Steven Raney | 2/22/2023
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June of 2022, a decision made by just six unelected justices with consequences for the bodily autonomy of millions of people across the United States, the socialist movement leapt into action to defend abortion rights. DSA led the charge, with over one hundred chapters across the country mobilizing for pro-choice campaigns throughout the summer and fall. On October 6th, YDSA organized demonstrations on more than fifty campuses in twenty-nine different states as part of a nationwide student strike for abortion. Since then, FU-YDSA has joined the fight by mobilizing Furman students to defend patients at the Greenville Women’s Clinic from aggressive anti-choice harassment. In coordination with Upstate Clinic Defenders, a pro-choice volunteer organization, we have so far assembled successful clinic defense operations on February 11th and February 18th, with more planned for the 23rd, 24th, 25th, and more dates in March. We are now in the process of organizing protests against South Carolina House Bill 3774, effectively a near-total abortion ban, with the help of other (Y)DSA chapters and local volunteer groups.
What significance does the right to an abortion hold for the socialist movement? Angela Davis, Black Marxist scholar and two-time Communist Party candidate for Vice President, proclaimed in Women, Race, and Class that “birth control—individual choice, safe contraceptive methods, as well as abortions when necessary—is a fundamental prerequisite for the emancipation of women.” It is noteworthy, then, that the same political forces responsible for the historic defeat of abortion rights last June, the same ones now pushing for a national abortion ban via an act of Congress, are also behind assaults on the legality of Plan B, the birth control pill, and even condoms. If we view the struggle over abortion not as a philosophical disagreement about the nature of human life, as conservatives would have us see it, but rather as a conflict over the concrete emancipation or subjugation of women and others with uteruses, then it would be dangerously shortsighted of us to brush aside omens of a mounting challenge to basic contraceptive rights. What is at stake here is not whether a fetus constitutes a human life, but whether the category of people capable of bearing a fetus to term are to have the freedom to decide, if, when, and under what circumstances they do so. We socialists have a duty to answer with an uncompromising “YES!” and plant ourselves firmly on the front lines of the fight to fully realize that freedom. That is the spirit of FU-YDSA’s clinic defense campaign.
Reproductive freedom is fundamentally a class issue. A very particular set of class interests is arrayed on either side. On an abstract level, the tension between bodily autonomy and external domination of the body is one expression of the tension between the ideology of the emancipation of the working class, which demands for every human being the full freedom to develop their own physical and mental capacities to whatever ends they desire, and the ideology of capital, which insists that one’s body and mind belong to the market as mere inputs in the process of production. On a more material level, the capitalist class benefits directly from the existence of a subclass of workers whose lives revolve around child-rearing and unpaid domestic labor. The former maintains a large working class, and the latter lowers the cost of social reproduction, that is, the minimum cost of the goods and services needed to keep the average worker alive and healthy enough to continue working. A larger working class means a larger market for the products the capitalists sell and a larger unemployed population to keep wages low. A lower cost of social reproduction means a lower limit for what the capitalist class can pay the proletariat before facing total system collapse. In short, patriarchy is a core pillar of the capitalist system of exploitation. Strengthening and deepening it by undermining the hard-fought historic advances of the feminist and queer liberation movements (abortion rights chief among them) benefits the capitalist class in a directly quantifiable way. As always, when the capitalist class stands to gain, the working class stands to lose. Workers of all genders will find themselves squeezed tighter from every angle as the right of their child-bearing comrades to regulate their own bodily functions is methodically stripped away.
All this may seem very theoretical to an outside observer, but the real, on-the-ground experience of clinic defense vindicates it. According to our Upstate Clinic Defenders comrades, many of the key individuals behind the efforts of our anti-choice opponents are property-owners or indirectly on the payroll of people who are. Several of them own construction companies. Additionally, the anti-choicers operate out of properties they own both adjacent to and across the street from the Greenville Women’s Clinic, including a newly constructed fake abortion clinic (yes, you read that right) which attempts to lure patients in for the medical malpractice they call “abortion pill reversal (a biological impossibility). The existence of such a facility suggests serious involvement from larger business interests.
The class dynamics are just as apparent on our side. None of our UCD comrades are businessowners, to say the least, and there are no propertied interests subsidizing their efforts (or ours, for that matter). A substantial number of the honks we solicit with our roadside “honk for choice” signs come from workers on the job: truckers for retail giants like Wal-Mart and Food Lion, postal workers, et cetera.
The battlelines in this fight could not be more clear. On one side stands a coalition of capitalists and petty proprietors who, for the sake of their own class interests, seek to keep millions of people stuck in a state of subhuman domination so that more profit may be wrung from the lives of the working class. On the other side stands a coalition of workers across all trades, industries, races, and genders who seek to defend their own from the desperate conditions anti-choice legislation is producing, conditions where the vulnerable and impoverished are forced to drive across state lines to seek healthcare under threat of harassment or worse. There can be no doubt for the socialist movement: we stand for the proletariat irrespective of gender, and therefore we must defend birth control in all its forms from the reactionary forces attempting to steal it away from those who depend on it most.
Lila Dawson | 2/22/2023
Perhaps when one considers “Socialist Art” images of the nationalistic propaganda spring to mind. Socialist Realism carries the connotations of state-chartered art intended to glorify a socialist Utopia (think of Unser Leben by Walter Womacka). On the contrary, in recent years, new appreciation has arisen for Ralph Fasenella, an American painter noted for his intertwining of Americana with scenes of Socialism. Fasenella’s work does not fabricate an optimistic fantasy, but rather brings to attention the preexisting community of laborers, highlighting the structures of socialism in the 20th century.
Born to a working-class family in the Bronx in 1914, Fasenella worked as a union organizer for United Electrical, prior to taking up painting at age 30 (although he did not paint full time until 1972). The scope of Fasenella’s work was broad, while the paintings themselves were intricate. Common threads in Fasenella’s work are mundanity, community, the coexistence of both joy and sadness in labor, and the intertwining of private lives against a bustling, diverse cityscape. Many have noted the detail on figures in Fasenella’s work. Despite clearly being part of a collective whole, they are all elaborate individuals, dispelling popular American anxieties about loss of self under socialism.
Consider Fasenella’s 1972 work Dress Shop, which illustrates a lively garment factory against a busy city, emphasizing the camaraderie the worker’s find in their labor. Fasenella’s 1974 work Family Supper highlights the domestic sphere, bringing a working-class family into the spotlight. One may also turn to Fasenella’s more objectively political pieces, such Farewell Comrade-The End of the Cold War (1991), which shows a pastiche of reactions to the fall of the USSR, centered on a coffin containing Vladimir Lenin’s body. Note the sea of faces which compose the background of this piece.
The term “Outsider Art” is often applied to art produced by artists who lack formal training. Fasenella is, by popular definition, an Outsider Artist. However, is art which was intended for display in labor halls (as opposed to for private collection) truly the art of outsiders? Perhaps Art Historians should reconsider who the outsider is. Is it the working class which constitutes for the majority of America, as reflected in Fasenella’s work, or the elite few who determine these typologies?
To close, I’d like to bring attention to a final seemingly minute commonality in Fasenella’s work. Many of Fasenella’s works include the phrase “Lest We Forget”, often seamlessly and unassumingly included in the background of his work. This phrase, often associated with fallen soldiers and cultures of remembrance, is turned on its head in Fasenella’s work. It is not the heroes of war who Fasenella’s work places an emphasis on, but rather the common laborer. I raise the question: What is it exactly that Fasenella implores viewers to not forget? Is it the post-war culture of America? The contribution of the working class? Perhaps something which is not identifiable as one concrete idea, but rather the whole of many parts, like Fasenella’s body of work itself.
Further reading:
https://folkartmuseum.org/resources/fasanellacollection/
https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/fasanella
https://www.ueunion.org/ue-news-feature/2022/remembering-ralph-fasanella
https://sites.nasher.duke.edu/hdyl/guides/outsider-and-folk-art/
Paige Lau | 2/22/2023
[Given the widespread religiosity of Furman’s student body and throughout the area, I thought it might be of interest to briefly discuss some of Marx’s views on religion. His thought, I think, is helpful in developing a socialist theory of religion that usefully informs how we ought to relate to religion and religious people here and elsewhere. Of course, Marx’s views on religion are not the only legitimate basis for legitimate socialist religious theory and practice.]
At first glance, Marx’s works appeared to me crudely atheistic, pre-occupied with tearing down illusions which lead us away from seeing things as they really are: flat, objective, material. This appearance is not entirely inaccurate—his project is highly doubtful of religion writ large and is influenced by Enlightenment rationalism and science. However, Marx’s texts do not merely seek to reduce all things to material, objective realities; they also seek to discover and understand the “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” present in the everyday phenomena of the capitalist world. Marx’s dual maneuver: naturalize that which is apparently unnatural and denaturalize that which is apparently natural.
In his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx discusses German anthropologist Ludwig Feuerbach’s conception of religion. According to Feuerbach, once religion is resolved “into its secular basis” there is no more to be done. Marx, in contrast, urges us to halt our pursuit of such generically atheistic approaches. Religion, he tells us, is not the primary issue at hand: “[Religion appears] as the manifestation of secular narrowness . . . . for the fact that the secular basis detaches from itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm can only be explained by the cleavage and self-contradictions within this secular basis.” Transcendence emerges from immanence, but that does not make it fictitious: it simply makes it contingent, something produced and experienced under particular social, material circumstances. On this view, religion does not express its own truths—it cannot, for example, express truths about the universal morality of the cosmos—but instead expresses the incapability of the material and social organization of the world to justify itself without divine intervention.
In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx & Engels describe religion as no more than a series of “bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.” This passage, at first glance, appears primarily as a critique of religion. Now, however, we can see that it is bourgeois morality itself that is first and foremost indicted, while religion is criticized only secondarily as expressive of the capitalist mode of production’s failure to justify itself on its own basis. It is the soulless, callous, and egotistical reality of capital and its bourgeois standard-bearers which demands religion to emerge and construct for society a soul outside of itself.
Marx & Engels pose a challenge not to religion but to the structure of human society as a whole. Why, they ask, do we need religion in the first place? It is not first and foremost mere superstition or lack of intelligence amongst the religious. After all, our ideas change “with every change in the conditions of material existence, in social relations and in social life.” We need religion because capitalist society fails to provide for the physical and spiritual flourishing of those within it. What precedes the abolition of religion is the creation of a world which no longer needs it.
Isaac Lewis | 3/1/2023
Americans are famous for a lot of things across the world. Things like being stupid, having large food portions, or having no healthcare. All the normal stuff. But one thing that Americans often don’t realize about themselves is that they are just awful at class analysis. Or, more specifically, realizing exactly what class we, as individuals, belong to.
No, I’m not talking about classes in a Marxist sense, because that’s not how average, everyday people understand class. I’m talking about classes like working (or lower), middle, and upper. American perceptions of how they stack up with the rest of the citizenry purely by socioeconomic status is terrible; sixty-eight percent of Americans considered themselves to be middle class in 2018, a time when just 52% of Americans could actually be considered “middle class.”
Where does this disconnect come from? Such a discrepancy doesn’t exist in other countries. And, more importantly, how are we so bad at everything?
It’s important to realize that “middle class” is a difficult term that should be taken with a grain of salt for multiple reasons, nebulosity being the primary one. But because the concept of the middle class is so ingrained in everyday class analysis and discourse, the potential applications of the concept absolutely cannot be ignored, however imperfect they may be. One of the biggest conclusions that we can draw from using this regular class analysis is that Americans don’t identify with the working class as much as they should, or as much as people from other countries do.
Ok, sure. But what does that mean? Well, fortunately, all the heavy lifting has already been done for me: famous American rhetorician Kenneth Burke has already given a speech on the topic. Burke says in Revolutionary Symbolism in America, a speech given to the Communist Party of the United States of America in 1935, that the American communist movement needs to stray away from using terms like “proletariat” and “worker” because Americans simply don’t identify with those terms, electing that we use more general terms like “the people” to unify Americans under one common goal instead.
Burke was booed off the stage for his speech, but is he not correct? The data didn’t exist in 1935, but sociological analysis has proved his sentiment right time and time again. How can we expect to build a powerful, bottom-up left-wing movement with language that doesn’t unify people?
I’m not saying all of this to tell my fellow socialists that they need to abandon their worldview and relational class view of society. I’m not advocating for adopting any view of class except a predominantly relational one, or a rhetorical shift to emphasizing nationality, race, or some other bogus metric over class. Hell, I think that maintaining a relational view of society is essential to radicalizing our peers. It’s important to realize that “worker” and “proletariat” speak to the hearts of those who have already achieved class consciousness, but what about regular, average, every day, disillusioned Americans? The same Americans who don’t feel spoken to when you call them “workers?”
So it’s important, when you’re talking to your friends who don’t know a whole lot about leftist politics, you don’t alienate them with your language. Don’t do what leftists are infamous for and cling to aesthetics and perfection when pragmatism and inclusiveness could get us so much further. We, as socialists, do stand for workers, but we stand for our fellow human beings above all else.
Steven Raney | 3/1/2023
We are ill-equipped to defeat an enemy we do not fully understand. From this basic premise, it follows that there are few errors more fatal than the underestimation of our enemies, for not only have we misunderstood them, but we have done so in such a way that will tend to disarm us and leave us underprepared to engage with them. As socialists, our primary enemy is the capitalist class, the class of property-owners and exploiters, a class sworn to defend the unjust, unsustainable capitalist system from our efforts to overthrow it. To ensure that we do not underestimate it, we must appreciate that the capitalist class is not a monolithic entity, but a dangerously complex one. It is a two-headed class. The two heads appear different, they behave differently at the surface level, but they both rely on the same social relation to exist, namely, the exploitation of the labor of the working-class majority.
The serpent of capitalism rears both its heads in our daily lives, but every now and then we have the good fortune to bear witness to a particularly transparent demonstration of each one in action. This past Thursday, the twenty-fourth of February, Furman YDSA was at the Greenville Women’s Clinic for an urgent session of abortion clinic defense against Operation Save America, a far-right organization described by clinic defenders on the scene as “Christian nationalist” and “white supremacist.” The label “fascist” will suffice for our purposes. These fascists were cruel, they were violent, they were stupendously reactionary. They threatened both us and the clinic’s patients with “eternal torment in Hell” and used their megaphones to broadcast tirades about how all humans are born wicked and deserve “death and Hell” until we accept OSA’s preferred variety of Christian dogma. They were quick to share their thoughts about queer people (best left to the imagination) and displayed appalling levels of antisemitism utterly unprompted. There is no mystery as to what class they hailed from. All of the principal actors, by their own admission or per our comrades who volunteer at the clinic full-time, are property-owners of one kind or another. Some own construction or landscaping companies. Others are landlords. One, without seeing the irony as someone ostensibly there to defend the sanctity of human life, admitted to working in the Department of Defense—not a bourgeois position per se but one inextricably bound up in the bourgeoisie’s apparatus of control. One of the landlords mystified us by boasting that he charges his tenants only $950 a month, a price for housing out of reach for the one-third of American workers, more than fifty million people, who make less than fifteen dollars an hour. Of course, this entire posse of parasites and petty tyrants worked in close coordination with the multimillion-dollar fake clinic across the street, whose mere existence, I noted last week, suggests the reactionaries enjoy the financial support of even larger business interests.
This is the first head of the capitalist serpent: vicious, reactionary, fascist. It does little to conceal its aims. A century ago, it donned a white hood and demanded “one hundred percent Americanism.” Today, it dons a red cap and demands that America be made great again. Bigotry and religious fundamentalism are the crude instruments with which it hopes to bludgeon the working class into submission.
After standing our ground at the clinic for five hours, we returned to campus and went about our day as students. I had a lab period for my sustainability class that afternoon, during which we took a tour of the inner workings of the dining hall. Our guide extolled the virtues of Bon Appetit, the company Furman contracts to manage dining on campus. We were all pleased to learn that Bon Appetit cares deeply about sustainability (hence the effort to source their ingredients locally) and workers’ welfare (take, for example, their boycott of Heinz for its labor abuses). On the way out of the dining hall, I ran into a worker who told me he was in the middle of a thirteen-hour shift. Workers’ welfare indeed. As we will all hear from the labor subcommittee at the next general meeting on March 17th, Bon Appetit and its multinational parent company are anything but ethical employers, if such a thing even exists. Behind the rosy picture they paint for us at Furman lies something rotten.
This is the other head of the serpent: deceptive, cynically humanitarian, “progressive.” It goes to great lengths to launder its image with philanthropy, support for liberal social causes, even faux concern for the condition of the working class. It wants capitalism to be humane, a “fair deal” for worker and capitalist alike. But “humane capitalism” does not exist. The second head’s progressive face hides the fact that it subsists on the same basic social relation as the first—domination of the majority by the minority through the exploitation of labor. A society founded on that principle can only ever crush and oppress the human spirit; it could no more be a “fair deal” for the worker than slavery was a “fair deal” for the slave or feudalism a “fair deal” for the serf.
A socialist movement that underappreciates the two-headed nature of the capitalist enemy is liable to fail to grasp what history demands of it. After all, is the Democratic Party—a political vehicle for the second head of capitalism—not a “progressive” force? Do Democrats not stand for civil rights, climate action, and social welfare, at least relative to the reactionary assaults mounted by the Republicans? It is easy to fall into the mindset that socialists should resign ourselves to the role of accomplices for liberal Democrats until an unspecified point in the future when the far right has been defeated. But we cannot rely on one faction of the capitalist class to protect us from another any more than we can rely on a serpent to wound itself by biting off one of its own heads. The Democrats largely take up progressive causes as a means of mobilizing sections of the working class as pawns in their dispute with the faction of capitalists represented by the Republicans, a mere “family feud” secondary to the life-and-death struggle between the owning and laboring classes. If we hope to revolutionize society, we cannot bloc with forces that will defend the ruling order to the hilt. If we want to liberate uniquely oppressed sections of the working class, we cannot bloc with forces that see issues like abortion rights, freedom from police terror, and the dignity of queer people as mere slogans for fundraising, never to be structurally resolved lest they cease to convince people to reach for their checkbooks in election season. No, the path to revolution and liberation is a path the working class must walk alone. The socialist movement must stand on its own two feet, learn to endure the open attacks of one face of the enemy while rejecting the sinister sweet-talking of the other, and lead a mass struggle at the ballot box, in the workplace, and in the streets. It is only then that we may slay the two-headed serpent of capitalism.
