Venture capitalism is about to find itself in a new arena – space. Its existence has already started as SpaceX has begun to launch its first rockets into space. Jeff Bezos said “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it.”[i] The rich want to get to space, and capitalists are extremely good at innovation. The development of space is inevitable and important, but the critical question is by whom.
 
The primary avenue for wealth creation in space will be mining. The vast number of material resources available on the nearest celestial bodies[ii], combined with the potential for strip mining, means that the first few corporations to mine in space will be wildly successful. Goldman Sachs claims that the first trillionaire will make their fortune in space[iii]. After purchasing competing rocket programs to create an oligopoly on access to space itself, these companies would quickly dwarf today’s Earthbound mega-corporations.
 
Once these corporations are off earth and recruit a space-based working-class, to which government will they answer?  What would stop these corporate settlements from arming their borders, proclaiming themselves free from governance, and lobbying Earth politicians into the ground with their newfound billions? Current governments are running a deficit pay for healthcare; the notion that they could finance a fleet of rockets to enforce bureaucratic regulations in space is a fantasy.
 
If these space-mining initiatives are powered by economic democracy, humans could have access to all the materials they require. The trove of metals and minerals would be at the behest of society as a whole, eliminating the politics of scarcity. Without such scarcity, an entire upper bound for human advancement and consumerism could disappear. Under the influence of capitalism, however, the process would be much different. The space-faring miners could flood the market and bankrupt miners on Earth repeatedly. Then, they would leverage another monopoly and most likely follow in the diamond industry’s footsteps – choking out supply to keep prices and revenue high[iv].
 
Space settlements would exist, but their leaders would not hold power democratically. These space settlements’ only purpose would be to generate more wealth and luxury. The existence of a ruling luxury class looking to build private kingdoms is one thing, but a more insidious issue would present itself. Everything involved with the settlement – including housing, utilities, food, and return tickets to earth– would be owned and controlled by the corporation. The company would set both the workers’ wages and the cost to leave the space settlement. It might not happen immediately, but the conditions are almost inevitably going to drift towards an exit ticket being too expensive to afford. A captive workforce with no option but to accept its wages is irresistible to any wealthy capitalist. Indentured servitude has and always will be attractive to a company’s bottom line.
 
There’s one other problem involved with the rich and powerful holding humanity hostage in space. A society based on wealth accumulation only seeks to become more and more extravagant. The drive to explore, create, learn, and discover falls by the wayside — bottlenecked and strangled by the desire for extreme luxury. Only a society based on economic democracy will allow humanity to choose exploration and science for its own sake because sometimes, discovery doesn’t find itself in the name of wealth.



​Citations



[i] Döpfner, M. (2018, April 28). Jeff Bezos reveals what it's like to build an empire and become the richest man in the world - and why he's willing to spend $1 billion a year to fund the most important mission of his life. Retrieved November 05, 2020, from https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-interview-axel-springer-ceo-amazon-trump-blue-origin-family-regulation-washington-post-2018-4

[ii] Bonsor, K. (2020, June 22). How Asteroid Mining Will Work. Retrieved November 05, 2020, from https://science.howstuffworks.com/asteroid-mining.htm

[iii] Business, R. T. (2018, April 22). Space mining will produce world's first trillionaire. Retrieved November 05, 2020, from https://www.rt.com/business/424800-first-trillionaire-space-miner/

[iv] Nace, T. (2018, May 30). De Beers Gives In And Begins Selling Lab Made Diamonds. Retrieved November 05, 2020, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2018/05/30/de-beers-gives-in-and begins-selling-lab-made-diamonds/?sh=5d5a25694636

About the Author:
Casper Rove is a blue collar worker from Omaha, Nebraska who coaches highschool debate part-time. His free time is best spent making headway in his endeavor for sustainable subsistence farming and looking for the most pragmatic way to convert socialist thought into socialist infrastructure.

This is the season to remind all our Christian friends of the relationship between Christianity and Marxism-Leninism and the working class movement. Engels (“On the History of Early Christianity”) tells us that there are “notable points of resemblance” between the early working class movement and Christianity.
​
First, both movements were made up of oppressed poor people from the lower ranks of society. Christianity was a religion of slaves and people without rights subjugated by the state and very similar to the types of poor oppressed working people that founded the earliest socialist and worker’s organizations in modern times.

Second, both movements held out the hope of salvation and liberation from tyranny and oppression: one in the world to come, the other in this world.

Third, both movements were (and in some places still are) attacked by the powers that be and were discriminated against, their members killed or imprisoned, despised, and treated as enemies of the status quo.

Fourth, despite fierce persecution both movements grew and became more powerful. After three hundred years of struggle Christians took control of the Roman Empire and became a world religion. The worker’s movement is still struggling. After its first modern revolutionary appearance as a fully self conscious movement (1848) it achieved a major impetus in the later part of the nineteenth century with the growth of the First and Second Internationals, and the German Social Democratic movement. It too is now a world wide movement with Socialist, Social Democratic and Communist parties spread around the world. [The rise and fall of the USSR was a bump in the road the consequences of which have yet to be determined.]

The Book of Acts reveals that the early Christians were primitive communists sharing their goods in common and leading a collective life style. This original form of Christianity was wiped out when the Roman Empire under Constantine imposed Christianity as the official religion of the state and set up the Catholic Church in order to make sure that the religious teachings of Jesus and the early followers of his movement would be perverted to protect the interests of the wealthy and the power of the state.

With few exceptions, all forms of modern day Christianity are descended from this faux version, based on a mixture of Jewish religious elements and the practices of Greco-Roman paganism, and only the modern working class and progressive movements (basically secular) carry on in the spirit of egalitarianism and socialism of the founder of Christianity.

Engels points out that there were many attempts in history (especially from the Middle Ages up to modern times) to reestablish the original communistic Christianity of Jesus and his early followers.

These attempts manifested themselves as peasant uprisings through the middle ages which tried to overthrow feudal oppression and create a world based on the teaching of Jesus and his Apostles.​

These movements failed giving rise to the state sanctioned Christianity of modern times. Engels mentions some of these movements– i.e., the Bohemian Taborites led by Jan Zizka (“of glorious memory”) and the German Peasant War. These movements are now represented, Engels points out, by the working men communists since the 1830s.

Engels reveals that misleadership is also a problem in these early movements (and still today I would add) due to the low levels of education found amongst the poor and oppressed. He quotes a contemporary witness, Lucian of Samosata (“the Voltaire of classic antiquity”). The Christians “despise all material goods without distinction and own them in common– doctrines which they have accepted in good faith, without demonstration or proof. And when a skillful impostor who knows how to make clever use of circumstances comes to them he can manage to get rich in a short time and laugh up his sleeve over these simpletons.” The Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwell types have been around for a long time. I am sure readers can add a long list of names.

Engels views on early Christianity were formed from his reading of what he considered “the only scientific basis” for such study, namely the new critical works by German scholars of religion.​

First were the works of the Tubingen School, including David Strauss (The Life of Jesus). This school has shown that 1) the Gospels are late writings based on now lost original sources from the time of Jesus and his followers; 2) only four of Paul’s letters are by him; 3) all miracles must be left out of account if you want a scientific view; 4) all contradictory presentations of the same events must also be rejected. This school then wants to preserve what it can of the history of early Christianity. By the way, this is essentially what Thomas Jefferson tried to do when he made his own version of the New Testament.

A second school was based on the writings of Bruno Bauer. What Bauer did was to show that Christianity would have remained a Jewish sect if it had not, in the years after the death of its founder, mutated by contact with Greco-Roman paganism, into a new religion capable of becoming a world wide force. Bauer showed that Christianity, as we know it, did not come into the Roman world from the outside (“from Judea”) but that it was “that world’s own product.” Christianity owes as much to Zeus as to Yahweh.

Engels maintains that The Book of Revelations is the only book in the New Testament that can be properly dated by means of its internal evidence. It can be dated to around 67-68 AD since the famous number 666, as the mark of the beast or the Antichrist, represents the name of the Emperor Nero according to the rules of numerology. Nero was overthrown in 68. This book, Engels says, is the best source of the views of the early Christians since it is much earlier than any of the Gospels, and may actually have been the work the apostle John (which the Gospel and letters bearing his name were not).

In this book we will not find any of the views that characterize official Christianity as we have it from the time of the Emperor Constantine to the present day. It is purely a Jewish phenomenon in Revelations. There is no trinity as God has seven spirits (so the Holy Ghost is impossible Engels remarks). Jesus Christ is not God but his son, he is not even equal in status to his father. Nevertheless he has pretty high status, his followers are called his “slaves” by John. Jesus is “an emanation of God, existing from all eternity but subordinate to God” just as the seven spirits are. Moses is more or less “on an equal footing” with Jesus in the eyes of God. There is no mention of the later belief in original sin. John still thought of himself as a Jew, there is no idea at this time of “Christianity” as a new religion.

In this period there were many end of times revelations in circulation both in the Semitic and in the Greco-Roman world. They all proclaimed that God was (or the Gods were) pissed off at humanity and had to be appeased by sacrifices. John’s revelation was unique because it proclaimed “by one great voluntary sacrifice of a mediator the sins of all times and all men were atoned for once and for all– in respect of the faithful.”

Since all peoples and races could be saved this is what, according to Engels, “enabled Christianity to develop into a universal religion.” [Just as the concept of the workers of the world uniting to break their chains and build a world wide communist future makes Marxism-Leninism a universal philosophy.]

In Heaven before the throne of God are 144,000 Jews (12,000 from each tribe). In the second rank of the saved are the non Jewish converts to John’s sect. Engels points out that neither the “dogma nor the morals” of later Christianity are to be found in this earliest of Christian expressions.

Some Muslims would presumably not like this Heaven, not only are there no (female) virgins in it, there are no women whatsoever. In fact, the 144,000 Jews have never been “defiled” by contact with women! This is a men’s only club.

Engels says that the book shows a spirit of “struggle”, of having to fight against the entire world and a willingness to do so. He says the Christians of today lack that spirit but that it survives in the working class movement. We must remember he was writing this in 1894.

There were other sects of Christianity springing up at this time too. John’s sect eventually died out and the Christianity that won out was an amalgam of different groups who finally came together around the Council of Nicaea (325 AD). Those who did not sign on were themselves persecuted out of existence by the new Christian state.

We can see the analogy to the early sects of socialists and communists, says Engels. We can also see what happened after the Russian Revolution (Leninists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, Bukharinites, Maoists, etc., etc.). Here in the US today we have the CPUSA, the SWP, Worker’s World, Revolutionary CP, Socialist Party, Sparticists, and etc., etc.).

Engels thought that sectarianism was a thing of the past in the Socialist movement because the movement had matured and outgrown it. This, we now know, was a temporary state of affairs at the end of the 19th Century with the consolidation of the German SPD. The wide spread sectarianism of today suggests the worker’s movement is still in its infancy.

Engels says this sectarianism is due to the confusion and backwardness of the thinking of the masses and the preponderate role that leaders play due to this backwardness. The Russian masses of 1917 and the Chinese of 1949 were a far different base than the German working class of the 1890s.

“This confusion,” Engels writes,”is to be seen in the formation of numerous sects which fight against each other with at least the same zeal as against the common external enemy [China vs USSR, Stalin and Trotsky, Stalin and Tito, Vietnam vs China border war, Albania vs China and USSR. ad nauseam]. So it was with early Christianity, so it was in the beginning of the socialist movement [and still is, peace Engels!], no matter how much that worried the well-meaning worthies who preached unity where no unity was possible.”

Finally, for those fans of the 60s sexual revolution, Engels says that many of the sects of early Christianity took the opposite view of John and actually promoted sexual freedom and free love as part of the new dispensation. They lost out. Engels says this sexual liberation was also found in the early socialist movement. He would not, I think, have approved of the excessive prudery of the Soviets.

In the last part of his essay Engels explains that the purpose of the Book of Revelations (by John of Patmos) was to communicate its religious vision to the seven churches of Asia Minor and to the larger sect of Jewish Christians that they represented.

At this time, circa 69 AD, the entire Mediterranean world much of the of Near East and Western Europe were under the control of the Roman Empire. This was a multicultural empire made of hundreds of tribes, groups, cities and peoples. Within the empire was a vast underclass of workers, freedmen, slaves and peasants whose exploited labor was lived off of by a ruling class of landed aristocrats and merchants. In 69 AD the empire was in essence a military dictatorship controlled by the army and led by the Emperor (from the Latin word for “general”– imperator).

At this time there were peoples but no nations in our sense of the word. “Nations became possible,” Engels says, “only through the downfall of Roman world domination.” The effects of which are still being felt in the Middle East and parts of Europe, especially eastern Europe.

For the exploited masses of the Empire it was basically impossible to resist the military power of Rome. There were uprisings and slave revolts but they were always put down by the legions. This was the background for what became a great revolutionary movement of the poor and the exploited, a movement that became Christianity. The purpose of the movement was to escape from persecution, enslavement and exploitation.
A solution was offered. “But” Engels remarks, “not in this world.”

Another feature of the work is that it is a symbolical representation of contemporary first century politics and John thinks that Jesus’s second coming is near at hand. Jesus tells John, “Behold, I come quickly” three times (22:7, 22:12, 22:20). His failure to show up by now doesn’t seem to pose a problem for Christians.

As far as the later Christian religion of love is concerned, Engels reports that you won’t find it in Revelation, at least as it regards the enemies of the Christians. There is no cheek turning going on here: it’s all fire and brimstone for the foes of Jesus. Engels says “undiluted revenge is preached.” God is even going to completely blot out Rome from the face of the earth. He changed his mind evidently as it is still a popular tourist destination and the pope has even set up shop there.

As was pointed out earlier the God of John is Yahweh, there is no Trinity, it is He, not Christ, who will judge mankind and they will judged according to their works (no justification by faith here, sorry Luther), no doctrine of original sin, no baptism, and no Eucharist or Mass. Almost everyone of these later developments came from Roman and Greek, as well as Egyptian mystery religions. Zoroastrian elements from the Zend – Avesta are also present. These are the idea of Satan and the Devil as an evil force opposed to Yahweh, a great battle at the end of time between good and evil, [the final conflict] and the idea of a second coming. All these ideas were picked up by the Jews during their contact with the Persians before their return after the Babylonian captivity and transmitted to the early Christians.

Once we realize all this we can also see why Islam was able to rise to the status of a world religion as well. Those areas of the world that were not the home land of Greco-Roman paganism were open to Islam which spread in areas of Semitic settlement and where Christianity had been imposed by force, so could Islam be.

We will give Engels the last word, the Book of Revelation “shows without any dilution what Judaism, strongly influenced by Alexandria, contributed to Christianity. All that comes later is  Western , Greco-Roman addition.”

