I am happy to see that more and more people are giving attention to the actual radical history of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the bastardization of his radicalism by the establishment in its attempt to neuter his lessons in radical activism. That being said, on what would be today his 95th birthday, it is clear the transformative visions he had for the country’s political, religious, social, and economic life are far from realized. As the genocide against Gaza enters its 101st day I think it is important we once again examine this American radicals legacy and how the actions of the United States, Israel, and seemingly the entire Western “civilized” world are completely contradictory to the values he lived by and the values our so called civilized societies claim to adopt.

Beyond Vietnam

April 4, 1967, exactly one year from when he would be assassinated, MLK spoke at Riverside Church in New York. This speech, titled “Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence”, was in opposition to the Vietnam war and how the genocidal killings abroad in Vietnam were apart of the struggle at home that Dr. King had been fighting against all of his life. It is a speech that the doctored version of MLK’s legacy often leaves out for it is filled with narratives that the established order wishes to bury. For instance, here is just one quote from the speech that shows MLK reflecting on the horrors of American foreign policy, horrors that may sound familiar to what we are seeing today.

“Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than eight hundred, or rather, eight thousand miles away from its shores.” — Martin Luther King Jr.
​
King vehemently spoke out against the atrocities committed by the U.S in Vietnam. The actions of the U.S in Vietnam echo its actions in foreign policy today, including in its relationship with Israel and its collaboration in the genocide against the Palestinian people.

On Trial for Genocide

After nearly 100 days of gross violence against the civilian population of Gaza, one country finally has had enough and has taken to international law for some attempt at holding the murderers accountable. South Africa has taken a case to the ICJ (International Court of Justice) accusing Israel of genocide against the Palestinian people. Their case, to anyone with eyes and ears, recounts the enumerable war crimes committed by Israel against Gaza which include: Planned starvation, destruction of water sanitation plants, shutting down internet and power, displacing over 2 million people inside of an open air concentration camp, bombing everything from hospitals to bakeries, the list is exhaustive and never ending.

Will this case amount to much? Not likely, even given the overwhelming evidence. No, like Dr. King astutely pointed out, America will lie about the overtures of peace from those who are sane. It will bribe the ICJ to rule against the possibility of genocide, or perhaps ignore any ruling altogether. It is still admirable that South Africa has gone to the international courts of law and asserted their humanity. South Africa not along ago was a nation mired by the scourge that is apartheid. That is why those who remember are making sure others will remember this genocide with stark clarity.

​​Yemen’s Show of Solidarity

​Much noise has been made lately by the Yemeni rebel group the Houthis and their capturing of commercial ships in the Red Sea. The Houthis are the de facto ruling entity of Yemen since Saudi Arabia’s equally genocidal campaign began in 2014, a war that is funded and enabled by the United States as well. Yemenis are facing one of the greatest humanitarian crises in the world imposed on it by the U.S and its allies. Despite this the Yemenis are the ones capturing ships in solidarity with Gaza. The Houthis have explicitly said that this is their reasoning. That they will capture and disrupt ships in solidarity with the Palestinian people until the genocidal assault against Gaza has ended. Yemen, facing its own existential threats, has made a show of solidarity when no other country has. Yemen, like South Africa, understands what it means to face genocidal threats and what it means to stand against them.

​U.S.A

The U.S has acted as though its hands are tied with regards to Israel’s latest murderous campaign against Palestinians. Even though Israel could not functionally survive without U.S financial and military support, the U.S State Department acts as though Israel is its own entity. This veneer of incapability is dropped quickly with the latest strikes against the Houthi rebels in the Red Sea. To stop Israel’s genocide against Gaza is out of our power, but thwarting the capture of commercial shipping vessels is well within our reach. It is disgusting. 10,000 + children have been murdered. 25,000+ civilians. A whole percent of the population of Gaza has been obliterated. The U.S makes a parade of MLK in the culture. Unbeknownst to most, his true legacy as a radical is covered up. He is made a puppet of imperial interest. A black face for empire. Those who see clear see his legacy in speeches like “Beyond Vietnam”. They see the acts of South Africa and the Houthis as extensions of his philosophy outlined in these speeches. They see the acts of the United States remain in an evil stagnant way, as the words used by King to describe the crimes in Vietnam ring so true to the crimes we see perpetrated against Palestinians today.

​I’ve Been to the Mountaintop

On April 3, 1968 whilst on a campaign to organize black sanitation workers outside Memphis, Tennessee, MLK made a speech at Mason Temple that is now titled “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” Aptly titled, this would be MLK’s final speech as he was shot the following day. MLK speaks with a tone fraught with danger reminiscent of corrido star Chalino Sanchez reading his death note before performing a final rendition of his “Alma Enamorada”. Hours before his plane had been subject to a bomb threat. Undeterred, MLK made it a point to show that he was not fearful, that he had “been to the mountaintop.” I’d like to end with a quote from this speech to remind us all what it means to stand for the downtrodden and oppressed. Sometimes this fight will cost us everything. That is the price of bearing witness and seeking justice.
​
“And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land” — Martin Luther King Jr.

​Name: European antisemitism.
​
Age: Centuries old.

Appearance: Earlier, it looked like Jewish persecution by Christians in Europe; now, it’s anything and everything that Israel and the Zionists disagree with.

Are you telling me antisemitism is a uniquely European phenomenon? Yes, 100 percent. Jews dispersed across the world after their expulsion from Jerusalem over 2 millennia ago and encountered marginalisation and outright hostility in Europe. They were forced to live in ghettos and faced episodic violence, which, at times, amounted to pogroms. Then the Nazis under Hitler went on a never-seen-before genocidal slaughter of the Jews beginning in the early 1940s with the express aim of getting rid of all Jews in Germany.

If the Europeans were terrible to the Jews, I am sure non-Europeans were no better. Or are you telling me the Jews were safe in other places? The Jews certainly didn’t face persecution in the Middle East, including in historic Palestine — in fact, in any of the Muslim-ruled lands — where they lived alongside the indigenous Muslim and Christian populations.

What are you saying? Aren’t Muslims virulently antisemitic? Caitlin Johnstone recently wrote: “The greatest trick white anti-semites ever pulled was getting Jews to leave western society and move to a foreign country to spend their lives beating up Muslims.” I would argue that the second-greatest trick the white antisemites ever pulled was imposing upon the non-Europeans the notion that they were also antisemitic just like them.

Since you are making such bold claims, I am sure you have evidence to back them. Of course I do. Examples of Muslims’ peaceful coexistence with Jews abound. Jews flourished not just in the Middle East but also in Muslim-ruled Spain (711-1492).

I will tell you the incredible story of Samuel HaNagid (also known as Samuel ibn Naghrillah and Isma’il ibn Naghrilla). HaNagid was a Talmudic scholar, poet, and warrior who ruled Muslim Granda for 2 decades and led the Muslim armies in battle against invading Christian forces.

In an introduction to his book Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid, Peter Cole writes: “The first major poet of the Hebrew literary renaissance of Moslem Spain, Shmuel Ben Yosef Ha-Levi HaNagid (993-1056 c.e.) was also the Prime Minister of the Muslim state of Granada, battlefield commander of the non-Jewish Granadan army, and one of the leading religious figures in a medieval Jewish world that stretched from Andalusia to Baghdad.”
​
Wait, a Jewish Prime Minister in a Muslim state?! Did I get that right? Yes, you got that exactly right. In his book, Cole writes: “He [HaNagid] successfully led Badis's [the King of Granda] forces into battle for sixteen of the next eighteen years, serving either as field commander or in a more administrative and Pentagon-like capacity as minister of defense, or chief of staff. In his various public roles HaNagid helped establish Granada as one of the wealthiest and most powerful of the thirty-eight Taifa or Party States of Andalusia, and he continued to serve both Moslem and Jewish communities until he died.”

That’s an incredible story. Wait till you hear about Moses Maimonides.

Now, who’s that? Also known as Rambam, Maimonides is widely considered among the greatest Jewish scholars. He was born in Muslim Spain and flourished there. A polymath, he served as Saladin's personal physician! Yes, the Saladin. The man who decisively conquered Jerusalem from the marauding Crusaders and kept them at bay. Can you imagine a Christian ruler of Saladin’s stature trusting a Jewish doctor for his health in the medieval era?

I can’t. I know. You know what happened at the coronation of Richard the Lionheart of England, Saladin’s rival in the unsuccessful Third Crusade for the conquest of Jerusalem?

No. What? Pogroms against Jews.

Oh! I should have guessed. I am glad you are starting to see a pattern in the historic European contempt for Jews. Although, to his credit, Richard is reported to have been incensed by the violence.
Anyway, let me continue my story about the Jews in Muslim lands.
​
When Ferdinand and Isabella took charge in Spain following the Reconquista in 1492, they issued the Alhambra Decree (also known as the Edict of Expulsion). It required the Jews in Spain to either convert to Christianity or leave Spain. Over 13,000 Jews were executed following the Christian reconquest of Spain. Those who fled were welcomed by the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II to settle in the Muslim Ottoman lands.

Moreover, Bayezid II didn’t just welcome the fleeing Jews; he arranged for his navy to bring them to his lands. According to an article in the Israeli outlet 972: “In August 1492, he sent his navy to Spain to evacuate the expelled Jews to the empire, where he granted them permission to settle and become citizens.”

Perhaps because of his awareness of Christian attitudes towards the Jews, Bayezid II “sent a special decree to the governors of his European provinces, ordering them to receive the Jewish refugees well.”

Historian Firas Alkhateeb writes in his book Lost Islamic History: “Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II ordered his military and governors to welcome any Jewish refugees from Spain. A sizeable Jewish community descended from these Spanish Jews remained in Istanbul until the twentieth century.”

On the Muslim generosity towards the Spanish Jews, one Turkish historian wrote: “In the Ottoman mind, Spain was a major antagonist, and the Ottomans made little distinction between the plight of the Andalusian Muslims and that of the Jews when both communities were threatened by Spain, and both appealed for Ottoman aid and protection.”

In short, the Ottomans made no distinction between the persecuted Muslims and the persecuted Jews.
Oh! And do you know when the Spanish formally rescinded their expulsion order?
​
No, I don’t. On December 16, 1968, after more than 476 years!

Those were medieval times. I am sure the Muslim-Jew ties would have been strained later. Not at all. In fact, when the Nazis were hunting Jews, there were recorded instances of Muslims doing all within their means to save Jews in Europe. Take, for example, Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the Imam of the Grande Mosque de Paris during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II. He “led a clandestine effort that offered protection, shelter, and travel assistance to about 1,700 French Jews after the Nazis and the Vichy government began targeting the community for deportation to Auschwitz.”

On July 16, 1942, when the French collaborationist government sent 13,00 Jews to Auschwitz, these words of the Imam were read throughout immigrant hostels in Paris the very next day: “Yesterday at dawn, the Jews of Paris were arrested. The old, the women, and the children. In exile like ourselves, workers like ourselves. They are our brothers. Their children are like our own children. The one who encounters one of his children must give that child shelter and protection for as long as misfortune — or sorrow — lasts.”

And the Imam wasn’t the only Muslim attempting to save Jews from the Nazis. Mustafa and Zejneba Hardaga, Ali Sheqer Pashkaj, and Nuro Hoxha were among the many, many conscientious European Muslims who did their best to save Jews from the gas chamber.

Moreover, it was the Muslims of Palestine who gave the fleeing European Jews refuge in their own homes at the height of the Nazi pogroms. Their current Western benefactors had deserted them and were turning away ships full of fleeing Jews, preventing them from landing on their shores, but the Muslims opened their arms.

Take, for example, the story of the St. Louis ship carrying over 900 fleeing Jewish refugees. They reached Canada in 1937 but were turned away. The Canadian government apologised only in 2018 for its inhuman act. “We apologise to the 907 German Jews aboard the St. Louis, as well as their families,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said. “We are sorry for the callousness of Canada's response. We are sorry for not apologising sooner.”

One should take Trudeau’s apology with a sack full of salt, considering he and his fellow Canadian parliamentarians just this year gave a Ukrainian Nazi standing ovation.

What happened to the passengers of the ship? They tried landing in the United States. But I am sure it won’t surprise you when I tell you that the United States also turned the refugees away. They were forced back to Europe, and a third of the passengers were murdered.

Moreover, shortly after turning the ship away, the US rejected a proposal to allow 20,000 Jewish children to come to the US for safety.

But Muslims were different? Yes, they were. Arab Muslims, especially in Palestine, treated the Jews as fellow Semites and welcomed them into their own homes, which, to their great surprise and utter misfortune, were taken over by the once-refugees. The welcoming Muslims had now become refugees.
Mohamed Hadid, the father of models Gigi and Bella, had his family kicked out of their home in Safed, Palestine, in which his father had hosted two European Jewish families. He recently recounted his family trauma: “When I was only nine days old, my mother, taking my two-year-old sister with her, returned to our home in Safed. Safed had almost been taken over by the Jewish residents there. My father, a professor at Haifa University, was also not at home. When we arrived at the part of our home that belonged to my mother and our family, they did not let us in.”

Unfortunately, the Hadids aren’t an aberration. Historic Palestine is full of stories like that of the Hadids.

Do the Jews acknowledge the generosity of Muslims towards them? Israelis and their supposed sympathisers in the West have tried hard to whitewash the story of the 1948 Nakba, in which over 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes, more than 15,000 were murdered in over 50 massacres carried out by Zionist terrorists, and 500 of their villages were ethnically cleansed.

However, there are some Israelis with a conscience. Even a former Haganah terrorist acknowledged the Muslim contribution to the survival of Jews over the ages. The late Uri Avnery, who was also a member of the Knesset (the Israeli parliament), once wrote: “Every honest Jew who knows the history of his people cannot but feel a deep sense of gratitude to Islam, which has protected the Jews for fifty generations, while the Christian world persecuted the Jews and tried many times ‘by the sword’ to get them to abandon their faith.”

All of this is news to me. Unfortunately, the European propaganda to paint Muslims in general and those of the Middle East in particular as antisemitic savages as a way to shift their guilt has led to the concealment of the cordial relations between Muslims and Jews throughout history.

I am sure the Zionist transgressions since the late 19th century, especially from 1948 onwards, have not helped matters either. No, they haven’t. However, Palestinians haven’t lost sight of the fact that their enemy is the violent racist death cult of Zionism and not Judaism. And as Joseph Massad has cogently argued, Palestinians are the last of the Semites bravely resisting antisemitism.
​
The Columbia University Professor writes: “The Jewish holocaust killed off the majority of Jews who fought and struggled against European anti-Semitism, including Zionism. With their death, the only remaining ‘Semites’ who are fighting against Zionism and its anti-Semitism today are the Palestinian people. Whereas Israel insists that European Jews do not belong in Europe and must come to Palestine, the Palestinians have always insisted that the homelands of European Jews were their European countries and not Palestine, and that Zionist colonialism springs from its very anti-Semitism. Whereas Zionism insists that Jews are a race separate from European Christians, the Palestinians insist that European Jews are nothing if not European and have nothing to do with Palestine, its people, or its culture. What Israel and its American and European allies have sought to do in the last six and a half decades is to convince Palestinians that they too must become anti-Semites and believe as the Nazis, Israel, and its Western anti-Semitic allies do, that Jews are a race that is different from European races, that Palestine is their country, and that Israel speaks for all Jews. That the two largest American pro-Israel voting blocks today are Millenarian Protestants and secular imperialists continues the very same Euro-American anti-Jewish tradition that extends back to the Protestant Reformation and 19th century imperialism. But the Palestinians have remained unconvinced and steadfast in their resistance to anti-Semitism.”

I agree with Mr. Massad. He’s hard to argue against. By the way, even the children of Palestine bear no ill will toward the Jews despite the Israeli butchery they have witnessed for their whole lives. They are smart enough to differentiate between Zionist terrorism that is ruining their lives and the ancient faith of Judaism.

The intact moral compass of Palestinian children was reflected in Max Blumenthal’s tribute to Refaat Alareer following his assassination by the Israeli terrorists in early December.

