“Democratic” Means Social Equality

BY THOMAS MOUNTAIN

Pundits in the international media and political classes twist an distort the word “democratic” until it has no resemblance to the actual meaning of the word. Start with “democracy” from which “democratic” is born. “Government by the people exercised either directly…? or by elected representatives” and later “the principles of social equality and individual rights”.

“Democratic; of, characterized by, or advocating democracy” and later “believing in or practicing social equality”.

Are all these countries who call themselves “democratic” practicing “the principles of social equality…”? As the 1%, the super rich, continue to grow richer while most of their people see their lives growing harder by the day can you call this “democracy”, “believing in or practicing social equality”? Hell no!

Democracy doesn’t mean you have to have elections? No, a country can be democratic without having elections. But can a society be “democratic” and yet completely abandon any pretense of “believing in or practicing social equality”? Of course not.

Those that comprise the National Security Establishments (NSE) in almost all the countries around the world, whether they be politicians, intelligence services/law enforcement, media or the wealthy have bastardized the word “democratic” to the point where it no longer resembles its real meaning.

“Democratic” means social equality, or working towards that end so the USA and Europe are clearly not democratic. Yet Cuba is democratic, with a democracy based on a government by the people exercised directly, even without the need for elections. The fact that Cuba practices social equality is key. Social equality and no golden rule demanding elections is democracy, democratic.

Yet the NSE’s in the imperial enclaves insist that elections be foremost in all countries political development. Never mind these elections have nothing to do with social equality, just the opposite. It’s all about looting and plundering the nations people in their name on behalf of the 1%er’s.

A social equality based international democratic system is desperately needed on this planet. What else can protect the worlds peoples from the impending crimate disaster of which we are just beginning to see and feel the warning signs?

Greed and excessive accumulation is driving this approaching climate disaster and only a socially cooperative society can prepare and hopefully prevent major social chaos and suffering. If a people, or peoples, can work in common for the common good there is still a chance for humanity. Learning from societies that today practice real social equality is a start.

Thomas C. Mountain attended Punahou School for six years some half a dozen years before “Barry O’Bombers” time there. He has been living and writing from Eritrea since 2006. He can be reached at thomascmountain at g_ mail_ dot _com

TRANSMITTING REVOLUTION: RADIO, RUMOR, AND THE 1953 EAST GERMAN UPRISING

Michael Palmer Pulido

Marquette University, 2017

This project examines public opinion in the Dresden Region of the German

Democratic Republic from the end of World War II through the summer of 1953. I argue

that the Socialist Unity Party (SED) projected its legitimacy through an official public

sphere by representing publicness to its citizenry. Through banners, the press, and

choreographed public demonstrations, it aimed to create the appearance of popular

support. Even more significantly, the SED used radio to ground its legitimacy in a

burgeoning post-war internationalism that bound residents of the GDR in an imagined

community of socialist nations under Stalin’s leadership.

At the same time, the regime’s opponents challenged its legitimacy and credibility

through a rival public sphere. In this space, foreign broadcasters, especially Radio in the

American Sector (RIAS), chipped away at the regime’s credibility and prestige while

improvised news and rumor undermined the Party’s state building efforts.

Tensions boiled over in the summer of 1953 when RIAS and rumor helped make

revolution thinkable. On the seventeenth of June, East Germans took to the streets in

hundreds of cities and protested the government. RIAS endowed the occasion with

national imaginings before and after East German police and Soviet forces ended the

protestors’ hopes for change. 

https://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1711&context=dissertations_mu

http://resolutereader.blogspot.com/2019/11/chris-harman-class-struggles-in-eastern.html

 Restarting Socialism: The New Beginning Group and the Problem of Renewal on the German Left, 1930-1970

by Terence Ray Renaud

Doctor of Philosophy in History and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Martin E. Jay, Chair

https://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/etd/ucb/text/Renaud_berkeley_0028E_15190.pdf

This dissertation concerns the problem of renewal on the German Left. How did crises of

renewal and moments of generational conflict shape the theory and organization of

German socialism during the tumultuous four decades between 1930 and 1970? When

and how did socialism cease to be a viable political alternative to democratic capitalism?

I treat the history of one small organization, New Beginning, as paradigmatic for the

experience of the socialist renewers generation—the generation that renewed socialism

through antifascist struggle and remade the German Left after the war.

Born between 1905 and 1915, the renewers were too young to have served in the First

World War or actively participated in the November Revolution. They matured amid the

political and economic turmoil of the Weimar Republic and later pioneered the formation

of “socialist splinter groups.” Between the fronts of social democracy and communism,

these small organizations like New Beginning, the Socialist Workers’ Party (SAP), the

International Socialist Fighting League (ISK), and the Communist Party-Opposition

(KPO) sought to unify and renew the German socialist movement through a curious

combination of elite vanguardism and grassroots initiative. They believed that the fight

against fascism provided socialists a unique opportunity to finish the democratic

revolution that had begun as early as 1848, leapt forward in 1918-19, but stalled during

the conservative Weimar Republic. New Beginning distinguished itself from the other

splinter groups in the way it explicitly articulated the problem of socialist renewal and

linked the fate of socialism to the fate of its own generation.

