Stalin in Ukraine: A Critical Examination of the Holodomor

By Anton

Republished from the author’s blog.

In this piece, I will examine the situation in the Soviet Union, particularly in Ukraine, 1932–1933, of what is commonly referred to as “Holodomor”.

“Holodomor” refers to the claim of an “intentional man-made famine-genocide in Ukraine caused by Communist collectivization of the Soviet Union” or often times more specifically, of Stalin himself.

To begin, I will start with its origins. Its origins are widely credited to a Welsh man named Gareth Jones. Who was he? Jones before arriving in the Soviet Union in March of 1933, he was in nazi Germany. In an article entitled, “WITH HITLER ACROSS GERMANY” which was published on February 23rd of 1933, he outlines his experience flying on Hitler’s private plane along with other high ranking nazi officials such as Goebbels. In the piece he says of the nazi leaders, “There is nothing hard and Prussian about my fellow-passengers. They could not be more friendly and polite, even if I were a red-hot nazi myself.” Continuing, after fawning over the nazis, he says regarding Hitler: “There are two Hitlers — the natural boyish Hitler, and the Hitler who is inspired by tremendous national force, a great Hitler. It is the second Hitler who has stirred Germany to an awakening.” In a following article by Jones, he states regarding Goebbels that “He has a remarkably appealing personality, with a sense of humour and a keen brain. One feels at home with him immediately, for he is amusing and likeable.”

After leaving nazi Germany, he arrived in the Soviet Union. After arriving, Gareth Jones reported that “millions are dying of hunger”. In the article he gives multiple anecdotes of unidentified and nameless persons — devoid of any information of any backgrounds, of their class interests, etc — making claims such as “we are waiting for death”, while presenting the entirety of not only Ukraine but the entire Soviet Union, as a monolith.

Following this, on the 13th of April of 1933, Jones expands in this article his claim regarding the cause of the situation. He states “the main reason for the catastrophe in Russian agriculture is the Soviet policy of collectivisation.”

Today, by the “holodomor-genocide” campaigners, collectivization is pushed as being the sole cause of the situation. Despite this, Gareth Jones of all people, even admitted the following factors played a role: natural droughts in some areas, landowning kulaks who he says their “incentive to work disappeared”, “massacre of cattle by peasants not wishing to sacrifice their property for nothing to the collective farm”, and that “prices have dropped most in precisely those products, wheat, timber, oil, butter, & co., which the Soviet Union exports, and least in those products, such as machinery, which the Soviet Union imports”.

In the previously attached article from April 13th of 1933, Jones also predicted that the next harvest will likely be worse and stated, “The outlook for the next harvest is, therefore, black. It is dangerous to make any prophecy, for the miracle of perfect climatic conditions can always make good a part of the unfavourable factors.”

Jones placed the blame mainly on the Soviet policies of collectivization, but still admitted — unlike the “holodomor-genocide” campaigners of today — the previously stated factors. Today if you mention these factors, you are demonized by certain people as being just as bad as the people who deny the holocaust, that you are a genocide denier equal to a holocaust denier.

Here we have the following factors by Jones, aside from collectivization:

1. Drought

2. Exporting grain & co. for industry machinery

3. “Disincentives” among ex-landowners

4. Slaughter of cattle by disgruntled ex-landowners

Before moving forward, it is important to take into account the location and the era of which this situation had occurred. For centuries prior, the entire region had regularly struggled against famines and droughts, including in Ukraine. Due to the economic backwardness of the feudal era, the entire region was largely ill-prepared to overcome these situations. As Jones mentioned, the Soviet Union was importing machinery. This was true. The reason for this was that it was that industrialization, as part of the first five-year plan, was a key to improving the agricultural system and overcoming the famines which had been inherited from the pre-revolutionary era. In a sense, the decision was as follows: “Do not industrialize, save some food, and allow the famines to continue anyway, or do industrialize, sell some food, and try to overcome the famines as quickly as possible”.

According to anti-Communist Nicholas V. Riasanovsky in “A History of Russia”, he states that the Soviet Union went from being the 5th in terms of industrial power, to second, only behind the United States, within the span of the first five-year plan. This bares out in many ways that industrial production was rapidly expanding. The first of which is that after industrialization and the end of the second world war, the famines which had plagued the regions for centuries, had stopped. They did not worsen, or even continue. It is also made clear through the fact that the industry of the Soviet Union was capable of repelling nazi Germany to the point of pushing the Germans not only out of Moscow, but all the way back to Berlin and the Reichstag. Finally, it is also shown by official statistical data of the Soviet Union. Granted that many will claim statistics from the Soviet Union cannot be trusted at all or are entirely fabricated, the fact still remains that even the western capitalist governments such as the United Kingdom will begrudgingly admit that during the era “almost all heavy industries [in the Soviet Union] enjoyed substantial increases in production”.

From “Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard” by Douglas Tottle

Regarding the issue of kulaks having no “incentives” to work, Isaac Mazepa, a hardline nationalist who had nothing but hatred of the Soviet Union & Communism, admitted the same as Gareth. He notes in the excerpt that kulaks and nationalists had first began murdering collective farm workers and Communist officials then eventually adopted a “passive” form of resistance. He openly admits that kulaks and anti-Communists had intentionally and knowingly left ‘whole tracts unsown’ and left “20, 40, and even 50 per cent” of crops to rot in the fields. To reiterate, this is not being claimed by a Soviet government official or a Communist, but by a leader of the Ukrainian nationalists and anti-Communists.

The Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance has stated that “Starting in February 1933, in order to ensure the spring sowing campaign, assistance began to arrive in Ukrainian regions. It was designated for local party leaders and activists as well as for those who worked at the collective farms.” It is in this that we begin to realize the class character of the situation and understand a little more of the truth of the situation. Above, Jones noted that the ex-landowning class refused to work in collectives saying they had ‘no incentive’, then we have Mazepa stating that many refused to sow land and harvest grain in the collectives out of spite, then the Institute claims that the aid was given to what largely amounted to those who worked. In essence, the picture painted by these admissions is exactly what Louis Fischer had stated when he was in Ukraine in 1932, as shown below.

From “Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard” by Douglas Tottle

This begins to paint a picture of exactly who, largely but not exclusively, starved and suffered. Though “the kulaks starved themselves” is regarded as “Stalinist propaganda”, that is effectively something that the “holodomor-genocide” campaign itself has inadvertently through this admitted to be true.

According to the infamous anti-Communist Robert Conquest, he reaffirms that kulaks did in fact slaughter their own cattle out of spite.

“The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine” by Robert Conquest

Though some will undoubtedly claim that since these statistics come from the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934 that it must be fake, despite Conquest even saying that the numbers are “supposedly lower than the reality”, it is shown to be evident due to the fact that Soviet documents report that the Soviet Union had to and did import cattle to attempt to replace some of that what the kulaks destroyed.

To summarize this far, it has been well-documented, even among anti-Communists of the early “holodomor-genocide” campaign, that in fact kulaks did refuse to work and actively acted to harm the production of the harvest, kulaks did slaughter their cattle out of spite for the collective farms, natural drought did impact the harvest’s quantity, and industrialization was crucial to stop the famines.

According to Gareth Jones, collectivization was supposedly the main reason for the situation of 1932–1933 and he said that famines would likely continue due to it. By the end of the year of 1931, according to official statistics, the percentage of farms that were collectivized was only at 52.7%. By the end of the year of 1933, the percentage of farms that had been collectivized rose to 65.6%. Had collectivization as a policy, in and of itself, been responsible for the situation, then it would only be inevitable that the situation would not only continue, but intensify and worsen. But it did not. Given that by the end of year of 1937 some 93% of farms had been collectivized, it would only make sense that if the situation from 1932–1933 had been caused by collectivization with only 52.7% of farms being collectives that in 1938 there would be a situation much, much, much worse and intense. But it wasn’t. Unfortunately, Jones was unable to witness this fact to prove his theory wrong for himself as he had passed away in 1935.

In addition, and despite some people (i.e., Norman Naimark) saying “The Soviet Union made no efforts to provide relief”, reports show that the Central Soviet Authorities sent hundreds of thousands of tonnes of food aid to Ukraine. In early February of 1933, Odessa and Dnepropetrovsk regions each received 3,300 tonnes of food aid. By the end of February, the Dnipropetrovsk region received 20,000 tonnes of food aid, Odessa received around 13,000 tonnes, and Kharkiv received almost 5,000 tonnes. Reports document that from February to June in the year of 1933, over 500,000 tonnes of food aid was sent to Ukraine.

According to archived documents, Joseph Stalin himself, along with Molotov, personally took it upon themselves to scold Joseph Vareikis, First Secretary of the Voronezh Regional Committee of the CPSU, on March 31st of 1933 for his objection to sending 26,000 pounds of potatoes to the Donbass region of Ukraine. These behaviors including, but not limited to, sending food aid and at that personally intervening to ensure food aid is being given, is fairly odd or strange behavior for, as the “holodomor-genocide” campaigners would say, a “genocidal maniac who wanted to kill Ukrainians”. Truly, there was no reason for Stalin to go as far as personally intervening in that situation as he did to ensure food aid was sent to Ukraine if he was genuinely trying to create a famine to crush Ukraine.

Regarding the issue of “intent”, on March 16th of 1932 the Politburo stated that “The Political Bureau believes that shortage of seed grain in Ukraine is many times worse than what was described in comrade Kosior’s telegram; therefore, the Political Bureau recommends the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine to take all measures within its reach to prevent the threat of failing to sow in Ukraine.”

This is one piece of conflicting evidence among many that was presented to Stalin and others of the Central Soviet Authorities. Conflicting reports of whether or not there was an issue, and if so to what degree or totality, by regional members and others in Ukraine casts doubt on the claim that Stalin was aware of the situation or that he was orchestrating it. Though the Central Soviet Authorities and Stalin were suspicious of it being worse than some had claimed, they still pushed for them to be careful and cautious.

Following that, Stalin wrote on the 2nd of July of 1932 to Lazar Kaganovich and to Molotov regarding Kosior and Vlas Chubar stating “Give the most serious attention to the Ukraine. Chubar’s corruptness and opportunistic essence and Kosior’s rotten diplomacy…and criminally frivolous attitude toward his job will eventually ruin Ukraine. These comrades are not up to the challenge of leading the Ukraine today.” By this point, it is without a doubt that Stalin is aware of the situation and automatically began to critically evaluate the situation and isolate the problems.

Shortly after this, Stalin sent another letter to Kaganovich on July 17th and mentions to Mr. Lazar that “These shortcomings are a great economic (and political!) danger to us”. The claim that this situation had been an intentional and man-made situation on behalf of Stalin & co. does not square up with this. For if it was, Stalin would not be concerned of these “shortcomings” and would certainly not be viewing them as ‘dangerous’ to them.

It is at this point that it is also worth noting the distinction between squarely blaming Communism & collectivization for the situation and between identifying elements or persons within the government as being responsible in part for the situation, in the way that Stalin identified specifically Kosior and Chubar and specific failures produced by them that in part led to this situation being able to develop under their watch.

By August 1st of 1932, Stalin wrote, and quite poignantly & savagely, regarding Kosior that “Instead of leading the raions, Kosior keeps maneuvering between the directives of the CC CPSU and the demands of the raikoms — and now he has maneuvered himself into a total mess”. Stalin continues, ripping into Chubar, stating that “Chubar is no leader. Things are bad with the GPU […] Unless we begin to straighten out the situation in Ukraine, we may well lose Ukraine.”

At this point, it becomes beyond evident that Stalin is now aware of the situation, is actively concerned about the situation and worried, is actively identifying the problems that have allowed this situation to unfold as it did, and began taking steps to begin to rectify the situation.

The situation 1932–1933 being viewed as a “genocide to crush Ukrainian nationalist resistance” is further undercut by the fact that the situation encompassed the entire union in varying levels and degrees. Nevertheless of the varying intensities, it included but was not limited to, Siberia, the Volga, the Kazakh ASSR, etc. With that being said, it was then not a man-made famine from the start, as some pretend, to “crush Ukraine” nor was it manipulated and weaponized to do the same. We’ve seen the true cause of the situation, that the food aid sent from other regions less impacted to more impacted regions such as Ukraine, and that the Georgian leader Stalin, the “evil Russian chauvinist who wanted to crush Ukraine”, personally intervened to make sure food aid was being sent when a regional official within the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic objected to sending aid to Ukrainians in Donbass.

The situation in 1932–1933 did lead to suffering and some death. But the level of which has been grossly inflated and exaggerated, disrespecting the people who actually did suffer and perish — it belittles the truth of the situation. The estimated range of the “holodomor-genocide” campaigners ranges from 3 million to as high as 12 million, some even higher, like Conquest alleging 14 million. Regarding these tolls, “starved to death” is not always accurate or truthful — intentionally or not. At the same time, there was a record outbreak of over a million cases of typhus and typhoid fever, a dramatic spike from the prior years and higher than in the rest of the Soviet Union. This resulted in a number of people dying due to the diseases, but not from hunger. However among certain historians, it is not differentiated, or even often noted — intentionally or not. That in fact many of the people who “starved to death” were not all people who did.

In 2010, in the same ruling that the Court of Appeals of Kiev decided to qualify the situation as a ‘genocide against Ukraine, to crush Ukraine’, they also made some noteworthy admissions. In it they claimed that 10,063,000 people had “died”. However, their qualification for a “death” is rather unusual. They note that 6,122,000 of the “deaths” are unborn people. Not even unborn babies that did not make it, but a person never born, a fetus never even conceived. Approximately 60% of the “deaths” were not even people that were even born! This is unimaginably childish logic, equivalent to saying one person being murdered is actually 10 people being murdered because that one person being murdered may have had kids and they may have had kids too, etc. According with the ruling, that leaves slightly under 4,000,000 people they claim were actually alive. Of the usual death toll claimed by the campaigners, the Ukrainian court’s is only a third. Meanwhile the Soviet archives estimate that around 1,800,000 people died.

The death toll alleged by the Ukrainian court was approximately 4,000,000 and the Soviet archives estimated 1,800,000 deaths during this period, which includes from the typhus outbreak, typhoid fever, etc. The number of deaths during this period being so significantly lower than what today’s “holodomor-genocide” campaigners claim may be relevant to the fact that Jones himself had admitted on May 13th of 1933 that he never actually saw any dead people. Jones stated that “Mr. Duranty says that I saw in the villages no dead human beings nor animals. That is true…” continuing, he implies that the reason he didn’t see anybody who had died during his entire trip that all of the people who had died were buried before he had the chance to witness a single person who had died.

For whatever reasons, since the 1930’s, and even to this day, the “holodomor-genocide” campaigners repeatedly and constantly use photos from regions and eras which are not 1932–1933 Ukraine. Beyond simply ordinary people who falsely attribute a photo, whether it is intentional or not, it is also “journalists” and other so-called “experts” such as Anne Applebaum.

Anne Applebaum fraudulently using a photo of Russian children in the 1920’s as an example of “holodomor” in Ukraine in an article she wrote for the British tabloid called “The Times”

Unfortunately, and for some reason, this is a reoccurrence throughout the campaign.

Anne Reid fraudulently using a photo of Russian children in the 1920’s as an example of “holodomor” in an article she wrote for the American rag “The Wall Street Journal”

Above all, the misusing of photos is truly horrific and reckless. In the carelessness, or even in cases of intentional deceitfulness, the “holodomor-genocide” campaign citing photos from the Volga in the 1920’s or using photos from other famines disrespects the people who had actually perished or suffered in the photos we see.

From the anti-Communist “Black Book of Communism” where it openly admits that Ukrainian nationalists conducted pogroms and sought to create an ethno-state and purge ethnic minorities

Before moving forward, we must address what and who the “Ukrainian nationalists” were, that the Central Soviet Authorities and Stalin wanted to allegedly “genocide”. One major manifestation of Ukrainian nationalism existed in form of the fascistic Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) — which eventually extended itself into the “Ukrainian Insurgent Army”, of which both collaborated with nazi Germany and actively participated in atrocities of the holocaust such as the massacre of Babi Yar. Before and during the Soviet revolution, before the OUN was formed, the Ukrainian nationalists perpetuated some of the most horrific pogroms of the early 20th century.

Website of the oun-upa.national.org.ua with bios of various leading members. In this bio, it states that Mykhailo Kolodzinsky was trained in fascist Italy — in 1932 through 1933 — along with the fascist Croatian Ustaše. This was in fact at the will of the National Executive of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.

The Ukrainian nationalists had connections and ties to among other fascist organizations and leaders, the Italian fascist regime.

From the book “Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide, and Cult” by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe

The exact nature, the characteristic of what this rabid nationalism entails is fairly easy to understand — a similar variant of the nationalism by the nazi Germans.

From the book “Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide, and Cult” by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe

This becomes much more clear and visible after 1932–1933 in which the Ukrainian nationalists are emboldened by the rise of Hitler in 1933 and become more violent and destructive. As a matter of fact, through analyzing “Ukrainian nationalism” and what ideology came with it (fascism, pursuing an ethno-state, etc) and the acts of the Ukrainian nationalists themselves (i.e., violent pogroms against ethnic minorities, aiding nazi Germany in committing crimes in the holocaust, etc) further bares out the truth of what “Ukrainian nationalism” exactly entails and means and what the people who bore that identity did and believed in.

Prominent Ukrainian nationalist, Eugene Onatskyi, regarding what “Ukrainian nationalism” actually means. From “Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist : Fascism, Genocide, and Cult” By Grzegorz Rossolinsk

Though the disdain for this nationalist movement by the Soviet authorities is brought up by “holodomor-genocide” campaigners, it is presented as if it was only the Ukrainian nationalists who received disdain. In fact, all sectarian ethnic nationalisms were treated in kind. German nazi collaborator Russian nationalist General Vlasov, in a similar sense to the Ukrainian nationalists, viewed Stalin and in fact Communism as being evil and the greatest threat to “his people”. In the civil war, the White Armies were largely a rabid Russian nationalist movement that the Red Army obliterated. When the White Armies failed, younger nationalists turned to German-style fascism; in Konstantin Rodzaevsky and the Russian Fascist Party were extremely nationalistic. Rodzaevsky was executed in August of 1946 after he voluntarily handed himself over to Soviet authorities after he had previously “fled” to land occupied by imperial Japan. Stalin, who was Georgian, also maintained an equal hostility to the rabid Georgian nationalist movement. It was Georgian Stalin who led the Soviet forces against the Georgian nationalist “August uprising” in 1924 and it was under Stalin that the rabid Georgian nationalist leaders were executed for their nationalistic treason.

The Black Book of Communism (page 231) counts executed and gulaged Russian nationalist nazi collaborators as ‘victims of Communism’

The idea that Stalin was uniquely hostile to bourgeois Ukrainian nationalism becomes less and less plausible as you examine Stalin’s hostility to the rest of the sectarian bourgeois nationalist movements, including the Georgian bourgeois nationalist movement.

Regarding the issue of “genocide”, we must first define it. According to the Genocide Convention of the U.N., it states “genocide” as being “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. In order for something to be qualified as a “genocide”, it must be that there was intent to kill or otherwise destroy said groups. That is more like the European colonialists invading the Americas and telling the Native people, such as through the Spanish requirement of 1513, that they must “submit, or we will kill everybody”, as they did. As noted above, the situation had been created through various factors, none of which were intentional by means of the Soviet Union, but of which a couple included intentional acts by the Ukrainian landowning class & Ukrainian nationalists — again, even admitted by Jones himself. It’s also been established that the Central Soviet Authorities had sent massive amounts of food aid to Ukraine, and that Joseph Stalin himself intervened against regional authorities of the Russian region in order to ensure food was taken from Russians and being given to Ukrainians.

The issue of “genocide” specifically, as a qualifying term, the vast majority of countries on this planet have rejected it. Of the nearly 200 countries on this planet, the vast majority reject the “holodomor-genocide” claim. Of the ones that do, let’s examine a few of them briefly. You have the U.S. which genocided millions of Native peoples in the Americas, Australia which genocided hundreds of thousands of Native peoples, Belgium which committed a genocide in the “Congo Free State”, Canada which genocided Native people, Israel which is currently genociding Palestinians, etc. Regardless, even with these genocidal countries accepting the “holodomor-genocide” campaign, it remains that the vast majority of the countries of the planet do not.

Upon analyzing and breaking down the “holodomor-genocide” campaign’s theory and the implications, it becomes much more visible as a violent and dangerous campaign. The campaign claims that Stalin fighting bourgeois-minded Ukrainian nationalism was tantamount to genocide. However, when you break down this logic and apply it elsewhere, it becomes more visible as the foolish logic that it is. If Stalin destroying rabid bourgeois nationalism that sought to create an ethno-state in Ukraine, which was part of the Ukrainian society, was “genocide”, then what would that mean for the crushing of bourgeois German nazi nationalism, when that was part of German society and resulted “in part” the destruction of some Germans? This logic would then also foolishly and wrongly interpret, for instance, the Haitian revolution as “white genocide” since it targeted and destroyed the French colonialists. And so forth. The notion that any of these can be considered “genocide” is far from being logical or sensible.

