Many writers have exposed the role architecture plays in controlling public space. Mike Davis discusses how cities have installed public benches designed to discourage sleeping and fenced in public parks. Israeli architect Eyal Weizman has studied the nature of control implicit in Israel’s design of its cities, settlements and highways. Fictionally, China Mieville’s The City and the City is a riveting tale of a future place strikingly reminiscent of today’s occupied Palestine. Most recently, economist and critic David Harvey has contributed a refreshingly new look at the nature of the modern city and, more importantly, why they need to be wrested back from the neoliberal corporate megalith currently trying to buy the world.

Harvey, who has lived in Baltimore, Maryland for the past several decades, places the modern city’s economic role directly in the center of capital’s creation and consumption of surplus. He discusses the claim that cites are the product of the proletarianization of the rural peasantry, pointing to industrial revolutions of the past and the current movement of populations in nations such as China and India from the countryside to existing urban areas and new economic zones created by international capitalism. Furthermore, his text, titled Rebel Cities, provides a look at the growth of so-called shantytowns on the outskirts of some of the world’s largest population centers. These shantytowns are often the focus of raids by military and police forces intent on making it easier for bulldozers behind them to destroy the structures found there. In certain instances, however, the authorities have conceded to the citizens of these shantytowns and given them rights to their homes.

It is from these shantytowns that we can gain inspiration. The people who live in such areas are considered surplus in the world of monopoly capitalism. They have no rights as far as the stock exchanges and bourses of the world are concerned. Yet, because they refuse to accede to this characterization, they will struggle to maintain their shelter, their communities and their human dignity. Like their historical predecessors in the Paris Commune of 1871, this population is determined to make the city a popular and democratic human organism. They are joined by those around the world who in the past couple of years have occupied city squares and parks and demanded a reconceptualization of the city, more democratic control of the urban space, and a reconsideration of who constitutes the working class and, subsequently, who will make the anti-capitalist revolution.

Harvey insists that the only genuine anticapitalist struggle is one with the goal of destroying the existing class relationship. Such a struggle cannot be waged by separating workplace issues from those of the community. Pointing to the classic film The Salt Of the Earth as an example of how the latter scenario might occur, Harvey suggests that the union must view the world of working people as an organic whole. Utility access and costs are workplace issues; childcare and education are too. Affordable housing and food costs are more than secondary concerns. Their role as a means for the capitalist system to take back wages describes their existence as a means for that system to maintain its control on working people. Debt peonage, whether incurred via education and vehicle loans in the advanced capitalist world or incurred via a micro-loan program in the developing nations, is still debt peonage. The increasing cost of post-secondary education throughout the world and the mortgage crisis are both tools of the neoliberal regime to continue the upward motion of capital.

This is a radical book. Its discussion ranges from the workings of the monopoly rent system and the nature of neoliberal capitalism to a call to take back the city. History is combined with economics and a call for serious struggle. With the Paris Commune as his inspiration, David Harvey discusses the positive and negative aspects of the Occupy movement, the squatters’ movements and allied struggles. He presents their historical precedents and he warns against essentially conservative attempts to manipulate such movements into supporting the existing economic reality. He further opines that cooptation by parliamentary elements are proof of these movements success, not their failure. Fundamental to all of this is Harvey’s radical definition of the city as the wellspring of capitalist oppression and also the foundation of resistance to that oppression.

A world without workers is impossible. A world without capitalists is necessary.

– World Federation of Labor

The unemployment rate in the USA is down to just over 8%. This is evidence that we are in a recovery from a recession. But that rate is actually higher than it was when this particular recession began.

The patient’s temperature has gone up, a sure sign that the patient is getting better. Huh?

Living under the rules of a profit and loss religion in a market church controlled by private clergy, almost anything negative can be made to sound positive, especially to those who have not yet felt the full impact of a disintegrating political economy. But those who are experiencing its worst aspects find no relief in academic jargon about structural or cyclical problems, stagnation, supply/demand curves, unemployment blips and market equilibrium. None of this helps them find jobs or borrow enough money to pay their rent, mortgage, food bills, or education loans. As those people are not only in the USA but in the rest of the world, the global nature of the problem makes it more clear that a solution is far beyond a particular nation state and concerns all of humanity.

An old admonition to act local but think global has come to mean far more than was originally intended. Then it had almost nothing to do with economics but now, if we don’t think and act economically we may assure failure for the planet and all its inhabitants. That’s us, whatever market terminology may be used to hide that fact behind national, racial, religious or other divisive identity group labels that help keep power in minority hands. And that minority is doing better than ever, in the short run, amassing more power and money than any past godlike royalty in what were supposed to have been more primitive societies. How much has really changed since ancient times when peasants and slaves were ground underfoot so that royal families and their wealthy sponsors could live lives of luxury? Not much, in essence, though the material standard of living for workers became what was called middle class and assured far more material comfort than previous generations of common people enjoyed. That lasted until the present breakdown began decreasing the income of more people at a faster rate so that the wealth of less people could increase at a greater rate.

What kind of system is this? This kind:

If people are murdered in wars, that is good for the weapons business. If illness and disease run rampant that is good for the medical business. If natural disaster ravages communities and kills people, that is good for the construction industry and the burial business. Such are the realities of the cold blooded economics by which the people of the world have been organized for hundreds of years. A profit for one always means a loss for many. The idea of keeping people healthy, safe, secure and alive is reduced to the private force of doing so only if they are able to create profits for those selling health, safety, security and life itself to the highest bidder in the market. If we can’t afford to buy those things and charity does not exist for us, we can just drop dead.

Millions of us do, and not only in bloody wars which profit the war makers. Many of us starve for lack of food while others have to go on diets because they eat so much. Many of us sleep in doorways, on the street or under bridges, while dogs and cats have their own rooms in comfortable homes. None of this happens because of individuals who are thoughtless or cold hearted or murderous, although such do exist. But in a system which dictates that profit must be created in a market sale, the owner of a private firm that makes band aids can be the nicest person on earth but still only profit and prosper if lots of people are bleeding. The social concept of doing all that is possible to avoid bleeding would be terrible for his private business. That is the case for every single human endeavor in the capital dominated religious belief system of the market, an anti-human, anti-social core of political economics that is threatening the future of all people all over the world.

Criticism and rebellion to such injustice is the history of humanity but today it is growing far beyond the national minorities previously involved in such struggle. People organized to obey authority, work for others to survive, live in physical poverty or shop in moral poverty and vote for employees of wealthy rulers when allowed to and call it democracy, have remained unorganizable for the kind of change now necessary for the survival of humanity. But as the critical conditions grow worse, new methods of communication among the people are helping bring more rebellious response to this old order of great wealth for the few at cost of crippling poverty and debt for the many.

Under the threat of potential social collapse, environmental destruction and radical revolution, those who reap the greatest profits are exploiting, ravaging and murdering at insane rates in mindless desperation to maintain their power and wealth. That cannot continue and is no longer tolerable to billions of human beings nor the planet’s natural support system.

All over the world of capitalist anti-social democracy, the collapsing structure has brought about calls for austerity from the rulers and their paid minions in government. This means further losses absorbed by the majority so that even greater profits can accrue to ruling minorities. Establishment philosophers of mass culture operating through corporate media still have enormous impact as they explain why the present reality is all that exists and must be experienced without substantial question. But when increasingly painful economic conditions for more people combine with increasingly dangerous conditions for much of the natural environment, the complex of events called material reality take on a new meaning well understood by growing numbers who face that reality in all its harshness and are less influenced by misinformation, propaganda and economic fairy tales.

Thus, many world citizens, even while their governing powers continue representing capital, wars and injustice, are rejecting the ugly burdens forced on them by their rich overlords. Elections in some places are small indications of change but far more indicative than the voting process which is still under the control of capital, are the rising multitudes all over the world all aiming for the same goal: a new world based on democratic power exercised by people taking action as members of the one and only human race and not simply as parties, religions, sects, cults or other labeled divisions which serve to keep minorities in control of majority created wealth.

Those tiny minorities are the capitalists who somehow own the fantastic wealth produced by enormous majorities of previously divided people. The divisions still exist and the power still is in the hands of those minorities whose days may be numbered, but so are those of humanity as well if action is not taken to create the world of democratic equality which has been the stuff of wishes and dreams but must become reality. Or else.

Doomsayers and doubters are in abundance and are to be expected, even when they are not on the payroll of the ruling minority. It’s easy to look at the state of the world and surrender to present reality. But that is only possible for those not yet suffering the ever increasing misfortune of dependence on a political economics of profit for a few through loss, pain and misery for most. It is not just time for social change activists but for all citizens of the world’s 99% to heed the words quoted at the beginning. An end to the reign of minority capitalism is necessary to save the earth and all its people so that we can begin a human society offering hope for all and not just some.

Overview (5 w’s): I worked in their Lehigh Valley Fulfillment Center for a year altogether and I served as Morning Call reporter Spencer Soper’s inside informant before, during, and after the investigation ran. Check this out if you haven’t already. I’m proud to have been a part of this story, perhaps the first anti-Amazon piece that really stuck.

Paul K. Haeder: Why’d you become a source for a news expose on this Amazon policy of sweatshop labor?

Nichole Gracely: I wanted to see Amazon exposed and I lacked the time and resources to write my own story. Peak 2010 was a nightmare and I accumulated demerit points due to snow-related absences and was terminated in February 2011.

Here I reference a story — “Erroneous emails lead some applicants to believe they had jobs when they didn’t.

July 23, 2011 by Spencer Soper, The Morning Call

“If you apply for a job at Amazon.com’s Lehigh Valley shipping hub, be careful. Especially if you’re about to quit a different job to work there.”

I contacted Soper immediately after I read the above article and urged him to investigate further. He later contacted me as a source and I requested anonymity because I planned to return to Amazon in August as an ISS temp for Peak 2011. I trusted him immediately because of the questions he asked when we first spoke.

I was inside Amazon’s warehouse to witness management’s damage control measures in the wake of the bombshell expose. “Inside Amazon’s Warehouse” ran on Sep 18, 2011 and I was hired directly by Amazon in October.

The following is my anonymous contribution to the story:

One temporary warehouse worker who started last year said a major selling point was that the assignment could lead to a permanent job with Amazon. Workers had meetings with their ISS managers at the start of each shift. During those meetings, Amazon managers would come and deliver a pep talk, encouraging the temporary workers who wore white badges to work hard if they wanted to get permanent positions and wear a blue badge, she said.

“They said, ‘We don’t care if you’ve been here for two months or for two weeks. If you work hard, we’ll notice and you’ll get converted to a blue badge,’ ” she said.

The number of permanent positions available was always vague, and it was difficult to get a straight answer about hiring, she said. Managers would say Amazon would be hiring “a significant number” of ISS employees to permanent positions.

“They said it on a semi-daily basis,” she said. “They really dangled it and made it seem like this wonderful possibility if we just worked harder … especially when there were a bunch of new hires hungry for a new job.”

She worked in the warehouse for six months and didn’t see any of her temporary colleagues converted.
ISS promoted her to ambassador, a position that trains new workers. Still, she was terminated shortly after the holiday rush ended for missing work during snowstorms, she said.

“It became clear that they did not want to hire people. They wanted to let people go,” she said. “They said they wanted the best people for ambassadors. I was an ambassador and I was not hired.”

I was pleased with how he handled my contribution, thankful to him and the editors at the Morning Call for the story, and amazed that it received national attention. Amazon has been protested for myriad reasons and the Morning Call ran the first article that crashed corporate’s party. Amazon’s arrogance was staggering and I still can’t believe that they did not envision any potential repercussions for the way they had abused thousands of workers. Amazon clearly enjoys immunity on so many levels so the arrogance fits neatly into a much larger, violent class structure.

The heat and cold received too much emphasis, and it was easy for callous detractors to mention kitchens and other hot workplaces while the more egregious offenses, the systemic issues, were obscured. I know that other workers have it worse, and even I’ve had jobs that were worse. There is something deeply unsettling about Amazon, and I was most profoundly distressed on a psychological and spiritual level while I worked there. Misanthropy and dehumanization; bitter class struggle; intelligence routinely insulted; mocked; punished for our powerlessness. The way Amazon handled the heat, fire pulls, and arson certainly demonstrates its ability to disregard workers’ humanity, and very poor decisions were made. There is so much more to the story! I don’t believe that greater compensation alone would improve Amazon’s workplace, though it would definitely be a start because most workers’ entire paychecks are spent before payday.

PKH: What does Amazon’s policies in the warehouse say about Amazon on a larger frame?

NG: Amazon is misanthropic to the core. Immature, destructive, sociopathic. Everything is for the shoppers and shareholders. Anyone with money is lavished in excess, workers are squeezed and punished for their powerlessness. Amazon is launching the People’s Production Company? Here we have another instance of Amazon’s Orwellian abuse of language –Amazon is not for the People in any way. They should focus on what they do best. Why do they try to be everything to everyone? What is this game Amazon (Bezos)? Amazon could be a life-giving river. Now, everything they do is toxic –venture capitalists and other nefarious influences decide for Amazon.

PKH: How can we get people to fight back and to blow the lid on this sort of corporate abuse when most Americans—150 million—are living at or near poverty?

NG: I honestly don’t know, and that is why I must connect with anyone who will fight against injustice. I don’t have much fear these days. Acquiescence is not an option. We must improve our social bonds. I’m most hopeful because I don’t see youth falling into the same race-baiting traps as their forbears. Racism is manufactured by the elite, at least that is my view. The kids are alright! We must improve literacy, however. Literacy is imperative and I am most troubled by America’s lack of literacy. We’re also terribly fragmented and our relations are less than harmonious and that is a problem. Families, communities, and schools are weak and must be strengthened.

PKH: What are your goals for the next few years, personally and as far as activism goes?

NG: Work with workers for improved conditions. Learn Spanish. Live and write. People tell me stories, and you would not believe what I hear. I’d like to write a series similar to Studs Terkels’ Hard Times because I hear more and more that must be documented. Keep an eye on AFRICOM and Academi. Strengthen bonds. Find my people. No more isolation. No more abuse. Community gardening. I believe that every connection forged against all odds is a potential revolution.

PKH: Is there a “typical worker” at these warehouses, or some common demographic or character list you can pinpoint? If so, what is that?

NG: Amazon’s warehouse is the most diverse work setting I have ever experience, and that is what I liked about it most. Anyone working there as a temp, or even an Amazon associate to a lesser extent, is disenfranchised and powerless – that’s what we all had in common.

PKH: What’s it like back east, in Penn., for youth, for people of color, women, the labor movement?

NG: All are threatened. Pennsylvania Governor Corbett is most pro-biz and his budget cuts are savage. I think that his support may have something to do with Amazon’s arrogance. Look into fracking in Pennsylvania for further proof that our state is being whored out to the big interests.

Story – “Amazon.com Sends Corbett a ‘Thank You’ for PA Budget”

“Supporting the growth of Pennsylvania’s economy and specifically the creation of secure jobs for our residents is a high priority,” said Kelli Roberts, a spokeswoman for Governor Tom Corbett. “This begins with the recent passage of a responsible state budget that does not raise taxes and the passage of tort reform. Both give business the stability they need to stay, relocate and grow in the commonwealth.”

PKH: Any comments about the Amazon pieces in the Morning Call and Mother Jones or Seattle Times that you’d like to illuminate?

NG: They are remarkably accurate.

PKH: What sort of transformation, if any, has this entire news report(s) thing done to you?

NG: I followed the discussion boards closely and it was heartening to read that a significant number of people were truly outraged by what they read, and that they planned to boycott. The return to investigative journalism is exciting and I hope that the success of these stories will compel smaller, community-oriented publications to investigate and report corporate and workplace abuse. I was also amazed by how quickly the Morning Call story spread and the attention it received. Soper could have written the same article ten, twenty years ago and it may not have been read outside the Lehigh Valley. Technology facilitated connections and I was able to connect with reporters and participate in labor discussions. It was all very exciting. I don’t place complete faith in technology and activists must have networks in place to stem the threat of executive decisions and potential communications’ disruptions. I’m done with Facebook after it goes public.

Amazon’s workers are no longer invisible. Foxconn’s workers are no longer invisible. The public now knows that the Tech industry utilizes a tremendous amount of human labor and that these corporations that everyone thought were so hip and cutting edge are really no different than the old bosses. I’m sure that a lot of middle-class liberals were dismayed to hear that it is no more ethical to shop Amazon than it is Wal Mart.

Name — Nichole Gracely
Age — 35
Hometown — Grew up outside Schnecksville, Pa. I taught ESL in South Korea for more than two years, traveled Asia, been around the Caribbean and zig-zagged the U.S. I worked at the Chicago Board Options Exchange and the Chicago Brauhau. I was a Sales Representative at REI in Eugene, Oregon. I currently live in Bethlehem, Pa. I’ve been around. The east coast is definitely not for me and it’s time to move.
Family — My mother passed away in February 2007 and her passing (combined with a mean economy) was a terrible setback. And so I went to Amazon with a positive attitude because I liked Amazon before I worked there. I like to do physical labor, feel comfortable among other laborers, and the pay was comparable to what I would have earned in an office at the time.
School(s) –MA in American Studies at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa.(2011). BS in Journalism at West Virginia University in Morgantown, W.Va.(1998). News-editorial focus, Sociology minor.
Immediate goals — Find my voice.
Down the road goals — Share.
Definition of social justice — Dignity for workers. Dignity for all. No rights should be granted to one group at the expense of another. It is more than mere economics — we’ve got to recognize our shared humanity. Working at Amazon felt a little too much like H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. One day I overheard a young girl on Amazon’s warehouse floor ask: “Why they be hating on us?” Good question.
Define “living wage” to the One Percent — We work hard and deserve more than a meager existence. Workers should not live paycheck to paycheck and constantly worry that everything can be taken away at any time for whatever reason. We need a national healthcare system. Now!

Today, material conditions for the vast majority of working people have sharply deteriorated as the capitalist class shifts the entire burden of the crisis and the recovery of their profits onto the backs of wage and salaried classes. One of the striking aspects of this sustained and on-going roll-back of living standards is the absence of a major social upheaval so far. Greece and Spain, with over 50% unemployment among its 16-24 year olds and nearly 25% general unemployment, have experienced a dozen general strikes and numerous multi-million person national protests; but these have failed to produce any real change in regime or policies. The mass firings and painful salary, wage, pension and social services cuts continue. In other countries, like Italy, France, and England, protests and discontent find expression in the electoral arena, with incumbents voted out and replaced by the traditional opposition. Yet throughout the social turmoil and profound socio-economic erosion of living and working conditions, the dominant ideology informing the movements, trade unions and political opposition is reformist: Issuing calls to defend existing social benefits, increase public spending and investments, and expand the role of the state where private sector activity has failed to invest or employ. In other words, the left proposes to conserve a past when capitalism was harnessed to the welfare state.

The problem is that this ‘capitalism of the past’ is gone and a new more virulent and intransigent capitalism has emerged forging a new worldwide framework and a powerful entrenched state apparatus immune to all calls for ‘reform’ and reorientation. The confusion, frustration, and misdirection of mass popular opposition is, in part, due to the adoption by leftist writers, journalists, and academics of the concepts and language espoused by its capitalist adversaries: language designed to obfuscate the true social relations of brutal exploitation, the central role of the ruling classes in reversing social gains and the profound links between the capitalist class and the state. Capitalist publicists, academics and journalists have elaborated a whole litany of concepts and terms which perpetuate capitalist rule and distract its critics and victims from the perpetrators of their steep slide toward mass impoverishment.

Even as they formulate their critiques and denunciations, the critics of capitalism use the language and concepts of its apologists. Insofar as the language of capitalism has entered the general parlance of the left, the capitalist class has established hegemony or dominance over its erstwhile adversaries. Worse, the left, by combining some of the basic concepts of capitalism with sharp criticism, creates illusions about the possibility of reforming ‘the market’ to serve popular ends. This fails to identify the principle social forces that must be ousted from the commanding heights of the economy and the imperative to dismantle the class-dominated state. While the left denounces the capitalist crisis and state bailouts, its own poverty of thought undermines the development of mass political action. In this context the ‘language’ of obfuscation becomes a ‘material force’ – a vehicle of capitalist power, whose primary use is to disorient and disarm its anti-capitalist and working class adversaries. It does so by co-opting its intellectual critics through the use of terms, conceptual framework and language which dominate the discussion of the capitalist crisis.

Key Euphemisms at the Service of the Capitalist Offensive

Euphemisms have a double meaning: What terms connote and what they really mean. Euphemistic conceptions under capitalism connote a favorable reality or acceptable behavior and activity totally dissociated from the aggrandizement of elite wealth and concentration of power and privilege. Euphemisms disguise the drive of power elites to impose class-specific measures and to repress without being properly identified, held responsible and opposed by mass popular action.

The most common euphemism is the term ‘market’, which is endowed with human characteristics and powers. As such, we are told ‘the market demands wage cuts’ disassociated from the capitalist class. Markets, the exchange of commodities or the buying and selling of goods, have existed for thousands of years in different social systems in highly differentiated contexts. These have been global, national, regional and local. They involve different socio-economic actors, and comprise very different economic units, which range from giant state-promoted trading-houses to semi-subsistence peasant villages and town squares. ‘Markets’ existed in all complex societies: slave, feudal, mercantile and early and late competitive, monopoly industrial and finance capitalist societies.

When discussing and analyzing ‘markets’ and to make sense of the transactions (who benefits and who loses), one must clearly identify the principle social classes dominating economic transactions. To write in general about ‘markets’ is deceptive because markets do not exist independent of the social relations defining what is produced and sold, how it is produced and what class configurations shape the behavior of producers, sellers and labor. Today’s market reality is defined by giant multi-national banks and corporations, which dominate the labor and commodity markets. To write of ‘markets’ as if they operated in a sphere above and beyond brutal class inequalities is to hide the essence of contemporary class relations.

Fundamental to any understanding, but left out of contemporary discussion, is the unchallenged power of the capitalist owners of the means of production and distribution, the capitalist ownership of advertising, the capitalist bankers who provide or deny credit and the capitalist-appointed state officials who ‘regulate’ or deregulate exchange relations. The outcomes of their policies are attributed to euphemistic ‘market’ demands which seem to be divorced from the brutal reality. Therefore, as the propagandists imply, to go against ‘the market’ is to oppose the exchange of goods: This is clearly nonsense. In contrast, to identify capitalist demands on labor, including reductions in wages, welfare and safety, is to confront a specific exploitative form of market behavior where capitalists seek to earn higher profits against the interests and welfare majority of wage and salaried workers.

By conflating exploitative market relations under capitalism with markets in general, the ideologues achieve several results: They disguise the principle role of capitalists while evoking an institution with positive connotations, that is, a ‘market’ where people purchase consumer goods and ‘socialize’ with friends and acquaintances. In other words, when ‘the market’, which is portrayed as a friend and benefactor of society, imposes painful policies presumably it is for the welfare of the community. At least that is what the business propagandists want the public to believe by marketing their virtuous image of the ‘market’; they mask private capital’s predatory behavior as it chases greater profits.

One of the most common euphemisms thrown about in the midst of this economic crisis is ‘austerity’, a term used to cover-up the harsh realities of draconian cutbacks in wages, salaries, pensions and public welfare and the sharp increase in regressive taxes (VAT). ‘Austerity’ measures mean policies to protect and even increase state subsidies to businesses, and create higher profits for capital and greater inequalities between the top 10% and the bottom 90%. ‘Austerity’ implies self-discipline, simplicity, thrift, saving, responsibility, limits on luxuries and spending, avoidance of immediate gratification for future security – a kind of collective Calvinism. It connotes shared sacrifice today for the future welfare of all.

However, in practice ‘austerity’ describes policies that are designed by the financial elite to implement class-specific reductions in the standard of living and social services (such as health and education) available for workers and salaried employees. It means public funds can be diverted to an even greater extent to pay high interest rates to wealthy bondholders while subjecting public policy to the dictates of the overlords of finance capital.

Rather than talking of ‘austerity’, with its connotation of stern self-discipline, leftist critics should clearly describe ruling class policies against the working and salaried classes, which increase inequalities and concentrate even more wealth and power at the top. ‘Austerity’ policies are therefore an expression of how the ruling classes use the state to shift the burden of the cost of their economic crisis onto labor.

