7/15/2021 20 Years of U.S. Occupation Was Brutal in Afghanistan—And So Will Be the Exit. By: Sonali KolhatkarRead NowAlongside the relief of ending the longest war in modern American history, we need to acknowledge the horrors of what we are leaving behind in Afghanistan. When a reporter in early July asked Joe Biden a question about the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. president sniped back, saying, “I want to talk about happy things, man.” Biden revealed, perhaps unintentionally, that the situation in Afghanistan is anything but a happy topic. It might have been one of the most revealing responses from a sitting president about the longest-running war in modern United States history. The president shifted focus, saying, “The economy is growing faster than anytime in 40 years, we’ve got a record number of new jobs, COVID deaths are down 90 percent, wages are up faster than any time in 15 years, we’re bringing our troops home.” The war’s end is merely the icing on the cake he is seemingly gifting the American public: an end to a war in addition to peace, prosperity, and health at home (even if such achievements are more marketing than reality). At the very least, one can give Biden credit for formally ending the U.S. role in the war, even if he had nothing substantive to say about the devastation we have wrought over the years. Members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus said they “commend President Biden for fulfilling his commitment to ending the longest war in American history” and took his withdrawal of troops to mean that “there is no military solution in Afghanistan.” (They made no mention of Biden’s role during the Obama presidency in prolonging the war.) Opponents of the war have known since 2001 that there is no military solution to the U.S.-sponsored fundamentalist violence that had plagued Afghanistan at the time. More such violence—which is largely what the U.S. offered for nearly 20 years—only made things worse. In announcing the war’s end and pivoting to what he deemed were “happy” topics, Biden fed the “propaganda of silence” that my co-author James Ingalls and I referred to in the subtitle of our 2006 book Bleeding Afghanistan. There has long been a deliberate effort to downplay the U.S.’s failures and paint a rosy picture of a war whose victory has always been just around the corner. But there is no happy ending for Afghans, and there was never meant to be. Afghans, already weary of never-ending war in 2001, were promised democracy, women’s rights, and peace. But instead, the U.S. offered elections, a theoretical liberation of women, and an absence of justice while championing corrupt armed warlords and their militias. In trying to end the debacle, American diplomats refused to involve the (admittedly flawed) Afghan government that they had helped to build as a bulwark against fundamentalism, and instead engaged in peace talks with the Taliban—the same “enemy” of democracy, women, and peace that the U.S. had spent nearly two decades fighting. Now, as the fundamentalist fighters claim more territory than they have controlled in decades, and the Taliban have predictably begun reimposing medieval-era restrictions on women, ordinary Afghans, including women, are taking up arms to fight them. Was this the liberation that the U.S. promised Afghan women? Even the manner of withdrawing American troops was as shameful as the mess the U.S. is leaving behind. The Associated Press reported that the U.S. military abandoned Bagram Airfield in early July in the dead of night, failing to properly coordinate with the Afghan army commanders who were expecting to take over. After they left, a “small army of looters” rifled through the millions of taxpayer-funded items left behind by American troops including small weapons and ammunition. Later on, one Afghan soldier bitterly told the AP, “In one night, they lost all the goodwill of 20 years by leaving the way they did, in the night, without telling the Afghan soldiers who were outside patrolling the area.” Afghans have every reason to be cynical. “The Americans leave a legacy of failure, they’ve failed in containing the Taliban or corruption,” said one shopkeeper in Bagram. Another auto mechanic told Reuters, “They came with bombing the Taliban and got rid of their regime—but now they have left when the Taliban are so empowered that they will take over any time soon.” Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, explained to me in an interview that there is a likelihood of civil war breaking out but warned, “I think it would be a mistake to see it as a new civil war.” Bennis, who is the author of several books including Understanding ISIS and the New Global War on Terror and Ending the U.S. War in Afghanistan, added, “This would be in a sense a continuation of the existing civil war.” By that, she meant that for the past 20 years, the U.S. has essentially been inserting itself into an existing civil war between the Taliban and fundamentalist Northern Alliance warlords who had enjoyed previous U.S. support. The Taliban had won that war in 1996, “not because of the extremism of their definitions of religious law, but despite that,” said Bennis. But in 2001, after the September 11 attacks, the U.S. restarted that civil war by bombing Afghanistan and bringing the Northern Alliance warlords back into power along with a puppet government in Kabul. More than 200,000 lives and $2 trillion later, the U.S. is leaving the same basic dynamic largely in place. Most wars are a farce. But if ever there was a textbook case to be made about the futility of war, the 20 years of U.S. militarism in Afghanistan offers a shining example. Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta in an opinion piece on CNN.com repeated the same list of tired and empty achievements that other defenders of the war have made: “the establishment of a democratic government, expanded rights for women, improved education, and successful operations to decimate core Al Qaeda and bring Osama Bin Laden to justice.” But then he went on to cite all the ways in which these seeming successes have unraveled and that the only way to prevent the Taliban from fomenting future violence is to “continue counter terrorism operations.” The narrow spectrum of actions that American elites have offered on Afghanistan ranges from Biden’s idea to withdraw forces (while pretending everything is happy), to an unending military presence as per Panetta. In other words, Afghans were never meant to have their happy ending. War and militarism do not offer such a solution. One cannot bomb a nation into democracy, women’s rights, and peace. Those things are built internally by civil-society-led institutions and networks free from violence, and that are engaged, supported, funded, and nurtured. Over 20 years, the U.S. cared little for such things. To its credit, the Congressional Progressive Caucus demanded from Biden that in addition to withdrawing troops, “The U.S. must support peace and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan.” In their statement, lawmakers said, “we encourage the Biden administration to quickly put in place a multilateral diplomatic strategy for an inclusive, intra-Afghan process to bring about a sustainable peace.” But there appears to be little appetite for such solutions within the Biden administration. And Americans remain largely blissfully ambivalent either way. If only Biden, Panetta, and others had the courage to admit that the war in Afghanistan was ultimately an exercise in American imperialist hubris. It was an expensive and deadly smackdown of a poor nation that dared to host a terrorist faction that attacked the U.S., a costly message to the world that an attack on the U.S. will not go unpunished. That is all it was designed to do, and when histories of the war are written, one can only hope that this stark fact is made crystal clear. Most ordinary Afghans understand this even if Americans don’t. “We have to solve our problem. We have to secure our country and once again build our country with our own hands,” said Gen. Mir Asadullah Kohistani, the new commander of Bagram Airfield. Sayed Naqibullah, the shopkeeper interviewed by Reuters, echoed this claim, saying, “In a way, we’re happy they’ve gone… We’re Afghans and we’ll find our way.” AuthorSonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute. This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Archives July 2021
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“Marcusian” and “Brownian” are odd words to put on display in modern political commentary. Some might even argue they are not political. Maybe they shouldn’t be. But then, why are we here? Here: as in somewhat interested in an article on Midwestern Marx for whatever reason, and here: as in living right now under certain specific conditions in a particular revolutionary moment dragging on endlessly with what feels like no end in sight. Initially, this question displays somewhat of a heavy sense of presence, yet it is destructively and even painstakingly fixated on a past movement either lacking guile or still not entirely realized; a movement concerning both time and human touch. It is our business to understand every moment as a relation, and the status of American political culture now is no exception. The American counterculture, the civil rights era, the Vietnam protests, those great acid dreams of Gonzo madness and degenerative jouissance still vibrate purposefully and very often in modern political discourse, radical or otherwise. At least, much more so than we would like to think. The fascination that we should have with what I am calling the Marcusian and Brownian split, derived from the great works of Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown, will be found in the heavy presence of this countercultural moment but actually begins with a more contemporary and slightly less gigantic, though no less important, theoretical figure, Mark Fisher. All will be made clear soon, as Jerry Garcia once said, “you just gotta poke around.” Mark Fisher was a British cultural and critical theorist specializing in Frankfurt School critical theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the study of ideology. What is most important for us is the extensive work Fisher did on what he called capitalist realism [i], defined as, “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it.” (MF, 2). We actually see examples of this all around us daily. Capital is notorious for its ability to co-opt any movement going against its systematic reach, eventually bringing counter-hegemonic movements under the umbrella of capital. Purchase a trendy t-shirt of Che Guevara on Amazon or watch a Netflix documentary like The Social Dilemma to see what I mean. Capital not only profits on the co-optation of movements aimed against it, but also weaponizes them for its own psychological and ideological purposes. This latter point is key for both myself and Fisher, as the inability to imagine an alternative to the current mold of the human condition is incredibly worrisome, and the evidence points to at least some validity to this conclusion. What’s more, the United States—the great agent of neoliberalism, according to Fisher—has effectively worked to eliminate any real alternatives to the capitalist system like democratic socialism or libertarian communism. Granted, there are also daily examples of individuals and groups fighting against these co-optations, like us! but the haunting spectre of capitalism continues to divide and weaken the potential for a unified form of consciousness among the working class, often leading to in-fighting amongst individuals in the same economic class and ideological posturing for red and blue parties that only represent destruction and status-quo symbolizations. It should be noted that Fisher himself did not accept this as a defeat for radical politics, only theorizing capitalist realism as a way to portray what we are really up against in the 21st century. As Slavoj Žižek writes, “An ideology is really ‘holding us’ only when we do not feel any opposition between it and reality - that is, when the ideology succeeds in determining the mode of our everyday experience of reality itself.” [ii] This is the danger Fisher attempts to illustrate. The spectre of capitalist realism, or the seeming victory of capital ideologically and materially, has both historical and psychological foundations. Maybe even magic pillars, as we might come to discover. Fisher locates the historical victory of capitalism in the failures of Salvador Allende’s socialist regime in Chile in the early 1970s. Following dictator Augusto Pinochet’s ascension to power, the United States began using Chile as a breeding ground for developing global economic innovations such as financial deregulation, opening up the economy to foreign capital, and privatisation. Policies that were “maintained through the violent oppression of the majority and the brutal eradication of opposing political ideals in order to transform the country’s political profile and economic system.” [iii]. Milton Friedman’s Chicago Boys made much of this possible, and I’m sure many are at least somewhat familiar with this history. What we are not given in Fisher’s work, however, is a coherent exploration of the psychological effects capitalism produces and where this origin might be discovered. Obviously, the scope of this project would be a massive undertaking, but my goal is to offer us somewhat of a starting point. If the historical and material victory of capitalism came in the early 1970s, then perhaps we can locate the psychological origins around the same time. Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown represented the intellectual heights of the counterculture movement but also foreshadowed its eventual failures. Both rose to prominence in the late fifties and continued to develop important work throughout the sixties and seventies. Marcuse was a German Marxist philosopher, a psychoanalyst by trade and a core member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. He, like his colleagues Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Erich Fromm, sought to ally the insights of Freud with the writings of Marx to understand why the great workers revolution had not happened, and to account for the horrors witnessed in their German homeland during WWII. Marcuse produced a stunning array of theoretical work, and there are two ideas in particular that I want us to focus on. First, a major theme of his work was that the continued development of capitalism also brought with it the continued development of its blatant contradictions; contradictions which could eventually be used against capital’s domination for the creation of a world beyond toil and exploitation. This was Marcuse’s gaya scienza, the incorporation of human beauty in the production of a new science, an outgrowth of capitalism’s technological advances and paralleled contradictions. [iv] Capital essentially created the tools necessary for its own destruction. Through inquiries into the structure of advanced capitalist society present in all forms of social phenomena, Marcuse aimed to show that the structure contained at its core “unrealized potentialities” capable of being redirected against the system itself. These unrealized potentials were exhibited in countless instances, any and all forms of social protest and social progress were minor illuminations of the possibility for overcoming capitalism’s destruction. Second, Marcuse’s concept of one-dimensionality has remained perhaps his most well known and timeless contribution to Marxist thought. Capital produces constant states of “unfreedom” which appear as a set of free choices, all contributing to the near sterilization of the free subject and the elimination of aesthetic, intellectual, and physical freedoms. This is not the representation of reality as a “false consciousness,” but reality as such. Social connectivity and human relations become thus moderated by the exchange and commodification of objects in the material universe. The search for human community becomes exhaustive, never-ending, and incredibly destructive, aiding in the creation of neurotic, anxiety-ridden subjects who can no longer find connection through sensual ephemeralities of beauty, love, or thought. Both of these ideas work together in a number of ways. The cultivation of a new consciousness, which Marcuse called the new sensibility, [v] would lead to both a psychological awakening of the repressed, one-dimensional subject and a political movement capable of utilizing the tools for capital’s overcoming. Given the status of Marcuse as a torchbearer of the New Left in the sixties, one may very well wonder why his project failed to achieve notable success as a political platform or set of political ideas. Certainly, there were elements of the hippie counterculture which undermined actual Marxist progress, often diluting radical politics with a liberal politic much like progressive movements today. Regardless of the disconnect between the actual revolutionaries of the time and their liberal, peace-loving counterparts, there existed a stark psychological break within the counterculture movement that both Marcuse and Brown adequately portray. In this split, Marcuse represents the political side of a psychological break containing at its base the erotic elements of human sensuality, pleasure, community, beauty, freedom, and love noted above. The gaya scienza and the one-dimensional thesis signify a psychological reinterpretation of the orthodox Marxian notion of the base-superstructure, this time