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

Attempts to manipulate and control one’s mind date back as far as 1550 BCE to the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It details occult rituals using “methods of torture and intimidation (to create trauma), the use of potions (drugs), and the casting of spells (hypnotism), ultimately resulting in the total enslavement of the initiate” (Edward). In the beginning of the Cold War era, rumor had it that Stalin was perfecting mind control techniques in the gulags on Chinese and Korean prisoners, but Allen Dulles and Richard Helms wouldn’t let the Soviets go through with this unchallenged. Initially their research into mind control and hypnosis would produce Project Bluebird in 1951, which would be renamed to Project Artichoke later that year to reflect the changes in scope and study- both of which were to be expanded. Artichoke continued to expand, and in 1953 Project MKULTRA would rise from its ashes.
 
MKULTRA was the umbrella project for about 150 subprojects all centering on how the CIA could create their own “Manchurian Candidates” to run operations for them without questioning it, and then having no recollection at all. MI6 in Britain did some work with the CIA, with Dr. Ewen Cameron leading much of their research in Canada. Using witting and unwitting test subjects, MKULTRA studied everything from religious cults, behavioral analysis, sensory deprivation, and chemotherapy radiation, to psychedelic drugs. Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, more commonly known as LSD, or acid, was a drug that was given to subjects as a truth serum. Project MKULTRA was officially shut down by the mid to early 1970s, but attempts at mind control, especially on a national scale, were not. The legacies and effects of MKULTRA are not fully known to us yet, but that which we can speculate is severe. The victims, many unwitting American and Canadian citizens, may never be known to us completely. Many of the victims don’t know that they were associated with the project because their trauma was so intense that the body’s natural reaction was to simply dissociate.
 
The threat of the Soviet Union loomed over Washington like a cloud- ominous and intangible. At the CIA headquarters in Langley it was like a tornado. The Agency’s only mission had become to defend the world from Soviet communism. At the end of WWII there was a race between the British, French, Americans, and Soviets to recruit the intellectual backbone of the Third Reich. This organized, clandestine effort was named Operation Paperclip. Included in this group are those responsible for weaponizing sarin gas and bubonic plague, many of whom would later stand trial for war crimes at Nuremburg. Known as the “Angel of Death” for his work in Auschwitz, “[Josef] Mengele’s research served as a basis for the covert, illegal CIA human research program named MKULTRA” (Edward). Although many in the CIA began their espionage careers in the military or OSS during WWII fighting against the very people they now employed, they saw it as a lesser of two evils scenario. In their minds, they had to make a choice between fascism and communism and using the intellectual leaders of the fascist Third Reich was more appealing than allowing the communist powers a leg up in covert operations (CIA).
 
MKULTRA was the result of a number of projects within different government agencies. Before 1953 the US Navy was studying the effects of brain concussions, specifically centering on memory loss. At some point during that research, they began to wonder if a drug could induce the same amnesia that occurs with a concussion, allowing the potentially successful Manchurian Candidate to have no recollection of their actions. It was at that point that the project was handed off to the CIA because it required human subjects that could not be justified by medical-therapeutic grounds (Drummond). In 1953 the CIA Chief of Special Operations, Richard Helms, wrote a memo to Director Allen Dulles in which he “proposed a program for the ‘covert use of biological and chemical materials’ both for its offensive potential’ to ‘give us thorough knowledge of the enemy’s theoretical potential.’ He recommended shielding the program under extreme secrecy: ‘Even internally in CIA, as few individuals as possible should be aware of our interest in these fields and of the identity of those who are working for us.’ He recommended Sidney Gottlieb to head its operations” (“1953”). Dr. Sidney Gottlieb was the Director of the CIA’s Chemical Division of Technical Service Staff, who specialized in “lethal poisons and creative methods of assassination,” and has been referred to as the CIA’s sorcerer. The author of the report on these memos wrote that “Sidney Gottlieb personified CIA’s immoral universe; a universe where there was nothing, however evil, pointless or even lunatic, that this unaccountable intelligence agency will not engage in, in pursuit of its secret wars. Gottlieb had used his studies on poisons and applied it to the attempted assassinations of world leaders. It’s been reported that Sidney Gottlieb was the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s character “Dr. Strangelove.” Dulles agreed with Helms on all accounts, and he exempted MKULTRA from “normal CIA financial controls, authorizing Gottlieb to start projects ‘without signing the usual contracts or other written documents’” (“1953”). Much of the research for MKULTRA was done with university professors, frequently using prison inmates and hospital patients as the main subjects. Academics and scholars at the University of Oklahoma, UCLA, University of Wisconsin, Harvard University, University of Illinois, Stanford University, Yale University, Cornell University, and Emory University, to name a few, were involved in MKULTRA research, some wittingly and others unwittingly. Aside from being top individuals in their fields, who would provide excellent research, the CIA had other motivations for using them as well; the idea was that as the project goes on, these individuals could be used as top- secret consultants (Jackman).

MKULTRA didn’t begin as an experiment with psychedelic drugs, as its more commonly known for today. In the memo from Richard Helms, we saw that what he described was more centering around chemical and biological weapons, which they had a basis on from the Nazi scientists recruited through Operation Paperclip. However, the goal of MKULTRA shifted from the offensive use of biological and chemical agents to the creation of a Manchurian Candidate. The Manchurian Candidate is a novel published in 1959 by Richard Condon that describes the son of a prominent family in American politics who had been brainwashed into becoming an assassin for a Communist conspiracy. Amid rumors that American soldiers had returned from Korea brainwashed, the CIA didn’t hold back in trying to perfect this as well. Gottlieb, having a specialty in assassination techniques, was the natural architect. The process by which a Manchurian Candidate could be created is known as Monarch Programming. A successful monarch slave will carry out operations, will not question orders, and will not remember their actions. The name comes from a monarch butterfly “who begins life as a worm (representing undeveloped potential), and, after a period of cocooning (programming) is reborn as a beautiful butterfly (the monarch slave)” (Edward). ​

Monarch programming tears down a person’s psyche, so that it can be built back up to have multiple personality disorder, and the different personalities can be triggered at will by the handler. These methods include “electroshock, torture, abuse and mind games in order to force them to dissociate from reality” (Edward). The torture may include confinement in boxes or cages for extended periods of time, near drowning, submersion into ice water or burning chemicals, forced ingestion of offensive body fluids like blood, urine, feces, or flesh, sleep deprivation, stress positions, hanging upside down, sensory deprivation, injection of chemicals such as chemotherapeutic agents, forced ingestion of amphetamines and barbiturates, and being forced to witness the abuse of others. Edward writes, “Due to the severe trauma induced... the mind splits off into alternate personalities from the core... Further conditioning of the victim’s mind is enhanced through hypnotism, double-blind coercion, pleasure-pain reversals, food, water, sleep, and sensory deprivation, along with various drugs which alter certain cerebral functions.” Once the victim dissociates and a split in personality occurs, the programmer can create alter personas to be triggered with a phrase or symbol. An official Monarch Program within the CIA has never been proven to have existed, however when CIA Director William Colby was asked, “he replied angrily and ambiguously, ‘We stopped that between the late 1960s and the early 1970s’” (Edward).
 
The CIA’s Monarch-like experiments were not held in the United States, and were performed by Dr. Ewen Cameron, a British psychiatrist, in Canada. Cameron had been studying what he considered psychotherapy, which involved a three-step process on mostly involuntary hospitalized women. The first step, mental depatterning, put subjects into a drug-induced coma for prolonged periods of time- some up to eighty-six days. The second step involved three high-voltage electroshock treatments every day, continuing the electroshock until the subject stops convulsing. The final step puts victims into isolated confinement, being kept on LSD while under food, water, sleep, and sensory deprivation. During this third step the victim would be subjected to what Cameron called psychic driving, “by use of a football helmet clamped to the head with taped messages played for hours non-stop" (“1950s”). This psychic driving could go on for weeks. After their “treatment,” most of his patients after were reduced to a state of infancy and lost almost all basic cognitive and motor functions. In the case of Gail Kastner, “The shock treatment turned the then 19-year-old honours student into a woman who sucked her thumb, talked like a baby, demanded to be fed from a bottle and urinated on the floor” (“1950s”). Cameron had been doing research like this before he was contracted by the CIA, but it was an opportunity that neither of them could refuse. For the CIA, they had found someone who was willing to perform electroshock experiments, drug tests, and deprivation exercises on unwitting subjects. For Cameron, he found someone to fund his sadistic research. Cameron gave his plans, and the Agency funded them.
 
MKULTRA experimented with the same techniques on American soil. However, the CIA did more experiments with drugs than the basic monarch programming. The CIA didn’t just use LSD, in fact one of their methods to force sleep deprivation was to give subjects a constant cocktail of amphetamines and barbiturates- uppers and downers. While awake, the victims would be given barbiturates which would make them calm and sleepy- at which point they’d be given amphetamines to make sleep near impossible. The victims of this could be anyone- witting volunteers, unwitting victims, pregnant women, prison inmates, hospital patients, rehab patients, or even members of the US military. CIA experiments with drugs were very holistic, almost all demographics were targeted to give an encompassing view of how people respond to physical trauma and drugs. One experiment studying the effects of prolonged exposure to LSD at the US Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, then called the Federal Addiction Research Center, had heroin addicts be put on LSD for 77 days straight under the supervision of Dr. Harris Isbell, a CIA contracted psychiatrist. The subjects were told they would be doing drug experiments, nothing more specific, and were promised free heroin at the end of the tests as a reward for their participation (Mernit and Morowitz). Another experiment looked to see LSD’s effect on soldiers. The US Army had been conducting tests in conjunction with the CIA to see if LSD could be used as a drug to incapacitate enemies, but not kill them. Using witting volunteers, the Army had soldiers run basic drills on command from their drill sergeant, which they performed like clockwork. Then, the soldiers were given LSD, and after a certain amount of time (which allowed the drug to kick in) they were ordered to do the same basic drills. The results were confounding for the observing scientists. Soldiers became giggly, fell out of line, performed slower than normal, and had a hard time doing simple tasks like jumping over a wooden obstacle (Mernit and Morowitz).
 
The CIA’s LSD experiments expanded past labs and controlled tests on witting volunteers, however. One subproject of MKULTRA, Operation Midnight Climax, involved the CIA running brothels in San Francisco and New York, hiring prostitutes to pick up men at bars, bring them back, and dose their cocktails with LSD. Two-way mirrors were put into the bedrooms, behind which a CIA officer would be observing the men's behavior. Aside from simply observing the johns, the CIA also was observing the women. They wanted to look at how the women responded to being given clandestine missions, and whether they could be turned into agents with split personalities, Manchurian candidates. The man Sidney Gottlieb put in charge of overseeing Midnight Climax was Col. George White. White had earned the rank of lieutenant colonel during his time in the OSS, the precursor to the CIA, during WWII. Upon White’s death in 1975, his widow left his diaries and papers to a junior college outside of San Francisco, from which we now have dates, names, and thoughts behind Midnight Climax which had yet to be uncovered. White wrote that he had met with Sidney Gottlieb and his deputy, Dr. Robert Lashbrook. Gottlieb recruited him to be a consultant, and a year later he was on CIA payroll. White was officially put in as the regional head of the Bureau of Narcotics, and unofficially oversaw Midnight Climax. In the safehouse that became White’s residence, he was known to keep pitchers of chilled martinis in the refrigerator and had photos of women being tortured and whipped, implying that he may have taken pleasure from his new position. White was so intrigued with his research that he himself used LSD under the supervision of psychiatrists, psychologists, and pharmacologists. White wrote, “So far as I was concerned, ‘clear thinking’ was nonexistent while under the influence of any of these drugs. I did feel at times that I was having a ‘mind-expanding experience,’ but this vanished like a dream immediately after the session” (“Diaries...”). The supervisors of Midnight Climax wanted to step up the experiment to a more realistic scenario. If the goal was to use LSD as a truth serum for foreign diplomats, foreign agents, or anyone with information to share, they needed to test it as such on people who had secrets. The CIA sought out drug dealers to be used, drugged, and questioned to simulate a real-life interrogation.
 
Some experiments had to do with contaminating entire cities with LSD, as was tested in New York and France by CIA research scientist Dr. Frank Olson and Lt. Col. George White. Dr. Olson specialized in aerosol chemical delivery, which subsequently was how LSD was released into the New York subway system in 1952 by White- among unwitting American citizens as subjects. The evidence of this experiment is spotty, however it was documented in White’s personal diary and confirmed by a colleague of Dr. Olson’s, Dr. Henry Eigelsbach. However, the New York experiment pales in comparison to an alleged CIA experiment in the French town of Pont St. Esprit. A New York Post article reports, “Over a two-day period, some 250 residents sought hospital care after hallucinating for no apparent reason. Thirty-two patients were hauled off to mental asylums. Four died. Mercury poisoning or ergot, a fungus of rye bread, was cited as the cause of the symptoms. Ergot is also one of the central ingredients of LSD. And curiously enough, Olson and his government pals were in France when the craziness erupted” (Messing). It’s unknown whether the French government was consulted hitherto.
 
For much of the duration of MKULTRA, other government agencies were involved to make the process go by without complication. The Department of Agriculture was helpful in speeding up the process of bringing “various botanicals” into the country for Project Artichoke and shows the FDA cooperating to allow the CIA to use laboratories and testing facilities- making these agencies complicit, whether they knew the CIA’s intentions or not (Jacobs). In his personal writings, Lt. Col. White discussed that although the Bureau of Narcotics was involved, its chief would “disclaim any knowledge of it” if he were ever to be asked (Drummond). The FDA was perhaps the agency most closely linked to MKULTRA. In 1962, a regulation was passed through Congress stating that any and all testing with LSD was to be done with special permission from the FDA, however there were loopholes for the CIA and Department of Defense in which the FDA could grant “selective exemptions.” If any research was classified for reasons of national security, the FDA ignored it, stating that “those seeking to develop hallucinogens as weapons were somehow more ‘sensitive to their scientific integrity and moral and ethical responsibilities’ than independent researchers dedicated to exploring the therapeutic potential of LSD” (Martin and Shlain). The FDA also provided personnel with security clearance to act as “consultants for chemical warfare projects” (Martin and Shlain). ​

When LSD was declared illegal in the late 1960s, MKULTRA began to quietly shut down. Conveniently, in the early 1970s Director Richard Helms and Sidney Gottlieb, one of the masterminds behind MKULTRA ordered all relevant paperwork be destroyed (Boylan). Gottlieb said that [MKULTRA and MKSEARCH] had been a waste of time, citing certain “scientific and operational flaws” ("June 1972”). The techniques that they were using to try to control human behavior proved to be too unpredictable, which, ironically enough, was the same conclusion that Nazi scientists had reached at Dachau in the 40s ("June 1972”). MKULTRA officially ended without anything going too public.
 