After twelve years of anti-Nazi resistance and war, former members of New Beginning

such as Fritz Erler, Waldemar von Knoeringen, Richard Löwenthal, Wolfgang Abendroth,

Ossip K. Flechtheim, and Robert Havemann either arose from the rubble or returned from

exile to acquire leading posts in German academia and politics. They set about applying

the theories and methods they had learned during the 1930s to the new problems of

reconstruction, divided Germany, and the developing Cold War. The majority of the

renewers generation helped modernize the Social Democratic Party and develop a new

kind of socialism that renounced Marxism and embraced a liberal, middle-class ethos. An 

2

important minority of renewers, however, stayed true to the promise of radical socialism.

These dissident left socialists paved the way toward a New Left, and in the 1960s the

original revolutionary élan of the renewers passed on to a new generation of militant

young intellectuals: the Sixty-eighters.

Political ideologies as well as mass social movements grow old. Their proponents and

participants physically age, and their ideas start to rust. Revival and rejuvenation, then,

periodically capture the attention and shape the objectives of multi-generational social

movements. The former members of New Beginning were keenly aware of how the

problem of renewal could cause dysfunction in the established parties of the Left. But

they also recognized an opportunity to mobilize the German youth against capitalism and

conservative reaction. Instead of restarting socialism, however, the New Left and the

Sixty-eighters unwittingly extinguished the original promise of German socialism and the

renewers generation. Subsequent movements for social change in Germany and

elsewhere in Europe would occur largely outside the socialist tradition.

Literary Skinheads? Writing from the Right in Reunified Germany

 JAY JULIAN ROSELLINI

https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1021&context=purduepress_ebooks

 Contents

PREFACE // ix

Thinking about contemporary Germany against the backdrop of cultural history.

CHAPTER 1 // 3

Predecessors and Predilections: A Problematic Legacy

Novalis and Political Romanticism. Nietzsche and the elitist as outsider. Stefan George’s

project of cultural renewal. Thomas Mann’s re¶ections on politics and culture. Hugo

von Hofmannsthal on literature and national identity. The antidemocratic warrior

Ernst Jünger. Gottfried Benn’s ill-fated ¶irtation with National Socialism.

CHAPTER 2 // 27

Long Forgotten, Now Feisty: Reuni¤cation and

the Right’s Quest for Respectability

Views of the literary right in the postwar period. Christian von Krockow on Jünger,

Schmitt, and Heidegger, Armin Mohler on the Conservative Revolution, HansPeter Schwarz on Jünger. East meet West on the right—the collaboration of Ulrich

Schacht and Heimo Schwilk. Attempts to in¶uence public opinion ¤fty years after

the German capitulation. Early writings by Schacht and Schwilk. The volume Die

selbstbewußte Nation as the manifesto of the intellectual New Right. An attempt to

reorient post-Wall Germany: For a Berlin Republic by Schacht and Schwilk.

CHAPTER 3 // 79

An Unexpected Detour on the Way to the Pantheon:

Strauß, Handke, and the Vagaries of High Culture in Germany

The “Literature Debate” and littérature engagée. Botho Strauß, his 1993 essay “Impending Tragedy” (Anschwellender Bocksgesang) and the mass media as arena.

Comparisons with Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Martin Walser. Peter Handke,

the poet’s perspective and the Bosnian con¶ict. Critical reactions to Strauß and

Handke. Royal reveries, political critique, and utopia on stage: Strauß’s Ithaka and

Handke’s Preparations for Immortality (Zurüstungen für die Unsterblichkeit). The

battle in the media, part two. Recent works by Strauß and Handke. The prospects

of a new generation of conservative writers.

Smplefrt.fm Page vii Friday, August 25, 2000 1:11 PM

EXCURSUS // 137

Attacks on Americanization and Westernization and

One Problematic Line of Defense

German/American culture. European intellectuals and America. German analyses

of anti-Americanism. Herzinger/Stein and one way to defend liberalism. Rightist

anti-Americanism: one characteristic example. Questioning reeducation and the

American model. Resisting cultural and linguistic in¤ltration, homogenization, and

mediocrity. Liberalism as old and new enemy. Heimo Schwilk, the Gulf War, and

dreams of German resurgence.

CONCLUSIONS AND PROSPECTS // 155

The Conservative Revolution: Reassessment and warnings. German developments

in European context. The former GDR as present staging area and possible longterm home of the New Right. Esthetics, ethics, and politics. Literature and democracy. From intellectual discourse to political platform. From literature to political

polemic. De¤ning left and right: beyond dichotomies? Ernst Jünger: end point or

inspiration? Germany, Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the future.

EPILOGUE // 173

Schröder, Walser, Bubis, and the Ongoing German Quest for Normalcy

The 1998 German elections and the generational shift. New manifestations of xenophobia. Martin Walser, Ignatz Bubis, and German-Jewish dialogue. Handke’s

crusade against the West. German troops in Kosovo and images of the past. The

Holocaust memorial and the new citizenship law.