The Central Soviet Authorities had stated on December 14th of 1932 that Ukrainization policy had inadvertently given legal cover to rabid bourgeois nationalist elements to organize anti-Soviet agitation, treason. In the decree which is cited by the campaigners as proof of a secret conspiracy to crush Ukraine, if you actually read it, it states that they recommend them “expel petliurites” (the rabid Ukrainian nationalists who had conducted pogroms under Symon Petliura) and others, and for them to carefully supervise the implementation of Ukrainization as to not embolden the rabid elements. It also states the following: “…instead of the correct Bolshevik implementation of nationality policy, “ukrainization” was carried out mechanically in a number of raions of Ukraine, failing to take into consideration the peculiarities of every raion and without the meticulous selection of Bolshevik cadres. This made it easier for bourgeois nationalist elements, petliurites and others to create their legal facades and counterrevolutionary cells and organizations.”

The Black Book of Communism openly portraying the OUN/UPA terrorists who participated in murdering Jews with the nazis such as in Babi Yar, where they set up the syrets concentration camp as heroic victims who fought against the “Communists and Jews”

This was evidently true as the fascist OUN had formed and began to rise under this policy which bourgeois-minded Ukrainian nationalists had exploited. These elements of Ukrainian society, the bourgeois-nationalist elements, that eventually collaborated with nazi Germany and sought to create an ethno-state had themselves proven in retrospect that Stalin was correct to be critical of them and their nationalist movement. They were not going to be happy until an ethno-state was created. This is the so-called “national liberation” movement of the Ukrainian nationalists which Stalin allegedly crushed, though the Ukrainian nationalists and the OUN persisted. This further demonstrates, in retrospect, that the so-called “national liberation” of the rabid Ukrainian nationalists who are portrayed as victims of “Stalinist repression” are less like a legitimate national liberation movement such as that of the Haitian national liberation and more like the bourgeois-nationalist nazi German movement which sought a distorted and truly fucked concept of “national liberation”, to create an ethno-state and remove ethnic minorities.

The “holodomor-genocide” claim of today is even more detached from reality than the campaigners of decades prior. The ethnic interpretation of the situation 1932–1933, and especially of the magnitude they claim and in claiming that it was an intentional genocide to crush Ukrainians, is far from the truth. The conception that a famine was created as a weapon to “stop Ukrainian national liberation”, above all, makes the assertion that the rabid Ukrainian nationalists of the OUN & co. were in fact “liberators”, good people, not evil like the German nazis. OUN-B leader Yaroslav Stetsko stated in July of 1941 that he supports “the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine”.

The rehabilitation of the rabid Ukrainian nationalists such as the OUN & UPA is an inevitable consequence and implication of accepting the “holodomor-genocide” claim. This rehabilitation should be rejected, forcefully. The perception of the Ukrainian nationalists as being “heroes” rather than, as they actually were, pogromists and nazi collaborators who committed some of the most horrific crimes in the holocaust and sought to create an ethno-state, is highly objectionable. The “holodomor-genocide” claim, de facto, asserts that these people are “victims”. It’s at this moment that we begin to see exactly why the comparison between the “holodomor-genocide” and the holocaust is so incredibly insidious. The holocaust was the large-scale systematic killing of ethnic minorities and other groups of peoples, especially Jewish people, by the German nazis and their collaborators, of which included the Ukrainian nationalist movement. Meanwhile the “holodomor-genocide” campaign claims that the Ukrainian nationalists who perpetuated pogroms before the 1930’s and the crimes of the holocaust in the 1940’s are the same as their victims who they massacred in the holocaust.

In summary, we have established the following facts regarding the situation 1932–1933:

1. Natural drought played a role in creating the situation

2. Ex-landowning kulaks and Ukrainian nationalists did in fact refuse to work, murder collective workers, slaughter their own cattle, and otherwise actively sabotage the sowing and harvesting campaigns

3. Importing industrial machinery was the reason for exporting amounts of food in order to increase production as fast as possible

4. The cycle of famines which had existed for centuries prior and inherited by the Soviet authorities ended after the industrialization and collectivization policies had been fully implemented and the nazi invasion had ended

5. Under Stalin, the Ukrainization policy went into effect for over a decade before being changed due to rabid bourgeois Ukrainian nationalist elements exploiting it for treasonous activities

6. Stalin did not harbor any unique hostility to the Ukrainian nationalists anymore than he did the Russian nationalists who he fought in the civil war or even the Georgian nationalists who he fought in the August uprising

7. The Ukrainian nationalist movement in question was heavily tied to anti-semitism & fascistic beliefs before the 1930’s and exposed themselves in their true goals by aligning with nazi Germany in their hopes to create an ethno-state

8. Central Soviet Authorities sent hundreds of thousands of tonnes of food to the Ukrainians from other regions and Stalin himself personally intervened to scold a regional Russian official objecting to sending aid and made him send food

9. The situation of hunger encompassed the entire union to varying degrees, including impacting ethnic Russians

10. The situation in Ukraine during 1932–1933 was not intentional or man-made by Joseph Stalin or the Central Soviet Authorities

11. The overwhelming and vast majority of countries on this planet do not recognize this situation as being a “genocide”

The idea of “holodomor” as an intentional or man-made genocide which specifically targeted Ukrainians and was used to crush Ukrainian nationalists fails on multiple fronts. Due to the nature of this perspective, I am without a doubt positive that words will be placed in my mouth alluding to me claiming it was utopian or something of that nature, but I would just like to categorically say that during this period some people did die. Though we’ve established that a large portion of the people who did die were people from the ex-landowning class who refused to work or actively pursued actions to sabotage the harvest and lessen the production of food, which was unfortunately largely successful, as it played a major role in creating this situation, that did result in some innocent people suffering and dying. In my view, the situation of 1932–1933 was tragic, but the false claims, notions, and the ensuing logic of the “holodomor-genocide” campaign should be vehemently rejected.

From Atlanta to Palestine: Liberation By Any Means Necessary

[Pictured: US and Israeli soldiers conduct joint urban warfare training near Jerusalem. Credit: Tsafrir Abayov/AP]

By Alex Ackerman

On May 31st, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Atlanta Police Department conducted a raid and arrested three Atlanta Solidarity Fund organizers. The activists’ work has supported those arrested for protesting against Cop City, a $90 million police training facility planned to be built in the Weelaunee Forest, known as one of the “four lungs” of Atlanta. In 2021, the Atlanta City Council voted to approve the plan to build Cop City, despite overwhelming popular opposition. In an eerie echo of history, on June 5th of this year, the council voted to approve the funding of Cop City, culminating in $67 million of taxpayers’ money. Hundreds of Atlanta residents spoke for more than 17 hours in opposition, yet the City Council aligned with the ruling class and the forces of capital. 

The “Stop Cop City” movement opposes the construction of this facility due to the combination of environmental harm it stands to inflict and the heightened threat of police violence against the surrounding neighborhoods, whose residents are primarily Black. The imminent destruction of 381 acres of forest to build a mock city for police training epitomizes the United States’ settler-colonial legacy of theft of indigenous life and land. Cop City would strengthen police tactics and expand resources for urban warfare, which law enforcement currently utilize across the country, particularly against Black people. The raid against the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, carried out by a heavily armed SWAT team, marks an escalation of state-sanctioned violence, as those in power work to maintain the hegemony of the capitalist state at any cost.

The recent raid against bail fund organizers highlights the encroaching presence of fascism and the broader militarization of police. In the United States, police violence serves as a continuation of settler violence waged against internally colonized populations, particularly Black and indigenous communities. In January of this year, queer and indigenous forest defender and “Stop Cop City” organizer Tortuguita was shot 57 times by Georgia state troopers, who were carrying out a similar militarized raid of the protestors’ encampment in the forest that is slated for destruction. This execution exemplifies the necessity of resisting Cop City, as such indiscriminate executions will only continue and be systematized with the completion of the facility. On a national level, this escalation of police violence is evidenced by the fact that police killed more people in 2022 than in any other year on record, with 1,241 people murdered, 97 percent of whom were killed in police shootings. Originating from slave patrols, police in their modern context function as an extension of the state to terrorize captive populations, preventing any potential disruption of the capitalist status quo. When any threats to this domination arise, the ruling class will expend all available resources to quell the opposition. For example, 42 protestors face domestic terrorism charges after Atlanta police stormed a music festival held by activists in the Weelaunee Forest. Additionally, three organizers face felony charges, with the potential of serving 20 years in prison, for the simple act of placing flyers that identified Tortuguita’s killer on mailboxes. These tactics of repression reflect a concerted effort to crush the growing dissent of the Stop Cop City movement. In this manner, the police raids in Atlanta, the murder of Tortuguita, and the charges of domestic terrorism demonstrate the lengths to which the capitalist class will go to preserve their hegemony, weaponizing the police as a cudgel against the masses. 

The United States is not the only settler-colonial, imperialist force heightening state-sanctioned violence. Across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) have carried out mass raids, indiscriminately arresting Palestinians and wreaking havoc through destruction, injury, and death in the dead of night. Specifically, occupation forces murdered two-year-old Mohammed Al-Tamimi, who succumbed to his wounds after being shot in the head. Furthermore, on Wednesday, June 7th, the IOF detained university student and ex-political prisoner Layan Kayed after ransacking her family home at dawn. The state-sanctioned inhumanity against the Palestinian people serves as a means of tormenting Palestinians, enforcing their subjugation by the Zionist entity with the aim of humiliation and demoralization. In essence, the cruelty is the point. These nightly raids comprise a fraction of the extensive violence enacted by the Israeli state and settlers, which are co-constitutive, whose goal is the complete eradication of Palestinians from the land. 

In addition to the raids, just this past week, Zionist occupation forces have assaulted Palestinians at apartheid checkpoints, uprooted more than 100 olive trees, demolished at least five family homes in East Jerusalem, and bombed a house in Ramallah. The IOF intentionally targeted and shot Palestinian journalists Mo’men Samreen and Rabie al-Munir, who were wearing their press uniforms, during a Ramallah raid. This attack is reminiscent of the deliberate and cold-blooded murder of Shireen Abu Akleh, another Palestinian journalist. These campaigns elucidate the reality of settler colonialism as an ongoing process of dispossession. Just as the United States arose as a European settler colony, so, too, does “Israel” share such colonial origins. In the monograph Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, Fayez A. Sayegh illustrates the alliance between British imperialism and Zionist colonialism:

“On the one hand, Britain, by utilizing Zionist influence in the United States and in France, would avert international rule in Palestine, on the pretext that a British-sponsored program of Zionist colonization required British rule in Palestine. On the other hand, by playing a catalytic role in bringing about the designation of Britain as the ruling Power in Palestine, Zionism would at last be able to embark upon the long-awaited program of large-scale colonization in the coveted territory under the auspices and protection of a Great power…For the Zionist settler-state, to be is to prepare and strive for territorial expansion.”

Though alliances have shifted with the emergence of the United States as the dominant imperialist power following the second World War, the primary contradiction of settler-colonialism persists. The existence of the Zionist state presupposes the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and the military aid supplied by the United States equips them with the resources to materially realize the decimation of Palestinian life and land. 

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From Atlanta to Palestine, the resistance against occupational forces is directly enmeshed in the material struggle for the land. As Frantz Fanon elucidates, “For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.” The struggles against Cop City and for the liberation of Palestine are mutually imbricated, as they both demonstrate state-sanctioned, settler-colonial violence by imperialist powers. Furthermore, the collaboration between the US and the Zionist state is the result of the impetus to further entrench their domination over colonized and working class people. 

Situated in the very site of the Stop Cop City movement, the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) illustrates this connection between the settler-colonial, imperialist powers. This joint project between Georgia State University and Georgia law enforcement facilitates international exchanges, subsidized by the Department of Justice, wherein the IOF and American police participate in cooperative training sessions. Not only do these settler-colonial states exchange tactics of warfare, but each also manufactures models of surveillance that the other can exploit against its own population. Specifically, the Atlanta Police Department created the Video Integration Center, a network of over 5,300 public and private cameras, after former Chief of Police George Turner visited “Israel” and observed the command and control center in Jerusalem. Such collaboration highlights the boomerang effect of colonialism, in which Palestine is used as a laboratory to develop technologies of surveillance and brutality that are imported into the imperial core and deployed against colonized and working class people. 

This boomerang effect remains far-reaching and reveals the interconnected nature of monopoly capitalism, imperialism, and settler-colonialism. Imperialist states and transnational corporations cooperate in a manner that serves their common interests: the perpetuation of their hegemony. Microsoft, for example, funded the startup Anyvision to produce technology utilizing thousands of cameras and facial recognition software to monitor hundreds of thousands of Palestinians across the West Bank and Jerusalem. Employed by Zionist occupation forces, this project directly infringes on Palestinians’ liberties and right to self-determination, especially when even a Facebook post criticizing “Israel” marks a Palestinian as a target. Anyvision’s executives stated themselves that Palestine was a “testing ground” for this technology. In an effort to dodge the backlash sparked by the revelation of Palestinian surveillance, Anyvision rebranded to Oosto. This technology now extends its reach internationally, utilized by both private companies, such as casinos and sporting stadiums, and the American government, specifically the Department of Homeland Security and Border Patrol. More recently, the emergence of Artificial Intelligence has engendered new ways by which surveillance technology can be wrought against the colonized. The Zionist entity has installed remote-controlled guns that use AI tracking systems to target Palestinians, with one gun located in the Aida refugee camp. Before long, such weaponry will also be used to target marginalized people and political organizers in the United States, such as those in Atlanta. 

The nature of monopoly capitalism is such that the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie entails cooperation between state governments and transnational corporations. Moreover, the alliance between the United States and “Israel” further speaks to their interdependence, characterized by their common weaponization of state-sanctioned violence. The United States funds the Zionist forces by appropriating $3.8 billion annually, the majority of which consists of military assistance. In return,  the Zionist entity functions as an extension of American imperial interests in the Middle East. Kwame Ture aptly describes the relationship between the US and the Zionist state in that “[t]he United States is the greatest dehumanizer in the world, and Israel is nothing but a finger of the United States of America.” In this manner, the shared tactics of state repression unite these settler-colonial, imperialist projects with the goal of solidifying their domination. The struggles in Atlanta and across Palestine, therefore, must be understood in the context of the international movement for decolonization and liberation from imperialism. 

Confronting the garish violence deployed by the capitalist state and settlers alike, resistance remains steadfast, despite the immense power and resources at the disposal of the settler imperialist empire. Organizers have engaged in a wide variety of actions in opposition to Cop City, including protests, juridical avenues, sabotage of police equipment and surveillance technology, and occupation of the forest through community encampments, which have been continuous targets of police raids. In a groundbreaking moment of direct action, forest defenders overtook a police outpost at the proposed building site, setting ablaze multiple vehicles, construction infrastructure, and a mobile surveillance tower. Pursuing avenues for political expression outside of bourgeois-controlled channels signals a shift in class consciousness and a growing understanding of the power of collective, organized action. 

Palestinians resist the occupation on a daily basis, incurring the wrath of Israeli forces yet prevailing nonetheless. The summer of 2021 saw the widespread mobilization of Palestinians across occupied territories, known as the Unity Intifada, resulting in global rallying cries for Palestinian liberation. This mass uprising evinced the revolutionary spirit of Palestinian people in their ongoing struggle for liberation. In September of the same year, six Palestinian political prisoners dug their way to freedom in an historic prison break, using six spoons as their only tools. Militant resistance continues to manifest across Palestine, illustrated by the Lion’s Den, an organization that gained momentum in 2022 after responding to heightened Zionist settler violence. These manifestations of popular revolt against state-sanctioned displacement and death explicate the will of the colonized in that no amount of brute military force can dissipate the steadfast conviction in the cause for liberation. 

To bring an end to settler-colonialism, imperialism, and all oppressive systems necessitates resistance by any means necessary. In an effort to maintain their illegitimate power, both settler-colonial entities criminalize this resistance with the aim of intimidating opposing forces into silence. The three Atlanta forest defenders arrested for flyering were detained in solitary confinement for multiple days, a purposefully torturous warning to every activist who dares defy the construction of Cop City. That these organizers faced legal retribution designates them as political prisoners subjected to persecution by the settler capitalist state. This form of state repression is rampant in Palestine, where over 1,000 political prisoners are incarcerated without charge or trial. In the face of this policy of administrative detention, detainees remain at the forefront of the struggle by organizing hunger strikes for their freedom. The deployment of this tactic across Atlanta and Palestine has only further intensified in recent years in response to growing resistance movements. 

The interconnected nature of these struggles highlights that resistance to imperialism requires solidarity across borders. The United States finances the Zionist occupation of Palestine, wherein weapons and technology are tested and subsequently imported back into the imperial core. Make no mistake: this fascist violence will not be contained only to Atlanta. If Cop City is built, the implications will reverberate not only across the country but also around the world. 

This escalation of state-sanctioned violence represents the fear of popular support and proliferating solidarity. Walter Rodney connects people’s political consciousness to their material conditions, explaining that “[s]o long as there is political power, so long as a people can be mobilized to use weapons, and so long as a society has the opportunity to define its own ideology and culture, then the people of that society have some control over their own destinies…” (255). If people take their destinies into their own hands, if people imagine a future free from capitalist and imperialist domination, these hegemons will crumble before our very eyes. Every martyr who has sacrificed their lives for the sake of this common cause against settler-colonialism and imperialism is not just a number, and they have not died in vain. The people with whom they shared a uniting goal uphold their memory by resisting every day until they achieve victory.  

Why Is Lula’s Government Environmentally Ambiguous?

[Photo credit: Grist / MAURO PIMENTEL / AFP via Getty Images]

By Diego Viana

On January 1st, 2023, when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva walked up the ramp of the presidential palace to begin his third term as President of Brazil, he was accompanied by eight people who represented the diversity of the country's population. Among them was Raoni Metuktire, chief and spokesperson of the Mẽbêngôkre people of Northern Brazil (popularly known as “Kayapó”), who achieved international fame in 1989, when rockstar Sting took him on a world tour in defense of the Amazon rainforest.

The display of diversity was a response to four years of a far-right, nationalist government that trampled over the rights of women, the LGBTQIA+ community, and indigenous peoples especially. The new government began in a context of shock, in the country and abroad, over former president Jair Bolsonaro's open support of illegal miners who invaded the lands of the Yanomami people in the Amazon, poisoned their streams with mercury, and suppressed any attempt at resistance. The federal government knew about the spread of famine and diseases among the Yanomami and openly chose not to act.

For many on the Left, seeing Lula and Raoni hold hands brought hope. First and foremost, it felt like a whiff of reconciliation, after approximately ten years of estrangement. Like other social movements, indigenous rights activists felt that the Brazilian Left had betrayed them and given its support to the old hegemonic project of occupying the Amazon through cattle rearing, mining, and building inefficient and expensive hydroelectric power plants. On the other hand, Lula's first stint as President (2003-2010) was successful in reducing Amazon deforestation, especially after worrisome data presented in 2002 revealed that deforestation had cleared over 28,000 square kilometers.

Largely due to the efforts of the Minister of Environment, activist Marina Silva, deforestation fell continuously until 2011 — three years after she left her post. The government also, in accordance with the 1988 Constitution, helped restore the rights of indigenous Brazilians over their historical lands. The military reacted grudgingly, alleging that this would undermine national sovereignty. The agribusiness sector, who had their eyes on large tracts of land in the region, in turn responded by creating a "milestone thesis," according to which only the lands indeed occupied by indigenous groups in 1988 should be recognized. The Supreme Court is yet to judge the validity of this thesis.

The same period was nonetheless a time when a series of ambitious engineering projects in the Amazon, first developed as part of a national-developmentalist ideology held by the military dictatorship in the 1970s, were put forward, so as to favor a handful of monopolistic companies and the advance of agribusiness. Among these projects, the Belo Monte dam, built between 2010 and 2016 at an estimated cost of 40 billion Brazilian reals (roughly $8 billion), is probably the most well-known and also the most deleterious. Against continuous and vocal opposition from environmentalists and indigenous activists, these projects were accelerated under Lula's successor, Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016), also from the Workers' Party. Around 2012 or 2013, the president of the Workers' Party, Gleisi Hoffman, who still occupies that post today, referred to the indigenous and environmental activists who were fighting against Belo Monte as “minorities with unrealistic ideological projects.”

Representatives of agribusiness progressively assumed key positions in Rousseff's government. This culminated in the appointment of a landowner, Senator Kátia Abreu, as Minister of Agriculture in 2015. Abreu, who owns multiple large farms in the central plains of Brazil, was by then already known to her critics as "Miss Deforestation," with Greenpeace and other NGOs awarding her a satirical golden chainsaw trophy in 2009. In 2013, during a cattle auction aimed at raising funds for the expansion of what was dubbed “private security” for farmers, meaning armed groups historically known for massacres of the local indigenous and landless peoples, she echoed the Wannsee Conference by promising to find a solution to “the indigenous question.” The episode is portrayed in detail in the film Martírio, directed by Vincent Carelli.

