9/22/2021 Israel Bombs Gaza for third Consecutive Day as Punishment for Palestinian Jailbreak. By: Steve SweeneyRead NowIsraeli soldiers take positions along the border between the northern West Bank near Jenin and Israel as they search for two Palestinians who broke out of a maximum-security prison last week | AP Israel targeted Palestinian resistance sites in series of airstrikes in Gaza for the third consecutive day today. It is accused by Palestinian groups of carrying out “collective punishment” for last week’s jailbreak in which six prisoners escaped from Gilboa prison. Missiles struck an outpost in southern Gaza, to the east of the city of Rafah, according to reports from the Palestinian Shehab news agency. Explosions reverberated across the besieged Palestinian territory, causing electricity blackouts in Rafah, locals said. Drones and aircraft have been conducting extensive overflights of the territory in what Palestinian sources say is an attempt to “strike fear” into Gaza’s civilian population. Tel Aviv claims to be justified in carrying out airstrikes, insisting that it is responding to incendiary balloons launched from Gaza. But its aggressive measures have escalated since last Sunday’s jailbreak, which was seen as a humiliation for the apartheid regime. Israeli security forces have recaptured four of the escapees, with a mass search operation underway as they hunt for the remaining pair: Ayham Kamamji and Munadel Infeiat. Minister of Public Security Omar Barlev said that he believes the men have separated and that attention was being focused on the northern Israeli town of Yokne’am and the West Bank city of Jenin. Jibreil Zubeidi, the brother of Zakaria Zubeidi, one of the prisoners that was caught by Israeli agents, spoke out against his brutal treatment in custody today. “My brother is undergoing most the brutal torture. They are electrocuting and beating him. They broke his leg, and he is not getting any sleep. “They are forcing him into stress positions over his broken leg and cursing at him,” Mr. Zubeidi said. The other detainees, Mahmoud and Mohammad Ardah and Yacoub Qadri, are also allegedly being tortured and have been denied access to their lawyers. An Israeli court ruled against overturning the ban today, denying an application from their legal teams. Palestinian prisoners are planning protest action over the punitive measures introduced at jails following the escape. The measures involved prison authorities placing tens of detainees into solitary confinement, preventing inmates from going to the prison yard, banning prisoners from meeting their families, and closing the canteens. The Palestinian Authority’s detainees affairs commission and the Palestinian Prisoners Society said that the prisoners would boycott the Israel Prison Service and its rules and start a gradual hunger strike, with more inmates expected to join the action every day. This article was reposted from Morning Star. AuthorSteve Sweeney writes for the Morning Star, the socialist daily newspaper published in Great Britain. He is also a People's Assembly National Committee member, patron of the Peace in Kurdistan campaign, and a proud trade unionist. This article was produced by People's World. Archives September 2021
0 Comments
9/22/2021 Violent Right-Wing Extremists Attack Communist Party Offices in India. By: Vijay PrashadRead NowA protest demonstration was organized in Agartala condemning BJP violence. In a pre-planned fashion, the offices of the CPI(M), including the state headquarters, were attacked by mobs of BJP men. The most brazen attack was on the state committee office in Agartala. | CPI(M) via Twitter RightOn September 8, members of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India’s right-wing ruling political party, attacked three buildings in the Melarmath area of Agartala (Tripura). These attacks targeted the offices of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the communist newspaper Daily Deshar Katha, and two private media houses Pratibadi Kalam and PN-24. The violence took place in broad daylight as the police stood by and watched. Across Tripura, 54 other offices of the communists were also attacked. The Communist Party—CPI(M)—and the media houses had been critical of the BJP-led state government. The CPI(M) and other organizations recently took to the streets to protest a range of policies; these protests have drawn considerable support from the population. The CPI(M) was a key constituent of the Left Front, which governed the state from 1978 to 1988 and from 1993 to 2018. Just a few days before the attacks, former Chief Minister Manik Sarkar, who is a leader of the CPI(M), was to speak to his constituency in Dhanpur (Sepahijala). BJP workers tried to prevent Sarkar’s car from entering Dhanpur. Sarkar, with CPI(M) cadre alongside, walked six kilometers through two BJP barricades. Sarkar’s public meeting was part of the wider communist campaign against the BJP. Since 2018, attacks on the CPI(M) have become routine. The communists in Tripura report that, between March 2018 and September 2020, 139 party offices have been set ablaze, 346 party offices have been vandalized, 200 offices of mass organizations have been vandalized, 190 homes of CPI(M) cadre have been destroyed, 2,871 homes of party workers have been attacked, 2,656 party workers have been physically assaulted, and 18 CPI(M) leaders and cadre have been killed. Sensitive people and organizations from around the world, including the International Peoples Assembly, condemned the attacks on India’s Left. Right-wing political violence has become routine worldwide What occurred in Tripura, a state in India’s northeast of nearly 3.6 million people, has become a normal facet of democracy in our times. Political violence by the right wing against those who seek to amplify the voices of the people is now routine. Just a few weeks before this attack in Tripura, a terrible act of violence silenced a trade union leader in South Africa. As he stood at the doorstep of the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation, and Arbitration in Rustenburg, South Africa, on Aug. 19, Malibongwe Mdazo was shot to death. Mdazo, a leader of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), had led a 7,000-worker strike against Impala Platinum Holdings, the world’s second-largest platinum producer, just a month before. The political assassination of Mdazo came nine years after the terrible massacre in Marikana of 34 miners from the platinum mines operated by Lonmin, a British mining company. The platinum belt in South Africa has bristled with tension not only because of the killing of Mdazo and the Marikana massacre but also because of the normal way in which the mining firms’ associates—including rival unions—settle industrial disputes through such grim violence. These trade union activists, political leaders, and community organizers are people who have the urge to lift up the confidence of the people. When these leaders are assassinated or when buildings are burned, a light begins to flicker. Those who carry out the violence expect that the flame of resistance will die down and that the people will be cowed into submission, no longer confident in their ability to change the world. But this is only one outcome of such political violence. The other outcome is just as likely, which is that these deaths and this violence inspire courage. When the BJP workers attacked the CPI(M) office, they tried to break the statue of Dashrath Deb (1916-1998), who led the liberation struggle in Tripura against its last king. Deb was born in a poor peasant family that had its roots deep in the indigenous culture of Tripura. He was a venerated communist leader who fought to democratize all aspects of life in Tripura as chief minister from 1993 to 1998. It was thanks to the struggles led by Deb and then by the Left Front government led by Manik Sarkar that the state saw its human development advance remarkably. When the communists left office in 2018, the state’s literacy rate stood at 97%, helped along by the provision of universal free education (including free school books) and by a massive electrification campaign (90% of homes in the state have electricity).
This is not just political violence, but it is rooted in social violence, a violence against those—such as the Garifuna leaders in Honduras and the Afro-descendant leaders in Colombia—who dare to lift their chins up and build the world in their image. A new report from Global Witness, Last Line of Defence, shows that a large number of Indigenous activists were killed in 2020 (227, or more than four a week); half of them were in just three countries (Colombia, Mexico, and the Philippines), and all of them fought to defend the dignity of humans and the integrity of nature. One of Tripura’s great poets and communist leaders, Anil Sarkar, spent much of his literary and political career uplifting the voices and the destinies of the oppressed castes (Dalits) in the state. Sarkar’s powerful poetry suggested that the old social forces would no longer be able to dominate society as they once had. Not only did they have the example of the great leader Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, but they had the legacy of Karl Marx and the Left. “The sound of his approaching step wakes me,” Sarkar wrote of his discovery of Marx in Marxer Prati, “and I see my land’s deprivation.” In another of his poems, Sarker sang to Heera Singh Harijan, a Dalit, that power would not be given to him; “you, after growing up, should take it by force.” Edited from an earlier version. AuthorVijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including "The Darker Nations" and "The Poorer Nations." His latest book is "Washington Bullets," with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma. This article was produced by People's World. Archives September 2021 9/22/2021 The Illusion and Reality of Siddhattha Gotama, the Buddha, A Marxist View of the Buddha. By: Thomas RigginsRead NowKaren Armstrong’s Buddha, published as a Penguin paperback is not only a bestseller but has been praised as "invaluable." Armstrong is well known as a popular writer on religious history and this book is one of many she has written for a lay audience. All of her books are well written and enjoyable to read but not always historically reliable. This is, unfortunately, the case with her book on the Buddha. I am afraid that people going away after a reading of this admittedly enjoyable book will have no real understanding of either the Buddha or his religion. The problem is that she has somewhat indiscriminately mixed up primary and secondary sources as well as credited and discredited theories about religion in general and Buddhism in particular. As an example she gives equal weight to both forms of Buddhism – i.e., the original, or at least the older, Theravada tradition (Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia) based on the Pali texts, [her book is, however, based mostly on the Pali texts] and the much later Mahayana tradition that developed in North India (written in Sanskrit rather than Pali) and spread to China, Korea, Tibet, Vietnam and Japan. This second tradition, influenced by contact with Persia and incorporating Zoroastrian elements, and seeing the Buddha as "an object of worship" is very different from the original teachings of Gotama who was himself inclined towards atheism and was more this worldly than other worldly. Armstrong is well aware of the difficulties of writing a "biography" of the Buddha. The man Gotama died in the 5th century B.C. and all we know about him has been mixed up with legends and later traditions to such a degree that what we say concerning him "cannot satisfy the standards of modern scientific history." We have a similar problem with the life of Yeshua ben Yosef, the first century Jewish preacher who became “the Christ.” The Buddha that emerges in her book is, as she says, an "archetypal figure" that she has more or less constructed out of the Pali canon which is the earliest and most reliable source available on the life and teachings of the Buddha. There are two annoying features of her interpretation that will not go down too well with Marxists. First she uses, as a framework for comparisons, the discredited notion of the "Axial Age" put forth by the German existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers. This is the notion that from around 800 to 200 B.C. the ancient world from Europe, thru Iran and India to China created the "ethos" that "has continued to nourish men and women to the present day." This fantastical "Axial Age" only works by selectively including and excluding, as well as misinterpreting the functions of the individuals who are supposedly the most important thinkers of this period. She includes Socrates and Plato (but not Aristotle) as well as "the sixth-century Iranian sage Zoroaster." Zoroaster’s dates are notoriously difficult to determine, but the modern consensus places him four or five hundred years earlier than the sixth-century – this messes up the "Axial Age" because Iran drops out of the picture. It should also be noted that Confucius was a thoroughly secular teacher and was not involved in reforming "the religious traditions of China." "People," she writes, "who participated in this great transformation were convinced that they were on the brink of a new era and that nothing would ever be the same again." A period that lasted 600 hundred years can hardly be called a "brink", nor, not having read Jaspers, would people from Europe to China even be aware of a "great transformation" taking place, especially since it was artificially constructed only recently. Second, she refers to the economic system in Buddha’s day as a "market economy." This is very confusing terminology with relation to the mode of production in ancient India. The ancient economy was based on the exploitation of village agriculturalists in a semi-feudal system that had recently developed in Buddha’s day (in northeast India where he lived) when state structures had evolved out of tribal systems into kingdoms and then empires. There was a large merchant class, as in Rome, but it is a stretch to say the cities and empires were "dominated by a market economy." Ancient India was not a capitalist state. Buddha, as we know, saw life as a big drag – suffering, etc., and his new religion was based on the Four Noble Truths (all is suffering, suffering has a cause, suffering can be overcome, the sacred eightfold path is the way to do it.) To escape suffering you needed to follow Buddha’s new rules of life. He founded an order of monks who could follow his path and attain enlightenment and escape from rebirth, and thus another round of suffering, to "nirvana" – a state of being or nonbeing never really spelled out. Armstrong gives an interesting account of all the trials and tribulations of the Buddha and the founding of his Order – but her explanations are almost exclusively in terms of inner struggles and spiritual development. This is all very well and good but will not satisfy Marxists who want to understand the rise of Buddhism in terms of class struggle and other Marxist categories. None of this is in Armstrong’s book. So Marxists will not get much out of her book. She lacks the necessary jaundiced eye when looking at religion which Marxists regard as an "illusion" and, as Marx said, brings the people only an "illusory happiness." The question for Marxists is – what were the social and economic conditions prevailing in Buddha’s time that allowed his religion to survive and prosper? The answer to this question is to be found in the works of the great Bengali Marxist philosopher Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya. The short answer is that in Buddha’s time the old democratic tribal associations were being replaced by newly emergent military states. The tribes had been governed by councils who appointed the leaders by democratic methods. Buddha came from such a tribe, the Sakyas. He witnessed the destruction of these tribal organizations by the new states and the consequent enslavement and murder of the tribal peoples: the source of the suffering world. In his Order he recreated the primitive democracy and interpersonal solidarity of the tribal ethos and thus presented, on a spiritual level, the illusion of freedom and meaning to life that had actually been lost in the real world. This is the real story behind the rise and development of Buddhism but you won’t find it in Armstrong’s book. References Karen Armstrong, Buddha, Penguin, New York, 2004 Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, Indian Philosophy: A Popular Introduction People’s Publishing House, Delhi, 1964 Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, Lokayata: A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism, People’s Publishing House, New Delhi, 1959 (7th ed. 1992) AuthorThomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. Archives September 2021 9/20/2021 September 20, 2021- Paulo Freire’s centennial: Political pedagogy for revolutionary organizations. By: Derek Ford & Liberation SchoolRead NowMural in the Faculty of Education and Humanities, University del Bío-Bío. Source: WIkicommons. " This article was originally published on Liberation School on September 17, 2021." All revolutionary processes are educational. From organizing meetings and study groups to writing protest speeches and propaganda before the revolutionary moment to creating new revolutionary educational and cultural institutions and training teachers and specialists after the seizure of power, revolution is educational through and through. Yet exactly what kind of educational operations does revolution entail, and how can we understand and practice them? It is precisely these questions that Paulo Freire addressed in his classic work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. One hundred years after his birth in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, Freire’s name is widely recognized and, relatively speaking, so too is his canonical text. Yet the book is referenced or discussed more than it is deeply engaged. This is particularly evident when Freire’s work is severed from its revolutionary Marxist orientation [1]. While it’s often taken as an abstract guide-book for how to teach, Pedagogy of the Oppressed is really a theoretical reflection on his own experiences teaching peasants how to read and write, a theory he extends to revolutionary movements, leadership, and organization. After spending 70 days in prison for “treachery” [teaching poor peasants to read and write], he was exiled from Brazil following the military junta in 1964. He eventually settled in Chile, which is where he wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The book has been targeted by the right wing in the U.S. (it is currently banned from public schools in Arizona). It addresses the educational components of revolutionary movements and, as such, it is littered with references to Marx, Lenin, Fanon, and others. Specifically, the book is concerned with how the revolutionary leadership pushes the struggle forward, or how it teaches and learns from the masses in struggle. The pedagogies of oppression and liberation The pedagogy of the oppressed has two stages. During the first stage, “the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through praxis commit themselves to its transformation.” During the second stage, which is after the world of oppression has been transformed, “this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed and becomes a pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation” [2]. The first stage addresses how the oppressed view and relate to the world. It begins by acknowledging that the oppressed possess both an oppressed consciousness and an oppressor consciousness. The oppressor consciousness is the enemy that needs to be liquidated: “The oppressor consciousness tends to transform everything surrounding it into an object of its domination. The earth, property, production, the creations of people, people themselves, time—everything is reduced to the status of objects at its disposal” [3]. This is what capitalism does: it takes everything and makes it into private property, including our ability to labor. This has a profound impact on the world, even instilling the oppressor consciousness in the oppressed. Thus, we have to distinguish an oppressor consciousness from the oppressed person, and we have to transform that consciousness. The way that we engage in that transformation is absolutely crucial, and this is where the question of pedagogy comes into play. Freire calls the traditional form of pedagogy “banking pedagogy.” In banking pedagogy, the teacher is the one who possesses knowledge and the students are empty containers in which the teacher must deposit knowledge. The more the teacher fills the receptacle, the better teacher she is. The content remains abstract to the student, disconnected from the world, and external to the student’s life. Banking pedagogy—which is what most of us in the U.S. experience—assumes that the oppressed are ignorant and naïve. Further, it treats the oppressed as objects in the same way that capitalism does. For Freire, education must be rooted in the daily lives and experiences of students, who are subjects rather than objects. The correct educational method for revolutionaries is dialogue, which means something very specific. To truly engage in dialogue means becoming partners with