​In any attempt to understand contemporary culture and its artistic manifestations in a materialist manner it is absolutely essential that we attempt to do so in the light of a Marxist critique. There is not, however, only one "official" Marxist approach to the understanding of art. Past attempts to force creative thought into a narrow official mould by means of state sponsored interpretations of Marxism resulted in a separation between genuine materialist theory and the social reality that was being presented. My purpose is not to present the "correct" theory of a materialist philosophy of art but to attempt to lay down what I think to be the four basic features that anyone trying to work out a Marxist aesthetic must keep in mind. These four features will also be useful to those who propose to write materialist criticism of both contemporary "pop culture" as well as so called "high culture."


First, it is well known that neither Marx nor Engels consciously worked out a philosophy of art as part of their general worldview. Nevertheless, they made particular judgments on art and their overall positions on historical materialism (in conjunction with these judgments) have been appealed to by their followers in order to support aesthetic theories that were developed later within the context of the Marxist movement.


Second, based on the general notions of historical materialism, the social context of art takes on the most important aspect in any Marxist aesthetics. That is to say, approaching art in a materialist spirit, a Marxist philosophy of art bases itself on the social, cultural, and biological factors of human life as the foundation upon which art arises. This, of course, does not distinguish a Marxist approach from a materialist approach in general. This further determination can be made when we consider the following.


Third, the notion of contradiction in the dialectical logic inspired by Hegel, as developed by Marx and Engels, and its relation to struggle and the overcoming of such at higher developmental levels are necessarily linked to the basic materialist approach fundamental to a Marxist aesthetic. In this we find the main difference between traditional philosophical materialism and Marxist historical materialism. Traditional materialism, while recognizing the primacy of matter, tended to interpret the world in unchanging mechanical categories. The materialist philosophers of the French Enlightenment, while disposing of religious, spiritual and mystical explanations for the events of the natural world, had no real theory of historical or natural change and development.


The materialist philosophy developed by Marx and Engels, on the other hand, by adapting the Hegelian concept of contradiction to materialistically inspired categories of explanation, was able to provide a non-mechanistic explanation of natural and historical change, development and progress. In this combination of materialist philosophy and dialectical method, of which the notion of contradiction is central, can be found the difference between "materialism" and "historical materialism."


The correct application, as well as understanding, of contradiction is one of the most vexing problems in the history of Marxist thought. Its abuse led to Marx’s famous comment about his not being a Marxist. I do not intend to go into all of the different interpretations which have been given to Hegel’s views on this subject. I will, rather, briefly outline what I consider a useful way of looking at contradiction as used by Hegel and Marx and Engels and relate this to my claim that it is the basis of any Marxist philosophy of art by showing how one of the most original Marxist thinkers, Christopher Caudwell, employed contradiction in his great work on the origin of poetry: Illusion and Reality.


Let’s begin by asking the following question: What happens when one makes a mistake in philosophical reasoning? One of the most common occurrences is that we have been guilty of over-generalization or have dealt with our subject without sufficient knowledge that might have affected the outcome of our reasoning. It is the presence of a contradiction in our reasoning which signals that this faulty way of reasoning has occurred. The function of philosophy is to deepen the analysis, make it less general, and overcome the contradiction while at the same time preserving what is true and valuable in the previous view. This method is then repeated on the new views, and on the views that replace them and is continued as long as we can. Hegel uses the German verb aufheben which means "to lift up," "to cancel," and "to preserve" to describe this process. No one English verb quite catches all these meanings. Contradictions are not therefore mutually exclusive after all. In The Science of Logic Hegel maintained it was very important to keep in mind that such seemingly contradictory opposites as positive and negative, virtue and vice, truth and error, and one could add, illusion and reality, only had their truth "in their relation to one another; without this knowledge not a single step can really be taken in philosophy." Ivan Soll puts it this way in his An Introduction to Hegel’s Metaphysics: "The dialectic preserves parts of putatively opposed categories as the necessary elements (Momente) of more concrete categories. But as necessary elements of a more concrete category their mutually exclusive character is removed or negated. These categories are both preserved and negated - they are aufgehoben."


This method was taken over by Marx and Engels and applied to the analysis of history as well as to natural phenomena. The difference in their materialist, as opposed to Hegelian application, is that, as Engels points out (The Dialectics of Nature), in the former the contradictions are derived from the actual study of history and nature while in the latter they "are foisted on nature and history as laws of thought."


When it comes to Caudwell, we see his use of contradiction throughout all the major discussions of Illusion and Reality. According to David N. Margolies (The Function of Literature), "Caudwell had to take a fully dialectical view of literature, seeing literature not as static works but as a process. Literature and society exist in a dialectical unity and thus not only does social existence determine literature, but literature also influences society."


But Caudwell uses contradiction in other realms besides literature. For example, he takes Freud’s category of "the instincts" (the source of humankind’s free natural existence) and contrasts it with the category of "the environment" (the source of the repression and crippling of the instincts) and derives the higher category of "civilization" which, Caudwell says, was evolved "precisely to moderate and lessen" the conflict between the other two antagonistic conceptions.


We should further note that illusion and reality, which we create and study by means of art and science are not for Caudwell absolutely contradictory conceptions. It is true, he notes, that in many theories these concepts "play contradictory" even if intermingled roles but they are really unified and reflect different (but equally important) aspects of our common world. Our human biological make up and "external reality exist separately in theory, but it is an abstract separation." Caudwell continues, "The greater the separation, the greater the unconsciousness of each." By which he means the more distance we put between "art" and "science" the less we really understand either of them.


Contradiction, as used by Caudwell, consists in the refusal to isolate the world into a system of mutually exclusive categories. What appears on one level of analysis as contradictory or exclusive is seen, on a higher level of analysis, to be complementary. He uses this method or argumentation and discussion when he deals with poetry, psychology, epistemology, language, communism, and in virtually every aspect of his philosophy. For this reason he can be located in the tradition of classical and contemporary Marxism.


Fourth, one last feature seems to me to be necessary for a Marxist philosophy of art. The fundamental purpose, the raison d'être of Marxism is to be the leading philosophy of the worker’s movement in the class struggle to overthrow the economic system of capitalism. Therefore, a Marxist philosophy of art must, as I define it, link up with the class struggle, directly or indirectly, and, whatever else it may seek to do or explain, provide insights and guidance in that struggle.

​​​​About the Author:
Thomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association.

In Equality as a Moral Ideal, Harry Frankfurt argues that the value of equality is not valued for itself. Rather than viewing equality as an intrinsic good, Frankfurt suspects that the  actual intuitive appeal of equality derives from our moral intuition that everyone should have enough. We will first investigate the concept of “enough” on Frankfurt’s account. Then, we will analyze the moral import of making sure everyone has enough under the framework of the “strong sufficiency view.” While we will see that sufficiency for others is indeed a vital moral  value, there is still reason to regard equality as good in itself as well. The latter view we will  refer to as the “weak sufficiency view,” which I seek to sketch out and defend. 

The view of Frankfurt’s we wish to analyze is concisely put forward by Frankfurt when he writes, “[W]hat is important from the point of view of morality is not that everyone should  have the same but that each should have enough. If everyone had enough, it would be of no moral consequence whether some had more than others” (Frankfurt 21). We will refer to this view as the “strong sufficiency view.” On this view, equality is regarded as entirely lacking  intrinsic moral import. For Frankfurt it simply does not matter how the distribution of resources  turns out to be in terms of some or other measure of equality—at least as long as everyone has enough. But what is enough? 

We must be clear that for Frankfurt the extension of the word “enough” is broadly  encompassing. We do not mean here enough to barely survive, or enough to hardly live comfortably. Rather, with “enough” we mean enough to flourish. Not only does sufficiency include the basic necessities of life such as food, water, and housing, but also what people need in order to live a meaningful life as they see it. For example, in order for the musically talented to flourish he needs instruments and leisure time to develop his skills. Alternatively, the nuclear physicist needs lab equipment, textbooks, and raw materials to do the work that makes her life feel meaningful to her. The conception of sufficiency on this view is wide-ranging, but the main point is that it is the amount of resources (social, material, and beyond) that someone needs in order to fulfill their potential as they see it. In this way, we see a strong parallel with John Rawls’s ideal of society promoting the ability of each individual to have genuine self-respect (Rawls, A Theory of Justice 386). While they strongly differ in their views on egalitarianism as a  whole, both of their views are at least partly motivated by an impulse to preserve the cherished values of autonomy and self-determination that underpin modern liberal democracies. 


To anyone on the political left, the idea that everyone should have enough to flourish is unlikely to garner much criticism. What about a libertarian? Someone like Robert Nozick would disagree strongly with the idea that morality demands that we be concerned with everyone having sufficient resources. Rather, from the strict libertarian perspective, what is morally  relevant is consent. For the libertarian, it doesn’t really matter if almost an entire society lived in poverty while some live in lavish conditions with more resources than they could use in a  thousand lifetimes. As long as those conditions arose out of voluntary transactions between individuals, there is no moral claim to be made against such a distribution. 


What the libertarian fails to understand is that without enough to live well people are not in a position to genuinely consent in a free-market system. Given the inevitable concentration of resources into the hands of a few in modern global society (see Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, etc.) a large portion of a free-market society must engage in menial labor in order to survive. In a free market system, there is no real choice. Is it genuine consent if failing to engage in menial labor will result in your children starving to death? Is it genuine consent if failing to  engage in menial labor will result in your mother dying from diabetes because she can’t afford her insulin? There is no consent where one does not have a legitimate chance of survival if she  says “no.”  


What if we provide everyone with enough? It seems then that no one would be forced into menial labor—one could say “no” to those jobs and still be perfectly able to survive and live  a meaningful life. While one may say that’s far-fetched—we will always need menial laborers—I  would urge him to look at the rapid development of technology. Far from far-fetched, it seems inevitable that large portions of the simple, menial jobs of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty first centuries will vanish within the next ten years. The dreaded decline of the trucking industry,  one of the largest employers in the United States as of this writing in 2020, is a particularly  poignant example. What are they to do when all the trucks drive themselves? What will their  “consent” in the “free” market look like then? 
We can see now that providing people with sufficient resources to live their best life (as they see it) actually enables consent!

​By securing sufficient economic resources for everyone, people’s freedom will grow exponentially. Let us picture our level of freedom as some rough estimate of our available choices. It is simply undeniable that a society in which everyone unconditionally had enough to live well would result in those people have more choices available  to them to design their conception of the good life. How many poor kids in the United States long to become doctors, lawyers, professors, or nurses, who will never be able to do so because their family has never had enough to invest in their education? It is an insidious falsehood that the only motivator for human behavior is profit. While this is an empirical claim we cannot verify here, I truly believe that there are millions who would pursue these things for their own sakes. The free market profit motive is not necessary for the perpetuation of our society.  Everyone should have enough. 

​
Let us now introduce an amendment to Frankfurt’s strong sufficiency view. We have  established that everyone having enough is vitally important for the legitimacy of a liberal democracy and market system. But that does not mean sufficiency is all that matters. 


Imagine a society in which everyone had sufficient resources. Every single person has enough to fulfill their conception of the good life, whatever it may be. To be clear, there has not  been a single society in the history of the world that has achieved this. But as philosophers we  get to imagine. 


In this society, we will say that a unit of $1/day covers the vast majority of people’s  needs. However, there is still a market in society, and some people amass much more wealth than others. We will structure it like this: 90% of the people have a net worth of $36,500 (which  would cover $1/day for 100 years); 5% of the people have a net worth of $1,000,000 ($1/day for  2,740 years); and the top 5% have a net worth of $10,000,000,000 ($1/day for 27,397,260 years).  


Is it really of no moral consequence that these vast inequalities exist? Keep in mind everyone has enough to thrive. There is not a single person in deprivation in this society. For the sake of further clarity, we can imagine this as a worldwide government. Every single human being has enough. However, even in those conditions, there is still a massive power inequality  between the three groups. The psychological effects of wealth have been discussed by  intellectual revolutionaries from the ancient prophets Buddha and Jesus Christ, to the economists of the nineteenth century and the psychologists of today. It seems extremely unlikely that in any society in which money still exists there would not be people motivated by greed. While, as  stated above, the profit motive is not the only motive human beings have for behavior, we know from time immemorial that there are people in every generation who are primarily motivated by this. In short, in a society in which money exists money is a primary vehicle of power. 


