Capitalists Return to the Past in an Effort to Gorge Themselves on the Fruits of Child Labor

[Pictured: Children working as miners in Pennsylvania. (AP Photo)]

By Conrad Dremel

Republished from Red Clarion.

Over the past few years, the countries of the imperial core — the United States and its junior partners in Canada and NATO —  have seen a startling reversal in what was once championed as a shining achievement of liberal democracy: child labor laws. History textbooks detailing the horrors of early industrial capitalism are replete with the soot-stained faces of child laborers. A relic, they claim, of a grim past, long since abandoned by today’s “enlightened” capitalists. Gone are the days of Dickensian chimney sweeps and adolescent black lung, banished to the dustbin of history by progressive reforms that ensured children could go to school and play and live carefree lives, unshackled from the horrors of exploitation.

This, of course, has always been a myth. Child labor persists both in the brutal exploitation in modern colonies, where children labor for little or no pay to produce chocolate and cobalt, as well as within the great imperialist countries themselves, where carve-outs for child agricultural workers were written into law from the very beginning. Even at its best, child labor has merely been constrained by the law, never abolished. And “its best” is quickly decaying as the empire falls apart and struggles to maintain its workforce. Those practices which were finally extinguished didn’t cease through the benevolence of the capitalists; the working class fought to keep our children out of the mines and the packing plants. This wasn’t a gift, but a hard-won victory.

When the COVID-19 pandemic first emerged, it quickly altered the landscape of every economy on the planet. Production was paused, consumption plummeted, workers stayed home to protect their lives, and in many places, the state stepped in to keep everyone afloat. Unemployment benefits and health coverage were expanded in even the most committed laissez-faire strongholds, such as the U.S. Measures such as eviction protection, aid payments, tax refunds and more were deemed necessary to prevent the entire working class from instantly collapsing into abject poverty and seeking more radical changes to the economic system. Top members of the Democratic Party have bragged that one measure, the expanded child tax credit, cut childhood poverty in the U.S. in half. Yet that truthful statement is undercut by an obvious revelation: this entire time, the state had been sitting on a tool to eliminate child poverty, used it only partially, and then, months later, opted to reverse the measure, thereby doubling childhood poverty.

Throughout the beginning stages of the ongoing pandemic, workforce participation stagnated. Workers were laid off en masse; some stayed home to protect themselves and their communities, others retired early, still more became unable to work due to disability, or simply died. The capitalists groaned and quailed, crying to their state and media cronies that “no one wants to work anymore!” Measures to protect these workers from both economic devastation and physical damage were instated only to be quickly reversed, replaced with harsh punishments for prioritizing their health. The pandemic was swiftly erased from public consciousness, meager reparations were rescinded, and unemployment began to fall, as desperate workers returned to the workforce en masse in order to make ends meet.

Still, the capitalists were not content. Unsatisfied with merely multiplying their wealth throughout this crisis, they demanded more. More production, more profit, more exploitation. So many workers dropped out of the labor market permanently, and so many are too sick to work on any given day, that the workforce availability declined by an estimated eight billion working hours in 2022 alone. This number is not captured in official unemployment metrics, but it is certainly noticed by the capitalists, who demand every hour of labor they can get. They demand not only an astonishingly high number of total working hours to keep their production running, but a massive reserve army of labor to undermine the negotiating position of existing workers. When they complain of a “tight labor market,” their grievance is not that there are no workers to be found, but rather that there are insufficient extra workers on the market to drive down wages. The capitalists need us to be desperate.

So with a shrinking population of adults willing and able to work, where do these predators turn their fangs? Our children. They have lobbied successfully for the loosening of child labor regulations -– easing restrictions on minimum age, hours worked, schooling requirements, sectors of employment, the need for parental permission, and even the mere enforcement of existing standards. These measures have been championed and signed into law by politicians across the bourgeois political spectrum. Across every capitalist state, every bourgeois party demands only one thing: the constant flow of profit, even at the expense of our youth.

The rising tide of efforts to expand the legal exploitation of children pales in comparison to the capitalists’ flagrant disregard for both law and decency, with violations of child labor law in the U.S. nearly quadrupling since 2015, and growing every year. Children as young as ten are working with dangerous machinery in car factories and handling caustic chemicals in meat-packing plants. This willingness to flout their own standards of morality while violating  labor laws has always been exacerbated by periods of economic strain : the last huge spike in violations happened during the 2008 financial disaster. In every crisis, the most despicable vultures swoop in and pick clean every carcass they can find. There is ample profit to be made by siphoning the blood of the most despondent workers. 

This combined assault on child labor protections — the degradation of regulations and the violations of existing ones — is so egregious that it cannot escape the notice of even pro-capitalist institutions. The Department of Labor has recently been investigating child labor violations by PSSI and Hyundai. The PSSI case in particular has generated so much public outcry because of its sheer brutality: children were expected to use caustic chemicals to clean industrial blades, leading directly to the injury of three minors. These injuries represent only a droplet in the rising tide of blood spilt by capitalists in their pursuit of profit. The investigations by federal agencies are themselves laughably pathetic; they carry no criminal charges, only fines. To the capitalist, this is only the cost of doing this depraved business. Still, the cost seems too much for them to bear, hence their push to scrap regulations altogether. Well-funded and highly-coordinated capitalist organizations, like Americans for Prosperity and the Chamber of Commerce have drafted and lobbied for bills toward this heinous end. So far, 10 U.S. states have proposed or enacted bills that expand working hours, lower working age requirements, lift restrictions on hazardous job duties, or even grant immunity to employers for workplace injuries or death. For children. The primary aim of this legislative blitz is to protect capitalists from legal action for the death and mutilation of children. The capitalists are enriched and empowered by their shamelessness, greed, and depravity. In their vampiric frenzy, not even children are spared the bloodlust.

The working class must act immediately to defeat this reanimated monstrosity. Child labor laws did not spring out of nowhere. They were the capitalists’ begrudging concession to a mobilized, militant labor movement. Our forebears told the bosses in no uncertain terms: release our children from this despicable practice, pay us enough to support our families, or you will not get our labor. United in solidarity, workers beat back the specter of child labor and other abuses, securing some level of dignity and power for our class. But their fight was incomplete. It was exclusionary, leaving gaps where the hyper-exploitation of racialized and colonized children could continue unabated. It was impermanent, leaving capitalists the profit stream to claw back all reforms. It was unambitious, unwilling to imagine and fight for a society built on true liberation. And now this old beast is now roaring back with a vengeance. This time, we must win not only the battle, but the war.

Engels and the Second Foundation of Marxism

By John Bellamy Foster

Republished from Monthly Review.

On the opening page of The Return of Nature, I referred to the “second foundation” of socialist thought as follows:

For socialist theory as for liberal analysis—and for Western science and culture in general—the notion of the conquest of nature and of human exemption from natural laws has for centuries been a major trope, reflecting the systematic alienation of nature. Society and nature were often treated dualistically as two entirely distinct realms, justifying the expropriation of nature, and with it the exploitation of the larger human population. However, various left thinkers, many of them within the natural sciences, constituting a kind of second foundation of critical thought, and others in the arts rebelled against this narrow conception of human progress, and in the process generated a wider dialectic of ecology and a deeper materialism that questioned the environmental as well as social depredations of capitalist society. [1]

The origins and development of this second foundation of critical thought in materialist philosophy and the natural sciences and how this affected the development of socialism and ecology constituted the central story told in The Return of Nature. The initial challenge confronting such an analysis was to explain how historical materialism, in the dominant twentieth-century conception in the West, had come to be understood as strictly confined to the social sciences and humanities, where it was divorced from any genuine materialist dialectic, since cut off from natural science and the natural-physical world as a whole.

Explorations of the dialectics of nature by Frederick Engels along with Marxian contributions to natural science were commonly treated in the Western Marxist philosophical tradition as if they simply did not exist. The natural-physical world was seen within the dominant view of Marxism in the West as outside the domain of historical materialism. The realm of biophysical existence was thus ceded to a natural science that was viewed as inherently positivist in orientation. This was so much the case that, with the rise of the environmental movement in the 1960s, it never occurred to those on the left who wrongly charged that Marxism had contributed little or nothing to the development of ecological analysis, to look beyond the social sciences to socialist contributions in the natural sciences, out of which today’s systems ecology arose. The irony was that not only had socialism engaged with the natural environment, but it had, in fact, from the very beginning played a pivotal role in the development of a critical ecology within science and materialist philosophy.

Part of the problem was that the entire tradition of “dialectical materialism,” associated with Soviet Marxism in particular, was declared by the Western Marxist philosophical tradition to be erected on false foundations. The dialectics of nature, as opposed to the dialectics of society, it was claimed, needed to be rejected since it lacked an identical subject-object and thus absolute reflexivity. But in rejecting the dialectics of nature, Western Marxism was compelled to absent itself from the natural world almost entirely, except insofar as it could be said to impinge on human psychology or human nature or to have an indirect impact via technology. This then encouraged a shift toward a more idealist interpretation of Marxism. [2]

To be sure, the classical Marxism of Karl Marx and Engels in the mid-nineteenth century had its origin in the critique of social science. As Engels wrote, “classical political economy” was “the social science of the bourgeoisie” and, as such, the enemy of socialism. [3] Marx’s critique of classical political economy was aimed at uncovering the “hidden abode” of class-based exploitation and expropriation on which the capitalist mode of production was based. [4] It was this critique, therefore, that constituted the initial foundation of Marxism. But from the first, the materialist conception of history in critical social science was inextricably tied to the materialist conception of nature in natural science. No coherent critique of political economy was possible without exploring the actual biophysical conditions of production associated with what Marx called the “universal metabolism of nature.” [5]

Human beings themselves were seen by Marx as corporeal beings, and thus objective beings, with their objects outside of themselves. There was, then, in the end, only a “single science” looked at “from two sides,” those of natural history and human history. [6] It was necessary, therefore, to go beyond philosophy and social science to engage in the critique of bourgeois natural science as well. Indeed, as a theoretical method, the philosophy of praxis could not be confined to the realm of social sciences and humanities, that is, it could not be divorced from natural science, without undermining its overall critique.

The fact that natural science and social science, nature and society, are bound inextricably together in any attempt to confront the current mode of production and its consequences is dramatically demonstrated to us today by the current Anthropocene Epoch of geological history, in which capitalism is generating an “anthropogenic rift” in the biogeochemical cycles of the Earth System, endangering humanity along with innumerable other species. [7] In these circumstances, the role of Marxian ecology in understanding our current environmental predicament is of crucial importance. It is here that the second foundation of Marxian theory within materialist philosophy and natural science proves to be indispensable to the development of a revolutionary praxis.

The Second Foundation

Marx and Engels did not see science, or what they called “scientific socialism,” in terms of the narrow conceptions of science that prevail in our day, but rather in the broader sense of Wissenschaft, which brought together all rational inquiries founded on reason. [8] Reason as science had its highest manifestation in the application of dialectics, which Engels defined in the Dialectics of Nature as “the science of the general laws of all motion,” contending “that its laws must be valid just as much for motion in nature and human history as for the motion of thought.” [9] Indeed, a consistent materialist dialectic was not possible on the basis of social science alone, since human production and human action occurred “in society, in the world and in nature.” [10]

Engagement with natural science became a more urgent necessity for Marx and Engels as their work proceeded. Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, in Marx’s words, was “the basis in natural science for our view.” Engels depicted Darwin as the leading “dialectical” thinker within natural history. [11] Revolutions in natural science, such as Justus von Liebig’s soil chemistry, allowed Marx to develop his theory of metabolic rift. The emergence of anthropology as a result of the revolution in ethnological time pulled Marx and Engels into this new realm having to do with prehistory. [12] They incorporated the new revolution in thermodynamics within physics into their political-economic critique.

However, there were also negative developments that compelled the founders of historical materialism beginning in the 1860s to shift their research more in the direction of natural science, and the second foundation of Marxist theory. The defeat of the 1848 revolutions in Germany in particular had encouraged the growth of a mechanistic philosophy of science in a line extending from the later Ludwig Feuerbach to thinkers such as Ludwig Büchner, Carl Vogt, and Jacob Moleschott. At the same time, Friedrich Albert Lange had introduced neo-Kantianism as a dualist philosophical perspective aimed at circumscribing a one-sided mechanical materialism, which was then separated off from an equally one-sided social/ideal realm. Coupled with this was the spread in Germany of irrationalism in the philosophies of Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann, who saw materialism and dialectics, principally G. W. F. Hegel and Marx, as the enemy. [13] Eugen Dühring entered into all of this with an eclectic mix of neo-Kantian, pseudoscientific, and positivistic ideas that targeted Marx. Agnosticism in Britain, in the work of figures like Thomas Huxley and John Tyndall, was closely identified with neo-Kantianism. Social Darwinism first arose in this period principally as an attack on historical materialism in the work of the German zoologist Oscar Schmidt. As a result of these various attacks on materialism and dialectics, both Marx and Engels were pulled into the task of articulating a dialectics of nature consistent with a socialist conception of the metabolism of humanity and nature, in what was later variously referred to as dialectical materialism, dialectical naturalism, and “dialectical organicism.” [14]

Engels’s dialectical naturalism was first advanced in a comprehensive form in his influential work, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (better known as Anti-Dühring), completed in 1878. His wider, unfinished work, written in the 1870s and ’80s, Dialectics of Nature, was not published in German and Russian until 1925, and had to await another decade and a half before it was to appear in English translation. Nevertheless, Engels’s central argument, that “Nature is the proof of dialectics,” was clear from the start. Translated into today’s terms, it meant Ecology is the proof of dialectics. [15]

“Dialectics,” in its materialist form, was, in Engels’s words, “a method found of explaining…‘knowing’ by…‘being,’” rather than “‘being’ by…‘knowing.’” It “interprets things and concepts in their interdependence, in their interaction and the consequent changes, in their emergence, development, and demise.” Viewed in this way, “nature,” he wrote, “does not move in the eternal oneness of a perpetually recurring circle, but [goes] through a real evolution.” Thus, “the whole of nature accessible to us forms a system, an interconnected totality of bodies, and by bodies here we understand all material existences extending from stars to atoms.… It is precisely [their] mutual reaction that creates motion.” [16] Nature as matter and motion (transformed energy) generates, within the course of natural history, new, emergent forms or integrated levels of material existence that arise out of, and yet remain dependent on the physical world as a whole. Human society is, in this sense, an emergent form of the universal metabolism of nature with its own specific laws. [17]

Engels has often been criticized on the left for his three dialectical “laws,” more properly referred to today as general ontological principles, that he presented in his works on the dialectics of nature: (1) the law of the transformation of quantity into quality, and vice versa; (2) the law of the identity or unity of opposites; and (3) the law of the negation of the negation. However, the first of these ontological principles has been long recognized within science through the concept of phase change, while the second is the main way in which dialectics is commonly approached in philosophy and social science through the concept of contradiction, or “the incompatible development of different elements within the same relation.” [18] Most criticisms thus focus on the third of these laws, the negation of the negation, which is often simply dismissed. [19]

Nevertheless, it is important to understand these three laws or ontological principles in terms of a dialectics of emergence. For Engels, everything is motion, attraction and repulsion, contingency, and development, leading to new forms or levels of organization in nature and human history. The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa refers to material transformation and transcendence at the most general level. Given such tendencies, arising out of the transformation of matter and motion (or energy) in organic and inorganic processes, contradictions or incompatible elements naturally ensue, leading to change as development, evolution, or emergence, the negation of the negation.

We can see the significance of this in Engels’s approach to geology. He treated geology and paleontology as “the history of the development of the organic world as a whole,” which practically came into being as a developed field of scientific research only in the late eighteenth century. The world that geology describes exists even “in the absence of human beings.” [20] Nonetheless, geological history can be approached dialectically, since “the whole of geology is a set of negated negations” resulting in massive transformations on the surface of the planet that can be discerned by means of careful scientific investigation. Engels questioned Georges Cuvier’s crucial emphasis on geological “revolutions” or catastrophes as contaminated by religious dogma, and argued that Charles Lyell, with his gradualism, had introduced a more scientific approach to geology. But Lyell himself had made the error of “conceiving the forces at work on the earth as constant, both in quantity and quality,” so that “the cooling of the earth” associated with ice ages “does not exist for him.” In this view, there are no “negated negations” and no major, permanent changes. [21]

There was, for Engels, no constant, non-contingent, inconsequential process of earth surface formation in line with Lyell’s uniformitarianism. Massive transformations of the earth at certain intervals in its history, as emphasized by Cuvier, were not to be denied. Some of these criticisms (and appreciations) of both Cuvier and Lyell, advanced by Engels, were later developed in the twentieth century by the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who used precisely these antinomies to explain the origins of the theory of punctuated equilibrium within the evolutionary process. [22]

Anti-Dühring, because of its sheer range—addressing philosophy, natural science, and social science—became one of the most influential works of its time. It helped spark the development of left materialism in science, which was later given a further boost by the publication of Dialectics of Nature. This facilitated major ecological discoveries, especially in the Soviet Union in the first two decades after the revolution, and in the British Isles, where a tradition emerged drawing on both Darwin and Marx. Among the major figures in Britain were Marx’s friend, and Darwin and Huxley’s protégé, E. Ray Lankester, and later leading red scientists and related cultural figures such as J. D. Bernal, J. B. S. Haldane, Joseph Needham, Lancelot Hogben, Hyman Levy, Christopher Caudwell, V. Gordon Childe, Benjamin Farrington, George Thomson, and Jack Lindsay. [23] Along with Engels’s works on science, the red scientists drew heavily on V. I. Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. [24] Although frequently overlooked in treatments of Marxism, this tradition included the most prominent Marxist thinkers in Britain of the day, all of whom were connected with materialist philosophy and natural science. Their work sunk deep roots in natural science, the influence of which has extended to our own time.

Marxist scientists and materialist philosophers were the target of purges in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and in the anticommunist attacks in Britain and the United States in the 1950s. The suppression of red science, which seemed almost to disappear for a time, had deep ramifications for Marxism as a whole. Since the leading representatives of the Western Marxist philosophical tradition rejected outright materialism apart from economic/class relations—a position closely associated with their rejection of the dialectics of nature—they had almost nothing of substance to contribute to the ecological critique. This led to the myth that socialism as a whole had failed in this area. [25] To be sure, critical theorists such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno referred to the “domination of nature,” by which they chiefly meant the role played by instrumental rationality and technology in contemporary capitalist society, as well as the repressive effects of this on human nature. However, the material-ecological world itself was characteristically absent from their analysis. Hence, the dialectical connections associated with human social production and its metabolism with the larger environment were also absent. [26]

What has become clear with the growth of Marxian ecology since the 1980s is the close connection between the critique of economic alienation and ecological alienation under capitalism. Recognition that these constitute the two sides of the historical-materialist critique has become increasingly pronounced in the context of the planetary ecological crisis. All of this calls for the reunification of Marxian theory, symbolized by the return of Engels, and an attempt to grapple with the universal metabolism of nature. There is an urgent necessity to transcend the current alienated form of the capitalist social metabolism with its destructive mediation of the human relation to nature through generalized commodity production.

