Frick was the chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company. He had recently used 300 Pinkerton agents to break up a picket line in Homestead, Pennsylvania sparking a fierce battle that killed at least 10, including 7 striking workers.

Berkman took a train to Pittsburgh where Emma Goldman wired him money for supplies for his attempt. His assassination would ultimately fail and Berkman spent 14 years in prison.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

U.S. experts speak of war with China. The U.S. and China are apparently preparing for it (Peter Apps, “US Prepares for Long War with China that Might Hit Its Bases, Homeland,” Reuters, 19 May 2025). And according to opinion polls, a large percentage of Americans, if not the majority, do support using U.S. troops to defend Taiwan. Thus it is important in 2025 to understand Taiwan’s special status and U.S.-China relations.

The civil war between the Nationalist Party (Guomindang) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continued intermittently from 1927 until 1949, when the Communists won control over mainland China. The war resulted in the premature deaths of millions of people, with a large portion of those non-combatants. In 1949 the head of the Guomindang, Chiang Kaishek (1887-1975), known today as “Jiang Jieshi” by most mainland Chinese speakers, retreated to the Island of Taiwan with the remnants of his forces and “established a relatively benign dictatorship” there, executing one thousand farmers, workers, intellectuals, students, labor union activists, and apolitical civilians during the White Terror in the 1950s. (Po Chien CHEN and Yi-hung LIU, “A Spark Extinguished: Worker Militancy in Taiwan after World War II [1945-1950],” Ivan Franceschini and Christian Sorace, eds., Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour, Verso, 2022). The martial law that Jiang Jieshi imposed in 1949 lasted for nearly four decades, until 1987.

Under his reign there were two Taiwan Strait crises in which a hot war between the Guomindang and the CCP almost broke out. The most dangerous, in terms of the prospects for decent human survival, was probably the second crisis, in 1958. It almost resulted in a nuclear war, according to the late Daniel Ellsberg. At a point in time when U.S.-backed Jiang Jieshi aspired to take back all of China, the U.S. had a secret plan to “hit every city in the Soviet Union and every city in China.” The U.S. military was prepared to annihilate 600 million people, a “hundred Holocausts,” Ellsberg explained. Today the Island of Taiwan may or may not be the “most dangerous place on Earth,” as the Economist called it (Justin Metz, “The Most Dangerous Place on Earth,” The Economist, 1 May 2021), but given the constant tension between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (i.e., Taiwan) during the last three quarters of a century, the fact that the U.S. and the PRC are both nuclear powers, the fact that U.S. intelligence leaders have recently called the CCP the “most consequential threat” to U.S. national security, and the fact that the Trump administration is riddled with China hawks underscores how important it is, for our species as a whole, and especially for people in East Asia, that sincere agents of peace understand Taiwan.

Over the course of nearly half a century, Jiang Jieshi and his party received constant diplomatic support, weapons, and billions of dollars in aid from the U.S.  Our government has recently even “quietly unfrozen about $870 million in security assistance programs for Taiwan.” With all this U.S. “support” for, or U.S. domination of, Taiwan, what does the word “sovereignty” mean in Taiwan’s case? And what does it mean for an island of 23 million people to prepare to fight with the PRC, with its population of 1.4 billion? How can Lai Ching-te say that they must prepare for war?

To understand the fight between the Republic of China and the PRC, and the intervening/interfering role of the U.S., one must have a basic understanding of the nature of this fight. A little study of the historical context in which Jiang Jieshi first seized power a century ago might help. This month marks 100 years since the start of the May Thirtieth Movement, when Chinese workers stood up against the imperialism of the West and Japan, while at the same time taking on the greedy business class and the power-hungry warlords of China.

Chinese Workers Struggle for Dignity in 1925

Back in 1925, Shanghai was known as “the Paris of the East,” and like Paris, it was a place where the rich could have fun as they liked and the poor had to suffer as they must. The workers of Shanghai suffered the injustices of colonialism and racism. Rich Europeans and Japanese colonizer-parasites had carved up the city and set up their own “International Settlement,” that they, rather than the Chinese, governed. This Settlement allowed them to live among and exploit the local laborers even as they disrespected them with the pejorative “coolies.” Some Japanese said they were “worthless” and called them “foreign slaves” (S.A. Smith, Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895-1927, Duke UP, 2002, page 163).

Shanghai had been a frequent site of labor “unrest” for some time. It was not a coincidence that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had been founded there in 1921. Early in 1925 a Japanese company that owned a cotton mill had rejected an agreement made by the striking workers and a mediation board. The conflict reached a head on the 15th of May that year when the managers of the mill locked out the workers and stopped paying their wages. (Apo Leong, “From the May Thirtieth Movement to the Canton Strike,” Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour). In this conflict, Japanese supervisors physically beat several workers and one foreman shot and killed a 20-year-old worker, a Communist, by the name of Gu Zhenghong.

This was not the first time that foreign bosses had murdered Chinese workers, but it was said that “Japanese capitalists treat Chinese laborers like cattle and horses” (S.A. Smith, Like Cattle and Horses 164). Many people, not only workers and students but also Chinese business persons, were fed up that year, in 1925. On the 30th of May nearly 10,000 demonstrators marched through the streets of Shanghai to the International Settlement where the British, French, Japanese, and other privileged foreigners lived. It was guarded by foreign soldiers and police. (Leong, “From the May Thirtieth Movement…”). The British chief of police gave orders to fire on the protesting workers and students, and thirteen people were killed, shot at “point-blank range” (Working Class History, PM Press, 2020, page 111-12).  Dozens were injured. This triggered what is known today as the May Thirtieth Movement. Through the cooperation of workers, students, and many Chinese businesses, a general strike was organized in Shanghai. There were at least 135 solidarity strikes in other regions. (Leong, “From the May Thirtieth Movement…”).

By one estimate, there were already 84,000 unionized workers in Shanghai at this time and many unions had contributed to building worker solidarity (Smith, Like Cattle and Horses 154). Up until the May Thirtieth Incident, the Shanghai Federation of Syndicates (SFS) had been a leading labor organization, if not the leading organization in Shanghai. It had been established in 1924, mainly by right-wing members, but also by many anarchists, such as Shen Zhongjiu (1887–1968), the editor of the anarchist journal Free Man (Ziyou ren) and later the chief editor of Revolution (Geming). Anarchism was the “central radical stream” in China after the First World War. And there had been a “long-standing indigenous libertarian tradition” in China (Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, PM Press, 2010, page 519).

Many SFS labor activists distrusted the Communist Party because they felt that CCP intellectuals tried to speak for the workers. The SFS had a “vaguely anarchist orientation,” but did not espouse federalism. (Smith, Like Cattle and Horses 155-59). Chinese anarchists in general, regardless whether they were members of SFS, had vocally opposed the CCP’s statist goals and promotion of “proletarian dictatorship” and “iron discipline.” But the fledgling CCP was on the ball. They “instantly launched a campaign calling for solidarity with the textile workers, a boycott of Japanese products, and a public funeral” for Gu Zhenghong (Leong, “From the May Thirtieth Movement…”).

In the city of Guangzhou, already an industrial center near Hong Kong then, anarchists had established at least 40 unions by 1921, and had been collaborating since 1924 with the Guomindang labor leaders in the syndicalist movement. The Guomindang was founded in 1924 by Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) in Guangzhou, and many anarchists and communists had collaborated with them for years.  In May 1925 the “Second National Labour Conference” was held in Guangzhou. The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) was established, representing 166 trade unions and 540,000 members. It was a national umbrella organization that functioned as a platform to coordinate different forces among workers, including non-party actors. After the Shanghai Massacre, the ACFTU called for a demonstration on 2 June and a solidarity strike. In the wake of the Massacre, many more workers joined unions (Leong, “From the May Thirtieth Movement…”).

Union leaders organized a strike in Guangzhou and in nearby Hong Kong. This strike began on 19 June. Soon, 250,000 workers hand had joined and many students in Hong Kong were also mobilized. In fact, half the labor force of Hong Kong was on strike, paralyzing the city. By the 21st of June, there was a full embargo against the foreign powers, and on the 23rd of June, a public procession in solidarity with the May Thirtieth Movement. The joint foreign security force with police from multiple countries opened fire on students and killed fifty-two people.

1925 was the beginning of a period of very active worker resistance, that is sometimes called the “Revolution of 1925-1927.” It was a time of many large uprisings, often or usually very violent, and a time of dedicated labor organizing. Through this revolution, Chinese workers regained some dignity, but true liberation was put on the back burner. According to the historian Gotelind Müller, “the CCP worked on Comintern instructions in a united front with the Guomindang, an authoritarian party populist in rhetoric but tied in practice to defending the interests of China’s business groups and rural elites. The terms of the alliance required the CCP’s subordination to the Nationalist [i.e., Guomindang] leaders and the submersion of its membership.” She explains that, just as with anarchists elsewhere, “Chinese anarchists were at first sympathetic to the Bolsheviks but by the mid-1920s they saw the regime in Moscow as oppressive.”

Meanwhile, Mao Zedong knew that something was happening, and he became very interested in this movement in the summer of 1925 (Rebecca Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth Century World, Duke UP, 2010, page 29). In addition to labor unions in the city, peasant unions were also forming, appearing in Hunan and surrounding provinces. Mao saw revolutionary potential among them, even more than among workers in the cities. This put him in opposition to the orthodox Marxist approach.

A Year of Strikes: 1926

There were even more strikes in 1926 than in 1925, and some of the rulers of China resorted to violence to keep them down. “During 1926 in Shanghai there were, according to one official survey, 169 strikes affecting 165 factories and companies and involving 202,297 workers.” Half of them were “wholly or partially successful.” (Harold Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, 1938). In May 1926 the Third Labor Congress was held in Guangzhou, with the participation of 699 labor organizations, who claimed to represent 1.24 million workers.

And it was at this point, when things were going so well for the workers, that Jiang Jieshi started abandoning them and dismissed his Soviet advisors (Dennis Showalter, “Bring in the Germans,” The Quarterly Journal of Military History 28:1, page 60). It was the Soviets who had urged the Communists of China to work with the Guomindang.

On 18 March, there was a massacre of anti-imperialist protesters in front of Beiyang Government headquarters. The Beiyang Government was run by warlords like Duan Qirui (1865-1936), who was tight with Japan. They were the main government of China between 1912 and 1928, and were based in Beijing.

Among those injured during the 18 March massacre was the leader Li Dazhao (1889-1927), who had co-founded the CCP with Chen Duxiu (1879-1942). Chen Duxiu had also founded the progressive journal New Youth (Xin Qingnian) in 1916, advocating human rights, democracy, science, and even Esperanto. Influenced by the October Revolution, it was openly promoting communism in 1920.

The great writer Lu Xun, who is often credited with modernizing Chinese literature, wrote about the March 1926 massacre in some detail in “In Memory of Miss Liu Hezhen.” Lu Xun wrote, “On March 18 in the fifteenth year of the Republic of China, Duan Qirui’s government ordered guards with guns and bayonets to surround and slaughter the unarmed protesters in front of the gates of the State Council, the hundreds of young men and women whose intent was to lend their support in China’s diplomatic dealings with foreign powers. An order was even issued, slandering them as ‘mobsters’!” (Lu Xun, “In Memory of Liu Hezhen,” Jottings Under Lamplight, Harvard UP, 2017, page 72).

Meanwhile in June, Jiang Jieshi was put in charge of the Northern Expedition aimed at removing the warlords from power and unifying the country.

Jiang Jieshi’s 1927 Slaughters

In 1927 rich men slaughtered workers like never before. Early on, the CCP suspected that something was up. On 26 January an internal Party memo read, “The most important problem which requires our urgent consideration at the moment is the alliance of foreign imperialism and the [Guomindang] right wing with the so-called moderate elements of the [Guomindang], resulting in internal and external opposition to Soviet Russia, communism, and the labor and peasant movements” (Michael D. Wilson, United States Policy and the Nationalist Revolution in China, 1925-1928, UCLA dissertation, 1996, page 121). The Communists knew that the Guomindang was allied with the “Powers,” i.e., the empires of the West and Japan. Yet they still encouraged workers to trust the Guomindang.

Around this time in early 1927, a powerful Communist-led union called the Shanghai General Labour Union (GLU) launched two insurrections. Their first insurrection was a general strike from the 19th to the 22nd of February, and their second was a strike supported by an armed militia from the 21st to 22nd of March. The strike in February “shut post offices, all cotton mills, and most essential services” (S.A. Smith, “The Third Armed Uprising and the Shanghai Massacre,” Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour, and Working Class History 41). This contributed greatly to the popularity of both the Guomindang and the CCP in Shanghai.

For their second insurrection in March, the GLU’s plan was “to take control of the city first and then welcome” Jiang Jieshi. But the British, the Americans, and the Japanese in Shanghai already knew the script. Written in 1938, Harold Isaacs’ historical account got to the heart of the matter:

The prevailing attitude among them during those early weeks of 1927 seemed to be to hear and protect the evils they had rather than fly to others they knew not of. For to your foreign business man, banker, soldier, consul, and missionary, this incomprehensible unrest, these endless slings and arrows for which they were the quivering targets, seemed the blows of a universally outrageous fortune. They could not make out who were the hares and who the hounds. So they barricaded their settlements behind gates and barbed wire. From overseas came regiment after regiment and whole fleets to protect them against all contingencies. Only the keenest among them understood from the beginning that their bread was buttered on the same side as that of the Shanghai bankers and oriented themselves accordingly. They knew Chiang Kai-shek [Jiang Jieshi] as a politically-minded militarist who wore a coat of many colours. If the Shanghai bankers were ready to back him, they knew they could follow suit. Only the workers of Shanghai stood between them and the consummation of the deal. Chiang’s coming would remove this obstacle. Thus by February when Chiang’s troops advanced into Chekiang, the situation was vastly clarified for all concerned except the workers and the Communist leaders for whom Chiang still remained the hero-general of the revolution. (Harold Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, 1938).

But as evidenced by the quote from the CCP internal Party memo, the Communist leaders, too, knew what was happening, that Jiang Jieshi was not on their side.

“On 21 March between 600,000 and 800,000 workers struck in demand for an end to militarist rule of the city. Among the workers who played key roles were the printers, postal workers, and mechanics. Several thousand radicals also formed an armed militia that occupied key sections of the city” (St. James Encyclopedia of Labor History Worldwide: Major Events in Labor History and Their Impact).

On the same day that these Communist supporters of Jiang Jieshi launched their violent take-over of Shanghai, Guomindang troops took control of the City of Nanjing, attacked foreigners and looted foreign property there, “including the American, British, and Japanese consulates.” (Wilson, United States Policy and the Nationalist Revolution in China, 1925-1928, page 111). Foreigners were frightened by these attacks and they blamed it on communists, not on Jiang Jieshi. “Actually, however, the nationalists [i.e., Guomindang] were the perpetrators of this series of attacks on foreign civilians. Some foreign officials, such as the Japanese Consul General, thus advised [Jiang Jieshi] to crack down on the radical elements in the city” (St. James Encyclopedia…). This is remembered as the “Nanking Incident of 1927.”

On 22 March, the stage was set for the great betrayal and a years-long bloodbath. On that day, a subordinate of Jiang Jieshi, called off the strike in Shanghai and ordered the suppression of the labor unions and other radical groups (Wilson 110). With thousands of soldiers in toe and at his command, Jiang Jieshi himself arrived on 26 March and began meeting with members of the local Guomindang, the Shanghai business community, and the gangsters. He was promised financial support “if he broke from the communists and pledged to ‘regulate’ the relationship between labor and capital” (St. James Encyclopedia…).

April 1927: Let the Reign of Terror Begin

Jiang Jieshi agreed with these parasitic foreigners that the changes being proposed by the workers and the Communists were too radical. “It should have come as no surprise to anyone that [Jiang Jieshi] decided to move against the radicals, as he had already done so in several other cities in late March” (St. James Encyclopedia…), but many Chinese workers as well as French, German, and Russian communists continued to believe in him.

After the Guomindang’s attack on Westerners and Japanese in Nanjing (i.e., the Nanking Incident of March 1927), Jiang Jieshi started to seek support from Japan and the U.S. rather than the USSR and the CCP (Wilson 33, 72, 134).

Jiang Jieshi viewed the success of the peasants and the workers as a threat to his party’s political, military, and social control, and this is one reason why he initiated the April 12th Shanghai Massacre, in which the Guomindang slaughtered communists in Shanghai and other places. According to Vincent Kolo, the “capitalist class and rural landowners whose sons were well represented in the officer corps of the [Guomindang] armies grew fearful of the increasingly radical demands of the working class (for shorter work hours and against the terror regime in many factories) and the peasantry (for land reform and against the crushing taxes of the landlord class)” (Kolo, “90 Years since Chiang Kai-shek’s Shanghai Massacre,” Chinaworker.info).

On 5 April Jiang Jieshi “instituted martial law and ordered the disarming of all bearers of arms not properly registered with the Nationalist Army” (Wilson 123). On the 11th, Wang Shouhua [the President of the GLU] was thrown in a sack and “buried alive” (Smith, “The Third Armed Uprising”). By the morning of the 12th, the worker militias “had been crushed,” according to historian S.A. Smith. That day, Jiang Jieshi hired hundreds of armed gangsters to massacre labor leaders and communists (Wilson, page 124).

Even so, the tenacious workers, led mainly by the GLU, called a general strike for the 13th of April. “240,000 workers walked out” (Smith, “The Third Armed Uprising”). Machine gunners opened fire on their parade. “Attackers” engaged in “stabbing, shooting, and clubbing the panic-stricken crowd.” One hundred were killed. But even on the 14th, the majority of striking workers did not give up.

By the 15th, the GLU estimated that three hundred trade union activists had been killed. It is estimated that by the end of the year, two thousand “Communists and worker militants” had lost their lives. The Guomindang killed “thousands of worker activists” in Shanghai, Wuhan, and Guangzhou (Leong, “From the May Thirtieth Movement…”). “Over the following twelve months, more than three hundred thousand people would be killed in the Guomindang’s anti-communist purges” (Working Class History 80-81).

The police of “Qingbang and Hongbang brutally executed the captured communist and union members by slaughtering them and putting them in the crater of a locomotive.” (“4.12 Shanghai Coup,” Namuwiki, 15 April 2025). Communists refer to the following years of Guomindang massacres as the “White Terror.” By one estimate, this White Terror resulted in the deaths of one million people (Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World 33). Enabled by the governments of the U.S. and other countries, Jiang Jieshi began in 1947 another White Terror on the Island of Taiwan. It did not end until 1987.

This is the way that Jiang Jieshi thanked the peasant and worker revolutionaries who had propelled his party to power. His rewards for this great achievement of “unifying” the nation included generous financial support from the business class of Shanghai (David Lowe, “Generalissimo,” The Weekly Standard 9:27:22, page 43), lots of help of various kinds from the Powers of the West and Japan, and recognition from the Empires that he was the legitimate ruler of China.

With his solid track record of bullying into submission Chinese workers, the U.S. showered Jiang Jieshi with treasure for decades, until his death in 1975. The U.S. was the first foreign country to step forward and grant recognition to his new regime (in 1928), and soon the U.S. would begin supporting him financially and militarily, too, even when informed U.S. observers, such as John King Fairbank (1907-91) labeled his Party as “proto-fascist.” For Fairbank, the Guomindang were a “small political group holding tenaciously to power…with hopes of using industrialization as a tool of perpetuating their power and with ideas which are socially conservative and backward-looking” (Wilson 2).

Yokomitsu Riichi, the Japanese ultra-rightist author who wrote the novel Shanghai (1931), presented in that story a surprisingly similar picture of the political and economic situation of China, a country where parasites of the West, Japan, and even China committed state violence against them and stole the fruits of their labor. For example:

He [Sanki] fell silent. He had detected the strength of will of the authorities who had hired Chinese to kill Chinese.

[Fang Qiu-lan, a woman to whom Sanki is attracted and a Communist who organizes workers in Japanese textile factories:]  “That’s right. The craftiness of the British authorities isn’t new. The history of the modern Orient is so filled with the crimes of that country that if you tried to add them up, you’d be paralyzed. Starving millions of Indians, disabling Chinese with the opium trade. These were Britain’s economic policies. It’s the same as using Persia, India, Afghanistan, and Malaysia to poison China. Now we Chinese must resist completely.” (Yokomitsu Riichi, Shanghai: A Novel by Yokomitsu Riichi, Dennis Washburn, trans., Center of Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2001, page 153).

Since 1950, the United States has sold Taiwan nearly $50 billion in “defense equipment and services, with a number of large sales during recent U.S. administrations.” Is this how we deliver “power to the people” and peace in East Asia? Were we promoting industrial democracy by increasing the wealth and power of Jiang Jieshi even after he committed massacres of Chinese workers with impunity? Don’t the people of Taiwan, the vast majority of whom are Han Chinese, deserve credit for sprouting democracy even under the sun-starved, U.S.-backed dictatorship of Jiang Jieshi? Where in the U.S. is there any recognition of the crimes that the U.S. committed against the Han Chinese and other ethnic groups of Taiwan and the rest of China? How solid is the foundation on which the current President Lai Ching-te stands, the man who called himself a “pragmatic worker for Taiwan independence” in 2017? When we spend 250 million U.S. dollars on an upgrade on our “informal,” 10-acre embassy in Taiwan, is that an example of how we adhere to our One China policy? Even merely with the foregoing brief exploration of the history of the obvious class struggle in China a century ago, and quick examples of U.S. support for Jiang Jieshi’s attacks on the working class of China, one can see that U.S. dollars were spent on death, destruction, and tyranny rather than on democracy and peace.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Joseph Essertier.

Tsoutsouvis had been a member of one of the first Greek leftist guerrilla orgs known as the ELA or Revolutionary People’s Struggle.

Over the years he participated in a number of militant acts of property destruction and later graduated to political assassinations targeting some of the worst perpetrators of torture of the Greek military junta.

He died on 15 May 1985 in a shoot out with the police in which he managed to take 3 of them with him.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

Orientation
International political economy at a crossroads

As most of you know the world economy is peppered with fault lines. On one hand we have the rising in the East of a new economic block, the BRICS nations and their friends. On the other hand, in the West we have a rapidly declining Yankeedom and its European vassals on. What are socialists in the West to do with this malestream, this great turning point? Is it not clear whether to support BRICS or not? After all, the BRICS countries have only one clear socialist country and two countries that are Hindu fundamentalists (India) as well as a theocracy (Saudi-Arabia). So does it make sense for socialists to support Russia, India, and Saudi-Arabia that are conservative politically? This article proposes that Western socialists need to give up their purist ideologies and accept that while the BRICS countries may be lacking in socialist policies domestically,they still should be supported because of their international attempts to follow Marx and Engels’ exhortation to “develop the productive forces”. This means striving to create material abundance through technological innovation.

Who am I
I am no academic socialist nor am I a red diaper baby. In fact, reading and school for me were mutually exclusive opposites. When I was a young adult I couldn’t stand reading and dropped out of community college. I only started to care for reading after I left and began hitchhiking across the country. Because I am self-educated, I did not have the benefits of being systematically educated in all the different schools of socialism, what socialist organizations were like and where and how socialism was applied all over the world. So I eclectically dabbled with books and organizations. I eventually found my way and this article is the result of conclusions I’ve come to after 50 years. Twelve years ago my partner and I started our own website and Facebook page which now has 10,000 followers. We each work 20-25 hours per week in various aspects of this work. Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism is our baby!

What do I Mean by Socialist Purist?
By the term socialist purist I mean someone who holds out for the most extreme, utopian form of socialism, whether it is defined by Marx, Engels, Lenin or an anarchist hero like Kropotkin. For Leninists socialism means no capitalism with the state which controls all economic transactions, the society is classless and does not use any currency. For the anarchists the ideal is no state, no capitalism, no classes and no money. If actually existing socialism has any of these things it is treated, not as part of a long process of development, but as a sign of a) betrayal of the party or a bureaucracy (Trotskyists) and b) corruption or some kind of pollution from the original source. That source is most often treated like a bible. It is more or less the same as the old ruling law in Louisiana that if a person had 1/32 of what was considered African American blood, they were considered black.

China
If I support China, I will be told that China isn’t really socialist or communist. If the state-controlled enterprises compose 60% of the Chinese economy I will be told that the 40% of the economy that is in private hands matters more. It will also be pointed out that in China strikes are outlawed and independent labor unions are illegal. I would prefer that strikes in China were legal and workers were allowed to form unions. There are labor unions in China but under the auspices of the state. Also, there are plenty of strikes in China. But for the purists this is enough for the entire country to be dismissed as a socialist project. For me it is not. Where do the purists get their definitions? I will be told that Marx and Engels defined socialism and communism in a particular way and that is the definition we should work with despite the fact that the definitions were intentionally sketchy and they were written over 150 years ago. If I point out China’s great work on the Belt and Road Initiative of building infrastructures and harnessing energy all over the world, I would be told they are still deriving a profit from them. Profits are bad! From anarchists for whom all states are bad, I will be told that China is really just continuing Western imperialism. For anarchists, helping to develop the productive forces in another country is nothing more than a “debt trap”. For them all capitalist and state socialist societies are imperialist the moment they engage with a country on the capitalist periphery.

Russia
There is no country in the world which has been more brutally and tenaciously demonized than Russia and that was so before, during and after the Russian Revolution. If we post a story on our website or social media pages about the Russian economy now being the fourth strongest in the world, we will be told by Trotskyists or Social Democrats that Russia is, after all, a capitalist country, as if that should end all discussion. Anarchists will tell me that Putin is a dictator. These folks don’t understand that Russia has at least four or five parties and that in the last election, Putin’s party got 49% of the vote and the Community party got 20%. I will be told by other purists that much of Russia’s spending is on its own and others’ military, not so much on producing goods and services for a better life for its citizens. The anarchists will tell me that anarchists and other dissidents are rotting away in Russian prisons. For them it doesn’t seem to matter that Putin has 80% approval ratings and Russia has built up its domestic economy even more since US sanctions. For socialist purists, the fact that Russia has been investing in the northern Arctic Silk Road which will increase trade in regions that have not been connected seems not to matter to them. The domestic economy is first and geopolitics is second. I believe the reverse to be true.

The International Proletarian Revolution Around the World at the Same Time

For anarchists any power at a national level is against socialism. So what do they advocate? An international revolution of workers’ councils that overthrows all states and is linked up locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. How realistic is this? As we stand now in the history of the United States we have never had a general strike that encompassed more than one local state. If we face this fact it is ludicrous to propose that workers’ councils are going to spontaneously arise, spread across an entire country then link up to other countries until the whole system is global. Doesn’t it seem ridiculous to assume this is going to happen in the near future? In Europe, the English, French and German heads of state are hated. Germany is de-industrializing, the French and English living standards have declined, still we have yet to see a general strike among the working classes of all countries that can drive them from power. It has struck me that:

• Since these European rulers are all bitterly against Russia;
• Russia possesses that cheap natural gas which could improve working class living standards; and
• the working classes could unite against their rulers and demand to have cheap Russian gas shipped to them.

How likely is even this semi-continent alliance? Unfortunately, not very. It has taken the rulers of states and capitalists roughly 300 years to convince people that their nation-state deserve more loyalties than their previous loyalties to provinces, principalities, regions and city states. How likely are the citizens today to give that national loyalty? Marx and Engels naively thought that workers would give up their fatherland for the international loyalty of the working class. All socialists found out the hard way through the results of two world wars that workers of the world uniting is not something workers across states have any intention of doing. So whether we like it or not, the real fight for the foreseeable future is between the rulers of capitalist states and their working classes. That is the best we can do for now and in the near future.  

World-Systems Theory and the Long View of Capitalism
In Giovanni Arrighi’s great book The Long Twentieth  Century, in world systems terminology, over the last 500 years capitalism has jumped all over the world from Italy, Holland, England and to the United States. Each ‘hegemon’ has ruled from between 220 to 100 years before its decline. In every case when the hegemon has fallen it has been replaced by a country on the capitalist semi periphery. The United States has been in decline for over 50 years. What’s next? Well, China certainly qualifies as a semi-periphery country that is still rising. But something much deeper is going on. Not only China, but all the other BRICS countries – Russia, India, Iran and Saudi Arabia have been in the semi-periphery world system. Can it be that after 500 years in Europe, we are witnessing the world economy shifting from the West to the East? It certainly looks that way. Every member of BRICS is a country on the capitalist semi-periphery.

The Rise of BRICS
I celebrate the emergence of a block of anti-imperialist countries that have broken away from the Anglo-American Empire. China, Russia, Iran and to a lesser extent India have resisted using the dollar as a world trade currency. Further, they have insisted on using their own local currency in trade transactions. With the exception of China Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia are capitalist countries, but their commitment has not been primarily to make a profit on war or forms of fictious capital such as stocks, bonds, derivatives or stock options as does the United States. Following the Chinese great Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) these countries have traded with each other in exchanges of energy systems, infrastructures such as roads and trains as well as in agricultural products and military defense.

The BRICS economic agreement between Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa was established as an alternative to the imperialist World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This breakaway movement is growing stronger by the day as the United States and the rest of the West sinks into decay. As a socialist I support this breakaway movement even if it is not explicitly socialist. In answer to my support of BRICS, I will be told that most of its members are capitalist and that socialism can never come from it. So how is socialism supposed to come about?

Nationalism as a Revolutionary Force in a BRICS Dominated World

For traditional socialists, nationalism has been the enemy. After all, historically it keeps workers from uniting with other workers around the world and it propagandizes them into aligning with the capitalist class rather than their own class. These are all reasons to be against nationalism. But the problem in today’s world is that we are fighting against a global capitalism that sets up continental systems such as the European Union which is organized to encourage the free flow of capitalism across the entire European continent. The EU does big business for the European capitalist class, a kind of Bilderberg economic union. The EU has no working-class representation. In my opinion, it is an advance for the working class of nation states to fight for independence from this European parasitic organization.

Conservative parties are moving towards nationalism – socialists are not

The problem for socialists is that in Europe and other parts of the world the  traditional conservative parties have taken positions of supporting the nation-state against the European Union and are not anti-Russian. This includes Le Pen in France, the AFD in Germany and Orban in Hungary. Sadly, to my knowledge there is not even an intermediate scale socialist party in Europe that has taken a nationalist stance. So am I advocating support of these conservative parties?

The linear political spectrum is bankrupt in the 21st century
In order to align ourselves with the current BRICS program we badly need a new political spectrum, one that leaves behind the current linear version. On this topic, please see my article of 2 ½ years ago which is still highly relevant.  As I said in my article, Are Socialists Going to let Neoliberals Define Fascism: Why the Linear Political Spectrum is Bankrupt this spectrum must be:

• inclusive of many more combinations than the communism-liberalism-conservative, fascist and libertarian, linearly strung out;
• economic as well as political;
• must account for qualitative leaps – which is the difference between socialism and capitalism;
• decentered so that both moderate and extreme solutions would seem reasonable under certain conditions. This means that all political tendencies would have to be seen as having pros and cons. The way it stands now liberals and conservatives are seen as virtuous and communism and fascism are seen as having vices;
• the spectrum must be flexible enough to make room for alliances between the extremes on the political spectrum such as China and Saudi Arabia or between India (fundamentalist) and China and
• not limited to ideologies that are next to each other on the political spectrum.

BRICS Leads the Way in Revolutionizing the Linear Political Spectrum                      

This is where things get messy. If we follow the lead of China, Xi Ping does not form alliances based on loyalty to socialism. He is committed to building communism but has formed alliances with a Hindu fundamentalist nationalist in India and with the theocratic state of Saudi Arabia. Putin is no socialist yet his strongest ally is to a country that wants to build communism. Modi, a right-winger is ok doing business with communist China. Cuba and Venezuela would be happy to do business with any of the BRICS countries whether they are socialist or not. So what united these BRICS countries that might make socialists of the West support them?

• They are anti-imperialist.
• They are anti-war.
• They are anti-finance capital.
• They want to develop the productive forces of the world.

Importance of Technological Innovation
Let me develop the last point. In the Communist Manifesto Marx spent a good deal of time praising the capitalist system for developing industry – building railroads and factories and upgrading the standing of living for the middle classes and parts of the working class. These are the very activities the BRICS countries are engaged in now. In Marxian terms, what is so good about this? It is based on the idea that socialism must be founded on abundance. It means increasing the ratio between freedom and necessity. This means maximizing productivity while decreasing the numbers of work hours. For me this is a more important goal to fight for even if internally the countries of BRICS suffer from class, race and gender inequalities.

Siege Socialism
Typically in the West, when socialist countries are compared to capitalist countries they are criticized in terms of standard of living, varieties of political parties and freedom of expression. In the first place, socialist countries should be measured in comparison to what these countries were like before the socialist revolution. Capitalist countries have had 300 years to develop themselves unopposed after they defeated feudalism. Socialist countries have had a little more than 100 years to develop yet they have done so in spite of constant capitalist attempts at sabotage, assassinations and betrayal. It is way too soon to make sweeping generalizations about the viability of socialism. In fact, based on the last 35 years of the “triumphant” West, when we look at the world around us, it is capitalism that is either is in deep trouble or has failed.

Secondly, capitalist critics fail to understand that Western concepts of freedom are not shared around the world. What matters to working-class people most is the ability to read and write, have low-cost health care and free education. In terms of housing, socialism either provides low-cost housing or makes it possible for people to buy their house outright. Socialist countries like China and Cuba have a higher percentage of home ownership than the United States. As far as the variety of political parties, I can well understand that the socialist leaders who have come to power may be extremely cautious about allowing many political parties to form. When we consider the ability of capitalist spies to turn alternative parties into organs of counter revolution, the concerns of socialist leaders is completely understandable. The best book I know which makes a case for actually existing socialism, is Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds.

Throwing Down the Gauntlet
What’s wrong with anarchism?

I do not share the criticism of anarchists by Marxists and or Marxist-Leninists. For the most part they were not “petite bourgeois individualists.” Most of the 19th and 20th  century anarchists were working classpeople who were very influential during the revolutions in Russia, 1917-1921, and Spain, 1936-1939. I respect many of their leaders from Bakunin to Louise Michel to Kropotkin to Malatesta, to Emma Goldman and to Buenaventura Durruti. However socialism must be based on abundance, not scarcity. Many anarchists don’t believe material abundance is a necessity. For those anarchists who support material abundance, a decentralized economy is not going to deliver the goods. A kind of promethean socialism requires some state centralization coordination of the distribution of water, heat, gas and electricity and other infrastructural projects.

Following Pannekoek and Gorter I agree that workers’ councils should be the micro unit of a communist society. But local workers’ councils plans for production need to be linked up regionally and then nationally. Centralization is necessary but it must be open so that there is a dialectical relationship from workers’ councils to the top and from the state back down to the bottom. Anarchists are hostile or cynical about centralization. The way political organs are organized today, a political body has to be a state in order even gain recognition. What do anarchist expect to do? Dismantle the entire state system founded at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648? It’s completely unrealistic.

Secondly, anarchism and workers’ councils have always been hostile to parties. The heart of politics is to steer, to develop social policy. Workers’ councils or radical unions cannot be solely economic organizations. Whatever their production goals they have to be coordinated by social needs outside of work. This includes consumer groups with community needs, family needs, social and psychological needs where there is an ongoing dialectic in which plans are first made and monitored. Political parties are necessary for both directing our future and learning from our past.

Lasty, there needs to be room for markets. As many of you know markets are much older and much different than capitalist exchange. They go all the way back to horticultural societies and even existed among complex hunter-gatherer societies. Markets will continue to exist among small traders who do not hire workers for wages. The possible relationship between workers’ councils, the state and markets is well laid out in David Schweickart’s  book After Capitalism.

What is Wrong with Stalinism
By themselves workers can only achieve trade union consciousness (more money and better working conditions)
I do not share Trotskyist evaluations of Stalin as some kind of bureaucratic madman implying that Trotsky wanted more party democracy. Neither do I share anarchist dismissal, not only of Stalin, but also equating Stalin, Lenin and even Marx as all authoritarian. My criticism of Stalin as a political leader can be broken down into the following parts. As far back as 1905 with the founding of the Bolshevik party, they claimed that left to their own devices working class people can attain only a trade union consciousness. They ignored what the workers did during the Paris Commune which went way beyond trade union consciousness. Workers  created revolutionary organs of self-management without much, if any, input from any socialist or socialist parties at the time. This leads me to my second criticism.

This is that the Communist Party, not just Stalin, but also Lenin never trusted the workers’ councils that formed in Russia. They did not trust workers’ own creativity. “All power to the Soviets” was a slogan the Bolsheviks used before they came to power. After that the factory committees in the cities and the self-organization of the peasants were treated as rivals rather than comrades. In addition, Stalin actively destroyed workers’ councils during the Spanish revolution when he saw he could not control them. Devoted Leninists will state that it was the war against Western capitalist parties that forced the communist parties into a narrower, heavy-handed approach. I agree with this up to a point, but I don’t think it could explain all the more repressive behavior. The anarchists have every right to despise the Communists for what happened to them and their comrades.

The limits of vanguard parties
Marx and Engels never talked about vanguard parties. In fact, they made fun of the secret revolutionary societies of August Blanqui. However, it makes sense to me that a secret party was necessary in Russia in the early 20th century, a society without even a liberal party, no constitution and a monstrous secret police. But Leninist parties that continued to build vanguard parties that operated under relatively liberal stable conditions in the West, where a legal party was possible and political activity could be public is just mechanically holding  onto a theory that longer fits in Western conditions. In their hands Leninist theory became a dogma.

The scholastic treatment of the sciences and philosophy

There were a number of areas where dialectical materialism became dogmatic rather than scientific. I will mention two. In anthropology, Marxist-Leninist, with or without Stalin preserved Marx and Engels’ stage theory of social evolution for 100 years in spite of real empirical data from anthropologists that challenged Marxism. There were new stages of simple and complex horticulture societies that came between hunter-gatherers and the emergence of the state. In addition, slavery and feudalism were not  universal stages of social evolution. Also, in the field of psychology, the communist psychology of Vygotsky was banned in Russia for 20 years. One his most creative followers, Evald Ilyenkov was forbidden to publish and was harassed to the point of committing suicide.

Every school in the history of philosophy was crammed into the categories of objective idealism, subjective idealism or materialism. See my article which shows philosophy can be grouped into six different schools: Out on a Limb With Dialectical Materialism. Lastly the various schools of 20th century philosophy are crudely labelled based on whether the school of philosophy – pragmaticism, logical atomism, analytical philosophy – was for or against imperialism. In addition to which class the school represented. This was the case even if the school of philosophy never made any political statements.

Lastly it was very short-sighted for Stalin to insist on controlling all communist parties of the world in the service of Russia. In the case of the United States, the American Communist Party lost many opportunities to move the Yankee working class towards communism because the American communist leaders were never allowed to adapt communist theory to their own conditions. It makes complete sense to me that on a world scale, smaller communist parties should defer to the party that had achieved state power. But that doesn’t mean the party that achieved state power should dictate the strategies and tactics of countries with different political and economic conditions. We need a mass socialist party, not a secret vanguard party.