Blumenthal writes: “Refaat also assigned his students The Merchant of Venice. He encouraged the class to view Shylock, Shakespeare’s Orientalized, avaricious Jewish character, as a sympathetic figure who was struggling to retain a modicum of dignity under an apartheid-like regime.

“When his students completed the play, Refaat asked them which Shakespearean character they sympathized with more: Othello, the Venetian general of Arab origin, or Shylock, the Jew. He described their response as the most emotional moment of his six-year teaching career: One by one, his students declared an almost visceral identification with Shylock.

“In her final paper, one of Refaat’s students reworked Shylock’s famous cri de coeur into an appeal to the conscience of her own oppressors:

“Hath not a Palestinian eyes? Hath not a Palestinian hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means,
warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer
as a Christian or a Jew is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us,
do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

Do say: “Wow! Muslims have been so cool with the Jews throughout history and continue to be so.”
​
Don’t say: “Let’s learn history exclusively from Western textbooks and Western leaders and Western media.”

​Today we mourn a hundred years since the physical death of one of our dearest comrades, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known to us as Lenin. It would be foolish, however, to think that his physical death meant the death of his ideas. Today, after a hundred years, Lenin’s ideas are as indispensable as ever. “They are mistaken when they think that his death is the end of his ideas”. This was told to us by Fidel Castro upon the death of Che Guevara, but it applies with equal accuracy to Lenin’s death.
​
Lenin was never, as the West reduces him to, simply the man of practice who ‘applied’ what Marx and Engels wrote. To be sure, in terms of revolutionary practice and the development of the tactics for class struggle in the era of imperialism, there is a particle of truth to this understanding. Few have understood the class struggle, and how to advance it, better than Lenin. Few have been so in tune with the Marxist worldview, so utterly devoid of dogmas and the purity fetish, as to understanding the dialectics of socialism in its utmost profundity. Lenin, whether pre or post conquest of power, was a man who excelled in using the Marxist outlook as a guide to action, as the greatest tool and best working weapon, as Engels described it, for the masses to change (and not just interpret) the world. Whether in the creative development of the vanguard party of a new type in the era of ultimate tzarist repression, where organizing work had to take a clandestine underground form with professional revolutionaries (which has always been misinterpreted in the West as a top-down elitist party), or in his understanding of the role of the peasantry in the revolutionary struggle, or in his development of the New Economic Policy during the first period of socialist construction, Lenin’s practice indubitably applied and creatively developed upon the work of Marx and Engels.

However, Lenin as a theoretician (which is dialectically embedded with the previous Lenin) is often overlooked, especially in the chauvinistic West which sees Europe as the bearers of ‘theory’ and the East as the appliers of it in ‘practice’. Lukacs is still right in telling us that “Lenin is the greatest thinker to have been produced by the revolutionary working-class movement since Marx… the only theoretician equal to Marx.”

On this centenary anniversary of his passing, here are five central developments of Lenin’s upon the Marxist tradition. 

​1) In the sphere of philosophy, he develops Marxist materialism in the context of the critique of Machist idealism and its spread in Russian Marxist spaces. This is done in his 1908 Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, a text which the postmodernized Western Marxists are nauseated by because of its outright defense of materialism and philosophical realism. Even some of those who have not fully condemned Lenin would like to create a split between the 1908 Lenin and the post-1914 one. While it is true that his 1914 philosophical studies in Switzerland, especially his study of Hegel, represents one of the greatest advancements in dialectical materialist literature, it ought to be added to the previous philosophical insights, not used to reject them. Frankly, what else can be expected from the Western Marxists, those who look everywhere and only see splits (early and mature Marx, Marx from Engels, pre and post 1914 Lenin, Lenin and post Lenin socialist construction in Russia, etc.)? Conjoined, therefore, with his philosophical developments to the Marxist worldview in 1908 are his 1914 philosophical notebooks. While Marx never got to provide us with the short ‘Dialectics’ text he promised, in his 1914 studies Lenin does give us ample work on a materialist interpretation of Hegel and the Marxist sublation of his dialectical worldview (which, as an upside-down materialism, holds the germ for the Marxist outlook), playing for future revolutionaries the role Marx’s ‘Dialectics’ presumably would have.
​
2) Lenin developed the Marxist understanding of capitalist political economy for the stage of imperialism and monopoly capital. Headway had already been made here by Marx in the third volume of Capital, but it is only with the carnage of the first world war that the imperialist stage of capitalism develops to a point of maturity where it could be understood as a stage of its own, a partially qualitative development within the capitalist mode of life as a whole. It is here where Lenin crystalizes this analysis, concretizing the previous work done by Hobson, Hilferding, and Bukharin. Lenin’s analysis of the dominance of finance capital in the age of imperialism has only become more indispensable as global financial institutions rose following the second world war. His prediction that imperialism will be conjoined with constant imperialist warfare (both of an inter-imperialist kind and of the kind that attempts to subjugate under imperial dominance nations outside of its sphere of influence), could not have been proven more prophetic in this last century, as US imperialism has waged hybrid warfare against virtually every country on the planet. Without the theoretical framework of Lenin’s analysis of imperialism, it is quite literally impossible to come anywhere near an accurate understanding of the world today. We have Lenin to thank for this clarity.

3) Conjoined with his insights on imperialism and the role of the peasantry in socialist revolutions, Lenin develops upon the anti-colonial works of Marx and Engels, who see national liberation struggles as forms of class struggles. Lenin sees the primacy these often take in the class struggles of imperialized nations against national oppression. All throughout the non-Western-European/Anglo world, these struggles have risen – sometimes securing their successes for decades to come (Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos, DPRK, etc.) and sometimes being overthrown by dirty US/European imperialist tactics after the successful conquest of power (Burkina Faso, Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Ghana, etc.).

The task Lenin bestowed on the proletariat of imperial nations, of connecting their class struggles to the rising anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements, is as pertinent as ever. In the US, as it becomes more evident how the empire feeds off the republic (as Michael Parenti calls it), it is easier than ever to see the unity of interests between the anti-imperialist struggles of the global south and those we face at home. As the labor aristocracy (a concept Lenin develops from Engels and the American Marxist, Daniel de Leon) is further disconnecting itself from the rank-and-file, the task of showing American working people the ineptitude of their bourgeoisified leaders, and henceforth, the socialist and anti-imperialist way forward, becomes easier. In some ways, the leadership of Chris Smalls in the Amazon Labor Union, Shawn Fain in the UAW, and (to a lesser extent) Sean O’Brian in the Teamsters, signifies a militant development in the labor movement – a movement growing (to various degrees) in class, socialist, and internationalist consciousness along lines Lenin would be proud of. This would, of course, also be true of the millions of American working folks who’ve protested over the last three months against the Zionist genocide of the colonized, Palestinian people.

4) Lenin concretizes the Marxist understanding of the state and socialist construction. In The State and Revolution (as well as in other essays), Lenin compiles Marx and Engels’s insights on the state and on the dictatorship of the proletariat. No text had ever provided the Marxist view of the state so succinctly and elaborately as Lenin, using the works of Marx and Engels (and most importantly, the Marxist method), did. This remains a necessary read for all communists. With it, all the abstract usages of ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, ‘dictatorship’ that the imperialist bourgeoisie uses to legitimize itself and attack its enemies are capable of being unpacked and ridiculed for what they are – empty abstractions. For whom is the democracy and freedom the bourgeoisie talks about? Is it for the people? NO! It is democracy for the rich, the insignificant minority! It is freedom of capital to exploit and accumulate! Is this not in direct opposition to a democracy and freedom of the people? Has it not been shown that the people, if they succeed in the conquest of power, must employ the method of ‘dictatorship’ against the counter-revolutionaries and imperialists to protect their revolutions? To protect actual popular and participatory democracy and freedom? Lenin’s refinement of Marx and Engels’s insights has allowed subsequent revolutionary struggles to understand the importance of overturning a state which is designed to reproduce the bourgeois mode of life for a working class state which can, as long as capitalist-imperialism exists, defend the people’s revolution from imperialist hybrid warfare and the counter-revolutionary collaborators which might still exists at home.

Lenin’s understanding of the workers state must also take into account the adjustments that had to be made in the post-revolutionary period, when it became clear that emphasis had to be put on developing the productive forces and an efficient state that could guide the process of destroying the global inequalities between imperialist and imperialized nations. This project, as Lenin’s NEP, Stalin’s collectivization, and the experience of China’s reform and opening up shows, can occur through various means. Capital can be employed, under the leadership of a strong and disciplined communist party, in the task of developing the forces of production for socialism. As long as “political capital,” as Mao called it, is sustained in the hands of the people through their communist and workers parties, the process of capital expropriation can take a variety of different speeds and time. Lenin’s insights following the revolution helps us concretize the dialectic of political and economic capital already employed by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto, where they argued that: “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.”

5) Lastly, Lenin’s development of democratic centralism continues to be, in my estimation, the most effective organizational method (whether for a party or state) that has ever been employed. Its unity (when it is properly applied) of the democratic components of open debate and consultation with the efficiency of centralized and unified action, are pillars of socialist democracy. “Centralism based on democracy with democracy under the guidance of centralism,” as Deng Xiaoping said. Unity of action amongst those which fight for the masses of humanity is amongst the scariest dictums the ruling classes’ ears have heard. The ruling classes (not just the capitalist ones) survive from divide et impera (divide and conquer). They love factions and factionalization. Just take a look at James Madison’s Federalist 10, where factionalization of the masses is seen as the key to preventing their unified revolt against the elite on the basis of the property question. But Leninist unity of action is preceded by democratic consultation, by the debating, on the part of the party cadre (the most advanced detachment of the proletariat), of the question at hand. The democratic component has often been the hardest to achieve, limiting our ability to appreciate the effectiveness of the unity of action. Nonetheless, even as the old communist parties in the West seem to have mostly fallen down the route of tailing the social democrats and liberals, the need for a strong communist party, guided by the methods of democratic centralism, could not be more urgent for satisfying the crisis in the subjective factor we are experiencing in our time – a time objectively pregnant with revolutionary potential (see my book, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism for more here). 

​Marxism-Leninism is the only worldview that contains within it these indispensable developments upon the open and ever-expanding Marxist tradition. In the US, Marxism-Leninism has been concretized to the national conditions of our country through the works of W.E.B. Dubois, Henry Winston, and others who have been able to assess the role of the color line in dividing working people, and hence, the role that the anti-racist struggle has played as the leading form of class struggle in the US (for a detailed analysis of this, see my paper ‘Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction: The Black Worker and Racist False Consciousness’). It is this Marxist-Leninist tradition, enhanced and concretized by the insights of Dubois (the father of American Marxism – see article cited above for why I say this), Winston, MLK Jr., etc., that creates the foundation for the development of American Marxism (as some of us have called it at the Institute), or American Marxism-Leninism. It is this theoretical framework which allows us to avoid the purity fetish, understand the American trajectory and the process of the last centuries’ bourgeoisfication and this centuries’ reproletarianization of the working masses. It is, in short, this Marxism-Leninism adjusted to our context that allows us to understand our class struggles and our pathway forward, guiding us as we overthrow the parasitic imperialist state and establish a working class democratic-dictatorship on its ruin. In other words, an actual government (or mode of life) of, by, and for working people. A promise our capitalist class was never able to actualize, but that we – working people – will! 

¿Sabes tú que la mano poderosa
que a un César arrancó del trono, era
suave como la rosa?
La mano poderosa
¿sabes tú de quién era?
¿Sabes tú que la voz de agua encendida,
terrestre impulso en que se ahogó tu dueño,
cantó siempre a la vida?
De esa voz encendida
¿sabes tú quién fue dueño?
¿Sabes tú que aquel viento que bramaba
como un toro nocturno, también era
onda que acariciaba?
El viento que bramaba
¿sabes tú de quién era?
¿Y sabes tú que el sol de rojo manto,
de duras flechas implacable dueño,
secó Nevas de llanto?
Del sol de rojo llanto
¿sabes tú quién fue dueño?
Te hablo de Lenin, tempestad y abrigo,
Lenin siembra contigo,
¡oh campesino de arrugado ceño!
Lenin canta contigo,
¡oh cuello puro sin dogal ni dueño!
¡Oh pueblo que venciste a tu enemigo, Lenin está contigo,
Como un dios familiar simple y risueño,
Día a día en la fábrica y el trigo,
uno y diverso universal amigo,
de hierro y lirio, de volcán y sueño!
 
“Lenin”
Nicolás Guillén

​​​Author: Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE.

VLADIMIR ILYICH ULANOV (1870-1924) was known by his pseudonym — Lenin. He was, like his siblings, a revolutionary, which in the context of tsarist Russia meant that he spent long years in prison and in exile. Lenin helped build the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party both by his intellectual and his organisational work.

Lenin’s writings are not only his own words, but the summation of the activity and thoughts of the thousands of militants whose path crossed his own. It was Lenin’s remarkable ability to develop the experiences of the militants into the theoretical realm that shaped what we call Leninism. It is no wonder that the Hungarian Marxist Gyorgy Lukacs called Lenin “the only theoretician equal to Marx yet produced by the struggle for the liberation of the proletariat.”

Building a Revolution

In 1896, when spontaneous strikes broke out in the St Petersburg factories, the socialist revolutionaries were caught unawares. They were disoriented. Five years later, Lenin wrote, the “revolutionaries lagged behind this upsurge, both in their ‘theories’ and in their activity; they failed to establish a constant and continuous organisation capable of leading the whole movement.” Lenin felt that this lag had to be rectified.

Most of Lenin’s major writings followed this insight. Lenin worked out the contradictions of capitalism in Russia (Development of Capitalism in Russia, 1896), which allowed him to understand how the peasantry in the sprawling tsarist empire had a proletarian character. It was based on this that Lenin argued for the worker-peasant alliance against tsarism and the capitalists.

Lenin understood from his engagement with mass struggle and with his theoretical reading that the social democrats — as the most liberal section of the bourgeoisie and the aristocrats — were not capable of driving a bourgeois revolution let alone the movement that would lead to the emancipation of the peasantry and the workers. This work was done in Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (1905). Two Tactics is perhaps the first major Marxist treatise that demonstrates the necessity for a socialist revolution, even in a “backward” country, where the workers and the peasants would need to ally to break the institutions of bondage.

These two texts show Lenin avoiding the view that the Russian Revolution could leapfrog capitalist development (as the populists — narodniki — suggested) or that it had to go through capitalism (as the liberal democrats argued). Neither path was possible nor necessary. Capitalism had already entered Russia — a fact that the populists did not acknowledge — and it could be overcome by a worker and peasant revolution — a fact that the liberal democrats disputed. The 1917 Revolution and the Soviet experiment proved Lenin’s point.

Having established that the liberal elites within tsarist Russia would not be able to lead a worker and peasant revolution, or even a bourgeois revolution, Lenin turned his attention to the international situation. Sitting in exile in Switzerland, Lenin watched as the social democrats capitulated to the warmongering in 1914 and delivered the working-class to the world war.

Frustrated by the betrayal of the social democrats, Lenin wrote an important text — Imperialism — which developed a clear-headed understanding of the growth of finance capital and monopoly firms as well as inter-capitalist and inter-imperialist conflict. It was in this text that Lenin explored the limitations of the socialist movements in the West — with the labour aristocracy providing a barrier to socialist militancy — and the potential for revolution in the East — where the “weakest link” in the imperialist chain might be found.

Lenin’s notebooks show that he read 148 books and 213 articles in English, French, German, and Russian to clarify his thinking on contemporary imperialism. Clear-headed assessment of imperialism of this type ensured that Lenin developed a strong position on the rights of nations to self-determination, whether these nations were within the tsarist empire or indeed any other European empire. The kernel of the anti-colonialism of the USSR — developed in the Communist International (Comintern) — is found here.

The term “imperialism,” so central to Lenin’s expansion of the Marxist tradition, refers to the uneven development of capitalism on a global scale and the use of force to maintain that unevenness. Certain parts of the planet — mostly those that had a previous history of colonisation — remain in a position of subordination, with their ability to craft an independent, national development agenda constrained by the tentacles of foreign political, economic, social and cultural power.