the people. In this situation, “the teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow” [4]. This process is referred to as conscientização, or coming-to-critical-consciousness. A decisive element to the location and direction of conscientização is the pedagogical relationship. This relates to Freire’s critique of the banking model of education and to his reconception of the teacher-student relationship. The dialogic model is a relationship between teacher and student, one which is more—but, and this is absolutely crucial, not completely—horizontal. In this schema, “people teach each other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in banking education are “owned” by the teacher [5]. The teacher does not relinquish authority or power, as if that was even possible. Instead, the teacher takes responsibility for producing new critical knowledge of reality with the student. While the pedagogical relationship and process are important parts of Freire’s thought, they have tended to be isolated from Freire’s ideological commitments and have come to stand in for Freire’s entire work. As a graduate student in a fairly critical school of education, I was only assigned the first two chapters of the book, and I’m convinced this is common practice. These chapters are rich; they’re where he denounces banking pedagogy and formulates dialogical pedagogy in response. When we stop here, however, we don’t discover the reason why he bothered writing the book in the first place. By selectively reading the book, Freire’s dialogic pedagogy is substituted wholesale for his broader conceptual and political work, his vocabularies and theories that generated new understandings of education and revolution. There is nothing inherent in dialogue or dialogic pedagogy that necessarily leads to progressive, critical understandings. For this to happen the content must be placed in a particular context by a teacher. Peter McLaren, one of the few U.S. educational theorists to insist on Freire’s revolutionary commitments (and a comrade of Freire’s), goes so far as to say that “political choices and ideological paths chosen by teachers are the fundamental stuff of Freirean pedagogy” [6]. We can’t divorce the methodology from the ideology, the theory from the method, or the critical from the pedagogy in Freire’s work. The dangerous fourth chapter Freire begins the last chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed with “Lenin’s famous statement: ‘Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement,’” which Freire rewords to insist that revolutions are achieved neither by verbalism nor by activism “but rather with praxis, that is, with reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed” [7]. It would be just as wrong to claim that reflecting on and helping name oppression is enough for revolution as to claim that activism is enough for revolution. The task of revolutionaries is to engage with our class and our people in true, authentic dialogue, reflection, and action. If we have dialogue and reflection without action, then we are little more than armchair revolutionaries. On the other hand, if we have only action without dialogue and reflection, we have mere activism. Reflection and action are not divisions of labor between revolutionary leaders and the people, whereby the leaders think and direct and the people are only able to act on their orders. “Revolutionary leaders,” he writes, “do bear the responsibility for coordination and, at times, direction—but leaders who deny praxis to the oppressed thereby invalidate their own praxis” [8]. People and revolutionary leaders act together, building and acting in unity before, during, and after the revolution. The prerequisite for such leadership is the rejection of the “myth of the ignorance of the people” [9]. Freire acknowledges that revolutionary leaders, “due to their revolutionary consciousness,” have “a level of revolutionary knowledge different from the level of empirical knowledge held by the people” [10]. The act of dialogue unites lived experience with revolutionary theory so that people understand what causes their lived experience to be as it is. This is a restatement of Lenin’s conviction that spontaneous knowledge of exploitation and oppression must be transformed through the Party into revolutionary consciousness of the relationship of our experience to the relationship of broader social, economic, and political forces at differing scales: within the factory, the city, the state, and the world. This is a Marxist philosophy of education in that it rests on the presumption of competence. We can see it, for example, when Engels writes that he and Marx “cannot co-operate with men who say openly that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves, and must first be emancipated from above by philanthropic members of the upper and lower middle classes” [11]. We can also see it in What is to be Done? as Lenin argues against economist Marxists, who hold that the working class develops its own revolutionary consciousness spontaneously as a result of daily struggles with the bosses. Lenin argued that spontaneity was only consciousness “in an embryonic form,” and that something more was needed. Spontaneity is necessary but is ultimately limited to “what is ‘at the present time’” [12]. In other words, spontaneity by itself isn’t able to look beyond isolated daily struggles and forward to a new society. Lenin called the spontaneously generated mindset “trade union consciousness.” Lenin believed that workers were capable of more than trade union consciousness. He actually derided those who insisted on appealing to the “average worker:” “You gentlemen, who are so much concerned about the ‘average worker,’ as a matter of fact, rather insult the workers by your desire to talk down to them when discussing labor politics and labor organization” (p. 153). He wrote that organizers had actually held workers “back by our silly speeches about what ‘can be understood’ by the masses of the workers” [13]. The economist organizers treated workers as objects rather than subjects. They didn’t believe in the people or their potential. Freire actually calls on Lenin when he insists revolutionary leadership is open and trusting of the people. “As Lenin pointed out,” he writes, “the more a revolution requires theory, the more its leaders must be with the people in order to stand against the power of oppression” [14]. This isn’t a naïve acquiesce but a belief in the power of the masses to become not only agents of revolutionary movements but creators of revolutionary theory through the Party. As Lenin also observed, that the Party creates a particular group of theoreticians: In the Party “all distinctions as between workers and intellectuals… must be obliterated” [15]. There is no abstract celebration of “horizontalism” within such a pedagogy. The form of the revolution and its leadership isn’t accorded abstractly; it can be more horizontal or more vertical and triangular, depending on the circumstances. Here, Freire turns to Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution to argue that their historical conditions compelled them to revolt without building widely with the people. Yet the leadership pursued this task immediately after taking power through organization, specifically the party. Tyson Lewis is one of the few to observe that “Freire himself clearly saw his pedagogy as a tool to be used within revolutionary organization to mediate the various relationships between the oppressed and the leaders of resistance” [16]. This is why Freire looked so favorably upon Amílcar Cabral [17]. Uniting politics and pedagogy for revolutionRevolutionary organizers, therefore, are defined not just by the revolutionary ideals they hold or actions they take, but by their humility, patience, and willingness to engage with all exploited and oppressed people. It is not possible for us to “implant” the conviction to fight and struggle in others. Coming-to-critical-consciousness is a delicate and contingent process that can’t be scripted in advance. Still, there are a few general components to it. First, we have to truly get to know our people, their problems, and their aspirations. This means that we have to actually learn from people, acknowledging that, even if this is their first demonstration, or even if they voted for a democrat in the last election, they actually have something to teach us. The more experiences we learn from the people the richer our theories are and the more connection they can have to the daily realities of workers and oppressed people today. Our class is bursting with creative and intellectual powers that capitalist society doesn’t allow us to express or develop. The revolutionary party is stronger the more it cultivates these powers. Second, we have to provide opportunities for others to understand their problems in a deeper and wider context, and to push their aspirations forward. Freire gives a concrete and relatable example of this: “…if at a given historical moment the basic aspiration of the people goes no further than a demand for salary increases, the leaders can commit one of two errors. They can limit their action to stimulating this one demand or they can overrule this popular aspiration and substitute something more far-reaching—but something which has not yet come to the forefront of the people’s attention… The solution lies in synthesis: the leaders must on the one hand identify with the people’s demand for higher salaries, while on the other they must pose the meaning of that very demand as a problem. By doing this, the leaders pose as a problem a real, concrete, historical situation of which the salary demand is one dimension. It will thereby become clear that salary demands alone cannot comprise a definitive solution” [18]. Through this process, both the people and the revolutionary leadership act together and collectively name the world. Genuine knowledge is produced, and authentic action is taken, and real conviction for the struggle is strengthened. Freire’s popularity presents an opening to draw many into the struggle and, in particular, the communist struggle. By re-establishing the link between his pedagogy and politics, we can draw those who admire his work into the movement. At the same time, we can better understand, adapt, and practice his pedagogical principles in our day-to-day organizing. “Only in the encounter of the people with the revolutionary leaders,” Freire writes in the book’s last sentence, “can this [revolutionary] theory be built” [19]. References [1] This process started with the advent of U.S. “critical pedagogy” in the early 1980s, and Freire’s later work might have played a role in it as well. See Malott, Curry S. (2015). History and education: Engaging the global class war (New York: Peter Lang), 63. [2] Freire, Paulo. (1970/2011). Pedagogy of the oppressed (New York: Continuum), 54. [3] Ibid., 58. [4] Ibid., 80. [5] Ibid. [6] McLaren, Peter. (2015). Life in schools: An introduction to critical pedagogy in the foundations of education, 6th ed. (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers), 241. [7] Freire, Pedagogy of the oppressed, 125-126. [8] Ibid., 126. [9] Ibid. [10] Ibid., 134. [11] Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. (1991). “Marx and Engels to August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Wilhelm Bracke and others (circular letter),” trans. P. Ross & B. Ross, in Marx and Engels collected works (vol. 45), ed. S. Gerasimenko, Y.Kalinina, and A. Vladimirova (New York: International Publishers), 408, emphasis added. [12] Lenin, V.I. (1902/1987). “What is to be done?” in Essential works of Lenin, ed. H.M. Christman (New York: Dover Publications), 67. [13] Ibid., 156. [14] Freire, Pedagogy of the oppressed, 138. [15] Lenin, “What is to be done?”, 137. [16] Lewis, Tyson E. (2012). “Mapping the constellation of educational Marxism(s),” Educational Philosophy and Theory 44, no. S1: 98-114. [17] Malott, Curry. (2021). Amílcar Cabral: Liberator, theorist, and educator,” Liberation School, 20 January. Available here. [18] Freire, Pedagogy of the oppressed, 183. [19] Ibid. AuthorDerek Ford Archives September 2021 Striker April Flowers-Lewis's family ties to the Chicago plant stretch back much further than do those of its current owner, Mondelez. Her grandmother, Rosetta Tudor, worked as a machine operator making saltine crackers for decades before retiring in the 1990s just as Flowers-Lewis was starting her career. | Roberta Wood / People's World CHICAGO—“We’re just tired!” April Flowers-Lewis told a rally in support of striking Mondelez workers. It’s not hard to see why the folks who make the nation’s cookies and crackers are exhausted and fed up. All through the pandemic, Flowers-Lewis, 48, and her co-workers, members of Bakery and Confectionary Workers Local 1, have been on their feet up to seven days a week, 16 hours a day baking and packing Wheat Thins, Chips Ahoy, Nutter Butter, Velveeta, and Animal Crackers here at what was the historic Nabisco plant on this city’s southwest side. Snack consumption during the pandemic skyrocketed; the plant’s owner, multi-national corporation Mondelez, took in $5.5 billion in profits in the second quarter of 2021, according to a report in Salon. The median average employee compensation is $31,000 a year. On the other hand, CEO Dirk Van de Put received 548 times more—$17 million in total compensation in 2020. The company’s profits are indicative of the surge in snack purchasing over the course of the pandemic. Since the start of the pandemic, 58% of consumers have been snacking more than they were previously, one grocer reported to NielsenIQ, a retail data platform. To maintain the flow of profits pouring in from the increased demand, managers at Mondelez have been moving workers from traditional 9-to-5 schedules, sometimes to 12- and 16-hour shifts. However, officials have made no move to recall the hundreds of workers laid off when the company moved the plant’s Oreo production to Mexico in 2015. Mondelez, headquartered in Deerfield, Ill., has workers in the Asia Pacific region, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Latin America, and North America. “The company just refuses to hire more workers,” says Flowers-Lewis, “They’d rather work us to death than pay the benefits for more employees.” She has worked at the former Nabisco plant for 27 years and is the first shift steward in the plant’s packing department. Mondelez has only owned the plant since 2012, but Flowers-Lewis’s family ties go back generations. Her grandmother, Rosetta Tudor, worked as a machine operator making saltine crackers for decades before retiring in the 1990s just as Flowers-Lewis was starting her career. First shift starts at 7:15 am and should end at 3:15 pm when workers should be able to go home, pick up their kids, grab dinner, and get a good night’s rest. But instead, the company demands the right to add a second shift and keep the worker till 11:15 pm. This could happen seven days a week, Flowers-Lewis explains. “All you can do is go home, take a shower, grab something to eat, and fall in bed.” Exhaustion from working like this throughout the pandemic no doubt contributed to the high numbers of illnesses and even fatalities, many workers believe. At one point, she said, it seemed like the whole Velveeta line was sick. Many sick people still came to work. “They were scared of getting fired.” Many members of the workforce are parents. What if you don’t have a babysitter to cover for you? “That’s your problem,” Flowers Lewis explains bitterly. Mondelez enforces a point system which assesses points for workers who can’t—or won’t—work the overtime. Points lead to disciplinary action—suspension or even firing. She notes that the managers who enforce the attendance policy can work comfortably from home. “They don’t care!” she says.
When robots do the work, they set the pace, and workers have to keep up. It can be exhausting even when your team works together like the first shift packing group. It’s not all routine: When the box size changes, the whole crew of eight or so workers has to re-set the settings on the machinery, then work out the glitches. The crew is made up of men and women of all nationalities, she says with pride. BCTGM workers are on strike in six facilities across the country. The union lists several ways to support the workers, including joining a picket line, donating to the strike fund, and spreading the word on social media. The workers have been on the picket line for over three weeks. A Labor Day weekend rally really lifted their spirits, Flowers-Lewis said. Pro-union spirit is high in this community where the Nabisco plant has deep historic roots. Horns of cars passing down South Kedzie Avenue during the rally were unanimous blaring their solidarity. Even a passing funeral procession joined in the chorus. The workers bowed their heads in respect. “The deceased must have been a union man,” one striker told this reporter. Flowers-Lewis is clear about what’s fueling the anger behind the strike: Mondelez needs to hire more people and end the forced overtime. Roberta Wood is a retired member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Coalition of Labor Union Women. Wood was a steelworker in South Chicago, an officer of Steelworkers Local 65, and founding co-chair of the USWA District 31 Women's Caucus. She was previously Secretary-Treasurer of the Communist Party. Currently, she serves as a Senior Editor of People's World. This article was produced by People's World. Archives September 2021 9/19/2021 U.S. and U.K.’s nuclear submarine pact with Australia targets China. By: C.J. AtkinsRead NowThe U.S. nuclear-powered submarine USS Texas arrives at a South Korea naval base in Busan, South Korea, as part of a deployment to the Pacific area. A new military alliance between the U.S., Britain, and Australia will supply nuclear submarine technology to Australia. | Jo Jung-ho / Yonhap via AP A new military alliance that will see the United States and Britain provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines to patrol the Pacific and Indian Oceans is being denounced as a threat to “regional peace and stability” by China. The country sees itself as the obvious target of a U.S.- and British-supplied Australian atomic fleet. Zhao Lijian, spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said Thursday that the pact between the three countries will set off an “intensifying arms race” in the Indo-Pacific region and severely damage global nuclear non-proliferation efforts. The deal—dubbed AUKUS (Australia-U.K.-U.S.)—was announced in a joint news conference by U.S. President Joe Biden, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison early Thursday. Biden pitched the agreement as an “historic step” to “address the current strategic environment in the region” and to protect what he called a “free and open Indo-Pacific.” Johnson called it “a new pillar” of strategy for Britain, which was long a colonial power in the region. Morrison said the building of eight nuclear-powered submarines with U.S. and British help will “deliver a safer and more secure region.” The new Cold War The deal comes amid the backdrop of a years-long military build-up by the U.S. that has been characterized by many analysts as the early stages of a new Cold War intended to constrain China’s growing economy and restrict its international influence.
The head of a top military-focused think tank, Peter Jennings, at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, told the Associated Press, “We should call the first submarine in this new category the ‘Xi Jinping,’” referring to the Chinese president. “No person is more responsible for Australia going down this track than the current leader of the Chinese Communist Party.” Jennings’s anti-communist finger-pointing at Xi summarizes the general analysis that the submarine deal is receiving in much of the media. Recently strained relations between Canberra and Beijing are held up as the primary prod for Australia to make this move, with alleged Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea and aggressions toward Taiwan rounding out the supposed motivations. Several nations make claims on islands in the South China Sea, including Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and China, among others. None of the three parties to the new military alliance, however, have any claim or basis for naval activity in the area. Yet, in clear provocations aimed at China, the U.S. and U.K. have both been sailing military vessels there and conducted war games in the region, as well as in waters near Taiwan—which China regards as a breakaway province. With its new nuclear submarines, Australia will no doubt be joining the patrols. The U.S. has been eagerly courting Australia for some time, hoping to tear it away from its close economic ties with China. It also recruited the country into another military arrangement—the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or “Quad.” The latter includes India and Japan and is another anti-China quasi-alliance. Mining profits at stake By embarking upon a tighter military embrace with U.S. imperialism, Australia is taking a significant financial gamble. Despite recent trade disagreements with China, the country remains Australia’s largest trading partner, by far. As of early 2021, China took in nearly 40% of all Australian exports. The U.S., by contrast, bought only 11% of what Australia produces for the world market.
