Lessons from abolitionism, 1830s-1860s

The abolitionist movement was an awe-inspiring mass movement that shook the foundations of American capitalism and white supremacy, and laid the foundations for all future revolutionary struggles in the United States.

It is fascinating to trace the rise of the movement, which is done in a sweeping fashion in Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (2016). The main wave of abolitionism began in the early 1830s, riding the aftershocks of the two great slave rebellions of 1831: Nat Turner’s Rebellion in Virginia, and the Baptist War in Jamaica. In the beginning, abolitionists in the US were a fringe and ostracized group; those who pushed for the abolition of slavery, such as the followers of William Lloyd Garrison and his famous newspaper The Liberator, were routinely targeted by violent mobs lead by law enforcement officials and politicians, who attacked meetings and destroyed buildings and printing presses owned by abolitionists. Garrison himself was almost killed in least one such occasion. These ruling-class riots took place in the North, in cities like Cincinnati, where in 1836 the mayor organized a mob to attack the home of a local abolitionist, which then turned into indiscriminate attacks on black homes and churches. In the South, antislavery politics was explicitly illegal, and underground organizing was routinely smashed apart with the full force of state repression. 

However, such violence also had the effect of increasing revulsion against the anti-democratic and anti-civil liberties tendencies of the proslavery elites, and correspondingly spread sympathy for, and interest in, the cause of abolition. The militant wing of abolitionism started to work in earnest to help escaped slaves remain free, forming the Underground Railroad, which helped Frederick Douglass escape from slavery in 1838. Indeed, the Underground Railroad initiated a kind of feedback loop, where fugitive slaves would grow the ranks of abolitionism and become its most militant and dedicated cadre, increasing the capacity to help free more slaves and agitate against the power of the slaveholders. Abolitionism received a further boost in the late 1840s, when popular revolutions erupted in Europe, and radical exiles migrated to the US, bringing with them fierce antislavery sentiments, socialist politics, and combat experience.  

In the 1850s, abolitionism grew into a true mass movement; its primary social base was free black communities across the North, but as a coalition it included white urban laborers and farmers. The popularity and militancy of abolitionism during this time period is especially clear in the many cases of unrest that took place whenever authorities attempted to apprehend and extradite fugitive slaves. Multiracial crowds numbering in the thousands, would rally and attack cops and slave catchers, break into jails and courthouses, and forcibly rescue captured slaves. This was not just spontaneous popular violence, either; it was often coordinated and organized by local “Vigilance Committees”, set up by abolitionists as part of the Underground Railroad. The first major rescue was the 1851 rescue of Shadrach Minkins in Boston, and the last was the 1860 rescue of Charles Nalle in Troy, Pennsylvania (which involved none another than Harriet Tubman herself, who just happened to be in town on her way to Boston). Meanwhile, in the world of electoral politics, the Republican Party emerged in 1854 as a popular antislavery party that brought together abolitionists, Northern workers and farmers, and certain segments of Northern capitalists. Six short years later it would seize control of the presidency, precipitating the Civil War and the full emancipation of all slaves in the US.  

One important dynamic to emphasize, and which is the central thesis in Sinha’s tome, is that abolition was driven by the slaves themselves, acting in their own self-interest. This sometimes took the form of spectacular rebellions that captured the national imagination, such as Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831, and the Amistad rebellion in 1839. But it was also driven by the simple act of running away; it is estimated that something on the order of 50,000 slaves ran away each year during the antebellum period. It was this literal mass movement that underpinned the importance of the Underground Railroad and its associated networks and organizations, which both spread propaganda about the plight of the enslaved, as well as coordinated concrete assistance to fugitives in the form of food, shelter, transportation, and weapons. White and free abolitionists did not create abolitionism; they simply joined and expanded a movement that was already underway, initialized by slave resistance that had been present since slavery was brought to the US. 

There were a number of strategic debates and controversies within the abolitionist movement that parallel issues in radical politics today. Notwithstanding the explosive rise of the Republican Party in the 1850s, there were fierce debates among abolitionists about electoral politics, whether to engage in elections, and how to work with politicians whose goals overlapped those of abolitionists, but who weren’t actual abolitionists. These debates intersected with debates over “revolution vs. reform”, and whether the Constitution and the federal government was amenable to becoming an anti-slavery force, or whether disunion or insurrection was the only viable path forward.