NOTES // 195

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY // 271

INDEX // 29

Introduction: politics in black and red: 20th century libertarian socialism

November 2012

Project: The intersections between anarchisms and marxisms
Authors:

Ruth Kinna
Loughborough University


Alex Prichard
University of Exeter


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Abstract
The history of the left is usually told as one of factionalism and division. This collection of essays casts new light on this history showing in more detail how the boundaries between marxism and anarchism have been more porous and more productive than is conventionally recognized. Bringing together original and ground-breaking pieces on some of the best and least known actors in twentieth-century socialism, this book promises to break new ground by providing a fresh outlook on left wing synthesis in the twenty-first Century. The political and social thought of Gramsci, Sorel, and the Trinidadian, C. L. R. James, amongst others, are discussed alongside key movements in 20th century socialism including the Situationist International, Socialisme ou Barbarie and lesser known council communists, carnival anarchists and anarchic currents in the American civil rights movement. This is a must read for students and scholars interested in the development of socialist ideologies.

 On the Reproduction of Capitalism

Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses 

LOUIS ALTHUSSER 

PREFACE BY ETIENNE BALIBAR

 INTRODUCTION BY JACQUES BIDET

 TRANSLATED BY G. M. GOSHGARIAN

https://legalform.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/althusser-on-the-reproduction-of-capitalism.pdf

Contents

Foreword: Althusser and the 'Ideological

State Apparatuses' by Etienne Bali bar

Introduction: An Invitation to Reread Althusser

by Jacques Bidet

Editorial Sote by Jacques Bidet

Translator's Note by G. A1. Goshgarian

To  Readers

1. What Is Philosophy?

2. What Is a Mode of Production?

3. The Reproduction of the Conditions of Production

4. Base and Superstructure

5. Law

6. The State

7. Brief Remarks on the Political and Associative

Ideological State Apparatuses of the French

Capitalist Social Formation

8. The Political and Associative Ideological

State Apparatuses

9. The Reproduction of the Relations of Production

10. The Reproduction of the Relations of

Production and Revolution

11. Further Remarks on Law and Its Reality,

the Legal Ideological State Apparatus

12. On Ideology

VI Contents

Appendix 1: On the Primacy of the Relations

of Production over the Productive Forces

Note on the ISAs

Appendix 2: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

Index 

BANDIERA ROSSA COMMUNISTS IN OCCUPIED ROME, 1943–44

 DAVID BRODER 

http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3688/1/Broder__bandiera-rosa.pdf

Abstract

This study is a social history of communists in wartime Rome. It examines

a decisive change in Italian communist politics, as the Partito Comunista

Italiano (PCI) rose from a hounded fraternity of prisoners and exiles to a

party of government. Joining with other Resistance forces in the Comitato

di Liberazione Nazionale (CLN), this ‘new party’ recast itself as a mass,

patriotic force, committed to building a new democracy. This study

explains how such a party came into being. It argues that a PCI machine

could establish itself only by subduing other strands of communist

thought and organistion that had emerged independently of exiled Party

leaders. This was particularly true in Rome, where dissident communists

created the largest single Resistance formation, the Movimento Comunista

d’Italia (MCd’I). This movement was the product of the underground that

survived across the Mussolini period, expressing a ‘subversive’ politics

that took on a popular following through the disintegration of the Fascist

regime. Standing outside the CLN alliance and the postwar democratic

governments, it reflected the maximalism and eclecticism of a communist

milieu that had persisted on the margins of Fascist society. In the

Occupation period this dissident movement galvanised a social revolt in

the borgate slums, which would also trouble the new authorities even after

the Allies’ arrival. Studying the political writing of these dissidents, their

autodidact Marxism and the social conditions in which it emerged, this

study reconstructs a far-reaching battle to redefine communist politics.

Highlighting the erasure of the dissidents’ history in mainstream narration

of the Resistance, it argues that the repressed radicalism of this period

represented a lasting danger to the postwar PCI and the new Republic.


Table of contents

Preface

Chapter One

What remembrance forgets

1.1 Myths and martyrs

1.2 The PCI’s partisan legends

1.3 From underground to dissent

Chapter Two

‘You just wait till Stalin gets here…’

2.1. The writing on the wall

2.2. The long journey through Fascism

2.3. Scintilla

2.4. The British ‘bulldog’ spurned

2.5. ‘From the clandestine grouplet to mass work’

