Here We Go Again: Socialists, Democrats, and the Future of the Left

Charles Wofford

In his article “Want to Elect Socialists? Run Them in Democratic Primaries,” Daniel Moraff, a self-described democratic socialist, demonstrates a thoroughly liberal and pedestrian understanding of how social change occurs. There are several errors of history and of reasoning in the article which I hope to illustrate here.

Our problems begin in the first paragraph, where Moraff conflates “winning elections” and “building power.” As a socialist, one would think Moraff would understand that power is in the People, in the mass movements and organization that takes place in communities by and for community members. The People provide the labor and do the dirty work upon which the political class maintains its privilege. If the People get angry and decide in sufficient number not to participate in the system anymore, then the basis of political privilege will teeter and possibly collapse, and those in power would generally rather give up what’s been demanded of them rather than lose their power entirely.

In the second section Moraff references Kim Moody’s article in Jacobin magazine titled, “From Realignment to Reinforcement.” Moraff writes, “One cannot argue with Moody’s contention that those currently in control of the party are rich, powerful and odious. They are also, as Moody points out, firmly determined to repel left challenges within the party. These same interests poured millions into the Hillary Clinton campaign, and pour millions more into incumbency protection every cycle.” Moraff misses however the part where Moody says, “The party structure and establishment has been fortified against its rivals, external and internal.” Moody is correct; the party structure has been fortified against its rivals. Moraff falls into an individualist fallacy when he argues that it is simply about “odious” people, as though we can simply replace the people and the whole system will work. A socialist ought to know better.

If it were merely about corrupt people, then we wouldn’t need to be anti-capitalist at all. All we would need is to make sure “progressives” got into political an corporate offices. Then we could have total, unfettered capitalism, and because those with power aren’t “odious,” we wouldn’t need to worry about exploitation, environmental destruction, war, etc.

Some basic Marxist philosophy can help to clarify the point. In “The German Ideology,” Marx writes, “The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual means they find in existence and have to reproduce…the nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.” In other words, people are born into their circumstances, not the other way around. The structures in which people live and work have greater influence on who they are as individuals than vice versa. So we cannot simply pin the problems of the Democratic Party on the “odiousness” of its leaders. Just as we condemn capitalism as a system, so must we recognize the Democratic party is part of that system which must be condemned.

Moraff asks throughout his article what alternatives there can be to running socialists as democrats. If you assume that winning elections is the same as building power (or the only way to do so) then it’s hard to see an answer. But here are a few examples of progressive change in recent American history that I think illustrate the distinction between being in office and having power.

The first is the signing of the 1965 Civil Rights Act by President Lyndon Johnson. President Johnson did not sign that bill into law because he was a benevolent philanthropist and really felt for the struggle of colored folk. Remember, this was the president who escalated the Vietnam War into the hideous conflict it became. Descriptions of him by those who knew him and extant audio recordings show Johnson to be possibly the most arrogant president in American history. Yet he signed the Civil Rights Act into law. Why?

Because one of the main functions of the president is to preserve the nation. And as the demonstrations, boycotts, riots, strikes, and other forms of disobedience and popular organization and resistance began to take their toll on society, the power-that-were recognized the precariousness of the situation. The bottom was coming for the top, and the top had to do something. And, as stated above, those in power would sooner give up a little bit of their power than lose all of it. So in the end Johnson, as a representative of the power-that-were, was compelled to sign that act into law by virtue of the mass popular pressure applied to him.

A second example is Richard Nixon ending the Vietnam War. Anyone who thinks that Nixon was some peace-loving progressive has never opened a history book: Nixon’s name is practically synonymous with the warmongering arch-conservative. Yet he ended the Vietnam War. Why?

Exactly the same reasons as above: the resistance at home, and the resistance of the military in Vietnam which was starting to collapse. Nixon, despite his personal wishes, was compelled to end the war because of the popular pressures placed on his administration and his duty-as defined by the structure of the institution-to preserve the nation.

Those are two recent examples, but that is how social change always happens. If we continue to divert our energies into the black hole that is the Democratic Party, then socialism will never come. You cannot elect socialism: it can only come about through a revolution that will overturn the legal fiction of private property, the protection of which the U.S. government is constitutionally predicated.

The lesson is this: We need not look to the powerful; we need only remember who the powerful truly are.

The Democratic Socialists of America seems to serve two functions: one is to be a kind of transition group for those who are gradually disconnecting from liberal ideology. The other is to act as a net to catch those who might otherwise go to actual radical organizations. There are DSAers who support democrats, and there are radicals in the DSA too. But sooner or later the DSA as an organization is going to have to choose which side it is on: the capitalists, or the revolutionaries.

Rethinking the Marxist Conception of Revolution

Chris Wright

In the twenty-first century, as capitalism enters an epoch of unprecedented crisis, it is time to reconsider the Marxist theory of proletarian revolution. More precisely, it is time to critically reconsider it, to determine if it has to be revised in order to speak more directly to our own time and our own struggles. It was, after all, conceived in the mid-nineteenth century, in a political and social context very different from the present. Given the 160-year span from then to now, one might expect it to require a bit of updating. In this article I’ll argue that it does need to be revised, both for a priori reasons of consistency with the body of Marx’s thought and in order to make it more relevant to the contemporary scene. That is, I’ll argue that when Marx conceptualized revolution in terms of a fettering of the productive forces by production relations, as well as in terms of a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” he was the victim of both intellectual sloppiness and a misunderstanding of his own system. Accordingly, I will purify Marx’s conception of revolution of his and his followers’ mistakes. What we’ll find is that the purification not only makes the theory more cogent but updates it for our own time, in such a way that it can teach activists strategic lessons.

In brief, I’ll conclude that in order to make Marxism consistent with itself it is necessary to abandon the statist perspective to which Marx and Engels arguably were committed, and which they transmitted to most of their successors. It is necessary to conceive of revolution in a gradualist way, not as a sudden historical “rupture” in which the working class or its representatives take over the national state and organize social reconstruction on the basis of a unitary political will (the proletarian dictatorship). According to a properly understood Marxism, even the early stages of the transition from capitalism to post-capitalism must take place over generations, and not in a planned way but unconsciously and rather “spontaneously,” in a process slightly comparable to the transition from feudalism to capitalism. I will also argue that my revision can be the basis, finally, for a rapprochement between Marxists and anarchists. [1]

*

Marx has, in effect, two theories of revolution, one that applies only to the transition from capitalism to socialism and another that is more transhistorical, applying, for instance, also to the earlier transition between feudalism and capitalism. The former emerges from his analysis of capitalist economic dynamics, according to which a strong tendency toward class polarization divides society, in the long run, between a small elite of big capitalists and a huge majority of relatively immiserated workers, who finally succeed in overthrowing the capitalist state and organizing a socialist one. It is the transhistorical theory, however, that I will focus on here. Its locus classicus is the last four sentences of the following paragraph from the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859):

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of th ese relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or-this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms-with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

This paragraph has inspired reams of commentary and criticism, but for our purposes a few critical remarks will suffice. First of all, it is clearly the barest of outlines, desperately in need of elaboration. Unfortunately, nowhere in Marx’s writings does he elaborate it in a rigorous way. Second, it is stated in functionalist terms. Revolution happens supposedly because the productive forces-i.e., technology, scientific knowledge, and the skills of the labor force-have evolved to such a point that production relations are no longer compatible with their socially efficient use and development. But what are the causal mechanisms that connect this functionalist concept of “fettering of the productive forces” to social revolution? As far as I know, nowhere does Marx express his theory in causal, as opposed to functionalist, terms.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that, as it is stated above, the theory verges on meaninglessness. How does one determine when production relations have started to impede the use and development of productive forces? It would seem that to some extent they are always doing so. In capitalism, for example, one can point to the following facts: (1) recurring recessions and depressions periodically make useless much of society’s productive capacity; (2) enormous amounts of resources are wasted on socially useless advertising and marketing campaigns; (3) there is a lack of incentives for capital to invest in public goods such mass transit, the provision of free education, and public parks; (4) the recent financialization of the Western economy has entailed investment not in the improvement of infrastructure but in glorified gambling that doesn’t benefit society; (5) artificial obstacles such as intellectual copyright laws hinder the development and diffusion of knowledge and technology; (6) a colossal level of expenditures is devoted to war and destructive military technology; (7) in general, capitalism distributes resources in a profoundly irrational way, such that, for example, hundreds of millions of people starve while a few become multi-billionaires. Despite all this, however, no transition to a new society has happened.

Indeed, in other respects capitalism continues to develop productive forces, as shown by recent momentous advances in information technology. It’s true that most of this technology was originally developed in the state sector;[2] nevertheless, the broader economic and social context was and is that of capitalism. It is therefore clear that a mode of production can “fetter” and “develop” productive forces at the same time, a fact Marx did not acknowledge.

In order to salvage his hypothesis quoted above, and in fact to make it quite useful, a subtle revision is necessary. We have to replace his idea of a conflict between productive forces and production relations with that of a conflict between two sets of production relations, one of which uses productive forces in a more socially rational and “un-fettering” way than the other. This change, slight as it might seem, has major consequences for the Marxist conception of revolution. It is no exaggeration to say that, in addition to making the theory logically and empirically cogent, it changes its entire orientation, from advocating a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that directs social and economic reconstruction to advocating a more grassroots-centered long-term evolution of social movements that remake the economy and society from the ground up.

My revision of the theory, then, is simply that at certain moments in history, new forces and relations of production evolve in an older economic, social, political, and cultural framework, undermining it from within. The gradual process of social revolution begins to happen when the old set of production relations fetters, or irrationally uses, productive forces in relation to the new set of widely emerging production relations . The “in relation to…” that I have added saves the Marxian theory from meaninglessness, for it indicates a definite point at which the “old” society really begins to yield to the “new” one, namely when an emergent economy has evolved to the point that it commands substantial resources and is clearly more “effective” or “powerful” in some sense than the old economy. The first time such a radical transformation ever happened was with the Neolithic Revolution (or Agricultural Revolution), which started around 12,000 years ago. As knowledge and techniques of agriculture developed that made possible sedentary populations, the hunter-gatherer mode of production withered away, as did the ways of life appropriate to it.

Similarly, starting around the thirteenth century in parts of Europe, an economy and society organized around manorialism and feudalism began to transform into an economy centered in the accumulation of capital. Several factors contributed to this process, among them (1) the revival of long-distance trade (after centuries of Europe’s relative isolation from the rest of the world), which stimulated the growth of merchant capitalism in the urban interstices of the feudal order; (2) mercantile support for the growth of the nation-state with a strong central authority that could dismantle feudal restrictions to trade and integrated markets; (3) the rise, particularly in England, of a class of agrarian capitalists who took advantage of new national and international markets (e.g., for wool) by investing in improved cultivation methods and enclosing formerly communal lands to use them for pasturage; (4) the partly resultant migration of masses of the peasantry to cities, where, during the centuries from the sixteenth to the nineteenth, they added greatly to the class of laborers who could be used in manufacturing; (5) the discovery of the Americas, which further stimulated commerce and the accumulation of wealth.

In short, from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries, capitalist classes-agrarian, mercantile, financial, and industrial-emerged in Europe, aided by technological innovations such as the printing press and then, later on, by all the technologies that were made possible by the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. All this is just to say that in the womb of the old society, new productive forces and production relations evolved that were more dynamic and wealth-generating than earlier ones. Moreover, on the foundation of these new technologies, economic relations, and scientific discourses arose new social, political, and cultural relations and ideologies that were propagated by the most dynamic groups with the most resources, i.e., the bourgeoisie and its intellectual hangers-on. ^[3]

My correction of Marx’s formulation of his hypothesis in the abovementioned Preface has another advantage besides making the theory more meaningful: it also supplies a causal mechanism by which a particular mode of production’s “fettering of the productive forces” leads to revolution-indeed, tosuccessful revolution. The mechanism is that the emergent mode of production, in being less dysfunctional or more socially rational than the dominant mode, eventually (after reaching a certain visibility in the society) attracts vast numbers of adherents who participate in it and propagandize for it-especially if the social context is one of general economic stagnation and class polarization, due to the dominant mode of production’s dysfunctionality.

Moreover, this latter condition means that, after a long evolution, the emergent economic relations and their institutional partisans will have access to so many resources that they will be able to triumph economically and politically over the reactionary partisans of the old, deteriorating economy. This, of course, is what ultimately ensured the political success of the bourgeoisie in its confrontations with the feudal aristocracy. Likewise, one can predict that if capitalism continues to stagnate and experience massive crisis over the next century, a new, more cooperative mode of production that has developed in the interstices of capitalist society may eventually mount the summits of political power.

In short, my seemingly minor revision provides a condition for the success of anti-capitalist revolution, and thus helps explain why no such revolution has so far been successful in the long run (namely because the condition has been absent). Another way of seeing the implications and advantages of the revision is by contrasting it with the views of orthodox Marxists. A single sentence from Friedrich Engels sums up these views: “The proletariat seizes state power, and then transforms the means of production into state property.” ^[4] This statement, approved by Lenin and apparently also by Marx, encapsulates the mistaken statist perspective of the orthodox Marxist conception of proletarian revolution.

This perspective is briefly described in the Communist Manifesto, where Marx writes, “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class,” and then lays out a ten-point plan of social reconstruction by means of state decrees. By the 1870s Marx had abandoned the specifics of his earlier plan, but his (qualified) statism remained, and transmitted itself to his followers. [5] It is true that orthodox Marxists expect the state, “as a state,” to somehow (inexplicably) wither away eventually, but they do have a statist point of view in relation to the early stages of revolution.

This statist vision emerges naturally from Marx’s famous passage quoted above, in that the idea of a conflict between the rational use and development of productive forces and the fettering nature of current production relations suggests that at some point a social “explosion” will occur whereby the productive forces are finally liberated from the chains of the irrational mode of production. Pressure builds up, so to speak, over many years, as the mode of production keeps fettering the socially rational use of technology and scientific knowledge; through the agency of the working class, the productive forces struggle against the shackles of economic relations; at long last they burst free, when the working class takes over the state and reorganizes the economy. These are the metaphors naturally conjured by the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

But there are logical and empirical problems with the statist view, the view according to which the substance of social revolution occurs after the seizure of state power. First of all, it is in tension with the Marxian conception of social dynamics. Briefly stated, Marx sees the economy-rightly-as the relative foundation of the rest of society, including politics, which suggests that a post-capitalist social revolution cannot be politically willed and imposed. This would seem to reverse the order of “dominant causality,” from politics to the economy rather than vice versa. Moreover, such extreme statism exalts will as determining human affairs, a notion that is quite incompatible with the dialectical spirit of Marxism.

According to “dialectics,” history really happens “behind the backs” of actors: it evolves “unconsciously,” so to speak, as Hegel understood. Social and institutional conflicts work themselves out, slowly, through the actions of large numbers of people who generally have little idea of the true historical significance of their acts. As Marx said, we should never trust the self-interpretations of historical actors. And yet apparently he suspends this injunction, and his whole dialectical method, when it comes to the so-called proletarian revolution. These historical actors are somehow supposed to have perfect understanding of themselves and their place in history, and their historical designs are supposed to work out perfectly and straightforwardly-despite the massive complexity and “dialectical contradictions” of society.

The reality is that if “the working class” or its ostensible representatives seize control of the state in a predominantly capitalist society-and if, miraculously, they are not crushed by the forces of reaction-they can expect to face overwhelming obstacles to the realization of their revolutionary plans. Some of these obstacles are straightforward: for example, divisions among the new ruling elite, divisions within the working class itself (which is not a unitary entity), popular resistance to plans to remake the economy, the necessity for brutal authoritarian methods of rule in order to force people to accept the new government’s plans, the inevitable creation of a large bureaucracy to carry out so-called reconstruction, etc. Fundamental to all these obstacles is the fact that the revolutionaries have to contend with the institutional legacies of capitalism: relations of coercion and domination condition everything the government does, and there is no way to break free of them. They cannot be magically transcended through political will. In particular, it is impossible through top-down directives to transform production relations from authoritarian to democratic: Marxism itself suggests that the state is not socially creative in this way. The hope to reorganize exploitative relations of production into liberatory, democratic relations by means of bureaucracy and the exercise of a unitary political will is utterly utopian and un-Marxist.

The record of so-called Communist revolutions in the twentieth century is instructive. While some Marxists may deny that lessons should be drawn from these revolutions, since they happened in relatively “primitive” rather than advanced capitalist countries, the experiences are at least suggestive. For what they created in their respective societies was not socialism (workers’ democratic control of production) or communism (a classless, stateless, moneyless society of anarchistic democracy) but a kind of ultra-statist state capitalism. To quote the economist Richard Wolff, “the internal organization of the vast majority of industrial enterprises [in Communist countries] remained capitalist. The productive workers continued in all cases to produce surpluses: they added more in value by their labor than what they received in return for that labor. Their surpluses were in all cases appropriated and distributed by others.” ^[6] Workers continued to be viciously exploited and oppressed, as in capitalism; the accumulation of capital continued to be the overriding systemic imperative, to which human needs were subordinated. While there are specific historical reasons for the way these economies developed, the general underlying condition was that it was and is impossible to transcend the capitalist framework if the political revolution takes place in a capitalist world, ultimately because the economy dominates politics more than political will can dominate the economy.

In any case, it was and is breathtakingly utopian to think that an attempted seizing of the state in an advanced and still overwhelmingly capitalist country, however crisis-ridden its economy, could ever succeed, because the ruling class has a monopoly over the most sophisticated and destructive means of violence available in the world. Even rebellions in relatively primitive countries have almost always been crushed, first because the ruling classes there had disproportionate access to means of violence, and second because the ruling classes in more advanced countries could send their even more sophisticated instruments of warfare to these countries in order to put down the revolution. But if a mass rebellion came close to overthrowing the regime of one of the core capitalist nations, as opposed to a peripheral one, the reaction of ruling classes worldwide would be nearly apocalyptic. They would likely prefer the nuclear destruction of civilization to permitting the working class or some subsection of it to take over a central capitalist state.

Thus, the only possible way-and the only Marxist way-for a transition out of capitalism to occur is that it be grounded in, and organized on the basis of, the new, gradually and widely emerging production relations themselves. This is the condition that has been absent in all attempts at revolution so far, and it explains why, aside from a few isolated pockets of momentary socialism (such as Catalonia in 1936),[7] they never managed to transcend a kind of state capitalism. They existed in a capitalist world, so they were constrained by the institutional limits of that world.

Ironically, Marx understood that this would be the case unless the revolution was international. He understood that “socialism in one country” is impossible. He knew that unless a revolution in Russia triggered or coincided with revolutions elsewhere, which on an international scale worked together, so to speak, to build a socialist mode of production, it was doomed to failure. What he did not understand was that the only way a revolution can be international is that it happen in a vaguely similar way to the centuries-long “bourgeois revolution” in Europe and North America, namely by sprouting first on the local level, the municipal level, the regional level, and expanding on that “grassroots” basis. The hope that the states and ruling classes of many nations can fall at approximately the same time to a succession of national uprisings of workers-which is the only way that Marx’s conception of revolution can come to pass-was always wildly unrealistic, again because of the nature of capitalist power relations that Marxism itself clarifies.

The alternative paradigm of revolution sketched here is not only more logically consistent and realistic; it is also the only one appropriate to the twenty-first century. For we are beginning to see the glimmers of new production relations on which a future society will have to be erected. This article is primarily theoretical, not empirical, so I will not discuss recent developments in depth. It will suffice to mention that such ideas as public banking, municipal enterprise, worker cooperatives, and participatory budgeting are becoming ever more popular, as scholar-activists like Gar Alperovitz, Richard Wolff, and Ellen Brown, and magazines such as Yes! Magazine and In These Times, publicize them.

Incipient popular movements are coalescing around anti-capitalist institutions associated with the “solidarity economy,” as this cooperative political economy has been called. For many years the World Social Forum has served as a venue to promote such non-capitalist initiatives, where activists from around the world can propose new ideas, publicize their work, connect with one another, and birth new regional or transnational organizations to spread the ethos of “cooperativism.” One can predict that as society descends into prolonged crisis-economic, political, social, and environmental crisis-worldwide activism on behalf of a more cooperative, democratic economy and politics will grow in influence, ultimately making possible, perhaps, a gradual transformation of the corporatist political economy of the present into something more socialistic, i.e., economically democratic.

It will certainly not be a peaceful process, as innumerable political clashes with oligarchical authorities will have to occur. And it will not be consummated in the short term, likely requiring well over a century to carve out even the basic infrastructure of a post-capitalist society. Nevertheless, given the unsustainability of the global corporate-capitalist regime, it would seem that the only alternative to complete social collapse and an ensuing Hobbesian state of nature is this slow transformation-proceeding on the foundation of slowly emerging anti-capitalist production relations-to a more democratic political economy.[8]

Another advantage of the revision I have made to Marx’s conception of revolution-besides providing an analytical framework to interpret the emerging solidarity economy-is that it shows a way out of the sectarian conflicts between Marxists and anarchists that have afflicted the left since Marx’s bitter fight with Bakunin. The way to transcend these old divisions is to recognize that, in its prescriptions and ideals, Marxism is not so different from certain strains of anarchism, such as anarcho-syndicalism. Indeed, properly understood, Leninist vanguardism and elitism-or any other statist version of Marxism-is less Marxian than anarcho-syndicalism, or any school of thought committed to building the new society within the shell of the old.

