endorsements and armchair advocacy. Most notably, these shifts have resulted in a severe lack of climate victories on the legislative front as well as serious organizational neglect of representation and empowerment of marginalized voices in the movement, particularly those of color.

The shift can be largely understood as a pragmatic change resulting from an outstanding reliance on big-money donations as well as ties to government officials and politicians. Through accepting and actively engaging with metrics of empire in this context, namely of the governmental and private varieties, the Sunrise Movement and organizations like it have provided a glimpse of what such a dynamic could mean for the socialist movement when applied to actual revolutionary praxis in the future.

This is not to suggest that socialist praxis should be entirely devoid of notable awards or recognitions. After all, acknowledgements of outstanding achievement can be an incredibly valuable way of qualifying motivated, focused, and effective work. These “metrics of the proletariat,” however, must have a carefully curated relationship to the doers of the work and to the empirical effects of it. The metrics themselves must never come to occupy the place of the work’s initial objective: substantive and revolutionary change. 

As such, “metrics of the proletariat” are a thing of the socialist future, an element of our aspirational imaginary that can come to occupy the dynamics of our work down the line, but not that of the present day. So long as systemic injustices and widespread oppression reign supreme — further emboldened by the unrelenting fervor of imperial capitalism — these metrics will inevitably reward advantaged and privileged socialists and, more pressingly, will run the risk of becoming metrics of empire in and of themselves.  

Thus, as the socialist movement carries on with its vital work of national and global changemaking, it cannot neglect the very real hurdle that metrics of empire can come to represent. Only by preemptively abolishing the air of legitimacy these metrics now hold — and looking toward a future in which new metrics of success and achievement that honor socialist ideals and avoid imperial capitalist corruption will be established — can the movement avoid existing structures of incentive and recognition that seek to counteract its aims at every turn.

Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso is a Colombian Marxist. In his writing, he seeks to interrogate the nuances of socialist thought and praxis.

Red Scared: Revising History at the Victims of Communism Museum

By Billie Anania

Republished from The Baffler.

“THERE IS NO WAY he is a victim of communism,” my partner quips, pointing to a photo of the late Pope John Paul II. We are near the end of our visit to the new Victims of Communism Museum, standing in an elevator-size lobby with photographs of “victims” screen-printed all over the walls. Among the many victims and honorees: Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, the Dalai Lama, Romanian writer Herta Müller, Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong, and Hungarian neofascist Viktor Orbán.

These public figures are the latest faces of a long campaign to flip the historical script. Ai Weiwei, among the highest-selling artists in the world, has earned his keep resolutely opposing the Chinese Communist Party. Meanwhile, Orbán’s vocal denunciations of Soviet occupation helped launch a political career filled with what critics call “pure Nazi speech.” Despite the cognitive dissonance of this display—Müller’s father served in the Waffen-SS, for god’s sake—the strategy allows the decades-old Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation to position all anti-communists as renegade freedom fighters regardless of their fascist associations, thus rebranding its Holocaust revisionism anew. What better destination for their new museum than Washington, D.C., just one mile away from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum?

Originally founded during the Clinton era by a unanimous act of Congress, the Victims of Communism Foundation is a relic of Cold War-era propaganda. Its central belief that communism has claimed “more than 100 million” victims was lifted from The Black Book of Communism, a controversial piece of Western agitprop that has since been delegitimized by its own contributors. The book, as well as the foundation, peddle the spurious notion that a “double genocide” took place in the twentieth century: one by fascists and another by so-called “Judeo-Bolshevik Communists.”

According to the Victims of Communism team, all Nazis killed by Soviets are victims of communism, as are all deaths resulting from Covid-19. Inside the museum, Mao Zedong figures as a “mass murderer,” but Adolf Hitler is nowhere to be found. Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, too, are portrayed as running authoritarian, anti-democratic regimes, yet British colonialism and American imperialism garner nary a mention. Hardly anywhere in the foundation’s documents, or in the museum, are Nazis, fascists, royals, colonizers, or capitalists portrayed as aggressors. In fact, World War II isn’t even included in the museum’s timeline.

Is now a good time to mention that the Victims of Communism Foundation’s original co-chairman, Yaroslav Stetsko, once led the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists to ally with Nazi Germany alongside Stepan Bandera, who is now a national hero of Ukraine? Not only does the foundation count Nazi sympathizers among its scant few donors, but many other immortalized “victims” were involved in the deportation and extermination of Jews, Poles, Roma, Serbs, Belarusians, and Ukrainians on behalf of Nazi puppet regimes across Europe. I went into the museum expecting to see the usual suspects among the victims—from Holocaust perpetrators Ante Pavelić and Roman Shukhevych to the kulaks and Cuban plantation owners—but was surprised to find the vaunted list has gotten a facelift. Perhaps they hope to attract a new generation of culture warriors, or just far-right trolls with Turning Point USA aspirations.

After more than an hour wandering around the building, I was left deeply unsure what, in their view, even constitutes a “victim” of communism, let alone a “communist.” No one will walk out of this institution knowing much more than some fudged numbers and fashy buzzwords. This kind of hyperbolic revisionism meets roadside tourist trap is capitalist projection at its finest, an alternative history built by dark money and reinforced by disinformation. Nonetheless, considering how much the art world masks its own regressive politics, an unabashed right-wing exhibition of this magnitude is a genuine treat for sickos like me.

