When Ron Brady drives through highway construction zones, he makes a point of looking for safety violations that threaten workers’ lives. He’s seen more and more of them the past few years as employers, emboldened by the weakened state of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), grew increasingly comfortable flouting the rules. Funding and staffing shortages engineered by the previous presidential administration hobbled OSHA and put workers in numerous industries at risk. But now, Congress is poised to pass a bill that would help revitalize the agency and provide the resources needed to protect workers in a growing economy. Along with many other provisions helping workers and their families, the Build Back Better legislation recently approved by the House would position OSHA to respond to more work sites, investigate additional complaints and proactively address a greater number of hazards. “They’ve been woefully understaffed for a long time,” observed Brady, president of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 14614, which represents about 1,200 workers in the chemical, construction, gaming, manufacturing and other industries in West Virginia. “They’re very professional,” he said of OSHA inspectors. “I’ve always found them to be very well trained. I think a lot of them are frustrated. They don’t have the resources to really do the job. There simply aren’t enough of them to cover it.” The number of OSHA inspectors fell to the lowest level in half a century in 2019, and the agency conducted fewer investigations into top hazards like chemical exposure and musculoskeletal risks, as the previous president deliberately undercut the agency to benefit corporations. Brady maintained a close watch on his members’ safety. But in recent years, he said, he’s seen other construction workers navigate high beams without fall protection and risk their lives in work zones lacking the proper signage. And he knows that the starving of OSHA also put workers in other industries at higher risk. “Everybody’s cutting corners and cutting budgets and trying to do more with fewer people. It’s something that’s going to get worse and worse,” Brady said. After taking office in January 2021, President Joe Biden quickly took steps to put OSHA back on course. He filled key vacancies and appointed proven, experienced advocates to top leadership positions. But more is needed to reenergize the agency’s mission of prevention and deterrence. The Build Back Better legislation, now before the Senate, would help Biden realize his goal of doubling the number of inspectors, to about 1,500, while also empowering the agency to impose significantly higher fines, as high as $700,000 per willful violation in some cases, on employers who flout safety rules. The bigger penalties are needed to deter safety lapses. Brady said the current low fines merely encourage employers to gamble with workers’ lives. The additional resources provided through the Build Back Better bill would also enable OSHA to focus on other kinds of prevention, like development of national standards to protect workers against growing and emerging threats. After a combustible dust incident killed a colleague in 2015, for example, workers at the former International Paper mill in Ticonderoga, New York, and the USW’s Health, Safety and Environment Department worked with OSHA and the company to implement new safety measures intended to ensure no tragedy like that ever happened again. But workers worried about their counterparts at other facilities across the U.S. who remained vulnerable, and they looked for OSHA to implement industry-wide safeguards. They’re still waiting. OSHA began working on a combustible dust standard even before the tragedy at Ticonderoga underscored the need for it. But the agency shelved the project during the previous administration because of “resource constraints and other priorities.” “If there was a combustible dust standard, everyone would have rules to follow,” explained Paul Shaffer, president of USW Local 005, which represents workers at the paper mill, now owned by Sylvamo. “It would make work much safer for everybody in the industry,” he said, noting standards both raise awareness and spell out the steps employers are required to take to keep workers safe. “You can’t protect against something you don’t know about.” Combustible dust is just one threat requiring OSHA’s attention. Workers also need national standards to help protect them from heat stress—a growing danger because of climate change—as well as infectious diseases and workplace violence. Without OSHA specifying the safeguards employers must take and holding them accountable, observed Shaffer, workers and unions “spend a lot of time trying to get companies to do what’s right.” It’s essential to strengthen OSHA as the nation prepares to carry out the historic, $1 trillion package of infrastructure investments that Biden signed into law in November. Upgrades to roads and bridges, airports, locks and dams, energy systems and communications networks will sustain millions of middle-class jobs, benefiting construction workers as well as workers who produce the raw materials, parts and components needed for infrastructure projects. Those workers will rely on OSHA to respond to complaints, inspect work sites and take other measures needed to keep them safe. Brady recalls the days when OSHA inspectors regularly visited job sites and looks forward to a time when they once again not only respond to complaints but also make spot checks to provide safe and healthy workplaces. “It makes management more safety-conscious,” he said. This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute. Archives December 2021
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12/12/2021 On Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, Atrocity Propaganda on Xinjiang, So Called 'Chinese Imperialism' and more. Produced by Unmasking ImperialismRead NowWatch Midwestern Marx's Carlos L. Garrido and Edward Liger Smith discuss socialism with Chinese Characteristics, atrocity propaganda on Xinjiang, and the 'China is Imperialist' narrative in Ramiro Sebastián Fúnez's show Unmasking Imperialism. AuthorInterviewer: Ramiro Sebastián Fúnez is a Honduran communist content creator based in Los Angeles, California. He is the producer and director of Nicaragua Against Empire, a documentary series highlighting Nicaraguan resistance to Western imperialism. With a second union vote at its Alabama warehouse coming at a time of rising worker disaffection, Amazon is clearly worried that American workers will go the way of Europe: toward collective bargaining for their labor rights. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has just ruled that a historic union vote held earlier this year among Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama, by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) was not valid. The highly publicized vote, which took place over several weeks in February and March 2021, resulted in a resounding defeat for the union, with more than 70 percent of those voting choosing against union membership. Stuart Appelbaum, president of RWDSU, accused Amazon of engaging in “efforts to gaslight its own employees,” and filed a petition in April to nullify the vote. After investigating the union’s assertion, the NLRB decided that Amazon interfered so blatantly in its workers’ ability to vote that a second election is now in order. The ruling detailed how, in spite of the NLRB denying Amazon’s request to install a mail collection box right outside the warehouse entrance, the company did so anyway, giving workers the impression that it was involved in the vote counting. Additionally, the company distributed “vote no” paraphernalia to workers in the presence of managers, forcing them to declare their support of or opposition to the union. And, Amazon held what the NLRB called “captive audience meetings” with small groups of workers, “six days a week, 18 hours a day,” in order to blast the approximately 6,000 employees who were eligible to vote with anti-union messaging over the course of the voting period. An NLRB regional director, Lisa Henderson, who made the decision for a second vote, denounced Amazon’s “flagrant disregard” for ensuring a free and fair election and said the company “essentially hijacked the process and gave a strong impression that it controlled the process.” It’s no wonder that the election turnout was low and that ultimately only about 12 percent of eligible voters cast ballots choosing to unionize. Anticipating the NLRB decision to allow a second vote, the company has already begun paving the way for interference once more. According to a Reuters report in early November, “Amazon has ramped up its campaign at the warehouse, forcing thousands of employees to attend meetings, posting signs critical of labor groups in bathrooms, and flying in staff from the West Coast.” This aggressive and repeated pushback by one of the world’s largest employers against a unionizing effort at a single warehouse in the United States is an indication of Amazon’s absolute determination to deny workers a say in their labor conditions. Kelly Nantel, a company spokesperson, said that workers don’t need a union because they benefit from a “direct relationship” with their employer—a laughable notion considering the unbalanced power dynamic between the behemoth retailer and any one of its nearly 1 million U.S. employees. So invested is the company in maintaining a union-free workplace that the NLRB in a separate decision determined that Amazon illegally fired two employees last year who were agitating against its unfair labor practices. There is an obvious reason why Amazon has opted to respond so aggressively to unionization efforts in the United States. Its European workers are unionized and are actively demanding better wages and working conditions. For example, in Germany, unionized Amazon workers walked off their jobs for higher pay in November during the peak holiday shopping season. Last year, Italian workers went on strike for 11 days to win an extra five-minute break to ensure good hygiene in light of the pandemic. And, in the spring of 2020, French unions demanded that Amazon suspend all activity at its warehouses in the interest of worker safety during the early months of the pandemic. A French court ruled favorably, saying that the company had to suspend deliveries of all nonessential items. Further, union leaders and unionized workers from various European nations began collaborating with one another last year in what Business Insider called an effort to “swap notes… on how to pressure the retail giant to improve their working conditions.” This sort of European union activity and cross-border worker solidarity is exactly the type of scenario that Amazon does not want to see replicated in the United States. When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos responded to the Bessemer vote in April saying that he would ensure his company became “Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work,” the RWDSU took it as an admission that Amazon has indeed been mistreating its workers. Indeed, there have been numerous studies detailing mistreatment. One investigation by the New York Times earlier this year at Amazon’s Staten Island, New York, warehouse found that the company churned through workers with an extremely high employee turnover rate. The paper also found that although managers keep careful track of nearly every conceivable aspect of how quickly employees work, their efficiency and productivity, there were apparently few records, if any, of worker health including COVID-19 infections. At the same time that the Bessemer warehouse workers were being bombarded with anti-union propaganda, the company was practically minting money with record profits from a greater dependence on online shopping during the pandemic. Profits jumped 220 percent in the first quarter of 2021 compared to the same period a year earlier. The NLRB ruling for a do-over vote at the Bessemer warehouse comes at a time when American workers are increasingly intolerant of poor labor conditions and low wages. A wave of strikes this fall and mass resignations have also impacted Amazon’s ability to hire more workers. Now, in addition to the RWDSU, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters has vowed to engage in organizing efforts aimed at Amazon and passed a historic resolution this summer in response to how “Amazon poses an existential threat to the rights and standards our members have fought for and won.” Still, Amazon’s aggressive efforts at maintaining union-free operations in the United States have continued to bear fruit. In addition to rolling out more anti-union efforts ahead of the second vote at its Bessemer warehouse, Amazon appears to have prevailed against another unionization effort—at the Staten Island warehouse that the New York Times investigated. Just two weeks ahead of an NLRB hearing on whether there was sufficient interest to form a union there, workers mysteriously withdrew their petition. A Reuters study of 20 years of wage data for the retail industry found a clear and growing advantage for unionized workers compared to non-union workers, with the weekly wage gap between the two groups increasing from $20 in 2013 to $50 in 2019. The outlet explained that “unionized workers tend to work more hours per week and on a predictable schedule, while non-union workers often have a ‘variable schedule’ that depends on how busy management thinks the store might be.” In other words, the rights of non-union workers are subservient to the company’s well-being. Perhaps this is what Nantel meant by the benefits of having a “direct relationship” with workers. Except, she claimed such a relationship was in the interest of workers, when in truth it is in the interest of employers like Amazon to have no collective power to wrestle against. AuthorSonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute. This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Archives December 2021 12/10/2021 How Oregon Is Turning the Page on America’s Disastrous Drug War. By: Phillip SmithRead NowIn a groundbreaking move, in 2020, Oregon voters approved the decriminalization of personal use amounts of all illicit drugs, with Measure 110 passing with a healthy 59 percent of the vote. That made Oregon the first state in the U.S. to make this dramatic break after decades of the war on drugs. Now, as other states are pondering a similar move and are looking for evidence to bolster their case for drug decriminalization, some of the initial results in Oregon are looking pretty impressive and promising. Measure 110 promised not only thousands of fewer drug arrests but also a move away from a punitive system to a more compassionate one, with hundreds of millions of dollars for “greatly [expanded] access to evidence-informed drug treatment, peer support, housing, and harm reduction services, without raising taxes,” according to a November 2020 press release from the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA). These services would be funded through “excess marijuana tax revenue” (more than $45 million) and savings accrued “from no longer arresting, incarcerating, and prosecuting people for drug possession,” said the press release. State analysts in June 2020 estimated the excess marijuana tax revenue alone would result in more than $100 million in funding for providing services in the first year, after the implementation of Measure 110—which went into effect in February 2021—and would further result in funding of up to $129 million by 2027. The state analysts were, however, too cautious. On November 3—“the one-year anniversary of the passage of Measure 110”—the DPA, whose political action arm, Drug Policy Action, spearheaded the successful campaign to get the drug reform measure passed, and the Health Justice Recovery Alliance (HJRA), the DPA’s key implementation partner in the state—which is working to implement treatment, harm reduction, and support programs--announced that they had secured funding of $302 million “for services over the next two years.” That’s more than $150 million a year, the DPA press release announced, “including $30 million lawmakers agreed to release ahead of schedule in May of [2021].” It is also “five times more than what Oregon currently spends on non-Medicaid funding for addiction services,” according to HJRA. On November 17, that funding got real, with the Measure 110 Oversight and Accountability Council announcing the opening of a grant proposal period to distribute $270 million of the funding to service providers, who will operate under the rubric of the new Behavioral Health Resource Networks (BHRNs). Grants will be going to groups working on a broad spectrum of substance-related concerns, including housing, peer support, and employment support, as well as harm reduction and drug treatment services. “Our vision is that by funding BHRNs, there will be a collaboration of networks that include culturally and linguistically specific and responsive, trauma-informed and gender affirming care that will meet the needs of anyone seeking services who have been negatively affected by substance use and the war on drugs,” said Oversight and Accountability Tri-Chair LaKeesha Dumas in a press release by the Oregon Health Authority announcing the grants. That initial round of grants went to 70 organizations in 26 out of the state’s 36 counties, with these results cited in a DPA press release on November 3:
“Addiction has touched us all somehow, some more personally and heartbreakingly than others,” said Tera Hurst, executive director of the Health Justice Recovery Alliance, in the DPA press release. “Too many of us have lost loved ones to addiction, or struggled with it ourselves. COVID-19 has made things much worse, decreasing access to care during a time when Oregonians need these services more than ever before. That’s why today, exactly one year after the Measure’s passage, we celebrate the great strides made when it comes to addressing Oregon’s addiction crisis, while recognizing that there’s still much work to be done. Our immediate focus is to ensure every Oregonian knows these critical harm reduction and recovery services are being invested in and expanded so that they will be available to anyone who wants and needs them, and that they can feel comfortable and safe accessing them.” But while the huge expansion of treatment, harm reduction, and related social services is undeniably a good thing, drug decriminalization is ultimately about getting people out of the criminal justice system and ensuring that they are not sucked into it in the first place. It’s looking like Measure 110 is achieving that goal. According to the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, there were roughly between 9,000 and 10,000 drug arrests per year from 2012 to 2018, prior to the passage of Measure 110, and while it is too early to have precise numbers, thousands of Oregonians who would have been arrested for drug possession in 2021 have instead faced only their choice of a $100 fine or a health assessment. This doesn’t mean that there will be no arrests at all, though, because some felony drug possession arrests (possession of more than the specified personal use amounts) have been downgraded to still arrestable misdemeanors. There will, however, be thousands fewer people subjected to the tender mercies of the criminal justice system and all the negative consequences that brings. Preliminary numbers reported by the Oregonian suggest that drug arrests in 2021 are occurring at a rate of about 200 a month, primarily for possessing more than a personal use quantity of a drug. If that rate holds throughout the year, we should see a dramatic reduction in overall arrests, down from 9,000 (in the latest-reported 2018 data from the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission) to fewer than 2,500. And most of the people being arrested are now facing misdemeanors instead of felony charges. “A year ago, Oregonians voted yes on Measure 110 to remove criminal penalties for possession of drugs and expand access to health services. Now, because of this measure, there are thousands of people in Oregon that will never have to experience the devastating life-long barriers of having a drug arrest on their record, which disproportionately and unjustly affected Black and Indigenous people due to targeted policing,” said DPA Executive Director Kassandra Frederique in the press release. “Because of this measure, there is more than $300 million in funding that did not exist before being funneled into community organizations to provide adequate and culturally competent care that people desperately need. And while the devastation of 50 years of cruel and counterproductive policies can’t be erased overnight, by all metrics we hoped to achieve, and what voters asked for, we are going down the right path.” AuthorPhillip Smith is a writing fellow and the editor and chief correspondent of Drug Reporter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has been a drug policy journalist for more than two decades. He is the longtime writer and editor of the Drug War Chronicle, the online publication of the nonprofit Stop the Drug War, and was the editor of AlterNet’s coverage of drug policy from 2015 to 2018. He was awarded the Drug Policy Alliance’s Edwin M. Brecher Award for Excellence in Media in 2013. This article was produced by Drug Reporter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. The Drug Policy Alliance is a funder of Drug Reporter. Archives December 2021 12/10/2021 American Express Goes on a Buying Spree in Argentina’s Congress. By: Juan GraboisRead NowI was told that a man by the name of John Doe passed through the offices of Argentine congressmen. He wasn’t carrying heavy bags of cash, but only had an American Express card on him. Doe was a well-groomed and well-dressed U.S. national who came on behalf of the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham). He came bearing gifts for several congressmen: airfare, lodging, and entertainment in Washington, D.C. It is a well-known fact that deputies in Third World countries travel to first world countries, especially to the United States, to meet their rich sponsors. The gifts from Doe were well received in several offices. The Argentine congressmen who received these gifts got to enjoy a nice trip to Washington from November 28 to December 4. That is the same week when the Argentine parliament was expected to pass the Packaging Law, the most important social and economic regulation in a decade, which will enable an ecological solution to the waste problem. The AmCham wants to save Argentina from making a serious mistake because apparently the U.S. companies are very concerned about how this law will affect jobs and overall growth in Argentina. The AmCham is an independent and nonprofit business organization, which is present in almost every country in the world and operates in Argentina openly. The organization defends the interests of the U.S. multinationals. Some U.S. firms—such as Pepsi and Coca-Cola, which are leading plastic-packing companies as much as soft drink manufacturers—have openly said that they are against the Packaging Law. I don’t know if it is a crime or not to go around offering airline tickets and receiving these tickets, lodging, and gifts, but it seems to me to be at odds with the most elementary principle of public ethics. It seems that Doe’s American Express card was put to work to encourage Argentine representatives to reject not only the Packaging Law but also the views of their constituents, who are in support of this law. This case illustrates how a transnational lobby operates in the Global South, against socio-environmental regulations and against any political action in defense of ecological practices, as well as against national sovereignty and the public interest that should bind corporations. As soon as AmCham realized that the Packaging Law could pose a danger to the profits of companies they represent in Argentina, they set the machinery in motion to undermine the law. The same Argentine media that praised the law days before AmCham got into the action now rant against it; deputies who had voted for the law in the committees now reversed their vote as soon as their offices were flooded with invitations to Washington, D.C. The American Chamber of Commerce claims that the businesses it represents are not against the Packaging Law per se, but that these companies should not be regulated: they should be allowed to manage their own packaging systems. It is quite ridiculous. Nobody forbids these companies from running their own private business. The Packaging Law is simply there to define the terms of the business. If a firm uses ecological packaging methods or recyclable packaging methods, then everything is fine. The government of Argentina seeks to encourage firms to do just this. If companies do not follow this rule, then the state will claim the cost of mitigation and remediation of environmental damage created by unecological packaging techniques used by these companies. When a corporation puts a container into the market, which it does not recycle or compost, then that packaging does not magically disappear into the infinite cosmos. It gets buried in a landfill, ends up in a clandestine dump, gets thrown into the ocean, threatens the lives of fish, and creates plastic islands. There is a place in the Pacific Ocean called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is three times the size of France. Fortunately for society, the cartoneros (waste pickers) provide an integral service that aids in the recovery of a considerable part of the waste, about 10,000 tons a day in Argentina; they are, however, paid poorly for their immense social service. At the same time, the corporations benefit from the raw materials that the cartoneros and their families gather. Their supply chains are as dirty as their lobbying practices. Coca-Cola manufactures its bottles with plastic that a child likely gathered from the San Pedro garbage dump in Buenos Aires. The social struggles and the new Packaging Law demand a more humane and ecological plan for the planet. The cartoneros would like to be part of cooperatives of urban recyclers and would like certain guarantees for their work. Also, the environmental damage caused by the plastic bottles and other materials should be absorbed by the firms, so that society does not have to bear this cost to ensure profits for these private firms. The U.S. corporations, meanwhile, propose a model of “private consortiums,” a kind of self-governed charity for greenwashing. They want to pay politicians to avoid regulations and then want to make their own watered-down regulations. Their corruption and their tendency to ecocide do not surprise anyone. It is in the nature of profit maximization that makes companies like these not care for the human and environmental damages caused by their actions or for the resulting costs that are eventually borne by communities and by nature. Their logic is to ensure profit maximization and capital accumulation for themselves. Corporations with this logic cannot be expected to voluntarily restrain themselves. Society and governments must stop this crazy runaway train. The real problem lies in the permeability of political power that sells itself, even more cheaply than corporate power: How inexpensive is the vote of a politician! Eva Perón condemned those who gave themselves for a “smile, a few coins or a banquet.” This is just like the Washington tour that has purchased the votes of several Argentine politicians, who seem eager to cash in on the benefits of AmCham’s American Express card—also made of plastic—while other plastic garbage patches are created in the oceans and the cartoneros struggle to survive amidst the toxic sludge of corporate waste. AuthorJuan Grabois is a lawyer and a leader of the Unión de Trabajadores y Trabajadoras de la Economía Popular (UTEP) in Argentina. He founded and now leads Frente Patria Grande, a leading political force in the country. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives December 2021 China as "New Cold War" EnemyThe dominant narrative in Western mainstream media nowadays is that China is the new rising global threat in what is now appropriately being called a “New Cold War ''. Of course this could not be further from the truth. No, rather the main antagonist of this very real “New Cold War '' is the United States itself as well as its Western counterparts that help maintain its status as the sole unopposed hegemon. Western powers have concocted lies against China, fabricating a “genocide” of Uyghurs in Xinjiang that even the Western media outlets that pushed this fabrication had to walk back. The United States has also given resources and support to color revolution protests in Hong Kong in order to destabilize China and has also provoked a possible conflict in Taiwan in order to “protect Taiwan’s sovereignty” , which is skeptical given past considerations by the U.S Military to conduct a nuclear strike on Taiwan during the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis as revealed by Daniel Ellsberg. Not only has China not been the rising cold war threat it has been portrayed to be, but its most recent moves toward a more multipolar world, along with similar efforts by other countries deemed enemies by the U.S Empire, will make the world much safer than it is now under U.S global imperial domination. Such is the Case with two of China’s current diplomatic moves in the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) and the BRI (Belt and Road Initiative), both of which have been portrayed by Western media as nefarious attempts to exploit other countries like the Western powers actually do themselves now. Rather in reality both these groups are actual attempts at removing unipolar, U.S dominated geopolitics in favor of a new economic order. A new multipolar world where individual countries and their peoples have a say in what happens both globally and at home. This new economic order that will be ushered in by projects like the SCO and the BRI will be one founded on peace and economic cooperation between countries rather than the warmongering and constant imperial plunder of the current order. BRI Dam and waterway project in Guizhou, China A New OrderThe SCO is made up of a handful of countries such as China, Russia, Pakistan, India, Iran, and many other countries spanning the Middle East and Central Asia. The BRI similarly has done infrastructure and economic projects with these countries, many of which make up what is called the “21st Century Maritime Silk Road '' named after of course its historical predecessor in the Silk Road. This new mass economic project to create a modern economic belt through the creation of infrastructure and various economic projects is not limited to Central Asia, Africa, and the Middle East however. In 2017 Panama became the first Latin American country to officially endorse the BRI. This was in line with the 2017 statement by Wang Yi, the Foreign Minister of the People’s Republic of China, where he called Latin America the “natural extension of the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road and the Belt and Road Initiative.” Since then more Latin countries have endorsed BRI, including Cuba which originally joined in 2018 and now as of 2021 has joined the global energy partnership and made its official entry into the BRI. Many Latin American countries have also yet to endorse the BRI, including Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia, some of the region's largest economies. Much of the disintegration between Latin countries in regards to endorsing BRI or other economic projects with China, is due to U.S imperial influence both historically and today, specifically through the use of organizations such as the OAS (Organization of American States). Evo Morales returning to Bolivia in 2020 "Ministries of Yankee Colonies"The OAS, founded in 1948 and headquartered in Washington D.C, was created as a neocolonial tool whereby the United States could exert total domination over the destiny of Latin American countries in the post World War Two world. This resurrection of Monroe Doctrine policy has been a key reason as to the general instability in some Latin countries, but more importantly as the key reason preventing true Latin American cooperation and a more peaceful multipolar planet. In 2019 the OAS helped to orchestrate a fascist coup in Bolivia by calling their elections illegitimate, despite no factual evidence, which then led to a Christo-fascist puppet for U.S imperial interests being installed and the popular MAS (Movimiento Al Socialismo “Movement for Socialism”) President Evo Morales being expelled from the country. After receiving amnesty from Manuel Lopez Obrador in a positive sign of Latin American unity, The Mexican Air Force (FAM) plane that helped the now fleeing Morales was shot at by a RPG rocket launcher by the coup forces the OAS helped install. Bolivia, through the brave struggle of their peoples, took their country back from the coup wagers, resulting in the reestablishment of the MAS government under President Luis Arce and the return of Evo Morales. Coup President Jeanine Anez carrying a giant bible Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry in front of a painting of Augusto Sandino Nicaragua faced equally false claims of illegitimate/rigged elections on November 7, 2020 by the OAS after the FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional “Sandinista National Liberation Front”) once again won by popular vote under President Daniel Ortega. This call from the OAS led the U.S Government to prepare new sanctions against the Nicaraguan people on top of the already illegal sanctions imposed. In response Nicaragua left the OAS on November 19th, being the only other country besides Cuba and Venezuela to leave when Cuba was suspended in 1962 for instituting the Cuban Revolution and Venezuela in 2019. Nicaragua’s statement of departure was made in front of a giant portrait of Augusto Sandino, a Nicaraguan revolutionary who fought the U.S Marines that occupied Nicaragua in the 20’s and 30’s, with Foreign Minister Denis Moncada saying that the OAS is an “instrument of interference” that “has the mission of facilitating the hegemony of the United States.” The gross attempts by the OAS to tamper with the sovereignty of Bolivia and Nicaragua and the subsequent responses by both countries makes clear the need and want for an alternative to the OAS that actually benefits Latin American countries and is a tool of mutual benefit and cooperation instead of a tool of U.S exploitation. CELAC Summit in Mexico City on September 18, 2021 Replacing the OASThis is where groups like CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) can provide this alternative. CELAC was officially founded in 2011 with its inaugural summit being held in Caracas on December 2 and 3rd. CELAC rose from its predecessor, the Rio Group, which formed in 1986 for the similar purpose of cooperating on regional policy issues independently from the United States. CELAC’s most recent summit took place on September 18, 2021 in Mexico City, being attended by the likes of Nicolas Maduro and Miguel Díaz Canel of Venezuela and Cuba respectively. Absent was fascist clown President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and Colombian narco President Ivan Duque who also “issued furious statements condemning Maduro’s attendance.” Despite the lingering of a few fascists in service of U.S interests in the region making some noise, this summit is a stark representation of an alternative to the OAS with cooperation between fellow Latin countries being emphasized. During the Summit an enumeration of issues were brought up including calls to end U.S colonialism in Puerto Rico, calls to end the U.S blockade of Cuba, and the general call to replace the OAS. All issues never discussed in any serious manner in the OAS. During the Summit China’s President Xi Jinping congratulated CELAC and called for further strengthening of relations between China and Latin America. The U.S and the Western powers at large have done everything to smear China and the rising power of groups like the SCO and initiatives like Belt and Road because they are crumbling empires built on exploitation and colonial extraction and a world where global power is more evenly distributed does not suit the Empire’s dominative interests. Latin America has been the historic “backyard” to the U.S colonial behemoth, with large swaths of it being swallowed into U.S territory, countless neoliberal dictators from Pinochet to Somoza being put into power throughout the continent, endless “drug wars” funded by the U.S State Department, and numerous other crimes the U.S has perpetually perpetrated on Latin America. The emergence of CELAC as a true union between Latin American countries and the disappearance of the OAS as a neocolonial entity could be the final nail in the coffin of U.S imperialism. A unified Latin America, defying U.S imperial interests, along with a unified multipolar coalition led by China, could actually bring about the peace the world desperately needs. AuthorJacan Stone is a writer from Oxnard, California who writes on American foreign policy, American politics, and International Relations. Any questions about Jacan's writings or other concerns, Jacan can be reached at this email at jacanstone@gmail.com. Archives December 2021 What does a Marxist theory of human psychology look like? Kyrill Potapov sheds light on this topic by showing how the works of Soviet thinkers like Lev Vygotsky and Evald Ilyenkov relate to more modern research on collective intentionality and niche construction. Vygotsky addresses students in a Soviet classroom. Soviet Marxist Lev Vygotsky, believing that psychology needed “its own Capital”1, took aim at Western psychology’s focus on classifying “fossilized behavior” as well as the Soviet tendency to lift concepts from Marx and apply them directly to observed phenomena. Western psychology served capitalism by getting us to pin our alienation on our unique internal makeup. Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Are you anally retentive or anally expulsive? What’s your IQ? Do you have an Oppositional Defiant Disorder or a growth mindset? Soviet psychology was just as prone to grouping people according to static generalizations, like “How many times the child went to the public baths and how many newspapers his father reads”2. It treated the environment as a set of absolutes determining human behavior. Vygotsky had not even reached his 38th birthday when he died of tuberculosis in 1934. But a group of his students took forward his scientific legacy, defying state decrees against his scientific work. The Vygotsky school continues to have a huge influence across the world, from Brazil to Finland, but many Marxists are unaware of their work and its significance. Vygotsky was one of the first to suggest that hardship and disability are not a problem of the individual, but a problem of her society. It is not a stamp one carries around, but a social relation, the conditions of which we can and must change. Psychology had been about patterns in the external appearance of our behavior, when it should have been about the “origination and disappearance, about reasons and conditions, and about all those real relations that are the basis of any phenomenon”3 – not what we have been but what we can be. Before you think this sounds like another self-help guru, we should remember that soon after the Russian revolution Vygotsky helped to bring education to thousands of street children. A school of Marxists including Vygotsky and the philosopher Evald Ilyenkov offered a creative counter-current to the dogma of Soviet Diamat. But the problems Vygotsky, Ilyenkov, and their comrades identified are still rife in psychology today. We can see the same issues at play in debates on the origins of human language. We will see how Vygotsky’s and Ilyenkov’s Marxist psychology can contribute to these debates by challenging the widespread assumption that science ought to start with individual minds. Vygotsky’s psychology starts with the social relations and material conditions that make human consciousness possible in the first place. I will argue that this strand of Marxist psychology is being confirmed by recent breakthroughs in the study of collective intentionality and niche construction. Evald Ilyenkov emerged as a leading figure of a renaissance in Soviet philosophy in the 1950s and 60s. He argued that what makes humans unique is that we produce representations: “The human being, and only the human being, immediately ceases to merge with the form of her life activity, separating it from itself and placing it before herself, that is, transforming it into representation.”4 Our clothes, our money, our games, and our country borders are made up of representations. The most important system of representations in our lives is of course our language. Scientists have often assumed we need to explain the origins of language to explain other kinds of representation. Vygotsky and Ilyenkov argue for the converse position: we can only understand language as developing out of wider concrete activity in a particular culture.5 At the start of the 20th century, American behaviorism and its Soviet analog (Pavlov’s reflexology) suggested that human language could be explained in terms of conditioning: we learned words through imitation and reinforcement. This view was comprehensively overturned by Noam Chomsky, who argued that conditioning just could not account for the rich novelty and versatility of the speech of young children. Chomsky instead proposed that humans were born with a language organ6 that acted like a computer program with a universal grammar that enabled any language to be learned. Over time this view too has been widely challenged: evidence for anything constituting a universal grammar has failed to materialize. Today Michael Tomasello is working at the cutting edge of research into language development. According to Tomasello the complex structures we find in our language are fully explainable in terms of our enculturation: a process in which more complex structures are learned on the basis of earlier simpler ones, with the models and reinforcements of more competent speakers. What is interesting is that Tomasello cites Vygotsky as his central influence. Tomasello’s innovations have come from shifting the focus of research from the individual-world relation to the social relations into which individuals are born. It is here that he most fully follows Vygotsky. Vygotsky suggested that while the behavior of non-human animals was explainable in terms of stimulus and response conditioning, human activity was mediated by social forms. While ripples on the water could direct a heron to dive for fish, humans could treat the ripples as a sign instead of automatically reacting, modifying their own response to it, for instance by adding a colorful float to their fishing line. The modus classicus for Vygotsky and Tomasello here is learning to point. While an infant’s extended reaching gesture might at first be met with the response that her mother gives her what she is reaching towards, over time it can become a mutually recognized sign which the infant has learned to appropriate to express her intentions. The mutual recognition involved in acting with others allows us to develop concepts with which to grasp the world. Tomasello has extended this hypothesis by noting that chimps raised in captivity can also be taught to point, though this pointing remains at the level of indicating what they want. Human infants meanwhile learn to point for a range of purposes such as expressing interest or directing someone to something they might want. This research brings confirmation to theories which Vygotsky first proposed from his readings of Hegel, Marx & Engels and their concepts of self-actualization and alienation.7 Unfortunately, I think it’s too early to see Tomasello as progressing the project of Vygotsky’s Marxist psychology. The cognitivist milieu in which Tomasello works has found it hard to shake off the grip of mind-body dualism. Here is the kind of story Tomasello offers to explain the history of language development: Before language existed, we walked around with intentional states and no way to express them to others. I would get hungry and an intentional state to climb the tree for cherries would form in my mind and I would lug my lonely self up the tree. But then one day I find someone already up the tree picking cherries and realise that others are after the same goals as me. I realise others have intentional states just like mine. Now I can apply my intentional states to them and understand them. With our shared intentional states we can now coordinate our activities and introduce gestures, then words like “ripe” and “rotten”8. But what are intentional states and how can we share them? When does one state stop and the next begin? When I play chess can’t I say that what I share with my opponent are the chess pieces right there on the board? I see certain dangers and openings as real parts of the dynamic situation. My intentions are embedded in the situation: enacted through the real constraints of the chess pieces and the activity of chess.9 Psychologists Racine & Carpendale10 offer a helpful summary of this criticism: In their interactions with others, children do not observe a pattern of activity and then go about computing the underlying meaning; children instead come to see psychological concepts directly in such patterns of activity. Tomasello reduces language and representations to patterns of information forming my mental states. He does not consider how such representations as parts of the material world, in turn, influence our development.11 This is one of the key areas in which Tomasello has rejected Vygotsky. At the heart of Vygotsky’s work is the bold claim that “Every function in the cultural development of the child appears on the stage twice, in two planes, first, the social, then the psychological, first between people as an intermental category, then within the child as an intramental category”.12 Vygotsky called this his general genetic law of development (GGLD). Whether they know it or not, mainstream psychologists tend to assume a Kantian frame in which the categories of thought were formed a priori in the mind of each individual. Over in the Frankfurt School, Alfred Sohn-Rethel tried to challenge this assumption by suggesting Kantian categories are produced through structures of human relations; but Sohn-Rethel’s work narrowly focuses on the conditions of exchange relations on the market, leaving little to say about everyday psychology. Vygotsky’s work came to the West during the Cold War and it reached its readership cleansed of its Marxist roots. Editors cut out references to Marx and rephrased passages to sound less Marxist. To use Vygotsky’s own language, Western psychologists had different social motives and were not in a social situation of development in which his radical theory of sociogenesis could be oriented. He was instead popularized as a flawed social constructivist. Trainee teachers often meet the watered-down version of Vygotsky’s GGLD that children learn best from others, while sociologists have highlighted that everything is culturally mediated. These truisms have little to do with Vygotsky’s project. Vygotsky followed Marx in taking the categories of thought to be produced through concrete labour. Unlike Sohn-Rethel, Vygotsky extended Marx’s insights on the dynamics of commodity exchange and applied them to other (and newly developing) forms of social practice. Though Vygotsky’s work is grounded in Marx, Hegel & Spinoza, its influences are much broader. The figure Vygotsky first credits for the discovery of the GGLD is psychologist James Mark Baldwin. A passage from Vygotsky’s student Aleksei Leontiev may help us see why Baldwin would interest a group of Marxist scientists: Mastering stimulation, man masters his own behaviour; in submitting himself to its natural laws he in this way subjects it to himself, in this sense turning it into voluntary behaviour. We see that at the foundations of this process lies the general process of the socialization of man. The beginning of collective labour and economic activities, which signify that humanity has entered the historical phase of its development – this is the chief condition for the appearance of higher forms of behaviour. Here we have an extremely complicated process of the double relation of interchange between the individual and his social comrades. In this process, in J. M. Baldwin’s terminology, ‘the social element projecting itself into the personality forms the “subjective”, which by a return movement is transmitted anew to other people and thus becomes “ejective” [the social form].13 Leontiev is tying Vygotsky’s theory of sign mediation into the broader context of Marx’s discussion of tool production and social practice. What is more interesting is the role that Baldwin is playing in this account. In a typical passage Vygotsky quotes Engels: “Both natural science and philosophy have till now completely disregarded research on the influence of man’s activity on his thinking. On the one hand, they know only nature and on the other, thought. But a more substantial and closer base for human thinking is precisely man changing nature and not nature alone as such, and the mind of man developed according to how man learned to change nature” (K. Marx and E Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 20, p. 545).14 Though he was by no means a Marxist, American psychologist and evolutionary biologist Baldwin independently arrived at many of the same conclusions as Engels. Baldwin was a leading voice in America until details of his sex life became public. Vygotsky and Leontiev took interest in Baldwin at a time when he had been largely forgotten by the global scientific community. That is until the 1990s when Baldwin was rediscovered in Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. The renewed interest in Baldwin is now part of a much bigger wave of interest in the biology of niche construction. For Deacon, we should understand the complexity of human language not through an inner universal grammar but through the “semiotic” constraints which come with the use and manipulation of the distinctive types of signs which define human language, namely, symbols. Deacon proposes a mechanism to explain this development that neither relies on dualism, nor crudely flattens everything to a favored foundation like neurons or reflexes. Something must account for the kind of readiness for language which allows a two-year-old to comment on the spilled cereal while a cat living in the same house meows and bangs her head against my leg. Deacon calls this mechanism for adaptation Baldwinian evolution. Baldwinian evolution (or what is more widely called niche construction) makes the striking claim that a group’s evolution can be altered by the behavior of its members during their own lifetimes i.e. that culture can change the course of evolution. While this may look like Lamarckism, it is fully compatible with Darwinism. Baldwin notes how many higher mammals have young who dedicate a lot of time to play. Goats living in the planes learn to jump one way and goats in the mountains jump another way – if goats got too experimental in their play, they’d jump off the edge of the cliff, but they’ve evolved the right level of flexibility in play to learn in their environment. Play and imitation-based learning give animals a huge advantage because it’s far more efficient than learning how to catch the fish in the nearby lake or hide from a predator through your own trial and error. These are a few of the basic ingredients but we have not yet seen full-fledged Baldwinian evolution. The most widely cited example of human Baldwinian evolution concerns lactose intolerance. Cultures that developed cattle herding have far lower rates of lactose intolerance compared to those relying on crops or fish. To this day there are clear disparities in the rates of lactose intolerance in France compared to China for instance. Another way to deal with lactose intolerance is for the sugar to be eaten up as the milk turns. Whoever started making milk into cheese gave themselves another protection against the potential negative effects of lactose. What’s more, cheese is a store of Vitamin D, meaning that cultures who make cheese can live in places that are dark a lot of the time. Gouda may have exerted a force on our evolution. The cheese itself has no magic force, rather it is in real human activity that cheese is made and cheese making is learned and passed on to others. And yet it is the cheese itself that can direct the activity, going too sour one year or too spongy: the cheese is the final criteria for cheese making. Cheese and cheese making are locked in a kind of unity in which it does not really make sense to separate one from the other. There is no gene for cheese making, but over time as cheese becomes increasingly needed for a group’s survival, adaptations may arise which increase the likelihood that a group will keep consuming it– perhaps (to oversimplify) a mutation guaranteeing that me and my mum find gorgonzola delicious. Of course, this progressive entanglement of the environment with the organism need not be limited to cheese, since it applies much more widely to the social niche we have constructed for ourselves. Vygotsky reminds us of the Marxist resonance here, and the contrasts with traditional approaches focused on information processing and behavioural patterns: It is very obvious that external signals – a reflection of the natural connection of phenomena, wholly created by natural conditions – cannot be an adequate basis of human behavior: For human adaptation, an active change in the nature of man is essential. It is the basis of all human history. It necessarily presupposes an active change in man’s behavior. ‘affecting the environment by this movement and changing it, he changes his own nature at the same time,” (K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 23, pp. 188-189).15 A chess board has been shaped over centuries of social practice and has in turn shaped social practice. Baldwinian evolution reminds us that human habits and dispositions have similarly been shaped over the