The moral consequence of our inequality here has nothing to do with sufficiency.  Sufficiency has been met in this society, and that is certainly a necessary condition for a just society. Ironically, sufficiency is not a sufficient condition for a just society. Any society in which  there are massive imbalances of power cannot be considered properly just. To appeal again to our liberal ideals of autonomy and self-determination, a relatively equal distribution of social power is necessary for the genuine expression of these values. Money is the ultimate social influencer in societies in which it exists. If one group of people enjoy far more access to social power than  another, those people are much more likely and able to exert their control over the society as a  whole to a much greater degree than those without that social power. To have one’s interests, desires, and beliefs manufactured intentionally is a barrier to true autonomy—but even in this  society of sufficiency such exertion of control through money would likely be inevitable. 
​

We will then call our adapted view the “weak sufficiency view.” On this view, sufficiency is vitally important. No society can be just even if a single person under its sovereignty does not  have enough in Frankfurt’s fullest sense. However, we have seen that the distribution of power is also vitally important, and the guarantee of such a just distribution of power cannot be achieved  by application of the principle of sufficiency alone. 

​
One might wish to object at this point that this defense of egalitarianism is simply a defense of equality as an instrumental good for the sake of maintaining just power structures.  However, the value of equality simply is the value of a just power structure between persons.  Frankfurt has shown us that it is not the equal distribution of material resources themselves that  is important with respect to equality. What is left for us then is the most basic sense of equality  between persons, and that is equality between the power of persons. As Rawls says, the value of  autonomy is sustained by our regard for all individuals as free and equal persons. The value of  equality of power between people underpins even the social value of personal autonomy for all  persons.  
​

On our weak sufficiency view, we assert that sufficiency is necessary. However, this sufficiency must be accompanied by a reasonably equal distribution of overall resources in order to retain the value of equality of power between persons. We have seen that maintaining a reasonably equal distribution is itself necessary to retain the very principles that constitute the  backbone of modern liberal democracies. The long and bitter struggle between the priority of liberty and the priority of equality may never see a practical end in human society, but I believe  that a proper analysis of the concept shows that they are mutually intertwined. Liberty without  equality of resources cannot be liberty because there is not genuine consent and autonomy  between citizens where there are great imbalances of material power. Equality of resources  without liberty cannot be equality because there would be great imbalances of power between  citizen and state. While liberty and equality are not reducible to each other fully, they are mutually affirming, and one cannot be properly understood without some reference to the other.

​About the Author:
Jared Yackley is an undergraduate student of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His primary focuses are in epistemology, history, and political philosophy. Yackley hopes to apply the principles of dialectical materialism to contemporary issues, both philosophical and political.

The basic logic of democracy is that the people are the final authority in politics.  This is the principle of popular sovereignty: that the true sovereign is no high official, no oligarch, no general, no king, but the people.  This is of course why we have elections to hold our leaders accountable: before we get to higher-level arguments about representation, responsible governance, or the common good, the first thing that democracy means is that the people are the final authority, who can peacefully overturn their government and put a different one in its place.
​
Until recently, I had thought that everyone in our society basically bought into this premise, with very few exceptions.  Yes, this basic conception of democracy is one of the fundamental tenets of the Enlightenment that is hegemonic in our culture today.[i]  And yes, if you ask people in the abstract, people will say they believe in popular sovereignty.  But it strikes me how often people get it backwards and invert this relationship of accountability.

I’ve been voting third party in presidential elections for a while now.  This is a decision that I have always given much deliberation in each election.  The point here is not my reasons for voting third party, but how others respond when I tell them this.

 “Voting third party?  But why would you throw your vote away like that?”

“I don’t think either major candidate has earned my vote, and I’m voting for a candidate who has.”

After some discussion of the strategic pros and cons of voting third party, which is typically premised on the idea the both of us have the same goals politically, the conversation then frequently devolves into a mild but persistent chiding of me, and an effort to convince me to vote, as a matter of strategy, for the Democrat. 

“Well, if you don’t vote for Biden, isn’t that kind of like voting for Trump?  Or at least effectively like half a vote for Trump?”

I won’t deal here with arguments about voting for an evil that is lesser than another evil, or about how much the two parties differ, or about voting “against” a candidate instead of “for” a candidate, or any of the usual suspects in an argument about tactical voting.  These, after all, are tough questions, and a matter of judgment for any given voter.  Here I simply want to point to an assumption that sneaks into these discussions: that I, as a voter, have an obligation to support one of the two major candidates, and if I don’t, I am letting the better candidate down.  Some people will go so far as to actively shame nonbinary voters for this. 

When that politician loses, as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, it is not her fault for failing to appeal to more voters, as she should have, but the voters’ fault—they failed to vote for her, as they should have.  It was not her responsibility to earn your vote, but your responsibility to vote for her, the reasoning goes.  This logic became just another device in the service of removing the blame from Clinton and her lackluster campaign.

The opposite party’s voters are not typically chastened like this.  I suppose this is because they are perceived to have different political values, goals, and worldviews, whereas I, who “should” be voting Democrat, am presumed to share these things with the Democratic voter I am speaking with.  In their minds, I imagine, Republicans don’t deserve this scorn because, even though they are on the opposing team, at least they are playing by the rules and voting for a candidate that won’t “waste” their vote.  I, however, am perceived to be on the same team, but I’m sabotaging all their efforts to win the game by not playing it with their optimized strategy.  Enemy soldiers may get fired at, but scorn is reserved for deserters.

From the perspective of the loyal Democrat, the problem is that I am not voting as I “should”.  So, I should be pressured into doing so.  What you might notice here is how voter shaming turns upside-down the basic idea of democracy: it holds voters accountable to politicians rather than the reverse.  Instead of expecting politicians to earn our votes, we expect each other (when categorized in the appropriate box) to support our politicians.  Instead of politicians owing us policies that will work in our interests, we owe politicians votes that will help them achieve their ambitions. 

In some cases, this voter shaming is only a side dish presented alongside a persuasive argument based on policy differences between the candidates, and that can be part of a healthy discussion on how (and whether) we should vote.  I am certainly not arguing against interpersonal debates about how to vote.  But in many cases the shame is the main course: you should vote for the Democrat because how dare you.  Even worse, it is sometimes claimed that exercising your right to freely vote for whom you choose by voting third-party is somehow a privilege that oppressed voters don’t have the luxury of indulging in.   This is clearly untrue, but the more important point is that when voting itself is characterized as a privilege, rather than as a right, the antidemocratic nature of this line of argument is undeniable.  After all, when something is a privilege and not a right, it is granted from above and can be taken away under certain conditions.

Where does this urge to blame voters rather than candidates come from?  Why is there so much voter shaming going on, when we should all be candidate-shaming instead?  Maybe social media has set us all up as targets to be critiqued for our politics.  Twitter and Facebook have certainly made punching down at least as easy as punching up.  It sometimes even seems like the business model of social media is meant to keep us hooked on public shaming and cancellation as a modern ritual of human sacrifice.  Or maybe we’ve learned to be fans rather than citizens, and we’ve come to believe that our role is to root for our electoral team to score as many points as it can.

​Whatever its sources, we can see this logic not just when it comes to elections, but in higher levels of politics as well.  In early January 2021, even the most progressive members of Congress balked at a proposal put forward by commentator Jimmy Dore to withhold their votes for Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House unless Pelosi promises them a floor vote on Medicare for All.  For instance, despite campaigning on the promise of getting a vote on Medicare for All, and despite her repeated claims that the Democratic party needs new leadership, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (along with everyone else in “the squad”) refused to even threaten to withhold her vote.[ii]  AOC argued that she didn’t want to risk getting a Republican elected speaker of the House. 
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At first blush this seems to be an understandable concern, but notice what’s already happened here.  What assumptions have already been made in order to make these arguments? First, AOC has assumed that if the lone Democratic nominee were to lose, then the Republican leader will automatically win.  It turns out, however, that a Speaker from the GOP minority was never really a possibility, as any Republican candidate would need the votes of multiple Democrats.  The rules for the election of the Speaker of the House don’t recognize the two-party duopoly.  In other words, unlike the presidential contests where we are habituated to, this was not a lesser evil election, but a contest to see which candidate—no matter their party—could earn a majority of votes in the House.  No Speaker would be elected unless and until someone could get that majority, and it was never likely to be a Republican.  Pelosi getting fewer votes does not translate into GOP leader Kevin McCarthy getting closer to a majority of House members.

Second, AOC assumed that Pelosi would say no.  This in itself says a lot about Nancy Pelosi and what House progressives think of her.  If they deemed Pelosi worth voting for in the first place, wouldn’t it be possible that she would at least entertain the idea of a floor vote on Medicare for All to shore up the support she needs to be elected Speaker again?  Conversely if you are confident that should would sacrifice her Speakership just to ensure that Medicare for All did not get a floor vote—as AOC implied in her tweets—how could she possibly be worth supporting?  If that is your expectation of Pelosi’s response, then the sensible move is to vote against her, not for her.  AOC’s using the fact that Pelosi would never allow a floor vote on Medicare for All as a reason to vote for her is an astonishing feat of intellectual gymnastics.

Third, AOC assumed that, should Pelosi say no, the House progressives who withheld their votes will be responsible for her losing her Speakership.  And here again we see the logic of inverted democracy: when subordinates refrain from supporting a leader, the leader is not deemed to have failed her supporters, but vice versa.  If Pelosi loses her position as Speaker it will not be because of such a simple demand being made by House progressives, but rather because of her refusal to concede to that demand.  Pelosi losing the Speakership would be what it looks like when a constituency holds its leadership accountable.  Pelosi would have failed, not the progressives who held her up to such a minimal standard.

So, AOC’s argument was based on false assumptions: a Republican speaker was never a real possibility, Nancy Pelosi probably would not have sacrificed her Speakership just to prevent a floor vote on Medicare for All, and if she had, it would have been her own fault, not the fault of those who refused to support her without such a promise. 

But even if AOC and other progressives realized all of this, there were plenty of reasons to support Pelosi, even if they aren’t the most noble of reasons.  It just so happens that Pelosi wields enormous fundraising power, as one of the richest and most well-connected (read: corrupt) members of Congress, and such informal powers, combined with the Speaker’s ability to mete out punishments and rewards in the form of committee assignments, have allowed her to scare anyone away from stepping forward as an alternative candidate from within the Democratic caucus—including the most vocal progressives in “the squad”, like Ocasio-Cortez herself.  In the absence of such a challenger, the choice appeared to be between Pelosi or someone possibly even worse.

So, for House progressives, it was either Pelosi or the wrath of Pelosi.  When presented with such a restricted choice, there is no power—no freedom—in choosing either A or B.  One must have the power to say no.  The power to say no is central to the most basic democratic processes.  Imagine a legislature that, when voting on legislation, structures the decision as follows: vote for bill A or bill B, and if you don’t like either, you should vote for the one you dislike less.   When Congress—or any legislative body, for that matter—passes legislation, it does not use this model, but instead votes on a single bill, up or down, yea or nay.  No is always an option.  If no is not an option in the choice you have before you, your vote is not an exercise of sovereignty.  In such cases, that sovereignty has already been exercised by whoever put the choice in front of you.

Third-party voters (and many abstainers) are those who have come to grips with their power to say no.  No, this choice is not good enough.  No, I will not be coopted into validating the corrupt elite processes that put these oligarchic puppets on the ballot.  Because of the Democrats’ reduced majority in the House, a handful of progressives had the rare opportunity to exercise their power to say no to Nancy Pelosi in order to force a vote on Medicare for All in the midst of a deadly pandemic.  If Pelosi had refused to accede to their demand for a vote (only a vote!) and lost the speakership, then she would only have proved beyond a doubt that it is indeed time for new leadership.  Yes, it would have been confrontational, even adversarial—it would have been playing hardball.  But the power of the vote is that it must be earned, and leaders will not be made to earn your vote unless you are willing to walk away.  There is no other way politicians can be held accountable to the people: if we are to have sovereignty, we must be capable of saying no.


