Chapter 5 “The Historical Roots of Eurocommunism”THE POPULAR FRONTS IN EUROPE AS ANTECEDENTS OF “EUROCOMUUNISM”POINT 1.) The following 10 points constitute the program of Eurocommunism. Although Eurocommunism is per se defunct, the CPs today adhering to similar ideas can be seen as inheritors of the Eurocommunist teachings. 1- Democracy is the Road to Socialism 2- A multi-party system 3- Parliaments and Representative Institutions 4- Universal Suffrage 5- Independent Unions (free of state or party control) 6- Freedom for the Opposition 7- Human Rights 8- Religious Freedom 9- Cultural, Scientific, and Artistic Freedom 10.Popular Participation in all the major forms off social activity This is combined with independence from any international centers [No more automatic echos of Soviet policies, or Chinese for that matter] These 10 points are domestic, there are also 7 international points which constitute the Eurocommunist versions of “proletarian internationalism.” 1- Cooperation and Peaceful Coexistence 2- No Military Blocks 3- No Foreign Military Bases 4- No Nuclear Weapons 5- Disarmament 6- Non-interference in the affairs of other countries 7- Self-determination for All Peoples These positions did not spring up overnight. They have roots going back to the days of the Popular Front but three major historical events have brought them to the forefront of Communist consciousness and discussion today [the 1970s] but even now they still reverberate: 1.-The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 2.- The invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968) 3- The Sino-Soviet Split The rest of this section is taken up by historical speculation on the part of Carrillo. In the political struggles of the 30s against fascism and Nazism, especially the Spanish Civil War and WW2, Carrillo was a major leader and knew most of the other Communist leaders. Behind the facade of a united Third International position on all the major issues, Carrillo points out the real internal disputes between the leadership of major Communist parties (the French, Spanish, Italian, British which wanted to tailor responses to fascism to their national features (to actually participate in Popular Front governments, or to remain outside of the government, for example.) The Third International (directed from Moscow) position always won out and for unity the national CPs went along. The French party did not join the popular front government for example. Well, the fascists were on a roll, came to power, wiped out the CPs public presence, they went underground and didn’t surface publicly until Germany was defeated by the USSR. Carrillo speculates that the fascists might have been halted if the Third International had not enforced its policies regardless of the different existential circumstances of the national CPs in Europe, etc. This is could’ve, would’ve, should’ve Marxism so I will skip it and go to the section where Carrillo was actually participating in one of these struggles — the struggle in Spain where he had first hand knowledge. THE SPANISH EXPERIENCE—THE CASE OF TROTSKYThis is Carrillo’s position in brief. When Spain became a Republic in the 1930s the CP was small and sectarian and following the line of the Communist International it proclaimed a class war against the bourgeoisie— this was class against class and no cooperation was allowed with the petty bourgeoisie or other classes— the workers would duke it out alone with the capitalists. The CP leaders however began to work with other left forces to broaden their appeal. These were pre-popular front days but there were changes under way in the International which facilitated these moves by the CP (this was 1933). Soon the Popular Front was the new International position and it was in full swing in Spain. The CP also included the Trotskyists into the Popular Front and in the Front’s government in Catalonia. This was non-sectarian at a time when communist parties around the world were fighting with Trotskyists. The collaboration did not last long, however, and the CP adopted the view of the International (the Soviet view) of Trotsky as an enemy of the Soviet Union. Now, in the 1970s, Carrillo said, the communists are talking about Trotsky and the Trotskyist role in the civil war again— a reevaluation seems in order. In the 1930s people were unjustly accused of being “fascist agents.” They are due for rehabilitation. Even nowadays in the 21st century there is much disinformation about this subject in circulation. In those days, Carrillo said, we Communists really believed that Trotsky and the Trotskyists were working for the fascists. A lot of this information was also being peddled by anti-communists as well. The Moscow trials and the confessions of the accused persuaded the CP, as well as others, of Trotsky’s guilt. But, Carrillo stresses, none of them in those days had any idea “of the infernal machine by means of which those confessions were obtained” [p.117] The victims of the Moscow trials and the Trotskyists proclaimed their innocence and the Trotskyists tried to expose the methods by which confessions were coerced but we chose to believe the Soviet Union. Fascism was on the rise. The Soviet Union was the first and only socialist state and Stalin was its leader. We had no first hand knowledge so, by “an act of faith,” we believed what the Soviets told them. So, “it was possible for the myth that Trotsky was linked with the Nazis and was protected by American imperialism to arise and establish itself, and we youngsters of that period swallowed the official accounts of the October Revolution and of the subsequent civil war, in which Trotsky’s role was passed over in silence.”[p.117] It is high time this myth be put to bed and an objective scientific account of Trotsky be written showing that Trotskyism was a trend within the Revolutionary Russian tradition instead of just treating it as some sort of pro-Nazi movement. Having said this, Carrillo notes “Trotsky’s opinions on the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 could not have been more profoundly mistaken.”[p.118] This is because he looked at Spain through the lens of the Russian Revolution and its tactics ignoring the fact that Spanish conditions were totally unlike the conditions facing the Bolsheviks. Finally, the case of Andreu Nin is discussed. Andreu Nin was a Trotskyist leader of the POUM party during the Spanish civil war. He disappeared in questionable circumstances and it was alleged he defected to the fascists (Franco) or that he was murdered by the Communists depending on your views of the POUM. Carrillo said, after he did all he could to find out what happened, that Nin did not defect to the fascists and that he was indeed extra judicially murdered but that it was not done under the auspices of the CP —but members on their own may have been involved. The POUM was foiled in a coup attempt against the Republic during the civil war — this was an act of high treason but Nin should have had his day in court. THE SPANISH EXPERIENCE: THE POPULAR FRONTThe leadership of the Spanish Republic in the early 1930s was in the hands of the bourgeois liberals. There had been cooperation between the socialists and liberals from 1931 to 1933. In 1934 the liberals alone were running the show. A real fascist threat developed and the socialist led Popular Front declined to work with bourgeois elements (the liberals). Seeing this disunity the fascists began an uprising, a civil war that lasted three years and brought Franco to power. The Popular Front joined with liberals when they saw what was transpiring, but by then it was too late, the war was underway. Carrillo maintains that in the Republican held areas a unique sort of Popular Front came to be, unlike the other European Popular Fronts, and it foreshadowed the kind of new democracy that Carrillo thought must be transitional between bourgeois democracy and socialism which was the basis, later, for Eurocommunism. The closest analogy I can think of is that Carrillo’s Republican zones were practicing a sort of participatory democracy à la 1960s SDS style. “At that time we communists were already upholding the parliamentary democratic Republic, the representative bodies of the nationalities, which brought down on us a lot of criticism from leftists. Already at that time we thought that by maintaining these forms of representative democracy, by doing the same with the bodies of the nationalities, with local government bodies, and by developing forms of direct democracy in the factories and other enterprises, by giving the working people a direct say in the running of affairs at all levels, the foundations could be laid for a democracy of a new type which would proceed to socialism.” [p.123] He also quotes from a letter he got from Stalin et al “It is very possible that the parliamentary road may turn out to be a more effective procedure for revolutionary development in Spain than it was in Russia.”[p.124] Despite subsequent revelations about Stalin, this letter shows that many Communists were seriously thinking about the parliamentary road being sometimes possible and this view was also backed by the 20th Congress of the CP of the Soviet Union. It is perhaps impolitic to point out a little over 30 years after this Congress the parliamentary road more often resulted in CPs being voted out of power than into power. Here we might make a comment about the use of slates. Some CPs use slates to elect their leadership and claim this is what unions do. It is correct that unions opposed to democratic elections do this. This is what Carrillo says: “We communists always fought for the democratic election of factory committees, coming out against the unfortunately dominant attitudes which left the composition of those committees to nomination from above by the trade union bureaucracies.” [p. 126] It is really ingenuous to claim that the use of slates is a democratic procedure. Finally Carrillo concludes, “it is not only from a Marxist analysis of present-day reality, but also from our own complex experience, that we derive the arguments in favor of the democratic socialism we advocate for our country.”[p.129]. It isn’t too far off the mark to say that the arguments for Eurocommunism have not been fruitful. THE EUROPEAN COMMUNIST PARTIES AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR At the end of WWII the CPs were at the height of their power. They had played the leading roles in the various underground resistance movements to Hitler and the Soviet Union had played the major role in the defeat of Hitler. They participated in the governments of the newly freed Western Europeans governments Italy, France, and others) and they played by the rules of parliamentary democracy. They were so strong that had the Soviet Union told them to, they probably could have taken over these countries by force. The Soviet Union did not tell them to take power. Probably due to the Yalta agreement between Stalin and Truman. The Eastern European countries along the Soviet border occupied by the Red Army would become part of the Soviet sphere of influence, Western Europe of the American. Nevertheless, these CPs played by the rules of democracy by their own choices as well, even after 1947 when the Americans began the Cold War and the Communists were kicked out of the coalition governments. Carrillo says another factor at work was trying to get free from Soviet control. Stalin had dissolved the Third International at the beginning of WWII (to show good faith to the Americans as allies against Hitler). Without the International the other CPs were no longer bound to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Yet they felt a loyalty towards the first socialist state. In 1947, after the Cold War began, Stalin founded the Cominform (Communist and Workers Parties Information Bureau) which brought the CPs together again under the guidance of the CPSU. Democratic methods remained in force in the Western parties. This remained the case until 1956 when the Cominform was dissolved during the de-Stalinization process. The Communist Party Spain operated under the principle that in Spanish affairs they had the final say and it was in International affairs that they followed the Soviet Union. The SU often did things on their own without consulting the other members of the Cominform and the others all went along for fear of being “excommunicated.’’ An unforgivable error, according to Carrillo, was going along with the SU when it denounced Tito and condemned Yugoslavia when it showed signs of independence from Moscow. For the Spanish party the “culminating” point was the Soviet led Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. No prior consultation, just the SU announcing the invasion to prevent capitalist restoration (with no proof) using the same methods as in the 1936 Moscow trials and the condemnation Yugoslavia— I.e., lies, disinformation, and stories “that were light years away from the truth.” [p.132]. This is the background which led to Eurocommunism and a commitment to the peaceful democratic road to socialism and the independence of national CPs. Still, the Eurocommunists consider the Soviets comrades and fully support their struggle against US imperialism. THE ROLE OF VIOLENCE IN HISTORYCarrillo tells us that the long years of the struggle against fascism has made communists more appreciative of (bourgeois) democracy and to support it in capitalist regimes, and also aware of its weak and under-appreciated use in the socialist states. Nevertheless, communists will not abandon the revolutionary struggle to overthrow imperialism and capitalism throughout the world. It is not a struggle in this or that country but an international struggle to overcome the economic system of capitalism per se. Each country has its own struggle but we are all together in the hopes for this international elimination of the capitalist system. This is NOT a turn to social democracy and communists are not social democrats. We are not abandoning the possibility of a revolution. Should the capitalist block the democratic road to socialism and revolutionary alternatives appeared we would support the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalists. However in Spain and countries in similar circumstances, the Eurocommunists declare the conditions have already arrived by which the nonviolent democratic electoral road is possible and that is how we will proceed to socialism. [40 years later in the 2000s we will find Carrillo not only no longer in the Communist Party but also a social democrat. He died in his 90s in 2012. So far the “peaceful road to socialism” has always led to a similar destination but that doesn’t mean we won’t find a fork in the road that gets us where we want to go.] We are not turning our backs on the historic role of violence in history. Without the English Revolution (Cromwell), the American Revolution, the Great French Revolution, the wars of Napoleon, the bourgeoisie would never have been able to overthrow the feudal system and spread the capitalist system around the world and become the new ruling