Ghost Stories of Capitalism: Racism is REAL, and it's a Class Struggle

By Danny Haiphong

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

In today’s political climate, the word racism has become taboo. Some on the “Left” take issue with the term because of how it has been co-opted by the neoliberal elite. This is understandable, since the neoliberal Democratic Party has indeed exploited race relations in the United States to forward a “lesser evil” but no less dangerous brand of U.S. imperialism. Racism is thus increasingly viewed as an ideological weapon of liberalism rather than a material force of oppression. So-called “conservatives” have pounced on the limitations of neoliberal racial politics to strengthen their own brand as crusaders against the “woke” politics of the Democrats.

The problem with all of this is that racism is a very real manifestation of class struggle. Racism isn’t merely the hateful words and behaviors acted out by individuals. It isn’t simply a set of “institutional” problems that can be reformed away at the workplace or the criminal justice system, either. Some on the liberal “left” say that racism is “systemic,” but even this is misleading. Failing to name the system, U.S. imperialism, decontextualizes racism from its roots in class and power.

Understanding racism as an expression of class power is not merely a thought exercise. U.S. race relations permeate every aspect of material life for working people. Racist ideology has a clear psychological impact and disparities in policing, incarceration, healthcare, unemployment, and wages have life and death consequences. The purpose of the “Ghost Stories of Capitalism” series is to strengthen a leftist analysis of political economy and exploitation through the personal experience of this author. By telling our stories, we strengthen our capacity to move others to participate a class struggle for genuine liberation from the imperialist system at the root of oppression.

My earliest encounters with racism were marked by the pernicious Yellow Peril ideology which has flourished under the U.S.’s New Cold War regime against China. Many of these encounters happened outside of the home as my Vietnamese mother and white father navigated their own racial contradictions. They also happened outside of the formal education system since U.S. schools are notorious for whitewashing history and valorizing slave owners and their capitalist project. My race consciousness, so to speak, was planted by peers. Race was an unavoidable fact of life.

The words “chink” and “gook” were frequently employed by peers on the playground and in the streets. Many would cackle at me with stretched eyes to demonstrate that they looked more “Asian.” I was frequently reminded of racist stereotypes about the lack of sexual prowess possessed by “Asians.” Some took my perceived Chinese or “Asian” identity as an excuse to steal my belongings or enact some other kind of violence. Many years would pass before I understood these experiences as an outgrowth of U.S. imperialist policy. Anti-Asian racism manufactured consent for immigration laws banning Chinese laborers beginning the mid-to-late 19th century and the U.S.’s wars of aggression against China, the Philippines, Korea, and Vietnam later in the 20th century.

Mistreatment from peers, while infuriating, was not the primary force that awakened me to the interconnection between race and class. Witnessing struggle and oppression was the main catalyst. Once I entered adulthood, I realized that we were all children being force-fed reactionary and divisive ideology. Racism was not just about my suffering  but the suffering of masses of people.  Such revolutionary empathy is rooted in a number of experiences that reflect the inner workings of a capitalist system reliant on dehumanization to reproduce relations of exploitation.

I remember a seventh-grade social studies teacher who reinforced my school’s racist school tracking system by asking me to transfer classes so I would stop “hanging with the knuckleheads,” a euphemism for poor Black youth. I remember being stopped and frisked in my first year of high school by a city cop and watching my Black peers swiftly rush ahead of the scene to avoid the same, if not worse, treatment. I remember the white woman who ran clutching her purse when she spotted my Haitian friend speaking to me at the gate of my building. By the time I turned 21, I had attended the funerals of three Black youth very dear to my heart who died prematurely of suicide, preventable illness, and homicide. One doesn’t easily forget the screams of pain coming from their loved ones.

I came to understand racism as a mechanism of class warfare in my college years. There was nothing like being surrounded by rich, white elites for the first time in my life to cultivate rage at the system. During my sophomore year, an Afro-Dominican student and friend at the college was arrested and charged with a hate crime for getting into a fight with a white person in town and allegedly calling him the “n-word.” The school immediately suspended him and his entire future at the university was placed at risk. This seemingly absurd yet unjust turn of events spurred me into activism.

I quickly wrote an op-ed in the school newspaper which caused such a stir among residents and students alike that anonymous death threats came in my direction. I made contact with likeminded students and we began organizing around issues of race on campus. Our efforts helped create an environment where the charges against the student were dropped and he was allowed back on campus to finish his education. But we didn’t stop here. We continued our activism to tackle other issues such as the lack of an ethnic studies or Black studies program on campus. Burnout mounted as liberal identity reductionism and “dialogue” were favored by administrators and student activists over significant changes in policy, placing insurmountable barriers in front of change.

My frustrations ended up being a blessing in disguise. They led me to a semester-long trip to New York City and a foray as an intern in the labor movement. Occupy Wall Street had just begun, and activists were having intense conversations about race and class. These conversations were often fraught with tension. People spun in circles arguing about whether race or class were more important to movement politics.

The arguments felt worse than fruitless; they felt out of touch with reality. I knew racism and class warfare were interconnected, but I didn’t have the language to explain why or how. I began to develop such a language after several friends introduced me to the science of Marxism at the end of my New York semester. Huey P. Newton, Claudia Jones, Fidel Castro, Vladimir Lenin, and a host of revolutionary socialist leaders of the 20th century taught me that U.S. imperialism requires racism to reproduce class relations of exploitation. Capitalists accumulate profit from the exploitation of workers and their system of race-based benefits places a critical in front of the solidarity necessary to wrestle off the shackles of such a class arrangement.

This is no abstraction. Black workers in the U.S. are paid as low as half the wages of white workers for the same employment and are twice as likely to be unemployed. Incarceration and police brutality are experienced at far higher rates by Black workers than white workers. Life expectancy is falling for all U.S.-based workers but it is falling fastest in Black American and Indigenous communities. Any class struggle that fails to give these disparities their proper attention is bound to fail.

Furthermore, racism is a key pillar of the American Empire. All U.S. wars, whether on Indigenous peoples in North America or the people of Iraq, have been sanitized by a psychological campaign of dehumanization. American exceptionalism itself is a racist ideology. The U.S. is said to spread “democracy” and “freedom” around the world despite the innumerable war crimes that it has committed. In the last decade alone, the nations of Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, Russia, China, Cuba, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, the DPRK, and many more have been subject to some act of U.S. warfare. Racist propaganda against each one of these nations has rendered U.S. war crimes that much more effective by creating an endless list of “enemies” from which to fear.

Propaganda is one of the biggest fronts of the American empire’s endless war regime. Those who are genuinely interested in winning the class war at hand must seek truth from facts. The fact is that racism is a very real phenomenon that shapes every facet of U.S. imperialism. Solidarity with and among the oppressed is only possible if the scourge of racism is defeated, materially and ideologically. This doesn’t mean we conduct a witch hunt for individual “racists” but rather that our efforts to win political power possess a built-in and organized intention to develop new human beings. It also means that we deeply study the ways in which racism divides humanity for capitalist profit and domination as we search for the correct methods to wage class struggle and restore the needs of humanity.

Danny Haiphong is an activist and journalist in the New York City area. He and Roberto Sirvent are co-authors of the book entitled American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News—From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror (Skyhorse Publishing).He can be reached at wakeupriseup1990 [at] gmail.com or @SpiritofHo.

Reject Anti-Intellectualism

By Erica Caines

Republished from Hood Communist.

A disingenuous trend is reemerging, bastardizing concepts of “accessibility” to attack and suppress radical efforts at political education. The focus on consistent ongoing political education is shot down as disconnected from the needs of the people. But these critiques should be seen clearly for what they are: anti-intellectualism masquerading as a faux concern for the elusive “everyday person”. These are not genuine concerns for how people learn (ignoring the array of techniques like creating glossaries, audio recordings of written materials, visual aids or establishing group reading environments), these are attacks on the acts of learning and studying.

As an article in Studio Atao explains, anti-intellectualism is more than “mere hostility towards acquiring knowledge, or the byproduct of the lack of a formal education…it is a pervasive and popular mindset because it encourages us to cling to our most fervently held beliefs, with little or no supporting evidence.“ 

We are in the midst of a propaganda war. As such, the growing insistence on collapsing the structure and institution of academia with intellect and literacy (i.e. anyone who appears to be literate or “smart” are said to be beholden to the academy) feeds into anti-intellectualism, which mis-characterizes reading and study as elitism. 

After years of this narrative, the intellectual dishonesty about the necessity of reading is firmly being spearheaded by supposed leftists and prominent progressive figures. In a Vanity Fair article, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez remarked, “When people say I’m not Socialist enough, I find that very classist. It’s like, ‘What—I didn’t read enough books for you, buddy?’”.  AOC weaponized anti-intellectualism to subvert any and all criticisms of her support of US imperial aggression against sovereign global south nations decrying reading as a pastime of the elite and depicting foreign policy as too worldly for “the everyday person.”

The pushback against engaging theory is the summation that reading does not tackle one’s immediate needs under the primary contradiction of imperialism. Yet, books like Robin DG Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression gives great detail to how sharecroppers with little to no formal education engaged Marxist theory. The Black Liberation Army Study Guide, written and studied by lumpenproletariat and poor working class African youth expounds on how to put theory into practice. What of the many African revolutionaries that have centered political education to successfully carry out revolutions like Amilcar Cabral, Samoa Machel, and Thomas Sankara? What of the expansion of a literate masses post-revolutions because it was centered in the “new society”, like in Cuba, Grenada and Nicaragua? Or the emphasis on literacy during the reconstruction period post civil-war that served as a catalyst for what would become the civil rights movement as detailed in Ibram X. Kendi’s The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution? 

