It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Forty years after the start of the historic miners’ strike, Bryn Griffiths returns to Yorkshire, where members of his family once mined coal.
On Saturday 9th March 2024, I had an emotional return with my family to Hatfield Main in South Yorkshire to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Great Miners’ Strike. My Grandad and other family members of that generation had worked in the local pits during the earlier successful strikes of 1972 and 1974. I spent the 1984-85 strike as an activist in the Brighton Miners’ Support Group but my heart always lay with the militant miners of Hatfield Main. Emotion was the order of the day for everyone. As we made our way through the streets, people came out of their houses to clap and show their respect. I spotted one woman shed a tear.
Ken Capstick, a Vice President of the Yorkshire NUM during the strike, wrote to event organiser Mick Lanaghan: “In all my 50 years as Branch and Area Official of the NUM (Yorkshire Area) I have never attended a miners’ event so full of emotion… to receive such a warm welcome from so many wonderful people will remain with me a as a special moment and the proudest moment of my life as a Yorkshire Miners’ Leader.”
Capstick went on to put the Hatfield miners alongside “the Chartists, the Levellers, the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the suffragettes.” We were all attending an important event and we knew it.
We gathered at a packed Broadway Hotel, in Dunscroft, and in the very best traditions of the miners we set off towards the Hatfield Main Pit Head with the Doncaster and East Yorkshire Pipe Band leading the way. The Hatfield Main Branch Banner featured AJ Cook, the Miners Federation of Great Britain and of course Keir Hardy from the Independent Labour Party and a founder of today’s Labour Party.
The Doncaster and East Yorkshire Pipe Band
We stopped at the Hatfield Main pithead, one of the few winding gears left standing after a campaign by the Hatfield Main Heritage Trust. The head gear was constructed in 1922 and now, thanks to the community campaign, has official Historic England Status. At the pithead we were entertained by the Hatfield and Askern Colliery Band.
The most important speech at the pithead was delivered on behalf of Dave Douglass – one of Hatfield’s most prominent militants who appears on one of the Hatfield Main banners alongside such greats as Scottish NUM leader Mick McGahey, local miner Freddie Matthews who gave his life on the picket line in 1972 and none other than Rosa Luxemburg.
Dave’s speech in absentia drew from his must-read working-class miners’ historyGhost Dancers. Dave put the strike of 1984-85 in its historical context. Taking us back to the miners’ strike in 1912 he reminded us that, “Churchill put machine guns at the pitheads, and tanks on the streets, armoured cars on the docks and swore to drive us back down our holes like rats… and when Arthur Cook [Miners’ Federation of Great Britian leader] said we would let grass grow on the pulley wheels before we’d submit to longer hours and still more wages reduction, Churchill said he’d make us eat the grass.”Dave, the South Yorkshire picket organiser in 1984-85 is unwell so I wish him a rapid recovery.
We were joined by Arthur Scargill, the former NUM president, as we marched to the site of the Battle of Hatfield where the local community was attacked by riot police as a few scabs were escorted into the pit in 1985. The day is memorialised by the broken stump of a lamppost that met its end in the mayhem that ensued.
The site of the Battle of Hatfield
At the Pit Club we heard keynote speeches from Rose Hunter, North Staffs Miners’ Wives Action Group, and Arthur Scargill. Arthur wore a Palestine badge and stood proudly, alongside Ken Capstick (on Arthur’s right), in front of a tall Palestinian flag. Arthur opened his speech to loud cheers saying the “slaughter of more than thirty thousand innocent people including children and the unborn in Gaza is nothing less than genocide.”
Arthur Scargill (centre) with Ken Capstick (right) at the Hatfield Main 1984-5 Strike commemoration
Arthur Scargill’s leadership of the NUM ended with some controversial wrangling within the union and the creation of the ill-fated Socialist Labour Party adventure, but every militant supporter of the miners’ strike would praise him as a great trade union leader who stood with the rank-and-file miners to the very end. This anniversary event was to mark our labour movement history and Arthur has an important place within it.
Gathering in the Pit Club to hear Arthur Scargill
Scargill’s speech was serious, long and intently listened to by the old miners. He recounted how, had NACODS, the pit deputies union which struck in September 1984, stood firm, the strike would have been won. He argued that there should have been a greater focus on starving the steel works of coal and maintained that the Battle of Orgreave could have been won had the pickets been maintained and built upon. To this day he stands by the decision by the NUM not to hold a ballot and instead recognise the legitimacy of the Area actions in accordance with the union rule book to defend their jobs.
Arthur made a “particular tribute to the young miners.” He also made a point of praising “the magnificent Women Against Pit Closures (WAPC) who were at the forefront of our struggle.” On 12th May 1984 Arthur attended the first WAPC march in Barnsley and he said: “I confess that I anticipated that if we were lucky 500 would appear… I couldn’t believe my eyes – 10,000 women were in Barnsley.” He recalled, with admiration, how the women completely ignored police instructions to march away from the centre of the town.
George Galloway’s presence on the day has been noted in some coverage of the event. I did not spot him on the march but he did appear for the photo calls and stood behind Arthur like ‘Where’s Wally’ at the end. He was not a speaker; according to press coverage, he was not invited by the organisers and his main activity seemed to be posing for selfies. Galloway is marmite and I never put it on my toast!
For me the most inspiring speaker of the day was Rose Hunter from Stoke who was an important figure in the Women Against Pit Closures movement. She started by remembering Davy Jones and Joe Green, the miners who were killed in the 1984-85 strike who as ‘Donkey Dave’ reports in the link had been remembered in Barnsley earlier in the day. Doreen Jones, Davy’s Mum, played an important role in the women’s movement. Rose said of Doreen: “The heartbreak of losing a bloody son never left her but she along with Mark Green [Joe’s Dad] continued to fight for justice… Her strong and defiant spirit lives on.”
Listening to Rose I was transported back to the strike as she introduced Liz French from Kent whom I met back in the 1980s. Rose told us that the Women Against Pit Closures were prominent at Wapping during the printers’ strike and were labelled “Scargill’s slags”, a badge she said they “wore with honour.”
Women Against Pit Closures was the greatest working class women’s movement I have ever witnessed and, as Rose said, turning to the younger women in the room, “This is your legacy.” She ended her speech by leading a thunderous rendition of the song Women of the Working Class, as many in the room choked back yet more tears.
I have marked the fortieth anniversary in the Labour Left Podcast with Mike Jackson, the co-founder of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners who was portrayed in the film Pride. Mike was an excellent guest to take us through the political, cultural and industrial legacy of the strike. In the interview with Mike we explored Mark Ashton’s legacy, compared Kinnock and Starmer, re-examined the awful Clause 28, considered the importance of the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign today and shared our deep-seated loathing of Margaret Thatcher.
Click to watch it on You Tube here. You can also listen to it on all your favourite podcast platforms such as Amazon, Audible, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Spotify etc. Just search for Labour Left Podcast.
The day was not all serious stuff because as well as choking back the tears we had a lot of laughs. Even the visit to the men’s urinals was marked by a memorable experience! As I looked down, I was met with a requirement to engage in target practice with a picture of Margaret Thatcher. I laughed so much I almost missed. As in the title of the event, we must never ever forgive.
Decoration of the Stainforth Pit Club Urinals
Bryn Griffiths, pictured below, is the host of Labour Hub’s spin off the Labour Left podcast which he produces with Luke Robinson, the podcast editor. They are both activists in the labour movement, Momentum and The World Transformed in North Essex. Bryn writes regularly for Labour Hub. You can find all the episodes of the Labour left Podcast here Bryn Griffiths will be speaking at a University of Sussex, UNITE and Sussex UCU event on Wednesday 20th March to consider How Sussex Supported the Miners.
Bryn Griffiths in front of the Hatfield Main NUM Banners.
Dixi et salvavi animam meam. With these Latin words Karl Marx concludes his Critique of the Gotha Program (1875) – “I have spoken and saved my soul.” One is unaccustomed to religious expression from the great communist, unless it be sarcastic, yet here he uses it to conclude a devastating analysis of the program of German workers party. What is Marx’s soul? How did he save it? And what about ours?[1]
These Latin words from two and a half millennia previous were distilled from a ‘brazen and stubborn’ prophet, Ezekiel, who with bizarre, way-out visions of animals, jewels, and wheels within wheels heard these words whispered from the heavenly vault.[2]
If I pronounce sentence of death on a wicked person and you have not warned him or spoken out to dissuade him from his wicked ways and so save his life, that person will die because of his sin, but I shall hold you answerable for his death. But if you have warned him and he persists in his wicked ways, he will die because of his sin, but you will have discharged your duty.
Perhaps Marx learned this in childhood. The oracular voice and the prophetic role came easily to him. Dixi et salvavi was used by Engels too writing thirty years earlier in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844) when it expressed bourgeois contempt. The phrase from Ezekiel became part of pompous boss-talk as the boss clears his conscience and walks away. And for a moment Marx and Engels considered walking away from the nascent German socialist party, but hung on in there, despite his criticisms. Marx, however, at this moment of obligation refers to capitalism and its wicked ways.
Salvation depends on speaking; it is the moral imperative. Black Lives Matter speaks truth to power; Extinction Rebellion’s slogan is “to tell the truth;” and women in north America form “speak outs” in recovering from male violence. Indispensable to the revolutionary project is calling out the wicked ways. Black Lives Matter (BLM) has pointed to the murderous effects of white supremacy. #MeToo has pointed to the violent degradations inherent to patriarchy. Extinction Rebellion (XR) has taken direct action against the political and economic causes of planetary warming. At Standing Rock indigenous people attempt to prevent pollution of the waters. Racism, patriarchy, settler colonialism, and destruction of the planetary earth system are the “wicked ways.” These are four destructive structures of capitalism. With them in mind we look back to select what is useful from Marx’s Critique bearing in mind, so to speak, that Marx also looks to us!
