On October 10, 2024, in the Cuban online news outlet Cubadebate, there appeared an article by Francisca López Civeira, a well-known Cuban historian, on the initiation of the first Cuban War of Independence on October 10, 1868.  On that date, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes declared from his Demajagua Estate in Manzanilla the launching of a war of independence from colonial Spain. 
    
López informs us that prior contemporary events had been favorable for the pronouncement of independence.  In 1866-1867, a reformist effort in Spain had failed, thus strengthening the independence cause.  Conspiratorial groups emerged across the island, especially in the eastern and central regions.  In September 1867, the Glorious Revolution resulted in the overthrow of Queen Isabella II, initiating division and instability in the Spanish government that would last several years.  Puerto Rico launched an independence uprising on September 23, 1868; and on the continent, Latin American states that had attained independence during the first quarter of the century were experiencing processes of liberal reform, which rejected any effort by Spain to reconquer her former possessions. 
    
The conspiratorial groups, López informs us, were composed fundamentally of landholders and professionals tied to particular regions in Cuba.  Their strong regional affiliations influenced their views on key issues confronting the Revolution, including the question of slavery. 
    
Céspedes demonstrated his commitment to the abolition of slavery on October 10, when he not only announced the initiation of a war of independence, but he also proclaimed liberty for his slaves and called upon them to join in the independence struggle under conditions of equality.  Subsequently, the Constitution of Guáimaro, in establishing the Republic of Cuba in Arms on April 10, 1869, declared that “all the citizens of the Republic are entirely free.”  On December 25, 1870, Céspedes, as President of the Republic of Cuba in Arms, declared the total abolition of slavery.
    
However, the independence war of 1868 failed to attain its goals.  The 1878 Pact of Zanjón with Spain ended the war without conceding the independence of Cuba, and it granted liberty only to those slaves who had fought in the insurrectionist ranks.  Various factors contributed to the failure of the Ten Years’ War: the opposition to the struggle on the part of the Western landholders, who feared that the unfolding forces would unleash an uncontrollable revolution from below; divisions between the executive and legislative branches of the Republic in Arms, which led to the destitution of Céspedes as president in 1873; the deaths of Céspedes in 1874 and Ignacio Agramonte in 1873, the two principal leaders of the revolution; and a tendency toward regionalism and caudillismo in the revolutionary army.  In essence, the Revolution of 1868 did not attain the necessary unity of the people, and it lost its exceptional leaders.
    
There were objective economic factors in the failure of the Revolution of 1868 to attain the necessary unity.  In the eastern provinces, sugar production and slavery were less developed, and therefore, cattle haciendas continued to be prevalent in some of the eastern provinces.   The cattle haciendas fulfilled a semi-peripheral function in the world-economy, supplying beef to the sugar plantations of the western provinces, which in turn exported sugar to the commercial centers of the world-economy.  In their semi-peripheral role, eastern cattle ranchers were embedded in the internal market, and they therefore had a long-term interest in the expansion of the internal market and in an autonomous Cuban economic development sustained by the greater purchasing power of the people.  This meant that the cattle ranchers had a long-term interest in alliance with slaves, freed slaves, workers, small farmers, and professionals, all of which would benefit from an autonomous economic development that casts aside Cuba’s peripheral role. 
    
At the same time, not all the eastern landholders were cattle ranchers; some were owners of sugar plantations, which fulfilled a peripheral function of supplying raw materials to Spain and other core nations.  They sought to include the western estate bourgeoisie, owners of sugar plantations, in the independence movement, by making concessions to their interests and concerns.  The western sugar bourgeoisie was hesitant to support a war of independence due to fear that it would unleash a slave revolution, as had occurred in Haiti.  These class, ideological and regional divisions prevented the independence movement initiated in 1868 from attaining the unity necessary for the taking of political power.
    
López notes that on January 24, 1880, in a famous speech in New York City before Cuban revolutionary emigrants, a 27-year-old José Martí declared that the daily lives of Cubans living in the areas controlled by the Cuban revolutionary forces during the Ten Years’ War had been essentially changed, as a result of the fact that different social groups were interwoven in the terrain of struggle.  The mass of combatants of the revolutionary army was composed of the middle strata of society—including intellectuals, peasants, and freed slaves—who on the basis of their performance were promoted in the military structure, and they also were elevated in popular recognition.  After the Revolution of 1868, the Cuban people would not be the same, in spite of its failure to attain its principal goals of independence and abolition.
    
Since the independence war of 1868-1878, the Cuban revolution has passed through different stages.  The Independence War of 1895 to 1898 attained formal political independence, but true sovereignty was denied by the U.S. military intervention of 1898 to 1902.  Moreover, the death in battle of Martí in 1895 meant that the Cuban Revolution was deprived of an exceptional leader who uniquely possessed the depth of understanding necessary for confronting U.S. neocolonial intentions.  Subsequently, the people’s revolution of the 1920s and the 1930s, which included an independent reformist government of 100 days, was frustrated by U.S. support in 1933 for the future dictator Batista.  In 1953, Fidel announced, with the attack on Moncada, a new stage of the Cuban Revolution, which he declared was a new stage of war in the single Cuban revolution that was initiated in 1868.
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Thus, the pronouncement of October 10, 1868, would be the beginning of the process of revolutionary transformation, recognized as such by Martí and Fidel.  López writes that “the Revolution of '68 was a fundamental event for the consolidation of the nation and for new revolutionary projects.  October 10 was its birth, its foundational moment.”
                                                                             §

The necessary unity of the people is ultimately attained
Fidel Castro possessed an exceptional capacity for understanding, which enabled him to discern the objective possibilities for establishing the necessary unity of the people’s revolutionary struggle.  And he possessed the capacity to explain to the people, enabling him to forge a unity rooted in objective-political conditions, thus bringing the Revolution of 1868 to its culmination.

As the Revolution approached triumph in 1958, Fidel was able to forge an anti-Batista political coalition.  But for the Revolution in power, a more substantive political-economic unity would have to be established.

In 1959, the representative democracy of the neocolonial republic had been discredited, and Fidel began to speak of the need for some form of direct democracy or humanist democracy.  Initially, this took the form of mass assemblies, mass organizations, and popular participation in a nationwide literacy campaign.  The initiative culminated in the development of people’s democracy, characterized by people’s power, mass organizations, constitutional assemblies, popular consultations, and a vanguard political party.

​With respect to the economy, Fidel understood the need to end Cuban dependency on the production of sugar for export and a system of forced agricultural labor in the form of low-waged plantation labor and low-income tenant farming, which reinforced the underdevelopment and the poverty of the country.  He understood the need to modernize and diversify the economy, thereby stimulating economic growth that would provide resources for high quality free public education and public health as well as for housing and transportation. 
    
Fidel’s envisioned economic program required mutually beneficial trade with the USA, in which Cuba would purchase from the United States not consumer goods, as in the past, but machines, equipment, parts, and supplies necessary for Cuban industrial production and modernized agricultural production of a diversity of crops.  And the program would be strengthened by the participation of the Cuban industrial bourgeoisie, insofar as it did so in a spirit of cooperation with the national project.
    
With these requirements in mind, Fidel arranged for substantial participation of the national bourgeoisie in the revolutionary government that was formed on January 1-2, 1959.  And Fidel undertook an eleven-day trip in April 1959 to the United States, where he spoke to the American Society of Newspaper Editors; gave speeches at Harvard, Colombia, and Princeton universities; addressed a multitude of 40,000 in New York’s Central Park; had ten interviews with various representatives of the news media; and held several press conferences.  Fidel’s message was that Cuba will undertake an agrarian reform program in order to expand its agricultural production, thereby enabling it to buy machines for its industrial production in Cuba.  He declared that he anticipated that Cuba would buy more from the United States than in the past but buying things necessary for Cuban production. 

​Even though the United States possessed the political and economic conditions to accept Fidel’s proposal of cooperation with Cuba, the American power elite was incapable of considering it.  We now know from unclassified documents that the USA at the time of Fidel’s visit was well-entrenched in a project of regime change with respect to Cuba.  But Fidel continued to hope that the United States would see the advantages of cooperative relations with revolutionary Cuba.
    
For its part, Cuban big industry rejected Fidel’s call for participation in the Cuban revolutionary project.  It balked at the measures being adopted by the Cuban Revolutionary Government, which were designed to break the neocolonial relation with the USA.  It opted to abandon the country and to join the United States in its project of regime change. 
    
Thus, in accordance with real unfolding dynamics, the unity that was forged during the 1960s by the triumphant revolution became a unity of the people, including professionals, peasants, workers, students, and women in a project of sovereign economic development, based in cooperation with the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc.  It did not include the Cuban national bourgeoisie, which incorporated itself in the Cuban counterrevolution, based in south Florida. 
    
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc, the Cuban revolutionary socialist project has been able to sustain the unity of the various sectors of the people, albeit with some erosion, and without the emergence of viable opposition.  At the same time, Cuba has adjusted to the collapse of the Soviet Union through the deepening of relations of mutually beneficial cooperation with other countries, first with Europe and Canada, then with Latin America, and subsequently, with the emerging economies and anti-imperialist states of the Global South and East.  Cuba has taken a leading role, along with other nations of the Global South and East, in the construction of a more sustainable and more just world-system.
    
Since 1980, the United States has evolved to a decadent, aggressive form of economic and militarist imperialism, to the detriment of its own economic development and prestige in the world.  Its self-destructive policies, combined with the sound structures of the alternative project of the Global South and East, point to a good possibility for the future emergence of a more just and peaceful world, unless this possibility is destroyed by imperialism in decadence.
    
​Cuban persistence in the context of difficult worldwide dynamics is remarkable, and it is rooted in the unity of the various sectors of the people in the construction of a socialist nation, as the best option to protect their interests.

​The West Still Fears the Bolsheviks

Although it's been over a century since the 1917 Russian Revolution, scrolling through social media might make you feel as though Lenin and Stalin have just seized power. A new Red Scare is emerging, with both historical revolutionaries and modern-day Marxist-Leninists becoming targets in the capitalists' crosshairs. 

As conditions deteriorate for Americans during yet another election that offers little improvement to the lives of the working class, the rise of a new political party is prompting the Western media to intensify its anti-communist rhetoric. Domestic attacks by the FBI and local police departments are also increasing against organizations and groups for having any semblance of a connection to the country formerly controlled by the Bolsheviks. Whether it is on social media or having your home raided by federal agents, in the future we may all look back on 2024 as the beginning of a new, total crackdown on Communists in the United States. 

How the Mighty Have Fallen

There has always been a pattern in U.S. political discourse where both Republicans and Democrats have historically used anti-Communist rhetoric, though they do so in different ways. The political Right tends to label progressive movements or policies as "socialist" or "communist," particularly in debates over social programs, LGBTQ+ rights, or economic regulations. Meanwhile, the political Left often criticizes countries like China and Russia on the basis of human rights or authoritarianism, distancing themselves from Soviet-style communism, while upholding liberal capitalist ideals. 

The difference in our present moment is that new actors are now speaking up against Communism, even those who were once unwittingly among the biggest critics of Western imperialism. One notable example is the recent heel turn of Kim Schmitz, better known by his online persona Kim Dotcom. Kim has been on the run from U.S. authorities over his website MegaUpload being charged with violating copyright laws. Kim has long been an outspoken critic of Western imperialism and worked to expose how they use their power to censor opposing voices. Yet, Kim suddenly changed his tune and instead began an onslaught of tweets attacking the Bolsheviks, as though he were tweeting live from the 1917 revolution. 

Kim tweeted the following on September 3rd: “The largest slaughter of innocent life in history was the Bolshevik Revolution with 60 million dead. Understand what happened and who was responsible and you’ll know what’s coming.” Kim went from supporting the Special Military Operation in Ukraine to slandering the Bolsheviks while many of the Russian military members still don the hammer and sickle. 

​What would lead someone to publish textbook imperialist lies after being one of the biggest critics of Western disinformation? Two weeks before Kim’s tweets, it was announced that his time in New Zealand might be ending soon as their government agreed to extradite Kim to the United States to face punishment for the crimes brought upon him over his time with MegaUpload. With over 1.6 million followers and as an authoritative voice on cybersecurity, was Kim given the choice to either get in line with the new Red Scare or face extradition? It is interesting that since the news of his extradition was released, Kim has barely tweeted, but that, when he has, it is not the same critical voice opposing Western imperialism and control of the media.

Instead, Kim now appears to be a standard conservative voicing their support for Trump in the upcoming election. Since Kim took this new approach of not criticizing anyone except Kamala Harris and the LGBT community, news of his extradition has been muted. For someone like Kim, it would be hard to believe he defanged himself without any outside influence. 

Hit Piece on the American Communist Party

The attacks from the Imperialist media is not limited to past Communist movements, and they are equally taking steps to manufacture an incorrect image of modern Communist organizations. Following the American Communist Party’s launch in July, there has been no shortage of attacks against the newly formed party. While attacks from internet “leftists” were to be expected, the mass media quickly took the opportunity to disparage the American Communist Party (ACP).

On September 15, CNN released a video titled “MisinfoNation: The Lost Left”. The description of the video reads, “O’Sullivan meets former “Bernie Bros,” whose disillusionment with politics has led them to embrace far-right extremism. Some of them spend most of their waking hours online playing video games, say they feel left behind in the United States, and are now embracing conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, and even Vladimir Putin.”

​September 30, 2024, marked the end of the six-year presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO, Tepetián, Tabascao, 1953). His government was characterized by controversial (for the right wing) constitutional reforms, increased capacities of state institutions, and a clear attempt to redistribute wealth. It is no coincidence that these governmental qualities are those of the first president in decades who does not belong to either the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) -which continuously governed Mexico for 71 consecutive years- or the National Action Party (PAN), both center-right and right-wing parties respectively, which became staunch internal opponents of the progressive government.

Beginnings in the PRI and the creation of the PRD

Surely the president was in no way surprised by the kind of opposition he faced from these parties if we take into account that AMLO began his political career in the PRI during the seventies, although he ended up breaking with that party after the political crisis that would place Carlos Salinas de Gortari in the presidency in 1988. This controversy with the PRI leadership would cause AMLO to break with the party and found the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), a political organization that sought to be the epicenter of the center and center-left political movements in the country.

AMLO became president of the PRD in the State of Tabasco and initiated a dispute of several years against the PRI, which he repeatedly accused of electoral fraud. He led the march called “Exodus for Democracy” which arrived in the Mexican capital and there, on January 11, 1992, he made a speech before tens of thousands of people. AMLO gradually ceased to be merely the state leader of Tabasco to become a national political figure.

From regional politician to national politician

In 1994, he ran against PRI candidate Roberto Madrazo Pintado for the governorship of Tabasco and was defeated. AMLO denounced electoral fraud and excessive campaign spending by the PRI candidate and once again called on his supporters to take to the streets and hold another march called “Caravan for Democracy”. In it he called to disavow the results of the electoral fraud, to build an interim government, and to assume a sort of civil resistance against the repeated frauds of the PRI. In addition, the “Caravana” began to oppose the PRI’s harshest neoliberal measures, such as the privatization of the national oil company, PEMEX. To this end, they devised a strategy of blocking the entrances to the oil company’s facilities and thus also demanded compensation for 40,000 peasants and fishermen affected by the oil company. AMLO was injured during the demonstrations.

His performance as a political and popular leader soon took him to the top of the PRD and there he turned the party into the second most-voted party in Mexico; they obtained 125 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Furthermore, in 1997, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano, a strong man of the PRD, became Head of the Government of Mexico City with 48% of votes in favor. It was the first important victory of the PRD in its history and few doubted that it had much to do with AMLO’s administration of the party. Soon, more electoral victories began to follow: in 1998, state victories in the states of Tlaxcala and Zacatecas; in 1999, state victories in Baja California and Nayarit.

Head of Government of the capital city

AMLO soon understood that he had to abandon his state pretensions in Tabasco and focus on a new objective: Mexico City. In 2000, he registered his candidacy for Mexico City’s Chief of Government despite fierce opposition from the PRI and PAN, who alleged that AMLO had not lived enough years in the capital to be a candidate. In reality, the accusations hid a desire to prevent the PRD president from acquiring greater political notoriety at any cost. However, despite the opposition, thanks to a broad alliance of center and center-left parties, AMLO won the election with 37.7% of the votes.

His government was characterized by constant communication with the media, which he summoned every day at 6:00 a.m. to explain the work he was carrying out (a communication strategy he would never abandon). His public works projects made him very popular in the capital: the enormous highway called “Anillo Periférico del Valle de México”; the first line of the Metrobus; an ambitious program of pensions for the elderly; assistance to single mothers, the disabled, the unemployed, peasants, etc.; medical consultations to poor people; delivery of school supplies to students; construction of the Public Hospital of Specialties; among other projects. In addition, the homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants dropped during his administration: in 2001 it was 9.01% while in 2005 it was 7.77%. Economically, the GDP of the Federal District grew from 1.17 trillion pesos in 2001 to 1.6 trillion pesos in 2005; in addition, during his administration, the lowest unemployment rate in the history of the city up to that time was recorded.

AMLO’s opponents criticized his investment in social programs, accusing him of being a populist and of building his image at the expense of the treasury. However, the Chief of Government bluntly said that whenever the right wing sees investment for the poorest, they label the opponents as populists, no matter who they point the finger at. Be that as it may, AMLO became one of the most popular politicians in the country. According to some polls, he even had the support of 85% of the people of the capital, and one contest even called him “the second-best mayor in the world”.

AMLO’s opposition promptly tried to close the way to a very possible presidential candidacy. Thus, it initiated a process that sought to remove him from certain political rights for allegedly having disobeyed a court order, i.e., to remove him from office for contempt of court. The dispute between Vicente Fox’s national government and AMLO’s Mexico City government escalated to become the main controversy in the country. Many saw this as an anticipation of the future electoral contest. On April 7, the withdrawal of AMLO’s judicial immunity was approved, and he immediately called for a “civil resistance” and declared his willingness to go to prison if necessary.

First presidential election and fraud
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After several pseudo-legal tricks by the opposition, AMLO was able to participate in the 2006 presidential elections against Felipe Calderón (PAN) and other secondary candidates. Calderon and his team initiated a media campaign based on the generation of fear against AMLO. One of the campaign slogans was “López Obrador, a danger for Mexico” while comparing him to Hugo Chávez and repeatedly saying that AMLO was a “risk for democracy”.

Despite the huge electoral campaign against AMLO, many polls indicated that he was likely to be the next president of Mexico. However, after the July 2, 2006, elections, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) announced that Felipe Calderón had won the elections. Suspicions arose throughout the country. AMLO and his supporters claimed that again an electoral fraud had taken place and requested a full recount of the votes. The request was denied, and a partial recount of the votes was performed. After several calculations, the electoral authorities reported that Calderón defeated López Obrador by a mere 230,000 votes. AMLO’s supporters insisted that there was fraud because as more ballot boxes were opened, AMLO gained more votes and Calderón lost dozens of votes, which is why they thought that if all the tally sheets were opened, the result would be different.

Although Calderón was declared the winner, AMLO and his followers insisted that they had been robbed of victory. They set up permanent encampments along Paseo de la Reforma, one of Mexico City’s most important avenues, which caused traffic chaos in the capital. Finally, on November 20, 2006, they decided to declare AMLO as the legitimate president without the authorization of the electoral authorities. A symbolic cabinet was formed and AMLO went around the country to explain how the presidency had supposedly been stolen from him and who was behind the fraud.

In a public statement, AMLO said:

​AMLO was undoubtedly defeated, but not for long. The Mexican leader had understood that to triumph he had to do so against the institutions he sought to govern. He would not cease in his eagerness to reach the presidential chair and undertake the necessary reforms to transform Mexico.

And so I went to Sardinia, searching for Gramsci’s phantom. An hour’s fight from Rome’s Ciampino took me to Cagliari, Sardinia’s principal city, to its small airport on the island’s southernmost tip. Then I drove a little Mitsubishi rental one-and-a-half hours northwest, chugging along a largely empty central E25 highway, battling a stiff cross wind, onward toward the twelfth century town of Santu Lussurgiu. Santu Lussurgiu is a labyrinth of narrow cobbled streets, many scarcely wider than my tiny car. With a couple of modest supermarkets, a butcher’s store, a few sad, lonely cafés, a population of around 2,500, it felt more like a large village, the sort of place where any strange car, unfamiliar to locals, provoked incredulous stares, as if an alien had landed from another planet.
​
I’d come excitedly to Santu Lussurgiu. I’d found inexpensive bed and breakfast accommodation in the same building, Sa Murighessa, where a teenage Gramsci lodged during his junior high school years. With its thick stone walls, wooden beamed ceilings, and granite staircase, Sa Murighessa today is one of a group of beautifully renovated buildings belonging to the Antica Dimora de Gruccione, a so-called “albergo diffuso,” a special kind of traditional inn. Room and board are provided in assorted historic buildings scattered around one another (hence diffuse); an old family house typically forms the heart of the albergo’s hospitality, for guests’ meals and collective conviviality.

