Wednesday, January 15, 2025

New York celebrates the anniversary of Swami Vivekananda's birth

NEW YORK (RNS) — Swami Vivekananda founded New York's first ashram. He was feted on what would have been his 162nd birthday.



Congregants attend a birthday commemoration service for Swami Vivekananda at the Vedanta Society of New York, Sunday, Jan. 12, 2025, in Manhattan.
 (RNS photo/Richa Karmarkar)

Richa Karmarkar
January 13, 2025


NEW YORK (RNS) — The Vedanta Society of New York is easy to miss. The center of worship, housed in a plain-old brownstone on the Upper West Side, has hosted dozens of monks, lamas and other “spiritual celebrities” over more than 100 years — all thanks to Swami Vivekananda, the young monk who brought the ancient Hindu spiritual wisdom to the city.

Vivekananda was born 162 years ago in Kolkata, India. Often referred to as “America’s first guru,” Vivekananda whose birth name was Narendra Nath Dutta, founded the Vedanta Society of New York in 1894, one year after landing in the U.S. It became the very first ashram of its kind outside of India.

“He said New York is ‘the purpose’ of America,” said Swami Sarvapriyananda, the presiding minister of the center. “That spirit, that vibrancy, the dynamism, the ability to execute and achieve, he noticed it, and he sought to channel it in a spiritual direction.”

About 80 New Yorkers, including Hindus, Christians, Buddhists and others of any or no label, piled into the center on Sunday (Jan. 12) to celebrate the life of the pioneer who opened the door to a wave of Indian wisdom and teachers in the West.

Vivekananda, whose given name combines the Sanskrit words for “conscience” and “bliss,” was 30 years old when he traveled to Chicago to speak at the Parliament of the World’s Religions as its first Hindu Indian delegate, where he gave a historic speech that emphasized the Vedantic Hindu teaching of coexistence and non-sectarianism.


Swami Vivekananda, seated second from right, at the Parliament of the World’s Religions, Sept. 11, 1893, in Chicago. (Photo courtesy Creative Commons)

“So large a mission to perform, yet like a child was he,” sang the congregants from a Vedanta hymn book at the beginning of Sunday’s service. “Into a strange new country tossed, often hungry, often lost, improvident of time or cost, but it was meant to be.”
RELATED: New film depicting ‘hero’s journey’ of Swami Vivekananda comes to PBS

Swami Sarvapriyananda, whose name is a combination of “all-loving” and “bliss,” spoke for an hour about his predecessor, who, he said, was a sporty “life of the party” and who at age 18 asked bluntly to the gurus around him: “Have you seen God?”

As the story goes, Sri Ramakrishna, the guru who took Vivekananda in, replied: “Yes, I have. And you can, too.”

Vivekananda soon became one of the 16 direct disciples of the Ramakrishna Order: a mission of the Vedanta spiritual tradition that often discusses existence, the universe and the interconnectedness of all beings as told in the Vedas. But Vivekananda was different from the rest, said Sarvapriyananda. It was simply predestined, or “in his bones,” to spread Ramakrishna’s teachings to the rest of the world, rather than remaining spiritually introspective as he may have desired.

For the 10 years Vivekananda was a guru, or spiritual teacher, he penned many of Ramakrishna’s teachings in English and started dozens of initiatives in India and the U.S. geared toward advancing education for women and children.

“He built this bridge between East and West,” said Sarvapriyananda, who added that thousands have been “pulled from depression and meaninglessness” after reading his texts. “He represented the best of the past, present and future. In every generation, people will always find him.”



Portraits of Swami Vivekananda, from left, his guru Ramakrishna, and Sarada Devi are displayed at the Vedanta Society of New York, Sunday, Jan. 12, 2025, in Manhattan. (RNS photo/Richa Karmarkar)

Diane Crafford, the center’s president since 2012, said Vivekananda’s teaching that “each soul is potentially divine” resonated more with her than the Anglican church of her hometown of London. After her late husband, also a past president, introduced her to the Ramakrishna mission in the ’70s, the rest was history.

“I think anybody who’s exposed to him and his teachings in the West has to see what I saw, which was somebody who could answer questions that the Western religions don’t,” said Crafford. “They can draw you into a way of thinking about yourself and about others that you haven’t thought about before.”

Vedanta’s teachings can give you solace, she added. And especially in New York, where dozens of different personalities are interacting daily, “it really does help us to find our better angels, to examine our behavior with each other. I can look at you and say, ‘What’s in you is in me.'”

A longtime follower of Vedanta, Arindam Mukhopadhyay has been attending services as regularly as he can with his schedule as a banker. Though he was introduced to the Ramakrishna Mission through his family back in Kolkata more than 40 years ago, he was then a kid “rolling his eyes” through prayers and lectures.


Swami Sarvapriyananda. (Photo courtesy Vedanta Society of New York)

But “as you grow, you actually understand the philosophy behind everything,” said Mukhopadhyay, who grew up not far from the mission’s headquarters. “It’s no more worship. You move from worship to what it actually means for you to be a better human being, whether eventually you get to meet God, whether you completely understand the non-duality, or not. But I think it’s just a journey towards the deeper thinking.

“Nobody knows whether there’s an afterlife, but at least the exercise to get there makes you a better person,” he added.

Sarvapriyananda, who became spiritual head of the society in 2017, also came from Kolkata. The charismatic and humorous leader, who has since given TedX talks and is often swarmed by followers at airports, is known to many. As Crafford remarked, “No other center has a swami like Sarvapriyananda.”

“Vivekanda always insisted on originality,” he told RNS. “You can practice Vedanta or your own path, whichever path of it, and you can make it your own. You should make it your own. You should leave your particular stamp upon it.”

Sarvapriyananda became a monk in the order in 1994. But similar to Vivekananda, he felt called to share this wisdom with the world and become the public-facing teacher he is today.

“For me, the beginning was a kind of a private spirituality,” he said. “I wanted to realize God. I wanted to meditate. I wanted to be this monk. I wanted to achieve enlightenment and the world.

“But Vivekananda showed that if Vedanta is at all true, then there is one divine reality. You are not cut off from the rest of the world. So the teachings about service, spiritualizing our actions in the world, of being of use to others, the other is not really an other — one powerful insight of Vivekananda is that a private spirituality is not very spiritual after all.”


People wait outside the Vedanta Society of New York, Sunday, Jan. 12, 2025, in Manhattan. (RNS photo/Richa Karmarkar)
Rutgers decides not to adopt caste policy, but both sides laud decision as a win

(RNS) — ‘Rutgers, in their announcement, has outlined the most robust response to caste discrimination by any university in the United States,’ said Audrey Truschke, professor of South Asian history at New Jersey’s Rutgers University.


People mingle on the Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick, N.J.
 (Photo by Tomwsulcer/Wikimedia/Creative Commons)


Richa Karmarkar
January 15, 2025


(RNS) — Despite a report finding that caste-based discrimination was a problem on campus, Rutgers University decided this week not to update its anti-discrimination policies — saying that policies already in place address the issue.

“Because caste is already covered by the Policy Prohibiting Discrimination and Harassment, the university will not be taking steps to amend this policy at this time,” Rutgers officials said in an official announcement Monday (Jan. 13).

Rutgers officials had been asked to respond to the 2024 report from the University Task Force on Caste Discrimination, which recommended adding caste as a protected category to its anti-discrimination policies, something that more than 20 other colleges and universities have done.

The university said its announcement “does not reflect the university’s agreement with, or adoption of, the findings and conclusions set forth in the report.”

The issue of caste discrimination has made headlines nationwide in recent years — most notably this past fall, when California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have banned caste discrimination in that state.

While not all of their recommendations were adopted, members of the Rutgers task force see the university’s announcement as an “unmitigated victory.”

Audrey Truschke, Rutgers professor of South Asian history and co-chair of the task force, said the university has committed to training staff members on identifying casteism and will include caste discrimination-related questions in the next campus climate survey. That shows the “most robust response to caste discrimination by any university in the United States,” she said.

Discrimination based on the caste group one is born into, say activists who work with caste in the Indian context, can take various forms, from social ostracization to blatant stereotyping about worship or eating patterns.

In their announcement, Rutgers officials cited the intersectional nature of caste, which means that discrimination can fall under religion, national origin, ancestry, race or a combination of those things, all of which are already covered.

“The report generated important discussion and review around how our policies address potential cases of discrimination based on caste and around how the university collects – and responds to – information in this area,” said Dory Devlin, spokesperson for Rutgers University.

According to its administration, Rutgers is among some of the most ethnically diverse universities in America. Almost 30% of its students identify as Asian American, and more than 80% come from areas of New Jersey, which has the highest population of South Asians in the country.

Though caste is not limited to any one community, its association with India and Hindus in mainstream culture had made caste a contentious issue for Hindus the world over.

RELATED: Rutgers task force report urges university to add caste discrimination ban

For Hindus for Human Rights, an anti-caste advocacy organization that launched an email campaign to urge Rutgers administrators to adopt the policy, the decision is both disappointing and encouraging.

“I think the difference between a case like SB 403 being vetoed (by Newsom) and Rutgers not adopting caste protections is that you do have this more fleshed-out and explicit acknowledgment of caste discrimination as an issue that needs to be combated,” said Pranay Somayajula, director of organizing and advocacy for HFHR. “And I think that we’ve seen in the statement from Rutgers a more comprehensive explanation of: ‘Here’s what we’re going to do to address the issue of caste at Rutgers.'”



Hedges spelling Rutgers at the Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick, N.J. 
(Photo by Tomwsulcer/Wikimedia/Creative Commons)

Not having an explicit protected category for caste in institutional policies makes it harder for people who are experiencing discrimination to make their concerns known, Somayajula said.

“We just shouldn’t be creating barriers to this,” he said.

Thus far, the Harvard Graduate Student Union, the University of Minnesota, the entire California State University system and the city of Seattle have been among the institutions that have adopted anti-caste policies.

Though its origins are contested, caste can be sometimes be identified through someone’s family surname, birthplace or religion. Yet many activists argue that the social hierarchy of caste, and any prejudice attached to it, was left behind years ago in India and did not travel along with its immigrants to America.

To Hindu organizations that have long been opposing the widespread adoption of caste-discrimination policies, Rutgers’ decision also seen as a win.

The legal counsel of the Hindu American Foundation, the largest group of its kind, sent a letter to Rutgers’ Office of General Counsel in August after the task force’s initial report, “strongly advising” the university not to implement any programmatic changes.

“The inclusion of ‘caste’ in your policies will necessarily and unconstitutionally single out and stigmatize students, faculty and staff of Indian origin as a matter of policy, and require ethno-racial profiling and disparate legal scrutiny on the basis of their race, national origin, ancestry, and religion,” read the letter.