When 54% of U.S. adults 16-74 years old – about 130 million people – lack proficiency in literacy, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level, the aggressive anti-intellectualism increasingly growing online and spilling over should be cause for alarm. Anti-intellectualism is not simply informed by reactionary opinions, but shapes, constructs and upholds the ideas of those in power— the ruling class— ultimately undermining new knowledge and new ideas as “irrelevant”. This ultimately undermines our organizing capabilities. It is a counter-revolutionary agenda being cloaked under  the language of “accessibility”. As a result of that rejection, there has been an ushering in of unprincipled and reactionary opinions all given validity because it’s how someone feels.

The distortion of “accessibility” is evident through the prevalence of political education via memes, as well. Online, slides of bright words on carefully picked colorful Canva app backgrounds or a sassy 69 seconds or less AAVE spouting breakdown of current events becomes a substitute for historical and dialectical materialism. Nothing needs to be cited, it just needs to be emotionally appealing. So one can engage in hashtag activism and make claims about nations in the crosshairs of western imperialism without providing anything more than thoughts and opinions on the matter. They are not required to make a full argument, provide primary sources or define anything.  But because it is made “accessible”, it is taken in as fact and spread around like wildfire. 

It is a critical matter in organizing when aggressive anti-intellectualism is being normalized as radical. It speaks directly to our conditions as colonized Africans in the confines of the empire that applauds and encourages anti-intellectualism through a bogus colonial education system. It also speaks directly to the global north/ western chauvinism that is deeply embedded in this society of people who have never carried out a revolution, are nowhere near organized to carry out a revolution, very loudly opinionated on what it would take while refusing to read, study and engage revolution and its class characteristics. These actions are the remnants of a collectively non-literate people.

Surely colonized Africans have an understanding of their conditions to the extent that the US is a racist nation and thus acts accordingly. What is not understood are the ways that a grounded political education expands on the US not only being a racist nation, but a settler colonial one and what that means, how that manifests, and how we should organize to stop it. Logically, of course, one can understand that the pressure to survive under domestic imperialism interferes with the ability for many to understand what they are facing through collective political education and organizing. The material conditions are dire and need solutions, but much of the reason our conditions keep worsening is because we are collectively not nearly equipped to comprehend and verbalize the causes of our conditions that (collective) reading and organization helps us better understand and fight to win.

“There’s no such thing as neutral education. Education either functions as an instrument to bring about conformity or freedom.”

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Erica Caines is a poet, writer and organizer in Baltimore and the DMV. She is an organizing committee member of the anti war coalition, the Black Alliance For Peace as well as an outreach member of the Black centered Ujima People’s Progress Party. Caines founded Liberation Through Reading in 2017 as a way to provide Black children with books that represent them and created the extension, a book club entitled Liberation Through Reading BC, to strengthen political education online and in our communities.

"Everything That Is Human Is Ours": The Political and Cultural Vanguardism of Antonio Gramsci and José Carlos Mariátegui

By Christian Noakes

Republished from Monthly Review.

Within the heterogenous tradition of Marxism there are two diametrically opposed conceptions of popular culture: the elitist and vanguardist. The former is far from unique to Marxism, and it could be argued that such positions are antithetical to the popular sentiments of Karl Marx’s revolutionary thought. Such an orientation represents a dominant intellectual trend more generally, wherein the popular culture of the masses is considered devoid of positive value and categorically distinct from so-called high culture.1 Within Marxism, this elitism tends to assume that the ruling class has an absolute monopoly on popular cultural production. This position is perhaps best represented by Theodor Adorno, who categorically dismisses popular culture as insidious and debased. In his analysis of popular music, he goes as far as to distinguish between popular and “serious” music.2 Such positions overlook popular agency and the need to combat capitalist ideology on a social, rather than individual, level.

In contrast, vanguardists consider popular culture as a fundamental vehicle for mass education and the propagation of a particular worldview, in concert with a corresponding and underlying socioeconomic order. Proponents do not dismiss popular culture outright or conceive of it as inherently “bad” or “low,” but instead ask: popular culture for which class and toward what ends? Vanguardist praxis treats popular culture as “a terrain of contestation.”3

Another distinguishing characteristic of vanguardism is the belief in the intellectual capacity of the populace. Vanguardism is not simply a matter of being the most advanced. It also implies the ability to lead or give direction to the masses. On the intellectual field of culture, this entails a raising of consciousness. In response to the critique that ideas put forward in socialist publications were too complex for the working class to grasp, Antonio Gramsci observed the following:

The socialist weeklies adapt themselves to the average level of the regional strata they address. Yet the tone of the articles and the propaganda must always be just above this average level, so that there is a stimulus to intellectual progress, so that at least a number of workers can emerge from the generic blur of the mulling-over of pamphlets and consolidate their spirit in a higher critical perception of history and the world in which they live and struggle.4

Gramsci, therefore, rejects the extremes of both infantilizing anti-intellectualism (i.e., tailism) or isolated elitism. This is illustrative of how vanguardists can meet the people “where they are,” so to speak, and then work to move them to higher levels of class consciousness.

Gramsci and the lesser-known Peruvian Communist José Carlos Mariátegui—who is himself often compared to Gramsci—were not merely theorists of vanguardism. They actively practiced it and indeed, led this aspect of the class struggle in Italy and Peru, respectively. Both treated cultural and political issues as being deeply intertwined and sought to promote politically and intellectually developed popular culture for the working class and oppressed peoples in order to counter the dominant popular bourgeois culture. Their revolutionary praxis materialized in publications such as Gramsci’s L’Ordine Nuovo and Mariategui’s Amauta.

Gramsci looked with admiration at the strides made by the Soviet Union in making the arts accessible to the working class and the proliferation of revolutionary cultural institutions such as the Proletkult. The revolutionary fervor in the Soviet Union and the increasing militancy of Italian workers inspired Gramsci to create an institution for the development and propagation of proletarian culture in Italy. Out of this desire came the newspaper, L’Ordine Nuovo: Weekly Review of Socialist Culture, which Gramsci founded in 1919 with a group of intellectuals and revolutionaries that would later become a core group in the Communist Party of Italy. In its pages, readers found works of political prose alongside theater and literary criticism. The paper also introduced many to Communist artists and intellectuals from abroad, such as Anatoly Lunacharsky, Maxim Gorky, Henri Barbusse, and Romain Rolland. Reflecting on the initial impetus for the publication, Gramsci said,

The sole sentiment which united us… was associated with our vague yearning for a vaguely proletarian culture.5

The June 21, 1919, edition marked a significant shift in the publication from this somewhat eclectic initial phase into an organ for a concrete political program. Ordine Nuovo became not only a publication, but a core group representing something of a tendency or faction within Italian socialist politics—with a particularly heavy influence on labor struggles in Turin. Central to this solidification of political purpose was the factory council movement, which Ordine Nuovo fueled with its program to turn internal commissions of Turin factories into Italian soviets or councils. By directly empowering the workers to manage production themselves, Gramsci asserted that the councils would prepare the working class of Italy to take power and provide them with the competence to build and maintain a socialist society. The Ordine Nuovo group put its energies toward fostering a culture, by means of the councils, in which the workers would see themselves as producers within a larger cooperative system of production, rather than as atomized wage-earners.6 This culture was organically fostered through direct dialog with the workers themselves. With an air of satisfaction, Gramsci remarked that “To us and to our followers, Ordine Nuovo became ‘the newspaper of the factory councils.’ Workers loved Ordine Nuovo… [b]ecause in its articles they found part of themselves.… Because these articles were not cold, intellectual architecture, but were the outcome of our discussions with the best workers. They articulated the real feelings, will, and passion of the working class.”7

At the request of the workers, Gramsci and other members of Ordine Nuovo spoke regularly at council meetings. In September 1920, the revolutionary potential of the councils reached a high point when workers occupied factories and took direct control over production. At this time, the publication ceased, and Gramsci and the other members joined the workers in the factories “to solve practical questions [of running a factory] on a basis of common agreement and collaboration.”8

While the editorial line of the newspaper became more defined and motivated by concrete political goals, it still focused on fostering an organic popular culture of the working class, which it treated as an integral part of building socialism. This included the creation of the School of Culture and Socialist Propaganda, which was attended by both factory workers and university students. Among the lecturers were Gramsci and the other members of Ordine Nuovo, as well as several university professors.9 Such efforts were vital in the intellectual and ideological preparation for the establishment of an Italian socialist state, at which time “[b]ourgeois careerism will be shattered and there will be a poetry, a novel, a theatre, a moral code, a language, a painting and a music peculiar to proletarian civilization.”10 While Italy would soon see the horrors of fascism—rather than the establishment of this proletarian civilization, and thus the full development of a national proletarian culture—the militant working class culture fostered by Gramsci and Ordine Nuovo could never be fully snuffed out by the Mussolini regime. The cultural politics of Gramsci would also have a lasting influence beyond Italy.

