Ⓐmerican Cynic

Some thoughts on Kiva's interest rates

2018-12-07T05:02:54Z

Table of Contents

1. Two Misconceptions About Kiva
2. What Are the Interest Rates Charged by Kiva’s Partners?
3. Philanthropy or Business?
4. Deeper questions
Appendix A: Data and Scripts
- A.1. Data
- A.2. Scripts

1. Two Misconceptions About Kiva

Kiva Microfunds is a nonprofit organization whose website allows users to provide money toward filling small personal and business loans to individual borrowers around the world. The stated mission of Kiva, whose name is a Swahili word meaning unity or agreement, is “to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty.”

Users of the website browse profiles of borrowers and select those to whom they wish to lend. Each profile includes the borrower’s location, some brief biographical information (usually including a photograph), and a description of what the loan will be used for. Users can then lend as little as $25 to a borrower, which is pooled with money from other users to reach the full loan amount. When the loan is repaid, the user’s account is credited back the amount they gave which can then either be lent to another borrower, donated to Kiva itself, or withdrawn. In its first ten years of existence (October 2005—October 2015), Kiva’s users lent $774 million to 1.8 million borrowers (75% of whom were women) in over 80 countries.^[1]

The goal is to improve the quality of life in developing and conflict-torn regions where it is hoped that entrepreneurs can make effective use of even very small, expensive loans. The loans are disbursed by Kiva’s field partners called microfinance institutions (MFIs). Despite its founders' original intention of allowing users to realize gainful returns on their loans, Kiva itself does not collect interest on loans, and Kiva’s users do not receive any interest on repaid loans.

While the concept behind Kiva is simple — use a website to crowdsource cheap credit to subsidize MFIs operating in poor neighborhoods — the way it is presented can be confusing and tends to result in two misconceptions:

That Kiva users lend money directly to individual borrowers: Because the Kiva website is built around the biography-oriented borrower profiles, it is easy for users to assume that the money goes directly to the borrower after the loan is filled. Both assumptions are wrong for most loans. In fact the money goes to intermediary MFIs who usually disburse loans to borrowers even before their profiles are posted to kiva.org. By the time Kiva users have filled the loan amount, MFIs have not only already disbursed the loan but have likely started collecting payments (and interest) from borrowers.

So Kiva is not a direct person-to-person lending system. Kiva users are in fact lending risk- and interest-free money to Kiva’s partner financial institutions, not to individual borrowers.

The Kiva website was once even more misleading about how disbursements worked, but after David Roodman of the Center for Global Development published an editorial titled “Kiva Is Not Quite What It Seems” (October 2009) which gained significant attention online, Kiva updated their “How Kiva Works” page to make it clear that loans are pre-disbursed.
And that borrowers are not charged interest on loans received through Kiva: Because Kiva itself is nonprofit and presents its operations as philanthropic, and because users do not receive interest on the money they lend, users might easily assume that borrowers are not charged interest. That is also an incorrect assumption. Most of Kiva’s partner MFIs do collect interest and other fees on the loans, sometimes at very high rates, and sometimes acting as explicitly for-profit investor-owned banks.

2. What Are the Interest Rates Charged by Kiva’s Partners?

Kiva does not directly provide information on interest rates for most individual loans. Instead, it lists two measures of field partners' performance which can be used to roughly indicate the average annual interest rate on that institution’s products and how much profit those rates produce:

Portfolio Yield is the primary measure of the cost of loans from a given lender and can be treated roughly as the annual interest rate. Portfolio yield is defined as all interest and fees paid by borrowers to the field partner divided by the average portfolio outstanding during any given year.
Profitability (Return on Assets) is the field partner’s net income divided by its total assets. It indicates how efficiently a field partner turns its investments into profit.

Kiva has started listing a calculated APR for some of its partners. They’ve introduced an “Average Cost to Borrower (PY/APR)” metric which displays either the Portfolio Yield (PY) or Average Percentage Rate (APR), whichever is available.

According to the Kiva website the average Portfolio Yield for all of its field partners in January 2016 was 29.09% (down from 35.21% in January 2010), but some of its field partners have yields near 100%. In 2010 the charity evaluator GiveWell surveyed one of Kiva’s field partners, MLF-Malawi, and reported that the actual APR on its most popular loan was 144%-149%.^[2]

As of January 2018 Kiva provides both Portfolio Yield and Profitability for 196 out of its 270 active field partners. The table and graph below summarize the range and distribution of those metrics.^[3]

	Minimum	1st Quartile	Median	Mean	3rd Quartile	Maximum
Portfolio Yield	0%	0.975%	22%	23.839%	37%	101.6%
Profitability	-170.2%	-1.653%	1.5%	-0.262%	4.333%	124.76%

Figure 1. Distribution of Portfolio Yields and Profitability among Kiva’s field partners (whiskers extend to 1.5 IQR). Click for PDF version.

As a comparison to interest rates in countries with established and widely available financial services, the average credit card APR in the United States is about 15%,^[4] and the maximum allowed interest rate on loans backed by the Small Business Administration is 8.75%.^[5]

2.1. The problems with ‘Portfolio Yield’

The Portfolio Yield indicator is the best available proxy for the actual annual percentage rate (APR) for most loans disbursed by Kiva’s field partners. Portfolio Yield was actually introduced by Kiva in 2009 to replace an even worse proxy for interest rates.^[6] Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX), a non-profit organization, sampled several MFIs and found an adjusted Portfolio Yield to be within five percent (not percentage points) of the reported APR.^[7]

However, in the MIX analysis the Portfolio Yield indicators were adjusted upward to account for defaulted and at-risk loans still on the books (which inflate the portfolio value and so deflate the reported Portfolio Yield). In addition to overvalued portfolio, the Portfolio Yield can easily underestimate the actual APR of microloans for two other reasons:

Many of the microfinance institutions partnered with Kiva require borrowers to save a portion (usually around 20%) of the loan they receive. This requirement is known in the microfinance world as “forced savings.” Borrowers from MFIs which use forced savings are effectively paying interest on a larger loan than they receive, so the Portfolio Yield in those cases will be misleadingly low.
Because the Portfolio Yield is calculated based on an institution’s average outstanding portfolio, it will tend to reflect the larger (usually cheaper) products offered by that institution rather than being an accurate estimate of the (almost always higher) rates on the tiny loans provided to the struggling rural borrowers featured on Kiva.org. The MIX report identified this (the use of the wrong APR to represent an institution’s microfinance loans) as the main reason Portfolio Yield and APR diverge.

So the nominal interest rates suggested by the Portfolio Yield of an MFI, which can be outrageously high, in many cases significantly underestimate the interest actually charged to microfinance borrowers.

Hugh Sinclair, author of Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic, wrote an article titled “What’s Wrong With Kiva’s Portfolio Yield Statistic?” exploring both of these (and other) problems with Kiva’s Portfolio Yield metric. He compared the actual APR for a sample of loans from ten of Kiva’s field partners with the Portfolio Yield reported by Kiva: for every MFI he looked at, the APR on most of the loans was higher (sometimes as much as double) the reported average Portfolio Yield.

So why doesn’t Kiva require MFIs to state the actual cost of loans made using Kiva money rather than relying on the oblique “Portfolio Yield” figure? Sinclair thinks it is because if people saw the actual interest rates collected on loans they are subsidizing then they would think twice before using Kiva:

Kivans like to believe they are helping the poor, and in order to achieve this Kiva needs to provide them with minimal, but reassuring information. Some nice photos, a little story, and as favourable an impression of the actual interest rates as possible, as this is an emotive topic that will irritate many Kivans. They can get away with rates of 30%, 40%, even 50%, but they have to avoid rates which will raise too many questions, and by citing a statistic known to be deeply flawed, but reassuring the Kivans, is the best way to do this.^[8]

2.2. The use and difficulties of ‘Profitability (Return on Assets)’

While the high rates charged by some of Kiva’s partners are a bit shocking and look outright usurious on first sight, Portfolio Yield alone doesn’t indicate whether the interest being collected is exploitative. Those high rates could reflect the actual costs of administering credit in some regions of the world. Small loans are more expensive because fixed costs tend to dominate the price. And some regions have high inflation, poor or non-existent infrastructure, difficult to reach populations, or high crime and other instabilities, all of which contribute to the cost of credit.

If high interest rates were simply the result of price gouging due to lack of competition, then we’d expect that MFIs which charge high rates would tend to have correspondingly high profitability. However, as illustrated in the graph below of Profitability plotted against the Portfolio Yield for all 149 MFIs (as of January 2018) with nonzero Portfolio Yield and available Profitability data, there is no such correlation (the Pearson correlation coefficient is 0.09).^[3]

Figure 2. Profitability plotted against Portfolio Yield. Click for PDF version.

A 2013 report based on a sample of 193 MFIs (none necessarily partnered with Kiva) gave similar results but found a slightly negative correlation between return on equity and portfolio yield (r = -.117). The author of the report hypothesized that the negative correlation, indicating that more profitable MFIs charge lower interest rates, is the effect of MFI lifecycle stages: young MFIs try to reach financial stability by charging high rates and fees while mature MFIs can afford more competitive rates.^[9]

In any case, the lack of correlation between Portfolio Yield and Profitability shows that at least some markets are competitive, though likely very geographically uneven. We might hope, then, that even if we concede high interest rates are a necessary evil in some regions to cover operating costs, we could use the Profitability metric alone to identify MFIs that are overcharging for loans (say, try to avoid giving to MFIs who make more than 15% on their assets). Unfortunately, as is noted in the next section, the Profitability indicator seems to be rather noisy and unreliable as an indicator that an MFI is overcharging (or undercharging) for its products.

In addition, it should be kept in mind that low profitability can be an indicator that an MFI is struggling with internal inefficiency including under-utilized investments, over-paid executives, and fraud (none of which are especially unheard of in the microfinance sector).

Other metrics Kiva provides that can help here are the Default Rate, Delinquency Rate, and Loans At Risk Rate. Field partners which have trouble collecting repayments may be charging more than their clients can afford.

2.3. MIX Market data

In addition to the information provided by Kiva itself, financial data about many of Kiva’s partner MFIs can be found on MIX Market (themix.org), an online clearinghouse for microfinance information run by the World Banks' Consultative Group to Assist the Poor. The data available on MIX Market is largely self-reported but claims to be independently reviewed and includes many more indicators than Kiva provides (including a portfolio yield figure which has been adjusted for inflation). Unfortunately, in June, 2016, while I was doing research for this essay, the MIX Market website was restructured to commercialize most of its data and publications behind a paywall making future research efforts using MIX datasets prohibitively expensive. Prior to the redesign, the MIX Market profile for Kiva provided a convenient list of MFIs currently and formerly associated with Kiva.^[10]

In a weblog entry mourning the change, Phil Mader notes that the privatization of the MIX Market data “mirrors one of the darker trends in microfinance as a whole, where institutions are first set up with public or charitable money and supported for years (MIX was funded with millions of dollars in charitable, tax-deductible donations), but then are turned onto a revenue-maximising, commercial course, confronting their users with a hard-nosed commercial lender. Even though in practice this restructuring often fails to yield truly commercial returns (and behind the scenes the institution continues to be supported with soft money) the beneficiaries still must deal with what poses as a for-profit business, stripped of the more ‘social’ promises that lured them in.”^[11]

One issue in trying to assess an MFI’s financial characteristics is that the data reported by Kiva is sometimes very different than the data provided by MIX Market. To get an idea of how well the available data agrees, I sampled^[12] the Portfolio Yield and Return on Assets indicators from both Kiva and MIX Market for several MFIs and plotted them in the figure below.^[3]

Figure 3. Correlation between data provided by Kiva and by MIX Market for Portfolio Yield (left) and Return on Assets (right). Click for PDF version.

While both sources tend to report similar Portfolio Yield figures (left graph), Kiva’s numbers can occasionally vary greatly from MIX Market’s. When the two obvious outliers are ignored, the correlation coefficient is nearly linear (r=0.96). In fact Kiva actually uses MIX Market data directly when reporting Portfolio Yield for some of its field partners, so that strong correlation is expected.^[13] I do not know if there is a list of which partners Kiva uses MIX Market data for and which it calculates itself.

The Return on Assets figure (right graph), on the other hand, is much less consistent between Kiva and MIX (r=0.52).

I suspect the main cause of the discrepancies between the data reported by Kiva and MIX Market is timing: each organization receives and releases information from the MFIs on different dates (the plot above is based on the most recent data from both Kiva and MIX at the time of retrieval — but they aren’t necessarily updated at the same time). If that’s the case, then it indicates that the reported Return on Assets of MFIs tend to be rather volatile, which is another reason the Profitability metric may not be of much use in identifying non/exploitative MFIs.

2.4. Finding good lenders on Kiva

Keeping the limitations of Kiva’s metrics in mind, the best strategy a Kiva user can adopt in order to find loans from a good MFI on Kiva.org depends on their humanitarian philosophy: a user who is concerned that high interest does more harm than good should seek out loans through partners with low Portfolio Yield; a user who is most concerned about exploitation should look for partners with low Profitability; a user who wants a balance of sustainability and humanitarian efficacy might look for partners with low Portfolio Yield and moderate Profitability; etc.