Just hours before the AUKUS alliance was announced, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)—one of the top institutions promoting capitalist and ‘free market’ ideology around the world—urged Australia to turn away from China. In a report issued Wednesday, the OECD warned Australia that too much trade with China made the country “vulnerable.” It said that Australia “should explore the potential for trade diversion to other export markets” and “provide targeted support to the impacted industries.” Translation: Move away from trade with China and hand out cash to your mining companies while they look for new buyers. NATO of the Pacific? While think tanks fret over the stability of mining profits, others are worried about the geopolitical implications of the submarine pact. Einar Tangen, a political analyst based in Beijing, told Al Jazeera that the agreement has “echoes of gunboat diplomacy going back to the colonial era.” All signs point to the sub deal—along with the Quad war games with Japan and India and the push for Australia to decrease its trade with China—as the beginning moves in a consolidation of a wider anti-China military and economic alliance. Helmed by U.S. imperialism, with former colonial master Britain as junior leader, the goal appears to be to lock in as many nations in the Asia-Indo-Pacific region as possible. The effort has some resemblance to the U.S.’ effort to assemble the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as an anti-communist military pact directed against the USSR in the late 1940s. Sharing nuclear submarine technology with Australia is a significant move in that direction, as Britain is the only other nation the U.S. has ever provided with atomic propulsion know-how, and that was in the middle of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Boris Johnson indicated in his remarks at the AUKUS launch that the subs were only the first item on the alliance’s agenda. “We expect to accelerate the development of other advanced defense systems in cyber, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and undersea capabilities,” he said. U.S. and British officials appeared to take no notice of the hypocrisy of assisting Australia in the development of nuclear-powered vessels while they continuously push the importance of nuclear non-proliferation when it comes to countries like Iran and North Korea. Meanwhile, one country in the South Pacific which explicitly refused to join the alliance was New Zealand. Since the 1980s, it has been a self-declared nuclear-free nation. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said New Zealand wasn’t invited to join the pact and would have said no anyway. It should “be very clear to all New Zealanders, and to Australia,” Ardern said, “why New Zealand would not wish to be a part of that project.” France also spoke out vehemently against the deal, but not because it is opposed to military alliances or nuclear proliferation. The AUKUS deal sinks a previous agreement between France and Australia for a diesel-powered sub fleet, so France ended up in the position of being outflanked by another, bigger weapons dealer. French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said, “It was a stab in the back” by Australia. As for Biden and the U.S., Le Drian remarked, “This brutal, unilateral, and unpredictable decision reminds me a lot of what Mr. Trump used to do.” The alliance has homegrown critics as well. Former Australian Labor Party Prime Minister Paul Keating slammed the deal. He said that “materiel dependency on the United States robbed Australia of any freedom or choice.” In 2019, he accused Morrison’s government of letting “the phobias of security agencies” dominate Australia’s foreign policy and said that the “whispered word Communism of old is now being replaced with the word China.” No price tag has been announced for the subs that will be built in Adelaide, but Morrison admits that Australia’s defense budget will be going up. The French submarine deal was worth $40 billion, and that was just for diesel-powered boats, so the new plan will no doubt feature a much higher figure. And as with all previous military alliances and weapons deals, the people of the United States can expect to find themselves on the hook for a big portion of the costs as well. AuthorC.J. Atkins is the managing editor at People's World. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from York University in Toronto and has a research and teaching background in political economy and the politics and ideas of the American left. In addition to his work at People's World, C.J. currently serves as the Deputy Executive Director of ProudPolitics. This article was produced by People's World. Archives September 2021 top, USDA (CC, public domain) The Biden administration has been described as potentially transformative, equaling Lyndon Johnson’s years and possibly even rivaling Franklin Roosevelt’s tenure. While it’s still early, such comparisons may not be far off, considering the possible impact of pending environmental, infrastructure, voting, and labor rights legislation. If made into law (and at this stage that’s still a big if, thanks to Mr. Manchin & Co.), these bills would go a long way to not only rescue the country from the scourges of the health, environment, racial, economic, and political crises that currently beset it, but also mark a break with the neoliberal doctrine that has gripped decision making since the 1980s. Or would it? This question is brought into bold relief when considering the nine-month-old administration’s “inflection point” foreign policy doctrine. It too might be transformative, but the comparison now would not so much be to LBJ and FDR but rather to Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter, Dwight Eisenhower, and even Richard Nixon. Transformation, in this instance, would represent a 180-degree turn towards positions not assumed since the height of the Cold War, away from not only the Obama administration’s rather constrained international posture, but from the very concept of peaceful coexistence that at least, in part, influenced U.S. foreign policy for the past half century. How so? Having retreated from the Afghan theater in the war on terror, Mr. Biden’s administration now seems hell-bent on opening up a whole new battlefront, replacing “radical Islam” with China, socialism, and what are deemed autocratic states. In today’s Cold War redux, China is seen “as America’s existential competitor, Russia as a disrupter, Iran and North Korea as nuclear proliferators,” writes the New York Times. Indeed, news of the military agreement between Australia, the U.S., and the U.K. aimed at China underscores this new direction. “We’re in competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century,” the 46th president recently declared. “We’re at a great inflection point in history.” “On my watch” he later boasted to reporters, China will not achieve its goal “to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world.” The administration’s lurch rightward in foreign affairs flies in the face of U.S.-China detente that dates from 1979 with Deng Xiaoping’s entry onto the world stage and China’s “opening up.” Biden and Xi, 李 季霖 (CC BY SA) Only two years ago, Biden was referring to China’s leadership as “nice people.” What changed? Thomas Friedman in a recent Times column sums up the U.S. rationale succinctly, identifying technology theft, Hong Kong, the alleged mistreatment of national minorities, notably the Uygurs, and Xi Jinping’s leadership. The last factor tops Friedman’s list: “Then there is the leadership strategy of President Xi Jinping, which has been to extend the control of the Communist Party into every pore of Chinese society, culture and commerce.” He continues, “This has reversed a trajectory of gradually opening China to the world since 1979.” Trade is another key issue. Here Friedman suggests that, to end the tariffs imposed by Trump, China must first end its commodity subsidies. “Many U.S. businesses are pushing now to get the Phase 1 Trump tariffs on China repealed — without asking China to repeal the subsidies that led to these tariffs in the first place. Bad idea.” Clearly, what irks U.S. capital and its apologists are primarily two issues: the CPC’s campaign to deepen the role of the Communist Party and the country’s commodity export policy, in other words, how what’s called “socialism with Chinese characteristics” handles trade. The party has been campaigning against corruption and attempting to politically and ideologically reinforce itself, an effort that makes the likes of Friedman cringe. The op-ed writer’s call to “end subsidies” is basically a demand to dismantle China’s organization of production — in other words, its drive toward socialism. One might ask Mr. Friedman, should the U.S. end its subsidies to agriculture and oil as well? Some might call these questions of national sovereignty where outsiders dare not intrude. Friedman, obviously, has other ideas as he quips: “When dealing with China, speak softly but always carry a big tariff (and an aircraft carrier).” Small wonder the Chinese general secretary replied in his speech celebrating the 100th anniversary of the CPC with such vigor to the “sanctimonious preaching” of those who have the gall to tell them what to do and combine it with threats of military force. Biden’s views, it seems, are widely shared in the circles of the 1 percent. Indeed, a new bipartisan ruling-class consensus has taken shape. Jake Sullivan, the administration’s current national security advisor, argued in a Dartmouth College interview in 2019 that the national security establishment of both parties in recent years had come to the conclusion that “we totally screwed up, we got China all wrong” in assuming that the People’s Republic would become more “liberal” and “responsible stakeholders” as they became integrated into the “rules based order” (meaning the WTO and other international bodies). When that didn’t happen, the powers that be concluded, says Sullivan, that the U.S./China equation is “no longer about cooperation; it’s about competition and competition in a way is kind of a code word for confrontation.” Enter Cold War 2.0. Yet this is a standoff of a different type. U.S. policy towards the USSR and the socialist community of nations was premised on the strategy of containment and the hope that these newly emerging societies would collapse under the weight of their own inertia. Today’s plans toward China instead posit a zero-sum, winner-take-all pursuit of U.S. imperialist objectives. Last spring Bernie Sanders sounded the alarm in Foreign Affairs: “It is distressing and dangerous, therefore, that a fast-growing consensus is emerging in Washington that views the U.S.-Chinese relationship as a zero-sum economic and military struggle.” Kurt Campbell, a Biden loyalist who advised the vice president during the Obama years and is now a member of his National Security Council responsible for China, put it this way last spring at a Stanford conference: the period of “engagement [with Beijing] has come to an end.” U.S. policy is now under a “new set of strategic parameters,” says Campbell. Fierce competition, according to the NSC staffer, is the new framework for the relationship. The war on terror helped fuel far-right extremism, leading to Trump’s Muslim ban and ultimately January 6th. Needless to say, this language is a far cry from the diplomatic niceties accorded state-to-state relations in normal times, at least in public. Still it should be pointed out that these not-so-veiled threats must be weighed against Biden’s pledge to end the forever wars and repeated ill-fated U.S. attempts at nation building. At the same time, one might rightly ask, is the White House speaking out of both sides of its mouth? Democrats, after all, are notorious for moving to the right on foreign policy, an alarming trend in normal times but extremely troublesome in light of the ongoing fascist threat. After all, it’s no secret that the conduct of the war on terror helped fuel far-right extremism, leading to Trump’s Muslim ban and ultimately January 6th. Fascist threat, ep_jhu (CC BY-NC 2.0) Here Democrats contend that it’s possible to confront on the one hand (e.g., pulling back on technology transfers) and cooperate on the other (climate change), a most dangerous game. Not surprisingly, Republicans just love it. Steve Bannon, alt-right gadfly and former Trump strategist, has long painted China as an existential threat. Now it seems, at least in spirit, ruling elites have found common cause. The casual equating of right and left “authoritarianism” obscures fundamental differences between social systems. Upon hearing the news, Hal Brands of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute waxed ecstatic: “Biden views . . . competition as part of “a fundamental debate” between those who believe that “autocracy is the best way forward” and those who believe that “democracy will and must prevail,” a patently false juxtaposition if there ever was one. Here the casual equating of right and left “authoritarianism” obscures fundamental differences between social systems. According to Brands, the U.S. is contemplating a three-pronged response: forging a new coalition with advanced capitalist nations, pursuing international responses to transnational crises like COVID, and reinvesting in infrastructure and technology in order to contest China and other rivals. Untangling the two countries’ economic ties will be no easy task, given the existing level of integration. Another observer, a former editor of Foreign Policy, argues that some measures already underway are more aggressive than those pursued by Trump: Since taking office, Biden’s administration has maintained former President Donald Trump’s trade sanctions against China. It has worked with the Senate to pass a massive, quarter-trillion-dollar industrial policy bill aimed at boosting U.S. competitiveness. It has launched a Buy American campaign that cuts foreign firms out of the extremely lucrative U.S. government procurement market. It has worked to block Chinese acquisitions and investments inside the United States and to keep Chinese students and researchers out of the country. And on June 17, Biden signed an executive order banning Americans from investing in Chinese companies linked to the military or to surveillance technology. Additionally, “the U.S. is looking to impose further restrictions on the export of leading-edge semiconductor technology to China, and the White House has raised the possibility of an Indo-Pacific-wide digital trade deal that excludes Beijing.” The situation is growing increasingly complicated. Consider that the foundations of the administration’s international objectives, spelled out in an Interim National Security Strategic Guidance, are premised on benefiting working- and middle-class families: “We have an enduring interest in expanding economic prosperity and opportunity,” the document’s authors aver, “but we must redefine America’s economic interests in terms of working families’ livelihoods, rather than corporate profits or aggregate national wealth.” Make no mistake: this is new. Without a doubt, a redefinition of U.S. economic interests, prioritizing working-class well-being over corporate profits, would indeed be welcome. That it’s framed within the context of U.S. national security is also noteworthy. The couching, however, of these ideas within the framework of such retrograde language and plans is extremely problematic. Biden’s national security advisor, Mr. Sullivan, it appears, is among the chief authors and architects of this strategy. What’s behind it? Sullivan himself seems to have been moved by the 2016 election campaign and the realization of “how profoundly such a large segment of our country felt their government wasn’t working for them.” Hence he concluded that “the strength of U.S. foreign policy and national security lies primarily in a thriving American middle class, whose prosperity is endangered by the very transnational threats the Trump administration has sought to downplay or ignore.” Bernie Sanders’ campaign too had an impact: “I didn’t always agree with his ultimate policy solutions, but there’s no question he connected with how much of America experiences and perceives the impacts of systemic inequality, and this sense that the system was somehow working against them.” Hence Sullivan’s belief in the need to address transnational issues like the pandemic, global warming, and trade along with massive reinvestments in infrastructure both traditional and human. But these are one individual’s subjective considerations, hardly a basis for the class policy shift that’s in the works. What then could be among the objective factors? Here a shift away, if not a break from, neoliberal policy may be part of a wider change in advanced capitalist countries. One writer points to the nationalization of a steel plant in the UK and writes that in “Europe, the EU is in the process of overhauling its State Aid rules to allow greater government support to industry, citing the need to meet competition from China.” Technology, Ugochukwu Ebu (Pixabay) A big issue, it’s argued, is the growth of big data and the absence of rules governing intellectual property, both of which demonstrate the need for government intervention: The broader point here is that the material base of the global economy has, in the past decade, been decisively reshaped around data technologies and a major new competitor economy outside the West, and that this in turn has promoted a direct challenge to neoliberal norms of government across the globe. To the extent that the pandemic has accelerated the shift toward the digital economy, and has expanded the range of government intervention, it has brought neoliberalism’s death rather closer. Then there are the objective imperatives of real life. Confronted with the aftermath of January 6th and the events leading up to it, the objective of the Biden Administration, at first glance, seems to be to rewrite the social contract in fundamental ways by addressing working-class concerns with the added benefit of winning back some of those influenced by Trump: “Biden has been pursuing investments in scientific research and development, digital and physical infrastructure, and other areas to improve competitiveness and address working- and middle-class alienation,” offers a Bloomberg analyst. He continues: “In Biden’s view, improving the economic fortunes of the middle class is insurance against a Trumpist resurrection and a way of strengthening the domestic foundations of U.S. diplomacy.” Other commentators appear either skeptical or at best nonplussed: “Allies are also asking what Biden’s concept of a foreign policy for the middle class can do to advance prosperity in the free world as a whole. Some worry that it is just a softer version of Trump’s protectionism, skeptical of free-trade agreements and partial to tariffs.” But clearly, there’s another goal at work here. Team Biden’s Security Guidance hints at it: “Anti-democratic forces use misinformation, disinformation, and weaponized corruption to exploit perceived weaknesses and sow division within and among free nations, erode existing international rules, and promote alternative models of authoritarian governance.” Who, it must be asked, is advocating “alternative models” of governance? Thomas Wright, writing for the Atlantic, comes close to an answer. “In his [Biden’s] view, the United States is in a competition of governance systems with China.” It’s one thing to compete as to who is best, East or West, and quite another to frame such competition in far broader and more insidious terms. Nader Mousavizadeh, founder and C.E.O. of Macro Advisory Partners and an advisor to the late Kofi Anan, quoted in the Friedman op-ed, hits the nail directly on the head. Questioning the advisability of the entire Biden foreign policy project, he asks, “Are we sure we understand the dynamics of an immense and changing society like China well enough to decide that its inevitable mission is the global spread of authoritarianism?” Social revolution is not an exportable commodity — it cannot be shipped in and imposed from without. It’s a damn good question. Biden and company have been led to believe that China’s main purpose in life is the global export of its revolution. But this is clearly a misreading of intentions. As a question of practice, “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is very China specific, a model based on that country’s unique conditions. As a matter of theory, as Gus Hall used to say, “socialism is not a foreign import.” In other words, there are no universal models of socialism fit for every time and place. If the 20th century has proven anything, social revolution is not an exportable commodity — it cannot be shipped in and imposed from without. U.S. imperialism seems particularly alarmed at China’s Belt and Road initiative, a wide-reaching infrastructure initiative aimed at developing nations. So alarmed in fact, that in response to Belt and Road, the U.S. pushed the G7 in June to launch a lamely labeled Build Back Better World (B3W) program aimed at a similar international audience. When it’s all said and done, the linking of a left progressive domestic program to anti-communist foreign policy aimed at “cancelling” China’s drive toward socialism marks a new stage in U.S. imperialism’s effort to regain lost positions and right the ship of state. As a tactic, however, the ploy is not new. During Cold War 1.0 sections of the left, particularly in the European social democratic movements, were encouraged to take similar positions. It would be a tragedy for history to repeat itself here at home. The danger, of course, is that this left/right pairing of bread-and-butter priorities at home with great power imperatives abroad carries with it the potential for faux populist appeals with all the dangers that come with it. Instead of responding to the genuine aspirations of Black Lives Matters movements, immigrant rights, union strikes, organizing drives, and shop floor activism, in other words, the “socialist moment,” the nation could be diverted toward potentially nationalist and xenophobic paths – the dramatic increase in anti-Asian hate and violence is a case in point. Black Lives Matter, Anthony Quintano (CC BY-NC-SA ) The Biden administration has already extended the Trump sanctions against Cuba and remains hostile to Venezuela. What country will be next? Nicaragua now appears to be in imperialism’s sights. Setting this aside for the moment, another question looms large: are any of these actions in the objective interests of African American, Latino, Asian American, Native American, and white workers? And how will the labor movement respond? Hopefully not with a new round of China bashing in exchange for a few pieces of badly needed silver. Notwithstanding these challenges, the concept of connecting security to working-class interests should not be dismissed out of hand. It would be a huge mistake to frame this problem narrowly. The issue is separating, if possible, these more-than-worthy domestic intentions from their entrapment in Cold War 2.0 designs. The good news here is that some early on have seen through the Cold War rhetoric and are taking sharp issue with it. As pointed out above, already in late spring Bernie Sanders took exception to the emerging consensus and called for its reversal. Sanders, who also buys into a bit of China bashing, nevertheless correctly noted, “The primary conflict between democracy and authoritarianism, however, is taking place not between countries but within them—including in the United States,” and called for a global minimum wage to help address worldwide inequality. Biden has proposed a global minimum corporate tax, and the G20 and OECD have agreed in principle on a 15% minimum corporate tax. This is a good beginning if implemented. US corporations currently pay an effective corporate tax of 17%. Importantly, around the same time, 40 organizations took issue with the hawkish U.S. policy toward China, warning that it threatened climate collapse. Politico writes, “It’s the latest salvo in the months-long drama between progressive Democrats who say cooperation on climate change should take precedence over competition with China, and moderates who think the administration can do both things at once.” The article continues: The progressive organizations, including the Sunrise Movement and the Union of Concerned Scientists, “call on the Biden administration and all members of Congress to eschew the dominant antagonistic approach to U.S.