they’re mostly Christmas/holiday tunes transformed into Occu-Carols, with a couple others thrown in as well. my favorite is #6 “Do You Hear What I Hear?”

let’s be a movement that sings!
alex

image by Larry Swetman

OCCUPY PHILLY SONGBOOK

1. WE WISH FOR A REVOLUTION
(by Alex Knight to the tune of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”)

We wish for a revolution
We wish for a revolution
We wish for a revolution
In the coming New Year!

Tunisia was first
Egypt heard the call
Then Occupy Wall St.
Inspired us all.

(Chorus)

In Chile and Greece
Now Russia we see
The people are rising
For democracy.

(Chorus)

Now Philly has joined
We’re ready to rock
We’re just getting started
And we’ll never stop!

We wish for a revolution
We wish for a revolution
We wish for a revolution
In the coming New Year!

2. THE TWELVE DAYS OF OCCUPY
(inspired by other versions, including one by Gina Botel)

On the first day of Occupy, my new friends gave to me
A tent and a community.

On the second day of Occupy, my new friends gave to me
Two woolen blankets and…

On the third day of Occupy, my new friends gave to me
Three warm meals…

On the fourth day of Occupy, my new friends gave to me
Four clarifying questions…

On the fifth day of Occupy, my new friends gave to me
FIVE LONG GA’s…

On the sixth day of Occupy, my new friends gave to me
Six working groups…

On the seventh day of Occupy, my new friends gave to me
Seven drummers drumming…

On the eighth day of Occupy, my new friends gave to me
Eight signs a-painting…

On the ninth day of Occupy, my new friends gave to me
Nine marchers marching…

On the tenth day of Occupy, my new friends gave to me
Ten locked arms…

On the eleventh day of Occupy, my new friends gave to me
Eleven cops a-raiding…

On the twelfth day of Occupy, my new friends gave to me
Twelve new encampments…

3. DECK CITY HALL
(by Alex Knight, inspired by other versions)

De-eck City Hall with tents
Fa La La La La, La La La La
‘Tis the time to start a movement
Fa La La La La, La La La La
October 6th we came together
Fa La La, La La La, La La La
But this movement lasts forever
Fa La La La La, La La La La

Dilworth Plaza sits before us
Fa La La La La, La La La La
Make a sign and join the chorus
Fa La La La La, La La La La
Follow us and take a chance
Fa La La, La La La, La La La
Grab a drum and let’s all dance
Fa La La La La, La La La La

Direct democracy’s our creed
Fa La La La La, La La La La
Helping those in times of need
Fa La La La La, La La La La
One thing that this movement knows
Fa La La, La La La, La La La
Capitalism has no clothes!
Fa La La La La, La La La La

Fa La La La La, La La La Laaaa!

4. OCCUPY
(by Alex Knight to the tune of “Jingle Bells”)

Occupy, Occupy,
We have come to say
Oh! what fun it is to fight
For a better world today!

(repeat)

Setting up our tents
We are here to stay
O’er the weeks we go
Laughing all the way (Ha ha ha!)

Drums are pounding loud
Keeping spirits bright
What fun it is to occupy
Our city squares tonight!

Oh! Occupy, Occupy,
We have come to say
Oh! what fun it is to fight
For a better world today!

(repeat)

Feeding all for free
And a place to lay
Medics standing by
Meetings all the day!

Our government has failed
To do what we all say
That is why we’ve come to build
Democracy our way!

(repeat chorus)

5. ORGANIZING WORKERS IN THIS LAND
(based on a version by Kelly Karjola to the tune of “Walking in a Winter Wonderland”)

CEO’s…
Are you listening?
On respect we’re insisting
In each industry
Our plan’s gonna be
Organizing workers in this land

All you rich politicians
Unions want recognition
You’d better see this,
We’re raising our fists
And organizing workers in this land

We all share a new vision
Occupy has a mission
One day “working poor”
Will be never more
We’ll have a living wage in every town!

So let’s join those committees
Time to build Union Cities
It’s a beautiful sight
When we all unite
Organizing workers in this land!

6. DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR?
(based on a version by Gina Botel)

Said the police to Mayor Nutter,
Do you see what I see, do you see what I see?
Way down in the streets, Mayor Nutter,
Do you see what I see, do you see what I see?
A Crowd, a Crowd
Marching in the streets
Waving signs out there for all to see
Waving signs for all to see!

Said Mayor Nutter to the Media,
Do you hear what I hear, do you hear what I hear?
Ringing through the town, Media
Do you hear what I hear, do you hear what I hear?
A Chant, a Chant
The popping up of tents
Saying we are the 99 percent
We are the 99 percent!

Said the Media to the Mighty Banks,
Do you know what I know, do you know what I know?
In your fortress walls, Mighty Banks
Do you know what I know, do you know what I know?
The People, the People
The People of this town
They will come, occupy and shut you down
They will come, occupy and shut you down!

7. O’ DAMN YE WALL ST. GENTLEMEN
(to the tune of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”)

O Damn Ye Wall Street Gentlemen,
You bastards made us pay
For all the debt you piled up
And then you walked away.
You handed out fat bonus checks
And sneered at our dismay.

O, you Swindlers and Liars and Frauds (x2)

O, Damn Ye Wall Street Gentlemen
For we are unemployed.
Our homes are in foreclosure
And our bank accounts destroyed.
You robbed us of our future
For the profits you enjoyed.

O, you Swindlers and Liars and Frauds (x2)

O, Damn Ye Wall Street Gentlemen
You paid off Uncle Sam,
For regulation of the Banks
Is nothing but a sham.
And no one went to prison
For this trillion dollar scam.

O, you Swindlers and Liars and Frauds (x2)

O, Damn Ye Wall Street Gentlemen,
If you do not repent
Prepare for occupation by the 99 percent.
The times are changing once again
And we will not relent.

O, you Swindlers and Liars and Frauds (x2)

8. SOLIDARITY FOREVER
(updated by Alex Knight)

When the movement’s inspiration through the 99 has run,
There shall be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun.
But what force on earth is weaker
Than the feeble strength of one?
For the movement makes us strong!

Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever
Solidarity forever, for the movement makes us strong!

It is we who worked our butts off,
Building all the stuff they trade.
Paved the highways, fed the children,
Endless gigs of websites made.
Now we stand outcast and jobless
‘Midst the wonders we have made.
But the movement makes us strong!

Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever
Solidarity forever, for the movement makes us strong!

They have taken untold millions
That they never toiled to earn
But without our brain and muscle,
Not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their fragile power
Gain our freedom when we learn,
That the movement makes us strong!

Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever
Solidarity forever, for the movement makes us strong!

9. RUDOLPH THE BROWN-NOSED BANKER
(based on a version by Loretta Callahan)

Rudolph the Brown-Nosed Banker
Got a very big bailout
He didn’t have to worry
Cause he was “too big to fail”

All of the other banksters
Jealous of his fat cat ways
Cranked up your interest payments
Now they’re really makin’ hay

Then one frantic autumn day
To Rudolph’s great dismay
He’d robbed so many 401k’s
All the markets went away!

Now all the people hate banks
And they’re shouting out angry
We’re gonna stop this nonsense
You’ll go down in history!

10. O’ ONE PERCENT!
(written by Michael Shultz to the tune of “Oh Christmas Tree”)

O’ One Percent! O’ One Percent!
The times they are a-changin;
O’ One Percent! O’ One Percent!
The times they are a-changin;
You foreclose when Summer’s here,
Keep empty homes through Winter’s drear.
O’ One Percent! O’ One Percent!
The times they are a-changin.

O’ One Percent! O’ One Percent!
No treasure can you give me;
O’ One Percent! O’ One Percent!
No pleasure can you give me;
For me to prop your system up,
While me and mine go belly up.
O’ One Percent! O’ One Percent!
No treasure can you give me.

O’ One Percent! O’ One Percent!
Your spokespeople lie daily;
O’ One Percent! O’ One Percent!
Your spokespeople lie daily;
The corporations fill our ears,
With things to buy and baseless fears.
O’ One Percent! O’ One Percent!
Your spokespeople lie daily.

O’ One Percent! O’ One Percent!
You are not our master;
O’ One Percent! O’ One Percent!
You are not our master;
Through Unity we’ll overcome,
Let’s bridge divisions everyone!
O’ One Percent! O’ One Percent!
You are not our master.

11. OCCUPY IS COMING TO TOWN
(adapted from other versions)

You better watch out
You better not lie
You better shape up I’m telling you why
Occupy is coming to town!

You’re cooking the books
We’re checking them twice
We’re gonna find out who’s naughty or nice
Occupy is coming to town!

We see you when you’re cheating
We know when you’re a snake
We know when you’ve been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake

Oh, you better watch out
You better not spy
You better not steal I’m telling you why
Occupy is coming to town!

We see you when you’re speaking
We know when you’re a fake
We know when you’ve been doing wrong
So do good for goodness sake

We’re speaking out loud
We’re taking the streets
The 99% cannot be beat
Occupy is coming to town!

12. WE OCCUPY!
(by Dave Marley of Occupy Philly)

We Occupy
It’s what we do
And what we do
We do for you
And also for us
Because we must
We Occupy…
We Occupy

We Occupy
Wherever we go
Wherever we go
Is our new home
And our new home
Is your new home
We Occupy…
We Occupy

We Occupy
Whatever we eat
Whatever we eat
Is Yours to eat
Come have a seat
And tell us why
You Occupy…
We Occupy

We Occupy
Wherever we stand
Wherever we stand
Is occupied land
Come take our hands
And raise them high
We Occupy…
We Occupy

We Occupy
Victoriously
Victoriously
We now are free
So shall we be
Until we die
We Occupy…
We Occupy

We Occupy
We Occupy
We Occupy
We Occupy
We Occupy
We Occupy
We Occupy…
We Occupy!

Whiteness and the 99%
By Joel Olson

Originally published by Bring the Ruckus, 10/20/11.  A printable PDF of this piece is available for download here, and a readable PDF is available here.

Occupy Wall Street and the hundreds of occupations it has sparked nationwide are among the most inspiring events in the U.S. in the 21st century. The occupations have brought together people to talk, occupy, and organize in new and exciting ways. The convergence of so many people with so many concerns has naturally created tensions within the occupation movement. One of the most significant tensions has been over race. This is not unusual, given the racial history of the United States. But this tension is particularly dangerous, for unless it is confronted, we cannot build the 99%. The key obstacle to building the 99% is left colorblindness, and the key to overcoming it is to put the struggles of communities of color at the center of this movement. It is the difference between a free world and the continued dominance of the 1%.

Left colorblindess is the enemy

Left colorblindness is the belief that race is a “divisive” issue among the 99%, so we should instead focus on problems that “everyone” shares. According to this argument, the movement is for everyone, and people of color should join it rather than attack it.

Left colorblindness claims to be inclusive, but it is actually just another way to keep whites’ interests at the forefront. It tells people of color to join “our” struggle (who makes up this “our,” anyway?) but warns them not to bring their “special” concerns into it. It enables white people to decide which issues are for the 99% and which ones are “too narrow.” It’s another way for whites to expect and insist on favored treatment, even in a democratic movement.

As long as left colorblindness dominates our movement, there will be no 99%. There will instead be a handful of whites claiming to speak for everyone. When people of color have to enter a movement on white people’s terms rather than their own, that’s not the 99%. That’s white democracy.

The white democracy

Biologically speaking, there’s no such thing as race. As hard as they’ve tried, scientists have never been able to define it. That’s because race is a human creation, not a fact of nature. Like money, it only exists because people accept it as “real.” Races exist because humans invented them.

Why would people invent race? Race was created in America in the late 1600s in order to preserve the land and power of the wealthy. Rich planters in Virginia feared what might happen if indigenous tribes, slaves, and indentured servants united and overthrew them. So, they cut a deal with the poor English colonists. The planters gave the English poor certain rights and privileges denied to all persons of African and Native American descent: the right to never be enslaved, to free speech and assembly, to move about without a pass, to marry without upper-class permission, to change jobs, to acquire property, and to bear arms. In exchange, the English poor agreed to respect the property of the rich, help them seize indigenous lands, and enforce slavery.

This cross-class alliance between the rich and the English poor came to be known as the “white race.” By accepting preferential treatment in an economic system that exploited their labor, too, the white working class tied their wagon to the elite rather than the rest of humanity. This devil’s bargain has undermined freedom and democracy in the U.S. ever since.

The cross-class alliance that makes up the white race.

As this white race expanded to include other European ethnicities, the result was a very curious political system: the white democracy. The white democracy has two contradictory aspects to it. On the one hand, all whites are considered equal (even as the poor are subordinated to the rich and women are subordinated to men). On the other, every white person is considered superior to every person of color. It’s democracy for white folks, but tyranny for everyone else.

In this system, whites praised freedom, equal opportunity, and hard work, while at the same time insisting on higher wages, access to the best jobs, to be the first hired and the last fired at the workplace, full enjoyment of civil rights, the right to send their kids to the best schools, to live in the nicest neighborhoods, and to enjoy decent treatment by the police. In exchange for these “public and psychological wages,” as W.E.B. Du Bois called them, whites agreed to enforce slavery, segregation, reservation, genocide, and other forms of discrimination. The tragedy of the white democracy is that it oppressed working class whites as well as people of color, because with the working class bitterly divided, the elites could rule easily.

The white democracy exists today. Take any social indicator—rates for college graduation, homeownership, median family wealth, incarceration, life expectancy, infant mortality, cancer, unemployment, median family debt, etc.—and you’ll find the same thing: whites as a group are significantly better off than any other racial group. Of course there are individual exceptions, but as a group whites enjoy more wealth, less debt, more education, less imprisonment, more health care, less illness, more safety, less crime, better treatment by the police, and less police brutality than any other group. Some whisper that this is because whites have a better work ethic. But history tells us that the white democracy, born in the 1600s, lives on.

The distorted white mindset

No one is opposed to good schools, safe neighborhoods, healthy communities, and economic security for whites. The problem is that in the white democracy, whites often enjoy these at the expense of communities of color. This creates a distorted mindset among many whites: they praise freedom yet support a system that clearly favors the rich, even at the expense of poor whites. (Tea Party, I’m talking to you.)

The roots of left colorblindness lie in the white democracy and the distorted mindset it creates. It encourages whites to think that their issues are “universal” while those of people of color are “specific.” But that is exactly backwards. The struggles of people of color are the problems that everyone shares. Anyone in the occupy movement who has been treated brutally by the police has to know that Black communities are terrorized by cops every day. Anyone who is unemployed has to know that Black unemployment rates are always at least double that of whites, and Native American unemployment rates are far higher. Anyone who is sick and lacks healthcare has to know that people of color are the least likely to be insured (regardless of their income) and have the highest infant mortality and cancer rates and the lowest life expectancy rates. Anyone who is drowning in debt should know that the median net wealth of Black households is twenty times less than that of white households. Only left colorblindness can lead us to ignore these facts.

This is the sinister impact of white democracy on our movements. It encourages a mindset that insists that racial issues are “divisive” when they are at the absolute center of everything we are fighting for.

To defeat left colorblindness and the distorted white mindset, we must come to see any form of favoritism toward whites (whether explicit or implicit) as an evil attempt to perpetuate the cross-class alliance rather than build the 99%.

The only thing that can stop us is us

Throughout American history, attacking the white democracy has always opened up radical possibilities for all people. The abolitionist movement not only overthrew slavery, it kicked off the women’s rights and labor movements. The civil rights struggle not only overthrew legal segregation, it kicked off the women’s rights, free speech, student, queer, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and American Indian movements. When the pillars of the white democracy tremble, everything is possible.

The only thing that can stop us is us. What prevents the 99% from organizing the world as we see fit is not the 1%. The 1% cannot hold on to power if we decide they shouldn’t. What keeps us from building the new world in our hearts are the divisions among us.

Our diversity is our strength. But left colorblindness is a rejection of diversity. It is an effort to keep white interests at the center of the movement even as the movement claims to be open to all. Urging us to “get over” so-called “divisive” issues like race sound inclusive, but they are really efforts to maintain the white democracy. It’s like Wall Street executives telling us to “get beyond” “divisive” issues like their unfair profits because if you work hard enough, you too can get a job on Wall Street someday!

Creating a 99% requires putting the struggles of people of color at the center of our conversations and demands rather than relegating them to the margins. To fight against school segregation, colonization, redlining, and anti-immigrant attacks is to fight against everything Wall Street stands for, everything the Tea Party stands for, everything this government stands for. It is to fight against the white democracy, which stands at the path to a free society like a troll at the bridge.

Occupy everything, attack the white democracy

While no pamphlet can capture everything a nationwide movement can or should do to undermine the white democracy and left colorblindness, below is a short list of questions people might consider asking in movement debates. These questions were developed from actual debates in occupations throughout the U.S.

1. Do speakers urge us “get beyond” race? Are they defensive and dismissive of demands for racial justice?
2. If speakers urge developing “close working relationships with the police,” do they consider how police terrorize Black, Latino, Native, and undocumented communities? Do they consider how police have attacked occupation encampments?
3. If speakers urge us to hold banks accountable, do they encourage us to focus on redlining, predatory lending, and subprime mortgages, which have decimated Black and Latino neighborhoods?
4. If speakers urge the cancellation of debts, do they mean for things like electric and heating bills as well as home mortgages and college loans?
5. If speakers urge the halting of foreclosures, do they acknowledge that they take place primarily in segregated neighborhoods, and do they propose to start there?
6. If speakers urge the creation of more jobs, do they acknowledge that many communities of color have already been in chronic “recessions” for decades, and do they propose to start from there?

Joel Olson is a member of Bring the Ruckus.

A Therapist Talks About the Occupy Wall Street Events

Occupy Philly General Assembly, October 6, 2011

By Lane Arye

Originally published by In Front and Center.

Last night I was talking with a group of activists/organizers from around the country about their impressions of the OWS movement. They were curious how the insights of a therapist and conflict facilitator schooled in Worldwork (which was developed by Arnold Mindell) might be useful to folks in the movement. After our teleconference, the activists encouraged me to write this.

First off, OWS is surrounded by a host of critics, from long-time social change organizers to mainstream media.  (Much of the media criticism has been debriefed, so I’m focusing on internal criticisms I have heard.)

We can learn from critics in at least two ways. They can help us improve by pointing out what we genuinely need to change. Paradoxically, they may be criticizing us for something we actually need to do more congruently. Seen from this angle, critics may be highlighting strengths we don’t yet know we have.

Take one criticism: The General Assemblies lead to a kind of individualism of people wanting to be heard and contribute, unaware of the impact on the thousand people listening.  In one recent GA, a small group of frustrated men hijacked the meeting, cursing and physically threatening the entire assembly.  Even in less dramatic situations, most GA’s are filled with judgment, fracturing statements, and individuals repeating each other just so they can get themselves heard.

From one point of view, the criticism is valid. Yes, Western individualism can be very problematic and it is always a good time to learn to become communitarian.  But perhaps there is also something beautiful about this individualism. People have the sense that they can finally speak up about the economy, that their voice is important, that they do not have to shut up and listen to talking heads who supposedly know better.

It can be useful to think about this in terms of roles. (Just as an actor plays many different roles, we all play different roles in our lives, sometimes without awareness.) Individuals wanting to be heard at a General Assembly might be in the role of someone who wants attention. “Pay attention to me! I have something to say!”  For years our “democratic” system has ignored these voices.  They have been excluded by money, a political system that merely offers citizens a chance to vote, and a financial system bent on inequality. But now this role is finding a public voice.

This role is talking to another role that does not listen. Many bankers, politicians, media and others are part of the role of “not listening.”  In essence the voice says: “Shut up! I am not listening to you!”  (Though they have learned to be more subtle: ”I wish the protestors had a single message.”)

There must be a third role here – the listener, who holds the space and receives what someone is offering.

Making this useful: Perhaps facilitators, organizers and activists could benefit from knowing that these three roles are around. For example, when someone is talking a lot at a General Assembly, the facilitator could echo back what the speaker is saying, getting to the essence of it so the speaker knows she/he is heard, and perhaps so the person knows what she/he is trying to say.

I have seen this work around the world. During a forum for reconciliation in the Balkans soon after the war there, a Bosnian Croat would not stop speaking, holding a virtual filibuster, despite the impassioned pleas of his fellow participants. When I echoed back what I thought he was trying to say, he thanked me and sat down. When people feel heard, they stop demanding the time to speak, because filling the missing role of the listener is relieving to the one who has something to say.

Of course, doing this can be challenging. Everyone wants to speak, but who can really listen? In Worldwork we say thatthe elder is the person who can listen to all voices, who supports everyone to speak and be heard, who wants the best for all sides of a given conflict. OWS, like the rest of the world, needs more elders.

Another way to make this useful is to think that probably everyone needs to be heard, and everyone needs to cultivate the listener. Having large groups move into pairs or groups of three people who can actively listen to one another about a given topic might be one way to incorporate this important need.  Occupy Minneapolis used this with huge success during a consensus process that had been routinely blocked. After pair-sharing, the group was able to move forward.  Or Aussie facilitator Holly Hammond has found value in “asking people to raise their hands in response to some questions e.g., ‘Raise your hand if this is your first General Assembly’ (very useful information!); ‘Raise your hand if you camped at City Square’; ‘Raise your hand if you were present at the eviction’, etc.”  Both methods gave people the sense that someone was listening to them, interested in them, and that they were an important part of what was happening.

This is one reason, by the way, that the spokescouncil model can be effective.  In that model there are affinity groups — embedded small groups so everyone can speak — and they each send representatives who sit at the spokescouncil, like spokes of a wheel.  Each spoke can consult with its affinity group and the whole process is done in public so it marries transparent representation and participation.

Similar to the listener is the appreciator. At some GA’s people are attacked when they step into new roles of leadership. How much more exciting it could be if these brave souls were cheered when they took the risk to lead. One OWS activists came up with a different solution: put up a large chart where people can leave anonymous (or signed) messages of appreciation for people in the camp.  It’s another way to model that people are hearing!

The one who wants attention is related to the role of the one who wants to contribute. Even long-time organizers may find themselves not knowing how to contribute to this movement that has its own culture, that may not seem to them to be strategic or sustainable. They might feel disempowered as well, and feel they have to adapt to the General Assembly culture and the rules that have been set up by the OWS organizers. And those who anticipate that the long history of oppression will be repeated yet again may feel that their voices and contributions will not be as welcomed.

When we notice the companion role, the one who receives someone’s contribution, then we find ways to work with this dynamic. For instance, facilitators might again try getting people into small groups, and having folks take turns saying what they personally feel they have to contribute to this movement. The other people in the small group can draw them out, and encourage them to find ways to bring their unique gifts. Many people want to contribute, but do not know how. It is important to support people to find their strengths and fulfill their need to contribute. This can prevent people from feeling discouraged or disempowered (and thus prevent harmful consequences like deciding not to return, or discouraging others from engaging with the movement). It also breathes new life into a movement by bringing new ideas and energy from the grassroots.

When I mentioned this point to the social change organizers, they put it to immediate use. One young woman of color from New York was talking about her frustration that, while People of Color have shown up, their contributions have often been minimized. She felt that OWS needs just the opposite- to value and prioritize these contributions in order to continue expanding and diversifying the movement. Another Philly organizer of color drew her out, asking how she imagined making a difference. Her initial hesitancy was transformed into excitement as he appreciated and received her great ideas. Then he asked if she would like coaching on one point, which she welcomed. A week later she facilitated a 100 person POC meeting, as well as a media training for POC/women, teaching them to better find their voice, initiate interviews, and speak up in the media. She also had other projects/contributions in the pipeline. As she wrote, “My mind and my heart are a-whirlin.”

