Breadtube: an amalgamation of Youtube channels who speak on communism, anarchism, progressivism, and leftwing politics. Sadly, Breadtube is the first place that most people go to when learning about leftism. Breadtube likes to champion themselves as the experts on all things related to Leftism. They claim to be the speakers of truth, along with being a helpful hand for confused young people stuck in the alt-right pipeline. However, like The Young Turks this is sadly not the case. Breadtube is controlled opposition, an anti-capitalism approved by the capitalists. Caleb Maupin’s book Breadtube Serves Imperialism is a brilliant rebuttal against many of the talking points made by Breadtubers. The book exposes the wider trend of Synthetic Leftism which is what many Breadtubers subscribe to. It also clarifies to the reader in clear and simple terms what capitalism, fascism, socialism, and imperialism are, and the way forward. All in all it’s a highly recommended book, and should be read by people who are interested in getting into Marxism. Especially, if they want to avoid the ideological cesspool of Breadtube. 

The introduction describes the deep divide amongst the ruling class. On one side of the ruling class there exists Wall Street, Exxon Mobil/the supermajors, and Silicon Valley, the part of the ruling class that tends to be more socially liberal. They follow the line created by the Council of Foreign Relations and believe that America should strategically undermine AES and anti-imperialists countries. The other side of the ruling class is composed of lower level capitalists, contains figures such as Betsy DeVos, Mike Lindell (My Pillow), fracking corporations, and military contractors who prefer a more libertarian deregulated economic model and a more outright hawkish foreign policy. The upper level of the ruling class (the former) prefers clandestine operations, proxies, propaganda campaigns, and most insidiously turning leftists against each other and funding certain leftists to create a controlled opposition. The lower level of the ruling class (the latter) typically prefers more direct conflicts and outright invasions. However, this is not to say that the tactics listed are mutually exclusive to each side of the ruling class, after all as Reagan said “We are all friends after six o’clock”. The capitalists nonetheless share the same interests of preventing the proletariat from rising up or effectively challenging their power. 

An interesting point that Maupin makes in the introduction is how Breadtube resembles the counter gangs that the British set up in Kenya to fight against the Land and Freedom Army. These counter gangs supposedly hated the British but also hated the Land and Freedom Army. The counter gangs were crucial in helping the British defeat the Mau Mau uprising. Like the counter gangs, Breadtube is used by the upper level of the ruling class to fight against the right wing elements of the lower level ruling class and to also purge true anti-liberal, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist voices from the left. It then no wonder that Breadtube loves to participate in cancel culture, label everyone who is truly anti-imperialist a tankie, genocide denier, dictator supporter, or even more disgustinly a Nazi. 
    
Maupin additionally brings up the social democrats in comparison to Breadtube. The social democrats in the early 20th actively worked to discredit the Soviet Union, and today Breadtube actively works to discredit actually existing socialist countries along with dismissing historical socialist countries as “state capitalist.” However, unlike Breadtube the social democrats did not believe in degrowth, many social democrats were and still are active in the labor movement, and working to improve living standards among the working class. While many social democrats today don’t accept Marxist analysis many in the past did. This is in stark contrast to Breadtube and the Synthetic Left which promotes degrowth and deindustrialization. Breadtube sees growth as a danger to the environment. It also for the most part rejects Marxist analysis or in some cases quotes Marxist theorists out of context. The majority of Breadtubers reject central planning and advocate for a type of “socialism” where worker cooperatives replace traditional firms. Never mind the fact that worker cooperatives can fit into a capitalist economy. Also unlike the soc dems in the early 20th century who didn’t support illegal or violent activities, many Breadtubers have been recorded to have supported illegal and violent street activities. Never mind that the capitalist class always uses riots and street violence as an excuse to restrict civil liberties and make it more difficult for true socialists and communists to organize. Breadtube’s goal in essence is to warp the definitions of anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism to make it something that is non threatening to the bourgeoisie while also defeating true communists and right wingers promoted by lower level capitalists. 

In Chapter 1, Maupin lists the top Breadtube creators and their backgrounds. Interestingly enough many of these Breadtubers have ties to or have been given the stamp of approval by bourgeois institutions. Contrapoints for example has been written about with glowing remarks by the New York Times and the New Yorker. Steve Hassan, while not a Breadtuber, has no doubt influenced the rhetoric of many Breadtubers and mainstream liberal news networks. Yet, despite being held in high regard Hassan was involved with the Cult Awareness Network which kidnapped people who were suspected to be in cults, the victims were deprived of privacy and the ability to sleep. Yet, despite his involvement with an organization like CAN, Hassan has yet to be arrested or called out for his behavior, rather he is allowed on networks like CNN and MSNBC. He has also been the mentor of Caleb Cain. Caleb Cain was raised by a conservative family who later adopted socially progressive viewpoints. Later, during a low point in his life he went down the alt-right pipeline. He was later brought out of the alt-right pipeline with the help of his girlfriend and started watching Destiny videos. But what’s notable about Cain is that much of his “political beliefs” only went so far as his Youtube recommendations, only “considering” attending Charlottesville. However, he has made it very clear that he is interested in greater censorship on social media, censorship that harms people on the left the most, and more intriguingly Caleb has collaborated with both Contrapoints and Destiny, and has also been featured on  MSM like CNN and MSNBC. It’s rather interesting that a group of people online who proclaim themselves to be bastions of revolutionary thought and activity are rarely connected or involved with any Marxist or in certain cases anarchist group. Vaush for example who claims to be an anarchist has no connection to any anarchist group and neither does Thought Slime.

Additionally, many notable Breadtube figures have been endorsed by bourgeois institutions, such is the case of Contrapoints. Breadtube was also overwhelmingly in favor of voting for Biden, with many figures like Vaush, Contrapoints, and Thought Slime preaching to their audiences about how Biden was “harm reduction.” Another thing that’s also rather ironic about Breadtube is their endorsement of US foreign policy with many of them slandering historical and modern AES nations as “red fascist” or dismissing them as “state capitalist” yet claiming to be the true anti-capitalists and anti-imperialists. The truth is abundantly clear Breadtube is a counter gang and loyal to the liberal bourgeoisie, while it’s ridiculous to say that they are directly taking orders from Washington, they still do the bidding of imperialists even if they are aware of it or not. 
    
Many of Breadtube’s most notable figures call themselves anarchists, these figures include Vaush, NonCompete, and Thought Slime. Breadtube takes its name from Peter Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread, Kropotkin rejected Marxist analysis and had an unrealistic belief that every human being had good intentions and thus would be able to operate in a system without coercion. This is in stark contrast to Marxist views on human nature, which sees man as being shaped by their environment and more broadly the economic system, human nature is fluid, not inherently good or evil. Breadtube also rejects Marxist for the most part, with many Breadtubers denying the labor theory of value (Vaush, Socialism Done Left, RE-EDUCATION, and Destiny) basic Marxist definitions of capitalism, socialism, fascism, and imperialism. For the most part when asked about their ideal societies it would be a society where worker cooperatives replaced traditional businesses.They reject central planning or in certain cases don’t seem to know what it is *cough* Thought Slime *cough*.  Vaush described his ideal society as such “Everything remains the same but replaced with worker cooperatives.” Worker Cooperatives are of course much better than traditional firms, but that doesn’t mean they are socialist. They keep production for profit, they don’t abolish the commodity form, in this world housing for example would still be built to be sold not to be lived in as would food.

A worker cooperative has the same incentive as a traditional firm to fire more workers or replace them with robots because each worker at the firm would get a larger share of the profits. Also turning Boeing and Raytheon into worker cooperatives won’t stop the military industrial complex, rather it would encourage the workers who work there to want it even more because they would be getting a more direct share of the profits. Breadtube also seems to have a bad habit of not reading their theory and history. This is evidenced by Vaush’s need for a theory compiler. Breadtube seems to vastly misunderstand Marx’s political views claiming that he was not a “statist.” Vaush, for example, points to a quote out of context in Marx’s Civil War in France “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready state machinery, and wield it for their own purposes.'' However, put into context this quote does not mean that states are unneeded but what a post capitalist society must do. In essence this quote is saying the exact opposite of what Vaush means, yes the workers can’t use the ready state machinery to create socialism, they have to create a new state apparatus. Breadtube has shown us that their knowledge on Marxism is extremely limited or nonexistent, with many of them distorting much of what Marx originally meant. Yet we shouldn’t be surprised at this because Breadtube has shown to us that they don’t care about revolution or moving towards socialism where production for profit is abolished. Instead they’d rather keep everything the same but have worker cooperatives. They are in essence anti-capitalists loyal to the super capitalists and we shouldn’t be surprised that they don’t actually want to abolish capitalism. 