That was, however, until Seymour Hersh, an investigative journalist, published an article in the New York Times just a few months after the Watergate scandal announcing that the CIA was spying on American citizens. This forced President Ford’s hand to create a commission led by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller into unlawful CIA activities. Only two pages of the entire commission were about MKULTRA, because the report downplayed the scope of the project. It did, however, mention the story of a CIA employee who jumped from his hotel window in New York City after having been dosed with LSD a few days earlier. The family quickly recognized the story as being about Dr. Frank Olson, whose family was told he committed suicide in 1953. Within ten days, the Olson family had made public accusations that the CIA had a role in Dr. Olson’s death, and were in the Oval Office receiving a formal apology from President Ford and $750,000 as compensation. The implicit reasoning for the money was to appease the family so they would drop their lawsuit against the US government. Later in 1974, Seymour Hersh exposed MKULTRA in an article he published which eventually led to the special hearings of the Church Committee (Boylan). The Church Committee is what provided us with testimonies about MKULTRA and gives us most of the information we have now. Although Helms and Gottlieb ordered the paperwork destroyed, the committee found a money trail with corresponding documents. More of MKULTRA was exposed by John Marks, who got about 16,000 pages of CIA documents through the Freedom of Information Act. There were several smaller commissions, including the Pike Committee Investigation. Although many of them, including Pike, were met with hostility by the CIA and White House. The opening line of the Pike report reads, “If the Committee’s recent experience is any test, intelligence agencies that are to be controlled by Congressional lawmaking are, today, beyond the lawmaker’s scrutiny” (“February 1975”). ​

​Citations
 
Boylan, Dan. “Acid Flashback: CIA's Mind-Control Experiment Reverberates 40 Years
after Hearings.” The Washington Times, The Washington Times, 30 Aug. 2017,
www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/aug/30/cias-mk-ultra-lsd-mind -control-experiment-has-ling/.
 
“CIA Had Nazi Doctors Test LSD On Captured Soviet Spies, Book Says.” The Huffington Post,
TheHuffingtonPost.com, 13 Feb. 2014,
www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/13/operation-paperclip_n_4781137.html.
 
Cohen, Zachary. “CIA Explored Using Potential Truth Serum Drug for Post 9/11
Interrogations.” CNN, Cable News Network, 13 Nov. 2018,
www.cnn.com/2018/11/13/politics/cia-documents-truth-serum-drug
-interrogations/index.html.
 
Drummond, Katie. “Chemical Concussions and Secret LSD: Pentagon Details Cold War Mind
-Control Tests.” Wired, Conde Nast, 14 Jan. 2018, www.wired.com/2010/05/chemical
-concussions-and-secret-lsd-military-releases-cold-war-mind-control-report/.
 
Edward, Sebastian. “MK-Ultra Project,Monarch and Julian Assange – Sebastian Edward –
Medium.” Medium.com, Medium, 20 Jan. 2015, medium.com/@sebastianedward/mk -ultra-project-monarch-and-julian-assange-ad2aa42ba1a4.
 
“February 1975: President Ford Appointed a Commission Headed by Nelson Rockefeller.” McCann 13 AHRP, 26 Mar. 2015, ahrp.org/feb-1975-president-ford-appointed-a-commission
-headed-by-nelson-rockefeller/.
 
Finger, Stan. Homeland Security Plans Inert Chemical Tests near Kansas Border. The Wichita
Eagle, 9 Nov. 2017, www.kansas.com/news/local/article183818896.html.
 
“Harmless Gas Released into New York Subway to Prep for Biological Attack.” The
Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 9 May 2016,
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/09/new-york-city-subway-harmless-gas
-released-biological—attack-study-jessica-now.
 
Hatmaker, Taylor. “DARPA Awards $65 Million to Develop the Perfect, Tiny Two-Way Brain
-Computer Interface.” TechCrunch, TechCrunch, 10 July
2017, techcrunch.com/2017/07/10/darpa-nesd-grants-paradromics/.
 
Jackman, Tom. “The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy: Was Sirhan Sirhan Hypnotized to Be
the Fall Guy?” The Washington Post, WP Company, 4 June
2018, www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2018/06/04/the-assassination
-of-bobby-kennedy-was-sirhan-sirhan-hypnotized-to-be-the-fall-guy/
?utm_term=.4449af741e24.
 
Jacobs, John. “CIA Papers Detail Secret Experiments on Behavior Control.” The Washington
Post, WP Company, 21 July 1977,
www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/07/21/cia-papers-detail McCann 14 -secret-experiments-on-behavior-control/90524b32-2527-413b-9673-f57be3ce7800/
?noredirect=on&utm_term=.686ff4748698
 
Jacobs, John. “The Diaries Of a CIA Operative.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 5 Sept.
1977, www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/09/05/the-diaries-of-a
-cia-operative/65b08a3e-c95a-434e-b1c6-c05f726a3a6f/
?noredirect=on&utm_term=.99166637bc9e.
 
“June 1972: Project MK-ULTRA and MK-SEARCH Were Terminated by Sidney Gottlieb.”
Alliance for Human Research Protection, -http://ahrp.org/june-1972-project-mk-ultra
-and-mk-search-were-terminated-by-sidney-gottlieb/.
 
Lee, Martin, and Bruce Shlain. “An Excerpt from Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of
LSD The CIA, the Sixties and Beyond.” Acid Dreams, Grove Press, 1985,
www.levity.com/aciddreams/samples/ciafda.html.
 
Mernit, John, and Morowitz, Noah. CIA Secret Experiments Documentary. National
Geographic Television, National Geographic, 26 Dec. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch
?v=7Afjf2ZgGZE.
 
Messing, Philip. “Did the CIA Test LSD in the New York City Subway System?” New York
Post, New York Post, 14 Mar. 2010, nypost.com/2010/03/14/did-the-cia-test-lsd-in-the
-new -york-city-subway-system/.
 
Odeshoo, Jason R. “Truth or Dare?: Terrorism and ‘Truth Serum’ in the Post-9/11 World.”
Stanford Law Review, vol. 57, no. 1, 2004, pp. 209–255. JSTOR, JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/40040204.
 
Rodriguez, Nicole. “Homeland Security Chemical Attack Tests Could Turn People into Lab
Rats, Residents Say.” Newsweek, 12 Dec. 2017, www.newsweek.com/chemical
-warfare-drills-homeland-security-turn-people-lab-rats-residents-fear-745697.
 
Ross, Colin. “The C.I.A. Mind Control Doctors.” CCHR International, 26 July 2013,
www.cchrint.org/2009/09/03/cia-mind-control-doctors/.
 
Wolverton, Joe. “Pentagon Dumps $65 Million Into Mind-Control Project.” The New
American, www.thenewamerican.com/tech/item/26528-pentagon-dumps-65-million
-into-mind-control-project.
 
“1950s–1960s: Dr. Ewen Cameron Destroyed Minds at Allan Memorial Hospital in Montreal.”
AHRP, 26 Mar. 2015, ahrp.org/1950s-1960s-dr-ewen-cameron-destroyed-minds-at -allan-memorial-hospital-in-montreal/.
 
“*1953: MK-ULTRA Was Hatched by Allen Dulles and Richard Helms.” AHRP, 26 Mar. 2015,
ahrp.org/1953-mk-ultra-was-hatched-by-allen-dulles-and-richard-helms/.
 
“1974: Seymour Hersh Exposes HUGE CIA Spying on Americans.” AHRP, 26 Mar. 2015,
ahrp.org/1974-seymour-hersh-exposes-huge-cia-spying-on-americans/.

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

It is generally accepted by most on the ‘left’ that capitalism required the black slave for capital to be “kick-started”,[1] and consequently, that the similarities in the lives of the early black slave and the white indentured servant required the creation of racial differentiation (hierarchical and racist in nature) to prevent Bacon’s Rebellion style class solidarity across racial lines from reoccurring. The capitalist class in the US has been historically successful in creating an atmosphere within the circles of radical labor that excludes solidarity with black liberation and feminist struggles. Yet, the black community historically has been at the forefront of the struggle for socialism in the US. Taking into consideration the history of dismissal, and sometimes even hostility, radical labor in the US has had towards black struggles for liberation, how could it be that the black community has stood in a vanguard position in the struggle for an emancipation that would include those whom they have been excluded by? This paper will look at two occasions in which we can see the exclusion of identity struggles from labor struggles, and answer the riddle of how white labor has been able to identify more with capitalist of their own race than with their fellow nonwhite worker. In connection to this, we will be examining three different perspectives concerning the relationship of the black community’s receptivity and active role in the struggle for socialism and the emancipation of labor.

A perfect example of this previously mentioned exclusion of identity from labor can be seen in Jacksonian radical democrats like Orestes Brownson, who although representing a radical emancipatory thought in relation to labor, failed to see how the abolitionist movement should have been included into the cause of the northern workers. Thus, his positions was (before falling into conservatism), that “we can legitimate our own right to freedom only by arguments which prove also the negro’s right to be free”.[2] The question is the negro’s right to be free when? Although he included blacks into the general emancipatory process, he was staunchly against abolitionist as “impractical and out of step with the times”,[3] and eventually urged northern labor to side with the southern plantation owners to counter the force of the northern industrial capitalist. What we see here with Brownson is a dismissal for the abolitionist struggle against black chattel slavery, unless it takes a secondary role to white labor’s struggle for the abolition of wage slavery. Brownson’s central flaw here is his assumption that you can free one while maintaining the other in chains, whereas the reality is that “labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded”[4]

In the generation of American radicals that came after Brownson we see a similar dynamic between the 48’ers[5] of the first section of the International and the utopian/feminist radicals of sections nine and twelve. This split takes place between Sorge and the German Marxist and the followers of the ‘radical’ Stephen Andrews and the spiritualist free-love feminist Victoria Woodhull. As Herreshoff states, in relation to the feminist movement of the time, “the Marxists were talking to the feminist the way Brownson had talked to the abolitionist before the Civil War.”[6] By this what is meant is that the struggle for women’s political emancipation, was treated as a sideline issue, that should be dealt with – or automatically solved – only after labor’s emancipation. Now, it could very well be argued that the positions taken by Sorge and some of the other Marxist 48’ers was not ‘Marxist’ at all. Marx and Engels were staunch abolitionist, close followers (and writers) of the Civil War, and even pressured Lincoln greatly towards taking up the cause of emancipation; this puts them in a direct opposition to the positions taken by the northern labor radicals like Brownson[7]. Engels also pronounced himself fully in favor of women’s suffrage as essential in the struggle for socialism[8]. The expansion of this argument cannot be taken up here though.

The point is that racial and sexual contradictions within the working masses have played an essential function in maintaining the capitalist structures of power. While workers identify – or are coerced into identifying – workers of other races, ethnicities, or sexes as their enemy, their real enemy – their boss – is either ignored or positively identified with.

Thus, white workers can blame their wage cuts/stagnations on the undocumented immigrant. Although he does play a function in maintaining wages low, the one who sets the terms for the function the immigrant is coerced into playing is the capitalist, not the immigrant. There are countless analogies to describe this relation, my favorite perhaps is the one of the cookies. In a table you have 100 cookies, on one side of the table you have the capitalist (usually caricatured as a heavy-set fellow) with 99 cookies to eat for himself. On the other side you have a dirtied white face worker, a dirtied brown face immigrant worker, and finally, the last cookie. The capitalist leans to the white worker and tells him, “be careful, the immigrant will take your cookie”.

Here we have the general function of racial division, the motto which is “have the white worker base his identification not in the dirt on his face, but in the mythical face laying under the dirt”. This mythical face under the dirt is the symbolic link of the white worker and the white capitalist. The link of commonality is based on the illusion of the undirtied faced white worker. The dirt, of course, symbolizes the everyday conditions of his toiling existence. Even though the white worker’s everydayness is infinitely more like the immigrant’s (immigrant here is replaceable with black/women/etc.), he is coerced into consenting his identification with whom he has in common no more than one does with a bloodsucking mosquito on a hot summer’s day.

Regardless of the dismissal, and sometimes even hostility, of radical labor’s relation to other identity struggles, the black community has been in the forefront of the struggle for socialism in America. Not only have elements of the black community consistently served as the revolutionary vanguard, but the community itself has historically expressed a receptivity of socialism that is unmatched by their white working-class counterparts.

There have been a few interesting ways of explaining the phenomenon of the black community’s receptivity of socialist ideas. Edward Wilmont Blyden, sometimes called the father of Pan-Africanism, argued in his text African Life and Customs that the African community is historically communistic. Thus, there is something communistic within the ethos of the black community, that even though it has been generationally separated from its origins, maintains itself in the black experience. He states that the African community produced to satisfy the “needs of life”, held the “land and the water [as] accessible to all. Nobody is in want of either, for work, for food, or for clothing.” The African community had a “communistic or cooperative” social life, where “all work for each, and each work for all.”[9]

The argument that a community’s spirit or ethos plays an essential role in its ability to be receptive to socialism is one that is also being analyzed with respect to the “primitive communism” of indigenous communities in South America. Most famously this is seen in Mariategui, who states:

These arguments have been recently found by Latin American Marxist scholars like Néstor Kohan, Álvaro Garcia Linera, and Enrique Dussel, to have already been present in Marx. From the readings of Marx’s annotations of the anthropological texts of his time (specifically Kovalevsky’s), they argue that Marx began to see the revolutionary potential of the “communards” in their communistic sprit. This was a spirit that staunchly rejected capitalist individualism, leading him to believe that its clash with the expansive nature of capital, if victorious, could be an even quicker path to socialism than a proletarian revolution. Not only would the indigenous community serve as an ally of the proletariat as revolutionary agent, but the communistic spirited community is itself a revolutionary agent too.[11][12]
           
Another way of explaining the phenomenon of a historically white radical labor movement (at least until the founding of CPUSA in 1919), and a historically radical black community[13], is through reference to an interview Angela Davis does from prison when asked a similar question. In this 1972 interview Angela mentions that the black community does not have the “hang ups” the majority of the white community has when they hear the word ‘communism’. She goes on to describe an encounter with a black man who tells her that although he does not know what communism is, “there must be something good about it because otherwise the man wouldn’t be coming down on you so hard.”[14] What we have here is a sort of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. The acceptance of communism is because of the militant rejection my oppressor has towards it. Although it might seem as a ‘simplistic’ conclusion, I assure there is a profound rationality behind it. The rationality is this “if the alternative is not different enough to scare my oppressors shitless, it is not an alternative where my conditions as oppressed will change much.” This logic, simplistic as it might seem, is one the current ‘socialist’ movement in the US is in dire need of re-examining. If the alternatives one is proposing does not bring fright upon those whose heels your necks are under, then what one is proposing is no qualitative alternative at all; rather, it is merely a request to play within the parameters the ruling class gives you. The relationship of who is setting the parameters is not changed by the mere expansion of them.
           