Such influences are apparent in the works of José Carlos Mariátegui, who had been in Italy at the time of the founding of its Communist Party and identified most closely with the Ordine Nuovo group. After returning to Peru, Mariátegui put his newfound Marxist convictions to use in a variety of endeavors, including the production of the journal, Amauta, which was heavily influenced by Gramsci.11

Published from 1926 to 1930, this groundbreaking and visually stimulating journal was Mariátegui’s primary vehicle for uniting the cultural and political vanguards of the time.12 In his introduction to the inaugural issue, Mariátegui states: “The goal of this journal is to articulate, illuminate, and comprehend Peru’s problems from theoretical and scientific viewpoints. But we will always consider Peru from an international perspective. We will study all the great movements of political, philosophical, artistic, literary, and scientific renewal. Everything that is human is ours.”13 Along these simultaneous lines of inquiry into Peruvian society and internationalism, Amauta brought together leading artists, intellectuals, and revolutionaries of Peru, Latin America, and Europe. In addition to featuring much of Mariátegui’s most enduring works, it featured other key Peruvian figures, such as the feminist activist and poet Magda Portal and leading indigenist artists José Sabogal and Camilo Blas. Reaching beyond Peru’s borders, the journal also featured contributions by Diego Rivera, Pablo Neruda, Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, and Georg Grosz. Likewise, its readership was also international. In addition to being available throughout much of Latin America, it was also distributed in New York, Madrid, Paris, and Melbourne, Australia.14

Mariátegui was at the center of the vanguardista movement in Peru. This youthful and creative movement concerned itself with the creation of a “new Peru,” which would break from the prevailing oligarchic traditions inherited from Spain.15 While diverse in focus and orientation, vanguardistas sought to create new social, political, and cultural forms. According to Mariátegui,

A current of renewal, ever more vigorous and well defined, has been felt for some time now in Peru. The supporters of this renewal are called vanguardists, socialists, revolutionaries, etc.… Some formal discrepancies, some psychological differences, exist between them. But beyond what differentiates them, all these spirits contribute to what groups and unites them: their will to create a new Peru in a new world.… The intellectual and spiritual movement is becoming organic. With the appearance of Amauta, it enters the stage of definition.16

For its part, Amauta promoted anti-imperialism, gender equality, and internationalism as core principles of its national vision.

A new Peru would have to resolve the “Indigenous question”—the most pressing issue for Mariátegui. To aid in this endeavor, the journal laid bare the semi-feudal/semi-colonial nature of Peru’s economy, which relied on the socioeconomic subjugation of the country’s Indigenous population, and acted as national forum and network for otherwise regionally isolated Indigenous peasant organizing.17 Every issue also promoted a plurinationalism that included Quechua and Amari people in the Peruvian identity and body politic. In stark contrast to the national bourgeoisie, which saw Spain as the source of Peruvianness, the journal promoted a national identity and culture centered around the country’s Indigenous population, as was reflected by the majority of its content. This included articles analyzing racialized relations of production, Indigenous-centered art, and even the very name of the journal, Amauta being Quechua for “wise one” and a title given to teachers in the Inca Empire. As Mariátegui states in his introduction of issue 17 (September 1928), “We took an Inca word to create it anew. So that Indian Peru, Indigenous America might feel that this magazine was theirs.”18 Previously excluded and infantilized, Indigenous people were central to the pages of Amauta, and to the national culture it fostered.

Amauta aimed to polarize Peru’s intellectuals and bring readers under the banner of Marxism-Leninism.19 Its content was particularly important in organizing and providing direction to the country’s rural and Indigenous populations.20 It also helped to establish Indigenismo as Peru’s dominant school of art, thereby fostering a national culture in opposition to the colonial culture inherited from Spain.21 As the most popular Latin American journal of its time, it was central in the propagation of an Indigenous and peasant-centered Marxism that would come to characterize socialist movements throughout Latin America.

The works of Mariátegui and Gramsci were instrumental in the development and dissemination of popular subaltern culture. Through dialog and collaboration, Amauta and L’Ordine Nuovo would come to be leading outlets in the education of the masses along explicitly revolutionary lines. In contrast to both anti-intellectualism and elitism, the cultural projects of Mariátegui and Gramsci represent the vanguardist conviction that the masses are capable both of understanding complex or advanced ideas and of developing their own organic culture divorced from the ruling.

Christian Noakes is an associate editor at the journal Peace, Land, and Bread.

Notes

1. Peter McLaren, “Popular Culture and Pedagogy,” in Rage and Hope: Interviews with Peter McLaren on War, Imperialism, and Critical Pedagogy (New York: Peter Lang, 2006) 213.

2. Theodor Adorno, “On Popular Music,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey (Athens, GA: University of Georgia, 2006).

3. McLaren, Rage and Hope, 214.

4. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgas and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Chicago: Haymarket, 2012), 33.

5. Quoted in Giuseppe Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary (New York: Schocken 1973), 118.

6. John M. Cammett, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967), 95.

7. Quoted in Antonio A. Santucci, Antonio Gramsci (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 68.

8. Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary, 139.

9. Cammett, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism, 81.

10. Gramsci. Selections from Cultural Writings, 50—51.

11. Marc Becker, Mariátegui and Latin American Marxist Theory (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1993).

12. David O. Wise, “Mariátegui’s ‘Amauta’ (1926—1930), A Source of Peruvian Cultural History,” Revista Interamericana de Bibliografia 29, no. 3—4 (1979): 299.

13. José Carlos Mariátegu, “Introducing Amauta,” in “The Heroic and Creative Meaning of Socialism”: Selected Essays of José Carlos Mariátegui, 75—76.

14. Wise, “Mariátegui’s ‘Amauta’ (1926—1930),” 293.

15. Kildo Adevair dos Santos, Dalila Andrade Oliveira, and Danilo Romeu Streck, “The Journal Amauta (1926—1930): Study of a Latin American Educational Tribune,” Brazilian Journal of History of Education 21, no. 1 (2021).

16. Mariátegu, “Introducing Amauta,” 74—75.

17. Mike Gonzalez, In the Red Corner: The Marxism of José Carlos Mariátegui (Chicago: Haymarket, 2019).

18. José Carlos Mariátegui, “Anniversary and Balance Sheet,” in José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology, ed. Harry E. Vanden and Marc Becker (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 128.

19. Wise, “Mariátegui’s ‘Amauta’ (1926—1930)”; Jesús Chavarría, José Carlos Mariátegui and the Rise of Modern Peru, 1890—1930(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979).

20. Harry E. Vanden, National Marxism in Latin America: José Carlos Mariátegui’s Thought and Politics (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1986).

21. Wise, “Mariátegui’s ‘Amauta’ (1926—1930),” 295.

Women, Capitalism, and the Ongoing Attacks On Bodily Autonomy and Reproductive Rights

By Karina Garcia

This article was originally published in the Autumn 2019 issue of Breaking the Chains magazine, titled “Not a Moral Issue.”

Thirteen years ago, a speaker at a meeting, addressing the right-wing attacks on women’s rights in the context of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, emphasized how important it was to elect pro-choice Democrats. The speaker gave no further explanation to the attacks.

At the time, the right-wing was attacking the ACA because it would expand abortion and contraception access. A couple years after it became law, the Supreme Court had already restricted access to birth control to “respect the religious beliefs” of corporations vis-a-vis reactionary owners. And to pass the ACA, the Democrats gladly compromised on reproductive rights. Obamacare ultimately continued to deny federal funds for abortion coverage and required that every state offer at least one insurance plan that did not cover abortions.

At the meeting, a young socialist woman spoke from the floor and criticized the speaker for not raising the “systematic” explanation. She said that capitalism was behind these patriarchal policies. She said that the bosses—the capitalists—want to restrict birth control and abortion because they want the working class to produce more workers and thereby drive down wages. On top of that, they want to pay less in healthcare costs to cover their employees. I remember nodding in the moment that indeed there must be a deeper cause. I knew capitalism as a system was implicated. What she was saying had a logic to it. But when I went home it started to make a lot less sense.

Do the capitalists really need more workers? Millions of people are unemployed as it is and they are incarcerating the “surplus” population. Is it really possible that the capitalists would conspire in this way to restrict abortion rights, but none of them would ever slip up and admit it? Why is it that some Democrats support abortion rights then? They too represent the capitalist class’s interests. It can’t just be about forcing women to produce more workers.

And as for costs and profits, the Affordable Care Act was going to make insurance companies, the healthcare sector, and the banks mega-profits with or without abortion coverage, so why try to tank the bill on that basis? It wasn’t really only about profit either.

She was right that the attack was “systematic” and that these sexist policies are linked to capitalism, but there seemed to be more to the answer than she’d presented. I dove into the Marxist and historical writing about the anti-abortion movement because I wanted to understand this and be able to explain it—for myself and others.

The Marxist approach to women’s oppression and liberation is often misunderstood or mischaracterized. In university settings it is portrayed as “economic determinism” or “reductionism” — asserting that Marxists reduce every issue to economics. In a way, that’s what the socialist speaking from the floor was doing in that meeting. But that’s not an accurate description of the Marxist method.

It is true that Marxists emphasize the importance of the economic system, in that the mode of production plays a critical role in shaping the economic system and the structures of society. Marxists start by looking at how a society produces and reproduces itself and the norms, laws and relationships under which production and reproduction take place. That is what “economics” really means anyway. At its base, every society is engaged in producing and reproducing.