This also, of course, raised debates about violence; many abolitionists were “non-resistors”, although most of them simultaneously defended and even celebrated the slave’s right to violently rebel. There was also the messy contradictions of coalition-building, especially when it came to electoral politics; the successful expansion of antislavery sentiment was coupled with the fact that many held antislavery views out of racism, and a desire to keep slavery, and therefore, black people, out of the new territories – which, of course, were being seized from various Native American nations. Abolitionists thus had to grapple with the problem of how to balance the costs and benefits made by such coalitional politics, and whether supporting a particular politician or campaign against slavery would be worth the costs to wider goals around anti-racism and equality. 

Another interesting and relevant dynamic is the way that slaveholder power evolved during the rise of abolitionism. Contrary to certain teleological narratives, slavery was not automatically withering away due to industrialization. On the contrary, it was on the upswing in the 1850s, with southern elites in firm control of the federal government, and working to build an empire of slavery, based on reopening the slave trade and expanding US colonial holdings into the Caribbean and Central America. New laws, such as the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, and the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court case, were expanding the power and rights of slaveholders across the country. And where law and order wasn’t enough, outright violence was used, as seen in the 1830s, and later in “Bleeding Kansas“, when proslavery gangs from Missouri invaded Kansas to attack free-state settlers and rig elections. In some respects, this aggression was a response to the growing power of abolitionism, and an effort by elites to maintain their position in the face of rising opposition by a combination of law and brute force. 

This gets into what is one of the most interesting lessons from abolitionism: the way radical politics, violence, and polarization interact with one another. Faced with violent suppression from its very origins, and dealing with a system that was fundamentally rooted in physical violence and coercion, abolitionism had to develop practices of self-defense and armed struggle from the beginning. As time went on, abolitionist use of violence became increasingly confident and sophisticated, and rooted in mass mobilization; this is one way to understand the emergence of the Underground Railroad, and the popularity of direct action against law enforcement in defense of fugitive slaves. John Brown and his fellow travelers escalated this further, first in matching the violence of proslavery forces in Kansas in the mid-1850s, and then by attempting to instigate a full-scale slave revolution in Virginia with the Raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859. 

Meanwhile, the Republican Party, despite its composition from relatively moderate forces, also helped lay the groundwork for the both the massification and the militarization of abolition. Matt Karp’s excellent essay in Catalyst, “The Mass Politics of Antislavery“, lays out a compelling overview of the Republican Party as a party marked by its mass politics and antislavery platform, which effectively utilized both popular mobilization and electoral contests to battle against the power of the southern slaveholders. Especially interesting in Karp’s narrative is the Wide-Awake movement,

which enlisted perhaps 100,000 Northern young men into something like a grassroots Republican paramilitary organization. Mostly wage-workers and farmers, Wide-Awakes from Maine to Minnesota formed themselves into companies with ranks and officers, donning soldiers’ caps and dark cloaks for midnight infantry drills. Their theatrical torchlight parades, accompanied by brass and drums, under banners celebrating “Free Labor,” “Free Land,” and “Lincoln, Liberator of Slavery,” attracted hundreds of thousands more awestruck spectators, and testified to the martial intensity of Northern popular feeling.

The Wide-Awakes are a fascinating case of how the lines between social movements, electoral politics, and military conflict can become blurred. The Wide-Awakes were initially organized by the Republican Party as a supplement to its 1860 election campaigning, but they also served as a self-defense organization to protect Republican politicians from disruption and assault from proslavery thugs. The following year, when the Civil War started in earnest, Wide-Awake locals became a crucial military force; in Missouri, the local Wide-Awake chapter mobilized and successfully defended a federal military arsenal from being captured by Confederate militias. But they also, in some respects, helped instigate the Civil War itself; the formation of such a paramilitary force, combined with events like John Brown’s raid in 1859, convinced the southern slaveholding elite that regardless of Lincoln’s intentions, there was no future in the union with such popular antislavery forces unleashed and growing by the day.