Engels published (and revealed) the Condition of the English Working Class in 1844. That year too found Marx publishing an earlier “critique,” not of a political program but of a political philosophy. A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in which he described religion as “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” “Criticism has plucked,” he writes, “the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.” To unmask self-estrangement he must turn to the criticism of actualities, and turn to history “to establish the truth of this world.” The two revolutionaries, Marx and Engels, one a critical philosopher and the other an empirical investigator, formed a partnership as revolutionary communists.
A year or so later they write, “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”[3] And that real movement in dissolving the world market abolishes alien property relations and restores mutual human relations. It is for us to see that real movement.” He makes the point again in The Critique of the Gotha Program: “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs.”
The goal is the commons, the means is the proletariat. What did these words – commons, proletariat – actually mean to him or to us? How are they part of the “real movement which abolishes the present state of things”?
Instead of proletariat he will write of producers or labor power. He’ll refer to serfs, to slaves; he’ll include employed and unemployed (the active army, the reserve army); he’ll refer to peasants, to artisans, to small manufacturers. All people who have lost their organic connections to nature, that is, to land, its creatures, its grains; to the waters and pastures; as well as to the geological resources lying beneath the land. All people who have been expropriated from the means of life, the means of production, the means of subsistence, this is what he means. It only remains to organize! “It is altogether self-evident that to be able to fight at all the working class must organize itself at home as a class…,” he states in this Critique. Yet this ‘class’ is constantly changing in its composition.
By the 1860s as the worker’s movement revived after the defeats that followed 1848, socialist parties were formed in Germany, and Marx helped to organize in 1864 the International Workingman’s Association, or the First International. It culminates with the Paris Commune of 1871, two months of self-rule by the French working-class, the first proletarian revolution.
The Gotha program says that labor is the source of all wealth. No, it’s not, says Marx. Nature is just as much a source of material wealth as labor. The single negation, right at the beginning with the little word “no” is the key that opens the door, for us in the twenty-first century, to planetary warming and the sixth extinction. We walk right in with the eco-socialism of Joel Kovel, Michael Löwy, and John Bellamy Foster .[4] We are present at the edge of the abyss staring into the “ecological rift.” Marx wrote of the “irreparable break” between nature and society. Or, he’d call the nature-humanity relation “metabolism.” The mass slaughter of the bison, the deforestation of the Great Lakes, the depletion of nutrients from the soil were some of the underlying phenomena of “the metabolic rift” in his day. The concept from Das Kapital of “the organic composition of capital” expresses in terms of economic quantities this rupture or rift.
Looking back to 1875 we see hints of Nature becoming self-conscious (as Elisée Reclus might say). About the time Marx was composing this critique the first “Arbor Day” (22 April 1875) celebrated by planting trees was announced in the USA and John Muir was walking in the Rockies and asking “How Shall We Preserve Our Trees.” While these were only “flea-hops” as Marx might say (see below) they were signs of what lay ahead.
Nature is the beginning both of life and of capitalism. “The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor since it follows precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature that the human being who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other human beings who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work by their permission, hence live only with their permission.” In Das Kapital this will be called expropriation and exploitation. In the young Marx it will be called alienation. Marx lifts the veil. To our world, to nature, to the biosphere, to creation, to the commons. Only the working class, he writes in the Gotha critique, can “lift this historical curse.”
Between the two critiques, 1844-1875, lay thirty years of class struggle, revolution, war, empire, and massive constructions of iron and steel, and Marx indeed threw away the imaginary flower to pluck the living flower. After the failures of the revolutions of 1848 he turned his attention to the demolition of the bourgeois divisions of politics from economics in perhaps the greatest critique ever made in the Grundrisse (1857) and Das Kapital (1867). These outlined the “wicked ways” of capital and established “the truth of this world.” They provide the means of plucking the living flower.
Could this critique become the soul, the heart, the sigh of the oppressed? It is no longer a philosophical or spiritual question; it is a political question.
One of his principle forms of critique is to describe the arguments of his opponent as “words” or “phrases” denying to them any substance in reason or factual evidence. He does this repeatedly in the Critique of the Gotha Program.(a sentence “limps,” “hollow phrases,” “bungled in style,” “mere phrases,” “obsolete verbal rubbish,” “false Lassallean formulation,” “a newspaper scribbler’s phrase”). Yet the critique contains two signature phrases of the Marxist outlook. One of them is both a profound summary of the fundamental opposition to capitalism and a fighting slogan for the banners of revolution, “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”[5] This is the seed of the living flower.
The physician, Luke, describes these early Christians who “had all things common” (Acts 4: 32) “and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need” (Acts 4:35). When threatened with famine during the reign of Claudius relief was obtained from “every man according to his ability.” (Acts 11:29).
What is it that abilities are creating? What is it that needs are accepting? Are we to interpret these two processes as production and consumption? In capitalist society production and consumption form a whole, the economy, regulated by the market, whose unit is the commodity, and whose lingo is money. This is “the historical curse.”
If you think about it, there seems to be some mysterious agent who measures out those abilities (senior management? HR?) or who doles out according to needs (Amazon? retail?). It is this mystery which can only be described in the future, “after the revolution.” Is it traditional institutions of civil society – family, work, government? Is it revolutionary assemblies – the congregation, the city the square, the soviet, some new version of the tribe? Is it some other social organization? Elinor Ostrom formulated it as ‘the governance of the commons.’[6] Marx relies neither on Providence nor on Progress for the realization of the future. The mystical former relies on divine agency and the abstract latter depends on Victorian technological and utilitarian belief. It does not happen automatically or inevitably. Earlier in the Grundrisse (p. 325) he had written “of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself”.
He refers to the “the common satisfaction of needs such as schools, health services, &c.” He refers to “the common stock.” The French revolutionary socialist, Jean Jaurès, said “Just as all citizens exercise political power in a democratic manner in common, so they must exercise economic power in common as well.”[7] Communist society, Marx writes, “emerges from capitalist society which is thus in every respect economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.”
What is the relationship between the statement of principles and the enumerated points of the program? In The Communist Manifesto (1848) the relationship was mediated by the history of class struggle. In the Critique of the Gotha Program the relationship depends on that critique of political economy found in Capital (1867) and the Grundrisse (1857).
In analyzing Marx’s thought we remind ourselves that thought is in motion. His ideas at any one time are not fixed in an eternity of truth. On the contrary they are very much of his times. So in understanding the problems of 1875 in the Gotha program, we can both think back to earlier phases of his thinking and forward to their subsequent development. We go back to the ‘young Marx’ and forwards to the ‘old Marx.’[8]
The ‘young Marx’ is all about alienation; he gives us both a spiritual and philosophical lens. The ‘old Marx’ is all about the commons; he gives us a lens in revolutionary anthropology and immersion in the so-called “backward” countries where indeed the air is better. Together the ideas of the young and the old Marx provide us with a way to read The Critique of the Gotha Program. We are no longer confined to the realm of political economy. We can approach both the meaning of communism and the anti-capitalist transition to it in ways that might be helpful in the twenty-first century.
The ‘mature Marx’ remains central which is to say that the critical analysis of the capitalist mode of production and the critique of political economy are what he is all about as he disentangles the hopeless web of error and bad politics found in the Gotha Program. Its guiding author, Ferdinand Lassalle, was formerly a follower of Marx who however allied with the Junkers, the German landlord class. Yet, the lords of the land turned nature into a commodity, a means of constant capital, and thus an instrument of extraction and exploitation. Such are the wicked ways.
The preface (1867) to Das Kapital, volume one, boldly proclaims, “Just as in the eighteenth century the American War of Independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class, so in the nineteenth century the American Civil War did the same for the European working class.”[9] The American Civil War sounded the death knell of slavery with the horn of the jubilee. That tocsin will ring to the European working class with the Paris Commune (1871) and reverberate with the working classes of the world on going.
In the Paris Commune the abolition of the death penalty and the burning of the guillotine, the destruction of the Vendôme column to the Napoleonic empire, and the formation of the Women’s Union provide during the seventy-two days of its life an idea of working-class self-government, or the political imaginary of commune.[10] Said Marx, “The great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence.”[11] As a result of the Commune Marx revised The Communist Manifesto to include the sentence, “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for their own purpose.”
In the summer of 1871 Peter Kropotkin (“mutual aid”) was in Finland, William Morris (“fellowship”) was in Iceland, and Karl Marx in London was studying the Russian language and reading Chernyshevsky’s Essays on the Communal Ownership of Land. His guide was the young Russian exile and Communard, Elisabeth Dmitrieff who besides leading Marx to the study of the peasant commune in Russia (the obshchina), was also the organizer of the seamstresses, laundresses, and dressmakers of Paris into the Women’s Union for the Defense of Paris and Aid to the Wounded. In Geneva discussions took place among veterans and exiles during the 1870s that produced the idea of “anarchist communism,” or the dissolution of State, Nation, and Capital.
The Commune was at the center of world-wide revolt. The writing of The Critique of the Gotha Program coincided with the hanging of nineteen coal miners (the “Molly Maguires”), with the police riot at Tompkins Square in New York, with the internment of the Navajo nation, the expropriation of the Comanches, the cultural war (‘kill the Indian, save the man’), Geronimo (“I was born where there were no enclosures”) escaping the San Carlos Reservation, and the African American military mobilization as ‘buffalo soldiers’ to annihilate the bison who had provided subsistence for the indigenous people of the plains. Thus did capital create and then utilize our divisions. The path was cleared for the global seizures and massacres in Africa, Asia, and Wounded Knee.[12]
The Kabylie revolt in Algeria against French conquest and confiscation of the common lands occurred at the same time as the Paris Commune. 250 tribes rose up, village assemblies providing the base along the coast, up the mountains, to the desert. It was led by Cheikh Mokrani. The infamous law of 1873 expropriated communal lands in Algeria, “tearing away the Arabs from their nature bond to the soil….”[13] At the end of his life in 1882 Marx spent two months in Algeria hoping that the commons of air in north Africa would heal the damage done to his lungs by capitalist externalities, i.e. London smog. Marx expressed his admiration of the Algerian Muslims for “the absolute equality of their social intercourse.”