In our time, new theories have emerged that suggest that the new conditions no longer can be understood by the Leninist theory of imperialism. Some people on the left reject the idea of the neocolonial structure of the world economy, with the imperialist bloc — led by the United States — using its every source of power to maintain this structure. Others, even on the left, argue that the world is now flat and that there is no longer a global North that oppresses a global South, and that the elites of both zones are part of an international bourgeoisie. Neither of these objections stand when confronted with both the increasing levels of violence perpetuated by the imperialist bloc and by the increasing levels of relative inequality between North and South (despite the growth of capitalist elites in the South).

Elements of Lenin’s Imperialism are, of course, dated — it was written 100 years ago — and would require careful reworking. But the essence of the theory is valid — the insistence on the tendency of capitalist firms to become monopolies, the ruthlessness with which finance capital drains the wealth of the global South, and the use of force to contain the ambitions of countries of the South to chart their own development agenda.

One of Lenin’s most vital interventions, which appealed to those in the colonies, was the idea that imperialism would never develop the colony, and that only the socialist forces in collaboration with the national liberation sections would be capable of both fighting for national independence and then advancing their countries to socialism. Lenin’s fierce anti-colonial determination drew his ideas to those in the colonised world, which is why they rallied so enthusiastically to the Comintern after 1919.

Ho Chi Minh read the Comintern’s thesis on national and colonial issues and wept. It was a “miraculous guide” for the struggle of the people of Indochina, he felt. “From the experience of the Russian Revolution,” Ho Chi Minh wrote, “we should have to people — both the working-class and the peasants — at the root of our struggle. We need a strong party, a strong will, with sacrifice and unanimity at our centre.” “Like the brilliant sun,” Ho Chi Minh wrote, “the October Revolution shone over all five continents, awakening millions of oppressed and exploited people around the world. There has never existed such a revolution of such significance and scale in the history of humanity.”

Finally, Lenin spent the period from 1893 to 1917 studying the limitations of the party of the old type — the social democratic party. Lenin’s text — Our Programme — makes the point that the party must be involved in continuous activity and not rely upon spontaneous or initial [stikhiinyi] outbreaks. This continuous activity would bring the party into intimate and organic touch with the working-class and the peasantry as well as help to germinate the protests that then might take on a mass character. It was this consideration that led Lenin to work out his understanding of the revolutionary party in What is To Be Done? (1902). The remarkable intervention highlighted the role of the class-conscious workers as the vanguard of the party and the importance of political agitation among workers to develop a genuinely powerful political consciousness against all tyranny and all oppression. The workers, Lenin argued, need to feel the intensity of the brutality of the system and of the importance of solidarity.

These texts — from 1896 to 1916 — prepared the terrain for the Bolsheviks and Lenin to understand how to operate during the struggles in 1917. It is a measure of Lenin’s confidence in the masses and to his theory that Lenin wrote his audacious pamphlet Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? a few weeks before the seizure of power.

Building a state

Having prevailed, Lenin now had to confront the problems of building a socialist project in the former tsarist empire, which had been devastated by its avarice and by the war. Before the Soviets had time to organise themselves, the imperialists attacked from all directions. Direct interventions on behalf of the peasants and workers, as well as national minorities, prevented large-scale defections from the new revolution to the counter-revolutionaries' armies. The peasants, with their limited means, held fast to the new beginning. But that was the point — the “limited means.” How does one build socialism in a poor country, with social development held down by the tsarist autocracy?

A close reading of State and Revolution (1918) anticipates the problems faced by the Soviets in their new task — they could not only inherit the state structure, but had to “smash the state,” build a new set of institutions and a new institutional culture, create a new attitude by the cadre towards the state and society. In April 1918, Lenin’s The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government summarises the work of the first few months and shows that the Soviets were well-aware of the deep problems that they had to confront.

Their revolution did not take place in an advanced capitalist country, but in what Marx had called the “realm of scarcity.” To increase the productive forces and to socialise the means of production at the same time was a task of immense proportions.

“Without literacy,” Lenin wrote, “there can be no politics. There can only be rumours, gossip, and prejudice.” What limited resources were there before the Soviet state went toward literacy, with the party cadre determined to ensure that they turn around the fact that only a third of men were literate and less than a fifth of women. Between the Likbez campaign and the policy of indigenisation (korenizatsiya), the use of regional and minority languages, the Soviets were able — in two decades — to ensure that literacy levels rose to 86 per cent for men and 65 per cent for women.

The centrality of workers and peasants to building Soviet Russia is often forgotten (Mikhail Kalinin came from a peasant family; Joseph Stalin came from a family of cobblers and housemaids). Education, health, housing and control over the economy as well as cultural activities and social development were the heart of the work of the new Soviet Russia, led by Lenin. No amount of right-wing drivel about the Soviet Union can erase the immense achievement of this workers’ state.

In the last year of his life, Lenin wrote four formidable texts: “On Cooperation,” “Our Revolution,” “How We Should Reorder the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection,” and “Better Fewer, But Better.” In these texts, Lenin acknowledged the difficulties in the process of transformation of capitalism to socialism. He wrote of the “enormous, boundless significance” of co-operative societies, the need to rebuild the productive base and to build societies to advance the confidence of the masses. What Lenin indicated was the need for a cultural transformation, a new way of life for the workers and the peasants, and new and creative ways for the workers and peasants to have power over their society and to build their clarities in action. The workers have inherited the architecture of a hideous state, and this must be totally transformed. But how? Lenin’s reflection in Better Fewer, but Better is fiercely honest:

“What elements have we for building this apparatus? Only two. First, the workers who are absorbed in the struggle of socialism. These elements are not sufficient educated. They would like to build a better apparatus for us, but they do not know how. They cannot build one. They have not yet developed the culture required for this; and it is culture that is required. Nothing will be achieved in this by doing things in a rush, by assault, by vim or vigour, or in general, by any of the best human qualities. Secondly, we have elements of knowledge, education, and training, but they are ridiculously inadequate compared with all other countries.”

In his last public appearance — at the Moscow Soviet in November 1922 — Lenin praised the achievements of the young Soviet Republic, but also cautioned about the hard path forward. “Our party,” he said, “a little group of people in comparison with the country’s total population, has tackled this job. This tiny nucleus has set itself the task of remaking everything, and it will do so.”

But this is not just the task of the party, but of the workers and peasants, who see the new Soviet apparatus as their own. “We have brought socialism into everyday life and must here see how matters stand. That is the task of our day, the task of our epoch.”

The Soviet Union lasted only 74 years, but in those years, it experimented fiercely to overcome the wretchedness of capitalism. Seventy-four years is the average global life expectancy. There was simply not enough time to advance the socialist agenda before the USSR was destroyed. But Lenin’s legacy is not merely in the USSR. It is in the global struggle to transcend the dilemmas that confront humanity by advancing to socialism.

COMRADE LENIN famously noted that “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

Communists and indeed all those dedicated to bringing about a new world have inevitably thought, at one time or another, on what Lenin might think or say about the 100 years that have passed since his death.

So much has changed. So much has transpired for humanity and for the global communist movement which Lenin played such a decisive role in creating.

The centenary of Comrade Lenin’s passing inevitably and quite rightly leads us to evaluate his life, his achievements and his legacy today.

Lenin’s indisputable individual brilliance, his foundational contribution to our ideology and his iconic status in our propaganda can easily lead us to forget that Lenin was a man who lived, worked and struggled.

Lenin was a key figure in the growing labour and socialist movement in Russia.

It was during this period, through tireless work and study, building on the ideas of Marx and Engels, that Lenin developed and refined fundamental concepts of the communist movement — imperialism, state monopoly capitalism and the need for a vanguard party of the working class.

But Lenin was not an academic or a theoretician who opined from the comfort and safety of an armchair.

Lenin’s ideas were tested in practice and in the fire of struggle. For all of the experience and understanding gained, he paid a dear price — hunted by the tsarist authorities and forced into exile, including here in Britain, where he worked at what is today the Marx Memorial Library.

Lenin would of course go on to lead the Great October Socialist Revolution — one of the single most important events in human history, an event which smashed centuries of tsarist autocracy, birthed the world’s first socialist state and opened a new era, the era of international proletarian revolution.

The Soviet state which Lenin helped to found would go on to make stunning achievements in human development, in science and the arts, women’s liberation, minority rights, the defeat of fascism and in the ideological and material support for decolonisation.

But in 2024 the Soviet Union is gone and has been for decades. Capitalism has proven itself to be more adaptable than was anticipated a century ago.

What does this mean for Lenin’s legacy?

If Lenin were alive today he would not lament or slump in defeat over the fate of the Soviet Union.

Nor would he content himself with navel-gazing, harking back to a halcyon time or endlessly rehashing battles past.

Lenin would not expect this of the movement he inspired.

Lenin would again ask himself and the movement — “What is to be done?” and then set about doing it with a singular determination and an invincible will to win.

The analysis of monopoly and imperialism that Lenin developed is even more relevant today than when first written. Lenin’s concept of a vanguard communist party has proven itself to be a powerful and, so far, the only model of leading the struggle to take and hold working-class state power and begin the advance on the path to socialism.

The destruction of the USSR by imperialism does not vitiate Soviet socialism’s countless achievements. The lessons gained by that first experiment are carried forward and applied in the many socialist states and the communist parties which continue to advance today.

Lenin’s legacy did not die with the Soviet Union. It lives on today in the world historic movement that he forged.

For all those determined to change the world and create a society free from exploitation and oppression, Lenin’s ideas and guide to action have only been vindicated and become more fundamental in the century that has passed.
​
Lenin lives — live like Lenin.

The recent political events of state courts in Colorado and Maine barring Donald Trump from running in the 2024 election should be of intense interest to Communists in the USA. While center-left “progressives” and those who tail the Democrats applaud this decision by the state courts, this is not a beneficial development for anti-imperialists or for all Americans who value our civil liberties. In the United States since the period of McCarthyism and the Cold War, the civil liberties of the American people have been on a precipitous decline. From the Smith Act, the construction of an anti-communist deep state through the FBI, the Patriot Act, and other transgressions on the liberty of the American working class, bourgeois democracy is waning in the United States. 

Since its revolutionary beginning, our country has always been a limited bourgeois democracy, even though the revolution represented the first of its kind. From American chattel slavery to the limitations on voting, to the Electoral College, the Supreme Court’s power post-Marbury vs Madison, and the existence of a bi-cameral legislative branch, these institutions were intentionally constructed by the land-owning and wealthy in the new Republic to restrict the power of the American yeoman farmer, smallholder, petty bourgeoise, and the nascent American proletariat--in sum, the majoritarian power of the working class. Throughout the 19th century to the present day, the American people have constantly waged a revolutionary struggle to expand upon bourgeois democratic rights and the power of the working class. 

From the struggle for universal suffrage without the precondition of property, to the abolitionist movement, the revolutionary uprisings such as Nat Turner's slave rebellion, Harpers Ferry, Bleeding Kansas, the Civil War against the reactionary Confederacy, the land reform and revolution of reconstruction, to the labor movement, socialist movement, the anti-fascist war of 1941-1945 and the Civil Rights Movement. The American people have a revolutionary tradition to be proud of which will form the basis for future progressive aspirations of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness via a people's government and working-class power. With this context, it is important for Communists in America, to recognize and actively struggle against the regressing political situation in the United States. ​

It is a basic democratic right that all Americans of a certain age and meeting citizenship requirements may run for elected office. But this basic freedom is presently under attack, as it was in the past. In the 1860 Election, Lincoln was arbitrarily and unconstitutionally barred from the ballot in almost the entire South. This was due to Lincoln’s refusal to countenance the cannibalistic expansion of American slavery, for this, the 1860 election was thoroughly rigged against the progressive Lincoln. Despite, this Lincoln was victorious in 1860 and would manage to lead the United States and a grand anti-slavery coalition in the turbulent years of the American Civil War.  

Another example of this utter lack of regard for upholding even the appearance of bourgeois democracy was when southern states barred Communist Party leader William Z. Foster from ballots during his 1932 presidential run. The American Communist Party was the only political party at this time with a thoroughly anti-racist, anti-Jim Crow platform. For this, southern states barred him from the ballot, fearing an outpour of support for William Z. Foster and an open opponent of Jim Crow. William Z. Foster suffered horrific treatment during this campaign, being arrested at every train stop, enduring torture by local police and interrogation, and eventually having a nervous breakdown. ​

From Heidegger's Nazism to Habermas's Zionism, the suffering of the 'Other' is of little consequence 

Imagine if Iran, Syria, Lebanon, or Turkey - fully backed, armed and diplomatically protected by Russia and China - had the will and the wherewithal to bomb Tel Aviv for three months, day and night, murder tens of thousands of Israelis, maim countless more and make millions homeless, and turn the city into a heap of uninhabitable rubble, like Gaza today.

Just imagine it for a few seconds: Iran and its allies deliberately targeting populated parts of Tel Aviv, hospitals, synagogues, schools, universities, libraries - or indeed any populated place - to ensure maximum civilian casualties. They would tell the world they were just looking for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet.  

Ask yourself what the US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia and Germany in particular would do within 24 hours of the onslaught of this fictional scenario. 

Now come back to reality, and consider the fact that since 7 October (and for decades before that date), Tel Aviv’s western allies have not only witnessed what Israel has done to the Palestinian people, but have also provided it with military equipment, bombs, munitions and diplomatic coverage, while American media outlets have offered ideological justifications for the slaughter and genocide of Palestinians.  
​
The aforementioned fictional scenario would not be tolerated for a day by the existing world order. With the military thuggery of the US, Europe, Australia and Canada fully behind Israel, we helpless people of the world, just like Palestinians, do not count. This is not just a political reality; it is also pertinent to the moral imaginary and philosophical universe of the thing that calls itself “the West”.  

Those of us outside the European sphere of moral imagination do not exist in their philosophical universe. Arabs, Iranians and Muslims; or people in Asia, Africa and Latin America - we do not have any ontological reality for European philosophers, except as a metaphysical menace that must be conquered and quieted. 

Beginning with Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and continuing with Emmanuel Levinas and Slavoj Zizek, we are oddities, things, knowable objects that Orientalists were tasked with deciphering. As such, the murder of tens of thousands of us by Israel, or the US and its European allies, does not cause the slightest pause in the minds of European philosophers.  

Tribal European audiences
​
If you doubt that, just take a look at leading European philosopher Jurgen Habermas and a few of his colleagues, who in an astoundingly barefaced act of cruel vulgarity, have come out in support of Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians. The question is no longer what we might think of Habermas, now 94, as a human being. The question is what we might think of him as a social scientist, philosopher and critical thinker. Does what he thinks matter to the world anymore, if it ever did?  

The world has been asking similar questions about another major German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, in light of his pernicious affiliations with Nazism. In my opinion, we must now ask such questions about Habermas’s violent Zionism and the significant consequences for what we might think of his entire philosophical project?

​If Habermas has not an iota of space in his moral imagination for people such as Palestinians, do we have any reason to consider his entire philosophical project as being in any way related to the rest of humanity - beyond his immediate tribal European audiences?  
​
In an open letter to Habermas, distinguished Iranian sociologist Asef Bayat said he “contradicts his own ideas” when it comes to the situation in Gaza. With all due respect, I beg to differ. I believe Habermas’s disregard for Palestinian lives is entirely consistent with his Zionism. It is perfectly consistent with the worldview in which non-Europeans are not completely human, or are “human animals”, as Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has openly declared.

This utter disregard for Palestinians is deeply rooted in the German and European philosophical imagination. The common wisdom is that out of the guilt of the Holocaust, Germans have developed a solid commitment to Israel. 

But to the rest of the world, as now evidenced by the magnificent document that South Africa has presented to the International Court of Justice, there is a perfect consistency between what Germany did during its Nazi era and what it is now doing during its Zionist era.

I believe that Habermas’s position is in line with the German state policy of partaking in the Zionist slaughter of Palestinians. It is also in line with what passes for the “German left”, with their equally racist, Islamophobic and xenophobic hatred of Arabs and Muslims, and their wholesale support for the genocidal actions of the Israeli settler colony.