Isaac Lewis | 3/15/2023
The crushing weight of the social systems at play around us can be overwhelming. We live in a world where every aspect of society is built up to insidiously maintain a wicked status quo, and thus it is easy to say that it’s naïve to assume that we can change the system with the tools that have been presented to us by the system.
Fighting can feel pointless. It can all feel like nonsense. Like we’re trapped in an eternal night where the sun will never rise. It can feel like digging for windows.
But I’m here to tell you all that fighting is still important, and that such hopeless feelings only help the status quo.
Yes, the omnipresent grasp of capitalism is enough to overpower and extinguish the light in anybody’s heart. But so was the clench of monarchy, or the grip of feudalism. The facts of history are abundantly clear: the human spirit is indomitable, and it has weaseled its way out of numerous other dire circumstances and oppressive environments over and over again.
That isn’t to say that we can stand by idly, clasp our hands together, and pray that everything has a happy ending. We have to fight, and we have to struggle. The world is fucked, and we severely need to unfuck it. But the world is also filled with abundant beauty, wonderful people, and incredible happenings. The endless possibilities of the future will never stop glimmering through the present, no matter how dark it may be. What drives us and motivates us varies from person to person but love for each and every one of your fellow human beings is a damn good place to start.
Che Guevara, the face of the Cuban Revolution, once said “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.”
When have you ever heard of someone who managed to change the world by sitting around and wallowing all day? When have you ever heard of change happening because of an unmotivated populace? The simple answer is never. Change only happens when people have hopes, dreams, and visions about the future in their mind, and radical love filling their hearts.
Yes, it may be impossible to radically change the system within the bounds set by the system itself. But that doesn’t mean that positive material changes are impossible to win at all, or even that we have to play by the rules all the time. It’s not only fatalistic to assume that this is the final version of the world as we know it, it’s just wrong. A better world is always possible. Losing hope only pacifies the human spirit and causes inaction, and inaction is where change goes to die. The most radical reforms in American history, from the abolition of slavery to the expansion of women’s rights and more, weren’t won by the twiddling of thumbs and playing by the rules. They were won by average, everyday people like you and me who stood up and worked towards change.
So, when Texas proposes a bill making it legal to bounty hunt drag queens, or when the president approves a new oil drilling project, or when the Supreme Court takes bodily autonomy from women in America, it’s important to not lose heart. Don’t let the evils of the world move you to despair, let them radicalize you and motivate you to fight for your fellow human beings. Revolutionary optimism isn’t just a mindset, it’s a set of actions. And now, we need action more than anything else.
Michael Ross | 3/15/2023
What does a socialist transition look like to you? Whether achieved through violent or nonviolent seizure of power – What are the key, qualitative changes which we must make, once in power, in order to definitively transmogrify our economy from one directed towards exploitative accumulation to one directed towards the basic needs of all?
For some, the discussion begins and ends with “worker democracy”. These socialists (some are more or less befitting of the name) say that once decision-making power in the economy is delegated to the workers either via market or state, then socialism has been achieved. Some would even go as far to say that a worker cooperative functioning in a largely capitalist market is socialism, claiming that “workplace democracy” is all socialism is and all that socialism has ever claimed to be. As per the title of this paper, I would like to problematize this potentially easy-to-succumb-to presumption. Ultimately, reducing socialism simply to “workplace or worker democracy” portrays a misunderstanding of the theoretical foundations of socialism and the problems in capitalism which socialism strives to correct.
Before I begin my critique, I would like to disclaim that I by no means believe worker/workplace democracy to be a bad thing – on the contrary, I think it is a vital part to creating a just society, as we must ensure that humanity’s path is determined by the many and not the few. Given our current economy, any amount of worker democracy is a vast improvement, and I would strongly encourage the formation of cooperatives. However, this is a matter of goalposts. We can – and must – go further in order to create a safe and just society for all within environmental limits.
I will begin with a small hypothetical.
Imagine a business. This business plays a socially useless, destructive, or nuanced role – imagine arms manufacturers, single-use plastic manufacturers, oil/petroleum companies, media companies. Now, if its workers were to unionize and (by some stroke of divine providence) take control of the company, the cooperative, within a market, could very easily still strive for growth for its sake over the rest of the market. Within a market, cooperatives are still pitted against each other, albeit with a lesser ferocity due to the lack of capital accumulation under a select few executives. What’s more is that in order to grow in a way that will benefit all of its workers, any given cooperative will have to maintain business-as-usual and continue selling arms, single use plastics, or oil. Media companies would continue peddling lies and sensationalism, as that is what has historically made the most money and has led to the most growth; advertising companies would continue preying on insecurities in order for yet more industries to grow and in turn pay the advertising companies more. Is this socialism? The workers own the means of production! Even if we were to take an industry-wide example (let’s say, steelworkers), this industry would still need to continue its extractive practices worldwide, which are deforestation intensive, fossil fuel intensive – and not to mention potentially imperialist – practices.
The main issue with this reductive view of socialism is that a shift in ownership in a capitalist, productivist, extractivist (and a plethora of other -ists) economy is not going to bring about the qualitative change needed in the 21st century. Kohei Saito argues that this comes from the fact that both formal and real subsumption of the forces of production have taken place. According to Saito, “transferring ownership” does not stand to solve the ecological issues of capitalism, as, according to Marx, the process of real subsumption (opposed to formal subsumption, in which productive forces are integrated as they are into capitalist relations of production) has transformed productive forces from their original form to a form which serves the valorization of capital above all else. Saito says that “the ‘productive forces of capital’ must be transformed into ‘productive forces of social labor’”, or else the transfer of ownership will still have us “driving SUVs, changing smartphones every two years and eating cultured meat hamburgers” (Saito, 2022). Commodities and consumer-culture will not disappear. Planned obsolescence will not disappear. Global-scale environmental degradation will continue as usual. Growth will remain.
Ultimately, a transfer in ownership does not solve the key problem of growth-oriented markets. Within a market, cooperatives will still be pitted against each other, vying for growth all they can, preying on human weakness, cutting corners for profit, and degrading the environment and other people by way of externalizing costs. The class dynamic will have been flattened, not for the sake of cooperation but so that the workers may cut out the middleman, the capitalist, and fight each other on their own terms on the desecrated earth that will become their battlefield.
When nothing is done regarding the real subsumption of productive forces, when the material processes and goals of production remain the same, capital maintains its grip on both us and the environment, regardless of who owns the means of production.
How can we fix this? How must we go further than a transfer of ownership, beyond workplace democracy? The solution is a change in mindset – The solution lies in degrowth. Defined by Jason Hickel as “a planned reduction of energy and resource use designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being,” degrowth entails emphasizing socially useful industries and getting rid of socially and environmentally harmful ones (Hickel 2021), constituting a dimension of the goal for a socialist transition from exchange- to use-value. By getting rid of harmful industries and giving workers the authority over the surplus produced by the degrowth economy, we can create an economy that is democratic, humane, and sustainable – one that asks nothing but “from each according to their ability and to each according to their needs”. Unlike a market-oriented degrowth process, workers can decide which industries should be cut while not spelling a death sentence for the workers of those industries. By shifting the working population towards socially useful ends, social production increases and required work hours decrease. Hickel details:
“As [environmentally] dirty and socially unnecessary industries close down and aggregate economic activity contracts, unemployment can be prevented by shortening the working week and redistributing necessary labour (into cleaner, more socially useful sectors) with a job guarantee” (Hickel 2019).
Only through comprehensive worker control of the economy in combination with a degrowth-oriented philosophy can we create a sustainable, just, socialist economy. Worker ownership and degrowth are designed to work hand-in-hand. But as long as markets are maintained and the forces of production maintain their growth-oriented attributes, the ghost of capitalism’s more hidden and pernicious attributes will continue to haunt us – simply transferring ownership is not enough.
Works Cited
Hickel, Jason. “What does degrowth mean? A few points of clarification.” Globalizations. (2021): 1105-1111. DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2020.1812222
Hickel, Jason. "Degrowth: a theory of radical abundance." Real-World Economics Review 87.19 (2019): 54-68.
Saito, Kohei. Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism. Cambridge, University Printing House. (2022). 160.
Steven Raney | 3/15/2023
In the face of the multiple compounding crises of modern capitalist society—the mounting debt, rent, and healthcare crises, police terror, unchecked far-right violence and reactionary advances on the political front, catastrophic infrastructure collapse, imperialism’s flirtation with nuclear war, and the potentially civilization-ending threat of runaway climate change—it is easy to become disheartened. The internal pessimist that hounds each of us in moments of doubt tries to convince us that it’s too late, socialism’s window has come and gone and all that remains for us to do is vote for the Democratic nominee every two to four years in the vain hope that the liberal wing of capital might, by some miracle, do something for us for once.
I hope to stave off that lurking pessimism and offer in its place a conditional optimism. The prospects for socialism in this country are promising, but we have to appraise them with clear eyes and have the courage to act on them.
From the point of view of the demoralized socialist, the most serious reason to abandon hope is that socialism simply does not have a mass base of support in America, and likely never will. That isn’t true. According to Pew, around six percent of American adults have a “very positive” impression of socialism. This is indeed a tiny minority, but six percent of the American adult population amounts to over fifteen million people. The percentage expands to thirty-six percent when those with a “somewhat” positive impression of socialism are factored in. Add to that the fact that these figures do not include youth, who are consistently more supportive of socialism than adults, and it becomes clear that there exists a base of up to one hundred million people in the United States waiting to be organized around a socialist program. Of course, that group of a hundred million likely sees socialism in terms of the milquetoast welfare-capitalist model put forth by those who call the Scandinavian countries “democratic socialist,” but the fact remains: tens of millions of people in this country are fed up with capitalism, and moreover are willing to identify the alternative as socialism, a word that was totally taboo in mainstream political discourse just a few short years ago.
The fifteen to one hundred million individuals who make up our prospective constituency are not a majority, but we don’t need one, at least not at first. We won’t build a movement by searching for demands that already enjoy majority support and attempting to use our support for them as a means of steering their supporters towards what we actually want. That strategy is how we end up running in circles trying to pass broadly popular policies like the Green New Deal or a $15 minimum wage without connecting those struggles to the broader struggle for the emancipation of the working class. Instead, we have to seek out the most politically advanced layers of the working class and mobilize them as a militant minority to fight for a socialist program in the here and now. By publicly battling with the forces of the ruling class, that militant minority will raise the class consciousness of millions of other workers and bring our movement closer to winning a majority mandate for socialism.
We already know the advanced layer of the working class is capable of mobilizing for transformative social demands. In the summer of 2020, between fifteen and twenty-six million people participated in a mass uprising that directly challenged the authority of the state, one where the flagship demand existed somewhere on a spectrum between “defund the police” and “abolish the police.” That same year, nine million people voted for a self-described socialist in the Democratic primaries, and candidates running as socialists demonstrated they could win elections in New York City, Detroit, and St. Louis.
All the necessary ingredients for a mass socialist movement exist, or are coming into existence before our eyes. Unions are growing and work stoppages are becoming larger and more numerous. Militant reform caucuses powered by the rank and file are on the move in America’s largest unions: Teamsters for a Democratic Union won the leadership of the 1.4 million-strong Teamsters in a landslide in 2021, and after voting to undo bureaucratic measures implemented to crush communist influence during the Cold War, the United Auto Workers (with an active membership of 400,000) are now on the brink of electing the full Unite All Workers for Democracy slate in their first-ever internally democratic elections. Unions like Railroad Workers United and the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers (UE for short) have openly called for a departure from two-party capitalist politics. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union has paved the way for the re-politicization of organized labor through industrial actions in solidarity with the struggles against police brutality and Israeli apartheid. More exciting still, ties between socialist organizations and the labor movement are growing in strength and number. DSA is in the process of building a strong working relationship with UE through the Emergency Worker Organizing Committee, UNITE HERE in the fight to unionize Starbucks, RWU in the fight against Norfolk Southern, the United Mine Workers in the ongoing strike against Warrior Met Coal, and more. Socialists outside of DSA are doing promising work in the labor movement as well, including efforts by the Communist Party and Socialist Alternative to help unionize Amazon warehouses.
Beyond the workplace, a mass working-class upheaval is brewing in the tenant organizing movement, and here too lie strong connections with organized socialism. Through its Housing Justice Commission, DSA has played a crucial role in organizing dozens of tenant unions all over the country, from Stomp Out Slumlords in D.C. to the Los Angeles Tenants Union in L.A. Other tenant organizations, like Brooklyn Eviction Defense in New York, have organized independently of DSA but are proving to be vital parts of a growing multi-organization ecosystem including groups from DSA to the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the Communist Party.
The recent labor and community upsurges are reflected in DSA’s meteoric rise in membership from roughly six thousand in 2016 to ninety-five thousand in 2021.
All these developments are encouraging signs, but again, I urge conditional optimism. The ingredients of a mass movement are all there, but ingredients are only as good as what you use them for. At the end of the nineteenth century, American socialists faced similarly promising circumstances. Unions were growing at an exponential rate, rail workers, miners, textile workers, and others were beginning to flex their organizing muscles with strikes of historic proportions like the Pullman Strike of 1894, and the movement for the eight-hour workday was bringing hundreds of thousands into the streets across the country. Socialist organizers of that era seized the opportunity and assembled the Socialist Party of America, which, in the span of a decade, surpassed one hundred thousand members, gained the active support of an estimated two million people, challenged the conservative union bosses of the American Federation of Labor for hegemony over the labor movement, won millions of votes for a radical socialist program, and elected hundreds of its members to public offices up to and including Congress. What has the modern socialist movement done in the equivalent position? What do we have to show for ourselves? DSA failed to fill the leadership vacuum during the uprisings of 2020 despite being the only organization in the country capable of doing so. Our electoral victories have been hollow, a record of our continuous failure to elect anyone willing to act in accordance with our own political platform. Military budget hikes, strikebreaking, and funding for Israeli apartheid all stain the legacy of “our” electeds. The alternatives to DSA are not faring any better. Despite leading some meaningful projects here and there, party-sects like the Communist Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and Socialist Alternative are stuck in a state of perpetual stagnation, doomed to limit themselves with outdated party structures until the inevitable schism splits them into even smaller sects.
If we want a mass movement, we need a mass party. The road to socialist revolution does not lie through forfeiting our political independence as a class any more than it lies through crudely applying the misinterpreted lessons of the Bolshevik experience to twenty-first century America. We must do as the Socialist Party of America did. We must unite the disparate factions of the socialist movement into one internally democratic political party, bring the emerging mass organizations of workers and tenants into the fold to rally the advanced layer of the working class around a party program that speaks to their interests, seek strategic public offices to transform the ruling-class halls of power into sites of class struggle, and fight an all-or-nothing battle for democracy and socialism on our own terms. The stakes could not be higher—we have a world to win.
Paige Lau | 3/22/2023
“The perpetual penality that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes.” —Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
The 17th and 18th centuries in Western Europe marked the open of a long series of revolutions in the political economy of the body. In the school, disciplinary practice became increasingly rigorous and standardized. The student was to sit straight, keep their arms above their desk, raise their hands before speaking, walk in single-file, and exercise strict obedience to their instructor in all matters. The greatest minds of Western Europe, on the eve of the industrial revolution, dreamed of a precisely calculated and regimented military society. The schoolhouse was to resemble the barracks, which was to resemble the monastery, which was to resemble the prison, which was—soon enough—to resemble the factory.
In 1858, Marx wrote on the development of the factory: “The workers activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the other way around.” The artificial limbs of the mechanized factory discipline the body of the working class. They inscribe new marks on the surface of the body: diseases of the lungs from chemical exposure, anxious compulsions, dirt and oil and burn marks, repetitive movements reminiscent of gears turning, hearing loss from exposure to loud machinery, chronic joint and back pain from constant strain, and so on. They train the body to adopt a new rigidity, a new automaticity, a deeply instinctual obedience to a new authority—the authority of the automated motions of capital, signified by the machine. The body of the working class, normalized according to the disciplinary impositions of capital.
The great colonial powers soon began exporting this new political economy of the body by violent means. Forceful installation of capitalist power structures in colonized territories invested itself in the bodies of the colonized. Presently, neo-colonial power functions in much the same way—mining sites, sweatshops, and other exploitative spaces define the contours of the body for the global working class. And while we in the imperial core have exported many of the worst horrors of industrial production, our bodies are still normalized by capital in schools, prisons, military camps, office computers, modern mass-production facilities, and so on and so forth. Even the most mundane jobs, such as the work of cashiers in grocery stores, are subject to disciplinary measures modeled after the factory. Cashiers are ordered to stand for hours straight, to mechanically repeat rote phrases devoid of meaning, and to obey the customer's dictates without question. Why? We must interrogate and combat the ways in which our bodies are conditioned and disciplined by the interventions of modern capitalism and remain vigilant in challenging the pervasive influence of capitalism on our bodies as we strive for a more humane system of labor.
Steven Raney | 3/22/2023
One of the most common misperceptions socialists encounter in the world of mainstream politics is the idea that socialism describes government intervention in the economy. That raises the question: whose government? People who view the world in liberal terms tend to have a mystified view of the state. They see it as a neutral body standing over society, capable of acting as a referee in disputes between classes. Socialists have attacked this idea since at least the time of Marx. The state, socialists have long held, is not a neutral body but rather what Marx and Engels called the “organized power of one class for oppressing another,” meaning the state in the capitalist epoch is “a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Put in simpler terms, the modern state is a tool for the capitalist class as a whole to protect its interests by imposing its will on the working class.