Sa Murighessa has a plaque on its outside wall, memorializing Gramsci. He himself, though, remembers it as a “miserable pensione.” “When I attended junior high school at Santu Lussurgiu,” he told Tatiana (September 12, 1932), “where three professors quite brazenly made short shrift of Instruction in all five grades, I used to live in a peasant woman’s house (I paid five lira a month for lodgings, bed linen, and the cooking of the very frugal board) whose old mother was a little stupid and forgetful but not crazy and was in fact my housekeeper and who every morning when she saw me again asked me who I was and how it was that I had slept in their house.”
​
The actual school, Ginnasio Carta-Meloni, at via Giovanni Maria Angioi 109, was a few minutes’ walk away. It no longer exists. These days, it’s a private residence, smartly maintained with an ochre-colored façade, with another brown plaque on the outside wall, announcing “I passi di Gramsci Santu Lussurgiu” [the steps of Antonio Gramsci Santu Lussurgiu], which, in three languages (Italian, Sard, and English), says: “Here was located the Gymnasium Carta-Meloni during Antonio Gramsci’s Studies, 1905-1907.” Underneath is a citation from Prison Notebooks: “culture isn’t having a well-stocked warehouse of news but is the ability that our mind has to understand life, the place we hold there, our relationship with other people. Those who are aware of themselves and of everything, who feel the relationship with all other beings, have culture…So anyone can be cultured, can be a philosopher.”

Gramsci hated his junior high school; they were wretched years, he said. Even as a young lad he could see through his teachers, didn’t respect them, knew their inadequacies. A precocious intelligence was already manifest. In another letter to Tatiana (June 2, 1930), he writes: “one day I saw a strange little animal, like a green grass snake yet with four tiny legs. Locally, the small reptile was known as a scurzone, and in Sardinian dialect curzu means short.” At school, he asked his natural history teacher what the animal was called in Italian and the teacher laughed, saying it was a basilico, a term used for an imaginary animal, something not real. Young Antonio must be mistaken because what he described doesn’t exist. His school chums later made fun of him, too. “You know how angry a boy can get,” he tells Tatiana, “being told he is wrong when he knows instead that he is right when a question of reality is at stake; I think that it is due to this reaction against authority put to the service of self-assured ignorance that I still remember the episode.” He’d already from an early age developed a nose for sniffing out authority put to the service of self-assured ignorance.

Nino had a set routine in those school years, leaving Ghilarza early Monday morning, on a horse-drawn cart, traveling the twelve-miles over the tanca (pastureland) on a dirt track, returning either Friday afternoon or Saturday morning, often on foot. The area could be hairy, bandit and cattle-thief country. Years later he remembered an incident walking with a friend, coming back from school one Saturday morning, plodding along a deserted spot when, all of a sudden, they heard gun shots and stray bullets whistling by. Quickly they realized it was they who were being shot at! The duo scrambled into a ditch for cover, hugging the ground for a long while, until they were sure the coast was clear. “Obviously,” he tells Tatiana, “it was a bunch of fellows out for a laugh, who enjoyed scaring us—some joke, eh! It was pitch dark when we got home, very tired and muddy, and we told nobody what had happened.”
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Back then, getting to and from school on foot would have taken Gramsci most of the day, even without being fired upon, and several hours by horse-drawn cart. In more modern times, on Sardinia’s surprisingly smooth, well-maintained country roads, you can zip along the SP15 in a shade over twenty-minutes. Though if you motor too fast, you’ll miss much of what’s noteworthy about the island’s landscape. Not least its stones. John Berger is right when he says that “in the hinterland around Ghilarza, as in many parts of the island, the thing you feel most strongly is the presence of stones.” “Sardinia is first and foremost a place of stones.” “Endless and ageless dry-stone walls separate the tancas,” Berger says, “border the gravel roads, enclose pens for the sheep, or, having fallen apart after centuries of use, suggest ruined labyrinths. Everywhere a stone is touching a stone.” Berger reckons that stones “gave Gramsci or inspired in him his special sense of time and his special patience.” Stones are silently there, stoic and solid, resistant to time, enduring the passage of time, unmoved, knowing that life on earth goes on over the long durée. This notion was surely not lost on its native radical son.

Like most nuraghi, Zuras has a single entrance, low and narrow, with an interior staircase. Zuras looked so forlorn that I was reluctant to crouch and enter the pitched darkness. What lay inside? An animal’s lair? A bees’ nest? Masses of cobwebs? Snakes? I didn’t fancy finding out. Nobody knows the precise function of nuraghi, excepting that they weren’t, like ancient Egyptian pyramids, burial grounds, places of the dead: nuraghi were very much structures for the living. Most likely they mixed protective and defensive activities, offering shelter to shepherds during inclement weather, and lookout posts for military surveillance; once ascended, they afford dramatic vistas across the whole countryside.

Stones figure prominently in Sardinian imagination and meant a lot to Gramsci; he’d touched many, collected many scattered around the surrounding tanca. At home, he spent hours with a chisel smoothing those stones down, shaping them into pairs of spheres of commensurate sizes, as big as grapefruits and melons, hollowing out little grooves inside each rock. Once ready, he’d insert into the holes pieces of a broom handle he’d cut up, foot-long lengths. He’d then join the spherical stones together, forming homemade, makeshift dumbbells. Gramsci used six stones to make three sets of dumbbells of varying weights, and with them, every morning, as hard as he could, as disciplined as he was, he did exercises to strengthen his weak body—his arms, shoulders, and back muscles, making himself more robust to confront the great and terrible world he knew lay beyond.

***

The Gramscis lived in the center of Ghilarza, at number 57 Corso Umberto I, still the town’s main drag. The house was built in the early nineteenth century, with two floors, divided into six rooms: three on the ground floor, with an inner courtyard, and three on the upper floor. From the age of seven until twenty, Gramsci shared the abode with his mother, father, and six siblings—Gennaro, Grazietta, Emma, Mario, Teresina, and Carlo. In what would become a life of lodgings, hotel rooms, clinics, and prison cells, the Ghilarza house was the only place he’d ever call home, always remember affectionally; a haven he’d return to nostalgically in his prison letters, cherishing it as a site of Gramscian collective memory. The plain, white-walled stone building, with a little upper-floor iron-grilled balcony, is today fittingly preserved as Casa Museo Antonio Gramsci, exhibiting a small yet significant array of Gramsci memorabilia for public viewing.

Months prior, I’d corresponded with the museum to arrange a visit. They’d welcomed me yet said: “the Casa Museo Antonio Gramsci is closed for major restauration works. But you can visit a temporary exhibition in the premises of Piazza Gramsci, right in front of the museum house. The temporary exhibition contains a chronological journey through the life of Gramsci and preserves a large part of the objects, photos, and documents present within the museum itinerary. The exhibition is accompanied by captions in Italian and English…We await your e-mail to plan your visit. See you soon!”
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And now I was parking my car along Corso Umberto I, headed for Piazza Gramsci. To the left, looking spick and span, I recognized from photographs Gramsci’s old house; the adjoining properties, at numbers 59 and 61, were covered in plastic sheeting, concealing the building works going on within, the said renovation of the museum complex. Almost opposite, on the other side of the street, I noticed something that would have doubtless thrilled Gramsci: the offices of a small, independent publishing house, a radical Sardinian press whose name sets the tone of its politics: Iskra Edizioni, after Lenin’s fortnightly socialist newspaper, produced in exile in London then smuggled back into Russia where it became an influential underground paper. Iskra Edizioni, founded in Ghilarza in 2000, tries to keep alive Sardinian folk traditions and dialect, and deals with translations of academic books and reissuing of militant texts “that can no longer be found on the market.”

Around the corner is Piazza Gramsci. Two young women welcomed me into the museum’s makeshift store, full of everything Gramsci: tote bags and tee-shirts, posters and notebooks, magazines and books, modestly for sale, all tastefully displayed. Then I was led into two temporary exhibition spaces where, left to myself, I was alone with Gramsci, overwhelmed because he was everywhere. What initially struck was his bed, a little single divan—a very little iron-framed divan, with two walnut wood panels serving as the head and end boards. It was its size, its smallness, that most affected me. If Gramsci slept here until the age of twenty, you get a sense of his diminutive stature—it was like a kid’s bed, not much bigger than a cot.

Nearby, a pewter washbasin and a glass cabinet containing a red and blue plaid shirt, worn by Gramsci in prison, together with toothbrush, comb, shoehorn, and shaving blade. Another glass cabinet had two grapefruit-sized stones, with two little grooves, the remains of Gramsci’s dumbbells, overlaying a series of family photos, Gramsci’s birth certificate, and a telegram Tatiana sent Piero Sraffa, dated April 26, 1937: “GRAMSCI COLPO APOPLETICO GRAVISSIMO, TATIANA.” [“GRAMSCI SUFFERED SERIOUS STROKE, TATIANA”] Above it something even more disturbing: dressed in a dark suit, a photo of Gramsci on his deathbed, taken by Tatiana.

Tatiana did several things for her dead brother-in-law: besides taking care of his notebooks and arranging his burial, she had two-bronze casts made, one of his right hand, his writing hand, the other a death mask, the most haunting object of all the museum’s exhibits. Gramsci looks unrecognizable—bloated, with puffed up round cheeks, far removed from the youthful images of him with flowing locks of curly black hair and those famous rimless spectacles. It was a far cry indeed from how he was remembered at High School: “he may have been deformed,” old school chum Renato Figari recalled, “but he wasn’t ugly. He had a high forehead, with a mass of wavy hair, and behind his prince-nez I remember the bright blue of his eyes, that shining, metallic gaze, which struck you so forcibly.”

Why bloated? It’s hard to say. Poor prison food? Medication for his illnesses? Sedentary life in a cell? Before incarceration, Gramsci was a great walker, covering vast distances on a foot, as a child and adolescent in Sardinia, and as a student in Turin, where he seemed to know old backstreets intimately; and even immediately prior to his arrest, he’d take long strolls around Rome, encountering comrades in cafés, hoofing around town to attend one meeting or another. Yet now I was looking at the cast of a man who’d aged dramatically, gained weight, and looked well beyond his forty-six years. Maybe Tatiana wanted to retain the image of her brother-in-law, whose metallic, piercing gaze was no more. Maybe she wanted to demonstrate to the world what the fascists had done to him. Lest we forget.
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It was difficult not to be stirred by the exhibit, not to be affected; but I knew I had one other thing to do in Ghilarza: I had to go and see his mother, whose remains lay on the edge of town in the municipal cemetery. An attractive arched stone entrance led you into a magnificent Cypress tree paradise, aglow in gorgeous late afternoon light. Giuseppina Marcias Gramsci’s grave has a prime site in the cemetery, with little around it, marked by a horizonal marble headstone, still bearing the flowers of the small commemoration of a few weeks earlier, on April 27. A Gramsci citation is chiseled into the foot of the marble, words taken from a letter he’d written his sister Grazietta (December 29, 1930), expressing concern about his mother’s health: “Ha lavorato per noi tutta la vita, sacrificandosi in modo inaudito.” [“She had worked for us all her life, sacrificing herself in unimaginable ways.”] Gramsci’s actual letter continues: “if she had been a different woman who knows what disastrous end we would have come to even as children; perhaps none of us would be alive today.”

Over dinner that evening, back at my albergo, I leafed through a publication I’d picked up during my museum visit, “Mandami tante notizie di Ghilarza.” Its title is a quote from another Gramsci letter to his mother (April 25, 1927): “Send me lots of news about Ghilarza”; a glossy magazine produced by the Fondazione Casa Gramsci Onlus, centering on “Paesaggi gramsciani: il santuario campestre di San Serafino”—“Gramscian Landscapes: The Rural Sanctuary of San Serafino.” San Serafino was one of his favorite boyhood stomping grounds, in a childhood much more adventurous out of school than in, a little village four miles from home, a journey Antonio would have doubtless made on foot.
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The village and its chapel overlook Lake Omodeo. The lake runs into River Tirso at the Tirso River Dam and the magazine reproduces a facsimile of a postcard of the “Diga del Tirso” not long after its construction, one Tatiana had sent Gramsci on August 2, 1935, presumably when she was visiting his family in Ghilarza. Three other large-sized facsimiles feature in the magazine, letters Gramsci sent to his mother. One, from October 19, 1931, is worth citing at length:

I went on foot. Crossing a main road bereft of any traffic, the signage reminded me, if I ever needed reminding, that I was in Gramsci country. I took a photo. At the roadside, an old hand-painted sign indicated, in yellow, “Lago,” with an arrow pointing its direction. I followed it, descending a little gravel path. Not a sole in sight. Soon the lake came into view, Lago Omodeo, and finding a rock to sit on at the water’s edge, I wondered whether perhaps I’d discovered Gramsci’s actual rock, where he’d sat for hour upon hour. It was May and baking hot, 100 degrees, without shade. So I knew my visit needed to be brief, imbibing the atmosphere, getting some sense of what Gramsci experienced, of what he’d loved, and what he might have loved again.

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In truth, I had no real idea what I was searching for, here or anywhere else in Sardinia. I was embarked on a peculiar research project, very unmethodological, impossible to conceive in advance, having little inkling what I’d expect to find, let alone how I would go about trying to find it. And what was this it I sought anyway? I knew that part of it was wanting to see Gramsci’s family house and museum, that I wanted to see some of the more tangible remnants of Gramsci’s Sardinian world, artefacts and documents; but there were other things I was after, too, less tangible aspects of this world, more experiential aspects, things subjective rather than objective, sensory rather than strictly empirical. Or, at least, the sort of empirical that’s hard to qualify and impossible to quantify: a smell, a texturing of the cultural and natural landscape, of Gramsci’s environment, the look on people’s faces, the region’s light and warmth, its dusty aridness, the sun beating down, the sun setting, the sun rising, the faint ripple of the lake below San Serafino, the buzzing of insects, the sound of silence, the presence of stones.
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I suppose I was accumulating impressions, and what impressions I’d accumulated I was now trying to recapture on the page back in Rome, where I write, reconstructing my trip from memory, realizing how much of it seemed to pass in a haze. I remember the day after San Serafino, going to Ales—I had to go to Ales (pronounced “Alice”): it was Gramsci’s birthplace, after all, an hour’s south of Ghilarza, a town of 1,500 people that never lets you forget it is his paese natale; it was home only for a matter of months (the family upped sticks shortly after Antonio’s birth to Sorgono, before permanently moving to Ghilarza). Another scorchingly hot afternoon, a fierce sun beating down. God knows how it’s possible that the thermometer could rise even more in July and August. Little wonder Gramsci always felt cold in prison.

There was no shade in Ales, nowhere open, no place to eat, to buy food, to drink anything—and hot, hot, hot. Yet I was there for Gramsci, and it was endearing how much due care and attention Ales devoted to him. His actual birthplace—a two-story, yellow-façade house at Corso Cattedrale, 14—is now a cultural center hosting talks, book launches, and movie-showings, and still keeps the Gramscian red flag flying: one poster in the window read: “STOP ALL EMBARGO CONTRO CUBA.” Gramsci’s life and thought crops up everywhere in Ales, almost on every street corner, by way of a novel series of plaque-posters detailing his lifeline and different aspects of his work. It had all been lovingly curated and presented, and proclaimed Ales as a “laboratorio di idee,” a laboratory of ideas, inviting visitors “conoscere Antonio Gramsci camminando nel suo paese natale”—“to know Antonio Gramsci by walking in his hometown.”

And I did walk, headed for another landmark, another Piazza Gramsci, with its modern stone sculpture garden that looked weather beaten, worn away by the sun, nicely done but utterly deserted by day because of so little shade. As I strolled, by chance I spotted one of the most interesting signs of Gramsci, an impromptu sign, unprogrammed, indicating that the man isn’t only remembered but that he’s also somehow alive in people: graffiti on a rusty old door of an abandoned building, which piqued my attention and brought a smile to my face: “SONO PESSIMISTA CON INTELLIGENZA,” all of which presumably implies that the daubers were somehow optimists of the will—“ottimista per la volontà,” as Gramsci said, summing up my own sentiment about our post-truth world.

Not far from the graffiti was the loveliest Gramsci homage I’d ever seen, the loveliest and cleverest: a giant mural painted on the side of a whole building, in bright color, huge and stunning, without any trace of desecration, sparklingly clean and vivid. What was so interesting and clever was its blending of reality and fantasy; illustrating some of Gramsci’s childhood adventures with hedgehogs, apples, and snakes; yet also showing him older, smiling, reunited with his two sons, a family portrait, a what might’ve been image if he’d returned to Sardinia, if Delio and Giuliano had somehow made it out of the USSR, come back to Italy to see dad—big ifs. Where was mom Giulia? The mural was so vast that I had a hard time properly capturing it on camera.

To the uninitiated, the hedgehog-apple imagery might be perplexing. For insight let’s invoke a letter (February 22, 1932) from father to son Delio:

Ales’ mural offered a beautiful pictorial rendering of Gramsci’s beautiful narrative tale of hedgehogs carrying apples on their backs, gathered together, about to chomp away on their harvested feast. The stars twinkle overhead and a glowing moon gives the whole scene a magical milky charm. Gramsci, aged and portly as he was toward the end, is here radiantly alive, neatly attired in suit and tie, a proud father, arms around his two sons either side of him--a what might have been prospect, a Gramsci family romance, a happier epilogue to the tragic story we know really ensued.

That happy image of Gramsci disturbed me for some time. I remember passing a morning in Santu Lussurgiu, strolling around its old center and then around what’s a sort of small outer suburb, a ring of houses built sometime over the past fifty-years, well after Gramsci’s day. I was deep in thought about Gramsci—not about Gramsci the young lad but Gramsci the older man, the person who might have returned to walk the streets where I was walking. In olden times, Santu Lussurgiu was the site of Sa Carrela è Nanti, a folkloric horse race, a tradition held every Mardi Gras. Horses used to gallop through audience-flocked streets at breakneck speeds, with pairs of riders dressed in flamboyant traditional costumes, donned in obligatory Zoro-like masks. The old town’s walls are still adorned with framed photos of this crazy equine event, now defunct, I looked at some showing the spectacle and its crowds as late as the 1980s.
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Perched up on high in Santu Lussurgiu, where you get a sweeping vista of the whole town, is a massive white granite statue of Christ, with placating arms stretched out, and a bright red heart that looks slightly ridiculous, like it’s pulsating, beating for the salvation of the town’s residents. (It resembles Jim Carrey’s heart in The Mask, beating for Cameron Diaz.) I negotiated Santu Lussurgiu’s streets, climbed upward to get a close up of Christ, and witness that panorama before Him. All the while, I tried to visualize Gramsci back here, living in Santu Lussurgiu, imagining his niece Edmea finding Uncle Nino a room, probably near to where he used to lodge, in the old quarter, in a little stone house where various relatives could come and go, cater for his needs, help him recover, regain his strength, his zest for life.

He might have taken short walks in the fresh air, got himself some false teeth, eaten healthily again, found peace and quiet and maybe resumed his work, his letter writing, reconnecting with the outside world, with all the people and places he’d formerly known. Maybe he would have taken the odd aperitivo in town, with his father Francesco, who might have lived himself had his son also lived. Gramsci Sr. and Jr. might have tippled with the town folk; son would have enjoyed speaking their language, their dialect. It could have been right out of the leaves of Machiavelli, of Gramsci’s hero’s life in exile. For downtime, while working on The Prince, Machiavelli loved to sneak through the secret underground passageway of his Chianti wine cellar and pop-up next door at a raucous tavern (L’Albergaccio). He’d guzzle wine, chinwag with peasants and wayfarers, play cards and exchange vulgarities with the butcher, miller, and innkeeper. “Involved in these trifles,” Machiavelli said, “I kept my brain from growing moldy.”

Gramsci’s post-prison life might have been no less bawdy, a homecoming dramatic and heart wrenching, like a scene from Cinema Paradiso—when, after a thirty-year absence, Salvatore, the famous film director, finally returns to his Sicilian native village, attending the funeral of the old cinema projectionist, Alfredo, whom he’d adored as a kid. But maybe Gramsci’s return would’ve been less mawkish; he wasn’t one for fainthearted nostalgia, would have probably been harder, followed the words of the island’s poet laureate, Sebastiano Satta: “His bitter heart lurches./ He does not cry:/ Sardinians should never cry.”

On the other hand, we might wonder how long Gramsci’s convalescence may have lasted before he’d gotten itchy feet, yearned for contact with the wider world again—for engaging politically again. Could he really accept, as he’d hinted to wife Giulia in 1936, “a whole cycle of his life definitively closing”? He’d spent a decade of sedentary life, cut-off from life within four narrow walls; it would be hard to imagine, as a free man, him wanting to sit around all day, behind a desk or in a bar, leading a quiet, mediative and contemplative existence. He’d surely have gotten bored after a while, a country boy who’d tasted the forbidden fruits of cosmopolitanism—in Turin and Vienna, in Moscow and Rome—a roving journalist, activist, and intellectual, a man who’d met Lenin and Victor Serge, who read in different languages, who’d prided himself on his internationalist outlook. Wouldn’t village life have soon become too stifling, too parochial?

Another question we might pose about Gramsci’s return to Sardinia is: did he really plan on staying long? Or was it just easier for him to flee Sardinia than mainland Italy—as he’d apparently told Tatiana, and as she’d written to her sister Eugenia in Moscow? A month prior to Gramsci’s passing, Tatiana told Eugenia (March 25, 1937): “Antonio believes it would be a lot easier to escape from Sardinia than from Italy. We can’t mention it, or rumors will start.” From what would he be fleeing? The Italian fascist authorities? The Russian Communist Party and its apparatchik, suspecting Gramsci as a closet Trotskyite? The Nazis, who’d soon be jack-booting across Europe? And where else might he go?