class. Political power did indeed grow from the barrel of a gun. As far as today is concerned, the example of the Paris Commune energized the working class and spread the ideas of working class democracy— and the fact that we today have such advanced democratic rights in many countries is due to the the response to the Russian Revolution and the defeat of Hitler and fascism for which the main credit goes to the Soviet Union and the Red Army which knocked out 80% of Hitler’s military and ended the possibility of a German victory in WWII. The violence of the past is responsible for all this. But, Carrillo believes, this has also brought about a qualitative change in history where violence is no longer necessary. [Well, the Soviet Union and the Red Army are history and fascism is making a comeback so perhaps Carrillo’s ‘qualitative change’ was just an illusion.] THE RUSSIAN COMMUNISTS HAD NO CHOICE IN 1917 BUT TO TAKE POWERCarrillo points out that Marx and Engels lived at a time when the working class was really only developed in parts of Western Europe and the U.S., England and France especially. Imperialism was just beginning (finance capital). Capitalism was fully developed and in its highest stages by the time of Lenin. Until WWI the three great international leaders of the working class were Marx, Engels, and then Kauksky. Kauksky’s Road to Power was the go to book for the revolutionary movement. The original “revisionist,” Bernstein had published his book also (Evolutionary Socialism) but it was “unorthodox.” The official theory was more or less as follows: Capitalism was going to fall apart due to internal contradictions after it had fully developed the productive forces to their maximum and this would happen in the most advanced capitalist countries where the class conscious Marxist workers would take over and begin the construction of socialism. The rigors of WWI brought about the collapse of capitalism in backwards Russia, socialism would be impossible there, what was needed was a bourgeois government that would bring Russia into the world of advanced capitalism before socialism would be possible. Socialists saw WWI coming and argued about the possibility of a revolution breaking out in countries as a result. The consensus was that if it did in a backwards area it could be successful because the revolution in the advanced countries would come to its aid. This is similar, e.g., to the Soviet Union coming to the aid of the Cuban Revolution which allowed it to survive the U.S. while it consolidated itself. This didn’t work in Afghanistan. The Bolsheviks were forced to take power in Russia because the country was falling apart and the provisional bourgeois government was totally incompetent. The Bolsheviks ended up isolated in a backward country and the revolution didn’t happen in the advanced countries. After waiting for the revolution for 10 years Stalin came to power and proclaimed “Socialism In One Country”— they tried for about 70 years but that whole system finally caved in. Neither the Eurocommunists nor the anti-Eurocommunists saw this coming. But Carrillo did see all the problems, as well as the good things, that ‘’Stalinism” brought about. Industrialization, economic development, scientific advance (Sputnik) but at the expense of democracy, free expression, and lower living standards than the West. His final views were that, for backward areas (underdeveloped) violent Revolution may be required and should be supported (Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Korea, China) but in the advanced capitalist countries the road to power was the democratic parliamentary road towards a peaceful arrival at socialism. For all that, however, Carrillo says the Communists of today are the children of the great Russian Revolution and of the CPSU and the whole history of our movement. We are not Social Democrats who have always opposed the revolutionary forces and seek to merely reform, not do away with capitalist oppression and exploitation. Coming up next, the last chapter: Chapter Six THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT 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. He is the author of Reading the Classical Texts of Marxism.
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10/6/2022 How Cuba Is Dealing With the Devastation of Hurricane Ian By: Vijay Prashad & Manolo De Los SantosRead NowOn September 27, 2022, a tropical cyclone—Hurricane Ian--struck Cuba’s western province of Pinar del Río. Sustained winds of around 125 miles per hour lingered over Cuba for more than eight hours, bringing down trees and power lines, and causing damage not seen during previous tropical cyclones. The hurricane then lingered over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, picking up energy before striking the U.S. island of Cayo Costa, Florida, with approximately 155 mph winds. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) called it “one of the worst hurricanes to hit the area in a century.” The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center said that this year will be the “seventh consecutive above-average hurricane season.” Both Cuba and Florida have faced the wrath of the waters and winds, but beneath this lies the ferocity of the climate catastrophe. “Climate science is increasingly able to show that many of the extreme weather events that we are experiencing have become more likely and more intense due to human-induced climate change,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas. Prepare and Relieve Cuba, said the WMO, is one of the “world leaders in terms of hurricane preparedness and disaster management.” This was not always the case. Hurricane Flora hit the eastern coast of the island on October 4, 1963. When news of the approaching hurricane reached Fidel Castro, he immediately ordered the evacuation of the homes of people who lived in the projected path of the storm (in Haiti, former dictator François Duvalier did not call for an evacuation, which led to the death of more than 5,000 people). Castro rushed to Camagüey, almost dying in the Cauto River as his amphibious vehicle was struck by a drifting log. Two years later, in his Socialism and Man in Cuba, Che Guevara wrote the Cuban people showed “exceptional deeds of valor and sacrifice” as they rebuilt the country after the devastation caused by Flora. In 1966, the Cuban government created the Civil Defense System to prepare for not only extreme weather events such as hurricanes but also the outbreak of epidemics. Using science as the foundation for its hurricane preparedness, the Cuban government was able to evacuate 2 million people as Hurricane Ivan moved toward the island in 2004. As part of disaster management, the entire Cuban population participates in drills, and the Cuban mass organizations (the Federation of Cuban Women and the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution) work in an integrated manner to mobilize the population to respond to disasters. The day before Hurricane Ian hit Cuba, 50,000 people were evacuated and taken to 55 shelters. No private vehicles or public transportation was visible on the streets. Work brigades were mobilized to work on the resumption of electricity supply after the storm had passed. In Artemisa, for instance, the Provincial Defense Council met to discuss how to react to the inevitable flooding. Despite the best efforts made by Cubans, three people died because of the hurricane, and the electrical grid suffered significant damage. Damage The entire island—including Havana—had no power for more than three days. The electrical grid, which was already suffering from a lack of major repairs, collapsed. Without power, Cubans had to throw away food that needed to be refrigerated and faced difficulty in preparing meals, among other hardships. By October 1, less than five days after landfall, 82 percent of the residents of Havana had their power restored with work ongoing for the western part of the island (the amount of time without power in Puerto Rico, which was hit by Hurricane Fiona on September 18, is longer—a quarter of a million people remain without power more than two weeks later). The long-term impact of Hurricane Ian is yet to be assessed, although some believe the cost of damages will surpass $1 billion. More than 8,500 hectares of cropland have been hit by the flooding, with the banana crop most impacted. The most dramatic problem will be faced by Cuba’s tobacco industry since Pinar del Río—where 5,000 farms were destroyed—is its heartland (with 65 percent of the country’s tobacco production). Hirochi Robaina, a tobacco farmer in Pinar del Río, wrote, “It was apocalyptic. A real disaster.” Blockade Mexico and Venezuela immediately pledged to send materials to assist in the reconstruction of the electrical grid on the island. All eyes turned to Washington—not only to see whether it would send aid, which would be welcome, but also if it would remove Cuba from the state sponsors of terrorism list and end sanctions imposed by the United States. These measures cause banks in both the United States and elsewhere to be reluctant to process any financial transactions, including humanitarian donations. The U.S. has a mixed record regarding humanitarian aid to Cuba. After Hurricane Michelle (2001), Hurricane Charley (2004), and Hurricane Wilma (2005), the U.S. did offer assistance, but would not even temporarily lift the blockade. After the fire at a Matanzas oil storage facility in August 2022, the U.S. did offer to join Mexico and Venezuela to help the Cubans put out the fire. Cuba’s Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossio offered “profound gratitude” for the gesture, but the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden did not follow through. Rather than lift the sanctions even for a limited period, the U.S. government sat back and watched as mysterious forces from Miami unleashed a torrent of Facebook and WhatsApp messages to drive desperate Cubans onto the street. Not a moment is wasted by Washington to use even a natural disaster to try to destabilize the situation in Cuba (a history that goes back to 1963, when the Central Intelligence Agency reflected on how to leverage natural disasters for political gains). “Most people don’t shout out freedom,” a person who observed one of these protests told us. “They ask for power and food.” AuthorVijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. 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 Globetrotter. Archives October 2022 It turns out that many of today’s billionaires are selfish, lonely men fantasizing about how they will survive the end times they have played a part in creating. In mid-September, for just a few days, Indian industrialist Gautam Adani entered the ranks of the top three richest people on earth as per Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. It was the first time an Indian, or, for that matter, an Asian, had enjoyed such a distinction. South Asians in my circle of family and friends felt excited at the prospect that a man who looked like us had entered such rarefied ranks. Adani was deemed the second richest person, even richer than Amazon founder Jeff Bezos! A Times of India profile fawningly quoted him relaying his thought process in the early days of his rags-to-riches story. “‘Dreams were infinite but finances finite,’ he says with engaging frankness,” according to the profile. There was no mention of the serious accusations he faces of corruption and diverting money into offshore tax havens, or of the entire website, AdaniWatch, devoted to investigating his dirty deeds. Adani made his money, in part, by investing in digital services, leading one economist to say, “Wherever there is a futuristic business in India, I think… [Adani] has a stronghold.” The moment of pride that Indians felt in such an achievement by one of their own was short-lived. Quickly Adani slipped from second richest to third richest, and, as of this writing, is in the number four slot on a list dominated by people who have made money from the digital technology revolution. In fact, ranking multibillionaires is a meaningless exercise that obscures the absurdity of their wealth. This year alone, a number of tech billionaires on Bloomberg’s list lost hundreds of billions of dollars as the gains they made during the early years of the pandemic were wiped out because of a volatile stock market. But, as Whizy Kim of Vox points out, whether or not they’re losing money or giving it away—as Bezos’ ex-wife MacKenzie Scott has been doing—their wealth remains insanely high, and most are worth more today than before the COVID-19 pandemic. What are they doing with all this wealth? It turns out that many are quietly plotting their own survival against our demise. Douglas Rushkoff, podcaster, founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism, and fellow at the Institute for the Future, has written a book about this bizarre phenomenon, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. In an interview, Rushkoff explains that billionaires worry about the end of humanity just like the rest of us. They fear catastrophic climate change or the next pandemic. And, they know their money will likely be of little value when civilizations decline. “How do I maintain control over my Navy Seal security guards once my money is worthless?” is a question that Rushkoff says many of the world’s wealthiest people want to know the answer to. He knows they ask such questions because he was invited to give private lectures by those who think his expertise in digital technology gives him unique insight into the future. But Rushkoff was quietly studying them instead and has few flattering things to say about these wielders of economic power. “How is it that the wealthiest and most powerful people I’d ever been in the same room with see themselves as utterly powerless to affect the future?” he asks. It seems as though “the best they can do is prepare for the inevitable calamity and then just, you know, hang on for dear life.” Rushkoff explores this tech billionaire “mindset” that he says has resulted in a generation of people who are “almost comedic monsters, who really mean to leave us all behind.” Adani is a perfect example of this, having invested in the very fossil fuels that are destroying our planet. He has large holdings in Australia’s coal mining industry and has sparked a massive grassroots movement intent on stopping him. The admiration that some Indians feel for Adani’s ascension on Bloomberg’s list of billionaires is based on an assumption of cleverness. Surely, he must be one of the smartest people in the world in order to be one of the richest? Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man by far (with twice as much wealth as Bezos), has enjoyed such a reputation for years. Those who are invested in the idea of merit-based capitalism can justify the unimaginable wealth of the world’s richest people only by assuming they are intelligent enough to deserve it. This is a façade. Rather than smarts, the wealthiest people on the planet appear to be rather small-minded idiot savants who share a common disdain for the rest of us. After being around tech billionaires in private, Rushkoff concludes that they are invested in “this notion that they really can, like puppeteers, kind of control society from one level above,” and that this approach is “different than the era of Alexander the Great, or Caesar.” If the question that vexes them most of all is how, in a disastrous future, will they control the guards they hire to protect their hoardings, then our economic system is a farce. “Even if we call them genius technologists, most of them were plucked from college when they were freshmen,” says Rushkoff. “They came up with some idea in their dorm room before they’d taken history, or economics, or ethics, or philosophy” classes, and so they lack the wisdom needed to oversee their own perverse amounts of wealth. Having spent time with many tech billionaires, Rushkoff worries that “their education about the future comes from zombie movies and science fiction shows.” Billionaires are not simply drawing their wealth from a vacuum. According to data from the World Economic Forum, “the world’s richest have captured a disproportionate share of global wealth over recent decades.” This means that, if you were rich to begin with a decade or two ago, you are likely to have seen your wealth multiply by a greater amount than middle-class or lower-income people. Not only are tech billionaires undeserving of their wealth, but they also are fleecing the rest of us—and fantasizing about hoarding that wealth in the worst-case scenarios while the rest of humanity struggles to survive. The danger is that if society valorizes such (mostly) men, we are in danger of internalizing their childish, selfish mindset and giving up on solving the climate crisis or building resiliency on a mass scale. Instead of relating to them, we ought to feel sorry for a group of people so cut off from humanity that their vision of the future is a very lonely one. “Let’s look at these tech-bro billionaire lunatics. Let’s laugh at what they’re doing… so they look small rather than big,” says Rushkoff. He thinks it is critical to adopt the perspective that “the disaster they’re so afraid of looks entirely manageable by more reasonable people who are willing just to help each other out.” AuthorSonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization. This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Archives October 2022 At the end of apartheid in 1994, only 36 percent of households in South Africa were electrified, with almost all white households having electric power and most Black households having no access to electricity. Ten years later, more than 80 percent of households were electrified. This was an important achievement, albeit one that mostly left out the residents of the rapidly growing shantytowns across the country. But this progress came to a halt in 2007 when South Africa first began to endure “load shedding,” which is the cutting of power supply to different areas on a rotational basis. Load shedding, implemented when the state-owned electricity company Eskom is unable to provide power to the whole country and the electricity grid needs to be kept stable, seems to have reached a new nadir in recent days with most areas going without power for up to 12 hours a day. There have been warnings that total blackouts may be necessary. Eskom has been unable to provide a stable supply of electricity for 15 years due to a lack of investment in keeping infrastructure up to date and its poor maintenance, a period of plunder under the kleptocratic regime of former President Jacob Zuma, and a longstanding state austerity program that has resulted in general disinvestment from state-owned companies. The energy crisis has been very damaging to an economy already reeling from socially devastating deindustrialization, state austerity, and the increasing hold of political mafias over economic life. It has been estimated that load shedding has led to the economy losing R500 billion (just over $28 billion) since 2018, working out to about R1 billion per stage, per day. South Africa has much higher rates of electricity connections compared to the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, where about 90 percent of the children who are able to afford a primary school education attend schools that do not have electricity. But with load shedding causing power to be off for much of the day many people in South Africa can often face similar conditions to those living in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. Given that South Africa is currently the most unequal country in the world, the deepening energy crisis further widens the gulf between the rich and the poor, with the latter being overwhelmingly Black and comprising a largely female population. According to the latest reports, more than 30.4 million people in South Africa live below the poverty line, out of a current population of 60.6 million. About 50 percent of the population lives on R1,335 a month, or approximately $75 a month. The basic cost of electricity for a low-income household is approximately between R1,100 and R1,500, which is already higher than what half the population subsists on. Along with widespread food insecurity, it is likely that the same population of more than 30 million South Africans also concurrently experience “energy poverty,” a term used to describe a situation in which electricity, gas, and other sources of energy bills make up a larger percentage of the household expenditure, making it difficult for South Africans to cover other costs such as food, rent, and clothing. Also, the reduced use of energy in households and workplaces has a negative impact on their physical and mental health. In shack settlements, the lack of electricity has long meant that people cook using candles and gas to light up their homes while living in cramped conditions resulting in regular fires, which are often devastating. With frequent load shedding, fires are now likely to become more common in other types of housing also. Moreover, South Africa had the eighth highest murder rate in the world in 2020, and the fourth highest rate of gender-based violence in the world, according to 2016 figures. The increased hours of load shedding and the radical decrease of access to electrification will make this pervasive violence worse. A 2017 study carried out in Brazil on the socioeconomic impact of electrification found that it results in a significant decrease in gender-based violence due to better lighting in public spaces. The burden of social reproduction has always largely fallen on the shoulders of women. Access to electricity can reduce this. An important 2021 study titled “Powering Households and Empowering Women” found that by freeing up women’s time poverty is reduced by creating opportunities for women and girls to develop livelihoods, enter the labor force, or focus on school. It can also reduce exposure to harmful indoor air pollutants, improve maternal health, and reduce gender-based violence. Demand for the resolution of the electricity crisis has been one of the few issues that have helped bring the poor, the working class, and the middle class together. But, so far, the demands for the resolution of the crisis are not well organized and have been met with little more than platitudes by the ruling elites, including South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. The African National Congress’s (ANC) commitment to neoliberal austerity has meant that there is insufficient investment in the state electricity company. Their only proposal is to move from state-owned coal-fired power stations, which are highly polluting, to privately owned renewable forms of energy. Currently, one of the best-placed people to benefit from this is the president’s billionaire brother-in-law, Patrice Motsepe, given his investments in renewable energy. Trade unions in South Africa have insisted that while a move to renewables is welcomed, undertaking it via privatization will raise the costs of electric power for the poor and the working class and result in a bias toward serving the needs of the capitalists and the rich. They have proposed that renewables should be socially owned and managed. The proposals from the unions have been ignored, austerity continues, and there has been minimal movement toward private electricity production. The situation is one of stasis. Experts believe that very high rates of economically and socially damaging load shedding are likely to continue for at least the next three to four years. Many analysts have argued that this is likely to hit the ruling ANC very hard in the next presidential election, scheduled for 2024. A crisis in terms of electric power could lead to a loss of political power. With right-wing and xenophobic parties rapidly advancing, this is not cause for easy optimism. South Africa will not move into the light until the social value of access to electricity is affirmed. The proposal by the trade unions for a shift to socially owned and managed renewable energy is the best option on the table. We need a solution that is for the majority and not the few. AuthorVashna Jagarnath is an academic as well as a political and labor activist. She is the director of Pan Africa Today (PAT), and she works in the office of the general secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA). She also serves as the deputy general secretary of the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP) in South Africa. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives October 2022 10/3/2022 The Cult of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: A Proletarian Critique By: William I. Robinson, Salvador Rangel and Hilbourne A. WatsonRead NowIt has been over four decades since Cedric Robinson published his widely-acclaimed study, Black Marxism.[1] In recent years the work has enjoyed a celebratory renaissance. It has become increasingly influential among the liberal and race-centric academic establishment and beyond, with a second edition published in 2000, followed by a third edition released in 2020. It is not surprising that the work has gained so much acclaim among academics. After all, Robinson provides these liberal academics with an outstanding affirmation of their hostility towards class analysis.[2] What is surprising is the seeming embrace of Black Marxism by much of the socialist left, given that the book is above all a broadside attack on Marxism.[3] In the 40 plus years since its publication, there has been a remarkable dearth of critical reviews of the book.[4] The notion of “racial capitalism” that Robinson advances as the underlying scaffolding of his historical and theoretical edifice has become a sort of master narrative held as common sense among much of the left. The text, it seems, has come to achieve a virtual cult status, its core assumptions defended as sacrosanct on U.S. university campuses, while its critics are shunned as heretics. This is all the more remarkable, as we shall argue, given that behind a seemingly radical critique – indeed, the book’s subtitle is The Making of the Black Radical Tradition – is an essentially conservative political essence. What are the core underlying claims of Black Marxism? In a nutshell, Robinson argues that Marxism or historical materialism is a European ideology that that has proven to be blind to racialism; that the epistemology of historical materialism, along with the political premium it places on proletarian struggle, does not apply to Africans and other non-European peoples. “It is still fair to say that at base, that is at its epistemological substratum, Marxism is a Western construction – a conceptualization of human affairs and historical development which is emergent from the historical experiences of European peoples mediated, in turn, through their civilization, their social orders, and their cultures.”[5] Robinson’s follow-up work, published in 2001, An Anthropology of Marxism,[6] consummates the diatribe against Marxism. In place of the alleged “grand narrative” of Marxism, Robinson gives us a “grand narrative” of the “Black Radical Tradition.” “Robinson literally rewrites the history of the rise of the West from ancient times to the mid-twentieth century, tracing the roots of Black radical thought to a shared epistemology among diverse African people,” notes approvingly Robin Kelly in his oft-cited Foreword to the 2000 edition of Black Marxism, “and providing a withering critique of Western Marxism and its inability to comprehend either the racial character of capitalism and the civilizations in which it was born or mass movements outside of Europe.”[7] But Robinson never provides evidence of this “shared epistemology among diverse African people.” This notion of Africans as some mega ethno-nation seems to simply be true by fiat, that is, by his assertion that it is true. It is this “truth” that forms the basis for the claim to a pan- “Black Radical Tradition” that compresses hundreds of millions of Africans in and outside of the continent into an undifferentiated category, and conversely collapses hundreds of millions of Europeans. As we will discuss below, this conception of an undifferentiated category of oppressed humanity defined by ahistoric essentialized identities is a hallmark of the identitarian paradigm. This paradigm, which posits some shared interests of a group of people made organic by an essential ascribed identity, generally racial or ethnic, often premised as well on some singular cultural tradition, has come in recent decades to eclipse the language of class – nay, to contrapose class to ethnic, cultural, or national identity. Yet, this view of the African past and present as made up of such an undifferentiated mass that shares a single epistemology and “Black Radical Tradition” misreads the African past as much as it does the present. While it is easy to become seduced by the literary brilliance of the text, the sheer power of its prose, and the vast sweep of history and literature that it covers, we maintain here that more is at work in explaining the left’s embrace of Black Marxism, namely the conservative retrenchment of the late twentieth century. As world capitalism entered a deep structural crisis in the 1970s, capitalists and bureaucratic elites from around the world strove to beat back the power that organized labor, radical social movements, and Third World liberation struggles had accumulated in the preceding period of mass struggle. Capitalist globalization and the neoliberal counterrevolution brought about a change in the worldwide correlation of class and social forces in favor of emergent transnational capital.[8] As proletarian power eroded and the left and socialist movements lost influence around the world in the fin de siècle, the chronic gap between theory and practice, thought and action, showed up as a degeneration of intellectual criticism as well. Rather than seek renewal, much of the left withdrew into post-modern identity politics and other forms of accommodation with the emerging neoliberal social order. The left intelligentsia retreated into the academy, abandoning the commitment to a universal emancipatory project as it turned to celebrating the fragmented particularisms postulated by post-narratives – post-structuralism, post-modernism, post-colonialism, and so on. The target of condemnation became Marxism, which it claimed was unable to explain racial inequality.