Even a century and a half hence, it is not safe to put this issue to rest. The most prominent self-described socialists in America, Bernie Sanders and the “Squad,” continue to frame socialism largely in terms of securing a “fair deal” for the working class, a deal mediated by the government as it currently exists. Reformist socialists of this type do not necessarily believe that the state is a neutral entity—they would be the first to recognize that policymaking is caught in the vice grip of corporate lobbying—but their entire strategy to achieve what they consider socialism is premised on the idea that the state is neutral territory. In other words, the problem with the state is that the wrong people are running it. If you elect the right people, say the reformists, you can make the government work for you. If only it were that easy.
First, let us be clear: setting aside where the problem stems from, there can be no argument about whose interests the United States government currently serves. If you need evidence that ours is a government by, of, and for the capitalist class, you need only look around you. Reforms like a mandatory living wage, universal healthcare, tuition-free college, and the Green New Deal all enjoy the support of commanding popular majorities as high as seventy percent of the voting public, yet the federal minimum wage is at its lowest point in terms of real value since 1956 as one in ten households struggle to afford food, tens of thousands of people die every year because they cannot afford healthcare, more than forty million Americans have gone into debt to pay for college, and rather than take action to address the looming climate apocalypse, the government is poised to greenlight a massive new oil extraction project that will release as much carbon dioxide as 66 coal plants firing simultaneously. At every turn, we see “our” government obstructing reforms that would transform the lives of working-class people to instead protect and expand the vast ill-gotten fortunes of the capitalist class.
When these class antagonisms flare up in more dramatic ways, the government’s loyalties are even more apparent. When millions of working-class people rose up to demand community control of law enforcement in 2020, police at all levels of government arrested over 13,000 people and beat, gassed, and shot at countless others. Local governments uniformly increased police funding the following year. When mineworkers in Alabama struck for higher wages and better hours in 2021, the National Labor Relations Board attempted to bankrupt their union by ordering it to pay the mine operators millions of dollars for “lost productivity” the following year. When rail workers across the country were prepared to strike over a lack of paid sick days in the fall of 2022, Congress declared the strike illegal and forced them to remain at work on their employers’ terms. When the people of Atlanta began protesting plans to create a new police training supercenter by leveling a large swath of the city’s forests while working-class issues like mass homelessness and crumbling infrastructure go unaddressed, state and local police began terrorizing the protesters, killing one and arresting forty-three others as “domestic terrorists” since December of 2022. A government like this one, which so flagrantly uses its power to subdue labor for the benefit of capital, is a natural enemy of the socialist movement, so it is no surprise that the current administration considers those “opposed to all forms of capitalism” to be “a key component” of the “domestic terrorism threat.”
How might we go about rectifying all this? The straightforward reformist solution of changing the character of the state by electing a new set of people to helm it is a dead end, because the regime we live under is not merely led by the wrong people. No, it has the interests of our ruling class built into its very framework. The House of Representatives, the only organ of government at the federal level with even a tenuous claim to being democratic, is counterbalanced by the Senate, whose equal apportionment among the states distorts the influence of individual votes by a factor of up to seventy-to-one. Both chambers must then contend with the power of a one-man executive elected by the electoral college, which dilutes the power of the popular vote in much the same way as the Senate. The President, in turn, relies on the power of a large pool of unelected bureaucrats in the executive branch and the web of influence extending out from there into the private sector—Trump’s “deep state” is a misdirection, but like all effective lies, it contains a kernel of truth. A thorough house-cleaning of the federal bureaucracy would require the consent of the Senate for every significant appointment, meaning whether the reformist socialist movement approaches the issue of repurposing the government for socialist ends from the legislative angle or the executive one, it will find itself stymied by the profoundly undemocratic nature of the Senate all the same. But even supposing the movement defied the odds and won control of the Senate, the House, and the presidency, its reforms would still be at the mercy of the Supreme Court, whose members are not even indirectly elected and serve for life. Finally, and most definitively, if a socialist-controlled Congress instigated a standoff with the President or vice-versa, or if a socialist governing trifecta initiated a standoff with the Supreme Court, the loyalty of the military would be the decisive factor. The U.S. military, of course, acts in the interests of the military-industrial complex and can therefore be trusted to come down on the side of the capitalist class in the event of a constitutional crisis. We need not look further than the long list of Cold War-era military coups against democratically-elected socialist administrations around the world for proof-of-concept.
The capitalist state is not a tool that can be wielded by any class for any purpose. In its historical emergence as a tool of capitalist domination, it developed particular attributes suited only to minority rule and only, therefore, to the oppression and exploitation of the working-class majority. In the United States, these attributes take the form of an impenetrable series of obstacles to democracy, each one buttressing the other. What, then, can the socialist movement hope to do?
The class character of our government lies down at its roots, so we have no recourse but to uproot it. In the words of Vladimir Lenin, “the liberation of the oppressed class is impossible without [...] the destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class.” We must put forward a bold program designed to qualitatively transform the public power from a tool suited to the enemy’s objectives into one suited to our own. Our most basic demands must be:
“One person, one vote” will entail, at minimum, the abolition of the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College, the presidential veto, and arguably the office of the presidency itself, with corresponding changes at all lower levels of government. The right to initiate legislative referenda and recall elected officials by popular vote will need to be instituted as well.
To destroy corporate power will require the mass expropriation of the sources of the bourgeoisie’s “soft power” over democracy, which it will use to bend even the most formally democratic system to its will if left intact. All finance capital—every bank, every Wall Street firm—will need to be seized. The largest monopolies, like Amazon and Wal-Mart, will have to be taken under public ownership. Critical instruments of social leverage will also be essential targets for expropriation, including communication, energy, healthcare, and transportation infrastructure. We will also find it necessary to reduce elected officials’ salaries to average working wages to wipe out the stains of government corruption that go hand-in-hand with the noxious influence of corporate power. To be in government must become simply another job, no more and no less.
Ending the standing army and the police state is easier said than done. These are the bourgeoisie’s means of exercising “hard power;” they are the bite that backs up the bark, and they cannot simply be willed away. The abolition of the United States military, agencies like the CIA and DHS, and existing police infrastructure will require a total reconstitution of society’s instruments of force. A militia of the whole people, with mandatory service and training, democratic rights for members, and total accountability to elected organs of civilian government will have to emerge to take up the tasks of law enforcement and martial activity in a way that empowers the proletariat rather than oppressing it. The universal workers’ militia is the antidote to capitalist militarism.
To achieve these three fundamental objectives and make the state something we can commandeer in our fight for socialism will require more than just sustained electoral efforts. None of these items are practically achievable by Constitutional means, nor through established means of amending the Constitution. The amendment process is perhaps the most radically undemocratic of our government’s foundations, requiring the simultaneous assent of the state legislatures (which reproduce all of the federal-level obstacles discussed above) of three-fourths of the states. Our entire campaign must be oriented around the premise that the Constitution is illegitimate, undemocratic, and antithetical to our existence as a free people. We must demand a Working People’s Constitution, drafted by the working class via a democratic constituent assembly and ratified on its own authority, irrespective of the norms of the current regime.
To credibly put forth such a demand, we will need to build a movement that can mount real challenges to the ruling class on all fronts.
We need a strong and aggressive labor movement to put capitalists on the defensive in the workplace. Socialists should try to cultivate ties with the most politically radical sections of the working class and the most militant members of labor unions. Our goal is to cohere a coalition of internally democratic unions prepared, if necessary, to bring all economic activity to a halt with a mass strike in order to force the capitalist class to accept the gains our movement makes in other arenas.
We need resilient community organizations to rally the proletariat into direct action towards its own emancipation. Tenant unions, student groups, cooperatives, and a variety of other organizations will prove vital in bridging the gap between national and international political struggles on the one hand and the day-to-day material interests of the class on the other.
We need an independent party of the working class to run socialists for office against the Democratic and Republican parties at every level. Our elected officials should be answerable to our party and should uphold its program at every turn. Rather than attempting to broker a “fair deal” with the political cartels of the class enemy, as has been the modus operandi of our reformist socialists thus far, elected socialists should act as forces of obstruction and opposition. In city councils, state legislatures, and the House of Representatives, disciplined socialist caucuses should throw a wrench into the machinery of capitalist government by, for example, voting down capitalist candidates for parliamentary offices like Speaker of the House and refusing to vote for any annual budget that provides funding for the military. Most importantly, our elected officials must act as representatives of the socialist movement and publicly platform our agenda, which at this stage of the class struggle means, above all, one thing: down with the Constitution!
Steven Raney | 3/29/2023
Two weeks ago, we published an article entitled Beyond Worker Democracy; Towards Degrowth Socialism by Michael Ross. This piece provides an excellent summary of the fundamentals of the philosophy of “degrowth socialism” as espoused by Kohei Saito. Ross’s conceit, shared by many proponents of degrowth socialism, is that the framework of “workers’ democracy” is an insufficient one for the revolutionary socialist movement to operate within because it does not, without external intervention, resolve the contradiction between human civilization and the natural environment, a contradiction which has led to massive ecosystem destruction and the threat of world-ending climate change. I happen to agree with the general principles of degrowth socialism, but I take issue with the way its theoretical innovations are often presented. The intent of this article is to put forth a comradely critique of Beyond Worker Democracy and its framing of the tension between workers’ democracy and eco-socialism—a tension I propose does not meaningfully exist. Socialism need not go “beyond worker democracy,” because a fully-realized democratic workers’ republic necessarily implies a sustainable and harmonious relationship between humanity and the rest of the biosphere. Far from surpassing the republican struggle, “degrowth socialism” actually entails a continuation of that struggle to its logical conclusions. The old Bolshevik slogan “democratic revolution to the end” is as good in the age of Kohei Saito as it was in the age of Vladimir Lenin.
Republicanism is often falsely reduced to its political dimension, misconstrued as merely the ideal of government by popular consent. Popular sovereignty, or political democracy, is indeed a crucial foundation of the republican struggle. But the notion that political democracy is the end-all, be-all of republican thought is in fact a distortion originating with liberalism, the rival ideology emerging out of the Enlightenment. The true foundation of republicanism is the idea of freedom from domination in all its forms. Before the liberal bourgeois took command of the revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the republican petty-bourgeois or plebeian elements sought to march beyond the political sphere and resolve the social question—in Marxist terms, to revolutionize the relations of production. For domination exists in the social sphere as well, after all, the domination of one class by another has historically occurred through economic exploitation, whether in the form of slavery, serfdom, or wage-labor. The aim of republicanism has always been to bring about both a political republic and a social one.
That is not to say that republicanism and the democratic struggle are substantially different, or that the social republic is different in content from a fully-realized workers’ democracy. Freedom from domination in the social sphere must mean equal say of all in the process of production, which can only be practically achieved through the democratic principle of one person, one vote. That is to say, the social republic is indistinguishable from a workers’ democracy. But democracy is more than just voting; the results of democratic decisions must be binding. We can therefore say that a true republic entails, along with the whole host of political freedoms, an economy managed on the basis of collective decision-making according to a common plan. The workers’ democracy comrade Ross describes—one where individual workplaces or even whole industries are managed democratically by their workers, but where these cooperatives or syndicates still operate on market principles—is no workers’ democracy, no social republic, at all. The working class cannot be said to have realized economic democracy if the “invisible hand” still guides production and exchange in the absence of a common and binding economic plan, and it is not free from domination (even having overthrown capitalist managerial relations) if it is still subject to the impersonal domination of the market.
I propose that the realization of the republican ideal entails answering a third question, beyond the political and social: the ecological. Freedom from domination must mean an end to human domination of the environment. After all, where did all political and social systems of domination contained within that leviathan we call “class society” come from? Human division of labor calcified into what became the first class structure with the invention of agriculture, which created, for the very first time in our history as a species, a consistent caloric surplus, meaning communities of humans could remain fed without all of their able-bodied members actively doing the feeding. From there, roles specialized, new categories of human aside from hunter and gatherer emerged—weaver, potter, etc.—leading to the emergence of rudimentary markets. A means of accounting then became necessary, leading to systems of writing (and therefore scribes, later clergy) and money to rationalize increasingly complex patterns of exchange. With the birth of money came its conjoined twin, the labor-value form, for only labor-time could exist as a common account of the relative value of all possible goods and services. At the same time, human communities became sedentary, giving birth to cities and then the armed forces necessary to defend them and the grain stores kept within. The invention of agriculture directly gave rise to the basic dynamic of extraction of surplus value from labor and the instruments necessary to maintain said dynamic, namely the written law and organized force of arms. The agricultural revolution, which set humans apart from all other forms of life and birthed the domination of nature by humankind, also birthed class society. The origin of all forms of political and social domination lies in the advent of ecological domination.
This is not mere metaphysics. Like Hegel’s master-slave dynamic or Aime Cesaire’s colonizer-colonized dynamic, the relationship between humanity and the environment is dialectical; the consequences of our domination of the environment reflect back onto us and cause us to reproduce structures of domination amongst ourselves, structures like capitalism, which then in turn bring our domination of the environment to new and apocalyptic extremes. The struggle to prevent the natural environment from falling into the maw of industrial capitalist hell is not merely adjacent to the struggle to realize the republican ideal, it is part and parcel to it, because ecological domination is the form of domination that preceded, spawned, and continually reproduces all others. Complete human liberation can never mean the freedom to extract and consume as much as we like at the environment’s expense, but must instead mean our liberation from the inhuman systems that compel us against our own interests to turn our only home in the universe into our collective tomb.
Just like slavery and colonialism could not have been reverted to the pre-slavery or pre-colonial status quo, we cannot overcome ecological domination by undoing it. A return to a preindustrial, nay preagrarian society is impossible. Instead of being erased, the contradiction between humans and the natural world must be resolved by our revolutionizing of how we reproduce ourselves as a species and civilization. We must usher in a new mode of production along with new patterns of energy harvesting and agriculture. And yes, we must move towards degrowth. But to do any of that, we must win the battle for democracy and bring about a democratic workers’ republic.
Promising efforts are being made towards that end as we speak. In Cuba, the boldest experiment in political democracy in human history exists side-by-side with radical innovations in sustainable agriculture through agrarian cooperatives. In Bolivia, the Movimiento al Socialismo has begun to democratize the state with a new constitution that, among other things, affords indigenous nations the right of democratic self-determination, while simultaneously granting the natural world itself inviolable legal rights through the “Law of the Rights of Mother Earth.” Even at the heart of the empire, in the United States, social movements raising democratic demands have become entwined with the movement for environmental justice. Flashpoints like Stop Cop City in Atlanta and the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in Sioux territory are illustrative. But the battle clearly isn’t won. As socialists, we must defend the gains already being made by comrades from Cuba to Bolivia against our own country’s imperialism and join our comrades here in America in their struggles for peoples’ self-determination, abolition of the police, and other democratic demands that are merging with ecological struggles in real time. These struggles are at the front lines of the current stage in the fight for the total republic—the fight for communism.
Steven Raney | 4/5/2023
This past Friday, March 31st, Furman YDSA hosted our first movie night (of many!), featuring the 1954 neo-realist film Salt of the Earth.
“Whose neck shall I stand on to make me feel superior, and what will I have out of it? I don't want anything lower than I am. I am low enough already. I want to rise and to push everything up with me as I go.”
Those words, perhaps the most resonant of the film, belonged to Esperanza Quintero, portrayed by Mexican actress Rosaura Revueltas. In the film, Esperanza is a Mexican-American zinc miner’s wife who takes on a leading role in a bitter strike at her husband’s mine, leading to dramatic changes in the role of women in the community as class, race, and gender collide into one great social conflagration. It all comes to a head at the film’s climax, as the entire community and workers from surrounding ones converge to stop the mine operators’ attempt to evict the striking workers from their company-owned shacks. With their sheer numbers and unflinching solidarity, they force the company to surrender to the strikers’ demands of equal pay with white workers, safer working conditions in the mines, and (at the insistence of the women) modern plumbing and heating in their homes. In the process, the community’s men set aside their wounded pride to come to the aid of their wives and sisters, and white workers from neighboring mines cross racial lines to help their fellow workers fight for that which they themselves already have. The message is clear: Workers of the world—of all genders, all races—unite! One can almost hear The Internationale play as the end credits roll.
This message is as timeless as it is revolutionary. It is radical today, and it was certainly radical in 1954. It should come as no surprise that the filmmakers could not find a Hollywood studio willing to distribute it, nor hardly any theaters that would screen it. In fact, Salt of the Earth’s entire history from conception to release is a window into the climate of rabid McCarthyist repression that dominated the era. Director Herbert Biberman was one of the “Hollywood Ten” who were imprisoned and then blacklisted from the film industry for defying McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. Production was complicated by the fact that U.S. authorities deported Revueltas, the star actress, to Mexico before the film was complete. Anticommunist vigilantes fired at the set with rifles during production and burned down one of the actors’ homes after filming wrapped. The editors who worked on it in post-production did so in secret after hours, and the final copy was stored in secret in an unlisted shack for fear that burglars would destroy it. Upon its (very limited) release, it was loudly denounced by the press and condemned by a formal resolution of Congress. It was not long before the FBI launched an investigation into how it was funded. One of the actors, a union organizer himself, was brought to trial and convicted for violating the anti-communist oath he and all other union members had been required to sign upon the passage of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, based on the assumption that Salt of the Earth was communist propaganda. His trial went as far as the Supreme Court before his conviction was struck down.
But as much as Salt of the Earth is a window into this country’s history of anticommunist repression, it is also a window into our own radical lineage as socialists. The events of the story are based on an actual strike, the 1951-1952 strike against Empire Zinc in New Mexico. Rather than professional actors, the director employed actual zinc miners for most of the film’s roles, and not just any zinc miners, but the actual participants in the Empire Zinc strike. These were the courageous workers of Mine-Mill Local 890, a local branch of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers. Many of the most prominent actors were union organizers who had been front and center during the strike, including Esparanza’s husband Ramon (Juan Chacón, president of Local 890) and union steward Frank Barnes (Clinton Jencks, IUMMSW national organizer). The IUMMSW itself had a long and storied career of labor radicalism. Founded in 1893 as the Western Federation of Miners, it waged some of the most intense strikes in American history, facing severe, often violent government repression in the process. In 1905, it was one of the founding members of the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World. In the 1930s, under its new name, it helped found the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the militant industrial-unionist alternative to the American Federation of Labor. It was known as a hotbed of Communist Party activity—its president in the 1940s and 1950s was a card-carrying Communist—for which it was eventually expelled from the CIO under pressure from the Truman administration. It won the admiration of marginalized workers and the ire of company owners and conservative union bureaucrats by denouncing the U.S. invasion of Korea and going out of its way to organize neglected Black and Hispanic workers. It was eventually worn down by decades of union-busting and division within the labor movement, but its radical legacy lives on in the frames of Salt of the Earth.