The ideologues of the ruling classes co-opted concepts and terms, which the left originally used to advance improvements in living standards and turned them on their heads. Two of these euphemisms, co-opted from the left, are ‘reform’ and ‘structural adjustment’. ‘Reform’, for many centuries, referred to changes, which lessened inequalities and increased popular representation. ‘Reforms’ were positive changes enhancing public welfare and constraining the abuse of power by oligarchic or plutocratic regimes. Over the past three decades, however, leading academic economists, journalists and international banking officials have subverted the meaning of ‘reform’ into its opposite: it now refers to the elimination of labor rights, the end of public regulation of capital and the curtailment of public subsidies making food and fuel affordable to the poor. In today’s capitalist vocabulary ‘reform’ means reversing progressive changes and restoring the privileges of private monopolies. ‘Reform’ means ending job security and facilitating massive layoffs of workers by lowering or eliminating mandatory severance pay. ‘Reform’ no longer means positive social changes; it now means reversing those hard fought changes and restoring the unrestrained power of capital. It means a return to capital’s earlier and most brutal phase, before labor organizations existed and when class struggle was suppressed. Hence ‘reform’ now means restoring privileges, power, and profit for the rich.

In a similar fashion, the linguistic courtesans of the economic profession have co-opted the term ‘structural’ as in ‘structural adjustment’ to service the unbridled power of capital. As late as the 1970’s, ‘structural’ change referred to the redistribution of land from the big landlords to the landless; a shift in power from plutocrats to popular classes. ‘Structures’ referred to the organization of concentrated private power in the state and economy. Today, however, ‘structure’ refers to the public institutions and public policies, which grew out of labor and citizen struggles to provide social security, for protecting the welfare, health and retirement of workers. ‘Structural changes’ now are the euphemism for smashing those public institutions, ending the constraints on capital’s predatory behavior and destroying labor’s capacity to negotiate, struggle or preserve its social advances.

The term ‘adjustment’, as in ‘structural adjustment’ (SA), is itself a bland euphemism implying fine-tuning , the careful modulation of public institutions and policies back to health and balance. But, in reality, ‘structural adjustment’ represents a frontal attack on the public sector and a wholesale dismantling of protective legislation and public agencies organized to protect labor, the environment and consumers. ‘Structural adjustment’ masks a systematic assault on the people’s living standards for the benefit of the capitalist class.

The capitalist class has cultivated a crop of economists and journalists who peddle brutal policies in bland, evasive and deceptive language in order to neutralize popular opposition. Unfortunately, many of their ‘leftist’ critics tend to rely on the same terminology.

Given the widespread corruption of language so pervasive in contemporary discussions about the crisis of capitalism the left should stop relying on this deceptive set of euphemisms co-opted by the ruling class. It is frustrating to see how easily the following terms enter our discourse:

Market discipline – The euphemism ‘discipline’ connotes serious, conscientious strength of character in the face of challenges as opposed to irresponsible, escapist behavior. In reality, when paired with ‘market’, it refers to capitalists taking advantage of unemployed workers and using their political influence and power lay-off masses workers and intimidate those remaining employees into greater exploitation and overwork, thereby producing more profit for less pay. It also covers the capacity of capitalist overlords to raise their rate of profit by slashing the social costs of production, such as worker and environmental protection, health coverage and pensions.

Market shock – This refers to capitalists engaging in brutal massive, abrupt firings, cuts in wages and slashing of health plans and pensions in order to improve stock quotations, augment profits and secure bigger bonuses for the bosses. By linking the bland, neutral term, ‘market’ to ‘shock’, the apologists of capital disguise the identity of those responsible for these measures, their brutal consequences and the immense benefits enjoyed by the elite.

Market Demands – This euphemistic phrase is designed to anthropomorphize an economic category, to diffuse criticism away from real flesh and blood power-holders, their class interests and their despotic strangle-hold over labor. Instead of ‘market demands’, the phrase should read: ‘the capitalist class commands the workers to sacrifice their own wages and health to secure more profit for the multi-national corporations’ – a clear concept more likely to arouse the ire of those adversely affected.

Free Enterprise – An euphemism spliced together from two real concepts: private enterprise for private profit and free competition. By eliminating the underlying image of private gain for the few against the interests of the many, the apologists of capital have invented a concept that emphasizes individual virtues of ‘enterprise’ and ‘freedom’ as opposed to the real economic vices of greed and exploitation.

Free Market – A euphemism implying free, fair and equal competition in unregulated markets glossing over the reality of market domination by monopolies and oligopolies dependent on massive state bailouts in times of capitalist crisis. ‘Free’ refers specifically to the absence of public regulations and state intervention to defend workers safety as well as consumer and environmental protection. In other words, ‘freedom’ masks the wanton destruction of the civic order by private capitalists through their unbridled exercise of economic and political power. ‘Free market’ is the euphemism for the absolute rule of capitalists over the rights and livelihood of millions of citizens, in essence, a true denial of freedom.

Economic Recovery – This euphemistic phrase means the recovery of profits by the major corporations. It disguises the total absence of recovery of living standards for the working and middle classes, the reversal of social benefits and the economic losses of mortgage holders, debtors, the long-term unemployed and bankrupted small business owners. What is glossed over in the term ‘economic recovery’ is how mass immiseration became a key condition for the recovery of corporate profits.

Privatization – This describes the transfer of public enterprises, usually the profitable ones, to well-connected, large scale private capitalists at prices well below their real value, leading to the loss of public services, stable public employment and higher costs to consumers as the new private owners jack up prices and lay-off workers — all in the name of another euphemism, ‘efficiency’.

Efficiency – Efficiency here refers only to the balance sheets of an enterprise; it does not reflect the heavy costs of ‘privatization’ borne by related sectors of the economy. For example, ‘privatization’ of transport adds costs to upstream and downstream businesses by making them less competitive compared with competitors in other countries; ‘privatization’ eliminates services in regions that are less profitable, leading to local economic collapse and isolation from national markets. Frequently, public officials, who are aligned with private capitalists, will deliberately disinvest in public enterprises and appoint incompetent political cronies as part of patronage politics, in order to degrade services and foment public discontent. This creates a public opinion favorable to ‘privatizing’ the enterprise. In other words ‘privatization’ is not a result of the inherent inefficiencies of public enterprises, as the capitalist ideologues like to argue, but a deliberate political act designed to enhance private capital gain at the cost of public welfare.

Conclusion

Language, concepts, and euphemisms are important weapons in the class struggle ‘from above’ designed by capitalist journalists and economists to maximize the wealth and power of capital. To the degree that progressive and leftist critics adopt these euphemisms and their frame of reference, their own critiques and the alternatives they propose are limited by the rhetoric of capital. Putting ‘quotation marks’ around the euphemisms may be a mark of disapproval but this does nothing to advance a different analytical framework necessary for successful class struggle ‘from below’. Equally important, it side-steps the need for a fundamental break with the capitalist system including its corrupted language and deceptive concepts. Capitalists have overturned the most fundamental gains of the working class and we are falling back toward the absolute rule of capital. This must raise anew the issue of a socialist transformation of the state, economy and class structure. An integral part of that process must be the complete rejection of the euphemisms used by capitalist ideologues and their systematic replacement by terms and concepts that truly reflect the harsh reality, that clearly identify the perpetrators of this decline and that define the social agencies for political transformation.

For those unfamiliar with the American University Corporate Complex, the adjunks are the people with higher degrees: Masters, ABDs, All But Dissertations, (have completed all of their doctoral course work including exams, or referred to secretly as unemployable Doctors in the Humanities), which teach regular university courses as professors do, and most importantly — work for wages that are comparable to prison labor stipends. So why do such people with advanced university degrees do such things?

I too crawled back into such dignity killing adjunk work after receiving my doctorate degree. The reason I sacrificed my self-respect was for starting up my ‘new career’ in welding after receiving a useless six-year doctoral degree in history. I chose a community college that offered a course in the manual arts, where there are still some jobs left under monopoly capitalism, and where the pay is often a lot better than many first year assistant professorships. I mean a starting wage at around 50,000 dollars per year. I thought that I would receive one of my manual arts courses for free if I taught an adjunk course for the community college administrators. Well, this used to be the case in the past, but this time around, I only got a few hundred dollars subtracted from my expensive welding course tuition.

I taught the adjunk course for the community college administrators thinking that it would be easy with little or no supervision. They forced me to use their own pre-made course syllabus and their own pre-ordered course textbook. I ignored both during that semester of teaching, but I was soon harassed on all sides by the administration. When they offered me a course for a later semester in my area of doctoral specialty, I was deeply shocked with the new requirements. The dean told me honestly that I had to cover the over 30 plus ‘course outcomes’ for the class. In my previous educational experience, I had never heard of such state mandated ‘course outcomes’ for a university level course. She printed out the course outcomes for me, and told me that I should look them over.

I looked over the ‘course outcomes’ for about ten minutes and I didn’t know whether to laugh or to rip them up. I actually placed the copies in my personal fraud and scam folder. After reading over those outcomes, it was obvious to me that some state bureaucratic hack had written the course outcomes for an area of study that he or she knew nothing about. The person who wrote them obviously knew nothing about the recent historiography in my field. The many outcome themes related to a bad Social Studies course that they tend to give in American public high schools.

After thinking over such outcomes, I began to shudder. It was obvious that the state community college system did not want any critical thinking or real learning to take place inside of the classroom. Instead, they wanted a pathetic wage slave with no self-respect to teach a bunch of rote crap with lots of useless busy work for the students. I thought: the poor students that have had to sit through such a waste of time — and they had to pay lots of money for this! I rejected the offer to teach such a course, and the course went for the same dismal pay as before: 1,000 dollars for four months of teaching. How did American higher education end up like this?

Most of us have used the American university system as students. I lived in it for many years, until I graduated with my PhD inside of a futile humanities program.  A PhD in history opened my mind to new ways of thinking, and I can do research inside of an archive, but as of yet, there is no job for me. I know that I am not the only one stuck as a PhD with no work, and I also know that a few other PhD holders have ultimately found the long desired tenure track, assistant professor position. The actual problem is not I, nor is it the PhD degree. It is an American academy, or a higher education system that has become another corporate complex inside of the global, monopoly capitalist order.

Important questions are in order: why are so many students in debt and without any means to pay the debts back? Why are so many parents fed up with the added on costs of tuition, when the services at the colleges and universities seem to go down for their sons’ and daughters’ education? Why does tuition and other fees keep rising when the students take longer to graduate?

The answer to all of these questions, and the reason why there are so many unemployable PhDs, is due to the corrupt administrators that run both the private universities and the pseudo, state ‘non-profit’ ones. They have successfully transformed the academic world of the university into one of the shameless scams of the new American economic nightmare. The US university system is now up there with cash checking centers and money stores, Wall St. hustlers, bank card and account user fees, variable rate bank mortgages with little money down, and used car dealership leasing agreements. The disaster of the US academy is neither due to professor teaching costs, nor due to athletic program costs. Rather, look to those administrators’ six figure salaries and full round of benefits.¹

At the university where I graduated from with my PhD, every Saturday night, the president received specially catered meals at his ‘home,’ which the university paid for completely. The president also received the free use of a car with free parking right by his office, a subsidized house paid by the college funds, special box seats with a fully loaded catered table with alcohol at sporting events, and a luxurious office in the oldest and prettiest building on campus. This was only the president. Imagine what his six figure salary assistants received, then the provosts, the assistant provosts, the deans and the assistant deans. Now tally up the salaries and perks of the multiple administrator-director parasites on every American university campus, everything from ‘affirmative action director’ to ‘foreign student services director’ to ‘alcohol and drug abuse director.’

In a political culture that make a fetish out of democracy, the American higher academy is a hierarchy that resembles the Vatican or the Pentagon — and it is even more ‘byzantine’ than the local City Hall. First, there are the ‘trustees’ or in the case of the state entities, ‘regents.’ Then their appointees: chancellors and presidents. The presidents then appoint their assistants and the next group in line, provosts, assistant provosts, and they in turn appoint, deans and assistant deans, and then they in turn appoint the various directors around campus. There’s no democracy there. All of these positions do two things: they delegate, or really hand down, their workloads onto the people below them and they all make good salaries in the six figure range. These positions have continued to grow astronomically at all universities and colleges. In higher education institutions where the main service is educating students, almost none of them teach.²

The administrators are definitely not dumb, however. They are actually the smartest ones on the campuses. During the 1980s when the reaction on university campuses began to mount, administrators, in collusion with state authorities, began to set up the campus police brigades. They ate donuts like other cops — and most importantly, they had the same legal rights as local cops. No more Sixties crap was the hidden code. At first, campus police forces arrested working class, African-American kids and other lower class drifters that ventured onto the well-cut green lawns, or the privileged space of ‘the campus.’ College kids with white skin privilege could still drink underage and smoke their weed in their dorm rooms. But like all methods of gradual repression, and especially in the United States, this would soon change.

Now the police regularly arrest these same paying students for various infractions that are not crimes in most other countries around the world.³ The United States is the only country in the world with such university police forces and that regularly arrest the same paying customers who study there! This method worked so well that now many community colleges have similar cop gangs. And just like the administrators, regular university cops on the beat make six figure salaries with the full round of benefits.⁴

What about the tenured professors? They will make six figure salaries after working for over 20 years in the institution. Unfortunately, they often behave as scared, cowardly and institutionalized drones. The tenure system makes them that way. They have had to walk lightly into such a tight system, so that they never offended anybody in order to receive their tenure security blanket. They have had to obey commands for over twenty years of previously schooling. They are well-trained intellectuals and have transformed themselves into the high managerial class on the campuses. There are very few ‘tenured radicals’ left. The ones that do stay in the system, have to moderate and internally police themselves; i.e., Angela Davis, or they end up fired; i.e., Ward Churchill.

Ward Churchill wasn’t the only one. Think Sami Al-Aran, professor and Palestinian rights activist fired from the University of South Florida before moving into the American gulag, or the professor, Norman Finklestein, ‘denied tenure,’ or politely fired due to his exposure of the Zio-Nazi movement. And there are many others, albeit less known, that have suffered under such a cruel system. At my own university where I received the doctorate curse, a ‘tenured’ professor with an Arabic sounding name publicly exposed the practices of animal cruelty within the university. The university administrators used every overt and covert action to kick him out. Finally, a new president arrived on campus. He simply called in the campus police, and the campus police ordered him to vacate his office immediately.

The American college-university, six figure salary club definitely has its perks – and they can fire and hire at will. The college campus has become their sacred garden of delights.

1. Stripling, Jack and Fuller, Andrea, “Presidents Defend Their Pay as Public Colleges Slash Budgets,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 3, 2011.
2. Gonzalez, Yvonne, ” ASU Calls Goldwater Report Seriously Flawed,” State Press, August 23, 2010.
3. Henderson, Kelli, “Students with unattended tickets could face arrest by campus police,” The Collegian Online, May 17, 2012.
4. Bousquet, Marc, “What UC-Davis Pays for Top Talent,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 19, 2001.

“These awards by SSU are reprehensible in light of Sandy Weill’s role in bringing about the economic crisis that has seized this nation,” said SSU sociology professor Noel Byrne. “The consequences have been dire for the SSU community of faculty, staff, students, graduates, alumni and their families, in the form of elevated tuition, reduced funding for education, auctioned homes, dashed dreams, burdensome debts, loss of employment opportunities, and resultant tragedies of an array of sorts.”

“The chaos resulting from the financial meltdown has cost us millions of jobs, throwing probably four to ten million people out of work,” added political science professor John Kramer. “Many folks define their lives, their responsibilities, and their worth to their families and to society by their work. When their work is lost, all too often their lives collapse. Their likelihood of dying in the next year increases. Suicide rates increase. More babies are born underweight and more of them die. We know of suicides here in Sonoma County whose proximate cause is loss of a job. Sandy Weill helped to create this vast tragedy.”

This year’s graduation was a disgrace. When it was announced that the Weills would receive an honorary degree, students, faculty, and alumni began organizing a direct action against that dishonorable degree. Occupy activists and other community members joined them, as did groups such as the Living Wage Coalition and the Peace and Justice Center.

With respect for the hard-working graduating students who earned their degrees, the peaceful action focused on educating the 10,000 students, faculty, family members, and friends who attended the two graduation ceremonies. Thousands of flyers documenting Weill’s substantial abuses as the architect of subprime mortgages and consequential foreclosures and evictions were passed out. Dozens of articles appeared in publications around the region, nationally, and even internationally. Radio stations and a television station reported the action on news and talk shows.

Dressed in black, students, family members, faculty, alumni, and others turned their backs in a dignified shunning when the doctorates were bestowed.

Christopher Bowers graduated on May 12 with a master’s degree in counseling. He turned has back on the Weills and later said, “SSU’s administration has had, for years, an incredible lack of accountability to its faculty, students and the community at large. This protest was for those who have had enough of that kind of cut-throat, dehumanizing culture that SSU continues to perpetuate.”

The last issue of the student newspaper, the May 8 Star, ran the banner “Day of Shame at SSU” across the top of the front-page with an article written by the news editor. The opinion page had two further articles, one entitled “Day of Shame: Wrong Place, Wrong Time” by the editor-in-chief. Those articles, as well as others, are at ShameOnSSU.org.

The newspaper appeared on stands Monday; it was soon taken away. A faculty member wrote the following on the faculty email listserve: “An SSU staff member observed SSU employees removing issues of the Star that had front page information on the controversy regarding the honorary degree process. This is truly disheartening.”

An SSU vice-president admitted, “Some newspapers were removed as part of efforts to clean the campus for graduation — something they do every year. I have directed the Facilities Team to return the papers.”

However, another faculty member reported the following: “I remember there being Star newspapers after nearly every Spring semester I’ve worked here. Some years I’ve been able to grab a copy well into July.” Though copies may have been temporarily returned, they soon vanished again.

“The editor of the Star estimates that 95 percent of newspapers have been removed,” wrote the Star’s faculty advisor. “This is unacceptable and a shot across the bow of the First Amendment. These so-called cleaning efforts that included the Star removal are an affront to free speech. The Day of Shame is now. Is this some attempt to cover up our controversies? I join with those who believe in freedom of speech to ask that a full accounting of what happened to these papers be made.”

Activists describe Weill as a “predator,” given the predatory lending practices that he used while CEO of Citigroup, once the largest bank in the world. A billionaire, he has been on Forbes’ Magazine’s list as one of the 100 most-wealthy Americans.

Weill retired and then spent $31 million dollars to buy a vineyard in Sonoma County in 2010. The wine industry is a primary presence of the 1% in our semi-rural county, which used to have a more diversified food-growing agriculture. It is now a monoculture of alcohol farming and industrial wine production.

As full-time residents in this beloved county, activists do not want other predator bankers and corporate managers to follow and retire with their big bucks and think they can move here without consequences. It is their intention to continue dogging Weill and others who think they can buy public education, join the wine industry, and spend the rest of the lives comfortably spending their ill-gotten wealth.

California’s greatness is due partly to its extensive public higher education, which used to be available here. That system is being privatized and corporatized by the 1% to further meet its elite needs, as these bought doctorates reveal.

The CBC examined support for the monarchy in an interview with John Fraser, master of Massey College at the University of Toronto.¹ Fraser wrote a book, The Secret of the Crown: Canada’s Affair with Royalty. The first question was about the book’s title: “Why Crown and not monarchy?”

A better question is why the assertion of “Canada’s affair with royalty”? There are plenty of polls done in recent years that indicate Canadians are apathetic or opposed to British royalty.²

Fraser replied, “I don’t think monarchy works here. No one talks about the Canadian monarchy and you never hear it, you don’t see it. But the Crown’s all over the place, on all sorts of things, so that seemed to me appropriate.”

The thing is that most Canadians do not see it as a Canadian monarchy but a British monarchy; this better suits monarchists since if Canadians knew the monarch of the UK was also Canada’s head-of-state (and a 2002 poll indicated that only 5 percent of Canadians knew the British monarch was Canada’s head-of-state), likeliest there would be increased pressure to, at least, Canadianize, the institution. A crown, however, merely represents a costly headpiece in the eyes of most people.

Fraser continues, “Also, we don’t really have a monarchy here. If we do I’d call it ‘monarchy lite.’ We’re not weighed down with the burden of court officers and that sort of thing.”

However, Canada is “weighed down” with the burden of paying for lieutenant governors, a governor general, and that sort of thing. Also, every time a monarch visits Canada, the cost is not cheap.³,⁴

Fraser says, “We have a constitutional system that seems to work quite well. It doesn’t weigh heavily on our shoulders.”

Whose shoulders? Try telling that to the Original Peoples who had no input into the British North America Act being forced upon them, who had too little immunity and military power to resist their lands being taken from them, and to resist the further encroachments into their lands today.⁵ The Crown represents an institution complicit in the dispossession of the Original Peoples of Turtle Island. Today, the “reserves” that Original Peoples live on are Crown lands, that is, lands belonging the Crown/state, not the First Nations.⁶

No need to fret over the present queen says Fraser: “She’s just the old lady of the House of Windsor, very faithful and loyal to the mandate and the burden she’s been given.”

Indeed, Elizabeth has the burden of being one of world’s wealthiest women,⁷ the burden of never having to do menial chores such as cleaning toilet bowls, sweeping castle floors, homecooking, etc. However, what kind of argument is that — being “just the old lady” — for having a privileged, foreign, unelected person being a head-of-state outside her own country?

Fraser: “One of the bits of fun about doing the book was looking at what I call the secret history because Canadian historians don’t like acknowledging the sovereigns.”

Why refer to them as “sovereigns” from a Canadian standpoint? Is Canada not a sovereign state?⁸ What kind of purportedly sovereign state allows another sovereign state to supply its sovereign? Is this not a contradiction? Furthermore, why should Canadians, whether historians or non-historians, “like acknowledging the sovereigns”? As for acknowledgement, there are plenty of geographical designations dedicated to the sovereigns, often eliding the designations used by the Original Peoples. For instance, I grew up in the Lekwungen settlement of Camosack that was renamed Fort Victoria (the Fort having since been dropped) after a monarch who never set foot on the soil, a monarch who was caught up in maintaining her empire.⁹ The monarchy is entwined in the history of Turtle Island; the genocide was carried out under the banner of monarchism and imperialism.

Fraser worries “… the monarchy will die if the government doesn’t support it. That’s what was happening, it was dying slowly through unbenign neglect. So the fact that the Harper government respects the monarchy and the Crown and has made sure that it had the right sort of outlets, I think is great.”

What is the reason that the Canadian government should support the monarchy? Is the monarchy deserving of respect? Does Canada support democracy or does it support monarchy? The two ideals are clearly antithetical. The Harper government, though, has abused the monarchy through the queen’s representative in Canada, to undermine democracy. In late 2008, when the three opposition parties planned to form a coalition to bring down the minority Conservative government (which governed as if it were a majority), Harper asked governor general Michaëlle Jean to prorogue parliament, and she assented.¹⁰

Fraser opines that deceased princess Diane’s “biggest bequest is those two boys, who are recognizable, contemporary human beings.”

They are two contemporary human beings born with the proverbial silver spoon in mouth. There are plenty of mothers bequeathing offspring to the world (and these mothers through their generous bequeathing — abetted in equal measure by fathers — are burdening the earth’s carrying capacity, but that is another topic). Why should William and Harry be accorded greater respect or privilege from society than the offspring of non-monarchial mothers? Either a society considers itself committed to genuine democracy and egalitarianism or it can drop the pretence and openly declare itself for class-based, non-democratic institutions.¹¹

The Massey College master holds that because no Canadian can aspire to be the country’s head of state: “It solves a lot of problems for a country like Canada. It removes it from being an issue.”

What wonderful logic. It is a logic that applies equally well to dictatorships, especially familial dictatorships. One would assume that Massey admires how the determination of the head-of-state in North Korea, Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia among others is unburdened by the issue.

Fraser says, “It’s very useful to a fractious country to have succession of the formal head of state, which is under a notion of the Crown, solved for us. We don’t have to elect it or whatever.”