2.6. From Mussolini to Stalin

Chapter Three

Out of clandestinity – and back again

3.1. 19 July 1943: The war comes home

3.2. The overthrow of Mussolini

3.3. The PCI in Rome after 25 July

3.4. The foundation of the MCd’I

3.5. The united front

3.6. 8 September: the chaotic collapse

3.7. Toward a single communist movement?

Chapter Four

The borgate rise

4.1. A ‘Red Belt’

4.2. Motors to Resistance

4.3. The MCd’I in Rome and beyond

4.4. The ‘Banda Rossi’

4.5. Political directives

4.6. 7 November

Chapter Five

The Allies’ approach

5.1. Insurrectionary plans

5.2. Military contacts and POWs

5.3. Allied anti-communism

5.4. The CLN crisis

5.5. The ‘Committee of Public Safety’

Chapter Six

The forces of repression

6.1. The arsenal of repression

6.2. Raids and deportations

6.3. Via Rasella and the Fosse Ardeatine

6.4. A retreat

Chapter Seven

A Soviet foreign-policy move

7.1. The turn before Salerno

7.2. Togliatti’s return

7.3. A narrative of betrayal

7.4. Tito’s alternative

7.5. Doppiezza and Soviet foreign policy

Chapter Eight

The missing insurrection

8.1. A peaceful takeover

8.2 The moment of liberation

8.2. Open organisation

8.4. The ‘Red Army’

8.5. From Resistance to insurrection

Chapter Nine

The constitutional arch

9.1. The anger of crowds

9.2. Holdout partisans

9.3. Criminalisation

9.4. Unity projects

9.5. L’Idea Comunista

9.6. A Cold War Republic

Chapter Ten

The ‘Red Resistance’ and its myths

10.1. The ora X of insurrection

10.2. The new anti-fascism

10.3. The Years of Lead

10.4. The passing of an illusion


Preface

This study is a social history of communists in wartime Rome. It centres on the

period between the Wehrmacht invasion on 8 September 1943 and the Allies’

arrival in the capital on 4 June 1944. These nine months were a decisive turning

point in the development of Italian communism, as the Partito Comunista Italiano

(PCI), rose from a hounded fraternity of prisoners and exiles to a party of

government. The partito nuovo created through the Resistance was quite unlike

the Communist Party that had succumbed to Fascism two decades earlier.

Joining with other Resistance forces in the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale (CLN),

Palmiro Togliatti’s party cast itself as a mass, patriotic force, committed to

building a new democracy. So, too, was the PCI’s social profile radically altered,

as young Italians without past communist affiliation now flooded into its ranks.

This study focuses on the other side of the partito nuovo’s formation: the communists

who rejected Togliatti’s approach. For the PCI’s party machine to take form, its

cadres had to impose their leadership over a series of communist movements that

had emerged outside of their control. This was particularly true in the Italian capital,

where dissident communists created the largest single Resistance formation. Their

Movimento Comunista d’Italia (MCd’I) was the product of the underground that

survived across the Fascist period. Standing outside of the CLN alliance, it expressed

the maximalism and eclecticism of a subversive milieu that had long been detached

from Party leaders. In the Occupation period and after it galvanised an unruly social

revolt in the borgate slums, a proletarian rebellion that clashed with the PCI’s politics

of ‘national unity’.

Central to our research is the autodidact Marxism that flowered within this milieu,

expressed in papers and pamphlets, bulletins and handwritten polemics. A militant

minority used this worker-writing to endow its activity with a grand historic mission

and a global perspective, even despite its long isolation from the international Left.

This thinking drew on earlier Italian communist politics as well as a subculture that

had evolved across the Fascist period. As this study shows, these militants’ texts

often bore the mark of the conditions of repression in which they were produced. Yet

this autodidacticism also stood in defiance of the political illiteracy that Fascism had

sought to create. It embodied workers’ and artisans’ attempt to free themselves from\

 the condition of those consigned only to follow leaders and execute commands.

These Roman militants’ pursuit of a class-war and revolutionary agenda set them

in sometimes sharp opposition to other anti-fascists. In the Occupation period the

demands of self-preservation compelled a degree of cooperation among all

clandestine militants, whether resisting Nazi raids or sheltering the endangered.

Yet in rejecting the idea of a common national interest, the dissident-communists

strongly opposed both the CLN alliance and the democratic governments that

followed.1 After Liberation they like other dissident partisans continued to build

their armed bands, waging expropriations and blackmail, occupying public

buildings and even extorting Allied supplies. As Nazi-Fascist2 tyranny gave way

to a new government of ‘national unity’, this intransigence drew these militants

into open conflict with the new authorities.

The Roman dissident movement did not create any lasting political force.

Paralysed by Nazi repression and criminalised under the Allies, it represented a

Resistance that did not shape the new Republic. Yet even in defeat, its militants

left an enduring legacy. The repression of partisan radicalism and a botched

defascistisation process left behind bitter weeds of disappointed hope;

‘unfinished business’ that repeatedly returned to the centre of Italian public life.

Making their own turn to the underground, new generations of armed militants

continued to destabilise the Republic into the 1970s. A study of this history thus

sheds light on the tensions at the origin of the postwar PCI and the Republic

itself. It highlights the subversive culture that developed across the Fascist era

and then re-emerged in the war period and beyond.

Each chapter of our study focuses on this fight to shape the Italian communist

movement as it emerged from two decades of repression:

Chapter One frames this study historically, explaining the blinkers that both

official Resistance remembrance and PCI self-mythology have placed on existing

1 ‘Antifascismo’, Disposizioni Rivoluzionarie, 5, 30.4.1944.

2 Nazifascismo, the common Italian term for the overlapping rule of Benito Mussolini’s

Fascist régime (the formally independent Repubblica Sociale Italiano, widely called the Salò

Republic in reference to its de facto capital) and Adolf Hitler’s control of the country,

occupied by Nazi Germany from 8 September 1943 onward.

understandings of wartime communism. It outlines a research perspective

focused on worker-militants’ own strategies for transforming Italian society, and

not just the decisions of professional politicians. It emphasises the generational

divide between the traditions inherited from earlier working-class radicalism,

and the new model of Party organisation forged in the interwar Comintern.