Here was one great example of what I imagine are a multitude of potential contributions that could be supported to come forward if we notice and fill the various roles in the field.

Let’s not forget that the man who wanted to hear her ideas also made a contribution of his own. Filling the role of the receiver was itself a contribution!

He had been one of those experienced organizers who had not found a way to be of use to the OWS movement. He had at various times tried to give advice to OWS facilitators about how to have better GA’s and create a more sustainable movement, without having had much impact. Now he realized he had been stuck in the role of the one who speaks (one of the many well-meaning people who turn into advice givers) rather than being an elder. That’s when he decided to try something different. (It is important to note that after listening to her, he asked if she wanted coaching, then waited for her feedback before offering his own ideas.)

Another way to look at all of this is through the lens of a criticism that has been leveled by the mainstream media at the OWS movement – that it has so many heads and no unified message. Rather than looking at the truth or falsehood of this criticism, let’s see if there is something good about it! If OWS is creature with many heads, then anyone can be the head. When so many heads are singing beautiful songs, it is up to each of us to both listen, and to sing our own song. The most beautiful and compelling ones will be heard. (Writing this article after listening deeply to those activists is my own attempt to contribute a song. Perhaps someone will hear it.) From this perspective, we are all potential leaders of this movement.

According to Mindell’s idea of Deep Democracy, when all voices and roles have a chance to be heard and interact, the wisdom of a group or community can arise. Perhaps the many-headed creature that is OWS needs our particular song, our particular direction. The world is trying to express itself. It is using us. By believing in our own voice, in our own special part, and by actively listening to our peers, we can help the wisdom and power of the movement to develop.

Whether the occupation on Lower Manhattan lasts, or grows, or dies in the coming weeks, the global upheaval will continue and become an ever-present feature of the 21st Century. Our theory is that capitalism has entered a crisis from which it will never recover. The youth can feel it, we know we have no future within the existing system. The only question is, what alternative models can we move to, when everything feels so bleak?

The Wall St. occupiers have followed the examples of Egypt, Greece, and Spain in using the direct democratic process of the “general assembly.” This means thousands of young people are having their first exhilarating taste of their voice being part of the actual exercise of power – participating in a movement.  In truth, this is our best hope, so spread it and bring that exhilaration to your friends and family.

If we have a general assembly in every town, every workplace, every school, then capitalism is over for real. [alex]

“Occupy Wall St. Rediscovers the Radical Imagination”

by David Graeber

Originally published the The Guardian UK, September 25, 2011.

Youth of the multiracial working class - always at the front of things. Police arrested over 80 people during this 9/24 march, and pepper sprayed more. Photo by davids camera craft

The young people protesting in Wall Street and beyond reject this vain economic order. They have come to reclaim the future.

Why are people occupying Wall Street? Why has the occupation – despite the latest police crackdown – sent out sparks across America, within days, inspiring hundreds of people to send pizzas, money, equipment and, now, to start their own movements called OccupyChicago, OccupyFlorida, in OccupyDenver or OccupyLA?

There are obvious reasons. We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt. Most, I found, were of working-class or otherwise modest backgrounds, kids who did exactly what they were told they should: studied, got into college, and are now not just being punished for it, but humiliated – faced with a life of being treated as deadbeats, moral reprobates.

Is it really surprising they would like to have a word with the financial magnates who stole their future?

Just as in Europe, we are seeing the results of colossal social failure. The occupiers are the very sort of people, brimming with ideas, whose energies a healthy society would be marshaling to improve life for everyone. Instead, they are using it to envision ways to bring the whole system down.

But the ultimate failure here is of imagination. What we are witnessing can also be seen as a demand to finally have a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008. There was a moment, after the near-collapse of the world’s financial architecture, when anything seemed possible.

Everything we’d been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie. Markets did not run themselves; creators of financial instruments were not infallible geniuses; and debts did not really need to be repaid – in fact, money itself was revealed to be a political instrument, trillions of dollars of which could be whisked in or out of existence overnight if governments or central banks required it. Even the Economist was running headlines like “Capitalism: Was it a Good Idea?”

It seemed the time had come to rethink everything: the very nature of markets, money, debt; to ask what an “economy” is actually for. This lasted perhaps two weeks. Then, in one of the most colossal failures of nerve in history, we all collectively clapped our hands over our ears and tried to put things back as close as possible to the way they’d been before.

Perhaps, it’s not surprising. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the real priority of those running the world for the last few decades has not been creating a viable form of capitalism, but rather, convincing us all that the current form of capitalism is the only conceivable economic system, so its flaws are irrelevant. As a result, we’re all sitting around dumbfounded as the whole apparatus falls apart.

What we’ve learned now is that the economic crisis of the 1970s never really went away. It was fobbed off by cheap credit at home and massive plunder abroad – the latter, in the name of the “third world debt crisis”. But the global south fought back. The “alter-globalisation movement”, was in the end, successful: the IMF has been driven out of East Asia and Latin America, just as it is now being driven from the Middle East. As a result, the debt crisis has come home to Europe and North America, replete with the exact same approach: declare a financial crisis, appoint supposedly neutral technocrats to manage it, and then engage in an orgy of plunder in the name of “austerity”.

The form of resistance that has emerged looks remarkably similar to the old global justice movement, too: we see the rejection of old-fashioned party politics, the same embrace of radical diversity, the same emphasis on inventing new forms of democracy from below. What’s different is largely the target: where in 2000, it was directed at the power of unprecedented new planetary bureaucracies (the WTO, IMF, World Bank, Nafta), institutions with no democratic accountability, which existed only to serve the interests of transnational capital; now, it is at the entire political classes of countries like Greece, Spain and, now, the US – for exactly the same reason. This is why protesters are often hesitant even to issue formal demands, since that might imply recognising the legitimacy of the politicians against whom they are ranged.

When the history is finally written, though, it’s likely all of this tumult – beginning with the Arab Spring – will be remembered as the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire. Thirty years of relentless prioritising of propaganda over substance, and snuffing out anything that might look like a political basis for opposition, might make the prospects for the young protesters look bleak; and it’s clear that the rich are determined to seize as large a share of the spoils as remain, tossing a whole generation of young people to the wolves in order to do so. But history is not on their side.

We might do well to consider the collapse of the European colonial empires. It certainly did not lead to the rich successfully grabbing all the cookies, but to the creation of the modern welfare state. We don’t know precisely what will come out of this round. But if the occupiers finally manage to break the 30-year stranglehold that has been placed on the human imagination, as in those first weeks after September 2008, everything will once again be on the table – and the occupiers of Wall Street and other cities around the US will have done us the greatest favour anyone possibly can.

Why Marxism Has Failed, and Why Zombie-Marxism Cannot Die
Or My Rocky Relationship with Grampa Karl

by Alex Knight, endofcapitalism.com
Part 3.1 – September 19, 2011
This is part of an essay critiquing the philosophy of Karl Marx for its relevance to 21st century anti-capitalism. The main thrust of the essay is to encourage living common-sense radicalism, as opposed to the automatic reproduction of zombie ideas which have lost connection to current reality. Karl Marx was no prophet. But neither can we reject him. We have to go beyond him, and bring him with us. I believe it is only on such a basis, with a critical appraisal of Marx, that the Left can become ideologically relevant to today’s rapidly evolving political circumstances. [Click here for Part 1 and Part 2.]

What Marx Got Wrong

“Marxism has ceased to be applicable to our time not because it is too visionary or revolutionary, but because it is not visionary or revolutionary enough” – Murray Bookchin, “Listen, Marxist!”

Although Karl Marx provided us crucial and brilliant anti-capitalist critiques as explored in Part 2, he also contributed several key theoretical errors which continue to haunt the Left. Instead of mindlessly reproducing these dead ideas into contexts where they no longer make sense, we must expose the decay and separate it from the parts of Marx’s thought which are still alive and relevant.

I have narrowed down my objections to five core problems: 1. Linear March of History, 2. Europe as Liberator, 3. Mysticism of the Proletariat, 4. The State, and 5. A Secular Dogma.

I submit that Marx’s foremost shortcoming was his theory of history as a linear progression of higher and higher stages of human society, culminating in the utopia of communism. According to Marx, this “progress” was manifest in the “development of productive forces,” or the ability of humans to remake the world in their own image. The danger of this idea is that it wrongly ascribes an “advance” to the growth of class society. In particular, capitalism is seen as a “necessary” precursor to socialism. This logic implicitly justifies not only the domination of nature by humanity, but the dominance of men over women, and the dominance of Europeans over people of other cultures.

Marx’s elevation of the “proletariat” as the agent of history also created a narrow vision for human emancipation, locating the terrain of liberation within the workplace, rather than outside of it. This, combined with a naive and problematic understanding of the State, only dispensed more theoretical fog that has clouded the thinking of revolutionary strategy for more than a century. Finally, by binding the hopes and dreams of the world into a deterministic formula of economic law, Marx inadvertently created the potential for tragic dogmatism and sectarianism, his followers fighting over who possessed the “correct” interpretation of historical forces.

(These mistakes have become especially apparent with hindsight, after Marxists have attempted to put these ideas into practice over the last 150 years. The goal here is not to fault Marx for failing to see the future, but rather to fault what he actually said, which was wrong in his own time, and is disastrous in ours. In this section I will limit my criticisms to Marx’s ideas only, and deal with the monstrous legacy of “actually existing” Marxism in Part 4.)

Capitalism is "advancing" us right off a cliff.

1. Linear March of History

“Rooted in early industrialization and a teleological materialism that assumed progress towards communism was inevitable, traditional Marxist historiography grossly oversimplified real history into a series of linear steps and straightforward transitions, with more advanced stages inexorably supplanting more backward ones. Nowadays we know better. History is wildly contingent and unpredictable. Many alternate paths leave from the current moment, as they have from every previous moment too” – Chris Carlsson, Nowtopia (41).

Much of what is wrong in Marx stems from a deterministic conception of historical development, which imagines that the advance and concentration of economic power is necessarily progressive. According to this view, human liberation, which Marx calls communism, can only exist atop the immense productivity and industrial might of capitalism. All of human history, therefore, is nothing but “progressive epochs in the economic formation of society,” as Marx calls it in his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859):

“In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production… the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism [communism].”

The idea that history marches forwards along a linear path was not an original of Marx’s – as Bookchin writes in The Ecology of Freedom, it stems from “Victorian prejudices” that “identify ‘progress’ with increasing control of external and internal nature. Historical development is cast within an image of an increasingly disciplined humanity that is extricating itself from a brutish, unruly, mute natural history” (272).

Marx absorbed this framework through Hegel, who theorized a pseudo-spiritual development of humanity towards the idealization of “Absolute Knowledge,” or God. The underlying logic of this divine movement is the attainment of higher levels of “Reason” – the human mind is increasingly able to detach itself from both the human body and from nature, and thereby exist “for itself.” In this way Hegel imagined that civilization had been evolving in a long dialectical process whereby humanity had become increasingly capable of conceptualizing freedom, and through events such as the French Revolution, was realizing that freedom in actuality.

Encoded in the word “teleology,” the linear march of history is a simplistic storyline whereby human history has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Along the way, the plot progresses and advances rationally through successive stages, inevitably reaching its predetermined destination. The famous “end of history” that Francis Fukuyama claimed had been achieved in 1989 with the downfall of the Soviet Union and the global dominance of Western capitalism was a distinctly Hegelian proposition. “Rational” capitalism had proven itself superior to “irrational” communism. The End.

Marx, like Fukuyama, inherited this Hegelian logic and succumbed to its tantalizing promise of unfolding destiny.¹ However, Marx’s teleology was not concerned with the advance of philosophy or ideas, but was only meaningfully realized in the emancipation of humanity from class oppression. According to Marx, humanity becomes “for itself” through the advance of economic forces, which will free humans from “material want” and thereby eliminate the need for the division of society into rich and poor. Communism is forecast as the final stage of the storyline, when humanity will achieve its end in classlessness and material abundance. In his “Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and General Philosophy” (1844), Marx explains this end:

“[Atheism and communism] are not an impoverished return to unnatural, primitive simplicity. They are rather the first real emergence, the genuine actualization, of man’s nature as something real” (Bottomore 213).

The core problem is Marx’s understanding of human liberation, which is posited as dependent on economic development. Instead of humanity possessing an innate and natural capacity for freedom, Marx delays “the first real emergence of man’s nature” to the end of history. Concerning himself with the “material conditions” for freedom, Marx fails to appreciate that people are constantly producing these conditions themselves in their own communities (taking care of one another, creating tools to accomplish work more efficiently, etc.), and that class systems like capitalism exist by leeching off those efforts, or impeding them to eliminate competition for institutionalized solutions. The development of massive industrialization and the emergence of powerful States do not bring with them the potential for liberation, but are that which humans must be liberated from.

This is not a question of technology, but of power. I fundamentally do not believe that liberation can be built on a foundation of oppression. Power must not be concentrated, but dispersed. Contrary to Marx, the imposition of class society does not enable progress, it obstructs progress.

Marx Against Nature

Marx’s mistaken logic is repeatedly manifest in his ambivalent attitude towards capitalism. Not understanding capitalism’s constant need to perpetuate terrible violence against the planet, and as Silvia Federici adds (below), against women, Marx assigns a beneficial and essential role to capitalism in his grand storyline. Although terrible for its social injustice, the system is simultaneously hailed as a necessary “advance” by virtue of its unprecedented “development of productive forces.” In Capital, Vol. 3 (unpublished at his death), Marx argues:

“It is one of the civilizing aspects of capital that it enforces this surplus labour in a manner and under conditions which are more advantageous to the development of the productive forces, social relations, and the creation of the elements for a new and higher form than under the preceding forms of slavery, serfdom, etc.” (Marx-Engels Reader 440).

Today we know that capitalism threatens the very survival of the human species, and perhaps of the Earth itself. The billions of commodities pumped out by capital’s factories for rapid consumption and waste correspond directly to unprecedented damage to the world’s ecosystems. The clear-cutting of forests, the collapse of the ocean’s fisheries, the creation and spillage of toxic chemicals, the exhaustion of the fresh water supply, and the immense pollution of the atmosphere with greenhouse gases – with its corresponding destabilization of the climate – all call our attention to the ecological violence carried out by overdevelopment. Simply put, human economy is exploiting the world’s resources at a drastically unsustainable rate. In this context, any talk of capitalism today as a “higher stage” of development is simply ecocidal.

In Marx’s era, ecology as a science did not exist, and his comments on nature were few and far between. Obviously he could not have foreseen the predicament we are in today. However, there is a dangerous anti-ecological sentiment built into Marx’s linear march of history, which we reproduce at our own peril. It is not simply an academic question of “what Marx really believed.” If freedom is conceived of and built by extending capitalism’s “progress,” Marxists will (have and are) seek to further industrialize and “develop,” at the expense of the planet. Achieving a sustainable economy means not only breaking with capitalism for its mass production and industry, but breaking with a Marxist teleology that ignores humanity’s place in the larger web of life.

Opposing this view is an increasing push by some Marxists to discover an ecological wisdom in Marx. As I was writing this essay, I received an email by the Marxist magazine The Monthly Review, telling me that a new book is coming out by John Bellamy Foster, author of numerous books on this subject, including Marx’s Ecology. The aim of Foster’s writings, and others of the same thought, seems to be to locate any and all passages in Marx and Engels’ huge body of work that suggest at least an ambiguous or vaguely positive view of nature, then weave them together to create a picture of environmentalism. I find this endeavor unconvincing for several reasons – the comments cited by Foster and others are typically tangential to Marx’s main arguments and are often vague in content. On the contrary, Marx’s core argument about historical development is based on directly anti-ecological assumptions, which can only be explained away by performing intellectual gymnastics.

The key issue regards economic growth, or in Marx’s phrase, “the development of productive forces.” In “Wage Labour and Capital” (1847), Marx speaks of production as “action on nature,” revealing his awareness of the ecological basis for human economic activity (M-ER 207). However, rather than speaking of the need to transform economic activity so as to benefit humanity and nature together, Marx speaks simply in terms of quantity of production, to take as much as possible from the Earth. He repeatedly claims that what is needed is to develop the “modern means of production,” the industrial technology and centralization of capitalism.

“Only under [capital’s] rule does the proletariat… create the modern means of production, which become just so many means of its revolutionary emancipation. Only its rule tears up the material roots of feudal society and levels the ground on which alone a proletarian revolution is possible” (588, “The Class Struggles in France” 1850).

This celebration of the advance of industry reflects Marx’s belief that communism will be more capable of rapid industrialization than capitalism. Capitalism is expected to develop the “productive forces” too fast for its own good, leading to crises when production is “fettered” by the irrational organization of “bourgeois property.” From the “Communist Manifesto” (1848):

“The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society… The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them” (478).

Communism is supposed to replace capitalism because its greater rationality will allow it to fully develop the means of production. Therefore, Marx’s historic mission for the proletariat is to seize control of the economy, not to slow down or decentralize industrialization; instead industrial growth is precisely the goal. The “Communist Manifesto” delivers one of Marx’s most important strategic statements:

“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible (emphasis added)” (490).

The key phrase “increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible” reveals much, but could be misinterpreted due to its vague character. Luckily, the same document fleshes this statement out a bit. Marx’s immediate goals for “the most advanced countries” (i.e. Europe) include, “Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State,” “Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands,” and “Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture” (490).

The idea that industrialization will bring freedom is laid bare here. Apparently Marx was not aware of, or concerned with, the destruction industrial agriculture would inevitably reap on so-called “waste-lands,” which today we know as the marshes and flood-plains that sustain some of the most diverse ecosystems on land. Protecting precisely these areas from “development” has been one of the primary aims of environmentalism.

In Capital, Vol. 3, Marx makes plain his “Victorian prejudices.” The purpose of developing industry “as rapidly as possible,” is for humanity to succeed in what he sees as its battle with a hostile Nature:

“Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilized man… Freedom in this field can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature” (M-ER 441).²

Friedrich Engels, Marx’s lifelong friend and collaborator, was even more blunt on the matter. Engels’ 1880 pamphlet “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” was one of the most important works for popularizing Marx’s theory. The pamphlet was published while Marx was still alive and even included an introduction by Marx, so it is very unlikely that Marx did not give his personal approval to its representation of the pair’s views. The essay explains the view that historical development is a process wherein humanity is liberated from Nature and comes to dominate it. It reaches a climax in this passage explaining the significance of “the seizing of the means of production” and the emergence of communism:

“[F]or the first time man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of Nature… It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom” (Marx-Engels Reader 715-6).³

Marx and Engel’s communist utopia, to the extent that they elaborated it, is conceived as a highly developed industrial paradise, where machines produce massive outputs of goods and services with the least amount of labor. Standing atop this virtually unlimited material abundance, humans should theoretically have no reason for competition or division into classes. They will stop acting like “animals” and start behaving “rationally.” Social peace is to be achieved through a cooperative war against nature. As Murray Bookchin summarizes, “In this dialectic of social development, according to Marx, man passes on from the domination of man by nature, to the domination of man by man, and finally to the domination of nature by man.”

Ecology is based on the fact that humans are just as much a part of the fabric of life as any other animal or life-form, and therefore the interests of humanity and nature are not in opposition, but the same. Marx and Engels’ “lord of Nature” statements are not exceptions to their overall theory of social development, but its inevitable end. A linear march of history, whereby “progress” is narrowly understood as stemming from economic growth, cannot be compatible with an ecological perspective.

One may rise to the defense of Marx and Engels and point out the terrible social misery and poverty of 19th century Europe, which would justify the demand for economic growth. In fact, this echoes the thinking of much of the American Left today, living in the most affluent economy that has ever existed, but which still de-prioritizes ecology in favor of the short-sighted demand for investment to “create jobs.” The error of this logic is not that it calls attention to the need for economic resources, but that it places such need in opposition to the needs of the planet. Instead of downscaling and decentralizing the economy so that people can meet their material needs in an ecologically balanced way, capitalism is understood as “necessary” precisely for its immense centralized structures of production and distribution. Critiquing only the distribution and not the production, shallow Leftist politics seek to give more resources to the poor by exploiting the planet to a greater degree.

Now that industrialism threatens to destroy the Earth’s biosphere itself, the bankruptcy of this position should be obvious. One hundred and fifty years after Marx wrote his masterwork Capital, we can now see quite viscerally that capitalism is “advancing” us off a cliff.

Capitalism: A Historic Setback

Marx’s linear march of history not only leads to a dead end, it confuses its beginnings. Specifically, Marx fails to give full weight to the terribly violent origins of capitalism and ultimately justifies these horrors as necessary to reach a “higher stage” of development. However, as Silvia Federici points out, capitalism did not bring social progress with its emergence. On the contrary, it is better understood as a global system of abuse, which for the last 500 years has perpetuated itself through violence against the poor, women, people of color, rural communities, and the planet itself. In this view, “It is impossible to associate capitalism with any form of liberation” (Federici 17). Capitalism is better understood as a historic setback, from which we must recover not by “expropriating” it, but by abolishing it.

Marx does devote space in Capital (1867) to the brutal violence that created the landless European proletariat and launched the capitalist system into dominance over Europe. He refers to these violent beginnings as “primitive accumulation,” or the “historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production” (Marx-Engels Reader 432). What this meant in lay-men’s terms was primarily the driving of Europe’s small farmers and peasants from their land and homes, and forcing people into the wage labor market. In contrast to the “bourgeois historians” who wash over these “enclosures” as merely a matter of “freeing” the workers from serfdom, Marx points out,

“[T]hese new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire” (433).

Only by eliminating the self-sufficient communities which made up Europe’s working class during the 14th and 15th centuries could capitalism take shape, because it is precisely the existence of a class of laborers who have nowhere to go and no way to provide for themselves asides from working for a wage that distinguishes capitalism from other systems of domination.

Marx also notes the “extirpation” of the American Indians, as well as the enslavement of millions of Africans, as necessary building blocks in the process of primitive accumulation for bringing immense wealth to the emerging European capitalist elite. He concludes: “capital comes [into the world] dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (435).

However, none of this shocking horror prompts Marx to rethink his linear march of history paradigm. Capital, Vol. I ends with a weak and abstract justification for how displacement, slavery and genocide could be compatible with historical progress. For this, Marx returns to Hegel, and suggests that capitalism’s “expropriation” of the world’s population is only paving the way for is negation, communism:

“But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation… the expropriators are expropriated” (438).

Discrediting these meaningless phrases, Silvia Federici – Italian autonomist and feminist – boldly asserts: “Marx could never have presumed that capitalism paves the way to human liberation had he looked at its history from the viewpoint of women (emphasis added)” (12).

Federici has done a great service by making visible the hidden history of “primitive accumulation” through her book Caliban and the Witch. The value of this book is not only that it fills in huge gaps in our knowledge of the origins and continuing bloody nature of capitalism; it also specifically illuminates the attacks on women, queer and trans people necessary for the creation and propagation of this social system.