Who needs the problem of democracy when monarchy can solve it for us? Fraser seems ignorant or oblivious to the fact that the British (and Canadian) sovereign is a source of friction in Canada because the monarchy represents — to the chagrin or Schadenfreude — for many Canadians the British conquest of the French on Turtle Island.

Fraser asserts, “And the will of the people, in the end, is expressed by the sovereign, because if the vast majority of Canadians chose not to have the Crown, it wouldn’t exist.

That is just blatant assertion. There are just so many instances of “the will of the people” (and one assumes the will of the majority is meant) being disregarded by governments. If what Fraser claims is true, then why not back the bluster with a call to hold a referendum asking Canadians if they prefer the British head-of-state to continue as Canada’s head-of-state?

1. Daniel Schwartz, “Canada and the Crown: John Fraser on Canada’s affair with Royalty,” CBC News, 20 April 2012.
2. The Canadian Press, “Canadians apathetic about monarchy: poll,” CBC News, 28 June 2010.
3. “…C$1.5m (£950,000), excluding security – although that is much less than the $2.5m cost of the Queen’s visit.” Adam Gabbatt and Stephen Bates, “William and Kate visit Canada for canoes, campfires and cookouts,” Guardian, 30 June 2011.
4. The queen and prince’s visit carried a higher estimated cost. Whatever the final cost was, it was not cheap. See Citizens for a Canadian Republic, “Royal visit could cost taxpayers $1M or more per day,” Press release, 1 July 2010.
5. See many articles at “Original Peoples,” The Dominion.
6. “Specific Claim Settlements Involving Land,” Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, Modified 15 September 2010. “A reserve is land that has been set apart for the use and benefit of an Indian [sic] band. … The federal Crown holds the title to reserve lands.” … “Less than 0.2 % of Canada’s land mass, 2.6 million hectares, has reserve status.” This is despite Original peoples being 3.8 % of Canada’s population. “Canada’s aboriginal population tops million mark: StatsCan,” CBC News, 15 January 2008. The Canadian state is attempting to municipalize the reserves and entrench fee-simple land ownership, dangerous to First Nation community interests. See Harley Chingee, “Individual property ownership on reserves,” Turtle Island Native Network, 20 July 2010.
7. Luisa Kroll, “Just How Rich Are Queen Elizabeth And Her Family?,” Forbes, 22 April 2011. “Queen Elizabeth, 85, has an estimated personal net worth of $500 million.” … “The Queen also receives an annual government stipend of $12.9 million.”
8. I refer solely to whether international institutions recognize Canada as sovereign. I do not delve into whether Canada is a legitimate state. Readers can decide for themselves whether conquest can legitimate the dispossession of an Indigenous people.
9. “Queen Victoria,” History.com.
10. “GG agrees to suspend Parliament until January,” CBC News, 4 December 2008.
11. See Kim Petersen, “Elitist, Racist, Religionist, Sexist, Inegalitarian: Canada’s Head-of-State,” Dissident Voice, 4 November 2003.

Who can hate creativity? Who would want less of it? No one, obviously.

But something profound has happened to the idea of creative expression in the past 20-30 years that should give us pause. For one, it’s become big business: as the globalized economy becomes more and more competitive, corporations are increasingly desperate to have their workers “create” new and different things to sell. As advertising media accelerate and slowly fill up public space, marketers are frantic to “creatively” (the people who come up with advertising ideas are actually called “creatives”) develop new ways of pitching products. And workplaces—from factories to hospitals to high tech firms to fast-food joints to schools—are all eager to “create” new products and forms of efficiency to keep the wolf at bay (usually at the expense of workers who must work longer, faster and leaner).

But it’s not just business that has embraced creativity as key to survival in the brave new world. These days whole governments have fallen in love with creativity as a means towards economic growth and social prosperity. Despite cuts to arts and culture budgets in this “age of austerity,” national, regional and local politicians pay lip service to the power of creativity not only to express people’s individuality, but to create jobs and heal communities. University of Toronto urban development guru Richard Florida has been staggeringly successful in promoting his idea of the “creative class.” He argues that the “new” post-industrial economy will reward those cities, nations and regions that foster and attract creative people, who bring with them good jobs and a better standard of living for everyone.

In a certain very limited extent this is partly true. A place that thrives with creativity is obviously more livable than one that doesn’t. But there’s a bigger problem at work. Not all places can be “creative capitals” and not everyone can be an artist in this economy – some places still need to make boring stuff, and so do most workers. More importantly, the call to embrace creativity does not typically include a call for equality, decent and meaningful work, social care and compassion, and social justice. Without also calling for these things, calls for creativity ring hollow: it is creativity for the few, not for the many.

The problem with the new hype around creativity is that it presumes that the economic system we have, with all its gross injustices and horrifying effects (global warming, child poverty, unrewarding jobs, imperial warfare, the exploitation of the third world), is inevitable. It doesn’t really imagine that everyone will get to express their creativity and enjoy the life of the artist. In
fact, the new hype over creativity actually (ironically) makes us less creative in how we think about social problems and solutions. It makes creativity an individualized thing, the “private property” of each isolated person.

But in reality, creativity is a social, socialized and socializing phenomenon: it’s something we do together as social animals. Every great creative genius was part of a community of peers and a society that supported her or him. Only when we recognize that creativity is a collaborative process (not an individual possession) can creativity help us transform our lives and our world creatively, and employ creativity for the good of everyone.

2. The creation of creativity

To understand how we ended up with the limited, individualistic idea of creativity we have today, we need to go back in history. All sorts of cultures have different ways of recognizing and valuing creative people and their accomplishments. We need to focus on the Western European worldview and its idea of creativity because it is this worldview that has shaped the world over the past 400 years, thanks to European imperialism and the spread of capitalism. Part of the imperialist project was insisting all other cultures acknowledge Europeans as the most creative “race” and see their own creative accomplishments (in the arts, sciences, theology, ecology and other fields) as childish imitations. Europeans, for instance, established schools that taught the “canon” of Great White thinkers and artists as the pinnacles of human creative achievement, reaffirming a sense of superiority that justified their “enlightened” domination of other peoples. We still study this canon, to the exclusion of many of the great works of world literature, art and science (from Arabia, Persia, China, the indigenous Americas, etc.).

So it might surprise you to learn that the European idea of creativity was, itself, created. In Shakespeare’s day, for instance, no one would have called The Bard “creative” – the word itself hardly existed in the English lexicon except to describe God’s generative powers (His creatures, His creation). Those whom we today consider “artists” were then considered more like skilled craftspeople. The originality of a play or a painting was valued far, far less than the craftsperson’s conformity to established forms and patterns. Shakespeare, like most of his contemporaries, was a plagiarist and a hack by today’s standards – he stole and sampled, he wrote for money and he earned it. Indeed, if today’s standards of “intellectual property” and copyright existed in Shakespeare’s day, he’d have been writing sonnets from the Tower of London.

It was only with the rise of global, European capitalism, that the idea of the “creative genius” emerged in Europe, largely in the 1700s. As the feudal system fell apart a new class of merchants, financiers, factory owners and middlemen started to demand “culture.” This was not “culture” as an inclusive part of community and everyday life (the ways songs, dances, and even plays used to be, for rich and poor alike) but as distinct objects or experiences that could be purchased for exclusive, private use by individuals – commodities to be consumed. This new class demanded novels, paintings, objects d’art, opera tickets and other articles of “refinement” to prove to themselves (and everyone else) that they were distinct from (and better than) the working classes, despite having no noble blood.

What made these cultural commodities (a painting, say) distinct was not so much their particular beauty or quality but the signature of an artiste, a special, unique and gifted “genius.” For a “creative” object to be valuable it needed to be singular and appear to be the true expression of the tortured soul. This is the origin of our modern idea of creativity: it was always a scam. Specialized workers called themselves artists to rip off haughty rich people.

But in doing so there was an unintended consequence. Once upon a time, art and culture was part of everyday life, everyone both created and consumed culture everyday. Creativity was part of the “social process,” the way people lived and worked together. But by the 1800s, culture was something you bought, rented or paid for, and “creativity” was generally understood to be the private property of eccentric men who tended to drink themselves to death in Paris.

3. The creativity commodity

The whole situation intensified again near the turn of the 20th century and the birth of what cultural critic and historian Walter Benjamin called “The Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” With film, photography, cheaper inks and printing presses, industrial manufacturing and the phonograph, culture-as-commodity became not only the property of the rich, but of everyone. By the advent of radio and television, the idea of creativity as the special property of gifted individuals (rather than social groups) was being broadcast into every home. The idea of the genius was lionized in the figures of stars and celebrities whose glamorous, aristocratic lifestyles illustrated their semi-divine status. Public schooling valourized a list of upper-class creative geniuses all students were to look up to at the same time as they denigrated everyday and working class culture as crude, simplistic and “derivative” (i.e. not creative).

Meanwhile, the opportunities for creativity in most people’s lives became increasingly scarce, even in Europe and North America. Through the 1800s independent crafts-people, peasants and working people had been swept into cities and factories where they toiled for much of their lives for a meager salary. Exhausted after a day of work, many turned to commodified culture for solace: cheap “sensation” novels, music-hall performances, and later, moving pictures. Opportunities to express oneself creatively were scanter than ever. Not only was there less time (and less money) to pursue creative expression, by this time creativity had become largely severed from community and daily life. Raising a barn, dying wool, or preparing a feast all became individualized affairs or industrialized processes. The idea of making and doing together, as a community, was suffocating. So too was the creativity of daily life. As more and more jobs and processes became systematized, concentrated and commodified, the everyday “micro” acts of creativity (the unique way a woodworker turns a piece of wood; the idiosyncratic chemistry of fibres, dyes, mordants and patterns a weaver might use; the innovative twists on and recombination of narrative a storyteller might employ) began to disappear. Meanwhile, in the colonized world, economies managed from afar left little space or room for native culture and creative workers, unless they agreed to emulate European forms.

By the mid-20th century the notion of creativity as an ivory tower on a hill was nearly complete. The industrial age had seen communities fundamentally redrawn around private homes and private lives. Women (of a certain class) were increasingly expected to stay in the home and were thought to be incapable of real creativity. Education was geared towards drilling facts into kids’ heads – creativity was seen as a dangerous threat to the social order. The strict social division of labour, where only a handful of gifted geniuses got to be “creative,” was held to be best for everyone. When the manual worker focused on doing his job and the artist doing his, all was for the best. In addition, creativity had by this time become an almost industrial product with a handful of major corporations controlling the production and consumption of music, books and film. Outside of arts and academic institutions, galleries and museums, conservatories and granting agencies effectively gate-kept the realms of “high art” from “uncivilized” intruders. The cultural markets of colonized and post-colonial countries were (and are) flooded by cheaper films, plays, books and art from the globe’s metropoles.

Meanwhile, the situation of those perceived to be “minorities” in Europe and especially North America was worse. As noted above, Euro-American ideology insisted that only white men could be real creative geniuses. Yet denied any other means of expression (or often the means to earn a living) many racialized people took up the fields of arts and culture. For instance, as cultural historian Robin D. G. Kelly argues, Blacks in the US were able to carve out a space of creativity and freedom within and sometimes against the “culture industries.” Largely this was because their creative products fed a deep and unquenchable hunger for integrity and authenticity among cultural consumers fed a steady diet of formulaic cultural mush. Unfortunately, from blues to jazz to soul to disco to hip-hop, these groups often witnessed their cultures of creative resistance commodified, mass produced and stolen by (largely white, male) corporate profiteers.

4. The rise of “creative capitalism”

Is it any wonder, then, that after the Second World War youth rebelled against that cultural system, demanding that they be allowed to express themselves creatively? The counterculture and protest movements of the 50s, 60s and 70s were, in part, based in a furious demand for a life that actually valued creativity. The best parts of these movements understood that capitalism systematically denied people’s creativity and abilities through an unjust and exploitative division of labour: most people got to do what the boss told them to do while only a few got to “be creative” (usually they were related to the boss in some way). The worst parts of these movements satisfied themselves with creating little spaces for creativity in their own personal lives through things like music, drugs and alternative living. The revolutionary feminist movement began to create spaces and processes to value women’s creative potentials and challenge the very idea of creativity as a white, male European project. In anti-colonial struggles, creativity became a key part of struggles for national liberation with artists, musicians and writers rekindling repressed creative and cultural traditions, stealing and subverting the traditions of the colonizer, or mixing and remixing the two, with revolutionary brilliance and fervour.

This era left its mark. After the 60s creativity ceased to be seen as a threat to social order and the idea that “everyone is creative” became widely accepted, especially in schools. While not in itself a bad thing, this new found acceptance of a very individualized idea of creativity had some troubling consequences. For one, it prompted what some say is a totally redesign of capitalism. In order to answer and co-opt people’s demands for greater creativity freedom in their lives, capitalism (as a whole system) began to offer more and more cheap commodities by which people could define themselves: more alternative fashions, more lifestyle products, more ways of expressing “individuality.” It even began to offer commodified opportunities for creativity, from art classes to tape recorders (a big deal in their day!). It also broke a homogeneous “mass” popular culture into commodified subcultures, which encouraged people to adopt diverse lifestyles and modes of creativity and community, but always under the broader, unquestionable domination of the “free market.” For instance, Jazz, which was once considered a radical and dangerous form of music and cultural expression very quickly became commodified as a set of consuming practices – both in terms of music and in terms of style, dress and design. Skateboard culture is a more recent example of a grassroots from of creative expression being coopted and colonized by a more diversified and clever capitalist culture. Indeed, French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have called this commodified freedom and individuality “the new spirit of capitalism,” noting that the system gains consent and legitimacy by encouraging all of us to believe we are unique, self-possessed rebels. This individualism, in turn, assists in the decay of collective institutions, from communities to the welfare state.

In the world of work, creativity became a key theme in restructuring economic life towards corporate-led “globalization.” As increasingly powerful corporate empires shifted industrial production overseas, a greater and greater share of work took place in the “flexiblized” information and service sectors. While the vast majority of this work is banal, routine and unimaginative, creativity is held up as a corporate ideal. Information technology workers are encouraged to see themselves less as digital drones and more as “creative collaborators” on shared projects. Service workers are told they are “creating positive environments” for their “clients,” rather than that they are being exploited not only for the time and labour but also for their brains and their social and emotional skills. The insistence that SubWay (one of America’s largest fast-food joints) insisted on calling their underpaid workers “Sandwich Artists” tells you a lot about just what sort of “creativity” is in store for most of us. Even if most workers don’t believe this creative bullshit there’s no denying that, in our current “Age of Austerity,” where social programs and the welfare state (health-care, pensions, employment insurance, schools, etc.) are being cut to the bone, we have all had to get a lot more “creative” just to survive the new “creative” economy!

5. The passion of the creative class

Ever those who are working in the actual “creative” sector these days aren’t doing so well. For one, jobs for designers, musicians and authors are extremely hard to come by—permanent, full time ones with benefits and pensions even more so. Most people who want to work in or for arts organizations need to be independently wealthy enough to spend months or years as unpaid “interns” to gain enough experience or connections to land even a small paying gig. Artists and other “creative” types almost always have to supplement their income with other, “un-creative” jobs, often in the service sector (waiting tables, etc.). Without a formal workplace and without a clear institutional hierarchy, artists, actors, web-designers, poets and others often lack the sorts of protections other workers (used to) enjoy. For instance, in an economy where you are constantly seeking to secure short-term contracts through personal and professional connections, issues like discrimination in the workplace (based on race or gender) or failure of employers to pay are often never pursued (who has money or time for a lawsuit?).

Today, artists and creative types are also made to serve other economic purposes as well. For instance, community activists across North America and Europe have consistently observed that when low-paid, free-thinking artists move into “quirky” poor neighbourhoods, looking for cheap rent and studio space, they are often followed by more affluent citizens seeking to “gentrify” the area, and speculate on up-and-coming properties, driving up property prices and rents and driving out the original inhabitants. Worse, in an age of cuts to municipal and government services (from community development to public infrastructure to school budgets to anti-poverty initiatives), government officials can often be enticed to fund “creative zones” or projects because they appear to offer public benefits (“social cohesion,” “entrepreneurship,” “vibrancy”) that make up for or cover over government neglect.

As British cultural critic Angela McRobbie has pointed out, the slogan that “everyone is creative” is the slogan of a broad cultural shift in our society: “artists,” she suggests, are being held up not as poverty-stricken social malcontents, but as triumphant “pioneers of the new economy.” Today, when the idea of a good, steady, life-long job seems impossible, corporate propaganda encourages us all to see ourselves as artistic souls. Instead of relying on big bureaucratic organizations like paternalistic corporations or the meddlesome “nanny-state,” we should all, like artists, rely on our personal “portfolio” of skills, passions and past accomplishments to secure short-term, no-strings-attached “gigs.”

The reality of course is that no-one feels any special passion for working three part-time jobs, and few achieve aesthetic (or any other sort of) satisfaction from working in a call centre. But the idea of the artist and the promise of creativity are today being held up as “carrots” for workers in the age of “creative capitalism.” The “stick” is the brutal discipline of the dog-eat-dog global economy.

It’s even more insidious. In our new economic situation, as digital-economy scholar Tiziana Terranova explains, many of us do “free” creative work all the time. We record music on our computers. We Photoshop images. We make video mashups. We write blogs or fan fiction. We teach ourselves digital photography. And we create what internet people call “content” and we do so because we enjoy it, and usually we share it for free. But how free is it? The internet-service providers, who are almost all big corporations, make money from our subscriptions. Google (Blogger, YouTube), FunnyOrDie and Facebook are all making money hand over fist thanks to all that “free labour.” In a funny way, our hobbies now act as free training for many jobs – free for our corporate masters that is: our ability to take and manipulate digital photographs, our competencies at social networking, our ability to type quickly, our capacity for online banking: all of these prepare us for the brave new world of work where we are competing against thousands of other people for the same few (typically bad) jobs. The Pentagon actively benefits from new recruits weaned on years of violent videogames.

Meanwhile, as we try and survive in this digital world, amidst increasingly casual and unsecure (“precarious”) employment with few guarantees about our futures, creativity becomes a highly individualized means of solace. Sure today’s economy has brought us unprecedented ways of becoming an amateur film-maker, animator, fiction writer or crafter. But was it brought us real creativity? As art critic Gregory Scholette points out, the number of people we consider artists and the range of things we consider creative practice are expanding everyday and in ways we can’t yet fully understand. And while there is a lot of potential for people to create new forms of community and empowerment, it all takes place within and as part of the expansion of global and local poverty, exploitation, and social dislocation.

Despite all this, establishment pundits and professors have declared ours an age of “creative capitalism.” Capitalism, they argue, is the best system for providing creative opportunities for everyone. Indeed, many argue that capitalism thrives on what is called “creative destruction” – the way competition forces companies to constantly reinvent themselves or go under, the way the incessant drive towards profit forces innovation and dynamism. The unseen cost of all this “creativity” is the tremendous effects on the human and natural environment as corporations compete to find new ways to cut costs (eliminating/downgrading jobs) or “externalize” their expenses by sub-contracting, globalizing or forcing governments to pay for their wrongdoing. This isn’t to mention the massive social upheaval when a firm shuts its doors or moves elsewhere because it failed to be “creative” enough, or the ecological costs of multiple corporations competing to “create” thousands of brands of almost identical products (a trip down the shampoo isle of a local drugstore is quite illuminating).

What capitalism does, in effect, is fundamentally shift what we could call the “economy of creativity”: it drastically alters what sorts of creativity we think are valuable and it focuses humanity’s creative energies towards earning ever greater profit for a few. While this system has produced many fine things, it is destroying the planet and most people’s lives because it has no broad vision of a decent future. It is driven only by irrational and pathological competition for profit, not by any compassionate and collective social vision. Imagine what the world would be like if we focused our creativity and energy towards other ends?

6. Creating a different world

Real creativity is the ability to change the world together. Or, more accurately, the ability to see our collective creative efforts realized in reality. So while today we have more opportunities than ever to “be creative,” we have less and less of an ability to actually control our fates. “Be as creative as you like,” the system tells us, “just colour inside the lines of the individualist, consumerist, capitalist system.” “You can even criticize and rage against the system – do that all you like (in fact, here’s an album you can buy whose lyrics reflect your anger and alienation),” it tells us “but nothing will ever change, and you know it.”

I’m not saying that all individual creative pursuits are dishonest or useless and worthless. Nor am I saying that the system is invincible (it isn’t), nor that we should reject the few moments of borrowed creative freedom that we do enjoy (we should). I am saying that if we really care about creativity, we need to ask ourselves what creativity really could mean.

Lets return to the abstract idea of creativity itself. While the idea of the “creative genius” might be the product of European history, it is, of course, not totally false. There have been and are creative geniuses whose work we love and cherish. But the thing we need to remember about Jane Austin, Mozart, Frida Kahlo or Miles Davis is that none of them ever existed in a vacuum. They were all part of creative communities that supported their work, or spurred their work on through competition, collaboration and criticism. Creative genius never occurs in isolation. Geniuses are manifestations of their time and place, and so is creativity.

We also need to remember that what we consider “creative” is a social phenomenon. In 1917 Marcel Duchamp took a mass-produced ceramic urinal, singed it “R. Mutt” and put it on a pedestal in a gallery and called it Fountain. This was one of the most significant moments in modern art history not because of Duchamp’s inherent creative power, but because the “work” existed in a time and a space where it could be recognized—by the public and by the artist’s peers—as creative. 25 years earlier Fountain would have been uninteligable; 25 years earlier it would have been redundant. After all, creating a perspectival drawing (eg. one with the illusion of “depth”) is something most art students learn quite early today and is not considered especially creative, but it would be considered highly creative (indeed, heretical) 500 years ago. And today’s experimental jazz would likely sound like meaningless noise (rather than creative boundary-pushing) to listeners even 50 years ago. Creativity is always a social phenomenon because creative people don’t survive except within a social environment. Beethoven could write hundreds of pieces of music because he didn’t have to do his own farming, or laundry, or manufacture his own clothing.

But on the other hand, creativity is not merely some sort of parasite, feeding on other people’s hard, boring “real” work. Creativity is work, it’s just not usually recognized as such. Work is the process by which we “reproduce” our selves and our community: it is concerted, collaborative effort to make the world go ‘round. Creativity is a fundamental part of how we work to “reproduce” our societies. Creativity lets us think about ourselves as people and as communities in new ways and provides us with a mirror for considering how things could be different. In a way, we are all being creative, all the time, just living our lives, making our way in the world. Under capitalism, all this work of reproduction, creative and not creative, is organized towards earning some people a lot of profit and keeping the rest of us in our place. And creativity is also made to serve this end.

So there is some truth to the slogan “everyone is creative.” But the real question is how we might have a society that actually values everyone’s creativity, not just the creativity of a few celebrities, or the creativity that makes money, or creativity that affords solace in an uncreative world.

Which brings us to the final point: you can be very creative under capitalism, and many people are. But real creativity, the sort of creativity that isn’t just about individual fulfillment but is about changing the world and being part of a changing world, is almost impossible under capitalism. It is a privilege reserved for a very select few, usually based on their ability to make someone else money (art dealers, the record industry, film studios, art supply stores, internet service providers, video game companies, etc.).

The fact is that capitalism doesn’t make good use of human talents, and it relies on exploitation and a fundamentally unjust division of labour, both within countries and around the world. We get to be creative on our MacBooks because children dig coltan for computer components in the Congo, because teenagers assemble touch-pads in Chinese sweatshops, because the global economy forces fthe toxic waste of computer manufacturing onto developing nations, and because we never have to deal with the consequences of mining, manufacturing, transportation and waste disposal (except in the broadest sense that digital waste is helping create a toxic planet for everyone).

Meanwhile, the same system imprisons everyone’s creativity in the prism of brutal economic “necessity.” Today’s Van Goghs are working at McDonalds. Tomorrow’s Mary Shelleys are graduating owing a fortune in student loans. Millions of creative people are in a day-to-day struggle for survival while some of the sharpest and most creative minds of our time are finding themselves dreaming up new ways of playing with money on Wall Street (a “credit default swap” is, after all, a remarkably creative product). We will see the best minds of our generation destroyed by debt, starved for time, and naked in a wearied, over-stimulated commodified cultural landscape.