Gramsci never knew anything about the German bombardment of the Basque town of Guernica; it took place after he’d had his stroke, on April 26, 1937, the day prior to his death. And yet, maybe Gramsci had anticipated a darkening of Europe, was fearing the worst, knew something was brewing, that fascism was not only alive and well but would soon brazenly expand its reach, morph into Nazism? Maybe he feared what was in store for his beloved island should war break out. Mussolini saw Sardinia as a stepping-stone for enlarging his Mediterranean empire. Because of its strategic positioning—only 8 miles from French Corsica—and the importance of Cagliari for launching attacks on Allied shipping in the Mediterranean, Sardinia suffered heavy bombing.

At the same time, the island also had a strong anti-fascist resistance movement, which supported the Allies, and played a significant role in eventual Italian liberation in 1943. If he’d stayed in Sardinia, what role would Gramsci have assumed? A leader of the underground resistance movement? A free man yet a communist enemy of the Nazis, a man who would need to battle on three fronts—against the German Nazis, the Italian fascists, and the Russian Stalinists. Whatever the case, it’s clear his Sardinia peace would have been short-lived, lasting a couple of years only.

On the other hand, would he have opted to join the dissident exodus from mainland Europe? It’s fascinating to consider that the northern Sardinian port of Porto Torres had a direct ferry line to Marseille; from Porto Torres Gramsci could have eloped to the southern French city. Although under German occupation, Marseille’s shady underworld of crime and opportunism, its rowdy bars and back alleys around the Vieux Port, its seafaring and immigrant culture, meant it slipped through the tightening grip of the Gestapo. The city’s cracks offered elicit protection for assorted refugees, dissidents, and Jews, while becoming a wartime waystation for the passage out to the new world. (One of Gramsci’s contemporaries, Walter Benjamin, born 1892, famously didn’t make it out, crossing the Pyrenees from Marseille in September 1940 only to find the Spanish border closed. Stranded, without the right exit visa, he preferred suicide to being sent back, overdosing on morphine in a cheap Portbou hotel.)

Might Gramsci have shacked up with the celebrated artists and intellectuals on the outskirts of Marseille, at the Villa Air Bel, before setting sail in March 1941 on Le Capitaine Paul Lemerle, a converted cargo boat, for Martinique? What a mesmerizing proposition that would have been. Onboard were 350 refugees, as well as a glitterati of creative dissents, castaways of old Europe, including anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, photographer Germaine Krull, surrealist painter Wifredo Lam, the “Pope” of Surrealism himself, André Breton, his wife, the painter-dancer Jacqueline Lamba, together with their six-year-old daughter Aube. The anarcho-Bolshevik revolutionary Victor Serge, himself no stranger to political persecution and imprisonment, was another passenger, accompanied by his twenty-year-old son, Vlady, a budding artist.
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Serge and Gramsci were kindred spirits, contemporaries who knew each other in Vienna in the mid-1920s. (There’s a touching photograph of them together, a group shot on a Viennese street, with optimism in the air and a grinning Gramsci.) Serge was remorselessly scathing about people he didn’t like or rate—his Notebooks, 1936-1947 are full of selected character assassinations—yet was generous about those he knew and/or admired, like Gramsci.

A few years after his arrival in Mexico, Serge wrote in his Memoirs of a Revolutionary perhaps the nicest portrait of Gramsci ever written:

Amid an atmosphere of fugitive uncertainty and fear—fear of being torpedoed or detained by Vichy-controlled Martinique—Serge and Gramsci would’ve had plenty to talk about aboard Le Capitaine Paul Lemerle, plenty of time to argue, to agree and disagree, to agree about disagreeing. Both had the capacity of conviction, believing in the unity of thought, energy, and life, yet were critical of all forms of fanatism. Both knew every idea is subject to revision in the face of new realities. Both would have agreed that the old world was dying and little was left of what they’d known, of what they’d struggled for (Serge’s own title for his memoirs was originally Memories of Vanished Worlds); both knew the new world had yet to be born and monsters lurked in the interregnum, in the darkness at dawn, in the unforgiving years they were each living out. Both would have shared prison tales of hardship and disappointment, told jokes with an inmate gallows humor they knew firsthand.

They’d have likely discussed the relative merits of anarchism and Marxism, agreed about the disasters of Stalinism, found common ground on the need to rebuild socialism through a Constituent Assembly. (In his Notebooks, Serge said socialists “ought to seek influence on the terrain of democracy, in the Constituent Assemblies and elsewhere, accepting compromise in an intransigent spirit.”) They’d have converged and diverged in their views about Georges Sorel, the French political theorist, agreeing about aspects of his anarcho-syndicalism, particularly on the general strike, about its “mythical” nature, that it was a “concrete fantasy” (as Gramsci called it) for arousing and organizing a collective will; yet would have disagreed about Sorel’s ethical repugnance to Jacobinism, which Gramsci recognized as “the categorical embodiment of Machiavelli’s Prince.” The jury would have been out on Gramsci’s feelings about Sorel’s “moral elite,” which Serge liked, the idea that history depends on the caliber of individuals, on how fit and capable they are for making revolution. Maybe Gramsci might have agreed; perhaps this was just another notion of an “organic intellectual”?

After landing in Martinique, where might Gramsci have gone? Followed comrade Serge to Mexico? Taken André Breton’s route, found refuge in New York? They never let Serge into America; no Communist Party member, existant or previous, was ever granted entry; Gramsci would have experienced a similar fate. Mexico would have been the more likely bet. Serge’s weak heart didn’t last long in high-altitude Mexico City: a cardiac arrest struck him down in the back of a cab in 1947. It took several hours before his body was identified. Vlady recalls finding his father on a police station slab. Son noticed the sorry state of dad’s shoes, his soles full of holes, which shocked Vlady because his father had always been so careful about his appearance, even during times of worst deprivation. A few days on, Vlady sketched dad’s hands, which were, as Serge had described Gramsci’s, very beautiful. Not long after, Serge’s final poem was discovered, drafted the day before he’d died, called “Mains”—”Hands”: “What astonishing contact, old man, joins your hands with ours!”

I know, I know–all of this is idle conjecture about Gramsci, maybe even pointless wish-imaging. It didn’t happen. What really happened happened: Gramsci died, never made it out, was never reunited with Serge. While we can act and should speculate on the future, we can’t change the past, the course of a history already done. That past can be falsified, erased and denied, of course, as people in power frequently do—remember Gramsci’s youthful article from Avanti!, penned in 1917, documenting a common bourgeois trait, prevalent today, of renaming old city streets, of coining new names for neighborhoods where a working class past was vivid. “Armed with an encyclopedia and an ax, they proceed to demolish old Turin,” Gramsci wrote of his adopted city. Streets are the common heritage of people,” he said, “of their affections, which united individuals more closely with the bonds of a solidarity of memory.”
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So we can’t reinvent Gramsci’s past, shouldn’t reinvent that past. But we might keep his memory alive, find solidarity in that memory, keep him free from any renaming, from the encyclopedia and the ax. His phantom, his death mask, can haunt our present and our future. To remember what happened to him is never to forget his dark times, the dark times that might well threaten us again. Victor Serge recognized this, somehow knew it was his friend’s powerfullest weapon. Twelve-years after their Viennese encounter, “when I emerged from a period of deportation in Russia and arrived in Paris,” Serge writes in Memoirs of a Revolutionary, “I was following a Popular Front demonstration when someone pushed a communist pamphlet into my hand: it contained a picture of Antonio Gramsci, who had died on April 27 of that year.” What should we do with this picture in our own hands? Remember it and pass it on.

With the surge in popularity of the Democratic Socialists of America since Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, it can be argued that there’s likewise been a surge in the successes of municipal socialism. Granted this is only concerning the electoral prospects of a single organization, but at least according to Wikipedia, there are nearly 150 people holding various positions within municipal governments ranging from the Mayoral office to smaller positions such as being members of a school board between 31 different states in the US. To understand the potential of these electoral results, or even the lack-there-of, historical examples need to be studied to absorb the lessons of these experiments. Could Bill Buell’s work “George Lunn: The 1912 Socialist Victory in Schenectady” serve as a lens into the achievements and shortcomings of socialism at the local level?

Published in 2019, the county historian of Schenectady’s book holds the dual purpose of being a biography of George R. Lunn, a minister and politician, as well as more specifically examining his time as the only ever socialist mayor of Schenectady, New York. Lunn is also one of only four people to hold a mayoral office in New York State under some form of the socialist banner, as well as being the first to do so.

The first seven chapters of this book touch upon Lunn’s early life and connections to the pulpit, as well as giving some historical context to the city of Schenectady and the standing of socialism within the United States in the early 20th century. To put it briefly, Lunn was born in Iowa in 1873, served very briefly as a chaplain during the Spanish-American War, and would later become ordained as a Presbyterian minister after graduating from Union Theological Seminary in 1901. In 1904 Lunn would move to Schenectady when he was named as pastor for Schenectady’s First Reformed Church. It was as a minister that Lunn began to gain prominence, being cited as an engaging and charismatic speaker, using his platform in the church to talk not only about religious affairs, but to address corruption within the city and speak of societal ills such as homelessness and child labor. The minister’s rhetoric would result in him leaving First Reformed in 1910, leading him to form his own congregation through the People’s Church and, soon after, officially joining the Socialist Party of America near the end of that year.

Chronicling George Lunn’s entrance to the SPA introduces the real meat and potatoes of this biographical piece, his political career. Buell chronicles Lunn’s quick rise to popularity and his election to Mayor of Schenectady on the socialist ticket, taking office in 1911. The efforts of Lunn and his associates to implement elements of socialism within the framework of capitalism such as introducing free garbage pickup and a protracted effort to improve the city’s parks are laid out, examining how Lunn introduced these as well as displaying the struggles that came with working to implement such programs. Lunn’s administration faced issues with Republicans, Democrats, and the Progressive party trying to block him from following through with such economic and social programs, as well as issues within the Socialist Party itself. Particularly, there were individuals and factions who considered Lunn to be not “socialist enough” in his practices. Famed writer Walter Lippmann for a short time served as part of Lunn’s cabinet, and his reason for leaving stems from that very critique. With Lunn’s politics being influenced more by the Social Gospel and reformism than any sort of scientific socialism, these specific critiques do hold water.

Buell does provide an astute recounting of Lunn’s involvement in the Little Falls Textile Strike of 1912-1913, with the Mayor serving as one of the primary catalysts in giving that struggle national attention, and bringing significant figures in labor history to New York’s Mohawk Valley as well as Schenectady, including Bill Haywood, Matilda Rabinowitz, Helen Schloss, Joseph Ettor, and more. Explaining how Lunn balanced his commitments as Mayor, his involvement in the strike, and his potential bid to run for Congress shows just how multifaceted Lunn was in his ability to juggle responsibilities. 

In that same vein, Buell covers Lunn’s struggles within and eventual leaving of the SPA after his second term as Mayor as well as his later career in a concise manner, though one could argue that it was too concise since he only spent three chapters including an epilogue covering Lunn’s career after this leaving the SPA. Given that this book is more specifically about Lunn’s first term as Mayor of Schenectady with some emphasis on his second, this is understandable. That being said, it would’ve been interesting and beneficial to see some more emphasis on Lunn’s third term as mayor and other political actions after leaving socialism.

Bill Buell’s book is informative and is generally well-written and digestible. Buell doesn’t dive very deeply into the major theoretical conflicts between Lunn and other members of the party. Besides a brief mention of Lincoln Steffen’s dissolution with the Soviet Union, there is no explicit political bias being pushed by this book, no upholding of the socialist boogeyman that so many would use a piece like this to demonize. However, there are some shortcomings. 

The first being that since this book is self-published, even with the aid of the Troy Book Makers, a handful of typos managed to slip through the cracks. Though unfortunate to see, these can be forgiven as such typos are few and far between throughout the entire 200+ page book. The biggest problem to be found though is the use of one particular source. Buell utilizes the book The Red Nurse: A Story of the Little Falls Textile Strike by Michael Cooney as a source when introducing Helen Schloss and her role in the strike. For one, this is a piece of historical fiction. There are true elements to the book’s story, but to use a dramatization of historical events as an academic source shouldn’t be acceptable. Additionally, according to others who have studied the strike and the life of Schloss such as playwright Angela Harris, there are various inaccuracies in The Red Nurse. One example being that in the novel, Cooney says that Schloss resigned from a position she held in Little Falls in a rather vitriolic manner, when all actual accounts show that she resigned in a cordial manner.

The story of George R. Lunn’s life and political career is not an unknown one given that there are a handful of academic articles and book chapters about the man and his career, as well as even having his own dedicated Wikipedia page. With that knowledge though, Buell’s piece serves as one of the only books dedicated to the life and times of the minister, the only other one that comes to mind being George Gardner’s The Schenectadians published in 2001. It’s not a perfect book given the aforementioned shortcomings, but George Lunn: The 1912 Socialist Victory in Schenectady is worth reading and analyzing for a look at the popularity of socialism at the time in addition to the benefits and shortcomings of municipal socialism. ​

Honoré de Balzac is renowned as a prolific literary genius and was one of Marx and Engels’ favourite authors. He was a pioneer of the Realist style that would be taken up by such famous authors as Émile Zola and Charles Dickens. In this article, Ben Curry explores Balzac’s Realist method, the predominant themes of his vast body of work, known collectively as The Human Comedy, and the fascinating paradox that lies at its heart.
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You’re deluding yourself, dear angel, if you imagine that it’s King Louis-Philippe that we’re ruled by, and he has no illusions himself on that score. He knows, as we all do, that above the Charter there stands the holy, venerable, solid, the adored, gracious, beautiful, noble, ever-young, almighty, Franc!

The period between the great revolutions of 1789 and 1848 was one of unprecedented upheaval in France. This was the epoch of the galloping advance of the French bourgeoisie. At its outset, this class formed part of the oppressed ‘Third Estate’ under the absolutist Bourbon regime; by its close, it was the undisputed ruling class and had begun to transform French society in its own image.

Contemporary with this era of storm and stress, at one and the same time its historian and the artist who best depicted its moving spirit, lived one of the giants of world literature, the father of the Realist novel, Honoré de Balzac.

Balzac, a favourite of Marx and Engels, was no revolutionary. Quite the contrary. And yet, Engels was able to say of his immense literary output:

There is the history of France from 1815 to 1848… And what boldness! What a revolutionary dialectic in his poetical justice!

A lifetime of furious nocturnal work, fuelled by immense quantities of coffee (it is estimated that he drank 500,000 cups in his lifetime!), sent Balzac to a tragically early grave at the age of just 50. In two decades of work, however, Balzac penned no fewer than 90 novels, novellas and short stories—60 of them full-length novels, and dozens of them masterpieces in their own right.

But Balzac’s novels, great as they are taken singly, cannot be fully appreciated other than in connection with each other. His tremendous opus, known collectively as The Human Comedy, represents a single, masterful panorama of French society from the fall of Napoleon until 1848: Paris and the provinces; soldiers, police spies and politicians; aristocrats and peasants; bankers, artists, journalists, bureaucrats, criminals and courtesans—all are expertly depicted with strokes that cut straight to the heart of their world.

More than a portrayal of French society, it portrays bourgeois society as it was and as it is: petty, grasping and brutal.

The Realist novel

Balzac was born in 1799, the same year that Napoleon overthrew the Directory, marking the closing chapter of the French Revolution that had aroused and dashed such immense illusions among the downtrodden masses of France.

One form of exploitation had been exchanged for another. In the words of Marx and Engels, “for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions,” the bourgeoisie “substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”

With the victory of the bourgeoisie, the authors of The Communist Manifesto explained how man was “at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” In the volumes of The Human Comedy, Balzac’s art acted like powerful smelling salts, assisting in sobering up this world whose illusions were crashing down around it, forcing it to look reality in the face.

Instead of a retreat into an idealised past in the Romantic style then all the rage in France, we find the present, with its sores and all, fully on display. Balzac’s method was wholly materialist. Under the banner of ‘Realism’, it represented a new departure in literature and the arts at large.

Stefan Zweig, in his essay on the genius of Balzac, gives a vivid description of his method:

The idea—which he christened ‘Lamarckism’, and which Taine was later to petrify into a formula—that every multiplicity reacts upon a unity with no less vigour than does a unity upon a multiplicity, that each individual is a product of climate, of the society in which he is reared, of customs, of chance, of all that fate has brought his way, that each individual absorbs the atmosphere by which he is surrounded as he grows to adulthood and in his turn radiates an atmosphere which others will absorb; this universal influence of the world within and the world without upon the formation of character, became an axiom with Balzac. Everything flows into everything else; all forces are mobile, and not one of them is free—such was his view.

Although Balzac explicitly rejected the label ‘materialist’, what is this but a clearly materialist method? And, what is more, it is an extremely dialectical method.

Balzac intended The Human Comedy to be a complete, living representation of all the “social species” that inhabit the world, not simply a dry accumulation of ‘facts’. No art can ever hope to chronicle every one of society’s details; nor does it need to. The real purpose of art is to reach beyond the accidental in order to grasp deeper, more essential truths. Balzac didn’t need to portray 30 million Frenchmen and women to give a portrait of France. It was enough to capture the essential types of the age. With his pen, the 2,000 or so characters of The Human Comedy sufficed for this task.

In The Human Comedy—perhaps counterintuitively for a work of Realism—we find men and women painted in bold, exaggerated colours, as Renaissance painters used the method of chiaroscuro, the bold opposition of dark and light, to highlight the drama in human expressions and motion. Balzac’s characters are frequently depicted as unusually singular in their passions. But they are all the more real for that fact: they form archetypes of their class and of their motivating passions.

Baron de Nucingen stands in as the archetype of the whole class of millionaire bankers; Grandet plays the same role for misers; Gobseck for usurers; Crevel for bourgeois parvenus; Madame Marneffe for the bourgeois courtesan; de Rastignac and de Rubempré for ambitious provincials; and Vautrin for the whole criminal underclass of Paris.

Just as the chemist breaks down for analysis the innumerable compound substances of nature into their purified constituent elements, so Balzac sought to “analyse into its component parts the elements of that compound mass which we call ‘the people’”.

Balzac’s ability, as he put it, “to rise to the level of others”, “to espouse their way of life”, “to feel their rags on his shoulders” was something unequalled:

I looked into their souls without failing to notice externals, or rather I grasped these external features so completely that I straightaway saw beyond them.

In the earliest novel in The Human Comedy, Les Chouans set in 1799, we meet the aristocratic leaders of the Chouannerie—a reactionary guerrilla rising in Brittany. In Les Chouans the Republican army is a disciplined fighting force, consisting of peasants who earnestly imagine their First Consul Napoleon to be the defender of the land they actually gained thanks to the Revolution. On the other hand the Chouan guerrillas, consisting of Breton peasants, are depicted as having joined the Royalist ranks merely to rob stagecoaches and the bodies of dead Republican soldiers—a practice solemnly sanctified at clandestine forest Masses by the Church.

As for their aristocratic leaders, we get their full measure when they confront their leader to greedily press their demands for titles, estates and archbishoprics as reward for their continued allegiance to the King.

In Lost Illusions and Père Goriot, we find the old nobility: petty, bigoted, two-faced and egotistical, restored once more in the saddle, thanks to the reactionary armies of Europe. But it was one thing for Louis XVIII to re-establish his Court and for the aristocracy to re-establish their salons in Paris, it was quite another to establish the old property relations on which the Ancien Régime once stood.

France had been changed irrevocably, and money formed the new axis around which it now turned. The rising bourgeoisie pressed against the old aristocracy in every sphere: in the theatre box, in politics, in the press. The faded nobles might scorn admitting the upstarts to their salons, but it was to the Stock Exchange that they entrusted their fortunes. It was to the bourgeois timber agents that they sold the wood felled from the forests of their manors, and it was to the bourgeois usurer that they turned to fund their marital infidelities.

In the provinces, where the nobility found itself on a slightly firmer footing, Balzac describes the most worthless rabble:

All the people who gathered there had the most pitiable mental qualities, the meanest intelligence, and were the sorriest specimens of humanity within a radius of fifty miles. Political discussions consisted of verbose but impassioned commonplaces: the Quotidienne was regarded as lukewarm in its royalism; Louis XVIII himself was considered to be a Jacobin. The women were mostly stupid, devoid of grace and badly dressed; every one of them was marred by some imperfection; everything fell short of the mark, conversation, clothes, mind and body alike… Nevertheless, comportment and class consciousness, gentlemanly airs, the arrogance of the lesser nobility, acquaintance with the rules of decorum, all served to cloak the void within them.

What is this if not a class that was doomed to extinction and deserving of its fate?
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Balzac’s beloved Catholic Church is depicted as little better. Like all the last bastions of the old order, it found itself besieged from all directions and forced to become bourgeois itself: “It stoops, in the house of God, to a disgraceful traffic in pew rents and chairs… although it cannot have forgotten Christ’s anger when he drove the moneychangers from the Temple.” In birth, marriage and death, we find the representatives of the Church, with their palm extended, collecting their fee at every stage.