As volunteers in the great historical army of emancipation that transcends borders and generations, the army of all people across space and time who have raised the red banners of freedom, justice, and solidarity, we count ourselves among the inheritors of the legacy of those who volunteered before us—comrades like the workers of Mine-Mill 890. By, for example, screening Salt of the Earth, we are celebrating that legacy, reveling in it, declaring that all the repression heaped on the shoulders of our comrades from years past means nothing in the face of a movement that lives and breathes today, a movement that has survived to honor its own history, a movement that is determined to continue to survive, because it has a lot of history left to make.
Will Sander | 4/5/2023
Below is a message that I submitted to the WSJ in response to Mary Eberstadt’s allegations. First, the editor asked me to insert comments that would characterize us in a negative light, and, second, refused to publish it when I denied him. I have reached out to other publications, hoping for a platform to respond to our accusers. This is a consolidated draft of what I have written. If you have thoughts, I would love to discuss them. Email me at sandwi9@furman.edu.
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Dear Ms. Eberstadt,
Our message to you is simple: we will listen if you respect us — all of us.
We welcome discussion about the state of our society and the role of youth, women, and the LGBTQ+ community in it, but there is a prerequisite: you must respect the legitimacy of everyone’s identities. From your writings, it is clear that you do not.
We believe that the foundation for academic debate is mutual respect, an acknowledgment that “we may disagree, but we both respect the validity of each other’s ideas and identities.” When one side revokes that agreement, the other is under no obligation to maintain any pretense of open-mindedness. When the debate is about “Who can debate?” the discussion has already ended. It is no longer a mutual exchange of ideas but, rather, a cleverly disguised mechanism for the continued oppression of disadvantaged groups.
The fight for social equality in this country is the fight that all people, regardless of race, gender, or sexuality, should be afforded that respect, an understanding that we all have a seat at the table. When people like you suggest that we should start pulling away chairs, it is our moral responsibility to say no and suggest that you leave the room.
Will Sander
Furman Young Democratic Socialists
Isaac Lewis | 4/12/2023
Like so many of you, 2020 was a rough year for me.
I was watching a global pandemic rip through the world, claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, when we had the means to prevent all the carnage.
I was watching my fellow human beings get gunned down in the streets by the militant arm of the state because of the color of their skin.
I was watching the richest among us use the tragedies of the world to facilitate the greatest transfer of wealth in American history.
I was watching those in power sit by idly as the earth burned because they were too obsessed with their temporary worldly possessions.
I was so abjectly frustrated with the state of the world, but felt like I was powerless to really change anything.
I didn’t see a way forward for the world, but I was determined to find one. And so I found socialism.
It was after finding this alternate way of organizing the world that I became determined to achieve just one goal in my life: to make a positive difference in the world. Whether that difference is something as large as a radical change in the grand scheme of the world or making one person’s day just a little bit better doesn’t matter.
I truly believe that YDSA will help me achieve that goal, and it’s for this reason that I’ve chosen to run for secretary. If I can start making a difference in Greenville, or on campus, or even in just our small chapter of YDSA, then larger change is sure to follow.
I am eager to help make small, incremental steps towards a better world with the rest of YDSA. And I promise to not let anybody down.
Steven Raney | 4/12/2023
On this day 162 years ago, in this very state, the white slaveowner and state senator Edmund Ruffin fired the first shot of the Civil War against Union troops occupying Fort Sumter. In so doing, he unwittingly ignited one of the greatest revolutionary firestorms in world history, and indeed the only true social revolution in the history of the United States. That revolution would spell the doom of his class, destroying the institution of chattel slavery forever. But today, hardly anyone knows it as a revolution at all. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, ninety-two percent of American high schoolers are unaware that slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War, let alone that it and the period of Reconstruction that followed were, in the words of W.E.B. DuBois, “one of the most extraordinary experiments of Marxism that the world, before the Russian Revolution, had seen,” striving towards the creation of a “dictatorship of labor” that would “achieve democracy for the working millions.” This ignorance is no accident of history.
First things first: the period from the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 to the end of Reconstruction in 1877 was a revolution, malicious revisions from bourgeois and racist historians notwithstanding. It belongs in the pantheon of great social revolutions that shaped the course of world history, alongside the French, Haitian, Russian, and Chinese. Like the contemporary Paris Commune of 1871, the American revolutionary period captured the attention of the young communist movement, and the cause of emancipation won their fanatic devotion. Karl Marx, as the chief European correspondent for the New York Tribune, an abolitionist paper aligned with the early Republican Party, reported extensively on the progress of the Civil War, which he deemed the “American Antislavery War.” In 1864, he authored a letter from the International Workingmen’s Association to President Lincoln congratulating him on his re-election and urging him to make “death to slavery!” the watchwords of his second term. Workers’ organizations across Europe held mass meetings demanding their governments retract their support from the Confederacy, efforts which, in DuBois’ estimation, likely prevented the British Empire from entering the war on the side of the slaveowners. Some 200,000 German immigrants, many of them political exiles for their participation in the German Revolutions of 1848, fought in the Union Army to destroy the slave power and usher in the republic they had failed to build on the other side of the Atlantic a decade prior. A great many of these were communists, including Joseph Weydemeyer, a Union general who was formerly a member of Marx’s own Communist League and consulted with Freidrich Engels throughout the war, making one of the grandfathers of the world communist movement an unofficial military advisor for the Union. Weydemeyer later distributed copies of the Communist Manifesto to the citizens of St. Louis en masse when he oversaw Reconstruction there as military administrator.
Anecdotes about the relation of foreign and German-American communists to the Civil War are interesting, and offer some evidence of the revolutionary character of the period, but they do not get to the heart of why it must be considered a revolution. What qualifies this great upheaval as America’s second revolution, and by far its greatest, is the world-historic triumph of the slaves-turned-freedpeople. During the Civil War, an estimated half a million slaves fled their plantations in what DuBois called a “general strike,” obliterating the Southern economy and swelling the ranks of the Union Army as they joined it to take up arms against their oppressors and free those they had left behind. In addition to dooming the Southern cause, their mass action made the question of abolition a settled one, though it would take some time for white politicians in the North to catch up to the historical inevitability they had wrought with their own hands and rifles. As the flames of war died down, the flames of revolution only grew brighter, and throughout the period of Reconstruction the Black masses who had freed themselves from the domination of bondage struggled to free themselves from the domination of political disenfranchisement, enforced illiteracy, and economic want. Freedpeople, joined for a time by the white working classes, seized equal suffrage, equal public education, and in some places, the very land they had once worked as slaves. But this elementary transformation of society was too much for the Northern capitalists who had, starting with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, anxiously tolerated the revolutionary mobilization of Black labor as a necessity to win the war. From the beginning, they robbed the revolution of its strength by refusing to expropriate most of the South’s plantations. After all, if the working classes were allowed to seize the property of the planter class, what could stop them in their newfound confidence from turning next to the property of the capitalist class? This first betrayal presaged the next. Rather than permanently crushing the political power of the defeated plantation aristocracy—a mercy compared to the fate they had met in Haiti, something their worst fears and most frantic protests against Black freedom indicated they knew they deserved—the Northern bourgeoisie gradually allowed former slaveowners and Confederate officials to become re-enfranchised. This, coupled with the economic weight of the lands they still possessed, paved the road for their return to the heights of the Southern class system, not as a class of slaveowners per se but as a class of parasitic landlords who, through political subterfuge and the terroristic violence of white militias and lynch mobs, subjugated the Black masses once more to a condition only nominally superior to slavery. The revolutionary state constitutions of the 1860s and 1870s gave way to new apartheid regimes. Counterrevolution prevailed, and the greatest advance this country has ever made towards the ideal of the democratic republic was reversed.
It should now be clearer why this history has been obscured. The fact that millions of enslaved people, immigrant factory workers and indebted farmers collectively destroyed human bondage, overthrew a class of monied elites, set fire to the estates and mansions of wealthy aristocrats, and led the charge in one of the boldest democratic experiments in human history is far too dangerous an idea to teach a class that remains over-worked, under-paid, over-policed, under-fed, over-drawn, and under-insured in the modern day while a small handful of people are richer than the entire planet was when slavery was abolished in name in 1865. If given the chance, tens of millions of people in this country are liable to learn the “wrong” lessons of the Civil War and Reconstruction—that is to say, the correct ones—and decide that the tasks of this great revolution remain unfinished. They are liable to realize that it is the historical destiny of the worker class to win the battle for democracy and steer human civilization towards a future where labor rewards us all, not merely a privileged ruling class. They are liable to conclude that the sale of human beings by the hour on the labor market is no more legitimate than their wholesale on the auction-block. Worst of all, they are liable to take inspiration from their nineteenth-century comrades who had the courage to force their own exploiters by way of general strike and insurrection into the dustbin of history.
No, the bourgeoisie cannot teach this history. It is a matter of survival. They will always cloak it in various disguises, some crude in their reactionary stupidity (“Lost Cause” lunacy) and others more clever and seemingly progressive. So we, the socialist movement, must teach it for them. We must celebrate the Second American Revolution, America’s true revolution, and strive for a third.
Steven Raney | 4/19/2023
The socialist left has a long and storied romance with the idea of the general strike, also known as the mass strike. The basic premise is that capitalist society survives only by the continued participation of the working class, and therefore if a critical mass of workers across industries were to cease work all at once, they could either overthrow capitalism entirely or force enormous concessions from the capitalist class. Folk musician and Industrial Workers of the World organizer Joe Hill summed it up best in “Workers of the World, Awaken!”:
If the workers take a notion,
They can stop all speeding trains;
Every ship upon the ocean,
They can tie with mighty chains;
Every wheel in the creation,
Every mine and every mill,
Fleets and armies of the nation,
Will at their command stand still.
The general strike, though not conceived of as such, actually predates modern capitalism by millennia. Workers have withdrawn their labor en masse as an act of revolutionary defiance since at least the age of the Roman Republic. In 493 BCE, the underclass of plebeians evacuated from the city of Rome to the surrounding hills in protest of the political settlement of the revolution of sixteen years earlier, which had overthrown the monarchy in favor of an elected government but restricted political rights to the patrician upper class. This evacuation, known as the first secessio plebis or “secession of the plebes,” was a sort of ancestor of the general strike as we know it today. It worked, forcing the patricians to negotiate with the plebeians as equals and grant them political representation. Subsequent mass strikes in the following two centuries gradually forced the ruling class to cede increasing political power to the plebeians until the formal distinctions between the two classes disappeared entirely.
As modern capitalism emerged from its birth pangs in the nineteenth century, the specter of the general strike rose from its grave in the hills of Rome to once again haunt the estates of the ruling class, which now consisted of capitalists and slaveowners rather than patricians. W.E.B. DuBois has noted how the mass uprising of slaves during the American Civil War could be considered a “general strike of the slaves.” This general strike, then—still the largest in American history—struck the fatal blow that brought down the planter class. But we may find an earlier example from the United Kingdom more relevant to our circumstances in the twenty-first century. In 1842, when Parliament rejected the second People’s Charter—a petition for democratic reforms with millions of signatures—half a million workers went on strike to try to force the government to reverse course and accept the Charter’s demands. The strikers were brutally suppressed, but in the long run nearly all of the reforms they had struck for were implemented.
Despite these historical experiences, the socialist movement that emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century was largely dismissive of the potential of the general strike as a means of defeating capitalism. But this attitude was not universal within the movement. Anarchists within the First International were early and vocal proponents of the general strike; the fact that they saw it as an alternative to political action was likely the main reason Marxists were so quick to dismiss the idea. With the founding of the Second International, which intentionally excluded anarchists, there was still disagreement over the value of the general strike. Though they were a minority, some socialists in the International saw it not as an alternative to the political struggle but as a tool to be deployed in it. Debates flared up now and again between the pro- and anti-general strike factions. During one such period of debate, Friedrich Engels remarked in a letter to German-American Marxist Friedrich Sorge, “I almost wish that the [Belgian socialists], who have provoked the general strike nonsense this time, will put it into practice to try to win universal suffrage.” Two years later, they did just that, but they were not, as Engels had predicted they would be, “mercilessly cut up.” The Belgian general strike of 1893—the first true general strike in Europe—won universal male suffrage in a mere six days. Still, the mood in the Second International did not begin to shift in earnest until after the Russian Revolution of 1905, which saw the most spectacular demonstration of the general strike in action to date. Nearly three million Russian workers struck that year, forcing the Tsarist government to convene an elected legislative assembly and reduce restrictions on the freedom of press and assembly. This firestorm rekindled the general strike debate in the Second International, prompting interventions like Rosa Luxemburg’s The Mass Strike and Vladimir Lenin’s Economic and Political Strikes.
In Economic and Political Strikes, Lenin defined “political strikes” as those which “concern the basic, most profound conditions of political life in the whole country” as opposed to the narrow economic interests of the workers of a single shop or trade or even of the industrial proletariat as a whole. Luxemburg argued that these strikes were the basis for the general strike, which she described in The Mass Strike as “a means, firstly, of creating the conditions of the daily political struggle.” Indeed, we can see this principle in practice in each of the previously listed examples by underscoring what they have in common. They each raised primarily political demands: expanded suffrage in the United Kingdom in 1842 and Belgium in 1893, a constitution and a parliament in Russia in 1905. Even the secessio plebis raised the demand of political representation for the plebeians. The general strike of the slaves in the United States is perhaps the exception that proves the rule. The demand that eclipsed all others was the abolition of slavery, but even still, when that demand had been won the struggle ignited by the uprising progressed to a higher political stage where the former slaves convened popular assemblies to demand equal suffrage and other political rights.
What of strikes with strictly economic demands? These are surely the most common form of strike, and many have risen to a level comparable to a general strike. But these are never “general” in the sense of the political strikes mentioned before. Philadelphia was gripped by general strikes in 1835 and 1910, New Orleans in 1892, and Seattle in 1919. Each of these revolved around principally economic demands like the ten-hour workday and wage increases, and they were all contained to their respective cities. Some of the larger strike waves motivated by economic demands could be considered a form of general strike, like the enormous textile strike that swept the East Coast and the South or the waterfront strike that swept the West Coast, both in 1934. But though these may have been an order of magnitude closer to true general strikes in scale, they were no closer in scope than the various single-city general strikes. Impressive though they were, they did not expand beyond the bounds of the industries in which they started except for sporadic solidarity strikes from unions in other trades. There are some exceptions, most notably the British general strike of 1926, when British trade unions shut down the entire economy in solidarity with miners’ demands for wage increases. But it is worth noting that the British strike of 1926 was a complete failure, while general strikes for political purposes have a remarkably successful track record.
Conditions like long hours, low wages, and poor shopfloor conditions are more intimately felt by the workers subjected to them than the “basic, most profound conditions of political life” and thus more likely to motivate those workers to strike at any given juncture. However, they are not capable of reliably bringing workers out to the picket lines from numerous different industries and geographical regions of the country, which is what makes a general strike general. The workers of any two workplaces or industries do not necessarily experience the same symptoms of economic exploitation, which manifest differently based on the interests of the particular group of capitalists exploiting them. True, all workers suffer the extraction of surplus value from their labor, but workers do not risk their livelihoods by the thousands and millions fighting abstractions, and more concrete economic grievances are endemic to certain sections of the class. On the other hand, all members of the working class across the entire country suffer from the political oppression of the capitalist state, which represents the interests of capitalists in general against workers in general, and here we can name specific grievances shared by the entire class: lack of universal and equal suffrage, police tyranny, and so on. This is why, as we have seen, general strikes have historically tended to cohere around political rather than economic demands, and when general strikes have possessed a purely economic character they have typically been brief and failed to win their demands.
It may be tempting to explain away the different fortunes of the strikes discussed here with an appeal to different local conditions. Perhaps the general strikes in Russia in 1905 and Britain in 1926 were so different because one occurred in a fundamentally revolutionary situation and the other did not, or perhaps the upheavals of 1934 in the US failed to take on a generalized character because the conditions were not ripe for a nationwide revolt of labor. Whether these diagnoses are correct or not, they do not paint the whole picture. Economic and political demands produce strikes of a different character even under comparably revolutionary circumstances. Let us examine two case studies. The Spanish general strike of 1917 and the Italian biennio rosso (“red two years”) of 1919-1920 both occurred in the context of a global revolutionary wave which consumed Europe and North America around the end of World War I. Both countries faced political instability, economic turmoil, and the rapid growth of radical labor organizations like the syndicalist CNT (National Confederation of Labor) and USI (Italian Syndicalist Union). In Spain, the PSOE (Socialist Workers’ Party) called a joint general strike with the CNT in protest of the collapsing regime, demanding a complete reconstitution of the government into a republic. The strike quickly enveloped the nation, shutting down almost all major industries. Though it was ultimately suppressed without achieving its aims, it mobilized a large section of the Spanish working class behind the socialist program. In the general election the following year, five times as many PSOE candidates won as in the previous election, including four imprisoned strike leaders who had to be released by the government so they could take their seats. All in all, the strike was a tactical defeat but a resounding strategic victory. In Italy, a movement of strikes and workplace occupations emerged organically, but instead of intervening to raise political demands, the PSI (Italian Socialist Party) tailed the existing movement and continued to raise demands for better wages and hours, workers’ control of factories, and expropriation of farmland. While the uprising took on a general character in the northern regions of Italy, it failed to expand into the impoverished south. Ultimately, it petered out after two years of disoriented unrest, giving way to the frenzied bloodletting of the “blackshirts,” paramilitaries who terrorized workers and peasants on behalf of employers. Led by Benito Mussolini, the blackshirts took power and installed a fascist regime within two years of the end of the biennio rosso. The Italian general strike was a resounding defeat both tactically and strategically.