course of a history of hundreds of thousands of years of engaging together with our environment. What appears to us as individual psychology is often the manifestation of complex networks of social relations: These techniques or methods of behavior, arising stereotypically in given situations, represent virtual, solidified, petrified, crystallized psychological forms that arose in remote times at the most primitive stages of cultural development of man and in a remarkable way were preserved in the form of historical survivors in a petrified and in a living state in the behavior of modern man.16 Vygotsky argues that even something as basic as a reflex response to a particular stimulus in a lab needs to be produced through wider social practice, creating the conditions for it to be observed. Cultural evolution and biological evolution have worked in tandem to produce the effects we observe in a lab. The only way science can study real behavior rather than its fossilized/reified products is by analyzing its history of production. Though Chomsky supposedly overturned behaviorism, in his wake linguistics has continued to focus on behavioral fossils rather than the dynamics of real human activity. According to Deacon, we have struggled to understand language development because we have isolated language from these broader processes of production, instead focusing on processes internal to language and hoping to see more primitive forms of them elsewhere in the animal kingdom. As Vygotsky notes, this is a kind of fetishism.17 Writing in the 60s and 70s, Evald Ilyenkov greatly expanded on the philosophical implications of the strand in Marxist thought we have been following here. In Ilyenkov’s philosophy, it is not mental representations that we form to grasp the world but the world itself as it appears in social practice. Our consciousness is not something inside us which we inspect for motives or apply knowledge from, it is part of our overall materially grounded activity: It is this that confronts the individual as the thought of preceding generations realized (‘reified’, ‘objectified’, ‘alienated’) in sensuously perceptible ‘matter’ – in language and visually perceptible images, in books and statues, in wood and bronze, in the form of places of worship and instruments of labor, in the designs of machines and state buildings, in the patterns of scientific and moral systems, and so on. All these objects are in their existence, in their ‘present being’ substantial, ‘material’, but in their essence, in their origin they are ‘ideal’, because they ‘embody’ the collective thinking of people, the ‘universal spirit’ of mankind.18 Ilyenkov does not believe that we transfer thoughts to one another but that we participate in shared activities that condition our thoughts through the objects directing these activities. Here again, we can draw comparisons to Sohn-Rethel and his comrades in the Frankfurt School. There are interesting affinities to be explored between Ilyenkov’s ideal and Sohn-Rethel’s real abstraction. It is not just the narrower focus on market exchange that distinguishes Sohn-Rethel from Vygotsky and Ilyenkov but a kind of pessimism which comes perhaps from Sohn-Rethel’s Kantianism or perhaps in the differences of worldview within and outside the USSR. For “Western Marxists” there is often a focus on how little we know, so that contemporary Frankfurt School philosopher Axel Honneth invites us to treat reification with suspicion: as phenomena concealing real relations.19 Analysis is limited to a critique of the social sphere without much room for a constructive story about how tools and materials may be appropriated. Vygotsky and Ilyenkov understand reification more broadly as the process through which objects possess certain values for us because we have acquired habits for their use. The interface at which we find complex connections here is not between world and head but between the world and social relations. As a seasoned chess player, I see the bishop as movable diagonally, but I also see that only a few positions are open, and I cannot melt my piece and reconstruct it on the other side of the knight. How I experience my environment is already conditioned by systems of norms, but each norm is only the norm it is because of how it is materialized in concrete activity. The opposition the world poses for me shapes and is shaped by historically accumulated practice. While traditional psychology has often sought scientific concepts for things inside the head, Ilyenkov suggests that psychology should begin with the public world we share in an activity. Ilyenkov does not deny that we have private thoughts but sees them as a sub-species of our overall activity. For Ilyenkov, instead of applying mental models or knowledge to the world, the world is its own model and already appears to us in relation to our activity. The world “gives us” this knowledge because we are inhabitants of the ecological niche Ilyenkov calls the ideal. The boundary between human and wider niche construction may still be a little fuzzy. Don’t beavers also live in social groups in which dams are both built through their activity and guide their activity? Again, Ilyenkov describes the distinction in terms of our production of signs or representations: The human being, and only the human being, immediately ceases to “merge” with the form of her life activity, separating it from itself and placing it before herself, that is, transforming it into representation.20 If representations are what distinguish us from beavers and woodpeckers, will we need to search for mental states after all? The cognitivist approach of traditional psychology is to look for a representation in the mind and consider how it is correlated with what it represents in the world. For Ilyenkov a representation is a functional relation, agnostic to whether it is inside or outside the skull. The power of language is in increasing my representational capacities by giving me more tools with which to represent. Discussing the work of psychologist S. L. Rubinstein, Ilyenkov explains: ‘Ideality mainly characterises the idea or image insofar as they, becoming objectivised in words’ [entering into the system of socially evolved knowledge which for the individual is something that is given for him.], ‘in objective reality, thus acquire a relative independence, separating themselves, as it were, from the mental activity of the individual’ . It is these forms of the organisation of social (collectively realised) human life activity that exist before, outside and completely independently of the individual mentality, in one way or another materially established in language, in ritually legitimised customs and rights.21 Ilyenkov defends a version of Vygotsky’s GGLD. People find themselves acting in a humanized nature that preceded them. They can only separate themselves from the world by being sensitive to its reifications/material constraints: by learning to recognize or create a representation of the world by which to draw meaningful distinctions within it.22 With representations I can imagine alternatives to the present reality and I am not a slave to the visual field. Producing representations can give us self-determination.23 I might tie a knot in a handkerchief to direct myself to remember the milk or I might write in a journal to direct myself emotionally while going through a difficult experience. Language is also a rich source of representations that can move us (as in poetry24) or by way of which we can move, as in a discussion. Motives/ affects are embodied in words through reification.25 The process of reification can explain how our representations and everyday objects take on the seemingly magical quality of having a value for us in our activity: Objects in the environment are not neutral for us… they not only create difficulties for us in our actions to a greater or lesser degree or, conversely, facilitate actions, but many things and events that we meet manifest for us a more or less determined will, they stimulate us to certain actions: beautiful weather or a lovely landscape move us to take a walk, the steps of a staircase stimulate a two-year-old to climb and slide…26 Self-determination is the subordination or appropriation of these dynamic constraints. The role of self-determination in niche construction is something which is still an undertheorized area within research on niche construction. It arguably also undertheorized in the work of Sohn-Rethel. In a fascinating anthropological study, Lansing & Fox ask, “Can niche construction be Marx’s ‘humanized nature?’” They note: Presently, there is little role for conscious planning in the theory of niche construction, which explains the intricate architecture of environments like termite mounds as products of Darwinian selection. But in cases like the rice terraces, the role of conscious intention cannot be ignored. As Marx observed, ‘a spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality’.27 Lansing & Fox use archaeological evidence and other materials to investigate the practices involved in constructing well-irrigated farms in Bali.28 Did the rulers in Bali work with architects and construct the farms top-down from a plan or were they constructed bottom-up as directed by the farmers themselves? As might be expected, when authorities told the farmers what to do based on their own plans and models in events like flooding or pest infestation, the advice of the authorities only made things worse because of unanticipated network effects. The farms were most effective when the farmers could direct their management themselves. What stands out in this study is that it is the top-down authority that ends up associated with Marx’s views and the farmers directing their own labor which represents the alternative. The authors give a nuanced discussion, recognizing the value of Marx and Hegel for research, but in assuming that for Marx the ideal is in the head, they limit the scope of their investigation. Vygotsky and Ilyenkov have shown us how we can avoid this awkward dualism, by putting psychology and representation in its proper place in Marx’s system: as part of a materially realized interpersonal developmental process. Western psychologists have often imported Soviet psychology into their work by fitting it to their existing frameworks to foreground social learning. Michael Tomasello has carried out original and interesting research on the differences between humans and our closest non-human relatives. Non-human animals can construct tools for their environment while humans can take the whole socialized world as their environment. So when young kids learn new tools there is a ratcheting effect in human culture, multiplying the possibilities of every free individual. For Tomasello and cognitive science humans have mental intentions as immediately given in consciousness and they can freely act on these intentions unless they are impeded from doing so. Ilyenkov’s philosophy shows that we have no need for this division of the mind from the body. We do not need the fetishism of relating mental states to mental states because we are born into a world already shaped for our thinking. And it is this world of the forms of social human life activity that confronts the newborn child (to be more exact, the biological organism of the species Homo Sapiens) as the objectivity to which he is compelled to adapt all his ‘behaviour’, all the functions of his organic body, as the object towards assimilation of which his elders guide all his activity. The individual is obliged to subordinate his own actions to certain ‘rules’ and ‘patterns’ which he has to assimilate as a special object in order to make them rules and patterns of the life activity of his own body.29 In our development, it is not beliefs and intentions that make a difference but customs and practices we find in the material world. An ethnographic study by Lipatov, Brown, and Feldman on the influence of niche construction on marriage customs in Taiwan illustrates this conclusion. If I am born in a culture with certain marriage customs, it is not that I introspect on and then share intentions with others in my culture but that this is what marriage actually is as an object in my world, about which I may then form beliefs.30 While Tomasello suggests it is shared intentions that characterize human psychology and allow for the mediation of human culture in our development, Vygotsky argues it is symbols and tools that humans share. Ilyenkov reminds us that symbols are things we can collectively construct in concrete material practice, rather than something locked in your head. Frederic Jameson says that these days we lack the cognitive mapping to orient our world. We tend to talk past each other and find it hard to communicate our intentions. But what is to be done? “Western Marxism” and Continental philosophy has often been unable to do more than offer criticism. As Ray Brassier argues, Marxism is nothing if it isn’t a process of collective grasping and construction.31 Vygotsky and Ilyenkov reframe this debate by theorizing the processes by which we produce maps and representations. Instead of grounding theories of language in “floating signifiers” or mental states, this school of Soviet Marxists has grounded them in concrete practice. As we’ve seen, recent scientific findings have vindicated them here. As Marxists, we should in turn appropriate this science for new emancipatory ends. Notes
AuthorThis article is based on a presentation made to the International Friends of Ilyenkov. To learn more about Ilyenkov, go here. Originally published in Cosmonaut. Archives December 2021 12/5/2021 The Injunction of Happiness: Slavoj Zizek and Capitalist Buddhism. By: Justin ClarkRead NowI’ve become more and more interested in the secular application of Buddhism over the last couple of years. As an atheist and materialist, I was never one for typical monotheism but still interested in how one can tap into numinous experiences. I began studying the practice of mindfulness broadly and a despiritualized Buddhism specifically. Living with anxiety and finding no clear respite for the daily onslaught of dread, I wanted meditation to become a way for me to alleviate some of my own personal suffering without increasing medications or falling into previous bad habits. I was first acquainted with secular spirituality through Sam Harris, whose book, Waking Up, opened my mind to the possibility of a spiritual life without supernatural or religious commitments. His musings on mindfulness (through the ancient practice of Vipassana) really intrigued me, so I signed up for his meditation app, also called Waking Up. I enjoyed the meditations a lot, even finding myself becoming more calm and less stressed. However, something lingered in the back of my mind about this entire project, a concern I couldn’t quite shake. Is the practice of Buddhism in this way, with its focus on mere stress-reduction and happiness, actually nothing more than a panacea? Is it just a way for me to feel better without actually addressing the reasons for my discomfort in the first place? This is the central question that Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek addresses in his book, Event. In the chapter “Buddhism Naturalized,” Žižek argues that the modern world’s insistence on scientific naturalism, coupled with the demands of neoliberal capitalism, makes us desire devices or systems of pleasure that don’t ultimately leave us satisfied. We then desire them more and more instead of addressing the underlying forces that drove us toward artificial satisfaction. To make his point, he discusses a device known as the “Stamina Training Unit.” This device is a flashlight-shaped pleasuring system that a person uses to achieve sexual gratification. The opening of the device is often shaped like a mouth, anus, or vagina, and “you put the erect penis into the opening at the top and move the thing up and down till satisfaction’s achieved.” In other words, the Fleshlight. Now, what in the world does the Fleshlight have to do with Buddhism? In a hilarious, yet profound way, Žižek’s comparison of the Fleshlight to Buddhism is pretty damned apt. Buddhism in the western, capitalist context is the same kind of hollow experience that the fleshlight is for sex; it makes one feel better in the short term but doesn’t actually remedy one’s issues in the long term. In this variant, Buddhism is no more a challenger of our material conditions then right-wing Christianity. As Žižek writes, “Although Buddhism presents itself as the remedy for the stressful tension of capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple and retain inner peace and Gelassenheit (self-surrender), it actually functions as capitalism’s perfect ideological supplement.” But these complications don’t stop political and economic elites from shoving this kind of nascent spirituality down our throats. As William Davies documents in his excellent book, The Happiness Industry, the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland has been abuzz with talk of Buddhism, mostly through encouraging mindfulness. In 2014, they invited Matthieu Ricard, the French-born Buddhist monk who routinely ranks high on personal levels of happiness and contentment. He encouraged attendees to employ mindfulness to their working lives. Davos then took this kind of self-care to the next level, providing attendees with wearable devices to track their movements, heart rate, and rest levels. In this regard, Davies agrees with Žižek that “the future of successful capitalism depends on our ability to combat stress, misery and illness, and put relaxation, happiness and wellness in their place.” Thus, Buddhism and mindfulness serve as a means for preserving the global economic order that requires so much from us and provides little contentment in return. According to this watered-down version of Buddhism, we achieve happiness by “solving the problem of suffering, so its first axiom is: we don’t want to suffer.” By contrast, Žižek underscores something he views as foundational to human life: some forms of suffering are actually worthwhile. Suffering can act as a catalyst for change, such as when one fights for a cause one believes in despite personal hardship. Karl Marx, while toiling over his most important and influential writings on capitalism, lived in relative squalor and lost some of his young children to illness. Abraham Lincoln, arguably America’s greatest president, buried a son while in the White House and agonized over the ravages of America’s bloodiest conflict. Yet, both men used their suffering to strive towards something greater than themselves; for Marx, it was the eventual collapse of capitalism itself and for Lincoln it was ending slavery and preserving the Union. I highly doubt that if either men had taken up a westernized mindfulness practice that their lives or works would’ve been as endearing. Žižek elaborates on this point through psychoanalysis: For a Freudian, this already is problematic and far from self-evident – not only on account of some obscure masochism, but on account of the deep satisfaction brought by a passionate attachment. I am ready to suffer for a political cause; when I am passionately in love, I am ready to submit myself to passion even if I know in advance that it will probably end in catastrophe and that I will suffer when the affair is over. But even at this point of misery, if I am asked, ‘Was it worth it? You are a ruin now!’ the answer is an unconditional ‘Yes! Every inch of it was worth it! I am ready to go through it again!’ Suffering allows us to know what’s beautiful, what’s true, what’s real. Learning a painful truth is still more noble, more worthwhile than a blissful lie. If we never felt pain or sorrow, we couldn’t understand what brings us relief or joy. There’s a dialectic of sorts between pleasure and pain, happiness and suffering. To have and know one is to have and know the other, which in turn make one-- the human experience. Furthermore, in many westernized forms of Buddhism, the question of suffering turns rather pernicious. As Žižek asks, is our goal to alleviate the experience of suffering through only an internal change in one’s being or should we advocate towards changing the conditions under which we needlessly suffer? If we only strive towards the former and negate the latter, we ignore the suffering of others and reject the very idea that there are systemic variables that contribute to our unhappiness. If our loci of introspection is only ourselves, then the way in which we achieve this happiness (either intense introspection or pharmaceuticals), really doesn’t matter. Žižek nails this point, saying that “there is really no difference between deserved and non-deserved happiness: in both cases, the underlying process is chemical. In other words, if Enlightenment can be generated through chemical means (‘Enlightenment pills’), is it still a true Enlightenment, an authentic spiritual Event?” Žižek’s answer is that “these impasses of Buddhism indicate is that it is difficult, if not outright impossible, to get rid of the dimension of subjectivity in the sense of free responsible agency. There is always something false in simply accepting fate, or in treating oneself as an objective entity, part of neurobiological reality.” Humans are always in relation to the world, not in contradistinction to it. In an ironic twist, the kind of determinism proffered by the likes of secularists like Harris is a denial of our ontological connection to the material world. If we really are determined, nothing but puppets on strings, that should compel us to accept responsibility for our mistakes, not shirk it. The retreat into the often-vacuous phraseology of “mindfulness” or the “loss of self” is merely an abdication of agency in a world that requires us to show up and take part, no matter the consequences. This setup allows capital and its vast army of lobbyists, intellectuals, and corporate elites to sell a form of Buddhism that says, “Hey, don’t pay attention to the climate crisis. Don’t care about the consolidation of corporate power. Don’t worry about the authoritarianism all around you. Don’t question the systemic ways in which your life is harmed. Just practice some ‘mindfulness,’ realize that the ‘self is an illusion,’ and keep buying what we’re selling.” This hollow, insulting form of spirituality should be seen as the farce that it is: a cheap ploy to lull the public from seriously investigating their position in the capitalist system. So, are there forms of Buddhism that’re worthwhile? Most certainly. In fact, if you’re looking for an insightful, rewarding study of it from a secular perspective, I highly recommend the writings of Stephen Batchelor. His short book, Buddhism Without Beliefs, boils down many of the core concepts without falling for the same pitfalls of thinkers like Harris. Also, I think mindfulness and meditation can be deeply moving and improve your life. I’m not advocating we give up all spiritual or religious practices. What I am saying is that you shouldn’t use these practices as a license to ignore the injustices and sufferings around you. It should embolden you to create a better version of yourself while working to improve the world in any way that you can. In short, practice Buddhism because you want to, not because capital says you should. AuthorJustin Clark is a Marxist public historian and activist. He holds a B.S. in History/Political Science from Indiana University Kokomo and a M.A. in Public History from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. His graduate research focused on orator Robert Ingersoll and his contributions to Midwestern freethought. You can contact him at justinclarkpubhist@gmail.com or follow him on Instagram at @justinclarkph. Archives December 2021 12/5/2021 In Defense of U.S. Proletarian Patriotism: A comradely response to Danny Haiphong’s “Marxist” Polemic on Patriotic Socialism. By: Kayla PopuchetRead NowAs children raised in the United States of America, we were expected every morning to recite the pledge of allegiance to our country. In grade school, we were taught that our first president, George Washington, had teeth made of wood; that Thanksgiving found its origins in Natives and pilgrims coming together to feast and celebrate one another; that our country is the best and freest country on the planet. God. Bless. America. Naturally, as we transcend the fabrications of bourgeois propaganda, we develop a critical analysis of the history of our country and everything we were taught. We come to the logical conclusion that our country is not the best, it is not free, and its sins are far too deep and vast that even God Himself could not forgive. And with that, we grow a visceral, instinctive reaction to the idea of U.S. patriotism, or rather bourgeois nationalism in the guise of patriotism. Bourgeois nationalism as an institution in the U.S. is seen through loyalty to the U.S. government, first and foremost; it is loyalty to the troops, loyalty to the police but it is never loyalty to your neighbors or coworkers. This by definition is not patriotism, this is nationalism. This has nothing to do with the people of the United States but everything to do with the United States government. Many on the anti-patriotic left raise their qualms with the growing discussions of patriotism in the communist movement, citing red herrings such as bourgeois nationalism, imperialism and the history of colonialism to encapsulate why the United States is uniquely incapable of reconciliation - why socialist principles used in imperial and settler colonial countries of the 20th century are incapable of practice in the United States. This critique is reminiscent of Jay Lovestone’s argument regarding capitalism in the U.S. to which led to the phrase coined by Stalin ‘American Exceptionalism’. Often these days, we use this term to describe the imperialist class and their double standards of law and democracy, but lest we forget this term found its birth against a faction in the Communist Party USA who thought the United States was too exceptional of a case for basic communist principles to be applied to. I fear the anti-patriotic left mirrors this error. In his short piece “On American Patriotism: A Marxist Polemic” (1), journalist Danny Haiphong condenses the multitude of criticisms of U.S. patriotism many on the left have into a well-thought out and digestible piece. While I respect the author and can even see where his logic follows and intent lies, I must highlight how fundamentally his analysis, and that of the anti-patriotic left, is deeply flawed. To open with the heart and soul of his piece, Haiphong uses a photo of a mural in Iran which depicts the U.S. flag with bombs falling down, titled “Down with the USA”. Iran’s leaders have continuously made it clear that popular chants such as “Death to America” apply solely to the U.S. government and not the working masses. Regardless, this is a poor tactic when applied within the United States, where the masses largely have not yet detached from the iconography of the bourgeois flag. There is this theme in the U.S. anti-imperialist movement, one that takes the tactics and sentiments of imperialized countries and makes it their own. The reality is, the Ayatollah and other imperialized nations’ main objective is defending themselves from the imperialism our government unleashes, but our main objective as anti-imperialists in the heart of the empire is to attack the beast. While the proletariat internationally carries the same interests and goals, we cannot have the same tactics for how we fight imperialism as our conditions are different. We can fully appreciate the Iranian and third world resistance, but let us not cosplay as though we are living their conditions, let us not forget that our routes to the same destination are different paths molded by our varying conditions. When entering a formal debate, at its inception the affirmative must set the definitions of the topic. It is for the negative to accept or provide a counter definition, but we cannot continue a debate if we cannot settle the most basic definition of what we are debating. Haiphong writes “Similarly, the concept of patriotism holds a definitive meaning in the context of the United States which is not fundamentally transformed by placing “socialist” or “proletarian” in front of it”, and goes on to claim that those who defend patriotic socialism are attempting to revise basic definitions. But the fact of the matter is, we know for certainty the ruling class lies to further their own agenda, and what Haiphong and the ruling class call patriotism is none other than nationalism. Haiphong even admits he equates the ruling class’s nationalism to patriotism as he writes “American patriotism is by definition bourgeois nationalism from the vantage point of U.S. capitalist development and its particular form of national oppression.” In fact, patriotism and nationalism do have different meanings, the former (2) places its loyalty to the people of the country and the latter (3) emphasizes loyalty to the state. Therefore, by definition, U.S. proletarian patriotism is at direct odds with bourgeois nationalism. How can we even suggest that bourgeois nationalism, a nationalism that takes our taxpayer money to fund the pentagon (4); to destabilize (5) the nations of other works; to sacrifice our youth to for-profit (6) wars; a nationalism that deprives the U.S. people of housing security (7); that intentionally under-educates (8) its people; that leaves its roads to crumble demonstrating pure disdain for its own working class, to call all this patriotism? The ruling class are not patriots and we would be remiss to award them with the soul of the U.S. nation, this belongs to the working class only. And now that we have established terms, perhaps one can argue that due to deep propaganda, patriotism as a term is beyond salvation. Well, because conservatives say that socialism is all about critical race theory, vaccinations, and ANTIFA, does that necessarily mean we stop correcting the masses of what socialism is and abandon socialism as a term? Do we abandon using communism because reactionaries and the ruling class paint the image of citizens in prison uniforms working in grey factories, desperate for “western freedom”? Of course we don’t abandon these terms, we correct and defend them! Certainly we must address the claims of American (U.S.) exceptionalism. As aforementioned, the origins of this term derives from a faction within the Communist Party USA, led by Jay Lovestone, who turned his back on the principles of Leninism as he thought the material conditions of the U.S. were exceptional to that of other countries, that U.S. workers wouldn’t seek revolution (9). When we speak of U.S. proletarian patriotism, we're met with similar arguments: “the U.S. is a settler colonial state” or “U.S. imperialism has seen heights never before in history making it unique from other empires before it”. It is a 21st Century explanation for why the U.S. is too exceptional for basic communist principles. These are the 21st Century American Exceptionalists. But let’s examine this further. Yes, it is true that part of the U.S. history is slavery, genocide, and apartheid, this is undeniable. Yet it is also true that the history of the United States cannot be reduced to its sins just as it cannot be reduced to its glories. As Marx writes “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”(10) Put simply, the United States, as every country, is not a product of genocide and slavery, nor is it a product of freedom and liberty, it is a product of class antagonisms and struggle, in this regard it is not exceptional. But the history of the Americas and its development is distinct from others. The history of almost all the nation states in the Americas is one that has traversed a similar colonial stage of development. But with the exception of the U.S. and Canada, patriotism is applauded in the Americas for the idea of celebrating the underdog, once again the difference between patriotism and nationalism. Can we see a contrast between the Chilean nationalist who looks down on his Bolivian and Peruvian neighbors and lynches Venezuelan migrants to the Chilean Patriot who fights against the old state in bed with European and North American imperialists; the patriot who defends the revolutionary aspects of his country’s history; who works for plurinationality in his new constitution; who rejects the Chilean nationalist. Perhaps we can see a difference between the Dominican nationalist who rounds up his buddies for pogroms against Haitian migrants; who promotes the execution of leftists to the Dominican patriot who honors his country’s revolutionary history; who stands against the national bourgeoisie of his country; who fights for a better Dominican Republic. The history of colonialism and slavery does not stain patriotism in Latin America, it doesn’t stain it for those who are ignorant of Latin American history; who romanticize the bourgeois governments and pretend they too don’t engage in anti-Blackness and Native genocide. Not even 40 years ago were their genocides and sterilizations of Native people in Peru (11) and Guatemala (12), and in Bolivia (13) just in 2019 after the neoliberal coup. Of course the United States is the most deadly empire known to history, however Marxist-Leninist principles prevail nonetheless But how is patriotism part of Marxist-Leninist principles? Does proletarian patriotism parallel Marxism-Leninism? Despite Haiphong referring to proletarian patriotism as an ideology, patriotism is merely a tool, not an ideology in and of itself. Was the political ideology in the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, Vietnam, the GDR socialist patriotism or was it Marxism-Leninism? Did they not use patriotism as a tool to define the soul of their nation and invigorate the masses to a revolutionary project? Much like the ruling class in the West uses nationalism to define the nation and push them to reactionary projects. So how does patriotism work as a tool of Marxism-Leninism? In Soviet historian Otto Wilhelm Kuusinen’s Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, he writes “Bourgeois propaganda tries to represent the capitalist class as the bearer of patriotic feelings”, a point to which Haiphong falls trap to. He goes on to write “by overthrowing the rule of the exploding classes the working class creates the conditions for the full as possible manifestation of its patriotism for it itself is the true bear of patriotism in our time”, (14) the very point that subscribers of proletarian patriotism make. Too many anti-imperialists seem to only view the world in teams of oppressor vs. oppressed, the oppressor and all her people are ridden with sin while the oppressed can do no wrong, this is not a dialectical understanding. We must not support patriotism in third world nations solely because of their positions in the global economy, but rather celebrate their achievements and struggle for the liberation of their class. Likewise, the patriotism in the first world nations does not manifest as national chauvinism and loyalty to our oppressors, but understands that their position of power is a hindrance to our lives. Therefore, when Haiphong writes “both Ho Chi Minh and Vladimir Lenin, however, were very clear in distinguishing between bourgeois nationalism and revolutionary nationalism rooted in the struggle for self-determination of oppressed nations,” this doesn’t ring so clear in the texts of both of these revolutionaries. Haiphong even goes so far as to suggest that Ho Chi Minh only spoke fondly of U.S. working class history to win sympathy, a baseless supposition formulated to support his conclusion rather than generated through scientific inquiry. In fact much of the evidence Haiphong uses does little to denounce patriotism in oppressor nations than it does to emphasize that the workers of the oppressor nation must be staunch against the imperialism of their government. We agree! Imperialism is in the interests of the ruling class, interests which are contradictory to those of the working class, including the proletariats of imperialist countries. The anti-patriotic left ignores that Russia, like the United States, at the time of its socialist revolution was a colonial empire itself, the country for which the