To other Hindus in this camp, naming caste outside of existing discrimination “perpetuates negative misinformation” that associates people of Indian origin with a specific form of bigotry, and therefore promotes the idea that students of Indian origin are either perpetrators or victims of caste discrimination. The letter also noted that the report used the words “India” or “Indian” 38 times, “South Asian” 25 times and only singularly mentioned other communities.

“I am glad that the Rutgers University Labor Relations office recognized that caste is already covered under their current policy and did not fall for the report by the task force, which singled out Hindu students and faculty,” said Hitesh Trivedi, associate Hindu chaplain at Rutgers University, in a press statement from the Coalition of Hindus of North America. “In a recent study, Rutgers University’s Social Perception Lab confirmed that adding caste to its policy would increase suspicion and hate towards Hindu and Indian Americans.”

The study he refers to, a November report from a nonprofit center at Rutgers University that studies misinformation and hate ideology, found that caste education can increase bias, saying, “anti-oppressive pedagogy increases hostility, distrust, and punitive attitudes — escalating tensions instead of fostering inclusion.”

Other groups, such as Caste Files, a think tank that focuses primarily on the perception of caste in the United States, applauded the new development, yet remained measured in their celebration.

“CasteFiles urges Rutgers University to reconsider the inclusion of caste-related questions in its campus climate surveys,” it said in a statement. “These surveys must avoid the pitfalls of anonymity breaches, biased incentives, and discriminatory implications for participants.”

Truschke, whose extensive research on the history of India and caste and outspokenness have made her a target of online vitriol and Rutgers the subject of international attention, said that Rutgers’ statement is a “promising beginning” that her educational efforts are working.

“We have already seen, especially this year, an increase in on-the-ground activity at Rutgers: more groups, more events talking about caste, and trying to get this more into the conversation,” she said. “So to me, the announcement by Rutgers, this is step one, maybe step two. But we’ve got 100 more steps to go.”


American Humanist Association sues West Virginia over $5 million grant to Catholic college

(RNS) — The AHA, which has a chapter in West Virginia, says the grant violates the state constitution, which says the state cannot favor one religion over another.


American Humanist Association logo, left, and part of the West Virginia stat flag. (Courtesy images)

Yonat Shimron
January 15, 2025

(RNS) — The American Humanist Association is suing the West Virginia Water Development Authority to stop it from awarding a $5 million grant to a tiny out-of-state Catholic college, arguing that the grant violates the state constitution’s freedom of religion provision.

Last year, the water authority approved a $5 million grant to the Steubenville, Ohio-based College of St. Joseph the Worker for the expansion of its campus into neighboring West Virginia.

According to the grant proposal, about $2.1 million would create a real estate, development and construction company headquartered in Weirton, West Virginia, where students could learn building trades. But about $1 million of the $5 million grant would support a think tank called The Center for the Common Good that advocates against abortion. And $1.6 million would go toward scholarships for the recruitment of West Virginia students.

The American Humanist Association, which has a chapter in West Virginia, says the grant violates the state constitution, which says the state cannot favor one religion over another. The association is represented in the lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the suit Monday (Jan. 13) in Kanawha County Circuit Court.

“That the government would use tax dollars, especially out of the water infrastructure fund, to fund a college that only grants degrees in Catholic studies and makes clear that its mission is to develop faithful Christians is an affront to the Constitution and an affront to West Virginians who are not Catholic,” said Fish Stark, executive director of American Humanist Association, a group that advocates for nonreligious Americans, including atheists.

There are 236 local American Humanist Association chapters across the country, said Stark. It may best be known for certifying humanist chaplains and celebrants.

The lawsuit represents a pushback to a decades-long effort by a network of politicians, church officials and activists who believe that the separation of church and state is illegitimate.

Marie Prezioso, the executive director of the West Virginia Water Development Authority, declined to comment to RNS, saying that any statements will come in public court filings or other public disclosures.

The West Virginia Constitution has a robust establishment clause. It says in part, “the Legislature shall not prescribe any religious test whatever, or confer any peculiar privileges or advantages on any sect or denomination, or pass any law requiring or authorizing any religious society, or the people of any district within this state, to levy on themselves, or others, any tax for the erection or repair of any house for public worship, or for the support of any church or ministry.”

According to the lawsuit, West Virginia violated this provision.

“Tens of thousands of West Virginians wonder every day where they will get clean drinking water,” Aubrey Sparks, the ACLU’s West Virginia legal director, said. “The College of St. Joseph the Worker has every right to exist and to educate its students in line with its religious worldview, but to force the taxpayers of West Virginia to fund its mission is wholly inappropriate and unconstitutional.”

The website for the college, which began holding classes with 31 student this past fall, says it “forms students into effective and committed members of their communities by teaching them the Catholic intellectual tradition while training them in skilled and dignified labor.” It offers one degree: a Bachelor of Arts in Catholic studies, and certification in carpentry, HVAC, electrical and plumbing. As of 2023, it had $860,00 in revenue and about $2.5 million in assets, according to its IRS 990 form.



More than $5 billion spent on Catholic sexual abuse allegations, new report finds

(RNS) — During the 20 years of surveys, the respondents reported 16,276 credible allegations of sexual abuse of minors by priests, deacons or religious brothers.


Victims of clergy sexual abuse, or their family members, react as Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro speaks during a news conference at the Pennsylvania Capitol in Harrisburg on Aug. 14, 2018. A Pennsylvania grand jury’s investigation of clergy sexual abuse identified more than 1,000 child victims in the state. The grand jury report said that number comes from records in six Roman Catholic dioceses. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Aleja Hertzler-McCain
January 15, 2025

(RNS) — Over two decades, Catholic dioceses, eparchies and men’s religious communities spent more than $5 billion on allegations of sexual abuse of minors, according to a new report released Wednesday (Jan. 15) by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.

Between 2004 and 2023, three-fourths of the $5.025 billion reported was paid to abuse victims. Seventeen percent went to pay attorneys’ fees, 6% was in support for alleged abusers and 2% went toward other costs. On average, only 16% of the costs related to the allegations was borne by insurance companies.

The CARA report combined 20 annual surveys sent to dioceses and eparchies within the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (which excludes some parts of the U.S., such as Puerto Rico, Guam and American Samoa), as well as U.S. religious communities belonging to the Conference of Major Superiors of Men. The report does note that some alleged perpetrators were assigned outside the U.S. The USCCB commissioned the survey in 2004


Jonathon Wiggins, a lead researcher on the report, told RNS that the report represented the Catholic Church’s superlative commitment to transparency. The report “is unprecedented by any non-governmental organization and is the largest effort of its kind,” the report’s authors wrote in a statement.

Wiggins told RNS that this report may have some overlap in cases with the groundbreaking 2004 research study on the nature and scope of sexual abuse in the church, conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, but that it has a different methodology.

During the 20 years of the survey, the respondents reported 16,276 credible allegations of sexual abuse of minors by priests, deacons or religious brothers. Those allegations represent slightly less than two-thirds (65%) of total allegations that dioceses, eparchies and men’s religious communities reported receiving.

Though the surveys come from the 2000s, the majority of credible allegations were for abuse that began before 1980. Ninety-two percent of credible allegations were for abuse that began before 1989. In contrast, 542 credible allegations represented abuse that began after the year 2000. The report defines credible allegations as bearing the “semblance of truth” and having been sufficiently substantiated to forward the allegations to the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Of the credible allegations, 4 in 5 victims were male, and one-fifth were female. More than half were between the ages of 10 and 14. About a quarter (24%) of victims were between 15 and 17 years old and another 1 in 5 was age 9 or younger.

The response rate for dioceses and eparchies averaged 99%, while men’s religious communities had an average response rate of 72%.

In addition to tracking the money spent on allegations of abuse, the report totals the amount of money spent on abuse prevention, including for safe environment coordinators and victim assistance coordinator salaries, administrative expenses, training programs and background checks, totaling nearly $728 million.

The report tracks that the abuse prevention expenses have risen over time, with the amount spent from 2014 to 2023 representing an 80% increase compared with the expenses from 2004 to 2013.



“Costs Related to Allegations, from 2004-2023: Dioceses, Eparchies, and Religious Communities of Men” (Graphic courtesy of CARA)

The financial costs of the abuse crisis have reshaped the Catholic Church in the United States. Marie T. Reilly, a professor at Pennsylvania State University Law School, has tracked 40 Catholic dioceses and religious organizations that have sought bankruptcy protection, and many dioceses have cited the expense of settling abuse claims as part of their decision to declare bankruptcy.
RELATED: Facing more clergy abuse lawsuits, Vermont’s Catholic Church files for bankruptcy

Those financial troubles have led dioceses throughout the country to sell diocesan property, including diocesan headquarters, seminaries, schools and churches. In the Diocese of Rockville Centre, New York, every parish had to pay amounts ranging from five figures to more than $1 million toward a bankruptcy settlement.

Of all the survey years, 2019 had the highest number of credible allegations reported, with 2,506 credible allegations reported that year. That year came after a flood of revelations about the extent of sexual abuse in the church.


Many state investigations were opened after an August 2018 Pennsylvania grand jury report found that there were more than 1,000 victims of child sexual abuse in that state and that Catholic bishops and other leaders had participated in a cover-up.

2018 was also the year that several dioceses found that the allegation that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick had sexually abused a minor was credible, leading to McCarrick’s removal from the clerical state in February 2019.

Over two decades, the survey’s questions changed in ways that may impact the total count of credible allegations. Before 2013, the survey did not include allegations of abuse by religious brothers, who are considered lay people in the Catholic Church.

Before 2016, all allegations were sorted into “credible” and “unsubstantiated/obviously false” categories. In 2016, a third category, “unable to be proven,” was introduced, which decreased the proportion of allegations deemed “credible.”

Based on the allegations deemed credible, the report estimates 4,490 alleged perpetrators, of whom 80% were diocesan priests, 15% were priests from religious orders, 4% were religious brothers and 1% were deacons.

In the years that the perpetrators were reported by dioceses, eparchies and men’s religious communities, 86% of the perpetrators were already dead, removed from ministry, laicized or missing. The other 14% were removed from ministry or retired from ministry during the survey year.


















New International Anarchist Prisoner journal

Jan 14, 2025



Dear friends and accomplices,

Long term anarchist prisoner Michael Kimble and I (a comrade on the outside) are working on bringing an international anarchist journal to life, from the compost of the lovely anarchist journal Fire Ant. Our aim is to bring together perspectives and voices of anarchist prisoners from behind bars. We are looking for contributions from captured comrades, which can include anything from artwork, poetry, condition updates, interviews, essays and any other writings you want to contribute. We are also looking fo people on the outside who want to get involved in the collective.