Throughout The Human Comedy we can read fictitious accounts of the numerous, real tragedies of what family life in particular becomes under capitalism. We find fathers swindling sons; men wooing women for dowries; adulterous fathers ruining families to support mistresses; daughters placed on bread and water by rich and ‘thrifty’ miser-fathers; husbands aiding their wives’ infidelities for career advancement; children treated as chattel by parents.

As Marx and Engels put it,

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

Criminals and capitalists

Balzac’s critique touches in turn upon all aspects of bourgeois society, only a few of which can be mentioned here.

In Père Goriot, a retelling of Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear in the bourgeois age, the real hero of that story, if he can be called such, is Eugene de Rastignac, an impoverished provincial nobleman. A new arrival in Paris, he is drawn between two ways to make his fortune: the ‘honest’ method, of seducing one of Père Goriot’s daughters, made wealthy through marriage to the banker de Nucingen; or through a shortcut involving the shedding of blood, offered by the branded criminal Vautrin.

What is the difference? In the opinion of Vautrin, who counsels de Rastignac through his pangs of conscience, the difference is little more than moral and legal hypocrisy:

There’s not one article [of the law] that does not lead to absurdity. The smooth-tongued man in his smart yellow gloves has committed murders without bloodshed, but someone has been bled all the same; the actual murderer has jemmied open a door; two deeds of darkness!

The capitalist kills just as surely as the murderer, although without spilling a drop of blood himself. The words of condemnation thrown in the face of the whole of bourgeois society do not fail to hit their target on account of being placed in the mouth of a branded miscreant:

Are you any better than us? The brand we bear on our shoulders is not as shameful as what you have in your hearts, flabby members of a putrid society.

Ultimately, de Rastignac is forced to agree with Vautrin:

He saw the world as it is: laws and morality unavailing with the rich, wealth the ultima ratio mundi. ‘Vautrin is right, wealth is virtue,’ he said to himself.

[The] only men of whom he always speaks with undisguised admiration, are his bitterest political antagonists, the republican heroes of the Cloître Saint-Méry, the men, who at that time (1830-6) were indeed the representatives of the popular masses. That Balzac thus was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favourite nobles, and described them as people deserving no better fate; and that he saw the real men of the future where, for the time being, they alone were to be found—that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of Realism, and one of the grandest features in old Balzac.

In his day, the cause of the bourgeois republic as yet represented progress relative to the outworn, lingering relics of feudalism. In the years depicted in The Human Comedy, the class that would come to challenge bourgeois rule, the working class, remained as yet a largely unorganised mass; only just becoming conscious of its own interests; scattered throughout small and medium-sized workshops. It is undistinguished from the general mass of the urban poor in Balzac’s novels.

But with his piercing insight, Balzac saw that the ‘Kingdom of Reason’ that the revolutionary republicans aspired to was a chimera that could only end in the naked rule of the bourgeoisie. In this assessment he was correct, and was proven so in the revolution that broke out in 1848, the same year that Balzac put down his pen for the very last time.

This was also the year in which the working class of Paris rose up for the first time, arms in hand, under its own banner. Reciprocally, the bourgeoisie recoiled in fear from its revolutionary tasks, stooped down and allowed itself to be yoked by the adventurer Louis Bonaparte, and demonstrated all the decadence, cowardice and paltriness that Balzac had shone a piercing light on.

What is left when we leave aside the reactionary dreams contained in Balzac’s work is a withering critique of bourgeois society and its hypocritical morality. The Realist method that he pioneered would inspire other great writers, like Charles Dickens and Emile Zola, to take up the task of depicting the conditions of the industrial proletariat. And it would also exert a fructifying influence on the authors of The Communist Manifesto, whose pages first saw the light of day in 1848, just as Balzac’s great literary career was drawing to a close.

In The Communist Manifesto—much like in The Human Comedy—we see the unstoppable wheels of history in motion. For the backward-looking Balzac, it was a matter of deep regret that this onward motion destroyed his idealised old society, with its deference to the King, God and the Family. But Marx and Engels, on the contrary, looked ahead and saw how this same destructive power that Balzac depicted was also a tremendous creative power. It was laying the basis for a new, classless society, in which all the vices of class society that capitalism had brought to their apex would be done away with forever.

Since the explicit Israeli colonisation of historic Palestine in 1948 supported by colonialist and imperialist powers, namely Britain and the US, the Palestinian struggle has become a global cause. Resistance was a natural response to the invasions and incursions better known as “the ethnic cleansing of Palestine”.

Even before then, as the military occupation entrenched itself at the hands of pre-state Zionist militias and paramilitary units, massacres and forceful expulsion were committed, leading to the 1948 Nakba, the catastrophe, of the loss of the Palestinians’ homeland. The 1967 Naksa, or “set back”, followed with the defeat of Arab armies.

Displaced indigenous Palestinians were forced to live in refugee camps in makeshift tent cities in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, relying on food hand-outs provided by UNRWA.

At first they assumed that they would one day return to where they had been driven out by force. During the Nakba, some 500 towns and villages were wiped off the map as they were looted. Today, 70 years later, the displaced and dispossessed are still waiting for the implementation of that dream – “the right of return”.

Amid all the developments at the time, a sense of revolt began to emerge among Palestinians to defend their land.

“Fedaeyyeen” – the Arabic term for “freedom fighters” – began to assemble and carry out reprisal attacks against occupying Israeli forces. Some fighters infiltrated the security border fence from neighbouring Arab countries.

Horrendous massacres followed, most notably in 1953, 1955 and 1956, in which hundreds of Palestinians were killed at the command of Ariel Sharon, then a hawkish army general charged with uprooting the Fedaeyyeen and punishing the refugees for supporting them.

Revolutionary spirit in Egypt

Egypt, known then as “The United Arab Republic”, had administered the Gaza Strip between 1948 and 1967 and lost dozens of its soldiers, police and security officers, especially in south Gaza’s Khan Younis and Rafah towns during a triple-pronged offensive against Egyptian forces by Britain, France and Israel in 1956, following Nasser’s decision to nationalise the Suez Canal.

The spirit of revolution was running high in Egypt under leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, the godfather of pan-Arabism, who was known for his anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist stance. Nasser, who dominated Arab politics and the imagination of the Arab masses at the time, extended an invitation to none other than Ernesto Che Guevara, the Latin American revolutionary, to visit Cairo.

It’s not known if visiting Gaza was on Che’s agenda, or if it was Nasser’s idea. But the timing of the visit was of great importance for the Palestinian national movement which was comprised of Fedaeyyeen. The movement drew inspiration from guerrillas in Latin America, Vietnam and Algeria.

The ideology of the Palestinian Fedaeyyeen was mainly left-wing nationalist, socialist or communist, and their proclaimed purpose was to defeat Zionism and liberate Palestine through armed struggle to establish it as “a secular democratic state“.

The idea of liberation gained momentum as Palestinians had never achieved any form of real national independence in their homeland, and a few years later, in 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was formed and led by Ahmad Shukeiri. Yasser Arafat became the PLO’s chairman in 1969 until his death in 2004.

Che Guevara in Gaza

After accepting Nasser’s invitation, Guevara was sent to the region by Cuba’s Fidel Castro on a three-month tour of 14 countries. A one-day visit was dedicated to Gaza which was then under Egyptian rule. Guevara landed in Gaza wearing his dark military fatigues on 18 June 1959 after travelling about 450km from Cairo.

He received a hero’s welcome from the Egyptian de facto governor of Gaza, General-Lieutenant Ahmad Salim, as well as from Palestinian officials and heads of municipalities and many ordinary people.

During his short visit, he toured several Palestinian refugee camps including Al-Buraij camp, where he was welcomed with chants from the Cuban revolution. Cuba went on to welcome the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, making official contact with it in 1965.

One of Che’s goals for the visit was to support Arab and Palestinian national liberation and revolutionary movements against western imperialism and colonisation.

Zulfiqar Swirjo, an official affiliated to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine stated during a previous interview that his father was there during that historic visit that aimed to share Guevara’s beliefs and revolutionary ideas with Gaza’s fighters. They had wanted to put together a strategic plan for a popular struggle to fight the Israeli forces using guerrilla warfare tactics.

Gaza

The Gaza Strip is a small slice of the eastern coastline of the Mediterranean Sea in the southern part of historic Palestine, bordering Egypt to the south-west and Israel to the east and north. At 45km long and between 5 and 12km in width, it has a total area of just 365 square km – around the same size as the city of Bakersfield, California (pop. 380,000).

Today, two-thirds of Gaza’s two million inhabitants are refugees, ethnically cleansed from their original homes.

According to Palestinian researcher Salman Abu Sitta, after Guevara’s visit to Gaza, Cuba gave scholarships to Palestinian students, granted citizenship to stranded Palestinians and held many conferences in support of Palestine. And as Palestine has become a symbol of struggle against colonialism, it’s no surprise that India’s first prime minister and anti-British colonialist Jawaharlal Nehru also visited Gaza in 1960 and met with the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF), whose presence was to protect the old armistice line between Israel and Egypt.

The Argentinean revolutionary leader was summarily executed by Bolivian forces in October 1967, nearly four months after the “six-day war”, when Gaza was annexed from Egyptian control and came under total Israeli occupation.

Che became an icon of resistance, especially for leftist Palestinian resistance movements such as The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Palestinian People’s Party.

His legacy endures and, for many Palestinian activists, he remains a source of inspiration, as a popular icon of rebellion against imperialism, colonialism and military occupation.

On what basis do we call the Civil Rights Movement a revolution? And will there be one to follow?

The year is 2024. America is today engulfed in its greatest political crisis perhaps since the Civil War. The blatant hypocrisy and contempt shown by our elites, decades of deindustrialization, neglect, and downward economic mobility, cities and towns overrun by deaths of despair, and America’s most recent proxy wars in Gaza and Ukraine have, in unprecedented fashion, driven Americans away from the current political establishment and toward the memory of that last great movement led by Martin Luther King and a sea of people who called themselves freedom fighters.

This was the Third American Revolution, and we are its children. It rests in our hands to determine whether there will be a Fourth.

To speak, then, of this history is not to regress into some dead past—it is to enter into battle for our present and future. Now is the time to face our inheritance.

Prologue: The Revolutionary

Diane Nash was 21 years old when she, along with a small number of other students from various Black colleges in Nashville, began attending James Lawson’s workshops on nonviolence in 1959.

Raised in Chicago, Nash had not encountered the full harshness and humiliating irrationality of segregation until she came to the South; Lawson’s workshops, inspired by his studies in India, were the “only game in town” where anyone talked about ending segregation. Over the course of many months, the group met, discussed, and debated—oftentimes for hours—over a series of formidable questions: was nonviolence a viable philosophy and method? Could nonviolent change ever take place in the hyper-violent American South? What would it take to desegregate Nashville? Who and what were the social forces, individuals, and institutions that mattered in the city, and how did they think and behave? Where should the effort to desegregate Nashville begin, and why? And finally: could each student accept the possibility of his or her death at the hands of an enraged white mob?

Aimed at desegregating lunch counters and other public facilities, the Nashville Sit-Ins of 1960 were the product of these months of exhaustive investigation, deliberation, and planning. It was one of the nation’s earliest, most audacious nonviolent direct action campaigns, and a microcosm for how the Civil Rights Movement created new human beings and new human relations: a condition for the rebirth of America as a nation and as a civilization in potentiality. Initially shy and timid, Nash grew to become the unquestioned leader among this cadre of students and a respected, battle-tested revolutionary in the Civil Rights Movement.
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What produced a Diane Nash? To answer this question, we must rewrite our entire understanding of American history and of the very question of revolution.

An American Canon

For the current generation of activists, leftists, and young people, it does not normally occur to us to think of the Civil Rights Movement as a revolution, nor of America having a revolutionary tradition beyond perhaps 1776. Our chronology of modern revolutionary history usually begins in 1917; our ideological references are Marx and Lenin. There is a great irony in this: Martin Luther King and the Black Freedom Movement are more foreign to us than the Russian Revolution. We cannot comprehend a revolution that used Nonviolence and Love as its theoretical framework, just as seriously as the Bolsheviks used Marxism.

So we dismiss the Civil Rights Movement as a bourgeois reform effort or quaint morality play; we cast figures like King as naive, or “problematic,” or insufficiently radical because they do not fit some imagined criteria of what it means to be a revolutionary. It is this assumption, this blind spot, which is our worst enemy; by it, we cripple our revolutionary potential, place ourselves in opposition to our own people, and give aid and comfort to the ruling class. We assemble fantasies of revolution and miss the glaring truth: revolutions are made by human beings. Any attempt at constructing a revolutionary vision in the United States must ultimately be anchored by the human qualities—and devoted to awakening the human capacity—of the people who make up this nation.

Defining the Third American Revolution as such requires a rethinking of revolutionary chronology and science. This does not mean discarding the experience of the Russian Revolution. But recognizing a Third American Revolution means locating a different point of origin for ourselves within the revolutionary history of the United States. More concretely, it means starting with the Second American Revolution: the Civil War and Reconstruction, the epic battle to bring down the slave system. Given far less credence than the First, it addressed the central contradiction emanating from 1776—slavery—thereby bringing new life to the American democratic experiment and yielding far greater impact in the grand scheme of history.

From the furnace of this Second American Revolution, three prophets were born whose words and deeds serve as the North Star of this nation’s revolutionary tradition: W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., and James Baldwin. Put together, their work forms an organic whole, a basic paradigm for American revolutionary thought. Du Bois, the greatest scholar of the 20th century, furnished the Black Freedom Movement with a method for understanding and intervening in the course of human action; King, the principal leader of the Third American Revolution, and Baldwin, who bore prophetic witness for this Revolution, both operated within the framework of Du Boisian science. It was no coincidence that King turned to Du Bois’s writing at the height of the Movement to make sense of the present revolution that was unfolding in America.

Du Bois’s monumental Black Reconstruction in America identified the enslaved Africans in America as workers—a figure of modernity. He then argued that the central category of the American revolutionary process was the Black Worker. This was, first, a recognition of the central fact that the rise of capitalism in the U.S. and Western world depended on the Transatlantic Slave Trade and chattel slavery—an oppression of an ancient form that yet produced a new world system never before seen in human history. Thus the freeing of four million slaves, the toppling of the planter class, and the reconstruction of a new state in the American South all constituted a “revolution on a mighty scale and with world-wide reverberation”—one which helped make possible the October Revolution of 1917.

Du Bois further saw that the condition of enslavement, disenfranchisement, and segregation produced, in the United States, a distinct social group with a highly unusual consciousness. Locked out of the pale of humanity by a white civilization, the enslaved were forced to grapple with and construct their own sense of humanity. Locked out of economic opportunities afforded to most immigrants, many slaves upon achieving freedom aspired to become not autonomous, self-made individuals but rather freedom fighters for their people still in bondage. They wanted freedom; they wanted education; they wanted an end to the plantation system; they wanted land to till; they wanted to work, but to be free workers; they wanted dignity.

The proletariat, as formulated by Marx and Engels, refers not merely to an economic relation; the proletariat is a category of consciousness and social organization. Black folk were compelled, by necessity, to develop tightly knit social institutions to ensure group survival. Foremost among them was the Black church: a sanctuary for communion with the divine, a gathering place for social life, a vessel for historical memory, a training ground for organic leadership, a site of ideological struggle, and a vehicle for freedom and protest. It was here that a new kind of proletariat emerged through the dialectic of history. The Black proletariat defied the ideology of a white supremacist Christianity and inscribed their own struggle for freedom onto the Biblical narrative. Where the European working class saw itself in the propertyless proletariat of antiquity, Black folk saw themselves in the Exodus story of Moses and the Israelites fleeing Egypt, or in the early Christians, forced underground by the Roman Empire.

It was the Black proletariat’s unique consciousness of social reality that decided the fate of the Civil War. The arrival of the Union army to the South meant, for the slaves, the fulfillment of divine prophecy. “To four million black folk emancipated by civil war,” Du Bois wrote, “God was real”—and His visage was Freedom. This sense of prophecy, this ability to see themselves as central actors in the dramatic unfolding of history, gave tens of thousands of slaves the courage to abandon the plantation, risking death, and join the Union forces. The withdrawal of their labor crippled the Confederacy and swung the war toward the Union, setting the stage for Reconstruction, the greatest experiment in a radical worker’s democracy the world had yet seen, as the masses of Black folk threw themselves into the difficult task of rebuilding a land ravaged by war. The subsequent counter-revolution against this experiment, enacted by a new alliance between rising industrial capital and white labor, decimated Black folk and set them to wander for a generation in the wilderness of America.

For his study of this period, Du Bois used Marx but was not bound to classical Marxist standards. He did not ask the dogmatic question, Was Reconstruction a revolution or not? Instead he asked, What kind of revolution was this? What was the logic of its development? What does it reveal about America’s historical trajectory and revolutionary, democratic possibility? Above all, what did it mean to those four million Black slaves who, on a fateful night, made the leap toward freedom and thrust themselves onto the stage of world history?

Here is where our understanding of the Third American Revolution must begin. It was part and parcel of world revolutionary processes in the 20th century; King, Lenin, Mao, and Gandhi alike ventured to resolve the same questions of democratic rule that had been raised by the modern epoch. And yet, the Black Freedom Movement of the 1950s-70s was a revolution of a different type—one whose full magnitude, quality, and depth have yet to be fully realized. It was distinct from other revolutions that were guided by Marx and Lenin; it laid a blueprint for future democratic revolutions seeking to address the contradictions of advanced capitalist societies. It is a vast goldmine beneath the feet of the American citizenry, waiting to be unearthed and used in the fire of a new struggle.

The Black Freedom Movement: Making Time Real

To the outside observer, it seems strange that a new revolutionary movement should have begun in the U.S. in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama. Conventional thought would tend to see greater revolutionary possibility in a period of intense economic crisis such as the 1930s, compared to a period of relative domestic economic prosperity like the 1950s.

Flushed with victory and unscathed by the Second World War, America faced the latter half of the 20th century as an industrial superpower on the ascendancy. Internal dissent seemed to have been solved by McCarthyism. To the extent that America’s elites thought about the “Negro problem,” they assumed they could allow the worst excesses of segregation to gradually dissipate over time, without fundamentally changing the economic, political, or social structure of the country.

The U.S. ruling class, seeing itself in nearly godlike terms as America subdued its mother Europe and much of the world to preserve the remnants of Western imperialism, believed it held the reins of history. It could not imagine a movement rising from the lowliest, most forsaken backwaters of the South to directly challenge its own authority.

To the children and grandchildren of the former slaves, however, the outpouring of the nonviolent movement in Montgomery and soon a hundred other cities made all the sense in the world. What Black folk saw in the immediate postwar period was a world freedom movement flooding across humanity, as the system of colonial imperialism came under crisis. From Alabama to New York, from Tennessee to Florida, from Mississippi to Pennsylvania, over kitchen tables, among church pews, and in shaded street corners, news of the anti-colonial struggles of Africa and Asia spilled into the vision, hearing, speech, thoughts, and hearts of Black people.

The remarkable victories of poorer, darker peoples over once-invincible Western empires forced Black folk in America to reflect on their own lack of freedom—in a nation that proclaimed its own “freedom” as a model for the world, no less. It was doubly fateful that the Black proletariat saw the 100th anniversary of Emancipation approaching; for it was the defeat of Reconstruction which had, as Du Bois explained, laid the foundation for the ascendance of U.S. and European imperialism at the sunset of the 19th century.
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From the nation’s halls of power, the Black proletariat heard the constant refrain: “Wait.” Yet from the turning of a world far vaster, the Black proletariat felt the thunderous cry: “Move.” So they moved. And through their movement, hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of ordinary working people commandeered the pace and direction of social-historical time in the United States. Martin Luther King wrote of this phenomenon in Why We Can’t Wait:

Nonviolence and the Revolutionary Imperative

The advent of nonviolence was the spark that made this breakthrough possible. Nonviolence has been so distorted in the pages of our history that it is necessary to completely abandon our prevailing notions of it and return to the source for a more useful interpretation of its meaning. First formulated by Mahatma Gandhi in the struggle against British imperialism and further developed by the Civil Rights Movement in America, nonviolence was not only a method of protest against injustice: nonviolence was a social process.

We must remember that the Color Line constituted a basic condition of American social life. If capitalism socializes various functions and contradictions of human relations, then the Color Line embodied the most explicitly social problem for the American working class to face. In other words, racism presented a clear contradiction that the people themselves had to resolve.

America’s white supremacist social system was designed to beat Black people down, to rob them of their dignity, to destroy their families and social ties, to keep them anxious in terror of the white mob, to undermine their consciousness of themselves, and to trap them perpetually within the lowest, most exploitative level of labor. For generations, the scourge of this system had worked day and night to break Black people’s will to struggle for a better future.

On the other hand, it took thinkers like Du Bois and Baldwin to show just how much white supremacy also degraded and debased the ordinary white American. It rendered him utterly dependent upon a ruling class to give him his aspirations and sense of reality. It robbed him of his democratic instinct—of his ability to think for himself. It trapped him, helplessly, within a false identity: an identity held captive by a lie about the inferior humanity of another.

The innovation of nonviolence for the American situation did two things from the start: it transformed the Black proletariat once more into a fighting people, and it shattered the false system of reality that imprisoned the white American. On this basis, the Third American Revolution set about forging a new social contract and democratic consciousness among the American people—in essence, began a process for the birth of a new American people.