Equality and autonomy are the real conditions of creativity. And equality and autonomy rely on and are grounded in creativity. Ideas of the “creative class” and the “new creative economy” celebrate creativity as an individualistic, capitalistic value. In doing so they are terribly uncreative when it comes to imagining what creativity is and what it might really be capable of.

7. Struggles for and against creativity

The struggle against the new “creative capitalism” is not very different than struggles against capitalism in other eras and in other places: people work together to win greater control over their working conditions; people create new ways of living and new communities that operate (to the best of their ability) outside the structure of capitalism; people reject the way capitalism divides people and puts them into hierarchies of race, class, gender, ability and identity; people try and take control of their governments to protect them from capitalist greed and sometimes succeed in transforming their economy and society completely. Little has changed in terms of the big scheme of struggle. But there are a few new facets to think about in this brave new world of creativity.

For one, the ruse of creativity and creative capitalism has seen capital outmaneuver many traditional institutions of workers’ power. Today, when workers are encouraged to see themselves as creative free agents and empowered economic individuals—rather than an exploited collective or community—union organizing has become very difficult. As workers increasingly flit from employer to employer and survive contract to contract, not only are they harder to organize into permanent collectivities, they often lack a shared culture and community that would foster solidarity. Creative capitalism encourages workers, both those employed in (ostensibly) creative industries (eg. film and television, web design, fashion) and in mundane jobs (services, petty management) to consider themselves as competitive individuals and to see their bosses as merely more successful or talented versions of themselves. This makes organizing around class antagonisms difficult. The failure of traditional unions to meet this challenge head-on has led to the pervasive sense that unions are relics of a different age, no longer able to defend workers’ interests in a “new” economy. But this is also due to the fact that unions have long since ceased to offer a substantive vision of a different world or economy.

Meanwhile, many creative workers like scriptwriters or performing musicians or professors, have had guild-like associations for decades, and sometimes centuries. But new media has led to grave challenges for the monopolies these groups won in years past. For instance, musicians and authors’ unions have had their solidarity undermined by the flood of competition unleashed by the internet, where today anyone can call themselves a songwriter or a journalist. Meanwhile, globalization has also seen challenges to the strength of professional associations, with new forms of competition in realms like editing and proofreading, graphics animation and architecture. Unfortunately, many artists’ associations have thrown in their lot with the employers in attempts to solidify international copyright and “intellectual property” laws, despite the fact these laws have never served artists as well as they have served major corporations.

One of the key struggles today within and against “creative capitalism” is occurring over the place of the arts and culture in today’s society. In an age of austerity, where governments are making dramatic cuts, many programs that supported creativity are being slashed. As the economic crisis deepens, people have less money to consume creative commodities. Unrestrained, the capitalist economy has little use for any artistic or cultural expression that doesn’t make someone a profit. As the government exits the picture and money dries up, the cultural “market” becomes less and less creative: creators and their sponsors gravitate towards more and more conventional, tried and true material hoping for a secure market. Fewer experimental or challenging books are published. Fewer opportunities exist for composers to try new things. Another way of thinking about it is this: all art is risk – a roll of the dice that an stylistic innovation or individual idiosyncrasy will be seen as genius and not merely insignificant or unimportant. Formerly, there used to be more help for artists and creative types from governments and even from the private sector in helping artists and creative people swallow this risk, supporting them while they took chances. Today, that margin of risk has dramatically shrunk. Only the independently wealthy or the foolishly romantic can afford to dwell with failure in the mad hope of success, as their forbearers have done for centuries.

Ironically, the fact that “creative capitalism” both depends on and encourages extreme individualism also undermines creative opportunities. To the extent people see themselves as competitive individuals they cannot see the bigger sociological picture. They are unwilling to consider the benefit of art or culture they don’t personally enjoy. As we all work more and leaner, we have less time to experiment with our preconceived ideas and tastes and we resent the imposition of other people’s creative experimentation on our lives. The cultural media and market have slowly been consolidated in the hands of five or six major multinational corporations like Disney, Time-Warner, Fox and Vivendi. Local arts, film and literature festivals starve for lack of interest from a public addicted to the cultural equivalent of fast-food.

Where people do embrace creative difference, they often do so as part of a commodified subculture where enjoying “unlistenable” music or watching art-house films gives us a sense of uniqueness and possibly community in a world of sameness and disconnection. From punk to funk, from hip-hop to skateboarding, cultures of once-authentic resistance and exprimentation have been folded into a mainstream commodified landscape that offers a valve for personal and social anxieties that is only very rarely transformative.

Unfortunately, all too often social movements participate in this game, acting more as subcultures of solace (with uniforms of dress or musical taste) than as broad-based engines of social change. Many forms of experimental culture or music also satisfy themselves with eking out a small space for limited creativity within a broader society, rather than demanding a different world—or they demand a different world only to the extent the act of demanding creates the illusion of rebellion.

More recently, the success of ideas about “creative cities” and the “creative class” has opened a new terrain of struggle. For many working in what are now considered the “creative industries” the idea that the arts could be an economic boon for cities and regions was welcome ammunition in a fight to maintain or improve meager government funding. For beleaguered cities and regions, concerned about the disappearance of factories and jobs in a “post-industrial” economy, the idea of creativity as the economic engine of the “information economy” seemed like a great fix, or at least like a cheap way to appear to be doing something. Many cities and regions invested millions of dollars in new arts facilities (often sponsored by major corporations which, for a relatively minor contribution to constructions costs, got to plaster their names all over a new opera house or art gallery). Meanwhile, in an effort to improve the “livability” and attractiveness of supposedly “creative” urban hubs, many cities accelerated plans to “clean up the streets,” ironically driving out the local character of many areas and increasing property values, both of which had attracted or fostered creativity and creative people in the first place. This “creative gentrification” has been based on a typically narrow vision of what creativity means and what sorts of people and jobs are considered creative, and often had the stated intention of using creativity as a means to raise property prices and “tidy up” neighbourhoods, thus both increasing tax revenue and decreasing the number of people in an area depending on social assistance.

Unfortunately, this approach has warmly embraced not only by local governments but also many upwardly-mobile residents who preferred to see romantically starving artists than less-than-romantically starving pan-handlers. Of course, we all want to live in a neighbourhood flourishing the creativity and vibrant energy. But the rhetoric and policy surrounding creative cities fails to make equality and the struggle against systemic injustice central to its vision. In the end, it serves real-estate developers and land-speculators far more than residents, grassroots creative workers, let alone the urban poor.

What will be key for organizers and activists fighting within and against the hype of creative capitalism, whether they are fighting worker exploitation or neighbourhood gentrification, will be acknowledging that the promise of creativity, while hollow, truly does move many people. It is precisely because our world offers so few substantive opportunities for creative expressions and efficacy that the rhetoric of creativity is so appealing. Creativity is valuable. Our task can be limited neither to pointing out that creativity is a carrot, nor showing that along with that carrot is the stick of brutal global economic terror. Nor can it be a flight into the most esoteric and self-reflexive forms of creative expression in a vain hope to avoid commodification. Instead, we need to focus on making it clear that real, deep creativity can never be achieved as an individual possession but is always a collective process, bound up with values of equality, social justice and community. In other words, the promise of creativity can only be fulfilled in a very different society than ours. Creativity must embrace its tradition, potential and promise as a key part of cultivating critical, revolutionary communities that resist capitalism, colonialism, gender oppression and racism and create fierce and sustainable alternatives within and against the status quo. Creativity is, in part, the way we refuse our current “reality” and, in a very small and often abstract way, propose or model something different. When creativity joins, supports and critiques social movements for radical change, or when it helps imagine and build the post-capitalist society of the future in the present, it is at its very best.

With A Renegade History of the United States, Thaddeus Russell casts a whole new light on the rejection by America’s lower classes of puritanical middle class notions of responsibility, discipline and self-denial. I think it’s a great pity the book hasn’t received more attention in the progressive and so-called “alternative media. In my view, it’s even more important than Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, because of its examination of social influences that cause the “disadvantaged” to reject middle class rules and convention. I think it’s an absolute must read for all progressive activists who are serious about organizing in and with blue collar and minority communities.

Russell offers a unique perspective on the mechanism by which Americans expanded their personal freedoms after the American Revolution. Unlike Zinn’s People’s History and similar “working class” histories, Russell argues that most of the person freedoms we enjoy originated, not from political movements, but from the refusal of renegades, degenerates and discontents to accept the puritanical work ethic the founding fathers tried to foist on them. In other words, we should thank America’s drunkards, prostitutes, pirates, slackers, “shiftless” slaves and juvenile delinquents for the unprecedented levels of personal freedom Americans enjoy.

I was really surprised by many parts of Russell’s book, especially where he describes the uptight, repressed social conservatives (including Martin Luther King) who led American campaigns for abolition, women’s suffrage, labor rights and civil rights. Despite their high profile campaigns for specific legal “rights,” the leaders of these movements worked nearly as hard trying to correct the “inappropriate” behavior of the masses they claimed to represent.

Our Socially Conservative Founding Fathers

Russell sets the stage by reminding us that the Puritans first left England due to the profound corruption in their homeland, as evidenced by liquor consumption, public holidays, communal feasts, sporting events and public festivals such as May Day. Most of the New World colonies they established glorified the ideal of hard work and strict frugality and scorned all forms of pleasure, including music, dancing, “luxuries” and colorful apparel. The founding fathers who laid out the workings of our republican form of government were all steeped in these influences. The writings of John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, John Madison, Benjamin Franklin universally condemn the lower classes for their corrupt, vicious, vile and depraved behavior. As Russell reveals, they are referring to behavior many of us would consider personal freedoms, such as drinking, dancing, non marital sex (especially between different races), prostitution and homosexuality (both were legal in the 18th century).

The major concern, in most cases, was that this behavior interfered with their ability to attend work. Russell’s description of early industrialism is quite fascinating, as factory workers, not their bosses, decided when they would show up for work and when they would go home.

The Internal Restraint of Citizenship

One of the primary aims of the founding fathers, according to Russell, was to stem this libertine way of life by establishing a system of government that replaced the external controls of the monarchy with the internal restraint of citizenship. They were all part of a transatlantic movement, heavily influenced by British philosopher John Locke, which believed that “self rule” was the most effective method of instilling self-discipline. This comes out most clearly in Russell’s description of the Freedman’s Bureau schools the federal government established in the South following the Civil War. The purpose of the schools was to persuade ex-slaves that freedom meant renouncing pleasures such as music, dancing and unrestrained sexuality.

Prostitutes and Ex-Slaves Challenge the Puritan Work Ethic

The unquestioned heroes of A Renegade History of the United States are prostitutes and ex-slaves. In the 19th century any woman who owned property, had sex outside of marriage, performed or received oral sex, used birth control, wore make-up, perfume or stylish clothes could only be a prostitute. It was prostitutes who won these and other rights modern American women take for granted. When women were barred from most jobs and wives had no legal right to own property, prostitutes, especially in the Wild West, became so wealthy that they funded crucial irrigation and road building projects. Likewise when most states banned birth control in the early 1800s, prostitutes continued to provide a market for contraceptives that stimulated production and distribution.

The importance of slaves and their descendents in the expansion of personal freedom relates to the tenacious manner in which they preserved a culture characterized by sensuous music, rhythms and dancing in a culture that condemned these activities as depraved and harmful to the work ethic.

The Unique Culture of Slavery

Russell presents a very different view of slavery that than is commonly depicted in public schools and the mainstream media. Sociologists have long recognized that the institution of slavery is incompatible with high quality work. Russell cites letters and diaries from 19th century slave masters expressing frustration about their slaves being “shiftless” and skillful in avoiding work. Plantation owners complained that harsh punishments, such as beatings, made slaves even more recalcitrant. George Washington (a prominent slave owner) wrote about the problem in a farming instruction manual he authored: “When an overlooker’s back is turned, the most of them will slight their work, or be idle altogether, in which case correction cannot retrieve either but often produces evils that are worse than the disease.”

Most landowners seemed resigned to providing other inducements to work, such as allowing slaves free time for drinking, gambling, dancing and sexual adventures. Slave women weren’t bound by laws against fornication, adultery and promiscuity that white women were forced to live by. This meant they weren’t expected to be virgins at the time of marriage, nor were they scorned for engaging in extramarital sex.

Teaching Ex-Slaves to Practice Self-Denial

Following the Civil War, there was a strong expectation that slaves would renounce these pleasurable pastimes and embrace the work ethic as good American citizens. Many eagerly embraced the discipline and self-denial emancipation demanded of them. Many didn’t. Many relished the “freedom” from responsibility they enjoyed when a slave master looked after all their basic needs.

In 1865 Congress confronted this dilemma by creating the Freedman’s Bureau to train ex-slaves how to become “good citizens.” Most enrolled eagerly, thinking they would be taught to read and write. Instead the classes focused on the ideals the founding fathers had promoted – frugality, self-denial and most importantly a love of work, even poorly paid work, as a source of virtue. Russell cites letters and interviews with ex-slaves who saw no point in being free if it meant they had to work harder than a slave did. Many northerners, who acquired southern plantations cheaply during Reconstruction, complained that ex-slaves made terrible workers. Not only did they come and go as they pleased, but they demanded days off and refused to work in inclement weather. Many ex-slaves also resisted pressure to adopt legal norms of marriage.

By 1872, the Republican-controlled Congress became so frustrated by their inability to teach ex-slaves to practice self-denial and commit themselves to hard work, monogamy and discipline that they abolished the Freedman’s Bureau.

King’s Campaign Against Un-Christian and Un-American Blacks

For me, the most interesting section of A Renegade History of the United States is the chapter about Martin Luther King and his little known campaign to persuade so-called “bad niggers” to embrace the strict work ethic and cult of responsibility and sexless self-sacrifice that characterized the predominant culture. In 1957 Reverend King launched three projects simultaneously: the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), to coordinate a nonviolent campaign to desegregate buses across the South, the Campaign for Citizenship to campaign for voting rights and a church-based campaign to rid African Americans of what King referred to as “un-Christian” and “un-American” habits. In 1957 he delivered a series of sermons condemning black people who led “tragic lives of pleasure and riotous living” (Problems of Personality Integration). In 1958 he wrote articles in Ebony and published his first book, Stride Towards Freedom, in which he claimed black poverty was as much due to laziness and lack of discipline and morality, as institutional racism. He also condemned rock and roll.

The Role of Violence vs Nonviolence in the Civil Rights Movement

Russell also weighs in on what has become a hot issue in the Occupy movement’s “diversity of tactics” debate. He lays out compelling evidence that 1) only a tiny minority of southern blacks participated in King’s nonviolent movement and 2) it was “bad niggers” and violence, rather than King’s nonviolent campaign, that won the first major civil rights victories in 1963. According to Russell’s careful review of Birmingham police records, the years between 1958 and 1963 saw a dramatic escalation of incidents in which black residents of both sexes punched, kicked, bit, stabbed and shot white residents who infringed on their freedoms, even in minor ways. He describes a number of these incidents in the book.

He also points out that the most famous image of the civil rights movement – of Bull Connor spraying protestors with a fire hose – culminated a week of rioting during the first week of May 1963. These weren’t nonviolent protestors being hosed but black rioters who, over a week, injured nearly a dozen cops with rocks and bottles and who were starting to arm themselves with knives and guns. The official history books quibble over the identity of the black people Bull Connor attacked with fire hoses, describing them as “bystanders,” “onlookers,” “spectators,” or “people along the fringes.” Yet police records make it really clear that Connor was dealing with a full blown race riot his officers were unable to quell.

Why the Chamber of Commerce Negotiated with King

According to Russell, this record of increasing black violence in Birmingham and other southern cities casts King’s famous “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” in a totally new light. In it he gives the Birmingham city fathers a clear choice: they can negotiate with him or face growing civil unrest. Russell also quotes a fascinating Wall Street Journal interview with Sidney Smyer, the president of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce. Smyer brokered the deal with King and the SCLC. The Chamber of Commerce president talks of the desperation of the Montgomery business community to end the racial violence, owing to its extremely negative economic impact

It can be argued that the concessions to the extractive MNC and local ‘leading’ classes assures stability, steady revenues and finances the incremental social expenditures which permit the re-election of the center-left regimes. In other words a de facto alliance between the “top” and “bottom” of the class structure is the unstated bases for center-left electoral successes despite the growing political divergence between the regimes and sections of the social movements.

The Progressive Camp

There is a general consensus that regimes in seven countries in Latin America form what can be called the “progressive camp”: Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Peru and Venezuela.

The identifying features usually attributable to regimes in these countries include: (1) their past political trajectory: most are led by former leaders and activists from social movements, trade unions or guerrilla formations; (2) their relatively independent foreign policy pronouncements especially regarding US intervention and sanctions policies; (3) their ideological rhetoric rejecting US-led regional bodies and favoring Latin American centered organizations; (4) their populist electoral campaign programs regarding social equity, environmentalism, and human rights; (5) their vehement rejection of ‘neo-liberalism’ and traditional neo-liberal personalities, parties and privatizations; (6) their strategic perspective that envisions a prolonged process of social transformation that emphasizes an agenda featuring modernization, developementalist priorities, and high levels of investment oriented toward global markets; (7) their prolonged political incumbency based on constitutional reforms permitting re-election justified by the need for completing the transformative vision.

The progressive camp has a self-image, projected inward to its electorate as representing a rupture or ‘historical’ break with the past, first with regard to the traditional neo-liberal oligarchy and secondly with the ‘statist’ left. In the case of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela they frequently resort to rhetoric evoking “21st century socialism”. The potency of the appeal to radical novelty has a limited time span dependent on the degree to which the regimes pursue policies in variance with the preceding neo-liberal regime.

The ‘Left-Right Division’ as Represented by the Progressive Camp (PC)

The perceptions of the objective and subjective divergence between the progressive camp and the right vary according to whether they emanate from official sources or from a critical empirical investigation.

According to the ideologues of the “Progressive Camp” (PC) there are at least five major policy areas which reflect the radical rupture with the traditional neo-liberal right.

(1) Nationalism: (a) the PC through renegotiations of contracts with extractive MNC secures a higher rate of taxation, increasing revenues for the national treasury; (b) via increased state investment it converts wholly owned private firms into public-private joint ventures; (c) through increases in royalty payments it lessens ‘foreign exploitation’; (d) through the greater presence of ‘local technocrats’ it increases national oversight of strategic economic decisions.
(2) Foreign Policy: The progressive camp has pursued an independent, if not explicitly anti-imperialist foreign policy. The progressive camp has established several Latin American and Caribbean regional organizations which deliberately exclude the presence of North American and European imperial countries such as ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas) and UNASUR (Union of South American Nations). The PC has rejected sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Syria, and Gaza and opposed the US-backed NATO war against Libya. They criticized the US position at the Summit of the America’s meeting in April 2012 on at least three major issues – inclusion of Cuba, opposition to British colonial control of the Malvinas, and the de-penalization of drugs. The PC has expressed its opposition to US hegemony, to IMF “structural reforms” and Euro-US control over international lending institutions. With the exception of Venezuela, the PC has diversified its export markets. For example Brazil exports to the US only 12.5% of its goods and services, Argentina 6.9%, and Bolivia 8.2%.
(3) Social Policy: The PC has increased social expenditures, especially toward reducing rural poverty; increased the minimum wage; approved salary and wage increases. In a few countries they provide easy credit and financing to small and medium businesses, have given legal title to land squatters and distributed plots of uncultivated public lands as a kind of ‘agrarian reform’.
(4) Regulation: The PC has, with varying degree of consistency, imposed controls over the financial sector, regulating the flow of speculative capital and the volatility of financial markets. With regard to the extractive sector regulations have been relaxed to permit the large-scale inflow of capital and the pervasive use of toxic chemicals and genetically modified seeds by agro-business. They have permitted the expansion of mining, agriculture, and the timber industry into Indigenous people’s and natural reservations. They have financed large-scale infrastructure projects linking extractive enterprises to export outlets trespassing onto previously regulated, protected natural habitats. Regulatory norms have been harnessed to facilitate ‘productive’ extractive developmentalism and to limit the financialization of the economy.
(5) Labor Policy: has been based on a ‘corporatist model’ of business-state-trade union (tri partite) negotiations and conciliation to limit lockouts and strikes and maintain growth, exports and revenue flows. Labor policy has been conditioned by the policy of limiting budget deficits, fixing wage increases, to the rate of inflation. In line with orthodox fiscal policies, pensions for public sector workers have been frozen or reduced especially among the middle and high end functionaries. Traditional job security guarantees have been maintained not augmented and severance pay has not been raised. Strikes by public sector workers, especially among teachers, medical staff and social service workers have been frequent and have led to government mediation and marginal gains. Government policy has been oriented toward protecting managerial prerogatives, while respecting and upholding the legal status, collective bargaining rights of trade unions. Within nationalized firms, state-appointed directors rule; there is no move toward worker self-management or ‘co-management’-except in limited cases in Venezuela. The structure of labor relations follows the private corporate hierarchical model Labor has, at best, an advisory role regarding health and safety but no determining influences or investment within this corporate framework. Pressure via strikes and protest by trade unions have been necessary, frequently in alliance with community groups, to rectify the most egregious corporate violations of health and safety rules. While the progressive regimes publically eschew neo-liberal “labor flexibility” policies they have done little to expand and deepen labor prerogatives over the labor and productive process.

The principle difference in labor policy between the progressive regimes and the traditional right is the ‘open door’ to labor leaders, their willingness to mediate and grant incremental wage increases, especially of the minimum wage and generally, the reduction of harsh, violent repression.

Continuities and Similarities between Past Neoliberal and Contemporary Progressive Regimes

Writers, academics, and journalists on the Right and Center-left emphasize the difference between the progressive and the past neo-liberal regimes, overlooking the large-scale socio-economic and political structural continuities. A more nuanced, balanced, and objective analysis requires that these continuities be taken into account because they play a major role in discussing the limitations and emerging conflicts and crises facing the progressive regimes. Moreover, these limitations, based on the continuities, highlight the importance of alternative development models proposed by popular social movements.

The agro-mineral export model has demonstrated profound strategic deficiencies in its very structure and performance. The promotion of agro-mineral exports has been accompanied by the large-scale, long-term entrance of foreign capital which in turn determines the rates of investment, the sources for inputs of machinery, technology and ‘know-how’, as well as control over the marketing and processing of raw materials. The MNC “partners” of the progressive regimes have conditioned their involvement on the bases of (a) the de-regulation of environmental controls; (b) the termination of price controls and the introduction of “international prices” for sales to the domestic market; (c) freedom to control foreign exchange earnings and to remit profits overseas.

They also control decisions regarding the exploitation of mineral reserves. Expansion of production is dependent on their own global criteria rather on the needs of the ‘host’ country. As a result, despite the “re-negotiated” contracts, which the progressive regimes hail as a “giant advance” toward “nationalization”, the cumulative losses in revenues and in rebalancing the economy are substantial. If one looks beyond the agro-mineral enclave the negative impact to further development are substantial. The very limited impact that the agro-mineral model has on the economy as whole has led to occasional conflicts between the MNC and the progressive host governments. A case in point is the conflict between the nominally Spanish oil company Repsol and the Argentine government of Cristina Fernandez in April 2012. Repsol’s behavior illustrates all the pitfalls of collaboration with foreign overseas extractive corporations. Repsol refused to increase investments, claiming that local regulated prices reduced profit margins. As a result Argentina’s energy bill rose three-fold between 2010 and 2011 from $3 billion to $9 billion. Furthermore, Repsol repatriated its profits, paid high dividends to overseas stockholders and thus had little impact in creating domestic industries producing inputs or refineries to process petroleum. The attempt by the deceased President Kirchner to increase ‘national ownership’ by bringing in a local private capitalist, (the Peterson Group) had no positive impact, merely entrenching Repsol’s control. When Fernandez took majority shares in order establish public control and increase local production, the entire Eurozone leadership led by the Spanish government and the Western financial press launched a virulent campaign, threatened litigation and predicted economic disaster. The problem of ‘inviting’ foreign MNCs to invest is that it is hard to disinvite them. Once they enter a country no matter how unfavorable their performance, it is difficult to rectify or undo the damage and move onto a new public centered model of development.