We must be forgiven if we thought what Germany had today was not Holocaust guilt, but genocide nostalgia, as it has vicariously indulged in Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians over the past century (not just the past 100 days).  

Moral depravity

The charge of Eurocentrism that is consistently levelled against European philosophers’ conception of the world is not based merely on an epistemic flaw in their thinking. It is a consistent sign of moral depravity. On multiple past occasions, I have pointed out the incurable racism at the heart of European philosophical thinking and its most celebrated representatives today.
​
This moral depravity is not just a political faux pas or an ideological blind spot. It is written deeply into their philosophical imaginations, which have remained incurably tribal.  

Here, we must recap the glorious Martinican poet Aime Cesaire’s famous statement: “Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the 20th century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for [Arab, Indian and African peoples].” 
​
Palestine is today an extension of the colonial atrocities Cesaire cites in this passage. Habermas appears ignorant that his endorsement of the slaughter of Palestinians is completely consistent with what his ancestors did in Namibia during the Herero and Namaqua genocide. Like the proverbial ostrich, German philosophers have stuck their heads inside their European delusions, thinking the world does not see them for what they are.  

​​Ultimately, in my view, Habermas has not said or done anything surprising or contradictory; quite the contrary. He has been entirely consistent with the incurable tribalism of his philosophical pedigree, which had falsely assumed a universal posture. 

The world is now disabused of that false sense of universality. Philosophers such as VY Mudimbe in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Walter Mignolo or Enrique Dussel in Argentina, or Kojin Karatani in Japan have far more legitimate claims to universality than Habermas and his ilk ever did.  

In my opinion, the moral bankruptcy of Habermas’s statement on Palestine marks a turning point in the colonial relationship between European philosophy and the rest of the world. The world has been awoken from the false slumber of European ethno-philosophy. Today, we owe this liberation to the global suffering of peoples such as the Palestinians, whose prolonged, historic heroism and sacrifices have finally dismantled the barefaced barbarity at the foundation of “western civilisation”.  
​
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

The perpetual production of ever-changing forms of poverty is an inevitable part of the creative destruction that characterizes capitalism. The form of the poverty changes, because capitalism is dynamic and constantly changing, but poverty remains. The production of poverty is not only an inevitable but also a necessary part of capitalism. This has been the case in Britain, the world’s first capitalist industrial power, for the past eight hundred years.

Poverty is in large part about peoples’ relationship to the means of production—they have been pushed off the land, they do not have a job, or the job they have is poorly paid, part-time, or irregular. This has been the case for centuries; it is the case today.

Two British authors describe the constant presence of poverty in working class life: “The single most unifying factor in working class history has been poverty: the threat of poverty, the fear of poverty, the certainty of poverty.”1 Precarious work—and indeed, the precarity of life itself—has been a constant. As Palmer put it, “work has never been anything but a precarious foundation of life lived on the razor’s edge of dispossession.”2

By the end of the seventeenth century, it is estimated that some 40 percent of Britain’s population had been forced off the land in previous centuries by the enclosure movement, a necessary precursor to the emergence of capitalism. Most were made poor as a result—the detritus of the long death of feudal society. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries these “masterless men” tramped the roads, where they “existed in alarming numbers…and too often were unemployable rejects of a society in economic transformation,” equivalent to “the unemployed of the Great Depression of the 1930s, or the jobless millions of today’s inner cities.”3

Fierce labor legislation was enacted throughout the sixteenth century to push vagabonds—those who were able-bodied but not working, and therefore poor— into employment. For example, a vagabond could be “tied to the end of a cart naked and beaten with whips…till his body be bloody,” and his ears could be cut off.4 Vagrants could be branded with a hot iron with the mark of “V.” In 1590, vagrants in Middlesex, for example, “were being whipped and branded…at the rate of one a day.”5 The point of such punishment was to force the poor into the paid labor force.

The poor often rebelled. Enclosure riots increased dramatically in the late sixteenth century. When the Duke of Norfolk asked to speak to the leader of a rebellious crowd, their answer reflected the anger of the times: “Since you ask who is our captain, forsooth his name is Poverty, for he and his cousin Necessity, have brought us to this doing.”6 By the end of the century, vagrancy was so widespread that it resulted in the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601.

The 1601 Poor Law was in effect a threadbare social assistance system that provided to the “deserving” poor—the sick, the aged, those with disabilities, for example—just enough to prevent them from dying in the streets or rebelling. It excluded those deemed able to work (the “undeserving” poor) who could be forced into the paid labour force or punished for noncompliance. The idea that relief should be directed at the “deserving” poor and consist of a bare minimum would persist over the following four centuries to today, as would the belief in punishing the “undeserving” poor.

Many who were poor during the two centuries following the Elizabethan Poor Law made their way to the cities, where they were plunged into more poverty and precarity. Consider the case of children. London in the eighteenth century “teemed with abandoned children. Over a thousand a year were being left on the rubbish heaps, in the streets, alleys and other public thoroughfares of the city.”7 The most common “solution” was to set them to work. For example, in 1770 it was recommended that “poor children be sent at the age of four to workhouses.… There is considerable use in their being, somehow or other, constantly employed at least 12 hours a day,” so that they might be “habituated to constant labour.”8

In those workhouses, massive numbers died. A 1767 Committee of the House of Commons reported that from 1741 to 1748, of the 1,429 children either born in a London workhouse or brought there at less than one year of age, only nineteen survived, slightly better than 1 percent.9 Based on 1746–50 data, historians Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker conclude that “St. Margaret’s workhouse was quite simply a place of death.”10  At St. Luke’s workhouse in London between 1757 and 1763, all fifty-three children under the age of 5 died—100 percent.11 Death rates of children in the 50 percent range were common in British workhouses in the years leading up to the Industrial Revolution.

Conditions were deliberately made cruel in order to force people to work in the mines and mills of the day. As explained a member of the Poor Law Commission, “I wish to see the Poor House looked to with dread by our labouring class…for without this, where is the needful stimulus to industry?”12

The New Poor Law of 1834 was similarly designed to force people to work. Work in the “dark satanic mills” was dangerous; hours were long and difficult; the pay was paltry. Nobody wanted such jobs. Force was necessary.

In the coal mines, children under the age of 10 could be found on all fours in low-ceilinged mine shafts, ropes around their waists and chains between their legs, pulling loaded coal carts like horses. Parents took children starting at 8 or 9 years of age into the pits, in most cases because their families needed the extra earnings. Women took children as young as 6 years old into the pits and sometimes used drugs, opium for example, to keep the little ones quiet. The result was that “a great number of infants perish from an overdose, or, as more commonly happens, painfully and insidiously. Those who escape with life become pale and sickly children…with a ruined constitution.”13

Many of the children found “infesting” the streets of London were rounded up, loaded into carts and forcibly hauled off to the Lancashire cotton mills. As described by a contemporary, “It is a very common practice in the great populace parishes in London to bind children in large numbers to the proprietors of cotton-mills in Lancashire and Yorkshire, at a distance of 200 miles. The children, who are sent off by wagon loads at a time, are as much lost forever to their parents as if they were shipped off to the West Indies.”14

In the mills, children often worked twelve or more hours in high temperatures, were beaten to induce work, injured by machinery, and even died from malnutrition. Joseph Habergram, disabled from work in the mills, told an 1833 parliamentary committee, “I had 14 1/2 hours actual labour, when seven years of age…strapping was the means by which children kept at work.”15 The son of factory owner and reformer David Owen wrote, “In some large factories, from one-fourth to one-fifth of the children were either cripples or otherwise deformed, or permanently injured by excessive toil, sometimes by brutal abuse.”16

This is capitalism. Its enormous profits were produced on the backs of workers and children. It made Britain the world’s leading industrial and imperial power—and it produced horrendous forms of poverty as a necessary part of the process. This is what Marx meant when he said, “A matter of a million paupers in the British workhouse is as inseparable from British prosperity as the existence of 18 to 20 millions in gold in the Bank of England.”17 The production of poverty is inseparable from the creation of wealth.

Similarly, profits from slavery fuelled the Industrial Revolution. Between 1630 and 1807, British slave merchants bought and sold an estimated 2,500,000 Africans. The trade in enslaved people was enormously profitable. Those profits were the result of a managerial strategy on the cotton plantations of the U.S. Deep South, described by Edward Baptist as “torture,” management by the whip. “The whip made cotton,” and slave-produced cotton made the Industrial Revolution.18

The importance of slavery and cotton to the Industrial Revolution is reflected in the case of Liverpool. Liverpool merchants controlled as much as 85 percent of the British slave trade. By the late 1830s, almost 90 percent of all British cotton imports entered through Liverpool. The city’s entire power structure was populated by those directly involved in the cotton-based slave trade. In 1787, thirty-seven of the city’s forty-one councillors “were slave-ship owners or major investors in or suppliers to the trade. All of the 20 mayors between 1787 and 1807 financed or owned slave-ships.”19 Wealth that flowed from the slave trade created Liverpool’s major banks, which in turn made vast profits by advancing the credit needed to build the cotton plantations in the Deep South. Collateral was typically the slaves themselves. Those supporting what has been called the “West Indian Interest” in slavery included “hundreds of MPs, peers, civil servants, businessmen, financiers, landowners, clergymen, intellectuals, journalists, publishers, soldiers, sailors, and judges, and all of them went to extreme lengths to preserve and protect colonial slavery.”20 Industrial capitalism would not have been born in Britain were it not for the blood of cotton and slavery.

The cotton produced in the U.S. by enslaved Africans was then processed by wage slaves—often children and, by the 1830s, increasingly women—in the Lancashire mills. The finished product, cotton clothing, was exported, primarily to British colonies such as India, undermining the production of clothing there. For centuries, India had been the leading producer of the world’s finest cotton. What Sven Beckert describes as “war capitalism”—the use of force and violence to open markets and secure labour and resources—virtually destroyed the Indian cotton industry. “India was systematically deindustrialized and became in turn a market for the Lancashire cottons: in 1820 the subcontinent took only 11 million yards; but by 1840 it already took 145 million yards.”21 Slaves picked cotton under brutal conditions in the Deep South; women and children processed it in Lancashire mills under brutal conditions; and the sale of the resulting products laid waste to what had been a thriving clothing industry in India. Poverty barely describes the condition of those involved in this global “market.”

Poverty—brutally inhumane poverty—was produced at every point in what was a global capitalist process. Slavery, colonialism, and forced labour were necessary elements of capitalism’s emergence. Capitalism generated, at the same time and as part of the same process, massive profits and horrific poverty and grief. As Marx wrote, capitalism came into the world “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”22

Nor is poverty a thing of capitalism’s past. Leap forward a century and a half, through the vast poverty of the Great Depression of the 1930s—when millions of British workers suffered the ravages of mass unemployment and mass poverty, and the cruel indignities of the bitterly hated Household Means Test and the “genuinely seeking work” test—to the Thatcher era of the 1980s and beyond. Britain’s capitalist economy was in trouble in the late 1970s, in response to which the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher—inspired by the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman—were elected in 1979.

Thatcher’s values were essentially Victorian. She believed the UK’s economic problems were caused by the welfare state. She opposed all forms of welfare and believed the poor should be forced to work. Before becoming prime minister, she was one of six Conservative members of Parliament who voted in favour of restoring flogging for the poor, as done four centuries earlier to force vagabonds to work. In her third term, she introduced a full-fledged workfare system. Workfare would force people into the lower reaches of the labor market, just as the workhouses and the 1834 Poor Law had been designed to do a century and a half earlier.

Thatcher’s governments deliberately created poverty. Their economic strategy included deep cuts to supports for the poor, a weakening of union power via “ferocious anti-trade union legislation unparalleled in Europe,” large cuts in taxation for high income earners, and the unleashing of market forces, together with an attempt to shift British culture to a more individualist and pro-enterprise orientation.23 Britain’s manufacturing sector was crushed and unemployment skyrocketed, reaching levels even higher and of longer duration than in the 1930s. By 1996, in Liverpool’s Merseyside, 37 percent of working age men were not employed, one in five households in Britain were without a working adult, and the number of adults living in households without work had doubled between 1979 and 1993–94.24 For Norman Lamont, chancellor of the exchequer, this was a “price worth paying” to restore the health of capitalism in Britain.25 Poverty was deliberately created to restore the conditions for capital accumulation, for profitability.

The result was an explosion of poverty. In 1999, after two decades of Thatcher-led and Thatcher-inspired Conservative governments, “there were more people living in or on the margins of poverty than at any time in British history. According to the most rigorous survey of poverty and social exclusion ever undertaken, by the end of 1999 approximately 14 million people in Britain, or 25 percent of the population, were objectively living in poverty.”26

Beyond the cold numbers, there was “disturbing evidence of desperate poverty on a scale not witnessed in Britain since the 1930s…diseases associated with poverty and malnutrition, such as rickets and tuberculosis, which most health experts had hoped were banished forever, had returned.”27 Conservative Member of Parliament Ian Gilmour was moved to say that “The Thatcherite treatment of the poor was unforgiveable.”28

The New Labour party took office in 1997. Poverty and inequality had reached levels unprecedented in modern times. Yet little changed in their approach. Danny Dorling described New Labour as “Thatcherism continued.” Colin Crouch called New Labour “Thatcher’s well-behaved step-children, her direct progeny.” Thomas Piketty wrote that New Labour “largely validated and perpetrated the fiscal reforms of the Thatcher era.”29 When Thatcher was asked what her greatest achievement was, she replied, “Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.”30

It may be that their minds were not much changed. Blair did not betray his roots, “as he had no roots to betray,” he “didn’t have a socialist bone in his body.”31 In a 1995 speech to the British Chamber of Commerce, Blair said, “old Labour thought the role of government was to interfere with the market. New Labour believes the role of government is to make the market more dynamic, to provide people and business with the means to success.”32 It followed logically that New Labour would abandon its long-held commitment to equality of outcomes, in the Thatcherite belief that such efforts would be a constraint on the economy.

Many key New Labour figures, including Blair, despised old Labour. Roy Hattersley, typically seen as part of the old Labour Right, said that New Labour abandoned “the disadvantaged,” adding that socialism “requires the bedrock principle to be the redistribution of power and wealth.”33 Blair and New Labour were adamantly opposed to the redistribution of power and wealth.

New Labour made some gains in reducing the poverty of children and pensioners—the so-called deserving poor. However, these gains were not long lasting, and inequality, which had risen dramatically under Thatcher, soared to new and obscene levels. As described by Peter Mandelson, an intellectual founder of New Labour, “We are intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich, as long as they pay their taxes.”34 Yet New Labour cut taxes for upper income earners and drove corporate taxation to levels lower than ever in British history and the lowest in major industrial countries.  The Sunday Times called the New Labour years a “golden age for the very rich.”35

New Labour’s approach had been to support people in moving out of poverty, via various “anti-poverty” programs. However, Hattersley was surely correct that “a Labour government should not be talking about escape routes from poverty and deprivation.” The task, rather, ought to be “to change society in such a way that there is no poverty and deprivation from which to escape.”36 New Labour had no such commitment.