Aside from vastly misunderstanding major works of theory, Breadtube also has an awful habit of smearing anyone who disagrees with them, including people who are truly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist,  as a nazi or adjacent to them. This was seen recently with the debate between Vaush and Jackson Hinkle where Vaush accused Hinkle to be in the same camp as Holocaust deniers because he questioned the State Department narrative about Syria. It’s also worth mentioning that much of Vaush’s sources for the debate came from Wikipedia and Bellingcat, along with misreading the leaked OPCW files. Additionally, while claiming to be anti-fascist and virtue signalling to be against the Holocaust, Vaush made incredibly anti-semetic remarks towards Aarond Mate, who’s father Gabor Mate was a holocaust survivor. Vaush isn’t the only person to horribly abuse the nazi lable. Natalie Wynn, otherwise known as Contrapoints published a video detailing how to detect nazis and alt-righters, many of these indicators included doing common hand gestures like the okay sign, patriotism, or even disavowing and claiming that one is not a fascist themselves.

​This horrible misuse of the label of fascist or nazi isn’t harmless it actively helps to delegitimize voices who are critical of US foreign policy, and if anything helps fascists. It makes the left look delusional and further alienates it from the working class, which is supposedly the people they wish to appeal to. This very liberal use of the word fascist also insinuates something even more insidious that normal everyday working class Americans are fascist because they might be patriotic, are Christians or religious, hold culturally moderate or conservative views, don’t wish to see their family members die for oil, and want stability and to just feed their families, or even want to have families in the first place. This is in essence the message of Breadtube, the American working class is evil and prone to reactionary ideologies while bourgeois academic socialists championing wokeness and an unrecognizable interpretation of Marxism will be the ones who will save us. 
    
There is also the pervasive notion of degrowth, which is peddled and embraced by many breadtubers, most notably Thought Slime. The idea of degrowth is not a new one and has been around for hundreds of years starting with Malthus. Malthus proposed that because birth rates and consumption rates are greater than production of resources the earth would suffer from overpopulation and face some sort of apocalyptic crisis. What Malthus failed to realize is that innovation and ingenuity are unlimited, humans have been able to advance and innovate productive forces to further accommodate more people. There is currently more than enough food and shelter for everyone. The planet has eight billion people but can feed ten billion people.

In the US we have three million vacant units but half a million homeless people if not more. The reason why we have so many people in poverty is not because of a lack of resources but because the allocation of those resources is determined by profit not by use. A worker cooperative society promoted by Breadtube wouldn’t change this. People are being overexploited and can’t buy back the goods that they used their labor to make. This isn’t due to overpopulation or overconsumption, but because in order to live people must sell their labor to a capitalist. Overpopulation and Malthusianism have also been championed by eugenists like Margaret Sanger and genocidal regimes like the British Empire who starved millions of people in India because the people on the subcontinent “had too many children.” Overpopulation and degrowth is a complete and utter lie promoted by the capitalist class and would make the lives of working people worse. 

Much of Breadtube is very pessimistic, it criticizes capitalism without actually offering any feasible solutions, and dismisses any real life socialist experiments. Socialists must not only criticize capitalism but also offer workers a path out of poverty and exploitation. Socialism has to be constructive and progressive. Communism is not a society where everyone is equally poor but a society where there is so much material abundance that class hierarchies, states, and money no longer need to exist. Communism cannot be achieved through pessimism, degrowth, McCarthyite smears of calling everyone you dislike a Nazi, and most importantly a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is. The transition to communism will be difficult but anything offered by counter revolutionaries will be worse. Even during harsh sanctions and constant sabotage the Soviet Union and other socialist republics gave workers a better life than what became before, often feudalism or subjugation under imperialist powers, and what came after, austerity and privatization leading often leading to the rise of a corrupt oligarch class and a falling standard of living continuing to the present. 

The Center for Political Innovation founded by Caleb Maupin offers a four point plan to rescue the country. The first point is a mass mobilization of workers to rebuild the country’s infrastructure, including the building of high speed rail and a revamping of the university system. A five year economic plan would also be overseen by the brightest minds of the country. The second and third point is the nationalization of natural resources and banking. The lending of money will no longer be done for profit but will be overseen by the local community and country over all. A national bank will be established to replace the financial sector. Credit will be given out if it aligns with the economic plan to secure long term developmental growth. Interest will also be paid back into the public budget. Finally, there will be an economic bill of rights. The four point plan is intended to move the US towards a rationally planned socialist economy free from the anarchy of production. American workers need of government of action to fight for working families!​

“Why I am an Atheist” is one of the paramount revolutionary and rational texts written in the Indian subcontinent. It’s a 24-page essay that Bhagat Singh wrote in 1934 when he was in Lahore Central Jail. He was detained for being involved in the assassination of Deputy Superintendent of Police John Saunders in retaliation to Lala Lajpat Rai’s death. In the prison, he met Baba Randhir Singh, a religious man and member of the Ghader Party who was convicted in the first Lahore conspiracy case. Baba Randhir Singh wanted to teach him about God and his beliefs, but Bhagat Singh maintained his atheistic stand. Reacting to his atheistic attitude, Randhir Singh said, "You are giddy with fame and have developed an ego which is standing like a black curtain between you and the God". As a reply to Randhir Singh, he wrote this essay on October 5th-6th, 1930.

Bhagat Singh was an Indian Marxist revolutionary who was a member of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association. He was heavily impelled by the works of Vladimir Lenin and called himself a staunch Leninist. His two revolutionary acts against the colonial British Raj led to his hanging in 1931 at the age of 23 which gave him an Olympian status in Indian revolutionary history. He is today remembered as a figure who not just wanted a political revolution but a social revolution to break the age-old discriminatory practices. Bhagat Singh has written many articles on untouchability in Indian society and communalism. “Why I am an Atheist” is his magnum opus.

He begins the essay by elucidating that vanity is not the cause behind his atheist views. He rebuffs the existence of the almighty God from his experience of what he witnessed around himself and in society. He further explains that vanity cannot lead to atheism that these two are in contradiction to each other. When someone is lead by vanity he either reckons himself to be in possession of godly qualities or declares himself a god.  According to Comrade Bhagat Singh, none of these two individuals are atheists. They are theists who believe in supernatural powers that are controlling the universe.

Bhagat Singh says that he has not turned atheist after he received acclamation after the constituent assembly bombing. He has been an atheist for a long time. Initially, he too like most Indians was a staunch believer. He used to recite the Gayatri Mantra in school for hours. However, eventually, he came to question his belief and started believing in disbelief. When he joined the revolutionary party, and came to know his comrades well, he was surprised to find them having no sense of impiety. The members were neither here nor there in matters of belief and some were closet atheists. There were Comrades who according to Bhagat Singh were well-read on socialism and communism but yet they couldn’t suppress their desires to recite Geeta. There was one who Comrade was not involved in such practices as he considered religion to be the outcome of human weakness or the limitation of human knowledge, but yet he was not critical of the existence of the omnipresent almighty god.

When he joined the party, he had the desire to study more so that he could challenge other Comrades during debates. He writes:

The romance of the militancy dominated our predecessors; now serious ideas ousted this way of thinking. No more mysticism! No more blind faith! Now realism was our way of thinking.

He first studied mysticism and blind faith and next he replaced them with the cult of realism. He studied the works of Bakunin, Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and Nirlammba Swami. He roved into the mysteries of the world, studied them, and found no direct proofs for them. Instead, what he found were several religions that were mutually incompatible with each other - Hinduism is very different from Islam, and Buddhism and Jainism with Brahmanism. All faiths differ on the rudimentary questions but each of them claims to be the only true religion. Bhagat Singh calls this the “root of the evil” as instead of instigating the ideas of ancient thinkers and thus dispensing ourselves with the ideological weapon for future struggle, we cling to orthodox religion and in this way reduce human awakening to a stagnant pool. This very dissertation is very important to understand the religions such as Buddhism which started as the struggle against Brahmanism in India but after some years it became a regressive religion that was supported on the foundation of serfdom, especially in Pre-China Tibet. Therefore, the lack of a single universal faith in this world was proof that there was no God. By the end of 1926 when he was 19 he was convinced that the existence of an almighty God is a façade.

Bhagat Singh elaborates on Karl Marx “Religion is the opium of the masses" quote by saying;

Beliefs make it easier to go through the hardships, even make them pleasant. Man can find strong support in god and an encouraging consolation in his name. If you have no belief in him, then there is no alternative but to depend on yourself.

Marx when he said "religion is the opium of the masses" believed that religion had certain practical obligations in society that were similar to the function of opium in a sick or injured person: it reduced people's immediate suffering and provided them with pleasant illusions which gave them the strength to carry on. In this sense, while Marx may have no sympathy for religion itself, he has deep sympathy for those proletariats who put their trust in it.

Bhagat Singh discussing vanity tells us that in difficult times, vanity evaporates and man cannot defy the beliefs held by the general public. He wrote this in the most difficult phase of his life and still had not given up his rationalism as he had no hope of afterlife like religious people; instead, he stressed moving to nothingness after death.