It is also worth noting how, during the Civil War, the movement of fugitive slaves and the Underground Railroad also became militarized. Many militant abolitionists enlisted with the Union Army and helped spread armed struggle into the Confederacy. They carried out spectacular campaigns like the famous Raid on Combahee Ferry – lead by Harriet Tubman and James Montgomery, a veteran of Bleeding Kansas – a lightning-strike attack which freed ~750 slaves and destroyed a number of plantations. Pretty much all of the men who were freed by Tubman and Montgomery immediately enlisted to fight the slaveholders: an example of how quasi-guerrilla attacks by abolitionists in the Union Army merged with slave resistance ratcheting up to a revolutionary pitch. In what Bruce Levine in an essay for Jacobin calls the “Second American Revolution,” tens of thousands of slaves abandoned the plantations, crossed over to the Union, picked up guns, and then turned right back around to help free their friends and families. 

By the end of the war, some 200,000 black men had served in the Union army or navy, most of them recruited in slave states. Black soldiers took part in about 450 military engagements, some 40 of which were major battles, and they provided the Union with 120 infantry regiments, 12 heavy artillery regiments, 10 batteries of light artillery, and seven cavalry regiments. They were crucial to the eventual victory.

After reading such a history, it is impossible to not view abolitionism as foundational to the revolutionary current in the US. Indeed, Sinha’s close reading of the intellectual currents within abolitionism reveals it to be a remarkable echo of contemporary radicalism; abolitionists not only fought against slavery, but also actively connected the movement to movements around women’s rights, indigenous sovereignty, anti-imperialism, and class struggle.  

One can trace the afterlives of abolitionism in the movements that came afterwards. Many abolitionists were unsurprisingly at the forefront of Radical Reconstruction and the battle to preserve black socio-economic and political power in the South against a vicious counter-revolution. When this gave way to the Gilded Age of industrialization and elite power, these veterans went on to build and influence radical and multiracial movements like the Populists and the Knights of Labor. These, in turn, were the forerunners of the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World of the 1910s and 1920s, which would then give way to the Communist Party and its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s. Communist organizing laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and would come back in a much more explicit and militant fashion with the Black Power Movement and New Communist Movement in the 1960s and 1970s. After that, there seems to be an abyss in terms of revolutionary continuity – but the ongoing uprisings in 2020 against police violence and for Black Lives has, of course, the unmistakable imprint of abolitionism and this 150-year current of popular American radicalism. 

4 reasons to prioritize the study of the Bolivarian Revolution

The Russian Revolution has a disproportionately prominent position in the imaginations of modern revolutionaries in the West. Regardless of how smart and insightful Lenin was, and the trailblazing  efforts of the Bolsheviks, the hard truth is that the Russian Empire in the early 1900s was a totally different society than the ones we are dealing with today. Instead of focusing so much on the Russian Revolution, would-be revolutionaries should put much more energy into studying the Bolivarian Revolution, which is still playing out in Venezuela today, and which will have continent-wide ramifications. Now of course, the Bolivarian Revolution can be a controversial topic, and there are a lot of disagreements within the radical left about whether it is “truly socialist” or whatever; but regardless of these debates, I think we can all agree on the basic fact that the last couple of decades have seen some truly remarkable experiments in revolutionary praxis happen in Venezuela.

The first and most obvious reason to study the Bolivarian Revolution is that it is actually contemporary, starting in the 1990s and continuing today, as opposed to taking place 100 years ago during a totally different historical context. It started at the dawn of the information age, during an era of relative peace and a uni-polar US-controlled world order, and rebelled against neoliberal capitalism. These factors still mostly hold today, although the geopolitical context is certainly changing quite a lot, with the rise of China and Russia as economic and military rivals to the US, respectively. Compare this to the situation in the early 1900s. Basic technologies we take for granted today, like electricity and oil-based transportation, were just barely getting off the ground; the world was getting ravaged by vicious wars between evenly-matched imperial powers, in the worst violence that humanity has ever seen; and capitalism, in its modernist-developmental phase, was non-existent or peripheral to many regions that were still largely feudal in nature — such as Tsarist Russia.