Unsurprisingly, soy producers interpreted Abreu’s appointment as free rein to invade Guarani-Kaiowá lands in the Center-Western state of Mato Grosso do Sul. They proceeded accordingly, engaging in their usual displays of gun violence and neglect of indigenous health tantamount to biological warfare. It is remarkable how these tactics mirror those of the colonizers from centuries past. Since the 16th century, land grabbers eliminated indigenous settlements by distributing clothes and toys infected with smallpox and other diseases.

The anti-environmental policies culminating in the construction of Belo Monte distanced much of the Left from what was still, by far, Brazil’s leading popular party. Marina Silva, who quit as Minister of the Environment in 2008, ran for president against Rousseff in 2010 and 2014. In the latter occasion, she nearly made it to the runoff election, but was held back to a large extent by a smear campaign conducted by her former party companions. She reacted by announcing her support for the right-wing candidate, Aécio Neves, in a move that might have cost her most of her political capital.

And yet, after the traumatic experience of the far Right in office, Silva and Lula were reunited. That was not all. Raoni's presence in Brasília, the capital, expressed the new government's commitment to advance indigenous leadership. The administration also created a new ministry specifically designed to advance indigenous land claims, directed by activist Sonia Guajajara. The Federal Police, for years complicit in the crimes of landowners and illegal miners, resumed their operations, destroying equipment and removing invaders, aided by the national Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama).

One might expect Lula’s administration to further reconcile with the indigenous community by abandoning big engineering projects and fighting agribusiness. They appeared to be starting these efforts in November, when President Lula attended the COP27 meeting in Egypt and declared that “Brazil is back.” He also brokered the return of German, Norwegian, British, and American investment in the Amazon Fund, which was created in 2008 under the management of the Brazilian National Development Bank (BNDES) to prevent deforestation and foster sustainable economic activities. The government's stated environmental goals involve reducing deforestation in the Amazon to zero, eliminating land conflicts, and rewriting the tax code to favor sustainable development.

This is where the picture begins to blur. The powerful landowners of the soy-exporting Central-West region have long pushed for the construction of a 580-mile long railway named “Ferrogrão,” which loosely translates to “grain rail.” It would cut through the Amazon rainforest, including protected areas like the Jamanxim National Park, slashing the cost and time of transporting the soybeans to the northern port of Belém. Another controversial project would allow for oil extraction in the “Equatorial Margin,” in deep waters near the estuary of the Amazonas river.

In March, President Lula's transportation minister, Renan Filho, expressed support for Ferrogrão, arguing that it reduces carbon emissions relative to the current use of trucks. Also in March, the president of Petrobras, Brazil’s enormous state-owned oil company, told investors that the Equatorial Margin project is a priority, though still in an early stage. The company expects $3 billion in investment. Other projects, such as a high-speed passenger rail line in the Northeast region, put to the test a passage of Lula's victory speech from October 13th of last year:

“We will show that it is possible to generate wealth without destroying nature”.

It is not entirely unsurprising that Lula's government is sending contradictory signals, trying to balance the demands of traditional, conservative pressure groups with the aspirations of social movements. There are both objective and subjective reasons for the mixed message. Firstly, it is hard to overstate the political power of agribusiness in Brazil. While the country has undergone a violent process of deindustrialization since the 1980s, agricultural and mining exports have become a financial lifeline for national accounts. As the influence of the manufacturing sector waned, that of landowners expanded. Productivity gains owed to the national research agency Embrapa’s development of a resilient soybean variant adapted to the tropics has turned vast zones of the previously untouched West into a powerhouse of soy and cattle.

Secondly, oil drilling is one of the few remaining areas where Brazil still invests in cutting-edge industrial technology. Sidelining the oil sector might prove suicidal for a government that draws much of its support from trade unions, as the fossil fuel sector is a stronghold of unionization in a deindustrializing country. The government also envisages oil production as a guarantor of energy security, until renewables become the main source of energy — most notably, biofuels and wind power in the Northeast.

Keep in mind that Lula's political profile has always been far from the radical leftist that both his conservative detractors and many of his left-wing supporters, in Brazil and abroad, tend to see. It would be kitsch, but not amiss, to describe him as a master of conciliation. As a union leader in the late 1970s, he excelled at negotiating deals between workers and employers. This shaped his politics for years to come.

At the negotiating table, Lula’s ultimate goal is always to reach a stable agreement. He has never been confrontational and is certainly not a revolutionary. While this attitude can certainly be criticized and faces the obvious limitation of objective conditions, recall that his much more confrontational successor, Dilma Rousseff, was sacked. This contrast should be read as an indication of what Lula's political ability, as one of the most important left-wing leaders alive, actually consists of. With his grasp of the stakes and possibilities of Brazilian politics, he acts as a manager of conflicts, identifying where advancement is and isn’t possible — frustrating as this might be for his grassroots diehards.

Beyond the individual figure of Lula, the ambiguity of the Workers' Party's record on indigenous rights and environmental policy offers a glimpse of the high political stakes in Brazil, a continent-sized country that houses half of the largest rainforest in the world and — at the same time — is one of the widest frontiers of agricultural expansion today. The interplay of political pressure and economic power from both sides of the dispute exposes the aporias and contradictions of 21st-century capitalism with unusual clarity.

To understand how the conflict plays out in Brazil today, look to the government. One expression of Lula's notorious ability for compromise and conciliation is his capacity to translate social conflicts into internal disputes between his ministers. This was the case between 2003 and 2010, and is now happening again. But is it possible to be a conciliatory leader in a country that derives much of its resources from predatory activities and still deliver on your promises to the environment and indigenous peoples?

That tension led to a rift which broke out in May of this year, when Ibama denied Petrobras the right to proceed with studies about the viability and safety of oil extraction from the Equatorial Margin, citing technical inconsistencies in the company's project. Petrobras' president, Jean Paul Prates, who is also a senator from the Workers' Party, regretted the loss of a “golden opportunity” to develop the Northern state of Amapá. The episode shows that, even within the government and the Left in general, many still consider fossil fuels a source of economic progress and think of environmentalism as a hurdle. Petrobras later announced it would revise its application, allegedly addressing the issues raised by Ibama.

All of this took place while Lula was attending the G7 meeting in Japan. Without mentioning the crisis among his supporters, the President structured his speech, given in Kyoto on May 19th, around the problems of oil dependency, war, and climate change. Here is the opening sentence:

“When G7 was created, in 1975, the main global crisis revolved around oil. Forty-eight years later, the world still has not managed to get rid of its dependency on fossil fuels.”

His main point was to rehash the demand presented last year at COP27: that the wealthiest countries should make good on their pledge, first expressed in 2009, to allocate $100 billion to climate action every year. To his domestic audience, in contrast, Lula tweeted allusively about "clean jobs" and "exploiting the Amazon's diversity" so that the region's 28 million people can "work and eat." The tweet was a masterpiece of ambiguity, sounding like a diplomatic dispatch in its capacity to express nothing at all.

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This was not the end of the story. On May 24th, Congress took two worrisome steps that many on the Left interpreted as capitulation, especially since the government presented little to no resistance. First, a commission approved an interim measure that, if carried out, would force changes in the structure of government, removing important agencies from the Environment, Agrarian Development and Indigenous Peoples ministries, such as the registry of rural properties, the administration of water resources, and the demarcation of indigenous lands. These agencies would be reassigned to ministries where the bureaucracy is controlled by the agribusiness sector, such as the agriculture ministry.

Later that day, the speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, Arthur Lira, passed a resolution that accelerated a vote about the milestone thesis, in such a way that NGOs, social movements and indigenous organizations would not have time to mount significant protests that have so far prevented the project from advancing. By voting on May 30th, Lira would also get ahead of the Supreme Court, who scheduled their own vote on the constitutionality of the rule for June 7th. A previous favorable decision by the House might predispose the Justices.

While these moves were a clear show of how powerful the agribusiness caucus remains, the episode as a whole elicited a swift response from civil society and Silva. The Minister made a speech warning of possible international backlash to the impending environmental destruction. She acknowledged that the country is going through a "difficult moment." Nevertheless, she promised resistance, saying that "good trees grow with stronger winds." Lula, in turn, tried to project calmness by saying — during an event at the Manufacturing Federation of São Paulo — that the political game was only just beginning. Subsequently, he summoned the ministers of the areas concerned for an emergency meeting.

It is hard to predict where these various conflicts are heading. But it is significant that the President has consistently stood by his environmental minister in both disputes. While it might be premature to declare that these episodes will result in victories for Silva, they certainly do not yet represent the defeat many on the Left are seeing.

It is worthwhile to contrast this episode to 2008, when — as Minister of the Environment — Silva lost a similar battle, which turned out to be consequential. Back then, Lula chose to side with Rousseff, the Minister of Mines and Energy at the time, by opting to proceed with the construction of the Belo Monte dam. The defeat led Silva, who was still a member of the Workers' Party, to leave for the Green Party and also resign from her post.

After 15 years, Silva’s position appears to be stronger. What’s changed? The answer may lie in the forces Silva brings with her into the government and, as a consequence, into its internal disputes. Silva's reconciliation with Lula represents a tentative alliance between the Workers’ Party and the emerging subset of “green capitalism,” backed by a powerful faction of the financial and corporate sector.

The emergence of green capitalism created a significant fault line within capital itself. While fossil fuels had become somewhat disgraced — at least until the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict —, “green” or “sustainable” capitalism has presented itself as the sole alternative to the archaic, unproductive model of extractivism and commodity export to which Brazil reverted in the last four decades.

More recently, development projects promising to boost the economy without destroying the Amazon have come to the fore. These projects hope to multiply the yields and jobs in the Northern regions of the country, which would thus become the new epicenter of economic growth, estimated to account for approximately 14% of the Brazilian gross domestic product. The prospect of new fields for investment with potentially high returns has attracted the attention of corporate and financial leaders from the more developed Southeast region of the country, particularly the two biggest cities and main financial centers, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. 

Brands such as Natura (cosmetics) and Raízen (biofuels) have become household names, brandishing their fame as sustainable and green. The owners of these companies, as well as bankers like Maria Alice Setúbal (Itaú bank) and the orthodox economist Eduardo Giannetti, have become Silva's main interlocutors in the last decade and helped create her party, Rede Sustentabilidade. When Lula and Silva joined forces in the presidential campaign last year, these actors were brought closer to the Workers' Party, to whom they are in principle hardly sympathetic.

For Lula, the most important gain lies in recovering part of the capitalist sector’s support, which was entirely lost after the chaotic economy of the Rousseff years. At least some of this has already taken place. In the 2018 election, big money in Brazil sided overwhelmingly with the far Right to elect Bolsonaro. In 2022, the divide was less clear-cut, with many representatives of the economic elite in São Paulo declaring their support for democracy in the abstract and occasionally for Lula explicitly.

If this is so, then the President is currently trying to accommodate not two, but three social forces. Within the capitalist setting, he has to mediate the tug of war between two forms of exploitation of the land: the nearly monocultural soy and meat complex on one hand and the technology- and capital-intensive bioeconomic project on the other. This is the local form of the global impasse of demanding to divest from fossil fuels while upholding an energy-intensive lifestyle based on growth and consumption.

It is hard to assess how much of this conflict is merely superficial, as major investors have no scruples in investing on both sides. It is also unclear to what extent we are looking at an attempt to greenwash capital as a whole. We should not forget that even the cleanest of large-scale economic activities must rely on such industries as lithium, cobalt, and rare-earth mining, or palm tree plantations, where working conditions are often degrading and the environmental record is hardly better than that of the fossil fuel industry.

Which brings us to the third actor: civil society, particularly social mobilization and environmental activism. With the aforementioned vectors of capitalism as a background, what strength do these groups have to achieve their policy goals? So far, there are signs that they are more capable of achieving their aims today than they were two decades ago.

Even during the dark times of far-right government, yearly assemblies of indigenous nations in Brasília called “Acampamento Terra Livre” (Free Land Camp) helped to attract attention to their plight and might have been able to freeze the far Right's project to limit their land rights to the territories occupied in 1988 when the Constitution was adopted (after a particularly harsh period of expulsions and persecution during the dictatorship). But this does not mean that they are strong enough to push the government toward more aggressive action in their defense. In May, the agriculture minister Carlos Fávaro, himself a soy producer and representative of agribusiness, expressed sympathy for the "milestone thesis" in an interview and suggested that the President might also have a favorable view. 

Also, the Landless Workers Movement (MST), one of the most important social movements in Brazil pushing for land reform, has established itself as a relevant producer of food products — particularly organic ones. In March, after less than three months of the new Lula government, the leader of MST, João Pedro Stédile, declared that initiatives for land reform were “too slow” and that the movement would increase pressure on Brasília to secure more incentives for family agriculture and organic crops.

A wave of mobilization, including the occupation of unproductive properties, was planned for the following months. Needless to say, the MST is the most maligned entity among the Right, as it represents the opposite kind of occupation of the territory. In May, far-right Congresspeople approved the creation of a commission to investigate the movement, with accusations that go as far as terrorism.

It is no wonder that Raoni's presence next to Lula had such an impact on public opinion and foreign commenters. Yet, politically, the gesture was as pragmatic as ever. Nevertheless, the playing field has clearly changed, apparently in favor of the environment, even if one is justified in suspecting high levels of greenwashing.

If we recognize that the climate crisis runs as two parallel conflicts — one between two brands of capitalism and, the other, against capital itself — it is remarkable that Lula is once again internalizing both struggles in the structures of his government. While the fundamental ambiguity at the core of his politics remains untouched, it is permeable to outside pressure (ie, social struggle), the ultimate source of political change.

Diego Viana is a Brazilian economic journalist. He earned his PhD in political philosophy from the University of São Paulo and covers Brazilian politics, economy, and social conflict.

Cornel West, the Pitfalls of Bourgeois Politics, and Forging a New Future Among the Rubble

By Colin Jenkins

On Monday, June 5th, Dr. Cornel West announced his bid to run for the presidency of the United States in 2024. Coming on the heels of two such runs by Bernie Sanders, as well as current runs by Marianne Williamson and Robert Kennedy, Jr. West is seeking to fill what many view as a “progressive” void on the grandest electoral stage. However, in contrast to the other three, West, a longtime member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), will shun the Democratic Party and run on a third-party ticket under the People’s Party.

West’s announcement came via his Twitter account, where he has one million followers, and has amassed over 18 million views, 47k likes, and 18k shares in a few days. The announcement coincided with an interview on Russell Brand’s Rumble livestream, Stay Free, and sparked a flurry of mainstream news reports over the last few days.

As the buzz continues to gain momentum, we should ask ourselves a few questions. What does this candidacy mean for working-class politics? Considering the recent betrayals by Bernie Sanders, can we expect anything different from West? Can any significant change come from participating in bourgeois elections? And, finally, should working-class people invest our time, energy, and resources to support West?

What does this mean for working-class politics?

While West’s candidacy could properly be described as the most potentially-overt, working-class (aka anti-capitalist, left-wing) endeavor we have seen on this stage since perhaps the 1960s, it remains to be seen how far he is willing to go. Outside of the Green Party, which has made strides to fill this void in recent years by including explicitly anti-capitalist wording in its national platform and running candidates such as Ajamu Baraka, there is no actual, organized, mainstream left in the United States. Socialist parties that are grounded in working-class emancipation exist, but they are typically small, fragmented, at constant war with one another, and subjected to mainstream censorship. The Green Party itself falls into the same traps, is scattered and unorganized due to a lack of resources, and has been chronically hamstrung by the capitalist duopoly’s (Democrats and Republicans) increasingly difficult standards for getting on ballots.

A major problem for authentic working-class politics in the US is the widespread misconception that Democrats and liberals are, in fact, “left wing.” This is an ahistorical belief that is ignorant to the formation, and subsequent historical developments, of political ideology. It is also an issue that has been historically unique to the US, as an international powerhouse birthed from the fascistic wombs of Native Genocide and chattel slavery and maintained by fascist tendencies embedded within the utter dominance of capital (the wealthy minority) over labor (the working majority). It goes without saying that the US government, in serving global capital, has thrived on exploiting not only much of the world, especially the Global South, vis-à-vis colonialism and imperialism, but also much of its own population, especially working-class peoples from historically-marginalized demographics (black, brown, women, migrants).

Thus, the country’s proclaimed “democracy,” or “republic,” has never actually been democratic in any genuine manner because self-determination and self-governance do not, and cannot, exist under capitalist modes of production. A “common good” can also not exist, which means that a so-called “social contract” cannot exist. These are realities that were firmly understood by the founders of the country, all of whom were privileged men of wealth hell-bent on breaking free from the confines of a monarchy while simultaneously arranging their own elaborate system of class dominance for centuries to come. The masses have been led to believe that the two capitalist/imperialist political parties which run the US exist in vastly different ideological wings, and that we have civic empowerment through the act of voting. However, this could not be further from the truth. And a West candidacy has the potential to destroy this illusion simply by showing the people what a genuine working-class (aka left-wing) candidate looks like – something most have never seen.

However, before we decide on where to stand with West’s campaign, there are many questions that need to be pondered. Because West’s track record is a mixed bag. There are aspects of his politics that are promising, just as there are aspects that are problematic. In light of the last few elections, we can’t help but ask ourselves if he will choose the same path as Bernie Sanders by building potentially radical momentum among the masses, only to pull the plug and herd us back to the Democrats? Or will he understand the importance of truly breaking from not only the capitalist duopoly, but also the dominant bourgeois (capitalist) institutions, narratives, and psychological tactics that have us all trapped in a tightly-manicured ideological space, inundated with delusions, paranoia, and hysteria pushed by capitalist media? Will he use this campaign in an ironically-masterful manner to steer us away from the electoral arena? And, if so, can he leave us with at least a foundation of formidable working-class organizations that are prepared for both the fascist wave and the demise of both capitalism and the United States as we know it?

the bernie lesson, the good and the bad of west, and will we ultimately be sold out again?

So, will West and his campaign ultimately herd us back to the Democratic Party? Anyone who has been involved in working-class politics – most notably, the Bernie Sanders campaigns – would likely ponder this question with fear, and understandably so. Sanders has been the closest thing we have had as a representative of the working class on a national stage in decades. Sanders’ first run in 2016 was especially electric in this regard, as he railed against capitalist greed, did not shy away from the “socialist” label, and generally maintained a solid campaign in support of the working-class masses, at least by US political standards. In terms of tangible results, Sanders spearheaded a formidable organizational following and gave millions of young adults the courage to call themselves “socialists,” even if perhaps many still did not know what this meant.

However, as beneficial as Sanders was to many, some noticed warning signs early. In a 2015-piece at Black Agenda Report, as the Sanders phenomenon began to gain steam, the late Bruce Dixon published a scathing critique, and what would come to be a prophetic warning, about Sanders serving as a “sheepdog” for the Democratic Party and its anointed candidate, Hillary Clinton. Unfazed by the momentum, Dixon brilliantly noted,

“Spoiler alert: we have seen the Bernie Sanders show before, and we know exactly how it ends. Bernie has zero likelihood of winning the Democratic nomination for president over Hillary Clinton. Bernie will lose, Hillary will win. When Bernie folds his tent in the summer of 2016, the money, the hopes and prayers, the year of activist zeal that folks put behind Bernie Sanders' either vanishes into thin air, or directly benefits the Hillary Clinton campaign.”

Dixon’s article was labeled as unnecessarily cynical by many at the time. However, to those who had followed electoral politics from a working-class perspective for some time, it was an accurate reflection of a decades-old tactic used by Democrats:

“1984 and 88 the sheepdog candidate was Jesse Jackson. In 92 it was California governor Jerry Brown. In 2000 and 2004 the designated sheepdog was Al Sharpton, and in 2008 it was Dennis Kucinich. This year it's Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. The function of the sheepdog candidate is to give left activists and voters a reason, however illusory, to believe there's a place of influence for them inside the Democratic party, if and only if the eventual Democratic nominee can win in November.”

In the end, Dixon’s warnings and predictions came to fruition. Sanders did, in fact, throw in the towel, publicly lauded Clinton, and asked his army of loyal followers to support her in the general election against Trump.

A much greater degree of skepticism followed Sanders’ second run in 2020. In a 2019 piece for Left Voice, Doug Greene exposed Sanders as a consistent supporter of US imperialism, opening with the following breakdown:

“On February 19, 2019, Vermont Senator and “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders announced his plans to run for the Democratic Party nomination for President. The announcement was met with cheers from large swaths of the American left who identify with his support for expanded labor rights, Medicare for All, free college, and a litany of other progressive issues. Those appear to be very compelling reasons to back the Sanders’ campaign. However, when it comes to American imperialism and war, Sanders may offer slightly different rhetoric than other Democratic candidates or Donald Trump, but his record proves him to be no alternative at all.”

