Why Prison Abolition? Why Now? 

Behavior Modification Control at the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility



August 23, 2020 

Length:2488 words


Summary: This report by a longtime Black political prisoner in Indiana exposes the mental and physical mechanisms being used to try to prevent prisoners from uniting against their oppressors. It concludes with a brief auto-biographical sketch on why prison abolition is imperative.


Behavior Modification Control: The Wabash Valley Correctional Facility G-Cell House Experiment

Segregated confinement has always been used to control or alter a prisoner’s behavior. The threat is that if you don’t stop your resistant behavior you will be placed in isolation.

During the 1980s Indiana Prisons were experiencing their worse episodes of violence. Officers were dogmatic and extremely brutal to the prisoners. As the political education of prisoners surged, militancy called men to take action. Prisoners in revolutionary anger lashed out in defense of their humanity, human rights, and civil rights.

We never prepared for it, but the Indiana Department of Corrections (IDOC) had plans to build two units here in Indiana to modify the behavior of prisoners. In 1991 the Maximum Control Complex was built as an annex to Westville Prison, located in Westville, Indiana. In 1993 the Secured Housing Unit (SHU) was built as an annex to Wabash Valley Correctional Facility (WVCF). These two units were designed to house and segregate Indiana’s worst of the worst. In addition, in seeking to maintain human bodies in a cell for 23 to 24 hours a day, a lot of prisoners were gradually removed out of the general population in a series of sweeps. But it didn’t alter the internal violence taking place inside any of these plantations. The psychological threat was obvious—if you don’t stop engaging in violence or political resistance you will be buried in isolation.

While the U.S. claims not to engage in torture in military operations, it has and will continue to engage in it with anyone deemed a terrorist. Likewise, the IDOC claims to not promote retaliation against prisoners but they have and will continue to do so, even though it violates the very policies they have sworn to uphold and enforce. The purpose of this essay is to expose who the real monsters are at Wabash Valley Correctional Facility. Highlighting obvious facts will show how they retaliate against us. We are not ignorant of their treachery.


The Experiment and Our Movement to Challenge It

For years, two housing units at WVCF have operated as general population status. Many of us are so happy to be out of segregation that it is not being properly challenged. This is over now. They are releasing us from segregation into yet another segregation-style housing unit. G-House and P-House are both another form of segregation. The idea behind behavior modification is to take away the prisoner’s freedom of movement and isolate him from the prison’s creature comforts. We are cut off from almost everything which is supposed to give us better control or our activities.

As a revolutionary political prisoner, I have been the subject of behavior modification experiments for the past 30 years. So, I and other comrades have no other choice than to challenge these tactics. Our movement inside and outside these prison walls is about building relationships with everyone who is engaged in the same work. Getting the word out to the media about the punishment and retaliatory schemes being used by the officials here at WVCF is very important.


Targeted for Retaliation and Invidious Discrimination

The way to right the wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.

—Idea B. Wells

On September 6, 2018, WVCF officials decide to convert what was a general population cell house into G-House. That is, they transformed it into a Restricted Movement Unit. It brings together four groups of prisoners in one unit, allowing each one to come out for recreation for one hour a day, but divided by the different groups. They isolate us from all programs, educational access, and religious services. They disrupted our daily ability to socially interact with friends and comrades. This was an experiment in psychological behavior modification control.

They moved a lot of prisoners out of this unit to make room for new prisoners they were targeting for retaliation. They singled out maybe 30 to 40 prisoners they wanted removed from general population. Six months later they had to modify the restrictions to allow all prisoners held in G-House access to all programs. They found a loophole to get it approved, as a Modified General Population Housing Unit. But they never changed the way recreation is operated. We are still held in our cells 22 or 23 hours a day. There are still four groups of recreation being run, not just one. As in all the population houses, G-House cells have key locks on the food tray slots. No other house has locks on their doors.

This housing unit is a segregation unit by another name. One prisoner filed a complaint against a counselor for messing with his legal mail. He was in a time-cut program called PLUS and only months from completing it. He was kicked out of the program for filing his complaint. He had no bad conduct, yet they had him moved out of the program and sent to G-Housing. This is a case of retaliation, simply because he filed a complaint against that counselor for mail tampering.

On January 26, 2020, I was removed from my sanitation job by internal affairs and sent to segregation under investigation. I had no conduct reports, no bad work evaluations. On February 21, 2020, I was released to the G-Housing Unit and removed from a working unit. They put me in G-House to keep me isolated from the prisoners and staff alike. This was retaliation. According to official policy I was supposed to be given a job at equal pay scale as what I was paid prior to being removed from my job in January. The G-Housing Unit has to be exposed as a warehouse dungeon specifically used for prisoners they want out of the way. They want me isolated, and out of the reach of some people, even if doing so violates the law and the Constitution. But they can’t isolate my mouth, they can’t stop me from voicing my concerns. I just want to teach them to keep their feet off of my neck.


Corruption and Coverups

Corruption and coverups can only exist when revolutionary conscious prisoners turn a blind eye to it and do nothing about it. In 2019 a comrade was murdered while an officer sat at his post as if nothing had happened. Once he was found dead his body was already hard—which tells you how long he was dead. They claimed it was from a drug overdose. But he was beaten and stabbed behind his ear twice. This happened in the G-Housing Unit. The prisoner was severely beaten while an officer neglected his duties to do security checks every 30 minutes.

In 2018, prior to G-House being converted to a Restricted Movement Unit, during the running of lunch meals two prisoners hid out inside a prisoner’s cell. As soon as the lunch line doors rolled, they entered a comrade’s cell and stabbed him and beat him up. This could never have happened if she had done a count and security check to ensure everyone was accounted for securely in their respective cells. This female officer failed to do her job, and her actions caused yet another prisoner to be beaten.

The criminal justice system, in conjunction with the prison industrial complex, is a nationwide problem. Its philosophy is to create and devise programs that can ultimately control those captives in their custody. The IDOC has used units like G-House and P-House to modify behavior by turning prisoners against other prisoners, create distrust, slander each another, and destroy unity and solidarity so that prisoner will have no one around them to trust. This way prisoners can only confide in prison administrators—which is how they maintain control of this prisons. These experiments in behavior modification of the past are still being used today. This is why we organize ourselves and work tirelessly to educate prisoners to avoid these manipulations from happening.

Indiana prisoncrats are also implementing the use of a tactic straight out of the Willie Lynch handbook, Breaking of a Slave. Lynch wrote about using slaves to keep other slaves in line. He also boasted that this system would perpetrate itself long after he was dead and gone. Today, some prisoners are being given positions so to try to keep other prisoners in line, as in allowing heads of street organizations to control entire units to make these prisoncrats appear to have everything under control. Revolutionaries and political prisoners are supposed to actually be the dominant players in these environments. But we are out-numbered by the opportunist informants and reactionaries. We still trying to teach these men how to oppose this stuff. We struggle forward.


We Are Supported by a Movement

We are organizing and slowly growing in our membership. IDOC-Watch watch was created as in prison as a watchdog group. It is a voice of Indiana prisoners and exposes violations that occur in prisons. We have litigated conditions inside WVCF and other prisons. Primarily, we want to confront how long prisoners are being held in these solitary torture chambers that they call segregation units.

Our movement, IDOC=-Watch, is now in several cities in Indiana, which now include Indianapolis, South Bend, Bloomington, and Gary. We are always open to new allies and friends of the movement. If anyone wants to join us or learn more about IDOC-Watch, you can do so by logging onto our blog idocwatch.org/blog-1, or our mail address at IDOC-Watch, PO Box 11095, Indianapolis, IN 46201.


Not a General Population Unit

Since September 6, 2018, G-Cell House could no longer be considered a General Population Unit. They converted G-House into a Restricted Movement Unit, and in doing so cut us off from all programs and religious services, school, etc. This action violated all prisoners based in G-House of their first amendment rights. On April 6, 2019, due to pending legally challenges, the prisoncrats removed restrictions against attending programs, religious services, and school. But they maintained the restrictions on recreation. There is no other unit at Wabash being operated like the G-House. Instead of those houses in the left and right sides of the unit being let out of their cells together for recreation (as all the population houses do), there are two recreation groups on the left side, and two recreation groups on the right side. We never get to see people from general population. We have locks on every cell door, just like in the segregation unit. Many of us have spent six months to a year in one of these three segregation units at WVCF, instead of being sent to a regular population house once our time is up. They are having many of us sent to G-House, which is amounting to double punishment. These tactics are being used to scare prisoners into changing their behavior. Yet they have not been able to stop any violence from occurring in G- or P-Housing Units.

We want the following demands to be addressed:
We want all prisoners with one year or more released to general population.
We want G-House to become unrestricted and opened up as a General Population Unit and not modified segregation.
That all padlocks be removed from every door in G-House.
That all prisoners be give 30-day and 90-day reviews, just like it is done in other Restricted Movement Units.