He draws a fine line between the morality among theist and atheist, that atheist conduct moral acts without any selfish motive of the reward in this life or afterlife. An eternal reward and damnation is the basic premise on which religion thrives. Atheist wages war on oppressors, tyrants or exploiters not to become a king or for a bounty, but to cast off the yoke of slavery and establish liberty and peace. This reason explains why morality has been hijacked by religion, one of the biggest scams of mankind, namely, many people believe that you cannot effectuate moral acts without the fear of almighty and eternal damnation.

Bhagat Singh apprises us by saying that it is incumbent for every person who stands for progress to lambast every doctrine of the old belief. This is a common thing in many revolutionaries and is also found in the writings of Mao Tse-tung. He says that faith is appreciated in any theory if it has been subjected to rigorous reasoning as reason is the guiding principle that shatters blind belief which is hazardous as it makes a person reactionary by depriving his understanding power.

Bhagat Singh says in a way that it is not enough that only atheists have to explicate their ideas, theist should be held liable in this debate as well to explain why they believe in something that they cannot see. He asks a simple question that why God created this world that is full of misery and plight, where no one lives in peace. He says that the concept of an ‘omnipotent god’ is not sound as he is held by a law that prohibits from ending melancholy or maybe it’s his pleasure to torture humans. He compares him with Roman Emperor Nero who burnt Rome, killed many but still a limited number for his leisure and enjoyment. History remembers him as a psycho and mass murderer who enjoyed torturing. Pages are blackened with invective diatribes condemning Nero: the tyrant, the heartless, the wicked. He also takes the example of Mongol Emperor Genghis Khan who slaughtered thousands and asks that why almighty created such a world where the majority of his creations are slaughtered and oppressed by the few. Millions are dying of hunger and living grim lives. Labourers are leading an awful life while the rich vampires are sucking their blood.

Hindus believe in the concept of reincarnation, that one gets reborn after death and that his next life is determined by the deeds of the present life. So if anyone is suffering and is oppressed in this life, then he must have been a sinner in the previous one and the one who is oppressing others in this life were godly people in their previous life. This provides legitimacy to their oppression. Lenin also in his works on religion illustrated this. In ‘Socialism and Religion’ Lenin explained how capitalists use religion as a tool for their profits and to justify their actions and they assure the workers who work in terrible conditions of getting an astounding afterlife by obeying their employers conscientiously. Lenin believed that religion is a historical phenomenon tied with feudalism and capitalism.

Bhagat Singh thereon talks about the philosophy of jurisprudence. He says that the punishment can be of three types. These are revenge, reform, and deterrence. Out of these, reformative has significant scope but Hinduism gives no room for reformation. As no one remembers one’s past, one is denied the opportunity to reform. One continues to suffer blindly without knowing the causes or effects. Bhagat Singh does not seem to consider the possibility that remembering all of one’s past will place an unbearable burden on one’s soul, and hence one is allowed to reform with a clean slate and redemption through suffering. That’s why he called poverty the capacious punishment and called it a sin.

Bhagat Singh raises the question of why an all-loving almighty god cannot stop someone from transgressing. Why he cannot see the plight of millions and learns the truth only after millions had undergone untold tribulations and penury. What is the fate of a person who by no sin of his, born into a low caste family, is shunned and hated by the upper caste all his life. He cannot go to school and hence remains ignorant. Why are lower caste kept illiterate by Brahmins. If they heard a few words from the Vedas, Brahmins would pour molten lead into their ears. Bhagat Singh asks that if someone commits a sin, who is responsible, the person or the god who, according to various scriptures, is responsible for anything happening in this universe. These are few questions he asks the theist to justify their imaginary lord.

Bhagat Singh exposes religion as follows:

My dear friends, these theories have been coined by the privileged classes. They try to justify the power they have usurped and the riches they have robbed with the help of such theories. Yes! It was perhaps Upton Sinclair that wrote at some place that just makes a man a believer in immortality and then rob him of all his riches and possessions. He shall help you even in that ungrudgingly. The dirty alliance between religious preachers and possessors of power brought the boon of prisons, gallos, knouts and above all such theories for the mankind.

The above quote reveals why religion is a pertinent tool of capitalism. It justifies the authority. In early times, monarchies were buttressed based on ‘Divine rights of the king,’ that is, the king dictated to the population because he is the figure most adjacent to god, and it was the god who entrusted him to rule over people. With the advent of capitalism, a similar approach was taken by the bourgeois to preserve an unequal status quo and pacify the proletariat. The working class needs to abandon religion, only then only they would be able to rise against the bourgeoisie and gain control of the means of production.

Bhagat Singh says that people rebut socialism on the pretext of implementation even though common people understand the merits and the welfare of people under socialism. So he asks theist that if an almighty God is so loving and filled with love and compassion then he must step up and fill the hearts of people with altruistic humanism that forces them to give means of production to the working class and free them from the shackles of money.

He casts aspersions on the other freedom fighters as he says that the British is not ruling from God's consent, but the reason, rather, is that we lack the courage to oppose it. British are commanding us at the point of gun and coercion through police and militia. He asks that where is God when one nation oppresses the other for imperialist goals, which according to him is "the most deplorable sin".

Bhagat Singh instructs the readers to read Darwin’s Origin of Species, which is a stalwart book against religion as it offers a logical explanation of the creation of everything in our surroundings, including that the progress of mankind is due to man’s constant conflict with nature and his efforts to deploy it for his own well being. He further says that God was invented by man in his imagination when he realized his weaknesses and limitations. This gave him the courage to face impediments and also to circumscribe his outburst in prosperity and affluence. He in the end coaxed the readers to be rational and oppose every regressive narrow concept of religion and face adversaries with valour. It is more salutary to face dilemmas in a realistic and judicious manner instead of anticipating for them to solve themselves with prayers. Thus, his atheism is not the outcome of vanity.

Religion enslaves people; it makes a mockery of human potential by curbing people from expanding their knowledge and understanding of the world. It makes us slaves of an imaginary being and makes us bow in front of the figurines just like how it was during serfdom days, except in this case there is no one on the other side who can be held culpable.  We have to spend our entire lives on our knees thanking him for saving us from his wrath yet all of us face tragedies.

He ends the essay with a heavy message:
​
Let us see how steadfast I am. One of my friends asked me to pray. When informed of my atheism, he said, during your last days you will begin to believe! I said, No, dear Sir, it shall not be. I consider it an act of degradation and demoralization on my part. For such a selfish motive, I am not going to pray. Readers and friends, "Is this vanity"? If it is, I stand for it.

As said before, the biggest tragedy of humankind's history remains that religion has hijacked morality. This makes people fall for various religions as many assume that you cannot be morally upright and conduct righteous acts without being religious.

The story of UNI’s underground press and its student staff stands as a microcosm of the burgeoning political and social changes seen in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. At the University of Northern Iowa, small-town Iowa students and working-class youth became the messengers of the era’s radical politics and student action.

At the national level, the United States of the 1960s and early-1970s was a time of massive social upheaval marked by the conflict in Vietnam, social/political movements, and the rise of the “freaks” and the New-Left. We have no shortage of books seeking to explain why so many American youths grew restless and dissatisfied with their country, and why so many turned to left-wing politics throughout the decade. Whether they’re viewed through a liberal, conservative, or socialist lens, the Sixties (the all encompassed decade) is a topic that is still fiercely debated today. Depending on the researcher or daytime television wonk, the Sixties stands as a watershed moment in American culture. But the counterculture of these youth rebels and “freaks” is most often attributed to the coastal cities and major universities in the USA. Areas such as the Midwest are often forgotten about or brushed aside by the more “exciting” locations such as San Francisco and Berkeley. So, it is my goal with this article to nullify those notions and discuss the radicalism that was present at UNI.

​ The counterculture of the Sixties was a diverse and expansive list of comedy, music, drugs, and writing. One facet of this massive ocean of movements was the rise of the so-called underground press in cities such as New York and San Francisco, especially at the universities. For those on the New-Left, underground newspapers were the alternative to the dismissive critiques of the mainstream media and provided their readership with a vulgar, passionate look into the cultures in which they lived. In 1965, the New Left could only claim 5 such newspapers, mostly in big cities, but within a few years, several hundred newspapers were in circulation with a combined readership in the millions.[1] Underground newspapers, according to Abbie Hoffman,  were the “... most important institution in our lives... It keeps tuned in on what's going on in the community and around the world. Values, myths, symbols, and all the trappings of our culture are determined to a large extent by the underground press.”[2]

The story of the underground press at the University of Northern Iowa begins with a newspaper called the Campus Underground in 1968. The Campus Underground was conceived by a publisher named Doug Warrington who aspired to make it a nationally syndicated newspaper. Its office was located 401-⅓ Main Street, Cedar Falls, Iowa, presently the location of the Voodoo Club Bar. In the beginning, the paper had 30 representatives from colleges and universities across the state who contributed articles and tips. The paper’s editor, Bruce “Bruno” Niceswanger, was a master’s student at UNI who was recruited by Doug Warrington after a search at all three state universities in Iowa.[3] The first issue was released on October 21, 1968, In this issue, they discussed segregation at Loras College, draft board protests across the state, and a feature-length editorial from David Quegg on his experiences among the protesting and riots at the Chicago DNC Convention of 1968 that previous summer. But after a few issues, a lack of resources and communication led to less participation from other campuses, and Cedar Falls became its primary audience.[4] While not a major success on campus, the paper gained a dedicated following as it grew more progressive and bolder with each issue.

