Tituba’s Revenge is a collective of anti-capitalist nonprofit workers who are majority queer women of color in NYC. We began to get together this year to discuss the challenges and contradictions in our workplace and aimed to develop tools and analysis as a collective to deal with workplace exploitation. We read Marxist-feminist texts such as Silvia Federici and Maria Mies to gain deeper insights into our alienation and devaluation as women caring laborers. In the past decades, the professionalization of nonprofits has drawn a significant amount of women – progressive activists from our communities in particular – into the low-wage, long hours, and non-unionized working conditions.  We feel that there is a vacuum in the analysis of the exploitation in the nonprofit workplace.  Nonprofits are serving as an integral part of the capitalist society rather than operating outside of it.  We want to dispel the myths we are told about nonprofits to create an active project aiming to develop an anti-capitalist analysis of the material oppression of the communities we work within through fighting against our shared exploitation in the workplace.

The pamphlet is part of an ongoing working project. We hope to continue to develop more in-depth analysis between the role of nonprofit in capitalist relations as well as strategies to facilitate workplace organizing.

About “Tituba”:

The name “Tituba’s Revenge” comes from a Black Caribbean woman named Tituba who was enslaved and brought to Salem, Massachusetts. She was persecuted in the witch trials particularly because she was an African healer.  We want to acknowledge the centuries of women’s struggles against capitalist patriarchy that appropriates and alienates us from our knowledge and labor and find ways to fight back in our own workplaces.

……………….

Download the PdF Here or visit http://titubasrevenge.wordpress.com

Guide to the Exploited Non-Profit Worker

I am a member of Unity & Struggle in Texas and I want to share an early pamphlet of the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO) that I re-read recently that has been a critical supplement for me of our group’s organizational studies.  It is called “Towards a Revolutionary Party” (TARP) and was written in 1971, just two years after STO was founded and after the collapse of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the national student civil rights and anti-war network from which it emerged.

STO, like many New Communist organizations, grew out of the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) opposition to the Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) dominate tendency in SDS called Worker Student Alliance (WSA).  When PLP took the position that all nationalism is reactionary it overnight put them in opposition to every national liberation struggle and hence every revolutionary Left tendency including the American Black movement which was then seen by many as a national liberation fight.  RYM formed as a broad opposition to the WSA which inevitably led to another broad opposition to the Weathermen faction (which became RYM I), a group that emphasized and undertook armed struggle then and who felt that the American working class was inherently backward, and RYM II.  It was out of RYM II that many Marxist Leninist pre-parties and grouplets would take shape and this included what would become the STO.

STO was a peculiar and highly original (as well as obscure) New Communist organization as they saw race and specifically white privilege as the main impediment to a united working class struggle against capitalism.  They believed the only way a united struggle could be built was to directly challenge the social basis of white supremacy (white privilege) by organizing white workers to support independent black struggles and demands.  They argued that such demands benefited the class interests of white workers.  White privilege for them, while not without its problems, was very different from the various academic manifestations of privilege politics today which abstract away history, class and struggle.  They developed a sophisticated theory that sought to understand how previous US labor movements had been defeated along racial lines.  For STO it was not because white workers had false consciousness.  It was ultimately because they took material advantages: better jobs, attended better schools, and were protected from the worst of capitalist crises in exchange for refusing to support or opposing Black movements.  It was this historical materialist analysis that marked STO’s understanding of white privilege.  Though there were inherent theoretical and programmatic pitfalls to their understanding of privilege, it is beyond the scope of this piece to address it.

The last thing I’ll say introducing STO and building off false consciousness is that they explicitly rejected any simplified and wooden approaches to understanding and changing consciousness.  This is no doubt due to the fact that STO, unlike RYM II, RYM I, and WSA were not a Maoist organization and took great influences from Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Communist who spent years in prison theorizing the relationship of consciousness and practice, and C.L.R. James, a Caribbean Marxist from the same generation as Gramsci and who came out of the Trotskyist movement and later broke with it.  James and the Johnson-Forest Tendency (JFT) of which he was a part, like Gramsci, also sought to more dynamically link thought and action which was facilitated by returning to Marx’s early philosophical writings, some of which they were responsible for publishing the first English translations.  Here is an excerpt from the pamphlet which sufficiently summarizes their understanding mass or popular consciousness:

“this collective consciousness is not a coherent and systematic ideology, and its reflection within each specific group of workers is also fragmentary, confused, and contradictory; a mixture of good sense, error, prejudice, and ‘borrowed’ features of capitalist ideology.”

The tendency of Maoism and Stalinism in the New Communist period toward consciousness was one where communists struggle to replace one coherent ideology with another one.  This was done through propaganda efforts and political education and was largely something separate from popular struggles.  In contradistinction, STO saw consciousness as dynamic, changing, contradictory, fragmentary, etc. all on its own.  Through struggle and reflection these contradictions can work themselves out in favor of something more coherent and revolutionary.  It wasn’t just their emphasis on the need for communist education that was problematic of Marxist-Leninists, it was their belief that everyday people are simply liberals or that someone’s professed and obvious politics are in complete harmony with their actions.  The experience of mass struggle show those things to be in constant tension.

So while STO’s theoretical influences clearly places them in a libertarian Marxist camp unlike the rest of the American New Left, they were also self-described Leninists (at least at the time of the writing of TARP) which automatically creates an uncomfortable tension with their theory–JFT specifically was opposed to building a Leninist party.  STO had one of the most unorthodox takes on Leninist/vanguardist organization precisely because they were trying to provide a dialectical relationship between mass struggle and revolutionary organization which most Marxist-Leninist (i.e. Stalinist) organizations did not.  Most were torn between the dichotomy of tailism (falling behind liberal leaders and refusing to raise independent perspectives or strategies) or absentionism (refusing to participate because the politics of the movement weren’t purely revolutionary).  This dynamic has not changed much today.

Yet original as their Leninism was, they were still Leninist which I contend is in fundamental contradiction with Marxism.  While I don’t want to write an exhaustive critique of this pamphlet, I did want to open a few things for discussion.  For starters, why is Leninism fundamentally at odds with Marxism?  JFT felt that revolutionaries must recognize and record but not intervene in mass struggles.  But can this interventionist component have a libertarian, i.e. non-Leninist content?  What would it look like to break from STO’s Leninism but retain an emphasis in intervention?

While they lead off in TARP from Lenin’s 1902 book What Is To Be Done?–which has been a starting point for virtually every revolutionary Marxist organization–that revolutionary change isn’t possible without the interventions of a Leninist party, the experience and mass participation of the working class is something which is given great emphasis and which a Leninist party must not subordinate but engage and expand.  Here STO argues that revolutionary consciousness, the consciousness of the need to overthrow the capital relationship and value production, isn’t merely injected by revolutionaries “from without” but is gained through the experience of struggle.  This not only departs from the Left but from Lenin himself (at least where Lenin was when writing that book).  STO sees a similar dynamic of M-L organizations who, like the various trade union bureaucracies, seek to organize and direct mass actions from the board room instead of creating openings to provide for the greatest amount of participation and experience to the working class.  Creating such openings is a central task of a Leninist party according to STO:

“The party must develop tactics which maximize the opportunity for mass participation in struggle, not passive participation; as an audience, or bodies at a demonstration, or a voting bloc — the things stressed [by] the C.P. and the S.W.P., in their ‘mobilizations’ — but participation which gives workers the experience of wielding power and shouldering political responsibility. Often Marxists regard these sorts of tactical considerations as sentimental utopianism, and it is true that they are often raised in a utopian or an anarchistic manner. Nevertheless, it is a basic mistake for the party to subordinate the development of active mass participation in the struggle to what is felt to be ‘good organization’ or ‘efficiency’.”

The pamphlet is largely polemical in nature (which shows their Leninist influence goes beyond organization matters) and captures well the bankruptcy of the existing Left.  It is on this topic that STO offers the most practical usage for communists today.  First, they lay out the existing approaches to mass struggle by the then existing communist tendencies.  Later, in two sections of the pamphlet, THREE ASPECTS OF THE REFORM STRUGGLE and ‘UPPING THE ANTE’ STO gives attention to the areas of demands, tactics, and theory and the relationship between the three, or rather, the theoretical dimension of tactics and demands.  The use the example of a typical strike to illustrate these three areas.

“…there is more to a struggle than demands and tactics. The typical strike involves a group of workers who manifest to some degree both the problems and the possibilities of the whole class. The group will embody or reflect the partial interests and the divisions within the class. Perhaps this will involve both a relatively privileged status for older, white, male workers, and resentment and reaction against these privileges; and both racist ideology and a reaction against it. Beyond this, the workers involved in the struggle will have a certain range of ideas about its meaning and importance; about the social group (class) of which they are a part (or believe themselves to be a part); and about what is generally right, good, and proper. Clearly, these, and the other aspects which make up the ideas and attitudes of the group of workers will be filled with internal contradiction and confusion. Not only will there be differences between various individuals and subgroups, it is likely that specific individuals will think and act in contradictory fashion.

“Even though the specific group of workers will seldom be a completely representative cross-section of the entire class, every group will reflect the major elements of the collective consciousness of the class.”

As the quotes indicate, the ideas of workers are an objective element of struggle that must be sufficiently theorized and oriented to.  Just having demands and set of tactics to carry them out is insufficient to the needs and vicissitudes of struggle nor do they have the potential to bring out those elements already existing in workers’ consciousness that foreshadow their potential to rule society.

“Although the term does not accurately convey just what we have in mind, we will call this third feature of every reform struggle its ‘ideology’.”

“First, once the ritual posturing of the union leadership is ended by the beginning of the strike, the demands generally turn out to be far less than what the workers need to make any real change in their situations…”

“Real struggle over demands and tactics are kept inside the inner-leadership caucuses in the union, and confrontation with management is limited to the top union-management bargaining meetings. The mass of the workers have no way to participate in or even to directly influence, these aspects of the strike. For them the entire process grows more institutionalized and alienated, more a matter of formal than substantive struggle.”

This is eerily close to the nature of struggles today, except it is rarely the union bureaucracies who are at the helm of leadership but non-profits.  The same dynamics of decision-making over demands, the methods of struggle and how the demands are backed up, all take place behind the backs of those who are supposedly at the center of struggle.

“Either a base of popular understanding for a certain demand exists, or it does not exist. When the party sees its role as winning a formal acceptance of ‘better’ demands, without developing any program to actually convince the particular constituency of the significance of these demands, most of its biggest ‘successes’ will be turned into weapons against it.”

“…the party should agitate for demands which reflect the real needs of the struggle, and should expose demands which are sops or which rest on illusions, or which would lead away from class unity…The problems arise when the question of which demands becomes more than a technical and tactical question and is allowed to assume a strategic significance in itself. This always subordinates the real problems and possibilities involved in organizing the workers as a revolutionary class, to a search for gimmicks and shortcuts.”

I think what’s important to take note of is that they are making a distinction between theory/perspectives and demands.  In my own organizing, we’ve tended toward conflating the two where demands are basically the bullet points of theory.  The problem we’ve run into is that our demands were always larger than what we and the forces we were able to mobilize (taken together with spontaneous upsurges of struggle) were able to carry out.  This conflation was never a problem for the theory as we consistently would contextualize the fight within a broader picture, propagandize for the need for fundamental social transformation, and discuss with folks what to expect from the rulers.  With demands so large, however, there was never any sense that we had won anything save for intangibles that mattered a lot to us but weren’t so clear to others.  We felt our demands needed to be more radical than others and that we needed to “up the ante” lest the fight be contained within reformism and liberalism.

Returning to STO’s theoretical Leninism, there is a deeper theoretical reason for their orientation to the class that breaks from the Kautskyian categories of Lenin’s thought in WITBD, categories Lenin never fully breaks from for the remainder of his life.  That is, they see the potentiality for communism within the activity of the working class and this potentiality is expressed in contradictory and fragmented ways.  For Lenin, the potentiality of communism is in his one-sided understanding of “productive forces.”  Productive forces for Lenin are largely a technical and technological formulation that denotes a society’s capacity to produce at a given level and rate.  This understanding was taken over from the German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky who represented the second generation of Marxists to popularize Marxism after the death of Marx and Engels.  It is unfortunate that Lenin never got to read Marx’s early works, particularly the German Ideology, where Marx argues that the cooperation of workers is itself a productive force.  James, Raya Dunayevskaya and the rest of the JFT had this advantage and it explains why they gave so much primacy to the working class and mass struggle.

The central lapse in STO’s libertarian Marxism and the essence of their Leninism was their view that the final and definitive break with capitalist relations made real through smashing the State is contingent purely upon the party’s intervention.  In fact, they set up their entire pamphlet with this fundamental perspective in mind:

“The daily struggles of the workers against the capitalists do not develop to the point where the class is sufficiently organized and conscious to undertake the revolutionary reconstruction of society. From this it is clear that the struggle for a socialist revolution is not, ‘inherent’ in the spontaneous class struggle. Whether or not the circumstances and conditions of the daily conflicts between workers and capitalists develop into the basis for revolutionary struggle depends, fundamentally, on the intervention of conscious revolutionaries.”

While revolutionary organizations have an important role to play in that regard, historically it has not always been dependent upon a party’s leading role as to whether this final rupture and destruction of the State happens.  Ironically enough, it was Correspondence (the grouping to emerge after JFT left the Trotskyist movement) who wrote the book Facing Reality which describes the historical process of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 which was organized and lead by workers, soldiers, and farmers assemblies without the intervention by existing parties or trade unions–in fact, Correspondence contended, it was against them.  Not only that but it was a successful revolution insofar as they smashed the Soviet satellite state and institutionalized working class self-governance through factory committees and other popular means.  It was overthrown only from the outside, by an invasion of Soviet tanks 11 days after the revolution began.

While there is much to gain theoretically and practically from a study of STO’s pamphlet, it should be borne in mind that though their Leninism is highly dynamic and original, it is still Leninist and as such must be categorically broken with if a libertarian Marxist tendency is to ever emerge and take shape.

Beyond Wall Street

A statement on strategy

by Resist and Multiply, based out of hunter college made of community members, students and workers, fighting for a free cuny.
All over the world, mass protest is becoming the norm.  People are rebelling against dictators, corrupt governments, and austerity regimes, all of which are part of an exploitative economic and political system.  For the past month, thousands have been occupying Zuccotti Park in New York in a revolt against Wall Street which has both contributed to the global wave of dissent and given new legitimacy to collective protest and organization in this country. Discussion of expanding the occupations has recently begun, but the questions remain of where, why, and how.

What are people so upset about?
People wonder what the protesters at Wall Street stand for because everyone seems to have a different answer. However, the only reason the movement has been able to stay alive this long, and even grow, is because the protesters agree: The society we live in works to benefit a very small few at the expense of the majority.  The problem is not based on greedy individuals in power, but rather the whole capitalist structure. Even if we agree that this is the problem, our solutions are different because the system is complex and affects all of us differently.

Capitalism is the reason we’re in debt, unemployed, and struggling to pay rent. But capitalism also affects the way we think about ourselves and the way we relate to each other.  Most of us have been told over and over again that rich people are rich because they work hard; that we need to look out for “number 1” in order to succeed like them. But living this way makes us feel like shit. It destroys our sense of community and meaning in life, and we feel apart from our neighbors, co-workers, and classmates.  We feel alienated.

The thing that unifies Wall Street protesters is the opportunity to overcome this alienation through experiences of shared social responsibility through collective decision making and based on achieving a better future. It’s not perfect, but it’s a start.

Bringing Wall St. to your job, school and community: disrupting the system
Have you ever thought you could do a better job than your boss? Felt taken advantage of at your job? Noticed that some people get to go to school while others don’t, and that it has a lot to do with the neighborhood they come from? When it comes down to it, capitalism exploits the majority so that the few on top can maintain their fortunes, while the rest of us have to work hard just to survive.  Furthermore, some of us are more exploited than others. It is not just about saving our pensions or paying less in taxes, because most of us don’t even have those options.  We are struggling to take care of ourselves, our families, and for our day to day survival.

But we have the power to transform our struggle into our liberation. We are not just the 99%: we are people of color, immigrants, women, and poor people. WE do the work, WE control our bodies, and WE take care of society.  But we can’t do it as individuals– we need to work together.

How do we do this?
The Occupy Wall Street movement won’t change the system itself. It will, however, open up space for us to bring this struggle to our schools, where we are trained to be good workers; to bring it to our places of work, where we make society function; and into our communities, where real power lives. We need to organize ourselves: go on strike, occupy our schools, have walkouts, do work slowdowns and build community centers for self-determination. Each of these actions can be pieces of a new system built right here and now, just waiting to link up with each other. When we do these activities together, we disrupt the profit of bosses and the power of politicians.  Instead of turning to them for answers, we create our own.

Why CUNY?
CUNY is the largest secondary educational institution for working class people of color in New York, and a major employer in the city.  CUNY used to be free, but tuition was established in 1975, soon after protestors changed the composition of the system from mostly white to mostly people of color by using sit-ins, walkouts, and strikes.  Historically, larger issues in our society have been fought over and won on CUNY campuses:  the fight against white supremacy in the open admissions struggle and battle for Black and Puerto Rican studies, the establishment of Hostos and Medgar Evers, and the fight against drafting working class people to go to Vietnam.

But now, CUNY is used as a testing ground for neoliberal capitalist policies: tuition hikes, overcrowding classrooms, hiring adjuncts at low rates to do hard work, and making scholarships and remedial classes harder to access, is making CUNY whiter and more upper class—its makes us feel like the people who fought for it don’t even belong.  Occupying, striking, and other direct actions allow us to build a movement that does fundamentally new: a direct democratic, open, and free CUNY, that works in relation to the rest of society, and addresses struggles against gentrification, police and state violence, and the devaluing of caring and teaching labor that go far beyond campus walls.

If you wanna throw down:
www.resistandmultiply.wordpress.com
resistandmultiplynyc@gmail.com

A public, revolutionary perspective of the ongoing occupations across the nation has been lacking. There is much talk within radical communities, organizations, and blogs about the occupations, but few written declarations have been made from those within the occupations themselves. This is our small attempt to address this problem.

We do not represent the voices of every occupier, but we also recognize that our own voices must be heard. We followed the Occupy Wall Street movement when it was just several hundred people in New York City, and we watched, thrilled, as it spread across the nation. We were ecstatic to find out that folks, here, in Atlanta were starting to organize our very own Occupy. But we were also cautious—cautious because we knew there were very serious critiques of the racial, class, gendered, and political makeup of the occupations that we largely agreed with and didn’t want to see replicated in our own city.