[9] The causal explanation of racism now shifted from the political-economy critique of capitalism to psychology and culture. It was in this context that Black Marxism, an Afrocentric and proto-Afro-pessimistic text par excellence, found such resonance in U.S. academia, and increasingly, beyond. A Transhistoric Racialism In his quest to explain racism and subjugation of peoples of African descent, Robinson takes us back to what he sees as its origins in “European” antiquity. For Robinson, capitalism is not the progenitor of racism but its offshoot in a construct that, as Jason W. Moore has noted in a different context, takes flight from world history, from the real movement of capitalism. “The pretext for this flight typically rests on two major claims. One is an empiricist assertion that world history is diverse and therefore cannot be grasped in its combined and uneven patterns. The second is an ideological claim that any attempt to narrate capitalism’s differentiated unity is irremediably Eurocentric.” While both these claims hold for Black Marxism, what concerns us most here is the second. The result, observes Moore, “is a descent into amalgamation of regional particularisms with assertions that the problem of modern world history is Europe – rather than capitalism.”[10] By “racial capitalism,” Robinson tells us, he means a commitment to racialism among Europeans that first sprung from the slave societies of antiquity – a transhistoric original sin that marks millennia of Western history. Let us put aside that “Europe” didn’t exist before 1492: the same historical forces at work that produced capitalism and propelled it to outward expansion also produced “Europe” that became the core of an expanding world capitalist system understood as a differentiated unity, or totality. This theme of a Greek and allegedly therefore European origin to modern racism is not new; it has become a trope among Afro-pessimists and other “race” scholars.[11] Robinson claims that Greek slavery was an “uncompromising racial construct” that was reiterated and embellished throughout European history: “Race was its epistemology, its ordering principle, its organizing structure, its moral authority, its economy of justice, commerce, and power…. from the twelfth century on, one European ruling order after another, one cohort of clerical or secular protagonists following another, reiterated and embellished this racial calculus.”[12] Ironically, one of the very authors whom Robinson includes as a case study in Black Marxism, C.L.R. James, insisted that “historically it is pretty well proven now that the ancient Greeks and Romans knew nothing about race. They had another standard – civilized and barbarian – and you could have white skin and be a barbarian and you could be black and civilized.”[13] At the same time, Robinson asserts that “racialism” is “hardly unique to European peoples” but does not explain what, then, would have separated the European case from civilizations the world over. For Robinson, Greek slavery is the prototype of modern-day racism, some mysterious particularity of “Europe” that wound its way through millennia to the contemporary era. We know that all the ancient empires as class systems also differentiated groups according to cultural or territorial criteria and involved differentiated relationships to the state or political statuses. So, there must have been something else that arose in Europe to explain why this region became the generator of systems of modern-day racial inequality and the colonizer of the world. That something, of course, is capitalism. We have a vast literature showing how systems of race-based slavery, exclusion, and oppression arose as part and parcel of the rise of capitalism as a world system (we cannot explain the antinomy whereby Robinson discusses much of this literature approvingly even though it refutes his thesis). Racialism, he goes on, “was not simply a convention for ordering the relations of Europeans to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the ‘internal’ relations of European peoples.”[14] These internal relations involved ideological conceptions of inferiority and superiority based on cultural (he singles out linguistic) and class distinctions, often adduced to be biological, which organized ancient and feudal domains that later became Europe. Beyond these “ordering ideas” of inferiority and superiority, we can find in Black Marxism no precise explanation of what Robinson understands racism to be, that is, no further conceptual specificity. It is not, in his construct, that these ordering ideas became specified along racialist lines as capitalism evolved, but that they sui generis constituted “racialism.” By conflating these ordering ideas of class rule with “racialism,” Robinson is able to claim that racism originates in “European” antiquity. Remarkably, Robinson gives no explanation as to why we should conflate slavery with “race.” We have no historical evidence of “race” and racialization prior to the modern era, if by this we mean something other than the “ordering ideas” of inferiority and superiority, or anything resembling the scientific racism that reached its apogee from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. Yet, at the same time, to reiterate, he asserts that “racialism” is “hardly unique to European peoples.”[15] If so, it begs the question – unanswered by Robinson – what makes the European case different from civilizations the world over? Since the dawn of class society, ruling groups have legitimated their rule through ideologies of biological and/or cultural superiority and inferiority and of natural providence and have instituted slavery legitimated by such ideologies. Black Marxism here appears abstracted from world history. Slavery has been a universal class relation, present everywhere from the Chinese to the Aztec, Arab, West African and other civilizations of ancient and pre-capitalist times.[16] This is a case not of the particular masquerading as the universal, but the universal masquerading as the particular. Slavery is known to have existed in China as far back as the Shang Dynasty (18th-12th century BCE). It is estimated to have comprised some five percent of the population in ensuing centuries and continued to exist as an institution down to the twentieth century. In Korea, estimates place the slave population, at up to a third or a half of the entire population during the successive Silla kingdoms. Slavery was also widely practiced elsewhere in Asia, from Thailand to Burma, Philippines, Nepal, Indonesia, Japan, and among the Turkic populations. As in Europe and elsewhere around the world prior to capitalism, slavery in India existed in the interstices of the dominant class relations, although in Malabar slaves constituted up to 15 percent of the population. Slavery also existed in successive Andean and Mesoamerican civilizations as well as in some Amerindian societies in North America, although slavery remained relatively minor, as conquered populations were subjugated generally through the extraction of tribute rather than slave labor. Slavery was practiced throughout Europe during the medieval period, particularly notable in Byzantium and in Russia – indeed, this later country was a creation of Viking slave raiding and trade routes from Scandinavia to Byzantium. If we take the story back further, slavery is recorded for thousands of years in what is today the Middle East, from Babylonia to Egypt. Slaves were owned in Africa throughout recorded history, and in some instances, such as in Ghana from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries, involved anywhere from one-third to two-thirds of the entire population. In most of these pre-capitalist cases, slave populations were drawn from historic “population reservoirs” that could be demarcated culturally, such as the Slavic periphery of the Islamic and European kingdoms and empires. Slavery achieved a prominent role in Islamic societies in the Middle East, where the slave trade happened on a large scale from the seventh to the nineteenth centuries. Robinson suggests of this slavery, the single instance in which he acknowledges the institution outside of Europe, that it was somehow more benign than European slavery, since “Muslim slavery was characteristically associated with unlimited potential for social mobility and much less racialism.”[17] In this tale of more and less benign slaveries, and consistent with his historical idealism, Robinson goes on to quote the Koran to explain what he claims were “great differences between slavery in Western and Christian societies and slavery in Islam.”[18] We do not know why Robinson would so egregiously choose not to discuss the presence of slavery as a class relation around the world throughout much of recorded history apart from its presence in the Islamic societies of the Middle East. But Robinson does not present any evidence that slavery in Europe prior to capitalism was significantly different from slavery in the Islamic societies – in fact, the historical evidence indicates that slavery was a much more powerful and widespread institution in the Islamic world than it ever was in feudal Europe. Rather, what would later on, from the sixteenth century and onward, distinguish European from Middle Eastern slavery was not mystical cultural, psychological or religious proclivities but the contrast between pre-capitalist and capitalist slavery. Slaves were generated in the pre-capitalist era, from ancient Greece and Rome, to Asia, the Islamic and Amerindian empires and elsewhere, by capture in warfare and slave raiding. An abundance of non-slave labor in tributary and feudal societies meant that slavery never developed into the primary mode of labor exploitation after antiquity. Just as in feudal Europe, the social relations of production were such that the ruling groups could not make use of, nor had the need for, large quantities of slaves. Eric Wolf notes in his classic study, Europe and the People Without History, that a few thousand slaves were brought in to the Iberian Peninsula per year in the fifteenth century,[19] which proved to be the upper limit since the prevailing feudal mode of production had no need for such a distinct mass of laborers. At this time as well, the Islamic world was also importing “white” slaves from Europe under similar relations of production. The relations of production proved to be the determining factor in the ontology of slavery as an institution.[20] Indeed, in Europe and the Islamic world, as elsewhere in the slave-owning feudal and tributary civilizations outside of the full-blown slave mode of production of ancient Greece and Rome, slaves were for luxury consumption that constituted an economic drain. This would only change under the imperative of capital accumulation, that is, expanded reproduction, and in circumstances in which the most expedient method for securing a tightly controlled mass of labor power for the emerging trans-Atlantic economy became slavery. Surplus would now be extracted on a large scale through the institution of capitalist slavery and its hallmark commodification of the human body (“chattel slavery”). This surplus, in distinction to pre-capitalist slavery, would be pumped back into the emerging circuits of capital in a process of expanded reproduction so that slavery, rather than an economic drain, became a lynchpin of world capitalist development. As Marx observed in this regard: “Slavery is an economic category like any other…Needless to say we are dealing only with direct slavery, with Negro slavery in Surinam, in Brazil, in the Southern States of North America. Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.”[21] There is a wealth of historical research that we cannot revisit here on the creation of “race” in the formative years of the world capitalist system. Linebaugh and Rediker, among others, show in The Many Headed Hydra how the American planter classes backed by European capitalists and states created “race” as a mechanism to differentiate the mass of exploited labor drawn into the emerging circuits of global capital. Eric Williams has noted in his classic Capitalism and Slavery that the indentured servitude of hundreds of thousands of Europeans in the early years of the colonial project in the Americas – and in some cases the outright slavery of Europeans, such as the fate suffered by thousands of Irish victims of Cromwell’s 1649 conquest of Ireland, many of whom were shipped out to slave plantations in Barbados – provided the “historic base” upon which American slavery was founded. “Slavery in the Caribbean has been too narrowly identified with the Negro,” observed Williams. “A racial twist has thereby been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery. Unfree labor in the New World was brown, white, black, and yellow; Catholic, Protestant and pagan.”[22] Robinson argues that “[F]rom its very beginning, this European civilization, containing racial, tribal, linguistic, and regional particularities, was constructed on antagonistic differences.”[23] Putting aside “racial” differences – to reiterate, Robinson never specifies exactly what he means by “racial,” although it seems he means it as a stand-in for cultural/ethnic distinctions – there is nothing historically specific to Europe of “tribal, linguistic, and regional [and cultural/ethnic] particularities” being exploited by ruling groups around the world in function of their rule. If “barbarians” was an established component of European ideology to categorize the “other,” as Robinson observes, so too was it established in civilizations around the world. The Aztec rulers referred derogatorily to those groups outside of its urban empire, especially to the less developed tribes and ethnic groups to the north of their realm, as Chichimecas, a Nahuatl term for barbarian (and also for dog), to be enslaved or sacrificed should they be captured. The Han Chinese rulers referred to Mongol tribes and indeed all outside groups, Europeans included, as “barbarians.” Let us focus on the dialectic of the universal and the particular – without, as Robinson does, collapsing universalism sui generis into bourgeois universalism. The universal is always and only manifest in the particular. We want to focus on how the endless accumulation of capital played out – and still plays out – in a world of concrete differentiation. In this first instance, difference is objectively historical, grounded in the uneven material and cultural development of human societies and civilizations across the globe and their particular histories. The notion that these societies were somehow isolated from one another for the great sweep of world history, however, is a myth. Difference – that is, particular processes of historical development – is always in the larger picture an outcome of historical processes of material and social differentiation within a matrix of interconnections to a larger whole. But key to the discussion of the creation of “race” and modern racism is differentiation as an act, an intentionality of capitalism: the agents of capitalism operating out of its European core appropriated and in fact produced differentiation in function of accumulation and control – in this case, they produced “races” in order to differentiate laboring masses. “Race” and white supremacy were two of capitalism’s world-historic productions vital to the organization of its worldwide circuits of exploitation and accumulation. While Robinson asserts that Europeans developed a “racial consciousness” as far back as antiquity, Linebaugh and Rediker tell a different story. Africans and Europeans conspired together in numerous plots and uprisings. The multitude of multinational, multiracial sailors and their land-based brethren had no racial consciousness; such a consciousness had to be created, not out of some European Nietzschean will to (racial) power but as a class project of the slavers and the bourgeoisie. Ongoing rebellion throughout the Greater Caribbean Basin by Africans and Europeans who had been forced into labor led the planters and colonial states to create juridical distinctions that would legally and socially differentiate slave from servant, assigning each to a distinct insertion into the division of labor.