That was until the late fall of 1968, in which a review of Norman Mailer’s “Fall of Miami and the Siege of Chicago” by Carl Childress, a controversial UNI English professor, used a quote that contained a certain four-letter word. After this, the local printers refused to print any further issues unless the obscenity was removed, especially as the pressure of printing an underground newspaper grew.[5] The staff of Campus Underground was then forced to build their own light tables and lay out the paper themselves. After this, the paper began to face financial woes as the costs were just barely met from each issue to the next. By the spring of 1969, the staff began to print notices informing the readers about their financial situation while asking for donations.[6] According to a 1971 article from the Northern Iowan, at one point the staff was short $100 of the printer’s fee and frantically rushed around the Hub looking for donations until they finally received the necessary funds.[7] The last Campus Underground came out on March 10, 1969, due to a combination of financial problems, student disinterest in politics, and everyone going home for the summer. But this was far from the end of the underground presses run at UNI.

​The summer of 1969 saw Woodstock and the birth of Abbie Hoffman’s “Woodstock Nation”. This saw the blossoming of the cliché Sixties counterculture that we know today. By that fall, scores of “freaks”, or hippies, began to arrive at UNI, and with them came the rise of more radical elements such as members of the New Left. With this new wave came the arrival of the rebranded Campus Underground, now named the New Prairie Primer. Edited again by Bruno Niceswanger, the paper was assisted by the dedicated core group of Dave Quegg, Peg Wherry, Jean Seeland, and Gary Hoff. The New Prairie Primer, which I’ll refer to as the Primer from here on out, served as the epitome of this new spirit on campus. The first volume of the Primer Released on October 4, 1969, with a several page long expose by Bruno on his and David Quegg’s experiences at Woodstock titled “Going Up to Meat County.” This article proved to be very popular among UNI students, and it helped set the mood for future iterations of the paper with its quick wit, vulgarity and Hunter S. Thompson style prose and reporting. 

Following the success of their first issue, the Primer had received enough donations to print thousands of copies for their second edition, a free issue about the Vietnam War to coincide with the events of the STOP Vietnam War Moratorium across the state.[8] This issue contained stories from draft dodgers across the state, including a UNI student named Dick Simpson who explained why he refused induction into the armed services. It was also the first publication anywhere in Iowa to list all the state’s war dead.[9] This issue also showed a great deal of cooperation among various statewide church ministries with the radical left and anti-war hippies in the anti-war movement. But this seemingly unlikely coalition produced results unlike that seen anywhere else in Cedar Falls. The previous 1968 moratorium had brought out only 300 marchers, but by the moratorium on October 15, 1969, nearly 2,000 marchers flooded the UNI campus.[10] But this relationship also drew some ire from the community at large, especially as the Primer’s office was in the Bethany House on College Hill, where the Primer had special arrangements with the United Christian Ministry to use their property.[11]

​One chief critic of this relationship was a cantankerous, editor of the Waterloo Daily Courier named Bill Severin, also known as the Iron Duke. On the front page of the October 12th issue, the Iron Duke stated, “I have no quarrel with Niceswanger, Quegg, et all, or their right to publish a radical leftwing newspaper. But they and the United Christian Ministry would seem to make strange bedfellows.”[12] In response, the Primer blew the incident out of proportion with a smug, tongue-in-cheek center spread titled, “Primer Staff Bewildered, Hurt”, featuring their high school pictures and squeaky clean, cliché records as small-town Iowan youth along with their own reactions to the Iron Duke’s accusations.[13] This incident was a boon to the Primer’s sales and cemented the Primer’s tone for the rest of the year as a humorous, yet informative publication on campus counterculture.

​The Primer’s first run was an array of everything from local music reviews and interviews with Waterloo civil rights activists. Having shifted their focus from national news in the Campus Underground to local coverage, the contents of the Primer give an interesting look into the culture of the Cedar Valley during this time. Of course, one of the most important issues on campus at the time was that of drugs. The Primer featured tongue in cheek critiques of the local CFPD “Narcs” and the pearl-clutching of the more conservative Cedar Falls residents. In one such issue the Primer covered a community symposium on the issue of recreational drug use in the Cedar Valley. In response to the symposium, the Primer printed tutorials on how to make your own joints and listed the local street prices of dope, hash, and LSD at the time.[14]

​One informative, and fascinating article from this period was an interview conducted by the Primer’s own Bruno Nicewanger and their secretary Marsha Petersen titled “3 Viet Vets Rap on the War”.[15] Released with the fourth issue in November 1969, the Primer spoke with three UNI students that had served in Vietnam about why they became involved with the anti-war movement after their time overseas. In retrospect, what made this article fascinating is that the interviewees represent what I deem to be a decent overall representation of Iowan’s backgrounds at the time. Tony Ogden was a 24-year-old white male from Sanborn, Iowa, a town in Northwestern, Iowa. Dave Sessions was a 28-year-old white male from the medium-sized industrial town of Mason City, Iowa. Sam Dell was a 22-year-old African American male who was born in Phillip, Mississippi, but had grown up in Waterloo, in eastern Iowa. While not a full cross section of Iowa’s socioeconomic makeup, these three men represent facets of Iowa’s urban and rural population who converged on Iowa’s campuses during this period of cultural and political turmoil.

​In summary, all three guys described their experiences overseas, their backgrounds, and their journey towards realizing the atrocities and injustices happening in Vietnam. Tony described the brutality he saw unleashed upon the Vietnamese people he came close to, Sam talked of the racism that followed the military overseas, and Sessions spoke of the bureaucratic apathy towards the death and destruction being perpetuated by armed forces. As such, each man's experiences caused them to question their values and ideological frameworks, driving them towards becoming radically against a system they saw as needlessly unjust and cruel. A passage that stood out when reading this interview was from its final page, which saw all three men ruminating on the meaning of the “American tradition” and the contradictions they saw during their service. As Tony put it, “Seeing marines kneeling within sight of a pile of bodies having a chaplain cram wafers down their throats, under a cross.”

While there are plenty of sections one could discuss from these interviews in the Primer, I see this insight into these three young men as a poignant look into the mindset of the emerging student radicals in the United States. But I have also not yet been so clear as what constitutes a student radical currently. And in sincerest sense I have struggled to find a definition insofar as who “they” were. In 2019, even as much then, the term “student radical” has many different connotations depending on who you ask. For the most part, a “student radical” is usually considered to be someone who holds left wing values and belongs to various flavors along the left-wing spectrum. To the politically illiterate, this would mean anyone to the left of the center right or is a “liberal”, but I digress. While a whole paper can be made on the distinction, a radical can be most definitely defined as an individual who opposes the status-quo and calls for a new system of governance and the distribution of resources. In the era of the Primer, as Vietnam raged and COINTELPRO lurked in the shadows, “student radicals” were a hodge podge of nondenominational leftists, middle-class liberals, and the “flower power” freaks.

Much like discourse in the vague progressive leanings of today, the ‘60s were a ripe era of barraging liberals and infighting amongst different leftist ideological sects. However, for the most part, UNI’s left-wing and liberals found somewhat common ground in the anti-war movement and demands for more succinct student rights on campus. As is, the Primer got an uptick in sales due to the pearl-clutching of local Cedar-Loo residents after allying with the United Campus Ministries in October of ‘69. And as further articles prove within the Primer, Cedar-Loo was not that far off from the rest of the United States. Labor disputes, gentrification, environmental pollution, and racial tensions were proliferating in Waterloo. Like Joker's duality of man in Full Metal Jacket, Waterloo, Iowa, has had a tumultuous history with segregation. In the fall of 1968 these issues, and industry layoffs, led to instances of rioting in select areas of Waterloo.[16] Other concerns at the time included pollution being released by the John Deere Company and Chamberlain Manufacturing Co. that was potentially contaminating the Cedar River.

​The Primer then served as a repository, or even a messenger, of these causes that were not often covered by the mainstream media in the community. In a special issue about ecology, the Primer advertised events from an environmental group called SOMETHING, deriding the local tv station for passing environmental pollution onto the individuals during a special sponsored by John Deere and Chamberlain Co.[17] The Primer also teamed up with the Grinnell based-paper the High and Mighty to co-author the so-titled “Military-Industrial Complex” and Iowa’s role in the US war machine, in which they listed the major Iowa companies with defense contracts, including the amount of the contract and what products they produced for the military. Chamberlain Co. of Waterloo was a company that was directly targeted by the Primer due to their production of ammunition for the war movement. But of course, the Primer did not neglect campus issues, especially as they covered the Spring 1970 student government elections in which the Primer backed Students Rights Party participated.