It may seem premature to dissect the anatomy of a general strike at a time when the socialist and labor movements are so underdeveloped in the United States. But the question of what makes a general strike successful is not one we can wait to settle on the picket lines. Years of diligent agitation and organization will be required before a general strike is plausible in this country, and the form the general strike of the future will take is a function of our agitational and organizational methods in the present. We must realize that, although the struggle for economic demands is the glue that holds labor unions together, to deploy these unions as instruments of nationwide revolutionary struggle requires that socialists consciously intervene to raise political demands linking the universal class interests of workers to the struggle against the capitalist state. A general strike for, say, a higher minimum wage might draw the support of millions of workers, but would struggle to mobilize millions more who already earn above whatever the proposed new minimum might be. As it comes into its own, the socialist movement might find the general strike more useful as a protest against the government’s refusal to allow elected socialists to take their seats (a problem the old Socialist Party encountered multiple times), or as a weapon to force the nullification of a reactionary Supreme Court ruling, or even the wholesale abolition of the Court or other undemocratic institutions like the Senate. When politics descends to the streets and takes insurrectionary dimensions, as it did in 2020 with the uprisings against police terror, the socialist movement may use the general strike as a means of sharpening the crisis and establishing the leadership of the militant working class over the movement. Finally, in the decisive hour of the battle for democracy, when the socialist party stands poised to provoke a constitutional crisis and in so doing pave the way for the democratic workers’ republic, the general strike may be the surest means of dispersing the legitimacy of the ruling-class Constitution and enforcing the counter-legitimacy of the organized working class. That is, it would be the opening salvo of the revolution.
This is more than mere fantasy—the potential for a general strike is brewing, although there is a long way to go before that potential may be transformed into anything more. During the government shutdown of 2018-2019, president Sara Nelson of the Association of Flight Attendants called for a general strike to force a resolution. Radical unions have begun testing the waters with explicitly political strikes, like the International Longshore and Warehouse Union’s shutdown of the port of Oakland in solidarity with Black Lives Matter in 2020. Economic strikes are proliferating, too, with consecutive increases in annual strike activity in recent years and notable flare-ups like the “Striketober” strike wave of 2022. With the Teamsters gearing up for a contract fight with UPS and the United Auto Workers preparing for their own with the “Big Three” automobile manufacturers, an even larger strike wave is a distinct possibility this summer. To lay the groundwork for an eventual revolutionary general strike, the socialist movement must do the following: unify around a minimum program of political demands designed to bring the working class to power in a democratic republic, establish an active presence in labor unions to help steer the labor movement in a revolutionary direction, and merge the day-to-day economic battles of these unions with the epochal war for political power.
Steven Raney | 8/25/2023
From August 1st through August 3rd, I represented our chapter at YDSA’s national convention in Chicago. Held annually, the national convention is the highest authority in YDSA, charged with resolving political questions within the organization, electing the national leadership, allocating resources to various projects, and setting priorities for the coming year. This year, roughly 150 delegates from nearly 200 chapters around the country gathered to carry out the political will of the largest group of YDSA cadre ever.
Part of what makes DSA one of the most promising U.S. socialist organizations in decades is that we allow the formation of internal factions, which makes our democracy more vibrant by bringing the diverse assortment of ideas included under the umbrella of “democratic socialism” into the light. Factional politics played a major role in the convention this year. I myself am a member of the caucus called Marxist Unity Group, or MUG, but I will try to depict every faction of DSA as impartially as possible in this report.
As a member of MUG, most of my work on the convention floor consisted of whipping votes for the faction’s top six priorities: resolutions R21, R22 unamended, R8, R9, and R17, and bylaws amendment A5. All six of these passed. Below is a brief description of what each one means for YDSA:
“R21: Winning the Battle for Democracy:” R21 raises the demand for “a new and radically democratic constitution” to replace the current one, directs the Youth Political Education Committee to draft political education curricula about the antidemocratic U.S. Constitution, and urges DSA as a whole to take up a stance of opposition to the Constitution. This resolution was authored by MUG and amended by Bread & Roses, another Marxist faction of DSA.
“R22: Anti-Militarism on Campus:” R22 amends YDSA’s platform to include language that denounces military recruitment on college and high school campuses, clarifies YDSA’s anti-imperialist principles, and demands the abolition of the standing military. This resolution was authored by MUG. There was an attempt from B&R to amend R22 to remove the language about the abolition of the standing military, but the convention voted to keep the original language,
“R8: Recommitting to Building an Independent Working-Class Socialist Party:” R8 directs the national leadership of YDSA to curate materials during the 2024 election cycle which emphasize YDSA’s commitment to building a socialist alternative to the Democratic and Republican parties, and also to create a handbook to instruct chapters in running structurally independent electoral campaigns on and off campus. This resolution was authored by B&R and amended by MUG.
“R9: Fighting the Right through Mass Action:” R9 directs national leadership to aid chapters in leading grassroots struggles for racial justice, reproductive freedoms, and LGBT+ rights from a class-independent perspective, and also to conduct political education on the matter. This resolution was authored by B&R.
“R17: For Building the Youth Wing of a Socialist Party:” R17 directs the national leadership to form an exploratory committee which will create a plan of action for approval at next year’s convention outlining how YDSA will transition from a strictly campus-based organization to a broad youth organization in the coming years. This resolution was jointly authored by B&R and Reform & Revolution, another Marxist caucus.
“A5: Programmatic Unity in YDSA:” A5 alters YDSA’s bylaws to make acceptance of our national political platform a condition of membership, transforming the platform from a general statement of principles to a program the entire organization is bound to. This resolution was authored by the Winter caucus, another Marxist faction.
Among the other noteworthy resolutions passed, one which stood out was “R19: For a Mass Socialist Campaign for Trans Rights and Bodily Autonomy,” a proposal from R&R which initiates preparations for a national-level campaign for trans rights and reproductive freedoms. National YDSA leadership will launch the campaign in January and coordinate a national day of protest sometime in the spring.
Between blocs of debate on proposed resolutions and bylaws amendments, the convention elected the 2023-2024 National Coordinating Committee, or NCC, which is the highest authority in YDSA between conventions. Historically, the NCC has been dominated by Bread & Roses, with the caucus holding a decisive share of the seats and at least one of the two co-chair seats every year since 2017. This year, there was a seismic shift in our leadership: B&R failed to secure either one of the co-chairships and only elected two of their candidates to the nine-person NCC overall, becoming a clear minority faction for the first time in years. The composition of the 2023-2024 NCC is as follows:
Constellation: Constellation is a politically heterogeneous caucus formed specifically to oppose B&R. The one common factor among all members of Constellation is a strong emphasis on internationalism. Constellation now has one co-chair and one at-large member on the NCC.
Bread & Roses: B&R believes in the “democratic road to socialism.” They are Marxists, and they want DSA to become an independent labor party, but they reject revolutionary methods for reformist ones. They are known for their focus on rank-and-file labor organizing. B&R now has two at-large members on the NCC.
Marxist Unity Group: MUG is a revolutionary Marxist caucus that wants to transform DSA into an independent socialist party. MUG’s most distinguishing feature is a focus on opposing the U.S. Constitution and centering the struggle for political democracy in the socialist movement. MUG now has one at-large member on the NCC.
University of Central Florida: UCF is not a caucus, but a very large chapter that binds its delegates’ votes and therefore behaves somewhat like a caucus. Its politics are somewhat unpredictable because they vary with the political shifts within the chapter. UCF now has one co-chair and one at-large member on the NCC.
Independents: There are two members of the new NCC who are not currently members of a caucus. Both are known to be sympathetic to B&R.
With this year’s national convention, YDSA has shown what is possible for the socialist movement. We can become a mass socialist party, we can challenge the capitalist state, we can embody the spirit of socialist revolution—but only if we have the courage to champion unpopular positions both within our own organizations and in the world at large, and the resolve to claw our way from the margins to the majority through patient agitation, education, and organization.
When the last vote was settled and proceedings came to an end on August 3rd, the delegates and staff joined together to sing “Solidarity Forever” to celebrate the unity of our movement. Since then, in every waking moment I have heard the howling of the winds blowing revolution in from the future, and with those winds at my back I now walk a little lighter and stand a little taller than I did before. That feeling is something every one of the many millions who dream of a better world, and the millions more who do not yet dare to dream it, can, should, and must come to feel. It is the joy of hope that comes only from glimpsing the possibilities unlocked by mass emancipatory politics. It is a feeling that I believe in my heart DSA—a stronger, better DSA we are now in the process of building—can be the vehicle for.
Michael Ross | 8/25/2023
Not too long ago, somebody in the midst of a fiery Twitter (or should I say X) debate sent out a poll to their followers in order to settle once and for all whether or not working in climate makes one more or less optimistic about our future. The user in question believed that if one were to actually work on climate issues, then one’s fears of a hothouse earth, of biblical floods, of worldwide crop failures would be assuaged. One instagram account, responding to a detractor, agreed with the original user’s sentiment, saying:
“Omg It’s done the opposite for me I feel like I know way more about all the amazing work that’s going on than when I was just running this page and not working in climate work. I guess it depends on what you do tho”
I do not want to discount this person’s personal experience, but I will be discounting this person’s personal experience. There is no doubt a lot of “amazing work” being done in the name of ecological sustainability, namely large reforestation efforts, new “green” businesses from water bottle alternatives to search engines that remove CO2 from the atmosphere with every search, and most notably the drive for renewable energy in China, which dwarfs all other efforts for the building of renewable energy infrastructure – but these are mere bandaids on a systemic problem.
Our current ecological catastrophe is a direct result of liberal capitalism and its host of feral offspring known as globalization, imperialism, and productivist accumulation. Marx realized the seeds of these issues in his three volumes of Capital – imperialism and globalization are the results of capitalist markets’ eternal battle against the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and productivism is a result of the abstraction of value from qualities to mere quantities, quantities which we only know to increase ad infinitum,[1] trapping us in an abysmal business ontology through which even our basic needs are subjugated to industrial capital’s radical monopoly.[2] With the help of abstract value, capital reduces the complexity of our biophysical and socioeconomic reality into one,[3] discrete progression of numbers, ultimately resulting in the absolutely absurd implementations of monocrop agriculture in deserts (which are then sent across the globe to be sold to a provider which then simply sells the produce back to the people where the farm was in the first place) and year-round seasonal fruits (which are often imported from imperial periphery countries and produced by exploited workers that never even get to think about trying their own products). Further, the wretched, incestuous combination of abstraction and expansion under capitalism give rise to the metabolic rift, seen today in our ever-growing amounts of waste and our ever depleting topsoils.[4]
One of the main causes of ecological degradation is economic growth.[5] The evidence for this is replete: GDP growth is correlated with fossil fuel and material use, and global decoupling of GDP from fossil fuel use and material use has not happened in any meaningful way.[6] Fossil fuel use, uncontroversially, is the cause of global climate change, which can and likely will result in ecosystem collapse, cascades of failed agricultural yields, and never-before-seen intense storms. Material extraction and use results in both land system change, which demolishes societies and ecosystems, habitats for humans and animals, and introduction of harmful waste materials such as plastics (which have been found in our blood) and chemicals (which cause eutrophication, the phenomena of mass ocean die offs most often resulting from agrochemical overuse).
But where does growth come from? Is it truly a necessity under capitalism? Again, I would recommend using the tools that Marx gave us, which help to provide an outline of the capitalist growth circuit.
Economic growth comes from capitalism’s drive to avoid economic crises, namely, the crisis of overproduction. In a crisis of overproduction, more commodities are produced than can be purchased by consumers due to, among other things, depressed (resulting from increasing surplus value extraction without a concomitant increase in productivity) or deleted (resulting from automation and unemployment) wages. These tendencies are inherent to capitalism – this will be elaborated below:
To understand the drivers of crisis and their snake oil remedy known as growth, we should first understand the nature of wage labor and social reproduction under capitalism. Under capitalism, people are required to work in order to earn a wage so that they can survive. This wage is supposed to be able to provide for the worker’s basic needs like shelter, food, etc. Marx called the meeting of these basic needs social reproduction. The capitalist wants to depress wages as much as they can in order to gain the most profit, but they must do so without breaching the ground level of social reproduction, since this leads to a crisis of overproduction – more money invested in production of commodities and not enough money given to the working class to purchase said commodities. This leaves the capitalist at an impasse – with wages as low as they can feasibly go, how can they extract more surplus value, how are they to gain profit? When wages are at the level of social reproduction, the only way to increase profits is to increase productivity. But how does one do that? The answer is fossil fuels. Since the introduction of fossil fuels into the capitalist system, worker productivity has skyrocketed.[7] This means that workers can get the same amount of work done in way less time. But if workers were to simply work less, then the capitalist wouldn’t be able to increase profits. Thus, Jevons paradox – the fact that increased efficiency INCREASES net resource use – wins out. Instead of giving workers more time off, capital demands that the workers work the same hours to produce even more goods, increasing net resource use and value production while often keeping wages at the same level.[8] In short, the introduction of fossil fuels into the circuit of capital increased the surplus value created by each worker, thus giving the capitalist more value to extract from each worker, thus increasing accumulation of capital through exploitation both of workers and the environment. This accumulated capital, wrung like blood from the earth and her people, is then used to reinvest in this vicious cycle and to meet the whims of indulgent capitalists.
Another example of the capitalist drive for growth comes from the process of automation. When productivity becomes so high (often enabled by fossil fuels) so as to make workers irrelevant, a given amount of workers is laid off. When laid off, a worker is unable to make a wage and thus unable to socially reproduce and meet their basic needs. In excess, unemployment predictably leads to a crisis of overproduction, as there are more produced goods but less people able to buy them. In order to avoid this crisis, the economy as a whole needs to offer more jobs. Thus, the said capitalist which would have laid them off instead must expand production, or perhaps another capitalist comes in to begin the manufacture of another commodity. In many cases, this results in ever-loved “innovation” in the form of five different companies’ varieties of the same soda flavor. In any sane universe, automation should be a cause for joy. Under capitalism, it is a death sentence for workers only to be ameliorated by further exploitation of the earth they live on.
Growth causes ecological and social exploitation. The absence of growth equals recession. Thus, a shortage of fossil fuels, which have been theoretically and empirically linked to growth, will lead to a recession. However, further use of fossil fuels will massively disrupt ecosystems on which we rely for social reproduction and economic production. Either way, growth will end. It just depends on who snaps first, the proletariat or the planet.
So now we have seen, through Marx, how capitalism’s internal struggle against itself leads to imperialism, exploitation, and environmental catastrophe. So how does this tie into the Instagram post I cited earlier?
It does not matter how much work is being done to help the environment or the climate – under capitalism, the tendency to catastrophe can not be avoided because the tendency is inscribed into capital itself. These environmental optimists, while valiant in their struggle, miss the big picture, and potentially obscure it for others by claiming that these half-solutions are cause for optimism. When observing this discourse, I am reminded of Lenin’s critique of anarchists in The State and Revolution. He notes that “the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social relations that gave birth to it have been destroyed.”[9] Marx understands the state as a complex result of class society, as an emergent structure that arises from particular material conditions to serve the dominant class. Lenin, knowing this definition, remarks here that one can’t simply abolish the state without getting rid of its cause – class. Essentially, he is saying that systemic problems require systemic solutions. Climate change, like the state, is an emergent result of imperialism, globalization, value abstraction, growth – the father of these phenomena, as has been elaborated, is capital. We can not expect to solve climate change and ecological collapse by simply developing new technologies, researching new practices, buying different light bulbs, or using different search engines. These solutions are defanged because they decline to engage with the real problem, “the social relation that gave birth to” the ecological crisis, which is capitalism. We cannot simply work parallel to capital in building a new, ecologically harmonious world – we must seize the means of production and redirect the forces of production into a socially productive manner, democratically deciding what to produce, and in some cases scrapping production altogether. We must impose strict resource and emissions caps, we must collectively build re-localized infrastructure that makes it to where we don’t have to rely on arbitrarily labyrinthine and ecologically irrational supply chains, we must choose collectively a modest and dignified standard of living that all the world, not only the global north, can enjoy. We must be able to decide when to stop working, when productivity is high enough for our needs instead of increasing productivity just for the global 1% to buy another vacation home or luxury tour – be it to the stars or the depths of the ocean. We must reacquaint ourselves with the infinitely beautiful depths within nature and other people that have been obscured by capitalist relations.
A cabin in the woods is not the answer. Techno-futurist pipe dreams and energy efficiency is not the answer. Spotty reforestation efforts will not help us. Even renewable energy, in an economy based on growth, can only lead to further exploitation of already vulnerable areas of the world. Technology will not save us. What we need is a political force, a group of people ready to say no to the endless expansion of capitalism, a mass of people ready to seize their own destiny, a mass of people that are done with denying their own future and the future of their children. A thoroughly democratic, planned economy provides a safe way down from our current precipice.
Many years before sustainability was even a concept, there was a group of people who realized that capitalism cannot be regulated away. No technocratic solutions can help, no piecemeal reforms will save us. This group of people understood that real change can only come from revolution. It is about time modern environmentalists and “sustainably” minded people come to this conclusion as well… lest economic recession’s accomplice, fascism, consumes us all.
So tell me, sustainability majors – recession or revolution? Read some theory and get back to me.
Ossian Quinn | 8/25/2023
Content Warning: Discussions of Sex, Sexuality, Brief Mentions of Sexual Violence
You ever noticed how weird people are about sex, especially when it comes to movies? I swear, every time a movie with a sex scene hits theaters I see people talking about how “sex doesn’t advance the plot” or “it isn’t necessary to the movie”. To me, there’s something super upsetting about statements like these, especially when they come from people on the left, as I often find they do. I think this attitude is a symptom of the decline in the idea of movies as art in favor of them being products, but that’s a topic for another day. Here’s my best try to communicate why sex in movies is important, and why people who think the opposite cause me catastrophic mental torment.