“Every new social structure makes organs for itself in the body of the old organism,” the anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker writes. “Without this preliminary any social evolution is unthinkable. Even revolutions can only develop and mature the germs which already exist and have made their way into the consciousness of men; they cannot themselves create these germs or generate new worlds out of nothing.” ^[9] The institutions around which anarcho-syndicalists hope to construct a new society are labor unions and labor councils-organized in federations and possessing somewhat different functions than they have in capitalist society-but whatever one thinks of these specific institutions as germs of the future, one can agree with the basic premise of prefigurative politics (or economics). And it is this that is, or should be seen as, quintessentially Marxist.

We may recall, in addition, that the “economism” of anarcho-syndicalism that Gramsci so deplored is reminiscent of Marxism’s materialism and economism. Both schools of thought privilege economics over politics and culture, focusing on economic struggles and such tools of working-class agency as unions and labor councils (though Marxists have generally acknowledged the potential utility of political parties as well). For both, the class struggle is paramount. For both, workers’ self-organization is the means to triumph over capitalism. James P. Cannon has a telling remark in the context of a discussion of the anarcho-syndicalist IWW: “The IWW borrowed something from Marxism; quite a bit, in fact. Its two principal weapons-the doctrine of the class struggle and the idea that the workers must accomplish their own emancipation through their own organized power-came from this mighty arsenal.” ^[10] The very life and work of Marx evince an unshakeable commitment to the idea of working-class initiative, “self-activity” (Selbsttätigkeit ), self-organization. The word “self-activity” evolved into the even more anarchist concept of “spontaneity” under the pen of Marx’s disciple Rosa Luxemburg, who devoted herself to elaborating and acting on the Marxist belief in workers’ dignity, rationality, and creativity. [11]

Traditionally, anarchists and Marxists had another conviction in common (aside from their shared moral critique of capitalism and vision of an ideal, stateless society)-a mistaken one, however. Namely, they both thought that a revolutionary rupture was possible and desirable. They had a millennial faith in the coming of a redemptive moment that would, so to speak, wash away humanity’s sins. By concerted action, the working class would with one fell blow, or a series of blows, overturn capitalist relations and establish socialist ones. This is the basic utopian mistake that Marxism (if purified) can prove wrong but anarchism cannot, because it lacks the theoretical equipment to do so. Even anarcho-syndicalists, despite their verbal recognition that the seeds of the new society had to be planted in the old, shared the utopian belief in a possible historical rupture, not understanding that the only feasible way to realize their “prefigurative politics” was to build up a new mode or modes of production over generations in the womb of the old regime. And the only way that would be possible is in the context of the gradual, self-inflicted deterioration of corporate capitalism, such as we are beginning to see now, in the neoliberal era.

It is neoliberalism that has carried to their global consummation the destructive tendencies of capitalism, viz., privatization, marketization, the commodification of everything, suppression of workers’ power, class polarization, integration of the world under the aegis of capitalist relations of production, ever-increasing capital mobility, and consequent despoliation of the natural environment. It is neoliberalism, therefore, that, in bringing about the climax of the capitalist era-sharpening the system’s contradictions to the breaking point-will end up precipitating its demise and making possible the rise of something new.

All these speculations and conceptual revisions require a more extended treatment, which I have attempted in my above-cited book Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States . Much more, for example, needs to be said about the relation between anarchism and a purified, updated Marxism. Much more can be said about the historical logic of how a gradualist global revolution will proceed, and why progressive sectors of the ruling class-not understanding the long-term revolutionary potential of local experiments in cooperativism and new types of socialism-will support it and sponsor it (as, indeed, they are already doing in the U.S. with respect to worker cooperatives). [12]Hopefully the foregoing has at least suggested fruitful avenues of research and activism, and has shown how Marxism may be made relevant-rather than antagonistic-to cooperativism, interstitial/decentralized socialism, and the solidarity economy in general. Whatever logical and political mistakes Marxists have made in the past, these (for now) “interstitial” phenomena-which of course must be supported by popular movements and constant pressure on political authorities, including all forms of “direct action”-should be seen as quintessentially Marxist, and in fact as being a key component of any viable path to a post-capitalist order.
Chris Wright has a Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is the author of Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States and Notes of an Underground Humanist. His website is www.wrightswriting.com.
Notes

 

[1] This essay is a distillation of some of the ideas in Chris Wright, Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States (Bradenton, FL: Booklocker, 2014).

[2] See, for example, Arthur L. Norberg and Judy E. O’Neill, Transforming Computer Technology: Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962-1986 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).

[3] Among many others, see Phyllis Deane, The First Industrial Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Robert Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review I/104, July-August 1977, 25-92; Rodney Hilton, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1976); T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986); Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 1994); and Robert Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

[4] Quoted in Lenin, State and Revolution (New York: International Publishers, 1969), 15.

[5] See, e.g., ibid., 51, 52. Marx’s pamphlet The Civil War in France, written in 1871, expresses an attitude close to anarchism, but it is not clear that this essay is a direct statement of his considered views. To a great extent it had to be a eulogy for the Commune and a defense of it against its bourgeois critics, not just a neutral discussion of what it did right and wrong. Elsewhere, Marx is critical of the Commune.

[6] Richard Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), 109.

[7] See Sam Dolgoff, The Anarchist Collectives: Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936-1939 (New York: Black Rose Books, 1974).

[8] On the social and political logic of such a gradual transformation, see chapter four of my Worker Cooperatives and Revolution. On the anti-capitalist institutions and initiatives mentioned above, see Gar Alperovitz, What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution (White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013); John Restakis, Humanizing the Economy: Co-operatives in the Age of Capital (British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 2010); José Corrêa Leite, The World Social Forum: Strategies of Resistance (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005); Carmen Diana Deere and Frederick S. Royce, eds., Rural Social Movements in Latin America: Organizing for Sustainable Livelihoods (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2009); Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (New York: Verso, 2010); Ellen Brown, “Banking for California’s Future,” Yes! Magazine, September 14, 2011; David Dayen, “A Bank Even a Socialist Could Love,” In These Times, April 17, 2017.

[9] Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice (Oakland: AK Press, 2004), 58.

[10] James P. Cannon, “The I.W.W.” (1955), available at http://www.marxists.org.

[11] See, e.g., Rosa Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution” and “Leninism or Marxism?” (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961/2000).

[12] See Wright, Worker Cooperatives and Revolution, 68, 69, 115.

The Pedagogy of Hip Hop: Underground Soundtracks for Dissecting and Confronting the Power Structure

Colin Jenkins

Disclaimer: The language expressed in this article is an uncensored reflection of the views of the artists as they so chose to speak and express themselves. Censoring their words would do injustice to the freedom of expression and political content this article intends to explore. Therefore, some of the language appearing below may be offensive to personal, cultural, or political sensibilities.

On the 16^th track of Immortal Technique’s Revolutionary, Volume 2, Mumia Abu-Jamal theorizes on the inherent contradictions between the lived reality of many Americans and the notion of homeland [in]security. In doing so, he explains how the musical phenomenon of hip hop captures these contradictions by displaying “gritty roots” that are bound up in systemic injustice and deep feelings of fear and hatred. These feelings, according to Mumia, engulf entire generations of children who have been betrayed by systems of capitalism and white supremacy, and their intricately constructed school-to-prison pipeline:

“To think about the origins of hip hop in this culture, and also about homeland security, is to see that there are at the very least two worlds in America. One of the well-to-do and another of the struggling. For if ever there was the absence of homeland security, it is seen in the gritty roots of hip hop. For the music arises from a generation that feels, with some justice, that they have been betrayed by those who came before them. That they are at best tolerated in schools, feared on the streets, and almost inevitably destined for the hell holes of prison. They grew up hungry, hated, and unloved. And this is the psychic fuel that generates the anger that seems endemic in much of the music and poetry. One senses very little hope above the personal goals of wealth to climb above the pit of poverty. In the broader society, the opposite is true. For here, more than any other place on earth, wealth is more widespread and so bountiful, that what passes for the middle class in America could pass for the upper class in most of the rest of the world. Their very opulent and relative wealth makes them insecure. And homeland security is a governmental phrase that is as oxymoronic, as crazy as saying military intelligence, or the U.S Department of Justice. They’re just words that have very little relationship to reality. And do you feel safer now? Do you think you will anytime soon? Do you think duct tape and Kleenex and color codes will make you safe?”

In his short commentary, Mumia refers specifically to the Black community in the US – a community that has been ravaged from every angle through America’s relatively short history: two and a half centuries of chattel slavery followed by various forms of legalized systems of servitude and second-class citizenship, including sharecropping , convict leasing , Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. A history consumed with betrayal after betrayal, complex layers of institutional racism carried out under the guise of legality, and a systematic ghettoization supported by both ” white flight” and widespread discriminatory housing and employment practices. Mumia juxtaposes this unique experience to the “broader society,” one that is riddled with insecurities stemming from “opulent and relative” wealth, to expose the irony of “homeland security,” a term that he views as oxymoronic.

Mumia is correct in characterizing the reactionary temperament of both the American middle and upper classes – sects that both determine and maintain dominant culture. Broader society is molded by this temperament, which is buoyed by small pockets of socioeconomic comfort floating in a vast sea of instability that not only plagues the Black community in its never-ending struggle against both white supremacy and capitalism, but also poor and working-class white communities that have been similarly doomed by their forced reliance on wage labor. Despite what he describes as “bountiful wealth,” American society has always been propped up on this hidden base of despair, felt by a majority of the population that exists below the façade. Since the 1980s, this façade has been slowly chiseled away as neoliberalism has successfully funneled wealth to the few at the top while creating a race to the bottom for everyone else, including those once deemed “middle class.”

This race to the bottom has exposed the underbelly of instability through its attack on a fast-eroding, mostly-white middle class that now finds itself desperately seeking reasons for its newfound despair. While those of us at the bottom may welcome the company, in hopes that it will bring the critical mass needed to finally confront and bring down the capitalist system, it also signals trying times ahead. In being consistent with similar erosions of “relative and bountiful wealth” throughout history, the American demise brings with it a fairly high probability of a fascist tide. In fact, this tide has already begun to form, largely through millions of white tears dropping from the Tea Party, its Reaganite forerunners, the “alt-right,” a surge of neo-Nazism and white nationalism, and Donald Trump’s pied piper-like rhetoric that has pooled it all together.

While middle-class America comes crashing down along with the empire, the Black community remains steadfast in its centuries-long defensive posture. Despite facing an acute, structural oppression that is unparalleled in any other modern “industrialized” setting, and in spite of Mumia’s sobering analysis, the Black community has in many ways survived and thrived like no other. This survival in the face of intense hatred has been expressed through many musical forms , from the early roots of rock n roll, Blues, and American Jazz to the hip-hop phenomenon that Mumia speaks of. This collective survival is perfectly captured in Tupac’s poem,The Rose that Grew from Concrete, which tells the story of

…the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete
Proving nature’s laws wrong, it learned how to walk without havin feet
Funny it seems but by keepin its dreams
It learned to breathe fresh air
Long live the rose that grew from concrete
When no one else even cared.

In explaining the meaning of the poem, Pac summed up much of the African-American experience, as well as the reactionary temperament often directed at it from those in more privileged positions:

“You try to plant somethin in the concrete. If it grows, and the rose petal got all kind of scratches and marks, you not gonna say, “Damn, look at all the scratches and marks on the rose that grew from concrete.” You gonna be like, “Damn! A rose grew from the concrete?!” Same thing with me… I grew out of all of this. Instead of sayin, “Damn, he did this, he did this,” just be like, “Damn! He grew out of that? He came out of that?” That’s what they should say… All the trouble to survive and make good out of the dirty, nasty, unbelievable lifestyle they gave me. I’m just tryin to make somethin.”

Pac’s story also describes that of the entire American working class, as a collection of former slaves, indentured servants, peasants, and poor immigrants set up for failure by a capitalist system designed to exploit us all, collectively. The working-class struggle is tightly intertwined with the Black struggle. The Communist Party knew this long ago. The Industrial Workers of the World did as well. The original Black Panther Party also knew this, as did all those coming from the Black Radical Tradition in America: W.E.B. DuBois, the African Blood Brotherhood, Harry Haywood, the Revolutionary Action Movement, Frances M. Beal, Angela Davis, C.L.R. James, the Combahee River Collective, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Congress of African People, and so many others.

As this struggle commences and intensifies during what appear to be the end days of American Empire, underground hip hop provides us with a soundtrack that is laced with historical context, deep analysis, and valuable knowledge – all of which should be applied while moving forward. The “psychic fuel” that Mumia points to in his brief commentary, which “generates the anger that seems endemic in much of the music and poetry” is far from misguided, and extends far beyond cathartic release. While in the mainstream, the Black Radical Tradition continues to be tragically mocked by identity politics , activist-celebrity tweeters pimping corporate brands , black liberation-themed credit cards , high-dollar-plate events, non-profit organizations, and the Democratic Party, its torch remains lit through the lyrics burning on underground hip-hop tracks. And this underground reflects the pulse of the streets, where tens of millions experience daily life in the underbelly of instability – not on Twitter, Facebook, or fundraising dinners at the Marriott.

 

Structural Oppression Under Capitalism

As resistance movements gain momentum in the days of Trump, an understanding of the disastrous effects of capitalism is necessary. Party politics are, as John Dewey once explained, the “shadow cast on society by big business (capitalism).” Politicians from both parties work within this shadow, delivering rhetoric to the masses before and after taking orders from their donors, sponsors, and corporate overlords. Regardless of who is in the highest office, whether it’s an eloquent black President or a blustering billionaire, “the attenuation does not change the substance.” As a popular Internet meme recently noted, the ‘hood under Trump is the same as the ‘hood under Obama, which was the same as the ‘hood under Bush, which was the same as the ‘hood under Clinton. Sadly, this sentiment could go on for as long as Presidents have occupied the white house. Politicians and presidents come and go, and nothing changes for most of us; because, quite frankly, it is not supposed to. Politics serve capitalism; and capitalism does not serve us.

“It’s like an open-air prison and it remained packed”

Hip hop serves as historiography in this sense, documenting the conditions of neighborhoods throughout the US for the past four decades, examining the histories behind multi-generational poverty, and seeking ways to address the dire situations many find themselves in. Ironically, the rise of hip hop paralleled the rise of the neoliberal era, a period that has been marked by an intensification of the capitalist system. During this time, things for most have at best remained stagnant, and at worst become increasingly disastrous. The hook in Erykah Badu’s The Cell (2008) captures this lived experience in sobering fashion:

We’re not well
We’re not well
We can’t tell

Brenda done died with no name
Nickel bag coke to the brain
Will they ever find the vaccine?
Shitty-damn-damn-baby-bang
Rich man got the double barrel
Po’ man got his back to the door
Code white stands for trouble
Shots from the po-po (blah blah)

Jean Grae’s Block Party , the 4^th track on her 2002 album Attack of the Attacking Things, provides an intimate glimpse into the state of Black communities during this time:

I don’t wanna preach or come off bitter, this is a commentary auditory
Editorial, about the state of things, state of mind and state of being
What the fuck is goin on? How the fuck we gonna make it out?
It’s hectic, from asbestos filled classrooms
To the stench of death that’s still in New York
The air is thick with it, but it reaches further
Like the world murder rate

While illustrating the chronic conditions found in many communities, Grae immediately offers insight into possible solutions rooted in consciousness. Without actually saying it, her lyrics brilliantly dip into a structural analysis that calls for abandoning capitalist culture and realizing the tragic ironies in seeking individual materialistic goals. In doing so, there is an underlying theme to escape values that have been implanted into not only predominantly Black communities, but also working-class communities as a whole:

We need to globalize, further spread on this earth
To appreciate the full value of individual worth
To realize how ridiculous the thought of ownership is
And protectin your turf – that’s bullshit man
That’s how we got colonized
Missionaries create foreign schools and change the native way & thinkin
So in ten years, we can have a foreign Columbine
In some small village in the Amazon, c’mon man

Grae’s second verse masterfully ties together a narrative based in seeking a collective consciousness while avoiding a house-slave mentality that aims to, as she puts it, “chill with rich white folks.” Again, while directed toward members of the Black community, Grae’s commentary is undeniably relative to the working-class struggle in its entirety, especially in terms of how the “rags-to-riches,” so-called “American Dream” is framed strictly within individual pursuits of wealth and hyper-consumerism. Ultimately, as Grae suggests, this mentality must be shed through deeper calls for knowledge, community, and shared struggle:

It’s every man for himself
That’s why the black community is lackin in wealth, there’s no unity
We soon to be chillin with rich white folk
And that means that we made it
Let our kids go hungry before our wardrobe is outdated

…If the system’s corrupt, then change it
Fought for the right to vote, don’t even use it
Forget electoral winnin
The way the world’s goin, we in the ninth inning
Heh, and we still aren’t up to bat
Niggas is happy just to have the rights to sit on the bench
Like floor seats is alright, and that’s as far as we reach
Materialistic values, not morals, that’s what we teach
I see it in the youth, hungry for fame and money
Not for knowledge and pursuit of the truth
Pick up a book or a newspaper
Take a free class in politics or human behavior

Talib Kweli and Rapsody’s Every Ghetto , the 2^nd track on Kweli’s 2015 album Indie 500, echoes Grae’s track in addressing the systematic ghettoization of the Black community under the intertwined tandem of capitalism and white supremacy. Crucially, the track challenges the often-mistaken attempt to characterize ghetto life as a monolithic existence, seemingly warning against the fetishization of the black struggle while reflecting Pac’s poem of the concrete rose and highlighting the unique struggle and persistence of the Black working class. Kweli’s bridge builds on Grae’s Block Party narrative, celebrating the communal potential of struggling communities:

I’m good walkin’ in every ghetto around the world
The hood often embrace ya when you profound with words
I say the shit they relate to, I keep it down to Earth
Other rappers sound like they hate you, them niggas sound absurd
So when they walk through the ghetto they get their chain snatched
They gotta talk to the ghetto to get their chain back
It’s like an open-air prison and it remain packed
Nothin’ but straight facts

Kweli’s initial verse jumps directly into a layered analysis, with the first bar alone touching on chronic malnourishment, poor education, smothering crime, gentrification, and a culture of anti-consciousness:

Every ghetto, every city, like Ms. Hill
They way too used to the missed meals
Hard to concentrate, hard to sit still
Murder rate permanent place in the top 10
We live here, these hipsters drop in
You hear them barrels cockin’
They say consciousness mean a nigga ain’t rugged
Until they get beat within an inch of it

Rapsody closes the track with a powerful verse, filled with structural and cultural critiques all tied to capitalism and white supremacy. Her verse is laced with innuendo in a masterful play on words as she illustrates the lived reality of generations of Black Americans who have been systematically targeted by America’s settler-colonial project, pointing to everything from police terror and the destruction of the Black family unit to the false promises of individualized pursuits of wealth.

Indie 5, for the people by the people
Ya-ya, giddy up, who got the juice now?
Snatch it out your kiddies cups
The shit you gave us watered down
This one’s for Basquiat
They be brushin’ with death, uh
Is this The Art Of War for cops?
We double-dutchin’ duckin’ shots
Every home ain’t got a Pops
Every man ain’t sellin’ rocks
A different will to win here
Different from switchin’ cars
They pray that we switch our bars
To a fiend from a metaphor
Worldstar, Worldstar
Lotta love and this life hard
Keep us prayin’ like “oh God”
Illegally thievery think us peelin’ off easily
Frustrated we hate it
That’s why we scream out “nigga we made it”
It’s an odd future they ain’t know we was all some creators
Somethin’ from nothin’ was told Kings walk and man you frontin’
For the people and by the people but them over money
I’m on my Viola Davis here, workin’ for justice
How you get away with murder? Be a cop and just kill us
How we supposed to not catch feelings?
Innocent lives, boy we got kids in these buildings
I’m on my Viola Davis, it’s what you call a defense
For all the drama they gave us I’m spittin’ Shonda Rhimes wit
Too high for you like ganja, that’s what Shonda rhyme with
I holla back in the Hamptons, you still black if you rich
Spread love ain’t just the Brooklyn way, it’s universal
360 and the nine lives, whoa, what a circle

 

“Keep it movin’ on”

While systemic oppression has plagued many generations of working-class Americans, especially non-white (as noted by Grae, Kweli and Rapsody), the middle class has only begun to feel the pressure of the capitalist system. The American middle class is an anomaly in history. Its formation defied the internal mechanics of capitalism, a system that is designed to favor the privileged few who have access to enough capital to own the means of production. This anomaly was beneficial for America’s capitalist class, in that it allowed for a slick rebranding of capitalism as a system of “freedom” and “liberty.” For decades, the American middle class was held up as the ultimate advertisement for a system that we were told allowed for social mobility through “hard work.” These fables became so strong that an entire century was spent trying to shape a benevolent form of capitalism through government intervention (Keynesianism) and a robust Welfare State. Because of its relative success, mainly due to US imperial endeavors abroad, the capitalist system was not only propped up, but it was even sold to the masses as “the only alternative.” The era of neoliberalism ended all of that. As capitalism’s internal mechanics were unleashed during this period, so too were its natural consequences – capital accumulation for the elites, and mass dispossession for the people.