Greene went on to provide detailed examples of Sanders’ support of the US war machine as a battering ram for global capital, which included backing the arms industry during the Reagan years, supporting sanctions and bombings during the Clinton years, supporting Bush’s initial response to the 9/11 attacks on the world trade center, providing lukewarm responses to Israel’s brutalization of Palestinians while refusing to support the BDS movement, and finally “by voting in favor of the military budget in 2009, 2010, and 2013, and supporting Obama’s military actions against Libya, sanctions against Russia, providing a billion dollars in aid to the far right Ukrainian government in 2014, and supported arming the Saudi Arabian monarchy to fight ISIS.”

Ultimately, despite being slighted by the Democrats, which pulled every backdoor maneuver possible to push their corporate candidate, Joe Biden, to the forefront, Sanders once again willingly stepped back, publicly proclaimed Biden to be worthy of the office, and asked everyone to support Biden. While Sanders had already lost a significant amount of support after his first betrayal, this second act of treachery seemed to be the final nail in his coffin, and legacy. Now, in retrospect, it is difficult for many of even his loyalist followers to see Sanders as anything other than what Bruce Dixon labeled him – a sheepdog who stole the immense time, energy, and resources that he received from millions and handed it over to the capitalist/imperialist Democratic Party, with no strings attached.

Which now brings us to Cornel West, who happened to be a vocal supporter of Sanders. To be fair, Marianne Williamson or Robert Kennedy, Jr. fit the profile of “sheepdog candidate” much more so than West does. West offers us much greater potential in terms of constructing an authentic, working-class campaign. But, still, we must ask ourselves, is he any different than Sanders?

In many ways, he is. First and foremost, West is not a career Senator of the US imperialist state and a direct surrogate of the Democratic Party. While West supported Sanders during the runups to both presidential elections, he ultimately had the integrity to “disobey” him by endorsing Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, in the 2016 general election. And while West, like many others, threw all of his weight behind the political ascendency of Barack Obama in 2008, he showed bravery and consistency by reconsidering this support shortly after Obama took office, publicly criticizing the country’s first black president for his Wall Street appointments, rampant drone strikes, record deportations, and unwillingness to take action for the struggling working-class masses, including the millions of black USAmericans who experienced no tangible benefits from the administration. In doing so, West faced a harsh backlash from much of the black community, who were understandably high on the symbolic victory and immense significance of seeing a black man in the oval office. Many viewed West’s criticisms of Obama as “petty jealousy,” despite the fact that they were perfectly consistent with West’s track record and represented a level of intellectual honesty that is rare in these times.

West has also remained steadfast in his support of the Palestinian people against the apartheid regime in Israel, something that typically amounts to political suicide in the United States (see the recent example of Robert Kennedy, Jr. quickly changing his tune on this very matter when pressured). And perhaps the most important difference is West’s willingness to shun the Democratic Party and run as a third-party candidate under the People’s Party. There has been much to say about why West chose this relatively-unknown party over the seemingly obvious choice of the Green Party, and that may be worthy of investigation, but the importance of this decision is more so in the blatant rejection of the Democrats, who have maintained a decades-long stranglehold on progressives, much of the working class, a large majority of the black community, and even some socialists, despite ongoing militarism, pro-corporate policies, and covert racism.

West has openly pushed for internationalism and has provided a more nuanced opinion on the situation between Russia and Ukraine, ultimately placing much of the blame on the United States and NATO, while calling for the disbandment of NATO. It is difficult to imagine someone like Bernie Sanders, who is a career Senator of the very state responsible for much of the strife in that region, thinking such things, much less saying them out loud. In fact, Sanders notably hopped on the “Russiagate” train following the 2016 election and has toed the Democratic party line since then.

However, in many ways, West is not different. In 2020, West joined other public intellectuals in supporting Biden as the “anti-fascist choice” in the general election against Trump, essentially going against his consistent opposition of both capitalist parties under the impression that Trump represented the greater threat. West described the battle between the two parties as “catastrophe (Trump and Republicans)” versus “disaster (Biden and Democrats)” and, while noting that Biden was not his first choice, ultimately proclaimed that “catastrophes are worse than disasters” in his official endorsement of Biden:

“There is a difference in neofascist catastrophe and neoliberal disaster,” he said. “Catastrophes are worse than disasters. Disasters have less scope and range regarding certain kinds of issues. I never want to downplay the least vulnerable in our society — our gay brothers, lesbian sisters, trans, Black poor, brown poor, Indigenous poor. They are more viciously attacked by the neofascists than the neoliberals. But the neoliberals capitulate to the attack. I would never say they’re identical, but I would say poor and working people are still getting crushed over and over again.”

On a Facebook post made on September 4, 2020, West shared a video link of his speech along with the explanation that, “An anti-fascist vote for Biden is in no way an affirmation of Neoliberal politics. In this sense, I agree with my brothers and sisters like Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Paul Street, and Bob Avakian.” Fifteen months earlier, however, in a Fox News appearance on The Ingraham Angle, West correctly referred to Biden as a “dye-in-the-wool, backward-looking neoliberal with little vision and even less courage” who “represents a past that hurt black people.”

West’s attempts to be a unifying force throughout his role as a public intellectual has led him to appear on platforms that many view as problematic, especially in a time when overt fascism is converging around various forms of bigotry, including Fox News, Joe Rogan’s podcast, Real Time with Bill Maher, and the former founder of the Proud Boys, Gavin McInnes’s, show, to name a few. There are also questions regarding the new People’s Party itself, which has faced criticisms about its ineffective organizing and willingness to include right-wing populists in a big-tent effort to focus on common struggles. This approach has led to some internal strife, rooted mainly in race dynamics, where some black members have felt understandably uneasy about the inclusion of working-class whites who exhibit racist and xenophobic undertones. It is unclear how substantial this problem is within the party but, at a time when identity politics has largely overshadowed and obstructed working-class unity, it is safe to assume it is potentially significant. Nevertheless, West has obviously embraced the party, being a founding member himself, enough to run as its presidential candidate.

West has openly supported the American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) movement, which may not seem problematic on the surface, as the call for reparations for black descendants of US slavery is a righteous and worthy cause. But, in doing so, West has ignored a perceived betrayal of Pan-African principles by the organization, which excludes most of the African diaspora throughout the world to embrace a peculiarly pro-US orientation. In a nuanced critique of the organization, Broderick Dunlap tells us,

“There is no question that Black folks in the United States are entitled to reparations for slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and centuries of racist violence. There is also no question that the United States has caused insurmountable harm to Africans outside of the US. To deny that is to deny history and reality. Understanding that the demand for reparations is an attempt to hold America accountable for harm done to Black folks, excluding Black folks from the conversation contradicts what ADOS claims to be trying to achieve. Besides the impracticality of trying to distinguish between people who are deemed ADOS and other diasporic Africans and biracial Black folks, Africans are socialized and racialized the same as Black folks born in the US. This contradiction is the primary reason it would serve ADOS leaders to adopt Black internationalist principles, so they can build a movement ‘informed by and engaged with real-world struggles.’”

Perhaps the most problematic aspect of West’s politics, though, has been his willingness to express anti-communist talking points. This willingness stems from the red-scare era of US history, when anyone and everyone who merely “sympathized” with socialism and communism were ostracized, exiled, imprisoned, and even murdered by the US government. And while such fears have certainly dissipated since the end of the Cold War and disbandment of the USSR, public intellectuals with large platforms and tenures at major universities are seemingly still held to this standard, with Noam Chomsky being the most notable of this bunch.

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West’s longtime association with Michael Harrington’s DSA also represents an in-between, anti-communist position between capitalism and socialism that is often indistinguishable from mid-20th century US liberals. From this standpoint, folks like West and Sanders can safely deliver vague socialist talking points while serving as social democrats, but are ultimately limited by their peculiar faith in US democracy and reformism, which becomes even more problematic by their anti-communism.

West’s constant yearning for unity among the people, while certainly commendable and needed, can and has led to extending an open hand to elements of the working class who are likely irredeemable, if not simply dangerous, due to their fierce bigotry, intense xenophobia, and blatant misogyny. And his unwillingness to commit to forceful politics over vague intellectualism has led him to make problematic assessments, one of which included a tweet from 2011, in which he oddly proclaimed Ronald Reagan as “a freedom fighter in terms of supporting our Jewish bros & sis in the Soviet Union & opposing vicious forms of communism.”

Granted, this tweet was made as part of a series of tweets that addressed Barack Obama’s public adoration of Reagan – ironically stating “this glorification of Ronald Reagan is really a sad commentary on our lack of historical consciousness” and concluding that Obama was “chasing the cheap fantasy of bipartisanship.” But, nonetheless, it provides a good example on how the weight of anti-communism, which seems to be holding West hostage, can be a potentially blinding force during a time when it, as a direct product of Nazism and fascism, needs to be snuffed out once and for all. In the end, such a blind spot is not only a massive liability, but also seemingly suggests the potential to drift back into the hands of the Democratic Party.

Can any significant change come from participating in bourgeois elections?

Oddly enough, if any significant change comes from this campaign, it will exist outside the realm of electoral politics. We would be foolish to believe that A) West can win, and B) even if he did win, he would have the power to single-handedly enact policies that would benefit the working-class masses. While this may sound defeatist, it is not. Because the reality is the US government and its entire political system are not only completely controlled by the will of capital, but were deliberately set up by the founders for this very reason: “to protect the opulent minority from the toiling majority,” to paraphrase James Madison.

Does this mean the working class has never won meaningful concessions from the government, via electoral politics? Of course not. Bourgeois democracy, despite its deliberate orientation as a force of capital, has represented a battleground between the class interests of the capitalist minority and the working-class majority in the past. In fact, during times of capitalist crises, the system has responded in ways that have resulted in very real concessions for the working class. In the US, the most notable period that included such concessions came during the 1930s, when “New Deal” policies were implemented in response to the Great Depression. Throughout the 20th century, Keynesianism represented the primary macroeconomic policy direction deployed by the government in its management of capital, using high tax rates on corporations and the wealthy to fund governmental programs designed to both supplement capitalist growth and soften the systemic parasitism of that growth. And, in the 1960s, coming on the heels of radical uprisings throughout the country — most notably, the antiwar and Civil Rights movements — “Great Society” policies were created to provide more assistance and opportunities to working people.

It should be noted, though, that the underlying reasons for many of these concessions were tactical, as they have been made to prevent a radical or revolutionary break from the dominant capitalist/imperialist system. In other words, they were just as much forms of appeasement issued by the capitalist class, for the sake of their own survival, as they were hard-fought gains won by the working class, for our betterment. Many gains were the direct result of organized labor struggles, but were also made possible by the US military’s brutalization and looting campaigns of the Global South via colonialism and imperialism. They were also products of the US’s advantageous post-world-war-two positioning, the Marshall Plan, and the fact that US infrastructure was virtually untouched by the ravages of the war. And much of these gains excluded black and brown members of the US working class, as well as women, all of whom continued to be relegated to hyper-exploited positions within the working class, often confined to internal colonies and subjected to compounded social and material forms of oppression. These inconsistencies, as well as the inability of these reforms to affect the modes of production, left such legislation vulnerable to both circumvention and rollbacks.

It is important to include context behind these concessions because we must understand, first and foremost, that all of capitalist society rests upon a fundamental class struggle between those who own and control the means of production (capitalists) and those of us whose only chance for survival is to sell our labor to those owners (workers). With this understanding, we can see that societal progression, or regression, is the result of this dialectical battle. The sobering reality for the working class is that capitalists always have the upper hand because they have claimed ownership of the means we use to function and survive. And, while capitalist governments like that of the United States have awarded us some rights, and have occasionally given us some concessions, they are ultimately tools that are wielded by the capitalist class to maintain their dominance over us.

Thus, bourgeois (capitalist) democracy is a brilliant scheme for the (capitalist) ruling class because it gives off the appearance of freedom via constitutional documents, legal systems, voting, and a variety of supposed civil/human rights. Beneath the facade are extremely strict power dynamics represented primarily by these class distinctions (again, the minority class who own/control property and the means of production overseeing the majority class whose only basis of survival is our labor). The working-class masses are repressed and controlled in nearly every way possible within this arrangement. Injustice is a daily part of our lives that we learn to accept to survive the drudgery. 

In some instances, where gross injustices occur, we are awarded the "right" to appeal to the systems that exist on the surface, but this "right" always places the burden of proof on us. Therefore, since we have no time, money, energy, and resources to dedicate to these processes (because we're all working our lives away while living paychecks to paychecks), it is incredibly rare for any sort of justice to materialize against a powerful state/class that has seemingly unlimited amounts of time, money, energy, and resources to oppose us. In this never-ending, losing scenario, the ruling class and all of their institutions (including schools and media) can simply say: "we gave you inalienable rights and encourage you to use them if you feel wronged," knowing very well these rights, and the systems put in place to exercise them, are nothing but manufactured dead ends hidden behind virtual freeways.

This systemic understanding brings us back to the question at hand: can significant change come from bourgeois elections? If we were to look at the history of the US, we would surely conclude that it can, as noted above. However, when looking at capitalism as the regressive system that it now is — due to its fascistic foundation of claiming “private property” as a social relationship for capital to employ (exploit) labor; its birth from trillions of dollars of “free capital” generated by chattel slavery; its tendency to centralize wealth and, thus, political/social/governmental power; its cancer-like need for never-ending growth; its bloodlust for expansion and theft via war; and its array of elements that are riddled with internal contradictions which only worsen over time due to perpetually falling rates of profit — we should understand that it has reached a very late stage. In other words, the concessions that were made in the past are, quite frankly, no longer possible. The formation of an industrialized — albeit, mostly white — “middle class” was an anomaly only made possible by the unique stages of historical development that existed in the 20th century.

The capitalist coup called “neoliberalism” put an end to all of that. And it did so during a period of time (1970s/80s) when falling rates of profit were decimating the Keynesian model, the gold standard was removed, monopoly capitalism became entrenched, corporate governance (what Mussolini himself referred to as “fascism”) was cemented, and globalization and financialization became prominent factors in wealth extraction. Pro-capitalists will claim all of these things are “artificial mutations” of “true, free-market” capitalism, caused by “too much government involvement,” but the truth is they are mature stages of capitalism that were inevitable, absent a socialist revolution. Clever terms like “cronyism” and “corporatism” merely refer to natural developments caused by capital accumulation (and, conversely, widespread dispossession) and the concentration of wealth and power that has allowed capitalists to gain control of all aspects of society, including the entirety of government.

The sobering lesson from all of this is that any meaningful concessions from the capitalist class (via the electoral arena) will likely never materialize during capitalism’s late stages. The system has become so cannibalistic and riddled with crises that it has been feeding on itself for at least the past forty years. The industrialized “middle class,” or aristocracy of labor, has been all but destroyed, small capitalists are being devoured by big capitalists, and the economic system has become fully intertwined with the government. Thus, we are already decades deep into a very real transition from covert fascism to overt fascism, as the system scrambles to shield itself from crises after crises.

During this process, capitalism has been propped up by so many tricks and tactics coming from the capitalist state — corporate subsidies, quantitative easing (“printing money”), constant meddling by the federal reserve, etc. — that it is too far gone to respond to the needs of the people. These tricks and tactics are necessary for the system’s survival; or, in more precise terms, necessary to protect and maintain the wealth of the capitalist minority, by further degrading the working-class majority and perpetually “kicking the can down the road.” But, this road comes to an end. And we are fast approaching that end.

The only thing that capitalists and their state are concerned with now is protecting themselves from the imminent collapse, which means we’re already well into a significant fascist transition. The fact that unfathomable amounts of money are being thrown at military and police during a time when tent cities, homelessness, and drug overdoses are taking over every major city, and working people everywhere cannot afford rent or food, tells us that the US government, which is a direct manifestation of the capitalist class, is unable to see past its own interests to avert this collapse. So, it has chosen to dig in and protect the increasingly wealthy minority from the increasingly desperate majority.

West will not have a chance to win the election, and will likely not even capture a miniscule percentage of the vote. He may not even make the ballots in most states. And, even worse yet, if he were to win the election in some dream scenario and assume “the highest office in the land,” nothing substantial would come from it. Because the system was set up to represent wealth (or capital), not people. And the days of meaningful capitalist concessions are long gone.

Despite this, West and his campaign should approach the election with the intent to win, because that is the way to build genuine momentum. But, in this process, the focus must be on building a new world from the ravages of the inevitable collapse. This is where our time, energy, and resources should be, and should have been for decades now, but we’ve been too enamored with bourgeois politics to begin that transition. However, it’s not too late to regroup and refocus. And West’s campaign, like Bernie’s campaigns, can be a catalyst for this shift. Bernie sold out, chose his career, and failed. West can succeed in serving as a launching pad, for us, if he chooses the correct path.

Should working-class people support West’s campaign?

Working-class people should support West’s campaign, if he chooses the right path. We need to divest from bourgeois politics and the capitalist system. A campaign like West’s, which will ironically occur in the bourgeois electoral arena, can be a major catalyst in this divestment. So, what do we need to understand, and what will he need to do, to stay on the right path?

1. We need to understand that electoral politics are both a time suck and a dead end if the goal is to win elections, assume office, and enact legislation. Therefore, campaigns should only be used to educate, agitate, and form counter-hegemonic and liberatory institutions and organizations.

2. We need to understand that building working-class consciousness is the primary need at this moment in time. Challenging capitalist propaganda from mainstream media, providing knowledge and historical context, and offering reality-based narratives as a counter to the extreme paranoia and delusion pushed by capitalist media is the way to do this.

3. We need to understand that authentic working-class politics (aka a left-wing) must be built from the ground-up in the United States. It must initially be anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and rooted in the working-class struggle against the capitalist ruling class. In this process, any remnants of anti-communism, which are almost always products of fear and/or ignorance, must be ironed out.

4. We need to understand that liberal identity politics and culture wars are being disseminated by the ruling class to whip up hysteria among the masses, cause widespread confusion and misdirected rage, and keep the working class not only further divided, but constantly at each other’s throats. We must challenge this head-on by keeping the focus on class struggle while, at the same time, not allowing for bigoted elements to fester, as they are mere remnants of capitalist culture and naturally anti-working-class.

5. We need to understand that fascism is already here in the US, and it has always been here for many of the hyper-marginalized members of the working class. This understanding includes the knowledge that the capitalist system has become fully intertwined with the capitalist government and is being protected by both capitalist political parties. In other words, Democrats are not anti-fascist; they are just as much a part of the transition to overt fascism as Republicans are.

6. We need to understand that formidable working-class institutions and organizations need to be built NOW, because time is running out. These organization and institutions must exist completely outside the realm of electoral politics, which means they must be organized, funded, and maintained by us, with no ties to, or relationships with, bourgeois politicians, the capitalist parties, or the US government.

What will West and his campaign need to do to make this happen?

1. West and his campaign must understand that the purpose of this run is not to win, assume office, and enact legislation. It is also not to build a political party to do these things moving forward. If those things happen to occur as a corollary development, then fine, but the primary goal should be to use this platform to radicalize (aka educate) and organize the US working class.

2. West and his campaign must use this platform to promote working-class consciousness. This can be done by attacking mainstream (capitalist) narratives head-on, offering counter narratives based in reality, and deconstructing the hysteria and paranoia being disseminated by media.

3. West and his campaign must show what a true left looks like. This means that he must be unapologetically radical by exposing the roots of our problems, which are not things like immigration, inflation, and “corruption,” but rather are capitalist modes and arrangements of production, imperialism, and the bourgeois state, which has been intentionally constructed to shield these roots. He should expect red baiting and take ownership of it without fear of being “unelectable,” which is easy to do if you are not ultimately concerned with winning an election. He should be openly socialist. He should be clear about what socialism actually is — the people owning and controlling the means that are used to sustain society. He should be clear that the welfare state is not socialism, but rather a necessity of capitalism. He should be clear that social democracy is merely a softer version of capitalism that simply cannot be maintained because of the predatory nature of the capitalist class in this late stage. Using very clear wording, even technical wording, goes against West’s oratory style, but he must make an effort to include such deliberate terminology along with his traditionally soulful approach.

4. West and his campaign need to keep the focus on class struggle by avoiding the inevitable pitfalls of liberal identity politics and culture wars. This does not mean ignoring the social realities of marginalized identities, which of course are naturally intertwined with class oppression, but rather by constantly keeping the focus on the basis of class. This is something West has done exceptionally well in the past and there is no reason why this should not continue moving forward on this particular stage.

5. West and his campaign need to express the reality that fascism is already here in the United States and is in a transitional period from being covert (in that it has always existed in the margins as well as in the foundation of both capitalism and the United States) to overt. He must explain that fascism is capitalism in decay. He must explain that the exponential funding of military and police by the capitalist class and its government will naturally come home to roost on the entirety of the US working class. And he must publicly rid himself of the belief that Democrats are allies in the fight against fascism.