Part fascist propaganda, part Epcot ride, the Victims of Communism “museum” is actually just three claustrophobic rooms of dystopian imagery and haunted house sounds, all designed to shock and appall. Tickers run at the bottom of screens endlessly tallying “victims,” while jump-cut documentary footage rushes between shots of Cuba, China, Poland, and Hungary. Along the floors and walls, the words WAR, REVOLUTION, and TERROR pop out against deep shades of black and crimson. LIES, one placard announces near an illuminated image of Eastern European Christians holding crosses. RELIGIOUS OPPRESSION, reads another, juxtaposed with stock imagery of barbed wire.

I can only describe the videos in this place as Ken Burns documentaries from hell. The first begins once visitors trigger a foot plate, enhancing the venue’s dungeon-esque quality. Then a series of jagged screens light up, interspersing photographs of Lenin, Trotsky, and Tsar Nicholas with an ominous, staccato orchestral score. Rather than address the complex historical conditions leading up to the October Revolution, our humble narrator goes straight for the gold: “Reformers hoped for a democratic solution—the Bolsheviks had another idea.”

It was hard for me not to burst out laughing at this appeal to Menshevik supremacy, but I held my cool, lest I offend the solitary front desk worker—who was, I should add, the only other person in the building. Afterward, I noticed a small glass display that held a first edition of The Communist Manifesto, as well as a Russian newspaper from the day after the Bolsheviks took power. “Marx and Engels’ manifesto gave birth to the world’s most violent regimes,” the nearby text intones. Lenin, too, is accused of single-handedly building the gulags and killing “hundreds of thousands” of Russians, leaving a “blood-soaked legacy” upon his death a few years later. Based on this room alone, one might surmise that communism is an individualistic, tyrannical ideology oriented around exploitation.

Of course, they would be wrong, but no matter to our humble curators; the museum never sets out to define communism in any capacity. In their selective version of history, once upon a time, Marx and Engels wrote an evil little pamphlet, and then—skipping right over the Paris Commune—we find ourselves in 1917 at the start of the Russian Revolution. We then jump, curiously, from Stalin consolidating power in the 1930s to the Cold War and beyond. These glaring gaps in history feel intentional in the displays devoted to starvation and imprisonment, in which Soviet gulags take precedence, but Nazi concentration camps are nowhere to be found.

A related video juxtaposes the gulags with prisons in Vietnam, China, Korea, and Cuba. Paintings and sketches made by detainees are interwoven with quotes from Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (a favorite of Steve Bannon and Jordan Peterson). Hearing the words of prisoners and experiencing their art, I was somewhat moved by the concept of creative resilience in confinement, particularly given the brilliant work produced by incarcerated artists here in the States. But it’s hard not to see this as artwashing Nazi war crimes, or what Ljiljana Radonić calls “comparative trivialization.”

By downplaying the Holocaust, the museum can seamlessly move to the Holodomor and Great Leap Forward, two periods of enforced economic reform that they portray as intentional massacres. And with little wall space remaining, they do a speed-run through Vietnam, China, North Korea, and Cambodia, sloppily tying together Juche, the state ideology of North Korea, with the Khmer Rouge. This rhetorical trick, which is hard not to perceive as racist, allows them to gloss over the nuances inherent to these distinct regions while avoiding what happened in Cambodia before Pol Pot took power. (As Anthony Bourdain once said, if you visit Cambodia, you will “never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.”) In a final video, the narrator also claims that Czech protesters from 1968 desired, above all, “democracy and free markets,” rather than the loosening of Soviet control over creative and political forms of expression. As it ended, my gaze fell on a nearby wall photograph showing an East German guard fleeing to West Berlin, which is credited to the CIA.

Toward the exit, an interactive choose-your-own-adventure game allows visitors to reflect on all this “information” as a Cuban, Korean, or German individual. Two paths can be chosen on the screens provided: in the first, you comply with a newly appointed communist government, while the other takes you on the dissident path. No matter which path I chose, however, my protagonist ended up compromised—either by facing persecution or bringing shame on my legacy. The framing is utterly nihilistic, a downward spiral resulting in entrapment no matter the response. In many ways, it resembles how people describe getting arrested in the United States.

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Before going any further, I should clarify a few things. I don’t doubt the existence of persecution and suffering in communist countries. I’m well aware of the mortal consequences of agrarian reforms in China and Russia, as well as the problems of absolute power. But the Victims of Communism Museum is not the place to find valid critique; it’s a wasteland of thinly veiled bigotry. Their fast-and-loose analysis feeds into a far-right strategy to whitewash imperial, feudal, and fascist histories, developed at a time when Western countries welcomed former Nazis into top-brass positions. Moreover, selectively lifting stats from long-debunked sources only further promotes disinformation; for an example, look no further than the “horrors of socialism” resolution recently passed in the House, which parrots the “100 million victims” statistic.