Both of these ways of examining the question concerning the relationship of the black community and its acceptance of socialist ideas I believe hold quite a bit of truth to them. Regardless, I think there is one more way to answer this question. The difference is that in this new way of answering the question, we are threatened with finding the possibility of the question itself being antiquated.

The thesis I think is worth examining relates to this previous “mythical link” the white worker can establish with the white capitalist. Unlike the white worker, the black worker has not – at least historically – had the ability to identify with a black capitalist from the reflective position of his ‘undirtied’ face. This is given to the fact that the capitalist class, or even broader, the class of elites or the top 1%, has been almost homogeneously white. Thus, whereas the white worker could be manipulated into identifying with the white capitalist, the white homogeneity of the capitalist class did not have the ripe conditions for working class black folks to be manipulated in the same manner.

The question we must ask ourselves now is: in a world of a socially ‘progressive’ bourgeois class, like the one we have today, can this ‘mythic-link’ come into a position of possibly becoming a possibility? With the efforts of racial (and sexual) diversification of the top 1%, can this change the relationship of the black community to radical politics? If we accept the thesis that the link of the black community to radical politics has been a result of not being able to – unlike the white worker – have any identity commonality with their exploiter, then, can we say that in a world of a diversified bourgeois class, the radical ethos of the black community is under threat?

Is the black working mass and poor going to fall susceptible to the identity loophole capitalism creates for coercing workers into consenting against their own interest? Or will its historical radical ethos be able to challenge it, and see the black bourgeois as much of an enemy as the white bourgeois? Under a diversified bourgeois class, will Booker T. Washington style black capitalism become hegemonic in the black community? Or will the spirit still be that of Fred Hampton’s famous dictum from his Political Prisoner speech “You don’t fight fire with fire. You fight fire with water. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity. We’re not gonna fight capitalism with black capitalism We’re gonna fight capitalism with socialism.”? I am unsure, but I think perhaps a totally disjunction-al way of thinking about it is incorrect; as in, the disjunction will not be one the totality of the community is forced to homogeneously choose, but one which fractures the community itself without leaving any side’s perspective hegemonized.

Regardless, I think it is up to those who represent the cause of the white and non-white working mass and poor, to go these spaces and assure that masses begin to identify based on class lines (‘class’ not restrictive to the industrial proletariat, but expanded to the totality of the working masses, and beyond that to the lumpen elements whose systemic exclusion, excludes them as well from being exploited subjects of the system). Only in this ‘class’ identity approach can we achieve the unity necessary to solve not just the antagonisms of class that capitalism develops and continuously exacerbates, but also those of race, sex, and climate. This does not mean, like it meant for the 19th century labor radicals, that we exclude non-class struggles to a peripherical position where we give them importance only after the socialist revolution has triumphed. Rather, our commonality of interests in transcending the present society forces us to examine how we can work together, and in doing so, begin to acknowledge and work on the overcoming of our own contradictions with each other. 

​

Citations.


[1]III, F. B. (2003). The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandel. In Afro-Pessimism An Introduction (pp. 72).

[2] Brownson, O. A. “Slavery-Abolitionism.” Boston Quarterly Review, I (1838), (pp. 240).

[3] Herreshoff, D. American Disciples of Marx (Wayne State University Press, 1967), (pp. 39).

[4] Marx, K. (1967). Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production (Vol. 1). (F. Engels, Ed.) International Publishers. (pp. 301) 

[5] “48’ers” refers to the Germans that came after the attempted revolution of 1848 (the one the Communist Manifesto was written for). Having to face persecution, many fled to the US.

[6] Ibid. (pp. 82).

[7] For more see: Marx, K. & Engels, F. The Civil War in the United States (International Publishers, 2016)

[8] For more see: Engels, F. The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (International Publishers, 1975)

[9] Blyden, E. W. African Life and Customs (Black Classic Press, 1994) (pp. 10-11)

[10] Mariategui, J. C. Seven Essays of Interpretation of Peruvian Reality (1928), (pp. 68)

[11] Linera, A. G. (2015) Cuaderno Kovalevsky. In Karl Marx: Escritos Sobre la Comunidad Ancestral  

[12] This is itself a message that strikes at the heart of the dogmatism of certain Marxist circles. Circles that religiously follow the early unilateral theory of history Marx’s begins proposing in The German Ideology, a view that was used to argue the revolutionary futility of these communities, and the need to ‘proletarianize’ them. This does not mean we throw out  Marx’s discovery of the materialist theory of history upon which the unilateral theory of history arises; but rather, that we treat it in a truly materialist manner (as the later Marx does) and realize the ‘five steps’ to communism is materially specific to the studies Marx had done with relation to the European context. With relation to other contexts, new studies must be made through the same materialist methodology.

[13] This is not to be taken as a statement of the homogenous radicalism of the black community in America. The influence of Booker T Washington style of black capitalist ideology does historically have a certain influence in the black community. But, when considered in proportion to the white population, the acceptance of socialism – and its vanguard role in struggles – has been much greater in the black community.

[14] Marxist, Afro. (2017, June 11) Angela Davis - Why I am a Communist (1972 Interview) [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGQCzP-dBvg

​About the Author:
My name is Carlos and I am a Cuban-American Marxist. I graduated with a B.A. in Philosophy from Loras College and am currently a graduate student and Teachers Assistant in Philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. My area of specialization is Marxist Philosophy.  My current research interest is in the history of American radical thought, and examining how philosophy can play a revolutionary role . I also run the philosophy YouTube channel Tu Esquina Filosofica and organized for Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020.

​Cooperatives, enterprises where workers are the owners of their workplace, have always held an awkward place in the socialist movement. Proponents, such as Robert Owen, saw worker cooperatives as socialism in practice. Other socialists, such as Karl Marx criticized cooperative projects for being “utopian” in the sense that cooperative advocates sought to build a socialist society without first dismantling the existing order. Rosa Luxemburg’s critique of the cooperative movement best exemplified the thought among many Marxists,
 
“The workers forming a co-operative in the field of production are thus faced with the contradictory necessity of governing themselves with the utmost absolutism. They are obliged to take toward themselves the role of capitalist entrepreneur—a contradiction that accounts for the usual failure of production co-operatives which either become pure capitalist enterprises or, if the workers’ interests continue to predominate, end by dissolving.”

Mark and Luxembourg were not wrong. Take the Mondragon Corporation, which is the largest worker cooperative in the world, employing 81,507 people and generating 12 billion euros in revenue. But market pressures to maximize profits over the broader interests of the community have eroded Mondragon to adopt exploitative practices typical of a corporation. Today, only a minority of Mondragon’s workers are owners and the cooperative is infamous for suppressing labor unions in its foreign subsidiaries. As cooperatives became more profitable, the worker-owners started to lose their sense of solidarity with their fellow workers as their self-image takes on the contours of a small business owner. 
 
Are cooperatives fated to end up like Mondragon? A growing group of organizers and academics are firmly saying “NO.” Learning from the accomplishments and failures by previous socialist experiments, these activists are confronting the assumptions that cooperatives cannot dismantle the existing institutions of oppression, are anti-political, and suppress class consciousness. But before that, let’s talk about the other and larger socialist movement that has dominated much of the 20th century.

​Most leftists agreed with Luxembourg and instead opted to join the social democratic movement. Unlike cooperatives, social democracy was perceived as political and militant. Social democrats believed the best path to abolish capitalism was by expanding the state bureaucracy through political parties and trade unions. The legacy of the New Deal era, a period of high union density and massive expansion of government programs, seemed to have validated those beliefs. But what followed social democracy wasn’t socialism, what followed was neoliberalism, also known as a 40-year bipartisan effort to undo every aspect of the New Deal from slashing taxes for the rich, weaponizing racist dog whistles as an excuse to gut welfare, and pass massive layoffs in the industrial heartland.
 
In their book “Bigger than Bernie”, Jacobin contributors Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht argue that the revived socialist movement’s main priority should be to finish the New Deal. Day and Uectricht’s call to undo the last 40 years is best reflected in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) national platform, which currently consists of building a rank and file labor movement, electing democratic socialists to office, and passing Medicare for All and a Green New Deal. Though Day and Uetricht acknowledge it’s simply not enough to rebuild the welfare state. As numerous historians have pointed out, a major cause for the downfall of the social democratic era was union bureaucrat’s suppression of militant labor organizers during the 2nd Red Scare. Day and Uetricht advocate for a supposedly revised version they call “class struggle social democracy.” The basic idea is that socialists should elect social democratic politicians and agitate for a militant labor movement at the same time. The assumption is that a militant labor movement can act as a check on social democracy’s tendency “to limit the scope and substance of the reforms which it has itself proposed and implemented, in an endeavor to pacify and accommodate capitalist forces."
 
But organizing a militant labor movement isn’t new, it was actually the main strategy for social democrats in the 20th century. While the CIO leadership did try to contain the more radical sections of the labor movement, the labor federation still relied on militant actions to force concessions. In 1936, the United Auto Workers organized the famous Flint Sitdown Strike, even though the Wagner Act already created the National Labor Relations Court to mediate labor disputes the year before. Union bureaucrats containing more militant activists can only explain part of the decline of social democracy, a greater factor was the expansion of the professional-managerial class. A large reason why so many working-class households left the union hall for the cubicle was the level of education and experience many white-collar jobs required allowed those workers to negotiate higher wages without the need for a union. A New York Times article on Tom Harkin’s failed 1992 presidential run sums up how devastating the professionalization of America had an effect on the left,
 
"The audience for Harkin's message is literally and figuratively dying," says Mike McCurry, the senior communications adviser to Kerrey. "It's just not appealing to the baby boomers, the geodemographic bulge that accounted for the Republican ascendancy of the 80's and that might signal a new Democratic resurgence in the 90's. These are people with virtually no party affiliations. The imagery of Roosevelt's New Deal simply does not resonate with them."
 
A revived social democratic movement will only recreate this cycle of a generous welfare state expanding a professional middle class that would push for reforms that will then shrink the middle class and so on and so forth.
 
But can the cooperative, that utopian experiment, provide a new path towards socialism? Cooperative activists correctly point out that worker-ownership reverses the dynamics between management and labor and thereby provide a much more radical transformation than expanding government programs and trade union density. Three case studies, one historical and two that are ongoing, provide evidence that cooperatives do not inherently have to cave to market forces but can act as a catalyst for social movements, and most importantly, by allowing people to experience a life where workers can own the means of production, they can counter the pressures to assimilate back to capitalism.

​The Civil War violently abolished America’s slave economy, but the war did not abolish crippling poverty for poor whites and emancipated slaves. The Civil War had accelerated America's industrial revolution. Slavery was not replaced with the Jeffersonian ideal of every man their own entrepreneur, instead, slavery was replaced with a more modern form of capitalism, the crop-lien system.
 
Merchants known as "the furnishing man" by white farmers and "the man" by black sharecroppers, controlled the post-war cotton industry. The furnishing men ensured that farmers were perpetually kept in poverty by forcing farmers to pay exorbitant interest rates and seizing their crops as collateral or lien. By taking crops as collateral, the furnishing man reaped the farmer’s surplus.
 
In response to what amounted to debt slavery, cotton farmers in the South and later corn and wheat farmers in the Midwest, organized cooperatives through the National Farmers Alliance to fight back against the crop lien system. Unlike previous cooperative societies, the populists were both confrontational and class-conscious. The populists inaugurated what Lawrence Goodwyn called, "the largest democratic mass movement in American history."
 
Similar to a labor union, a farmer’s cooperative was a collective of farmers that allowed them to bargain with merchants for livable prices. According to Goodwyn, America’s founding ideology of meritocracy and rugged individualism forced farmers to create an entirely separate political tradition rooted in class warfare. The Farmers Alliance accomplished this feat by instituting a circuit of traveling lecturers who sought to replace the Jeffersonian myth of the farmer as the entrepreneur with an ideology that placed farmers and wage workers as members of the “producing class” being exploited by the financial monopoly. The growing class consciousness among farmers drove the National Farmers Alliance to seek an alliance with the labor movement through the Knights of Labor. According to one anti-union newspaper, the aid that farmers were giving to the Knights of Labor was integral to the Great Southwest Strike, “but for the aid strikers are receiving from farmers alliances in the state and contributions outside, the Knights would have gone back to work long ago.”
 
However intense opposition by the railroad monopolies prevented the cooperatives from replacing the furnishing men, so the populists entered the political scene. In 1892, farmers formed the People's Party, the most successful third party in American history. The People's Party elected 11 governors, 35 members of the house of representatives, and six senators. But tragically, the populist movement does not have a happy ending. The People’s Party collapsed after their endorsed presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan, lost to monopoly backed candidate, William McKinley. Bryan was not the populist’s first pick, he had actually refused to endorse the party’s most important demand, a radical transition of America’s monetary system from the gold standard to fiat money, a transformation we would not see until the 1970s. The populists also failed to dismantle America’s racial and regional divides, preventing the farmers from forming a strong alliance with black sharecroppers and northern industrial workers who became disorganized after the Knights of Labor dissolved. Worst of all, even after nearly two decades of fighting, the merchant and railroad monopolies were still intact, which took a huge toll on farmers’ morale. However, the remnants of the populist movement would later form the backbone for the burgeoning Socialist Party.

​In the heart of the deep south, Chockwe Antar Lumumba, the socialist mayor of Jackson, Mississippi is promising to build "the most radical city on the planet." Lumumba and his father, the former mayor, also named Chockwe Lumumba, have been part of a decades-long fight to fulfill the Jackson-Kush plan, an ambitious promise to transform Jackson into a solidarity economy, a network of worker cooperatives, urban farms, and community land trusts. What may be most unique about Jackson-Kush is that it’s not rooted in the populist era cooperative movement or English mutual societies. Instead, Jackson-Kush is based on the ideology of pan-Africanism. The elder Lumumba, a veteran of the black power movement, was inspired by former Tanzanian president Julius Nyere’s theory of Ujamaa and Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farms.
         
Activists in Jackson began the movement by organizing the "People's Assembly." Taking inspiration from previous experiments in post-Katrina New Orleans, the People’s Assembly was a mass forum for citizens to address community issues, wage strategic campaigns to leverage pressure on political and economic decision-makers, and foster a culture of direct democracy. The assembly was incredibly effective in its goals, reaching 300 members by 2010. The People’s Assemblies were more than just a mechanism for direct democracy, they were a cultural revolution. Most city governments are run like personal fiefdoms, preserved through a system of patronage and party machines. The Peoples’ Assembly flipped that model by agitating the largely black and working-class population to become active decision-makers.
 