Protest calls and letters should be made to:



Governor Eric Holcolm

Office of the Governor, State House, Room 206

200 W. Washington Street

Indianapolis, IN 46204

Phone: 317 232-4567



Commissioner Robert Carter

Indiana Government Center-South

302 West Washington St.

Indianapolis, IN 46204-2738

Phone: 317-232-6711



The author of this essay can be reached by going online to connectnetwork.com and setup a free account. Go to Indiana Prisoners and find “Leonard McQuay,” 874304, location Wabash Valley Correctional Facility. Once you send me an email I will be able to email you back. You can also write me via snail mail at:



Brother Khalfani Malik Khaldun

(Leonard McQuay)

874304

PO Box 1111

Carlisle, IN 47838



* * * *


If these Walls Could Talk

If these walls could talk, they would openly reveal to you the story of a boy at 17 entering a prison plantation with a 25-year sentence to serve twelve and a half years.

If these walls could talk, they would explain to you how I transitioned into a man inside these walls and embraced the revolutionary mission as a political prisoner. If these walls could talk, I’m sure they would reveal that I spent at least 27 of my 32 years in prison fighting for change inside these walls—self-educating myself and countless young misguided youth on the struggle and the ways to survive this prison life style.

If these walls could talk, they would let you know all the main and suffering I have endured from losing my mother and two brothers, my father, two sisters, and my only son since 1997. That I pray they went to heaven. If these walls could talk, they would tell you the prisoncrats in 1994 framed me for the murder of a prison guard that ended in a trial in the state of Indiana that gave me a 60-year sentence. If these walls could talk, they would describe what it was like to spend as total of 20 years in solitary confinement, now knowing if I was every going to see the light of day. If these walls could talk, they would tell you how guards would tamper with my food trays and give racist prisoners my mail, and tear my cell up just because they can get away with it.

If these walls could talk, they would convey my discontent for President Trump who is more stupid than Forest Gump. They would say how I expressed solidarity with the comrades and organizations who opposed the assassinations of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, LaQuan McDonald, Castille Abree, and of course George Floyd. Say their names loud and proud. George Floyd changed the world, as did Eric Garner.

If these walls could talk, they would tell you the main who has sacrificed half of his life confined to a prison cell is a stand-up person full of compassion, love, and vision. He does appreciate the love and support given to him.

If these walls could talk, they would tell my story to world, calling on the entire activist community to bring Khalfani Malik Khaldun home from these trenches. If these walls could talk, they would say that I am proud of all of the youth of all races out in the streets mobilizing to defund the police. Keep that fire alive!

If these walls could talk, they would tell you that I love each and every one of you. That I am devoted to the abolition of all prisons. That I will be an outstanding representative of our national and global solidarity movement. Power of the People! Black Lives Matter! Political; Prisoners’ Lives Matter! Now as a people let us change the world. Peace and Blessings!

Ecology and Life in the Pandemic: Capital’s Treadmill of Growth and Destruction




August 24, 2020

Length:4128 words


Summary: Report to the July 2020 Interim Convention of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization, slightly updated — Editors


“One basis for life and another for science is a priori a falsehood.”
—Marx, 1844 Manuscripts


The reality of life in 2020 is one of overlapping crises—Covid-19, a deep economic recession, climate change and its related effects, and the dehumanization of persons of color, just to name a few. All of these and more are fundamentally related to attempts by capital to despotically control all of nature, including human beings for the purpose of extracting whatever surplus value it can. This despotic control has reached a point where it can be said without exaggeration that capital has become hostile to the continuance of life on Earth. This is especially clear in the case of the ecological crisis that capitalism faces and in one of its most pressing recent manifestations, Covid-19.

Earlier this year as wildfires raged across Australia at an unprecedented rate, seeming to signal an urgency in preventing further climate change, many in the world paid lip service to the threatening ecological crisis that is clear to soon envelop the world in catastrophic change—rising temperatures, glacial melting, rising sea levels, increasing drought in some regions, loss of biodiversity, increasing scarcity of clean water, etc. Earth’s average temperature has increased about 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit (0.9 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century, most of which has occurred in the past 35 years, with the six warmest years on record taking place since 2014. Globally, sea levels rose about eight inches (about 20 cm) in the 20th century and we are currently on track to double that this century.[1] Scientists predict that the effects on human communities will be profound and will likely include temperature increases which could by 2070 rise to levels that will make about 19% of the Earth unhabitable by humans;[2] droughts in many parts of the world that will disrupt local and international food chains, leading to at the very least, regional famines; increasing water shortages that could lead to regional conflict; increased transmission of infectious disease; and the flooding and submersion of low-lying coastal areas. All of the above are likely to increase conflict as well as create new climate refugees seeking basic survival. Moreover, those who will likely see the greatest negative effects of climate change are those least able to mitigate those effects due to poverty among many other factors.


How Did We Get Here?

The basic story of climate change is a familiar and (outside of the far-right) a non-controversial truth. The increased use of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution has led to atmospheric degradation. These fossil fuels, which took thousands of years to create, have been burned for their energy and released into the atmosphere at an alarming rate. With more carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the Earth has been getting warmer since greenhouse gases reduce the amount of heat that can escape the atmosphere into space.

While the above is relatively uncontroversial, there are at least two prominent theories of why humans have caused climate change. One argues that the current age is one of the Anthropocene, meaning that human beings as such are having a large enough effect on the climate to represent an entire era of environmental history. In brief, this theory is problematic as it posits abstract human beings outside of any particular mode of production as the cause of climate change. This theory follows the logic of capitalism which argues that human beings have always been egoistic and acquisitive and rules out the possibility of a different type of social relations as human nature is unchanging and unchangeable.

Others such as Jason Moore would argue that the current environmental regime is one of the Capitalocene. Here, it is the relations inherent in capitalism, in its incessant drive to attain greater and greater surplus value which leads to the destruction of the environment. While space prevents a full discussion and critique of Moore’s work, I would like to point out some of the most significant aspects of his understanding of the relationship between humanity and nature.[3] Perhaps the most noteworthy of these is his critique of the majority of left ecologists that either explicitly or implicitly maintain a theoretic separation between nature and society where each is nearly completely isolated from the other. Moore points in the direction of a theory that dialectically combines the interrelations between nature and culture which can be more useful. Here there are constant interactions between human beings and the natural world where it becomes impossible to completely separate the two. Human beings create new nature while simultaneously, nature acts on and changes the human being.

As Kohei Saito (2017) rightly points out, Moore’s theory is problematic in that he trades the Cartesian dualism of “nature” v. “culture” for an undifferentiated unity of the two. As Marx notes in numerous places in his work, humans are natural beings, but they are also unique in the sense that they are also conscious beings, capable of conscious change to their environment in a way that nature never can:


A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes his own purpose in those materials.[4]

If we do not maintain this conceptual distinction between the human being and nature, the subjective aspect of humanity cannot be understood, nor can purposeful change happen. Thus, Moore cuts off the most important avenue for humanity to overcome this crisis.[5] However, we do not need to follow Moore this far with his unitary theory. Instead, a dialectical unity of humanity and nature where both commonality and difference are acknowledged can be conceptualized. As Marx argued in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please in circumstances they choose for themselves; rather they make it in present circumstances, given and inherited.”[6] The same can be said for nature as for history.

Another important point for Moore is that we must look closely at the relations between humanity and nature, not as such, but in social and historical context. Human beings do not interact with the natural world in the same way in a feudal society as they do in a capitalist society. Moreover, within different stages of capitalism, humanity’s relationship with nature may shift. The reverse can also be true—climate conditions affect capitalist relations and the opportunities available for individual capitalists to expand. Looking at the issue from a more global perspective, we can perhaps say that contemporary capitalism has developed to the point where its own rapacious nature has led to conditions that further limit its ability to expand and survive (more on this below).

This type of thinking undermines the logic of neo-Malthusian environmentalists who would argue that overconsumption and an increasing world population are the biggest problems. Instead, the issue is that capitalism so exhausts the inputs of nature and the available labor power such that these workers and resources will not be able to reproduce themselves at the same rate, quality or cost for capital. It becomes more expensive for capitalists to do business, cutting the rate of surplus value. Simply reining in overconsumption through state interventions like population control, pollution regulation, or caps on production would, at best, slow down the degradation of nature, but could never solve it. Similarly, the proposed Green New Deal would be a positive development in the sense that it prioritizes new green technology, more democratic control of industry and a stronger social safety net. However, the basis of this program is a neo-Keynesianism which does not question the basis of capitalism itself, thus it cannot be effective in bringing about the type of transformative change necessary to stave off the climate crisis. Capital’s raison d’etre is to expand its accumulation of value and the only way of doing this is through the exploitation of the “free gifts” of nature—i.e. overworked nature and human beings that cannot continue to reproduce themselves in the same way for future rounds of production—hence, the necessity of further degradation of the natural world.