All the progressive regimes with the possible exception of Venezuela have signed long-term large-scale contracts with major foreign extractive multi-nationals. Apart from the increase in royalties these agreements do not differ greatly from contracts signed by preceding right-wing neo-liberal regimes.

Evo Morales signed a large-scale exploitation contract with Jindal, an Indian multi-national to exploit the iron-mine Mutun with virtually all inputs — machinery, transport, etc. — imported and with very limited ‘industrializing’ of the raw iron ore, mostly simple iron ‘nuggets’. The bulk of Bolivia’s gas and oil is exploited by foreign MNC-public ‘joint ventures’ and is shipped abroad, leaving most of the 60% rural households without piped gas,and resulting in Bolivia’s importing most of its diesel.

Ecuador under President Correa, another leading progressive president, signed two big contracts with foreign oil groups in February 2012, despite the opposition of the majority of Indian organizations including CONAI. In Ecuador, as in Bolivia, big oil and gas companies, while raising objections to the re-negotiations of contracts leading to an increase in royalty payments and an increased presence of public officials, retain a privileged position in crucial decisions regarding management, marketing, technology and investment. Despite claims to the contrary, the leaders of the progressive regimes sign off on these strategic agreements without consulting the communities affected. Decisions are based exclusively on executive privilege. The style and substance of the distribution of the powers and privileges in the oil and gas agreements between the progressive governments and the multi-nationals are no different than what transpired under previous ‘neo-liberal’ regimes. Moreover, in both Ecuador and Bolivia many of the “technocrats” and administrators who worked under the previous neoliberal regimes play a prominent role in running the joint venture.

While progressive regimes have pursued anti-poverty programs and have registered some successes in reducing poverty levels, they do so as a result of the growth of the economy not via the redistribution of wealth. In fact, the progressive regimes have not pursued redistributive polices: income and land concentrations, including high levels of inequality remain intact. In fact the hierarchy of the class structure has not been altered and in most cases has been reinforced by the inclusion of new entrants into the upper and middle class. These include many former leaders and activists from the lower middle and working class who have entered the government as well as ‘new capitalists’ benefiting from state contract agreements with the progressive regime.

The financial system has remained intact and prospered under the progressive regimes, especially because of the regimes tight fiscal policies, build-up foreign reserves, control over government spending and low rates of inflation. Financial sector profits are especially high in Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Brazil, in particular, has attracted large inflows of speculative capital from Wall Streets and the City of London because of its high interest rates relative to the rates in North America and Europe.

Alongside the concentration of ownership in the extractive and financial sector, the progressive regimes have not introduced progressive taxes to reduce the disparities of wealth. The income of the agro-business elites in Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Ecuador are several hundred times that of the bulk of subsistence farmers, peasants and rural laborers. Many of latter remain subject to brutal working and living conditions. In many cases, the progressive regimes have done little to enforce the labor and health codes in the giant agro-business plantations while workers are subject to unregulated toxic chemical sprays.

If the configuration of ownership and wealth remains relatively unchanged from the neo-liberal past, the progressive governments have accentuated the tendencies toward export specialization. Under the progressive governments the economies have become less diversified and more dependent on agro-mineral and energy exports, and more dependent on large-scale long-term foreign investments for growth. State revenue and growth are more dependent on primary product exports.

The free market policies of the progressive agro-mineral export regimes have stimulated the growth of large-scale commercial activity. The commercial sector is increasingly influenced by the large-scale entrance of foreign owned multi-nationals, like Wal-Mart, who source their products overseas, undermining local-small scale producers and retailers.

The appreciation of the currency has adversely affected traditional manufacturers and the transport industry causing significant job losses especially in textiles, footwear and automobiles in Brazil, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. Moreover, favorable polices promoting large-scale agro-mineral exporters has been accompanied by a credit squeeze on local small business people, especially, producers for local markets who have been bit hard by the import of cheap consumer goods (from Asia). Farmers producing food for local markets have been downgraded in the drive to expand cultivation of export crops like soya.

In summary, the progressive regimes have pursued a multi-faceted double discourse: an anti-imperialist, nationalist and populist rhetoric for domestic consumption while putting into practice a policy of fomenting and expanding the role of foreign extractive capital in joint ventures with the state and a rising new national bourgeoisie. The progressive regimes articulate a narrative of socialism and participatory democracy but in practice pursue policies linking development with the concentration and centralization of capital and executive power.

The progressive regimes preach a doctrine of social justice and equity and a practice of co-optation of social leaders and clientalism via poverty programs for the poorest sectors of society.

The progressive regimes have combined incremented income policies with large-scale structural changes, benefiting the extractive-primary sector. Stability of the PC is utterly dependent on the increasing demand for raw materials, high commodity prices, and open markets. The progressive regimes have successfully linked trade union and sectors of the peasant movement to the state and have undermined or weakened independent class organizations and replaced them with corporate tri-partite structures.

The progressives have successfully ‘reformed’ or replaced the chaotic, de-regulated, conflictual, racialist policies of their predecessors and institutionalized “normal capitalism.” They have introduced rules and procedures favorable to institutional stability, fiscal discipline, and incremental but unequal gains. In other words, the “parameters of neo-liberalism” are now effectively administered and legitimated by faux nationalism based on greater political autonomy and market diversification. Centralized executive decision making based on agreements which require extractive MNC to invest and develop the forces of production is legitimated by an electoral framework and a multi-class political coalition.

The domestic and foreign policies of the progressive extractive regimes reflect two contradictory experiences: their radical origins in the lead-up to taking power and their subsequent adoption of an agro-mineral developementalist export strategy, favored by neo-liberal technocrats. The “synthesis” of these two apparently “contradictory” experiences finds expression in the adoption of an independent, critical political position toward imperialist militarism and interventionism and economic collaboration with the agencies of economic imperialism, namely the signing of long-term and large-scale contracts with US-EU-Canadian agro-mining and energy multi-nationals. In other words, the progressive extractive regimes have ‘redefined’ or reduced imperialism to mean its state structures and policies rather than its economic components (MNC) which are engaged in the extraction of raw materials and exploitation of labor. In the same fashion, they redefine ‘anti-imperialism’ to mean opposition to political-military interventions and a ‘fair distribution’ of profits between the regime and its MNC “partner”. This redefinition allows the progressive regimes to claim popular legitimacy on the bases of periodical criticisms of the policies and practices of the imperial state while collaboration and agreements with the MNC allow the progressive regimes to retain support from domestic and overseas business interests. When a progressive regime, as is the case of Argentina ruled by Cristina Fernandez, decides to “nationalize” or more correctly secure the majority shares in Repsol, the nominally Spanish oil multi-national, the entire financial press, the European Union, and Washington denounce the move and threaten reprisals. In other words, the unstated pact between the progressive camp and the imperial regimes is that political differences are tolerable but nationalist economic measures are not acceptable. Renegotiations of contracts to increase state revenues may cause a temporary suspension of new investments but not a political confrontation. However, the public takeover of a foreign extractive firm evokes predictable hostility and retaliation from the imperial states. The Argentine progressive regime’s embrace of a policy of economic nationalism was, however, enterprise and sector specific. The Fernandez regime did not, and has no future plans, to expropriate other extractive firms, nor was the measure part of a general nationalist strategy to shift toward greater public ownership. Rather Repsol’s refusal to increase investments and production was increasing Argentina’s dependence on imported oil, which was deteriorating its balance of payments and foreign currency reserves. Repsol’s refusal to comply with Argentina’s developementalist agenda was based on the Fernandez policy of maintaining the retail price of oil for the domestic market below the international price. Repsol’s decline in production was a way of leveraging the regime to lift price controls. However, a higher petrol price would have a negative impact on industrial and private consumers, raising costs and reducing the competitiveness of the Argentine exporters and domestic producers. In effect, Repsol’s intransigence threatened to undermine the social and political balance of forces between labor and capital and between extractive exporters and popular consumers, which sustained the regimes majoritarian coalition. In brief, the measure was nationalist in form but capitalist developementalist in content.

Even so the measure polarized the global economy between the imperial west and the Latin American left, with the usual imperial satraps in Latin America (Mexico’s Calderon and Colombia’s Santos) backing Repsol.

Divisions between the Progressive Regimes and the Social Movements

Prior to coming to power via electoral processes, the progressive leaders maintained close ties and actively supported and participated in the ‘street action’ and mass struggle of the social movements. They embraced the banners of economic nationalism, ecological conservation and respect for the natural reserves of the Indigenous communities, social equality, and reconsideration of the foreign debt including the repudiation of ‘illegal debts’.

The social movements played a major role in politicizing and mobilizing the working and peasant classes to elect the progressive presidents. This convergence was short-lived. Once in power, the progressive regime appointed orthodox economic ministers to run the economy. They adopted the extractive strategy, shifted from a nationalist public sector economy, designed to diversify the economy, to a ‘mixed economy’ based on joint ventures with overseas extractive capital. First, the Indigenous communities of Peru, Ecuador, and some sectors in Bolivia went into opposition, on the bases that their interests were neglected and they were not consulted. Second, sectors of the working class and public employees struck demanding higher salaries, an increase in public spending. Small farmers and manufacturers demanded economic stimulus for family farms and local industry rather than subsidies for agro-mineral MNC, fiscal orthodoxy, and export strategies based on lower labor costs and neglect of the domestic market.

Radical trade union peasant and Indigenous leaders of the social movements called into question the entire agro-mineral extractive strategy, the distribution and administration of state revenues and expenditures. They reasserted their support for a social program embracing agrarian reform, including the expropriation of large plantations and the redistribution of land to landless peasants. Workers’ leaders called for an industrial policy to process ‘raw materials’ in order to create manufacturing jobs. Some trade unionists called for the nationalization of strategic industries and banks. However, despite some major protests, the bulk of the followers of the social movements and the majority of their leaders soon shifted from radical rejection of the extractive model to demands for a bigger share of the revenues. The progressive regimes attracted the bulk of the social leaders to tri-partite councils of conciliation to negotiate and secure incremental changes. The progressive regimes highlighted their opposition to “neo-liberalism.” They redefined it as unregulated capitalism based on low royalties and underfunding of social programs. The progressive regimes successfully divided the social movements between “utopian” radical opponents and progressive reformists. In time of social strife, the progressive regimes evoked a “left-right alliance,” charging their social critics of acting on behalf of imperialism, impervious to their own collaboration with imperial based multi-nationals. Presidential appeals, a nationalist populist discourse, and increased revenues which funded increased social expenditures weakened the left opposition. Moderate but sustained increases in anti-poverty programs and minimum wages neutralized the appeal of the radical leaders in the social movements. Despite the progressive regime’s break with its ‘radical egalitarian roots,’ it was more than able to secure large-scale mass-electoral support, based on the overall dynamic growth of the economy and steady growth of income. Both were underpinned by long-term high commodity prices.

Popular extractivist presidents repeatedly won elections by substantial majorities and were able to mobilize sectors of the moderate social movements to counter anti-extractivist social movements. The high prices of commodities and multiple opportunities for exploitation of resources attracted foreign investors despite higher royalty payments. Foreign investors were attracted by the social stability ensured by the progressive regimes in contrast to the instability of the previous neo-liberal regimes. The progressive regimes thrived on economic ties with the MNC and an electoral alliance with the lower classes.

Case Studies of Extractive Capitalism and the Progressive Camp

While the seven regimes which form the ‘progressive camp’ share a common development strategy based on the export of primary commodities there are significant differences in the levels of diversity of their economies, the nature and character of the commodities which they export, the degrees of social polarization and social cohesion and the size and scope of the opposition. In line with these differences there are also substantial differences in the degree to which the “progressive and extractive model” is sustainable or subject to upheaval or reversal.

The progressive camp can be divided in many ways: between those regimes based on charismatic leaders and extreme dependence on primary exports (Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Venezuela) and those with developed industrial sectors and ‘institutionalized political leadership (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay). There are also significant differences in the degree of class and ethnic conflict: Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador are experiencing significant mass resistance from substantial Indigenous communities, while in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, where the Indigenous population is sparse, there is only isolated opposition. In terms of class struggles, Bolivia, has experienced widespread protests by health, education, mining, and factory workers. Venezuela has faced lockouts and boycotts organized by the economic elite (“class struggle from above”). Ecuador faced widespread protests from the police. Most of the rest of the countries (Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay) faced limited strikes largely on wage issues. With the exception of Bolivia, the major trade union confederations work closely and collaborate with the progressive regimes; in contrast, the peasant and rural workers movements in Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru have retained a greater degree of independence and militancy largely because they have been the most prejudiced by the agro-mineral export strategies. In Venezuela and Brazil, landlord’s private armies have played a major role in combatting land reform beneficiaries with relative impunity.

The most pervasive and environmental degradation has occurred in Brazil, where millions of acres of rainforest have been “cleared” during the decade of Workers Party rule. Chemical exploitation of agriculture is strong in most countries especially in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay where soya production has become a dominant crop. All the major agro-industrial exporters (Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay) rely on toxic chemicals and GM seeds with numerous cases of toxic consequences for indigenous residents and their natural habitat. The issue of toxicity and environmental degradation resulting from the giant mining and timber companies has been well documented in Peru, Ecuador, and Uruguay. Overall, the greater the urban population and the more dispersed the rural communities adversely, affected, the smaller the environmental protest and the likelihood that NGO ecologists play a leading role in protest.

Since the extractive industries are outside of the major urban centers, since most of the major trade union confederations collaborate with the progressive regimes and secure incremental wage increases, and since the overall economy has been growing and unemployment has declined, macro-economic imbalances, commodity dependency and related structural vulnerabilities have not resulted in major confrontations between labor and capital. The most contentious conflicts which have occurred have been between the orthodox neoliberal elites backed by US and European powers and the progressive regimes. Several cases come to mind.

On April 12, 2002 and in December 2002-February 2003 the Venezuelan capitalist class backed by the US and Spain organized an abortive coup which was reversed and a petrol industry lockout that was defeated. An uprising in 2011 led by the police in Ecuador and an abortive coup in Bolivia were put down successfully, before they gained traction. A large-scale agro business protest in Argentina in 2008 which paralyzed the agro-export sector against an export tax ended with regime concessions.

In large part, these “class struggles from above” worked in favor of the progressive regimes because it allowed them to pose the issue as one between a popular democratic regime and a retrograde authoritarian oligarchy. As a result the progressive regimes were able to neutralize, at least temporarily, internal critics from the left. The defeat of “the Right” burnished the credentials of the progressive camp and raised their popularity.

While popular support was important in sustaining the progressive regimes against US and EU backed rightest destabilization campaigns, of equal or greater importance was the backing of the military, sectors of the business elite and extractive capitalists. The progressives by adopting “moderate policies” – including business subsidies and generous pay hikes to the military – were able to divide the elite, retain support of the military and isolate the right-wing opposition. The right-wing has remained electorally marginal and provide very limited leverage for US-EU interference and influence over the progressive agenda.

The degree of “progressiveness” within the progressive extractive capitalist camp varies substantially.

The Chavez government has advanced an anti-imperialist and socialist agenda involving the rejection of US coups, wars and blockade of independent states; it has supported the re-renationalization of oil, aluminum, and other raw material, mining, and energy sources. Its extensive agrarian reform benefiting 300,000 families is aimed at food self-sufficiency. Universal free public health and higher education and subsidized basic food prices via publicly owned supermarkets; and large-scale low-cost public housing for the poor along with literacy campaigns and the formation of thousands of neighborhood councils to adjudicate and resolve local issues have deepened and extended the socialization process

On a far lesser scale, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Argentina have pursued independent foreign policies. Their partial and selective nationalizations are designed to increase revenues rather than as part of a long-term, large-scale strategy of transformation. They have not followed Chavez’s lead on agrarian reform and on greater enhancement of social spending on health, housing, and higher education. They offer remote, public lands of dubious quality as “land reform.” They have been advocates of incremental changes involving wage and social benefits commensurate with the rise in revenues from commodity exports and in line with the rate of inflation, Bolivia and Ecuador have dislodged land squatters and defended the major agro-business land holdings. The least ‘reformist’ regimes with the most dubious ‘progressive’ credentials are Brazil, Uruguay, and Peru (under Ollanta Humala) which have adopted a free-market agenda; they actively promote large inflows of unregulated foreign investments, degrade millions of acres of the rain forests (Brazil especially), promote agro-business and oppose agrarian reform in all of its forms, relying on the dispersion of peasants and landless to the cities, towns where they serve as a labor reserve for capital or join the low paying informal sector. These “moderate” progressive regimes have signed military accords with the US, and adopt a low profile in opposition to US imperial policies in the Middle East. Their “progressiveness” is found in their support of regional integration, their opposition to US hemispheric hegemonism (opposing the US coup in Honduras, blockade of Cuba and interference in Venezuela), and the diversification of overseas markets. Brazil leads the way in catering to Wall Street speculators and in government anti-poverty spending on minimum food baskets. Poverty reduction is matched by the spectacular growth of millionaires linked to the finance and agro-mineral export sector. The “moderate” progressives have the most egregious (and well-documented) record of ongoing environmental degradation. In Peru, Humala has given the green light to mining exploitation threatening the livelihood of thousands of peasants and local business in Cajamarca; Presidents Lula da Silva and Dilma Rouseff, of the Workers Party, promoted the destruction of millions of acres of the Amazon rain forest and displacement of scores of Indian communities in a decade. In Uruguay, the Broad Front Presidents Tabaré Vasquez and Mujica promoted the highly polluting Botina cellulose factory contaminating the Parana River despite mass protests.

In summary, it is difficult to generalize about the performance of the progressive camp given the divergences in social and economic policies. But a “report card” of sorts can be drawn up.

All regimes have lowered poverty levels and increased dependence on agro-mineral exports and investments. All have signed and/or renegotiated contracts with extractive MNC’ few have diversified their economies. Those with a substantial industrial base (Argentina, Brazil, Peru) have suffered a severe decline in the manufacturing sector because of appreciating currencies and loss of competitiveness resulting from high prices for commodity exports. Incremental wage agreements have led to low level social conflicts in the cities (except in Bolivia), but displacement of peasants and degradation have intensified conflicts in the interior between rural communities and the MNC leading to state repression (Peru).

The social impact of the progressive regimes has the widest variation, with Venezuela registering the most far-reaching structural changes and the rest lacking any vision or project for redistributing wealth, income, or land. Their common support for regional integration is matched by important divergences in accommodation to US military policy. Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia, the members of ALBA, reject military treaties, while Brazil, Uruguay, and Peru have signed military agreements with the Pentagon.

The overall economic performance is mixed. Brazil’s economy, especially its manufacturing sector, is stagnating with zero or negative growth in 2011-2012, Venezuela is recovering, but with over a 20% rate of inflation while the rest of the PC is experiencing steady growth, but increasing dependence on commodity exports to the Asian (China) market.

Alternatives to the status quo extractive economies vary enormously. In Venezuela, the regime has made diversification a high priority; the Brazilian and Argentine regimes are taking protectionist measures to promote industry with limited success especially as their policies are countermanded by the real expansion of acreage for soya production and exports. Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia talk of diversification but have avoided taking measures to shift to food production and family farming and have yet to take concrete measures to stimulate local industry via a publicly funded industrialization policy.

Sure, that might be the mantra for the New Faculty Majority, but in a large sense, the fight to normalize the work, pay and benefits of part-time/contingent/temporary/migratory/irregular/at-will/auxiliary faculty, AKA “freeway fliers,” is one centered on dismantling the two-tiered system of inequitable pay and punitive treatment between tenure track faculty and non-tenure track faculty.

At one school where I recently taught, Green River Community College in Auburn, Washington, the battle for the minds and hearts of students is fought with almost 70 percent of the faculty hitched to the quasi-indentured servitude label, “adjunct.”

My fellow colleague, philosophy adjunct Keith Hoeller, lives a typical story of teaching 20 years at 10 colleges to cobble together a living. “The use of adjunct faculty is higher education’s way of outsourcing,” he recently said.

For this Puget Sound region, all 3.3 million of us, the April 20 teach-in – “The Solution to Faculty Apartheid” – was somewhat historic, so says several faculty involved in the break-away group of adjunct instructors organizing this event. A few of the GRAFA members – Green River Adjunct Faculty Association – have been teaching at GRCC for more than two decades each.

The two speakers both had global and localized perspectives on adjuncts – Frank Cosco with Vancouver Community College Faculty Association and Jack Longmate, Olympic College English instructor who is at the center of a battle with both the college and faculty union on moonlighting and academic freedom and retaliation.¹

Both are the authors of “Program for Change, 2010-2030,” a manifesto festooned to the New Faculty Movement’s impetus to activate adjuncts around the North America, Mexico and other countries, to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, since the new majority is part-time and non-tenure track faculty:

The dysfunctional state of faculty employment in post-secondary education in 2010 is well documented and well known. Over the last few decades, corporatization has fragmented faculty. It has resulted in a caste-like structure with primarily two tiers. The majority of the faculty occupies the lower tier and is recognized as performing only a portion of the job, classroom instruction; these faculty tend to be compensated at a rate of pay in violation of the principle of ―equal pay for equal work, often resulting in a poverty-level income. They work in complete insecurity. They are left to draw upon the satisfaction of working with students as their chief inspiration to continue because of their dismal working conditions and the equally dismal prospects for improvement.

Cosco is a full-time VCC faculty member in ESOL and has worked with normalizing adjuncts since the 1980s. He’s also been a key official with the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL). This GRCC teach-in was made up of students, adjuncts and full-time faculty – and three faculty union folk, two TT and one PT.

We filmed it for You Tube distribution.

Union-led and Unionist-Thinking, and Proud of It.

It was clear early on in the teach-in that the Vancouver, BC, model is the pie in the sky for many US adjuncts who cannot imagine what VCC has gained through hard-fought union collective bargaining. Frank Cosco is pugnacious, diplomatic and a man with a mission – “The very point of a union and our duty as a faculty union is to fight for those who are the least able to speak, the most vulnerable. It’s about creating one community of faculty, so when one group is disregarded, the union leadership has to fight for their inclusion.”

So, “the weakest and most vulnerable,” non-tenured, have gained equal pay for equal work, and more:

• salary and workload equity, to include immediate pay scale; pay for vacation and holidays
• paid professional development days
• hiring equity and reappointment rights, to include one hiring process per career and right to seniority reappointment after six months
• evaluation transparency, to include strong grievance procedures
• conversion right from term faculty to regular faculty, to include automatic regularization of the person, not the position
• college health and pension benefits
• seniority rights, pro-rated
• maternity leave that doesn’t disadvantage faculty
• right to participate equally in union and professional matters
• and more.

The US national percentage of “adjuncts” teaching in all institutions of higher education, including private colleges, state universities, community/technical colleges, as well as for profits and on-line schools, is reaching the 8 out 10 mark. Twenty percent of faculty now are tenure track workers.

In Washington State, just counting the 34 community and technical colleges, 46 percent of all state-supported instruction is taught by adjuncts. I think of it this way: 8,059 PT to 3,598 FT (2010, SBCTC).

Castes, Untouchables/Two tiers, Two lives

It gets worse., according to Pablo Eisenberg, senior fellow at Georgetown Policy Institute in his piece, “The ‘Untouchables’ of Higher Education.”² :

American universities and colleges are riddled with a caste system that violates our societal sense of fairness, justice, and decency. Neither the general public, nor parents, nor the large majority of students are even aware of its existence. College administrators and tenured faculty, who are acutely aware of the system, have done little or nothing to remedy the problem. It is a festering sore that threatens not only the quality of higher education but the system’s ability to recruit and retain good teachers.

Here we are, now, with a caste system, viewed as untouchables, and, for many, we are considered disposable people. Right now, more than 540,000 adjuncts fill the rosters of part-time faculties, and another 240,000 are full-time, off tenure track who are quarterly or semester by semester hired as full time, or maybe with a yearly contract.

Full-loads, Freeway Flying, One-third the Pay

I’ve taught a full load at one institution, Spokane Falls Community College, with some other college duties funded through soft money (memos of understanding). My sum total for that couple of years? Less than 50 percent of what a full-timer would have been paid. I worked on campus-wide curriculum development, served on two committees, headed up the college’s sustainability efforts, and organized one year-long series of highly public events tied to climate change and helped organize a themed year event. Oh yeah, I advised the general population of students and served as the Earth Club faculty coordinator.