Sex, nudity, or anything in the realm of sexuality is not new in movies, far from it. From early trailblazing movies like Wings, to the exploitation movies of the 70s and 80s to the erotic thrillers of recent memory, sex has been around. But for a while, it was incredibly rare to find sex in movies. Around the 1930s, conservative weirdos began to force filmmakers into rigid boxes to make sure that films aligned with societal standards. Will Hays, a particularly militant opponent of sexuality in movies, established the Motion Picture Production Code (also Hays Code as its commonly known now), censoring any ideas that were considered “detrimental to society” . It goes unsaid that any depictions of sexuality outside of white heterosexuality were not allowed to be produced during the reign of the Hays Code, and even then, depictions were still forced to be extremely subdued, with even kissing being seen as potentially code breaking. Any portrayals of queer or minority love and sexuality was all but expressly prohibited. Watch just about any movie from before the 60’s and the influence of the Hays Code is apparent. The only movies that were not affected, at least not directly were so called “nudies” which typically featured incredibly violent depictions of sex, and were closer to modern day porn films than a typical feature film. So, in this day, the options for depictions of sexuality were violent pornos, or nothing. It wasn’t great.
The Post-Code, Pre-Y2K Disaster era of film contains some really interesting stuff, as mainstream filmmakers worked to make up for lost time in incorporating sexuality into their art. A particularly interesting work from immediately after the Code Era is The Graduate, an examination of a recent college graduate’s sexual journey as he has relations with a middle-aged woman and later, her daughter, a graduate student. The Graduate is an interesting look into how messy sexual relationships can be, and both the beautiful and ugly sides of romance are. I won’t spoil it here, but the ending of the film is truly phenomenal, and would not be nearly as impactful if not for the explicit sexuality earlier in the film. You should go watch it, it’s cool.
Still, until the change of Millennium ruined all our technology, sex in movies tended to focus on the heterosexual male perspective, with few examples of queer or woman-facing stories. With the introduction of directors like Steven Soderbergh, Ang Lee and Sofia Coppola to broader American audiences, we started to see more diverse depictions of sexuality, with homosexuality and the sexual desires of women being at the forefront of some of the biggest movies for the first time. There is a whole treasure trove of ways to approach sex and it seems that mainstream movies have barely touched the surface. This, along with the fact that racial minority representation in movies has been so low, explorations of how those groups experience sexuality are virtually untapped in mainstream cinema, aside from rare films like Moonlight. Many underrepresented communities are just beginning to see themselves represented in a positive light on screen, and we must continue allowing them to be seen.
If the establishment of conservative ideals is what we’re against, we must encourage sex to be in movies. We need to allow art to challenge the ideas of sexuality that have been made standard by strange weirdos who think anything other than missionary between a man and a woman is “deviant”. Sex scenes and nudity are good, not only because they allow for broader artistic expression, but because they can also serve as a tool in the fight against fascistic forces. Whether as cautionary tales of problematic sexual expression or as unapologetic expressions of identity, sex greatly expands the limits of what art can be. To deny sex in movies is to deny art, and that’s what fascists do. So let’s not. As an asexual, I know how uncomfortable a sex scene can be, believe me. But they’re worth it. Go watch No Hard Feelings, it was fun. Go watch Oppenheimer, there’s a truly hilarious sex scene. Go watch Bottoms when it comes out, it looks great. Let’s not let conservative weirdos limit our expression and experiences.
History information gathered in part from:
List of movies that informed this:
Isaac Lewis | 8/25/2023
From a young age, we are taught that any and all forms of violence are completely and totally unjustifiable, regardless of the motivations behind said violence. We are taught that the people in charge know what they’re doing, and that they have our best interests in mind. We are taught that disdain for the systems of the world is allowed, as long as such disdain remains within the bounds of the world.
I’m here to tell you all that that’s all bullshit. Violence isn’t desirable, far from it. I would go as far as saying that violence for violence’s sake is horrific. But revolutionary violence is necessary and justified for the safety of oneself and the safety of others, or when used against a status quo that reinforces itself with violence of its own.
Capitalism and the state as we know it are based on illegitimate, bogus, and hypocritical ideas, and thus need to use acts of violence to justify and cover up the violence inherent to them.
Is it not violent to deny healthcare to millions of Americans?
Is it not violent to let millions of homeless people freeze in the streets?
Is it not violent to separate children from their parents at the border?
Is it not violent to have the militant arm of the state kill black Americans because of the color of their skin?
Is it not violent to let children suffer and wallow in abject poverty?
Is it not violent to try and groom the most vulnerable high school graduates into joining the military?
Is it not violent to enable the complete and total destruction of the Earth?
Is it not violent to force each and every person in this country to choose between work or starvation?
We may not think of these things as violent at first thought, because these acts of violence have been so institutionalized that they’ve become normal to us. Any justified society should shudder at the thought of people going hungry because they can’t afford food, but this is an everyday occurrence in the world as we currently know it.
We are all socialists because we reject the status quo and the violence it uses to reinforce itself. We seek to establish an equal and just society where peace is upheld.
But, as Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panthers, once said, “We are advocates for the abolition of war, we do not want war, but war can only be abolished through war. And in order to get rid of the gun, we find it necessary to take up the gun.”
We live in a world where the right to obey has been thrust upon us, and those in power have given themselves the right to kill. Using revolutionary violence to demonstrate against those in power and the way the world is is an unabashed act of self defense and the defense of others. It’s sad that things have to be this way, but violence against property is the only way to get the attention of a world that cares more about property than human life.
And so, I leave you all with one more quote, this time from Malcolm X: “Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.”
Steven Raney | 9/8/2023
On Thursday, June 29th, the Supreme Court ruled affirmative action on the basis of race to be unconstitutional.The exact proscriptions of the ruling are narrow, applying mainly to the practice of curving standardized test scores, but the true consequence of SFFA v. Harvard is that it provides favorable terrain for the anti-affirmative action movement to continue its assault on the higher education reforms that came out of the civil rights struggles of the mid-twentieth century.
If its opponents succeed in removing the principle of affirmative action from college admissions entirely, the ramifications will be severe. Decades after Brown v. Board and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, research suggests that K-12 schools are still effectively segregated and Black households are separated from white ones by a truly staggering wealth gap. With Black youth chronically underserved by a collapsing public education system, and with the historically unprecedented cost of a college degree looming over systemically impoverished Black families, the disappearance of race-conscious admissions practices and financial aid will revert colleges and universities back to their near-exlusively-white status from the Jim Crow era.
Where do we go from here? To adequately answer that question, we must first understand how we got here.
The enormous divide in education opportunities and material wealth between racial groups in this country is no accident of history. America was built on the backs of enslaved Africans, who were never compensated for their own unpaid labor or that of their many deceased ancestors when they finally won their freedom. The vast majority were prohibited from learning to read. In their first years as free men and women, the Black protagonists of Reconstruction made universal public education one of their core demands, alongside a general redistribution of the lands they had labored on for generations as slaves. Northern capitalists, fearing what the expropriation of Southern plantation-owners’ property would mean for their own fortunes, betrayed the antislavery revolution and condemned Reconstruction to defeat, paving the way for the re-subjugation of the free Black masses under a regime of racial segregation. The legal basis for segregation was battered down by the civil rights movement over the course of the twentieth century, but it persists today in less overt forms.
Universal, integrated, and comprehensive education was once again a core demand of the Black freedom struggle during the mass mobilizations of the 1950s and 60s, leading to famous flashpoints like the integration of Little Rock Central High School or the standoff at the University of Alabama. It was during this time that the term “affirmative action” was first applied to programs intended to ensure racial diversity, first in government contract work, then gradually in universities.
Early affirmative action programs were met with backlash from Southern conservatives, but today’s anti-affirmative action movement is rhetorically dissimilar to the backlash of the early 1960s. Neither in talk show soundbites nor in Supreme Court briefs do today’s reactionaries explicitly defend racial exclusion as a property right, even if the implication is there. Instead, they take up the cause of meritocracy: affirmative action is bad because it gives the disadvantaged (if they admit any disadvantage) a leg up at the expense of the best of the best, or so the argument goes.
This new line of thought is best understood as a reaction to the revolutionary youth movements that shook the U.S. in the late 1960s. All over the country, multiracial student organizations flooded college campuses with radical ideas. We had one of our own here at Furman—the local chapter of the Southern Student Organizing Committee, which held anti-war and anti-police violence protests and fought for the right of communists to come to Furman as guest speakers. Joseph Vaughn was a founding member, something the university seems to have forgotten. Elsewhere, student organizing took on an even more militant quality. At Columbia and Cornell in 1968 and 1969, respectively, students organized physical occupations of school property to protest their universities’ complicity in on-campus racial hatred, the destruction of local Black neighborhoods, and racist terror abroad via the military-industrial complex. In the years since these upheavals, conservatives have denounced them with a mixture of law-and-order panic and feigned meritocratic concern. The commentator Thomas Sowell laid out the argument clearly when he wrote the following:
“The Cornell tragedy began with one of those good intentions with which the road to Hell is paved. [The administration] sought to increase minority student enrollment—and to do so by admitting students who would not meet the existing academic standards at Cornell. The emphasis was on getting militant ghetto kids, some of whom turned out to be hoodlums.”
With campus activism no longer taking on menacingly revolutionary proportions like it did in the 1960s, the second part of this line of thought—that affirmative action sows the seeds for the revolt of the marginalized in a setting where the nation-sized country club we call white civil society is meant to be manufactured—has faded into the background, though with the recent growth of organizations like the Young Democratic Socialists of America, that may soon change. But in the meantime, the movement has completed its long march to the Supreme Court under the banner of meritocracy, with high-scoring Asian-American students as its poster children rather than the wealthy whites who will in fact be the primary beneficiaries of the end of affirmative action.
What comes next for those of us on the other side of the line?
First, we must recognize that no progress has ever been attained or defended except through mass struggle. Racial equity in higher education will not be won in a courtroom, in the halls of Congress, or in the Oval Office. It will be won in the streets, on picket lines, and on campus grounds filled with throngs of people organized for a common purpose.
Second, we must see affirmative action for what it is and strive to go beyond its limitations. Race-conscious admissions, though they must be defended at all costs from efforts to reimpose segregation by another name, are still a step backwards from the demands raised by the Black freedom struggle since Emancipation: the universal right to a comprehensive education and the destruction of white supremacy at its roots. Outside of this revolutionary context, affirmative action exemplifies an uninspired liberal approach to racial equity whereby the racially oppressed climb the social ladder into the middle income bracket to improve their standing in capitalist society rather than organizing for a mass redistribution of wealth, property, and political power that would challenge that society’s foundations.
Third, we must be conscious of the fact that this issue is a flashpoint in the wider struggle for a multiracial democracy. The Supreme Court is unelected, yet effectively holds the power to rule by decree on issues from affirmative action to abortion. Of the six justices who signed onto the majority opinion in SFFA v. Harvard, five were appointed by presidents who were elected without winning the popular vote. All justices are approved by the Senate, which gives voters in small states like Wyoming (roughly 90% white) up to seventy times more voting power than those in large states like California (roughly 65% non-white). All this is thanks to our Constitution, which was written by slaveowners, for slaveowners and continues to reflect those interests centuries later. We will need to tear down this old political order to pave the way for racial justice.
Fourth, and most importantly, we must understand that we, as students, hold the power to bring about the world we hope, need, and deserve to live in, and that we have the responsibility to use that power. We should look to the example of the students at Columbia and Cornell half a century ago, whose anti-racist struggles forced their administrations to concede disciplinary reforms, new race-conscious curricula, and the creation of elected assemblies of students with input in their schools’ budgets. They put everything on the line to fight for racial justice and democracy, and though the fight is far from over, they won concrete and lasting victories. We should all dare to be so bold.
Paige Lau | 9/8/2023
[Content warning: references to sexual assault, Nazism, and disturbing acts of violence.]
There is no singular unity referred to by the word ‘patriarchy.’ Instead, it consists of innumerable lines of penetration, some discordant with others, but all set against feminine modes of subjectivity made out as inconvenient, abject, or otherwise ‘out of line.’ Penetration is the guarantor of the masculine ego: the sword, the rifle, the literal phallus—a whole armory of techniques for the assertion of power, of virility, of control. Alongside penetrative techniques, a whole array of technologies is invented to shore up flows—other than the fountains of blood unleashed upon the Other by the fascist male. Solid boundaries secure the ego of the masculine subject. He stands tall in the face of the undifferentiated chaos of the feminine as he constructs it. Monuments to the impenetrable masculine hold whirlpools and torrents and surging waves at bay.
Patriarchy freely seizes upon the whole of its history as a repository of techniques of shoring-up; it “makes its history current by artificially reconstructing it” (Theweleit, 359). Putting into play centuries worth of images of ideal and monstrous femininities, patriarchy constantly redefines femininity according to the needs of each moment. It deploys the fetishized figure of the Virgin Mary moments before calling upon the coquettish noblewoman of 17th century Europe; it demands women simultaneously adopt the rigid posture of masculine virtue and play the role of the soft and malleable wife-as-property—in short, it wants, without exception, to exert control over feminine subjectivity and the ‘female body.’ Like in a movie, “the male protagonist is free to command the stage” (Mulvey).
Through these techniques of domination, the masculine ego hides the evidence of its fundamental lack—which, by its own standards, is inadmissible. Manhood under patriarchy is wholly vital. This is why fascist men—the most vigorous adherents of patriarchy-as-a-mode-of-being—paint their enemies as ‘degenerate.’ Jews, communists, homosexuals: all are weak and effeminate, according to fascists. They embarrass the ego of the fascist male, and so they “must” be exterminated—their mere possibility must be foreclosed. Extermination is a way of shoring up flows before they turn to floods, and bloodlust replaces ‘shameful’ need for women—which threatens to reveal lack and dispel fantasies of total control—with a drive for total mastery, as expressed in fascistic depictions of murder as a kind of rape fantasy.
Any struggle against fascism must be a struggle against patriarchy. And, as we are all molded in patriarchy’s image, much of the work to be done is in transforming how we relate to ourselves and others.
Cited:
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies, Volume I: Women, Floods, Bodies, History
Ossian Quinn, Michael Ross, and Anna Timbes | 9/22/2023
This past summer, we experienced some of the hottest temperatures ever recorded. Wildfires ravaged Canada. California saw its first hurricane in sixty years. Scientists say that we are in the middle of a mass extinction event.
All the while, GDP, which has been repeatedly linked to carbon emissions and material extraction, continues to increase with the full backing of all of the world’s most influential economic actors. Why is this? GDP continues to grow despite all signs pointing to collapse because of the prevailing economic system – capitalism. Capitalism lives off growth, and without growth capitalism falls into crisis.
First, it is clear that we must stop economic growth – we must degrow. Degrowth is a movement which calls for reducing our material consumption while redirecting existing material use towards human needs and flourishing. This is incompatible with capitalism. Under capitalism, reduced material use leads to what little material is left being consumed by the people who already can meet their basic needs and more – in short, the capitalist class. On top of this, multinational corporations drain the Global South of economic resources all while paying their workers pitiful wages and forcing them to work in pitiful conditions. Under capitalism, cost-cutting is the name of the game – the less you have to compensate workers and the environment, the higher the profits and the more “entrepreneurial success”.
So how do we achieve equitable degrowth? Furman YDSA believes that this can only be achieved through a democratically planned economy. A democratic economy allows for
things to be produced for concrete needs rather than abstract money-values and profit margins by making the conscious input of human beings, not price signals, the determining variable. The goal is to redesign our economy to be able to thrive within biophysical limits and reprioritize what we value; cherishing human health and prosperity over unneeded material or social objects. Degrowth requires placing money at the bottom of the hierarchy of these values. In order for this to work, there needs to be a collective transformative social change, starting with the nations that are leading in consumptive practices.
Higher-education is among these transgressors. Furman University claims to want to create a Climate Action Plan to mitigate their carbon footprint. But how much of this is genuine commitment and how much is hand-waving? Biodiversity is a critical factor of the climate crisis that is creating cascading effects around the globe. Furman itself contributes to this ongoing emergency through our useless landscaping endeavors. Our notion of keeping our lawns pristine and well-kept is an extractivist and harmful practice that must be stopped. Lawn-mowers are among the leading engines that emit carbon, and implementing mono-culture practices have detrimental alterations on the ecosystems of Furman. Using a non-native, invasive grass species forces out the native animals and plants that help our microcosm thrive.
Ideas like degrowth and a democratically planned economy are massive changes to the way we are currently operating. It may seem like too tall of a task for any of us to try to accomplish. As college students, it probably is. But what we can do is lay the ground-work for something bigger. Right here, and right now at Furman we can start the process of changing the damaging system that is destroying our Earth. To be able to eventually stop growth across our whole economic system, we must do something to stop growth where we can, at Furman.
With our 2023-2024 campaign, we propose that we as a Furman community put together a democratically elected committee of students, faculty, and staff to oversee our ecological impact and to not only establish but also enforce our next Climate Action Plan. We are advocating for the disclosing of Furman’s financial investments, and the divestment of funds from the fossil fuel industry. We are advocating for wide reform of the landscaping of our campus, moving from a country club style of landscaping to that of a national park. Unless we start making significant changes, we as a species are doomed to become extinct. Join us in the quest to push against the systems racing us toward that reality.
Steven Raney | 9/22/2023
With the draft of the “Democratize Our Campus - Win the Battle for Sustainability” petition approved by Furman YDSA’s general membership at our semester kickoff meeting, the ecological justice campaign our chapter voted to pursue over the summer is now in full swing. Over the next two months, we will collect signatures from Furman students, faculty, and staff to demonstrate popular support for the demand of a democratically elected student-worker committee to oversee the university’s new Climate Action Plan.
Why this campaign, and why now?