Chapter Two examines the culture of the Roman communist underground in the

early phases of the Second World War. It highlights the culture clash between the

intellectual fellow-travellers drawn into the orbit of Togliatti’s party during the

Popular Front era, and the proletarian underground that had survived across

Fascism. This chapter highlights the effects of the Fascist experience on this

clandestine milieu, including the spread of a millenarian cult of Stalin, outside of

and in tendency opposed to the PCI’s new strategy.

The clashes among the Roman communists become more sharply defined in

Chapter Three, which spans the 45 Days between the palace coup against

Mussolini and the German invasion. The liberalisation period following Marshal

Badoglio’s appointment allowed the formation of the political movements that

would go on to shape the Resistance. This chapter explains how the PCI’s

‘national unity’ policy hardened it against the dissident MCd’I.

The German invasion marked the beginning of a harsh Occupation regime, and

Chapter Four turns our focus to the social conditions in which armed bands now

emerged. Exploring the differences between the slum proletariat in Rome’s

peripheral borgate and the industrial working class of the North, we explain how

their respective forms of mobilisation related to communists’ differing

conceptions of ‘class struggle’. This focus on the particular forms of social revolt

on Rome’s periphery allows us to explain the relative strength of the dissident

communists in these areas compared to all other Resistance forces.

Chapter Five takes on a more international dimension, with the Anglo-Americans’

January 1944 arrival at Anzio, 35 miles south of the capital. For many anti-fascists

these landings offered hope that Liberation was close at hand. This chapter explains

how this prospect drove tensions within the anti-fascist coalition, as the parties

advanced their rival visions of the next government. This is also informed

by a study of the Allies’ efforts to impose order on the democratisation process in

the ‘laboratory’ of the liberated South.

Chapter Six focuses on the effect of repression on the Roman Resistance,

focusing on the counter-insurgency that struck in February-March 1944 as the

Allies’ march toward the city was halted. In particular, it highlights the contested

place of terrorist tactics in communist strategy, and the increased opposition to

their use in the face of devastating Nazi reprisals. It argues that this wave of

repression succeeded in demobilising the Roman Resistance.

Chapter Seven revolves around Togliatti’s ‘Salerno Turn’, as he led his party and

its allies into government. It argues that the Turn embodied the overlapping of

the PCI’s new democratic approach with its ongoing Soviet inspiration, allowing

the Party to unite widely varying political sensibilities. It highlights how

communists both within and outside the Party sought to reconcile Moscow’s

diplomatic moves with their understanding of their own strategic possibilities.

The controversy over the ‘Salerno Turn’ again poses the question of what

potential communists really had to transform an Italy liberated thanks to AngloAmerican invasion, and Chapter Eight explains why Rome did not see a popular

insurrection upon the Allies’ arrival. It explains that the weakness of Resistance

movements in the capital was compounded by the new institutional deal and the

Allies’ own efforts to prevent social unrest.

Chapter Nine proceeds into the post-Liberation period, with the disarming of the

partisans and the formation of Ivanoe Bonomi’s Allied-backed ‘government of

national unity’. It highlights the tensions between the CLN parties in

government, the state machine inherited from Fascism, and the armed bands

continuing to operate on the Roman city periphery. This allows us to see how a

new Republic built itself on the pacification of social unrest.

Finally, the concluding Chapter Ten explores the echoes of the so-called ‘Red

Resistance’ in the culture of the postwar Italian Left. Tracing the continual

remergence of militant anti-fascism and the politics of insurrection, it points to

the disappointed hopes of the Resistance period that continued to fuel political

violence. It thus presents repressed partisan radicalism as an enduring factor for

instability in Togliatti’s new party, as in the new Republic.

This study begins, however, by examining the role of Resistance commemoration

in Italian public life

The Police System That Terrorizes the Poor and Minorities Is Rooted in the Colonial Past

BY JUSTIN PODUR

 OCTOBER 23, 2020

The Minneapolis City Council’s attempt to defund police may have fizzled out for the moment, but the problem of police violence across the United States is unresolved—and much of it stems from the institution’s colonial, counterinsurgency roots.

Here are seven counterinsurgency features of policing and the inequities in the criminal justice system.

1. Counterinsurgency Tactics Are Everywhere.

In the Canadian province of Ontario, when the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) changed its public transportation fare collection method from tokens to the Presto card, users had a strange experience. Sure, the fare booth was predictably replaced by an inhuman and unforgiving terminal that malfunctions all the time (despite the steep price the province had paid for it). But instead of having less human interaction, TTC passengers found they had more—with fare inspectors who corral passengers into small spaces at stations to test everyone’s cards. In counterinsurgency terms, this is called a cordon-and-search operation.

Another counterinsurgency concept, that of “hearts and minds,” can be seen in a public information campaign to shame fare evasionthrough posters blanketing subway walls and the sides of buses. Riders were infuriated—not just by the campaign itself but also by abusesand racial discrimination by the fare inspectors. Unsurprisingly, spoofs of the TTC’s messaging followed, as they did in New York City in resistance to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s fare evasion messaging.

There is nothing special about Toronto, New York City, or other transit systems that increasingly use these warlike techniques to police customers; what’s happening with the TTC and MTA is a relatively mild example of what happens when counterinsurgency methods are the first resort for any urban problem that arises.

