If you are a liberal and are siding with extremely regressive taxation (the Obamacare “fines”, $800/lb taxes on cannabis, high taxes on cigarettes and alcohol, consumption taxes (which they pretentiously call “sin taxes”) generally) and state coercion to defend private corporations and control people’s self-determination of their own bodies then you are standing on the wrong side of the line.

We should fight to impose steep taxes on the rich and seize the assets of the health insurance and drug companies. That money can be used build a comprehensive, public, single-payer healthcare system (including things like talk therapy, abortion, contraception, medical marijuana, medicinal psychedelics, sex/gender reassignment surgery & medicine, needle exchange, healthcare for soldiers, etc etc – healthcare for each and every community and medical need). We should force the government to legalise drugs and release all drug prisoners. Individuals with the advice and guidance of doctors can decide what to do with their bodies just fine.

I cannot recall how many times during discussions I’ve heard the same refrain about unity and divisiveness. It seems that whenever I chart my way into the territory of critically examining sections of the Left I am ultimately faced with accusations of being sectarian. I’m urged to focus on unity and solidarity and often treated as naive for even attempting to voice an opinion about this tactic, that strategy, or some other theory. Interestingly enough – these same groups and individuals feel that they have full authority to demean, deliberately misinterpret and criticize my positions. This is nothing new and nothing unique to radical politics, either. I also don’t want to give you the wrong impression. These people are allies. They are not enemies. We organize together, we support one another, we work together. However, this does not mean that this issue is merely personal. It has ramifications for our organizing and also for the broader Left.

I am not opposed to unity. Not in the slightest. I am opposed to pie-in-the-sky ideas informing our opinions about how we conduct ourselves, though. The idea that we can merely believe in unity and subsequently act upon it is silly. It is a dream. There are many different opinions on the Left, and while we are all united by basic core beliefs, these opinions are not simply thoughts that can be pushed aside or let alone for a different time. Many of these differing opinions involve very important aspects of our organizing efforts. Some of the greatest differences involve process – and I’m not sure if you’ve figured it out yet or not, but without a collectively agreed upon process we’re not likely going to get very far. So if we attempt to organize and have a terrible time deciding on process (especially since, in most cases, you need a process to determine the process) it’s something that needs to be seriously addressed. We can not simply ignore it and it is not divisive to address the issue.

I’ve written about the damning consequences of firmly established liberalism in the United States before, and it bears repeating here. We are infected by a liberal understanding of terms that places more stress upon the appearance of things than on their substance. Preaching unity and decrying critical analysis and internal debate on the Left has the same characteristics as those silly “coexist” bumper stickers. Brilliant concept, but there tends to be a long, arduous process between violent factionalism and beautiful harmony. The fact is that there are concrete differences between liberals, anarchists and socialists that have real world implications for how we interact, just as there are concrete differences between Muslims, Christians and Jews. Saying and thinking something isn’t the same as making it a reality.

If we really want to be united, the first step is to get over this concept that everything is tidy, easy and pleasant. Discussions need to be had, ideas need to be challenged and unfortunately (while we all wish otherwise) some feelings are going to get hurt. We’ve slowly been challenging the concept of color blindness – the idea that if we just pretend that racism doesn’t exist, it will go away. The concept ultimately stems from (mostly) white people trying to avoid having to have their feelings hurt by listening to some real talk about race in society. The same is true about multi-faith sloganeering. “Be the change…” is nice, but it’s not a revolution and part of “be[ing] the change” is doing the uncomfortable work of holding people accountable.

If we want to have real unity, we have to be unified and that unity is going to come dialectically, not linguistically. Opposing ideas need to be smashed against one another – bad ideas should be crushed with logic (not bullying) and good ideas should be accepted until further notice. It is not dogmatic to defend a position against another position and it is not dogmatic to criticize a bad position on its merits (or lack thereof). What’s dogmatic is clinging to a set of beliefs, refusing to defend them logically and accusing anyone who criticizes those beliefs of being sectarian. Most of the time, though, I’ve encountered people who don’t even hold the beliefs in question. They often confuse legitimate debate and discussion with personal, meaningless quibbling – forgetting (or perhaps being completely ignorant of) the fact that these beliefs are not just thoughts in our heads, but are the seeds of our actions.

“Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?”

“The Soweto Uprising: South Africa’s Black Townships Have Finally Exploded“ by Alex Callinicos, International Socialism (1st series), No.90, July/August 1976, pp.4-7.