Undercutting all of this, of course, is the role that Western powers have played in constraining—violently and otherwise—Soviet and Third-World autonomy. Not a single revolution of the twentieth century went without its fair share of trade sanctions, assassination attempts, and disinformation campaigns. Rather than focusing on building a new society, revolutionary movements have always been forced on the defensive—and even still, freedom of art flourished in the well-funded Soviet film industry, and Vietnam successfully ousted its occupiers. Should we really be taking what Holocaust revisionists claim about China, Cuba, and elsewhere today at face value?

Conflating communism with fascism—while conveniently eliding the horrors carried out by its own fascist honorees—is old hat for this foundation, and the museum treads well-worn territory. Curiously, many of the foremost “victims” are men, and few are Black. I almost have to admire their attempts to tiptoe around slavery and identity politics, if it weren’t for the number of Black radicals persecuted by and within capitalist countries—from the outright assassinations of Amílcar Cabral and Patrice Lumumba to the persecution of intellectuals like Assata Shakur and Paul Robeson. Of course, even the nightmare fantasies concocted here include a tinge of casual racism, and it’s remarkable they even thought to acknowledge communist revolutions in Africa (albeit in small text near the exit).

As this all makes clear, the museum is not really for anyone who disagrees with conservative doctrine, or even for centrists playing both sides; it’s for far-right ideologues who already champion the views espoused here and would like their children to do the same. As with most roadside attractions, every reactionary impulse is thrown to the wall to see what sticks. While Covid-19 is simultaneously a hoax and communist plot, you can still find the Victims of Communism-branded hand sanitizer in its gift shop, along with supposedly real fragments of the Berlin Wall, anti-Che Guevara shirts, bracelets made by a Ukrainian jeweler, and—oh my—a Nora D. Clinton book on the perils of quarantining. Communists are simultaneously to blame for Covid-19, as well as for lockdowns, but please do remember to wash your hands!

By now you’ve likely seen the videos of the expansive encampment across from the museum in D.C.’s McPherson Square. Social media posts hardly convey the scale; there are countless tents across multiple city blocks keeping the city’s unhoused population warm through the winter months. “When you step outside the building you conveniently enter the real-time updating Victims of Capitalism Museum,” one astute reviewer noted. While D.C. officials recently cleared the premises—an action endorsed by the entire Washington Post editorial board—I doubt they recognize the irony here.

This is the world the Victims of Communism Foundation seeks to preserve, and the one they also tend to blame on their liberal opponents—who are also, supposedly, all communists. Coincidentally, the museum is located in the United Mine Workers of America Building where, as Mike Davis has written, union leader John L. Lewis notoriously banned communists and imposed top-down leadership to limit local autonomy. Much like Lewis, the museum’s goal is to obfuscate, yet for anyone with a working smartphone, much of it can easily be written off. At the same time, Eastern European countries like Hungary, Lithuania, and Latvia have all passed laws criminalizing opposition to the “double genocide” claims, so maybe the propaganda really is working.

For now, the Victims of Communism Museum continues its mission uninterrupted—or at least from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., five days a week—all while its foundation still receives donations from fascist sympathizers across Eastern Europe and the Balkans. As recently as 2021, they installed a controversial memorial in Ottawa entirely with private funding. Rather than name victims on the memorial, the foundation instead listed the monument’s moneyed donors. Perhaps letting people Google victim names might get them into trouble again. At the very least, Canadian media remains skeptical.

“Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution,” a quote from Soviet officer Felix Dzerzhinsky reads on one wall back in the museum. True enough, but terror for whom? For the profiteers of state terror at home and abroad? Or enslavers of the prison-industrial complex who sit on museum boards? I fail to see what Mao or Stalin could do beyond the grave to significantly impact my life, but I can see how white nationalism threatens my agency. I can see that by flipping the script, fascists quickly transform into freedom fighters, and thus the severity of slavery and extrajudicial killing in capitalist countries become mere matters of opinion. Such sore winners will never be happy until every last speck of land is open for extraction—and even then, it still won’t be enough.

But, hey, don’t just take my word for it! Listen to the voices of their workers—or, if you will, the Victims of the Victims of Communism Foundation. One woman who worked there for a few months notes that “sexist and conservative management” contributed to a “toxic work environment.” Another employee claims that anyone who is not a “staunch conservative” will be “extremely uncomfortable” with management’s daily discussions and that employees are not allowed to “openly voice concerns.” While none of this sounds surprising for a U.S. nonprofit, it does speak volumes about an institution that claims to be on the right side of authoritarianism—turns out they’re just on the right.

What the Titan Submersible Says About Capitalist Culture

By Saheim Patrick

It is ironic that the name of the doomed sub that captivated the minds of Americans this past week, contains the suffix: -gate, a morpheme that has become de facto synonymous with conspiracy theories. The irony stems from the fact that conspiracy theories, or at least the ones that attach -gate to their title, are a direct product of the type of distracting, unified discourse characteristic of our current, US society that has allowed the topic of the OceanGate submersible to thrive.