While mainstream media outlets continue to push a tired narrative, hip hop has shed some light on the real effects of capitalism. Vinnie Paz’s 2010 track Keep Movin’ On provides insight into these effects, and especially how they relate to the American worker. The first verse informs us in two ways. First, Paz illustrates the workers’ role in the capitalist system, which is merely to serve as a tool to be used and exploited until no longer needed. In this role, we are not considered as human beings with families, needs, and inherent rights; we are only valuable as long as we provide owners with an avenue of extracting surplus labor from us for their profit. Second, the verse specifically describes the plight of the American manufacturing worker and the demise of middle-class jobs over the past 40 years due to globalization, corporate offshoring, and free trade agreements – all elements of the proliferation of capitalism in the neoliberal era:

I lost my job at the factory and that’s disastrous
They said it’s due to regulation and higher taxes
They ain’t give me no notice. They knocked me off my axis
I can’t pay the electric bill. It’s total blackness
I suggested some incentives for innovation
But that was met with resistance like it’s a sin of Satan
I’m losing my patience over here. I’m sick of waiting
And I ain’t never expect to be in this situation
And the manufacturing jobs are fading fast (Damn)
Can’t do nothing else. I should’ve stayed in class
I have to wait till summertime to cut the blades of grass
I have this little bit of money. Have to make it last
I have children to feed. I have a loving wife
I had a hard time coming that was nothing nice
I keep asking myself what am I doing wrong
And they just look at me and tell me “Keep it movin’ on”

 

“Kill my landlord”

Along with massive unemployment and underemployment, the working class is also constantly faced with insecure housing situations. Landlordism is a natural byproduct of a capitalist system which seeks to commodify basic human needs such as food, clothing, housing, and healthcare for profit. Under this system, the few who can afford to own multiple properties are allowed to exploit the many who can barely afford basic shelter for themselves and their families. Because of this, many of us go our entire lives without ever establishing a stable home environment.

As of 2017, this natural housing crisis has reached a point where it’s being labeled an epidemic even by mainstream sources. As rent continues to soar , so do evictions. ” As of 2015 , more than 20 million renters-more than half of all renters in the U.S.-were cost burdened, meaning they spent at least at least 30 percent of their income on rent. That’s up from almost 15 million in 2001. And while rents have risen 66 percent since 2000, household incomes have only risen 35 percent.” In 2015, an estimated 2.7 million Americans faced eviction. Median rent has increased by more than 70% since 1995, while wages have stagnated for almost 30 years, and jobs that pay a living wage have disappeared during this same period. Landlords will go to great lengths to throw families and children out in the streets, sometimes even for falling behind one month on rent. “A landlord can evict tenants through a formal court process,” explains Matthew Desmond , “or they can choose cheaper and quicker ways” to boot the families, such as “paying them a couple of hundred dollars to vacate by the end of the week” or even by removing the front door of the home. In order to protect this for-profit housing system from total collapse, the federal government uses numerous programs to assist people, including public housing, rental assistance, and even massive tax subsidies for homeowners. Despite this, many families are cold-heartedly exploited and discarded by landlords who want nothing more than to profit off this forced, human desperation. After living such an existence, The Coup’s 1993 track Kill My Landlord , which featured the less-known rap duo Elements of Change, is surely to serve as a long-standing anthem for many:

Overlord of the concrete jungle but I’m humble
As I witness my opponent crumble
Like the shack that I live in the house that I rent from him
Roach infested I’m sure that the rats are nesting
The heat doesn’t work he still hasn’t checked it
Disrespected me for the last time
I loaded up the nine stepping double time
Bullseye, Another point scored
Right between the eyes of my landlord

All who have relied on rental property to live can certainly relate to the undignified relationship between landlord and tenant. Like bosses, landlords exploit us as resources. And the capitalist system not only allows them the power to do this on mass scale, it actually supports their rights with force if necessary. Our collective desperation is their individual gain. And our forced dependency on them leaves us with no leverage against their power. The second verse of The Coup’s classic track reflects on this slave-like existence brought on by capitalism and landlordism:

So me I’m chilling at the table with my family
Hypothetically trying hard to keep my mind off the economy
Yeah I know the reason I find it hard to pass the test
Call me a victim cause I’m another brother jobless
Every day it seems like I’m moving closer to the streets
PG&E repo’ed the lights and my fucking heat
The situation’s getting hard for me to handle
Had to trade my Nike’s to the store to buy some candles
Last to first and I’m a-hunted and a ho I know
The man is going to come and throw me in the cold
Tears in my eye as I’m thinking of place to stay
While I’m staring at the freebie cheese up in my plate
I heard a bang bang bang knocking at my door
I looked up it was my motherfucking landlord, let him in quick
Followed by the sheriff deputy trying to come in
Every po on my property, staring me down
Mugging hard up in my family’s face
While they’re sitting at the table trying to say grace
But before I make this one my last meal
Any moves, yeah I’m looking for the damn kill
I said it twice in case he didn’t hear me though
Sucker made a move evidently when he hit the floor
So now I’m in cuffs for the crimes I’ve committed
Maybe I’ll go to jail, heh, or maybe I’ll get acquitted
But the fact still stands I killed my landlord dead
Now I’ve got three meals and a roof over my head

In the third verse, Boots Riley connects the inherent injustices of landlordism to not only capitalism, but also to European conquest and the process of primitive accumulation that allowed settler-colonists to create wealth from the Atlantic Slave Trade and Indigenous holocaust. There is an overt racial component to this process, as descendants of former slaves are still forced to depend on descendants of former slave-owners for basic needs. Recognizing the injustices and illegitimacy of this system, and seeking revolutionary change, is crucial. Boots delivers knowledge:

Cash is made in lump sums as street bums eat crumbs
So I defeat scum as I beat drums
Rum-tiddy-tum like the little drummer boy song
Here comes the landlord at the door, ding dong
Is it wrong that my momma sticks a fat-ass thong
Up his anal cavity cause he causes gravity to my family
Says we gotta pay a fee so we can stay and eat
In a house with light and heat
The bastard could get beat, stole the land from Chief Littlefeet
House is built on deceit, got no rent receipt
So I’m living in the street and I’m down now
Don’t you know to not fuck with the Mau Mau?
Notice of eviction, four knuckle dental affliction
Friction, oh did I mention
You’ll be finger licking as I handicap your diction
And you say you’re not a criminal like Tricky Dick Nixon?
While we’re fixing to impose rent control
We didn’t vote on it, this land wasn’t bought or sold
It was stole by your great granddaddy’s ganking
Osagyefo said they call it primitive accumulation
Plantations, TV stations wealth is very stationary
I learned the game and I became a revolutionary
Scaring the corporate asses cause the masses are a loaded gun
Killing the world banking and international monetary fund
I’m done, we’re done with what you’ve done
For twenty-five score we’ve got a battle cry
Kill my, kill my, kill my, kill my
Kill my, kill my, kill my, kill my landlord

While representing a main staple of capitalism, landlordism also mimics the dynamics of settler societies in that settlers gain a disproportionate amount of land ownership at the expense of the mass dispossession of native populations. In many ways, modern landlords in the US represent the traditional colonizer, often buying up property in “foreign” communities for the sole purpose of exploiting masses of renters through dispossession and forced reliance. As in the process of gentrification, landlords dispossess thousands of poor and working-class people in their never-ending pursuit for more and more property to commodify. E-Roc finishes the track strong, calling on a figurative Mau Mau rebellion to “kill” the modern version of colonizers.

I need six hundred dollars by the end of the week
My body is cold, dirty socks on my feet
Not a black sheep, but who’s the creep
Trying to put me on the street while I’m trying to sleep?
I wanna kill my landlord, murder in the first degree
If there’s something wrong he wants to blame me
Wants to be a threat so he carries a gun
Well I pack a 9 cause I can’t trust 911
Son of a gun, I’m the one who cuts the grass
Wash the windows and he still wants me to kiss his ass
But I laugh cause America’s not my home
My landlord took me away from where I belong
But it’s a sad song so I face reality now
Pick up the phone and now here comes the Mau Mau
To the rescue, down with The Coup
Yo landlord, I’ve got a little message for you
I’m going cuckoo, fuck a machete or sword
E-Roc is on a mission to kill my landlord

 

How the Capitalist/Imperialist War Machine Works Against Us

On Track 7 of Immortal Technique’s 2005 Bin Laden remix album, Mumia Abu-Jamal once again spits knowledge, this time providing brilliantly poetic commentary framing capitalism and imperialism as ” a war versus us all “:

“The war against us all
This war in Iraq isn’t the end; it’s the beginning of Wars to come
All around the world at the whim of the Neo-Cons in the White House
This is the Bush Doctrine come to life; War, war and more war!
War brought to you by the big corporate-masters who run the show
This isn’t just a War on Iraqis or Afghanis or Arabs, or even Muslims
It is ultimately a War on us all.
That’s because the billions and billions that are being spent on this War
The cost of tanks, rocketry, bullets and yes even salaries
For the 125, 000 plus troops, is money that will never be spent on;
Education, on healthcare, on the reconstruction of crumbling public housing
Or to train and place the millions of workers
Who have lost manufacturing jobs in the past three years alone
The War in Iraq is in reality; a war against the nations’ workers and the poor
Who are getting less and less
While the big Defense industries and making a killing, literally.
What’s next Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela?
We’ve already seen the corporate media
Play megaphone to the White House, to build and promote a War based on lies
War is utilized by the imperialists first and foremost, to crush internal enemies
We’re seeing the truth of its insight
When we see the sad state of American education
The rush of seniors to buy affordable medications from the Canadians
Because American drugs are just too expensive
The threat of privatization of Social Security
And the wave of repression that comes with an increasing Militarized Police;
This is a War on all of us
And the struggle against War is really a struggle for a better life
For the millions of folks who are in need here in this country!
The fight against the War is really to fight for your own interest
Not the false interests of the Defense Industry
Or the corporate media or the White House
Down with the Wars for empire.”

Immortal Technique’s subsequent track, Bin Laden , is a masterful critique of US imperialism and the corollary effects of government control on American citizens. Written during the W. Bush administration and the Iraq War, the track touches on the fear-mongering that led to the Patriot Act, the hypocrisy of American politicians, and the CIA’s dealings in the Middle East during the 1980s, which created and strengthened groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Tech begins by contrasting the lived realities of most American citizens with the artificial realities disseminated from the power structure and its calls for blind patriotic loyalty:

I pledge no allegiance, fuck the President’s speeches!
I’m baptized by America and covered in leeches.
The dirty water that bleaches your soul, and your facial features.
Drowning you in propaganda that they spit through the speakers.
And if you speak about the evil that the government does.
The Patriot Act will track you to the type of your blood.
They try to frame you and say you was trying sell drugs.
And throw a federal indictment on niggas to show you love.
This shit is run by fake Christians, fake politicians.
Look at they mansions, then look at the conditions you live in.

He wraps up the first verse by summarizing US foreign policy during the 1980s, specifically referring to the substantial financial and military aid provided to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan during their prolonged war against the Soviet Union. During this time, Osama Bin Laden was a US ally who was a beneficiary of much of this aid, as was Saddam.

All they talk about is terrorism on television.
They tell you to listen.
But they don’t really tell you they mission.
They funded al-Qaeda.
And now they blame the Muslim religion.
Even though Bin Laden was a CIA tactician.
They gave him billions of dollars and they funded his purpose.
Fahrenheit 9/11? That’s just scratching the surface!

…And of course Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons.
We sold him that shit after Ronald Reagan’s election.
Mercenary contractors fighting in a new era
Corporate military banking off the war on terror.

The fact that the US government once supported and funded Bin Laden, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein is not the main point in Tech’s lyrical thesis, but rather the context that leads us into deeper analysis on US foreign policy, the military industrial complex, and the rise of Islamophobia and the War on Terror. By showing how loyalties easily sway, Tech is showing us how the purpose of US interventions abroad are not really about “protecting freedom” or “defending us.” Rather, US foreign policy is a chess game played by the capitalist ruling class for the purpose of engineering and maintaining the US Empire , which in essence is serving as the forerunner and protector of the global capitalist system. So-called terrorism and “Muslim extremism” are nothing more than a manufactured fears designed to scare a sizable portion of the American public into supporting these destructive efforts abroad. Samuel Huntington’s 1996 book Clash of Civilizations is often looked to as the main driver in this farce of a cultural/religious global war. In supporting Tech’s message, Noam Chomsky talks about the obvious contradictions of Huntington’s thesis here , as Edward Said further discredits ithere . A simple search of stock reports for major weapons manufacturers over the past decade shows how profitable the “war on terror” has been. Understanding geopolitics is often as easy as following the money.

Part of Tech’s second verse includes a brilliant critique of state nationalism and patriotism, illustrating how and why government and capitalist interests are not the same as the peoples’ interests, despite being advertised as such. While these wars spread and intensify, most of us continue to struggle.

They say the rebels in Iraq still fight for Saddam
But that’s bullshit, I’ll show you why it’s totally wrong
‘Cause if another country invaded the hood tonight
It’d be warfare through Harlem and Washington Heights
I wouldn’t be fighting for Bush or White America’s dream
I’d be fighting for my people’s survival and self-esteem
I wouldn’t fight for racist churches from the South, my nigga
I’d be fighting to keep the occupation out, my nigga

…. ‘Cause innocent people get murdered in the struggle daily
And poor people never get shit and struggle daily

In a remixed version of this track that includes hip-hop vets Chuck D and KRS-One, Tech tweaks the lyrics to this verse in order to show how the “clash of religions” narrative, as highlighted by Chomsky and Said, is falsely perpetrated:

They say that terrorism revolves around the Qur’an
But that’s stupid, I’ll show you why it’s totally wrong
Cause if this country was invaded and crumbled
I’d turn Harlem into a Columbian jungle
And I wouldn’t be fighting for a Christian nation
I’d be fighting for survival from extermination
I wouldn’t fight for Fox News, them racist niggas
I’d be fighting for the hood, for the faceless niggas

Tech also addresses the hypocrisy of America’s fundamentalist Christian sect, which strongly supports the Republican Party, the clash of civilizations/religion narrative, the Israeli Apartheid state, and military interventions abroad. Christian fundamentalism in the US plays an important role as a conduit to white supremacy and class warfare, as seen in its common stance against the interests of both the Black community and the immigrant community, as well as the poor and working-class communities altogether. This conduit has shown itself in the Republican Party’s four-decade-long Southern Strategyand the rise of Donald Trump’s presidency, which has brought with it overt elements of white supremacy, or as Tech puts it, “devils that run America like ‘Birth of a Nation,’ a popular white-supremacist propaganda film from 1915:

Government front religious, but their heart is empty
Like a televangelist preaching out of his Bentley
Calling abortion murder in a medical building
But don’t give a fuck about bombing Iraqi children
Talking like units in the fucking libretto
Look at their mansions and look at your suburban ghetto
The gulag, the new hood where they send us to live
Cause they don’t give a fuck about none of our kids
That’s why Blacks and Latinos get the worst education
While devils run America like “Birth of a Nation”
Affirmative action ain’t reverse discrimination
That shit is a pathetic excuse for reparations

 

Fake News, Structural Misinformation, and How the Ruling Class Control Politics

The notion of “fake news” has become a prominent theme in American politics due to Donald Trump’s constant use of the term to explain what he views as his unfair treatment and misinterpretation by some media outlets. Ironically, the term is also being used by liberal opponents of Trump to claim that Russia had influenced the Presidential election in Trump’s favor. The Washington Post even went as far as publishing a report citing “anonymous groups” to list dozens of online news sources that allegedly served as “instruments of Russian propaganda” during the 2016 Presidential race. Despite some backpedaling on the initial article (to include an editor’s note and the removal of some websites from the list), liberal-leaning media outlets like the Washington Post and MSNBC have persisted with this seemingly hysterical and bizarre Russophobic angle to attempt to discredit Trump’s presidency. As if Trump’s personal history, business dealings, fascist rhetoric, narcissism, constant lies, and hyper-capitalist policy platform are not bad enough.

There are some very interesting points to take from this liberal narrative. One is regarding the corporate media itself, which has both perpetuated the allegations of “fake news” and been accused of delivering it. Ironically, Trump is correct in referring to these news sources as fake. But they are not fake for the reasons he claims they are fake – which is only regarding how they portray things related to him. They are fake because they ceased being news agencies decades ago. They are now part of the entertainment industry. They are concerned with ratings and advertising profit, not with delivering information to the public. Information does not sell, sensationalism does. Fox News knows this just as much as MSNBC and CNN know this. To earn profit, you need ratings. To get ratings, you need people to tune into your channel. To get people to tune into your channel, you need drama, controversy, fear, sex, shock, sensationalism; in other words, entertainment.

Another point is regarding corporate news as a de facto fourth branch of government. Often referred to throughout history as the fourth estate, media and press journalism have long been relied on to provide a valuable fourth branch of checks and balances in the US. However, as time has gone on, rather than uncovering conflicts of interest, exposing backroom deals, and delivering investigative journalism, the media in the US has become both complicit and indifferent in and to government corruption. This was never more evident than in the months leading up to the Iraq War, which according to Australian journalist John Pilger , may have never happened if journalists had done their job of uncovering truths in the face of, and in spite of, power:

“…had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children might be alive today; and millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and the infamous Islamic State might not now exist.”

Media collusion with the power structure has been a central theme to the work of Pilger, who has consistently tied the media’s full institutional compliance to what is properly referred to as “the deep state” or “invisible government” through the proliferation of propaganda . This was also the main theme of Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, as well as the subsequent 1992 documentary by the same name. According to Chomsky and Herman, mass media in the US “are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship , and without overt coercion.” Which is to say that profit-driven news not only seeks to appease popular narratives, but also will toe the government line in return for continued access or exclusive scoops, all of which are determined by government officials.

Immortal Technique’s 2003 track, The 4^th Branch , fortifies the work of Pilger, Chomsky, and Herman by illustrating how the media and its propaganda serve the ruling-class narrative. Released in the aftermath of 9-11 and during the beginnings of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Tech weaves multiple theses into a central theme of propaganda versus reality. The hook sums up the track:

It’s like MK-ULTRA, controllin’ your brain
Suggestive thinking, causing your perspective to change
They wanna rearrange the whole point of view of the ghetto
The fourth branch of the government, want us to settle
A bandanna full of glittering, generality
Fightin’ for freedom and fightin’ terror, but what’s reality
Read about the history of the place that we live in
And stop letting corporate news tell lies to your children

The opening verse introduces us once again to Huntington’s clash-of-civilizations narrative and the role of Evangelical Christians in pushing forth this narrative. Tech focuses on the moral bankruptcy of Christian fundamentalism in the US and how US foreign policy is continuously designed on a base of hypocrisy and misinformation, carried out by agents of the capitalist class:

The voice of racism preachin’ the gospel is devilish
A fake church called the prophet Muhammad a terrorist
Forgetting God is not a religion, but a spiritual bond
And Jesus is the most quoted prophet in the Qu’ran
They bombed innocent people, tryin’ to murder Saddam
When you gave him those chemical weapons to go to war with Iran
This is the information that they hold back from Peter Jennings
Cause Condoleezza Rice is just a new age Sally Hemings

The remainder of the first verse continues the critique on conservative ideology and Christian fundamentalism, tying them into the ultimate hypocrisies perpetrated in the founding of the United States. The miseducation that most of us are subjected to through years of formal education interplay with Tech’s exposure of the public misinformation that disseminates from media sources, all of which combine to produce a hidden history of the US that is a perfectly pliable tool firmly in the hands of the ruling class:

I break it down with critical language and spiritual anguish
The Judas I hang with, the guilt of betraying Christ
You murdered and stole his religion, and painting him white
Translated in psychologically tainted philosophy
Conservative political right wing, ideology
Glued together sloppily, the blasphemy of a nation
Got my back to the wall, cause I’m facin’ assassination
Guantanamo Bay, federal incarceration
How could this be, the land of the free, home of the brave
Indigenous holocaust and the home of the slaves
Corporate America, dancin’ offbeat to the rhythm
You really think this country, never sponsored terrorism
Human rights violations, we continue the saga
El Savador and the contras in Nicaragua
And on top of that, you still wanna take me to prison
Just cause I won’t trade humanity for patriotism

Returning to Vinnie Paz’s track, Keep Movin’ On, we see the experiences and views of an American soldier, handpicked from the working class to serve in illegal and immoral wars and occupations abroad. The verse touches on everything from the recruitment process and the brainwashing effects of patriotism to the gruesome effects of serving as tools of war for the capitalist ruling class :

I signed up cause they promised me some college money
I ain’t the smartest motherfucker but I’m not a dummy
They told me I would be stationed in places hot and sunny
I had a lot of pride. Motherfuckers got it from me
These people over here innocent. They never harmed me
My sergeant tried to convince me that they would try to bomb me
I feel like an outsider stuck inside this army
Everybody brainwashed. American zombies
I ain’t realized how much it set me back
Until I lost my leg and then they sent me back
I don’t have anything now. I’m left with scraps
From a government who created AIDS, invented crack
People told me not to join. I tried to prove ’em wrong
Now I’m homeless and I’m cold without no food thas’ warm
I keep asking myself, “What did I do that’s wrong?”
And the government telling me, “Keep it movin’ on”

Tech’s closing comments on the 4^th Branch summarizes the class-component that shapes the military industrial complex, a system designed to create, maintain, and protect private profit. Echoing Paz’s verse on the experience of soldiers, Tech illustrates our role in this system while touching on the constant propaganda we are bombarded with, which pushes this narrative of “we,” as if “we” have anything in common with the American ruling/capitalist class and their servants in mass media.