Ecology, the Pandemic and Capital

The Covid-19 pandemic underlines the close relationship between capitalist relations and the natural world. It should be noted that this is far from an instance of “nature” reasserting itself against humanity. Instead, the very conditions for a pandemic are written into the social relations of globalized capitalism at a number of levels. Sonia Shah in Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond charts the outbreak of pandemics in the modern world starting with Cholera in the early 1800s. There had been outbreaks of Cholera in parts of India for a very long time, which could become a local epidemic, but not a large-scale pandemic. She argues that in part, what made the Cholera pandemic possible was the dense concentration of people together in cities, high levels of poverty coupled with inadequate sanitation, and the increased ability of individuals to travel throughout the world, spreading the disease. All of these factors were made possible by a particular type of social organization: capitalism. While it is very unlikely that Shah herself could be accused of being a socialist, she shines light on the degree to which capitalism in bringing parts of the world together through commerce, the increased agrarian production that allowed for more people to live and work in cities and through the vast inequality that value production creates, opened up significant ground for the possibility of pandemics.

Additionally, Shah is keen to point out that we are likely to see an increase in epidemics and pandemics. This has as much to do with social relations as it does with the biology of viruses. As we have seen with Covid-19, geography is no barrier to transmission. When it is possible to travel around the world by jet, cruise ship, train or car, securing borders from contagions is almost impossible, especially if there is little or no advance warning. Add to that the motive to sweep under the rug the outbreak of a new virulent pathogen as has been the case in countries like the US and China in order to protect tourism, industry and reputation, and you have a recipe for a full-scale world pandemic.

Moreover, because viruses can adapt to their environments in unique ways, the possibility of more virulent pathogens only increases as interactions among humans and between humans and animals increases. Viruses, bacteria and other microbes have the ability to acquire traits through horizontal gene transfer, meaning that as they interact with each other, they can pick up the traits of that microbe simply from that interaction. Antibiotic resistant MRSA emerged in this way, for example.[7] Thus, more interaction between live beings creates the possibility of more dangerous pathogens. This issue will certainly not be abated in the new society and, in fact, the interaction of people from all parts of the world may increase. What will be different, however, is that these and other interactions will not be driven by profit, but by socialized human needs. When epidemics or pandemics happen, there will be appropriate infrastructure in place to combat it such as free adequate and equal healthcare for all, PPE supplies on the basis of need instead of profit, public dissemination of factual information to a public that can critically assess this information, and scientific research that is driven by community interests rather than profit.

Finally, capital’s drive to produce greater amounts of surplus value factor significantly into the equation. For example, the overuse of antibiotics on farm animals to maintain their health in the completely unhealthy conditions of factory farms has been common. Also, for reasons that are not fully understood scientifically, antibiotics help these animals grow faster, meaning less time between birth and slaughter—less cost of doing business and faster turnaround means a greater profit. This use of antibiotics has led to the development of antibiotic resistant pathogens that is making medical care more difficult and increasing the potential for even more lethal pandemics in the future.

While Covid-19 is a natural phenomenon in most senses, because it exists in a globalized capitalist world, it lays bare many of the contradictions of contemporary capitalism. It is certainly no accident that Black, Latinx and other persons of color are being disproportionately affected by Covid-19—in fact, the dualities of capitalism and its understanding of “nature” and “society” as well as how it values these things has meant that there will always be workers and aspects of “nature” that will be disposable if it means greater profits for capital. Blacks are about 3.5 times more likely to die from Covid-19 and Latinx are twice as likely to die.[8] Native Americans make up 57% of cases and 72% of hospitalizations in New Mexico.[9] The Navajo Nation alone has had more cases of Covid-19 than 12 states and more deaths than 7 states.[10]

These disparities can be traced to a number of factors stemming from structural inequalities which have been legitimized through the implicit and explicit rhetoric of biological differences which have no real scientific legitimacy once environmental factors are brought in. These groups are not more likely to be diabetic, have heart disease, or asthma because of some genetic predisposition as the medical community often presumes, instead capital has deemed these groups disposable and has naturalized their eventual deaths from these environmental factors.

Take for example, the prevalence of asthma and cancer within minority communities, which are also significant risk factors for complications from Covid-19. A recent study found that Blacks and Latinx breathe much dirtier air that contains PM2.5 particles—extremely small particulates that can collect in the lungs and lead to cancer and other lung problems. Blacks are exposed to 56% more pollution than caused by their consumption and Latinx are exposed to 63%. For non-Hispanic whites, they are exposed to 17% less than their consumption.[11]

Similarly, there have been disproportionate deaths by race in Louisiana. Some of this can be linked to what is known as “Cancer Alley.” This is an 85-mile area between New Orleans and Baton Rouge that is home to more than 150 chemical plants and refineries. This area has seen five times higher death rates from Covid-19 than the rest of the nation. A recent study from Harvard showed a strong relationship between exposure to PM2.5 particles and Covid-19 deaths even after other factors were controlled for such as healthcare access, poverty, unemployment, and preexisting conditions.[12]

These are just two of many examples of how capitalist-led environmental destruction has put minority communities at greater risk of disease and death. Easily added to these issues are safe water issues on Native American reservations, unsafe water in many cities due to failing infrastructure, food deserts, and the greater heat exposure of cities.[13] These seemingly natural problems become social and changeable problems when viewed as what they really are: the result of capitalism’s efforts to eke out surplus value from nature—whether that is via a static ahistorically created human being or a static ahistorical “natural” commodity. This is why it is so important to view nature and society as dialectically related rather than as simply isolated and opposing forces. Urban spaces and marginalized individuals are finally seen as not just existing outside history but are a part of capitalist nature that human beings have created. The natural becomes historical and thus changeable.


Moving Forward

Capitalism’s defining feature is its need to create greater and greater amounts of surplus value. It can only do this successfully through commodification and its necessary movement of abstracting out all concrete characteristics other than an object’s ability to produce surplus value. This is the only use value that capital truly acknowledges. Because of this, it makes no difference to the capitalist what is produced, how it is made or what harm comes from its production. The worker without health insurance who becomes sick can be replaced by another who is healthy at the same or potentially lower rate. The chicken that is genetically engineered in such a way that it can barely stand upright because of its large breasts is more commercially profitable,[14] and thus, better than the non-genetically modified chicken. Neither the fate of the worker or the chicken matters to capital.

This illustrates the need to uproot capitalism. It is a cruel system that can never work for human or natural interests as its sole purpose is to continually produce. A supply of one good is totally consumed, so it is then time to look to a new source of surplus value. Capitalism’s rapacious nature is such that it will continue to destroy the bases of life beyond the point where it loses profitability. There is no hope that it can or will regulate itself.

We have recently seen the growth of celebrity of Greta Thunberg and other young environmental activists who are calling for a change in the way in which human beings interact with the natural world through events like school strikes and Thunberg using her celebrity to get the message out that the status quo will destroy the planet. While not yet a Marxist movement, these efforts illustrate an important step forward as they show not only the negative of climate change, but also indicate that another world is possible. These young people who will have to disproportionately bear the burden of capital’s frenzied activity to extract as much value as possible, have taken the first step of saying “no” to the current system and are just beginning to think about what an ecologically sustainable society might look like. Perhaps most encouraging is Thunberg’s recent statements which seem to indicate that she is beginning to see the interconnected nature of capitalist oppression. For example, in discussing the Black Lives Matter Movement she says that society “passed a social tipping point, we can no longer look away from what our society has been ignoring for so long whether it is equality, justice or sustainability.”[15] As she and many other young activists take to the streets and public airwaves demanding change, we should critically support their message and encourage them to think deeper about what a new society should look like.

Certainly, the Covid-19 crisis begins to show that another world is possible. Carbon emissions this year are estimated to be between 4.4-8% less than last year. This would be the lowest levels since World War II.[16] Wild animals have been seen roaming urban spaces devoid of people. These sorts of things show that we have not reached a point of no return, and that there is still time to avoid the worst, however, this reprieve is only temporary. It was the power of the state which forced business and industrial closures and mandated lockdowns for citizens in a time of crisis. These types of policies have already shown signs of wear perhaps most visibly with the recent armed protests in the Michigan State legislature. Individuals were essentially protesting for a return to normal—the right to be exploited by their bosses and the right to spread a deadly infection. Others, including prominent politicians have called for a reopening even at the expense of a greater death toll. For many, the system must be maintained at any cost, thus state-mandated change outside of a clear emergency is unlikely to be tolerated for long enough to do any real good.