The story, largely irrelevant for reasons which will be divulged, goes like this: five men aboard a twenty-two foot carbon-fiber and titanium craft, named the Titan, planning to tour the ruins of the famed Titanic shipwreck. At an hour and forty-five minutes into their expedition, contact was lost with their surface ship: the Polar Prince. In the days following, the story and question of whether they were alive or not, left the public reeling, and the media magnates sensationalizing. It is important, for the sake of critiquing the discourse surrounding it, to note that the men aboard paid 250,000 USD each for this trip. This particular detail has stoked a fire in the discussions of the event, namely on Twitter, and has promoted a false dichotomy, a false binary, in talking about the sub. The sides that you can take are presented as: finding the likely deaths of these men a tragic event, or ridiculing and showing apathy towards their deaths. It is not uncommon for a simplification of this sort to happen in modern discourse.

The dominant medium of communication in the US is social media. It is easy to believe it to be the Internet as a whole, but the difference between a technology and a medium must be noted (not only for this clarification, but for our understanding of modern discourse as a whole). Neil Postman’s 1985 treatise on dominant mediums of communication throughout history and television as a medium, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, tackles specifically this difference.

We might say that a technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind. Like the brain, a technology is a physical apparatus. Like the mind, a medium is a use to which a physical apparatus is put. A technology becomes a medium as it employs a particular symbolic code, as it finds its place in a particular social setting, as it insinuates itself into economic and political contexts. A technology, in other words, is merely a machine. A medium is the social and intellectual environment a machine creates.

In other words, a technology is a machine, and a medium is the use of that machine. It then becomes clear that while the Internet is a dominant technology today, the dominant medium, its dominant use, is social media. And with this in mind, it becomes abundantly clear as to why discourse today is the way it is.

There is a constant, pervasive threat of irrelevance anytime one posts on social media, and I am sure that anyone who has spent more than a few days on any given platform can attest to the rapid speed at which one buzzing topic moves to the next. As a result, arguments, ideas, and discussions are spewed out quick and without any nuance. Actual engagement with the ideas being talked out cannot be risked. In the time it takes you to study, read a book, or to genuinely think about the subject you are so fervent about, there is a new point of mass interest, and you are left speaking into a void which no longer cares to hear what you have to say.

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It is then not surprising to me that discourse on Twitter has taken such an extreme split; such a sharp turning away from the simple and foundational idea that multiple things can be true about a given thing at once. It is possible to believe that the deaths of the billionaires aboard the Titan are sad. Objectively, I think if any one of us were in that situation, ignoring of course the circumstances that got them in the situation in the first place, we would be primally and utterly terrified. That is a chilling thought. However, it is also possible to believe, at the same time, that the reaction this has caused in us is utterly terrifying. What is there to happen when people believe that they have to passionately defend billionaires’ sanctity of life? What does this mean for revolution in America?

I will put it this way: we are slaves on a plantation. Our plantation’s master has gone away on a boating trip with neighboring plantation masters. On this trip, an accident happens which leads to our master, and his master friends, dying. If you asked me, a slave, to put myself in the master’s shoes, and to divorce myself from the fact that I as a slave do not even have the resources to take a boating trip, I would surely say that would be a scary moment for me and I may feel your idea of empathy. However, my master has died, his plantation still exists, a new master will come soon to rule that plantation, and I am still a slave. Therefore, that idea of empathy that you have has its limits on me. As well, if there were a group of slaves on the plantation so intensely tore up about master’s death and scolding other slaves for not being as tore up, it would lead me to fear that when the time to fight for our liberation comes, these fellow slaves will not be able to be counted on. It brings into question whether someone is truly for the people; for if you are not staunchly for the people, you are against them.

The even more frightening factor here is that people so loudly championing empathy for the billionaires are not even aware that they are serving capitalist interests. They cannot tell that — by the way that the meticulous, scientific system of capitalism works — anytime you defend billionaires, you are defending capitalism. It is no coincidence that this story was pushed as hard as it was. Within three days of the submersible going missing, a documentary on it has already been filmed, produced, edited, and sent to air. Ask yourself, and I mean seriously ask yourself: why do we not hear the stories of the people who are ruthlessly exploited by billionaires as much as we do this? In that answer is also the answer as to why you will not hear the same people championing empathy for these billionaires, also championing empathy for their victims, whom are countless and suffering daily.

Aside from the political thought that this story may inspire, it is a synecdoche of a larger culture of irrelevant news and information that has been in place for centuries in US. What so many people fail to recognize about this story, and its parts, is that it simply does not matter.

What bearing does this have on your day-to-day life? I am not asking this to say that any story or information that is not directly related to you cannot have value, but I am saying that a lot of the information sensationalized by US media has no actual value, and for a reason.