What Stalin did right
Internationally Stalin was a great politician. For 25 years the Communist Party outfoxed the entire Western world of the United States, England, France and Germany that were all in cahoots to destroy state socialism in Russia. Also the Communist Party practically single-handedly defeated the Nazis. Nationally Stalin raised the standard of living for workers and peasants compared, not to Western societies, but under the conditions of that existed under the czars until the Revolution.

There are issues that in the West Stalin is regularly attacked about:

• the treatment of peasants on the collective farms;
• the famines in Russia;
• the notion that Stalin was a dictator;
• that Russia operated in totalitarian way and
• the political trials of the 1930s.

Ludo Martens in his book Stalin: Another View, talks about each of these issues and exposes the typical Western ideology about this. It is important to remember that the statistics about the collective farms and famines were mostly written by CIA agents. Further, Martens does not take the position of idealizing everything that Stalin did. He simply presents facts that show Western propaganda as either wrong at worst or exaggerated at best.

So What are Messy Transitions?
The world of BRICS is a messy world. As I said before, China is the only country moving in a clear socialist direction. It has to work with two right wing countries – Hindu fundamentalist India and a theocracy in Saudi Arabia. Russia and Iran are clearly locked in with China but they are not socialist. Secondly, there is the class struggle going on within BRICS countries. None of these countries are supporting radical labor unions so the class struggle will go on within BRICS. Thirdly, workers cooperatives are a growing but small movement around the world. They represent potential dual forms of power. It is unclear how the heads of the BRICS countries will deal with worker co-ops as radical forms of economic exchange. Fourthly there are the ecological problems of extreme weather, accumulation of toxins, desertification and species extinction that the human species face. BRICS countries will deal with this in various ways. Lastly, there is the collapsing empire of the United States whose ruling class will fight to the death to keep it from slipping even to a minor power status. It will take all the ingenuity to navigate in, around and through this ruling class before it takes down half of the world with them.

Over many years organizations such as the United Nations have developed world programs for abolishing poverty and world hunger, increasing political participation and many other improvements. Those plans continue to gather dust because the world capitalist class is dead set against them. These plans can be potentially put into practice by some of the more progressive members of BRICS. In short it will be a messy bitches’ brew for the next century. We socialists have to accept messes and attempt to be more dialectical, not only in how we deal with the messes but also the bitterness of all socialists groups to each other.

Cooling Out the Socialist Family Feuds

For the past 170 years socialist groups have fought each other bitterly, sometimes justified and sometimes not. But we might do better if we understand each other as having various tensions that were there from the beginning, specifically:

• What is the role of the state?
• What is the role of a socialist party?
• What is the role of self-organizing workers? and
• What is place of markets?

To begin with, Leninists of all types need to face the fact that they don’t have the answers to everything. In fact, workers’ councils have shown that workers are far better at co-creating than they have been given credit for. On the other hand, anarchists and Council Communists need to come to terms with the fact that the state is a necessary part of socialism and for socialists to compete with capitalism on a world scale, some infrastructural industries require a state. In addition, council communists and anarchists cannot exist by themselves in economics organizations with no party. We need socialist parties to navigate political direction. Lastly, both anarchists and Council Communists need to appreciate that what the USSR, Cuba and Venezuela have achieved with their population is to be admired, not just criticized.

Finally, all these groups have to respect what the social democratic parties in the Scandinavia countries achieved domestically, at least before the rise of neoliberalism. They made some real improvements domestically for the populations in terms of standard of living, wages, health care and housing.  On the other hand Social Democrats internationally should be roundly condemned for actively or passively not standing up to the imperialist powers of the West with a sense of international solidarity with other socialist countries against capitalists. Finally, while Social Democrats have given far too much power to capitalists domestically in their own country, they have also shown that local markets can be productive contributors to socialism and that markets are not synonymous with capitalism.

What is the Opposite of Purity?
Throughout this article I have criticized socialist purity. But the opposite of purity is enmeshment. In psychological terms, enmeshment is a process by which a person cannot easily tell where their boundaries end and another’s begin. The worst example of enmeshment politically are the actions of the social democratic parties of the world since the end of World War II. They allowed themselves to become entangled with capitalism. Their boundaries were enmeshed. They couldn’t tell the difference between domestic socialism and international imperialism

The worst example of socialist enmeshment is the Democratic Socialists of America. This organization for 60 years has been devoted to “moving the Democratic Party to the left”. In reality the Democratic Party has been moving right despite whatever interventions they’ve made. The Democratic Party has continuously moved to the right, today being a center-right party. Yet the leaders of the Democratic Socialists of American continue to support the Democratic Party. Today it is difficult, if not impossible to tell the difference between Social Democrats and left liberals.

Conclusion
I began my article by defining what I meant by socialist purity. I said it could apply to both the anarchist as well as the Leninist left – Trotskyists, Stalinists or Maoists. At the end my article I said that the opposite of socialist purity was socialist “enmeshment”. It is the Social Democrats in Europe and the Democratic Socialists in the United States that are the best example of this. I pointed out examples of socialist purity in attitudes towards two countries, China and Russia. I argued why BRICS holds the best hope for a socialist future and I based this partly on World Systems Theory of the history of capitalism. I pointed out the Utopian nature of the wish for a workers’ revolution all over the world at the same time. I argued that based on how they behave today, workers fighting for socialism within their nation-states is the best we can do. I also claimed that these days nationalist loyalties in the West is an advance against regional institutions like the European Union on the one hand  or global institutions like the IMF or the World Bank on the other. I proposed that nationalism is an advance, whether it comes from countries such as Cuba or Venezuela on the left or European nationalists on the right including Le Pen’s party in France, the AfD in Germany or Orban in Hungary.

I attempted to be dialectical in weighing both anarchism and the varieties of Leninism for their pros and cons. I defended what has been called siege socialism against the purists, using Michael Parenti’s book Black Shirts and Reds and Ludo Martens book, Stalinism: Another View as two sources.

For over 50 years I have drawn from some very unlikely bedfellows. Some of these groups I joined and some I was on the periphery of and only knew them from their writings:

• beginning with historical anarchists culminating with Murray Bookchin (2 years);
• The Situationists of Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord culminating in Pannekoek and Gorter’s council communism (3 years);
• National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) converging in Lyndon Larouche’s book Dialectical Economics (1 year). More recently I’ve been influenced by William Engdahl, Matthew Ehret and Cynthia Chung, also in the Larouche orbit;
• world-systems theory following the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, Christopher Chase-Dunn and Giovanni Arrighi;
• communist psychology of the Soviet Union whose main practitioners were Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev. Also one year’s involvement with Social Therapy founded by Fred Newman and Lois Holtzman in New York City;
• in 2000 the anti-war movement headed by ANSWER (8 years);
• the Occupy movement from 2011-2012;
• the founding of our own organization Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism from 2012 to today; and
• one year with anarchists from Olympia Assembly and the Industrial Workers of the World.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

The Estallido Social (or Social Explosion) was a popular uprising in the territories occupied by the Chilean state, sparked on October 18, 2019 by a fare hike of 30 pesos. What began with a student-led campaign of transit fare evasions quickly spread into a nationwide uprising that shook society to its very foundations.

This uprising was born out of the long history of revolt in so-called Chile. Unfortunately, as participant Yza reminds us, long histories of revolt are often due to long histories of repression. Repression in these lands goes back before the formation of the Chilean state, to the Spanish invasion and conquest. But the modern era begins with the 1973 coup that installed Augusto Pinochet as dictator. Years of neoliberal reforms produced a disillusioned and disorganized working class. InterRebellium traces the roots of the 2019 uprising to the student movements of the 2000s and feminist movements of the mid 2010s, as well as through Indigenous resistance throughout the history of colonial domination. The movement also took cues and tactics from revolts happening concurrently in Hong Kong and Ecuador.

For months, thousands of people fought pitched street battles with the cops and military, organized networks of support for the front line militants, created horizontally organized neighborhood assemblies, participated in general strikes and conducted acts of arson and sabotage against symbols of power and multinational corporations.

The Estallido was ultimately contained through a combination of brutal state repression, promises of reform and a new constitution, and an aesthetic face-lift on the old symbols of power with the election of the young Gabriel Boric of the new-left. As the riots subsided and many people became willing to work within the channels of state bureaucracy, Boric and the new left were free to build coalition with the same forces that were in power before the Estallido, leaving many of the worst perpetrators of state repression in their same roles. A handful of political prisoners from the Estallido remain behind bars to this day (April 2025)

InterRebellium will cover the global wave of revolts from 2018-2020. The title is from Latin for “between uprisings.” We believe it is important to take this time between waves relate our experiences on a worldwide scale, to study the last one so that we are better prepared for the next one.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

“A gargantuan influence.”
— Chris Hedges

“ … brilliant … unswerving … relentless … heroic.”
— Arundhati Roy

“Preposterously thorough.”
— Edward Said

“[A] fierce talent.”
— Eduardo Galeano

“An intellectual cannon.”
— Israel Shamir

“A lighthouse over a sea of hogwash.”
— Kathleen Cleaver

He had a disarming frankness, a toothy grin, a dazzling mind that never rested.

He always felt completely out of tune with the world. At ten, he published his first article (in the school paper) – a lament on the fall of Barcelona to Franco. At thirteen, he was haunting anarchist bookstores in New York City and working a newsstand with his uncle, eagerly soaking up everything a brilliant mix of immigrant minds had to offer, by far the richest intellectual environment he was ever to encounter. At sixteen, he went off by himself at the news of Hiroshima, unable to comprehend anyone else’s reaction to the horror. At twenty-four, he abandoned a Harvard fellowship to live on a kibbutz, returning only by chance to fulfill an academic career. At twenty-eight, he revolutionized the field of linguistics with his book, Syntactic Structures. At twenty-nine, he became associate professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (and full professor three years later), though his competence with technology was limited to the tape recorder. At thirty-five, he threw himself into anti-war protest, giving talks, writing letters and articles, promoting teach-ins, and helping to organize student demonstrations and draft resistance against the Vietnam War. At thirty-eight, he risked a five-year jail term protesting at the Pentagon, spending the night in jail alongside Norman Mailer, who described him in Armies of the Night as “a slim sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, and an air of gentle but absolute moral integrity.”[1] At forty, he was the only white face in the crowd at Fred Hampton’s funeral, after the young Black Panther leader was gunned down by the FBI in a Gestapo-style raid.[2]

Such was the early life of America’s greatest dissident intellectual, raised in a deeply anti-Semitic German-Irish neighborhood in Quaker Philadelphia, later awarded an elite linguistics professorship at the center of the Pentagon system at MIT.

Fulfilling a brilliant academic career at the pinnacle of the Ivory Tower, Chomsky railed against his fellow intellectuals’ subservience to power, dismissing pious declarations of Washington’s alleged commitment to freedom, equality, and democracy, with abundant demonstrations of its actual values – greed, domination, and deceit. He forensically examined the claim that the establishment media operate as an objective check on the excesses of the powerful, marshalling overwhelming evidence showing that in fact they are a propaganda service working on their behalf. Laboriously debunking the flood of lies and distortions targeting mass audiences, he transformed dangerous misperceptions of U.S. benevolence into insightful comprehension of imperial reality.

Thus we learned that the Vietnam War was not a noble quest to defend freedom, but a quasi-genocidal assault on a former French colony designed to subjugate a defenseless peasantry; that Israel was not a glorious example of uniquely decent democratic socialism, but a modern Sparta on a path to self-destruction; that the Cold War was not a contest between freedom and slavery, but a shared opposition to independent nationalism, in which a galaxy of neo-Nazi U.S. client states masqueraded as the “Free World.”[3]

Such insights were anathema in academia, and Chomsky quickly earned a reputation as a political crank among his more subservient colleagues (the vast majority), even as he gained considerable stature as a public intellectual in American society at large and internationally. These contrasting perceptions of his credibility made for a striking schizophrenia in how he was evaluated: dismissed as a lunatic by pundits and professors, Chomsky’s political lectures were sold out years in advance to overflow general audiences throughout the world.

Elite commentators who wrote him off as a novice for his lack of credentials in political science contradicted themselves by recognizing him as a genius for his linguistics work, though he had no formal credentials in that field either. Nevertheless, they were right about his genius. When Chomsky first entered linguistics the prevailing model of language acquisition was behaviorist, the assumption being that children acquire language by imitation and “reinforcement” (gratifying responses from others for the correct use of language), which Chomsky immediately realized couldn’t begin to account for the richness of even the simplest language use – obvious from an early age in all healthy children – who routinely manifest patterns of use they’ve never heard before.

When Chomsky subjected the behaviorist paradigm to rational scrutiny it promptly collapsed, replaced by recognition that language capacity is actually innate and a product of maturation, emerging at an appropriate stage of biological development in the same way that secondary sex characteristics not evident in childhood emerge during puberty. Like so many other Chomsky insights, the idea that language capacity is part of the unfolding of a genetic program seems rather obvious in retrospect, but in the 1950s it was a revolutionary thought, vaulting the young MIT professor to international academic stardom as the most penetrating thinker in a field his un-credentialed insights utterly transformed.[4]

At the time, Chomsky appeared to be living the perfect life from a purely personal standpoint. He had fascinating work, professional acclaim, lifetime economic security, and a loving marriage with young children growing up in a beautiful suburb of Boston, an ideal balance of personal and professional fulfillment. But just then a dark cloud called Vietnam appeared on the horizon, and Chomsky – with supreme reluctance – launched himself into a major activist career, sacrificing nearly all of his personal life along the way.[5]

In the Eisenhower years the U.S. had relied on mercenaries and client groups to attack the Vietminh, a communist-led nationalist force that had fought the French and was seeking South Vietnamese independence with the ultimate goal of a re-unification of South and North Vietnam through national elections. Though the U.S. was systematically murdering its leaders, the Vietminh did not respond to the violence directed against them for many years. Finally, in 1959, came an authorization allowing the Vietminh to use force in self-defense, at which point the South Vietnamese government (U.S. client state) collapsed, as its monopoly of force was all it had had to sustain itself in power.

Plans for de-colonization proceeded. The National Liberation Front was formed, and in its founding program it called for South Vietnamese independence and the formation of a neutral bloc consisting of Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam, with the ultimate goal of peacefully unifying all of Vietnam. At that point there were no North Vietnamese forces in the South, and no North-South military conflict.[6] That would emerge later, as a direct result of U.S. insistence on subjugating the South.

To head off the political threat of South Vietnamese independence, President Kennedy sent the U.S. Air Force to bomb rural South Vietnam in October 1962 and drive the villagers into “strategic hamlets” (concentration camps), in order to separate them from the nationalist guerrilla movement Pentagon documents conceded they were willingly supporting. This overt act of U.S. aggression was noted in the press, but without a flicker of public protest, which would only come years later.[7]

When Chomsky first began speaking out on Vietnam, venues were scarce and public support for the effort virtually nil. He was actually grateful for the customary police presence, which prevented him from getting beaten up. “In those days, protests against the war meant speaking several nights a week at a church to an audience of half a dozen people,” Chomsky remembered years later, “mostly bored or hostile, or at someone’s home where a few people might be gathered, or at a meeting at a college that included the topics of Vietnam, Iran, Central America, and nuclear arms, in the hope that maybe participants would outnumber the organizers.”[8] The quality of his analysis was extraordinary and Chomsky placed himself “in the very first rank” of war critics (Christopher Hitchens) from the start, helping to spark a mass anti-war movement over the next several years.[9] Unlike “pragmatic” opponents of the war, who justified U.S. imperialism in principle but feared it would not bring military victory in Vietnam, Chomsky called out U.S. aggression by name, sided with its victims, and urged the war be terminated without pre-conditions.

Though a radical departure from establishment orthodoxy, Chomsky’s positions on the war were always carefully thought out, never blindly oppositional. For example, though he opposed the drafting of young men to fight in a criminal war, he was not opposed to a draft per se. In fact, he emphasized that a draft meant that soldiers could not be kept insulated from the civilian society of which they were a part, leading to what he regarded as an admirable collapse of soldier morale when the anti-war movement exposed U.S. intervention in Vietnam as naked aggression. When the draft was terminated in 1973, the Pentagon shifted to a “volunteer” army, that is, a mercenary army of the poor and low-income, which Chomsky regarded as one much less likely to be affected by popular anti-war agitation, even aside from the more serious issue of unjustly assigning responsibility for “national defense” to the most economically exploited sector of the population. For these reasons he felt that a universal draft was to be preferred to a “volunteer” army brought into being by strongly coercive economic forces.[10]

Unlike his establishment critics, Chomsky did not consider class analysis a conspiracy theory, but rather, an indispensable tool in properly accounting for known facts. For example, while there was no national interest in attacking South Vietnam, there very much was an elite interest in suppressing the contagious example of a successful national independence movement in Southeast Asia, as the failure to do so might encourage other countries in the Pacific to “go communist” (i.e., seek independence), which could ultimately have reversed the outcome of WWII in the Pacific had Japan ended up accommodating the officially socialist world instead of Washington.[11]

Given the unanswerable nature of this type of (anti-capitalist) analysis, Chomsky was kept well away from mass audiences. On the rare occasions he did appear in the corporate media, his overwhelming command of relevant fact meant that he couldn’t be distracted or derailed. When interviewers attempted to get him off track, they were quickly confronted by the soft query – “Do the facts matter?” – followed by an informational tsunami leading inexorably to a heretical conclusion.

Given his mastery of evidence and logic, it was frankly suicidal for Chomsky’s establishment critics to confront him directly, which probably accounts for why so few of them ever did. The handful that tried were promptly obliterated by a massive bombardment of inconvenient fact. Since “facts don’t care about your feelings,” all of the latter group were obligated to examine which irrational emotions had encouraged them to adopt the erroneous conclusions Chomsky showed them they held, but none of them did.

William F. Buckley had his error-riddled version of the post-WWII Greek civil war exposed on his own show – Firing Line. “Your history is quite confused there,” commented Chomsky to Buckley’s face, after the celebrated reactionary referred to an imaginary Communist insurgency prior to the Nazis’ Greek intervention.[12]

Neo-con Richard Perle tried to divert his discussion with Chomsky from U.S. intervention and denial of national independence around the world to an analysis of competing development models, an entirely different topic. With no answer for fact and reason, he was reduced to rhetorically asking the audience if it really didn’t find establishment mythology more plausible than what he called Chomsky’s “deeply cynical” arguments revealing the shameful truth.[13]

Boston University president John Silber complained that Chomsky hadn’t provided proper context when mentioning that the U.S. had assassinated Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, blown up the church radio station, and cut the editor of the independent newspaper to pieces with machetes. Silber neglected to disclose what context could possibly redeem such atrocities.[14]

Dutch Minister of Defense Frederick Bolkestein dismissed Chomsky and Edward Herman’s thesis on capitalist media as a conspiracy theory and Chomsky’s anarchist convictions as a “boy’s dream.” In the course of their debate, however, Chomsky refuted every one of Bolkestein’s charges, while pointing out their complete irrelevance to evaluating the thesis advanced in Herman and Chomsky’s book, Manufacturing Consent, which was the purpose of the debate.

The term “Manufacturing Consent” derives from the public relations industry, the practices of which more than amply confirm Herman and Chomsky’s thesis that under capitalism the broad tendency of the mass media is to function as a propaganda service for the national security state and the private interests that dominate it. In any case, Bolkestein himself confirmed Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model in his very attempt to refute it, objecting to Chomsky’s allegedly undercounting of killings attributable to Pol Pot (an official enemy of the U.S.) while completely ignoring U.S. client Indonesia’s massacres in East Timor, to which Chomsky had compared the killings in Cambodia. This is exactly what the propaganda model predicts: crimes of state committed by one’s own side will be ignored or downplayed while those of official enemies will be exaggerated or invented, while occasioning great moral indignation, which is never in evidence when one’s own crimes are under discussion.[15]

These four intellectual knockouts by Chomsky appear to have deterred the rest of the establishment pack from even entertaining debating with him.[16] A story told by the late Alexander Cockburn suggests they were actually afraid to do so. “One prominent member of the British intellectual elite,” related Cockburn, warned him not to get into a dispute with Chomsky on the grounds that he was “a terrible and relentless opponent” who confronted central issues head-on and never ceded ground as part of a more complicated maneuver. That was why, explained Cockburn, the guardians of official ideology so often targeted Chomsky with gratuitous vilification and childish abuse: “They shirk the real argument they fear they will lose, and substitute insult and distortion.”[17] (emphasis added)

So unprepared were these establishment mouthpieces to engage in substantive discussion that they actually refused Chomsky the customary right to defend himself even against their repeated personal attacks. After demonstrating that elite assertions about him were no more than vulgar smears, Chomsky found his letters to the editor went unprinted or were mangled beyond recognition by hostile editing.

Rather than take offense, Chomsky shrugged off such treatment as only to be expected. If he hadn’t received it, he often said, he would have had to suspect that he was doing something wrong.

As unperturbed as he was by personal attacks, the same cannot be said of his reaction to propaganda passed off as news. Christopher Hitchens and Alexander Cockburn both told the story of how Chomsky once went to the dentist and was informed that he was grinding his teeth in his sleep. Consultation with Mrs. Chomsky determined that this was not the case. Further investigation found that Chomsky was indeed grinding his teeth, but in the daytime – every morning when he read the New York Times.[18]

The explanation for these disparate reactions is straightforward. Chomsky could see that vilification was infantile and inconsequential and therefore easily dismissed it. But the deadly impact of mass brainwashing made him react with the whole of his being, unconsciously gnashing his teeth at elite hypocrisy.

This fury fed his boundless reading appetite, equipping him with the insurmountable advantage of a lifetime of determined preparation. An avid reader from early childhood, he devoured hundreds, if not thousands, of books growing up, checking out up to a dozen volumes at a time from the Philadelphia public library, steadily working his way through the realist classics – Austen, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Eliot, Hardy, Hugo, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Twain, and Zola – as well as Hebrew literature, including the Bible, and Marxist and anarchist texts.[19]

This insatiable appetite for books continued throughout his life, supplemented by countless other print sources. At home or at work he was always surrounded by enormous stacks of books, more than anyone could read in several lifetimes. The practical results of such a studious life could be amusing. Chomsky himself told the story of how he and his first wife Carol once heard a loud crash at 4:30 a.m., thinking it was an earthquake. In fact, it turned out to be a mountain of books cascading to the floor in an adjoining room.[20]

Though Chomsky could only read a portion of all that he would liked to have read, that portion was of staggering dimensions for any ordinary reader. Aside from the mountain of books he read growing up, according to his wife Carol he read six daily newspapers and eighty journals of opinion, in addition to thousands of personal letters he received from the general public, an important part of his reading load.[21] Before 911, Chomsky spent an average of twenty hours a week on personal correspondence, a figure that probably increased after 911 when interest in Chomsky’s work surged.[22] His longtime personal assistant Bev Stohl confirms that he answered e-mails every night until 3:00 a.m.,[23] while Chomsky himself used to say he wrote 15,000 words a week responding to personal letters, which he drily claimed was “a C.I.A. estimate.” Even subtracting out the writing time for private correspondence, one can see that Chomsky’s reading was beyond enormous, and not at all recreational, a preference that manifested itself early in life when he read a draft of his father’s dissertation on David Kimhi (1160-1236) a Hebrew grammarian,[24] which turned out to be the first step on a complicated path to intellectual stardom sixteen years later with the publication of Syntactic Structures.

Chomsky’s boundless reading appetite appears to have been matched by the public’s appetite to hear him speak. He probably spoke to more Americans in person than anyone else in history, giving political lectures and talks at a staggering rate for nearly sixty years. In the pre-zoom era that meant considerable travel, the demands of which he embraced without complaint, whether driving, flying, or taking the train. In addition to destinations all over the U.S. he also went to Colombia, Palestine, Nicaragua, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, India, Mexico, Britain, Spain, France, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, Japan, Italy, Turkey, and South Africa, among other places activists invited him to visit.

The talks were brilliant, and standing ovations routinely followed them. But the question and answer periods were where Chomsky’s unparalleled mastery stood out. Hour after hour questions were put to him on dozens of different topics, from labor history to union organizing to guerrilla tactics to drone warfare to economic theory to counter-insurgency and popular resistance, and hour after hour he patiently answered with illuminating precision and fascinating detail, at the same time providing an astonishing array of book titles, article summaries, history lessons, revealing quotes, and clarifying context about a seemingly limitless number of political conflicts past and present. His prodigious power of recall was vastly superior to any merely photographic memory, which overwhelms with irrelevant detail, whereas Chomsky always selected from a vast trove of information just what was immediately and historically relevant to a single person’s inquiry, before moving on to the next, and the next, and the next, and the next, in city after city, decade after decade after decade.

The size of his audiences mattered little to him, whether he spoke on a tiny college radio station or in front of thousands at a prestigious university. If anything, the larger audiences – though routine for Chomsky – were less desirable, as they highlighted the discouraging fact that too few intellectuals were willing to take up the challenge of political education and popular organization, a conformist constriction of supply in relation to strong public demand. In short, libertarian socialist Chomsky had no interest in being a “hot commodity,” and the fact that he could be regarded as such represented a failure of the intellectual class to politically engage with the public more than it did any personal merit on his part. Furthermore, as far as merit to his speaking ability goes, Chomsky deliberately refused to cultivate it, shunning oratory and rhetorical flourish in preference for what he called his “proudly boring” style of relying solely on logic and fact. Swaying audiences with emotion, he thought, was better left to propagandists.

This preference for the analytical over the emotionally gratifying was always in evidence with Chomsky. For example, in the early eighties a massive build-up of first-strike nuclear weapons sparked the emergence of the Nuclear Freeze movement, which mobilized enormous popular support for a bilateral freeze (U.S.-U.S.S.R.) in the production of new nuclear weapons by relentlessly focusing public attention on apocalyptic visions of nuclear annihilation.

From the moment the incineration of Hiroshima was publicly announced, of course, Chomsky, too, had recognized the danger of a world wired-up to explode in atomic fury, but he dissented from the view that paralyzing visions of utter destruction were an effective way of achieving nuclear disarmament. On the contrary, Chomsky felt that public attention needed to be focused on imperial policy, not military hardware, as it was policy that produced outcomes.[25] When the Nuclear Freeze movement attracted more than a million people to New York City in 1982 to protest the accelerating nuclear arms race, Chomsky withdrew from the event when no mention was made of Israel’s ongoing invasion and devastation of Lebanon, including the killing of Soviet advisers, a direct incitement to potentially terminal superpower confrontation.[26]

While the Freeze continued to focus laser-like on the awesome destructiveness of nuclear bombs, Chomsky found the approach insultingly simplistic, and expressed no surprise when its efforts were ultimately absorbed into the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, then headed by Kenneth Adelman, who was given the position after saying in his confirmation hearings that he had never given any consideration to the idea of disarmament.

In spite of dissenting in such ways even from the views of popular movements he sought to encourage, Chomsky’s public stature continued to grow. While subject to an almost complete blackout in the corporate media (for years after the end of the Vietnam War his writings could most reliably be found in the pages of the right-wing magazine Inquiry and the worker-owned and managed South End Press), Chomsky nevertheless won widespread acclaim for his analytical brilliance, tireless activism, and unflagging commitment to exposing the truth. Though he himself downplayed personal accolades, he won praise from a dazzling array of admirers, from learned professors and radical journalists to students, activists, authors, spiritual leaders, political hopefuls, movie directors, musicians, comedians, world champion boxers, political prisoners, international leaders, and awestruck fans throughout the world. With their constant compliments ringing in his ears, it’s doubly remarkable that he never lost his humility.

Physicist Lawrence Krauss remembered being deeply impressed by Chomsky’s consistent willingness to spend an hour of his time talking to him whenever Krauss dropped by his office as a young student at MIT, though Chomsky had no professional obligation to students outside of linguistics. “He showed me a kind of respect I wasn’t anticipating,” said an appreciative Krauss years later, while pronouncing Chomsky’s work “incisive, informative, provocative, and brilliant.”[27]

Activist and journalist Fred Branfman was impressed by Chomsky’s apparent ability to X-Ray vast reams of print and extract the essence for immediate practical use. When Chomsky visited Laos in 1970 to learn about refugees of U.S. saturation bombing of the region, Branfman gave him a 500-page book on the war in Laos at 10:00 one night, and was amazed to see him refute a propaganda point in a talk with a U.S. Embassy official the next day by citing a footnote buried hundreds of page into the text. Branfman was also struck by the fact that, unlike many intellectuals, Chomsky retained access to his deepest emotions. While witnessing Laotian peasants describing the horrific effects of U.S. bombing, he openly wept.[28] Overall, Branfman found Chomsky to be intense, driven, and unrelenting in combating injustice, but also warm, caring, wise, and gentle.

A documentary about Chomsky released in 2003 saluted his amazing productivity, calling him “[a] rebel without a pause,” which was the title of the film. After four decades of public intellectual work featuring eighteen-hour workdays, the MIT professor was well-known for working through the night drinking oceans of coffee, yet somehow still making himself available for morning interviews.[29]

Journalist and friend Alexander Cockburn emphasized Chomsky’s provision of a coherent “big picture” about politics, “buttressed by the data of a thousand smaller pictures and discrete theaters of conflict, struggle and oppression,” all the product of his extraordinary responsiveness to injustice. “Chomsky feels the abuses, cruelty and hypocrisies of power more than anyone,” wrote Cockburn. “It’s a state of continual alertness.”[30]

Famed American author and wilderness defender Edward Abbey wrote that Chomsky deserved the Nobel Prize for Truth, if only one had existed.[31]

British philosophy professor Nick Griffin declared Chomsky “extraordinarily well-informed,” and found the experience of simply talking to him “astonishing.” “He’s read everything and remembered what he’s read,” he marveled.[32]

Referring to the dissident classic, American Power and the New Mandarins, historian and gay rights activist Martin Duberman hailed Chomsky’s seemingly Olympian detachment, his tone so “free of exaggeration or misrepresentation,” his avoidance of “self-righteousness,” and his rare ability “to admit when a conclusion is uncertain or when the evidence allows for several possible conclusions.” Perhaps most remarkably, Chomsky was able, said Duberman, “to see inadequacies in the views or tactics of those who share his position – and even some occasional merit in those who do not,” a rare talent in the best of times and virtually non-existent in the frenzied tribalism so prevalent today.[33]

The brilliant Palestinian scholar Edward Said expressed admiration for Chomsky’s tireless willingness to confront injustice and for the awesome extent of his knowledge. “There is something deeply moving about a mind of such noble ideals repeatedly stirred on behalf of human suffering and injustice. One thinks here of Voltaire, of Benda, or Russell, although more than any of them Chomsky commands what he calls ‘reality’” – facts – over a breathtaking range.”[34]

Pantheon editor James Peck noted a kind of intellectual vertigo in reading Chomsky, finding his critiques “deeply unsettling” and impossible to categorize, as “no intellectual tradition quite captures his voice” and “no party claims him.” Always fresh and original, “his position [was] not a liberalism become radical, or a conservatism in revolt against the betrayal of claimed principles.” He was “a spokesman for no ideology.” His uniqueness, said Peck, “fits nowhere,” which was in itself “an indication of the radical nature of his dissent.”[35]

People’s historian Howard Zinn resorted to leg-pulling irony to describe the Chomsky phenomenon: “I found myself on a plane going south sitting next to a guy who introduced himself as Noam Chomsky…. It occurred to me, talking to him, that he was very smart.” Zinn, a popular speaker himself, was sometimes asked for the latest count of the learned professor’s staggering output of books. He would begin his reply with the qualification, “As of this morning,” and then pause for dramatic effect, drolly suggesting that any number he might offer stood a good chance of being abruptly rendered obsolete by Chomsky’s latest salvo.[36] Daniel Ellsberg was of similar mind, once saying that keeping up with Chomsky’s political work was a considerable challenge, as “he publishes faster than I can read.”[37]

Establishment liberal Bill Moyers was impressed by Chomsky’s apparently greater admiration for the intelligence of ordinary people than for the specialized talents of his elite colleagues. In an interview at the end of the Reagan years he told Chomsky: “[It] seems a little incongruous to hear a man from the Ivory Tower of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a scholar, a distinguished linguistics scholar, talk about common people with such appreciation.” Chomsky found no paradox at all in this, replying that his appreciation flowed naturally from the evidence provided by language study itself, which demonstrated overwhelmingly that ordinary people have deep-seated creative intelligence that separates humans from every other known species.[38]

Where paradox does exist is in elite intellectuals’ apparently boundless capacity to pervert natural human intelligence into specialized cleverness at serving the ends of power. However, this makes them not the most intelligent part of the population, as they believe themselves to be, but, on the contrary, the most gullible and easily deceived, a point Chomsky made often.

In Chomsky’s final public years the fruit of using our species intelligence to serve institutional stupidity manifested itself in growing threats of climate collapse, nuclear war, and ideological fanaticism displacing all prospect of democracy, calling into question the very survival value of such intelligence.

Helpfully, Chomsky has left us with sage advice about which direction our intelligence should take and also avoid, in order to escape looming catastrophe. As to the first, he said, “You should stick with the underdog.”[39] About the second, he said, “We should not succumb to irrational belief.”[40]

In June 2023, Chomsky suffered a massive stroke, leaving him paralyzed down the right side of his body, and with limited capacity to speak.

His appetite for news and sensitivity to injustice, however, remain intact. When he sees the news from Palestine, his wife reports, he raises his remaining good arm in a mute gesture of sorrow and anger.[41]

Still compassionate and defiant at 96.

Incredibly well done, Professor Chomsky.

Happy Birthday.[42]

ENDNOTES:

[1]Mailer quoted in Robert F. Barksy, Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, (MIT, 1997) p. 129.

[2] Chomsky’s childhood, see Mark Achbar, ed. Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, (Black Rose, 1994) pps. 44-50. Also, Robert F. Barsky, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, MIT Press, 1997) Chapter 1. Chomsky at Fred Hampton’s funeral see Christopher Hitchens, Covert Action Information Bulletin event at the University of the District of Colombia, C-SPAN 1995 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODfic8Z818

[3]On U.S. neo-Nazi client states, see Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection And Third World Fascism, (South End, 1979), and many subsequent works. On Vietnam, see Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins: Historical and Political Essays; (Vintage, 1969); Noam Chomsky; At War With Asia: Essays on Indochina, (Pantheon, 1970); and Noam Chomsky; For Reasons of State, (The New Press, 2003). On the Middle East, see Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians, (South End, 1983); Noam Chomsky & Gilbert Achcar, Perilous Power: The Middle East And U.S. Foreign Policy, (Paradigm, 2007); Noam Chomsky, Middle East Illusions, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). On the Cold War, see Noam Chomsky, World Orders Old and New, (Columbia, 1994).

[4]Chomsky appears to never have confused symbols of knowledge (credentials) with knowledge itself, and he had early evidence that the brightest minds were often without credentials. The uncle whose newsstand he helped work was extremely intelligent and well-read, even had a lay practice in psychoanalysis, but never went beyond fourth grade. Similarly, though his mother never went to college, Noam agreed that she was “much smarter” than his father and his friends, who he said “were all Ph.Ds, big professors and rabbis,” but “talking nonsense mostly.” On Chomsky’s uncle, see Mark Achbar ed., Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, (Black Rose, 1994), p. 50. On Chomsky’s mother, see Noam Chomsky (with David Barsamian), Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World,” (Metropolitan Books, 2005), p. 158.

[5]Chomsky found political activism distasteful, and hated giving up his rich personal life. See Mark Achbar ed., Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, (Black Rose, 1994) p. 65-6.

[6]Noam Chomsky interviewed by Paul Shannon, “The Legacy of the Vietnam War,” Indochina Newsletter, Issue 18, November-December, 1982, pps. 1-5, available at www.chomsky.info.net

[7]Noam Chomsky, The Chomsky Reader, (Pantheon, 1987) p. 224-5.

[8]Chomsky quoted in Milan Rai, Chomsky’s Politics, (Verso, 1995), p. 14.

[9]Christopher Hitchens, Covert Action Information Bulletin event at the University of the District of Colombia, C-SPAN, 1995, available on You Tube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODficd8Z818

[10]Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel, eds. Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, (New Press, 2002) pps. 35-6

[11]See Noam Chomsky, “Vietnam and United States Global Strategy,” The Chomsky Reader, (Pantheon, 1987) pps. 232-5.

[12]“Firing Line with William F. Buckley: Vietnam and the Intellectuals,” Episode 143, April 3, 1969.

[13]“The Perle-Chomsky Debate – Noam Chomsky Debates with Richard Perle,” Ohio State University, 1988, transcript available at www.chomsky.info.net.

[14]“On the Contras – Noam Chomsky Debates with John Silver,” The Ten O’clock News, 1986, transcript available at www.chomsky.info.net

[15]Mark Achbar, Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, (Black Rose, 1994) pps. 128-31

[16]There was also a “debate” between Chomsky and Alan Dershowitz in 2005 on the future of Israel/Palestine, although Dershowitz’s performance was not much more than intellectual clowning, with repeated “I” declarations demonstrating his inability to move beyond narcissistic fantasy (“I believe,” “I think,” “I call for,” “I propose,” “I support,” “I have written,” “I can tell you,” “I favor,” “I see,” “I hope,” etc.). He irrelevantly quoted Ecclesiastes, called for a “Chekhovian” as opposed to “Shakespearean” peace, and ignored decades of total U.S.-Israeli opposition to anything remotely like national liberation for Palestinians. Chomsky wryly congratulated him for the one truthful statement he made, i.e., that Chomsky had been a youth counselor at Camp Massad in the Pocono Mountains in the 1940s. See “Noam Chomsky v. Alan Dershowitz: A Debate on the Israel-Palestinian Conflict,” Democracy Now, December 23, 2005

[17]Alexander Cockburn in David Barsamian, Chronicles of Dissent: Interviews with Noam Chomsky, (Common Courage, 1992) p. xii

[18]An understandable reaction given the “Newspaper of Record’s” grotesque distortions. On Chomsky’s teeth-grinding, see Alexander Cockburn in David Barsamian, “Chronicles of Dissent – Interviews with Noam Chomsky,” (Common Courage, 1992) p. ix; Christopher Hitchens, Covert Action Information Bulletin event at the University of the District of Colombia, C_SPAN, 1995, available on You Tube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODficd8Z818

[19]Robert Barsky, Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, (MIT, 1997) p. 13, 19; Mark Achbar ed., Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, (Black Rose, 1994) p. 44

[20]Noam Chomsky in David Barsamian, Class Warfare: Interviews With David Barsamian, (Common Courage, 1996) p. 26

[21] Noam Chomsky: Rebel Without a Pause, 2003 Documentary

[22] Robert Barsky, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, (MIT, 1997) p. 45

[23] Bev Bousseau Stohl, Chomsky and Me: A Memoir, (OR Books, 2023) p. 53

[24] Robert F. Barsky, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, (MIT, 1997,) p. 10

[25]“A narrow focus on strategic weapons tends to reinforce the basic principle of the ideological system … that the superpower conflict is the central element of world affairs, to which all else is subordinated.” Noam Chomsky, “Priorities For Averting The Holocaust,” in Radical Priorities, (Black Rose, 1984) p. 283

[26]“The conclusion is that if we hope to avert nuclear war, the size and character of nuclear arsenals is a secondary consideration.” Noam Chomsky, “The Danger of Nuclear War and What We Can Do About It,” Radical Priorities, (Black Rose, 1984) p. 272.