The best way to explore individual loan offerings is to use Kiva’s lending tool (https://www.kiva.org/lend). As part of a June 2016 redesign, Kiva implemented improved filtering of their lending tool including the ability to filter based on “Average cost to borrower” (Portfolio yield, APR, or MPR, whichever is available) and “Profitability.”

Unfortunately Kiva does not provide the option to sort their field partners table by Portfolio Yield or Profitability. But they do helpfully provide field partner information through a programmable web interface. I used that service to build KivaSort (https://kivasort.americancynic.net/) which provides a fully sortable and filterable table of Kiva’s field partners.

By default KivaSort displays field partners with the lowest Portfolio Yield at the top to facilitate finding inexpensive lenders. But in order to illustrate and briefly investigate the high interest rates charged on some Kiva loans, the table below lists the active field partners with the highest Portfolio Yield (as of January 2018).

The ten field partners with the highest Portfolio Yields. Visit KivaSort.americancynic.net for a full, up-to-date table.
Name	Portfolio Yield	Profitability	Country	Default Rate

2.4.1. Example: Thrive Microfinance

If we read the Kiva profile for the MFI second from the top of the list of field partners with the highest Portfolio Yields, we learn that Thrive Microfinance is an independent MFI in Zimbabwe which lends exclusively to women using the group loan approach (in which small groups take out a loan collectively and keep each other accountable for payments).

Note that after suffering record hyperinflation from 2007—2009 (by the time the central bank stopped issuing currency, prices were more than doubling every 25 hours),^[14] Zimbabwe stabilized prices by abandoning its national currency and switched to the US dollar. During most of 2014, Zimbabwe was experiencing slight deflation caused by a shortage of cash. That means the credit provided by Kiva was all the more valuable to Thrive, and its loans that much more expensive than their nominal rate.

The main reason Thrive charges so much for loans is apparently because they provide four weeks of mandatory training to borrowers before disbursing a loan. There is a note from Thrive addressing the high interest rates on their Kiva profile which concludes, “Even though we could reduce the interest rate if we reduced the amount of training, we do not believe that it is in our borrowers' interests to do so.” That rings hollow to me: why not provide cheaper loans and then sell training to the groups who find that service valuable enough to pay for it?

2.4.2. A note on Islamic banking

Allah will deprive usury of all blessing, but will give increase for deeds of charity: For He loveth not creatures ungrateful and wicked.

— al-Baqarah 2:276

Islam has always had a healthy suspicion of exploitative increase (called riba in Arabic). As a result, financial service providers including MFIs partnered with Kiva which conform to sharia law are forbidden from charging interest on loans.^[15]

Islamic financial institutions have developed some creative methods of working around the prohibition on interest by recasting loans as either joint ventures or normal trades, neither of which involve interest in a strict sense. Popular schemes include:

Mudarabah - where a bank provides capital and then shares the profit/loss at an agreed upon proportion with the entrepreneur.
Murabaha - where a bank buys an item, and then sells it at a higher price to the “borrower” who buys it from the bank in installments. This is the most popular Islamic financial instrument because it provides a predictable profit margin for the lender, though insofar as it is an attempt to hide financial interest (riba al-qurud) as merchant profit (riba al-buyu) it is arguably a violation of sharia (at least in spirit).

Islamic financial services dull the dangerous edges of traditional interest: if a borrower becomes unable to repay a loan, at least they do not become hopelessly burdened by ever-compounding interest. For that reason even devious implementations of murabaha will tend to be less exploitative and damaging than capitalist credit. However, it is a mistake to think that because Islamic loans are “interest free” they are also necessarily non-profit. Islamic banks still leverage their capital to profit from the work of borrowers. Furthermore, because Islamic banks take on more risk than traditional banks, loans based on murabaha generally require upfront collateral for the loan amount so that even without the spectre of compounding interest, Islamic loans can still pose a serious risk to families and poor entrepreneurs whose ventures fail.

The same metrics used to evaluate other field partners can be used to evaluate Kiva’s sharia-compliant field partners. For example, at the time of this writing Kiva’s long-time partner Al-Amal Microfinance Bank has a Portfolio Yield of 33.1% and a Profitability of 11.1%. Another example is Jerusalem Interest-Free Microfinance Fund Limited which is operated by volunteers and disburses loans at 0%, with a profitability of 17.1% (presumably its income from donations).

3. Philanthropy or Business?

It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair.

— Oscar Wilde
The Soul of Man Under Socialism

3.1. Kiva’s origins: an accidental charity

Kiva was founded in 2005 by Matt Flannery and Jessica Jackley, a husband-and-wife team working out of San Francisco. They developed the first version of the Kiva.org website while Flannery was employed as a programmer at TiVo and Jackley was employed at the Stanford Business School (where she attended a lecture by Muhammad Yunus which ignited the initial spark of inspiration). Two years after launching, Flannery published a retrospective about Kiva’s origins and development called “Kiva and the Birth of Person-to-Person Microfinance.”^[16]

In that article, Flannery described how even in the early days of Kiva there was a fundamental tension about “whether it was better to be seen as a charity or as a business.”^[17] Neither Kiva nor its users have ever earned interest on the loans facilitated by the website, but that charitable nature is more an accident of history (encouraged by the bureaucratic hurdles erected by the SEC) than the design of its founders.

The original plan was to charge MFIs interest on Kiva-financed loans, and then share a portion of that interest with users:

I architected the database, software, and user experience around the idea of returning interest to users. There was never any question that we wanted interest rates on the site.^[18]

After grudgingly settling on the interest-free approach for the first two years, Flannery wrote that “we would still like to realize our original vision of having interest rates on the site. The fact that we had to remove them is a sore spot with me […] Kiva thus continues its effort to allow our partners to post businesses to the site with interest rates attached.”^[19]

3.2. Charity for whom?

Kiva’s founding tension was resolved by keeping Kiva itself purely charitable, supported exclusively by donations and grants, but partnering it with remote field partners who charge interest. That way the SEC was satisfied and the dirty business of collecting interest from people with no money was pushed to a more comfortable distance from the users of Kiva’s website.

But the impedance-matching function of Kiva, which converts interest-free loans made by Kiva’s users into interest-bearing loans collected by microfinance institutions, understandably produces a cognitive dissonance in its users. That double nature of loans given through Kiva, which are simultaneously charitable credit for MFIs and expensive debt for poor borrowers, is the source of the misconceptions I outlined in the first section of this essay, and it raises a question at the heart of the matter: who benefits from the free credit raised by Kiva? Does the incidence of Kiva users' charity fall mostly on the borrowers they intend to help? or does it fall more on the MFIs who accept the free credit and then turn around and loan it for gain to those borrowers?

Profitability among Kiva’s field partners tends to be rather modest (suggesting that Kiva prefers partners on the charitable/non-profit as opposed to self-sufficient/commercial side of the spectrum): over three-quarters of currently active field partners have a Profitability at or less than 4.3%. By comparison, one report that looked at interest rate data from hundreds of MFIs (not limited to, or necessarily including any, Kiva field partners) over seven years found that three-quarters of MFIs in 2011 had a rate of profit up to 20%. That same report noted that if every MFI set their interest rates to their break-even point (so that profits = 0), then the average interest rate would fall by only 2.6 percentage points (in other words, even if every MFI were non-profit, interest rates would still be quite high in many cases).^[20] That finding underscores the fact that microcredit is simply expensive.

The efficacy of microfinance at alleviating poverty has been a matter of research and debate since Muhammad Yunus founded the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1983 (Yunus and the Grameen bank were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006). The early anecdotal reports of success and the prospect of a business-friendly cure to poverty created an increasing excitement around microfinance for over two decades. But in recent years expectations have sobered.

In the past five years or so several rigorous studies which use a randomized method to compare the effects of microfinance on borrowers have appeared in the academic literature. The result of one recent survey of six such studies found that “The studies do not find clear evidence, or even much in the way of suggestive evidence, of reductions in poverty or substantial improvements in living standards. Nor is there robust evidence of improvements in social indicators.” But the same survey also found “little evidence of harmful effects, even with individual lending […] and even at a high real interest rate.”^[21]

Kiva performs a degree of due diligence and monitoring of the MFIs it chooses to partner with which provides some protection against abuse. The measures Kiva uses to evaluate field partners developed out of some hard-learned lessons. In their first four years of operations they discovered six “situations involving severe fraud,” including one involving their very first partner, a Ugandan man named Moses Onyango, who was so instrumental in getting Kiva started that he is sometimes referred to as the third co-founder.^[22]

Among the MFIs Onyango signed up as partners in Kiva’s early days was one he founded himself, the Women’s Initiative to Eradicate Poverty (WITEP). It turns out that not all of the WITEP borrowers were real: some loans were being disbursed in the names of fictional people and pocketed by Onyango. Due to Uganda’s unresponsive legal system, Kiva never recovered the stolen money (but they did pay back Kiva.org users out of their own expense account, as well as maintain a policy of transparency about the fraud when it was discovered).

The kind of fraud Onyango perpetuated is not particularly worrying. He used the stolen money to buy a house for his family (and he was so grateful to Kiva for its influence on his life that he named his new son Matthew Flannery Onyango). What Onyango did was to cut out the interest-charging middleman and transform Kiva into the version of itself that users imagine it is: they lent money, helped out a Ugandan family, and got repaid.

Far more worrisome are legitimate MFIs who might use Kiva’s website as a place to sell feel-good stories to naive Americans for free capital with which they can go about their business of robbing the poor. It strikes me as much less likely that Kiva would discover and terminate its partnership with MFIs who overcharge borrowers, and in fact Kiva’s entire structure of funneling interest-free credit to interest-charging lenders almost encourages it.

As an example consider the case of Kiva’s former partner in Nigeria Lift Above Poverty Organization (LAPO). In 2010 the New York Times published an exposé about microfinance interest rates which specifically mentioned the high rates and forced savings of LAPO.^[23] Kiva had initially defended the interest rates and high profitability of LAPO with its usual explanations (inflation, high operating costs, and the need for sustainability), but then after further investigation prompted by the media attention decided to terminate the partnership. LAPO overwhelmingly targeted women with its high-interest loans. The LAPO incident doesn’t exactly breed confidence in Kiva’s other partners who have not been investigated by journalists.^[24]

3.3. Kiva’s apology

To questions about the high interest rates charged by its field partners, Kiva has responded by pointing to the high costs of administering microloans, emphasizing that they annually evaluate each partner “to ensure that there is a sound justification for each relationship,” and that they are continuing their efforts to bring in more charitable and 0% lending partners.^[25]

In his article, Flannery also outlined a justification for the proposed collection of interest on loans to the global poor. He rejects pure charity, what he calls the benefactor relationship between people in developed and undeveloped countries, because “recipients resent benefactors even as they consume the aid.” He also rejects the defeatist notion that poor people cannot be helped, what he calls the colonizer relationship, because it is just the other side of “the same destructive mentality” as the benefactor. To these dialectical endpoints he applies a liberal dose of Silicon Valley Logic and derives the perennial insight that the best way to help poor people is to find a way to make money off of their circumstances. He calls this the business relationship, from which he formulates the precept that “interest rates, which turn a charitable relationship into a business relationship, empower the poor by making them business partners.”^[26]

Invoking the concept of colonizer without any discussion or hint of awareness about actual colonialism or the socioeconomic context within which microfinance works is emblematic of Kiva’s tone-deaf approach to structural issues. This decontextualization is also inherent to the way the Kiva website packages and presents borrower profiles by “displacing them from local contingencies” thus providing to lenders a ‘flat’ and placeless perspective on development and poverty. “By obscuring the geographic contexts of microlending and borrowers, Kiva.org squanders an essential opportunity to engage the public with the ongoing conversation about poverty, debt, development, and the roots of contemporary inequality.” And the faux equality presented by Flannery’s “business relationship” obscures the differentials of wealth between the site’s lenders and borrowers. “Kiva not only renders its own workings unproblematic, but also justifies the worldwide expansion of micro-credit by much larger conventional aid and financial organizations.”^[27]

Of course Flannery’s “business relationship” has never been unambiguously achieved by Kiva. The tension between philanthropy and business remains, and is in fact what is attractive to users of the platform. By promising a way for users to help the global poor without personal gain to themselves and without just giving money away, Kiva harmonizes the warring moralities of compassion and fiscal responsibility.^[28] By blurring the differences between lenders and borrowers to maintain the illusion of person-to-person business deals,

Microfinance makes poverty in the global South comprehensible to the (primarily Northern) middle and upper classes by proposing a solution on terms that they can understand and identify with […] While their circumstances and constraints remain fundamentally different, the rich and the poor are seemingly aligned in the microfinance narrative through their shared identity as subjects of finance.^[29]

In 2009 Flannery wrote a second retrospective for Innovations in which he expressed his lingering unhappiness that Kiva was not generating profit for comfortable Americans (who make up most of Kiva.org users) off of the hard work of poor women in remote agricultural villages (who make up most of Kiva’s borrowers): “I repeatedly tried to get the interest rates back on the site. […] To me, taking the rates off the site was an accident and I was determined to undo that temporary concession.”^[30]

Fortunately, Flannery was never successful in his efforts to turn Kiva into a for-profit lending platform which would have had the effect of making loans targeted at the global poor even more expensive while sucking more wealth out of impoverished regions. In 2015, after serving as Kiva’s chief executive officer for ten years, he stepped down (but remains on the board of directors) to co-found the for-profit Branch International. Branch provides a branchless banking service (based on Vodafone’s M-Pesa) which allows people in Kenya to use a mobile phone app to receive small loans. Branch appears to determine credit worthiness and interest rates on an individual basis by an algorithm (which looks at borrowers' Facebook profiles, among other sources of data). By July 2017 Branch is reported to have disbursed $35 million (KSh3.63 billion) in loans to its 350,000 users. Interest rates start at 163.2% per year, and can get as low as 14.4% for users with the best credit rating.^[31] No doubt this new enterprise provides Flannery with better opportunity than Kiva to more directly “empower” cash-strapped sub-Saharan workers.