Housing for the poor—for centuries a dismal and often horrific aspect of poverty in Britain—worsened under New Labour, their record on social housing being worse than Thatcher’s.  Council estates, once the proud homes of the British working class, were increasingly seen as the homes of the undeserving poor and were allowed to deteriorate even further than they had under Thatcher. New Labour was “ideologically opposed to building council housing” and cut in half—”to the extraordinarily low figure of 0.3 percent”—the proportion of GDP spent on council housing.37

Young adults in marginal housing estates—“sink estates”—were relegated to poorly paid, no-benefits/no future jobs at the bottom of the labor market. These are the jobs that capitalists now create. New Labour’s response was to build on Thatcher’s workfare strategy, to the point that Britain became the world’s leading “workfare state,” the logic being “workfare is not about creating jobs for people that don’t have them; it is about creating workers for jobs that nobody wants,”38 which is precisely what the workhouses and the 1834 New Poor Law were designed to do. In the face of these dead ends, young people rioted in 2001. As the Guardian wrote in May of that year, the riots “were the result of tensions that have been brewing for years and whose sources are not mysterious. The first tension was based in poverty. As in every British riot, the struggle erupted in a place of desperate economic hardship”—yet the blame was placed on the rioters, “and the community pathologies that have generated them.”39

In 2011, the year after New Labour left office, civil unrest erupted again, generating a rash of hateful blaming of the poor. The Telegraph ran an article titled “London Riots: The Underclass Lashes Out.” Media coverage used such language as “scum, thugs, feral rats.… The term scum was the favourite pejorative: ‘the scum class,’ ‘verminous waste.’” The Justice Minister called rioters “our feral underclass.” Prime Minister David Cameron attributed the riots to a “moral collapse,” insisting “these riots were not about poverty” but rather “about behaviour.” Boris Johnson, then London’s mayor, considered it “revolting” to advance explanations related to poverty.40

A more informed explanation can be located in the words of a 22-year-old man involved in the 2011 riots: “All I can tell you is that me, myself and the group I was in, none of us have got jobs, yeah? I been out of work now coming up two years…and it’s just like a depression, man, that you sink into.… I felt like I needed to be there to just say ‘look, this is what’s gonna happen if there’s no jobs offered to us out there.’”41

Capitalism produces poverty, but the poor have always shouldered the blame. Even more than blamed, they have been feared, reviled, and hated. During the early years of the centuries-long enclosure movement, those tramping the roads were called “lawless beasts” committing “heinous deeds, detestable sins”; they were “the very filth and vermin of the commonwealth.”42 Centuries later, in the late nineteenth century, Charles Booth, a relatively sympathetic recorder of poverty in London, said about the poor, “their very life is the life of savages.… They degrade whatever they touch.43 About the Irish poor, who had moved into England in large numbers especially in the mid-nineteenth century, a Liverpool physician wrote in 1845: “The Irish seem to be contented amidst the dirt and filth…they merely seem to care for that which will support animal existence.”44 A century later, in the late 1940s and ’50s, mothers in what were then called “problem families” were identified as the cause of poverty. They were “feckless mothers,” raising children who were “dull and feeble-minded.”45 In the ’60s, a hostile media blamed poverty on “Britain’s army of dole queue swindlers,” triggering an outburst of “Scroungerphobia” that included headlines like “Get the Scroungers!”46

It continues. The May 24, 2023 edition of the British Guardian reported that the Right wing of the Conservative Party was blaming Britain’s economic problems on “slackers” and “idlers.” Capitalism keeps producing poverty; the poor keep on being blamed for their poverty. This is “poverty propaganda.”47 It is functional to capitalism.

Throughout the past eight hundred years, there has almost never been a serious attempt to dramatically reduce the poverty that capitalism produces. There is one important exception. The 1945–51 Labour governments were outstanding in meeting the needs of the poor, despite never, as far as I can tell, using the term “anti-poverty programs.” Their approach was universal programs, that is, programs that benefitted the entire working-class population—the National Health Service; massive, good quality housing for the working class; a National Insurance Act that paid unemployment and sickness benefits to all working people; and a dramatic reduction in the numbers of the unemployed.
The ideological basis of these policies was a commitment to move away from a targeted, residual and charity-based approach to an egalitarian, inclusive, and universal approach. All citizens were to have access to services of a roughly equal standard, and by this means, a floor was to be established for all. This insistence upon universality—opposed tenaciously by Conservatives—can legitimately be seen as an attack on class privilege.

So too can changes to taxation. The Labour governments placed a surtax on incomes over £10,000 and death duties of 75 percent on estates worth more than £21,500. By 1951, the marginal tax rate on high incomes was over 90 percent.48

The 1945–51 Labour governments faced immense financial pressure—John Maynard Keynes called the 1947 financial crisis following the termination of Lend-Lease “a financial Dunkirk.”49 They faced massive opposition from the private sector and the British establishment. A junior Labour minister described rising to speak in the House of Commons and facing “the cold, implacable eyes of that row of well-tailored tycoons, who hated the Labour government with a passion and fear which made them dedicated men in their determination to get it out of office.”50

In the face of these huge financial and political pressures, Labour displayed enormous courage and a rock-solid commitment to meeting the needs of working people. The result was that poverty plummeted. As Kenneth Morgan wrote,  “All the indices—for instance, the statistics of medical officers of health, or of school medical or dental officers—suggest that the standard of health and of robust physique steadily improved during the entire 1945–51 period, from infants, whose survival rates continued to improve, to old people, whose expectation of a long and happy retirement steadily lengthened.”51 Quantitative studies of the incidence of poverty were consistent with these other indicators: poverty declined dramatically.52 It was not eliminated, but never before had it been so dramatically cut—a fact confirmed by a later, revised analysis of B. Seebohm Rowntree’s and G. R. Lavers’s 1951 study.53

There was much still to be done. The emergent welfare state ought to have been “merely the first installment of a much more far-reaching program of radical reform.”54 That did not happen. The huge steps taken by the postwar Labour governments were not built upon by later Labour governments in ways that were both necessary and possible. Britain moved from being a social policy leader in the immediate postwar years to a social policy laggard—gradually at first, as the result in part of revisionist Labour Party policies, then more deliberately and dramatically with the elections starting in 1979 of Thatcher’s Conservative governments, and, finally, with the efforts of New Labour. “The welfare state had been Labour’s greatest achievement. It had been damaged and weakened under Mrs. Thatcher. But its wholesale destruction was to be New Labour’s historic mission.”55

Poverty continues to be a massive problem in Britain in the third decade of the twenty-first century. In 2018, Philip Alston, the United Nations rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, following an investigation of poverty in Britain, accused the government of the “systematic immiseration of a significant part of the British population.”56 In November 2023, his successor, the UN’s current rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Oliver De Schutter, stated “things have got worse.”57 Housing conditions for many are appalling. Homelessness grows relentlessly. Precarious labor abounds. Food banks are ubiquitous. Fuel poverty is widespread. The poor suffer depleted health and shortened lives. Drug addiction is rampant and destructive, especially for the poor. Punishment and imprisonment of the poor is a staple of today’s response to poverty, as it was under and prior to the Poor Laws. Hopelessness and despair weigh heavily on those who are poor. Vast human suffering is the result of this age-old scourge, today as ever. Still, the poor continue to be blamed, even reviled and hated, for their poverty—a poverty caused not by their moral and behavioral failings, but by the fundamental logic of capitalism.

Capitalism’s logic produces poverty. It does so because the surplus generated in the process of capital accumulation is invested where capitalists believe it will generate the greatest future profit. It is not invested in meeting peoples’ needs if doing so is not expected to produce profits. It is, for example, not invested in adequate and affordable housing for those who are living in poverty despite the great need, because adequate and affordable housing for the poor is not profitable. This is the case even though it is known that inadequate and unaffordable housing contributes to the further production and reproduction of poverty. The entire point of the capitalist system is the maximization of profit, not the meeting of human needs and certainly not the elimination of poverty.

If there is a solution in today’s world, the radical reformism of the 1945–51 Labour governments provides its broad outlines. The standard Left criticisms of those governments are mistaken. What those governments did was not simply “a modest program” largely indistinguishable from what was implemented in most advanced capitalist societies to varying extents. Nor can it be written off, as some Marxist scholars have done, as simply a means of stabilizing capitalism and taming the working class. Thus, John Saville argues that the achievements of those governments “are a necessary and essential part of the structure of advanced capitalist societies,” because they remove “the harshness and insecurity which is a built-in characteristic of industrial life.”58 Such analyses remove the class struggle that was the basis of Labour’s considerable achievements, and ignore the massive financial and political challenges that had to be overcome in order to do so. They ignore the class-based efforts of workers and their organizations over many decades to achieve these gains.

The more accurate approach is to acknowledge that Labour governments went an enormous distance in a remarkably short time to dramatically reduce poverty. They diverted fiscal resources away from individual consumption via rationing and invested in the creation of collective services that pulled millions out of poverty. As Dorothy Thompson described it, these collective services provided benefits “purely on the basis of need and not of cash payment.… This conception is a profoundly anti-capitalist one. It had to be fought for at every stage.” Therefore, “these are, objectively, victories for working class values within capitalist society.”59

Although the 1945–51 Labour governments were not revolutionary, significant improvements did occur in the lives of many of Britain’s poor, “as shown by oral history studies of the impact of the NHS. We do well to respect such testimony.”60 Tony Benn argued that given the circumstances of the time, the 1945–51 Labour governments achieved a “social revolution,” adding, “these things didn’t happen inexorably, they happened because a form of socialist, democratic and activist leadership was given at a critical moment.”61 These changes laid the foundation for what could have been a lasting end to poverty, had their initial steps been built upon, and had their vision and political courage been carried on by their successors—but that did not happen. It is the Labour successors to the 1945–51 governments who must bear the responsibility for the failure to build upon the foundation laid by those governments.

Poverty will never be solved by capitalism, because capitalism produces poverty. Supporters of capitalism will continue to argue that all efforts must be directed to restoring economic growth, because only with more growth can the needs of the poor be met. Such claims are not to be believed. Unrestricted capitalism will constantly demand sacrifices for growth, with the goal of defeating poverty endlessly deferred.

Nor can poverty be solved by narrowly targeted “anti-poverty” programs. They have the effect of pulling some people out of poverty, while leaving intact the system, the logic of which relentlessly produces poverty. Further, because they are targeted at the poor, and the poor have always been blamed for their poverty and even hated as a result, such programs lack broad public support and are minimalist as a result.

To dramatically reduce poverty, radical reforms are necessary. These include a massive redistribution of income and wealth; putting to work large numbers of people to do the many things that need to be done and paying them a living wage; adopting universal programs that support all working people (and not just the poor); and paying for these measures with a genuinely progressive tax system that particularly taxes those accumulating ethically insupportable and economically destructive amounts of income and wealth.
​
Doing all of this would require a clear ideological commitment to socialist or strong social democratic principles and the courage to adopt and defend such measures in the face of the fierce opposition they would surely generate. Failure to take such steps will mean that capitalism will continue, without end, its relentless production of poverty.

​Notes
1. Trevor Blackwell and Jeremy Seabrook, A World Still to Win: The Reconstruction of the Post-War Working Class (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), 39.
2. Bryan Palmer, “Reconsideration of Class: Precariousness as Proletarianization,” in Socialist Register 2014: Registering Class, eds. Leo Panitch, Greg Albo, and Vivek Chibber, (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 1985), 44.
3. A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985).
4. William P. Quigley, “Five Hundred Years of English Poor Laws, 1349–1834: Regulating the Working and Nonworking Poor,” Akron Law Review 30, no. 1 (1997): 12.
5. Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), 287.
6. Catherina Lis and Hugo Soly, Poverty and Capitalism in Pre-Industrial Europe (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979), 85.
7. Tanya Evans, “Unfortunate Objects”: Lone Mothers in Eighteenth Century London (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 129.
8. Quoted in E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” in Essays in Social History, eds. M. W. Flinn and T. C. Smout, (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 59.
9. Dorothy Marshall, The English Poor in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 145.
10. Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City, 1690­1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 252­–53.
11. Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, Children in English Society, Volume I: From Tudor Times to the Eighteenth Century (London/Toronto: Routledge and Kegan Paul and the University of Toronto Press, 1969), 181.
12. Derek Fraser, Evolution of the British Welfare State: A History of Social Policy Since the Industrial Revolution, 2nd edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1984), 41.
13. Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, Children in English Society, Volume II: From Tudor Times to the Eighteenth Century (London/Toronto: Routledge and Kegan Paul and the University of Toronto Press, 1973), 406.
14. Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Penguin, 1991), 58.
15. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Penguin, 2015), 177.
16. Quoted in J. T. Ward, The Factory Movement:183-1855 (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd, 1962), 22.
17. Quoted in Palmer, “Reconsideration of Class,” 54.
18. Edward Baptist, “Towards a Political Economy of Slave Labour: Hands, Whipping Machines and Modern Power,” Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development in eds. Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 52.
19. Norma Myers, Reconstructing the Black Past: Black in Britain 1780–1830 (London: Frank Cass and Co., 1996), viii.
20. Michael Taylor, The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery (London: Bodley Head, 2020), 311.
21. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848 (New York: New American Library, 1962), 53.
22. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 926.
23. Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (London: Fontana Press, 1997), 506.
24. Paul Convery, “Unemployment,” in Britain Divided: The Growth of Social Exclusion in the 1980s and 1990s, eds. Alan Walker and Carol Walker, (London: CPAG Ltd., 1997), 187, emphasis in original; and Helga Pile and Catherine O’Donnell, “Earnings, Taxation and Wealth,” in Britain Divided, 32.
25. Quoted in Convery, “Unemployment.”
26. Christina Pantanzis, David Gordon and Ruth Levitas, Poverty and Social Exclusion in Britain: The Millenium Survey (Bristol: Policy Press, 2006), 1.
27. Alan Walker, “Introduction,” in Britain Divided, 9.
28. Quoted in Pete Dorey, British Conservatism: The Politics and Philosophy of Inequality (London: I. B. Taurus, 1997), 101.
29. Danny Dorling, “Mapping the Thatcherite Legacy: the Human Geography of Inequality in Britain since the 1970s,” in Stephen Farrell and Colin Hay (eds.), The Legacy of Thatcherism: Assessing and Exploring Thatcherite Social and Economic Policies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 260; Colin Crouch, “The Parabola of Working Class Politics,” in The New Social Democracy, eds. Andrew Gamble and Tony Wright, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 70; and Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 845.
30. Quoted in Leo Panitch, “Foreword: Reading the State in Capitalist Society,” in Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (Pontypool: Merlin Press, 2009), xiv.
31. Quoted in Richard Heffernan, New Labour and Thatcherism: Political Change in Britain (London: Macmillan, 2000), 22.
32. Tony Blair, A Journey: My Political Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 45.
33. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, The End of Parliamentary Socialism: From New Left to New Labour (London: Verso, 1997), 232.
34. Quoted in Andrew Rawnsley, The End of the Party (London: Penguin, 2010), 6.
35. Pat Thane, “Poverty in the Divided Kingdom,” History and Policy (September 2018): 438, historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/rss_2.0.
36. Quoted in Stephen Meredith, “Mr. Crosland’s Nightmare? New Labour and Inequality in Historical Perspective,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 8 (2006): 244.
37. Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (London: Verso, 2012), 230; Rodney Lowe, The Welfare State in Britain Since 1945, 3rd edition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 429.
38. Jamie Peck, Workfare States (New York and London: The Guilford Press, 2001), 6.
39. Claire Alexander, “Imagining the Asian Gang: Ethnicity, Masculinity and Youth after ‘the Riots,’” Critical Social Policy 24, no. 4 (2004): 528.
40. Imogen Tyler, “The Riots of the Underclass? Stigmatization, Mediation and the Government of Poverty and Disadvantage in Neoliberal Britain,” Sociological Research Online 18, no. 4 (2013): 3.1, 3.3, 3.4, 6.1.
41. Paul Lewis and Tim Newburn, Reading the Riots: Investigating England’s Summer of Disorder (London: The Guardian and London School of Economics, 2011), 25.
42. Quoted in Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (New York: Longman, 1988), 23, 25.
43. Albert Fried and Richard Elman, Charles Booth’s London (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968), 11.
44. Ian Law, A History of Race and Racism in Liverpool, 1660–1950 (Liverpool: Merseyside Community Relations Council, 1981), 22.
45. Pat Starkey, “The Feckless Mother: Women, Poverty and Social Workers in War-time and Post-War England,” Women’s History Review 9, no. 3 (2000): 542; Pat Starkey, “The Medical Officer of Health, the Social Worker, and the Problem Family, 1943–1968: The Case of Family Service Units,” Society for the Social History of Medicine 11, (1998): 430–31.
46. Molly Meacher, Scrounging on the Welfare: The Scandal of the 4 Week Rule (London: Arrow Books, 1974), 40; Alan Deacon, In Search of the Scrounger: The Administration of Unemployment Insurance in Britain 1920–1931, Occasional Papers on Social Administration no. 60 (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1976); Daniel McArthur and Aaron Reeves, “The Rhetoric of Recessions: How British Newspapers Talk About the Poor When Unemployment Rises, 1896–2000,” Sociology 53, no. 6 (2019): 1007.
47. Tracy Shildrick, “Lessons from Grenfell: Poverty Propaganda, Stigma and Class Power,” Sociological Review Monographs 66, no. 4 (2018).
48. Thane, “Poverty in the Divided Kingdom,” 191–92.
49. Henry Pelling, The Labour Governments, 1945–51 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 54.
50. David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945–51 (New York: Walker and Company, 2008), 172.
51. Kenneth Morgan, Labour in Power, 1945–51 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 370.
52. Seebohm Rowntree and G. R. Lavers, Poverty and the Welfare State (London: Longman’s, Green and Co, 1951).
53. Timothy J. Hatton and Roy E. Bailey, “Seebohm Rowntree and the Postwar Poverty Puzzle,” Economic History Review LIII, no. 3 (2000).
54. Jose Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 434.
55. Stuart Hall, “New Labour’s Double Shuffle,” Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies 27, no. 4 (2005): 321.
56. Philip Alston, Statement on Visit to the United Kingdom, by Professor Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights (Geneva: United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, 2018).
57. Robert Booth, “UK ‘in violation of international law’ over poverty levels, says UN envoy,” Guardian, November 5, 2023.
58. John Saville, “Labourism and the Labour Government,” in Paving the Third Way: The Critique of Parliamentary Government, ed. David Coates, (London: Merlin Press, 2003), 78.
59. Quoted in Palmer, “Reconsiderations on Class,” 202.
60. Robert Pearce, Attlee’s Labour Governments 1945–51 (London: Routledge, 1994), 76.
61. Quoted in Eric Hobsbawm, The Forward March of Labour Halted? (London: Verso, 1981), 79–80.