flipped on its head. Instead of interpreting changes to the human psyche as a product of the material modes of production, something Marx in the German Ideology calls “the language of real life”, [vi] Marcuse used the cultural and psychological elements of the superstructure to interpret material change. This type of analysis allows for the freedom to develop a psychological theory explaining the effects of capitalist progress, while not straying too far from the original Marxist position of dialectical historical materialism. Brown, on the other hand, developed his own dialectic in strict relation to the human body. Unlike Marcuse’s political aesthetic and growth as a leader of the Political New Left, Brown rose to prominence as the mystical poet of the growing radical scene in the fifties and sixties. Brown, for what it's worth, was a classicist by training. He and Marcuse were friends, and it was actually Marcuse who introduced him to the work of Freud, setting off a project for Brown that would lead to one of the most radical readings of Freud ever offered. In his most famous work, Life Against Death, Brown not only developed what he called “the psychoanalytic meaning of history,” but contributed greatly to psychoanalytic studies by giving Freud’s instinctually dualistic understanding of Life and Death (Eros and Thanatos) a necessary dialectical interpretation. The dialectic, Brown observed, returned to the origin of what he called, citing Anaximander and Heraclitus, “the undifferentiated unity.” [vii] “We need,” Brown writes, “a metaphysic which recognizes the continuity between man and animals and also the discontinuity.” [viii] Like Marcuse, Brown noticed that the dualistic separation of the human from nature, and much more so the dualism of human life in seemingly endless conflict with the inevitable prospects of death, greatly hindered the possibility for any formulation of hope and human community beyond the repression of modern capitalist society. Unlike Marcuse, however, Brown spoke not of the technologies of advanced capitalist society or of its inherent contradictions pointed out by leading activists at the time, but offered an incredibly complex analysis of the human organism—the physical life of the human body and its near mystical instinctual counterpart—within history and the society this history has continuously reinforced. Freud presented the conflict between Eros and Thanatos, and the corresponding effect this has on the individual within human society (i.e. the Marcusian transformation from the pleasure principle to the reality principle) as a biological necessity. The dualistic interpretation of the conscious and the unconscious, which for Freud calcified the irreconcilable conflict between Eros – seeking to preserve and enrich life–and Thanatos–seeking to return life to the peace of death – seemed only to establish human history as a biological phenomenon undergirded by factors which prevent the possibility for full human transformation and freedom. Brown developed his dialectic as a way to return creative powers back to humanity. What Freud and others had for so long considered inevitable or biologically necessary—the fear of death in the face of overabundant life—appeared for him to be the continuing production and reproduction of a history that maintained the human organism as a neurotic and repressed piece of a neurotic and repressed history. Brown wanted to destroy this history and discover eternity, something entirely within reach of a new humanity. He was fascinated by the aesthetic in a way radically different from Marcuse, he saw it as a way to integrate mystery back into human life, which for so long now has sought to eliminate mystery through democratized knowledge or positivistic research: And so there comes a time—I believe we are in such a time—when civilization has to be renewed by the discovery of new mysteries, by the undemocratic but sovereign power of the imagination, by the undemocratic power which makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, the power which makes all things new. [ix] Between Marcuse and Brown we see a marked distinction between political, Marxist aestheticization as a form of analysis in a social project, and a poetic, bodily mysticism devoid of a political project or goal. Marcusian politicization took seriously both the psychologically repressed capitalist subject and the importance of Marxist material dialecticism. Brownian mysticism was not explicitly political, but also succeeded in creating a poetic theorization of the body and psycho-social space-time which did not succumb to the now famous Young Hegelian tendency of “descending from Heaven to Earth.” [x]. Given Brown’s ability to not only formulate the instinctual dialectic, overcoming the dualism of life and death, but also his theorization of poetics as a new avenue for revolutionary dialectics, he was able to create a necessary psychoanalytic history to accompany historical materialism. Thus, the Marcusian-Brownian split: the separation of the political from the mystical in Marxist analysis, captures the core psychoanalytic rupture between two of the leading revolutionary intellectuals of the sixties. The significance of the split is that instead of developing together or at least with some potential for reunification, the monumental success of capitalist realism at the same time ensured their continued separation. There was no “commingling with new aesthetic forms,” as Fisher once playfully wrote. Not only this, but the ideological victory of the capitalist system also increased the perceived oasis between the political and the mystical in the human psyche. To quote Marcuse, the “elimination of the spectre of a world which could be free,” [xi] necessitated the loss of both. The political and the mystical were drastically reduced. Even Marcuse and Brown, quarrelling in a series of letters published in Commentary Magazine in 1967, failed to notice the insightful oneness of political and mystical, poetic consciousness as a potentially unifying project itself. Only a year later the events of May 1968 would engulf France. Streets would fill with student protesters, college dormitories would be consumed by the naked bodies of young lovers, protest art sprawled across the walls, lamp posts, subways, and restaurants of the French capital, while a president secretly fled to Germany. The “social revolution,” as it is called, was a success, but once again the political revolution did not come to fruition. There is much to be learned from the disagreements between Marcuse and Brown, most important of which is that insightful and radical reevaluations of the body, language, and human history are a necessary accompaniment to structural Marxism and its many appendages. Capitalist ideology really “holds” us in place now because these two elements of human experience are often held in stark contrast to one another, especially amongst the new alleged torchbearers of the modern political and social moment. We might do well now to take seriously both Marcuse’s assertion that “at the highest stage of capitalism, the most necessary revolution appears as the most unlikely one,” [xii] and Brown’s notable tactic for this revolution, “(to put it simply) the simultaneous affirmation and rejection of what is; not in a system, as in Hegel, but in an instant, as in poetry.” [xiii]. I will have many more articles up soon. Thanks for checking out my first piece! Notes [i] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Washington: Zero Books Publishing, 2009), 2. [ii] Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, (London: Verso Books, 1989), 49. [iii] Elizabeth Dicken, “An Assessment of the Pinochet Regime in Chile,” E-International Relations, 2015, https://www.e-ir.info/pdf/56089 [iv] Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston, Beacon Press, 1969). [v] Ibid., 19. [vi] Karl Marx, “The German Ideology,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 154. [vii] Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Origins of History (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), 83. [viii] Ibid., 83. [ix] Norman O. Brown, Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 4. [x] Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 [xi] Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation , (Routledge, 1987), p. 2 [xii] Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Beacon Press 2010) [xiii] Norman O. Brown, “A Reply to Herbert Marcuse,” Commentary Magazine, March 1967. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/commentary-bk/a-reply-to-herbert-marcuse/ AuthorHunter Hilinski is a PhD student at the University of California, Irvine. He received a dual BA in Political Science and Philosophy from Wilkes University and an MA in Political Science from Colorado State University. His current research interests are in the American counterculture of the 1960s and Latin American political movements at about the same time. His work is deeply indebted to the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and Psychoanalysis. At UCI he is a labor union steward/organizer and member of the Housing and Anti-Policing committees. Archives July 2021 7/15/2021 Book Review: Eric-John Russell- Spectacular Logic in Hegel and Debord: Why Everything is as it Seems. Reviewed By: Carson WelchRead NowThe work of Guy Debord has often been associated in the English-speaking world with the ubiquity of some vague menace called “the spectacle,” which amounts to little more than an impenetrable mass of images that paper over the reality of social antagonism. A few recent studies have begun to remedy such misunderstandings of Debord’s central concept by restoring the complexity of its engagement with the Hegelian Marxist philosophical tradition. Spectacular Logic in Hegel and Debord both contributes to this restoration and offers some revisions of the studies that preceded it. But in doing so, it provides far more than a mere analysis of Hegel’s influence on Debord. Having situated Debord’s thought among a range of dialectical thinkers, Russell ultimately shows how Debord’s engagement with Hegel evinces the continuing use of the concept of “appearance” for understanding, as Russell puts it, the “phenomenality of a world that cannot be seen otherwise” (4). At the heart of Russell’s study is the form of appearances in societies organized by political economy. What Russell means by “appearance,” as his subtitle suggests, is the way in which the world seems to subjects in a broad sense that includes the sort of conceptual immediacy associated with the term “ideology.” In Hegel’s Science of Logic, appearance more specifically denotes how the object reveals itself; there, in a complex dynamic that Russell lays out with refreshing clarity, mere illusion, Schein, unfolds into the more complex Erscheinung, the appearance whose necessity compels the phenomenal world to bear its own truth: as per Hegel’s famous phrase, which Adorno compared to the great climaxes of Beethoven’s symphonies, “essence must appear!”. The category of appearance thus spans the historically determinate meanings of “phenomenology” that each reflect in various ways on how the world ‘reveals itself’ to consciousness. But for Russell, “appearance” is more specifically the concept that renders possible Hegel’s speculative philosophy. The central gambit of Russell’s study hinges on precisely such elective affinities between “the speculative,” as a direct relation between appearance and essence, and “the spectacle,” as a historical manifestation of that relation. This realm of appearances was likewise the starting point of Marx’s critique of political economy. In Capital, Marx begins this critique not with labor, circulation, the working day, Feudalism, or any of the other possible starting points, but rather with the commodity, the sensible and ubiquitous manifestation of the mode of production whose logic it soon reveals. As for Debord, that the first sentence of The Society of the Spectacle should play on the opening sentence of Capital indexes from the outset the intent to update this analysis of the commodity for his own time: “The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles” (Debord, 1995; 12). Not only does the replacement of “commodities” with “spectacles” denote a generalized commodification, but it also encapsulates Debord’s project of updating those forms of appearance that, for Marx, offer a profound view onto the dynamics of capital (if only to give way to other views as Capital progresses). The shift of emphasis from commodity to spectacle does not entail the effacement of the commodity form as a central analytic concept, but rather the commodity’s emerging tendency toward the visual. As the highest form of commodification, the “image” is one of the obvious-seeming manifestations of the spectacle in the age of ubiquitous advertising, celebrity, mind-numbing TV, and so on, but it more importantly indexes a certain encroachment of the commodity form upon the sensory apparatus. While the image is thus an important site for understanding the mutations in the commodity form, the spectacle is not identical with “images,” and its tendency toward visuality in the 20th-century ultimately “refers back to the riddle of the money-fetish” (104). As a condensed expression of the historical transformation in the capitalist mode of appearance witnessed by Debord, this first sentence of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle also serves as a prime example of the Situationist logic (adopted from the Lettrists) of détournement—the estrangement of old content or an imposition of a new context that makes the old material suddenly give off a flash of relevance. But perhaps another détournement from Society of the Spectacle serves as a better entry into Russell’s erudite study, this time a reworking of Hegel: “In a world that really has been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood” (14). The first chapter of Russell’s book is devoted to working through the development of the Hegelian aphorism from which this sentence is derived: “the true is the whole.” Taken up by Adorno, this aphorism revealed that social totality could only be comprehended at the expense of the very particulars of which it is composed, admitting of a profound reversal: “the whole is the untrue.” Russell draws clear parallels between Debord’s own engagement with this problematic and that of Adorno’s, especially insofar as both take heed of the form of appearances under late capitalism as the true expression of a corrupt world. For Russell, this is the only way to make sense of the concept of spectacle: the spectacle is not the illusion that obscures the way a society really functions; rather, it is that functioning itself. Spectacle is not an obfuscation of class struggle but one of its many facets. Returning to Hegel’s terminology, Russell argues that many misreadings of Debord ignore this rational kernel in the mystical shell of spectacle and could be remedied by recognizing that the spectacle is not so much caught in the illusory dualism of Schein—illusion and reality, misrecognition and truth—as it is an expression of the internal necessity of Erscheinungen described above. The moments of this paradoxical identity of essence and appearance in the spectacle follow so closely those articulated in Hegel’s Logic that, for Russell, the spectacle can be considered the latter’s manifestation in reality (in much the same way that Adorno considered the culture industry a realization of the most fanciful formulations of German Idealism, industrializing the function of conceptual schematization that Kant had reserved for the individual). As Russell makes clear, this is because the concept of spectacle is not so much concerned with appearances per se as their unity or organisation in a given social formation, aligning the spectacle with the dialectical reversals in use- and exchange-value detailed by Marx. Though Russell ultimately argues that the spectacle should be considered the manifestation of Hegel’s subjective logic, such assertions in large part sidestep the usual thorny disputes as to Hegel’s relationship to the critique of capitalism, insofar as the spectacle names not capitalism in particular but a “critical theory of society” that is better understood alongside the Frankfurt School than the so-called postmodern theorists like Baudrillard. Such disputes return, however, when the contemporary spectacle is considered the self-moving and internally differentiating force that Marx called the “automatic subject” of capital and that bears such a striking formal similarity to the self-movement of Hegel’s world spirit (making it no surprise that Hegel, too, was familiar with Adam Smith’s “invisible hand of the market”). Another such problem addressed in Russell’s book is that of “separation,” inherited by Debord from Lukács and the early Marx. Like in the studies of Tom Bunyard and Anselm Jappe on which Russell builds, Spectacular Logic gives detailed accounts of the process by which subjects are unable to recognize the products of their labor as their own when the objective social world becomes “separated” from those who have created it, acquiring the status of an inalterable “second nature.” Russell adequately traces this tradition and its problems, revising at times its treatment in recent scholarship—in particular what Russell considers Jappe’s over-emphasis on the value-form and Bunyard’s opposition of Hegel’s speculative philosophy to the real logic of spectacle. Though taking into account the influence of French Hegelians like Hyppolite and Lefebvre, Russell focuses