[27]“Chomsky and Krauss: An Origins Project Dialogue,” You Tube, March 31, 2013

[28] Fred Branfman, “When Chomsky Wept,” Salon, June 17, 2012

[29]Bev Boisseau Stohl, Chomsky and Me: A Memoir, (OR Books, 2023) p. 92

[30]Alexander Cockburn in David Barsamian, Chronicles of Dissent: Interviews with Noam Chomsky, (Common Courage, 1992) p. x – xi

[31]Edward Abbey, ed., The Best of Edward Abbey, (Counterpoint, 2005), preface.

[32]Quoted in the documentary Rebel Without a Pause, 2003.

[33]Martin Duberman quoted on the back cover of “American Power and the New Mandarins,” 1969 (first Vintage Books edition).

[34]Edward Said, “The Politics of Dispossession,” (Chatto and Windus, 1994) p. 263

[35]James Peck, introduction to The Chomsky Reader, (Pantheon, 1987) p. vii – xix

[36]Howard Zinn, The Future of History: Interviews With David Barsamian, (Common Courage, 1999), pps. 39-40. Though Chomsky’s total book count has ended up around 150 (with collaborations with activist friends still coming out), it’s possible nobody knows the exact figure with certainty. Lifelong activist and friend Michael Albert tells the story of how Chomsky’s immense body of work once convinced a group of activists in Eastern Europe that there were two different Chomskys, one a linguist, and the other a political activist. Given Chomsky’s preposterous output and far from unusual surname in that part of the world, it was perhaps an understandable error. See Michael Albert, “Noam Chomsky at 95. No Strings on Him,” Counterpunch, December 8, 2023.

[37]Paul Jay, “Rising Fascism and the Elections – Chomsky and Ellsberg,” The Analysis News, You Tube November 2, 2024

[38]Bill Moyers, A World of Ideas: Conversations With Thoughtful Men and Women, (Doubleday, 1989). The interview is also available online on You Tube. See “Noam Chomsky interview on Dissent (1988).”

[39]Milan Rai, Chomsky’s Politics, (Verso, 1995) p. 6

[40] Chomsky in Chronicles of Dissent: Interviews With David Barsamian, (Common Courage, 1992) p. 159

[41] “Noam Chomsky, hospitalizado en Brasil,” La Jornada, June 12, 2024 (Spanish)

[42]Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Michael K. Smith.

On this day in Anarchist History, November 14 1909, we remember young Simón Radowitzky and his assassination of Colonol Falcón, the head of the federal police in Argentina.

Colonel Falcón rose through the ranks of the military by conducting genocide and enslaving Mapuche and other Indigenous People in Patagonia and brought those same skills to Buenos Aires where he brutally repressed anarchists.

After assassinating Falcón, Radowitzky was tortured and jailed for 22 years but that didn’t stop him from continuing to lead a revolutionary life.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

Just in time for the COP29 summit, where a group of self-congratulatory world leaders will meet in Baku, Azerbaijan for photo-ops, catered meals, and of course discussion of climate goals that they don’t intend to meet, subMedia, in collaboration with Peter Gelderloos, is pleased to release part one of a three part series: It’s Revolution or Death.

The first installment of the series takes a look at the push for green capitalism, and questions the common-sense assumptions of its cheerleaders. Bolstered by unwavering, uncritical support from NGO’s, energy corporations portray themselves as cutting edge innovators in green energy technology while hedging their bets and maintaining diversified portfolios – packed with fossil fuel investments.

The coming two installments will discuss Indigenous and anarchist struggles for land and autonomy and how local communities can get organized to build resiliency in the face of worsening climate catastrophe.

The effects of runaway climate change are already here. If the past 50 years of gas-lighting have made one thing abundantly clear, it’s that the politicians and entrepreneurs leading the charge for green energy will never prioritize the interests of life on earth in their pursuit of profits. So what are we going to do about it?

For more of Peter Gelderloos’ work check out They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us and The Solutions are Already Here. Both from Pluto Books.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

Just in time for the COP29 summit, where a group of self-congratulatory world leaders will meet in Baku, Azerbaijan for photo-ops, catered meals, and of course discussion of climate goals that they don’t intend to meet, subMedia, in collaboration with Peter Gelderloos, is pleased to release part one of a three part series: It’s Revolution or Death.

The first installment of the series takes a look at the push for green capitalism, and questions the common-sense assumptions of its cheerleaders. Bolstered by unwavering, uncritical support from NGO’s, energy corporations portray themselves as cutting edge innovators in green energy technology while hedging their bets and maintaining diversified portfolios – packed with fossil fuel investments.

The coming two installments will discuss Indigenous and anarchist struggles for land and autonomy and how local communities can get organized to build resiliency in the face of worsening climate catastrophe.

The effects of runaway climate change are already here. If the past 50 years of gas-lighting have made one thing abundantly clear, it’s that the politicians and entrepreneurs leading the charge for green energy will never prioritize the interests of life on earth in their pursuit of profits. So what are we going to do about it?

For more of Peter Gelderloos’ work check out They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us and The Solutions are Already Here. Both from Pluto Books.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

By all accounts their trial was a sham. They were found guilty even after somebody else confessed to the crimes.

Their funeral was attended by 10,000 people and the wreath over their casket read, “Waiting for the hour of vengeance.” Anarchists around the world would soon deliver on this promise of vengeance.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

On this day in anarchist history, July 19th of 1936, fascists attempted to take control of Spain by force.

While most of the more liberal elements of Spanish society rested on their laurels, the anarchists were preparing to defend against the fascist coup in the making.

On that day officers from the Spanish army led their troops into several cities around the country but in Barcelona the anarchists were prepared for them. By the next afternoon, anarchists were in full control of the city.

In the years to follow anarchists would play a major role in the Spanish Civil War but sadly their tenuous alliance with the broader left would prove to be a grave miscalculation and Spain would eventually fall to the fascists.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

On June 13th 2013in anarchist history, we remember The Vinegar Revolt, a series of protests turned into riots across the lands occupied by Brazil.

On June 13th 2013 ongoing demonstrations over a transit fair hike In São Paulo, Brazil erupted into a national uprising after police cracked down hard, arresting 60 people for simply possessing vinegar to protect themselves against the use of teargas.

Soon the demonstrations spread to many other cities and became one of the first documented use of the Black Bloc tactic in the country.

The violent and disruptive tactics of The Vinegar Revolt highlighted the wide gulf between the radical and institutional left and has even led to progressives conflating anarchists with the far-right.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

In this episode of A is for Anarchy, we examine the historical origins of dual power and analyze current examples and those throughout history.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

In Chicago in 1886 police murdered two people at a general strike for an 8 hour work day. A rally for revenge on May 4^thled to a riot when a bomb was thrown at the police. Several cops and protesters were killed in the ensuing gunfire and many more were injured.

The state then began rounding up known dissidents and sentenced most of them to death even though many of those arrested weren’t even there.

For over a century anarchists around the world have been avenging the Haymarket Martyrs through strikes, pickets and clandestine attacks.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

It was one of the earliest examples of a new anarchist strategy: “Propaganda by the Deed.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

Hello and welcome to the first of what we hope will be a many episodes of our new series, This Day in Anarchist History!

In this series we’ll make brief primers on historical anarchist events, uprisings, bios of famous anarchists and beginnings of autonomous communities around the world and throughout time. It’s our hope that by understanding our past we can put our current social movements into broader perspective and fight for a better future.

In our premier episode we examine The Paris Commune, a short lived uprising when a broad coalition of the working classes took control of the city on March 18, 1871 and held out under siege until the end of May when the French national army entered Paris and executed thousands of the rebels.

In the coming years, anarchists would seek vengeance for their comrades who fell at the Paris commune.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ken Klippenstein.

The true end of Man… is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole. Freedom is the first and indispensable condition which the possibility of such a development presupposes… Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being but still remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies but merely with mechanical exactness…

[T]he principle of the true art of social intercourse consists in a ceaseless endeavor to grasp the innermost individuality of another, to avail oneself of it, and, with the deepest respect for it as the individuality of another, to act upon it… The very variety arising from the union of numbers of individuals is the highest good which social life can confer, and this variety is undoubtedly lost in proportion to the degree of State interference. Under such a system, we have not so much the individual members of a nation living united in the bonds of a civil compact, but isolated subjects living in relation to the State…

The entire book is an elaboration of these ideas. In them, we do not see a vulgar individualism, a reduction of humans to mere nodes in the cash-nexus who buy and sell to one another and need protection from each other, the kind of anti-humanism for which traditionalists and Marxists have criticized classical liberalism. We see, instead, an appreciation of the richness of every individuality; an emphasis on the human need for community, respect, friendship, and love; an anarchist critique of coercive institutions, in particular the state; a proto-Marxist theory of the alienation of labor; socialistic intimations that people have the right to control their own labor; in short, a liberal humanism of the sort that leftists of various persuasions would embellish in the following two centuries.

If one were to believe the “postliberals” who have burst onto the ideological scene in recent years, liberalism doesn’t have the moral or intellectual resources for such a mature humanism. It seems they haven’t read Humboldt.

Postliberalism has emerged in the UK and U.S. during the last ten years as a reaction against the manifest failures of what its thinkers call liberalism. The economic, social, political, and environmental crises that afflict the world they attribute to a systemic lack of regard for the “common good,” which, in turn, they attribute to a liberalism that has been horribly successful in its reduction of humans to atoms—“increasingly separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.” So writes Patrick Deneen, professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, in his 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed. Other vocal postliberals include Adrian Vermeule, Sohrab Ahmari, Yoram Hazony, Adrian Pabst, Chad Pecknold, Gladden Pappin, and some other writers associated with such magazines as American Affairs, UnHerd, and Compact. For all their differences, these writers share a rejection of any one-sided fixation on liberty, whether it be that of right-wing libertarianism—the “free market” doctrine to which the Republican Party is at least rhetorically committed—or left-wing social liberalism, the liberalism of identity politics. They seek to resuscitate ideas of social obligation, duty, community, and tradition, for example in the forms of family, church, and nation. The modern understanding of liberty is unhealthily and immorally licentious; better is the ancient and Christian conception that true freedom consists in self-control, self-discipline (under the constraints of tradition and religion), rather than slavish submission to base and hedonistic appetites.

Postliberals, therefore, criticize the modern gospel of “progress” and its ideological cognates, alleged solvents of social bonds, such as “Enlightenment rationalism,” or the application of critical reason to all forms of order and authority for the sake of dismantling whatever isn’t emancipatory, liberal, or conducive to economic growth. Their perspective is reminiscent of that of the social theorist and historian Christopher Lasch, whose 1991 book The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics was an extended critique of the ideology of progress and a history of its dissenters in the United States. Preferring an honest recognition of ineluctable limits—not least ecological limits—over modern liberalism’s faith in endless economic growth, endless moral progress, and liberation from the benighted parochialism of the past, Lasch turned to the culture of the lower middle class as a more human and realistic alternative. Without denying the historical vices of this culture (“envy, resentment, and servility”), he was nevertheless impressed by “the moral conservatism of the petty bourgeoisie, its egalitarianism, its respect for workmanship, its understanding of the value of loyalty,” in general its rootedness, so different from the deracinated future-fixation—detachment from the past—of contemporary liberal elites. Postliberals share these concerns and values.

What postliberalism amounts to, then, is a rejection of dominant tendencies of modernity. Some writers are more willing than others to acknowledge the positive achievements of liberalism—for instance, in The Politics of Virtue (2016), John Milbank and Adrian Pabst grant that liberalism “has afforded some protection against the worst transgressions upon the liberty of some by the liberty of others”—but, on the whole, postliberals are attracted to a kind of Burkean conservatism. “Right-wing on culture, left-wing on the economy” is how they are usually characterized. Through this formula, they think, it may be possible to bring back social cohesion, “the wisdom of tradition,” and respect for “the common good.”

Two books published this year by leading lights of postliberalism, Patrick Deneen and Sohrab Ahmari, provide an opportunity to critically evaluate this “new” school of thought (perhaps not so new). On the one hand, Deneen’s Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future illustrates the weaknesses of the ideology; on the other hand, Ahmari’s Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do About It illustrates its potential strengths. Ultimately, however, despite its mutability, postliberalism is misguided and dangerous in its idealism, its theoretical confusions, its political naïveté, and many of its political commitments. It too easily slides into proto-fascism. What is valid in it can be and has been expressed more sophisticatedly by the Marxist left.

Since it has the ear of some right-wing populists, such as J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley, and it seems to be growing in influence, this ideology should be taken seriously. Leftists may be able to find common ground with its advocates on certain issues, but in general, they should strongly resist this latest brand of conservatism.

The Idealism of Postliberalism

One of the major analytical flaws of postliberalism is, in fact, one of the weaknesses of all conservatism: its anti-Marxian idealism. In all his romantic talk of reverence for ancestral traditions, Edmund Burke abstracted from the actual daily functioning of these traditions, from their foundations in appalling violence, in constant violations of the dignity and freedom of the lower classes, in the irrationality of a nation’s being subject to the will of some arbitrary monarch who happened to be born to a previous monarch. A very different conservative, Milton Friedman, similarly abstracted from the daily realities of capitalism—the indignities of working for a boss, the suppression of the right to unionize, the violence in which the rule of capital is grounded—in his simplistic paeans to “freedom.” (His famous book Capitalism and Freedom (1962) consists of abstract idealizations like this one, chosen at random: “The kind of economic organization that promotes economic freedom directly, namely, competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other.” As if, in the real world, economic power doesn’t tend to confer political power!) Fascism was even worse: it idealized will, nation, race, the state, the Leader, and war, abstracting from the grubby realities of all these things.

Being a type of conservatism, postliberalism does the same. Its very name is idealistic and simplistic. “Liberalism” can’t be the fundamental problem we face today for the simple reason that there isn’t only one liberalism, there are many. Among the classical liberals, there were British, French, American, and German figures, as diverse as John Locke, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Kant, Thomas Paine, William Godwin, John Stuart Mill, and Tocqueville. There were socialists, anarchists, and capitalists. There were deists, Protestants, Catholics, and atheists. There were democrats, republicans, and monarchists. And in the twentieth century, liberalism evolved in even more complex ways, towards social democracy and its protection not only of “negative liberty” but also “positive liberty,” as in the freedom of people to have a living wage, a home, an education, and affordable healthcare. Even the anarchist communism of Peter Kropotkin can be said, in some respects, to belong to the liberal tradition. In short, the core intuition of liberalism—“a general enlargement and freedom and rational direction of human life,” as Lionel Trilling described it—can be fleshed out institutionally in innumerable ways, including in socialism, i.e., people’s democratic control of their work. (In fact, one can argue that Marxism is but a continuation and conceptual deepening of the best traditions of liberalism.)

Patrick Deneen’s two recent books—Why Liberalism Failed and Regime Change—exemplify the idealism of conservatism. Again and again, imposing a false unity on the liberal tradition, he blames liberalism for things that are more realistically attributed to capitalism. When he refers to “[recent] decades of liberal dismantling of cultural norms and political habits essential to self-governance,” what he means is capitalist dismantling. Liberalism is but an ideological attitude, a constellation of philosophies; capitalism—how people work, how they acquire property, how they exchange goods, how class relations are structured, how culture is produced and politics is organized—is the real basis for a way of life.

When Deneen, in Why Liberalism Failed, writes that “[liberalism] has remade the world in its image, especially through the realms of politics, economics, education, science, and technology, all aimed at achieving supreme and complete freedom through the liberation of the individual from particular places, relationships, memberships, and even identities,” one recalls the words of an infinitely more profound thinker:

“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations… It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation… All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…”

No mere ideological “tendency” (to quote Trilling again) could achieve all this. It is the class structures of capitalism that have remade the world.

Regime Change is shot through with idealism. The basic structure of the book is reasonable enough: in the first two chapters, Deneen diagnoses the faults of liberalism, including not only its ostensible ripping apart and atomizing of the social fabric but also its elevation of hypocritical liberal elites (“the managerial class,” the real power elite) who don’t care about “the people” but use identity politics to pretend they do, shredding the last vestiges of traditional norms in the process. In the next three chapters, he presents the postliberal vision. He calls this “common-good conservatism,” associating it with Burke, Benjamin Disraeli, and G. K. Chesterton, but more generally with “the classical and Christian tradition of the West—a common-good political order that seeks to harmonize the various contentious elements of any human society.” This conservatism aligns itself with the “common sense” of ordinary people, who “seek stability, predictability, and order within the context of a system that is broadly fair.” The solution to contemporary social ills is to implement the political philosophy of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, a “mixed constitution” (democratic and aristocratic) in which an elite much more noble than that of today will “work to improve the lives, prospects, and fate of the people,” as the people, in turn, demand excellence from the elite and themselves are influenced by the virtues of the new aristocracy.

In the final two chapters, Deneen fills out his Aristotelian vision, which he calls “aristopopulism,” while also gesturing towards an answer as to how this glorious new society will be realized. His answer isn’t particularly satisfying: “an ennobling of our elite” will come about “through the force of a threat from the popolo [people],” that is, “through the efforts of an energized, forceful, and demanding populace.” This is pretty much all he says on the matter. Likewise, his sketches of the better world to come consist of empty bromides and exhortations. Rather than meritocracy, we need a society that integrates the “working-class ethos of social solidarity, family, community, church, and nation” with the “virtues of those blessed by privilege.” To combat racism, we shouldn’t embrace affirmative action or other divisive approaches but should resurrect Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a “deeper ‘integration.’” Tepidly criticizing the ardent nationalism of people like Yoram Hazony (author of The Virtue of Nationalism), National Review editor Rich Lowry, and other “national conservatives,” Deneen proposes instead “a new form of integration of local, national, and international” (italics in the original). What that concretely means he leaves unsaid. His practical program for reinfusing religion into social life is similarly perfunctory, containing little more than such vague entreaties as “a simple first step would be to publicly promote and protect a life of prayer.” Politics should be “a place for prayer, since politics is how we together seek to realize the good that is common.”

One of the greatest swindles of postliberalism is its nostalgia for an idealized past. According to Deneen, the Enlightenment project of individual liberation required the overthrow of “older social forms that had taught and reinforced the cultivation of virtue.” Traditional institutions “protect the stability and order that most benefits ordinary people,” and in fact are deeply democratic “because they are the creation of countless generations of forebears” and “largely develop from the ‘bottom up.’” As it happens, feudalism wasn’t a particularly democratic institution that cultivated virtue. Nor was absolute monarchy. Nor was the Catholic Church, which, until the spirit of liberalism finally began to permeate it, was a rapacious tyranny that burned heretics, policed thought, crusaded against the advance of knowledge, and made common cause with autocrats everywhere. (Also, of course, it now has the distinction of systemically aiding and abetting child abuse.) However inspiring the figure and philosophy of Jesus may be, history has shown that religious institutions, like all administrative hierarchies, are prone to abusing their power unless suffused with the liberal spirit of respect for individual rights.

This worship of religion is a classic instance of mistaken idealism. Postliberals are enamored of Christianity, attributing much of what is good in our civilization to its religious inheritance and much of what is bad to its abandonment of religion. Most of the time, they ignore questions about whether, after all, it is true that something called “God” exists or that Jesus is His son and was resurrected after dying for our sins, or any of the other dogmas of Christianity (or Judaism)—and rightly so, for in order to evaluate the plausibility of any proposition, it’s necessary to use the Enlightenment’s “rationalistic” method they dislike. With regard to socially relevant questions, they appear to have a pragmatist conception of truth: if a belief is useful, we might as well believe it. But is religion in fact useful? Its violent, tortured, bigoted history suggests otherwise. Nor is it at all clear that humans need religion in order to enjoy a healthy communal and family life or to heed the moral duties that bind us all together.

Often, religion has functioned to undermine the well-being of communities and families. It isn’t a secret that conservative politicians use appeals to religion to convince people to vote against their economic interests. An infamous example is that of Governor Sam Brownback of Kansas, a religiose Christian who passed radical tax cuts in 2012 that, as the Brookings Institution summarizes, “led to sluggish growth, lower-than-expected revenues, and brutal cuts to government programs” like schools, housing, infrastructure, and police and fire protection. Similarly, for over a hundred years, businesses in the American South have used conservative Christianity to ward off the threat of unionism, helping to keep the region in a state of relative poverty. In Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South (2015), historians Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf describe how corporate executives in the postwar era relocated their factories to this region, where “chambers of commerce advertised the benefits [of] locating in a ‘distinctly religious city’ where the ‘labor is of native Anglo-Saxon stock—loyal and efficient.’” The CIO’s Operation Dixie was unable to overcome the resistance that evangelical Protestantism (among other forces) put up to unions.

On the whole, then, postliberals have a rather uncritical attitude towards tradition and religion, as conservatives usually do. They’re nostalgic for a lost social cohesion, the lost unity of “Western culture.” As Adrian Pabst writes in Liberal World Order and Its Critics (2019), identity politics (combined with “corporate crony capitalism”) is “changing the fundamental character of Western civilisation from being a cultural community bound together by common values that define shared interests to a ‘business community’ based on sectional interests that promote divisive values.” But when, exactly, was “Western civilization” such a unitary entity? The history of Europe is the history of constant clashes, constant wars, constant struggles between different value systems and interests and cultures, long centuries of violence and bloody suppression of innumerable popular uprisings. Divisiveness is history. And idealism is false history.

Buried under all the confusions and shallowness of postliberalism, however, there is a truth: throughout its five-hundred-year history, riven by war, privatization and the destruction of the commons, mass immiseration, and the crushing of democracy, capitalism has profoundly disrupted communities and uprooted identities. This is precisely why, or one reason why, leftists and “the people” have fought against it. Genuine leftists are well aware of the human need for roots, for order and stability and community. The great anarchist mystic Simone Weil even wrote a book entitled The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind. “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul… Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive.” There is no reason such a recognition should be incompatible with the best traditions of liberalism, for instance Humboldtian liberalism. That is, there is no reason a philosophy of individual rights and individual dignity should preclude a recognition of mutual obligations and the essentially social nature of humanity, including even a valorization of honorable traditions and shared norms that constrain unfettered liberty. This isn’t the place to delve into the philosophies of communism, socialism, and anarchism—the writings of Kropotkin, William Morris, Anton Pannekoek, Rudolf Rocker, Murray Bookchin, etc.—but the societies they envision are hardly licentious or degenerate or atomized. (Or remotely similar to the Soviet Union’s state capitalism, with which socialism and communism are absurdly associated.) They are eminently ordered, communal, and democratic, because they are grounded in a liberal humanist sensibility.

Indeed, one might even say that the real reason the world is in such an awful state is the opposite of that given by postliberals: there is too little freedom, not too much. There is too much authoritarianism, not enough liberalism or democracy. In particular, the authoritarian structures known as corporations have overwhelming power—including over governments—which they certainly do not use in the interests of humanity, community, or social harmony. Noam Chomsky is surely right that classical liberalism, or libertarianism, in its profoundest forms is not only not fulfilled in capitalism but is actually incompatible with it, inasmuch as capitalism tends to violate both the negative and positive liberties (“freedom from” and “freedom to”) of ordinary people. A vast literature of the left, of journalism, and of historical scholarship exposes the tyrannical nature of capitalist institutions; for example, in 2017, the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson published a well-received book called Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It). (A corporation is “a government that assigns almost everyone a superior whom they must obey… [T]here is no rule of law… Superiors are unaccountable to those they order around. They are neither elected nor removable by their inferiors,” etc.) The most recent addition to this literature may be a surprise, though: Ahmari’s new book.

Tyranny, Inc. could not be more different from Regime Change. It appears, in fact, that Ahmari is undergoing a semi-conversion to the left, or to aspects of the left. It is striking, after all, that a postliberal should have written a book the very subtitle and substance of which valorizes “American liberty.” Whereas Deneen wallows in a lazy idealism that traffics in windy abstractions like virtue, excellence, and tradition, Ahmari investigates the material conditions workers have faced under the neoliberal onslaught, together with the corrupt political economy that has brought about these abysmal conditions. Where Deneen believes that an enlightened Aristotelian aristocracy will magically come into being and work to uplift the people, Ahmari comprehends the essential fact of class struggle and advocates the resurrection of strong unions and social democracy. He even uses Marxist language: “cultural norms, practices, and beliefs…rest on a material substrate that includes law, politics, and economics.” In short, while Deneen and his co-thinkers blame a unitary ideology of their imagination called liberalism, Ahmari, at least in this book, blames capitalism.

One can’t help wondering if the postliberal gang is a little unhappy with Ahmari’s semi-apostasy. Consider his criticisms of conservatives in his concluding chapter:

[C]onservative defenders of the [social] system are often the first to lament its cultural ramifications: …a decline in civic and religious engagement, particularly among the poor and working classes; low rates of marriage and family formation; and so on.

…[What results] is a downright ludicrous politics centered on preaching timeless virtues while denying what political theory going back to the Greeks has taught, and what every good parent or teacher knows: that cultivating virtue requires tangible, structural supports. A child will struggle to master honesty if his parents routinely model dishonesty; a body politic will likewise spurn the virtues if subjected to merciless economic exploitation.

It’s true that more populist conservatives these days are prepared to defend right-wing cultural values against ‘woke capital.’ But few if any dare question the coercive power of capital itself. Dig into the policy platforms of tub-thumping GOP populists, and you will likely find effusions of unreserved praise for capitalism.

Here, he is coming close to the realization that right-wing populism is completely phony, that it has always functioned to distract from the class conflicts that are fundamentally responsible for popular suffering, so that a large portion of the public instead rages against LGBTQ people, liberals, Muslims, immigrants, Jews, Communists, China, and anyone else not big business. To be sure, postliberals don’t effusively praise capitalism, as other populist conservatives do. But if they really valued “the common good” about which they prattle, they would, like leftists and the new-and-improved Ahmari, direct their ire at the chief agents of the collapse of community, family, morality, and the natural environment, namely the capitalist class. Otherwise they’re in danger of being useful idiots for this class that is interested only in further shredding the social compact.

Tyranny, Inc. is dense with journalistic investigations of a litany of types of “coercion” corporations inflict today on employees and the public, informed by a competent telling of the history behind it all (relying on scholars like Karl Polanyi, John Kenneth Galbraith, and David Harvey). Among other topics, Ahmari illuminates the many ways in which the sacred doctrine of “liberty of contract” between employer and employee conceals chasmic disparities in power that can ruin people’s lives. He illustrates the capture of the judiciary by the corporate sector. He exposes the predations of private equity, including its use of private emergency services (firefighting firms, ambulance companies) to fleece unsuspecting innocents of tens of thousands of dollars. He discusses the ongoing evisceration by Big Tech and Big Finance of the U.S.’s newspaper industry, which has seen almost a third of its newspapers shutter since 2005 (while many of the remainder are gutted by their new Wall Street owners). And so on. The most viable solution to all these tragedies, he argues, is to revive Galbraithian countervailing power. “Once more, it’s up to the American worker to drag our politicians and corporate leaders into a new consensus.”

Insofar as Ahmari remains a postliberal, his book shows the mutability of this ideology. Its proponents can choose any particular agenda to devote their energies to, whether reconstituting unions and social democracy, advocating a Catholic theocracy (like Adrian Vermeule), fighting against the rights of non-heteronormative people, seeking a much more restrictive immigration regime, denouncing so-called “liberal” interventionist foreign policy, or prohibiting the teaching of the history of racism in the U.S.’s public schools. Rhetorically at least, all of this can be defended in terms of shoring up the disintegrating social order and protecting “communal solidarity.” In a sense, this mutability can be considered a strength, for it allows postliberalism to appeal to people of very different values and interests. But it is the strength of fascism, an ideology that likewise prided itself on being postliberal. Fascism was no less resourceful in appealing to different groups of people, including peasants, landowners, industrialists, the petty bourgeois, racists, traditionalists, even a small minority of workers, who were told their interests would be represented in the great community of the nation bound together by common traditions. In practice, of course, fascism, as a species of conservatism, ended up representing above all the interests of the ruling class, while crushing unions and working-class political parties.

The Proto-Fascism of Postliberalism

Tyranny, Inc. shows that leftists can find common cause with postliberals on some issues. To the extent that someone of the right really does care about the common good, or rather the good of the vast majority (to which the good of the ruling class tends to be inimical, since its power rests on the exploitation of others), a socialist might well be willing to work together with him. Such an alliance, necessarily limited and conditional, is often ridiculed as “red-brownism” by leftists, but it does happen in politics that people of different ideologies cooperate on a political campaign or policy that will conduce to the greater good. A politics that rests on maintaining one’s purity is unlikely to get very far.

Nevertheless, it is undeniable that postliberalism is very dangerous, potentially fascist. Insofar as it is anti-liberal—which left-leaning postliberals, such as Adrian Pabst, are not—this isn’t a difficult case to make. “Within the West, Hungary has set the standard for a reasonable approach,” Gladden Pappin believes. Vermeule deplores the expansiveness of liberal rights: “Yesterday the frontier was divorce, contraception, and abortion; then it became same-sex marriage; today it is transgenderism; tomorrow it may be polygamy, consensual adult incest, or who knows what.” In Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022), Yoram Hazony argues that “cultivation of the national religion is an indispensable purpose of government.” He goes so far as to affirm, quoting Irving Kristol, that “there is no inherent right to self-government if it means that such government is vicious, mean, squalid, and debased.” But who is to make such a judgment? Why is your definition of what is right and good necessarily better than someone else’s? Are you infallible? What gives a reactionary religious nationalist like Hazony the right to impose his vision of the good life on an entire society?

Apart from the noxious political commitments of most postliberals, there is an even deeper problem: in conditions in the United States today, to ground one’s politics in attacking liberalism is to undermine postliberals’ own professed values of “national resilience,” “common purposes,” and the “social covenant” (to quote Adrian Pabst’s Postliberal Politics). This is because the chief beneficiaries are the forces most aggressively sabotaging these values, the Republican Party and reactionaries in the business community.

To put it bluntly, postliberals’ embrace of politicians like J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley, even (in some cases) Donald Trump, and their hope for an authentically populist, working-class Republican Party, is incredibly naïve. Nor is it new. At least since (in fact, before) Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy, Republican politicians have been clothing themselves in populist garb, stoking culture wars and denouncing liberal elites in order to cleave the “working-class” vote from Democrats. As Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew traveled the country attacking “permissivists,” “elitists,” “radical liberals,” “thieves, traitors, and perverts.” Reagan liked to invoke the “postliberal” themes of family and community: “When they [Democrats] talk about family, they mean Big Brother in Washington. When we talk about family, we mean ‘honor thy father and mother.’” These themes, of course, have been a mainstay of Republican rhetoric for generations. “I am here to say to America,” Bob Dole pontificated, “do not abandon the great traditions that stretch to the dawn of our history. Do not topple the pillars of those beliefs—God, family, honor, duty, country—that have brought us through time and time again.” George W. Bush preached the virtues of compassionate conservatism, which proved to be just as oxymoronic as common-good conservatism will doubtless be. Today, the enemies du jour are critical race theory, transgenderism, and wokeness, but the underlying strategy is always the same.

And what does that strategy eventuate in? Tax cuts for the rich, gutting of regulations to protect the environment, and a war on workers and the poor. Trump’s NLRB waged an “unprecedented” attack on workers’ rights. His administration weakened or eliminated over 125 policies that protected the country’s air, water, and land. His budgets savagely slashed benefits for low-income Americans, continuing a longstanding Republican practice. The great “populist” senators Hawley and Vance give, at best, tokenistic and rhetorical support to the working class: neither has even cosponsored the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, and Hawley, according to the AFL-CIO, has almost always voted against the interests of workers. Vance, a venture capitalist, finds it much more congenial to spout racist “great replacement” nonsense and blame those with a low income for their own failures than to actually do anything to help the latter. Meanwhile, the Republican Party remains rock-solidly opposed to even the mildest proposals to address global warming, which threatens not only working people but all life on earth. If this sabotage of life itself is what the postliberal common good looks like, one might even prefer the classical fascists.

Analytically, a key error that helps make possible postliberal political naïveté (assuming the likes of Patrick Deneen and Yoram Hazony are acting in good faith) is to associate together, in one overarching nefarious tradition, classical liberals, modern economic conservatives, New Deal liberals, contemporary centrist liberals, woke identitarians, and “liberal” imperialists from Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. In a sense, even Marxism is included in this tradition, inasmuch as it shares the orientation towards progress of all these groups, their detachment from and denial of the virtues of tradition. (As if the left doesn’t want to preserve healthy traditions and abandon unhealthy ones.) This is a hopelessly confused classification, wholly superficial because of its idealistic focus on the supposed shared commitment to vague concepts of progress and freedom. In order to understand political history, you have to consider the material interests that these different groups and ideologies serve.

For example, economic conservatives like Milton Friedman or Paul Ryan are liberal or libertarian in name only. Their talk of free markets is a fig leaf for outright authoritarianism in the form of slavish support for corporate tyrannies (as Ahmari describes), which would have horrified classical liberals like Adam Smith. Most conservatives don’t care about a mythical free market anyway, as shown by their enthusiasm for exorbitant government spending on the defense industry and for munificent tax breaks and subsidies for corporations. Capitalism could not survive without these sorts of government interventions, nor can markets operate without some firms soon exerting “illiberal” market power; so it is idle for postliberals to talk about a nonexistent economic liberalism.

New Deal liberals were and are totally different from self-styled economic liberals, serving a popular constituency—so it’s odd that Deneen attacks them, too. After all, they often acted—as progressives still act—in approximately the same way as his ideal aristocracy would, “work[ing] to improve the lives, prospects, and fate of the people.” If one cares about the common good, why denounce social democracy, which more than any other capitalist formation protected families and communities? But because the progressive state was irreligious, non-traditional, and supposedly inspired by elite fear and loathing of the people (?), it was and is bad. (Deneen also opines that redistribution of wealth to workers has “led to extensive damage to the broader economic order,” citing no evidence.) His preferred reforms include increasing the size of the House of Representatives to 6,000 members; requiring that every American serve one year in the military; “substantially reducing” university education and investing in more vocational education; breaking up monopolistic companies; investing more public funds in infrastructure and manufacturing; penalizing companies that employ undocumented immigrants; banning pornography and passing laws that promote “public morality”; and enacting policies that reward marriage and family formation, such as Hungary has instituted under Orbán. Predictably, he says nothing about labor unions, except, as a parenthesis, that strengthening them is “a worthy undertaking.”

Leftists would be more sympathetic to postliberals’ contempt for the conventional centrist liberalism of the Democratic Party today, albeit not necessarily for the same reasons. Indeed, many are similarly disdainful of the performative, business-friendly identity politics that has become a dominant ethos in the “professional-managerial class” that postliberals despise. But to call this “class” the real power elite, the real oppressors—as Deneen and others do—is both laughable and proto-fascist. This thesis is a core premise of right-wing postliberalism, for, if you can find a villain that isn’t the capitalist class, you don’t have to locate yourself uncomfortably close to the left. The PMC will do the job nicely, since it’s a diffuse category of people, many of whom have an elite status, that pervades and partially runs society’s hegemonic institutions. Its members tend to be culturally different from the masses of Americans without a college degree, so it’s easy to stir up resentment against them, which can be used to elect reactionaries who will do the bidding of the real ruling class (while blaming woke liberal professionals for the suffering that results).

Deneen’s treatment of the “managerial elite” is influenced by a favorite text of postliberals, Michael Lind’s The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite (2020), which itself is influenced by James Burnham’s famous book The Managerial Revolution (1941). Burnham posited that ownership and control were separated in modern corporations, and that, as a result, a new managerial class was replacing capitalists as the ruling class. This was a flawed analysis: for one thing, despite the transformations of the economy that had indeed occurred in preceding decades, corporations were still subject to the logic of capital, which required that they squeeze profits out of the exploited labor of workers. Capitalism was not ending. But whatever plausibility the thesis may have once had was long gone by the time of the 1980s’ shareholder revolution, which Deneen and Lind seem not to have heard of. The stubborn fact is that some people still make their money from ownership and investments, while others make money by selling their labor-power. These two groups tend to have antagonistic interests, an antagonism rooted not in the vague cultural differences between the “meritocracy” and “the people” that Deneen describes—such as (he says) the former’s mobility, its “disconnection from a shared cultural inheritance,” and its identity politics—but rather in objective structures of how money is made and how power is distributed in the workplace and the economy.

It is true that most professionals occupy an ambiguous place between capitalists and the larger working class. Barbara and John Ehrenreich theorized this ambiguity in their landmark 1977 essay “The Professional-Managerial Class,” and Marxists since then have devoted a great deal of effort to making sense of this huge group of people, some of whom have more interests in common with the traditional working class and others with corporate executives and owners. Since its emergence in the early twentieth century to help manage “the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations,” the PMC has, most of the time, not shown much solidarity with the blue-collar working class. In fact, in their 2013 essay “Death of a Yuppie Dream,” the Ehrenreichs argue it “has played a major role in the oppression and disempowerment of the old working class.” Professionals (usually more or less politically centrist, or “liberal” in today’s parlance) are easy to dislike, since they often exhibit the vices of high-status groups everywhere: they’re prone to being smug, elitist, hypocritical, conformist despite their pretensions to independent thought, complicit in the neoliberal evisceration of society, etc. Leftists are, perhaps, almost as fond of ridiculing them as conservatives; see Catherine Liu’s Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class (2021) and Amber A’Lee Frost’s “The Characterless Opportunism of the Managerial Class” for examples.

Nevertheless, if you want a more communal, just, and sustainable social order, you have to think about strategy. No class exemplifies virtue. The question is whether your agenda will be to dismantle corporate power, the real engine behind the atomization that postliberals decry, or to attack the relative peons of the PMC, who (as the Ehrenreichs note) are beginning to succumb to the disintegrating economic and political forces that have decimated the old working class. The second path is the road of fascism, the search for a scapegoat that only ends up empowering the most vicious elements of the ruling class. The first path, according to which professionals in precarious economic circumstances ought to be appealed to instead of vilified, is the road to genuine social change.