For contributions, questions or whatever other stuff email: cantjailthespirit@riseup.net

If you are in contact with anarchist prisoners, ask them if they want to contribute and email contributions to the above address. We will do our best to translate the journal into other languages. Contributions can be in any language. Thanks!
Review of Freedom or Death

Original title: "Bakunin’s Anarchism Reconsidered Review of Freedom or Death: The Theory and Practice of Mikhail Bakunin by Felipe Correa"


Jan 14, 2025
by Wayne Price

Anarchism, like Marxism, was the outcome of European mass movements in the 19th Century: the early socialist movements (later called “utopian” socialism), the movement for political democracy (against the monarchs and aristocrats), and the movement for workers’ rights. But if there is one person who may be described as the initiator of revolutionary anarchism, it would be Mikhail Bakunin (1814—76). Born into the lower-to-middle ranks of the Russian aristocracy, he was active in a range of popular movements, participated in several armed rebellions, spent a decade in Czarist prisons, and played a major role in the First International. This concluded in a sharp faction fight with Karl Marx, resulting in a split in the International.

He considered himself more a man of action than an intellectual. “I am not a philosopher, nor a system inventor like Marx.” (p. 43) While a fine orator, Bakunin’s writings were unsystematic, and he hardly completed a book. Yet there was a consistency to his work, as this volume demonstrates. His views inspired anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist activists throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, and North and South America. His opinions remain relevant today, as we face authoritarianisms on the Right and the Left.

The author is Felipe Correa Pedro. Mark Bray calls him “among the world’s foremost scholars of anarchism…” (in a front-page blurb). A Brazilian anarchist scholar and activist, Correa is internationally known, although few of his works have been translated into English. (But see, for example, Correa 2021; 2022a; 2022b.) He describes himself as an “especifist anarchist” (an organizational dualist). He follows a revolutionary, class-struggle, anarchist-socialism which has developed from the work of Mikhail Bakunin. (I am also of this school of anarchism.) While plainly an admirer of Bakunin, he attempts to be as objective as he can, excluding hagiography and including Bakunin’s failures and contradictions.

Bakunin’s thinking is sometimes presented as though he had one set of ideas which did not change during his lifetime. Correa demonstrates that, as he lived, Bakunin developed his ideas. He made major changes in his concepts and program, while still keeping continuity. “To cut up and rearrange Bakunin’s writings without regard for the context or the period in which they were written risks the loss of a balanced presentation in favor of a purely personal interpretation.” (Dolgoff 1980; p. xi) His earlier beliefs were to culminate in his revolutionary anarchist-socialism (to use the term preferred by Errico Malatesta).

Correa divides Bakunin’s adult life into three main periods. These were, first, his Hegelian period (1836-43)—then his period of revolutionary pan-Slavism (1844-63)—finally his evolution from socialism to anarchism (1864-76).

The Philosophy of Freedom (1836-43)

As a young man in Czarist Russia, Bakunin became fascinated with German Idealist philosophers, particularly the dialectical philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel. Correa goes into Bakunin’s philosophical development in great detail, giving separate chapters to Bakunin’s Fichteian period, his “first Hegelian period,” his “second Hegelian period,” and his evolution out of philosophy and religion. “Bakunin was the greatest figure of Hegelianism in Russia between 1838 and 1840….” (p. 26)

Bakunin’s interpretation of Hegelian dialectics was very similar to that of the Left Hegelians of Germany; he was to move to Berlin and interact with this grouping—which included Marx and Engels. “In Germany, between 1840 and 1842, he rose to a prominent, if heterodox, position on the Hegelian Left.” (p. 26)
(It would be interesting for someone to contrast Bakunin’s period of Hegelianism with Marx’s early Hegelianism.)

The grouping also included “Max Stirner” (Casper Schmidt). His writings were later taken up by individualist anarchists. Contrary to the Marxists, there is no evidence of any interaction between the two, nor does Bakunin’s social anarchism have much similarity to Stirner’s egotism. To Bakunin, individuals only become free with others. He declared, “Man only becomes man…through collective or social labor….To be free, for man, means to be recognized, considered, and treated as such…in the consciousness of all free men, his brothers and sisters, his equals.” (pp. 338-9)

Correa quotes Hegel, when asked by Goethe to explain dialectics, as saying it was a “spirit of organized contradiction.” (p. 118) Dialectics presents the world as process—dynamic and holistic—which moves and organizes itself through contradiction, internal conflict, and negation of what-is. This applies to society as it does to nature. Societies can only be understood in terms of contradictions such as classes, as well as genders, nationalities, races, ages, and so on. It is these internal conflicts which hold societies together and which break them up in forward movement. “This dialectical method, which is concomitantly historical, permeates all Bakuninian writings from this period (cf. alienation…).” (p. 118)

Hegel’s dialectics presents the world’s processes as directional, moving toward ever greater consciousness and freedom. Just what this meant in practice varied. In Hegel’s youth, he was greatly influenced by the French Revolution and its expansion of human freedom. When older, he became reconciled to the Prussian status quo. He now saw the bureaucratic Prussian state as the historical culmination of the World Spirit.

Personally, I think that there are streams within nature and society which may lead to greater consciousness and freedom—as one branch of evolution led to humans. But other streams do not, as evolution also produced bacteria and cockroaches. I doubt that nature as a whole has an innate progressive directionality. Marx—or at least many Marxists—believed that the dialectic of history would inevitably result in stateless, classless, communism. However, while there are forces pushing in that direction (such as the class struggle), there are also reactionary forces pushing in the other direction (such as capitalist ideology). It is not really possible to know which will (“inevitably”) win out. Choosing socialist revolution is a decision and a commitment—with no guarantee of “inevitable” success.

In this period, Bakunin read some socialist literature, by William Weitling and others. Politically, he regarded himself as a radical, in the tradition of French republicanism, “the foundation of which,” writes Correa, “is the notion of self-government of the people…” (p. 85)

I will not review Correa’s lengthy and detailed analysis of Bakunin’s early Hegelian dialectics. An introductory book on Hegel’s philosophy may be more useful. However, to stay on the topic of Bakunin and philosophy, I will jump ahead to his socialist and anarchist period.

By this final period, Bakunin had rejected religion and theism, along with all philosophical Idealism. Morris writes, “Bakunin’s conception of reality, like that of Marx’s, is dialectical, materialist, and deterministic.” (1993; p. 78) In Correa’s view, it was not a “dialectical materialism,” although he does not explain why he thinks this. (In any case, Marx never used the term, which was invented by G. Plekhanov.) Instead, Correa calls Bakunin’s views “scientific-naturalist materialism.” He saw nature and matter as one, the whole of reality.

Bakunin saw nature as self-organized and lawful. He regarded “free will” as a theological concept. But he believed that nature—including society and the individual—was creative, that new things appeared through the dialectical process. He reconciled theory and practice. Theory was necessary as a guide, but only practice would prove the reality of perception and thinking. It was only through the unified activity of theory and practice, interacting with nature and other people, that humans creatively develop their potentialities and become fully free.

Pan-Slavism and National Self-Determination (1844-63)

Like almost all progressive people, Bakunin supported the struggle for national independence of the Polish people. At the time, Poland was mostly incorporated into the Russian empire, with large chunks also being owned by Prussia and by Austria. Officially, there was no “Poland.” (Just as colonists and imperialists today claim that there is no “Palestine” or that “Ukraine” does not really exist.)

A movement developed to tie the Polish national struggle to that of all the Eastern European Slavic peoples, including those oppressed by Turkey. The goal was a federation of all the countries with Slavic-based languages. A further expansion of the idea was to include the biggest Slavic country of all, Russia, in the federation.

Left pan-Slavism advocated a democratic federation of Slavs. This could not be achieved without revolutions in several lands—especially Poland and Russia. It was believed that these uprisings would lead to democratic rebellions throughout Europe. Conservatives did not like this. Polish nobility wanted independence, only in order to have a free hand in exploiting their own serfs. Russian pan-Slavists dreamed of an unified Slavic nation led by an enlightened Czar.

Bakunin worked within the broad pan-Slavist movement, cooperating with radical democrats but also with conservatives. While a revolutionary, he was by no means an anarchist yet. At times he veered toward a conservative, narrow nationalism. At other times he seemed to want to integrate national liberation with a social, as well as democratic, program. He called for revolutionary governments to be set up as dictatorships.

He proposed the formation of secret societies of revolutionaries, organized hierarchically, and managed as dictatorships. This was the beginning of his organizational dualism—support for broad organizations and movements, while also building relatively homogeneous organizations of militants committed to specific revolutionary programs, to operate inside and outside broader organizations.

By contrast, Marx and Engels rejected pan-Slavism. They supported the fight for Polish independence. However, they saw Czarist Russia as the greatest threat to progress in Europe. They wanted it defeated in war, preferably by a revolutionary democratic Germany. Further, they had contempt for the smaller, Eastern European, Slavic, countries: Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, and Croats. These they regarded as “unhistorical.” Such countries, they expected, would—and should—be taken over by larger nations, such as Germany, Poland, Italy, and Hungary. (This was similar to their support for the U.S.A. seizing half of Mexico, its land and people. That was supposedly progressive.)

At times, Bakunin expressed an extreme hatred of Germans, whom he blamed for the oppression of the Slavic peoples (only partly true in terms of Prussian and Austrian imperialism). His writings sometimes expressed racist-nationalist Germanophobia, a condemnation of all the German people. It ignored differences between German workers and the German ruling classes. At other times he raised opposition to Germanophobia, advocating support for all democratic struggles in German, as well as Slavic, countries. Both attitudes were to remain with him. His bigotry became particularly extreme when arguing with German Jews, such as Hess, Liebknecht, or with the German social democrats.

He especially raised such bigotry during his disputes with Marx, in his last period. Bakunin wrote, “Mr. Marx is a [German] patriot no less ardent than Bismarck….He desires the establishment of a great Germanic state, one that will glorify the German people….Marx…considers himself at least as Bismarck’s successor….” (Bakunin 1980; pp. 314-5) And further nonsense….

Bakunin’s anti-Germanism overlapped with Jew-hatred. He claimed that there was “a conspiracy of Russian and German Jews against” him. (p. 426) And “The Jews…are sworn enemies of every truly popular revolution.” (p. 426) This was not a central part of his beliefs, but Correa correctly says, “His antisemitism is indefensible and contradicts his positions of the revolutionary socialist period….” (p. 427) (After Bakunin’s death, Germanophobia was to be an issue when World War I broke out between two imperialist alliances. A small number of leading anarchists, including Peter Kropotkin, supported the Allied imperialists, partly out of fear and hatred of Germans.)

Bakunin may be said to have abandoned pan-Slavism, if that is defined as a commitment to narrow nationalism, let alone a hope for a united Slavdom led by the Czar. But he continued to support the struggles for national self-determination of Poland and the other Slavic countries. “His project of national liberation of the Slav peoples was not supplanted or completely reconsidered but incorporated into his revolutionary socialism….” (p. 430) It became integrated with the goal of class liberation of the peasants and workers oppressed by their national rulers.