“The function of the apartheid system, consolidated by the Nationalist Party, which has been in power since 1948, is simple. The factories, mines, farms, offices and homes of white South Africans require a huge pool of cheap black labour in order to provide the settlers with their privileges and the multinationals operating in the country with their profits. Yet a permanent urban black working class would be an explosive threat to the system. So the apartheid system serves to prevent such a working class from forming. In theory, all blacks are temporary residents in the cities, which are reserved for the whites. They are required under the pass laws always to carry documents certifying their right to be in the city. Should a black lose his job he can be deported back to the rural area to which he ‘belongs’ even if he has lived all his life in the city.

“Hand in hand with the immigrant labour system goes the denial to all blacks of trade union rights. Strikes by black workers are illegal, and their unions go Unrecognised by the employer or the state. The system of job reservation guarantees that skilled jobs will go to whites alone. The white trade unions, enjoying huge wage differentials out of all proportion to the work they do (mainly supervising the blacks who actually do the work), are less a section of the working class than a parasitic excrescence dependent on the white capitalists for their privileges.

“The result can be seen in Soweto. 86 per cent of homes in Soweto have no electricity; 93 per cent no shower or bath; 97 per cent no hot water. 54 per cent of the township’s one million residents are unemployed. The average black family income in South Africa is 73 rand; yet the poverty datum level – the minimum income compatible with bare subsistence – is 120 rand a month.”

An elderly Afghan man sits next to the covered body of a person who was murdered during a rampage by a U.S. soldier and member of U.S. special operations forces (AP Photo/Allauddin Khan)

16 Afghan civilians were murdered by a U.S. soldier who went on a rampage in the Afghan village of Alkozai, including 9 children, 4 women, and 3 men. At least 5 others were wounded.

“The shooting early Sunday took place in Panjwayi district outside Kandahar city, in a village called Alkozai. U.S. military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was believed that the assailant had suffered a mental breakdown.”

In the past several hours the L.A. Times has removed the word “rampage” from the headline. It now reads: “U.S. serviceman kills 16 in Afghan village shooting, officials say”.

“Anti-U.S. sentiment flared into deadly riots after the Koran-burning at Bagram airfield came to light. American officials have said the action was a mistake and offered profuse apologies, but some Afghans, including lawmakers and senior clerics, brushed aside the apologies and called for harsh punishment of those involved.”

“During more than a week of nationwide protests over the burning of the holy books that left at least 30 people dead, six U.S. service members were shot and killed by Afghan soldiers or, in the case of two of them, a worker at Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry. Two of the American troops who were killed were deployed in Kandahar province.”

“what did the credit unions do with their very modest windfall? They actually reduced their consumer lending (things like credit cards and auto loans). They increased their mortgage lending, but they increased their purchases of federal agency (e.g. Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae) and Treasury bonds considerably more. They also increased their short-term lending to commercial banks via the federal funds market—in fact, more than a quarter of their increase went there. As I’ve said before, they already have more money than they know what to do with. Put your money in a credit union and it’s more likely than not to end up in very orthodox pursuits.”

“Stop #stopkony” by Richard Seymour, Lenin’s Tomb, 11 March 2012 (U.K. Timezone).

“I will not rehearse my own arguments. Those who haven’t yet read [The] Liberal Defence [of Murder] now have the opportunity to go and consult the record from five hundred years of liberal imperialism. Nor will I take it on myself to explain the history and social complexities of Uganda’s insurgency. It would be superfluous in the context, since people are not even being mobilised on the basis of misinformation – this is ideologically very weak – but rather are being invited to share a sentiment which taps their natural solipsism (as well as, at a vulgar level, their desire to help people, to be altruistic). All that is necessary is to alert people to the fact that they are being manipulated by slime balls into supporting scumbags”

Bill Clinton’s “Welfare Reform”: “the number of US households living on less than $2 per person per day—a standard used by the World Bank to measure poverty in developing nations—rose by 130 percent between 1996 and 2011, from 636,000 to 1.46 million. The number of children living in these extreme conditions also doubled, from 1.4 million to 2.8 million.”

via Critical Reading

Microfinance: myths and reality by Danielle Sabai, International Viewpoint - March 2012 (IV446)

“Recent events have thrown another light on microfinance and its effects on poverty. In autumn 2010, a wave of suicides took place in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh which has the highest rate of microfinance institutions in India. More than thirty people who had had recourse to microcredit killed themselves because they could no longer meet the repayments. A first wave of 200 suicides had already taken place in Andhra Pradesh in 2006 for the same reasons.”