Hence the importance of our work on The Critique of the Gotha Program. As Marx addresses the Gotha Program in his own era, we need to continue our work to theorize an alternative to capitalism which can bridge the gulf between “nature” and “society” in both theory and practice. This will involve great creative efforts from our organization and others of like minds in order to truly unite the purposes of the natural and social sciences in such a way that they are able to truly serve all regardless of race, class, gender, sexuality, gender identity, and ability. However, as Marx notes, the foundation has already been partially laid:


But natural science has penetrated all the more practically into human life through industry. It has transformed human life and prepared the emancipation of humanity even though its immediate effect was to accentuate the dehumanization of man. Industry is the actual historical relationship of nature, and thus of natural science, to man. If industry is conceived as the exoteric manifestation of the essential human faculties, the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man can also be understood. Natural science will then abandon its abstract materialist, or rather idealist, orientation, and will become the basis of a human science, just as it has already become—though in an alienated form—the basis of actual human life. One basis for life and another for science is a priori a falsehood. Nature, as it develops in human history, in the act of genesis of human society, is the actual nature of man; thus nature, as it develops through industry, though in an alienated form, is truly anthropological nature.[17]


Footnotes

[1] “Climate Change: How Do We Know?” https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

[2] Helen Regan, “Billions of People Could Live in Areas Too Hot for Humans by 2070, Study Says,” https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/05/world/global-warming-climate-niche-temperatures-intl-hnk-index.html

[3] For a full theoretical exposition of this theory, see Jason W. Moore. 2015. Capitalism and the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Verso. For an interesting application of these theoretic premises, see: Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore. 2017. A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet. University of California Press. Where Moore’s argument is especially problematic is in his adherence to a theory of underconsumptionism which posits that capital must continually expand to non-capitalist realms in order to avoid and/or overcome economic crises, ignoring the importance of labor to capital as well as subjective possibilities. However, his is a more nuanced look at the issue than most which includes important discussions of gender and social reproduction, for example.

[4] Karl Marx. 1976. Capital, Vol. I. New York: Penguin. P. 284.

[5] Koehi Saito, 2017. “Marx in the Anthropocene: Value, Metabolic Rift, and the Non-Cartesian Dualism,” Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie. 4(1–2): 276–295.

[6] Karl Marx. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Terrell Carver, ed. 1996. Marx: Later Political Writings. Cambridge University Press. p. 32.

[7] Shah, Sonia. Pandemic. 2016. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. P. 72

[8] Bill Hathaway. “New analysis quantifies risk of COVID-19 to racial, ethnic minorities” May 19, 2020. https://news.yale.edu/2020/05/19/new-analysis-quantifies-risk-covid-19-racial-ethnic-minorities

[9] Elise Kaplan and Theresa Davis, “Huge Disparity’ in COVID-19 death rates for Native Americans in NM” May 30, 2020. https://www.abqjournal.com/1461218/huge-disparity-in-covid19-death-rates-for-native-americans-in-nm.html

[10] Rachel DeSantis. June 11, 2020. “Navajo Nation Has More COVID-19 Cases Than 12 States — and More Deaths Than 7 States Combined,” https://people.com/human-interest/navajo-nation-more-covid-cases-7-states-combined/

[11] Doyle Rice. March 12, 2019. “Study Finds Race Gap in Air Pollution—Whites Largely Cause It, Blacks and Hispanics Breath It.” https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/03/11/air-pollution-inequality-minorities-breathe-air-polluted-whites/3130783002/

[12] Rachel Ramirez. “A Tale of Two Crises: Wake-Up Call: As coronavirus ravages Louisiana, ‘cancer alley’ residents haven’t given up the fight against polluters.” May 4, 2020. https://grist.org/justice/as-coronavirus-ravages-louisiana-cancer-alley-residents-havent-given-up-the-fight-against-polluters/

[13] A study in the journal Climate, found that “redlining” is a strong predictor of which neighborhoods are exposed to extreme heat. These neighborhoods are less likely to have green spaces and will contain more concrete and other materials that will trap heat due to the “heat island effect.” “The analysis examined 108 urban areas across the country, and found that 94 percent of historically redlined neighborhoods are consistently hotter than the rest of the neighborhoods in their cities, underscoring a major environmental justice issue. Portland, Oregon, showed one of the largest heat disparities between redlined and non-redlined communities — up to 12.6 degrees F.” Rachel Ramirez. “Another legacy of redlining: Unequal exposure to heat waves” January 15, 2020. https://grist.org/justice/another-legacy-of-redlining-unequal-exposure-to-heat-waves/

[14] Patel and Moore (2017).

[15] Justin Rowlatt. “Greta Thunberg: Climate Change ‘As Urgent’ as Coronavirus,” June 20, 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53100800

[16] Scottie Andrew. “Covid-19 Lockdowns Could Drop Carbon Emissions to Their Lowest Level Since World War II, but the Change May be Temporary.” May 19, 2020. https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/19/world/carbon-emissions-coronavirus-pandemic-scn-climate-trnd/index.html

[17] Karl Marx. 2004. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in Erich Fromm, ed., Marx’s Concept of Man. New York: Continuum.

Battle of Ideas: Race, Class, Gender, and Revolution in Theory and in Practice


August 21, 2020

Length:4770 words


Summary: Report to the July 2020 Interim Convention of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization, slightly updated — Editors


INTRODUCTION


Ours is the age that can meet the challenge of the times when we work out so new a relationship of theory to practice that the proof of the unity is in the Subject’s own self-development. Philosophy and revolution will first then liberate the innate talents of men and women who will become whole. Whether or not we recognize that this is the task history has ‘assigned’, to our epoch, it is a task that remains to be done.

-Raya Dunayevskaya, 1973 in Philosophy & Revolution Chapter 9, “New Passions and New Forces The Black Dimension, The Anti-Vietnam War Youth, Rank-and-File Labor, Women’s Liberation”.


Over the past 10 years, we have seen the rise of authoritarianism, state repression and white supremacy across the globe. As always, Black, Indigenous people of color, youth, women, LGBTQ folks, and people with disabilities will often bear the brunt of these dehumanizing structures. Some of the structural issues Black and Brown populations are experiencing in the United States at this time, include over-policing, police brutality, gentrification of already under-resourced communities, depressed wages, lowered health outcomes, housing insecurity, mass incarceration to name a few.

Marxist-Humanism is a philosophy that engages with the totality of Marx’s work, posits that alienation is at the center of dehumanizing structures humans face under capital and embraces Marx’s philosophy of liberation. To analyze the current uprisings we must try to understand the dialectical relationship between the objective and subjective forces in these movements. This report will examine issues of race and gender from a United States based context. Because we are living through an unprecedented time, of a Black-led multi-racial movement, this report will primarily focus on United States-based Black and feminist movements.


THE MOVEMENTS OF BLACK MASSES


Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.

-Ruth Wilson Gilmore


Black Lives Matter and Related Movements

Each generation of revolutionaries must theorize, and act based on current conditions. Movements like Black Lives Matter have been at the forefront of not only fighting police violence, the incarceration of Black, Brown and Indigenous people, and an unjust immigration system, but have also taken on issues such as mental health, LGBTQ rights, and reproductive justice for folks of color. Moreover, the current Covid-19 pandemic has not revealed a “we’re in this together” moment as many in the bourgeoisie were claiming it would. In fact, this particular crisis has laid bare all of the inequities in our society as Black, Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) find themselves disproportionately affected by this catastrophe. Indeed, the social and economic impacts of this crisis coupled with recent racist murders of Black folks is fueling the revolts we see as BIPOC, women, youth, the working class, immigrants and sexual minorities rise up against the domination of racialized and gendered capitalism.

Throughout this decade, the United States public has been forcefully confronted with what many communities of color have long understood, i.e. their bodies are considered disposable in this society. A 2015 study by the Harvard Public Health Review confirms this, revealing that Black men are three times more likely to have a fatal encounter with the police compared to white men. The same study also shows there’s been a sharp rise in these fatal incidents since the 1980s. The 2014 brutal murders of Eric Garner and Michael Brown by police mobilized the Black masses to say, “I can’t breathe,” a reference to Garner’s last words as police manhandled him cutting off his circulation and “We have nothing to lose but our chains,” a phrase found in the Communist Manifesto but popularized by Assata Shakur in the 1970s. Today we repeat the same harrowing last words of George Floyd as he pleaded for his life and called out for his mother, while a police officer kneeled on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. “I can’t breathe” is now the cry of the streets as masses everywhere protest Mr. Floyd’s murder, racialized capitalism and state violence worldwide.

Public perception of the movement for Black lives and of systemic racism have shifted over the past 7 years. A July 2020 poll by Langer Research Associates reveals that 63% of U.S. Americans support the Black Lives Matter movement and 69% of the same group acknowledge that Black people and other racialized minorities face institutional racism within the criminal justice system. The response to the question of systemic racism has jumped 15 percentage points since 2014, the year the Black Lives Matter movement was born. This shift in consciousness for the masses does not necessarily translate into widespread desire for revolutionary change. At a time when confidence in law enforcement institutions is at a 30 year low (48% across the general population, 56% among whites and 19% among Blacks), the U.S. masses favor widespread police reforms over defunding or abolishing the police (Brennan, 2020). White U.S. citizens are less likely to support the defunding of the police department budgets and shifting resources to social programs (41% compared to 49% of the Hispanic and 70% of the Black population). And while the U.S. general population does not support the complete abolishment of policing as we know it (15% support from the general population BUT 33% for persons under 35 years old), the public is now having important conversations about the carceral state (Crabtree, 2020).