Bakunin came to distinguish between the “homeland” and the “state.” It was natural for people to love their homeland, which meant their geography, their culture, their language, and their historical struggles for freedom. But “political patriotism” was an artificial, abstract, emotion whipped up by a ruling class in order to support the state. Bakunin opposed states but defended the right of all peoples to their homelands. “I feel, frankly and always, the patriot of all the oppressed homelands.” (p. 407)

He declared, “Every people, weak or strong, every nation, large or small, every province, every commune has the absolute right to be free, autonomous, to live and govern themselves according to their particular interests.” (p. 407) This is anarchism.

While participating in a movement for national liberation, anarchists fight against “nationalism,” because it serves the ruling classes. Correa writes, “Nationalism is intended to be a multi-classist movement…[but] anarchist anti-imperialism supports the need for a movement concentrated on the dispossessed classes….Anarchist anti-imperialism claims the concomitant end of both national domination and class and state domination in the struggling nation.…” (p. 408)

From Socialism to Anarchism (1864-76)

After a dozen years of imprisonment by the Czarist state, Bakunin escaped in 1861 and returned to Europe. After the defeat of a Polish uprising in 1863, he turned his main attention to Western Europe. He tried to set up secret revolutionary societies and attempted to influence a middle class liberal organization, the International League of Peace and Freedom, to little lasting effect. He was impressed by a number of big workers’ strikes and by the growth of the International Workingmen’s Association (the First International). “These strikes…considerably changed Bakunin’s positions on the transformative capacity of workers and the centrality of their movements….” (p. 262) From then on, he called himself a “revolutionary socialist.” He wrote to Marx, at the end of 1868, “My homeland is now the International.” (p. 301)

Bakunin rejected any vision of socialism as being government-owned industry and centralized planning. His socialism was heavily influenced by P.J. Proudhon, the first person to identify as an “anarchist.” (The movement which followed him generally called itself “mutualist” or “federalist,” rather than “anarchist.”) “His great inspiration is Proudhon.” (p. 262) From Proudhon, Bakunin took anti-statism and anti-electoralism, workers’ self-management of industry, decentralized democracy, and bottom-up federalism. However, he rejected Proudhon’s gradualism and reformism, his market socialism, and his opposition to strikes and to revolution. (Bakunin also rejected Proudhon’s misogyny. While the liberation of women was never at the center of his thinking, he included it whenever presenting his program.). Bakunin developed “a radicalization of Proudhonism.” (p. 262)

He was also influenced by other militants and theorists, such as Cesar de Paepe, who had been “mediating between Proudhon and Marx.” (p. 260) Correa mentions the influence of Karl Marx on Bakunin, but does not emphasize it as much as do other commentators (or as Marx and Engels did!). However, Correa notes that “at various times, [Bakunin] uses and defends Marxist ideas and even terminology.” (p. 264)

Bakunin made a turn toward revolutionary socialism, beginning in 1864. But it was only in 1868, Correa argues, that he really became an anarchist—while still a socialist.

Among the differences between his pre-anarchist and anarchist periods: “In 1864, the popular masses were considered [by Bakunin] incapable of liberating themselves, and it was therefore necessary for minorities from the upper classes to organize themselves to act on the peasantry and especially the urban proletariat….From 1868 onwards, it held that workers are able to emancipate themselves and that those with privileged origins, if they so desire, must…act together with peasants and proletarians in the struggle for emancipation.

“[In the earlier period] the favored space is the secret society and therefore mass and public expressions are discarded….In the anarchist period, Bakunin defends organizational dualism, reconciling secret and public, cadre and mass expressions. Finally, in 1864, the model of secret society proposed by Bakunin…still has hierarchical and centralist features, which from 1868 onwards will be abandoned in favor of a federalist model of cadre organization.” (p. 300)

Correa calls Bakunin’s vision of a free socialism, “collectivist-federalist socialism.” This included, Bakunin wrote, “the taking over by autonomous collectivities, workers’ associations, agricultural or industrial, and communes of all social capital, all ownership of land, mines, dwellings, religious and public buildings, instruments of labor, raw materials, …and manufactured products.” (p. 386) There is a need to end the division between mental and manual labor. Distribution of goods would be based on the amount of labor contributed by each (able-bodied) worker. (This was “collectivism.” Later models of a “communist” anarchism—distribution “to each according to their need”—were developed by Kropotkin and others, as a modification of“collectivism.”) The self-managed “collectivities, workers’ associations, and communes” would coordinate through federations and networks (democratic planning from below).

Bakunin only occasionally described his views as “democratic,” usually reserving the term for the capitalist representative “democracies,” which he wanted to overthrow. He did call his anarchist association, the “Alliance of Socialist Democracy.” While “democracy” is not discussed by Correa, Morris argues, “If the term ‘democracy’ denoted government of the people, by the people, for the people, then this would imply no state, and Bakunin could therefore happily call himself a ‘democrat.’” (Morris 1993; p. 99)

Correa gives a summary of Bakunin’s analysis of how capitalism worked. Bakunin had been influenced by Proudhon and Marx, but his views, as summarized here, appear to be mostly that of Marx. Bakunin had read Marx’s Capital, and had made an effort to translate it. Even during his bitterest exchanges with Marx, Bakunin continued to express respect for Marx’s intellect and theoretical advances. (For an anarchist review of Marx’s economic analysis, see Price 2013.)

From Correa’s summary of Bakunin’s writings on political economy, Bakunin believed that capitalism was based on the exploitation of the workers. Through collective labor they produced value by producing commodities. The capitalists, owners of the means of production and other capital, owned the total product and only gave a fraction of its value back to the workers. The rest they kept as profit. The competition among the capitalists had a tendency toward centralization and monopolization. In its origins and in its continuation, the state was required to build up and to maintain the capitalist system. With cause, Correa calls this “the statist capitalist system.” (p.370)

Overall, with some differences, this seems consistent with Marx’s critique of political economy. Bakunin claims (in Correa’s summary) that the workers sell their “labor” as a commodity to the capitalists. Marx thought it better to say that the workers sell their “labor power,” their ability to work, to the capitalists as commodities, when the capitalists hire them. Their labor power is then expended in the process of labor during working hours.

More significantly, Bakunin implies that capitalism pushes workers’ wages to the very bottom, to what is just necessary biologically for the workers and their families to survive and work (which was the view of the classical bourgeois economists). Bakunin writes that capitalists must pay workers “the lowest possible wages…the labor…which is forced to be sold at the lowest value…[that which is] strictly necessary for the daily maintenance of their families….The worker is forced to sell his labor for almost nothing….” (p. 369)

The view that workers’ wages must be pushed toward the bottom, to “almost nothing,” has been used to claim that it is pointless to strike for higher wages. This has been called “the iron law of wages,” and was held by some “Marxists,” such as F. Lasalle (a founder of German social democracy). While this is a real tendency, there are counter-tendencies, as Marx pointed out. These include the capitalists’ need for increasingly educated and healthy workers to handle more sophisticated and complex machinery.

Also, the workers do not simply accept the downward pressure of the bosses. In many ways, not only including unions, they push back. A certain standard of living becomes accepted as mandatory in wealthier countries. The capitalists must accept this to some extent or face “labor unrest.” Especially during boom periods, when the business cycle is on an upswing, workers can gain benefits. Marx recognized this, but noted that even the better-off workers were still exploited and oppressed.

Correa declares, “The contradiction between bourgeoisie and proletariat, as fundamental as it is…is not the only one and cannot be understood as the primary one….” (p. 374) He cites the class conflict between landlords and peasants (not a big factor in the U.S. but still important on a world scale). Further, he refers to “the state bureaucracy, the clergy, and the intellectuals” as also “among the upper classes” which exploit and dominate “the rural proletariat and all the poor and marginalized.” (p. 374) This may be how Bakunin saw matters.

That there are non-capitalist contradictions and subsystems within capitalist society is not in question. Nor is it in doubt that the working class needs to be allied with every oppressed section of society. But it is industrial capitalism which mainly produces the goods and services by which everyone lives. This includes the surplus value which supports not only the capitalists but also the landlords, the state bureaucracy, the clergy, and the intellectuals. The powerful capital/labor dynamic pulls all subordinate conflicts into its orbit and makes them consistent with it. (That these subordinate systems, react back upon the specific ways that capitalism functions is also not in question.) This puts the international, multi-racial, bi-gendered, multi-sexually-oriented, multi-religious, proletariat in a central (“primary” if one insists) position to make a revolution.

Bakunin rejected “economic determinism,” writes Correa. However, in a footnote, Correa quotes Bakunin, as declaring (at various times), “At the basis of all historical, national, religious, and political problems…[is] the economic problem, the most important, the most vital of all….The whole intellectual and moral, political and social history of humanity is a reflection of its economic history…. One of Mr. Marx’s main scientific merits is to have enunciated and demonstrated this truth.” (p. 381-2) Correa calls Bakunin’s view “relative economic determination.” It seems consistent with a version of Marxist “historical materialism” (another term Marx never used).

The Split in the International

Bakunin and Marx shared the goal of an international revolution of the working class and all oppressed groups (peasants, women, colonized nationalities, etc.) to create a classless, stateless, free society. Yet they had deep and bitter differences.

In 1872 Marx organized the expulsion of Bakunin from the International. This was followed by a split of the majority of the organization into an alternate “Anti-Authoritarian International.” Correa goes into detail about the background of this conflict, from the time Bakunin and his comrades joined the International to the final split. I will not review this history. (I have discussed the split in the International elsewhere; see Price 2017.)

What were the issues (leaving aside conflicts of personality)? Correa believes that the major issue involved party and power. After the Paris Commune, Marx made a big push to order every International branch to form a workers’ political party—to run in elections and compete for state power. Bakunin and his comrades opposed this program (although he supported each national section’s freedom to form a party or not). It was not merely a tactical matter of whether to vote. Marx and his comrades believed that the road to socialism was through seizing the state—either by elections or by revolutions which established new states (the “dictatorship of the proletariat”).

To the anarchists, the state was an instrument of minority class rule and could not be used for any other purpose. Instead, the road forward was through independent mass action, particularly by building militant unions. (The Marxists were also for building unions—that was not in dispute.) The post-revolutionary society would be a federation of workers’ councils and communal assemblies, not a state.

However, the actual attack by Marx against Bakunin was not explicitly over workers’ parties and elections. Instead, Bakunin was accused of forming secret societies, with the aim of either taking over the International or destroying it from within. Marxists still charge him with that. Really it was a conflict over Bakunin’s concept of organizational dualism.