Unarmed Black Teen Gunned Down By Neighborhood Watch Leader After Being Deemed Suspicious by Danny Gold

“George Zimmerman, a 26-year-old member of the local neighborhood watch, saw Martin and called police to report a suspicious man in the community. He tailed Martin in his car. He had a loaded pistol on him. The police told Zimmerman they would handle it.

“For some reason, Zimmerman didn’t obey. Minutes later, a number of local residents called police to report a fight. A gunshot was heard. Martin died 70 yards from the house he was staying in. Zimmerman was arrested and then released. He was carrying the pistol legally and has claimed that he was acting in self-defense.

“Said Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee Jr. in an interview with the Huffington Post, “For some reason he (Zimmerman) felt that Trayvon, the way that he was walking or appeared seemed suspicious to him.”"

At least eleven Palestinians killed, four critically injured, as the terrorist israeli state bombs gaza tonight

via Socialist Workers Party (Ireland)

Rosebell Kagumire, a Ugandan blogger, responds to #kony2012 phenomenon

March 8, 2012

GROWING UP in the Hudson Valley under the reign of conservative George W. Bush, Green Party Mayor Jason West stood out as someone who seemed willing to stand up for principle. He violated New York State law when, in his capacity as mayor of New Paltz, N.Y., he married lesbian and gay couples, becoming part of a nationwide debate on marriage equality that continues to this day. In a conservative environment like upstate New York, this was very significant, especially for LGBT youth who suffer from depression and high suicide rates.

When Occupy Wall Street led to a Occupy movement that spread across the country this fall, an encampment was set up in New Paltz, gaining steam from the already strong Occupy Poughkeepsie camp on the other side of the Hudson River.

On December 15, 2011, in response to the birth of Occupy New Paltz, Mayor West wrote: “The [New Paltz Village] Board is…unanimous in our opinion that, given the clear First Amendment protections covering the occupation, we do not have the authority to remove the encampment. By any measure, Occupy New Paltz has the community’s blessing.”

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg took a similar position during the first month of Occupy Wall Street, when on October 10, 2011, he was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying he’d allow Occupy Wall Street to stay indefinitely: “The bottom line is–people want to express themselves. And as long as they obey the laws, we’ll allow them to.”

West reversed his position last month when he capitulated to calls for “law and order” and evicted Occupy New Paltz, having several of its members arrested. In doing so, he put himself in step with Democratic Party mayors across the country–as well as billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg–whose ruling class offensive shut down most Occupy encampments around the country.

Compared with his remarks last December, West’s comments in February showed a marked change in tune: “[T]hey are no different than a little league [team] or Girl Scouts…[T]here are liability concerns,” he told the New Paltz Oracle.

West called Occupy New Paltz a group of “inexperienced” protesters who didn’t know how to organize or choose targets. His comments mirrored those of representatives of the 1 percent across the country whose claims that Occupy is a “health hazard,” a “liability,” and something to be “feared” could not be further from the truth.

Anyone in touch with the current state of our economy and the ruling class’s program of austerity and repression knows that it is the rich who are the real threat to health and safety: they are the ones cutting our wages, closing our schools and health clinics, promising to gut Social Security and Medicare, and waging wars all around the world.

Asked about West’s reversal, Occupy New Paltz member James T. commented, “I don’t understand how it’s a First Amendment right one day and is illegal only two months later. How does that work?”

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JASON WEST’S actions should not be sugarcoated. What if a member of Occupy New Paltz, unbeknownst to West, was on parole or probation? What if a member was an undocumented immigrant? What if the police went further in their actions than West wanted or expected (as is evidenced by the brutality exhibited during evictions across the country, as well as on a daily basis in communities of color)? In any of these instances, the eviction would have quickly led to events well beyond West’s control.

It is true that Occupy is inexperienced. It is a new movement! Anyone who supports Occupy realizes this, and sees the growing pains it is experiencing as fundamental to its eventual success. People learn through struggle, through practice, through making their own mistakes. That is how our movement will learn how to grow, how to articulate our concerns, and, eventually, how to win.

Occupy can do without police repression, be it backed by Republicans, Democrats, or even local Green party politicians. But repression does teach us an important lesson about the role of government under capitalism.