The fourth branch of the government AKA the media
Seems to now have a retirement plan for ex-military officials
As if their opinion was at all unbiased
A machine shouldn’t speak for men
So shut the fuck up you mindless drone
And you know it’s serious
When these same media outfits are spending millions of dollars on a PR campaign
To try to convince you they’re fair and balanced
When they’re some of the most ignorant, and racist people
Giving that type of mentality a safe haven
We act like we share in the spoils of war that they do
We die in wars, we don’t get the contracts to make money off ’em afterwards
We don’t get weapons contracts, nigga
We don’t get cheap labor for our companies, nigga
We are cheap labor, nigga
Turn off the news and read, nigga
Read… read… read

Tech’s final verse is powerfully connected to liberation movements of the past, echoing among other the great Irish socialist, James Connolly, and his call for international, working-class solidarity during the beginnings of World War I. In his A Continental Revolution (1914) , Connolly sums up the profit motive and class-basis of war:

“… [in war] the working class are to be sacrificed that a small clique of rulers and armament makers may sate their lust for power and their greed for wealth. Nations are to be obliterated, progress stopped, and international hatreds erected into deities to be worshipped.

… against the patriotism of capitalism – the patriotism which makes the interest of the capitalist class the supreme test of duty and right – I place the patriotism of the working class, the patriotism which judges every public act by its effect upon the fortunes of those who toil.

To me, therefore, the socialist of another country is a fellow-patriot, as the capitalist of my own country is a natural enemy.”

“Fake news” is simply propaganda constructed through ruling-class channels to boost systems and cultures that support the power structure. In other words, it is the status quo. It is nothing new. It happens rather naturally, flowing from concentrations of money and power. Regarding the newfound liberal version of “fake news,” the final point to consider relates to the idea of an outside influence on American politics. Long before the Russia hysteria surfaced, the American political system had been bought and sold numerous times over. To suggest that politicians from either major party ever represented the interests of American people is incredibly naïve. Campaign financing and corporate lobbying determine who wins political races and which legislation is introduced and passed in Congress. Long before Russia was accused of influencing elections, Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms were proven to influence elections. Long before Trump supposedly got a boost from Putin, official US policy had been directly shaped by Israeli interests in the Middle East.

Access to oil has always determined foreign policy, access to capital for big business has always determined economic policy, and the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision has ensured that the Kochs’, Soros’, Gates’, and Buffetts’ of the world will always hold more political weight within the electoral system than 100 million voters combined, if they so choose. Whether it’s Goldman Sachs, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Koch brothers, George Soros, or Putin, the American people have never had a say in what the political machine does or doesn’t do. This fact renders the Trump-Russia hysteria as moot. Any real sense of US national interests has long been replaced by the global capitalist order, if they ever truly existed at all. In terms of political empowerment and self-determination for the working-class majority within the US, a foreign president is no different than any number of nameless American millionaire hedge-fund donors.

 

The Seamless Political Machine and the Failures of Identity Politics: From Reagan to Trump

Within electoral politics, lesser-evilism has become the dominant stance for at least half of the American population. For individual voters, the 2-party duopoly has been mostly abandoned as identifications with either party have reached near-historic lows . As of 2015, nearly half of registered voters identify as something other than Republican or Democrat. However, despite this overwhelming rejection of the 2-party system, many of these voters continue to choose what they view as the “lesser evil” in voting for candidates from one of the two major parties.

Since the Reagan administration and introduction of a seamless political machine based in neoliberalism (an intensification of capitalism), presidential administrations regardless of party have been almost indistinguishable. Despite this seamless identity that’s emerged, many voters still insist on claiming differences between the two corporate parties, even if it means choosing what they view as the lesser-evil. The fact that some public radical intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Angela Davis have proposed lesser-evilism lends this direction some undue credence. However, when we step back and analyze the big picture, away from the emotions that often emerge in the heat of electoral moments, it is easy to see that lesser-evilism, as an electoral tactic embraced by the Left, has pushed the entire political system to the right over the past 40 years. Clear evidence of this shift can be seen in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, which carried forth Reagan-esque economic policy, while also gutting welfare (Clinton), facilitating mass incarceration of the Black community (Clinton), escalating US bombing campaigns (Obama), pushing historical levels of deportation of immigrants (Obama), and maintaining the attack on civil liberties that began under W. Bush (Obama). Even more evidence is the emergence of Bernie Sanders as a candidate who is viewed as being an outlier of the Democratic Party, despite an ideological identity that is consistent with run-of-the-mill liberalism of old. Yet, when compared to a Democratic Party that has clearly shifted rightward, toward more hard-line capitalist-friendly policies that have characterized the neoliberal era started by Reagan, as well as highly-destructive imperialist missions abroad, Sanders looks like a radical.

Killer Mike’s 2012 track, Reagan, brings us to the start of the neoliberal era. In a social context, specifically regarding the treatment of Black communities throughout the country, the Reagan era merely picked up on hundreds of years of oppression. By implementing an official “war on drugs,” this era provided the basis for what Michelle Alexander termed The New Jim Crow , in her book with the same title. It also created a new wing of the military industrial complex through the construction of an extensive for-profit prison system and widespread militarization of domestic police forces. Mike’s second verse introduces us to the Reagan environment, as experienced by the Black community:

The end of the Reagan Era, I’m like ‘leven, twelve, or
Old enough to understand the shit’ll change forever
They declared the war on drugs like a war on terror
But what it really did was let the police terrorize whoever
But mostly black boys, but they would call us “niggers”
And lay us on our belly, while they fingers on they triggers
They boots was on our head, they dogs was on our crotches
And they would beat us up if we had diamonds on our watches
And they would take our drugs and money, as they pick our pockets
I guess that that’s the privilege of policing for some profit

The intensification of American policing in poor communities of color served a bigger purpose. As Mike explains in the same verse, it bolstered the cornerstone of US economics and capitalism: free labor. As per the 13th amendment of the US Constitution , “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” In other words, the forced free labor of convicts in the US prison system is still legal. And the “war on drugs” helped to create nearly 1.3 million free laborers for mainstream corporations , as the prison population in the US grew from roughly 300,000 in 1980 to over 1.5 million in 2015 . Killer Mike touches on this:

But thanks to Reaganomics, prisons turned to profits
Cause free labor is the cornerstone of US economics
Cause slavery was abolished, unless you are in prison
You think I am bullshitting, then read the 13th Amendment
Involuntary servitude and slavery it prohibits
That’s why they giving drug offenders time in double digits

Mike closes the track by moving the focus from Reagan to the system, telling us that Presidents (and most politicians, for that matter) are nothing more than “employees of the country’s real masters,” serving capitalist interests rather than the masses of people:

Ronald Reagan was an actor, not at all a factor
Just an employee of the country’s real masters
Just like the Bushes, Clinton and Obama
Just another talking head telling lies on teleprompters
If you don’t believe the theory, then argue with this logic
Why did Reagan and Obama both go after Gaddafi
We invaded sovereign soil, going after oil
Taking countries is a hobby paid for by the oil lobby
Same as in Iraq, and Afghanistan
And Ahmadinejad say they coming for Iran
They only love the rich, and how they loathe the poor
If I say any more they might be at my door
(Shh..) Who the fuck is that staring in my window
Doing that surveillance on Mr. Michael Render
I’m dropping off the grid before they pump the lead
I leave you with four words: I’m glad Reagan dead

Reagan the man may be dead, but his spirit has survived in symbolic terms through the perpetuation of neoliberalism’s capitalist/imperialist order. The actions of our last President, Obama, who may appear to be the polar opposite of Reagan in any superficial analysis, confirms this perpetuation. The 2015 remix, Obamanation 4 , hammers this truth home in magnificent fashion. Opening with excerpts of speeches from Malcolm X, the track sets up a premise of systemic analysis as Malcolm rails against the “international Western power structure (capitalism),” calling upon “anyone, I don’t care what color you are, as long as you want to change the miserable conditions on this earth.”

Echoing Killer Mike’s track, M-1 (from Dead Prez) uses his verse in Obamanation 4 to expose the systemic nature of our political system, illustrating how not only the Democratic Party, but also the first Black President, equal nothing more than cogs in an imperialist machine. His analysis begins by disregarding the propaganda stemming from right-wing sources like Fox News and syndicated radio, all of which claimed Obama represented a diversion from politics-as-usual by having some mythological “radical-left-wing agenda.” In reality, Obama’s administration continued, and even escalated in some cases, America’s imperialist endeavors abroad. M-1 flips this “right-wing propaganda” and puts it back on progressives, rhetorically asking “who you gonna blame” now that the man in charge is no longer a white Republican named Bush:

After you divorce yourself from the right wing propaganda campaign, it’s all simple and plain.
America customed the game.
Your President got an African name, now who you gonna blame?
When they drop them bombs out of them planes.
Using depleted uranium, babies looking like two-headed aliens.
Follow the money trail, it leads to the criminal.
Ain’t nothing subliminal to it, that’s how they do it.

Continuing on this theme, M-1 pinpoints Obama as the new head of the US’ global imperialist agenda, even touching on the irony of a Black man carrying out neo-colonialism with white-supremacist underpinnings. M-1’s verse is not only insightful in its blanket condemnation of the 2-party machine, but also in its inherent warning about the dangers of a brand of identity politics that seeks to plug folks from historically marginalized groups into the power structure. Ultimately, to M-1, as to all radicals and revolutionaries, it’s the system that drives our injustices, not the figureheads chosen to facilitate the system:

See they game they run.
Give a fuck if he’s cunning, articulate, and handsome.
Afghanistan held for ransom.
By the hand of this black man, neo-colonial puppet.
White power with a black face, he said fuck it I’ll do it.
…. Last stage of imperialism, I ain’t kiddin.
In the immortal words of Marvin Gaye ‘This ain’t living.’

On the same track, Black the Ripper picks up on M-1’s analysis, keeping the focus on Obama as nothing more than a figurehead of a system that must be opposed. This particular verse includes a harsh critique, deploying the house-slave mentality in describing Black figures in power, as well as their accomplices:

See it’s not where you’re from, it’s where you’re at.
He’s sitting in the White House, so who cares if he’s black?
And why’s there still soldiers out there in Iraq?
Natural resources ain’t yours, it’s theirs, give it back!
You’re just another puppet, but I’m not surprised
Look at Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.
They didn’t change shit, house nigga’s fresh off the slave ship.

The Obamanation remix includes a verse from Lupe Fiasco’s track, Words I Never Said. The verse fits the overall narrative perfectly, keeping focus on systemic operations. Lupe takes the analysis even further, touching on various social aspects stemming from capitalism and imperialism, most notably those which keep the American public in line, agreeable, and ignorant through a process of devalued education, fear-mongering, and mind-numbing celebrity gossip. All of this, Lupe suggests, leads to what Chomsky has referred to as “manufactured consent,” which he strongly rejects:

I really think the war on terror is a bunch of bullshit.
Just a poor excuse for you to use up all your bullets.
How much money does it take to really make a full clip?
9/11, building 7, did they really pull it?
Uh, and a bunch of other coverups.
Your child’s future was the first to go with budget cuts.
If you think that hurts, then wait, here comes the uppercut.
The school was garbage in the first place, that’s on the up and up.
Keep you at the bottom but tease you with the upper crust.
You get it, then they move it, so you never keeping up enough.
If you turn on TV, all you see’s a bunch of “what the fucks.”
Dude is dating so and so, blabbering ’bout such and such.
And that ain’t Jersey Shore, homey, that’s the news.
And these the same people supposedly telling us the truth.
Limbaugh is a racist, Glenn Beck is a racist.
Gaza strip was getting bombed, Obama didn’t say shit.
That’s why I ain’t vote for him, next one either.
I’m a part of the problem, my problem is I’m peaceful.
And I believe in the people.

Lowkey concludes the remix with a strong verse on American imperialism, an agenda that has become indistinguishable between various Presidents and both corporate parties. He points to specific missions carried out under the Obama administration, seemingly calling to attention those who continue to portray Obama as a separation from the Bush administration. The verse serves as a prophetic warning about Syria, and nails home M-1’s earlier reduction of Obama as just another “neo-colonial puppet” doing the job that every American President is called upon to do, including bombing an African country (Libya) and disposing of a leader (Gaddafi) known for promoting pan-Africanism throughout the continent:

Was the bigger threat from Osama or from Obama?
Military bases from Chagos to Okinawa.
I say things that other rappers won’t say.
Cause my mind never closed like Guantanamo Bay.
Hope you didn’t build a statue or tattoo your arm.
Cause the drones are still flying over Pashtunistan.
Did he defend the war? No! He extended more.
He even had the time to attempt a coup in Ecuador.
Morales and Chavez, the state’s are on a hunt for ya.
Military now stationed on bases in Columbia.
Take a trip to the past and tell em I was right.
Ask Ali Abunimah or Jeremiah Wright.
Drones over Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya.
Is Obama the bomber getting ready for Syria?
First black president, the masses were hungry.
But the same president just bombed an African country.

The false hopes placed in the first Black President highlight the failures and pitfalls of identity politics, a political approach that is grounded in assimilation. This approach to social justice attempts to mold a multicultural, multi-sex, non-gender-descript power elite by simply placing individuals who identify with these hyper-marginalized groups into the existing power structure. Thus, the ultimate goal is more Black bankers, more gay landlords, more transgender politicians, more women Senators, and so on. This approach has led to the creation of what the left-wing publication Black Agenda Report (BAR) has deemed the black misleadership class in the US. Obama was the ultimate product of this class, but not the totality of it. For as long as identity politics seek to assimilate into the power structure, this class will persist, as will the formation of other such classes: the gay misleadership class, the transgender misleadership class, the women’s misleadership class (Hillary), etc…, because, ultimately, the power structure does not exist to serve the people, no matter how diverse it is. Nas touches on this in his 1999 track, I Want to Talk to You , which addresses the frustrations of living under a government that does not represent:

Step up to the White House, let me in
What’s my reason for being, I’m ya next of kin
And we built this motherfucker
You wanna kill me because my hunger?
Mr. America, young black niggas want ya
I wanna talk to the man, understand?
Understand this motherfuckin G-pack in my hand
Look what happened to San Fran
Young girl hit by policeman
Twelve shots up in her dome, damn
….Dissin us, discrimination different races
Tax payers pay for more jail for Black Latin faces

Coming full circle, Nas closes the track by delivering a prophetic warning against identity politics, characterizing BAR’s “black misleadership class” as nothing more than “fake black leaders [who] are puppets, always talking ’bout the city budget (rather than addressing problems that plague their communities).”

What y’all waitin for the world to blow up
Before you hear this rewind this 4 minutes before we timeless
Let y’all niggas bang my shit before Saddam hits
Let Nastradamus tell us what time it is
They try to buy us with doe
Fake black leaders are puppets, always talking ’bout the city budget
The news got it all confused lyin to the public
They eyes watchin stay wise move above it
Water floods predicted, hurricanes, twisters
Its all signs of the Armageddon, three sixes
People reverse the system, politics vs. religion
Holy war, Muslim vs. Christians
Niggas in high places, they don’t got the balls for this
People in power sit back and watch them slaughter us
Mr. President I assume it was negligence
The streets upside down, I’m here to represent this

 

Confronting the Power Structure

Modern working-class resistance is still rooted in Marx’s class war analysis, whereas the proletariat (those of us who are forced to depend on our labor to survive) finds itself fighting for its collective life against the bourgeoisie (the owners of the means of production) and the layered power structure created by this economic realtionship. It is also crucially intertwined in the fights against other forms of structural oppression, including white supremacy, patriarchy, and misogyny; because, quite frankly, all forms of oppression that splinter the working class must be effectively destroyed if the working class has any hopes of overcoming the capitalist system.

In echoing Malcolm X’s famous “the ballot or the bullet” speech from 1964, working-class resistance must include “action on all fronts by whatever means necessary.” Since the police represent the front lines of a criminal justice system inherently designed to enforce class oppression, as well as structural white supremacy, working-class resistance must include a firm stance against not only police brutality and mass incarceration, but also against the very foundation of modern policing, which is rooted in “slave-catching” and strike-breaking. This means standing in blanket opposition to policing as an institution designed to “serve and protect” capitalist property and enforce laws created by a capitalist ruling class with capitalist interests in mind. Reflecting on the Black community’s especially intense history of oppression at the hands of police, hip hop has delivered a proper analysis and call to action. From NWA’s seminal track Fuck tha Police (1988) to David Banner and Tito Lo’s Black Fist (2016), the armed extension of the capitalist state is consistently exposed, as it has left countless Black lives lying in its tracks with no signs of slowing. Banner and Lo’s track captures the sheer anger and frustration stemming from this reality:

[Banner]

These crackers got drones. They are flying their saucers
Keep your white jesus, don’t pray to your crosses
They are burning our churches, K.R.I.T. pass me the UZI
I know how to work it; I know how to Squirt it
No Martin, No Luther, No King, No Marching No choirs don’t sing
The same christian lovers that raped our GrandMothers and hung our GrandFathers from trees
They are enemies!
Blood on the leaves, blood on the streets, blood on our feet
I’m sick of walking, I’m sick of dogs getting sicced on us, I’m sick of barking
I’m sick of spitting written sentences listeners don’t get
Don’t get, don’t get, don’t get!
Because they got Chains on their brains and that is not a diss

[Lo]

… I’m staying religious, cause we stay in the trenches
And gotta play where they lynch us, done came to my senses
I bet them crackas never came through my fences
Ya burn up ya cross, and I’ll burn up ya corpse
Then I turn and bang and do the same to the witness
Hang ’em and dangle ’em in the street looking up at his feet
So you never forget this we did this for Martin and Malcolm, even Mandela
Jimmie Lee Jackson and then Medgar Evers
For Clyde Kennard, hard labor slaving in the yard
For Huey, for Hampton, for Bobby we GODLY
For Jordan Davis we gon’ play this, for Sandra Bland we gon’ stand
I’m still out here stomping, for Janaya Thompson, from the Coast to Compton

The video for Black Fist shows a series of events that encapsulate what working-class justice would look like outside the parameters of capitalism and white supremacy. This includes a people’s arrest, people’s trial, and subsequent execution of a police officer who was acquitted of murdering a Black teenager. The fact that this hypothetical scenario could be remotely controversial illustrates how strong we’ve been conditioned to equate our current system with any real sense of justice, of which there is very little if any. The environment of injustice that is bred under so-called legalities is masterfully summed up in Lauryn Hill’s Mystery of Iniquity (2002):

Ya’ll can’t handle the truth in a courtroom of lies
Perjures the jurors
Witness despised
Crooked lawyers
False Indictments publicized
Its entertainment the arraignments
The subpoenas
High profile gladiators in bloodthirsty arenas
Enter the Dragon
Black-robe crooked-balance
Souls bought and sold and paroled for thirty talents
Court reporter catch the surface on the paper
File it in the system not acknowledged by the Maker
Swearing by the bible blatantly blasphemous
Publicly perpetrating that “In God We Trust”
Cross-examined by a master manipulator
The faster intimidator
Receiving the judge’s favor
Deceiving sabers doing injury to they neighbors
For status, gratis, apparatus and legal waivers
See the bailiff
Representing security
Holding the word of God soliciting perjury
The prosecution
Political prostitution
The more money you pay.. the further away solution

…Blind leading the blind
Guilty never defined
Filthy as swine
A generation purin it’s own mind
Legal extortion
Blown out of proportion
In vein deceit
The truth is obsolete
Only two positions:
Victimizer or Victim
Both end up in destruction trusting this crooked system

Running hand in hand with capitalism’s version of “justice” is the underlying dominance of white supremacy. In the formation of the United States as a nation, as well as the customs, cultures, and systems we’ve become accustomed to during this process, white supremacy has played a formidable role. It has created an all-powerful wedge among the working class, rendering its potential limited. Its divisive message is often hidden in powerfully emotional rhetoric regarding “American values” and patriotism, all of which secretly (or not so secretly in the era of Trump) call for protecting the Eurocentrism that has systematically devalued black skin in dominant American culture. In an old-school track from 1991, Ice Cube uses brilliant analogy and powerful lyrics while condemning America’s history of white supremacy and challenging the toxicity of patriotic rhetoric, concluding with the need to ” kill Sam“:

I wanna kill him, cause he tried to play me like the trick
But you see, I’m the wrong nigga to fuck with
I got the A to the motherfuckin K, and it’s ready to rip
Slapped in my banana clip
And I’m lookin.. (lookin..)
Is he in watts, oakland, philly or brooklyn?
It seems like he got the whole country behind him
So it’s sort of hard to find him
But when I do, gotta put my gat in his mouth
Pump seventeen rounds make his brains hang out
Cause the shit he did was uncalled for
Tried to fuck a brother up the ass like a small whore
And that shit ain’t fly
So now I’m settin up, the ultimate drive-by
And when you hear this shit
It make the world say “damn! I wanna kill sam”

…Here’s why I wanna kill the punk
Cause he tried to take a motherfuckin chunk of the funk
He came to my house, I let ’em bail in
Cause he said he was down with the l.m
He gave up a little dap
Then turned around, and pulled out a gat
I knew it was a caper
I said, “please don’t kill my mother, ” so he raped her
Tied me up, took me outside
And I was thrown in a big truck
And it was packed like sardines
Full of niggas, who fell for the same scheme
Took us to a place and made us work
All day and we couldn’t have shit to say
Broke up the families forever
And to this day black folks can’t stick together
And it’s odd..
Broke us down, made us pray – to his god
And when I think about it
It make me say “damn! I wanna kill sam”

…Now in ninety-one, he wanna tax me
I remember, the son of a bitch used to axe me
And hang me by a rope til my neck snapped
Now the sneaky motherfucker wanna ban rap
And put me under dirt or concrete
But god, can see through a white sheet
Cause you the devil in drag
You can burn your cross well I’ll burn your flag
Try to give me the h-I-v
So I can stop makin babies like me
And you’re givin dope to my people chump
Just wait til we get over that hump
Cause yo’ ass is grass cause I’mma blast
Can’t bury rap, like you buried jazz
Cause we stopped bein whores, stop doin floors
So bitch you can fight your own wars
So if you see a man in red white and blue
Gettin chased by the lench mob crew
It’s a man who deserves to buckle
I wanna kill sam cause he ain’t my motherfuckin uncle!