Caliban and the Witch focuses on the long-ignored topic of the Great Witch Hunt. From the 15th to 17th centuries, being female in Europe was a risky proposition. If someone didn’t like you they could denounce you as a witch, and there was a real chance you would be rounded up by the authorities, accused of copulating with the devil, casting evil spells, consorting at Sabbats after dark, etc. You would most likely be tortured, then executed in the public square in front of relatives and children. Witch-hunting spanned both Catholic and Protestant nations, and the practice was carried out primarily at the hands of Church and State, not by the common person in the street.

The sheer scale and scope of this horror leads Federici to conclude that it was not accidental, but instead locates it as a key form of primitive accumulation:

“Hundreds of thousands of women were burned, hanged, and tortured in less than two centuries. It should have seemed significant that the witch-hunt occurred simultaneously with the colonization and extermination of the populations of the New World, the English enclosures, [and] the beginning of the slave trade” (164-5).

The identities of the women targeted by the witch hunts reveals much about the purpose of this campaign of murder. In most cases, their “crimes” were of a sexual or economic nature. The most common offenses were infanticide, abortion, inability or unwillingness to get pregnant, the sterility of a husband or other male, cheating on a spouse, sex of an “unproductive” nature (i.e. non-missionary), as well as theft, the death of livestock, or other misfortunes.

“[T]he witch was not only the midwife, the woman who avoided maternity, or the beggar who eked out a living by stealing some wood or butter from her neighbors. She was also the loose, promiscuous woman – the prostitute or adulteress, and generally, the woman who exercised her sexuality outside the bonds of marriage and procreation. Thus, in the witchcraft trials, ‘ill repute’ was evidence of guilt. The witch was also the rebel woman who talked back, argued, swore, and did not cry under torture” (184).

In short, the witch hunt was primarily a war against female sexuality and female economic independence. Whereas before capitalism, many European women had enough independence to support themselves as healers, midwives, herbalists, gardeners, prostitutes, fortune tellers, etc., the witch hunts eliminated most of these opportunities. By the 17th century most European women had become restricted to the roles of housewife and mother (24-5). As this work of taking care of men and children, which Federici calls “reproductive labor,” was unpaid, while males could hold waged jobs and earn an income, a “new sexual division of labor” was constructed whereby women became dependent on men for economic survival (170).

Another hidden aspect of this history is that the witch hunt also targeted homosexuality and gender non-conformity. Silvia Federici reminds us that among the “unproductive sex” demonized during this time was any sex other than that between one male and one female. Across much of Europe up to that point, homosexuality had been accepted and even celebrated. In the town of Florence, for example, Federici asserts,

“[H]omosexuality was an important part of the social fabric ‘attracting males of all ages, matrimonial conditions and social rank.’ So popular was homosexuality in Florence that prostitutes used to wear male clothes to attract their customers” (58-9).

In the new patriarchal order of capitalist Europe, which was obsessed with controlling reproduction, non-conformity of gender or sexuality were seen as threats to monogamous marriage. An unknown number of queer and trans people lost their lives in the witch burnings, but Federici points out that the word “faggot” remains in our language as a reminder of the terror that converted human beings into kindling for the flame (197).

Silvia Federici’s argument is not that feudalism was a wonderful or idyllic system either – it was still a class society. Instead, she points to the enormous peasant movements and heretical movements active in Europe during the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries as indications that in the breakdown of the feudal system, other worlds were possible. In place of Marx’s deterministic formula for “progressive epochs in the economic formation of society,” we can understand that human beings make their own history, either by submitting to systems of oppression and authority, or by working together for collective liberation. There is a constant struggle between those in power and those against it, and the future can go in any direction as that struggle shifts, moves, and evolves.

In this light, Federici argues the “transition” from feudalism to capitalism was not an “evolutionary development” of economic forces, but rather a brutal “counter-revolution” carried out by the old feudal elites and emerging merchant class (21).⁴ Most of the Crusades, as well as the Inquisition, were levied against Europe’s internal enemies: the poor and working classes. The goal of the repression was to stop the social revolution that was spreading out of control, and spilling over into “national liberation” struggles such as the Peasant’s War of Germany or the Hussite rebellion in what is now the Czech Republic. Recovering the hidden history of these epic clashes embarrasses the view of capitalism as an “advance,” showing that it has only “advanced” over hundreds of thousands of dead peasants and proletarians, destroying their rebellious attempts to create a non-feudal, non-capitalist world.

In the face of this bloody history, it seems no longer morally acceptable to justify the violence of “primitive accumulation” as necessary for historical development. Capitalism did not move us forwards, but backwards. Federici concludes that the creation of capitalism not only reduced human beings to landless proletarians, but introduced new sexual, gender, and racial hierarchies to divide the working class and make revolution significantly more difficult.

“[Primitive accumulation] required the transformation of the body into a work-machine, and the subjugation of women to the reproduction of the work-force. Most of all, it required the destruction of the power of women which, in Europe as in America, was achieved through the extermination of the ‘witches.’ Primitive accumulation, then, was not simply an accumulation and concentration of exploitable workers and capital. It was also an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as ‘race’ and age, became constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat. We cannot, therefore, identify capitalist accumulation with the liberation of the worker, female or male, as many Marxists (among others) have done, or see the advent of capitalism as a moment of historical progress. On the contrary, capitalism has created more brutal and insidious forms of enslavement, as it has planted into the body of the proletariat deep divisions that have served to intensify and conceal exploitation. It is in great part because of these imposed divisions – especially those between women and men – that capitalist accumulation continues to devastate life in every corner of the planet” (63-4).

Women, queer and trans people, and other oppressed groups in the Global North have all made tremendous strides towards equality and recognition in recent decades. However, Silvia Federici reminds us that “primitive accumulation” did not just launch capitalism, it has accompanied the spread of capitalist relations across the world. At the same time that Northern society has opened up for women and minorities, capitalism has exported more vicious patriarchal violence to much of the Global South, devastating the social fabric. Today we can see it most horrifically in the mass rapes, child slavery and ethnic cleansing of the Congo, where various factions and government armies fight over access to minerals like coltan. The global market for minerals used in laptops, video games and cell phones relies on the cheapening of these resources, and also the cheapening of African lives. With arms money pouring in, some five million Congolese have died in the last eight years. The despair of the Congolese is not natural – it is being manufactured through brutal capitalist enclosures on their self-sufficient ways of life.

In order to uphold Marx’s linear march of history, we would have to ignore, deny, or rationalize these realities of social and ecological trauma. By shelving all “pre-capitalist” cultures as “lower” forms of social development, Marx unfortunately justified the violent imposition of capitalism on his European ancestors (and the rest of the world as I will explain in the next section). As Silvia Federici makes visible, this campaign was directed especially against women, homosexuals and gender non-conformists through the witch hunts. While Marx himself was apparently unaware of the sexual nature of “primitive accumulation,” such ignorance is much harder to justify in our current age of global information.

Postmodernism was largely a response to the failure of Marx’s deterministic narrative. It argued that there is no one single narrative – a thousand ways of understanding the same events are all valid. We don’t have to follow this backlash to its extreme and declare, as some do, that big-picture narratives as such are oppressive. Instead, critiquing the linear Marxist narrative provides an opportunity to generate a more liberating narrative of human history.

A liberating narrative would be one that sees, for example, the autonomous nature of human freedom, being something that people create in their own communities, on an egalitarian basis, in communion with nature and not against it. Class, the State, patriarchy, and all oppressive systems would have to be cast aside as fundamentally destructive, and the impossibility of achieving liberation through the advancement of these forces should be clearly stated. The fortunes of the movement(s) for human emancipation would be understood to go through ups and downs, and although the capitalist epoch has been the most destructive towards humanity and the planet, its end opens up a wide range of possibilities for alternative systems of production and reproduction. As Chris Carlsson pointed out in the quote at the start of this section, there is no single path to liberation, and we cannot demand the entire world follow one.

Because capitalism’s continued assault on the world has proven Marx’s linear march of history untenable, many clear-thinking Marxists have abandoned this theory and are specifically incorporating ecological and feminist wisdom into their politics of class struggle. However, undead notions of “progress” and “development” remain in the muddled thinking of many, reproducing outdated and destructive politics which continue to damage the relevance and moral character of the Left.

In 2010, certainly the worst case of such developmentalist logic shuffles along in the Chinese Communist Party, which in Marx’s name is turning China into a mega-producing and mega-consuming industrial capitalist powerhouse – with dire consequences for the ecosystems of China and the planet as a whole. China is now the second-largest consumer of oil in the world behind the United States, and at Copenhagen last year allied with the U.S. to sabotage a meaningful climate agreement. Now as the Cancun climate talks approach, China’s Zombie-Marxism will likely continue to play a disastrous role, preventing the world leaders from seriously tackling global warming.

Here is an outline of the entire [unfinished] essay.

• Introduction
• My Encounter with Grampa Karl
• What Marx Got Right
  1. Class Analysis
  2. Base and Superstructure
  3. Alienation of Labor
  4. Need for Growth, Inevitability of Crisis
  5. A Counter-Hegemonic World-view
• What Marx Got Wrong
  1. Linear March of History
  2. Europe as Liberator
  3. Mysticism of the Proletariat
  4. The State
  5. A Secular Dogma
• Hegemony over the Left
• Zombie-Marxism and its Discontents
• Conclusion: Beyond Marx, But Not Without Him

Footnotes

1. Engels summarized the value he and Marx found in Hegel’s “gradual march” of history in his 1880 pamphlet, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”:“In [the Hegelian] system – and herein is its great merit – for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process, i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development. From this point of view the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally condemnable at the judgement-seat of mature philosophical reason and which are best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as the process of evolution of man himself. It was now the task of the intellect to follow the gradual march of this process through all its devious ways, and to trace out the inner law running through all its apparently accidental phenomena” (M-ER 697).

2. This domination of nature theme was expounded further in an article Marx wrote for the New York Tribune in 1853: “The bourgeois period of history has to create the material basis of the new world [including] the development of the productive powers of man and the transformation of material production into a scientific domination of natural agencies (emphasis added). Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth. When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.”

3. Engels goes further when he writes, “[If] division into classes has a certain historical justification, it has this only for a given period, only under given social conditions. It was based upon the insufficiency of production. It will be swept away by the complete development of modern productive forces… The expansive force of the means of production bursts the bonds that the capitalist mode of production had imposed upon them. Their deliverance from these bonds is the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly accelerated development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited increase of production itself (emphasis added)” (M-ER 714-5).

4. Here is Federici’s full quote: “Only if we evoke these struggles [of the European medieval proletariat], with their rich cargo of demands, social and political aspirations, and antagonistic practices, can we understand the role that women had in the crisis of feudalism, and why their power had to be destroyed for capitalism to develop, as it was by the three-century-long persecution of the witches. From the vantage point of this struggle, we can also see that capitalism was not the product of an evolutionary development bringing forth economic forces that were maturing in the womb of the older order. Capitalism was the response of the feudal lords, the patrician merchants, the bishops and popes, to a centuries-long social conflict that, in the end, shook their power, and truly gave ‘all the world a jolt.’ Capitalism was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle – possibilities which, if realized, might have spared us the immense destruction of lives and the environment that has marked the advance of capitalist relations worldwide. This much must be stressed, for the belief that capitalism ‘evolved’ from feudalism and represents a higher form of social life has not yet been dispelled” (Federici 21-22).

David is a British radical who goes to Spain to fight the Fascists, and discovers the reality of revolution, counter-revolution, and love.  The film does an excellent job portraying the political debates, struggles and betrayals between the various factions (Fascist, Communist, Anti-Stalinist Marxists, and Anarchists). The entire film is available in one video on youtube (109 min). It is directed by Ken Loach, and is in English and Spanish. Highly recommended!

A little fun while I take a short break from the Zombie-Marxism series. [alex]

Origins of English Words and Class!

Originally published in shorter form, September 1, 2008

by Alex Knight, endofcapitalism.com

Would you rather receive a hearty welcome or a cordial reception?

Notice the imagery and feelings evoked by the two phrases. The first has a Germanic origin, the second, French. The English language is split along class lines — a reflection of the Norman invasion of England, almost 1000 years ago. German-derived English words carry with them a working class connotation, and French-derived words come off sounding aristocratic and slightly repulsive.

Even though cordial literally means “of the heart” in French (cor is Latin for heart), the picture that comes to my mind is a royal douchebag entering a hall of power amidst classical music and overdressed patrons and nobility. The image I get from hearty welcome is the extreme opposite: a single peasant reaching out to hug me and get me into their little hovel, out of the weather. Class is deeply embedded within our language, each word having its own unique history.

Wikipedia teaches many fun facts. The English language derives mainly from:

1. Old German — the Angles and Saxons (from Saxony) conquered Britain in the 5th century, mixing with Scandinavians and developing Old English.
2. Old French — the Normans (from Normandy) conquered England in 1066.

William the Conqueror, first Norman king of England, as depicted on the famous Bayeux Tapestry. His royal descendents would speak French until Henry V, 350 years later.

After the Norman invasion, England was dominated by a small French aristocracy, ruling over a much larger German working class. For more than three centuries, the rulers of England spoke French, while the common person spoke a Germanic language (Old English).

The two cultural groups began to intermarry after the Black Death of the 1340s wiped out half of the population, and over time the languages slowly merged, greatly simplifying the grammar of English, but also leaving a huge combined vocabulary.

The really interesting thing is that a lot of words in English carry a class connotation, based on whether they derive from French or from German. Words that mean basically the same thing will have either a formal, fancy, academic, upper-class connotation, or a casual, down-to-earth, gut-level, working-class feeling depending on the origin of the word.

Check out this list of synonyms!

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Notice that the Germanic words are usually shorter, more concrete and direct, while the French words are more elaborate, more abstract and indirect. What kind of person do you imagine speaking the words in the left column vs. the right column?

It’s interesting to me that nature and children are described by the French-derived English words as somehow negative or hostile, as with savage and juvenile. To me this reflects the hatred on the part of the wealthy and powerful for that which is untamed and free.

The medical-industrial complex also uses almost exclusively Latin and French-derived words, to sound more technical. This has the effect of making the body seem lifeless and mechanical, as with abdomen.

Plus, meat words are almost all French-derived, which reflects that while the Anglo-Saxon working class was responsible for hunting/shepherding the animals, it was only the Norman nobility who could actually afford to eat meat.

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Chicken and fish are the exceptions here, most likely because these meats were less expensive and more available for peasants and workers.

Finally, most of our government/state words are all French: court, judge, jury, indict, appeal, traitor, prison, military, representative, parliament, Congress, president, and marriage.

I notice that when I use the French-derived words, I experience a slight feeling of discomfort, as if I’m trying to impress people with my big words. This is precisely how academia functions, which is why if you attend a university or graduate school, you will be inundated with French and Latin-derived vocabulary, to distinguish you from the uneducated masses with their street language.

Might all of this explain why American conceptions of the French are as snooty, pompous, pretentious, easily-hate-able snobs? In occupied England, THEY WERE!

And for anyone interested in working class revolution, the best way not to talk down to people: stick with the more common Germanic words instead of bureaucratese.

Towards freedom! (not mere liberty)

p.s. George Orwell wrote an awesome essay called Politics of the English Language, where he breaks down how abstract, complex language is a tool for those who seek to confuse the populace, and he outlines how to make use of concrete, plain English to actually reach people. A highly recommended essay for anyone who wants to write.

Why Marxism Has Failed, and Why Zombie-Marxism Cannot Die
Or My Rocky Relationship with Grampa Karl

by Alex Knight, endofcapitalism.com
Part 2 – November 4, 2010
This is part of an essay critiquing the philosophy of Karl Marx for its relevance to 21st century anti-capitalism. The main thrust of the essay is to encourage living common-sense radicalism, as opposed to the automatic reproduction of zombie ideas which have lost connection to current reality. Karl Marx was no prophet. But neither can we reject him. We have to go beyond him, and bring him with us. I believe it is only on such a basis, with a critical appraisal of Marx, that the Left can become ideologically relevant to today’s rapidly evolving political circumstances. [Click here for Part 1.]

A brilliant, critical mind in his own time. Not infallible.

What Marx Got Right

Boiling down all of Karl Marx’s writings into a handful of key contributions is fated to produce an incomplete list, but here are the 5 that immediately come to my mind: 1. Class Analysis, 2. Base and Superstructure, 3. Alienation of Labor, 4. Need for Growth, Inevitability of Crisis, and 5. A Counter-Hegemonic World-view.

(It must be noted that many of these insights were not the unique inspiration of Marx’s brain, but were ideas bubbling up in the European working class movements of the 18th and 19th centuries, which was the political context that educated Marx. Further, Marx’s lifelong collaborator, Friedrich Engels, undoubtedly contributed significantly to Marx’s ideas, although Marx remained the primary theorist.)

1. Class Analysis

In the opening lines of the “Communist Manifesto” (1848), Marx thunders, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

In other words, as long as society has been divided into rich and poor, ruler and enslaved, oppressor and oppressed, capitalist and worker, there have been relentless efforts amongst the powerful to maintain and increase their power, and correspondingly, constant struggles from the poor and oppressed to escape their bondage. This insight appears to be common sense, but it is systematically hidden from mainstream society. People do not choose to be poor or oppressed, although the rich would like us to believe otherwise. The powerless are kept that way by those in power. And they are struggling to end that poverty and oppression, to the best of their individual and collective ability.

The Manifesto elaborates Marx’s class framework under capitalism:

“Our epoch… possesses this distinctive feature: it has simplified class antagonisms: Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps…: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat” (Marx-Engels Reader 474).

Marx relayed the words “bourgeoisie” and “proletariat” directly from the French working class movement he encountered in his 1844 exile in Paris, when he briefly ran with the likes of “anarchist” theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Marx himself reminds us, “No credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them.” Class analysis pre-dated Marx by many decades. Yet he articulated the class divisions of capitalist society quite clearly.

The “bourgeoisie” are those who own and control the “means of production,” or basically, the land, factories and machines that make up the economy. Today we know them as the Donald Trumps, the Warren Buffets, etc., although most of the ruling class tries to avoid public scrutiny. In short, the ruling class in capitalism are the wealthy elite, who exert control over society (and government) through their dollars.

Opposing them is the “proletariat,” which Marx defines as “the modern working class – a class of labourers who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital” (479). The working class for Marx is everybody who has to work for a wage and sell their labor in order to survive.

The divide between the bourgeoisie and proletariat as seen by Marx impacts society in deep and rarely understood ways. However, it is clear that as the rich rule society, they design it for their own benefit through politics, the media, the school system, etc. Inevitably, through “trickle up” economics, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. As the class conflict worsens, for Marx there can only be one solution — revolution:

“This revolution is necessary not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew” (193, “The German Ideology” 1845).

How could it happen? Marx rightly answers, “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.”

This proclamation comes from the Preamble (1864) of the International Workingmen’s Association, also known as the First International. The International, which Marx helped found, was an organization made up of workers and their allies from across Europe, and a few from outside it. The International’s goal was the solidarity of workers across national boundaries, becoming united and empowered to lay siege to the capitalist system. Through “class consciousness,” the workers would become aware of their “historic mission,” and through organization, they would build the means to accomplish it.

The key is that Marx believed that change would come from below. It was impossible to decree communism from above. This explains Marx’s slogan, still just as relevant today if not for the gendered language, “Working men of all countries, Unite!”

Today, workers in China are perhaps the most successful practitioners of Marx’s class analysis. As China has opened itself up to Western corporations to take advantage of extremely low wages, China over the last 20 years has transformed itself into the sweatshop of the world. Workers make just a few cents per hour, work up to 12-15 hours per day, and are often forbidden from taking bathroom breaks. With literally nothing to lose, class struggle must appear to be a viable option for these exploited millions. And they have seized the opportunity. Organizing independently of the Communist Party’s official labor union, Chinese workers have self-organized thousands of massive strikes in the past few years. In the words of Johann Hari, “Wildcat unions have sprung up, organized by text message, demanding higher wages, a humane work environment, and the right to organize freely. Millions of young workers across the country are blockading their factories and chanting ‘there are no human rights here!’ and ‘we want freedom!’”

What if working men and women of the United States were to join in solidarity with the Chinese workers currently rebelling against totalitarian abuse? What if the primary consuming nation and the primary producing nation had to contend with a united, powerful anti-capitalist movement? It could create a force with the power to bring the entire capitalist system to its knees.

2. Base and Superstructure

“High on my own list of Marx’s important insights was the understanding that economics cannot be separated from politics.” – Roger Baker, “Is Marx Still Relevant?“

Marx locates economics as the motive force of history. Marx called this the “materialist conception of history,” as opposed to the idealist conception of history as articulated by the earlier German philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel. Marx, who had been a member of the “Young Hegelians” while attending university, famously “stood Hegel on his head.” Instead of the material world being an extension of the ideas in people’s heads, Marx saw ideas as reflections of material reality, chiefly the economic “relations of production.”

History, for Marx, can best be explained in the context of the evolution and development of human economy. In an early letter (1846), he explains:

“Assume a particular state of development in the productive faculties of man and you will get a particular form of commerce and consumption. Assume particular stages of development in production, commerce and consumption and you will have a corresponding social constitution, a corresponding organisation of the family, of orders or of classes, in a word, a corresponding civil society” (Marx-Engels Reader 136-7).

Marx therefore separates the economic “base” (or “foundation”) from a social, political, and ideological “superstructure” built on top of it. He elaborated this more fully in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859):

“The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

Debates over the extent of Marx’s economic determinism have raged since his death, but Engels clarified his and Marx’s framework in an 1890 letter:

“According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure: political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and then even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas, also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form…
We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions (emphasis added). Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one” (Marx-Engels Reader 760-2).¹

The core of Marx and Engels’ argument appears self-evident. Agricultural societies worship crop-related gods, and create social structures such that divide people into Lord and peasant. Industrial societies worship technology and money, and create classes such as financier and worker. What good would it have done for an Egyptian pharaoh to attempt to create something like the Internet, if the economic means (microchips, factories, wage labor, international banking) didn’t exist? Or, more precisely, how would the pharaoh have conceived of the Internet without these material conditions existing in front of him?

The concept of base and superstructure has many useful applications. For example, Marx articulated in his essay “The German Ideology”, that those in power materially can also exert ideological control over the rest of society. “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force” (M-ER 172). Today we know this as propaganda and brainwashing.

Building off these ideas, later Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci developed a critique of “hegemony” – the dominance of one group of people, or one ideology, based on consent and persuasion, rather than by brute force. In other words, hegemony means the oppressed accept their oppression, internalizing and perhaps even outwardly arguing for the mythology of their rulers. People are much easier to rule if they believe it is for their own good.

Hegemony is a highly relevant idea to our situation today, especially in the United States where the population is thoroughly indoctrinated with the mythology of capitalism – seeing the system as positive and liberating, rather than violent and destructive as it actually is.

However, if the base of the American economy continues to deteriorate as it has, Marx would suggest the superstructure is sure to follow, and revolutionary change is perhaps not far around the corner.

3. Alienation of Labor

At the core of Karl Marx’s extensive critique of capitalism is his critique of the alienation of labor.

Marx used to spend weeks on end at the library, thoroughly researching the findings of the major economic theorists of capitalism. One of his important discoveries was Adam Smith’s “labor theory of value,” which posits that the value of a commodity is proportional to the quantity of human labor used to create it. A highly complex product, such as a space shuttle, is valuable (or expensive) in part because of the thousands of work-hours spent by hundreds of workers in the construction of its parts and their assembly. Whereas constructing a wheel-barrow is significantly less labor-intensive, it is therefore worth less money.