2. Police Don’t Live in the Communities They Police.

Colonial forces are imposed from outside; this prevents too much natural solidarity between the occupier and the occupied. In the United States, the majority of police don’t live in the communities they serve. One Newark officer from the Fraternal Order of Police put it succinctly: “the community hates the police. And you want to put us right in the middle of that with our families?”

The polling is consistent with the idea that one group of people is policing another. A July 2020 Gallup survey showed that 70 percent of Black Americans support reducing police budgets, while only 41 percent of white Americans do. Out-and-out defunding is more commonly supported by Black Americans (according to FiveThirtyEight’s average of two polls, 45 percent of Black Americans polled support defunding, with 28 percent opposed) and opposed by white Americans (with 61 percent of white Americans opposed to defunding and only 23 percent in support of defunding). The difference in public opinion reflects one group benefiting from police security and another suffering from police violence and surveillance.

As Richard Rothstein showed in his book The Color of Law, the racial segregation of U.S. cities was brought about by methodical legal means, racially explicit zoning, and the destruction of integrated neighborhoods. This segregation, too, has consequences for the police-counterinsurgency alignment.

In author James Ron’s book Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel, he compared the methods of state violence used in a “ghetto,” where a hostile population is meant to be contained by powerful state control but where law and morality still limit its enforcement due to the nature of oppressor and oppressed living side-by-side; and on a “frontier,” where even more devastating warfare is unleashed since state power is more tenuous on targeted populations who don’t live among their oppressors, but the bounds of law and morality are weaker.

In the United States, this theory also has applied throughout its history: domestic ghettos are policed, and frontiers are the sites of total war both at home and abroad. But the more police think of cities as the “frontier,” the more violence they will commit against the policed.

3. Police Get Specialized Counterinsurgency Training.

Police officers are encouraged to take weekend courses in a field called “killology,” developed by retired Army Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman. There, they learn to see themselves as “front-line troops” in a war, presumably on the civilians they are policing.

A critic of killology courses, Seth Stoughton, says they steep police in the worldview that “the officer is the hero, the warrior, the noble figure who steps into dark situations where others fear to tread and brings order to a chaotic world, and who does so by imposing their will on the civilians they deal with.” Another critic, Craig Atkinson, calls the courses “fear porn.” One such training, “The Bulletproof Warrior,” was taken by Philando Castile’s killer.

4. In a Counterinsurgency, Everyone’s a Criminal.

According to defenders of law enforcement, the thinking is: If you don’t want to be policed, don’t commit crimes, right? But the law creates the criminal.

And the number of laws for police to identify those criminals is growing suspiciously. American University professor Emilio Viano notes, quoting the conservative think tank the American Heritage Foundation, that “the ‘number of criminal offenses in the United States Code increased from 3,000 in the early 1980s to 4,000 by 2000 to over 4,450 by 2008.’ From 2000 to 2007 Congress added 56.5 new crimes every year.” The staggering number of laws is incongruous to American society’s actual concerns, as is evidenced by attorney Harvey Silverglate’s book arguing that the average American commits “three felonies a day.”

In this system, the full weight of the law is available to bring down upon anyone at any time.

And once it is brought down on you, you have no meaningful right to a trial.

5. There’s No Right to a Trial in a Counterinsurgency.

In TV cop shows, the police are constrained by clever lawyers and fair-minded judges in the courtroom—but in reality, cases almost never go to trial. As Professor Viano writes:

“In fiscal year 2010, the prevalent mode of conviction in U.S. District Courts of all crimes was by plea of guilty (96.8% of all cases). The percentage ranges from a relative low of 68.2% for murder to a high of 100% for cases of burglary, breaking and entering. With the exception of sex abuse (87.5%), arson (86.7%), civil rights (83.6%) and murder (68.2%), for all other crimes the rate of convictions by plea of guilty is well over 90%. In the… [2012] U.S. Supreme Court decision, Missouri v. Frye, Justice Kennedy, writing the majority opinion, pointed out the statistics that 97% of federal convictions and 94% of state convictions are the result of guilty pleas.”

The fact that 90 percent of cases don’t go to trial is the outcome of two Supreme Court rulings described by Michelle Alexander in a 2012 op-ed in the New York Times:

“The Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that threatening someone with life imprisonment for a minor crime in an effort to induce him to forfeit a jury trial did not violate his Sixth Amendment right to trial. Thirteen years later, in Harmelin v. Michigan, the court ruled that life imprisonment for a first-time drug offense did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.”

Regardless of the innocence of the offender or the senseless overzealousness of law writing and enforcement, it is standard operating procedure that the accused do not get their day in court. Instead, prosecutors threaten the accused with shocking sentences, and have them plead guilty to something less to get them into the life-ruining prison system.

Alexander noted that the criminal justice system is unequipped for any other way: “If everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised his constitutional rights, there would not be enough judges, lawyers or prison cells to deal with the ensuing tsunami of litigation.” The author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness also argued in the New York Times op-ed that “crash[ing] the system just by exercising our rights” could comprise a strategy to combatting the inequities and flaws in the criminal justice system. Blogger Arthur Silber agreed that this strategy could work if done en masse, noting, “[n]othing short of mass non-cooperation has a chance in hell.”