​

About the Author:
​​Ben Darr teaches politics and international studies at Loras College, in Dubuque, Iowa.  He went to college at Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa, and earned his Ph.D. in political science at the University of Iowa.  His interests include global inequality, and U.S. foreign policy.  He is currently working on a book on spectator sports as a model of neoliberal politics.

When considering the philosophy of Karl Marx, one must consider first and foremost the role of alienation. The fundamental problem with capitalism is that it alienates the worker from the product of their labor. Marx developed this idea after developing his thoughts on the forms of alienation produced by religion. While the details of this transformation are beyond the scope of this paper, I highly recommend Why Read Marx Today? This work, written by contemporary philosopher and former professor of philosophy at University College London, Jonathan Wolff, concisely sketches the development of Marx’s thoughts on alienation as a product of religion to alienation as a product of capitalism.

We may regard alienation as an evil precisely because it denies the human being the fruits of the most fundamental part of our nature; viz., alienation robs us of the full value of our creative faculties. The human being is inherently creative. Even so-called “uncreative” people are in fact extremely creative. Every day we create something—whether it be food, a planned experience with a loved one, or an especially clever email to a boss. Creativity should not be understood as a characteristic only attributable to the likes of Chopin and Tchaikovsky, or Van Gogh and Picasso. The creative force is the driving force of humanity, and this is precisely why the alienation from the fruits of our labor by capitalism is so insidious. Furthermore, any labor that creates value is a creative behavior. Acknowledging the theory of surplus value developed by Marx, we can recognize that the expropriation of
the product of the mass’s labors is the expropriation of the driving force of their existence. One of the great beauties of humanity is our ability to create meaning itself. Could it be that the more general drive to create new means of interacting with the world is also what forces the conscious development of meaning in our lives? After
all, it is the development of technology which allowed for historical human civilizations to evolve in the first place. Directly through the development of new means of production does history march. As humanity moves through new phases of development, we are forced to develop new types of meaning in order to justify to ourselves the burden of rising self-consciousness.

The burden of self-consciousness is perhaps the most ancient burden in the history of human thought. One might easily interpret the Biblical story of Adam and Eve as a reflection of this manifestation of the collective subconscious. The curse of the knowledge of good and evil is the “original sin” in the broader Christian tradition, and one may quickly find the germ of truth present in material reality that is captured in this myth. By coming to self-awareness humanity has burdened itself with the knowledge of choice. It is directly our awareness of our own actions, our own ability to apply causes to the material world for a specific effect that drives our need to create meaning in our own lives. The beauty of non-human animal consciousness is that they simply cannot call into question neither their means or their ends. While it is clear non-human animals, especially other mammals, have some function akin to deliberation, it is unlikely that they are able to call into question the legitimacy of their ends. But how did we get to question the legitimacy of our ends? There is no definitive answer to this, and if there is a scientific answer to be found it will be found by anthropologists, not philosophers. However, I suspect that the development of agriculture sparked the first real questioning of the validity of our ends. While we have evidence of pre-agricultural art and artifacts, these can be seen to be largely descriptive images of the world around them. It is not until after the agricultural revolution some 12,000 (or more) years ago that clearly interpretative art began to arise. But why agriculture?

The simple answer is that the development of agriculture took humanity off the well-trodden path that our evolution had theretofore plotted for us (to speak very loosely). While I can only speculate, it seems to make good intuitive sense that in shirking off the instincts given to us by direct natural selection, through the development of new technologies, our ancestors were forced to question these new ends simply in virtue of their being so new. Agriculture allowed for the emergence of the most complex social structures on earth, and, for all the evidence we have, in the entire universe. Neurological systems simply could not evolve quickly enough to keep pace with the amazing phenomenon that is cultural evolution. Forced to confront systems so foreign to the patterns of nature under which our neurological systems were developed, human beings may well have been forced to create new meaning to match the novelty of these ways of life. Perhaps meaning-making is just the natural response such highly complex brains are forced to take when confronted with such starkly different ends available to them than presented through the subconscious instinct shaped by natural selection over countless ages. It may just be the case that those humans who could not make new meaning out of their lives simply died out—or perhaps not, if we are to look at the increasing rates of suicide and depression in many industrial societies of today.

“All of this is very interesting (and quite dry) but what does it have to do with free speech?” I imagine the reader is asking themselves at this point. Let us recognize that speech itself is inherently creative. In every speech act, the human being designs a meaningful construct to communicate something, however benign, to another person. In fact, we hold many of those talented in language to the highest esteem— Mary Shelley, writing Frankenstein at nineteen years of age, the greatest novel of all time, is a favorite example.

As it turns out, speech is one of our most cherished creative aspects. Think back to Descartes, who ultimately appeals to an internal speech act to justify his own existence—cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. However, this type of thinking is just an internal speech act! While here we do not wish to defend Cartesian dualism, or really anything promoted by Descartes, the famousness of this quote of his is illuminating to just how dear our speech is to our identities as human beings. Most people greatly value the quality of their own thoughts, and the ability to express those thoughts at-least-sufficiently well through language. To take it even further, speech is largely the vehicle by which we make meaning out of our post-agricultural revolution existences. Is it not through language that we call into question good and evil? Is it not through language that we pierce through the veil of appearances with the natural sciences? Is it not through language that we express our love?

Certainly not in all cases, but that is beside the point. The fact of the matter is that we do use language for these things, and even the other things we use for these purposes are fundamentally products of our creative nature, such as painting or music.

We can now see the evil that is the alienation of the human being from their own speech. Certain strains of thought in the Marxist tradition are very unfriendly to the concept of free speech, but they do not realize that in doing so they are lowering themselves to the criminality of the capitalist class themselves. The aim of the liberation of the working people of the world is the end of alienation. Any Marxist theoretician who strays from the ideal of free speech forgets the vitality of the dissolution of social structures which inherently alienate individual human beings. Let us now sketch a more condensed version of our argument:

1. Alienating a human being from their creative nature is evil.
2. Alienating a human being from the products of their labor is tantamount to alienating a human being from their creative nature.
3. Speech is a product of human labor and, thereby, the human creative nature.
4. Therefore, alienating a human being from their speech is evil.
5. Censorship of speech alienates human beings from their speech.
6. Therefore, censorship is evil.

The only exception to the value of free speech is speech that is directly calling for violence. As the right to life is more fundamental than even the right to the fruits of one’s labor, as life itself is that which allows for the creative force to exist, the right to freedom of speech must be subordinated to the right of people to remain safe. Speech encouraging direct violence towards persons or groups cannot and should not be tolerated, as the concern for the existential security of every person must come before any other concerns. Thus, it is acceptable to censor Nazi propaganda, for instance. However, censorship should be used with great hesitation, as censorship is one of the greatest threats to democracy as a whole. The unabashed endorsement of censorship by some in the Marxist tradition undermines the anti-hierarchical, democratic nature of the Marxist goal, and should be regarded as antithetical to the movement.

About the Author:
Jared Yackley is an undergraduate student of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His primary focuses are in epistemology, history, and political philosophy. Yackley hopes to apply the principles of dialectical materialism to contemporary issues, both philosophical and political.

In the days after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer in the United States, massive revolts  spawned in that country and have travelled fast around the world, getting the center of international attention and gaining massive support. Among those who comment on these events, there has been much (and certainly, there has to be) insistence on the fact Floyd’s murder is not merely an isolated act of racist hatred: it is recognized that racist violence is a systemic or structural issue[1].
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Nonetheless, it is very important to clarify what that means. What is that system in which racial violence is framed (inside and outside of the United States)? If this is not explained, pointing out the structurality of racist violence remains at a level of generality in which, without being less true, it ends up being something banal.

Of course, I do not pretend to provide an exhaustive analysis or a definitive answer here. I would like to insist, however, that it is crucial for this explanation to understand that, like all phenomena in our society, racism is a historical phenomenon, and a specifically modern one[2]. It is a mistake to believe that it has been present exactly as we know it in all societies; yes, there has always been a difference between one’s own group and foreigners, along with a hierarchy of value between “them” (barbarians) and “us” (civilized), which can include differences based on physical or phenotypic traits. However, racism, the idea that there is a natural fatality, race, that is much more deeply rooted in the being of individuals than any archaic caste, and that innately entails a state of moral, cultural and intellectual inferiority and a servile condition, is a legacy of modern colonialism and the system of slavery that it inaugurates[3].

One must also understand that, contrary to what many liberal advocates of Western civilization maintain, slavery was not some “pre-modern” heritage. Slavery in Europe had been abolished in the 13th century, and in the Islamic world even earlier. Slavery will resurface in the middle of the 16th century, when it is already crystal clear for the whole of society that it is something aberrant, and in a much more degrading way than in any other time in history (a slave in the Middle Ages or in the Ancient World did not inherit his condition by the color of her skin, and she had a much better chance of buying her freedom for herself or her family, and even of moving up socially), because of the interests of the new merchant class that was then beginning to emerge (that is: due to the economic need of cheap labor)[4]. Racism does not precedes slavery: racism emerges after decades of forced servitude, subject to the need for profit of the new capitalist class, to its need to appropriate land and human beings to generate wealth without cost overruns. It is the quasi-natural justification of the situation of oppression inherent to a system of expropriation and exploitation.

The history of modern racism and colonialism goes hand in hand with the history of capitalism: they are the same history. That is why it is a mistake to think that capitalism is merely “an economic system”. Capitalism is, above all, a system of domination based on expropriation and exploitation.

And that is also why, although it is correct to celebrate the awareness of the masses who, exercising their legitimate right to disobedience, unleash their indignation and furious protest[5], we must not remain complacent in the pure celebration of revolt (which without organization and a clear strategic route, always ends up fading away). Eliminating racist structural violence, overcoming the oppression of peoples of colonial origin and exploited labor throughout the world, requires thinking about a radical reorganization of the economic and political system that we call capitalism (to think, without fear, in its opposite). We must think and speak without fear of socialism, and think and speak without fear about how we must organize to overthrow the social class that to this day benefits from the most savage injustice.
 
Regarding this reflection, I believe that Marxism (with 180 years of theoretical and practical experience in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas) has much to contribute.

​Citations

[1] In the case of the United States, this becomes evident to those who contemplate the figures and the systematicity with which the Afro-descendant population suffers this kind of violence by the punitive institutions of the state. In the case of Peru (my country), a similar argument could be made in relation to the mestizo and indigenous population.

[2] See Allen, T., The Invention of the White Race (2012). Also, I. Wallerstein and A. Quijano, “América como concepto o América en el moderno sistema mundo”, in Revista Internacional de Ciencias Sociales vol. XLIV n°4, 1992.

[3] See Losurdo, D., Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History (2015).

[4] Indeed, it is interesting to see how European society, in the centuries before the restoration of the slave trade, had already generated institutions and normative resources to question the practice of slavery (the antislavery position of the theorist of absolute monarchy Jean Bodin can be contrasted with that of the “father of liberalism”, John Locke, whose defense of private property included a defense of slave ownership in the colonies). The Catholic Church and the monarchical state, despite all of their despotism, often played a positive role in this regard. It was against the “illegitimate” interference of these “illiberal”, pre-modern powers in regard to the administration of their possessions that liberalism as a doctrine would be born. See D. Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History (2005), and for a more general history of “primitive accumulation”, see the first volume of Marx’s Capital.

[5] See Celikates, R., “Rethinking Civil Disobedience as a Practice of Contestation – Beyond the Liberal Paradigm”, in Constellations Volume 23, n°I (2016). 

​About the Author:
Sebastián León is a philosophy teacher at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, where he received his MA in philosophy (2018). His main subject of interest is the history of modernity, understood as a series of cultural, economic, institutional and subjective processes, in which the impetus for emancipation and rational social organization are imbricated with new and sophisticated forms of power and social control. He is a socialist militant, and has collaborated with lectures and workshops for different grassroots organizations.

Historically, Marxism has been perceived to be inexorably hostile to religion and especially to Christianity (since Marxism grew up in the Christian West). Nowadays most non-Marxists think Marxism is hostile to all religions and looks down on those who have religious beliefs. There are others today who think Marxism has become more mellow and is either neutral about religion or even somewhat encouraging in its attitudes towards some religious opinions. I hope to show that a contemporary Marxist position will incorporate some of both these perceptions. 
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The basic Marxist position was first enunciated by Marx as long ago as 1843 in his introduction to a "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law."
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This work contains the famous "opium of the people" remark. More pithy than Lenin's "Religion is a sort of spiritual booze", which I am sure it inspired. 