Bakunin made a distinction between two types of organization. One was a mass organization of the working class, in this case the International. It included workers of varied views on politics and religion, united to fight for their interests, primarily economic. The other was a smaller, politically homogenous, grouping of “cadres,” which would act publicly or secretly, inside and outside the broader organization. Its goal was to advance its revolutionary program among the workers, in opposition to the various authoritarian forces which existed. This was then the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy. Both types of organizations were to be federalist, not centralist, in structure.

This was hardly undemocratic. Why shouldn’t Bakunin or anyone else be free to form a socialist caucus within the International? Marx himself had a network of fellow-thinkers throughout the International with whom he corresponded and collaborated, even if not a formal body, and he was allied with the Blanquists, who had their own, highly centralized, party.

However, Marx and his comrades accused Bakunin of organizing to take over the International (which was what Marx had been trying to do) or to destroy it (which was nonsense). The Marxists pointed out that Bakunin had been forming (or trying to form) secret associations (secret not only from the police but also from the members of the International) under his leadership. This was partly true, at least in Bakunin’s mind and imagination, if not in reality.

One of Bakunin’s young followers then was the Italian Errico Malatesta. Years later (in 1897), he commented, “In the [anarchist] movement’s early days there was a strong residue of Jacobinism and authoritarianism within us, a residue that I will not make so bold as to say we have destroyed utterly, but which has definitely been and still is on the wane.” (Turcato 2016; p. 335)

Correa discusses some of the worst things Bakunin wrote, in private letters and elsewhere. These indicate that he wanted a secret, collective, “dictatorship” over society by the Alliance. Correa gives reasons to downplay these authoritarian statements. In my opinion, he does not sufficiently acknowledge the elements of Jacobinism which still lingered in Bakunin’s thinking. Yet he is correct in showing how Bakunin’s anarchist-federalist dualism laid the basis for present-day revolutionary anarchism, which is not Jacobin or elitist but radically democratic and federalist.

In an afterward to this book, the Argentinean anarchist Rocio Soledad Lescano states that organizational dualism is among “the most important contributions proposed by Bakunin that are still valid today and are being put into practice by a portion of contemporary anarchism.” (p. 436) Today this is often referred to as especifisimo or neo-platformism.

This is sometimes confused with the Leninist vanguard party. They have some things in common, in the organization of revolutionaries who agree with each other and coordinate ideas and actions. But there are drastic differences, too. The Leninist party is centralized, directed from the top down (“democratic centralism”). The anarchist association is federalist, organized from the bottom up (which might be called democratic federalism). Most important of all, the Leninist party exists to win state power, while the anarchist association exists to promote the self-organization of the workers and oppressed.

Conclusion

Brian Morris wrote, “Bakunin’s anarchism has not been discussed anywhere with the seriousness it deserves.” (Morris 1993; pp. 73-4) This book is the serious discussion which Bakunin’s anarchism deserves.

It is a big book (475 pages) and covers many topics—not all of which are discussed in this review. It is somewhat academic, beginning with a bibliographic essay on the international literature about Bakunin. The thorough discussion of Bakunin’s philosophical development may be useful to specialists but not to most of those interested in Bakunin. Yet there is value in showing how his final, revolutionary anarchist, period carried on aspects of his earlier thinking.

Bakunin was constantly looking for ways to struggle for freedom. From Hegel he took a dynamic understanding of the world. From Proudhon he took a commitment to decentralized federalism and self-management, while rejecting Proudhon’s reformism. From Marx he gained an analysis of how capitalism works and other insights, while fighting against Marx’s strategy of taking state power.

Bakunin had to overcome certain elitist, and even racist, aspects of his thinking, which he may never have done completely. He was far from perfect. But it is the conclusion of Bakunin’s life, approximately his last decade, which is most important for today’s anarchist-socialists. He put together the fundamental theory and practice of revolutionary anarchism.

Today we face the rise of semi-fascist and outright fascist movements, threatening to take over even “democratic” governments. On the Left, there is the growth of authoritarian and statist versions of “socialism.” This includes “democratic socialism” (that is, reformist state socialism) and various regrowths of Marxist-Leninist trends (Stalinist-type “revolutionary” state socialisms). The vision of Mikhail Bakunin remains of extraordinary value as a guide to freedom and socialism.

References

Bakunin, Mikhail (1980). Bakunin on Anarchism. (Ed.: S. Dolgoff). Montreal Canada: Black Rose Books
Correa, Felipe (2024). Freedom or Death: The Theory and Practice of Mikhail Bakunin. (Trans.: Jonathan Payn). Montreal/NYC: Black Rose Books.

Correa, Felipe (2022a). “Elements of Anarchist Theory and Strategy. Felipe Correa Interviewed by Mya Walmsley.”
https://www.anarkismo.net/article/32657

Correa, Felipe (2022b). “Power and Anarchism: Approximation or Contradiction?” https://www.anarkismo.net/article/32520?search_text=Felipe

Correa, Felipe (2021). “Anarchist Theory and History in Global Perspective.” https://www.anarkismo.net/article/32487?search_text=Felipe

Dolgoff, Sam (1980). “Prefatory Note.” Bakunin on Anarchism. (Ed.: S. Dolgoff). Montreal Canada: Black Rose Books. Pp. xi—xiii.

Morris, Brian (1993). Bakunin: The Philosophy of Freedom. Montreal/NYC: Black Rose Books.
Price, Wayne (2017). “The First International and the Development of Anarchism and Marxism.”
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/wayne-price-the-first-internati…
Price, Wayne (2013). The Value of Radical Theory; An Anarchist Introduction to Marx’s Critique of Political Economy. Oakland: AK Press.
Turcato, Davide (Ed.) (2016), “A Long and Patient Work…” The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897—1898. Complete Works of Errico Malatesta. Vol. III. (Trans.: P. Sharkey). Chico CA: AK Press.

Anarcho-Syndicalist Review # 91 (Winter 2025)




REST IN POWER

Robert Paul Wolff (1933-2025)
Jan 14, 2025



From Freedom News UK
Famous for his philosophical anarchism, he was also a champion of Black liberation and anti-war movements

~ James Birmingham ~

Philosopher and professor of Afro-American studies Robert Paul Wolff passed away at the age of 91 on January 6, 2025. Wolff was born in Queens, NYC and earned his philosophy degrees at Harvard, finishing his PhD at the young age of 23. He spent his academic career in philosophy until 1992 when he transitioned to the Afro-American studies department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst until 2008. He was a champion of Black studies and his dedication to the field of thought is expounded in 2005’s Autobiography of an Ex-White Man.

Wolff had a long and prolific career with a wide range of research interests including Kant, Rawls, Marx, critiques of liberalism, and anarchism. For most readers of Freedom the book he will be known for is 1970’s In Defense of Anarchism. I first read this text at the age of 19 and it truly helped refine and sharpen my own sense of Anarchism as a philosophy in and of itself. Most other books that are offered as introductory texts about anarchism focus on classical thinkers (Wolff’s book, arguably in error, eschews mention of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, etc.), events in Anarchist history and labour movements, and the culture of people and organisations that used the A-word. When most of us use the term anarchism we are referring to a milieu – not just thought, but practice, culture, fashion, and a sense of connection to a history of anarchists.


Wolff’s book is different – and that difference is quite useful. Reading In Defense of Anarchism armed me with ideas and arguments that proved extremely effective in discussions with professors and students who did not have classical anarchist thinkers in their repertoire. It is a sharp and incisive book that is reliant on Kant’s philosophy but ultimately makes broad arguments nigh all anarchists would agree with.

Wolff didn’t just write from and for the Ivory Tower—he was a loud and insistent voice for various social movements, from Black liberation to protests of the war in Vietnam to nuclear disarmament. His letter to the editor from the July 30, 1967 issue of the New York Times deserves to be reprinted in full:Right to Rebel

To the Editor:
The men who founded this nation believed that when a people were oppressed, and their pleas for justice were ignored, and they were denied all redress for their legitimate grievances, then that people had a moral right to rise up against their government and throw off its yoke. The Negro ghetto dwellers of this nation are oppressed; their pleas for justice have been ignored; the Congress of the United States mocks their misery; their peaceful demonstrations make no change in the oppression.

The conclusion is obvious and inescapable: American Negroes have as much right to rebel now as the patriots of 1776 had then.

Can anyone maintain that the British rule was more oppressive than that of the modern slum? Are Stokely Carmichaels’s speeches more inflammatory than those of Patrick Henry? The tragedy of the riots is not that they are happening, but that they will fail. For unlike the patriots of Colonial America, today’s oppressed Negroes are a minority, without a genuine chance to free themselves as the colonies once did. Until the injustice of the ghetto is eliminated, the American Government is illegitimate, and no decent man has a moral obligation to obey it.


I’ll end this obituary with thoughts on a piece titled “APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA” from Wolff’s personal blog dated June 1, 2020: “Many years ago, more than forty now, I gave a talk at Hampshire College in South Amherst. My theme was the relative unimportance in the struggle for social justice of disquisitions on the philosophical subtleties and niceties of Marxist theory. Invoking an image I had used before and would use again, I said that social change was not like brain surgery, where the slightest misstep could lead to death, but rather like a landslide, with huge boulders and uprooted trees sliding down a mountainside, accompanied by countless branches, clods of dirt, and even little pebbles. The important thing in life was not how big a boulder you were, but rather that you were tumbling down the right side of the mountain.

“During the discussion period after the talk, a student asked, ‘If that is what you believe, why do you write books about the subtleties and niceties of Marxian theory’? I replied, ‘Writing books is a quite minor contribution to the struggle, but I am good at it, and I enjoy it, which means I will keep on doing it even when there is not much excitement in the struggle. Not everyone can be a boulder, but I think my pebble is rolling down the right side of the mountain’.

“At times like these, when my world is exploding and I am sitting in my study, self-quarantined and offering my opinions to a world otherwise occupied, I remember that talk and comfort myself that at least I am bouncing down the right hillside”.

I often think about this passage when asked about what I do as an anarchist. As a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies I mostly fundraise for our grants program and facilitate the publishing of our books co-published with AK Press. I’ll be 40 in February and I simply don’t organise in the streets in ways I did in my youth. But I know I’m rolling down the correct hillside—and I know R. P. Wolff is resting now on that same side of the mountain, awaiting the landslide.

Photo: Wikipedia

Bob's prolific & beloved blog can be found here:
https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/
And two other obituaries with lots of comments & remembrances from those whose lives he touched can be found here:
https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2025/01/in-memoriam-robert-paul-…
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/legacyremembers/robert-wolff-obitu…
SYRIA

The regime is dead, the legacy of Omar Aziz is alive!

Jan 15, 2025


From Remember Omar Aziz

Omar Aziz told his friends:

“If the revolution fails, my life and that of my whole generation would be devoid of meaning…
all that we have dreamt of and believed in would have been mere illusion.”