Last Friday was the first night of Occupy Atlanta. At six pm, the scheduled time for the first General Assembly, over 500 people gathered in Woodruff Park in downtown Atlanta. It was exciting to see so many people come out to something that had been planned so quickly. It was a testament to the excitement and rage in the air. At the same time, there were lots of problems from the start. White men moderated the entire three hour discussion, spoke almost the whole time, and made it very difficult for anyone else to speak because of the “process” of the meeting. Many of us had to wait almost twenty minutes, several times, to say one word even though no one else was on stack. The meeting was at times boring, tedious, and incredibly frustrating. Yet, it was also an exercise in democracy, and the biggest collective decision making body most of us had ever witnessed.

During the GA, Congressman John Lewis, the celebrated civil rights leader, showed up in expectation of addressing the crowd. We were informed that he wanted to address the crowd at that very moment, and were not told until far later that he had a prior engagement and thus could not wait until later to speak. Hundreds of people were in the midst of a critical meeting and knew that there was a place at the end of the agenda for people to address the crowd. Furthermore, recognizing that one of the central values of the Occupy movement is the belief that no individual or group of individuals is more valuable than any other person—particularly those already over-valued and over-represented in the very governmental institution we are opposing—many folks in the crowd felt that the meeting should not be interrupted for an “important” figure. The folks asking Lewis to wait until the scheduled speaking time were not only white folks, as has been suggested by some, but a diverse group of people, and ultimately made up the majority. Those asking Lewis to wait wanted Lewis to speak—they recognized his legacy, his importance, and his value for many of us, especially to the black community—but they also wanted him and every other individual to respect the process of a democratic meeting.

Yet, this collective ask prompted a handful of black folks to leave the crowd, telling some individuals they felt alienated and upset by what had happened. One woman of color was in tears on the phone, speaking to a friend, saying that those who claimed to speak for her were unaware of what she needed—John Lewis was a radical man whom empowered his community, and here was a mostly white crowd shooing him away. This was so upsetting to witness for many of the radicals in the crowd, as we were already concerned about the racial dynamics and did not want the decision to ask Lewis to wait to be construed as a rejection of such a prominent black leader, and therefore, as a major affront to POC and the black community. In the days that have followed, the John Lewis story has not died down, but rather gained steam and turned into something it absolutely was not. So let us be clear, as witnesses—John Lewis was asked to wait until the specified time for speakers to address the crowd. He did not stay; he had to leave for an appointment. He expressed absolutely no ill will towards us, publicly.

What happened is unfortunate. But those of us writing this document must be clear—if we have to rely on the presence of Lewis to attract and retain folks from the black community at a protest, something is fundamentally wrong. The situation should raise an altogether different question—why were only white men speaking and moderating? If a black woman had been on the bullhorn and had been the one to say Lewis needed to wait until the end, how would things have been interpreted differently? On the one hand, we need not to fetishize the democratic process. On the other hand, we need to recognize the influence of an individual like Lewis in the hearts of so many. However, the solution and discussion shouldn’t be limited to letting Lewis speak or making him wait. Again, if there were more women, more POC, more queer folks, up at the front of the crowd, and if they were the ones telling Lewis he needed to wait, what then would there action from the crowd have been? We ask this question because we are adamantly against the privilege baiting that has gone on in regards to the Lewis debacle. Far too often, these privilege politics (you are white and thus you have no right to ask Lewis to wait) are often masking political beliefs of individuals that are deeply imbedded within the non-profit industrial complex and black capitalist class which is nowhere more prominent than in Atlanta. Additionally, the privilege baiting attempts to erase the countless voices of women and people of color that also voted for Lewis to wait.

Again, the issue from the onset is not about Lewis being asked to wait; it is that people of color, queer folk, women—those upon whose backs capitalism was built and perpetuates its oppression—were not adequately reached out to in the preparatory stages of Occupy Atlanta, and were not actively included once it began. Using Facebook and word of mouth to spread information about an occupation, or any movement for that matter, is insufficient. These forms of communications rest on friendship ties, and friendship ties in this case were predominantly between those already existing in the progressive Atlanta community (which is very white). The Atlanta occupation, and those all across the country, have been planned, dominated, and frequented by mostly white, middle class, young men and women. This is the true issue at the forefront of these occupations, and many social movements. It is the sharp contrast between those speaking and those needing to speak that must be brought up, discussed, and publicly addressed by radicals, lest we fall into the same paradigms of non-profits, whom claim to speak for the disenfranchised, but in reality, rob and maim the voices of the oppressed classes.

Yet, we found ourselves questioning, why despite all of these problems, do we remain occupying? This is our answer: We remain occupying precisely because of these problems. We are revolutionaries, and the job of revolutionaries is not to ignore a mass movement of people breaking out just because it has problems, but to insert ourselves directly into the movement to raise, critique, and help fix the problems. We must stay here so we can bring up these non-coincidental issues of color, class, and gender-orientation representation and strive to change them. We must stay here so that we can raise the revolutionary character of these movements, challenge the participants to think and act differently, and incorporate the voices of those that have thus far been absent.

The authors of this document, along with countless others occupying cities across the nation, stand against capitalism, patriarchy, and racism. We recognize that capitalism would not be possible without the original, and ongoing, oppression of women, queer folk, and people of color. Capitalism was built upon our backs. This economic crisis has been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years for queers, people of color, and women—it is nothing new. These communities have also been fighting back since the beginning of their oppression—resistance is also not new. We recognize that it is only when the homes of white, middle class Americans get taken away, when their jobs are lost, when they begin to suffer, when they begin to fight back, that the media and the politicians begin to pay attention.

But we also think there is a space to recognize and critique these factors from within the current occupation movement. We refuse to abstain from the largest mass activity that any of us have seen in our lifetimes, just because there are problems.

The authors of this document believe that the occupy movement reflects the biggest self-organization of the people that we have seen in decades. People are joining together to address the problems they face. But we also recognize that full realization of the demands that occupiers are making, such as putting people over profit, are impossible under the capitalist society in which we live. Full victory will never be possible as long as economic relations continue to be driven by the profit imperative. It is only through a revolution, created and led from the bottom up, by the people, for the people, by the 99% that are most affected, that we can move beyond the corruption and corporate rule we are witnessing today.

Yesterday, three women from this document moderated a 100 person general assembly. We are currently working on a workshop on white privilege and male privilege. There are more brown faces at the occupation each day, than the day previous. We renamed Woodruff Park, the park which we are occupying, Troy Davis Park. We are organizing a walk out at our school in which more than 30% of the students are black. There is a workshop on Saturday at Troy Davis Park about free, radical childcare. There is a march on Friday in support of a homeless shelter nearby that is in danger of being forced to close. We have fed hundreds of mouths, many which would have gone to bed hungry without our homemade peanut butter sandwiches and bean burritos.

Here’s the thing: We’re sick of asking for change, and we’re not going to do it anymore. We’re sick of being told to lobby and to vote, and if we just supported Obama a little more, things would be different. We’re sick of being told to join a non-profit, however radical it perceives itself to be. We’re sick of being told that change can happen within the system if we only just participate more. We’re sick of being told we’re racist, or sexist, or classist, for participating in a movement that has problems. We’re sick of sitting on the sidelines and refusing to actually engage in a movement while writing on our blogs and Facebook about how screwed up things are. We’re sick of asking and we’re sick of waiting. The time to act is now, with every ounce of our brown, female, and queer bodies.

But as news came of Troy’s impending execution, everyone I knew, radical or not, felt the need to act. Not only did we recognize the importance of being able to temporarily suspend our own organizing when sudden and important moments occur, but we also saw how many people who had never acted before were outraged and pouring into the streets (or the sidewalks at this point, because we hadn’t yet learned to take the streets together).  In this piece, I will first attempt to reconstruct my own experiences in the week leading up to Troy’s murder specifically the protest outside the prison on the September 21^st. I will then address some of the critiques that have been made about the movement in relation to my own analysis not only as a witness, but as a committed revolutionary. This is a long piece, but bear with me, as I strongly believe this was one of the most important political ruptures many of us have ever seen, especially here in the South.

REFLECTIONS:

On Wednesday, September 21st, I drove to Jackson, Georgia with two friends, including one of my closest comrades, S. We had no idea what to expect, and we were stunned to see so many people already there once we arrived. There were lots of cops walking around alongside protestors, but no action was taking place as far as we could see. We asked where we could join the protestors who were already there, and the police told us that they were on the other side of the street and we could not go over to be with them. We could not even see them from where we were, and so there was an enormous amount of confusion about what to do. We were directly across from the gates to the prison, which opens to a long driveway. So in truth, we weren’t even close to the actual prison (I had this wild hope that if we chanted loud enough, the prisoners would hear us and begin chanting too). The police told us we were not allowed to stand across the street, and kept pushing us back down a small road that led to a church where a lot of events were going on for Troy (hosted by the NAACP). Almost immediately upon our arrival, they arrested a middle aged black man for telling a cop to get his finger off the trigger. They didn’t read him his rights (nor did they read anyone their rights throughout the night).

We walked to the church, where the NAACP was talking, talking, talking and not doing one goddamn thing. They had physically separated themselves from the prison, the police, and the public, crowding into a small church where they listened to big shots instead of hearing their own voices. We needed those people inside, sitting in the pews, to march out of the church up to the road and take over the street with us. Our group waited and talked about what to do, and eventually, got word we could protest back in the original spot we were told to leave. Over time, more and more people came from the church, and the crowd swelled. At its height it was a thousand or more. We were chanting, talking, and making lots of noise. At one point, a young black man tried to gather people around and started talking about how he didn’t want to just sit and watch this happen, how he wanted to act. People were agreeing with him, nodding their heads and shouting amen. He said he was going to try to walk across the street and hoped people would follow. Almost immediately, he turned around and took a few steps, with many of us following. But we never found out how many of us were actually going to attempt to cross the street with him, because within seconds the cops leaped on him, swarming him and the rest of us, pushing us back, back on top of the people behind us. He was doubled over, they were on top of him, there were screams and panic and he was quickly tased and dragged away. In a matter of seconds, a crowd of riot police had taken formation across the street from us.

As we grew, so did the riot police. At a particularly startling moment, about 50 marched up, with their shields and batons in hand, and started marching in place, doing drills. It was absolutely terrifying. At their peak I would say there were between 100 and 200 of them. We were separated by a four lane street/highway, and from 4 pm until 12 pm when I left, they never stopped staring us down and we never stopped staring them down. The division between us and them became not only political but physical, and I think actually being able to visualize this separation illuminated to a lot of people in the crowd the role of the police and state terror in repressing the people.

Ten minutes before 7 pm, when Troy was schedule to be executed, folks started to quiet down and began holding hands, praying together. I was in a circle of people in which everyone was touching each other in some way, hand on shoulder, hand on back. Many of us were kneeling. Someone started giving a small sermon, and although I am not religious, it was one of the most spiritual moments of my life. He said that violence wasn’t just killing an innocent man, but violence is poverty, imperialism, war, racism. The amens got louder and louder the more radical he became. No eye was dry. I sobbed, feeling the mix of sweat and tears roll down my face, and I could feel the shaking and quivering rolling through every body I touched. As we closed our eyes, feeling the time approach, there were solemn hymns rising from the crowd. I couldn’t breathe. And then suddenly, there was shouting, and people started screaming, “There’s a stay!” “There’s a delay!” Everyone started yelling, hugging desperately, huge smiles mixed with tears, the incredible confusion of terror replaced by elation. Over time, we learned that it was a delay, not a stay of execution. People were frantic to find out more information, but everyone’s phone had horrible service because we were all attempting to get online. We shared information as much as we could, and it was amazing to watch as things got passed through the crowd, everyone relying on everyone else for information, solidarity, strength. In the next few hours, the crowd began to dwindle. Many of the HBCUs had brought busloads of students, and they began to leave. That reduced our numbers by lots. But many of us remained, strengthened by our resolve to stay until the very end.

It was during the time between 7 pm and the time when the actual execution occurred that I witnessed some incredibly important conversations taking place. One of these conversations was between me, S, and several young black women that we happened to be sitting beside. We started discussing the role of the police, asking and debating questions like – Who do they serve? What is their consciousness? What should our position be towards them? Later, as I walked around the crowd, I heard a middle aged black man on the phone saying “This isn’t only about us man. There are white people here, and they are feeling this just as strongly as us. This isn’t about black and white here.” Which got at the most spectacular part of all – the crowd was completely integrated, black and white together in a way I NEVER seen. I saw black preachers holding their arms around my white male friend who was sitting in a ball on the ground, devastated. I saw white women and black women making up chants together. I saw people sharing water and food and everything they had with people they have never met, who looked nothing like them.

I should note here that I am well accustomed to the suggestions that white and black must fight together that usually come from the mouths of white middle class liberals. I am always highly suspicious of these statements, very conscious of the white privilege that takes place in every arena, radical or not, that many refuse to recognize. I am not arguing that there was not white privilege in this space, but that there was a sense of community and shared identity that was groundbreaking. And I think we were all aware of it. I heard so many discussions about race, and so many people reflecting on the solidarity within the crowd. One woman cried hysterically, repeating over and over, “Why? Why? Why? Because we’re black, because of the way we were born. That isn’t fair!” But race was not the only thing discussed. I also heard people talking about overthrowing the state, a black woman condemning Obama and saying we should never vote for him again, many others calling for complete boycotts of Georgia. These weren’t just a few people in the crowd, these were many, and the sentiments grew with the passing of the night. There is no doubt that the non profits have completely taken the spotlight of the Troy Davis issue, but yesterday’s event proved that no matter how hard they try, they cannot control the everyday people who also care and want to act. Because we were separated from the people who got to Jackson earlier, I think there were actually a lot less Amnesty and NAACP people in the crowd than normal. Because of this, and because of the energy of the crowd, they weren’t able to gain control. There were no speeches by Amnesty people, there were no chants that were stopped, it was real people power. This is why it’s important to separate the non profit wing of the Troy Davis issue (Amnesty, NAACP) from the thousands of other people across the world who are enraged and who have decided to act. They do not represent us, and last night, we refused to let them even try.

Just before 11, we received word that Troy would in fact be executed. We again joined together to pray, holding hands, singing. We cried even harder this time. At 11:08, Troy Davis was executed by the state. Candles were passed around and we began singing -

All over Jackson, Georgia, I’m going to let it shine
All over Jackson, Georgia I’m going to let it shine
let it shine, let it shine, let it shine
 
All for justice, I’m going to let it shine
All for justice, Georgia I’m going to let it shine
let it shine, let it shine, let it shine
 
All for freedom, I’m going to let it shine
All for freedom, I’m going to let it shine
let it shine, let it shine, let it shine
 
All for Troy, I’m going to let it shine
All for Troy, I’m going to let it shine
let it shine, let it shine, let it shine
 
Each new phrase, someone would shout out the next line, whether it be “justice” or “liberation.” For the first time in my life, I truly sang with every inch of my body.

At 11:45 PM, the crowd had significantly dwindled to a few hundred, but the police still remained on the other side of the street. They were not advancing, and many of us had agreed to sit down and link arms if they did come forward. Suddenly, a middle aged black man who was later identified with the NAACP came across the street and told us that the Davis family wanted us to leave, to go to the church, which was off the main street. Going to the church would mean leaving the front lines. He told us if we didn’t leave, we would be in danger. This is in spite of the fact that the police hadn’t gotten close to us in over five hours. Many people got up to leave, guilt tripped by the argument that the Davis family wanted us to leave (or so we were told, despite the fact that Troy Davis always said that it wasn’t about him, but so much more), but many others began arguing with the man, telling him we didn’t want to leave, that we weren’t leaving until the cops left. As he yelled at us, the riot cops advanced on us at an alarming rate. They were suddenly upon us, pushing us backwards. S and a few others were sitting down on the ground. The NAACP man told her to get up, but she refused. Soon, several cops were upon her, and after saying one thing to her without allowing her to respond, they had snatched her away. I reached out desperately for her, screaming, crying, watching as she disappeared behind a line of police. I couldn’t see her, and they swarmed around me, screaming at me. I began screaming back, screaming at the NAACP man and all his little cronies who had so blatantly orchestrated this assault. Others were screaming at them too. The truth is, I remember little of what happened. I blacked out within my rage and fear. I was later told there was a helicopter circling above us, it’s light shining down directly upon us. My friends tried to pull me back, but I was hysterical, felt I could not leave S alone with those murderers. Eventually, my friend got me to step back, more or less threw me into his car, and we drove the jail where S and 8 others were being held. We waited around 4 hours and finally got her out and made it back to Atlanta by 5 am. She was remarkably okay – she’s an absolute soldier.

When I shared these initial reflections, many criticized my belief that the NAACP was working with the police. We will never know the absolute truth, but I strongly stand by my assertion that throughout the entire day, the only people policing us were the police and the NAACP officials. Time and time again, the heads of the NAACP came to the front of the crowd, pushing us backwards out of the street, telling us not to cross some invisible line that wasn’t even being enforced by the police. We repeatedly refused, and at one point, some of them literally had to be held back from us by their friends, as if they were going to attack us (we were all women, I should mention). Leading up to the final confrontation, we had literally not interacted with the cops in hours, and yet at the very second the NAACP told us to leave or we would get hurt, the police advanced. My beliefs are strengthened by the reflections of a comrade, a young latino man, who wrote: “ After being pushed back towards the church and away from the prison, I was standing in a truck parking lot across the road. The NAACP member alongside two troopers interrogated me regarding my presence. As soon as I told them I had a car parked, they told me to get to it or get arrested. I could not speak a word in response without getting shouted down with arrest threats. My car was in the direction of the jail, so I had to walk through the sea of advancing police. When I got to my car I was heckled by police. They used profanities and told me I was lucky I got to my car before they did. When I didn’t respond, they tauntingly asked me if I spoke any English. As I left in my car, I heard the NAACP member laughing with 2 officers. I also heard them thank him.”

I am not suggesting that the NAACP are a nefarious group that consciously understands their behavior as siding with the police instead of the people, but that their political beliefs lead to no other possible actions than the ones they enacted.  They are a non-profit, liberal organization that is seeped into a capitalist, racist, and patriarchical system that they seek to reform, not revolutionize. The result of this reformist inclination is the suppression of the power of the people and an understanding of a movement as one tied to voting, non-violence, and hierarchy.