Engels and the Roots of the Anthropocene

In the twenty-first century we live in an age of planetary ecological peril, represented by the anthropogenic rift in the Earth System. This is associated with the advent, around 1950, of the Anthropocene Epoch in the geological time scale, which succeeded the Holocene Epoch of the last 11,700 years. Capitalism is presently in the process of crossing planetary boundaries that have defined the earth as a safe place for humanity. If all geological history, as Engels said, is the history of “negated negations,” today the Holocene—the geological epoch in which human civilization arose and prospered—is being negated by the system of capital accumulation, leading to the Anthropocene crisis of today.

If we were to look back to the earliest overarching recognition of the ecological predicament imposed by capitalist society, we could not do better than to turn to Engels’s famous treatment of this in “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” in the Dialectics of Nature. Here, Engels declared that human beings, as social beings, do not “rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature—but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.” Thus, for each presumed “victory” of humanity over the natural world of which we are a part, “nature takes its revenge on us,” leading to widespread natural/ecological devastations—not simply in the ancient and medieval worlds, but increasingly, and on a far larger scale, in the world wrought by capitalism and colonialism. [27]

Failure to understand what Engels called “our oneness with nature” and the need to conform to its laws is itself a product of our historical class relations. Here the capitalist domination of nature becomes a means of dominating human beings. The result is that history moves in a spiral, exhibiting both progress and retrogression. [28] Accumulation of capital is accompanied by the accumulation of catastrophe. Moreover, under such an anarchic system—as opposed to a socialist and planned society controlled by the associated producers—a fully rational pursuit of science becomes impossible, and substantive irrationalism prevails even in the midst of the advance of formal technological rationality. Pointing to soil degradation, deforestation, floods, desertification, species extinction, epidemics, and the squandering of natural resources, Marx and Engels indicated that the current mode of production was generating widening Earth catastrophes associated with the uncontrolled “interference with the traditional course of nature.” [29] Engels’s global analysis of nature’s “revenge” was thus at one with Marx’s theory of metabolic rift.

“The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” was first published in 1896 in the German Social Democratic journal Die Neue Zeit shortly after Engels’s death. Although it is difficult to chart its influence outside of Marxism, it is remarkable how close Engels’s analysis was to the ideas put forward not long after by Lankester in 1905 in his Romanes Lecture at Oxford, “Nature and Man” (later retitled “Nature’s Insurgent Son”), and his related 1904 article “Nature’s Revenges: The Sleeping Sickness,” both of which were reprinted in his 1911 The Kingdom of Man. [30] We do not know if Lankester read Engels’s article, though he was fluent in German, communicated with social democratic circles, and would have been deeply interested in Engels’s analysis in this respect, which overlapped in many ways with his own. [31] As a close friend of Marx and an acquaintance of Engels, a strong materialist, and a critic of capitalism (who had read Marx’s Capital), as well as the leading figure in British zoology at the time, Lankester’s radical ecological critique was necessarily related to historical materialism. In referring to the Kingdom of Man, Lankester sought to describe a new period in Earth history in which human beings were now the main force affecting the natural world, with the result that they increasingly must take responsibility for it. He presciently highlighted the ecological consequences of a capitalist economic system engaged in the unheeding destruction of nature, ultimately undermining humanity itself.

In “Nature’s Revenges,” Lankester referred to the human-social being as “the disturber of Nature,” including being the instigator through global capitalism and finance of all epidemics in animals and humans, which could be traced largely to social, and primarily commercial, causes, including the “mixing up of incompatibles from all parts of the globe.” [32] Under these circumstances, humanity had no choice but to control its production and its relation to nature, relying on science and superseding the narrow dictates of capital accumulation, thus ushering in a coevolutionary development. Human society was on a permanent ecological knife-edge in its relation to the natural world, which Lankester described somewhat ironically as the “Kingdom of Man.” Such “effacement of nature by man” not only undermined living species, but also threatened civilization and human existence itself. [33] The only answer was for social humanity to take responsibility for its relations to the natural world, in conformity with natural laws and principles of sustainability, in opposition to the capitalist mode.

Today, resistance to the notion of the Anthropocene Epoch is evident in many of those on the left, who, while largely oblivious of the scientific discussion, are horrified by the implications of a dominant Anthropos. This seems, in their minds, to point to an exaggerated humanism or anthropocentrism in the understanding of the physical world, and to a downplaying of the social causes of the geological climacteric that we are now witnessing. Yet, from a geological and Earth System perspective, the issues are clear. By crossing certain critical thresholds or planetary boundaries, the global system of capital accumulation has generated quantitative changes that represent a qualitative transformation in the Earth System, shifting it from the Holocene Epoch in the Geologic Time Scale to the Anthropocene Epoch, where anthropogenic rather than nonanthropogenic factors are for the first time the major drivers of Earth System change, and in which human civilization and human existence are currently imperiled. [34]

From a historical and dialectical perspective, the planetary ecological contradictions that we are now witnessing have been long coming. The issue of a new “Kingdom of Man,” which was also at the same time subject to the revenge of nature or nature’s revenges, can be traced back to Engels and Lankester. Such views were related to the conception of nature as a dialectical totality mediated by processes of evolutionary change, in which humanity was increasingly playing a dominant role. It was in the Soviet Union during the 1920s that the notion of what was called the Anthropogene Period in geological history, connected to the disruption of the biosphere as defined by V. I. Vernadsky, was introduced by the geologist Aleksei Pavlov. The word Anthropocene itself, as an alternative to Anthropogene, first appeared in English in the early 1970s in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. [35] It was by uniting the awareness of ecological destruction with the concept of ecosystem, the theory of the origins of life, and the analysis of the biosphere—all products of dialectical science—that Rachel Carson was able to warn the world population of the full scale of the planetary peril confronting them in her lecture introducing the concept of ecology to the general public. Moreover, it was socialist scientists who pointed to a decisive change in the human relation to the entire Earth System, or “ecosphere,” beginning around 1945. [36]

More recently, we can point to the breakthrough in the treatment of the Anthropocene Epoch in Earth history represented by the geologist Carles Soriano. The conception of the Anthropocene Epoch in the Geologic Time Scale derives from the recognition that for the first time in the more than four billion years of Earth history, a living species, Homo sapiens, is the primary driver of Earth System change. This revelation of the human role in geological change was thus the product both of the emergence of Earth System science and the growing perception of an “anthropogenic rift,” undermining the earth as a safe home for humanity. It has its theoretical roots in the concept of metabolism, which formed the basis for both the notion of ecosystem (first introduced by Lankester’s student, the British ecologist Arthur Tansley, a Fabian-style socialist) and the later concept of the Earth System metabolism. [37]

Once human society has emerged as the primary force in Earth System change due to the scale of production, inaugurating the Anthropocene Epoch, this becomes unalterable—barring the collapse of industrial civilization in an Anthropocene extinction event. Like it or not, industrial humanity is now permanently responsible, on pain of its own extinction, for limiting and controlling its effects on the Earth System. Nevertheless, if capitalism by the mid-twentieth century has ushered in a planetary ecological rift, the possibility still remains of the transformation of the human metabolism with nature in conformity with natural laws in a society devoted to substantive equality and ecological sustainability.

Rooting his analysis in materialist dialectics, Soriano proposed in Geologica Acta in 2020 that the first geological age of the Anthropocene, following the current geological age of the Meghalayan (the last age of the Holocene Epoch), be designated as the Capitalian, in recognition of the destructive relation that capitalism is now playing with respect to the entire Earth System, creating a habitability crisis for humanity. [38] The Capitalian Age stands for the fact that behind the current Anthropocene crisis lies the capitalist mode of production. Environmental sociologists independently issued a similar proposal shortly after, suggesting that the new geological age associated with the advent of the Anthropocene Epoch should be called the Capitalinian, and that the future geological age toward which humanity must now necessarily strive—introducing a new climacteric surmounting the planetary emergency—should be named the Communian, after community, communal, and commons. [39] If all of geological history, according to Engels, is one of “negating negations,” leading to the Earth System crisis of today, we are now presented with the choice between the negation of the material conditions of human society itself to which capitalism is leading us, or else the negation of the capitalist mode of production (and thus of the present Capitalian/Capitalinian Age). What is essential in these circumstances is the creation of a new, socially mediated geological age of the Communian (the negation of the negation), embodying a restored, developed, and sustainable metabolism of humanity and the earth.

Dialectics, Engels argued, encompassed interaction, contradiction, and emergence, and was a general expression of the evolving totality of material things and of motion (matter and energy), applicable to all of existence. From this standpoint, it was possible to understand more fully the material world around us, providing the basis of a grounded scientific socialism. In the past, Marxist scholarship with respect to Engels’s forays into dialectics of nature has focused simply on the question of the rejection or acceptance of his general views, leaving out the more positive challenge of exploring their significance for the philosophy of praxis. Today, we need to go beyond this stale debate to recognize, in line with the neglected second foundation of Marxism within science and materialist philosophy, that the dialectics of nature offers new insights and methods for the understanding of our time, precisely because its approach is a unified one, bridging the great gulf that has emerged in the ecology of praxis.

As Soriano explains, “most natural sciences” today—if “spontaneously” and without full awareness—take “a dialectic and materialist epistemic view in understanding the natural side of the Earth System and of the Anthropocene crisis. From the social side of the problem, however, the epistemic view adopted by most natural scientists turns into an positivist and idealist one,” deferring to mainstream liberal social science and philosophy. [40] Meanwhile, the so-called Western Marxist tradition, while holding on to the notion of dialectics, has applied this only in ways related to the identical subject-object of the human historical realm. The tendency here has been to portray natural science as primarily positivistic, while seeing no relation between nature and dialectics. In this way, the two realms of dialectical thought in the natural sciences and the social sciences have remained separate, making a unified praxis based on reason as science impossible. This can only be overcome by reunifying Marxism’s first foundation in the critique of bourgeois political economy with its second foundation in the critique of mechanistic science.

Writing in the tradition of Engels, Soriano states: “Nature is dialectical too, and the dialectics of Nature is not merely a theoretical construct but a construct that is only possible because Nature is inherently so. Otherwise, how is it possible to ‘construct’ dialectics if it is not yet in the studied object, which is the ultimate source of any empirical perception?” [41] Today, the dialectics of nature must be reunited with the dialectics of society, the critique of political economy with the ecological critique of capitalism. This requires that the second foundation of Marxism be accorded a central place in the philosophy of praxis. The human relation to the earth lies in the balance.

Postscript: Did Engels Break with Marx on Metabolism?

Kohei Saito’s important work Marx in the Anthropocene: Toward the Idea of Degrowth Communism, published by Cambridge University Press in 2023, has raised the critical question of whether Engels departed fundamentally from Marx’s analysis of social metabolism. [42] Saito charges that Engels, in editing the third volume of Capital, from the original draft in Marx’s Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865, removed the adjective “natural” and thus in effect the term “natural metabolism” from Marx’s passage on the “irreparable rift.” [43] This is then backed up by a criticism of Engels for allegedly “rejecting Liebig’s concept of metabolism.” On these bases, Saito argues that Engels was largely responsible for the suppression of Marx’s social metabolism/metabolic rift argument, helping “to make Marx’s ecology invisible,” with disastrous effects for later Marxist theory. The reason given for Engels’s alleged transgression in this respect is that his notion of the dialectics of nature represented an approach to nature/natural science that was in direct conflict with Marx’s social-metabolic analysis. “It was precisely due to this difference” between Marx’s and Engels’s approaches to dialectics and ecology, we are told, “that the concept of metabolism and its ecological implication were marginalized throughout the 20th century.” [44]

It is true that the term “natural metabolism” was missing from the passage on the “irreparable rift” in Engels’s edition of volume 3 of Capital. (This same term is also absent in Ben Fowkes’s recent English-language translation of Marx’s original manuscript for volume 3 in the Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865.) Hence, instead of capitalism leading to “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself,” as conveyed in Engels’s edition of third volume of Capital, the same passage should read, in Saito’s rendering: “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process between social metabolism and natural metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of the soil.” (An even more literal translation would be “an irreparable rift in the context of the social and natural metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of the soil.”) Engels, in editing the third volume of Capital, thus removed the term “natural metabolism,” though “natural” still remains in the rest of the sentence. In Saito’s view, this omission reflected a “profound methodological difference” between Marx and Engels on the concept of metabolism. [45]

Yet, examined closely, it is debatable that the removal of “natural metabolism,” substantially changed the meaning of Marx’s original passage—certainly not enough to raise a significant issue in that regard. Although Marx referred in his original incomplete draft to the “social and natural metabolism,” definitely including the term “natural metabolism,” there was a certain redundancy here. The notion of natural metabolism is basic to Marx’s entire materialist approach and is already assumed in the very concept of “social metabolism” itself, which mediates the relation of humanity with what Marx called the “universal metabolism of nature.” [46] The social metabolism for Marx is nothing but the specifically human relation (via the labor and production process) to the universal metabolism of nature. Moreover, even without the words “natural metabolism,” the passage indicates that the “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism” violates “the natural laws of life [soil],” which itself refers to a break with the universal metabolism of nature. The omission of the word “natural,” and thus the term “natural metabolism,” does nothing to alter the fundamental point being made. Saito declares that what is lost in Engels’s version is Marx’s second-order mediation, or alienated mediation. [47] But that too is problematic, since the very context of the passage, as it appears in the third volume of Capital, is a rift in the social metabolism, that is, a disruption of the social-metabolic mediation of humanity and nature as a result of alienated capitalist production.

Saito supplements his philological argument on the missing term in Engels’s editing of Marx’s “irreparable rift” passage, with the additional charge that Engels developed a “critique of Liebig’s theory of metabolism.” [48] However, evidence of this “critique” is nowhere to be found in Engels’s writings. In fact, Saito himself is unable to offer a single sentence indicating such a critique of Liebig on metabolism issued from Engels’s pen. Instead, he resorts to highlighting Engels’s quite different criticisms in Dialectics of Nature of Liebig’s vitalism, including his rejection of Darwin’s theory of evolution and his hypothesis that life had existed eternally. Saito illogically infers from Engels’s criticisms of Liebig in this regard that since Engels objected to Liebig’s vitalistic and anti-evolutionary notions in biology, he must also therefore have objected to Liebig’s use of the metabolism concept in his chemistry. However, Liebig was a “dilettante” in biology and at the same time a leading scientist in chemistry, a distinction that Engels stressed. What makes Saito’s criticism here even more problematic is that Engels repeatedly utilized Liebig’s analysis of the rift in the soil metabolism, in his own writings—even if he did not choose, as Marx did, to use the word Stoffwechsel (metabolism) in this context. [49]

But the deeper theoretical problem confronting Saito, in his attempt to find evidence of Engels’s supposed “rejection” of Liebig’s concept of metabolism, is that Liebig, in utilizing the notion of metabolism was referring to the natural-science concept of metabolism. Liebig did not, as in the case of Marx, develop the category of social metabolism. Saying that Engels rejected Liebig’s concept in this regard then amounts to charging that he rejected the notion of natural metabolism, of which Engels, however, was a major nineteenth-century proponent. The concept of metabolism originated in German cell biology early in the nineteenth century and was applied broadly in Liebig’s mid-century writings in agricultural chemistry. [50] Metabolism in this sense was a concept that Engels employed many times, including in his famous analysis of metabolism (and proteins) as the key to the origins of life. [51] Indeed, the notion of Stoffwechsel was central to the development of the first law of thermodynamics in Julius Robert Mayer’s “The Motions of Organisms and their Relation to Metabolism” (1845), which strongly influenced Engels (as well as Liebig and Marx). [52]

All of this throws into further disarray the contention that Engels, supposedly encumbered by his dialectics of nature perspective, failed to appreciate the significance of Marx’s inclusion of “natural metabolism” in the “irreparable rift” passage. It was due to this failing, Saito tells us, that Engels “intentionally” deleted the term natural metabolism, effectively “marginalizing” and making “invisible” Marx’s core ecological critique, which was thereby “suppressed.” [53] Yet, here Saito is confronted with the inconvenient fact that Engels, who was certainly one of the most erudite figures of his day, wrote again and again on the subject of nature’s metabolism, a concept for which he demonstrated a very deep appreciation. [54] Moreover, Engels’s edition of the third volume of Capital, far from suppressing the conception of “natural metabolism,” includes it in other places where Marx employed it in his original text. [55]

Behind Saito’s entire argument here is an attempt to reinforce the notion within Western Marxist philosophical tradition that Engels’s dialectics of nature, with its wider materialism, was antithetical to Marx’s own historical materialism. Thus, rather than looking at how Marx and Engels’s ecological analyses are complementary and reinforce each other, we are presented with the notion of a theoretical break between the two that is rooted in Engels’s dialectics of nature, which supposedly led Engels to distance himself from Marx’s ecology. Yet, in the course of his argument, Saito is unable to find any satisfactory way of demonstrating that the dialectics of nature as developed by Engels is actually at odds with Marx’s ecology. Hence, he merely contends that Engels’s approach to Earth history was “transhistorical” in that it transcended human history in the manner of positivistic natural science when addressing nonhuman nature. [56] Yet, one wonders what kind of natural science there would be if it were to restrict its analysis simply to human history, that is, if it were not transhistorical in the sense of superseding the human world. Clearly, our social being influences our understanding of nature, something that Engels emphasized as well as Marx. But science is necessarily concerned with domains beyond the human. [57] Surely, an analysis of Earth history extending beyond human history did not contradict Marx’s own thinking, since he exhibited a deep fascination with paleontological developments within geological time prior to human existence. [58]

Engels is also criticized by Saito for developing a more “apocalyptic” theory of ecological crisis than Marx through his use of the metaphor of the “revenge” of nature and the notion that human beings are capable of undermining the conditions of their existence on a planetary scale. [59] Engels even contemplates human extinction in the distant future. Saito attributes such views to Engels’s “apocalyptic” conception of the dialectics of nature as opposed to Marx’s nonapocalyptic ecological conceptions in his theory of metabolic rift. But surely Engels, from the standpoint of the twenty-first century, is to be commended for conceiving of the reality of human-generated ecological crisis throughout the globe! Nor does this in any way contradict Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, the contemporary relevance of which has mainly to do with the Earth System crisis. [60]