term ‘prison house of nations’ (15) was coined for! Yet Lenin himself wrote, about the prison house of nations that was Tsarist Russia “Is a sense of national pride alien to us, Great-Russian class-conscious proletarians? Certainly not! We love our language and our country, and we are doing our very utmost to raise her toiling masses to the level of a democratic and socialist consciousness. To us it is most painful to see and feel the outrages, the oppression and the humiliation our fair country suffers at the hands of the tsar’s butchers, the nobles and the capitalists” (16). While the Tsar sent his peasants to imperial conquests in Asia and Europe, plundering the lives of workers and peasants domestically, Lenin nonetheless makes a clear distinction that the chauvinism of the Great-Russian perpetuated by the Tsar is at odds with the national pride of the socialist Great-Russians. But despite that proletarian patriotism saw success in every socialist revolution to date, there are those who argue not only is the U.S. an exception but that it has already been tested and failed, citing Browderism. Browderism refers to the mid to post-WWII period of the Communist Party USA, led by Earl Browder, which sought class collaborationism under the banner of Americanism to fight against the global fascist movement (17). That is to say the tactic of the CPUSA under Browder sought to unite the classes in the United States under a broad front, in fact contrasting from William Z. Foster’s leadership which put class struggle against the bourgeoisie at the forefront. Browderism was liquidationism, taking the CPUSA out of its position as the vanguard party, an entirely different practice than proletarian patriotism. Where one calls for turning away from Marxism-Leninism, the other calls to bring Marxism-Leninism to the workers. Proletarian patriots do not call for collaboration with the bourgeoisie, quite the opposite, and to conflate patriotism among communists to Browderism is a willful manipulation. But lastly, and most egregiously, the greatest claim that Haiphong’s piece commits is its attempt to equate proletarian patriotism with the vile, chauvinist principles found in Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. Haiphong writes “In other words, if we simply remember and apply the greatness of the “American” working class, then the United States can be made great again.” This is completely unfair and wholly not the message of proletarian patriotism. In remembering the strength, victories, and legacy of the U.S. working class, we remember that this was in action against the U.S. government, that the history of the U.S., as with all countries, is one of class struggle. The U.S. state in its entire existence has been dominated by the oppressor class, therefore the state has always been in direct opposition to the masses. However, the anti-patriotic left incessantly implicates the crimes of the U.S. ruling class onto the hundreds of millions of working people in this country. But not only that, in return also takes from the workers their progressive history. It is because Haiphong concedes and accepts the ruling class’s portrayal of patriotism, one specifically used to mislead U.S. workers, that he is rendered unable to see how socialist patriots see their patriotism as one in line with the working class struggle and vehemently opposed to imperialist crimes. The U.S. faces an identity crisis, one that either the left or the right will define in the coming years. Both the Synthetic Left and the far-right agree that the face of the U.S. is a white supremacist, reactionary and anti-Marxist nation, when it is the state, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The soul and future of the United States does not belong to the ruling class. Their sins, their crimes, their interests have always been and continue to be in direct contradiction with the working class, the masses, in the United States. A proletarian patriot who defends the very state that is hostile to his class, that would readily kill him for his ideas, who supports the tools of the state that carry out the agenda of the ruling class to oppress his class, cannot call themself a socialist or a patriot. To be a patriot does not need to be realized through caricatures, but simply a devotion to your people and building a progressive future for them. We have seen the socialist government of Venezuela has reclaimed Simon Bolivar as a historical and integral figure of their history for fighting for their liberation from the Spanish crown, despite being of the bourgeoisie and aiming to build capitalism in South America. Likewise the Cubans have reclaimed Jose Marti who fought for their betterment, despite not being a communist. In the United States, we are rich with our own progressive proletarian history to be used to redefine and claim the soul of the nation we strive to be, a socialist and truly free nation. It is the working class of all nations that will bring about socialism and the defeat of the imperialists, this inherently includes the U.S. working class and all her peoples. * Clarification note from the author (December 07, 2021): I must clarify, there is no intention to subvert the role or erase the impact of colonialism as the basis to modern class society. Of course not, all the previous modes of production became the basis upon which enters the new mode of production. As Marx writes how capitalism will bring about socialism, colonialism brought out the emergence of capitalism. We still see these effects in our modern society in the Americas, not just the U.S. Even as late as the 60s, Peru was still considered a semi-feudal society, today Natives continue to fight for their land which had been sold off to international corporations, where in the U.S. battles such as those of Standing Rock and Mauna Kea continue to be had; where Black Americans, though a marginal percentage of the population, are over represented in the prison population, we understand these as holdovers of colonialism upheld by the class war of the bourgeoisie against the working and poor. However, the primary contradiction existing in the United States today, in 2021, is between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, both of which are multinational and multi-ethnic. Is this to say that colonialism is no longer seen in today's society? No. Is this to say that colonialism had no effect on U.S. history? Also no. We must view the history of the United States dialectically. It is not solely out of genocide of Natives that makes the U.S. the country it is today, but also Native resistance to colonization. Slavery is not the only factor of U.S. history, but the abolitionist movement as well; it is a product of where capitalist exploitation met the vigorous labor movement of the 1930s. The constant contradictions, which is the class struggle, have made the United States what it is today. Not just the legacy of the oppressor nor just the legacy of the oppressed, but their constant battles, that is what the United States and all countries are a product of. Class antagonisms. If we ever hope to successfully beat the growing far-right from winning the masses of this country, we need to meet them where they are at, not five steps ahead. But we will not leave them where we found them. This is not about a flag, symbols, this is about the workers of this country. We can use patriotism as a tool to show the workers their true enemy is not of another nationality, but of another class who betrays their own nationality. It is irrelevant to pose as the most radical online if you don't seek to find strategies to win, and I hope we all want to win. Sources:
AuthorKayla Popuchet is Peruvian-American CUNY student studying Latin American and Eastern European History, working as a NYC Housing Rights Advocate. Kayla is a member of the Party of Communists USA. Archives December 2021 In mainstream media and social media, there is a public debate surrounding Critical Race Theory (CRT) mired in a slew of misconceptions about CRT including the misconception about the relationship between CRT and Marxism. The misconception is that CRT is a Marxist theory. This misconception is fairly common among many people on the right. There is a similar misconception among liberals and progressives that CRT and Marxism are more or less congruent with one another. In this essay, I wish to dispel both misconceptions. In particular, I argue that CRT is not a Marxist theory and that there tends to be an ideological as well as a theoretical tension (if not outright contradiction) between CRT and Marxism. It’s essential that I explain CRT before I explain why (1) CRT is not a Marxist theory and (2) there is a tension between CRT and Marxism. Explaining (1) and (2) will involve explaining Marxism, but since my general audience are likely to be Marxists it isn’t necessary for me to cover every basic thesis of Marxism. What is CRT? A majority of the people who debate about CRT in mainstream media and social media seem to be under the impression that CRT refers to a single theory about structural racism in the United States. However, this impression couldn’t be further from the truth about CRT; it’s a fundamental misunderstanding. This misunderstanding comes from an understandable source: the word “Critical Race Theory” is singular, so it seems that it refers to a single theory. However, the reality is that “Critical Race Theory” refers to a family of theories about structural racism in the United States. Like the word “Critical Race Theory,” the word “feminism” doesn’t refer to a specific feminist theory, but rather it refers to a family of feminist theories: liberal feminism, radical feminism, Marxist feminism, ecofeminism, and so on. Feminist theorists tend to disagree with one another because they endorse theories that conflict with one another. Similarly, “Critical Race Theory” refers to a family of theories that aren’t necessarily in harmony with one another. In this sense, it would be accurate to use the plural term “Critical Race Theories” as opposed to “Critical Race Theory.” (However, I’ll continue to use the term “CRT” as a shorthand to refer to a family of theories in the tradition that’s called Critical Race Theory). While there are many different variants of CRTs as a family of theories, it’s convenient and fairly accurate to group CRTs into two schools of thought. According to Patrick Anderson, who wrote a three-part series explaining CRT based in part on the work by Richard Degaldo, there is the realist school of CRT (realism or realist) and the idealist school of CRT (idealism or idealist). Both schools of thought not only agree that structural racism exists in the United States, but aim to explain structural racism in the United States. However, realism and idealism use quite different explanations for how structural racism exists in the U.S. In this respect, realism and idealism are competing critical race theories. How do they differ exactly? Let’s begin with realism since it was the original critical race theory that came before idealism. The realist version of CRT was developed by Derrick Bell who argued that structural racism is ultimately based on the political and economic interest of the white bourgeoisie to exploit black people in the United States under the capitalist political economy. Since the abolition of slavery and reconstruction, they manage to continue the exploitation of black people through a variety of means but one of the more recent methods is to integrate or assimilate both the black bourgeoisie and the black professional class (e.g. lawyers, doctors, academics, journalists, entertainers, and so on) into the capitalist political economy in order to use them to maintain control over the black working class. Hence, structural racism in the United States, which disproportionately affects the black working class compared to the black bourgeoisie and the black professional class, exists because it maintains class and racial dominance of the white bourgeoisie in a capitalist political economy. This view can be divided into two theses. The first is the materialist thesis, the thesis that interests the white bourgeoisie as well as economic factors related to their interest underpin structural racism. The second thesis is the neocolonial thesis of realism (or neocolonialism), the thesis that the white bourgeoisie controls the black masses by assimilating their bourgeoisie and professional class into the political system. In order to understand the materialist thesis, it’s important to keep in mind that structural racism in the United States begins with slavery which came into existence through the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The white ruling class requires a cheap and large labor force to develop the plantation economy and it happens to be the case that the slave market in western Africa provides them what they need. This economic interest of the original white plantation owners played a significant role in the emergence of structural racism in the United States to maintain the political economy of slavery by oppressing slaves. While the white plantation slave owners no longer exist, their ideological successor, the white bourgeoisie, still finds structural racism indispensable to maintain the exploitation of the black working class. So far the explanation seems at least semi-plausible, but one might object that the explanation is wrong because it doesn’t account for racial progress. Derrick Bell uses the above materialist framework to explain why racial progress exists. In particular, it was in the political and economic interest of the white bourgeoisie to allow for some racial progress while maintaining structural racism. For example, Bell argued that the real reason why the U.S. government abolished Jim Crow segregation is because its presence is obviously incongruent with the U.S. propaganda that America values democracy, equality, and liberty. During the Cold War socialist countries such as the USSR would use examples of Jim Crow segregation to humiliate the U.S. This was one of the key factors that contributed to the judicial decision to outlaw Jim Crow segregation (at least in schools) as unconstitutional. Since the white bourgeoisie saw socialist countries like the USSR as its mortal enemy, it had to prove that America is still a country that values freedom, equality, and democracy. Hence, racial progress only happened because it happens to coincide with the interest of the white ruling class. This kind of explanation Bell uses is an instance of his belief in what he calls racial fortuity: black people in the United States will occasionally experience racial progress only because their interest happens to coincide with the interest of the white ruling class. Given that a white ruling class has consistently controlled and exploited black people in the United States since its inception, Bell concludes that there is no reason to believe that racism will ever end in the United States. Bell uses the following simple argument from induction: since we observe that racism has been a part of our social fabric since colonial America, it is extremely unlikely that it would be eradicated from America; racism is a permanent feature of our country. This thesis is what Bell calls realism (needless to say, this is why Bells’ version of CRT is simply called Realism). One very common objection people make against Bells’ realism is that it’s too pessimistic because it suggests we should stop struggling against structural racism. Bell responds that the problem isn’t with the struggle against structural racism, but it’s aim to eliminate structural racism altogether. The energy of the struggle should be channeled to alleviating and adapting to the challenges of structural racism. So far I’ve explained Bell’s Realism, but what about idealism? What is idealism in CRT? In contrast to realism, idealism is the school of thought which says that what causes structural racism to exist and continue to exist isn’t ultimately the economic interest of the white bourgeoisie, but rather our psychological attitudes alongside with cultural artifacts such as symbols, language, texts, categories, and ideology from which our predominantly white society socially constructs races in order to subjugate and oppress people of color while elevating white people as the privileged and dominant group. While realism would appeal to economic interest (as well as other interests) of the white ruling class and economic factors to explain structural racism, idealism tends to appeal to our society’s collective social consciousness and its artifacts (e.g. literature, language, films, symbols, and so on) that ultimately give rise to and maintain structural racism in the United States. The result is a vicious feedback loop: our social consciousness, which consists of collective psychological racist attitudes, creates cultural artifacts that not only reflect racial prejudices, but also perpetuate racist attitudes. When cultural artifacts perpatuate racist attitudes, the racist attitudes in turn perpetuate and generate the same kind of cultural artifacts which in turn would perpetuate the same kind of racist attitudes. This vicious feedback loop doesn’t just occur in the vacuum, but in a society that includes institutions such as the criminal court system, mainstream media, entertainment, education, electoral system, and so on. An idealist solution to structural racism is to radically change our language, beliefs, attitudes, symbols, literature, and other cultural artifacts in order to overcome structural racism. According to Patrick Anderson, one person who exemplifies the idealist school of thought is Kimberele Crenshaw. Anderson points out that the idealist school of thought has largely supplanted realism from academia. Anderson’s explanation is that realism was too radical insofar as it challenged the political economy of our society, capitalism, but idealism is conservative in comparison because it doesn’t directly and blatantly challenge the white ruling class and its political economy. Idealism identifies racist attitudes and prejudices, as opposed to the white ruling class in particular, as the root of structural