Ultimately, resistance in the 21^st century must focus on the inherent inequities created by the capitalist system and the corrollary social hierarchies that support these inequities. There simply is no choice but to destroy and replace this system. Gang Starr’s 1998 track Robbin’ Hood Theory hammers this home, urging us to “squeeze the juice out of all the suckers with power, and pour some back out so as to water the flowers.” Just as reparations are needed to begin to address the history of Black enslavement in America, so too is mass working-class expropriation of the capitalist class. In realizingthe illegitimacies of the wealth accumulated under this system , we must formulate bold moves toward recuperating it for all of society. Guru preaches, leaving us with our battle cry:

Now that we’re getting somewhere, you know we got to give back
For the youth is the future no doubt that’s right and exact
Squeeze the juice out, of all the suckers with power
And pour some back out, so as to water the flowers
This world is ours, that’s why the demons are leery
It’s our inheritance; this is my Robin Hood Theory… Robin Hood Theory

… They innocent, they know not what they face
While politicians save face genius minds lay to waste
If I wasn’t kickin rhymes I’d be kickin down doors
Creatin social change and defendin the poor
The God’s always been militant, and ready for war
We’re gonna snatch up the ringleaders send em home in they drawers
But first where’s the safe at? Let’s make em show us
And tell em hurry up, give up the loot that they owe us
We bringin it back, around the way to our peeps
Cause times are way too deep, we know the Code of the Streets
Meet your defeat; this is my Robin Hood Theory… my Robin Hood Theory

…Necessary by all means, sort of like Malcolm
Before it’s too late; I create, the best outcome
So I take this opportunity, yes to ruin the
Devilish forces fucking up my black community
And we ain’t doing no more interviews
Til we get paid out the frame, like motherfucking Donahue
We’re taking over radio, and wack media
Cause systematically they getting greedier and greedier
Conquering turfs with my ill organization
Takin out the man while we scan the information
You wanna rhyme you best await son
You can’t even come near, if you ain’t got our share
You front on us this year, consider yourself blown out of here
Yeah… by my Robin Hood Theory

 

Violence, Counter-Violence, and the Question of the Gun

Colin Jenkins & Devon Douglas-Bowers

 

In June 2016, the Democrats had a sit-in on the House floor to push for gun legislation that had been blocked. It has been noted by numerous writers the myriad of problems with this bill[1][2] [3] as well as the hypocrisy of the sit-in itself.[4] However, this article is to talk about something deeper: the question of violence, so-called “gun control,” and how these issues relate to politics and the working-class majority in its place within the socio-capitalist hierarchy.

There are arguably three main types of violence which will be premised in this analysis: state violence, group violence, and revolutionary violence. The first two forms of violence, coming from the state and groups empowered by the status quo, are designed to oppress. The third form, coming from revolutionaries and the systematically oppressed, is designed to strike back at this oppression for the purpose of liberation. The first two types (state and group) are violent, or offensive, by nature. The last type (revolutionary) is counter-violent, or defensive, by nature.
State Violence

Violence and politics are historically intertwined, so much so that the definition of the state is “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” [5] Due to this monopoly of violence, the state is able to put restrictions on what kinds of weapons people can have, and if they can have any at all. Because of the state’s monopoly on the use of violence, which is directed at citizens of that state whenever deemed necessary, the issue of “gun control” is rather peculiar. It is also fairly unique to the United States, a country that was born at the hands of the gun, and a country that has been largely shaped by the degrees of “liberty” reflected in gun ownership among the populace. In modern society, gun control seems like a common-sense measure as it is quite obvious to many that people shouldn’t have the right to possess tanks, Javelins, Scuds, nuclear weapons, and other military-grade weaponry. However, as technology in weaponry increases, so too does the power of the state in its monopoly of violence. Because of this natural progression of state power based solely in military hardware, a side effect of gun control is that it creates a polarization of power between the state and its citizenry. In other words, the state continues to build its arsenal with more powerful and effective weaponry, while the citizenry continues to face restrictions on access to weaponry. While this scenario may seem reserved for the Alex-Jones-watching, prepper-obsessed fringes, the reality is that, within an economic system (capitalism) that naturally creates extreme hierarchies and masses of dispossessed people, it is (and has been) a serious problem in the context of domestic political and social movements.

In the U.S. (as with many countries), there are underlying class and racial issues related to the state’s monopoly of violence and its restriction of access to guns for its citizens. Looking from a historical perspective, when it comes to violence at the hands of the state, it is regularly used on the side of capital. One only need look at the history of the American labor movement during the first half of the twentieth century, which was an extremely violent time. Within the context of class relations under capitalism, whereas the state represents moneyed interests and a powerful minority, the working-class majority has faced an uphill battle not only in its struggle to gain basic necessities, but also in its residual struggle against an increasingly-armed state apparatus that is inherently designed to maintain high levels of dispossession, poverty, and income inequality. A primary example of the state using violence to aid capital is the Ludlow Massacre.

In the year 1913, in the southern Colorado counties of Las Animas and Huerfano, miners (with the help of the United Mine Workers of America) decided to strike. They argued for union recognition by the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, an increase in wages, and an eight-hour work day, among other things. In response, the company kicked a number of miners off of the company land, and brought in the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency which specialized in breaking coal strikes. The Agency initiated a campaign of harassment against the strikers, which “took the form of high-powered searchlights playing over the colonies at night, murders, beatings, and the use of the ‘death special,’ an improvised armored car that would periodically spray selected colonies with machine-gun fire.” The purpose of this harassment “was to goad the strikers”[6] into violent action so the National Guard could be called out to suppress the labor strike. It worked.

In October 1913, Governor Elias A. Ammos summoned the National Guard, under the command of General John Chase, who declared martial law in the striking area. Under control of the National Guard, a state-controlled militia, a number of atrocities took place against the striking workers, such as the “mass jailing of strikers, a cavalry charge on a demonstration by miners’ wives and children, the torture and beating of ‘prisoners,’ and the demolition of one of the [workers’] tent colonies.”[7]

The situation came to a gruesome ending when on April 20, 1914 gunfire broke out between the striking miners and National Guard troops. When miners who had taken up arms to protect themselves and their families went to a railroad cut and prepared foxholes in an attempt to draw the National Guard away from the colony, Guard troops sprayed the colony with machine gun and rifle fire and eventually burned the tent colony to the ground. An estimated 25 people died that day, “including three militiamen, one uninvolved passerby, and 12 children.”[8] Unfortunately, this example of the state using its monopoly of violence to represent the minority interests of capital against the majority interests of workers. The state had previously come down hard on the side of union-busting with violence in the 1892 Homestead Massacre in Pennsylvania, and in 1894 when President Cleveland sent out over 16,000 U.S. Army soldiers to handle the railroad strikers in Pullman, Chicago.[9]

In 1932, state violence targeted a large group of war veterans who had assembled in Washington, D.C. demanding payment from the federal government for their service in World War I. The Bonus Army, an assemblage of roughly 43,000 people consisting primarily of veterans, their families, and affiliated activists, marched on D.C. to demand payment of previously received service certificates only to be met with violent repression. First, two veterans were shot and killed by Washington, D.C. police, and then, after orders from Herbert Hoover, Douglas Macarthur moved in on the veterans with infantry, cavalry, and six tanks, forcing the Bonus Army, their wives, and children out of their makeshift encampment and burning all of their belongings and shelter. “Although no weapons were fired, cavalry advanced with swords drawn, and some blood was shed. By nightfall, hundreds had been injured by gas (including a baby who died), bricks, clubs, bayonets, and sabers.”[10]

Later in the 20^th century, state violence continued, yet it had switched targets from union members and striking workers to political activists. An example is the Kent State shootings, where on May 4, 1970 “members of the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of Kent State University [antiwar] demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine.”[11] Kent Mayor Leroy Satrom had requested Ohio Governor James Rhodes to summon the Guard due to “threats had been made to downtown businesses and city officials as well as rumors that radical revolutionaries were in Kent to destroy the city and the university.”[12]

The rhetoric of Governor Rhodes escalated the situation as he called the protesters “the worst type of people in America and [stated] that every force of law would be used to deal with them,” which created a perception among both soldiers and university officials that “a state of martial law was being declared in which control of the campus resided with the Guard rather than University leaders,”[13] and on top of this, all rallies were banned. This helped to foster an increase of tension in an atmosphere that was already extremely tense.

On the day of May 4^th, around 3,000 students gathered to protest the Guard’s presence on the campus. At noon, it was announced the General Robert Cantbury, the leader of the Ohio National Guard, had made the decision that the rally was to disperse; this message was delivered to the students via the police. When this was met with shouting and some rock throwing, the Guard was sent in to break up the protest and, due to the students retreating up a hill and on to a portion of the football field, the soldiers who followed them ended up somewhat trapped between the football field’s fence and the protesters. The shouting and rock throwing continued as the soldiers began to extract themselves from the football field and up a hill, and when they reached the top, the soldiers fired their weapons back toward the crowd, with a small amount firing directly into the crowd.

No matter how one looks at it, the entire point of the National Guard being deployed to Kent State University was to squash the protesters who had gathered under their perceived constitutional rights to express their collective displeasure with the Vietnam War. The state chose to deploy its monopoly of violence as a tool to end these public protests.

Assassination campaigns by the state, directed by the FBI or CIA, and often times carried out by local police departments, have also been deployed under this monopoly of violence. There is the notably disturbing case of Chicago Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton, who was assassinated by Chicago police due to his political views and membership in the Black Panther organization.[14] There is also speculation and credible evidence that the U.S. government was involved in both the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. [15] and Malcolm X.[16]

Today, state violence has manifested itself in daily public displays of police brutality and violence against citizens. This endemic use of state force has become so bad that a recent report from the UN Human Rights Council noted concerns “for police violence and racial discrimination” in the U.S. [17]Yet, despite this widespread recognition of state terror being directed at citizens, we see that the federal government (the highest level of state) is protecting its enforcers, with President Obama signing into law what is effectively an Amber Alert for the police[18], and states such as Louisiana passing ‘Blue Lives Matter’ bills which designates “public safety workers” (a clever euphemism for police) as a specially protected class of citizens, opening the door for possible “hate crime” legislation that further protects those who carry out state repression.[19]

This rampant use of state violence against U.S. citizens has also gone international. In the age of the Global War on Terror, the U.S. government has gone so far as to decide it has the power to use its monopoly of violence on its citizens abroad. The case of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who was killed via drone strike in Yemen in 2011, provides a notable example of this.[20] The significance of this extension to the parameters of “international warfare” or the often vague “fight against terror” is that any U.S. citizen deemed to be under suspicion of associating with “terrorists” may be immediately executed without due process. Since al-Awlaki, the U.S. government has officially acknowledged that it has killed four American citizens abroad, while claiming that three of those deaths were by accident.[21]

In looking at the state’s (in this case, the U.S. state at multiple levels) monopoly of violence and its continued use against its own citizens, we see that this deployment of violence is always done in the favor of capital (a small minority) in order to expand and strengthen capital’s influence, through its state surrogate, over the working-class majority with no regard for life.
Group Violence and Its Enablers

Group violence manifests itself in numerous citizens joining together in a common cause to perpetrate violence against other citizens who in some way fit the intended target of that cause. When discussing group violence, it should be noted that the subjects are non-state actors. While these groups may be directly or indirectly supported by the state, they essentially carry out their acts of violence as groups autonomous from the state apparatus.

The Ku Klux Klan (which is currently attempting to make a comeback[22]) has for decades engaged in numerous acts of group violence, from public lynchings to terrorism and coercion to bombing churches.[23] The purpose of this group violence has been to maintain a social order in which Anglo-Saxon, Protestant white men are able to keep their hands on the reins of power in the U.S., if not systematically, then culturally and socially.

In many cases, because they may share interests, group violence intertwines with and complements state violence. During Reconstruction following the U.S. Civil War, the KKK had well-known ties to the more official southern state apparatus of power. In the modern era, white supremacists who adhere to notions of group violence have purposely and strategically infiltrated formal arms of state violence, including both the U.S. military and many local police departments around the country.[24][25] A similar group that is making major headway today is the Neo-Fascists, who can be seen in Europe being legitimized and assimilating into mainstream political parties such as Greece’s Golden Dawn, the UK’s UK Independence Party, Austria’s Freedom Party, and France’s National Front. Like the Klan, these groups seek to maintain a race-based, social status quo that benefits their own group. In the polls, they seek to gain some influence on the use of state violence, whereas on the streets they adhere to group violence and domestic terrorism.

A difference worth noting between the old-school group violence of the Klan and the new-school group violence (or at least contributing to an atmosphere of violence) that neo-fascists encourage and enact is that the new-school violence has been legitimized in many ways by both the media and the public at-large. In other words, we now have large segments of the population who are openly defending the neo-fascists through legitimizing means.

Back in the heyday of the Klan, there was violence, yet no one defended it under the banner of free speech or attempted to legitimize it through mainstream channels. It was certainly supported by mainstream power structures, and even gained steam through the insidious white supremacy which characterized American culture, but it wasn’t openly defended. The KKK often carried out its operations in a clandestine manner, attacking and terrorizing at night, and wearing hoods to maintain anonymity. And many black people actively took up arms to defend themselves against it. [26][27] Today, the situation has been turned on its head, with many people arguing that fascists have the right to free speech and that they should be protected.

An example of this changing paradigm regarding right-wing extremism and group violence could be seen after a recent fight between Neo-Nazis and antifascists in Sacramento, California in late June 2016.[28] The incident brought out many defenders. Sacramento police chief Sam Somers stated that “Regardless of the message, it’s the skinheads’ First Amendment right to free speech.” [29] Debra J. Saunders, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote in an article that “the bullies who were protesting against fascists seemed to have a lot in common with fascists – they’re also thuggish and simpleminded” and that “An informal army of anarchists uses violence to muzzle unwanted speech.”[30] The Los Angeles Times editorial board wrote that they agreed with Antifa Sacramento that racism shouldn’t be tolerated, but “What we disagree with is the idea that skinheads and neo-Nazis, or anyone else with a wrongheaded view, shouldn’t have a 1st Amendment right to free speech.” [31]

There are a number of problems with these statements. First, by defending fascists through arguments couched in free speech, such commentators are not only ignoring the underlying group-violence historically perpetrated by these groups, but also misusing the First Amendment itself. The First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or 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.” [32]Note, the Amendment says nothing about how other citizens may respond to free speech, nor does it say that groups of citizens can’t abridge free speech; rather, it specifically applies to Congress and its prospective legislation. In other words, the Constitution of the United States applies strictly to thegovernment and how it relates to its citizens, whereas the laws created by the government apply to the individuals and how they relate to the government.

Then there is the matter of ignoring power dynamics and creating a false equivalence. These responses create the illusion that each side is doing something negative and so neither side should be supported. This ignores the fact that one side (the neo-nazis and fascists) are assembling with the purpose of oppressing others, while the other side (the anti-fa and anarchists) are assembling to stop (violently, if necessary) the one side from oppressing. While the former adheres to violent means to oppress people based on the color of their skin, or their sexuality, or their Jewish heritage, the latter adheres to violent means to resist this oppression, or essentially oppress the oppressor. To equate their motivations is irresponsible and dangerous. This false equivalence that has been deployed by much of the media, both liberal and conservative, amounts to placing a murderous and whip-lashing slave owner in the same light as a rebelling slave who murders the slave owner to gain freedom. By using this hypothetical, it is easy to see that there is a fundamental difference between violence and counter-violence.

Another side effect of this public defense of the oppressor, and subsequent legitimization of group violence, is that it is used to increase state violence. Marcos Brenton, a writer at The Sacramento Bee, argued that “I would bet that future demonstrations will see a shared command center between the CHP and Sac PD instead of what we saw Sunday: CHP officers overwhelmed by warring factions. […]Law enforcement wasn’t ready this time, but they have to be next time. In a climate where life isn’t valued, life will be lost.”[33] This is an argument that is implicitly in favor of an increase in state violence from an already hyper-militarized police force. And, when used in this context, the deployment of state violence will almost always be directed at those who assemble to stop oppressive group violence, because arguments housed in free speech and false equivalencies erase any and all distinctions between violence and counter-violence.

This is where the connection between state and group violence often manifests itself. As mentioned before, there is a rather long history of the police and the KKK being connected: On April 2, 1947, seven black people in Hooker, GA were turned over “to a Klan flogging party for a proper sobering up” by Dade County Sheriff John M. Lynch. In Soperton, GA in 1948, “the sheriff did not bother to investigate when four men where flogged, while the sheriff of nearby Dodge County couldn’t look into the incident”[34] due to his being busy baby-sitting.

There is also the famous case of the Freedom Riders, three Civil Rights activists who were killed by the Klan, which amounted to three individuals being “arrested by a deputy sheriff and then released into the hands of Klansmen who had plotted their murders.” [35]

This connection has yet to end. In 2014, in Florida, two police officers in the town of Fruitland Park were linked to the Klan [36] and in 2015 in Lake Arthur, LA, a detective was a found to be a Klan member and even attended one of the group’s rallies.[37]

These connections allow for the state, and all the power and resources it wields, to be used directly to further the ends of white supremacy and empower fascistic, racist group violence in the streets. It also puts racial minorities from within the working class at greater risks since many of these bigoted individuals who carry out group violence on their own time are also allowed to carry out state violence while on the job. As agents of the state, they can kill, terrorize, harass, and imprison racial minorities with impunity vis-à-vis their roles as state enforcers and are further empowered by the public’s and media’s reverence of oppressive forms of assembly and “free speech,” as well as the police officers who defend this.
Revolutionary Violence

Revolutionary violence is realized in two distinct forms: self-defense and/or counter-violence. It is a type of violence in which the goal is either self-defense for an oppressed people and/or full liberation for a people, whether that liberation take the form of autonomous communities, a nation state, or something else. It is also resistance to encroachment on the land by oppressive forces, such as in the case of indigenous resistance to expansionist Americans. Revolutionary violence may come in different forms and be carried out through various means. It includes everything from individual acts of “propaganda by the deed” to large-scale revolutions against a state.

Examples of revolutionary violence are abound throughout history, and include the slave revolts of Spartacus and Nat Turner, the Reign of Terror against the French monarchy, the Spanish revolt against the fascist Franco regime, Alexander Berkman’s attempted murder of Carnegie Steel manager Henry Clay Frick, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Reconstruction-era blacks taking up arms against the KKK, the Mau Maus in Kenya [38], the Cuban revolution[39], and a number of national liberation movements in the mid-twentieth century that occurred around the world.

Revolutionary violence is different from state and group violence in that it manifests itself as a response to violence often stemming from one of these two opposing sources. For this reason, it is strictly counter-violent (or defensive) in nature, designed to break the violent oppression that its adherents find themselves under. The benefit of being able to deploy revolutionary violence is obvious in that it allows the oppressed to strike back at their oppressors. It is in this beneficial scenario where the question of guns and “gun control” come back into the mix. How are people supposed to free themselves, or even defend themselves from state and group violence, if they are unable to have guns? How are people able to protect themselves from oppressive violence if they do not have access to the same weaponry used by their oppressor?

When faced with systemic violence that is rooted in either a direct extension of the state (police, military) or an indirect extension of the power structure (the KKK, the Oath Keepers, neo-Nazis, neo-fascists), written laws constructed by the same state and power structure aren’t typically useful. And when doubled-down on by media and liberal establishment cries of free speech and false equivalencies, oppressed sectors of the population become even more vulnerable to state and group violence. Often times, armed self-defense becomes the only option to protect oneself, one’s family, and one’s community from these deeply embedded, existential threats.

Formulating revolutionary counter-violence and self-defense measures became a staple of the American Civil Rights movement. From Malcolm X’s calls to defend the black community “by any means necessary” to the original Black Panther Party’s organizational emphasis on armed self-defense, the Civil Rights movement as a whole gained strength due to these more militant strains centered around revolutionary violence. In 1956, after a “relentless backlash from the Ku Klux Klan,” Robert F. Williams, a Marine Corps vet, took over the Monroe, North Carolina chapter of the NAACP and strengthened it with militancy by “filing for a charter with the National Rifle Association (NRA),” forming the Black Guard, “an armed group committed to the protection of Monroe’s black population,” and delivering weapons and physical training to its members.[40] In 1959, following the acquittal of a white man who was accused of attempting to rape a black woman, Williams summed up the need for oppressed people to take up arms in their own self-defense. “If the United States Constitution cannot be enforced in this social jungle called Dixie, it is time that Negroes must defend themselves even if it is necessary to resort to violence,” responded Williams. “That there is no law here, there is no need to take the white attackers to the courts because they will go free and that the federal government is not coming to the aid of people who are oppressed, and it is time for Negro men to stand up and be men and if it is necessary for us to die we must be willing to die. If it is necessary for us to kill we must be willing to kill.” [41]

Revolutionary violence often finds itself up against difficult odds, being deployed by marginalized peoples with limited resources against powerful state and group entities with seemingly unlimited resources, professional military training, and advantageous positioning within the given power structure. The 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising reflected this exact scenario, as a Jewish resistance in the hundreds, armed with handguns, grenades, and Molotov cocktails faced off against the powerful Nazi paramilitary Schutzstaffel (SS). When reflecting on the uprising over two decades later, one of the Jewish survivors, Yitzhak Zuckerman, encapsulated the need for an oppressed and degraded people to strike back:

“I don’t think there’s any real need to analyze the Uprising in military terms. This was a war of less than a thousand people against a mighty army and no one doubted how it was likely to turn out. This isn’t a subject for study in military school. (…) If there’s a school to study the human spirit, there it should be a major subject. The important things were inherent in the force shown by Jewish youth after years of degradation, to rise up against their destroyers, and determine what death they would choose: Treblinka or Uprising.”[42]

This human spirit referred to by Zuckerman is the same that compelled Nat Turner to take up arms against slave-owning whites, the same that led to the formation of the original Black Panther Party, and the same that motivated Robert F. Williams in 1950s North Carolina. Without access to weapons, this human spirit would result in nothing more than gruesome massacres at the hands of state and group violence. With weapons in hand, this spirit is presented with a chance to stunt pending attacks of physical oppression and terrorism, if not repel them.
Conclusion

The modern gun control debate has taken on two, stereotypical, opposing sides. The first side is representative in the Congressional sit-ins on the House floor this past June. They represent a common liberal viewpoint that gun-control measures should be taken to restrict or, at the very least, delay the acquisition of guns by citizens. Popular demands coming from this side include the banning of all automatic or semi-automatic weapons, the blacklisting of certain people (including those suspected of “associating with terrorists,” the mentally ill, and felons), and the implementation of more stringent forms of clearances. The other side is represented by a reactionary right, mostly white, that is backed by both the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its surrogate, the Republican Party. These who oppose the liberal attempt to stifle the Second Amendment historically come from privileged strata of the status quo, including whites of all classes and those occupying advantageous positions in the socioeconomic hierarchy.