Why? I love students, I love working with new focuses in cross-disciplinary communications, and I love being fully engaged in political-public-private-non-profit connections to our community colleges. Part of that motivation, too, was to try and work just at one college campus while pulling down around $28,000. The other projects I worked on included a weekly hour public affairs community radio show where I interviewed such people at Bill McKibben, David Suzuki, Naomi Wolf, Amy Goodman, authors, poets, social justice advocates and dozens of actors in the climate change and sustainability arena. Then there was a paid column in the weekly alternative newspaper. Finally, I ended up working with several City- and County-wide task forces looking at Spokane’s educational needs tied to the high dropout rate. Add to that a writer in the schools gig and my advisory role status with the large literary event, Get Lit!, part of Eastern Washington University’s week-long writing festival.

The reason for inserting this brief narrative for several of my total 10 years in Spokane is that my work was part of the larger frame of why adjuncts are more than just interchangeable, underclass workers that “help” the bottom line needs of colleges to be flexible when enrollments swell or contract: we’re professionals who in the current culture of education are whipping posts for such things as the falling achievement and performance gaps, as well as the threat against tenure.

Where I went and worked outside the college, everyone knew my college association.

Forget the fact that adjuncts publish, research, carry through with massive amounts of continuing education, present at conferences, and go onto completing other graduate degrees.

It’s the economy, stupid could be replaced with, It’s the fragmentation thing. In the eyes of by the privatizers who seem to be the soldiers of the vulture and parasitic capitalists who are emboldened by a divide and conquer program pitting TT faculty against PT faculty.

For now, the goals of adjuncts and graduate students tie into developing distinct and sometimes separate union issues since Full-time Tenure Track folk supervise us, determine how many classes we get, and where and when. It’s obvious the huge faculty unions have failed at defending this attack on higher education and failed to stop the evisceration of the collective bargaining movement. The administrations are swelling their ranks, and as a cost saver, ramping up cheap-rate and insecure jobs.

This is the time to fight “fragmentation of the time and place of work” as Ulrich Beck illustrates it in his book, The Brave New World of Work (Polity Press, 2000).

1. See Chronicle of Higher Education, April 9, 2012, “Adjunct Challenges College’s Accreditation Over Alleged Failure to Stop Union Retaliation” by Peter Schmidt.
2. Huffington Post, 29 June, 2010.
3. See Activism through Art and 2255 Films.

Barrister Robert Jay, QC, the pondering lead counsel for the inquiry into press ethics has been praised for his diverging questioning into the machinations of the Murdoch clan.  One of his bright moments against the mogul was to have happened when Jay probed the decision of The Sun in 1997 to back Tony Blair in the elections.  Suddenly, it seemed, the shock jock rag had turned its hand away from the Tories and placed it firmly on the shoulders of New Labour.  The spin doctor love affair thereby became a marriage.

Jay had his impressive moments but to what end?  Martin Kettle strikes an optimistic note, claiming that the appearance of the Murdochs before the Levenson inquiry and the Commons media select committee in 2011 ‘mark the first time that the Murdoch dynasty has ever been compelled to account for itself to the system of democratic government that it does so much to influence’ (Guardian, Apr 25).  Kettle ignores the ingratiating political forces that allow such a lack of accountability to thrive in the first place.

Murdoch remains a grand vizier, pulling the strings and being the ventriloquist of political puppets, a figure who exerts a control over public opinion that is always hard, if not impossible, to gauge yet all too apparent.  Media analysts claim otherwise, seeing the Murdoch dynasts as dinosaurs awaiting their gradual extinction.  In the fractious, nebulous world of online media, such paper gods are not so much going to be shredded as bypassed, becoming museum pieces in high-tech environs.

Murdoch, quite rightly, disagrees.  As he made it clear in the third Boyer lecture delivered in 2008, newspapers will continue to exist.  Obsolescence will only come to ‘the editors, reporters, and proprietors who are forgetting a newspaper’s most precious asset: the bond with its readers’.

That bond has been a fetid one.  Press ethics, at least through the eyes of such media moguls, tends to be viewed through a municipal sewerage system, and Murdoch hardly let on that there was any ‘influence’ to speak of.  “I want to say, Mr Jay, that I, in 10 years of his power, never asked Mr. Blair for anything.  Nor indeed did I receive any favours.  If you want to check that, I think you should call him.”  Let us ignore, of course, Blair’s incorporation into the Murdoch family by becoming godfather to Rupert’s daughter Grace, or the more recent courtship of the current British Prime Minister, who visited Murdoch on his daughter Elizabeth’s yacht in 2008.

When Jay began pressing Murdoch on the ‘subtlety’ inherent in the alleged Blair-Murdoch interactions, the reply was blunt. “I’m afraid I don’t have much subtlety about me.”  That should have been evident in the Cameron government’s dealings with News Corp over its efforts to increase its stake in British pay operator BSkyB.  Culture minister Jeremy Hunt is the latest victim of the dynastic family’s influence, given allegations that he allowed the family a back channel to ‘influence’ the bid.  “This”, he fumed, “is categorically not the case”. (First Post, April 25). Such is the nature of rage born of impotence.

Son James, ever in the shadow of his father, has adopted the same line.  The Sun was not in the business of backing different horses based on quid pro quos.  What Jay did do was to simply allow the Murdochs to reveal and expand upon their influence over their paper empire and the political forces they chose to influence.  News Corporation, at the end of the day, had only one person to answer to, and one family to pay homage to.

As Martin Dunn in The Guardian (April 25) noted, Murdoch has over the years managed to make the manipulation of power “seem as dull as chartered accountancy.”  The pregnant pause is his metier, and this was used against his inquisitors with effect.  Amidst the struggles before the committee, the patriarch remains in command, slightly blunted by the phone hacking scandal, but still uncompromising.  He has bonds to maintain, and levers to pull.

Once I had gotten past the Prologue – which I thought did not belong at the beginning of the book – Khan’s narrative never lost its power to sustain my interest. The book takes the reader through many unexpected shifts in the protagonist’s life – from cricket to charity work, from charity work to politics, from the life of a celebrity to a life of piety, from disdain for Islam to a deepening respect for its richness and depth, from contempt (a colonial legacy common to Pakistan’s elites) for ordinary Pakistanis to a growing concern for their tormented lives, from wilting shyness before audiences to a determination to face the glare of public life, from growing anxiety about Pakistan’s problems to an unshakable resolve to do something about them; etc. In short, the book takes the reader through the life of an extraordinary man, at first fully immersed in the privileges of his class and his cricket celebrity but slowly turning inwards, questioning the colonial mindset of his own privileged class, angry at the limitless corruption of Pakistan’s rulers, and, finally, reaching resolution in his commitment to take Pakistan back from its corrupt elites. A politician with Imran Khan’s record would be rare in Western ‘democracies.’ In a country like Pakistan, mired for decades in the corruption of rapacious elites, he is an anomaly – an outlier. Should the Pakistanis embrace Imran Khan, should they give him the chance to pick and lead the nation’s political team, this could be a game-changer for their country.

While describing his spiritual journey following the pain of his mother’s death, Imran Khan sums up his life in an aphorism, “A spiritual person takes responsibility for society, whereas a materialist only takes responsibility for himself (87).” Quite apart from the truth-value of this statement (since a ‘materialist’ or someone without belief in God or afterlife may also choose to take responsibility for society), this sentiment very aptly describes the author’s long and tortuous passage from indifference towards larger questions – both metaphysical and political – to a deepening engagement with God and the history and fate of Pakistanis and Muslims. In time, after much soul-searching, Imran Khan chooses to take “responsibility for society.” Once he has formed a conviction, Imran Khan has shown that there is no turning back for him.

Imran Khan’s autobiography contains some homespun theology too. At one point, he describes how cricket nudged him towards faith; it began with observations on cricketing luck. A game can turn on the toss of a coin; success in bowling can depend on the way the ball is stitched, on umpiring mistakes, on fortuitous injuries, on the weather, etc. In other words, “there seemed to be a zone beyond which players were helpless, and it was called luck (84).” He muses, “… could what we call luck actually be the will of God?” Is it possible, amidst the infinite complexity that produces any outcome, that God intervenes in our lives, nudges a particle here a particle there to confront us with outcomes that surprise us, overthrow our certainties, deflate our egos, forcing us to think of higher forces?

After his mother’s painful death from cancer, Imran Khan turned away from God. Questions of theodicy troubled him. He worried that his life’s accomplishments could vanish in a moment. In the face of this vulnerability, persuaded by a logic that recalls Pascal’s wager, he resumed his salaat. “This was really like an insurance policy – a sort of safety net in case God really did exist.” It is likely that Imran had arrived at his reasoning on his own, or he had encountered this argument in the Qur’an. Unknown to most Muslims, the Qur’an makes this argument on several occasions; it is then taken up by Hazrat Ali, the Prophet’s cousin, and in the eleventh century by al-Ghazzali.

Imran Khan speaks reverently of the influence of Mian Bashir on his life, an obscure but spiritually gifted man who gently led him to discover the inwardness and beauty of Islam. People who have lost touch with metaphysics will likely frown at this influence. Untroubled by such skeptics, Imran Khan recognizes this obscure sufi as the “single most powerful spiritual influence” on his life. I respect this openness to the Unseen, this divinely implanted ‘naiveté’ – if you will – that lies at the heart of all authentic religious experience, and that Western rationalism and scientism have nearly destroyed in modern man. Despite the materialism that assails us, we can stay in touch with this ‘naiveté.’ In better times too, very few men and women could reach the summits of the mystical ascent; but they sought spiritual sustenance in the baraka of the valis, friends of God. Unknown to Pakistan’s militant secularists, Asadullah Khan Ghalib too – despite his celebrated skepticism – sought intimacy with God through veneration of Hazrat ‘Ali and his family.

2.

Imran Khan is nothing if not resolute in pursuing the goals he sets for himself; and his goals have never been modest. “Over the years,” he writes, “I came to the conclusion that ‘genius’ is being obsessed with what you are doing (63).” Quite early in his cricket career, spurred by the example of Dennis Lillee, he decided to remake himself as a fast bowler. His teammates and coach warned him that he “had neither the physique nor the bowling action to become a fast bowler (118)” and he could ruin his career if he tried to change his bowling style. Imran Khan was not deterred. He remodeled his “bowling action to become a fast bowler,” and as he worked hard towards this goal – he writes – “my body also became stronger for me to bowl fast.” Most cricket commentators agree that Imran Khan went on to establish himself as one of the greatest fast bowlers of all time. Fewer still have combined his eminence in fast bowling with skill at batting and leading his team.

When Imran Khan set out in 1984 to establish Pakistan’s first cancer hospital – he ran into a wall of skepticism. When he presented his plans for the Hospital to the leading Pakistani doctors in Lahore and Lon-don, they were dismissive; he did not give up. Working indefatigably to collect mostly small donations from tens of thousands of people at home and abroad, Imran Khan began construction work on the project in April 1991. The Hospital admitted its first patients in December 1994, with a com-mitment to provide free care to all poor patients. Skeptics had warned that this policy was not viable, but generous Pakistanis proved them wrong. Now plans are underway for building two more cancer hospitals in Peshawar and Karachi.

Our author has shown the same dogged persistence in the arena of politics. When he announced his entry into politics in 1996 – with the for-mation of a new party, Tehreek-e-Insaaf, dedicated to fighting corrup-tion in public life – Pakistanis ignored him. In the first elections it contested in 1997, the Tehreek won no seat; in the second election in 2002, it won a single seat. Imran Khan could draw large crowds to his rallies, but they were drawn to their cricket hero not the political leader who promised to deliver a better future for them. Perhaps, Imran Khan had not done his homework. His promise to fight corruption did not yet carry a broad appeal; his message did not resonate with workers, peasants, students, clerks and small shop-keepers. Pakistanis knew that their leaders are corrupt, but they did not see Imran Khan as the force that could pry Pakistan out of their dirty but powerful grip. Imran Khan had not begun the hard work of building his party from the ground up, creating a cadre of committed workers and donors. He spent too much time on talk shows and too little time organizing his party.

The failure of Tehreek-e-Insaaf to make an impact in the 2002 elections may well have ended Imran Khan’s political career; but he was not ready to quit the field. He persisted in his attacks on Pakistan’s corrupt elites through regular appearances on television talk shows that had proliferated following General Musharraf’s liberalization of the media. Then came the attacks of 9-11, the US decision to draft Pakistan into its so-called Global War Against Terror. Gleefully, Pakistan’s generals accepted every demand that the US made on Pakistan’s sovereignty; they gave the US air and land corridors to Afghanistan, control of one or more airbases in Pakistan, and free run of Pakistan to CIA operatives. Only the religious parties and jihadi factions opposed this surrender of Pakistan’s sovereignty, but they occupied limited political space in Pakistan. With few exceptions, Pakistan’s ‘liberal’ and ‘left’ intellectuals also supported the US War; they were happy to see the Taliban driven out by the American invaders. The political tides were begging to turn for Imran Khan. This was his opportunity to broaden his critique of Pakistan’s corrupt political classes; their corruption now veered towards treason. None of this was surprising, but it did bring out into the open Pakistan’s descent to the depths of servitude.

As events unfolded, the charge of treason would gain greater plausibility. General Musharraf’s government kept the Americans happy by killing the Taliban who had sought refuge in Pakistan; others were captured and handed over to the Americans. In open violation of Pakistan’s constitution, the government also began to disappear Pakistanis who were then secretly transferred to the Americans. Pakistan’s involvement in America’s war entered a new phase in 2004 as the CIA mounted its first drone strikes on Pakistani territory. On American demand, the generals also directed the Pakistani military to attack Taliban sanctuaries in Waziristan. Pakistan’s political classes had now privatized the army. Pakistani soldiers now killed the Taliban and Pakistanis to enrich the country’s political elites.

While the generals collected cash from the US, Pakistanis would pay the price for this treason. Pakistan’s war against the Taliban and their Pashtun hosts produced a frightening backlash that has continued to grow. The logic of this backlash was simple, as Imran Khan also explains. No doubt encouraged by the Afghan Taliban, the families of the Pashtun victims – calling themselves the Pakistani Taliban – mounted devastating retaliatory attacks against military and civilian targets in Pakistan, but mostly against the latter. There was no change in Pakistan’s commitment to America’s war when a civilian government, led corrupt politicians rehabilitated under a deal hatched in Washington, replaced General Musharraf in 2008. While Pakistan’s liberal and left intellectuals wanted the government to exterminate the Pakistani Taliban; they insisted that the Pakistani Taliban was an Islamic fundamentalist movement to take power in Pakistan and had nothing to do with the war Pakistani military had unleashed against the Pashtuns. Imran made the opposite argument. Terminate the war against the Pashtuns and Afghans, and the Pakistani Taliban would cease their attacks; they would disappear as quickly as they had appeared.

After a long delay, Imran Khan’s strategy began to pay off. As Pakistan escalated the war against its own people in two of its four provinces, as Paki-stani capital fled and foreign capital shunned the country, as the economy worsened, as poverty deepened, as political factions in Karachi engaged in bloody turf battles, as power outages persisted, as supply of cooking gas be-come intermittent, the anger and desperation of Pakistanis also grew. Who could lift Pakistan from this descent into chaos? Pakistanis knew better than to expect a savior to emerge from the military or the established political classes: for they had produced the mayhem and were its chief beneficiaries. In this gloom, Imran Khan beckoned to Pakistanis. His calls for justice grew louder, his jeremiads against corrupt politicians became sharper, his critique of the generals became unsparing. Slowly, his message began to resonate with Pakistani youth and the urban middle classes in Pakistan. Starting in mid-2011, the polls signaled a surge in his popularity.

On October 30 2011, Imran Khan was ready to take a measure of his popularity with a rally in Lahore. The rally was a great success; more than two hundred thousand people showed up. Most people agreed that nothing like this had been seen since the days of the charismatic Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s. On December 25, the Tehreek organized a second rally in Karachi, the stronghold of a local ethnic party, with the same results. Finally, some sixteen years after his entry into politics, people were beginning to rally around Imran Khan and his party. This surge in his popularity suddenly changed the political map of Pakistan. It also produced some unwelcome results; now that his prospects looked brighter, some members of the established political class began to knock on the Tehreek’s door. Imran Khan was now a political force; after wandering for many years on the margins, he had arrived with a bang on Pakistan’s political scene.

Imran Khan offered a more optimistic assessment of his prospects. He described the surge in his popularity as a political tsunami that would in time sweep out the old corrupt order. Was this a case of excessive self-congratulation? This would depend on whether the Tehreek could sustain the momentum it had generated, whether it could capitalize on this surge to build a grassroots organization, whether it could expand its program to incorporate the interests of workers and peasants, and whether it could create an intellectual cadre that would disseminate its message through print, television and the internet. Can Imran Khan energize the people, raise their hopes of change to a fever pitch, so that attempts to defeat them by extra-legal means could backfire and persuade the Tehreek to lead an uprising? I will return to these questions; but first, I wish to turn to the increasingly shrill and frenzied attacks against Imran Khan by Pakistan’s putative liberal and left-leaning intelligentsia; these attacks are most visible in the English-language print media. Their shrill commentary suggests that they are beginning to take him seriously.

3.

Pakistan’s ‘liberal’ and ‘left-leaning’ groups bring three related charges against Imran Khan: he is an Islamist (or fundamentalist), a partisan of the Taliban, and a rightist. They rely on less than half-truths in making their case.

Imran Khan is certainly Islamic in his thinking, inspiration and identity but he is not an Islamist, a term that generally applies to Muslims who subscribe to a literalist interpretation of the Qur’an and the Traditions of the Prophet. Unlike many Pakistanis who identify themselves as liberals or leftists – and take a Kemalist view of Islam as a backward religion that must be rigorously excluded from the public discourse and even public space – Imran Khan derives his identity from Islam and seeks inspiration in the Qur’an and the Traditions. In regards to the relevance of some of the legal aspects of the Qur’an, together with Allama Iqbal and Fazlur Rahman (for many years, a professor of Islamic Studies at University of Chicago), he recognizes the need for revisiting some of the rulings that were given currency by the consensus of a previous age. In this sense, it would be appropriate to describe Imran Khan as an Islamic modernist; but unlike most Islamic modernists he also feels a strong affinity for the sufi tradition of Islam that has emphasized the spirit and inward content religion without neglecting its outward practice. In both respects, I doubt if there are Islamists who would admit Imran Khan into their inner circles.

Is Imran Khan then a partisan of the Taliban? The United States has used its hegemonic control over mainstream global discourse – especially since launching its global military offensive under the cover of the Global War Against Terror – to smear all freedom fighters it does not support as terrorists. The discourse on terrorism is very cleverly designed to focus the world’s attention on the relatively insignificant acts of violence by oppressed peoples and thereby legitimize the massive acts of violence perpetrated by Western nations against the rest of the world. In American demonology, anyone fighting against the US occupation of Afghanistan is a terrorist – whether he is Afghan or Pakistani. Most ‘liberal’ and ‘left’ writers in Pakistan have internalized this American rhetoric; it follows that the Afghans and Pakistanis fighting the US occupation do not have a legitimate cause regardless of what fighting tactics they employ. In describing Imran Khan as Taliban sympathizer, then, these writers hope to smear him as a terrorist-sympathizer. This smear will not stick. Most Pakistanis recognize that Imran Khan supports the right of Afghans to rid their country of US occupation; other than that and his ethnic kinship with the Pashtuns, there can exist little affinity between him and the Afghan Taliban.

It is time now to explain the scare quotes surrounding the political labels left, right and liberal. In much of the Islamicate, politics has moved into strangely dubious territory, where these labels retain very little of their original meaning. As the liberal or left-oriented political elites in much of the Islamicate began to lose their legitimacy starting the 1970s – because of their dismal failure to create free, sovereign and prosperous polities – and faced growing opposition from various Islamist movements, they chose to sacrifice their ideology in order to cling to power. They had risen to power on an anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist and, in some cases, socialist platform. Starting in the 1970s, the survival of the increasingly repressive regimes they led was tied to the support of Western powers in return for keeping the Islamists out of power; this was the pact they made with the devil. It was an enduring pact that crushed any opposition to these regimes until the recent Arab uprising. The liberal and left factions in Pakistan also reprogrammed themselves after the end of the Cold War. Under Benazir Bhutto, the Pakistan People’s Party, once left-leaning, anti-imperialist, sought legitimacy in Washington and quickly embraced its neoliberal program to open the economy to Western capital.

If the formerly liberal and left leaning forces completed this metamorphosis with little difficulty, this is not entirely surprising. Even when they proclaimed socialist ideals or employed anti-imperialist rhetoric, the thinking of the politically dominant classes in much of the Islamicate had been shaped by an Orientalist narrative. After the Western powers had destroyed or marginalized the traditional learned classes – judges and jurisprudents trained in Shariah, theologians, physicians, engineers, architects and artists – this created space for the emergence of new intellectual classes that were beholden to their colonial masters. More often than not, they were secular and nationalist in their politics, and, following their Orientalist mentors, they blamed Islam for their backwardness; as a result, even when they paid lip service to Islam, they were determined to exclude it from their political discourse. In keeping with their colonialist thinking, they affected Western styles and mannerisms but did little to acquire the institutions, sciences and technology that were the motors of Western power and prosperity. It is no exaggeration to assert that these new elites – despite their nationalist rhetoric – felt closer to their colonial masters they had replaced than to the people they claimed to lead.

In consequence, as Islamist opposition movements began to reject their claims to leadership, the failed political elites retreated into the arms of their former colonial masters. They sought to convince the Western world that they faced a common enemy; the Islamist parties eager to replace them would turn the clock back on human rights, women’s rights and the rights of minorities. Worse, should the Islamist opposition gain power they would pursue policies openly hostile to Western interests. Despite the about-turn in their policies, however, these elites continued to sport their old political labels. They were ‘nationalists’ but owed their survival to Western arms, money, diplomatic support, intelligence, and advice. They were ‘liberals’ but they were happy to use the police state to suppress opposition to their regimes. They were ‘socialists’ but eagerly embraced the neoliberal dictates of the IMF and the World Bank.

In Pakistan, different factions of the ruling elites – who variously claim to be ‘nationalists,’ ‘liberals’ or ‘leftists’ – strenuously lobby the Americans or the British to gain power or to keep it. They outbid each other in sacrificing vital national interests; they never tire of proclaiming that the nation’s economic salvation depends on attracting foreign investment; they have backed unconditionally America’s so-called war on terrorism; they oppose the Afghans’ right to free their country of foreign occupiers; they cheered when General Musharraf used Pakistan’s military to fight Pakistanis who aided the Afghans; they privately assure the Americans that – despite their public stance – they stand firmly behind the deadly drone strikes against ‘targets’ inside Pakistan. Disregarding Pakistan’s Islamic sensibilities, a tiny minority of ‘secularists’ in Pakistan want to impose Western sexual mores on Pakistan; they have campaigned to abrogate the nation’s laws against blasphemy, not prevent its abuse or mitigate its penalties; they refuse to defend the rights of Muslim minorities in Western countries; they support America’s demands to shut down the madrasas in Pakistan but have long supported a colonial system of education for the elites that uses syllabi and exams designed in Cambridge.

Indeed, recently, one columnist at Dawn – a leading English newspaper – lampooned Imran Khan for refusing to share the podium with Salman Rushdie at a literary event in India. I do not know what inner demons drove Rushdie to produce his obscene caricature of Islam, but it does seem odd that a writer – that any person with imagination – would seek to sully and shatter a sacred treasure of humanity only because he finds himself excluded from its deep mystery. Needless to say, I did not support Ayatollah Khomenei’s call for Rushdie’s assassination; nor do I support the death penalty for apostasy. Islam supports free choice in matters of conscience, but the state may limit the activities of well-funded foreign missionaries that use pecuniary inducements to gain converts.

4.

Imran Khan has a great deal to say about the canker of Pakistan’s colonial legacy; the cultural divide that separates the class of brown sahibs and the great mass of Pakistanis who remain anchored in their history and traditions; and the new American masters this class has served since the departure of the British.