Mayor West commented to the Oracle, saying that it is not the “Board’s job to hold [Occupy's] hand.” This is true. The role of the capitalist state, even its local arms, even governments headed by self-identified progressives, is to: maintain “law and order” and “business as usual”; repress those who resist these atrocities; condemn any resistance as “crazy,” “a hazard,” “a liability,” “un-American,” “inexperienced,” etc.; and, protect the interests of our enemy: the 1 percent, the capitalist class.

What causes progressive politicians to take actions so contrary to their stated principles? Occupiers dealing with local politicians everywhere should ask themselves this question.

No matter how progressive you claim to be, the pressures of participating in the capitalist state are great, especially if you are not attached to a mass workers’ movement. You have pressures on your position from people of various class backgrounds, especially those antagonistic to the interests of the 99 percent (pressures from landlords, owners, bankers, and so on). The structures of government force you to carry out policies that violate your principles and, over time, you begin to apologize for those policies.

That is why we must understand change as coming from below, from the people themselves, and not from politicians from on high.

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OCCUPY HAS a basic right to set up camp in public space and express our grievances. It does not need permits. It does not need “insurance policies” (certainly not at a recurring price tag of $600). Our predecessors fought and died for the cause of progressive social change and the right to utilize our basic rights.

The former slave and radical abolitionist Frederick Douglass had words for those who favor “law and order” over struggle. In 1857, Douglass wrote:

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

What Occupy needs is to be given the space to learn and grow on its own. The transformation that has occurred in Occupy groups across the country–from a focus mostly on encampments to work around concrete issues facing working people like foreclosures, deportations, police brutality, women’s rights, and the like–proves that learning through struggle does work.

Occupy should make it known that those who side with the police and the calls for “law and order” of the bosses are not on our side and not welcome in our movement. There is no place in Occupy for those who will turn our comrades over to the police. To allow such actions go unchallenged would be to open up our movement to further repression and infiltration.

Moreover, as a registered member of the Green Party, I urge Greens everywhere to review West’s actions and formulate an appropriate response. Either we stand with Occupy or we remain silent at a critical turning point in history. As the late historian and socialist activist Howard Zinn pointedly noted, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” We should heed his advice.

Contact Mayor West to express your opinions of his attack on Occupy New Paltz by calling 845-255-1413 or e-mailing mayor@villageofnewpaltz.org.

‘Liberating theory’ or ‘complementary holism’, claims a “commit[ment] to understanding and paying serious attention to race, class, gender, sex, sexuality, age, ability, and authority without elevating any but instead recognizing the intrinsic importance of each, and their entwinement, and understanding that we must confront the totality of human oppression”. This quote comes from a statement I wrote for the now defunct ‘new Students for a Democratic Society’ (SDS) for one of its conventions (“A Statement on Totalist Politics”). When I left SDS I helped to found a small socialist cadre group – the Organization for a Free Society, or OFS – with several like-minded individuals, a good portion of which I was a member of SDS with. To this day OFS maintains a statement of principles close in essence (and in wording) to the statement I submitted for conventional approval in SDS. It has two other founding documents which elaborate on these principles.

The statement was written in response to a perceived inadequacy in Marxist thought. In reality – a mix of distain for Stalinism (who supported various tyrants like Saddam Hussein), and a misunderstanding and ignorance of what genuine Marxism is and what it claims.

The first motivation – distaste for Stalinism and its adherents is simple enough. It manifested itself in concepts like freedom, democracy, and sensitivity to authority. All of which are important things that I still agree with today.

The statement had a clear source, a book called Liberating Theory, written by Michael Albert, Lydia Sargent, Robin Hahnel, Leslie Cagan, Noam Chomsky, Mel King, and Holly Sklar. Lydia and Michael have been close personal friends and great comrades for several years.

After my first interactions with the book, and other books by the same authors, I liked with the general framework, agreed with it, and sought to integrate it into my practice. But as time went on, I found the framework incapable of explaining a lot important things that I thought vitally needed explaining. Particularly it didn’t, despite its claim to the contrary, highlight a lot of important dynamics that needed highlighting, and it lead people in OFS – and people who adhered to ‘complementary holism’ outside of OFS – to highly divergent conclusions. This frustrated me.