Marx extrapolated from this theory, showing that because labor produces everything of value (along with what nature provides), the entire system of capitalist accumulation is sustained by profiting off the backs of workers.

The focal argument of Capital, Volume 1 (1867), is that there would be no capital if not for the exploitation of labor. Marx coins the phrase “surplus value” to show that workers produce a higher value of goods for their bosses than they receive for themselves in wages. In effect, the worker only gets paid for working half a day, which is the amount of pay needed to keep him or her alive, yet he or she works a full day. What they produce in the second half of the day is therefore pure profit for their employer. “The rate of surplus-value is an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labour-power by capital, or of the labourer by the capitalist” (Chapter IX).

Marx hereby creates the fascinating distinction between the worker’s “living labor,” and the machines, commodities and wealth (capital) created by that living labor, called “accumulated labor” or “dead labor.” While the worker produces surplus value for capital, giving the capitalist an incentive to keep the worker hard at work, the worker’s life diminishes in direct proportion to the work performed. This exploitation is the basis of the entire system: “[W]hat is the growth of productive capital? Growth of the power of accumulated labour over living labour. Growth of the domination of the bourgeoisie over the working class” (Marx-Engels Reader 210).

I believe “Alienated Labour,” written as part of the “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,” is Marx’s most enduring and relevant essay. It originally went unpublished and was only re-discovered in the 20th century, influencing the “New Left” of the 1960s, which was largely concerned with the pervasive alienation of modern consumer capitalism.

In the essay, Marx elaborates on the distinction between the worker’s active labor and the product of his or her labor:

“The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation of the world of men. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity” (M-ER 71).

The alienation of labor therefore emerges from the reality that under capitalism, human beings are reduced to commodities, whose value is expressed through wage labor. For most of us, survival is impossible without pimping ourselves out to the highest bidding employer. Unfortunately, when we sell ourselves for a wage, we also give up power over what we do with our time. What we produce is not under our control or discretion. Our work activity and its product are therefore alien to us.

“[T]he worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over-against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him as his own” (72).

Because the wage worker is disempowered in the process of work, their labor gives birth not to a world in their own, human, image but to a world in the image of capital. It is an alien world, full of meaningless commodities, but very little humanity. Humanity has been conscripted into the wage labor process, against its will. Workers themselves are ever being produced, as humans who have lost touch with their “intrinsic nature.”

The essay’s climax is prompted by Marx’s question, “What, then, constitutes the alienation of labor?”

“First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself… His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague…
Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another… As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal“ (74).

This is Marx at his most human, and therefore his most relevant. This passage resonates because it speaks directly to our concrete needs, which are not only economic, but mental, emotional, and spiritual. Marx is articulating something core here – the work we do for our bosses creates their profits, but it makes us miserable in the process. We create commodities and services which are not our own, which are not designed for our concrete needs but based solely on the demands of the market, and as a result, we are alienated from our own humanity. If we did not need wages to survive, we could just as easily quit our worthless, meaningless jobs. Unfortunately, the joke is on us. With each hour of work that deadens our souls, we give more life and power to the very “alien world of objects” that oppresses us.²

The phrase “Work sucks” therefore becomes literal. Our lives are sucked out of us by the vampire of capital.

4. Need for Growth, Inevitability of Crisis

Why does work have to suck in a capitalist society? For the simple reason of the profit motive. By exploiting workers, the system creates profit, and therefore grows. Growth is capitalism’s raison d’etre — reason for being. Without growth, capitalism would wither and die.

In Capital Vol. 1, Marx lays out his “General Formula of Capital”: M—C—M’. M=money, C=commodities, M’=more money (Marx Engels Reader 336).

The formula indicates that on the micro level, capital is nothing but the movement of money into a larger amount of money, producing profit. Marx explains this endless movement of money as the inner workings of the system:

“Value… becomes value in process, money in process, and, as such, capital. It comes out of circulation, enters into it again, preserves and multiplies itself within its circuit, comes back out of it with expanded bulk, and begins the same round ever afresh” (335).

Thus, capital is like a shark – it must keep moving in order to breathe. If it were to sit still, it would quickly suffocate. Only by constantly finding and exploiting investment opportunities can capital accumulate, and thereby, survive. This ever-present need to grow therefore compels each individual capitalist to maximize profit.

“The expansion of value, which is the objective basis or main-spring of the circulation M—C—M, becomes [the capitalist’s] subjective aim, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations, that he functions as a capitalist, that is, as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will (emphasis added)… The restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is what he aims at” (334).

Here Marx explains that capital’s need for growth determines the actions of each individual capitalist, such as a wealthy financier, or the modern example, a multinational corporation. In Marx’s brilliant language we can therefore understand Wal-Mart or Sony as “capital personified.” Their one and only motive is to profit, to grow. All other considerations, ecological or social, are essentially irrelevant.

Suppose a capitalist/corporation failed to create growth, either mistakenly, or somehow purposely abdicated their role in the system. What would happen? Very simply, capital would work its way around them. Another capitalist would come along, a competitor, to take advantage of the situation, and inevitably put the first capitalist out of business. Marx names this competition between capitalists “the industrial battlefield.”³

This war of competition makes it impossible to simply blame BP, British Petroleum, for its shoddy safety standards which led to the poisoning of the Gulf. If BP prioritized safety over profit, the company would lose a competitive edge to its rivals, Exxon-Mobil or Chevron-Texaco. It is only by obeying the command of capital to constantly grow or die, that a capitalist survives. The entire system must be indicted — “hate the game, not the player.”

As each capitalist serves his master and performs the ritual of profit-making, the system as a whole also necessarily expands “on an ever more gigantic scale” (214). This systemic expansion is famously described in the Communist Manifesto:

“The need for a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere… The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls… It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production” (476-7).

As each capitalist battles for resources, labor, and markets for its goods, every community, every nation, and eventually the entire planet itself, is consumed. Capital therefore creates a global system, organized by the incessant requirement of accumulation. The entire system must grow.

Should capitalism ever cease growing, a crisis would necessarily develop. Investors would cease making investments for fear that they would not get a return. Businesses would cut back, laying off workers, which has the effect of reducing consumer demand. Without a friendly investment environment, things can rapidly enter a downward spiral. And as Marx emphasized, this happens over and over again, through “the commercial crises that by their periodical return put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society” (478).

As Marxist professor David Harvey likes to quote, Marx states in the “Grundrisse” (1857) that capital cannot “abide” limits. Any limit which would stand in the system’s path must be transcended or circumvented in some way to keep the accumulation of capital alive and well. Can this accumulation continue forever? Clearly it cannot. Because we live on a finite planet, the idea of an ever-increasing system of production and consumption is absurd on its face. At some point the limits to growth will be reached.

Marx seemed to sense these limits instinctively in “Wage Labour and Capital” (1847):

“Finally, as the capitalists are compelled… to exploit the already existing gigantic means of production on a larger scale and to set in motion all the mainsprings of credit to this end, there is a corresponding increase in industrial earthquakes… [Crises] become more frequent and more violent, if only because, as the mass of production, and consequently the need for extended markets, grows, the world market becomes more and more contracted, fewer and fewer markets remain available for exploitation (emphasis added), since every preceding crisis has subjected to world trade a market hitherto unconquered or only superficially exploited” (217).

When will capitalism hit the limits to growth? The answer is, in my opinion, quite soon. As David Harvey states dispassionately, “There are abundant signs that capital accumulation is at an historical inflexion point where sustaining a compound rate of growth is becoming increasingly problematic.”

Speaking directly to this question, I propose the End of Capitalism Theory to suggest that at this moment in history, no great new sources of wealth remain to be conquered. We are near or at the global peak of oil production, and the planet is having increased difficulty sustaining the ecological damage produced by capitalist production and waste. These ecological limits are joined by the social limits to growth, manifest in people’s resistance to capitalism all over the world. The aforementioned Chinese workers’ movement is only the most dramatic example. From Bolivia to Greece to the schools of California, more and more people are rejecting the alienating and dehumanizing roles that capitalism forces them into, and by standing up for themselves are placing limits on the ability of the system to increase its power over them — to grow.

It is natural to try to make sense of the extremely broad and deep crisis we are living through. As the crisis has dragged on over the last few years, sales of Marx’s Capital have skyrocketed. I suspect people are looking for an explanation for why capitalism has failed. The End of Capitalism Theory is one attempt at an explanation. I encourage others to come forward.

5. A Counter-Hegemonic World-view

The name of Karl Marx endures to this day as virtually synonymous with anti-capitalism. In contrast to the hegemonic world-view of capitalism, which sees itself as essentially a meritocracy where people are rewarded for hard work and receive what they deserve, Marx outlined a theory of capitalism that was grounded in exploitation and destruction. This critique formed the basis of an entirely new narrative, a new story about ourselves and our world.

While the core elements of Marx’s narrative were largely spelled out by the working class movement of Europe he immersed himself in, Marx was the transcriber. He put the story of European workers on paper, and adding his own philosophical learnings, deepened and elaborated the story so that these workers’ struggle became emblematic of the dilemma of capitalist development as a whole.

Marx’s “scientific socialism” was distinguished from the approach of other European socialists by his reaching for the big picture. It wasn’t enough to criticize capitalism, Marx felt it was necessary to describe, with as much precision as possible, the conditions that enabled it to exist and which would enable its destruction. In so doing, Marx constructed a counter-hegemonic world-view, a way of seeing the world which was complete enough in itself that it could seriously rival the dominant capitalist explanation of reality.

I want to highlight three aspects of Marx’s world-view that make it so enduring. First, his story gives us meaning and a place in history. Second, it gives us direction and purpose. Third, it is brilliantly told, with poetic and even mystical language weaved alongside the densest of political economic writing.

Meaning

Every good story reveals to us something about ourselves. The really great stories — the ones which captivate people for centuries or even millennia — are the ones that provide answers to life’s most fundamental questions: “Who are we?” and “Why are we here?”

Marx’s philosophical education with the Young Hegelians gave him the drive to search for answers to these fundamental questions, as well as the critical tools to deconstruct the popular narratives of the day. He pursued fellow German philosopher Feuerbach in discarding the Christian narrative that predominated in his time, asserting that God was not the creator of humanity, but rather that the inverse was true. Humanity had created God, projecting him into the heavens from our own hopes and fears.

“In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process… Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” (Marx-Engels Reader 154-5, “The German Ideology”).

For Marx, then, we lead our own lives as earthly beings. However, we do not start with a blank slate, because we are also historical beings, the inheritors of the past. This past is brought down to us not only in terms of stories and myths, but especially in terms of material activity.

“History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations, each of which exploits the materials, the capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by all preceding generations, and thus, on the one hand, continues the traditional activity in completely changed circumstances and, on the other, modifies the old circumstances with a completely changed activity” (172).

Who we are, according to Marx, is the descendants of thousands of generations of human-kind and the care-takers of that living legacy, which for Marx is especially an economic (or “productive”) legacy.⁴ What can be accomplished by the current generation is necessarily a function of the machines, tools, social structures, etc. that our ancestors leave us.

Marx adds an interesting plot-twist when he specifies that in this era of capitalism we are living in unique circumstances which distinguish our present era from all human history. From the “Communist Manifesto”:

“The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?” (477).

Given that our generation sits atop this dramatic expansion of ‘productive forces,’ it now falls to us to decide what to do with such historic power. Marx makes clear that we have a special responsibility to fulfill.

Purpose

In the Marxist narrative, life’s purpose is encapsulated as “class struggle.”  As mentioned earlier, Marx sees history as a centuries-long battle to overcome class divisions:

“In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs… The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones” (474, “Communist Manifesto”).

Our capitalist era is special not only because of the massive growth of the economy, but also because of the unique and unparalleled class inequality between “bourgeoisie” and “proletariat.” In particular, the proletarians are the protagonists of Marx’s story, who carry within them the seed of a new world.

“A class is called forth, which has to bear all the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages, which, ousted from society, is forced into the most decided antagonism to all other classes; a class which forms the majority of all members of society, and from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness” (192-3, “The German Ideology”).

Marx assigns the proletarians the role of liberating not only themselves as a class, but of putting an end to class as such. This is accomplished first through the “ever-expanding union of the workers,” who wage an economic struggle against the capitalists and build their power, and finally through communist revolution. According to Marx, this revolution fulfills the proletarians’ “historic role.”

“[The communist revolution] does away with labour, and abolishes the rule of all classes with the classes themselves, because it is carried through by the class which no longer counts as a class in society, is not recognised as a class, and is in itself the expression of the dissolution of all classes, nationalities, etc., within present society” (193).

Now the narrative reaches its climax. After thousands of years of bondage, the opportunity to put an end to human oppression once and for all is now approaching. Due to the twin emergence of highly developed “productive forces” which offer the possibility of abolishing “material want,” alongside a massive and desperate proletariat, the conditions are ripe, for the first time, for the final victory of the working class. And if the workers are able to liberate themselves, they will likewise liberate all of humanity.

“In the place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (491).

A communist society would be established to provide for each individual, each community, and each nation, to develop themselves freely, rather than being slaves to the market. And this is how Marx’s story ends:

“[Communism] is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be this solution” (Bottomore 155, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844″).

Poetry

The strength of Marx’s narrative is not only that it gives us a meaning that transcends our individual lives to include our common, human, legacy. Nor is limited to providing us with a purpose and mission, so that we can see ourselves as historical actors. The final piece of the puzzle for Marx’s successful story is his poetry, as reflected in passages such as this:

“The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win” (500).

For a writer of philosophy and political economy, which is typically the densest and most technical prose, Marx consistently displays a poetic sensibility. His words often have a beauty and an art; they conjure up images that help the reader appreciate the fantastic nature of the story Marx is weaving. Here is one of his most famous sections from the “Communist Manifesto”:

“Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations… are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life” (476).

Much of Marx’s poetry takes the form of dialectics. Dialectics, which formed much of Hegel’s thought and interest, are a way of thinking about contradicting forces opposing one another within a larger whole, whose contradictions transform that larger whole into something different. These transformations occur through “negations,” as opposites overtake one another. Dialectical thought can be traced back to the ancient Greeks, and is embedded in much Eastern philosophy and religion as well. For example, the Yin and Yang of Taoism represents a whole which contains opposites in contradiction.

Marx was fascinated by the complexity of dialectical thought. Turning to a random page, I can pick many passages to display his interest. Here is another from the “Communist Manifesto”:

“In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality” (485).

In this excerpt, Marx expounds two dialectics: the past vs. the present, both of which exist together in the now, and capital vs. the living person, both of which strive for independence.

The darkness and mystery which surround dialectical ideas grab hold of our imagination, making the impossible appear possible. There is a mystical quality to these ideas. Like television, Marx’s writing both disturbs and fascinates – the complexity of thought pushes the reader away at the same time that its dynamism draws them in.

Here is one of Marx’s most brilliant and memorable uses of dialectics, his attack on the division of labor and specialization:

“[A]s 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. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic” (160, “The German Ideology”).

Poetry takes Marx’s narrative to its most important destination – the human heart. Readers are drawn in by the language and internalize this story as their own – seeing themselves for the first time in relation to the historic moment in which we live, and the historic mission with which Marx presents us. This power to reach hearts and minds is the reason Marx’s world-view was able to become counter-hegemonic, and actually challenge the capitalist claim on reality.

However, with this power there is also a danger. As reality is ever-changing, a world-view can either continue to develop and remain relevant, or it can become static and outdated by failing to adapt. The very fascination that a narrative wields can also distract its adherents from asking difficult questions that would breathe new life into the framework. By defending its weaknesses, one facilitates the narrative remaining hegemonic, but saps it of the potential to evolve and incorporate new, critical perspectives. In the short-term, the narrative survives, but in the long-term, it decays.

The Marxist world-view has fallen victim to this very dynamic. As organs of the narrative have lost circulation with reality and gangrened, they have not been amputated, but allowed to persist as parasites on the elements of Marx’s ideas that remain alive.

Yet, responsibility for today’s Zombie-Marxism cannot be placed entirely on the shoulders of his followers; we must trace the origins of this horror back to the misconceptions in Karl Marx’s writings. The next section of the essay will explore those misconceptions.

Here is an outline of the entire essay. Check back soon for more!

• Introduction
• My Encounter with Grampa Karl
• What Marx Got Right
  1. Class Analysis
  2. Base and Superstructure
  3. Alienation of Labor
  4. Need for Growth, Inevitability of Crisis
  5. A Counter-Hegemonic World-view
• What Marx Got Wrong
  1. Linear March of History
  2. Europe as Liberator
  3. Mysticism of the Proletariat
  4. The State
  5. A Secular Dogma
• Hegemony over the Left
• Zombie-Marxism and its Discontents
• Conclusion: Beyond Marx, But Not Without Him

Footnotes
1. Engels adds this interesting note to the discussion of economic determinism: “Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasise the main principles vis-a-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to allow the other elements involved in the interaction to come into their rights… And I cannot exempt many of the more recent ‘Marxists’ from this reproach, for the most amazing rubbish has been produced in this quarter, too” (Marx-Engels Reader 760-2).
2. In “Wage Labour and Capital” (a speech delivered to German workers in 1847), Marx brilliantly expanded on the alienation of labor in terms of the division of labor caused by the development of machine industry. “The greater division of labour enables one worker to do the work of five, ten, or twenty; it therefore multiplies competition among the workers fivefold, tenfold and twentyfold. The workers do not only compete by one selling himself cheaper than another; they compete by one doing the work of five, ten, twenty… Further, as the division of labour increases, labour is simplified. The special skill of the worker becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple, monotonous productive force… His labour becomes a labour that anyone can perform. Hence, competitors crowd upon him on all sides, and besides we remind the reader that the more simple and easily learned the labour is, the lower the cost of production needed to master it, the lower do wages sink, for, like the price of every other commodity, they are determined by the cost of production.
Therefore, as labour becomes more unsatisfying, more repulsive, competition increases and wages decrease. The worker tries to keep up the amount of his wages by working more, whether by working longer hours or by producing more in one hour. Driven by want, therefore, he still further increases the evil effects of the division of labour. The result is that the more he works the less wages he receives, and for the simple reason that he competes to that extent with his fellow workers, hence makes them into so many competitors who offer themselves on just the same bad terms as he does himself, and therefore, in the last resort he competes with himself, with himself as a member of the working class.” (214-5).
3. Also in “Wage Labour and Capital,” Marx explains the strategy of this “industrial war of the capitalists among themselves”: produce ever-growing quantities of increasingly cheap commodities. “One capitalist can drive another from the field and capture his capital only by selling more cheaply. In order to be able to sell more cheaply without ruining himself, he must produce more cheaply, that is, raise the productive power of labour as much as possible. But the productive power of labour is raised, above all, by a greater division of labour, by a more universal introduction and continual improvement of machinery. The greater the labour army among whom labour is divided, the more gigantic the scale on which machinery is introduced, the more does the cost of production proportionately decrease, the more fruitful is labour [for the capitalist]. Hence, a general rivalry arises among the capitalists to increase the division of labour and machinery and to exploit them on the greatest possible scale.
The more powerful and costly means of production that he has called into life enable him to sell his commodities more cheaply, they compel him, however, at the same time to sell more commodities, to conquer a much larger market for his commodities.” (211-2).
Noting that profit for the capitalists is inversely proportional to the wages paid out to workers, he adds, “this war has the peculiarity that its battles are won less by recruiting than by discharging the army of labour. The generals, the capitalists, compete with one another as to who can discharge the most soldiers of industry” (215).
4. In a similar passage from an 1846 letter to one P.V. Annenkov, Marx explains: “Every succeeding generation finds itself in possession of the productive forces acquired by the previous generation, which serve it as the raw material for new production, a coherence arises in human history (emphasis added), a history of humanity takes shape which is all the more a history of humanity as the productive forces of man” (137).

Why Marxism Has Failed, and Why Zombie-Marxism Cannot Die
Or My Rocky Relationship with Grampa Karl

Image by Germ Ross, artnoise.net

by Alex Knight, endofcapitalism.com
Part 1 – October 29, 2010

[Click to see Part 2]

“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” – Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852

“Once again the dead are walking in our midst – ironically, draped in the name of Marx, the man who tried to bury the dead of the nineteenth century.” – Murray Bookchin, Listen, Marxist!, 1969

A specter is haunting the Left, the specter of Karl Marx.

In June, my friend Joanna and I presented a workshop at the 2010 US Social Forum, an enormous convergence of progressive social movements from across the United States. The USSF is “more than a conference”, it’s a gathering of movements and thinkers to assess our historic moment of economic and ecological crisis, and generate strategies for moving towards “Another World”.

Our workshop, entitled “The End of Capitalism? At the Crossroads of Crisis and Sustainability”, was packed. A surprising number of people were both intrigued and supportive of our presentation that global capitalism is in a deep crisis because it faces ecological and social limits to growth, from peak oil to popular resistance around the wold. Participants eagerly discussed the proposal that the U.S. is approaching a crossroads with two paths out: one through neo-fascist attempts to restore the myth of the “American Dream” with attacks on Muslims, immigrants and other marginalized groups; the other, a path of realizing and deepening the core values of freedom, democracy, justice, sustainability and love.

Despite the lively audience, I knew that somewhere lurking in that cramped, overheated classroom was the unquestionable presence of Zombie-Marxism.¹ And I knew it was only a matter of time until it showed itself and hungrily charged at our fresh anti-capitalist analysis in the name of Karl Marx’s high authority on the subject.

It happened during the question and answer period. A visibly agitated member of one of the dozens of small Marxist sectarian groups swarming these sorts of gatherings raised his hand to speak. I hesitated to call on him. I knew he wasn’t going to ask a question, but instead to speechify, to roll out a pre-rehearsed statement from his Party line. I called on others first, but his hand stayed in the air, sweat permeating his brow. Perhaps by mistake or perhaps from a feeling of guilt I gave him the nod to release what was incessantly welling up in his throat.

“I don’t agree with this stuff about ecological limits to growth. Marx wrote in Capital that the system faces crisis because of fundamental cycles of stagnation that cause the falling rate of profit…”

With the resurrection of Marx’s ancient wisdom, a dangerous infection was released into the discussion. Clear, rational thought, based on evaluating current circumstances and real-life issues in all their fluid complexities and contradictions, was threatened by an antiquated and stagnant dogma that single-mindedly sees all situations as excuses to reproduce itself in the minds of the young and vital.

Marx didn’t articulate his ideas because they appeared true in his time and place. No. The ideas are true because Marx said them. Such is the logic. If I didn’t act fast, the workshop could surrender the search for truth – to the search for brains.

I would have to cut this guy off and call on someone else. I knew better than to try to respond to his “question” – it would only tighten his grip on decades of certainty and derail the real conversation. Unfortunately, there is no way to slay a zombie. Regardless of the accuracy or firepower in your logic, zombie ideas will just keep coming. The only way out of an encounter with the undead is to escape.

I motioned my hand to signal ‘enough’ and tried to raise my voice over his. “Thank you. OK, THANK you! Yes. Marx was a very smart dude. OK, next?”

Karl Marx was without a doubt one of the greatest European philosophers of the 19th century. In a context of rapid industrialization and growing inequality between rich and poor, Marx pinpointed capitalism as the source of this misery and spelled out his theory of historical materialism, which endures today as deeply relevant for understanding human society. He emphasized that capitalism arose from certain economic and social conditions, and therefore it will inevitably be made obsolete by a new way of life.