6. West and his campaign must use this platform to build actual organizations and institutions, on the ground, throughout the country, funded and maintained by the people. These organizations and institutions must be constucted to last far beyond this campaign, and must be built with the understanding that they will never work with bourgeois institutions, including the government and political parties owned by the capitalist class. These organizations should exist to meet the most basic needs of the people: food programs, clinics, self-defense, political education, ideological development, etc. all rooted in a working-class culture formed in direct contrast to bourgeois culture.

A means to an end?

From a dialectical perspective, Dr. Cornel West’s announcement to run for president of the US is a seemingly positive development for the working-class masses, in our struggle against the forces of capital. This is not necessarily saying much, as we have had very little reason to pay attention to, let alone participate in, bourgeois elections for quite some time. Thus, this is not positive because West has any chance of winning or assuming office — he does not — but because it provides us the opportunity to finally break away from the stranglehold of bourgeois politics and the two capitalist/imperialist political parties. We should seek to use this campaign as a way to build our own proletariat infrastructure throughout the country — community centers, clinics, food programs, networks, schools, etc. — something that will be needed as both the capitalist system and US government continue their rapid descent into overt fascism.

As West throws down the gauntlet against what he, and many others, see(s) as systemic ills, he will find himself stuck between two vastly different worlds: one where the masses of people desperately need, and I believe are ready for, an unapologetically radical candidate from the left; and another where dominant society and its very real mechanisms of capitalist violence and oppression will simply not allow this need to be delivered. The best thing West can do in this moment is dedicate himself to serving this need. Whether or not he and his campaign choose to use this opportunity as such a catalyst remains to be seen.

By all signs, Cornel West is a social democrat. And, history tells us we should be very wary of the compromising nature of social democrats. So, we should be skeptical. We should continue working on our own efforts and projects to construct authentic, working-class organizations and institutions. We should pace ourselves and not throw too much energy, physical or emotional, behind West and his campaign. But we should also give this a chance to serve our needs — use it as a potential tool whose frequency can increase if we find it on the right path, or decrease and even discarded if it becomes clear that it will not be fruitful. We should attempt to steer it in the right direction because it is the best option we have been given on this type of platform, if only for the fact that it exists outside the Democratic Party.

Our present reality is dismal. Our immediate future is dystopian. Capitalism is rotting away and taking us with it. Fascism is here. The capitalist government and all of its institutions are clearly responding by choosing an increasingly-predatory and barbaric direction. We must forge our own way, dig ourselves in, and prepare for the absolute worst, while building our own institutions that show the promise of a better world. West and his campaign are a potential tool in starting to build this future.

How the Capitalist Class Censors Dissenting Voices Via the US Government: The Case of TikTok and the Midwestern Marx Institute

By Carlos Garrido, Noah Krachvik, and Edward Liger Smith

​The First Amendment of the United States Constitution says that “Congress shall make no law… Abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” Yet in 2023 the United States is attempting to extradite Julian Assange because he published proof of U.S. civilian executions in Iraq, systematic torture at Guantanamo Bay, and the DNC rigging of the 2016 primary election against Democratic Socialist candidate Bernie Sanders, which is itself a violation of the Democratic rights enshrined in the American Constitution. The U.S., with its supposed constitutional guarantee of free speech and media, has indicted four leaders from the African People's Socialist Party (APSP) and Uhuru Movement on flimsy claims of “advancing Russian propaganda,” simply because they challenge the narrative of the imperialist financial cartels and war mongers. Even if we look only at these examples, how can we say there is freedom of speech or press in our modern age of neoliberal capitalist-imperialism? The Political establishment has shown that it will crack down on anyone who shares information that is damaging to its foreign policy interests, and most social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter, owned by wealthy shareholders like Mark Zuckerberg and others, have proven not only to be impressionable to the influence of US intelligence agencies like the FBI and other institutions of the ruling class, but (after the release of the Twitter files) directly steered by them at times.

No social media platform is more tightly linked to the intelligence community, NATO, or US State Department than the incredibly popular Tik Tok app. In 2020 the Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis, within a few months of work, amassed 375,000 Tik Tok followers when the app was still owned and operated by the Beijing, China based company Bytedance, a testament to the people-oriented algorithms of Bytedance that allow any content that is genuinely popular to go “viral”, and a stark contrast to the money-centered way our Western software works. Unfortunately, that year the Biden administration would force ByteDance to hand over management of their U.S. servers to the Texas-based company ORACLE, a company with intimate ties to the CIA. No sooner had news of this forced change of control happened would the Institute have its account, which received millions of views on many videos containing factual information that challenged the narratives of the US war machine, banned from the platform. A second account that we started when the first one was wiped quickly accumulated 200,000 followers, and right when a growth parallel to the previous account was evident, the second account would also be banned. This blatant censorship would continue without explanation as the Institute had five more accounts banned by Tik Tok after they started to quickly gain popularity. It was later revealed that Oracle had hired a litany of former US State Department and Intelligence Operatives to manage the content for Tik Tok, as well as a few NATO executives for good measure. Tik Tok said that they deleted 320,000 “Russian accounts” which included many American socialist organizers who have never been associated with Russia in any way, such as an account ran by an organization of socialist organizers called “The Vanguard” that had over 100,000 followers when it was deleted.

Countless hours of our work that helped inform millions of people were stripped from the internet with little to no explanation, while truly hateful and incendiary accounts were allowed to remain up. Our institute's co-founder and editor, Eddie Liger Smith, was doxxed twice during this period, having his phone number, job, private social media profiles, and location shared by two creators working in tandem to attack Midwestern Marx. Both responsible accounts, Cbass429 and ThatDaneshGuy, were allowed to remain up until recently, when Cbass429 was finally banned for a completely unrelated incident. However, ThatDaneshGuy still has 1.6 million followers on Tik Tok, where he consistently calls for his political opposition to be fired from their jobs. ThatDaneshGuy called for his followers to contact Eddie’s place of employment and ask for his firing, claiming that it was deserved because of Eddie’s stance against US backed regime change efforts in Iran, which Danesh conflated with support for the Iranian Government executing people. Similar campaigns to these have been waged against other Institute co-founder Carlos Garrido and Institute contributor Kayla Popuchet, the latter who, like Eddie Smith, was fired from their place of employment because of the work they do for the Institute. On Tik Tok, the voices which speak the truth and champion peace are quickly banned, while those who harass and deceive people with imperialist lies are upheld by the algorithms.

Since the transfer of power to US entities, Tik Tok users have been fed a steady diet of neoliberal and imperialist propaganda, while critical voices are systematically being censored by the app’s content moderation staff. Neoliberal commentators like Philip Defranco are never made to retract errors, such as when Phil claimed that Russia blew up the Nord Stream Pipeline, despite all the evidence at the time pointing towards a Biden Administration sabotage. Award-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh later proved this to be the case in his detailed report on the incident. Despite all this, Defranco never had his account suspended or removed for posting this misinformation, and his video remains on the platform to this day, as do his comments accusing anyone who suggested the US might have sabotaged the pipeline of believing “Putin propaganda.” The Midwestern Marx Institute had predicted that Biden sabotaged the pipeline before it was revealed in detail and was unsurprisingly attacked and reported for doing so.

Censorship, clearly, does not emerge out of a void. And so, we must ask the question: what are the social conditions which make censorship necessary? Who does the censored speech threaten? Who does it uplift? In whose interests is censorship carried out? On whose side is truth - a category our moribund imperialist era, dominated by postmodern philosophical irrationalism, scoffs at? The liberal ideal of freedom of press can never be actualized so long as the press is owned by a small ruling class, by corporations and shareholders who profit from war and the exploitation of the mass of people. They will always censor dissent and push coverage that suits their foreign and domestic interests. This has been the case throughout history, and the modern Western ruling class is, in this regard, no different from any other. It lies, it manipulates, it misinforms to the best of its ability. It needs a population that can view its actions as ethical and just, and so it must spend countless hours and dollars papering over every crack that appears in the facade its media apparatus has built around the minds of the people.

A revolving door between the media, intelligence agencies, NATO, and the U.S. State Department is only the logical result of a society based on capitalist relations of production, where capitalists not only control the production of material goods, but the production of information as well. The ruling class sees the media, including social media, as a vital part of the societal superstructure that is needed to maintain and reproduce the relations of production at the core of society. In other words, they see it as an important tool to convince you that capitalism and U.S. Imperialism are good and eternal. Under these social relations, the constitutional right to free speech and media have always been exclusive - it excludes all speech and media which substantially challenges the dominant forms of societal intercourse. The freedom of speech and media is, therefore, actually the freedom of pro-capitalist speech and media. V. I. Lenin’s description of the media in capitalist society rings truer than ever in the 2020s, it is dominated by an “atmosphere of lies and deception in the name of the ‘freedom and equality’ of capital, equality of the starved and the overfed.” Any absolute statements about the freedom of the press must be followed by the Leninist question: “freedom of the press… for which class?” The capitalist media’s freedom to deceive the masses in their defense of the existing order is in contradiction to the masses’ interests in searching for and publicizing the truth.

Those who keep our people misinformed and ignorant, who have made their life’s purpose to attack truth-tellers, do so under the insidiously categorized guise of ‘combating misinformation.’ In their topsy-turvy invented reality, as Michael Parenti called it, they posit themselves as the champions of truth and free speech – a paradox as laughable as a vegan butcher. Anyone with the courage to fight for the freedom to speak truth to power should unite in fighting this blatant attack on our constitutional rights. We must stand against this censorship from our ruling class, those who are the worst purveyors of misinformation imaginable, and who now, in the backwards-world name of ‘fighting misinformation,’ censor the truth. 

There is ‘fighting misinformation,’ and there is fighting misinformation. The divide of class interests between the ruling class of the West, and the good, honest, hard-working people who live under their regime could not be clearer. One side finds it necessary to invent a reality, under the guise of fighting the ‘mis-informers,’ that paints the world in a disfigured backwardness, the other side, on the contrary, is sick to death of being lied to by the media machine, and their screams of “fake news” grow more and more common every day. The American people not only deserve the truth, but absolutely need its existence to find commonality in the world, stability, and the ability to pursue lives of meaning and dignity. They are tired of the private monopolization of media that has erased the ability for regular working people to speak on an equal playing field; they feel their voices drowned in a sea of well-funded lies by MSNBC, Fox News, and the rest of them. This struggle has crystallized into a fight over The Truth itself.

And so, if fighting misinformation is to be done, we must begin by asking: Where was the crackdown on the media outlets who got 4.5 million people killed by claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Where are the crackdowns on those who are lying us into a third World War with nuclear-armed powers? Where are the crackdowns against those who play the drums for those marching humanity towards nuclear Armageddon? Why is it only the outlets calling for peace that are dubbed “Putin propagandists” and wiped from the internet? Where are the crackdowns on the blood-thirsty warmongers? The answer is: they are nowhere, and they will continue to be nowhere while giant corporate financial interests control the lives and realities of regular Americans. Truth is censored and lies are proliferated because it serves the interests of the ruling capitalist class, and only through the overthrow of this class can a real freedom of thought, not an abstract empty freedom to deceive the people, be achieved. Until then, all we can have – it seems – is a media and culture that elevates the most odious imperialist voices while suppressing those who seek truth and peace. Nonetheless, the fight must continue, and with the dignity that comes from the incessant speaking of truth to power, the enemies of humanity will fall.

Let us remember the words of Julian Assange, whom the imperialists have rotting in a prison because of his sterling bravery… because he is a true journalist and not a lapdog of the powerful: “if wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by TRUTH.”

Carlos L. Garrido is a philosophy teacher at Southern Illinois University, editor at the Midwestern Marx Institute, and author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism and Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview.

Noah Khrachvik is a working class organizer, teacher, and editor at the Midwestern Marx Institute. 

Edward Liger Smith is an American political scientist and editor at the Midwestern Marx Institute.

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

By Gus Griffin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Capitalists Return to the Past in an Effort to Gorge Themselves on the Fruits of Child Labor

[Pictured: Children working as miners in Pennsylvania. (AP Photo)]

By Conrad Dremel

Republished from Red Clarion.

Over the past few years, the countries of the imperial core — the United States and its junior partners in Canada and NATO —  have seen a startling reversal in what was once championed as a shining achievement of liberal democracy: child labor laws. History textbooks detailing the horrors of early industrial capitalism are replete with the soot-stained faces of child laborers. A relic, they claim, of a grim past, long since abandoned by today’s “enlightened” capitalists. Gone are the days of Dickensian chimney sweeps and adolescent black lung, banished to the dustbin of history by progressive reforms that ensured children could go to school and play and live carefree lives, unshackled from the horrors of exploitation.

This, of course, has always been a myth. Child labor persists both in the brutal exploitation in modern colonies, where children labor for little or no pay to produce chocolate and cobalt, as well as within the great imperialist countries themselves, where carve-outs for child agricultural workers were written into law from the very beginning. Even at its best, child labor has merely been constrained by the law, never abolished. And “its best” is quickly decaying as the empire falls apart and struggles to maintain its workforce. Those practices which were finally extinguished didn’t cease through the benevolence of the capitalists; the working class fought to keep our children out of the mines and the packing plants. This wasn’t a gift, but a hard-won victory.

When the COVID-19 pandemic first emerged, it quickly altered the landscape of every economy on the planet. Production was paused, consumption plummeted, workers stayed home to protect their lives, and in many places, the state stepped in to keep everyone afloat. Unemployment benefits and health coverage were expanded in even the most committed laissez-faire strongholds, such as the U.S. Measures such as eviction protection, aid payments, tax refunds and more were deemed necessary to prevent the entire working class from instantly collapsing into abject poverty and seeking more radical changes to the economic system. Top members of the Democratic Party have bragged that one measure, the expanded child tax credit, cut childhood poverty in the U.S. in half. Yet that truthful statement is undercut by an obvious revelation: this entire time, the state had been sitting on a tool to eliminate child poverty, used it only partially, and then, months later, opted to reverse the measure, thereby doubling childhood poverty.

Throughout the beginning stages of the ongoing pandemic, workforce participation stagnated. Workers were laid off en masse; some stayed home to protect themselves and their communities, others retired early, still more became unable to work due to disability, or simply died. The capitalists groaned and quailed, crying to their state and media cronies that “no one wants to work anymore!” Measures to protect these workers from both economic devastation and physical damage were instated only to be quickly reversed, replaced with harsh punishments for prioritizing their health. The pandemic was swiftly erased from public consciousness, meager reparations were rescinded, and unemployment began to fall, as desperate workers returned to the workforce en masse in order to make ends meet.

Still, the capitalists were not content. Unsatisfied with merely multiplying their wealth throughout this crisis, they demanded more. More production, more profit, more exploitation. So many workers dropped out of the labor market permanently, and so many are too sick to work on any given day, that the workforce availability declined by an estimated eight billion working hours in 2022 alone. This number is not captured in official unemployment metrics, but it is certainly noticed by the capitalists, who demand every hour of labor they can get. They demand not only an astonishingly high number of total working hours to keep their production running, but a massive reserve army of labor to undermine the negotiating position of existing workers. When they complain of a “tight labor market,” their grievance is not that there are no workers to be found, but rather that there are insufficient extra workers on the market to drive down wages. The capitalists need us to be desperate.

So with a shrinking population of adults willing and able to work, where do these predators turn their fangs? Our children. They have lobbied successfully for the loosening of child labor regulations -– easing restrictions on minimum age, hours worked, schooling requirements, sectors of employment, the need for parental permission, and even the mere enforcement of existing standards. These measures have been championed and signed into law by politicians across the bourgeois political spectrum. Across every capitalist state, every bourgeois party demands only one thing: the constant flow of profit, even at the expense of our youth.

The rising tide of efforts to expand the legal exploitation of children pales in comparison to the capitalists’ flagrant disregard for both law and decency, with violations of child labor law in the U.S. nearly quadrupling since 2015, and growing every year. Children as young as ten are working with dangerous machinery in car factories and handling caustic chemicals in meat-packing plants. This willingness to flout their own standards of morality while violating  labor laws has always been exacerbated by periods of economic strain : the last huge spike in violations happened during the 2008 financial disaster. In every crisis, the most despicable vultures swoop in and pick clean every carcass they can find. There is ample profit to be made by siphoning the blood of the most despondent workers. 

This combined assault on child labor protections — the degradation of regulations and the violations of existing ones — is so egregious that it cannot escape the notice of even pro-capitalist institutions. The Department of Labor has recently been investigating child labor violations by PSSI and Hyundai. The PSSI case in particular has generated so much public outcry because of its sheer brutality: children were expected to use caustic chemicals to clean industrial blades, leading directly to the injury of three minors. These injuries represent only a droplet in the rising tide of blood spilt by capitalists in their pursuit of profit. The investigations by federal agencies are themselves laughably pathetic; they carry no criminal charges, only fines. To the capitalist, this is only the cost of doing this depraved business. Still, the cost seems too much for them to bear, hence their push to scrap regulations altogether. Well-funded and highly-coordinated capitalist organizations, like Americans for Prosperity and the Chamber of Commerce have drafted and lobbied for bills toward this heinous end. So far, 10 U.S. states have proposed or enacted bills that expand working hours, lower working age requirements, lift restrictions on hazardous job duties, or even grant immunity to employers for workplace injuries or death. For children. The primary aim of this legislative blitz is to protect capitalists from legal action for the death and mutilation of children. The capitalists are enriched and empowered by their shamelessness, greed, and depravity. In their vampiric frenzy, not even children are spared the bloodlust.

The working class must act immediately to defeat this reanimated monstrosity. Child labor laws did not spring out of nowhere. They were the capitalists’ begrudging concession to a mobilized, militant labor movement. Our forebears told the bosses in no uncertain terms: release our children from this despicable practice, pay us enough to support our families, or you will not get our labor. United in solidarity, workers beat back the specter of child labor and other abuses, securing some level of dignity and power for our class. But their fight was incomplete. It was exclusionary, leaving gaps where the hyper-exploitation of racialized and colonized children could continue unabated. It was impermanent, leaving capitalists the profit stream to claw back all reforms. It was unambitious, unwilling to imagine and fight for a society built on true liberation. And now this old beast is now roaring back with a vengeance. This time, we must win not only the battle, but the war.

Engels and the Second Foundation of Marxism

By John Bellamy Foster

Republished from Monthly Review.

On the opening page of The Return of Nature, I referred to the “second foundation” of socialist thought as follows:

For socialist theory as for liberal analysis—and for Western science and culture in general—the notion of the conquest of nature and of human exemption from natural laws has for centuries been a major trope, reflecting the systematic alienation of nature. Society and nature were often treated dualistically as two entirely distinct realms, justifying the expropriation of nature, and with it the exploitation of the larger human population. However, various left thinkers, many of them within the natural sciences, constituting a kind of second foundation of critical thought, and others in the arts rebelled against this narrow conception of human progress, and in the process generated a wider dialectic of ecology and a deeper materialism that questioned the environmental as well as social depredations of capitalist society. [1]

The origins and development of this second foundation of critical thought in materialist philosophy and the natural sciences and how this affected the development of socialism and ecology constituted the central story told in The Return of Nature. The initial challenge confronting such an analysis was to explain how historical materialism, in the dominant twentieth-century conception in the West, had come to be understood as strictly confined to the social sciences and humanities, where it was divorced from any genuine materialist dialectic, since cut off from natural science and the natural-physical world as a whole.

Explorations of the dialectics of nature by Frederick Engels along with Marxian contributions to natural science were commonly treated in the Western Marxist philosophical tradition as if they simply did not exist. The natural-physical world was seen within the dominant view of Marxism in the West as outside the domain of historical materialism. The realm of biophysical existence was thus ceded to a natural science that was viewed as inherently positivist in orientation. This was so much the case that, with the rise of the environmental movement in the 1960s, it never occurred to those on the left who wrongly charged that Marxism had contributed little or nothing to the development of ecological analysis, to look beyond the social sciences to socialist contributions in the natural sciences, out of which today’s systems ecology arose. The irony was that not only had socialism engaged with the natural environment, but it had, in fact, from the very beginning played a pivotal role in the development of a critical ecology within science and materialist philosophy.

Part of the problem was that the entire tradition of “dialectical materialism,” associated with Soviet Marxism in particular, was declared by the Western Marxist philosophical tradition to be erected on false foundations. The dialectics of nature, as opposed to the dialectics of society, it was claimed, needed to be rejected since it lacked an identical subject-object and thus absolute reflexivity. But in rejecting the dialectics of nature, Western Marxism was compelled to absent itself from the natural world almost entirely, except insofar as it could be said to impinge on human psychology or human nature or to have an indirect impact via technology. This then encouraged a shift toward a more idealist interpretation of Marxism. [2]

To be sure, the classical Marxism of Karl Marx and Engels in the mid-nineteenth century had its origin in the critique of social science. As Engels wrote, “classical political economy” was “the social science of the bourgeoisie” and, as such, the enemy of socialism. [3] Marx’s critique of classical political economy was aimed at uncovering the “hidden abode” of class-based exploitation and expropriation on which the capitalist mode of production was based. [4] It was this critique, therefore, that constituted the initial foundation of Marxism. But from the first, the materialist conception of history in critical social science was inextricably tied to the materialist conception of nature in natural science. No coherent critique of political economy was possible without exploring the actual biophysical conditions of production associated with what Marx called the “universal metabolism of nature.” [5]

Human beings themselves were seen by Marx as corporeal beings, and thus objective beings, with their objects outside of themselves. There was, then, in the end, only a “single science” looked at “from two sides,” those of natural history and human history. [6] It was necessary, therefore, to go beyond philosophy and social science to engage in the critique of bourgeois natural science as well. Indeed, as a theoretical method, the philosophy of praxis could not be confined to the realm of social sciences and humanities, that is, it could not be divorced from natural science, without undermining its overall critique.