Liberating Theory proposed that to best understand oppression and exploitation, we should abstract from society ‘different spheres of social life’ to try to find their underlying features. So, for example, there is capitalism, which is ‘economics’, sexism, which is ‘kinship’, and so on, and they should be considered separately so to understand their separate processes, which should then be brought back together conceptually into a ‘totality’ that is ‘interconnected’ and ‘entwined’ (how it does this – and why I think it fails in its attempt – I will attempt to clarify in future articles)

I did not find a problem with this method at the time. I was resistant to the claim that there is one way – an accurate or scientific way – to abstract from social reality to come to good conclusions and analysis. That is, to understand society as it really is, or as close thereto as possible. The point was to try to find a way to conceive society that would lead to moral conclusions and moral practice – though I don’t think I understood it precisely in those terms at the time. To do this, ‘complementary holism’ abstracted from the ‘totality’ of modern society four ‘spheres’ of social life: ‘economy’ (which it claims includes ‘production’, ‘consumption’, and ‘allocation’), ‘polity’ (covering ‘authority’, ‘government’; ‘legislation’, ‘adjudication’, and ‘implementation’) ‘kinship’ (covering ‘procreation’, ‘nurturance’, ‘socialization’, ‘sexuality’, ‘gender’, and ‘organization of daily home life’), and ‘culture’ (‘development of collectively shared historical identities’, ‘culture’, ‘religion’, ‘spirituality’, ‘linguistic relations’, ‘lifestyles’, and ‘social celebrations’).

Abstracting capitalist society in this way, like I mentioned above, led to wildly divergent conclusions. It allowed people with completely different theoretical understandings of history and modern capitalist society to believe they had unity when, in fact, they didn’t. Many people found the theory difficult to understand (something that some people have claimed is true of Marxism). Most of those that claimed to understand ‘complementary holism’, understood it in an extremely uncritical way, mainly as a received and accepted dogma. For example, I heard proposals for the addition of another “sphere”, one addressing sexuality in its own right. This pointed both to a misunderstanding of the claimed theory (despite its problematic formulations, it did cover all elements of capitalist society; in other words it was a purely moral proposal – did this or that element of society ‘deserve’ its ‘own sphere’) and to fundamental problems with the theory itself. Many examples like this were presented, mostly by people trying to understand the theory, and wondering why it was conceived as it was and not differently.

The abstraction of gender and sexuality, for example, into completely different ‘spheres’ of social life (with different purposes, causes, and so on), so that they had to be understood in terms of their ‘intrinsic importance’, began to seem highly suspect to me. That is, homophobia having different causes from sexism, different purposes, and so on, seemed to misunderstand the purpose of the theory. But it was eye opening.

Reading the works of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci was probably what started my accelerating march towards a rejection of these politics, and my eventual embrace of Marxism. This begun with what I saw as the collapse of the idea that ‘politics’ and ‘authority’ were different from other parts of social life.

Gramsci describes, in rich detail, how the state organises the consent of the governed, provides a coercive apparatus to bring into line any who rebel, and disciplines specially oppressed groups so as to sow divisions within the working class and other strata of society. The state under capitalism, when it is broken down to its most fundamental function, is the owners organised as a class to lead and suppress the rest of society. It cannot be understood apart from the mode of production of a given society; that is, it cannot be understood ahistorically or mechanically as merely ‘legislation’, ‘adjudication’, and ‘implementation’.

Once I understood this, it caused me to question the whole theory. For if one ‘sphere’ didn’t make sense, if the theory could be challenged in such a way, without – importantly – taking women’s oppression, national oppression, democracy, racial oppression, class, and so on, ‘less seriously’, then the entire theory – and Marxism, which was posing questions that challenged many of my basic assumptions (assumptions which came more from an upbringing in a bourgeois society than from ‘complementary holism’ itself) – both deserved reconsideration.

Tried as I did, I did not find anyway in which Gramsci’s thought – and the thought of a variety of other Marxist revolutionaries like Karl Marx himself, as well as Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Clara Zetkin, Vladimir Lenin, and others – could be integrated into ‘complementary holism’ without losing some of its sharpest explanatory power and practical implications. That is to say that one can take snip-its of Gramsci’s thought and integrate it into basically any leftwing theory – academics do this all the time – but Gramsci’s works are most powerfully understood as a system of thought – a system which can’t be taken in part, but only in whole, and which must be considered alongside the theory and practical activity of its other adherents. Anyone who reads Gramsci and is sympathetic to what he says, must grapple with the question, ‘am I a Marxist?’ It cannot be ignored. The same is true of the works of the other Marxist revolutionaries I interacted with.