3.3.1. Direct and interest-free: Kiva’s future?

In the final analysis, putting questions of profit and exploitation aside by assuming that MFIs operate efficiently and at some optimal balance between charity and sustainability, the root question which confronts the Kiva user is whether giving poor women in Zimbabwe expensive debt is a good way to help them — and if it is not, then what else can someone on their computer in a rich Western country do to help?

Fortunately Kiva has a few initiatives in the works which may help side-step these difficult questions in the future. In 2013 they launched Kiva Zip, a pilot program which offered loans directly to entrepreneurs (without an intermediary MFI) in the United States at 0% interest and without any credit score requirement. In 2016 the Kiva Zip program was integrated into the main Kiva website as Kiva U.S.^[32]

In the summer of 2016 Kiva also announced the Direct to Social Enterprise program which provides interest-free loans directly to medium-sized enterprises (too big to be customers of MFIs and too small to benefit from commercial loans), which has brought the benefits of Kiva Zip to countries outside of the United States (albeit on a person-to-enterprise rather than person-to-person model). I haven’t found a complete list of participating social enterprises, but at least a partial list can be found by searching KivaSort for field partners whose names contain ‘direct to’.^[33]

4. Deeper questions

On one hand the demographic and geographic distributions of Kiva’s borrowers and lender-users, wherein sympathetic people in parts of the world with extra money are providing charitable loans to people in parts of the world with not enough money, are not surprising. Those are exactly the sort of relationships Kiva exists to facilitate per its mission statement, after all. But Kiva’s entire model of microfinance takes for granted that there are a great number of women and peasants at the developed world’s periphery who are in desperate need of financial services without attempting to explain why the world’s wealth has become so stratified by lines of geography and gender, and without any introspection into its own role in the greater processes of global capitalism arising from and transforming those lines.

For a closer look at those processes see the full essay at “The Loan, the Witch, and the Market: Microfinance and the re-exploitation of women”.

Appendix A: Data and Scripts

The canonical versions of these files can be found at https://americancynic.net/log/2018/12/6/some_thoughts_on_kivas_interest_rates/#data

A.1. Data

The data used to generate the table and graphs presented in Section 1, “Two Misconceptions About Kiva” are available to download as:

active_partners.csv - the list of all active field partners with complete Portfolio Yield and Profitability data (as fetched using the Kiva API) in comma separated values format.
combined.csv - list of some chosen field partners data from both Kiva and the MIX Market (used to produce the figure correlating Kiva and MIX Market data). Unfortunately this is a hand-assembled file, and now that MIX Market data is not freely available, it can not easily be updated.

A.2. Scripts

The data files above can be automatically updated and the figures re-generated using the following scripts:

update-data.js - Node.js script which fetches field partner data from the Kiva API and writes active_partners.csv to the working directory. (See package.json for its dependencies which can be installed with npm or Yarn.)
analyze-all.r - R script which processes active_partners.csv to generate the several Portfolio Yield ad Profitability graphics (in the current working directory) and outputs the summary table in AsciiDoc format. Requires ggplot2.
analyze-correlation.r - R script which processes combined.csv to produce the figure correlating Kiva and MIX Market data). Requires ggplot2 and gridExtra.

References and Notes

1. Talea Miller, “Celebrating 10 Years of Impact,” Kiva Blog (27 October 2015). As of March 2017, Kiva users have lent $1.13B (https://www.kiva.org/about).

2. “GiveWell.org: MicroLoan-Foundation (MLF).” GiveWell does not recommend MLF-Malawi because they prefer a different MFI in the region (Small Enterprise Foundation), which is not a Kiva partner).

3. See Appendix A, Data and Scripts.

4. Kelly Dilworth, “Rate survey: Average card rate jumps to 15.18%,” CreditCards.com (3 February 3 2016).

5. For an explanation of how the interest rates on SBA loans are set, see Marc Prosser, “SBA Loan Rates – Current Interest Rates and How They Work,” Fit Small Business (1 January 2018).

6. “Changes To Interest Rates,” Kiva Blog (14 August 2009).

7. Scott Gaul, “MFTransparency and MIX Market,” Microfinance Information Exchange (April 2011).

8. Hugh Sinclair, “What’s Wrong With Kiva’s Portfolio Yield Statistic?” Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic Blog (22 October 2012).

9. Johannes Flosbach, “Profitability and Interest Rates: Does the Commercialization of Microfinance Institutions Lead to Higher Interest Rates?,” African Journal of Microfinance and Enterprise Development 3, no. 1 (2013): 1-22.

10. The list can still be accessed via the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20160514083728/http://www.mixmarket.org/service-providers/kiva

11. Phil Mader, “Paywalled Microfinance Data: Is the global ‘Knowledge Bank’ dead?” Governance Across Borders (5 July 2016).

12. This is not a random selection. I chose the 17 field partners with Portfolio Yield data whose names happen to be identical in both the data provided by Kiva’s API and the spreadsheet provided by MIX Market.

13. According to the Portfolio Yield FAQ on the Kiva Blog: http://blog.kiva.org/faqs/portfolio-yield-qa

14. Steve Hank, “R.I.P. Zimbabwe Dollar,” CATO Institute.

15. For an overview of how Islamic banking schemes can be used by Islamic MFIs, see Abdul Rahim Abdul Rahman, “Islamic microfinance: a missing component in Islamic banking,” Kyoto Bulletin of Islamic Area Studies 1, no. 2 (2007): 38-53.

16. Matt Flannery, “Kiva and the Birth of Person-to-Person Microfinance,” Innovations 2, no. 1-2 (2007): 31-56.

17. Flannery, “Kiva and the Birth of Person-to-Person Microfinance,” 36.

18. Flannery,“Kiva and the Birth of Person-to-Person Microfinance,” 37.

19. Flannery, “Kiva and the Birth of Person-to-Person Microfinance,” 53-54.

20. Richard Rosenberg, Scott Gaul, William Ford, and Olga Tomilova, “Microcredit Interest Rates and Their Determinants 2004–2011,” Reports by CGAP and Its Partners, no. 7 (June 2013), Figure 21.

21. Abhijit Banerjee, Dean Karlan, and Jonathan Zinman, “Six randomized evaluations of microcredit: introduction and further steps,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 7, no. 1 (2015): 13-14.

22. Matt Flannery, “Kiva at Four,” Innovations 4, no. 2 (2009): 33-35. All the facts relating to Onyango below are from this source.

23. Neil MacFarquhar, “Banks Making Big Profits From Tiny Loans,” New York Times, April 13, 2010.

24. Hugh Sinclair provides a first-hand account of the LAPO affair and his role as a whistle blower in Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic.

25. “Interest Rates,” http://blog.kiva.org/faqs/interest-rates-qa, retrieved April 2018.

26. Flannery, “Kiva and the Birth of Person-to-Person Microfinance,” 54.

27. John Carr et al., “Kiva’s Flat, Flat World: Ten Years of Microcredit in Cyberspace,” Globalizations 13, no. 2 (2016): 143-154.)

28. For an analysis of this “interplay of philanthropic sentiment and entrepreneurial pragmatism” based on some Kiva users' own words, see Domen Bajde, “Marketized philanthropy: Kiva’s utopian ideology of entrepreneurial philanthropy,” Marketing Theory 13, no. 1 (2013): 3-18.

29. Philip Mader, The Political Economy of Microfinance: Financialising Poverty (Palgrave Macmillan: 2015), 1.

30. Flannery, “Kiva at Four,” 37.

31. Doreen Wainainah, “Virtual lender Branch Kenya loans hit Sh3.6 billion,” Daily Nation (31 July 2017).

32. All interest-free loans currently seeking funding on Kiva are always listed at: https://www.kiva.org/lend?avgBorrowerCost=0,0

33. A list of current social enterprise loans is available at: https://www.kiva.org/lend/social-enterprises

The Loan, the Witch, and the Market: Microfinance and the re-exploitation of women

2018-12-03T17:32:23Z

❤️

For Mindy

Preface

This booklet began as an essay about the microlending website Kiva.org and the interest rates charged to poor borrowers by its financial field partners. It has become my attempt at an introduction to Marxian economics and materialist feminism. In retrospect, the research and writing I put into this essay (over the course of several years) were mostly to the benefit of my own learning as I sought to clarify my position on various controversies. But of course I hope I’ve put down a few notes of interest to other readers as well. In particular I hope the introductory material is adequately clear so that a reader previously unfamiliar with the topics discussed will be able to go on and read the works listed in Chapter 4, Further Reading if they desire (as well as the wealth of Marxist and feminist material available elsewhere).

Due to the personal nature of my methodology, the selection of sources throughout the essay follow somewhat haphazardly the whims of my curiosity rather than a systematic exploration of the issues. Although this has resulted in an essay which is clearly polemic in nature, I’ve tried to engage and synthesize most major positions and relevant academic treatments. Unfortunately, in an attempt to keep things concise, my impressionable voice may have adopted something of a pseudo-scholarly and arcane tone in mimicry of my academic sources. For that reason I feel I should state my main thesis in plain language at least once from the outset, and that is that most of the billions of people in the world today already do too much work, particularly women, especially in the so-called third-world or developing countries, and any scheme which promises to improve life by giving poor women more work to do ought to be met and examined with the utmost suspicion.

The good news is that nobody needs to read this entire essay. Each top-level section should be mostly standalone and readable on its own.

Readers only interested in Kiva should instead read my shorter essay “Some thoughts on Kiva’s interest rates”

Readers only interested in an introduction to neoliberalism and Marxian economics should read Chapter 1, Capitalism but skip the lengthy Chapter 2, Housework. Anyone interested in the debate over socialist markets may also want to read much of Chapter 3, Alternatives.

Readers only interested in an introduction to materialist feminism should read all of Chapter 1, Capitalism or at least Chapter 2, Housework.

Acknowledgements

This essay is less bad than it could have been thanks to Louis Burkhardt, Evan Apel, and Nate Pierce who were kind enough to read early versions of this essay and provide valuable suggestions and corrections.

The canonical version of this essay can be found at https://americancynic.net/log/2018/12/3/kivas_interest_rates/

Table of Contents

1. Capitalism

1.1. Microfinance as neoliberal financialization

Contemporary capitalism is financialized capitalism, and microfinance is its response to poverty.^[1]

— Phil Mader
The Political Economy of Microfinance

Microloans are small, short-term lines of credit given to entrepreneurs who lack access to more traditional financial services. The goal is to improve the quality of life in developing and conflict-torn regions where it is hoped that borrowers can make effective use of even very small, expensive loans. The efficacy of microfinance at alleviating poverty has been a matter of research and debate since Muhammad Yunus founded the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1983 (Yunus and the Grameen bank were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006). The early anecdotal reports of success and the prospect of a business-friendly cure to poverty created an increasing excitement around microfinance for over two decades. But in recent years expectations have sobered.

Most Americans who are familiar with microfinance were likely introduced to it through Kiva Microfunds, a nonprofit organization whose website allows users to provide money toward filling small personal and business loans to individual borrowers around the world. The loans are disbursed by Kiva’s field partners called microfinance institutions (MFIs). Despite its founders' original intention of allowing users to realize gainful returns on their loans, nether Kiva itself nor its users/lenders collect interest on loans which has contributed to the impression that microfinance is a purely philanthropic project.^[2]

But some MFIs have shown themselves to be nothing more than predatory banks, as typified by the 2007 IPO of Compartamos Banco in Mexico which raised millions of dollars of equity for investors with its business model based on charging groups of women very high interest on microloans.

In October 2010 the microfinance industry in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh self-destructed in a frenzied lending bubble accompanied by aggressive collection practices.^[3] Hundreds of suicides in the region have been linked to microfinance debt and harassment at the hands of loan agents. The Associated Press reported the following details about some of the suicides linked to an MFI called SKS:

One woman drank pesticide and died a day after an SKS loan agent told her to prostitute her daughters to pay off her debt. She had been given 150,000 rupees ($3,000) in loans but only made 600 rupees ($12) a week.

Another SKS debt collector told a delinquent borrower to drown herself in a pond if she wanted her loan waived. The next day, she did. She left behind four children.

One agent blocked a woman from bringing her young son, weak with diarrhea, to the hospital, demanding payment first. Other borrowers, who could not get any new loans until she paid, told her that if she wanted to die, they would bring her pesticide. An SKS staff member was there when she drank the poison. She survived.

An 18-year-old girl, pressured until she handed over 150 rupees ($3)--meant for a school examination fee—also drank pesticide. She left a suicide note: “Work hard and earn money. Do not take loans.”