What did Marx mean by calling religion an opiate? Being a materialist, Marx of course holds to the view that religion is ultimately man made and not something supermaterial or supernatural in origin. "Man makes religion," he says. 

Man, or better, humanity is not, according to Marx, some abstract entity, as he says, "encamped outside the world." In the world of the early nineteenth century the masses of people lived in horrendous societal conditions of poverty and alienation and lived lives of hopeless misery. This was also true of Lenin's time, as well as of our own for billions of people in the underdeveloped world as well as millions in the so called advanced countries. 

The social conditions are reflected in the human brain ("consciousness") and humans living in such conditions construct their lives according to these reflections (ideas). These social conditions and ideas give rise to forms of culture, political states, and ideas about the nature of reality and the meaning of it. Marx says, "Religion is the general theory of that world... its universal source of consolation and justification." 

The world we live in is one of exploitation and the human spirit or "essence" appears in a distorted and estranged form. This is all reflected in religion as if it (the human spirit or essence) had an independent existence rather than being our own self-creation out of our interactions with the terrible societal conditions in which we find ourselves. 
In order to improve our conditions we must struggle against the imperfect social world and the ideas we have in our heads that that world has placed there and which reinforce its hold on us. This leads Marx to say. "The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a fight against the world of which religion is the spiritual aroma." 

This is the background to Marx's view of religion as an opiate. The complete quote is: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people." 

Lenin remarks that this dictum "is the corner-stone of the whole Marxist outlook on religion." (CW:15:402) Marx has more to say than this, however. It is possible to misinterpret Marx's intentions by not going beyond this dictum. Let's see what else he has to say. 

Remember that Marx said that struggle against religion was indirectly a fight against an unjust and exploitative world. Religion is an opiate because it produces in us Illusions about our real situation in the world, the type of world we live in, and what, if anything, we can do to change it. The struggle against religion is not just an intellectual struggle against a system of beliefs we think to be incorrect. Marxists are not secular humanists who don't see a connection between the struggle against religion and the social struggle.
 
This is why Marx maintains that, "The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions." That is to say, he wants to abolish religion in order to achieve real happiness for the people instead of illusory happiness. We will see that when Marx, Engels or Lenin use the word "abolish" they do not mean that the government or any political party should use force or coercive measures against people who are religious. 

What they have in mind is that since, in their view, religion arises as a response to inhumane alienating conditions, the removal of these conditions will lead to the gradual dying out of religious beliefs. Of course, if the Marxist theory on the origin of religion is incorrect, then this will not happen and religion will not be abolished. 
At any rate, this is what Marx means when he says, "Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of the earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics." 
We should also keep in mind that in addition to the theory of the origin of religion, Marx, Engels and Lenin were most familiar with organized religion in its most reactionary form as a state supported church representing the most unprogressive and backward elements of the ruling classes. "Quakers", for example, does not appear as an entry in the subject index to Lenin's Collected Works. 

They are not thinking about religion as a positive force as we might today: as for example the Quakers in the antislavery movement or the Black church in the civil rights movement. [Although Engels had positive things to say about early Christianity in the time of the Roman Empire.] These would have appeared to them as aberrations confined to a very tiny minority of churches. 

Sixty six years after Marx published his remarks on religion, Lenin addressed these issues in an article called "The Attitude of the Worker's Party to Religion" (CW:15:402-413), published in the paper Proletary in 1909. 

In his article, Lenin categorically states that the philosophy of Marxism is based on dialectical materialism "which is absolutely atheistic and positively hostile to all religion." There is no room for prisoners here! "Marxism has always regarded," he writes, "all modern religions [he remembers Engels liked the early Christians] and churches, and each and every religious organization, as instruments of bourgeois reaction that serve to defend exploitation and to befuddle the working class." 

I don't think we could have that opinion today. I mentioned above the role of the Black churches in the civil rights movement and we also know of many religious organizations and churches that have been involved in the peace movement and have taken stands in favor of workers rights and other progressive causes. In dialectical terms, what in 1909 appeared as two contradictory approaches has now become, in many cases, a unity of opposites. While Lenin's comments are, I think, on the whole still correct about the role of religion, we must admit that there are now many exceptions and that Lenin would probably not formulate his views on religion in quite the same way today. 

Be that as it may, religion would still be seen as an illusion to overcome by a proper materialist worldview. This does not mean that Lenin would have been hostile towards people having religious beliefs. He is very clear, following Engels, that to wage war against religion would be "stupidity" and would "revive interest" in it and "prevent it from really dying out." 

The only way to fight religion is by basically ignoring it and simply carrying on the struggle against the modern system of exploitation (capitalism). Those so-called revolutionaries who insist on proclaiming that attacking religion is a duty of the workers' party are just engaging in "anarchistic phrase-mongering." 

We have to work with all types of people and organizations to build the broadest possible democratic people's coalition. Still following Engels views, Lenin says the proper slogan is that "religion is a private matter." Elsewhere he writes ["Socialism and Religion" in the paper Novaya Zhizn in 1905: CW:10:83-87], that to discriminate "among citizens on account of their religious convictions is wholly intolerable." 

He maintains the state should not concern itself with religion ("religious societies must have no connection with governmental authority") and that people "must be absolutely free to profess any religion" they please, including "no religion whatever" (atheism). Would that socialist states (among others), past and present, followed Lenin's philosophy on this matter. 

Lenin sounds positively Jeffersonian! Jefferson in his second inaugural address (1804) proclaimed, "In matters of religion, I have considered that its free exercise is placed by the constitution independent of the powers of the general government."

This is in line with Jefferson's 1802 comments about the "wall of separation between church and state." And what does Lenin say? He says the "Russian Revolution must put this demand into effect"! "Complete separation of Church and State is what the socialist proletariat demands of the modern state and the modern church." 

However, what is true for the state and the citizen is not true for the worker's party. Religion is a private matter in relation to the state but not in relation to the party. To think otherwise, Lenin says, is a "distortion of Marxism" and an "opportunistic view." Therefore, the party must put forth its materialist philosophy and atheistic world view and not try to conceal it from view. But this propaganda "must be subordinated to its basic task-- the development of the class struggle of the exploited masses against the exploiters." 

This basic task also means that workers with religious views must not be excluded from joining the party, and, indeed we "must deliberately set out to recruit them." Not only do we want to recruit them as part of the work of building a mass movement and mass party, "we are absolutely opposed to giving the slightest offence to their religious convictions." 

People are educated in struggle not by being preached to. This means that valuable party time should not be taken with fruitless debates on religious issues, but with organizing the class struggle. Finally, Lenin says there "is freedom of opinion within the party" but this does not mean that people can use this freedom to disrupt the work of the party. 

So, I conclude that, outside of the realm of theory, Marxists are not hostile to religion per se and are willing and eager to work together with all types of progressive people, religious or not, who will struggle with them in the current fight against the ultra-right and in the eventual fight, of which the current struggle is a part, for the establishment of socialism.
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​​​About the Author:
Thomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association.

​In US history the two largest spikes in the murder rate have happened during eras of drug prohibition. The first spike occurred from 1920 to 1933 during the prohibition of alcohol. The second from 1970-1990 when Nixon declared the war on drugs. From the very start, the war on drugs has been about suppressing the poor and the marginalized. And, even if it was about eliminating drug use and all the horrible issues related to it, such as addiction, mental health disease, poverty, and violence, it has proven a failure in stopping those as well. Instead, the war on drugs has worsened these problems causing more chaos, pain, addiction, and death. The war on drugs and drug prohibition as a whole has been completely ineffective at reaching its goals of eliminating drug use and the negative effects associated with it. 

As ingrained as drug laws seem today, it was only in 1875 when San Francisco passed the nation’s first anti-drug law. The law wanted to stop the spread of opium dens and banned the practice of smoking opium. A federal law accompanied the San Francisco law, banning anyone of “Chinese origin” to bring opium into the country. The racist excuses didn’t end, the targeting of cocaine followed suit in 1909 when rumors began to spread that black men were getting high on cocaine and as a result were raping white women. These rumors allowed a mass hysteria to sweep the nation and anti-cocaine laws followed suit. Five years later in 1914, the Harrison Narcotics Act passed. While the HNA didn’t outright ban drugs such as cocaine, cannabis, and heroin, it expanded the government's ability to tax and regulate them. The goal being to tax drugs to the point of nonexistence. However, despite the HNA, cannabis still remained popular especially among the jazz and swing scene in the 1920s and 30s. At this point, Harry Anslinger, head of the Bureau of Narcotics and notorious for being racist even in the 1930s steps in. Anslinger warned the nation that jazz and marijuana created an opportunity for blacks to rise above the rest; and that it induced madness in Hispanic immigrants leading them to commit violence against whites. Then in 1937, Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act for the purposes of raising the prices of marijuana making it even more inaccessible.

​The same trends of reactionary backlash are shown in the 1960s and 1970s, amidst a variety of social movements but mainly the civil rights, and anti-war movement. These movements caused the rightwing who were unwilling to acquiesce to any of the demands to crack down on drugs which they knew would harm those communities. John Erlichman an assistant to the Nixon administration, even admitted in 2016 in an article by Dan Baum for Harper’s Magazine that racism and suppression of opposition to the Nixon administration was the reason why they further agitated the war on drugs. Stating, “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities…. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.” From the very beginning, drug prohibition existed to suppress a society’s underclass. While there are numerous supporters with good intentions the unpleasant roots do not simply disappear. Thus, supporting prohibition ignores the history of ruthless attacks against minorities and contradicts America’s values such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

Racist origins and intentions aside, even if the war on drugs started out by attempting to lower drug use and by extension to create a healthier society, it still would have resulted in a massive disaster. Simply banning drugs doesn’t stop people from using them. The perfect example of this is alcohol prohibition. While it is true that alcohol consumption dropped significantly in 1921 from about 0.8 gallons to 0.2 gallons, the rate sharply rose in 1922 to 0.8 gallons and continued on an increasing trend through the 1920s. Prohibition failed at lowering alcohol consumption for most of its duration and made the alcohol more potent. This is due to the Iron Law of Prohibition by Richard Cohen which states that the stricter the law enforcement, the more potent a substance becomes. Prior to prohibition Americans spent a falling share of their income on alcohol and purchased higher quality and weaker drinks. They also spent similar amounts of money on both beer and spirits. However, after Prohibition spirits replaced beer as the drink of choice for almost all consumption and production of alcohol. Hard liquor and spirits are more potent than beer and wine which made it easier to hide and transport. Liquor and spirits could also be sold to greater amounts of people.

The largest cost in selling an illegal good is avoiding detection by the authorities. Weaker products like beer were too bulky and indiscrete. As a result of the law, the prices of beer rose more drastically than that of brandy and spirits (700, 433, and 270 percent respectively). Beer consumption and production all but disappeared with the exception of homemade beers. However, after prohibition was repealed total expenditure on distilled spirits as a percentage of total alcohol sales severely dropped and people returned to drinking beer and other milder forms of alcohol. The lesson gleaned from this experiment gone wrong is that prohibition is completely ineffective at reducing drug abuse and addiction. Prohibition is completely counterintuitive because rather than stopping people from using drugs it makes drugs more potent and more addictive which increases drug use. 
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Black markets are like all markets, the profit motive is king, which means drug dealers want the biggest bang for their buck. Especially when the largest cost of buying and selling drugs on the black market are the social and legal consequences. In order to get the best deal, drug dealers must satisfy the demand of as many consumers and create new ones without getting caught. This means that they have a financial incentive to increase the potency of the drugs because stronger drugs are easier to hide and transport thus lowering the social and legal risks. Along with lowering the costs, more potent drugs are able to meet the demand of more consumers than weaker drugs. Take the example of alcohol, while a gallon of beer can only be sold to two people, a gallon of spirits can be sold to ten people. The seller makes more money selling spirits to ten people than only selling beer to two people. In the situation of transporting the drugs since beer is bulkier and satisfies less demand, there is more of a legal and social incentive to produce and distribute spirits.