racism. In this respect, idealism doesn’t challenge the status quo from a realist perspective. Naturally, universities and foundations would provide grants and other forms of funding to idealists more often than realists because an idealist version of CRT is congruent with the status quo. It’s apparent that both realism and idealism are incompatible with one another. Realism identifies the political economy, in which the white ruling class reigns, as the material foundation for structural racism whereas idealism identifies the collective psychological attitudes of society (social consciousness) and cultural artifacts as the foundation of structural racism. The former believes that racism is ultimately rooted in exploitation because historically the white ruling class didn’t demonize and dehumanize black people until they need slave labor; the white ruling class used racism to justify and legitimize slave labor of black people and continued to use racism to justify and legitimize the super-exploitation of black people. The idealist believes that collective racist attitudes and beliefs of white people have always been responsible for the existence of structural racism since colonial America. Why CRT isn’t Marxist The division between realism and idealism seems to run in rough parallel with the division between Marx’s dialectical and historical materialism and German idealism. Marx believed that development in the mode of production is fundamental to development of society whereas idealists during Marx’s time believe that development in the realm of ideas (e.g. ideology, culture, literature, zeitgeist, and so on) lead to the development of society. Realism believes that racial progress depends largely on the political and economic interest of the white bourgeoisie whereas idealism tends to believe that racial progress depends on changing the social consciousness of society. From this parallel, it’s obvious that Marxism is incompatible with the idealist school of thought in CRT. The idealist school of thought in CRT would identify the root of structural racism ultimately in society’s social consciousness (e.g. racist prejudices collectively held by a vast majority of people and their manifestation in our cultural artifacts), but a Marxist would point out that structural racism is an integral part of the superstructure that depends on the capitalist mode of production as its base. A superstructure consists of our political, legal, cultural, and ideological institutions that maintain and shape an economic system in which capitalists privately own productive forces (e.g. factories, agriculture, power plants, infrastructure, banks, and other businesses), workers sell their labor-power as a commodity to capitalists for wages, and the capitalists extract surplus value from the labor power of the working class. How does the superstructure maintain and shape the political economy of capitalism? It not only maintains the legality of private property, but enforces it by using state coercion. It uses education and mass media to indoctrinate the masses into believing that capitalism is “normal,” “natural,” ''legitimate,'' “fair,” ''meritocratic,” and possibly eternal. How does structural racism fit into this picture? It’s part of our superstructure. It dehumanizes groups of the working class in order to create artificial division and false consciousness. What’s important to remember is that this superstructure which structural racism is a part of can’t exist without the underlying mode of production, capitalism, as its material base. Idealists believe that capitalism, while it may have played a role in the formation of structural racism in the past, is currently and largely orthogonal to structural racism. Structural racism exists because of the state of our social consciousness. Specifically, structural racism exists because of our collective racist attitudes, the cultural artifacts that perpetuate them, and the vicious feedback loop between our collective racist attitudes and cultural artifacts. These factors which constitute our social consciousness shape our institutions. However, Marxists believe that structural racism is an integral part of the superstructure that depends on the capitalist mode of production as its material basis. Without the capitalist mode of production, structural racism wouldn’t continue to exist. So far it seems to be that idealism of CRT and Marxism are hopelessly incompatible, but what about realism and Marxism? On the face of it, it appears that realism and Marxism seem not only compatible, but quite congruent with one another. Both realism and Marxism place emphasis on the economic base as the material foundation of structural racism. Furthermore, many astute Marxists realize that the historically white ruling class often used the black bourgeoisie and black professional class to control the black working class. In this respect, it seems that Marxists would largely agree with Bell’s theses: materialism and neocolonialism. While most Marxists would agree with Bell’s neocolonial thesis, they wouldn’t necessarily embrace Bell’s materialism. This may sound confusing to my readers since both Bell’s materialism and Marxism agree that our political economy is the material base for structural racism. However, their uncanny similarity is mostly on the surface. One crucial hint as to why Bell’s materialism is actually quite different from Marxism is due to Bell’s last thesis: realism. Bell argues that because we observe the existence of structural racism from colonial America to the present day, it’s extremely unlikely that we can eliminate structural racism. It would seem that structural racism is a permanent feature of America. Structural racism takes different shapes and forms depending on the historic condition, but it will nonetheless remain. Bell’s realism indicates the true nature of his materialism. In particular, Bell’s materialism implicitly rejects the dialectical aspect of the materialism widely accepted by Marxists. This version of materialism is what Marxists call dialectical materialism. What is dialectical materialism? It states that all things undergo change due to their internal contradictions, to the fact that they are composed of a of unity of opposites. Every composite thing contains tendencies or forces that are in constant opposition to one another. This unity of opposites begins with initiating gradual and quantitative changes within each composite thing, but ends with a transformative and qualitative change of a composite thing. For instance, a heated water contains a unity of opposites between the tendency toward structural integrity and the tendency towards disintegration. This unity of opposites begins with a gradual change in which a water slowly loses structural integrity as a liquid until it becomes a boiling water. When a heated water becomes a boiling water, it reaches a point in which its underlying changes become a qualitative and transformative one: it loses structural integrity as a liquid and becomes a gas. Because of its unity of opposites, liquid water becomes its opposite: gas. Marxists apply the above insight of dialectical materialism to all societies. Like every material composite thing, societies carry within themselves unity of opposites. There are many opposing forces within each society, but the primary opposing force in society is class struggle: the struggle between the exploiting class and the exploited class. This class struggle initially begins a quantitative change in each society, but towards the end it becomes a qualitative and transformative change of each society. In a feudal European society, there was class struggle between on one hand feudal landlords, monarchs, and the clergy (basically the feudal landowning classes) and on the other hand the peasants, craftsmen, and the nascent bourgeoisie. When class struggle reaches a certain height, the nascent bourgeoisie becomes a more mature bourgeoisie in which it privately owns industrial productive forces that render feudal productive forces obsolete. When the peasants become landless due to land enclosures, in which the landlords take land away from the peasants, the peasants become propertyless workers who seek jobs in the new industrial productive forces. They sell their labor power to the new capitalist class for wages in order to survive. They become wage-labourers or the proletariat. This quantitative change in feudalism becomes a qualitative change in which feudalism transforms into its opposite: capitalism. Just as feudalism inadvertently create conditions of its own annihilation (e.g. land enclosure of the peasants which facilitates the development of nascent capitalists becoming new industrial capitalist and the development of landless peasants into proletariat), capitalism will create conditions of its own annihilation. Capitalism gives birth to something that will negate it. This is known as negation of negation. The overall message of dialectical materialism is that societies are always in constant motion and flux. Virtually nothing about society is permanent. While this insight is usually applied to the class structure of societies, it isn’t necessarily limited to it. The insight extends to anything that has its root in class exploitation. Since structural racism in the U.S. is historically emerges from exploitation, for instance slavery, structural racism is not immune from the fact that everything is in constant flux. Since structural racism is part of the superstructure of the capitalist political economy that perpetuates the super-exploitation of people of color, and since capitalism will create conditions of its own annihilation, structural racism too will be annihilated by the conditions created by its capitalist political economy. A Marxist would understand that structural racism has at least two axes of unity of opposites. The first unity of opposites is between on one hand the white bourgeoisie, state agents (e.g. police), black bourgeoisie, and black professional class, and on the other hand working class black communities. The second unity of opposites is between the black working class and the white working class. The first unity of opposites is what I shall call the vertical contradiction because the white bourgeoisie are at the top whereas the black working class is at the bottom. The second unity of opposites is what I call the horizontal contradiction because both the black working class and white working class belong to the same class: the proletariat. I should add an important caveat to the thesis of horizontal contradiction. This horizontal contradiction isn’t perfectly horizontal but rather it is slightly tilted in favor of the white proletariat insofar as the white proletariat class has some unearned average social advantages and the black proletariat class has some unearned average social disadvantages. The vertical contradiction is essentially the primary and antagonistic contradiction whereas the horizontal contradiction is secondary and non-antagonistic contradiction (see Mao’s essay “On Contradiction” on the distinction between antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradiction). What does this mean? It means the vertical contradiction is a zero-sum game in which one side necessarily benefits at the expense of another whereas the horizontal contradiction is not a zero-sum game: one side does benefit, but this benefit isn’t inextricably tied to the disadvantage of the other side. How so? Because the white bourgeoisie, alongside with its agents such as the black bourgeoisie and black professional class, extract surplus value created by the labor of the black working class. It extracts surplus value through uneven development or underdevelopment of black working communities. With regards to horizontal contradiction, the white working class enjoyed temporary economic privileges from the post-war period (from the new deal to Reaganomics), but these temporary economic privileges are slowly waning since the rise of neoliberalism. While the white working class retains some social and economic privileges, it remains the case that their labor power is commodified and exploited by capitalism. This is also the case with the black working class but worse since they don’t have those same social and economic privileges as the white proletariat. In this respect, the contradiction between the white working class and the black working class, while it certainly exists, isn’t antagonistic or irreconcilable. The only way to guarantee the resolution of the horizontal contradiction between the white and black working-class communities is to resolve the vertical contradiction between the white bourgeoisie and the black working class. How would resolving the vertical contradiction lead to the resolution of the horizontal contradiction? Recall that I said the horizontal contradiction is a secondary contradiction. It’s secondary because it depends on the existence of the vertical contradiction. The horizontal contradiction is largely an artifact of the vertical contradiction. How exactly does one resolve the vertical contradiction? By overthrowing capitalism. But this requires class solidarity between black working-class communities, white working-class communities, brown working-class communities, asian working-class communities, and other working-class communities. This class solidarity is something that can be realistically realized because working class communities of different races are being exploited (though not equally) by the white bourgeoisie. This is the view that I think a majority of Marxists would agree with. However, this isn’t necessarily the view that a majority of realists of CRT would agree with. Why? Realism rejects that structural racism can be eliminated through class solidarity because the contradiction between white working class and black working class is an antagonistic contradiction (or very close to being one). There are three reasons why realists reject that class solidarity can overcome structural racism. First, there has never been a genuine and lasting transracial class solidarity between white working-class communities and other non-white working-class communities (see Peter Hossler’s chapter “False Consciousness” in the book Encyclopedia of Critical Whiteness Studies in Education). Second, there is ample evidence that white working-class communities oppressing other non-white working-class communities is a recurring pattern of American history (Hossler, 2020). Third, many members of the white working class do benefit at the expense of black people in the black working-class communities. A Marxist would respond to each point as follows. First, in the past, there has existed transracial class solidarity, but they don’t necessarily last long enough because the white bourgeoisie would always use racism to destroy it through a series of methods pertaining to false consciousness. The white bourgeoisie would extend faux privileges, make false promises, and so on to give white members of the working class a false sense of superiority. Second, the fact that members of the white working-class communities oppress members of the black working-class communities doesn’t contradict Marxism. Karl Marx, for instance, observed the discrimination the Irish working-class face from the English working class. He observed that this discrimination is largely an artifact of the propaganda machine of British imperialism to create tensions between both working-class groups so that the British aristocracy and capitalists can maintain their private property holdings in Ireland. A similar logic can apply to what is happening in the United States. The bourgeoisie of the United States can ultimately own private properties in black communities by using its propaganda machine to create tensions between black working-class communities and white working-class communities. With regards to the third point, it is true that there are many members of the white working class who do benefit under capitalism. They are more likely to successfully sell their labor power in the market than their black counterparts. But in the grand scheme of things, these benefits are ultimately minuscule and temporary compared to the real benefits experienced by the white bourgeoisie. A realist may disagree with the above rebuttals, and I could try to anticipate their response to my rebuttals, but this is beyond the scope of my essay. The purpose of going over this hypothetical exchange (which is based on reality) is that there is a disagreement between a realist of CRT and a Marxist. Moreover, this disagreement shows that the relationship between realism (CRT) and Marxism is complicated and tense. In effect, it’s apparent that CRT isn’t a Marxist theory. Bell’s materialism renders structural racism in the United States (and possibly other countries) exceptional to the laws of dialectical materialism. It may accept that most things undergo constant flux, but structural racism will prove to be too resilient to change. Marxists who are dialectical materialists believe that structural racism, like private property, will eventually be abolished when the underlying mode of production, capitalism, becomes too obsolete and dysfunctional for the entire working class. In this respect, Marxism is essentially an optimistic worldview whereas CRT (in particular its realist school of thought) is pessimistic. Concluding Remarks I’ve shown that CRT isn’t Marxism because both of CRT’s schools of thought, realism and idealism, aren’t compatible with Marxism. CRT tends to be pessimistic about the prospect of transracial class solidarity between black and white working-class communities because of the history of racism in the U.S., but Marxism tends to understand that transracial class solidarity is artificially paused in its premature and nascent stage by the white bourgeoisie through a variety of methods pertaining to false consciousness and the instruments of structural racism. Marxists who are serious about building socialism in America must build a transracial class solidarity across working-class communities of different colors. While they should acknowledge unearned social and economic inequalities among working class communities, they should reject that the relationship among them is an antagonistic and irreconcilable contradiction. Anyone who accepts that there is an antagonistic and irreconcilable contradiction among working class communities is not serious about building socialism in America. They are merely pessimists who reject one of the fundamental findings of dialectical materialism: societies undergo constant flux. They are unwitting and inadvertent ideological agents of the bourgeoisie who maintain the artificial racial division among the working class, an artifact of a bourgeois ideology. They merely reproduce bourgeois pessimism that has been reproduced for generations to maintain this exploitative political economy. Being pessimistic costs us the opportunity to build socialism, but, accepting the dialectical view of Marxism in the form of renewed American optimism might reward us socialism in America. Workers and oppressed people of America have nothing to lose but their chains. Workers and oppressed people of America, unite! References 1. Anderson, Patrick. “The conspicuous absence of Derrick Bell—rethinking the CRT debate, Part 1.” Black Agenda Report (July 23, 2021). 