He also writes about his own struggles to overcome the Orientalist culture into which he was born, the culture of the brown sahibs, their sneering contempt for Islam, their denigration of the ‘natives’ and their culture. He describes his long and distinguished career in cricket that reveals a perfectionist and a man undaunted by failures. He shares with the readers his personal discovery of God, about growing spiritually through his own struggles in cricket and his charity work; finding inspiration in Islam’s great thinkers, poets and sages – most of all the great Islamic poet, visionary and philosopher, Muhammad Iqbal – but also seeking the blessings of nameless sufis, who prefer to live in obscurity and poverty despite their spiritual gifts. This review can only look at some of these issues; to accompany Imran Khan on his life journey, to walk through the many stages of his life, to explore his personal narrative of Pakistan’s political failures you have to read his Pakistan: A Personal History.

Quite rightly, Imran Khan blames the brown sahibs – a few thousand of the most powerful military officers, bureaucrats, and influential landed families – for never giving Pakistan the chance to develop into a self-respecting, sovereign and prosperous country. This class had retained or acquired its social rank, wealth and power during the colonial era by rendering loyal service to the British rulers; demonstrating their servility to their foreign masters by adopting their dress, mimicking their life style and mannerisms, and gaining familiarity with the history of British royalty, British place names, and British writers. They turned to jaundiced Orientalists for their knowledge of Islam, the history of Muslims and of India; and from them they acquired their deep contempt for Islam, the Muslims and their languages and traditions. Like their British masters, they interacted with the ‘natives’ – those who did not speak English or spoke it with a native accent – only as social inferiors, as clerks, peons, servants, peasants, low-ranking military officers and nameless jawans in the army.

Imran Khan provides several vignettes from the social life of these brown sahibs in Pakistan. “In the Gymkhana and the Punjab Club in Lahore,” he writes, “Pakistanis pretended to be English. Everyone spoke English including the waiters; the men dressed in suits; we, the members’ children, watched English films while the grown-ups danced to Western music on a Saturday night (43).” At Aitchison College, where the sons of Punjab’s landed elites were trained to become brown sahibs, boys “caught speaking in Urdu during school hours were fined, despite it being the official language of Pakistan (47).” Elsewhere, he writes, “When I was a boy I remember one of my uncles asking a cousin of mine, who was wearing shalwar kameez, why he was dressed like a servant (49-50).” Asked if he could speak Urdu – I can recall – the son of leading civil servant who served during General Ayub Khan’s tenure, shot back, “Only a little, when talking to the servants.”

Led by Iqbal, Jinnah and a small band of dedicated leaders – from the various provinces of British India – the struggles and sacrifices of ordinary Muslims had created a country they had hoped would make them proud, a country that would be guided by the highest Islamic ideals of justice, a country where they would be safe, where they could prosper, a country that would be a source of strength for the Muslims they had left behind in India, a country that would offer inspiration and leadership to the Islamicate. This was not to be. Within a few years of gaining independence, the brown sahibs in Pakistan seized control over the affairs of the country. That was the beginning of Pakistan’s descent into a shameless kleptocracy in the service of foreign powers.

“Far from shaking off colonialism,” writes Imran Khan, “our ruling elite slipped into its shoes (43-44).” Our brown sahibs made no significant changes to the colonial structures developed by the British to keep their Indian subjects on a tight leash. This omission was deliberate: the intent was to keep the ‘natives’ down, to continue to smother their long-suppressed energies, to stifle their creativity. As a result, the economy that Pakistan’s elites promoted soon became dependent on foreign loans; its capitalist class built its wealth on defaulted loans; its manufacturing sector could not move too far beyond processing raw materials; the educational standards at state institutions were allowed to deteriorate so that quality education was confined to the rich; and sixty years after independence more than half the population remains illiterate.

Over time, the emerging middle classes too began to mould themselves in the image of the brown sahibs. Since Urdu or the regional languages would get them nowhere in Pakistan’s private or public sectors, they began sending their children to English schools. Under colonial rule, the Muslim middle classes had abandoned Arabic and Persian, thus losing contact with the classics of their civilization; in the sixty years since gaining nominal independence, the new generations that attended English schools have become strangers to Urdu as well. Were it not for the logic of audience ratings – most viewers do not understand English – that forced the proliferating television channels to run their programs in Urdu, spoken Urdu too would be on its way out. Nevertheless, many of the actors who play lead roles in the Urdu serials can scarcely carry on a conversation in Urdu; the credits for these serials too are often presented in English. A growing number of commercial billboards in the cities also display their Urdu slogans and jingles in Roman letters.

The style of education at Aitchison College – the elite boarding school that he attended – Imran Khan writes, transformed Pakistani students “into cheap imitations of English public school boys.” These students adopted Western sportsmen, actors and pop stars as their role models. Only much later did Imran Khan come to understand how much this “education dislocated our sense of ourselves as a nation.” A generation later, this cultural dislocation is being reproduced on a much larger scale in dozens of elite schools – all run as profit-making enterprises – that prepare their students for the Cambridge O-level and A-level exams. As a result, writes Imran Khan, “Today our English-language schools produce ‘Desi Americans’ – young kids who, though they have never been out of Pakistan, have not only perfected the American twang but all the mannerisms (including the tilt of the baseball cap) just by watching Hollywood films.” In imitation, poorer children too are deserting the state-run Urdu schools to attend poorly staffed English medium schools run out of apartments but carrying exotic labels. Some are named after Catholic saints, in a tawdry attempt to bask in the prestige of Christian missionary schools. Others carry more hilarious names. One school, less inclined to borrow the halo of Catholic saints, calls itself, Oxford and Cambridge Islamic English-Medium School. I am aware that this faux Anglicization is being driven by global forces as well, but – in the Islamic world alone – Turkey, Iran and Indonesia continue to give primacy to their national languages.

A slavish Westernization among the elites has forced Pakistan into intel-lectual sterility. Over the past century, these Westernized classes have produced little world-class scholarship on the country’s history or social and economic structures; their scientific production too remains mostly meager and mediocre, if not worse. Nearly all the great Muslim thinkers and writers of the previous hundred and fifty years in South Asia had received their early education in wholly or partly traditional setting; and this includes Ghalib, Hali, Syed Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Iqbal, Abul Kalam Azad, Shibli Nu’mani, Syed Sulaiman Nadvi, Syed Abul ‘Ala Maududi, Saleemuzzaman Siddiqui, and Faiz, to name only a few illustrious figures from that period. Yet the growing cohorts of Western-educated Muslims since the 1900s have produced scarce any thinker or writer who could stand comparison with their predecessors. As the middle classes too increasingly submit themselves to the same shallow Westernization, this has deepened the poverty of Muslim intellect in South Asia. As the shift towards Western education has drained the Madrasas of its recruits from the middle classes, this has produced another deleterious effect: the coarsening of the Islamic discourse that flows from the madrasas. Imran Khan is deeply cognizant of this intellectual malaise. “If our Westernized classes started to study Islam,” writes Imran Khan, “not only would it be able to project the dynamic spirit of Islam but also help our society fight sectarianism and extremism… How can the group that is in the best position to project Islam do so when it sees Islam through Western eyes? The most damaging aspect of the gulf between the two sections of our society is that it has stopped the evolution of both religion and culture in Pakistan (340-1).”

The coarsening of religious discourse in the West too flows in large part from similar causes: the abandonment and denigration of religion and its mystical traditions by the intellectual classes. In the West this process began with the Renaissance and the Reformation, gained strength with the Enlightenment, and reached its apogee in the nineteenth century with the launching of Darwinian evolutionalism. As a result, over the past three centuries, Christianity has increasingly adopted hard fundamentalist positions – especially in the United States – that draw their inspiration from the conquest narratives of the Old Testament not the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels. Over the past half century, especially, the more fundamentalist variants of Christianity have become the refuge of whites who have been marginalized by the rapid economic and social changes in the United States. They vent their anger at immigrants, blacks and Muslims, at women who take charge of their bodies, and – paradoxically – at ‘big’ government, the only institution that could help reverse their economic marginalization. Increasingly also, they have been led by Christian Zionism and Israel’s military successes to identify with Jewish colonization of Palestine. In their commitment to Israeli expansionism, these messianic Christians are more intransigent than the Israelis themselves.

5.

Imran Khan blames the Westernized elites for the Pakistan’s deepening problems. Quite early on, these elites ensured that independence would merely exchange one set of white masters for another: the Americans for the British. Unlike the British, the Americans would rule over Pakistan through local surrogates; the brown faces of these surrogates would maintain the happy illusion that Pakistanis were in control of their destiny.

Although this neocolonial relationship has seen some ups and downs, starting in the 1990s, the top echelons of Pakistan’s governments have been appointed by Washington and, accordingly, their activities are monitored and supervised by the US ambassador in Islamabad. In turn, the Pakistani rulers and their cronies use the government to capture rent, much of which is transferred to foreign bank accounts. Pakistan’s subordination to the US reached a new low after the 9-11 attacks as the rulers – civilian and military – rented the country’s ports, highways, airspace, air bases, and, soon, its military to the US for moneys that have largely gone into private coffers.

Although Imran Khan does not spell out the manifold linkages that bind Pakistan’s corrupt rulers to the United States, he understands that Pakistan cannot move forward unless it ends its neocolonial ties to the United States. To this end, he sets himself several interrelated tasks. A Tehreek government will pull Pakistan out of America’s so-called war on terrorism; this means stopping the drone attacks on Pakistani territory, revoking all the territorial concessions General Musharraf made to the United States, and ending Pakistan’s war against its own people in Pakhtunkhwa. “Pakistan should disengage from this insane and immoral war,” writes Imran Khan (360). If this could be done, the chief factor that has been destabilizing Pakistan, pushing it to the edge of a civil war, will disappear. Pakistan’s military disengagement from the US will be followed by efforts to end Pakistan’s dependency on foreign loans to pay for gov-ernment programs, much of which have been diverted to private coffers in the past.

Is all this doable? Despite the dire warnings of slanted commentators, should Pakistan withdraw from the US war against terror, it is extremely unlikely that it would face a war. At present, the US has no stomach for starting another war even as it and Israel threaten to start a war against Iran. The US will certainly stop payments of the blood money, but this should not hurt Pakistan since most of this money finds its way back where it came from. China too will oppose any US attacks against Pakistan, and will stand ready to tide Pakistan through its balance of payments difficulties.

Pakistan can gain economic independence – Imran Khan argues – by ending tax evasions; this alone will double the government’s revenues. Ending corruption at the highest levels of government, therefore, is the Tehreek’s signature policy goal. Imran Khan has sought to develop a culture opposed to corruption in his own party; the Tehreek requires the party’s office bearers to declare their assets and tax returns; it has set in motion steps to elect all office bearers to the party; it will deny the party’s ticket to anyone with a record of corruption; and, it has promised to make all elected and unelected officials accountable to an independent National Accountability Board. Ending corruption at the top – Imran Khan maintains – will banish corruption from lower levels of government. I am afraid this is a wish not a well-considered expectation. It will take a lot of hard work – a variety of administrative reforms – to push back against Pakistan’s rampant corruption.

Reforming the country’s education system is a fundamental goal of the Tehreek. The country’s three-tiered system – consisting of private English-medium schools, public schools using Urdu and local lan-guages, and the madrasa system – is divisive. The English schools reproduce the class of brown sahibs and spread their pernicious culture to the growing middle classes; the poorly staffed and poorly equipped public schools deny the great majority of the country’s population a decent education; and the madrasas have become a welfare system for the poorest children. The plan is to replace this multi-tiered educational system, one that has perpetuated the colonial mindset, with a uniform system of education for everyone that will embrace mathematics, the natural and social sciences, and history while giving their proper place to the Pakistani languages, English, and the Islamic sciences.

Another important policy goal of the Tehreek is to create a system of local governance for Pakistan’s 50,000 villages. This will take local development funds out of the hands of politicians and put them in the hands of elected village councils, who will decide how this money is spent. They will also serve as the local government for the villages, with responsibility for maintaining municipal services, including a registry of births, deaths and marriages; and reviewing the work of local officials responsible for policing, health, irrigation, and education. In addition, like the panchayats of the pre-colonial era, the village councils will provide cheap and quick adjudication of local disputes.

Imran Khan has not articulated – at least in his book – an economic policy. Most likely, this omission is deliberate; he has had many occasions to set forth his economic policies but he has persisted in reiterating his position on a few signature issues, including corruption, lawlessness, and the betrayal of Pakistan’s , national interests by the rulers. As a result, we know very little about what policies he favors on infrastructure, industry, agriculture, urban labor, urban transportation, exports, energy, water, R&D, etc. This appears to suggest that he takes a rather Adam Smithian view of economic development. If you provide honest governance – I have heard him say this a few times – this will create the right incentives for all other matters to move in the right direction; the proverbial invisible hand will sort things out for the best. With their property rights secured, private individuals, pursuing their own interest, will generate savings, investments, innovation and, therefore, rapid economic growth. It is possible that Imran Khan has not had time to formulate policies in these areas; or he believes that the focus on a small number of core issues will best help to energize support for his party. In either case, it is this writer’s view, that he should quickly remedy this neglect. For good governance alone will not energize Pakistan’s people to become active economic agents of change. In addition, from an electoral standpoint, he is more likely to expand his support base by articulating his position on issues that are vital to the inter-ests of workers, peasants, ordinary citizens anxious for their health, and pro-spective investors in Pakistan’s economy.

Certainly, better governance will be a hugely positive thing for Pakistan; it can start to reverse the ruination produced by decades of rampant corruption. But good governance alone will not lift Pakistan out of poverty nor will it produce economic miracles. Objectively considered, no one will contest the British claim that they instituted ‘good governance’ in India once the rule of the East India Company was replaced by representatives of the Crown. Nevertheless, the evidence is also clear that during their long stay in India the British produced a great deal of economic misery; unfettered British imports destroyed India’s manufactures; British capital displaced indigenous capital from the most vital areas of the economy; their destruction of indigenous educational institutions produced mass illiteracy; and they pauperized the Indians. Good governance alone will not produce economic development if that governance is not used to encourage the growth of indigenous capital, institutions, technology, education and skills. Good governance must also be used to correct past social inequities and the new ones that a capitalist system is certain to produce. If good governance is used only in support of markets and capital, it will very quickly be overthrown by the inequities produced by the capitalist system. Let us not forget that Western democracies – especially in the United States and Britain – are now mostly hollow institutions; they are tolerated by corporate leaders only because they can game these systems to perpetuate their wealth and power.

6.

Notwithstanding the surge in his popularity in the cities, what are the chances that the Tehreek, if given the chance, will be able to form the country’s next government?

If Pakistan had a presidential system of government, it is more than likely that Imran Khan would sweep the polls; the rivals that any party might place against him would look like cretins. Under Pakistan’s parliamentary system, however, he faces an uphill task. In this decentralized system, where elections have to be won in several hundred local constituencies, the Tehreek candidates will have to fight against the power of corrupt local incumbents who will use their traditional authority, their money, dirty tricks, thugs, and help from their foreign masters to defeat a challenge that threatens to end their plundering binge. Winning a majority of these local contests cannot be easy.

On his path to power, Imran Khan will have to face a showdown with several factions of Pakistan’s corrupt elites. Many top generals, bureaucrats, politicians, media barons, loan-defaulting mill-owners, journalists, television anchors, and leaders of civil society have become entangled with American interests: they have cultivated ties with various US agencies; they or their close relatives hold green cards; they or their relatives work for subsidiaries of Western corporations; they have advised or worked for Western think tanks; their NGOs have thrived on foreign funding; and they have become rich and are hungry for more. Perhaps, the corrupt elites may concede victory to the Tehreek, since they may soon engineer a return to power; but it appears more likely that they will fight back, since this will end even if temporarily the bonanza they have enjoyed since 2001.

If it appears that the Tehreek is going to win the next elections scheduled for 2013, will these elections be held or, if they are allowed to proceed, will they not be rigged to ensure the Tehreek’s defeat? Alternatively, the political parties in power may try to increase the chaos in Pakistan’s cities, and thus pave the way for a military takeover that may end Imran Khan’s political career. More simply, the CIA or some segment of the corrupt elites, or the two working together, may assassinate Imran Khan. Can Imran Khan forestall these subterfuges? None of these options are certainties, but not to anticipate them and have contingent plans to deal with them would be reckless.

The power of the corrupt elites will be hardest to dislodge in Pakistan’s rural hinterlands that are still dominated largely by traditional power barons: the landlords, dynasties of so-called pirs, and tribal chiefs. Despite his tremendous charisma and notwithstanding his populist rhetoric, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto chose the easy route to electoral victory by co-opting the traditional rural power barons. This compromise brought an easy victory but, bending to the power of these barons, Bhutto proceeded to marginalize the left block in his party. At the same time, he implemented his farcical ‘socialist’ agenda of destroying Pakistan’s nascent capitalist class; he seized and handed over their industries, banks and even schools to the stalwarts in his party. Imran Khan too is aware of the handicap he faces in a parliamentary system; and – on a smaller scale so far – he too has opened leadership positions in his party to the old power barons. This compromise is certain to alienate the old workers in his party, but it also carries the more serious risk of alienating the young voters who have pinned their hopes for change on the Tehreek’s commitment to establish a just order in Pakistan. The propagandists of the old order are already hammering home this point. It does not inspire confidence when the Tehreek takes a strong stand against drone strikes but appoints a former foreign minister – who supported these strikes during his tenure – as the vice-chairman of his party.

Imran Khan’s defense of these compromises is not convincing. These old politicians – he parries – are welcome to join his party but he will vet them for corruption before he awards them the party’s tickets to the national and provincial assemblies. If the Tehreek cannot win the rural constituencies without enlisting the local power barons, he will have to embrace many more of their kind. Should he do this, however, he will surrender his chief strength – the unwavering commitment to reform the old order. Once the scions of the traditional political families begin to fill his party – even if they look less corrupt than others – the Tehreek cannot implement the reforms that will hurt the economic and political interests of this class of people.

Aware of these risks, Imran Khan is seeking to strengthen his hand by organizing his base, consisting of younger voters. He has launched a drive to register them as members of the Tehreek. Once the membership rolls are ready, he promises that they will elect their local, regional and national leaders. It is a formidable undertaking; it has never been done by any party other than the Jamat-e-Islami that restricts membership to practicing Muslims. If the Tehreek succeeds in this endeavor, this may begin to alter the dynamics of power at the local levels. As a grass-roots party with a strong organization, it could stand up more effectively against the power of the local barons. This will reduce the need to bring these rural barons into the party; the Tehreek could use them selectively to win a few seats in districts where its support base is weakest.

The Tehreek has a chance to extend its populist appeal to the rural areas with its plan to institute thousands of elected village councils. This is the only program that carries the prospect of mobilizing the peasants behind the Tehreek, but for this populist appeal to take roots, the party has to do two things. It must ensure that the rural population hears about this program and understands the benefits it can bring to them. More importantly, the Tehreek has to come up with a plan to assure the rural poor that these village councils will not be captured by the local power barons. How is this to be done? If the party members can be organized at the level of the villages, they can pit their organized strength against the bullying of the local thugs. The Tehreek should also create mobile brigades of young idealist college students who will be ready to travel and deploy to the villages to support – with their disciplined but non-violent presence – the rural poor during the elections to the village councils. The elections can be staggered to ensure that these college volunteers are available at the village elections. In addition, these elections should be held only after the Tehreek has had time to reform the police force.

Since it began drawing crowds, its rivals have accused the Tehreek of receiving support from the ‘establishment,’ a code word for the security agencies working under the umbrella of the Pakistan army. This is a smear. The Tehreek‘s support has grown because the people can see more plainly than before their country being pushed ever closer to the brink by the unbridled corruption of their rulers: and they see Imran as their only real chance of reversing their country’s slide into chaos. The Tehreek should continue to distance itself from any material assistance of the security agencies, but I hope that that it enjoys the tacit sup-port of the mid-level and junior officers and the jawans in the military, who cannot be too happy at having to kill other Pakistanis and whose lives were sacrificed by the military leadership so that they and the civilians leaders could collect blood money from the United States. In 1996, the Pakistan army faced a spate of desertions from its ranks as they were asked to fight the Afghan resistance and their Pakistani hosts. Although these desertions were contained, it cannot be doubted that resentment still simmers in the army’s rank and file against the military leadership for their readiness to do the bidding of the United States for pecuniary gain. One hopes that as the Tehreek ratchets its campaign, it will work in subtle ways to win the esteem of the rank and file in Pakistan’s army. The knowledge that their own rank and file have their eyes on their backs will restrain the generals who may want to extend their profitable partnership with the United States.

The Tehreek should also send out signals – convincing signals – that it has a second arrow in its quiver. It must let Pakistanis know that it is ready to mobilize its ranks for more forceful action if the corrupt political elites will use dirty tricks to extend their corruption binge for another five years. Pakistan cannot survive another five years of their depredations. In times of crisis – and Pakistan has never faced a greater crisis than it does now – the movement to save the country must be ready to proceed along two tracks: change through the electoral process but if that is obstructed the people must be ready to bring down the corrupt rulers through massive and sustained but non-violent protests. Victory only comes to those who are prepared to broaden their democratic struggle if change becomes impossible through the ballot box.

This last, the encultured view of ourselves, robs us of our class identity. Very few of us consider ourselves working class. The term has been made to seem a musty relic of the nineteenth century, synonymous with lower class, a disreputable band of losers who are to be feared and perhaps pitied, but certainly not to be identified with. Instead we are offered a hierarchy of many classes: upper, upper middle, middle, lower middle, and last and certainly least, the lumpen lower. Within these we are fragmented further by conflicting differences: ethnic, religious, gender, life style. We’re supposed to identify with our niche and our job and to strive to move up or at least not slip down in the hierarchy. But more and more of us are slipping down, losing the few securities we had. In our bewildered anger we find allies only within our isolated niche, so our struggles are ineffective.

Almost all of us are, in fact, working class. Everyone in the world who has to work for someone else for the essentials of living is working class. Only when we join together in solidarity will we succeed.

The elite have also fragmented us geographically. The most exploited are far away from the centers of power and thus invisible to us except for media images of illegal aliens storming our borders or insurgents attacking our soldiers. They live under the heel of authoritarian governments held in power by the rich nations and are forced to work under deplorable conditions. The wealth extracted from their labor has enabled the corporations to pay their employees in the home country better wages, thus minimizing discontent here and stimulating consumption of their products.

That economic arrangement is changing, however, as global competition intensifies. Selling in the world market has become more important than selling in the home country. Competing globally requires low prices, so corporations are slashing wages and benefits. The international working class is being leveled. Our task now is to unite and overthrow the elite that rules us all.

This elite is composed of many nationalities and has many internal conflicts. They even make war on each other when economics demands it. But they always recognize their overriding interests as a class, and they will do everything in their considerable power to defend those interests. We, the workers of the world, need to recognize and defend our own class interests with as much determination as our rulers.

They have designed a political system in the USA that ensures their power monopoly. The candidates of both major parties represent their interests. Through corporate financing, winner-take-all elections, ballot-access laws, and slanted media coverage, they effectively exclude alternatives.

To break free of their political control and build genuine democracy, we must delegitimize in particular the Democratic Party, which exists to channel potentially radical discontent into dead-end streets. The Democratic Party is the graveyard of social movements, capturing people’s hopes for fundamental changes, then burying them. It produces only superficial reforms that strengthen capitalism.

Each of us should examine the parties and organizations on the left, find one that matches our orientation, and actively support it. Just being angry at the system isn’t enough. Unless we are organized and militant, a viable alternative to the capitalist parties won’t emerge. The best program I’ve found is the Socialist Equality Party’s .

Labor unions, like the Democratic Party, have become merely reformist. They have been purged of any anti-capitalist leadership and now serve the same function on the economic front that the Democrats serve on the political front: to convince the working class to accept the dictates of capital. Union leadership collaborates with employers to worsen the conditions of their members. They have become functionaries of capitalism and are richly rewarded for it. Workers are going to have to build an independent base of power that will throw out this bureaucracy and militantly confront bosses worldwide.

The reformism pushed by the Democratic Party and the labor unions is reinforced by the liberal media. They foster the idea that the system is basically good but just has some problems that need to be fixed. This is appealing because it’s easy. Instead of revolution to replace the system, we just need to repair it.