In other words, postliberals have to make a decision: do they want to concentrate on combating social liberalism—banning pornography, criminalizing gender-affirming health care for those who suffer from dysphoria, erecting draconian barriers to immigration, banning “liberal” books and school curricula that address America’s real history—thereby empowering faux-populist Republicans who will cut social programs, attack unions, increase military spending, accelerate environmental destruction, give corporations and the wealthy even more power than they have, and devastate families and communities? Or do they want to concentrate on tackling the latter crises and forego a war on social liberalism? They can’t have it both ways, because only the left will ever honestly confront the material catastrophes that are savaging working-class communities. The left itself would do well to start prioritizing class solidarity rather than only identity politics (as some leftists have argued), but at least it is trying to do far more for the working class than the right is (since the right, after all, exists to serve business). Even Biden’s Build Back Better bill, which couldn’t pass because of Republican opposition, would have enormously benefited working families through its investments in childcare and preschool, paid family and medical leave, community college, child tax credits, physical infrastructure, affordable housing, health care, and environmental protection.

Thus, because of its alleged interest in the public good but its conservative (Republican) orientation, postliberalism is ultimately incoherent. It is not a new ideology, being in many ways a return of paleoconservatism, of the anti-modernism of Jerry Falwell and Pat Buchanan, even of the—admittedly more extreme—alt-right of several years ago, which shared a lot of the reactionary cultural grievances of postliberals. Deneen & Company try to make their ideas more respectable by invoking Aristotle, Aquinas, Tocqueville, Pope Leo XIII, and other exalted names, but this is a transparent exercise in idealistic mystification. The proto-fascism is right below the surface.

There is a particle of hope, however. If more postliberals choose the left-wing path of Tyranny, Inc. than the far-right path of Regime Change, they might manage to make a positive contribution to American politics. But this will require shedding their illusions about the likes of J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley, and instead following the example of, say, Bernie Sanders. That’s where a humane, working-class politics is to be found.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Chris Wright.

In his book Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life, Scott Branson argues that “anarchism is a name for something most of us already do. The name itself matters less than the doing.” Anarchists are doers who refuse to wait for a perfect moment or a political revolution to begin the work of making a better world. Anarchists are also social critics who challenge the status quo with facts and will not simply accept the undemocratic rule of experts. The economists have not been able to—although, in their defense, they don’t seem to care to try—explain how it is that their robust, dynamic, hyper-competitive global marketplace should be dominated by so few firms with so much money and market power. There are so few firms in part because the global capitalist environment in which firms operate has become extraordinarily large and complex. We have made it that way, according to class interests, consciously or otherwise. Navigating this complex system requires close and very expensive relationships with state actors, and there are many powerful state proxies in for example, defense and aerospace, energy and oil, telecommunications, among others. Access to the complexities is guarded and heavily curated. a system of beliefs is required, but it is by no means a religious code—indeed, if it includes the choreography of religious practice, it nevertheless disdains the truly devout as unsophisticated, if we may, deplorables. The code of the coastal elite is monopoly capitalism and American hegemony.

Who knows what to call them really? They aren’t merely college educated these days; they have often attended the best schools and they have fancy graduate degrees, but much more importantly, they share a deep cultural outlook about America’s role in the world. They may be conservative or progressive, religious or not, black or white, gay or straight, cisgender or transgender. The litmus test is one’s understanding of what kind of thing the United States of America really is, its history, its uniqueness, its moral character, its destiny. The story of contemporary American elites is not a new one. It’s the story of how sophisticated people who see themselves as above chauvinistic prejudices can, nevertheless absorb the values of imperialism and actively recreate that system.

Education plays the decisive role in creating and re-creating generations of well healed elites who see it as America’s unquestioned right to dominate the globe. To accomplish this distorted reality in such sophisticated minds requires that they see it all as a matter of progress and choice, much as the conquistadors saw their entrance into the western hemisphere. Progress because the United States particular corporate system is bringing us cheap new gadgets. In choice, because of course, there is no country in the world that doesn’t want to be a US vassal state, stripped and looted by western corporations, with little or no real sovereignty where it matters. That the United States plays this destructive global role seems clear to most non-Americans with little more than a moment’s thought, and even many Americans have steadfastly opposed the war crimes of the American Empire in both the land theft from the global south. This is to underscore the fact that an extraordinarily tiny group of elite Americans creates and implements a destructive agenda that serves their class interests. This extreme stratification is a feature of empire: the distance of the plebes from power; democracy as a shared faith and a show rather than a functioning practice; wealth distributed upwards to those few in power; eventual breakdown from these contradictions—from the fundamental mistake of making human institutions, too large, hierarchical, and bureaucratic to sustain themselves. More importantly, they are inhumane systems, and eventually humans join together to change their environments. Anarchists suggest that there is no time like the present to transform our environments, in millions of constructive revolutions. For those interested in participating in such positive social interventions, there are countless ways to engage in your own anarchist practice, the one that serves with your values and makes you feel great. Here are some suggestions:

1. Really Really Free Markets: Really Really Free Markets has been around for around twenty years, and it has been tremendously successful as a real-world alternative to the toxicity of artificial scarcity, runaway commodity fetishism, and lack of genuine community that we find today. People new to anarchism often ask if it can work. It is certainly working within and through the countless volunteers, spread across thousands of miles, who have made Really Really Free Markets the radical stronghold it is today. The hopeful anarchist would suggest that this model is scalable to many parts of the world. It both enriches the lives of the people who participate and offers a proof of concept for a vibrant alternative to capitalism’s bankrupt notion of economic freedom.

2. Help your neighbors without homes: With a growing housing crisis in our country, we all have neighbors and members of our communities who have no consistent place to live right now. Whatever we can do, these folks need help and a little love and connection if you can muster it. Anarchists believe that we are a human family and that those who’ve fallen on hard times are our comrades. State governments and municipalities have traditionally regarded people without homes as less than human, as pests you want out of your city. As government bodies have adopted programs, they are either underfunded or shot through with old hatreds and prejudices. The anarchist movement has long been a center of help for people without homes who need places to stay. The anarchist’s ethical sensibility says that, particularly in a country with so much vacant and unused space, no one should be sleeping on the streets, exposed to the elements. And the anarchist’s characteristic DIY sensibility says that people should help other people survive if they can. As stated similarly below, in the section on land, anarchists do not accept the dominion of a small minority of people over the land. Anarchism is an explicit challenge to the legitimacy and authority of the state and to the reign of capital. Anarchists will always prioritize people—and helping people—over people-created abstractions. Thus have anarchists historically positioned themselves at the forefront of efforts to assist squatters; as Ruth Kinna observes, squatting is not only “a logical solution to the insanities of the housing market,” but it is “also a consciously politicized practice,” with a unique cultural identity and a special place within the anarchist movement.

3. Support prisoners. Prisoners are subject to some of the world’s worst injustices, with thousands here in the “land of the free” alone living in squalor without basic necessities. The United States has long been infamous for imprisoning more of its population than any other country; and when we give even a cursory look at the demographic composition of the group we’ve decided in our wisdom to cage, we see a direct continuity to the country’s frightening, shameful past of race-based slavery and the train of horrors associated with it. We can support prisoners by writing to them, and it is often possible to arrange for gifts for inmates (but of course check with the relevant overlords). Prisoners want and need to know that they have not been forgotten, and many are interested to learn that there is a prison abolition movement many of us have been fighting for. For over one-hundred years, anarchist organizations dedicated to supporting prisoners have operated as chapters of the Anarchist Black Cross. The ABC organizes for the freedom of prisoners and supports their wellbeing. There are several important reasons that the prison question has long been a focal point of anarchists. Prisons enforce with violence the oppressive class and social hierarchies that dominate our lives; more specifically, they have played and continue to play a key role in shaping and sustaining America’s brutal racial hierarchies and relative social positions. Slavery remains in practice on American soil today, with the permission and protection of prisons around the country, who have no qualms with stealing labor from people locked in cages. Hundreds of thousandsof American prisoners are being forced to work, and they’re often doing so for mere cents every hour.

4. Local currencies and credit systems. Just as we challenge global monopoly capitalism by keeping our wealth in our communities and helping provide for each other’s needs, so do we need to divest from the dollar; indeed, we could be a crisis or two away for this divestment to become a matter of survival. The good news is that we have workable models of local currencies that thrive at this moment, as they have in the past. Keeping the management and manipulation of the currency close to the community that uses the currency is a powerful, if under-appreciated, policy tool. At the current scale, these important questions of money and credit have become almost completely opaque to all but a small group of initiates, led by witch doctors in the form of central bank chairpersons, whom we somehow continue to take seriously. Given the role that currencies now play in our lives, anarchists humbly suggest that (if we cannot abolish them altogether) we make them democratic, transparent, and available through a credit system designed with the goal of building community and funding projects that enrich local culture and agriculture (rather than the goal of enriching faraway banks).

5. Land repatriation. Any future society that approximates the values of freedom and fairness will find a radically different pattern of land ownership. As successive generations of anarchists (and others) have pointed out, the land titles we have inherited from history were won with methods much less staid and scrupulous than the scrolls and seals we were taught to picture; to the extent that those existed, they were often the symbols of murder, expulsion, and deprivation. Many anarchists and decentralists today argue that functioning, sustainable community for human beings means access to and connection with the land. Perhaps no one has put it as well as Henry George did in Progress and Poverty, “For the ownership of the land on which and from which a man must live is virtually the ownership of the man himself….” Just insofar as we’re human beings, we are people of the land, and it doesn’t belong to a tiny minority of thieves. To take a bit of liberty with the Lockean Proviso, if you take much, much more than you need when others are in deep need, you are a thief.

6. Protect each other. Even the Supreme Court has given us fair warning that the cops have absolutely no obligation to us. So then what are they there for? We know what they’re there for because we believe our eyes and ears and friends more than government officials assuring us that the cops are just like us, that they’re patrolling our streets with military hand-me-downs because we need protecting. When I see tanks and extended clips rolling around my community, I know exactly who I’m supposed to be afraid of and intimidated by. The United States has a hyper-militarized police culture, and our unwillingness as a society to confront the problems with unchecked power of this kind has led to a crisis that also has deep roots in the country’s history of racism and sanctioned violence against Black people. Having seen that the police are predatory rather than protective, we nonetheless have to protect ourselves and our neighbors. An anarchist who is trained in self-defense, for example, could pass some of that knowledge on to members of her community, particularly the vulnerable. Recognition of the fact that we are on our own comes with a tremendous responsibility, as we can no longer allow our fears to turn us away from the kinds of training we and our friends may need in order to protect ourselves. Accepting that safety is an illusion and that our would-be protector, the state, is actually our captor and abuser, anarchists suggest that we protect ourselves and each other. Protecting each other means that we are in active solidarity with each other, particularly those who face risks and dangers others of us don’t. Coming together in community to defend one another demonstrates to police and other agents of state power, as well as to dangerous authoritarians, that our communities are not places of occupation and fear, that we will not tolerate bullies’ intimidation tactics. Left-wing gun clubs have been proliferating over the past several years, educating members on how to safely use firearms, but also educating members in how to deescalate potentially violent conflicts.

7. Mutual aid. Peter Kropotkin deserves the credit for positioning this concept as central in the group of ideas most closely associated with anarchism.^[1] Mutual aid is not the same as charity, nor is how we’d traditionally think about insurance. It isn’t charity because it is predicated on the idea of solidarity, the principle of togetherness and a recognition of the fact that we all need others at points throughout our lives. For Kropotkin, mutual aid is, in a real sense, what defines us as a species. He saw it as self-evident that mutual aid “is the real foundation of our ethical concepts.” It is unlike insurance as we know in that it need not be formalized, reduced to writing, or even ongoing. It is also very different in that it is not a capitalist insurance contract; such agreements, so called, do not originate from a space of mutual understanding and equality of bargaining power. Further, mutual aid is help when and where help is needed, without the permission or control of the state or of capitalist charity. There are no representatives, no administrators, no strings attached; mutual aid is accomplished through direct action, and there are only the bonds of mutuality and reciprocity that connect us to each other. This follows a leitmotif in anarchism: the responsibility is with us, and the action emerges from us. This lack of imposed hierarchy and centralization distinguishes mutual aid as a human response to shared struggles rather than a system of control imposed from above or without by a dominant class.

8. Food Not Bombs. Food Not Bombs has been feeding people and activating our friends and neighbors against war and empire for more than four decades; they also regularly provide meals to hungry strikers and protesters. If you’re interested in the idea that all human beings deserve food, and you also want to raise the profile of opposition to war and nuclear arms, get involved with Food Not Bombs.

9. Civil disobedience. Henry David Thoreau said that a person couldn’t be associated with their government without shame; perhaps unsurprisingly, he didn’t see government’s laws as having moral force or authority in and of themselves, independent of a human’s judgment. Thoreau believed that all people have the right and the capacity to exercise their consciences and govern themselves. Civil disobedience extends from these ideas and has taught us that we can nonviolently refuse participation in and actively disobey laws that our consciences tell us are unjust. Like Thoreau, anarchists do not abdicate our mental faculties or moral capacities to presidents, kings, senators, or bosses. We observe society and act together to ensure that, as Thoreau recommended, we have a government and social order that deserves our respect. Until we live in a world that is free, civil disobedience is a muscle we must exercise, much as James C. Scott counsels the practice of “anarchist calisthenics.” Massive-scale oppression is possible only because people have never been raised to cultivate their inner anarchists. Instead, we have been raised to obey unquestioningly. Without practicing, Scott asks, “How are you going to prepare for that day when it really matters?” It is common to treat particularly horrible historical events with a level of surprise: how could it have happened? Why did people go along with it? It’s simpler than we think. People were not ready when the time came because all of their training had been in obedience, not moral courage.

10. Take to the streets. A tested and empirically-proven program that gets the state to respond is mass action—the retaking of public spaces that belong to us, marches and protests, and (also related to civil disobedience). Even as we are peaceful, we must be disruptive to the systems of power that are eating us alive and to the representatives of those systems. When enough people are organized, we can demand freedom, justice, and equality, but it takes getting outside in the streets and showing that we are ungovernable, because the ballot box isn’t working for us.

11. Jury nullification. Jury nullification is simply the idea that jurors have it in their power and discretion to return a not guilty verdict even if they believe the defendant committed the crime. Jurors have an obligation to take this role seriously and use their power wisely. They have a much better track record of fairness than either prosecutors and judges. For example, jurors might nullify if, consulting with their consciences and looking to their personal values, they do not believe a criminal conviction is the just or appropriate response to whatever the individual may have done. In many other instances, jurors may believe that the laws at issue in the case should not exist anyway, and therefore carry no moral force or obligation. Many jurors are not aware of the extraordinary, potentially life-changing power they hold—not through fault of theirs, but because judges and prosecutors naturally want to hide the jury’s power to nullify from both jurors and all future jurors, meaning the people. Jury nullification nonetheless has a long history. It has been used to save the lives of many caught in a broken, racist criminal justice system, as well as to free activists given bogus charges on account of their political views.

12. Cooperative businesses. One of the best ways to realize a world without hierarchy, domination, and the exploitation and absentee-ownership of capitalism is to create that world in our workplaces. When workers in the business own the business, there is a level of responsibility, community, and personal investment that is absent in the bureaucratic modern corporation. People working together in coops relate to one another horizontally. They don’t see bossism as necessary to productivity, quality, or any other measure—in fact, hierarchical relationships produce stress, poor performance, and a toxic workplace culture.

13. Clean up your community. A growing body of research demonstrates that when we live in clean and beautiful environments, filled with walkable green spaces, we are happier and more productive, which makes our communities safer and healthier places to live. Organizing clean-ups can turn to picnics in the park and opportunities to exchange ideas about local, permissionless work and play.

14. Community workshops and skill-sharing. Combining a park clean-up with a skill-share is a great way to build camaraderie and demonstrate again the benefits of openness and cooperation. This is also an opportunity to impart important survival skills such as self-defense, mentioned above. Vital to anarchism, for Herbert Read, was an active effort to “secure a revolution in the mental and emotional attitudes of [people].” Read was wise beyond his years in recognizing that lasting social change must have roots in mental and emotional transformation. When we share our skills and our experiences, we not only change attitudes, but create genuine solidarity and connection.

15. Try a little kindness. Anarchism is a philosophy of respect for the dignity and autonomy of every other person; it is the active, living recognition of the fact that the human species is a single family with a single shared home. This recognition rationally demands kindness to one another, and an anarchist’s society’s rejection of domination and rulership is a reflection of kindness and respect. Christian radicals like Henry C. Wright based an anarchist-like non-resistance politics on their pacifism and submission. On principle, he would not defend himself after being assaulted, mistaken for someone else. Wright said, “The moment a man claims a right to control the will of a fellow being by physical force, he is at heart a slaveholder.”

Notes.

^[1] In the Introduction to the Second Edition of his own classic Anarchy in Action (which he shares that he would’ve preferred to be called “Anarchism as a theory of organization”), Colin Ward remarks, “In a sense the book is simply an extended updated footnote to Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid.”

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David S. D’Amato.

Orientation

Summary of Part I

In Part I of this article, I contrasted the differences between rising Multipolarism with a declining Anglo-American empire. Taking the side of the multipolarists of the East, I  identified Lyndon LaRouche as someone who bridged the gap between East and West.

His concept of “The American system” defends the Enlightenment as the movement to look to if the west is going to join the multipolar world. I also presented Matthew Ehret’s book The Clash of the Two Americas: Volume I The Unfinished Sympathy as a concrete example of the battle between the British System and American system in the 18th and 19thcenturies. At the end of Part I, I raise questions as to where to place these advocates of the American system on the political spectrum and ask who its enemies are.

Are there times when centrism is unrealistic, ungrounded, and against common sense?

Unlike the left-wing and right-wing of the political spectrum, centrism is presented as a golden mean against the extremes. It embodied common sense, as opposed to fanaticism, pragmatism in contrast, unrealistic idealism and non-violence against violence. Yet there are times when centrism doesn’t work; occasions when centrism is not common sense, circumstances when centrism is not pragmatic, when compromise between extremes comes up empty. Not only is centrism unrealistic but the entire linear political spectrum founded at the end of the 18th century is bankrupt.

Strange bedfellows? Finance capitalists and the New Left

By the end of World War II, the financial capitalists had two enemies – the liberalism of FDR and the world communist movement. Most of us know the historical differences between the Old Left and the New Left. The Old Left represented the world communist movement as well as the forces of the Enlightenment. Is it possible that the emergence of the New Left with very different values driven by Romanticism was shaped by the anti-communist finance capitalists?

My claims in Part II

1)The political philosophy of the Anglo-American Empire and finance capitalists empire is centrism and it must be opposed.

2) The forces of Promethean City builders must dispense with the linear political spectrum create a new political spectrum which expresses its hopes.

3) For the past 70 years, the anti-communist forces of the Anglo-American empire have shaped a fake opposition, the romantic New Left, to oppose the development of a communist movement.

The first image at the top of this article includes arch anti-communists Arthur Koestler and Sidney Hook. The second image is the founder of Democratic Socialist of America, Michael Harrington, also an anti-communist.

Poverty of Centrism

As I wrote in my article: Are Socialists Going to Let Neoliberals Define Fascism?

All over the world, centrist parties are losing elections. People are either not voting at all or they are voting for fascists. In some countries people are voting for Social Democrats. The traditional choices between liberals and conservatives do not speak to world problems today. Additionally, just as centrist parties are collapsing (as depicted in the image above) so is the linear political spectrum model that serves as its visual description.

Today the fact that liberal and conservative parties are the same is far more significant than their differences. They have at least agreed on:

• Support of finance and military capitalism as an economic system domestically
• Never to discuss socioeconomic class in the way Marxists would
• Suppressing third-party access into political debates.
• Supporting imperialism around the world
• Supporting the instillation of right-wing dictators
• Supporting Israel elites despite 75 years of Zionist fundamentalism and their oppression of Palestinians
• Opposition to state-centered socialism around the world

What this means is that:

• There are far more commonalties between liberals and conservatives than there are between liberals and socialists because capitalism divides them
• There are far more commonalities between liberals and fascists than between liberals and socialists because both liberals and fascists support capitalism

The linear political spectrum is too simple for today’s complex politics

Examples include:

• China forming alliances with non-socialist countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia
• Social Democrats (socialists) forming alliances with imperialists (Germany, Norway, Sweden). This goes way back to Social Democrats voting for war in 1914
• Right-wing governments like Modi’s of India supporting a socialist country (China)
• The Recent elections in France in which Le Pen (supposed fascist) has social programs to the left of Macron (a neoliberal)
• A neoliberal Democratic Party supporting fascist Ukrainian forces

Centrism is bankrupt in extreme capitalist crises

The linear political spectrum also makes it appear that the middle of the political spectrum is compromising, pragmatic, down-to-earth and can never be unrealistic. Supposedly, centrists are moderate and not hysterical like the fascists or communists. What this ignores is that when there are extreme economic, political or ecological conditions the center doesn’t hold. It caves in.  In certain periods of history being moderate is unrealistic. Gradualist trial and error won’t cut the mustard because a storm is so overpowering that it would overwhelm its centrist structures. Under the conditions of our time extremes are the only answer because of capitalism’s failure to address its contradictions. It has brought us to the point where neither liberal nor conservative solutions can nor will work. A new model of the political spectrum must be:

• More inclusive of many more political ideologies
• Economic as well as political
• Able to account for qualitative leaps such as revolutions
• Able to decenter the spectrum so that both moderate and extreme solutions would seem reasonable
• Make room for alliances between the extremes on the political spectrum, not just among those next to each other

How the left and some conservatives might work together is because both are industrializers whose goal is to expand the productive forces. They may fight about how the wealth gets distributed but they agree that real wealth should be produced. By contrast, neo-liberals, fascists, Greens, Social Democrats, and anarchists are de-industrializers who abhor the introduction of new wealth-creation, especially nuclear technologies and city building. They are Malthusians.

We are now at the point where I can reintroduce the distinctions between the Enlightenment and Romanticism from Part I. I want to show how the Anglo-American empire, finance capitalists and the CIA shaped the New Left into embracing Romanticism.

Below is a table I developed from my book Forging Promethean Psychology which compares what the Enlightenment stands for as opposed to Romanticism.

Table A Enlightenment vs Romanticism Compared

The Politics of the Anglo-American Empire, The British System, Romanticism and the New left

The Old Left

As many of you know, soon after World War II capitalists in Mordor set out to destroy the Socialist and Communist parties. But the CIA also wanted to create a relatively harmless alternative to Communism by recruiting leftists who were critical of the Communist Party but did it in the name of socialist democracy. As many of you know, this began with the Congress of Cultural Freedom. Along the way, it helped to craft an ideology of the New Left that would render it harmless against capitalism while at the same time keep the Communist movement from growing back.

The heart of the Old Left was the defense of countries that were at least part way towards socialism – Russia, China and Cuba. Its economic focus was on the inherent contradictions of capitalism whether it be the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, underconsumption or the profit squeeze. Very importantly, communists were committed to the belief that Communism had to be based on abundance, which meant “developing the productive forces”. If a communist society’s economy stagnated that would introduce the temptation to steal. By producing more than enough stealing would not be an issue. As different as anarchists are from Marxists, even anarchists before the 1960s understood that abundance was the foundation for socialism.

The major social category for political organization was socio-economic class. It was only the working class that had the power to overthrow capitalism. Also, the only real democracy was economic democracy in which workers control what is produced, how much is produced and how it is distributed through centralized planning and workers’ control. In terms of political parties the Old Left advocated a Leninist vanguard party of dedicated revolutionaries.

While claiming that the workers were internationalists, in practice the Old Left political organization operated at the nation-state level. Whatever tiny ecology or changes in the climate movement existed it was not on the radar of communists. For communists’ growth of the human population was taken as given since by the second half of the 19th century and into the 1950s it seemed human productivity could easily accommodate a rising population.

When it came to the arts and psychology, the Old Left was fairly conservative. In the arts, socialist realist mural painting was predominant. In painting and music, the focus on working class life was its subject matter. In personal life, Communists usually did not drink and their appearance emulated working class clothes. Their personal life was relatively unimportant and their marriages were traditional. They were generally hostile to psychology, saw it as a bourgeois distraction from their main purpose was to work for the revolution. While most Communists were atheists, they understand that most workers were not, and they had to make relative peace with this “superstition” in order to organize workers. The CIA, and the Rockefellers set out to destroy the values of the Old left and replace  with a very different orientation to the world. Table B displays the values of the New Left, and what is equally important, how these values support and are beneficial to  the Anglo-American empire, finance capital, the Rockefellers, and the CIA.

Table B How the Values of the New Left Benefit the Anglo-American

Empire, Finance Capital the Rockefellers and the CIA

 Techniques Used by the Powers that be to Undermine Communism

• If you examine all twenty categories, the purpose of the CIA and the Rockefellers was to divide and conquer:
• Existing state socialism from the New Left
• Class on the one hand, race and gender on the other
• Personal life and political life
• Clothing, physical appearance middle class hippies and the working class
• Non-Christian religions and Christianity
• Ecology movement and the working class

 Distracting people:

• With sex and drugs and nihilistic or hedonistic rock music
• With psychological preoccupations as at Esalen (The Human Potential Movement, social psychology of groups and therapy) rather than economics
• With cultural or linguistic issues (Frankfurt School, postmodernism)
• With romantic exoticism, primitivism, individualism

Fragmentation by:

• Decentralizing politics from the nation-state to local configurations
• Championing infinite diversity to weaken commonality and unity of organization
• Treating ecology as separate from a Socialist program
• Making art psychological instead socially inspiring

Demoralization

• That capitalism had no inherent limits
• Undermine belief in progress and that people should expect an abundant life
• Pessimistic anti-science
• There is no alternative to the Democratic Party

Demonization:

• Of nuclear energy
• Of all state socialist societies
• Any international leader who wants to set their own economic foreign policy

 Qualifications

I am not suggesting that the New Left was simply a creature of the CIA and the Rockefellers. The New Left was a movement that came out of the middle class which was anti-war, anti-racist, mostly anti-capitalist and a rebellion against a conservative culture. Surely the “powers that be” did not encourage this. What I am saying is that the CIA and the Rockefellers either intervened directly as in the existence of COINTELPRO or threw money at New Left projects that suited their needs.

Conclusion

In Part II I argued that the political philosophy of the Anglo-American empire is centrism. I argued that political centrists are losing elections all over the world because centrism cannot speak to the extreme crisis that finance capital has created. Also, the linear political spectrum that houses centrism no longer works in depicting political change. I identify five characteristics a new political spectrum would need in order to be workable.

Then I contrasted the multipolar values in the East and the Enlightenment in the West to the Romantic values in depth. The reason for this comparison that Romanticism is the foundation of the Anglo-American empire’s attempt to control the potential forces of Communism in the West by shaping a New Left.

I close my article with a contrast between the Old and the New left. The Old Left of the Communist Party was a great threat to the Anglo-American empire, finance capital, the Rockefellers and the CIA. All these powers attempted to support the shaping of an anti-communist New Left. I begin with the values of the Old left. Then I identified 20 characteristics of the New Left and how each served directly or indirectly to support the powers that be against the rise of Communism. All twenty characteristics used a combination of five techniques: divide-and-conquer; distraction, fragmentation, demoralization and demonization.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Glenn Wallis is an independent scholar and founder of Incite Seminars in Philadelphia. He has taught at several universities, including Brown University and the University of Georgia. His most recent books include A Critique of Western Buddhism and How to Fix Education. Wallis blogs at Speculative Non-Buddhism. He holds a Ph.D. in Buddhist studies from Harvard University.

He has also recently published An Anarchist’s Manifesto (Warbler, 2021). He is an expert in Emma Goldman’s practical philosophy of anarchy. Here in this interview, he goes into detail about what Goldman espoused and her legacy, while also contrasting her thoughts on anarchy with his own. He addresses how notions of anarchy have changed over time and what its value is today.

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HAWKINS: Glenn, Warbler Press recently released a book, The Essential Emma Goldman (2022). Its subtitle is Anarchism, Feminism, and Liberation. This is a good place to start. Can you tell us about these terms and how Emma Goldman put them into action?

WALLIS: That subtitle certainly gets right to the point! When I hear those three words together, I immediately think: oh, Emma Goldman! That’s what she dedicated her life to. Or, truer to her own spirit and way of speaking, that is what she fought and bled so mightily for. Goldman’s own succinct definition of anarchism is: “a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.”

This is a deceptively dense statement, containing far-reaching assumptions about the confluence of human capacity (to be cooperative and creative, for example) and about the state or government (inherently coopting and coercive). Each term requires careful teasing out. The short version, though, is provided by Emma Goldman’s life itself. Her life was a testament to her view of anarchism. She chafed against “man-made law” as mere ignorant, self-serving “phantoms that have held [us] captive” to the powers that be. Although she deeply experienced love and longed for the comfort of companionship, to give one example, she never married. This decision was a result of her lived anarchism. She considered marriage to be yet another form of economic bondage, a cynical “insurance pact,” a “parasitism,” in which both partners are degraded. Anarchist theory enabled her to see through the supposedly natural, inevitable, and self-evidently “sacred institution of marriage.” Anarchist theory also enabled her to imagine other possibilities for how we might engage in intimate relationships. Emma Goldman’s courage of conviction did the rest.

In this example, we catch a glimpse of how Goldman put all three terms—anarchism, feminism, and liberation—into action at once. Her anarchism was a heuristic into the structures of domination pressing on our lives and, at the same time, a guide to more humane alternatives.

Her feminism disabused her of any and all notions of women’s inferiority to men. Her choice not to marry or have children stemmed from her feminist conviction that “Everything within [a woman] that craves assertion and activity should reach its fullest expression; all artificial barriers should be broken, and the road towards greater freedom cleared of every trace of centuries of submission and slavery.”

Finally, the entire point of it all, of the anarchist struggle, is liberation. Whenever I hear someone speak like that, I have to ask: liberation from what? As we should expect, Emma Goldman has an answer: “liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. True liberation, individual and collective, lies in his emancipation from authority and from the belief in it.” I should also mention her adamant conviction: “History tells us that every oppressed class gained true liberation from its masters through its own efforts.”

HAWKINS: You, too, have had a book recently published by Warbler, titled, An Anarchist’s Manifesto (2020). By way of contrast, how are Goldman’s terms and contributions addressed in your book? Have they changed in character over the last 100 years.

WALLIS: I mention Goldman throughout the book. It is hard not to. As Vivian Gornick says in the Foreword to the Warbler edition, Emma Goldman was “an incarnation.” She is a timeless avatar, haunting, in the playful yet uncanny spirit of a poltergeist, any writing on anarchism today. When young leftists hear about Goldman for the first time, the response is typically: what a badass! It is an immense help in making the case for anarchism to have a figure of such courage, intelligence, irreverence, wit, wisdom, integrity, force, humor, and—you can’t mention it often enough— courage, all rolled into one.

The relationship between classical anarchism (roughly, 1840-1939) and contemporary anarchism (roughly, 1968-the present) is complex and fraught with contention. By its very nature, anarchism must remain highly adaptive to the ever-changing conditions that require its application. By the same token, anarchism has to stand for something, and that something must transcend perpetual contingency. The principles that animate Emma Goldman’s anarchism do, I believe, transcend temporal and sectarian differences. In fact, I’ll stick my neck out and say that her foundational principles are wholly uncontroversial to all anarchists. These principles are, basically: opposition to authoritarianism, capitalism, the state, unjustified hierarchy, and institutional oppression; and cultivation of cooperation, collective intelligence and creativity, mutual decision-making, helping one another. Now, in terms of Goldman’s specific application of these principles—we should not expect them to be transferable to our time and place. This holds true for all of the classical anarchist writers. Indeed, it holds true for the more recent ’68 Situationist or Seattle anti-globalism anarchism. So, Emma Goldman’s foundations remain in place; and her applications are undergoing perpetual metamorphosis.

HAWKINS: Aside from her opening essay, “What I Believe,” the other essays in Goldman’s collection are selections from her previous book, Anarchism and Other Essays. In “What I Believe,” Goldman boldly pronounces her position on seven different controversial issues: property; government; militarism; free speech and press; the church; marriage and love; and, acts of political violence. These issues remain fiery and controversial 100 years later. Which of these issues would Goldman find most requiring activist resistance today?

WALLIS: It’s impossible to offer a “pan-anarchist” answer to your very interesting question. I have already touched on the reason for this: anarchist solutions or, better, strategies, are, by definition, highly fluid, adaptable, and time-place-problem specific. I know anarchists in Turkey for whom resisting Erdogan’s increasingly illiberal government is paramount. Until recently, when things have gone silent, we were hearing from anarchists in Russia for whom agitating against militarism and for increased free speech are the pressing issues. In the United States, since 2020 in particular, acts of political/police/incarcerational violence have been front and center. If we took a trip around the world, we would likely find anarchist activists engaged in all of those issues mentioned by Goldman.

HAWKINS: A blurb for An Anarchist’s Manifesto at your website partly summarizes the content of your book with:

Why anarchism? And why a manifesto? Anarchism is commonly viewed as an outdated and wholly impractical idea. Worse, it has an accursed reputation for advocating chaos, violence, and destruction. The aim of An Anarchist’s Manifesto is to convince readers of the exact opposite: that anarchism is the most adaptive, humane, intelligent, singly inclusive proposal that we, as social animals, have ever envisioned.

Would you elaborate on this?

WALLIS: One of my favorite remarks in all of anarchist writing, a line that I repeat every opportunity that I get, is Emma Goldman’s remark about “The strange phenomenon of the opposition to Anarchism.” I cannot for the life of me understand how someone can hear what anarchism has to say about, for example, work, and remain opposed to it. Precisely this “phenomenon” was the catalyst for An Anarchist’s Manifesto.

So, it’s, say, 1886. Factory workers in America are toiling for sixteen hours a day in unsafe, unregulated conditions for a pittance while the owners become Gilded Age millionaires. The workers are not permitted breaks. The workspace is unventilated. Workers are as young nine years old. They have no unemployment, health, or life insurance. They are considered expendable. When they are too ill or incapacitated to work, when they die at home or on the job, someone else steps in to replace them. Of this, the boss has no doubts. And around and around it goes.

Now, along come the anarchists. On the streets, in organized mass demonstrations, in rousing pamphlets and magazine articles, in impassioned speeches, in neighborhood canvassing campaigns, in workplace pickets, they agitate for an 8-hour workday, safety regulations, ample breaks and ventilation, the end of child labor, a minimum living wage, unemployment insurance, wealth distribution, and more. And yet, there is opposition to anarchism? Among the workers even? In An Anarchist’s Manifesto I offer many contemporary examples of the same vexing issue of opposition to anarchist strategies today, strategies bearing on environmental degradation, economic insecurity, slave labor, technological dystopia, racial and gender oppression, daily mass extermination of sentient non-human animals, and so forth.

We understand the workings of “manufactured consent” (as the anarchist Noam Chomsky terms the way in which our mass media act as a propaganda apparatus for the dominant ideology). Emma Goldman understood, too. She knew what the problem was. In “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For,” she identifies the basic reason for the “strange opposition” that she continually encounters. It was, namely, that the emotions of media consumers “are continuously kept at a pitch by the most blood-curdling stories about Anarchism.” In particular, anarchism’s supposed proclivity toward violence and impracticality are singled out by the pro-capitalist media propaganda machine.

As Goldman says in the same essay, “it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think.” That is why education is perhaps the matter of first importance in much anarchist theory. In the last sentence that you quote from An Anarchist’s Manifesto, I am appealing to readers who, I am assuming, are ready to start thinking about anarchist claims. I am confident that a thoughtful person who takes a close, open-minded look at anarchist theories will come away startled, surprised, impressed, and who knows, ready to convert.

HAWKINS: In the Foreword to The Essential Goldman, the radical feminist Vivian Gornick writes:

Goldman was regularly being taken to task by her fellow anarchists for interpreting anarchism as a movement for individual self-expression rather than as a collective bent on overthrowing corporate capitalism. To this critique she would reply hotly that if radicals gave up sex and art while making the new world they would become devoid of joy. Without joy, human beings would cease being human—and then any world they made would be even more heartless than it had been before. In conclusion, as she herself said, if she couldn’t dance, Emma wasn’t coming to their revolution.

This recalls for me what the Yippee Abbie Hoffman once said about participatory democracy:

“Democracy is not something you believe in, but something you do. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles.”

Do you see that such joy is missing from the public discourse and counterculture today? How does your anarchism reflect joy?

WALLIS: I personally find public discourse and the counterculture both incredibly grim these days. Has it always been so bleak? The more troubling of the two, for me, is the latter. Goldman’s quip that any revolution that doesn’t include dancing is not for her is deceptively casual. Laughter, a sense of humor, dancing, music, play, pursuit of pleasure, satisfaction, joy, are the very point. They are the outflow of liberation. Think about the kind of social formation that begets all of this. It must be a society where so much of what we are currently bereft of already prevails: justice, integrity, fairness, intelligence, creativity, cooperation. People are often surprised when they discover that Marx explicitly stated that the whole point of communism is to create the conditions for personal fulfillment. I believe that all good leftist thought is oriented in this direction.

By the way, that criticism from Goldman’s fellow anarchists that you mention is still bandied about today. It’s a debate between what one anarchist derisively calls “life-style anarchism”— which we can more generously see as doing our best to live anarchist principles in a small corner of the universe, in our daily life—and a large-scale revolutionary anarchism of movements and campaigns directed at the dismantling of capitalism and the state.

HAWKINS: In her chapter “The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation,” Goldman acknowledges that women have made great strides, especially in economic equality, but that she sees a great emptiness and lack of fulfillment in modern women. She concludes the chapter with:

Pettiness separates; breadth unites. Let us be broad and big. Let us not overlook vital things because of the bulk of trifles confronting us. A true conception of the relation of the sexes will not admit of conqueror and conquered; it knows of but one great thing: to give of one’s self boundlessly, in order to find one’s self richer, deeper, better. That alone can fill the emptiness, and transform the tragedy of woman’s emancipation into joy, limitless joy.

What is the state of sex relations today? Does the overturning of Roe vs. Wade erode the progress assumed to have been made over 100 years.

WALLIS: Emma Goldman would be absolutely appalled by the overturning of Roe vs. Wade. That a government can dictate what a woman does with her body, much less a government consisting largely of men, was the height of misguided, thoughtless idiocy for her. Worse even, it was yet another way in which one group exercises ruthless domination over another. Recall that control over one’s body is woven into her very definition of anarchism’s goal: “the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property.”

I think Goldman would see “sex relations” today as still being mired in a “property” logic. And the “emptiness and lack of fulfillment” that she witnessed all around her, particularly but not exclusively among women living within the so-called “sacred institution of marriage”—does it not still define our times? Goldman’s stance on “sex relations” in the essay you mention even strikes me as anticipating queer arguments against marriage, to take one example. That position holds that marriage, same-sex or otherwise, is deeply, and deceptively, conservative. It is part and parcel of a unequal status quo. Its legal and ideological roots are literally located in property law. Are there not other, more humane, ways of expressing and living our “sex relations”?

Emma Goldman’s intimate relationships were precisely experiments toward this aim of seeking alternatives. Her non-conformity in this regard was very difficult for her psychologically and socially, and she suffered greatly for it. But, in her relationships, she also gave of herself “boundlessly,” and found herself “richer, deeper, better,” for doing so. Here we have another central anarchist principle. In fact, we can cite this principle by paraphrasing the Abbie Hoffman quote you gave earlier: “Anarchism is not something you believe in, but something you do. If you stop doing it, we will never know what future is possible.”