​However, after suffering a defeat, the Primer declared a so-called “revolutionary student government” on campus which was coordinated by UNI students Al Woods, Sam Dell, and Tony Ogden.[18] By this time, Bruno stepped down as editor to form a collective editorship with everyone on the staff, in which the Primer did its part to become a forum for those who wanted to organize on campus. Among other issues, the Primer waged an aggressive campaign against the Dean Voldseth, Dean of Students, in the leadup to the potential referendum of 1970. The Primer, for several issues, was inscribed with the back-page message of “Dean Voldseth is alive and well in Cedar Falls--Still.” This campaign fizzled out once the student senate was unable to override Student President Mike Conlee’s veto against the referendum. However, that following spring UNI would face one of the largest events to happen on the campus during its history, the UNI 7.

​Throughout 1969 and 1970, the Afro-American Society, led by UNI students Palmer Byrd and Sam Dell, had been working with the administration at UNI to establish a minority culture house on campus. The process, however, was arduous and the prospect of minority students having their own cultural house drew flak from administrators and parents of students alike. So, in March 1970, 10 African-American students at UNI visited President Maucker’s home late at night to have a discussion with him to take more concrete action on the request for a minority culture house before the board of regents. However, the discussion became visibly heated as the hours went on and President Maucker repeated that he would not sign a document for a specific house and demanded that they leave. The students refused and Maucker returned with his wife to bed while a night guard sat with the youth in the living room as they decided to sit still until some action was taken. By the next morning, rumors began to fly around campus and students began to clamor around the President’s House to view the commotion. By then the sit-in had grown to 40 individuals as radical elements and sympathetic liberals showed their support to the Afro-American students against the slowness of “the system”[19]

​But after a few more hours, the arrival of the press, and an incoming injunction, the sit-in students elected to move to an administrative building to continue their sit-in, but decided to end the sit-in with no press release which might rile up the administration and media. By the end of the week, Dean Eddie Voldseth announced that seven students were to be suspended pending an investigation by the student conduct board. By the March 31, 1970 issue, the Primer had begun to cover the case and the subsequent student hearings. The staff also worked with other students to storm the hearings and helped solidify a growing campus movement that fed off the growing student dissatisfaction of the administration with the 7.[20] Then with the coming of the invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State killings, the campus grew more divided as there were those who wanted to act and those who did not.

​But by then another summer was on the way and most students at UNI had packed up to go home. That summer was predicted to be the summer of “Ohio”, or the summer in which the radicals and progressives alike take extreme action in honor of the dead at Kent State. However, this prediction never came to pass. Once students returned to UNI in in the fall of 1970, the political fervor and calls for radical change had seemingly disappeared overnight. While the Primer did return that fall, almost all the papers veterans and staff had either graduated or lost interest. The paper was then edited collectively by John O’Connor, Dick Faust, Bill Yates, and Diana Morgan with a shifting focus away from the “freak” audience that had been its base. John O’Connor thought that while the counterculture and drugs had been useful in radicalizing people, it was coming to the point where it was becoming counterproductive. O’Connor instead sought to change the Primer from being an entertaining, informative magazine for the counterculture to being like that of a classical, educational journal that sought to discuss theory and ideology.

In O’Connor’s own words, “We’d like to think people would rather read about a problem and make up their own minds than go to a Speak-Out and find out what happens to be in the wind that day. It is unfortunate that people around here seem to think they need a leader for solutions. They should come to their own conclusions. But this is not to say that they shouldn’t unite, once those conclusions have been reached. We hope that the articles we’re printing now will help people to become better informed, so that the eventual decisions reached will be the right ones.”[21] In this stripped down format the Primer hoped that by losing the “freak” edge they would be better able to reach liberals and workers alike. But this third edition of the New Prairie Primer lasted for only 8 issues from June of 1970 to December of 1970. The Primer finally floundered in December 1970 after a lack of money prevented them from printing any more issues. Considered the longest running underground paper in the history of the state of Iowa, the New Prairie Primer had only lasted for two-and-a-half years.

​As such, the New Prairie Primer was the first and last of its kind on the campus of the University of Northern Iowa. While this wouldn’t spell the end of student action on campus, far from it, the end of the Primer marked the end of a short but explosive era of student politicization at the University of Northern Iowa. Dozens of committed students and volunteers spent countless hours working to create the Primer in their dorms and in the streets. But one thing is clear, we will never again see anything like the underground press of the Sixties. The technology that spawned the underground press is practically obsolete and it is simply no longer exciting or cost-efficient to transfer inked images to paper. And as John McMilian says in his book “Smoking Typewriters”, “...The movement that fueled the growth of underground newspapers is likewise extinct. Of course, the Sixties remain а force in American popular culture; so momentous were that decade's events that even subsequent generations have come of age in its afterglow. But the underground press had а specific raison d'erre: it was created to bring tidings of the youth rebellion to cities and campuses across America and to help build а mass movement. And for all its shortcomings -- intellectual, and even sometimes moral-- this is something it did remarkably well.”[22]

​Whether they advanced the hard-nosed analysis of SDS and its offshoots, or the likes of Huey Newton and Noam Chomsky, or championed the new liberated lifestyles seen with the Woodstock Summer, radical newspapers became the medium through which the youth transmitted their arguments and ideas to try and popularize their rebellions. And because of the underground newspapers’ extraordinary inclusiveness, they helped frame the decentralized operations and diverse social relation within the New Left. But as we saw with the Primer, this did not come easily. For many papers like the Primer, their staff were often deluged with bills they couldn’t pay, lack of time, and coordinating a group made producing an underground paper a nightmare. But this didn’t discourage thousands of youth radicals to create their own papers across the United States. After reading something like the Primer, one can see it was a finished product of love-labor that tried to communicate with kindred minds and maybe had converted a few minds along the way.

The Primer’s demise is but a small example of this short, yet manic era in American history. As the Sixties ended and gave rise to the Seventies, the passionate campaigns of American radicals and their youth following had seemed to fall on deaf ears. Vietnam still lumbered on in the background for five years, Nixon and Kissinger performed their own dirty backroom deals, the enthusiasm on the campuses seemed to wane. Thus, we had entered the era of Taxi Driver and Deep Throat, the forces of evil had seemingly won as the far-right gathered momentum and prepared for the launch of Reagan and Bush less than a decade later. But the democratic sensibilities that Sixties youth had brought to journalism not only persist, but have also taken on a life of their own. And they are still likely to endure in some fashion or another. For radicals today, the internet holds tremendous promise and opportunity with the rise of online forums, social media, and internet podcasts.

But much of what the 2000s blogosphere and left-wing YouTube, referred to as “BreadTube,” have accomplished today with building communities and democratizing the media was accomplished more than 40 years ago by the frank, vulgar, and threadbare papers of the underground press. While there may be little evidence left of the Primer’s impact on the University of Northern Iowa, the culture of student activism hasn’t completely died out. While it lies mostly nascent, the vigor and passion of the 1960s still emerges for a moment every decade or so. Whether that be the Iraq War protests of the 2000s or the Racial and Ethnic Coalition of 2019, and statewide campaigns by Iowa Student Action.

In conclusion, the story of UNI’s underground press and its student staff stands as an example of the burgeoning political and social changes seen in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. At UNI, small-town Iowa students and working-class youth became the messengers of radical politics and student action during their time. The culture the Primer spread to the masses persists today with the new generation of radicalized youth.

Bibliography

​Hoffman, Abbie. Steal This Book (Pirate Editions, Grove Press, 1971)

​McMillian, James. Smoking Typewriters (New York; Oxford University Press, 2011)
Nelson, Thomas. “This Week Marks 50 Years since the 1968 Riot in Waterloo. We Look Back.”

The Courier. September 9, 2018. https://wcfcourier.com/news/local/this-week-marks-years-since-the-riot-in-waterloo-we/article_761a2ea4-3bdb-5ea9-89f7-e90172d41a82.html.

Niceswanger, Bruno, et all. “3 Viet Vets Rap on the War.” New Prairie Primer, November 13, 1969.

Niceswanger, Bruno, et all. “Duke Blasts Bedfellows!!!” New Prairie Primer, October 25, 1969.

Niceswanger, Bruno. “Editor’s Note.” New Prairie Primer, December 9, 1968.

Niceswanger, Bruno. “Editor’s Note.” New Prairie Primer, January 27, 1969.

Niceswanger, Bruno. “The UNI Struggle: What It Means.” New Prairie Primer, April 27, 1970.

Ogden, Tony. “UNI 7.” New Prairie Primer, March 31, 1970.

Pedersen, Steve. “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Primer Pt. 1.” Northern Iowan, February 12, 1971.

Pedersen, Steve. “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Primer Pt. 2.” Northern Iowan, February 15, 1971.

Pedersen, Steve. “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Primer Pt. 3.” Northern Iowan, February 19, 1971.

Quegg, David. “In This Issue.” New Prairie Primer, October 4, 1969.
Severin, Bill. “Bill Severin, the Iron Duke.” Waterloo Daily Courier, October 12, 1969.