more directly on Debord’s engagement with the German tradition from Hegel to Lukács. But it is only when Russell returns to his sustained reading of Hegel’s subjective logic and of the “Force and Understanding” section from the Phenomenology that this work most starkly stands out from its predecessors’. It is best not to spoil any of Russell’s thorough and idiosyncratic reading of Hegel’s speculative philosophy, except to point out that Spectacular Logic, as Étienne Balibar writes in the book’s foreword, “might very well become one of the best critical introductions to the reading of the Subjective Logic” (xviii). From the book’s opening, Russell admits that he will somewhat narrowly focus on the logic of appearances in capitalist society, leaving untouched a great deal of material at the margins of this already massive scholarly undertaking. Nonetheless, since Debord’s artistic works constitute in their own right a profound meditation on the social organisation of appearances, one might have expected Russell to extend his own insights into a consideration of Debord’s artistic practice. Despite his limited output, Debord primarily considered himself a filmmaker, even as he made one of the first, but certainly not the last, proclamations of cinema’s end—not to mention the possibility for art to transcend itself in the construction of a new reality (and as for media more generally, Debord could not have more clearly stated that “the media” constitute only the most immediate and particular example of a mode of appearance that extends far beyond them). Many of the strengths of Russell’s book, however, stem from this decision to bracket such topics within Debord’s thought. Such bracketing allows him to provide much more than a corrective to the reception of Debord in the Anglophone academy, however needed one may still be. Russell goes far beyond such correctives by providing a strong statement about why, to play on a sentence from Oscar Wilde that serves as the book’s epigraph, it is only shallow critics who do not judge by appearances. AuthorCarson Welch is a PhD student in the Program in Literature at Duke University. This article was republished from Marx & Philosophy. Archives July 2021 7/14/2021 Book Review: Henry Heller- The French Revolution and Historical Materialism: Selected Essays. Reviewed By: Jean-Pierre ReedRead NowThe French Revolution, a collection of articles and (review) essays previously published in Historical Materialism, is a must read. In it, Heller sets out to challenge the revisionist history associated with this historical event. What is at stake? The Marxist interpretation of the French revolution as a bourgeois revolution, a position that goes back to the work of Marx (among others, the German Ideology, Capital, Vol. 1, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850) and Engels (in the Origin of the Family), and which gains serious scholarly recognition starting at the turn of the twentieth century with the work of French Socialist Jean Jaurés and through the late 1960s at which point under the intellectual context of post-structuralism and post-modernism and the already existent geopolitical context of the Cold War, the Marxist – historical materialist – interpretation is challenged, first by French scholars (prominently François Furet representing the cultural turn) and subsequent to them, Anglo scholars (deniers of its historical impact). All in all, Heller provides us with an insightful and astute account of the historiography on the French revolution in the service of demonstrating the significance of historical materialism as an interpretative framework for the event in question. He does this in an expository way and in an elucidating back-and-forth manner with his critics (William Beik, David Parker, and Stephen Miller), whose essays are also part of the collection. At the centre of the revisionist debate are some obvious but important questions: Was the bourgeoisie a class-in-itself and/or a class-for-itself at the time of the revolution? Is there any historical evidence that can support the claim that capitalism and its representative class actors existed at the time of revolution? Revisionist accounts, Heller shows, deny both the existence of a bourgeois class actor and the history of capitalist development that would have given rise to it. Historical records show, Heller further conveys of the revisionist history, that the absence of a capitalist infrastructure in seventeenth century France undermined the development of the bourgeoisie into a class-in-itself and class-for-itself capable of overthrowing the ancien régime. These latter factors imply that class conflict as portrayed in Marxist accounts was non-existent since the actors implied in the scenario of class conflict were also, in essence, non-existent, given the absence of a fully formed (or even despite an emergent) capitalist infrastructure. State sanctioned property rights – ‘seigneurial rights, venal offices, tax farms, noble titles, and bonds sold by office holders, municipal magistracies, and provincial estates’ – similarly got in the way of capitalist infrastructural development (112). If the bourgeoise was in fact a “viable” actor in the socio-political context that resulted in the outbreak and overthrow of the French monarchy as one of his critics contends, they played ‘a relatively small role’ (84). The real struggle between contending forces was not between the monarchy and emergent entrepreneurial middle classes. It was, so revisionists claim, between the nobility and the monarchy, if not between the monarchy and a reactionary peasantry. Revisionist accounts, to succinctly summarise, have ‘questioned the link between’ the bourgeoisie and capitalism, ‘cast doubt on the strength of both capitalism and the bourgeoisie … sought to deny the meaning of the terms,’ and ‘questioned the significance of the revolution to French history, which, it is claimed, is a history of continuity rather than change’ (127). Heller’s response to revisionist contentions is to acknowledge, as the revisionists do, that the seventeenth century was indeed a period where the development of the French bourgeoisie was undermined on account of state practices that bolstered the logic of a feudal system. Yet, Heller further conveys, their undermining was not an indication that they lost momentum entirely from their emergence in the sixteenth century. The key to making sense of their influence is connected to what Marx referred to as primitive accumulation. A type of accumulation that comes in the form of rural capitalism and the social, economic, and technological changes that are correspondent to it. To make sense of this latter phenomenon that revisionist accounts readily dismiss, Heller conveys, one must consider the rationalisation of agricultural practices and the emergent wage system associated with a coming-into-being new mode of production and how these factors were connected to the material interests and the development, if in a limited way, of an emergent rural capitalist class and its influence (on agricultural practices, see 122-23). Yes, the seventeenth century was not as conducive to their development, as it was the case in the sixteenth century. The aforementioned feudal-state sponsored property practices are a key factor that largely explains their retardation. Yet, shifting agricultural and land practices in place – and despite ‘increased taxes and rents’ – kept them in a holding pattern that made it possible for them to sustain profits and to re-emerge and gain momentum in the eighteenth century, a more favourable context of opportunity to their material and political interests (122). Heller also maintains that their influence in the unfolding of revolutionary situations is easily found in the discourse of the time. The fact that the artisan classes frequently engaged in strikes is also telling, not to mention the role finance capital played in the expansion of external commerce and development of industry before and after the overthrow of the monarchy. The reality that a language of class was present at the time of the revolutionary crisis and soon thereafter tells us something about the transformation processes already in place. The discourse against and for the revolution – as found in the language of key figures and journals – for example, was often consistent of warnings against bourgeois hegemony or calls for alliances with them against the monarchy. It not only proved the presence of a class actor, it also projected inchoate class interests that eventually matured and took hold of French society. Artisan strikes were in effect Luddite attacks against the imposition of an emergent economic regime that was displacing them through technological innovation, and the surest indicator of class conflict in the revolution. Regarding finance capital, Heller notes the following: ‘bankers were clearly involved in the development of both mining and metallurgy as well as large-scale commercial capitalism, the latter being the most dynamic sector of the economy prior to the revolution. It was in this sector in particular that industrial enterprises developed prior to 1789. The revolutionary period further advanced the development of capitalism and the development of a capitalist class’ (236). The debate over whether the French revolution was a bourgeoisie revolution is likely to continue as past accounts are scrutinised, historical records come to light and are interpreted, and new insights develop from paradigm shifts in academia. Heller’s The French Revolution, however, gives credence to the usefulness of historical materialism, and in a significant way settles the score, to date, between liberal and radical interpretations. In this reviewer’s opinion The French Revolution has set the standard for Marxist interpretations for years to come. For this reason alone, it should be read. AuthorJean-Pierre Reed is Associate Professor of Sociology, Africana Studies, and Philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, USA. His scholarship falls within the sociology of revolutions/social movements, social theory, and culture. It explores the significance of popular culture (especially religion), discourse, emotion, and storytelling in (revolutionary) politics. He has published extensively on the religious dimensions of the Nicaraguan revolution. He is author of Sandinista Narratives: Religion, Sandinismo, and Emotions in the Making of the Nicaraguan Insurrection and Revolution (Lexington Books 2020). This article was republished from Marx & Philosophy. Archives July 2021 Since various economics professors noticed that Marxists had been publishing articles showing, from empirical data, that the labour theory of value was right[ 5,3,4,6,1 7,2 ], they have felt the need to come up with objections. Whilst in the past the objections economists raised to the labour theory of value were purely abstract and theoretical, now they had a harder job. They now had Marxists producing actual figures which they had to cast doubt on. The objections raised by economists then get relayed in a popularised form on blogs or social media debates. It is worth my while giving a brief rundown of the 3 favourite objections along with an explanation of why these are all groundless. We have refuted them all in the open literature but since the relevant paper is not well known here is a short informal account. 1. The objection from moneyThe first objection is to say that the Marxists have not demonstrated a correlation between exchange values and labour but only between wages and exchange value. This, it is argued is circular, money quantities are being used to explain value not quantities of labour. This objection is simply false. Zachariah[6] used Swedish I/O tables that contain data on the number of person-years used in each industry there and obtained a correlation of 96.5% between integrated labour contents and market values of industrial output. We[2 ] used UK I/O tables which have total wage bills for each industry along with other statistics on average hourly wages for each industry to do a similar correlation between hours directly and indirectly used in each industry and market values of outputs and obtained a 96.4% correlation. So it has been demonstrated that if you start out from actual hours worked you get a very strong correlation between price and labour value. 2. The objection from social necessityAnother objection that economists raise is to say: ‘Marx said it was socially necessary labour time that determines value, but the empirical studies just take clock time not socially necessary time’. This objection shows that some economists do not understand how Marx defined socially necessary labour time: The labour, however, that forms the substance of value, is homogeneous human labour, expenditure of one uniform labour power. The total labour power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour power, composed though it be of innumerable individual units. Each of these units is the same as any other, so far as it has the character of the average labour power of society, and takes effect as such; that is, so far as it requires for producing a commodity, no more time than is needed on an average, no more than is socially necessary. The labour time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time. He is explicit that the socially necessary time that creates value is the average time that it takes to make a commodity of a given class. So the socially necessary time to produce 1Kwh of electricity is the average time used across all power plants active on the grid. Or expressed in money, the socially necessary time to produce £1 of electricity is the average time spent to produce £1 of electricity across all power plants weighted by the amount of electricity each plant produced. Now the empirical studies use, for each industry, the total labour required to produce the output of the industry. So for the electricity, they give the total hours of labour to produce the total sales of electricity for the year. But by definition, this total is equal to the average labour content multiplied by the number of units produced. So the empirical studies are strictly and exactly using the Marxian definition of socially necessary labour in the calculations. 3. The objection from sizeAnother objection is that the observed correlations are a spurious side effect of industry sizes. For a third factor to be the common cause of the variation in the two vectors of interest, that third factor must itself be quantifiable. How do you measure industry size? Is it defined in money terms? Is it defined in employment terms? We can intuitively see that ‘big’ industries employ more people and ‘big’ industries have a larger money output. But employment and money output are the two variables being taken as data by the empirical studies. What they are demonstrating is that the money turnover of the industry is 96% explained by the direct plus indirect employment of labour by the industry. So ‘size’ defined in either money or employment terms is not a third factor that could be causing the spurious correlation. One could, of course, use some physical definition of size, output in Kg or land area occupied. But none of the economists has attempted to use such physical measures of size to show that weight of output or land area used is the ‘size’ that is causing the spurious correlation. Of course, as soon as you try to think of some such physical measure it becomes obvious that the task will be hopeless. There will only be a relatively weak correlation between the weights of the output of industries and their money output or employment, the same for land use. References 1. Nils Fröhlich, “Labour values, prices of production and the missing equalisation tendency of profit rates: evidence from the German economy“, Cambridge Journal of Economics 37, 5 (2013), pp. 1107–1126. 2. G. Michaelson, W. P. Cockshott, and A. F. Cottrell, “Testing Marx: some new results from UK data“, Capital and Class (1995), pp. 103–129. 3. E. M. Ochoa, “Values, prices, and wage–profit curves in the US economy“, Cambridge Journal of Economics 13 (1989), pp. 413–29. 4. P. Petrovic, “The deviation of production prices from labour values: some methodology and empirical evidence“, Cambridge Journal of Economics 11 (1987), pp. 197–210. 5. A. M. Shaikh, “The empirical strength of the labour theory of value“, in Marxian Economics: A Reappraisal vol. 2, (Macmillan, 1998), pp. 225–251. 6. David Zachariah, “Testing the labour theory of value in Sweden” (2004). 