The full extent of Saito’s adherence to the notion of a break between Marx and Engels on the dialectics of nature, depicting a deep ecological split between the two thinkers, can be seen in his direct support for Terrell Carver’s position that Engels most likely lied in his 1885 preface to Anti-Dühring when he indicated that he had read the various parts of that work to Marx prior to their publication in serial form. In Saito’s own words, Engels’s statement here was “not necessarily credible.” [61] Hence, Engels, it is insinuated, might very well have lied about his interactions with Marx in this respect. The fact that there is absolutely no basis for believing that Engels would have lied on such an important point, which does not at all fit with his character or his lifelong loyalty to Marx, does not seem to deter those sowing such doubts. Indeed, the nature of this argument is that Engels must have lied, because otherwise, Marx (who had contributed a chapter to Anti-Dühring) could be assumed to have been entirely familiar with that work prior to its publication and presumably agreed with its contents. This would then undermine the notion of a fundamental break between Marx and Engels. [62]

Saito’s attempt to establish a methodological break between Marx and Engels with respect to the concept of metabolism adopts a similar form for essentially the same reasons. Engels must be responsible for intentionally suppressing the term “natural metabolism” (and with it, the significance of the metabolic rift) in editing the third volume of Capital, since otherwise notions of the complementarity of Marx and Engels writings on ecology might carry the day, contradicting Saito’s contention that “Marx never really adopted the project of materialist dialectics that Engels was pursuing.” [63]

Yet, the fact that Saito’s whole supposed proof of a methodological break between Marx and Engels depends on the absence of a single term, the word “natural” preceding “metabolism,” in a single passage, constituting a small change of highly debatable significance, points to the total absence of any substantive evidence of such a break. To rend asunder Marx and Engels on metabolism and ecology on such a basis is unwarrantable. The truth is, while Engels did not directly employ Marx’s notion of “social metabolism,” except in his 1868 Synopsis of Capital, nor develop Marx’s analysis in this regard, there is no indication that his outlook contradicted that of Marx in this area. [64]

If Marx’s theory of metabolic rift was not better known among Marxists prior to this century, this had nothing to do with Engels’s alleged suppression of Marx’s ideas, a claim for which there is no concrete basis. Rather, it had to do with the reality that the metabolism concept was embedded in the deep structure of Marx’s work and thus was often overlooked, while a great deal of what he wrote on this was incomplete, and developed only in his later years. More importantly, much of Marx’s science, as Rosa Luxemburg emphasized, was well ahead of the socialist movement itself and would only be taken up as new problems presented themselves. [65] It was the development of ecosocialism a century after Marx’s death that led to the rediscovery and reconstruction of Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, rather than the reverse. This unearthing of Marx’s ecological argument was partially enabled by the substantial (if somewhat indirect) influence that it had exerted, along with the work of Engels, on subsequent socialist ecological analyses within natural science and materialist philosophy. [66]

Rather than perpetuating old divisions within the left, it is necessary today to bring Marx’s social-metabolism argument together with Engels’s dialectics of nature, seeing these analyses as integrally related. The object should be to unite the first and second foundations of Marxist thought, providing a broader material basis for the critique of the capitalist mode of production as the essential ground for a revolutionary ecosocialist praxis in the twenty-first century.

Notes

1. John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 7, emphasis added. Reference to the “second foundation of Marxist ecological thought” was first introduced twenty years earlier in Marx’s Ecology. See John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 250.

2. Western Marxism took its point of departure in this respect from the short footnote in Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, where he indicated dissatisfaction with Engels’s account of the dialectics of nature. Yet, as Lukács indicated on multiple occasions afterward, and as attested by the text of History and Class Consciousness itself, he did not actually reject the “merely objective dialectics of nature.” The distortions of his thought in this respect nonetheless remain dominant. In the translation of his famous Tailism manuscript, this went so far as to translate incorrectly what appears as “Dialectics in Nature” in the original German in one of the chapter headings as “Dialectics of” See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin, 1971), 24, 207; Georg Lukács, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2000), 94, 102–7; Kaan Kangal, “Engels’ Intentions in Dialectics of Nature,” Science and Society 83, no. 2 (2019): 218; Foster, The Return of Nature, 16–21.

3. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 463–64.

4. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 279.

5. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 30, 54–66.

6. Karl Marx, Early Writings (London: Penguin, 1974), 389–90; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5, 28.

7. Clive Hamilton and Jacques Grinevald, “Was the Anthropocene Anticipated?,” Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1 (2015): 67.

8. Joseph Fracchia, Bodies and Artefacts, vol. 1 (Boston: Brill, 2022), 3.

9. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 545.

10. Karl Marx, Early Writings, 398.

11. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 24, 301; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 633; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 41, 232, 246; Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 197, 291; Foster, The Return of Nature, 251–58.

12. Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 212–21.

13. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 340; Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (London: Merlin Press, 1980), 403–8.

14. On “dialectical organicism” see Joseph Needham, Moulds of Understanding (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1976), 278.

15. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 24, 301; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 23–27, 633; John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature, 254.

16. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 26–27, 363, 593, 633.

17. On dialectics and integrated levels, see Joseph Needham, Time: The Refreshing River (London: George Allan and Unwin, 1943), 233–72; Jean-Pierre Vigier, “Dialectics and Natural Science,” in Existentialism Versus Marxism, ed. George Novack (New York: Dell, 1966), 243–57.

18. Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 11; John Bellamy Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022), 304–8; Craig Dilworth, “Principles, Laws, Theories, and the Metaphysics of Science,” Synthese 101, no. 2 (1994): 223–47; Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1985), 268.

19. A characteristic of much Marxist dialectical thought has been to downplay the negation of negation, or development, evolution, and emergence. This can be seen in Ollman’s influential work where “dialectical research” is confined to “four kinds of relations: identity/difference, interpenetration of opposites, quantity/quality, and contradiction.” Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic, 15. On Marx and “scientific socialism,” see Foster, The Return of Nature, 253. This was even more the case in Soviet Marxism. As Frederick Copleston notes: “In Stalin’s time, of course, the law of the negation of the negation was passed over in silence.” Frederick C. Copleston, Philosophy in Russia (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 327.

20. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 82, 326.

21. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 126, 324–25.

22. Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002), 479–92; Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987), 112–15, 133–34; Stephen Jay Gould, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), 97–105; Richard York and Brett Clark, The Science and Humanism of Stephen Jay Gould (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 21, 28, 40–42.

23. See Helena Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1985); Foster, The Return of Nature, 358–530.

24. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 14 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977).

25. Sebastiano Timpanaro issued a strong criticism of Western Marxism for abandoning materialism, but since he also rejected the dialectics of nature, his analysis—despite its brilliance—was unable to overcome the limitations he imposed upon it. Sebastiano Timpanaro, On Materialism (London: Verso, 1975).

26. The inability of critical theory, due to its shallow materialism and its denial of the dialectics of nature, to provide any meaningful ecological analysis is evident in a recent work seeking to promote classical critical theory’s contributions to ecology, chiefly that of Adorno, while at the same time acknowledging that “the classical Frankfurt School critical theorists hardly engaged with natural science,” or ecology. Carl Cassegård, Toward a Critical Theory of Nature (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 118.

27. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 460–62. Engels attributed ecological disasters to shortsighted, “unforeseen,” and “remote natural consequences,” and to the necessary byproducts of a system of production devoted only to immediate gain. In the chapter on “The Revenge of the External” in his Barbaric Heart, Curtis White explains that such “unintended consequences” are treated in capitalist economics as externalities, and it is these externalities, vis-á-vis natural processes, which are coming back to haunt capitalism. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 461–62; Curtis White, The Barbaric Heart (London: Routledge, 2009), 89–107.

28. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 313, emphasis added.

29. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 461.

30. Ray Lankester, The Kingdom of Man (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1911).

31. Lankester’s conception of human evolution in its emphasis on the hand was much closer to that of Engels in “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” than to either Darwin or Ernst Haeckel. See E. Ray Lankester, Diversions of a Naturalist (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1915), 243–44.

32. Lankester, The Kingdom of Man, 1–4, 26, 31–33, 184–89.

33. Lankester, Science from an Easy Chair (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1913), 365–79.

34. Carles Soriano, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Other ‘-Cenes,’” Monthly Review 74, no. 6 (November 2022): 1–28.

35. I. Vernadsky, The Biosphere (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1998); E. V. Shantser, “The Anthropogenic System (Period),” in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1973): 139–44; V. I. Vernadsky, “Some Words About the Noösphere,” in 150 Years of Vernadsky, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: 21st Century Science Associates, 2014), 82. The Anthropogene was initially introduced in the Soviet Union to describe the geological period now known as the Quaternary.

36. Rachel Carson, Lost Woods (Boston: Beacon, 1998), 227–45; Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (New York: Bantam, 1971), 60–61, 117, 138–45; Foster, The Return of Nature, 502–13; John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “Rachel Carson’s Ecological Critique,” Monthly Review 59, no. 9 (February 2008): 1–17.

37. A. O. Tansley, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms,” Ecology 18, no. 3 (July 1935): 284–307. In developing the notion of ecosystem, Tansley relied heavily on the systems theory of the Marxist mathematician Hyman Levy. See Hyman Levy, The Universe of Science (London: Watts and Co., 1932).

38. Carles Soriano, “On the Anthropocene Formalization and the Report of the Anthropocene Working Group,” Geologica Acta 18, no. 6 (2020): 1–10.

39. John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “The Capitalinian: The First Geological Age of the Anthropocene,” Monthly Review 73, no. 4 (September 2021): 1–16.

40. Carles Soriano, “Epistemological Limitations of Earth System Science to Confront the Anthropocene Crisis,” Anthropocene Review 9, no. 1 (2020): 112, 122, Soriano, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Other ‘-Cenes,’” 14.

41. Soriano, “Epistemological Limitations of Earth System Science,” 121.

42. Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 53–55.

43. In Marx’s original German, as well as in Engels’s edition of the third volume of Capital, what is presented in the English translation as single sentence is in fact only a section of a much longer sentence, taking up an entire paragraph. Hence, rather than referring to a “sentence” in the discussion here, the term “passage” is used, particularly as the main issue in dispute concerns only a part of a sentence, even in the English-language edition.

44. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 45, 67–68.

45. Karl Marx, Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), II/4.2 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1992), 753; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, Band 25 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1964), 822; Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 53–55, 70; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 949; Karl Marx, Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865 (Boston: Brill, 2016), 797–98. Saito also makes the point that Engels’s edition of volume 3 of Capital incorrectly uses the word “life” at the end of the disputed sentence, rather than “soil.” However, both terms essentially convey the same broad meaning in this particular context, while “soil” also appears in the sentence that follows in Engels’s edition of volume 3, as well as in Marx’s original manuscript. Saito himself said that this discrepancy was probably due to Marx’s poor handwriting, in which the words Boden and Leben look almost identical. Yet, although acknowledging in his footnote that this could very well have been a result of Marx’s poor handwriting, he nonetheless criticizes Engels in his text for substituting the term “life,” claiming that Engels made this change to bring Marx’s sentence more in line with Engels’s own notion of the “revenge” of nature. Given the penmanship problem and the very problematic nature of Saito’s claims about the theoretical significance of the replacement of “soil” by “life,” this whole issue can be set aside in the present discussion. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 56, 70.
    In correspondence and discussions with me, Joe Fracchia has translated the critical passage in the original German in his Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865 (as published in MEGA) slightly differently from Saito as: “provoking an irreparable rift in the context of the social and natural metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of the soil.” It is Fracchia’s translation that is the more literal one mentioned in the text. I owe much of my understanding of these philological problems to Fracchia, who helped me in exploring the differences and nuances in a close comparison of Marx’s original German text with his Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865, Engels’s edited German text of volume 3 of Capital, and the various English-language translations.

46. Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene, 41–61; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 30, 54–66.

47. Marx in the Anthropocene, 53. On István Mészáros’s concept of “second order mediation,” see John Bellamy Foster, “Foreword” in István Mészáros, The Necessity of Social Control (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015), 16. On Marx’s concept of alienated mediation see Marx, Early Writings, 261.

48. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 45.

49. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 56–57; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 574–76; Justus von Liebig, Familiar Letters on Chemistry, in Its Relations to Physiology, Dietetics, Agriculture, Commerce, and Political Economy, fourth edition (London: Walton and Maberly, 1859), 283–86; John Farley, “The Spontaneous Generation Controversy (1859–1880),” Journal of the History of Biology 5, no. 2 (1972): 317; Frederick Engels, The Housing Question (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979), 92–93.

50. Franklin C. Bing, “The History of the Word Metabolism,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 26, no. 2 (April 1971): 158–80.

51. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 578; J. D. Bernal, The Freedom of Necessity (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), 363–64; Foster, The Return of Nature, 414; Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 56–57.

52. Julius Robert Mayer, “The Motions of Organisms and Their Relation to Metabolism,” in Julius Robert Mayer: Prophet of Energy, ed. Robert B. Lindsey (New York: Pergamon, 1973), 75–145; Kenneth Caneva, Robert Mayer and the Conservation of Energy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 117; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 688.

53. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 45, 53.

54. Foster, The Return of Nature, 414.

55. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 195, 949, 954.

56. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 59, 67.

57. Saito points to Lukács’s criticism in History and Class Conscious of the validity of scientific experiment as a basis for a dialectical knowledge of the universal metabolism of nature and says that this constitutes the grounds for Lukács’s rejection of Engels’s dialectics of nature. Saito fails to note, however, that Lukács later reversed himself on this point in his 1967 preface to his book. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xix; Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 85.

58. Marx and Engels, Marx-Engels Gesamtasugabe (MEGA) IV/26 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011), 214–19; Joseph Beete Jukes, Student’s Manual of Geology (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1872), 476–512; Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene, 51, 270; John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, The Robbery of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 143; Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 65–67.

59. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 55, 59.

60. On this see John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010).

61. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 51; Terrell Carver, Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1983), 123–25; Foster, The Return of Nature, 584. In addition to indicating that he had read the entire manuscript to Marx, Engels said that “it was self-understood between us that this exposition of mine should not be issued without his knowledge.” Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 9.

62. Oddly, Saito refers elsewhere in his argument to evidence provided by the present author and others pointing to the extent of Marx’s involvement in and appreciation of Engels’s Anti-Dühring. See Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 48, 241, 253.

63. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 67.

64. Frederick Engels, On Capital (New York: International Publishers, 1937), 63.

65. Rosa Luxemburg, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), 111. An additional factor was that the word Stoffwechsel was not originally translated as “metabolism” in the English-language translations of the first and third volumes of Capital in 1886 and 1909, but rather as “circulation of matter.”

66. See Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 21–65; Foster, The Return of Nature, 405.

Charter Schools and the Privatization (and Profitization) of Education

By Shawgi Tell

Eleven months ago a critical education case came before the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in North Carolina (Peltier v. Charter Day Sch., Inc., 37 F.4th 104, 116, 4th Cir. 2022). A main issue in the case pertains to the dress code at “Charter Day School” in Leland, North Carolina, specifically, whether the privately-operated but publicly-funded charter school had violated the rights of female students by stipulating what they could and could not wear. The ACLU reports that, “Girls at Charter Day School, together with their parents, challenged the skirts requirement as sex discrimination under the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution and Title IX.”

For general purposes and for the purpose of this case in particular, it is first important to appreciate that, while all non-profit and for-profit charter schools are privately-operated schools, many, including “Charter Day School,” are also owned-operated by a private educational management organization (EMO).[1] This is another layer of privatization, another level of private ownership and control. In this vein, it is important to grasp that the legal framework that applies to private entities differs qualitatively from the legal framework that applies to public entities. Private actors and state actors operate in different legal spheres. The U.S. Constitution, for example, does not apply to the acts of private entities; it applies mainly to acts of government. Indeed, the private-public distinction shapes the laws and institutions of many countries. As a general rule, no public schools in America are operated by an EMO.

It is also legally significant that the parents of the students suing “Charter Day School” voluntarily enrolled their daughters in the privately-operated charter school. No one is forced or compelled to enroll in a charter school in the United States. Nor is the state compelling, encouraging, or coercing “Charter Day School” to adopt any particular dress code or educational philosophy for students.

As a general rule, privatized education arrangements in America (e.g., private Catholic schools that charge tuition) have always been able to adopt the dress code they want without any government interference. It is generally recognized that, as private schools, they can essentially adopt whatever dress code or educational philosophy they wish to enforce, and that parents are under no obligation to enroll their child in a private school if they do not wish to do so. This has been the case for more than a century. It is one of many expressions of the long-standing public-private distinction in law, education, and society.[2]

It is also important to consider that the capital-centered ideologies of choice, individualism, and the free-market encompass the notion of doing something voluntarily, i.e., willingly and freely. It is the reason why charter school promoters repeat the disinformation that charter schools are “schools of choice” (even though charter schools typically choose parents and students more than the other way around).[3] This neoliberal logic is also consistent with the “free market” notion that parents and students are not considered humans or citizens by charter school operators, they are viewed instead as consumers and customers shopping for a “good” school that won’t fail and close, which happens every week in the crisis-prone charter school sector.[4]

Charter schools, to be clear, represent the commodification of education, the privatization and marketization of a modern human responsibility in order to enrich a handful of private interests under the banner of high ideals. For decades, neoliberals and privatizers have painstakingly starved public schools of funds so as to set them up to fail. Then they have mass-tested them with discredited corporate tests to “show” that they are “failing.” This is then followed by a sustained media and political campaign to vilify and demonize public schools so as to create antisocial public opinion against them, which then eventually “justifies” privatizing public education because “privatization will improve education.” Suddenly “innovative” charter schools appear everywhere, especially in large urban settings inhabited by thousands of marginalized low-income minorities.

The typical consequences of privatization in every sector include higher costs, less transparency, reduced quality of service, greater instability, more inefficiency, and loss of public voice. Privatization essentially undermines social progress while further enriching a handful of people driven by profit maximization. To date, whether it is vouchers, so-called “Education Savings Accounts,” or privately-operated charter schools, education privatization (“school-choice”) has not solved any problems, it has only multiplied them.[5]

With this context in mind, let us return to the court case at hand. In a 10-6 vote on June 14, 2022, the Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, “found that that the dress code [at “Charter Day School”] ran afoul of the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law.” Girls at the K-8 charter school, it was concluded, should have the freedom to wear pants and not just skirts because they have “the same constitutional rights as their peers at other public schools - including the freedom to wear pants.”

Marking the first time a federal appeals court has ever done such a thing, the Richmond Court found that “Charter Day School” is a state actor (i.e., it is a public school), which means that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment does apply to the school.

Consistent with numerous other court rulings over the years, however, the lawyer for “Charter Day School,” Aaron Streett, maintained that the Richmond court issued a flawed ruling because the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment does not apply to the charter school because the charter school is a private entity and not a state actor like a public school.