Taylor (2020) carefully examines the superficial display of solidarity we are witnessing from our public and private institutions. “At one level, the rapid, reflexive default to offering symbolic recognition of racism was quite typical. No other country engages in the cavernous nothingness of the fake apology as frequently as the United States.”. At the same time she acknowledges what other radical scholars have that the uprisings are a response to prolonged systemic inequities minorities suffer under racialized capital and that the emerging social movements are forcing everyone, including the left to engage seriously with issues around class, race, anti-blackness, crime, and state-sanctioned violence.

An important task for those in these movements is to offer a critical analysis of the role of looting and vandalism during protests. As Vicky Osterweil (2014) and others have noted, the media attempts to distinguish “good” protesters from “bad” ones and by doing so “reproduces racist and white supremacist ideologies, deeming some unworthy of our solidarity and protection, marking them, subtly, as legitimate targets of police violence. These days, the police, whose public-facing racism is much more manicured, if no less virulent, argue that ‘outside agitators’ engage in rioting and looting. Meanwhile, police will consistently praise ‘non-violent’ demonstrators, and claim that they want to keep thosedemonstrators safe.” In this current revolt, the “good” protesters can be seen marching during the day, chanting and expressing anger in a way that is only slightly unacceptable in civil society. The “bad” protesters are characterized by actions like looting, ignoring curfews, vandalism, mocking police officers, allowing their anger to spill over onto freeways by occupying them, and displaying generally antisocial behavior. Embracing the “good vs. bad” protester logic risks dividing movements and undermining the solidarity protesters might otherwise have. This logic also implies that those engaged in these acts don’t have agency and are not involved in conscious and tactical resistance. Furthermore, undermining the more violent aspects of a revolt underestimates the very visceral rage many are experiencing at this time. Organizers and activists should continuously push their demands forward and not fall into this logic, particularly at a time when we see the state making concessions and wide public condemnations of systemic racism. Conversations about non-community invaders should center on police and National Guard troops who are the true outside agitators as they’ve been deployed from other cities to repress communities. Moreover protesters can and have been using this moment to push forward a counter-narrative, using the language of looting, stealing and violence to confront the white supremacist settler-colonial project that is the United States, and making the case that exploitation under capitalism is actually the ultimate form of looting.

The current Black Lives Matter movement has been viewed as a form of race-based identity politics by some on the Marxist left who remain only interested in class-first solutions to the problems we experience under capitalism. These critics claim that these forms of identity politics undermine class solidarity for neoliberal reforms or for bourgeois individualisms. Understanding that the politics of recognition do not develop in a vacuum, Raya Dunayevskaya (1982) did not reject these politics wholesale, in fact she evokes Hegelian concepts in support saying, “it is clear that for the Black masses, Black consciousness, awareness of themselves as African-Americans with their dual history and special pride, is a drive toward wholeness. Far from being a separation from the objective, it means an end to the separation between objective and subjective. Not even the most elitist Black has quite the same arrogant attitude as the White intellectual toward the worker, not to mention the prisoner.” (1982:281)

Dunayevskaya recognizes something that scholars like Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2016) point to, that even the Black elites in the United States society cannot escape racialization. This is an important observation that the class-reductionists are usually not able to make. Their fear of being derailed from struggling against a global class war prevents them from understanding how comparatively little power Black and Brown elites hold in a racist society. They also fail to realize that even the bourgeois Black and Brown classes are willing to fight against racialized oppression and have historically done so. Indeed, almost all United States mainstream politicians of color at our present time are willing to proclaim, “Black Lives Matter.”

Concerning the issue of identity-first or race-based movements, Dunayevskaya (1982) also rejects the idea that Black self-development of subjectivity is bourgeois. Over the span of her career, she remains committed to the struggle against structural racism and its relationship to capital. She also follows the activities and self-development of people of color, particularly in relation to the Black dimension in the United States. Determined to always get to the root of racial domination, she was consistently willing to take the class-reductionist left as well as the Black bourgeois leadership to task. Dunayevskaya (1963) does more than champion the rights of racialized minorities or simply explain how their oppression is connected to a larger class war. Through her dialectical exploration of history, she is able to demonstrate that not only are the United States Black populations always on the forefront of liberation movements but that no system of domination can snuff out the human desire to be free. In American Civilization on Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard, she writes, “[the Black dimension] at each turning point in history, anticipates the next stage of development of labor in its relationship with capital. Because of his dual oppression, it could not be otherwise” (1963:81). To make this claim she analyzes the creativity of abolitionists through the slave revolts, Black anti-imperial resistances during the turn of the 20th century, Black labor battles of the reconstruction era, the courageous actions of the Little Rock Nine in their quest to desegregate schools and the Black wildcat Detroit strikes — notice that many of the struggles she highlights have no obvious or immediate class character. Dunayevskaya takes a special interest in the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott asserting that this struggle was as relevant and radical as the Hungarian revolution that occurred the year after. She writes extensively on not only the relatedness of these movements but on the underlying humanism that propels them. Throughout her scholarship, Dunayevskaya observes that the Black masses at this time remain revolutionary, “contrary to the reports in the white press, Black America’s actual rejection of white capitalistic-imperialistic exploitation, with or without Black lackeys, is, all one and the same time, a time-bomb that is sure to explode, and a time for thinking and readying for action.” ([1978] 1986:12)


Black Pain for White Witnesses

In a provocative essay Zoe Samudzi (2020) explores the question of why we watch videos of Black people being murdered or brutalized by state actors or white vigilantes. She asserts, “it serves usually, as a reinscription of white supremacy: a reification of the boundary between the white self and the black ‘others’ through a passive bystander witnessing and the enforcement of race through public violence.” In other words, it is possible to view these heinous acts over and over again, express concern, and share the videos for the purpose of awareness-raising without actually engaging in anti-racist praxis. If state violence is a mainstay of Black life, what awareness is there to raise? Why have the masses at this point not come to understand how violence functions under racial capitalism?

Samudzi also claims that “the killings, in a way, become a macabre method of marking social and political time” and an opportunity for white progressives and leftists to claim moral superiority over other white people because they experience sympathy by watching the horror and subsequently sharing them in a quest for justice (that as we’ve seen is rarely achieved). One other reason for the sharing of these videos is to convince the masses of the innocence of the victims. If Black people in this society by default are guilty, then there must be evidence of the opposite before the masses can demand justice for their murders. The families of state murder victims understand this and also often urge us not to look away from the dehumanization of their Black family members. What remains clear is that we will continue to witness violence against Black, Brown, Indigenous, non-male, queer and disabled folks until we fundamentally change social relations in our societies. We will continue to share and be horrified by the videos that capture this violence. One question we should ask is how to move mass passive white viewership from this place of witnessing to one of struggling for justice. Perhaps we are on the way there as the witnessing of George Floyd’s murder has become the impetus for the current uprising against state violence.


Women’s Movements and Abolition Feminisms


Let this (moment) radicalize you rather than lead you to despair.

-Mariame Kaba



We’ve seen tremendous activism and organizing of women (many of color) and queer folks over the past several years. In 2019, we witnessed Sara Nelson, the head of the flight attendants union call for a general strike after a government shutdown left TSA screeners, air traffic controllers, and customs agents unpaid for 35 days. This tactic has not been attempted in the United States for over 70 years! Although flight attendants are paid by the private airlines they work for, Nelson made a rousing speech calling for worker solidarity across all sectors, “Some would say the answer is for them to walk off the job. I say, ‘What are you willing to do?’ Their destiny is tied up with our destiny — and they don’t even have time to ask us for help. Don’t wait for an invitation. Get engaged, join or plan a rally, get on a picket line, organize sit-ins at lawmakers’ offices.” Perhaps Nelson like many have recognized, the current political and economic conditions have opened the door for these radical ideas to be broached and the masses are hungry for changes. She would go on to say, “I think what we’re seeing, with the teachers strikes, the hotel workers who took on Marriott and won, is that people are not willing to put up with it anymore. People are willing to do more to fight for their families because they have been pushed so far, and there has been so much productivity put on the backs of the American worker without any increases in wages.” When asked about her call for a general strike, she wondered, “What is the labor movement waiting for?”

While we have yet to observe a general strike, we cannot discount the strikes and other labor-related activities that have occurred over the past few years. Indeed, we’ve witnessed widespread teacher strikes in states like West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, California and Colorado. These teacher strikes can be understood as both labor and feminist issues, considering that 77 % of all K-12 educators in the United States are female, and that the demands educators have been making address matters of social reproduction. As teachers during these strikes have demanded better pay and/or work conditions, they’ve also called for changes that socialist feminists everywhere have considered important for life-making. These include a demand to invest in counselors, librarians and mental health support for students, re-investment in after-school and early education programs for public education, access to quality education for working-class students, access to quality food in schools, and demands for the safety of children, and specifically, a halt to random searches and the policing of students.