​However, the Iron Law of Prohibition doesn’t only apply to distributors it also applies to the consumer. Take the example of a college football game, stadiums typically ban alcohol, as a result, college students who are typically beer drinkers now become hard-liquor drinkers. Since it's easier to sneak in liquor in a flask than it is beer bottles which are heavier and less discrete. While there certainly is a problem with drinking and alcoholism in the US, prohibition is simply not the solution. Drug Prohibition forces drug use and distribution to occur under a black market which creates more addictive and potent drugs. The results of Prohibition merely exacerbate the overdose crisis and line the pockets of drug lords. 

The War on Drugs is perhaps one of the largest scams in US history. According to the Center for American Progress, the federal government has spent an estimated 1 trillion dollars on the war on drugs, increasing every day since the 1970s. From 2015 the government has spent more than 9.2 million dollars every day to incarcerate people with drug offenses alone. The federal government isn’t the only party that spends outlandish amounts of money on drug enforcement. In 2015 alone states spent about 7 billion dollars on incarcerating people on drug-related charges. Georgia spent about 78.6 million dollars just to incarcerate people of color on drug charges, an amount that is 1.6 times more than the amount it spent on treatment services for drug use. However, enforcement isn’t the only cost, what happens once the person convicted of drug charges gets released? Their employment and economic prospects are ruined.

​For example, the Cato Institute estimated that the cost of the diminished employment aspects of felons ranges from about 78-87 billion dollars. In total the war on drugs costs the US about 51 billion dollars annually. That is 51 billion dollars every year for a crusade that has done nothing but destroy the lives of millions, rob Americans of their freedom, and create countless unproductive members of society. Bear in mind that there are many better alternatives to using 51 billion dollars for a racist witch hunt, a great alternative would be ending homelessness which would only cost about 20 billion dollars. Having access to a shelter would make it easier for people to get a job since most job applications require an address. Having a home would also encourage people to live in a stable supportive community where there would be support for them to go to rehab. In an era with greater wealth inequality and a growing deficit, hunting people down for doing what they want with their bodies should be the last thing on the mind of the state. Especially a state that is well known for committing horrible atrocities to minorities and reinforcing institutions such as Jim Crow and slavery which continue to leave a lasting scar on millions of people. 

​Aside from taking away the right of every American the liberty to do whatever they want with their body, the war on drugs also punishes thousands if not millions by locking them up in a cage if even caught with a single trace of a drug, even something as innocuous as weed. In 2018 the U.S arrested more than 1.6 million people for drug-related charges, of those arrested more than 1.4 million were for possession only, and of those arrested for possession about 608,000 of them were for marijuana possession. However, the penalties are almost never distributed evenly, despite making up only about 13% of America’s population, blacks make up about 27% of drug arrests. Nearly 80% of people arrested for drug-related charges in federal prisons and 60% in state prisons are black or Latino. Prosecutors were also more likely to pursue mandatory minimum sentences for blacks than whites. In 2011 of those who received a mandatory minimum, 38% were black and 31% were Latino. However, despite unequal enforcement blacks and whites use and sell drugs at similar rates yet black people face harsher punishments if caught using drugs. The war on drugs is nothing more than an excuse to deny America’s problem with systemic bigotry. Rather than solving the problems arising from systemic racism, the war on drugs associated minority communities with drugs and poor behavior instead of actually solving these problems at their root cause. 

However, has locking up people for drug offenses actually reduced drug use and crime? The answer is no, drug overdoses have skyrocketed since the 1980s. The drug abuse rate has remained stagnant since the 1970s at 1.3 percent despite US spending on drug control significantly increasing since the 70s. The Center for American Progress adds that incarceration has shown to have had a negligible impact on drug abuse rates and in fact are linked with higher rates of overdose and mortality. Prisoners in the first two weeks upon release faced a mortality rate that was 13 times higher than the general population. The leading cause of death among these people is overdose. Incarceration is a traumatic experience for most people. In prison, violence is a constant presence by both inmates and guards. Many also face solitary confinement, a punishment so torturous that it’s been called out by the UN and has been proven to induce a variety of mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, psychosis, self-harm, and suicide.

Upon release, all opportunities for decent employment are nonexistent, as are paths to being able to enroll in higher education, and not being able to live in public housing or to be able to buy a home. All of these factors create the perfect conditions for addiction and drug use. Contrary to popular opinion the substance itself only plays about a 20% role in addiction. The Office of the Surgeon General found that only 17.7% of nicotine patch wearers stopped smoking. While 20% is still significant it nonetheless shows that chemical hooks aren’t the overwhelming reason why people are addicted and that there are greater causes of addiction outside pharmacology. In regards, of the 80% gap the psychological state of the user is perhaps more influential than the chemical hooks. According to a study conducted by the CDC and Kaiser Permanente called the “Adverse Childhood Experiences Study” the scientists looked at ten different traumatic events that could happen to a child such as physical and sexual abuse to the death of a parent. Discovering that for each traumatic event the child’s chances of becoming an addicted adult increased 2-4 fold.

​They also found that nearly two-thirds of injection drug use was the result of childhood trauma. Addiction isn’t the result of bad morals it’s the result of pain. Of course, people with pain will try to numb it whether it's as simple as taking an aspirin for a headache, drinking after work after a rough day, or injecting heroin to forget about a traumatic event. The only difference is that society condones the first two while tossing the third one in jail. By criminalizing people with substance abuse disorders society is criminalizing mental illness rather than treating it. Therefore, when society throws these people who already deal with unbearable amounts of pain and which resort to self-medication with illicit drugs, they are not getting rid of the problem, they are aggregating it by creating more suffering for the person who is already in pain. 

​The War on Drugs has been a disaster of epic proportions from locking up millions of people and ostracizing drug users, to stripping Americans of their liberty to do as they please with their body. The War on Drugs dehumanizes drug addicts who most likely faced some sort of traumatic event in their life and further exacerbates the problem by adding more trauma via incarceration and the denial of support upon release. All of this added pain makes the susceptible person more likely to self-medicate. Since safe versions of the drugs are gone because of prohibition they have to rely on shady dealers peddling products with questionable quality and deadly potency as a result of the Iron Law of Prohibition. And if they get caught with the substance, they’re thrown into prison which creates a downward spiral. Prohibition regards drug users as below human and only worthy of contempt. It is only care and community that help people get over their problems. Thus, repealing drug prohibition would stop the stream of both non-problematic drug users and drug addicts being imprisoned. Thus, encouraging people to seek medical help for their problems without the fear of law enforcement and it would leave the non-problematic users in peace. While there certainly are many ways to go about the problem of drug abuse and the negative effects associated with it, prohibition is simply ineffective at reducing both and will continue to harm millions of people until society finally realizes the error of their ways. 

About the Author:
I am N.C. Cai. I am a Chinese American Marxist Feminist. I am interested in socialist feminism, Western imperialism, history, and domestic policy, specifically in regards to drug laws, reproductive justice, and healthcare. ​

The average academic “Marxist” usually understands very well Marx’s ideas about specific topics: she can explain what is expanded reproduction, what is the difference between relative and absolute surplus, the question of the falling rate of profit, etc. And yet, despite their erudition, few of these “Marxist” academics have a proper understanding about Marxism, communism, and what they entail.

By contrast, few people in history have had such a clear and distinct understanding about Marxism and its philosophy as Mao Zedong did. Before this assertion, the “Marxist” academic might giggle to herself, wondering what an “Asian despot” from a backward country of peasants, the author of simple writings addressed to the masses, could teach her about Marxism.
​
Huey P. Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party, once said about their experience of struggle in the United States: 

Unlike the “Marxist” academic, who understands a lot about specific postulates of Marx’s work (and of some of his philosophical predecessors or successors, such as Hegel or Adorno and Horkheimer, or, perhaps, if we are dealing with a particularly daring individual, David Harvey), what Newton finds in Mao’s thought, already after initiating his revolutionary praxis with his Black Panther comrades, is a fundamental dialectical relationship between thought and action (between, say, the truth of theory and the efficacy of practice), which is precisely what the young Marx demands in his Thesis XI on Feuerbach when he claims that “[p]hilosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”[2] The “Marxist” academic, with all her erudition, forgets that the place where the truth of theory is put to test (when it claims to be revolutionary or transformative) is in the realm of concrete practice.
​
That’s why Mao says in On Practice:

Mao’s first point here, the commitment of Marxism to the struggle of the proletariat and the oppressed classes, is not a political bias that is imposed on the theory from the outside: as anyone who has studied dialectics knows[4], the starting point from which one progresses towards every true [total] knowledge about reality is always that of the immediate experience that one has about said reality. In capitalism, that first immediate experience, necessarily partial or incomplete (and therefore in need of clarification) is always an experience of struggle, of the opposition between the individual and the whole of social reality; it is the contradiction between those who live from the system and those who are simply not allowed to live by the system. Hence, the first step towards clarifying one’s own experience (the first step towards real knowledge) is none other than the step towards praxis: the leap to rebellion, to open confrontation in the class struggle[5].

That’s why Mao says that “Marxism comprises many principles, but in the final analysis they can all be brought back to a single sentence: it is right to rebel”[6]; the event that inaugurates the transition of consciousness towards knowledge of reality as a whole (of capitalism and the immanent dynamics of its contradictions) is the class struggle that ultimately drives and mobilizes said reality. For this reason, it can be affirmed that Marxism as a materialist and dialectical theory of history is the self-awareness about the progressive clarification of one’s own consciousness in the process of class struggle, the dialectical systematization of the stages of that struggle, the rectification of errors and the progressive accumulation of political experience by which an oppressed class gradually becomes a revolutionary class (in which the proletariat acquires “class consciousness”).

That is why Mao, denounced so many times by Western “Marxist” academics as an “ultra-orthodox Marxist” and “fanatic”, from his camp in Yan’an, allows himself to denounce “book worship”, and to conclude that:

​Almost as if he anticipated the criticisms of these left-wing university professors. Twenty-seven years later, in 1957, with the Chinese Communist Party already in power, Mao will assert in a speech: 

A strong contrast with the German theorist Max Horkheimer (historical leader of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, who in the 1930s one of the most lucid and fundamental texts of so-called Western Marxism, Traditional Theory and Critical Theory) and his colleague Theodor Adorno, who would not only eventually denounce the Soviet efforts to consolidate a state apparatus that would allow them to develop a modern industry capable of lifting millions out of poverty and defending themselves against the onslaught of the Nazi Wehrmacht as a “betrayal of socialism” and to the Marxian ideal of “the abolition of the State in communism”, but also, in the name of abstract universalism, would compare the struggle for independence of the Vietnamese and the colonized peoples of the world with the rise of “Hitlerian nationalism”, and likewise, they would brand as reactionary and even fascistic the student protests of the late 1960s that threatened to disrupt the normal delivery of their classes at the University of Frankfurt (and probably putting the CIA’s disapproving eye on the Institute for Social Research, with a probable cut of its government funding)[9].

Adorno would famously declare on one occasion: “When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.”[10] Against a revolutionary praxis that, in its attempt to conquer power and initiate the construction of socialism, would inevitably run into obstacles, make mistakes, and move away from pre-established abstract schemes, Horkheimer and Adorno would call for the defense of the rights of “thought” (of Pure Theory) to remain untainted, entrenching it in the faculties of philosophy and social sciences, thus preserving it from a reality and a social practice incapable of living up to “theoretical truth”.

The gesture of the founding fathers of Critical Theory, by which they crowned their turn from materialism to idealism, is repeated today even by scholars of Marx’s work and researchers strongly committed to the collection, measurement and analysis of empirical data. And this is fundamentally because, as Mao understood so well, Marxism is dialectical thought, but true dialectical thought (true theoretical thought) is not (it cannot be) in opposition to social practice, to direct involvement in the history of class struggle: a perspective that claims to be dialectical and that does not merges into the real experience of class struggle, cannot aspire to a true knowledge of reality (that is: concrete, material, and multilateral, total), only to an abstract and partial view of the system, typical of a Cartesian academic subject who, consciously or unconsciously, understands herself as external to social antagonism, and therefore, as uprooted from historical reality.

Certainly, Marxism is method (dialectical method), but as the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács stated:

Hence “[i]t is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of [social] totality.”[12]

Marxism is not, then, a mere theory of social formations: it is the wisdom that is born from rebellion, from revolutions throughout history, the methodical learning of revolutionaries on how to transform reality.