Iraqi security sources are warning of an ISIS revival in the country, which coincides all too neatly with the spike in Iraqi resistance operations against US bases in Iraq and Syria, and with widening regional instability caused by Israel's military assault on Gaza. 

More than six years after declaring victory over the terrorist organization, Iraqi intelligence reports now indicate that thousands of ISIS fighters are emerging unscathed, under the protection of US forces in two regions of western Iraq.

The missing piece of the puzzle
​
According to intelligence reports reviewed by The Cradle, at its height, ISIS consisted of more than 35,000 fighters in Iraq – 25,000 of these were killed, while more than 10,000 simply “disappeared.”
As an officer of one Iraqi intelligence agency recounts to The Cradle: 

Imprisoned ISIS officials admit that infiltrating that border is not an easy task, because of the strict control imposed by the Iraqi Border Guards and the use of modern technologies, such as thermal cameras. 

It therefore became necessary for the terror group to identify intermediaries capable of breaking through or bypassing these fortifications to transport its fighters across borders. 
​
An Iraqi security source, insisting on anonymity, tells The Cradle that the US plays a vital role in enabling these border violations:

The Iraqi security source adds that there are confirmed reports of US Chinook helicopters transporting fighters from eastern Syria to the Anbar desert in western Iraq and Jebel Hamreen, in the country's east.
Munir Adib, a researcher specializing in Islamist movements, extremist organizations, and international terrorism, confirms the possibility of the return of ISIS after the organization's “dozens of attacks in Syria and Iraq in the past few weeks,” which led to the death of tens of civilians and soldiers. 
According to Adib, “the international community's preoccupation with the Gaza and Russia-Ukraine wars gave ISIS an opportunity to reorganize its ranks, while continuing to receive internal and external logistical support.”

Manufacturing and harboring terrorism

Houran Valley is the largest of its kind in Iraq, extending 369 kilometers from the Iraqi-Saudi border to the Euphrates River near the city of Haditha in Anbar Governorate. Its topography is marked by soaring cliffs ranging in height between 150 to 200 meters, and includes the hills surrounding the valley and the sub-valleys that extend into its surroundings.

The valley was and still is one of the most dangerous security environments in the state. Terrorist groups use it as a safe haven because of its desert terrain, and distance from congested urban areas. The valley and its environs have witnessed numerous security incidents, most notably in December 2013, when ISIS killed the commander of the Iraqi army's Seventh Division, his assistant, the director of intelligence in Anbar Governorate, eight officers, and thirteen soldiers.

Iraqi MP Hassan Salem has called for launching a military operation to clear Houran Valley of terrorist fighters. He confirmed to The Cradle that “there are thousands of ISIS members in the valley receiving training in private camps, under American protection,” noting that US forces have “transferred to this area hundreds of ISIS members of different nationalities.”

US foreign policy, of course, is rife with historical evidence of the creation of proxy armed militias in West Asia and Latin America, often utilizing these organizations to overthrow governments in target countries. We know Washington has no aversion to allying with Islamist extremists largely because of its direct involvement with arming and financing the Afghan Mujahideen, from which the Taliban and Al Qaeda emerged.

An early US-ISIS connection exists quite clearly: the terrorist group's founding and second rank leaders were among the inmates of Camp Bucca prison in southern Iraq, an internment facility run by the US military. The roster of high-value terrorists captured, then set free by the Americans is quite extraordinary: ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, his successor Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, Haji Bakr, Abu Abdulrahman al-Bilawi, Abu Ayman al-Iraqi, among others.

Camp Bucca, known for abuses against its detainees, brought together extremist elements, slow-boiled this combustive formula for six years (2003-2009), then let the now well-networked extremists go free.

The religious officials of ISIS even say they used their time at the prison to obtain vows from prisoners to join the terrorist group after their release.

US intelligence also protected the terrorist organization indirectly, by allowing ISIS convoys to move between the cities that were under its control. Other forms of protection, according to Iraqi security experts, include refusing to implement death sentences issued by Iraqi courts against detained ISIS members, and establishing safe havens for the organization’s members in western and eastern Iraq.

ISIS: US foot soldiers in the regional war

In a speech on 5 January, Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah warned that the US was supporting an ISIS revival in the region.

The Cradle obtained security information monitoring the new activity of extremists in Lebanon, communications between these elements and their counterparts in Iraq and Syria, and suspicious money transfer activities among them.

Lebanese Army Intelligence also recently arrested a group of Lebanese and Syrians who were preparing to carry out security operations.

Importantly, this surge in terror activities comes at a time when the Lebanese resistance is engaged in a security and military battle with Israel, which may expand at any moment into open war. It is also notable that renewed ISIS activity is concentrated in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran; that is, in the countries that support the Palestinian resistance politically, militarily, and logistically.

On 4 January, ISIS officially claimed responsibility for two bombings in the Iranian city of Kerman that targeted memorial processions on the anniversary of the assassination of Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani by US forces. The dual explosions killed around 90 people and injured dozens, in an unprecedented attack targeting the biggest US-Israeli adversary in West Asia – just one day after Tel Aviv killed top Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut.

Before that, on 5 October 2023, ISIS drone-attacked an officers graduation ceremony at the Military College in the Syrian city of Homs, killing about 100 people. These attacks, and others in Iraq, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Africa, indicate that fresh blood, money, and weapons are being pumped into the ISIS organization’s arteries again.

A high-ranking PMU officer, who asked to remain unnamed, tells The Cradle that US forces are preventing Iraqi forces from approaching Houran Valley by attacking any security forces approaching the area. “This happened when American aircraft targeted units of the PMU that were attacking ISIS in the region,” he reveals, citing intelligence reports confirming the presence of dozens of ISIS members and other extremist organizations in the valley, where they receive training and equipment from US forces.
​
Security sources in the Anbar Operations Command confirm this information:

Concurrently, ISIS is expanding its operations in the east of Iraq, within the geographical triangle that includes eastern Salah al-Din Governorate, north-eastern Diyala, and southern Kirkuk, particularly in the geographically challenging Makhoul, Hamrin, Ghurra, Wadi al-Shay, and Zaghitoun areas.

It should be noted that US forces are deployed in Iraq under the umbrella of the International Coalition to Combat ISIS. Last week, four years after the Iraqi parliament first voted to expel foreign forces, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammad Shia al-Sudani weighed in on the “destabilizing” impact of US troops and demanded a “quick and orderly” exit of those combat units. 

Washington not only countered by saying it has “no plans” to withdraw from Iraq, but announced on 14 January that it would be sending an additional 1,500 troops to Iraq and Syria illegally, and without the consent of either nation.

One irony here is that ISIS appears to regain momentum each and every time Baghdad raises the issue of US military withdrawal from Iraq. 

It can also no longer be seen as a coincidence that the terror group is now re-assembling its forces to target Washington and Tel Aviv's most capable regional foes – the Axis of Resistance – just when the US and Israel are struggling to handle a region-wide, multi-front assault from the Axis. 
​
The extraordinary synergies between the Americans and the world's foremost terror group can no longer be ignored: their targets are one and the same, and ISIS is only now entering the fray, just as Washington begins to lose its hold on West Asia.

It is difficult, very difficult to make a valid account of 65 years of great events, of profound transformations, of surprising achievements, of complex challenges, of internationalist victories, of global warnings, of new approaches, of constant search and also of mistakes; but always of tenacity and fierce constancy, sustained in the most contradictory circumstances by a whole people on the march. In short, the Cuban revolution changed the circumstances of the world since the second half of the 20th century.

My earliest memories go back to childhood, when my father clung to a radio and patiently managed to tune in to Radio Rebelde, founded by Che in the Sierra Maestra. For him, a survivor of the Spanish Civil War and a year in a concentration camp, this was a dream recovered, a return to life. When I arrived in Cuba as part of the international brigades, summoned to cut cane for the challenge of producing 10 million tons of sugar, my life changed, the fact that most expresses the impact on my senses and capabilities populating them with meanings is that I not only read, but I lived a revolution: its torrent of joyful and determined humanity. An avalanche of facts, memories, readings, presences, debates envelopes me and I believe it is so for those who have been close to Cuba.

A statement that has accompanied these 65 years of revolution was made by Fidel Castro on January 8, 1959, in the first speech that Havana’s citizens witnessed in amazement: “Perhaps from now on everything will be more difficult”. And so it has been. A fragment never to be forgotten: “I know that in speaking here tonight I am faced with one of the most difficult obligations in this long process of struggle […]. I believe that this is a decisive moment in our history: tyranny has been defeated. The joy is immense. However, much remains to be done. Let us not delude ourselves into believing that from now on everything will be easy; perhaps from now on everything will be more difficult. To tell the truth is the first duty of every revolutionary. To deceive the people, to awaken delusions, would always bring about the worst consequences, and I believe that the people must be warned against excessive optimism […]. And that is why I want to start -or rather continue- with the same system: to tell the people the truth”.

In his first incredible speech, because it was the moment of victory, Fidel warned: “The revolution no longer has before it an army in combat readiness. Who can be today or in the future the enemies of the revolution? Who can be, before this victorious people, the enemies of the revolution? The worst enemies that the Cuban revolution could have in the future are the revolutionaries themselves”. This statement had and has multiple meanings for any process of change. First, to ask oneself what were the intentions of those who participated: ambition, desire to command, ignoble purpose, enjoyment of power, living like kings? “If these are the intentions, the revolution will fail”. If henceforth new combats were necessary, it will not be more or less numerous troops that will prevail, the only column that will win the war alone will be the people. “More than the people can no general, more than the people can no troops.” If mistakes are made, all of us, we and the people are going to suffer the consequences. “There is no error in the revolution without consequences for the people.” In the face of mistakes only the truth and let the people decide. “It is necessary to speak this way so that demagogy and confusionism does not arise, and above all divisionism […] the first thing I will always do, when I see the Revolution in danger will be to call the people” and that the people know everyone and their actions. “It is necessary to call the people a thousand times, it is necessary to talk to the people a thousand times, so that the people, without shooting, solve the problems.”

Times of exploits came, the recovery of embezzled goods and popular justice, literacy, land distribution, the great nationalizations, the volunteer work days, the vaccination campaigns, the total victory against the mercenary invasion. Times of unity, with the defeat of the counterrevolutionary bands, with the ideological struggle against sectarianism, with the great assemblies of the people and the first and second Havana declarations. Times of organization and participation forming the popular militias, the CDR, the women’s federation, the students’ federation, the peasants’ and workers’ federation, the writers’ federation, culture and science. Times, as Martí said, of creating the new from the roots, creations that even today amaze the world, such as scientific ones: new drugs, vaccines, unique teaching and cultural systems, medical universities for the third world, selfless solidarity of all kinds initiated in 1963, liberation of southern Africa and the end of apartheid, creation of the system of broad democratic participation of the People’s Power, among many others.

Since that bestial attack on March 4, 1960, when the explosion of the ship La Coubre shook the whole of Cuba, difficult times came, with terrorist attacks, bombings, incendiary bombs on the population and workplaces, economic blockade, contamination of crops and livestock. A thousand and one forms of vileness against a people that has not ceased to evolve technologically. Difficult times that today strike with force to that heroic people that continues stubborn in an unimaginable, epic resistance, that is why Cuba continues to be that vital utopia in our hopes also in resistance.
​
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English

Between World War I and the Great Depression, in New York’s Harlem, a dazzling art, literature, and political movement emerged. It strove for the liberation and manifestation of a people’s search for yearning for beauty and meaning. It was creative, courageous, and truthful as it sought new ways to make art an instrument of struggle. Each of the artists, poets, musicians, and intellectuals were activists and freedom fighters in their own right. Their artwork was rooted in and exuded a sense of dignity, innovation, and striving for higher artistic and social ideals. They were selfless and disciplined, in a time when shadow of slavery loomed large and the majority of Black people remained trapped in poverty in Northern ghettos and Southern plantations, with racial terror consuming their lives. 

The world of the Harlem Renaissance was rich with talent and energy. The movement sought inspiration in the artists’ Afro-American heritage of struggle, but also in the broader American historical and cultural canon. It was influenced by the 1919 October Revolution of the Soviet Union and the Mexican muralist movement. It reached into the past and captured the best of the present to make sense of the historical moment and where Black folk must go from there. It also laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950’s and ‘60s.

But during its time, despite its recognition across the nation and the world, Harlem Renaissance artists remained segregated by the color line and from white society. Segregation limited the venues where Black artists were able to perform and exhibit, but also culturally and philosophically relegated the innovations of the Harlem Renaissance to a so-called “primitivist” instinct and thus to an inferior status to the white world.
​
The Harlem Renaissance was powerful for its ideological clarity and commitment. It was led by artists and intellectuals such as WEB Du Bois (1868-1963), who co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and edited its magazine The Crisis. Du Bois’s essay “Criteria for Negro Art” proclaimed that “all art is propaganda” and therefore all Black artists can and should choose to make art in service of their people’s liberation. As such he employed artists and poets like Aaron Douglas and Langston Hughes to fill The Crisis’s pages with art that broadened its readers’ horizons for building a better world. The artists and intellectuals’ close relationships, intense dialogue, and shared commitment to the liberation of the Black masses consolidated the movement around the importance of struggle and clarity, which translated into the exceptional art, music, and scholarly contributions of their time.

One artist deeply shaped by the Harlem Renaissance and who carried its legacy forward was the painter Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000). Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey to Southern Black migrant parents, his family moved to Harlem in 1930 when he was 13 years old. His talents and ideological development were nurtured during the movement’s most dynamic years, counting Harlem Renaissance painter Charles Alston (1907-77) as one of his key mentors. 