-China relations and instead prioritize multilateralism, diplomacy, and cooperation with China to address the existential threat that is the climate crisis,” their letter reads. “Nothing less than the future of our planet depends on ending the new Cold War between the United States and China.” It seems that the Biden administration itself is not of one mind on these issues. The Atlantic writes that “some in the party’s foreign-policy establishment hope that his views on China are not yet settled, and that he will moderate his rhetoric and outlook over time, deemphasizing the contest between democracy and authoritarianism. They worry that the United States could find itself embroiled in an ideological struggle with China akin to the Cold War.” The divisions extend deep into the administration: “A Biden-administration official [said] that, while the top foreign-policy officials are simpatico with the president, some in the government share the restorationists’ concerns, while others have yet to grasp the significance of the president’s statements.” The Biden administration is also risking a hot war with Russia over the Ukraine and with Iran in the Middle East. US imperialism is being challenged at the same time that Biden attempts displays of resoluteness in showing US military and diplomatic “strength.” Thus, there is plenty of room and opportunities to push the administration in a better direction, and pushing is a must. The goal here must not necessarily be to change the administration’s hearts and minds, but compel change with real mass on-the- ground politics. This should include a change of personnel in the State Department, which, having already badly managed the withdrawal from Afghanistan, is now pushing the country into a new balance of military and nuclear terror with China and possibly Russia. The future of human civilization may depend on what mass movements do. It’s either peaceful coexistence or no existence. AuthorJoe Sims is co-chair of the Communist Party USA (2019-). He is also a senior editor of People's World and loves biking. This article was produced by CPUSA. Archives September 2021 Brazilian President Jair Bolsanaro has given new license to the killing of Indigenous people in Brazil. Before he came to power in 2019, it wasn’t clear what he wanted to build, but he knew exactly who and what he wanted to destroy: the Indigenous people and the Amazon rainforest, respectively. “Bolsanaro attacked a woman first, the land, our mother,” the Indigenous leader Célia Xakriabá told me. “We have no choice but to fight back.” Since becoming president, the former Army captain, who served under the country’s last military dictator, has led an unprecedented war against the environment and the people protecting it. A slew of anti-Indigenous legislation, escalated violence against and assassinations of Indigenous land defenders, and the COVID-19 pandemic have threatened the existence of Brazil’s original people, the Amazon rainforest, and the future of the planet. Under Bolsanaro’s oversight, about 7,700 square miles (20,000 square kilometers) of the Amazon has been deforested, mostly by fires caused by the cattle and logging industries. The destruction of the Amazon rainforest is pushing the biome toward an irreversible tipping point where it won’t be able to renew itself and making the Amazon uninhabitable for Indigenous people. Meanwhile, in 2021, scientists found that for the first time the Amazon has been emitting more CO2 than it has been absorbing. The Amazon—often touted as the “lungs of the planet” for the oxygen it creates—seems to be dying faster than it is growing. But Indigenous people, who call this forest their home, refuse to disappear. At the end of August 2021, red dust rose like smoke from the pounding feet of some 6,000 Indigenous people marching on the main promenade surrounded by Brazil’s Supreme Court, Congress, and presidential palace in the country’s capital city of Brasilia. One hundred and seventy-six different Indigenous groups from every region of the country arrived at the encampment of Luta pela Vida (the Struggle for Life movement) to protest against their own erasure. This Indigenous mobilization, which is the largest in history, broke a spell of inviolability surrounding the institutions of power that have for centuries excluded Indigenous people or sought their demise. “We need a union of Indigenous people,” Alessandra Munduruku from the Association of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil, known as APIB, said to me. “Our lives matter.” They have a champion in Joênia Wapichana, the first Indigenous female lawyer and member of Congress. She’s calling for a “political renewal” of Brazilian and Indigenous rights. And she has helped spearhead the Indigenous movement at a national and international level with APIB. APIB is a powerful unifying tool for the Indigenous peoples of the country. Indigenous Brazilians comprise a small fraction of Brazil’s population—about 900,000 Indigenous people survive today in a country of 211 million—yet they possess a profound human diversity in language and culture not seen in most modern countries. And they are now united in a common cause against Bolsanaro’s belligerence and the powerful forces that brought him into power. On August 9, APIB filed a lawsuit in the International Criminal Court charging Bolsanaro with genocide. It’s the first time in the history of the ICC that the Indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere have defended themselves, with the help of Indigenous lawyers, against crimes against humanity in the Hague. “We have been fighting every day for hundreds of years to ensure our existence and today our fight for rights is global,” APIB’s executive director Sonia Guajajara said in a statement. A coalition of right-wing forces ranging from agribusinesses, the gun lobby, and evangelicals—collectively known as the “bull, bullet, and bible” bloc in parliament—is backing Bolsanaro’s project of destruction of the Amazon and its people. Soy fields (mostly for animal feed) and cattle herds have replaced lush forestlands and traditional rural communities. Most of Brazil’s food is exported, largely feeding U.S. and European markets. And many Indigenous people blame multinational corporations like Cargill, the United States’ largest privately held company, for their role in driving environmental destruction to produce soy. Rural landowners, loggers, and miners terrorize and evict Indigenous and traditional communities from their lands at the barrel of a gun. Relaxed firearm and ammunition laws have led to a sharp rise in gun ownership, especially among rural landowners, which has led to a subsequent rise in gun violence. Bolsanaro’s signature finger gun gestures signal support for arming his base. Much of this influence, including ties to evangelical churches, comes from the United States, a country Bolsanaro and his supporters look to for inspiration. “It’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry wasn’t as efficient as the Americans, who exterminated the Indians,” Bolsanaro once lamented. “Indigenous extermination has already happened in your country [the United States],” Munduruku told me. She sees a similar process unfolding in Brazil. But the connection doesn’t end there. “At the rate [at which] your country [the United States] consumes soy, it contributes to the destruction of my land,” she added. The final front of this onslaught is the very legal and political framework protecting Indigenous territories—the 1988 Brazilian Constitution. The Brazilian Congress has been voting on a series of bills that would undo hard-won rights such as protecting Indigenous territories, granting immunity to illegal land-grabbing, and sacrificing Indigenous lands for infrastructure, mining, and energy projects. One of the bills would authorize the president to leave the International Labor Organization Convention’s 1989 Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention 169, a major international treaty protecting Indigenous and tribal peoples. At minimum, APIB and Luta pela Vida are asking the government to respect its own laws and constitution. That’s why a group of 150 Indigenous people burned an effigy of a large black coffin at the steps of Brazil’s Congress on August 27. Scrawled on its sides were the names of the bills aimed at their destruction. The message was clear: Indigenous people refuse to be burned. On September 1, the Supreme Court began hearing arguments in a case that could lead to either enabling or preventing the usurping of ancestral lands from Indigenous people who were removed from their territories after the ratification of the 1988 Constitution. On September 15, the Supreme Court suspended the case without setting a date to revisit it. APIB claims a positive ruling for Indigenous people would immediately resolve hundreds of land conflicts in the country, and warns a negative ruling could accelerate violence. What is important to consider is that Brazilian democracy is fragile. As Bolsanaro’s chances for reelection in 2022 dwindle, his supporters called for street mobilizations on September 7 to “begin a general cleansing process in Brazil.” The targets of the rally were the Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Chinese Embassy—and Bolsanaro supporters seemed to take their cues from their U.S. counterparts who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6. On August 10, Bolsanaro’s son Eduardo Bolsanaro shared a stage with Trump supporters in my rural home state of South Dakota, hoping to cast doubt on the 2022 elections and draw international right-wing support. He was joined by Steve Bannon, who called Brazil’s former leftist leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva “the most dangerous leftist in the world” because his presidential candidacy poses a great threat of undoing what Bolsanaro has done during his presidential term over the last four years. The following week, in an Indigenous ceremony, Sonia Guajajara designated Lula the “guardian of territories,” a reminder of his obligations to Indigenous people and the Amazon should he become president. The Indigenous movement goes beyond Brazil and its constitution. “Our [Indigenous] history doesn’t begin in 1988,” was one popular slogan at the Luta pela Vida camp. And the Indigenous struggle is more than recuperating imagined halcyon days that never entirely existed for Indigenous people. “The future is ancestral,” Guajajara told me. And she’s calling on the entire world to take leadership from Indigenous movements in this time of terrible danger. AuthorNick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is a journalist, historian and co-host of the Red Nation Podcast. He is the author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019). This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives September 2021 9/18/2021 Book Review: Nobility & Civility- Wm. Theodore de Bary (2004). Reviewed By: Thomas RigginsRead NowWm. Theodore de Bary (1919-2017) was one the deans of Asian Studies in the United States. Operating out of Columbia University he had edited and overseen the publication of the ubiquitous series of readers Sources of The Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Traditions. Sources of the Vietnamese Tradition was produced by others after his death’ In his book, Nobility & Civility: Asian Ideals of Leadership and the Common Good, published by Harvard, 2004, de Bary examines many Asian cultures to see what they may have to offer to the "humanizing" of the march towards globalization. "Nobility" refers to "leadership", "Civility" to "public morality." By studying the foundational cultural values of the Asian peoples (de Bary primarily discusses China and Japan with a nod to India) he hopes to show the possibility of a civilizational synthesis of western and eastern thought with respect to the future development of globalization. Without knowledge as to how the people of the past have dealt with the political consequences of their value systems "it will be difficult," he writes, "to see how anyone could be expected to recognize and cope with similar problems in the present." Without the humanizing values found in the Asian tradition, especially in Confucianism, becoming a part of the world’s educational background, globalization may become [I would say it already is] "degrading, dehumanizing, and destructive of the earth, beyond anything seen in the past." [The current Chinese promotion of Confucianism is thus part of the socialist humanism that will, hopefully, be the future basis of global culture.] He discusses Confucius’ conception of the "noble person" in the first chapter. Of course one cannot mechanically apply the Confucianism of ancient China, developed in a feudal society, to the modern world dominated by monopoly capitalism. Nevertheless, Confucianism is still a living force in Asia. What is still relevant, regardless of economic system, is the Confucian belief that the duty of government is to serve the people and should be consensual. The rulers have, according to Confucians "responsibilities towards the disadvantaged and uneducated.... noblesse oblige as it would be called in the West." De Bary quotes from a Confucian work from the 4th or 3rd century B.C. (Chronicle of Mr. Zuo) which talks about a ruler driven out by his people (a revolutionary act indeed) and concludes "if he exhausts the people’s livelihood... and betrays the hopes of the populace... what use is he? What can one do but expel him?" This is a fundamental Confucian value and is certainly applicable today, think of Trump in exile at Mar-A-Lago. I don’t think, however, that it is congruent with the fundamental values of the globalization process which is driven by the principle that the welfare of the people is always secondary to the need for profit and the financial supremacy of corporations. Confucianism might be used to try and mitigate the ravages of capitalism by well meaning (but ineffective) idealists, but more than likely it would be used to cover up and mask the social reality of exploitation and human enslavement, much as Christianity is used by the Republican Party and conservative Christians in the United States. This is not, of course, the fault of Confucianism. It is in its homeland China where it has the best chance to succeed. The basic values of socialism are not at odds with the Confucian ideal. It should be noted that after initial hostility to Confucianism (more to how it was abused by the ruling classes than to its philosophical content), the Chinese party now has a more positive relationship with Confucians. Under Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin [and now Xi Jinping] de Bary noted that some in the leadership have been led to reevaluate the role of tradition (especially after the excesses of the "Cultural Revolution" under Mao) and he concludes that "it is understandable that the regime might favor a more civil tradition like Confucianism to provide the Chinese content for a Chinese socialism. Thus it has sanctioned a Confucian Association to promote scholarly discussion of the subject and traditional observances of rituals like the celebration of Confucius’ birthday." Besides Confucianism in China, de Bary also traces the history of the Japanese reception of Confucianism. This is an interesting history and shows how the original pro-people content of this philosophy was corrupted by the ruling classes to justify their privileges and power. There are also chapters on the influence of Buddhism in both China and Japan. In an epilogue de Bary points out that in a time when people are talking about a "clash of civilizations" and the incompatibility of other cultures with their own it is important that students be educated in the classics of other civilizations. "We owe it to ourselves," he writes, "to make another, more determined effort to understand how the... resources available within these traditions afford the means for a meaningful discourse to take place on each other’s terms." One of the most important themes that de Bary thinks should be discussed is the Asian view of the status of the person. He attacks the chauvinist view that the value of the individual "is a peculiarly Western or Judeo-Christian idea and that people who do not recognize it cannot be expected to respect human rights." De Bary maintains that the Asian cultural tradition has always been aware of the importance of the individual and his or her self-cultivation. He quotes the Japanese Confucianist, Nakamura Masanao (1832-1890) who said "As far as individual morality is concerned, regardless of past and present, East or West, the main principle is the one thing of self governance.... This is the central concern of the independent self and is the source and principle of freedom." If we link this with the duty of the government to provide the conditions that best promote the principle of freedom we will find that Confucianism has a natural ally in Marxism in combating the inhumane practices of the movement towards globalization. This is an important book and should be read by anyone interested in Asian culture. Nobility and Civility: Asian Ideals of Leadership and the Common Good by Wm. Theodore de Bary, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2004, 256pp. AuthorThomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. Archives September 2021 “How are you today Fred? I’ve been looking over Fung Yu-lan’s exposition of Xuanzang’s thought. It’s pretty complicated.” “You’re telling me? Nevertheless, we should have a go at it. I’ve read over Chan (Source Book In Chinese Philosophy) and am ready to give it the old college try.” “Let’s go.” “I’ll start with a background based on Chan’s introductory remarks. Xuanzang (596-644) was quite a character. He entered a Buddhist monastery when he was thirteen. Then moved around China studying under different masters. Finally he went off to India to study Buddhism at its source and with Sanskrit masters. He spent over ten years in India, wrote a famous book about his journey, and returned to China with over six hundred original manuscripts. He spent the rest of his life with a group of translators rendering seventy five of the most important works into Chinese. All of this work was sponsored by the Emperor of the newly established Tang Dynasty (618-907).” “Sounds like he had an interesting life.” “He certainly did, but too short. He died in his forty eighth year. He created what Chan calls the ‘most philosophical of Buddhist schools.’ It is called the ‘Consciousness-Only School’ and is based on the Indian Buddhist school, founded by Asanga (c.410-500) and his brother Vasubandhu (c.420-500), known as Yogacara (way of Yoga). What Xuanzang did, among other things, was to take a major work of Vasubandhu, Treatise in Thirty Verses on Consciousness-Only (Vijnatimatratrimshika), plus ten commentaries on it, including that of Dharmapala (439-507), add his own views, stir all this together and come up with his own concoction called Treatise on the Establishment of the Doctrine of Consciousness-Only. This work was in Sanskrit , Vijnaptimatratasiddhi, but was translated into Chinese by his student Kuiji (632-682) who wrote sixty chapters of commentary based on his translation notes. This is the Notes on the Treatise on the Establishment of the Doctrine of Consciousness-Only. Chan says we couldn’t really understand Xuanzang without it.” “Great. Now we are going to try to understand him based on our own notes from Chan, Fung (Short History of Chinese Philosophy)and a few others.” “That’s how it goes Karl.” “Well, finish up on Chan’s intro so we can get to the text.” “OK. In outline, it goes like this. Humans have eight forms of consciousness which are (1-5) the different senses, (6) a concept forming ‘sense-center’ which organizes the raw data of the senses into ordered ideas, (7) a willing and reasoning consciousness or ‘thought-centered’/ self-centered one, and finally (8) one called the “storehouse” or alaya consciousness.” “What’s that last one? Is it ‘memory’?” “Much more than that. It's not memory in any conventional Western sense which would be in number seven.” “So why is it called alaya?” “It's called alaya because all the other ones are ‘stored’ in this one. All these eight consciousnesses are in constant flux. Chan says, ‘It is so called because it stores the “seed” or effects of good and evil deeds which exist from time immemorial and become the energy to produce manifestation. This storehouse consciousness is in constant flux, constantly “perfumed” (influenced) by incoming perceptions and cognitions from external manifestations. At the same time, it endows perceptions and cognitions with the energy of the seeds, which in turn produce manifestations.’” “Let me chime in here with some Fung. He says, ‘According to the teachings of this school, all sentient beings suffer from two erroneous beliefs: that in the subjective existence of an ego or atman (wo), and that in the objective existence of external things or dharmas (fa). The purpose of the [Consciousness-Only] or Wei-shi school is to destroy these two beliefs by showing that both are equally unreal (empty or shunya). Thus the Treatise maintains that what we call the “ego” and “things” have “only a false basis and lack any real nature of their own”; their manifestations are “all mental representations dependent upon the evolutions of consciousness.”’” “Very interesting. Is that it?” “No, Fung also gives Kuiji’s comment, which is a good gloss on your quote from Chan. Namely: ‘From this (it may be seen that) the inner consciousness is not, in its essential nature, non-existent, whereas the ego and things, considered as external to the mind, are not, in their essential nature, existent. In this way we exclude the heterodox doctrine which clings to the additional reality of objects aside from the mind; we also exclude the erroneous view which, because it wrongly believes in “emptiness,” sets aside consciousness itself as non-existent, thus reducing (everything) to “emptiness.” Equally to avoid (the dogmas of) “emptiness” on the one hand and “being” on the other: this is what the School of [Consciousness-Only] teaches.’” “That’s great. So we know the alaya is the fundamental consciousness. The other seven are ‘in’ it. Now we must note the three transformations that are always going on as well. The first is just the alaya-vijnana (storehouse consciousness) itself. The second is the transformation brought about by the ‘thought-centered consciousness’ which objectifies the alaya-vijnana as the ‘self’-- specifically as a personal self ‘always accompanied by the evils of self-interest.’ The third is the result of the actions of the senses and the coordinator of the senses (the sixth consciousness) constructing out of the alaya-vijnana (unconsciously) an external world (illusory as ‘external’). ‘Because these six consciousnesses,’ Chan says, ‘ have external things [he means so called ‘external’ things] as their objects, they are conditioned by them and are therefore crude, superficial and discontinuous.’” “Let me interrupt here Fred. This is the place, I think, for me to jump in with my notes from the Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion as they clarify much of what you have said.” “Go ahead. I welcome the relief.” “In Chinese this school is called Fa Xiang or ‘Marks of Existence School.’ Remember the Chinese use ‘fa’ for ‘dharma.’ Let’s take up with the ‘thought-centered’ consciousness, number seven. This is the go between the first six and number eight-- the alaya-vijnana. The ‘self’ arises in this interaction so I’m just going to refer to this seventh type of consciousness as the ‘Ego.’ For this school, the task is to overcome the Ego, recognize the ‘illusory nature of the world’ and thus gain enlightenment -- that is to become bodhi (‘awakened’) so it is suggested that awakening is a better term to use.” “Awakening to what? To the ultimate ‘Truth’?” “That is correct Fred. There are three levels of ‘Truth.’ Namely, 1) The Parikalpita level: ‘that which is imagined or conceptualized.... that which people take to be the “objective” world is imagined or conceptualized; i.e., this world is illusory and deceptive; it exists only as a semblance but not as a true reality.’” “So this is like Kant I suppose-- the noumenal world and the phenomenal world of appearances. I think we can sort of accept this, Karl, if we think of the everyday world on the one hand and the worlds explained by science on the other. What is the second level?” “The Paratantra level: ‘The level of “contingent nature”.... on this level dharma enjoy only temporary existence, since everything that arises contingently (i.e., interdependently) possesses neither self-nature nor “reality”....’” “This is a special use of ‘reality,’ I guess.” “Yes, somewhat like Plato’s. The ‘real’ is self-subsistent and eternal as well as external-- the objects in the realm of the ideas (the forms) for Plato. Everything in our empirical world is in flux and change, so by this definition ultimately unreal. I think we can accept this level also.” “What’s the last level?” “The Tathata (suchness) level: ‘central notion of the Mahayana referring to the absolute, the true nature of things. Tathata is generally explained as being immutable, immobile, and beyond all concepts and distinctions. “Suchness” is the opposite of “that which is apparent”-- phenomena.’ This is the Absolute Reality.” “Very similar to Kant in many respects, Karl.” “I think so. The noumenal realm is beyond our ability to comprehend (Kant)-- pure reason breaks down. Buddhists can become mystical here but they really don’t know what they are talking about. I don’t say that disparagingly but as a consequence of their own doctrines.” “Well, this is all very interesting, but Chan points out this school did not have much of a future in China.” “And why is that?” “For two reasons. First, it was too ‘Indian.’ Chan says both it and the Three Treatise School we discussed last time were simply Indian schools transplanted into China where they ultimately didn’t mesh with the Chinese ‘psyche,’ if I can put it that way. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the school didn’t believe that all people were capable of salvation! As Chan says, it lost prestige ‘because it advocated that some people, being devoid of Buddha-nature, can never achieve Buddhahood, thus clearly betraying the Mahayana ideal of universal salvation.’ This was a really big objection.” “Are we ready to hit the texts?” “Yes. I’m going to quote from eight selections from Xuanzang’s Treatise.” “So what’s the first selection?” “Its called The Nonexistence of the Self and in it Xuanzang says: ‘Both the world and sacred doctrines declare that the self and dharmas are merely constructions based on false ideas and have no reality of their own.... On what basis are [the self and dharmas] produced. Their characters are all constructions based on the evolution and transformation of consciousness....’” “Is there a comment?” “Yes. Chan says: ‘The denial of the ego is the starting point of Buddhist philosophy in general and the Consciousness-Only School in particular. The idealism of Berkeley (1685-1753) and that of this school are very much alike. But while Berkeley’s philosophy is built on the assumption of individual minds and therefore finds itself in an “ego-centric predicament” — you only know the ideas in your own mind so how do you get to things external to your own mind- e.g., an external world.Buddhist idealism rejects the ego to start with and is therefore able to be free from solipsism.’” “Fred, we should note that Berkeley also escapes from solipsism as he has more than just individual minds. He rejects ‘matter’ and thinks things only exist as objects of mentation-- esse est percipi- to be is to be perceived- but everything is perceived by the mind of God. Even for Xuanzang there is an ‘ego’-- it's just not the ultimate reality which is the alaya-vijnana.” “Here is the second selection: The Nonexistence of Dharmas. I’m not going to quote from this selection. You remember the comment I quoted from Chan previously when we discussed Jizang, I mean his point on the ‘Four Points of Argumentation.’” “You mean all that ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ ‘yes and no.’ ‘neither yes nor no’ type of argumentation. I remember.” “Well, in the same way Jizang used the Four Points to refute our ordinary conceptions of causality, Xuanzang uses them to argue for the nonexistence of dharmas. The point is, of course, not the absolute nonexistence of dharmas -- but rather that they are phenomenal, not noumenal. Chan says, ‘The Four Points of Argumentation are ... employed to refute the doctrines of existence of dharmas. Whether the logic is sound or not, it cannot be denied that Buddhist thinking is rational and methodical, absolutely contrary to the common belief, even among some scholars, that the only mental activity of the Buddhist is intuition. It is significant that in a school chiefly concerned with the thinking process, the rationalistic and methodical elements are so strong.’” “An interesting point Fred. The rationalistic aspect of Buddhist argumentation is often neglected.” “Time to move on to selection three: The First Transformation of Consciousness. Here is a quote: [I]t is clear that the self and dharmas separated from consciousness conceived by the heterodoxical and other schools are all unreal.... From this we ought to know that there is really no external sphere of objects. There is only inner consciousness which produced what seems to be the external sphere....’” “This is Descartes’ Evil Demon with a vengeance!” “And without the demon. “The characters transformed by consciousness are infinite in variety, but the consciousnesses that transform can be divided into three kinds. The first is the consciousness where fruits ripen at a later time. It is the eighth consciousness. [It is so called] because it possesses in abundance the nature to ripen at later times. The second is called deliberation. It is the seventh consciousness. [It is so-called] because it is continuously in the process of deliberation. The third is called the consciousness that discriminates spheres of objects. It is the same as the first six consciousnesses (the five sense-consciousnesses and the sense-center consciousness. [It is so called] because it discriminates gross spheres of objects....’” “Vasubandhu called this first (the eighth) the ‘storehouse consciousness’ (alaya-vijnana). This is the fundamental root of all consciousness and it contains the ‘seeds’ of all that we will later experience as the ‘external’ world. The other consciousnesses are responsible for our conception of an ‘external’ world by the way they interact with the alaya-vijnana and cause as it were the germination of the seeds. This process is called ‘perfuming.’” “That seems to be what is going on Karl. Xuanzang says, ‘The act of enabling the seeds that lie within what is perfumed (the storehouse consciousness) to grow, as the hemp plant is perfumed, is called perfuming. As soon as the seeds are produced, the consciousnesses which can perfume become in their turn causes which perfume and produce seeds. The three dharmas (the seeds, the manifestations, and perfuming) turn on and on, simultaneously acting as cause and effect....’” “I wonder how much the hemp plant had to do with this. At any rate, this is a perpetual transformation.” “Yes it is and from it arise what we experience as the four realms of existence, the five stages of transmigration, and the four kinds of living beings.” “What are you talking about?” “This is the medieval or ancient Buddhist world view-- their pre-scientific outlook on reality. Here, this will make it clear. This is how Chan puts it in a footnote. ‘In Buddhism, there are four realms which constitute the substances of all existence: earth, water, fire, and air; the five stages of transmigration: the hells, those of ghosts, animals, human beings, and heavenly beings; the four kinds of beings: those produced from the womb, from eggs, from moisture, and through metamorphosis. The Consciousness-Only School, because it denies the reality of the self and dharmas, regards all these as constructions of consciousness.’” “Well, indeed, I agree this is a construction of consciousness! The ‘four realms’ are the same primary elements of the Greeks (Empedocles). Today we have the Periodic Table. We can’t take transmigration seriously from a scientific point of view, and hells, ghosts, and heavenly beings are definitely out in any case. The ‘four kinds of beings’ is also a group to revise in the light of modern biology. But even then, the modern scientific world view will be considered as only a ‘construction of consciousness.’ I think this would require that the alaya-vijnana be the universal first principle of the world.” “Lets see. Xuanzang says, ‘By “transformation” is meant that this consciousness [the alaya], from time immemorial, comes into and goes out of existence every moment and changes both before and after, for while it goes out of existence as cause, it comes into existence as effect, and thus is neither permanent nor one.... Being like a violent torrent, it neither comes to an end nor is eternal. As it continues for a long time, some sentient beings will float and others will sink. It is the same with this consciousness....’” “And I have no idea what that would be like.” “I don’t think anyone has. Here is an interesting comparison to Hume (1711-1776) made by Chan. ‘The theory that consciousness is a constant stream of ideas inevitably reminds one of Hume. The comparison between him and the Consciousness-Only School has been made by Fung Yu-lan among others. Both that school and Hume hold that the mind is nothing but a stream of ideas, that ideas are governed by a causal relationship, and that the external world is ultimately unreal [this may be too much of a claim as to what Hume says]. But Buddhism is free from the skepticism of Hume, for Nirvana is realizable through spiritual cultivation. Furthermore, in Buddhism, but not in Hume, the source of ideas is known and can be controlled.’” “Fred, I don’t think this is quite right. You can’t really say that Hume held to the unreality of the external world. That’s too positive for a skeptic. What he holds is that all our ideas come from impressions of sense but he doesn’t claim to know where these originate-- externally or internally. This is a far cry from claiming that the external world is unreal.” “Now I’m going to turn to selection four, The Second Transformation of Consciousness.” “OK.” “Here Xuanzang explains how the thought-centered consciousness interacts with the alaya-vignana. He writes: ‘...Spontaneously this thought-centered consciousness perpetually takes the storehouse consciousness as an object and is associated with the four basic defilements. What are the four? They are self-delusion, self-view, self-conceit, and self-love. These are the four. Self-delusion means ignorance, lack of understanding of the character of the self, and being unenlightened about the principle of the non-self. Therefore it is called self-delusion. Self-view means clinging to the view that the self exists, erroneously imagining certain dharmas to be the self that are not the self. Therefore it is called self-view. Self-conceit means pride. On the strength of what is being clung to as the self, it causes the mind to feel superior and lofty. It is therefore called self-deceit. Self-love means a greedy desire for the self. It develops deep attachment to what is clung to as the self. It is therefore called self-love.... These four defilements constantly arise and pollute the inner mind and cause the [six] other transforming consciousnesses {the five senses and the self-centered consciousness}to be continuously defiled. Because of this, sentient beings are bound to the cycle of life and death and transmigration and cannot be free from them. Hence they are called defilements.’” “I can see the benefit of trying to overcome these ‘defilements’ Fred. Not because of any imaginary ‘transmigration’ but just in terms of living a calmer and happier life here and now. If you want to take the cycle of life and death and transmigration in a philosophical way-- in this case metaphorically-- we can say that these defilements of an individual are spread about things (s)he comes into contact with and this perpetuates the cycle. ‘Transmigration’ is just a poetic way of talking about how we can transmit influences from our own lives to those of others. If my self-love influences your self-love then, in a manner of speaking, a little bit of me is ‘reincarnated’ or has transmigrated to you. Let us not, as do hoi polloi, take these images literally.” “I agree, Karl. We must transcend the literal meaning to get any insight from this way of thinking. I would also maintain this has to be done with all religious writings-- not just Buddhism.” “What a world of misery would be overcome if people only understood this.” “Now I’m going on to the fifth selection, The Third Transformation of Consciousness. This is the relation of the five senses plus the sense-centered or coordinating consciousness. Xuanzang puts it this way: ‘The root consciousness is the storehouse consciousness because it is the root from which all pure and impure consciousnesses grow.... By ‘causes’ are meant rising activities of the mind, the sense organs, and spheres of objects. It means that the five consciousnesses arise and manifest themselves, internally based on the root consciousness and externally as a result of a combination of the causes like the rising activities of the mind, the five sense organs, and spheres of objects.’” “This is fairly confusing, especially when he says the ‘causes’ behind the activities of the mind are both ‘internal’ and ‘external.’ If you hold to consciousness-only there is no ‘external’-- only an apparent external. The external should be an illusion produced by the sense-centered consciousness.” “You think Xuanzang is confusing? This comment by Chan is just as confusing. ‘[T]he primary concern of the school has always been on characters of dharmas. In accepting them as real, is not quite Mahayana and has therefore been regarded as quasi-Hinayana which, generally speaking, accepts the external world as real. One wonders if the Chinese refusal to regard the world as illusory did not have something to do with the school’s position.’” “But Fred, this is an Indian school transplanted into China. Chan has already established that this is one of the reasons it failed to ultimately catch on. I don’t know about calling it ‘quasi-Hinayana.’ The problem has to do with the concept ‘real.’ If ‘real’ means ultimately reducible to the alaya-vijnana, then the dharmas are ‘real’ and one doesn’t have to say the world is illusory. The same as with Berkeley. There is no matter. The tree is a percept. Everything ultimately exists because it is a perception in God’s mind. That doesn’t make the things illusory, just non-material. I think the same thing goes for what Xuanzang is saying. Maybe Chan is so confusing because he too is a victim of the ‘Chinese refusal." “Lets look at selection six then: Consciousness-Only. This section begins with a quote from Vasubandhu: "Thus the various consciousnesses transform and change. Both discrimination (consciousness) and the object of discrimination Are, because of this, unreal. For this reason, everything is consciousness only." This is explicated thusly by Xuanzang: ‘”The various consciousnesses” refer to the three transforming consciousnesses previously discussed and their mental qualities. They can all transform and appear as the perceiving and the perceived portions. The term “transformation” is thus employed.... Therefore everything produced from causes, and everything seemingly real or unreal, are all inseparable from consciousness. The word “only” is intended to deny that there are real things separated from consciousness, but not to deny that there are mental qualities, dharmas, and so forth inseparable from consciousness. The word “transform” means that the various inner consciousnesses transform and manifest the characters which seem to be the external spheres of the self and dharmas.... Therefore everything is consciousness only, because erroneous discrimination in itself is admitted as a fact. Since “only” does not deny the existence of dharmas not separated from consciousness, therefore true Emptiness [mental qualities--Kuiji] and so forth have the nature of being. In this way we steer away from the two extremes of holding that dharmas are real [although they have no natures of their own] or holding that dharmas are unreal [although they do function as causes and effects], establish the principle of Consciousness-Only, and hold correctly to the Middle Path.’” “These quotes, Fred, clear up the issue we just discussed about the confusion between ‘internal’ and ‘external.’ There really is no ‘external.’ It also clarifies that Chan comment about the dharmas being ‘real.’” “The next selection concerns several objections raised against the Consciousness-Only School. I’m not going to go over all of them, but since, as Xuanzang says, ‘One’s own principle cannot be established by demolishing those of others,’ I will point out some of his responses to criticisms.” “I for one am interested in the ‘Two Levels of Truth’ doctrine.” “His discussion of this point comes from the criticism that if everything is ultimately ‘Emptiness’ then his philosophy of Consciousness-Only is also Empty. He rejects this view. ‘Empty’ is not the same as ‘Nothing.’ It just means the view of hoi polloi that dharmas have real external being is wrong. But consciousness is real. He says, ‘If there were no such consciousness, there would be no worldly (relative) truth, and if there were no worldly truth, there would be no absolute truth, for the Two Levels of Truth are established on the basis of each other. To reject the Two Levels of Truth is to have evil ideas of Emptiness, a disease the Buddhas consider to be incurable. We should realize that some dharmas [which are imagined] are empty and some [which depend on something else, i.e., cause, to be complete-- Kuiji] are not....’” “So why do we think that some dharmas are external?” “His answer is that, ‘At the time the external spheres are realized through immediate apprehension, they are not taken as external. It is later that the sense-center consciousness discriminates and erroneously creates the notion of externally. Thus the objective spheres immediately apprehended are the perceived portion of the consciousnesses themselves.’” “So, ‘Enlightenment’ or ‘Awakening’ is when we realize that, just as our dreams in sleep, the so-called world of independent reality is really a creation of the mind.” “Yes. Xuanzang says, ‘This is why the Buddha spoke of the long night of transmigration, because of our failure to understand that the objective spheres of color [and so forth] are consciousness only.’” “So, is there one big mind-- an ocean of consciousness-- or just individual minds?” “There appear to be many individual streams of consciousness. I think the best view is that the alaya-vijnana of each person is always an endless stream. Individuals are perfumed seeds that develop from the other seven consciousness interactions with the alaya as temporary aggregates. They dissolve eventually back into the stream. Then a new ‘Ego’ is perfumed. Reincarnation may be that the new aggregate contains reperfumed seeds from the old aggregate-- but there is no permanent ego or self. I have to agree with Chan when he says, ‘In the final analysis, Buddhism is mysticism and a religion. All speculation is but a way to Nirvana.’” “That’s it?” “More or less. There is a final section which is just a lot of quotes from Vasubandhu but we have basically covered this philosophy.” Well, we have finished our agenda Fred. Remember, we wanted some background in classical Chinese thought and we have covered the foundations of Confucianism. Daoism, and Buddhism so we could understand better what are the “Chinese characteristics” that may be at work in the Marxism of present day China. I think we can read Fung Yu-Lan’s A Short History of Chinese Philosophy for the Medieval and early modern period leading up to the Chinese Revolution. OK, Karl, and we still have Chan”s Source Book as well and we have a good foundation for self-study. AuthorThomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. To read the Confucius Dialogue click here.