Likewise, the defeat of the European working class (the two month Commune concluded with the bloody massacre of 20,000 – 30,000 communards) signaled the advent of Jim Crow, the end of Reconstruction, the KKK, the Colfax massacre, and the betrayals of 1875 Hayes-Tilden presidential election the year following. Virulent counter-revolution and violent suppression of textile workers of the north and railway workers of the west. “A new slavery arose,” wrote W.E.B. DuBois.[14] “The system of wage labor is a system of slavery,” wrote Marx in his Gotha Critique.
In a letter to Bebel in March 1875 Engels proposed replacing “state” everywhere by “Gemeinwesen, a good old German word which can very well convey the meaning of the French word “commune.” The Paris Commune four years earlier was, they said, “the glorious harbinger of a new society.” The mixture of commune, commons, and communism was a heady semantic mix concealing a revolutionary riddle not yet solved.
“The question then arises, what transformation will the body politic undergo in communist society? In other words what social functions analogous to present state functions will remain at that juncture. The question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousand-fold combination of the word people with the word state [as Lassalle did in the Gotha program]. Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” We can say that this is, at least, a flea-hop.
The second key phrase in The Critique of the Gotha Program is “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” In 2020 Mike Stout, the Pittsburgh steel-worker and singer-song writer, gave one explanation: “the only ‘dictatorship’ I envision is one that doesn’t let the greedy 1% and their class drive us into indebted servitude, while squandering and hoarding our wealth and natural resources, and stops them from destroying the whole planet.”[15] Frederick Engels gave a similar explanation. In the same year that Engels published Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program (1891), he asked, “Do you want to know what the dictatorship of the proletariat looks like?” and answered, “Look at the Paris Commune. That was the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Marx had used the phrase once before in a letter (5 March 1852) to Joseph Weydemeyer (1818-1866). “My own contribution,” wrote Marx, “was (1) to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; [and] (3) that this dictatorship, itself, constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”
Weydemeyer went to America and became a lieutenant colonel in the Union Army. He surveyed Central Park, and he designed the defenses of St. Louis while distributing copies of Marx’s Inaugural Address to the International. Marx’s address addressed the ditch diggers and hod carriers of these earthen works, pointing to the day “like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart”!
“To conquer political power has therefore become the great duty of the working classes,” he wrote just as Black Reconstruction was beginning. Success depended not on numbers alone but upon knowledge particularly of solidarity, and that led to the formation in 1864 of the International. Emancipation of the working classes entailed “the abolition of all class rule.”[16]
We are familiar with the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie: the democratic Levellers of the 1640s were followed by the dictator Cromwell, the insurgent Jacobins of the1790s were followed by the emperor Napoleon, the Russian Bolsheviks of the 1920s were followed by Stalin. Marx had learned from the Paris Commune that the proletariat cannot simply take over the state and use it for its own purposes. It must smash the state.
W.E.B. DuBois intended to call his chapter on Black reconstruction in South Carolina, “The Dictatorship of the Black Proletariat in South Carolina” but changed it simply to “The Black Proletariat in South Carolina.” He made this change after it was brought to his attention that “since universal suffrage does not lead to a real dictatorship until workers use their votes consciously to rid themselves of the dominion of private capital. There were signs of such an object among South Carolina Negroes, but it was always coupled with the idea of that day, that the only real escape for a laborer was himself to own capital.” Dictatorship is a “stopgap pending the work of universal education, equitable income, and strong character.” He writes of the “dictatorship of capital” in the North, a plutocracy. When DuBois chose not to use the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” it was because the suffrage was used to promote individual rather than collective ownership.
We now write ‘history from below.’ The expression includes histories of the oppressed whether that is labor history or women’s history or indigenous people’s history or African American history or even (to use an old term) natural history. In every example the ‘below’ implies an ‘above.’ It implies a contrast or an unspoken opposite, namely ruling class history which is reified as economic history, then history of the state, then history of war. These are aspects of what the Zapatistas call the war of oblivion. Indeed, deliberate forgetting is one of capital’s wicked ways.
The anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, asked, “Will perhaps the proletariat as a whole head the government?” Marx answers, “There will in fact be no below then.” History from below comes to an end just as class rule comes to an end.[17] Class rule over the resisting strata continues “until the economic basis that makes the existence of classes possible has been destroyed.”
The view that Marx and Engels “rigidly refused to paint pictures of future communist society,” as Eric Hobsbawm says, is only a half-truth. Marx did not paint pictures with brush and oil; he took photographs. That is to say, he sought the commune in the real movement. This is the significance of Chernyshevsky, of Henry Lewis Morgan, of his stay in Algeria, of his letters to Zasulich. Hobsbawm says that Marx was provoked “into a theoretical statement which, if probably not new, had at any rate not been publicly formulated by him before.”[18] It wasn’t a question of “new” or not. To Marx theory generated the project of revolutionary investigation.
The Ethnological Notebooks are one of the major works of the ‘late Marx.’ They contain, among other things, close study from Lewis Henry Morgan of the five nations of the Iroquois, or the Haudenosaunee. The Notebooks delighted the Chicago surrealist, Franklin Rosemont, who took joy in Marx’s multiple references by the Iroquois and Muscokees to the species of ‘Turtle Island’ – elk, raccoon, buffalo, turtle, eagle, wolf. Marx insists on the importance of imagination to the elevation of human beings. It and the poetic spirit, the spiritual as such, lead us to the real movement.
Marx took note of the Iroquois whose “democratic assembly where every adult male and female member had a voice upon all questions brought before it.” “The women were the great power among the clans,” he copies into his notebook.[19] The same text inspired Engels to refer in The Origin of the Family to “the world-historic defeat of the female sex.”
In February 1881 Vera Zasulich initiated a correspondence with Marx on whether the rural commune, the obshchina, could “develop in a socialist direction or whether it was destined to perish as an archaism. Marx wrote several draft replies including a lengthy consideration of common property in history, as a constitutive form (assembly, kinship, clan), and in various ecologies of forest, pasture, meadow. He concluded “that the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia.”[20]
“The rebuilding, whether it comes now or a century later, will and must go back to the basic principles of Reconstruction in the United States during 1867-1876 – Land, Light, and Leading for slaves black, brown, yellow and white, under a dictatorship of the proletariat”[21] It is not quite synonymous with ‘proletarian hegemony.’ The values of the material institutions of society have to change to become the ground of government. Hence, the decisive importance of the northern “schoolmarms” or the women who went south during Reconstruction to arm former slaves with the tools of reading, writing, and criticism.
Marx did not publish his Critique of the Gotha Program. But five years after he wrote it the French socialist, Jules Guesde, visited him in London in May 1880 and asked him to write the preamble to the program of the French Parti Ouvrier or Worker’s Party. Marx did so in a dense sentence with many thoughts: the productive class will emancipate all human beings without distinction of sex or race. They can be free only by possessing the means of production collectively. This must be accomplished by revolutionary action which may include universal suffrage as an instrument of emancipation rather than deception. The aim is “the political and economic expropriation of the capitalist class and the return to community of all the means of production….”
Here is the commons, here is democracy and universal suffrage, here the phrase “return to the community” implies something lost or expropriated. The term community refers to the collective, cooperative social forms which Marx was studying at the time (the Iroquois, the obshchina, Algeria) or what we might call the commons. It is not the state, the market, or the nation. The door is always open for the “real movement.”
Labor is organized by capital to work. When labor, employed or unemployed, organizes for itself it becomes a class and thus able to save its soul. So, the four structures of capitalism and their wicked ways – white supremacy, patriarchy, settler colonialism, and privatization – have caused risings among black and brown people, women, indigenous peoples, and the rebels against extinctions. The immanent possibility arises of these insurgencies becoming components of “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things….” This is not just an electoral or economic process. We can pluck the living flower to recreate the commons.
Ann Arbor, Turtle Island 2020.
This essay forms the “afterword” to PM Press’s forthcoming edition and new translation of Marx’s “Critique of the Gotha Program.”
Notes.
1) I thank Wendy Goldman, Geoff Eley, and John Garvey for help with bibliography, Riley Linebaugh for suggestions, and Monty Neill for editing. ↑
3) Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (Lawrence and Wishart: London 1965), p. 48. ↑
4) Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World (London: Zed, 2002), John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review, 2000), Michael Löwy, An Eco-Socialist Manifesto (2001) ↑
5) The phrase is not original to Marx. Louis Blanc had employed it in the 1848 Revolution, it was the epigraph to Saint-Simon’s journal, L’Organisateur, and Étienne Cabet used it in his utopian fiction, Voyage en Icarie (1845). ↑
6) Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutios for Collective Action (London: Cambridge University Press, 1990). ↑
7) Quoted by Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000 (Oxford Univrsity Press, 2002), p. 21. ↑
8) E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, refers to Marx’s “increasing preoccupation in his last years with anthropology, was resuming the projects of his Paris youth.” ↑
9) Capital, translated by Ben Fowkes (Penquin; London, 1976), p. 91 ↑
10) Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (Verso, London, 2015). ↑
12) Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper, 1980), and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon, 2014). ↑
13) John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Hannah Holleman, “Marx and the Indigenous,” Monthly Review (February 2020) ↑
14) W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (1935) ↑
15) Mike Stout, Homestead Steel Mill The Final Ten Years (Oakland: PM Press, 2020), p. 8. ↑
16) Karl Marx, The First International and After: Political Writings, volume 3, David Fernbach (ed.) (Penguin: London, 1974), p.73-84 ↑
17) Karl Marx, “The Conspectus of Bakunin’s Book State and Anarchy,” ↑
18) E.J. Hobsbawm, How To Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism (New Haven: Yale U.P., 2011), pp.47 and 58. ↑
19) Composed in 1880-1882 and published in English for the first time in 1974, see Lawrence Krader (ed.) The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1974). Frankilin Rosemont, “Karl Marx & the Iroquois,” Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, 4 (1989), and republished as Environmental Action Series 5 by the Red Balloon Collective (199?). ↑
20) Teodor Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the Peripheries of Capitalism (Routledge, 1983). ↑
In 1995, at a key moment in the creation of New Labour, Tony Blair gave a speech to the Fabian Society to mark the 50th anniversary of Clement Attlee’s 1945 victory. In his speech, Blair embedded New Labour within the work of philosophers such as JA Hobson and LT Hobhouse, pioneers of early 20th century New Liberalism.