Reforms have in the past improved a few conditions. Social Security helped stave off abject poverty in old age, and Medicare helped protect a family’s savings from catastrophic health costs. From the 1950s to the ’70s unions were able to force through higher wages and better working conditions in many industries. But these hard-fought reforms are being reversed now because of capitalism’s need to reduce prices to compete with emerging industrial powers such as China and India. The pressure of international competition is being shifted on to us, the workers, and the Democrats and unions are implementing that. In this new economic reality, reformism has become a coward’s dream, a way of avoiding the unpleasantness of protracted struggle. We need to abandon its delusion and prepare to fight for fundamental changes that will replace oligarchic capitalism with democratic socialism.

Another thread that binds us is the image of socialism that has been burned into our brains. We are continually persuaded that it means brutal dictatorship, concentration camps, no freedom, a slave state. To counter this, we need to criticize the regimes of the Soviet Union and China and point out that they weren’t socialist. The totalitarian tradition in their cultures and constant attack by the capitalist nations kept them from achieving anything close to real socialism. In many cases the government took over as the exploitative boss, and the workers had little power. Real socialism means economic democracy, where we decide together how our economic life will be organized. It puts the resources and productive capacity of the world in the hands of its people, who use them to meet human needs rather than to generate private profits for a few owners.

We are educated to serve the system: to be obedient, to respect authority, to fit into a hierarchy. We are channeled into learning skills the corporations need, and our labor has become just another commodity. Our deepest interests and talents often remain undeveloped, unrecognized even by ourselves. This won’t change until students, parents, teachers, and other workers come together and educate one another to take power.

The mass media exist to control the masses by shaping our perceptions of reality. The pap they feed us switches off our brains, so we can’t analyze society as a system. Instead of thought, we are offered a dazzling array of personal emotions and sensory stimulation to distract us from the bleak reality of our lives.

Through entertainment and news the media fixates us on physical violence, so we don’t perceive the structural violence that causes it. We get lurid, fear-arousing accounts of violence committed by ghetto youths and Muslim guerrillas accompanied with commentaries calling for tough measures to combat these vicious berserkers. We get no accounts of the structural violence of poverty and oppression that capitalism and imperialism have created there. It’s this built-in structural violence that generates the physical violence.

The corporate media exists also to stimulate greed and consumption. Capitalism divides us from one another, and the isolation imposed by this false separation generates insecurity and a sense of incompleteness. It creates hollow personalities craving to fill an inner emptiness, then it comes to the rescue by promising satisfaction through consumption. First it causes the void, then convinces us to fill it with things — beautiful, fascinating, stimulating, extraordinary, sexy things. Lots of them. And so much the better that they never really fill our needs, because then we need more of them.

Dissident Voice and other alternative publications are awaking people from the stupor induced by this mainstream propaganda. They deserve our support.

To escape from the mental manipulation, we must strive for inner self sufficiency so we won’t need all that garbage the media is selling us. This self sufficiency has its basis in our shared humanity, and if we tune in to that, the superficial substitutes of commercial products and entertainment will lose their appeal. A good way to combat such conditioning is a consumer strike. Buy as little as possible. Turn off the television. By overcoming our need for entertainment, we can develop our own authentic creativity. When we’re not consuming as much, the planet will breathe a sigh of relief. Instead of hiding behind fashion, jewelry, and cosmetics, let’s face the world as we are and let the beauty of our defiance show.

The media creates images and myths that reinforce the existing ideologies. Rugged individualism, for example, validates the “every man for himself” ethos of capitalism. The belief that we are isolated beings striving for our own gratification is an axiom of our society. Men are particularly enamored of it, taught to identify with the mountain man, the lone wolf, the entrepreneur.

The separations between people are easy to see: each of us inhabit a different body. Our connections are much more fundamental, but they are invisible, so a shallow culture like ours doesn’t perceive them. We can overcome this by centering ourselves in our connectedness and acting from it. In our lives and in our art we can demonstrate the deeper commonality that underlies our surface separations. Our genuine individuality can be best developed within this context.

Reinforcing traditional masculinity is one of the chief ways in which the elite seek to keep the working class on its side. They exploit the fact that many men cling to maleness as the last power left to them. Working-class men have almost no say over their work lives; machismo has become their only realm of agency. This is exploited by elements of the media, who portray leftists as intent on rendering traditional males extinct. Admittedly, there’s a grain of truth in this. Traditions of dominance and aggression, whether practiced by men or women, need to be resisted. The real attack on working class men, though, is coming not from leftists but from economic forces that are increasingly constricting their lives and limiting their possibilities down to low paying, exhausting jobs. The rage this generates in them is deflected by the media towards leftists, feminists, and minorities, who are actually the core opposition to those economic forces.

We need to show traditional men that socialism will give them economic security and power in the work place. When they have that, they won’t need to dominate their wives and children. If they persist in doing so, society has to prevent them from that. The dominator mentality is a pathology we must overcome.

Gender politics by itself won’t build socialism. In fact, in many cases it ends up serving capitalism. But gender studies can help break the patriarchal mold that keeps producing the same authoritarian personality type. It opens up new possibilities and fosters psychological diversity. By showing that our categories of feminine and masculine aren’t natural but cultural, it calls into question the naturalness of other institutions. It helps us see that capitalism also is not an inherent necessity but rather a product of social forces open to change. Gender subversion can lead to political subversion.

The enforcement mechanisms of society — military, police, and courts — are the bottom line of oppression. All three are licensed to kill and do so regularly. The military are the spear carriers of capitalism. Their job is to defend and expand the empire, and they slaughter millions for that goal. The police live up to their motto, To Protect and To Serve, but they are primarily protecting and serving an oppressive social structure, defending property and its owners against attacks by the deprived. The courts are run by judges who are for the most part members of the elite. They are the final arbiters of punishment, locking up anyone who threatens the system, primarily poor minorities. They have created an American gulag, an egregious, ever-growing prison-industrial complex that crushes those who dare defy its rules.

We need to show the soldiers and police they are workers too. We all have the same basic interests and the same common enemy: their employer. If we win enough of them to our side, they will stand with us rather than against us when a revolutionary situation develops. Winning the judges to our side is unlikely. Most of them are ruling class. We’ll probably just have to find some socially useful work for them, like sweeping the sidewalks.

Our rulers (yes, we really do have rulers) try to convince us that there’s no solution to humanity’s problems, no alternative to the way things are now. This is human nature. Get used to it.

Fortunately the international working class is refusing to get used to it. It is resisting this new wave of impoverishment the corporations and their governments are trying to force onto it. Our bound Gulliver is starting to awaken. It knows now it is fettered and is testing its strength against these bonds. In some places it has already broken a few. The rule of the Lilliputians is coming to an end. This won’t happen quickly, though. A long struggle lies ahead of us. But the tide has changed and is now running in our favor.

The uprising began in the Muslim world because they are under the most direct imperialist attack. It has spread to the NATO countries, the chief instigators of the attacks, because their populations are having to pay the bills for this war through social cutbacks and lower wages. As the uprising spreads globally, the elite will do everything they can to crush it. They will try to divide us and make us fight one another. They will offer tempting reforms and compromises that will allow them to maintain ownership. They will bribe some of our opportunistic leaders with promises of token power if they cooperate. They will jail us. They will even kill some of us. But if we persist, holding to a militant rather than a reformist course, we will eventually free ourselves of them and build a system that emphasizes the humane in humanity. This is our time, a historic battle for liberation.

The real-deal occupation of Wall Street is an outgrowth of the Union Square occupation where occupiers recently conducted a teach-in aimed at the New York Police Department (NYPD). David Graeber read off from an enlarged copy of the 2000 federal court ruling to the NYPD (you know the country is in trouble when anarchists are schooling cops on court rulings), occupiers showed the NYPD a large map of the Union Square area, explained where they intended to lawfully sleep, and did so without evictions or mass arrests.

Turns out that Clay Claiborne of Occupy LA was right to insist on using existing laws against state repression is the way to go.

With this in mind, Occupy Wall Street decided to occupy Wall Street, minus the tents and the baggage that came with them. Occupation 2.0 is lighter and more mobile, able to move off the sidewalk when necessary and back on when the danger of arrest passes. The People’s Library is back and a makeshift kitchen will probably soon follow.

The Spring of Assemblies, the weekly marches on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) starting in Zuccotti Park on Fridays at 2 p.m., and the new and improved Wall Street occupation are part of the American Spring grand strategy building up to the May 1 general strike.

If this occupation reaches critical mass, with hundreds or even one thousand to join the re-occupation of Wall Street with sleeping bags, the sidewalks around the New York Stock Exchange and the New York Federal Reserve will be lined with people from all walks of life, creating a dramatic visual contrast between the well-dressed con men who work there and the http://www.nycga.net/springtraining/ who are literally sleeping on cardboard to make their voices heard just in time for May 1. “A day without the 99%” could mean the 1% and 99% staring each other down in the Financial District. Luckly for them, we don’t have torches or pitchforks.

Yet.

So if you spent any time in Zuccotti Park during its glory days, come down to Wall Street and Nassau or join the Friday marches on the NYSE.

Welcome to the post-post-eviction phase of Occupy.

Americans have been watching authentic bottom-up revolutions in other countries but remain oblivious to a very different kind of revolution by elites that has been in progress for over three decades in the US.  It has not destroyed the government or Constitution, merely bought control of both.  Our government was not overthrown in a bloody revolution.  It was purchased to win the class war against the 99 percent.

Call it the frog revolution.  It is best understood by the parable of the frog in water that stays in it as the temperature is raised, ultimately to the boiling point, killing the frog.  The key indicator of the US frog revolution is a mountain of data showing the rise in economic inequality, the loss of upward economic mobility, and the killing of the middle class.  The vast majority of Americans, the 99 percent of frogs, remain ignorant of how they are being destroyed by that infamous rich and powerful one percent.

Note that in a poll released by Pew, 19 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that “success in life is pretty much determined by forces outside of our control,” the highest number since 1994.  It would be much higher if there was not an epidemic of delusional thinking.  But more on target, 40 percent of Americans — also the highest number since 1994 — agreed with the statement that “hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most people.”  For the counter-revolution we need that number must get much higher.

Consider new data about American reality from a study by University of California economist Emmanuel Saez.  In 2010, despite non healed wounds from the great recession, an amazing 93 percent of the additional income created in the country that year, compared to 2009 — $288 billion — went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, those with at least $352,000 in income. That delivered an average single-year pay increase of 11.6 percent to each of these households.  Yes, the rich are getting richer.

But there is more to this depressing story. All the talk about the top 1 percent misses the truth about the super rich.  In 2010, 37 percent of these additional earnings went to just the top 0.01 percent, a miniscule collection of about 15,000 households with average incomes of $23.8 million. They saw their incomes rise by 21.5 percent.  The richer you are the richer you get.

What about ordinary Americans?  The bottom 99 percent received a microscopic $80 increase in pay per person in 2010, after adjusting for inflation. The top 1 percent, whose average income was $1,019,089, saw an 11.6 percent increase in income.  Most Americans are no longer sharing in economic recovery or growth.

Consider this finding: David Madland and Nick Bunker of the Center for American Progress recently found that in pre-frog revolution 1968, when 28 percent of the workforce was unionized, 53 percent of the nation’s income went to the middle class.  In 2010, when only 11.9 percent of the nation’s workers were unionized, the fraction earned by the middle class had fallen to 46.5 percent.  And if current efforts to destroy unions are successful, the vast majority of non-unionized workers will suffer more.

Still more numbing numbers: Over time the top 1 percent has done better in successive economic recoveries of the past two decades. In the Clinton era expansion, 45 percent of the total income gains went to the top 1 percent; in the Bush recovery, it was 65 percent; now it is 93 percent.   How much more negative impacts of the frog revolution will it take for a counter-revolution to take back our country?

Add to all this: Research by Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution, as part of the Economic Mobility Project, has shown that intergenerational mobility in the United States has fallen far below the levels in Germany, Finland, Denmark and other more social democratic nations of Northern Europe.  In other words, the American Dream really is nothing more than a big, delusional lie that far too many Americans still cling to and that mainstream politicians still boast about.  Those politicians enable the elites to sustain the top-down frog revolution.

Listen, all around the 99 percent the socio-economic waters are still being heated up more by the rich and powerful 1 percent that runs the two-party plutocracy.  Delusional frog-citizens are mostly blind to the hot water they are in.  Far too many are still clinging to the myth that voting for one party or the other will somehow make things better.  Wrong.  Both major parties have allowed and sustained the top-down frog revolution.  What we need for the counter-revolution is finding a way to overturn the status quo political system.

A major opportunity is using what the Founders gave us in the Constitution: an Article V convention of state delegates with the power to propose reform constitutional amendments.  This should be a priority for both the Tea Party and Occupy movements and any candidate coming through the Americans Elect nomination process on the Internet should also support using the convention option.

What is at risk without effective rebellion is much more than dollars.  Harold Meyerson got it right: “If belief and participation in democracy are sustained by people’s conviction that democracy produces good economic outcomes, then the growing concentration of wealth and income in the United States is a long-term threat to everything we profess to stand for.”

There’s this group of Anglo-American males, mostly well-to-do and some wealthy. They’re not big fans of minorities (especially African-Americans) or the poor. They hate homosexuals. They feel they know better than the rest of us what’s best for the community, so they’ve anointed themselves as the right folks to restore order (as they see it) and clean things up.

Republican Party 2012?

No.

Well, yes. But conservatives of the new millennium are not the ones I had in mind.

I was actually thinking back to Pascal High School in Fort Worth, Texas, circa 1985. I was remembering the Legion of Doom.

By all accounts, members of Pascal High’s Legion of Doom were All-American students from good, mostly privileged families, some even inhabiting the rarified confines of the Tanglewood and Overton Park neighborhoods on the West side.

The Legion of Doom didn’t like the growing minority population at Pascal. They didn’t like the increased levels of theft and drug use that they attributed to the increased minority population at Pascal. And, based on a misguided, self-indulgent sense of righteous indignation, these clean-cut, flag-waving Caucasian students decided to do something about it.

The Legion of Doom threatened classmates with guns and shot out a local porch light with an M-1 Carbine.  Members vandalized lockers. They painted a dummy black and used it for target practice. They constructed a homemade bazooka and built a gasoline bomb. They harassed poor kids and homosexuals. They smashed in the windows of one student’s car and pipe-bombed another. They gutted one student’s cat and splayed it across his steering wheel.

The hateful antics of the Legion of Doom and its members’ subsequent indictments and trials were well-known and made for rather unpleasant news coverage of Cowtown during the mid- to late ‘80s. But what didn’t get covered was the Legion’s philosophical underpinnings. Members of the Legion were conservative athletes and honor students. They were straight-laced sons of lawyers and executives and even one Christian minister. As one member’s mother put it, they were all “pro-Republican.”

The relevance of the Legion of Doom’s political leanings should never be downplayed. The Ronald Reagan presidency ushered in an alarming uptick in all things conservative, and many Republicans—especially those who had held their heads in shame since Watergate—were fat and sassy again. As pop act Huey Lewis and the News so aptly phrased things, it was once again “hip to be square.”

The Legion obviously took things too far. Their victims had had a hard enough time trying to act white or straight or upper middle class; demanding that they BE SQUARE OR ELSE just added insult to the many injuries the Legion inflicted.

Passing years, however, provide perspective.

It seems to me now that the Legion of Doom was just ahead of its time.

In a society where abortion-providers are gunned down in church, Democratic Senators are shot in public and African-American teenagers are killed for being black, the Legion of Doom today would probably be a hit with hardcore Republicans and get serious consideration for guest spots on Fox News. And Legion members would undoubtedly be hailed by fascist blowhards like Rush Limbaugh as misunderstood good Americans (like him).

We live in troubling times and it seems that for every sane person you run into, you meet two wackos. And not Charlie Manson or Jeffrey Dauhmer wackos.  I’m referring to Ward and June Cleaver wackos.  I’m talking about Mayberry freaks.  A large percentage of Middle America has gone zombie and can only be sated by gorging on human hatred and fear.

In the midst of the Legion of Doom news cycle, a sociology professor from Texas Christian University (in Fort Worth) noted that Legion members may have presented themselves as well-meaning vigilantes working to rid their community of destructive elements, but their explanation smacked of a wishful rationalization posited “to soothe their conscience.”

Smells like team spirit in the trenches of the 2012 Republican base.

A black man is president. Homosexuals are allowed to fight for their country. The nation is becoming more open-minded and diverse.

The extreme Right still slouches towards square-ness with “Papers Please” laws and selective voter disenfranchisement campaigns, but things are not going well for zombie bigots. Like Fort Worth’s mostly forgotten Legion, their doom is at hand by their own hand.

They also try to scare us into voting for him by claiming a Republican president would be much worse. In fact the differences between Republicans and Democrats are mostly a matter of image and style. Their military policies are equally aggressive, and their economic policies differ only in nuances. But the Democrats put a friendly face on their administration of capital. Their rhetoric is sprinkled with populist slogans as they’re bailing out banksters and dropping bombs.

The more blatant style of a Republican president might actually be better now because it would generate more opposition at home and abroad. This opposition needs to build into militant resistance before it will produce real change. To prevent this sort of uprising was one of the reasons the corporate elite backed Obama. And until recently he’s succeeded in quieting dissent. With masterful PR legerdemain, he put the antiwar movement to sleep while continuing to fight the wars. Under a Republican president we could revive the spirit of revolt and mobilize the people of the world against the empire. It’s going to take that kind of international struggle to overthrow this colossus.

Another strategy of deception is to claim that the good old days of middle-class prosperity can be brought back. Both major parties say their policies will restore high employment at good wages. But those times are gone. Those were the conditions in the prior, Keynesian phase of capitalism, when the main market for products was the home country. Wage increases were tolerated then because they stimulated consumption. Now the market is global, and corporations face severe competition from emerging industrial powers such as China and India, which have far lower labor costs. To compete with their prices, US and European corporations must slash wages and benefits. If they are to maintain long-term dominance, they must also extend their hold on essential resources. Control over Mideast oil and a pipeline through Afghanistan aren’t just things they’d like to have. They need them to hold on to their power in the present consolidation phase of capitalism, when the less effective predators are eliminated and wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer giant corporations. The system demands they impoverish their workers and kill millions of people. Capitalism is inherently aggressive and predatory, and this intensifies in its later stages. Reforms can’t change its basic nature.

In addition to pushing reformism, the liberal media portray the economic crisis as being a problem of distribution. The 99% have too little, the 1% have too much, so the 1% should be taxed and regulated so the rest of us get a fair share. This sounds good, and it has elected a string of Democrats who talk about it while loyally serving the interests of the 1%.

The core problem is not distribution but ownership. If forced to, the 1% will accept higher taxation and regulation, as long as they maintain ownership. With the economic power in their hands, they can reverse the taxes and regulations later, as we have seen.

The only fair share is an equal share for everyone. To achieve that we must take the means of production — the natural resources, factories, banks, and major corporations — away from the 1% and use them for the benefit of us all.

The 99% doesn’t need a bigger piece of the pie. We need to own the pie. We planted the seeds for the pie, tilled and harvested them, ground the flour, cut the sugar cane, churned the butter, bake the pie, delivered it to the store, rang up the sale, and made the owners rich. It’s our pie! But we’re going to have to take it back.

We’re not going to do that through liberal regulations and reforms that leave ownership in the hands of the 1%. And we’re also not going to do it through a dictatorship such as the Soviet Union or China. Those societies had no tradition of democracy, so they kept their totalitarian character. We however can build a democratic, decentralized form of socialism.

The first step towards that is to free ourselves from the strategies of deception with which the oligarchs try to shape our minds. The second is to join with others in active struggle. Just being angry isn’t enough; to succeed we must be organized and militant. Dissident Voice is a resource for both these steps.

This year the poverty meeting attracted a surprisingly large number of people, estimated to be well over a hundred. Many appeared to be ‘workers’ in the system – possibly on ‘company’ or taxpayer time.  There were also some interested private citizens.  A tiny number – maybe five or six – were real people, those who depend on the system for survival.

This article was inspired by the comments heard at the conference. Most showed a lack of understanding about the causes and effects of poverty.  The people meant well and were well-motivated. They were sincere and the compassion in their hearts was apparent, but many in our culture across the United States just do not get it.   Our culture is obsessed with a worship of wealth and material goods.  The bottom line is that we live in a very classist society.

In Bennington there are three very distinct classes.  First, there are the ‘fancy people’. They are the ones who rule and control everything. They are on the boards — the hospital board, the library board, the select board, the school boards.  They attend the formal fundraisers for the hospital and other institutions. They have the power — even the power over life and death. They, occasionally during a medical crisis in the hospital, make the decision to pull the plug or allow life to go on.

Then there is the large group of ordinary citizens. Some are blue collar workers.  Most work hard. Love their families. And have had family in Vermont for generations.  They acknowledge the class system in conversation often.   They call it the ol’ boys network – croneyism.

The third group consists of those who are in need. Those on the bottom of the economic pile.  At the conference some of the most impressive comments were made by a poor mother of two disabled children. She talked about the oppressive avalanche of redundant paper work required to get any tiny benefit.  The social services system is designed by nameless, faceless, unelected beaurocrats.  It is set up to assure maximum job security to the workers in the system. To a struggling family it often feels like an attack of the ‘paper churners’.   Being poor is a full time job.  Sadly, it often takes precious time away from the children.

Below are some observations, made during many years of studying the culture, not only in Vermont but across the US.

Poverty means living with shame.

Poverty means working three jobs, and still not ‘making it’.

Poverty means that you go to work when you are sick.  Worse than that you send your children to school when they are sick.

Sometimes poverty means that you skip meals so that your children can eat.

Poverty means that your housing is never secure.

Once in a while, poverty means that your child will be stereotyped and misjudged by his teacher.

Poverty means having no dependable source of transportation.

Poverty means that you will receive inferior health care – maybe no health care at all.

Poverty means that you have no access to dental care. Remember the death of Diamonte Driver – a 12 year-old Maryland boy.  His mother could not afford dental care for him. He died of a tooth abscess. An $80 tooth extraction would have saved his life.

Poverty is not like that described in The Waltons. Poverty can mean isolation from family and friends.

Poverty can mean missing your mother’s funeral because you had to go to work.

Poverty means you are invisible and voiceless.

Poverty means that no matter how hard you work, you will still be on the wrong side of the desk.

Poverty means that your hobby is not skiing or surfing.  It is surviving.

Living in poverty means that you will probably never hold elective office.

Poverty is declaring bankruptcy because your wife has cancer.

Being a low income father means that you will miss your son’s games because you have to work.

Living in poverty means that you have no options – no choices about where to live, what to eat.

Poverty means that you pay for the family groceries with a credit card – until it is maxed out.

Poverty means following all of the rules. Then graduating with oppressive student debt so that the president of UVM can be paid $447,000 per year.

Being poor means no access to gyms, fitness centers, etc.

Being poor means that you do not have equal access to the legal system.

Being a poor child means that you will be at increased risk of being bullied.

Being poor means that you dread the holidays. Your family celebrations are not like those depicted in Norman Rockwell paintings.

Being a baby in a low income family means that you might spend all of your infancy strapped to a plastic baby carrier in a day care center, while your mother goes to work.

Being poor could mean that you are the waitress serving Mothers’ Day dinner to other mothers in a fancy restaurant.

Being poor keeps you on the wrong side of the digital divide – no computer, no ISP, no cell phone, no Facebook, no Twitter.

Being poor might mean that you never get to see the ocean - never get to see your children playing in the surf…

Being young and poor in Bennington might mean that you never get to go to a library that doesn’t ban books.

Being poor means that you feel disenfranchised when there is so much focus on the middle class, and so little on the poor.

Living in poverty means that you care more about what is in your grocery sack than any news about Goldman Sachs.

Poverty means that your life-span will be shortened.

Even in death you might not escape the chains of poverty.  Being poor might mean that you have no say in the final disposal of your remains.  Cremation might be imposed, even if you would have preferred burial.

Being poor means that you carry the burden of the misjudgment of others.

Will the United States ever rise above the evils of classism and racism?   Is ‘poverty’ the new black?