Second, the Bolivarian Revolution took place in a highly urbanized country, which is again a stark contrast to Russia in 1917 (~20% urban), or really any country that saw a revolutionary socialist movement take power in the 20th century, like China, Vietnam, or Angola (Cuba is a possible exception, since in 1960 it was almost 60% urban). This is a huge factor for revolutionary politics, since the socio-economic and political dynamics of cities are extremely different than that of the rural countryside. Cities tend to be “fully capitalist”, with people totally subsumed by markets and wage-labor. In rural areas, markets have a presence but tend to exist alongside other social relations. The economic basis is also wildly different, with cities being orientated around industrial and service sectors, while rural areas revolve around energy and resources (agriculture, mining, etc), and corresponding differences in class and social composition. Given that the West is heavily urbanized, we should look closely at how radical politics has taken such deep roots within Venezuela.

Third, the Bolivarian Revolution was largely a peaceful process that combined electoral politics with autonomous social movements. This is quite novel in the history of revolutionary socialism; the closest parallel to this was the Allende government in Chile in the 1970s, which only lasted three years before being overthrown by a military coup. Chavez’s democratic road to power is crucial to study, given how hegemonic and popular democratic institutions generally are in the US, other developed countries, and wide swathes of the Global South. Despite the structural limitations of bourgeoisie democracy, its hegemony means that revolutionaries have to figure out some way to engage with it — albeit in a very different way than Western electoral parties, socialist or otherwise, have done so thus far. Hence the need to learn from the electoral experiences of Venezuelan socialists. The key lesson is probably in the relationship between electoral politicking and non or extra-electoral organizing, which has taken place across a dizzying number of cooperatives, clinics, affinity groups, neighborhood associations, etc., and how they feed into each other — a process that is much more complicated and interesting than current debates on the matter in the US and the West have acknowledged thus far.

Fourth, the Bolivarian Revolution is a revolution based on oil. The Chavez administration has used Venezuela’s oil industry as the material base for organizing and mobilizing the Venezuelan masses, turning its huge profits into funding for the aforementioned network of grassroots cooperatives and associations. This worked as long as oil prices were high (which was an explicit policy goal of Chavez), but their collapse has been the key factor in the recent crisis and potential end of the Bolivarian Revolution. This whole experience is an important lesson in the relationship between political economy and revolutionary strategy, and strategic questions about revolution and global processes — namely, imperialism and climate change. Venezuela’s oily socialism was dependent on exports to the US, which is obviously untenable for any serious revolutionary project in the long-term. And dependence on oil is itself untenable given the ongoing climate crisis. The (failed) attempts of the Bolivarian Revolution to break from US imperialism and fossil fuels must be studied; whether we can figure out how to actually overcome our material entanglement with US imperialism and fossil fuels will make or break all future revolutionary struggles.

Notes on Endnotes on class decomposition and technical labor

As summarized in my last post, the main essay series of Endnotes Issue 4, “A History of Separation”, is all about dismantling orthodox Marxist mythology around the importance of the industrial worker as the main protagonist of overthrowing capitalism and establishing socialism.

A key part of this argument, which I didn’t touch on in the summary, is relationship between technology, class, knowledge, and political identity.  Back in the earlier stages of industrial production and industrial labor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when revolutionary workers’ movements were blossoming, it was very easy for a worker to see themselves as part of a class that was the actual force that built and maintained society.  Workers sweated and toiled alongside each other in massive centralized plants, stitching clothes, building cars, refining oil, chopping trees, etc.  Workers were key to the production process, and they understood the process just as well as, if not better than, the capitalists who pocketed the profits.

However, as development and industrialization proceeded (under both capitalist and Marxist-Leninist regimes), worker knowledge of the means of production diminished.  The industrial use of technology fragmented the labor process, separated the supply chain across entire regions and countries, and made work repetitive and dull, and in general, destroyed the old basis for a common, positive identity around being an industrial worker.  From “The Strange Victory of the Workers’ Movement”:

In spite of the development of the productive forces, labour, it was insisted, remained the source of all wealth, its latent power and knowledge reflected precisely in that development. That turned out not to be true: knowledge of the production process was no longer located in the place of the collective worker, but rather (if anywhere), in the place of the collective technician. That was a key point because — while it upended the foundation-stone of the workers’ movement — it also finally confirmed Marx’s perspective in the “fragment on machines” (reproduced more soberly in Capital).