Shackelford, Christopher J., "A Midwestern culture of civility: Student activism at the University of Northern Iowa during the Maucker years (1967-1970)" (2013). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 29

Wherry, Peg. “Underground Newspaper In Circulation Under New Name.” Northern Iowan, October 7, 1969.
 
“Primer Special Drug Supplement.” New Prairie Primer, March 3, 1970.

“Revolutionary Student Government Declared.” New Prairie Primer, March 31, 1970.

“Scenes from the Revolution: Iowa #1.” New Prairie Primer, October 25, 1969.

“Special Edition on Life” New Prairie Primer, April 27, 1970.

Over the course of Mexican history, culture and heritage have been used in multiple ways by the state. During the Porfiriato, the state tried to centralize heritage to fan the flames of nationalism within Mexican borders. As a result, multiple heritage sites and artifacts were taken over by the state and taken away from the rightful indigenous owners of these places and items. During the 20th century, the installment of more democratic institutions and (the spread of neo-liberalism into the fields of culture and heritage) was intended to benefit historically oppressed groups like the indigenous population of southern Mexico. From these massive institutional changes, global institutions like the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and state ran heritage agents like the Mexican National Institute of History and Anthropology (INAH) used tourism and other arms of capitalism to justify the exploitation of these sites. In contemporary Chiapas, Mexico we are seeing the complete subversion of this common form of the neoliberal heritage and cultural preservation model. With the presence of the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional (EZLN) occupying various autonomous zones in the region, the preservation of culture is done through the preservation of these communities’ ability to be autonomous and control over their land. Some would attribute this sense of culture preservation to these communities shared indigenousness, however as this paper explores, this model of heritage creation and preservation is tied to a shared class struggle, which has resulted in the use of indigenous institutions for things like governance within these autonomous zones.

On January 1st, 1994 the Mexican state of Chiapas witnessed a military insurrection from the EZLN, a left-wing indigenous organization that views the Mexican state and its president as illegitimate. The EZLN embraces indigenous and Maya culture as a guiding light for how they build society within their autonomous zones, with the organization having a decentralized structure representing people from many different Maya communities like the Tzeltal, Chol, Tzozil, and Zoque among many other groups.[1]  However, the roots of this movement within Chiapas are seen in the constant indigenous uprisings in the region for the last four hundred years, marked by thirteen different ethnic groups that now make up the landless peasant families and day-laborers in contemporary Chiapas.[2] These socio-economic problems are relevant in many other states in Mexico however these problems were exacerbated by the lack of land reform in the state after the revolution from 1910-1917. While the majority of Mexicans saw a revolution marked by Zapatism, Chiapas saw an internal civil war between two different groups of elites that eventually prevailed over the peasant class agraristas which resulted in a lack of land reform leaving many families landless and powerless.[3]

This lack of land and autonomy had massive effects on the mindset of the indigenous people of Chiapas. One reason that may immediately come to mind is Karl Marx’s Theory of Alienation. Although the worker or peasant is an autonomous, self-realized being, because their goals, activities, and duties are dictated by the bourgeoisie due to economic centralization they lose their ability to determine life and destiny.[4] Due to outside forces, like the elite cattle farmers and planters, owning the majority of arable land, these indigenous workers have had their freedom and autonomy taken away as they now rely on the landowners to provide for them their food and wages. On top of this, to the indigenous population a lot of culture and heritage is tied to the land itself. This lack of land reform disenfranchised a majority of the population, making Chiapas a fertile area for uprisings and unrest throughout the 20th century. Even policy reforms made to benefit the laborers like the creation of Confederacion Nacional Campesina, which was meant to represent small-scale farmers and ejidatarios, failed since land reform was absent in Chiapas.[5] This organization, along with every other political and state institution, fell back on the pre-revolutionary alliances between the local elites, like the cattle farmers. [6]

As more reform and neo-liberal policies were enacted over the course of the 20th century, the EZLN embraces class struggle and their tie to the land to subvert the national government’s attempts to centralize power. This eventually led to the beginning of the Chiapas conflict in 1994 when the North American Free Trade Agreement was set to begin, a treaty that the EZLN claims as a death sentence for the indigenous ethnicities of Mexico.[7] This is because NAFTA would require Mexican agriculture laws to align with that of the United States and Canada which would allow for privatization and big transnational companies to dominate the agricultural sector.[8] As seen throughout Mexican history, indigenous culture and heritage has been used as a rallying point to supplement and support the status quo as the people of Mexico should rally around their inherent “Mexicaness.” Leaders of the EZLN subvert this centralization of culture by embracing class struggle, thus creating a rallying point for these indigenous groups to gather around by embracing their disenfranchisement from their land that would result from policies like NAFTA. This disenfranchisement materialized itself in a peasant, agrarian resistance movement that prides itself on taking back land and stopping the commercialization of indigenous culture. The EZLN after rising to prominence in the 1990’s did a lot of groundwork for the future success of the indigenous people in Mexico. This became clearly apparent in 2001 when the Mexican Congress, under EZLN pressure, passed a law that recognized the rights of indigenous people giving them the ability to practice autonomy within the united nation of Mexico.[9] As a result of this, multiple EZLN autonomous zones were created all over the Chiapas region. These indigenous administrative territories use a traditional way of governance, like the Calpulli (Large House) system.

The calpulli is the organizational level below altepetl or city-state. At the smallest level of this organizational structure are families, who are responsible for each other’s education and food preparation. Followed by the calpulli, which is a functional community ran by the calpiulec, the main administrator of the region who designates responsibilities and duties like what crops to grow between the families.[10] This right to self-determination resulted in indigenous people being able to maintain their traditions because they did not have to change their lifestyles. The embracing of heritage is abstract in concept and can materialize in many ways such as the preservation of sites, the use of the supernatural, or the complete erasure of sites. With the EZLN we see these indigenous communities preserving culture through their use of their own governance system, living an indigenous lifestyle free of change due to things like NAFTA .  This is a stark contrast to the conservation and preservation of culture through neo-liberal means. Neo-liberal celebration of culture and heritage is not for practical purposes but rather to supplement the end means of profit. As a result, this involves the inclusion of material items and places like heritage sites as seen at Palenque, Tonina, and Chichen Itza. Here we see the exploitation of indigenous sites- that indigenous communities would like to use- to help turn a profit for the private investors who are funding these projects to centralize cultural power within the Mexican state.

​Despite the existence and the ability to create these autonomous zones for indigenous communities, indigenous communities are still being taken advantage of by the Mexican state and neo-Liberal agents. For example, the continued existence of heritage sites like Chichen Itza and Tonina that are used to generate wealth for non-indigenous communities and are used for non-indigenous heritage events like an Elton John concert. To combat this the EZLN has implemented multiple strategies to disrupt and stop the exploitation of indigenous culture. One common occurrence of civil disobedience are the roadblock demonstrations leading to sites like Tonina, sometimes taking donations to allow cars to pass.[11] Another tactic used by the EZLN is to just create villages in unused land to expand influence. This has actually been a problem for the state in the Lacandona Jungle and the group of sixty-six families of Lacandon elites that were awarded 614, 321 hectacres of the land displacing the twenty-six indigenous communities of various other ethnic backgrounds in the 1970’s and 1980’s.[12] To combat this, the EZLN has helped re-establish and protect these villages of subsistence farmers in the unused land.

The establishment of EZLN villages in the Lacandona Jungle is a part of a grander strategy to spread the influence and power of neo-zapatism to other parts of Mexico. The EZLN does this by making being a Zapatista easy to identify with, not to mention embracing anyone willing to help their movement. To quote EZLN leader Comandante Zebedeo “If they are suffering exploitation, if they are suffering intimidation, if they are not receiving a just salary, then they can be considered Zapatistas, because that is our struggle as well. This is what we want, I think many people sympathize with us, because in reality that is perhaps what the great majority of our country and the world are suffering.”[13] This brings up the important point of EZLN culture and heritage building that is vastly different from most western ideas of the two. The EZLN, while it uses indigenous culture, is at the forefront of fighting for indigenous rights, and is made up of mostly indigenous groups like Tzetal and Chol, derives its cultural power from a class view of society. This use of the dynamic between the oppressed and the oppressor has been seen throughout this paper, as many of the EZLN’s tactics are used to disrupt the norms of neo-liberal imperialism and oppression through land and wealth concentration. This is a struggle that is very apparent in Southern Mexico’s indigenous communities hence the embrace of indigenous institutions like the calpulli system.