He passed away before seeing the triumph of the revolution and reaping the fruits of his majestic work. Syrians who are still alive owe Omar Aziz and the tens of thousands of Syrian martyrs a massive debt. It is a debt that cannot be paid with tears and moving tributes. Nothing less than fighting like hell for a free Syria would suffice.

The regime has fallen. Assad is gone. This is an important victory for all revolutionaries, but especially for Syrian revolutionaries.

More than 13 years have past since those protests that shook Syria in 2011, when the first cracks of the regime started to show. The regime tried to cover those cracks with bullets and barrel bombs. It didn’t know that ideas are bulletproof. Today those cracks are wide open. Today those cracks brought down the walls of the regime prisons. Today we witness a new Syria.

This should be a time of joy, of celebration. But it is also a time of action. We can’t stop now. We need to go further. Authoritarian forces are already climbing the ladders of power, aiming to crown themselves as the new rulers. The revolution is not over. This is just the beginning. A new beginning.

A new beginning also needs a new road map, a new direction to continue moving forward. We want to move forward together. For that, we first need to find each other, to recognize each other, to orient each other in these new coordinates. Brother, sister, friend, comrade! Let’s march together!

Difficult is the path ahead of us, but today let’s celebrate our victories. And let’s do it in the memory of those who can not celebrate with us, because it is also thanks to their sacrifice, thanks to their struggle, that we are here today.

This is a call, a call to remember, a call to struggle. Omar Aziz has been an inspiration for many of us, and his legacy is alive.

This February 16th, on the 12 anniversary of his death from the brutal prisons of the regime, let’s celebrate life and let’s celebrate revolution. And let’s fight. Because nothing less than a fight like hell for Syria will suffice!

If you want to organize and event for February 16th you can contact us to coordinate and work together!

If you want to learn more about the life and work of Omar Aziz, here there is a good artice from Leila al Shami, here an excelent summary from Javier Sethness with more links and references.
Henry Pratt Fairchild, Immigration, and the Legacy of Scientific Racism in the United States
January 15, 2025

LONG READ




Henry Pratt Fairchild (1880-1956, Ph.D. Yale University) spent the bulk of his academic career at New York University where he was on the faculty for 26 years, serving as Chairman of the Department of Sociology in the Graduate School. He conducted and published research on race, nationalism, and ethnic conflict; he also was involved with the founding of Planned Parenthood and served as President of the American Eugenics Society. In his book The Melting Pot Mistake (1926), Fairchild argued that the melting pot metaphor coined by Israel Zangwill in his 1909 play ‘The Melting-Pot’ was picturesque, but a fallacy that failed to account for the apparent disintegration of American society that had been in the making during the past 50 years of unbridled immigration. According to Fairchild, the group unity necessary for national cohesion and well-being was endangered because the differences of ‘groups’ are not ‘meltable,’ as “the primary basis of group unity is racial.”


In this article, I provide extended excerpts on Fairchild’s views on immigration and race, which have been totally debunked; yet, despite his bogus scientific analyses on race and culture, his writings were influential in political and policy debates among academics, politicians, and social reformers, and were useful in the promotion and passage of laws that severely restricted immigration from ‘undesirable’ countries and that authorized the sterilization of thousands of people who were considered to be inferior and who should be permanently prevented from passing their ‘bad genes’ to another generation. The work of Fairchild was not an outlier in its analysis of the danger posed by allowing non-white and other types of ‘alienage’ to enter the United States. The first two decades of the twentieth century produced a flurry of dystopian accounts of the dangers posed to a nation that needed to protect itself from the ‘alienage’ penetrating its gates before it was too late1. The bogus claims and fear mongering that were widespread in the early decades of the 20th century are eerily similar to discourses on immigrants and immigration in the United States today.


Race, Nationality and Scientific Racism

In a critical review of Henry Pratt Fairchild’s 1947 book Race And Nationality As Factors In American Life, published in Commentary magazine, May 1948, the eminent American historian Oscar Handlin summed up the book’s thesis:


Race and nationality both exist, but they are two different phenomena. Race is a purely biological division of mankind; nationality, a division based on culture. A nation is something else again, but strong nations are homogeneous in race and nationality, and are distinguished by uniformities of language, religion, and customs.

This summation applies equally to The Melting Pot Mistake; in both books, Fairchild spends a great deal of time explaining his understanding of race, racial characteristics and the connections between race and nationality. It is easy to dismiss Fairchild’s absurd and unscientific account of human evolution; as a professional academic sociologist who dabbled in natural history, Fairchild’s description of how races evolved, where they evolved, and their relative qualities is amateurish, given the scientific evidence in wide circulation even at the time of his writing. But in the popular imagination of the time, and among many prominent ‘race scientists’ and anti-immigrant zealots in positions of academic and political power and influence, Fairchild’s ideas and analyses were generally well-received and promoted. Fairchild, along with other prominent public intellectuals and professional academics, believed that ‘racial traits’ were unalterable facts about a person’s character which “he has no power to alter or dispose of a single one of them”. All a person can do, according to Fairchild, is “artificially conceal them (racial traits) or inhibit their display in his own person so far as that is possible, and his only hope for his offspring is to mate with a person of a different race”. In contrast to race traits, which are inborn, inherited, and unchangeable, nationality is acquired:


Nationality is a composite body of ideas and ideals, beliefs, traditions, customs, habits, standards, and morals infused with loyalty, devotion, allegiance, and affection.

For Fairchild, both race and nationality are “the two universal foundations of group unity”. Unfortunately, according to Fairchild, the ‘melting pot’ is a ‘light-hearted attempt to dismiss the ‘great problems’ the American people face. He claims that the primary human groups are characterized by two types of likeness: physical similarity or race unity, and cultural similarity or national unity. Fairchild, borrowing the term from Professor Giddings, calls this unity ‘consciousness of kind’. He claims that “it was natural that among members of each of these original groups there should be a feeling of sympathy, and a feeling of antipathy toward the out-group”; thus, it is simply ‘natural’ to dislike (or hate) members of the out-group: “Dislike of the ‘foreigner’ is a lingering feature of a primal sentiment in the masses of the most civilized peoples”, according to Fairchild. The obvious conclusion to be drawn is that a democratic pluralistic society, i.e., the United States, is unnatural, because it goes against human nature, as Fairchild understands that term. For Fairchild, “The strongest possible group unity exists when national solidarity and racial identity are combined. When racial sympathy supports national sympathy group harmony reaches its maximum…racial dissimilarity always constitutes an element of weakness in group life”. For Fairchild, and those who share his ‘scientific’ analysis of human nature, it isn’t that ‘Americans’ are racially prejudiced because of flaws in their character, or their ignorance of other cultures and ways of life, but rather that it is natural that they feel that way—real ‘Americans’ have a ‘natural’ antipathy toward ‘non-Americans’, and they need not make any apologies for their true and reasonable ‘nature’. He argues that democracy is threatened by a variety of racial allegiances because there is no assurance that questions will be decided upon their intrinsic merits, and for Fairchild, intrinsic merits means the values and beliefs of ‘true’ Americans, people of Nordic/Anglo-Saxon provenance.

To bolster his claim that antipathy towards ‘others’ in American society is not based on race prejudice, he cites a study by John B. Trevor titled ‘Japanese Exclusion: A Study of the Policy and the Law’ (1925), submitted to the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, United States House of Representatives. Trevor writes that the Immigration Act of 1924 wasn’t adopted in criticism of others, “but solely for the purpose of protecting ourselves. We cast no aspersions on any race or creed, but we must remember that every object of our institutions of society and government will fail unless America can be kept American”. America is for Americans, as defined by ‘racial scientists’ and their supporters. In commenting on a ‘racial clash’ between the Japanese and the Whites, Fairchild says this is “typical of the difficulties any democracy must face which contains diverse racial elements in its electorate or even in its general population”. He claims that judging people is an unconscious decision, “we like people or we do not like them…we seldom stop to ask why…We do not need to inquire as to the grounds upon which the group differentiation rests”. For Fairchild, introspection, open-mindedness, and personal experience are irrelevant for how people understand themselves and the world they inhabit when it comes to making (unconscious) judgments about fellow citizens.

For Fairchild, and millions of other Americans influenced by pseudo racial ‘science,’ when numbers of persons representing two or more different racial stocks are put in close contact, the results are predictable: “…qualities of race are carried in the germ plasm…[and] they remain constant and unchanged from generation to generation…and the only way they are modified is by putting them together in different combinations…the basic elements are never changed…No amount of intimate social association would have modified a single black or a single white toward the opposite type”.

Fairchild questions whether ‘racial amalgamation’, i.e., ‘racial’ intermarriage, would be good for anything. While he allows that “the crossing of races is not necessarily disastrous,” he emphasizes that “what is mixed is important; random crossing of breeds will not produce a better stock of humans. You will get a mongrel…’bad’ genes cancel out ‘good’ genes, and the offspring is therefore a primitive, generalized type—spoken of as a “reversion”, “atavism”, or “throwback”.

Continuing with the ‘mongrel’ metaphor, Fairchild writes that rather than the figure of the melting pot, a better one is the village pound. Even if the dogs in the pound are pure-breeds, once they inter-breed, it will result in a loss of specialization on all sides. There can be certain types of inter-breeding that result in positive outcomes, however; for example, “the combination of a large amount of Nordic with smaller proportions of Mediterranean and Alpine has certainly produced a type with outstanding characteristics; in the judgment of many persons (specifically those who are members of it) it is a type of peculiar excellence. This is the English type and it is the American type”. The English may be inter-bred, but breeding among the best racial types leads to superior stock, defined in a circular and backward-looking way, as the American stock: Q.E.D. The American type “is certainly a notable type, with a remarkable record of achievement in the past and promise of achievement for the future”.