…It was increasingly the case that human labour was no longer the main productive force; science — often applied to the worst ends of industrial “development”— took labour’s place. That profoundly affected workers’ self-understanding, their experience of what they did and their place in the world: workers could no longer see themselves as building the world in the name of modernity or a better, more rational way of living. On the contrary, that world was already built, and it was entirely out of their hands. Modernity presented itself as this imposing thing, which workers’ confronted, not as subject, but rather, as an object to be regulated and controlled.

…Society is no longer just the means of production, a set of factories that can be taken over and self-managed by the workers who run them…The bases of social power are now much more dispersed. They are located not just in the repressive apparatuses of the police, the jails and the armed forces and the so-called “ideological” apparatuses of schools, churches, and television. They include also power stations, water-treatment plants, gas stations, hospitals, sanitation, airports, ports, and so on. Just like the factories themselves, all of this infrastructure relies on a legion of engineers and technicians, who keep the whole things running from minute to minute. These technicians possess no collective workers’ identity, nor were they ever included in the programmes of the workers’ movements.

The comments on the rise of science, and the importance of technical labor, stuck out since of course it connects with what I’ve been musing about regarding the current politicization and radicalization of workers in the tech industry in the US.

To me, what’s key here is the fact that the workers’ movement did not adapt or evolve in step with the evolution of class as it was restructured by capitalism, to acknowledge the growing importance of scientific and engineering labor in the increasingly complicated complex of production, distribution, and circulation.  Some groups did this, but had to split from the old vanguard in order to do so.  Two examples that I’ve taken a closer look at: 1) the Students for a Democratic Society’s “Port Authority” statement looking at the new class composition of the US, that included skilled technical workers, and 2) debates among French Marxists in various parties over the nature of the new classes in light of the post-1968 period.

The latter is particularly interesting in the context of the comments by Endnotes because it precisely shows how class recomposition provoked crisis and splits in Marxism and the workers’ movement.  The French Communist Party (PCF) stuck with the industrial workers as their social base, but bizarrely tried to build a reformist coalition with the new middle classes who they saw as non-revolutionary and more conservative.  This was presumably a reaction to the fact that parts of this middle class, particularly the skilled technicians, played a key role in the upheavals of 1968, even as the PCF was playing a backseat counter-revolutionary role (which begs the question why they continued to see these classes as less radical than themselves).  Meanwhile, theorists like Serge Mallet of the  an Alain Touraine adapted the old logic of the workers’ movement to uphold the skilled technical workforce as the new vanguard of technologically advanced and automated capitalism, as the only fraction of the working class which could grasp the complexity of post-industrial society.

However, at this point in time, it certainly doesn’t seem like any identity around a “collective technician” has emerged, let alone one that is revolutionary and anti-capitalist (yet!).  Nonetheless, its very worthwhile to go back and look at these older debates around the class nature of technicians and engineers and scientists, to help us in the present figure out how to go about composing a revolutionary proletarian composition that is dynamic and cohesive across an increasingly fractured landscape.

Notes on the revolutionary potential in housing campaigns

There are some real swell comrades in the area who are kicking off some serious work around housing, so its a good time for me to dive back into some of my earlier musings on revolutionary communism and housing struggles.  The following is a summary of the argument I was trying to make across three essays I wrote several years ago: Biopolitics, Dual Power, and the Revolutionary Characteristics of “Serve the People” Programs, The Political Economy of Revolutionary Struggle: Lessons From the Black Panthers, and Serve the People, Seize the Land: Prospects for Revolutionary Struggle Around Affordable Housing.

Revolutionary movements are all based on particular local conditions and histories, but they do have important similarities that can be universalized and applied generally.