According to legal precedent, as a private actor, “Charter Day School” did not deprive any person of their constitutional rights. This view stems in part from the long-standing premise that charter schools are “independent,” “autonomous,” “innovative” schools under the law, that is, they are deregulated “free market” schools, meaning that they are exempt from most of the laws, rules, policies, and regulations that govern public schools. They do not operate like public schools. They are not so-called “government schools.” They are not arms of the state.[6] They are not connected to state authority in the same way public schools are. They are not governed by elected officials like public schools are. Charter schools operate in their own separate sphere. The fact that many charter schools are also owned or operated by private EMOs only adds an additional wrinkle to the public-private dynamic.

“Charter Day School” is currently appealing the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which may hear the case this summer (2023).

The issue of whether a charter school is a state actor or not is critical because it hits at the core issue about charter schools. This point cannot be overstated. If it is the case that “Charter Day School” is not a state actor, as the lawyer for the privately-operated school argues, then the Virginia court’s ruling represents a form of “harmful government interference” because the 14th Amendment does not apply to private actors.

Under U.S. law, “state action” is defined as “an action that is either taken directly by the state or bears a sufficient connection to the state to be attributed to it.” Another source states that a state actor is “a person who is acting on behalf of a governmental body, and is therefore subject to regulation under the United States Bill of Rights, including the First, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, which prohibit the federal and state governments from violating certain rights and freedoms.”[7]

However, as private actors charter schools are not in fact “acting on behalf of a governmental body.” Private actors are not controlled or directed by the state, at least not in the way agencies and arms of the state are, which means that the actions of privately-operated charter schools cannot be called actions taken directly by the state. State action doctrine holds that government is not responsible for the conduct of a private actor.

Even most of the entities that authorize charter schools are not public or governmental in the proper sense of the word. Many charter school authorizers are operated or governed by unelected private persons. Many of the wealthy individuals who operate or govern such entities are hand-picked by wealthy governors. The public, as a matter of course, is omitted in these arrangements. The public has no meaningful say in any part of this set-up. This is on top of the fact that charter schools themselves are not governed by publicly elected citizens either, whereas public schools are. Unelected private persons governing a deregulated private entity (which may also be owned by another private entity) is not the same as elected public school officials governing a public school that serves no private interests, admits all students at all times, has unionized teachers, can levy taxes, and is accountable only to the public.

Unlike charter schools, regular public schools, which have been around for 180 years and educate 90% of America’s youth, are in fact state actors; they are political subdivisions of the state because they not only carry out a public function but are also explicitly delegated authority by the state to carry out various public responsibilities. “Function” and “authority” are not synonyms; they are different concepts. Carrying out a role is not necessarily the same thing as having power to carry out that role. A role can be carried out by a person or entity that derives its responsibility from a higher political power. Its role can be delegated by a more influential power.

Properly speaking, charter schools are not exercising state prerogatives. Nor do they enter into what may be called a symbiotic relationship with the state. Unlike public schools, they are not state agencies proper, which explains why the state does not coerce, encourage, or compel charter schools to act in the same way it coerces, encourages, or compels public schools to act. The state has more influence and control over public schools than it does over privately-operated “free-market” charter schools. In this neoliberal legal setup, the state is not responsible for the policies and operations of deregulated charter schools; charter schools can do as they please; “no rules;” “laissez-faire;” “hands-off,” “autonomy.”  This usually means no meaningful accountability.

Charter schools are intentionally set up to operate outside the parameters and framework governing public schools. This is what makes them “innovative,” “independent,” and different. It is worth stressing again that, in the case of “Charter Day School,” the state played no direct role in creating, directing, or shaping the dress code being challenged by parents who voluntarily enrolled their children in the school. The charter school’s dress code policy was not therefore an expression of state action.

Unlike public schools, charter schools fall under private law, specifically contract law. Charter, by definition, means contract: a legally-binding agreement between two or more parties to do or not do something in a specified period of time with associated rewards and punishments. For state action doctrine this means that just because a private entity has a contract with the government that does not mean that the actions of private contractors like charter schools can be attributed to the state. Simply “partnering” with the state does not make the conduct of a private entity a form of state action. A private actor does not become public, does not become a state actor, just because it contracts with the state.

The issue of whether a charter school is public or not is often confusing to many because there is relentless disinformation from charter school promoters that charter schools are public schools when in reality they are privatized independent entities. Charter schools remain private, independent, deregulated, segregated entities even though they receive public money, are often called public, and ostensibly provide a service to the public. Interestingly, when asked what they think a charter school is, most people say they are not really sure or they think that charter schools are some sort of private school. The average person rarely thinks charter schools are public schools.

To be sure, charter schools cannot be deemed public just because they are called “public” 50 times a day. Under the law, this is not what makes an entity public. Simply labelling something a specific thing does not automatically make it that thing. In the U.S. legal system, merely labeling private conduct “public” does not make it a form of state action. Moreover, receiving public funds does not spontaneously make an entity pubic under the law. Thousands of private entities in the U.S. receive public money, for example, but they do not suddenly stop being private entities.[8]

Only narrow private interests benefit from obscuring the distinction between public and private. Public and private mean the opposite of each other. They are antonyms. They should not be confounded.

Public refers to everyone, the common good, all people, transparency, affordability, accessibility, universality, non-rivalry, and inclusiveness. Examples include public parks, public libraries, public roads, public schools, public colleges and universities, public hospitals, public restrooms, public housing, public banks, public events, and more. These places and services are available to everyone, not just a few people. They are integral to a modern civil society that recognizes the role and significance of a public sphere in modern times.

Private, on the other hand, refers to exclusivity, that is, something is private when it is “designed or intended for one's exclusive use.” Private also means:

• Secluded from the sight, presence, or intrusion of others.

• Of or confined to the individual; personal.

• Undertaken on an individual basis.

• Not available for public use, control, or participation.

• Belonging to a particular person or persons, as opposed to the public or the government.

• Of, relating to, or derived from nongovernment sources.

• Conducted and supported primarily by individuals or  groups not affiliated with governmental agencies or corporations.

• Not holding an official or public position.

• Not for public knowledge or disclosure; secret; confidential.

In its essence, private property is the right to exclude others from use of said property; it is the power of exclusion;[9] it is not concerned with transparency, inclusion, the common good, or benefitting everyone. This is why when something is privatized, e.g., a public enterprise, it is no longer available to everyone; it becomes something possessed and controlled by the few. This then ends up harming the public interest; it does not improve efficiency, strengthen services, lower costs, increase accountability, or expand democracy.

Charter schools are labeled “public” mainly for self-serving reasons, specifically to lay claim to public funds that legitimately belong to public schools alone. If charter schools were openly and honestly acknowledged as being private entities they would not be able to place any valid claim to public funds and they would not be able to exist for one day. This presents a contradiction for defenders of charter schools who want to “have it both ways,” that is, be public when it suits them and act private when it serves them. This is the definition of arbitrary and irrational.

To be clear, the relationship between the state and charter schools is not the same as the relationship between the state and public schools. This is one reason why the rights of students, teachers, and parents in charter schools differ from the rights of students, teachers, and parents in public schools. Thus, for example, while the vast majority of public school teachers are unionized, about 90% of charter school teachers are not unionized. Charter schools are notoriously anti-union. They energetically fight efforts by teachers to unionize to defend their rights. Teachers in charter schools are considered “at-will” employees, meaning that they can be fired at any time for any reason. This is not the case in public schools where due process, tenure, and some collective security still exist. Conditions are more humane and more pro-worker in public schools, even when these chronically-underfunded and constantly-vilified schools face one neoliberal assault after another. This is also linked to why many charter schools across the country can legally hire numerous uncertified and unlicensed teachers.

Another profound difference between charter schools and public schools is that the former cannot levy taxes while the latter can. A tax, as is well-known, can only be laid for a public purpose, which means that charter schools do not possess the characteristics of a political subdivision of the state; they are not fully exercising a public function.

Many other legal differences could be listed.

It would be more accurate to say that charter schools resemble traditional private schools far more than they resemble regular public schools, yet they continue to be mislabeled “public schools.”[10] In practice, charter schools are quintessentially private schools. See Outlaw Charter Schools: Can A Charter School Not Be A Charter School? for additional analysis of these themes.

The question of whether a charter school is a state actor or not also has big implications for thousands of other organizations (e.g., hospitals, utility companies, colleges, etc.) across the country because various constitutional provisions typically do not apply to private entities and businesses. This case is therefore of national importance. The public-private distinction at stake in this education case goes beyond the issue of the dress code at “Charter Day School.”

The “Charter Day School” case is currently in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court. The issue at stake—the public-private distinction—is so significant that, on January 9, 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court asked President Joe Biden’s administration to give their view on the case. The U.S. Supreme Court States that the key issue at stake is: “Whether a private entity that contracts with the state to operate a charter school engages in state action when it formulates a policy without coercion or encouragement by the government.” This move is seen by charter school promoters as a positive sign that the highest court in the land is willing to consider the case.

In the final analysis, with or without a ruling from any court, as privatized, marketized, corporatized arrangements that celebrate consumerism, competition, and individualism, charter schools have no legitimate claim to the public funds, facilities, resources, and authority that belong only to public schools. No court ruling, one way or the other, will change this fact. Claiming that charter schools are public schools for the purpose of laying claim to public wealth that belongs solely to public schools, damages public schools, the public interest, the economy, and the national interest. It does not help low-income minority youth or close the long-standing “achievement gap” rooted in poverty, racism, inequality, and disempowerment.

Charter schools do not raise the level of education or improve society. Thirty plus years of evidence shows that charter schools mainly enrich narrow private interests. Without charter schools, public schools would have tens of billions of additional dollars to pay teachers and improve learning for all students, especially low-income minority students enrolled in urban schools. This would make a huge difference. No charter schools would also mean that thousands of students, teachers, and parents would no longer have to feel angry and abandoned by charter schools that close every week (often abruptly).

Neoliberals have never cared about public schools or the public interest; they are masters of disinformation and self-serving to the extreme. Neoliberals have worked ceaselessly over the last few decades to methodically privatize public education in America under the banner of high ideals while actually lowering the level of education, increasing chaos in education, and enriching a handful of people along the way. The so-called “school choice” political-economic project has little to do with advancing education and improving opportunities for millions of marginalized youth and more to do with profit maximization in the context of a continually failing economy. “School choice” has brought immense suffering to public education and the nation. “School-choice” does not have a human face.

The only sense in which charter schools may be called state actors is that they are neoliberal state actors because they are actively organized by wealthy individuals and groups that control and influence many state positions, levers, institutions, and individuals. In this sense, charter schools are indeed acting on behalf of the neoliberal state and are therefore neoliberal state actors. This is bound to happen in a society where Wall Street and the state become indistinguishable.

About 3.5 million students are currently enrolled in roughly 7,600 charter schools in 45 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Guam.

Shawgi Tell, PhD, is author of the book “Charter School Report Card.” His main research interests include charter schools, neoliberal education policy, privatization and political economy. He can be reached at stell5@naz.edu.

Notes

[1] It is also worth recognizing that the non-profit/for-profit distinction is generally a distinction without a difference, that is, both types of charter schools engage in enriching a handful of private interests under the veneer of high ideals; profiteering takes place in both types of schools.

[2] See the works of Jürgen Habermas for further discussion and analysis of the origin and evolution of the public sphere in the Anglo-American world.

[3] See School’s Choice: How Charter Schools Control Access and Shape Their Enrollment (Teachers College Press, 2021).

[4] See 5,000 Charter Schools Closed in 30 Years (2021). This is a high number of charter school closures given that there are only about 7,600 charter schools operating in the U.S. today.

[5] See The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back (2023).

[6] In March 2023, in a separate case, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed that IDEA, a charter school operator, is not an arm of the state.

[7] The phrase “state action” does not appear in the U.S. Constitution.

[8] As a matter of principle, no public funds should flow to any private organization because such funds are produced by working people and belong rightfully to society as a whole.

[9] The right to exclude is “one of the most treasured” rights of property ownership.

[10] In Rendell-Baker v. Kohn, 457 U.S. 830 (1982), the court held that “Even when a private school is substantially funded and regulated by the state, it is not a state actor if it is not exercising state prerogatives.”

Manufactured Crisis Over US Debt Ceiling Sets Stage for Bipartisan Assault on Social Security and Medicare

[AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib]

By Barry Grey

Republished from World Socialist Website.

It is now one week out from the “X-date,” June 1, when the US will purportedly default on its debt obligations, triggering a “catastrophe,” unless the Democrats and Republicans can agree on a bipartisan deal raising the debt ceiling in return for brutal cuts in social programs on which tens of millions of working people rely.

Behind the mutual recriminations between the two capitalist parties and the stage-managed crisis negotiations, there is a basic agreement: All of the social gains made by the working class in the course of more than a century of struggle must be wiped out to pay for the drive by the American ruling class to remove, by force of arms, Russia and China as obstacles to US hegemony, even if it means triggering a nuclear war.

The social cuts implemented in an eventual debt limit/budget deal will be only a down payment. They will set the stage for an assault on the core entitlement programs—Medicare and Social Security—extracted from the ruling class in the class battles of the 1930s and 1960s.

President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California walk down the House steps Friday, March 17, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington. [AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib]

On Wednesday, with the talks between President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy having hit a “speed bump” and the financial markets indicating increasing nervousness, the Washington Post published an editorial backing Biden’s proposal for a two-year spending freeze and $1 trillion in cuts over the next decade. At the same time, the newspaper owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos reiterated its demand that both parties tackle what it deems the real problem, the cost of the mandatory programs that stand outside of annual discretionary spending—Social Security and Medicare.

“Mr. McCarthy keeps claiming the nation has a ‘spending problem,’” the Post wrote. “The part he leaves out is the spending problem is driven largely by the fact that Social Security, Medicare and health-care costs are shooting up. Yet House Republicans and Mr. Biden don’t want to touch Social Security and Medicare.”

The editorial is part of an expanding wave of media commentary on the need to “reform” or privatize these core social programs. On Sunday, CNN’s “State of the Union” program featured Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, a so-called “moderate” who advocates tying Social Security to the stock market and essentially privatizing it.

“Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan interviewed congressmen Brian Fitzpatrick, Republican of Pennsylvania, and Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey, members of the “moderate” Problem Solvers Caucus in the House. Fitzpatrick declared:

Medicare will run out of money in 2028. Social Security will run out of money in 2034 … until we tackle the mandatory spending and get a handle on our long-term sustainability of our debt and deficit, we’re just playing around the margins.

McCarthy himself spoke along similar lines before his meeting Monday with Biden, while refraining from explicitly targeting Social Security and Medicare. “I don’t want you to think at the end of the day, the bill that we come up with is going to solve all this problem,” he told reporters. “But it’s going to be a step to finally acknowledge our problem and put one step in the right direction. And we’re going to come back the next day and get the next step.”

Biden has already made a large down payment on the new austerity drive with his ending of the national COVID-19 emergency, which has not only increased the risk of infection and death from the ongoing pandemic, but authorized state governments to review their Medicaid rolls in order to terminate people’s benefits. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that between 5.3 million and 14.2 million people will lose Medicaid coverage just through that process alone.

Graph showing decline in tax receipts even as corporate profits rise. [Photo: This graph was published by the Center for American Progress. (online)]

Far from increased social spending driving the rise in the national debt, it remains sharply down, when adjusted for inflation and population growth, from the levels preceding the bipartisan Budget Control Act of 2011. That bill, which followed the financial collapse of 2008, the multitrillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street, and the imposition of wage and benefit cuts and wage tiers under the auto restructuring overseen by the Obama administration, marked the first use of the debt ceiling, previously raised as a matter of course, to impose brutal attacks on the working class.

In all the media coverage, no explanation is given as to the real causes of the soaring national debt or why it is the working class that must pay the price.

What are the real sources of the increase in the national debt to its current $31.4 trillion?

• Military and war spending: The United States spent between $4 trillion and $6 trillion on the 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a Harvard analysis.

  Last year alone, the Biden administration allocated $113 billion in arms to Ukraine and this year proposed a record $1 trillion Pentagon budget. Last week at the G7 summit in Hiroshima, before returning to the US and holding budget talks with McCarthy, Biden announced an additional $375 billion in arms for the right-wing puppet regime in Kiev.

• Tax cuts for corporations and the rich: The George W. Bush administration enacted two rounds of tax cuts, overwhelmingly benefiting the wealthy. The Obama administration made them permanent in 2012. That has cost $4 trillion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

  The Trump tax cut of December 2017 handed over $2 trillion to the corporate elite, including the reduction of the official corporate tax rate to 21 percent. As Biden noted in his press conference last Sunday from Hiroshima, 55 US corporations that made $400 billion last year paid zero in taxes, and US billionaires pay an average tax rate of 8 percent.

  According to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, corporate profits rose by 20 percent between 2014 and 2020, while corporate tax receipts fell by more than 60 percent.

  In 2018, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), corporate tax revenue as a share of GDP in the US, at 1.1 percent, was lower than every other member country except Latvia.

Graph showing the US has the second-lowest percentage of corporate tax revenue as a share of gross domestic product, just above Latvia. [Photo: This graph was published by the Center for American Progress. (online)]

• Bank and corporate bailouts: The Bush and Obama administrations enacted $2 trillion in emergency measures following the subprime mortgage collapse in 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession. In addition, the Federal Reserve funneled trillions more to Wall Street through its program of “quantitative easing.” Meanwhile, tens of millions of workers lost their homes and life savings as a result of the criminal practices of the bankers.

  The Trump administration, with the support of the Democrats in Congress, allocated $3.4 trillion in the March 2020 CARES Act to unfreeze the Treasury bond market and rescue banks and corporations from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Fed added trillions more through its expansion of “quantitative easing.”

War mongering, greed, and criminality have impelled the policies pursued by the parasitic American ruling elite and driven up the national debt.

Exchange Rate Depreciation and Real Wages

By Prabhat Patnaik

Republished from People’s Democracy.

MOST people, including even trained economists, fail to appreciate the fact that an exchange rate depreciation, if it is to work in reducing the trade deficit in a capitalist economy, must necessarily hurt the working class by lowering the real wage rate. A capitalist economy, looking at it differently, improves its trade balance, for which it must improve its competitiveness, by lowering the real wage rate; and an exchange rate depreciation is one way of doing so.

Most textbooks in economics do not mention this fact. They are written from the point of view not only of bourgeois economics in general, but of a bourgeois economics that invokes a model of a capitalist economy that is far removed from reality. They see this economy as consisting of a set of markets in each of which a price-rise is supposed to lower excess demand. The foreign exchange market is one such; and the text books simply say that as long as the demand and supply curves have the right shape in this market (so that excess demand is lowered through a price-rise), an exchange rate depreciation, which is the same as a rise in the price of foreign exchange, lowers the excess demand for foreign exchange, namely lowers the trade deficit. This is where their analysis of an exchange rate depreciation usually ends; and then they move on to discussing under what conditions the curves have the right shape.