[24] In this way, the ruling groups responded to class struggles from below by the multiethnic exploited classes with a racialist recomposing of global class relations – that is, the constitution of “race” took place through the world historic process of capitalist class formation. “Race” now became, as Stuart Hall put it, “the modality in which class is lived.”[25] Racialized class relations and white supremacy would henceforth become a centerpiece of capitalist colonialism and imperialism, a mechanism for producing a more intensive and repressive control over racialized labor, a more complete appropriation of the wealth that labor has produced in the history of the world capitalist system. Racism, as Allen has shown in his exhaustive study, The Invention of the White Race, would have a dual function: as a mechanism of social control over all of the working classes and as a mechanism ensuring the super-exploitation and super (including juridical and extra-legal) control over the racialized portions of the laboring masses.[26] Moreover, this racial division of the working masses involved generating and reproducing a racial consciousness and a “psychological wage” among the mass of exploited whites – a consciousness that had to be constantly recreated by the ruling groups each time the laboring masses came together in multiracial struggles.[27] The New York City waterfront, Linebaugh and Rediker show, became a staging ground for ongoing multiracial uprisings among white and black laborers, enslaved and free, throughout the 1700s: “The authorities approached the solidarity with trident in hand, each of its points carefully sharpened to puncture the prevailing multiracial practices and bonds of proletarian life in Atlantic New York. First they went after the taverns and other settings where ‘cabals’ of poor whites and blacks could be formed and subversive plans disseminated. Next they self-consciously recomposed the proletariat of New York to make it more difficult for workers along the waterfront to find among themselves sources of unity. And finally, they endeavored to teach racial lessons to New York’s people of European descent, promoting a white identity that would transcend and unify the city’s fractious ethnic divisions.”[28] Robinson objects in Black Marxism and later on in The Anthropology of Marxism to the Marxist claim that racism is “derivative” of capitalism. For him it is the reverse: capitalism is epiphenomenal to a racialism that originated in “European” antiquity, a moment in the development of European racialism.[29] The current celebratory renaissance of Black Marxism among academics and activists is matched by a parallel nostalgic celebration of the U.S. Black Panther Party.[30] Yet, these acolytes want to have their cake and eat it too. There is a clear tension in how they understand the interrelation of “race” and capitalism that they appear oblivious to. The Black Panther Party was an avowedly Marxist organization that explicitly considered racism to be a derivation of capitalism. Here is the party’s Deputy National Chair and Chair of the Chicago chapter, Fred Hampton: “We never negated the fact that there was racism in America, but we said that the by-product, what comes off capitalism, that happens to be racism. That capitalism comes first and next is racism. That when they brought slaves over here, it was to make money. So first the idea came that we want to make money, then the slaves came in order to make that money. That means, through historical fact, that racism had to come from capitalism. It had to be capitalism first and racism was a byproduct of that.”[31] It is no small irony that of Robinson’s three case studies of black Marxists, two were themselves Marxists (the third, Richard Wright expressed reservations about Marxism after his experience confronting racism among white communists). C.L.R. James was a lifelong Trotskyist active in the Fourth International and W.E.B Dubois identified as a socialist for much of his life and was a member of the Communist Party at the time of his death. Were James and Dubois – along with thousands of African Marxists – perched outside of the purported “Black Radical Tradition” because they were Marxists? How could it be otherwise once Robinson asserts that this tradition is “incommensurate” with Marxism? Remarkably, apart from these three, Robinson simply ignores the Third World Marxists, or otherwise disregards their Marxism as if it did not stand in contradiction with his “Black Radical Tradition” construct premised explicitly on its incommensurability with Marxism. These Third World Marxists – from Che Guevara and Jose Mariátegui in the Americas, to Amílcar Cabral, Walter Rodney, Chris Hani, Samir Amin, Claude Ake, and Abdulrahman Babu in Africa, to Mao Zedong and Kamekichi Takahashi in Asia, among countless others – saw in Marxism a theoretical and political tool for liberation from colonialism, from imperialism, and from capitalism. They put forth theoretical contributions, an implacable defense of Marxism, an application of historical materialism to histories and realities distinct from Europe and left rich legacies of Marxist revolutionary praxis. Marx and Engels, charges Robinson, insisted that the European proletariat was the predilect agent of revolution and underestimated the importance of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles. We will not repeat here the work that others have done with extensive reference to Marx and Engel’s writings to belie Robinson’s claim.[32] Marx applauded the Taiping rebellion in China and Indian revolts in the 1850s. Marx speculated that the Chinese uprising might even spark revolutionary upheavals in Europe, and that the European proletariat could learn much from the Indian anti-colonial revolts. And Marx would write in 1860 that “in my opinion, the biggest things that are happening in the world today are on the one hand the movement of slaves in America, started by the death of John Brown, and on the other the movement of the slaves in Russia.”[33] Contrast this to Robinson’s insistence that Marx saw slaves as an “embarrassing residue” of an old mode of production “which disqualified them from historical agency in the modern world.”[34] It was, let us recall, Marx and Engels, followed by European Marxists, from Lenin to Luxembourg, and Marxists from the Third World, who in the first place gave us the theories of colonialism and imperialism, and who argued that only an alliance of proletarian and anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles the world over could liberate the oppressed. Historical Materialism and Historical Idealism On the one hand, Robinson conflates historical materialism with the particular application that Marx undertook of historical materialism as method to the reality of his time as he saw it, while simultaneously conflating class and class analysis with capitalism and also, as Moore notes, collapsing “the significant differences between world-historical class analysis and Eurocentric class formalism.”[35] On the other, he conflates Marxism as an epistemology and ontology of human society with how it was applied and practiced in its particular history by Marxists or in the name of Marxism. If the fundamental premises of historical materialism and human universals have appeared in Marxism as dogmatic or Eurocentric, let us fault the Marxists who applied them in their intellectual and political practices. European Marxists may have been Eurocentric. They may have exhibited a blind spot to racism or suppressed the struggle against it in the name of class struggle. Indeed, they may even have been racist and chauvinistic. But none of this invalidates the fundamental tenets of Marxism. Indeed, Marxists have been at the forefront of critiquing Eurocentrism. It is not clear how the Eurocentrism or the racial chauvinism of Europeans who considered themselves Marxists invalidates historical materialism that, along with the dialectical approach, forms the epistemological core of Marxism that Robinson claims is incommensurate with the struggles of African peoples. The fundamental premise of historical materialism – at once a method, an epistemology, and an ontology – is based on the assumption that human existence along with all other life forms is organized in the first instance around survival, and that this survival depends on complex and structured forms of cooperation and cultural creations that we call society.[36] While Robinson, in a caricatured reading of Marx, claims that historical materialism is limited to nineteenth century Europe, the world historical evidence demonstrates that there are human universals and that these are grounded in the deep history of our species. The quest for survival is universal. That this survival involves a social labor process around which social organization is structured is universal. States and social classes throughout the world did emerge around new forces of production and the surpluses they generated long before capitalism and the rise of Europe. These classes have struggled over the surplus for millennia, in the process generating the social dynamics that are the object of inquiry of Marxist historiography and social science. The basic Marxist categories of analysis – classes and class struggle, surpluses, exploitation, forces and relations of production, and so on – are observed around the world and show to be universally applicable. These fundamental tenets of historical materialism are the core of Marxist epistemology, and all of this applies to the African past as much as it does to the European past. In his explicitly Marxist essay “The Weapon of Theory,” a veritable primer in historical materialism, Amílcar Cabral analyzes the historical class structure and mode of production in Guinea Bissau and how it was altered by colonialism: “[W]e refuse to accept that various human groups in Africa, Asia and Latin America were living without history, or outside history, at the time when they were subjected to the yoke of imperialism… if class struggle is the motor force of history, it is so only in a specific historical period. It is not difficult to see that this factor in the history of each human group is the mode of production – the level of productive forces and the pattern of ownership – characteristic of that group…. Classes themselves, class struggle and their subsequent definition, are the result of the development of the productive forces in conjunction with the pattern of ownership of the means of production. It therefore seems correct to conclude that the level of productive forces, the essential determining element in the content and form of class struggle, is the true and permanent motive force of history.”[37] In Robinson’s essentialist metaphysics, there is something beyond material relations that have led Europeans to practice racial oppression and something beyond real historical experience in the material world that produces a mystical African consciousness. “Some knowledge, some aspect of Black consciousness was unaccounted for in the Marxist explication of the historical processes and sources of the motives in which were attributed the social formation of the modern world.” Robinson goes on to adduce an “Africanity of our consciousness – some epistemological measure culturally embedded in our minds that deemed that racial capitalism we have been witness to was an unacceptable standard of human conduct.”[38] Africans and Europeans are endowed with distinct metaphysical essences, with innate and presumably inverted cultural sensibilities. Robinson tells us that there is a resistance in Western radicalism (read: Marxism) that leads it to take “flight from the recognition that something more than objective material forces were responsible” for the destruction wrought on African peoples. In a fantastical and romanticized misreading of African history, we are told that a clash of civilizations between Europe and Africa “had always to be an unequal contest, not because of the superiority of weapons or the preponderance of numbers but because such violence did not come naturally to African peoples.”[39] Let us put aside Robinson’s misreading of African history: that state and empire formation in Africa prior to the European arrival in the fifteenth century were violent, often bloody, affairs; that the notion of a European antiquity is a myth as is the notion of an aboriginal and irreducible African antiquity. For Robinson, the violent “mechanisms of self-destruction inherent in Western civilization” were a function not of class struggle and class rule but of Western culture, an expression of an underlying civilizational logic stretching back millennia.