HAWKINS: Goldman was adamantly anti-patriotic and is quite eloquent in her chapter “Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty,” where she writes:

We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens. We are ready to hang, electrocute, or lynch anyone, who, from economic necessity, will risk his own life in the attempt upon that of some industrial magnate. Yet our hearts swell with pride at the thought that America is becoming the most powerful nation on earth, and that it will eventually plant her iron foot on the necks of all other nations.

Such is the logic of patriotism.

Are these not prescient words for a nation that has virtually been at war with someone for almost 100 years.

WALLIS: Sigh, yes. This is one of the instances where I would invoke “The strange phenomenon of the opposition to Anarchism.” Go back and scour the anarchist record for diagnoses and prognoses of human “progress.” They saw it all coming. Another strange phenomenon is that we don’t all see it coming. When, in Goldman’s time, fossil fuel powered automobiles began clattering down dirt roads, spewing petroleum clouds, killing small animals and children, destroying the neighborhood peace, was it not obvious that they’d be clogging the streets in no time, and perhaps even contributing to a hole in the ozone one day? A proto-anarchist like Henry David Thoreau certainly thought so, and on merely hearing the first rumbling of the locomotive near Walden Pond. For anyone with a bent for utopian thinking (in the best sense of that term), past and present are prologue. When Emma Goldman imagined “the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens,” she was seeing the nightmare of Dresden and Hiroshima.

HAWKINS: In your chapter on the critique of capitalism, you write a succinct description of its eroding powers:

“Spectacle” is an apt metaphor for life in a capitalist society. It suggests that we are mesmerized, infatuated, spellbound, be-witched, beguiled, and eventually seduced by a perpetually unfolding market extravaganza of commodities, images, and representations, the overwhelming majority of which are demonstrably superfluous, indeed often counterproductive, to happiness and wellbeing.

Yes, you see this in the AI phenomenon. We seem smitten, don’t we?

WALLIS: Don’t get me started! Take it away Noam: “Given the amorality, faux science, and linguistic incompetence of [AI language] systems, we can only laugh or cry at their popularity.”

The relationship between anarchism and technology is complex. Similar to Marx, some anarchist thinkers (for instance, Peter Kropotkin and Murray Bookchin) held out hope that technology would create ease in place of labor’s hardship and drudgery. Technology, to this kind of thinking, will allow us more free time, putting us in “a position to apply [our] usually-varied capacities to several pursuits in the farm, the workshop, the factory, the study or the studio,” as Kropotkin wrote in Fields, Factories, and Workshops in 1899. I know people who spend a good deal of time translating texts. They swear by Chat AI, for example, because it saves them so much time and effort. AI gets the basics of the translation right. That done, the translator can then spend more energy refining and perfecting the text.

I think one viable anarchist response to such technology is suggested in your earlier Vivian Gornick quote about the importance of “individual self-expression” and “joy” to Emma Goldman. I do translations, too. Every word choice, every syntax decision, every punctuation detail involves my” self-expression.” Why would I even want to by-pass any of the process? I’m talking about work dealing with language and ideas and rich metaphors and complex meaning—why would I want to collaborate with a machine? And what’s to say that I don’t derive deep joy from doing the parts that AI can approximate? Present being prologue, we’d better be careful, as the Gornick quote indicates, that we don’t start (continue!) making a heartless world “devoid of joy.”

Speaking of Luddites, anarchism itself vacillates between radical anti-civilization primitivism and starry-eyed techno-utopianism. Of course, there are many positions in between as well. Much current thinking around deindustrialization, rewilding, degrowth, anti-work, DIY, and so on, have roots deep in anarchist thought.

HAWKINS: You’ve written a few books on Buddhism. How does that practice jibe with your anarchism?

WALLIS: This is a huge question. To give a brief answer, I would say that the core concern of both Buddhism and anarchism is, arguably, alleviating the suffering of all sentient beings. This “all” is not to be taken lightly. It necessarily leads to what anarchism calls “total liberation,” and what Buddhism calls “universal compassion.” Those goals strike me as near identical since they are intended to lead to real world transformation. So, for each, the aim is to embody the ideal so as to create actual effects.

On a related note, anarchists have been anti-religion from the beginning. As I see it, the main reasons for that stance are that (i) Christianity was their model, (ii) Christianity is highly authoritarian, hierarchical, and dogmatic—qualities that any self-respecting anarchist abhors, and (iii) for millennia, the Church was in perfect collusion with the coercive State.

But that attitude is changing. When An Anarchist’s Manifesto came out, I was invited to several anarchist forums to discuss the book. During virtually every Q & A, some young leftist asked about the place of “spirituality” in anarchism. My knee-jerk response is to point out that anarchism wants to create a world in which the succor of spirituality is not necessary. Still, it’s a great question. What might a materialist “spirituality” look like? (The very terms seem to be contradictory, and yet…) This would be a great project to work on. I imagine humans have already fashioned useful material toward this end—from, for instance, the Hermetic traditions, pagan traditions, contemplative and meditative traditions, apophatic and mystical traditions. We would have to extract the material material from the idealist material, though. That is tricky business. Anyway, it is something we might need to address as the world continues to hurl toward cataclysm.

One final note. I said that anarchism advocates “total liberation” and Buddhism advocates “universal compassion,” for all sentient beings. I’d like to mention one area in which both traditions have an abysmal blindspot. If their respective practices are really enabling people to embody their ideals, then why are so few anarchists and Buddhists vegan? Animal liberation should be interwoven into the consciousness of everyone claiming liberation and compassion “for all sentient beings.” According to the Animal Kill Clock (https://animalclock.org), 12,221,879,967 have been killed in the United States for food since January 2023 alone. So, this is not a criticism from outside. It is an imminent critique, derived from anarchism’s and Buddhism’s very own principles. Anarchism does not fight for “partial liberation of some sentient beings.” Buddhism does not strive for “universal compassion for all sentient beings except non-human animals.” This heartless, blind, and contradictory state of affairs within two otherwise great traditions saddens me. Talk about “the strange phenomenon of opposition.”

HAWKINS: Have you seen the film, Emma Goldman: An Exceedingly Dangerous Woman? It begins with Emma being deported from the US in 1920 for her anarchism. She was then regarded by some as “the most dangerous woman in America.” What actions caused her to be seen that way?

WALLIS: Yes, an excellent film.

I think that what made Goldman so dangerous in the eyes of the local and national authorities was the combination of four elements. First, what she spoke about tended toward the socially taboo, and was often outright illegal—sexuality and birth control, free love, the evils of militarism, the hypocrisy of the church, atheism, the degradation of married life.

Second, her reach was substantial. She typically spoke before massive crowds, numbering in the hundreds and thousands. She spoke in university lecture halls, in community centers, in suburban parks and city squares, in barrooms and pool halls, in grimey mine shafts, and in elegant theaters. She traveled relentlessly, some years giving hundreds of talks. In a fascinating article in the academic journal Women’s History Review, titled “Emma Goldman: Passion, Politics, and the Theatrics of Free Expression,” Candance Falk writes that “Often press reporters were swayed by her message, humored by her free flowing jabs at the hypocrisy of big government and of conventional norms—all grist for wonderfully entertaining newspaper articles.” Such press coverage, favorable or not, greatly increased her reached, making her (in)famous throughout the United States and beyond.

Third, who she spoke to caused agonizing consternation. Goldman’s speeches challenging convention were delivered to audiences that crossed class, ethnic, race, nationality, age, and gender lines—lines that only the boldest orators in her day dared to entangle or transgress.

Fourth, how she spoke was perhaps the most “dangerous” of all. She was deeply theatrical. She spoke with equal amounts of force and eloquence. Roger Nash Baldwin, one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union, said that he was converted to radical ideas about free speech when, as a Harvard student, he witnessed an Emma Goldman speech. (In 1927, Baldwin would even edit Peter Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets. These are the roots of the ACLU!)

U.S. Attorney General Francis Caffey touched on this combination of elements when he reported that Goldman was “a woman of great ability and of personal magnetism, and her persuasive powers make her an exceedingly dangerous woman.”

HAWKINS: President Woodrow Wilson, in his December 7, 1915 State of the Union address spoke as if unhinged at times about the “disloyalty” of immigrants who had repaid America’s generosity with “disloyalty.” He said, in part:

I urge you to enact such laws at the earliest possible moment and feel that in doing so I am urging you to do nothing less than save the honor and self-respect of the nation. Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out. They are not many, but they are infinitely malignant, and the hand of our power should close over them at once.

Not long after the 1917 Espionage Act was passed by Congress. And Emma was on the list of its suspects. How did that happen? And does it reveal anything about the Assange case?

WALLIS: The United States Congress enacted the Espionage Act just after entering World War I in 1917. It is, with occasional revisions, still in effect. And, as you say, both Emma Goldman and Julian Assange were indicted under it. (So were Daniel Ellsberg, for his Pentagon Papers leaks, and Edward Snowden, for his National Security Agency leaks.) The Act prohibits “obtaining information, recording pictures, or copying descriptions of any information relating to the national defense with intent or reason to believe that the information may be used for the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” It also mandated “criminal penalties for anyone obstructing enlistment in the armed forces or causing insubordination or disloyalty in military or naval forces.”

Goldman was arrested, along with her companion Sasha Berkman, for her public remarks in New York City against the military draft and militarism in general. They both received the maximum penalty of two years incarceration a $10,000 fine (that’s roughly $235,000 in today’s money). While she was in prison, Congress passed the “Anarchist Exclusion Act,” specifying that “aliens who are anarchists…shall be excluded from admission into the United States.” So, in December 1919, Emma Goldman and 248 other utterly wrong-thinking “aliens” boarded the S.S. Buford and were deported to the fledgling Soviet Union.

The authorities were glad finally to be rid of her. No less an authority than an American president, Theodore Roosevelt, could trumpet:

Anarchy is a crime against the whole human race; and all mankind should band against the anarchist. His crime should be made an offense against the law of nations, like piracy and that form of man-stealing known as the slave trade; for it is of far blacker infamy than either. It should be so declared by treaties among all civilized powers. Such treaties would give to the Federal Government the power of dealing with the crime.

Let’s give the great Emma Goldman the last response to this bluster of officialdom:

[Anarchism] is so absolutely uncompromising, insisting, and permeating a force as to overcome the most stubborn assault and to withstand the criticism of those who really constitute the last trumpets of a decaying age.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Kendall Hawkins.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, “Income and wealth inequality is higher in the United States than almost any other developed country, and it is rising.” In September 2022 the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a report entitled Trends in the Distribution of Family Wealth, 1989-2019. The CBO found that the “growth of real wealth over the past three decades was not uniform… In 2019, families in the top 10 percent of the distribution held 72 percent of total wealth, and families in the top 1 percent of the distribution held more than one-third; families in the bottom half of the distribution held only 2 percent of total wealth.” In fact, families in the top 1 percent saw their share of the total wealth increase by at least 7.4 percentage points – from 26.6 percent in 1989 to 34.0 percent in 2019.

Since 1989 income gains have been heavily skewed toward the topmost bracket of high earners. This is strikingly evident in the growth of CEO compensation since 1965, when “a typical corporate CEO earned about twenty times that earned by a typical worker; by 2018, the ratio was 278:1.” As the Economic Policy Institute points out, from 1978 to 2018, CEO compensation grew by over 940 percent. Wages for the typical worker on the other hand grew by less than 12 percent. CEOs are getting paid exorbitantly because of their power to set pay, “not because they are increasing productivity or possess specific, high-demand skills,” according to the EPI.

This obscene source of inequality cannot even pretend to have any legitimate economic justification: it represents unchecked greed and self-aggrandizement at the expense of everyone else—especially ordinary workers. We could learn something from Spain’s Mondragon Corporation, undoubtedly the world’s largest and most successful cooperative enterprise. Mondragon employs over 80,000 workers across nearly one hundred businesses, but no manager or executive within the company can make over six times the pay than any worker. The excessive compensation of CEOs is only one contributing factor to the rise of wealth inequality in the United States, but it is a significant factor and one that “we could safely do away with.”

The intensifying concentration of wealth, and unjustifiable level of income inequality is proving disastrous in many ways. Here are just a few of them. First, less equal societies typically have more unstable economies, and this country is no exception. “The United States experienced two major economic crises over the past century—the Great Depression starting in 1929 and the Great Recession starting in 2007. Both were preceded by a sharp increase in income and wealth inequality…” It is also well-known that societies with greater economic equality generally also enjoy longer periods of sustained growth: simply put, “longer growth spells are robustly associated with more equality in the income distribution.”

Second, there is an incontrovertible link between economic inequality and violent crime. The fact is that rates of violence are higher in more unequal societies. Why is inequality associated with an increase in criminal activity? As equalitytrust.org observes, economic inequality “may curtail opportunities for some, giving rise to a sense of hopelessness which incites fear, violence and murder.” Certainly, inequality erodes social solidarity and trust, so much so that societies with “large income differences and low levels of trust may lack the social capacity to create safe communities.”

The erosion of perceived fairness and trust also explains the inverse relationship between economic inequality and happiness: a 2011 study, Income Inequality and Happiness, found that “the negative link between income inequality and the happiness of lower-income respondents was explained not by lower household income, but by perceived unfairness and lack of trust.”

Third, the undeniable fact is that the greater the economic inequality that exists, the worse it is for general health outcomes. What is sometimes overlooked is that income inequality is bad for health outcomes across economic strata, not just for those in poverty. To be sure, poor health and poverty are closely linked; but the epidemiological research shows that high levels of economic inequality “negatively affect the health of even the affluent, mainly because… inequality reduces social cohesion, a dynamic that leads to more stress, fear, and insecurity for everyone.” People live longer in countries with lower levels of inequality, as the World Bank reports. In the United States, for example, “average life expectancy is four years shorter than in some of the most equitable countries.”

The most obvious and readily available method for addressing wealth inequality is through taxation policy, subjecting those in the topmost economic echelon to a “high and rising marginal tax rates on earnings.” In 1944 the top marginal tax rate reached 94 percent, applying to income over $200,000, roughly equivalent to $2.8 million today, adjusted for inflation. With our collective amnesia Americans often forget that the top tax rate remained above 90 percent through the 1950s and did not dip below 70 percent until 1981. At no point during the decades that saw America’s greatest economic growth did the tax on the wealthy drop below 70 percent. Today it is somewhere around 37 percent.

There is another method, no less important, for addressing inequality, but one that gets little attention because it involves a fundamental reorganization of the relations of production: namely, worker self-management, workplace democracy – or, perhaps most accurately, worker self-directed enterprises, to use the wording of economist Richard Wolff. As Wolff points out, these enterprises “divide all the labors to be performed… determine what is to be produced, how it is to be produced, and where it is to be produced” and, perhaps most crucially, “decide on the use and distribution of the resulting output or revenues.” One essential way to appreciate a worker self-directed enterprise is to contrast it to a typical, hierarchically organized corporation where a small board of directors, selected by a tiny number of shareholders, appropriate and distribute the surplus produced by employees. (Surplus refers to the difference between the value added by workers and the value paid to workers). In a worker self-directed enterprise, the surplus-producing workers themselves make the basic decisions about production and distribution.

According to Democracy at Work Institute, worker cooperatives have grown in number by more than 30 percent since 2019. It is estimated that there are some 900-1000 worker cooperatives in the United States, comprising roughly 10,000 workers. What these non-capitalist firms have demonstrated, among other things, is first, that they can succeed and be competitive with respect to traditionally organized firms. And second, worker self-directed enterprises can serve to alleviate income inequality, as Mondragon Corporation does, for example, by establishing a minimum and maximum income level for all workers that is equitable, and reasonable. At US worker cooperatives, the “2:1 top-to-bottom pay ratio… points to the prioritization of reducing internal inequality over other compensation goals.”

Extricating ourselves from the quagmire of inequality will require a progressive taxation policy that includes closing corporate loopholes and tax havens. But taxation is not sufficient: genuine, meaningful equality demands economic democracy. Fortunately, there is ample historical evidence to show that worker self-management can be successfully implemented on a large scale. We also know that “investment funds can be generated by taxation instead of from private savings,” as the philosopher David Schweickart has observed.

Worker self-directed enterprises will not only facilitate economic equality but will also foster a participatory-democratic consciousness within the firm and society at large, and ultimately serve as an antidote to the alienation of labor under capitalism. This is because the members of democratized workplaces are arguably no longer estranged from the act of production: empowered to make decisions regarding the labor process, production is no longer an activity ‘alien’ to the worker. In conclusion, workers self-management is an essential component in the struggle against gross inequality, exploitation, and the alienation of labor, a process that truly begins with workers formulating their own rules.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Sam Ben-Meir.

Oh dear! A man failing to dismiss a political group on the basis of their description or political leaning! Where will it all end?

I am a communist in the traditional sense that I aligned myself to the Communist Party of Ireland for many, many years only to discover that either most of them – or me – are not the type of ‘communists’ that should keep each other company. Eventually, I was expelled for – to keep a long story very short – disobedience!

Now, how many of you readers are still with me? How many of you have now instantly made one decision or another based on what you have read so far or are you prepared to read on?

First, I will contend that in the ‘west’, liberals, progressives, left, socialists, communists, etc are so far away from achieving any political power that many of the differences between them, the historical animosities, the petty squabbles, the inflated egos, the personal disputes, are completely and utterly ridiculous. And, that many people see us that way and is why so many people will not touch us.

By all means indulge ourselves in establishing or maintaining historical or current differences. But, as is frequently the case, our fractious nonsense is only a thin veil that covers our organisational and political failures within our ever-decreasing circle. It does nothing to create any possibility for progress whatsoever. Mostly, it provides a cheap, ignorant platform to help us escape having to answer so many awkward or pertinent questions. And it certainly contributes nothing to resolving deeper fundamental issues that will inevitably arise at a later level of organisational development.

Frankly, an objective look at many organisations, including communist parties, must conclude we that have long since descended into pathetic cultish outfits. There are plenty of individuals and organisations in most ‘western’ countries that could form the basis of a united Left challenge to the prevailing and very successful ruling bodies. Many, especially in the Americas, have been successful or have made considerable progress despite overwhelming odds.

Now, look at the comfortable ‘western’ record. Take Europe. There is barely a handful of relatively successful organisations and even fewer successful communist parties. The left, the progressive forces have been chewed up and spat out for the most part, though many ‘survive’ in insular and constant states of delusion.

Discussion of revolution and communism in the English-speaking world is just fantasy role playing unless it begins and ends with the cold hard reality that the left has been completely neutralized and marginalized here and the numbers are nowhere close to what they need to be. Moving revolutionary leftism out of the farthest margins and closer to the mainstream should be your first and foremost objective before you talk about anything else, because otherwise you’re just LARPing. You’re arguing about a political movement that has no actual movement.

You can do this by outreach and activism. You can also do this by finding ways to make socialism and communism look so fucking cool that people start knocking each other over to be a part of it. Finding clever ways to make it shiny and attractive in a very indoctrinated society.
— Caitlin Johnstone, Australian journalist

Where to start? At least, acknowledge that the capitalistic and imperialistic forces, organisations and political parties have excelled themselves compared to the Left despite their differences. Acknowledge that they have utilised every means available to them — especially the media — in spectacular fashion particularly in relation to their struggle with the Left. The enormous imbalance in our access to the broad media does not absolve us of the requirement to at least try to counter or circumvent that imbalance.

Nothing does more to fracture the Left than the Left itself. The establishment, along with the media (and frequently with the media and their armies) plant the seeds of division and the Left grows those seeds to maturity with unrelenting eagerness and astonishing success.

I am sorry that this little peep into the Left is largely concentrated on Europe. Despite decades of engagement in solidarity with Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela (chiefly), my practical political experience is in Europe.

I have watched (and marched with) people being led to the top of the hill so many times in my lifetime on so many issues only to find that everyone had to find their own way home with nothing more than either the satisfaction that they had done ‘something’ about something or the feeling that they had been led astray – completely astray by leaders who had no sense of direction.

For now, in the ‘west’, we have lost the battle with the capitalists and our prospects of changing that trajectory are slim. However, to improve those odds, to prepare for the coming confrontations we have to be better organised than in the past. That is self-evident:

Stop living in the past

Stop accepting mediocre leadership

Stop listening to ‘leaders’ whose only response to any issue is to ‘organise’ a picket or a march

Stop relying on so-called liberals whose only purpose in life is to let you down when you need them the most

Stop believing that governments who do not respond to any democratic demands will be intimidated into accepting the demands of some pathetic picket outside (always outside) some government department or other

Stop everything and reassess and learn from our past failures

Stop responding to each and every provocation thrown at us by our governments, or blocs or employers – they are laughing out loud at us. It is so hilarious for them that they feed us on a constant drip diet of provocation and watch as hundreds of separate organisations respond in hundreds of separate ways – none of which threatens them in the slightest

Stop and try to work out how and why we have lost the argument when our message could be and should be so attractive – how can this be?

Stop believing that when a government retreats on some particular issue that that has been a victory for the opposition. At best, it may be a tactical retreat. If only the Left would engage in a tactical retreat from failed tactics, we might make some progress on some front

Stop accepting any financing from your government or local authority to ‘assist’ in running some social organisation or other, some quasi-educational project, some ‘human-rights’ outfit, there are literally hundreds of examples. The state funding organisations that often engage in campaigns against the government! Do you think that the governments are stupid?

Stop accepting leadership from rogues and charlatans – if you take the time to look, they will expose themselves, and usually the only cover they have is a compliant membership

Stop evading our responsibility for ensuring the effectiveness of our organisation

Stop embracing all sorts of side-issues – race, religion, gender, etc and stick to the only thing that can resolve these issues – class unity and class victory

Stop strangling discussion: at the same time stop analysing issues to death at the expense of any form of organised response

Stop showing how small we are, how little support we have. The governments, the capitalists and unfortunately the people already know this, mostly because in case they missed it, we insist on reminding them at every opportunity!

Stop thinking that every defeat is somehow a victory – skip the self-delusion and start to learn the real difference between the two concepts

Stop and accept that especially in the English-speaking world and in Europe generally we lost and are continuing to lose more every day and try to figure out why that is the case and try to figure out what to do about it

Stop and consider why there are so many separate groups with separate approaches on issues that most other organisations would hold some degree of sympathy with. There is no question that many of the leaders of these, let’s call them specialised or sectional groups, have been driven out of other groups or had failed to make any progress or even see any prospect for progress on some issue within some larger group. There is a lot of talent out there, a great number of people with specialist knowledge yet all, including the larger groups, are running round like headless chickens and failing to recognise the basic principle that unity, or even co-operation, is strength

Stop and consider the issue of unity being strength (for the most part): If unity is strength, then disunity is weakness. Weakness inevitably leads to failure. Who is responsible for the disunity of forces on the Left?

Stop and consider how we are rated, not necessarily in terms of success or failure, as these concepts are subject to wild variations according to our environment, but in terms of how we are perceived: how does our government rate us in terms of being a threat, how do other organisations rate us (for all manner of reasons), how do the people we appeal to rate us?

“Street activism reinforces the negative public perception”

“Street activism is more about cops, “symbolic” arrests, and social media”

“Street activism gives us the illusion of being a threat”
— Mickey Z

Stop behaving as if we just represent ourselves. By our own declarations we take on to represent the working class. Yet, carrying that responsibility we expose ourselves variously as disorganised, violent (sometimes), incompetent, tiny, fractious, vulgar, arrogant or cult-like outfits presenting ourselves as glorious defeated heroes and/or marked with an obvious outcast mentality. If you don’t recognise yourself then ask anyone in the street and they will set you straight. Even if you are not one of the above, even if you are one of the few stalwarts, you will be lumped in with the above either because people are not able to distinguish one from the other, or you will be deliberately so labelled by the media, etc

Stop and look to see if there is one thing we do well: any one thing that we do well that makes us indispensable in the wider or narrower scheme of the political reality you inhabit

Just Stop. Consider for one moment what would be the consequence if your particular organisation ceased to exist. Would such a disappearance even be noted within the great scheme of things? Be honest with ourselves. The fact is that most left political organisations would not be missed. That does not mean that they should go away. Indeed, they are needed more than ever. However, it does mean that most of them do have to completely reassess their situation. Instead of wasting time doing the same futile things time after time, take a look at ourselves and develop some self-respect for our image.

Considering that the capitalists have outgunned the Left — in every sense of the word — how can it be possible that we continue to use every method that we know does not work. What is the matter with us?

The Left has no credibility, for the most part and in most instances. It is not only the governments and the capitalists that ignore us but also the very people we try to appeal to. They deserted us in droves and continue to do so.

“But that’s the magic of ‘activism,’ isn’t it? We rebels loyally follow the time-worn script and then pat ourselves on the back for being so badass that the ‘pigs’ have no choice but to come after us.”

“Imagine if those who are passionate about living in a more sane, equitable, and compassionate society, took steps that actually contributed to that noble goal.”

“It’s never too late to try something new…”

— Mickey Z

What is to be done? There is no alternative to good organisation — it is the key to everything. Solid political and organisational structures will transform any group no matter what it is. Rejecting all the previous methods that did not work — and will not work — is the first step to being forced to consider alternative approaches. That can only happen when the organisation itself is nourished with clear plans and strategies. When we skip that step, we are doomed and so is anything we touch. Building the organisation and promoting policies are distinct activities which, although related, require separate attentions and expertise.

Look at the real world, the world of capitalist successes and outright victories in pursuing and achieving their goals for themselves. Capitalism itself is a disaster but the people who oversee that disaster are first-class organisers and strategists. They have not secured and cemented their grip on most of the world on a wing and a prayer.

We cannot lead others until you know where we are going ourselves. We have to recognise that too many people have been led up blind alleys and are no longer willing to be fooled again. We have to take responsibility for having been the cause of that disastrous outcome and take steps to make sure there is no continuation or re-occurrence of that disaster. Think quality, not quantity. Just like the 1% does. Think organisation. Just like the 1% does. Think strategy. Just like the 1% does. Or, do we consider ourselves (from a broad organisation and strategic perspective) to be better at the job than they are?

“Using no way as way. Having no limitation as your only limitation.”
— Bruce Lee

Leaving the futility behind will be no loss but seriously reassessing our internal situation just might sow a seed of our choice that we could learn to nourish and develop. Is that proposition so hard to understand? After we have achieved some organisational and leadership capacities, we might just be able to look at the next step: how to cooperate with others and then achieve unity. We have nothing to lose but our own self-imposed chains!

It is likely that I may be wrong on some of the points I have raised. It is just as likely that I have missed many other important points. In any event, can you correct me or enlighten me without attacking me? At least, try.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Declan McKenna.

In Peru, plagued by an entrenched political opposition, allegations of corruption and a low approval rating, former president Pedro Castillo attempted to dissolve congress, which has led to his impeachment and subsequent arrest. This has sparked a wave of protests that have paralyzed the country.

Meanwhile in Greece, the police murder of Kostas Fragoulis, a Roma teenager accused of stealing 20 Euros of gasoline has inspired another wave of protests.

Finally, a statement from Alfredo Cospito, an anarchist prisoner on hunger strike resisting Italy’s draconian 41-bis regime.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

In Peru, plagued by an entrenched political opposition, allegations of corruption and a low approval rating, former president Pedro Castillo attempted to dissolve congress, which has led to his impeachment and subsequent arrest. This has sparked a wave of protests that have paralyzed the country.

Meanwhile in Greece, the police murder of Kostas Fragoulis, a Roma teenager accused of stealing 20 Euros of gasoline has inspired another wave of protests.

Finally, a statement from Alfredo Cospito, an anarchist prisoner on hunger strike resisting Italy’s draconian 41-bis regime.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

Anarchism is an aspect of socialism (among many others) that those of us wishing socialism, or some comparable form of resistance, to survive will have to think about again, this time without a prearranged sneer.

— T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea

This December 9 marked 180 years since the birth of Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921), the great Russian anarchist, sociologist, historian, zoologist, economist, and philosopher. Now, of all times, we should be remembering, revitalizing, and creatively reconstructing his legacy.

One might assume that a 19th century Russian anarchist would have nothing to say that could possibly have real bearing on the world today, that his political philosophy, whatever relevance it might have once held, had been long surpassed. I would dare to venture another point of view: not only are we unable to justify confining Kropotkin to the history (or worse, the dustbin) of ideas – rather, this is a thinker that remains still ahead of us, a thinker whose vision has yet to be truly realized. We have not yet caught up with Kropotkin, but there are indications that conditions more favorable to receiving his thought are on the horizon, and that perhaps there is a day approaching when we may even begin to see his ideas implemented on a scale that could radically transform our communities and, most especially, our workplaces.

Kropotkin’s importance for us has only grown because the material conditions, the post-scarcity, the technological advances, have made it possible, no doubt for the first time in history, to truly realize his vision of unfettered human creativity. There is one chapter in The Conquest of Bread (1892) that I want to focus on because it may surprise those who are new to anarcho-communist political philosophy. The chapter is entitled ‘The Need for Luxury,’ and his thesis is quite a simple one: “After bread has been secured, leisure is the supreme aim.” The anarchist commune — or what is sometimes referred to today as “luxury communism” — recognizes “that while it produces all that is necessary to material life, it must also strive to satisfy all manifestations of the human mind.”

We can agree with Aaron Bastani, who argues in Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2020) that, “There is a tendency in capitalism to automate labor, to turn things previously done by humans into automated functions. In recognition of that, then the only utopian demand can be for the full automation of everything and common ownership of that which is automated.” Bastani is talking about using the levels of post-scarcity and automation that we’ve attained to finally usher in a society free of drudgery, toil, and where the full range of tastes can be satisfied.

Given the multiple crises we are facing, the general name for which is global capitalism, how should we answer the question famously posed by Lenin, “What is to be done?” There are at least three basic principles which can be derived from the work of Kropotkin, and that can and should strategically guide us as we move forward. The first is ending the tyranny of private property which has produced greater economic inequality today than we have ever seen in the history of the world. The concentration of capital has produced a condition in which a handful of individuals possess wealth exceeding that of the combined wealth of the billions of people who share this planet. So, as the great French philosopher Alain Badiou has also reiterated, our first principle must be that of collectivism in opposition to the dictatorship of capital: “It is not a necessity for social organization to reside in private property and monstrous inequalities.”

The second principle involve democratizing our workplaces, through worker self-management, or more precisely through what the economist Richard Wolff calls ‘worker self-directed enterprises – in a word, economic democracy. Experiments with non-traditional, non-hierarchical firms, have largely met with success. Perhaps the greatest example is Spain’s Mondrian Corporation, but there are many others. So that we are well past the stage of asking ourselves whether such non-capitalist forms of organization can succeed and be competitive. It has been amply proven that they indeed can.

The non-capitalist reorganization of our workplaces would undoubtedly improve the condition of workers, which is under assault around the world. In countries around the world, union leaders are routinely threatened with violence or murdered. Indeed, the International Trade Union Confederation reports that 2019 saw “the use of extreme violence against the defenders of workplace rights, large-scale arrests and detentions.” The number of countries which do not allow workers to establish or join a trade union increased from 92 in 2018 to 107 in 2019. In 2018, 53 trade union members were murdered — and in 52 counties workers were subjected to physical violence. In 72 percent of countries, workers have only restricted access to justice or none at all. As Noam Chomsky observed, “Policies are designed to undermine working class organization and the reason is not only the unions fight for workers’ rights, but they also have a democratizing effect. These are institutions in which people without power can get together, support one another, learn about the world, try out their ideas, initiate programs, and that is dangerous.”

And third, it is time we recognize, as Badiou put it two weeks after the election of Trump, “that there is no necessity for a state in the form of a separated and armed power.” The principle of free association as opposed to the state is one that anarchism has long advocated. But we need to be clear here: anarchism is usually taken to mean, if anything, opposition to all government or to government as such. In fact, this is a mistakenly one-sided view of anarchism, and it certainly does not represent a nuanced understanding of Kropotkin, who made a clear and sharp distinction between government and the state.

Anarcho-communism is opposed to the state inasmuch as it represents centralized power in the hands of a few, hierarchical relationships and class domination. But Kropotkin was not necessarily opposed to a condition of society in which certain elements of decentralized community government remain. Martin Buber underscored this point: Kropotkin’s “‘anarchy’ like Proudhon’s, is in reality ‘anocracy’; not absence of government, but absence of domination.” The distinctive feature of anarchist programs is not that governments are excluded from the process and without any meaningful contribution to make. The essential characteristics are voluntarism, anti-authoritarianism, the decentralization of political authority, worker self-management (economic democracy), and in general a tendency to address social problems from the bottom up, rather than by imposing solutions from the top down.

Kropotkin was one of Russia’s finest minds, and one that was among the most dedicated to the ideals of which we are in danger of completely losing sight. There is no better time than now to salvage the very best of Russian thought, to reaffirm its universality, its inherently critical posture towards authoritarianism, and the self-destructive pursuit of power through violence.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Sam Ben-Meir.

The post Make Anarchism Great Again: A Call for a Stateless Form of Populism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nicky Reid.

Our most important contribution is to have demonstrated concretely how to reconcile democratic planning with worker and consumer autonomy. We believe this was the Achilles’ heel of socialism during the twentieth century, which must be resolved if there is to be a future for socialism in the twenty-first century.

— Robin Hahnel speaking to the breakthrough that would be achieved in A Participatory Economy, 2022 (p 236-237)

In his book, A Participatory Economy, Robin Hahnel, a professor emeritus of economics at American University, begins by clarifying the goals of a participatory economy: economic freedom, economic justice, solidarity, efficiency, environmentally sustainable, and economic variety.

Economic justice is achieved by remunerating people based on their effort and sacrifice, how much of the burden one bears. Effort and sacrifice will be judged by colleagues in the workplace. Efficiency is the converse of wastefulness — that work performed is beneficial. Environmental sustainability means attaining intergenerational equity. Economic variety recognizes that people are different, have different tastes and wants; therefore, achieving an economy that produces a diversity of outcomes and lifestyles is sought.

Chapter 2 looks at different political-economic models and discusses why a participatory economy (parecon) is preferable and superior to capitalism, communism, and democratic socialism.

Hahnel shoots down the canard relentlessly propounded by adherents of capitalism that humans are motivated by greed. Hahnel writes, “The fallacy is in asserting that people will act in the same greedy and fearful ways in a system where they are given the opportunity to make their own decisions, are positively rewarded for embracing a fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of economic activity, and are rewarded, not punished, for acting in solidarity with others.” (p 32-33)

Perhaps the most controversial feature in a parecon is that there will be no private enterprise. This is because of the belief that “… only full social ownership of all productive resources is capable of achieving economic justice and distributive justice.” (p 40)

Markets are also eschewed for a variety of reasons, including their unfairness and subversion of democracy.

Instead of markets determining outcomes, people will get together and plan the economy. This is not a centralized command economy. A permanent top-down hierarchy has been eliminated. All workers and consumers are equally empowered in a parecon, although workers within a job complex will have greater input into their particular job complex than others outside that job complex.

There are many factors that go into protecting the environment (by, e.g., eliminating externalities), determining planning, creating balanced job complexes, determining effort, special needs, etc. Nonetheless, parecon and its planning are not pie-in-the-sky. Hahnel cites the promising results of computer simulations that support the feasibility and efficiency of annual planning. (see chapter 5)

A Participatory Economy also includes a chapter on reproductive labor. Thus labor, that has traditionally been heavily skewed to women (e.g., housework, child care), is recognized for its value to not only the family unit but society. Women’s equal participation in the workplace and economic life is a given in a parecon.

Parecon is a system in which fairness means fairness is across all ethnicities, genders, and whichever identifying features people choose for themselves. Application of the principles that underlie parecon must be accorded to all human distinctions with fairness. This is a sine qua non to be faithful to parecon’s principles.

Subsequent chapters examine participatory investment planning and long-run development planning.

But how does all the forgoing relate to international economic relations? Hahnel relates that a parecon rejects foreign direct investment in all forms because it is at odds with worker self-management. Private, for-profit business is not allowed in a parecon.

Foreign trade would take into account the level of economic development in a trade partner and seek to rectify long-standing economic injustices. Hahnel details a more-than-50-percent rule to greater benefit disadvantaged economies and respect a commitment to economic justice.

Parecon is not considered a finished product. Neither is it a process. It answers the question of what kind of economy and world do we desire once markets are supplanted and the masses of people have gained control of the resources, economy, and their futures.

A Participatory Economy is an eminently worthwhile read for people devoted to social justice and an economically just society. Seek answers to your questions and gain a deeper understanding of the principles and details of a promising people-oriented economic model that cannot be sufficiently covered in a book review.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

In Lebanon people have had enough of rampant corruption, inflation and limits on bank withdrawals. Without any other options, they’ve resorted to robbing banks for their own money, to the cheers of supportive crowds.

Next up in Haiti recent fuel hikes have exploded in a powder keg of rioting and looting in the capitol city of Port Au Prince.

Finally in Mexico, some revenge for family members of 43 students who went missing in 2014 and a poorly named police station gets the attention it deserves from some Anarcha-Feminists.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

As supply chains are pushed to the brink, working people around the globe struggle with new realities of stagnated wages and out of control inflation. While oil corporations celebrate record profits, the people of Ecuador are fighting back with work stoppages, road blocks, and riots across the country.

Meanwhile, in Tanzania, tensions have flared as the government tries to displace many indigenous Maasai people from their ancestral homelands for yet another playground for capitalist elites.

Finally, we follow up with our coverage of Giannis Michailidis, anarchist prisoner in Greece, who has now been on hunger strike for over a month.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

We start in so-called Chile where the newly elected ostensibly left-libertarian president Gabriel Boric has failed to deliver on his promise to free political prisoners.

Meanwhile in Munich, police have raided a number of apartments, an anarchist library, and a print shop.

Then in Greece, long term anarchist prisoner Giannis Michaildis has announced a hunger strike demanding his release.

Finally, a run down of the recent events at the Defend the Forest Atlanta encampment.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

CORRECTION: During the production of this episode we were working with the most up to date information at the time when we had said nobody had died at the May Day protests in Chile. Unfortunately we have since learned that Francisca Sandoval, a journalist age 29 died several days later in the hospital. Our condolences go out to her family and loved ones.

Welcome to another episode of System Fail. In the news this week we do a quick rundown of May Day celebrations around the world. Although there were other May Day festivities we focused on Montreal Santiago de Chile, Istanbul, Berlin and Paris.

For our next segment we cover the drastic curtailing of reproductive rights in the United States as foreshadowed by the leak of Supreme Court documents. We also take a look at the acts of resistance and the obnoxious recuperationist conspiracy theorists who try to discredit them.

Later, we see how comrades in Greece are resisting Law 4777 which would station police on university campuses, where they have historically not been allowed to go.