This entire mode of analysis however is flawed. Most economies need imported inputs, usually oil and natural gas; the oil-producing economies on the other hand need a range of non-oil raw materials which they cannot grow themselves but cannot do without. The imported inputs,together with labour and domestically-produced current inputs, constitute the list of current inputs. And in all capitalist economies, the prices of commodities are determined as a mark-up over the costs of current inputs per unit of output. This is of course true under monopoly capitalism. This is how oligopolists operate; they fix prices in this manner and let the level of demand at this price determine what is produced. Some argue that capitalism even in the earlier period was characterised by such price-fixing, and that the classical political economists’ conception of free competition (which Marx took over) where the producers accepted a price impersonally determined by the market, was not a realistic picture. But this discussion is not germane to the present issue; the basic point here is that in any modern economy, prices are fixed by oligopolists as a mark-up over the unit prime cost.

Now, suppose a currency depreciates by 10 per cent; then the local currency prices of all imported inputs go up by 10 per cent, and therefore the part of unit cost arising from imported inputs in the production of any final good goes up by 10 per cent. If real wages were to remain unchanged, then money wages will have to keep going up proportionately as prices rise; and in such a case prices will ultimately rise by 10 per cent in local currency, with money wages also rising by 10 per cent and hence unit labour cost too also rising by 10 per cent. (The unit prime cost arising from domestically-produced inputs rises in the same ratio as the final produced goods price and therefore will also rise, automatically, by 10 per cent). But if local currency prices rise by 10 per cent following an exchange rate depreciation of 10 per cent, then this means there has been no real effective depreciation whatsoever; and hence not an iota of difference will be made to the trade deficit.

If domestic prices rise by 10 per cent following an exchange rate depreciation of 10 per cent, then the prices of export goods in terms of foreign currency would remain unchanged; and hence there is no question of any increase in the quantity of exports owing to their becoming cheaper. Likewise, if domestic prices rise by 10 per cent following an exchange rate depreciation of 10 per cent, then the local currency price of imported goods would rise by 10 per cent, the same as domestically produced goods, in which case there is no question of any reduction in the quantity of imports. It follows therefore that with no increase in the quantity of exports and no decrease in the quantity of imports, the trade deficit measured in foreign currency remains unchanged.

An absolutely essential condition for an exchange rate depreciation to work therefore (and this is only a necessary condition with no guarantee that its fulfilment will actually improve the trade balance) is that domestic prices must not rise at the same rate as the price of foreign exchange owing to an exchange rate depreciation. And this can happen only if money wages do not rise by the same proportion as the final goods prices; that is, if there is a fall in the real wage rate.

This can be seen as follows. If, say, a 10 per cent exchange rate depreciation is to make any difference to the trade balance, then the domestic prices must rise by less than 10 per cent, say, by 7 per cent, for only then would there be some real effective depreciation. For this to happen, the unit prime cost must rise by 7 per cent, as the mark-up by the capitalists is a given ratio. Now, the unit prime cost has two relevant components: the unit labour cost and the unit imported-input cost (unit home-produced input cost rises in the same ratio as the final goods price and therefore need not be considered separately here). Therefore, for the unit prime cost to rise by 7 per cent, since the unit imported-input cost rises by 10 per cent, the unit labour input cost must rise by less than 7 per cent, say by 5 per cent. With given labour coefficients in production this can happen only if money wages rise by 5 per cent, when prices rise by 7 per cent; that is, when real wages fall.

Of course, there can be real effective exchange rate depreciation, with domestic prices rising by less than the 10 per cent rise in the price of foreign exchange, even with real wages remaining unchanged, if the profit margins of the capitalists could be lowered. But this is precisely what is not possible in a capitalist economy. This can happen in a socialist economy where the enterprises, mostly State-owned, can be directed to charge lower profit margins, so that a real effective exchange rate depreciation can be brought about with no fall in the real wage rate; but in a capitalist economy, the profit-margin is not amenable to any reduction. A real effective exchange rate depreciation therefore necessarily imposes a squeeze on the real wage.

But even assuming that the workers are not strong enough to resist such a reduction in their real wage rate, there is no reason to expect the trade balance to improve: if the trade balance is to improve then domestic employment and output will increase, but this would mean a reduction in output and employment in some other countries at whose expense this economy would be increasing its market-share. If those countries retaliate by depreciating their exchange rates in the same proportion, then there would be no change in market shares and no change in trade balances either.

When the competing countries depreciate their exchange rates in retaliation, the real wages go down in those countries as well. This mode of reducing trade deficit therefore, when no country is making any independent effort to raise the level of demand through income redistribution in favour of the workers or through larger government expenditure, simply results in each squeezing its workers to no avail.

The attempt to raise domestic employment at the expense of rivals, through an exchange rate depreciation (that is supposed to work through reducing the trade deficit) is called a “beggar-my-neighbour” policy. The pursuit of “beggar-my-neighbour” policies by several capitalist economies raises employment nowhere while reducing the real wage rate everywhere.

But that is not all. The reduction in real wages can, under certain circumstances, even lead to a reduction in employment everywhere because of the associated reduction in aggregate demand. It is a symptom of the irrationality of capitalism that a group of countries vying with one another to improve their positions by pursuing “beggar-my-neighbour” policies, may ultimately end up with each country becoming worse off than before.

It is a sign of the hopelessness induced by the current capitalist crisis, that, notwithstanding the experience of the 1930s, voices are audible in the US today which seek a revival of the US economy through a depreciation of the dollar.

Tipped and Tricked: It's Time To Pay Service Workers A Living Wage

By Liam Easton-Calabria

Republished from Socialist Alternative.

If you’ve recently been out to eat, grabbed a cup of coffee, taken a Lyft, or gotten a haircut, you’ve likely given someone a tip. Leaving a tip as a sign of appreciation is a regular practice in the U.S., and is more common here than any other country in the world. Tipping has become increasingly prevalent across different service sector jobs, and as wages have stagnated and the cost of living has increased dramatically, tips make up an important part of the income of roughly five million workers in the U.S. While tipping is a lifeline for workers in today’s current working conditions, the economic model of tipping as a whole is anti-worker and negatively impacts both the worker and the customer. 

Most tipped workers would say that they really need tips. A restaurant server, thought of as the “classic” tipped worker, usually earns a majority of their income through tips, while getting a subminimum wage from their employer. In many states, this subminimum wage is only the federal minimum of $2.13 an hour. Servers are therefore wholly reliant on customers at restaurants to tip between 15-20% of sales in order to make ends meet. When customers tip below this, or not at all, it can put servers and their families in financially strenuous positions. The difference in tipped wages month to month can determine whether a family is able to pay their rent.

A Growing Problem

Tipped work has changed over time, however, and tips now play a larger role in work outside of just the restaurant industry. There are more service jobs than ever before. This March, the leisure and hospitality sector saw the most growth with 72,000 new positions, while the manufacturing, construction, and retail sectors all saw job losses. An economy dominated by service jobs means many more workers holding multiple jobs in precarious industries. The custom of tipping has expanded to include thousands of counter-service workers, including baristas and food service, and gig workers that work for companies like Uber or Doordash. These workers make minimum wage and typically make far less in tips than servers. The pathetic state of the $7.25/hr federal minimum wage means tips are still vital to making rent, buying groceries, and generally scraping by. In the age of persistent inflation and stagnant wages, even $15/hr is a poverty wage across the U.S. To many workers, tips make it possible to survive, and therefore tipping itself can feel like an act of solidarity between working people. 

However, at the heart of the matter, tipping allows bosses to shove the burden of providing a subminimum wage onto other workers, i.e. customers, generating even more exorbitant profits off the cheap labor of their employees. This relationship becomes abundantly clear when looking at the origins of the custom. Tipping began in the U.S. after slavery was abolished following the Civil War. Employers in the service industry took advantage of the limited economic opportunity for Black people recently freed from slavery by letting them “work” but paying them no wage at all. Instead, bosses pressured customers to provide a small extra charge to their server. The extreme racism of the post-Reconstruction-era U.S. allowed employers to continue profiting off the free labor of an underclass of workers and continue a slavery-like business model. 

Tipped work today has sanitized its image and is a far cry from the horrors Black workers endured in the post-Reconstruction period. But the power imbalance created by the tipping system remains the same, pitting service workers against working class customers. Customer-facing tipped workers endure far greater levels of harassment and exploitation than their non-tipped counterparts. The reliance we have on our tips means we are much more vulnerable to mistreatment and are financially incentivized to withstand verbal and even physical abuse while on the job. Whether a customer has an angry outburst about their overcooked burger or makes a sexist comment to their barista, the tipped worker has to judge how their response will affect the tips from their customer and those around them. Smiling through these types of situations is often the choice that workers have to make. Some of my coworkers at Starbucks would actually switch positions or step off the floor when customers with a record of harassment were seen waiting in line, but this wasn’t always possible Far from being on the side of their employees, managers and supervisors are financially incentivized to downplay or ignore instances of mistreatment and penalize workers who speak up.

Sexual harassment is one of the biggest abuses increased by the tipping system. All tipped workers report higher rates of sexual harassment, but women are by far the most affected. 71% of female restaurant workers report having been sexually harassed on the job, and not only from customers – 41% report facing harassment from a manager or supervisor! Our low wages make the financial exchange from customer to employee extremely important, and in our deeply sexist capitalist society, that power imbalance manifests in extreme objectification of women service workers. In a recent trend on TikTok, female servers test out and report back that wearing their hair in pigtails results in significantly greater tips. While these servers recognize that this is because men are sexually infantilizing them, many say they are going to keep wearing their hair up after testing the “pigtail theory.” As one server put it with a shrug, “single mom,” pointing to herself. This trend is just one of many examples of how women in the service industry are pressured to withstand abuse and even normalize their own objectification.

Gig workers like Uber, Lyft, and Doordash drivers face a different side of the problem: consistent undertipping. While it has long been expected that customers leave a solid 20% tip for taxi drivers, the tradition hasn’t translated to app drivers in the same way. Multiple reports show that Uber drivers average under 10% in tips. This may be because of the depersonalization of the app experience or because these companies pile on junk fees that inflate the price of their service. App drivers are subject to very inconsistent wages because of fluctuating demand, especially since the pandemic. This, compounded by the high price of gas, means tips are all the more important for drivers, sometimes to just break even for a food delivery. Black and Hispanic workers are much more likely to work these jobs than their white counterparts. 

Make The Bosses Pay!

Ultimately, customers are paying the price for this tipping culture. The Square app may give a suggested tip amount of $1, $2, or $3 when a worker takes 30 seconds to scoop your ice cream or pour your black coffee, and even suggests a tip for the server staff of 20% when picking up food, not dining in. Our tips go to workers (usually), but allow the bosses to keep wages at the bare minimum while lining their pockets. The point-of-service tipping model pressures the customer to tip on things that we may not have in the past, and with companies using inflation as an excuse to blatantly price-gouge us, this extra cost can sting. The anxiety that comes with this has come to be known as “guilt-tipping” because most people know service workers deserve more than what they’re getting, but rightly feel as though they shouldn’t be the one to pay for it.

For the time being, we absolutely shouldn’t stop tipping. We should stand with unionized Starbucks workers fighting for credit card tipping, as it would dramatically improve workers’ lives and especially because it’s been used as a bargaining chip against the union drive. Making the bosses pay for our labor, not other workers, will require mass unionization of the service industry, built on campaigns for the best possible wage increases, so we can begin to phase out this anti-worker custom and replace it with a stable and livable income for all.

Petro/Márquez and the Question of Democratic Socialism in Latin America

By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso

On September 11th, 1973, a US-backed military coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Chile led by Socialist Party leader Salvador Allende. Given his own success, Allende believed that electoral means could bring about socialist ends. Despite this optimism, the coup took his life after he responded to the attack by staying inside the presidential palace to defend it at all costs. Following the tragedy, Cuban revolutionary and then-Prime Minister Fidel Castro said the following:

“The Chilean example teaches us the lesson that it is impossible to make the revolution with the people alone. Arms are also necessary! And that arms alone aren’t enough to make a revolution. People are also necessary!”

“Chilean revolutionaries know that now there’s no alternative other than revolutionary armed struggle. They tried the electoral way — the peaceful way — and the imperialists and reactionaries changed the rules of the game. The reactionaries trampled the Constitution, the laws, the Parliament — everything.”

Twenty-five years after Castro uttered these words, Latin America experienced a phenomenon now known as the “Pink Tide.” This refers to a wave of elections that saw many socialist executives take power democratically across the region. It began with the 1998 landslide victory of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Chávez was followed by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, Evo Morales of Bolivia, and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina. Many of the region’s more robust electorates soon rejected this trend, however — namely those of Brazil, Uruguay, Ecuador, and Argentina -- electing conservative leaders soon after. It wasn’t until the late 2010s that a second Pink Tide took hold — this time, featuring the likes of Andres Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, Pedro Castillo in Peru, Gabriel Boric in Chile, and, most recently, Gustavo Petro in Colombia. Petro’s election last year rocked the status quo, as decades of pendular motion between liberals and conservatives had cast aside the prospects for socialist leadership.

Petro is a product of the leftist guerrilla movements that emerged in Colombia during the mid-1960s, a development in political militancy largely born out of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. From 1974 to 1987, he was a member of the 19th of April Movement — colloquially referred to as M-19 — an urban guerrilla effort with the goal of expanding electoral democracy in the country via armed struggle. The future premier would go on to pursue a prolific political career, serving in the Colombia House of Representatives from 1991 to 2006, the Senate from 2006 to 2012, and as mayor of the capital Bogotá from 2012 to 2015.

Petro’s chosen vice president, Francia Márquez, is an equally momentous figure. A native of Yolombó — a small mountain town located in the Cauca region — she began working as an environmental activist at 13, participating in the Ovejas River defense from 1994 to 1997, an effort to prevent the development of dams in an important water source for her community. In 2014, Márquez led a direct action of 80 Afro-Colombian women. The demonstrators marched from the Cauca to Bogotá, demanding an end to illegal mining in the region.

Their efforts were successful. By the end of 2016, the Colombian government had disassembled and removed all illegal mining machinery. This victory earned Márquez the 2018 Goldman Prize for excellence in environmental protection. She is also the first Afro-Colombiana vice president in the nation’s history.

During their presidential run, Petro and Márquez outlined a platform of five reform agendas:

1. Labor: shorten the workday, increase access to overtime pay, and regulate short-term contract work.

2. Pensions: provide a guaranteed 223,000 Colombian pesos per month — roughly $155 adjusted for purchasing power — to the 75% of Colombians whose incomes currently do not qualify for a pension.

3. Taxation: raise $5.6 billion in revenue by raising wealth taxes, eliminating corporate exemptions, and raising export tariffs on oil and gas.

4. Political System: prohibit private funding of political campaigns and lower the age requirement for congresspeople.

5. Healthcare: transfer the responsibility of selecting private health providers from individuals to municipal and provincial governments.

Since the inauguration of Petro and Márquez in August of last year, only tax reform has found legislative success, having passed in November of 2022 with a revised fundraising goal of $4.2 billion. The labor and pension reforms remain in congressional limbo while the political reform has already died, having been canceled by Petro in March of this year after legislative changes severely transformed the proposal from its initial iteration. As for healthcare, the reform has prompted notable scrutiny and opposition by all parties, including President of Congress and Petro ally Roy Barreras. This backlash caused Education Minister Alejandro Gaviria to resign. Revised language has since softened the proposed healthcare reform considerably.

Beyond the minutiae of legalese, however, the ambitious aims of the administration’s reform agenda have placed a legitimate target on the backs of Petro and Márquez. At best, they’ve become the subjects of inflammatory rhetoric and baseless criticism. At worst, they’ve become victims of attempted acts of violence.

While campaigning, Petro had to cancel a visit to the nation’s coffee-growing region after learning of a credible death threat against him. The threat came from La Cordillera, a paramilitary organization with ties to the drug trade, law enforcement, the Colombian military, and far-right politicians. Márquez has faced similar challenges.

She narrowly survived two assassination attempts this year alone. The first happened in January when seven kilograms of explosives were found near her home in the Cauca. The second took place in March, when explosives were found near an airport Márquez was passing through in the Choco region.

Since then, right-wing demonstrations against Petro and Márquez have become commonplace. The most notable of which took place on May 5th. The event was held at Bogotá’s Plaza de Bolívar, and featured thousands of retired military personnel as well as law enforcement officials. The occupational character of the crowd triggers bitter déjà vu for anyone familiar with democratic socialist history in Latin America at large. After all, the successor to Allende in post-coup Chile was none other than Augusto Pinochet, the commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army during Allende’s short-lived presidency.

Luckily, this correlation has not gone unnoticed, as Petro himself took active steps to counteract the trend’s more worrying manifestations late last month. On April 26th, he announced the resignation of seven ministers in his cabinet in hopes of removing the internal dissonance and gridlock the cohort had been struggling with, particularly with regard to his proposed health reforms. In early May, Petro also tweeted out, saying, “Why are they conspiring for a coup? Because they are terrified that we will end impunity. The truth intimidates them so much that they despair.”

Cautionary measures and public denouncements notwithstanding, Petro and Márquez should brace for what is to come. They must embrace the optimism of Allende alongside the cynicism of Castro. For the belief in electorally derived socialism cannot mean the dismissal of its most glaring shortcomings. Only by taking heed — pushing their agenda onward while remaining wary of undemocratic attacks — will this administration entrench a legacy of democratic socialism in Colombia and serve as a success story for prospective socialist nations across the region.

Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso is a Colombian Marxist. In his writing, he seeks to interrogate the nuances of socialist thought and praxis.

Biden Calls Cuba “Terrorist” While The People Demand An End to U.S. Terrorism Against Cuba

[Pictured: Thousands of Cubans gather to celebrate the country’s National Rebellion Day, a yearly commemoration of the Cuban revolution]

By Calla Mairead Walsh

While Biden doubles down on Cuba's designation as a so-called “State Sponsor of Terrorism," the US people are calling for an end to US terrorism and sanctions against Cuba.

On Tuesday, May 23rd, the State Department reported that Cuba — along with Iran, Syria, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and Venezuela — are not “not cooperating fully” in the United States’ supposed fight against terrorism. The Biden administration officially designates Cuba as a “State Sponsor of Terrorism” (SSOT), as well as Iran, Syria, and the DPRK.

Literally 0% of Americans view Cuba as a serious threat, and the Biden administration has provided no evidence of Cuba supporting terrorism in any way. Cuban and American officials even met earlier this month in Havana to discuss cooperating on anti-terrorism measures. So why is Biden keeping Cuba on the “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list?

Sixty-four years after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, the United States is still waging an economic and media war against Cuba. The administrations of Trump and now Biden have weaponized the “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list to isolate Cuba internationally and justify continuing the genocidal American blockade.