The elder Chockwe channeled the politicization from the People’s Assembly towards an electoral landslide in 2013, winning the mayorship with 80 percent of the vote. Tragically, the elder Lumumba died only seven months into office. In 2014, Lumumba's son founded Cooperation Jackson, a grassroots organization committed to building a solidarity economy,  which also became the base for Chockwe Antar’s successful 2017 election.
 
However, relations between the mayor and activists started to sour. Lumumba drained the People’s Assembly of most of their top organizers and staff, which created a rift between city hall and the grassroots. Lumumba’s actions were partly in response to Mississippi’s white supremacist state legislature maneuvering to take away Jackson’s local control, including engaging in a tense legal battle with the city government threatening to take over the Medgar Wiley Evers Airport. Cooperation Jackson, the organization Lumumba founded, has started to focus on building the Jackson-Kush plan independent of the state. Cooperation Jackson’s possible shift away from politics risks the project eroding into the same pressures as Mondragon. However, Chockwe Antar Lumumba still has a working relationship with grassroots activists and against all odds is still pushing through with his promise to turn Jackson-Kush from a dream into a reality. It is hard to tell what the future holds for Jackson, Mississippi, but one thing is clear, only through the state will there be a transition to the solidarity economy.

At the turn of the 21st century, a group of academics and activists created Democracy Collaborative to answer the criticisms that market forces will inherently erode cooperatives into a typical capitalist enterprise. Democracy Collaborative can't really be given a single label, it's a think tank, a business incubator, and a grassroots lobbying arm all-in-one. Their answer to the market pressure argument is a program they call "community wealth building." Under this framework, cooperatives are only one part of a larger economic system. The local community, through the state and NGOs, invest in worker-owned cooperatives, which are guaranteed employment through contracts with something known as "anchor institutions," businesses that are not going to be leaving the community. Most importantly, the decision-makers are not limited to the existing worker-owners but include the government, community leaders, and in some cases labor unions. 
 
It is important to remember that power and status in Mondragon is not determined by stratified educational levels and bargaining power, but by membership into the cooperative. Under Mondragon's structure, a worker-owner on Fagor's assembly line is more privileged than a programmer who was only an employee. Mondragon's erosion back to capitalist norms was caused by worker-owners excluding the next generation of membership, mutating worker ownership from a form of economic democracy into an exclusive club. By expanding the decision-makers beyond the worker-owner, community wealth building creates a check on worker-owners potential greed.
 
To prove the viability of their model, Democracy Collaborative decided to test their model in Cleveland, Ohio. Cleveland is a textbook example of deindustrialization. Decades of neoliberalism, offshoring of manufacturing jobs, and white supremacist policy has turned Cleveland into one of the poorest cities in America. In 2010, the city government and several NGOs created the "Evergreen Cooperatives," which are three worker-owned cooperatives: Laundry, Energy Solutions, and Green City Growers. The Evergreen Cooperatives were deliberately set up in neighborhoods with a median income of $18,500, a disproportionately large undereducated workforce, and an unemployment rate of 25 percent. Evergreen also explicitly hired workers with prior felony charges. The cooperatives were guaranteed a contract with local anchor institutions, such as the Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals. 
 
Like any new business, there were some early mistakes. The cooperatives had an overambitious target of 1000 employees and the lack of financial literacy among workers forced the cooperative to adopt a more representative model of governance. However, within a decade, Evergreen has grown to more than 100 workers, 30% of whom are already worker-owners. Two out of three of the cooperatives are profitable, with Green City Growers on track to profitability. Currently, only 15% of the revenue comes from the original anchor institutions. Keep in mind, this is all inside one of the poorest and under-invested-in cities in America. Through Community Wealth Building, Democracy Collaborative reversed the neoliberal norm of cities begging for corporate contracts by cutting public services. 
 
But Democracy Collaborative was never satisfied with merely proving there is an alternative to the status quo. During a Q and A session at Cornell College, Thomas Hanna elaborated that Evergreen is only a proof of concept, the main vision is to directly transition existing businesses and industries, from Amazon to Wall Street. Democracy Collaborative has intensely lobbied politicians, political parties, and organizers towards this program. Already the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign, the UK Labour Party, and People's Action, a million-member community organizing network, have all adopted the community wealth building framework. Community wealth building should not be seen as a “startup incubator”, but a spiritual successor to Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs vision for "the whole of all industry to represent a giant corporation in which all citizens are shareholders and the state will represent the board of directors acting for the whole people." 

​What the three case studies have shown us is that the answer to Luxembourg’s criticisms is not to abandon the cooperative, the answer is to integrate cooperatives into militant social movements. Each case study has directly challenged the existing order, actively engaged in the political sphere, and created an alternative analysis of the dominant narrative. The populists built agrarian cooperatives to organize a militant social movement and politicize farmers. Cooperation Jackson’s plan for a solidarity economy became the basis for a successful political campaign and created a radical vision of black self-determination. Democracy Collaborative proved that cooperatives do not have to succumb to market forces. More importantly, the three case studies are causing many leftists to question if the distinction between cooperative projects and social democracy still matters. Nationalizing key industries does not inherently contradict the cooperative’s effort to expand workplace and economic democracy, if anything they complement each other. Thomas Hanna recently published “Our Commonwealth,” where he argues for expanding public ownership through publicly owned enterprises in red states, such as the North Dakota Public Bank. Bernie Sanders' 2020 labor platform included a promise to force large corporations to divert 20 percent of their stock to an ownership fund democratically controlled by workers, itself influenced by the Meidner plan, a policy proposed by the Swedish Social Democratic Party in the 1970s. The Marxist economist, Richard Wolff, maybe right when he called cooperatives “Socialism in the 21st century.”

About the Author:
​Greg Chung is a Korean-American, born in New Jersey, but lived abroad for ten years in Vietnam and South Korea. He moved back to the states in 2018 to attend college in Iowa, where he became a community organizer for Iowa Student Action and later the Cornell College chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America.

In a previous essay, I gave a brief history of the U.S. Government’s “War on Crime” and how this led the “Land of the Free” to be the world’s number-one prison state. The success of “law and order” narratives from Nixon to Reagan to Clinton, were not the work of these administrations alone. They were bolstered by media representations amplifying the threat of crime and portraying it in a racialized fashion. Here I will explain how the media has developed a symbiotic relationship with “law and order” centers of power which produces high ratings but also misrepresents the reality of crime.

Richard Nixon, who declared the “War on Crime” after his “Southern Strategy” propelled him to the presidency in 1968, was largely successful due to his ability to capitalize on media reports depicting broad societal disorder with “race-riots” and crime reports taking center stage. A similar media framework was used to characterize Civil Rights movements and left-wing political groups as a unique threat to America. (There’s a reason the Black Panthers made Nixon’s enemies list and J. Edgar Hoover labeled them “the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States.”) The net effect of this was to intensify white peoples’ fears of crime and black militancy making a “law and order” narrative more palatable for the general public.

This sort of sensationalized, hysteria-inducing reporting can be seen again during the mid-1980s media panic over the “Crack Baby Epidemic”. Amid the Reagan administration’s “War on Drugs” news outlets across the nation seized on case studies showing a potential link between prenatal exposure to crack cocaine and birth defects among newborns. News reports often characterized crack babies as permanently damaged, who, as future adults, would be unable to care for themselves, thus, creating people who are, at best, burdens to society and, at worst, extremely dangerous. This may be best exemplified by Charles Krauthammer writing in the Washington Post, “the inner-city crack epidemic is now giving birth to the newest horror: a bio-underclass, a generation of physically damaged cocaine babies whose biological inferiority is stamped at birth” comparing them to “a race of (sub)human drones” whose “future is closed to them from day one. Theirs will be a life of certain suffering, of probable deviance, of permanent inferiority. At best, a menial life of severe deprivation.” He finally concludes, “the dead babies may be the lucky ones.” Other “Crack Baby” headlines include: “Drug Babies Invade Schools” (San Diego Union Tribune, 2/2/92), “Crack Babies Born to a Life of Suffering” (USA Today, 6/8/89), and “Crack’s Tiniest, costliest Victims” (New York Times, 8/7/89). This was common fare for those who consumed main-stream news outlets at the time.

Unfortunately, the story was bullshit. As the New York Times itself reported in 2009 (around thirty years too late) medical researchers who followed many “Crack Babies” found “the long-term effects of such exposure on children’s brain development and behavior appear relatively small” and are “less severe than those of alcohol and are comparable to those of tobacco.” Even Dr. Ira Chasnoff, whose research inspired much of the “Crack Baby” reporting, insisted from the very beginning that his results were qualified and limited and, in 1992, lamented that his research was misused saying, “It’s interesting, it sells newspapers, and it perpetuates the us-vs-them idea.” And as we have seen Chasnoff’s fears were warranted. Much of the reporting depicted black people as uniquely prone to drug addiction and shamed the mothers with headlines such as “For Pregnant Addict, Crack Comes First” in the Washington Post (12/18/89). Additionally, it is telling that news outlets focused their attention on crack instead of other forms of cocaine. Even the original “Crack Baby” research showed similar effects on children prenatally exposed to powdered cocaine. But the media ignored this choosing to isolate crack, which, conveniently enough, helped legitimize the Reagan administration’s scaremongering over a “crack epidemic” destroying American cities and justified the militarization of police forces as well as the increasingly punitive measures taken against drug use.

You might expect the media to have learned to avoid credulously repeating narratives from “law and order” politicians and academics, but you’d be giving them way too much credit. Only a few years after the “Crack Baby” phenomenon, the media was back to reporting “law and order” propaganda. This time the public needed to be afraid of “super-predators”- a term many associate with Hillary Clinton. During a rally in 2016, Clinton was confronted by Black Lives Matter protesters about her statements from 1996 promoting the “super-predator” narrative at a New Hampshire event for her husband’s reelection campaign. In her speech, Clinton touted the “Tough on Crime” policies of Bill Clinton’s administration and spoke of a new type of predator warning, “We also have to have an organized effort against gangs…. They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators. No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel, and the president has asked the FBI to launch a very concerted effort against gangs everywhere.”

Much of this sort of “super-predator” rhetoric was based on the theories of a conservative criminologist at the Brookings Institution, John Dilulio. Dilulio coined the term “super-predator” in a piece he wrote for Rupert Murdoch’s magazine, the Weekly Standard, positing that due to America’s moral decline, youth are growing more prone to violence and crime with each succeeding generation. Dilulio proposed- and much of the media reported as fact- that “Americans are sitting atop a demographic crime bomb…. What is really frightening everyone…is not what’s happening now but what’s just around the corner—namely, a sharp increase in the number of super crime-prone young males.” These young males would come from the growing number of “elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches” and “those kids who have absolutely no respect for human life and no sense of the future... big trouble that hasn’t even begun to crest.” Many of Dilulio’s theories were reflected in news headlines of the time with gems such as: “A Teenage Time Bomb” (Time, 1/15/96), “Wild in the Streets” (Newsweek, 8/2/92), and “Killer Kids” (Reader’s Digest, 6/93). 

The fact that youth crime rates had been dropping for years and would continue to do so for years to come did not change the perception that youth were committing an exorbitant amount of crimes. A Gallup Poll (Gallup Poll Monthly, 9/94) found that Americans had a drastically inflated view of the amount of violent crimes committed by people under 18 years old with the average American adult believing young people committed 43 percent of all violent crimes in the U.S. while they actually only accounted for 13 percent of all violent crimes. As Gallup claims, this is largely a result of news coverage regarding youth violence. For instance, a study by the Berkeley Media Studies Group found that more than half of local news stories on youth included violence, and that more than two-thirds of all stories concerning violence involved people under 25 years old. These inflated perceptions of crime allowed the Clinton administration to pass its own “Tough on Crime” legislation in an attempt to break the Republican party’s monopoly on “Law and Order” politics.

A more recent example of media outlets’ PR work for law enforcement is the “gang raid” narrative. One of the most blatant examples of this is the “Bronx 120”. Before dawn on April 27th of 2016, 700 officers from the NYPD, ATF, DEA, and Homeland Security conducted a pre-dawn raid on the Eastchester Gardens and Edenwald House housing projects, arresting on conspiracy charges what they claimed were 120 gang members who were the “worst of the worst.” Even before the raid had occurred law-enforcement officials predicted news outlets would uncritically reprint the official narrative and run tabloid headlines about “urban gangs” and “violent thugs”. And how did the media respond? By doing exactly fucking that. On the day after the raid, the Daily News ran the headline, “87 Bronx Gang Members Responsible for Nine Years of Murders and Drug-Dealing Charged in Largest Takedown in NYC History”. The reporters not only repeated official claims that all these people were gang members, but they also posted several photos of those arrested, going on to describe them as “hoodlums” and “unrepentant gangbangers”. These may have been the wrong descriptors to use as a recent study out of CUNY has shown the majority of those arrested in the raid were never even alleged by officials to be gang members. These were mainly people who lived in public housing being swept up in the dragnet of a massive raid, held without bail as gang members, and forced to accept plea-deals instead of face notoriously unfair conspiracy trials. But the actual consequences for these people do not matter. As Adam Johnson, contributor for FAIR, put it, “These high profile “gang raids” are, above all, PR operations designed to help pad budgets and justify unusually harsh prosecutions. It’s not until years later, after trials and FOIAs and academic reports, that we learn how thin the narrative really was. But by then it’s too late.”

All these examples were major media stories with articles appearing in many national news outlets, but distortion seeps into everyday crime-reporting as well. In general, reporting on crime shows black people committing crime disproportionately compared to the share of crimes they actually commit. For example, a Color of Change study on local news crime-reporting in New York City found that black people were shown committing 75% of crime- a full 24% higher than their actual share (51%). Additionally, black suspects of a crime are shown in a more dehumanizing way as compared to white suspects. One study of the Chicago media by Robert Entman found that black people (38%) are more likely to be shown in restraints compared to white people (17%), thus conveying the message that black people are more dangerous and in greater need of restraint. Additionally, the study found that news reports were more likely to show mug shots for black subjects than white, and portray black people less as individuals, referring to black suspects by name only 39% of the time compared to 65% for white suspects. Entman argues the overall effect this has is to render black people as more violent, and de-individualizes them turning them into one homogenous group. Further, many media critics have been questioning the journalistic credibility of a large amount of crime reporting. Many local news stations get their information about crime directly from the police- some even going as far as seeming to copy-and-paste police press reports. This has the obvious effects of repeating police narratives and stoking fears of crime, but it also decontextualizes the crime and the individual’s history by acting as a glorified police blotter.     
​
As usual, the goal is to inspire fear. People need to fear getting mugged or else they may think twice about their local police rolling down the road in a tank. A particularly egregious example of this was in the months prior to the “Bronx 120” raid, the NYPD and US Attorney’s Office released to the press war maps of the Bronx depicting alleged gang dominated areas. The Daily News went as far as to turn it into an interactive map which was linked to coverage on the raid. Many observers have questioned the veracity of this map. Adam Johnson wondered, “Who knows if the color-coded areas provided by Bharara (US Attorney) and the NYPD actually correlated with ‘gang control’? Since the majority of those arrested in the Largest Gang Takedown Everweren’t actually in a gang, one can reasonably suspect these maps were just generalized, PR-driven marketing materials.” For its part, the Daily News said, “Obviously, not everyone in these areas are in a gang.”