Gramsci returned me to Marx’s ‘base and superstructure’ metaphor, something which ‘complementary holism’ attempted to provide an alternative explanation to. The metaphor, to explain it simply, is the claim that there is an ‘economic base’ (or ‘structure’) to society as well as an ‘ideological superstructure’ which arises from and rests on that base. Put another way, Marx’s metaphor tries to explain how the way in which humans produce their means of subsistence at a definite point in human history determines politics, ideology, and other social relations in that society.

Marxism is often accused of being ‘deterministic’, but as the Bill Keach has noted (in a video of a talk from the Socialism 2011 conference which is forthcoming on WeAreMany.org), this sets up false argument which is used to uncritically reject marxism. ‘Determinism’ is not a moral term. It does not mean, as ‘complementary holism’ claims is important, taking gender, for example, ‘less seriously’. When ‘determinism’ is defined this way it is really being used as a synonym for ‘having serious blind spots to a particular type of oppression’. But that isn’t what determinism means at all. Keach notes that ‘determinism’ comes from the Greek root ‘terminus’, which means ‘limit’. Marxism is a theory which centers the relationship between freedom and constraint, between agency and limits. Ignoring limits, positing unlimited free will, does not mean you take oppression ‘more seriously’. Arguably it means the opposite.

My first problem, as I realised it, was that I completely misunderstood Marx’s concept of ‘economics’. That is, I understood it in an extremely narrow and mechanical way. I struggled with Friedrich Engels’ book The Origin of the Family, State, and Private Property, which reinforced, alongside Gramsci’s ideas about ‘state’ and ‘civil society’, that the state was merely, in Marx’s word’s, “but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” (The Communist Manifesto). That is, considering ‘government’ and ‘economics’ as somehow separate (as if capitalism could exist without state intervention, as ideologists of market fundamentalism claim) was a useless and highly ahistoric way of abstracting the state from the rest of society. The bourgeois state has a function of domination – physically repressing those who rebelled against the rule of the owners – and a hegemonic or ideological function – indoctrinating the population and maintaining ideological cohesion and support for the status quo. But its purpose was to protect the rule of a particular class – the capitalists.

Similarly, I came to see that the family could not be understood outside of the economy. The family under capitalism has a very particular function that developed only under capitalism (maintaining reproduction of the next generation of workers, ensuring access to free labour through the oppression of women, the repression of sexual activity which is outside of these narrow needs, the disciplining of young children to become obedient workers, the atomisation of communities into tiny and isolated units, etc) – and a role that was different from how the family operated in feudal society before the development of capitalism, and slave societies before that. And, most importantly, the family as such didn’t exist before the development of classes, before the development of an economic surplus and a ruling class that controlled it while living off the labour of others who make it. Myths of Male Dominance: Selected Articles on Women Cross-Culturally by the late Marxist anthropologist Eleanor Burke Leacock made this case clearly for me using a wealth of historic evidence. This anthology of her writings goes through various reports of European colonists who interacted with the peoples of the Americas for example.

Burke Leacock quotes the Jesuit colonialist Paul Le Jeune who went to what is today called Québec on a ‘civilising mission’ – a mission designed, really, to make way for further European colonisation through the extraction of resources, settlement of land, and control of labour necessary for the expansion of European capitalism. He noted (horrified of course) that the people of the Montagnais-Naskapi society did not engage in corporal punishment (the beating) of children: “The Savages prevent their instruction; they will not tolerate the chastisement of their children, whatever they may do, they permit only a simple reprimand” (p. 46). Burke Leacock records instances where community members would throw themselves between the colonial invaders and their children to prevent the beatings, so horrified were they at the idea of physical punishment. This is but one example in a 300 page book, which talks about a variety of cultures, with different ways of producing their basic means of survival, and covers such topics as violence, sexual divisions of labour, sexual and romantic partnerships, and more. The clearest themes throughout the book are (1) that oppression exists differently at different points in history corresponding closely to the way in which those societies organise production, and (2) the evidence exists that many societies around the world were relatively free of what radicals call oppression – that is, these societies were relatively egalitarian (even societies which were already class societies, but where slavery, feudalism, or capitalism had yet to develop). This changed only when capitalism was violently introduced, as we know, through terrorism, slavery, war, and genocide.