• Revolutionary movements deliver immediate and concrete benefits to people.  They are not based in abstract demands for a better world, or promises of societal improvements at some point in the future—they improve things now.  Hence why workplace action has often been at the center of Marxist praxis—it is an area where people can force immediate changes, and in the process, develop into revolutionary subjects.  The creation of concrete benefits makes it clear to people that participating in the revolutionary struggle will improve their lives, even if they may disagree ideologically, or don’t understand the more complex theoretical underpinnings of communism.  The Black Panther Party applied this practice in the US outside the traditional site of class struggle (the workplace), in the neighborhoods, with their service and protection programs.
• Revolutionary movements develop autonomous institutions of the working class, outside of state and capital. This is a requirement for the revolutionary creation of material benefits to the masses; what makes these benefits revolutionary is that they are created and distributed by and for the masses.  This requires proper coordination, planning, and discipline, as well as the ability to scale up and out, and to continually reproduce itself—hence the term “institutions”.  They are also independent from capital and its fetters, outside the control of the state, wealthy donors, non-profit foundations, and so on.  Thus the establishment of popular institutions of the class, which govern and coordinate the creation and distribution of tangible goods and services, develops proletarian “dual power”.  The Black Panther Party developed such institutions to organize their diverse spectrum of survival programs such as breakfasts, clothing drives, etc., although they failed to ensure that these efforts were properly independent from state and capital.
• The economic foundations of the revolutionary movement are key to its survival, and is heavily related to the way dual power institutions are structured. The Black Panther Party, while at its core was made up of dedicated volunteer cadres, also became dependent on donations from petite-bourgeoisie classes like local business owners and white professionals.  This worked while there was a material basis for an alliance (local business owners were locked in the ghetto due to segregation and thus subject to Panther governance; the children of white professionals faced the draft), but once the foundation of this alliance crumbled (desegregation, end of the war), the Panthers were split between a social-democratic tendency that chased after donations from an increasingly conservative base (thus steadily absorbed by liberal institutions) and an insurrectionary tendency attempting to be true to its revolutionary principles without any material base at all (thus easily crushed militarily).  For modern revolutionaries it is clear that we must take seriously the question of how we sustain and reproduce ourselves and our organizations financially.
• Revolutionary movements tap into feedback loops. The creation of immediate concrete benefits isn’t just a way to attract new recruits and impress observers, it is to help break the biopolitical control of capital over our lives and free up time and energy to further engage in revolutionary organizing — thus allowing for even more benefits to be created, and so on, in a positive feedback loop.  Militant unionism increases wages and decreases workplace stress and working hours, thus increasing the amount of money, time, and energy available to organize, which should lead to even more wage increases and stress/workday reductions.  The Black Panther Party’s armed interventions against police brutality made the streets safer for people to walk around and organize, and also kept money in people’s pockets, making more available to help fund more survival programs.
• Land struggles in particular have a lot of potential to generate revolutionary feedback loops. It is precisely for this reason why pretty much all modern revolutions have had at least some basis in land struggles, and why some of the most interesting movements today are based in land struggles (EZLN in Mexico, MST in Brazil, Maoist guerrillas in Asia).  The monopolization of land in agricultural societies presents a very obviously zero-sum game for the masses of landless peasants.  When even a small group of revolutionaries begin to upend this monopolization and start to seize control of and distribute land, it is obvious to all landless people that it would be most excellent if this revolutionary movement was to expand.  The more land gets expropriated and redistributed, the more stable and prosperous and popular the revolutionaries are, and the weaker the old landed class is, and the more land that can be expropriated and redistributed.  (Obviously things are more complicated than this, i.e. unresolved ethno-linguistic conflicts between landless people, less black-and-white statistics around land ownership and inequality, but in general the trend seems to emerges).
• The situation of housing in the US today has many parallels to unequal feudal/agricultural societies. After 2008 the rates of property ownership for different income/class groups was completely upended in favor of the bourgeoisie and their institutions.  The number and proportion of tenants has skyrocketed, as has the amount and proportion of workers’ income going into the pockets of the landlords.  Pushing back against this trend and organizing to put money into people’s pockets is a simple, common-sense idea with broad popularity, but at the same time is a radical attack on capitalist property rights, even if it does not immediately turn into a campaign of expropriating and collectivizing housing (it won’t!).  Organizing around simple and straightforward demands (i.e. repairs/maintenance, freezes on rent increases) would be popular, and also pave the way for increasingly revolutionary actions, like rent strikes and outright expropriation.  But key to all this, as comrades on the ground in housing struggles have emphasized, is overcoming the incredibly high level of risk present in acting against your landlord — and by extension, the state’s security apparatus.  This is not just a question of tactics, but a question of overall revolutionary strategy, and one that should be the focus of investigation and experimentation for all of us interested in exploring the revolutionary potential in urban land struggles.