This is not to say that the EZLN is the end all and be all for the indigenous community of Mexico. While the indigenous people of Chiapas may have found freedom in autonomy and defiance of the Mexican state, one should not ignore the massive material downsides. Chiapas provides more than half of Mexico’s hydroelectricity and thirty percent of Mexico’s total water, yet around ninety percent of the indigenous population in Chiapas do not have energy or plumbing. On top of this these indigenous communities lack proper healthcare, with less than one doctor per thousand inhabitants.[14] While these may speak to the lack of material improvement for these communities, an argument can be made that the material state of these communities would be the same if not worse under the neo-liberal system that involves wage slavery and reliance on systems and people that are unaccountable. Another criticism levied at the EZLN is their inability to unite all indigenous communities, as seen with the tensions between the EZLN backed indigenous villages and the Lacandon indigenous population over the use of the Lacandona Jungle. However, this criticism misses the point of the EZLN and how they have developed their culture. The essence of EZLN does not rely on the indigeneity of the people, rather their position within the standing power structure. The Lacandon people do not fit in when observed through this lens as they view themselves through a sense of culture and reject the view of class struggle. This is due, in some part, to the Mexican Government’s attempts to preserve the Lacandon culture in the 70’s and 80’s which resulted in the disenfranchisement of the many indigenous communities that now make up the EZLN.

​In essence, the story of building, conserving, and preserving culture and heritage within the EZLN framework is to fill the negative spaces of neo-liberalism. Zapatistas diverge immediately from the neo-liberal model through how they preserve culture. The preservation of culture is done through the preservation of these community’s ability to be autonomous and have control over their land. This can be seen in the EZLN’s establishment of indigenous political organizational structures like the calpulli and their efforts to retake land that indigenous communities were removed from in the Lacandona Jungle. This foils the neo-liberal model of obtaining physical items or preserving places and, in essence, taking away all practicality. To put culture on display as the exotic other within the country it is supposed to represent. Another major diversion in the EZLN’s perception of culture and heritage is how they create an identity. While the EZLN is heavily associated with and often called an indigenous movement, identity within the group is not centered around ethnicity. While many may disagree due to the EZLN’s prominence in fighting for things like indigenous rights in Mexico, this evidence is purely circumstantial due to where and when the movement was created. At its core to be a Zapatista, you have to side with the oppressed, the exploited, and form solidarity to conquer their struggle. This focus on class is why the EZLN is able to rally people from multiple indigenous groups in the most ethnically diverse state of Mexico. The basis of indigenous association with the EZLN is found in this class struggle as indigenous groups have been historically oppressed. All in all, this opposition to the neo-liberal status quo, through autonomy, self-subsistence, and class solidarity is how the EZLN preserves heritage in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.

​Bibliography
​[1] Godelmann, Iker Reyes. “The Zapatista Movement: The Fight for Indigenous Rights in Mexico.”

[2] Dietz, Gunther. “Neozapatismo and Ethnic Movements in Chiapas, Mexico: Background Information on the Armed Uprising of the EZLN.” Pp 27

[3] Dietz, Gunther. “Neozapatismo and Ethnic Movements in Chiapas, Mexico: Background Information on the Armed Uprising of the EZLN.” Pp 27
​
[4] MARX, KARL. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

[5] Dietz, Gunther. “Neozapatismo and Ethnic Movements in Chiapas, Mexico: Background Information on the Armed Uprising of the EZLN.” Pp 27

[6] Dietz, Gunther. “Neozapatismo and Ethnic Movements in Chiapas, Mexico: Background Information on the Armed Uprising of the EZLN.” Pp 27

[7] Shantz, Jeff. “Understanding the Chiapas Rebellion: Modernist Visions and the Invisible Indian.”

[8] Godelmann, Iker Reyes. “The Zapatista Movement: The Fight for Indigenous Rights in Mexico.”

[9] Godelmann, Iker Reyes. “The Zapatista Movement: The Fight for Indigenous Rights in Mexico.”
​
[10] Godelmann, Iker Reyes. “The Zapatista Movement: The Fight for Indigenous Rights in Mexico.”

[11] Schafer, Norma “Tonina, Hidden Chiapas Archeology Gem: The Road Less Traveled.”

[12] Vegara-Camus, Leandro. “The MST and the EZLN Struggle for Land: New Forms of Peasant Rebellions.”

​[13] Callahan, Manuel. “Why Not Share a Dream? Zapatismo As Political and Cultural Practice.”

​[14] Godelmann, Iker Reyes. “The Zapatista Movement: The Fight for Indigenous Rights in Mexico.”

​

​Bibliography
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Primary Sources 

1. Sankara, Thomas. “Speech before the General Assembly of the United Nations.” Speech. UN General Assembly, October 4, 1984. Marxist.org. https://www.marxists.org/archive/sankara/1984/october/04.htm.
2. Thomas Sankara Speaks, n.d. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVKgvakY_Io&t=49s&ab_channel=JoeDwyer.
3. Sankara, Thomas. "The 'Political Orientation' of Burkina Faso." Review of African Political Economy, no. 32 (1985): 48-55. Accessed April 25, 2021. http://www.jstor.org.proxyiub.uits.iu.edu/stable/4005706.

Secondary Sources

1. Akinwotu, Emmanuel. “ Burkina Faso Ex-President Compaoré to Face Trial over Thomas Sankara Murder.” The Guardian, April 13, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/13/trial-in-absentia-burkina-faso-ex-president-blaise-compaore.
2. Harsch, Ernest. Thomas Sankara : An African Revolutionary. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014. Accessed April 23, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central.
3. Manji, Firoze. “Solidarity Not Saviours. (Cover Story).” New African, no. 546 (January 2015): 14–15. https://search-ebscohost-com.proxyiub.uits.iu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=100315104&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
4. Mednick, Sam. “Conflict, Coronavirus, and Now a Hunger Crisis.” The New Humanitarian, 19 Aug. 2020, https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/2020/08/19/conflict-and-coronavirus-spark-hunger-crisis-burkina-faso.
5. Newton, Huey. “Huey Newton Introduces Revolutionary Intercommunalism, Boston College, November 18 1970.” Libcom.Org, 18 Nov. 1970, https://libcom.org/library/huey-newton-introduces-revolutionary-intercommunalism-boston-college-november-18-1970. 
6. OUEDRAOGO, LASSANE. “Mediated Sankarism: Reinventing a Historical Figure to Reimagine the Future.” African Studies Quarterly 18, no. 1 (September 2018): 19–29. https://search-ebscohost-com.proxyiub.uits.iu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=132398805&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
7. Prashad, Vijay. “When the Stars Began to Shine.” New Internationalist, no. 518 (March 2019): 34–36. https://search-ebscohost-com.proxyiub.uits.iu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=134650976&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
8. Pulido, Laura. Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angelos. 1st edition, University of California Press, 2006.
9. Shuffield, Robin. “Thomas Sankara: The Upright Man.” Films On Demand. 2006. Accessed April 23, 2021. https://fod.infobase.com/PortalPlaylists.aspx?wID=99355&xtid=49792.
10. Springer, Devyn. “Does the Western Left Have an African Problem?” Truthout.Com, 16 Oct. 2017, https://truthout.org/articles/does-the-western-left-have-an-african-problem/. 
11. Williams, Justin C. “New Africa in the World Coming to Harlem: A Retrospective Comparison of Jerry Rawlings and Thomas Sankara.” Journal of Pan African Studies 7, no. 7 (December 2014): 7–25. https://search-ebscohost-com.proxyiub.uits.iu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=100261775&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Why am I quoting Lenin in a book about totalitarianism? Because he is a figure who propounds a very germane exegesis of the liberal democracy model which is acknowledged today as a symbol of prosperity and peace.  Lenin called it the dictatorship of the bourgeois, rule of the capital, or rule of the upper class where there is only freedom for the slave owners.
 
Whenever someone says Totalitarianism, several thoughts surface to the mind of the individual. They think about various governments that have restricted the rights of the people, took part in vanquishing opposition and fear-mongering, control all aspects of life for complete subjugation to authority by controlling mass media to spread propaganda.
 
Totalitarianism became a political ideology with the advent of Fascism. Mussolini believed that the Corporate State is totalitarian and also wrote a book on it titled ‘The Corporate State’. Any individual interest or whatsoever was out of harmony with the interest of the State. The State corrals all of society. The idea that totalitarianism is integral political power that is exercised by the state was contrived in 1923 to elucidate Italian Fascism as a system that was fundamentally different from conventional dictatorships.
 
Totalitarianism is not at all predictable and, in many instances, it's not even conspicuous. According to the dictionary, Political science is the branch of knowledge that deals with the state and systems of government or the scientific analysis of political activity and behavior. A policy state or system can be interpreted in many different manners. So political study is subjective and open to many interpretations but ignorance moves it to the objective side. This is what Žižek discusses in the book about totalitarianism. how it has been reduced to just a few interpretations and the fact that liberals don’t want to talk about what they call a ‘demonic’ political idea and denounces as ethically dangerous.
 
Totalitarianism as an ideological concept has always had an explicit strategic function to guarantee the liberal-democratic hegemony by dismissing the Leftist critique of liberal democracy as the perfidious or Janus-faced of Right-wing dictatorships.  Žižek looks at totalitarianism in a way that Wittgenstein would approve of, finding it a cobweb of family resemblances.
 