This clarified the confusion I had at some self-identified leftists who hold the reactionary idea that what they call ‘patriarchy’ had always been around (that is, that women were ‘naturally’ oppressed). Patriarchy theory abstracts women’s oppression from historic development. Some theories of ‘patriarchy’ claim that women’s oppression has always existed. Others aren’t so clear on the matter. One person I know takes the position “how could we know?”, which always made my head spin. Most often there is no clear understanding of the topic at all; no understanding that, for example, women’s oppression manifests itself in fundamentally different ways at different stages of economic development. Most important in implication was the claim that women have always been oppressed, for it places serious doubt as to whether women’s oppression could ever be destroyed. “Complementary holism” leaves the door open for a wide range of completely different explanations as to where women’s oppression came from (biology or historical economic development) and whether or not it can be overcome (yes it can, or no it can’t). This is the problem with analysing gender and sexuality from the standpoint of ‘intrinsic importance’. Those who do posit that women’s oppression and the oppression of LGBT people can be ended (such as those who rightly claim sexual and gender binaries should be broken down, and equality should be the goal), should root that claim in a scientific analysis of the history of social development. It makes the argument so much stronger. The best framework for understanding this historic development is, in my view, the materialist conception of history, better known as Marxism.

The same was true with race. Well before I looked more systematically into Marxist theory I understood that racial oppression and ideology arose at a definite point in human history to divide working people by oppressing one section of the working population, so as to prevent united rebellions and suppress the standard of living of all workers. This was clearly a concept I got from reading content by Marxists and biologists. This idea was made most pointedly for me in an essay by Marxist historian Barbara Jeanne Fields called “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America” (suggested by a comrade) where Fields noted that:

“Probably a majority of American historians think of slavery in the United States as primarily a system of race relations—as though the chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco.”

Fields points out that the tendency to analyse social relations – which are apologised for by the capitalist system with racial ideology – in terms of ‘race relations’ is something unique to American racism, and racial ideology around the world more recently in history.

“No one dreams of analysing the struggle of the English against the Irish as a problem in race relations, even though the rationale that the English developed for suppressing the ‘barbarous’ Irish later served nearly word for word as a rationale for suppressing Africans and indigenous American Indians. Nor does anyone dream of analysing serfdom in Russia as primarily a problem of race relations, even though the Russian nobility invented fictions of their innate, natural superiority over the serfs as preposterous as any devised by American racists.”

In other words, racial ideology is used as a way to protect the prevailing economic order, to protect the ruling class in a given society by apologising for the oppression of one section of the working class and, in doing so, dividing the entire class. Disparities and inequalities in economic status between different strata of the working population are purposefully created. Ideologies are devised to apologise for these disparities. Violence results from widespread ideological indoctrination and state sponsored violence. Laws, rules, and regulations are created to repress these specially oppressed groups, and to promote divisions that keeps the entire class from rebelling together.

Properly understood, oppression must be analysed in relation to the mode of production of a given society. Attempting to analyse racial ideology – ‘race’ – from the standpoint of its ‘intrinsic importance’, though it was certainly never my intention before I became a Marxist nor is it the intention of any of my non-Marxist comrades, opens the door for a wide range of divergent ideas ranging from taking no position on the origins of racism to, much more problematically, seeing race as a biological reality (something that has zero basis in reality and which is rejected by the scientific consensus among biologists; see, for example, biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s book The Mismeasure of Man). Note this is way different from ‘not taking racism seriously’. As Eleanor Burke Leacock points out,

“To put national or racial oppression against class exploitation is a sophomoric sociological enterprise; it is not Marxist analysis. That people of color can fall across class lines – a few of them – has befuddled our thinking insofar as we are metaphysical and not dialectical. Class exploitation and racial and national oppression are all of a piece, for in their joining lay the victory of capitalist relations.”

Finally there was class. Class always seemed different in some way. At one point, shortly before I left OFS, I discovered that a good number of comrades in OFS agreed on this point. Some did not, but a good number did. Class involved not just oppression, but also what Marxists call exploitation. Workers only have their labour power to sell to capitalist owners, they own no property, no means of production. They work for a given period of time on a given day, and in return they get a wage. But the wage they get is always less than the amount of labour they put into the process. The owners get to keep a portion of the output – which is called profit – even though they do absolutely no work. This is what Marxists mean by exploitation.

An billionaire owner, even if they are gay (for example) and suffer from some hateful comments on occasion, has the ability to live in extremely beneficial social conditions, free from want or misery. This isn’t true for a working class Black woman, or for a white lesbian worker, for example. They suffer from both economic exploitation and extreme and unavoidable social oppression (though of course in very different ways).