FURTHER ANALYSIS:

Troy Davis was murdered because he was born a black man in a nation that was founded on racism, patriarchy, and capitalism. The president of this country, who people continue to tout as representative of our supposed racial progress, said nothing. Not one word. He sat silent and watched a man die. Every single person involved in the radical elements of those protests will remember that on November 4^th. Even as they wore their Obama t-shirts, their consciousness, their reality, changed in those short days. The fists they raised in the air, the songs they sang, the shouts they screamed, they were the seeds of resistance, they were the seeds of something that can grow.

The vast majority of the campaign was dominated by the non-profit industrial complex and individuals who refused to make any genuine and accurate analysis of these three forces because doing so would be in itself a self-critique of their own “work.” Additionally, these groups attempted to focus solely on Troy’s innocence, rather than rejecting the racist death penalty altogether, the criminal justice system itself, or white supremacy. When people in the various protest crowds tried to get on the bullhorn or push the discourse to the left, these groups tried their absolute hardest to stop us. Our attempt to chant “No Justice, No Peace, Fuck the Police” was met with absolute furor. But what’s important here is not that the non-profits attempted to control a movement – they’ve been doing that forever and won’t be stopping anytime soon. What’s important is not that they failed to critique capitalism or racism, or that they tried to stop us from chanting “fuck the police.” What’s important is that people were chanting this in the first place.

In a recent post on Bring the Ruckus’s blog about the execution of Troy, the author wrote:

“Why is their such outrage over the execution of this one black man’s life? And why do we as a community and a country continue to ignore the names and faces of black people who are killed everyday.”

And in response to the repeated cry of “I am Troy Davis” throughout the movement, the author maintained:

“No one can claim they are Troy Davis unless they have experienced living in a constant state of fear of being stopped and searched because you look like a “criminal”, or have had to say good-bye to friends and loved ones to be locked up in a cage and taken away for good. The only people who can legitimately represent being Mr. Davis are the black men, women and in-between who are constantly harassed by the police and live in fear that they too will suffer death at the hands of the state–on death row, in the streets or in their homes. The individual decree by non-black peoples of the world declaring “I Am Troy Davis” unfairly places Mr. Davis as a token for white liberals and leftists, allowing for individuals to seek personal redemption for the guilt of Slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the War on Drugs. The individual nature of the whole campaign, through the petitions and calls to various officials, has further emphasized the individual, leading to a sort of political impotency placing all the power in the hands of the state and the system. Let’s take power instead of asking for it and break down these systems that insist upon killing black and brown bodies.”

While the author makes many valid points, particularly in calling out the corrupt and racist “innocence” rhetoric, I believe both the actions and political discussions that occurred in the streets leading up to Troy’s execution were far more nuanced and radical than those described. I stood on the front lines and heard these discussions with my own ears, and I know first hand that they were not limited solely to discussions of innocence. We must look further than what the non-profits and official speakers were saying, because they were only one part of the crowd, only one part of the movement. What I heard were debates about capitalism, violence, revolution, and reform between white, black, brown, women, children, men, and queer folks. The real content of those crowds were made up of everyday people who didn’t care whether Troy was innocent or not. That is not what was important to the prison worker who left her job to cross the street and protest alongside us, or the young black family who were sitting down to dinner and saw the protests on the news, quickly deciding to jump in their car and drive to the protest with their two-year-old son.

Perhaps the clearest moment of this tension was seen on Tuesday night, the day before Troy’s murder. There was a rally at the Georgia capitol that featured endless speakers from Amnesty and the NAACP. Much of the youth stood in the back, in the street, and attempted to start several chants, each time getting shut down by the speakers. When the speakers had finally finished, almost half of the crowd broke out into a march, refusing to go home, refusing to be silent. We marched across downtown Atlanta, taking the streets, walking through the dark, rainy night. Our screams pierced the silent night; we blocked roads, stopped traffic, and didn’t stop even when our legs and feet ached. We were untamed, we did what we wanted, said what we wanted, screamed what we wanted, and no non-profit could stop us. This is the kind of activity we must pay attention to. This is the kind of activity you wouldn’t know happened if you weren’t there. This is the kind of activity that no television or newspaper is going to cover, but that’s going to stay in the collective memories of those who participated forever.

As revolutionaries, we have the responsibility to demarcate between the discourse and actions of non-profits and those of the people. In every large movement, there will be a large spectrum of political thought, and it is our job to recognize where seeds of radical thought exist and engage directly with it. We cannot reject a movement altogether just because it contains elements that are not revolutionary. We must pay close attention and attempt to discover what else is there. There might not always be something for us to harness onto, and in these situations, we have to make the difficult decision of whether the battle is worth fighting. But we can’t refuse to fight before we’ve even tried.

“There are so many more Troy Davis’… We need to dismantle this Unjust system city by city, state by state and country by country.” – Troy Davis, September 10, 2011

The overall argument of Marx at the Margins is that Marx develops from a position relatively uncritical of colonialism to one that is far more complex and oppositional. Specifically, Anderson shows how Marx’s early work on the non-western world and the peasantry tended to be undialectical, reflecting a unilinear conception of history. Marx was inclined, Anderson argues, to conceive of historical development in non-western societies as inevitably mirroring that of Western Europe. Furthermore, the peasantry was to gradually wither away into the proletariat. The problem with such thinking is that it lends itself to a stagist understanding of the historical process, one that has had profound political consequences. Anderson contends that it was not until the Grundrisse that Marx began to arrive at an alternative view, one that was more dialectical and global perspective. Anderson characterizes Marx’s developing theory of history as multilinear, rather than unilinear. These ideas are outlined in chapters one, five and six in the book. Chapters 2-4 focus on Marx’s understanding of nationalism and capitalist development. Those issues are not covered here.

A “never changing natural destiny”

Anderson notes that Marx’s early writing on non-western societies was “clearly influenced by Hegel.” For instance, examining his “harsh critique” of Indian society, Anderson quotes Hegel’s racist disregard of “India as a society that ‘has remained stationary and fixed’.” Therefore, “as a society where no real change or development had occurred, India had no real history,” Anderson concludes. Hegel accepted “colonialism as the product of historical necessity”; that is, the inevitable outcome of the absence of historical dynamism. India, like most of the non-Western world, was for Hegel characterized by a fundamental inertia, a lack of antagonism which “undergirded internal despotism.” Nevertheless, citing anthropologist Lawrence Krader, Anderson holds that, all things considered, Hegel could be distinguished from his contemporaries by his “concrete and historical” approach—something Marx was to later develop in more liberating directions (14).

Anderson highlights The Communist Manifesto as the most representative example of the tendency in Marx’s early writing on non-western societies to view colonialism uncritically. The Manifesto marveled at how the revolutionary power of capitalism “has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together” and “by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation.” However, it has done so by “pitilessly [tearing] asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment,” replacing it with nothing but “naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.” Anderson notes that the Manifesto indicates the dialectical opposition between the expanding productive powers of social labor, its impoverishment and the subject in the form of the proletariat that is its negation. And yet, as Anderson comments, this dialectic seems limited to the Western context. In terms of the colonial world, the emphasis remains only on the incorporation of “even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation.” The Manifesto, Anderson seems to be saying, lends itself to a stagist reading, one where we await the creation of a proletariat at which point the struggle for communism can really begin in such non-Western societies.

Such views found their way into his first articles on India of 1853. Marx could write that British colonialism created “the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.” Marx pointed to how British trade and eventual political subordination of South Asia destroyed the foundations of its textile industry through the flooding of its market with goods manufactured in England (15). For British capitalism, through the auspices of the powerful corporate syndicate the British East India Company, India was to become another cotton exporting country providing raw material for the English textile industry and a captive market for British trade. Part of the social revolution introduced by British colonialism, according to Marx, was the seizure of nominally public land and its distribution to a new class of landowners. The zemindars, “a semihereditary class of local officials” who collected taxes from the peasantry, thereby gained private hold of the means of subsistence of the peasantry. Such primitive accumulation meant that the recipocal rights of Indian feudalism were therefore displaced by the potentially unlimited exploitation of a newly created class of landlords (21). Losing any traditional right to the land for their own sustenance, many Indian peasants experienced a qualitative decline of social life and deepening poverty with devastating consequences—including the periodic cholera outbreaks that devastated 19th century India resulting in tens of millions of lost lives.

While Marx was clearly aware of the real qualitative regression involved in these social developments and catastrophes, Anderson contends there remained unresolved contradictions in his thought, in particular in his concept of “Oriental despotism.” For example, Marx contended that the immense geographic spaces of Asia gave rise to the “centralizing power of Government,” which was the only effective means to successfully establish large-scale irrigation and other public works. This was in contrast to Europe where such needs instead “drove private enterprise to voluntary association” (16).

Setting aside for now the historical accuracy of such an assessment it is the structure of Marx’s argument that is of immediate concern. Marx at the Margins is interested in the reproduction of the trope of “Asiatic despotism” in Marx’s thought and how his views, according to Anderson, subsequently change. As Anderson suggests, Marx still considered in a one-sided fashion the relationship between peasant struggles to retain the communal character of the land and the development of private property relations. Maintaining that in India the “idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism,” because such spaces contained no internally generated antagonisms, rendering human beings “transformed” from “a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny” and fundamentally reflecting a “stagnatory, and vegetative life” (16). An enclosed and self-sufficient village world propelled by simple craft and agricultural production corresponded to a changeless mode of social existence that gave rise to, or underpinned unchanging “despotic” societies of Asia. Despite drawing attention to the regressions set in motion by colonialism, Marx continued to situate the development of private property as the negation of the so-called “Asiatic mode of production.”

Not only did the possibilities of historical change in India remain located in the antagonisms introduced by British colonialism. Those very antagonisms seemed to abstractly lead to the duplication of a particular historical development as a universal expression of all historical change: “England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia” (22). Thus the incorporation of Britain and India into an expanding world capitalism continued to be conceived one-sidedly. If Marx remained embedded within a racist European historiographic tradition concerning non-Western societies that traversed the likes of Adam Smith and Hegel among others, Marx’s ability to make any empirical advances in the concrete study of non-Western societies was limited by inaccurate histories written by colonial officials.

It “supports communist tendencies in people’s minds”

According to Anderson, Marx’s somewhat deterministic views of historical change in non-Western societies were significantly modified beginning with the Grundrisse, remained an important theme in Capital, which culminated in his Ethnological Notebooks and late writings on the Russian peasant commune. Anderson devotes chapters five and six to the conceptual changes in Marx’s thinking about the possibilities of historical development within communal, “precapitalist” forms of labor and land, and their relationship to the struggle of the proletariat. Anderson argues that instead of treating non-Western societies as an undifferentiated whole conditioned by a few key features, Marx begins to consider more seriously how these societies change through internal contradiction, develop various permutations, and in the process become sites of potential communist revolution. Such changes in Marx’s thinking have profound implications for his theory of history.

Typical of this change, Anderson tells us, is the growing realization by Marx that communal land need not necessarily be expropriated as private property in order to develop its productive power. As an example Anderson contrasts Marx’s extensive notes on Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society and Engel’s The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State. The comparison is significant because Engels based much of his own book on Marx’s notes. As Anderson writes, “Engels, who concentrated on the rise of private property, missed the possibility that collectivist forms of domination that minimized private property could also create very pronounced social hierarchies” (204, his emphasis). If such forms of social organization could develop within communal societies, for instance caste-type systems of social hierarchy, then so too could their alternatives. There was therefore the potential for what Marx called “ a more despotic or a more democratic form” of communally based society (157). Marx no longer saw communal societies as an undifferentiated and unchanging whole—as he had with India in the early 1850s—and began to give attention, writes Anderson, to the “broad changes in India’s communal forms,” suggesting that he no longer saw it as an “‘unchanging’ society without any real history, as in 1853” (209).

No longer seeing the capitalist privatization and modernization of communal land and labor as a necessary step toward the conditions for communist revolution, Anderson argues that Marx now saw in a positive sense that “communal social forms in Russia and Asia represented an obstacle and a challenge to bourgeois property relations” (205). With this in mind, Marx approvingly quotes from Russian sociologist Maskim Kovalevsky on the policy of the French National Assembly towards Algeria in the early 1870s. As representatives of the bourgeoisie, their goal was “[t]he formation of private landownership [ ] as the necessary condition of all progress in the political and social sphere. The further maintenance of communal property, ‘as a form that supports communist tendencies in people’s minds’ is dangerous both for the colony and for the homeland” (219-220).

In previous moments Marx’s stagist conception of historical development would put his theory—at least nominally—on the side of the French bourgeoisie and colonialists. After all, both saw the conversion of communal forms of land holding and labor as “progress.” Now Marx suggested the opposite. While the French capitalists and colonialists called their plans “progress,” in fact the bourgeoisie wanted to separate, as Marx again quotes Kovalevsky, “the Arabs from their natural bond to the soil to break the last strength of the clan unions thus being dissolved, and thereby, any danger of rebellion.” The breaking of the social basis of Algerian society was key to the transfer of land to the colonists and the creation of a labor force to work those landholdings. In the Algerian fight against French colonialism Marx saw a corresponding struggle to that of the Paris Commune. Anderson comments that Marx was making “a connection between those who suppressed a modern ‘commune’ set up by the workers of Paris and those who were seizing indigenous communal landholdings in Algeria” (220).

At the same time, Marx continued to contrast communally based societies, which remained “confined” to a “restricted level of economic and social development,” to capitalist society. Marx continues with the idea that the social relations and productive power of capitalism established the conditions to realize a “universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces” that was not possible in previous modes of production. As Anderson writes, quoting the Grundrisse, the revolutionary potential unleashed by capitalist society “stood in contrast to the ‘predetermined yardstick’ of precapitalist societies, with their fixed absolutes focused upon the past. Instead, the future-oriented modern human being, he writes, is engaged in ‘the absolute movement of becoming’” (159). Precapitalist modes of production and social relations, Marx says, inevitably produce local and closed societies that repeatedly reproduce themselves with little change. Universality, in terms of the potential of individual and social development, is not possible.

Marx does not abandon the idea that capitalist social relations lay the foundation for a communist society. He continued to compare capitalist to non-capitalist social relations in order to present a picture of what Anderson calls the former’s “perverse uniqueness” (181). Capitalism created a new class that was radically separated from the means of labor. Because of their closed off condition, isolated individual workers compete to sell their ability to labor to capitalists. Only through this act of exchange in the receipt of wages can these workers meet their needs. The proletariat is, then, alienated from all needs. It cannot realize any need except through reproducing its alienation as a means to obtain money in search of those needs.

Conversely, as Anderson reminds us, Marx writes that in precapitalist society “the individual does not become independent vis à vis the commune” (159). Here the individual is not completely shut off from the means of production and, as a consequence, Marx holds, “direct relations of dominance and servitude” prevail (183). What is the connection? The person is not separated from the means of labor and therefore the product of labor is not alienated from their activity. Further, because the means of production are considered communal property, a direct relationship to the means of production, for example a peasant to the land, means that the person’s existence is self-identical to a social role—such as caste, guild or any clearly defined community such as a clan. In these circumstances, according to Marx, there is no standpoint from which the person experiences this role external to oneself. Exploitation appears directly in the form of a “natural” domination.

In capitalism, exploitation is experienced indirectly because, while nominally free, the working class is profoundly dispossessed of the means of labor. The working class is “free” to sell its ability to labor, or die, clearly no choice at all. However, the appearance of freedom underlies these relations because they are mediated indirectly through things, i.e. commodities, the most important, “universal” commodity being money. Unlike in precapitalist societies, according to Marx, here the means of production and the product of labor appear as external and dominate the person. There can be no self-identification on the part of the proletarian with the means of production and the product of labor, which conditions her struggle for freedom in unique ways.

Dispossessed of all direct ties, the proletarian is radically individual and, nevertheless, interdependent and conditioned by cooperative labor. Therefore, given its state of complete separation from the object of labor, the proletariat as individual and as a class conducts a relentless struggle to appropriate the means of production. While for Marx communal labor served as a basis for communistic struggle it was also true that there remained certain limitations in the development of these social relations. Communal forms of labor provided an obstacle to “the labor of an individual from becoming private labor and his product a private product, it causes individual labor to appear rather as the unmediated function of a member of the social organism” (161).

The revolutionary character of capitalism overturns all social bonds and anything fixed. It frees the individual only to reduce her to an automaton. Capitalism frees the means of production only to turn it into an apparatus of virtually unlimited domination. Such a condition is a terrible prospect, which for Marx makes capitalism the most exploitative and socially devastating society ever known. In precapitalist societies the extraction of surplus by the ruling class was consumed as a use-value. Despite their exploitation and oppressiveness, these societies continued to have the human being as the purpose of production. Conversely, the capitalist above all seeks unlimited surplus as its own end. The reproduction of human beings is incidental to his logic. For Marx, there is a universality and expansiveness about capitalism that precapitalist societies lack.

Yet such universality also contains tremendous potential. The proletariat struggles to appropriate this potential by realizing it in new social forms through the establishment of new society. The productive power unleashed by capitalism potentially frees human beings from the problems of scarcity, but, equally important, lays the foundation for the means to collectively and individual expand, develop and realize human powers and needs in a way not seen in history.

“A higher form of an ‘archaic’ type”

Anderson speaks of a multi-linear theory of history emerging in Marx’s work, which gradually displaces the unilinear concept that had characterized his earlier thinking. Anderson argues that this new line of thought begins to fully take shape in the Grundrisse. He quotes Raya Dunayevskaya, who notes that the “historic sweep” of the Grundrisse “allows Marx, during the discussion of the relationship of ‘free’ labor as alienated labor to capital, to pose the question of, and excursion into, pre-capitalist societies” (155). Similarly, Anderson contends, the “subtext” of Capital implicitly suggested “how the very existence of these noncapitalist societies implied the possibility of alternative ways of organizing social and economic life,” allowing Marx “to elaborate modern, progressive alternatives to capitalism” (181).

By raising the idea of a multi-linear theory of history, Anderson infers that Marx’s “excursion” is about far more than distinguishing the particular form of labor in capitalist society. Instead, as Dunayevskaya’s insight suggests, Marx was searching for a total conception of human history, where the successive alienated forms of social existence made up a single arc from so-called called primitive communism, an original egalitarian society with little social division of labor, to communism in its “higher phase”—a post-capitalist society.