What should the radical left do about Syria?

First, we need to recognize that this is a bad question.  We need to back up a bit, and recognize that the radical left (specifically, in the US) is in no position to do anything about Syria.  We’re weak, divided, confused, and largely isolated from the American masses.  We have depressingly little influence on domestic policy, let alone on how US imperialism functions abroad.  Most of our debates are academic and abstract.  Our protests — especially our anti-war protests — are reactive, and utterly disconnected to any kind of larger, coherent strategy around fighting imperialism and building a revolutionary movement.

With this in mind, the next step is to consider what would constitute an effective program around Syria.

The core plank of an effective program would be establishing and deepening concrete ties with people in Syria.  I’m not talking about re-Tweeting activists in Aleppo or helping “raise awareness” through interviews or whatever — I’m talking about actual coordination, planning, and resource transfer with organizations on the ground in and around Syria.  From this perspective, the most effective programs thus far have been 1) solidarity efforts with Rojava, such as fundraising for supplies and volunteering to fight, and 2) solidarity efforts with refugees, which have been particularly impressive in southern European countries like Greece.

“Seize the Land, Serve the People”

I’ve finished an essay I’ve been working on intermittently for the past year or so, titled Seize the Land, Serve the People: Prospects for Revolutionary Struggle Around Affordable Housing.  Its intended as the third essay in a series on revolutionary communist strategy, the first of which is Biopolitics, Dual Power, and the Revolutionary Characteristics of “Serve the People” Programs, and second of which is The Political Economy of Revolutionary Struggle: Lessons from the Black Panthers .  The general thrust of this series is to think about revolutionary movements from a properly Marxist perspective that analyzes how movements intervene at the material level of society–that is, how they directly affect political economy and class power.  This is opposed to standard liberal theories of change, that focus at the level of discourse and debate (i.e. “raising awareness”).

Seize the Land, Serve the People looks specifically at the issue of affordable housing in the United States, and the parallels between housing inequality in urban areas and land inequality in rural agrarian areas of the Global South, and the revolutionary dynamics that can emerge from directly challenging and undermining landlord property rights.

Communist tech start-ups in Tamil Nadu, circa 2004

On September 8, 2006, security forces in Andhra Pradesh captured a massive arms cache of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), which lead to the unveiling of a guerrilla manufacturing network.

From Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country (2008):

Over the next two months, the Andhra and Tamil Nadu police cooperated to crack the modus and the network, tracing it back from the initial find in Andhra to Ambattur, a busy industrial hub in Chennai.  Investigators from Q Branch of the TN police, tasked with anti-Naxal work, recruited civilians, gave them parts of rocket launchers and shells and made them do the rounds of Ambattur, showing them to several small and medium metalworking units and asking if they could fashion similar parts.  Finally, a manufacturer eyed a part and said a person named Raghu had wanted such a design replicated.  Following this break, the police traced seven units: Everest Engineering Company, Universal Cuts, Bharath Fine Engineering, Jai Tech Engineering Company, Shanthi Engineering Company, Arun Engineering Company and Dhanalakshmi Foundry.

In November, Raghu–or Thota Kumaraswany, also called “Tech Madhu” in Maoist circles–who ran Bharath Fine Engineering…surrendered to the Andhra police.  On 4 November he appeared before media in a hurried police-managed meeting and talked about how he had trained cadre in the use of rocket launchers in the Nallamala forests, how the party had specifically given him the responsibility of developing a manufacturing network in 2004…(252-3)

This example should raise questions about the position of engineering and technology in the general dynamics of revolutionary class struggle.  Of course, this example is a bit extreme, as Maoist guerrilla warfare remains extremely controversial even in radical leftist circles; but it still points to a general need for radicals and revolutionaries to think about what popular control of manufacturing, technology, and engineering looks like.

Zizek on claiming 20th-century socialism as “one’s own”

I’m in the middle of an essay by Slavoj Zizek titled “Mao Zedong: The Marxist Lord of Misrule”, about the break in Marxist praxis betwen Lenin and Mao.  Its quite interesting and very readable (especially if you read it in Zizek’s voice, complete with the occasional stutter and spittle).  The first paragraph, I thought, does a great job of framing the need for Marxists to take seriously the legacies of the 20th century socialisms, rather than brushing them aside as “Stalinist” or whatever and distancing one’s own political project from them.