One framework socialist feminists of color are rallying around particularly when it comes to issues of social reproduction, is that of abolitionist feminism (Lorber, 2018). Abolitionist feminism is an anti-capitalist framework with Marxist roots which seeks to not only dismantle the carceral state but project a new world. According to Maureen Mansfield (2018), “abolitionist feminism invites us to consider the world we want, and how to organize to build it. Seeking a world beyond cages, policing and surveillance, Abolitionist Feminism focuses our attention on developing stronger communities and bringing about gender, race and economic justice. It encourages us to consider our approach systemically and collectively rather than individually… Abolitionist Feminism asks us to consider the violence and harm caused by the state, as well as inter-personally, and seek alternative strategies for addressing these harms.”

While abolitionist frameworks are not new, we find new generations of feminists of color adopting these ideas. The abolitionist frameworks are indeed informing activists and theorists in this moment of civil unrest. When the Black Lives Matter movement launched in 2014, most calls for justice from even the leaders of the organization were reformist in nature. In this second wave of BLM activism, we are witnessing these demands change to have a more abolitionist character. The present-day abolitionist movements comprise of grassroots organizers, feminist collectives and scholars and is a very decentralized movement. Beyond the abolitionist frameworks that unite their work, the organizing principles are carried out in context-specific ways. By eschewing big party politics, vanguardism or hierarchical organizations, abolitionists have managed to be nimble and propose an abolitionist platform that meets current Black Lives Matter uprising. For example, the calls to #defundpolice and for #carenotcops were crafted quite thoughtfully. When abolitionists proposed these demands, they looked at actionable ways of approaching police abolition that had the potential to shrink the scope of policing, the size of the prison-industrial complex and to undermine the surveillance state. Defunding the police and investing public monies in services for communities that are most affected by the carceral system, creates the potential for new communities of care where societal ills are no longer addressed through either interpersonal or state violence.

By contrast, liberal reformers are calling for a police reform program known as #8cantwait. This platform proposes measures to combat police brutality that many states have tried with little success (e.g. banning chokeholds on arrest victims) to ones that are almost unenforceable (e.g. mandating police officers to use de-escalation techniques in their arresting practices). These proposals seek to make tweaks to a system that can not be accountable to itself and offers no generative community-based to address peoples’ material needs. But for the ongoing radical organizing of contemporary abolitionists, this framework would be accepted as the most progressive solution to the problems of state violence and police terror we face. So strong was the opposition to the #8cantwait program that its original framers have almost abandoned it and a collective of revolutionary abolitionists have released their own plan titled #8toabolition.

Abolitionist frameworks have the potential of upending all systems of domination and projecting new humanist alternatives. As famed abolitionist feminist Mariame Kaba says, “a big part of the abolitionist project… is unleashing people’s imaginations while getting concrete — so that we have to imagine while we build, always both.” Abolishing the carceral state would necessitate the abolishment of capitalism. The current abolitionist feminisms we are witnessing are advocating for a politic that goes beyond the redistribution of resources and instead proposes new human social relations that are not based on commodification and exploitation. This framework refuses to explore the “woman question,” “the race question” or the “prison/policing/surveillance abolition question” after the revolution but demands that it be theoretically worked on now. Time will tell if these and related movements can potentially uproot the capitalist mode of production and overcome the mental and manual division of labor that creates alienated human relations.


CONCLUSION


Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

-Arundhati Roy




We therefore now need to initiate the exploration of the new reconceptualized form of knowledge that would be called for by Fanon’s redefinition of being humanas that of skins (phylogeny/ontogeny) and masks (sociogeny). Therefore bios and mythoi. And notice! One major implication here: humanness is no longer a noun. Being human is a praxis.

-Sylvia Wynter



At the current moment, we are facing a global pandemic and multiple historic political uprisings. How are we to identify and be in solidarity with the revolutionary subjects of our day? What kinds of organizations do we need at this time and what role can Marxist-Humanists play in articulating a theory of organization that meets this moment? It is abundantly clear that the masses are eschewing vanguardism and hierarchical organizations for smaller, more horizontal democratic female and queer-led models. As we theorize about organization, we should consider Dunayevskaya’s insights when asked to address the question of decentralization within the Womens’ liberation movement. She writes, “ the demand for small informal groups is not to be disregarded as if it were a question of not understanding the difference between small and large, and that large is better. Nor can this demand be answered in our bureaucratic age by attributing to Women’s liberation a deep-down belief in private property, petty home industry, and “of course” Mother Earth. Nothing of the kind. The demand for decentralization involves the two pivotal questions of the day; and, I might add, questions of tomorrow, because we are not going to have a successful revolution unless we do answer them. They are, first, the totality and the depth of the necessary uprooting of this exploitative, sexist, racist society. Second, the dual rhythm of revolution: not just the overthrow of the old, but the creation of the new: not just the reorganization of objective, material foundations but the release of subjective personal freedom, creativity, and talents. In a word, there must be such appreciation of the movement from below, from practice, that we can never again let theory and practice get separated. That is the cornerstone” (Dunayevskaya [1982] 1991:108)

Over the past two years we’ve explored matters of identity, intersectionality, and other politics of recognition in our theorizing around this issue. In the past I have suggested, “instead of becoming frustrated with the consciousness-raising and empowerment projects some identity-based movements have turned to, we should position ourselves to do the theoretical and practical labor required to be in critical solidarity with Black and Brown movements.” I have also proposed that these projects be taken on by theorizing around the psychic components of racialized and gendered oppression while seeking out ways to move incomplete articulations of intersectionality and emerging movements to a place of radical criticality. In addition, my fellow IMHO colleague Lilia Monzó (2019) asks us to move Dunayevskaya’s concept of Black masses as vanguard to what she calls women of color as vanguard, making a case that women of color subjects are currently the force and reason for revolution. Others in our organization like Peter Hudis (2019) propose developing an intersectional historical materialist framework that can theorize not only around Marxist concepts but also take on the issues of dehumanization produced by racialized and gendered domination under capitalism. These are important additions to Marxist-Humanist thought as much of the revolutionary movement work we see today is being led by Black, Brown and Indigenous women and queer folks in the United States who are wrestling with similar questions.

Dunayevskaya always had a long and dialectical view of history and would systematically relate capital’s latest crisis to mass movements and issues concerning people of color. She did so by developing Marxist-Humanism, a philosophy that reanimates the totality of Marx’s Marxism and that posits alienation at the heart of the dehumanization we suffer under capital. She remained situated in the struggles of the day, paying special attention to the activities of the Black dimension which she identified as historically being an important force for liberatory movement. Always working from Marx’s concept of revolution in permanence, she also posed the question “what comes next,” taking care to articulate the potential to produce new humanisms during each revolutionary struggle. As the Marxist left continues to struggle when it comes to issues of race and gender and as identity-based intersectional theories continue to be relevant we are also noticing a liberatory politics emerge from below as people try to make sense of their everyday experiences. Our task as revolutionaries is to project better alternatives that take the everyday material conditions of folks seriously, to be in critical solidarity with the revolutionary subjects of our day and to “recognize that there is a movement from practice — from the actual struggles of the day — to theory; and, second, to work out the method whereby the movement from theory can meet it.” (Dunayevskaya [1965] 2012:73)

Several excerpts of this report can be found in an upcoming book chapter titled, Raya Dunayevskaya on Race, Resistance and Revolutionary Humanism


REFERENCES

8 Can’t Wait Platform: https://8cantwait.org/

8 to Abolition Platform: https://www.8toabolition.com/

Brenan, Megan. “Amid Pandemic, Confidence in Key U.S. Institutions Surges”. Gallup, August, 2020: https://news.gallup.com/poll/317135/amid-pandemic-confidence-key-institutions-surges.aspx

Crabtree, Steve. “Most Americans Say Policing Needs ‘Major Changes”. Gallup, July 2020: https://news.gallup.com/poll/315962/americans-say-policing-needs-major-changes.aspx

Duda, John. Towards the horizon of abolition: A conversation with Mariam. The Next System Project. 2017: https://thenextsystem.org/learn/stories/towards-horizon-abolition-conversation-mariame-kaba

Dunayevskaya, Raya. [1963] 2003. American Civilization on Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard. Chicago: News and Letters Publications.

Dunayevskaya, Raya. Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm. [1965] 2012. The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse Fromm Correspondence, 1954-1978: Dialogues on Hegel, Marx and Critical Theory, K. B. Anderson and R. Rockwell (Eds.). Maryland: Lexington.

Dunayevskaya, Raya. [1973] 2003. Philosophy and Revolution. Lanham: Lexington Books.

Dunayevskaya, Raya. [1982] 1991. Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s

Philosophy of Revolution. 2nd ed. Foreword by Adrienne Rich. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Dunayevskaya, Raya. “A Post-World War II View of Marx’s Humanism, 1843-83; Marxist-Humanism, 1950s-1980s,” News and Letters, 1986.

Grabar, Henry. What Workers Can Learn From “the Largest Lockout in U.S. History”

An interview with Sara Nelson, the flight attendant union head who called this week for a general strike. Slate, 2019.