Placing capitalism in relation to other modes of life that exist contemporaneously and in the past allowed Marx to historicize capitalism. Bourgeois thought naturalizes capitalist social relations, making their existence given, pre-determined and eternal. For this reasons bourgeois thought has a unilinear conception of history that sees the destruction of other types of society as progressive development. By historicizing capitalism, Marx is able to show how it is a transitional society, subject to historical development, generating the subjects whose activity constantly revolts against it and thereby brings it to an end. Humanity exists and has existed, Marx argues, in other social forms besides capitalist relations. Those modes of life serve as “alternatives to capitalism,” as Anderson puts it, precisely because they are social forms in which the relation between the creation of uses and their appropriation is not severed. There is a direct link between labor and the means of production. In many ways, therefore, for Marx this represents a qualitatively higher moment of realization of human existence than capitalist society, which destroys the connection to the production of uses and their direct appropriation by the producers.

For this reason Marx often drew attention to the retrogression of capitalism, nowhere more emphatically than the course of primitive accumulation. Anderson contends that when looking at colonialism in India in the early 1860s there is no longer any sense in Marx, as he was to note of the condition of Ireland, that “truly capitalist relations were beginning to develop in India, or that however painfully, some sort of progressive modernization was taking place; rather, there is a sense of reaching an historical impasse, as the old forms disintegrated without progressive new ones being able to form and develop” (165). This impasse is not limited to primitive accumulation. Capital not only periodically destroys the conditions of labor, ever increasing the level of exploitation of existing workers, but creates a massive surplus of laborers, separated from the land or other means or production yet who can never be regularly employed.

As an example of the relationship different forms of labor, Anderson cites a passage from Capital where Marx examines the kinds of expression found in the work of an Indian artisan as compared to that of the English proletarian. Anderson comments:

Thus, the Indian village system was on one level extremely conservative and restrictive, but on another level, it offered a type of freedom lost to workers under capitalism: autonomy in the actual conduct of their work. This existed because there was as yet no separation of the workers from the objective conditions of production. In this sense, the Indian craft workers—and their medieval European counterparts—exercised an important right indeed, one at the heart of the notion of what is lost when labor becomes alienated. (186)

The village artisan experiences modes of life and, therefore, freedoms unknown to the proletarian. At the same time, of course, the proletariat exists in certain ways far more free than the artisan or the peasant. Although the proletarian is cut off from any means of labor, she is also more free from constraints upon her social personality. Given capitalism’s constant revolutionizing character the proletarian realizes any number of newly created needs and, potentially, appropriate many new uses thereby significantly expanding the personality. As a result, for Marx proletarian existence is potentially far more many-sided than that of previous classes. As Marx suggested, the proletariat is the first truly global class, neither tied to a particular locality nor bound by particular traditions.

There is a dialectical movement between the complete separation of labor from the means of labor, the increasing social wealth of society and, therefore, the appropriation of that wealth as the realization of an expanding human personality. In contrast, the village craftsman creates a limited number of uses in a mode of production that produces for immediate use. However, in capitalism, capital deploys labor in order to produce surplus and not uses. There are no limits to the exploitation of the proletariat by capital in its necessary quest to achieve ever more surplus. This is the meaning of socially necessary labor time. There is an inverse relation between the separation of the proletariat from the means of production and its necessary struggle to appropriate the social wealth of humanity.

Again, Marx does not have a unilinear conception of the uniqueness of capitalist society. Its social relations are one form in historical succession of many others, which also exists along side these forms contemporaneously. It is capitalism that universalizes itself by looking back to precapitalist social relations as well as their continuing presence and finding there its own shadow. Therefore the connection between living labor in the value form and in the precapitalist forms is continually erased and obscured by capital and its interlocutor political economy.

Precapitalist societies are centered around the creation of use-values, which capital interrupts. Communism is the return of the production of use-values. Marx wrote that capital was “in conflict with the working masses, with science, and with the very productive forces it engenders—in short, in a crisis that will end through its own elimination, through the return of modern societies to a higher form of an ‘archaic’ type of collective ownership and production” (234). Thus for Marx the arc of human history is not a straight line but a spiral, which involves a return to the past, but at a qualitatively higher level where the variant historical and contemporary social permutations in the forms of labor that express specific sides of the human personality are now grasped as a totality and, finally, pregnant with the potential for expanded powers. Communism is a return of the past but without the limitations of that past.

In the last chapter of Marx at the Margins, Anderson primarily focuses on Marx’s “ethnological notebooks,” written from 1880-1882 toward the end of his life. What is significant about these writings, Anderson argues, is that they are “concerned not so much with the origins of social hierarchy in the distant past, as with the social relations within contemporary societies under the impact of capitalist globalization” (201).

A central part of these late writings by Marx was the careful study of the Russian peasant commune. Anderson shows how for Marx In concert with a proletarian revolution in Western Europe it was possible that “communal villages could be a starting point for a socialist transformation, one that might avoid the brutal process of the primitive accumulation of capital.” However, “to achieve a successful socialism, Russia would need connections to Western technology and above all, reciprocal relations with the Western labor movement” (196-197). Nevertheless, as the preface to the Russian edition of The Communist Manifesto put it, a revolution in Russia may not only serve as “the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other,” echoing his writings on Poland and Ireland, so “Russia’s peasant communal landownership may serve as the point of departure for a communist development” (235). As Anderson concludes, Marx asserts the “possibility that noncapitalist societies might move directly to socialism on the basis of their indigenous communal forms, without first passing through the stage of capitalism” (224).

In response to the Russian communists who, in the name of Marx, interpreted Capital in abstract ways. Marx complained that they insisted on transforming his “historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of the general course fatally imposed on all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they find themselves placed” (228). The Russian marxists held that Russia had to pass through distinct stages of social develop along the lines of England, which was the central “case study” in Capital. The root of the notion of a deterministic historical development in Marx is summarized in the well-known line in Capital—which Anderson cites—that “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future” (177). Anderson argues it was exactly because of these kind of readings that Marx chose to alter this line. In the French edition of Capital from 1872, Marx alters the sentence in question to read: “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to those that follow it on the industrial path, the image of its own future” (178). Although, given the extent of primitive accumulation, the countries of Western Europe were following the general path of England, this was not so for other regions, still relatively untouched by the violent introduction of capitalist social relations.

The abstract reading of Capital ironically turns historical materialism into a speculative science, creating a theory of history that unfolded deterministically as form empty of any content. As Anderson implies, in contrast Marx is far more historically concrete here, placing a specific kind of labor as developing on its own foundations. Marx argues that it is capitalism that lays the foundations for the peasant commune to leap into communism and, therefore, the commune need not be replaced by capitalist social relations as the precondition of communism.

In the case of the Russian peasant commune, Marx posits the emergence of communism as a synthesis between the Western proletariat and the rural commune. Anderson writes that for Marx “it might be possible to combine Russia’s ancient communal forms with modern technology, this in a less exploitative manner than under capitalism…a new synthesis of the archaic and the modern, one that took advantage of the highest achievements of capitalist modernity” (230). In Marx’s words it is “Precisely because it is contemporaneous with capitalist production, the rural commune may appropriate for itself all the positive achievements and this without undergoing its frightful vicissitudes” (230). In short, the negation of the value-form at the center of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism is not the realization of a universal simply derived from the proletarian experience, but one arrived at by a qualitative leap of all the forms of labor, past and present.

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The Dual Character of the Commodity is the Dual Character of Labor

Marx begins chapter one of Capital by describing the dual character of the commodity. One side of the commodity is defined by how it is used. Marx calls this “use-value.” He defines use by how the commodity “satisfies human needs of whatever kind” (125). The idea of “human needs” plays an important role in Marx’s thought and takes on a number of interrelated meanings. In the German Ideology he argues “The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history” (47). Throughout history human beings have produced things, or “uses,” to address their basic and expanded needs, which gives rise to particular forms of society, specific kinds of social relations and subjectivities.

When looked at as merely a use, the commodity is indistinguishable from the process of satisfying needs as a general characteristic of all human societies. So, as various kinds of uses to fulfill our many needs, commodities “constitute the material content of wealth, whatever its social form may be.” However, Marx concludes in Capital that a commodity takes on characteristics that are specific to capitalist society, which only becomes clear when he looks at the other side of the commodity: exchange. “In the form of society to be considered here [in Capital] they are also the material bearers of exchange value” (126).

The production of uses to satisfy needs in capitalist society takes a specific form of exchange. While historically there have been other types of exchange, these reflected non-capitalist forms of society. One of Marx’s tasks is to show how the form of exchange in capitalism, and therefore the social relations or form of that society is historically unprecedented and something new.

So the tendency for the production of uses to satisfy needs to take on a specific form of exchange is the other side of the commodity. What form does this exchange take place in capitalism? “Exchange-value appears first of all as the quantitative relation, the proportion, in which use-values of one kind exchange for use-values of another kind” (126). As Marx explains:

The totality of heterogeneous use-values or physical commodities reflects a totality of similarly heterogeneous forms of useful labour, which differ in order, genus, species and variety; in short, a social division of labour. This division of labour is a necessary condition for commodity production….Only the products of mutually independent acts of labour, performed in isolation, can confront each other as commodities (132).

Marx suggests that we can only understand the capitalist form of society if we grasp how the creation and use of something for need is related to the need for exchange specific to capitalism. It is important how Marx characterizes these “acts of labour” as “mutually independent,” and yet “isolated” from each other. Under capitalism our association with each other is not only one in which we are alienated from each other, but we are also alienated from our many-sided needs, from are many-sided activity. In the capitalist form of society we, in general, only perform one task, separate from all others. Since we cannot satisfy them, we must exchange to satisfy our many needs. Marx writes, “A thing can be useful, and a product of human labour, without being a commodity. He who satisfies his own need with the product of labour admittedly creates use-values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use-values, but use-values for others” (131).

The commodity is therefore not a thing, but a social relation. It is the relation between the labor for use and the labor for exchange. For Marx social relations are relations of labor and the commodity is the form of labor in capitalist society. Marx argues that the dual character of the commodity is also, at the same time, the dual character of labor in capitalist society.

However, before we get into the dual character of labor, the commodified form of labor, it is worth taking a step back for a moment and looking at what Marx exactly means by “labor.” This is critical because if you don’t understand his concept of labor in its philosophical dimensions you cannot grasp Marx’s concept of the human being and therefore his notion of freedom and liberation.

Labor as Self-Activity

Marx says, from a certain perspective, labor for use or need transcends history. It is the fundamental condition of the human being irrespective of any particular form it takes in a given historical period. He writes, “Labour, then, as the creator of use-values, as useful labour, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man an nature, and therefore human life itself” (133). What does it mean that labor mediates “human life itself”?

Marx already began to explore the idea of labor as metabolism in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. In “Estranged Labor,” Marx says if “free, conscious activity is man’s species-character,” then “Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness.” Unlike an animal, which is “immediately identical with its life-activity,” the human being “has conscious life activity” (76). In other words, where animals are bounded by nature, human beings are defined by a different relationship to nature. As a “species-being” they are able to apply their powers of imagination to nature and themselves thereby altering both in significant ways according to their conscious intention.

To be sure, like the animal world, “man is a part of nature,” “Man lives on nature….which he must remain in continuous intercourse if he is not to die” (76). However, because human beings are consciously separated from the natural world, but part of a bodily continuum with it, in reproducing themselves they must transform nature and their own selves and its conditions of life. In doing so, according to Marx, the human being constantly transforms nature and itself into “an objective world by his practical activity.” The metabolic process of “labor” is the realization of the imagination in material forms, the constant and alchemic transformation of nature and oneself (76). The creation of the social world and oneself is the consequence and process of self-activity, which is the essence of the human being. Marx writes, “The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species-life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created” (77). In the end, self-activity—the metabolic process—in its ideal state, unrestrained by any forms that do not correspond to its essence, is the state of freedom. For the human being the criteria of liberation must be, Marx concludes, “his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity” (76).

Of course, as Marx makes clear, we do not exist in this state of “free activity,” where our “own life is an object” for ourselves. The reason is the prevailing form of social relations or the social division of labor. In The German Ideology, Marx argues that human beings “distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence.” Here the objectification of self-activity—as he puts it in “Estranged Labor”—takes on a specific social form or organization to produce the uses in order to fulfill human needs. Marx calls this a “mode of production.” However, “This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part” (37). It is a form that mediates the totality of self-activity and the social organization of that self-activity at a given historical moment. The mode of production, a “mode of life,” is the form of existence that mediates self-activity, human labor and essence.

It follows that history, then, is the process and narrative of the successive forms—mode of production, mode of life—that self-activity takes. It is the way in which self-activity is diverted from being “free activity,” and how the metabolic process, the objectification of oneself in the world, creates its own prison, realizes itself in forms that closes off the totality of its potential powers and expression. It is the process whereby the development of the totality of the human personality, the realization of its many-sided powers and needs, becomes disfigured and stunted. The forms it takes or through which it is mediated alienate the content of human activity from itself. Communism is both the constant movement of this content towards the self-abolition of its alienated forms in which it takes shape—such as the proletariat—and the state of freedom where this content—our many-sided self-activity—establishes its corresponding socio-political form in which it finds expression and development.

A valuable picture of Marx’s concept of the human being emerges behind the concept of labor that is at the absolute center of Capital and all his work. “Labor” cannot be understood reductively as an economic category, but has to be grasped in its philosophical dimensions as transformative (metabolic) self/social activity. Marx is not writing “political economy” he is negating it as hopelessly trapped in the categories of capitalist society.

Social Relations and Value

Returning to chapter one of Capital, Marx asks how can these alienated, isolated individuals, producing a single use, reproducing themselves as a one-sided activity, be interrelated and thereby produce the many kinds of uses necessary for their reproduction as a whole? He identifies labor—the “metabolic” process—as the “common
element” which makes the exchange of varied uses, separated as isolated activities, possible.

What does Marx mean? If human beings are unique in that they “produce their means of subsistence” they may do so only collectively. The “means of subsistence,” a “mode of production” is, then, as he puts it in The German Ideology, necessarily a “mode of co-operation” (49). Through this co-operation we come into being as social individuals, existing as relations of “mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour is divided” (52). Our consciousness is constituted by “the necessity of associating with the individuals around” us (49). Society, therefore, is the relations of the interdependent self-activity of its many members. In Capital, Marx argues that this common activity is broken up into separate, atomistic activities, though the exchange of these activities is vital in order to reproduce society and us. With the social division of labor the exchange of our activity—our mutual interdependence—must be mediated by, or take place through, a form that expresses this mutual and internal alienation. Separated from the other kinds of activity that are necessary to fulfill our many-sided needs, the activity of others and the “uses” they create must come to us in this alienated form. Within in these capitalist social relations the commodity—as a relation to our self and others—represents the form of how this interaction is achieved.

Marx says, “the exchange relation of commodities is characterized precisely by its abstraction from their use-values” (127). He indicates that at the end of this process of abstraction there is not “an atom of use-value” as the use loses its “material constituents and forms that make it a use-value” (128). Though it is the specific qualities of a use—what makes it useful—which isolated individuals need, in order to obtain them they must do so through a form exchange where “[a]ll its sensuous characteristics are extinguished.” Marx is clear though—and I’ve already emphasized this above—since the commodity is a form of labor, a form of self-activity, the transformation of labor for use, for needs, into the necessary labor for exchange involves, ultimately, an alienation into something Marx calls “value.” He describes the movement this way:

All its sensuous characteristics are extinguished. Nor is it any longer the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason or the spinner, or of any other particular kind of productive labour. With the disappearance of the useful character of the products of labour, the useful character of the kinds of labour embodied in them also disappears; this in turn entails the disappearance of the different concrete forms of labour. They can no longer be distinguished, but are all together reduced to the same kind of labour, human labour in the abstract. Let us now look at the residue of the products of labour. There is nothing left of them in each case but the same phantom-like objectivity; they are merely congealed quantities of homogenous human labour, i.e. of human labour-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure. All these things now tell us is that human labour-power has been expended to produce them, human labour is accumulated in them. As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values—commodity values. (128)

Something happens to our living metabolic process or self-activity, where its concrete, particular and “sensuous characteristics” take on the features and experience of being “abstract,” “congealed” and “homogenous.” The specific qualities of self-activity and labor are reduced to a mere quantity Marx calls “value,” which takes on a “phantom-like objectivity.” He makes this equation explicit when he says that value is “human labour…objectified” (129). This is a critical transition in only the first few pages of Capital.

In “Estranged Labor,” Marx describes the same transition he does here between concrete, living labor (activity for use and need), and abstract, dead labor (activity for exchange and value). We have to recall that for Marx human essence is the objectification of oneself in the creation of the social world through conscious intention. To the extent this activity or metabolic process takes a social form that corresponds to this essence, it can be characterized as “free activity.” However, in capitalism this process of objectification of oneself is dramatically inverted through the value-form, the commodity-form, which is the social form of capitalist society. As he writes in “Estranged Labor,” here

the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation. (71)

Self-activity is no longer the realization of the object of our imaginations through the transformation of nature, and us, but our realization as objects determined by social imperatives not of our own choosing. It is for this reason that society (and ourselves) feels like an external force that determines or controls us from without. In The German Ideology, Marx again connects the material organization of society to the form its “metabolism” takes: “as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape” (53). Our “own deed” reproduces the form of our own objectification, our own imprisonment in the form of existence of the proletariat. The world takes on a “phantom-like objectivity” because it is nothing but our own ghostly self-activity trapped in the dead body of the commodified, value-form.

When Marx writes about the process of abstraction in the production of value, he is addressing the fact that not only the “sensuous characteristics [of the use] are extinguished,” but also our “sensuous” relationship to others and ourselves as well. It is the case because these relationships are mediated abstractly by value, taking the form of exchange-value. Therefore we experience a loss of “sensuousness” by being separated from our self-activity and mutual relations. We lose concrete, bodily contact with and conscious control of the object of our activity by being converted into an object ourselves—one object, abstracted from our essence, among many others in the capitalist social world of commodities.

That value is human activity “objectified,” according to Marx, takes on a specific character that is a unique consequence of the social division of labor in capitalist society. Individual labor, isolated within a single activity and use, becomes social labor only through the form of our abstract relations with each other reflected in this capitalist division of labor. Value is not a thing. It is the unity or relation of all our individual activities that are at the same time separate from each other because of the capitalist division of labor. Therefore the universal necessity of mutual social relations, as well as our essential self-activity as total and many-sided, can only have in capitalism a necessary unity through value. Thus, as Marx puts it, the “total labour-power of society, which is manifested in the values of the world of commodities, [merely] counts here as one homogenous mass of human labour-power” (129). Value is the sum of all our interrelated self-activity within the form of the capitalist social division of labor—the form our social relations take in capitalist society. Separated from each other and ourselves, yet bound together, the process of mutual self-activity must be conducted through the form of value, that is, exchange measured by the criteria of value.