One of the most devious traps which lurk for Marxist theorists is the search for the moment of the Fall, when things took the wrong turn in the history of Marxism: was it already the late Engels with his more positivist-evolutionary understanding of historical materialism? Was it the revisionism AND the orthodoxy of the Second International? Was it Lenin? Or was it Marx himself in his late work, after he abandoned his youthful humanism (as some “humanist Marxists” claimed decades ago)? This entire topic has to be rejected: there is no opposition here, the Fall is to be inscribed into the very origins. (To put it even more pointedly, such a search for the intruder who infected the original model and set in motion its degeneration cannot but reproduce the logic of anti-Semitism.) What this means is that, even if – or, rather, especially if – one submits the Marxist past to a ruthless critique, one has first to acknowledge it as “one’s own”, taking full responsibility for it, not to comfortably get rid of the “bad” turn of the things by way of attributing it to a foreign intruder (the “bad” Engels who was too stupid to understand Marx’s dialectics, the “bad” Lenin who didn’t get the core of Marx’s theory, the “bad” Stalin who spoils the noble plans of the “good” Lenin, etc.).

Post-confederate elites, labor struggles, colonialism

I’ve been looking at stuff regarding the Civil War, the Confederacy, and Reconstruction the last couple of days.  It’s striking to realize just how much the Confederate elites–the White, landed slavers who controlled political and economic life across the South–managed to preserve their power even after they lost a disastrous, bloody war.

Gary Brecher the War Nerd talks about this in a quite amusing and provocative manner; check out this half-hour podcast where he talks about the collapse of the Confederacy, and the insurgency that rolled back Reconstruction efforts.  He has two great articles on the matter, as well: “Why Sherman was right to burn Atlanta“, and “The Confederates who should’ve been hanged.”  The first article talks about the insanity of the Confederate elites in their pursuit of war, and the second article talks about what it would have taken to prevent post-Civil War insurgent groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Red Shirts (who Brecher argues were probably the first fascist group to form in the United States) from violently rolling back the rights and freedoms that Black people had won.

It’s really quite sad to reflect on the fact that ultimately, the Confederates won, and maintained systems of slavery via the sharecropping system and Jim Crow.  Federal/Union elites were simply too weak and too entrenched in White supremacist ideology themselves to want to really dismantle racial hierarchies, and expropriate the Confederate elite and redistribute their property to former slaves.  There were some vibrant movements on the ground that fought for these ends, however; Jacobin has a great article on the Knights of Labor and their socialist, anti-racist organizing efforts that peaked in the 1870s, written by the author of From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (2014).  I imagine this book would be well-suited to be read side-by-side with Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (2015), considering that these two books cover two adjacent eras of intersecting movements of class struggle and Black liberation.

While reading some of these articles on the continuation of Confederate rule, another thought struck me: was there a relationship between the expansion of US imperialism (both into the western regions, as well as into Latin America and the Spanish colonies) and the class interests of the Confederate/Southern agrarian-based elites?  This seems quite likely, especially considering the fact that the corporate expansions that underpinned imperial expansion were constructed to uphold segregation and racial hierarchies.  And while the era of imperialism started in the late 1800s, even companies and expansions that came later–like the creation of the Arab-American Oil Company (ARAMCO)–were precisely and consciously constructed to echo the hierarchies and power dynamics of the old South.  Indeed, the book America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (2006) does a marvelous job of tying the nature of oil companies in the Third World with to the nature of frontier mines in the West, in terms of both racial hierarchies and the ties between foreign investment capital and domestic class elites.

And with resurgent labor struggles in the mainland US around that time, there is little doubt that planter elites were looking for investments that could be easier defended from militant workers.

Monday Interesting Links

• Overview and reflections of revolutionary leftist organizing in Jackson, Mississippi, from Threshold Magazine

• Vox profile/reporting on Bhaskar Sunkara and Jacobin Magazine

• Summary of a study analyzing inequality and the evolution of an economy via fluid dynamics

• Interview on a new book on the role of workers and unions in the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings of 2011

• Edward Snowden says he’s not a communist, but wants to “seize the means of communication”