The ideas, laws, formal institutions, religions that justify, strengthen, and stabilize those underlying processes and relations at the base of production and reproduction is what Marx called the superstructure.

The capitalist mode of production and the family

So for instance, under capitalism, there are some people who own the means of production (land, factories, technology, etc.), while others go to work every day and work on those means of production. They generate profits that go back to the owners. That exploitation is at the base of society. But that arrangement would not last a single day if it was not backed up by the laws, the courts and the police—which protect the owners and landlords—and by the schools, media, politicians, and religious institutions that have taught us since day one that this is the normal and perfectly natural way of things.

The capitalist mode of production developed historically out of previous modes of production, including slavery and feudalism. Capitalism represented a major change in the dominant form of property and labor and many other things changed as a result of that. Racism and white supremacy are part and parcel of the foundation of modern capitalism. In the case of the United States, colonial dispossession and racialized chattel slavery are the foundations for the accumulation of wealth within the capitalist mode of production.

Capitalism did not simply erase the pre-existing world and start with a blank slate. Patriarchy has existed since the dawn of class society and is part of the fabric of the capitalist system. In pre-class society, before private ownership of property there was a much more diverse set of family arrangements and women generally played a leadership role for the community as a whole.

After those pre-class modes of production were overthrown, and eventually the forms of social and family organization alongside them, women were held in a subordinate position and male supremacy became the law. For thousands of years, women’s basic conditions and status were confined to the home. Law, custom, and ideology held women to a dependent status and entirely subject to the whims of the leading male in the family. Housework and child rearing, in addition to ongoing work in the fields (in the case of agricultural societies), were delineated as “women’s work.” This was a central element to modes of production based on private property.

In the United States, today, the capitalist mode of production has changed in many ways, as has the shape and detail of the superstructure. Yet core historic features persist. While women can enter the wage workforce and women can legally own property and have independent political and civil rights, the basic unit of what has been called social reproduction is the nuclear family. In that family, women carry out the vast majority of the labor in the household, in child rearing, and in elder care. Because this family form has been carried over in its essential characteristics, all the values, traditions, and cultural norms that developed to explain and justify male supremacy have been largely carried over, too.

While capitalism has broken down many of the economic relationships that were at the heart of a nuclear family, the family has not been abolished or collapsed entirely. The family unit has changed, but the precarious existence of workers under capitalism makes it necessary for most workers to have a family to survive. One income is not enough. Take, for example, the conditions of so many LGBTQ youth who have been rejected by their families. To not have a family is, in these instances, to be subjected to the worst forms of deprivation, homelessness, and brutality that capitalism has to offer.

For the purposes of the capitalist system, the family unit is highly valuable—especially as it relates to the reproduction and caring for the next generation of workers. Lisa Vogel highlights this in her social reproduction theory [1]. Others have taken it in different directions, highlighting the other forms of labor that are often unpaid or underpaid, but are nonetheless essential for reproducing a workforce that is healthy and stable enough to continue to come into work.

Reactionary worldview explains economic shifts

How does this relate to the attacks on women’s rights and attacks on women’s growing assertiveness in challenging sexual violence and sexist rhetoric? These don’t present themselves as issues of the basic functioning of the mode of production. They can appear distinct and separate, so people fighting for women’s rights on these fronts might not see the linkage to capitalism. And yet more and more activists are talking about systemic patriarchy. The Party for Socialism and Liberation banners, “The whole system is sexist! Fight for socialism!” have been very popular in these movements.

Here we are talking about struggles in the world of politics and culture, the superstructure [2]. They appear as fights within capitalism—in the sense that you should be able to fight for and achieve full abortion rights and other reproductive services under capitalism. In some countries that already exists. You should be able to reduce sexual harassment or violence or eliminate it altogether under capitalism. At least, in theory, it is not pivotal to the mode of production.

But if that is the case, why are those gains so hard to win? Why do socialists insist a revolution would be necessary to really achieve them? It’s because the domination of women remains a pillar of the U.S. capitalist class’s form of rule.

Abortion access became a major political issue starting in the late 1970s as a cornerstone of an emerging reactionary trend. A reactionary is someone who says that things were better in society before they changed. “Make America Great Again” is a true reactionary slogan. It implies we should return to the past. Big sections of the ruling class turn to a reactionary agenda when they feel that their social control is slipping in the face of a powerful social movement, or when capitalism itself has destabilized the economy and when life seems more uncertain for big sections of the population.

In the late 1970s, both were happening in the United States. The mass uprisings of the 1960s and early 70s with the struggles for women’s liberation, Black liberation, LGBTQ liberation, and the anti-war movement were powerful challenges to the U.S. capitalist status quo. The Vietnamese anti-colonial resistance defeated U.S. imperialism, dealing it a major blow while imperialism was engaged in constant heated confrontation with the socialist bloc.

The U.S. economy also went into a period of recession during which layoffs and unemployment increased, consumer spending decreased. Capitalist recessions are cyclical and occur regularly because of overproduction. From 1979 to 1984, approximately 11.5 million workers either lost their jobs or shifted to lower-paying service jobs. Most of the jobs that were lost were in manufacturing industries such as steel, auto, mining, electronics, and more.

The reactionaries have a very powerful appeal and socialists should understand how it works. They say essentially, “Your life used to be better, right? You’re feeling less sure about your future right? Well, that’s understandable because look at how much has changed. We’ve lost our way. And now we’re going to hell in a hand-basket unless we turn back.” Then they link that to whatever issue, whether it be abortion, sex education, gay rights, and so on. The reactionaries sometimes blame the “weak” government, which has bent to pressure and refused to defend “our values, while at other times attacking the government for being “too big.”

Another example is how the economic ravaging of whole Black communities is laid at the feet of Black women for “having too many children out of wedlock,” or at the feet of “absent” Black males. This reactionary worldview builds upon the extreme racist character of the U.S. capitalist system along with thousands of years of ingrained cultural indoctrination that with a “strong” family—that is with men and women in their “proper place”—everything will be fine.

This sort of reactionary worldview offers an all-purpose explanation for general problems or unsettling changes. Politicians then conveniently avoid discussion of the actual causes of social and economic distress, i.e., capitalist instability. It furthermore coincides with and makes use of the explanations being cultivated in conservative religious institutions, which tend to focus on going back to a more moral time, and theorize the problems of modern society as a reflection of an absence of godliness and values. So these ideas and theories are already circulating and can easily be picked up on by a politician who wants to present himself as a champion of “family values” while not actually doing anything to change families’ material conditions.

And so the “New Right,” ascending in the Republican Party in the late 1970s, started to really focus on abortion in the 1980s and 1990s. Abortion rights were identified as a weak spot for the women’s movement because it had been secured in the Supreme Court in Roe v Wade, not via legislation. There was existing opposition on religious grounds that they could mobilize, and there were big parts of the country where abortion rights had become law but the movement was weak.

Evangelical mega-churches and televangelists were entering politics in a big way—most famously in the “Moral Majority”—and eventually became significant power-brokers that handpicked and groomed elected representatives. They delivered considerable resources and a captive audience to enterprising politicians, as long as they took on their issues and their framing. The whole Moral Majority movement became a target base of support for hard-right capitalists who personally did not care much about abortion or other moral issues, but who wanted to turn back government regulations, social spending, and the power of labor unions. Over time, this relationship produced a major pipeline of campaign funds and airtime.

In short, abortion became a preferred electoral issue, quickly moving from local and state to federal politics. Right-wing politicians could portray pro-choice Democrats as ‘baby killers’ and link them to the “decline of the family.” It is not so much that these issues in and of themselves threaten capitalists profits, but that they offered a way for one sector of the capitalist class—leaning on the powerful institutions of the superstructure in their areas to consolidate political legitimacy—to distract constituents from social and economic concerns that the politicians have no desire to address.

It became a central political strategy for the conservative right. The Republican Party used to be considered just the “pro-business” and “law-and-order” party. Some were actually liberal on “social issues.” But as the party moved further to the right, that has changed.

In the United States, where money controls so much of politics, the agenda is set by the highest bidder. With the near obliteration of campaign finance laws, this has become more overt. A few billionaires could say, “These are my political interests, these are my priorities and I’m gonna throw my money around only to those who take on my agenda and my interests.” When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, they meant that ruling-class ideas were dominant because the ruling class “has the means of material production at its disposal” and therefore “has control at the same time over the means of mental production” [3]. Today ruling-class ideas become dominant because of the direct and explicit intervention of the most powerful capitalists and their politicians. In the absence of a fight-back movement, the reactionary obsessions of some really rich men can set the tone of politics, and actually can determine major issues for hundreds of millions of working-class women in the United States and worldwide.

The anti-abortion billionaires are not spending their money because it will help their immediate profits. If anything, they are spending significant parts of their fortunes on these right-wing causes. That is where capitalism comes back in at the systematic level. It is not as a conspiracy for profits, but as a form of political rule based on disciplining and intimidating one section of poor and working people, distracting and confusing others, and finally winning over and satisfying other layers.

True rights attainable only with a new mode of production

No mode of production based on extreme inequality and exploitation would be able to last long if it did not have ruling institutions, political systems, ideas, traditions, and so on, that protected and rationalized those economic processes. The ruling class does not just get to extract wealth; it also has to find stable ways to rule.