Class is also not simply something that divides people. It also unites people. Class unites the capitalists (despite their competitive interests) for example, as a class, against workers and other economic strata. Workers, by virtue of their place at the heart of production, share a common experience, despite other divisions. Through struggle they can unite, break down divisions, and go on the offensive against their common enemy: the ruling capitalists. In other words, the position workers are in relation to production and in relation to owners, also gives them power. The working class, unlike other subjugated classes throughout history, has both the power and the interests to unite together and to end oppression and exploitation once and for all. This isn’t true of all gay people for example. Gays are a minority for one, they do not have the social power to change society alone as gay people, and their experiences are widely divergent, divided especially on class lines.

It finally sank in, as a comrade in the International Socialist Organization (ISO) pointed out, that the base and superstructure metaphor wasn’t a moral one (what’s more ‘important’, or what’s taken more ‘seriously’), but an analytic metaphor meant to try explain capitalist society as it really was, where it came from, and who has the power to overthrow it. Moralism, which many revolutionaries struggle with (including myself), can be a strong force that clouds analytic judgment – but that’s another article for another day. The comrade that pointed out this reality and gave meaning to what I was already trying to understand, also clarified another important reality. The claim that ‘Marxism doesn’t take oppression seriously’ obviously wasn’t correct. Almost all of the Marxists I know are obviously some of the most resolute fighters against oppression and injustice. Rather, the real issue was a debate on how to understand oppression and exploitation. And that is a discussion and debate we should have openly – for the implications are serious indeed.

Truly liberating theory cannot afford to be neutral on these sorts of questions, especially since the evidence that oppression has not always existed – and has changed under different types of class societies – is quite strong.

My failure to examine Marxism more deeply and – especially – more systematically earlier on, led me to strange conclusions, not merely theoretically, but practically as well, and retarded my political development for far too long.

This will be just the first in a series of articles that addresses several concerns I’ve heard some non-Marxist comrades raise – concerns which I myself shared in the past. Below are some readings and audio talks which people can listen to to learn more. I’m, of course, available to talk with anyone whose interested in a discussion (email me at butterflywalking (at) gmail (dot) com). More articles will come soon.

For now, I’ll close with this. Marx was concerned above all, as others have pointed out, with ‘understanding capitalism – the better to overthrow it’. In his text Theses on Feuerbach he noted that “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” That was the basis from which Marx analysed capitalist society and participated in the revolutionary workers’ movements of his time.

I encourage those interested in these tasks to take Marxism seriously, to study its claims and its history (free the distortions of bourgeois ideologists and Stalinism), and to make an informed judgment for themselves. I suspect some of you will be pleasantly surprised.

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Regular Marxist publications, blogs, and book publishers:

Socialist Worker (US)

International Socialist Review (US)

We Are Many (US)

Haymarket Books (US)

Marxist Left Review (AU)

International Socialism Journal (UK)

Bookmarks (UK)

Resistance MP3s (UK)

Socialist Review (UK)

A Better World is Probable (US)

Pink Scare (US)

Sherry Talks Back (US)

Lenin’s Tomb (UK)

International Viewpoint (Int’l)

Left Business Observer (US)

For further reading:

Eleanor Burke Leacock, Myths of Male Dominance: Collected Articles on Women Cross-Culturally.

Alex Callinicos, “Historical materialism“, (Marxism 1998, audio).

John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity” (pdf) from Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality(1983) edited by Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharan Thompson.

Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State: In the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan (1884).

Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America“.

Antonio Gramsci, “State and civil society”.

Chris Harman, “Base and superstructure“.

Chris Harman, A People’s History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium.

Bill Keach, “Marx and Engel’s historical materialism”, (Socialism 2011, audio).

Antonio Labriola, “Essays on the materialist conception of history (part 1) (part 2) (part 3)” (1896).

Andy Lawson, “The dialectic” (Marxism 2006, audio).

Franz Mehring, On Historical Materialism (1893).

George Novack, The Irregular Movement of History: The Marxist Law of the Combined and Uneven Development of Society.

Rob Owen, “Historical materialism” (Marxism 2006, audio).

Georgi Plekhanov, “The materialist conception of history“.

Kirstin Roberts, “Before Classes: Our Egalitarian Past” (audio, 2010).

Jen Roesch, “Base and superstructure” (Socialism 2011, audio).

Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours (1938).

Sherry Wolf, Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics, and Theory of LGBT Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2009), especially Chapter 7 “Biology, Environment, Gender, and Sexual Orientation”, and Chapter 6 “In Defense of Materialism: Postmodernism, Identity Politics, and Queer Theory in Perspective”.

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