That is the main reason why, at the end of the day, the average “Marxist” academic and many great specialists on Marx’s work know little or nothing about Marxism, communism and what they entail.    

​Citations


[1] Newton, H.P., Revolutionary Suicide. Penguin Books: New York (2009), p. 353.

[2] Marx, K., Thesis on Feuerbach. Progress Publishers: Moscow (1969). Available on marxists.org

[3] Mao, Z., On Practice (2004). Available on marxists.org

[4] Hegel, G.W.F, Phenomenology of Spirit. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge (2019).

[5] Lukács, G., “What is Orthodox Marxism?” in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (pp. 1-26). The MIT Press: Cambridge (1971), pp. 19-21.

[6] Mao, Z., Speech marking the 60th birthday of Stalin (1939), later revised as “It is right to rebel against reactionaries.”

[7] Mao, Z., Oppose Book Worship (2004). Available on marxists.org

[8] Mao, Z., Speech at the Chinese Communist Party’s National Conference on Propaganda Work (2004). Available on marxists.org

[9] As quoted in D. Losurdo, El Marxismo Occidental: Cómo nació, cómo murió y cómo puede resucitar. Editorial Trotta: Madrid (2018), pp. 11-12 and 78-84.

[10] As quoted in M. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research. University of California Press: Berkeley (1973), p. 279.

[11] Lukács, G., “What is Orthodox Marxism?” in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (pp. 1-26). The MIT Press: Cambridge (1971), p. 2.

[12] Lukács, G., “The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg” in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (pp. 27-45). The MIT Press: Cambridge (1971), p. 27. 

It’s generally assumed today that one can be a capitalist and a feminist simultaneously. In fact, such a strain of thought is not only the default, it’s encouraged. Everywhere, one can see calls for “more female representation”, “diversifying the board room,” and “elect more women ''. The 2016 infamous campaign slogan of Hillary Clinton was “I’m with Her”. Women are encouraged to take up the mantle of the exploiter, the colonizer, and the oppressor in the name of feminism and representation. But one must ask can there be oppressors and feminism at the same time? Is something more feminist if a woman is in charge? The answer to this is a sound no. Feminism is broadly defined as the advocacy of equal rights between the sexes. However, a more inclusive and lucid definition would be that feminism is the “struggle against sexist oppression. Its aim is not to benefit solely any specific group of women, any particular race or class of women” which bell hooks argues in her book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. This particular definition is antithetical to capitalism because it relies on the exploitation of workers and the unpaid and unappreciated labor of women to survive. Even the broader definition of “advocacy of equality between the sexes'' is contradictory to capitalism as well, because capitalism requires inequality and does nothing to stop the perpetuation of inequality between the sexes. It doesn’t matter if a few corporations promote more women to higher positions, or if our liberal democratic system elects more women, capitalism will continue to suppress the rights and freedoms of women, regardless of who’s in charge.
              
​An inconvenient and unglamorous truth that liberal feminists rarely like to bring up is that class and gender are closely tied. Women are more likely to be food insecure than men in every region of the world according to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. Women also suffer disproportionately when it comes to the affordable housing crisis because of lower wages in comparison to men. As a result, women spend a larger percentage of their income on housing which results in fewer savings and less disposable income. Women of color are also more disproportionately represented in minimum wage jobs. Yet, rarely do liberal feminists talk about these issues, because they pose a threat to the neoliberal capitalist consensus and to their brand of feminism, instead the method of tinkering around the edges of the system and meager reforms seems to be the friend of liberal feminists.

The belief that patriarchy can simply be reformed away with laws and that having more women in charge pervades liberal feminists. Yet even the most liberal of institutions contradicts this liberal feminist axiom, the World Economic Forum found that companies lead by women often reduce the wage gap at top levels and increase it at the bottom of the wage distribution whereas male lead companies do the exact opposite, the report found that there was almost no change in the average wage gap between male and female lead companies. There’s no doubt that representation does matter, but it’s completely irrelevant when the person in power changes but the same oppressive and exploitative system remains. CEOs regardless of gender have the same priority in mind, profit and growth. Profit is the appropriation or perhaps more succinctly theft of the surplus value that a worker creates. CEOs and other members of the capitalist class such as shareholders and landlords rely on this exploitative system to survive; one which includes denial of benefits such as paid leave which are vital to working women, or simply paying women less because they are seen as less productive because the responsibilities of childbearing and rearing are placed on them. It doesn’t matter how feminist or how female the leadership of a company is, even if they have the best intentions and truly want to empower women, they can’t because when profit is the only priority nothing else matters, that includes the empowerment of women. 
              
It’s important to recognize that since the profit motive is engrained in the capitalist system, the result is that woman will continue to be disadvantaged and face continuing inequalities because of their biology and the pervasive belief that women are caretakers. The election of more female and/or feminist politicians won’t change that because they are also bound by the rules of capitalism. Donors won’t even bother approaching them. The media will either ignore or slander them. Even when a progressive politician is elected any policy that they propose or support will be immediately stricken down by both right leaning and moderate branches of their party. And in the fortunate situation if their policy were to pass, it would be susceptible to being rolled back and susceptible to austerity and budget cut measures. 
              
Most importantly a politician being a woman doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be good for women’s rights or the broader population, take the examples of Margaret Thatcher and Hilary Clinton. Margaret Thatcher destroyed British industry, deregulated the financial sector, suppressed miner’s strikes with brutal force, and caused massive unemployment to name a few of her disastrous effects. Not to mention that she cozied up to Augusto Pinochet and dismissed the Africa National Congress which fought against apartheid as “terrorists”. She was also no feminist, despite what mainstream and liberal media like to say, she herself sneered at the word feminism. She also froze benefits for childcare and insulted working mothers by creating a “creche generation”, she also did little for women’s representation in politics and only elected one woman into her cabinet, and did little to fix problems such as domestic abuse and rape. While it’s true that Thatcher was the first female prime minister of England that shouldn’t take away from the fact that she was horrible for women’s rights and the feminist movement. The example of Thatcher teaches girls that in order to get ahead they must only care about themselves and that they must stomp on the rights of others to be successful. In essence, to follow and advance the feminist movement one must also suppress it and become anti-feminist. 

The same can be said of Hillary Clinton in the states. Hillary Clinton herself while broadly hailed as a feminist icon, by herself and liberal feminists alike, has shown to have a horrible record when it comes to feminism and worker’s rights, but a record that corporate executives love. She has sat on countless corporate boards such as TCBY, LaFarge, and most infamously Walmart. During her tenure at Walmart, she did nothing to help the majority female workforce to unionize, nor to stop Walmart from ruthlessly crushing these very unions. Nor did she do anything to solve the many problems that plague Walmart’s workforce such as discrimination against its low wage female employees involving wages and promotions, wage theft, sweat shops, sexual harassment, horrible working hours and pay with little benefits, and wrongful termination to name a few. Hillary’s political career hasn’t been much better. She encouraged her husband to cut vital social services, which millions of women and children relied on. She also sneered at these very women who rely on welfare to raise their children and survive as “dead beats”. She also played an instrumental role while her husband was governor of Arkansas to slander public school teachers, many of whom were African American women, and shut down their unions as well.
​
Hillary isn’t only an enemy to American women, but also an enemy to women in the global south. She lobbied against a fair wage for Haitian women toiling in garment factories as Secretary of State. She also played an important role behind the scenes in supporting a coup in Honduras which led to greater social instability, higher crime, and a resurgence in femicide. Not to forget that she has been a proud supporter of Israel and constantly brushes away or ignores the crimes of the IDF to Palestinian women and children. For example, in 2014 when Israel launched a massive assault on Gaza, and even the mainstream media and otherwise politicians who typically supported Israel expressed worry about the disproportionate number of Palestinian women and children being killed, whereas Clinton expressed full support for Israel’s actions. Hillary Clinton’s feminism is the type of feminism that only benefits people like her, rich white women in the imperial core. A feminism that doesn’t apply to all women, or for that matter all people regardless of gender, race, class, etc. isn’t true feminism. Of course, the liberal, resistance, white, imperial, bourgeois “feminists” might say that any critique of Hillary Clinton is misogynistic and that women who criticize her have internalized misogyny or are simply bitter and jealous (though ironically labeling women as bitter has typically been a sexist insult). There’s no doubt that Hillary Clinton has faced many struggles and much misogyny herself. However, that doesn’t erase her horrible policy record, nor does it merit her for canonization. Of course, many of these “resistance feminists” who claim to also be for intersectionality should not forget that there are women politicians who have it harder than Hillary, because of their race, class, immigration status, sexual orientation, political platform, etc. Additionally, representation shouldn’t be done for the sake of representation but for the sake of providing valuable role models, a position that Hillary has proven horrible at filling. 

Needless to say, though Hillary may be another saint in the resistance canon, and an often-touted example of women in politics, there are nonetheless better examples for representation in politics, who are far better role models, (which isn’t a very high bar), the examples being the Squad, Nina Turner and Cori Bush to name a few in the present. There have also been important roles of women in the past such as Alexandra Kollontai who fought to ensure maternity leave and universal childcare for Soviet women and who occupied important positions in the Soviet government. She was also one of the first female diplomats. Tsola Dragoycheva who was a heroine of the Bulgarian Communist Party in the 1930s for fighting against the country’s monarchist regime. She was also the first Bulgarian woman to serve in a cabinet position. Vida Tomšič from Slovenia was communist partisan who fought against the Italians and served as the minister for social policy after World War II. These are women who actually deserve to be revered as quite literally resistance heroes and who aided their respective countries in getting rid of the very system that oppressed women in their own countries, that of capitalism, fascism, and feudalism. 
              
​Representation while a noble goal isn’t enough to liberate women. In order to truly smash the patriarchy, it’s insufficient merely to encourage women to fill the very same roles that oppress and marginalize vast swaths of the population. True liberation comes with the destruction of these oppressive and exploitative positions. Capitalism relies on the patriarchy to survive, and the patriarchy requires capitalism. As long as capitalism exists, single mothers will keep struggling to feed their children on an ever-dwindling social welfare system. Women with master's degrees will continue to sell their bodies to pay the rent. Women in poor circumstances will still marry for money, often to men much older than them, resulting in unhappy and frequently abusive and toxic relationships. It doesn’t matter who’s exploiting the workers by stealing their surplus value, busting the unions, or forcing people into sweatshops, as long as these very conditions exist there is no liberation, there is no feminism. 



Citations

Elia, Nada. “Hillary Clinton Is No Feminist: Just Look at Her Stance on Palestine.” Middle East Eye Édition Française, 10 Aug. 2016, middleeasteye.net/fr/node/55465.
 
Featherstone, Liza, et al. False Choices. Verso Books, 2016.
 
Flabbi, Luca. “How Do Female CEOs Affect Their Company’s Gender Wage Gap?” World Economic Forum, 27 Apr. 2015, weforum.org/agenda/2015/04/how-do-female-ceos-affect-their-companys-gender-wage-gap/.
 
Ghodsee, Kristen. Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism. Random House, 2018.
 
Hooper, Simon. Many Faces of the Iron Lady. 9 Apr. 2013, aljazeera.com/features/2013/4/9/margaret-thatcher-the-good-bad-and-the-ugly.
 
Kendall, Mikki. “Feminism Claims to Represent All Women. So Why Does It Ignore So Many of Them?” Time, 24 Feb. 2020, time.com/5789438/feminism-poverty-gun-violence/.
 
Leonard, Sarah. “Socialism Is the Answer to Corporate ‘Girl Boss’ Feminism.” Teen Vogue, 5 May 2020, teenvogue.com/story/what-is-socialist-feminism.
 
New FAO Data Highlights Gender Gap in Food Insecurity across Regions | Gender | Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. 25 Sept. 2017, fao.org/gender/news/detail/en/c/1038453/.
 
​

About the Author:
I am N.C. Cai. I am a Chinese American Marxist Feminist. I am interested in socialist feminism, Western imperialism, history, and domestic policy, specifically in regards to drug laws, reproductive justice, and healthcare. ​

​Who was Pol Pot and how did he come to symbolize one of the most horrible and repressive regimes in the history of modern times? The subtitle of Philip Short’s biography says it all-- a nightmare! Short knows his subject well, having been a reporter for the BBC, the “Times” (London) and “The Economist” and living in China and Cambodia during the 1970s and 80s.