7. David Zachariah, “Labour Value and Equalisation of Profit Rates“, Indian Development Review 4, 1 (2006), pp. 1–21. AuthorPaul Cockshott is an economist and computer scientist. His best known books on economics are Towards a New Socialism, and How The World Works. In computing he has worked on cellular automata machines, database machines, video encoding and 3D TV. In economics he works on Marxist value theory and the theory of socialist economy. This article was republished from Paul Cockshott Blog. Archives July 2021 7/14/2021 The Streets of Cuba Belong to Revolutionaries and We Will Defend Them. By: Juan Diego Nusa Peñalver & Yudy Castro Morales & Milagros Pichardo PérezRead NowEnemies of the Revolution want to take advantage of our problems to apply the social unrest formula they have used in other countries; but with Cuba there are no formulas that work Foto: Juan Diego nusa Peñalver "We are here because the streets belong to Fidel, because the streets of Cuba belong to revolutionaries." This was the phrase we heard the loudest walking along several Havana avenues Sunday afternoon, July 11, when an entire people came out to defend their Revolution. We heard it, for example, in front of the Capitol, seat of the National Assembly of People's Power, and along Prado down to the waterfront Malecon. We heard it up to Belascoaín, and along Carlos III, where neighbors gathered, waving flags and, above all, ideas. A woman shouted from her balcony, "Viva la Revolución!" and "Viva Cuba Libre!" Her voice joined those of many younger residents who, on the street below, waved the 26th of July Movement flag and repeated, louder and louder, clearer and clearer: "Fidel, Raúl and Díaz-Canel are here," "Patria o Muerte, Venceremos" (Homeland or Death, We will win). We heard it along Infanta, from women and men, Cubans with few and many years of age, all with the same conviction: a country like ours, with so many dreams and more than a few pains, is defended tooth and nail, knowing that, as the poet said, "For this freedom/ beautiful as life/ we must give our all/ if necessary/ even the shadow/ and it will never be enough." We heard it from Julio Alejandro Gómez, a blogger who joined the honest demands of those who love and create and took to the streets, "because I am a revolutionary and I know that this is a manipulation. They want to take advantage of our needs and problems to apply the same formula of ‘social unrest’ that they have used in other countries; but with Cuba there are no formulas that work. The Revolution belongs to the people and is defended by the people." We heard Alberto Bermudez, who lives on Infanta, and in the midst of the racket, hummed "I die as I lived" with a group of buddies and, soon thereafter, it was the notes of the national anthem they offered. "Unity and continuity," others shouted, while Alberto interrupted his song to affirm, "Fidel, this is your people, and the streets belong to the people. The order has been given and we are here. We are going to win, in spite of COVID-19, in spite of whatever." The same phrases, shouted along the way, led our group of reporters to Alfredo Vázquez, provincial secretary of the Federation of Cuban Workers in Havana, who was injured in one of the confrontations with the "destabilizers." Foto: Ricardo López Hevia "They hit me hard on the head and I ended up with a seven-stitch gash. But here I am, my flag stained with blood, ready to continue defending the Revolution, because to die for the Homeland is to live," he insisted without slowing his pace, just like Cuba, the land of revolutionaries who are never intimidated. And there beside Via Blanca, Faustino Leonard, a resident of Cerro municipality, also spoke to us about the day, with the remains of rocks thrown still on the street. "The quarrel was tough here, but there were more revolutionaries. The saboteurs ran away to hide, probably to some cave, like rats usually do. Let no one doubt it, this country belongs to the people, and will continue to belong to us." AuthorJuan Diego Nusa Peñalver This article was republished from Granma. Archives July 2021 With capitalism’s rapid descent into environmental catastrophe, epidemiological crises, and neo-fascist forms of governance, the forceful necessity of a socialist revolution seems evident. However, the specific modes of realization of such a historical change remain elusive. Decades of neoliberalism have resulted in a sharp decline in mass movements and struggles that represent vibrancy of subaltern praxis and popular power. The vast reservoirs of creativity, solidarity and existential resoluteness have been dealt a solid blow by undiminished austerity attacks which target the core of human dignity. And this explains the prolonged collapse of long-term imagination and revolutionary perspectives on the international Left. An article in the April 2021 issue of “Reform and Revolution” - a magazine run by a Marxist caucus within Democratic Socialists of America - argues: “reforms are only won through struggle, and…if our class organizes on a larger scale and in a direct fight for political power, far more can be won.” This line of reasoning closely resembles Erik Olin Wright’s proposed strategy to “erode” capitalism. What these viewpoints share in common is a failure to understand the structural texture of capitalist totalities, overlooking the interlinked nature of the various elements which compose such social formations. More specifically, a reformist perspective is theoretically underdeveloped, being incapable of locating the particular positions of the political and social levels within capitalism. State-forms in East and WestIn his famous “Prison Notebooks”, Antonio Gramsci once wrote: “In the East, the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relationship between State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there was a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks: more or less numerous from one State to the next, it goes without saying - but this precisely necessitated an accurate reconnaissance of each individual country.” In this passage, Gramsci affirms the existence of a strong state-form in the West that includes, importantly, the multiple articulations and mediations of a mature civil society. The real subsumption of society under capital in the West provides the basis for social cohesiveness. This may be a corollary of the mediating role of representative institutions, or the more abstract phenomenon of social democratization - juridical equality that allows increased national political and economic participation. In the East, by contrast, the state lacks the complex of defensive trenches that a developed and articulated civil society can provide to the state in the West, and which helps to resist the immediate eruption of conflicts in the sphere of production into the political terrain. Gramsci’s comparison of advanced capitalist formations - with high state viscidity - to politically disarticulated and heterogeneous ones, characterized by arrangements of pre- or non-capitalist elements alongside capitalist ones was borrowed from Vladimir Lenin. Lenin’s “Report on War and Peace” - published in 1923 - contained the following: “The revolution will not come as quickly as we expected. History has proved this, and we must be able to take this as a fact, to reckon with the fact that the world socialist revolution cannot begin so easily in the advanced countries as the revolution began in Russia - in the land of Nicholas and Rasputin, the land in which an enormous part of the population was absolutely indifferent as to what peoples were living in the outlying regions, or what was happening there. In such a country it was quite easy to start a revolution, as easy as lifting a feather. But to start without preparation a revolution in a country in which capitalism is developed and has given democratic culture and organization to everybody, down to the last man - to do so would be wrong, absurd.” Gramsci’s differentiation of state-civil society relations in the East and West was used by reformist thinkers - most prominently Eurocommunists - for patently non-revolutionary purposes. They asserted that insofar as the Western state was based largely in the civil society, capitalism could be slowly weakened through cultural and parliamentary struggles against bourgeoisie hegemony. Thus, Nicos Poulantzas was writing about his hopes of building democratic footholds in the capitalist state in the 1970s in Europe, when labor was relatively strong and social democratic parties seemed to be able to take over the administrations of different western European countries. Nevertheless, his hopes never materialized. Integral StateThe reformist reformulations of the “Prison Notebooks” are aided by a selective reading. According to Gramsci, the Western bourgeoisie’s full-fledged articulation of a hegemonic project reproduces itself at the institutional scale in the form of a qualitatively new apparatus - the “integral state”. The state is no longer an intermittent entity in quotidian life. Instead, it percolates into the micro-pores of society, penetrating into the sumps of civil society. Gramsci identifies civil society closely with the “consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group”. In addition to civil society, there also exists political society, comprising the “apparatus of state coercive power which ‘legally’ enforces discipline on those groups who do not ‘consent’ either actively or passively.” As Gramsci further notes, “This apparatus is, however, constituted for the whole of society in anticipation of moments of crisis of command direction when spontaneous consent has failed” - thus, the integral state equals “political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armour of coercion”. Here, the distinctions between political society and civil society are heuristic, not organic and ontological. In reality, both the components of the integral state exist as dialectical moments in a wider picture of fundamental unity. This point can be clarified through a brief delineation of the contours of hegemony. In “Dominance without Hegemony”, Ranajit Guha developed a useful analytical schema. Hegemony involves a relation of Dominance [D] to Subordination [S] - and these two terms imply each other. Both aspects of power have their correlates: Dominance can take the forms of Coercion [C] and Persuasion [P], whereas Subordination” can take the form of Collaboration [C*] and Resistance [R]. In the words of Guha, the “mutual implication of D and S is logical and universal in the sense that, considered at the level of abstraction, it may be said to obtain wherever there is power, that is, under all historical social formations irrespective of the modalities in which authority is exercised there.” But the specific mix of coercion, persuasion, collaboration and resistance is contingently variable in different historical situations. In any given society, and at any given point in time, the relation D/S varied according to what Guha termed - following the terminological style of “Das Kapital” - the “organic composition” of power, which depended on the relative weights of C and P in D, and of C* and R in S, which were always, he argued, contingent. Hegemony was a condition of dominance in which P exceeded C. “Defined in these terms, hegemony operates as a dynamic concept and keeps even the most persuasive structure of Dominance always and necessarily open to Resistance”. But at the same time, “since hegemony, as we understand it, is a particular condition of D and the latter is constituted by C and P, there can be no hegemonic system under which P outweighs C to the point of reducing it to nullity. Were that to happen, there would be no Dominance, hence no hegemony”. This conception, he noted, “avoids the Gramscian juxtaposition of domination and hegemony as antinomies”, which had “alas, provided far too often a theoretical pretext for a liberal absurdity - the absurdity of an uncoercive state - in spite of the drive of Gramsci’s own work to the contrary”. As is evident, hegemony - unlike reformist conceptions - only constitutes the social basis of power in the state (conceived in a limited sense, as governmental apparatus); expressed in terms of the dialectical unity of the integral state, dominance in political society depends upon a class’s ideological capacities in civil society. Given the earthworks and trenches that exist in the West, a class that aspires to be hegemonic must pass through the different, yet unified, moments of civil and political hegemony before reconstituting the state - the final war of maneuver. When the integral state is understood in all its comprehensiveness, civil society becomes the terrain upon which social classes compete for social and political leadership or hegemony over other social classes. Such hegemony is guaranteed, however, in the ultimate instance, by capture of the legal monopoly of violence embodied in the institutions of political society. Hence, the political society is a condensation of the social forces in civil society that are themselves overdetermined by economic interests and relations of forces originating from the political arena. The state apparatus of the bourgeoisie can be defeated only when the proletariat has deprived it of its social basis through the construction of an alternative hegemonic narrative and its concretization in a corresponding hegemonic apparatus. Contemporary reformists deny the indispensability of the latter. Hence, rather than locating hegemony in either civil society or political society, or characterizing hegemony as invariably involving consent by the ruled to their subordinate status, or seeing hegemony as a process working at the molecular level in an almost non-political way, we need to see hegemony as a way of amalgamating social forces into political power. The exercise of hegemony, initially done within civil society, must also have a substantive effect upon political society - because political society itself is integrally intertwined with civil society and its social forces, as their mediated, higher forms. In fact, any attempt for the attainment of hegemony within civil society has to progress towards political hegemony in order to maintain itself as such. Dual Power StrategyBy now, it should be obvious that Gramsci posits no deep-seated differences between East and West, as far as the state goes. Despite any ease of access to political power on one side of the divide, there is still - to use Gramsci’s phrase - that intense “labour of criticism” (part and parcel of a lengthy war of position) which needs to be carried out in any historical process of intellectual and moral reform; hegemony needs to be molded in a manner that reaches popular consciousness. Any conquering of a “gelatinous” state needs to be followed by this work. Thus, different historical formations are at different levels in terms of their development of civil society. These formations purely differ in the quality of the relationship between state and civil society. Now, the types of the state-civil society linkages in the West depend crucially upon material apparatuses. In “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci”, Perry Anderson turned his emphasis away from culture as the mechanism of consent to “the general form of the representative State,” which “deprives the working class of the idea of socialism as a different type of State.” Communication, consumerism, and “other mechanisms of cultural control” could only reinforce, in a complementary and secondary manner, this more fundamental mechanism, which belonged to the sphere of the state itself. The bourgeois state abstracted the population from its class divisions, “representing” individuals as equal citizens: “[I]t presents to men and women their unequal positions in civil society as if they were equal in the State. Parliament, elected every four or five years as the sovereign expression of popular will, reflects the fictive unity of the nation back to the masses as if it were their own self-government.” The “juridical parity between exploiters and exploited” conceals “the complete separation and non-participation of the masses in the work of parliament.” The consent extracted by the bourgeois state “takes the fundamental form of a belief by the masses that they exercise an ultimate self-determination within the existing social order.” The belief in equality of all citizens, that is, in the absence of a ruling class, produced by the institutions of parliamentary representation, is the structure of consent found in a developed capitalist society. Since parliamentary apparatuses are themselves responsible for the preservation of capitalist society, a “democratic road to socialism” ends up reinforcing the ideology of bourgeois democracy. Hence, socialism will require not the uncritical takeover of the existing state apparatuses but their dismantlement through the cultivation of new institutions of grassroots democratic popular power. This revolutionary perspective is described as a dual power strategy because it promotes new centers of popular power outside of (an in opposition to) the apparatuses of the old state. But such a revolutionary position is ignored by present-day reformists who neglect the conjoined status of civil society and political society. AuthorYanis Iqbal is an independent researcher and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India and can be contacted at yanisiqbal@gmail.com. His articles have been published in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and several countries of Latin America. Archives July 2021 7/13/2021 The United States Tries to Take Advantage of the Price Cubans Are Paying for the Blockade and the Pandemic. By: Manolo De Los Santos & Vijay PrashadRead NowCuba, like every other country on the planet, is struggling with the impact of COVID-19. This small island of 11 million people has created five vaccine candidates and sent its medical workers through the Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade to heal people around the world. Meanwhile, the United States hardens a cruel and illegal blockade of the island, a medieval siege that has been in place for six decades. In April 2020, seven United Nations special rapporteurs wrote an open letter to the United States government about the blockade. “In the pandemic emergency,” they wrote, “the lack of will of the U.S. government to suspend sanctions may lead to a higher risk of such suffering in Cuba and other countries targeted by its sanctions.” The special rapporteurs noted the “risks to the right to life, health and other critical rights of the most vulnerable sections of the Cuban population.” On July 12, 2021, Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel told a press conference that Cuba is facing serious shortages of food and medicine. “What is the origin of all these issues?” he asked. The answer, he said, “is the blockade.” If the U.S.