The impacts of being labeled a “State Sponsor of Terror”

It goes without saying that the United States is the biggest “State Sponsor of Terrorism” in the world. The US is the only country with over 800 foreign military bases and spends more on its military than 144 countries combined. The US has launched 251 foreign military interventions since 1991. A report recently published by Brown University shows that the post-9/11 wars the US waged in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan killed at least 4.5 million and displaced 38 to 60 million people. But the word “terrorist” is almost never applied to the US government. The term is highly politicized and subjective in the United States, used to demonize internal and external enemies and justify waging war on them, be it by bombs or blockades.

Designating Cuba as “terrorist” exacerbates the already devastating impacts of the American blockade, which has stolen an estimated $144.4 billion from the Cuban economy from the early 1960s to 2020, according to the United Nations. The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) determined that US sanctions on Cuba “constitute the most severe and prolonged system of unilateral coercive measures ever applied against any country.”

On top of the blockade, Cuba’s “terrorist” designation restricts American foreign assistance, exports of dual-use items, and loans from the World Bank. It has also prevented Cuban Americans from transferring money to family in Cuba, stopped faith-based groups from shipping humanitarian supplies, and inhibited American universities from working with Cuban academics and institutions. Non-US citizens who have traveled to Cuba, a supposedly “terrorist” country, also have restrictions on visas to enter or visit the United States.

Despite being a list created and maintained only by the United States, because of its enormous power over the global financial system, the designation inhibits the ability of Cuba — and the other countries listed — to trade normally with the rest of the world. Banks don’t want to risk giving loans to a country labeled as “terrorist” by the hegemonic United States. The United States has sued foreign companies and banks for hundreds of millions of dollars for violating American sanctions on Cuba, and many major international banks no longer provide services to Cuba for fear of retaliation. The blockade as a whole is extraterritorial and thus violates international law.

The history of Cuba’s “terrorist” designation and US terrorism against Cuba

President Ronald Reagan first added Cuba to the terror list in 1982, citing Cuba’s support for national liberation movements across the world, such as giving military aid to Angola to defeat a US-backed invasion by the South African apartheid regime. Meanwhile, the United States was backing violent terrorism to sabotage the Cuban Revolution.

As Cuba expert Professor William LeoGrande said, Cuba’s “terrorist” designation “is ironic because in the 1960s, the CIA sponsored assassinations attempts, sabotage and paramilitary raids against Cuba—what today would be called state-sponsored terrorism—and CIA-trained Cuban exiles continued such attacks for the next several decades.”

Luis Posada Carriles, the mastermind behind many of these US-backed terrorist attacks — including the bombing of Cubana Flight 455 in 1976 and a series of hotel bombings in 1997 — died peacefully in Florida in 2018, protected by the US government and lionized by the right-wing Cuban-American community in Miami. But Cuba, according to the State Department, was the real terrorist.

🧵 The terrorist attack the US doesn't want you to know about: Cubana Flight 455 🇨🇺

The CIA trained Cuban exiles who planted 2 time bombs on the plane on October 6, 1976. All 73 passengers & crew were murdered, including the entire Cuban Olympic fencing team. pic.twitter.com/UwORmyD5SL

— Calla (@CallaWalsh) March 10, 2023

During President Barack Obama’s second term, he pursued a policy of “rapprochement” with Cuba, restoring diplomatic relations and lifting some travel and trade restrictions. The Obama administration removed Cuba from the terror list, saying, “we will continue to have differences with the Cuban government, but our concerns over a wide range of Cuba’s policies and actions fall outside the criteria that is relevant to whether to rescind Cuba’s designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism.”

Obama’s “friendly” policy was still aimed at regime change through a new set of tactics, and he continued funding covert operations and “democracy promotion” programs aimed at undermining the Cuban Revolution. Nevertheless, rapprochement had positive effects for the Cuban and American people, especially renewed travel and people-to-people exchanges between the two countries. All of this was undone by Donald Trump.

Trump tightened the blockade and added an additional 243 sanctions on Cuba. Then, just four days after the January 6th insurrection, Trump and his neoconservative Secretary of State Mike Pompeo redesignated Cuba as a “State Sponsor of Terrorism.” They made this last-minute move in bitter spite of Cuba, but also to create a political obstacle for President Biden, who would be pressured from different sides to keep or remove Cuba’s “terrorist” designation.

Biden and Trump’s hawkish Cuba policy

Many Cubans and Americans alike hoped Biden would re-normalize US-Cuba relations as he promised during his campaign, when he said he would “promptly reverse the failed Trump policies that have inflicted harm on the Cuban people and done nothing to advance democracy and human rights.” But Biden has changed little. He slightly eased some Trump-era restrictions in May 2022 but has also renewed his predecessor’s harshest measures. As a result, Cuba — also impacted by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine — is experiencing its worst economic crisis and fuel shortages in decades.

The economic crisis in Cuba is fueling a political crisis for Biden at the border, as more Cubans than ever are leaving for the United States to escape the crushing impacts of sanctions. A group of Democratic lawmakers is urging Biden to lift Trump-era sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela to slow the surge of migration, but Biden has not moved a finger. Instead, he follows the line of conservative Cuban-American lawmakers on Cuba policy, especially Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, who Biden needs to push his appointments through the confirmation process.

21 House Democrats urged @POTUS last week to lift Trump-era sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela contributing to record levels of migration:

“Ending these indiscriminate economic sanctions is an indispensable part of addressing the migrant crisis.”https://t.co/VZbkZ7AgRZ pic.twitter.com/useckZPg96

— Belly of the Beast (@bellybeastcuba) May 15, 2023

Menendez, who is currently under investigation for corruption, lambasted his fellow Democrats’ push against Trump-era sanctions and claimed that the Cuban and Venezuelan governments — not US policy — were solely responsible for the economic crises in those countries. The Washington Post reported that “Privately, senior Biden officials have conceded that picking a fight with [Menendez] is not worth whatever benefit might come from relaxing sanctions on [Cuba and Venezuela], even if it would fulfill a campaign promise Biden made to restore President Barack Obama’s policies toward Cuba.”

Despite Biden claiming to care about “human rights” and “supporting the Cuban people,” he is not changing his internationally condemned policy — which violates Cuba’s sovereignty and human rights — because doing so is not politically expedient.

Activists who support normalizing US-Cuba relations have concentrated on pressuring Biden to remove Cuba from the terror list because, as Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad wrote in Peoples Dispatch, “Biden can remove Cuba from this list with a stroke of his pen. It’s as simple as that” — unlike the blockade, which is a complex amalgamation of hundreds of different laws in the hands of Congress.

In the State Department’s most recent public remarks on Cuba, they have doubled down on Trump’s policy of keeping Cuba on the list. Earlier this year, far-right Florida Republicans Maria Salazar and Marco Rubio introduced the FORCE Act in the House and Senate, respectively, to codify into law Cuba’s “terrorist” designation so that it could only be removed by Congress, not the President alone.

And not only that. Cuba would have to meet impossible criteria, completely changing their political and economic system to be what the United States defines as “free,” in order for the designation to be lifted. As People’s Dispatch wrote, “Essentially, Salazar is demanding that the Cuban people overthrow their own government and overturn the Cuban political system which has been built by the people and for the people over the last 60 years.”

It could not be more clear that the terror list has nothing to do with preventing actual terrorism; rather, it is about harming enemy states of the US. In March, when Salazar interrogated Secretary of State Antony Blinken about Cuba’s “terrorist” designation, he said that Cuba would have to “meet a very high bar” to be removed from the list and the State Department had no plans to do so.

Earlier this month, Cuban journalist Liz Oliva Fernandez stumped State Department Spokesperson Vedant Patel when she asked him “Why is Cuba on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list if you are trying to work with them to fight against terrorism?” He completely dodged the question, refusing to provide any examples of Cuban terrorism.

Cuba is on the U.S. state sponsors of terrorism list. But "what evidence is there that Cuba sponsors terrorism?" @LizOlivaFdez asked @StateDeputySpox yesterday.

His answer was a new one from the @StateDept.

Apparently, it has nothing to do with terrorism at all. pic.twitter.com/vMJiz1fMuB

— Belly of the Beast (@bellybeastcuba) May 3, 2023

Even anti-Cuba mainstream US media has reported that the “terrorist” designation is “bogus.” NBC News wrote, “according to half a dozen interviews with former intelligence analysts and officials who worked on Cuba policy in both Republican and Democratic administrations, the ‘consensus position’ in the US intelligence community has for decades been that the communist-led nation does not sponsor terrorism.”

Larry Wilkerson, chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell in the George W. Bush administration said that “‘Cuba is not a state sponsor of terrorism’ was a mantra from the moment I walked into the State Department to the moment I walked out. It’s a fiction that we have created…to reinforce the rationale for the blockade.”

Similarly, Congressman Jim McGovern (Democrat-Massachusetts) and Senator Patrick Leahy (Democrat-Vermont) published an op-ed in The Boston Globe explaining that “[i]t’s an open secret in Washington that Cuba does not belong on the list and that the previous false justification by the Trump administration was politically motivated.”

The #OffTheList campaign

The US government does not represent the American people on most issues — especially Cuba. The blockade of Cuba persists against the democratic will of the American people, a majority of whom have consistently opposed the blockade, especially restrictions on trading medicine and food with Cuba.

In the United States, Cuban-Americans, solidarity activists, labor unions, and local governments, have organized resistance to Biden’s designation of Cuba as a “State Sponsor of Terrorism.” Since January 2023, the National Network on Cuba (NNOC), a coalition of over 50 organizations across the US working to end the blockade, has been leading an international campaign to get Cuba #OffTheList.

On June 25th, this movement will rally at the White House — and in other locations around the world — to demand Biden take Cuba off the list, lift all US sanctions, and end US terrorism against Cuba. The NNOC is organizing these rallies alongside the Canadian Network on Cuba, ANSWER Coalition, CODEPINK, IFCO/Pastors for Peace, the Alliance for Cuba Engagement and Respect (ACERE), the International People’s Assembly, and over 70 other groups.

The voices of the American people and our progressive movements are clear: we want normalized relations with Cuba. Just in the past couple of years…

• Labor unions and city councils have passed over 80 resolutions supporting an end to the blockade, promoting scientific collaboration with Cuba, and urging that Cuba be removed from the terror list. And, just last week, the Washington, DC Council unanimously voted to pass a Cuba solidarity resolution and sent copies to Biden and key congresspeople urging them to end the blockade. Combined, these resolutions represent well over 50 million Americans.

• The 33 member states of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) demanded that the United States remove Cuba from the terror list and “reiterated their rejection of the US unilateral lists and certifications that affect Latin American countries.”

• Across the world, there have been monthly rallies and car caravans initiated by Cuban-Americans calling to end the blockade, take Cuba off the list, and build Puentes de Amor (bridges of love) between the American and Cuban people.

• Over 100 Democratic House members urged Biden to remove Cuba from the SSOT list and normalize US-Cuba relations. Their open letter was signed by big names like Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations Chair Barbara Lee of California, Rules Committee Chair James McGovern of Massachusetts, and Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Gregory Meeks of New York.

• Nearly 9,000 Cuban and American business owners sent a letter to Biden demanding he lift Trump-era sanctions and deliver on promises to help Cuba’s private sector, with the main demand being to take Cuba off the terror list.

• Over 10,000 people and 100 progressive advocacy groups signed an open letter organized by CODEPINK urging Biden to reverse Trump’s terrorism designation for Cuba and to reinstate Obama-era policy with the island.

• Hundreds of US lawyers wrote to Biden urging him to take Cuba off the list.

• We are rallying at the White House — and around the world — to tell Biden that Cuba is not a terrorist state, and the American people won’t stand for US terrorism against Cuba.

🚨 CALL TO ACTION! #OffTheList

Rally with us on June 25 to tell President Biden:

🇨🇺 CUBA IS NOT A TERRORIST STATE!

🇨🇺 END US ECONOMIC TERRORISM AGAINST CUBA!

Join us in DC for a weekend of action, organizational unity, and solidarity with Cuba: https://t.co/8XBARZMOow pic.twitter.com/rlDRfUa5Rb

— National Network on Cuba 🇨🇺 (@NNOCuba) May 22, 2023

Calla Walsh is an anti-imperialist organizer and writer. She is a co-chair of the National Network on Cuba, a coalition of 50+ organizations across the United States working to end the US war on Cuba.

Housing is Determined By Class Power and Profit, Not "Supply and Demand"

By Shi Sanyazi

There is a widely accepted belief among the journalists, think tanks, and politicians who animate the housing discourse that a lack of housing supply is the source of tenants’ present conditions (ever-rising rents, primarily). It follows that these thinkers advocate for a variety of policies which will, in their eyes, allow the market to “self-correct.” Once the supply of housing has met the demand, they argue that rents should go down (just like in the graphs we drew in high-school economics class!).

We shouldn’t deny that the idea has a comforting appeal. It offers a neat, ostensibly “common-sense” solution that all sides — developers, landlords, tenants — can theoretically get behind. It’s very easy to say: “match supply and demand and rents will go down — that’s just how markets work.” It’s more difficult to admit the inconvenient truth. 

The truth is that — especially in the era of algorithmic price-setting and increasingly financialized, corporate ownership of rental housing — our conditions as tenants are determined by the balance of class power, not the balance of supply and demand. 

Landlords, developers and their financiers are classes with class interests — namely, making the fattest profits possible. They are highly organized and have historically been willing to wage war on anyone who challenges their bottom line. Real estate capital’s return-on-investment depends on their capacity to out-organize and overpower tenants. 

Tenants' class interests — community control over our housing and the basic need for shelter — are, by definition, the opposite of real estate capital’s class interests.

The “supply crisis” narrative is deficient because it makes no attempt to reckon with the class relationships which define the housing market. The assumptions this narrative makes about the behavior of the housing market hinge on ignoring the structural imbalance of power between tenants and landlords, developers and their financiers. 

Landlord’s profit margins are determined by their level of organization (aided nowadays by political corruption, algorithmic financialization and consolidation of the rental housing stock) and the state’s ability to enable their exploitation with neglect, violence, and the threat of violence. Developers similarly ensure their profits by working in tandem with local governments and the police to forcibly remake neighborhoods to their liking, displacing working-class Black and brown communities. Lurking in the shadows, backing the landlords and developers, is the ruthlessly efficient and sophisticated arm of finance capital.

If we understand real estate capital as an organized class pursuing its class interests, and if we take the “pro-housing” argument at face value (i.e; increased supply will decrease rents), then we would expect real-estate interests (whose profits would be cut into if rents decreased) to oppose their policy prescriptions.

It’s quite curious then that the real-estate lobby and their political bedfellows openly support “pro-housing” non-profits and propagate their political lines. Powerful lobbying groups like the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) and the National Multifamily Housing Council revel in parroting “pro-housing” talking points. From REBNY’s 2022 testimony on Mayor Adams’ housing plan: 

New York is facing a housing crisis. A key driver of this crisis is the lack of housing production and inadequate supply to meet the needs of our growing and diverse city.

They go on to — shocker! — recommend the city and state remove regulatory barriers to development and continue to subsidize their lucrative construction projects. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that NYC Mayor, Eric Adams, agrees: he’s pledged to administrate a “city of yes,” arguing bluntly in The Economist that “although many factors contribute to the problem, at its core we have a housing crisis because we are not building enough housing.” NY Governor Kathy Hochul’s housing proposals echo the same logic. For what it's worth, Adams and Hochul have both been consistently showered with real-estate donations.

So, despite the promise that building more housing will bring down rents, the real-estate lobby embraces the prospect of building more housing! Why? Because the “supply crisis” narrative is an idea working in defense of their class interests.

Do we really believe that landlords and developers will actively support a reduction in their profits? Do we think they’re going to resign themselves with a deep sigh and a “well, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles?” How naïve can we possibly be? As James Baldwin once wrote of capitalism, to imagine these leeches ceding power and profits willingly demands “yet more faith and infinitely more in schizophrenia than the concept of the Virgin Birth.” 

Landlords and developers have no interest in solving the housing crisis because the permanence of that crisis is the condition of their wealth and power. This understanding has serious practical implications. 

In other words, if we understand our conditions to be a result of class struggle (rather than a market imbalance), it becomes quite clear that our conditions will be determined by our level of organization as tenants and our ability to wage struggle against the force that commodifies our need for shelter: real-estate capital.

The magic lies in our hands and our hands alone

This conclusion is the same as that at the core of all consciousness-raising movements, indeed at the core of all anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-patriarchal movements (see, for example, the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa; the Combahee River Collective; or the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil). It's the same conclusion which the legendary anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon came to:

[Political education] means driving home to the masses that everything depends on them, that if we stagnate the fault is theirs, and that if we progress, they too are responsible, that there is no demiurge, no illustrious man taking responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people and the magic lies in their hands and their hands alone.

The magic lies in our hands and our hands alone.

When we get organized, we have the capacity to transform our conditions. Will we win collective control over our cities? Will the threadbare protections we have left be rolled back? Will we stagnate? It’s up to us! 

Through militant organization, tenants wield — and historically have wielded! — a tremendous amount of power. Every concession from the landowning class; thus, every victory for tenants, has been won through this organization. 

The first rent control laws in New York City were passed due to pressure created by waves and waves of militant rent strikes (not to mention the fears of a Bolshevik-style revolution that these strikes helped inspire). Great Depression-era tenant activism — which included the successful efforts by the Communist Party to reverse evictions of working class tenants — was the impetus for New York City’s first public housing projects (FDR himself said that the concessions of the New Deal were driven by a desire to “save our system, the capitalist system…”). Mass agitation by Black organizers led to the passage of Fair Housing laws (while the real estate lobby was organizing against them). The COVID-19 eviction moratorium in New York was fought for and repeatedly extended due to pressure from organized tenant unions.

These are all tenuous and often contradictory reforms (public housing in the US, for instance, often deepened racial segregation), class truces which politicians negotiated in exchange for relative peace and quiet. The goal is not to aspire to reform, but to highlight that these reforms were not enacted because of our participation at the ballot box, nor passed by a benevolent state, nor advocated for by benevolent landlords and developers — they were fought for, collectively, in the streets and hallways and lobbies of our neighborhoods. 

Tenants are and always have been the protagonists of the struggle for control over our buildings, neighborhoods, and cities. 

OK. With that in mind, we can move on to addressing the core claim — that the “housing crisis” is caused by a supply deficit — in detail. Through this, we can highlight that the “housing crisis” is not “fixable” with “policy.” Our conditions as tenants are determined by our level of organization and effectiveness at waging class struggle.

The “supply crisis”

An imbalance between supply and demand is not the source of tenants’ present conditions. The real source — as has been the case since capitalism violently imposed its will on the world four centuries ago — are the private property relations which enable the exploitation of working people by the landowning class. Present-day gentrification is just one chapter in the centuries-long story of displacement, enclosure and imperialism which has marked the penetration of capital into indigenous and working class communities. So long as these relations remain intact, our struggle will persist. 