Since value is a relation and not a thing we can’t see it. It takes form only in the objects produced (uses) as a result of our commodified interactions. In this situation our metabolic process is reduced to—or takes the form of—a merely quantitative relation that Marx calls “socially necessary labor time.” It is the “labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society” (129). Labor time in capitalist society is marked by its own “socially necessary” measure of our mutual activity of what something is “worth” and therefore determine on what basis or value it will exchange. Value becomes the normative social standard that dictates our existence. What is “socially necessary” under capitalism is the organization of society and our labor to produce value and, specifically, surplus value for the capitalist. Therefore our relations our mediated by, or reduced to the abstract form of “exchange-values,” as “commodities [that] are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time” (130). If the “common element” that makes the exchange of uses possible at all is our mutual self-activity, it takes the alienated form of an abstraction called value: “The common factor in the exchange relation….is therefore its value” and “exchange-value [is] the necessary mode of expression, or form of appearance, of value” (128).

Value and the Reproduction of Alienation

The implication that value is human labor “objectified” is important to dwell on, even if it only becomes more clear in section four. I will discuss it more fully when looking at that section, but a brief note is helpful now in order to understand value. In “Theses on Feuerbach,” Marx argues we must “conceive human activity itself as objective activity.” This idea is further developed in “Estranged Labor,” where he says that self-activity is a process where, through the interaction with others and nature we objectify ourselves by reproducing in material form our imaginations. In The German Ideology, Marx writes that this process only emerges collectively as a social process, what he refers to as the social relations of production.

Value is the inversion of this process. The objectifying “metabolic process” ends up being one where we become objectified. The social relations of production have been turned against us, existing as something seemingly external. Yet, as the commodity relation shows, it is also not outside of us. The relationship between use and exchange is dialectical, a unity of opposites, making them mutually dependent upon each other. The need for uses compels us to exchange. Exchange is only possible because what is being exchanged is needed or useful. In capitalism the content of human needs constantly reproduces the form of our objectification. Our own metabolism provides the fuel, so to speak, for the system to function. Our activity, then, objectifying or reproducing ourselves in the world, returns to us as a “phantom-like objectivity,” which is the living content of human activity embodied in the dead form of the commodity relation and value (128). This return of the living dead, existing as we do in a world haunted by our own ghostly presence, a world somehow made by us but without our control and behind our backs, is not an illusion. It is real and “objective.” We exist as value and, at the same time, we do not. We are the proletariat and, at the same time, an essence that constantly struggles toward the abolition of the alienated social forms we take in capitalist modernity.

By measuring social necessary labor time, value mediates the equivalence between different types of labor and the total of all our collective self-activity taken as a whole. It also embodies the abstract, alienated quality of our interactions within the form of capitalist social relations. Finally, it is the abstract power of capital that reduces our capacity to labor—our metabolic process—to the one single goal of producing surplus value for the capitalist. Value becomes detached from use and the necessary satisfaction of human needs, coming to impose its own logic and its own needs. The mode of production becomes separated from the means of subsistence, imposing a logic that is becomes antithetical to human needs.

Thus we must produce to sell, and we sell according to social necessary labor time, to the value of our labor power that is coerced out of us in this particular form through the control of the means of production by the capitalist. Value becomes for Marx, in a transition from the individual producers, the nightmarish self-reproducing, totalizing social power of capital itself. It is the inverse of the many-sided potential of our self-activity and collective humanity, in short, of human freedom, creativity and collective wealth. Marx is speaking here of the objective and objectifying logic of capitalist society, that point in which value as an autonomous, self-reproducing relation determines the life-activity of society and ourselves as a whole. The realization of human powers is of no concern from the standpoint of capital and the capitalist. In terms of class struggle, which is immanent in the categories of chapter one, but not developed until later in Capital, the capitalist embodies the relentless imperatives of value, and organizes society and its reproduction through determining what is socially necessary labor time, which measures our lives on a daily basis.

Value as the Inverted Form of Our Expanding Creative Powers

However, given that value depends upon living labor, in the end it cannot detach itself from the metabolic process of human beings. If it tries to separate itself, then the capitalist system would break down. Therefore Marx ends section two on this critical point. Despite its apparent power to reproduce itself and destroy the world and us to achieve its own seemingly autonomous ends, value cannot escape its dialectical relation with living labor. This is clear in the dialectical relationship between use and exchange as the two poles in the commodity relation, the embryonic relation of capitalist society.

Marx says that since value is objectified living labor, it does not find its source in changing technology of machines designed to increase productivity. That too is produced by living labor, now materialized as dead labor, objects that have no meaning or function accept in relation to living activity. Marx writes that “the greater the productivity of labour, the less the labour-time required to produce an article, the less the mass of labour-crystallized in that article, and the less its value. Inversely, the less the productivity of labour, the greater the labour-time necessary to produce an article, and the greater its value.” Therefore, Marx concludes, “The value of a commodity represents……Simple average labour….More complex labour counts only as intensified, or rather multiplied simple labour, so that a smaller quantity of complex labour is considered equal to a larger quantity of simple labour” (135).

There are important implications here for the understanding of the relationship between labor and value. Marx goes onto explain:

In itself, an increase in the quantity of use-values constitutes an increase in material wealth. Two coats will clothe two men, one coat will only clothe one man, etc. Nevertheless, an increase in the amount of material wealth may correspond to a simultaneous fall in the magnitude of its value. This contradictory movement arises out of the twofold character of labour. By ‘productivity’ of course, we always mean the productivity of concrete useful labour; in reality this determines only the degree of effectiveness of productive activity directed towards a given purpose within a given period of time. Useful labour becomes, therefore, a more or less abundant source of products in direct proportion as its productivity rises or falls. As against this, however, variations in productivity have no impact whatever on the labour itself represented in value. As productivity is an attribute of labour in its concrete useful form, it naturally ceases to have any bearing on that labour as soon as we abstract from its concrete useful form. The same labour, therefore, performed for the same length of time, always yields the same amount of value, independently of any variations in productivity. (136-137)

The “twofold character of labour” in capitalism—the essence of the commodity form—means that only concrete human activity can put to use or realize abstract value embodied in those uses. The less time it takes to make each use means, therefore, there may be more uses, but each one contains less value. To realize more value the capitalist must expand, “intensify” and “multiply” productivity, inevitably leading to increased exploitation. Value remains irrevocably attached to concrete human labor.

The implications are profound and there is a terrible irony here. Greater productivity dramatically expands our power to produce uses and satisfy needs. However, the new social, cooperative and individual dimensions of this new expansive power remain only a potential, struggling within and against the form of production for value. Instead, in the inverted world of capitalism, increased productivity leads to the general immiseration of the proletariat. Marx is thinking here of the kind of contradiction he sees at the heart of capitalist modernity. In “Estranged Labor,” Marx says, “the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production” (69). Rather than the expanded powers of humanity, we have the “intensified” and “multiplied” powers of capital. As Marx argues again in “Estranged Labor,” for the worker, “the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him as his own….the more powerful labor becomes, the more powerless becomes the worker” (72-73).

Such a vision by Marx of our existence in capitalist society is echoed in the relationship between productivity and concrete labor in the passage quoted above from Capital. “By ‘productivity’ of course, we always mean the productivity of concrete useful labour,” Marx writes. Therefore “variations in productivity have no impact whatever on the labour itself represented in value. As productivity is an attribute of labour in its concrete useful form, it naturally ceases to have any bearing on that labour as soon as we abstract from its concrete useful form” (my emphasis). In capitalism, knowledge and tools that enable productivity are separated from concrete labor. Yet as objects of the expanding wealth and capacity of human society they are produced by concrete labor. The collective wealth—the alchemic, expanding and “multiplying” powers of our imaginations and its materialization around and within us—is instead appropriated by capital. In the inverted world of value, humanity’s collective wealth is used to “intensify” and “multiply” its exploitation. The value-form renders this as a separation: a separation between means of subsistence and means of production, manual and mental labor, subject and object, form and content. In the end we are unable to appropriate the expanding powers, objects and social world we create, which is instead appropriated by the capital and the capitalist as surplus value. As Marx concluded at the end of The German Ideology, the objective reality and “necessity” of communism flows from the daily logic of the struggle to achieve such a reappropriation, an explosion of the value-form of existence as the proletariat:

Thus things have now come to such a pass that the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but, also, merely to safeguard their very existence. The appropriation of these forces is itself nothing more than the development of the individual capacities corresponding to the material instruments of production. The appropriation of a totality of instruments of production is, for this very reason, the development of a totality of capacities in the individuals themselves. This appropriation is further determined by the persons appropriating. Only the proletarians of the present day, who are completely shut off from all self-activity, are in a position to achieve a complete and no longer restricted self-activity, which consists in the appropriation of a totality of productive forces and in the thus postulated development of a totality of capacities. (96)

The uprising in Egypt is escalating. Imperialists who have said that ‘stability’ is what makes for good democracy, racists who have said that Arabs do not want their freedom, patriarchs who have said that women do not attend, much less lead, protests, and the Western middle classes who have wanted to paint the Egyptian uprising as a Twitter and Facebook-happy ‘Cedar Revolution’ of doctors and lawyers, have all in the last two weeks seen their pseudo-sociological assumptions about the Egyptian people collapse.

On Tuesday, one of the largest pro-democracy demonstrations yet went down in Cairo – this after days of the US media reporting, and the Mubarak regime requesting, a return to “normalcy” in Egypt – and perhaps even more significantly, new and militant strikes are now emerging throughout Egypt: six thousand Suez Canal workers have gone on strike in Suez, Port-Said, and Ismailia. They are being joined by railway technicians and oil workers, by government, sanitation, and court employees, and by factory workers both in Suez and historic, militant Mahalla. Independent trade unions are forming, and calls are being circulated for both single-day and more sustained General Strikes. The working class is moving in Egypt.

And while the Mubarak regime unleashes both direct and extra-parliamentary repression against the pro-democracy forces, while Torturer-in-Chief Omar Suleiman issues a mixture of pleas, threats, and mild economic ‘reforms’, and while both the Obama administration and the Egyptian opposition itself cannot coherently say whether they are for dictatorship or democracy, cannot unequivocally call for the Mubarak regime to be dismantled and for Mubarak and Suleiman to step down, the Egyptian people are showing no signs of giving up, and are continuing to call for the entire government’s dismissal.

The Egyptian uprising is very quickly showing the signs of revolution. Bloggers are talking about “the Cairo Commune” and are making parallels to the Spanish Civil War. Popular committees are emerging in certain Cairo neighborhoods – to handle food distribution, medical care, and anti-looting patrols – and shop-floor councils are emerging in different parts of Egypt that are circumventing and defying the official union bureaucracy, that are struggling to form new and independent labor unions, and that are coordinating new and militant strikes. Tunisia is forming nation-wide District Committees, and some people, both in the Egyptian and western Libertarian Left, are calling for this to be urgently replicated in Egypt itself.

While the future of the Egyptian uprising is still unclear, what is clear is that we are seeing, right before our eyes, the dramatic illustration of an old Leninist mantra: that the proletariat, through concrete, revolutionary action, accomplishes the democratic tasks that the bourgeoisie can only weakly and hypocritically proclaim.

The Egyptian uprising is proving to be one of the most inspiring, humbling, and significant world events in the last 40 years, and it raises many rich and pressing questions for the US Left. These questions have been expanded upon and written about more eloquently elsewhere (for a start, see the links below), but we would like to list just a few of them here.

Is the Egyptian uprising a revolution? What needs to happen for it to become a revolution? What is the role of the military, both the brass and the rank and file? What is the role of the working class and these new, independent proto-unions? Where have women been in this struggle? What might the effects of the Egyptian uprising be on US imperialism, Israeli apartheid, and other authoritarian regimes in the Middle East? What are the two competing conceptions of democracy in this conflict, and why is the concrete relationship between democracy and socialism so crucial to pinpoint and understand for the revolutionary Left? What is the proper, non-sectarian attitude to have towards political Islam? Finally, where is the Egyptian solidarity movement in the US? Why is it so weak? What needs to happen to make it stronger?

The following links provide some crucial background on the dynamics of the Egyptian uprising. We’ve included them here and would like to invite discussion.

Paul Amar: Why Mubarak Is Out | Jadaliyya
Reviewing the factional interests within the Egyptian ruling class and its intersections with the uprising.

Juan Cole: State And Class In Egypt | Informed Comment
Discusses the declining legitimacy of the Egyptian ruling class.

Adam Shatz: After Mubarak | London Review of Books
Summary of the early U.S. and Israeli response to the uprising in Egypt.

Asa Winstanley: The World Turned Upside Down | New Left Project
Argues for the profound lasting effects of the uprisings no matter its immediate outcome.

Jubayr: The Labor Movement In Egypt | Gathering Forces
Background to the new workers movement in Egypt.

Richard Seymour: Egypt’s Working Class Is On The Move | Lenin’s Tomb
Richard Seymour surveys some of the demands of radical workers in the movement.

Revolutionary Socialists: Statement By The Revolutionary Socialists | Lenin’s Tomb
To do list put out by the Revolutionary Socialists group of Egypt.

Advance the Struggle: Workers’ Control And The Revolutions In North Africa | Advance the Struggle
What way forward for the North African (and international) revolution?

The week of August 30^th, 2010 saw five people murdered by police throughout Washington State, including John T. Williams. Williams was a First Nations carver who was shot four times by police officer Ian Birk while walking with a closed carving knife and a block of wood.  Birk gave Williams only four seconds warning before opening fire, and Williams, who is partially deaf, may not have heard his commands.

This murder, along with several other recent cases of police brutality against Black and Latino folks in Seattle has sparked a small but vibrant movement against police terrorism.  Here we will analyze the potentials and the limitations of this movement.  While we are very critical of some of the players in this movement, our goal is not to hate on folks- it is to open a rigorous and honest discussion about how we can advance the struggle beyond its current limitations.   We need to advance the struggle because we don’t want more people in our communities to die at the hands of killer cops. Every day we are struggling and organizing against the effects of the economic crisis in our workplaces , schools, and neighborhoods and we need to organize citywide and country-wide networks of resistance  and solidarity to make sure these small embryonic struggles are not shut down through joint repression by the bosses, landlords, and cops.

This reflection is broken into two essays.  In the first one, “The Rainbow Coalition stomps the flames”, Nightwolf analyzes how liberal people of color leaders worked with the cops to try and dampen the explosion of anger in communities of color  following John T. Williams’ death; he puts this in historical context, showing how it relates to the successes and failures of the 1960s and 70s movements against white supremacy.

In the second piece, “Workers spread the embers”, Mamos analyzes some of the small but promising actions against police brutality that have emerged in Seattle the past few months and asks how these actions can deepen and how they can connect to other forms of working class organizing going on in Seattle now.  He  explores the role that  militant worker networks like Seattle Solidarity Network and International Workers and Students for Justice could play in challenging state violence.

While these essays reflect on anti-police brutality struggles, they raise much broader questions that are really relevant for a number of different struggles in Seattle and in other cities.  While these essays may not present a full answer to the question of how to stop police brutality, they are an attempt to prompt discussion about the current political impasse our movements are  in and to think creatively about how to move beyond it.

The Rainbow Coalition stomps the flames

A reflection by Nightwolf

The week of August 30th, 2010 saw five people murdered by police throughout Washington State, one of whom was John T. Williams. Williams was a First Nations carver who was shot four times by police officer Ian Birk on September 2nd while walking with a closed carving knife and a block of wood.

In response to this the murder of John T. Williams, the native community held a meeting at the Daybreak Star Cultural Center on September 8th, 2010. The meeting was attended by many in the native community as well as those other oppressed people who wanted some answers to the ongoing reality of police terrorism. It was held on land re-claimed through an occupation by native militants during the heyday of the American Indian Movement and other anti-racist movements of the 60s and 70s. However, despite the heroic history of the place and its leaders, the meeting was not a rebirth of those dynamic struggles; it was obviously an attempt to quell unrest today in 2010.

The police knew they had to be diplomatic in their relations with communities of color. Earlier in the year a black woman was punched in the face by a cop and another cop stomped a Latino man’s head after saying “I’m gonna beat the fucking Mexican piss out of you homie, you feel me?”  This is the reality many oppressed peoples have to deal with on a regular basis but I imagine that having these instances of terror caught on camera sparked more outrage. The murder of Williams had the potential to stoke the flame. Being aware of this potential, police officials staged this meeting at the Daybreak Star to “engage” the public and listen to concerns and suggestions with assistance from native  leaders organized in the Seattle Police’s Native Advisory Council.

I went to this meeting with a group of comrades from Unity and Struggle and International Workers and Students for Justice (IWSJ). We are a multiracial crew – native, black, latino, asian, and white. We have been active in the struggle against budget cuts to high school and University public education and in custodian labor struggles at the University of Washington; some of us are custodians, some are workers in other industries, and some are students and unemployed young workers who are deeply affected by the economic crisis.

We decided to get involved in anti-police work recently because the custodian organizing at the UW has been grossly repressed by management and the cops. Meetings have been infiltrated by undercover cops, two of our comrades were arrested for interviewing custodians about working conditions, and rank-and-file custodian leaders have been followed and harassed by the Campus and the Seattle Police Departments. All of this is creating an atmosphere of fear and hesitancy to continue fighting among rank and file workers. This has created the very objective need to begin taking up a struggle against the cops because it can open up the possibility of  building solidarity with broader layers of the community which could breathe new life into renewed custodian and other workplace struggles.

At the same time, we wanted to mobilize the networks we had built last year in the anti-budget cuts and labor struggles to stand in solidarity with the Williams family and our fellow people of color and working folks who are brutalized by the cops. We felt that an injury to one is an injury to all and we wanted to do our part to build the movement. As our comrades in Advance the Struggle have argued, the anti-budget cuts movement cannot afford to ignore the struggle against state violence.

So I came to the meeting intending to meet fellow militants among those attending. We recognized that we did not have enough people power to initiate an event ourselves and attempted to reach out to others who might want to initiate action to see if we could support them and work together.

It should be said that this kind of meeting has its origins in the sixties and seventies when police across the U.S. recognized that they needed to take preemptive measures to stop future rebellions such as what was occurring in Watts and various other ghettos. It is public relations. It is not because the police care about our communities; it is simply an effort to maintain control under the guise of a democratic forum by attempting to co-opt a rainbow coalition of middle class “representatives” from our communities who can help keep those of us who are more rebellious from taking independent action.