Hudis, Peter. “How is an Intersectional Historical Materialism Possible?: The Dialectic of Race and Class Reconsidered”. Paper presented at. Toronto, April, 2019.

Krieger, Nancy et.al. “Trends in US deaths due to legal intervention among black and white men, age 15- 34 years, by county income level: 1960-2010”, Harvard Public Health Review, Vol. 3 Jan 2015.

Langer Research Associates. “63 Percent Support Black Lives Matter as Recognition of Discrimination Jumps”. July 21, 2020: https://www.langerresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/1214a3RaceandRights.pdf

Loewus, Liana. The Nation’s Teaching Force Is Still Mostly White and Female. Eduweek, 2017.

Lober, Brooke. “(re)Thinking Sex Positivity, Abolition Feminism, and the #MeToo Movement: Opportunity for a New Synthesis”. Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics, January 2018.

Mansfield, Maureen. “What is Abolitionist Feminism, and Why Does it Matter?”, The Progressive Policy Think Tank,2018. https://www.ippr.org/juncture-item/what-is-abolitionist-feminism-and-why-does-it-matter

McKittrick, Katherine. ed. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.

Monzó, Lilia D. 2019. A Revolutionary Subject: Pedagogy of Women of Color and Indigeneity. New York: Peter Lang.

Osterweil, Vicky 2014. In Defense of Looting. The New Inquiry: https://thenewinquiry.com/in-defense-of-looting/

Samudzi, Zoe. White Witness and the Contemporary Lynching, 2020: https://newrepublic.com/article/157734/white-witness-contemporary-lynching

Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. 2016. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Chicago: Haymarket.

Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. “We should still defund the police”. The New Yorker, August 14, 2020: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/defund-the-police.

Erich Fromm and the Revolution of Hope




August 18, 2020

Length:3140 words


Summary: Marks the fortieth anniversary of the socialist humanist Erich Fromm’s death. First appeared in Jacobin, here https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/08/erich-fromm-frankfurt-school-marxism-weimar-germany — Editors


The German socialist thinker Erich Fromm is an unjustly neglected figure, certainly when compared with his erstwhile Frankfurt School colleagues, such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Fromm’s analysis of authoritarian culture offers what is in many ways a more grounded alternative to the influential theories of Horkheimer and Adorno, and reveals a distinctly more optimistic and hopeful engagement with the question of radical social change.

Scholarship on the Frankfurt School and critical theory has minimized Fromm’s contribution, continuing a trend that Max Horkheimer himself inaugurated after Fromm’s departure from the Frankfurt Institute in 1939. This has left us with a picture of Frankfurt School critical theory that is rather one-sided, lacking a serious account of Fromm’s thought and his influential critique of authoritarianism.

Fromm’s story shows us that a critique of authoritarian culture – that points out the strong tendencies toward passivity and reaction in the general populace – can retain its central thrust while also maintaining some of the optimism of the original Marxian critique of capitalism, and its orientation towards political action in the here and now.


Early Years

Fromm was born in 1900, into a middle-class, orthodox Jewish family in Frankfurt am Main. His initial plan on leaving school was to become a Talmud scholar; instead, his father persuaded him to study Law at Frankfurt University, where he lasted less than a year before transferring to Heidelberg’s Ruprecht-Karls-University to study “Nationalökonomie” (National Economics).

In Heidelberg, under the tutelage of Alfred Weber (brother of Max), Karl Jaspers, Hans Driesch, and Heinz Rickert, Fromm attended classes on the history of philosophy and psychology, social and political movements, and the theory of Marxism. During this period, Fromm continued his Talmud studies side-by-side with his academic work. The Romantic socialism of his Talmud teacher, Salman Rabinkov, was particularly influential.

Like Max Horkheimer, Fromm refrained from direct involvement in socialist politics during these early years. He was a member of neither the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) nor the German Communist Party (KPD). Fromm’s strongest engagement at this time remained his Jewish studies. He helped set up an influential Jewish Teaching Institute (Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus), at which he lectured along with figures such as Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Leo Baeck, and Siegfried Kracauer. He also set up a sanatorium in Heidelberg with his future wife, Freida Fromm-Reichmann, for the specific psychoanalytic treatment of Jewish patients.

Fromm’s interest in Marxism grew from the mid-1920s – in the period that Karl Korsch dubbed the “crisis of Marxism” – during which he studied at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. Fromm, who had by this point renounced Judaism, was part of a group of young dissident socialist thinkers, including Wilhelm Reich and Otto Fenichel, who were concerned with applying the ideas of psychoanalysis to social issues.

This group, like many others in Germany at the time, wanted to understand why socialism had thus far failed to materialize in Germany, despite the fact that it had a large working class and a highly organized labor movement. Influenced by the critique of “mechanical Marxism” that Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch had inaugurated, they tried to identify what might be called the “subjective” barriers to socialism and believed that psychoanalysis could play a particularly important role in illuminating those barriers.


Joining the Frankfurt School

During this period, Fromm made the acquaintance of Max Horkheimer, who was also interested in the potential for psychoanalysis to make sense of the failures of socialism. Horkheimer at this time was affiliated with the famous Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, set up in 1923 by Felix Weil, son of a wealthy businessman father and former student of Karl Korsch. Although the institute was initially modelled along the lines of an orthodox Marxist institute of labour studies, when Horkheimer became director in 1930 its focus shifted toward the interdisciplinary mixing of social philosophy with the empirical social sciences, and particularly the mixing of sociological and psychoanalytical concerns. At Horkheimer’s instigation, Fromm received an invitation to join the Institute, where he and Horkheimer were to be the central intellectual force in these early years, pioneering the fusion of psychoanalysis and Marxism long before Theodor Adorno entered the picture.

At the Institute, Fromm took charge of an innovative empirical study of manual and white-collar German workers. Making use of a detailed questionnaire distributed to some 3,300 workers, the study sought to analyse the relationship between the psychological make-up of the workers and their political opinions. The questionnaire revealed that the majority of respondents associated themselves with the left-wing slogans of their party, but that their radicalism was considerably weaker when it came to more subtle and seemingly unpolitical questions.

Fromm concluded that roughly 10 percent of the participants were “authoritarian,” roughly 15 percent were “democratic/humanistic,” and the remaining 75 percent were somewhere between the two. The authoritarians, he predicted, would support a future fascist political movement, while the democrats/humanists would stand up and oppose them. The problem was that the democratic/humanistic segment might not be strong enough to defeat the authoritarian 10 percent if those in the middle were psychologically unprepared to resist the authoritarians.

Although the study itself wasn’t published until the 1980s, under the title The Working Class in Weimar Germany — partly because of the subsequent breakdown in Fromm’s relationship with Horkheimer — it clearly shone considerable light on what was to transpire under the Nazi regime. It was also a rare example of empirical research into the lives and attitudes of the working class from within the Frankfurt School tradition.

Fromm remained an important part of the Institute’s work for much of the 1930s. He was largely responsible for the relocation of the Institute to the US in response to the Nazi takeover, making personal contact with scholars at Columbia University, where the Institute eventually settled. He was also pivotal to the Institute’s continuing research on authoritarianism, and played a central role in the 1936 Studien über Autorität und Familie (Studies on Authority and the Family) – a 1,000-page preliminary report which helped pave the way for the Institute’s more famous work on The Authoritarian Personality.

However, Fromm’s revision of Freud during this period began to alienate him from Horkheimer. Fromm argued that the key problem of psychology was how individuals relate to one another and to the society around them and not a matter of predetermined libidinal stages (anal, oral, genital, etc.) as was the case in Freud. The burgeoning intellectual relationship between Horkheimer and Adorno contributed further to this sense of alienation. Fromm left the Institute towards the end of 1939.


Fear of freedom

Not long after his departure from the Institute, Fromm broke onto the US intellectual scene with his work Escape from Freedom (1941). The book’s central theme was that Europe had sacrificed its progress over the course of centuries towards ever greater forms of political freedom — and even towards socialism — through its capitulation to fascism. Fromm wanted to explain how Nazism had taken hold in Germany, and why so many individuals had come to support Hitler.

He put forward the notion of a “sadomasochistic” or “authoritarian” character, which combines strivings for submission and for domination to provide the human basis for authoritarian rule. Fromm wanted to transcend simplistic explanations of Nazism that depicted it as an exclusively political or economic phenomenon, without falling back on purely psychological theories (suggesting that Hitler was mad, and his followers equally so). He sought to understand Nazism as both a psychological and a socio-economic problem.

Like most Marxist analyses at the time, Fromm focused on the role of the lower middle classes. He argued that certainsocioeconomic and political changes had left a deep psychological mark, removing traditional supports and mechanisms of self-esteem. Those changes included the declining status of this class in the face of monopoly capitalism and hyperinflation, as well as the defeat Germany had suffered in the First World War.