Fairchild often uses a rhetorical ploy, which Oscar Handlin calls the ‘this is not to say’ tactic, in which the writer disarms his opponents by giving all the arguments against his own position, then blandly takes it anyway. Here is an example of this strategy; Fairchild argues that the new arrivals to America were sufficiently different in their basic elements to threaten the existing type with annihilation. He then writes that “it’s not ‘positively asserted’ that it would have been inferior to the present type, but it is almost certain that it would have been a much less specialized type, resembling much more closely a more primitive stage of human evolution.” Here is another example of the ‘this is not to say’ tactic in Fairchild’s book: he writes that the means by which the non-white races in the United States have been excluded leaves much to be desired. But bad means can often produce good results, and “there can be no doubt that the policy of keeping this as far as possible a white man’s country is fully justified”. In other words, slavery may have been an unfortunate episode in American history, but in the end, keeping America ‘as white as possible’ is a good thing. Junk science is often used to justify junk morality.
The Meaning of Assimilation

In chapter 7 of his book, Fairchild discusses the meaning of assimilation. He begins by making a distinction between nationality and population: “Nationality is a very different thing from population. Nationality is a spiritual reality, existing in the realm of the sentiments, emotions, and intellect”. At this point, we should be forewarned that for Fairchild, sentiments, emotions, and intellect are quintessential ‘racial’ qualities, difficult to suppress or overcome for the less-favorably endowed ‘non-American’ races. Fairchild does not disappoint in his frontal attack on the inability of immigrants to become full-fledged members of the American nation. Fairchild writes that before assimilation is complete, the immigrant “must have lost all traces or suggestion of his foreign origin…He must feel no sense of alienation with reference to his new compatriots nor they any sense of distinction from him, because of his origin…He must have become completely one with the receiving body”. This is certainly a tall order, one that, obviously, cannot be met. For Fairchild, “assimilation appears as a task of tremendous, almost insuperable, difficulty. In fact, it is doubtful whether…any adult immigrant to any country is ever completely assimilated”. Of course, such a ‘fact’ justifies the goal of complete cessation of immigration from ‘undesirable’ countries, a position that Fairchild supports. For Fairchild and those who endorse his argument, “there is one central standard, the existing national type, which is constantly preserved, and to which all the different types are made to conform”. This begs the question: what is the national type? Fairchild allows (‘this is not to say’) that there will be differences in personality among native and immigrant, but differences in foreign nationality must be submerged or erased. He warns that “the attempt to mix nationalities will result not in a new type of composite nationality but in the destruction of all nationality. The melting pot will not work for the greater part of the task of unification”. In the end, Fairchild is a racial determinist: race determines destiny, and that destiny is fixed and passed on in racial germ plasm. For Fairchild, “Racial discrimination is inherent in biological fact and in human nature…As long as racial feeling exists in the human heart, to ignore it in legislation and policy will be to promote, not peace, but international misunderstanding and war”.

As these ‘facts’ apply to the United States, Fairchild is unequivocal in his judgment on American identity and American exceptionalism:


There can be no doubt that the founders of America expected it and intended it to be a white man’s country…in the meaning that was current among intelligent people one hundred and fifty years ago…There can be no doubt that if America is to remain a stable nation it must continue a white man’s country for an indefinite period to come. An exclusion policy toward all non-white groups is wholly defensible in theory and practice.

For Fairchild, America represents “…truth, beauty, goodness, morality, justice, propriety, efficiency, custom, order, and—home,” and to maintain those stellar qualities, it must remain a white man’s country.

Today, it is mainly white nationalists and neo-Nazis who openly and unapologetically express such overtly racist views. But Fairchild’s views were well within the mainstream of elite and popular opinion with regard to racial stereotyping of foreigners and their descendants of non-Nordic background, extending, of course, to the descendants of enslaved African people, Native Americans, and peoples incorporated into the United States through conquest, such as Mexican-Americans. In fact, leading book publishers, newspapers, magazines, university professors and administrators, artists, scientists, politicians and political leaders were often even more graphic and condemnatory in their writings on these topics than was Fairchild.
Keeping America a White Man’s Country

Here are some examples that reveal how leading editors, scholars (including scientists at elite universities), politicians, and university administrators thought about immigrants, often relying on the findings of leading scientific racism researchers to support their claims.The editor of the highly influential Saturday Evening Post magazine, George Horace Lorimer, became enthralled by the ideas of scientific racism, and became a crusader in the cause of immigration restrictionism. In a 1920 editorial in the magazine titled ‘Self-Preservation,’ Lorimer wrote: “the rank-and-file of these assimilated aliens still live mentally in the ghetto or as peasants on the great estates”. In the Spring of 1921, he wrote that “scientific writers had disproved “the rose-colored myth of the…magical melting pot”2, and that immigration should be limited to individuals from races that are biologically fit for assimilation, and that “race character is as fixed a fact as race color,’ and that immigrants were “infected stock” whose presence would have a “sterilizing effect” on “our fine old stock”3.
In a signed column in Good Housekeeping magazine, soon to be sworn in as vice president of the United States Calvin Coolidge, explained that “it would be suicidal for us to let down the bars for the inflowing of cheap manhood…there are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend…and the dead weight of alien accretion stifles national progress”4.
Harry H. Laughlin, Ph.D. in Science from Princeton University and leader of the American eugenics movement, called for the annual sterilization of “culls” (his term for the least desirable ten percent of the population) in his report to the Breeders Association. The report’s central conclusion was that “Society must look upon germ-plasm as belonging to society and not solely to the individual who carries it”5. Laughlin’s work was critical to the 1927 U.S. Supreme Court’s 8-1 decision in Buck v. Bell (274 US 200 (1927)) that upheld the constitutionality of Virginia’s law allowing state-enforced sterilization of ‘defective’ individuals living in state institutions.
James Davis, Secretary of Labor in the Warren G. Harding administration, told an audience in Pittsburgh that the results of the army IQ tests developed by Carl Brigham and published in his Study of American Intelligence, published by Princeton University Press in 1923, had determined that exactly 6,346,856 immigrants were “inferior or very inferior”6.
The former president of Stanford University, David Starr Jordan, used Brigham’s data to declare that unwanted immigrants were “biologically incapable of rising either now or through their descendants above the mentality of a 12-year-old child”7.
Congressman Albert Johnson of Washington, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Immigration Committee, appointed racial scientist Harry Laughlin as the committee’s official “expert eugenics agent”. His unscientific ‘findings’ presented to the committee were instrumental in promoting the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 that restricted immigration to 155,000 a year; quotas were set at 2% of the U.S. foreign-born (or derived) population from any given country as enumerated in the 1890 census. (It would not be until 1965 with passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act in the Lyndon Johnson administration that country-of-origin quotas were eliminated.) Albert Johnson made his own view quite clear: “We do not want Japanese, Chinese, Hindu, Turk, Greek, Italian, or any other nationality until we can clean house”. Committee member J. Will Taylor of Tennessee described immigrants who threatened the nation’s unguarded gates as “a heterogeneous hodgepodge, polyglot aggregation of aliens, most of whom are the scum, the offal, and the excrescence of the earth”8. Similar comments were made by other Republican members of the committee, with no supporting evidence whatsoever—no health records or interviews with ‘aliens’ were provided. The officials reporting from Poland openly acknowledged the central assumption that preceded their investigation: “The unassimilability of these classes politically is a fact too often proved in the past to bear any argument”9.
New York lawyer Charles Winthrop Gould, author of America: A Family Matter (1921), insisted that the southern Italians had for two thousand years “never produced an outstanding able man”. He considered the immigrant stream corrupting the nation “revolting”.
Biologist Raymond Pearl of Johns Hopkins University, one of the nation’s leading interpreters of biological statistics, told a friend that discrimination against Jews “is a necessary move in the struggle for existence on the part of the rest of us…The real question seems to come to this: Whose world is this to be, ours, or the Jews?”10
The language of eugenic science was convenient and effective; even though eugenics was not based on sound science, the theories of prominent racial scientists in the United States were admired and validated by editors of the New York Times, U.S. Presidents11, prominent publishers, and praised by Nazis12.
White supremacist and author of Rising Tide of Color Against the White World-Supremacy (1920), Lothrop Stoddard, declared that “science is our polestar. It is alike our guide for the present and our hope for the future”.

Franz Boas, German-American anthropologist called Stoddard’s book “vicious propaganda” and provided scientific evidence to counter claims by racial scientists that the cephalic index (a measurement of head width versus head length) was anything but immutable. His analysis of 17,821 skulls revealed that the longer a family had been in the United States, the more likely it was that the heads of their children would move toward the American mean. These changes were brought about by environmental influences (mainly nutrition). Boas concluded that “there can be no stability in mental traits of the races, as is often assumed”13. In fact, Boas argued, as skull shape was mutable across generations, so were all physical and mental traits.

His findings have been validated for all immigrant groups to the United States, and after decades of cultural promotion of scientific racism in the 20th century in the United States, the movement finally came to an end; the bankruptcy of scientific racism was documented in the scientific literature, and the reputations of its principal promoters were mostly in tatters. However, the ideas—and ideologies—that fueled scientific racism did not die out, and research designed to legitimize racial categories and demonstrate the connections between race and intelligence, as measured on standardized tests and other social indices, has continued to be published to the present day.

A good example is the 1994 book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by the Harvard University psychologist Richard J. Hernstein and political scientist Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute, in which the authors argue that there are stark differences between racial and ethnic groups, including differences in intelligence, a view that has been largely discredited by science. Funding for much of the research on which they relied was provided by the organization Pioneer Fund, described by many as white supremacist.14
The Beginnings of Scientific Racism in the Nineteenth Century

Reginald Horsman15 traces the collapse of Enlightenment theory in the United States that helped produce scientific theories of black and Indian inferiority16. In the early decades of the 19th century, there was considerable optimism that the newly formed American nation could live up to the standards necessary to sustain a republican democracy. Someone who expressed such optimism was Edward Everett (1794-1865), a distinguished American politician, orator, member of the U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Senator, and Governor of Massachusetts, who avoided asserting the innate inferiority of other peoples. As early as 1824 he spoke of the importance of extending “one government, one language, and…one character, over so vast a space as the United States”17. Everett believed in one human race. Everett, along with James Barbour (1775-1842), U.S. Senator and Governor of Virginia, praised the American people as being particularly gifted in the arts of government; yet, both men believed that republicanism, good government, and education would transform other peoples, and both men emphasized America’s duties more than America’s wants18.

However, confronted with the reality of slavery and continental expansion that culminated in the Indian Removal Act in the 1830s and the state-sponsored theft of Indian lands19, abstract dreams of universal improvement and cooperation were threatened and supplanted by theories based on ‘science’ that justified the superiority and domination of the white race over all other races and cultures. Between 1839 and 1859, the American school of ethnology, centered in Philadelphia, argued there were irreversible differences between races and eventually defended polygenesis, the theory that human races evolved independently. The ‘science’ of craniology flourished during this period. In 1839, Samuel George Morton, considered to be a founder of the American school of ethnology, published Crania Americana in which he argued that measured differences in the volume of human skulls equated with differences in intelligence, and based on his findings, Caucasians (his term) had the largest volume, while the American Indians had the lowest. These findings were welcomed by defenders of slavery and supporters of the dispossession of Indian territory.

During this period of the growth of scientific racism, the writings of amateurs were often given as much weight as ‘serious’ researchers, such as Morton. New York physician John H. Van Evrie (1814-1896) argued that “slavery was the most desirable thing in human affairs”. He believed that God had designed races to serve different purposes, and that slavery was the natural condition of black people, and white people were naturally fit to be masters. To abolish slavery would be cruel to black people who, when separated from the white man, were destined for extinction.