The purpose behind Blair’s embrace was to reunite liberal and socialist traditions, a modern ‘LibLabism’ that earlier in the century had resulted in Labour’s first MPs in 1906 and the common campaigns of 1910. For Blair, the objective was a new progressive alliance to avoid a repeat of the Conservative domination of the 20th century and to build an anti-Tory coalition to win and retain power.
Labour’s 1992 defeat meant many modernisers remained fearful that the party might never again secure an outright victory. After that defeat, Blair had begun to meet privately with Alliance leader Paddy Ashdown to explore the future reconstruction of the left. Once leader, he privately stated to Ashdown that his preferred option was to include Lib Dem representatives in his government.
The landslide of 1997 removed the electoral imperative behind such changes. Yet Blair offered Ashdown membership of a joint cabinet committee to consider constitutional change, chaired by Blair himself, with equal representation from the two parties. Moreover, in December 1997, Blair established the Jenkins committee to recommend alternatives to the voting system.
Labour’s pluralist, liberal tradition has a rich history
The long-standing liberal left pluralist tradition within the party influenced the early phase of New Labour. There are three basic elements to this tradition.
First, a focus on questions of legal equality best expressed in the five decades of equalities legislation enacted by successive Labour governments from the 1960s culminating in the 2010 Equality Act.
Second, the promotion of human rights derived from post-war concerns to defend and enhance human dignity and freedom given wartime experience of genocide and totalitarianism, reflected much later in the 1998 Human Rights Act.
Third, confronting questions of constitutional and electoral reform to challenge the power of the state in the name of liberty and to advance citizenship. Initiatives such as reform of the House of Lords, devolution and freedom of information – all under the Blair government – reflect this emphasis.
This pluralist, liberal tradition has a rich history. It was on display with the pioneering social reforms of the 1960s under the guidance of Roy Jenkins. In the 1970s and 1980s, campaigners such as Tony Benn referenced the contribution of the Diggers, Levellers and Chartists when making the case for modern democratic and constitutional renewal. In the 1980s and 1990s, Charter 88 attracted widespread support from across the liberal, social democratic and socialist left. Above all, it can be identified in the embrace of human rights and constitutional reform by John Smith as Labour leader. In his first week as Prime Minister on July 3rd 2007, Gordon Brown argued for a written constitution.
This liberal plural tradition is under attack in the modern party
Today, this liberal plural tradition is under attack. Neal Lawson, a member for 44 years, is one of the most high profile advocates of pluralism in Labour. Neal is Labour through and through. In all the 30 years I have known him, he has continually demonstrated the Labour values that our party was built on: respect, tolerance, compassion and, importantly, pluralism.
The soft left has historically been the group most committed to political and constitutional reform, to questions of liberty and freedom in their understanding of socialist justice. Compass, the think tank Neal leads, is the organisation most associated with upholding this tradition. Neal must have been targeted and threatened with expulsion for this reason.
My point is that what we are witnessing is not just an attack on Neal or Compass or the soft left. It is an attack on a liberal and pluralist tradition of justice pursued through democratic, constitutional and political reform and the pursuit of individual and human rights.
The right-wing faction who appear to be running the party, singling out Neal and deciding who is and is not a candidate or member come from a very different tradition – colder, more authoritarian and utilitarian, in which politics is all about state capture and factional control. Different political traditions have always coexisted around Labour. Every Labour leader has accepted this cohabitation.
Factionalism threatens our ability to challenge the status quo
Today, many see Starmerism as a New Labour restoration project. I don’t. New Labour had a liberal quality which is under threat in the modern party. The enduring features of New Labour’s first term – the Good Friday Agreement, devolution, new legal rights to equality, the Human Rights Act, freedom of information – show its liberal, plural quality.
After the next election one small, Leninist section of one party has no hope of tackling the huge issues facing our country, whether on climate, inequality or rebuilding our crumbling public services.
The threat to our party, and by extension the country, from this factionalism cannot be overstated. This is much bigger than Neal Lawson. It is about the character of the modern party and upholding the liberal, pluralist tradition within Labour. Neal is threatened, but something much more significant is at stake: our capacity to democratically challenge the existing social and economic order.
Jon Cruddas
Jon Cruddas is MP for Barking and Dagenham and chair of Labour Together.
The current climate crisis emerged out of a specific set of historical and economic factors which have maintained capitalist accumulation and class inequalities to this day. Jason W. Moore, geographer and Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, explains how the development of capitalism fueled European colonialism and Western imperialism, resulting in a novel form of climate destruction.
Transcript
Hi, I’m Talia Baroncelli, and you’re watching theAnalysis.news. I’ll shortly be joined by historian and geographer Jason W. Moore to speak about capitalism’s effect on climate change. If you’d like to support us, and if you’re in a position to donate, you can go to our website, theAnalysis.news, and hit the donate button at the top right corner of the screen. Make sure you get onto our mailing list and like and subscribe to the show wherever you watch the show, be it on YouTube or on podcast streaming services such as Apple or Spotify. See you in a bit with Jason W. Moore.
Joining me now is Jason W. Moore. He’s a historical geographer and professor of sociology at Binghamton University in Upstate New York. He’s also the Coordinator of the World Ecology Research Network and the author of several books, including Anthropocene Or Capitalocene? and A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, which he co-wrote with Raj Patel. Jason, it’s a pleasure to have you. Jason Moore
What a treat to be here today, Talia. Thank you for having me. Talia Baroncelli
I came across your work because a friend of mine gave me this amazing book of yours, which you co-wrote with Raj Patel. I also was going into some of your more academic articles, and your big critique, which I thought was really pertinent, is how you critique this scientific narrative around climate change. Even in the mainstream scientific discourse, when they’re talking about climate change, such as in the IPCC reports, they’ll say that climate change is manmade and that humans are the main culprit to blame for the climate destruction that we’re witnessing.
What you’re saying is something very different, and pinpointing it on just manmade climate change or saying that the conditions we’re living in are simply due to manmade actions is a form of denialism. You’re arguing to go beyond those very binary terms of man and nature. What you’re arguing for is actually an analysis of capitalism and how capitalist systems, structures, and power dynamics are resulting in the climate change that we’re witnessing.
Why don’t you explain what you mean by this form of capitalism and the Capitalocene, and why it’s so important to go beyond our mainstream understanding of manmade climate change? Jason Moore
It’s a fantastic question. Let’s first recognize that we are subject to one of the greatest ideological con jobs in human history, which is to sort out history in terms of what I call, sarcastically, the eternal conflict between man and nature.
We want it to be clear that humanity is not a historical actor. Humans do not build empires. Humans do not build corporations. This is not the work of an abstract man or of man in general. These are the actions of specific groups of human beings who are in corporations, financial systems, and empires. These are the agents that make history. Political parties make history. Churches make history. Humanity does not make history. Humanity does not go about organizing the climate crisis. There’s a confusion indeed that is deliberately cultivated by the bourgeoisie and their ideologues, which is an argument about human nature. Humans did it.
Well, we know who is responsible for the climate crisis, and they have names and addresses, just like those corporate and capitalist actors who are responsible for the slave trade, they have names and addresses. And just like in the era of slavery, they should be expropriated. It’s as simple as that.
The solution to the climate crisis is part of this argument about the Capitalocene, that we live not in the age of man, the Anthropocene, but in the age of capital, the Capitalocene. The argument is that the source of the problem has definite historical origins in specific times and places, especially in the centuries after Columbus, long before the steam engine came along by the way. It creates a particular set of geo, cultural, economic, and political relations that are always with and within the web of life.
Capitalism did not start transforming the climate with the steam engine. Capitalism and the imperialist agencies responsible for the conquest of the Americas started the climate crisis, and it was evident as early as the long, cold 17th century, roughly from the middle of the 1500s to the year 1700. Why?
In the limitless thirst for cheap labor, the imperialist forces decimated new world populations. The forest grew back. The soils were left undisturbed. There was a drawdown of carbon dioxide which contributed to the greatest crisis that capitalism, to that point, had faced. It was planetary. It wasn’t limited to Europe. This was the era in which capitalism as a world ecology, not as an economic system narrowly conceived, but as a world ecology of power, profit, and life, come together in those centuries during this first great climate crisis, this capitalogenic climate crisis, at least in part. We see the crystallization of capitalism as a trinity, what I call the climate class divide, climate apartheid, and climate patriarchy. This was a response to the crises, the climate class conjuncture of that era, and it is still very much with us today.