In all these cases, the report commissioned by SKS concluded that the company’s staff was either directly or indirectly responsible.^[4]

A 2012 paper by outspoken microfinance critic Milford Bateman (author of Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work?: The Destructive Rise of Local Neoliberalism) and influential heterodox Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang described the microfinance model as “most likely” a “poverty trap” at the individual and community level, and as a mis-allocation of capital at the national level.^[5]

An infographic published by Kiva in celebration of its 10th year of operation draws attention to the fact that 75% of borrowers have been women and that nearly 400,000 farmers in the least developed countries have received loans made possible by Kiva.^[7] Both of these groups — women and subsistence farmers — are specifically targeted by Kiva through programs like the dollar-matching Women’s Entrepreneurship Fund (a partnership between Kiva, the US State Department, and the Inter-American Development Bank) and Kiva’s “Financing Agriculture” lab which hopes to use microloans to alleviate the cycles of risk inherent to small-scale farming.

The gender composition of Kiva lenders (users of Kiva.org) skews in the same direction as that of its borrowers: about 67% are women. Most lenders are in wealthy countries: by dollar amount, over 70% of loans are lent by users in the United States, Western Europe, and Canada.^[8] In addition to individual users, Kiva collects donations from institutional partners and corporate sponsors. Among Kiva’s corporate sponsors who have given $1 million or more during the past 30 months, most of them are financial institutions (including Capital One, Deutsche Bank, and Moody’s). Among the others are foundations associated with large, multinational corporations (including HP, PepsiCo, and Google).^[9]

On one hand these demographic and geographic distributions, wherein sympathetic people in parts of the world with extra money are providing charitable loans to people in parts of the world with not enough money, are not surprising. Those are exactly the sort of relationships Kiva exists to facilitate per its mission statement, after all. But Kiva’s entire model of microfinance takes for granted that there are a great number of women and peasants at the developed world’s periphery who are in desperate need of financial services without attempting to explain why the world’s wealth has become so stratified by lines of geography and gender, and without any introspection into its own role in the greater processes of global capitalism arising from and transforming those lines.

Most academic criticism of microfinance investigates its role as a neoliberal institution. A vague and contentious term, but used too heavily within academic theory to avoid, neoliberalism is so-called because it represents an attempt to return to or rescue the ‘free-market’ optimism of classical liberalism from the Keynesian and social democratic trends of the twentieth century. It generally refers to the economic policies that became dominant at the end of the 1970s which seek market creation and uninhibited international trade, financialization (seeking profit in financial markets rather than directly investing in production), and financial imperialism (including the practice of providing credit in exchange for political influence and the imposition of austerity measures in debtor countries).

In his postface to The Road from Mont Pelerin (a collection of essays exploring the intellectual origins and development of neoliberalism), Philip Mirowski provides eleven defining traits which together give a description of the neoliberal project “as an authoritarian variant of the liberal tradition,” wanting a strong state, sufficiently insulated from democracy, to create and maintain its markets.^[10] The successful effects of neoliberal policy in the United States are strikingly illustrated by plotting the change in real hourly wages on top of the changes to net domestic product as in the figure below: since the mid 1970s wealth from increased productivity is going almost entirely to owners rather than to the wage-earners doing the work. (Similar illustrations of the neoliberal break can be seen by examining plots of wealth and income share for the same time period.)

Figure 1. Disconnect between productivity and typical worker compensation (1948-2013). Click for PDF version. Data from the Economic Policy Institute.^[11]

The academic perspective of microfinance as a neoliberal tool considers it as a method by which capital can gain access to and exploit the peripheral poor who were previously outside of the core economic sphere.^[12] Microfinance, then, plays a similar role at the frontiers of capitalism as subprime lending plays within the borders of financial centers. As the geographer Katharine Rankin has noted, in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis two seemingly contradictory attitudes toward the populations targeted by these two forms of “poverty finance” emerged. The recipients of subprime loans (variable-rate mortgages and expensive credit cards), mostly racialized minorities in American cities, were “disparaged as irresponsible, risk-embedded subjects,” while the recipients of microcredit, mostly third-world agrarian women, were still “enrolled as responsible, risk-averting subjects” into profitable microfinance schemes.^[13]

Despite such different initial reactions, Rankin concludes from the parallel trajectories of both groups that “there is every reason to expect that the latest frontier of speculative arbitrage will expose a widening set of households, neighbourhoods and regions in the Third World to financial shock and to material and socio-emotional forms of dispossession.”^[14] It would seem that the 2008 crises in Nicaragua (Section 3.3, “Debt strike”) and the disastrous 2010 collapse in Andhra Pradesh can be seen as waves of the shock reaching the microfinance sector.

Rankin gives a description of neoliberalized microfinance as a tool of capital expansion that “is dispossessive to the extent that it extracts wealth not through primary exploitation in the realm of production or the direct enclosures of primitive accumulation, but through predation and fraud that turns poor households into new markets for financial instruments.”^[15] Rankin’s Marxian terminology brings together several important concepts upon which we can conveniently expand.

1.2. “Primary exploitation” (wage labour and accumulation)

In the context of macro-economics, exploitation refers to the process by which a portion of the surplus produced by a society is taken and used for the benefit of a parasitic group, either a foreign conqueror or an endemic owning class. Each such class society can be characterized by its primary means of exploitation. While history provides a handy menu of legal schemes for implementing exploitative systems (tribute, tax, rent, usury, profit), the primary means of exploitation is determined by the prevailing organization of productive forces. In slave societies, for example, exploitation is naked and workers are often coerced with open force: slaves are made to produce enough to maintain their own meager existence, and then forced to continue to work to maintain much of the rest of society’s needs. In the various serf and sharecropper arrangements, peasants and bonded farmers are allowed to support themselves, but a portion of their harvest is taken by landlords to support the other classes.

In capitalism, exploitation is carried out primarily through a more subtle system of wage labour: when the value created by workers is more than the value of the wages they receive, the difference (what Marx called “surplus-value”) is kept and controlled by business owners and executives. A portion of the surplus-value is consumed by the owning classes (sometimes at lavish levels), but in large projects the majority of surplus-value becomes profit and is re-invested as capital where it can be used to extract even more surplus-value from workers to be re-invested, and so forth. This ‘self-expanding’ process by which capital exploits wage workers to become ever more capital is called the “accumulation of capital.”^[16]

1.3. “Primitive accumulation” (dispossession)

The simplified description of capital accumulation presented above is of a self-contained process which presupposes the existence of capital but doesn’t explain how it got started in the first place. In an allusion to a phrase used by Adam Smith, Marx referred to the basis of capitalism, the initial concentration of property and creation of propertyless workers, as “so-called primitive accumulation” which “is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.”^[17] “Primitive accumulation” is a rather unfortunate but standard English translation of ursprünglich Akkumulation, “original accumulation.”

But as Marx pointed out, the peaceful account of primitive accumulation consisting of frugal industrialists employing liberated peasants told by the bourgeois economists of his time (and ours) is only half of the history. The other half — the story of how peasants are brutally forced off of the lands and out of the homes which provide their sustenance, how skilled artisans are alternately displaced by machines and then used as machines — in short the story of how a sufficient workforce for a nascent capitalism can be assembled by so thoroughly stripping individuals of their possessions and their relationships on such a wide scale that it becomes possible to hound them into factories, mines, and farms to work for wages — is left untold. “And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.”^[18]

1.4. The two-stroke engine of accumulation

To recapitulate: the basic everyday mechanism of capitalist accumulation is wage work which is experienced by most people in capitalist society as the normal workday, by the paycheck stub and the loan statement (or by the stress of unemployment and the loan statement). Normal accumulation is the extraction of profit from those people already integrated into the capitalist system. Primitive accumulation, on the other hand, is direct dispossession, usually carried out by state-sponsored violence. Examples of primitive accumulation which are happening somewhere today include peasants and indigenous peoples being forced off of their lands, foreclosures on homes, and asset forfeiture processes (like those enforced as part of America’s racialized “war on drugs”). Primitive accumulation directly extracts wealth through the theft of resources, but more importantly it produces propertyless people who can then be integrated (or further integrated) into the capitalist system of wage work (or prison slave work), or into the debt-bound ranks of the wage-suppressing unemployed.

Some Marxist descriptions of capitalism treat primitive accumulation as a historical process which got capitalism started in a given region but which no longer plays a role in its reproduction. Such views reflect the fact that in Capital Marx was mostly concerned with critiquing capitalist production on its own terms. Toward that end he theorized the employee-employer relationship itself as a market transaction where the employees' ability to do work is sold to employers as a commodity called ‘labour-power.’ From that distinguishing transaction, where the worker’s labour-power becomes the unique commodity that can produce more value than it costs, he demonstrated how capitalist exploitation and accumulation takes place even in an ideal (fair and free) market where “all commodities, including labour-power, are bought and sold at their full value”^[19] In such an idealized pre-existing market, profit is extracted and re-invested through the normal mechanism of waged exploitation, without the need for further dispossession. Correspondingly, Marx’s description of primitive accumulation is largely relegated to the short eighth (and last) part of the first volume of Capital (where it deals mainly with England and English enclosures as representative of the “classic” process by which capitalism emerged out of feudalism in Western Europe).

However, trying to describe capitalism without acknowledging the role of ongoing primitive accumulation is like trying to describe the action of a two-stroke engine based on its driven downstroke alone while only vaguely acknowledging that the upstroke, which brings fresh fuel into the cylinder to be compressed, must have occurred some time in the past. In fact the upstroke is not only the prerequisite of the downstroke, it is also its consequent. The piston’s own momentum, constrained by the geometry of its linkage to the crankshaft, carries it back up on every cycle causing both strokes to repeat until the supply of fuel is exhausted or a catastrophic mechanical failure occurs.^[20]

The process of capitalist accumulation and expansion, carried on according to its own momentum and constraints, similarly consists of two self-propagating steps:

Dispossession
Integration & [re-]exploitation

1.5. Crises and fixes

The two-stroke engine of accumulation works so well that it periodically suffers from so-called crises of overaccumulation, a victim of its own success. When the extraction of surplus-value outpaces the demand for the resulting capital, investors have trouble finding profitable investments and existing productive assets lose their value. Likewise, when production of consumer goods outpaces demand, markets become flooded with products which nobody wants or can afford to buy. When investments in technology lead to increased automation at a rate which outpaces growth, the result is more layoffs than new jobs which further exacerbates the problem of overproduction (as unemployed people can afford even fewer commodities).

Taken together, capitalist crises — and the history of capitalism as recorded in the headlines of the popular press is a series of booms followed by gluts, recessions, mass layoffs, market crashes, and depressions — are characterized by investors who have money they can’t profitably invest, unemployed workers who can’t find work at a wage to live on, and markets full of abundant goods which people don’t need or which needy people can’t afford.

In The New Imperialism David Harvey describes two methods or “fixes” to which investors and policymakers can turn in order to temporarily stave off the effects of overaccumulation. A “temporal fix” seeks to maintain profit rates by investing excess capital into long-term (and large scale) projects such as expenditures on social services, education, research & development, and infrastructure. A “spatial fix” seeks a renewed rate of profit by extending geographically: investing in developing parts of the world and gaining access to new markets and pools of cheap workers in parts of the world where people are not already fully integrated into the labour market — often by displacing subsistence farmers and finding ways to extract more surplus-value from the self- or pseudo-employed participants in the informal economies of developing regions.^[21]

These spatio-temporal fixes, as Harvey calls them, can be roughly mapped to the two-steps of capitalist accumulation: spatial fixes, by which capitalism extends itself geographically, depend on the availability of a dispossessed workforce to be employed by exported capital and correspond to the first step (“dispossession”); temporal fixes, which are merely instances of usual capitalist exploitation and re-investment intensified in time, correspond to the second step (“exploitation”). Taken together, spatio-temporal fixes allow capitalism to expand through what Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession,” a term chosen to emphasize the ongoing nature of what Marx called primitive accumulation expanded to include:

“the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations […]; conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive private property rights (most spectacularly represented by China); suppression of rights to the commons; commodification of labour power and the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption; colonial, neocolonial, and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources); monetization of exchange and taxation, particularly of land; the slave trade (which continues particularly in the sex industry); and usury, the national debt and, most devastating of all, the use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession. The state, with its monopoly of violence and definitions of legality, plays a crucial role in both backing and promoting these processes.”^[22]

Such a mapping emphasizes an extensive (spatial fixes, dispossession) and intensive (temporal fixes, regular capitalist exploitation) interpretation of the two steps of accumulation which, taken in combination, give rise to the neoliberal forms of primitive accumulation noted by Harvey. Another extensive-intensive pair which can similarly be analyzed in terms of capitalist accumulation is that of globalism and nationalism: the play of transnational corporations, banks, and governing bodies with that of the chauvinism of nation-states. These dynamics define capitalism’s shape at the global scale: imperialism.

1.6. Imperialism and war

Marx died in 1883, decades before the Great War of the twentieth century, but he was aware that capitalism’s origin in slavery and colonialism meant a future in world war:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. Hard on their heels follows the commercial war of the European nations, which has the globe as its battlefield.^[23]

The first great period of capitalist imperialism, during which the industrial powers extended and divvied up their colonial holdings according to their respective military power, emerged at the end of the Nineteenth century and eventually led to the world wars of the twentieth century. In his influential booklet which summarized several characteristics of the capitalist imperialism of that time, Lenin noted the increasing role of financialization in international relations — “The world has become divided into a handful of usurer states and a vast majority of debtor states” — a trend which was resumed in the 1970s as a characteristic feature of neoliberalism after capital accumulation outgrew the “fixes” provided by the wars and the postwar New Deal.