This is not to say that we should never build housing. There’s no doubt that under the collective governance of the working class (god-willing), the supply of housing would be responsive to migration and other fluctuations in demand. The disagreement stems from a core question: who is building housing and for whom are they building housing?

The alternative to the current arrangement, wherein tenants have next to zero democratic control over their communities, is to organize towards a world where tenants themselves collectively control and direct the development of safe, beautiful, ecological housing. 

That’s the polemic response — let’s dive a little deeper. As we work through the details, let’s keep the argument in mind:

Tenants’ conditions are determined by the balance of class power, not “supply and demand.”

This section is divided into a few parts to make it a bit more digestible. 

Mind the rent gap!

We can start by exploring the process of gentrification, where we can very clearly observe how real estate capital wields its class power to mold cities to its liking. Notably, its class organization has become increasingly sophisticated in recent years, as the rental housing stock has been consolidated in fewer and fewer hands. It can be quite challenging nowadays to figure out who your landlord actually is, as they usually hide behind a maze of shell companies, LLCs and Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). An army of supers and management companies further distance landlords from tenants, acting as convenient buffers for the corporate owners and private equity firms pulling the strings.

As a result of this consolidation, private equity firms, mega-developers and corporate landlords execute rent hikes, serve evictions, illegally (and legally) deregulate apartments and in sum, cause displacement, in an increasingly coordinated manner. 

In our organizing, more often than not, we work with tenants in buildings owned by a landlord with hundreds to thousands of units in their portfolio. (The average apartment in New York City is part of an 893 unit portfolio.) When we visit other buildings in that portfolio, we’ll usually find the same issues, whether disrepair, harassment, skyrocketing rents, and (illegal and legal) deregulation. 

(If you are interested in researching the owner of your building in NYC and kick-starting a tenants association in your building, JustFix is an incredible asset.)

To streamline gentrification, mega-developers, corporate landlords, and private equity firms utilize sophisticated algorithms to identify “rent gaps.” A rent gap is the difference between the rent currently being paid by tenants and the rent that could be potentially charged in the same location if the current tenants were evicted through legal or illegal means. PropTech companies like Skyline AI and RealPage are accomplices in this plunder. Their business is that of identifying apartments which are “‘inefficient’ in the rental market in relation to their total cost, before teaming up with the largest property investment companies to make an offer.” 

These advanced techniques (enabled by troves of data collected by big tech firms) allow investors to target optimal neighborhoods for gentrification with pinpoint accuracy. It shouldn’t surprise us that at a neighborhood level, there is a direct correlation between concentrated corporate ownership and gentrification. 

Naturally, real estate capital’s drive to extract as much profit out of our cities as possible does not care much for pesky renter protections like rent-stabilization and public housing. In fact, the relatively low rents in rent-stabilized apartments and public housing (as compared to market-rate) make them even more appealing, in the sense that they present even larger rent gaps to “close.” 

From a private equity firm’s perspective: Imagine a rent-stabilized building which rents for an average of $800/mo per unit, in a neighborhood where rents are averaging $1500/mo per unit (and climbing!), or are where rents are primed to increase to that price (in accordance to the precise calculations of algorithms from RealPage and Skyline AI). To a private equity firm, the building represents an opportunity for superprofits. To the building’s working class, usually Black and brown tenants, the building is not an investment opportunity — it’s home, a small pocket of resistance to the waves of real estate capital engulfing their communities. But if the private equity firm can evict the current residents, destabilize the building, and slap on a gentrification mask — then they can charge many times as much in rent and make a fat profit. All in a day's work for the vampires sucking our cities dry. 

Real estate capital also pushes this class agenda through legal action. For instance, New York City landlords are currently suing to wipe out rent regulations which protect around 1 million tenants from naked exposure to the “free market.” This case will go to the revanchist Supreme Court, who will likely rule in favor of the landlords. Once again, we can plainly observe that our class enemies are organized and aggressive!

It’s not an accident that in our organizing we encounter and experience consistent patterns of harassment, disrepair, and neglect in rent-regulated buildings. In New York City, deregulation is most commonly allowed upon vacancy, so it follows that landlords and speculators doggedly pursue vacancy via eviction. Some of their choice strategies include: buyouts, fake eviction notices, illegal refusal to renew leases, intimidation, neglect, intentional disrepair, cutting off heat, electricity and water, calling the police on tenants, and direct harassment. There are technically legal protections against strong-arming tenants out of regulated apartments, but they’re rarely enforced. Like other tenant’s rights (or, for that matter, any right “granted” by the state), protection from harassment is generally only realized when enforced by organized tenants. 

It’s also not an accident that the real-estate lobby and their politician friends have intentionally neglected to fund the upkeep of New York City’s remaining public housing stock. After all, NYCHA’s repair backlog (many tens of billions dollars) makes for a very convenient political device. When it came time to justify the “Preservation Trust” — nothing more than a scheme to privatize and commodify that remaining bastion of working class affordability — NYCHA’s repair backlog was cynically presented as evidence that public funding is no longer feasible. When challenged by outraged NYCHA tenants, conservative and “socialist” politicians alike argued that we have no option but to turn to the private sector to save NYCHA. As Holden Taylor writes: 

The line of reasoning put forth by the policy wonks and “socialists” advocating for the trust is, as usual, one of pragmatism and practicality. The Trust is the only way to get money for repairs, they say. This boils down, to butcher Rosa Luxemburg’s aphorism, a framework of “Privatization or Barbarism,” as these experts claim that the only alternative to the Trust is the status quo and the ever more crumbling infrastructure and dire quality of life that define it. Again, this is a failure of imagination. It is the socialist’s responsibility to push past the status quo, to fight for socialism, not merely a different form of marketization.

These observations about de-regulation and the privatization of public housing also help us to understand why the minority of left YIMBYs — who argue we should pair market solutions with an increase in social housing and tenant protections — are so woefully misguided. There is no way to guarantee that any housing we build will stay affordable when landlords, developers and finance capital have demonstrated they will wield their class power to commodify every inch of the city they can get their grubby hands on. Even our supposedly “socialist” elected officials are liable to bend to the will of real-estate capital without an organized mass movement to back them. The sober reality is: the remaining sources of off-market housing are being eroded because we are not sufficiently organized to protect them. The only way to protect those apartments and reverse the trend is through organized struggle. 

For instance, in 2020, organized community groups resisted the illegal eviction of tenants at 1214 Dean St. in Crown Heights. By occupying the stoop and physically resisting the eviction, the tenants eventually forced the city to buy the apartments and convert them into publicly-funded, affordable housing.

Build, baby, build! What could go wrong?

It doesn’t matter how “market optimistic” you are (as one reporter recently described the “pro-housing” non-profit Open New York) — when we let developers build freely, they will always be incentivized to build market-rate housing because those are the developments with the juiciest profit margins (and often the juiciest subsidies). This is not a neutral outcome. Building housing which people in surrounding neighborhoods cannot afford is the one of the first steps in the process of gentrification. 

In response to residents’ concerns about displacement, politicians will often promise that developments will meet the needs of communities because they contain 10% or 20% affordable units. This logic is premised on the idea that flooding a working class neighborhood which desperately needs cheap housing with, for instance, 900 market-rate units and 100 “affordable” units (which, due to the way affordability is measured, are often not actually affordable to those who most desperately need them), will produce anything but an influx of wealthier people who will displace the current residents. Just the announcement of permits for new market-rate developments can set off a frenzy of speculation, as investors look to sink their grimy fingernails into the imminently gentrifying neighborhood. 

The rise in the median income of an area (which inevitably accompanies market-rate development in working class neighborhoods) is often the impetus for steep hikes in the median rent. Which is to say: when people have more money, landlords generally raise rents (and rents usually rise faster than income — a few studies to reference: here, here and here.) Income inequality ensures that rising median rents disproportionately displaces working class tenants, as Francesca Manning explains:

While some people’s income is increasing at a rate to keep pace with rising rents, a large group of people’s wages are stagnating, falling, or rising far too slow to keep them housed … households that live in high-income [areas], whether or not they are themselves high income, end up paying a higher and higher percentage of their wages in rents.

In locales where market-rate development is not profitable, developers will not develop unless subsidized. This is a prominent form of “organized abandonment,” the movement of capital and social services away from populations and geographies deemed surplus and/or no longer profitable. Working class Black and brown communities are the first victims of this abandonment. These communities are faced with either: investment and gentrification; or disinvestment and abandonment. It’s russian roulette, except all of the chambers are loaded. Flint’s working-class Black population is one such example of a community which has been systematically abandoned by capital and the state.

Even with an understanding that developers will always build for profit, some will maintain that new housing supply at the top-end creates downward pressure on the market and “filters” units down to working class tenants. This is not an effective strategy, especially with the urgency that present conditions demand. Even when a filtering effect can be observed over decades, it is usually outweighed by the more immediate effects — sharply increased rent burdens and displacement  — that market-rate development set in motion. It’s important to understand that the “housing market” is not a single, unified market, but rather a series of income-level based sub-markets. Increased supply at the top end of the market can simultaneously stabilize rents for high-income tenants and increase rents for low-income tenants.

The “filtering” theory makes more than a few dubious presumptions. Three more are:

1. that new apartments will be occupied by warm-blooded humans;

2. that tenants are able to move constantly to and from apartments in the name of market equilibrium; 

3. that landlords who were recently collecting rent from a wealthier tenant will suddenly have a change of heart and lower their rent to accommodate the new, lower-income tenant who is moving into the “filtered” apartments.

1) ignores the reality, which is that many of these apartments are destined to be bought for investment purposes. At least a hundred thousand units in New York City are investment properties and second homes for the ultra-rich. As Raquel Rolnik writes, luxury real estate in places like New York City has increasingly become a “safe-deposit box for the transnational wealthy elite,” rendering many new apartments un-filterable.

2) and 3) are even further divorced from reality. I’m not quite sure where the filtering theory nerds are finding landlords willing to grant day-to-day leases to allow for this kind of flexibility — nor where they find landlords willing to sacrifice their bottom line for the sake of market equilibrium. 

To this point (that supply and rents are not necessarily, or even likely to be correlated), we can briefly look at two of the metropolitan areas which produced the most housing in the last decade (2010-2019): Raleigh, NC and Austin, TX. Both of these cities maintained a ratio of 1-2 jobs per new housing unit, which mainstream economists consider to be “healthy.”

In Raleigh, housing construction kept pace with population growth from 2010-2019. Did rents stabilize or go down in accordance with the magic supply and demand graph? No! They rose 53%, miraculously spurning the ironclad economic law of supply and demand.

In Austin, between 2010 and 2020, new housing production actually outpaced population growth (25.5% to 21.7%). According to the “supply crisis” narrative, rents should have gone down or at least stabilized, right? You’ll be shocked to learn that between 2010 and 2020, rents in Austin increased by 93%. Historically Black enclaves like East Austin have rapidly gentrified in spite of the growth in housing construction. The supposedly common sense relationship between housing supply and median rents is, uh, not so apparent to the average tenant in Austin.

The shock troops of real-estate capital

Class power requires enforcers, and real-estate capital’s war on working-class tenants is no different. The police are intimately involved in the process of displacement. 

The police are, after all, the most visible manifestation of the violence which undergirds private property relations. When you don’t (or can’t) pay your rent, you come face to face with the enforcers of the private-property relation: the court sending a Marshall to serve you with an eviction notice, and the police forcefully and violently executing that eviction if you resist. Landlords rely on the police to backstop evictions, which is the most fundamental mechanism for the reproduction of privately-owned housing. Without the threat of eviction, the landlord's power would evaporate, as we experienced during the COVID-19 eviction moratoriums. The state’s power is also felt implicitly: even if a tenant association is interested in taking a radical action like resisting a fellow tenant’s eviction, they understand that the state will almost certainly intervene on the side of the landlord, and can therefore be discouraged from acting. 

The process of eviction is nothing less than the state using their monopoly on legal violence to privilege the landlord’s right to exploit us over our human need to have a roof over your head. 

Gentrification relies on the same violence to function. In its infancy, gentrification is marked by the violent projections of private property relations onto working class communities, which solidify in physical form as the police. Cops consistently step up broken windows policing in neighborhoods which are gentrifying, further exposing working class Black and brown communities to the carceral state. Broken windows policing is the proverbial stick to the carrot of tax abatements, rezoning and developer incentives which open the floodgates for real estate capital. 

In the process of gentrification, homeless tenants (homeless people are tenants in that they do not control their housing; the struggles of housed tenants and homeless tenants exist along the same spectrum of precarity) are brutalized and disappeared. Eric Adams’ assault on homeless tenants which we have resisted over the past year is inseparably part of this same project. He is not uniquely evil either; his predecessors De Blasio and Bloomberg similarly utilized the NYPD to terrorize homeless tenants and remake the city to the real estate lobby’s liking. Connecting the struggles of homeless tenants to housed tenants — not just in solidarity, but as a movement united in opposition to the same forces of real estate capital — is a crucial task.

As many have compellingly argued, including her own family, Breonna Taylor was, at least in part, a victim of state-sanctioned gentrification. Breonna was murdered in the Russell neighborhood, which was being explicitly targeted for gentrification by the city of Louisville. Before and after her murder at the hands of the state, there was an observable “sharp increase in public nuisance cases, with 84% of those cases occurring in Louisville’s predominantly Black western half, which includes the Russell neighborhood.” As the Root Causes Research Center explains:

… the forces of property and police converged in Russell to acquire the remaining property for the redevelopment of Elliott Ave through the collaboration of the Louisville Metro Develop Louisville Office and the Louisville Metro Police Department’s Placed Based Investigations Squad (PBI). Increased pressure from the Louisville Mayor's Office to acquire these properties led directly to the rapid employment of PBI. The PBI Squad, then, employed a concept they were barely familiar with, to create the false evidence needed for the "No-Knock Warrant" that led to the murder of Breonna Taylor.

Gentrification is a process which travels along the existing contours of racial capitalism. Working-class Black communities (including homeless tenants) are the first to encounter — and the first to resist — the rusty knife edge of displacement. 

In sum: Gentrification is initiated by speculative, algorithmically-backed, financialized development and landlord harassment; enabled by racist police violence, tax abatements, developer incentives and capitalist urban planning; and resulting in displacement and harm (sometimes death) for the working class Black and brown communities who stand in its way. Gentrification is, in other words, not a natural phenomenon, not an unavoidable but necessary process, but rather one front in real estate capital’s organized class war on working class tenants.

Does this evidence point to a solution which gives more freedom to developers and landlords? No. Gentrification can only be stopped by collective control of our buildings, neighborhoods and cities. After all, it's highly unlikely that communities would displace themselves if and when they win control over their space.

One glimmer of hope we can look to for inspiration: In Los Angeles, after being confronted with rent increases of up to 200%, the tenants of Hillside Villa organized, militantly — in Spanish, Cantonese and English, no less. In 2022, their organizing paid off: they successfully pressured the city to buy their building on their behalf, thwarting their landlord's attempt to fatten his profit margins and placing their housing under some level of community control.

Ransom, manipulation, collusion

Organized real-estate capital demonstrates every day that it will protect its profits by any means necessary — regardless of “market equilibrium.” Outside of the strategies we’ve already covered, some of their choice tactics include market manipulation, legal action and collusion.

For instance: CHIP — a New York landlord advocacy group — is currently keeping 20,000 rent-stabilized units vacant (an act that is particularly malicious considering that over a hundred thousand New Yorkers are homeless, including thirty thousand children). In total, over 60,000 rent stabilized units are currently vacant across the city. Why? As a threat! A show of force! An act of organized class war! CHIP has openly stated that they won’t put these apartments back on the market until the state legislature repeals the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protections Act, which limits their ability to jack up rents after making necessary renovations. It’s a “ransom!”

As Karl Marx himself pointed out (and others have more recently argued), the tendency of the landowning class to withhold their land from the market, and to threaten to withhold land from the market, is intrinsic to capitalism. Holding land off the market is not an irrational action for landlords — it is a rational, profit-maximizing strategy that is employed everyday by landowners across the world. This tendency is why, seemingly paradoxically, increases in vacancy rates do not always correspond with reduced rents.

This tendency explains why property owners will always fight vigorously against any regulation which would restrict their ability to keep units vacant. For example, in response to a newly passed vacancy tax which would fine landlords for failing to rent empty apartments, organized San Francisco landlords (through lobbying groups representing thousands of property owners) are suing the city, arguing they have “constitutional and statutory rights to keep their units vacant if they so choose.” Constitutionally speaking, they’re correct — the Supreme Court will always protect property owners “right to exclude” — but that’s only because the Supreme Court is designed to codify and protect private property relations.

According to the most recent statistics (from 2021), there are around 250,000 (officially) vacant units in New York City. Importantly, the vacancy rate does not include the hotel rooms which sit empty while homeless tenants beg for change just outside their doors, nor unreported warehoused market-rate apartments, nor the hundred thousand or so units which are kept as investment properties and second homes for the ultra-rich.

While in any context, there will be some vacancies, to really understand this number we have to understand which apartments are vacant. Low-cost apartments are at near-zero vacancy levels while the vacancy rates  in high-cost apartments remain extraordinarily high. Tracy Rosenthal of the LA Tenants Union sums up this disparity bluntly: “There is no shortage of housing except for poor and working people, which the market has never and will never provide.” 

In their 2022 report, the Community Service Society of New York echoes Rosenthal, writing that many of New York’s vacancies can be attributed to “long-term overproduction of luxury condos/co-ops as investment vehicles.” They sum up their findings neatly:

There is very little available housing at low rents, but a lot available at rents most New Yorkers couldn’t possibly pay. At the same time, more and more apartments are going unused, not because nobody wants them – clearly there’s plenty of demand for housing – but because their owners are keeping them as pieds-a-terre, Airbnbs, investment properties, or warehoused rentals.

One example of this phenomenon, from Madden and Marcuse:

On January 16, 2015, a limited liability corporation named P89-90 bought a single penthouse apartment in Midtown Manhattan for $100,471,452.77 … the luxury tower that it tops, branded as One57, is not likely to be a particularly sociable environment. Chances are that none of the building’s ninety-two condominium units will be their owner’s sole residence. In fact, many of the apartments in One57 will remain empty. They will be held as investments or as vanity homes for people who do not lack for places to live. One57 is not high-rise housing so much as global wealth congealed into tower form.”

In recent years, the rental housing stock has become increasingly concentrated in larger and larger portfolios controlled by private equity firms and corporate landlords. In New York City, around 9 in 10 apartments are owned by corporate landlords. 