The set-up was generic when it comes to these kinds of events. Police in a panel claiming that they want to initiate a dialogue with the community. Amongst them were leaders and “representatives” of the native community acting as mediators or, as it turned out, rather overseers for master. Seeing the Native representatives and leaders on the panel with the cops reminded me of all the books I had read as a kid about the history of Native peoples: treaties made, then broken. Some of them seemed to whole-heartedly believe they were helping their people. The police talked of making changes. I knew these were hollow promises. The only thing that comes from peace talks with the state is betrayal. On the panel were native police officers, which came as no surprise. An image of diversity is central to rainbow coalition politics. What seems to really matter is that people of color have the opportunity to be oppressors too. The rainbow coalition came to the forefront in two ways; the broker and the warden roles.

The broker role was apparent in this situation in the sense that these “leaders” seemed to have decided that the most they could push for was that the police be more culturally sensitive and change their trainings in order to be careful next time. In this sense I guess they weren’t as naïve as I thought. They recognized the truth of the matter. A poor person of color’s life isn’t worth much in this society. But the problem is they have no vision for changing the society to alter that fact; they just accept it and work within its limitations. From engaging with folks in the crowd it became evident that not everyone agreed with the position of their “leaders”.

The warden role emerged to make sure that a room that was filled with tension, anger, and fear did not erupt in calls for independent action. An elderly member of the Native community began the meeting with a prayer and speech. He began his monologue with a fiery rhetoric reminiscing about his people and his role in the American Indian Movement. Interwoven with this seemingly radical tone was a call for peace between the community and the police, a call for understanding and patience. It was like a preemptive strike. He had shown his radical credentials, proving in a sense that he was down. It was clear he was an elder and for that he was respected off top.

So when he began to contradict himself and propose peace, it made it difficult for many to rebuke his position. In my experience this has been an ongoing occurrence throughout the Left; elders and leaders using their credentials to quell any questioning of their liberal positions on issues. After the elder and other leaders spoke, it was clear what the tone for the night and the coming weeks would be. Anyone who strayed from the line of peace, cultural understanding, and reconciliation was shut down instantaneously. Elders and respected community members controlled the “rabble” and made sure that everyone was “respectful”, code word for passive.

This in effect caused some to silence themselves or as in the case of one women who spoke, to “stop being angry”.

All of this shows that today the white man cannot govern by cultural justifications alone; he needs a multiracial and multi-gender bureaucracy, a new rainbow coalition, of leaders to keep our communities in check. The power of the rainbow coalition leaders lies in their use of identity politics and generalizations of the identity group they represent. They place themselves in the positions of leadership by fighting for the perceived interest of marginalized groups presenting themselves as fighting to maintain equality. In doing so they have to ensure they continue to have a base of power within these communities which often translates into them becoming wardens in the sense that they must keep dissent from within their communities at bay i.e. generalizing their experiences. It is essential to their power that they show the state that they have a base and that they can control them only if given concessions. To be certain they are often from the oppressed community they are supposed to represent often allowing their dominance to go unquestioned because they know what “their” community needs. They become “representatives “and spokespersons for a community brokering for concessions from those in power.

What has become apparent to me about this rainbow coalition is that they play the role of broker and warden, as mentioned above, over their own people. They gain and maintain their power by claiming to speak for their people justifying that claim by positioning with identity politics. Their attitude seems to say, “I know these communities best therefore I can speak for them.” This type of thought process often works from the assumption that there is a defining archetype for what it means to be a part of certain communities (i.e., there is one experience. There is one kind of “blackness”, etc). This kind of logic allows for the individual experiences of people within these communities to be lumped into one, often with a devastating effect of simplifying social relations and allowing for opportunism.

Anybody can claim to speak for a given group. This also feeds into white supremacy, patriarchy, and homophobia. Often, as we have seen historically, this tendency amongst the affluent classes, people of color and white, to define the experience of a given social group for their interest has lead to defeat for working class people of color which has weakened our struggles against white supremacy.

For example, at the end of the Black Power Era in the early 70s, middle class Black leaders told working class people of color to demobilize, claiming they could take care of the struggle against white supremacy from the position of their newly won posts in the offices at city halls, police headquarters, and nonprofit administrations. They claimed those offices were the fulfillment of Black Power. But by demobilizing and scaling back our grassroots, working class-led community actions, a void was created which was filled by electoral politics, non profits, and gangs leaving our communities left open to a white supremacist backlash from the 80s through today involving the defunding of social programs, the withdrawal of jobs from our neighborhoods, the incarceration of more and more youth of color, and even outright political attacks on the Rainbow Coalition itself by the old school white supremacists!

So even the Rainbow Coalition itself has started to crumble in the face of racist attacks because the rest of us have not remained active. It is no surprise that several members of the native community expressed that this Native Advisory Council had not even been consistently active until the crisis following the death of John T. Williams. It was revived because, as one of the cops on the panel put it frankly, “the Seattle Police department needs someone in the community to go to and relate to when something like this happens.” What this officer revealed is that the white supremacists attack or ignore the Rainbow Coalition and only reinvigorate it when they fear that working class people of color might take matters into our own hands.

The native leaders and representatives on the panel and the crowd could be compared with other communities of color dealing with the same issues. This was demonstrated in Oakland during the protests against the murder of Oscar Grant, a black man shot in the back by a white cop.  Nonprofit leaders stood next to the police urging people to go home in fear that they would riot. Nonprofit leaders thought it was their jobs to ensure a “peaceful and thriving Oakland” by creating , “organized events or avenues for young people and community members to express their frustrations with the system in constructive and peaceful ways” and by “inoculating our bases and the community at-large so that when the verdict comes down, people are prepared for it, and so that the ‘outside agitators’ who were active during the initial Oscar Grant protests are not able to incite the crowd so easily.”   These quotes are from an email sent by one of the Oakland non-profits, the Urban Peace Movement.  To be sure their intentions may have been good but this obviously creates an atmosphere where only certain strategies and tactics are allowed. The language reeks of supposed leadership of a theoretical community where all have the same interest and one way of attaining such obscuring the fact that those agitating were no outside agitators but members of the community these non-profits supposedly represent.

During the meeting in Seattle the murder of Williams was being framed as a matter of cultural misunderstanding and as an isolated incident. I knew by engaging with folks earlier that this was not accepted by everyone in the room. If the rainbow coalition had been listening to the anger of “their” people they may have changed their tone. Williams was poor, native, and homeless which equates to target practice for the police. They are here to serve and protect those with property not the rest of us. A few people began to speak along the same lines, calling out the police very forcefully, and the “wardens” came in using cultural norms and appealing to the heroic history of the Daybreak Star Cultural Center in order to  shut folks down and demand respect for the police. I think that this brief outcry may have been one of the biggest highlights around this issue and it’s a damn shame. But, it was obvious that people we’re upset and ready to move.

A week later on September 16th, 2010 the Native rainbow coalition staged a rally/march through downtown Seattle. The initial meeting place was the scene of Williams’ murder. Around noon members of International Workers and Students for Justice (IWSJ) and I arrived at the scene. Our crew’s goal at this march was the same as at the Daybreak Star; agitate and dialogue to find other militants who wanted to build toward a more dynamic and democratic network of workers and poor folks who could oppose police brutality, budget cuts, and all the other assaults on our communities which are becoming more intense with the economic crisis. We wanted to attempt a solidarity action with folks in Oakland who were gearing up for strikes to protest the Oscar Grant verdict. We wanted to put a transitional method into action. To do this we felt we needed to work in a united front and build a multi-cultural from- below alliance.  We wanted to make demands that would lead to reforms at best but would not easy for the elites to concede to and thus draw out the contradictions of the system and build our collective power hoping that this would build unity and confidence for the future struggles. Maybe it was naïve of us to try to attempt this in a month and a half but the need for something of this nature seems dire in Seattle.

The event began with a rally. The first speakers were very militant. Unfortunately, this would be the last of the militancy and as the rainbow coalition again took over. A native “leader” took hold of the bullhorn and began directing. In a sense this foreshadowed what would occur later. He began directing the crowd telling the native drummers to lead the march followed by elders and family members. Then he said that he knew there were folks in the crowd who had an agenda and who wanted to cause trouble and they should leave because, “This event was for the mourning.” This was another preemptive strike.

I recognize there are political divisions among Native leaders, and not all of them are part of this rainbow coalition; there are still militant AIM members and veterans of past struggles who continue to struggle in various ways. Also, I believe that some rainbow coalition members honestly believe they are helping their people and join these leadership groups because they are seemingly no other options (If the Left were more organized maybe we could prevent powerful organizers from being sucked into these roles). On the other hand, others in rainbow coalition are quite calculative and opportunistic as in the case of this one Native leader. Later on that day hundreds of people gathered inside the city hall as people began to speak. One of the speakers was a woman who identified herself as Williams’ family member. She was clearly upset and said something to the effect that there shouldn’t even be police. Before she could finish, the same Native leader from earlier who tried to run various left groups off stopped her in mid-sentence and ushered her to the side. I thought this whole event was put on for the Williams’ family to mourn? Why are they being prevented from expressing their anger as part of this mourning?

Native leaders welcome the mayor into a drum circle

It seemed that the Rainbow Coalition leaders were holding back militancy from Native folks and other people of color in the crowd so that they could bargain with the city government. They even provided a gift to a city councilman symbolizing peace and welcomed the mayor into a drum circle. Ironically, when the mayor and a council member spoke they were uninterrupted even when the council member stated that, “we should see this through the eyes of the officer who shot Williams. If we can see the situation through their eyes they can see it through ours.” No interruption there. So a comment like that passes without interruption but militancy from one of Williams’ loved ones needs to be silenced? I guess the one with the agenda was the one directing the event supposedly for the family. Williams’ murder seemed to be used by some Native leadership and officials to put themselves in the spotlight rather than the issue.

I think that it should go without saying that my critique of some of the Native leadership is also a critique of the rainbow coalition as a whole.What I can say is that regardless of the flaws in the rainbow coalition, the left has not been able to dethrone them as the de facto leaders of working class, poor, queer, and more militant people of color politics. To do so, we need to start envisioning and practicing a clear alternative. The events that followed in the months of October and November proved to be the beginnings creating new avenues of resistance outside of the confines of the system.

Workers spread the embers

A reflection by Mamos

Our current moment in history is agonizingly complex and confusing.  More and more people are loosing their jobs, their housing, their education, and their health care,  and police brutality, which has existed since the police began, seems to be on the rise.  Under these conditions it would not be surprising if working class and oppressed people rose up and took matters into our own hands like folks seem to be doing outside the US  from strikes in China to uprisings in Greece.   Mobilizations against police brutality, budget cuts, bosses, and landlords have begun here in Seattle and across the U.S. but we, as working people, have not yet developed the confidence and vision to connect all of these struggles together into the kind of  movement that could really challenge state violence.  This  essay is an attempt to discuss how solidarity networks of workers and unemployed folks could play a role in fighting back against the economic and political warfare the elites are waging against oppressed people, with the cops as their ever-brutal bodyguards and shock troops.

In the streets against police brutality: “No More Racist Pigs at Work, Let’s Make Some Bacon Out of Birk”

I’ll begin with recent developments in Seattle in the struggle for Justice for John T. Williams,  a Native American man killed by the Seattle cops.  At the actions Nightwolf described, people voicing militant resistance to police brutality were scattered and either voiced their discontent as individuals or were shut down by people of color leaders who played the role of warden and power broker with the city government.  No groups were able to bring people together around making more confrontational demands.

This started to change a bit with the Oct 22^nd rally against police brutality.  This rally happens every year, and it is usually put on by Leftists and families who lost loved ones to police violence .  This year it took on a broader and deeper character with a wide range of people from various political perspectives getting involved.

The rally began with courageous  speeches by families who lost loved ones. Inspired by their stories, A.K., one of the rank and file University of Washington custodian leaders who helped build International Workers and Students for Justice, spoke about how the police had framed his son and then deported him to Ethiopia, even though his son had never lived there.  Dropped off there with no money wearing a prison jumpsuit, his son disappeared.  A.K.  has also been harassed regularly by Seattle Police for speaking up in the media about UW campus cops’ collaboration with management to repress custodian organizing there.  He and other custodians attending the rally are now becoming community activists, not just organizers in their single workplace.  It was great to see that this broad multiracial crowd of working people had A.K.’s back, and that these various struggles for labor, immigrant rights, and an end to police terror could be linked in solidarity.

As the sun set and the march moved through downtown it swelled with people coming off the streets injecting even more militancy and straight up revolutionary perspectives. Homeless folks, youth of color from different hoods, gang members, and workers got on the megaphone and spit fire.

This made the concept of “the working class” as a fighting community feel less and less abstract.  We have a long way to go, but in actions like this you can really see the initial rough outlines of what it would be like for  the proletariat to  pull ourselves together as a fighting force.  To see custodians and gang members, unemployed homeless folks and students vibing off of each other’s energy really helped me understand how all of these different groups of people are part of the proletariat.  The proletariat is not just currently employed waged workers.  It includes everyone from slightly better-paid unionized workers to precariously employed non-unionized workers to unemployed folks, gang members, and in short, anyone who is dispossessed and does not own or control the means of production.

Of course there are concrete differences in power, privilege, consciousness, and strategic positions among these different layers of the proletariat, and we can’t gloss those over.  White supremacy and patriarchy divide the proletariat along race and gender lines, attempting to buy off white and male workers through special deals.  American imperialism separates layers of the proletariat here from the majority of the class in the hellish factories that line places like the US Mexico border and  the Pacific Rim of Asia.  But if we can try to break down those divisions by rallying around the demands and the self-activity of the most oppressed layers of the proletariat, then maybe, just maybe the class struggle can resurge here again.

The proletariat in Seattle is multiracial and when it really makes moves that will mean the reinvigoration of historic movements like Black Liberation and the American Indian Movement, as well as the birth of new struggles which will put ethnic communities like Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Samoan folks at the forefront of American politics.  When it goes down, the stereotype of Seattle as a bourgie white Starbucks latte-sipping, Microsoft town will be shaken to the core.

For a second, on the night of Oct 22nd, it seemed like it was about to go down when everyone started chanting “No more racist pigs at work, let’s make some bacon out of Birk”

Next Steps:  What do we do once we see that all the cops, and the whole system is guilty?

Since the Oct 22^nd rally, the coalition that planned it has continued to organize actions demanding that Ian Birk be jailed for murder.  These actions have been small but have consistently drawn in new folks, including a number of homeless and low-wage workers from the Native communities that congregate downtown.  This shows that the Rainbow Coalition middle class power brokers cannot claim to speak for all Native folks – when the most oppressed people in the Native Community have spoken up what they have been demanding goes far beyond diversity training for the pigs.

However, the Rainbow Coalition’s small reform demands will continue to be the only viable option for a lot of folks until we can work together to develop and put into practice an alternative program. Many people see that police brutality is not simply a matter of a  “few bad apples” and it won’t disappear if they simply fire Ian Birk.  Many people also see that it is not simply a problem that will go away if the culture of the Seattle Police Department is changed through better training.

Many, many people see the police are systematically oppressive, that they exist to hold down working people and people of color.  But where do you go once you realize that?  Once you see that, then what we are up against is the entire state itself, which is a formidable opponent. So many folks have no faith in the cops but are cynical about fighting back because it seems impossible: if we actually tried to take away the power the police currently have won’t they just kill us or put us in jail?  As Seattle activist GCL1 has consistently reminded us that your politics are only as good as your ability to back them up. What kind of power would need to be built to directly challenge the state, in a way that is not simply symbolic but can actually stop state terror?

To try and figure this out, Unity and Struggle and IWSJ members have been studying together, and based on our studies we’ve made flyers and passed them out together regularly in locations like the Central District and Native Park downtown.  We’ve been talking to other working class people and people of color about these ideas and we’ve been listening to folks’ ideas about what is to be done as we start to work out a program to move forward.

Some folks are just waiting to smash on the cops

One alternative we keep hearing from folks is something along the lines of “rallies are a waste of time, I’ll get involved when the rioting starts.”  This just goes to show that working class’ folks consciousness is far more radical than a lot of people on the Left would give them credit for. Like our comrades in Oakland, we don’t condemn riots outright because the real violence folks should be worried about is the violence of the pigs not a little property destruction by the people.  Also, the uprisings in Oakland were instrumental in scaring the system enough to bring the cop who murdered a young Black man named Oscar Grant to trial.  However they weren’t enough to make sure he got a meaningful sentence and he may be out in 7 months.

Also, there are real problems with rioting in Seattle, so we can’t just be sitting around waiting for a riot to start, we need to come up with creative and militant alternatives. As one comrade of ours put it, the city’s rulers would just use a riot as an excuse to accelerate their campaign of clearing homeless youth off the streets. The anti- World Trade Organization uprising here in 1999 was before my time, but from talking to activists who participated in it, it sounds like the police basically implemented a reign of terror afterwards which lasted for years, leaving residues of trauma that last to this day.  The cops were so embarrassed that they had been caught off guard in ‘99 that they took precautions to make sure it won’t happen again: they beefed up their repressive apparatus, they have increased their liability insurance in case they brutalize people and get sued, and they have enveloped this iron fist with the polite parlor gloves of all these ethnic advisory councils like the Native Advisory Council that held the meeting Nightwolf criticized above.

The ruling class has also de-concentrated potentially rebellious working class people of color communities through gentrification. As middle class white folks build condos and displace working people out of neighborhoods like the Central District, High Point, the Hollies, White Center, etc., people are pushed out of the city and scattered through various far apart locations like housing complexes in Renton, motels on Aurora, or towns in southern King County.  How would all of these folks get to the same place spontaneously to riot?   So all of these factors together make riots less likely here.  I’m not saying they’ll never happen but I’m not sure how deep or fast they would spread if they do start and I’m not sure how much of a political impact they would make.  Of course, I am certainly open to be proven wrong.  If there is one thing I have learned from organizing  it  is never to try and predict the future with certainty, and never to underestimate the creative self-activity and power of working class people.

What could be more powerful than a riot?  A mass strike!

We are learning from comrades in the Bay Area who have experienced the ebb and flow of the Justice for Oscar Grant Movement and have distilled their experiences into strategic and programmatic insights for how to move forward.  In particular, our comrades in the group Advance the Struggle have consistently raised the idea of mass political strikes to shut down business as usual – school walkouts, strikes in key industries, etc – against police brutality and are tirelessly building for this among the Bay Area working class.