Finally, we cover a violent insurrection in Sri Lanka where protesters have ousted the corrupt Prime Minister and torched two of the President’s houses and his presidential Lamborghini.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

Part I – Pre-History of Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

Waking Up

In 2001 Barbara had her awakening to the disasters that capitalism caused. This started as part of the 9/11 events, beginning after the response to the supposed attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. It became immediately clear the US would respond to the attacks with military action against whatever country seemed most vulnerable and had access or proximity to resources, in this case oil. The attacks were supposedly coordinated by al-Qaeda, a radical Islamic group founded by Osama bin Laden and headquartered in Afghanistan. We firmly believed, with documented evidence, that the US attacked Iraq instead even though Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with the attacks. The US wanted control of Iraq because of their large reserves of oil. In fact, they were the second largest oil exporting state at that time.

As soon as the news came of the World Trade Towers being hit, Bruce said that something was fishy. From that time forward Barbara’s political life began. Watching the news was surreal and terrifying. Over and over again, images of the towers collapsing were televised. Talk of war began almost immediately, with George “W” Bush putting the blame on Iraq – with absolutely no proof. What was even more alarming was watching how people reacted to it. So many of them jumped on the bandwagon of war.

Making signs

Shortly after the attack Bruce – who had been a socialist for 30 years – talked Barbara into going to her first demonstration. Together we made signs to bring with us – “No War on Iraq”, “War is not the Answer”. Making the signs was so much fun. We got old cardboard cartons from the grocery stores along with some long lightweight sticks from lumber stores to hold them up. We brainstormed ideas for what to write. Bruce’s signs always had much more content than Barbara’s. Barbara went for the fewer words, the better.

First demonstration

The gathering, or demonstration, was held in Palo Alto, CA, just outside the Stanford University Campus. We had to park our car some distance from the crowd, and Barbara felt self-conscious carrying our signs. A radical political science faculty member, Joel Benin, who was pro-Palestinian, gave an impassioned speech. It was so sane, so true. People around us began chanting and we joined with them – NO WAR – NO WAR. This wasn’t a big demonstration, only a couple of hundred people, but everyone was in agreement that we could see where this drive to war was going, and we wanted to try to stop it. Barbara didn’t fully grasp the full implications of where the US was headed or what would be her involvement in the fight to stop it. Ultimately, that was the beginning of her journey to socialism.

Barbara has already written about much of this in My Journey to Socialism, some of which we’ve quoted here, which began after these attacks. Bruce was so happy to see her waking up.

Attending anti-war demonstrations

We went to anti-war demonstrations in San Francisco and Oakland, chanting “No Blood for Oil”. Many of the demonstrations and meetings were organized by San Francisco ANSWER, an anti-war group formed in San Francisco shortly after 9/11. On March 20, 2003, we marched with tens of thousands of people to protest the war on Iraq that Bush started that very day. We shut down the city. Aside from ANSWER, there seemed to be no large, unified movement to take action against the existing paradigm of US imperialism and capitalism. That is, there was no large movement until the Occupy Wall Street Movement in 2011 which was designed to protest income inequality and the use of influence of money in politics by occupying public spaces.

2004 – 2011 Looking for a Foothold

During this time period, we were searching for the best place for us to fit in and work towards changing the existing capitalist system. We had a book club together, just the two of us. We read and discussed The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Gregg Palast, Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins, The powers That Be, and Who Rules America, both by G. William Domhoff. We met every other week on the weekends for 2 hours. This helped to develop Barbara’s understanding of capitalism.

In 2008 the economic crash hit almost everyone.  We each lost ¼ of our savings in our IRA accounts, even though we had our money invested in socially responsible companies. Since this was money we hoped to use to supplement Social Security, this was a very personal wake-up call, not just for us, but for many. Were we witnessing the collapse of capitalism, and its effects on ordinary people?

In 2009 we attended a KPFA townhall meeting. KPFA was our local radio station, representing a mix of New Deal liberals and Social Democrats. They featured people like Amy Goodman, Sasha Lilly, C.S. Soong, and Bonnie Faulkner. At that meeting Bruce spoke about why KPFA is supporting the Democratic Party. When the meeting was over, he was approached by a labor organizer who wanted to start an organization to try to coordinate the public education unions. We stayed with this group for about a year, attending meetings about once a month, but nothing ever came of it, so we left.

Part II – 2011 – 2012 – Turning Point – Occupy

Excitement of General Assemblies:

We were happy to see Occupy San Francisco and Occupy Oakland blossom in October of 2011 which lasted until the spring of 2012. We initially attended assemblies at the amphitheater in Frank Ogawa Plaza, right on the doorstep of Oakland City Hall. In San Francisco they were near the Ferry Building and at the bottom of the financial district.

The General Assembly (GA) meetings in both San Francisco and Oakland were electrifying. There were some extremely skilled facilitators. The GAs met every day and discussed how to regulate the public space that they had occupied and integrate the homeless community, which turned out to be a very difficult task. In San Francisco there were people who rode on a ferry that would stop by and watch the meetings. This was a good way to draw people in. Some of the members of the organizing committee of Occupy led tours around the Occupy camp to combat the propaganda against it.

Shutting Down the Port of Oakland

November 2, 2011, Occupy Oakland coordinated to shut down West Coast ports to make a statement that we would not go back to “business as usual”. The shutdown was a way of protesting the treatment of longshoremen and truck drivers, who were forced to work as independent contractors. They were then fired by port owners EGT and Goldman Sachs for wearing union t-shirts. We marched with 200,000 others from Oscar Grant Plaza to the ports. While the ILWU did not openly support the blockade, the rank and file and many former labor leaders did. Clarence Thomas, secretary/treasurer of the ILWU, was fully committed to this blockade, as he had been for many past blockades. We’ll never forget the power of the first speech we heard from him which began – “I’m Clarence Thomas – the REAL Clarence Thomas”. Jack Heyman, also with the ILWU, was another powerful and persuasive speaker.

The Challenges of the Working Committees

We joined some of the committees, but we noticed there was a real gap in ages in the members. The overwhelming majority of people were in their 20s, with the exception of the Committee for Solidarity with Labor. There were virtually no people in their 30s and 40s and only a handful of people like us in our 50s and 60s. We were both working full time and tried to join committees that would work with our schedules, but the organizers kept changing the days and times of the meetings. It seemed like, at best, most of the Occupy participants worked part-time or might have been upper middle-class people whose schedules were more flexible. The committees were not very solid.

People would float in and out. Any group could start a committee – even conservative committees like those who wanted to work with merchants were allowed. Committees were dissolved without letting the Occupy leadership know so you could join a committee and discover that it no longer existed. We found many of the meetings off-track and with members who didn’t have the basic social skills like asking a person “How are you? How are things going?” They lacked skills for building solidarity with strangers like tracking things a person may have told them and following up with a question like “what’s happening with that project you were working on?” They are skills like showing up to meetings on time and remembering to tell others if a meeting is cancelled. The Occupy movement was the best and the worst of anarchism.

Monday Night Occupy Meetings in the Women’s Building

When the police drove Occupy in SF and Oakland away from Oscar Grant Plaza in Oakland and the area outside the Federal Reserve building in SF the Occupy organizers decided to meet indoors. Speakers were arranged every Monday night to talk on various political and economic topics. On average, 50-75 people attended. We noticed how the cliquishness of Occupy in the public are continued into the events in the Women’s Building in SF. Bruce told Barbara that when he was meeting with the organizers of an economic forum that Barbara was standing by herself. Nobody introduced themselves or tried to introduce themselves. These folks were calling themselves socialists and yet they lacked the most elementary friendliness to others who were on the same page. We decided it was then that we felt we needed to stop trying to join other organizations and start our own.

Part III – History of Socialist PBC

2012 – 2014 Building Political Documents and Our Website

We began to develop our own organizational documents, including a manifesto, mission statement, our attitude towards politics, and developed a political practice. At first that seemed like a lot of work to Barbara, and she also wondered how we would get people to join us. We had many meetings, just the two of us, to hash out the development of our perspective. Our main purpose was to provide a forum for exposing capitalism and spread the word to the public.

In spite of this challenging work, the creation of this site was so much fun. The first area we wanted to cover included telling people who we are and what we’re about. It included our mission statement – which was to become one of many eddies for:

• “Exposing the predatory, incompetent, and irrational practices of capitalists to direct human social life.
• Engage in collective political actions that throw a monkey-wrench into and slow down or disrupt the profit-making mechanisms of the system.
• Weave and expand the fabric of a growing body of workplaces under worker self-management.”

Barbara switched from full-time to part-time work, allowing her more time to work on developing our book clubs that were focused on educating people about the reality of capitalism and the havoc it’s wrecked in the world. From 2012-2014 we tried to do outreach by having in-person book groups.

In April 2014 our first step was to create a website, Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. Through our Occupy contacts we found a wonderful tech guy named Jeremy who, with our input, created the website that we still have today. Our baby was gestating. It was scary for Barbara to learn how to manage a website. While she had considerable work experience using numerous platforms, managing a website is a whole other ballgame. At a ridiculously low cost, Jeremy built our WordPress site. He patiently showed Barbara the basics and was the best tech teacher we have been able to find since then. He never spoke to her in tech-speak. Sadly, he has disappeared from our lives, even though we’ve tried hard to reach him. Since then, we have struggled to find someone to help us with our site, as well as with social media.

In November 2014 we wrote our first post – titled The Collapse of Capitalism. In it you will see that our economic situation has only gotten worse since then. In addition to all the things we listed, we’re now dealing with the economic fallout of Covid, hyper-inflation, and a rush to war with Russia.

We added a slider at the top of our page that, in addition to The Collapse of Capitalism, included the Personal Impact of Crisis. In that section we asked the question “What caused the crisis?” We gave 4 reasons for this. We then proposed “Making adjustments within the system” asking 6 questions of readers. Finally, we asked the question “Are there alternatives”?

The next section was titled Alternatives to Capitalism. We gave examples of workers’ self-management, workers’ control, and worker cooperatives – all of which currently exist and often are more successful than capitalist businesses.

The next section was titled History of Workers’ Councils so readers could see this is not just an unrealistic pipe dream. There is a 150-year history of worker self-management.

Finally, we included a section titled Local Workplace Democracy that allowed readers to learn about some of the local cooperatives in the US.

On our site we included sections on Our Manifesto, Our Process Politics, Our Mission Statement, Calendar of Radical Events, Submission Guidelines, Films, Books, Our Mythological Story, Our Allies, and Getting Involved.

2014 – 2016 Richard Wolff – Democracy at Work

Around the same time, Richard Wolff, the Marxist political economist, began to give public talks about the crisis in capitalism and workplace democracy as an alternative. In one of our book clubs, we began reading his book, Capitalism Hits the Fan. We attended one of several talks by Wolff and met our soon-to-be comrade, K.J. Noh, who was petitioning for some local cause. We asked him to join our book group and he did, adding an international perspective from his own personal experience of growing up in South Korea. We also discovered he was an extraordinary writer. We cited some of his publications on our site. One of the best was “The Economic Myths of Santa Claus“, published in CounterPunch on Christmas day, 2014.

After a year in our book clubs, which drew between 4 and 6 people, K.J. said to us that the book clubs really were not the way to go in this day and age. He said we needed an electronic presence. He recommended 3 newsletters we could write for and said our focus must be international in order to keep his interest. We followed his suggestions, and our website and FB page likes grew.

We also became involved with Richard Wolff’s Democracy at Work project in 2014. This was an organization developed by Richard Wolff that had chapters in numerous cities and states to support and teach people about the theory and viability of worker cooperatives to combat capitalism by democratizing our workplaces. People were either encouraged to study cooperatives, provide educational forums for cooperatives, or even start a cooperative.

Why We Left Democracy at Work

We discovered that Democracy at Work was very loose in its structure. People like us who were long-time socialists were mixed in with people who neither cared nor knew nothing about socialism, and simply wanted to start a small business. Many of the groups throughout the country were uneven in terms of their commitments and we were disappointed that Rick did not take a firmer stand in directing what we were doing. In fact, the management of these groups was left to someone else, and Rick had very little engagement with the groups.

2016-2022 Coming into Our Own

Social Media Ups and Downs – FB and Twitter

Since Jeremy set up our website, we have had consistent problems finding someone to help us. Jeremy was so good at explaining things clearly, teaching us how to create posts and perspectives, add to our pages and change our images. Since that time – in 2014, Barbara has mostly figured stuff out on her own and has become our house techie. WordPress is not a user-friendly platform and learning how to manage it is not obvious or intuitive. We need a professional, who we’ve only recently found, who can help us navigate that.

Someone who earlier helped us enormously was Sameer, who lived close to us in Oakland. He was also great at explaining things in non-tech speak. However, he’s moved on to bigger and more lucrative projects. We’ve since discovered that it’s very hard for technical experts to be able to communicate to non-experts in an understandable way what they’re trying to do – or trying to teach us to do.

Sameer introduced us to Susan Tenby in 2016 – who was able to help us with our social media. She taught us how to make our Facebook and Twitter pages more visible and appealing. We are so lucky to have found Susan. We were a small, community organization trying to get our message out. When we started working with Susan our visibility was very low. Susan did a comprehensive audit of where our social media stood when we started working with her and helped us track its rapid change. We were not getting a whole lot of attention on our website or through our social media. She gave us a crash course on how to turn that around and in a very short period of time our visibility skyrocketed. Each session with her was packed with techniques and ideas we never would have known about.  She’s also terrific at adapting to each individual’s learning style.

Susan also introduced us to Colleen Nagel, an SEO expert and digital marketing. These terms were completely unfamiliar to us. SEO means Search Engine Optimization and is the process used to optimize a website’s technical configuration, content relevance and link popularity so its pages can become easily searchable, more relevant, and popular, and as a consequence, search engines rank them better. In other words, it’s the process of making a website better for search engines, like Google. We began to understand how to make more sense of our analytics, although we’re still struggling to figure out WHY our followers like some of our posts and tweets better than others.

Where we needed help was in translating the analytics into verbal meaning. The deeper step, after understanding what these numbers mean, was to understand the causal dynamics which produce an increase or decrease in viewers and attention span. The next step was to develop a plan for increasing the number of followers after we were able to analyze what’s actually happened up to then. We never felt that we got that help

All of this cost money, of which we didn’t have a lot. We have never asked for donations or “supporters” for our site. Barbara’s income at that time consisted of a small retirement fund, Social Security, and a modest IRA. Bruce worked as an adjunct faculty member. As he’s written in his article “Capitalist Economic Violence Against Road Scholars: Now You’re Hired, Now You’re Not” his income was never completely stable and, of course, they paid adjuncts at a much lower rate than they paid faculty. In fact, today there are adjuncts who are living in their cars because they can’t afford to pay rent. We simply couldn’t afford to pay what Colleen was charging.

We then moved on to 2 more people whose entire focus was to install SEO optics. While we got some help from this, we found that both of them explained things in tech-speak and were not easy to communicate with.

Finally, we tried working with Liz and her sister. Liz was an editor of one of Bruce’s books and claimed to have some technical skills. But she didn’t have a Mac like we do and was not good at explaining things so that wasn’t much help. Her sister did have a Mac and was good at explaining things but worked full time, had small kids and was erratic in her response time.

Flying High

Between 2014 and 2016 we worked hard on learning how to get our message out through Facebook and Twitter. We learned how to “boost” our articles, Facebook’s language for paying them to promote it. We were able to select what type of audience we were trying to reach and where they were likely to be geographically. As we started to boost articles either we or one of our comrades had written, we began getting a lot more attention on Facebook. Our Facebook boosted posts for our articles ranged from 5,000 to 10,000 readers. A couple of them reached 20,000. Between 2016 and 2019 we were getting about 1,000 page likes a year, reaching thousands of people each week. At that point we had gained a total of 3,400 page likes.

Twitter was much slower to get off the ground. We began to understand the importance of hashtags and which hashtags were more likely to get attention. We also came to see the importance of liking, commenting on and retweeting the tweets of people who were following us. Our followers have increased steadily since we’ve been doing this. However, we still lag behind the attention we were getting on Facebook, and we would like to understand why.

Facebook Attempts to Clip Our Wings

In early 2020 Facebook stopped allowing us to boost our articles. The reason they gave was that since we are posting “political content” we must be registered as a political organization with the IRS. As you can imagine, we did not want to do that. When Facebook first started doing this, we were able to mount arguments that not all of our articles were, in fact, political. Well, of course they were, but not “political” in the way they were framing it. After a while, they simply stopped allowing us to boost them at all, no matter what our argument was. About the same time, we noticed that our typical daily reach (how many people saw the article) was shrinking dramatically. Whereas our daily reach used to be in the thousands, they are now in the hundreds. The same thing has happened with our engagements (how many people actually look at our post or click on a link we’ve provided) Our total page likes have gone from an average of 30 a month to less than 10. That’s because the only people who see our posts are the ones who have already liked our page! Our reach now is about one third of what it used to be. We have read that the same dramatic drop happened to World Socialist Website, The Greanville Post, and many other socialist sites.

Our Work Schedules for PBC

Since the very beginning, we each put in a minimum of 15 hours a week, often more, including Saturdays and Sundays. We have 2-hour weekly meetings to discuss what we’ve done during the week and what we want to do for the coming week. We give ourselves “homework”, then report in on the results of that homework at our weekly meetings. We jokingly call these meetings, our “Central Committee” meetings.

We write almost all of our own articles. After editing them and finding images for them we publish them and then also send them to other websites for publication. We have tried to find other comrades to write articles for publication for us also. We wanted to be able to include authors on our site beyond just the two of us. While we did, in fact, get a few people to write for us, it often required a lot of work on our part to help them frame their work. Of course, we did all editing the articles. We publish an average of one article every three weeks.

For our daily posts, every morning Bruce searches for an article online from a number of trusted sources, that usually focuses on the decay of capitalism. We also want very much to spread the word of the success of worker-owned cooperatives to the public. This lets them see that there is a way to work other than for “the man” and create a new society. He writes a post about the article, finds an image to go with it, and then sends it to Barbara. Barbara edits his post, puts it up on our site and shares it to FB and Twitter. We then share that article to our Facebook groups.

We have been doing all of this every day, every week, every month since we began our electronic outreach. This is a joy for us. We call Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism “our baby”. She’s now almost 10 years old and stable. She will be thriving when we can get the technical and social media support we need. When people ask us if we’re retired, we start laughing. Barbara always says she’s working harder than she ever did, she just doesn’t get paid for it! There are few things we would rather spend our time on than Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism.

Thank you for reading our history, and please consider joining us by reading and sharing our articles and posts. Together we are strong. Together we can change the world.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce and Barbara MacLean-Lerro.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

The Operating System identifies the starting point for understanding the State being its legal, administrative, and decision-making structure — the government. (p 60) The State is the government; its writes the laws; its police, festishized by mass media, enforce the laws while shielded from accountability for their actions by qualified immunity. Prejudice forms the underbelly to the State and, hence, its “vested interest in maintaining if not promoting sexism, gender inequity, homophobia, and transphobia.” (p 177)

That the State is regressivist, that it promotes elitism and eschews diversity, that it is anti-democratic is made clear: “Today, the State is well on its way to creating, for the first time in human history, a worldwide monoculture tied to a uniform economic model and a single pattern of governance by a self-selecting global elite.” (p 26) But the masses are inculcated to believe the State is a necessity. (p 27)

In chapter 4, Laursen points to the European origin and cultural domination of the State. (p 84) It is a big monoculture that is hegemonic. (p 111-112) Yet, it was acknowledged in chapter 3 that not all States are the same; there are different “Versions of the Operating System.”

The State is an out-of-control abomination. Laursen quotes political theorist Chandran Kukuthas who points out that while the State is a human creation, it has evolved into something ungovernable by humans. (p 11) Among the crimes of the State are warring, genocide, racism, elitism (the State is organized hierarchically, although not necessarily by meritocracy¹ ), and setting up barriers to certain humans: the Others.

For example: “The State does not contain Indigenous peoples who’ve never accepted the rule of a state and never adopted a functional role within it.” (p 23)

Nineteenth century European anarchists were staunchly opposed to any type of authoritarianism, especially the State, and held the conviction that capitalism couldn’t be abolished without the simultaneous abolishment of the State. (p 15) This probably holds true for most anarchists today.

Opposition to authoritarianism forms the backdrop for Laursen to inordinately beam his criticism at the State on China. The “authoritarian, one-party China” even gets lumped together with the “absolute monarchy” in Saudi Arabia and with the theocratic Islamic State (ISIS). (p 150) The error here is that one is led to presume that all forms of authoritarianism are the same and that all are equally anathema. Moreover, authoritarianism seems to be applied, more or less, specifically to non-western States. However, which State is not by definition authoritarian?

Is The Operating System Sinophobic?

Especially in recent years, China has been under unceasing criticism by the West and western mass media. The Operating System is also relentless throughout for its criticism of China. No State should be above criticism, but such criticism must be factually accurate and substantiated by whoever generates the criticism. I find that The Operating System fails miserably to substantiate its claims against China. When it does provide endnotes or footnotes for its claims, The Operating System diminishes its verisimilitude by citing western corporate media sources for such claims.

In the second chapter, “The State and COVID-19,” Sinophobia² becomes palpable. Laursen states, “… the virus emerged in China…” (p 31 — no substantiation) Usually, when I find myself in doubt about proffered information, I look for substantiation to support a contention. Did SARS-CoV-2 originate in China? China state media, CGTN, has challenged that depiction presenting evidence that it arose simultaneously in France and before that in the United States: “A legitimate Question: when did COVID-19 first appear in the U.S.?” The Chinese state media’s evidence can be challenged, but at least CGTN provided evidence which Laursen did not.

Viruses can arise from various locales on the planet. The Spanish flu arose in the US; the Ebola virus arose in Africa; the H1N1 swine flu pandemic arose in Mexico. Pinpointing the source of a pandemic may seem uncritical, but Laursen followed up the sourcing of COVID-19 to China by writing that “China has developed possibly the most thorough and minutely controlling state system in the world.” (p 31) Criticism of China continues in the next paragraph: “Arguably, China was slow to address the underlying conditions that allowed the virus to spread, increasing the odds of a breakout epidemic…” The peer-review medical journal The Lancet did not find China to be slow. It found, “While the world is struggling to control COVID-19, China has managed to control the pandemic rapidly and effectively.” [italics added] The words that I italicized point to uncertainty by Laursen. Laursen provides no evidence or rationale to support his contention.

Nonetheless, Laursen is equally scathing of the US response to the pandemic; the $500 billion for the newly jobless, a pittance compared to that offered to businesses.

While Washington often complains that it has no money for social spending; safety-net programs or old-age pensions, in reality this is nonsense: its power to spend and to support the economic units it values is unlimited. The difference is who the State deems worthy of support. (p 54)

Laursen tars most large countries with the same brush of a “disastrous government response” to COVID-19 (China, the US, Russia, Brazil, etc). (p 41 ) Contrariwise, the peer-review journal Science noted early on that “China’s aggressive measures have slowed the coronavirus.” The New England Journal of Medicine reported a “Rapid Response to an Outbreak in Qingdao, China.” Canadian Dimension headlined: “The difference between the US and China’s response to COVID-19 is staggering.”

The Operating System gloms on to the western bugbear accusing China of persecuting ethnicities in its autonomous provinces: “Tibetans and Uighurs suffer [empire building] as Beijing encourages Han Chinese to establish themselves in Tibet and Xinjiang…” (p 79 — no substantiation) First, Xinjiang and Tibet are regions in China where the US and its CIA have long sought to stir up ethnic revolt against Communism.³ Second, a longtime student of China, Godfree Roberts, wrote that Tibetan fear of Han Chinese vanished when they noticed that the Han were just trying to eke out a living. Most Han Chinese did not thrive and left within a few years.⁴ Third, China liberated Tibet from serfdom under the lamas. Some Tibetans still regard Mao Zedong as their emancipator; they say their life is better now than under the Dalai Lama; and Tibetans remain free to practice their religion.⁵ Fourth, the Chinese government has sent tens of thousands of anti-poverty workers to Xinjiang who identified opportunities for the people of Xinjiang, improved infrastructure for access to markets, had major corporations relocate to Xinjiang, and Beijing moved whole universities to Xinjiang.⁶ Is this empire building? It was building up the Xinjiang economy. Yet Laursen charges that Beijing was underwriting the “ethnic Chinese colonization of Xinjiang.” (p 106) Laursen does not substantiate this claim, but offers an explanation: “[E]conomic rationalizations, are mostly rationalizations.” (p 106) This explanation is far from compelling. The Communist Party of China (CPC) has put the people first throughout the country. It stems from the ancient Chinese philosophy of the Mandate of Heaven — something hard to dismiss as just a rationalization.

Laursen cites the Wall Street Journal to build a case for “cultural erasure” against Uyghurs by “demolishing some eighty-five hundred mosques” in Xinjiang. (p 106, 154) This erasure, contends Laursen, has been the intent since the days of chairman Mao Zedong. (p 125 — no substantiation) A comparison of respect for the sanctity of mosques in China with western states such as France and the US refutes the disinformation that The Operating System proffers. In the case of mosque and building demolitions in Xinjiang, it is about improving living and safety standards, a process into which Uyghurs have input and choices.⁷

Laursen charges that China uses government surveillance to manage and control population (p 148 — no substantiation). No one denies the prevalence of CCTV cameras, but what is not delineated is what is meant by “manage” and “control” of the population.

Laursen warns that China’s social-credit program collects data on individuals which can lead to blacklisting for ‘untrustworthy’ persons. (p 102) This plays into the western mass media demonization of data collection in China while ignoring that the West, as revealed by Edward Snowden (p 147), does the same. (p 138-140) That is what the CIA, NSA, Facebook, and social media do.

From first-hand experience, my impression is that most Chinese people like the social-credit program. Imagine that! Being rewarded for paying bills on time, being able to book rail tickets, tickets to attractions easily online. For those people who refuse to pay bills, child support, fines, or engage in other untrustworthy activities, the question is: should or shouldn’t they be revealed and compelled to make amends? Most Chinese seem of the opinion that they should be compelled.⁸

Laursen complains about the blurring of lines between State and capital in providing “nominally private” security for the Belt and Road Initiative while noting the staff are veterans of the People’s Liberation Army. (p 108) Laursen sources the discredited right-wing Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal.

The author writes of protests against Beijing’s increasing encroachment on Hong Kong’s autonomy. (p 110) Encroachment? Hong Kong is not sovereign; it is part of China. One country-two systems remains in place. Moreover, Beijing allowed Hong Kong to deal with the protestors/rioters:

What about the protests/riots that have resumed in Hong Kong? What triggered those protests? Some citizens were opposed to extradition of alleged criminals? How has China responded to rioting, sabotage, terrorism, separatism, and even murders by the so-called protestors? Hong Kong is a territory having been a under British colonial administration from 1841 to 1997 when it reverted to mainland China as a special autonomous region; it must be noted that once the original demands [of the protestors] for rescinding the extradition bill were met, the goal posts of the NED-supported protestors transformed into a purported democracy movement.

Has China responded with military force? No. With arrests of law-abiding journalists? No. With police brutality? Most observers will acknowledge that police have been incredibly restrained, some would say too restrained in the face of protestor violence.

The protestors, largely disaffected youth, as is apparent in all or most video footage, by and large employ random violence as a tactic, which they do not condemn. This was made clear by Hong Kong protest leader Joey Siu, during an interview with Deutsche Welle, who said she “will not do any kind of public condemnation” for the use of unjustified violence by protesters against residents who do not share their political views.

The anarchist author also compares the one-party China to Nazi Germany and fascist Italy stating that China is elitist. (p 121) It is true that the CPC effectively rules China, but it is inaccurate to say China is a one-party State, as there are many political parties in China. One could rightfully argue that the US and Canada are effectively one-party States since two business parties with little to distinguish them apart alternate to form the government. The Chinese political system is different in that unlike the bickering among business parties in Canada and the US, the CPC and other parties in China pull together for the good of the country and its citizens. Laursen, however, argues that two-party democracies are preferable to a one-party system because this provides a venue for “citizens to channel their preferences into effective vehicles for competition and governance.” (p 160) Laursen does acknowledge that the “real purpose” of the two-party system is “to block anti-capitalist and anti-State movements.” (p 162)

The root of the criticism of being a one-party State is seemingly directed at the State not being democratic. Australian journalist and author Wei Ling Chua challenges the western narrative on what constitutes democracy and finds the West is sorely behind in serving the needs of its people compared to China.⁹ Roberts writes compellingly on what constitutes genuine democracy:

While there is an obvious tension between the ideals of democracy and the realities of power, it is fair to say that governments that consistently produce the outcomes that their citizens desire are democratic, while those that consistently fail to produce the outcomes their citizens desire … are not. By that definition, China is clearly democratic and the United States is clearly not.¹⁰

Chinese citizens clearly seem pleased with their form of government. A recent York University-led survey of 19,816 Chinese citizens post-pandemic revealed trust in the national government at 98 percent.

Mega-projects are intertwined with being a State. Interesting to Laursen is that these projects were carried out by “representative democracies”¹¹ as well as by “authoritarian states.” Interestingly, he points to the “subjugation and settlement of the American West” and the spreading neoliberalism worldwide as not being carried out by an authoritarian State. (p 155)

Laursen charges, “In Hong Kong in 2019, the Chinese government threw unprecedented force at large but peaceful prodemocracy demonstrations…” (p 169) First, the Chinese government “threw” no force at the demonstrations. Mainland Chinese security forces did not police the Hong Kong riots. Second, calling the demonstrations “peaceful” is risible disinformation.¹² Third, the demonstrations were not about “prodemocracy.” The goal of the demonstrations morphed following attainment of the initial goal to prevent coming into law an extradition bill with mainland China, something Hong Kong has with the US and UK. Fourth, the funding of the protestors/rioters in Hong Kong traces back to the US and its notorious National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

Surely Laursen is aware of the Propaganda Model propounded by anarchist professor Noam Chomsky and lead author Edward Herman in their much praised Manufacturing Consent. So why does he cite an oft discredited corporate media publication, the Guardian, to accuse China of sterilizing Uyghur women? (p 224) This is patently false given the burgeoning Uyghur population.

There are a litany of criticisms sprinkled throughout The Operating System about China. It causes one to wonder why this preponderence given that China is a State that has lifted all its population out of extreme poverty: no homelessness, no dumpster diving, no begging!

Overcoming the State

The modern State is an instrument of violence, war, conquest, repression, and counterinsurgency. The State can repress rebellion because it is above the law, and it uses the military to drive the economy. To gain rights, benefits, and respect for human rights, the population has had to rise up or revolt against the State. (p 88-89)

Yet Laursen finds that anarchists seemingly “shy away from directly addressing the State…” (p 16) Capitalism is an adjunct to the main target, as Laursen writes, “… the fundamental problem isn’t capital or the wage system, it’s the State.” (p 20)

By emphasizing direct action, anarchism reflects a growing disillusionment with the Sate and democratic government as engines of progressive change. (p 13)

The State is an onerous construct that serves the 1%-ers. So, of course, 99% of the people who care about such matters, should want to overthrow the Westphalian system of states. To accomplish this overthrow, Laursen calls for a revolution. To start, a revolution of the mind. People need to liberate themselves from business as usual. In this context, The Operating System considers the Green New Deal, degrowth, deglobalization, food sovereignty, maintaining safety nets, and a community of mutual aid. In other words, becoming more self-sufficient.

Laursen knows that no modern state has ever been overthrown by a revolution — yet. For such a successful revolution to transpire, he says the State must have discredited itself in a large segment of the population. (p 18) According to the anarchist writer Peter Gelderloos, this already is the case.¹³ Indeed, this may be occurring now with the poor handling of the pandemic, an underwhelming response to climate change, and the persistence of systemic racism (look no further than the self-identifying Jewish State’s war crimes against Palestinians, supported by the US and Canada governments). Laursen notes that the State will not willingly disappear; it will have to be compelled to go away.

How? The revolution can be realized by the masses through a general strike, mutiny within armed forces, and the seizure of government facilities and key businesses. It won’t be easy. There are difficulties in bringing this about: among them are overcoming the inculcation of the “education” system (raising the question of whether critical thinking is genuinely encouraged in schools), the inability to disengage from fake news on corporate/state media and social media, and that consumers continue to shop at Walmart and big box stores.

Conclusion

Should a revolution succeed, the big question is how to defend an anarchy both domestically and from external attack. A tiny minority benefits extraordinarily to the detriment of the masses, and these morally bankrupt people have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo of the State and the capitalist system which places them at the top of the power hierarchy.

The Operating System is useful in understanding the anti-humanism of the State, why the State should be abolished, and steps toward seeking the abolishment of the State. However, I found that The Operating System derailed itself mightily when it went off track to repeatedly excoriate China, apparently without knowledge of the history of China at the hands of the West or considering the Chinese side’s rebuttals to allegations against it.

I agree with the central thesis of the State being harmful to the wider humanity, but I demur from the supposed lumping together of all big states in the basket of the bad. There are large, militarily powerful states that seek to expand their influence, exploit the wealth and resources of smaller, less militarily developed states. China is anti-imperialist. It eschews hegemony. Of course, the actions of China must be held to account with its words. Moreover, an understanding of why China does what it does is crucial. China is ringed by US military bases. The US and its allies work to destabilize China. China seeks a peaceful reunification with Taiwan that was dismembered from it by Japan, with the support of the US. In the meantime, China is caring for all its citizens, promoting the Chinese Dream, a dream that will benefit other countries. China pledges peaceful development and cooperation.¹⁴ Importantly, China promises to honor its commitments.

Mao Zedong was, arguably, an anarchist in sentiment:

Now to have states, families, and selves is to allow each individual to maintain a sphere of selfishness. This utterly violates the Universal Principle and impedes progress. Therefore, not only should states be abolished — so that there would be no more struggle between the strong and the weak — but families should also be done away with, too, to allow equality of love and affection among men.¹⁵

Current chairman Xi Jinping calls for the upholding of Mao’s thought. To this end, Xi delineates the mass line of the CPC:

Adhering to the mass line means following the fundamental tenet of serving the people wholeheartedly.¹⁶

1. If meritocracy even exists
2. As expressed toward the Chinese State and not toward Chinese individuals.
3. Read Thomas Laird, Into Tibet: The CIA’s First Atomic Spy and His Secret Expedition to Lhasa (Grove Press, 2003).
4. Godfree Roberts, Why China Leads the World: Democracy at the Top, Data in the Middle, Talent at the Top (Oriel Media, 2020): 233.
5. Roberts, 232.
6. Roberts, 305.
7. Roberts, 179.
8. Roberts, 107.
9. Wei Ling Chua, Democracy: What the West Can Learn from China (2013). Review.
10. Roberts, 155.
11. The representatives in so-called representative democracies, by and large, do not represent their constituents and, hence these are not democratic.
12. View “Another Hong Kong: Chaos in the streets.”
13. Diagnostic of the Future: Between the Crisis of Democracy and the Crisis of Capitalism: A Forecast 2018, 2018. “… the fact that an important state [the US], followed by a growing body of others, is breaking apart an old and hallowed synthesis — turning the nation-state against universal equality — is incontrovertible evidence that the world system that has governed us up to now is falling apart.” location 131.
14. Xi Jinping, The Governance of China (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2014).
15. Mao quoting from memory Confucius’ Liyun by Kang Youwei. From Roberts, 305.
16. Xi, “Carrying on the Enduring Spirit of Mao Zedong Thought” in The Governance of China.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

by subMedia / April 20th, 2021

[embedded content]

The film looks at history through the lens of the working class, beginning with the Haymarket Massacre of 1886 in Chicago, continuing through the spread of Jim Crow in Louisiana, to the Triangle Shirtwaist tragedy of 1911, and on to the violent strikes and police crackdowns of the Great Depression. In the first few minutes alone, the film tackles the concept of “wage-slavery,” noting that the great abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass initially rejected the term, yet later conceded, “there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery.” Conservatives who have re-branded themselves “classical liberals” may be surprised to learn that 19th century English philosopher John Stuart Mill believed that wage-labor would soon be replaced by something more amendable to the majority, as it was not a “satisfactory state to human beings.”

The period of industrialization following the Civil War had a brutalizing effect on most Americans, creating horrendous working conditions and giving rise to the first labor unions, as well as more radical movements devoted to various forms of socialism. Noble connects the dots between the rise of industrial capitalism, mass corporate profits, and the suppression/exploitation of labor along with affiliated radical political adherents, eventually leading to international conflicts and destruction on a scale the world had never before seen.

Particular attention is paid to the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (aka “the Wobblies”), who as the film notes were the first American union “to reject all divisions among workers, even that of nationality.” At a time when racial issues are occupying much of our public discourse, the film reminds us that racial conflict and white supremacy have always been intentionally fostered by America’s ruling class, pitting workers against one another to prevent class solidarity. Though the Wobblies were non-violent, they embraced an overtly anti-capitalist and revolutionary doctrine (the Wobblies have undergone a resurgence in recent years, though have yet to approach their former heights).

Noble highlights how these struggles put common people in the crosshairs of their own civil institutions. Time after time, authorities responded to union organizing with extreme violence, often via the National Guard. When combined with the equally violent counter-insurgency methods of private armies like the Pinkertons, it was perhaps inevitable that some workers responded with violence of their own. The “propaganda of the deed” campaign, which originated in Europe, saw anarchists engage in assassinations and bombings of ruling class figures, undertaken with the hope of spurring on the masses to revolution. Instead, the campaign mostly had the effect of increasing state repression. In the United States, the most deadly and dramatic of these incidents was the bombing of Wall Street in 1920 (the film adds a grimly ironic historical footnote, namely that Wall Street was originally founded as a slave market).

The Industrial Workers of the World (and socialists of all stripes) were viciously repressed during WWI, often under the pretense that they were saboteurs working for Imperial Germany. New legislation such as the Espionage Act and later the Sedition Act provided broad authority to the Bureau (later Federal Bureau) of Investigation, resulting in the Palmer Raids and the deportation of hundreds of people, mostly poor immigrants. Leading the assault was a young J. Edgar Hoover, initially the head of the “radical division” or G.I.D. According to a later report, constitutional violations became a matter of routine. Mass surveillance was implemented against dissidents, ranging from the NAACP to Hellen Keller, a socialist and the first deaf and blind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree. People were beaten and sent to jail without trial or warrant. Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs was imprisoned after delivering an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio (stating that he would not “go to war for Wall Street”). Equally damaging to radical union organizers were the introduction of “criminal syndicalism” laws passed at the state level. The laws were so broad in their wording that “loitering on the job” could be classified as “sabotage.”

Discussion in The War at Home of repression during WWI and the Red Scare includes an analysis of propaganda and information control (looking at the influences of Walter Lippmann, George Creel, and Edward Bernays among others), and how such campaigns paved the way for social/political acceptance of such repression. Conscription is also highlighted as a serious injustice (most American men who fought and died in WWI did not do so voluntarily). The anarchist Emma Goldman spearheaded a legal challenge to outlaw the practice, arguing that it violated the 13th Amendment’s prohibition against involuntarily servitude. The Supreme Court unanimously rejected the petition.