[40] Robinson here seems to update Leopold Senghor’s mid-twentieth century Negritude, whereby Africans and Europeans are endowed with distinct metaphysical essences: the African soul, Senghor claimed, is essentially spiritual, whereas the European soul is endowed with a scientific rational essence. Indeed, the linear cultural logic that Robinson claims to discern in Marxism, warts and all, is alive and well in the “Black Radical Tradition,” viz, the ideological notion of an irreducible white European essence has its parallel in a black African essence. What are we to make of Robinson’s culturalist explanations for how Europe rose up to constitute the core of world capitalism while Africa and Africans were pushed to the peripheral margins? If only Africans had a cultural repertoire that involved the practice of violence, they could have resisted the European onslaught. If only Europeans had a different cultural makeup, they would not have undertaken that onslaught. If we accept that there is something intrinsic in European culture prior to capitalism that led Europeans to conquer and enslave, then we fall back on the very assumptions of modernization and cultural deficit theory, according to which it was not capitalism but culture (“modern” over “traditional”) that caused the development of some peoples and backwardness of others. In the logic of this account, the vanquishing of the world’s colonized peoples is the result of their cultural deficit. Africans were averse to violence. Not so Europeans. A clash of civilizations, of cultures: the one facilitating conquest, the other leading to enslavement. For Robinson, the European conquest of Africa lies not in superior material capabilities made possible by capitalism but in cultures rendered essentialist, in antagonistic cultural drives. Yet, the conquest of Africa was very much a matter of material superiority. In one bloody afternoon on September 2, 1898, one British regiment lined up on the Eastern shore of the Nile River, not far from Khartoum. They faced 100,000 Nubian soldiers on the other side defending the Mahdist State, the one side armed with machine guns, invented just a decade earlier and not at the disposal of the Sudanese soldiers, who were armed with an earlier generation of weapons. By the end of the battle, 27 British soldiers had died, while every Sudanese soldier perished. The battle was won, opening the way for British colonization and control of the Nile, not by cultural proclivities, but precisely by superior material force. West Africans fought British colonial forces bitterly for decades before they were finally subdued, not because they were averse to violence or had other cultural proclivities that prohibited resistance, but because they simply did not have the same material means, including the military hardware, at the disposal of the invaders (the existence of these material means is explained, in turn, by the productive powers of capitalism in its European core).[41] The contradiction in Robinson’s construct should not go unnoticed. On the one hand, we are told explicitly that Africans were conquered not because of “objective material forces” but because “violence did not come naturally” to them. On the other hand, one of Robinson’s core claims is a history of resistance as part of the “Black Radical Tradition” that involved quite decidedly violent slave uprisings. But let us assume Robinson is correct – that Africa was conquered because the conquerors exhibited a violent racist culture, while the vanquished exhibited a culture averse to violence. Where does that leave us theoretically and politically? Robinson’s account ultimately boils down to the antagonism between two fundamentally opposed psyches. Racism is in the first instance a state of European consciousness, while Africans, averse to violence, exhibited an “epistemology [that] granted supremacy to metaphysics not the material.”[42] An “Africanity of our consciousness” allowed African peoples “to conserve their native consciousness of the world from alien intrusion.”[43] Haider aptly calls this approach a “Black Hegelianism”: “Hegel explains world history as the succession of particular national spirits, the spirit of a people as it is built up objectively by the state, and which depends on the cultural formation of its self-consciousness…Robinson presents a relativist philosophy of history, in the sense that there are different spiritual principles of different peoples, whose relations to one another are not progressive. However, Robinson seeks not to correct Hegel’s false universalism with a real universalism, but rather to oppose the White Absolute Spirit with a unitary Black Radical Tradition, which aspires not to Universal History but to the internal consistency of its own community.”[44] The Political Implications of the Black Marxism Thesis What kind of a political project comes out of Black Marxism? We do not know what vision Robinson has of an emancipatory program for African peoples beyond an ahistorical “Black Radical Tradition,” as Black Marxism does not provide any clues. However, there is no ambiguity in Robinson’s view that Marxism is not just insufficient, but antagonistic to black liberation: “Marxism and Black radicalism [are] two programs for revolutionary change” that “may be so distinct as to be incommensurable” (our emphasis).[45] “Black radicalism,” we have seen, is predicated on a radically distinct African metaphysic. Beyond the history of slave revolts in the diaspora, what is the particularity of African resistance compared to that of other peoples’ resistance in both pre-capitalist and capitalist settings? Should we posit a Brown Radical Tradition, an Asian Radical Tradition, and so on? Even if we accept Robinson’s claim at face value, a “Black Radical Tradition” is not an emancipatory program for the reorganization of society. The idea of “racial capitalism” may appear as a critique of capitalism. But Robinson makes clear from the start that racism “anticipated capitalism in time” and that racialism as a psychic phenomenon of Europeans, not the laws of capital accumulation, drive its dynamics.[46] Racial capitalism, notes Haider, is a category “specifically articulated from the vantage point of the ‘Black Radical Tradition.” Even “the most superficial interpretation of the term implies the existence of a non-racial capitalism – that is, a capitalism which did not emerge and develop within a world market that incorporated racial slavery. There is no such capitalism, except as a fictitious a posteriori construct.”[47] Robinson did not coin the phrase racial capitalism. It dates to at least the 1970s, when South African Marxists told a very different story in applying the concept in reference to the particular racialized form of capitalism that developed during the apartheid era. In his classic study, The Political Economy of Race and Class in South Africa, Bernard Magubane referred to racial capitalism as a form of capitalist organization that facilitated the transfer to wealth from black workers to white capitalists. “An economic system must not only produce and transfer wealth,” he said, “but must produce political and ideological systems that facilitate this transfer.”[48] Robinson’s notion of some cohesive worldwide black community unitarily engaged in the “Black Radical Tradition” insinuates its opposite, some cohesive and unitary white/European community that shares an interest in the reproduction of a racialism etched into its psyche over millennia. Again, Robinson is unambiguous: racism runs so “deep in the bowels of Western thought” that Europeans are “unprepared for anything else.”[49] At best, then, proletarian struggle is replaced by ethnonational struggle; a civilizational conflict among meta-ethnonations or meta- identity groups that obliterates the class antagonisms within each ethnonation and the shared class interests among the exploited across each ethnonation. There can be no possibility of a universal emancipatory program, a class project of the exploited against the exploiters, as that would require, in Meyerson’s words, “abandoning the racial architectonic paradigm for class struggle paradigm.”[50] The appeal of Black Marxism in academia must be placed in the historical moment of its publication in the 1980s, namely the worldwide defeat of proletarian forces and revolutionary struggles of the preceding two decades and capital’s globalizing and neoliberal offensive, which would culminate in the late twentieth century “There Is No Alternative” and “End of History” theses. In was in the context of a radical shift in the worldwide correlation of class and social forces in favor of emergent transnational capital that an era of cynical post-Marxism flourished. As we noted in the introduction, the triumph of neoliberalism found its philosophical alter-ego in a post-modernism/post-structuralism that undermined ideas of broad solidarity, working class struggle, and socialist projects. In place of a universalism of the oppressed was a universe of particulars and the celebration of “differences” and fragmentation, so that there was no underlying principle of human social existence, no collective subject capable of social transformation, indeed no emancipatory project that could unite a majority of humanity. In the face of the attack on Marxism and radical politics, many intellectuals who previously identified with anti-capitalist movements and emancipatory projects withdrew into an identitarian politics of reform and inclusion, a set of political and cultural practices, radical only in appearance, that are at best liberal and that end up shoring up the hegemony of capital. It was the mass struggles of the 1960s and 1970s themselves that helped representatives from the oppressed groups to join the ranks of the professional strata and of the elite. In academia, it opened up space for a new intellectual petty-bourgeoisie, whose class aspirations became expressed in post-modern narratives and the race reductionism of identitarian politics, while in the larger society it found resonance among aspiring middle-class and professional/managerial elements that sprung from the mass movements. The identitarian approach eschews class and the critique of capitalism at the level of theory and analysis, notwithstanding its often radical-sounding language, while advancing the class politics of the petty bourgeoisie, especially the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. If radical ideas only become an historical force when they are channeled into political organization, into a vision of a new world and a revolutionary project to bring it about, the same is true for all ideas, revolutionary or otherwise; they become material forces when they influence mass consciousness and action. As identitarian narratives became hegemonic in the academy and in the broader society, they shaped the commonsense understanding of racial, gender and other forms of oppression. Ethnic, racial, gender and sexual oppression are not tangential, but constitutive of capitalism. There can be no general emancipation without liberation from these forms of oppression. But the inverse is just as critical: all the particular forms of oppression are grounded in the larger social order of global capitalism that perpetually regenerates these oppressions. Considering that culture is porous and is therefore migratory, dynamic, dialectical in construction and process, our challenge is to discover our universal humanity in the context of the cultural differences that are not given but produced, a production that can never have an end point. If Robinson’s treatise were a mere academic broadside against Marxism, we would not deem it necessary to engage in this critique, limited as it has been. But as we noted at the onset, Black Marxism has evolved into something akin to a cult, in which its adherents are prepared to jettison history and critical inquiry in reverent defense of the cult orthodoxy. As its influence grows, so do does its political significance in undermining the type of global class analysis and politics necessary to advance the proletarian internationalism – or transnationalism – that is more urgent than ever as global capitalism spirals into intractable crisis and as far-right and neofascist forces gain ground.[51] Black Marxism has become a favored text with which to badger radical intellectuals and activists who place a premium on proletarian struggle. This has led some among left organizers to fear they may be condemned as Eurocentric, as “class reductionists,” and as “ignoring race” should they place a premium on class analysis, should they insist that racism is an outcome of class exploitation and that its eradication involves a transnational and pan-ethnic proletarian struggle against capitalism. No struggle of the oppressed can be without its organic intellectuals, and the battles to come are as much theoretical and ideological as they are political. At a time when global capital is on an all-out rampage against the global working and popular classes and when our very survival is under threat, we need more than ever a transnational revolutionary proletarian politics. We won’t find that in Black Marxism. Notes: [1] Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), henceforth cited as BM. The original publisher is Zed Press, 1983. All references here are from the 2000 edition. [2] On race reductionism, see Toure Reed, Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism (London: Verso, 2020). [3] In 2017, for instance, the socialist publishing house Verso Press published Futures of Black Radicalism as a tribute to Black Marxism. The contributors include Angela Davis, Nikhil Pal Singh, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, among others. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (eds), Futures of Black Radicalism (London: Verso, 2017). [4] We could only find a handful of critical reviews, among them: August H. Nimtz, Jr., “Marxism and the Black Struggle: The ‘Class v. Race’ Debate Revisited,” Journal of African Studies, No. 7, 1985; Bill V. Mullen, “Notes on Black Marxism,” Cultural Logic: A Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice, Vol. 8, 2001, available at https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/clogic/article/download/191958/188903/218923; Asad Haider, “The Shadow of the Plantation,” Viewpoint Magazine, 17 February 2017, available at https://www.printfriendly.com/p/g/m6D9XU; Joseph G. Ramsey, “Sifting the ‘Stony Soil’ of Black Marxism: Cedric Robinson, Richard Right, and Ellipses of the Black Radical Tradition,” Socialism and Democracy, 34(2-3), 2020; Ken Olende, “Cedric Robinson, Racial Capitalism and the Return of Black Radicalism,” International Socialism, No. 169, 6 January 2021, available at http://isj.org.uk/cedric-robinson-racial-capitalism/#footnote-10080-66-backlink. The most exhaustive critical review we are aware of is Gregory Meyerson, “Rethinking Black Marxism: Reflections on Cedric Robinson and Others,” Cultural Logic: A Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice, Vol. 6, 2000, available at https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/clogic/article/view/192628/189186 [5] BM, pp. 2. [6] Cedric J. Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001). [7] BM, pp. xii. [8] See, inter-alia, William I Robinson, Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). [9] See Zine Magubane’s excellent critique of the current trope of race theory, “Contemporary Race Theory and the Problem of History: A Critique,” NonSite, Issue 39, 11 May 2022, available at https://nonsite.org/contemporary-race-theory-and-the-problem-of-history-a-critique/. [10] Jason W. Moore, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene & the Flight from World History: Dialectical Universalism & the Geographies of Class Power in the Capitalist World-Ecology,” Nordia Geographic Publications, 51:2, pp. 123, available at https://nordia.journal.fi/article/view/116148/69298 [11] See, e.g., Michael G. Hanchard, The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). [12] BM, pp. xxxi. [13] C.L.R. James, Modern Politics (Oakland: PM Press, 2013), pp. 127. [14] BM, pp. 2 [15] BM, pp. 2 [16] Unless otherwise specified, references to instances of pre-capitalist slavery around the world is from Craig Perry, David Eltis, Stanley L. Engerman, and David Richardson (eds), The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Volume 2, AD 500 – AD 1420 (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2021, new edition). [17] BM, pp. 95. [18] BM, pp. 95 [19] Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). [20] Karl Marx writes: “[I]n any given economic formation of society, where not the exchange-value but the use-value set of the product predominates, surplus-labor will be limited by a given set of wants which may be greater or less, and that here no boundless thirst for surplus-labor arises from the nature of the production itself….But as soon as people, whose production still moves within the lower forms of slave-labor, etc., are drawn into the whirlpool of an international market dominated by the capitalistic mode of production, the sale of their products for export becoming their principal interest, the civilized horrors of over-work are grafted on the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom, etc.” Capital, Vol. I (New York: International Publishers, 1967[1867]), pp, 226. [21] Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Chapter Two, “The Metaphysics of Political Economy.” This chapter is reproduced in Marxist.org archives here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02.htm. Marx goes on: “Thus slavery, because it is an economic category, has always existed among the institutions of the peoples. Modern nations have been able only to disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the New World.” Robinson sets up a series of strawmen to support his claims. One of these is that Marx (and Marxists) relegated slavery to “primitive accumulation” (BM, pp. 4). This is simply untrue, as these quotes – and an abundant of writings by Marx and Marxists, make clear. [22] Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (New York: Capricorn Books, 1966). [23] BM, PP. 10 [24] Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). [25] As Moore notes, the disconnection of capitalism from colonialism and imperialism “tends to present any account foregrounding class and capital as ‘reductionist’ – a view that collapses the significant differences between world-historical class analysis and Eurocentric class formalism.” Moore, pp. 4. [26] Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race (London: Verso, Vol. I, 1994, Vol I, 1997I). [27] As Allen put it, “it was only because ‘race’ consciousness superceded class consciousness that the continental plantation bourgeoisie was able to achieve and maintain the degree of social control necessary to proceeding with capital accumulation on the basis of chattel bond-labor.” Allen, Vol. II, pp. 240. [28] The Many Headed Hydra, pp. 207-208. [29] Meyerson notes in his critique of Black Marxism that “the ‘relative autonomy’ of ‘race’ has been enabled by a reduction and distortion of class analysis. The essence of the reduction and distortion involves equating class analysis with some version of economic determinism.”, pp. 1. [30] Noteworthy here is Cedric Johnson’s critical discussion of this nostalgia, The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now,” Catalyst, 1(1), 2017. [31] https://mronline.org/2020/06/11/fred-hampton-black-panther-and-red-revolutionary/ [32] But see, inter-alia, the sources in endnote 3. [33] As quoted in Nimtz, pp. 82. [34] These are Kelley’s words in the Preface to the 2000 edition, summarizing Robinson’s argument. [35] Moore, pp. 4. [36] Let us recall that for Laclau and Mouffe “society” is not a valid object of discourse, as Munck notes (approvingly?…it is not clear). Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985). [37] Amilcar Cabral, Return to the Source (New York: Monthly Review, 1973), pp. 95. [38] BM, 308. [39] For these citations, see BM, pp. 308. [40] BM, pp. 71. [41] There is a vast historiography we cannot reference here on Africa’s pre-modern and modern past, including the violence of state and empire building over millennia prior to the modern capitalist era, and the fierce resistance Africans wages against colonialism in their face of the superior material power of the colonialists. The eminent historian of Africa, Basil Davidson, who could hardly be accused of racism or Eurocentrism, popularized this history in his prolific late twentieth century publications, among them: Africa in History (New York: Touchstone Books, 1995); Modern Africa: A Social and Political History (New York: Routledge, 3rd edition, 1994). [42] BM, pp. 169 [43] BM, pp. 308, 309 [44] Haider, pp. 5. [45] BM, pp. 1. [46] BM, pp. 9. While Robinson does not ever give us a precise definition of “racial capitalism,” Magubane cites the definition put forth by one prominent racial capitalism scholar: “the process of deriving social and economic value from the racial identity of another person.” Nancy Leong, “Racial Capitalism,” Harvard Law Review, as cited by Magubane. [47] Haider, pp. 4-5. [48] Bernard Magubane, The Political Economy of Race and Class in South Africa (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), pp. 4. [49] BM, pp. 76. [50] Meyerson, pp. 11. Meanwhile, even if we reduce class analysis to a quantitative measure of wealth distribution, the very idea of racial wealth, a favorite trope of liberals and anti-racists in the United States, observe Michaels and Reed, “is an empty one”: “If you look at how white and black wealth are distributed in the U.S., you see right away that the very idea of racial wealth is an empty one. The top 10 percent of white people have 75 percent of white wealth; the top 20 percent have virtually all of it. And the same is true for black wealth. The top 10 percent of black households hold 75 percent of black wealth….97 percent of the racial wealth gap exists among the wealthiest half of each population. And more tellingly, more than three-fourths of it is concentrated in the top 10 percent of each. If you say to those white people in the bottom 50 percent (people who have basically no wealth at all) that the basic inequality in the U.S. is between black and white, they know you are wrong. More tellingly, if you say the same thing to the black people in the bottom 50 percent (people who have even less than no wealth at all), they also know you are wrong. The wealth gap among all but the wealthiest blacks and whites is dwarfed by the class gap, the difference between the wealthiest and everyone else across the board.” Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, Jr, “The Trouble with Disparity,” NonSite, Issue 32, 10 September 2020, available at https://nonsite.org/the-trouble-with-disparity/ [51] On this crisis, see inter-alia, William I. Robinson, Can Global Capitalism Endure? (Atlanta: Clarity, 2022). AuthorWilliam I. Robinson is Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Global and International Studies, and Latin American Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. this article was republished from the Philosophical Salon. Archives October 2022 10/3/2022 We Need to Elect More Leaders From the Labor Movement Into Government By: Tom ConwayRead NowWhen a group of custodians in York County, South Carolina, learned their bosses planned to sell them out to save a few pennies, they knew exactly who to turn to for help—a fellow worker who’d walked in the very same shoes. County Councilman William “Bump” Roddey, a longtime member of the United Steelworkers (USW) and a former custodian himself, assured the county workers that he had their backs. Roddey ultimately helped quash the scheme to contract out the county’s janitorial services, a victory both for the custodians and the taxpayers relying on their quality work. Electing more union members like Roddey to councils and mayoral posts will help to combat right-wing attacks on workers and hold local government accountable to the ordinary people it’s intended to serve. “We speak for the American worker,” Roddey, a member of USW Local 1924 who works at New-Indy Containerboard, said of union members. “We speak for the middle class. The agenda is not about us if we are not at the table.” If the county had privatized cleaning services, any small budgetary savings would have paled next to the pain inflicted on the custodians, Roddey said, noting officials out of touch with working people “don’t too quickly grasp these scenarios.” “The perspective of the people who sign the front of the paycheck is different from the perspective of the people who sign the back of the paycheck,” said Roddey, whose colleagues on the council include three business owners. “I bring that back-of-the-paycheck perspective to everything I do.” Attacks on working people aren’t unique to South Carolina. After the school board in Putnam, Connecticut, contracted out custodial services, for example, workers lost access to their pension system even though they’d been promised no change in benefits. In recent months, USW-represented school bus drivers in Bay City, Michigan, beat back efforts to contract out their work, while union members in Los Angeles County, California, won their own fight against privatization. Electing more union members would ensure that local officials instead invest their energies in productive ways, such as building robust, worker-centered economies. Some forward-thinking local officials have used their authority to pass worker protection laws, to establish agencies for enforcing those safeguards, and to create workers councils to take testimony on job-related issues, noted the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, in a recent report. At Seattle’s Office of Labor Standards, for example, a full-time equivalent staff of 34 enforces 18 worker-centered ordinances, including those requiring paid sick time, employment opportunity, and protections for gig workers. Local officials have the power to hold corporations accountable when they accept public subsidies with promises of creating dignified, family-sustaining jobs. It’s also the prerogative of mayors and councils to provide resources, like affordable housing, that help level the playing field for struggling workers. And the advocacy of local officials can buoy workers in difficult times. Roddey and other leaders stepped up to support workers at Giti Tire in Chester County, South Carolina, during a USW organizing drive sparked by low pay, unsafe working conditions, and discrimination. “I certainly recognize the challenges that workers are facing every day at Giti,” said Roddey, part of a community coalition that signed a letter to corporate management in November 2021 demanding an end to its abusive practices. Having union members in charge at city hall not only protects jobs but may even help to ensure the survival of the community itself. Clairton, Pennsylvania, Mayor Richard Lattanzi points out that no one can adequately represent his city without a deep appreciation for the Clairton Coke Works and the Steelworkers who have anchored the community for decades. And while meeting the daily needs of his constituents, many of them USW members and other union workers, Lattanzi also must defend the coke works against extremists eager to shut it down. “That’s one-third of our tax base, and that’s our identity,” said Lattanzi, a longtime USW member who worked at the Irvin Works in the nearby community of West Mifflin. Some union members run for local office because their concern for coworkers spills over into the communities they call home. “Our job as a union and as union leaders is to take care of people, especially working people, and that’s what our communities are made up of,” observed Steve Kramer, president of USW Local 9777 and a member of the Dyer, Indiana, Town Council, calling his step into government service “a natural and easy progression.” Union membership equips workers with the skills they need for public office. Union members understand the power of solidarity and diversity. They’re accustomed to having a voice and standing up for what’s right. “What better person to run for elected office than a union member? We’re problem-solvers,” said Kramer, who’s helped to ensure that Dyer buys American-made products, that town-funded projects support good jobs, and that government resources are equitably distributed across the community. “I wish more union members would step up and do it. I know we have talent out there,” he continued, noting that in addition to elected positions, communities need volunteers to serve on water, library, and many other boards. An influx of union members into councils and other local posts would also help pave the way to more worker representation at other levels of government. As these local officials move up to higher office, Roddey noted, state legislatures and Congress will become more responsive to the will of the people. “There’s a path to changing how these bodies operate, and the first step is getting involved locally,” he said. AuthorTom Conway is the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW). This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute. Archives October 2022 A cycle of protests began in Haiti in July 2018, and—despite the pandemic—has carried on since then. The core reason for the protest in 2018 was that in March of that year the government of Venezuela—due to the illegal sanctions imposed by the United States—could no longer ship discounted oil to Haiti through the PetroCaribe scheme. Fuel prices soared by up to 50 percent. On August 14, 2018, filmmaker Gilbert Mirambeau Jr. tweeted a photograph of himself blindfolded and holding a sign that read, “Kot Kòb Petwo Karibe a???” (Where did the PetroCaribe money go?). He reflected the popular sentiment in the country that the money from the scheme had been looted by the Haitian elite, whose grip on the country had been secured by two coups d’état against the democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide (once in 1991 and again in 2004). Rising oil prices made life unlivable for the vast majority of the people, whose protests created a crisis of political legitimacy for the Haitian elite. In recent weeks, the streets of Haiti have once again been occupied by large marches and roadblocks, with the mood on edge. Banks and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—including Catholic charities—faced the wrath of the protesters, who painted “Down with [the] USA” on buildings that they ransacked and burned. The Creole word dechoukaj or uprooting—that was first used in the democracy movements in 1986—has come to define these protests. The government has blamed the violence on gangs such as G9 led by the former Haitian police officer Jimmy “Babekyou” (Barbecue) Chérizier. These gangs are indeed part of the protest movement, but they do not define it. The government of Haiti—led by acting President Ariel Henry—decided to raise fuel