It seemed like this perspective gained ground when the ILWU, the port-workers union, staged a work stoppage demanding justice for Oscar Grant on Oct 23^rd.  This is certainly a major step beyond the situation in Seattle where no union has yet stepped forward like that, and those of us who are rank and file members of unions should try to organize our union brothers and sisters to take this kind of step.  However, the action in Oakland was limited by the fact that other workers in other industries didn’t join the strike and it didn’t last long enough to seriously disrupt production in the port. Advance the Struggle was advocating something much larger than that, a city-wide general strike, and I think that sort of thing will be necessary to actually stop police brutality.

What would it take to build that sort of thing here in Seattle?  To organize a general strike like that would require serious working class organization that can be bold, daring, and fast moving, in dynamic interaction with spontaneous upsurges of worker militancy like what the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg analyzed in her excellent Mass Strike pamphlet.  It’s difficult to predict spontaneous militancy, though we need to be constantly open to it and ready to embrace and interact with it.  As Don Hamerquist puts it, we need to be constantly on the lookout to recognize and name events which are ruptures from the status quo, and our organizations need to remain “porous” to these events of insurgent worker self-activity.   In the meantime, we can try to build an organization so we are not caught off guard when it does go down and so that we can open up new phases of this spontaneous struggle through our actions instead of simply trailing it.

Sewing the seeds of mass political strikes:  Seasol, IWSJ, and hopefully others

Seeds for this type of strike organization can be found in the growing networks  in Seattle of independent worker-militants from different workplaces or currently unemployed  folks who are independent from union bureaucrats, nonprofit leaders, Democratic Party politicians, or other forces that could try to dampen a political struggle against police brutality. Right now these networks are mostly engaged in small-scale economic struggles around specific bread and butter issues but these issues can quickly take on a political character when they involve fighting a racist or sexist boss, or mobilizing broader layers of immigrant communities around an on-the-job struggle which starts to galvanize the broader immigrant rights struggle.  But what would it take to get the point where these networks could mobilize in campaigns that could build real power against state terror and police brutality so we could actually go on the offensive instead of just reacting to crises all the time?

First let me describe these networks and then I’ll discuss how they could develop to go on the offensive. I will focus on the groups I am most connected to because these groups are my immediate intended audience for this piece; I imagine that other, related networks exist in the city or are forming now, and I welcome further elaboration of these points and analysis of the state of the Seattle Left in the comments section.

First there is International Workers and Students for Justice, which emerged out of organizing solidarity with rank and file UW custodians against budget cuts but is now becoming a network of rank and file militants in different industries as well as youth and unemployed folks.  This is still very small and we have a long way to go but we are in the initial stages of helping organize in other workplaces off campus.   Even more impressive is Seattle Solidarity Network, or “Seasol” for short,  a group of working people who support each others’ struggles against oppressive bosses and landlords.  They have a track record of winning the vast majority of their campaigns against small to middle sized private businesses, surviving lawsuits and coordinated counter-attacks by bosses and professional union-busting agencies.  This shows that something can be won, even during a recession and  massive bosses’ offensive. I am an organizer with IWSJ and just joined Seattle Solidarity Network as a rank and file member (which means I go to their actions but am not an organizer)

IWSJ and Seasol both have limitations but these could change over time.  IWSJ emerged out of a specific single workplace struggle so it’s biggest challenge is to continue to expand off the UW campus/workplace.  We have also had difficulties in maintaining independent rank and file organizations inside the workplace in the face of management and police harassment, sometimes facilitated by and other times passively allowed by the union bureaucracy.  That’s why we’ve turned toward collaboration with Seasol and other folks involved in the anti-police brutality work, trying to build an outside support network for on the job rank-and-file led struggles.

Seasol seems to be moving in a complementary trajectory – it started as a solidarity network building outside support for individual workers, but Seasol is open to eventually trying to organize in workplaces as well or to support workers who do so.  One Seasol organizer put it well in an interview on Libcom:

“SeaSol is in some sense an adaptation to modern conditions of high turnover and small workplaces – as one member has said we ‘organise the worker, not the workplace’. Any worker who joins SeaSol after a problem at their old job is much better prepared to fight back if they encounter problems at their new job. It’s an organisation of militants spread across different work and housing situations. Obviously, working towards organisation in specific workplaces and neighbourhoods is still vital.”

As I see it, this is exactly what we need to keep building : a network of rank and file worker militants across the city who can support each others’ immediate workplace and neighborhood struggles and can stand up to repression from the bosses and the state; this in turn could generate new rank and file workplace and neighborhood organizing campaigns which in turn could lay the groundwork for  political mobilizations or even political strikes around city-wide crises like police brutality.  Again, when mass political strikes do emerge, they could start from workers who were not previously drawn to Seasol and IWSJ networks by these groups’ previous small victories;  a track record of winning small battles does not guarantee we will win the war.  However, when mass strikes do erupt, from wherever they come, these existing networks of militants could hopefully  help recognize, expand, defend, and deepen these strikes.

Problems with this strategy?

I can see a few immediate objections to this strategy which I’ll attempt to respond to here:

1)  Some may ask, how can unemployed or homeless folks participate if it’s a workplace and tenant based strategy?  Does this strategy privilege those who already have jobs and homes? If the strategy were based only on organizing in current workplaces and neighborhoods that would be the case, but again it also involves outside solidarity through mobilizing wider layers of people against specific bosses or landlords.  This means unemployed folks have tremendous power as general activists who can move fast in flying squad pickets to confront targets, linking up struggles in different parts of the city, and mobilizing folks on the streets to help out.  High school and college students, and workers employed in industries that aren’t on the move can also play this role.

If workers on strike in a particular business for example get a court injunction to stop striking this injunction would not apply to people who don’t work there, and unemployed folks, students, and workers from other jobs could keep the picket line going like the Lucas County Unemployed League did during the 1934 Toledo Autolite strike (this action turned that strike into a broader general strike which involved insurrectionary street fighting).  In turn, unemployed folks should organize to inject their own demands into actions and workers need to listen to them, for example if grocery workers went on strike they could add demands for price controls on food to their strike demands, or the workers and community could team up to occupy a supermarket and give away food in an organized way…  kind of like an organized food riot, or a Panthers free breakfast program at a large scale.  In the more short term, unemployed people and groups like Seasol could take up struggles  against abusive homeless shelter administrators who function as homeless folks’ immediate landlord, or against companies that hire  unemployed folks for temp jobs and then don’t pay them.

2) The second objection I could see is that groups like Seasol and IWSJ are still small with few resources and need to focus on continuing to do the labor work we are already doing, we can’t just move into mass political mobilization against police brutality right now. This is generally true for the time being because the level of mass struggle is still relatively low.  If anything, we need to try to convince folks who are becoming active as part of the anti-police brutality work to also support these small scale workers’ struggles.   This essay is an attempt to do that – to show how these labor struggles could lay the groundwork for a base of power to actually win against the cops down the road, but that base will only be there if we build it by fighting the immediate labor struggles that emerge now.   If not our actions against police brutality could remain small symbolic protests for a long time and people in our communities will keep getting murdered.  Of course, if mass struggle against police brutality really picks up we’d have to do the opposite and convince folks in worker networks to be flexible enough to shift focus and throw their energy into large scale mobilizations against the state.  These kinds of calls are historical and context-specific.

As one of the founders of Seasol put it: “My own perspective originated from frustration with symbolic and ineffectual anti-war and anti-globalization protests and anarchist propaganda groups that had limited relevance to most people’s lives, including my own.”  This is right on. Many activists felt that way in the wake of the collapse of movements in the early 2000s.  The anti-WTO rebellion in 1999 was not symbolic, it actually shut down the WTO, but the protest hopping that emerged in its wake often became a contained ritual with no threat to the system.  While some activists reacted to that collapse by becoming reformist and trailing the union bureaucracy in the name of “putting down roots for the long haul”,  it is to the credit of the founders of Seasol that they built something more dynamic, independent, and direct-action-oriented.  The key question though is how to make sure that we don’t get stuck in only small -scale fights forever, and to be open to returning to large scale, Seattle ’99 type mobilizations but now with more sustained power to strike back in ways that are not just symbolic.

3) The third objection I could see to this strategy is that it could become economistic, focused only on bread-and-butter demands like back wages, getting someone’s job back, etc. However, most of the folks involved in Seasol and IWSJ are not economistic in their perspectives and do have a broader vision than simply the immediate small scale labor struggles we’re involved in now.  Lots of folks are asking how we can fight police brutality; how  can we take the organizing skills we’ve learned in labor work into the streets to confront the state.  I do think it’s important for independent labor organizers to be out there at small symbolic anti-police brutality rallies like the one described above, which many have been.  This allows us to meet people and build up a proletarian network that overcomes some of the divisions within the working class such as the divisions caused by white supremacy, patriarchy, occupational divisions, unionized vs. nonunionized workplaces, and employed vs. unemployed workers.

Also, to avoid economism we need to engage in political and specifically revolutionary study and agitation to develop a vision and strategy that can see beyond the immediate small-scale labor struggles, that way we won’t get swamped in those struggles forever, and we can link them to something larger.  Even though there is no mass movement right now we need to be bold and daring and imaginative about the possibilities of one breaking out, and we need to train and prepare ourselves as militants to engage with the complex and contradictory working class self-activity that could erupt anytime.   The various revolutionary study groups emerging in Seattle right now are a good step in this direction, and there is a small but growing culture of political cross-fertilization and debate between different political tendencies which is contributing to this.

We need to foster this.  Networks like Seasol and IWSJ by necessity should remain politically pluralistic, with a variety of perspectives in the mix, open to anyone who wants to wage the immediate fight against the boss or landlord.  But when we are on the picket lines at a Seasol or IWSJ or some other labor action we should keep on mixing it up and discussing and debating politics, just like radicals used to do in the unions and mass neighborhood organizations of the 30s.  This will prepare us to play a role in the kind of mass political strikes that will be necessary to actually turn the tide against state terrorism and police brutality.  I hope to discuss the contents of this essay with folks soon on the picket lines.

So…. What is to be Done?

Finally, I do think it is necessary to build specifically revolutionary organizations at the same time as we build these working class networks.  I don’t see these tasks as counter-posed to each other.   Unlike Lenin, I believe it’s possible for working people to develop revolutionary consciousness without joining revolutionary organizations.  But this doesn’t mean that we can forget about revolutionary organization.  Some, but not all of the folks involved in the broader networks and study circles will develop revolutionary consciousness and will want to join and build revolutionary groups; while we build those groups we can still struggle side by side with and be in dialogue with those who don’t choose to build them.  Being in a revolutionary group allows us to develop our political skills, analyses, methods, and fighting capacities much faster than only being in a study group and participating in organizing efforts.  It allows us to do this study and organizing together with fellow comrades who can reflect together on that work and study and learn from each other, which accelerates growth and allows us to make positive political interventions in the movement together as a team.

These interventions could mean developing new strategies;  developing a political program that could illuminate the contradictions and potentials of current movements; challenging authoritarianism, patriarchy, or white supremacy within the movement; or, as things heat up down the road, being prepared to deal with the inevitable fact that strike picket lines will likely become street confrontations with the cops.

These are exactly the kind of strengths we will need to develop further if we want to take on police brutality and the organized power of the state in a way that goes beyond symbolic protests and it would be a shame if we wait until things heat up to start training ourselves to deal with all of this.

Conclusions

So to summarize, these are the challenges I think the current crisis of police repression in Seattle is posing:  1) the need to build an alternative to the rainbow coalition 2) the need to link up different layers of the working class in a fighting force, 3) the need to expand independent labor and solidarity networks across the city 4) the need to organize our workplaces and neighborhoods to deepen these networks 5) the need to politicize these networks though study, dialogue, and debate, and 6) the need to build revolutionary organizations that can  do 1-5 collectively, reflect on these activities, and go beyond them to prepare for the next steps.

Some of us around Gathering Forces are reading a selection from The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 by Karl Marx. We should be careful not see this document as just a brilliant piece of writing coming from a solitary brain of an intellectual giant. Instead this writing is a powerful product of its time with all sorts of issues and events shaping its coming together. Four things which stand out in shaping this document are: a) Marx was breaking from Hegel who thought history moved through a world spirit and alienation was only mental. b) Marx was heavily influenced by the working class and specifically the Silesian weavers uprising in Germany. This was an important moment for Marx has it continued to propel him to break from bourgeois radicalism and left-wing Hegelianism. He saw that the movement of history was the process of production, that it was materially located in the working class. So two things are solved in this piece: alienation’s material dimension and the labor process as the central thread of human history. What placing the labor process as central to human history meant was that by only solving the contradictions in how humans work can we hope to build a radically new society. Or as Raya says, “He began with the proletarian activity at the point of production. He separated labor from product and from property, and looked for the contradiction within labor itself. It is through this contradiction that the laborer would develop, that is, would overcome the contradictions in the capitalist method of production (Marxism and Freedom, 55).” c) Marx was separating himself from the various dimensions of French socialism. It’s a big list so I won’t go into it here but folks can look up Utopian Socialism, Auguste Blanque, and Proudhon to get a sense of what I mean. d) He was using British political economy as a basis for his critique of political economy.

There is a trajectory of Marx’s writings which kinda shows his development in these years: Philosophy of Right where Marx says that ideas are not the subject of history, but humans/ society. At this point things are still very general in the way Marx is working things out. In On the Jewish Question, Marx writes how human emancipation is the liberation from the powers of money. And the latter is based on the existence of private property. So we see more clarification. While Marx was in Paris and surrounded by working class militants, he wrote Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, where he proclaims a new class has stepped onto the stage of history which can abolish private property: the working class! From here Marx went onto study more political economy which meant England, Adam Smith, Ricardo etc.

In Marx’s own words, “My investigation led to the conclusion that legal relations such as forms of state are to be grasped neither from themselves nor from the so-called general development of the human mind, but rather have their roots in the material conditions of life, the sum total of which Hegel, in accordance with the procedure of the Englishmen and Frenchmen of the eighteenth century, cominbed under the name of ‘civil society,’ but that the anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy (Economic and Philosophic Manscuripts of 1844, 22).

Marx read Frederick Engel’s writings in a journal which slammed political economy. He also read works by a guy called Moses Hess. What is interesting about Hess is that he argued for a philosophy of action. He believed that only through struggle can human beings reach self-consciousness and fulfill the potentials of their species-being. We see how various events, thinkers, and struggles shaped Marx. So many of the ideas which we consider to be Marxism were kinda floating around in different countries, different movements, and in different peoples’ heads. Marx brings them together, but in a way which no one had done before, creating a whole new framework for looking at ourselves and the world.

So in terms of what Marx is doing in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, we need to remember that Marx broke with Hegel and uses Ricardo and Smith to arrive at a new understanding of labor. What was important about Ricardo and Smith is that they too argued that wealth comes from labor! But they had nothing to say about the dehumanizing and horrible effects of capitalist forms of work and private property. Marx takes the viewpoint of the working class and says what does the world look like from there! So from there the basic structure of the book is revealed. Marx says look the worker’s labor is the source of wealth, but the workers are forced to share their wealth with the capitalists and the landlords. This leads to all kinds of estrangement. And while the estrangement of labor developed private property, the development of private property revealed the real basis of labor’s estrangement—private property. Marx writes, “Private property thus results by analysis from the concept of alienated labor, i.e., of alienated man, of estranged labor, of estranged life, of estranged man” (1844 Manuscripts, 117). What this shows is one of Marx’s key methods which is that the internal contradictions of labor become externalized into private property. That is why we can say that the alienation of the laborer results in private property: labor-power against capital.

Alienation

The idea of estrangement or alienation has its own history. In terms of religion (to be Christian centric) alienation is found in the idea of falling from grace/ or the fall of humankind. When people say we have parted from the ways of God. Another way alienation has come up is the complaint of theologians and others in complaining that everything is becoming property or sellable. So Thomas Munzer complained, “that every creature should be transformed into property” (Meszaros 33). “The complications, at an earlier stage, were of an “external”, political nature, manifest in the taboos and prohibitions of feudal society which declared things to be “inalienable” (Meszaros 34). For a good definition of alienation it could be seen as “selling is the practice of alienation” (Maszaros 34). The rising bourgeoisie in general saw this as a positive development because it meant you can sell land, hats, rivers etc and most importantly purchase labor-power from a worker. So alienation was generally looked at only from a positive side. But as the crappiness of capitalism suck in and revolts in factories took place, another conception of alienation took shape.

Out of this we can try to take a leap into understanding a more complex set of relations, which are key and show the power of the concept of alienation. “Alienation is therefore characterized by the universal extension of “sale-ability” (i.e. the transformation of everything into commodity); by the conversion of human beings into “things” so that they could appear as commodities on the market (in other words: the “reification” of human relations); and by the fragmentation of the social body into “isolated individuals”…” (Maszaros 35). Or as I like to think of it, we just lose control of our lives, but to understand why, we have to enter the realm of the labor process!

In the chapter on Estranged Labor, in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Marx breaks from Hegel, classical political economy (Ricardo and Smith) and Feuerbachian materialism. Here is how we breaks with them in the following ways a) for Hegel consciousness was key and for Marx it was the alienation of labor b) for classical political economy the worker was central to production but ends up with nothing and Marx demolishes the political economists for not explaining why and c) he takes Feuerbach’s concept of humankind’s alienation of himself in religion and applies that to humankind’s alienation of himself in the product of his labor and also how the workers’ labor is praxis.

Why is estranged labor so important and revolutionary? The basic premise is that no matter how much capitalism pays a worker, no matter the retirement benefits, or whether the state owns means of production; labor alienates itself (Will explain below.) All of the earlier points mentioned, have been the basis for many revolutionaries to proclaim the working class is bought off or that some type of socialism/ communist society has been setup. But as long as labor is alienated, as defined in Estranged Labor, capitalism exists and only with the end of alienated labor can we begin to talk about the end of capitalism.

The Class Basis of Political Economy

Marx outlines why political economy is a bourgeois science. Political economy takes private property for granted. It cannot see the transitory nature of private property. Furthermore, political economy does not historicize capitalism and accepts the categories of wage, profit, and interest as eternal. It sees relations of the worker to commodity as simply that, instead of relationships determined by humankind. Political economy represents the viewpoint of the bourgeoisie. This is why revolutionaries are not political economists and instead conduct a critique of political economy.

The Objectification of Labor

“This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor, which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification” (1844 Manuscripts, 108). This is vital to understanding capitalism and how the labor power of the worker comes to dominate the worker. Another way of saying what commodities are, the tools a worker uses, and even capital, is objectified labor. So it is not absurd to say that under capitalism past labor dominates labor (the worker).