Forms of patriarchy operate powerfully at the base of capitalism, in how the system produces and reproduces itself on a daily basis. It also is a cornerstone at this superstructural level, and in particular, as a central element of the reactionary agenda. So how could patriarchy be ended under capitalism if it is so embedded at every level of the capitalist system? It is impossible.

Socialism, by contrast, eliminates the economic dependence on the family unit. Simply by changing who controls and owns the vast means of production, every person can now be guaranteed housing, food, healthcare, childcare, retirement, and other human needs as guaranteed rights. The gender pay gap and undervaluing of “women’s work” could essentially be overturned overnight. A government in the hands of class-conscious workers would also remove from power the lackeys of the billionaire bigots, and instead launch bold initiatives to advance women’s equality and liberation in the world of culture, ideology, education and politics.

This would be an ongoing process, of course, but it would be fundamentally different from the battle for women’s rights under capitalism. In the present, we fight for rights inside a system that reproduces patriarchal economic relationships daily, and under a ruling class that defaults to a reactionary agenda as a way to protect its exploitative rule. That is why “smashing the patriarchy” often feels so impossible. Under socialism, by contrast, the battle will be to win an egalitarian superstructure that will harmonize with a new economic system based on meeting the needs of all.

References

[1]See Dickinson, Hannah. (2019). “Social reproduction: A theoretical framework with organizing potential.”Breaking the Chains4, no. 1.Also availablehere.
[2] Ford, Derek. (2021). “The base-superstructure: A model for analysis and action.”Liberation School, November 22. Availablehere.
[3] Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. (1964/1978). “The German ideology: Part I,” in R.C. Tucker (Ed.),The Marx-Engels reader, 2nd ed.(New York: W.W. Norton & Company), 172.

Unions Fight Back: The Transformation of Labor Law in the United States and its Impact on Union Organizing Strategy

[Pictured: Christian Smalls has become an instrumental part of a nationwide labor resurgence in the United States, heading up union efforts at Amazon]

By Noah Streng

The state of union organizing in America is intimately tied to the legal structures governing labor. Court rulings during the late-19th and early-20th century, for example, created a semi-outlaw status for unions and their activities. Nearly every time unions tried to get the political system to pass pro-labor legislation, their efforts were overturned by a reactionary Supreme Court that had the final say over labor law. A prime example of this was Lochner v. New York (1905).

In the case, the Supreme Court overturned a New York law that prevented bakers from working more than 10 hours per day, citing liberty of contract guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. Unions had fought hard to pass this and other protections for workers in the New York legislature. But, despite the public’s mandate via their elected representatives, the Supreme Court overruled them in favor of private property rights.

Cases like Lochmer were common in postbellum labor relations. The outsized influence of the judiciary left elected legislatures with little say over American labor law. Many unions consequently lost faith in the potential for winning reforms through the ballot box and adopted an anti-statist approach to labor organizing. These unions had never experienced a state that worked on behalf of the working class, so it was hard for them to envision one.

This disillusionment gave rise to the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and voluntarist American Federation of Labor (AFL). Both prioritized grassroots labor action over state intervention. But, despite this commonality, the two unions practiced very different kinds of anti-statism.

The AFL focused on upholding liberty of contract by fighting to remove the government from labor relations entirely. When the AFL participated in elections and legislative advocacy, it was typically to preempt judicial intervention in labor disputes. Meanwhile, the IWW sought to unite laborers across race and gender lines to overthrow capitalism. In their organizing, the IWW gained significant traction — especially among unskilled workers, immigrants, people of color, and women. Unlike the AFL, which organized along craft lines, the IWW ran industrial unions that united all workers in a given shop.

Despite early momentum, however, many judicial rulings stifled the IWW’s ability to organize across racial lines. In Hodges v. United States (1906), for example, the Supreme Court officially stripped black workers of equal labor rights. This — in tandem with other hostile decisions — divided the American working class, thereby frustrating the IWW’s universalist strategy.

The environment for labor improved significantly following the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which guaranteed many American workers the right to organize unions, engage in collective bargaining, and partake in concerted union activity such as strikes. The NLRA did this by expanding executive power over the judiciary, transferring power from courts in labor law cases to the National Labor Relations Board. This paved the way for much of the pro-labor legislation in the New Deal, which the Supreme Court almost certainly would’ve struck down had it been able. The NLRA thus redefined what was politically possible for unions. Now, they could plausibly build worker power through the organs of the state.

Nevertheless, the NLRA had its flaws. Following the precedent set by Hodges and other discriminatory cases, the bill excluded domestic, agricultural, incarcerated, and sex workers from its labor protections. This would be hard to reconcile if we interpret the NLRA as something intended to advance working-class liberation. But that arguably wasn’t its intention at all.

Indeed, the NLRA’s legality was based on the federal government’s right to regulate interstate commerce. The bill provided concessions to labor in order to achieve “labor peace” and ensure the stability of the capitalist economy. Nevertheless, the NLRA — coupled with other pieces of legislation like the Norris-La Guardia Act — was undoubtedly beneficial to workers. By shifting power over labor relations from courts to the administrative state, the NLRA opened new opportunities for radical pro-union reforms.

Despite gains in the previous century, however, we still find ourselves in an era where the federal government and judiciary are aligned with the interests of capital. As both continue to chip away at the progress made by the NLRA, organized labor in the United States needs to develop new strategies for our current context. That includes finding ways to work around — or, preferably, reverse — legal restrictions on union activities as enshrined by, for example, the Taft-Hartley Act and infamous Janus vs. AFSCME (2018) Supreme Court decision. Just as union leaders in the past had to adapt to rapidly changing rules governing labor, leaders today must strategize to meet the moment and revitalize class struggle in America.

One way to do this would be through rekindling the socialist labor movement in the United States. Organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America have already begun doing so by raising over $100,000 for strike funds, engaging in solidarity actions, and directly organizing workers into unions across the country. Labor is at its strongest when grassroots, militant, rank-and-file-led unions organize to radically change society. Part of this strategy should include capturing state power and wielding it to redefine labor law, empowering workers in their fight against the owning class.

Noah Streng is a member of River Valley DSA’s steering committee and a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Labor Center.

Sin Fronteras: Dispatches from Mexico City

[Pictured: A mural by Jose Antonio Aguirre]

All photos of the event, included in this article, were captured by Carmen Harumi V. Leos.

By David A. Romero

“Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar. (Voyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks.)”

—Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Nov 15-19, 2022 — A delegation of Chicano poets, artists, and intellectuals flew to Mexico City for five events over the course of four days across the city. 

It all began with a series of emails and social media messages flying across the Mexico–United States border. 

One poet, Matt Sedillo, Literary Director of the Mexican Cultural Institute of Los Angeles, and one academic, Alfonso Vázquez, founder of the Chicanxs Sin Fronteras project in Mexico City, first made their acquaintance virtually, and eventually, made plans together to bring a delegation from the U.S. to Mexico.

“In my first conversation with Alfonso, I told him I had spoken all over the world, that I had even spoken at Cambridge. While that was a huge honor, my real dream was UNAM,” said Sedillo of those early exchanges.

A professor at FES Acatlán (UNAM), and the author of a history of Chicano cinema and media representation in Spanish, Chicano (University of Guanajuato, 2018), Vázquez knew he could make Sedillo’s dream a reality.

“There is a great reception and interest in Chicano culture in Mexico.” Said Vázquez in an interview with Nancy Cázares, of La Izquierda Diario.

Alongside his partner Abril Zaragoza, Vázquez has created Chicanxs Sin Fronteras to “disseminate and bring young people and the general public closer to Chicano culture beyond the stereotypes that have been imposed on the Mexican who lives in the United States.”

Sedillo and Vázquez developed a four-day literary and arts series of events across Mexico City – with the coordination of the Mexican Cultural Institute of Los Angeles and Chicanxs Sin Fronteras, along with the latter organization’s frequent collaborators: Tianguis Literario CDMX (a collective led by young poet Yasmín Alfaro) and Gorrión Editorial (a publishing house run by poet and professor Abraham Peralta Vélez) – collectively entitled: Desfronterizxs. Homenaje a la escritora Gloria Anzaldúa. Encuentro de poesía chicana.

Sedillo’s delegation flying in from the U.S., a mix of those born in the U.S. and in Mexico, was a “dream team” that included the Director of the Mexican Cultural Institute of Los Angeles, the muralist Jose Antonio Aguirre, poets and professors Norma Elia Cantú and Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs (both of whom knew the series’ figure of homage, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, personally), community activist and author of Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. (Atria, 2005), Luis J. Rodriguez, the sociologist and organizer of delegations to Cuba, Jose Prado, the art curator and organizer of events at El Camino College in Los Angeles, Dulce Stein, and myself, David A. Romero, the author of My Name Is Romero (FlowerSong Press, 2020) (and writer of this article).

Norma Elia Cantú, along with the sharing of her poetry, carried the special honor of giving a multimedia presentation on Anzaldúa’s life, work, and philosophy. Cantú’s own reputation, as the recipient of over a dozen awards and the author of dozens of books, including Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (University of New Mexico Press, 1997) preceded her in CDMX and many of the professors and students in attendance were excited to meet her in person.

The delegation from the U.S. presented from November 15-19, 2022 at locations as varied as the universities FES Acatlán (UNAM) and La Casa de la Universidad de California en México (UC system), the high school CCH Naucalpan (UNAM), the activist café La Resistencia, and arts center Gimnasio de arte y cultura in Roma (formerly the home of the Partido Popular Socialista (PPS)).