For me, what makes Marx’s work so powerful is that he told a compelling story about humanity and our purpose. It was a big-picture narrative of economy and society, oppression and liberation, set on a global stage. Marx constructed a new way of understanding the world – a new world-view – which gave meaning and direction to those disenchanted with the dominant capitalist belief system. And in crafting this world-view, Marx happened to do a pretty good job wielding the tools of philosophy, political economy and science, aiming to deconstruct how capitalism functions and disclose its contradictions, so that we might overcome it and create a better future.

Brilliant ideas flowed from this effort, including his analysis of class inequality, the concepts of “base” and “superstructure”, and the liberating theory of “alienated labor.” Marx also showed that the inner workings of capital live off economic growth, and if this growth is limited, crisis will ensue and throw the entire social order into jeopardy. For all these reasons, Marxist politics – the Marxist story – remains popular and relevant today.

But due to serious errors and ambiguities in Marx’s analysis, Marxism has failed to provide an accessible, coherent, and accurate theoretical framework to free the world of capitalist tyranny.

I believe Marx’s foremost error was his propagation of the older philosopher Hegel’s linear march of history. This theory characterizes human society as constantly evolving to higher stages of development, such that each successive epoch is supposedly more “ideal” or “rational” than what came before. Marx’s carrying forward this deterministic narrative into the anti-capitalist struggle created the confusion that capitalism, although terrible, is a necessary “advance” that will create the conditions for a free society by the “development of productive forces.” This mistaken conception often put Marx, and his uncritical descendants, on the wrong side of history – arguing that in order to achieve the ideal of socialism or communism, countries first had to follow the Western European model of becoming capitalist first.

Hegel’s framework of linear progression blinded Marx to non-European, feminist, and ecological critiques of capital’s violent conquest of the world. Without this knowledge, Marx charted a flawed strategy for radical social change that missed the core of what human freedom is all about. Instead of vocally, unambiguously opposing European colonialism and the displacement of small farmers from their land, Marx construed the proletarianization of the world as a matter of capitalism “producing its own grave-diggers.” Focusing narrowly on the economic “misery” of capitalism and upholding the proletariat as the agent of history, Marx simplified the aims of the anti-capitalist project to a matter of the working class seizing state power to “increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible” (Marx-Engels Reader 490).

This mechanical focus on the hardships of workers led Marx to overlook the many other ways that capitalism threatens life on this planet, and therefore also the resistance coming from those outside his framework: peasants, indigenous cultures, women, youth, queer and trans people, students and intellectuals, immigrants, people of color, artists, and more.

Perhaps most urgently for our moment of climate meltdown, Marx’s view of capitalism as an “advance” blinded him to the ecological destruction that capitalism reaps on our planet, from deforestation to the extinction of species and so much more. Preoccupied with the “development of productive forces,” Marx predicted that communism would come about due to capitalism placing “fetters” on economic growth. Growth itself was perceived as inherently good, and the rational proletariat would advance it further than capital ever could. Following this logic to its conclusion, Marx praised industrialization as creating the material conditions for the “scientific domination of natural agencies.”

Afflicted with these blindspots, the Marxist narrative was defenseless against repeated manipulations, and mutated into ideological cover for “Socialist” and “Communist” tyrants who have been chief enemies of human liberation. Where Marx’s doctrine didn’t fit the reality of social struggle, as in Russia, China, and every other country that has experienced a “Marxist” revolution, his disciples attempted to transcend reality in order to fit Marx’s doctrine, instead of transcending Marx’s ideas in order to fit reality. The results have been nothing short of nightmarish.

A zombie idea is an idea that has been demonstrably proven false by reality, which has expired in its usefulness, but which continues to reproduce itself by preying on real-live hopes and fears. A zombie idea cannot adapt to new conditions, it only decays. It lacks moral purpose, but will continue to lumber on, propelled by an insatiable hunger for as long as it can find unfortunate victims.

Sadly, disturbingly, much of Marxist thought today finds itself in such a state. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the monstrosity of “actually existing” Marxism spectacularly failed to bury capitalism. Quite the contrary, it was shocked to find itself swept into the “dustbin of history.” Proven wrong, this dogma hasn’t stayed dead. Now a mockery of the living philosophy Marxism once was (and for some still is), Zombie-Marxism has continued to weigh heavy on the collective mind of the Left, for the simple reason that we haven’t turned a critical eye to Karl Marx’s body of work itself.

This essay is not meant to be an attack on any particular Marxist, or even on sectarian groups as a species of organization, but rather on a mindset, which uncritically carries forward Marx’s ideas into present circumstances where they no longer fit. Too often, Marx is invoked as an authority on subjects of which he was totally silent on. When Marx did make a statement related to a current issue, it is viewed as confirmation of his wisdom, rather than evaluated for the relative clarity or obscurity which it throws on our understanding of capitalism and revolutionary practice today.

We need to carry out an autopsy on the old man. There is much to be gained by reading Marx. But when we look to him for all the answers we transform him into a prophet and transform ourselves into a mindless herd. One hundred and fifty years after Marx’s major writings, it is beyond time to ask ourselves: What did Marx get right?, What did he get wrong?, and Why has Marxism failed in practice? Finally, how can we integrate Marx’s brilliance alongside the insights of many other necessary thinkers, to create a common-sense radical analysis, based not on ideological blueprints of the past, but on our lived conditions in 21st century late capitalism?

I was once infected with Zombie-Marxist ideas myself. I overcame this infection and freed my mind of such undead ideas, so I know it can be done. Of course, I am not the first, nor will I be the last, to raise these questions and attempt a critique of Marx. For example, in this essay I will draw from the feminist critique of Silvia Federici, the anti-Eurocentrism critiques of Edward Said and Russell Means, the ecological critique of Murray Bookchin, the anti-statist critiques of Mikhail Bakunin and Emma Goldman, the anti-dogmatic critique of Cornelius Castoriadis, and others. I offer my own perspective on the Marxist tradition in the hope that others find it useful, and to spark conversation on the need to constantly re-examine our assumptions. Marx himself wrote:

“The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped off all superstition in regard to the past” (M-ER 597).

In this era of capitalist crisis, when the entire system threatens to implode, new challenges, and new opportunities, are springing to life. To be relevant to our own century requires shedding the dead superstitions of the past, and facing the future with critical consciousness.

In this essay, I will first recount how I became a follower of “Grampa Karl”, and why I was eventually disillusioned. In the two following sections I will lay out my critique of Marx, limited to what I see as Marx’s five most enduring contributions and his five most debilitating mistakes. In the remaining parts of the essay I will explain how these theoretical failures led to “actually existing” Marxism – a monstrous dogma which dominated the revolutionary left for a century, and still perpetuates itself as an undead ideology even after mortifying two decades ago. Finally I will attempt to rescue Marx from the zombies haunting his legacy and situate him in what I call a common-sense radical perspective of living anti-capitalist politics, incorporating newer theoretical developments such as “de-growth,” “reproductive labor” and “transformative justice.”

My Encounter with Grampa Karl

When I was 18, I read the book Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. The book famously declares “there’s shit in the meat.” Fast Food Nation exposes how factory farms, which produce the vast majority of meat for US consumption, are hell-holes where unsanitary and unsafe practices not only carry out unspeakable animal cruelty, not only endanger and exploit their workers (who are mostly undocumented immigrants), but also pump out enormous quantities of excrement-laden and potentially dangerous meat, which has even killed children with E.coli. And this is to say nothing about the “normal” health effects of ingesting fast food. The fast food industry is also directly responsible for the clear-cutting of the Amazon rainforest, as huge areas of the world’s most diverse ecosystem are burned down and replaced with ranches raising cattle for Americans’ burgers.

As Schlosser documents, the meat industry is well aware of their socially and ecologically destructive practices, but persists in them for the simple and undeniable reason of maximizing profit. The ongoing disaster has nothing to do with evil or immoral people – the system itself is responsible. Capitalism is feeding us shit and we’re “lovin’ it.”

Facing this truth was too much for my teenage apathy to withstand. My dispassionate ignorance of the world – cultivated by years of television and video games – was suddenly shattered on the grim rocks of reality. As my world-view lay in jagged pieces, I found myself overwhelmed with questions. “Is capitalism killing our planet?” “Why doesn’t anyone know about this?” “If they know, why don’t they ever talk about it?” “Is it wrong to think this way?” “Am I a Communist for asking these questions?”

I sank below waves of uncertainty and anguish. I thrashed about for any explanation of how this terrible reality could make sense. I clamored to know what I could do about it. Drowning in questions, I longed for answers.

Karl Marx presented me with the first solid ideas I could stand on. I read “Alienated Labor” and it gave me a name for the anguish I was experiencing. My hatred for my job did not mean there was something wrong with me, but that I was responding correctly to an alienating and exploitative situation. I wasn’t wrong; the system was wrong.

Feeling validated by the old man, I rapidly developed a strong affinity for his teachings. I read “The Communist Manifesto,” “The Civil War in France,” even “The Grundrisse.” Although the language was thick and foreign, I slowly waded through because my efforts were occasionally rewarded with profound nuggets of insight into my own world. I discovered a long and complex history of Marxist anti-capitalism.

I felt as though I had been mentally rescued. I had found an ideological home, from which I could launch criticisms of the capitalist system and encounter others who desired revolution. Marx was our guide, my guide. His story of class struggle gave me meaning and purpose, which is what I had been seeking.

In mainstream American society, Karl Marx is like an estranged grandfather who no one brings up in polite conversation. A long time ago there was a bitter falling out over politics and he stopped being invited to family functions – all the better because he wouldn’t be caught dead at those “bourgeois” ceremonies. If the subject of Grampa Karl ever does come up, it’s usually in the context of a ghost story meant to frighten and silence unpatriotic sentiments. For example, Glenn Beck says Marx is controlling our president and destroying the country. On the other hand, Grampa Karl does get some favorable mentions in the university, where the facade of liberal education is more important than any minor disturbance that the introduction of students to Marx’s obscure rantings is likely to produce.

When I became a follower of Grampa Karl, I knew I was distancing myself from the mainstream. If people realized I was consorting with that rabble-rouser they might have thought I was crazy or stupid, or both. I had no problem with that. Rather, I had such contempt for the dominant culture as it exists, that I relished the identity of outsider and rebel. Moreover, the old man had promised me it was only a matter of time before capitalism collapsed due to its internal contradictions. Time was on our side. I cherished my secret Marxist hope and laughed behind the back of bourgeois society.

But as time went on, Marx’s warts began to show. First, I noticed his almost-total silence on issues of ecology. Being motivated largely by my concern for capitalism’s apocalyptic approach to life on this planet, I strained to find even the slightest clues of environmental consciousness in Marx’s writings. Instead, I was confronted with the faulty notion of a linear development of history, with liberation equated with human domination of nature. It became increasingly apparent that Marx didn’t have all the answers for me. His analysis was trapped in another century, when industrialization still seemed like a good idea to people.

Nevertheless, I was not ready to abandon my political home just because I had such doubts. On the contrary, I clung all the more desperately to my mentor, seeking to prove him right and his critics, perhaps even myself, wrong. Looking back, I can locate in myself the attitude of one afflicted with Zombie-Marxism. If I didn’t understand what Marx was saying, it was because he was speaking to a higher truth that I couldn’t grasp. If Marx’s ideas were questionable, I hastened to silence the questions. Instead, I sought to dispose of them by returning to Marx’s writings and scouring for quotes or passages, no matter how tangential, which could be used to clobber those who dared to doubt the wisdom of Grampa Karl. I felt close to Marx as to a guardian – he had pulled me from confusion and provided me with clarity. Through him, the world made sense. Or at least I thought it did.

My questions didn’t ebb. I became disturbed by the company Marx was keeping. Leninists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, Maoists, and more, all swarming around him and treating his every word as gospel. Worse, they seemed to spend more energy feuding with each other than building the kind of movement we need to overturn capitalism. I attended the 2006 Left Forum in New York City and despaired at seeing the horde of Marxist sectarian grouplets denouncing one-another over petty ideological questions that had been irrelevant decades ago. Were these people engaged in the same project that Marx had given me?

My disappointment grew, so that when the anarchist critique finally reached me, I was ready to listen. Although it was plainly apparent to me that people like Lenin and Stalin had entirely distorted the liberatory potential in Marx and created something horrifying, the anarchists pointed to the errors of Marx’s ideology and method which paved the way for those distortions. No matter how smart someone is, they are bound to make mistakes, so labeling yourself an “ist” of someone’s name is to engage in the worship of an individual, which can only detour you from trusting your own feelings and thoughts. How could someone know better than yourself what is hurting you and what you need to heal?

I saw this cult of personality in Venezuela, where I could not walk down the street, turn on the television, visit the beach or the mountains without seeing President Chavez’s name or face everywhere. This essay is no place to critique the policies of the Chavez government, which are complex and contain both positive and negative aspects, but the omnipresence of an uncritical Chavismo made me cringe on an emotional level, even if I firmly supported his government against the right-wing U.S.-funded opposition.

I felt betrayed by Marx. He should have known, and stated clearly, that politicians, no matter how progressive, cannot make revolution. It has to come from the bottom – from everyday people organized in social movements – fighting for their liberation. Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” suddenly appeared to me as a pathetic joke. How did he not see how such an absurd idea would be exploited by opportunists? Disillusioned in Venezuela, I read Emma Goldman’s My Disillusionment in Russia and parted ways with Marxism.

Even though Grampa Karl and I are no longer close comrades, Marx continues to influence my politics because there is much to value in his writings. A full recounting of his genius would be too difficult, but I will explore 5 key contributions of Marx that I believe remain relevant and useful insights today, during capitalism’s global crisis. Then I will follow this with what I see as the 5 most urgent failures in Marx’s analysis, from which spawned the Zombie-Marxism lurking in our midst today.

Karl Marx was no prophet. But neither can we reject him. We have to go beyond him, and bring him with us.² I believe it is only on such a basis, with a critical appraisal of Marx, that the Left can become ideologically relevant to today’s rapidly evolving political circumstances.

Here is an outline of the entire essay. Check back soon for more!

• Introduction
• My Encounter with Grampa Karl
• What Marx Got Right
  1. Class Analysis
  2. Base and Superstructure
  3. Alienation of Labor
  4. Need for Growth, Inevitability of Crisis
  5. A Counter-Hegemonic World-view
• What Marx Got Wrong
  1. Linear March of History
  2. Europe as Liberator
  3. Mysticism of the Proletariat
  4. The State
  5. A Secular Dogma
• Hegemony over the Left
• Zombie-Marxism and its Discontents
• Conclusion: Beyond Marx, But Not Without Him

Footnotes
1. The idea of a zombie ideology was transmitted to me from Turbulence magazine and the “zombie-liberalism” they discuss as taking the place of neo-liberalism in the wonderful article “Life in Limbo?”
2. This framing comes to me through Ashanti Alston, the “Anarchist Panther,” and his excellent essay “Beyond Nationalism, But Not Without It.”

Also published by OpEdNews, Countercurrents, and The Rag Blog.

Take Back the Land: Land, Gentrification and the Umoja Village Shantytown

by Max Rameau

Nia Press, 2008

Review by Alex Knight, endofcapitalism.com

I first heard about a group called Take Back the Land, which was illegally moving homeless families into empty homes in Miami, in a study group about the Civil Rights movement and the grassroots organizing that made it so powerful. The reference was highly appropriate. In many ways, Take Back the Land is a direct heir of that bottom-up, Black self-empowerment, civil disobedient, movement-building tradition, and is one of the most inspiring examples of a group renewing and developing that tradition today.

In our moment of crisis and stagnation, here is a group full of creativity, improvisation, and highly potent political analysis. Through its actions, the group proclaims: ‘Families are being foreclosed on and kicked out onto the street? We’re not going to lobby Washington and hope for some crumbs to come down. We’ll take matters into our own hands and move people directly into homes!’ This is precisely the spirit of direct action and participatory democracy that kick-started the Civil Rights movement, and the spirit that we need if we are to escape the human suffering that the elite are imposing on the poor and working class in this economic crisis.

Max Rameau, author of this book and a principal organizer in Take Back the Land Miami, came and spoke in Philadelphia a few months ago. I was struck not only by how charismatic and effective a speaker he was (something I could say about many smooth-talking political or corporate salesmen of our age), but by how Max was able to break down complex, abstract theoretical questions into common language that was easily understood. In this way, he demystifies politics and translates concepts usually reserved for academics or professionals in such a way that average, everyday people can take away something new and useful from the exchange. It’s clear that his primary goal is not an ego-trip to show off his brilliance, or to sell books and make money, but to do something much more difficult and meaningful: to spark movement to force the US government to recognize housing as a human right.

This book is written in that same frank style. In fact, it’s basically a how-to on grassroots housing organizing. It’s short – only 132 pages – but all you need to know is laid out here: the political context of Miami and nationally in terms of lack of affordable housing and gentrification that drives poor and Black people out of their homes, the strategic decisions and organizing that go into launching a new organization and campaign, the challenges and joys of working with homeless people, and the difficult and deceptive terrain of interacting with politicians, who are often agents of larger and more powerful corporate forces. Max Rameau just tells the story of his group, but in such a provocatively specific way. He explains to us exactly how things were done, who did them, who interfered and how, and he’s not at all afraid to name names.

The book centers on the incredible story of the Umoja Village, a shantytown built by Take Back the Land and allies on a vacant lot in a poor Black section of Miami. Because “In South Florida… local governments responded to the [housing] crisis by actively decreasing the number of low-income housing units” (pg. 23), Take Back the Land took the initiative to seize land and invite homeless people to take up residence there. The purpose of the action was not only to house people, an immediate need, but to draw attention to the crisis and to the government’s inaction, thereby hopefully shaming them into creating more low-income housing.

In the long run, the group’s “Political Objectives” were as follows (72):
“1. House and feed people
2. Assert the right of the black community to control land in the black community.
3. Build a new society.”

Even before the land seizure, much groundwork had been laid, including debating the strategy and politics of this type of action, discussing the possibility with allies and neighbors of the site, and trying to line up legal, fundraising, and other forms of support that would be necessary.  Citing a legal precedent that homeless people had a right to not be evicted from territory where their basic living needs were met, the group was able to dissuade the police from immediately evicting them once they did move onto the land.

Seeing the police cars back away without arresting anyone made a strong impression on the homeless and poor people moving onto this land. “This was a real, tangible victory that the people witnessed with their own eyes” (65).

With shanty homes and compost toilets built, the Umoja Village stood on the land for 6 months, and was self-organized by the homeless residents. Take Back the Land prioritized that their group, while inspiring and leading this takeover, would become increasingly unnecessary in the day-to-day operation of the shantytown, so that the residents had total control.  The self-empowerment of the homeless was one of the most inspiring aspects of this book.  You read about individuals who had been victims for decades, or their entire lives, and grappling with mental illness and/or drug addiction, becoming confident by working with one another and making the decisions that affect their lives.

“[W]e assert that the most marginal members of society are better qualified to run their ‘city’ or ‘village’ than the college educated elected official and bureaucrat. We not only asserted the proposition, we proved it as Umoja’s residents made real decisions about the rules of the Village and the manner in which it was run” (75).

Here is precisely the principle of participatory democracy that Ella Baker championed in the Civil Rights movement. Rather than turn for help to political elites, religious leaders, business leaders, or whomever, we can take matters into our own hands and manage our own affairs. Forget what passes for “American Democracy.” Real democracy is about ‘people power’. Demos in Greek means people, cracy means rule. Put it together – Democracy: Rule by the people.

Unfortunately, true democracy is rarely tolerated by the U.S. corporate and governmental establishment, and that was the case in Miami. Shortly after the Umoja’s 6-month anniversary celebrations, a “suspicious” fire burned down the entire village. Before Max, the homeless residents, and allies could clear the wreckage and begin the process of rebuilding, the city of Miami sent in the police to permanently evict them from the land.

What follows the disastrous fire and eviction is perhaps the most intriguing section of the book. Take Back the Land, still trying to re-occupy the site, is approached by a “progressive” city councilperson, who offers to house all the homeless residents in a new low-income housing unit that Take Back the Land would develop. The group then has to debate whether to accept this deal, which would mean giving up some of their oppositional character against the government, in order to gain the immediate goal of moving people off the street and into homes.

The difficulty of this decision opens up an important question that all grassroots movements need to address at some point: whether to compromise with government/”the system” and receive tangible gains, or hold fast to ideals and principles and potentially miss some opportunities.  It is never an easy decision.

In Max’s words, “as the opposition, it is difficult for us to accept victory, even when we win. Virtually any settlement between us and our political targets can be interpreted as a sell out simply because there is an agreement or because those in power no longer stand against the demand. Consequently, we, as a movement, must clearly define what constitutes victory, particularly in the context of the US political and economic system” (118).

If the goal is to “Build a new society” and that necessitates sweeping away the existing order of oppression, how do you compromise with elites whose job is to uphold that very order? On the other hand, because those elites have the power to give you what you need, at least in the short term, how can you avoid accepting a deal when they agree to give you something you need?

Ultimately, it is a question about “revolutionary reforms” – theoretically a change in policy (reform) that leads to the empowerment of a movement, and therefore the ability to carry on further campaigns towards revolution. But what does that actually look like in a capitalist society that has successfully undercut and co-opted grassroots social movements for the last century or more, and which even more skillfully ignores and silences those movements so that they feel powerless and marginalized?

In a situation as desperate as our own, how do you avoid the temptation to work within the system, even if it means abandoning some of your political principles? And how do you stay true to those ideals while at the same time engaging that system to gain concrete victories?

I encourage all to read this book and discover how Take Back the Land wrestled with these and other pressing strategic questions. I hope it won’t be a “spoiler” to say that in the end the city of Miami betrayed the “deal” and the land was never restored, nor was there any new low-income housing construction. The government failed the public yet again.

The U.S. housing crisis has only gotten worse since this book was written in 2007, especially now that the economy has tanked. An estimated 3.5 million homes will be foreclosed in 2010, a 25% jump from 2009. The work of Take Back the Land therefore becomes increasingly relevant and inspiring. As Michael Moore’s latest film Capitalism: A Love Story highlighted, the group has gone from taking over one piece of land to moving many homeless families into abandoned buildings throughout Miami. In this way, they have continued to make headlines and push the issue of housing as a human right.

“There is no way to sugarcoat the loss of Umoja Village. The land we controlled for just over six months is now out of our control, a tremendous defeat for the community and the movement. Our efforts to take full and legal control over the land also ended in failure. However, none should confuse the killing of a deal with the killing of a movement. Umoja not only forged a model for the adversarial takeover of land, but also established a potential conclusion to the struggle: community ownership of that land.” (130)

To solve the immense problems we face in this crisis, not just housing but unemployment, lack of health care, attacks on immigrants and Muslims, the endless wars, climate chaos, etc., requires active, confrontational, and creative social movements. Even more, it requires a return to Ella Baker’s principle of participatory democracy, the taking of power away from unsympathetic elites and into the hands of people who are directly affected by issues on the neighborhood level. Take Back the Land is a particularly striking example of a group hard at work pursuing this vision.

Organizing outside the Chinese Communist Party’s official union, workers have initiated a series of crippling strikes that repeatedly shut down factories, among other forms of rebellion. They are openly defying the totalitarian state-capitalist government of China, as well as the Western corporations whose factories they are closing. And they are winning. Wages are being increased by 40, 60, even 100% at some plants.