And here we have come full circle. The police need public support for their growing number of raids and the media needs the raids for salacious crime stores that write themselves (or taken directly from police statements). It should come as no surprise that these media panics coincided with the mass expansion of the U.S. carceral state. The “Crack Baby” panic came at the same time as the Reagan administration’s “War on Drugs” which targeted crack users specifically for especially harsh punishment. Similarly, the “super predator” narrative was popular preceding the Clinton administration’s own “tough on crime” legislation, including establishing harsher penalties for juvenile offenders. This latest string of reporting on “gang raids” has essentially been a marketing campaign for RICO busts which many have criticized. Journalist Josmar Trujillo commented, “the continued use of conspiracy laws in poor communities of color like an atomic bomb is not justice. We’ve clearly over-criminalized black and Latino youth across the board, but RICO is particularly harsh and inappropriate.”

The aggregate effect of these media tendencies is to create a distorted view of crime for the public, supporting a growing police state. This distortion also promotes a racialized view of crime, portraying black and Latino people as uniquely inclined to criminality, justifying the hyper-criminalization of these communities. This has been a major contributor to the rise of a system of mass-incarceration preying on poor black and brown communities. Instead of addressing the main root cause of crime in these communities, which is poverty, media representations of crime promote strict and heavily punitive policies which exacerbate problems by removing members from their communities and placing a stigma on them that near completely ruins their future economic opportunities. In all these ways, media outlets have aided and abetted the “law and order” agenda, expanding the power of the carceral state and law-enforcement to unprecedented levels. As long as media outlets continue to promote a distorted image of crime, developing policies to best address criminality will be increasingly difficult because the public will not have an accurate understanding of the problem. We need an entirely new paradigm for talking about crime which does more than credulously regurgitate police claims, instead attempting to accurately contextualize the causes of crime in communities and endorsing a less punitive framework for dealing with those who break the law.                     

About the Author:
​​I'm Alex Zambito. I'm born and raised in Savannah, GA. I graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2017 with a degree in History and Sociology. I am currently seeking a Masters in History  at Brooklyn College. My Interest include the history of Socialist experiments and proletarian struggles across the world.

For years NeoConservatives within the American Political Establishment have salivated over the idea of going to war with Iran. The last four years under Donald Trump have seen hostility towards Iran reach dangerous levels, as neocons within Trump’s administration such as Mike Pompeo and John Bolton have openly encouraged Trump to overthrow the Iranian Government. While not a socialist country, The Islamic Republic of Iran has long defied the economic interests of Western multinationals. The notoriously right wing, Koch brothers funded, Heritage foundation says, “Large numbers of state-owned enterprises and other firms controlled by Iranian security forces crowd out private-sector activity.” [1] Iran’s economy is largely driven by state run oil and gas industries, and the country is considered an “energy superpower.” This of course is the primary reason neoconservatives like John Bolton with deep ties to the private fossil fuel industry have long obsessed over regime change in Iran. If the Iranian Government is overthrown, while the country and its people will be thrown into violent chaos, US based multinationals will have unhindered access to Iranian oil.
 
While neocons like Bolton claim their advocacy for Iranian regime change is based on a desire to protect human rights, a look at recent history reveals their true motives. Almost 20 years after the invasion of Iraq, which Bolton staunchly defends, what we’ve seen is the destabilization of Iraq and the deaths of hundreds of thousands. This is a war which Noam Chomsky calls “the crime of the century”[2]. Are we going to allow these bloodthirsty politicians to lie us into yet another war where they claim to be protecting human rights while murdering hundreds of thousands? At a time when people in the US are struggling to meet their basic needs, and the Covid pandemic continues to rip through the country, the last thing we need in this world is a war between Iran and the United States. Let us demand our public officials meet the needs of American workers, rather than send them to die in yet another disastrous oil war.
 
The United States has a long history of interfering in Iranian Politics. One of the first acts of the CIA following their inception in 1947 was to overthrow the secular, Democratically elected, Iranian Nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Declassified documents released over 60 years later have proved the CIA and UK collaborated to overthrow the Iranian Prime Minister and replace him with the pro-Western Shah. Mossadegh’s primary economic proposal was to nationalize the Iranian oil industry. He argued that Iran had a right to the resources produced in their own country. In 1951 Mossadegh would Nationalize the British controlled Anglo-Persian Oil company. [3] Effectively booting British multinationals from the country. The CIA and UK’s Secret Intelligence Service (m16), threw their support behind the Iranian Shah, Reza Pahlavi, and launched an anti-Mossadegh propaganda campaign, both in Iran and The United States.[4] The first attempt to capture Mossadegh failed, however days later a second attempt would apprehend Mossadegh, leaving Iran in the hands of the Western backed Shah.

​The 1953 coup would become a rallying cry 26 years later during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Under the pro-Western Shah Reza Pahlavi, opposition parties were outlawed and suppressed. The opposition parties include The National Front, a combination of noncommunist left-wing groups, as well as the Tudeh Party, a party of pro-Soviet Communists. During the 1979 Revolution these parties would unite behind a shared desire to overthrow the oppressive Shah. Former philosophy professor Ruhollah Khomeini was gaining popularity in Iran through advocating the reduction of the authoritarian powers of the Shah, and a more populist economic program aimed at meeting the needs of the Iranian masses. Both the Tudeh and National Front parties would put their support behind Khomeini, eventually overthrowing the Shah, dealing a heavy blow to Western influence in Iran. [5] 
 
Since the Revolution Iran has remained a theocracy with an economic program based on central planning and state ownership of large portions of the economy. Many in Iran heavily criticize their government, and advocate for the state to become more secular. Iran has a rich intellectual history, and many academics and student groups have organized to push for change recently, as many did in the 1979 revolution. While many in Iran are critical of their Government, the people are unified against intervention from the United States. Continued escalations against Iran from the Trump Administration have given Iranians a common enemy in the US, who has been unable to resist meddling in Iranian Politics for over 70 years now. The Conservative parties in Iran are now calling for breaking off all ties with the US, and to end the 24 hour a day monitoring of the Iranian nuclear program agreed to in the Iran deal. [6] Iran’s internal politics are complex, and belligerent US foreign policy threatens to push Iranians in a reactionary direction.
 
The Trump administration has made multiple escalations towards invading Iran. The decision to pull out of the Iran deal was one of the most belligerent foreign policy decisions of the century, and the justification from the State Department was truly incoherent. The Iran deal forced Iran to allow 24-hour a day surveillance of their nuclear program by the International Atomic Energy Agency. [7] While under this 24-hour surveillance not one time has Iran ever been accused of creating a nuclear weapon. The nuclear energy is used for power, while enriched uranium is used to create medical isotopes. However, despite no findings of wrongdoing, the US has put crippling sanctions on Iran. Including blocking medicine from entering the country. [8] US officials justify this action by calling Iran the number one state sponsor of terrorism. The media has yet to ask these officials if blocking a foreign nation from importing medicine in a pandemic qualifies as terrorism or not.

​So, while Iran has never before sought to create a nuclear weapon, now many in the country are calling for that to change. The people of Iran got a great view of how the US invaded Iraq on false pretenses about nuclear weapons. Iran has seen the devastation and brutality of the United States empire on those who dare claim sovereignty over their natural resources. The Iranian people do not want their country to see the same fate as Iraq, and they are seeing the similar rhetoric from the US about their country. It is truly hard to blame Iranians for wanting their country to increase defense capabilities, especially following the US murder of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. A clear act of aggression, and a blow to the Iranian military. And now at the end of 2020 Israel and the US have assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists who the US media, of course, portrays as dangerous terrorists. [9] While Iran has never created Nuclear weapons before, US aggression may push them to.
 
So, now to my fellow Americans. Are we going to let them do this again? Are we going to allow our bloodthirsty Government to take hundreds of thousands of lives, in a war that is so clearly being waged for control of natural resources? How many US soldiers were killed in Iraq? How many died to stop the Iraqi nuclear program which never existed? Are we really going to allow this to happen again? Will we destroy a nation, and hundreds of thousands of lives, to maximize the Koch Brothers’ profits?
 
I for one stand against war with Iran and see through the lies of our corporate media. Remember how loudly the war drums were beating after 9/11, to stir up patriotic fervor, and manufacture support for the invasion of Iraq. They PROMISED YOU that it would be a short invasion to extract nuclear weapons. Nearly 20 years later the US still occupies Iraq, nuclear weapons were never found, and hundreds of thousands are dead. Do not fall for this again my friends. Tell the US Government that either they make peace with Iran, or face mass resistance.

Citations


[1]Heritage Foundation. (2020). 2020 Index of Economic Freedom: Iran. Heritage.org. Retrieved 2020, from https://www.heritage.org/index/country/iran
[2] Chomsky, N. (2015, 10 28). Voices on Iraq: Noam Chomsky. Sputnik News. https://sputniknews.com/politics/201510281029239831-chomsky-us-iraq-invasion-crime-obama/
[3] Byrne, M. (2013, 8 19). CIA Confirms Role in 1953 Iran Coup. NSA Archive. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB435/
[4] Wu, Lawrence, and Michelle Lanz. 2019. “How The CIA Overthrew Iran's Democracy in 4 Days.” NPR. https://www.npr.org/2019/01/31/690363402/how-the-cia-overthrew-irans-democracy-in-four-days.
[5] Afary, Janet. 2020. “Iranian Revolution.” Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/event/Iranian-Revolution.
[6] Karimi, Nasser. 2020. “Iran's parliament approves bill to stop nuclear inspections.” Associated Press https://apnews.com/article/iran-parlianment-bill-nuclear-inspection-e2f2225c1f91c5c09afaf776cf9e04e3
 [7] IAEA. n.d. “Verification and Monitoring in Iran.” IAEA. https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/focus/iran.
[8]Zakavi, Rasoul. 2019. “Economic Sanctions on Iran and Nuclear Medicine.” NCBI. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6352058/.
[9] “State Media Says Iran's Top Nuclear Scientist Killed In Ambush.” 2020. New York Times. Iran’s Top Nuclear Scientist Killed in Ambush, State Media Say.

About the Author:
​My name is Edward and I am from Sauk City, Wisconsin. I received my B.A. in Political Science from Loras College, where I was a former NCAA wrestling All-American, and active wrestling coach. My main interest are in Geopolitics and the role of American imperialism with relation to socialist states, specifically China and Venezuela.  ​I also worked for Bernie Sanders' campaign in 2020.

​This time around, residents were pushed out of the encampment due to a zoning change proposal which was posted about in a notice on a fence near the Arkins encampment. As the notice explains, Tryba Architects seeks to change the zoning at Arkins Court and three other locations in Denver to allow “mixed use development between 110 and 250 feet in height,” in other words, more high-rise buildings. 

The sweeps tend to gather protesters and supporters of the homeless population (some are both) who offer moving supplies, refreshments, and a helping hand in moving their camps. On the morning of the Arkins sweep, dozens of people showed up with Uhaul trucks as well as the usual supplies, including a pop-up table with coffee, hot chocolate, pastries, sandwiches, fruit, and more.

About the Author:
My name is Maddy. I am a journalist, writer, and thinker based in Colorado where I work as a stringer for a small-town newspaper and have some odd jobs on the side. I am a member of the Democratic Socialist of America and am interested in bringing a lens of intersectionality to journalism and "pushing the envelope" to make people think critically about social issues. I love animals, music, food, creative writing, and the outdoors. She/her. 

​In this paper I will examine the history of conceptualizing justice in western political thought through the lens of what I call the Platonic fall. I define the Platonic fall as the moment when thought from a very particular context is universalized in a manner that seeks to transcend, escape, and forget the contextual boundaries of the theory's establishment. The term ‘fall’ is used because what is happening is a demoting of a perspective from universal (in terms of totality) to particular. From the start, I would like to emphasize that this fall does not itself signify the theory's absolute relativity, that aspects of a theory might contain universal characteristics is accepted. Rather, the point is one about the de-classification of the theory from universal to relative/particular as a totality.

​I will begin by laying out the Platonic theory of justice and how it sets up this ‘fall’. Once I define this ‘fall’, I plan on extrapolating on the influence it has had in western political philosophy by looking at the theories of justice in Hobbes, Locke, and Kant. The importance of this will lay in our ability to recognize that all theory, as long as we are in class society, is an expression of a class perspective. And although this is not wrong in itself, the contradiction comes when this particular is masked as a universal. I will conclude with a summation of why the ‘fall’ happens, and with a consideration of a future where the ‘fall’ not only ceases to fall but also to exist overall. 

In the Republic Plato seeks justice as the highest of values. Justice, for Plato – at least in this text – carries two different but corresponding dimension to it. A micro dimension in the level of individual justice, and a macro dimension in the level of societal justice. In both cases, justice can be seen as a non-equilibria balance between three parts. It is thus, a tripartite conception[1], both in the individual and in the societal presentations.
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In the individual, the tripartite division of the soul is between the logos (reason), thymos (emotions/honor/spirit), and eros (desire/appetites). To Plato, the highest value was placed on the logos, the rational part of the soul. This is because it is this part of the soul that he believed was truly eternal. This part of the soul he conceived of as immortal and existing within the ideal forms except when it reincarnates into the material realm (which he conceived of as a shallow representation of the ideal world).[2] Given the superiority of this part of the soul – a result of its intimate relation with the realm of the forms – Plato considered that this is the part of the soul that should control the other parts.

In Plato’s micro assessment of justice, what we find is justice as the ability of the rational aspect of the soul to virtuously control the appetitive and the spiritual parts. This control itself must be one that is balanced. A tyranny of reason itself could cause unbalance and lead to injustice. Thus, we must consider the rational part of the soul as the driver in a horse chariot[3]. The driver is one guiding and controlling the other two. The driver is not the sole participant, he recognizes the role the two frontal horse play in his development (movement). Thus, it is not a forceful rule of the rational part, but a controlled guidance of the rational part, with the goal of using the other two parts in a way that lets the subject as a totality advance. The other extreme of this would be a lack of control from the rational part. This would mean the domination of the rational part by the emotional/spiritual or appetitive aspects. This is where unfreedom arises; when one is unable to control one’s own appetites and emotions. Thus, to Plato, individual justice consists of being able to rationally control one’s emotional and appetitive parts.