By the middle of the 19th century, the idea of distinct races with innately different capabilities was firmly engrained in American scientific thinking. As Horsman notes, “American science provided Americans with a confident explanation of why blacks were enslaved, why Indians were exterminated, and why white Americans were expanding their settlements rapidly over adjacent lands”20. By 1850, the science of man was of vital interest. Throughout America, scientific proofs of racial separation were widely disseminated, and the future of the American continents and the world was thought of in terms of white domination and the subordination or disappearance of other races21. George Perkins Marsh (1801-1882), considered to be America’s first environmentalist, a philologist, linguist, lawyer, member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Vermont, distinguished diplomat in the administrations of Zachary Taylor and Abraham Lincoln, elected to the American Philosophical Society, expressed the view that other peoples were unfit to share in the representative government developed by the Germanic peoples. Many of the most sophisticated, highly educated, and politically progressive Americans were convinced of the superiority of their own kind, and scientific racism gave them confidence that their views on race did not make them racists at all.

Our contemporary scientific understanding of human genetics and the great variation that exists within and between all human groups has conclusively demonstrated that race is a social construct, not a biological reality22. Yet, despite these facts, the power of race as a social and political construct is alive and well because it justifies the maintenance of social hierarchies in which the ‘right’ racial/cultural types rule at the top of the social pyramid, while the other, ‘inferior’, racial/cultural types dwell at the bottom of the social pyramid. But not only are those deemed to be inferior placed at the bottom of the social pyramid, they are also at risk of being deported, or prevented from entering a country, or systematically exterminated, as in pogroms that targeted Jewish people in Russia and Eastern Europe, culminating in the genocide of Jews in the 1940s in Germany and German-occupied Europe, among many other cases of ethnic cleansing over the past centuries throughout the Western Hemisphere, Europe, and elsewhere.

In his review in Commentary magazine of Henry Pratt Fairchild’s 1947 book Race and Nationality as Factors in American Life, Harvard historian Oscar Handlin notes that Fairchild continued to ignore findings in the scientific literature that rendered his claims on the immutability of racial ‘germ plasma’ baseless, even embarrassing, given that twenty-one years had elapsed since the publication of The Melting Pot Mistake in 1926. When confronted with Franz Boas’ findings on changes in the cephalic index in immigrants in a single generation, Fairchild, writing in 1913, sidestepped these inconvenient facts with the hope that “they will be subjected to the most careful scrutiny by anthropologists qualified either to verify or correct them”. He remained unconvinced 34 years later, blaming the lack of verification or correction on the eminent reputation of Franz Boas that had dissuaded researchers from questioning his findings: “Boas’ very eminence and his high standing as a scholar have created a certain reluctance among his colleagues to launch a really destructive attack upon his edifice”. The explanation is nothing more than a slur against Boaz, a man whose role in debunking scientific racism was pivotal in the dismantling of the baseless claims of racial determinism and racial superiority that ultimately led to the destruction of much of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.
America Comes Full Circle

In the recent U.S. presidential campaign, language used to describe immigrants (whether ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’) was very similar to the language used by academics and politicians one hundred years ago. Republican Party candidate for president, Donald J. Trump, said in an interview that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country:” “Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country,” Trump told the right-leaning news site The National Pulse in a video interview: “It’s poisoning the blood of our country. It’s so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have.”23 In another speech, Trump asserted, again without evidence, that other countries were emptying their prisons of “young people” and sending them across the border. “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases,” he said. “They’re not people, in my opinion.” He later referred to them as “animals.”24

Of course, this rhetoric was nothing new for Trump. In his first run for the presidency in 2015, then candidate Trump read the following statement to the assembled crowd: “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” he said, adding the word “hell” for emphasis this time25. But all indications are that in his second term he plans to go further than the partial ban on Muslim immigrants that, in a revised form, was upheld by the Supreme Court (in a 5-4 decision). In his second term, Trump is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration, including preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled. Mr. Trump wants to revive his first-term border policies, including banning entry by people from certain Muslim-majority nations and reimposing a Covid 19-era policy of refusing asylum claims — though this time he would base that refusal on assertions that migrants carry other infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis. He plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year26. The same xenophobia and racial stereotyping that led to the lopsided passage of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 (308-62 in the House of Representatives, 69-9 in the United States Senate, signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge) is informing Donald Trump’s immigration policies nearly one hundred years later.

There will surely be legal challenges to some or all of these plans, but there is little doubt that Trump’s policies will create turmoil, chaos, uncertainty, and suffering for millions of people, many of whom have lived in the United States for most or all of their life. Their misfortune is that they are not the ‘right’ type of people; they are people who are easily demonized because of the color of their skin, their countries of origin, their economic status, their political views, and/or the religion they profess. Almost exactly one hundred years after the publication of The Melting Pot Mistake, America (and millions of the American electorate) has come full circle, apparently destined to once again shut its gates and expel those people who came to the United States seeking a better life. In summing up Henry Pratt Fairchild’s arguments on race and nationality, Oscar Handlin offers this assessment:


The whole is held together by confident assertions, confident because they rest upon an absolute lack of consequential thinking and upon a stolid refusal to regard the world of facts. Here is a logician who defines race in purely biological terms and who then shows that “the notion of race is almost as old as humanity” because all men have in-group feelings. Here is a scholar who has not changed his discussion of assimilation in thirty-five years, all the evidence from the experience of that generation to the contrary notwithstanding.

The comments of Oscar Handlin continue to have relevance in our contemporary world, in all societies, including in those most scientifically advanced. The values, methods, and goals that the best science embodies continue to be attacked and undermined by those people who eschew and repudiate the legitimate and hard-won findings of empirically-based scientific inquiry. Denial of the overwhelming evidence in support of evolutionary biology undermines the legitimacy of scientific inquiry more broadly, and leads to the types of unfounded and dangerous ideas and ideologies revealed in the Melting Pot Mistake. Those who deny the reality of global planetary warming, who deny the efficacy of vaccines developed by professional virologists to prevent the spread of communicable diseases, and who place religious beliefs above scientific inquiry and facts as the best guide for finding solutions to our most pressing social and environmental problems, will find that nature does not respond to hopes and prayers. The rejection—or marginalization—of science, facts, and reason threatens the very existence of our species and all forms of life on planet earth.
[Editor’s Note]

On Saturday, February 1, 2025 at 1:00 pm EST, ZNetwork is hosting a 1 hour online panel discussion with Zafiro Patiño, Aviva Chomsky, and Peter Bohmer that will focus on the critical and increasingly contentious topic of immigration.

The panel will highlight the key dangers for immigrants once Trump comes to power, the current mood in immigrant communities and how they’re preparing, and practical action that can be taken to resist what might happen. There will be time for some questions from the audience too.

Register here: https://actionnetwork.org/events/immigration-immigrants-in-a-fascist-us-panel-discussion




References

The legendary editor of the publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons, Maxwell Perkins, promoted and published the work of the leading scientific racists, including Madison Grant (The Passing of the Great Race; or, the Racial Basis of European History 1916) and Lothrop Stoddard (The Rising Tide of Color 1920; The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man 1922; Racial Realities in Europe 1924; and Social Classes in Post-War Europe 1925), among many other books by well-known American intellectuals and academics who advanced theories of scientific racism. ↩︎
Daniel Okrent, The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law that Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America, Scribner, 2019, p. 268, 269. ↩︎
Ibid, p. 269. ↩︎
Ibid, p. 270. ↩︎
Ibid, p. 274. ↩︎
Ibid, p. 320. ↩︎
Ibid, p. 320. ↩︎
Ibid, p. 284. ↩︎
Ibid, p. 283. ↩︎
Okrent, p. 309. Those words were substantially the same ones uttered by marchers in the Unite the Right Rally, August 11 and 12, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, when torch carrying white nationalists chanted “Jews will not replace us.” ↩︎
“In a speech outdoors before more than a hundred thousand people, black and white, in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1921, President Warren G. Harding declared that blacks must have full economic and political rights, but that segregation was also essential to prevent “racial amalgamation,” and social equality was thus a dream that blacks must give up. Harding added: “Whoever will take the time to read and ponder Mr. Lothrop Stoddard’s book on “The Rising Tide of Color” . . . must realize that our race problem here in the United States is only a phase of a race issue that the whole world confronts.” (‘When W.E.B. Du Bois Made a Laughingstock of a White Supremacist’, Ian Frazier, The New Yorker, August 19, 2019). ↩︎
Nazi Party ideologist Alfred Rosenberg was in awe of the work of Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. Rosenberg encouraged the United States to “proceed with youthful strength to set up the new idea of the racial state, such as some awakened Americans have already apprehended, like Grant and [Lothrop] Stoddard.” (Okrent, p. 361-2). Hitler cited passages of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race; or, the Racial Basis of European History (1916) in speeches and writings and owned a copy of the original German edition at the time of his suicide in Berlin in 1945 (Ibid, p. 361). ↩︎
Ibid, p. 155 ↩︎
The nonprofit Pioneer Fund referenced here (which has recently been rebranded as the Human Diversity Foundation) is not to be confused with the venture capital firm Pioneer Fund. ↩︎
Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, Harvard University Press, 1981. ↩︎
Ibid, p. 115. ↩︎
Ibid, p. 96. ↩︎
Ibid, p. 97. ↩︎
Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory, W. W. Norton & Company, 2020. ↩︎
Horsman, p. 137. ↩︎
Ibid, p. 157. ↩︎
“Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza’s genetic work earned him accolades from those hoping to break down the barriers of race. He found that people from the same population are as genetically diverse as people from two different groups, essentially showing that at the genetic level, there is no such thing as race. Reviewing Cavalli-Sforza’s 2000 book Genes, Peoples, and Languages in The New York Review of Books, Jared Diamond praised the Stanford researcher for “demolishing scientists’ attempts to classify human populations into races in the same way that they classify birds and other species into races.” Amy Adams, Hanae Armitage, Stanford Medicine, News Center, September 10, 2018. ↩︎
Kate Sullivan, CNN, ‘Trump’s anti-immigrant comments draw rebuke’. October 6, 2023. DOI November 7, 2024: https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/06/politics/trump-anti-immigrant-comments/index.html ↩︎
Anjali Huynh and Michael Gold, ‘Trump Says Some Migrants are ‘Not People’ and Predicts a ‘Blood Bath’ if he Loses’. The New York Times, March 16, 2024. ↩︎
The Washington Post, December 7, 2015. ↩︎
Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, ‘Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 Immigration Plans.’ The New York Times, November 11, 2023. ↩︎


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Thomas Ricento

Thomas Ricento, Ph.D. (UCLA) is emeritus professor and research chair at the University of Calgary. He is the author of 8 books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles and chapters. He has received research grants with the Russell Sage Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. He is a Fulbright Professor (Colombia and Costa Rica) and visiting professor at universities in Aruba, Chile, Costa Rica, Germany, Spain, Switzerland.