It is the job of the capitalist system to keep the people subordinated and unconscious. If the system succeeds in doing this, people will blindly practice, uphold, and promote the interests and values of capitalism. For if the masses of people took even the most simple view of capitalism, it would become abundantly clear how unjust it is. A handful of people control and own not only the means of production, but the production, while those who work on these means of production and produce have no stake in where they work and often can’t even access what they produce. It is clear from even this base-level understanding of capitalism that it is a system built on exploitation. By extension, to keep people subordinated, unconscious, and unaware of this, they must remain uninformed; or, better yet, consumed with useless information. As Kwame Ture once put it, “the capitalist system makes the people think they’re thinking, when in fact they are not thinking.” Therefore, when the people waste our time discussing a situation which has no true effect on our lives, convinced that value can be traded for entertainment — and then, at that, discuss without a tinge of nuance, critical thinking, or rhetoric — the capitalist rejoices! This is because all while doing this, the people truly believe we are contributing to an important cultural discourse. Sure, the culture is having discourse, but what is it doing for the culture?

This irrelevant news disguised in a cloak of being relevant is not new. As Henry David Thoreau incisively remarked in 1849:

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate .... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

My point is this: if you can tell me five facts about the Titan submersible, or any other nationally syndicated story, but not five about the community directly around you, you are not an informed person, you are a distracted one. And this battle of focusing and reshifting toward real issues and real change is one we must be constantly waging, because capitalism is constantly waging against that.

On the Concept of "Time Poverty"

[Photo credit: Marisa9 / iStock / Getty Images Plus]

By Rugveda Sawant

“In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour-time.”

-Karl Marx

There is a considerable amount of literature on “time-poverty” concocted by researchers and policy-makers. The term is used to denote lack of time an individual experiences to devote to personal and social activities which ends up negatively impacting their well-being.

Apart from the already established definition of the term, a fresh deconstruction of it may lead one to observe that if poverty is understood as a lack of (financial) resources, time-poverty may be understood as a lack of (financial) resources to purchase time rather than lack of time itself. The worker who does not own any means of production and has nothing but his labour-power to sell in order to sustain himself, must do so by lending it out for a certain duration of time to the capitalist who purchases it in order to extract surplus value. However, it becomes important to note that what is being sold and purchased here is not time, but labour-power. Time is not a commodity- it can be a measure of value but has no value in itself; it cannot be produced or purchased. Defining “time-poverty” as “lack of time” helps mask this simple contradiction; we are stuck with a term that fails to delineate the exact relationship between time and poverty, leading to the proposal of flawed solutions for a legitimate issue.

Even though a more liberal understanding is that people, no matter what their financial status, can experience “time-poverty”, a more sophisticated argument observes that it is an issue more relevant to and persistent amongst the income-poor. [1] To avoid ambiguity, let us replace “poor” with the working class and “rich” with the capitalist class. The working class earns its money through ‘wages’ while the capitalist class earns it through ‘profits’. The following illustration by Engels will help us understand how ‘wages’ and ‘profits’ are earned:

“The capitalist takes the labourer into his workshop or factory, where all the articles required for the work can be found – raw materials, auxiliary materials (coal, dyestuffs, etc.), tools, and machines. Here, the worker begins to work. His daily wages are, as above, 3 shillings, and it makes no difference whether he earns them as day-wages or piece-wages. We again assume that in 12 hours the worker adds by his labour a new value of 6 shillings to the value of the raw materials consumed, which new value the capitalist realizes by the sale of the finished piece of work. Out of this new value, he pays the worker his 3 shillings, and the remaining 3 shillings he keeps for himself. If, now, the labourer creates in 12 hours a value of 6 shillings, in 6 hours he creates a value of 3 shillings. Consequently, after working 6 hours for the capitalist, the labourer has returned to him the equivalent of the 3 shillings received as wages. After 6 hours’ work, both are quits, neither one owing a penny to the other.

“Hold on there!” now cries out the capitalist. “I have hired the labourer for a whole day, for 12 hours. But 6 hours are only half-a-day. So work along lively there until the other 6 hours are at an end – only then will we be even.” And, in fact, the labourer has to submit to the conditions of the contract upon which he entered of “his own free will", and according to which he bound himself to work 12 whole hours for a product of labour which cost only 6 hours’ labour.

Similarly with piece-wages. Let us suppose that in 12 hours our worker makes 12 commodities. Each of these costs a shilling in raw materials and wear-and-tear, and is sold for 2.5 shillings. On our former assumption, the capitalist gives the labourer .25 of a shilling for each piece, which makes a total of 3 shillings for 12 pieces. To earn this, the worker requires 12 hours. The capitalist receives 30 shillings for the 12 pieces; deducting 24 shillings for raw materials and wear-and-tear, there remains 6 shillings, of which he pays 3 shillings in wages and pockets the remaining 3. Just as before! Here, also, the worker labours 6 hours for himself – i.e., to replace his wages (half-an-hour in each of the 12 hours), and 6 hours for the capitalist.” (Frederick Engels, Wage Labour and Capital, 1891)

Profits are earned by appropriating unpaid labour of the working class. Profit constitutes the amount of time that the worker has spent in producing value that does not belong to him. The magnitude of profits can be increased by increasing intensity of labour, productiveness of the labour or by increasing the length of the working day. But no matter how these three variables shift, (relative) wages and profits remain in inverse proportion to each other. [2] Lower the wages, more the profit. More the labour-time that remains unpaid, more the capitalist gains. Once this is clear, one can start to see how “lack of time” that one class of the society faces is a gain for the other. The issue of “lack of time” devoid of class analysis leads to vague rhetorics [3] and empty solutions. All sincere critique must elucidate how the “lack of time” that the “poor” face and which affects their “well-being” is an inevitability under capitalist production. [4]