-imposed blockade ended, many of the great challenges facing Cuba would lift. Of course, there are other challenges, such as the collapse of the crucial tourism sector due to the pandemic. Both problems—the pandemic and the blockade—have increased the challenges for the Cuban people. The pandemic is a problem that people all over the world now face; the U.S.-imposed blockade is a problem unique to Cuba (as well as about 30 other countries struck by unilateral U.S. sanctions). ProtestsOn July 11, people in several parts of Cuba—such as San Antonio de los Baños—took to the streets to protest the social crisis. Frustration about the lack of goods in shops and an uptick in COVID-19 infections seemed to motivate the protests. President Díaz-Canel said of the people that most of them are “dissatisfied,” but that their dissatisfaction is fueled by “confusion, misunderstandings, lack of information and the desire to express a particular situation.” On the morning of July 12, U.S. President Joe Biden hastily put out a statement that reeked of hypocrisy. “We stand with the Cuban people,” Biden said, “and their clarion call for freedom.” If the U.S. government actually cared about the Cuban people, then the Biden administration would at the very least withdraw the 243 unilateral coercive measures implemented by the presidency of Donald Trump before he left office in January 2021; Biden—contrary to his own campaign promises—has not started the process to reverse Trump’s designation of Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism.” On March 9, 2021, Biden’s spokesperson Jen Psaki said, “A Cuba policy shift is not currently among President Biden’s top priorities.” Rather, the Trump “maximum pressure” policy intended to overthrow the Cuban government remains intact. The United States has a six-decade history of trying to overthrow the Cuban government, including using assassinations and invasions as policy. In recent years, the U.S. government has increased its financial support of people inside Cuba and in the Cuban émigré community in Miami, Florida; some of this money comes directly from the National Endowment for Democracy and from USAID. Their mandate is to accelerate any dissatisfaction inside Cuba into a political challenge to the Cuban Revolution. On June 23, Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez said that the Trump “measures remain very much in place.” They shape the “conduct of the current U.S. administration precisely during the months in which Cuba has experienced the highest infection rates, the highest death toll and a higher economic cost associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.” Costs of the Pandemic On July 12, Alejandro Gil Fernández, Cuba’s minister of economy and planning, told the press about the expenses of the pandemic. In 2020, he said, the government spent $102 million on reagents, medical equipment, protective equipment and other material; in the first half of 2021, the government spent $82 million on these kinds of materials. This is money that Cuba did not anticipate spending—money that it does not have as a consequence of the collapsed tourism sector. “We have not spared resources to face COVID-19,” Fernández said. Those with COVID-19 are put in hospitals, where their treatment costs the country $180 per day; if the patient needs intensive care, the cost per day is $550. “No one is charged a penny for their treatment,” Fernández reported. The socialist government in Cuba shoulders the responsibility of medical care and of social insurance. Despite the severe challenges to the economy, the government guarantees salaries, purchases medicines and distributes food as well as electricity and piped water. That is the reason why the government added $2.4 billion to its already considerable debt overhang. In June, Cuba’s Deputy Prime Minister Ricardo Cabrisas Ruíz met with French Minister of Economy and Finance Bruno Le Maire to discuss the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. France, which manages Cuba’s debt to the public creditors in the Paris Club, led the effort to ameliorate the debt servicing demands on Havana. Costs of the Blockade On June 23, 184 countries in the UN General Assembly voted to end the U.S.-imposed blockade on Cuba. During the discussion over the vote, Cuba’s Foreign Minister Rodríguez reported that between April 2019 and December 2020, the government lost $9.1 billion due to the blockade ($436 million per month). “At current prices,” he said, “the accumulated damages in six decades amount to over $147.8 billion, and against the price of gold, it amounts to over $1.3 trillion.” If the blockade were to be lifted, Cuba would be able to fix its great financial challenges and use the resources to pivot away from its reliance upon tourism. “We stand with the Cuban people,” says Biden; in Havana, the phrase is heard differently, since it sounds like Biden is saying, “We stand on the Cuban people.” Cuba’s Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz said that those who took to the streets on July 11 “called for foreign intervention and said that the [Cuban] Revolution was falling. They will never enjoy that hope,” he said. In response to those anti-government protests, the streets of Cuba filled with tens of thousands of people who carried Cuban flags and the flags of the Cuban Revolution’s 26th of July Movement. Cruz said, “The people responded and defended the revolution.” AuthorManolo De Los Santos is a researcher and a political activist. For 10 years, he worked in the organization of solidarity and education programs to challenge the United States’ regime of illegal sanctions and blockades. Based out of Cuba for many years, Manolo has worked toward building international networks of people’s movements and organizations. In 2018, he became the founding director of the People’s Forum in New York City, a movement incubator for working-class communities to build unity across historic lines of division at home and abroad. He also collaborates as a researcher with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and is a Globetrotter/Peoples Dispatch fellow. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives July 2021 7/13/2021 Hands off Cuba: Defend the Revolution! By: Carlos L. Garrido and Edward Liger SmithRead NowYesterday, the Midwestern Marx co-founders got together to discuss the recent imperialist attacks on Cuba. In the podcast below, Carlos and Edward analyze the Cuban protests in their historical context; beginning from the development of colonial monocropping and the subsequent sugar and tobacco dependency created on the Cuban economy thereof, to the revolution, the process of industry nationalization, and the last 60+ years of the US blockade (which includes military, biochemical, and ideological attacks). Situating the condition in Cuba in its proper historical position, the focus is then turned towards the recent build up towards these protests, which include the US’ exploiting of the pandemic to intensify the conditions created by the reinstatement of the blockade via the Trump administration, the US funding of opposition groups in Cuba, and the role Cuban-opposition artist have played in furthering the imperialist narrative. The duo also examines the role and tactics western media has used to manufacture consent for these opportunists, as well as how they have been able to blow the scope of the protests out of proportion while ignoring the substantially larger pro-revolution crowds that hit the streets after Diaz-Canel’s called on them to defend the revolution. Watch our podcast interview below if you want a complete picture of the current situation in Cuba. AuthorCarlos L. Garrido is a philosophy graduate student and professor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. His specialization is in Marxist philosophy and the history of American socialist thought (esp. early 19th century). He is an editorial board member and co-founder of Midwestern Marx and the Journal of American Socialist Studies. Archives July 2021 Image: US/Cuba Normalization Committee. The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) calls on its members and friends to demand the Biden Administration not interfere in the internal affairs of Cuba and live up to its pledge to “reset” relations that must include an end to the blockade. We urgently ask our members and friends to contact the State Department, the White House, Senators, and Congresspersons and tell them “Hands off Cuba! The majority of our country who desire peace and an end to the decades-long strangulation of the Cuban people and economy must make their voices heard. We stand firmly in solidarity with the Communist Party (PCC) and the people of Cuba against U.S. imperialist interference. For more than half of a century, the country of Cuba has been the target of U.S. ruling class resentment and ire. Despite never having threatened or attacked the U.S., Cuba has met with resistance at every turn for over 60 years. Despite all the immense difficulties, Cuba has maintained its efforts to build socialism, led by its Communist Party and working class. They have created a medical system that is the envy of the world, provided free education for all its citizens, and ended homelessness. Cuba is an example to the world of what the working class can achieve. It is for these reasons, chief among them medical solidarity, that they have been nominated to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet U.S. imperialism never relents and now is trying to plant an anti-communist movement in the middle of Cuban society. In addition, members of Congress like Rep. Anthony Sabatini are openly calling for the toppling of the Cuban government and the execution of government members. Despite the best efforts of the forces of reaction, the Cuban people stand strong. We see the videos of Cuban people flooding the streets in support of the government and the revolution. The best solidarity we can build is to end the blockade, a position now supported by tens of millions in this country as represented by resolutions passed by city councils, trade unions, school boards, churches, and others. One specific way to support is to assist the Syringes4Cuba campaign. The time to act is now! Every effort to build broad public support helps wherever you are, be it the city, rural communities, or suburbs. AuthorCOMMUNIST PARTY USA The Communist Party USA is a working class organization founded in 1919 in Chicago, IL. The Communist Party stands for the interests of the American working class and the American people. It stands for our interests in both the present and the future. Solidarity with workers of other countries is also part of our work. We work in coalition with the labor movement, the peace movement, the student movement, organizations fighting for equality and social justice, the environmental movement, immigrants rights groups and the health care for all campaign. But to win a better life for working families, we believe that we must go further. We believe that the American people can replace capitalism with a system that puts people before profit — socialism. We are rooted in our country's revolutionary history and its struggles for democracy. We call for "Bill of Rights" socialism, guaranteeing full individual freedoms. This article was republished from CPUSA. Archives July 2021 Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel spoke to the Cuban people today, Sunday, July 11 at 4:00 p.m. Eastern, after going to the site of one of several protests that took place in Cuba today. This unprecedented series of events are the result of the growing difficulties the people are experiencing by the double blow created by the increasingly severe U.S. blockade and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite being in control of infections for many months, cases have been growing in recent weeks and days. Because the Cuban government is necessarily prioritizing medicines and health care for thousands of COVID-positive patients, shortages are being experienced by the rest of the population. Electrical energy is scarce because of the blockade, and what little is available is being directed to facilities for COVID patients. As a result, blackouts are happening in parts of the country, adding to the people’s difficulties. The United States is taking advantage of the situation by heavily financing counter-revolutionary groups that are part of the protests and trying to foment opposition. And yet, this is at a time when Cuba’s famed biotechnology industry has created five vaccines to vaccinate its population, the real hope for saving lives. This speech provides crucial context and information being covered up by the corporate media in the United States. We in the Party for Socialism and Liberation stand with the Cuban Revolution and the heroic people who have resisted U.S. imperialism for more than 60 years. Down with the U.S. blockade! The following is an unofficial translation of President Díaz-Canel’s words from CubaDebate.cu (Italic and bold type in the original article). We have been honest, we have been transparent, we have been clear and at every moment we have been explaining to our people the complexities of the current moments. I remind you that more than a year and a half ago, when the second semester of 2019 began, we had to explain that we were entering a difficult situation. … Since then we have remained under that situation as a result of all the United States government moves led by the Trump administration in relation to Cuba. They began to intensify a series of restrictive measures, a tightening of the blockade, of financial persecution against the energy sector with the aim of suffocating our economy and expecting that this would provoke the desired massive social outbreak, which sows the possibilities for the entire ideological campaign that it has done, to be able to call for humanitarian intervention that ends in military intervention and interference, and that affects the rights, sovereignty and independence of all peoples. That situation continued, then came the 243 measures that we all know about [Trump’s measures tightening the blockade, banning all remittances, etc.] and finally they decided to include Cuba in a list of countries sponsoring terrorism, a spurious, illegitimate and unilateral list that the United States government has adopted, believing themselves, the United States, the emperors of the world. Many countries suddenly submitted to these decisions, but it must be recognized that others do not allow it to be imposed on them. All these measures led to the immediate cutting off of various sources of foreign income such as tourism, Cuban-American travel to our country, and remittances. A plan was made to discredit the Cuban medical brigades and the solidarity collaborations provided by Cuba, which received an important amount of foreign exchange for that collaboration. This whole situation caused a situation of shortages in the country, especially of food, medicines, raw materials and supplies to be able to develop our economic and productive processes that at the same time contribute to exports. Two important elements are cut off: the ability to export and the ability to invest resources. And from the productive processes, to then develop goods and services for our population. We also have limitations on fuels and spare parts and all this has caused a level of dissatisfaction, coupled with accumulated problems that we have been able to solve and that came from the special period together with a fierce media campaign of discrediting, part of the unconventional war that tries to fracture the unity between the party, the state and people; that tries to portray the government as insufficient and incapable of providing well-being to the Cuban people whereby the U.S. government tries to convey that only with them can a country like Cuba hope to progress. Those are well-known hypocritical recipes, speeches of double standards that we know very well throughout the history of the United States towards Cuba. How did they intervene in our country, how did they take over our island in 1902, how did they maintain domination of our island in the pseudo-republic stage, and how were those interests dealt a blow by the Cuban Revolution in its triumph? The example of the Cuban Revolution has bothered them a lot for 60 years and their aggression has been constantly increasing. They have applied an unjust, criminal and cruel blockade, now intensified in pandemic conditions and therein lies the manifest perversity, the evil of all those intentions. Blockade and restrictive actions that they have never taken against any other country, nor against those they consider their main enemies. Therefore, it has been a policy of viciousness against a small island that only aspires to defend its independence, its sovereignty and to build its society with self-determination according to the principles that more than 86% of the population has supported in the broad and democratic exercise that we supported a few years ago to approve the current Constitution of the Republic of Cuba. In the midst of these conditions comes the pandemic, a pandemic that has not affected only Cuba, but the entire world, including the United States. It has affected rich countries and it must be said that in the face of this pandemic neither the United States nor those rich countries