The workers’ labor power creates social conditions, which are against the worker. The economics and organization of capitalist society are beyond the control of the working class under capitalism. When recessions happen the worker is laid off and is powerless. When productivity of the worker increases, the worker has to work according to the dictates of a machine (past objectified labor) and/or supervisor. The worker can quit their job but will find only unemployment. When productivity increases in certain sectors the value of the worker actually falls, which means the capitalists can give the worker less in wages. More generally it means it costs the capitalists less to reproduce the worker and the extra savings go into the pocket of the capitalist and not the worker. All of these are aspects of the domination of objectified labor power over the worker. There is no reason for this to happen, but under capitalism there is no other way. In this way the workers’ life is not controlled by the worker, but by capital.

This same passage has Marx discussing the objectification of labor. This is another way of saying that when the worker works on an object eventually making a shoe, that labor becomes congealed/ concentrated into the shoe. It is now something beyond the control of the worker. It stands against/ opposed to the worker. The workers’ objectified labor will only be enjoyed by someone else that the worker does not know. The workers’ product is owned by the capitalist. The worker does not get to choose how to dispose it. Whether the shoe will sell or not is completely out of the control of the worker. But at the same time its sellability determines whether the worker will have a job in the future. Other capitalists are trying to get their own workers to work harder or be more productive so they can sell shoes for cheaper. If they succeed then all workers will have to produce shoes at the new rate or face the shutting down of factories/ unemployment.

There is also the question of what kind of objective political-economy this creates which dominates everything, which has its own laws/ tendencies, which is inescapable etc etc.

We can ask what is the relationship of the objectification of labor and its estrangement?

Workers’ alienation from nature

So Marx is saying that labor is useless without things from nature to work on. You cannot work on empty space. But even more essentially nature provides the means of life in terms of food, water, and air. The irony of capitalism is that as productivity increases, the worker loses ownership of what he produces and that the worker’s labor directly has less-and-less to do with the reproduction of the worker’s own life. For example, a small number of workers at a peanut butter factory for example use a lot of machines to transform peanuts into peanut butter. So there is a lot of objectified labor in the machines and some in the peanut butter. The worker does not own a farm where the peanuts come from, or the river, which feeds the farm, and definitely not the peanut butter where the worker’s labor is congealed etc etc. The worker owns their labor-power and little else. Even if the worker owned the peanut butter, the worker cannot live off the peanut butter alone. It has to be sold. But this is completely hypothetical since workers do not own what they produce anyway. But what it shows is that by the immense division of labor in capitalist society workers do not produce things for themselves and nor can they. They produce things for strangers through the market. The worker is a slave to the object the worker creates.

This has huge impacts on the ecological question. How we produce is part of the ecological crisis because our production is an extension of a continuum of our relationship to nature. But the “our” is also nature so it is nature acting on nature.

Workers’ alienation from the workers’ products
Workers do not control what happens to their products but instead the products determine what happens to workers. It is from here that Marx jumps to saying that the labor process itself must involve alienation, “If then the product of labor is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity…” 110.

Workers alienation from the labor process

110 The fact that workers do not choose how the production is organized is an alienating process. Workers do not freely choose to work, but must work or else starve. (Try feeding yourself without working! There is real violent/ coercion going on!) Worst of all the labor of a worker is not their own, but the property of the capitalists. That is what the wage represents.
Marx does something interesting here in this part of the discussion: “First, the fact that labor is external to the worker… The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His labor is therefore (emphasis added)not voluntary by coerced; it is forced labor.”
This is different from saying that labor is coerced/forced and therefore then the worker is outside himself, etc. in Marx’s dialectical method “forced labor” is a category that emerges only through a contradictory relationship; here too, Marx is exploring this concept of “externality” as something that emerges from an internal antagonism, i.e., the worker to their own creative power.

The workers’ estrangement from the species being

Human kinds’ (species being) activity is reproduction of the conditions of our life. Things like food, clothes and shelter etc are what make up this reproduction at a minimum. The production of these things is integrally tied to nature and as human kind is part of a continuum of nature, our alienation from nature, from the most important activity our species being does, estranges ourselves from the fundamental purposes of our species being. The purpose of our lives is to enjoy our relationship to nature, to enjoy the work process, to control what we make, to enjoy making things for other people, but under capitalism none of this is possible. Marx says that in theory we have the potential to live upto our species beings, an advantage granted to us by nature/ evolution, but under capitalism we lose that advantage.

“Estrangement of man from man”

Since the worker is estranged from the species being it also means that workers are estranged from other workers. (Marx could have gone more into how estrangement of workers from each other looked like.)

Marx goes onto ask if workers do not own their labor, what they produce etc, then who owns it? Marx answers with, “The alien being, to whom labor and the product of labor belongs, in whose service labor is done and for whose benefit the product of labor is provided, can only be man himself.” 115

“The relationship of the worker to labor creates the relation to it of the capitalist.” 116 Marx goes onto say that private property is the result of alienated labor. We also get a chance to see how Marx thinks when he says that the movement of private property helped in the theoretical understanding of alienated labor, in the real world it is alienated labor which leads to private property. There is a significant difference in this, but it reveals the objective process of history and at the same time Marx’s method.

Marx makes a comment about higher wages, “there be nothing but better payment for the slave…” 118
In Marxism and Freedom Raya writes, “To Marx, private property is the power to dispose of the labor of others. That is why he so adamantly insisted that to make ‘society’ the owner, but to leave the alienated labor alone, is to create “ an abstract capitalism.” 62 In the second sentence Raya is referencing that Russian communism=state capitalism. That when society supposedly (according to Stalin or Trotsky) owns the means of production, alienated labor is not touched. For Marx “freely associated individuals” must become the masters of society 62.

The worker produces commodities on an unimaginable scale. These commodities take on a life of their own in the work process. The workers have to work according to the needs of the machine. Alienation sucks! Time to overthrow capitalism!

Referenced works

Marx’s Theory of Alienation by Istvan Mesazaros
Philosophy and Revolution by Raya
Marxism and Freedom by Raya
Grundrisse by Karl Marx
Alienation by Bertell Ollman
Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value by I.I. Rubin
Dialectics of Labour by C.J. Arthur

The 2007-2008 election campaign of Obama was unique in that it took on a popular character, which ultimately helped him win the Democratic primary and the general election. Under the slogan of “change we can believe in” Obama promised a new type of bourgeois politics to answer the country’s pressing problems.

However, after two years of economic crisis the capitalists and ruling class have responded by successfully attacking the living standards and the remnants of the political power of the working classes and oppressed people. Arguably, general social and political polarization is the greatest it has been in generations.

How do we explain the discrepancy between the promises of Obama’s election victory and this reality? What is the nature of the Democratic Party? How can we historicize its current character? What is its relationship to the need to find the political forms within the new content among the American oppressed and working classes that seems to be emerging in response to the crisis?

Meanwhile, a new dust up within the Left is going on between supporters and critics of Obama and the Democratic Party.

One side, led by the trade unions, the Congressional Black Caucus, The Nation and the former Progressives for Obama, argues for a popular front against finance capital and the white populist right.

The other side urges direct opposition to Obama and the Democratic Party and the call for some kind of political alternative.

We are reposting some of that analysis below.

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Protest Obama, An Open Letter to the Left Establishment

Bill Fletcher, Responding to the Letter to the Left Establishment regarding Obama

Glen Ford, Psycho-Babbling Obama

Paul Street, Note to “the Left”: Obama Hates You

The following is being reposted from the blog, Workers Power, which archives material from the Industrial Worker newspaper.  In a similar vein, it begins to discuss what is required to actually help a new layer of militants develop as organizers.

Replace Yourself

by J. Pierce

The primary task of an organizer is to build more organizers. We need more and more working class leaders and the way to do this is to constantly replace yourself. Here’s a few easy ways to help you build up your successors:

Reveal your sources so others can think with you: “I had a long talk with MK recently. He really convinced me that we should reorganize as a shop committee instead of having one or two ‘stewards’. He gave me this awesome article on how IWW shop committees used to work.” Telling others where you got an idea from demonstrates that you think of them as equals. You also provide an opportunity for them question your sources.

Show others how it’s done and take them through the process: “Hey Keith, has anyone showed you how to post an article to iww.org? I’m going to post that write-up on the strike right now. Let me show you how to do it. We need another person who can post.” Pass on the technical know-how so others can be ‘experts’ just like you.

Encourage people because you believe in them and you know they can do it: “We really need this message to get to the people upfront. Can you have a talk with Shannon? She respects you and you’re the best person to talk to her.” You run faster for coaches that want to win. We’ve got to show that what we do matters and that we believe in each other.

Ask people to do things that are difficult. Move them to take on responsibilities outside their comfort level: “I’m glad you’ve been talking things up so much at your shop. You’re one of our best guys, Jerm. The next step is for you to start coming to the Industrial Organizing Committee meetings. I know its gonna be tight with your schedule but we’re gonna help you fit it in. You have to be there or this thing doesn’t move.” We need to help others break out and step up. It’s a sign of respect to ask people to do difficult things.

Train your replacement for an officer position: “Hey, Mei, you got a second? Has anyone talked to you about becoming the chair of the Committee? I’m going to be stepping down at the end of my term and you’re everyone’s pick for this position. Put some thought into it. Meanwhile I’ll start showing you what the job entails.” If we train new officers properly and regularly, we can avoid crust and dust in our leadership structures.

Encourage other members to read what you’ve read: “For those that didn’t make it to the Summit, Maxine did a killer presentation on the legal barriers to organizing in her industry. It totally reminded me of this thing I read in an old One Big Union Monthly. So I ran off some photo copies of that article for y’all to check out. I think it will help us come up with some good strategies we can try.” In making IWW history and principles accessible, you cut down on the knowledge monopoly and pass on valuable lessons and experiences.

Introduce people to each other and have them exchange phone numbers: “Tenaya, have you met Steve yet? Steve, this is Tenaya. Yeah, you guys both work in the same industry and would have some awesome stories to tell each other. You two ought to collaborate and submit something for the next newsletter.” By introducing and ensuring info exchange, you avoid ‘Ol Boys Clubs’ and now information doesn’t have to go through you.

The task that we have as IWWs is to build working class leaders everywhere we go. We are constantly looking for opportunities to teach others what we know so that they could do what we do without us.

‘Jim Crow’ Self Defense: Personal Protection in a “Colorblind” Society.

Prologue.

I initially attempted to submit this article to a ‘mainstream’ martial arts publication. It was denied due to its ‘racially charged’ subject matter. Lol.

Unfortunately, for those who are specifically targeted in the context of being part of an oppressed minority, this subject matter is NOT funny. And the frosty response to this subject I received, which I had hoped would spark healthy debate amongst my fellow self-defense instructors, speaks volumes to the prevailing attitudes in mainstream amerikkka towards real-deal ‘life or death’ issues that shape the quality and content of the daily lives of oppressed people (and in fact ALL people).

And while many of us rightfully and justifiably criticize the latest imperialist outrage in the Middle East, or how local police act towards groups of protesters/activists/community people on the streets of europe or amerikkka, or how the FBI or CIA conduct themselves on activist’s doorsteps[!] around the world, or increasing attacks on Blacks, Latinos, and Muslims by organized white supremacists, we still often under-report (or outright ignore) violent incidents towards workers, youth, and elders outside the easily identifiable state-sponsored acts of terror. We have difficulty speaking to ‘horizontal violence’, both in its panoramic analysis and in the formulation and implementation of solutions that attack not only the symptoms, but the systemic root causes.

Both the liberals and conservatives, in addition to having historical, and thus ideological, tenure on the planet (this is an empire, after all) as distinct national political tendencies and associated organizations, have a monopoly on state-sponsored violence in which the real politic of the legal standard is essentially this: “What is, or is not, ‘justifiable’ as ‘self-defense’, as interpreted by court precedents in various political periods in amerikkkan history, as viewed through the lens of the current political climate in the area from which the defendant is accused of the offense, the political climate in the area from which the jury is selected and seated, and in the country at large?”.

Based upon the sick ‘logic’ of some of these rulings, and the willingness of much of the public (including the potential targets of oppression) to co-sign to the aforementioned ‘sick logic’ for a whole host of reasons (all related to our relative powerlessness at this time), they have a monopoly on the debate on what constitutes ‘self-defense’ as well. We need to change that, lest we ALL fall victim to it!

For many of us, this is a deeply personal subject. Take note of my ‘nice guy’ presentation to these folks.

Let me know what you think. Let’s begin… – G.L.

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Are we coming to a point in American history where we, as real-world self-defense instructors, are going to have to throw our curriculum(s) out all together, revisit our entire approach to use of force as it applies to civilians, and revise it to reflect the specific needs of our students who come from so-called “minority” populations?

Are we really willing to take the professional risk and responsibility to tell our Black, Latino, Indigenous (so-called “indians”), and Lbgt (lesbian/bi-sexual/gay/transgendered) students that statistically they have a greater chance of being assaulted or killed, and that whoever is convicted of committing the crime will potentially serve less time for that act of violence than our student(s), the target(s) of the attack, will serve for defending themselves?

Indeed, these are life-or-death questions we must ask ourselves, given the ever-changing political (and thus, legal) direction the United States is going; especially in regard to its various non-white, non-Christian, non-heterosexual populations.

Two years ago John White, a black resident of Suffolk County, NY, was forced to defend his home and his son against an angry white mob who had gathered outside.

Aaron White, John White’s teenage son, had been attending an under-age drinking party nearby when he was accused by several white males of being a rapist, based upon a facebook post made by a female acquaintance of both he and his accusers. White denied the allegation, but willingly left the party in order to avoid conflict. He was followed home by his accusers, who exchanged racialized insults with him via phone and text message. When these young men attempted to enter the house one of the attackers, 17-year-old Daniel Cicciaro, was shot dead. John White was arrested for first degree manslaughter and for the illegal possession of an unregistered handgun.

During the trial, right-wing pundits asked why White didn’t just lock his door and call the police. This question was never asked of the white teens why they decided to institute their own brand of vigilante justice, instead of calling the police to investigate the rape allegation. They also failed to mention that Cicciaro had been drinking heavily prior to the incident. Nor was there any mention of the poor police/community relations that existed between black residents and the police department(s) for years due to numerous allegations of harassment, as well as high-profile incidents of assault and summary executions of black people by police, including the cases of Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Patrick Dorismond, and Anthony Baez; which could conceivably make blacks and other minorities hesitant to call 911. And none of them one uttered a word about how this incident is could be viewed as a ‘21st century’ attempt at lynching.

Often in this nation’s ‘glorious past’ [that more than a few openly state they wish we could return to], mobs of white men would kidnap a young black male for simply looking in the direction of a white woman and then spread a rumor of sexual assault throughout a white community in order to mobilize and justify support for hanging, burning, and mutilating the individual in question publically.

Suffolk County Court Judge Barbara Kahn granted a request that allowed the jury to consider convicting Mr. White of reckless endangerment, a misdemeanor that carries a prison term of up to one year. Instead, the jury found him guilty of second degree manslaughter which carries a minimum sentence of 5 years and a maximum sentence of 15. In 2007, White was sentenced to 2 to 4 years in state prison. His conviction has been upheld on appeal.

Four years ago, seven young Black lesbians from New Jersey—Patreese Johnson, Renata Hill, Venice Brown, Terrain Dandridge, Chenese Loyal, Lania Daniels, and Khamysha Coates—were hanging out on the pier in New York City’s West Village when Dwayne Buckle, a man selling DVDs on the street, sexually propositioned Patreese. Prior to this event, another young woman named Sakia Gunn had been stabbed to death under very similar circumstances—by a pair of highly aggressive, verbally abusive, openly homophobic male strangers in that very same area. One of the seven had known Sakia personally.

Refusing to take “no” for an answer, Buckle followed them down the street, issuing insults and threats, telling one of them “I’ll f*** you straight, sweetheart!” During the resulting confrontation, Buckle first spat in Renata’s face and threw his lit cigarette at her, then he yanked another’s hair, pulling her towards him, and then began strangling Renata. Patreese Johnson, a ‘menacing’ 4 feet 11 inches tall and 95 pounds, produced a small knife from her bag to stop Buckle from choking her friend—a knife she carried to protect herself when she came home alone from her late-night job.

Two male onlookers, one of whom had a knife, ran over to physically deal with Buckle in order to help the women. Buckle, who ended up hospitalized for five days with stomach and liver lacerations, initially reported on at least two occasions that the men—not the women—had attacked him. What’s more, Patreese’s knife was never tested for DNA, the men who beat Buckle were never questioned by police, and the whole incident was captured on surveillance video. Yet, the women ended up on trial for attempted murder. Doing their part to contribute to the climate of a witch hunt, the local NY corporate-owned media referred to the women repeatedly as a “wolf pack of lesbians.” and demonized them at every opportunity in print and on the air.

In June 2007, after spending most of a year in jail, four of the seven women were sentenced—reportedly by an all-white jury of mostly women—to jail terms ranging from 3 1/2 to 11 years. The oldest of the women was 24, and two of them are mothers of small children. The pro-bono lawyers for the women would later have to purchase the public record of the case since the judge, Edward J. McLaughlin (who openly taunted and expressed contempt for the women in front of the jury all throughout the trial), refused to release it. As of August 2007, the defense team still does NOT have a copy of the security camera video footage!

Then there’s the case of Montequa Jackson, a former University of Louisville student. In August, 2009 after walking her home, her boyfriend Jermaine Stafford was randomly surrounded and attacked by a group of white men on campus. Hearing what was happening outside her dorm, Jackson rushed to his aid and stabbed one the attackers with a small knife. She was prosecuted for assault, placed on probation, and expelled from school. You can watch the FOX news account (including the attack caught on security camera video) for yourself here.

As the economy worsens, and the people become more desperate, it becomes easier for conservative talk radio personalities, politicians, and other fear-based demagogues to use their access to the media to move the public (especially the white population) into a narrow, dogmatic, decidedly reactionary direction. Currently, both republicans and democrats pander to this crowd; as do various religious and political leaders at the local and state level.

In their pandering to the most racist, intolerant, imperialist, and anti-democratic forces, those who have positions of real power over our daily lives (and that of our students), particularly those who are employed as public servants who have a social, political, and cultural affinity with the political line of the most racist, intolerant, imperialist, and anti-democratic forces in the country are creating policies, procedures, ‘best’ practices, and legal precedents that we as instructors must pay attention to and consult both legal and political experts to help us to interpret, in order for us to deliver to our students the most up-to-date, realistic, and relevant self-defense education we can provide.