Lawrence proclaimed he was first and foremost a historian, a keen observer of Black life, and a painter rooted in the people, truth, and history. This is especially evident in his iconic Migration series, one of the first great works of African American art recognized by the white mainstream art world and completed when Lawrence was just 23 years old. Dynamically employing color, abstraction, and composition, the painting series depicts the organic exodus of the Black masses from the South to the booming northern industrial centers in the early 20th century. Each of the sixty panels captures a different facet of how this movement reconstituted the American social fabric and infused its cities with the spiritual, social, economic, and political strivings of the Black worker.
​
In his statement “My Opinion on Painting,” Lawrence says, “For me a painting should have three things: universality, clarity, and strength. Universality so that it may be understood by all men. Clarity and strength so that it may be aesthetically good.” In the 35th panel of the Migration series, titled They left the South in great numbers. They arrived in the North in great numbers, ten Black figures march across the scene against a pale blue sky, carrying their cargo and dressed in their heavy coats and hats. Limiting the palette to earthy tones and simplifying the varying figures’ profiles, Lawrence keeps the focus on the collective nature of the migration. The painting powerfully evokes the search for fuller dignity, economic livelihood, and citizenship that drove nearly a million Black folk towards cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York — a journey which Lawrence’s own family underwent and Lawrence was closely acquainted with as he came of age in Black Harlem.

Lawrence declares,
​
“It is more important that an artist study life than study the technique of painting exclusively… It is more important that a student of art develop a philosophy and clarity of thought than paint nude after nude, still life after still life and cube after cube… One’s pictures should be about things most familiar to him. My pictures express my life and experiences. So I paint about the American Negro working class.” 

Hence the basis of the Harlem Renaissance and Jacob Lawrence’s spirit of painting was grounded in clarity through the realities, history, and aspirations of the Black worker. His emphasis on clarity was a far cry from the obscurantism of postmodernism that would come in a few generations and dominate today’s art scene. 

Fast forward a few decades, a new wave of art and culture emerged from New York City, specifically the white elite world. It was an art movement opposite to the Harlem Renaissance in form and content, intent on obfuscation rather than clarity. Looking away from the Black freedom struggle, and siding with imperialism during a period of great world liberation movements, it proclaimed a new set of values on behalf of the American ruling class in a time when capitalism had to be rebranded to suit the new post-WWII paradigm of US global hegemony. 

The ‘50s was the pivotal moment in US history: allied business, government, and other elite interests locked course on fashioning the country into a global superpower. Their vision was an American assertion of dominance over the world through establishing a military clawhold, capitalist market control, and ideological influence over the American people and abroad. It also sought to counter and repress the developments of the Soviet Union and anti-colonial movements for liberation after centuries of imperial exploitation.

The broader philosophical movement of postmodernism emerged shortly thereafter. Postmodernism is centered on unmooring knowledge from the objective rational truth, and recentering the discussion on the fluid and subjective. It rejects the notion that truth is knowable and worth knowing. It may have started off in academic discussions in Western universities, but it has since saturated art, culture, politics, activism, and mainstream thought. One of postmodernism’s earliest artistic tendencies that helped popularize it was Pop Art. Pop Art emerged during the mid-1950s as artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns pioneered a new art movement that sought to elevate the aesthetic and philosophy of capitalism and popular culture to fine art. 

The very life of Andy Warhol, Pop Art’s most notable champion, serves as an illustrative example of postmodernism’s tenets themselves. Warhol was born in 1928 to working-class Slovakian parents in the Rust Belt’s Pittsburgh. As he came of age in the ‘50’s, he moved to New York City to reinvent himself completely and “make it” as an artist. Yet it was when he began producing what he termed Pop Art that he experienced a meteoric rise to fame. Through his large scale screenprints of Campbell soup cans and popular celebrities of the day, he became one of the richest artists to have ever lived: his art and presence was coveted by the ruling elite during his lifetime and beyond his death. 
​
His art reflected these materialistic values: Andy Warhol produced artwork in a studio dubbed “the Factory” and garnered a fortune from manufacturing and selling copy after copy of his works like mere commodities—mirroring capitalism’s mass production of commodities for maximizing profit, rather than the uplift of the masses. He was infamous for punchy interview quotes as part of his absurd, aloof personal brand: he claimed he wanted to be a machine, that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes in the future, and that “you can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking… Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.”

Although Warhol’s absurdist posturing has been construed as a critique of capitalist values, the Pop Art movement ultimately embraces the opposite, proclaiming that “life is best under capitalism.” Andy Warhol’s public persona best embodied this, which redefined fame and celebrity culture forever: partying, carefully curating appearances as to surround himself with other celebrities and models, and failing to take on any human issue (moral, political, economic) substantively. Thus, Pop Art presents the very economic exploitation that enables such a decadent lifestyle possible for few celebrities, as the only future for humanity.

In short, while Pop artists often claimed to “parody” the tenets of capitalism in their artistic and philosophical endeavors, they were in fact cementing their cultural capital and benefitting from their position in a decadently capitalist system. This kind of shallow “irony” allowed Warhol and his compatriots to uphold the ideology of capitalism and shielded them from serious criticism. It excuses Pop Art’s ultimately nihilistic view of human nature as primarily a product of materialistic, profit-driven, and consumerist tendencies—a comfort-seeking, non-struggle position that obscures the sheer will and necessity for the masses of humanity to fight for a better future and against oppression of all forms, unlike the art of the Harlem Renaissance. 

Yet many academics and curators regard Pop Art as utterly radical, either because it protested social boundaries and art traditions with such disruptive artwork—or that it embodied the best of American values of artistic and consumeristic freedom. But if juxtaposed with the Harlem Renaissance, it’s clear that what Pop Art proclaims to be “radical,” is not the same as what its contemporary movements—the Civil Rights Movement, the 1960s global anticolonial struggles—meant when they evoked terms like “vanguard” or “revolutionary.” 

Through the example of the artists of the Harlem Renaissance, the ideal of freedom meant joining the broader struggle for all people’s right to manifest their human potential and strivings, and all children grow up in a world free of exploitation and poverty. Therefore, genuine freedom, in substance, does not signify that we struggle to drink the same bottle of Coke. Rather, it is to speak on behalf of the voiceless, an incisive tool of critique against the very monopolistic forces that seek to disenfranchise the masses—to instill a lack of belief in the masses through their shallow assumptions about the worst of humanity, rather than the best. In their eyes, revolutionary art, as well as the use of irony, would not reflect ruling class ideologies. However, Pop Art, in line with postmodernism, abstracts any notion of true freedom and objective responsibility to the masses, and fails to present any paths for collective, principled struggle against dominant systems of oppression and exploitation. 

For a few decades, Pop Art and postmodernism primarily operated in mainstream, white American culture, leaving the spirit and legacy of the Black American freedom struggle untouched. This all changed with the arrival of Jean-Michel Basquiat onto the art scene, and after his premature death, in all arenas of culture. 

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88) was born to a middle class Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother. Growing up in a Brooklyn brownstone, he received a decent education, reading American literature and Beatnik poetry, and frequenting the city’s abundant museums and galleries. As a child, he witnessed the great Civil Rights and Black Power movements play out: watching Muhammad Ali box courageously and speak out against the Vietnam War, as well as the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Fred Hampton.

After running away from home as a teenager, Basquiat co-founded the art collective SAMO (short for “Same Old Shit”), spraying paint wordplay on walls across New York City. He hung around the nascent hip hop scene of the time, influenced by early MC’s, DJ’s, and graffiti artists. Not long after, he began to catch the attention of the establishment art market and gallery world. It took several key downtown gallery exhibitions to catapult this adolescent artist into fame, and his artworks’ sale value into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

One night, 22-year-old Basquiat met 54-year-old Andy Warhol at a restaurant, as the young artist was at the cusp of catching his break in the art world. The two immediately clicked, setting off an intense artistic, personal relationship. Andy Warhol became Basquiat’s mentor, promoter, and collaborator, and Basquiat began spending time at Warhol’s Factory, where they produced art together. Yet their relationship never recovered after an irreconcilable falling out, just preceding Warhol’s 1987 death from gallbladder surgery complications and Basquiat’s passing from a heroin overdose the same year. 

Although the grittier aspects of Basquiat’s life are emphasized as part of his struggles to “make it” as a household name artist, he was ultimately quickly accepted into the mainstream art world because he adopted the principles of postmodernism as a young Black artist, and earned immense fame and wealth because of it. Basquiat’s legacy has both made postmodernism digestible for the masses, and contributed to the elevation and commodification of disaffected youth culture into high art. 
​
Yet not only is Basquiat praised as an artistic genius of the likes of Picasso and Warhol, he is also lauded as a postmodernist inheritor of the broader Black American artistic legacy. In his works, Basquiat nods to the rich spirit of jazz artists like Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, and Miles Davis. Jazz, after all, has been a vanguard force within several key stages of the Black freedom struggle, including the Harlem Renaissance, which nurtured Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Basquiat’s Horn Players (1983), for example depicts several lumpy, skeletal figures playing a trumpet and a saxophone, with words like “Dizzy”, “Teeth”, “Ornithology” strewn throughout the triptych—in characteristic Basquiat-style of wordplay, rough sketches, and swaths of color. Throughout his works, he experimented with repeating words scrawled in capital letters, combining disparate phrases between his drawings in a graffiti-inspired style.

One must ask, how exactly is this postmodern approach honoring or elevating these Black jazz artists? Rather, how is this anything but deconstructing and muddying their great legacies, under the false guise of paying them tribute? It’s often said Basquiat’s irreverent style of scribbling words and doodles is a tribute to the improvisational nature of jazz, but in a visual format. However, compared to the disciplined practice of Duke Ellington and Count Basie, or the Coltranes, Sun Ra, and Miles Davis, it is apparent that Basquiat represents a sharp departure from such a tradition. Unlike Basquiat, the Coltranes, Sun Ra, and Davis did not make much money in their lifetimes, but did spend day and night honing their craft; they deeply studied the spiritual and artistic traditions of European classical music, as well as Eastern, African, and other civilizations, in order to produce new musical innovations for the world. In addition, their improvisational practice was rooted in a sincere engagement with their audience, furthering and following the footsteps of a participatory tradition of dialogue between artist and community, emerging from the legacy of Black struggle in this country. 

Basquiat certainly was improvisational across his short but prolific art career, his works pulsating with frenetic, unbounded creative energy. But in contrast to the artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Basquiat led an indulgent, egoistical, and carefree life—likely exacerbated by the fact that he was but a teenager when the white elite showered upon him staggering amounts of fame and wealth, not yet mature enough to develop a strong inner world that bound him closer to a principled struggle for his people’s liberation.  

Yet strangely enough, the academic tendency is to paint the artistic legacy of the Harlem Renaissance and the postmodern contributions of Basquiat as part of one single lineage of Black culture—the same way hip hop is also considered as “paying homage” to jazz, gospel, and funk. But few critics have explored how Basquiat is an aberration from the longer Black cultural tradition rooted in struggle, for the reasons above. 

This leaves the unanswered question: what do we stand to lose when we conflate or confuse Basquiat or Warhol’s postmodernist contributions, with the kind of substantive tradition of the Harlem Renaissance which gave a full-throated voice to the Afro-American strivings for liberation? And what do we gain when we choose to inherit the unadulterated spirit of artists like Jacob Lawrence or Aaron Douglas—who painted the Black worker, his dignity, history, and aspirations in their entirety—instead of taking Basquiat as a North Star for “radical” Black art? If we look up to Basquiat and Warhol, do we not lose the ability to see figures like Jacob Lawrence, Aaron Douglas, WEB Du Bois as role models for our times: Black leaders who stood tall with dignity and intellect, never compromising their courage and people’s struggle?

Instead, the hip hop culture that Basquiat partook in during his lifetime endures today, where those same defining values of his life live on: hip hop is rife with celebrity worship, commodification of art and artists’ persona as a brand, decadence, and nihilism. With its brash and violent lyrics, instrumentation, imagery, and overarching culture, hip hop actively contributes to a broad feeling among young people to wallow in their dissatisfaction, anger, and feelings of impotence to take responsibility for themselves and the world—in short, it encourages them to instead turn towards pessimism and destructive impulses. 

Culture, whether art or music, plays a significant role in the consciousness of young people, who are most susceptible as they develop their outlook and capacity to imagine and struggle for a future. With such a mainstreaming of postmodernism, what is its impact on the younger generation? What kind of future is postmodernism and its various tendencies striving for? Is it anything like that of the Harlem Renaissance, whose leaders dreamed of a world free of economic exploitation, where one’s sense of self and the human relationships of society are not determined by these values of commodification and decadence? 

It is clear that hip hop, as a cultural movement emerging from the legacy of Basquiat (and by extension Warhol’s Pop Art and postmodernism), fails to even come close. Ultimately, the nihilistic and materialistic qualities of hip hop and the art of Basquiat more closely embody the ideals of postmodernism and Pop Art, a stifling, deadening culture rooted in the values of the ruling class—rather than descending from an artistic tradition of the oppressed masses, like that of the Harlem Renaissance. Thus, postmodernism and its various tendencies debase the American people and drive them further away from the rich legacy of the Harlem Renaissance and its potential for inspiring a truly dynamic and liberatory art for our times. 

Once we stop conceiving certain radical-sounding postmodern movements as “organic” to the people and understand their true ideological basis, it becomes apparent why the ruling class needs these movements, and will stop at nothing to entrench them into mainstream culture. Du Bois said it best: All art is propaganda, and both the ruling class and revolutionary artists know it best—art is an ideological weapon to be used either for or against the people’s ability to struggle. Therefore, if we choose the side of the people, it is evident what we must do to move forward: to critique postmodernism in all forms, and draw from the true, organic cultural traditions to give birth a new cultural renaissance that speaks clearly to our times

As we enter a new age of the crisis of the West and its values, American capitalism once again tries to rebrand itself, the way the rise of postmodernism marked the start of a new American hegemonic era in the 50s, necessitating Andy Warhol and Pop Art to rebrand capitalism. In a similar fashion, counterrevolutionary currents today cloak themselves in the veneer of wokeness and identity politics, deploying figures like Jean-Michel Basquiat to win over the Black, brown, and working class youth. Yet identifying the origins of these dominant cultural tendencies in postmodernism frees us from their spell, and allows us to look to the true traditions of the people—like that of the Harlem Renaissance. 
​
Our task today is to demand a new kind of art and culture for our times, rooted in truth and struggle, just as the Harlem Renaissance artists and intellectuals did. Humanity deserves art worthy of the people, not these decadent art movements, which are unable to liberate humanity from its current chains and bring about a brighter future. 

What can we draw from the legacies of Jacob Lawrence, Aaron Douglas, and WEB Du Bois to respond to this moment and build a path forward? It’s up to us to inherit all that the generations before have left us: their ideas, culture, and spirit of dignified resistance needed more than ever in these times. The memory of these progressive traditions can and must be revived through deep intensive study, as well as creatively applied to our period of crisis. By doing so, we plant seeds of a new revolutionary cultural movement to guide us onward.

​The 2023 German film Paradise went virtually unnoticed by commentators on the socialist left. Yet, it is amongst the best dystopian anti-capitalist films produced in the decade.

The film follows the life of Max, an employee of Aeon, a company that buys life years from the poor to give them to the rich. Yes, you read that correctly, the life of the working poor (especially the large migrant populations – a phenomenon, as Immanuel Ness shows, integral to modern imperialism) is literally sold to the rich. Max is one of these salesmen. He is exceptional at his job, which is introduced to us as he tries to convince an 18-year-old migrant kid that he should sell him 15 years of his life for 700 thousand bucks. His family has been living in dire poverty since they arrived in the country, so this loss of life is presented as a gain. Now, Max tells them they will have enough money to live better in the years to come. Following this scene, Max is awarded employee of the month (Aeonian of the Year), showing us how capable he is at sucking the life of the poor to keep the rich alive. This award celebrates the 276 years he was able to collect.[1]  

Aeon (the company’s name) comes from the Greek ὁ αἰών, which originally meant a lifespan of 100 years. With time, it came to be understood also as vital force (a sort of Élan vital a la Bergson), life, or being. This is, after all, what the company is taking from the working poor to give to the elite. As Max’s working class father-in-law notes, the rich are living longer as the poor (who are unable to pay for the service even with a lifetime of saving) die younger. Because of the enormity of the company, they have their own private militia (which they will use towards the end of the film) and a tremendous power over the state’s judicature. Everything they are doing is perfectly legal, as the father-in-law tells Max. (Interestingly, socialist China is the leading international force behind the attempt to ban these life-year transfers.)