We have to, first and foremost, name the system. Otherwise, we are denying climate change in the more real historical sense of who is responsible. We’re saying with the CEO of ExxonMobil, yes, climate change is real, and we all need to join together to solve the problem. Talia Baroncelli
Well, you’re trying to infuse a historical perspective into this analysis of climate change. What would you say to people who argue that there were instances of different societies having an impact on the climate, even, say, in the 1200s, for example? In the medieval period, when there was actually, I wouldn’t say, global warming, but there was a bit of a warm period, and there was some affluence that came along with that, as well as increases in the population. Because of the feudal system, more people were put to work in the feudal system under the lords. But then, when there was a cooling. As a result, there was a more vulnerable population that was more vulnerable to health crises.
A lot of people ended up dying when the Black Plague came along. In 1347, because there were still trade networks between Europe and Asia, once the Black Plague hit Europe, a lot of people, a lot of workers or peasants ended up dying. Then, we see the peasant uprisings of the late 1300s and the 1400s that led to the undermining of the feudal system.
How would you say that particular moment is different from what we’re experiencing now? Is it a different critical juncture? Why would those impacts on the environment be different from the way you’re characterizing the Capitalocene in the modern day? Jason Moore
Well, it’s another fantastic question. I’ve written quite a bit about this over the past 25 years, and people can go to my website, jasonwmoore.com, and look into these discussions. Yes, indeed, the crisis of feudalism was a climate class conjuncture, a socio-physical conjuncture, if you will. It was not the climate shift from the medieval climate anomaly, sometimes called the medieval warm period, because in Europe it was warm; that provided very favorable conditions for the emergence of feudalism and the assertion of feudal power, the encagement of the peasantry, as Christopher Wickham summarizes it. This was fundamental to the golden age of feudalism. You think of knights, the castles, and the cathedrals. When the climate shifted, it transformed everything in that civilization’s DNA. The same thing is going on today.
Here’s the most important takeaway from that story. First of all, it’s not a Malthusian story. It’s not too many people on the land, leading to famine and disease and all this. That is a straight-up ideological falsification. It was very much a Marxist struggle and contradiction of the climatological and other biological and ecological conditions of feudal power that was coming unraveled at the moment of this shift from a warm era that had endured either two and a half, three centuries, or possibly even longer, depending on how we want to look at it, to a very unfavorable climatic situation.
I like to say climate change is not everything. But if we want to understand anything about our political conjuncture today, we have to understand the climate crisis. The same is true for these previous moments, even though they weren’t nearly so dramatic. There were climate shifts within the climate stability of the Holocene. That long era from 11,700 years ago to the present is now over or close to being over.
The key takeaway is that these unfavorable shifts in the climate, unfavorable to large-scale class-dominated agriculture, were bad for the ruling classes. This is true for the feudal ruling classes in the 14th century. It was true for the ruling classes of Western Rome a thousand years earlier when we saw the onset of what science has called the Dark Ages Cold Period. It was true for what’s called the Bronze Age collapse, where a period of sustained drought, along with other factors, led to the near-simultaneous collapse of most of the major Bronze Age civilizations right around the year 1200 BCE. There’s a long history to this.
Lo and behold, the same pattern repeats itself in the history of capitalism. People don’t pay any attention to this, and as a consequence, they overstate the resilience of the ruling classes. The ruling classes today are not in a good position, and climate history tells us a lot about why that is.
As I mentioned in the previous question, the long, cold 17th century was one of the coldest periods of the past 8,000 years. This was an era of profound revolt. It’s an era that ends with civil wars and revolutions.
Oliver Cromwell in England has cut off the head of the king and is then facing the prospect of a Communist, or as they said at the time, a Communist army, the Levellers, outside of London. He was trying to figure out what to do with this. We can’t have a Communist revolution. This dynamic repeats itself again and again in the era of the French Revolution and Malthus. This was the last great cold stretch of the Little Ice Age between 1783 and 1820. This was the era of the Haitian Revolution, of the revolt in Ireland in 1798, of the English fleet mutiny in the 1790s. This was an era of profound revolution and revolt. So again, in an era of very unfavorable climate. This should give us pause to reject both the climate doomism and, I think, the climate resignation, this sense of powerlessness in the present conjuncture. These moments of unfavorable climate change are wrapped up with periods of popular revolt and the unraveling of the underlying conditions for ruling class power especially, but not only in agriculture.
The ideological terrain has been dominated by neo-Malthusians. We don’t understand that, ultimately, the source of bourgeois legitimacy is their ability to maintain a cheap food regime so people can gain access to cheap food. That’s obviously an issue in the present moment. There are many intervening factors, but it has to be front and center in our imagination that climate is, amongst others, a weak link in the imperialist chain of power. Talia Baroncelli
We’ll definitely get into how your analysis of capitalism, the Capitalocene, and world ecology can potentially be useful to revolutionary struggles as well as to the climate movement. You did bring up the issue of cheapening nature. This is something that you discuss, along with Raj Patel in your book, on that topic.
I think it was really interesting how you brought up the historical example of the island of Madeira. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this was in the mid-1400s when the Portuguese went to Madeira. They were so taken by the idea of making sugar or producing sugar that they went to the island. They cleared the island of all the forestry that was there because, for every pound of sugar, they would need to burn something like 50 pounds of wood to distill the sugar and get to it. Distill the sugarcane, rather.
You use this example of what took place on the island to illustrate the seven ways in which nature is cheapened. You speak about how capitalism cheapens nature. It takes things that are essentially undenominable, or it transforms them into relations of production and consumption in ways that perhaps didn’t exist previous to that. It’s not just making the cost of things cheaper but also reducing the integrity or the value. It is also reducing people or Indigenous people to being cheap, essentially, or women and other marginalized groups, for example, and how that relates to nature and cheap goods and energy. Maybe we could get into that historical example as well, the example of Madeira and how cheapening nature and these seven cheap things that you mentioned with Raj Patel are so important to understand the perspective you’re getting at in world ecology. Jason Moore
Absolutely. When we think about the rise of capitalism and the extension of the formal colonial empire, which is modern imperialism, today, people talk about colonialism and don’t have any sense of what that is.
Colonialism, as a formal expression of imperialism, is how the bourgeoisie prefers to wage the class struggle. That is at the core of my theory of cheap nature. This expansion was because, under the conditions of the feudal crisis, the seigneurs and the aristocrats were defeated. They lost the class struggle. You mentioned the popular revolt. The peasants and workers everywhere across Europe prevented the restoration of feudalism.
To make a very long and complex story very short, they essentially forced the bankers, the kings and queens, and the seigneurs to find a solution overseas, where the overwhelming military power of the new capitalist states gave them a decisive advantage. Be mindful, they didn’t go to Africa, they didn’t go to India, they didn’t go to China because they would have lost. They went to the Americas where decisive military power allowed them to create the conditions for a good business environment.
Cheap nature has two moments, and you nailed it. It is both cheap in price for the capitalist. It’s not the $3 hamburger. It is the $10 barrel of oil. It is commodity prices. It is the cost of doing business for capital. Cheap nature is a strategy to create other cheapened moments.
Now, the second moment of cheap nature is geo-cultural devaluation. This gives rise to specific forms of proletarianization that are today talked about in very abstract and incorrect language, like women and Indigenous peoples, as if the whole point was not to create indigeneity, to create man/woman as a binary, to create racial categories in order to cheapen the labor. These are cultural expressions of the worldwide class struggle.
Why was it that capitalism needed to invent, for instance, a new binarized gender division of labor? Because it needed cheap workers. The only people who can produce cheap workers are females. So that was fundamental to the emergence, the invention of climate patriarchy, of climate apartheid, out of the raw material of what I think is the most dangerous word in the language, nature.
The book is titled Seven Cheap Things. But in fact, very quickly, we say, look, there aren’t really seven cheap things because nature is a specific cultural and political mechanism to make other relations into things and make them cheap. Cheap nature puts these two moments together. Everybody pays lip service today around intersectionality, but they never bother to put them together historically. That is the exploitation of labor power and the domination through nature, the domination of the web of life, and various forms of naturalized domination like racism and sexism. These are all intimately tied in this account. This allows us to begin to understand what is at the core of the climate crisis. And what is at the core of the climate crisis is not European white men doing bad things to landscapes. It is about the drive to find cheap labor, because without cheap labor, you can’t do anything to the rest of the web of life. You can’t turn the rest of life into a cash machine without cheap labor. And that’s more than just wage workers. It is, as I’ve been arguing, my comrades, and the World Ecology Conversation, have been arguing for over a decade. Capitalism is a system of unpaid work. It thrives when there are small pockets of market exchange of the cash nexus within oceans of cheap or potentially cheap nature, at the center of which is labor. We’re always looking at how labor is cheapened through these ideological dynamics.
I would close with a nice sound bite that I take from the great German Marxist feminist Claudia von Werlhof. She says, “Nature is everything the bourgeoisie does not want to pay for.” If you stop and think about it, that applies to racism and it applies to sexism. It applies to the whole dynamic of what economists, in a rather banal way, talk about as externalization.
We have to begin to pierce the ideological con job of this eternal conflict between man versus nature and begin to understand this is a dynamic of class struggle in the web of life. That’s an old-fashioned way of putting a very, very concrete reality here. This is not a struggle of Europe against indigenous peoples. This is the emergence of a capitalist class structure committed to an absurdity, the endless accumulation of capital, and therefore, the endless conquest of the earth, as in the story of Madeira, where one frontier gives right away to another, to another, to another, where the frontiers fix the problems of capitalism or fix the problems of the Iberian states in the era of feudal crisis. Talia Baroncelli
Yeah, just touching on the unpaid aspect of labor. Silvia Federici would also speak about the importance of reproductive labor and how that form of unpaid labor is so crucial to upholding very specific capitalist relations.