To read the Mencius Dialogue click here. To read the Xunzi Dialogue click here. To read the Mozi Dialogue click here. To read the Laozi Dialogue click here. To read the Zhuangzi Dialogue click here. To read the Gongsun Dialogue click here. To read the Great Learning Dialogue click here. To read the Doctrine of The Mean Dialogue click here. To read the Book of Changes Dialogue click here. To read the Dong Zhongshu Dialogue click here. To read the Wang Chong Dialogue click here. To read the Philosophy of Liezi Dialogue click here. To read the Guo Xiang and Neo-Daoism Dialogue click here. To read the Jizang Dialogue click here. Tim Russo’s article “Socialism worldwide needs American patriotism” contains certain contradictions. He writes that the repudiation of American patriotism is built on the “complete erasure of American socialism’s leaders, thinkers, writers, artists, organizers, agitators, even freers of slaves”. Without the remembrance of this history of radicalism, he remarks, “you have no movement, no mass line, no cultural hegemonic change, no revolution, nothing.” While Russo shows admirable acquaintance with the historico-cultural specificities of USA’s socialist tradition, he fails to theorize these details from the politico-strategic logic of hegemony. In my previous write-up which Russo critiques, I noted, “While traditions of patriotic socialism are present in imperialist countries, they don’t constitute a proper historical memory to function as the full-fledged scaffold for a mass movement.” Let me elaborate this statement. A nation is not a mere idea, it is a material force; it is a historical, cultural and political process which is consciously lived and shared by a group of people who identify with a particular community of interests. In metropolitan countries, nationalism was originally used by the proto-bourgeoisie of the early modern age as an ideological tool against monarchic-aristocratic rule. The growth of market production and the proliferation of exchange values (as opposed to pre-capitalist use-values) came in direct contradiction with the political domination of purely landed property and the existence of the Absolutist state. As a result, the nascent bourgeoisie adopted the banner of nationalism to press forward for the creation of spatial units wherein political power could be centralized and dispersed according to the demands and exigencies of the emerging capitalist system. In other words, the internal mechanisms of the market economy came to structure and constitute the bases of national identity in the core countries of the world system. Metropolitan national ideologies coalesced around reactionary values in four phases: a) imperial chauvinism arose in the mercantilist period in those states wherein internal colonialism facilitated the state formation essential to independent capital accumulation; b) racial chauvinism arose in the classical capitalist period, which witnessed the functional preponderance of overseas and settler colonialisms in the extension of metropolitan industry; c) social chauvinism arose in the imperialist era, when the convergence of monopoly capitalism and colonialism enabled the distribution of super-profits amongst leading sections of the Global North working class; and d) First Worldism arose in post-WWII period, in which the oppression of the Third World allowed for the maintenance of divergent living standards between the metropolitan and peripheral working classes. USA - as the imperial heartland - oversaw the tight interlocking of nationalist-patriotic discourses with conservative forces. This fundamentally impacted counter-hegemonic politics. By the 1940s, the label of “communist” in mainstream language came to embody the entirety of anti-Americanism, becoming one of the most powerful weapons to impose a dimension of otherness upon citizens. The red scare against radical labor organizers became a more political version of anti-immigrant rhetoric, associating the idea of foreignness with the revolutionary traditions of socialist groups. These anti-communist narratives continue to heavily circumscribe the field of nationalism in USA. Taking into account American patriotism’s historical status as a social force determining political relations, it becomes evident that there are certain limits to the construction of counter-narratives that stress the working class’s role in a nation’s history. The nation is not a homogeneous and cohesive formation which provides an even and consensual cultural field provides for hegemonic struggle. In “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”, Paul Gilroy explains: “Nationhood is not an empty receptacle which can be simply and spontaneously filled with alternative concepts according to the dictates of political pragmatism. The ideological theme of national belonging may be malleable to some extent but its links with the discourses of classes and ‘races’ and the organizational realities of these groups are not arbitrary. They are confined by historical and political factors which limit the extent to which nationalism becomes socialist at the moment that its litany is repeated by socialists. The intention may be radical but the effects are unpredictable, particularly where culture is also conceived within discrete, separable, national units coterminous with the boundaries of the nation state.” Thus, a proper analysis of nationalism needs to highlight the question of the institutional locations from which the ideology originates; the actual class practices, concrete social sites and systems of hierarchical-conflictual relations in which it is instantiated, of the agents who produce it; the material circuits through which it travels the totality of any historical bloc and the class fractions who substantiate it with the structures of power; hence the objective determinations of nationalism itself by the co-ordinates of its production, not considering the individual’s personal stance towards this matrix. Consequently, it does not matter how leftist patriots conceive of American nationalism; what matters is the fact that the presence of national pride within the boundaries of the American empire is strongly tied to the hegemonic logic of racist imperialism. In a metropolitan country like the US, the arena of the nation is dominated by the bourgeoisie which - from the start - gives patriotism an imperialist, exclusionary and supra-class character. In the Global South countries, in contrast, the foundations of anti-colonial nationalism - internationalist solidarity with movements for national liberation and the incorporation of both workers and peasants - continue to ensure the persistence of elements of progressivism in the ideological battle for nationalism. Insofar that nationalism mirrors the motion of the contradictions between imperialism and oppressed nations on a world scale - in the dominant imperialist nations, the reactionary character of nationalism determines the overall shape of the movement; in the subordinate nations the revolutionary character is principal, propelling the anti-imperialist struggle - the American Left needs to move beyond the national discourse. Since the ruling class has established nationalism as a jingoistic instrument, left-wing patriotism can have deleterious effects, degenerating into demands for a more lucrative social contract between monopoly capital and the labour aristocracy. Thus, what we need is a genuine politics of anti-imperialism which remains committed to the abolition of the US in its present-day form as an illegitimate state built on imperialism, racism and native genocide. 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. Midwestern Marx's Editorial Board does not necessarily endorse the views of all articles shared on the Midwestern Marx website. Our goal is to provide a healthy space for multilateral discourse on advancing the class struggle. - Editorial Board Archives September 2021 Ghosts of Plum Run is a leftist historical fiction series about the charge of the First Minnesota at Gettysburg. Tim is currently writing Volume 3 ~ Light, coming out in January, 2022, from which Midwestern Marx publishes the excerpt below. ”You look lovely ...,” Corporal Peter Marks muttered in his sleep, “...in purple...,” head turning back and forth on his haversack in the tent on Babylon Farm a mile east of Uniontown, MD, about 4:30 am., Wednesday, July 1, 1863. His tent mate, Private Rasselas Mowry, was sick of hearing Marks talk to himself. “We know, we know,” Mowry said, packing up for a day’s march ahead. To wake Marks, Mowry yanked the haversack out from under his head, dumping its contents onto his chest, including Millie’s purple handkerchief. Marks still murmuring, Mowry hit Marks with a slap from the purple hanky across his face. “Hey! We’re marching soon!” Marks rubbed his eyes. “Where’s my saber?” Marks mumbled into the ground. “In St. Paul where you left it in pieces two years ago,” Mowry laughed. “You remember nothing, do you...get up!” Marks stirred. A hangover announced itself like a knife through his head. He began trying to piece together where he was. “Were we at a dance last night?” Marks asked. “Ha ha!” Mowry chuckled, “you thought you were! Here, drink some water.” Marks propped himself onto his elbow to chug down half his canteen in one go. Then he fell back to the ground. “Coffee,” Marks moaned. Mowry grabbed a tin cup jumping out of the tent to Company A’s campfire, learning there from woozy half dressed comrades the march was delayed. Breakfast could proceed calmly. Thus began the First Minnesota’s 20 mile march to immortality the next day at Gettysburg, interrupted by frustrating stops and starts punctuated each time by the attendant urgency to brew coffee for hangovers. At one of those coffee brewing stops, two and a half miles north, a lady couldn’t sleep in her abandoned mansion, called Trevanion. Louisa Shorb was born in 1824 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Elizabeth Mark Shorb and Anthony Shorb, Jr., a grandson of John Shorb, who came to America with his two brothers from the Catholic Alsace Lorraine region bordering France and Germany. They arrived in Philadelphia on two ships, one called the Priscilla in 1749, the other called the Halifax in 1754, settling in Hanover, Pennsylvania, just a few miles across the Maryland border from where Louisa was losing sleep at Trevanion over a century later. The three Shorb patriarchs were typical of the German immigrant wave that would become known as the Pennsylvania Dutch, farming the land at first, then starting businesses, the succeeding generations restless and thinking bigger. Iron ore and coal deposits in central Pennsylvania formed the backbone of industrial capitalism not long after the Shorbs arrived from Germany, so that’s where Anthony went. After service in the army during the War of 1812, Anthony realized that being Catholic, like his ancestors, wasn’t good for business. So at 27 years old in 1815, Anthony married 18 year old Elizabeth at a church combining Lutheran and Reformed congregations, the Tabor First Reformed Church in Lebanon, PA, built in 1792, where services were said in German every two weeks. By the time their second daughter Louisa was 4 years old in 1828, Anthony was co-owner of one of the largest ironworks companies in America, Lyon & Shorb Co. of Pittsburgh, a sprawling empire of mines, boats, furnaces and forests. Three generations removed from his family’s arrival in America, Anthony Shorb Jr. rose to such power, the town where he first began working in iron, Tyrone, PA, was first known as Shorbsville. Anthony Shorb, Jr. Child laborers at Lyon & Shorb Ironworks Little Louisa thus grew up in Pittsburgh a very pampered, pretty princess. Her mother Elizabeth dutifully kept the home of an iron baron, bearing him three daughters. The girls loved traveling with their mother to visit the old uncles and aunts back in Littlestown near Hanover, or to her father’s partner, Mr. Lyon’s towering mansion called The Cedars in Tyrone, made of pure limestone nestled in the central Pennsylvania hills. When Louisa learned around age 10 that little boys her age made up much of daddy’s workforce, it didn’t bother her much, because as it turned out, she didn’t particularly like boys anyway. Louisa excelled in all the ladylike matters, loved art and music, always punctual and polite, a precious darling of a girl. Courting disinterested her as Louisa grew to a teenager, but her father, ever on the lookout for more ways to get more rich, had long ago begun seeking the perfect family into which to marry his daughter, which was duly accomplished when at age 20, Louisa Shorb became Louisa S. Dallas, her maiden name reduced to nothing but a middle initial in 1844 by an heir to a slave fortune. William W. Dallas, was born in Pittsburgh in 1823 into more and better placed generations of landed gentry privilege than Louisa; a long line of imperial colonizing British, then American, slavers. His great grandfather Dr. Robert Dallas first brought the Scottish family name across the sea to Jamaica around 1730. There, the good doctor accumulated 91 slaves on 900 acres, then began breeding, like a bull out to stud, at a castle named after himself. One of Dr. Dallas’s illegitimate children born of the slave women he impregnated he named Robert Charles Dallas, who settled into his inherited slave wealth as a man of letters, writing many books about the Caribbean wars fought to expand slavery, and also a lovely book about the poet Lord Byron. Robert Charles mortgaged the entire slave plantation into a trust for the benefit of the family heirs, one of whom was his brother Alexander J. Dallas, William’s grandfather, born on the Jamaican slave plantation in 1759. The Welsh name “Trevanion” first enters the Dallas family by way of Alexander’s wife, William’s grandmother Arabella Maria Smith, a great great granddaughter of Sir Nicholas Trevanion of the Royal Navy, who helped settle Newfoundland, in Canada. Alexander and Arabella married in England while Alexander studied law, then moved back to the family’s slave plantation in Jamaica in 1781 where Dr. Dallas arranged for his son to be admitted to practice law in the courts of His Majesty King George III. Sadly, tropical climes did not agree with Alexander’s delicate flower Arabella’s Welsh constitution, so the newlyweds moved to Philadelphia in 1783, the year America won independence. There, Alexander cobbled together a rather common racket of the time - government printing contracts. While living off his slave built trust fund, Alexander got himself admitted to practice law in Pennsylvania in 1785, then began printing Pennsylvania and U.S. Supreme Court decisions using his own slave money, the very first court reporting in America. Of course, being a slaver having never actually worked a day in his life, Alexander’s four volumes of court reporting between 1790 and 1806 were riddled with errors, inaccuracies and incompletions, reporting decisions so late one very important early case, Chisholm v. Georgia (1793), had already prompted the 11th Amendment to the Constitution voiding the ruling by the time Alexander reported it five years later. America’s first court reporter In Chisholm, the Supreme Court ruled states could be sued in federal court by individuals. Alexander Dallas immediately understood Chisholm as a deep threat to slavery, as practically all American jurisprudence would prove to be in one way or another for the next 70 years. So, being the only court reporter in America, Dallas duly sat on the Chisholm decision those five years to keep anyone with any power from reading it, creating a void of information in which states could swiftly ratify the 11th Amendment granting constitutional immunity to states in federal court, no one the wiser. As with every early American slaver, it all propelled William W. Dallas’s grandfather Alexander to his next act failing upward, the towering heights of American government as President James Madison’s Secretary of the Treasury from 1814 to 1816, during which he double dipped as acting Secretary of War in 1815. Into these generational layers of slave built privilege was born to America’s first court reporter William’s father, Trevanion Barlow Dallas, in 1801. Trevanion’s older brother George, born in 1792, would stay in Philadelphia to become mayor in 1828, climbing the slaver’s preferred route to power through the Democratic Party all the way to Vice President under James K. Polk in 1845. Trevanion Barlow studied law at Princeton until 1820, then followed another landed gentry slaver heir’s career path of the time - going west, to Pittsburgh. There, in 1822, he married William’s mother, Jane Stevenson Wilkins, born in 1802 to yet another powerful family, daughter of John Wilkins, Jr., who George Washington appointed as Quartermaster General of the U.S. Army from 1796 to 1802. Wilkins then became president of the Bank of Pennsylvania’s Pittsburgh branch. Banker’s daughter and slaver’s son in no time were centers of Pittsburgh high society by the time their first born son, William W. Dallas arrived in 1823. The trust fund in Jamaica kept William’s childhood just as comfortable as child labor produced iron kept Louisa, while both daddies climbed the ladder in Pittsburgh. Cultured as any ambitious aristocratic family would be, the Dallas family especially loved to hob nob with Pittsburgh’s leading music publishers, the William Smalling Peters family, who were the first to publish the sheet music to Thomas D. Rice’s foundation of black face minstrelsy Jump Jim Crow in 1831, when William was 8 years old. Thus, as a little kid in black face, William grew up dancing to America’s first popular music. By 18 years old in 1841, William’s father had became a prominent county judge in what was then the very wild west boomtown of Pittsburgh, population about 30,000. Looking west, as slavers always did, Judge Dallas’s musical friends the Peters family had become partners in a syndicate granted permission in 1841 to settle northern tracts of a brand new country, a breakaway portion of Mexico dedicated to defying Mexico’s attempt to end slavery, calling itself the Republic of Texas. Judge Dallas’s friends called their slice of this new country the Peters Colony. When Judge Dallas died unexpectedly that April, his bereaved slaver friends honored him by renaming their Peters Colony, built on the money of black face minstrelsy for the sole purpose of expanding slavery, Dallas, Texas. Thomas D. Rice as Jump Jim Crow, c. 1836 Louisa’s iron baron father had been seeking to arrange this very convenient marriage well before William’s very useful father, the judge, kicked the bucket in 1841. Sadly, neither was attracted to the other before William’s father died, because neither was attracted to the opposite sex, at all. What attracted them both after Judge Dallas’s death was money and power. One summer between William’s law studies at Princeton, they finally met at a minstrelsy show in Pittsburgh in 1843. A particularly rousing rendition of Jump Jim Crow set the crowd to dancing, so the two awkwardly joined in for appearances’ sake. When Louisa learned that night William’s family not only had political power reaching to the very pinnacle of American government, but also a trust fund his dear departed daddy had left him, the question was settled, and they wed in 1844 before William returned to Princeton. The marriage was never consummated. Instead, William finished his law studies, then sulked. After three years of unconsummated marriage, William wondering what he’d gotten himself into, he traveled to Europe in 1847 to find his bliss, whatever it might be, staying over a year. It was then Louisa knew her marriage was a lie. Thanks to his trip to Europe, William already knew it. Trevanion today They bought Trevanion in 1854, a 200 acre plot home to a very successful grist mill and distillery straddling Big Pipe Creek just northwest of Uniontown, first built in the 1790s by local Germans the Kephart family. David Kephart Jr. expanded the business in 1817, naming it Brick Mills. George Kephart sold to Dallas, who re-named it after his father, then pumped his and his wife’s trust fund wealth into the existing mill business to become a leading aristocrat in western Maryland as quickly as possible. The first thing William did was buy four slaves. The second, William needed the house to become a mansion, so hired one of Louisa’s cousins, architect and carpenter Joshua Shorb, to transform his home with the Parisian and Italian architecture William fell in love with while searching for his bliss in Europe. Mr. and Mrs. Dallas were immediate sensations in Carroll County, the housewarming ball upon completion of the new mansion the event of the decade, not just in Carroll County, but across the border in Pennsylvania. William tossed money around for a local railroad extension, to sit on boards, for charities, the works. Word went out among slave owning glitterati everywhere that a new socialite couple held the finest affairs at Trevanion, burst to overflowing with gowns and top hats. Costume balls, New Years Eve, the first day of summer, afternoon teas, Sunday brunches for the dozen or so house guests who couldn’t make it to their carriage the night before, any occasion at all, the lord and lady of Trevanion kept Western Maryland begging for more, delighting in plantation gallantry constantly. For a few years, the lie of their marriage, and the looming civil war over the slaves they owned, seemed not to matter to Mr. and Mrs. Dallas. It didn’t last long. On the morning of July 1, 1863, Louisa was alone, her husband gone, the world around her crumbling, armies surrounded her cavernous home now filled with cobwebs, her (now) five slaves the only people in the empty mansion. Her husband had deeded it all to her a year ago, and was somewhere else, Louisa knew not where. She spent that year alone questioning, searching, poring through his papers and diaries, especially those he wrote in Europe from 1847 to 1848, learning only that her worst fears weren’t nearly adequate. Louisa got out of bed that day for the final great event of Trevanion’s short life - to watch the Union Army march by on its way to Gettysburg. Two and a half miles south of Trevanion, the Second Corps was supposed to begin marching from Uniontown before dawn July 1, but the whisky soaked night before, the paper on which marching orders arrived from headquarters ended up in a muddy wad at the bottom of a shoe. The two hours it took to get new orders kept that morning mercifully slow. Uniontown would get one last opportunity to celebrate the 11,000 men of Hancock’s Second Corps, this time on their way out under the rising sun Wednesday, through the little town they entered after sundown Monday night at the end of 33 miles marching. In between, Uniontown poured 36 hours of whisky and feasting onto them at Babylon Farm, throwing a fancy ball for their officers, as full a day of rest anyone could hope for. A bit too full for many. Being German, during the day of rest Corporal Peter Marks tried to moderate the whisky with lager brought to camp in barrels by the town’s Germans, a terrible mistake. None of the regiment had had so much as a sip of alcohol in months, or a year, and only when snuck into camp against orders. Some managed the whisky deluge better than others, as Private Mowry did, but mostly, livers in the Second Corps were sitting ducks. Especially those who needed the most rest, like Marks, his feet raw from marching, chaffed and covered in sores from wet boots plodding across streams. Marks spent June 30 alternately passed out in the tent, then sick to his stomach bent over the creek running through Babylon Farm, then refilled by the town folk with liquor. It was all a blur. “Go back to sleep,” Mowry said as Marks took a first sip of coffee from the tin cup. “I didn’t go to a ball in town?” Marks asked. “Only in your dreams,” Mowry said, tossing himself to the ground, “which you spoke of constantly while having them. When you were awake, you were very upset you weren’t invited.” “Please tell me I didn’t make a scene of any kind,” Marks begged. “Corporals are officers!’ you kept yelling, ha ha!” “Oh dear.” “I thought you Germans could handle your booze,” Mowry joked. Marks put down the coffee to sit up, the purple hanky falling from his chest to his lap. He struggled to stand, grabbed the hanky and the coffee, then wobbled out the tent flap to find the creek. Marks stumbled through Company A’s tents, strewn with men as disheveled as himself. Above, a setting, nearly full moon and pre dawn stars mingled with passing clouds, heat of a long summer day already looming. At the creek, Marks bent down to dip the purple hanky in the water, wringing it out over his head, wiping his face with it, and in the wet cloth before his bloodshot eyes, he saw Uncle Monty, remembering the night he first met Millie, in her purple dress. AuthorTim Russo is author of Ghosts of Plum Run, an ongoing historical fiction series about the charge of the First Minnesota at Gettysburg. Tim's career as an attorney and international relations professional took him to two years living in the former soviet republics, work in Eastern Europe, the West Bank & Gaza, and with the British Labour Party. Tim has had a role in nearly every election cycle in Ohio since 1988, including Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020. Tim ran for local office in Cleveland twice, earned his 1993 JD from Case Western Reserve University, and a 2017 masters in international relations from Cleveland State University where he earned his undergraduate degree in political science in 1989. Currently interested in the intersection between Gramscian cultural hegemony and Gandhian nonviolence, Tim is a lifelong Clevelander. Archives September 2021 9/15/2021 The Texas Abortion Ban Ensures Only the Privileged Get Access to Reproductive Care. By: Sonali KolhatkarRead NowFor too long, politicians relied on the Supreme Court to uphold the right to an abortion. Now that the Texas law has been allowed to take effect, its prime targets are low-income people of color. Texas, with the help of conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, has made abortion all but illegal for most pregnant people living within state borders. Republican state legislators passed a draconian and diabolically innovative bill that Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law in May ensuring that all abortions after six weeks of gestation can be subject to lawsuits brought by any individual anywhere against anyone involved in the procedure. That includes the patient, their medical provider, or even their Lyft driver. Those seeking abortions will likely need to leave Texas, effectively making the procedure out of reach of the poorest residents of the state. Blair Wallace, of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, told NBCNews.com, “We know the brunt of this will fall on our Black and brown communities and our poor communities the most.” Only those with the financial resources and ability to take time off work can travel to neighboring states to terminate a pregnancy. Already abortion providers in Louisiana are fielding calls from desperate Texans seeking abortions, leading to longer wait times. Imani Gandy, senior legal analyst for RewireNewsGroup.com, explained to me in an interview that the Texas law is “really, really pernicious,” because it is “using taxpayer dollars to provide a bounty for bounty hunters to go attacking or harassing abortion providers.” In fact, the hundreds of Republican-led state-level legislative attacks against abortion have cost taxpayers millions of dollars in legal fees of both pro-choice and anti-abortion forces. According to the Washington Post, “states have paid at least $9.8 million in abortion providers’ [attorney] fees,” in the last four years alone. This is money that could be put to better use—such as providing health care to low-income residents that includes abortion and other reproductive medical care. For a party that has been railing in favor of “individual liberties” when it comes to lifesaving masks and vaccinations during a pandemic, asserting that a series of electrical impulses between newly formed cells are more important than a person’s bodily autonomy is the height of hypocrisy and reeks of performative politics. Indeed, Republicans may be victims of their own success, having relied on the Supreme Court for years to preserve the seminal Roe v. Wade precedent against most egregious anti-abortion laws in order to score political points with evangelical voters. According to one legal analyst for Slate.com, Mark Joseph Stern, “it seems undeniable that Republicans did not anticipate this abrupt triumph over Roe, instead assuming that the Texas law would be blocked by the courts.” Gandy called the Texas law “patently unconstitutional,” and pointed out that “no federal appeals court has upheld” it, which is why pro-choice activists and legal scholars had expected the nation’s highest court to intervene. Except that the Supreme Court is currently, as Gandy described, “hyperpartisan and captured by conservatives.” Of the five justices who chose to let the ban remain, three were appointed by former President Donald Trump as a gift to evangelical voters. Robert P. Jones, author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, wrote a year ago that “white evangelicals’ political behavior is animated by racial resentment,” and that this demographic “will be the most powerful force in hindering this work for racial justice and reconciliation.” Given that low-income people of color are likely to be the most impacted by the Texas ban, this prediction appears prescient. It isn’t solely Trump’s fault that the right to an abortion is on its way out. Maine’s supposedly moderate and pro-choice Republican Senator Susan Collins in 2018 cast a deciding vote for Trump’s anti-abortion nominee for the Supreme Court. In voting to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was one of five justices choosing to let the Texas abortion ban stand, Collins now bears partial responsibility for beginning the end of abortion rights in the United States. Even Democrats bear some blame. A party that has upheld the right to an abortion as the centerpiece of its feminist agenda has done remarkably little to ensure the law is preserved from the Supreme Court’s increasingly activist conservative justices. In the nearly 50 years since the Roe v. Wade decision, Democrats have enjoyed political power in the House, Senate, and White House simultaneously four times—under Presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and now Joe Biden—and could have passed legislation protecting the constitutional right to an abortion so that it didn’t hinge on the Supreme Court’s political makeup. In the short term, corporations like Uber and Lyft have offered to pay the legal fees of any of their drivers who might get sued for transporting a pregnant person to get an abortion. Some celebrities are announcing their own boycotts of the state of Texas, and the city of Portland, Oregon, is also considering a boycott. But none of these commercial responses are a substitute for decisive government action ensuring that all Americans, especially low-income communities of color, have an equal right to access abortion care. In the wake of the Texas abortion ban taking effect, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House of Representatives would soon take up a vote on the Women’s Health Protection Act, which, if passed, would ensure that the right to an abortion was cemented in law. While Gandy denounced Democratic inaction, saying, “we’ve had Democrats in office that have not bothered to codify Roe,” she added that the lawmakers’ inaction “really underscores how powerful the anti-abortion lobby is.” A majority of Americans support the right to an abortion, and yet the demands of the anti-abortion minority have held the nation hostage to its whims. Although Biden’s Justice Department has filed a lawsuit and is seeking an injunction to stop the law from being enacted in Texas, critics point out that it is a long shot. Now, six other states, including Florida and Mississippi, are hoping to follow in Texas’ footsteps and pass similar abortion bans. The train has left the station, so to speak. In addition to legislation like the Women’s Health Protection Act, activists want Biden to use his executive powers right now to protect abortion access. Kristin Ford of NARAL Pro-Choice America said, “The White House should make clear their commitment to this critical legislation to ensure no other state has the opportunity to follow in Texas’ footsteps.” According to Gandy, “the bottom line is, there will always be abortion.” In light of the Texas ban, the questions center on “how people are going to access it, and who the lack of access is going to affect most—which is poor people, and people of color.” Nations like Poland and Nigeria offer a glimpse of the mental and physical toll in store for Americans if the Texas ban were to take hold nationwide. Polish women are suffering from a mental health epidemic as a result of their nation’s abortion ban. In Nigeria, dangerous back-alley abortion procedures are endangering lives. Other nations offer a different path. Shortly after the Texas ban took effect, Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalized abortion, setting the stage for a nationwide legalization of the procedure. And, in France, where abortions are legal for pregnancies up to 12 weeks of gestation, the government says it will begin offering free contraception for everyone under the age of 25. Here in the United States, California is bucking the terrifying state-by-state anti-abortion trend by considering a bill that will make the medical procedure cheaper, and even free of charge. Already it is one of only six states that require health insurance plans to cover abortion care. California State Senator Lena Gonzalez said, “We’re taking a stance, not just to make abortions available but to make them free and equitable.” Indeed, if such a trend were pursued nationally, the right to control one’s body would not be relegated to the privileged among us. 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 September 2021 9/13/2021 September 13, 2021-What is ideology? An introduction to the Marxist theory of ideology. By: Derek Ford & "Liberation School"Read NowIntroduction" This article was originally published on Liberation School on September 07, 2021." Marxist ideology is one of the most potent weapons the working and oppressed classes have, a weapon that our class can and has used to not only win reforms but to build revolutionary societies where the people, and not profits, are in control. As the PSL identified at our 3rd Party Congress in 2016, one of our primary tasks is to mend the “break in ideological continuity” that emerged after the overthrow of the Soviet Union by reestablishing “the theory of revolutionary Marxism and the entire vision of workers’ power” as a dominant guiding pole in people’s struggles [1]. To correct for the ideological break, it’s helpful to have a concrete understanding of ideology and the different forms it takes. Although the word ideology is used frequently, it’s commonly used in a pejorative sense to refer to something that’s not factual, that’s unscientific, or that’s devoid of substance. It’s also used by those hostile to socialism to present a distorted view of Marxism. What exactly is ideology? What is the difference between bourgeois and Marxist ideology? What significance does this have for organizing today? To address these questions and help repair the break in the ideological continuity of revolutionary socialism in U.S. social movements, this article outlines Marx’s understanding of ideology. It traces his historical-materialist approach to investigating the relationship between ideas, material reality, and modes of production through several of his works. This allows us to take in the theory’s nuances about life and consciousness, as well as to draw out examples that are still relevant and applicable today. In particular, we focus on the theory of commodity fetishism and the function of the wage in producing the bourgeois ideological conception of the atomized individual. Proposing a move from “true/false” to “correct/incorrect,” the end of the article returns to the importance of popularizing and promoting Marxist ideology to understand and transform the world today, as revolutionaries have done throughout the socialist struggle to break the chains of exploitation and oppression. False consciousness?One of the widely used definitions of ideology sees it as a form of “false consciousness.” Here, ideology carries inherently negative connotations. Although Marx never used this term, Engels did in a July 1893 letter to Franz Mehring, a German communist. Yet it’s important for us to understand exactly what he meant by this. Addressing Mehring’s latest book, On Historical Materialism, Engels writes [2]: “Ideology is a process which is, it is true, carried out consciously by what we call a thinker, but with a consciousness that is spurious [mit einem falschen Bewußtsein, also translated as “false consciousness”]. The actual motives by which he is impelled remain hidden from him, for otherwise it would not be an ideological process. Hence the motives he supposes himself to have are either spurious or illusory” [3]. The process of developing ideology in this sense is one in which the thinker is fully conscious while simultaneously being unconscious of the forces actually driving their thought. These forces are external to thought itself and form the real basis of the material existence of the thinker. “False consciousness” thereby refers to the dialectic by which consciousness is conditioned by the material world while also under the illusion that it is not conditioned as such. In other words, it is the idealist assumption that the origin of one’s thoughts is purely conceptual. As Engels explains, the thinker ensnared within ideology of this sort, “works solely with conceptual material which he automatically assumes to have been engendered by thought without inquiring whether it might not have some more remote origin unconnected therewith; indeed, he takes this for granted since, to him, all action is induced by thought, and therefore appears in the final analysis, to be motivated, by thought” [4]. The material relationship between classes is not based on a rational arrangement for all parties involved or an intellectual agreement between the ruling class and the working masses [5]. It is a concrete relationship of exploitation that needs to be imposed and maintained, both physically and intellectually. Georg Lukács developed this point in important ways. Reflecting on Engels’ words to Mehring, he notes that Engels is emphasizing that “the dialectical method does not permit us simply to proclaim the ‘falseness’ of this consciousness and to persist in an inflexible confrontation of true and false” [6]. Put differently, another essential aspect of ideology as false consciousness is that it actually contains an important kernel of truth. Although it is false in the sense that individual subjects do not apprehend the material forces driving their ideas, it is “true” in the precise sense that—for historical materialists—it reveals something real about the operative forces behind ideology. This dialectical understanding of false consciousness—which is thus never simply “false” but contains elements of truth—means that it does not simply amount to a set of haphazard ideas held by individuals that happen to be incorrect. On the contrary, false consciousness is a determined condition that is rooted in a particular mode of production. It is therefore anchored in a specific set of class interests within the overall organization of social production. Far from simply pointing out false ideas of individuals, Marxist practice requires a materialist analysis of class society and the ways in which it necessarily produces very specific sets of ideas and ways of thinking. This is what Marxist ideology reveals through the practice and theory of class struggle. One example of the distinction between false consciousness and Marxist ideology is in the third volume of Capital, where Marx explains why the capitalist might not understand the source of their profits because they remain at the superficial level of the legal contract. They pay a certain sum of money to the worker for their labor, the landlord for their factory, the banker for their loan, their suppliers for their raw materials and means of production, and after the commodities produced by workers are sold, the capitalist ends up with more money than they had at the start of the process. The banker lends out money only to have more money returned to them. The entire cycle looks like money breeds more money. For the capitalist, “capital appears as a relationship to itself” and that how surplus-value is created “is now mystified, and appears to derive from hidden qualities that are inherent in capital itself” [7]. As workers, on the other hand, we not only see but experience and suffer the expansion of value and the source of profit as we literally expend our energy and life for the production of surplus value. However, this doesn’t happen organically and requires theoretical reflection and generalization, which can lead to Marxist ideology. Ideology, consciousness, and historical materialismVarious trends and Marxist revolutionaries use different definitions and words for Marxist theory, with some preferring “science” to “ideology.” Lenin, in his foundational text on communist organization, wrote that, “the only choice is: either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course” and “hence, to belittle socialist ideology in any way, to deviate from it in the slightest degree means strengthening bourgeois ideology” [8]. All ideology has a class basis, and Marxist ideology “can only represent the class whose vocation in history is the overthrow of the capitalist mode of production” [9]. When we use ideology, we refer to a political framework and worldview of our class in order to understand and overthrow exploitation and oppression. The origins of Marxist ideology can be found in The German Ideology, a series of manuscripts written between 1845-1846, where Marx and Engels formulated their break with the “Young Hegelians” with whom they were previously affiliated. As Engels later wrote, the manuscripts, which weren’t published until 1932, were written “to clear our own minds” of the idealism they previously endorsed [10]. They represent a major breakthrough in Marxist theory. Most significantly, they construct the groundwork for the method of historical materialism. One major line of attack is that the Young Hegelians considered “conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute[d] an independent existence, as the real chains of men” [11]. In other words, Hegelians believed that ideas prevent historical progress and that new ideas drive historical change. Yet they never questioned or examined the relationship between their own ideas and the material conditions of their lives in Germany because they assumed that the life of the mind is independent from the actual world. This is perfectly in line with Engels’ critique of “false consciousness” that we discussed above because it is a form of consciousness that ignores its own concrete conditions of existence. Moreover, the Young Hegelians presumed that the struggle against incorrect ideas was only to be fought out on the terrain of ideas themselves, meaning that something like “true consciousness” was the antidote to “false consciousness.” Marx and Engels polemicized against this belief and the Young Hegelians’ assumption that we just need to change “present consciousness to human, critical… consciousness” [12]. Such an approach reduces critique to fighting words with other words rather than “combating the real existing world” [13]. It isn’t “criticism but revolution,” Marx and Engels insist, “[that] is the driving force of history” [14]. This elucidation of the Young Hegelians’ false consciousness—meaning their misrecognition of the material forces driving history and their own worldviews—is an opportunity to articulate the fundamentals of the historical materialist method. “The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination” [15]. The materialist method begins with how people “produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation” [16]. This varies according to different modes of production. The “mode of production,” they write, “must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals” but “a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part” [17]. In other words, the mode of production encompasses the productive forces and the relations of production, which are not confined to a “purely economic” realm but encompass all of society. Determination, consciousness, and the class struggleMarx and Engels state that “the production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of life” [18]. The first step, then, is directly opposed to Hegel and his followers who begin with ideas and proceed to the world. Marx and Engels, by contrast, explain that “[we] do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive… we set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process” [19]. This is the paragraph in which the famous line appears: “Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.” What do Marx and Engels mean when they declare that life determines consciousness? The terminology of “determination” figures frequently in Marxist analysis, and it’s an object of superficial criticism for those who want to discredit it. Some say it deprives people of agency because it’s deterministic or reductionist. Yet without understanding what determines what and why, no theory has any explanatory or transformative value whatsoever. “The root sense of ‘determine,’” as Raymond Williams points out, “is ‘setting bounds’ or ‘setting limits’” [20]. It doesn’t mean that something mechanistically and unilaterally causes something else to happen. Determined limits also evolve and change based on the class struggle, which can push it in new directions and erect new limits. For example, individual consumers have a range of choices under capitalism, but our ability to choose is determined by multiple factors, like our income. Capitalism determines what we can and can’t buy, which in turn sets limits on the quality of our lives. Relative to ideology, material conditions, the productive forces, the economic and social reality of our world pushes our thoughts in certain directions rather than others. It makes it easier to think and imagine in certain ways and much harder to do so in other ways. Fighting for concrete reforms is crucial to the socialist movement because if we win, we improve our material conditions and show that we have the power to determine new limits and exert our own pressures. As a result, it’s easier to imagine that we can ultimately determine our existence collectively and establish a socialist society. If it was only a matter of changing material conditions, why would Marx and Engels develop a theory and fight tooth-and-nail against other competing theories in the workers’ movement? Ideas and material life are in a dialectical relationship in that the mode of production sets limits and exerts pressures on our ideas, beliefs, and even feelings, tending to direct them in certain ways. Yet working and oppressed people can, when we’re organized, push back against those limits and pressures. Speaking of ideology in general, Marx and Engels write that it makes people “and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura,” which itself “arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process” [21]. This metaphor is apt, as Jennifer Ponce De León and Gabriel Rockhill note, because “a camera obscura does not simply misrepresent the world outside” but rather “perfectly captures key features of it, and this is part of its pernicious power of sense-making” [22]. Ideology frames the world in a particular way within a given social reality. Representations are always partial, which doesn’t mean that all representations or ideologies are equal. Representations and ideologies are, rather, always partisan in that they guide our understanding of the world, allowing us to see certain things and not others. The difference between bourgeois and Marxist ideology turns on what and how much of the world we can see and understand. Bourgeois ideology remains at the level of appearances, while Marxist ideology expands our understanding to show us what makes things appear like they do, how they change over time, and how we can change these