The fact that natural science and social science, nature and society, are bound inextricably together in any attempt to confront the current mode of production and its consequences is dramatically demonstrated to us today by the current Anthropocene Epoch of geological history, in which capitalism is generating an “anthropogenic rift” in the biogeochemical cycles of the Earth System, endangering humanity along with innumerable other species. [7] In these circumstances, the role of Marxian ecology in understanding our current environmental predicament is of crucial importance. It is here that the second foundation of Marxian theory within materialist philosophy and natural science proves to be indispensable to the development of a revolutionary praxis.

The Second Foundation

Marx and Engels did not see science, or what they called “scientific socialism,” in terms of the narrow conceptions of science that prevail in our day, but rather in the broader sense of Wissenschaft, which brought together all rational inquiries founded on reason. [8] Reason as science had its highest manifestation in the application of dialectics, which Engels defined in the Dialectics of Nature as “the science of the general laws of all motion,” contending “that its laws must be valid just as much for motion in nature and human history as for the motion of thought.” [9] Indeed, a consistent materialist dialectic was not possible on the basis of social science alone, since human production and human action occurred “in society, in the world and in nature.” [10]

Engagement with natural science became a more urgent necessity for Marx and Engels as their work proceeded. Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, in Marx’s words, was “the basis in natural science for our view.” Engels depicted Darwin as the leading “dialectical” thinker within natural history. [11] Revolutions in natural science, such as Justus von Liebig’s soil chemistry, allowed Marx to develop his theory of metabolic rift. The emergence of anthropology as a result of the revolution in ethnological time pulled Marx and Engels into this new realm having to do with prehistory. [12] They incorporated the new revolution in thermodynamics within physics into their political-economic critique.

However, there were also negative developments that compelled the founders of historical materialism beginning in the 1860s to shift their research more in the direction of natural science, and the second foundation of Marxist theory. The defeat of the 1848 revolutions in Germany in particular had encouraged the growth of a mechanistic philosophy of science in a line extending from the later Ludwig Feuerbach to thinkers such as Ludwig Büchner, Carl Vogt, and Jacob Moleschott. At the same time, Friedrich Albert Lange had introduced neo-Kantianism as a dualist philosophical perspective aimed at circumscribing a one-sided mechanical materialism, which was then separated off from an equally one-sided social/ideal realm. Coupled with this was the spread in Germany of irrationalism in the philosophies of Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann, who saw materialism and dialectics, principally G. W. F. Hegel and Marx, as the enemy. [13] Eugen Dühring entered into all of this with an eclectic mix of neo-Kantian, pseudoscientific, and positivistic ideas that targeted Marx. Agnosticism in Britain, in the work of figures like Thomas Huxley and John Tyndall, was closely identified with neo-Kantianism. Social Darwinism first arose in this period principally as an attack on historical materialism in the work of the German zoologist Oscar Schmidt. As a result of these various attacks on materialism and dialectics, both Marx and Engels were pulled into the task of articulating a dialectics of nature consistent with a socialist conception of the metabolism of humanity and nature, in what was later variously referred to as dialectical materialism, dialectical naturalism, and “dialectical organicism.” [14]

Engels’s dialectical naturalism was first advanced in a comprehensive form in his influential work, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (better known as Anti-Dühring), completed in 1878. His wider, unfinished work, written in the 1870s and ’80s, Dialectics of Nature, was not published in German and Russian until 1925, and had to await another decade and a half before it was to appear in English translation. Nevertheless, Engels’s central argument, that “Nature is the proof of dialectics,” was clear from the start. Translated into today’s terms, it meant Ecology is the proof of dialectics. [15]

“Dialectics,” in its materialist form, was, in Engels’s words, “a method found of explaining…‘knowing’ by…‘being,’” rather than “‘being’ by…‘knowing.’” It “interprets things and concepts in their interdependence, in their interaction and the consequent changes, in their emergence, development, and demise.” Viewed in this way, “nature,” he wrote, “does not move in the eternal oneness of a perpetually recurring circle, but [goes] through a real evolution.” Thus, “the whole of nature accessible to us forms a system, an interconnected totality of bodies, and by bodies here we understand all material existences extending from stars to atoms.… It is precisely [their] mutual reaction that creates motion.” [16] Nature as matter and motion (transformed energy) generates, within the course of natural history, new, emergent forms or integrated levels of material existence that arise out of, and yet remain dependent on the physical world as a whole. Human society is, in this sense, an emergent form of the universal metabolism of nature with its own specific laws. [17]

Engels has often been criticized on the left for his three dialectical “laws,” more properly referred to today as general ontological principles, that he presented in his works on the dialectics of nature: (1) the law of the transformation of quantity into quality, and vice versa; (2) the law of the identity or unity of opposites; and (3) the law of the negation of the negation. However, the first of these ontological principles has been long recognized within science through the concept of phase change, while the second is the main way in which dialectics is commonly approached in philosophy and social science through the concept of contradiction, or “the incompatible development of different elements within the same relation.” [18] Most criticisms thus focus on the third of these laws, the negation of the negation, which is often simply dismissed. [19]

Nevertheless, it is important to understand these three laws or ontological principles in terms of a dialectics of emergence. For Engels, everything is motion, attraction and repulsion, contingency, and development, leading to new forms or levels of organization in nature and human history. The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa refers to material transformation and transcendence at the most general level. Given such tendencies, arising out of the transformation of matter and motion (or energy) in organic and inorganic processes, contradictions or incompatible elements naturally ensue, leading to change as development, evolution, or emergence, the negation of the negation.

We can see the significance of this in Engels’s approach to geology. He treated geology and paleontology as “the history of the development of the organic world as a whole,” which practically came into being as a developed field of scientific research only in the late eighteenth century. The world that geology describes exists even “in the absence of human beings.” [20] Nonetheless, geological history can be approached dialectically, since “the whole of geology is a set of negated negations” resulting in massive transformations on the surface of the planet that can be discerned by means of careful scientific investigation. Engels questioned Georges Cuvier’s crucial emphasis on geological “revolutions” or catastrophes as contaminated by religious dogma, and argued that Charles Lyell, with his gradualism, had introduced a more scientific approach to geology. But Lyell himself had made the error of “conceiving the forces at work on the earth as constant, both in quantity and quality,” so that “the cooling of the earth” associated with ice ages “does not exist for him.” In this view, there are no “negated negations” and no major, permanent changes. [21]

There was, for Engels, no constant, non-contingent, inconsequential process of earth surface formation in line with Lyell’s uniformitarianism. Massive transformations of the earth at certain intervals in its history, as emphasized by Cuvier, were not to be denied. Some of these criticisms (and appreciations) of both Cuvier and Lyell, advanced by Engels, were later developed in the twentieth century by the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who used precisely these antinomies to explain the origins of the theory of punctuated equilibrium within the evolutionary process. [22]

Anti-Dühring, because of its sheer range—addressing philosophy, natural science, and social science—became one of the most influential works of its time. It helped spark the development of left materialism in science, which was later given a further boost by the publication of Dialectics of Nature. This facilitated major ecological discoveries, especially in the Soviet Union in the first two decades after the revolution, and in the British Isles, where a tradition emerged drawing on both Darwin and Marx. Among the major figures in Britain were Marx’s friend, and Darwin and Huxley’s protégé, E. Ray Lankester, and later leading red scientists and related cultural figures such as J. D. Bernal, J. B. S. Haldane, Joseph Needham, Lancelot Hogben, Hyman Levy, Christopher Caudwell, V. Gordon Childe, Benjamin Farrington, George Thomson, and Jack Lindsay. [23] Along with Engels’s works on science, the red scientists drew heavily on V. I. Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. [24] Although frequently overlooked in treatments of Marxism, this tradition included the most prominent Marxist thinkers in Britain of the day, all of whom were connected with materialist philosophy and natural science. Their work sunk deep roots in natural science, the influence of which has extended to our own time.

Marxist scientists and materialist philosophers were the target of purges in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and in the anticommunist attacks in Britain and the United States in the 1950s. The suppression of red science, which seemed almost to disappear for a time, had deep ramifications for Marxism as a whole. Since the leading representatives of the Western Marxist philosophical tradition rejected outright materialism apart from economic/class relations—a position closely associated with their rejection of the dialectics of nature—they had almost nothing of substance to contribute to the ecological critique. This led to the myth that socialism as a whole had failed in this area. [25] To be sure, critical theorists such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno referred to the “domination of nature,” by which they chiefly meant the role played by instrumental rationality and technology in contemporary capitalist society, as well as the repressive effects of this on human nature. However, the material-ecological world itself was characteristically absent from their analysis. Hence, the dialectical connections associated with human social production and its metabolism with the larger environment were also absent. [26]

What has become clear with the growth of Marxian ecology since the 1980s is the close connection between the critique of economic alienation and ecological alienation under capitalism. Recognition that these constitute the two sides of the historical-materialist critique has become increasingly pronounced in the context of the planetary ecological crisis. All of this calls for the reunification of Marxian theory, symbolized by the return of Engels, and an attempt to grapple with the universal metabolism of nature. There is an urgent necessity to transcend the current alienated form of the capitalist social metabolism with its destructive mediation of the human relation to nature through generalized commodity production.

Engels and the Roots of the Anthropocene

In the twenty-first century we live in an age of planetary ecological peril, represented by the anthropogenic rift in the Earth System. This is associated with the advent, around 1950, of the Anthropocene Epoch in the geological time scale, which succeeded the Holocene Epoch of the last 11,700 years. Capitalism is presently in the process of crossing planetary boundaries that have defined the earth as a safe place for humanity. If all geological history, as Engels said, is the history of “negated negations,” today the Holocene—the geological epoch in which human civilization arose and prospered—is being negated by the system of capital accumulation, leading to the Anthropocene crisis of today.

If we were to look back to the earliest overarching recognition of the ecological predicament imposed by capitalist society, we could not do better than to turn to Engels’s famous treatment of this in “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” in the Dialectics of Nature. Here, Engels declared that human beings, as social beings, do not “rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature—but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.” Thus, for each presumed “victory” of humanity over the natural world of which we are a part, “nature takes its revenge on us,” leading to widespread natural/ecological devastations—not simply in the ancient and medieval worlds, but increasingly, and on a far larger scale, in the world wrought by capitalism and colonialism. [27]

Failure to understand what Engels called “our oneness with nature” and the need to conform to its laws is itself a product of our historical class relations. Here the capitalist domination of nature becomes a means of dominating human beings. The result is that history moves in a spiral, exhibiting both progress and retrogression. [28] Accumulation of capital is accompanied by the accumulation of catastrophe. Moreover, under such an anarchic system—as opposed to a socialist and planned society controlled by the associated producers—a fully rational pursuit of science becomes impossible, and substantive irrationalism prevails even in the midst of the advance of formal technological rationality. Pointing to soil degradation, deforestation, floods, desertification, species extinction, epidemics, and the squandering of natural resources, Marx and Engels indicated that the current mode of production was generating widening Earth catastrophes associated with the uncontrolled “interference with the traditional course of nature.” [29] Engels’s global analysis of nature’s “revenge” was thus at one with Marx’s theory of metabolic rift.

“The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” was first published in 1896 in the German Social Democratic journal Die Neue Zeit shortly after Engels’s death. Although it is difficult to chart its influence outside of Marxism, it is remarkable how close Engels’s analysis was to the ideas put forward not long after by Lankester in 1905 in his Romanes Lecture at Oxford, “Nature and Man” (later retitled “Nature’s Insurgent Son”), and his related 1904 article “Nature’s Revenges: The Sleeping Sickness,” both of which were reprinted in his 1911 The Kingdom of Man. [30] We do not know if Lankester read Engels’s article, though he was fluent in German, communicated with social democratic circles, and would have been deeply interested in Engels’s analysis in this respect, which overlapped in many ways with his own. [31] As a close friend of Marx and an acquaintance of Engels, a strong materialist, and a critic of capitalism (who had read Marx’s Capital), as well as the leading figure in British zoology at the time, Lankester’s radical ecological critique was necessarily related to historical materialism. In referring to the Kingdom of Man, Lankester sought to describe a new period in Earth history in which human beings were now the main force affecting the natural world, with the result that they increasingly must take responsibility for it. He presciently highlighted the ecological consequences of a capitalist economic system engaged in the unheeding destruction of nature, ultimately undermining humanity itself.

In “Nature’s Revenges,” Lankester referred to the human-social being as “the disturber of Nature,” including being the instigator through global capitalism and finance of all epidemics in animals and humans, which could be traced largely to social, and primarily commercial, causes, including the “mixing up of incompatibles from all parts of the globe.” [32] Under these circumstances, humanity had no choice but to control its production and its relation to nature, relying on science and superseding the narrow dictates of capital accumulation, thus ushering in a coevolutionary development. Human society was on a permanent ecological knife-edge in its relation to the natural world, which Lankester described somewhat ironically as the “Kingdom of Man.” Such “effacement of nature by man” not only undermined living species, but also threatened civilization and human existence itself. [33] The only answer was for social humanity to take responsibility for its relations to the natural world, in conformity with natural laws and principles of sustainability, in opposition to the capitalist mode.

Today, resistance to the notion of the Anthropocene Epoch is evident in many of those on the left, who, while largely oblivious of the scientific discussion, are horrified by the implications of a dominant Anthropos. This seems, in their minds, to point to an exaggerated humanism or anthropocentrism in the understanding of the physical world, and to a downplaying of the social causes of the geological climacteric that we are now witnessing. Yet, from a geological and Earth System perspective, the issues are clear. By crossing certain critical thresholds or planetary boundaries, the global system of capital accumulation has generated quantitative changes that represent a qualitative transformation in the Earth System, shifting it from the Holocene Epoch in the Geologic Time Scale to the Anthropocene Epoch, where anthropogenic rather than nonanthropogenic factors are for the first time the major drivers of Earth System change, and in which human civilization and human existence are currently imperiled. [34]

From a historical and dialectical perspective, the planetary ecological contradictions that we are now witnessing have been long coming. The issue of a new “Kingdom of Man,” which was also at the same time subject to the revenge of nature or nature’s revenges, can be traced back to Engels and Lankester. Such views were related to the conception of nature as a dialectical totality mediated by processes of evolutionary change, in which humanity was increasingly playing a dominant role. It was in the Soviet Union during the 1920s that the notion of what was called the Anthropogene Period in geological history, connected to the disruption of the biosphere as defined by V. I. Vernadsky, was introduced by the geologist Aleksei Pavlov. The word Anthropocene itself, as an alternative to Anthropogene, first appeared in English in the early 1970s in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. [35] It was by uniting the awareness of ecological destruction with the concept of ecosystem, the theory of the origins of life, and the analysis of the biosphere—all products of dialectical science—that Rachel Carson was able to warn the world population of the full scale of the planetary peril confronting them in her lecture introducing the concept of ecology to the general public. Moreover, it was socialist scientists who pointed to a decisive change in the human relation to the entire Earth System, or “ecosphere,” beginning around 1945. [36]

More recently, we can point to the breakthrough in the treatment of the Anthropocene Epoch in Earth history represented by the geologist Carles Soriano. The conception of the Anthropocene Epoch in the Geologic Time Scale derives from the recognition that for the first time in the more than four billion years of Earth history, a living species, Homo sapiens, is the primary driver of Earth System change. This revelation of the human role in geological change was thus the product both of the emergence of Earth System science and the growing perception of an “anthropogenic rift,” undermining the earth as a safe home for humanity. It has its theoretical roots in the concept of metabolism, which formed the basis for both the notion of ecosystem (first introduced by Lankester’s student, the British ecologist Arthur Tansley, a Fabian-style socialist) and the later concept of the Earth System metabolism. [37]

Once human society has emerged as the primary force in Earth System change due to the scale of production, inaugurating the Anthropocene Epoch, this becomes unalterable—barring the collapse of industrial civilization in an Anthropocene extinction event. Like it or not, industrial humanity is now permanently responsible, on pain of its own extinction, for limiting and controlling its effects on the Earth System. Nevertheless, if capitalism by the mid-twentieth century has ushered in a planetary ecological rift, the possibility still remains of the transformation of the human metabolism with nature in conformity with natural laws in a society devoted to substantive equality and ecological sustainability.

Rooting his analysis in materialist dialectics, Soriano proposed in Geologica Acta in 2020 that the first geological age of the Anthropocene, following the current geological age of the Meghalayan (the last age of the Holocene Epoch), be designated as the Capitalian, in recognition of the destructive relation that capitalism is now playing with respect to the entire Earth System, creating a habitability crisis for humanity. [38] The Capitalian Age stands for the fact that behind the current Anthropocene crisis lies the capitalist mode of production. Environmental sociologists independently issued a similar proposal shortly after, suggesting that the new geological age associated with the advent of the Anthropocene Epoch should be called the Capitalinian, and that the future geological age toward which humanity must now necessarily strive—introducing a new climacteric surmounting the planetary emergency—should be named the Communian, after community, communal, and commons. [39] If all of geological history, according to Engels, is one of “negating negations,” leading to the Earth System crisis of today, we are now presented with the choice between the negation of the material conditions of human society itself to which capitalism is leading us, or else the negation of the capitalist mode of production (and thus of the present Capitalian/Capitalinian Age). What is essential in these circumstances is the creation of a new, socially mediated geological age of the Communian (the negation of the negation), embodying a restored, developed, and sustainable metabolism of humanity and the earth.

Dialectics, Engels argued, encompassed interaction, contradiction, and emergence, and was a general expression of the evolving totality of material things and of motion (matter and energy), applicable to all of existence. From this standpoint, it was possible to understand more fully the material world around us, providing the basis of a grounded scientific socialism. In the past, Marxist scholarship with respect to Engels’s forays into dialectics of nature has focused simply on the question of the rejection or acceptance of his general views, leaving out the more positive challenge of exploring their significance for the philosophy of praxis. Today, we need to go beyond this stale debate to recognize, in line with the neglected second foundation of Marxism within science and materialist philosophy, that the dialectics of nature offers new insights and methods for the understanding of our time, precisely because its approach is a unified one, bridging the great gulf that has emerged in the ecology of praxis.

As Soriano explains, “most natural sciences” today—if “spontaneously” and without full awareness—take “a dialectic and materialist epistemic view in understanding the natural side of the Earth System and of the Anthropocene crisis. From the social side of the problem, however, the epistemic view adopted by most natural scientists turns into an positivist and idealist one,” deferring to mainstream liberal social science and philosophy. [40] Meanwhile, the so-called Western Marxist tradition, while holding on to the notion of dialectics, has applied this only in ways related to the identical subject-object of the human historical realm. The tendency here has been to portray natural science as primarily positivistic, while seeing no relation between nature and dialectics. In this way, the two realms of dialectical thought in the natural sciences and the social sciences have remained separate, making a unified praxis based on reason as science impossible. This can only be overcome by reunifying Marxism’s first foundation in the critique of bourgeois political economy with its second foundation in the critique of mechanistic science.

Writing in the tradition of Engels, Soriano states: “Nature is dialectical too, and the dialectics of Nature is not merely a theoretical construct but a construct that is only possible because Nature is inherently so. Otherwise, how is it possible to ‘construct’ dialectics if it is not yet in the studied object, which is the ultimate source of any empirical perception?” [41] Today, the dialectics of nature must be reunited with the dialectics of society, the critique of political economy with the ecological critique of capitalism. This requires that the second foundation of Marxism be accorded a central place in the philosophy of praxis. The human relation to the earth lies in the balance.

Postscript: Did Engels Break with Marx on Metabolism?