Going back to the Madeira example, what happened on the island was that the island was completely deforested, and they had to shift the sugarcane production to, I believe it was wine or something else. It seems like once that happened, the people who owned the modes of production then required other frontiers to expand their relations and to continue to profit off of those other sites of power that you could potentially call them. They needed to go to what they termed the New World, to the Americas, to look for more land there and to have a cheaper labor force that they brought from Africa to then exploit and appropriate energy. Jason Moore
There’s an ongoing frontier, a restless frontier that is at the core of capitalism. There’s no capitalism without frontiers. We know this today because capitalism is in its zombie phase. It is dead. Its underlying inner sources of animism and vitality are gone. Those are frontiers. Frontiers of what? Of cheap labor, food, energy, raw materials, anything that’s fundamental to capital accumulation. The role of imperialism is to secure cheap nature frontiers. Today, those frontiers are gone. What’s the role of imperialism? Well, we’re seeing it right before our eyes. Talia Baroncelli
Would you say that your argument is similar to what David Harvey would be speaking about, the spatial-temporal fix in which, due to crises of over-accumulation, capital always seeks other areas beyond other frontiers, for example, to continue to accumulate? Then, once there’s nothing else, no other frontiers, you see these crises boiling over even within what we would consider the Global North, for example, not just in places such as the Global South. Jason Moore
Yes and no. David Harvey is a comrade and a teacher of mine. I’m very much in that intellectual lineage rather directly. Harvey is brilliant. What you just summarized is not Harvey’s position. Harvey has stated many times that capitalism does not need frontiers of cheap labor, energy, food, and raw materials to survive, that it can cannibalize itself in some version of Nancy Fraser’s argument. This is provided without any historical examination of the real historical conditions through which capitalism has resolved its great accumulation crises.
If you look at history, say, classically at the end of the 19th century, but also in the middle of the 16th century, the Great Depressions were resolved through new ways of imperialism, the securing of new frontiers, especially these four cheaps of labor, food, energy, and raw materials, to fix the over-accumulation problem. That is, the problem where there’s too much capital and not enough profitable investment opportunities.
Harvey went part of the way, and in fact, in his most important work that nobody reads but go read, Limits to Capital from 1982, he says, look, right around the early 20th century, and Luxemburg put her finger on it at that moment, there was a sea change in capitalism, the closure of the frontiers, and then what he calls the law of rising geographical inertia.
Now, interestingly, nobody, I think, except for me, has ever picked up on that. But that means, essentially, there was an intimate connection between capitalism’s famous flexibility and capacity for innovation and its capacity to secure frontiers.
Lo and behold, if we look at the past 50 years, and this is part of my thesis on zombie capitalism, in the productive center, the heart of capitalism, we see long-run productivity stagnation. We see a long-run agricultural productivity stagnation at the very moment when the last meaningful frontiers have been enclosed. Yes, there are frontier spaces in Borneo, Sumatra, in the Amazon, here and there, for sure. But these are no longer or even remotely close to promising to restore the conditions for a new golden age of capitalism, such as existed at previous moments of restructuring. In this long historical cycle of imperialism, frontiers, the acquisition, appropriation of new cheap natures, resolving the crisis, and then, of course, there’s another crisis, another century or so ahead. That’s a story that I tell in Capitalism in the Web of Life and in many, many essays. It’s important to remember those frontiers are now gone. I just have to mention that it’s related to waste frontiers, foremost among them, the atmosphere as a great waste frontier for greenhouse gasses.
Part of what we see in the history of capitalism is that for every moment of externalizing waste and polluting and toxifying the world, for every moment of waste, there’s a complementary moment of laying waste. That’s what we’re seeing in the world today. We’re seeing in the world today the end of capitalism, a climate crisis that is inducing a shift towards geopolitical accumulation, using political and military power to secure the best deal for different capitalist classes in different imperial centers of the world. Talia Baroncelli
Well, the waste thing is quite a big issue. I think it was in one of your books where you mentioned that by 2050, there’ll probably be more plastic in the oceans than fish. That’s an example of where all the [crosstalk 00:28:54]. Jason Moore
And that was optimistic. Talia Baroncelli
That was an optimistic estimate because that was probably in 2017 that you wrote that. Jason W. Moore, it’s been really great to speak to you. Thanks so much for your time. Let’s talk again soon. Jason Moore
Talia, it has been a pleasure. Thank you for such a lively conversation. For those who are interested in anything that I’ve just said, you can go to my website, jasonwmoore.com. Talia Baroncelli
You’ve just been watching part one of my discussion with Jason W. Moore. In part two, we get to some of the strategies that can be deployed by movements to unseat capitalism and the consolidation of the elite power. Thanks for watching.
The Assertion of Popular Power: A Climate Movement Imperative
In part 2, historian and geographer Jason W. Moore explains why climate and revolutionary struggles must understand capitalist dynamics and deploy a language of universal class solidarity to overthrow transnational power structures perpetuating the climate crisis.
Hi, I’m Talia Baroncelli, and you’re watching theAnalysis.news. This is part two of my lively discussion with historian Jason W. Moore. If you’d like to support this content and the work that we do, you can go to our website, theAnalysis.news, and hit the donate button at the top right corner of the screen. Don’t forget to get onto our mailing list; that way, you’re always up to date every time there’s a new episode. Like and subscribe to the show on podcast streaming services such as Apple or Spotify, as well as on our YouTube channel, and please share the show if you enjoy this content. See you in a bit with Jason.
Joining me now is Jason W. Moore. He’s a historical geographer and professor of sociology at Binghamton University in Upstate, New York. He’s also the Coordinator of the World Ecology Research Network and is author of several books, including Anthropocene or Capitalocene? as well as A History of the World and Seven Cheap Things, which he co-wrote with Raj Patel. Jason, it’s a pleasure to have you.
Jason W. Moore
Well, it is a treat to be here today, Talia. Thank you for having me.
Talia Baroncelli
I’m sure there are some people listening who are thinking, so what? What does this all mean? Why is any of this relevant to have different perspectives or to not focus on this man-made binary with nature? I think if you want to put this analysis into practice, then you have to look at how relevant this could be for the climate struggle.
What would you say to that for revolutionary struggles or for climate movements such as, well, there are several, I’m thinking even Debt-for-Nature or movements which argue for the cancelation of debt, for example, or for other climate groups as well. How important is this adaptation of the language and the perspective that you’re deploying? How important is that for their struggles to be even more effective, or is it more of a linguistic issue?
Jason W. Moore
Yeah, well, of course, it’s not. It isn’t linguistic because language is a crucial nexus of power. I always love it when Marxists who should be committed to the critique of ideology are like, “Oh, that’s just changing the words around.” It’s clearly not. The analysis of the weak links of capitalism that proceeds from man versus nature leads to forms of neo-Malthusian techno-scientific authoritarianism. This is profoundly and thoroughly anti-democratic.
From the origins of second-wave environmentalism, I think of the first Earth Day in 1970, the first UN Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. From there onwards, the main ideological message has been listen to the science. Trust us. Give power to the experts. This is fundamentally anti-democratic.
Here, I agree entirely with Naomi Klein about the climate crisis, who basically says, echoing ’60s radicals, “The issue is not the issue.” The issue of the climate crisis is an issue of democracy. It is a crisis of democracy. Therefore, the first step has to be the assertion of popular power over the political structures of the world and to confront the oligarchies, the national security states, and the imperial apparatus in the case of the United States and a few other countries that are fundamentally about the dictatorship of capital.
We should stop pussy-footing around the issue with the illusion that somehow, if only we elect enough social Democrats to parliament, they will legislate socialism, and the climate crisis will go away. That’s not how it’s going to work.
The history of the 20th century, which eco-socialists routinely ignore, is a history of counter-insurgency and regime change politics. It’s baffling to me that folks want to devolve into single-issue politics. Single-issue politics really emerged out of the crisis of Fordism in the 1960s. It was an invention of the new right and then was picked up by elements of a centrist, liberal, professional managerial class strategy. Environmentalism was one of the major ones, not just in the U.S. but in Western Europe.
The result is something like, well, you’re in Berlin now, if I remember right, something like what you see with the German Greens. The German Greens love war. They love war. Look at the civilizational rhetoric coming out of the Greens and the warmongers in Germany right now, which is in the midst of the greatest rearmament since 1936. What could go wrong? Then, we begin to hear that old language of the Civilizing Project. The Russians might look like us, but they’re not us. They don’t value life. Josep Borrell, the E.U.’s Chief Diplomat, is saying, “Well, Europe is the garden, and the rest of the world is the jungle.” Yeah, exactly. This is exactly…
We talk about language. Ideological power flows through language and flows through the power to name. Most so-called radicals around the climate are not saying the problem is capitalism and not just capitalism as some system of corporate power. Yes, corporations, but also the increasingly tight nexus of the bourgeoisie and its political representatives, which is spectacularly advanced or degenerated, as the case may be in the United States, but clear in the U.K. and many other places. The left has been completely destroyed. The proletarian forces have been defeated across the Global North. In the Global South, you see the semi-proletariat organizing, but in very ideologically confused ways.
What’s necessary is clarity, a historical clarity, over the actual dynamics of capitalism in the web of life. And that means that we need a new conceptual apparatus that does involve a different linguistic turn. Let me point out that you understand this, Talia, but some of these idiots in the eco-socialist crowd say, “Well, it’s just language.” Every liberation movement in the modern world ever has insisted on a new language. Why? Because the language of the dominating and exploiting classes is one designed to keep people down. And that’s only intensified in the era of social media and misinformation fetishes and all of that.
Talia Baroncelli
Right. And all knowledge production is a representation of those power relations and inequalities that these movements are also trying to undermine.
Jason W. Moore
Absolutely.