But the price of seeking one’s right to trial is prohibitive. Julian Assange is being publicly tortured right now mainly for doing journalism, but partly also for insisting on his rights to a trial. And Aaron Swartz was hounded to death, driven to suicide by a prosecutor applying the standard operating procedure by threatening Swartz with a 35-year sentence for trying to make scientific publications available to those outside of university paywalls.

In cases relating to the drug war, the goal of police and prosecutors is also to get the accused to turn on one another: in exchange for more lenient punishments, suspects are made to become informants against others—another key element of counterinsurgency and its slow destruction of solidarity in the criminalized, targeted society.

6. U.S. Policing Was Developed in Concert With the U.S. Empire.

Consider one of the founding fathers of American policing, August Vollmer. A U.S. Marine who invaded the Philippines in the Spanish-American War in 1898, he set out to “reform” Berkeley’s police when he became its first chief in 1909. He used the scientific techniques of counterinsurgency developed by the U.S. empire in the Philippines (a system described in Alfred McCoy’s book Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State). Vollmer brought in centralized police records, patrol cars, and lie detectors. Vollmer established a criminal justice program at the University of California, Berkeley in 1916 and wrote books including scientific racist theories of “racial degeneration” and crime. He joined the American Eugenics Society and wondered how to prevent “defectives from producing their kind.”

Smedley Butler provides another example. The military man famously wrote that he had been “a gangster for capitalism,” including that he “helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.” He had done so by, among other things, establishing Haiti’s first police force when the Marines occupied that country in 1915, as Jeremy Kuzmarov describes in his bookModernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation-Building in the American Century. When Butler became police chief in Philadelphia in 1924, he too upgraded police technology and militarized its tactics, including military checkpoints and Marine-style uniforms. The mayor fired him after two years, sending him back to the Marines.

7. Counterinsurgencies Use Auxiliaries.

In counterinsurgency campaigns, state armies and police work with paramilitaries, who do dirty work with plausible deniability.

As Alan MacLeod reported on September 28, there were more than 100 vehicle ramming attacks against protesters since the George Floyd protests started in May, many of which “seem to have the tacit approval of local law enforcement,” given the lack of consequences.

Portland activist Mac Smiff told the Brief Podcast, “We call it a shift change. They’re all the same people… there’s the cops, there’s the sheriffs, there’s the marshals, there’s the DHS [Department of Homeland Security], there’s the Proud Boys, there’s the Patriot Prayer, it just goes on and on. They just take turns.”

It is called impunity: the criminal activities of paramilitaries or proxy forces go unpunished, while the full power of the state is brought down upon the intended victims of counterinsurgency.

The default counterinsurgency mode is a consequence of being ruled by an elite that sees the whole population as the enemy. The model for policing isn’t going to be changed even if Trump is replaced by “shoot them in the leg” Biden. The occupied always challenge the legitimacy of their occupiers: the debate about abolition is not going anywhere.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

 

Iron Law of Oligarchy by Robert Michels

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In this article we will discuss about the iron law of oligarchy by Robert Michels.

The Italian sociologist Robert Michels (1876-1936) published in 1911 a book entitled Political Parties. This is a study of European socialist parties and trade unions with particular reference to the German Socialist Party.

These organisations were ostensibly anti-capitalist and pro-socialist in their aims. Their activities were directed towards abolition of capitalism and establishment of socialist societies in their respective countries.

These organisations also claimed to be democratic inasmuch as they represented the interests and wishes of their members. In this book Michels analysed the activities, and in particular the ways in which these organisations functioned, and concluded that democratic ideals bore little resemblance to the actual situation. Michels begins his analysis with reference to a paradox.

In large-sized and populous nation-states of today, the masses of people are completely helpless in making their wishes felt at the centre of power till they are able to organise themselves. According to Michels, therefore, organisation is essential to democracy. The masses cannot participate directly in the decision-making process for obvious difficulties.

Numbers stand in the way. What is possible for one or the few is not possible for the ‘many’, particularly when ‘many’ means hundreds, thousands or hundreds of thousands.

The only way out is to adopt the representative system whereby ‘delegates represent the mass and carry out its will’. Theoretically, this system meets the demands of democracy. Michels, however, argues that, in practice, the picture is entirely different.

Organisation, which is indispensable for ensuring the participation of the masses in the democratic process, sounds the death knell of democracy. Power tends to be concentrated in the hands of those who are at the helm of affairs of the organisation.

This is a paradox and a tragedy which constitute the theme of Michel’s book. Michels gives us a step-by-step analysis of the way in which an oligrachy actually monopolises power under the facade of a democratic set-up.

In the early stages of the development of an organisation, the various functions and positions are all equal in the sense that “differential amounts of wealth or power are not associated with the various positions”. The social honour which is accorded to the head of the organisation and other t6p functionaries does not enable them to transform that honour into special perquisites and privileges.

In Michels’ words:

“Originally, the chief is merely the servant of the mass”.

The democratic and equalitarian character of the organisation is assured, in the early stages, by the strong commitment of its members to the principles of democracy and equality. “Functions are rotated, delegates and representatives are totally subject to the will of the collectivity, and in general a high degree of camaraderie prevails”.

This state of affairs is possible as long as:

(i) The organisation is relatively small in size and

(ii) Functions of the organisation do not call for specialised knowledge and skill.