The concept of justice in society is a mirror of justice in the individual. Society, like the individual soul, is divided between groups that are guided by emotions, groups that are guided by appetites, and groups that are guided by reason. To Plato, the groups that are guided by appetites are the lower classes, those being the workers. The group guided by emotions – like honor – are the warriors, which he calls the auxiliaries. Finally, those who are guided by reason in society are the guardians – an intellectual elite class – which would be headed by his philosopher king. Like in the case of the individual soul, justice in the society consist of being able to have a successful balance where all the classes play their respected parts in society. The guardians – representatives of reason – guide the community, the auxiliaries – representatives of honor – obey and enforce the guidance of the guardians, and the workers/producers do pretty much what they are told to do by the guardians; which is to produce for the general populace.

If all goes well, the auxiliaries will be inactive, because their role as the forceful enforcer of the guardians will upon the producers will be deactivated with the producers consent to the orders of the guardians. Thus, in Plato, we have already the function of what is called a noble lie. A noble lie – as contradictory as it may sound – is given an essential role in the process of establishing and maintaining a just society[4].

Although Plato might have made it down safely in the flight of stairs of the school of Athens, his conception of justice will suffer a different fate. Plato portrays his conception of justice as a universal. His engagement with justice is not one which seeks to understand justice in relation to a certain spatial-temporal context, but one which seeks to understand justice outside of its being in a particular circumstance. His understanding – or attempt at theorizing – justice is as universal justice. This is a justice that is conceived as true in all places at all times. Not only is his conception of justice aiming at a universality, but the foundation upon which it is built is itself based on the universality of the realm of the forms. Thus, with Plato – and we will see how this trend infests the history of western philosophy – justice is something that must be thought of as universal. Justice must be the same – at least in its general foundation – everywhere and always.
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The question is, can Plato really do that? Can Plato escape the biases of his time, and specifically the biases of his placement-in-society at his time? Or is his attempt to escape the confounds of his historical and cultural specificity really just an illumination of the ideals of his historical and cultural specificity? Now, I expect a well-read reader can respond with the question “How is Plato expressing an ideal reflection of his time, if he is himself placed at odds with his own time?”. What this question asks is, if Plato stood against most of the regular held beliefs of his time, how can his philosophy, and more specifically, his theorizing of justice, be one that is limited by the confounds of a society he was himself not in favor of? If for example, Greek society at his time placed a high value on democracy, and Plato repeatedly stands against democracy, how can his thought be pinned down to a time and location with which he was so profoundly at odds with?

The answer is simple, the ideas of a time are not homogenous. For every place there is a ruling hegemony, there is always a counter hegemony, although more or less controlled and influenced by that which it is counter to. This is how Plato represents a reflection of his time. He is the intellectual counter hegemony present in Greece. And though he might not reflect the dominant attitude of his time (good philosophers rarely do), he is still bound within the confines of matter while claiming to be lounging in spirit. What I mean by this is that Plato’s fall is in his conception of justice presenting itself as a universal form of justice, while in reality being a very acute conception of justice limited by the confounds of his class position in his spatial-temporal context. Plato’s anti-democratic sentiment – which is the negativity present in his affirmative theory of justice – is not derived from a void; but rather; is a very specific illumination caused by his concrete experience of the horror democracy was able to do to his beloved teacher , Socrates. His rejection of democracy leads to his affirmation of an intellectual elite conception of a just society. The one cannot be separated from the other. And although we might be able to see ascribed in his overall project on justice elements of truth that still linger today, the project’s overall presentation as universal, and its concrete observation as contextual, establishes a trend in western philosophy. The trend is led by an appeal to universals that are hyper exaggerated phantoms of the given philosopher’s concrete class position within their respective historical context. 

In the same manner in which today’s celebrity trends end up being followed by us the peasants, Plato stands as the ultimate demiurge celebrity figure in the history of philosophy. The ultimate trend setter. His good aspects, and bad ones, are all seen reflected in different ways in the history of western political philosophy. In this manner, Whitehead is truly correct in his famous dictum “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consist of a series of footnotes to Plato”.[5] What I hope to demonstrate in this section, is how three of the most prominent political philosophers in the history of western philosophy have the same fall previously mentioned in Plato. Thus, who we will be concretely looking at is Hobbes, Locke, and Kant.

An informed reader might ask, why Hobbes? If Plato’s fall is in the fact that he expresses what is a concrete particular as a totalizing universal, this fall must not be in the great materialist thinker, whose feet were grounded enough to not believe any silly conception of transcendence. This great materialist, who is aware that “man is a living creature”[6], who unlike Plato’s man, has a rational side that is there to serve the appetites (the horse driver is the one pulling the horses in the chariot now), can surely not have the same faults of his idealist predecessor.

Well, I will argue that within the confines of Hobbes’ depersonalized materialist relativity, we find an implicit appeal – or better yet, assumption – of a present universality. What is this assumed universality? Nothing if not the whole basis for his social contract theory, the indubitably existing universal fact of contractual relations. This is, of course, the holy covenant! The one whose holiness saves us from the ‘state of war’ of which our natural state consist of; whose man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.[7] This Holy covenant which drives people to ‘give-up’ certain rights for the security of civil society and the state is where we find the assumed universality.

Hobbes’ theory of justice is tightly related to this contractual framework. What is just is the keeping of covenants, what is unjust is its breaking. A state of constant covenant breaking (the time before the establishment of the state) is the necessary unjust predecessor of the just. The just can only arise thanks to the unjust. It is a direct inversion of the biblical formula of the devil’s turning against God. For evil (the devil) to arise, the good of God must have been present as that which one deviates from. For Hobbes, the great materialist, we have the same formula but on its head, only after the evils of the injustice of covenant breaking can the good and just activities of covenant keeping (or monitoring by form of a state) arise. Justice is thus the keeping of covenants, and injustice the breaking of covenants. The content of the covenants might be admittingly relative, but the covenant itself is a universal truth of a post ‘state of war’ humanity.

This fetishism of contractual relations, which sees the contract as the universal foundation of justice in civilized society, is where we see Plato’s trendy fall present in Hobbes. The contract, and its treatment as universal, is itself a particular reality of the transition into bourgeois society.

Oh the holy covenant, the holy father of bourgeois society’s trinity. The one whose holy presence the process of enclosure depended on. What a great universal. Whose holy justness we are to thank for expropriation of lands, exploitation of labor, and enslavements of bodies. Oh this holy covenant upon which bourgeois society till this day revolves. This magnificent freedom to be unfree. This is Hobbes’ kernel of universal justice. One whose’ describing as universal is a sin against history, and whose’ describing as just is a sin against humanity and nature. Hobbes’ justice – the keeping of the universal system of covenants – represents the myth of capitalism’s freedom. You are free to engage in a relation of exploitation or die! What a universally just dichotomy! Oh the beauty of choice and freedom in bourgeois society!

Continuing with our analogy of the holy trinity of bourgeois society, if Hobbes’ covenant was the holy father, Locke’s unbreakable bond of justice and property under the universal guise of natural law is the holy spirit.
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Locke’s conception of justice is tied to the gifts of land property God has given to humanity in common.[8] This is a gift which can only help in satisfying our needs through our own laborious relation to it.[9] The laboring of the land, and the fruits it bears, is the source of property. As he states, “He that is nourished by the acorns he picked up under an oak, or the apples he gathered from the trees in the wood, has certainly appropriated them to himself.”[10] Thus far, we have a conception of our natural right to property, and property is seen as the fruits of the labor  which we have incorporated on the land that is gifted to us collectively by God. Where can we see justice here? In the spoils. He states, “But how far has he (God) given it (land) to us? To enjoy. As much as anyone can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils, so much he may by his labour fix a property in: whatever is beyond this, is more than his fair share, and belongs to others. Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy.”[11] Jesus Christ Johny Locke, you sound like a socialist! If only he who works today received the equivalent of what they produced (and not just enough to go home and subsist), and if only the constant spoilage of unsold goods were seen as an injustice in a world where there are still so many facing necessities that are solvable by those same goods being spoiled, perhaps the world would be a more just place.

But let’s hold on to our horses, with the exception of Locke’s right to revolution in Ch. XIX of his Second Treatise of Government, his radicalism in relation to labor and property ends quickly. Soon we see that those natural rights, only belong to natural human beings. Thus, in his talk of the “vacant places in America”[12] we saw that the being with the right to property is a specific kind of being, a white being. The native savage is excluded, what a holy spirit this justice represents!

But wait, there’s more! Locke finds a loophole for the spoilage law that limits our right to property. This loophole is money! He says, “this invention of money gave them the opportunity to continue and enlarge them (possessions)”.[13] Thus, money comes in as the un-spoiling possession. But we must think of this critically and go beyond money itself. This level of the beyond, that delves in the realm of property that does not spoil, is capital. What a wonderful invention, a possession that not only does not rot, but on the contrary, continuously reproduces itself. Capital, whose life is constantly rejuvenated by the slow deaths of those who rejuvenate it!

Here we see that although Locke’s initial positioning might seem radical, it transforms very quickly into what is perhaps the most influential of the early philosophical justifications for the development of capitalism. The man whose conception of justice is inextricably tied to the universal natural right of property is neither universal nor just. It suffers the Platonic fall of universalizing the particular spirit of the epoch (specifically from the up and coming bourgeois class). As with Hobbes, considering this doctrine universal is a crime against history, and considering it just – a doctrine so tied to the global pillage of lands and bodies in capitalist expansion – is a crime against humanity. Even his declarations of the rights to revolution, whose radicalism was truly ahead of its time and was one of the most overwhelming inspirations for our project as a nation, is itself not a universal right at all, but the right for the political emancipation of the bourgeois class from the clamps of the privileged aristocracies.

Finally, the last third of the trinity! If Hobbes’ universal covenant was the holy Father, and Locke’s universal right to private property and accumulation was the holy Spirit, in Kant’s rational moral agent – capitalism’s monadic individual – we have the holy Son.

To Kant, justice is inseparable from the duties we have to other people as moral agents. These duties, arise from his categorical imperative which states that “act as if thy maxim were to become by thy will a universal law of nature”[14] and “act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as means only”[15] This is perhaps a bit harder to see its particularity to a class interest, especially considering the extent of the influence it has had on socialists – as the representatives of the interest of the proletarians – around the world, while at the same time reigning as one of the dominant perspective in the halls of bourgeois society.

But we must remember that this is a Kant influenced by Rousseau’s freedom as collective autonomy, and thus we must measure his position with that of the most advanced (in terms of escaping a concept of justice from a ruling class position) in his time. What we find when we do this is that his concept of justice is a step backwards (in terms of the larger picture) from the approach of Rousseau. The latter’s justice, as well as his conception of freedom, sprung from a sensation of a collective sovereignty. It represented a thought impregnated with a post-bourgeois ethos. The bourgeois ethos is the holy Son, the monadic individual separated from nature, community, and even his own body (Cartesian res extensa and res cogitans). The bourgeois ethos prioritizes this ego that floats on top of the world and looks down on it as other and lesser. Rousseau begins the process of demystifying this ego and placing it in community. Kant returns to the bourgeois individual, albeit now with duties to the other (of course the white other), but it is a return that generally aligns itself with the spirit of individualism in bourgeois society. As such, it is still an acclaimed universal justice (based on the duties that arise from the categorical imperative) that is tied to a necessary particular class in a particular epoch. But even if we are charitable with Kant, and admit the class fluidity of his theory, the fluidity is not enough to consider it a universal totalizing truth, given that its depiction of justice is within the capitalist lebenswelt (life-world), and has as its foundational element the holy Son, capitalism's monadic reified human.

In conclusion, what we have found here is that the history of western political philosophy is plagued by the original Platonic sin of universalizing theories that stem, and are necessarily tied to, particular spatio-temporal contexts. This is a sin whose presence has been felt in even the most staunchly materialist thinkers the west has produced. Through the analysis of Plato, we established the genesis of what becomes a central trend in western philosophy. Through our analysis of Hobbes, Locke, and Kant, we have materialized our conclusions of Plato’s trend, by showing that whether in their outright conceptualizing of justice as a universality, or in their hidden universal assumptions behind their ‘relative’ theory of justice, the history of the greatest thinkers in western philosophy is synonymous with the history of the greatest thinkers of the ruling classes of certain epochs. What I have hoped to prove here is that all philosophizing in general, and philosophizing of justice in particular, is always philosophizing from a class position. A class positions that we may certainly attempt to abandon, but one whose leap out of will necessarily land us in another class position within the existing class structures of society. Thus, you can have an Engels whose class position is bourgeois, but whose class thought is proletarian. Just like you can have a Marx whose class position is petty/bourgeois and intelligentsia, but whose class thought is proletarian. In class society, all thought is class thought. This is something that only those who represent the proletarian class – or more generally the working mass – seem to understand.
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This is not to say that there aren’t advancements in the process of discovering universal truths about justice. There definitely can be. Rather, what I am attempting to say is that a universalizing and totalizing way of thinking about justice that stems from a class society will always be merely the justice of the class the author identifies and thinks from. Universal justice can only become a totalizing cognitive reality when justice loses its class chains. Which is to say, only in a classless society can universal justice be conceived of. Only then, can the perspective of the thinker be a truly human perspective, and not just a class perspective. Therefor, only then can a theory of justice that includes all be possible.

The paradox is: given that our theorizing of justice necessarily stems from the presence of injustice, a truly universal theorizing of justice will become impossible in the same instance in which it becomes possible. When it is possible to speak of universal justice in a classless society, we will lack the language to speak of the affirmative (justice), because we would be missing from experience its necessary negation (injustice). Thus, justice is in a dialectical position of never fully being or not-being, but always becoming. When justice can be thought of in its full being, not only would such task not be necessary, but it would be linguistically impossible because of our inability to question ourselves about justice in a state where there is no injustice. 

About the Author:
My name is Carlos and I am a Cuban-American Marxist. I graduated with a B.A. in Philosophy from Loras College and am currently a graduate student and Teachers Assistant in Philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. My area of specialization is Marxist Philosophy.  My current research interest is in the history of American radical thought, and examining how philosophy can play a revolutionary role . I also run the philosophy YouTube channel Tu Esquina Filosofica and organized for Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020.