Nonviolence drew from the example set by the slaves during their exodus from the plantations in the heat of the Civil War—what Du Bois called the General Strike. Further synthesizing this Black tradition of mass noncooperation with Gandhi’s satyagraha, King and the Civil Rights Movement developed nonviolence into a powerful, highly disciplined method of political activity and social change.
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Seldom recognized for his philosophical and political genius, King became the leader of the Movement because he knew his people and he knew America. He sensed the precise moment when Black people were “ready for mass action, ready for its risks, and ready for its responsibilities.” He was an earthquake in the landscape of American religious and political orthodoxy, harnessing the Black church and prophetic tradition to their fullest power. He broke the McCarthyite consensus that had frozen the nation into ideological sterility. Through his words and by his willingness to suffer, he challenged Black and white people alike in a way that no figure ever had or has since.

Like water in the desert, or light roaring down from heaven, nonviolence forged a path to democratizing America that has not yet been fully realized. This was the dialectic of the Movement: it forced American bourgeois democracy to fulfill its long-forsaken promise of legal equality and enfranchisement to Black folk, while at the same time conceiving a new type of democracy directly in the battles and campaigns waged across the South and North.

The Civil Rights Movement comprised manifold phenomena at once. It was an odyssey of human discovery, sending waves of pioneers out among the most destitute, fearsome territories of the Jim Crow South to win over the people to a new vision of the future. It enlisted young and old, poor and professional, industrial and domestic worker, man and woman, southerner and northerner, believer and non-believer, Black and white into an army of equals—and instilled in them the confidence that they could decide the future of the country. It yielded a vast labor movement that in the end organized tens of thousands of unorganized Black workers in the South. It created a channel for Black and white people to relate to one another with unflinching openness and uncommon honesty—seeking to fulfill Du Bois’s vision of a “creative relationship” between white and Black workers. It produced a generation of leaders, artists, and intellectuals who were tested on the threshing floor of mass struggle. It compelled millions of white Americans to grapple, for the first time, with their own passivity and political immaturity, their own mediocre aspirations and moral standards. And drawing the beast of segregation out into the open for all humanity to see, it directly confronted the U.S. state at the local, state, federal, and international level, paralyzed the state’s normal functions, and bent it to the point of breaking.

On the eve of the October Revolution, Lenin looked to the Soviet councils created by Russian workers and saw the seeds of a new democratic state that could supplant the crumbling Tsarist regime. In the whirlwind of the Third American Revolution, King saw the new human beings and social relations being created through nonviolent action and understood that therein lay the possibilities for a new people’s democracy in the United States. His name for it was the Beloved Community. Baldwin translated this vision into a task: “achieving our country.”

The Human Heart: Where Civilization Begins

Before embarking on their Sit-In campaign, the Nashville students trained relentlessly with each other to endure physical and verbal abuse—to kill the natural instinct within themselves to flee or fight back, and reach a new plane of human ability that stood unmoved by the gales of hatred, fear, indifference, intimidation, violence, and death. Their eventual collision with these forces took place, simultaneously, in dramatic confrontations in the public square and in the private reaches of the human soul.

It was in this same vein that Baldwin wrote of King’s presence in Montgomery: “Martin Luther King, Jr., by the power of his person­ality and the force of his beliefs, has injected a new dimension into our ferocious struggle. He has succeeded, in a way no Negro before him has managed to do, to carry the battle into the individual heart and make its resolution the province of the individual will.” This battle of the human heart erupted in every single encounter between the apostles for freedom and their countrymen. Here, in so little as a brief moment of eye contact, the former could level a challenge to the latter: I am not who you think I am. Who, then, are you going to be?

The Civil Rights Movement was the first true mass phenomenon to be experienced by the whole nation through the new technology of television. Raw footage of children being battered by fire hoses, mauled by police dogs, paraded to jail, and beaten by mobs filled the living rooms of tens of millions of American households. The country’s white majority was forced to recognize, first, that the Negro was not happy in his designated place as Southern authorities had proclaimed; and second, that all Americans were implicated in the moral storm that the Movement had brought to the surface of the nation’s conscience.

The question of morality has long been distorted by liberals and dismissed by radicals. Yet in the eyes of King, Lawson, Nash, Baldwin, and many others in the Movement, morality was conceived as an essential task of democracy and civilization. The “moral choice,” as Baldwin framed it, meant that all Americans must confront themselves as products and agents of a complex, still-unfolding history; and, on those terms, face the question of whether they could take responsibility for their own lives and the life of their country—or, surrender their sovereignty to the hands of the butchers, liars, and fools who ruled the nation. When King called for a “revolution of values” at the height of the war in Vietnam, he was therefore calling upon the American people to assert that the basic tenets of civilization belonged to them, and not the ruling elite. Du Bois, King, and Baldwin all envisioned an America that could break free from the confines of a dying Western civilization—to become, simultaneously, truly American and a synthesis of the world’s civilizations, especially the rising Afro-Asiatic axis of world humanity.
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If civilization in America was to be reborn, then that future took root in the heart of one like Diane Nash, who was prepared to die for freedom. She and all the Movement’s young people, Black and white, who rushed toward the crucible of danger to wage the Sit-Ins, the Freedom Rides, the Children’s Crusade, and the Freedom Summer Project, forged a fierce bond among each other—and achieved a personal, moral authority through their sacrifice—that set a new standard for the rest of the nation to emulate.

​From Montgomery to Nashville to Birmingham, the soldiers of the nonviolent army unleashed a new human possibility in the estranged landscape of modern American society. They called it love—“the sword that heals.”

The War That Came

​It is commonly said that King became “more radical” in his later years. This is a fundamental misreading: the Civil Rights Movement and its strongest adherents were revolutionary from the beginning. Revolutions do not happen overnight, but rather proceed in stages; even a sudden lightning strike of revolutionary action is the result of deeper processes of change, tension, and protracted struggle.

With each victory and mark of progress, the Third American Revolution faced new questions, challenges, and contradictions. The success of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was marred by the escalation of the U.S. war in Vietnam. Even as the government tried desperately to offset the cost of the war, King saw the Vietnam War as a sign of a hardening contradiction between the U.S. state’s ability to fulfill its social contract to the American people, versus its need to sustain world imperialism through perpetual wars and military expansion abroad.

The next stage of the Movement naturally reached for a broader, deeper coalition—a Poor People’s Campaign—to attack the “triple evils” of racism, poverty, and war. Where the Movement had earlier sought to negotiate with the state to gain equal rights, the question of war placed the Movement into more direct opposition to the state and monopoly power. America’s ignominious defeat in Vietnam spoke to the success of the Vietnamese liberation forces as much as it did to the demoralization and opposition of soldiers, young whites, and Black folk who listened to King and Muhammad Ali more than they did Lyndon B. Johnson or Richard Nixon. By 1967, when King named the U.S. government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” he understood that he was marked for death.

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. was the beginning of a concerted, merciless campaign to overturn the Third American Revolution as it was reaching a higher stage of development. This counter-revolution wrought more chaos and destruction than we know: it left in its wake not only the smoldering cities that erupted in anger and pain immediately after King’s death, but also the ruins of the deindustrialized, impoverished, war-like heartlands and urban metropolises that we live in today, as the nation continued to gorge itself on new wars that paved the way for the hollowing out of domestic industry as cheaper labor was secured abroad.

With King’s death, the ruling class decapitated the Movement and sowed confusion in its ranks. The Black Power generation that followed, though not lacking in revolutionary zeal, largely accepted the false narrative that King had been a moderate and that nonviolence had failed. They tried to reinvent revolution by turning their backs on the revolutionary era that had produced them. Meanwhile, many of the Movement’s original freedom fighters who resumed their lives in “normal society” suffered from long standing psychological wounds akin to veterans returning home from war. Only a few—among them, Coretta Scott King, James Lawson, Diane Nash, and James Baldwin—carried the torch for peace and King’s unfinished legacy. And the nation’s white “silent majority,” having already grown cold to King at the exact moment he issued a call to break silence on America’s path of destruction, did not realize what they, too, had lost in losing King.

The ruling elite again tried to reassert control over time by making King’s memory and martyrdom obsolete. In later decades, they found it safe enough to appropriate nonviolence itself: removing its revolutionary, democratic, emancipatory essence, and turning nonviolence into an empty form of protest that could be made to serve whatever agenda the state wanted. Drunk on its apparent victories, America at the close of the 20th century found itself secure as the so-called leader of the free world. Yet for the people, it was another long night of desolation and wandering.

To Awaken the People

We have been born into this period of counter-revolution. The political confusion and susceptibility of today’s younger and middle-aged generations are a reflection of that fact. We are scarcely aware of whence we came. It is not our fault that we have become so lost—but it is our responsibility to find our way forward.

America is a contradiction: it is a globe-spanning empire that is dragging humankind to the brink of annihilation; yet it is this same nation that produced King, Baldwin, and Du Bois, and which still contains the seed of the Beloved Community. It is a society still blinded by delusions about its own freedom and apparent diversity, yet it is also an indescribably more vast, complex, and beautiful place because of the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. The Third American Revolution was forestalled and undermined—but it was not a failure. Americans are less racist than they were in 1955. They are more broadly suspicious of the ruling class than ever before. They have grown exhausted and disgusted with unending wars. These are the marks of the Third American Revolution upon the body politic of the country. Untold effort has been expended to reverse these advancements of the people’s consciousness.

What is going to be our relationship to this history? What is going to be our role in this nation’s future? Such questions hang in the air all over America and are perceived, however dimly at first, by a generation that is just now having to grapple with real, inescapable political and moral questions as we face the horror of a genocide in Gaza being committed in our name, and the collapse of America’s paper-thin prestige on the world stage.

The crisis of American society is a crisis of legitimacy: the people do not trust the nation’s governing institutions, making it impossible for the ruling elite to rule in their accustomed ways. A crisis is an opening. When everything is in flux, new coalitions and new ways of doing politics become possible, and the actions of ordinary people take on greater weight in deciding how the crisis will be resolved and in which direction history will move.

Such a time calls for a re-examination of the Third American Revolution and a revival of nonviolence in its fullest, most creative sense. Such a time calls for a Fourth American Revolution.

The broad mass of Americans are daily pushed toward anti-social impulses, toward isolation and distrust of one another. We are told that it is not our place to question the reality presented to us, but we question it anyway—making every person feel that he or she is slowly going insane as the world burns.

The science of nonviolence can be developed in a multitude of new forms to help the American people find each other again; to openly confront the obscenities of our senile, inhuman elites; to create new spaces where the people can come together—unbothered by official institutions—to work out their common problems and grapple with their common future. Peace and war, poverty, violence, moral values, education: all these and more are questions that must be made democratic, that must be returned to the province of the people’s will. We are only at the tip of the iceberg of what can be conceived in this peculiar drama called the American experiment.

Can it be done? Can our people find it within themselves to achieve King’s vision, or are we all doomed to go down with our war-crazed ruling elite? We do not know—the shape of the future is sharp and uncertain.

But what will happen if we do nothing? What do we reveal about ourselves when we say that hundreds of millions of people in this country—and all the children to be born—are beyond saving? What does humanity demand of us, if not the complete transformation of America from an empire to a new nation that “studies war no more”?

Our Common InheritanceThe Third American Revolution is the birthright of every single American, whether we came here 20 years ago or have lived here for 200 years. Diane Nash put it plainly:

It is worth repeating: the young formed the beating heart of the Third American Revolution. Martin Luther King was only 25 when he was called to serve as pastor of Dexter Avenue Church in Montgomery. And James Baldwin knew better than anyone that the young are uniquely capable of battling for a revolutionary vision and purpose because they feel, instinctively, that in doing so they are also fighting for their very lives.

They were the children of sharecroppers, ministers, maids, doctors, and dock workers. They were prepared to pay their dues to the generations who came before them, who fought—in darkness, and against all odds—to bring them to where they stood: facing the future.

We must prepare to do the same.

I am happy to see that more and more people are giving attention to the actual radical history of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the bastardization of his radicalism by the establishment in its attempt to neuter his lessons in radical activism. That being said, on what would be today his 95th birthday, it is clear the transformative visions he had for the country’s political, religious, social, and economic life are far from realized. As the genocide against Gaza enters its 101st day I think it is important we once again examine this American radicals legacy and how the actions of the United States, Israel, and seemingly the entire Western “civilized” world are completely contradictory to the values he lived by and the values our so called civilized societies claim to adopt.

Beyond Vietnam

April 4, 1967, exactly one year from when he would be assassinated, MLK spoke at Riverside Church in New York. This speech, titled “Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence”, was in opposition to the Vietnam war and how the genocidal killings abroad in Vietnam were apart of the struggle at home that Dr. King had been fighting against all of his life. It is a speech that the doctored version of MLK’s legacy often leaves out for it is filled with narratives that the established order wishes to bury. For instance, here is just one quote from the speech that shows MLK reflecting on the horrors of American foreign policy, horrors that may sound familiar to what we are seeing today.

“Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than eight hundred, or rather, eight thousand miles away from its shores.” — Martin Luther King Jr.
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King vehemently spoke out against the atrocities committed by the U.S in Vietnam. The actions of the U.S in Vietnam echo its actions in foreign policy today, including in its relationship with Israel and its collaboration in the genocide against the Palestinian people.

On Trial for Genocide

After nearly 100 days of gross violence against the civilian population of Gaza, one country finally has had enough and has taken to international law for some attempt at holding the murderers accountable. South Africa has taken a case to the ICJ (International Court of Justice) accusing Israel of genocide against the Palestinian people. Their case, to anyone with eyes and ears, recounts the enumerable war crimes committed by Israel against Gaza which include: Planned starvation, destruction of water sanitation plants, shutting down internet and power, displacing over 2 million people inside of an open air concentration camp, bombing everything from hospitals to bakeries, the list is exhaustive and never ending.

Will this case amount to much? Not likely, even given the overwhelming evidence. No, like Dr. King astutely pointed out, America will lie about the overtures of peace from those who are sane. It will bribe the ICJ to rule against the possibility of genocide, or perhaps ignore any ruling altogether. It is still admirable that South Africa has gone to the international courts of law and asserted their humanity. South Africa not along ago was a nation mired by the scourge that is apartheid. That is why those who remember are making sure others will remember this genocide with stark clarity.

​​Yemen’s Show of Solidarity

​Much noise has been made lately by the Yemeni rebel group the Houthis and their capturing of commercial ships in the Red Sea. The Houthis are the de facto ruling entity of Yemen since Saudi Arabia’s equally genocidal campaign began in 2014, a war that is funded and enabled by the United States as well. Yemenis are facing one of the greatest humanitarian crises in the world imposed on it by the U.S and its allies. Despite this the Yemenis are the ones capturing ships in solidarity with Gaza. The Houthis have explicitly said that this is their reasoning. That they will capture and disrupt ships in solidarity with the Palestinian people until the genocidal assault against Gaza has ended. Yemen, facing its own existential threats, has made a show of solidarity when no other country has. Yemen, like South Africa, understands what it means to face genocidal threats and what it means to stand against them.

​U.S.A

The U.S has acted as though its hands are tied with regards to Israel’s latest murderous campaign against Palestinians. Even though Israel could not functionally survive without U.S financial and military support, the U.S State Department acts as though Israel is its own entity. This veneer of incapability is dropped quickly with the latest strikes against the Houthi rebels in the Red Sea. To stop Israel’s genocide against Gaza is out of our power, but thwarting the capture of commercial shipping vessels is well within our reach. It is disgusting. 10,000 + children have been murdered. 25,000+ civilians. A whole percent of the population of Gaza has been obliterated. The U.S makes a parade of MLK in the culture. Unbeknownst to most, his true legacy as a radical is covered up. He is made a puppet of imperial interest. A black face for empire. Those who see clear see his legacy in speeches like “Beyond Vietnam”. They see the acts of South Africa and the Houthis as extensions of his philosophy outlined in these speeches. They see the acts of the United States remain in an evil stagnant way, as the words used by King to describe the crimes in Vietnam ring so true to the crimes we see perpetrated against Palestinians today.

​I’ve Been to the Mountaintop

On April 3, 1968 whilst on a campaign to organize black sanitation workers outside Memphis, Tennessee, MLK made a speech at Mason Temple that is now titled “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” Aptly titled, this would be MLK’s final speech as he was shot the following day. MLK speaks with a tone fraught with danger reminiscent of corrido star Chalino Sanchez reading his death note before performing a final rendition of his “Alma Enamorada”. Hours before his plane had been subject to a bomb threat. Undeterred, MLK made it a point to show that he was not fearful, that he had “been to the mountaintop.” I’d like to end with a quote from this speech to remind us all what it means to stand for the downtrodden and oppressed. Sometimes this fight will cost us everything. That is the price of bearing witness and seeking justice.
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“And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land” — Martin Luther King Jr.

VLADIMIR ILYICH ULANOV (1870-1924) was known by his pseudonym — Lenin. He was, like his siblings, a revolutionary, which in the context of tsarist Russia meant that he spent long years in prison and in exile. Lenin helped build the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party both by his intellectual and his organisational work.

Lenin’s writings are not only his own words, but the summation of the activity and thoughts of the thousands of militants whose path crossed his own. It was Lenin’s remarkable ability to develop the experiences of the militants into the theoretical realm that shaped what we call Leninism. It is no wonder that the Hungarian Marxist Gyorgy Lukacs called Lenin “the only theoretician equal to Marx yet produced by the struggle for the liberation of the proletariat.”

Building a Revolution

In 1896, when spontaneous strikes broke out in the St Petersburg factories, the socialist revolutionaries were caught unawares. They were disoriented. Five years later, Lenin wrote, the “revolutionaries lagged behind this upsurge, both in their ‘theories’ and in their activity; they failed to establish a constant and continuous organisation capable of leading the whole movement.” Lenin felt that this lag had to be rectified.

Most of Lenin’s major writings followed this insight. Lenin worked out the contradictions of capitalism in Russia (Development of Capitalism in Russia, 1896), which allowed him to understand how the peasantry in the sprawling tsarist empire had a proletarian character. It was based on this that Lenin argued for the worker-peasant alliance against tsarism and the capitalists.

Lenin understood from his engagement with mass struggle and with his theoretical reading that the social democrats — as the most liberal section of the bourgeoisie and the aristocrats — were not capable of driving a bourgeois revolution let alone the movement that would lead to the emancipation of the peasantry and the workers. This work was done in Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (1905). Two Tactics is perhaps the first major Marxist treatise that demonstrates the necessity for a socialist revolution, even in a “backward” country, where the workers and the peasants would need to ally to break the institutions of bondage.

These two texts show Lenin avoiding the view that the Russian Revolution could leapfrog capitalist development (as the populists — narodniki — suggested) or that it had to go through capitalism (as the liberal democrats argued). Neither path was possible nor necessary. Capitalism had already entered Russia — a fact that the populists did not acknowledge — and it could be overcome by a worker and peasant revolution — a fact that the liberal democrats disputed. The 1917 Revolution and the Soviet experiment proved Lenin’s point.

Having established that the liberal elites within tsarist Russia would not be able to lead a worker and peasant revolution, or even a bourgeois revolution, Lenin turned his attention to the international situation. Sitting in exile in Switzerland, Lenin watched as the social democrats capitulated to the warmongering in 1914 and delivered the working-class to the world war.

Frustrated by the betrayal of the social democrats, Lenin wrote an important text — Imperialism — which developed a clear-headed understanding of the growth of finance capital and monopoly firms as well as inter-capitalist and inter-imperialist conflict. It was in this text that Lenin explored the limitations of the socialist movements in the West — with the labour aristocracy providing a barrier to socialist militancy — and the potential for revolution in the East — where the “weakest link” in the imperialist chain might be found.

Lenin’s notebooks show that he read 148 books and 213 articles in English, French, German, and Russian to clarify his thinking on contemporary imperialism. Clear-headed assessment of imperialism of this type ensured that Lenin developed a strong position on the rights of nations to self-determination, whether these nations were within the tsarist empire or indeed any other European empire. The kernel of the anti-colonialism of the USSR — developed in the Communist International (Comintern) — is found here.

The term “imperialism,” so central to Lenin’s expansion of the Marxist tradition, refers to the uneven development of capitalism on a global scale and the use of force to maintain that unevenness. Certain parts of the planet — mostly those that had a previous history of colonisation — remain in a position of subordination, with their ability to craft an independent, national development agenda constrained by the tentacles of foreign political, economic, social and cultural power.

In our time, new theories have emerged that suggest that the new conditions no longer can be understood by the Leninist theory of imperialism. Some people on the left reject the idea of the neocolonial structure of the world economy, with the imperialist bloc — led by the United States — using its every source of power to maintain this structure. Others, even on the left, argue that the world is now flat and that there is no longer a global North that oppresses a global South, and that the elites of both zones are part of an international bourgeoisie. Neither of these objections stand when confronted with both the increasing levels of violence perpetuated by the imperialist bloc and by the increasing levels of relative inequality between North and South (despite the growth of capitalist elites in the South).

Elements of Lenin’s Imperialism are, of course, dated — it was written 100 years ago — and would require careful reworking. But the essence of the theory is valid — the insistence on the tendency of capitalist firms to become monopolies, the ruthlessness with which finance capital drains the wealth of the global South, and the use of force to contain the ambitions of countries of the South to chart their own development agenda.