2. Anderson, Patrick. “Realism, idealism, and the deradicalization of Critical Race Theory—Rethinking The CRT Debate, Part 2.” Black Agenda Report (September 1, 2021). 3. Cornforth, Maurice. Materialism and the Dialectical Method. New York: International Publishers, 1968. 4. Hossler, Peter. “False Consciousness.” In Encyclopedia of Critical Whiteness Studies in Education. Leiden: Brill Publishers, December 7, 2020. 5. Marx, Karl. “Outline of a Report on the Irish Question to the Communist Educational Association of German Workers in London.” in Marx and Engels on Ireland. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971. 6. Zedong, Mao. “On Contradiction.” August 1937. AuthorPaul So is a graduate student who studies philosophy in a PhD program at University of California Santa Barbara. While Paul’s research interests mostly lie within the tradition of Analytic Philosophy (e.g. Philosophy of Mind and Meta-Ethics), he recently developed a strong passion in Marxism as his newfound research interest. He is particularly interested in dialectical materialism, historical materialism, and imperialism. Archives December 2021 Introduction The decade of 1980s in the U.S.A is remembered, among other things, for its rightward political shift. The eighties were marked by Ronald Reagan’s term as President, his staunch concern for ‘traditional family values’, and his hostility towards even the tiniest of social-welfare programs. The previous government of Carter had played the role of ossifying public opinion and presenting a certain softness in foreign policy, in order to reassure a citizenry that had grown bitter after the Vietnam war. Unlike the Democrat Carter, the Republican Reagan had no need to hold back. He went on to dissolve the ‘Fairness Doctrine’ of the Federal Communications Commission, which had earlier posed some requirement for broadcasters to air dissenting political views. U.S hegemonism and aggressive foreign policy would be obscured by a sense of ‘super-patriotism’, and the President’s humour and aura would be sufficient justification. From the Sandinista revolutionaries of Nicaragua, to the progressive government in Afghanistan, none would be spared from the outreaches of the U.S.A that would culminate in the Reagan Doctrine (Zinn, 2009). In the same decade a text would be written, which would later go on to capture the nerve of left-leaning realpolitik in the U.S.A and beyond. The text was an academic paper titled ‘Demarginalising the Intersection of Race and Sex’, written by academic-lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw. This was the text that led to the escalation of the term ‘intersectionality’ from obscure jargon to everybody’s woke watchword. The paper inspects certain cases of legal battle, which involve racial and sex discrimination. Crenshaw argues that socio-economic and legal systems are not neutral, but designed to uphold and multiply bias against marginalised identities, in this case women and people of colour. She noted that by looking at women (sex identity) and POC (racial identity) in a way that is mutually exclusive, is harmful and will inevitably ignore the conditions of oppression where both the identities ‘intersect’. Whatever the merits of its original implications, the text would go on to become the manifesto for the divisive, hateful, self-obsessed, identitarian politics that is dominant in the left today. We may view the text as a mirthful reflection and product of the political and ideological contradictions of the times, which I described at the start (Crenshaw, 1989). In the same decade, another text was published – which is the subject of this essay. Alice Walker’s epistolary novel ‘The Color Purple’. The book would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1983) and the National Book Award for Fiction. It would be met with a film adaptation, directed by Hollywood’s Steven Spielberg (1985). Recognising the appeal and positive reception of the novel, it would be no exaggeration to argue that it captured the sentiments of its time, and reflected the zeitgeist of its time. By inspecting and resolving the contradiction posed in the novel, some assessment can be made of the political scenario in which it was written, read, appreciated and adapted. The Color Purple ‘The Color Purple’ is set in Southern U.S.A, in the early 1900s. The story revolves around African-American families. The novel is written in an epistolary form, primarily as letters that the protagonist Celie writes to ‘God’, where she describes her everyday life and tribulations, in gruesome detail. Celie is sexually abused by her ‘father’ and later married off to a man referred to as Mister __, who had originally desired to marry Nettie, Celie’s 12-year old sister. Unable to bear with her abusive ‘father’, Nettie makes her run to Celie’s dwelling at Mister __’s house. She reunites with her sister, but only to be chased away from there (Walker, 1992). Mister __’s son Harpo marries a woman called Sofia. Mister __’s male-chauvinism compels Harpo to exercise domination over his wife, Sofia. Harpo’s attempts are overpowered by the outspoken Sofia, who ultimately leaves the house having grown weary of it. Some time then, a jazz-singer Shug Avery (who was also Mister __’s long time mistress) finds her way into his house. Initially hostile to Celie, she soon befriends her. The novel has vivid descriptions of the homosexual relationship that Celie and Shug develop, which have not passed without controversy. Celie and Shug discover, that Celie’s sister Nettie is indeed alive and has been writing letters from Africa. The letters had been confiscated by Mister __, without Celie’s knowledge. Nettie reveals in the letters that she travelled to Africa with a missionary couple, Samuel and Corrine. She writes of her experiences with tribal groups there. The letters also reveal that Alphonso, the man Celia and Nettie had thought to be their father, is actually their step-father. Reading those letters, Celie discusses her rising scepticism towards ‘God’. Shug explains to her that God isn’t a white man in the sky, but something more sublime. Shug’s affirmation towards Celie, has a profound impact on the latter who eventually musters the courage recognise how she has been wronged and decides to leave Mister __. Other complications arise and slowly resolve. Celie inherits a house after Alphonso’s death. Shug and Nettie come to Celie’s new home. Mister __ (Albert) returns as a changed man, and is forgiven. Injustice The theme of injustice dominates the novel. Different characters experience injustice in different forms, and find different ways to ‘overcome’ it. At many instances, characters are presented as helpless, almost as victims of their destiny, condemned to suffer at the hands of the inhumane who have power. Injustice manifests through verbal and sexual abuse, violence and mistreatment, subjugation and control. Male dominance runs at the vein of it, and so does the reality that the characters are African-American. Therefore injustice and justice here, are not abstract concepts. Idea of justice is rooted in the material reality and determined by social and economic conditions, and also the realities of male-dominance and racial subjugation. Somewhat of an ‘intersection’, many would instantly remark. From Plato and Aristotle, all the way to John Rawls, justice has been understood in a desertist sense (i.e. desert theory of justice.) This means that justice is understood as the delivering of rights and material goods that an individual deserves. Injustice, therefore, is the situation where individuals get what they don’t deserve, or don’t get what they deserve. Plato elucidates his idea of justice in Republic, as intrinsically linked to virtue – justice is delivered when the virtuous individuals are rewarded, and the vicious are punished. Aristotle drew a distinction between distributive justice and corrective justice. During the Enlightenment, philosophers appealed to ‘reason’ and ‘human nature’, and called for extending political rights to all individuals. As the dictum went, “All men are born equal.” Today, there is no reasonable objection to the idea that everyone deserves equal political rights. There is still debate about the just distribution of material goods (Xinsheng, 2015). It is vital to recognise that all hitherto existing theories of justice make no remarks whatsoever about property relations and ownership. Even with the evolving understanding of justice, the concept of desert continues to underlie all of them. Each must get his due. An individual’s due (or desert) is implicitly assumed to be the due that he is entitled to because of his existing social position, and ownership of property. There is the assumption that the economic relations are themselves just, in the way that they exist, therefore justice is to be delivered over and above those economic relations, and without striving to change those relations. Private property is deemed to be just and imagined as eternal, and not as something that has been appropriated historically over years through primitive accumulation in the hands of the already advantaged mercantile classes. Desert theories of justice take private property and ownership as the premise of the argument for what is deserved in terms of income and wealth. Private property is just and eternal. This assumption is usually implicit and not conscious, but has began to grow more explicit with the rise of neoliberalism, one of whose pioneers was President Reagan. In ‘The Color Purple’, Celie finds ultimate freedom and independence when she inherits private property from her step-father. This reinforces the same desert theory of justice. Celie has overcome her emotional subjugation, and has been empowered to stand up to her abuser simply by being more confident in herself. It seems as though that there is no need to fight the material basis of patriarchy and male-dominance, and trying to overthrow existing patriarchal systems, family institutions or property relations. Celie is now an independent woman who will not have anyone put her down. She is now a property owner. Erotic Capital The notion of ugliness is repeated at several instances in the novel. Celie is deemed as ugly, at least in comparison to her sister, by their step-father Alphonso. The main reason that Celie is married off with Mister __, is because she is considered the uglier of the two sisters, and Alphonso refuses to let go of Nettie, who is deemed pretty. There should be no doubt here, that the abstract notions of beauty and ugliness, have nothing to do with aesthetic or intrinsic beauty. They have more to do with what is known in sociology as ‘sexual capital’ or ‘erotic capital’. The phrase was first used by sociologist Catherin Hakim, adding upon Bourdieu’s concepts of economic, cultural and social capital. Erotic capital is subversive, and can be used for upward social mobility. Therefore, there is always an attempt from the powerful, to suppress an individual’s erotic capital, lest they rise up the social ladder (Hakim, 2011). Since beauty is subjective, not much can be commented on the precise ways in which this works in the novel. It can surely be added that even here, injustice that both the sisters (Nettie and Celie) suffer, are intrinsically linked to property relations, in this case through the means of erotic capital. Celie is repeatedly deemed ugly by her male subjugators and at one instance by Shug Avery. This can be understood as a reflection of the need to suppress her potential erotic capital, using which she could rise above her subjugators. Intersectionality? ‘Class’ in the social sciences, is understood differently by different schools of thinking. Socio-economic class, when the term is ordinarily thrown around, is understood in a gradational sense: lower, middle, lower-middle, upper-middle, the list is endless. Otherwise it is seen as a marker of occupation: the managerial class, business class. What is often lacking, is a relational understanding of class. Class is to be understood as the relation an individual or group has with the productive mechanisms of the economy. Do they own the mechanisms of productions as their property, or do they work for someone who owns it? Understood in this way, class is linked to the economic base and is much more than a social identity. This is where intersectionality fails. It sees class merely as an identity that intersects with other identities, such as racial identity and gender identity. Thus, even an intersectional understanding of justice, does not challenge the assumptions of ‘desert’ which assume entitlement of justice to those that own property. Instead, intersectionality merely calls for various identity groups to enter the propertied class. It calls for more women CEOs, more LGBTQ+ military commanders or more African-American Presidents, but the core property relations are not altered at the slightest. This is the zeitgeist of resistance politics that have become persistent from the times of Reagan. The same zeitgeist reflects in Crenshaw’s paper and Alice Walker’s novel. Let us take a close look at the events surrounding Sofia, the outspoken lady who marries Harpo but leaves him, having become deterred by his attempts at subjugation. In a later segment of the book, Sofia is seen to be enjoying an afternoon in a street, with her children and boyfriend. Miss Millie, the wife of the mayor, speaks to Sofia in an insulting way. Sofia gets into a physical altercation with the mayor himself, and injures him. She is immediately arrested and imprisoned. Sofia is eventually released, and starts to work for Miss Millie. It is not difficult to see the question of race in this segment. The immediate police action and arrest of Sofia, is largely due to her racial identity. What must also be noted, is the question of class, which operates here as a relational economic reality and not merely a social identity. One can draw a modern parallel with the recent BLM protests against the police-murder of George Floyd. While the mainstream discourse very rightly was about racial disparity and mistreatment of African-Americans by a white-dominated police system. There was little talk about the economic reality of class and property relations involved. If the issue is entirely about race, then it can perhaps be solved by sensitisation programs in the police and employment of more African-American officers. But if the issue is about material economic relations, then the solution involves the complete overturn of the existing system, if not some radical police-reform. It is not merely social identity, but his position in economic relations that compelled George Floyd to pass off a ‘counterfeit’ twenty dollar bill, which was to be the end of him. It is the need to feed a hungry stomach and a hungry family. It is the same need that compels Sofia to serve, albeit resentfully, the mayor’s wife after the former’s release from prison. Conclusion Various contradictions such as the ones mentioned in this essay, can be found in ‘The Color Purple’. They all lead to some important questions about the political shift over the years. However, a contradiction is not hypocrisy. Alice Walker’s novel is great literature, and at least part of the appreciation must be due to its literary excellence. An attempt to resolve contradictions, is not to say that the novel is a piece of postmodernist propaganda. Far from it, the novel has themes that go against the grain. An example could be the segment where Nettie’s letter mentions the state of the Olinka tribe, which prohibits girls from getting an education. “They’re like white people at home who don’t want coloured people to learn,” says a witty character. The novel refrains from any form of relativism here. The novel is born out of lived-experience. Individual experiences and their most beautiful literary expressions can only be translated to political change if they are placed in larger analytical frameworks and within broader political contexts. As lines from the book read: “I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering about the big things and asking about the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.” References Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex. Unversity of Chicago Legal Forum , 139-167. Hakim, C. (2011). Erotic Capital: The Power of Attraction in the Boardroom and the Bedroom. Basic Books. Walker, A. (1992). The Color Purple. Women's Press: London. Xinsheng, W. (2015). A Fourfold Defense of Marx’s Theory of Justice. Social Sciences in China , 5-21. Zinn, H. (2009). A People's History of the United States. New York: HarperCollins. AuthorSuryashekhar Biswas is an independent journalist and researcher, based in Bangalore, India. His research areas include political economy, media studies and literature. He is a member of AISA - a communist student organisation. He runs a YouTube channel called 'Humour and Sickle' (https://www.youtube.com/c/HumourandSickle) Archives December 2021 |
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