At FES Acatlán, La Casa de la Universidad de California en México and CCH Naucalpan, the delegation from the U.S. presented with introductions from Vázquez, and organizers at their respective campuses: María del Consuelo Santamaría Aguirre, Jeohvan Jedidian Silva Sánchez, Keshava R. Quintanar Cano, Eva Daniela Sandoval Espejo, and Efraín Refugio Lugo.

At La Resistencia and Gimnasio de arte y cultura, the delegation was joined by the Mexican poets, writers, and performers: Pita Ochoa, Cynthia Franco, Sara Raca, Abraham Peralta Vélez, Yasmin Alfaro, Bajo Palabra, Rubikon, Omar Jasso, Lumen Eros Vita, Imperio Soul, and DJ Paolo Guerrero, all of which were excited to share their work alongside the delegation and to represent their country.

The delegation from the U.S. was embraced in all places by their Mexican hosts, who welcomed them into their institutions, presented them with certificates of thanks, took photos with them and purchased their books, escorted them on trips throughout the city to visit historic places of interest and for many members, even welcomed them into their own homes and the homes of their extended families.

Outside of the events, the trip held special meaning for members of the delegation. For Jose Antonio Aguirre, who holds dual citizenship and makes frequent trips to his homeland, the trip to Mexico City was nevertheless an opportunity to meet up with his daughter and to reconnect with an old friend. For Luis J. Rodriguez and Dulce Stein, it was an opportunity to connect with family members they had never met. In the case of Rodriguez, those family members were the children of his aunt Chucha, the namesake of his cultural center in Sylmar, Tia Chucha's, which has served its community for over twenty years. 

For Sedillo, the author of Mowing Leaves of Grass (FlowerSong Press, 2019) the trip to Mexico City had a less direct, but still profound cultural and spiritual meaning, “It's every Chicano's dream to be welcomed back home—to Tenochtitlan.”

The historical significance of the Chicano delegation to Mexico City

Gloria Anzaldúa traveled to Mexico City to teach a graduate seminar “La Identidad Estadounidense” at UNAM’s main campus in 2013, and a handful of other noted writers of Mexican descent born in the U.S., including Sandra Cisneros and Roberto Tejada, have both lived in the metropolis on and off for decades and have given readings in the city, sometimes inviting their contemporaries from the U.S. to join them.

However, there is no bridge that has been regularly maintained, neither by universities nor cultural centers in Mexico City that has been built to bring in Chicano writers and poets to share their work and build a connection between the communities in earnest.

For over a century, the populations have been separated: by border, by language, by history, by culture. It may have seemed unlikely, if not impossible, for the Chicano and Chilango to come together and to build together.

In the U.S., Chicanos, whether those with longstanding ties to the borderlands, or the children of immigrants, are often treated as second-class citizens, lumped into a category known as “minority,” or more generously, as “people of color,” thereby still subject to microaggressions, labor exploitation, criminalization, and violence. Ours is a history of struggle and poverty. Of the antagonism between assimilation and resistance. Of constantly being uncertain of our futures and of who we are. Of being, "ni aqui, ni alla." We are a people often defined by what we are not.

The Mexicans of Mexico City, the Chilangos, can seem to be the opposite, as people who are certain, who are defined, who are. They are the majority population. The normal. The normative. The unquestioned. They live in their capital, a world city, cosmopolitan and international in their tastes. Everywhere, they pull from the character of their nation, producing a synthesis, one that may vary from neighborhood, but that is proud. That is Mexican. They are fluent in Spanish, because prima facie, that is their language. Everywhere in CDMX, there is a tie to both the recent and ancient past. They live in Tenochtitlan; the ruins of Templo Mayor within arm's reach and mere feet away from the Zócalo and the National Palace. Monuments to their heroes abound in bust and sculpture—and their heroes all look like them.

For a time, it could seem that we, the Chicano and the Chilango, could not be more different. What sense would the tales of uncertainty and second-class citizenship make to a Chilango? How could the Chicano, who directly, or indirectly, benefits from U.S. imperialism, respond to accusations that they are implicit in the modern-day gentrification and subjugation of their motherland?

And yet—culture connects us: music, art, film, literature. As in Japan and Thailand, Chicano culture has saturated Mexico City. The cholo is cool. Chicano is cool. Chicano es chido. But, unlike in Japan and Thailand where the connection is deeply felt, but somewhat cosmetic, the Chilangos know that, although divided, although different, the Chicano and Chilango share the same blood. We are the same people.

“The borders aren’t real. They’re not like the rivers or mountains. They weren’t made by God. They were made by man. This land is one. All of the Americas are our community.” Luis J. Rodriguez, the former poet laureate of Los Angeles, said, passionately, to the students at FES Acatlán.

During a short presentation at CCH Naucalpan, Jose Antonio Aguirre described himself, humorously, “I am from Ciudad de Mexico. I am a Chilango. But I have also lived in the United States for a long time, and am influenced by the Chicanos. So, I call myself a Chicalango.”

In one of the most powerful moments of the event series, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, the author of Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (Utah State University Press, 2012) , asked the over one hundred in attendance at CCH Naucalpan for a show of hands. “How many of you have family in the United States?” Almost everyone in the audience raised their hands. She added, speaking of Chicanos in Mexico, "This is our country, too."

Alfonso Vázquez, a Chilango with family in California, knows this isn't an isolated phenomenon, “Many of our families, many states of the Republic have a great tradition around to migration, they are migrant states: Michoacán, Jalisco, Guanajuato, Zacatecas, are states with a great tradition. There are also many migrants in Mexico City, it is a place from where many people leave for other states, and to the United States of course.”

Vázquez partnered with CCH Naucalpan and Gorrión Editorial to collect work from the writers of the delegation from the U.S., with translations of works in English into Spanish, and art by Jose Antonio Aguirre, into a special collection entitled, Ellos son nosotros (They are us).

The message from the Chilangos to the Chicanos could not be clearer.

A bridge that goes both ways

“We thank you. For creating a bridge into Mexico.” Matt Sedillo said, at Gimnasio de arte y cultura to close out his set, wiping sweat off his brow, addressing the crowd of Mexican organizers and artists present. “I recognize, a bridge goes both ways. It’s not just for us to come here. But for us [Chicanos], to host you [in the United States].”

The words of Anzaldúa ring, “Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar.”

For Sedillo, who has sailed to the island of Elba, taken trains to Paris, flown to Ravenna to receive the Dante’s Laurel, and likewise, traveled to Cuba, England, Mexico, and Canada, the task of continuing to work with Vázquez to build such a bridge between Mexico and Los Angeles, is not merely a challenge, as the Literary Director of the Mexican Cultural Institute of Los Angeles it’s in his job description, and is the greatest opportunity he can imagine.

David A. Romero is a Mexican-American spoken word artist from Diamond Bar, CA. Romero is the author of My Name Is Romero (FlowerSong Press), a book reviewed by Gustavo Arellano (¡Ask a Mexican!), Curtis Marez (University Babylon), and founding member of Ozomatli, Ulises Bella. Romero has received honorariums from over seventy-five colleges and universities in thirty-four different states in the USA and has performed live in Mexico, Italy, and France. Romero's work has been published in literary magazines in the United States, Mexico, England, Scotland, and Canada. Romero has opened for Latin Grammy winning bands Ozomatli and La Santa Cecilia. Romero's work has been published in anthologies alongside poets laureate Joy Harjo, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Luis J. Rodriguez, Jack Hirschman, and Tongo Eisen-Martin. Romero has won the Uptown Slam at the historic Green Mill in Chicago; the birthplace of slam poetry. Romero's poetry deals with family, identity, social justice issues, and Latinx culture.

Lula’s Victory Means Relief for Venezuela

By Joseph Lobodzinski

Lula's victory on October 28th was an electoral win for leftists both in and outside of Brazil. The pink tide that has swept many right-wing leaders across Central and South America from power once again crested to wash out the crazed fascist Jair Bolsonaro. 

There are many reasons to celebrate this triumph. Lula has pledged to end the Bolsonaro administration’s massive deforestation efforts, promising to protect the rights and livelihoods of the millions of indigenous peoples who call the Amazon their rightful home. Lula’s pledge will also prevent approximately 100 billion metric tons of carbon being released into the Earth’s atmosphere.

However, there is reason to temper hopes. Despite Lula’s win, Brazil’s right wing secured a majority in the national congress and have vowed to block any of his progressive policies. The Vice President-elect of Brazil, Geraldo Alckmin, is a social democrat who has been labeled as a “pro-business centrist,” highlighting the fact that the incoming presidential administration will take a more “pragmatic” and “means-tested” approach to governance.

Despite these issues, Lula's win is another step in the beginning of a new era — one in which Brazil and other Latin American countries will begin normalizing relations with Venezuela.

The recent pink tide has brought forth more leaders who are either actively advancing diplomatic relations with Venezuela, or who are — at the very least — open to doing so.

In Colombia, leftist President Gustavo Petro, elected earlier this year, has taken the most ambitious approach toward working with President Nicolás Maduro and Venezuela. In late September, the two countries reopened cargo trade, and their borders, for the first time in seven years. A few weeks later, on November 1st, Maduro welcomed Petro in Caracas, inaugurating the reactivation of flights between the two countries.