Things begin to change, however, when the growing scale of the organisation leads to complex division of labour,’ so much so that certain tasks and duties require training, skill of a special kind, and a considerable amount of expert knowledge. Expertise becomes a ‘foot in the door’.

“The experts increasingly resemble not servants but masters and the organisation becomes increasingly hierarchical and bureaucratic”, with the growing scale of the organisation, administrative duties and tasks proliferate, with the result that “it is no longer possible to take them in at a glance”.

In course of time, these tasks and duties become incomprehensible to those who do not possess expert knowledge.

“Faced with this complexity, rank and file members of trade unions and political parties tend to leave matters to their leaders. Decisions are increasingly taken by executive committees within the bureaucracy rather than by assemblies of the rank and file. Thus the very organisation which was created to represent its members ends up by largely excluding them from participation and decision-making”.

There is another parallel development. The men who were originally appointed to serve the interests of the collectivity soon develop interests of their own which are often opposed to that of collectivity. Michels, therefore, concludes that organisations, which are set up to preserve democracy, inevitably produce oligarchy, that is, rule by small elite. This is the ‘iron law of oligarchy’.

Given the oligarchical nature of bureaucratic structures, may not the interest of the rank and file be attended to? Michels is very pessimistic. He argues that those, who enjoy various perquisites and privileges by virtue of their occupying certain positions in the organisation, gradually develop vested interests of their own. Naturally, such vested interests take priority over the stated goals of the organisation.

This clearly involves a displacement of organisational goals whereby preservation of the organisation becomes an end in itself rather than a means to an end. The leaders of the organisation naturally refrain from doing anything which may eventually endanger their own positions, even though realisation of organisational, goals demands such actions.

Leaders are able to maintain power for a variety of reasons of which three are important. In the first place, the leaders harp on ‘experience’, ‘expertise’ and ‘indispensability’ in order to legitimize their positions of power. They assiduously create an impression among the rank and file that the organisation would suffer if they cease to be at the helm of affairs of the company.

Second, the rank and file is apathetic, they are actually quite content to have others attend to their affairs, and their indifference is evident from the slackness of attendance at ordinary meetings. Third, the masses are incompetent Michels characterizes this frailty as “perennial incompetence of the masses”.

According to Michels the weakest link in the Marxian view of the new socialist society is the problem of administration. In large organisations, there will necessarily be concentration of power in the hands of a few. Human nature being what, it is, this small minority would, in course of time, develop interests of their own which may be in conflict with those of the collectivity.

Moreover, they would try by all means to retain their privileges. Michels, therefore, concludes that conflicts of interests emerge between leaders and led, not unlike the class conflicts of old society. This process is characterised by Michels as an absolute social law.

He says:

“By a universally applicable social law, every organ of the collectivity, brought into existence through the new for the division of labour, creates for itself, as soon as it becomes consolidated, interests peculiar to itself. The existence of these special interests involves a necessary conflict with the interests of the collectivity. Nay, more, social strata fulfilling peculiar functions tend to become isolated, to produce organs fitted for the defense of their own peculiar interests. In the long run they tend to undergo transformation into distinct classes”.

Michels, it should be particularly borne in mind, does not intend this as a refutation of Marxian theory of class struggle, but of his vision of a classless society. He made a very significant comment long before a single socialist regime had taken power anywhere: The socialists might conquer, but not socialism, which would perish in the moment of its adherents’ ‘triumph’.

Zeitlin observes in this context that “the victory of the bureaucratic organisation over the socialist soul, had already become evident in the violation of a fundamental socialist principle: international solidarity”.

The views of Robert Michels, particularly his views about the Iron Law of Oligarchy as an absolute social law, have been criticised from different points of view. To begin with, the suggestion that the iron law of oligarchy will inevitably operate in all large sized organisations is not acceptable.

Various cross-cultural and even intra-cultural studies of political parties indicate that the internal organisations of political parties do not exhibit a uniform pattern and that oligarchical rule may develop in some while in some others it may not.

S.M. Lipset says that the internal organisational structures of the Democratic and Republican parties are decentralised, so much so that there is no central leadership in either of the parties which can dictate and impose its views on party members.

The party members at the local level exercise considerable influence and power. But no oligarchical rule at the local level can develop, for the simple reason that the members themselves are divided into various factions.

Secondly, Michels’ treatment of the subject has been one-sided. He emphasised only the possibilities of misuse of power, and not have a word to say about the efforts made by party bosses to realise the goals of the organisation. This they needs must do in their own interest.

The accumulated grievances of the members of the organisation may eventually endanger the position of the party bosses. Possibilities of revolt among the rank and file may act as a brake upon them to misuse power beyond a certain limit and ignore the wishes of rank and file.

Thirdly, in all democratic organisations, commitment to democratic ideals and norms is, more or less, all-pervasive among the members. In such a situation, party bosses cannot act undemocratically with immunity. There are pockets of resistance at all levels of the democratic organisations to the attempts of party bosses to utilise power solely in furtherance of their selfish interests.

In the words of Talcott Parsons, power is only one of several cognate factors in the determination of social events”. As pointed out by Lipset, rivalry among party bosses themselves may serve as a check to abuse of power and consequent subversion of the goals of the organisation.