Kohei Saito’s important work Marx in the Anthropocene: Toward the Idea of Degrowth Communism, published by Cambridge University Press in 2023, has raised the critical question of whether Engels departed fundamentally from Marx’s analysis of social metabolism. [42] Saito charges that Engels, in editing the third volume of Capital, from the original draft in Marx’s Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865, removed the adjective “natural” and thus in effect the term “natural metabolism” from Marx’s passage on the “irreparable rift.” [43] This is then backed up by a criticism of Engels for allegedly “rejecting Liebig’s concept of metabolism.” On these bases, Saito argues that Engels was largely responsible for the suppression of Marx’s social metabolism/metabolic rift argument, helping “to make Marx’s ecology invisible,” with disastrous effects for later Marxist theory. The reason given for Engels’s alleged transgression in this respect is that his notion of the dialectics of nature represented an approach to nature/natural science that was in direct conflict with Marx’s social-metabolic analysis. “It was precisely due to this difference” between Marx’s and Engels’s approaches to dialectics and ecology, we are told, “that the concept of metabolism and its ecological implication were marginalized throughout the 20th century.” [44]

It is true that the term “natural metabolism” was missing from the passage on the “irreparable rift” in Engels’s edition of volume 3 of Capital. (This same term is also absent in Ben Fowkes’s recent English-language translation of Marx’s original manuscript for volume 3 in the Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865.) Hence, instead of capitalism leading to “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself,” as conveyed in Engels’s edition of third volume of Capital, the same passage should read, in Saito’s rendering: “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process between social metabolism and natural metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of the soil.” (An even more literal translation would be “an irreparable rift in the context of the social and natural metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of the soil.”) Engels, in editing the third volume of Capital, thus removed the term “natural metabolism,” though “natural” still remains in the rest of the sentence. In Saito’s view, this omission reflected a “profound methodological difference” between Marx and Engels on the concept of metabolism. [45]

Yet, examined closely, it is debatable that the removal of “natural metabolism,” substantially changed the meaning of Marx’s original passage—certainly not enough to raise a significant issue in that regard. Although Marx referred in his original incomplete draft to the “social and natural metabolism,” definitely including the term “natural metabolism,” there was a certain redundancy here. The notion of natural metabolism is basic to Marx’s entire materialist approach and is already assumed in the very concept of “social metabolism” itself, which mediates the relation of humanity with what Marx called the “universal metabolism of nature.” [46] The social metabolism for Marx is nothing but the specifically human relation (via the labor and production process) to the universal metabolism of nature. Moreover, even without the words “natural metabolism,” the passage indicates that the “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism” violates “the natural laws of life [soil],” which itself refers to a break with the universal metabolism of nature. The omission of the word “natural,” and thus the term “natural metabolism,” does nothing to alter the fundamental point being made. Saito declares that what is lost in Engels’s version is Marx’s second-order mediation, or alienated mediation. [47] But that too is problematic, since the very context of the passage, as it appears in the third volume of Capital, is a rift in the social metabolism, that is, a disruption of the social-metabolic mediation of humanity and nature as a result of alienated capitalist production.

Saito supplements his philological argument on the missing term in Engels’s editing of Marx’s “irreparable rift” passage, with the additional charge that Engels developed a “critique of Liebig’s theory of metabolism.” [48] However, evidence of this “critique” is nowhere to be found in Engels’s writings. In fact, Saito himself is unable to offer a single sentence indicating such a critique of Liebig on metabolism issued from Engels’s pen. Instead, he resorts to highlighting Engels’s quite different criticisms in Dialectics of Nature of Liebig’s vitalism, including his rejection of Darwin’s theory of evolution and his hypothesis that life had existed eternally. Saito illogically infers from Engels’s criticisms of Liebig in this regard that since Engels objected to Liebig’s vitalistic and anti-evolutionary notions in biology, he must also therefore have objected to Liebig’s use of the metabolism concept in his chemistry. However, Liebig was a “dilettante” in biology and at the same time a leading scientist in chemistry, a distinction that Engels stressed. What makes Saito’s criticism here even more problematic is that Engels repeatedly utilized Liebig’s analysis of the rift in the soil metabolism, in his own writings—even if he did not choose, as Marx did, to use the word Stoffwechsel (metabolism) in this context. [49]

But the deeper theoretical problem confronting Saito, in his attempt to find evidence of Engels’s supposed “rejection” of Liebig’s concept of metabolism, is that Liebig, in utilizing the notion of metabolism was referring to the natural-science concept of metabolism. Liebig did not, as in the case of Marx, develop the category of social metabolism. Saying that Engels rejected Liebig’s concept in this regard then amounts to charging that he rejected the notion of natural metabolism, of which Engels, however, was a major nineteenth-century proponent. The concept of metabolism originated in German cell biology early in the nineteenth century and was applied broadly in Liebig’s mid-century writings in agricultural chemistry. [50] Metabolism in this sense was a concept that Engels employed many times, including in his famous analysis of metabolism (and proteins) as the key to the origins of life. [51] Indeed, the notion of Stoffwechsel was central to the development of the first law of thermodynamics in Julius Robert Mayer’s “The Motions of Organisms and their Relation to Metabolism” (1845), which strongly influenced Engels (as well as Liebig and Marx). [52]

All of this throws into further disarray the contention that Engels, supposedly encumbered by his dialectics of nature perspective, failed to appreciate the significance of Marx’s inclusion of “natural metabolism” in the “irreparable rift” passage. It was due to this failing, Saito tells us, that Engels “intentionally” deleted the term natural metabolism, effectively “marginalizing” and making “invisible” Marx’s core ecological critique, which was thereby “suppressed.” [53] Yet, here Saito is confronted with the inconvenient fact that Engels, who was certainly one of the most erudite figures of his day, wrote again and again on the subject of nature’s metabolism, a concept for which he demonstrated a very deep appreciation. [54] Moreover, Engels’s edition of the third volume of Capital, far from suppressing the conception of “natural metabolism,” includes it in other places where Marx employed it in his original text. [55]

Behind Saito’s entire argument here is an attempt to reinforce the notion within Western Marxist philosophical tradition that Engels’s dialectics of nature, with its wider materialism, was antithetical to Marx’s own historical materialism. Thus, rather than looking at how Marx and Engels’s ecological analyses are complementary and reinforce each other, we are presented with the notion of a theoretical break between the two that is rooted in Engels’s dialectics of nature, which supposedly led Engels to distance himself from Marx’s ecology. Yet, in the course of his argument, Saito is unable to find any satisfactory way of demonstrating that the dialectics of nature as developed by Engels is actually at odds with Marx’s ecology. Hence, he merely contends that Engels’s approach to Earth history was “transhistorical” in that it transcended human history in the manner of positivistic natural science when addressing nonhuman nature. [56] Yet, one wonders what kind of natural science there would be if it were to restrict its analysis simply to human history, that is, if it were not transhistorical in the sense of superseding the human world. Clearly, our social being influences our understanding of nature, something that Engels emphasized as well as Marx. But science is necessarily concerned with domains beyond the human. [57] Surely, an analysis of Earth history extending beyond human history did not contradict Marx’s own thinking, since he exhibited a deep fascination with paleontological developments within geological time prior to human existence. [58]

Engels is also criticized by Saito for developing a more “apocalyptic” theory of ecological crisis than Marx through his use of the metaphor of the “revenge” of nature and the notion that human beings are capable of undermining the conditions of their existence on a planetary scale. [59] Engels even contemplates human extinction in the distant future. Saito attributes such views to Engels’s “apocalyptic” conception of the dialectics of nature as opposed to Marx’s nonapocalyptic ecological conceptions in his theory of metabolic rift. But surely Engels, from the standpoint of the twenty-first century, is to be commended for conceiving of the reality of human-generated ecological crisis throughout the globe! Nor does this in any way contradict Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, the contemporary relevance of which has mainly to do with the Earth System crisis. [60]

The full extent of Saito’s adherence to the notion of a break between Marx and Engels on the dialectics of nature, depicting a deep ecological split between the two thinkers, can be seen in his direct support for Terrell Carver’s position that Engels most likely lied in his 1885 preface to Anti-Dühring when he indicated that he had read the various parts of that work to Marx prior to their publication in serial form. In Saito’s own words, Engels’s statement here was “not necessarily credible.” [61] Hence, Engels, it is insinuated, might very well have lied about his interactions with Marx in this respect. The fact that there is absolutely no basis for believing that Engels would have lied on such an important point, which does not at all fit with his character or his lifelong loyalty to Marx, does not seem to deter those sowing such doubts. Indeed, the nature of this argument is that Engels must have lied, because otherwise, Marx (who had contributed a chapter to Anti-Dühring) could be assumed to have been entirely familiar with that work prior to its publication and presumably agreed with its contents. This would then undermine the notion of a fundamental break between Marx and Engels. [62]

Saito’s attempt to establish a methodological break between Marx and Engels with respect to the concept of metabolism adopts a similar form for essentially the same reasons. Engels must be responsible for intentionally suppressing the term “natural metabolism” (and with it, the significance of the metabolic rift) in editing the third volume of Capital, since otherwise notions of the complementarity of Marx and Engels writings on ecology might carry the day, contradicting Saito’s contention that “Marx never really adopted the project of materialist dialectics that Engels was pursuing.” [63]

Yet, the fact that Saito’s whole supposed proof of a methodological break between Marx and Engels depends on the absence of a single term, the word “natural” preceding “metabolism,” in a single passage, constituting a small change of highly debatable significance, points to the total absence of any substantive evidence of such a break. To rend asunder Marx and Engels on metabolism and ecology on such a basis is unwarrantable. The truth is, while Engels did not directly employ Marx’s notion of “social metabolism,” except in his 1868 Synopsis of Capital, nor develop Marx’s analysis in this regard, there is no indication that his outlook contradicted that of Marx in this area. [64]

If Marx’s theory of metabolic rift was not better known among Marxists prior to this century, this had nothing to do with Engels’s alleged suppression of Marx’s ideas, a claim for which there is no concrete basis. Rather, it had to do with the reality that the metabolism concept was embedded in the deep structure of Marx’s work and thus was often overlooked, while a great deal of what he wrote on this was incomplete, and developed only in his later years. More importantly, much of Marx’s science, as Rosa Luxemburg emphasized, was well ahead of the socialist movement itself and would only be taken up as new problems presented themselves. [65] It was the development of ecosocialism a century after Marx’s death that led to the rediscovery and reconstruction of Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, rather than the reverse. This unearthing of Marx’s ecological argument was partially enabled by the substantial (if somewhat indirect) influence that it had exerted, along with the work of Engels, on subsequent socialist ecological analyses within natural science and materialist philosophy. [66]

Rather than perpetuating old divisions within the left, it is necessary today to bring Marx’s social-metabolism argument together with Engels’s dialectics of nature, seeing these analyses as integrally related. The object should be to unite the first and second foundations of Marxist thought, providing a broader material basis for the critique of the capitalist mode of production as the essential ground for a revolutionary ecosocialist praxis in the twenty-first century.

Notes

1. John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 7, emphasis added. Reference to the “second foundation of Marxist ecological thought” was first introduced twenty years earlier in Marx’s Ecology. See John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 250.

2. Western Marxism took its point of departure in this respect from the short footnote in Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, where he indicated dissatisfaction with Engels’s account of the dialectics of nature. Yet, as Lukács indicated on multiple occasions afterward, and as attested by the text of History and Class Consciousness itself, he did not actually reject the “merely objective dialectics of nature.” The distortions of his thought in this respect nonetheless remain dominant. In the translation of his famous Tailism manuscript, this went so far as to translate incorrectly what appears as “Dialectics in Nature” in the original German in one of the chapter headings as “Dialectics of” See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin, 1971), 24, 207; Georg Lukács, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2000), 94, 102–7; Kaan Kangal, “Engels’ Intentions in Dialectics of Nature,” Science and Society 83, no. 2 (2019): 218; Foster, The Return of Nature, 16–21.

3. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 463–64.

4. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 279.

5. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 30, 54–66.

6. Karl Marx, Early Writings (London: Penguin, 1974), 389–90; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5, 28.

7. Clive Hamilton and Jacques Grinevald, “Was the Anthropocene Anticipated?,” Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1 (2015): 67.

8. Joseph Fracchia, Bodies and Artefacts, vol. 1 (Boston: Brill, 2022), 3.

9. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 545.

10. Karl Marx, Early Writings, 398.

11. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 24, 301; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 633; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 41, 232, 246; Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 197, 291; Foster, The Return of Nature, 251–58.

12. Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 212–21.

13. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 340; Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (London: Merlin Press, 1980), 403–8.

14. On “dialectical organicism” see Joseph Needham, Moulds of Understanding (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1976), 278.

15. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 24, 301; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 23–27, 633; John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature, 254.

16. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 26–27, 363, 593, 633.

17. On dialectics and integrated levels, see Joseph Needham, Time: The Refreshing River (London: George Allan and Unwin, 1943), 233–72; Jean-Pierre Vigier, “Dialectics and Natural Science,” in Existentialism Versus Marxism, ed. George Novack (New York: Dell, 1966), 243–57.

18. Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 11; John Bellamy Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022), 304–8; Craig Dilworth, “Principles, Laws, Theories, and the Metaphysics of Science,” Synthese 101, no. 2 (1994): 223–47; Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1985), 268.

19. A characteristic of much Marxist dialectical thought has been to downplay the negation of negation, or development, evolution, and emergence. This can be seen in Ollman’s influential work where “dialectical research” is confined to “four kinds of relations: identity/difference, interpenetration of opposites, quantity/quality, and contradiction.” Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic, 15. On Marx and “scientific socialism,” see Foster, The Return of Nature, 253. This was even more the case in Soviet Marxism. As Frederick Copleston notes: “In Stalin’s time, of course, the law of the negation of the negation was passed over in silence.” Frederick C. Copleston, Philosophy in Russia (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 327.

20. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 82, 326.

21. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 126, 324–25.

22. Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002), 479–92; Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987), 112–15, 133–34; Stephen Jay Gould, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), 97–105; Richard York and Brett Clark, The Science and Humanism of Stephen Jay Gould (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 21, 28, 40–42.

23. See Helena Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1985); Foster, The Return of Nature, 358–530.

24. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 14 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977).

25. Sebastiano Timpanaro issued a strong criticism of Western Marxism for abandoning materialism, but since he also rejected the dialectics of nature, his analysis—despite its brilliance—was unable to overcome the limitations he imposed upon it. Sebastiano Timpanaro, On Materialism (London: Verso, 1975).

26. The inability of critical theory, due to its shallow materialism and its denial of the dialectics of nature, to provide any meaningful ecological analysis is evident in a recent work seeking to promote classical critical theory’s contributions to ecology, chiefly that of Adorno, while at the same time acknowledging that “the classical Frankfurt School critical theorists hardly engaged with natural science,” or ecology. Carl Cassegård, Toward a Critical Theory of Nature (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 118.

27. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 460–62. Engels attributed ecological disasters to shortsighted, “unforeseen,” and “remote natural consequences,” and to the necessary byproducts of a system of production devoted only to immediate gain. In the chapter on “The Revenge of the External” in his Barbaric Heart, Curtis White explains that such “unintended consequences” are treated in capitalist economics as externalities, and it is these externalities, vis-á-vis natural processes, which are coming back to haunt capitalism. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 461–62; Curtis White, The Barbaric Heart (London: Routledge, 2009), 89–107.

28. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 313, emphasis added.

29. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 461.

30. Ray Lankester, The Kingdom of Man (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1911).

31. Lankester’s conception of human evolution in its emphasis on the hand was much closer to that of Engels in “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” than to either Darwin or Ernst Haeckel. See E. Ray Lankester, Diversions of a Naturalist (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1915), 243–44.

32. Lankester, The Kingdom of Man, 1–4, 26, 31–33, 184–89.

33. Lankester, Science from an Easy Chair (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1913), 365–79.

34. Carles Soriano, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Other ‘-Cenes,’” Monthly Review 74, no. 6 (November 2022): 1–28.

35. I. Vernadsky, The Biosphere (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1998); E. V. Shantser, “The Anthropogenic System (Period),” in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1973): 139–44; V. I. Vernadsky, “Some Words About the Noösphere,” in 150 Years of Vernadsky, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: 21st Century Science Associates, 2014), 82. The Anthropogene was initially introduced in the Soviet Union to describe the geological period now known as the Quaternary.

36. Rachel Carson, Lost Woods (Boston: Beacon, 1998), 227–45; Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (New York: Bantam, 1971), 60–61, 117, 138–45; Foster, The Return of Nature, 502–13; John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “Rachel Carson’s Ecological Critique,” Monthly Review 59, no. 9 (February 2008): 1–17.

37. A. O. Tansley, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms,” Ecology 18, no. 3 (July 1935): 284–307. In developing the notion of ecosystem, Tansley relied heavily on the systems theory of the Marxist mathematician Hyman Levy. See Hyman Levy, The Universe of Science (London: Watts and Co., 1932).

38. Carles Soriano, “On the Anthropocene Formalization and the Report of the Anthropocene Working Group,” Geologica Acta 18, no. 6 (2020): 1–10.

39. John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “The Capitalinian: The First Geological Age of the Anthropocene,” Monthly Review 73, no. 4 (September 2021): 1–16.

40. Carles Soriano, “Epistemological Limitations of Earth System Science to Confront the Anthropocene Crisis,” Anthropocene Review 9, no. 1 (2020): 112, 122, Soriano, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Other ‘-Cenes,’” 14.

41. Soriano, “Epistemological Limitations of Earth System Science,” 121.

42. Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 53–55.

43. In Marx’s original German, as well as in Engels’s edition of the third volume of Capital, what is presented in the English translation as single sentence is in fact only a section of a much longer sentence, taking up an entire paragraph. Hence, rather than referring to a “sentence” in the discussion here, the term “passage” is used, particularly as the main issue in dispute concerns only a part of a sentence, even in the English-language edition.

44. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 45, 67–68.

45. Karl Marx, Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), II/4.2 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1992), 753; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, Band 25 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1964), 822; Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 53–55, 70; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 949; Karl Marx, Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865 (Boston: Brill, 2016), 797–98. Saito also makes the point that Engels’s edition of volume 3 of Capital incorrectly uses the word “life” at the end of the disputed sentence, rather than “soil.” However, both terms essentially convey the same broad meaning in this particular context, while “soil” also appears in the sentence that follows in Engels’s edition of volume 3, as well as in Marx’s original manuscript. Saito himself said that this discrepancy was probably due to Marx’s poor handwriting, in which the words Boden and Leben look almost identical. Yet, although acknowledging in his footnote that this could very well have been a result of Marx’s poor handwriting, he nonetheless criticizes Engels in his text for substituting the term “life,” claiming that Engels made this change to bring Marx’s sentence more in line with Engels’s own notion of the “revenge” of nature. Given the penmanship problem and the very problematic nature of Saito’s claims about the theoretical significance of the replacement of “soil” by “life,” this whole issue can be set aside in the present discussion. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 56, 70.
    In correspondence and discussions with me, Joe Fracchia has translated the critical passage in the original German in his Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865 (as published in MEGA) slightly differently from Saito as: “provoking an irreparable rift in the context of the social and natural metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of the soil.” It is Fracchia’s translation that is the more literal one mentioned in the text. I owe much of my understanding of these philological problems to Fracchia, who helped me in exploring the differences and nuances in a close comparison of Marx’s original German text with his Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865, Engels’s edited German text of volume 3 of Capital, and the various English-language translations.

46. Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene, 41–61; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 30, 54–66.

47. Marx in the Anthropocene, 53. On István Mészáros’s concept of “second order mediation,” see John Bellamy Foster, “Foreword” in István Mészáros, The Necessity of Social Control (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015), 16. On Marx’s concept of alienated mediation see Marx, Early Writings, 261.

48. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 45.

49. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 56–57; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 574–76; Justus von Liebig, Familiar Letters on Chemistry, in Its Relations to Physiology, Dietetics, Agriculture, Commerce, and Political Economy, fourth edition (London: Walton and Maberly, 1859), 283–86; John Farley, “The Spontaneous Generation Controversy (1859–1880),” Journal of the History of Biology 5, no. 2 (1972): 317; Frederick Engels, The Housing Question (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979), 92–93.

50. Franklin C. Bing, “The History of the Word Metabolism,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 26, no. 2 (April 1971): 158–80.

51. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 578; J. D. Bernal, The Freedom of Necessity (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), 363–64; Foster, The Return of Nature, 414; Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 56–57.

52. Julius Robert Mayer, “The Motions of Organisms and Their Relation to Metabolism,” in Julius Robert Mayer: Prophet of Energy, ed. Robert B. Lindsey (New York: Pergamon, 1973), 75–145; Kenneth Caneva, Robert Mayer and the Conservation of Energy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 117; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 688.

53. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 45, 53.

54. Foster, The Return of Nature, 414.

55. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 195, 949, 954.

56. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 59, 67.

57. Saito points to Lukács’s criticism in History and Class Conscious of the validity of scientific experiment as a basis for a dialectical knowledge of the universal metabolism of nature and says that this constitutes the grounds for Lukács’s rejection of Engels’s dialectics of nature. Saito fails to note, however, that Lukács later reversed himself on this point in his 1967 preface to his book. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xix; Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 85.

58. Marx and Engels, Marx-Engels Gesamtasugabe (MEGA) IV/26 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011), 214–19; Joseph Beete Jukes, Student’s Manual of Geology (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1872), 476–512; Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene, 51, 270; John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, The Robbery of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 143; Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 65–67.

59. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 55, 59.

60. On this see John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010).

61. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 51; Terrell Carver, Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1983), 123–25; Foster, The Return of Nature, 584. In addition to indicating that he had read the entire manuscript to Marx, Engels said that “it was self-understood between us that this exposition of mine should not be issued without his knowledge.” Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 9.

62. Oddly, Saito refers elsewhere in his argument to evidence provided by the present author and others pointing to the extent of Marx’s involvement in and appreciation of Engels’s Anti-Dühring. See Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 48, 241, 253.

63. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 67.

64. Frederick Engels, On Capital (New York: International Publishers, 1937), 63.

65. Rosa Luxemburg, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), 111. An additional factor was that the word Stoffwechsel was not originally translated as “metabolism” in the English-language translations of the first and third volumes of Capital in 1886 and 1909, but rather as “circulation of matter.”

66. See Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 21–65; Foster, The Return of Nature, 405.

State Repression Targets the "Stop Cop City" Movement

[Pictured: Kamau Franklin of Community Movement Builders and other organizers announce a ballot referendum effort at a June 7 press conference in Atlanta.] (Photo: Twitter @Micahinatl)

By Margaret Kimberley

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

Cop City is an effort to ensure that state violence will bring the most draconian methods to bear against Black people. State violence is also being used proactively, in an effort to end opposition to this creation of Atlanta's white ruling class and their errand boys and girls who ostensibly control a fake mecca for Black people.

“The politicians don’t care about the people. They don’t work for the people. They work for corporations, the developers, and the police. The Atlanta City Council ignored the largest mass mobilization ever because the corporate-funded Atlanta Police Foundation controls them.”

— Kamau Franklin, Community Movement Builders

Atlanta, Georgia is no mecca. The idea that it is a “good for Black people” city is a lie. Atlanta is little more than a glorified plantation where powerful white people give directions to the Black people they choose to be overseers. The power of the latter group is severely limited of course. They can always be counted on to act on behalf of the white power structure they serve.

No one should be shocked that members of the Atlanta City Council listened to hours of impassioned testimony from their constituents opposing what they call a Public Safety Training Center yet still voted to approve an initial $31 million expenditure by a vote of 11 to 4. The center is commonly and more accurately known as Cop City and thousands of people have mobilized to keep it from being built.

In the days before the vote the degree of official perfidy was revealed when the public were informed that the estimated cost for the center was more than double what they had been told. The cost to the city is $67 million , and not the $30 million figure that has been stated ever since the project was announced.

The state of Georgia and their Atlanta lackeys swung into action after the budgetary fraud was exposed and arrested three organizers of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund , a bail fund used to support protesters who have been arrested. The city and state had already mobilized brute force, killing one protester, Manuel Paez Teran, with 57 bullet wounds and charging others with terrorism. Before the bail fund arrests, three other organizers were charged with felony intimidation of an officer when they shared already public information which identified the killer police.

Atlanta Solidarity Fund organizers were arrested by a SWAT team and charged with charity fraud and money laundering because they reimbursed themselves for expenses. Judge James Altman released the three on $15,000 bond each. “Paying for camping supplies and the like? I don’t find it very impressive. There’s not a lot of meat on the bones of the allegations that thousands of dollars are going to fund illegal activities.”

But the city of Atlanta and the state of Georgia are not alone in their acts of repression. The federal Department of Homeland Security has also weighed in calling protesters “militants” who they say comprise a “violent far-left occupation.” When the DHS report was made public, online access was suddenly removed.

Cop City would be more than a police training center. The 85-acre site would be a mock city, used to train police in “crowd control,” methods. It would be a militarized policing center training law enforcement from around the country. Cop City is a response to the 2020 protests which sprang up across the country after the police killing of George Floyd and the protests in Atlanta which took place after the killing of Rayshard Brooks. The reaction against the new movement was swift and Atlanta’s local oligarchs demanded that their Black figureheads do something to ensure that any further protests be met with the harshest measures possible.

Yet the people of Atlanta weren’t fooled, and they lined up for hours to give testimony before their so-called representatives who don’t really want to hear from them. Atlanta resident Robell Awake spoke for many when he said, “I cannot believe I am standing here, pleading with you not to spend the tax dollars of a Black city, to tear down a forest in a Black neighborhood, to increase the policing and caging of more Black people. All this in a city with Black leadership. It breaks my heart.”

As we have said many times at Black Agenda Report, we don’t have Black political leadership in this country. We have misleadership, a corrupt buffer class who do the bidding of Black people’s enemies while pretending to be our representatives.

The next step in stopping the Cop City scam is to put a referendum on the ballot. Organizers must secure 75,000 signatures from registered voters within the next two months in order to give voters a voice in the process. Direct democracy is the tool, but the same people who use SWAT teams to arrest organizers won’t stop either.

Cities, states, and the federal government will all work together at the behest of the ruling class whenever the people choose to act in favor of their own interests. They will bring terrorism charges, kill protesters, and buy off politicians in order to get what they want. As always, the question is how the masses will respond. Atlantans are ready and they are showing the way.

Margaret Kimberley is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents. You can support her work on Patreon  and also find it on the Twitter  and Telegram  platforms. She can be reached via email at margaret.kimberley(at)blackagendareport.com.

Charter Schools and the Privatization (and Profitization) of Education

By Shawgi Tell

Eleven months ago a critical education case came before the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in North Carolina (Peltier v. Charter Day Sch., Inc., 37 F.4th 104, 116, 4th Cir. 2022). A main issue in the case pertains to the dress code at “Charter Day School” in Leland, North Carolina, specifically, whether the privately-operated but publicly-funded charter school had violated the rights of female students by stipulating what they could and could not wear. The ACLU reports that, “Girls at Charter Day School, together with their parents, challenged the skirts requirement as sex discrimination under the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution and Title IX.”

For general purposes and for the purpose of this case in particular, it is first important to appreciate that, while all non-profit and for-profit charter schools are privately-operated schools, many, including “Charter Day School,” are also owned-operated by a private educational management organization (EMO).[1] This is another layer of privatization, another level of private ownership and control. In this vein, it is important to grasp that the legal framework that applies to private entities differs qualitatively from the legal framework that applies to public entities. Private actors and state actors operate in different legal spheres. The U.S. Constitution, for example, does not apply to the acts of private entities; it applies mainly to acts of government. Indeed, the private-public distinction shapes the laws and institutions of many countries. As a general rule, no public schools in America are operated by an EMO.

It is also legally significant that the parents of the students suing “Charter Day School” voluntarily enrolled their daughters in the privately-operated charter school. No one is forced or compelled to enroll in a charter school in the United States. Nor is the state compelling, encouraging, or coercing “Charter Day School” to adopt any particular dress code or educational philosophy for students.

As a general rule, privatized education arrangements in America (e.g., private Catholic schools that charge tuition) have always been able to adopt the dress code they want without any government interference. It is generally recognized that, as private schools, they can essentially adopt whatever dress code or educational philosophy they wish to enforce, and that parents are under no obligation to enroll their child in a private school if they do not wish to do so. This has been the case for more than a century. It is one of many expressions of the long-standing public-private distinction in law, education, and society.[2]

It is also important to consider that the capital-centered ideologies of choice, individualism, and the free-market encompass the notion of doing something voluntarily, i.e., willingly and freely. It is the reason why charter school promoters repeat the disinformation that charter schools are “schools of choice” (even though charter schools typically choose parents and students more than the other way around).[3] This neoliberal logic is also consistent with the “free market” notion that parents and students are not considered humans or citizens by charter school operators, they are viewed instead as consumers and customers shopping for a “good” school that won’t fail and close, which happens every week in the crisis-prone charter school sector.[4]

Charter schools, to be clear, represent the commodification of education, the privatization and marketization of a modern human responsibility in order to enrich a handful of private interests under the banner of high ideals. For decades, neoliberals and privatizers have painstakingly starved public schools of funds so as to set them up to fail. Then they have mass-tested them with discredited corporate tests to “show” that they are “failing.” This is then followed by a sustained media and political campaign to vilify and demonize public schools so as to create antisocial public opinion against them, which then eventually “justifies” privatizing public education because “privatization will improve education.” Suddenly “innovative” charter schools appear everywhere, especially in large urban settings inhabited by thousands of marginalized low-income minorities.

The typical consequences of privatization in every sector include higher costs, less transparency, reduced quality of service, greater instability, more inefficiency, and loss of public voice. Privatization essentially undermines social progress while further enriching a handful of people driven by profit maximization. To date, whether it is vouchers, so-called “Education Savings Accounts,” or privately-operated charter schools, education privatization (“school-choice”) has not solved any problems, it has only multiplied them.[5]

With this context in mind, let us return to the court case at hand. In a 10-6 vote on June 14, 2022, the Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, “found that that the dress code [at “Charter Day School”] ran afoul of the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law.” Girls at the K-8 charter school, it was concluded, should have the freedom to wear pants and not just skirts because they have “the same constitutional rights as their peers at other public schools - including the freedom to wear pants.”

Marking the first time a federal appeals court has ever done such a thing, the Richmond Court found that “Charter Day School” is a state actor (i.e., it is a public school), which means that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment does apply to the school.

Consistent with numerous other court rulings over the years, however, the lawyer for “Charter Day School,” Aaron Streett, maintained that the Richmond court issued a flawed ruling because the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment does not apply to the charter school because the charter school is a private entity and not a state actor like a public school.

According to legal precedent, as a private actor, “Charter Day School” did not deprive any person of their constitutional rights. This view stems in part from the long-standing premise that charter schools are “independent,” “autonomous,” “innovative” schools under the law, that is, they are deregulated “free market” schools, meaning that they are exempt from most of the laws, rules, policies, and regulations that govern public schools. They do not operate like public schools. They are not so-called “government schools.” They are not arms of the state.[6] They are not connected to state authority in the same way public schools are. They are not governed by elected officials like public schools are. Charter schools operate in their own separate sphere. The fact that many charter schools are also owned or operated by private EMOs only adds an additional wrinkle to the public-private dynamic.

“Charter Day School” is currently appealing the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which may hear the case this summer (2023).

The issue of whether a charter school is a state actor or not is critical because it hits at the core issue about charter schools. This point cannot be overstated. If it is the case that “Charter Day School” is not a state actor, as the lawyer for the privately-operated school argues, then the Virginia court’s ruling represents a form of “harmful government interference” because the 14th Amendment does not apply to private actors.

Under U.S. law, “state action” is defined as “an action that is either taken directly by the state or bears a sufficient connection to the state to be attributed to it.” Another source states that a state actor is “a person who is acting on behalf of a governmental body, and is therefore subject to regulation under the United States Bill of Rights, including the First, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, which prohibit the federal and state governments from violating certain rights and freedoms.”[7]

However, as private actors charter schools are not in fact “acting on behalf of a governmental body.” Private actors are not controlled or directed by the state, at least not in the way agencies and arms of the state are, which means that the actions of privately-operated charter schools cannot be called actions taken directly by the state. State action doctrine holds that government is not responsible for the conduct of a private actor.

Even most of the entities that authorize charter schools are not public or governmental in the proper sense of the word. Many charter school authorizers are operated or governed by unelected private persons. Many of the wealthy individuals who operate or govern such entities are hand-picked by wealthy governors. The public, as a matter of course, is omitted in these arrangements. The public has no meaningful say in any part of this set-up. This is on top of the fact that charter schools themselves are not governed by publicly elected citizens either, whereas public schools are. Unelected private persons governing a deregulated private entity (which may also be owned by another private entity) is not the same as elected public school officials governing a public school that serves no private interests, admits all students at all times, has unionized teachers, can levy taxes, and is accountable only to the public.

Unlike charter schools, regular public schools, which have been around for 180 years and educate 90% of America’s youth, are in fact state actors; they are political subdivisions of the state because they not only carry out a public function but are also explicitly delegated authority by the state to carry out various public responsibilities. “Function” and “authority” are not synonyms; they are different concepts. Carrying out a role is not necessarily the same thing as having power to carry out that role. A role can be carried out by a person or entity that derives its responsibility from a higher political power. Its role can be delegated by a more influential power.

Properly speaking, charter schools are not exercising state prerogatives. Nor do they enter into what may be called a symbiotic relationship with the state. Unlike public schools, they are not state agencies proper, which explains why the state does not coerce, encourage, or compel charter schools to act in the same way it coerces, encourages, or compels public schools to act. The state has more influence and control over public schools than it does over privately-operated “free-market” charter schools. In this neoliberal legal setup, the state is not responsible for the policies and operations of deregulated charter schools; charter schools can do as they please; “no rules;” “laissez-faire;” “hands-off,” “autonomy.”  This usually means no meaningful accountability.

Charter schools are intentionally set up to operate outside the parameters and framework governing public schools. This is what makes them “innovative,” “independent,” and different. It is worth stressing again that, in the case of “Charter Day School,” the state played no direct role in creating, directing, or shaping the dress code being challenged by parents who voluntarily enrolled their children in the school. The charter school’s dress code policy was not therefore an expression of state action.

Unlike public schools, charter schools fall under private law, specifically contract law. Charter, by definition, means contract: a legally-binding agreement between two or more parties to do or not do something in a specified period of time with associated rewards and punishments. For state action doctrine this means that just because a private entity has a contract with the government that does not mean that the actions of private contractors like charter schools can be attributed to the state. Simply “partnering” with the state does not make the conduct of a private entity a form of state action. A private actor does not become public, does not become a state actor, just because it contracts with the state.

The issue of whether a charter school is public or not is often confusing to many because there is relentless disinformation from charter school promoters that charter schools are public schools when in reality they are privatized independent entities. Charter schools remain private, independent, deregulated, segregated entities even though they receive public money, are often called public, and ostensibly provide a service to the public. Interestingly, when asked what they think a charter school is, most people say they are not really sure or they think that charter schools are some sort of private school. The average person rarely thinks charter schools are public schools.

To be sure, charter schools cannot be deemed public just because they are called “public” 50 times a day. Under the law, this is not what makes an entity public. Simply labelling something a specific thing does not automatically make it that thing. In the U.S. legal system, merely labeling private conduct “public” does not make it a form of state action. Moreover, receiving public funds does not spontaneously make an entity pubic under the law. Thousands of private entities in the U.S. receive public money, for example, but they do not suddenly stop being private entities.[8]

Only narrow private interests benefit from obscuring the distinction between public and private. Public and private mean the opposite of each other. They are antonyms. They should not be confounded.

Public refers to everyone, the common good, all people, transparency, affordability, accessibility, universality, non-rivalry, and inclusiveness. Examples include public parks, public libraries, public roads, public schools, public colleges and universities, public hospitals, public restrooms, public housing, public banks, public events, and more. These places and services are available to everyone, not just a few people. They are integral to a modern civil society that recognizes the role and significance of a public sphere in modern times.

Private, on the other hand, refers to exclusivity, that is, something is private when it is “designed or intended for one's exclusive use.” Private also means:

• Secluded from the sight, presence, or intrusion of others.

• Of or confined to the individual; personal.

• Undertaken on an individual basis.

• Not available for public use, control, or participation.

• Belonging to a particular person or persons, as opposed to the public or the government.

• Of, relating to, or derived from nongovernment sources.

• Conducted and supported primarily by individuals or  groups not affiliated with governmental agencies or corporations.

• Not holding an official or public position.

• Not for public knowledge or disclosure; secret; confidential.

In its essence, private property is the right to exclude others from use of said property; it is the power of exclusion;[9] it is not concerned with transparency, inclusion, the common good, or benefitting everyone. This is why when something is privatized, e.g., a public enterprise, it is no longer available to everyone; it becomes something possessed and controlled by the few. This then ends up harming the public interest; it does not improve efficiency, strengthen services, lower costs, increase accountability, or expand democracy.

Charter schools are labeled “public” mainly for self-serving reasons, specifically to lay claim to public funds that legitimately belong to public schools alone. If charter schools were openly and honestly acknowledged as being private entities they would not be able to place any valid claim to public funds and they would not be able to exist for one day. This presents a contradiction for defenders of charter schools who want to “have it both ways,” that is, be public when it suits them and act private when it serves them. This is the definition of arbitrary and irrational.

To be clear, the relationship between the state and charter schools is not the same as the relationship between the state and public schools. This is one reason why the rights of students, teachers, and parents in charter schools differ from the rights of students, teachers, and parents in public schools. Thus, for example, while the vast majority of public school teachers are unionized, about 90% of charter school teachers are not unionized. Charter schools are notoriously anti-union. They energetically fight efforts by teachers to unionize to defend their rights. Teachers in charter schools are considered “at-will” employees, meaning that they can be fired at any time for any reason. This is not the case in public schools where due process, tenure, and some collective security still exist. Conditions are more humane and more pro-worker in public schools, even when these chronically-underfunded and constantly-vilified schools face one neoliberal assault after another. This is also linked to why many charter schools across the country can legally hire numerous uncertified and unlicensed teachers.

Another profound difference between charter schools and public schools is that the former cannot levy taxes while the latter can. A tax, as is well-known, can only be laid for a public purpose, which means that charter schools do not possess the characteristics of a political subdivision of the state; they are not fully exercising a public function.

Many other legal differences could be listed.

It would be more accurate to say that charter schools resemble traditional private schools far more than they resemble regular public schools, yet they continue to be mislabeled “public schools.”[10] In practice, charter schools are quintessentially private schools. See Outlaw Charter Schools: Can A Charter School Not Be A Charter School? for additional analysis of these themes.

The question of whether a charter school is a state actor or not also has big implications for thousands of other organizations (e.g., hospitals, utility companies, colleges, etc.) across the country because various constitutional provisions typically do not apply to private entities and businesses. This case is therefore of national importance. The public-private distinction at stake in this education case goes beyond the issue of the dress code at “Charter Day School.”

The “Charter Day School” case is currently in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court. The issue at stake—the public-private distinction—is so significant that, on January 9, 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court asked President Joe Biden’s administration to give their view on the case. The U.S. Supreme Court States that the key issue at stake is: “Whether a private entity that contracts with the state to operate a charter school engages in state action when it formulates a policy without coercion or encouragement by the government.” This move is seen by charter school promoters as a positive sign that the highest court in the land is willing to consider the case.

In the final analysis, with or without a ruling from any court, as privatized, marketized, corporatized arrangements that celebrate consumerism, competition, and individualism, charter schools have no legitimate claim to the public funds, facilities, resources, and authority that belong only to public schools. No court ruling, one way or the other, will change this fact. Claiming that charter schools are public schools for the purpose of laying claim to public wealth that belongs solely to public schools, damages public schools, the public interest, the economy, and the national interest. It does not help low-income minority youth or close the long-standing “achievement gap” rooted in poverty, racism, inequality, and disempowerment.

Charter schools do not raise the level of education or improve society. Thirty plus years of evidence shows that charter schools mainly enrich narrow private interests. Without charter schools, public schools would have tens of billions of additional dollars to pay teachers and improve learning for all students, especially low-income minority students enrolled in urban schools. This would make a huge difference. No charter schools would also mean that thousands of students, teachers, and parents would no longer have to feel angry and abandoned by charter schools that close every week (often abruptly).

Neoliberals have never cared about public schools or the public interest; they are masters of disinformation and self-serving to the extreme. Neoliberals have worked ceaselessly over the last few decades to methodically privatize public education in America under the banner of high ideals while actually lowering the level of education, increasing chaos in education, and enriching a handful of people along the way. The so-called “school choice” political-economic project has little to do with advancing education and improving opportunities for millions of marginalized youth and more to do with profit maximization in the context of a continually failing economy. “School choice” has brought immense suffering to public education and the nation. “School-choice” does not have a human face.

The only sense in which charter schools may be called state actors is that they are neoliberal state actors because they are actively organized by wealthy individuals and groups that control and influence many state positions, levers, institutions, and individuals. In this sense, charter schools are indeed acting on behalf of the neoliberal state and are therefore neoliberal state actors. This is bound to happen in a society where Wall Street and the state become indistinguishable.

About 3.5 million students are currently enrolled in roughly 7,600 charter schools in 45 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Guam.

Shawgi Tell, PhD, is author of the book “Charter School Report Card.” His main research interests include charter schools, neoliberal education policy, privatization and political economy. He can be reached at stell5@naz.edu.

Notes

[1] It is also worth recognizing that the non-profit/for-profit distinction is generally a distinction without a difference, that is, both types of charter schools engage in enriching a handful of private interests under the veneer of high ideals; profiteering takes place in both types of schools.

[2] See the works of Jürgen Habermas for further discussion and analysis of the origin and evolution of the public sphere in the Anglo-American world.

[3] See School’s Choice: How Charter Schools Control Access and Shape Their Enrollment (Teachers College Press, 2021).

[4] See 5,000 Charter Schools Closed in 30 Years (2021). This is a high number of charter school closures given that there are only about 7,600 charter schools operating in the U.S. today.

[5] See The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back (2023).

[6] In March 2023, in a separate case, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed that IDEA, a charter school operator, is not an arm of the state.

[7] The phrase “state action” does not appear in the U.S. Constitution.

[8] As a matter of principle, no public funds should flow to any private organization because such funds are produced by working people and belong rightfully to society as a whole.

[9] The right to exclude is “one of the most treasured” rights of property ownership.

[10] In Rendell-Baker v. Kohn, 457 U.S. 830 (1982), the court held that “Even when a private school is substantially funded and regulated by the state, it is not a state actor if it is not exercising state prerogatives.”