If the Chinese workers’ movement continues to disrupt the sweatshops pumping out our electronics and car parts, they could throw a wrench into the China->U.S. cheap goods conveyor belt that has carried global capitalist growth for more than a decade.  The destruction of this global trade alliance will not only free the Chinese workers from the abominable conditions Hari describes, but potentially free the entire planet from an economic system hell-bent on relentless growth and plunder.

image from The Economist

In short, capitalism relies on China’s absurdly cheap labor for its profit margins. This unsanctioned frenzy of Chinese labor organizing is striking a blow in the heart of the system. More power to ‘em! We should support these workers however possible. [alex]

And the Most Inspiring Good News Story of the Year is…

by Johann Hari, August 6, 2010

At first, this isn’t going to sound like a good news story, never mind one of the most inspiring stories in the world today. But trust me: it is.

Yan Li spent his life tweaking tiny bolts, on a production line, for the gadgets that make our lives zing and bling. He might have pushed a crucial component of the laptop I am writing this article on, or the mobile phone that will interrupt your reading of it. He was a typical 27-year old worker at the gigantic Foxconn factory in Shenzen, Southern China, which manufactures i-Pads and Playstations and mobile phone batteries.

Li was known to the company by his ID number: F3839667. He stood at a whirring line all day, every day, making the same tiny mechanical motion with his wrist, for 20 pence an hour. According to his family, sometimes his shifts lasted for 24 hours; sometimes they stretched to 35. If he had tried to form a free trade union to change these practices, he would have been imprisoned for twelve years. On the night of May 27th, after yet another marathon-shift, Li dropped dead.

Deaths from overwork are so common in Chinese factories they have a word for it: guolaosi. China Daily estimates 600,000 people are killed this way every year, mostly making goods for us. Li had never experienced any health problems, his family says, until he started this work schedule; Foxconn say he died of asthma and his death had nothing to do with them. The night Li died, yet another Foxconn worker committed suicide – the tenth this year.

For two decades now, you and I have shopped until Chinese workers dropped. Business has bragged about the joys of the China Price. They have been less keen for us to see the Human Price. KYE Systems Corp run a typical factory in Donguan in southern mainland China, and one of their biggest clients is Microsoft – so in 2009 the US National Labour Committee sent Chinese investigators undercover there. On the first day a teenage worker whispered to them: “We are like prisoners here.”

The staff work and live in giant factory-cities that they almost never leave. Each room sleeps ten workers, and each dorm houses 5000. There are no showers; they are given a sponge to clean themselves with. A typical shift begins at 7.45am and ends at 10.55pm. Workers must report to their stations fifteen minutes ahead of schedule for a military-style drill: “Everybody, attention! Face left! Face right!” Once they begin, they are strictly forbidden from talking, listening to music, or going to the toilet. Anybody who breaks this rule is screamed at and made to clean the toilets as punishment. Then it’s back to the dorm.

It’s the human equivalent to battery farming. One worker said: “My job is to put rubber pads on the base of each computer mouse… This is a mind-numbing job. I am basically repeating the same motion over and over for over twelve hours a day.” At a nearby Meitai factory, which made keyboards for Microsoft, a worker said: “We’re really livestock and shouldn’t be called workers.” They are even banned from making their own food, or having sex. They live off the gruel and slop they are required to buy from the canteen, except on Fridays, when they are given a small chicken leg and foot, “to symbolize their improving life.”

Even as their work has propelled China towards being a super-power, these workers got less and less. Wages as a proportion of GDP fell in China every single year from 1983 to 2005.

They can be treated this way because of a very specific kind of politics that has prevailed in China for two decades now. Very rich people are allowed to form into organizations – corporations – to ruthlessly advance their interests, but the rest of the population is forbidden by the secret police from banding together to create organizations to protect theirs. The political practices of Maoism were neatly transferred from communism to corporations: both regard human beings as dispensable instruments only there to serve economic ends.

We’ll never know the names of all the people who paid with their limbs, their lungs, or their lives for the goodies in my home and yours. Here’s just one: think of him as the Unknown Worker, standing for them all. Liu Pan was a 17 year old operating a machine that made cards and cardboard that were sold on to big name Western corporations, including Disney. When he tried to clear its jammed machinery, he got pulled into it. His sister said: “When we got his body, his whole head was crushed. We couldn’t even see his eyes.”

So you might be thinking – was it a cruel joke to bill this as a good news story? Not at all. An epic rebellion has now begun in China against this abuse – and it is beginning to succeed. Across 126,000 Chinese factories, workers have refused to live like this any more. Wildcat unions have sprung up, organized by text message, demanding higher wages, a humane work environment, and the right to organize freely. Millions of young workers across the country are blockading their factories and chanting “there are no human rights here!” and “we want freedom!” The suicides were a rebellion of despair; this is a rebellion of hope.

Last year, the Chinese dictatorship was so panicked by the widespread uprisings that they prepared an extraordinary step forward. They drafted a new labor law that would allow workers to form and elect their own trade unions. It would plant seeds of democracy across China’s workplaces. Western corporations lobbied very hard against it, saying it would create a “negative investment environment” – by which they mean smaller profits. Western governments obediently backed the corporations and opposed freedom and democracy for Chinese workers. So the law was whittled down and democracy stripped out.

It wasn’t enough. This year Chinese workers have risen even harder to demand a fair share of the prosperity they create. Now company after company is making massive concessions: pay rises of over 60 percent are being conceded. Even more crucially, officials in Guandong province, the manufacturing heartland of the country, have announced they are seriously considering allowing workers to elect their own representatives to carry out collective bargaining after all.

Just like last time, Western corporations and governments are lobbying frantically against this – and to keep the millions of Yan Lis stuck at their assembly lines into the 35th hour.

This isn’t a distant struggle: you are at its heart, whether you like it or not. There is an electrical extension cord running from your laptop and mobile and games console to the people like Yan Li and Liu Pan dying to make them. So you have to make a choice. You can passively let the corporations and governments speak for you in trying to beat these people back into semi-servitude – or you can side with the organizations here that support their cry for freedom, like No Sweat in Britain, or the National Labour Committee in the US, by donating to them, or volunteering for their campaigns.

Yes, if this struggle succeeds, it will mean that we will have to pay a little more for some products, in exchange for the freedom and the lives of people like Yan Li and Liu Pan. But previous generations have made that choice. After slavery was abolished in 1833, Britain’s GDP fell by 10 percent – but they knew that cheap goods and fat profits made from flogging people until they broke were not worth having. Do we?

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here.

The following exchange between Michael Carriere and Alex Knight occurred via email, July 2010. Alex Knight was questioned about the End of Capitalism Theory, which states that the global capitalist system is breaking down due to ecological and social limits to growth and that a paradigm shift toward a non-capitalist future is underway.

This is the final part of a four-part interview. Scroll to the bottom for links to the other sections.

Part 3. Life After Capitalism

MC: Moving forward, how would you ideally envision a post-capitalist world? And if capitalism manages to survive (as it has in the past), is there still room for real change?

AK: First let me repeat that even if my theory is right that capitalism is breaking down, it doesn’t suggest that we’ll automatically find ourselves living in a utopia soon. This crisis is an opportunity for us progressives but it is also an opportunity for right-wing forces. If the right seizes the initiative, I fear they could give rise to neo-fascism – a system in which freedoms are enclosed and violated for the purpose of restoring a mythical idea of national glory.

I think this threat is especially credible here in the United States, where in recent years we’ve seen the USA PATRIOT Act, the Supreme Court’s decision that corporations are “persons,” and the stripping of constitutional rights from those labeled “terrorists,” “enemy combatants”, as well as “illegals.” Arizona’s attempt to institute a racial profiling law and turn every police officer into an immigration official may be the face of fascism in America today. Angry whites joining together with the repressive forces of the state to terrorize a marginalized community, Latino immigrants. While we have a black president now, white supremacist sentiment remains widespread in this country, and doesn’t appear to be going away anytime soon. So as we struggle for a better world we may also have to contend with increasing authoritarianism.

I should also state up front that I have no interest in “writing recipes for the cooks of the future.” I can’t prescribe the ideal post-capitalist world and I wouldn’t try. People will create solutions to the crises they face according to what makes most sense in their circumstances. In fact they’re already doing this. Yet, I would like to see your question addressed towards the public at large, and discussed in schools, workplaces, and communities. If we have an open conversation about what a better world would look like, this is where the best solutions will come from. Plus, the practice of imagination will give people a stronger investment in wanting the future to turn out better. So I’ll put forward some of my ideas for life beyond capitalism, in the hope that it spurs others to articulate their visions and initiate conversation on the world we want.

My personal vision has been shaped by my outrage over the two fundamental crises that capitalism has perpetrated: the ecological crisis and the social crisis. I see capitalism as a system of abuse. The system grows by exploiting people and the planet as means to extract profit, and by refusing to be responsible for the ecological and social trauma caused by its abuse. Therefore I believe any real solutions to our problems must be aligned to both ecological justice and social justice. If we privilege one over the other, we will only cause more harm. The planet must be healed, and our communities must be healed as well. I would propose these two goals as a starting point to the discussion.

How do we heal? What does healing look like? Let me expand from there.

Five Guideposts to a New World

I mentioned in response to the first question that I view freedom, democracy, justice, sustainability and love as guideposts that point towards a new world. This follows from what I call a common sense radical approach, because it is not about pulling vision for the future from some ideological playbook or dogma, but from lived experience. Rather than taking pre-formed ideas and trying to make reality fit that conceptual blueprint, ideas should spring from what makes sense on the ground. The five guideposts come from our common values. It doesn’t take an expert to understand them or put them into practice.

In the first section I described how freedom at its core is about self-determination. I said that defined this way it presents a radical challenge to capitalist society because it highlights the lack of power we have under capitalism. We do not have self-determination, and we cannot as long as huge corporations and corrupt politicians control our destinies.

I’ll add that access to land is fundamental to a meaningful definition of freedom. The group Take Back the Land has highlighted this through their work to move homeless and foreclosed families directly into vacant homes in Miami. Everyone needs access to land for the basic security of housing, but also for the ability to feed themselves. Without “food sovereignty,” or the power to provide for one’s own family, community or nation with healthy, culturally and ecologically appropriate food, freedom cannot exist. The best way to ensure that communities have food sovereignty is to ensure they have access to land.

Ella Baker championed the idea of participatory democracy

Similarly, a deeper interpretation of democracy would emphasize participation by an individual or community in the decisions that affect them. For this definition I follow in the footsteps of Ella Baker, the mighty civil rights organizer who championed the idea of participatory democracy. With a lifelong focus on empowering ordinary people to solve their own problems, Ella Baker is known for saying “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.” This was the philosophy of the black students who sat-in at lunch counters in the South to win their right to public accommodations. They didn’t wait for the law to change, or for adults to tell them to do it. The students recognized that society was wrong, and practiced non-violent civil disobedience [video], becoming empowered by their actions. Then with Ms. Baker’s support they formed the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and organized poor blacks in Mississippi to demand their right to vote, passing on the torch of empowerment.

We need to be empowered to manage our own affairs on a large scale. In a participatory democracy, “we, the people” would run the show, not representatives who depend on corporate funding to get elected. “By the people, for the people, of the people” are great words. What if we actually put those words into action in the government, the economy, the media, and all the institutions that affect our lives? Institutions should obey the will of the people, rather than the people obeying the will of institutions. It can happen, but only through organization and active participation of the people as a whole. We must empower ourselves, not wait for someone else to do it.

Justice is supposed to protect the weak and oppressed from the strong and powerful, but in capitalist society it too often plays out as the reverse. As I write this, the Oakland police officer who shot Oscar Grant in the back and killed him was just handed a verdict of “not guilty” for murder, and found “guilty” of the lesser charge of “involuntary manslaughter.” How can it be “involuntary” if he was caught on video putting a gun in Oscar’s back and pulling the trigger? Is it because the police officer is white and Oscar Grant was black? What would the verdict have been if the roles were reversed and the police officer had been shot in the back? This isn’t justice, it’s injustice.

So to reach an ideal future, we would need to eliminate systems of oppression that benefit one group, like whites, at the expense of another group, like people of color. Racial justice aims to overturn this disparity. Of course we also have to put an end to patriarchy, the domination of society by men. Women have been organizing for centuries to gain equal rights, and to live without fear of violence or silencing. Theirs is a struggle for justice, too. Queer and trans justice mean that everyone should have the basic right to express their sexual preferences or gender identity however they so choose. Finally, I don’t think we can speak of justice as long as society is divided into rich and poor. A just society would ensure that everyone has access to resources to meet their basic needs, like food, housing, education, health care, transportation, clean water and air, and everything necessary for a decent livelihood.

The concept of intersectionality is also crucial. It means we must appreciate the complex ways that different forms of oppression intersect with one another. A simple example is that the injustice experienced by a black woman is different than for a white woman or a black man. These are not new concepts of justice, but I advocate them proudly.

Sustainability is such a buzzword these days, with corporations adopting sustainability statements and selling us “green” products, that it’s close to becoming meaningless propaganda. In a deeper sense, sustainability means human economy existing in harmony with the rest of the planet’s ecology, rather than as an alien force outside it and exploiting it. I draw inspiration for this definition from the work of the late, great social ecologist Murray Bookchin.

Bookchin also theorized that “the domination of nature by man stems from the domination of human by human.” In his book The Ecology of Freedom he points out that humans lived for 95% of our history as interconnected members of the web of life, and that it was the rise of class society about 10,000 years ago that first divided humans into rich and poor, and alienated us from the Earth’s natural balance. Class societies are committed to exploiting the land, air and sea for all they can provide. The ruling class sees their human subjects and the environment as things to use for enriching themselves and gaining power over other class societies. If they fail to do this, they themselves risk being conquered by more powerful neighbors. Class hierarchy therefore can never be sustainable.

Jared Diamond and others have written in detail how the Babylonian, Mayan, Roman and many other empires have collapsed because they abused their ecosystems faster than those ecosystems could restore themselves. This is why the “Fertile Crescent” of the Middle East, where class society originated, is now largely desert. In a sense, capitalism learned from these prior empires to spread its damage over the entire planet. But what it couldn’t learn was that exploiting the Earth and humanity to enrich the powerful few is always unsustainable in the long run.

Now that this global class society appears headed towards its own collapse, I would expect continents, nations, and regions to go their own directions. This makes it hard to envision exactly how sustainability will develop in the future. What works in the cities might not work in the country, and the same could be said about drylands and wetlands, North and South, etc. One point that seems clear is that technology must be appropriate to its surroundings, because you can’t use wind turbines where there’s no wind, or solar panels where there’s not enough sun. Appropriate technology means that it must serve human need, while also respecting the needs of the ecosystem on which it depends. Permaculture is an example of an appropriate technology for growing food – the idea is that gardening should actually restore the soil and nourish the ecology. I’ll add that the movement towards a sustainable future must be global, pursuing all of humanity’s shared long-term benefit. Instead of competing, we must work together, learning from each other’s successes and failures.

One sustainability success story is the organic revolution in Cuba. Around 1990, the collapse of the Soviet Union led to the loss of cheap oil for the island nation of Cuba. Cuba had entirely depended on that oil for their food production, as they maintained an industrialized agriculture system heavy on machinery and petrochemicals. I should add that this industrial food model is the same model the IMF and World Bank have pushed on most of the world. In neoliberal language, this was called the “Green Revolution.” But without oil, this industrial model cannot produce food.

The Cubans recognized this in the most visceral sense – facing an economic collapse that literally threatened starvation. They had no choice but to rapidly transition all food production over to an organic model. Petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides were abandoned, in favor of “biofertilizers” and “biopesticides,” natural solutions that mimicked the work of ecology. At the same time, tractors were replaced with human and animal effort, and the entire population had to relearn the farming skills of their ancestors. Gardens suddenly appeared on rooftops, in backyards and vacant lots, and the government raised farmers’ pay above that of engineers.

Farmers at the Organiponico de Alamar, a neighborhood agriculture project in downtown Havana (Photo by John Morgan)

Amazingly, despite being enclosed within a persistent US embargo, this genuine Green Revolution succeeded. No Cuban starved, though everyone lost 20 pounds. Today about half of Havana’s produce is grown within the city limits. As the global oil and energy shortage deepen, the entire world will need examples like that of Cuba. It is not just that the economy must use less resources than it does now. We have to face the equally important question of how to distribute the resources that exist. Transitioning to a sustainable path means prioritizing necessary economic functions like food production over wasteful and irresponsible expenditures on things like weapons or luxury items. For this reason, the transition away from a highly industrialized, capitalist model need not bring poverty and stress. If we use this opportunity to re-prioritize our economy towards meeting human and ecological needs, downscaling can actually improve quality of life and community self-reliance.

Last on the list of guideposts, but certainly not least, love is the force that ties everything together. I don’t speak of the sappy, saccharine love that comes in the form of millions of throwaway Valentine’s cards and gifts every year. What we need is a guide towards respect for life and all creatures, and a spirit of support and cooperation with our fellow human beings. This force, I believe is deep, genuine love. The kind of transformative love that writer bell hooks talks about when she writes, “Love will always move us away from domination in all its forms. Love will always challenge and change us.”

If capitalism is a system of abuse, the task ahead of us is fundamentally one of healing. In any abusive relationship, where one asserts control over another through physical, emotional, psychological, or sexual violence, the only path to healing is to end the abuse. For this reason, we must continue to speak up and challenge the violence capitalism perpetrates daily against the planet and all of humanity. However, we must also understand that the survivor, or the recipient of the abuse, may not recognize their partner’s behavior as abusive, and will typically internalize some amount of shame and guilt, feeling that they brought the treatment on themselves. They may justify the abuse by believing that they deserve it as punishment for real or imagined wrongs.

Even if the survivor names the abuse, they may stick with the relationship and futilely try to “change” or “reform” their abuser. Perhaps they will lower their expectations by reasoning that they cannot “do any better” than this relationship, and so will resign themselves to the abuse. Meanwhile the abuser is likely to attempt to isolate the survivor from friends, family, or other potential sources of support. As time goes on, the survivor is likely to feel increasingly trapped and powerless. The situation is not going to get any better until they end the relationship and rediscover their independence as a self-reliant entity.

I believe this analogy helps clarify why the population living under capitalism often does not appear eager to rebel against the injustices of the system. We have come to internalize our abuse, feeling powerless to escape it, and not recognizing that there are other ways to live. Every one of us has experienced abuse in this system. It comes in many forms, including (but not limited to): poverty, racism, repression of sexuality, pollution and environmental injustice, violence in our communities and schools, police brutality, sexism, ableism, neglect from parents or loved ones, isolation, sexual violence, imprisonment/punishment, and the private hell of domestic abuse. Without the support to be able to name this abuse, and go through the process of healing our wounds, too often we hide our scars and hope the pain will go away. When it doesn’t, we are left with anxiety, depression, addiction and mental illness.

Love can set us free. We must commit to loving ourselves in a deeper sense than many of us ever have. Capitalism uses propaganda, distractions, and boredom to numb us to the violence and enclosures it perpetrates, and often it is easier to remain numb than to deal with our emotional trauma. We have tuned out. We ignore the pain and anguish our bodies are communicating to us, and remain silent. Loving ourselves is really about committing to a process of healing: healing our bodies, healing our minds and our spirits, healing our communities, and healing the planet. I believe in our capacity to heal.

First we must name the abuse – the social and ecological crises we are experiencing, and move past the shame of victimhood. We may have participated in capitalist society and truly believed it was right, but we did not deserve to be treated this way. Next, we must end the relationship with capitalism that is responsible for the harm. When we take this step, the future will open up and we will see immense opportunity in every direction. We will experience a sense of liberation, finally grasping the independence and self-empowerment that we have always been capable of.

A Society That Values Life

If we follow the five guideposts of freedom, democracy, justice, sustainability and love, I believe the path will lead towards a society that values life. Capitalism is clear that it values money – profit – and not much else. With this single-minded focus, it leaves the well-being of humanity and the well-being of the planet too far down on the list of priorities. Those should be the top priorities. What is more important than life? This imbalance is the root of our troubles. It’s the reason our era is an era of war, poverty and unemployment, consumerism, drug addiction, corrupt politicians, and ecological catastrophe. We live in a society that straight-up doesn’t care about us. Capitalism cares about an individual if they can make a profit, but if not, it doesn’t care if they’re lying facedown in the gutter. Perhaps we’ve come to accept it, but this is totally backwards logic. It flies in the face of every system of morality, every major religion, and simple common sense.

What if we reversed the priorities and created a society that valued life more than it valued numbers on a spreadsheet? What would that look like? Conflicts resolved through dialogue and reconciliation rather than violence? Sharing when we’ve got enough and our neighbors don’t? Asking for help when we need it, and actually receiving it? Listening to our elders and our youth, and I mean really listening? Working meaningful jobs that make a difference in the world? Spending more time in our gardens, volunteering in the community, or playing with our children? Overcoming addiction and mental illness? Doing what’s in our hearts, and not just what will make the most money?

Does this sound unrealistic? Then remember the figure I quoted in response to the second question: $17 Trillion [PDF]. That’s how much money the US government has given to the banks since this crisis began, according to Nomi Prins. It’s such a huge number that it’s hard to fathom what that means. Let’s put it in perspective. On May 30, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan hit a total of $1 trillion. So the bailouts have cost about 17 “wars on terror,” in just a year and a half.

The group Rethink Afghanistan made a Facebook application that suggests alternative ways we could have spent that 1 trillion dollars wasted on war. On the list: $12 billion to “hire every worker in Afghanistan for a year,” $930 million to clean up the BP oil spill, $23 billion for “health care for 1 million children for one year,” and the list goes on. The website Global Issues also estimates the following costs for universal access in all the world’s poor countries: $9 billion to provide clean drinking water and sanitation, $12 billion for reproductive health for all women, and $13 billion for basic health and nutrition. Even if these figures are underestimated, it seems clear that we could eradicate global poverty and eliminate the conditions that breed terrorists for just a fraction of the cost of occupying the Middle East with US soldiers and keeping capitalism on life support.

What would you do with $18 trillion? I trust the reader could come up with all kinds of good ideas! For myself I want to see every community self-sufficient with electricity and heat, coming from clean and renewable energy sources. Let’s make solar panels, wind turbines, geothermal, passive solar, and most importantly, energy efficiency, available to everyone regardless of income.

We have the resources. We have the technology. All we need is the power to change these priorities. Every day, people all over the world work towards gaining this power.  Impoverished communities, youth and students, people of color, disabled folks, women and trans folks, workers, lesbian, gay and queer folks, religious and ethnic minorities, indigenous communities, and allies are organizing daily to end the trauma of capitalism and move towards a society that values life. This struggle is as old as time. As long as oppression has existed in the world, people have been organizing to undo it.

If the End of Capitalism Theory is correct, then right now we find ourselves at a historic crossroads, where the old order of oppression is breaking down under the strain of ecological and social limits. Will it be replaced by a new form of oppression, perhaps even more violent and authoritarian, or will we begin to heal and put an end to oppression once and for all? It’s a question that only we can answer through our actions.

Many people across the US and the world are trying to answer this question. We are getting smarter at creating approaches that integrate both ecological justice and social justice. More and more people are beginning to see that economic growth is not the goal. The capitalist economy is large but poor – it does not meet the needs of the majority of humanity or the needs of the planet. We can create an economy that is smaller but richer. Some examples of people who developing and spreading this knowledge are the de-growth movement which is getting stronger in Europe, and the Post-Carbon Institute in the United States. Yes! Magazine and Democracy Now! are two media outlets that regularly highlight the solutions we need.