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

Marxist scholars have often looked at religion merely as a method of social control and not as a potentially emancipatory counter-hegemonic force. Despite religious ideology’s historic use in manufacturing the consent of the exploited class, it has as often been used as a rampart against the most excessive byproducts of that exploitation. The Second Great Awakening movement in 1830s Western New York arose as a method of ruling class hegemony, but transformed into a radical movement that challenged the emergent Market Revolution. The Second Great Awakening became a catalyst for the explosion of utopian socialism after the Market Revolution’s first economic depression in 1837.
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Christian spiritual leader John Humphrey Noyes argued the utopian socialist movement in 1840s America was a continuation of the Second Great Awakening and the teachings of Charles Finney.[1] While many of the socialists of the Owenite and Fourierist periods were atheists or freethinkers, the earlier and more institutional communist societies were religious. Christian groups like the Shakers, the Zoarites and the Inspiratioists all lived communally in America before secular socialist Robert Owen first visited in 1824. Noyes believed socialism should not be separate from religion.[2] The revivalist religious tradition inspired individuals to reform their souls. For Noyes, only religion provided sufficient “afflatus” or collective motivation to carry out the work that socialism required.[3] He argued that two elements, spiritual enlightenment and worldly communism, were present in the early Christian church.[4] His attempts to reconcile religious revivalism and secular socialism resulted in one of the most successful experiments in utopian socialism in North American history. His “bible communist” society at Oneida, NY lasted from 1848 to 1881. It had the most longevity of any of the North American utopian socialist experiments of the nineteenth century.

Workers and the small business class often came to socialism through religion. Religiosity was a common response to the economic changes taking place in Upstate New York in the 1820s. Rochester, New York was an epicenter of economic growth driven by the Erie Canal. According to historian Carol Sheriff, “From a middle-class perspective, the Canal had become a haven for vice and immorality; the towpaths attracted workers who drank, swore, whored, and gambled…. These canallers provided a daily reminder of what fluid market relations - and progress - could bring.”[5] By the 1830s, many Rochesterians felt the Market Revolution encouraged an increasingly sinful lifestyle. The drinking, violence, racism and misogyny characteristic of canal worker culture in Western New York had devastating effects on the workers’ health, security, safety and prospects for social mobility. Historian Peter Way argues that while working class communities offered a measure of solidarity and autonomy to canal laborers that the market did not offer in the 1820s, they just as often encouraged anti-social behavior that divided the working class, keeping them in a subjugated position.[6] Faced with working class culture’s failure to uplift their economic station, conscientious laborers turned to the religious radicals of the business class who had both the motivation to seek a new economic system and the economic power to put such a new system into place.[7]

Western New York became a fertile atmosphere for experimental views of society. Mobile tent revivals had already swept through the region as part of the first Great Awakening in the 1730s and 40s. By the 1820s, the Western frontier near Rochester, New York was the epicenter of the Second Great Awakening.[8] Itinerant Methodist minister Charles Finney, who came to Rochester in 1830 on a mission to save Rochesterian souls, was the standard-bearer for the Second Great Awakening.

​Perfectionism and millenarianism were key theological doctrines of the Second Great Awakening that directly influenced the emergence of utopian socialism. Christian perfectionism is the idea that humankind can achieve perfection on Earth. Millenarianism is the belief that Jesus Christ will return to earth for a second time and he will rule for a thousand years. Perfectionist millenarianism argued true servants of God must create a paradise on Earth to pave the way for the thousand-year reign of Jesus the Lord. Historian Paul Johnson writes:

Radical ministers John Humphrey Noyes and James Boyle were part of the Second Great Awakening movement. Boyle joined the Northampton Association, a so-called “Nothingarian” community loosely inspired by the teachings of French socialist Charles Fourier. The Northampton Association later became a wing of the New Church, an emergent religious movement based on the teachings of 18th century Swedish Lutheran mystic Emanuel Swedenborg.[10] Noyes, originally a Congregationalist, on the other hand, formed the Oneida Community of Bible Communists in Oneida, New York.[11] These examples make it clear that the attempt to establish a Heaven on Earth led some to believe that a radical restructuring of society was necessary and become leaders in the movement.
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Most are familiar with the cliché attributed to Marx: “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” Most are not aware of the whole quotation. In his seminal critique of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Marx wrote, “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”[12] Marx was saying that religion was a response to and a coping  mechanism for the suffering of the oppressed. Religion lessened the suffering of the oppressed, but it was also a revolt against the conditions that caused such suffering. Marx argued that reason, unobscured by religious zeal, would lead to liberation. He wrote:

What was the living flower Marx was arguing those seeking liberation must pluck? Marx said it was a social reality illuminated not by religion alone, but by the earnest search for truth. Still, the fact that religion served such a unique function for the oppressed means study and critique of religion is of utmost importance. How else are those interested in the emancipation of the proletariat to understand the complex social relationships enforced and reinforced by religion?

Historian Paul E. Johnson answers that it is not enough merely to explain the social and economic conditions under which religion arose. Those who are curious about systems of control must look at the relationships religions enforce, reinforce and reproduce as social facts. In A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, Johnson’s study of Finney’s religious revival movement in Rochester, New York from 1830 to 1837, he aptly explains the material basis for the movement’s rise. However, he does not account for how the movement shifted after the 1830s. Johnson argues that control of the private morality of a newly autonomous proletariat made revivalism especially attractive to the bourgeoisie.[14] Prior to the 1820s, workers lived with their employers. However, as they moved out of the bosses’ homes they developed autonomous lives of their own.[15] Proletarian autonomy made the bourgeoisie nervous. Religiosity was a convenient way to maintain social control.[16] Johnson writes from a Marxian perspective, but fails to look deeper into the meaning of Marx’s ideas on religion.  He thus fails to account for the revivalist movement’s influence on utopian socialism in America, especially in Western New York. Utopian socialism offered the proletariat a radical alternative to capitalism. Whatever the roots were, revivalism contained emancipatory elements for the proletariat. It led workers to conclude that it was necessary to reorganize society in order to ameliorate social ills.

Although he takes a Marxian approach, Johnson does not cite or as much as mention Marx once in the entire book. Instead, he cites sociologist Emile Durkheim as his inspiration. Early in the introduction, he invokes Durkheim’s notion of “social facts.”[17] Johnson defines social facts as, “habits and ways of feeling that shape individual consciousness and behavior, yet exist outside the individual and coerce him independant of his will.”[18] He emphasizes how relationships in a community create and reproduce social facts. His research is concerned with how social facts arise and how, through the reproduction of social facts, societies have collectively formed ideas about the world.
           
Johnson argues that religion was an elemental social fact in the nineteenth century as it was used as a form of social control. Prior to the 1820s, when Rochester’s workers mostly lived with their employers, drinking was a form of social cohesion shared between the employer and his employees under conditions the employer controlled.[19] As capitalists favored money and privacy over paternalistic control of their workers the proletariat began to move out of the capitalists’ houses. The bourgeoisie shuddered in anxiety over the new, autonomous proletariat. Working class drinking habits made them most nervous. No longer could they control the conditions under which workers drank.[20] Johnson argues this caused the bourgeoisie in Rochester to turn to temperance as a way to control the autonomous action of the workers. Employers’ insistence on sobriety made them likely targets for religious revivalism and in 1830 Charles Finney took advantage of this propensity among the bourgeoisie.[21]
           
Johnson’s arguments contrast with sociological theorist Max Weber’s idealist conceptualization of religiosity and the growth of capitalism. While Weber insists that the spirit of the Protestant ethic initiated the growth of capitalism in America, Johnson argues capitalism revived the Protestant ethic in America.[22] Bourgeois anxiety over a newly autonomous proletariat was the root of Finney’s revivalism. The Rochester bourgeoisie rejected the paternalistic practice of housing employees under their own roof in favor of privacy and amassing private wealth. Still, they wanted to maintain social control over the proletariat. It is easy to see why the bourgeoisie were among Charles Finney’s earliest and most enthusiastic converts.

Proletarians soon joined in as their bosses increasingly saw church attendance as an essential trait of a good worker. Religiosity thus became a vetting process for employment.[23] Workers had an economic imperative to join in the enthusiasm of revival. They predictably did so. Workers, due to the precarity of their employment, gave in to the social pressure to join the religious revival. The bourgeoisie and the proletariat cohered in a religious community. The proletariat could feel themselves part of a devout group of elite parishioners. Finney’s ideas of cohesive community, equality of the devout under the eyes of God and the Millenarian belief in building a utopia of Christian believers on earth had emancipatory potential for workers.
           
Johnson misses the potential emancipatory impact of religiosity on the proletariat. Spiritual leader of the Perfectionists John Humphrey Noyes’ communist experiment at Oneida, New York is evidence that revivalism had emancipatory potential for the proletarian class. Johnson mentions Noyes only once in his account. He quotes Noyes during his discussion of Millennialism. Johnson writes:

Christian utopianism, inspired by Millennialism, proved to be a much more advantageous daisy chain for workers than Protestant capitalism. The Millenarians believed that heavenly conditions had to be created on earth to usher in the coming thousand year reign of Christ. The workers at Noyes’ so-called “bible communist” Oneida community attempted to create such perfect conditions. They were equal in all things, the community provided for their needs, they engaged in free love and had full equality of the sexes.[25] Noyes connected the explosion of revivalism in the “Burnt over district” (Western New York) with the later wave of utopian socialism in the “Volcanic district” (also Western New York) in his 1870 study of American Socialisms. He wrote:

Noyes goes on to argue that the early Christian church described in the bible book of Acts was itself a communitarian project. His attempts to reconcile religious revivalism and secular socialism were successful. The Oneida Community never collapsed like other contemporary utopian experiments. Noyes fled to Niagara Falls, Ontario to escape statutory rape charges in 1879. His teachings about complex marriage, a form of group marriage where elders collectively chose who was allowed to engage in sexual intercourse, ultimately caught the attention of a Hamilton College professor who organized a campaign against Noyes and the Community.[27] When the Oneida Community voted in 1879 to end complex marriage they also left bible communism behind. The Oneida Community became Oneida Community Limited in 1881. To this day it is the largest supplier of silverware to the North American food service industry.

Even Marx and his comrade and writing partner Friedrich Engels acknowledged the significance of the religious utopians on the international socialist movement. In an 1844 letter, Engels wrote of the religious communities of the Shakers, Inspirationists and Harmonists, “For communism, social existence and activity based on community of goods, is not only possible but has actually already been realised in many communities in America… with the greatest success….”[28] However, there was a flaw in American utopianism. Engels, himself the son of a factory owner, says of the utopians:

Representatives of the bourgeois class may not be expected to have the answers to the liberation of the proletariat. Noyes' fatal flaw was his failure to adapt his teachings to the changing attitudes within and outside the community. However, Marx said of the utopian socialists, “...the communist tendencies in America had to appear originally in this agrarian form that seemingly contradicts all communism….”[30] Despite his flaws, Noyes may have been on to something when he attempted to reconcile religiosity and socialism. His “bible communist” society at Oneida, NY lasted from 1848 to 1881, much longer than any of the other utopian socialist experiments in North America, and unlike his socialist contemporaries, he was an industrial socialist, not an agrarian.[31] Noyes concluded:

The success of liberation theology movements in Latin America in the 1960s and 70s, during the Civil Rights Movement in the United States in the 1950s and 60s and in Palestine to this day bear witness to the truth of Noyes’ insistence that liberation for the working class must seek both the regeneration of society and of the soul. Noyes might have agreed with Marx when he, in 1844, called religion, “the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.”[33]

Johnson’ aptly assesses the material basis for the rise of revivalism, but fails to account for its chimeric change over time. In the final chapter he briefly mentions the rise of the African Methodist movement, to which abolitionist Frederick Douglass belonged, as connected to Finney’s revival.[34] The African Methodist church was instrumental in building power and solidarity between black Americans that, in turn, presented a militant challenge to the Southern institution of race-based slavery. Johnson does not explain where the movement led, only how it gained strength. To be sure, Finney’s revival gained strength as a mode of social control for the bourgeoisie over a newly autonomous proletariat, but once the proletariat joined and took it over it took on a life of its own. Revivalism became a catalyst for the working class movements that swept the United States, especially Western New York, throughout the nineteenth century. Abolitionism, suffragism and utopian socialism all came out of Finney’s revival. The workers weaved living flower of truth that Marx spoke of into the daisy chain of religion creating something truly progressive and emancipatory.

​Citations


[1] Noyes, A History of American Socialisms, 26.

[2] Noyes, A History of American Socialisms, 26.

[3] Noyes, A History of American Socialisms, 26.

[4] Noyes, A History of American Socialisms, 27.

[5] Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: the Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 138.

[6] Peter Way, “Evil Humors and Ardent Spirits: The Rough Culture of Canal Construction Laborers,” The Journal of American History 79, no. 4 (1993): 1400.

[7] Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeepers Millenium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 121.

[8] Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850, (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 154.

[9] Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, 110.

[10] Christopher Clark, The Communitarian Moment: the Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 30.

[11] Cross, Burned-Over District, 190-191.

[12] Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Eugene Kamenka ed., The Portable Karl Marx, (New York: Penguin, 1983), 115.

[13] Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on Religion, (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), 42.

[14] Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, NY 1815-1837, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 9.

[15] Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, 43.

[16] Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, 81.

[17] Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, 11.

[18] Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, 11.

[19] Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, 56.

[20] Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, 60.

[21] Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, 106.

[22] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Talcott Parsons trans., (London: Unwin University Books, 1965), 82.

[23] Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, 121.

[24] Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, 110.

[25] Charles Nordhoff, The Communistic Societies of the United States, (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), 271.

[26] Noyes, A History of American Socialisms, 26.

[27] Lester G. Wells, The Oneida Community collection in the Syracuse University Library, Syracuse University and the Oneida Community, 1961.

[28] Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Nelly Rumyantseva, Marx and Engels on the United States, (Moscow: Progress, 1979), 33.

[29] Frederick Engles, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, trans. Edward Aveling, (New York: International Publishers, 1935), 32.

[30] Karl Marx, Marx on America and the Civil War, (New York: Saul K. Padover, 1972), 5.

[31] Constance L. Hays, “Why the Keepers of Oneida Don't Care to Share the Table,” The New York Times, June 20, 1999.

[32] Noyes, A History of American Socialisms, 27.

[33] Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Eugene Kamenka ed., The Portable Karl Marx, (New York: Penguin, 1983), 115.

[34] Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, 117.

​

About the Author:
​Mitchell K. Jones is a historian and activist from Rochester, NY. He has a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and a master’s degree in history from the College at Brockport, State University of New York. He has written on utopian socialism in the antebellum United States. His research interests include early America, communal societies, antebellum reform movements, religious sects, working class institutions, labor history, abolitionism and the American Civil War. His master’s thesis, entitled “Hunting for Harmony: The Skaneateles Community and Communitism in Upstate New York: 1825-1853” examines the radical abolitionist John Anderson Collins and his utopian project in Upstate New York. Jones is a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.