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It is argued that women are the most “time-poor” since they are ones who usually perform domestic and household work which (widely) remains unrecognized and unpaid. The burden of performing these tasks leaves them with very little time for themselves. Recognition, remuneration and provision of alternative arrangements of such work will lead to diminution of the time deficit that women face. Researchers by employing the methodology of time-use surveys have made proclamations like “rich women work harder than poor men”. [5] Such statements are as contrived as the terms “rich” and “poor” are abstruse. Women unarguably are burdened with domestic and household work, which to a very large extent remains gendered. However the premise that it is “unpaid” is false. Even though this work may not be remunerated directly, it is accounted for in the wages earned by the worker:

“The manufacturer who calculates his cost of production and, in accordance with it, the price of the product, takes into account the wear and tear of the instruments of labour…In the same manner, the cost of production of simple labour-power must include the cost of propagation, by means of which the race of workers is enabled to multiply itself, and to replace worn-out workers with new ones. The wear and tear of the worker, therefore, is calculated in the same manner as the wear and tear of the machine.

Thus, the cost of production of simple labour-power amounts to the cost of the existence and propagation of the worker. The price of this cost of existence and propagation constitutes wages. The wages thus determined are called the minimum of wages. This minimum wage, like the determination of the price of commodities in general by cost of production, does not hold good for the single individual, but only for the race. Individual workers, indeed, millions of workers, do not receive enough to be able to exist and to propagate themselves; but the wages of the whole working class adjust themselves, within the limits of their fluctuations, to this minimum.”  (Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, 1847) 

Therefore, even if household and domestic work was to be paid for separately, it would lead to a relative decrease in wages, not leading to any sort of substantive improvement in the life of the working class. The gendered nature of the oppressive burden of household work can be understood as an effect of the patriarchal system but the cause of it lies in the exploitative nature of class relations under capitalism. The patriarchal system itself, at the outset, is a result of the historical division of labour within a class society. The condition of women being domestic slaves to their husbands will not be made better, in any real sense, by demanding for household work to be remunerated.[6] According to the calculations of the capitalist, it is already recognised and paid for in the wages of the worker. As explained above, the impoverished status of the working class is directly linked to the prosperity of the capitalist. Therefore, any demands for alternative arrangement or socialisation of domestic work that might emancipate women from their current state of slavery and proposals about providing free goods and services via public policy, remain incompatible with and a utopia under the capitalist mode of production.

The burden of “unpaid work” that leads individuals to face a “lack of time” is a legit issue. However, it cannot be understood in isolation from the process of production of which it is a part. Marx writes:

“All the slave’s labour appears as unpaid labour. In wage labour, on the contrary, even surplus-labour, or unpaid labour, appears as paid. There the property-relation conceals the labour of the slave for himself; here the money-relation conceals the unrequited labour of the wage labourer.” (Karl Marx, Vol 1., Capital, 1887)

It is this very phenomenon that can so easily lead one to think of household work (domestic slavery of women) as unpaid while overlooking the exploitative nature of class relations within the capitalist mode of production. The concept of “time-poverty“, which wrongly posits time as a commodity, furthers the concealment of the worker’s unpaid labour. The worker appears to be selling his time and not the value creating source that is his labour-power. It becomes easier then, for the price of this “time” to be detached from and determined independently of the value created by him. Terms like “time-poverty” when undisguised reveal themselves as nothing but plain, old poverty. Averse to the dilution and deviation that this term begets, one must not lose sight of the fact that the fight for personal and leisure time is inextricably tied with the fight for socialism.

Notes

[1] “...time-poverty among the better off accounts for very little of the total, and that genuine time poverty is more than a qualitative loss resulting from individual choices. Rather, most people who are time-poor are also income-poor and suffer from other (often multiple) deprivations.” Ghosh, “Time Poverty and the Poverty of Economics,” 2.

[2] “The share of (profit) increases in the same proportion in which the share of labour (wages) falls, and vice versa. Profit rises in the same degree in which wages fall; it falls in the same degree in which wages rise.” Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, 37.

[3] “Though it is difficult to say how much leisure or free time a person needs, one can say that a person who does not get enough leisure is under time stress.” Hirway, Understanding Poverty, 28.

[4] “Capitalist production, therefore, of itself reproduces the separation between labour-power and the means of labour. It thereby reproduces and perpetuates the condition for exploiting the labourer. It incessantly forces him to sell his labour-power in order to live, and enables the capitalist to purchase labour-power in order that he may enrich himself.” Marx, Vol. 1. Capital, 406.

[5] Ultra-poor women rank at the bottom in terms of burden of total work. They spend 32.74 per cent of their total time (53.42 hours) on work. They are followed by non-poor women (and not by ultra-poor men) who spend 31.66 per cent of their time (53.18 hours) on work. That is, rich women work much harder than ultra-poor men in terms of the time put into work. Hirway, Understanding Poverty, 35. Also quoted by Jayati Ghosh in “Time poverty and the poverty of economics” with an addition that “This partly reflects the lack of paid work for poor men as well as the greater burden of unpaid work borne by women in their own households.”