underlying structures. Marxist ideology could be called “scientific” in that it poses and answers the fundamental and structural questions that bourgeois ideology can’t. Bourgeois vs. Marxist ideology “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it” [23]. These ruling-class ideas are not independent of social production but are “the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships.” The class that dominates society “rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age” [24]. Bourgeois ideology takes many forms, but they’re united by their basis in the capitalist world system as a natural system and, therefore, as the most superior one. The ideology of the ruling class is not only reflective of its interests but also, and as a result of that reflection, is severed from its material basis, so capitalism appears as independent and eternal. Another key point is that bourgeois ideology doesn’t come from outside the system, but—as we hinted with the earlier example of the capitalist—emanates from within the very inner logics and workings of the capitalist system. A few examples might help illustrate both how bourgeois ideology is built into the structure of capitalism and how Marxist ideology shows us what the capitalist can’t see. The first example is what Marx refers to as the “fetishism of the commodity.” In Capital, Marx notes that the “commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood” [25]. We walk into the grocery store and see before us a host of commodities. We are not confused. Each has a price, a weight, a size, a package, a list of ingredients, a brand, a category, and so on. We think we have all of the information that we need about the products. Upon further inquiry, however, Marx finds that the commodity “is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” [26]. What is it that is so queer and metaphysical about a loaf of Wonder Bread? What the bread contains is human labor-power; commodities are literally the congealed form of a particular socially-necessary form of labor. Workers produce commodities, yet under commodity fetishism: “the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour” [27]. Stated differently, commodity fetishism is the way in which relations between people take on the appearance of relations between things. At the grocery store we think we’re exchanging our money for a commodity, but in reality, we’re interacting with the relations that enable commodity production under capitalism—between workers and bosses, unions and CEOs, politicians negotiating trade deals, immigration and customs officials, and so on. There is no label on Wonder Bread stating that it was made by exploited labor, that the profits go to the ruling class, that its process of production relied on ecologically destructive bio-industries, that the technologies that produced it were developed through class struggle—to name just a few social relations that produce the particular commodity. It’s the same with the money–or our wage–that we exchange for the bread. As Marxists, we know that there’s a difference between the value we’re paid and the value we produce for the capitalist [28]. For whatever period of time we work, part of the time goes to reproducing our wage and part of it goes as surplus to the owner. Yet when we get a paycheck at the end of a shift, a gig, a week, or month, it looks like we’ve been paid for the entirety of our time. We work for an hour, we get paid an hour. Where’s the exploitation in that? Bourgeois ideology is content to look at the contract between the worker and capitalist and declare an equality between the two. Marxist ideology reveals that the worker and capitalist are anything but equals, and that in reality the wages we’re paid come from our work and go to the capitalist, who then pays it back to us after siphoning off what Marx called surplus value. This leads to a second example of the limits of bourgeois ideology and the revolutionary potential of Marxist ideology: the wage and the atomized individual. Through the form of the wage, bourgeois ideology mystifies exploitation while Marxist ideology explains how the form of the wage reinforces the idea that we’re all equal individuals being paid for the entirety of our working day [29]. Bourgeois ideology holds up the individual as the cornerstone of the world and as a form of the human that’s natural and timeless. Marx later wrote that, “Smith and Ricardo still stand with both feet on the shoulders of the eighteenth-century prophets, in whose imaginations this eighteenth-century individual… appears as an ideal, whose existence they project into the past. Not as a historic result but as history’s point of departure” [30]. Humans have for most of history not thought of themselves as individuals, nor have we related to others as individuals. “Production by an isolated individual outside society… is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other” [31]. Why is it that we think of ourselves as individuals or that we think of society as a group of individuals? Marx locates the individual with the rise of “civil society” in the 18th century and as the real basis for German ideology. As the atomized and independent individual solidifies as the basis of civil society and capitalism, real humans become ever more interdependent as trade, commerce, and divisions of labor expand and intensify. One of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism is that it necessarily creates a collective and international working class, the class that can overthrow it. The ideology of the individual attempts to smooth this over while also dividing the global working class and pitting workers against one another as atomized competitors. The bourgeois ideology of the individual works on different scales, from the mass media and public schooling to everyday interactions. We constantly have to prove that we’re “unique” individuals, such as every time we log into an account, verify our social security number, or answer a special security question. Whereas bourgeois ideology describes what it sees, Marxist ideology probes beneath the surface to uncover the real mechanisms that create exploitation and oppression so we can act to change them. Marxist ideology is the generalization of the working-class struggle because only through the proletarian movement can we see the real operations of capitalism. Revolutionary ideas can only come from a revolutionary class in its struggle for power, from the communists (which they define at one point in the The German Ideology as “the follower of a definite revolutionary party”) [32]. The Party is the vehicle through which the working class produces socialist ideology, as the Party removes “all distinctions as between workers and intellectuals” [33]. In the Party, as Lenin wrote, workers produce our class ideology “not as workers, but as socialist theoreticians” [34]. Popularizing and promoting Marxist ideologyOne of the goals for any struggle is to build collective unity, to show how we’re not independent and atomized but deeply interdependent on others; how we’re not “Americans” but members of an international working class. Communism overturns this relation of individuals, denaturalizes the ideas and relations of capitalist society, “and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals” by transforming “existing conditions into conditions of unity.” Communists take existing relations of production as “inorganic conditions” [35]. Marx and Engels can understand and explain why bourgeois ideology is the way it is because historical materialism reveals that our current reality isn’t eternal or preordained, but one that is always changing—and that our class can overthrow. Rather than what is true or false, however, it’s more helpful for Marxists to concern ourselves with what is correct and what is incorrect. Whereas “truth” denotes an objective or neutral “fact” or “state of affairs,” and has a sense of permanence, what is “correct” is always only correct from a partisan standpoint and from within a certain time and social situation. An example of the distinction between the true and correct comes from David Backer’s analysis of the struggle over the length of the working day, where Marx stages a dialogue between the worker and Mr. Moneybags [36]. The capitalist, as the buyer of labor-power, is within their rights to extend the working-day as much as they want, as they, like the purchaser of any commodity, are free to use it as they wish under the laws of capitalist exchange. Yet as workers, we’re within our rights to reduce the working-day, as the labor-power purchased is literally our bodies and lives. There is, as Marx says, “therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchanges” [37]. The worker says “the working-day is eight hours!” as the boss says “the working-day is twelve hours!” Both statements can be true but only one can be correct, and this will be determined by the class struggle, by which group is able to force their position to establish a new truth and, ultimately, a new mode of production. We have to fight bourgeois ideology with Marxist ideology, a dynamic ideology that—because it’s rooted in social production and the perspective of the working and oppressed classes—explains the reasons why we’re poor and oppressed and provides a framework for overthrowing the structures that produce these conditions. Marxist ideology not only explains oppression and exploitation but provides weapons for transforming the social order to eliminate both. This transformation isn’t potential but actual: the oppressed have and continue to wield it in order to abolish exploitation and combat all forms of oppression. Bourgeois ideology has brought neither understanding nor progress. Marxist ideology has and continues to generate both. While “material force must be overthrown by material force,” by developing, popularizing, and applying Marxist ideology to our organizing, we can help make “theory become a material force” [38]. References [1] Becker, Brian. (2016). Theory and revolution: Addressing the break in ideological continuity.” Liberation School, September 28. Available here. [2] Mehring, Franz. (1893/1975). On historical materialism (London: New Park Books). [3] Engels, Friedrich. (1983/2010). “Engels to Franz Mehring in Berlin.” In Marx & Engels Collected Works (Vol. 50): Letters 1892-1895 (London: Lawrence & Wishart), 164. [4] Ibid. [5] Ideology defined as false consciousness not only rests on the incorrect belief that ideas have an independent existence, but it also assumes that they are the primary terrain of struggle. The struggle against injustice would thus amount to a purely intellectual task of pointing out the incorrect thoughts of one’s adversaries, based on the assumption that the establishment of true ideas would correct things. Truth, in other words, would simply amount to a correct intellectual formulation. If this were the case, then we would simply have to form the best arguments in order to fight and win. [6] Lukács, Georg. (1971). History and class consciousness: Studies in Marxist dialectics, trans. R. Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press), 50. [7] Marx, Karl. (1894.1981). Capital: A critique of political economy (vol. 3): The process of capitalist production as a whole, trans. D. Fernbach (New York: Penguin Books), 139. [8] Lenin, V.I. (1902/1987). “What is to be done?” in Essential works of Lenin, ed. H.M. Christman (New York: Dover Publications), 82. [9] Marx, Karl. (1867/1967). Capital: A critique of political economy (vol. 1): The process of capitalist production, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers), 25-26. [10] Engels, Friedrich. (1888/1941). Ludwig Feuerbach and the outcome of classical German philosophy (New York: International Publishers), 7. [11] Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. (1970). The German ideology: Part one, with selections from parts two and three and supplementary texts, trans. C.J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers), 41. [12] Ibid. [13] Ibid. [14] Ibid., 49. [15] Ibid., 42. [16] Ibid. [17] Ibid. [18] Ibid., 47. [19] Ibid. [20] Williams, Raymond. (1977). Marxism and literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 84. [21] Marx and Engels, The German ideology, 47. A camera obscura was a predecessor to the photographic camera. It consists of a dark room with a small hole that lets light in. The result is that an inversion of the outside is projected on the opposite wall. [22] De León, Jennifer Ponce and Gabriel Rockhill. (2020). “Towards a compositional model of ideology: Materialism, aesthetics, and cultural revolution.” Philosophy Today 64, no. 1: 99. [23] Marx and Engels, The German ideology, 64. [24] Ibid. [25] Marx, Capital (vol. 1),76, emphasis added. [26] Ibid. [27] Ibid., 77. [28] See Ford, Derek and Mazda Majidi. (2021). “Surplus value is the class struggle: An introduction.” Liberation School, March 30. Available here. [29] One exception is piece-wages, when we’re paid according to each individual service or product we produce. Here, it’s easier to tell the difference between what we’re paid for producing and what the capitalist sells it for. For a personal example, I used to work at a gym as a personal trainer, and I could see what my boss charged my clients and what he paid me for each session. There wasn’t any mystification there. [30] Marx, Karl. (1939/1973). Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy (rough draft), trans. M. Nicolaus (New York: Penguin), 83. [31] Ibid., 84. [32] Marx and Engels, The German ideology, 60. [33] Lenin, What is to be done?, 137. [34] Ibid., f1. [35] Marx and Engels, The German ideology, 86. [36] Backer, David I. (2016). “Toward an activist theory of language,” in Truth in the public sphere, ed. J. Hannon (Lanham: Lexington). [37] Marx, Capital (vol. 1), 255. [38] Marx, Karl. (1927/1977). Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of right,’ trans. J. O’Malley and A. Jolin (New York: Cambridge University Press), 137. AuthorDerek Ford Archives September 2021 Top, Earthworm (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) Every form of scientific socialism has adapted to the unique circumstances and material conditions of the country it has been in. In the USSR there was the soviet system, in China there is Mao Zedong thought and socialism with Chinese characteristics, in the Vietnam there is Đổi Mới (innovate or renovate), the name given to economic reforms, and so on. Likewise, in the current-day United States there will be a form of socialism that will be adapted to its material conditions. The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) envisions this unique approach to socialism in the US as what it calls Bill of Rights Socialism. There have been excellent works on this, such as this piece by Roberta Wood and Dee Miles and this piece by Brad Crowder, and here I would like to start an investigation and development of the idea as well. My goal isn’t to explore the subject too deeply on a philosophical or theoretical level, but to propose what a socialist-oriented economic Bill of Rights might look like — not necessarily Bill of Rights Socialism in its entirety — and express it on a level that could be used as an accessible, appealing mass political platform. Crafting an Economic Bill of Rights One of the core ideological foundations of U.S. culture and political consciousness is that of freedom, particularly those such as free speech, freedom of assembly, and others enshrined in the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights and the ideas within it play a major role in American political discourse generally, and in the minds of many Americans they are the very foundations that allow for political discourse. What I propose here is an “economic” Bill of Rights. In doing so, I draw from three sources in particular: Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights, W. E. B. Du Bois’ application for membership in the Communist Party, and the CPUSA’s current Party Program. President Roosevelt giving State of the Union Speech where he outlines a “Second Bill of Rights,” Jan. 11, 1944 (public domain) The popular idea of an economic Bill of Rights traces back to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Second Bill of Rights,” if not further. In his State of the Union Address in 1944, he recommended a second Bill of Rights, saying the following: This republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights — among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty. We have come to a clear realization of the fact, however, that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry, people who are out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made. In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all — regardless of station, or race or creed. Among these are:
All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being. America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for all our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world. It’s unfortunate that we’ve yet to make good on any of these ideas, and many even seem beyond the scope of contemporary American political discourse. Nonetheless, drawing from this source not only grounds us in existing American politics and history but also provides a good list of demands that are still applicable today. While FDR wasn’t a socialist, the rights listed in his Second Bill of Rights would arguably go a long way in freeing many Americans up from various hardships and allow for increased political activity and potentially involvement in the socialist movement. Mural of W. E. B. Du Bois, Erik Anestad (CC BY 2.0) From there, we then look to Du Bois’ application for membership in the Communist Party, written in 1961. In it, he discusses what the Communist Party would call for to make the United States truly democratic. He says: The path of the American Communist Party is clear: It will provide the United States with a real third party and thus restore democracy to this land. It will call for:
These aims are not crimes. They are practiced increasingly over the world. No nation can call itself free which does not allow its citizens to work for these ends. While Du Bois’ list is more explicitly socialist, we see similarities with FDR’s Second Bill of Rights as well as in some of the popular demands of today. Du Bois’ list goes beyond reforms that a capitalist government might make (whether or not they actually uphold them) and actually demands the nationalization of natural resources and capital as well as the call for the end of exploitation of labor. Some of the demands, however, are more political than economic, and the goal at the moment is to craft a Bill of Rights specifically targeting economic issues. Finally, we come to CPUSA’s current Party Program. In it we find the following: The anti-monopoly people’s coalition will put forward a program of public policies and government practices as the coalition grows and strengthens. A developed anti-monopoly program will build on the many struggles and issues already begun and won in the fight against the extreme right. As part of that coalition, the Communist Party will propose radical democratic demands aimed at curbing the political, economic, and ideological power of the monopolies. Unless they are already won at an earlier stage, our demands will include
Later on in the Party Program, we see an explicit outlining of what a Socialist Bill of Rights might look like: Our vision is of a humane socialist USA, which can be achieved in part by enshrining more freedom and democracy in a Socialist Bill of Rights:
Here, between the political and economic demands, we see common themes once again. Spread out over the course of almost 80 years, we see certain economic demands arise over and over. Though each time these demands have been iterated slightly differently, they’ve all been simple and easy to understand. Going back to the 1940s with FDR’s Second Bill of Rights up through to Du Bois’ list of demands and then to the current CPUSA Party Program, we can see the need for a succinct yet comprehensive economic Bill of Rights, something that might be the foundation for making Bill of Rights Socialism a widespread, powerful movement in American politics. CPUSA banner; People before Profits banner, Backbone Campaign (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0). What an economic Bill of Rights might look like Between these three sources we have quite a number of potential rights and policy proposals that could constitute an economic or socialist Bill of Rights, but part of the appeal of the existing Bill of Rights is that it captures American political values in just 10 amendments. The number 10 is a round, satisfying number and has also been used to outline other key principles, such as the Ten Commandments and the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program. A short, succinct list can act as a rallying cry and can be remembered and repeated by its proponents. While there are so many things that need to be addressed, we want to create something that even those less interested in politics can hear and agree with without having to remember an extensive platform. Drawing from the three aforementioned sources and adapting them to modern times to some degree, I recommend the following 10 amendments (or some variation of them):
Each of these would be followed by a clause similar to those found in a number of other amendments giving Congress the authority to enforce the amendments through legislation, such as, “The Congress shall have the power and duty to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” The wording of each would have to be honed by specialists, and it’s likely that certain changes and compromises might be made, but my hope is that this can be a starting point. If we were to whittle the economic Bill of Rights down to slogans, we might see something like:
This economic Bill of Rights not only provides all Americans with key economic rights but has the potential to unite wider popular forces, oppressed groups, and potential allies within the country under a common cause. The economic Bill of Rights isn’t socialism, nor will it inherently bring about socialism just through its passage, but the goal of this new Bill of Rights is to create a general platform that will benefit the masses and further enable a more thorough socialist revolution. In the struggle for such a Bill of Rights, we would have to create extensive alliances, work within our communities to create bodies of political engagement, and lay the groundwork for a more democratic system capable of defeating capitalism independent from existing political institutions. Furthermore, if the passage of such an economic Bill of Rights were successful, the government would be legally bound to enforce it lest they openly delegitimize themselves. To fulfil their duty in upholding the newly amended Constitution, the government would have to move left, opening up new avenues for class struggle and the fight for political and economic democracy. There very likely would be a reactionary push by the ruling class to revoke these new rights and maintain their heavy-handed dominance over American society, but the people would be unlikely to accept such an attempt without fighting back. Of course, just an economic Bill of Rights would still leave much to be desired, given the various other issues and forms of oppression seen in American society. We would likewise need a social or civil rights Bill of Rights to address these issues. As seen in both Du Bois’ application and the CPUSA Party Program, there are certain democratic and social guarantees beyond the economic that are needed to make the country truly free. Bill of Rights Socialism and a socialist-oriented economic Bill of Rights wouldn’t just be static “things” — they would be ever-evolving processes. Only in a socialist society can any rights in an economic Bill of Rights be completely fulfilled, and the same goes for many of the values espoused in our current Bill of Rights. Socialism is the only path to the freedom that the United States claims to strive for, and it’s what we must fight for if we truly want to be free. Original article was first posted on June 9, 2021, in M. P. Britt’s blog AuthorThis article was produced by CPUSA. Archives September 2021 |
Details
Archives
April 2024
Categories
All
|