As with all ecological issues, the question “Why now?” needs only one answer: “Because we didn’t do it ten, twenty, thirty years ago.” We have to answer the call to struggle for a just and sustainable society now because now is when the future is made, and the only possible outcome of a now devoid of struggle is a future where there is no one left to struggle and nothing left to struggle for.
In the long view, what transpires at a small private university with a predominantly white, predominantly upper-middle income or wealthier student body will not be decisive in the global fight for ecological justice. It is ultimately only the masses in motion, the many oppressed and exploited millions organized for their collective interest, who will determine whether humanity lives to see the next century. But Furman is not isolated from the wider world. As a nearly billion-dollar business standing over a community of roughly three thousand people, it casts a long shadow over places near and far. The materials consumed here are imbued with the labor of untold workers from up to thousands of miles away. The people who work here exist in other communities as well, where they are actors in other theaters of class conflict which lie just out of view from our vantage point on campus. The students who live here hail from all over the world, and in a few short years we will all disperse across the world once again, carrying the experiences of our time here with us. Those of us who are drawn into the campaign for a democratic Climate Action Plan will go forth having internalized the lessons of that struggle, which will inform how we engage with the broader movement for ecological justice for the rest of our lives.
What should that engagement look like? At this late hour, there are paths we cannot afford to retread. We have seen the path of liberal reformism, institutional deference and technocratic tinkering expose itself in real time as a strategic dead end with a crippling deficit of the kind of vision we so desperately need. On the left wing of this “possibilist” approach, the Green New Deal has utterly failed, surgically dismantled by our undemocratic constitutional order and repackaged as a set of subsidies for corporate mega-polluters. On the right wing, efforts to influence the administrative state under the Obama and Biden administrations have all been dead on arrival, with the latter breaking new records in oil and gas production even as it boasts of token conservation efforts. We will choke on the air we breathe and be boiled alive in the rising seas before this kind of do-nothing, go-nowhere institutionalism ever delivers on its meager promises. If we were to follow a similar approach at Furman, attempting to secure environmental reforms through existing institutional channels, not only would we more than likely fail to win the most important of our material goals on campus, but we would without question fail to prepare ourselves to organize for ecological justice in the wider world in a way that has any hope of pulling the species back from the brink of climate catastrophe. To waste our potential in this way by allowing ourselves to be lured into the wilderness of reformism would be a betrayal of our responsibility to future generations to win the battle for a sustainable society. We have no choice but to formulate and practice a new kind of ecological politics, starting right here in our immediate context. Our campaign to bring the Climate Action Plan under democratically elected student-worker management is a crucial first step towards that goal. It represents an effort to redefine sustainability from a technocratic discipline to be haggled over in the halls of power into an ongoing, bottom-up, collective struggle for real popular sovereignty.
In addition to being profoundly democratic—in fact, in order for it to be profoundly democratic—our vision of ecological justice must also be essentially anti-capitalist. This is the other crucial element of our campaign. If we succeed in winning democratic student-worker control of Furman’s sustainability initiatives, we will be materially contesting the university’s status as a private institution by calling into question the ability of Furman’s private stakeholders to exercise full authority over its finances. It goes without saying that the Board of Trustees would not allow this to pass without massive resistance, and indeed we can expect a future democratically-decided and -enforced Climate Action Plan to be undermined and obstructed even more fiercely than one emerging from the existing institutional channels would be. But by carving out a formal arena for those in the community without multimillion-dollar portfolios to their name to claim the Climate Action Plan as their own and act accordingly, we will have opened a new site of intense class conflict between the capitalists who leech profit from our home and workplace on the one hand and a coalition of proletarians and circumstantially proletarianized students and faculty on the other. Even if we fail to see the student-faculty-staff committee implemented, by fighting for it we will have oriented the Furman community in struggle towards that end and opened up entirely new possibilities for campus politics in the coming years.
This—class struggle, people power, grassroots democracy—is what socialists stand for. This is what socialists have a duty to fight for. This is the approach we, as Furman YDSA, must have to ecological justice on our campus and the approach we must train ourselves in and carry into the wider world if we, as citizens of the Earth, are to live up to the demands history has placed on us at this do-or-die moment for the human species.
Steven Raney | 10/20/2023
If the events of the past two weeks are anything to go by, we will have the good fortune of outliving the state of Israel—but no rabid dog dies without a fight. On the night of October 17th, the Israeli Air Force bombed a hospital in the Gaza Strip, killing somewhere between 500 and one thousand Palestinians in a frenzied effort to satiate the bloodlust of the most fanatic elements of Israel’s settler society. Why this bloodlust? The Palestinian resistance delivered Israel its greatest military defeat in fifty years with Operation Al-Aqsa Flood earlier this month, exposing the Israeli “Defense” Forces as an army of paper tigers. It is now plain for the Palestinian people and the entire Arab world to see that two decades of glorified police duty in the West Bank, consisting mainly of dragging defenseless families from their homes and brutalizing children for throwing rocks, have left the IDF woefully unprepared to wage a real war for the survival of the Zionist project.
When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formed a coalition government of Zionist hardliners in 2022, he wrote his supporters a check with the Palestinian people as collateral, and now that check has bounced. By the terrible logic of Israeli politics, the immense cost incurred to national morale two weeks ago can only be made up with a bounty of charred flesh of innocents and fresh lebensraum for the next wave of settler-paramilitaries. The chips are down, there is nowhere to retreat: for Israel, it is a second Nakba or death. In a reenactment of the original sin of 1948, the Zionist entity is now prepared to ethnically cleanse over a million Palestinians from North Gaza.
Naturally, the United States is as eager as ever to sign off on Israeli bloodletting. The custodians of our enlightened empire from D.C. to Wall Street have never encountered a mass slaughter they wouldn’t bankroll for America’s financial and geostrategic gain. But Israel in particular has always enjoyed premium access to our patronage, because for decades now it has loyally served as America’s colonial outpost in the Middle East. Israel is a country-sized military base that allows the U.S. to diplomatically corral the oil-producing slave-states of the Persian Gulf into a coalition against Iran so long as their pliable absolute monarchs remain in power, and presents the threat of military annihilation with billions of dollars of American hardware if those monarchs ever step out of line or, god forbid, are deposed by their subjects in an anti-imperialist revolution. An arrangement like that is too good to let go of, so no atrocity is too great a liability to stop the State Department from dirtying its hands in the coverup, and no amount of bloodshed could ever stain the hide of the Israeli cash cow enough for the Pentagon to put it out to pasture.
Where has DSA been during all of this? So far, exactly where we should be—on the side of the Palestinians. DSA released a statement on October 7th expressing “steadfast” solidarity with Palestine against Israeli occupation. This was soon followed by other statements from local chapters, and then tangible action in the days that followed as thousands of DSAmembers took to the streets to demand an end to U.S. aid to Israel. The backlash from the ruling class has been visceral. Imperialist stooges from the New York Times to the House of Representatives have denounced DSA for our refusal to include condemnations of Hamas in our statements, slandering us as antisemites and terrorist sympathizers. In standing with Palestine, we have defiled the most sacred principle of American politics—Israel’s inalienable right to reenact the horrors of the Holocaust that birthed it—and for that the bipartisan consensus has branded us persona non grata. It is a fate generations of Palestinian organizers before us are all too familiar with.
As a whole, we have held strong under this onslaught, but our weakest links have started to break. A handful of elected officials and candidates endorsed by DSA have turned on us. Congressman Jamaal Bowman, a former member who had a falling-out with DSA over his vote to fund the Iron Dome in 2021, denounced a Palestinian solidarity rally New York City DSA participated in and made sure his staff clarified his lack of affiliation with us. Some DSA members in office, including two state representatives from Colorado, have left the organization entirely. Good. Our platform is unequivocally pro-Palestine. Those who have abandoned it for the sake of electability were parasites on our movement, using our time and resources to seek office without feeling any obligation to defend our core principles. Now is the time for these cowards and opportunists to expose themselves. True solidarity means fighting alongside the oppressed no matter how hated you are for it. The bitter uphill struggle against public opinion is, in fact, our natural place in the world as socialists. Certain “comrades” are now revealing they don’t have what it takes to join us there, but that’s okay, our ruling class has saved plenty of room for them worshiping alongside billionaires and war criminals at the altar of death.
Under no circumstances can we allow ourselves to be cowed into a tepid both-sidesism, let alone anything approaching support for Israel and its “right to defend itself.” We will hear the demand a thousand times: denounce Hamas! Denounce the deaths of Israeli civilians! Denounce the rocket strikes from Gaza!” We must have the same answer every time: “No. Victory to Palestine.” Israel operates the largest concentration camp in world history in Gaza, and is now preparing to liquidate it. Did anyone of conscience denounce the prisoners of Treblinka, Sobibor, or Auschwitz when they revolted against the SS? Would anyone of conscience have bothered denouncing them had German civilians died in the process? No, that would be despicable. It would be equally despicable for us to waste our breath denouncing Hamas. The ravenous demand for denunciations of this or that expression of Palestinian resistance, a demand nearly every public figure and organization in the United States has bent over backwards to accommodate, is an attempt to deflect attention from Israel, its crimes against humanity, and the struggle of an oppressed people to free themselves from it. The abolitionists of the 19th century refused to kowtow to the slavers’ press and put on crocodile tears when slave revolts spilled white blood. Instead, they seized the opportunity to agitate against the system of oppression they knew to be at the root of the violence. They set the standard, and we had better live up to it.
Those of us brave enough to take this position and stand by it (and I have faith I can count the majority of DSA’s eighty thousand members among that number) will without a doubt be hated for doing so. As the Palestinian struggle intensifies, as it threatens to upend the imperialist status quo in the Middle East by activating other forces of resistance and bringing the existence of Israel and Arab comprador states into question, the pressure for us to fold will rise exponentially. But make no mistake: we have nothing to gain by betraying our Palestinian comrades. There is no path to victory for the socialist program through surrendering it piecemeal in a vain effort to win the favor of the ruling class. If we have any hope of success, we will need to take stands as costly as this one on a long list of issues, and if we have any sense of duty to the global working class, we have no excuse to not start here and now.
Trivialities like social ostracism weigh so heavily on our minds in the United States because we live lives of supreme worldly comfort, a comfort which is held up by pillars of chemical fire raining from the night sky on desperate millions enslaved in their own homeland. Peace and dignity, food and water, health and a home, freedom from the fear of extermination—these should be the birthright of all human beings, but in a world such as ours, they are luxuries the privileged few hoard at the expense of the wretched of the Earth. We have no right to qualify our solidarity with the Palestinian people, no right to raise our voice to condemn them, no right to apologize on their behalf, no right to drop our guard or mince our words in the fight against the machine crushing them to death. We have no right. It would be nothing less than treason to humanity.
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, we’ll keep the red flag flying here.
Paige Lau | 10/20/2023
Given the ongoing events in Israel-Palestine, I wanted to take a moment to provide some historical background about the history of the State of Israel and its relationships with Palestinians and Jewish people both. To that end, this piece tackles two popular mythologies underpinning the Israeli justifications for the horrifying crimes they are committing against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, starting in response to the first Palestinian Resistance insurgency earlier this month. These mythologies provide the ideological framing for a system which Human Rights organizations across the globe have likened to apartheid and are used to delegitimize the Palestinian people’s anti-colonial struggle.
We have all heard the Israeli perspective on the issues at hand—the descriptions of Palestinian violence as inexplicable and enigmatic, the references to the “animal” “violent instincts” of the Palestinians, the characterizations of Hamas as a terrorist group with the sole purpose of murdering Israelis, and so on and so forth. I do not deny that, during the initialinsurgency and since, Hamas operatives have killed a number of Israeli civilians—likely numbering near 1,300 as of today (October 12). I do not condone this, nor am I blind to it. I fully understand the need to mourn over those Israeli civilians tragically killed, especially by their families and those close to them. But no deaths could justify the ongoing mass destruction in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli state and military, or the profound cruelty and contempt with which Western governments and media establishments speak of the Palestinian people as a whole. The situation is far more complicated than the Israeli story is willing to allow in its attempt to justify bombing entire neighborhoods and cutting off food, water, and electricity to the 2 million people (including hundreds of thousands of children) residing in the Gaza Strip. Already, over 4,000 civilians have been murdered by Israeli airstrikes in the Strip, including over 1,000 children (that we know of so far). Hospitals have been bombed and dozens of aid workers have been killed in attacks by the Israeli Defense Forces. Let’s be clear: this is genocide.
The incursion from the Strip has been characterized by some as Israel’s 9/11, due to the number of civilians killed within such a short period by Hamas and other resistance forces. It is also Israel’s 9/11 in another way: it is already being used as a pretext for horrific mass-murder. And, again like 9/11, it is being exploited to shut down any who dare speak up against the compounding of tragedy. As David Klion explains in n+1, “To foreground the suffering of the Americans in the Twin Towers was obligatory; to acknowledge the past, present, or future victims of American violence abroad was at best awkward; to imply these things might be related was something almost no one wanted to hear when it might have made any difference” (Klion, “Have We Learned Nothing?”). The situation following the incursion into Israel looks eerily similar.
The ideology being used to justify the Israeli state’s genocidal actions today is nothing new—Israel and its supporters have a long history of constructing myths in order to justify and forestall criticism of Israeli war crimes and human rights abuses. Here, I would like to focus on two of those myths. Firstly, I will discuss the myth of universally peace-seeking Israeli state forced into violence as a result of Palestinian refusal to cooperate. Secondly, I will discuss the myth that the State of Israel is representative of all Judaism across the globe, and therefore that criticism of the Israeli state is by necessity anti-Semitic in character.
Myth #1: Palestinian intransigence is the primary obstacle to peace.
There are two component myths that allow the myth of perpetual Palestinian intransigence to flourish: firstly, the myth of an Israeli state eager and waiting for peace, if only the Palestinians would cooperate; and, secondly, the myth of a Palestinian leadership and people inexplicably bent on forestalling the possibility of peace by any means. Here I investigate the first component myth.
Throughout the past years, the Hamas movement has been the primary target for accusations of Palestinian intransigence. But where did Hamas come from? How did it become such a powerful force in the Gaza Strip? Until the late 1980s, Palestinian political power in the Gaza Strip was held by the Fatah movement, a secular national movement which, beginning in the 1970s, supported a two-state solution and the creation of a democratic Palestinian state. Israel was fearful of the secular elements of Palestinian society, especially those with revolutionary left-wing elements. Fatah—as well as the broader Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) of which it was a part—especially concerned Israeli military and government agents, due to their use of guerrilla warfare tactics popular amongst leftist insurgents.
As part of its anti-Fatah efforts, Israel provided funding and strategic support to an educational and charitable movement starting in 1979: Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s Islamic Society. Yassin’s Islamic Society would, in 1988, transform into the movement now called Hamas. As the Washington Post argued in 2014: “Yassin's [Islamic Society] would become Hamas, which, it can be argued, was Israel's Taliban: an Islamist group whose antecedents had been laid down by the West in a battle against a leftist enemy” (Tharoor, “How Israel helped create Hamas”). It is unclear, however, if the Israeli state truly regrets its contributions to the Hamas movement. As recently as 2019, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been recorded making statements such as: “anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy—to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank” (Weitz, “Another Concept Implodes”). Times of Israel columnist Tal Schneider, in an article from October 8—just after the initial Palestinian incursion—explains that, over the past few decades, Israeli policy has de facto treated Hamas as a useful asset, propping it up in hopes of preventing reconciliation between Palestinian leadership in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (Schneider, “Netanyahu propped up Hamas”).
It is evident that Israel itself has played a significant role in creating the Palestinian resistance organization least likely to consider working with the Israeli state towards peace. Why? Because the State of Israel does not want peace unless it is entirely on its own unjust terms. Let us look at several other cases further evincing Israel’s own intransigence.
Let’s start from beginning, with the first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, who refused to enter into talks regarding the repatriation of Palestinians expelled during the 1948 Nakba—the mass expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from their homes through a mix of violence, intimidation, and fear, ending in the destruction of 531 villages, eleven urban neighborhoods, numerous massacres, and placement of Palestinian men and boys over ten in labor camps for more than a year (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing). Ben-Gurion not only refused to enter talks over this world-historical campaign of uninhibited colonial violence; he further declared that Israel had not gone far enough, lamenting the decision not to maintain control over the West Bank (Pappe, Ten Myths).
Not long after the Nakba ended, Israel refused to comply with Resolution 194 of the UN General Assembly, a peace plan adopted in 1948 which included provisions for (1) renegotiating partition to better account for the needs of Palestinians, (2) the right for all Nakba refugees to return to their homes, and (3) the transformation of Jerusalem into internationally held territory (Schlaim, The Iron Wall). After all, accepting the UN’s peace plan would mean giving up the demographic dominance of Jewish over Palestinian people in the newly formed State. David Ben-Gurion and his allies in government would not accept such a sacrifice. Even a 60% Jewish majority was not enough for him. None of this thinking was exclusive to Ben-Gurion: anti-Arab ethnonationalism guides Israeli decision making for up to this very moment (Sa’di, “Incorporation”) and has accelerated over the past decades under the leadership of neo-Zionist parties and politicians.
Israel again refused to heed international concerns after the June 1967 War. This time, binding UN Security Council Resolution 242 demanded Israel’s immediate withdrawal from all territories occupied during the war. Israel categorically refused to accept the terms of the Resolution. They did not let go of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, or what they termed the territory of Greater Jerusalem. However, the new territory posed a problem for the ethnonationalist Israeli government. They would not accept bringing in so many Palestinian citizens and upsetting the demographic balance they had worked so hard to create. Thus, the Palestinian people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were neither allowed citizenship nor independence. Ever since, Israel has continued to flagrantly and in plain view tear apart the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israeli historian Haim Bresheeth-Zabner elaborates in detail:
Israel has built an enormous network of illegal settlements, covering the OPT with more than 750,000 Jewish settlers and a network of roads that exclude Palestinians. It took control of all resources, periodically denying Palestinians water and electricity, and limited the supply of food and medicines for long periods. It slaughtered many thousands of Palestinians for no apparent reason. It installed hundreds of checkpoints disabling daily life and destroyed Palestinian infrastructure—water, electricity, telephone lines, and roads. To cap it all, it has built the longest and largest separation wall in modern times, one clearly visible from outer space (Haim, An Army Like No Other).