[6] “Payment for the housewife’s “reproductive labour” in the house, i.e. for domestic slavery, in addition to keeping the working family’s standard of living the same, and consequently the level of the housewife’s freedom on the same level as before, is something that would serve to perpetuate the idea of the housewife as the beast of burden that bears on her back all the social pressure exerted on working-class homes (including psychological and physical abuse). It would keep her away from social life, imprisoned within the four walls of her house, making her numb with chores that mangle her body and dull her mind.” Rey, Is housework an “unpaid” job?

Reflections on My Visit to Cuba: A Response to Calla Walsh

By Gus Griffin

Calla Walsh’s May 29th op-ed, Biden Calls Cuba Terrorist While the People Demand and End to U.S. Terrorism against Cuba, was correct!

Having been born after its revolution in 1959, I, like anyone else growing up in the United States, have been subjected to a very one-sided characterization of the island and its government.

This year, through the National Network on Cuba in the U.S. and the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) 16th annual Mayday Brigade, I finally got the opportunity to visit the island and observe and draw my own conclusions. I was among some three hundred others in the U.S. delegation. About thirty other countries sent delegations from five different continents.

It is impossible to fully relay what I observed and the amazing accomplishments this tiny island of about eleven million has achieved despite an illegal economic embargo for over 60 years. Having said that, I’ll list a few:

• While the U.S. is facing a growing diabetes crisis, Cuba has a promising treatment for the disease. However, due to the blockade, U.S. citizens are not allowed access to this treatment. This is an example of how the embargo can have life or death consequences for both U.S. citizens as well as Cubans;

• Cuba also has one of the largest adults Covid 19 vaccination rates in the world despite the embargo hindering its capacity to acquire syringes. This is thanks to the faith the Cuban people have in their world-renowned healthcare system and the country’s development of five different Covid 19 vaccinations which also are beyond the reach of U.S. citizens again due to the embargo;

• Other bio-medical advancements include a tic vaccine that helps preserve their livestock but does not kill the tic;

• The country’s Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) established in 1999 provides a tuition free medical education with the only condition being that graduates commit to practice medicine in poor and underserved communities after graduation. Two hundred and twenty of its graduates are currently working within the U.S. without the crippling burden of medical school student loan debt. The average U.S. medical school graduate owes $250,990 in total student loan debt. Seventy-three percent of medical school graduates have educational debt. One of ELAM’s graduates is an alum of my employer, Montgomery College and we are in the process of bringing her to the campus in the fall to talk about ELAM and her experience;

• An extension of the country’s internationalism is its health care and educational ambassadorship which sends doctors and other health care workers and literacy educators to the world’s most underserved areas. They are currently serving in thirty-two different countries around the world; 

• There is a home ownership rate of 85% which explains why I saw none of the homeless encampments we routinely see in the U.S.; and

• The country recently updated its Family Code which now recognizes same sex marriages and other family structures previously excluded from the benefits of marriage.

This list is by no means complete! The country can and is doing so much more, and the people of the U.S. and the rest of the world would benefit if the embargo, a relic of the cold war, were ended. 

In this year, the 200th anniversary of the infamous “Monroe Doctrine” from which the U.S. declared all the western hemisphere its hegemonic domain, there is no better time to renounce this ideology which is at the root of the Cuban embargo. The Washington D.C. Council is among the latest to take a step in that direction recently by passing a resolution urging the lifting of the embargo and removal of Cuba from the list state sponsors of terrorism. A third action would be to return Guantanamo Bay back to the island as a piece of its sovereign land. This sentiment represents a growing international movement. Of 193 United Nation members, 185 voted to condemn the blockade last year.  This trend has been consistent for about 30 years.  

It is my hope that other governing bodies and organizations will join the world chorus by condemning the blockade against Cuba. 

Gus Griffin is a professor at Montgomery College and a member of Black Alliance for Peace and Ujima People’s Progress Party.

Tipped and Tricked: It's Time To Pay Service Workers A Living Wage

By Liam Easton-Calabria

Republished from Socialist Alternative.

If you’ve recently been out to eat, grabbed a cup of coffee, taken a Lyft, or gotten a haircut, you’ve likely given someone a tip. Leaving a tip as a sign of appreciation is a regular practice in the U.S., and is more common here than any other country in the world. Tipping has become increasingly prevalent across different service sector jobs, and as wages have stagnated and the cost of living has increased dramatically, tips make up an important part of the income of roughly five million workers in the U.S. While tipping is a lifeline for workers in today’s current working conditions, the economic model of tipping as a whole is anti-worker and negatively impacts both the worker and the customer. 

Most tipped workers would say that they really need tips. A restaurant server, thought of as the “classic” tipped worker, usually earns a majority of their income through tips, while getting a subminimum wage from their employer. In many states, this subminimum wage is only the federal minimum of $2.13 an hour. Servers are therefore wholly reliant on customers at restaurants to tip between 15-20% of sales in order to make ends meet. When customers tip below this, or not at all, it can put servers and their families in financially strenuous positions. The difference in tipped wages month to month can determine whether a family is able to pay their rent.