Detroit, more than any other city, displays the hope springing from the cracks in capitalist crisis. Detroit was once the home of the automobile industry, the example of technologic progress in America. That industry has fled and left tremendous disinvestment and poverty in its wake. But solutions are coming from the community. Poor black people are turning vacant lots into urban gardens and organic farms, so that now Detroit has more urban agriculture than any city in the US. Detroit City of Hope, an effort connected with 95-year-old long-time activist Grace Lee Boggs, is helping to coordinate efforts between community organizations re-imagining sustainable development in what used to be the “motor city.” Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Detroit shows us that by joining together in a spirit of mutual aid and healing from trauma, regular people can begin to create a new world, now.

What If Capitalism Survives

As you point out, the End of Capitalism Theory could be wrong. So what if capitalism survives this crisis as it did the others? In that case, I see two possible outcomes.

Option 1 is that the world literally comes to an end, either because of catastrophic climate change or nuclear warfare. The planet fries, the seas boil, and all life ceases, including humanity. This possibility is too horrific for me to imagine. I also happen to think it’s less likely than the second.

Option 2 is that either through renewed enclosures on the planet and the poor, pure dumb luck, or some combination of the two, President Obama and the world leaders manage to get the global economy back on a trajectory of growth, for another few decades. Perhaps they push through “cap and trade” and sell the atmosphere to polluters, opening up a new market for speculation. Or similarly they could force into existence a climate deal that includes REDD agreements that privatize pristine forests and displace the indigenous communities that have lived in them for thousands of years. Maybe they pump enough oil out of the tar sands, known as “the most destructive project on Earth,” and waste a lot of money on more nuclear reactors and ethanol plants in desperate attempts to mitigate some of the effects of peak oil. Slavery could be reinstated, perhaps along with debtors’ prisons to house the millions of Americans unable to pay back their student loans, credit cards, and mortgages. Or the ruling class could fall back on the tried-and-true strategy of escaping economic crisis by launching another war. They might enlist non-profits, academics, and even some “leftists” to promote the project by calling it neo-Keynesianism, or a Green New Deal, or some other snazzy title.

It sounds plausible. The problem with this option is that these are all, at best, temporary fixes. The fundamental contradiction of a system that requires endless growth on a finite planet would remain in place like the force of gravity on an airborne vehicle. It’s not the kind of thing that can be delayed forever. Once the fuel runs out, that sucker’s going down. Capitalism has stayed in the air through a lot of crises in the past, but it has only managed to buy more time until the next storm hits and throws the system into jeopardy even more starkly.

Sooner or later, capitalism will lose its forward momentum and there will be no technological fix, no new miracle energy source, no new round of enclosures that can pull it from its nosedive. The End of Capitalism Theory says this day will probably come sooner rather than later, and in that sense it’s a hopeful theory. But I think if we study the evidence of the ecological limits, like how soon peak oil is hitting, and the social limits, like the turmoil in China, we’ll see the system is either sputtering and about to go down, or has already entered freefall. If capitalism is already hurtling towards the rocks, then I believe the severity of the current crisis – which everyone agrees is rivaled only by the Great Depression, and this time is a much more global crash – begins to make sense. That’s what theories are good for, after all, helping us make sense of our experiences.

Thanks for the wonderful questions!
Alex Knight
July 2010

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Alex Knight is a proponent of the End of Capitalism Theory, which states that the global capitalist system is breaking down due to ecological and social limits to growth and that a paradigm shift toward a non-capitalist future is underway. He is working on a book titled “The End of Capitalism” and seeks a publisher. Since 2007 he has edited the website endofcapitalism.com. He has a degree in electrical engineering and a Master’s in political science, both from Lehigh University. He lives in Philadelphia, where he is a teacher and organizer. He can be reached at alex@endofcapitalism.com

Michael Carriere is an assistant professor at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, where he teaches courses on American history, public policy, political science, and urban design. He is currently working on a book, with David Schalliol, titled “The Death and (After) Life of Great American Cities: Twenty-First Century Urbanism and the Culture of Crisis.” He holds a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Chicago.

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Click the links below for more of the interview:

1. The current financial crisis is clearly a moment of peril for both individuals and the broader system of capitalism. But would it also make sense to see it as a moment of opportunity?
Part 1. Crisis and Opportunity

2. Capitalism has faced many moments of crisis over time. Is there something different about the present crisis? What makes the end of capitalism a possibility now?
Part 2A. Capitalism and Ecological Limits
Part 2B. Social Limits and the Crisis

3. Moving forward, how would you ideally envision a post-capitalist world? And if capitalism manages to survive (as it has in the past), is there still room for real change?
Part 3. Life After Capitalism

The following exchange between Michael Carriere and Alex Knight occurred via email, July 2010. Alex Knight was questioned about the End of Capitalism Theory, which states that the global capitalist system is breaking down due to ecological and social limits to growth and that a paradigm shift toward a non-capitalist future is underway.

This is the third part of a four-part interview. This part is a continuation of Alex’s response to the second question. Click here for Part 2A. Scroll to the bottom for links to the other sections.

Part 2B. Social Limits and the Crisis

MC: Capitalism has faced many moments of crisis over time. Is there something different about the present crisis? What makes the end of capitalism a possibility now?

AK: As I described in the last section, the current crisis can be understood as resulting from a massive collision between capitalism’s relentless need for growth and the world’s limits in capacity to sustain that growth. These limits to growth are both ecological and social. In this section I’ll discuss the concept of social limits to growth.

The Extraordinary Power of Social Movements

Social limits to growth function alongside the ecological limits but are drawn from a different source. By social limits we mean the inability, or unwillingness, of human communities, and humankind as a whole, to support the expansion of capitalism. This broadly includes all forms of resistance to capitalism, a resistance that has arguably been increasing around the world through innumerable forms of alternative lifestyles, refusal to cooperate, protest, and outright rebellion.

As a disclaimer it’s important to recognize that not all resistance is progressive. There are right-wing, fundamentalist, and undemocratic forces that also resist capitalism, for example the Taliban, or North Korea. These are not our allies. They do not share progressive values, we cannot condone their attacks on women, or on freedom more generally, and I don’t see anything to be gained by working with them. However it is important to recognize how these forces are aligned against capitalism and U.S. imperialism, in addition to being aware of the danger they present to our own hopes and dreams.

Progressive resistance, on the other hand, has always taken its strength from grassroots social movements. Silvia Federici writes about the immense and varied peasant movements in medieval Europe that fought for religious and sexual freedom, challenging both feudal lords and emerging capitalist elites. I like to think of these rebels as my European ancestors – they were just commoners but they rose up to fight for a better world. This is the nature of social movements. Ordinary folks, daring to pursue their deepest aspirations, interests and dreams, join together with others who share those desires, and thereby create something extraordinary. The magic exists in the joining-together. Isolated individuals lack the power to accomplish what a group can achieve.

We can appreciate this extraordinary power if we look at how social movements have transformed our lives. A century ago, millions of American workers joined the labor movement and won the 8-hour day, Social Security, and workplace safety. Regular folks carried forward the Civil Rights Movement and broke Southern segregation. The feminist and LGBT movements have transformed the way gender and sexuality are viewed all over the world. It’s hard to overstate how dramatically these and other social movements have improved society. While capitalism has invented ways to co-opt social movements and redirect them into outlets that do not challenge the system on a deep level (like the “non-profit industrial complex”), movements have remained alive and vibrant by empowering people to reach towards a different world.

Have social movements limited capitalist oppression recently? To answer this we need to learn the story of the Global Justice Movement.

Demonstrators tear down a section of security fence in the Mexican resort city of Cancun to confront the World Trade Organization’s Fifth Ministerial summit on Sept. 10, 2003.

The Global Justice Movement

David Graeber, anarchist anthropologist, wrote a remarkable essay called “The Shock of Victory” in which he looks at this movement that suddenly flared up at the turn of the millennium and seemed to disappear just as quickly. Although most Americans may not remember the Global Justice Movement, and those who participated in it may feel demoralized by the fact that capitalism still exists, Graeber points out that many of the movement’s ambitious goals were accomplished.

A decade ago, capitalism was pursuing a strategy to transform the entire world into a single marketplace. It claimed this “globalization” would benefit everyone because everyone would get to share in the spoils of growth. What it really wanted was to extract maximum profit from the cheap labor of the “Global South,” by moving industry and jobs out of high-wage areas like the US, while imposing privatization and debt on the poor countries of the world. This strategy was called “neoliberalism,” because it aimed to eliminate all barriers to trade, such as worker protections or environmental regulations. Multinational corporations would have a bonanza. Like previous rounds of enclosure, the damage these policies would have on poor communities and on the planet was disregarded.

Starting from directly affected communities in places like Mexico, Brazil, India, South Korea and Africa, an enormous network of farmers, workers and educators connected with progressives and anti-capitalists in North America and Europe. They didn’t have a single leader or organization, but they came together as a Global Justice Movement to coordinate efforts and stop the spread of neoliberalism. The movement became visible to the world when it manifested at the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle, where steelworkers, indigenous people, environmentalists, and students literally shut down the trade negotiations with creative civil disobedience.

Along with the WTO, the other main institutions responsible for pushing global neoliberalism were the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The GJM moved to confront all three. “Free trade” agreements such as the hemisphere-wide Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) were also challenged. Through creative protest and non-violent direct action, the movement called into question the dominant story around “free trade” and pointed towards a new world of global cooperation. And to their own surprise, they were incredibly successful.

According to David Graeber, Global South governments (like India and Brazil) were emboldened by the worldwide protest and refused to compromise on the North’s (European and American) unfair agricultural subsidies. As a result the WTO’s negotiations have totally broken down. The FTAA never came into existence at all. It was stopped in its tracks. The IMF and World Bank saw their reputations tarnished after their policies led to the meltdown of the Argentinean economy in 2002, and they are no longer welcome in some parts of the world. This is especially true in Latin America, where the political landscape has completely turned around in the last 10-15 years.

In the 1990s, most of the continent was still under the heel of military dictatorships and authoritarian states, but since then a wave of leftist governments has been swept into power by unprecedented social movements opposed to neoliberalism and U.S. imperialism. For example, in 2005 Bolivia elected their first-ever indigenous president, Evo Morales, who came directly out of the social movement that successfully stopped water privatization in Bolivia. Morales has become a spokesperson for many:

“If you want to save planet Earth, to save life and humanity, we have a duty to put an end to the capitalist system. If we do not put an end to the capitalist system, it’s impossible to imagine that there will be equality and justice on this planet Earth. This is why I believe that it is important to put an end to the exploitation of human beings, and to put an end to the pillage of natural resources; to put an end to destructive wars for raw materials and the market; to the plundering of energy, especially fossil fuels; excessive consumption of goods and the accumulation of waste.”

We can’t ignore the many difficulties facing Latin America or the Global South as a whole. The situation is still extremely dire, with over a billion people living on the brink of starvation and without access to clean water, and with the U.S. expanding military bases in places like Colombia. And of course leftist governments have their own problems and need to be held accountable just as rightist ones. Regardless, the Global Justice Movement demonstrated that by joining together across borders, opposing injustice and working towards a new world, victories can be achieved. Even victories as dramatic as discrediting the major institutions promoting neoliberal capitalism and the political transformation of an entire continent.

The GJM vanished almost as quickly as it appeared, but as David Graeber points out, this was partially because it met many of its goals so rapidly. With the widespread repudiation of the neoliberal doctrine, the Global Justice Movement provides an inspiring lesson that social movements can and do place limits on capitalism.

Social Limits and the Crisis

Social movements in many countries have been amplified by the economic crisis. Greece has seen massive rebellions in the past 2 years to stop the government from imposing austerity measures like cutting social services. In Iceland, a country not known for its political radicalism, huge protests in response to the country’s bankruptcy brought the government down and led to the election of the world’s first openly lesbian prime minister. In Nigeria there is an armed rebellion aimed at stopping oil companies from destroying the ecosystem and exporting their profits from the region. Off the coast of Somalia, pirates have plagued international shipping, and grabbed headlines last November when they hijacked an oil tanker headed for the US.

It’s clear that anger is building towards a capitalist system that is failing to meet people’s needs. But let’s dig deeper and ask: What role did social limits play in causing the economic crisis?

Perhaps the most instructive case is that of China and its rising labor movement. Supposedly a “communist” country, China has become a capitalist haven producing an absurd quantity of goods for the global market due to its very low (sweatshop) wages. The profit extracted from Chinese workers has done wonders to sustain capitalism over the last two decades. For this reason, the organization and rebellion of Chinese workers threatens not just the Chinese government, but the global capitalist system as a whole.

This explanation may require a bit of historical context. During the 1960s-early ‘70s, the capitalist order was challenged by a high tide of protest and rebellion – from Africa shaking off its colonial masters, to the end of Southern segregation in the US, to the struggle against the US genocide in Vietnam, to the new upsurges of the feminist, queer and ecology movements. This movement activity was pronounced a problem of an “excess of democracy” by the Trilateral Commission, a ruling class institution composed of bankers and corporate elites from the US, Europe and Japan. One of the strategies used to escape this “excess of democracy” (along with increased repression and co-optation of social movements), was to relocate industrial production out of places like the US, where wages were seen as too high, to places like China, where wages were minimal.

Obviously this cheap labor generated more profit in production. But it also created a problem in terms of consumption, because US wages began to decline as all those unionized industrial jobs left the country. As explained by Professor Richard Wolff in his video “Capitalism Hits the Fan,” in order to make up for this income difference and keep consumption growing, starting in the 1970s US workers were given access to an immense pool of credit, in the form of credit cards, home mortgages and financial schemes like 401(k)s. Cheap available credit allowed the US to consume more and more junk, even as wages declined. It kept its position as the world’s strip mall.

Meanwhile, China became the world’s factory, pumping out cheap products for the global market, especially for the United States. As Americans flocked to Wal-Marts for their low prices, the Chinese government was flooded with trillions of US dollars. So far, they have dutifully recycled those dollars back into US Treasury bonds, thus keeping the American economy afloat. If they didn’t invest in the US, their main trading partner would be crippled by its trade debt, which grows daily.

The US-China relationship became core to the global economy. Each behemoth kept the other afloat – one producing like crazy by exploiting its workers near exhaustion, the other consuming like crazy by sailing on a sea of cheap credit. The damage to the planet’s ecosystem was atrocious, but immense profits were made and by the 1990s the market was soaring and “the end of history” was proclaimed. It seemed all opposition to capitalism had been vanquished.

There are numerous weak points in this international division of labor. One that has not been fully appreciated is the severe turmoil in China due to the growing strength of a new militant labor movement. This movement aims to put an end to sweatshop conditions where many toil for 12+ hours a day in dangerous, polluted factories. Organizing outside the Communist Party’s official unions, Chinese workers have initiated a series of crippling strikes that repeatedly shut down factories, among other forms of rebellion. The government has been forced to accept workers’ demands for wage increases, so the Chinese average real wage has risen by 300% between 1990 and 2005 [PDF], with half of that increase between 2000 and 2005.

Workers in green uniforms stage a sit-in protest at the main entrance of the Mitsumi Electric Co factory in Tianjin on Thursday, July 1, 2010. China Daily

Although the Chinese economy continues to grow, increased wages mean a falling rate of profit for companies operating in China, whether American, Japanese, European or otherwise. Wage increases also mean increased consumption within China, and therefore less cheap exports. When Chinese workers can afford the cars and electronics they’re producing, Americans can’t demand the same low prices.

Can we draw a direct connection between Chinese wage gains and the drying up of cheap credit in the US market of 2007-8? I humbly submit this question to the reader, as I haven’t done enough research on the relationship between the two trends. But I’ll say this about the big picture: If Chinese workers continue to break free from totalitarian control and win dignity in their jobs, the loss of China as the sweatshop of the world imperils trade arrangements that have carried global capitalist growth for decades.

If we study any country in the world, we’ll find people resisting capitalism any way they can. In the fields & factories, slums & schools, homes and prisons, the desire to be free cannot be extinguished, only held back and diverted. As humanity gains awareness of its own power and begins to act for its own interest rather than the interest of profit, the system’s tenuous grip on the world can easily falter, and a new world appears just over the horizon.

With the ecological limits encroaching on one side, and the social limits looming on the other, economic growth is under increasing strain in between. It’s as if the system cannot breathe. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, it’s too busy putting out the fires of multiplying crises, which continue to spawn and grow. The policy makers, market gurus and technocratic apologists scramble to regain control, but they are disoriented in a new arena. Circumstances have changed. They cannot come to agreement on what to do, and instead quarrel amongst themselves over diverging interests. As social and ecological forces combine and put new stresses on the system, capitalism is smothered and chokes.

Considering the ecological limits and social limits to growth side-by-side, the only conclusion I can make is that the end of capitalism is not only a possibility, but an inevitability. Neither the planet nor the world’s population appear able to support this system much longer, and something’s got to give. It may be years or even a couple decades before we can look back and say for sure that a paradigm shift has occurred and that we are living in a different, non-capitalist era. But the End of Capitalism Theory dares us to question how long a system that lives on economic growth can continue to function in a world of such profound and permanent limits.

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Alex Knight is a proponent of the End of Capitalism Theory, which states that the global capitalist system is breaking down due to ecological and social limits to growth and that a paradigm shift toward a non-capitalist future is underway. He is working on a book titled “The End of Capitalism” and seeks a publisher. Since 2007 he has edited the website endofcapitalism.com. He has a degree in electrical engineering and a Master’s in political science, both from Lehigh University. He lives in Philadelphia, where he is a teacher and organizer. He can be reached at alex@endofcapitalism.com

Michael Carriere is an assistant professor at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, where he teaches courses on American history, public policy, political science, and urban design. He is currently working on a book, with David Schalliol, titled “The Death and (After) Life of Great American Cities: Twenty-First Century Urbanism and the Culture of Crisis.” He holds a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Chicago.

—–

Click the links below for more of the interview:

1. The current financial crisis is clearly a moment of peril for both individuals and the broader system of capitalism. But would it also make sense to see it as a moment of opportunity?
Part 1. Crisis and Opportunity

2. Capitalism has faced many moments of crisis over time. Is there something different about the present crisis? What makes the end of capitalism a possibility now?
Part 2A. Capitalism and Ecological Limits
Part 2B. Social Limits and the Crisis

3. Moving forward, how would you ideally envision a post-capitalist world? And if capitalism manages to survive (as it has in the past), is there still room for real change?
Part 3. Life After Capitalism

The following exchange between Michael Carriere and Alex Knight occurred via email, July 2010. Alex Knight was questioned about the End of Capitalism Theory, which states that the global capitalist system is breaking down due to ecological and social limits to growth and that a paradigm shift toward a non-capitalist future is underway.

This is the second part of a four-part interview. Scroll to the bottom for links to the other sections.

Part 2A. Capitalism and Ecological Limits

MC: Capitalism has faced many moments of crisis over time. Is there something different about the present crisis? What makes the end of capitalism a possibility now?

AK: This is such an important question, and it’s vital to think and talk about the crisis in this way, with a view toward history. It’s not immediately obvious why this crisis began and why, two years later, it’s not getting better. Making sense of this is challenging. Especially since knowledge of economics has become so enclosed within academic and professional channels where it’s off-limits to the majority of the population. Even progressive intellectuals, who aim to translate and explain the crisis to regular folks, too often fall into the trap of accepting elite explanations as the starting point and then injecting their politics around the edges. This is why there is such an abundance of essays and videos analyzing “credit default swaps”, “collateralized debt obligations,” etc., as if this crisis is about nothing more than greedy speculators overstepping their bounds.

On the contrary, the End of Capitalism Theory insists there are deeper explanations for why this crisis is so severe, widespread, and long-lasting. Here’s one explanation: The devastating quaking of the financial markets, and the lingering aftershocks we’re experiencing in layoffs and cut-backs, are manifestations of much larger tectonic shifts under the surface of the economy. This turmoil originates from deep instabilities within capitalism, the global economic system that dominates our planet. The dramatic crisis we are experiencing now is resulting from a massive underground collision between capitalism’s relentless need for growth on one side, and the world’s limited capacity to sustain that growth on the other.

These limits to growth, like the continental plates, are enormous, permanent qualities of the Earth – they cannot be ignored or simply moved out of the way. The limits to growth are both ecological, such as shortages of resources, and social, such as growing movements for change around the globe. As capitalism rams into these limiting forces, numerous crises (economic, energy, climate, food, water, political, etc.) erupt, and destruction sweeps through society. This collision between capitalism and its limits will continue until capitalism itself collapses and is replaced by other ways of living.

Tectonic Plates Colliding - Capitalism is Ramming into the Limits to Growth, Causing Massive Shocks on the Surface of the Economy

The End of Capitalism Theory argues that capitalism will not be able to overcome these limits to growth, and therefore it is only a matter of time before we are living in a non-capitalist world. A paradigm shift towards a new society is underway. There’s a chance this new future could be even worse, but I hold tremendous hope in the capacity of human beings to invent a better life for themselves when given the chance. Part of my hope springs from the understanding that capitalism has caused terrible havoc all over the world through the violence it perpetrates against humanity and Mother Earth. The end of capitalism need not be a disaster. It can be a triumph. Or, perhaps, a sigh of relief.

Defining the Crisis

Rather than spend our time learning the language of Wall St. and trying to understand the economic crisis from the perspective of the bankers and capitalists, I think we can get much further if we take our own point of reference and then investigate below the surface to try to find the true origins of the crisis. This is what I call a common sense radical approach. Start from where we are, who we are, and what we know, because you don’t need to be an academic to understand the economy – you just need common sense. Then try to get to the root of the issue (radical coming from the Latin word for “root”). What is really going on under the surface? What is the core of the problem? If we can’t come up with a common sense radical explanation of the crisis, we’ll always be stuck within someone else’s dogma. This could be Wall St. dogma, Marxist dogma, Christian dogma, etc. So what is this crisis really about?

I assert that the current crisis is dramatically and profoundly different from any crisis previously faced by the global capitalist system. I see one basic reason for this: the system can no longer grow. Capitalism cannot function without growth. Like a shark that must keep moving in order to breathe, a capitalist economy must keep growing in order to survive. Without the possibility, or probability, that investors will make a profit on their investments, they will not invest. No one invests if they expect to lose money or keep the same amount. If investors cease to invest, businesses cannot expand, jobs are lost, consumer spending declines, and loans stop coming, creating a cycle of bust. Crashing markets will continue to freefall until the government steps in with bailouts to artificially boost investment. But bailouts are only a temporary solution. If the markets cannot be “corrected” and get back on a growth trajectory, game over.

Financial analyst Nomi Prins has tallied the various loans, guarantees and giveaways that make up the Wall St. bailout to a total of $17 Trillion [PDF], a sum larger than the annual GDP of the United States. This is a staggeringly expensive life support system for the “too big to fail” banks. How much longer can the federal government essentially print dollars to keep the stock market afloat? The End of Capitalism Theory says, “not long.” In the long arch of history, we are at the tail end of the capitalist period. Whatever follows it, for better or worse, will need to be adapted to an economy that grows smaller, not larger.