One of Lenin’s most vital interventions, which appealed to those in the colonies, was the idea that imperialism would never develop the colony, and that only the socialist forces in collaboration with the national liberation sections would be capable of both fighting for national independence and then advancing their countries to socialism. Lenin’s fierce anti-colonial determination drew his ideas to those in the colonised world, which is why they rallied so enthusiastically to the Comintern after 1919.

Ho Chi Minh read the Comintern’s thesis on national and colonial issues and wept. It was a “miraculous guide” for the struggle of the people of Indochina, he felt. “From the experience of the Russian Revolution,” Ho Chi Minh wrote, “we should have to people — both the working-class and the peasants — at the root of our struggle. We need a strong party, a strong will, with sacrifice and unanimity at our centre.” “Like the brilliant sun,” Ho Chi Minh wrote, “the October Revolution shone over all five continents, awakening millions of oppressed and exploited people around the world. There has never existed such a revolution of such significance and scale in the history of humanity.”

Finally, Lenin spent the period from 1893 to 1917 studying the limitations of the party of the old type — the social democratic party. Lenin’s text — Our Programme — makes the point that the party must be involved in continuous activity and not rely upon spontaneous or initial [stikhiinyi] outbreaks. This continuous activity would bring the party into intimate and organic touch with the working-class and the peasantry as well as help to germinate the protests that then might take on a mass character. It was this consideration that led Lenin to work out his understanding of the revolutionary party in What is To Be Done? (1902). The remarkable intervention highlighted the role of the class-conscious workers as the vanguard of the party and the importance of political agitation among workers to develop a genuinely powerful political consciousness against all tyranny and all oppression. The workers, Lenin argued, need to feel the intensity of the brutality of the system and of the importance of solidarity.

These texts — from 1896 to 1916 — prepared the terrain for the Bolsheviks and Lenin to understand how to operate during the struggles in 1917. It is a measure of Lenin’s confidence in the masses and to his theory that Lenin wrote his audacious pamphlet Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? a few weeks before the seizure of power.

Building a state

Having prevailed, Lenin now had to confront the problems of building a socialist project in the former tsarist empire, which had been devastated by its avarice and by the war. Before the Soviets had time to organise themselves, the imperialists attacked from all directions. Direct interventions on behalf of the peasants and workers, as well as national minorities, prevented large-scale defections from the new revolution to the counter-revolutionaries' armies. The peasants, with their limited means, held fast to the new beginning. But that was the point — the “limited means.” How does one build socialism in a poor country, with social development held down by the tsarist autocracy?

A close reading of State and Revolution (1918) anticipates the problems faced by the Soviets in their new task — they could not only inherit the state structure, but had to “smash the state,” build a new set of institutions and a new institutional culture, create a new attitude by the cadre towards the state and society. In April 1918, Lenin’s The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government summarises the work of the first few months and shows that the Soviets were well-aware of the deep problems that they had to confront.

Their revolution did not take place in an advanced capitalist country, but in what Marx had called the “realm of scarcity.” To increase the productive forces and to socialise the means of production at the same time was a task of immense proportions.

“Without literacy,” Lenin wrote, “there can be no politics. There can only be rumours, gossip, and prejudice.” What limited resources were there before the Soviet state went toward literacy, with the party cadre determined to ensure that they turn around the fact that only a third of men were literate and less than a fifth of women. Between the Likbez campaign and the policy of indigenisation (korenizatsiya), the use of regional and minority languages, the Soviets were able — in two decades — to ensure that literacy levels rose to 86 per cent for men and 65 per cent for women.

The centrality of workers and peasants to building Soviet Russia is often forgotten (Mikhail Kalinin came from a peasant family; Joseph Stalin came from a family of cobblers and housemaids). Education, health, housing and control over the economy as well as cultural activities and social development were the heart of the work of the new Soviet Russia, led by Lenin. No amount of right-wing drivel about the Soviet Union can erase the immense achievement of this workers’ state.

In the last year of his life, Lenin wrote four formidable texts: “On Cooperation,” “Our Revolution,” “How We Should Reorder the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection,” and “Better Fewer, But Better.” In these texts, Lenin acknowledged the difficulties in the process of transformation of capitalism to socialism. He wrote of the “enormous, boundless significance” of co-operative societies, the need to rebuild the productive base and to build societies to advance the confidence of the masses. What Lenin indicated was the need for a cultural transformation, a new way of life for the workers and the peasants, and new and creative ways for the workers and peasants to have power over their society and to build their clarities in action. The workers have inherited the architecture of a hideous state, and this must be totally transformed. But how? Lenin’s reflection in Better Fewer, but Better is fiercely honest:

“What elements have we for building this apparatus? Only two. First, the workers who are absorbed in the struggle of socialism. These elements are not sufficient educated. They would like to build a better apparatus for us, but they do not know how. They cannot build one. They have not yet developed the culture required for this; and it is culture that is required. Nothing will be achieved in this by doing things in a rush, by assault, by vim or vigour, or in general, by any of the best human qualities. Secondly, we have elements of knowledge, education, and training, but they are ridiculously inadequate compared with all other countries.”

In his last public appearance — at the Moscow Soviet in November 1922 — Lenin praised the achievements of the young Soviet Republic, but also cautioned about the hard path forward. “Our party,” he said, “a little group of people in comparison with the country’s total population, has tackled this job. This tiny nucleus has set itself the task of remaking everything, and it will do so.”

But this is not just the task of the party, but of the workers and peasants, who see the new Soviet apparatus as their own. “We have brought socialism into everyday life and must here see how matters stand. That is the task of our day, the task of our epoch.”

The Soviet Union lasted only 74 years, but in those years, it experimented fiercely to overcome the wretchedness of capitalism. Seventy-four years is the average global life expectancy. There was simply not enough time to advance the socialist agenda before the USSR was destroyed. But Lenin’s legacy is not merely in the USSR. It is in the global struggle to transcend the dilemmas that confront humanity by advancing to socialism.

COMRADE LENIN famously noted that “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

Communists and indeed all those dedicated to bringing about a new world have inevitably thought, at one time or another, on what Lenin might think or say about the 100 years that have passed since his death.

So much has changed. So much has transpired for humanity and for the global communist movement which Lenin played such a decisive role in creating.

The centenary of Comrade Lenin’s passing inevitably and quite rightly leads us to evaluate his life, his achievements and his legacy today.

Lenin’s indisputable individual brilliance, his foundational contribution to our ideology and his iconic status in our propaganda can easily lead us to forget that Lenin was a man who lived, worked and struggled.

Lenin was a key figure in the growing labour and socialist movement in Russia.

It was during this period, through tireless work and study, building on the ideas of Marx and Engels, that Lenin developed and refined fundamental concepts of the communist movement — imperialism, state monopoly capitalism and the need for a vanguard party of the working class.

But Lenin was not an academic or a theoretician who opined from the comfort and safety of an armchair.

Lenin’s ideas were tested in practice and in the fire of struggle. For all of the experience and understanding gained, he paid a dear price — hunted by the tsarist authorities and forced into exile, including here in Britain, where he worked at what is today the Marx Memorial Library.

Lenin would of course go on to lead the Great October Socialist Revolution — one of the single most important events in human history, an event which smashed centuries of tsarist autocracy, birthed the world’s first socialist state and opened a new era, the era of international proletarian revolution.

The Soviet state which Lenin helped to found would go on to make stunning achievements in human development, in science and the arts, women’s liberation, minority rights, the defeat of fascism and in the ideological and material support for decolonisation.

But in 2024 the Soviet Union is gone and has been for decades. Capitalism has proven itself to be more adaptable than was anticipated a century ago.

What does this mean for Lenin’s legacy?

If Lenin were alive today he would not lament or slump in defeat over the fate of the Soviet Union.

Nor would he content himself with navel-gazing, harking back to a halcyon time or endlessly rehashing battles past.

Lenin would not expect this of the movement he inspired.

Lenin would again ask himself and the movement — “What is to be done?” and then set about doing it with a singular determination and an invincible will to win.

The analysis of monopoly and imperialism that Lenin developed is even more relevant today than when first written. Lenin’s concept of a vanguard communist party has proven itself to be a powerful and, so far, the only model of leading the struggle to take and hold working-class state power and begin the advance on the path to socialism.

The destruction of the USSR by imperialism does not vitiate Soviet socialism’s countless achievements. The lessons gained by that first experiment are carried forward and applied in the many socialist states and the communist parties which continue to advance today.

Lenin’s legacy did not die with the Soviet Union. It lives on today in the world historic movement that he forged.

For all those determined to change the world and create a society free from exploitation and oppression, Lenin’s ideas and guide to action have only been vindicated and become more fundamental in the century that has passed.
​
Lenin lives — live like Lenin.

The perpetual production of ever-changing forms of poverty is an inevitable part of the creative destruction that characterizes capitalism. The form of the poverty changes, because capitalism is dynamic and constantly changing, but poverty remains. The production of poverty is not only an inevitable but also a necessary part of capitalism. This has been the case in Britain, the world’s first capitalist industrial power, for the past eight hundred years.

Poverty is in large part about peoples’ relationship to the means of production—they have been pushed off the land, they do not have a job, or the job they have is poorly paid, part-time, or irregular. This has been the case for centuries; it is the case today.

Two British authors describe the constant presence of poverty in working class life: “The single most unifying factor in working class history has been poverty: the threat of poverty, the fear of poverty, the certainty of poverty.”1 Precarious work—and indeed, the precarity of life itself—has been a constant. As Palmer put it, “work has never been anything but a precarious foundation of life lived on the razor’s edge of dispossession.”2

By the end of the seventeenth century, it is estimated that some 40 percent of Britain’s population had been forced off the land in previous centuries by the enclosure movement, a necessary precursor to the emergence of capitalism. Most were made poor as a result—the detritus of the long death of feudal society. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries these “masterless men” tramped the roads, where they “existed in alarming numbers…and too often were unemployable rejects of a society in economic transformation,” equivalent to “the unemployed of the Great Depression of the 1930s, or the jobless millions of today’s inner cities.”3

Fierce labor legislation was enacted throughout the sixteenth century to push vagabonds—those who were able-bodied but not working, and therefore poor— into employment. For example, a vagabond could be “tied to the end of a cart naked and beaten with whips…till his body be bloody,” and his ears could be cut off.4 Vagrants could be branded with a hot iron with the mark of “V.” In 1590, vagrants in Middlesex, for example, “were being whipped and branded…at the rate of one a day.”5 The point of such punishment was to force the poor into the paid labor force.

The poor often rebelled. Enclosure riots increased dramatically in the late sixteenth century. When the Duke of Norfolk asked to speak to the leader of a rebellious crowd, their answer reflected the anger of the times: “Since you ask who is our captain, forsooth his name is Poverty, for he and his cousin Necessity, have brought us to this doing.”6 By the end of the century, vagrancy was so widespread that it resulted in the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601.

The 1601 Poor Law was in effect a threadbare social assistance system that provided to the “deserving” poor—the sick, the aged, those with disabilities, for example—just enough to prevent them from dying in the streets or rebelling. It excluded those deemed able to work (the “undeserving” poor) who could be forced into the paid labour force or punished for noncompliance. The idea that relief should be directed at the “deserving” poor and consist of a bare minimum would persist over the following four centuries to today, as would the belief in punishing the “undeserving” poor.

Many who were poor during the two centuries following the Elizabethan Poor Law made their way to the cities, where they were plunged into more poverty and precarity. Consider the case of children. London in the eighteenth century “teemed with abandoned children. Over a thousand a year were being left on the rubbish heaps, in the streets, alleys and other public thoroughfares of the city.”7 The most common “solution” was to set them to work. For example, in 1770 it was recommended that “poor children be sent at the age of four to workhouses.… There is considerable use in their being, somehow or other, constantly employed at least 12 hours a day,” so that they might be “habituated to constant labour.”8

In those workhouses, massive numbers died. A 1767 Committee of the House of Commons reported that from 1741 to 1748, of the 1,429 children either born in a London workhouse or brought there at less than one year of age, only nineteen survived, slightly better than 1 percent.9 Based on 1746–50 data, historians Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker conclude that “St. Margaret’s workhouse was quite simply a place of death.”10  At St. Luke’s workhouse in London between 1757 and 1763, all fifty-three children under the age of 5 died—100 percent.11 Death rates of children in the 50 percent range were common in British workhouses in the years leading up to the Industrial Revolution.

Conditions were deliberately made cruel in order to force people to work in the mines and mills of the day. As explained a member of the Poor Law Commission, “I wish to see the Poor House looked to with dread by our labouring class…for without this, where is the needful stimulus to industry?”12

The New Poor Law of 1834 was similarly designed to force people to work. Work in the “dark satanic mills” was dangerous; hours were long and difficult; the pay was paltry. Nobody wanted such jobs. Force was necessary.

In the coal mines, children under the age of 10 could be found on all fours in low-ceilinged mine shafts, ropes around their waists and chains between their legs, pulling loaded coal carts like horses. Parents took children starting at 8 or 9 years of age into the pits, in most cases because their families needed the extra earnings. Women took children as young as 6 years old into the pits and sometimes used drugs, opium for example, to keep the little ones quiet. The result was that “a great number of infants perish from an overdose, or, as more commonly happens, painfully and insidiously. Those who escape with life become pale and sickly children…with a ruined constitution.”13

Many of the children found “infesting” the streets of London were rounded up, loaded into carts and forcibly hauled off to the Lancashire cotton mills. As described by a contemporary, “It is a very common practice in the great populace parishes in London to bind children in large numbers to the proprietors of cotton-mills in Lancashire and Yorkshire, at a distance of 200 miles. The children, who are sent off by wagon loads at a time, are as much lost forever to their parents as if they were shipped off to the West Indies.”14

In the mills, children often worked twelve or more hours in high temperatures, were beaten to induce work, injured by machinery, and even died from malnutrition. Joseph Habergram, disabled from work in the mills, told an 1833 parliamentary committee, “I had 14 1/2 hours actual labour, when seven years of age…strapping was the means by which children kept at work.”15 The son of factory owner and reformer David Owen wrote, “In some large factories, from one-fourth to one-fifth of the children were either cripples or otherwise deformed, or permanently injured by excessive toil, sometimes by brutal abuse.”16

This is capitalism. Its enormous profits were produced on the backs of workers and children. It made Britain the world’s leading industrial and imperial power—and it produced horrendous forms of poverty as a necessary part of the process. This is what Marx meant when he said, “A matter of a million paupers in the British workhouse is as inseparable from British prosperity as the existence of 18 to 20 millions in gold in the Bank of England.”17 The production of poverty is inseparable from the creation of wealth.

Similarly, profits from slavery fuelled the Industrial Revolution. Between 1630 and 1807, British slave merchants bought and sold an estimated 2,500,000 Africans. The trade in enslaved people was enormously profitable. Those profits were the result of a managerial strategy on the cotton plantations of the U.S. Deep South, described by Edward Baptist as “torture,” management by the whip. “The whip made cotton,” and slave-produced cotton made the Industrial Revolution.18

The importance of slavery and cotton to the Industrial Revolution is reflected in the case of Liverpool. Liverpool merchants controlled as much as 85 percent of the British slave trade. By the late 1830s, almost 90 percent of all British cotton imports entered through Liverpool. The city’s entire power structure was populated by those directly involved in the cotton-based slave trade. In 1787, thirty-seven of the city’s forty-one councillors “were slave-ship owners or major investors in or suppliers to the trade. All of the 20 mayors between 1787 and 1807 financed or owned slave-ships.”19 Wealth that flowed from the slave trade created Liverpool’s major banks, which in turn made vast profits by advancing the credit needed to build the cotton plantations in the Deep South. Collateral was typically the slaves themselves. Those supporting what has been called the “West Indian Interest” in slavery included “hundreds of MPs, peers, civil servants, businessmen, financiers, landowners, clergymen, intellectuals, journalists, publishers, soldiers, sailors, and judges, and all of them went to extreme lengths to preserve and protect colonial slavery.”20 Industrial capitalism would not have been born in Britain were it not for the blood of cotton and slavery.

The cotton produced in the U.S. by enslaved Africans was then processed by wage slaves—often children and, by the 1830s, increasingly women—in the Lancashire mills. The finished product, cotton clothing, was exported, primarily to British colonies such as India, undermining the production of clothing there. For centuries, India had been the leading producer of the world’s finest cotton. What Sven Beckert describes as “war capitalism”—the use of force and violence to open markets and secure labour and resources—virtually destroyed the Indian cotton industry. “India was systematically deindustrialized and became in turn a market for the Lancashire cottons: in 1820 the subcontinent took only 11 million yards; but by 1840 it already took 145 million yards.”21 Slaves picked cotton under brutal conditions in the Deep South; women and children processed it in Lancashire mills under brutal conditions; and the sale of the resulting products laid waste to what had been a thriving clothing industry in India. Poverty barely describes the condition of those involved in this global “market.”

Poverty—brutally inhumane poverty—was produced at every point in what was a global capitalist process. Slavery, colonialism, and forced labour were necessary elements of capitalism’s emergence. Capitalism generated, at the same time and as part of the same process, massive profits and horrific poverty and grief. As Marx wrote, capitalism came into the world “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”22

Nor is poverty a thing of capitalism’s past. Leap forward a century and a half, through the vast poverty of the Great Depression of the 1930s—when millions of British workers suffered the ravages of mass unemployment and mass poverty, and the cruel indignities of the bitterly hated Household Means Test and the “genuinely seeking work” test—to the Thatcher era of the 1980s and beyond. Britain’s capitalist economy was in trouble in the late 1970s, in response to which the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher—inspired by the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman—were elected in 1979.

Thatcher’s values were essentially Victorian. She believed the UK’s economic problems were caused by the welfare state. She opposed all forms of welfare and believed the poor should be forced to work. Before becoming prime minister, she was one of six Conservative members of Parliament who voted in favour of restoring flogging for the poor, as done four centuries earlier to force vagabonds to work. In her third term, she introduced a full-fledged workfare system. Workfare would force people into the lower reaches of the labor market, just as the workhouses and the 1834 Poor Law had been designed to do a century and a half earlier.

Thatcher’s governments deliberately created poverty. Their economic strategy included deep cuts to supports for the poor, a weakening of union power via “ferocious anti-trade union legislation unparalleled in Europe,” large cuts in taxation for high income earners, and the unleashing of market forces, together with an attempt to shift British culture to a more individualist and pro-enterprise orientation.23 Britain’s manufacturing sector was crushed and unemployment skyrocketed, reaching levels even higher and of longer duration than in the 1930s. By 1996, in Liverpool’s Merseyside, 37 percent of working age men were not employed, one in five households in Britain were without a working adult, and the number of adults living in households without work had doubled between 1979 and 1993–94.24 For Norman Lamont, chancellor of the exchequer, this was a “price worth paying” to restore the health of capitalism in Britain.25 Poverty was deliberately created to restore the conditions for capital accumulation, for profitability.

The result was an explosion of poverty. In 1999, after two decades of Thatcher-led and Thatcher-inspired Conservative governments, “there were more people living in or on the margins of poverty than at any time in British history. According to the most rigorous survey of poverty and social exclusion ever undertaken, by the end of 1999 approximately 14 million people in Britain, or 25 percent of the population, were objectively living in poverty.”26

Beyond the cold numbers, there was “disturbing evidence of desperate poverty on a scale not witnessed in Britain since the 1930s…diseases associated with poverty and malnutrition, such as rickets and tuberculosis, which most health experts had hoped were banished forever, had returned.”27 Conservative Member of Parliament Ian Gilmour was moved to say that “The Thatcherite treatment of the poor was unforgiveable.”28

The New Labour party took office in 1997. Poverty and inequality had reached levels unprecedented in modern times. Yet little changed in their approach. Danny Dorling described New Labour as “Thatcherism continued.” Colin Crouch called New Labour “Thatcher’s well-behaved step-children, her direct progeny.” Thomas Piketty wrote that New Labour “largely validated and perpetrated the fiscal reforms of the Thatcher era.”29 When Thatcher was asked what her greatest achievement was, she replied, “Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.”30

It may be that their minds were not much changed. Blair did not betray his roots, “as he had no roots to betray,” he “didn’t have a socialist bone in his body.”31 In a 1995 speech to the British Chamber of Commerce, Blair said, “old Labour thought the role of government was to interfere with the market. New Labour believes the role of government is to make the market more dynamic, to provide people and business with the means to success.”32 It followed logically that New Labour would abandon its long-held commitment to equality of outcomes, in the Thatcherite belief that such efforts would be a constraint on the economy.

Many key New Labour figures, including Blair, despised old Labour. Roy Hattersley, typically seen as part of the old Labour Right, said that New Labour abandoned “the disadvantaged,” adding that socialism “requires the bedrock principle to be the redistribution of power and wealth.”33 Blair and New Labour were adamantly opposed to the redistribution of power and wealth.

New Labour made some gains in reducing the poverty of children and pensioners—the so-called deserving poor. However, these gains were not long lasting, and inequality, which had risen dramatically under Thatcher, soared to new and obscene levels. As described by Peter Mandelson, an intellectual founder of New Labour, “We are intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich, as long as they pay their taxes.”34 Yet New Labour cut taxes for upper income earners and drove corporate taxation to levels lower than ever in British history and the lowest in major industrial countries.  The Sunday Times called the New Labour years a “golden age for the very rich.”35

New Labour’s approach had been to support people in moving out of poverty, via various “anti-poverty” programs. However, Hattersley was surely correct that “a Labour government should not be talking about escape routes from poverty and deprivation.” The task, rather, ought to be “to change society in such a way that there is no poverty and deprivation from which to escape.”36 New Labour had no such commitment.