that had all the capacity to face its effects in the beginning — and in many of those first world countries — with much more wealth, their health systems and intensive therapy rooms collapsed. The poor were disadvantaged because there are no public policies aimed at the people for their salvation, and their indicators in relation to the confrontation of the pandemic have worse results than those of Cuba in many cases. This is how we were progressing, we controlled the outbreaks and new outbreaks, with a tremendous capacity of our people, our scientists and our health personnel to sacrifice, and almost the entire country has been involved in it. We have created five vaccine candidates, of which one has already been recognized as a vaccine and which is the first in Latin America. Cuba is already vaccinating its population. It is a process that takes time. Vaccines must be produced, but at the moment we have one of the highest vaccination rates in the world and in a few weeks we have exceeded 20% of the population’s vaccination, a process that continues. In recent months, strains that are more aggressive and cause more transmission of the disease have begun to circulate. In the middle of this situation is that a group of complications begin to appear. In the first place, cases occur with a speed and accumulation that exceeds the capacities that we have to be able to create, to attend to these cases in state institutions. So we have had to go to open up capacities in other centers for the cases. By opening up more centers, we have also had to give priority for electrical energy use, even in the midst of accumulated energy problems that have caused us blackouts. The amount of electricity circuits we are having to protect so COVID patients are treated, creates a situation where more circuits are causing annoying but necessary blackouts, because we have to restore our electricity generation capacities. This has happened in recent days and has caused irritation, misunderstanding, concerns and affectations to the population. By having more patients, there is more consumption of medications, and our stocks of drugs are also running out, the possibilities of acquiring them being very difficult. In the midst of all this, we continue with will, thinking about everything, working for everyone. Now we have to go to the experience of [COVID-positive cases] cases staying home, due to the lack of capacities in a group of provinces, and we have had to summon the family so that they have a more direct, responsible participation. We do not tire of admiring in the midst of this situation the capacity for creative resistance that our people have. And how with these values, if we maintain responsibility and unity, in the shortest possible time with vaccination and with responsible behavior, complying with hygienic sanitary measures, social isolation and physical distancing, we will leave this pandemic peak sooner rather than later, which is not just the case for Cuba. What Cuba managed to do was postpone this pandemic peak over time with everything we did, and in the shortest time we will overcome it. This is what we have affirmed these days, in our tours of the provinces to specify all the strategies of confronting the pandemic. In a very cowardly, subtle and opportunistic and perverse way, from the most complicated situations that we have had in provinces such as Matanzas and Ciego de Ávila, those who have always approved the blockade and who serve as mercenaries of the Yankee blockade on the streets, begin to appear with doctrines of humanitarian aid and a “humanitarian corridor.” We all know where they come from. They do this to strengthen the claim that the Cuban government is not capable of getting out of this situation, as if they were so interested in solving the health problems of our people. If you want to have a real gesture of support with Cuba, if you want to be concerned about the people, lift the blockade and we will see how we engage. Why don’t they do it? Why don’t they have the courage to lift the blockade? What legal and moral foundation do they have to support a foreign government that applies this policy to a small country in the midst of such an adverse situation. Isn’t that genocide, isn’t that a crime against humanity? They make claims that we are a dictatorship. What a strange dictatorship it is that cares about giving its entire population health care, that seeks wellbeing for all, that in the midst of these situations is capable of having programs and public policies based on everyone. A dictatorship that is aspiring to vaccinate everyone with a Cuban vaccine, because we knew that no one was going to sell us vaccines and we had no money to go to the international market to buy vaccines. Now they shout that we are murderers. Where are the murdered in Cuba? Where are the disappeared? Why were the other countries that have suffered these events of pandemic peaks not attacked in the press? Why were they not given the solution of humanitarian intervention? They were not attacked with discrediting campaigns that they have wanted to launch against us. Life, history and facts show what is behind all this: It is to suffocate and end the Revolution and for that they are trying to discourage our people by misleading them. When people are in severe conditions like the ones we are living in, events like the ones we saw today in San Antonio de los Baños occur. In San Antonio de los Baños, a group of people gathered in one of the most central parks in the city to protest and demand. Who were those people? They were made up of the people who are experiencing some of the shortcomings and difficulties, there are revolutionary people who may be confused and who may not have all the arguments or who were expressing their dissatisfaction. Those two groups of people did it in a different way and looked for an argument and asked for an explanation. The first thing they said was “I am a revolutionary” “I support the Revolution.” This was headed by a group of manipulators who were lending themselves to the plans of those campaigns that appeared on social networks. The famous SOSMatanzas or SOSCuba, the call to the banging of pans, so that in several cities of Cuba there would be demonstrations of this type and there would be social unrest. This is very criminal, very cruel, especially at this time where we must ensure that people remain in the houses who are protecting themselves from the pandemic. With the morale that the Revolution gives, the revolutionaries of San Antonio de los Baños, the authorities of the province, and a group of comrades from the leadership of the country presented ourselves in San Antonio de los Baños. This mass of revolutionaries confronted the counterrevolutionaries and we spoke with the revolutionaries and some who may be non-revolutionaries but who were asking for arguments. Later we marched and toured the town to show that in Cuba the streets belong to the revolutionaries. While this is happening, we know that there are other towns in the country, where groups of people in certain streets and squares have gathered, also motivated by such unhealthy purposes. The state has all the political will to dialogue, but also to participate. We will not hand over our sovereignty nor the independence of this nation. They have to pass over our corpses if they want to overthrow the Revolution. AuthorThis article was republished from Liberation News. Archives July 2021 7/12/2021 PSL statement: U.S. Imperialism Seeks Counter-Revolution in Cuba. By: Party for Socialism and LiberationRead NowThe Party for Socialism and Liberation stands in full solidarity with the Cuban Revolution, its government and people in the struggle against the latest sinister counterrevolutionary efforts of U.S. imperialism. The sixty year old blockade and hundreds of sanctions imposed under the Trump administration have caused grave shortages of food, medicines, electricity and other necessities of life. The shortages have greatly exacerbated the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the island. The pandemic has virtually eliminated the economically vital tourism industry, greatly reduced remittances and contributed to major problems in the already-limited global supply chains serving the island. In the last day, protests have been taking place in Cuba focused on the shortages and economic deprivations caused by the intensification of the U.S. blockade during the time of COVID. The corporate media in the United States is pointing to these demonstrations as evidence that the people of Cuba oppose the revolutionary government. As always, these outlets are completely distorting the situation and covering up the criminal role of the United States. And they are ignoring the mobilizations held in response by Cubans who support the revolution, as well as the efforts of the top leadership of the country to directly engage with the people in the areas where the demonstrations occurred. The United States has a long and bloody history of coups and “regime change” operations, including in Iran, Guatemala, Congo, Greece, Chile, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Libya, Ukraine and elsewhere. Most often in recent years, coups have come in the form of “color revolutions,” beginning with what falsely appear to be spontaneous popular protests, following the imposition of extreme sanctions and blockades designed to strangle the targeted country’s economy and foment discontent. Like other “color revolution” coup attempts, such as in Venezuela in 2014, the break-out of the protests at the same time suggests planning by opposition elements. Since the Revolution took power in 1959, Cuba has endured hundreds of U.S.-sponsored terrorist attacks, CIA assassination attempts of its leaders, and a relentless and vicious economic war aimed at cutting off Cuban trade not only with the United States but the entire world. For more than six decades, Washington has sought to inflict the greatest suffering on the people in the hope that would lead to counterrevolution. All of these measures are a form of punishment for Cuba for having broken free after 60 years as a U.S. neo-colony and set out on a course of independent development. No working person in the United States should be fooled – this is the latest manifestation of an imperialist war to destroy Cuban independence and socialism. U.S. hands off Cuba! AuthorParty for Socialism and Liberation This article was republished from Liberation News. Archives July 2021 7/12/2021 We Defend the Revolution, Above All Else. By: Gladys Leydis Ramos López & Juan Diego Nusa PeñalverRead NowFor 60 years the example of the Cuban Revolution has bothered the United States, stated First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba and President of the Republic, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, yesterday, during a special message from the Palace of the Revolution explaining to the people the most recent provocation orchestrated by small groups of counterrevolutionaries. Photo: Estudios Revolución For 60 years the example of the Cuban Revolution has bothered the United States, stated First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba and President of the Republic, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, yesterday, during a special message from the Palace of the Revolution explaining to the people the most recent provocation orchestrated by small groups of counterrevolutionaries. The President began his remarks with a revolutionary greeting to the entire people, and said: "Unfortunately, we have been obliged to interrupt our Sunday, that all our families take to rest and spend time together, to inform you and share with you a series of elements related to the events that have been taking place today, which are part of a high level, systematic, escalating provocation, which has been promoted by the counterrevolution over these days." What is the background to this situation we are experiencing, he asked. "We have been honest, we have been open, we have been clear, and at all times we have explained the complexities of the current situation to our people. I remember that more than a year and a half ago, when the second half of 2019 was just starting, we had to explain that we were heading toward a difficult conjuncture, and we used that term, which was later taken up as part of popular humor, since we have remained in this ‘conjuncture’ for a long time...Beginning with all the signs that the U.S. government, headed by the Trump administration, was giving in relation to Cuba." Diaz-Canel recalled that the adoption of an extensive series of restrictive measures to tighten the blockade began; financial persecution, energy persecution, with the goal of asphyxiating the country’s economy. He denounced ongoing efforts to provoke a massive social explosion in Cuba, including all sorts of propaganda and ideological constructions they fabricate to call for misnamed humanitarian interventions, which end up as military interventions and interference, trampling the rights and violating the sovereignty, the independence of peoples. This succession of hostile acts continued, he noted, "Then came the 243 measures we all know about. And in the last days of that administration the decision was made to include Cuba on the list of countries sponsoring terrorism." He reiterated that this list is a totally spurious list, an illegitimate list, and a unilateral list, fabricated by the U.S. in the belief that they are the power dominates the world, that they are the emperors of this world." He noted that, unfortunately, due to the lack of principles that exists within more than a few international institutions and national governments, many cave in and go along with these hostile measures and actions. "It must be recognized that others do not submit to be the imposition of these measures, but they are limited by the extraterritorial nature that these. "And that further increased the impact of the restrictions, which above all implied that the country was immediately cut off from its main sources of foreign currency income: I am talking about tourism, I am talking about the trips of Cubans and U.S. citizens to our country, about the much-awaited remittances to Cuban families from their relatives in the United States." The President also denounced U.S. efforts to discredit Cuban medical brigades, since this medical collaboration, beyond the many instances of solidarity provided, also generates foreign currency income. All this, he said, is causing shortages in the country: "Shortages of food, of medicines, raw materials and inputs needed by our economic and productive processes, which contribute both exports and supplies for the people; therefore here two important elements are cut off: the capacity to export and to acquire foreign currency to import and invest, and the capacity of the productive processes to be produce a full range of goods and services for our population." He pointed out that the country "has seen its fuel supply limited, access to spare parts limited, and all this has caused dissatisfaction, has exacerbated accumulated problems, which we have not been able to resolve, have been around since the special period, and to all this has been added a ferocious media campaign to discredit us, as part of a so-called non-conventional war, which attempts, on the one hand, to break the unity of the Party, the government, the state and the people, attempting to portray the government as inept, incapable of providing wellbeing to the Cuban people, attempting to portray the U.S. government as “very concerned about the welfare of the Cuban people,” who it has unjustly blockaded, telling them how they can aspire to development and progress in a country such as ours. "These are the usual hypocritical prescriptions and speeches of double standards, which we know very well, throughout the history of United States behavior toward Cuba. We know how they intervened in our country, how they appropriated our island, how they maintained domination of our Island during the pseudo-republic and how their interests were hit hard by the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. "For 60 years the example of the Cuban Revolution has bothered them, and they have constantly tightened… applied an unjust, criminal, cruel blockade, reinforced, worse than ever under pandemic conditions. Therein lies the manifest perversity, the maliciousness of all these intentions: blockade and restrictive measures, which they have never taken against any other country, or against those they consider their main enemies. "This has been a work and a policy of viciousness against a small Island, which only aspires to defend its independence, its sovereignty and build, with self-determination, its society in accordance with the principles that more than 86% of the population has approved, has supported in the broad and democratic exercise we held, to approve the current Constitution of the Republic of Cuba. "And in the midst of these conditions comes the pandemic, a pandemic that has not only affected Cuba, a pandemic that has affected the whole world, a pandemic that has also affected the United States, that has affected rich countries. It must be said that the United States and other rich countries did not have the capacity to confront the effects of this pandemic at the beginning. "And in many of those first world countries, with much more wealth, health systems collapsed, intensive care units were overwhelmed. The poor have been disadvantaged because there are no public policies directed toward saving the people,” and these rich countries in many cases have