Lenin called his book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, but for Hannah Arendt “Imperialism must be considered the first stage in political rule of the bourgeoisie rather than the last stage of capitalism.”^[24] Unlike classical Marxism, Arendt was not preoccupied with the internal economic laws of capitalism and considered openly-violent primitive accumulation, not the peaceful appearance of wage labour, to be the true ideal toward which capitalism had always striven and which was fulfilled in imperialism:

The bourgeoisie’s empty desire to have money beget money as men beget men had remained an ugly dream so long as money had to go the long way of investment in production; not money had begotten money, but men had made things and money. The secret of the new happy fulfillment was precisely that economic laws no longer stood in the way of the greed of the owning classes. Money could finally beget money because power, with complete disregard for all laws — economic as well as ethical — could appropriate wealth. Only when exported money succeeded in stimulating the export of power could it accomplish its owners' designs. Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital.^[25]

Imperialist adventures allowed capital to escape its cloak of “voluntary” wage work and economic neutrality, at least in the distant lands it conquered, and step to its place as a more effective if naked system of exploitation. Investing in war machines to protect international business concerns (and to pulverize fixed capital in faraway places, which can then be profitably re-built at government-contractor rates) is simultaneously a temporal and spatial fix, hence the continued importance of the military-industrial complex in sustaining capitalist profit.

“Globalization” (or “globalism”) when used in a positive connotation today is usually a euphemism for neoliberal imperialism which carries with it optimistic visions of lasting trade-facilitated peace among nations, enough credit to smooth over crises, and the cosmopolitan freedom to transcend borders. Similar hopes were attached to the imperialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before they disappeared in depression, world wars, and holocaust. Capitalist globalization does not harmonize national interests; it harnesses them for the cause of war. As Arendt noted in her description of imperialism (as a preparatory step toward fascist totalitarianism), “In theory, there is an abyss between nationalism and imperialism; in practice, it can and has been bridged by tribal nationalism and outright racism.”^[26]

The US invasion of Iraq during the Persian Gulf War of 1990-1991 shattered any lingering hopes that the neoliberal version of imperialism could be conducted without the use of direct military force (or at least of ground troops). But of course war and financialization are not at odds with each other — they complement each other, and usurer states pursue their interests with both tools.^[27]

While coalition forces were bombarding military and civilian infrastructure in Iraq, negotiations were already underway between Canada, the United States, and Mexico regarding the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), an iconic piece of globalist legislation drafted under the first Bush administration and signed into US law at the beginning of the Clinton administration. As part of its preparations for joining NAFTA, the Mexican government implemented a series of neoliberal reforms including the abolition of protections against the privatization of communal land resulting in the removal of campesinos from their land and into wage work — a clear example of ongoing primitive accumulation.

The day NAFTA went into effect on January 1, 1994, a leftist revolutionary group in Chiapas, Mexico, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, rose up in open insurrection against the government. Over two decades later the Zapatistas still maintain autonomous communities in Chiapas which exist in resistance to the Mexican state and perhaps more emphatically to the incursions of neoliberal globalization. Subcomandante Marcos, the now-retired spokespersona for the Zapatista movement, has described the neoliberal policies of globalization as the Fourth World War (succeeding the Cold War), “a new war for the conquest of territory.” But, he continues, “while neoliberalism is pursuing its war, groups of protesters, kernels of rebels, are forming throughout the planet. The empire of financiers with full pockets confronts the rebellion of pockets of resistance”:

Neoliberalism attempts to subjugate millions of beings, and seeks to rid itself of all those who have no place in its new ordering of the world. But these “disposable” people are in revolt. Women, children, old people, young people, indigenous peoples, ecological militants, homosexuals, lesbians, HIV activists, workers, and all those who upset the ordered progress of the new world system and who organise and are in struggle. Resistance is being woven by those who are excluded from “modernity”.^[28]

Much of the subsequent grassroots opposition to neoliberalism during the 1990s was also from the left. In 1999 during a meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle, anti-globalization protesters — environmentalists, anarchists, and labour union members — dramatically overwhelmed police to shut down the meeting and helped to make “WTO” and “globalization” household words in America.

Some of the rhetoric in Subcomandante Marcos’s essay on the Fourth World War (and elsewhere) including his romantic view of culture and national identity, his bemoaning of the European Union as the ruin of European civilization, his warnings about the globalist “new world order,” and his resentment of modernity is almost indistinguishable from the anti-globalization talking points of right-wing populism. But leftists, as champions of internationalism, are not literally against globalization in the etymological sense of the word. For that reason many activists prefer labels like “alter-globalization” to “anti-globalization.” This distinction has become very important now that right-wing and nationalist movements often predominate the anti-globalization discourse.

Everywhere, but especially in countries being plundered by neoliberal policy, not only are racial and gender hierarchies being reformed to better serve capitalism, but oppressed groups continue to fight for their own liberation. The result is the loss of old local and familial forms of privilege, wealth, and exploitation at both ends — whisked out to financial centers or destroyed by feminists and other progressive reformers. In many of these places the right-wing resistance to globalization — including Islamacist militants, populist demagogues, and a resurgence of various decentralized fascist and far-right revolutionary groups — have displaced leftist movements as the dominant forces challenging the global expansion of capitalism. As one essayist has pointed out, it is an unfortunate fact that today the world’s most successful “anti-imperialists” are “a motley assortment of authoritarian regimes, right-wing populists, local capitalists trying to negotiate a piece of the action, religious fundamentalists, warlords and gangsters.”^[29]

This resentful patriarchal revolt against globalism and social progress has been slowly building even in Western countries. David Harvey’s description of the nationalist backlash to neoliberalism in America during the 80s and 90s illustrates how the nationalist phenomena that consolidated around President Trump has been forming for decades:

Many elements in the middle classes took to the defence of territory, nation, and tradition as a way to arm themselves against a predatory neoliberal capitalism. They sought to mobilize the territorial logic of power to shield them from the effects of predatory capital. The racism and nationalism that had once bound nation-state and empire together re-emerged at the petty bourgeois and working-class level as a weapon to organize against the cosmopolitanism of finance capital. Since blaming the problems on immigrants was a convenient diversion for elite interests, exclusionary politics based on race, ethnicity, and religion flourished, particularly in Europe where neo-fascist movements began to garner considerable popular support. […] The prevailing mood of ‘helplessness and anxiety’ was conducive to ‘the rise of a new brand of populist politician’ and this could ‘easily turn into revolt’.^[30]

Now, nearly twenty-five years after NAFTA and the Zapatista uprising, eighteen years after the Battle in Seattle, fifteen years after the 9/11 terror attacks carried out by anti-Western Islamicists and the invasion of Afghanistan by the United States (a war which has been waged for over 16 years, twice as long as the Vietnam War), thirteen years after the catastrophic second invasion of Iraq by the United States, and ten years after the 2007 financial crises, the racist and nationalist reactions noted by Harvey have re-emerged more clearly than ever. The 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK and the election of Trump in the US signal the arrival to the Anglosphere of a forceful right-wing populism driven by a patriarchal reaction against globalization.

Another important distinction, which has been made by J. Sakai, is to clarify that this anti-imperialist brand of fascism “is anti-bourgeois but not anti-capitalist.”^[31] While fascists can (and often do) adopt the language, analysis, and tactics of the left,^[32] they can only apply them in a superficial manner to the distant elites and liberal billionaires who encroach on what fascists perceive as their rightful means of exploitation. The old shallow trope of the good, productive industrial capitalist versus the evil, parasitic financial or merchant capitalist is the extent of the fascist critique of capitalism. Even with slogans couched in anti-capitalist or pro-worker rhetoric most fascists can’t bring themselves to offer an actual economic critique but instead malign the global bourgeoisie in terms of an imagined Jewish conspiracy. Because if fascists were to critique the engine of capitalism itself they would be undermining the very system of exploitation they hope to command.

One way imperialism is bridged to and feeds off of nationalism can be seen at work in the Trump administration which rode to power by fomenting nationalist and racist sentiment and soon shifted toward militarism and likely increased conflict (or outright war) with rival imperialists. Immediately after Trump’s election, the Democratic Party (representing the only viable political opposition to Trump) began a concerted campaign of anti-Russian propaganda using almost every media outlet available in the country. As usual, even during times of potentially great political upheaval, on the issue of imperialism and war the liberal parties are united.

1.7. Migrant work

Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus the creation of the physical conditions of exchange — of the means of communication and transport — the annihilation of space by time — becomes an extraordinary necessity for it.

— Karl Marx
Grundrisse

Owing to the combined efforts of ongoing primitive accumulation and war, one of the chief products of global capitalist accumulation is displaced people. The number of international migrants was estimated to be 258 million people in 2017 (up from 173 million in 2000), over 10% of whom are refugees or asylum seekers.^[33] As climate change threatens to exacerbate wars and famines, the near future may dwarf the already unprecedented number of refugees seeking temporary shelter and new homes today.

The Syrian Civil War is currently the most active proxy theatre for the conflict between the United States and Russia (as rival imperialists), but it is also the center of the global conflict between extreme right-wing anti-globalization militants like ISIS and socialist revolutionaries defending Rojava. (This situation is reminiscent in many ways of the Spanish Civil War, a proxy war between the USSR and Nazi Germany and also between Spanish fascists and the socialist revolutionaries in Catalonia.) Since 2011, over 6 million people have fled Syria as refugees, and another 6 million are displaced (many living in camps) within its borders.^[34]

In terms of scale, nothing in human history compares to the mass migration of peasants triggered by the ongoing industrialization and urbanization of China. The liberalization of China’s economy under Deng Xiaoping occurred contemporaneously with the rise of Western neoliberalism with similar aims and effects. A 2016 survey by China’s National Bureau of Statistics puts the number of long-distance migrant workers, typically rural villagers looking for jobs in cities, at over 168 million (about 45% of whom have migrated to a new province).^[35] A recent report indicates that the national government’s urbanization plan includes the relocation, forced if necessary, of a further 250 million rural residents to cities by 2025.^[36]

The neoliberal and NAFTA-related reforms in Mexico not only allowed traditionally communal plots of land (ejidos) to be privatized, but they also flooded the Mexican markets with subsidized corn and pork from the United States. The result was the demise of much of the country’s small-scale farm industry sending millions of rural Mexicans north to find work in the sprawling maquiladora factories near the border or to seek agricultural and domestic work in the United States. Between 1990 and 2007 (net migration has stabilized near zero following the recession) a net total of more than 8 million Mexicans migrated to the United States (almost 75% crossing the border without authorization).^[37] Between 1998 and 2013 a total of 6,029 deceased migrants were found near the Mexican border by the United States Border Patrol (with close to 300 bodies being found per year since the year 2000). The actual number of migrants who die crossing the US-Mexico border is likely much higher, as the Border Patrol does not count deaths that occur on the Mexican side of the border, nor do the numbers reflect remains which go undiscovered in the desert.^[38]

The Arizona-based humanitarian group called No More Deaths, which works to raise awareness of the dangers faced by migrants as well as to provide direct aid to migrants and document abuses by law enforcement, has identified several practices of the Border Patrol (whose official motto is “Honor First”) which “further increase the risk of death in the desert.” Those practices include: intentionally funneling migrants to deadly regions, impeding volunteer search and rescue operations, and vandalizing food and water drops left on migrant trails. No More Deaths has also documented abuse of migrants in Border Patrol custody, concluding in a report based on thousands of interviews with detainees, “It is clear that instances of mistreatment and abuse in Border Patrol custody are not aberrational. Rather, they reflect common practice for an agency that is part of the largest federal law enforcement body in the country. Many of them plainly meet the definition of torture under international law.”^[39]

Two reports based on Freedom of Information Act requests were published in 2018 which corroborate much of the No More Deaths interviews alleging widespread abuse of detainees held by the Obama-era Department of Homeland Security agencies (Customs and Border Protection (CBP) & Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)). One report on mistreatment faced by unaccompanied minor migrants based on thousands of pages of reports obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union from the Department of Homeland Security Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) found that “CBP officials regularly use force on children when such force is not objectively reasonable or necessary,” including the unnecessary use of Tasers as well as verbal abuse including death threats. The report concludes that “The abuse is not limited to one state, sector, station, or group of officials— rather, the CRCL documents reflect misconduct throughout the southwest, from California to Texas, at ports of entry and in the interior of the United States, by CBP and by Border Patrol.”^[40]

The second report, by The Intercept, examined 1,224 complaints of sexual abuse filed between 2010 and September 2017 by detainees in ICE custody which “suggest that sexual assault and harassment in immigration detention are not only widespread but systemic, and enabled by an agency that regularly fails to hold itself accountable.” In over 70 percent of the complaints, an officer was alleged to be the perpetrator and/or a witness. The Department of Homeland Security was only able to provide documentation of 43 investigations (an investigation rate of less than 4 percent).^[41] I have found no reports of Homeland Security officials who have been indicted for crimes committed against children or other detainees in their care, but several volunteers with No More Deaths have been arrested and charged with federal crimes related to providing food, water, and shelter to undocumented immigrants.^[42]