Both sides of the modern gun-control debate cling to very problematic positions and ideologies that are tantamount to their respective arguments. Both sides, in their own ways, reinforce the embedded racial and class privileges that repress much of the working class, the poor, and people of color – in other words, those sectors of the population that are most likely faced with extremely dire economic situations, occupying police forces that resemble foreign armies, and (literally) daily, life-or-death interactions with both police (state violence) and vigilantes (group violence). The liberal or Democrat argument for gun control, like those represented by the Congressional sit-in, almost always target extremely marginalized groups, like felons who have been victimized by the draconian “drug wars” of the ’80s and ’90s, as well as those who have been victimized by the “war on terror” and find themselves on terrorist watch lists for little more than their chosen religion or Islamic-sounding name. The reactionary opposition to gun control, represented by the NRA and Republicans, remains embedded in white supremacy, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and classism, and thus also ends up targeting these same marginalized populations. This latter group’s motivation is evident in the overlap between fringe groups that historically adhere to group violence, like the KKK and Oath Keepers, and the more “mainstream” operations of the NRA.

Both sides of the gun-control debate, whether consciously or subconsciously, are motivated by what Noam Chomsky (paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson) recently referred to as a fear of “the liberation of slaves, who have ‘ten thousand recollections’ of the crimes to which they were subjected.” These “fears that the victims might rise up and take revenge are deeply rooted in American culture” (in racialized institutions of slavery and white supremacy) with reverberations to the present.”[43] The liberal insistence on preaching strictly non-violent and pacifist tactics to poor, working-class, people of color exposes their privileged, white-supremacist leanings. The fact that they do this while also passing draconian legislation that has led to the virtual genocide of an entire generation of blacks (through drug laws and mass incarceration), and in the face of brutal, daily murders of black citizens by police, further exposes them. The recent silence from the NRA regarding the police killing of Philando Castile[44], who was licensed to carry a gun in Minnesota and properly identified his status to officers before being shot for no reason, has exposed the NRA’s white supremacist leanings. Also, the split that occurred within the Oath Keepers when one of their members in the St. Louis chapter, Sam Andrews, encouraged black residents in Ferguson and Black Lives Matters protestors to practice their Second-Amendment rights [45] has exposed their own white supremacist leanings which they regularly disguise as “constitutionalism.”

While white supremacy has an intense and insidious hold on every aspect of American culture – social, economic, political, etc. – it is especially strong within the gun-control debate. So much so that it drove then-California governor, Ronald Reagan, in 1967, to sign extensive gun control legislation under the Mulford Act[46] in response to armed patrols by members of the Black Panther Party. The classist nature of gun control can be found in the targeting of the most marginalized of the working class, along with the historically brutal state repression against workers collectively striking or standing up for their rights against bosses. The most common argument from the authentic, anti-capitalist left (not liberals or Democrats) against the idea of workers collectively exercising their constitutional right to bear arms has been housed in the insurmountable strength and technology owned by the government’s military. Left-wing skeptics claim that an armed working-class will simply have no chance against an overpowering military. The problem with this is that it is preoccupied with a large-scale, pie-in-the-sky revolutionary situation. It ignores the reality faced by many working-class people who find themselves in small-scale, daily interactions with police and vigilantes, both of whom are heavily armed and not afraid to use their weapons to kill. It is in these very interactions, whether it’s a black citizen being racially profiled and harassed by police or an activist being terrorized by reactionary groups, where the access to a gun may become vitally important and life-saving.

Advocating for disarming those who need protection the most simply doesn’t make sense, especially in an environment such as the modern U.S. – a heavily racialized, classist landscape with over 300 million guns in circulation. Nobody wants to be drawn into a violent situation that may result in the loss of life, but our current reality does not allow us that choice. Unfortunately, we live a society where police oppress rather than protect; where violent reactionary groups are allowed freedom to carry out their terrorizing of marginalized people; and where politicians readily use their monopoly of violence to enforce capital’s minority interests against masses of workers. Because of this, modern gun control can only be viewed as anti-black, anti-woman, anti-immigrant, anti-poor, and anti-working class because it leaves these most marginalized and vulnerable of groups powerless in the face of a violent, patriarchal, white-supremacist power structure that continues to thrive off of mass working-class dispossession. The conclusion is simple: If the oppressor cannot be disarmed, the only sane option is to arm the oppressed. In the U.S., the Constitution makes this a practical and legal option.
“Sometimes, if you want to get rid of the gun, you have to pick the gun up.”

-Huey P. Newton

Notes

[1] Philip Bump, “The Problem With Banning Guns For People On The No-Fly List,” Washington Post, June 13, 2016 ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/12/07/the-no-fly-list-is-a-terrible-tool-for-gun-control-in-part-because-it-is-a-terrible-tool/ )

[2] Alex Pareene, The Democrats Are Boldly Fighting For A Bad, Stupid Bill, Gawker,http://gawker.com/the-democrats-are-boldly-fighting-for-a-bad-stupid-bil-1782449026 (June 22, 2016)

[3] Zaid Jilani, “Dramatic House Sit-In on Guns Is Undercut by Focus on Secret, Racist Watchlist,” The Intercept, June 22, 2016 ( https://theintercept.com/2016/06/22/dramatic-house-sit-in-on-guns-is-undercut-by-focus-on-secret-racist-watchlist/ )

[4] Tom Hall, “Congressional Democrats stage ‘sit-in’ stunt on gun control,” World Socialist Website, June 25, 2016 ( https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/06/25/dems-j25.html)

[5] Fact Index, Monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force, http://www.fact-index.com/m/mo/monopoly_on_the_legitimate_use_of_physical_force.html

[6] Mark Walker, “The Ludlow Massacre: Class Warfare and Historical Memory in Southern Colorado,”Historical Archaeology 37:3 (2003), pg 68

[7] Walker, pgs 68-69

[8] Walker, pg 69

[9] Ronald J. Barr, The Progressive Army: U.S. Army Command and Administration, 1870-1914 (New York, N.Y.: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), pg 7

[10] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/macarthur/peopleevents/pandeAMEX89.html

[11] Thomas R. Hensley, Jerry M, Lewis, “The May 4 Shootings at Kent State University: The search for historical accuracy,” The Ohio Council of Social Studies Review 34″1 (1998), pg 9

[12] Hensley, Lewis, pg 11

[13] Ibid

[14] Ted Gregory, “The Black Panther Raid and the death of Fred Hampton,” Chicago Tribune, July 3, 2016 ( http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/chi-chicagodays-pantherraid-story-story.html )

[15] The King Center, Assassination Conspiracy Trial, http://www.thekingcenter.org/assassination-conspiracy-trial

[16] Garrett Felber, “Malcolm X Assassination: 50 years on, mystery still clouds details of the case,”The Guardian, February 21, 2015 ( https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/21/malcolm-x-assassination-records-nypd-investigation )

[17] Natasja Sheriff, “US cited for police violence, racism in scathing UN review on human rights,” Al Jazeera, May 11, 2015 ( http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/5/11/us-faces-scathing-un-review-on-human-rights-record.html )

[18] Gregory Korte, “Obama signs ‘Blue Alert’ law to protect police,” USA Today, May 19, 2016 (http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/05/19/obama-blue-alert-law-bill-signing/27578911/ )

[19] Elahe Izadi, “Louisiana’s ‘Blue Lives Matter’ bill just became law,” Washington Post, May 26, 2016 ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/05/26/louisianas-blue-lives-matter-bill-just-became-law/?tid=sm_tw&utm_term=.6d262fdb3218 )

[20] Joshua Keating, “Was Anwar Al-Awlaki Still A US Citizen?” Foreign Policy, September 30, 2011 (http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/09/30/was_anwar_al_awlaki_still_a_us_citizen )

[21] Adam Taylor, “The U.S. keeps killing Americans in drone strikes, mostly by accident,” Washington Post, April 23, 2015 ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/04/23/the-u-s-keeps-killing-americans-in-drone-strikes-mostly-by-accident/ )

[22] John Bazemore, “Ku Klux Klan dreams of making a comeback,” The Columbus Dispatch, June 30, 2016 ( http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/national_world/2016/06/30/0630-is-klan-making-a-comeback.html )

[23] Southern Poverty Law Center, Ku Klux Klan, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/ku-klux-klan

[24] Hampton Institute, Rising Nazism and Racial Intolerance in the US. A report gathered and submitted to the United Nations, http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/Rising-Nazism-and-Racial-Intolerance-in-the-US.pdf (April 30, 2015)

[25] FBI report on white supremacists infiltrating law enforcement agencies in the US.http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/402521/doc-26-white-supremacist-infiltration.pdf

[26] Rebecca Onion, “Red Summer,” Slate, March 4, 2015 (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/03/civil_rights_movement_history_the_long_tradition_of_black_americans_taking.html)

[27] Akinyele K. Umoja, “1964: The Beginning of the End of Nonviolence in the Mississippi Freedom Movement,” Radical History Review 85:1 (2003)

[28] Ellen Garrison, Stephen Magagnini, Sam Stanton, “At least 10 hurt at chaotic, bloody neo-Nazi rally at Capitol,” The Sacramento Bee, June 26, 2016 (http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/crime/article86099332.html)

[29] Ibid

[30] Debra J. Saunders, “Saunders: Freedom of speech stifled by Capitol rally fracas,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 2, 2016 ( http://www.recordnet.com/article/20160702/OPINION/160709984)

[31] Los Angeles Times Editorial Board, “How anti-racists play into the skinheads’ hands,” Los Angeles Times, June 28, 2016 ( http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-neo-nazi-rally-20160627-snap-story.html )

[32] Legal Information Institute, First Amendment,https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment

[33] Marcos Brenton, “Madness came to Sacramento, and the cops weren’t ready,” The Sacramento Bee, June 29, 2016 ( http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/marcos-breton/article86556112.html )

[34] David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan, 3^rd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), pg 336

[35] Civil Rights Movement Veterans, Mississippi Civil Rights Martyrs,http://www.crmvet.org/mem/msmartyr.htm

[36] Michael Winter, “KKK membership sinks 2 Florida cops,” USA Today, July 14, 2014 (http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/07/14/florid-police-kkk/12645555/ )

[37] Bill Morlin, Police Chief Demands Resignation of KKK Cop,https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015/09/01/police-chief-demands-resignation-kkk-cop (September 1, 2015)

[38] “Mau Mau Uprising: Bloody history of Kenyan conflict,” BBC, April 7, 2011 (http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-12997138)

[39] Andres Suarez, “The Cuban Revolution: The Road to Power,” Latin American Research Review 7:3 (1972)

[40] PBS Independent Lens, A synopsis on the film, “Negroes with Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power,” http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/negroeswithguns/rob.html

[41] Ibid

[42] A. Polonsky, (2012), The Jews in Poland and Russia, Volume III, 1914 to 2008, p.537

[43] Hampton Institute, On the Roots of American Racism: An Interview with Noam Chomsky,http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/chomsky-on-racism.html (April 22, 2015)

[44] Brian Fung, “The NRA’s internal split over Philando Castile,” Washington Post, July 9, 2016 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/09/the-nras-internal-revolt-over-philando-castile/?utm_term=.b0f673e3221c )

[45] Alan Feur, “The Oath Keeper Who Wants To Arm Black Lives Matter,” Rolling Stone, January 3, 2016 ( http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-oath-keeper-who-wants-to-arm-black-lives-matter-20160103 )

[46] Wikipedia, Mulford Act, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act

The Science of Corrosive Inequality

Dr. Nicholas Partyka

 

As the Presidential campaign season begins to get into full-swing, inequality will become a prominent topic, and misleading conventional narratives will abound. Both the presumptive nominees of the two major political parties have addressed this topic at length already, and will certainly have much more to say as the general election phase kicks-off. Inequality is a prominent topic because we are still dealing with the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis that spawned the Occupy Wall-Street movement, which did much to put the issue of economic and political inequality back on the table for discussion. This is why the topic came up in the 2012 Presidential election cycle, and why during this election cycle one candidate in the Democratic Party’s primary was able to attract a very large following by focusing predominantly on this issue. The success of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump shows that the issue of inequality, and its various social, political, and economic effects, still resonates deeply with large portions of the electorate on both sides of the mainstream partisan divide. This is the case, principally, because a great many non-elite Americans are still living with the economic consequences of the financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession.

Inequality, political and economic, not only helped to inflate the bubble whose bursting caused the crash, but it also determined in large measure who benefited from the bailouts and the “recovery”. Rising inequality from the 1970s on helped funnel more and more wealth to the top of the income scale. These people spend their money very differently from others. When this group has surplus income, they are very likely to purchase financial instruments. As more and more wealth was channeled into their hands by the economic and political policies of neoliberalism, as championed by the likes of Reagan and Thatcher, the demand for financial products grew correspondingly. Further, after the financial sector was deregulated in the late 1990s, this process of financialization only picked up speed. Once home mortgages were securitized, that is, made into financial instruments, the stage was set for the collapse. After the crash, elites used their political and economic clout to divert bailout funds from America’s proverbial ‘main streets’ to Wall-Street. This, combined with fiscal policy choices, that is, the choice by bourgeois politicians not to use it as a tool to combat unemployment, is why the so-called “recovery” has not extended all that far down from the top of the income scale.

In order to know what kinds of solutions are necessary to address the problem of inequality it is important to know what kinds of problems it produces, as well as their scale. Scientists and scholars studying inequality, and its various impacts, have revealed a number of striking conclusions about the nature and extent of the social, political, and economic, impacts of inequality. When taken together these various research results paint a very clear picture of the corrosive effects of economic inequality on society, economy, and democratic politics. The totality of these wide-ranging effects constitutes a significant threat to a society aiming to be democratic and egalitarian. In what follows, we will examine some of these interesting studies and their results to see what they reveal about the multifaceted impacts of inequality on persons, societies, and democracy. What we will find is that the scale of the problem far outstrips the scale of most of the mainstream solutions proposed; even those put forward by the self-proclaimed (though quite incorrectly)”socialist” candidate in the Presidential primaries.
Piketty on Inequality

It seems a safe bet that few would have predicted the overwhelming success that a hefty tome on economic inequality by a French economist would achieve in the spring of 2014.[1] The 2011 Occupy Wall-Street movement did much to bring the issue of economic inequality in society, as well as its many social and political effects, into the public consciousness, as well as into political debates. Nevertheless, Thomas Piketty’s book, and its success, caught many totally by surprise, and set off a vigorous debate, and vitriolic reaction, upon its translation into English. Both liberals and radicals pointed to his work as evidence, as confirmation, of what they have been saying for many years. On the other side, conservatives seemed wither to accept his findings, but dismiss his policy suggestions, or to find technical “flaws” with his data or methodology as a way of undermining all his conclusions. Using mainly tax-return records, from several countries, Piketty’s work presents the most comprehensive view of the historical evolution, and structure, of income inequality throughout the industrialized world. Several highly significant, and well-established, conclusions result from his research.

First, Piketty confirms empirically several notions the left has asserted, namely, income inequality in the United States has returned to a historic high level, and it has been rising since the 1970s. The level of income inequality in the United States, especially the growth of incomes at the very top of the income spectrum, has, according to Piketty, revived the social significance of capital in the 21^stcentury, and is bringing back the more patrimonial economy that dominated earlier centuries, until the period between 1914 and 1975. That is, once dynamic and equalizing societies are now increasingly reverting to the kinds of more rigidly defined, and largely hereditary, social relationships and attitudes that dominated the economy and society of the Gilded Age, as well as preceding centuries.

Second, and very importantly, Piketty’s research provides much needed context for perceptions of growth, both of capital and wages. What Piketty’s historical research reveal is that average annual growth rates, even in this most recent and most fecund epoch, are actually rather small. Average annual growth rates for the most productive societies, in the most productive era, are still only about 1 – 1.5% per annum. Capital, on the other hand, has grown on an average of 4-5% per annum over the same historical period. This observation gives rise to one of Piketty’s fundamental conclusions, namely the law (r>g).[2] This law is the biggest source of divergence in market economies, because it directly implies that a capital, however small, will with time invariably become a large capital; exogenous shocks, natural catastrophes, and acts of God notwithstanding. What this law also implies, and very significantly, is that the economic and social landscape of the mid-20^th century is an economically and historically unique, and likely non-replicable period.

Why did economic inequality decline in the United States during the middle part of the 20^th century? Piketty’s answer is that this decline was largely the result of the confluence of historical events, namely the World Wars and the Great Depression. It is the historical conjuncture of these events in this period, as well as the political and social response to them, that accounts for the uniqueness of this era. Piketty’s fundamental law (r > g) was able to be broken in this period because of the exigencies of combating foreign military foes and domestic economic woes. One of the most significant results of the efforts to combat both is that working people in the Unites States accumulated during the war years the largest stock of disposable income ever. It was the spending of this money, as well as exploiting the United States’ position as global hegemon, that fueled the post-war economic boom up until the mid-1970s. When the economic effects of the 1914-1945 period wore off, inequality began to rise again.
Inequality & Social Mobility

One of the major implications of Piketty’s conclusions was on the topic of social mobility in the United States. Many on the left have been arguing for some time that social mobility in America is much lower than commonly thought, and Piketty’s data on inequality seems to support just such an argument. If economic inequality in a society is very high, and growing, then social mobility is likely to be low. The reasons for this are that as economic inequality increases, so the economy comes to be more and more patrimonial, and thus economic divisions come to settle more and more into sharp caste divides. This is, of course, because in a capitalist society, income determines the extent of an individual’s, or a family’s, ability to consume, that it, their income determines the range of their consumption choices.

One thing Piketty’s work demonstrated clearly was just how stark income inequality is in America. What he also, very importantly, showed that the growth of inequality in the United States since the 1970s is due principally to the rise in the incomes of the wealthiest 1%, and .1% of income earners. [3]This increasing concentration of wealth among the wealthiest certainly bodes ill for high levels of social mobility. One of the main features of a patrimonial economy is that, at least from the point of view of social mobility, it is not dynamic. Piketty appeals to interesting evidence from 19^th century Victorian literature to demonstrate this fact. In a highly patrimonial economy the ability of individuals at the very bottom of the economic scale to advance into the “middle-classes”, let alone into the top 10% or 1%. A patrimonial economy also makes it very easy for those who have accumulated wealth to be fairly confident of never falling below the “middle classes”, if one falls out of the elite classes at all. One of the most striking features, at least to modern readers, of Piketty’s use of the economic evidence in Victorian novels, is that with conservative management an accumulated fortune is unlikely to be dissipated, and thus to be transmitted to the next generation.

The notion that classes, or castes, define American society is anathema to many pundits and commentators. Thus the vigorous attempts to rebut, dispute, and discredit Piketty’s work and conclusions. This image of a patrimonial economy does not square well with the cherished nostrum of capitalist society as dynamic and highly socially mobile. To some extent this belief in mobility is evidenced in empirical studies. What these studies often compare are the economic, or educational, outcomes achieved by parents and their children. What they reveal is a strikingly low-level of social mobility, at least as defined by the “rags to riches” mythos of America. Indeed only .2% of those born into the bottom 20% of the income scale will end up rising into the top 1% of income earners. And, as one might expect, the picture is more bleak for persons of color, and other marginalized groups.

What some researchers found is that the picture of social mobility in America is much more complex than simplified narratives from right or center-left suggest. The reality for the majority of Americans is rather fluid, in that people enjoy bouts of relative prosperity and affluence, as well as bouts of relative poverty and deprivation. If such a picture of social mobility were not shocking enough, research taking a different tack suggests that social mobility is actually much lower that the picture presented by inter-generational studies mentioned above, and has been very low throughout history. [4] Economist Gregory Clark studied the prevalence and endurance of ‘elite’ surnames in elite institutions as a way of measuring social mobility with societies.