Žižek reveals the unison view of totalitarianism, in which it is defined four ways: the holocaust as the ultimate, diabolical evil and beyond any political analysis; the Stalinist gulag as the alleged truth of the socialist revolutionary project which refutes socialism and radical progressive thoughts as they call it utopian and believe that utopian vision leads to totalitarian realities; the recent wave of ethnic and religious fundamentalism to be fought through multiculturalists tolerance; and the deconstructionist idea that the ultimate root of totalitarianism is the ontological closure of thought.
 
Žižek starts the book by telling that trounce of the left is not because of the inanition of the intellectual resources but because of its ideological defeat against liberalism. The radical left is trapped in a facile opposition between the rhetoric of liberal democracy on the one hand and totalitarianism on the other.
 
The book explains the psychoanalysis of the concept of Totalitarianism. Žižek can be called the seer of Lacan as his ideas drew heavily from Hegel’s Idealism and Lacan’s psychoanalysis and that’s why the book is more of a psychoanalytic study of totalitarianism than political. Lacanian psychoanalysis in itself is an intricate topic to comprehend, the book might help some to look at it in a clear sense. It’s important to understand Lacan to discuss liberalism as he believed that no matter how democratic we may be, we are always attracted to authority figures. We simply don’t want to take charge and want someone to lead. This concludes that Liberal democracy is still a rule of the insignificant minority over the significant majority and is less about representation and leads to the polarity of the power.
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Žižek in this book calls the discourse on totalitarianism pertinent because it helps to discern the shortcomings of the modern democracy but the problem he calls out is the misuse of the notion as any argument regarding it is rejected by calling it evil and this thwarts the intellectual development of the society giving rise to centrism which believes that any change in the status quo will eventually lead to totalitarianism.

Žižek examines these ideas and concludes that the devil lies not so much in the detail but in what enables the very designation totalitarian: the liberal-democratic consensus itself which remolds itself into fascism in no time as it is governed based on capital. Authoritarianism is not pretending anymore to be a real alternative to the flawed democracies everywhere, but we can see many more authoritarian practices and styles being smuggled into democratic governments.

Liberalism is a more sophisticated version of authority that is not about freedom and it can be best fathomed by studying Gramsci. In a totalitarian society the ruling class tells you to do this particular thing, in liberal democracy Ruling class through various institutions like family school, religion familiarizes us with rules and behavior and natural respect for the ruling class while maintaining a delusion around ‘Free Speech’. This is what Žižek in his lectures call the ‘Paradigm of modern permissive authority’.

Regardless, Žižek raises interesting points. Does real democracy come only as an unanticipated paroxysm of ethical duty? Is the marking of diversity enshrouds totalitarian thought?  Does magnum opus result from excessive knowledge? Do deeds emanate from prevailing ethical materiality or do they create it afresh each time they occur? Do cultural studies reveal the shapes of global hegemony?

There is one point that Žižek misses out; the conflict between the divergent ideologies is not only because of the parochialism of liberal democracy but also the altercation between the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment thoughts. Progressive politics is the outcome of Enlightenment thoughts which is the intellectual legacy of Marx that values freedom and equality.

This is not an easy book at all. This is meant for research scholars. I (a chemistry Hons student) had difficulty reading but was able to complete this because the pop culture references made it very engrossing for those who are aware. I'll recommend it for those who want a different and very deep perspective of the liberal democratic model and good work on Lacanian psychoanalysis.

A close friend of mine once said to me “I basically have two options, toughen up or wind up in jail.” This was in reference to the intense set of circumstances plaguing him at that moment. Either continue to accept the abuse he received from his father or end back up in juvenile detention. What struck me in that moment is how he described going to juvie as “winding up in jail.” What I came to realize is that juvenile detention was not reforming these kids but breaking them down and feeding them into a greater criminal justice system. This was my introduction to the school-to-prison pipeline.

The school-to-prison pipeline can be thought of as and perceived in many different ways but what can be pinned down mainly is this; it is the system in which various forms of corrective punishment (such as suspension, expulsion, in-school detainment, etc.) is used to correct the misbehavior of students. These methods of correction eventually lead to large numbers of students being pushed from the education system into the criminal justice system. What can we observe about this system? Well, firstly we must try to pinpoint how this system was developed in the first place. Then, we must note that the school-to-prison pipeline (or SPP for short) primarily affects people of color and people of a disadvantaged background.

Let’s first look towards the presidency of Ronald Reagan and his expansion of the War on Drugs. The intention of the War on Drugs was to “take a tough stance on drugs and crime.” The outcome was not a decrease in drug abuse and crime rates but a rapid increase in incarceration in the United States. Going further than that, the outcome of Reagan’s War on Drugs was an increased incarnation rate of people of color. Around 77% of people incarcerated on drug offenses are Black and Latinx people while only collectively consisting of about 30.1% of the population. This coupled with Reagan’s booming prison industry during the 1980’s columnated not in a War on Drugs nor a War on Crime, but a War on POC and a rapid expansion on legal slavery.

I mention this because these “initiatives” created a runoff into the school system. The “zero tolerance” school discipline policies were developed as a result of the drug and crime laws of the 1980’s. Like the War on Drugs the ideology of zero tolerance discipline is to aggressively punish people for one or more specified offenses in the idea that these individuals will be reformed and will discontinue their “wrong behavior.” As you can imagine, like the outcome of the War on Drugs, these policies have only aided the growth of incarceration rates and the success of the Prison Industrial Complex.

There’s a rigid dichotomy between zero tolerance policies and positive behavior changes in students. The education system's hardened approach to discipline has continued to disillusion many students from education and the many things that supposedly lay waiting for students who pursue a further education. Understandingly, this disillusionment oftentimes leads towards criminality rather than away from it. When breaking this policy down we must note that the purpose with zero tolerance discipline was to focus on targeting and punishing individuals for violating specific rules and regulations such as enacting violence, bringing drugs, alcohol, or weapons to campus, hate speech, etc. The reality, however is that many schools have decided to enact these policies against students who exhibit signs of possible mental illness, abuse, etc. as a shortcut to addressing these problems.

Consequently, at least half of all prisoners in the United States exhibit mental health concerns. It has been observed that 64% of jail inmates, 54% of state prisoners, and 45% of federal prisoners report mental health concerns. Anywhere from 10-25% of those inmates incarcerated in the United States suffer from serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia, major affective disorders, etc. Compare this to the only 20.6% of US adults who have reported any mental illness (AMI).

The increased militarization of U.S. schools has further perpetuated the lasting effects of these zero tolerance policies and is largely responsible for the disproportionate number of students of color funneled directly out of the school system and into the criminal justice system. In the 2015-2016 school year, black students represented only 15% of the student population nationally, but represented 31% of the students arrested or referred to law enforcement. And, overall, it has been noted that black students are also three times more likely to attend a school that employs at least one police officer but no mental health personnel.

Considering all of this, it is important to note the way in which zero tolerance discipline and the militarization of schools as a whole is viewed by most through an idealist lens; the true implications of which are ignored by most and the way in which these policies are used as instruments of capital are completely overlooked. The idea presented to us that the system works in reforming and helping our children is enough to feel as though it is a reality. It is even important to note that the implementation of 8-hour school days that correlates with the typical 8-hour work day has created the perfect set of conditions to convince the general public that these cruel and abusive tactics are fundamental in shaping and caring for your children.  However, by looking at this system through a materialist lens we can begin to understand why zero-tolerance policies and the militarization of schools was truly implemented, why it specifically targets POC and mentally ill students, and how it has been used as a tool for capital.

With the abolition of slavery came the ratification of the 13th amendment, which in turn allowed for legal slavery as “punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” After the American Civil War when slave plantations became no longer useful, we began to exponential growth of the prison system and a wave of legislation across the country. Legislation which targeted black people for the slightest of things and resulting punishment being prison time (where they could once again exploit the labor of black people in America for free and act more violently in doing so.) And we can see that overall, not much has changed.

Our material conditions, while evolving, continue to perpetuate systemic inequality. The conditions that made it possible racism, sexism, ableism, islamophobia, etc. to thrive worldwide have become ingrained into every aspect of our social and economic practices, not excluding the SPP. In fact, these very conditions have made it possible for the SPP to be created in the first place.
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It is becoming increasingly obvious that the education system is the aid to and could be the end of the Prison Industrial Complex. The demilitarization of schools and introduction of further mental health personnel is only the first step to dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline. And in turn, beginning on the path to full on prison abolition.

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Citations

Nellis, Ashley, and Kevin Muhitch and Nazgol Ghandnoosh. “The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons.” The Sentencing Project, 10 Jan. 2019, www.sentencingproject.org/publications/color-of-justice-racial-and-ethnic-disparity-in-state-prisons/.

2014, October. “Incarceration Nation.” Monitor on Psychology, American Psychological Association, Oct. 2014, www.apa.org/monitor/2014/10/incarceration.

“Ending Student Criminalization and the School-to-Prison Pipeline - EJ-ROC Policy Hub.” NYU Steinhardt, 7 May 2020, steinhardt.nyu.edu/metrocenter/ejroc/ending-student-criminalization-and-school-prison-pipeline.