The film draws a link between the purging of radicals from labor unions and the decline of union power during the 1920s. Following the Bolshevik revolution, mainstream unions such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL) ejected communist members, while business organizations simultaneously portrayed unions as a communist plot. The Socialist Party fractured after a majority of their members voted to support the Comintern in Russia. Minimum wage laws were struck down. The drunken exuberance of the wealthy during the “roaring twenties” is contrasted with the poverty of the majority (as well their hellish workplaces, epitomized by soul-destroying assembly lines under the corporate metric tyranny of Taylorism).

The final section of the film deals with events during the Great Depression, emphasizing the great labor strikes of 1934. Many of these strikes, including those in San Francisco, Toledo, and Minneapolis, were led by communists. In Minneapolis, militant Trotskyists created alliances with farmers and encouraged everyone connected to the delivery process to join in the strike – not just truckers. The events of 1934 were instrumental both to the creation of Congress of Industrial Organizations (CEO), which sought to organize unskilled workers, and various New Deal measures adopted by president Franklin. D. Roosevelt (FDR). Increasingly frightened of rebellion from below, certain segments of the ruling class actually supported FDR’s reforms.

Based on research from historians like Howard Zinn, Sharon Smith, Peter Kuznick, Peter Rachleff, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, The War at Home – Rebellion exposes the roots of America’s class war on its own people. If this montage paints what seems a grim portrait of US history, it is because most students are rarely presented with the Untold History that Noble explores. But the story he tells is not a bleak one, rather, it is ultimately a history of hope and struggle, of progress and perseverance. It shows just how powerful we the people can be when we work together against the odds, against our myriad oppressors.

Glimpses of genuine worker solidarity and triumph appear at various stages of the film: the Wobblies overcoming free speech prohibitions in the early 20th century; the Lawrence Textile strike, which involved immigrant workers (mostly women) from dozens of different nationalities; the Seattle General strike of 1919, which saw workers taking over the entire city for a brief time period; the great sit-down strikes of 1936-37, by which workers successfully challenged some of the largest corporations in the country and indeed the world.

In a time when many are questioning institutional integrity across society, seeking accurate and relevant information to help make sense of our supposedly post-truth era, Noble shines a spotlight into our dark past while providing a crucial class context often missing or obscured in mainstreamed accounts. It is precisely this sort of work that can provide a foundation for mapping a better, brighter, and more just future for all.

As I write this, Noble promises to upload part II of The War at Home, titled “Blacklist.” It explores the years 1936 to 1956, and ends with the word “COINTELPRO.” All of Noble’s films can be viewed at his website. He is currently seeking support for Part III, which will cover the 1960s.

Having seen all of Noble’s previous films, it is safe to say that once completing the series, he will have provided yet another stellar resource for educators and others who seek a deeper understanding of the world’s most powerful hegemon, and of its many oppressed inhabitants fighting for liberty and democracy in the United States of America.

This article was posted on Friday, March 19th, 2021 at 9:49am and is filed under Anarchism, Film Review, History, Labor, Unions.

by subMedia / March 15th, 2021

Soon people will be coming here to make documentaries about how we’ve been forgotten, about how nothing has been done.

— survivor of the Brumadinho dam collapse

Some call them ‘mountains of doom.’ Dotting the landscape of once-green Wales to this day are the stygian slag heaps resulting from centuries-old collieries, mammoth piles of debris that tower above the mining towns. They are cheerless sights, which one writer likened to “spiritless cathedrals of the industrial age.” As was proven in horror at Aberfan on October 21, 1966, these looming giants are killers.

— from the entry on the Aberfan landslide in Darkest Hours

I’ve been a disaster enthusiast since I was young enough to read. That might sound strange and gruesome, but I somehow got my hands on a massive tome of despair called Darkest Hours: A Narrative Encyclopedia of Worldwide Disasters by Jay Robert Nash. I was mesmerized by the horror, more visceral and terrifying than the movies that my Grandpa was the only one who would let me watch late at night; pictures of tangled metal cutting through flesh, searchers balancing precariously on rubble searching for survivors, grief on their faces, and rows of bodies covered in white sheets laying on cracked and crooked roads after an earthquake. The first entry is the tragic landslide in Aberfan, Wales, where a slagheap 800 ft. high was weakened, “releasing a two-million- ton torrent of rock, coal, and mud, which cascaded onto the Pantglas Junior and Infants School and 17 other buildings… crushed to death and buried alive were 145 persons, of whom 116 were children.” Stories like this profoundly shaped my view on the disasters we inflict upon the world and therefore ourselves, more than any statistics on things like carbon levels; I had no concept of that then and no use for them now.

I still harbor a passion for these stories, so when I heard about The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells, billed by one critic as “a terrifying polemic that reads like a cross between Stephen King and Stephen Hawking” (I hoped for more of the former than the latter), I was excited to see what the latest in climate change literature had to offer, and what it offers is an overwhelming accounting of humanity’s sins.

The book is divided into chapters that, like Dante, take us through different hells we are already experiencing, and describe punishments we can only begin to appreciate: heatwaves, famine, floods, wildfires, pollution, disease, economic collapse, and conflict. We’re talking destruction on such a scale that it is considered a hyperobject; a “conceptual fact so large and complex that, like the internet, it can never be properly comprehended.” That climate is something we have no control over is the cause of epidemics of distress and depression, which this book will not alleviate. Nor should it.

Anybody in the United States who has gone to see a therapist, psychiatrist, or other mental health professional has inevitably heard the positivity spiel. It goes like this: you go in for terrible depression, anxiety, or any number of conditions that are branded abnormal or deviant. Sometimes this is because of personal problems—grief over the death of a loved one for instance—or visual and auditory hallucinations, things that in the past been were the realm of shamans and witches, but are now efficiently exorcised through pharmaceuticals. However, more and more people are seeking help because of a deep existential crisis, which at its root is the state of the world.

The response of these experts is to dismiss your concerns as something to avoid thinking about (perhaps using behavior modification), something holding you back (from reaching your potential), and something that can be fixed (with the right medications). Becoming an empty shell is better, apparently, than feeling an emotional connection to the world, which in these times can only distress you. The last thing this society wants is for people to stop participating, by which they mean going to work each day and contributing to society. Panic attacks? There’s a pill for that. Nightmares? There’s a pill for that as well.

But maybe nightmares are real, and none of us can ultimately escape them. Everybody will be touched by the consequences of humanity’s hubris and ecocidal ways. Ultimately, this acknowledgment is what lies at the core of The Uninhabitable Earth.

Each climate-related event can be expanded on to reveal the terrifying details of what we have faced, are facing, and will face. It would have been nice for Wallace-Wells to get even more detailed with his descriptions. Perhaps it’s my penchant for the morbid, but the best example of this may be Luis Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway, which tells the story of a group of Mexican migrants who were found dead after being ditched by a coyote in the Sonoran desert. Tracing their path to disaster, Luis does not spare the reader, as the migrants weren’t spared on their trek to seek out a better life in a country hostile to their dreams. The description of their fate is stomach-churning. Here, he describes all six stages of heat death: heat stress, heat fatigue, heat syncope, heat cramps, heat exhaustion, and heat stroke. He describes each in detail. Consider the following, which is just one stage, the final one:

Your blood is as low as it can get. Dehydration has reduced all your inner streams to sluggish mud- holes. Your heart pumps harder and harder to get fluid and oxygen to your organs. Empty vessels within you collapse. Your sweat runs out.

With no sweat, your body’s swamp-cooler breaks. The thermostat goes haywire. You are having a core meltdown.

Your temperature redlines—you hit 105, 106, 108 degrees. Your body panics and dilates all blood capillaries near the surface, hoping to flood your skin with blood to cool it off. You blish. Your eyes turn red: blood vessels burst, and later, the tissue of the whites literally cooks until it goes pink, then a well-done crimson.

Your skin gets terribly sensitive. It hurts, it burns. Your nerves flame. Your blood heats under your skin. Clothing feels like sandpaper. Some walkers at this point strip nude. Originally, BORSTAR rescuers thought this stripping was a delirious panic, an attempt to cool off at the last minute. But often, the clothing was eerily neat, carefully folded and left in nice little piles beside the corpses. They realized that walkers couldn’t stand their nerve-endings being chafed by their clothes. The walkers stripped to get free of the irritation.

Once they’re naked, they’re surely hallucinating. They dig burrows in the soil, apparently thinking they’ll escape the sun. Once underground, of course, they bake like a pig at a luau. Some dive into the sand, thinking it’s water, and they swim in it until they pass out. They choke to death, their throats filled with rocks and dirt. Cutters can only assume they think they’re drinking water.

Your muscles, lacking water, feed on themselves. They break down and start to rot. Once rotting in you, they dump rafts of dying cells into your already sludgy bloodstream.

Proteins are peeling off your dying muscles. Chunks of cooked meat are falling out of your organs, to clog your other organs. The system closes down in a series. Your kidneys, your bladder, your heart. They jam shut. Stop. Your brain sparks. Out. You’re gone.

Wallace-Wells doesn’t see himself as an environmentalist, or even, as they say, a “nature person,” having grown up in cities “enjoying gadgets built by industrial supply chains I hardly think twice about.” He truly represents the average person in the West today and this is exactly who this book is for, because presumably none of this will be new for anybody reading this paper, who are already critical of civilization. That some pretty fringe ideas are being presented to a mainstream audience is what makes it important. Some of the names he drops will be familiar to many of you—James C. Scott, Robinson Jeffers, and Paul Kingsnorth to name a few. But to most these will be new names and new ideas, perhaps in a paradoxical way providing comfort—in a time where we can find little—by guiding us to new paths secreted away. That is, if you see the coming chaos and revenge of the wild to be comforting, with minds unclouded by the delusions identified by Wallace-Wells:

The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an arctic saga unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the ‘natural’ world, not the human one; that those two are distinct and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down.

For each of these narratives, the author provides ample evidence to chisel them apart, using science and statistics to back them with examples from both micro and macro catastrophes. It’s a laundry list of climate horror you can’t ignore; readers are strapped down with their eyes pried open, forced to look at what we have brought upon ourselves. Nature’s ultraviolence, in the form of hurricanes, earthquakes, and other disasters.

Again, readers of the anarchist publication, the Black Seed, may feel this is tedious. More of interest to green anarchists is what Wallace-Wells has to say further into the book, where he talks about “the climate kaleidoscope,” beginning with a chapter on storytelling—one of the most important things that can be done by those of us hurting, fighting, and struggling to survive in this doomed society. Writing our own myths to counter those of the world-eaters is imperative, but no easy task considering our scant resources versus the vast majority of the global media.

One of the most damaging myths that haunts the new man, Homo industrialis, is the idea that surroundings of concrete, strip malls, air-conditioned cars, and heated homes have insulated mankind from the dangers of the natural world. We have not moved farther away from nature, on the contrary. In his brilliant and harrowing book, Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan, Brett Walker describes this well:

the pain and suffering that remind us of our relationship to nature is caused by the modern technologies and engineered environments that are meant to shelter us from certain kinds of pain, meaning that, paradoxically, the more technologically driven modern life becomes, and the more alienated from nature it thus appears, the more we are reminded in painful ways of our timeless connection to nature…Our bodies are porous and easily insulted—easily industrialized—inescapably tied to the environments we inhabit; not only the food we eat but the air we breathe and the water we drink can prove dangerous. In this respect, modernity and its technologies and engineered landscapes have not distanced us from nature…

The stories in The Uninhabitable Earth also remind us that we are intricately linked to our surroundings. Poison the land, and we too are poisoned. Modern medicine will do everything it can to discover the resulting human diseases and treat them (as long as they can afford it, or to stem the tide of a cataclysmic epidemic). Scientists all over the world devoting their lives to discovering how to cheat death. From individual mortality to human extinction we are taught to fear non-existence, so people tighten their blinders until they can’t see their intimate relationship with the wild, and choose instead to continue believing they have overcome the kinds of problems other animals face, up to and including death. These ideas have played a large part in leading us to where we are today. There will always be consequences for our actions, and there’s no way to beat nature when we are part of it. Each new technology brings with it new possibilities for frightening events: consider a future in which it’s commonplace to hear about another electric vehicle exploding, or another self-driving car plowing through a crowd, adding to the already massive numbers of yearly vehicle deaths. One doesn’t need to think of nanotechnology and AI to see that where we’re headed isn’t going to be pleasant, especially when things already look so bleak.

Humans lost when they began dismissing omens of doom, and instead turned to numbers and experts. These numbers might tell us, for instance, that this many whales turned up with plastic in their stomachs, the weight of that plastic, and all the information that can be garnered from the corpse before it explodes spectacularly, cold reason masking the suffering of the magnificent creature. The 40 lbs of plastic is more than enough evidence that we have crossed the point of no return, and yet we collect and search through more and more data in a desperate attempt to find an answer that will magically fix the state the world is in. Why are people afraid to look? An article written by Wallace-Wells posted on the NY Mag website addresses this:

Why can’t we see the threat right in front of us? The most immediate answer is obvious:

It’s fucking scary. For years now, researchers have known that ‘unrealistic optimism is a pervasive human trait,’ one that, whatever you know about how social-media addicts get used to bad news, leads us to discount scary information and embrace the sunnier stuff.

And the generation of economists and behavioral psychologists who’ve spent the last few decades enumerating all of our cognitive biases have compiled a whole literature of problems with how we process the world, almost every single example of which distorts and distends our perception of a changing climate, typically by making us discount the threat.

So many remain optimistic, even though governments show no signs of implementing their own regulations. Even the extremely moderate proposal of the Green New Deal, a bill that was more symbolic than anything, was killed before ever being seriously considered by lawmakers (see the now infamous speech overflowing with memes by Senator Lee of Utah). By now we should know that these green energy solutions mean nothing except fatter wallets for those who invest in these scams. Ask the villagers in China who militantly resisted the building of solar panel factories. They know better than anyone that there’s nothing “green” about it. They are simply new technologies that don’t replace old tech running on fossil fuels, but are merely placed adjacent to them, creating an even larger footprint.

If you’re a pessimist, don’t expect to make any friends. It’s more likely you will be dismissed outright—slandered as defeatist or worse—when presenting someone with evidence that challenges their sunny dispositions about what humanity is and what it is capable of (we as a species have proven plenty capable of destruction). This is just more reason to push back against the crack of the activist whip that demands everybody do something, even though most of us realize that changes in, say, individual consumption, would have to be on a worldwide scale. If the hippies failed to conjure their worldwide awakening (proto-wokeness), what chance to these idealists have in this much more fragmented society that just can’t stop consuming at a rate unprecedented in human history? Their answers only rearrange the same logic of capitalism that created and supports these massive but unstable states to begin with.

There is a reason for the cult of optimism: it keeps people going. In an effort to prevent burnout you must have hope that you can make a change. Usually optimists, curiously, have no concrete solutions to the worst of the problems on the horizon, only judgement for those who they see as apathetic. Wallace-Wells distances himself from pessimism many times (e.g. “Each of us imposes suffering on our future selves every time we flip on a light switch, buy a plane ticket, or fail to vote. Now we all share the responsibility to write the next act.”) Not only does he describe himself as an optimist, he makes the claim that to be pessimistic about humanity’s prospects is to be apathetic to human and non-human suffering. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Brett Walker’s Toxic Archipelago begins with a horrific story of a pod of orcas becoming trapped between fast moving thick ice and the rocky coast. A mother, desperately, vainly, trying to protect her calf, was the only one to be rescued by locals. The remaining 11 were crushed, slashed and ripped apart by the jagged rocks, the sound of their screams breaking through the howling wind. Of course, when scientists performed necropsies, they found the PCBs and mercury detected in the blubber to be eleven times higher than normal for whales in Japanese coastal waters. He goes on to reflect on choosing this story to open the prologue:

I must confess that, partway through writing this book, when I heard the story of this destroyed orca pod, a darker tone began to permeate parts of my analysis and narrative. The image of a mother orca trying in vain to protect her deformed calf was hard to shake, particularly because I assume some blame, as a member of Homo sapien industrialis, for their destruction… I tried to exorcise the darker side of this book during later editing and rewriting, but I was unable or, quite possibly, unwilling to do so. No doubt, when they read the pages ahead, some of my colleagues will cry out, ‘He narrates environmental declension!’ And rightly so, I should add. But I remain unapologetic: I am a historian and I am calling it as I see it, and I see environmental decline and deterioration everywhere.

Unfortunately in the end, Wallace-Wells, even in the face of his growing collection of similar horror stories, suggests if we really cared we’d run to the voting booths posthaste. His point isn’t about purity, but about a sober assessment of the scale of change necessary, and I agree with Wallace-Wells that the only thing that would make even the smallest impact (using human suffering as the barometer here), is massive political engagement that would put enough pressure on the jugular of corporations and other profiteers of industry to choke them out, as no regular person on the street has any power to force the issue at all.

Is all this negativity just a sad and desperate plea to act now before its too late (as if it already isn’t)? For the pessimist, the answer is no. Pessimism has no solutions or answers to these disasters. However things change it won’t be for the better. Even places seemingly out of reach will one day face the wrath of the wild forces. Nature will cause more destruction than anarchists could ever dream of achieving, and she shows no remorse, no discrimination. Anybody is a potential victim. While some in the direct path at this juncture are most vulnerable, even the well-off—who can simply rebuild or move entirely—will suffer. There might not be any perilous journeys for them across deserts and oceans to reach safer land, but rest assured they won’t be able to evade the inevitable cataclysms to come.

Most people have no time, or are unwilling to listen to prophets of doom these days, being stuck in front of glowing screens and working to survive. And when people finally leave their jobs they want to come home to binge Netflix, not read about the latest climate horrors. Hell, they know if they wanted to there’s no reason to even check the headlines. One can simply walk out into the city and see that suffering and death is all around us, and that we suffer ourselves, every day, from civilization’s debilitating effects, both psychological or physical.

Calamity and its “invisible undermining of self,” also undermines our ideas of reality. Charles Darwin, after experiencing an earthquake in Concepcion, Chile, wrote: “A bad earthquake at once destroys our oldest associations: the earth, the very emblem of society, has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over a liquid; one second of time has created in the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would not have produced.” This is what can be called “nature’s agency;” a reminder that Homo industrialis, despite seeming omnipotence as it builds skyscrapers higher and higher, is actually pitifully weak in the face of nature’s strength. Ultimately, we aren’t in charge. Is this fatalism? Perhaps, but maybe that is better than being in denial of the storm on the horizon. Coming to accept this means giving up control to the chaotic forces of the wild, where we will drop to our knees in awe of its power, relinquishing our stolen crown.

This article was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2021 at 6:00pm and is filed under Anarchism, Book Review, Environment, Japan.

Tear Gas Ted is getting Tough On Crime and Anarchy, and I’ve got some analysis for you.

Oregon Public Broadcasting has been giving a lot of play to Mayor Wheeler’s latest couple of speeches, where he once again criticized “violent anarchists” for doing terrible things like spray-painting memes on plywood, or breaking the windows of outrageously expensive downtown corporate property that he confuses for “local businesses owned by people of color” (I think that’s a direct quote of the man), and, of course, most recently, for allegedly punching him in the shoulder.

Not wanting to interfere with the news cycle, or sensing the bad optics that might be involved, he took a week off from criticizing the Criminals and Anarchists (interchangeable terms, of course) of Portland, while the far right was laying siege to the Capitol Building and attacking other state legislatures across the country, but now he’s had enough time off, and he’s back at it.

OPB reporters have pointed out that the mayor has given a lot of speeches lambasting people he characterizes as anarchists, while talking very little about the far right.  I would add that he rarely has anything critical to say about his tear gas-happy police force, either, from which he derived his most popular nickname.

In his recent speeches railing against “Antifa anarchists,” which is, incidentally, a little like saying “liberal progressives,” he points out that most of them — all, he claims, in the instance of the riot declared by the police downtown on New Year’s Eve — are young white men.  He also said they should be prosecuted for their crimes, and probably he talked about reclaiming downtown from the constant protesting and window-smashing, but I couldn’t listen to the whole speech.  It was too predictable, and his voice grates on me too much.  But I heard enough — more than enough — to put his latest little public tantrum in some context.

All of his main talking points were derived from a combination of things frequently said by the police commissioner, and things frequently said by the richest commercial property owner in the city, both of whom are regularly featured in local media, naturally.

Ted Wheeler is a very slick politician with inherited wealth, coming out of a long dynasty of local political power and timber money, which is how he got to be mayor.  He’s white and male, too, as with many of the “Antifa anarchists,” but that’s where the similarity ends.

I dressed up as a protester for Halloween — with a helmet, padded vest, and leaf-blower.  The latter device I used as a socially distant candy delivery mechanism, rather than for blowing tear gas back at the cops — and I was taken aback by the degree of thinly-veiled hostility I encountered among some of my fellow white male neighbors, particularly those in one of the many new, half-million-dollar houses in the neighborhood, who clearly agreed with their mayor’s perspective.  But I shouldn’t have been surprised.  After all, they may have been listening to their mayor’s speeches, among other things.

To be very specific about who these “Antifa anarchists” are that the mayor is referring to:  what I can say from personal knowledge is that half of them are housing insecure, because they can’t afford to live in this country the way it is these days, especially here, in the most rent-burdened city in the USA.  Privileged white male youth?  Hardly.  Not like Ted was, when he was young.  Not at all.

Also, as anyone who has spent much time at protests in Portland over the course of the past few months can attest, including the ones downtown, many of the participants are, in fact, Black, and from every other racialized group.  Also, many identify with genders other than male or female, which, of course, the mayor has no interest in knowing about, or acknowledging in his word use.  Also, many are not male, in any sense, but are female-identified females.  I wasn’t downtown on New Year’s Eve, so I don’t know offhand if that was the case on that particular night, but normally it is the case.

So, to recap, the mayor is laying into a fairly small group of largely homeless teenagers for being upset with the government, for a whole lot of different reasons, and for daring to express their anger by launching fireworks at City Hall — which is a very solid, stone building — and for smashing the windows of a Starbucks nearby (quite likely they did this after being thoroughly shot at and gassed by the cops).  But because he says they’re white and male, that’s supposed to tell us that they’re basically doing it just to party, and also they must not care about Black people, because if they did, they’d protest in a different way, and then everything would be better.  And if they’re not protesting on behalf of oppressed Black people, what could they possibly be upset about, since all us white folks are rich like him?

Now, the mayor, being the mayor of the city and the ostensible head of the police bureau, presumably knows that the Portland police — like all the other police departments across the country — have undercover agents.  He also knows that what these agents tend to do, among other things, is join the Black Bloc (“Antifa anarchists”), and be the first ones to throw rocks at windows.  This is an established pattern.  He ignores it.  This is not to say that it’s only undercover cops throwing rocks, but they do throw lots of them, no question about it, and he chooses to ignore this fact.

Why does the mayor have just about nothing critical to say about the far right, which is growing across this country?  Is it because they don’t tend to smash windows — at least until recently — but only attack random Black people and random black-clad white people with bear mace and pickup trucks?  Smashing windows is much worse for business than attacking protesters (or people perceived to be protesters).  Is that why he cares so much about the windows, and calls the smashing of the windows “violent,” unlike the plastic-coated steel bullets and other projectiles fired at us by the police, which he would call something like, “responding to violence with established crowd control techniques”?

The mayor repeats the line of the police chief, that there need to be prosecutions of these violent protesters.  The mayor knows full well that in order for there to be prosecutions, the police have to actually target specific people who have committed a crime, arrest them, and charge them.  At that point, the District Attorney can decide whether to press the charges, change the charges, drop the charges, or whatever, at his discretion.  He is an elected official named Mike Schmidt, and the mayor has just basically ordered him to get with the mayor’s “tough on crime” program, or else.  A much more polite, less mafia-sounding, and also perfectly legal, version of Trump’s talk with that election official in Georgia, really.

The police attack entire crowds methodically, almost never targeting specific people for specific acts, but just attacking everyone as soon as one person throws a water bottle.  That’s reality on the ground, regardless of the mayor’s fantasies.  After they attack entire crowds — causing serious injuries, sometimes permanent maiming, always psychological trauma — they round up a few stragglers and arrest them, often including journalists, medics and legal observers.  At which point the DA tends to drop the charges, because he has nothing to charge anyone with.  He’s also a progressive, unlike the gaslighting mayor, but that’s largely beside the point in this instance.

The biggest reason I suspect the mayor is choosing this moment to come down so hard on “Antifa anarchists,” and to try further to divide this grouping from the rest of the more progressive/radical segments of what remains of Portland as we once knew it, is that there will soon presumably be a Democrat in the White House again.  With Democrats in City Hall, in Salem, and in DC, what might we possibly have to complain about?  Even the mayor came out on one night to protest against Trump’s federal goons, when they were in town in larger numbers.  But that was different, clearly.

There are a lot of reasons for mainstream Democratic mayors like Ted to take the positions he does, in speeches like this one, and in his policies.  Such as his recent policy decision, along with the requisite two other members of the five-member City Council, to once again spend half of our local tax dollars on the police department in the 2021 budget.

But perhaps he’s just angry that he didn’t invest in plate glass and plywood manufacturers earlier in the pandemic, when he might have stood to make more money from his stock portfolio.

The post Why Does Mayor Ted Wheeler Hate Us So Much? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

The offending sign:

They are not what David Graeber said, “We Are the 99 Percent.” They are making three retirements, getting social security (times two), government (tax payer funded) Medicare, free VA, and they sold a house (obscene inflated price) in California, and have come to Oregon because this coast is almost “We Are the 99 Percent White” homeland of Sundown Laws. Their house on our street is the largest and newest built right on the dunes overlooking the bay. Cheap compared to Simi Valley. They banked the rest for their glorious days as racists on the coast of Oregon.

You know, criticize students, teachers, journalists, local elected officials, the road department, Portland in general, Democrats, anyone with a green button on, and, well, not exactly connoisseurs of our incredible Hatfield Marine Sciences Center.  For them, spending money at a spendy restaurant in Newport, chipping in a $7 tip, and lording over some subservient waiter is their way of “rubbing elbows with the poor people.”

I know the types because I have talked with others around here — Californians from Orange County, Semi Valley and the like. The ones who for decades have cursed the Mexicans, the Guatemalans, the African Americans, the Koreans, the Armenians, the Sikhs, the Indians, the Chinese, and on and on and on. You know, in places named Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, San Diego, those all-American English proper nouns.

The single thread I have attempted to help students understand is that we are as individuals what we individually… do, say, eat, drink, watch, read, dream, hope for, act upon, see, smell, hear, hold true, protect, believe, perform, learn, value, preserve, who we valorize, what we consume, build, and write. Collectively, well, one can imagine as a society or culture or nation that we might also have  all of these “what we …” to reflect upon whether we are good people or bad people, takers or leavers, kind or cruel, pacific or warring, COLLECTIVELY.

More on the MAGA deplorables in a moment.

Having lived in some interesting places – Bisbee, Tucson, Sierra Vista, El Paso, Albuquerque, Spokane, Seattle, Portland,  Vancouver, and then many other places in foreign lands —  I understand the concept of those who have and those who have nothing or barely nothing.

I understand (know closely) those in crisis, those with bad families, those who have been abandoned by the most important people who should have been there for them – mother, father, sister, brother, uncles and aunts, extended families. I know the directionless mindset of young people who join gangs, use drugs, commit violence,  and are on a war-path toward self-destruction. I know the deep thread of trauma inflicted upon people, and how that stays for life, an ever-lasting series of lamentations, self-analyses, and self-doubts and self-loathing, to just name a few.

It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to know bad hombres when you see them. It doesn’t take the niece or the sister of a Trump Character to know the lack of worth and the insult to humanity a guy like him reflects.

Did Hitler have adverse childhood experiences? Does it matter? Trump? Cheney? Bush? Kissinger? Milton Friedman? Colin Powell? Madeline Albright? Obama? Clinton? Biden? Every single billionaire and every single millionaire?

You know, I have a neighbor here, next door, from Arizona. Husband and wife. They hate Glendale, hate the republican Red State politics, hate the criminal ex-pardoned-sheriff Joe. They are here, and alas, they bought a lot, and built on it a manufactured home. The kind that comes in two parts. You know it from the long line of cars on the freeways with “extra wide load” pilot cars sandwiching them. A nice one with a foundation and it looks like a from-the-ground-up-with-footings house.

The deal is they (no one) can get a traditional mortgage for a trailer or park home or manufactured home. But, that billionaire Warren Buffet made some cool billions by financing mobile homes, using a balloon payment system, and his scheme (one of thousands) caused many (millions) to pay exorbitant fees, interest rates, and many-many homes were repossessed, like yesterday’s Pontiac Grand Am. Then, old Warren inflicts another layer of making money — on the used (repossessed) manufactured home market. This is the scheme of misanthropes, those that make the Forbes 1000 List, those that end up on Obama’s economic transition team. Or Trump’s. Or Biden’s.

The neighbors are nice, but alas, they are voting for Biden-Harris, and even that action conjures up fears, so much so they are afraid to put out a legal, everyday “Vote for Harris-Biden 2020” yard sign. Other neighbors want that same sign up, but fear retaliation.

I know many people living in many countries, including many in Europe, and they are sort of looking at this country from a telephoto lens, and really have not idea how bad, how messed up, how fearful, how spineless Americans are. Sure, they want USA to bomb Iran, bomb North Korea, bomb Venezuela, bomb China, bomb Russia, bomb liberals or bomb MAGA’s, but in reality, this country is all show and all bravado with a few tens of millions of psychopaths with guns running around (driving big trucks) with the red-white-and-blue dangling near the tailpipe.

Show up here on the coast a dark-skinned Italian, Frenchman, Greek, Spaniard, well, you get the picture. A deep swarthy tan, even for a so-called white man or woman, well, that’s a suspect epidermis. REALLY.

I used to work outside a lot, ride a bike for 50 miles in a day, and had dark black hair and a goatee. Sure, the hair on my arms bleached out, but still, in Idaho, in 2001 when I first ended up in the Pacific Northwest, from El Paso, one day in Idaho, while taking guests around, I was asked if I was a Heb – Jewish? Asked if I was an Arab? And asked if I was a Mexican?  I am not kidding. First, you have to deal with the fact being any of those – Jewish, Arab and Mexican – I still think is legal. But then, the undertone, the very concept of questioning who I am, based on nationality (or maybe ethnicity, because you can be any racial member in all three camps – Arab, Jewish and Mexican.

Deplorables 2001. Deplorables in 1980 bombing innocents in Central America. Deplorables rah-rah Bush and Nixon and Bombing them All Back to the Stone Age. And, those who work for these deplorables, well, some can call them Eichmann’s or Little Eichmann’s like Ward Churchill called many of those working in the World Trade Center. People who work for the masters, the paymasters, the schemers, the grifters, the snake oil salesmen, the high risk loan sharks, PayDay loan sharks, all those used car salesmen who eat the potato salad at the Sunday School brunch, and on Monday, sell another car with saw dust inside the transmission casing or hawk an SUV that once floated around NOL after Hurricane Katrina. Faulty air bags, faked VW emissions, cracks in the O-ring for the NASA Space Shuttle, fissures in the metal containing the nuclear rods at Three Mile Island. You know, all those people, who, unfortunately, have been lumped into “We Are the 99.”

We can say they were duped by the money, made a Faustian Bargain, drank the Kool-Aid, were bought out or sold out. Brainwashed by Capitalism … or greed. Sell their mothers down the river, because something bad in their lives turned them. Excuse/ excuse/ excuse.

I can’t go there now, or even years ago when the slogan began, We Are the 99.” I was pepper sprayed by Seattle Police during Occupy Wall Street. Many of those in the “99” ended up on the message boards and comments sections telling us that we deserved to be pepper sprayed, or what did we expect, or that there are other ways to make our point other than marching peacefully.

So, yeah, no, not part of any “We Are the 99.” Closet racists? Misogynists? Believers in the lie that all faculty at colleges and universities are elitists?

I was not brought up in privilege – my old man was an airman in USAF and then got into the Army as a Warrant Officer. Yes, I got to live overseas, travel overseas, be with relatives in Scotland, England, Ireland and Germany, but we are not talking about anything past lower-middle class. [Of course, there are plenty of psychological studies and cognitive theses on how Americans conflate their abilities, inflate  their actual economic standing, and frame their own narratives around the bastards of the world. Imagine, dirt poor people in Appalachia relating to silver-spooned, poor-hating, accent-mocking, disabilities-deriding, excon-slamming Trump or Bush or Nixon or Reagan.]

Did I strike gold? Well, I was in that time period in 1975 when a state college education was dirt cheap, and the state university in Tucson was progressive, made tons of allowances letting dudes like me major in science, English, journalism – all at the same time, semester to semester. Electives were anthropology [got to do the Garbage Project, garbology, with William Rathje];  marine biology [got to be a diver in Sea of Cortez with incredible professors who had a slew of marine species named after them]; poetry and creative writing [got to be a hanger on at the University of Arizona Poetry Center and all the writers who came through to the university];  journalism [got to get paid reporting for the then daily Wildcat newspaper, a wholly independent newspaper not under the thumb of the journalism department]. We broke stories on the veterinarian school paying for dogs (stolen) for ghastly experiments with ballistics; and broke the story on the football coach scamming refunding unused airline vouchers for his own slush fund. I even got to take a special topics class with W. Eugene Smith, the photographer. We got the Center for Creative Photography and the Ansel Adams slides. I did a first-person series on homelessness in Tucson, and I learned community journalism working on the lab paper, The Tombstone Epitaph. I got to party with Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Bly, Denise Levertov, and even had beers several times with Lee Marvin. I got the chance to ride my motorcycle as an extra in C.C. & Company, with Joe Namath and Ann Margaret. And, much-much more by the time I was 20 years old.

A measure of an adult is not the size of his or her bank account, for sure, and alas, 43 years later, I am still lower-middle class, having had a life of part-time gigs threaded into a multi-variant quilt. Some of my friends are/were tenured professors, semi-successful novelists, and a millionaire or two here and there.

The bulk of my life has been teaching in places like El Paso and Las Cruces and Tucson, Spokane, Seattle and Vancouver.

The measure of some can be grasped through the quality of their living, their life philosophy and for some, an education inside and outside the hallowed walls of university life. I took education by the horns, got the paid TA-ship for one master’s (in English) and got another almost free ride getting another master’s in urban and regional planning. Learning is and was something you can do outside of a college, but a good college and good students and a vibrant campus and community life, no one can replace. They can bullshit you into thinking everything taught and learned in school is easily learned in the real world, but the problem is the real world is not our house, and the real world is the paymaster. A real education is life-long learning, a community of service learning, and one where curriculum is morphed, special projects encouraged, across disciples are the norm, and the liberal arts the foundation.

As many have said, I should/could write many books on my life and on what I have seen in so many other people’s lives.

I take radical action seriously, and I know – knew from an early age – the system is rigged for the rich, and that in this country, at least, the majority of people are colonized and co-opted by the complex forces of capitalism as it plays out as predatory, penury, parasitic, usury, sociopathic and ablaze with the profits privatized and all the external costs to us, society, and to the environment, socialized. A society that doesn’t do a drum beat around the tenets of something like War is a Racket and one that has no grasp of that the same fellow, General Smedley Butler, thwarting a military coup against FDR by a group of businessmen, none of whom got “hook-line-and-sinkered” for the crime, well, that society is delusional and infantilized.

I have studied human nature, have been in developing countries, under developed countries and what might be termed as third world countries. I understand the overt corruption of a place like Mexico, where cops-politicians-rich-narcos have laid siege on the people, on the indigenous ones, on teachers and land reformers and environmental defenders. The duplicity, the complete global thuggery of the USA – all those systems of exported extortion, pollution, hostage taking, maiming, theft, fraud, and grifting, again, make the narcos look like school bullies. Right, tales of a few tens of millions Economic Hit Men, thanks John Perkins!

There is something totally hardened by the Yankee and Rebel  –

In 1923, the British novelist D.H. Lawrence offered a grim assessment of America and Americans: “All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

Lawrence’s observations of the American character did not draw upon deep wells of direct personal experience. When he wrote those lines, he had only been living in the United States for a bit more than a year and had spent much of that time among artists and the literati. But he was neither the first nor the last to make such an observation. Nearly 50 years ago, surveying both the wreckage of the 1960s and centuries of archives, the brilliant historian Richard Hofstadter acknowledged that “Americans certainly have reason to inquire whether, when compared with other advanced industrial nations, they are not a people of exceptional violence.”

Here, David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. He was one of several who helped coin the “We Are the Ninety-Nine Percent.”

Well, one of the things that I discovered in researching my book is that the kind of debt crisis we’re experiencing now, being a real debt crisis, which is a debt crisis that affects ordinary people, debts between the very wealthy or between governments can always be renegotiated and always have been throughout world history. They’re not anything set in stone. It’s, generally speaking, when you have debts owed by the poor to the rich that suddenly debts become a sacred obligation, more important than anything else. The idea of renegotiating them becomes unthinkable. In the past, though, there have been mechanisms, when things get to a point of real social crisis, that have always existed. And they vary by the period of history. In the ancient Middle East, often new kings would simply declare a clean slate and cancel all debts, or all consumer debts, commercial debts, between merchants were often left alone. The Jubilee was a way of institutionalizing that. In the Middle Ages, there were bans on interest taking entirely. There have been many mechanisms. [Counterpunch]

Now how is Graber’s untimely death Sept. 3, 2020 related to the misanthropes across the street who not only exhibit the middling middle class from California hatred of Muslims, hatred of liberals, hatred of education, hatred of book learning, hatred of the arts, hatred of discourse, hatred of debate, hatred of countervailing beliefs, hatred of evolution, hatred of most sciences, hatred of multiculturalism, hatred of youth/color/polyglots/indigenous people.

Every week there is a new yard gnome, a new seasonal flag up – you name the Hallmark celebration, this family puts them all up, during those “correct” calendar spans. They wear sports team clothes, they shop at Walmart, they plant plastic flowers, they have a yippy little dog, they don’t own a bicycle, kayak, canoe, anything to at least prove they are part of the walking species. They don’t walk. Both have hobbled gaits, and at 63 they seem and act like dinosaurs from an Archie Bunker episode.

What takes the cake is that they, as I said in the first part, took down a smallish placard/sign from our property, at our front door. The son did the stealing, age 41, and the mother the next day out and out told me “my son would never do that.”

This is America, the nation of liars and thieves and infants. So, the sign was gone, I caught him in the act, I tried to stop him with my words, and he slinked into his mother’s house at 10:40 pm. All the lights were out.

You see, they were looking at this sign, and not only were they bubbling over with rage, they were talking about it. Somehow, this sign represents everything they are against. Steal a sign from the neighbors.

Ahh, but that just was part one. Now, two days later, we get a bang on the door. Nothing like having to utilize your 2nd amendment rights. Startled, well, I thought maybe this guy was back on a rampage. I saw a Sheriff deputy.