Talia Baroncelli
The language is important. But you bring me to my next question then, and I think [Antonio] Gramsci, the Italian thinker and writer, would be really important to bring in at this particular moment. I think it was in 1919, after the April strike, and after he was maybe a bit pessimistic over how the workers’ councils were failing in a way. He wrote more about hegemony and how the issue is perhaps within the mindset of the proletariat or the working classes themselves because the hegemonic values of the bourgeoisie have been inculcated into the mass consciousness of the proletariat. There needs to be a shift in their way of thinking and way of viewing the world.
It sounds to me like you would still view that argument as being extremely pertinent right now, that there still has to be an ideological shift in order for these various climate movements that are so multifaceted, multiracial, and multinational to rise up and form a counter-hegemonic force.
Jason W. Moore
Now, right now, they can’t because they have fetishized nation, they have fetishized race, they have fetishized colonialism. They have fetishized, and therefore, all of these and more. To first lay out all the differences between, if you will, the workers of the world or the world’s semi-proletarians, we have to confront that head-on.
We have to understand that what people are embracing under the sign of decolonize everything and intersectionality is, in fact, a subaltern, if you will, expression of the bourgeois strategy to divide and conquer.
Talia Baroncelli
To break up solidarity, essentially.
Jason W. Moore
Exactly. You want to say, okay, if you’re white, you go over here. If you’re Black, you go over here. If you’re a woman here, a man here, straight here, queer here. All of this is embedded in, say, some of these absurd ideas that circulate within the academy, for instance, of the privilege walk, and of progressive stacking. It is designed to set workers against each other because, of course, there are more of us than there are of them, them being not European white men but the 1%: the owners of capital and the owners and possessors of the means of violence and destruction.
That’s a fairly simple notion, but I would say you invoke Gramsci, and I especially love the historicization of this in 1919 by Gramsci and [Vladimir] Lenin. Let’s remember that Gramsci was a Communist, a class struggle Communist, and a Leninist. What happened in the 1980s and ’90s is all of these professors discovered Gramsci and others that they could turn into professional managerial class toys or puppets, like hand puppets. They could cosplay being revolutionary without having to deal with the excruciating political conjuncture of that moment in 1919, when Lenin, Gramsci, and many others understood the proletarian revolution had been beaten back and defeated in Germany and many other places. Of course, the consequence of that was the rise of [Benito] Mussolini and [Adolf] Hitler.
Talia Baroncelli
Lenin was in prison for many years.
Jason W. Moore
Yes. Of course, Gramsci was put into prison, which is a good reminder: look, if you’re going to organize to take away the wealth and power of the 1%, be ready because they’re not playing around. They’re going to put you in jail. They’re going to kill you. They’re going to send the death squads and the drones. They’re going to dump Agent Orange on you. They’re going to do whatever they need to do to prevent your movement from gaining wealth and from redistributing what is, in the bourgeoisie’s view, their wealth and power. Of course, we understand the sources of all wealth are humans and the rest of nature, as Marx reminds us.
But in 1919, as Gramsci and Lenin were dealing with this problem, Lenin began a famous turn towards national liberation movements. He begins to understand, and this comes together in the famous Baku conference of 1921, that the Archimedean lever of the world-class struggle was in the third world, in the colonial world at the time, in the Global South. This was the Archimedean lever of worldwide class struggle. It wasn’t some simplistic, naive, social democratic workerism. Remember, the Socialists all voted for war in 1914.
We want to understand that history as we look at the present moment and begin to identify a working class as an agent of history that is not the old Eurocentric, economistic, formalist working class. It is what I have argued for: a planetary proletariat, a proletariat, biotariat, and femetariat, unifying paid labor with unpaid work of women, nature, and colonies. Not as a typology, but we are all biotarians now. We are all femetarians. We are all enmeshed in this web of cooperation and proletarian solidarity, at least potentially, but we’ll have to rebuild because the neoliberal ruling classes have really defeated the working classes and also convinced many leftists that they shouldn’t want state power. I see this all the time in the North American Academy. North academics love Indigenous peoples as long as they don’t take power.
Talia Baroncelli
Yeah, just do land acknowledgments, and it is fine.
Jason W. Moore
Yeah, let’s do that, or we could say land acknowledgment and decolonize this. When Evo Morales takes power, they’re like, “Oh, no, we can’t have that.” And what they say is, look, first of all, building socialism is not that easy. And second of all, there’s one group in the world that knows socialism works and that’s the bourgeoisie. They know that socialism works, so they sabotage it, and they impose sanctions. At the heart of it, this goes back to Lenin and Gramsci’s point, at the heart of it, from the standpoint of empire, they don’t care about communism or not. They don’t care what you call your state. What they fear is an independent third world or an independent Global South. That’s why the Americans hated the Soviets. It wasn’t about communism. It was that the Soviets sat on all of that wealth, power, oil, and everything else, and they couldn’t be overthrown until the end of the ’80s when they were overthrown.
Talia Baroncelli
When you speak about the 1% and corporate elite, and if you’re looking at climate movements and young people who are so fed up with power and resources being consolidated in a very specific, narrow corporate class that supports big oil and gas and is also supported by big oil and gas because of all the lobbies, how do you unseat that consolidation of power? Because you could have all the climate movements in the world, but if you have this corporate class that has adopted this form of green capitalism as well as this neoliberal green capitalism of, yeah, we’ll invest in carbon capture and storage and enhance oil recovery to make it look like big oil and gas is cutting emissions and are on the side of the young people. They’re shifting. They have their ecological solutions that aren’t really solutions. I guess there are probably two aspects of that. The language is incredibly important, as you mentioned, but how do we actually unseat those centers of power?
Jason W. Moore
Well, first, we have to have clarity of analysis. What’s often called green capitalism, and your summary is excellent, is, in fact, a post-capitalist strategy for a civilization based on political accumulation. That is one in which there are many of the accoutrements we would associate with capitalism, but it’s fundamentally governed by a political dynamic. I call this the ‘too big to fail dynamic’ out of the phrase that came to fame in the Great Recession, where the big financial institutions were, “Too Big to Fail.” Obama comes in, he bails out the criminal banksters and puts six and a half million people out on the streets. That’s political accumulation. That’s not a very common occurrence in the history of capitalism, but increasingly so because the masters of mankind, to borrow Adam Smith’s phrase, understand that their grasp on wealth and power depends on politics, on controlling the states and controlling the military and repressive apparatus. Also, the surveillance apparatus, which, as we know, is quite advanced in the U.S. with the very, very tight relationships, really enmeshed, interpenetrating relationships between Silicon Valley capital and the national security state. This has all come out with the Twitter Files and many other reports in recent years.
Talia Baroncelli
With police as well, it seems like the police have some money and funds where they can buy all sorts of surveillance tech.
Jason W. Moore
That’s exactly right. We’ve witnessed not only the massive growth of a surveillance economy but also what David Gordon and Sam Bowles once called the garrison economy, the growth of the guards, the prisons, the police, and everything else.
There’s, I think, a lot of… confusion is the nicest way to put it when we come to these climate justice movements. By and large, they refuse to identify capitalism, and they talk about it as if it’s a system of corporate power. No, it’s a system of class power in which the reproduction of ruling class power depends on what? The control over the state. Yes, they have an ideological apparatus. Yes, there are hegemonic and counter-hegemonic struggles. But what happened in the 1980s and ’90s is that academics said, “Well, we’re going to talk about counter-hegemony.” Like that’s all about civil society, forgetting or closing their eyes to the reality.
Civil society was an invention of what was called, in 1968, the Cultural Cold War. This very, very intimate connection between what we now call the non-profit industrial sector and cultural counter-insurgency worldwide. This has given rise more recently to what we call Color Revolutions, where you have CIA cut-outs like the National Endowment for Democracy actively overthrowing, as in Ukraine in 2014, the democratically constituted government. There are many other examples we could provide. But there’s this sense of like, oh, we’re just going to resist, and then somehow the resistance is going to translate into pressure politics that will convince capitalists to give up their wealth and power. This is the Greta Thunberg strategy. And by the way, she’s not new. There’s an exact parallel from 1992, around Rio, with Severn Suzuki, the child of one of Canada’s greatest environmentalists, as I’m sure you know. This is very common. We’re going to talk, we’re going to use all this woke language, but we’re not going to name the centerpieces of the coherent and cohering mechanisms of capitalist class power.
Also, to understand, people are going to say that I’m wrong, but capitalism is dead. Capitalism is in its zombie phase. It’s still moving around. It’s still deadly. But the ways that it has for five centuries overcome its crises no longer exist. Those frontiers of cheap nature are no longer there, but also the frontiers of cheap waste are now gone. What does that mean? Here’s a great example: climate change has already suppressed agricultural productivity. Fully eight years of productivity loss have been recorded. So far, according to the OECD, the 24-member Country Member Club of Rich or Semi-rich Countries, agriculture will absorb half of all the costs of climate change. That’s fundamental because the whole apparatus of capitalism of expelling labor from the countryside rests on agricultural revolutions. Those days are over. Climate-smart agriculture is not going to rescue anything.
Once we begin to develop clarity, then the answer becomes an old-fashioned answer. It’s necessary for the popular forces to seize state power and maintain it at all costs. We know that violence ensues after that, but we also know the violence that ensues from failure. I think of the U.S. interventions, the death squad imperialism in El Salvador in the 1980s, the consequence of the failure or the defeat, rather, of the proletarian forces, the FMLN, in that struggle has led to this dystopian prison industrial hellscape that is El Salvador today. You think that the struggle is indeed worth it. It’s not going to come from just resisting. We saw this with Occupy. You have to have politics.