prices during this crisis, which provoked a protest from the transport unions. Jacques Anderson Desroches, president of the Fós Sendikal pou Sove Ayiti, told the Haitian Times, “If the state does not resolve to put an end to the liberalization of the oil market in favor of the oil companies and take control of it,” nothing good will come of it. “[O]therwise,” he said, “all the measures taken by Ariel Henry will be cosmetic measures.” On September 26, trade union associations called for a strike, which paralyzed the country, including the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. The United Nations (UN) evacuated its nonessential staff from the country. UN Special Representative Helen La Lime told the UN Security Council that Haiti was paralyzed by “[a]n economic crisis, a gang crisis, and a political crisis” that have “converged into a humanitarian catastrophe.” Legitimacy for the United Nations in Haiti is limited, given the sexual abuse scandals that have wracked the UN peacekeeping missions in Haiti, and the political mandate of the United Nations that Haitian people see as oriented to protecting the corrupt elite that does the bidding of the West. The current President Ariel Henry was installed to his post by the “Core Group” (made up of six countries, this group is led by the United States, the European Union, the UN, and the Organization of American States). Henry became the president after the still-unsolved murder of the unpopular President Jovenel Moïse (thus far, the only clarity is that Moïse was killed by Colombian mercenaries and Haitian Americans). The UN’s La Lime told the Security Council in February that the “national investigation into his [Moïse’s] murder has stalled, a situation that fuels rumors and exacerbates both suspicion and mistrust within the country.” Haiti’s CrisesAn understanding of the current cycle of protests is not possible without looking clearly at four developments in Haiti’s recent past. First, the destabilization of the country after the second coup against Aristide in 2004, which took place right after the catastrophic earthquake of 2010, led to the dismantling of the Haitian state. The Core Group of countries took advantage of these serious problems in Haiti to import onto the island a wide range of Western NGOs, which seemed to substitute for the Haitian state. The NGOs soon provided 80 percent of the public services. They “frittered” considerable amounts of the relief and aid money that had come into the country after the earthquake. Weakened state institutions have meant that the government has few tools to deal with this unresolved crisis. Second, the illegal U.S. sanctions imposed on Venezuela crushed the PetroCaribe scheme, which had provided Haiti with concessionary oil sales and $2 billion in profits between 2008 and 2016 that was meant for the Haitian state but vanished into the bank accounts of the elite. Third, in 2009, the Haitian parliament tried to increase minimum wages on the island to $5 per day, but the U.S. government intervened on behalf of major textile and apparel companies to block the bill. David Lindwall, former U.S. deputy chief of mission in Port-au-Prince, said that the Haitian attempt to raise the minimum wage “did not take economic reality into account” but was merely an attempt to appease “the unemployed and underpaid masses.” The bill was defeated due to U.S. government pressure. These “unemployed and underpaid masses” are now on the streets being characterized as “gangs” by the Core Group. Fourth, the acting President Ariel Henry likes to say that he is a neurosurgeon and not a career politician. However, in the summer of 2000, Henry was part of the group that created the Convergence Démocratique (CD), set up to call for the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Aristide. The CD was set up in Haiti by the International Republican Institute, a political arm of the U.S. Republican Party, and by the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy. Henry’s call for calm on September 19, 2022, resulted in the setting up of more barricades and in the intensification of the protest movement. His ear is bent more to Washington than to Petit-Goâve, a town on the northern coast that is the epicenter of the rebellion. Waves of Invasions At the UN, Haiti’s Foreign Minister Jean Victor Geneus said, “[T]his dilemma can only be solved with the effective support of our partners.” To many close observers of the situation unfolding in Haiti, the phrase “effective support” sounds like another military intervention by the Western powers. Indeed, the Washington Post editorial called for “muscular action by outside actors.” Ever since the Haitian Revolution, which ended in 1804, Haiti has faced waves of invasions (including a long U.S. occupation from 1915 to 1930 and a U.S.-backed dictatorship from 1957 to 1986). These invasions have prevented the island nation from securing its sovereignty and have prevented its people from building dignified lives. Another invasion, whether by U.S. troops or the United Nations peacekeeping forces, will only deepen the crisis. At the United Nations General Assembly session on September 21, U.S. President Joe Biden said that his government continues “to stand with our neighbor in Haiti.” What this means is best understood in a new Amnesty International report that documents the racist abuse faced by Haitian asylum seekers in the United States. The United States and the Core Group might stand with people like Ariel Henry, but they do not seem to stand with the Haitian people, including those who have fled to the United States. Options for the Haitian people will come from the entry of trade unions into the protest wave. Whether the unions and the community organizations—including student groups that have reemerged as key actors in the country—will be able to drive a dynamic change out of the anger being witnessed on the streets remains to be seen. 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 Globetrotter. Archives October 2022 10/3/2022 Labour conference delegate suspended after opposing arming Ukraine By: Morning StarRead NowALABOUR conference delegate who spoke against uncritical support for the Ukrainian government on Tuesday has been suspended. Angelo Sanchez of Leicester South CLP was the only speaker to oppose Composite 13 at conference, which backed sending more weaponry to the authorities in Kiev as it battles the Russian invasion. Pointing out that the Ukrainian government has ripped up collective bargaining rights and banned opposition parties, Mr Sanchez had told conference: “It means that the future Labour government would be sending money to a government, the Ukrainian government, that is repressing the left in their own country, a government that is criminalising socialist parties and imprisoning Ukrainian activists. “If you support this motion, motion 13 on Ukraine, you are not supporting the Ukrainian people, you are supporting only the United States, you are supporting neoliberalism, you are supporting imperialism.” Some delegates tried to shout him down as he spoke while others jeered that he was a “Putin apologist.” Another delegate, speaking at the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD) fringe meeting on Tuesday night, said she had felt too intimidated to speak against the motion after seeing the way he was attacked, though she added that session chair Angela Eagle had stood up for his right to be heard and rebuked unruly delegates. Mr Sanchez was suspended yesterday, the Morning Star understands – despite Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer claiming in his own conference speech to stand for tolerance of differing opinions within the party. AuthorMorning Star This article was republished from Morning Star. Archives October 2022 “They won’t arrest my thoughts. They won’t arrest my dreams. If they don’t let me walk, I’ll walk with your legs. If they don’t let me talk, I’ll speak through your mouth. If my heart stops beating, it will beat in your heart.” – Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva. Overcoming poverty isn't a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. This is the best sentence to explain the works of former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio da Silva, better known as Lula, the most popular president of Brazilian history, the only president that completed two terms, and the first president from the left, honored with Honoris Causa from Sciences Po, one who served the working class instead of Brazilian elites, first illiterate president who constructed most universities in Brazil. This is how people remember him. On January 24th, 2018, Federal judge Sergio Moro passed the judgment based on the Lava Jato scandal against Lula and sentenced him to 10 years in prison without any evidence (which became 12 years in prison when he appealed). The whole process was so rigged that the media reported the judgment a few minutes before the Brazilian Supreme Court gave its verdict. The book is comprised of the interview conducted with Lula in February 2018, just 2 months before his arrest where he exemplified his side, how convinced he was about his works, his views, Lulism (a national movement that United the middle class with the working class in Brazil), Lava Jato scandal, also known as car wash scandal which landed him in prison. The book primarily focused on his trial and politics in Brazil and the coup and failure of his successor Dilma Rousseff. He explains how the capitalist bluffed the Brazilians, how it ruined the society and basic rights of the poor, and how they controlled everything. It is pertinent to comprehend who Lula is, whom Obama called the most popular leader in the world. Lula was born in 1945 in Caetés located 250 km from Recife, capital of Pernambuco, a state in the Northeast of Brazil, which is one of the most impoverished regions of Brazil. He was born into a poor family and had to quit school after the second grade to work and assist his family. At the age of 12, he worked as a shoe shiner and street vendor. He began to work in a warehouse when he was 14. When 16-year-old Pele became the youngest to score a goal in the world cup final and lifted the Jules Rimet trophy, Lula was a child working in a factory. At the age of 19, he had an accident in an automobile parts factory in which he lost his left hand’s pinky. He had to run to several hospitals before he received the treatment. This juncture shaped his ideas and developed his inquisitiveness in participating in the Worker’s Union. The days of the American-backed military dictatorship were the darkest period of Brazil’s history, a period which the current Brazilian president Jair Bolosnaro glorifies. This era was characterized by a high level of unemployment, crippling recession, and most importantly the exploitation of the Brazilian proletariat. Lula started as a metalworker in 1966 at Villares Metals S.A, where inspired by his brother Frei Chico he joined the labour movement. His brother was a militant of the Communist Party himself who introduced Lula to labour militancy. He became the president of the Union in 1975. Lula co-founded the Worker’s Party (PT) in 1980. He faced many hardships, organized labour strikes, and went to jail. He became the most voted lawmaker in 1986. He then ran for 3 unsuccessful presidential elections before becoming President in 2002. His presidency was marked by 76% reduction in chronic poverty, more than 20 million people were lifted from acute poverty, extreme poverty was dropped from 12% to 4.8%, unemployment from 10.5% to 5.7%, tripled the education budget, opened 14 new universities and illiteracy rate dropped from 17% to 9.6%. He later assumed the role of Chief of Staff under President Dilma Rousseff in 2012. The Brazilian right wing started an impeachment process based on the Lava Jato scandal. This was the time when Jair Bolsonaro (who was very much unknown) broke into headlines when he honoured the notorious and most sadistic Brazilian general, Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, who tortured Rousseff when she was imprisoned. It was a Parliamentary coup and Brazilian democracy faced the biggest threat since the days of the military junta. Before the 2018 elections, Lula enjoyed 39% of the votes and Bolsonaro 19%, but then Lula was incarcerated which was a ruse planned by Brazilian elites and right-wing groups. Bolsonaro's rating reached the peak when he was stabbed in a rally in September 2017, which proved vital for him as his campaign was based on chaos (most far-right election campaigns are based on threats and securities which are non-existent most of the time, but they use this fear which they manufacture to win elections and dismantle democracy). The judge who sentenced Lula, Sergio Moro, became the Minister of Justice in the Bolsonaro administration. This proves the statement that A. G. Noorani wrote in his book The Trial of Bhagat Singh, “court-rooms serve as the most convenient and effective weapon for the ruling powers whenever they took up arms against freedom and right. For a repressive and tyrannical government, no other weapon is better suited for vengeance and injustice.” Lula was released in 2019 on the orders of Supreme Federal Court judge Edson Fachin who nullified charges against him because he was tried by a court that did not have proper jurisdiction over his case. What Lula did for the poor and weak people in his country was something that no other president was able to achieve. He stood against racism and for the rights of blacks in his country; he was (and is) a man whose raison d'être was that every Brazilian would wake up in the morning knowing that they would have breakfast, lunch and dinner each day. This is a good read to get an idea of Brazilian politics and the impact that Lula left on Brazilian society. This book is important for not just Brazilians who are going out to vote on 2nd October but for all of us progressives and leftist who want to send fascism back to the sewers of history. It motivates us to work tirelessly for the betterment of the working class, to develop class consciousness, to get an idea of the state weaponry and tricks that the right wing employs in the same manner everywhere by spreading hatred. Read this book comrades. "Where there is hunger there is no hope. There is only desolation and pain. Hunger nurtures violence and fanaticism. A world where people starve will never be safe."- Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva. AuthorHarsh Yadav is from India and has just recently graduated from Banaras Hindu University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry. Harsh is a Marxist Leninist who is intrigued by different Marxist Schools of Thought, Political Philosophies, Feminism, Foreign Policy and International Relations, and History. He also maintains a bookstagram account (https://www.instagram.com/epigrammatic_bibliophile/?hl=en) where he posts book reviews, writes about historical impact, socialism, and social and political issues. Archives October 2022 |
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