The company pitches the selling of life as an opportunity, as a ‘winning of the lottery’. Their advertisement is filled with phrases like ‘choose your dreams,’ ‘when you give time, life recompenses you,’ ‘your time, your opportunity, your choice.’ The company’s president, Sophie, tells us of how great it would have been if some of the great poets, composers, scientists, etc. could have lived decades longer. Now with Aeon’s services they can!

How can we not think here of Stephan Jay Gould’s famous quote: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” In the Paradise universe, how many geniuses are never able to actualize their potential because of the material conditions of their existence? How many of these, perhaps wealthier in their potential to serve humanity than the wealthy scientists and artists, are forced to give their life years to the rich to get by?

This dystopic society terrifies us because we know that if our society ever achieved such technological development, it would be used and legitimized in exactly the same ways. It doesn’t take much imagination for us to see the homologies already present, even though we lack the technology the movie is centered around.

It is already scientifically established that the wealthier live longer than the poor. Studies which have followed the lives of twins have shown how the richer sibling consistently lives significantly longer. The rich have the capacity to access healthier foods, better medical services, and to free themselves from the life-sucking stresses and traumas of not knowing how one will pay the bills at the end of the month (for the latter point, see the work of Gabriel and Daniel Mate in The Myth of Normal). An MIT study showed that “in the U.S., the richest 1 percent of men lives 14.6 years longer on average than the poorest 1 percent of men, while among women in those wealth percentiles, the difference is 10.1 years on average.” These statistics are only intensified when we take into account the inequalities of life expectancies between the rich of imperialist countries and the poor of imperialized countries.

The wealth that the capitalist vampires suck from the working poor is life itself. “Capital is dead labour,” as Marx tells us, “that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks… The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.” Capitalist exploitation is already, like life-year selling in Aeon, the sucking of the Aeon (vital force) of the working class to accumulate capital for the elite. The inequality of life expectancy is merely a reflection of the relations of production and the exploitation at the root of capital accumulation. Each pole is dialectically interconnected; the rich get richer and live longer because the poor are poor and live less, destroying their bodies to accumulate capital for the wealthy.   

Research has shown that we have developed the productive forces to the point of only needing to work around 3 hours a day (15 hours a week). The 3-hour workday prediction of John Meynard Keynes, only an aspirational ideal decades earlier for Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue, has today become materially possible. The impediment to its realization is rooted in social, not material incapacity. It is the capitalist mode of social life, with profit as its sole goal and purpose, which prevents this freeing up of humanity’s time and potential. Its relations of production are a fetter on human life and culture, not just on the forces of production. Under a different mode of life, with a modus operandi for society other than capital accumulation, we could radically reduce the socially necessary labor time and increase what Martin Hägglund has called socially available free time. As I’ve argued before, the absence of its actualization is “not rooted in the machines and technologies themselves, but in the historically constituted social relations which mediate our relationship with these developments.” But until then (that is, until socialism can freely develop without pressures from the global imperialist system), we will continue to slavishly give more than a decade worth of work hours (90000 on average) working in alienating jobs that make our bosses richer while we stay poor and triply exploited. Is this not, like in Paradise, the giving up of decades of our life to making the rich not only richer, but capable of living significantly longer than us?  

The way Aeon defends its practices are also reminiscent of apologists for wage slavery. It is, after all, presented as a ‘choice,’ something we ‘consent’ to. But as with wage slavery, what is the alternative? Can I expect anything other than death if, born into a working family, I decide not to commit my life to being exploited through wage slavery? How would I obtain the necessaries of life if I object to spending labor power in enriching someone else? Under capitalism this is impossible. The choice is between a slavish life of being exploited and death. As socialist thinkers (utopian and Marxists) have criticized from the start, this is really no choice at all. Perhaps there is a slight bit of choice in deciding who exploits us (for instance, Walmart or Amazon), but what does this amount to other than the capacity to pick our slave masters? Is this really what we want to herald as pillars of ‘choice’ and ‘consent’? Likewise, for those who sell their life-years to Aeon, the ‘choice’ is one between unlivable poverty and a fractioned lifespan with a better living standard. This is hardly a ‘choice’ at all.

Aeon also describes selling your life-years as akin to winning the lottery. Is this not, like we see today, a linguistic whitewashing which puts a pretty terminological veil upon a horrific practice? For instance, how we call civilian deaths ‘collateral damage,’ or US state department propped up terrorists ‘moderate rebels’. In relation to work, a similar romanticizing language is operative. Today the growing precarity of a gigifying workforce is pitched as ‘flexibility’. As I have argued before:

The last four decades of neoliberal capitalism has been a continuous disempowerment of workers through the cutting of benefits, stagnating of wages, and repression of unionization efforts. The gig economy takes this even further, through an employer’s complete removal of responsibility for workers. By categorizing workers as ‘independent contractors’, the ‘flexibility’ they continuously speak of is one that is only for them. Flexibility for the capitalist entails the removal of responsibilities for his workers, and subsequently, increasing profits for him. But for the worker - regardless of how much the capitalist’s propaganda says they are now ‘flexible’ and ‘free’ – flexibility means insecurity, less pay, and less benefits. Like in sex, flexibility for the worker here only means he can get screwed more efficiently.

Aeon’s immense resources also allow it to advance its practices, regardless of how unethical they might be, into the sphere of legality. Everything it is doing is perfectly legal. It is accepted under bourgeois ‘justice’, where justice is indistinguishable from the interests of the economically dominant class. Today readily available cancer drugs like Imbruvica are priced at 16 thousand dollars a month, something only the ultra-rich can afford. In the US, 45,000 people die a year because they do not have insurance. Any sane society (as opposed to a deeply irrational one centered on upholding the interests of capital accumulation) would consider the activities of the medico-pharmaceutical industrial complex criminal. However, because the American state is the state of their class (i.e., the big monopoly capitalists), their profit-rooted class interests are consistently upheld to the detriment of the majority of Americans.

Aeon’s capture over their society’s judicature is simply a particular form of how the state and its institutions have always functioned. The state in general doesn’t exist. What exists is particular types of states, corresponding to various modes of life holding one or another class in an economically dominant position – a dominance the state is tasked with reproducing. “The modern state,” as Marx and Engels write in 1848, “is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” When profitable technology like Aeon’s develops, the state’s judicature adapts it to the existing framework of bourgeois legality. As Marx and Engels write in 1846,

Whenever, through the development of industry and commerce, new forms of intercourse have been evolved (e.g. assurance companies, etc.), the law has always been compelled to admit them among the modes of acquiring property.

Paradise, all in all, puts a mirror up to our capitalist societies. It shows us, through the medium of a new technological development, the barbarity of the logic operative in our mode of life. A barbarity, of course, which is historical, not eternal. It is something we can overcome when the class struggles for the conquest of political power by working people succeed.

Notes

[1] This review will focus on the more general social critiques operative in the movie. There are no ‘spoilers’ here, so feel free to read even if you intend to watch the movie afterwards. 

​​Author: Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE.

Anyone who has ever taken or taught a philosophy class is familiar with the claim "[Blank] is subjective" in which the [Blank] in question could be anything from literary interpretations to ethical norms. This response effectively ends any and all cultural and philosophical discussion, which is why it is so aggravating. One response is to argue against this claim, to point out that not every interpretation of a poem, novel, or film, is authorized, that there are better or worse interpretations, with respect to cultural version. With respect to the ethical or political arguments it is tempting to point out that the very existence of ethics, of society, presupposes norms that are shared as well as debated and challenged.

What if we took a different perspective? Instead of arguing against this view, ask the question of its conditions. To offer a criticism in the Marxist sense. By Marxist sense I mean specifically the criticism that Marx offers of idealism, of philosophy, in The German Ideology. In that text Marx gives the conditions of how it is that the world appears so upside down that ideas and their criticism rather than material conditions drive and determine history. So we could ask a similar question, how has subjectivity, subjective opinion and perspective, has come to appear as so prevalent and powerful. How did we come to live under the reign of subjectivity?

In a move that will surprise no one who has read this blog that I find a useful starting point for answering this question Frank Fischbach's book Marx with Spinoza. In that text Fischbach argues that rather than seen alienation as an alienation from subjectivity, a reduction of a subject to an object, it is subjectivity itself that is an alienation, an alienation from objectivity, a privation of the world.  As Fischbach argues:
​
"The reduction of human beings, by this abstraction, from natural and living beings to the state of ‘subjects’ as owners of a socially average labour power indicates at the same time the completion of their reduction to a radical state of impotence: for the individual to be conceived and to conceive of itself as a subject it is necessary that it see itself withdrawn and subtracted from the objective conditions of its natural activity; in other words, it is necessary that ‘the real conditions of living labour’ (the material worked on, the instruments of labour and the means of subsistence which ‘fan the flames of the power of living labour’) become ‘autonomous and alien existences’"

And also: 

"This is why we interpret Marx’s concept of alienation not as a new version of a loss of the subject in the object, but as a radically new thought, of the loss of the essential and vital objects for an existence that is itself essentially objective and vital....Alienation is not therefore the loss of the subject in the object it is the loss of object for a being that is itself objective. But the loss of proper objects and the objectivity of its proper being is also the loss of all possible inscription of one’s activity in objectivity, it is the loss of all possible mastery of objectivity, as well as other effects: in brief, the becoming subject is essentially a reduction to impotence. The becoming subject or the subjectivation of humanity is thus inseparable according to Marx from what is absolutely indispensable for capitalism, the existence of a mass of “naked workers”—that is to say pure subjects possessors of a perfectly abstract capacity to work—individual agents of a purely subjective power of labor and constrained to sell its use to another to the same extent that they are totally dispossessed of the entirety of objective conditions (means and tools of production, matter to work on) to put to effective work their capacity to work."

At the basis of subjectivity, of subjectivity understood as an abstract and indifferent capacity, there is the indifferent capacity of labor power. Behind the figure of the subject there is the worker. I have already argued elsewhere on this blog that this reading of the Marx/Spinoza connection could be understood as one which reflects and critically addressed our contemporary situation in which subjecitivity, a subjectivity understood as potential and capacity, is seen as the condition of our freedom rather than our subjection. What Fischbach suggests through a reading of Marx and Spinoza that such capacity, capacity abstracted and separated from the material conditions of its emergence and  activity, can only really be impotence. Just as a worker cut off from the conditions of labor is actually poverty, a subject cut off from the conditions of its actualization is impotence. 

What now I find provocative about this analysis is that if we think of it as a general schema in which an objective relation, a relation to objects but also others, is transformed into a subjective potential or capacity it is possible to argue that the constitution of subjectivity through labor power is only one such transformation, and that the current production of subjectivity is itself the product of several successive revolutions in which subjective potentials displace objective relations. One could also talk about the creation of subjectivity as buying power, as a pure capacity to purchase. I know that criticisms of consumer society from the fifties and sixties today seem moralistic and often passé. I am thinking here of Baudrillard, Debord, Lefebvre, and of course Horkheimer and Adorno. It is worth remembering, however, that some of the early critics were less interested in moralizing criticisms of materialism as they were in this kind of constitution of subjectivity. As Jean Baudrillard wrote in The Consumer Society, ‘It is difficult to grasp the extent to which the current training in systematic, organized consumption is the equivalent and extension, in the twentieth century, of the great nineteenth-century long process of the training of rural populations for industrial work.’

One person who continued such an an analysis is Bernard Stiegler. Stiegler even uses the same word, "proletarianization" to describe both the loss of skills and knowledge by the worker and the loss of skills and knowledge by the consumer.  As I wrote in The Politics of Transindividuality:

"At first glance, the use of the term proletarianisation to describe the transindividuation of the consumer would seem to be an analogy with the transformation of the labour process: if proletarianisation is the loss of skills, talents, and knowledge until the worker becomes simply interchangeable labour power, then the broader proletarianisation of daily life is the loss of skills, knowledge, and memory until the individual becomes simply purchasing power. Stiegler’s use of proletarianisation is thus simultaneously broader and more restricted than Marx, broader in that it is extended beyond production to encompass relations of consumption and thus all of life, but more restricted in that it is primarily considered with respect to the question of knowledge. The transfer of knowledge from the worker to the machine is the primary case of proletarianisation for Stiegler, becoming the basis for understanding the transfer of knowledge of cooking to microwaveable meals and the knowledge of play from the child to the videogame. Stiegler does not include other dimensions of Marx’s account of proletarianisation, specifically the loss of place, of stability, with its corollary affective dimension of insecurity and precariousness. On this point, it would be difficult to draw a strict parallel between worker and consumer, as the instability of the former is often compensated for by the desires and satisfactions of the latter. Consumption often functions as a compensation for the loss of security, stability, and satisfaction of work, which is not to say that it is not without its own insecurities especially as they are cultivated by advertising."
​
​For the most part Stiegler considers this deskilling to take place in the automation of the knowledge and skill that makes up daily life. Everything from cooking to knowing how to navigate one's own city is now more or less hardwired into precooked meals and the ubiquitous smartphone. Other cultural critics have pointed to the general deskilling of daily life through the decline of repair, tinkering, and mending. The effect of all this is to change the consumer from someone who buys things based on knowledge and familiarity to a pure expression of buying power, an abstract potential. Just as the worker is separated from the means of production, from the objective conditions of their labor to be the subjective capacity to work, the consumer is separated from the knowledge to consume to become a personification of buying power. As with work the conditions to realize this buying power are outside the control of the consumer. We do not decide what to buy based on our knowledge of our needs and desires but on what is advertised to us as a need or desire.

As much as the worker and consumer are opposed, making up two sides of economic relations under capitalism, they are unified, connected in the tendency to transform work to abstract labor power and consumption into abstract buying power. While abstract subjectivity is how these two sides of the capitalist economic relation function it is not how they are lived. They are lived as profoundly individual, subjective in the conventional sense of the word. What one does for a living is in some sense considered to be one's identity: "What are you?" is in some sense equivalent to "What do you do?" If for any one of the myriad reasons what one does is inadequate to constitute an identity, remains just a day job, then consumption or the commodity form steps in to supply the necessary coordinates for an identity. 

From this perspective we can chart not only the historical progression of the two identities, but also the structural similarities. With respect to the first, consumer society, consumption, and the myriad possibilities to construct an identity through consumption, comes after the worker, after the formation of capitalism. Any attempt to read Marx's Capital for consumer society, for the common sense understanding of commodity fetishism as the overvaluing of commodities, is going to have a hard time navigating the dull world of linen, coats, corn and coal. The consumer comes after the worker. However, it is also possible to see a similarity of a structural condition. In both case subjectivity is abstracted from, or separated from, objectivity, from not just objects, but objective spirit, in Hegel's sense, institutions, norms, and structures. This abstraction is lived as a highly individualized identity, in some sense work and consumption form the basis of individuation as such. However, it only has effects, only functions in the aggregate. As a worker one only has effects, both in terms of the creation of value, and in terms of any disruption of exploitation, as part of a collective. The same could be said for consumerism, even though it is through consumerism that we are encouraged to believe that we can have ethical effects as individuals, green consumerism, cruelty free products, etc. 

I am wondering if one can see a similar structure of abstract/individual subjectivity in other aspects of society. I am thinking of politics, in which individuals are abstracted from any real connection to their communities and societies only to be constituted as "voting power," an abstract aggregate that is lived as a highly individualized identity. I will have to think more about that one. My point here is to connect the often asserted claim "that everything is subjective" back to its material conditions, to the production of subjectivity in both work and the reproduction of everyday life, production and consumption. It is not just a matter of a bad reading of Nietzsche, although it is often that as well, but an effect in the sphere of ideas and discussion of what is already at work in the sphere of production. The thread running through both is connection between power and impotence. If everything is subjective then I can offer any interpretation, create my own moral code whole cloth, live as I prefer, but if everything is subjective then I can do very little, nothing at all to alter or change anything. This is the fundamental point of intersection between Marx and Spinoza, subjectivity, individual subjectivity, is not the zenith of our freedom and power, it is the nadir of our subjection.