Housing for the poor—for centuries a dismal and often horrific aspect of poverty in Britain—worsened under New Labour, their record on social housing being worse than Thatcher’s.  Council estates, once the proud homes of the British working class, were increasingly seen as the homes of the undeserving poor and were allowed to deteriorate even further than they had under Thatcher. New Labour was “ideologically opposed to building council housing” and cut in half—”to the extraordinarily low figure of 0.3 percent”—the proportion of GDP spent on council housing.37

Young adults in marginal housing estates—“sink estates”—were relegated to poorly paid, no-benefits/no future jobs at the bottom of the labor market. These are the jobs that capitalists now create. New Labour’s response was to build on Thatcher’s workfare strategy, to the point that Britain became the world’s leading “workfare state,” the logic being “workfare is not about creating jobs for people that don’t have them; it is about creating workers for jobs that nobody wants,”38 which is precisely what the workhouses and the 1834 New Poor Law were designed to do. In the face of these dead ends, young people rioted in 2001. As the Guardian wrote in May of that year, the riots “were the result of tensions that have been brewing for years and whose sources are not mysterious. The first tension was based in poverty. As in every British riot, the struggle erupted in a place of desperate economic hardship”—yet the blame was placed on the rioters, “and the community pathologies that have generated them.”39

In 2011, the year after New Labour left office, civil unrest erupted again, generating a rash of hateful blaming of the poor. The Telegraph ran an article titled “London Riots: The Underclass Lashes Out.” Media coverage used such language as “scum, thugs, feral rats.… The term scum was the favourite pejorative: ‘the scum class,’ ‘verminous waste.’” The Justice Minister called rioters “our feral underclass.” Prime Minister David Cameron attributed the riots to a “moral collapse,” insisting “these riots were not about poverty” but rather “about behaviour.” Boris Johnson, then London’s mayor, considered it “revolting” to advance explanations related to poverty.40

A more informed explanation can be located in the words of a 22-year-old man involved in the 2011 riots: “All I can tell you is that me, myself and the group I was in, none of us have got jobs, yeah? I been out of work now coming up two years…and it’s just like a depression, man, that you sink into.… I felt like I needed to be there to just say ‘look, this is what’s gonna happen if there’s no jobs offered to us out there.’”41

Capitalism produces poverty, but the poor have always shouldered the blame. Even more than blamed, they have been feared, reviled, and hated. During the early years of the centuries-long enclosure movement, those tramping the roads were called “lawless beasts” committing “heinous deeds, detestable sins”; they were “the very filth and vermin of the commonwealth.”42 Centuries later, in the late nineteenth century, Charles Booth, a relatively sympathetic recorder of poverty in London, said about the poor, “their very life is the life of savages.… They degrade whatever they touch.43 About the Irish poor, who had moved into England in large numbers especially in the mid-nineteenth century, a Liverpool physician wrote in 1845: “The Irish seem to be contented amidst the dirt and filth…they merely seem to care for that which will support animal existence.”44 A century later, in the late 1940s and ’50s, mothers in what were then called “problem families” were identified as the cause of poverty. They were “feckless mothers,” raising children who were “dull and feeble-minded.”45 In the ’60s, a hostile media blamed poverty on “Britain’s army of dole queue swindlers,” triggering an outburst of “Scroungerphobia” that included headlines like “Get the Scroungers!”46

It continues. The May 24, 2023 edition of the British Guardian reported that the Right wing of the Conservative Party was blaming Britain’s economic problems on “slackers” and “idlers.” Capitalism keeps producing poverty; the poor keep on being blamed for their poverty. This is “poverty propaganda.”47 It is functional to capitalism.

Throughout the past eight hundred years, there has almost never been a serious attempt to dramatically reduce the poverty that capitalism produces. There is one important exception. The 1945–51 Labour governments were outstanding in meeting the needs of the poor, despite never, as far as I can tell, using the term “anti-poverty programs.” Their approach was universal programs, that is, programs that benefitted the entire working-class population—the National Health Service; massive, good quality housing for the working class; a National Insurance Act that paid unemployment and sickness benefits to all working people; and a dramatic reduction in the numbers of the unemployed.
The ideological basis of these policies was a commitment to move away from a targeted, residual and charity-based approach to an egalitarian, inclusive, and universal approach. All citizens were to have access to services of a roughly equal standard, and by this means, a floor was to be established for all. This insistence upon universality—opposed tenaciously by Conservatives—can legitimately be seen as an attack on class privilege.

So too can changes to taxation. The Labour governments placed a surtax on incomes over £10,000 and death duties of 75 percent on estates worth more than £21,500. By 1951, the marginal tax rate on high incomes was over 90 percent.48

The 1945–51 Labour governments faced immense financial pressure—John Maynard Keynes called the 1947 financial crisis following the termination of Lend-Lease “a financial Dunkirk.”49 They faced massive opposition from the private sector and the British establishment. A junior Labour minister described rising to speak in the House of Commons and facing “the cold, implacable eyes of that row of well-tailored tycoons, who hated the Labour government with a passion and fear which made them dedicated men in their determination to get it out of office.”50

In the face of these huge financial and political pressures, Labour displayed enormous courage and a rock-solid commitment to meeting the needs of working people. The result was that poverty plummeted. As Kenneth Morgan wrote,  “All the indices—for instance, the statistics of medical officers of health, or of school medical or dental officers—suggest that the standard of health and of robust physique steadily improved during the entire 1945–51 period, from infants, whose survival rates continued to improve, to old people, whose expectation of a long and happy retirement steadily lengthened.”51 Quantitative studies of the incidence of poverty were consistent with these other indicators: poverty declined dramatically.52 It was not eliminated, but never before had it been so dramatically cut—a fact confirmed by a later, revised analysis of B. Seebohm Rowntree’s and G. R. Lavers’s 1951 study.53

There was much still to be done. The emergent welfare state ought to have been “merely the first installment of a much more far-reaching program of radical reform.”54 That did not happen. The huge steps taken by the postwar Labour governments were not built upon by later Labour governments in ways that were both necessary and possible. Britain moved from being a social policy leader in the immediate postwar years to a social policy laggard—gradually at first, as the result in part of revisionist Labour Party policies, then more deliberately and dramatically with the elections starting in 1979 of Thatcher’s Conservative governments, and, finally, with the efforts of New Labour. “The welfare state had been Labour’s greatest achievement. It had been damaged and weakened under Mrs. Thatcher. But its wholesale destruction was to be New Labour’s historic mission.”55

Poverty continues to be a massive problem in Britain in the third decade of the twenty-first century. In 2018, Philip Alston, the United Nations rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, following an investigation of poverty in Britain, accused the government of the “systematic immiseration of a significant part of the British population.”56 In November 2023, his successor, the UN’s current rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Oliver De Schutter, stated “things have got worse.”57 Housing conditions for many are appalling. Homelessness grows relentlessly. Precarious labor abounds. Food banks are ubiquitous. Fuel poverty is widespread. The poor suffer depleted health and shortened lives. Drug addiction is rampant and destructive, especially for the poor. Punishment and imprisonment of the poor is a staple of today’s response to poverty, as it was under and prior to the Poor Laws. Hopelessness and despair weigh heavily on those who are poor. Vast human suffering is the result of this age-old scourge, today as ever. Still, the poor continue to be blamed, even reviled and hated, for their poverty—a poverty caused not by their moral and behavioral failings, but by the fundamental logic of capitalism.

Capitalism’s logic produces poverty. It does so because the surplus generated in the process of capital accumulation is invested where capitalists believe it will generate the greatest future profit. It is not invested in meeting peoples’ needs if doing so is not expected to produce profits. It is, for example, not invested in adequate and affordable housing for those who are living in poverty despite the great need, because adequate and affordable housing for the poor is not profitable. This is the case even though it is known that inadequate and unaffordable housing contributes to the further production and reproduction of poverty. The entire point of the capitalist system is the maximization of profit, not the meeting of human needs and certainly not the elimination of poverty.

If there is a solution in today’s world, the radical reformism of the 1945–51 Labour governments provides its broad outlines. The standard Left criticisms of those governments are mistaken. What those governments did was not simply “a modest program” largely indistinguishable from what was implemented in most advanced capitalist societies to varying extents. Nor can it be written off, as some Marxist scholars have done, as simply a means of stabilizing capitalism and taming the working class. Thus, John Saville argues that the achievements of those governments “are a necessary and essential part of the structure of advanced capitalist societies,” because they remove “the harshness and insecurity which is a built-in characteristic of industrial life.”58 Such analyses remove the class struggle that was the basis of Labour’s considerable achievements, and ignore the massive financial and political challenges that had to be overcome in order to do so. They ignore the class-based efforts of workers and their organizations over many decades to achieve these gains.

The more accurate approach is to acknowledge that Labour governments went an enormous distance in a remarkably short time to dramatically reduce poverty. They diverted fiscal resources away from individual consumption via rationing and invested in the creation of collective services that pulled millions out of poverty. As Dorothy Thompson described it, these collective services provided benefits “purely on the basis of need and not of cash payment.… This conception is a profoundly anti-capitalist one. It had to be fought for at every stage.” Therefore, “these are, objectively, victories for working class values within capitalist society.”59

Although the 1945–51 Labour governments were not revolutionary, significant improvements did occur in the lives of many of Britain’s poor, “as shown by oral history studies of the impact of the NHS. We do well to respect such testimony.”60 Tony Benn argued that given the circumstances of the time, the 1945–51 Labour governments achieved a “social revolution,” adding, “these things didn’t happen inexorably, they happened because a form of socialist, democratic and activist leadership was given at a critical moment.”61 These changes laid the foundation for what could have been a lasting end to poverty, had their initial steps been built upon, and had their vision and political courage been carried on by their successors—but that did not happen. It is the Labour successors to the 1945–51 governments who must bear the responsibility for the failure to build upon the foundation laid by those governments.

Poverty will never be solved by capitalism, because capitalism produces poverty. Supporters of capitalism will continue to argue that all efforts must be directed to restoring economic growth, because only with more growth can the needs of the poor be met. Such claims are not to be believed. Unrestricted capitalism will constantly demand sacrifices for growth, with the goal of defeating poverty endlessly deferred.

Nor can poverty be solved by narrowly targeted “anti-poverty” programs. They have the effect of pulling some people out of poverty, while leaving intact the system, the logic of which relentlessly produces poverty. Further, because they are targeted at the poor, and the poor have always been blamed for their poverty and even hated as a result, such programs lack broad public support and are minimalist as a result.

To dramatically reduce poverty, radical reforms are necessary. These include a massive redistribution of income and wealth; putting to work large numbers of people to do the many things that need to be done and paying them a living wage; adopting universal programs that support all working people (and not just the poor); and paying for these measures with a genuinely progressive tax system that particularly taxes those accumulating ethically insupportable and economically destructive amounts of income and wealth.
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Doing all of this would require a clear ideological commitment to socialist or strong social democratic principles and the courage to adopt and defend such measures in the face of the fierce opposition they would surely generate. Failure to take such steps will mean that capitalism will continue, without end, its relentless production of poverty.

​Notes
1. Trevor Blackwell and Jeremy Seabrook, A World Still to Win: The Reconstruction of the Post-War Working Class (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), 39.
2. Bryan Palmer, “Reconsideration of Class: Precariousness as Proletarianization,” in Socialist Register 2014: Registering Class, eds. Leo Panitch, Greg Albo, and Vivek Chibber, (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 1985), 44.
3. A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985).
4. William P. Quigley, “Five Hundred Years of English Poor Laws, 1349–1834: Regulating the Working and Nonworking Poor,” Akron Law Review 30, no. 1 (1997): 12.
5. Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), 287.
6. Catherina Lis and Hugo Soly, Poverty and Capitalism in Pre-Industrial Europe (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979), 85.
7. Tanya Evans, “Unfortunate Objects”: Lone Mothers in Eighteenth Century London (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 129.
8. Quoted in E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” in Essays in Social History, eds. M. W. Flinn and T. C. Smout, (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 59.
9. Dorothy Marshall, The English Poor in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 145.
10. Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City, 1690­1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 252­–53.
11. Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, Children in English Society, Volume I: From Tudor Times to the Eighteenth Century (London/Toronto: Routledge and Kegan Paul and the University of Toronto Press, 1969), 181.
12. Derek Fraser, Evolution of the British Welfare State: A History of Social Policy Since the Industrial Revolution, 2nd edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1984), 41.
13. Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, Children in English Society, Volume II: From Tudor Times to the Eighteenth Century (London/Toronto: Routledge and Kegan Paul and the University of Toronto Press, 1973), 406.
14. Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Penguin, 1991), 58.
15. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Penguin, 2015), 177.
16. Quoted in J. T. Ward, The Factory Movement:183-1855 (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd, 1962), 22.
17. Quoted in Palmer, “Reconsideration of Class,” 54.
18. Edward Baptist, “Towards a Political Economy of Slave Labour: Hands, Whipping Machines and Modern Power,” Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development in eds. Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 52.
19. Norma Myers, Reconstructing the Black Past: Black in Britain 1780–1830 (London: Frank Cass and Co., 1996), viii.
20. Michael Taylor, The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery (London: Bodley Head, 2020), 311.
21. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848 (New York: New American Library, 1962), 53.
22. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 926.
23. Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (London: Fontana Press, 1997), 506.
24. Paul Convery, “Unemployment,” in Britain Divided: The Growth of Social Exclusion in the 1980s and 1990s, eds. Alan Walker and Carol Walker, (London: CPAG Ltd., 1997), 187, emphasis in original; and Helga Pile and Catherine O’Donnell, “Earnings, Taxation and Wealth,” in Britain Divided, 32.
25. Quoted in Convery, “Unemployment.”
26. Christina Pantanzis, David Gordon and Ruth Levitas, Poverty and Social Exclusion in Britain: The Millenium Survey (Bristol: Policy Press, 2006), 1.
27. Alan Walker, “Introduction,” in Britain Divided, 9.
28. Quoted in Pete Dorey, British Conservatism: The Politics and Philosophy of Inequality (London: I. B. Taurus, 1997), 101.
29. Danny Dorling, “Mapping the Thatcherite Legacy: the Human Geography of Inequality in Britain since the 1970s,” in Stephen Farrell and Colin Hay (eds.), The Legacy of Thatcherism: Assessing and Exploring Thatcherite Social and Economic Policies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 260; Colin Crouch, “The Parabola of Working Class Politics,” in The New Social Democracy, eds. Andrew Gamble and Tony Wright, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 70; and Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 845.
30. Quoted in Leo Panitch, “Foreword: Reading the State in Capitalist Society,” in Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (Pontypool: Merlin Press, 2009), xiv.
31. Quoted in Richard Heffernan, New Labour and Thatcherism: Political Change in Britain (London: Macmillan, 2000), 22.
32. Tony Blair, A Journey: My Political Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 45.
33. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, The End of Parliamentary Socialism: From New Left to New Labour (London: Verso, 1997), 232.
34. Quoted in Andrew Rawnsley, The End of the Party (London: Penguin, 2010), 6.
35. Pat Thane, “Poverty in the Divided Kingdom,” History and Policy (September 2018): 438, historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/rss_2.0.
36. Quoted in Stephen Meredith, “Mr. Crosland’s Nightmare? New Labour and Inequality in Historical Perspective,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 8 (2006): 244.
37. Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (London: Verso, 2012), 230; Rodney Lowe, The Welfare State in Britain Since 1945, 3rd edition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 429.
38. Jamie Peck, Workfare States (New York and London: The Guilford Press, 2001), 6.
39. Claire Alexander, “Imagining the Asian Gang: Ethnicity, Masculinity and Youth after ‘the Riots,’” Critical Social Policy 24, no. 4 (2004): 528.
40. Imogen Tyler, “The Riots of the Underclass? Stigmatization, Mediation and the Government of Poverty and Disadvantage in Neoliberal Britain,” Sociological Research Online 18, no. 4 (2013): 3.1, 3.3, 3.4, 6.1.
41. Paul Lewis and Tim Newburn, Reading the Riots: Investigating England’s Summer of Disorder (London: The Guardian and London School of Economics, 2011), 25.
42. Quoted in Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (New York: Longman, 1988), 23, 25.
43. Albert Fried and Richard Elman, Charles Booth’s London (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968), 11.
44. Ian Law, A History of Race and Racism in Liverpool, 1660–1950 (Liverpool: Merseyside Community Relations Council, 1981), 22.
45. Pat Starkey, “The Feckless Mother: Women, Poverty and Social Workers in War-time and Post-War England,” Women’s History Review 9, no. 3 (2000): 542; Pat Starkey, “The Medical Officer of Health, the Social Worker, and the Problem Family, 1943–1968: The Case of Family Service Units,” Society for the Social History of Medicine 11, (1998): 430–31.
46. Molly Meacher, Scrounging on the Welfare: The Scandal of the 4 Week Rule (London: Arrow Books, 1974), 40; Alan Deacon, In Search of the Scrounger: The Administration of Unemployment Insurance in Britain 1920–1931, Occasional Papers on Social Administration no. 60 (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1976); Daniel McArthur and Aaron Reeves, “The Rhetoric of Recessions: How British Newspapers Talk About the Poor When Unemployment Rises, 1896–2000,” Sociology 53, no. 6 (2019): 1007.
47. Tracy Shildrick, “Lessons from Grenfell: Poverty Propaganda, Stigma and Class Power,” Sociological Review Monographs 66, no. 4 (2018).
48. Thane, “Poverty in the Divided Kingdom,” 191–92.
49. Henry Pelling, The Labour Governments, 1945–51 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 54.
50. David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945–51 (New York: Walker and Company, 2008), 172.
51. Kenneth Morgan, Labour in Power, 1945–51 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 370.
52. Seebohm Rowntree and G. R. Lavers, Poverty and the Welfare State (London: Longman’s, Green and Co, 1951).
53. Timothy J. Hatton and Roy E. Bailey, “Seebohm Rowntree and the Postwar Poverty Puzzle,” Economic History Review LIII, no. 3 (2000).
54. Jose Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 434.
55. Stuart Hall, “New Labour’s Double Shuffle,” Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies 27, no. 4 (2005): 321.
56. Philip Alston, Statement on Visit to the United Kingdom, by Professor Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights (Geneva: United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, 2018).
57. Robert Booth, “UK ‘in violation of international law’ over poverty levels, says UN envoy,” Guardian, November 5, 2023.
58. John Saville, “Labourism and the Labour Government,” in Paving the Third Way: The Critique of Parliamentary Government, ed. David Coates, (London: Merlin Press, 2003), 78.
59. Quoted in Palmer, “Reconsiderations on Class,” 202.
60. Robert Pearce, Attlee’s Labour Governments 1945–51 (London: Routledge, 1994), 76.
61. Quoted in Eric Hobsbawm, The Forward March of Labour Halted? (London: Verso, 1981), 79–80.

Between World War I and the Great Depression, in New York’s Harlem, a dazzling art, literature, and political movement emerged. It strove for the liberation and manifestation of a people’s search for yearning for beauty and meaning. It was creative, courageous, and truthful as it sought new ways to make art an instrument of struggle. Each of the artists, poets, musicians, and intellectuals were activists and freedom fighters in their own right. Their artwork was rooted in and exuded a sense of dignity, innovation, and striving for higher artistic and social ideals. They were selfless and disciplined, in a time when shadow of slavery loomed large and the majority of Black people remained trapped in poverty in Northern ghettos and Southern plantations, with racial terror consuming their lives. 

The world of the Harlem Renaissance was rich with talent and energy. The movement sought inspiration in the artists’ Afro-American heritage of struggle, but also in the broader American historical and cultural canon. It was influenced by the 1919 October Revolution of the Soviet Union and the Mexican muralist movement. It reached into the past and captured the best of the present to make sense of the historical moment and where Black folk must go from there. It also laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950’s and ‘60s.

But during its time, despite its recognition across the nation and the world, Harlem Renaissance artists remained segregated by the color line and from white society. Segregation limited the venues where Black artists were able to perform and exhibit, but also culturally and philosophically relegated the innovations of the Harlem Renaissance to a so-called “primitivist” instinct and thus to an inferior status to the white world.
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The Harlem Renaissance was powerful for its ideological clarity and commitment. It was led by artists and intellectuals such as WEB Du Bois (1868-1963), who co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and edited its magazine The Crisis. Du Bois’s essay “Criteria for Negro Art” proclaimed that “all art is propaganda” and therefore all Black artists can and should choose to make art in service of their people’s liberation. As such he employed artists and poets like Aaron Douglas and Langston Hughes to fill The Crisis’s pages with art that broadened its readers’ horizons for building a better world. The artists and intellectuals’ close relationships, intense dialogue, and shared commitment to the liberation of the Black masses consolidated the movement around the importance of struggle and clarity, which translated into the exceptional art, music, and scholarly contributions of their time.

One artist deeply shaped by the Harlem Renaissance and who carried its legacy forward was the painter Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000). Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey to Southern Black migrant parents, his family moved to Harlem in 1930 when he was 13 years old. His talents and ideological development were nurtured during the movement’s most dynamic years, counting Harlem Renaissance painter Charles Alston (1907-77) as one of his key mentors. 