His book is more than a biography of Pol Pot. It is a history of modern Cambodia as well. He attempts to explain the rise and fall of the Khmer Rouge, also known as the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK).


As a Marxist, I was particularly interested in what Short had to say about the origins of the political party, the CPK, that Pol Pot headed. How could it be possible for a Marxist party to do what the Khmer Rouge did in Cambodia. That is, to be responsible for the killing one and a half million people-- at least-- 500,000 outright by mass executions of whole villages including women, children and old people and another million through malnutrition and disease.


Could it be that the Khmer Rouge was not really a “Marxist” party at all? Was it possible that the CPK’s relation to “Marxism” was analogous to the relation that the National Socialist German Workers Party had to “Socialism” or Pat Robertson to “Christianity? That is to say, the word was used but it was empty of any of its traditional content. To me this was a distinct possibility as all the folks I know who consider themselves Marxists or Marxist-Leninists are repulsed by the actions of the Pol Pot government.


I had read Jean-Louis Margolin’s essay “Cambodia: The Country of Disconcerting Crimes”, chapter 24 in The Black Book of Communism the new anti-communist Bible (and just as historical) and he maintains that the CPK is part of the history of the international communist movement. If Margolin was correct my theory would be insupportable.


So, I read Short’s book with great anticipation to see if there was any evidence to support my thesis. Before going any further, let me define what I mean by “Marxism” or “Marxism-Leninsm,” and most especially what I consider a “Marxist” ( “Communist”) party to be. This is a definition based both on history and theory.


Needless to say a Marxist or Communist party will have its program rooted in the theories of Marx, Engels, and Lenin as a minimum. It will be a party based on, and in, the working class and represent the material and spiritual interests of that class, especially its industrial component. It will be internationalist in outlook and represent the most historically advanced ideas based on an objective materialist and scientific outlook.


According to these criteria, I would conversely consider a party to be in various degrees “anti-communist” in so far as it deviated from them. Since the term “anti-communist” has already been associated with the fascist movements and other right-wing political groupings, I will use the term “non-communist” or “non-Marxist” to describe ostensibly radical parties that fail to reflect the criteria expressed above. Now I will try to show, on the basis of Short’s research, that Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge associates were “non-communists” and in fact, their values and actions were diametrically opposed to the teachings of Marxism.


That this is the case has been hinted at by the leadership of the Khmer Rouge. Consider the following statement by Ieng Sary (vice-premier) who claimed, quoted by Short, the Khmer Rouge would rule “without reference to any existing model” and would go where “no country in history has ever gone before.” They certainly did that!


Margolin, in his anti-communist essay, writes: “The lineage from Mao Zedong to Pol Pot is obvious.” This is a superficial observation. Short argues that the Pol Pot regime morphed into what it became as a result of the cultural background unique to Cambodia. This cultural backdrop was the Khmer version of Theravada Buddhism “which teaches that retribution or merit, in the endless cycle of self-perfection, will be apportioned not in this life but in a future existence, just as man’s present fate is the fruit of actions in previous lives.”


There was a “cultural fracture” between Khmer culture and the cultures of China and Vietnam, based as they are on Confucian values. Throughout the history of Cambodia this fracture has led to “mutual incomprehension and distrust, which periodically exploded into racial massacres and pogroms” by the Khmers against the Chinese and Vietnamese inhabitants of the country.


Short presents a picture of Khmer society as having within it all the violence and brutality that the Khmer Rouge so horribly displayed. Previous movements and governments engaged in the same type of murder and mayhem that the Khmer Rouge indulged in-- the difference was one of magnitude. A case of quantitative change leading to qualitative change.


Pol Pot and his associates were conditioned as children into Khmer culture (naturally) and when they joined in the nationalist and anti-colonial struggles of the 50s through the 70s they naturally allied themselves and identified with the Communist movements in Asia which were their only possible allies. But, as Short, points out: “Marxism-Leninism, revised and sinified by Mao, flowed effortlessly across China’s southern border into Vietnamese minds, informed by the same Confucian culture. It was all but powerless to penetrate the Indianate world of Theravada Buddhism that moulds the mental universe of Cambodia and Laos.”


The Pol Pot leadership, made up of former students who had been educated in France as well as local anti-colonialist elements based themselves on the class of the poorest peasants and this was reflected in the ideology of the leadership. Here is Pol Pot talking about his “Marxism”-- “the big thick works of Marx... I didn’t really understand them at all.” Ping Say (one of the founders of the CPK ) remarked “Marx was too deep for us.” In fact, although influenced by their own version of “Marxism,” only two Cambodians ever attended the French CP’s school for cadres. For Pol Pot and his cronies “Marxism signified an ideal, not a comprehensive system of thought to be mastered and applied.”


The tragedy that befell Cambodia was that a basically ignorant leadership gained control of the Cambodian revolution and carried out an atavistic racially based program against non-Khmer nationalities inside Cambodia as well as rooting itself in the values of the lower peasantry (abolishing money, formal education, traditional arts and technology).


The policies of the US government, as well as those of China and Vietnam, helped this leadership come to power. The US aggression in Vietnam, as well as its attacks on Cambodia, were primarily responsible. In sheer numbers of people killed and mutilated the US aggression was twice as deadly as the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge.


As for the support from China and Vietnam, it is only fair to point out that, as Short says, until 1970 Pol Pot had not done “or permitted to be done by the Party he led any intimation of the abominations that would follow.” But after Lon Nol overthrew the Sihanouk government (1970) the Khmer Rouge waged, with Chinese and Vietnamese help, a guerrilla war that eventually, after much bloodshed and indiscriminate killing (including massive bombing of civilians by the US) on all sides, led to their victory (1975). Short points out that, “The United States dropped three times more bombs on Indochina during the Vietnam War then were used by all the participants in the whole of the Second World War; on Cambodia the total was three times the total tonnage dropped on Japan, atom bombs included.” The US claimed to be bombing Viet Cong and Khmer Rouge troops, “but the bombs fell massively and above all on the civilian population.”


But why were the Khmers so violent? Short maintains that the Chinese and Vietnamese communists treated their prisoners and enemies under the Confucian expectation that human beings are capable of change and reform. He also says that in Khmer culture there is no such expectation. Enemies will never change and have to be destroyed. “In the Confucian cultures of China and Vietnam, men are, in theory, always capable of being reformed. In Khmer culture they are not.” It was, as one Pol Pot’s bodyguards put it, a “struggle without pity.”


After they came to power, the Khmer Rouge became xenophobic nationalists. Turning against the Vietnamese as the “hereditary enemies” of Cambodia they became anti-Vietnamese as Vietnamese of no matter what ideology. They also distrusted China and struck out on a path to be completely self-sufficient and dependent on no one (“independence-mastery” was the slogan). This is of course completely contradictory to any Marxist theory. Marxism stress internationalism and cooperation of fraternal and working class parties. It was that very internationalism which the Khmer Rouge banked on to get into power and which they immediately betrayed.


What followed was disaster. By 1979 the Khmer Rouge had driven hundreds of thousands Vietnamese out of Cambodia and created a “slave state” at home. They finally began attacking across the Vietnamese border and this resulted in their being attacked in return and deposed from power.


Earlier I quoted Ieng Sary to the effect of making a revolution that would be unique in history. He also said that theory was to be avoided and that the Khmer Rouge would just rely on revolutionary consciousness. In other words, they are a revolution now and will make their own reality. Short says this calls into question whether “Cambodian ‘communism’.... could be considered Marxist-Leninist at all.”


I think it clear that it could not. Here is Pol Pot remarking that “Certain [foreign] comrades take the view that our party... cannot operate well because it does not understand Marxism-Leninism and the comrades of our Central Committee have never learnt Marxist principles.” His reply was that the CPK “did ‘nurture a Marxist-Leninist viewpoint’ but in its own fashion.”


Its own fashion was not good enough. Short remarks that the “Cambodian Party had never been an integral part of the world communist movement... and it took from Marxism only those things which were consonant with its own worldview.” That worldview was narrow, insular and constricted and completely incompatible, I believe, with the ideas we usually, and properly, associate with the names of Marx, Engels and Lenin.


After the Khmer Rouge were deposed by the Vietnamese, and the whole world could no longer pretend not to know what type of regime they had been running, how did that world react? The US, China, and the UN General Assembly sided with the Khmer Rouge and condemned the Vietnamese!


As for the CPK, in 1981 it abandoned its claim to being a “communist” party and turned to the West and Sihanouk as allies. Pol Pot said “the communists are fighting us [i.e., the Vietnamese and the anti-Khmer Rouge Cambodians]. So we have to turn to the West and follow their way.”


Short writes that this action by Pol Pot “provided confirmation, were any needed, that the veneer of Marxism-Leninism which had cloaked Cambodian radicalism had only ever been skin- deep.” Q.E.D.


The rest of Short’s book continues the history of the Khmer Rouge to the death of Pol Pot and the final end of the movement in 1999. This is a book that should be read by everyone who wants to understand what happened to the Cambodian Revolution. It should also help to remind us that Marxism-Leninism is not just a name-- it is a working class movement not a movement to be dominated by petit bourgeois intellectuals and peasants.

​​About the Author:
Thomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association.

The year 2020 saw unprecedented waves of political activism. Between 15 and 26 million people participated in the demonstrations, making this happening the largest movement in American history. The Women’s March of 2017 had 3 to 5 million on a single day, even as a highly organized event, which reflected the scale and scope of the Summer Demonstrations.1 The murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police spurred outrage across the United States and brought an unprecedented wave of support for structural police reform. The Summer Demonstrations of 2020 were met by tear gas, rubber bullets, beatings, and in some places, protesters were arrested by federal law enforcement on suspect grounds and without explanation, identification, or acknowledgement of Miranda rights. In lay terms, citizens were taken off the streets without concern for legality by the Department of Homeland Security.2 These acts of state violence were unusual, we didn’t see these methods employed at the Women’s March of 2017 or March for Our Lives of 2018, although they were also demonstrations of unprecedented size.  The recent protests are different in that their discourse threatens the very ability of the state to reproduce its own hegemony by functioning on ideology and repression. The Summer Demonstrations called for structural change: we did not believe that police training reform or individual accountability of police officers is sufficient for the desired change, these issues are rooted in the history of the institution of policing itself. The object of desire is not reformist, it is structural- it is revolutionary.  
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 The rhetoric of the 2020 Summer Demonstrations challenged the way we think about police and state, our opinions and assumptions; they challenged the discourse of American politics, and in doing so have threatened the stability of the hegemonic ideology, which is to say the state ideology. When the people begin to threaten state ideology, the Repressive State Apparatus serves to defend it with force to deter further action- acting on repression primarily, and ideology secondarily. A threat to state ideology, in the spatial metaphor of the edifice, is lifting the veil on the superstructure where ideology is determined by the base (means and relations of production) and is a step in the development of class consciousness. This paper will build off the spatial metaphor using Althusser’s structural theory to identify how ideology can be threatened, and how the state responds to it when threatened. 