Capitalism and Enclosure

To understand the end of capitalism, we need to know where the system started. For 500 years, capitalism has spread like a cancer across the planet. It first spawned in Western Europe on the backs of the peasants and small farmers who were displaced by the “enclosures.” The enclosures were the forced privatization of land, literally the enclosing or fencing off of land that was previously shared or held in common. The state acted as enforcer of this process, violently expelling poor communities from their homes and the “commons,” or traditionally public land. The land was taken away from the small farmers so it could be exploited for large-scale agriculture and animal herding.

These enclosures had the effect (intended or not) of creating two new classes of people: 1. a small opportunist class of private landowners and businessmen who evolved into today’s capitalists, and 2. a large landless class of workers who were forced to toil for a wage in the new urban factories, because they had nowhere else to go.

At the very same moment, the European states carried out the enslavement of millions of Africans and the genocide of the indigenous nations of North and South America. Suddenly two “new” continents could be exploited, with slave labor, bringing tremendous wealth to the rising capitalist elites in Europe. This brutal violence against people of color was instrumental in the spread of capitalism across the planet. It was accompanied by a terrifying assault on women in the form of the witch hunts, which saw hundreds of thousands of women tortured and burned alive, according to Silvia Federici’s provocative and necessary book Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body, and Primitive Accumulation.

The book documents how the Church and state used the witch hunts to persecute sexually rebellious women, such as those having sex out of wedlock, committing adultery, abortion or infanticide. They also targeted women who held respected professions in peasant communities, such as that of midwife, healer, or fortune teller. Federici sees this as a broad attack on women that created a new kind of patriarchal order. She explains that by the time the witch hunts came to an end in the 17th century, women in capitalist society had largely become enclosed within the prescribed roles of mother pumping out new workers, or unpaid houseworker. These are exactly the female roles that the new system of capitalism required of women, argues Federici, because women’s unpaid reproductive labor boosted capitalist profits just like the unpaid labor of the African slaves. Keeping women confined as housewives and mothers meant their labor was never valued, although this labor is necessary for the entire society to exist.

Women have pushed back against this paradigm and made dramatic gains in the last 50 years, especially in the Global North. But in the Global South the position of women has largely deteriorated as capitalism has penetrated.

A disturbing but necessary example is the Congo, where hundreds of thousands of women have been raped and mutilated in the past decade. This mass rape is a weapon in the ongoing war between various guerrilla and state factions over minerals like coltan. Coltan is used in many of our electronic devices such as laptops and cell phones, making it highly valuable. The factions that export these minerals to the global market make a lot of money, which they can use to purchase weapons. Attacking women’s bodies has been one way to assert control over territory, as the shame of rape too often leads to the ostracizing of the women, thus breaking apart peasant communities. Once the village is displaced, their land becomes available for mining.

Mujawimana was raped when she returned to her village to find her children after being forced to flee from fighting there. Photo ©2008 Stephen Matthews/World Vision

This appalling violence in the Congo is more than a throwback to the enclosures which first launched capitalism, for as Silvia Federici says, systemic violence “has accompanied every phase of capitalist globalization, including the present one, demonstrating that the continuous expulsion of farmers from the land, war and plunder on a world scale, and the degradation of women are necessary conditions for the existence of capitalism in all times” (pg. 13).

In other words, enclosure has been an ever-present feature of capitalism because the system cannot reproduce itself without constantly putting up walls to control and limit human possibility, as well as controlling the planet itself. To be blunt, people usually only submit to capitalism when they no longer have any option.

Federici’s work challenges many myths about capitalism, such as the conservative assertion that capitalism works best without state interference, as well as the vulgar Marxist assumption that capitalism was a progressive advance over pre-capitalist forms of life, on some linear march of history. On the contrary, Federici uses the example of the witch hunts to demonstrate that capitalism has always relied on state violence in order to attack not only women’s position in society, but all communal or non-capitalist forms of life. Although she makes it clear that not all pre-capitalist forms of life were idyllic or free of oppression, the ultimate lesson she draws is that capitalism is an enemy of life itself, and that its spread has been a dramatic setback for all of us, including the planet.

Limits to Growth

2010 is a very different moment than 1492, or 1929 for that matter. In earlier times, there remained entire continents, entire populations of people, and vast reserves of natural resources remaining to be exploited for the capitalist regime of profit. Now that globalization has worked its wonders and you can order the same McDonald’s hamburger virtually anywhere in the world, what growth markets remain untapped? The answer is, in my view, remarkably few. The limits to growth are being reached. The system needs growth now. It can’t find it. And the machine is straining to keep running on the promise that profit will come tomorrow. So it turns to speculative bubbles like the dot-coms and the housing market to create artificial growth and keep the party going, even for a little while. But it’s only a temporary strategy. Each time the bubble bursts, the hangover is worse. Reality is beginning to set in. Steady, long-term growth is elusive because capitalism is overstepping its limits. If you want a simple explanation for the collapse of the financial markets, it’s that.

Let’s explore this concept of the limits to growth. It can be divided into two categories: ecological limits and social limits.

Ecological limits are the restrictions placed on economic growth by the planet’s inability to sustain that growth indefinitely, either because of lack of resources or lack of capacity to withstand ecological damage. The list of ecological limits is long and awareness of them has been growing rapidly. Some big ones include the limits of oil, natural gas, coal, uranium, phosphorus, copper, fresh water, arable soil, fish, and more broadly, climate. Perhaps the most decisive limiting factor is oil, which I’ve called the “lifeblood of industrial capitalism” because it supplies 40% of the energy for the total economy, making it the system’s primary energy source. Oil’s critical contribution includes powering 95% of transportation. Oil is the fuel that moves the people and equipment that do virtually all of the work in the capitalist economy. There is no known substance on Earth that can replace it.

Peak Oil

Since the oil price shock of 2008, “peak oil” has become something of a household word in the United States, but I’ll just give a few facts to back up the validity of the concept. First, US oil production peaked in 1970. Oil was discovered in Pennsylvania in 1859, and the US quickly became the main exporter of petroleum in the world, like Saudi Arabia is today. After its oil supply peaked, the US became a chronic importer of oil and went into severe debt to pay for it. Today, contrary to the cries of “Drill, Baby Drill!”, there is no amount of drilling that could bring US oil production back to the level of 40 years ago. In fact, production is about half what it was then, and still declining.

A second essential fact is that global discovery of oil peaked in 1960 and for the last 50 years less and less oil has been found across the planet. Demand keeps growing, but supply has not been, despite the efforts of every oil company to discover more “black gold.” With all the cheap, easy oil pretty much gone, they’re left to spend millions to drill in remote locations, like the Gulf of Mexico, which is now a disaster area. So we know peak oil is a real phenomenon because it happened to the US. And we know there’s not enough oil being found anywhere in the world to sustain growing demand. The only question is when the global peak will be reached.

Global oil production has hit a wall, despite skyrocketing prices. Kenneth Deffeyes

There are a whole slew of geologists, ecologists and engineers dedicated to answering that question, and I can’t add much to their debate. But I do want to highlight this remarkable graph created by Princeton geologist Kenneth Deffeyes, author of the books Hubbert’s Peak and Beyond Oil. He graphs global production of oil against the price of a barrel (equal to 42 gallons). We can see that as global production hits about 27 billion barrels, the price spikes into the heavens. We would expect, according to Economics 101, that as the price increases, supply would also increase. It’s in the interest of producers to pump more oil from the ground, and develop more expensive oil wells, in order to take advantage of the high prices. Instead, we can see that no matter how expensive oil has gotten, production has hit a wall. What Deffeyes argues, and I agree with his analysis, is that the peak has already been hit. No matter how wildly the price of oil fluctuates, growth in production is no longer possible.

In Beyond Oil, Deffeyes also makes the case that there is nothing that can do for the capitalist economy what cheap and plentiful oil has done. Solar and wind are great technologies, and they certainly have a role to play in transitioning to a democratic and sustainable future, but not being liquid fuels, they’re useless for powering the Army’s tanks and planes in Afghanistan. Even hydrogen fuel cells or electric engines would solve little, because there would still need to be a massive influx of energy to make up for the 40% provided by petroleum. And that’s without factoring in necessary growth.

Efficiency is another crucial piece to look at. Efficiency in energy can be measured in Energy Returned on Energy Invested (ERoEI). The ERoEI of oil is something like 10-to-1, meaning for every calorie or joule of energy expended in getting oil out of the ground and making it a usable fuel, 10 times that much energy is made available by it. If the ERoEI for a particular fuel was 1-to-1, it would be useless. It would take just as much energy to extract the fuel as they could get out of it. This is the trouble with “non-conventional” fuels such as the tar sands, corn ethanol, or coal liquefaction. All are tremendously destructive to the planet, but none comes anywhere near oil in terms of efficiency, and corn ethanol may actually waste more energy than it produces. The bottom line is that no energy source is as abundant, cheap, versatile, easy-to-transport, and efficient as oil.

Oil is also not the only energy source hitting its peak. Natural gas appears to be in the same position, and coal and uranium aren’t far behind. All are being exploited at a rate much higher than can be sustained. This is why Richard Heinberg has written a book called Peak Everything, and argues that from ecological limits alone, growth is no longer possible. Capitalism needs abundant and growing sources of energy to move its resources, products and labor around the world, to organize them into the production process, and to power the assembly lines. We are now entering a period in which for the first time in 500 years, less energy will be available, the energy that exists will be more expensive, and therefore profits will be severely constrained. Without energy, the shark stops swimming and dies.

Did peak oil trigger the economic crisis? It’s difficult to know for sure. One thing is certain, in 2007-8 the price of oil skyrocketed to a record high of almost $150/barrel, while production stayed flat. And as former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan noted in 2002, “All economic downturns in the United States since 1973… have been preceded by sharp increases in the price of oil.”

I will explore social limits, the other piece of the puzzle, when I finish responding to your great question in the next part of the interview.

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Alex Knight is a proponent of the End of Capitalism Theory, which states that the global capitalist system is breaking down due to ecological and social limits to growth and that a paradigm shift toward a non-capitalist future is underway. He is working on a book titled “The End of Capitalism” and seeks a publisher. Since 2007 he has edited the website endofcapitalism.com. He has a degree in Electrical Engineering and a Master’s in Political Science, both from Lehigh University. He lives in Philadelphia, where he is a teacher and organizer. He can be reached at alex@endofcapitalism.com

Michael Carriere is an assistant professor at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, where he teaches courses on American history, public policy, political science, and urban design. He is currently working on a book, with David Schalliol, titled “The Death and (After) Life of Great American Cities: Twenty-First Century Urbanism and the Culture of Crisis.” He holds a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Chicago.

—–

Click the links below for more of the interview:

1. The current financial crisis is clearly a moment of peril for both individuals and the broader system of capitalism. But would it also make sense to see it as a moment of opportunity?
Part 1. Crisis and Opportunity

2. Capitalism has faced many moments of crisis over time. Is there something different about the present crisis? What makes the end of capitalism a possibility now?
Part 2A. Capitalism and Ecological Limits
Part 2B. Social Limits and the Crisis

3. Moving forward, how would you ideally envision a post-capitalist world? And if capitalism manages to survive (as it has in the past), is there still room for real change?
Part 3. Life After Capitalism

The following exchange between Michael Carriere and Alex Knight occurred via email, July 2010. Alex Knight was questioned about the End of Capitalism Theory, which states that the global capitalist system is breaking down due to ecological and social limits to growth and that a paradigm shift toward a non-capitalist future is underway.

The interview will be available in four parts. Scroll to the bottom to read all of Prof. Carriere’s questions.

Part 1. Crisis and Opportunity

MC: The current financial crisis is clearly a moment of peril for both individuals and the broader system of capitalism. But would it also make sense to see it as a moment of opportunity?

AK: Absolutely. I see opportunity springing from every crack in the structure of capitalism. For all those who wish to see a different world, this moment is dripping with opportunity because the old order is crumbling before our eyes.

Shock and Awe on the New York Stock Exchange

The crisis extends far beyond the broken financial system. Millions of people are losing their jobs, homes, and savings as the burden of the crisis gets shifted onto the poor and working class. Public faith in the system, both the government and the capitalist economy, has been shattered and is at an all-time low. And it’s not just the economic crisis. The bank bailouts, the endless wars in the Mid East, the BP spill and the meltdown of the climate, and about a dozen other crises have shaken us deeply. It’s become common sense that the system is broken and a major change is needed. Barack Obama was elected in the US precisely by promising this change. Now that he is failing to deliver, more and more people are questioning whether the system can provide any solutions, or whether it’s actually the source of the problem.

Shattered faith is the dominant sentiment today. You can see it in people’s faces – the disappointment, grief, worry, and anger. To me, this loss of faith presents an enormous opening for putting forth a new, non-capitalist way of life. People are ready to hear radical solutions now, like they haven’t been since the Great Depression.

Historic Crossroads

If we go back to 1929, we’ll see some interesting parallels to our current moment. When that depression started, millions lost their livelihoods to pay for the bankers’ crisis. Faith in capitalism sunk to rock bottom. The public flocked to two major ideologies that offered a way out: socialism and fascism.

Socialism presented a solution to the crisis by saying, roughly: “Capitalism is flawed because it divides us into rich and poor, and the rich always take advantage of the poor. We need to organize the poor and workers into unions and political parties so we can take power for the benefit of all.”

Socialism attracted millions of followers, even in the United States. The labor movement was enormous and kept gaining ground through sit-down strikes and other forms of direct action. The Communist Party sent thousands of organizers into the new CIO, at the time a more radical union than the AFL. Socialist viewpoints even started getting through to the mass media and government. Huey Long was elected Senator from Louisiana by promising to “Share Our Wealth,” to radically redistribute the wealth of the country to abolish poverty and unemployment. (He was assassinated.) Socialism challenged President Roosevelt from the left, pushing him to create the social safety net of the New Deal.

On the other side, fascism also emerged as a serious force and attracted a mass following by putting forth something like the following: “The government has sold us out. We are a great nation, but we have been disgraced by liberal elites who are pillaging our economy for the benefit of foreign enemies, dangerous socialists, and undesirable elements (like Jews). We need to restore our national honor and fulfill our God-given mission.”

When people hear the word fascism, they usually think of Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, where successful fascist movements seized state power and implemented totalitarian control of society. Yet fascism was an international phenomenon during the Depression, and the United States was not immune to its reach. General Smedley Butler, the most decorated Marine in US history, testified before the Senate that wealthy industrialists had approached him as part of a “Business Plot” and tried to convince him to march an army of 500,000 veterans on Washington, DC to install a fascist dictatorship.

Today we are approaching a similar crossroads. When I hear the story of the Business Plot I think about the Tea Party, which has sprung from a base of white supremacist anger, facilitated by right-wing elements of the corporate structure like Fox News. This is an extremely dangerous phenomenon. The “teabaggers” have moved from questioning Obama’s citizenship, to now trying to reverse the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, such as the ability of everyone, regardless of color, to enjoy public accommodations like restaurants.

I think it’s fair to name the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, the Christian Right, etc. parts of a potential neo-fascist movement in the United States. Their words and actions too often encourage attacks on people of color, immigrants, Muslims, LGBT folks, and anyone they don’t see as legitimate members of US society. Ultimately, many in this movement are pushing for a different social system taking power in the United States: one that is more authoritarian, less compassionate, more exploitive of the environment, more militaristic, and based on a mythical return to national glory. This is not a throwback to Nazi Germany. It’s a new kind of fascism, a new American fascism. And it’s a serious threat.

Tea Party racism in Denver, April 15, 2009

On the other hand, this crisis is also an opportunity for all of us who see capitalism as a destructive force and believe the message of the recent U.S. Social Forum that “Another World is Possible. Another US is Necessary.”  “Socialism” in the post-McCarthy/Cold War era of the United States is a dead word, because it carries a lot of baggage from the Soviet Union. Rightly so, the USSR was a terrible dictatorship that is hardly an example to follow. The question is, how do those of us who are progressive and anti-capitalist articulate our ideas to resonate with a mass audience in this moment?

Common Values

I argue that we need to speak to the population in a language of our common values: democracy, freedom, justice, and sustainability.

Adopting this mainstream language is not an attempt to be deceptive. These words have captured people’s hearts for a real reason: they offer a window to the world we want to see. It is the government, corporations, and media who deceive us by evoking these words to justify their atrocities, as in “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” (Over a million dead, and the Iraqi people are no closer to any kind of “freedom” I would want.) Rather than surrendering these noble ideals to the right wing, where they become meaningless dogma, I see immense potential to take language back and use it with honesty, as if words actually mean something.

So what if progressives reclaim these common values and make them guideposts on the way to a better society? For example, how can we talk about freedom if there is no self-determination, either in Iraq or here in the US? Let’s be honest, what freedom do we really have? The freedom to choose Coke or Pepsi, or similarly, to vote Democrat or Republican?

What about the freedom to determine our own destinies outside the constraints of corporations and government? What freedom is more basic than freedom from poverty and suffering? How can anyone speak of freedom if they have no income and no opportunity to escape unemployment? Or if they have nowhere to live because their home was foreclosed? What if their community is torn apart because so many youth are filling the prisons on nonviolent drug offenses? Is a prisoner free? Is their mother, spouse, or loved ones free? What does freedom mean if you’re queer or trans, and you face emotional and physical violence every time you express who you are and live your own life? How can we claim to be a free society if immigrants live in fear of being locked up by ICE and deported? What freedom do you have if your neighbor has none?

I think real freedom requires self-determination, the ability of an individual or community to choose their own destinies. We can’t pretend we have freedom in this country until “we, the people” have a say in our neighborhoods, towns and cities, in our workplaces, our schools, and our government. This requires that the public actively participate in managing their own affairs, for example through neighborhood councils to have a say in the neighborhood, through labor unions to have a say at work, student unions to have a say at school, and other democratic organizations that give people the power to defend their rights. There is a dire need to hold our corrupt representatives in Washington accountable to popular will. But to be truly free, might we also need to structure government in a new way, so it can be run by the people themselves? Or even to abolish the government, if it can’t do what the people say?

So I believe when we get to the meaningful core of the word “freedom,” it poses a radical challenge to capitalist society. We can say similar things about “democracy,” “justice,” and “sustainability,” and I would add, “love.” I’ll talk more about this in response to your third question. These values reinforce each other, and if we honor them for their true depth of meaning, they can be effective tools for change.

The Power of Imagination

This might sound good, but do progressives have the power to achieve these kinds of changes? It may sound farfetched. The media and government, especially in the U.S., have done an excellent job convincing us that we can never win. People with our views are routinely excluded from official conversation on the news or in elections. When we try to protest and take our voices to the street, they corral us within “free speech zones” so we look crazy and feel powerless. If a progressive voice does get through to the public somehow, it’s dismissed as “unrealistic.” We’re pressured to just vote for the lesser of two evils and be silent. The result of this silencing is that we have no idea how many people share our values and aspirations, because we’re often too intimidated to proclaim our views proudly. Worse, to some degree we’ve internalized this silencing so that we hesitate even to imagine our progressive hopes and dreams, lest they accidentally slip past our lips into polite conversation.

The stifling of progressive views is part of a larger culture of silence that helps the system maintain control. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman call it Manufacturing Consent, the use of media and propaganda to create a passive, obedient population. The message we receive constantly from media is that we are spectators, not participants. Rather than take a stand on an issue and risk being wrong or foolish, why not leave it to the experts? Besides, we’re too busy being consumers, workers and students to worry about politics. Better to not make waves. We might as well amuse ourselves with television, celebrity gossip, and Facebook, and try not to get involved. From all the propaganda we consume over the course of our lives, we come to develop the core belief that we are powerless to affect change. This myth of powerlessness is one of the biggest lies in the history of the world, and we need to dismantle it.

What the U.S. Social Forum proves is that there is a large, broad-based movement for change here in the United States, the very core of the global capitalist machine. There are millions of average, everyday people all across the nation who are working and pushing in a progressive direction in large and small ways, whether on immigrants’ rights, women’s rights, housing, health care, education, prison justice, queer and trans justice, environmental justice, peace in the Middle East, etc. The system doesn’t want you to know about this, which is why they don’t show it on television. Our movements are alive and well. They are strong. They are inspiring. And in many places they are winning.

Coalition to Save the Libraries confronts the Philadelphia City Council and its Budget Cuts, May 21, 2009

I’ll just share a local example from here in Philadelphia. In late 2008, Mayor Nutter announced he would close 11 libraries due to budget constraints. Seemingly out of nowhere – but actually out of strong communities throughout the city – a movement emerged to oppose and prevent this decision, facilitated by the multiracial, multigenerational Coalition to Save the Libraries. The coalition organized creative actions at library branches slated for closure and at City Hall. People from across the city came together to imagine what kind of library system would best serve the public. Pressure kept mounting until the Mayor had to abandon his closures. All the libraries remain open to this day, despite continuing budget cuts and layoffs.  Kristin Campbell wrote a fuller description of how grassroots organizing saved the libraries.

We can look at this victory and downplay it as limited because it only restored a public service that shouldn’t have been attacked anyway. But like all grassroots organizing it points towards a better future, for the simple reason that people became empowered by working together. Capitalism is a system of disempowerment. It cannot tolerate our active participation in public affairs. As soon as we begin to break our silence and speak out against the injustices we are being subjected to, the system begins to quake and it searches for ways to pacify and silence us again. If we remain alert, active, and vocal, we can break the culture of complacency and bring more and more people into the awareness of their own power. So I think that’s the opportunity we have in this crisis.

I want to excite people’s imaginations of what a better world might look like. There is no better time to do it. If my theory is right, then capitalism, the system that has dominated the world for the past 500 years, is coming to an end. Recognizing this opens up a world of possibility for the future. Maybe that’s scary, because who knows what will happen? We might be driven into a neo-fascist nightmare. Things might keep getting worse, in which case maybe we should just find reasons to enjoy our current way of life while it lasts. I can see some of my friends saying that. But that leaves out two crucial truths that I want to highlight.

The first truth is that capitalism is a terribly abusive and destructive system, which we would be better off without. The second truth is that if we organize and push for a better world, we might win. So the time for complacency is over, and the time for taking bolder steps toward our dreams is here.

—–

Alex Knight is a proponent of the End of Capitalism Theory, which states that the global capitalist system is breaking down due to ecological and social limits to growth and that a paradigm shift toward a non-capitalist future is underway. He is working on a book titled “The End of Capitalism” and seeks a publisher. Since 2007 he has edited the website endofcapitalism.com. He has a degree in electrical engineering and a Master’s in political science, both from Lehigh University. He lives in Philadelphia, where he is a teacher and organizer. He can be reached at alex@endofcapitalism.com

Michael Carriere is an assistant professor at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, where he teaches courses on American history, public policy, political science, and urban design. He is currently working on a book, with David Schalliol, titled “The Death and (After) Life of Great American Cities: Twenty-First Century Urbanism and the Culture of Crisis.” He holds a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Chicago.

—–

Click the links below for more of the interview:

1. The current financial crisis is clearly a moment of peril for both individuals and the broader system of capitalism. But would it also make sense to see it as a moment of opportunity?
Part 1. Crisis and Opportunity

2. Capitalism has faced many moments of crisis over time. Is there something different about the present crisis? What makes the end of capitalism a possibility now?
Part 2A. Capitalism and Ecological Limits
Part 2B. Social Limits and the Crisis

3. Moving forward, how would you ideally envision a post-capitalist world? And if capitalism manages to survive (as it has in the past), is there still room for real change?
Part 3. Life After Capitalism