Lawrence proclaimed he was first and foremost a historian, a keen observer of Black life, and a painter rooted in the people, truth, and history. This is especially evident in his iconic Migration series, one of the first great works of African American art recognized by the white mainstream art world and completed when Lawrence was just 23 years old. Dynamically employing color, abstraction, and composition, the painting series depicts the organic exodus of the Black masses from the South to the booming northern industrial centers in the early 20th century. Each of the sixty panels captures a different facet of how this movement reconstituted the American social fabric and infused its cities with the spiritual, social, economic, and political strivings of the Black worker.
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In his statement “My Opinion on Painting,” Lawrence says, “For me a painting should have three things: universality, clarity, and strength. Universality so that it may be understood by all men. Clarity and strength so that it may be aesthetically good.” In the 35th panel of the Migration series, titled They left the South in great numbers. They arrived in the North in great numbers, ten Black figures march across the scene against a pale blue sky, carrying their cargo and dressed in their heavy coats and hats. Limiting the palette to earthy tones and simplifying the varying figures’ profiles, Lawrence keeps the focus on the collective nature of the migration. The painting powerfully evokes the search for fuller dignity, economic livelihood, and citizenship that drove nearly a million Black folk towards cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York — a journey which Lawrence’s own family underwent and Lawrence was closely acquainted with as he came of age in Black Harlem.

Lawrence declares,
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“It is more important that an artist study life than study the technique of painting exclusively… It is more important that a student of art develop a philosophy and clarity of thought than paint nude after nude, still life after still life and cube after cube… One’s pictures should be about things most familiar to him. My pictures express my life and experiences. So I paint about the American Negro working class.” 

Hence the basis of the Harlem Renaissance and Jacob Lawrence’s spirit of painting was grounded in clarity through the realities, history, and aspirations of the Black worker. His emphasis on clarity was a far cry from the obscurantism of postmodernism that would come in a few generations and dominate today’s art scene. 

Fast forward a few decades, a new wave of art and culture emerged from New York City, specifically the white elite world. It was an art movement opposite to the Harlem Renaissance in form and content, intent on obfuscation rather than clarity. Looking away from the Black freedom struggle, and siding with imperialism during a period of great world liberation movements, it proclaimed a new set of values on behalf of the American ruling class in a time when capitalism had to be rebranded to suit the new post-WWII paradigm of US global hegemony. 

The ‘50s was the pivotal moment in US history: allied business, government, and other elite interests locked course on fashioning the country into a global superpower. Their vision was an American assertion of dominance over the world through establishing a military clawhold, capitalist market control, and ideological influence over the American people and abroad. It also sought to counter and repress the developments of the Soviet Union and anti-colonial movements for liberation after centuries of imperial exploitation.

The broader philosophical movement of postmodernism emerged shortly thereafter. Postmodernism is centered on unmooring knowledge from the objective rational truth, and recentering the discussion on the fluid and subjective. It rejects the notion that truth is knowable and worth knowing. It may have started off in academic discussions in Western universities, but it has since saturated art, culture, politics, activism, and mainstream thought. One of postmodernism’s earliest artistic tendencies that helped popularize it was Pop Art. Pop Art emerged during the mid-1950s as artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns pioneered a new art movement that sought to elevate the aesthetic and philosophy of capitalism and popular culture to fine art. 

The very life of Andy Warhol, Pop Art’s most notable champion, serves as an illustrative example of postmodernism’s tenets themselves. Warhol was born in 1928 to working-class Slovakian parents in the Rust Belt’s Pittsburgh. As he came of age in the ‘50’s, he moved to New York City to reinvent himself completely and “make it” as an artist. Yet it was when he began producing what he termed Pop Art that he experienced a meteoric rise to fame. Through his large scale screenprints of Campbell soup cans and popular celebrities of the day, he became one of the richest artists to have ever lived: his art and presence was coveted by the ruling elite during his lifetime and beyond his death. 
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His art reflected these materialistic values: Andy Warhol produced artwork in a studio dubbed “the Factory” and garnered a fortune from manufacturing and selling copy after copy of his works like mere commodities—mirroring capitalism’s mass production of commodities for maximizing profit, rather than the uplift of the masses. He was infamous for punchy interview quotes as part of his absurd, aloof personal brand: he claimed he wanted to be a machine, that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes in the future, and that “you can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking… Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.”

Although Warhol’s absurdist posturing has been construed as a critique of capitalist values, the Pop Art movement ultimately embraces the opposite, proclaiming that “life is best under capitalism.” Andy Warhol’s public persona best embodied this, which redefined fame and celebrity culture forever: partying, carefully curating appearances as to surround himself with other celebrities and models, and failing to take on any human issue (moral, political, economic) substantively. Thus, Pop Art presents the very economic exploitation that enables such a decadent lifestyle possible for few celebrities, as the only future for humanity.

In short, while Pop artists often claimed to “parody” the tenets of capitalism in their artistic and philosophical endeavors, they were in fact cementing their cultural capital and benefitting from their position in a decadently capitalist system. This kind of shallow “irony” allowed Warhol and his compatriots to uphold the ideology of capitalism and shielded them from serious criticism. It excuses Pop Art’s ultimately nihilistic view of human nature as primarily a product of materialistic, profit-driven, and consumerist tendencies—a comfort-seeking, non-struggle position that obscures the sheer will and necessity for the masses of humanity to fight for a better future and against oppression of all forms, unlike the art of the Harlem Renaissance. 

Yet many academics and curators regard Pop Art as utterly radical, either because it protested social boundaries and art traditions with such disruptive artwork—or that it embodied the best of American values of artistic and consumeristic freedom. But if juxtaposed with the Harlem Renaissance, it’s clear that what Pop Art proclaims to be “radical,” is not the same as what its contemporary movements—the Civil Rights Movement, the 1960s global anticolonial struggles—meant when they evoked terms like “vanguard” or “revolutionary.” 

Through the example of the artists of the Harlem Renaissance, the ideal of freedom meant joining the broader struggle for all people’s right to manifest their human potential and strivings, and all children grow up in a world free of exploitation and poverty. Therefore, genuine freedom, in substance, does not signify that we struggle to drink the same bottle of Coke. Rather, it is to speak on behalf of the voiceless, an incisive tool of critique against the very monopolistic forces that seek to disenfranchise the masses—to instill a lack of belief in the masses through their shallow assumptions about the worst of humanity, rather than the best. In their eyes, revolutionary art, as well as the use of irony, would not reflect ruling class ideologies. However, Pop Art, in line with postmodernism, abstracts any notion of true freedom and objective responsibility to the masses, and fails to present any paths for collective, principled struggle against dominant systems of oppression and exploitation. 

For a few decades, Pop Art and postmodernism primarily operated in mainstream, white American culture, leaving the spirit and legacy of the Black American freedom struggle untouched. This all changed with the arrival of Jean-Michel Basquiat onto the art scene, and after his premature death, in all arenas of culture. 

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88) was born to a middle class Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother. Growing up in a Brooklyn brownstone, he received a decent education, reading American literature and Beatnik poetry, and frequenting the city’s abundant museums and galleries. As a child, he witnessed the great Civil Rights and Black Power movements play out: watching Muhammad Ali box courageously and speak out against the Vietnam War, as well as the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Fred Hampton.

After running away from home as a teenager, Basquiat co-founded the art collective SAMO (short for “Same Old Shit”), spraying paint wordplay on walls across New York City. He hung around the nascent hip hop scene of the time, influenced by early MC’s, DJ’s, and graffiti artists. Not long after, he began to catch the attention of the establishment art market and gallery world. It took several key downtown gallery exhibitions to catapult this adolescent artist into fame, and his artworks’ sale value into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

One night, 22-year-old Basquiat met 54-year-old Andy Warhol at a restaurant, as the young artist was at the cusp of catching his break in the art world. The two immediately clicked, setting off an intense artistic, personal relationship. Andy Warhol became Basquiat’s mentor, promoter, and collaborator, and Basquiat began spending time at Warhol’s Factory, where they produced art together. Yet their relationship never recovered after an irreconcilable falling out, just preceding Warhol’s 1987 death from gallbladder surgery complications and Basquiat’s passing from a heroin overdose the same year. 

Although the grittier aspects of Basquiat’s life are emphasized as part of his struggles to “make it” as a household name artist, he was ultimately quickly accepted into the mainstream art world because he adopted the principles of postmodernism as a young Black artist, and earned immense fame and wealth because of it. Basquiat’s legacy has both made postmodernism digestible for the masses, and contributed to the elevation and commodification of disaffected youth culture into high art. 
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Yet not only is Basquiat praised as an artistic genius of the likes of Picasso and Warhol, he is also lauded as a postmodernist inheritor of the broader Black American artistic legacy. In his works, Basquiat nods to the rich spirit of jazz artists like Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, and Miles Davis. Jazz, after all, has been a vanguard force within several key stages of the Black freedom struggle, including the Harlem Renaissance, which nurtured Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Basquiat’s Horn Players (1983), for example depicts several lumpy, skeletal figures playing a trumpet and a saxophone, with words like “Dizzy”, “Teeth”, “Ornithology” strewn throughout the triptych—in characteristic Basquiat-style of wordplay, rough sketches, and swaths of color. Throughout his works, he experimented with repeating words scrawled in capital letters, combining disparate phrases between his drawings in a graffiti-inspired style.

One must ask, how exactly is this postmodern approach honoring or elevating these Black jazz artists? Rather, how is this anything but deconstructing and muddying their great legacies, under the false guise of paying them tribute? It’s often said Basquiat’s irreverent style of scribbling words and doodles is a tribute to the improvisational nature of jazz, but in a visual format. However, compared to the disciplined practice of Duke Ellington and Count Basie, or the Coltranes, Sun Ra, and Miles Davis, it is apparent that Basquiat represents a sharp departure from such a tradition. Unlike Basquiat, the Coltranes, Sun Ra, and Davis did not make much money in their lifetimes, but did spend day and night honing their craft; they deeply studied the spiritual and artistic traditions of European classical music, as well as Eastern, African, and other civilizations, in order to produce new musical innovations for the world. In addition, their improvisational practice was rooted in a sincere engagement with their audience, furthering and following the footsteps of a participatory tradition of dialogue between artist and community, emerging from the legacy of Black struggle in this country. 

Basquiat certainly was improvisational across his short but prolific art career, his works pulsating with frenetic, unbounded creative energy. But in contrast to the artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Basquiat led an indulgent, egoistical, and carefree life—likely exacerbated by the fact that he was but a teenager when the white elite showered upon him staggering amounts of fame and wealth, not yet mature enough to develop a strong inner world that bound him closer to a principled struggle for his people’s liberation.  

Yet strangely enough, the academic tendency is to paint the artistic legacy of the Harlem Renaissance and the postmodern contributions of Basquiat as part of one single lineage of Black culture—the same way hip hop is also considered as “paying homage” to jazz, gospel, and funk. But few critics have explored how Basquiat is an aberration from the longer Black cultural tradition rooted in struggle, for the reasons above. 

This leaves the unanswered question: what do we stand to lose when we conflate or confuse Basquiat or Warhol’s postmodernist contributions, with the kind of substantive tradition of the Harlem Renaissance which gave a full-throated voice to the Afro-American strivings for liberation? And what do we gain when we choose to inherit the unadulterated spirit of artists like Jacob Lawrence or Aaron Douglas—who painted the Black worker, his dignity, history, and aspirations in their entirety—instead of taking Basquiat as a North Star for “radical” Black art? If we look up to Basquiat and Warhol, do we not lose the ability to see figures like Jacob Lawrence, Aaron Douglas, WEB Du Bois as role models for our times: Black leaders who stood tall with dignity and intellect, never compromising their courage and people’s struggle?

Instead, the hip hop culture that Basquiat partook in during his lifetime endures today, where those same defining values of his life live on: hip hop is rife with celebrity worship, commodification of art and artists’ persona as a brand, decadence, and nihilism. With its brash and violent lyrics, instrumentation, imagery, and overarching culture, hip hop actively contributes to a broad feeling among young people to wallow in their dissatisfaction, anger, and feelings of impotence to take responsibility for themselves and the world—in short, it encourages them to instead turn towards pessimism and destructive impulses. 

Culture, whether art or music, plays a significant role in the consciousness of young people, who are most susceptible as they develop their outlook and capacity to imagine and struggle for a future. With such a mainstreaming of postmodernism, what is its impact on the younger generation? What kind of future is postmodernism and its various tendencies striving for? Is it anything like that of the Harlem Renaissance, whose leaders dreamed of a world free of economic exploitation, where one’s sense of self and the human relationships of society are not determined by these values of commodification and decadence? 

It is clear that hip hop, as a cultural movement emerging from the legacy of Basquiat (and by extension Warhol’s Pop Art and postmodernism), fails to even come close. Ultimately, the nihilistic and materialistic qualities of hip hop and the art of Basquiat more closely embody the ideals of postmodernism and Pop Art, a stifling, deadening culture rooted in the values of the ruling class—rather than descending from an artistic tradition of the oppressed masses, like that of the Harlem Renaissance. Thus, postmodernism and its various tendencies debase the American people and drive them further away from the rich legacy of the Harlem Renaissance and its potential for inspiring a truly dynamic and liberatory art for our times. 

Once we stop conceiving certain radical-sounding postmodern movements as “organic” to the people and understand their true ideological basis, it becomes apparent why the ruling class needs these movements, and will stop at nothing to entrench them into mainstream culture. Du Bois said it best: All art is propaganda, and both the ruling class and revolutionary artists know it best—art is an ideological weapon to be used either for or against the people’s ability to struggle. Therefore, if we choose the side of the people, it is evident what we must do to move forward: to critique postmodernism in all forms, and draw from the true, organic cultural traditions to give birth a new cultural renaissance that speaks clearly to our times

As we enter a new age of the crisis of the West and its values, American capitalism once again tries to rebrand itself, the way the rise of postmodernism marked the start of a new American hegemonic era in the 50s, necessitating Andy Warhol and Pop Art to rebrand capitalism. In a similar fashion, counterrevolutionary currents today cloak themselves in the veneer of wokeness and identity politics, deploying figures like Jean-Michel Basquiat to win over the Black, brown, and working class youth. Yet identifying the origins of these dominant cultural tendencies in postmodernism frees us from their spell, and allows us to look to the true traditions of the people—like that of the Harlem Renaissance. 
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Our task today is to demand a new kind of art and culture for our times, rooted in truth and struggle, just as the Harlem Renaissance artists and intellectuals did. Humanity deserves art worthy of the people, not these decadent art movements, which are unable to liberate humanity from its current chains and bring about a brighter future. 

What can we draw from the legacies of Jacob Lawrence, Aaron Douglas, and WEB Du Bois to respond to this moment and build a path forward? It’s up to us to inherit all that the generations before have left us: their ideas, culture, and spirit of dignified resistance needed more than ever in these times. The memory of these progressive traditions can and must be revived through deep intensive study, as well as creatively applied to our period of crisis. By doing so, we plant seeds of a new revolutionary cultural movement to guide us onward.

IMPERIALIST hegemony over the third world is exercised not just through arms and economic might but also through the hegemony of ideas, by making the victims see the world the way imperialism wants them to see it. A pre-requisite for freedom in the third world therefore is to shake off this colonisation of the mind, and to seek truth beyond the distortions of imperialism. The anti-colonial struggle was aware of this; in fact the struggle begins with the dawning of this awareness. And since the imperialist project does not come to an end with formal political decolonisation, the education system in the newly independent ex-colonies must continuously aim to go beyond the falsehoods of imperialism.

This requires that the course contents and syllabi in Indian educational institutions must be different from those in metropolitan institutions. This is obvious in the case of humanities and social sciences where it is impossible to understand the present of the country without reckoning with its colonised past; and metropolitan universities scrupulously avoid making this connection, attributing the current state of underdevelopment of the country to all sorts of extraneous factors like laziness, lack of enterprise, superstition, and, above all, excessive population growth. But even in the case of natural sciences, the syllabi and course contents in third world universities cannot be identical with those in metropolitan universities, not because Einstein’s theory or quantum physics have any imperialist ideology in them, but because the range of scientific concerns in the third world is not necessarily the same as in the metropolitan countries. In fact, this was the view of JD Bernal, the British scientist and Marxist intellectual, one of the great figures of the twentieth century.

To believe that the syllabi and course contents in third world universities should be identical with those in metropolitan universities is itself a symptom of being hegemonised by imperialism. Education policy in the dirigiste period in India was aware of this; despite the obvious failings of the education system the education policy of that period could not be faulted for having a wrong vision.

With neo-liberalism however things begin to change, as the Indian big bourgeoisie gets integrated with globalised finance capital, as the Indian upper middle class youth looks for employment in multinational corporations, as the nation’s development is made dependent upon exporting goods to foreign markets and attracting foreign finance and foreign direct investment to the country. Significantly, even top functionaries of the government start talking of reinviting the East India Company back to India.

Since the era of neo-liberalism entails the hegemony of globalised finance capital, and since this capital requires a globalised (or at least a homogeneous) technocracy, the emphasis shifts to having a homogeneous education system internationally to train such a technocracy; and obviously such a system necessarily has to be one that emanates from the metropolis.

This means an education system not for decolonising minds but for recolonising minds. To this end, the UPA government earlier had invited several well-known foreign universities to set up branches in India, and even to “adopt’ some Indian universities that could be developed in their own image. Oxford, Harvard and Cambridge were obviously invited under this scheme not to follow in India the syllabi and course contents prepared within India, but to replicate what they follow back home. The idea was to start a process whereby there would be a uniformity of course contents and syllabi between the Indian and metropolitan universities, that is, to roll back the attempt made earlier towards a decolonisation of minds in Indian universities. In fact an Indian Human Resource Development minister had openly stated in parliament that his objective was to provide a Harvard education within India so that Indian students did not have to go abroad for it.

The NDA government has carried forward to a very great extent what the UPA government had started; and the National Education Policy it has enacted gives an official imprimatur to this idea of a uniform education system between India and the metropolis, which necessarily means the adoption of  common curricula, course contents and syllabi between Indian and metropolitan universities.

Towards this uniformity it has taken two decisive steps: one is the destruction of those universities in India that were providing a counter to the imperialist discourse, and that had, for this very reason, attracted world-wide attention; the obvious examples here are the Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Hyderabad Central University, Jadavpur University, and others.

The other is the carrying out of negotiations under the pressure of the University Grants Commission between individual Indian universities and foreign universities to make the course contents in various disciplines in the former clones of those in the latter. The only caveat here is that the UGC insists on having some material on subjects like Vedic Mathematics included in the course contents of Indian universities which the foreign universities do not always agree with.

No doubt some accord will be reached on these issues in due course, in which case the Indian universities would be having curricula and course contents that represent an admixture of the demands of neo-liberalism and the demands of the Hindutva elements. It would be a colonisation of minds with a veneer of “how great our country was in ancient times”. Imperialism should not have any problem with that. As long as imperialism, which is a modern phenomenon that has emerged with the development of capitalism, is painted not as an exploitative system but as a benevolent civilising mission for countries like India, as long as the present state of underdevelopment of these countries is not in any way linked to the phenomenon of imperialism, which it would not be if there is uniformity of course contents with metropolitan universities, then what had happened in ancient times is not of much concern to imperialism, at least to the liberal imperialist viewpoint, as distinct from the extreme right which favours a white supremacist discourse.

An alternative tendency with the same consequence, of recolonising minds, is to do away with the social sciences and humanities altogether, or to reduce them to inconsequential subjects, and substitute them with courses that are exclusively“job-oriented” and do no ask questions about society, like management and cost accountancy. In fact both the Hindutva elements and the corporates have a vested interest in this, since both are keen to have students who are exclusively self-centred and do not ask questions about the trajectory of social development. This tendency too is gathering momentum at present.

An education system that recolonises minds is the counterpart of the corporate-Hindutva alliance that has acquired political hegemony in the country. Such a recolonisation is what the corporates want; and the Hindutva elements that were never associated with the anti-colonial struggle, that never understood the meaning of nation-building, that do not understand the role and significance of imperialism, and hence of the need for decolonising minds, are quite content as long as lip service is paid to the greatness of ancient India. An education system that purveys the imperialist ideology with some vedic seasoning is good enough for them. This is exactly the education system that the country is now in the process of building.

The corporate- Hindutva alliance however is a response to the crisis of neo-liberalism, when corporate capital feels the need to ally itself with the Hindutva elements to maintain its hegemony in the face of the crisis. The National Education Policy likewise is not for carrying the nation forward but for managing the crisis by destroying thought, by preventing people from asking questions and seeking the truth. The “job orientation” that this policy prides itself on is only for a handful of persons; in fact the crisis of neo-liberalism means fewer jobs overall. In sync with this, the education system excludes large numbers of persons; their minds are to be filled instead with communal poison within an altered discourse that by-passes issues of material life, and makes them potential low-wage recruits for fascistic thug-squads.

This education policy therefore can only be transitory, until the youth starts asking questions about the unemployment and distress that has become its fate. And as an alternative development trajectory beyond neo-liberal capitalism is explored, the quest for an education system beyond what the NDA government is seeking to introduce will also begin; and decolonisation of the mind will again come on to the agenda, as it had done during the anti-colonial struggle.