Fromm identified deep feelings of anxiety and powerlessness upon which Hitler had been able to capitalize. His sadomasochistic message of love for the strong and hatred for the weak — not to mention a racial program that raised “true-born” Germans to the pinnacle of the evolutionary ladder — provided a means of escape from intolerable psychological burdens experienced on a mass basis.

Escape Fromm Freedom was not merely an analysis of Nazism. At the heart of its thesis was the notion that capitalism — particularly in its monopolistic phase — fostered “the development of a personality which feels powerless and alone, anxious and insecure,” and which is therefore tempted to surrender its freedom to strong-man leaders.

Fromm’s analysis explicitly spoke of the conditions for fascism which existed in the US: the effects of the Great Depression, the existence of increasingly mechanized forms of factory work, the prevalence of political propaganda and hypnoid forms of advertising, interacting with a purported psychological tendency toward “automaton conformity” on the part of a significant percentage of the population.


The marketing orientation

Fromm returned to the theme of social conformity fourteen years later in The Sane Society (1955), which identified a widespread, socially patterned “pathology of normalcy” governing advanced capitalist societies. The Sane Societyengaged in an extended critique of mid-twentieth-century US society, which for Fromm was essentially a bureaucratic form of mass-consumer capitalism.

As part of this critique, Fromm utilized the notion of the “marketing orientation” to describe what he saw as the newly dominant personality type in US society. This notion was clearly a social-psychological refraction of the Marxian notion of alienation, with the idea that humans were alienated from themselves and their own powers and capacities. For Fromm, the “marketing orientation” denoted a mode of existence in which people experienced themselves and others as commodities — literally as something to be marketed.

The Sane Society did show a certain affinity with the emphasis of the other Frankfurt School theorists on the integration of the working class into capitalist society. But there was a greater sense in Fromm’s work of the possibilities for change, even if he did not identify a particular social agent that would be responsible for such change. Fromm devoted considerable space to practical alternatives, including an extended analysis of communitarian work practices, such as Marcel Barbu’s watch-case factory at Boimandau.

The Sane Society was also notable for its criticism of aspects of the Marxist project, especially concerning the traditional concept of revolution. Fromm believed that there was a profound psychological error in the famous statement that concludes The Communist Manifesto, suggesting that the workers had “nothing to lose but their chains.” As well as their chains, the workers also had something else to lose: all the irrational needs and satisfactions which had originated while they were wearing those chains.

Fromm argued that we need an expanded concept of revolution: in terms not only of external barriers, but of internal, subjective barriers as well. Such a concept would address the roots of sadomasochistic passions, such as sexism, racism, nationalism, and other deformities of individual and social character that aren’t necessarily going to disappear rapidly in the context of a new society.


Capitalism and love

Fromm continued his analysis of the subjective barriers to a true humanistic socialism in The Art of Loving (1956), perhaps his best-known work. He was adamant that there was a deep incompatibility between “the principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle of love.” The criticism of love — which, for Fromm, is not a phenomenon restricted to its romantic manifestations — was therefore also a criticism of capitalism, and of the ways in which it obstructed genuine forms of love that would be realized in a more human society. Fromm demanded that we analyse the conditions for the possibility of realizing love and integrity in the present society and seek to strengthen them.

During the 1950s, Fromm joined the American Socialist Party–Social Democratic Federation (SP–SDF) and sought to influence its program. The resulting document, published as Let Man Prevail (1958), set out Fromm’s distinctive form of Marxism, which he called “radical humanism.” The text was full of criticism of the USSR as a form of “vulgarized, distorted socialism.”

What Fromm offered in its place was a democratic, humanist form of socialism that placed the human being at the center. He finished with a set of short- and medium-term goals, including proposals to increase grassroots participation in the economic, social, educational, and political spheres.

At the very time when Horkheimer and Adorno were moving further away from organized politics, in the shadow of Auschwitz, Fromm, the most Jewish of all the Frankfurt School thinkers, was moving towards it. He continued on this path in the 1960s. May Man Prevail? (1960) was an analysis of Soviet Communism intended to influence a move to unilateral disarmament during the Cold War.

Fromm’s extended critique of Stalinism and post-Stalinist Khrushchevism also stressed the managerial and bureaucratic similarities between the Soviet and American systems. His text referred approvingly to the anti-colonial revolutions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and there were some sharp words directed at Western hypocrisy.


A return to Marx

In Marx’s Concept of Man (1961), Fromm turned back towards Marx. The book contained the first full English translation of Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which became a key reference point for Marxist humanism, prefaced by a few short essays on Marx and his philosophy. Fromm sought to restore Marxism to its original form as “a new humanism,” cleansed of the distortions of Soviet and Chinese Communism.

Marx’s Concept of Man helped popularize Marx in the US and challenged some misunderstood views of his thought that predominated in the English-speaking world at the time. The book was not without its problems. In a letter to the Russian-American Marxist Raya Dunayevskaya, Fromm himself admitted that his account of Marx was “too abstract.” All the same, it is notable that Fromm’s engagement focused on the whole of Marx’s work. Fromm rejected the idea of a sharp break between the “early Marx” and the “late Marx,” promoted by figures such as the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.

Fromm’s renewed engagement with Marx continued with the publication of Beyond the Chains of Illusion in 1962. In this work, Fromm further developed his Freudian-Marxist social-psychological theory of social character. This included an attempt to bolster the Marxian theory of ideology that praised the unacknowledged psychological insights in Marx’s work. Fromm also explicitly praised Marx as a thinker of “much greater depth and scope than Freud,” underlining the centrality of Marx to his own project.

Fromm also played a leading role in the publication of Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium (1965). In this volume, he assembled a global collection of humanist Marxists and socialists, drawn largely from Eastern Europe (with many from the Yugoslav Praxis school), but also from Africa and India. Contributors included Herbert Marcuse, Raya Dunayevskaya, Karel Kosík, Gajo Petrović, Mihailo Marković, Léopold Senghor, Ernst Bloch, and Maximilien Rubel.


Dealing with politics

Fromm remained a prominent figure on the US Left over the years that followed, despite living mostly in Mexico. Unlike Horkheimer and Adorno, who refused to criticize the Vietnam War, Fromm was vocal in his anti-war stance. He gave many speeches on college campuses and even wrote speeches for Senator Eugene McCarthy’s 1967–68 anti-war challenge to Lyndon Johnson in the Democratic primaries.

In this capacity, Fromm drafted a long “Memo on Political Alternatives” that identified a series of democratic, grassroots movements, essentially similar to those outlined in The Sane Society, that could form the basis for a mass movement of people. The memo appeared in print as The Revolution of Hope (1968) after McCarthy’s failed presidential bid.

Fromm steadfastly defended himself against critics who accused him of social-democratic reformism, including his old friend Herbert Marcuse. Referring to the apparent hopelessness of Marcuse’s account of critical theory in his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man, Fromm suggested that “if one is not concerned with the steps between the present and the future, one does not deal with politics, radical or otherwise.”

From the late 1960s, after a series of heart attacks, Fromm’s political engagement slackened, and his energies turned more towards academic concerns. Even so, Fromm did not sever his connections with left-wing causes. His 1973 book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness engaged with contemporary academic discussions of human nature, challenging the view of that nature as innately aggressive and avaricious that would provide intellectual ballast for the neoliberal era.

The last of Fromm’s social and political writings, To Have or To Be? (1976), appeared after he had returned to Europe from Mexico. He took up again the discussion of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, integrating them with a critique of capitalism’s ecological destructiveness that helped inspire the European Green movement. Once again, Fromm worked the text around his call for practical economic, social, and political reforms, this time moving even closer to Marx in proclaiming what he saw as “the beginning — and rapidly increasing — decline of capitalism.”


A thinker for our age

In one of his few comments on Max Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School, written toward the end of his life, Fromm gave a sense of what he considered to be the nature of “critical theory”:


As far as I know, the whole thing is a hoax, because Horkheimer was frightened . . . of speaking about Marx’s theory. He used general Aesopian language and spoke of critical theory in order not to say Marx’s theory. I believe that that is all behind this discovery of critical theory by Horkheimer and Adorno.

While Fromm’s writings did pay insufficient attention to the waves of labor unrest in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, unlike Horkheimer, he did not view the rise of fascism as having marked the final defeat of the socialist project. Instead, the experience of fascism spurred Fromm deeper into forms of left-wing political engagement, characterized by a spirit of radical hope and optimism, and a return to Marx that was intended to help revive the Left on a mass basis.

In many ways, Fromm is the Frankfurt School thinker most suited to the current age. His vision was attentive to the interrelations between economics, culture, and human emotions, and avoided the pitfalls of either melancholic resignation or schematic determinism. He placed the regressive and reactionary tendencies of the present firmly at the forefront of his analysis, yet also sought to identify tangible avenues for progress.

In a political context that is rapidly moving into dangerous territory, with a recession that threatens to be as deep as the Great Depression, a socialist account that pays no heed to the danger of authoritarianism would be as irresponsible as one that presented it as our inevitable fate. This, along with the engagement with the humanism of Marx, is where Fromm still has many valuable lessons to offer us.