The Trump administration seems intent on continuing the inhumane immigration enforcement against refugees and other migrants at the southern border. Shortly after Trump took office, ICE and federal prosecutors began bringing more criminal charges against parents who entered the country without authorization, resulting in hundreds of children being taken into state custody.^[43] In April 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered ICE to implement a “zero tolerance” policy, institutionalizing the revanchist family separation policy — reportedly architected by senior Trump policy advisor Stephen Miller^[44] — as a means to punish and dissuade migrant families (including asylum seekers). Within months, reports and photographs of the thousands of children separated from their families and herded into chain-link cages in internment camps mobilized a broad-based protest movement nationally and internationally, with some protesters utilizing occupy-style tactics to blockade ICE offices in several major American cities. Because of the public outrage, Trump was forced to sign an executive order that requires “detaining alien families together where appropriate and consistent with law and available resources.”^[45]

The maquiladora system in Mexico consists of over 5,000 factories owned by multinational corporations in special economic zones (mostly near the United States border) where raw materials are imported duty-free (often from the United States), processed by nearly two million Mexican workers (historically, mostly young women) earning low wages (easily a tenth of the cost of American workers) in stressful and dangerous working conditions. The finished products are exported under reduced tariffs back to the United States.^[46]

In short, the maquiladoras are desert sites of industrial wage slavery which hold millions of Mexican families in poverty, daily grinding them in production lines to extract another ten hours of their lives to be packaged up and shipped as profits back to wealthy shareholders in the United States, Europe, and Japan. The entire system, from the primitive accumulation of indigenous farmlands to the exploitation of urban labour in the factories, provides several convenient fixes for the overaccumulation of American capital:

the export of excess agricultural goods and raw industrial products to Mexican markets
the export of excess capital as investments in maquiladora plants
the import of wage-suppressing and easily exploitable labour to the American workforce
the import of cheap finished products for American consumers

A secondary benefit to the United States' capitalist class is achieved through what No More Deaths calls dispossession through deportation: migrants who are captured by U.S. border enforcement agents often have their belongings (including money) confiscated (in 5% of observed cases via direct theft by individual agents) before they are deported. This is not only a source of direct accumulation (“When Department of Homeland Security protocols are followed, much of the money goes to a CBP suspense account then eventually ends up in the U.S. Treasury fund. Many others also siphon money along the way including MoneyGram, prison profiteers such as prepaid debit card companies like NUMI Financial, and individual agents, as illustrated by cases of direct theft”), but more significantly works as an engine of primitive accumulation producing an ever more propertyless and desperate population vulnerable to a predatory economic system.^[47]

It is worth noting that for decades nativists and wage-jealous white workers in the United States have loudly complained about the porous southern border, but their concerns were rarely reflected in policy which instead maintained whatever level of control at the border was deemed necessary to steer wages and keep illegal immigrants simultaneously abundant and vulnerable for the benefit of employers. It was not until recent years, when net migration from Mexico has been zero or negative, conditions which make controlling unauthorized immigration much less important to economic interests, that the strict anti-immigrant proponents (as typified by the Trump presidency) have gained influence. This dynamic demonstrates that, in the United States, racism remains subservient to and must wait its turn behind the needs of capital.

Unlike what its apologists claim, neoliberal globalization does not provide greater freedom to travel for most people. “This is a travesty of globalization — a world without borders to everything and everyone except for working people.”^[48] Capital is free to cross borders in search of cheaper labour to exploit, but people are stopped, questioned, searched, detained, interned, enslaved, turned back, smuggled, drowned, lost, starved, shot, hunted down, rounded up, deported, “and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored.”

As the rise of microcredit at the periphery was mirrored by aggressive subprime lending in the urban centers, so is migration in the periphery mirrored by thousands of homeless people living in the urban centers of capitalism. The refugee camp at the border has a counterpart in the homeless camp in the city park. One study in the United States counted 564,708 people sleeping outside, in emergency shelters, or in transitional housing on a winter night in 2015. About 15% of those counted were chronically homeless, including over 13,000 members of chronically homeless families.^[49]

Like migrant workers, homeless workers (including the unemployed) are harassed and herded by police. An increasing number of cities in the United States have passed legislation making it illegal for homeless people, who have nowhere else to be, to perform life-sustaining acts — eating, sleeping, urinating, defecating, sheltering — in public.^[50] The epigraph to this section has Marx describing advances in technology which connect people over ever further geographic distances as “the annihilation of space by time.” The radical geographer Don Mitchell has described the criminalization of homelessness as an example of another way in which capitalism annihilates space:

In city after city concerned with ‘livability,’ with, in other words, making urban centers attractive to both footloose capital and to the footloose middle classes, politicians and managers of the new economy in the late 1980s and early 1990s have turned to what could be called ‘the annihilation of space by law.’ That is, they have turned to a legal remedy that seeks to cleanse the streets of those left behind by globalization and other secular changes in the economy by simply erasing the spaces in which they must live.^[51]

The short-sighted interests of capitalism and capitalists are best served by the propertyless workers it produces when those workers are relatively immobile and stuck competing for low wages. The policing, border regimes, and other mechanisms of control set around migrants and vagrants to keep them simultaneously homeless yet constrained work to satisfy those interests.

John Smith, author of Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century, has argued that driving wages even below the free-market value dealt with by Marx’s theory of exploitation — what Smith therefore refers to as “super exploitation” — through the dislocation and control of workers in developing countries has become the predominant method of increasing the surplus-value extracted from workers under global capitalism. “By uprooting hundreds of millions of workers and farmers in southern nations from their ties to the land and their jobs in protected national industries, neoliberal capitalism has accelerated the expansion of a vast pool of super-exploitable labor.”^[52]

But while the scale of the global proletariat in the twenty-first century may be unprecedented, capitalism has never operated according to the free labour market it has imagined for itself. As the anthropologist David Graeber has noted:

the history of capitalism has been a series of attempts to solve the problem of worker mobility—hence the endless elaboration of institutions like indenture, slavery, coolie systems, contract workers, guest workers, innumerable forms of border control—since, if the system ever really came close to its own fantasy version of itself, in which workers were free to hire on and quit their work wherever and whenever they wanted, the entire system would collapse. It’s for precisely this reason that the one most consistent demand put forward by the radical elements in the globalization movement—from the Italian Autonomists to North American anarchists—has always been global freedom of movement, ‘real globalization,’ the destruction of borders, a general tearing down of walls.^[53]

Marxists (following Marx himself) tend to view capitalism as a progressive development, as a powerful force of socialization and production. The effects of this stance can be seen in the Leninist and Stalinist industrialization programs conducted in the USSR and elsewhere which intentionally initiated processes of primitive accumulation and succeeded in reproducing, within a compressed time frame, both the horrors and the advances in technology which accompanied the more organic rise of capitalism in sixteenth-century Europe. Under this Marxist influence, socialism is sometimes reduced to a program of development, following Lenin’s own rather caricatured formulation that “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.”^[54] In the struggles against neoliberal capitalism, Marxists as advocates of progressive primitive accumulation have sometimes found themselves opposed to indigenous groups and other anti-capitalists who are often more concerned with preserving tradition and livelihoods in the face of the encroaching threat of capitalist development than with accelerating their own obsolescence.

David Harvey does an admirable job of describing and attempting to navigate these complications in The New Imperialism.^[55] However, he narrowly skirts the longstanding Marxist predilection of presenting capitalism as a more beneficial force than it is. In his attempt at distinguishing between progressive and destructive forms of accumulation by dispossession, he notes that the position of women has been enhanced by factory work and that “Faced with the choice of sticking with industrial labour or returning to rural impoverishment, many within the new proletariat seem to express a strong preference for the former.”^[56] Similar sentiment, formulated less carefully and more crassly as something like “sweatshops are good for the poor,” expresses a frequent talking point of neoliberal apologists. Even if it were true, it would only be true by an implicit assumption that there is no alternative to capitalism (a literal Thatcherite slogan) or by jumping from ‘best possible’ option to ‘good’ option without justification, a naturalistic fallacy.^[57]

Factories are not completely lacking in social benefits, and the capitalist patriarchy of the factory can offer opportunities for independence many girls (especially) are not given in the feudal patriarchy of their villages. But it is likely not true in general that people prefer industrial impoverishment to rural impoverishment, at least not until rural subsistence becomes an impossibility due to privatization and the ensuing pressure to buy commodities, pay rent, and make credit payments. A recent randomized study conducted in Ethiopia which provided industrial jobs to participants (mostly young women who had expressed interest in such work) and then tracked them over the course of one year found that 77% quit their jobs and returned to informal work within that time: “these young people used low-skill industrial jobs more as a safety net than a long-term job, and […] self-employment and informal work were typically preferred to, and more profitable than, industrial jobs, at least when people had access to capital.”^[58] That young women do not prefer to leave their family life to work unpleasant, dangerous, degrading, alienating, low-paying industrial jobs with long hours would be surprising only to a liberal (or perhaps Marxist) economist, but it is such unlikely preferences that are nevertheless repeatedly claimed in defense of industrialization.

The study also found that people with the means to become self-employed were usually successful at avoiding industrial work, which shines a hopeful light on microfinance and its entrepreneurial aims. But the threat remains for microfinanced work-from-home schemes (often targeted at housewives who need 'supplemental’ income) to become simply cheaper ways to [super]exploit rural poor without the overhead of a factory. An important detail when considering the Ethiopia study is that it was evidently conducted at a time when industrial wages in Ethiopia were not yet competitive with the informal sector, which explains why the participants were able to quit their jobs so easily. In the report, the researchers who conducted the study naively wonder why the firms they worked with did not try to combat turnover by paying higher wages. But of course factory owners know enough about maximizing profit to rely on subsidized non-market, coercive forces whenever they can. And as we’ve seen, the politics of global capitalism are characterized by policies that allow and encourage accumulation by dispossession — enclosing and privatizing traditional farmland, crushing informal local markets with cheap imported goods, saddling the under-employed with expensive debt, erecting border controls to prevent migrants from finding better conditions elsewhere. Factory owners in places like Ethiopia can count these policies to provide continued and increasingly reliable access to cheap labour without needing to pay a reasonable wage (and when workers then “choose” those jobs rather than starving in the rubble of the traditional and informal economies, we will hear again about how sweatshops are actually feminist social programs which are good for the poor).

The orthodox Marxist optimism toward capitalism and its violence is not shared by more libertarian socialist traditions. The anarchists and autonomist Marxists mentioned by Graeber in the above quotation, for example, view capitalism as the failure to abolish earlier class societies rather than as a necessary step toward that goal.^[59] Especially relevant to this essay are the autonomist critiques, with roots in the feminist struggles of the 1970s, which expand Marxian categories beyond the factory to provide a class-conscious understanding of housework and reproduction. As Silvia Federici wrote in the introduction to Caliban and the Witch, her book exploring the role and persecution of women during the rise of capitalism, “Marx could never have presumed that capitalism paves the way to human liberation had he looked at its history from the viewpoint of women.”^[60]

2. Housework

One could, even, start from the belated recognition of the importance of women’s labor to reimagine Marxist categories in general, to recognize that what we call “domestic” or even “reproductive” labor, the labor of creating people and social relations, has always been the most important form of human endeavor in any society, and that the creation of wheat, socks, and petrochemicals always merely a means to that end, and that—what’s more—most human societies have been perfectly well aware of this. One of the more peculiar features of capitalism is that it is not—that as an ideology, it encourages us to see the production of commodities as the primary business of human existence, and the mutual fashioning of human beings as somehow secondary.

— David Graeber
“The Sadness of Post-Workerism”

2.1. Genesis

The capital in capitalism derives from the Latin root caput, meaning “head” as in “head of livestock.” The words cattle and chattel share that etymology and were once also used as general terms for movable property or wealth. The derivation makes sense: The important attribute of animals as a type of property is that they are productive: barring a catastrophe, an owner of livestock can expect the number of heads they own to increase with time as the animals reproduce; and since the rate of births will be roughly proportional to the total number of animals, the rate of increase will be exponential.

From an investor’s point-of-view, modern capital is a generalization of livestock which works on identical principles. An investor makes an investment, their invested money goes forth and produces additional value (as if reproducing on its own), and it then returns to the investor along with their share of the increase. But things are very different from the workers' point-of-view from whence capital does nothing productive on its own. It is only by applying human labour that capital can be made to produce wealth. And that capital, in the form of tools and other material inputs, was itself created or mined by workers. In turn, much of the newly created value will be taken by owners and re-invested into more capital to be worked. “Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”^[61]

Capital does not reproduce autonomously like livestock, but people do. All economic wealth is the result of human labour, and all labourers are the result of the arduous work of human reproduction. Tracing this relation backwards reveals a motive for some of the most horrific organizing forces in our species' history: to control humans is to control the production of wealth, and to control young women is to control future, exponentially increasing wealth. From these two dynamics derive the various forms of exploitation and patriarchy as they’ve been invented and adapted by societies around the planet over the millennia.