A Growing Problem

Tipped work has changed over time, however, and tips now play a larger role in work outside of just the restaurant industry. There are more service jobs than ever before. This March, the leisure and hospitality sector saw the most growth with 72,000 new positions, while the manufacturing, construction, and retail sectors all saw job losses. An economy dominated by service jobs means many more workers holding multiple jobs in precarious industries. The custom of tipping has expanded to include thousands of counter-service workers, including baristas and food service, and gig workers that work for companies like Uber or Doordash. These workers make minimum wage and typically make far less in tips than servers. The pathetic state of the $7.25/hr federal minimum wage means tips are still vital to making rent, buying groceries, and generally scraping by. In the age of persistent inflation and stagnant wages, even $15/hr is a poverty wage across the U.S. To many workers, tips make it possible to survive, and therefore tipping itself can feel like an act of solidarity between working people. 

However, at the heart of the matter, tipping allows bosses to shove the burden of providing a subminimum wage onto other workers, i.e. customers, generating even more exorbitant profits off the cheap labor of their employees. This relationship becomes abundantly clear when looking at the origins of the custom. Tipping began in the U.S. after slavery was abolished following the Civil War. Employers in the service industry took advantage of the limited economic opportunity for Black people recently freed from slavery by letting them “work” but paying them no wage at all. Instead, bosses pressured customers to provide a small extra charge to their server. The extreme racism of the post-Reconstruction-era U.S. allowed employers to continue profiting off the free labor of an underclass of workers and continue a slavery-like business model. 

Tipped work today has sanitized its image and is a far cry from the horrors Black workers endured in the post-Reconstruction period. But the power imbalance created by the tipping system remains the same, pitting service workers against working class customers. Customer-facing tipped workers endure far greater levels of harassment and exploitation than their non-tipped counterparts. The reliance we have on our tips means we are much more vulnerable to mistreatment and are financially incentivized to withstand verbal and even physical abuse while on the job. Whether a customer has an angry outburst about their overcooked burger or makes a sexist comment to their barista, the tipped worker has to judge how their response will affect the tips from their customer and those around them. Smiling through these types of situations is often the choice that workers have to make. Some of my coworkers at Starbucks would actually switch positions or step off the floor when customers with a record of harassment were seen waiting in line, but this wasn’t always possible Far from being on the side of their employees, managers and supervisors are financially incentivized to downplay or ignore instances of mistreatment and penalize workers who speak up.

Sexual harassment is one of the biggest abuses increased by the tipping system. All tipped workers report higher rates of sexual harassment, but women are by far the most affected. 71% of female restaurant workers report having been sexually harassed on the job, and not only from customers – 41% report facing harassment from a manager or supervisor! Our low wages make the financial exchange from customer to employee extremely important, and in our deeply sexist capitalist society, that power imbalance manifests in extreme objectification of women service workers. In a recent trend on TikTok, female servers test out and report back that wearing their hair in pigtails results in significantly greater tips. While these servers recognize that this is because men are sexually infantilizing them, many say they are going to keep wearing their hair up after testing the “pigtail theory.” As one server put it with a shrug, “single mom,” pointing to herself. This trend is just one of many examples of how women in the service industry are pressured to withstand abuse and even normalize their own objectification.

Gig workers like Uber, Lyft, and Doordash drivers face a different side of the problem: consistent undertipping. While it has long been expected that customers leave a solid 20% tip for taxi drivers, the tradition hasn’t translated to app drivers in the same way. Multiple reports show that Uber drivers average under 10% in tips. This may be because of the depersonalization of the app experience or because these companies pile on junk fees that inflate the price of their service. App drivers are subject to very inconsistent wages because of fluctuating demand, especially since the pandemic. This, compounded by the high price of gas, means tips are all the more important for drivers, sometimes to just break even for a food delivery. Black and Hispanic workers are much more likely to work these jobs than their white counterparts. 

Make The Bosses Pay!

Ultimately, customers are paying the price for this tipping culture. The Square app may give a suggested tip amount of $1, $2, or $3 when a worker takes 30 seconds to scoop your ice cream or pour your black coffee, and even suggests a tip for the server staff of 20% when picking up food, not dining in. Our tips go to workers (usually), but allow the bosses to keep wages at the bare minimum while lining their pockets. The point-of-service tipping model pressures the customer to tip on things that we may not have in the past, and with companies using inflation as an excuse to blatantly price-gouge us, this extra cost can sting. The anxiety that comes with this has come to be known as “guilt-tipping” because most people know service workers deserve more than what they’re getting, but rightly feel as though they shouldn’t be the one to pay for it.

For the time being, we absolutely shouldn’t stop tipping. We should stand with unionized Starbucks workers fighting for credit card tipping, as it would dramatically improve workers’ lives and especially because it’s been used as a bargaining chip against the union drive. Making the bosses pay for our labor, not other workers, will require mass unionization of the service industry, built on campaigns for the best possible wage increases, so we can begin to phase out this anti-worker custom and replace it with a stable and livable income for all.