Marx’s spatial metaphor of the edifice is his explanation of how our material existence (means and relations of production, I.e class structure, centralization of capital, private ownership) determines our social existence (socio-political structures, legal structures, ideology, ideological state apparatuses). By the logic of his metaphor, if the base undergoes a change, the superstructure will be shaped accordingly. Inversely, if the superstructure is changed, then the base may come to reflect these changes. The base heavily determines the superstructure in Marx’s metaphor, but the superstructure doesn’t quite share the same deterministic strength. The superstructure may push and nudge, but not necessarily move. Change in the superstructure undermines the ground upon which the base is maintained. As a deterministic factor, the base resists change from the structures it determines, but if it is no longer capable of determining ideology, then its cycle of reproduction is endangered. 
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In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Louis Althusser elaborates on Marx’s spatial metaphor to explore ideology and identify what he calls the Ideological State Apparatus. He first remarks that “for each [Ideological State Apparatus], the various institutions and organizations comprising it form a system.” He proceeds,  

Systems, however, do not evolve or change on their own- an external force must break their cyclical motion. Althusser writes, “ideology ‘functions’ at its most concrete level, the level of individual ‘subjects’: that is, people as they exist in their concrete individuality, in their work, daily lives, acts, commitments, hesitations, doubts, and sense of what is most immediately self-evident.”5 

This implies a few important things. First, that ideological apparatuses do not exist in isolation- they are inextricably tied together into the system which Althusser calls the Ideological State Apparatus, or ISA for short. Therefore, a shift in one ideological apparatus impacts the Ideological State Apparatus as a whole, which in turn has the ability to influence the base it emerged from. Goran Therborn elaborates on Althusser’s idea, which is that ideology functions on the level of individuals. If we accept this, then we are bound to admit that individuals have the capacity for agency in the realm of ideology. Therborn writes that “to conceive a text or an utterance as ideology is to focus on the ways it operates in the formation and transformation of human subjectivity.”6 Therborn here recognizes that humans can dissociate from their ideology to examine how an idea or process contributes to their own subjection by the hegemonic class. If this is true, that we are able to examine how our ideology contributes to subjection from the ruling class, and that we have agency within the ideological realm, then class consciousness can develop and ideology can be found as a site of class struggle. The protests of Summer 2020 did exactly this- challenge the individual's notion of what is usually taken as self-evident; the object being challenged, of course, was the police apparatus. Ideologies operate in a matrix of sanction and affirmation, with this matrix determining a relationship.7If a subject fails to act predictably under the hegemonic ideology, then their stance is in contrast to the powers surrounding them: it is a stance of defiance. 

Therborn holds that emerging ideologies only rise out of those which already exist. This process of ideological change is dependent upon non-ideological, material changes, and that the most important material change is in modes of production and internal social dynamics.8 The rhetoric of the Summer Demonstrations did not address economic productive forces, but it did address radical change in the internal social dynamics of the United States. Protesters and activists did not call on justice for individual police officers, but for structural reform in policing and carceral institutions: demilitarization of police, defunding police to allow for greater social programs, dismantling legal codes which disproportionately target racial minorities, and abolition of carceral institutions which target racial minorities in favor of greater social programs. These measures are but a step towards dismantling structural racism, however they are heavy attacks on the foundations of policing and incarceration in American society. Therborn writes, “In conformity with the dialectics of history, the processes of social reproduction are at the same time processes of social revolution; revolutions occur when the latter become stronger than the former.”9 This suggests that as new ideologies emerge from the old ones, a revolutionary shift in discourse can overtake the old ones if they become strong enough and accepted enough by the masses. When the Repressive State Apparatus takes action in these instances, one can be sure that the emerging discursive shift functions as a threat to the old social order. The threat of a revolutionary discursive shift can be seen in the great social movements of American history, particularly during the Vietnam War and Civil Rights era and Battle of Seattle.  

When the ideological state apparatus is threatened, it relies on the Repressive State Apparatus, or RSA, as its secondary mode of reproduction. The Repressive State Apparatus is that which relies directly or indirectly on physical violence. ISAs rely primarily on ideology as its own method of sustaining itself as a system, which is to say its reproduction. The scholastic apparatus or religious apparatus do not use physical violence, conforming to them is considered an act of one's own free will, though ideology places pressure on the individual to do so. An ideological apparatus does not even have recourse for violence, its secondary function on repression comes through a separate repressive apparatus. The Repressive State Apparatus follows the same structure as the Ideological State Apparatus: it is made up of several repressive apparatuses, eg police, national guard, military, intelligence organizations, the state, carceral institutions, etc. These apparatuses are separate and operate within their own realms, but function as a singular entity in which a change in one must change the Repressive State Apparatus as a whole.10 When ideology fails to adequately defend itself, the RSA mobilizes to put down dissent, and in-so-doing discredits the dissenting party through the spectacle of force. When the RSA mobilizes, eg with riot police, national guard, etc, the dissenting party becomes discredited through the individual’s notions of state legitimacy. State action assumes legitimacy, thus when the state responds to dissent, the people believe the state to be justified in its actions and assume that the dissenting party is out of line. This is the symbolic value of state repression which relies on ideology. The RSA relies primarily on violence, crushing dissent with tear gas, crowd dispersion, and brute force, and relies secondarily on the symbolic value of its action as a function of ideology. People believe the state to be justified and the dissenting party to be invalid based on the state’s assumed legitimate use of force. This symbolic discreditation is exemplified with the historiography of the Seattle WTO protests of 1999. 

Often referred to as the Battle of Seattle, the anti-globalization protests took place alongside the beginning of a new round of trade negotiations for the new millennium. This protest was created at the grassroots level, partnering with labor organizations like the AFL-CIO and various national and international NGOs. Anticapitalistic at heart, the protest sought to air grievances about the emerging globalized mode of production. Some vandalism occurred, and police retaliation was heavy- thus began the battle for the story of Seattle. After the protest had ended, the Pentagon hired the Rand Corporation “to produce a study, in which the movement was described as ‘the NGO swarm,’ difficult for governments to deal with because it has no leadership or command structure and ‘can sting a victim to death.’ Corporate public relations  consultants Burson Marsteller published a ‘Guide to the Seattle Meltdown’ to help its clients like  [the Monsanto Company] ‘defend’ themselves.’”11 In the wake of the protest, activists fought  corporate media against government disinformation campaigns used to “stoke public fears and  justify repression against grassroots movements.”12 Media outlets focused on the small group of  “black bloc” self-described anarchists, instead of the tens of thousands of citizens who rose up  with anti-corporate sentiment and were met with tear gas and police blockades because of a  number of broken windows. This exaggeration of the destructive aspect and building it as the hegemonic narrative serves the purpose of discrediting the protesters. In January 2000, a Business Week opinion poll showed that despite the disinformation efforts, 52% of Americans sympathized with the protesters. This kind of myth is created to increase acceptance of the curtailing of civil liberties towards even the peaceful protesters by mere association.13 

Similar disinformation was pushed by the Trump Administration in response to the Summer Demonstrations. Data analysis by the US Crisis Monitor, a joint project by The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project and Princeton University reports: 

​The report suggests that some violence was not perpetrated by protesters, but by those who wish to paint the protesters as violent: 
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During a demonstration on 27 May in Minneapolis, for example, a man with an umbrella — 

The report also identifies repression against reporters. The group Reporters Without Borders  have identified “an unprecedented outbreak of violence” against reporters, with over 100 separate incidences of government sponsored violence against journalists documented in 31 states and the District of Columbia during demonstrations associated with Black Lives Matter.16 It would appear that the disinformation campaign has been rather successful, given that 42% of respondents to a FiveThirtyEight poll believe “most [BLM] protesters are trying to incite violence or destroy property,” even when statistics show that counterprotests by the right have a 12% rate of violent occurrences, as opposed to the 5% on the part of Black Lives Matter protesters at over 10,600 protests, with 93% having no violence at all by either side of the political spectrum. In urban areas where more violence has occurred, like Portland, Oregon, “violent demonstrations are largely confined to specific blocks, rather than dispersed through the city.”17 

These disinformation efforts are a site of ideological conflict, a battle for the truth of a narrative. When one thinks of violence, one thinks of crime, terrorism, war, civil unrest. However, viewing violence only by its visible, subjective form with identifiable agents denies the existence of the background, objective violence which creates a space for these visible, subjective outbursts.18 This way of thinking allows us to identify that which sustains violence as it tends to be understood. This objective violence is that which is inherent to the “normal” state of daily life, often called systemic violence. Slavoj Zizek says that this objective violence is like the “notorious ‘dark matter’ of physics, the counterpart to an all-too-visible subjective violence. It may be invisible, but it must be considered if one is to make sense of what otherwise seems to be ‘irrational’ explosions of subjective violence.”19 When one thinks of ideology, one doesn’t think of the norms of daily life. One tends to recognize only extreme acts as those explicitly ideologically marked, but the Hegelian point here would be that it is precisely those things which are not questioned and accepted without critical thought, that are the truest manifestations of ideology. This seemingly neutral background to the state of affairs is where this objective violence is found.20 

Objective violence functioning in those things perceived as neutral is where we look again at repressive apparatuses. When the RSA mobilizes, it is believed to be just through the assumption of state legitimacy, even if the methods are more extreme. The US Crisis Monitor reports: 

​The report continues: 

The seemingly neutral object of criticism by the protesters is structural racism and police brutality, inherent to police modes of operation and the prison industrial complex. These practices are left as a result of the limitations of the Civil Rights Movement. Angela Davis writes, “we not only needed to claim legal rights within the existing society but also to demand substantive rights- in jobs, housing, healthcare, education, etc- and to challenge the very structure of society.”23 The Civil Rights Movement was able to demand legal progress, but ideology does not change as quickly, especially when racism has been used to maintain divisions in society for two and a half centuries. Angela Davis writes “the Civil Rights movement was very successful in what it achieved: the legal eradication of racism and the dismantling of the apparatus of segregation. This happened and we should not under-estimate its importance. The problem is that it is often assumed that the eradication of the legal apparatus is equivalent to the abolition of racism. But racism persists in a framework that is far more expansive, far vaster than the legal framework.”24 White American racist ideology “exerts a performative efficiency. It is not merely an interpretation of what blacks are, but an interpretation that determines the very being and social existence of the interpreted subjects,” as white America has been the dominant demographic for the duration of its existence.25 Racism, in this way, is exemplary of how ideology determines social existence. This is the process of ideological interpellation, by which an individual subject is created through its positionality within the hegemonic ideology. Legal code may change, but Louis Althusser writes that “law is indifferent to whether it is approved or condemned: law exists and functions, and can only exist and function, formally.”26

Thus, racism can only be effectively “checked” by law formally. In our concrete reality however, simply because something is bound by law does not mean that it will be either obeyed or enforced, or that the interpellated subject ceases to be subjected as such. Therborn writes, “a historical  materialist conception of ideology, it would seem, involves the not very far-fetched assumption that human beings tend to have some capacity for discriminating between enunciation of the  existence or possibility of something... and the actual existence/occurrence of what is  enunciated.”27 Police brutality and incarceration rates reflect structural racism in American legal  code, law enforcement, and carceral institutions, yet most white Americans are rather blind to the  structural racism inherent to their institutions. The Summer 2020 Demonstrations showed the consciousness of the demonstrators in their recognizing that the enunciation of racism in America does not align with the existence of racism in America. In short, that the idea of a post racial America is a farce: the people have separated fact from fiction. 

The fifth chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s, Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin once said that “violence is as American as cherry pie.”28 When peaceful demonstrations do not produce desired results and law enforcement uses force to repress dissent, protests turn more disruptive.29 The social conditions of the United States have not been created; they have been passed down. Class based tensions, almost always intersected with race in the United States, rear their heads in defiance at every epoch: the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, the social movements of the 1960s, again with the expansion of globalized production in the late 90s, and now with the Black Lives Matter movement amidst cries for structural change. We have not made history as we please, but by the circumstances directly transmitted from national past.30 However, something is notably different: the extent to which these crowds were anti-capitalist and intersectional. Crowds chanted against structural racism, monuments of white supremacy, the rise of right-wing populism, the resurgence of white supremacy, and the role of class within systems of domination and exploitation.

With Black, White, Latinx, Asian, and  Indigenous peoples, as well as the support of the LGBTQ+ community, the intersectionality of  the masses implies solidarity and commonality of interest- intersectionality transcends solidarity  and steps towards class consciousness.31 This is not a factor that has been quite so significant  throughout American history, and presents a unified people engaged in social revolution.32 The  Summer Demonstrations of 2020 have openly declared that their ends can only be attained by the  structural change of existing repressive apparatuses. Now, they represent the interests of the working class and all oppressed minorities, “but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement.”33

About the Author:
​​​Joseph Senecal  is a student completing undergraduate research in international studies and political science at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida. McCann is interested in structuralism, post-structuralism, ideology, revolutionary history, and translation. Particularly inspired by French structuralist and existentialist writers of the 1960s, McCann hopes to translate works that have yet to be put in English for an American audience. Applying to doctoral programs in philosophy and political science, McCann hopes to continue his education in Marxian thought. In his personal life, he works as a cook, enjoys blues rock, and has an adored cat named Carlos Santana.