Talia Baroncelli
What if it’s essentially grassroots? To me, it sounds like you’re saying that these different Indigenous movements, for example, and I think there was something recently in Colombia, even, where they were taking back some of the land and having maybe different councils of how to manage that land. Would you say that that’s not revolutionary enough? Because you’re saying that people need to take [crosstalk 00:21:59]
Jason W. Moore
I would say those are defensive strategies. Defensive strategies, of course, are the order of the day, given still the worldwide political balance of class forces. That’s inevitable. We will have many defensive struggles. They are called resistance struggles. They should be defended. The problem is they don’t meet my criteria for revolutionary action. The criteria is, is this part of a strategy to actually take power and take power away from the bourgeoisie. We know the long and violent history of soft power, hard power, economic hitmen, death squads, and regime change, training the militaries to take power, engage in, and stay in terrorism like the U.S. with contras in Nicaragua. We know what’s coming. This is not going to be a surprise. The ruling class is not going to be somehow convinced.
You mentioned Columbia. Of course, Columbia has long been known as the most dictatorial so-called democracy in the Americas. Twice, FARC has laid down its arms, and twice, what happened? They came back and made them pay for it. I don’t think they’re laying down its arms again. This has to be done in terms of a Gramscian strategy. Gramsci was not like we don’t need to be ready to cede state power; we need to indeed identify, as Marx would say, the rich totality, the rich diversity of struggles, and look for their common threads, and then look for the weak links in the imperialist chains of power. Because, of course, taking state power is not enough.
Look at Venezuela, subject to basically constant sanctions and regime change politics, soft power, color revolution, and mercenaries, undoubtedly financed through the CIA Black Budget coming in. This is the dynamic of our times. I worry that a lot of these resistance struggles… the indigenous peoples in Colombia, they know what this is like. I’m not saying they don’t know what the front lines are, but if you look at what the politics are of social democratic academics and other professionals in the Global North, there is a complete memory holding of all of this history.
Talia Baroncelli
Right.
Jason W. Moore
Including in the United States. It’s absurd in the United States where, I mean, for Christ’s sake, the National Security State killed or had Martin Luther King killed.
Talia Baroncelli
Yeah, of course.
Jason W. Moore
This is not a conspiracy theory. This is like out in a day; this has been reported for three decades, actually, going back to the ’70s. We need to be engaged in defensive struggles. They need to be linked to serious multiracial, anti-imperialist, feminist working-class politics. Otherwise, you end up with a rolling series of resistance movements. You have Occupy here. You have the No D’appel over there. You have all of these isolated struggles that don’t ever congeal into actual politics, or they subordinate themselves to social democratic politics. You know this, as you mentioned, growing up in Toronto. You know this from the New Democratic Party. The New Democratic Party never misses an opportunity to move to the right. This is the case for Social Democrats across the world for the past, well, for the past forever.
Talia Baroncelli
Yeah, that’s also taking place right now in Germany, where the AfD has come to power in certain parts of the country. The Social Democrats started instituting more right-wing policies to try to take back those voters who then went over to the AfD. But it doesn’t work that way. That’s not how you’re going to get people back. You increase your electorate, if you actually have the right left policies that will enable workers to have some better standard of living, rights, and to redistribute resources, and not just, oh, we’re going to have anti-migrant policies.
Jason W. Moore
The liberal diagnosis of the problem is white supremacy.
Talia Baroncelli
Right.
Jason W. Moore
That is, for one thing, wrong. Yes, white supremacy is a result of the process, but this is part of the general realignment of social democratic parties, as people like Elizabeth Humphreys have detailed around the neoliberal agenda. Of course, this should not surprise us that Social Democrats, almost without exception, and there are one or two exceptions, move to the right. They cooperate with the deep state. Social Democrats hate the left. They hate the left more than they hate the right. What they want to do is either move right, like you’re saying with the AfD, and this is all across Europe; as you know, the rise of the populist right is channeling working-class outrage at the social democratic and centrist liberal Christian democratic model.
Working class people should be outraged. It’s a failure of the left. It’s a failure of the academic cultures which embraced anything but class leftism, ABC leftism, and refused to keep their hands on the tiller and steer towards the North Star around working class revolution and the expansion of democracy and of working class power. Socialism is not more power for the professional-managerial class. Socialism is more power for the working class.
Talia Baroncelli
Right. Having this totalizing view of everything as just being a product of white supremacy, in a way, reinforces those racialized structures and white supremacy because it doesn’t present a threat to the classes that control the modes of production and that are the consolidated bourgeois or rich elite.
Jason W. Moore
Yes.
Talia Baroncelli
If you just focus on that aspect, which is a result and maybe not the driving factor, then you don’t get any real shift in the material conditions or in redistribution of power, any universal working class struggle, which would actually in turn, contribute to the livelihoods of racialized and marginalized people. The outcome of that lens or of that way of understanding the world, in a way, it just reinforces it. It doesn’t lead to any change.
Jason W. Moore
It absolutely reinforces it. We see this around the critique of settler colonialism. What’s the politics of settler colonialism? It’s supposedly ethnic cleansing. The inverse of it is inverted ethnic cleansing. That’s not what we need. We don’t need more nations. We need the proletariat to run the affairs of the planet and to proceed to abolish class distinctions.
Around this question of race and racial capitalism, much of the current vogue is a rejection of the Communist parties; I think in the U.S., the Communist Party USA’s position on multiracial working-class unity, pioneered by people like W. E. B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones, and many others in this period. I’ve written a little bit about this. I urge people to go back and consider the multiracial, anti-imperialist, feminist proletarian strategy, all of which sounds very old-fashioned. It sounds old-fashioned because the neoliberal ideological offensive has memory-holed and destroyed our capacity to remember these traditions. It’s deracinated us, uprooted us from traditions of communists and socialist struggle. Whether we agree with those traditions or not, or we want to advance them, renew them, or be creative around them, we need to remember what they were in order to do that, not simply reinvent woke wheels.
Talia Baroncelli
Right. Just one final thing. I don’t know if we’ll have much time to get into this, but if you look at the legal apparatus that’s in place after the First World War and the Second World War, you have the right to self-determination. It’s all this rights framework that is based around the nation state. That in itself is not going to cut it because if you look at, for example, the right to self-determination of Palestinians, I don’t see how having a two-state solution, for example, is all of a sudden going to address all of the issues because ultimately there is a class factor.
As you were talking about the various capitalist ways of cheapening nature and cheapening humans and pulling people into this system which cheapens them, that’s not going to be addressed if you have rights that align with the interests of nation-states and the interests of nation-states also serve the interests of the neoliberal class. I guess we need to get somewhere, and there has to be some sovereignty for the Palestinians, for example. But seeing it as an issue of statehood is, in my view, poorly wrong.
Jason W. Moore
Well, and there’s a profound naiveté around national self-determination. As the Russians discovered in 1917, simply hoisting the red flag or whatever flag of color you choose does not make you independent. The imperialist countries do not want independence. This was what America had to wrestle with as the world’s hegemonic power after World War II: how to control and dominate a world without a formal colonial structure. They were wrestling with this all the way through. Basically, you could go along with the Americans, or you would be subjected to, well, say, the experience of Vietnam. That’s something that I think has not been properly digested. There is this long history of what it takes to win self-determination, never mind building socialism.
Many of these radlib academics go out and say, “Well, socialism failed. It didn’t do this. It didn’t do that.” It’s like, well, according to whom? I mean, according to those who benefited from the defeat of Nazism, maybe socialism succeeded. Maybe that was what socialism in the 20th century was about. Maybe it was about opening space for third-world movements. Do we think for a minute that Libya went from the most secular and prosperous country in Africa to a country where there are open slave markets on the streets of Bengasi? Do we think that Libya, for a moment, would have been destabilized if the Soviet Union was still around? There’s that naivete that comes from memory-holing history. I called this in one recent essay, The Flight From History. This is what pretty much defines most of this radlib, radical posturing, decolonial set of arguments in the world, and it crucially undermines our capacity to forge the worldwide proletarian solidarity necessary to begin to push at the imperial structures that hold the climate, the capitalogenic climate machine together.
I’ve said this many times. If we want to do something concrete, let’s demand that all of the European armies withdraw from the rest of the world, the American armies. Get the French out of Africa. Get the U.S. out of Africa. Shut down the bases, 700 plus bases, and three new bases in the Philippines to face off against the Chinese now. These are the real coercive instruments of political power. They’re not going to go away because people occupy a town square. Now, occupying a town square may be necessary as part of the struggle. Don’t get me wrong, but it’s not like Congress is going to convene and say, “Let’s shut down the bases.”
Talia Baroncelli
Well, I think next time we talk, it would be good to do an episode on the various strategies and also real existing socialism. The different experiences of the Soviet Union, for example, and whether this Vanguard strategy that’s driven by a specific party is the way to go or if there could have been correctors to that. That’s a whole other debate, which we could get into next time, and there’s a lot of scholarship on that.
Jason W. Moore, it’s been really great to speak to you.
Jason W. Moore
Absolutely.
Talia Baroncelli
Thanks so much for your time. Let’s talk again soon.
Jason W. Moore
Talia, it has been a pleasure. Thank you for such a lively conversation. For those who are interested in anything that I’ve just said, you can go to my website, jasonwmoore.com.
Talia Baroncelli
Thank you for watching theAnalysis.news. If you’d like to support us, you can go to our website, theAnalysis.news. Hit the donate button at the top right corner of the screen and get on to our mailing list. See you next time.
Jason Moore is an environmental historian and historical geographer at Binghamton University, where he is a professor of sociology and leads the World-Ecology Research Collective. He is the author or editor, most recently, of Capitalism in the Web of Life, Capitalocene or Anthropocene?, Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, and, with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. His books and essays on environmental history, capitalism, and social theory have been widely recognized, including the Alice Hamilton Prize of the American Society for Environmental History (2003), the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the Section on the Political Economy of the World-System (American Sociological Association, 2002 for articles, and 2015 for Web of Life), and the Byres and Bernstein Prize in Agrarian Change (2011). He coordinates the World-Ecology Research Network.