Using a variety of sources, including Census records, tax returns, death records, graduation records, and others, Clark makes a case that the rate of social mobility in the United States is much lower than contemporary estimates suggest. He argues that the common perception of very slow long-term mobility is more accurate than the estimates presented by social scientific research. For the case of the United States, Clark first identifies certain elite surname groups, as well as underclass surname groups. Then, he looks to test the prevalence of both groups among occupations identified as high status. Clark uses membership lists, mainly from professional associations, of doctors and lawyers as the high status occupations. Among the elite surname groups in America Clark lists Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, what he calls the 1923-1924 rich, and pre-1850 Ivy League graduates. The underclass groups are black Americans, and a groups Clark terms New French settlers. What his research concluded was that elite surnames show a very strong persistence, between 0.7 and 0.9, over the long-term, that is, for Clark, at least three generations.[5]

Another very interesting body of research suggests that humans have innate physiological and physiological reactions to the particular stresses induced by scarcity, by having less than is needed to make ends meet. Researchers found that these reactions impair humans’ long-run decision making faculties, even if boosting short-term focus, resulting in patterns of behavior that lead the poor to be likely to remain in poverty. [6] The experience of scarcity causes people to ‘tunnel’, that is, focus on immediate goals and concerns, and thus to neglect many other important goals or other things one values. While this focus does yield an important benefit in increased productivity, the long-run consequences can lead to what researchers call a ‘scarcity trap’. As one tunnels in on pressing immediate goals, the things that fall outside ones view are neglected, and thus become shocks as they suddenly appear on the tunnel of the person experiencing scarcity. As one reacts to each successive shock, even when “shocks” are predictable and routine events, one resorts to increasingly dodgy schemes to make ends meet. This is how people end up in, and unable to extract themselves from, one or another of the many kinds of scarcity trap.

This is only compounded by the fact that the experience of scarcity imposes a kind of tax on humans’ cognitive capacities, such that as scarcity increases one comes to have less and less of the most important mental resources for escaping scarcity. Will-power is a finite resource, and the effects of scarcity are such that this resource is heavily depleted by scarcity, and the tendency of humans to psychologically obsess about their deprivations. Moreover, scarcity erodes intellectual capacities, in some studies the effect was the equivalent of as much as 13 or 14 IQ points. Thus, as scarcity taxes one’s cognitive capacities, shocks continue to arise, and one must constantly react, always seemingly one step behind. Thus, one will end up making poorer, more impulsive decisions that meet short-term needs, but at the expense of the individual’s long-term goals and interests. Scarcity, in this way, perpetuates scarcity, leading people to remain locked into debt and poverty. Unfortunately, even when poor people do escape poverty, or debt, they often fall back in because they lack any kind of buffer or cushion. The truth is that the poor tend to stay poor because of the physiological and psychological effects of the experience of scarcity, and the rich tend to stay rich because of the effects of abundance.
Inequality and Personality

Beyond its effects on the rates of social mobility, and how this affects people’s lives, inequality also seems to change who people are on a deeper level. Inequality has some interesting, and disquieting, impacts on what people think, their attitudes, their moral values, their perceptions of situations and of other people, and more. Wealth, or the lack thereof, impacts on individual’s personality in many ways. It directly provokes the question of whether the wealthy and the poor are qualitatively different sorts of persons, or whether they are constructed that way by their social environment. The results of empirical research suggest that the experience of inequality, from the top or the bottom of the economic scale, has profound effects on our personalities. The clear implication is that our personalities are in some very significant ways shaped by the contingent realities of the social environment.

In the wake of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, and its aftermath, came much scorn, and condemnation of Wall-Street’s recklessness and greed. The Great Recession brought increased scrutiny to the 1% as a class, and to the mis-deeds and cupidity of the finance industry and financial institutions in the lead-up to and during the 2007-2008 Crisis. The treatment of the whole matter by the federal government angered many citizens, and further fueled the public’s fury and indignation. One of the threads that emerged from this storm of vitriol that was poured on Wall-Street bankers was comparing corporate CEOs to sociopaths. The callousness, selfishness, and nonchalance with which many in the financial industry profited from the crash which they themselves had both created and precipitated, even as others were being fired en masse, made many Americans think of corporate CEOs as basically sociopaths. Some pundits took this to the logical conclusion and compared clinical symptoms ofsociopathic behavior to the characteristics of successful CEOs. As it turns out, a growing body of empirical research is suggesting that the wealthy are indeed very different from others, e.g. morally and emotionally, as a result of their wealth.

A series of creatively designed studies by researchers Paul Piff, Dacher Keltner, Michael Kraus, Stephane Cote, and a host of collaborators, has revealed some very interesting results about the moral and emotional differences of rich people from persons of lower social class. Piff and Keltner, et al , demonstrated in both naturalistic and laboratory settings that those of higher social class, i.e. the wealthy, are more likely to lie, cheat, steal, and break the law than their counterparts in lower social classes.[7] On the naturalistic side, they found that wealthier drivers, as determined by the model of the car, were more likely to illegally cut-off both other drivers at intersections and pedestrians at crosswalks. On the laboratory side, they found that in experimental simulations those of higher social class, even if artificially created, were more likely to lie, cheat, and steal in order to win prizes. Moreover, in experimental simulations, even those whose position of wealth and dominance had been engineered as part of the experiment, showed the signs of feeling entitled to their totally un-earned wealth. Other research found that those who had attitudes characteristic of social dominance were found to be more likely to come to feel entitled to their position in the inequality hierarchy, or to believe the “legitimizing myths” of inequality. [8]

Other studies have produced similarly striking results. One study showed that lower-class individuals were more “empathically accurate” than their wealthier counterparts. ‘Empathic accuracy’ here refers to the ability of persons to correctly judge or predict the emotional states of others. [9] They hypothesize that since poorer people have to rely more on others to get by, they become more accurate at judging other people’s emotional states, since their success in obtaining cooperation depends on managing the emotions of others. In another study, Kraus & Keltner demonstrated that the wealthier subjects in their experiments were less likely to pay attention to others, as demonstrated by a prevalence of “disengagement cues”, e.g. looking at one’s cell phone while others are talking.[10] A further study revealed that the wealthier subjects were more likely to have a predominance of “self-oriented affect”, that is, the rich are more likely to think about themselves before others. [11] In yet a further study, Stellar, Keltner, & colleagues, demonstrated that wealthier subjects were not only slower to feel compassion, but reported feeling less compassion, for others experiencing suffering.[12] Higher social status individuals were also shown in one experiment to be stingier than their less wealthy counterparts.

Inequality, in addition to warping the perceptions and sensibilities of the rich, also distorts the perceptions of the working-classes. Kraus, Piff, and Keltner found in one study that those of lower social class position were more likely to favor contextual explanations over dispositional ones, because of a perceived lack of personal control over the outcome.[13] This means that poorer people tend to explain, or rationalize, their own choices, or the events of their lives in terms of external causal factors, that is, factors over which they as individuals do not have control. This perceived lack of control is characteristic of how researchers Melvin Kohn, Carmi Schooler, and their collaborators, understand the concept of alienation.[14] Their research demonstrated important connections between inequality in levels of alienation between high and low status groups in the workplace. The difference between the high- and low-status positions in the workplace roughly matches the colloquial “blue collar”, “white collar” distinction, where the latter type of jobs contain an abundance, and the former a paucity, of opportunities to exercise “occupation self-direction”, that is, control over their work. Each of these groups was found to have a distinct set of values and social orientations associated with it.

The correlation between the social stratification position of lower-status workers within the firm, and the personal values, social orientations, and psychological functioning that predominate among these workers is troubling.[15] The results obtained by Kohn and Schooler, et al, demonstrate that the more alienated low-status group are more likely to have specific set of values, attitudes, and social orientations. In particular, more alienated, “blue collar”, workers tend to take on personality traits like authoritarianism, conformity to authority, resistance to change, and a focus on the letter rather than the spirit of the law. This is in turn related to the lower levels of psychological functions, or intellectual flexibility, observed among the high-alienation, low-status workers. This research also shows that the observed connection between these traits and social-stratification position within the firm are mediated by the division of labor in the typical capitalist firm, whereby the low-status workers are denied opportunities to exercise self-direction at work. Of course, we should note that an individual’s social-stratification position with the firm is in many ways correlated with, and even determined by, that individual’s social class in society generally. This latter is not a conclusion issued by the research we’ve been discussing, but rather a more general observation about the fit, under capitalism, between low-status persons and those who perform the low-status work in society.

One very telling, and worrisome, result of the work of Kohn and Schooler, et al, is that alienation experienced in the workplace spilled over into the non-work life of workers, effecting their leisure time preferences. The rate of interest in discussing non-political matters was found to be consistent across both the high- and low-alienation groups. However, interest in discussing political topics was distinctly lower among the high-alienation group. Moreover, the intellectuality of the preferred leisure time activities among highly alienated workers was seen to be much lower than among their counterparts in the low-alienation group. As a further kind of informal test, the researchers conducted their survey in two separate parts. One part of the survey covered non-political topics, the other political topics. After controlling for Swedes’ cultural tendency to comply with researches requests, they found, quite suggestively, that the political part of the survey was returned later on average by the high-alienation group. This specifically political withdrawal by the high-alienation, low-status workers will have profound implications for the well-being of political democracy.
Inequality & Health in both Individuals and Societies

A growing body of research in public health has shown that economic inequality is highly related to certain significant socials ills, e.g. high levels of violence, as well as higher rates of illness and early death among those of lower class position in society. Building off this work on the “social determinants of health”, Richard Wilkinson presents an argument that societies with more inequality are also, e.g. less trusting, less cohesive, less sociable, more prejudiced, and more violent. [16] He begins by noting an apparent paradox. Modern societies are more wealthy and productive, and with more luxuries readily available, than most of our ancestors would have ever dreamed. He cites the example of indoor plumbing and hot and cold running water as luxuries often taken for granted. And yet, modern societies also appear rife with unhappiness, e.g. high rates of suicide and depression, illness, violence, and early death. Wilkinson links the sources of these manifestations of unhappiness with economic inequality and its social, as well as physiological, effects.

Wilkinson’s work successfully showed that almost all the social problems that are indicators of unhappiness, are more concentrated in poor areas, and more common among poor people. He argues that, as a result of the “epidemiological transition”, the most common causes of death for all in developed countries shifted from infectious diseases to degenerative diseases. What he found is that health is graded by social status, that is, largely by income. His results demonstrated that as income increased so did health, according to a range of metrics, and vice versa. He appeals to a range of studies to help show that social problems indicative of unhappiness are caused by the same sources of stress as chronic diseases. Wilkinson points to three main categories of psychological risk factors, namely, early childhood social and emotional development, being more socially isolated, and high or low social status.

As inequality in a society rises, Wilkinson argues, the social relationships of that society increasingly become characterized by relations of dominance and subordination, that is, by increasing social distance. The more this latter is the case, the more the sense of autonomy, or of self-direction, decreases for the proverbial have-nots as their dependence on the haves increases. In Wilkinson’s causal mechanism, increased inequality leads to increased competition for social status, and subsequently the adoption of anti-social values and attitudes as people become more detached from and less reliant on others. These latter values progressively erode social relations and community life, and thus contributing to the social problems afflicting society. Basically, the psychological factors that create unhappiness, produce ill health and other social issues through increases in stress associated with inequality, and deprivation. For, indeed, as Wilkinson acknowledges, the connection between economic inequality and ability to access consumption goods will play a large part in explaining the connection between inequality and ill health.

On the one hand, inequality makes societies less healthy. For example, one study based on data from the U.S. General Social Survey by Kawachi and Kennedyet al, Wilkinson cites, demonstrates that states with higher inequality were less trusting than in more equal states. [17] Two studies by Robert Putnam and colleagues, one conducted in the U.S. and the other in Italy, found that the strength of community life varied with the level of inequality. The more inequality there was, the less likely people were to be involved with social, or civic organizations or activities.[18] Building off others’ data for ten U.S. cities, the more inequality there was the more hostility three was.[19] Moreover, as Wilkinson notes, there are more than fifty studies showing a relationship between inequality and homicide rates.[20] Other studies have shown that higher rates of economic inequality were related with increased racial prejudice, as were lower social status for women. [21] Lastly, but by no means least, studies have shown that where inequality is greater political participation decreases, when participation is measured by propensity to vote.[22]

On the other hand, inequality also makes individuals less healthy, resulting in the early death of those on the short-side of social inequalities. All three of the main psychological risk factors for unhappiness and stress, and thus illness, that Wilkinson identified are directly related to economic inequality. Pre-natal and early childhood stress have been linked by studies to a range of later life health problems. The scientific evidence points to the stress hormones like cortisol as an important influencing factor.[23] Social isolation, that is, lack of embeddedness with a robust network of friendships, and other social connections, has been shown to be related to higher mortality rates. [24] Low social status has also been shown to be related to higher rates of mortality. What may be the most striking thing about what some of the research in this area suggests that, yes the material conditions attached to poverty matter, but that the position of inequality, of subordination and deprivation, itself produces negative consequences for health.[25]

Compounding these effects of inequality on health is the visibility of inequality, which research has found further increases inequality. [26] Subjects were experimentally manipulated into higher and lower status groups, the higher the status the more the initial endowment of the participant. The subjects participated in a game designed to test their choices given specific incentives. Basically, the experiment consists of a turn-based game where fake money is waged. The participants can choose to act cooperatively, i.e. contribute to a common pool or bank. Alternatively, players can also choose to act selfishly, and defect from cooperation, and thus gain more money for themselves than if they had cooperated. The outcome of each round depends on the choices of each of the players, and each of the player’s choices effects the choices of each of the other players. The researchers found that when the levels of inequality were more visible in these experiments the outcomes of the games were more unequal distributions of wealth than in games where the levels of inequality were invisible to the players. If the visibility of wealth increases inequality in the distribution of wealth, then it stands to reason that, given the link between inequality and social health, visibility of inequality will exacerbate the negative health effects of inequality.
Inequality is Anti-Democratic

I am in deep agreement with Wilkinson when he asserts that the surprise should not be so much that inequality is as harmful to ourselves and to society as it is, but rather that we should have forgotten this. For, indeed, when we look back into the history of our modern democratic political culture, we see that the concern about economic, and thus social and political, inequality has been a major one. Both the ancient Greek and Romans had important laws, not always scrupulously abided, that limited land ownership by individuals. The idea behind these laws was to attempt to preserve a wide distribution of land-ownership, because owning land and political and social independence were linked. Indeed, in ancient minds, the former was the necessary material foundation of the latter.[27] For the Greeks , someone who depended on another for work, for a livelihood, would be thought of as an unreliable citizen. This was because the relationship between employer and employee, patron and client, is one of domination and subjugation. If one’s ability access important subsistence goods hinges on the disposition of another, then one is unlikely to oppose that other politically; especially in a time when political debate and voting was done face to face, and in public. The rise of patron – client relationships was in part responsible, in the case of the Romans, for the fall of the republic.

Consider the classic slogan of the French revolution, “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité”, or liberty, equality, and solidarity. As Wilkinson rightly notes, each one of these values, is a demand, and is addressed or related to inequality. We’ve seen already that inequality lead to subordination, which is the anti-thesis of democratic political relations. Solidarity has to do with our understanding of social relations themselves, and their quality. A robust democratic culture must maintain a certain level and quality of social cohesion, built on relationships that affirm liberty and cooperation. We’ve see already that research shows that as inequality increases the quality of social relations decreases, importantly, inequality was found to decrease levels of participation. Equality can thus be seen as the basic pre-condition for liberty and solidarity. This is because of the importance of the material bases of liberty and solidarity, and the link between access to these material bases and income. Thus, the most essential foundation of any democratizing reform must be a change in the distribution of levels of access to the material pre-requisites of a decent life, the enables substantial political participation.

Inequality is also anti-democratic because it skews the outcome of public political deliberative institutions and processes, as well as “competitive” elections. A recent study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page demonstrated that that the majority of the U.S. electorate had little or no control over the legislative outcomes of their “democratic” institutions. That is, as their research shows, there is no statistically significant connection between the preferences of the majority of voters and the legislative outcomes of their political institutions.[28] The wealthiest elites have a statistically significant lead over the rest of the American citizenry in the likelihood of their preference being realized in public policy and law. The recent Citizens Untied ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court only further entrenched the role of money in the contemporary American political system, by legally equating money with speech. It is very likely because people perceive the way that their political elites serve economic elites and their interests much more than those of the proverbial “common man”. This is also very likely behind the deep decline in voter participation in America over a period of many years. It is also almost certainly part of why other research found that a full one third of survey respondents replied “not at all” when asked, “(H)ow democratically is your country being governed?”[29]
Conclusion

Economic inequality is thus highly corrosive of democracy because it limits social mobility, creates ill health and social problems, warps the personalities of those involved in un-democratic ways, and distorts the outcomes of the political process in favor of the wealthy. Inequality lowers mobility and results in more rigid social hierarchies divided by class, that is, by income. The result of this is a society in which a great gulf opens between these classes as their social, political, and economic experiences become increasingly divorced from each other. Further, because of the link between income and consumption, there is a connection between income inequality and health; both in persons and in societies. Inequality makes people more stressed, triggering physiological reactions, that when sustained over long durations produce consequences leading to more illness and earlier death. Inequalities in societies, in particular inequalities in income, resources, and opportunities, help produce unhealthy social maladies like increased violence and crime, reduced levels of compassion, higher levels of hostility, reduced levels of trust. In essence, inequality tends to decrease social cohesion, and the robustness of participation in community life, leading to increased levels of social isolation. Inequality also leads to the creation of social and economic conditions, and structures of work, under which individuals are incentivized to become persons with anti-democratic values, attitudes, and preferences. Increases in exposure to relationships of domination and subordination lead those subordinated to taken on adaptive preferences, e.g. the specifically political withdrawal noted in the work of Kohn & Schooler et al.

What we can see now is that the responses to the problem, really problems, of inequality are woefully inadequate to address the wide range of maladies created or exacerbated by inequality. Raising taxes on the rich, and spending that money on social programs sounds like an appealing solution. But, from what we have just seen, this strategy is not capable of providing real solutions to the variegated social, economic, and political problems related to high levels of inequality in society. Tackling the problem of inequality will require much more robust measures. What should be clear from what we’ve discussed here is that the political and economic problems of economic and political inequality cannot be addressed singly or in isolation. Only a comprehensive strategy addressing them all simultaneously will suffice to effect real change. The economic power of capitalists gives them political power, which they use to preserve and even enhance their economic power. Unless the very social and economic foundations of this feedback loop are extirpated, the hold of bourgeois elites on both economic and political power is unlikely to be broken. This is why even a successful “political revolution” would be ineffecti ve in combatting inequality; let alone reversing the four decade old trend towards rising inequality. The only effective means of combatting inequality, and its myriad of detrimental consequences, is the seizure of political and economic power from the capitalist class by a working class that is conscious of itself as a class both in-itself and for-itself.
Notes

[1] Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the 21^st Century. Tr. Arthur Goldhammer. The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2014.

[2] In this equation r = average annual rate of growth of capital, and g = average annual rate of growth of income, or output. See Piketty, (2014), 25.

[3] See Piketty (2014); figs.8.5 – 8.10

[4] See Clark, Gregory. The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. Princeton University Press, 2014.

[5] See Clark (2014) ch.3.

[6] See Mullainathan, Sendhil & Eldar Shafir. Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives. Picador, 2014.

[7] Piff, Paul, et al. “Higher Social Status Leads to Increased Unethical Behavior”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Vol.109 no.11 (2012): 4086-4091.

[8] See Wilkinson (2005), 196.

[9] Kraus, Michael W., Stephane Cote, & Dacher Keltner. “Social Class, Contextualism, and Empathic Accuracy”. Psychological Science. Vol.21 no.11 (2010):1716-1723.

[10] Kraus, Michael W., & Dacher Keltner. “Signs of Socioeconomic Status: A thin Slicing Approach”.Psychological Science. Vol.20 no.1 (2009): 99-106.

[11] Kraus, Michael W., Paul Piff, & Dacher Keltner. “Social Class as Culture: The Convergence of Resources and Rank in the Social Realm”. Current Directions in Psychological Science. Vol.20 no.4 (2011): 246-250.

[12] Stellar, Jennifer, V.M. Manzo, Michael W. Kraus, & Dacher Keltner. “Class and Compassion: Socioeconomic Factors Predict Response to Suffering”. Emotion. Vol.12 no.3 (2012): 449-459.

[13] Kraus, Michael W., Paul Piff, & Dacher Keltner. “Social Class, Sense of Control, and Social Explanation”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol.97 no.6 (2009): 992-1004.

[14] Kohn, Schooler, and their colleagues take their conception of alienation from work done by Melvin Seeman in the early 1960s. See; Seeman.”Alienation and Social Learning in a Reformatory”. American Journal of Sociology. Vol.69 no.3 (1963): 270-284. Also see; Seeman, & John W. Evans. “Alienation and Learning in a Hospital Setting”. American Sociological Review. Vol.27 no.6 (1962): 772-782.

[15] See; Kohn, Melvin. Class and Conformity: A Study in Values. 1969. University of Chicago Press, 1977. Also see; Kohn and Schooler, et al. Work and Personality. Ablex Publishing, 1983.

[16] See; Wilkinson, Richard. The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier. The New Press, 2005.

[17] Kawachi, I., B.P.Kennedy, K.Lochner, &D.Prothrow-Smith.1997. “Social Capital, Income Inequality and Mortality. American Journal of Public Health. Vol.87 no.1: 21-32.

[18] See; Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster. 2000. Also see; Putnam, R.D., R. Leonardi, & R.Y. Nanetti. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton University Press, 1993.

[19] Wilkinson (2005), 51.

[20] Wilkinson (2005), 47-50.

[21] Kennedy, B.P., I. Kawachi, K. Lochner, C.P. Jones, & D. Prothrow-Smith. “(Dis)respect and Black Mortality. Ethnicity & Disease. Vol.7 (1997): 207-214. Also see; Blau, F.D. & L.M. Kahn. “The Gender Earnings Gap – Learning from International Comparisons”. American Economic Review. Vol.82 (1992): 533-538.