In Mexico, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who hosted Maduro in Mexico City for his 2018 presidential inauguration and has refused to recognize opposition leader Juan Guaidó, recently urged the United States to restore relations with Venezuela. Since the decision by the US to impose draconian sanctions, Venezuela’s economy has collapsed, creating a massive humanitarian catastrophe. Unable to obtain housing, food, and medical care, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have left the country, triggering a migration crisis that has left thousands stranded in Mexico as they seek entry into the United States. While the US agreed to take in 24,000 asylum seekers, last month, the Department of Homeland Security inexplicably deported 1,700 Venezuelans back to Mexico.

Lula’s victory, however, may facilitate the amelioration of this dire situation. Like in other countries, Brazil’s executive office holds significant power to shape foreign policy and direct trade agreements. Not only should Lula’s administration be able to reverse the diplomatic approach of its delusional predecessor; they should be able to convince other nations — specifically, the United States — to normalize relations with Maduro and lift sanctions through appropriate avenues of economic leverage, such as placing an exports tax on some of the $31.3 billion of goods shipped to the US from Brazil.

The timing could not be any more relevant. With relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia souring after the latter seemingly convinced other OPEC members to follow its lead in cutting oil production as an act of retaliation for Western opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the US has now been left scrambling to find an alternative source of crude oil.

This has led all eyes to fall on Venezuela.

Both Biden and Maduro have supposedly signaled their openness to normalizing relations, whether by directly stating it or by opening certain diplomatic avenues. 

Maduro has been forward, auctioning off some of the 300 billion barrels of oil in his nation’s reserves to the West, including a three-million barrel sale to Italy earlier this year, leading to global leaders such as France’s Emmanuel Macron meeting with Maduro at COP27 to begin “proposing dialogue” between their countries.

Earlier this year, US senior officials began negotiating with Maduro over the possibility of relieving sanctions. Now several months into the process, the prospect of reaching an agreement seems increasingly likely.

In exchange for cash and sanctions relief, all Maduro has to do is agree to a “clean” presidential election in 2024 and return to stalled negotiations with the Unitary Platform, his liberal-democratic opposition.

However, this is all tentative. As history shows, the US will do anything to obtain the natural resources it needs to drive its economy. In the case of Venezuela, if throwing the opposition under the bus or launching another imperialist coup provides access to their oil reserves, either may happen.

Then there’s Lula.

Lula’s established relationship with both Maduro and countries such as the United States makes him the best mediator for a decent deal.

Lula has had solid diplomatic relations with Maduro dating back to his initial presidency from 2003–2011, and both have already agreed to resume a “cooperation agenda” between their two countries. Lula’s respect among Western powers like the United States is also quite notable. This relationship was recently exemplified by the Biden administration’s immediate recognition of Lula’s electoral victory.

What all of this ultimately means is that Lula can lead the charge of providing sanctions relief for Venezuela, as well as restarting their economy through the oil sector. Lula can influence the United States to begin lifting sanctions and reversing some of its hostile diplomatic stances toward the Maduro government. In return, Maduro would take steps toward “free” elections and resume oil sales to the United States, giving him the money he needs to rescue his country.

Regardless of how this diplomatic situation plays out, it is important to remember that the people of Venezuela need to be alleviated of their current strife. After years of trade embargos that have caused poverty to skyrocket, creating a massive humanitarian crisis, any means of bringing this to an end should be considered.

And while it looks like the US is once again getting away with geopolitical hostage-taking by placing another country with leftist sympathies under the gun of despotic sanctions, we should be cautiously optimistic that Venezuela — with the help of Brazil — may be able to lift the imperialist boot from its neck.

Joseph Lobodzinski is a University of Michigan alumnus and leftist writer covering international politics, American social movements, labor, and the environment.

Inventing Reality: Past and Present

By Youhanna Haddad

Capitalist countries like to claim that they have the freest media. President Joe Biden frequently reiterates America’s supposed commitment to a free press. In a similar vein, the British Broadcasting Corporation has repeatedly lauded the United Kingdom’s ostensible “freedom to publish.”

These statements often feature alongside denunciations of the alleged unfreedom in other countries — particularly those adversarial to Western hegemony. Such criticism tends to take on a certain form. Westerners claim that these adversarial powers tightly curate their media, only allowing information that reinforces state agendas. A recent (retracted) article in The Wall Street Journal, for example, accused China of “parroting lies” via their “solidified grip on information.”

But China is far from the only target. Whether it’s nations in Latin America and the Middle East, or Russia, the Global North’s prominent media institutions frequently remind viewers that information coming out of these places should be heavily scrutinized, with particular caution advised toward state-sponsored media. 

Since the Cold War, the imperial core has honed this rhetoric, which not only espouses the superior integrity of its media institutions but also attributes that integrity to a supposed respect for free speech rights. This narrative sounds good. But it rings utterly hollow upon closer scrutiny. In reality, free speech does little to keep the interests of capital from dictating the “news” Western media reports. As Lenin described over a century ago, “[In] capitalist usage, freedom of the press means freedom of the rich to bribe the press, freedom to use their wealth to shape and fabricate so-called public opinion.”

In the United States, just six corporations own a whopping 90% of the news media. This centralization demonstrates that, despite what seems like an abundance of options, the media is controlled by a tiny capitalist minority. And this minority is united by an overriding monolithic interest: profit. That means the media is only really free to report what doesn’t threaten the bottom lines of its owners.

But that is far from the only source of bias. Oftentimes, Western media institutions act at the direct behest of their governments. While the full extent of such collusion is often hidden in classified documents, what little has trickled into the public view vindicates the belief that “free” Western media is a fantasy.

The history of collusion between Western governments and media megacorporations is both storied and unsettling. Consider the 1975 Church Committee, which was organized by the United States Senate to investigate potential abuses by the CIA, NSA, and FBI. The Church Committee formed after several major news stories broke implicating the Department of Defense and CIA in the surveillance of civilians and covert assassinations of foreign leaders. 

One of the most disturbing findings was the explicit confirmation of CIA involvement in domestic and foreign media. The Committee confirmed at least “50 CIA relationships with U.S. journalists or employees of U.S. media organizations.” Additionally, it demonstrated that the CIA had control of two European press services — one of which was subscribed to by “over 30 U.S. newspapers.” With a notable lack of remorse, a senior CIA official told the Committee that, “Whether or not this type of overseas activity should be allowed to continue is subject to differing views and judgments… [in my opinion] we would be fools to relinquish it because it serves a very useful purpose.”

CIA defector Colonel John Stockwell corroborated this practice of media corruption. On his assignment to the Angolan Civil War, he allegedly headed a CIA campaign to disseminate news stories that slandered the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola and their Cuban reinforcements. According to Stockwell, a full third of his CIA personnel in Angola were career propagandists. One startling falsehood they reported was a totally fabricated execution of 17 Cuban soldiers for the rapes of Angolan women. Framed as an act of feminist liberation, the imaginary victims supposedly executed the perpetrators by firing squad. This tale made its way to the front page of the Toronto Star — Canada’s largest daily newspaper — the Globe and Mail, and local papers in Winnipeg, Halifax, and Montreal. 

More recently, a 2019 bombshell in The Washington Post revealed that — even in this century — United States’ military campaigns are shrouded in lies to make them more palatable to the American public. Generals, senior federal officials, an Afghan War czar, and a Bush-era secretary of defense all confirm that the war in Afghanistan was unwinnable while claiming that there was “no way” the United States could lose the war when interviewed. Federal officials faithfully chanted “steady progress” throughout the duration of the war despite knowing that their objectives were bound to fail via the means they were employing.

Today, the world's eyes are on Ukraine. Russian troops have been in the country for over nine months after Ukraine, against Russia’s repeated warnings, moved to join NATO. Since the invasion began, the United States has spent $68 billion to aid the Ukrainian government and military.  

While modern Russia is thoroughly capitalist, it's easy to see why NATO — the world’s preeminent imperialist alliance — views it as a threat. The country has the world's largest nuclear arsenal and its security interests are directly opposed to NATO’s objective of expanding eastward toward Russia’s borders. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not unexpected by any stretch of the imagination, Russian leaders have expressed for decades that their ability to defend their nation from invasion or global conflict would be severely compromised if NATO was permitted to expand toward its borders. 

Most infamously, declassified State Department documents confirm former Secretary of State James Baker promised Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward” in 1990. To the contrary, NATO has admitted 14 former Soviet or Soviet-aligned states since then.

From the billions in aid to Ukraine, it’s clear the United States is investing heavily in the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Much of that aid is designated for weapons that are not yet manufactured, suggesting the United States is ready to support the neoliberal Ukrainian government for years to come. This means that — just like in Vietnam and Afghanistan — the federal government is dedicated to a long-term conflict with little regard for any public resistance they may encounter. Ask yourself: When in its history has the United States heavily funded a fighting force that was trying to improve living standards for any group of working people?

Today, we face a nonstop barrage of pro-Ukrainian media. Major news outlets have been reporting optimistically on Ukraine’s war efforts, while Russian troops remain planted on Ukrainian soil since February. Western bourgeois media is clearly trying to make NATO’s investment in Ukraine seem worthwhile, as they have done to support the invasions of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

You don’t have to be a Putin apologist to understand that Western powers see Russia as a threat to their hegemony. Those with a deep respect for human life should hope to see an expedient and diplomatic end to the conflict, with no further expansion of NATO. Unlike the United States and her allies, we should not support the effort to include Ukraine in NATO at any cost. This position is nonsensical, and only remains publicly acceptable due to the tireless media campaigns of a supposedly “free press” in the Global North.