The ancient Israelites had a myth about the origin of civilization: when the first human couple first disobeyed God, they were expelled from paradise to live a life characterized by wearing clothes, agriculture, the enduring anxiety of death, moral knowledge, separation from the divine, and most significantly to our current discussion, the sexual division of labour. In the version of the narrative recorded in Genesis 3, God says to the man:

cursed is the ground because of you;
    in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
[…]
By the sweat of your face
    you shall eat bread

Class societies which are built on some form of economic exploitation have discovered a partial “solution” to this curse: make most people do extra work so that a small parasitic class may have bread for free. In pre-capitalist societies, these class distinctions are clear: everyone knows the master appropriates what the slave produces. Capitalism doesn’t change the fact that economic wealth is created by human labour, of course, or that bread must be bought with somebody’s sweat. But the extraordinary thing about capitalism is the degree to which it manages to obscure such a basic fact. The great innovation of wage labour is that it hides the underlying exploitation with the illusion of a voluntary and equal exchange of work for money.^[62] The idea that it is money rather than work that produces wealth or that investors play a role equal (or even primary) to workers in the production process is always current in the ideology of capitalist societies. It wasn’t until Marx articulated his theories in the middle of the nineteenth century that philosophy could even offer a clear look behind the appearances of the wage system to reveal how profit is the result of paying workers less than what they produce, a tax cleverly hidden and extracted by paying as wages what labour costs rather than the full value it produces.

But to the woman in the myth, God gave this curse:

I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing;
    in pain you shall bring forth children,
yet your desire shall be for your husband,
    and he shall rule over you.

The Hebrew word rendered in the above passages as both “toil” for the man and “pangs” for the woman is 'itstsabown (עצבון) meaning “worrisomeness, i.e. labor or pain: sorrow, toil.”^[63] A translation which preserves the repeated word and so the generalization across the division of labour would have been to use in both verses the English word labour which has historically been used to describe specifically both the pain of tilling the ground and of childbirth. But 'itstsabown seems to be even more general than labour, indicating mental anguish as well as physical pain and is specific to neither manual labour nor childbirth. The word rendered “pain” in the next part of the line directed to the woman (“in pain you shall bring forth children”) is 'etseb (עצב), from the same root as 'itstsabown and with an almost synonymous meaning (in modern Hebrew it means “sadness”).^[64]

A translation of the first lines which follows the underlying Hebrew more literally than most other English versions (taking the above and other lexical considerations into account) is provided by biblical scholar and archaeologist Carol Meyers:

I will greatly increase your toil and your pregnancies;
(Along) with travail you shall give birth to children.^[65]

Meyers uses this translation to argue her thesis that the pronouncement is fitting to the conditions of an emerging Israelite civilization during the early Iron Age (around 1200 BCE) when maintaining an existence in the thorny Canaan highlands would have given rise to an anxiety about underpopulation and the demand for women to contribute significantly to both food production as well as to caring for children. She also observes that though the division of labour and balance of power between the sexes varies greatly across societies, “The continuum of possible relative contributions of males and females to societal chores can be correlated with the status of women. […] Within certain parameters, societies in which women enjoy relatively high status are those in which women bear a quantitatively large portion of the roles which comprise the productive labor of the community.”^[66]

In other words, according to the anthropological model espoused by Meyers, when women as a class perform both their maternal duties and contribute significantly to food production they enjoy a higher social status. However, because women are preoccupied with their pregnancies and domestic chores, they can never contribute to the material needs of society as much as men can (Meyers gives a maximum estimate of 60%:40% man:woman balance of contributions) so “women are never valued as a class more than men.”^[67]

But as myth the etiological insight offered by the Genesis account is far more general than the specific circumstances in which it may have been developed. The Biblical account of woman’s daily suffering, especially clear in Meyers' translation, is linked to her biological specialization for childbirth beyond its specific, periodic pains. Among the general pains of childbirth is the domestic work it entails according to cultural norms. In most societies this work has included not only giving birth and caring for infants, but washing, preparing food, healing, making clothing, and gardening for the entire family. As a corollary, because women are tied to the home by their work, the tasks that must be done in the distant fields and forests — including farming, hunting, and fighting — traditionally fell to men for which toiling in the cursed land of the myth is a stand-in.

As in the case of the man’s plight to work the ground (which, as noted, can be seen as a consequent of the woman’s own plight), the general trajectory of human civilization has evolved from the configuration described in the myth — in which women suffer the pain of child birth and the bulk of the subsequent care work upon which all societies depend while at the same time being rendered subservient to their husbands — to develop versions which further intensify and mystify the suffering. This basic pattern in which women work twice and are valued less, a cross-cultural fact of modern societies and described by the early Hebrews as an originating characteristic of civilization, is the ancient foundation upon which today’s capitalism has been built.

Nineteenth-century anthropologists developed their own myths of the origins of family and women’s oppression. For several decades into the twentieth century, the ideas of Lewis Henry Morgan, a pioneering American ethnologist, became current in both America and the United Kingdom. Through his studies of the matrilineally-organized Iroquois tribes in New York, especially their kinship terminology which he believed held clues to their prehistoric kinship system, Morgan developed a theory of social evolution in which he attempted to reconstruct the universal family forms adopted by human societies as they advanced through historical stages of technological development. Morgan published the most complete version of his theory in 1877 as Ancient Society.

Marx and Engels considered Ancient Society to be an independent development and confirmation of their own materialist conception of history including the origin of class antagonism itself: “The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male. […] It is the cellular form of civilized society in which the nature of the oppositions and contradictions fully active in that society can be already studied.”^[68] After Marx’s death, Engels set out to write a book to summarize Morgan’s findings and synthesize them with Marx’s economic social theory which was published in 1884 as The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

The most salient feature of Morgan’s conjectured history of kinship groups, as summarized by Engels, is that early societies were built around matrilineal families and matrilocal, communal households where women enjoyed high social status due to their important reproductive role and could count on the solidarity of their sisters and brothers in any dispute with a visiting husband. But then the gradual fall from this pre-pastoral Eden: With “the introduction of cattle breeding, metalworking, weaving and, lastly, agriculture,” it became possible to produce a sizable surplus of wealth.^[69] These new methods of production, generally controlled by men, allowed old forms of social obligation to be replaced by purchase, made slavery useful on a wide scale and war profitable for the first time, and provided an impulse to convert the clan’s wealth into private property of the family while replacing matrilineal with patrilineal reckoning of descent.

The success of this patriarchal revolution dissolved the primitive communism of the matrilineal clans and gave rise to varying degrees of what Engels called the monogamous family which “is based on the supremacy of the man,” who alone has the right to divorce. The express aim of the monogamous family is “to produce children of undisputed paternity; such paternity is demanded because these children are later to come into their father’s property as his natural heirs.” The shift to a society composed of monogamous families was, in Engels' famous words, “the world-historical defeat of the female sex.”^[70]

Some modern anthropologists accept matrilineal primacy and primitive communism, but other particulars are now known to be incorrect and the overall Morgan-Engels scheme is challenged on several grounds.^[71] Still, Engels’s account remains compelling if only because it is an attempt to find the historical origins of the subordination of women within families and public society. It is easier to confront and undo a historically constituted arrangement than one that is presented as eternal or unchangeably “natural”. And whereas anthropologists have only interpreted culture, in various ways, the point is to change it.^[72]

Morgan and Engels’s work on the family can be read in part as an attempt to provide a scientific explanation of the myths of prehistoric matriarchy found in many cultures (they both drew on Johann Jakob Bachofen’s very popular, at the time, Mother Right, which read those myths as history). But there is another, more sinister, interpretation of those myths which doesn’t rely on fragile anthropological evidence and, in fact, describes a process that can be observed to take place every day all over the world and for thousands of years. That is that myths of matriarchy, and male initiation rites which fulfill a similar role, are repeated narrations of the transition from the mother-dominated world of boyhood in the home to patriarchal manhood in public society. In this interpretation, myths of matriarchy work as a tool of education and socialization to help reproduce patriarchy and its existing sexual division of labour. “The myth of matriarchy is but the tool used to keep woman bound to her place. To free her, we need to destroy the myth.”^[73]

Whatever their actual prehistory, patriarchal relations — including the control of and ownership rights to women and their fertility — are the prototypical organization for class societies and have been adapted quite well to serve the reproduction of capitalism and its workers. When factory production is thrust upon a population, the gender composition of its employed workforce follows a pattern of development in which the first employees tend to be (sometimes almost entirely) female, followed by a period of de-feminization, and finally, at least as observed in progressive capitalist republics, the re-entrance of women to the wider workforce at rates, in roles, and earning wages on a slow trajectory toward parity with men. The first two phases are especially pronounced in modern export-oriented manufacturing regions, made possible by global capital, where sweatshops on opposite sides of the planet must compete as sites of low wages.

The maquiladora system in Mexico, for example, began with an overwhelmingly female workforce. In the late 1960s, 90% to 95% of production workers were women, while supervisors and higher-paid technicians were mostly American men sent over from the parent companies. As late as 1975, women still made up 78% of the production line workforce (and almost 93% in border maquilas), but only 57% by 1998. Supervisory and technician jobs were increasingly filled by Mexican workers, but were more often given to men; if those positions are counted then the ratio of women to men drops to about 52% in 1998. By 2005 women accounted for only 44% of all maquiladora jobs (with new male hires still going disproportionately to supervisory and technician roles).^[74] Similar trends can be seen among the ‘factory girls’ of China’s Pearl River Delta and other Asian manufacturing zones.

Marx was aware of the first stage of this trend in industrializing Europe, which he explained by pointing to mechanized factories which allow the employment of “workers of slight muscular strength” so that the “labour of women and children was therefore the first result of the capitalist application of machinery!”^[75] While that might explain why capitalists could employ women and children on a large scale,^[76] the reason they did, and did so eagerly, was because women and children made up a vulnerable segment of the population which could be more intensively and reliably exploited. Men not only had more pride, education, and political clout, they were also more likely to already be organized into labour associations which opposed the reduction of wages accompanying automation. Marx also noted this latter point, that women were found by capitalists in a more exploitable position. As an example he quoted the testimony of a member of parliament regarding an owner of power looms who employed exclusively women and girls and who gave “a decided preference to married females, especially those who have families at home dependent on them for support; they are attentive, docile, more so than unmarried females, and are compelled to use their utmost exertions to procure the necessaries of life. Thus are the virtues, the peculiar virtues of the female character to be perverted to her injury — thus all that is most dutiful and tender in her nature is made a means of her bondage and suffering.”^[77]

While the idea that women have “peculiar virtues” which can be used against them persists, most sweatshop owners are not as forthright as the Victorian power loom employer quoted above. From the textile factories of Southeast Asia to the assembly lines of Mexican maquiladoras, employers almost always justify their preference for vulnerable women in the rhetoric of naturalization rather than acknowledging the desperate financial situation of the girls they hire: women (and children) make good factory workers because they have “nimble fingers” or are naturally “dexterous” and “diligent,” etc.

But Marx thought the effect of mechanized factories preying on women and children would be the destruction of the working-class family. What happened instead was that men began to make up more of the unskilled industrial workforce while women were relegated back to the informal/service sectors and unpaid domestic work. Thus industrial society — in nineteenth-century Europe as well as its subsequent expansions driven by ongoing rounds of primitive accumulation — swings from extensively exploiting women as the cheapest available labour to a norm in which women are excluded from the factory and are “relegated to a condition of isolation, enclosed within the family cell, dependent in every aspect on men.”^[78] It has never actually been the case that most women could afford to do only housework, but that was nonetheless the ideal during the periods in which capitalism claimed to offer a ‘family wage’. The economic conditions which produce these swings include growth outpacing the supply of women — especially as the initial population of women and children are worn out and used up while the survivors begin demanding more respect and legal protection — and the reduction of real wages in the higher-paying sectors making factory work more attractive to unemployed men. Political and moral movements also activate to combat the erosion of family values by industry.

The first phase, feminization of industry, works to destroy whatever is left of pre-capitalist family livelihood, while the second, housewifization, then works to integrate proletarized women into roles as reproducers of the capitalist workforce. The arrangement resulting from housewifization protects women and children from the abuse of factory life, protects the wages of men and their privileged position in the home as the breadwinner, and perhaps most importantly protects the family as an effective means of producing children, vessels of future labour-power, and therefore of reproducing capitalist society. The fact that this arrangement preserves traditional male privileges, a tacit compromise with working-class men who are rewarded with a ‘family wage’ and the possibility of a captive housekeeper, suggests the possibility that men, even Marxists and militant labour activists, might choose a symbiotic relationship with capital in favor of housewifization and other patriarchal perks. As Heidi Hartmann remarked in noting this pitfall of relying on men to lead the fight against capitalism and the oppression of women: “Men have more to lose than their chains.”^[79]

The workforces of modern developed capitalist societies are still deeply structured by gender, age, race, and physical ability — in fact, labour markets (especially those in countries like the United States which don’t have a history of strong social democratic movements) are downright sexist, ageist, and ableist, felt most acutely by those without the disposition or experience to insist on whatever legal rights have been nominally afforded to them — but they fall somewhere between the two extremes of working families to death and shutting women away in private homes as dependents of their husbands. In the United states, women’s labour force participation rate remains less than that of men by about 12 percentage points (56.8% to 69.2% in 2016), and that gap more than doubles when considering full-time year-round work which is engaged in by about 34.9% of women and 59.2% of men. The labour force participation rate (including part-time and temporary work) of all women with minor children, though, is about 70 percent. However, while most women including mothers engage in at least part-time work outside the house, it is significant to note that the jobs they find are often centered around care work. The top twenty-five most common occupations for full-time women include teachers, nurses, secretaries, receptionists, maids and housekeeping cleaners, personal care aides, and social workers. In all of those fields, women make up at least 75% of the workforce. Among management positions, which women are less likely to occupy, women predominate in human resources, social services, and education administrators.^[80]

Working-class women in core capitalist countries, then, have been rescued first from factory work, then from an isolated existence of housework, so that today more women than ever, no longer only the poorest, are free to do much of the childcare and housework in their own homes and also to earn a wage — often by taking care of other people’s families for money.