worse results than Cuba in terms of responding to the pandemic. "And we were impacted by the pandemic and, in the midst of all these other restrictions, with the reserves that the country has created, with the little we had in the country, with the little we have been able to acquire this difficult year and a half, is that we have been able to meet these challenges, these tests. "And we have done it with courage, we have done it without giving in and, above all, we have done it by sharing among all the little we have, and we have not only shared within Cuba, we have shared with the world. There is the example of the Henry Reeve internationalist brigades, which has gone to places brutally affected by the pandemic. "And this is how we have moved forward, controlling one wave after another, with a tremendous capacity for sacrifice on the part of our people, of our scientists, of our health personnel, of almost the entire country involved in this. Díaz-Canel recalled that five candidate vaccines have been developed, one already recognized as a vaccine, the first in Latin America against COVID-19. Cuba is already vaccinating our population, and this is a process that takes time. Vaccines must be produced, but we currently have one of the highest vaccination rates in the world and in a few weeks we will have reached more than 20% of the total population," he noted. However, he noted, in the last few months more aggressive strains have appeared, and in the midst of this already serious situation, another group of complications began to appear. "First of all, new cases are emerging at a speed and accumulation that exceeded the capacities we have been able to create to treat these patients in state institutions. On the other hand, we have been obliged to expand capacity in other centers," he explained. In this sense, by opening more centers, to which energy priority must be given - in the midst of the accumulation of problems in the generation of electricity, the number of circuits that we must protect, to attend these patients, has increased. With more patients, he continued, the stock of medicines is also running low and acquiring them is very difficult; and in the midst of all this, we continue to work for everyone. "Now we have been obliged to resort to home isolation due to the lack of capacity in a number of provinces, and call on families to participate more directly, more responsibly. One never tires of admiring the capacity for creative resistance of our people." With these values, he insisted, with vaccination advancing, complying with the necessary sanitary measures, we will emerge sooner rather than later from this peak in the pandemic, which is not only hitting Cuba. Cuba managed to postpone this high point with everything we did, and we will overcome it. But now, he noted, in a very cowardly, subtle, opportunistic and perverse manner, exploiting the most difficult situations we have in provinces like Matanzas and Ciego de Avila, those who have always supported the blockade, those who have served as mercenaries, lackeys of the Yankee empire, begin to appear with calls for a humanitarian intervention, a humanitarian corridor, to strengthen the idea that the Cuban government is not capable of handling this situation, as if they were really interested in the welfare and health of our people. “If they want to make a gesture toward Cuba, if they really are concerned about the people, if they want to solve Cuba's problems: lift the blockade and let's see how we do, why don't they do that? Why don't they have the courage to lift the blockade, what legal and moral basis allows a foreign government to implement such a policy against a small country, and in the midst of such adverse conditions? Isn't this genocide?” He denounced the assertion that a dictatorship exists in Cuba, "A dictatorship that is concerned about providing healthcare for its entire population, that seeks welfare for all, that in the midst of this situation is capable of conducting public policies, aspiring to vaccination with a Cuban vaccine, because we knew that no one was going to sell us any, since we don’t have the money to buy them," he said. "What a strange dictatorship," he exclaimed. Now they are shouting that we are murderers. Where are the murder victims in Cuba, where are the missing persons in Cuba? Other countries that have suffered these pandemic peaks were not attacked in the press and they were not offered humanitarian intervention as a solution, nor were they subjected to these slander campaigns as we are, Díaz-Canel emphasized. "I believe that life, history, the facts show what is behind all this, which is the effort to asphyxiate us and put an end to the Revolution, and for that they are trying to discourage our people, to confuse our people. And when the people are facing severe conditions, then events like the ones we experienced in San Antonio de los Baños take place." About the events in this area, he detailed: Who was part of the group? It included members of the population, who have needs, who are experiencing some of these shortages; it included revolutionaries who are confused, do not have all the arguments, or were expressing these dissatisfactions, but they were doing differently, because they were seeking to understand, seeking explanations. "But this was led by a core group of manipulators who are indeed lending themselves to the designs of the SOS Matanzas or SOS Cuba campaigns… Several days ago, they were preparing demonstrations or social disturbances of this type in several Cuban cities. This is criminal, at a time when people should be at home, protecting themselves." Diaz-Canel reported that revolutionaries in San Antonio de los Baños, provincial authorities, a group from the country's leadership showed up there, we confronted the counterrevolutionaries and we talked to the revolutionaries, and to those asking for explanations, to show that Cuba’s streets belong to revolutionaries. He pointed out that we know there are other groups of people gathering in streets and plazas, in other cities of the country, also moved by unhealthy purposes. "I am also giving this information, to reaffirm that in Cuba the streets belong to revolutionaries, that the state, the revolutionary government, guided by the Party, are more than willing to discuss, to argue and to participate with the people in the solution of problems, but recognizing the real cause of our problems, without allowing ourselves to be confused." Those who are encouraging demonstrations are not interested in good healthcare for Cuba, he emphasized. Remember that their model is neoliberal, the privatization of health, of medical services, of education; that everyone should save themselves as best they can, that those who have the money can access health care, he warned. "We are not going to surrender sovereignty, the independence of our people, or the freedom of this nation. There are many of us revolutionaries in this town who are willing to give our lives and this is not a slogan, it is a conviction. They will have to step over our corpses if they want to confront the Revolution, and we are ready for anything and we will be in the streets fighting." We know that incidents of this type are being orchestrated in the streets of Havana and that there are large groups of revolutionaries confronting counterrevolutionary elements. We are separating the confused revolutionaries, the inhabitants of Cuba who have specific concerns, but we are not going to allow any counterrevolutionary, any mercenary, to provoke destabilization among our people. "This is why we are calling on all revolutionaries in our country, all communists, to take to the streets in any of the places where these provocations may take place today, from now on, throughout these days," he insisted. "As I said in my closing speech at the Party Congress, we revolutionaries defend the Revolution above all else, we communists on the front lines, and with that conviction we are now in the streets, we are not going to allow anyone to manipulate our situation, or defend a plan that is not Cuban, that is not for the welfare of Cubans and that is annexationist. This is the task to which we call revolutionaries and communists of this country," he concluded. AuthorGladys Leydis Ramos López & Juan Diego Nusa Peñalver This article was republished from Granma. Archives July 2021 View of the facade of the Organization of American States (OAS), today, in Washington (United States). | Photo: EFE Just as in 2018, Nicaragua is once again the subject of the kind of mass international bad faith news coverage and perception management more usually associated recently with US and allied government offensives against Bolivia, Cuba, Iran, Syria and Venezuela. In Nicaragua's case the current offensive is aimed at influencing the country's elections scheduled for next November 7th. Currently, all the opinion polls show that, should President Daniel Ortega stand again for election, he and his FSLN party will win easily with over 60% support against around 20% for the the country's right wing opposition. The campaign against Nicaragua's Sandinista government is clearly intended to encourage punitive coercive economic measures from the US and European Union governments aimed at influencing voter opinion in those November elections against President Ortega and the FSLN. Right now, the main false accusation is that “Ortega” has unjustly imprisoned over twenty opposition leaders, among them several presidential candidates. All US attempts to overthrow governments resisting US and allied government dictates depend on this kind of big lie. The standard big lie is that target governments are unpopular, repressive dictatorships. Invariably, the truth is very different if not the complete opposite. For example, in 2009, the big lie in preparation for the coup against then Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was that the proposed Fourth Ballot referendum aimed to secure him re-election so as to impose a dictatorship. In Nicaragua's case, the current big lie is that “Ortega” is arresting opposition leaders to prevent them defeating him in next November's elections. These big lies only flourish in an essentially fascist culture of corporate dominated government in which truthful information is systematically suppressed and substituted by false beliefs. Typical Western false beliefs or presuppositions are, for example, that the US and its allies are a force for good in the world, that Western culture is morally superior to others and that capitalism promotes optimal economic and social outcomes. These ridiculous false beliefs are fundamental tenets of Western intellectual life and public discourse. They make possible the kind of psychological warfare repeatedly unleashed against governments that obstruct the wishes of Western corporate elites and the governments they own. An important component of Western psychological warfare shaping the moral dimension of any given disinformation assault is the essentially class based solidarity with the target country's imperialist proxies. This neocolonial solidarity operates in reactionary and progressive varieties, both claiming a Western monopoly on freedom, democracy and defence of human rights. Both essentially agree that governments resisting Western demands deserve to be attacked one way or another. The reactionary variety, prevalent mostly among the business and financial classes and related professionals, insists on abandoning international law in favour of intervention based on Western dictated rules. The progressive variety, prevalent mostly among non profit organizations, academics and other socially oriented professionals, agrees but is more diffident about the means of intervention deployed, demanding alibis to satisfy susceptibilities over humanitarian and human rights concerns. The right wing variety generally favors aggressive, overt or covert military-based solidarity with armed opposition rebellion, while the progressive variety favors smart-power coercive measures prioritizing solidarity with some version of opposition civil society or popular movements. Nicaragua experienced the first right wing version of neocolonial solidarity during the Contra war of the 1980s when president Reagan declared, with more truth than he realized, that the CIA-run narco-terror campaign was “the moral equivalent of the founding fathers”. Subsequently, ever since the Sandinista FSLN party returned to government in 2007, Nicaragua has experienced principally the progressive version of smart power neocolonial solidarity developed under president Obama. That policy, supporting Nicaragua's anti-Sandinista opposition, intensified under president Trump and continues unchanged now under “Biden”. Self-evidently, these varieties of neocolonial solidarity thrive on their respective class loyalties and ideological susceptibilities. In 2018, a massive disinformation campaign covered up the Nicaraguan opposition's extreme violence and their deliberate campaign of destruction. As Harold Pinter remarked in relation to the 1980s Contra War, even as the opposition violence of 2018 was happening, the murders, the extortion, the arson, the torture, it was made to seem that nothing happened. Now, when the Nicaraguan authorities have acted to preempt a repeat of that failed 2018 coup attempt, a furious psychological warfare assault is taking place to conceal the coup mongering opposition's treasonous collusion with the US and EU country governments. As regards progressive and left wing opinion in general, militant foreign supporters of Nicaragua's ex-sandinista opposition have long been important protagonists covering up the ex.sandinistas' anti-democratic collaboration with Western imperialist intervention. Even before the 2006 elections, the US authorities had coopted ex sandinistas as collaborators. But when Daniel Ortega and FSLN won those elections, successfully managed the crisis of 2008-2009 and then triumphed in the 2011 elections, US government support for the opposition switched to promoting efforts at outright regime change. Inside Nicaragua, the ex sandinistas, devoid of popular support, abused their non profit networks to camouflage their political opposition to the government and the accumulation of resources necessary to mount the 2018 coup attempt. That systematic abusive subterfuge has been eliminated and its protagonists held to account. So now foreign supporters of the ex sandinista opposition again cloak their militant, aggressive, politically driven advocacy under phony human rights concerns. In 2018, they did so to cover up the violent role of the ex sandinistas in the failed coup attempt. Now, they falsely allege human rights abuses to cover up ex sandinista US collaborators' treasonous criminality. The false human rights propaganda motif makes it possible for proponents of the progressive variety of neocolonial solidarity in North America, Europe and elsewhere, to work in parallel with their right wing counterparts. Even many supposedly left wing figures have written articles or signed declarations in support of the ex-Sandinista US collaborators and those people's right wing allies in Nicaragua. They do so for three main reasons. Firstly, many supposedly left-wing figures attacking the Nicaraguan authorities for defending Nicaragua's independence and sovereignty have some degree of friendship with the ex-sandinistas now under investigation, so they defend them for essentially personal reasons. Secondly, it is likely that many supposed left wingers supporting the ex Sandinista US collaborators have been duped by the massive psychological warfare assault on Nicaragua without bothering to question it. A third main reason for that kind of neocolonial solidairty from people who should know better, is that they fear alienating their support networks and are simply signaling how virtuous they are so as to avoid criticism. In any case, the current situation, just like the 2018 coup attempt, categorically defines where everyone's loyalties lie. People genuinely committed to the principles of sovereign independence and self-determination recognize the Nicaraguan authorities are applying the country's laws and criminal code to defend the country against US intervention aimed at overthrowing the elected government. People who believe the bogus human rights accusations and claims that the current criminal investigations are driven by electoral considerations are engaging in the kind of neocolonial solidarity regularly deployed to justify yet another operation of imperialist regime change. For anyone foolish enough to credit the ex sandinista leaders denials of complicity with the US government, this series of photographs should help disabuse them of that false belief. AuthorteleSur This article was republished from teleSur. Archives July 2021 7/12/2021 Rituals of Submission: Amazon’s Creation of the Neoliberal Worker. By: Panos TheodoropoulosRead NowAmazon creates a collective identity that is firmly rooted in neoliberal ideals. To challenge it, unions and social movements must focus on building the commons. It is around 3 p.m. in a brightly lit Glasgow Amazon warehouse. We are walking around fulfilling our duties, when the managers summon us to the common room where we immediately observe the festive atmosphere and the burgers, fries and drinks. We had been expecting the usual monthly meeting where our superiors jubilantly inform us of our successes and amicably warn us of our infractions, but this seems a lot better. We are told to relax and to set our handheld device which monitors most of our activities into “admin.” The responsibility