[22] See Mahler, V.A..”Exploring the Subnational Dimension of Income Inequality”. Luxembourg Income Study Working Paper 292, January, 2002. Also see; Blakely, T.A. B.P. Kennedy, & I. Kawachi. “Socioeconomic Inequality in Voting Participation and Self-rated Health”. American Journal of Public Health. Vol.91 no.1(2001): 99-104.

[23] Wilkinson (2005), 81-85.

[24] Wilkinson (2005), 78-81.

[25] Wilkinson (2005), 73-76. Also see; Shively, C.A., & T.B. Clarkson. “Social Status and Coronary Artery Atherosclerosis in Female Monkeys”. Arteriosclerosis & Thrombosis. Vol. 14 (1994): 721-726.

[26] Nishi, Akahiro, Hirokazu Shirado, David G. Rand, & Nicholas A. Christakis. “Inequality and Visibility of Wealth in Experimental Social Networks”. Nature. Vol.526 Oct., (2015): 426-429.

[27] See; ; Havell. H.L.. Republican Rome. 1914. Oracle Publishing, 1996. Also see; Hanson. Victor Davis. The Other Greeks. University of California Press, 1999.

[28] Gilens, Martin & Benjamin I. Page. “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens”. Perspectives on Politics. Vol.12 no.3 (2014).

[29] See World Values Survey Wave 6 (2010-2014).

Debt, Underemployment, and Capitalism: The Rise of Twenty-First-Century Serfdom

Cherise Charleswell & Colin Jenkins

 

Systemic contradictions of capitalism have only intensified in the neoliberal era. Structural unemployment, a phenomenon directly related to capitalist modes of production, has continued unabated, creating a massive and ever-growing “reserve army of labor” that has been disenfranchised on an unprecedented scale.

Working classes, en masse, have been corralled into legalized systems of education debt with false promises of “middle-class” lifestyles, only to be tossed into a job market that can no longer keep up with the system’s inherent deficits and inability to provide a living wage to the masses. Massive inequality and unprecedented wealth accumulation and concentration have paralleled uncontrollable costs of living and widespread housing insecurity for the working-class majority.

The twentieth-century liberal experiment has failed, bringing down with it the delusional hopes of constructing a manageable and benevolent form of capitalism. The ripple effects of capitalism’s structural failures, intensified by modern forms of government-facilitated debt slavery, job markets that can no longer keep pace with wage demands, and interrelated housing insecurity and displacement, have pushed us into a twenty-first-century serfdom. We are left wondering how long this balancing act can last.
Capitalism and Underemployment

Unemployment is not a natural occurrence within society. It is a purely capitalist problem that arises from artificial economic arrangements, most notably the advent of wage labor, which forces people to serve as commodities. This is an important point that is often missed, especially in regards to modern assessments of the labor market and popular reports that focus on the fiction of an unemployment rate. In the United States, since the 1950s, the official unemployment rate has fluctuated between 4.4 percent and 10 percent.¹ Full employment in a capitalist system is neither possible (without government intervention) nor desirable to capitalists or those who benefit from the system. Rather, substantial and perpetual unemployment is both a byproduct of the system’s relational mechanisms and a necessity that serves a systemic purpose in regards to profitability and wage reduction (or stagnation). The never-ending search for profit by those who have access to capital, and the means to reproduce it, places those who must sell their labor power to survive in a perpetual state of insecurity. Other than the fundamental extraction of profit through the labor process (surplus value), the most basic method in regenerating profit comes from replacing variable capital (living labor) with fixed capital (machines), a relationship that Marx referred to as the “organic composition of capital.”² While the process of creating surplus labor value consists of paying wages that equal a fraction of the value created, the process of increasing productive capacities through the implementation of machinery leaves living labor in an even more precarious situation. This process leads to the creation of what Marx referred to as the “Industrial Reserve Army” (the unemployed)-a phenomenon that becomes both a byproduct and a leveraging tool within the capitalist system.

Attempts to circumvent capitalism’s tendency to create and maintain high amounts of unemployment and underemployment have been carried out by industrialized capitalist societies utilizing Keynesian economic programs. By calling on a high degree of governmental involvement in the economic system vis-à-vis taxation and supplementation, John Maynard Keynes believed that structural problems like “involuntary unemployment” could be remedied. ³ When coupled with the post-World War II economic boom in the United States, Keynesian techniques appeared to make positive steps towards remedying structural unemployment. Between 1948 and 1970, the official unemployment rate in the United States was relatively low by historic measures, typically fluctuating between 3 and 5 percent, and falling below 3 percent on a few occasions during the 1950s.⁴ The marginal tax rate during this time-also a byproduct of Keynesian thought-was a major factor in the economic success experienced by much of the U.S. population, including the white working class in its ascent to “middle class” status, and also helped create historically low unemployment rates. From 1948 to 1963, the top marginal tax rate remained at 91 percent, with the exception of 1952 and 1953 when it was raised to 92 percent.⁵ In 1964, this top rate was lowered to 77 percent, and from 1965 into the 1970s, it was set at 70 percent.⁶

The Keynesian experiment came to an end in the 1980s, when neoliberalism took form as a class project. Coupled with the phenomenon of globalization, which fused formerly industrialized labor markets (unionized with living wages) in the global core with formerly colonized labor markets in the global periphery, underemployment has become an epidemic with disastrous effects. Marx warned of such developments when writing, “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. … It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, and establish connections everywhere.”⁷ The global consequence of this constant pursuit of profit is not only the establishment of new markets of consumers and laborers, but also the proliferation of imperialism. For the former industrialized working classes, such as in the United States, it means an intensification of capitalist mechanisms that create unemployment and underemployment. Because of this, the replacement of manufacturing jobs by low-wage service sector jobs has become a distinguishing characteristic of American capitalism since the 1980s. Government involvement in this system has become a necessity, not for the purpose of obstructing it (as many right-wing critics claim), but for the purpose of supplementing it and propping it up via infusions of money and for maintaining the minimum of social welfare programs. The former can be seen in the increased importance of the Federal Reserve and monetarism (including the practice of quantitative easing), while the latter can be seen in the working class’s increased reliance on things like food stamps-a direct result of the disappearance of living wages.

The type of government involvement that became common in the 1980s was nothing like its Keynesian predecessor. Rather than seeking public programs and fiscal policies that created jobs, neoliberal intervention seeks to supplement profit accumulation for those at the top of the socio-economic ladder. This is carried out with mantras like “getting government off our backs,” lowering taxes for so-called “job creators,” and even blatantly allowing for massive profits to be justified under a promise of such money “trickling down” to the masses. As neoliberalism represents an intensification of capitalism, not only through the dismantling of Keynesian-style interventions but also through a 180-degree reversal in using government to supplement the capitalists rather than the workers, the neoliberal era has brought on a uniquely precarious existence for the working class in the United States. Thomas Palley explains:

Before 1980, economic policy was designed to achieve full employment, and the economy was characterized by a system in which wages grew with productivity. This configuration created a virtuous circle of growth. Rising wages meant robust aggregate demand, which contributed to full employment. Full employment in turn provided an incentive to invest, which raised productivity, thereby supporting higher wages.

After 1980, with the advent of the neoliberal growth model, the commitment to full employment was abandoned as inflationary, with the result that the link between productivity growth and wages was severed. In place of wage growth as the engine of demand growth, the new model substituted borrowing and asset price inflation. Adherents of the neoliberal orthodoxy made controlling inflation their primary policy concern, and set about attacking unions, the minimum wage, and other worker protections.⁸

The culmination of the disastrous neoliberal measures that began in the 1980s was realized with what has been labeled the Great Recession of 2008, whose effects are only starting to be fully understood nearly seven years later. Some alarming statistics should be emphasized: Between 2008 and 2014, the U.S. labor market lost a total of 1.4 million full-time jobs; more than 20 percent of workers who were laid off as a result of the Great Recession still have not found a new job; when considering those workers who have given up looking for employment, the unemployment rate is closer to 12 percent; of all “prime-age workers” (ages 25 to 54) in the United States, 23.3 percent were “not employed” as of November of 2014.⁹

A January 2014 study conducted by Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, entitled, “Is There Really a Shortage of Skilled Workers?” countered a popular argument presented by the mainstream analysis, which claimed there was a shortage of qualified workers to fill so-called “skilled” positions. ¹⁰Fred Goldstein, writing on Shierholz’ research, said,

The study found that no matter what the skill level of workers, their unemployment rate went up by 150 percent to 190 percent from 2007 to 2013. The unemployment rate for workers with less than high school education was 10.3 percent in 2007 and 15.9 percent in 2013. For high school graduates, the unemployment rate was 5.4 percent in 2007 and 9.6 percent in 2013. For workers with some college, the unemployment figures jumped dramatically from 4.0 percent in 2007 to 7.3 percent in 2013; for college graduates, it went up from 2.4 percent to 4.5 percent and for those with advanced degrees, it went from 1.7 percent to 3.2 percent, that is, almost double.¹¹

This highlights perhaps the most alarming effect of the recession, which has been a mass replacement of living-wage jobs with low-wage jobs in the service sector. In sectors that experienced severe job losses during the Great Recession, workers were earning 23 percent less in 2014. In manufacturing and construction, the average salary fell from $61,637 in 2008 to $41,171 in 2014. The jobs that have been added during the “recovery” (2009-2014) have been largely low wage, confirmed by the fact that $93 billion in “lower wage income” has been created during this time period.¹²
Toward Twenty-First-Century Serfdom: Debt, Student Loans, and Rising Costs of Living

The net result of prolonged and skyrocketing unemployment and underemployment and the increasing stagnation of wages is the mounting epidemic of debt. Debt, in the form of medical bills, housing costs, and ballooning mortgage payments, has contributed to people having to file for bankruptcy as well as finding themselves homeless.¹³ This new-age form of debt has effectively divided the United States into an income-bound set of castes, the “Haves” and “Have Nots.” The awakening to this unequal balance of wealth and debt set the stage for the Occupy Movement uprisings, which spread globally and advocated on behalf of the 99 percent, the workers who collectively hold much less economic wealth than the richest 1 percent. In real terms, according to the IRS, those who belong to the lower 99 percent of U.S. income distribution are those with a household adjusted gross income of less than $343,927. This valuation not only illustrates how wealthy the 1 percent must be, but it also speaks to the fact that there is still much socio-economic stratification within the 99 percent, including differences in the likelihood of financial hardship and debt.¹⁴ While the outsourcing of jobs has greatly contributed to unemployment, those who are lucky enough to still have a job are finding themselves working long hours or having to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. Despite the noted rise in hours worked, which should logically translate into higher annual incomes, Americans are finding themselves falling into debt at unprecedented rates.¹⁵

All of this has helped to give rise to what can only be referred to as a twenty-first-century serfdom. An example of the indebted economy is the fact that mergers, monopolies, and concentrations of influence have created the present reality of workers finding themselves employed by, and simultaneously indebted to, the same corporate entities. The “pay” that is earned is immediately shuffled back to these corporations in the form of student loan payments, mortgage payments, cable payments, health insurance premiums, and so on. The feasibility of paying off these employer/debt-holding entities in a timely matter, or at all, is difficult or nearly impossible, especially when considering that they are the very ones who set and keep wages low and transfer the profit from workers’ increased productivity to the pockets of CEOs, investors, shareholders, bankers, and so on.
Debt is a Byproduct of Capitalism

Within this current era of unchecked capitalism, where citizens must take to the streets in protest to persuade the government to intervene and create policies that will support a living wage or protect workers’ rights, debt and inequality are the most recognizable and predictable byproducts. The process of financialization, which began in the 1970s, depends on widespread loosening of banking regulations, environmental laws, and labor laws. Inequality is inherent in capitalism due to its concentrating of wealth in the hands of the few, in the form of monopolies and by the exploitation and maximizing of profits at the expense of, or through the labor of, the masses-the twenty-first-century serfs. Neoliberal capitalism has allowed for unprecedented concentrations of not only wealth, but power, creating a landscape where the wealthy are modern representations of feudal lords. As in feudal societies, it is the pauper (serf) who pays the biggest percentage of taxes (or dues for land usage in the case of serfs), and this is even true under Democrat-led administrations in the United States. Just consider the fact that corporate taxes decreased from 25 percent during the Bush Administration to 12 percent under Obama, while workers’ tax rates remained the same or increased.¹⁶
The Student-Loan Debt Crisis

The biggest driver for debt in the past twenty-five years has been the rising cost of tuition and student-loan debt. This debt crisis may eventually represent the proverbial “final straw that breaks the camel’s back,” as there do not seem to be any plans for immediate relief. Instead, politicians spend election seasons making false promises and arguments in favor of student debt relief, but do not offer any concrete measures to bring this into fruition. Further, those outside of socialist and progressive movements remain ignorant of, or will not be honest about, the fact that capitalism is structured to produce exploitation, concentrated wealth and profitability, and debt. Capitalism’s constant pursuit of profit has led to the transformation of higher education into a no-holds-barred profit-seeking venture. This process can be summed up as follows: Colleges and universities are using decades of cutbacks in state and federal funding for higher education to justify massive increases in tuition, the proliferation of adjunct professor positions, and budget cuts to educational and other services upon which students depend. A 2008 study published by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities made headlines when it shared that on average states are spending $1,805, or 20 percent, less per student than before the recession; some states, such as Alabama, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina, which are for the most part states where there is a Republican stronghold, have slashed their higher education funding by more than 35 percent since 2008, and they are topped by Arizona with a decrease of 47 percent.¹⁷ Back in 1988, in the not so long ago past, public colleges and universities received 3.2 times as much revenue from state and local governments as they did from students.¹⁸ This simply means that the student did not carry the bulk of the burden to finance higher education, which was instead paid for by public dollars, collectively sharing these costs.

As wages go down, the cost of tuition continues to climb, leaving behind an educated populace that is saddled with debt. Tuition jumped 28 percent between the 2008-2009 and the 2013-2014 school years, while real median income fell by approximately 8 percent over this period. To understand the bigger picture, consider that since 1973 average inflation-adjusted college tuition cost has more than tripled-an increase of 270 percent-but median household income has barely changed and is up by only 5 percent;¹⁹ this represents the core of the crisis. What are graduates to do? How are they to survive and afford their most basic needs while working low-paying jobs and still being forced to pay back a student loan that they cannot even write off in bankruptcy, like the corporations and banks do with their debts?

There is no greater evidence of the burden of student-loan debt than the accounting of loans that have fallen into delinquency. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a 2015 report that shared that delinquent student loans (those whose payments are 90 days or more past due) increased to 11.5 percent of the $1.9 trillion (yes trillion!) in education loans.

Essentially, the burden of financing the exorbitant costs of education has been passed on to the students, and the high cost with dwindling returns (where are the higher-paying jobs?) has begun to discourage would-be college-goers, a process that is equally by design. Higher education was once looked on as a means to develop a cultured, well-rounded, and informed citizenry. However, this is no longer the case, since cultivation of thinkers would only lead to questioning of the prevailing system of inequality. The Great Society programs that gained steam in the 1960s set out to make sure that students who could not otherwise attend college could do so, without the burden of having to work excessive hours to help cover the cost of education. In fact, at one time students could actually use their summer vacations to “work their way through college,” something that is now impossible. In the current landscape, students are forced to take out mortgage-sized loans from financial lenders who are profit-driven corporations and who inevitably put their bottom lines before the needs and best interests of students.

This student-loan crisis has ensured that the last two generations are worse off than were their parents, ending the historical progression of improvements in the quality of life with each subsequent generation. Over a lifetime of employment and saving, someone with $53,000 in education debt can expect nearly $208,000 less wealth than a similarly educated person without debt.²⁰ Crippled by this debt and entering a job market with lower and stagnant wages, graduates, who were sold the falsehood of the American Dream, are unable to afford the lifestyles that their parents and grandparents once enjoyed. Dispensable income is becoming a scarcity, while more money is being spent to cover the rising costs of food, health care, transportation, clothing, and housing. With this reality the feudal lords, the wealthy 1 percent, are gaining exponential profits through this multi-dimensional exploitation of the working class.
Conclusion

The proliferation of the capitalist system through the neoliberal era has resulted in a modern form of feudal society where there is great inequality and wealth is concentrated among the few. Policy changes, and perhaps a restructuring or change in the current systems of governance, are needed, but this will largely depend on the actions of the working-class majority: the growing number of impoverished, overworked, unemployed, or underemployed serfs whose labor and bodies are being exploited and who have been left wholly disenfranchised.

Despite the need for mass action, it has yet to materialize. Despite dire circumstances, there remains a great reluctance to challenge the status quo of inequality. This stems from the fact that far too many are still hopelessly reliant on the illusion of the American Dream, believe in the falsehood of rugged individualism, or merely fear the prospects of instability and the unknown. The motivation for revolutionary change exists throughout, yet many fundamental questions remain unanswered. Some may not have an answer until steps are taken. For instance, if the current system of government-which has become no more than a “dollarocracy”²¹ that does not represent or even consider the views or needs of the working-class majority-is overthrown, what would happen next? Fears of the unknown persist and are perpetuated by corporate-sponsored media, which thrives on the sensationalism of doomsday reporting, ignoring the fact that fluctuations in the stock market and other macroeconomic indicators are far removed from the daily lives of many who actually work for a living.

Despite this widespread reluctance and fear that has been peddled to the majority, action is needed. Addressing debt is an immediate concern. Action does not need to be instantly revolutionary, but may be accomplished through gradual steps and reformist means. Some steps include:

• Continue building movements around issues of debt, unemployment, and inequality-movements that are multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-generational. An intersectional approach to such movements will effectively attack the divisions that have been artificially created to ensure that the status quo continues. Examples of this division are most visible throughout the impoverished states of the U.S. South, which despite having vast income inequality and being susceptible to corporate exploitation, also happen to possess high rates of historical, intra-working-class, racial animosity. Hate, fear, and ignorance cause many to vote and act against their own interest.

• Get behind efforts that are working to remove moneyed influence over the U.S. political system; some of that influence comes through the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling that has the audacity to state that corporations are people. Be ready to accept that the entire system itself may need to be dismantled.

• Demand that the federal government gives us a New Deal that can address the problems of unemployment and the crumbling infrastructure. Bridges and highways need to be repaired, and high-speed rail needs to be laid out.

• Join and support unions, which are under assault, because they are the only stakeholder who truly bargains and fights for the working-class majority. Expanding the number of active unions will only benefit the workforce-those who are union and non-union alike.

For short-term and immediate relief of student-loan debt, which has become a critical issue:

• Shift direct-lending administration to the federal government and regulate and reduce interest rates on loans. Work toward de-profitizing higher education, making higher education a civic value.

• Reduce the military budget and replenish the diminished funding to schools, colleges, and universities that once helped to keep tuition costs down or made possible free tuition to public schools.

• Allow for student-loan debt to be included in bankruptcy claims, allowing for full or partial forgiveness of the debt to those who are without the means to pay.

The brief period of Keynesian consensus that ruled from the 1940s to the 1970s is over. The neoliberal imperative that has ruled since is currently subjecting an ever-larger share of the population to brutal austerity measures. Skyrocketing levels of debt and structural unemployment are the most visible manifestations of how far neoliberalism has penetrated into the structures of American society. However, in the years ahead, it will prove increasingly difficult to disguise the full nature of the crisis, and new opportunities to advance programs of systemic change can and will present themselves. If the left does not find a way to rise to the occasion, then it is unclear which track the country will take as it makes its way toward collapse.
This essay was published in the Winter 2016 edition of New Politics.

Notes

1. U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics.

2. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 3: Part II, Chapter 8.

3. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money (London: Macmillan and Co., 1936), 15.

4. U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics.

5. U.S. Federal Individual Income Tax Rates History (Nominal Dollars).

6. U.S. Federal Individual Income Tax Rates History (Nominal Dollars).

7. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848). Chapter 1.

8. Thomas I. Palley, “America’s Exhausted Paradigm.”

9. Colin Jenkins, ” The Great Recession, Six Years Later: Uneven Recovery, Flawed Indicators, and a Struggling Working Class ,” The Hampton Institute, November 5, 2014.

10. Heidi Shierholz, “Is There Really a Shortage of Skilled Workers?” January 23, 2014.

11. Fred Goldstein, “Marxism and Long-term Unemployment.”

12. Jenkins, “The Great Recession.”

13. O. Khazan, ” Why Americans Are Drowning in Medical Debt ,” The Atlantic, Oct. 10, 2014.

14. R. Wile, ” Student Debt Has Turned Millennials into Carless, Homeless, Basement Dwellers Who Can’t Borrow ,” Fusion, Feb 2, 2015.

15. D.S. Logan, ” Fiscal Fact: Summary of the Latest Federal Individual Tax Data.” Tax Foundation, 2011: No.285.

16. D. Gilson, ” Overworked America: 12 Charts That Will Make Your Blood Boil ,” Mother Jones, July/Aug 2011.

17. J. Geler, “Capitalism’s Long Crisis,”International Socialist Review (No. 8, 2010).

18. E. Blake, ” State funding for higher education in US slashed by 20 percent since 2008,” World Socialist Web Site.

19. M.D. Weiss, ” Student Loan Debt: America’s Next Big Crisis ,” USA Today, Aug 23, 2015.

20. R. Hiltonsmith, “At What Cost? How Student Debt Reduces Lifetime Wealth,” Demos.

21. J.Nichols, Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex Is Destroying America(Nation Books, 2014).