Well, this same boy, at 7 pm, according to two witnesses, threw a large garden cement paving stone into my passenger side window. The witness called the cops. The cop asked if I wanted to report this as a crime. The cop photographed the interior, the paving stone, and then took the stone. He also called for back-up. He told me a neighbor and visitor witnessed the brick being thrown through my window. Of course, on the little Metro, I had the same sign on the back window.

This is it for America, in a nutshell. This is not Covid-19 stir crazy. This fellow has a history of booze and 24-hour drinking at mom’s place. I found this out later. The other son also has issues with going off the wagon. This is the reality of these Trumpies, 39, 41 and two 63-year-olds. Big screen TV I can see every time I go outside. The talking heads of the 24/7 Hate TV, Big Brother Hannity and Fox and Friends Hate TV stars.

But you see, these deplorables were deplorables way before this greasy man got into the White House. Seething against the Latinos and Blacks. Seething against the wildfires (blaming the democrats for those). Seething against the high cost of living, and seething that they were passed up on the time line the day they were born.

Trauma informed care means understanding where people are in their addictions, their mental crises and their involvement in the criminal injustice system. Not about blame or expecting people to meet some “normal” level of functioning, but meeting them there at the trauma and going from here to be an inspiring and helpful case manager.

But when the shoe is on the other foot – the neighbor committing an act of violence (yes, a brick or rock through a car window right outside your home is a symbolic threat to a person’s body) or the politician thieving or the president raping – well, the victim cannot always be so holistic and understanding of those perpetrators’ childhood, juvenile, teen, young and old adult traumas as rationales for bad behavior.

One brick, a few hundred dollars later, then cops who give citations but do not take people to jail because of Covid-19. Guys that are white met by white cops. Lies, excuses, etc. The deputy said this perpetrator was saying, “Come on, aren’t you guys part of the blue lives matter? Come on, what I did was for you.”

There you have it. Me threading the needle, since I know for sure policing has been a giant racist and punishment and sadistic thing in US society. I know if the perp had been a dark person, a BIPOC, then, one backtalk move, and that person would be in cuffs.

Instead, the deputy said this guy was all over the place, was trying to coddle up to the cops, and that he was smelling of booze and that his job was to disarm the individual’s uneven demeanor by de-escalating things.

And, the bottom line is I am told to exercise my 2nd amendment rights, have the gun/guns ready, “and, if any trouble happens on the property, wink wink …,” well, those are the words of cops.

Oh, and they recommended to get a no-stalking order filed at the court, so a judge can meet with me via phone to determine if this one guy, the 41-year-old, will be hit with a court order to stay away from me. For each member of the family, we’d have to file individual stalking orders.

This is America, the hard, cold shallow/sallow America. The California Here You Come America. The Fox News America. The seething white racist America. The Americans who hate welfare while they scoop up all the welfare from their mercenary service (sic) in the US Navy, while getting social security, while getting Medicare and VA benefits, and maybe this fellow, the 41-year-old, he too is on government assistance – unemployment and possibly developmentally disabled before age 18?

I have friends all over the world who think the United States is something completely than it is. They consume so much Holly-dirt, and they maybe smart and read the elites and Ivy League mostly white books on this or that angle in America. Their take on things – because the Ivy Leaguers and Elite Coastal Lizards – have no real sense of how bad the country is, how tough the soul of the white nation is, how quickly the nation of immigrants will turn into a nation of haters.

The paperwork for the no stalking order is absurdly long. Then, the conference courtroom swearing in. All the other no-stalking cases up first – violent spouse or ex-boyfriend. Nothing like listening to all these cases of violence, threats, etc. to get a person re-traumatized. That’s what was on the docket — my case and then women who were in fear for their lives because of violent ex-spouses and ex-boyfriends.

So, get this – in the USA, now, I have a temporary no-stalking order, and the guy will be served soon, which means, you guessed it, more escalation of his testosterone, etc. More of the MAGA might makes right stupidity? That’s one possible scenario. The order goes to a level, according to the judge,  of this fellow not being allowed in my field of vision, which makes it, err, problematic for him, since the house’s stoop overlooks the same road we share.

All the nonsense like –

You will have the opportunity to ask the judge to stop the stalker from:

Following or monitoring you,
Threatening you,
Talking or writing to you (by mail, phone, text, email, or social media),
Interfering with or damaging your property,
Coming near you in public or on private property, and
Showing up at your work, home, school, or daycare facility.

Someone may be stalking you when they:

Follow you,
Conduct surveillance on you,
Appear uninvited at your home, work, or school,
Makes unwanted phone calls or sends unwanted emails or texts,
Leave objects for you,
Vandalizes your property, or
Hurt your pet.

Like I said, I have had an interesting life. Worked as a police reporter and was even threatened as a newspaper journalist by both Sheriff deputies and a local policeman in Bisbee, Las Cruces and El Paso. For publishing too much on the PD/Sheriff. Got to hang out in Chihuahua City and on a couple of ranchos outside the city with some mean hombres – both college educated (MBA and JD) in the USA, but then, also politicos with ties to the cocaine trade. Been in small towns in the south, and up north in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and Utah and Arizona.

The Euro’s and Aussies and Kiwis know nothing about how warped and dysfunctional this country under white banking and war rule is. Imagine, that defective set of genes then moving into 1990 and the 2000s. Complete monsters like Zuckerberg and Bezos, the entire Fortune 5000 captains of industry, the sports team owners, Hollywood, from sea to shining sea.

The MAGA thing is real, not just some kneejerk against the orange monster/menace/accused pedophile/accused rapist. Yet, there are so many Americans willing to give the GOP the benefit of the doubt, so many Ellen’s and Karen’s giving Bush Baby the benefit of the doubt. This is the caliber of both sides of the political manure pile.

You’re 77 and Joe Biden and, bam, the slippage, big time. Then the felon, the grifter, the complete imbecile, Trump, 74. Two accused rapists, two rotten men, and one, Biden, living some fabled set of lies, the plagiarist in the Senate and VP. Then the habitual thief, Trump, lying as a tool, incompetent, and believe it or not, dumber than dirt, making Bush Junior look like Stephen Hawkins.

One hundred and fifty-one, the two of them, combined imbecility and lies and entitlement. Both racists, both lovers of the exceptionalism that is the huge American lie. Imagine, having five leaders, 30 years old each, running for president? Imagine that. “Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution sets three qualifications for holding the presidency. To serve as president, one must: be a natural-born U.S. citizen of the United States; be at least 35 years old; resident of the US for at least 14 years.”

This is the quality of MAGA, and many of them are old, Christians, sure, and they in any other time in history would not let their daughters come home with a greasy man like Trump for a date, let alone for candidacy for son-in-law. Not exactly all-American virtuous guy. No Norman Rockwell guy. No Norman Vincent Peele kinda dude.

Yet, their televangelists and pulpit punchers are all degenerates, and the country – little do the Euro visitor knows this – is steeped in magical thinking, protective angels, strong belief in papa in the head office guiding the poor and even educated people on what to think, say, mouth, and hear around what it means to be American.

So it goes, these neighbors, the quasi-restraining order (for a stranger, no less – not even work related). People of two generations hating blacks, hating gays, hating people with disabilities, hating the environment, hating hating and more hating.

A rock through the window, and what’s next? What will happen when the Black Lives Matter signs go up? When will they bring out their guns and ammo? When oh when will that restraining order come to the rescue? After two more pavers are thrown into our vehicles’ windows? Gunshots over the house, threw the window or at us?

This is the Trump-Land, and the same scum were there during Clinton (I went to a gun show in Texas and they were selling embossed bullseye targets with Chelsea, Bill and Hillary faces on them. Nixon? Democratic Convention in Chicago? School busing? How many are dead in Ohio? Black Panthers? Which red-baiting McCarthyite went on to, well, advise Mister Queens New York?

This is how the sausage was made in America with that secret ingredient always back into the ground up mix–

400–500 years ago, Europe’s unwanted social outcasts and religious extremists began relocating to Virginia and Massachusetts. Grateful crowns back in London, Amsterdam and Strasbourg rejoiced as their most ungovernable and unwanted subjects self-exiled to the new world. There, waste people and pilgrims set about recreating the same intolerance they sought to flee. Puritan Christianity was so intolerant that they were unable to coexist anywhere – neither with their own kind back in the old world, nor with the natives of the new.

These first settlers thought the Inquisition ended too soon and eagerly sought to reproduce it – burning heretics and accused witches, perpetuating the cruel and unusual medieval tortures discarded by their European forebears, and forcing abused wives to wear the scarlet letter. Women and children had no rights; men were vicious tyrants. Colonial promoter Richard Hakluyt back in England neatly summarized the first settlers’ goals in 1585: “The ends of their voyage are these: to plant Christian religion; to trafficke; and to conquer.”  Abel Cohen

Oh, those in the One Percent and then the others, in that 19 Percent Group —

I’ll go with Michael Parenti on this accord — the richest 85 families own as much wealth as the lower 50 percent of the world? Bullshit. Those misanthropes own a hell of a lot more than anything the 3.5 billion people on earth might collectively “have.” No comparison:

Regarding the poorest portion of the world population— whom I would call the valiant, struggling “better half”—what mass configuration of wealth could we possibly be talking about? The aggregate wealth possessed by the 85 super-richest individuals, and the aggregate wealth owned by the world’s 3.5 billion poorest, are of different dimensions and different natures. Can we really compare private jets, mansions, landed estates, super luxury vacation retreats, luxury apartments, luxury condos, and luxury cars, not to mention hundreds of billions of dollars in equities, bonds, commercial properties, art works, antiques, etc.— can we really compare all that enormous wealth against some millions of used cars, used furniture, and used television sets, many of which are ready to break down? Of what resale value if any, are such minor durable-use commodities? especially in communities of high unemployment, dismal health and housing conditions, no running water, no decent sanitation facilities, etc. We don’t really know how poor the very poor really are. — Michael Parenti 

And so I get a rock through my car window, get to go to court to file a no stalking order, and await yet more American mean as cuss reactions as the Black Lives Matter and Ecosocialist signs go up . . .  Of course, after I have to purchase and install closed circuit surveillance cameras. Yep, MAGA Mutts for Trump 4.0.

This article was posted on Monday, September 7th, 2020 at 12:26pm and is filed under Activism, Anarchism, Anti-slavery, Civil Disobedience, Fearmongering, Freedom, History, Housing/Homelessness, Neo-Nazis, Occupy movement, Poverty, Protests, Racism, Right Wing Jerks, Social Movements, Socialism, Society, Solidarity, White Supremacy.

Society must return to truth or cease to exist.

— Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, 1892

In these times the establishment continues to bellow out hippie like rhetoric that we’re all in this together, that we must find unity and peace, put down our differences, sing kum ba yah, and hug this shit out. Great. I want peace too, but forgive me if I find the words coming from those in power to be a little less than authentic.

The way I see it is that peace isn’t found on the top of a bloody mountain of suppressive violence stemming from nation states. Clear truth is not found by wallowing in the muddied waters of agenda driven lies. Love isn’t found in servility and threats. Understanding is not deepened in the wake of massive denial. Real freedom is not found in the world’s largest prison state. And a society worth living in isn’t built on a foundation of selfishness and deceit. The deceit is always required if selfishness is to be maintained, go figure right; when lots of people have almost nothing and a tiny minority have more than they could ever use then you’d better have a pretty good excuse for that inequality — but there never is. Thus copious amounts of lies must be told. And lies to cover up for the first lies you told ad infinitum.

Centralized power normalizes a culture of division that believes in the dangerous other, a criminal archetype only they can protect you from. And so it only stands to reason if they believe in criminal bad guys that must mean they have assumed the role of the good guy. By what measure do they default to being good just because it can be pointed out that another has perceived flaws? Ultimately those in power dictate what will be seen as good and bad for the people. You know, because they are so wise and stuff.

It is those who have seized power who say good humans do this and bad humans do that, and the values chosen to emphasize are arbitrarily chosen by whoever currently holds power and what works for them at that time to maintain a grip on power. Power must be clenched in some capacity with an iron fist otherwise people would never agree to live in this way. So those in power must have a system to properly corral the human herds into their designated roles, and heck, they’ll even let you choose your work detail these days, and this is what the US and capitalists have long defined as “freedom.”

Ruling authority establishes a pecking order by the act of simply putting themselves in power. If they are above then someone else must be below. From there they assign different people to manage their kingdom and see to it that all the lower ranks sublimate their energies into doing what ruling power wants instead of frivolously choosing to live their own lives. Those lower down on the organizational chart will inevitably be silenced and will have to take the orders from those above them or there will be consequences. A system of punishments and rewards is established that reaches a balanced state when it creates conditions that makes it easier for you to just comply and do what power wishes instead of resisting. Similar to how any work animal is broken in, a horse may not like its saddle at first but after sufficiently breaking its spirit it will soon learn its subservient role, just as humans learn their subservient role to those higher above them in the hierarchy of this culture.

Naturally resentments gradually build in any relationship where inequality exists, as the multitudes on the bottom of the pyramid scheme soon find they are doing all the work and receiving the bulk of the suffering while the ones at the top take all the credit and receive all the pleasure derived from the work of those lower on the hierarchy.

Every step down the chain of command the punishments get a little harsher for disobedience, the work more back breaking, while simultaneously having less of a voice to change any of your circumstances. To make things worse the working class carries the denigrations received at work home with them, the angst and bile workers can’t take out on their superiors who doled out the pain then filters down to family life. So when the boss is a total asshole to you and makes you feel subservient, a common impulse is to take it out on those close to you who you can exert some form of control over.

The concept of hierarchy doling out pain and passing down a chain of command where it is eventually taken out on people with the least amount of power is also displayed in other species, like baboons for instance, where Robert Sapolsky (a neuro-endocrinologist, professor of biology, and author) observed in nature how a baboon troop behaved under the thumb of alpha males. When the alpha males were ruling the troop exhibited high amounts of stress hormones and violence was more common. However after a fortuitous event occurred where the alpha males died from consuming bad food, Sapolsky observed the troop became more peaceful, stress went down, and cooperation increased. There’s a good ten minute clip that summarizes this research and can be seen here, I recommend giving it a watch if you’re unfamiliar with his work.

Domination and ownership culture, despite the claims from those in power, does not make any real progress by doing more of what is already wrong. In the bounds of a social hierarchy and calling any part of what is happening under the rule of nation states, corporations, or central banks progress is like someone who’s addicted to gambling who claims to be progressing at kicking their addiction by getting better at gambling.

In a system of power the culture will inevitably become subservient to what power rewards in some manner, and hence the culture of the masses will over time begin to resemble having the values of those in charge. If those in charge are materialistic pricks then it’s highly likely society will place value on techno-bling-baubles that materialist pricks love. Just as a corporation tends to take on attributes of its CEO by way of hiring habits and enforced culture in the organization, a nation state too will exhibit characteristics of its leaders. When inept, cruel, and frivolous leaders claw their way into power, as is so often the case,  they will predictably pass a multitude of unreasonable laws that future generations after them must follow and are difficult to later overturn; the structure then becomes increasingly corrupt and rigid where only the most naive and sold-out remain patriots.

The powers that be have a relationship to the people similar to an abusive spouse that keeps trying to make up to us and tells us how much they care and how they’ve changed, but then they tell us there’s a curfew for when we have to come home at night, and if there’s a slight possibility we may get sick they’re going to make the decision for us that we can’t go outside at all. And when we tell them we want to leave them they lock us in the closet, and if we try to run away they’ll shoot us in the back. They stole all our stuff and declared it theirs, and if in revolt of our treatment we break things they have stolen from us they’ll beat us over it; maybe stick a knee on our throats, show us how much they love us. They also have a long list of chores we have to get done, most of which are things for their convenience that don’t need to be done at all, but nonetheless if we don’t complete the tasks to their liking they’ll make us sleep in the backyard without being fed as punishment. Then we must grovel to them to be allowed to do more chores to end the torments of hunger and being forced to survive out in the elements.

Sounds like we’ve hooked up with a real asshole here. Worth sacrificing it all to get out from under their grasp. We’ve seen how the establishment acted during the hippie movement whose central message was peace, love, and coming together, and their reaction was to put a jackboot on it. They jailed and assassinated lefty leaders, they shot unarmed students at Kent State, and they passed drug laws to imprison people they didn’t like with zero scientific reasoning for doing so, and as we all know, these laws still exist today and are used for the same purposes. And that’s just a portion of the bullshit they’ve pulled. But that’s what they think about peace and love. They want to snuff it out if it gets in the way of their lust for power. They’ll murder you in the street over money and material things they plundered themselves.

The emotional plaque of suffering & servility builds over time and is handed down through lineage to children who grow up to see the ones they love needlessly suffer because of a puerile system where the emotionally arrested fools in charge will kill everyone in their path with their pew-pew murder toys to keep the pain train rolling along. The means of production have been taken away from the people and all power placed in the dollar with control mechanisms in place to violently defend money; it creates a world of people who are subservient to power and will do anything to get their hands on money so they can live. Money then becomes a false god capable of demanding people to do the most wretched of things, all because ruling power has made it so. This system is chosen because it’s the most efficient way to break your spirit, make you fall in line and conform to serving the desires of power. It’s not a conspiracy over the ages, it’s just a collection of idiots who are all lost to the same temptation of grasping after the drug of power which consumes anyone who reaches for it.

The tragedy here is how unnecessary it all is. How all this iniquitous power present on earth now doesn’t have to be this way, but humans still have lessons to learn before the suffering begins to lessen. Those in power are abusers, but the people continue to enable them, and the suffering won’t stop until the people learn to overcome their fear of independence and fight for something worth having instead of fighting for half measures that do nothing to correct our relationships to power and each other.

Related:
“The Utility of Rules and Hierarchy”
“Human Hierarchies, Competition, and Anarchism“

This article was posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2020 at 5:41pm and is filed under Anarchism, Philosophy.

The corporate media and corporate politicians are paralyzed with indecision.  Which fake myth do we adhere to?  “Black people burning down their own neighborhoods” or “outside agitators”?  What if it’s both, and more…?

Media coverage of the past few days and nights of the multiracial uprising that is currently taking place in various forms in cities small and large across the United States has been confused and misleading, as usual.  Media coverage of such events is usually either confusing, misleading, or both, because of the influence of the media owners, and because of the implicit biases, insufficient resources, and/or ignorance of the journalists who work for them.  So, it begs for a bit of helpful clarification.

But, first of all, they keep saying these are the biggest urban disturbances in the US since 1968.  This sounds huge, and while it’s certainly impressive, the basic phenomenon taking place, and the various dynamics within it, are not new, not unprecedented, and, in fact, are very commonplace.

Most people, from my experience, never go to protests.  Among those who do go to protests, many people only go to one big one in their lives, if any.  At pretty much every big protest I’ve ever been to, which is a lot, I’m surrounded by people of all ages who tell me and others around them that they are attending their first protest.  Whatever got them out — a racist police murder, a massacre, an imperialist war, a massive bank bailout — they say they just had to come out this time, even though they never went to a protest before.  The hardcore protest-hopping crowd like me is a very select group, for a lot of different reasons.  We are not representative.

As a consequence, at every protest I have been to, there are participants who are under the impression that the tactics the protesters are employing were just invented yesterday, and that the militarization of the police is a new phenomenon.  In Ferguson in 2014 I remember hearing many local people of all ages saying things that made it abundantly clear that they thought large groups of riot police rioting in their town and making use of tear gas, stun grenades, and tank-like vehicles was something that had not been seen since the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s.  They were under that impression simply because that was the last time anyone remembered tanks on the streets in Ferguson, and for many older people in town, that was also the last time they attended a large protest.

Before I start contextualizing the current situation, let me say that although me and many other radicals did certainly predict most everything that is currently taking place, I have no idea where this is going.  Predictions made by people like me are usually wrong.  If they’re right, it’s because they were obvious — everyone knows powder kegs eventually explode, but nobody really ever knows exactly when this might happen, or what will be the spark.  But the keg is now burning.  It may have started with one spark, but the lynching of George Floyd, although horrific, is only symbolic of what this is all about.  Justice in this situation most certainly does not begin or end with the sentencing of all four of those cops with murder.  They’re certainly guilty, but there’s a lot more of that to go around, at far higher levels of authority than the local cops, fascist as they may be.  (To anyone who was not literally born yesterday, living in the US today, who is aware of who the president is, this is a very obvious statement.)

The main question I want to focus on here is a burning question in the minds of the corporate media and for many regular people from all walks of life across the country — who is smashing, looting and burning buildings, torching police cars, and throwing projectiles at the riot cops all over this country?

The “Peaceful Protesters” Myth

It is probably the case that the vast majority of the people assembling during the day and during the evening to hold protest rallies against the tendency of the police in the US to lynch black people on a regular basis are not the same people who are engaging in some of the other aforementioned activities.  But it would be very wrong to put them all in this fake “peaceful protester” box.

What the media calls “peaceful protesters” are people who stand around in a public space with signs and make speeches.  They can be angry speeches, that’s OK.  This is what they call “peaceful protest.”  If they don’t have a permit, it might not be “peaceful” anymore, in the media’s eyes.  If the police attack peaceful protesters and a single person from within the ranks of the protesters responds in any way that can be construed as violent — such as if someone raises their hand to attempt to block a billy club that’s about to come down on their face — this will be labeled a “clash,” such as, “there are now clashes taking place between the police and the protesters.”

When people occupy an intersection and stop traffic, or block the entrance of a building, this is what people from within social movements generally refer to as civil disobedience, or direct action.  It is considered by anyone involved with a social movement anywhere to be solidly within the “nonviolent” category, and it is often referred to by its full name, “nonviolent civil disobedience.”  People like Gandhi and MLK popularized these sorts of tactics, which were pioneered long before, by other social movements that were also led by oppressed people, such as the labor movement, very much including the multiracial movements of tenant farmers and sharecroppers in the early part of the twentieth century.

The corporate media, however, will often start referring to protests as “violent” as soon as any law is being broken, such as traffic laws, when an intersection, highway, or building entrance is blocked.  This use of the term “violent” is very confusing for many, because it’s patently inaccurate, when people learn enough to understand what the reporters actually mean — if they are allowed to get to that point, which is generally not the case.  If people are looking to the media to understand what’s happening around them, this is very unhelpful.  One of many very unhelpful aspects of their coverage.

The “Black People Are Burning Down Their Own Neighborhood” Myth

As soon as a police murder or the acquittal of a killer cop lead to anyone setting fire to a building, the media will tend to shift into a different gear, where they start focusing on the popular response to the racist, elitist system, rather than on the problems that led to the response.  This happens, again, partly because this is what the corporate propagandists who own most of what remains of the press want to focus on, not just because it’s sensationalist and keeps eyes glued to the screen, but because it is consistent with their perspective, and that of most of their reporters, who were generally raised in totally different circumstances from most of the folks currently burning stuff down.

Thus, for different reasons, but amounting to the same effect, the media will talk about people burning down “their own” neighborhoods.  It’s unfashionable these days to refer to them as “animals,” which was a common refrain during the national uprising in 1991 that the media refers to as the “LA riots.”  Trump prefers the racially loaded term, “thugs,” which is just a slightly updated version of “animals.”

No rent-burdened renter who has been evicted multiple times, which is the case for millions and millions of people in the US, feels like the neighborhoods they live in are “their own” neighborhoods.  Most working class people in urban America are struggling to stay in “their own” neighborhoods.  They are constantly being evicted and driven out of “their own” neighborhoods.  Yuppies flip houses and sell them at impossible prices, and “their own” neighborhoods become quickly unrecognizable and unaffordable.  There is a massive rate of displacement and what can accurately be described as ethnic cleansing taking place in cities throughout this country, that has been going on for centuries now.  It has only been interrupted for periods of time through strong rent control legislation, which used to exist in states like New York and Massachusetts.  But multi-generational, real communities are fewer and farther between, because of the fact that housing is an investment for capitalists in this country, not a right, not at all.

So no one is burning down “their own” neighborhood.  To the extent that local people are involved with these activities — which lots of them are, let’s be very clear about that, and this is nothing new, not at all — the neighborhoods they are burning down are not their own.  They are owned by people that often feel like invaders.  However, these invaders may be “mom and pop” business owners, or “mom and pop” landlords.  The media will refer to any business as a “small business” if it’s not a big corporation.  But someone running a restaurant that serves food that many people in a given neighborhood can’t afford to eat, while easily fitting the media’s description as a “mom and pop” small business, is not often seen by local people as part of “their community” or as particularly distinguishable from a chain store like Target.  Either the “mom and pop” establishment in this instance, or the chain store, will have the same impact, of raising the cost of housing in the now more “desirable” neighborhood.

The “Outside Agitators” Myth

Traditionally, when there is a major protest that involves some forms of civil disobedience or other forms of direct action, so that business as usual is sufficiently interrupted to the point where the protests can’t be ignored, the media will adopt one of two tropes.  If it’s not people “burning down their own neighborhood,” then it’s some kind of “outside agitators” who did it.

The “outside agitator” is generally someone like me, who cares about society, and other people in it, so much that they want to leave their own homes and even their own home towns or states or countries, to go to another place to practice what is known as solidarity or mutual aid, depending on the situation.  It’s easier for the media to blame “outside agitators” when there’s a national or international meeting of the elite taking place, say a G8 or G20 meeting, and tens of thousands of people show up to protest against or try to shut down those meetings.  This scenario has been played out many times in the US, Canada, and many other countries, and I’ve personally been to many such events throughout the world since I’m more or less an outside agitator by profession.

From my experience, even at a big international event in Washington, DC or New York City, most of the people involved with the protests will be from the local area.  They may not be from the actual city the protest is taking place in, but most of them will be from a nearby state.  Locals, by a broader definition than the media likes to use.  So when they say that 20% of those arrested in Minneapolis were not from Minnesota, they don’t mention that of those 20%, the vast majority were from the state of Wisconsin, a short drive away.  (I don’t know this to be true, I’m just guessing based on past experience.)  Of course, if they came from further afield than Wisconsin to show solidarity with people in Minneapolis, this still does not make them bad people.

One of the wonderfully confusing things going on right now with media coverage and the reactions to events by politicians trying to spin the picture the way they want us to see it is they can’t decide on which false trope to fall back on here.  Is it people burning down their own neighborhoods, or are these outside agitators?  Obviously, it’s both — and so much more.

The outside agitator theory also becomes very hard to maintain in this situation, because they are everywhere at the same time.  Traditionally, outside agitators have to come from outside.  By outside, usually they’re talking about select groups of highly committed young anarchists going from supposed anarchist hubs like Seattle, San Francisco and New York City, to places where big, pre-planned events are taking place, such as the G20 meetings in Pittsburgh in 2009 or the Free Trade Area of the Americas talks in Miami in 2003, to name a couple random examples.  In the face of protests happening in every major city at the same time, the “outside agitators” now must have come from a nearby suburb, which doesn’t seem all that “outside” to me.

The fact is, the city of Minneapolis has thousands of people in it who probably identify explicitly as anarchists.  There are many other cities in the US that have a high concentration of radicals.  Minneapolis has been one of them for a very long time.  The radical tradition in Minneapolis is a multiracial one, like this uprising, and includes prominent people from every major ethnic background, very much including white, black, brown, Asian and indigenous resistance in many forms.

Within the ranks of all of these communities, and within the ranks of radicals within all of these communities, there are many different opinions on effective strategies.  While many people understand how folks might not differentiate between burning down a locally-owned upscale restaurant and a big chain corporate store, many would be critical of burning down anything, ever.  And those who think burning down buildings is a good tactic might distinguish between these two targets, intellectually.  Where radicals of all backgrounds tend to unite is around the understanding that oppressed people will tend to rise up, and those uprisings will tend to be messy, especially in the absence of a radical labor tradition, and in the absence of any kind of viable third party option to the two capitalist, imperialist ruling parties who are largely responsible for the terrible disparities in society in the first place.

The “You’re Just Being Paranoid” Myth

In their efforts to confuse people and manage the situation from their corporate elite vantage points, the stenographers of CNN and NPR will rarely mention that local, state and federal police forces have a long and terrible history of infiltrating, undercutting, planting evidence, sowing division and otherwise destroying social movements in any way possible, including killing activists and then blaming others for the killings.  Dozens of leaders of the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement were systematically killed by the authorities at various levels of power, and no one has ever been brought to justice for these many crimes against these immensely popular organizations.  If you familiarize yourself with the public record on the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program or Cointelpro — which has never ended, to be sure — you will find they have committed every crime imaginable, both very overt and extremely underhanded, to cause movements to implode or explode, depending on what works best.

So, are FBI agents and undercover cops among those who are attacking the police and burning down buildings across this country?  While we may not yet have any concrete proof of this, we can assume, based on massive amounts of concrete proof of past activities of these so-called law enforcement agencies, that their agents are involved with many of the most egregious cases of small or ethnically-owned businesses being burned down.  This has been their modus operandi for a very long time in order to sow division.  You would have to be completely ignorant of recent history to think it’s not happening now.  Yet on the off-chance anyone might suggest on a mainstream media outlet that this sort of thing is probably happening, they would likely be lampooned as a conspiracy theorist.

Currently, it appears right-wing actors who may or may not also be cops are trying to start a “race war” by targeting certain buildings for arson attacks and by firing into crowds of protesters.  This adds another level of complexity to the situation, obviously.

Collateral Damage

In a war, many innocent lives are lost.  If you have ever known a person who participated in a war that they even thought was completely just, you will find just one more person who is traumatized by the things they have seen, and the innocents who have died in the course of the conflict they participated in.  If you meet someone who participated in a war that they realized at the time, or later, was unjust, this trauma will tend to be even more intense.

In an uprising like what is currently taking place, this is no different.  When you set about to burn down a police station, this is a difficult task that involves many challenges.  Without going into all the details, suffice it to say that if you’re burning down a building, neighboring buildings might also catch fire, whether you wanted them to or not.  If the fire department were assisting the arsonists, as with a controlled burn of a forest or building, to make sure nearby trees or houses didn’t catch fire, it would be different, but that’s not the situation here.  If it were the military accidentally bombing the wrong house, or a hospital, or a wedding party, as the US military has so often done in recent years in so many parts of the world, they’d just say oops, it was collateral damage.  But if a small business gets torched by accident, or on purpose, by people in the course of an urban rebellion, then it’s a different story you’ll hear from the media and others that these wackos are burning down very nice nonprofit centers that no sensible person would want to harm.  The collateral damage angle, though obvious from a logistical standpoint, will rarely be mentioned — as rarely as the possibility that a particularly destructive action might have been carried out by an FBI agent posing as a protester, despite the abundant evidence of this kind of systematic behavior over the course of past decades.

In Conclusion

Rebellions, uprisings, and revolutions have some things in common, regardless of the outcome:  they are messy, they are dirty, they smell bad, people get hurt, people get killed, buildings get burned, and a lot of innocent people suffer.  They don’t happen unless conditions were completely untenable to begin with.  And as they grow, for some there are rays of hope amidst the flames.

This article was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2020 at 2:22am and is filed under Activism, Anarchism, Civil Disobedience, Donald Trump, Fascism, FBI, Fearmongering, Media, Opinion, Police brutality, Protests, Racism, Resistance, Riots, Solidarity, Surveillance, United States.

In the midst of the current pandemic, it’s easy to forget that 2019 was a year of global uprisings on a scale not seen since 1968. The system is dying. Today we stand at the precipice of a massive restructuring of the global order. There will be no going back to the way things were. We can either fight for a future that we want to live in, or we can sit by and let the banks and the tech companies pick it for us. It’s important that we take the necessary steps to keep each other safe during this crisis. Of course. But it’s also important that we take the necessary steps to keep each other safe from what comes after. And that means getting organized.

Note: The interviews for this episode were filmed back in January, before the COVID-19 crisis. Some parts are in Spanish, so if No Hablas español, make sure you remember to turn on the subtitles by clicking ‘CC’.

This article was posted on Wednesday, April 15th, 2020 at 9:00am and is filed under Activism, Anarchism, Solidarity, Video.

A Sanders presidency is a long shot — and it might also be our only shot.

Since only recently discovering the social media platform, Reddit, I have been posting various things to various sub-Reddits, depending on the subject matter of whatever I’m posting. Knowing it was possibly going to be considered unwelcome on the very popular Anarchism sub-Reddit, I posted a song I just wrote, called “Bernie 2020.” It got some positive response from some folks, as it did on other platforms. (I haven’t sung it to a live audience yet.) But then it got taken down by the moderators of the Anarchism sub-Reddit, because it’s about electoral politics.

Let me say at the outset, for any of you who are moderators of the Anarchism sub-Reddit, this is not at all a dig at you — I understand these spaces need structure and moderation in order to flourish, and I appreciate your efforts. I already thought my post might be removed, or at least roundly criticized, for liberalism or whatnot. But the experience, along with a conversation I’ve been having with my friend Peter Werbe, an editor of the Fifth Estate newspaper, has inspired me to share some thoughts.

I suppose the intended audience for what I’m saying here are mainly my fellow anarchists, particularly in the US — along with anyone else who might be interested, of course. But especially anyone out there who is generally too far left to bother with voting.

I am an anarchist, or a libertarian socialist, if you like — take your pick of terms. Either of these terms means different things to different people at different times, in different situations, and nothing is ever as concrete as people would like to believe. But for me, and for many others, the term “anarchist” is shorthand for one who believes that society would work best if it were horizontally organized, in the form of collectively-owned and collectively-managed enterprises of all varieties.

It also tends to indicate one who, like me, has a deep distrust in the possibility that severely hierarchical institutions like the US federal government can possibly be reformed. This distrust among anarchists of reformist movements dates back at least to the aftermath of the Europe-wide rebellions of 1848, which saw many reforms in many governments, none of which managed to eliminate the widespread poverty and misery of most of the European laboring classes in the decades following 1848.

Indeed, on every continent save Antarctica, the histories of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries are full of reformers in government with apparently good intentions, failing to deliver on them. History is also full of reformers who did deliver on reform, such that their populations often saw their lives improve dramatically — only for the great leaders of social and economic reform to turn out to be genocidal maniacs, intent on world or regional domination, such as Franklin Roosevelt or Saddam Hussein.

History also gives us some prominent examples of how the failure of social democratic governments to provide for their populations gave rise to fascist movements. Notable occasions include Italy in the 1920’s, Germany in the 1930’s, and right now, in an ongoing process with an undetermined outcome in India, Brazil, the Philippines and the United States, to name four fairly major countries.

But for those of us who have an outlook that we would describe as anarchist or socialist, or for anyone who is most especially opposed to the possibility of fascism, it seems most crucial to me that we note the following: in instances where social democratic rule has been instrumental in maintaining relatively prosperous societies for the past few decades, we do not see fascist movements of any significant size — such as in Denmark, Norway, or Switzerland. In countries with social democratic governments that have more fully embraced privatization and other neoliberal reforms, fascist movements have much more fully taken root — such as, once again, in Italy, along with other countries I’ve already mentioned, particularly my own.

I travel and play music for a living, more or less, mainly in Europe and North America, so I’m also talking from direct, first-hand knowledge here, when it comes to 21st century developments, not just what I’ve processed second-hand.

Our Orangeman was the natural outcome of decades of neoliberalism and austerity. In Europe, it’s common knowledge that the fascist movements got their big boost with the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, which here in the US the media generally refers to as a “recession,” while they refer to our economy as “booming” — in stark contrast to what most people are experiencing, and what most people can see when they look around them, if they don’t live in a gated community.

Point is, there are different forms of governments, much as I’d prefer neither rule by corporations — which make no pretense of representing anyone’s interests but their stockholders — or allegedly representative governments. But as much as there are tendencies toward corruption and all sorts of other problems with representative government, including within the so-called advanced social democracies, all governments are not the same.

In fact, they can be very different. There’s a big difference, for example, between a state that has been completely captured by corporate interests, and a state that hasn’t been. There are big differences to be seen between governments that rule in such a way that their population is able to prosper, as opposed to those that don’t, or can’t.

Given these observations about government, society and history that I have made, my take on the current precipice we’re on is this: we can talk about which wars he’s supported and which ones he hasn’t, which military expenditures he’s voted for and which ones he’s voted against. He is far from perfect. But, as with Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, Bernie Sanders is not just the flip side of the same coin. There is no Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is a corrupt, captured institution, and Sanders’ campaign is an insurgent campaign to take it over. A Sanders government could — not would, but could — be a qualitatively different sort of government, of the sort that could make a difference in whether we continue our societal march towards fascism or reverse course.

It’s a very, very long shot, to be sure. The entire corporate media, including the supposedly liberal outlets, are virulently opposed to Sanders (just as they are to Corbyn in the UK). The captured corporate leadership of his own party is horrified by his rise, just as the party’s base is more excited than they’ve been in a very long time. Both the corporate and so-called “public” media will continue to trash Sanders at every opportunity, and his own party leadership would actually rather have fascism than even the threat of socialism — they have made this clear over and over again.

And then, if he gets the nomination, he’ll have the corporate media, his own party, as well as all of the resources of the other party, to oppose his election. If he somehow manages to actually get into the White House, he’ll then be opposed by the vast majority of members of both parties of the Congress, and the corporate media will immediately launch a campaign to depict Sanders and his administration as totally inept. The corporate elite will secretly conspire to sabotage the US economy and blame it on Sanders. They’ll arrange shortages, like in Chile and Venezuela. And that will only be the beginning of the opposition to a Sanders presidency.

The only way he’ll even get as far as winning the nomination to be the Democratic Party candidate will be because of a massive groundswell that can’t be ignored by superdelegates and corrupt officials. The kind of groundswell that threatens to disrupt business as usual, and keep disrupting it, until the state has been un-captured.

A victory of any of the so-called “moderate” candidates — the ones who favor a continuation of the neoliberal Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Obama status quo that led us to our current precipice — will guarantee the further rise of the fascist movement that Trump represents, though it might delay it a bit. A Sanders or Warren victory could disrupt the trend enough that it makes a real difference. If, and only if, one of them gets elected, and then gets massive popular support in the streets, to the point that they are able to actually implement any of their social democratic policies, this could be an opportunity — perhaps our last opportunity, not to be overly dramatic — to avoid ongoing and untold suffering for so many societies, including ours.

To be sure, a movement in the streets will be absolutely required for even the remotest possibility of a Sanders nomination. There are no rules, as you may have noticed — the party leadership is making them up as they go along, in order to keep him out of office. It’s not just about voting — mostly not. But that’s one small element of it. So yes, in case my conclusion for this thought process is not already abundantly clear — take to the streets, shut the cities down, stop business as usual, as much as and wherever possible. But also, vote for Bernie.

<p class="postmeta">This article was posted on Friday, February 14th, 2020 at 6:11am and is filed under <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/anarchism/" rel="category tag">Anarchism</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/bernie-sanders/" rel="category tag">Bernie Sanders</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/democrats/" rel="category tag">Democrats</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/europe/" rel="category tag">Europe</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/fascism/" rel="category tag">Fascism</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/united-states/" rel="category tag">United States</a>.