Youhanna Haddad is a North American Marxist of the Arab diaspora. Through his writing, he seeks to combat the Western liberal dogmas that uphold racial capitalism.

Staughton Lynd, Radical Historian and Labor Lawyer, Dies at 92

By Sean Posey

One of the giants of the American Left, activist, lawyer and eminent historian, Staughton Lynd, died Nov. 17 in Warren, Ohio. He was 92. In a career that took him from the Freedom Summer of 1964 and the first organized Vietnam War protests to a national campaign to save shuttered steel mills in the Rust Belt, he straddled the worlds of the Labor Left of the early 20th century and the New Left of the ‘60s and ‘70s. 

Friend and colleague Tom Hayden referred to Lynd’s ideology as “a blend of Quaker, anarchist and Marxist traditions.” During the ‘60s, he was the model of “the historian as activist,” and found himself at odds with contemporaries such as Eugene Genovese, who opposed his ascension to the presidency of the American Historical Association. In explaining the conflict between the two, Howard Zinn described Lynd’s moral outlook. “Genovese saw … Lynd as a self-righteous person because Lynd is a very Quaker type, even his life is hard to emulate.” Zinn later referred to him as “an exemplar of strength and gentleness in the quest for a better world.”

His parents, Robert and Helen Merrell Lynd were sociologists widely known in the field for their “Middletown” books, which applied the tools of anthropology to the study of life in Muncie, Indiana. Upon graduating from Harvard, a young Staughton sought “to combine the life of the mind and social action,” as he later described it, by studying city and regional planning in graduate school. It was not to be. He moved into an ecumenical religious cooperative community – where he met his wife and longtime intellectual collaborator, Alice – before going on to study American history at Columbia.

After meeting the young scholar at a 1960 gathering of the American Historical Association, Howard Zinn, head of the history department at Spelman College, invited him to teach at the historically black college for women in Atlanta. Alice Walker was among his many students.
Before accepting a position at Yale, Lynd served as director of the “Freedom School” during the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964. That summer, a bridge between the Civil Rights Movement and the escalating American involvement in Vietnam opened in Lynd’s mind during a speech Bob Moses gave to a Freedom School convention after the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in July.

“He emphasized that the bodies of the young men were discovered almost simultaneously with Congressional passage of a resolution concerning the so-called Tonkin Bay incident,” Lynd later recalled. “I was unaware of it until Bob spoke about it. There was a connection between these two events, Bob said. Dark-skinned people were being killed both in Mississippi and Vietnam.”

Lynd’s involvement with the nascent anti-war protest movement in 1965 made him a national figure and eventually ended his academic career. He chaired the first anti-war Vietnam protest in Washington with the Students for a Democratic Society in April of that year. Tom Hayden later remembered the event as a harbinger of a movement to come. “As we gazed at the unexpected crowd of 25,000, I remember Staughton dreaming out loud that someday such a massive crowd would flow over the Capitol and take the government back.” 

Hayden wanted Lynd to lead a national antiwar movement. “He was perhaps the only person who could unite the New Left and the Old Left, speak truth to power, and also be a persuasive advocate within the mainstream.” But such a move was against Staughton’s nature, and the “anti-leadership ethos” of the era precluded such a possibility, Hayden later recalled.

Hayden and Lynd attracted far more attention later in 1965 when they traveled to North Vietnam and met communist leaders, becoming the center of a global story. They documented the journey in their book, “The Other Side.” At home, Lynd found himself defending the trip and his anti-war efforts on William F. Buckley Jr.’s “Firing Line” TV show, and eventually, at Yale as well.

In his academic life, Lynd’s 1968 book, “Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism,” broke new ground in its examination of the radical tradition in early American intellectual thought and won praise throughout the field. Nevertheless, due to his activism against the war, Yale denied him tenure. Lynd claimed he found himself essentially blacklisted in academia.

Drawn to Chicago and its long history of radicalism, he spent a few years in the late 1960s working as a community organizer with the famed Saul Alinsky. During this time, Lynd became interested in unions and the labor movement after meeting men who had lived through the CIO organizing drives of the 1930s. During a writers’ workshop in Gary, Indiana, he met two socialist steelworkers from Youngstown, Ohio, developing a friendship that led him to the steel city in 1976.

The year after his arrival, the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. announced the closing of its Campbell Works just outside the city. At the time, it was the largest peacetime plant shutdown in American history. Lynd, who had graduated from law school while in Chicago, became lead counsel for a group called the Ecumenical Coalition, which sought to buy the mill from the company and reopen it under employee-community ownership.

“What was new in the Youngstown venture was the notion that workers and community residents could own and operate a steel mill,” he later wrote in the book, “The Fight Against Shutdowns.” The effort attracted international attention. Political economist Gar Alperovitz became involved with developing the plan. He had been thinking along similar lines and had co-written “Strategy and Program: Two Essays Toward a New American Socialism” in 1973 with Lynd, which developed some of the themes seen in the Youngstown initiative.

Despite getting the Carter administration to look at their plan, the government declined to provide funds needed for the modernization of the mill. Though the effort failed, Alperovitz later wrote, it inspired the founding of the Ohio Employee Ownership Center at Kent State University and foreshadowed a growth in worker-owned businesses throughout the state.

Staughton and Alice spent their later years advocating for the abolition of the death penalty and working for prisoners’ rights. The couple served as co-counsel in a landmark class action lawsuit challenging the use of solitary confinement at the supermax Ohio State Penitentiary. The Lynd’s also worked with men from the “Lucasville Five,” accused of being the leaders of the worst prison riot in Ohio history at the maximum-security Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. Staughton wrote a history of the event in, “Lucasville: The Untold Story of a Prison Uprising.” 

He stayed connected with local labor organizing and international freedom movements during his final years, said writer and activist Daphne Carr. “[Staughton] urged us to join strike lines throughout Ohio. In these last years he was in constant email and Zoom contact with friends across the world, sharing manuscripts and details about struggles worldwide.”

Staughton Lynd represented the best of humanity, scholarship and activism. His passing, like that of Howard Zinn before him, turns one more page in a radical chapter of American leftism. However, the indomitable legacy of that humble Quaker of the left will live on. The relevance of his life to a new generation of labor historians, organizers and activists is more evident now than ever.

Elon Musk, Twitter, and the Power of Ownership

[Musk family wealth came from property ownership throughout Africa, including Apartheid South Africa and Zambia, where Errol Musk owned an emerald mine like the one pictured above]

By Carl Beijer

Republished from the author’s blog.

Last month, Elon Musk purchased Twitter and immediately disbanded its entire board of directors. This may have surprised you if you get your ideas about power from the populist right, who have been telling us that “power has passed from individual bourgeois business to a new ruling class” — the so-called “managerial elite.” Evidently, their “cultural power” with its full arsenal of “wokeness” and “cancel culture” couldn’t do a damn thing to save them in the end.

Even their enormous incomes couldn’t help them! These are no blue collar workers; these are multi-millionaires with astronomical salaries. “Heterodox economists” like Lévy and Duménil tell us that capitalism is over and we now live in the age of “managerialism”, in which “the main social split is nowadays between lower and higher wage earners, and increasingly so in conformity with the rise of managers”; but Musk had no problem whatsoever kicking some of the highest paid managers in the world to the curb.

Capitalist discourse loves to dismiss Marxist economics as a kind of obscurantist and contrarian analysis that no sensible person could possibly take seriously, but look at how everyone is talking about Musk right now and it’s obvious that we all know exactly what happened. He won because he took ownership of Twitter. That is what allowed him to crush the assembled power of the professional managerial class — Twitter’s corporate governance structure, the complex of NGO professionals and celebrities and academics who protested his takeover, all of it — on a whim. Taking ownership was his coronation, and the moment it happened everyone knew that his opponents would never prevail.

If you take one lesson from the Musk takeover, it should be this: capitalists can do this whenever they want. And even the highest-level managers and corporate executives know it, which means that they can only either defer to ownership or risk getting fired. This is a point I spelled out a few months ago when former WWE CEO Vince McMahon resigned:

Whether or not he has plans to exercise that power [majority ownership of the the WWE] is beside the point; at any given moment, shareholder Vince can decide to appoint a new board that will re-appoint him as CEO. And the very possibility that he could do this gives him the exact same power over management that shareholders have when Vince pleads that he only fired wrestlers because he’s a publicly traded company.

Private ownership confers a unique form of power unlike anything else in our politics. It matters more than professional titles, than academic degrees, than cultural norms and values, than the power of free speech and public reason. Even the state’s victory against it isn’t assured. And there is no form of power concentrated in fewer hands.

Nor is there any form of power that we meet with less skepticism. If you don’t believe me, just pay attention to how we talk about Musk’s power-play moving forward. You’re going to see a lot of talk about how Musk is a bad apple, one of those dreaded right-wing Silicon Valley billionaires. You’re going to hear about the rising tide of fascism, driven by vague hatreds of egalitarianism and freedom. You’re even going to hear some talk about “corporate” power, as if Twitter’s board would still be in control if it were structured slightly differently. But what you won’t hear is skepticism of the basic legal, political, and economic institution — private property — that actually keeps Musk in control.