for our lack of movement will now be assumed by the management. As we begin to eat, our site manager announces that one of our colleagues has been made “Associate of the Month,” a prize that comes with prestige and a £50 Amazon voucher. The walls of the common room are lined with the photographs of previous winners, a daily reminder of their success for the rest of us. This “associate” — not “employee,” not “colleague” — has proven himself worthy of becoming a permanent employee. Starting from next month, he will be awarded the coveted “blue badge.” We are told that his tireless work ethic, his friendliness, flexibility and willingness to assist the rest of the workforce are the reasons he has been selected. We are told that he has demonstrated his unwavering commitment to customer satisfaction by consistently checking every product for expiry dates before packing it. We happily clap for his success and the management reminds us that everyone has the chance to rise to his level. They commit to assisting us with anything we might need to reach our true potential. After all, we are a team of highly capable, passionate individuals. Reinvigorated and inspired, we resume our work. COVID-19 AND A BREAK IN NORMALITYThe above description hardly fits with the dominant accounts of Amazon warehouses emanating from social movements and progressive media outlets. Anyone even remotely interested in issues of labor and resistance has read the horrific accounts of overworked employees — powerless cogs in the huge multinational’s ceaseless quest for maximum profits — collapsing from the stress, urinating in bottles due to the relentless pressure of meeting unmeetable targets. Amazon’s intense union-busting operations, highlighted in full in the recent failed unionization drive in Bessemer, prove that the giant is not even remotely interested in workers’ well-being. Its partnership with the Pinkerton agency, notorious for killing striking workers in the late 1800s and its persistent drive to monopolize every sector of the economy it can get its hands on, complete the image of Amazon as the major incarnation of the post-modern dystopian superpower. These issues are well-documented, and constantly met with new campaigns and organizing drives. But working for Amazon reveals a more complex reality, one that highlights the corporation’s underlying intentions and how it aims to shape the minds of tomorrow’s workers. Crucially, overt aggression, repression and control are only a last resort in a much darker project, which became increasingly visible because of the additional measures introduced due to the pandemic in the warehouse I worked in. Being a picker in an Amazon Prime warehouse in the UK is a seemingly simple task. Your responsibilities are picking products from the shelves, neatly placing them in the requisite paper bags for delivery to the customers and then re-stocking the shelves. In each of these stages a handheld device tells you everything that you need to do: where the product is located, what the product is, if it requires additional packaging and in which bag it needs to be packed. In general, the system has been regimented to such an extent that within a few weeks workers know everything they need to know to do the job, and the Amazon behemoth proceeds smoothly with its productivity targets. The warehouse I worked in is Amazon’s smallest in the UK. When COVID-19 hit, the need to maintain social distancing in its extremely narrow corridors meant Amazon’s notorious pick-rates had to be temporarily abandoned. As orders were surging and Amazon was exhibiting the full scale of its repressive repertoire in other sites, we were told to relax, walk slowly and focus on maintaining social distancing. While our superiors still had access to our performance statistics, we nevertheless had a period of serenity which was in stark opposition to what existed in almost every other site. We began to joke with the managers and have time for some small conversations as we carried on our duties. All this, for the comparatively handsome wage of £9.50 an hour, one pound over the UK’s minimum wage. But once the relentless focus on targets was lifted, this revealed a clear image of the worker subjectivities that Amazon is trying to create. MOLDING THE NEW CAPITALIST SUBJECTThroughout the history of capitalism, systems of labor management have changed significantly. Instead of the heavy, Fordist reality of permanent employment in a single unionized industry from adolescence to retirement, most workers in the West are now experiencing the fluidity and insecurity of precarious employment. This labor regime is characterized by a rise of job agencies, a lack of labor rights, temporary contracts and the almost complete absence of unions. These structural changes are accompanied by an intense focus on the workers as individuals, with governments, educational systems and cultural production increasingly promoting the values of individualism, entrepreneurship and competition in a race to the bottom where the most adaptable, most able-bodied, and most obedient survive to work another day. Amazon is the apogee of this new system. The small celebration described above betrays some important elements of the real dystopia behind Amazon’s patent smile. These performances intend to reinforce Amazon’s already-held beliefs about itself, its purpose and its identity. In that sense, they fulfill an almost ritualistic purpose. The walls are lined with inspirational slogans and the photographs of previous “Associates of the Month.” The gifts offered to staff in the form of free food and other trinkets have the purpose of showing our boss’ “appreciation” for our hard work. When some workers are elevated above the rest of us because of their hard work, obedience and “unwavering commitment to customer satisfaction,” this is nothing more than an employer recognizing a worker’s contributions to their own profitability. But at Amazon this is presented as a recognition of the worker’s outstanding personal qualities. As we participate in cheering for these workers, we collectively reinforce both the underlying premises of this celebration and our own beliefs that someday we could be the ones in their position. And we need to be in their position. Because as a newly contracted worker at Amazon in the UK you do not have labor rights or security. Amazon does its hiring for pickers and packers exclusively through employment agencies. This absolves the company from all responsibility towards its workers and maintains Amazon’s right to dismiss them whenever it wants. Apart from enabling Amazon to manage all its operations without regard for the nuisance of workers’ rights and well-being, this precarity is also an excellent tool for sorting through vast numbers of individuals to retain the select few who will be offered the coveted blue badge, a permanent contract. Such contracts are with Amazon rather than an agency and include labor rights such as a relatively humane sick policy. This is in sharp contrast to agency workers who get fired if they call in sick more than a few times over a six-month period. Amazon contracts also include various benefits, like training sessions, that workers can access to rise up the occupational hierarchy. Most importantly, the blue badge protects workers from arbitrary dismissal — once you “make” it, Amazon can no longer get rid of you from one day to the next. As workers, this badge is our security and we are all striving to achieve it. This landscape is further enforced by Amazon’s nominal commitment to positive ideals such as diversity and mental health. The walls were lined with phrases such as “Diversity is our strength,” and, indeed, the workplace was the most multicultural that I have ever found myself in. During Black History Month, posters were put up of “inspirational” Black personalities. Of course, people such as Malcolm X were not included, but Martin Luther King, Serena Williams and Oprah Winfrey were. Interestingly, a quote by Angela Davis was also included, demonstrating the extent to which capitalism can adaptively recuperate some radical figures to suit its projects. A similar commitment was observed with regards to LGBTQI rights. In a video we were shown during our induction training we were repeatedly encouraged to notify our superiors if we experienced any mental health issues and were assured that we would be supported. Far from reproducing the classic stereotype of the oppressive corporation that carelessly participated in racist, sexist and homophobic stigmatization, Amazon invests both internally and externally in promoting a modern image of inclusivity and tolerance. This goal makes perfect sense: why would the biggest multinational in the world lose productive workers on account of characteristics that do not impact profitability? If you could walk and you could communicate in English, you were good to go. When the mechanics of Amazon’s labor practices are considered in their totality, the intent behind the ritualistic celebrations as described above comes into view. The entire performance has the objective — and direct consequence — of crafting workers that are grateful for the opportunity to participate in entrenching their own alienation. Amazon succeeds in getting the workers to exert themselves, to compete with each other, while at the same time maintaining a facade of collective spirit and diversity which it uses to defend itself against the threat of unions and other worker-led organizing efforts. Many of the managers and supervisors that participate in this circus have themselves been through it as agency workers. They are not malicious or evil. They have simply been more fully sculpted and are thus invested in the performance because they deeply believe in it. This belief does not necessarily manifest itself in a delighted performance of the “good worker” stereotype. Indeed, many workers are critical of Amazon and their position within it. However, in the absence of a wider critical and oppositional narrative, Amazon’s “ideals” and practices of worker competition and overexertion become naturalized. The result is a deep subjective identification with our oppression and with the behaviors that are required of us. With time, everyone partakes in the circus, As an anarchist and a union organizer who was acutely aware of what was happening around me, I found even myself trying to work as efficiently as possible in order to get a recognition and security that was always just slightly out of reach. Workers’ conversations with each other circulate around the blue badge: who deserves it, who is working well and who is not, who believes they have been snubbed, and who is “cheating the system” by trying to use personal relationships to improve their chances. Amazon’s organization of labor is heavily dependent on collaboration. If, for example, a worker has stowed an item incorrectly, it directly impacts the next worker who will try to pick it. This means that every individual mistake adversely impacts everyone’s chances of achieving employment security. Underneath the veneer of happiness and support, we are participants in an all-encompassing system of individualism and subtle but omnipresent competition that is designed to enter deep into our psyches. The more you participate, the more you reproduce it with a smile on your face. The degree of workers’ belief and investment in this new form of collective identity is therefore inversely proportional to the possibility of even considering collective organizing. The focus on individual qualities, combined with a relatively privileged wage and a relatively supportive working environment, masks the structural inequalities that form the basis of one’s labor experience in Amazon. With time, workers accept the idea that they must prove themselves worthy of rights that were once considered non-negotiable. Taken together, these processes cultivate a vicious cycle of neoliberal individualism that makes collective dreams not only impossible, but unimaginable. CULTIVATING THE RADICAL IMAGINATIONAgainst the overwhelming force of neoliberalism’s assault on all spheres of social and economic life, most unions in the UK have proven themselves woefully inadequate. Fundamentally based on an organizing model that was catered to the stereotype of the Fordist, male, industrial worker, they have been unable to respond to the needs of today’s precarious workforce. At Amazon, this was most appallingly demonstrated by their complete inexistence in, or around, the workplace. While global unionization drives at Amazon warehouses are noteworthy, the reality in most UK sites remains bleak. Even in the weeks leading up to a momentous coordinated strike by Amazon workers in Europe, we did not see a single union leaflet or representative outside our workplace. Most workers had no idea that a strike was even taking place. Instead, when Amazon attempted to quell the strike by literally bribing its workforce, offering a one-off sum of £300 to permanent employees and £150 to temps and labeling it a “bonus,” most workers saw it as another welcome recognition of their efforts. Without a union to explain to the workers why they received this sum, the company was successful in using the strike to reinforce its own hegemony. Unions are supposed to empower workers, especially the most exploited segments of the workforce. In the UK, the opposite is the case. The more precarious one becomes, the least likely they are to find a union in their workplace. The temporariness and acute mobility associated with agency work means that even if a union were to attempt to organize precarious workers, it would be met with profound logistical difficulties. Temporary postings and the threat of arbitrary dismissal make it hard to build the trust required to engage temp workers in conversations about organizing. The engaged and empowering presence of radical unions and other social movements in our communities is a critical first step for us to begin imagining alternatives to this dystopian abyss. Since reaching workers in their workplace is not only difficult, but could even jeopardize their livelihoods, the neighborhood emerges alongside the shopfloor as a crucial site of struggle. This could take the form of regularly holding outreach actions such as stalls and events in working class communities instead of the centers of cities, which may guarantee higher participation on paper but excludes vast sums of overextended and impoverished workers. However, long-term engagement and a questioning of the neoliberal hegemony that is inculcated daily through working at places like Amazon can only be achieved by establishing social centers in those communities. For example, the Immigrant Workers’ Center in Montreal is a key node in the networks that foster the organization of precarious and migrant workers in the city. Other instances of radical, autonomous social spaces can be found across Southern Europe and are of inestimable importance to social struggles. These include radical social spaces such as K-Box in Athens, which operates on a range of domains, including hosting an autonomous health clinic and providing space for various social movements to organize. In Madrid, the Fundacion Anselmo Lorenzo, tied to the radical CNT union, is a space committed to the preservation of historical memory and to the further political education of the masses. These are only two examples of how social centers connect concrete, oppositional social action to practical, creative empowerment. Establishing a radical space in working class communities directly challenges the fragmentation of the working class that neoliberal policies are trying to achieve both on an economic and social level. It enables workers to come to the space in their own time instead of scrambling to make a set meeting or event. Rather than trying to get people to engage in some abstract propaganda, it establishes a sustained dialogue with communities over the long-term. It also allows unions and movements to provide real opportunities for empowerment by, for example, holding regular workshops on employment rights. These skills and knowledge will stay with workers regardless of whether they become activists and will directly tip the scales in favor of the working class as they share them with their friends and relatives. However, some will become active and will bring these ideas and practices with them to their workplace. In the UK, initiatives to achieve community embeddedness have begun, albeit on a small scale. As the monopoly of companies like Amazon expands, employing ever-increasing numbers of the total workforce, such radical community spaces become crucial sites of empowerment. We must be acutely aware that we are not simply fighting against the further impoverishment of the masses, but against the gradual and complete obliteration of all possibilities of imagining alternatives. We are grappling with a monster that is infinitely better resourced than us. The issue thus becomes one of utilizing our available resources with maximum efficiency. As Amazon continues its efforts to convince ever larger swathes of workers that there is no alternative, we may be running out of time. The establishment of a physical commons, not as a side-project in other movement activities but as a central priority, emerges as an inescapable necessity for our liberation. AuthorPanos Theodoropoulos has a PhD in sociology from the University of Glasgow. He is a member of the Interregnum collective and is currently based in Athens. This article was republished from Roar. Archives July 2021 |
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