One important implication of this trend: the more organized and concentrated ownership is, the easier it is for landlords to collude and fix prices — a task made significantly easier due to the rise of algorithmically-informed price-setting. Services like the now infamous RealPage — which uses advanced data to help landlords charge the highest possible rents for their units — openly boast about their role in driving the staggering rent hikes of recent years. A ProPublica investigation revealed RealPage has “recommended that landlords in some cases accept a lower occupancy rate in order to raise rents and make more money.” RealPage and other similar services are a potent tool for cartel style market collusion, a fact which has not escaped the ire of the Department of Justice's antitrust lawyers. 

A common “pro-housing” argument is that increased supply gives renters more options, thus allowing us to play landlords off of eachother and secure lower rents. Again, this line of thinking ignores the sordid reality, which is that landlords will flex their class muscle to keep rents high — and that without organization, tenants have no power to contest their ever-worsening conditions. What good is a market equilibrium if the landlords are almost certain to collude, warehouse apartments and keep rents high regardless?

Landlord’s profit-maximizing behavior plainly highlights the irrationality endemic to capitalism. Well, let's amend that: it's quite rational for those who own the property. For the rest of us (the vast majority) — not so much. A system which distributes (and chooses not to distribute!) housing based on the profits that will accrue to its owners is a system which is incapable of ending the precarity which defines our lives as tenants. 

The “housing crisis” is not so much a crisis as a permanent feature of urban capitalism, an unavoidable consequence of developing and distributing housing as a commodity to line the pockets of the few, rather than organizing housing around the social need for shelter. Framing our experience as a “crisis” insinuates that it is an aberration from the norm, an aberration which can be “solved” with policy fixes, new legal protections and, most insidiously, the market. The system is not in crisis; the crisis is the system!

It's all about class power? Always has been.

What we’re observing here is the all too familiar dissonance between capitalism’s economic theories and its economic realities. Despite what free-market proselytizers and “market optimists” alike want us to believe (as if there’s any functional difference between the two), capitalism is a system whose outcomes are ultimately determined by the balance of class power. Landlords, developers and financiers, who are single-mindedly driven by a desire to extract as much profit as possible out of tenants, do not submit meekly to the “laws” of supply and demand. 

To imagine that rent prices hinge on supply and demand rather than class power is completely ahistorical. Time and time again, capitalism has demonstrated an inherent tendency towards monopoly, cynical market manipulation and organized class warfare. 

Understanding the balance of class power as the condition of our exploitation is simultaneously key to grasping that our exploitation can only be limited and abolished through the exercise of our own class power as tenants. We’re engaged in a class war which only one side is consciously fighting. Our choice as tenants is whether or not we want to fight back.

If the future came on a platter…

The common sense which commands our collective reflexes does not permit us to think of revolution. After all, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

So it’s natural that we’re derided as unrealistic for striving towards the abolition of the landlord class, and by extension the abolition of capitalism — but are we the unrealistic ones?

Our critics (liberals!) — on all issues, not just housing; think climate change, for instance — position themselves as “realistic” for arguing that handing the reins to organized capital will alleviate the conditions of the working class. Don’t we have hundreds of years of experience telling us that the exact opposite will happen? We can look to our cities as they are right now to understand that control of our buildings and neighborhoods by profit-motivated landlords, financiers and developers is a disastrous arrangement.

There’s nothing realistic about giving capital the freedom to roam where it wants and praying that it will magically change course and defy its five hundred year history of ravaging indigenous and working class communities for profit.

It's nonsense. Don’t listen to these people — they are the ones being unrealistic. 

And yes, to organize towards community control of our buildings and neighborhoods is a tremendous, daunting task. But let’s remember that we don’t organize simply because we believe in a political program. To struggle, to think — to really think! — to learn, is nothing less than the process of being alive. To not be in the struggle is a much more demoralizing proposition.

So let's get to it! Landlords and developers, and the financiers that back them, are tremendously well organized. To beat them, we have to turn to the only method by which we have historically won: that is, through our militant organization. If history has taught us anything, it's that we can only win by out-organizing our class enemies. 

Check out the Autonomous Tenants Union Network to see if there’s an existing organization in your area. In New York City: the Crown Heights Tenant Union, the Ridgewood Tenants Union, Brooklyn Eviction Defense and Tenant Union Flatbush; nationwide, the aforementioned Los Angeles Tenants Union; Tenants and Neighborhood Council (TANC) in the Bay Area; Stomp Out Slumlords in DC; and many more are doing incredible, principled work. 

You can find some resources and thoughtful reflections on tenant organizing here, here, here, here, here and here.

I like to think of this essay as a small contribution to uncovering the shape of the conjuncture, as Stuart Hall would call it. There is, of course, much more to be uncovered (and much more that has already been uncovered!), such as: the relation of tenants in the imperial core to the global anti-imperialist movement; how the tenant movement can resist settler-colonialism and aid the struggle for indigenous sovereignty; feminism and the tenant movement; the homeless industrial complex; and the ideology of homeownership, to name a few.

None of this work is easy. But, as Eduardo Galeano reminds us: “If the future came on a platter, it would not be of this world.”

The “Powell Memo” and the Supreme Court: A Counteroffensive Against the Many

By Derek Ford

Republished from Liberation School.

Introduction: The domestic right-wing counteroffensive

By the early 1970s, the global revolutionary tide of socialist and national liberation struggles was at its apex, and the tide was washing over the U.S., with expanding and increasingly militant social movements and political organizations. The beginning of “neoliberalism” was a domestic aspect of the coming global counterrevolution, which devastated the world for decades.

This article tells the story of how the right wing of the capitalist class came to drive a new set of reactionary Supreme Court rulings, government policies, and ideological battles against democracy and the basic democratic rights our class won and that the right wing soon started rolling back. A key figure in this anti-democratic turn was Lewis F. Powell Jr., a tobacco company executive turned Supreme Court Justice. In the transition between the two roles, he wrote his infamous “Powell Memo.”

In hindsight, the private memorandum Lewis F. Powell Jr. sent to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on August 23, 1971—known as the “Powell Memo”—in many ways represents the inaugural moment in this counteroffensive. Titled, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” the Memo clearly expressed the sharpness of the class struggle at that time and encapsulated the capitalist class’ fear that they were losing the battles of ideas and the world. It undoubtedly laid the groundwork for some key components of U.S. imperialism’s new offensive against the global revolutionary upsurge that characterized the immediate post-World War II environment, an offensive that is still with us today.

Understanding the background, context, and content of the Memo helps us get a sense of the right-wing counteroffensive against domestic people’s movements. Powell eventually entered the Supreme Court and helped usher in a wave of reactionary rulings against the people and for corporate profits. Thus, while the exact impacts of the Memo are hard to ascertain, they eventually made their way into the law books, attacking affirmative action and establishing a theory of corporate speech and “personhood.” More immediately, after the Memo’s circulation, the Chamber of Commerce “expanded its base from around 60,000 firms in 1972 to over a quarter of a million ten years later,” spending almost $1 billion annually to promote their interests [1].

The ideological stakes at play in the Powell Memo

Powell wrote and sent the confidential memo at the request of one of his colleagues, Eugene B. Sydnor, Jr., who chaired the education committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for a high-level discussion with the Chamber’s Vice President Arch Booth the next day. The Chamber of Commerce is not, as the name might imply, a government agency, but is the largest private pro-business lobbying group in the country. Because the Memo was written for the capitalist class by one of their most fervent ideologues, it displays the fears and ambitions of the imperialists in the most blatant manner, revealing exactly how they speak to each other when they don’t have to feign decorum or decency, providing a glimpse into how much they feared progressive movements.

“No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack,” the Memo begins [2]. The problem is not so much with the usual suspects like “the Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system, both political and economic.” Although such “extremists of the left” are growing in numbers, support, and legitimacy in unprecedented fashion, Powell continues, they are still relatively minor players on their own.

Powell’s primary fear was that revolutionaries, the usual suspects, were now influencing “perfectly respectable elements of society” such as “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.” In essence, Powell expresses how the global tide of revolutionary and progressive struggles sweeping the world during that period were normalizing and popularizing radical political change and demands [3]. As he puts it, the issue is that respectable institutions like the campus were hijacked “by minorities” who “are the most articulate, the most vocal, the most prolific in their writing and speaking.”

Powell’s insistence on the influence of vocal minorities—a prelude of sorts to the “silent majority”—was more than just a rhetorical flourish. Although the “Marxist doctrine that the ‘capitalist’ countries are controlled by big business” had widespread currency at the time, for Powell, nothing could be further from the truth. Simply put, Powell’s memo claimed that in capitalist countries capitalists had no influence or control over the government or society. This ridiculous claim is phrased frankly:

“…as every business executive knows, few elements of American society today have as little influence in government as the American businessman, the corporation, or even the millions of corporate stockholders. If one doubts this, let him undertake the role of ‘lobbyist’ for the business point of view before Congressional committees. The same situation obtains in the legislative halls of most states and major cities.”

Powell goes further still, in a sentence that constructs the corporation not only as a person, but as a minority person in need of protection: “One does not exaggerate to say that, in terms of political influence with respect to the course of legislation and government action, the American business executive is truly the ‘forgotten man.’”

This dire situation, in which the very existence of capitalism and imperialism are at stake—claims that are, to say the least, exaggerated—calls for drastic and wide-ranging responses. To address the supposed exclusion of corporations in the U.S. government and the attack on the capitalist system, Powell included a vast list of recommendations for pursuing their ideological agenda, in which the Chamber of Commerce would play a central and organizing role. Powell’s upbringing and professional career account for his deep concern for the position of the corporation in U.S. society and politics.

Powell: A fighter for “oppressed” tobacco companies

With a family lineage traced back to “one of the original Jamestown settlers,” Powell graduated from an elite prep school, McGuire’s University School in Richmond, Virginia in 1925 [4]. From there, he ascended the ranks of the political elite, earning a Master of Laws degree from Harvard Law School in 1932 before returning to Virginia and starting a long career with a Richmond law firm. After a brief stint as an intelligence officer in the Army, Powell integrated himself into Virginia’s political scene and rose through the ranks of the American Bar Association, becoming the ABA’s president in 1965.

Powell served on over a dozen boards, including the Colonial Williamsburg Museum and, most pertinently, the tobacco giant Philip Morris. Powell joined Philip Morris’ Board of Directors in 1964 at a time when, historian Jeffrey Clements notes, “the corporation sought to mitigate the US Surgeon General’s report about the grave dangers of smoking” [5].

When he penned his infamous memo, Powell was in the trenches defending Philip Morris and other tobacco corporations through their lobbying group, the now-discredited Tobacco Institute. He was also busy defending big tobacco when Richard Nixon asked him to serve on the Supreme Court in 1971 (although his appointment went into effect in 1972).

During his tenure at the Tobacco Institute, he fought against the “radicals” and liberals in public health and education who were increasingly sounding the alarm on the dangers of tobacco and nicotine addiction. In their 1967 annual report, issued on behalf of Powell and the rest of the Philip Morris board, they deplored how “unfortunately the positive benefits of smoking which are so widely acknowledged are largely ignored by many reports linking cigarettes and health, and little attention is paid to the scientific reports which are favorable to smoking” [6].

Powell was nothing if not a champion of free-enterprise, facts be damned.

The ideological counteroffensive

It’s not hard to draw the line between Powell’s defense of big tobacco and the broader capitalist system, on the one hand, and his derision of public health, education, and the public interest, on the other. For Powell, it was a small and logical step to move from attacking health researchers to attacking other “revolutionaries” and those they influenced in “respectable” places like universities.

In addressing “what can be done about the campus,” Powell outlines an array of tactics and strategies to beat back the insurgent student tide and revert educational institutions away from  critical inquiry. He called for the Chamber of Commerce to establish a cadre of “highly qualified” pro-capitalist scholars, a full-time paid staff of speakers, and a Speaker’s Bureau that would advocate for capitalists.

The Chamber’s “faculty of scholars” should be given “incentives” to publish prolifically in scholarly journals because “one of the keys to the success of the liberal and leftist faculty members has been their passion for ‘publication’ and ‘lecturing.’” Powell wasn’t concerned with the number of leftist faculty per se, and his memo only cited one by name: Herbert Marcuse, one of the few remaining critical theorists who remained committed to organizing and who supervised, among other important revolutionaries (and against the advice of his colleagues), the doctoral work of Angela Davis [7].

Those like Marcuse “need not be in a majority” because “they are stimulating teachers… prolific writers and lecturers,” according to Powell [8]. In fact, “as his attention to charismatic teaching, textbooks, and other writings shows, Powell based his strategy for ideological warfare on the intellectual productivity that he observed among progressive thinkers” [9].

The historical context for Powell’s ire is instructive, as it was during this time that oppressed nationalities were forcing changes in hiring practices, curricular content, and even creating physical spaces dedicated to the study of radical politics and oppressed nationalities and successfully fighting for open admissions.

The militant organized movements of students, workers, Black people, Chicano people, women, the LGBTQ community, and others—many of whom were openly Marxists—forced open some space within universities and society, legitimizing their grievances, proposals, and knowledge [10]. Importantly, the demands of the student movements “were organized around the redistribution of outcomes in the university and in US society generally” [11]. They helped, in part, to fundamentally restructure what and whose knowledge counted by positioning oppressed groups as central knowledge producers.

Unable to captivate audiences with their ideas or teaching, Powell urged the Chamber to ensure capitalist ideologues would gain audiences on campus. He called on the Chamber to “insist upon equal time on the college speaking circuit” between critics and proponents of capitalist exploitation and oppression. Importantly, they must be “attractive, articulate and well-informed speakers” who “exert whatever degree of pressure—publicly and privately” to ensure equal speaking opportunities” [12].

Powell’s focus on “equal speaking opportunities” denies the larger political and historical context of the times, as if socialists and capitalists get equal time and space in the mainstream news outlets or corporate papers. At the same time, within the universities, they’re still mobilized to promote right-wing ideologues. Today, it’s clear to growing numbers of people in the U.S. that “freedom of speech” policies are intended to limit the dissemination of and engagement with revolutionary ideas.

The Supreme Court: Defending white supremacy and corporate speech

Powell’s disdain for revolutionaries wasn’t personal (or wasn’t primarily personal); it was political. Take, for example, his role in the 1978 Supreme Court case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, a ruling that was a significant step on the way to undoing affirmative action. Although the ruling sustained affirmative action, it declared racial quotas for university admissions to be unconstitutional and, specifically, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In his majority opinion, Powell claimed that “the United States had become a Nation of minorities” and the U.S. Constitution was meant “to overcome the prejudices not of a monolithic majority, but of a ‘majority’ composed of various minority groups” [13]. White people were, according to his ruling opinion and his own beliefs, minorities deserving protection [14].

In 1982, he issued the majority opinion in Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corporation v. Public Service Corporation of New York, declaring that private utility and energy corporations could, with the protection of the right-wing activist court, dominate the imaginary “marketplace of ideas.” The case revolved around the prohibition of energy corporations from promoting their services during and after the 1973 oil crisis. Powell’s opinion affirmed that corporate “expression not only serves the economic interest of the speaker, but also assists consumers and furthers the societal interest in the fullest possible dissemination of information.” The opinion “rejected the ‘highly paternalistic’ view that government has complete power to suppress or regulate commercial speech” [15].

With the backing of a new barrage of pro-capitalist think tanks and institutes, Powell led the Supreme Court on a pro-corporate rampage that was based on an illegitimate precedent. As discussed in the Liberation School article on Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the 1886 Supreme Court case has been falsely interpreted as setting the “precedent” for corporate personhood [16]. The case did not rule on the question of corporate personhood. Rather, a statement on corporate personhood was included in a headnote added to the case. Headnotes are not legally binding and therefore do not impact the establishment of legal precedent.

Nevertheless, the same year that Powell led the court to undo affirmative action in the Regents of the University of California, he also established “corporate speech” as protected under the First Amendment. That case, First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, for the first time held that corporations are protected by the First Amendment and therefore are entitled to “free speech.” Powell delivered the majority opinion in the case, stating “the Court has not identified a separate source for the right when it has been asserted by corporations.” In the footnote accompanying the statement, he claims that “it has been settled for almost a century that corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment,” incorrectly citing Santa Clara as legal precedent [17].

With Powell’s new theory of corporate speech, “the Court struck down law after law in which the states and Congress sought to balance corporate power with the public interest” [18].

Conclusion: The struggle for socialism and liberation today

Powell’s Memo and interventions in the Supreme Court were part of an overall strategy to defeat or at least de-radicalize the revolutionary movements of the time, especially the radical transformations they achieved in education. A central element in the capitalist state, education always plays an important role in the class struggle, as it is a primary place where we form our ideology or worldview, whether we know it or not.

The struggle wasn’t—and isn’t—confined to the university, and in fact, its radical edge comes from its ability to link the university to broader social struggles, from anti-imperialism and socialism to anti-racism and sexism, then and now. As the Powell Memo shows, for the ruling class at the time, the balance of forces tipped too far toward the exploited and oppressed. In response, the capitalists launched a virulent counteroffensive in all areas of society, and Powell, his role on the Supreme Court, and his Memo were integral parts of this reactionary wave we need to, and will, push back.

References

[1] David Harvey,A Brief History of Neoliberalism(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 43.
[2] Lewis Powell, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,”PBS. Availablehere.
[3] See Brian Becker, “From Inter-Imperialist War to Global Class War: Understanding Distinct Stages of Imperialism,”Liberation School, 28 July 2018. Availablehere.
[4] Tinsley E. Yarbrough, “Powell, Lewis F., Jr. (1907-1998), Supreme Court Justice,”American National Biography, 01 January 2001.
[5] Jeffrey D. Clements,Corporations are Not People: Reclaiming Democracy from Big Money and Global Corporations(San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2014), 21.
[6] Cited in Ibid., 22-23.
[7] Gabriel Rockhill, “Critical and Revolutionary Theory: For the Reinvention of Critique in the Age of Ideological Realignment,” inDomination and Emancipation: Remaking Critique, ed. D. Benson (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021).
[8] Powell, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.”
[9] Roderick A. Ferguson,We Demand: The University and Student Protests(Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 44.
[10] See Stephen Ferguson II,Philosophy of African American Studies: Nothing Left of Blackness(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 16.
[11] Ferguson,We Demand, 40.
[12] Powell, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.”
[13] Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S., 265 (1978), 292. Availablehere.
[14] Ibid., 295.
[15] Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. v. Public Service Commission, 447 U.S., 557 (1980), 561, 562. Availablehere.
[16] Curry Malott, “Corporate Personhood, Monopoly Capital, and the Precedent that Wasn’t: The 1886 ‘Santa Clara’ Case,”Liberation School, 09 February 2023. Availablehere.
[17] First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 435 U.S. 765 (1978), footnote 15. Availablehere.
[18] Clements,Corporations are Not People, 25.