It is in response to these horrendous injustices—these processes of ethnic cleansing—that the Palestinian Resistance, including Hamas and several other revolutionary organizations, has recently taken up arms. And it is in this context that we can better contextualize the brutality of some of their actions: for decades, the Palestinian people have lived under horrific conditions, constantly at risk of death and surrounded by the indiscriminate violence of the IDF and the settlers, who widely view the Palestinians as something less-than-human. What is described by Israel, the U.S. government, and nearly every major media source in the U.S. as senseless violence is in reality something else entirely: blowback.
Everything I have discussed only covers a few of the innumerable ways in which theState of Israel, in spite of its rhetoric, stands directly in opposition to the attainment of true and just peace with the Palestinian people. After all: how can one negotiate with terrorists or terrorists-in-training, which Palestinians have always already been in the eyes of the Israeli state and military? How does one negotiate with a people who have been (and still commonly are) likened to “a disease that threatened to kill a healthy body,” and “a cancer at the heart of the nation” (Pappe, The Idea of Israel)? No matter how many times Israel claims it wants peace, its actual actions on the ground argue exactly the opposite.
Myth #2: Zionism = Judaism
All of us have heard the accusation: “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.” After all, the State of Israel supposedly represents all Jewish people internationally. Or does it? I would argue that this conception of Zionism as equivalent to Judaism as such is mythological in that it obfuscates the fact that modern Zionism is modern, a product of late 19th and 20th century global developments, and which in many ways marked a break with popular Judaism across the world up to that point. Furthermore, the conception of Zionism as Judaism and vice versa erases modern Jewish opposition to the State of Israel and the Zionist project.
The socio-political movement of Zionism originated in the late 19th century. It mirrored many other global changes, including the enlightenment, the 1848 Spring of Nations, and utopian socialism (Pappe, Ten Myths), in response to the dangers of anti-Semitic nationalism in Western Europe. Zionist trailblazer Theodore Herzl managed to get the Zionist movement international recognition by the end of the 19th century. As he put it, a Jewish state settled primarily from Western Europe would “form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism” (Lloyd, “Settler Colonialism”). Thus, not only would Palestine become a national home for the Jewish people, but it would also open up access to the Orient and forestall the threat to the West posed by what, to Herzl and his comrades, was an undifferentiated mass of savage Arabs. From the beginning, Zionism was envisioned as a settler colonial project underlaid by deep anti-Arab racism.
Herzl and his fellow Zionists were not the only popularizers: many Christians were (and still are) highly favorable to the Zionist movement, thanks to the popular belief that the Jewish people must all return to their “ancestral homeland” in order to trigger the End Times. Anti-Semitic Western European governments, especially the British government, also supported the Zionist movement. Imperial Britain specifically felt that Zionism fit well with its geostrategic impulses to extend its reach further into the Middle East; thus, it issued the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which declared the creation of a “national home” for the Jewish people in Palestine. Other anti-Semitic governments were favorable to Zionism explicitly because it got Jewish people out of their countries. However, especially early on, Zionism was far less popular amongst the majority of Jewish communities.
The Balfour Declaration was far more popular amongst Christian Zionists than even Jewish Zionists themselves, and it was even less popular amongst the non-Zionist majority of Jewish people across the globe (Jeffries, Palestine). Members of the Jewish Bund in Russia, a popular socialist movement, argued that a revolution in Europe would be far preferable for the Jewish cause to the formation of a modern nation-state in Palestine. Liberal Jews “regarded Zionism as a fanciful movement that provided no answer to the problems of the Jews in Europe” (Pappe, Ten Myths). Orthodox Jews opposed Zionism on a religious basis, arguing that the Jewish people ought to wait for the coming of the Messiah to guide them out of exile. To be sure, it was relatively normal pre-Zionism for Jewish people to consider themselves as having a distinct historical relationship with the land of Palestine, especially the city of Jerusalem. However, for the vast majority, that relationship did not translate into a wish to settle the area, and the few who did desire to settle the area did so by integrating themselves into the existing Palestinian society.
While Zionism is more widely popular today amongst Jewish people, especially American and Western European Jews, many still decry the ways in which their history and their religion are exploited by the State of Israel to justify its genocidal acts against Palestinians. In this respect, books such as Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, which chronicles how Israel invokes the Holocaust to defend its atrocious record on human rights, have paved the path for Jewish criticism of Israel. Other American Jews, such as Jewish Currents editor-at-large Peter Beinart and the anti-Zionist Jewish organization Jewish Voice for Peace have taken up the mantle of criticizing Israel for its profoundly inhumane treatment of the Palestinian people. Peter Beinart has, in his long career as a journalist, has compared Israeli rhetoric on Palestine to Russian rhetoric on Ukraine (Beinart, “Justifications”) and argued that, for American Christians, Zionism and anti-Semitism go hand-in-hand (Beinart, “Antisemitic Zionists”). American Jewish writer Joshua P. Hill recently framed his specifically Jewish opposition to Zionism like this:
I can tell you with great confidence that the Jewish people have a long history of being expelled from one land after another, one home after another, of being attacked and persecuted and killed. But there are multiple ways to respond to that history. We can hold deeply to the idea that no one should ever experience what we have been subjected to, or we can turn and say that we must protect ourselves at all costs, even if it means hurting others the way we’ve been hurt. And the state of Israel in many ways chose the latter (Hill, “A Jewish Case”).
Not only are there plenty of Jewish people who stand firm in their opposition the State of Israel despite immense pressure otherwise; but, as the above quote indicates, the historical oppression of Jewish people offers resources which open up opportunities for even deeper solidarity with the suffering of Palestinians under occupation.
In the 1990s, an explosion of works by Israeli academics—which have now been aggressively suppressed by the neo-Zionist regime of today—took advantage of their access to historical archives to cast doubt on the founding myths of Zionism. They documented, among other things, the way Zionist intellectuals attempted to collaborate with the early Nazi state to bringexpelled Jews exclusively to Palestine (Segev, The Seventh Million); the way in which leading Israelis and Israeli popular culture continue to draw “a clear contrast between the new ‘brave’ Jews of Israel and those who went ‘willingly’ to the slaughter in Europe’s extermination camps” (Pappe, The Idea of Israel); and the way in which early settlers and major figures in the Israeli military and government explicitly considered Zionism a colonial project predicated on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians (Haim, An Army Like No Other).
All of this forces us to abandon the false equation of Zionism with Judaism, or anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Zionism represents the beliefs of many Jewish people in the modern day, but not all. The many Jewish people who do oppose the Israeli project of colonialism and ethnic cleansing deserve to be taken seriously, not dismissed out of hand as self-hating or lacking in commitment to their community.
Let us stand in solidarity with those killed during this nightmarish conflict, especially the 2 million in Gaza trapped as their homes are turned to rubble and their families are decimated by bombs, bullets, and deprivation.
Works Cited:
Bresheeth-Zabner, Haim (2020). An Army Like No Other: How the Israel Defense Forces Made a Nation.
Verso Books.
David Klion, “Have We Learned Nothing?” n+1, October 11, 2023.
Finkelstein, Norman (2003). “The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering.
Verso Books.
Gidi Weitz, “Another Concept Implodes: Israel Can’t Be Managed by a Criminal Defendant,”
Haaretz, October 9, 2023.
Ishan Tharoor, “How Israel helped create Hamas,” The Washington Post, July 30, 2014.
Pappe, Ilan (2016). The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge. Verso Books.
Pappe, Ilan (2007). The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld Publications, Second edition.Jeffries, J. M. N. (2017). Palestine: The Reality. Skyscraper Publications.
Joshua P. Hill, “A Jewish Case Against Zionism,” New Means, October 8, 2023.
Lloyd, David. “Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel”
Settler Colonial Studies 2:1 (2012), pp 59-80.
Pappe, Ilan (2017). Ten Myths About Israel. Verso Books.
Pappe, Ilan (2016). The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge. Verso Books.
Pappe, Ilan (2007). The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld Publications, Second edition.
Peter Beinart, “Antisemitic Zionists Aren’t a Contradiction in Terms,” Jewish Currents, January 10,
2023.
Peter Beinart, “Justifications for Destroying a People,” Jewish Currents, March 8, 2022.
Sa’adi, Ahmad. “The Incorporation of the Palestinian Minority by the Israeli State, 1948-1970: On
the Nature, Transformation, and Constraints of Collaboration” Social Text, 21:2 (2003), pp. 75-94.
Schlaim, Ava (2001). The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. W. W. Nortion & Company.
Segev, Tom (2000). The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust. Picador.
Tal Schneider, “For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces,” The
Times of Israel, October 8, 2023.
Steven Raney | 11/17/2023
This Tuesday, Furman YDSA and five other organizations released a joint open letter to the Furman administration and Board of Trustees demanding concrete action in solidarity with Palestine against the ongoing Israeli genocide. The signatory organizations—YDSA, the Furman Middle East and North Africa club, Afrikiya, the Furman International Student Association, the Environmental Action Group, and the Furman Pride Alliance—represent a broad cross-section of progressive social movements and marginalized communities at Furman. This coalition has united on the basis of programmatic unity around the following demands:
1. Pledge to never again send MayX or study abroad programs to Israel or facilitate internships with Israeli firms.
2. Open Furman’s financial records to the public and terminate all investments linked to Israel.
3. Formally distance the university from pro-Israel statements and release an official statement unequivocally recognizing and denouncing the Israeli genocide.
These demands are the product of lengthy deliberation between members of multiple organizations. It is fair to say that each signatory is committed to them wholeheartedly. They represent a critical merger between the existing the movement for Palestinian justice and the emerging movement for democratic socialism, in the sense that they simultaneously apply the principles of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement to conditions at Furman and point towards the issue of democratic control over our university’s finances. Any advance in this coalition’s fight for Palestinian liberation will advance Furman YDSA’s ongoing campaign for a democratic Climate Action Plan (which necessitates student-worker control over financial affairs), and vice-versa.
The difference between this coalition’s activities and the activities of the Furman Justice Forum is night and day.
While the six-member coalition was busy finalizing its plans on Monday night, the FJF released its own statement in an effort to pre-empt the impending open letter. We can only speculate as to the true reasons FJF decided on this course of action, but we know from communications with the group’s executive leadership that it was done with the knowledge that there was already a bold, action-oriented statement being prepared with the support of groups representing broad layers of Furman’s progressive student population. In that context, it is difficult not to interpret the FJF’s actions as cynical. Perhaps it alarmed the FJF to know that a consensus was emerging among student social justice and identity-based organizations without its input, but a thorough read of its competing statement should make it clear why the working group which drafted the coalition’s open letter did not approach the FJF during the drafting process.
The opening lines of the statement are telling: FJF refuses to use the word “genocide,” referring instead to the vague “actions of the Israeli government” which it describes as merely “leading to” the deaths of Palestinians. FJF then switches its focus to Hamas and the October 7th attacks—perhaps understandable on October 8th, but absurd and inappropriate 38 days, 12,000 murdered Palestinians, and 1.4 million Gazan refugees later—before remarking on the “complex” and “nuanced” nature of the situation. This would be equivalent to a statement about the Holocaust dedicating equal space to addressing the Nazi program of genocide itself and the retaliatory Koniuchy Massacre of German civilians by Jewish resistance fighters. Neither should be celebrated, but condemning one is a matter of moral imperative for all people of conscience while going to great lengths to condemn the other in this context can only serve to draw a false equivalence between the violence of a genocidal occupation regime and the desperate violence of its victims. In both cases, declaring the situation “complex” and “nuanced” to justify refusing to take a side is the height of moral bankruptcy.
FJF goes on to proclaim that “one of the most significant acts of justice we can do right now is to listen.” Listening is hardly ever the wrong thing to do, but it is hard to believe that it ranks anywhere among the most significant things we can do as people who do not face obliteration by a bloodthirsty colonial army and are in fact immersed in a sea of institutions directly or indirectly footing the bill for said colonial army’s world-historic killing spree. Nevertheless, FJF concludes its letter with a call to attend a meeting on Thursday to collaboratively “formulate a statement inclusive of all voices,” which might have led those reading prior to Thursday night to assume that the FJF’s commitment to listening could at least help generate something of political substance, perhaps even something emancipatory, with enough community input at the meeting in question.
Though there may well have been attendees who derived some personal value from the conversations that took place at FJF’s meeting, the event can only have been a profound disappointment for anyone who believed it had the potential to catalyze meaningful collective action. The primary purpose appeared to be to encourage us to exchange platitudes while discouraging discussion of how Furman students might wield our collective power to help turn the tide for Palestine. When the agenda finally turned to discussing action, “we” statements and normative statements were forbidden—attendees were repeatedly reminded to only speak in terms of what they were willing and able to do as individuals. Thought-terminating liberal cliches disorganized the flow of conversation before it went anywhere consequential. For instance, the sin of “speaking for others” was invoked against both the assertion that Palestinians do not see their own genocide as “nuanced” and a denunciation of the intimidation of faculty for being critical of Zionist narratives. At the end of the event, the presiding FJF executive unilaterally decided that it was not the right time to collaboratively draft a statement as had been promoted. One factor in this decision may have been the fact that a majority of attendees seemed likely to move to endorse the existing open letter, or at least draft a similarly strong anti-Zionist and action-oriented one if given the chance.
With the FJF choosing to situate itself in opposition to what might be described as the nascent organized left at Furman, it is time to ask what purpose its continued existence serves. Certainly not to live up to its name and serve as a vehicle for justice, not if it goes on refusing to take a firm stand for Palestine. The issue of anti-Zionism has separated the wheat from the chaff on the organized left across the country, easing the burden of identifying who is truly on our side and who is not by inviting them to do it for us. It appears poised to do the same at Furman. The six signatories of the November 14th open letter might all benefit from displacing the FJF by founding a true united front of organizations interested in pursuing justice by collective action rather than sinking into the mire of dialogue fetishism. Such a united front would act as a forum where its diverse member organizations could share skills, experiences, and resources to mutually strengthen one another. It would also act as a practical alliance based on the same kind of programmatic unity around which the coalition for Palestine revolves, allowing us to more effectively combine our forces to fight for student-worker power on campus and beyond.
[1] Marx, K. (1867). Capital: A critique of political economy. 107. “Use-values must therefore never be looked upon as the real aim of the capitalist; neither must the profit on any single transaction. The restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is what he aims at.”
[2] Fisher, Mark. Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative?. John Hunt Publishing, 2022. 17. Illich, Ivan, and Anne Lang. "Tools for conviviality." (1973). 63. Here I use two terms, Mark Fisher’s “business ontology” (the idea that “everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business” and Ivan Illich’s concept of a “radical monopoly”, in which “one industrial production process exercises an exclusive control over the satisfaction of a pressing need and excludes non-industrial activities from competition.” I feel they are linked by the privileged nature of abstract value as described by Marx. Once value is abstracted and divorced from its qualitative dimension, it is used as the standard against which processes are compared instead of, for example, using long term ecological/social viability or human fulfillment. Businesses are thus the most optimal way to meet needs as they produce capital. This leads to the radical dependence which capitalism produces, dependence which valorizes capital all while making people and the environment weaker. This obviously ties into the metabolic rift as well.
[3] Marx, K. (1867). Capital: A critique of political economy. Volume 1, Part 1, Chapter 3. Sutter, A. J. Giacomo D'Alisa, Federico Demaria, Giorgos Kallis (Eds.), Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, Routledge, Abingdon, UK, 2015. 45. Degrowth advocates, in tandem with Marx, advocate against abstracted value and for qualitative, heterogenous value. “The desired change is qualitative, not quantitative”
[4] Jones, D.L., Cross, P., Withers, P.J.A., DeLuca, T.H., Robinson, D.A., Quilliam, R.S., Harris, I.M., Chadwick, D.R. and Edwards-Jones, G. (2013), REVIEW: Nutrient stripping: the global disparity between food security and soil nutrient stocks. J Appl Ecol, 50: 851-862. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.12089. “Amongst other factors, the spatial disconnects caused by the segregation and industrialisation of livestock systems, between rural areas (where food is produced) and urban areas (where food is consumed and human waste treated) are identified as a major constraint to sustainable nutrient recycling.” Fridolin Krausmann, Christian Lauk, Willi Haas, Dominik Wiedenhofer, From resource extraction to outflows of wastes and emissions: The socioeconomic metabolism of the global economy, 1900–2015, Global Environmental Change, Volume 52, 2018, Pages 131-140, ISSN 0959-3780, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2018.07.003. See Fig. 2-F.
[5] Speth, James Gustave. The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. Yale University Press, 2008. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1npkxd. 14.
[6] On growth and the environment: Donella H. Meadows [and others]. The Limits to Growth; a Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York :Universe Books, 1972. Hickel, Jason. Less is more: How degrowth will save the world. Random House, 2020. 109-114. Wiedmann, Thomas, Manfred Lenzen, Lorenz T. Keyßer, and Julia K. Steinberger. "Scientists’ warning on affluence." Nature communications 11, no. 1 (2020): 3107. On “decoupling”: Haberl, Helmut, Dominik Wiedenhofer, Doris Virág, Gerald Kalt, Barbara Plank, Paul Brockway, Tomer Fishman et al. "A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part II: synthesizing the insights." Environmental research letters 15, no. 6 (2020): 065003.
[7] Malm, Andreas. Fossil capital: The rise of steam power and the roots of global warming. Verso Books, 2016. 24. “What could the rotative steam engine accomplish that the hearth and pump of old could not? Most obviously, it could impel a machine: the prime fulcrum of self-sustaining growth, increasing output per capita, raising the productivity of labour in a universal speedup that has yet to see its end.”
[8] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforce-america-united-states-wages-stagnate
[9] Lenin, Vladimir Ilich. The state and revolution. Penguin UK, 1992. 44.