2.2. Productive reproductive work?

At the resurgence of feminist movements in the 1960s, the world still didn’t look much different to women of the developed world than it did to the working-class Victorian wife, whose plight was described by Engels in these terms: “if she carries out her duties in the private service of her family, she remains excluded from public production and unable to earn; and if she wants to take part in public production and earn independently, she cannot carry out family duties. And the wife’s position in the factory is the position of women in all branches of business, right up to medicine and the law. The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife, and modern society is a mass composed of these individual families as its molecules.”^[81]

So it was this society, or its twentieth-century consumerist descendant, that became the object of inquiry for second-wave feminist theorists who sought to understand not only the phenomenological and psychological experiences of the women living within it but also to understand and resist the material conditions which create and maintain it. Most theorists located the source of women’s subordination as arising somehow from the division of labour between men and women, and especially in the unpaid child bearing, child rearing, and housework done mostly by women. But the exact nature of those divisions and work became a matter of some contention. Particularly at issue in the economic debates of the 1970s was how to apply Marxian analytic categories to unpaid domestic work, specifically in what sense the work of raising future workers is “productive”.

In Marxian terms, “productive work” under capitalism (or it might be better to say “from the viewpoint of capital”) is work which directly produces surplus-value; it is wage work which contributes directly to commodity production. Contrariwise, “unproductive work” is work which is seen as an expense from the viewpoint of capital. In the course of doing business, capitalists hire both kinds of labour, and both are necessary, but it is only in productive workers that owners can hope to find a source of profit. “To be a productive worker is therefore not a piece of luck, but a misfortune.”^[82]

These are simple but confusing categories for three reasons. The first is that they define mutually exclusive sets so it is tempting to try to categorize all kinds of work as one or the other, but the label “productive” applies only to purely capitalist relations of production. In other words, it is not applicable to all possible work arrangements that take place in our nominally capitalist world: some work is neither productive nor unproductive in the Marxian sense. The second is that whether work is productive or unproductive has nothing necessarily to do with the nature of the work itself, but only with the relationship between the worker and whoever is paying for the work to be done. Third, despite being technical economic terms, “productive” and “unproductive” evoke moral connotations as if they mean “useful” and “not useful”.

An unemployed mother, for example, who does work in the house is neither productive nor unproductive — those categories only apply to paid work. The living costs of non-working family members including housewives and children are presumed to be reflected in the breadwinner’s wages. It is this traditional arrangement that has often been identified as a major source of women’s subordination under capitalism. Not only is the housewife’s work not socially recognized as work, but because her costs of living are paid as a wage to her husband, she often has little direct control over how her own material needs are met and becomes dependent on his whims and his distribution of household funds. “The figure of the boss is concealed behind that of the husband.”^[83]

A nanny who is paid by a family to care for their children, on the other hand, is an unproductive worker: her wages are an expense to the family rather than a direct source of profit. It is also possible to view such a self-employed nanny as productive to and exploited by herself as both capitalist and worker. But Marx considered self-employment to be an anomaly which offers “a favourable field for outpourings of drivel about productive and unproductive labour.” To avoid such paradoxes it is best not to try to analyze self-employment in terms of purely capitalist categories. A nanny who works for an agency, which keeps a portion of her earnings, is clearly a productive worker making a profit for the owners of the nanny agency (but from the viewpoint of the patron family, hiring the nanny through the agency is still an unproductive expense).

In 1912 Rosa Luxembourg provided this clarifying example noting the poetic crudeness of how the economic definition of “productive” devalues so much work done by women:

The women of the proletariat […] are engaged in productive work for society just as the men are. Not in the sense that they help the men by their housework, scraping out a daily living and raising children for meagre compensation. This work is not productive within the meaning of the present economic system of capitalism, even though it entails an immense expenditure of energy and self-sacrifice in a thousand little tasks. This is only the private concern of the proletarians, their blessing and felicity, and precisely for this reason nothing but empty air as far as modern society is concerned. Only that work is productive which produces surplus value and yields capitalist profit—as long as the rule of capital and the wage system still exists. From this standpoint the dancer in a cafe, who makes a profit for her employer with her legs, is a productive working-woman, while all the toil of the woman and mothers of the proletariat within the four walls of the home is considered unproductive work. This sounds crude and crazy but it is an accurate expression of the crudeness and craziness of today’s capitalist economic order^[84]

The so-called domestic-labour debates recorded in the feminist literature of the 1970s and 1980s produced three general approaches to trying to understand domestic work’s role within capitalism despite that work not fitting into existing Marxian categories: ignore the categories and treat social and private production separately, extend the categories to include domestic work, or simply [mis]use the categories as they are.^[85]

Taking the inapplicability of Marx’s analytical categories to unpaid work at face value, “dual system” theories don’t try to stretch Marx’s theories to understand the oppression of women nor do they try to explain economic exploitation as an effect of patriarchy. Instead they hold that both systems contribute to the oppression of women. Dual systems theories tend to emphasize the trans-historic and cross-class nature of patriarchy — women of all classes and in most societies experience some economic and political subordination to men, so it is clearly not specific to capitalism — and warn that Marxism and “class-first” attitudes to social liberation threaten to sideline specifically feminist issues. In “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union” (1979), one of the most articulate essays associated with the dual systems approach, Heidi Hartmann complains that Marxist feminists have “subsumed the feminist struggle into the struggle against capital.”^[86] When expanded to include racism and other axes of oppression, the dual systems approach is a precursor to the intersectional analyses which have become influential in recent decades.

A contrasting approach, a response to dual systems theories which nonetheless also attempts to avoid the economism of reducing women’s oppression to class or work, is to seek a unifying theory by extending Marxian analytic categories to include domestic labour (and social reproduction more generally, even outside of private kin-based families). Lise Vogel’s Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (1987) expands directly on concepts in Capital to include the work of daily and generational reproduction more fully into a Marxist framework. Vogel’s short book has recently been reprinted (2013) and is considered a foundational text of what is now being called “social reproduction theory.”^[87]

Finally, though chronologically it preceded and influenced the dual and unitary approaches, one way to understand the importance of unpaid domestic work to capitalism in Marxian terms is to reason as follows: because domestic work produces labour-power, and labour-power is the source of all surplus-value, then domestic work is productive of surplus-value. This is the line taken by Mariarosa Dalla Costa in her influential “Women and the Subversion of the Community” (1972) where she wrote that “domestic work produces not merely use values, but is essential to the production of surplus value” and clarified in a footnote that “What we meant precisely is that housework as work is productive in the Marxian sense, that is, is producing surplus value.”^[88]

All three approaches have produced valuable (and often very similar) insights and criticisms; they differ more in their subtle theoretical emphases than their substance. All socialist feminists, for example, likely agree with Vogel that “So long as capitalism survives, domestic labour will be required for its reproduction, disproportionately performed by women and most likely accompanied by a system of male supremacy.”^[89] But even such a minor difference as how to apply an obscure Marxian category can and has led to discernible differences in political outlook and strategy.

From Engels’s “the first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry”^[90] to latter-day feminist champions of careerism and the two-income family, one unfortunate position both Marxist and liberal feminisms tend to hold is that women’s liberation is to be found in doing more work.

By these views “work will set you free,” and it is little more convincing in the long run than the same slogan set in slave-wrought iron above the entrances to Nazi death camps. They would have us believe that leaning in to systems of oppression and exploitation will somehow dismantle them: That if on top of the disproportionate amount of subsistence and care work women have done for millennia and continue to do under capitalism, they would only sacrifice more of their lives every week, every day, to keep other people’s middle-class homes clean or make some investors somewhere a little bit wealthier, then equality of economic distribution, political rights, and social recognition would finally be at hand.

It is true that these pro-work reformers intend for women to do social, remunerated work instead of so much isolated, unpaid housework, and that the work-focused movements of the twentieth century have contributed to opening up economic opportunities and cultural freedom to many women (although the case might be made that much of the success of these movements is attributable to women adapting to the needs of capital rather than the other way around). But the reality for most women is that getting [another] job means more work (and more bosses), not more freedom.

While freedom to work may be a prerequisite, the ultimate power and hope for members of subservient classes lies in (and corresponds in degree to) their ability to refuse work. Among the approaches developed by second-wave theorists, the one that most successfully avoids the work trap, I think, is Dalla Costa’s assertion that domestic work is productive of surplus-value. Such an assertion, as we’ve seen above, is an abuse of Marxian categories,^[91] but it is rhetorically a very effective abuse: instead of burdening women with more work, the point is to recognize the important, hidden work already disproportionately done by women at the root of the capitalist system. Dalla Costa herself explicitly rejected more work as an emancipatory path, writing that “Work is still work, whether inside or outside the home,” and, “Those who advocate that the liberation of the working-class woman lies in her getting a job outside the home are part of the problem, not the solution.”^[92]

2.3. Women’s work

In general, the mystification of the exploitation of women’s work is accomplished by concealing it as a so-called natural aspect of femininity. We noted earlier how factory owners rely on the naturalization of low-paid industrial work to justify their exploitation of women (because they have “nimble fingers” or somesuch). An emphasis in Dalla Costa’s approach is to show how domestic work is also justified as “natural” to women, and thereby expose the ways in which women’s work remains unrecognized. An example of this naturalization is present in the last lines God speaks to the woman in our myth: “yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” Here the ancient myth tellers (whose oral tradition likely predates the Levant Iron Age) already locate the woman’s subordination in her own intrinsic desires. This subordination is deftly extended from mothers to wives to all individuals perceived as women, whether or not they ever marry or give birth, an essentializing process of creeping subjugation underlying a long tradition of justifying the oppression of women by appeals to biological determinism.

Just as the exploitation of wage workers in capitalist societies (traditionally men) is obscured by the wage system, the even more fundamental exploitation of mothers and domestic workers (traditionally women who are often also wage workers) is obscured as housework which women do “naturally,” and so as not-really-work. This was a key insight of the Wages for Housework groups that formed out of the theorizing by Dalla Costa and other Italian feminists in the 1970s. Silvia Federici’s 1974 “Wages Against Housework” served as the de facto manifesto of that movement, which she helped bring to the United States, and includes this description of the further naturalization of housework as unwaged women’s work in capitalist societies:

The wage gives the impression of a fair deal: you work and you get paid, hence you and your boss are equal; while in reality the wage, rather than paying for the work you do, hides all the unpaid work that goes into profit. But the wage at least recognizes that you are a worker […] To have a wage means to be part of a social contract, and there is no doubt concerning its meaning: you work, not because you like it, or because it comes naturally to you, but because it is the only condition under which you are allowed to live. […]

But in the case of housework the situation is qualitatively different. The difference lies in the fact that not only has housework been imposed on women, but it has been transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character. Housework had to be transformed into a natural attribute rather than be recognized as a social contract because from the beginning of capital’s scheme for women this work was destined to be unwaged. Capital had to convince us that it is a natural, unavoidable and even fulfilling activity to make us accept our unwaged work. In its turn, the unwaged condition of housework has been the most powerful weapon in reinforcing the common assumption that housework is not work, thus preventing women from struggling against it, except in the privatized kitchen-bedroom quarrel that all society agrees to ridicule, thereby further reducing the protagonist of a struggle. We are seen as nagging bitches, not workers in struggle.^[93]

In Patriarchy and Accumulation On A World Scale, the German scholar Maria Mies, writing in the same vein as her Italian colleagues, noted the ideological biases which ascribe different qualities to the two spheres created by the sexual division of labour whereby men’s work is associated with conscious action and history-making while women’s work is relegated to the passive and natural:

Thus, women’s household and child-care work are seen as an extension of their physiology, of the fact that they give birth to children, of the fact that ‘nature’ has provided them with a uterus. All the labour that goes into the production of life, including the labour of giving birth to a child, is not seen as the conscious interaction of a human being with nature, that is, a truly human activity, but rather as an activity of nature, which produces plants and animals unconsciously and has no control over this process.^[94]

To combat these views which naturalize (undervalued and unpaid) domestic and subsistence work as women’s burden, Mies (like Dalla Costa) insists on a broader understanding of ‘productive labour’ than the narrow Marxian category. Because women’s “production of life is the perennial precondition of all other historical forms of productive labour, including that under conditions of capitalist accumulation, it has to be defined as work and not as unconscious ‘natural’ activity.”^[95] Capitalism — specifically its ongoing processes of primitive accumulation, that spirit of Capitalism ever rushing over the face of the formless earth seeking out new sources of surplus value — depends on unwaged subsistence work. In agreement with the theory of ongoing primitive accumulation, Mies views these unwaged forms of labour as necessary to understanding global capitalist accumulation (as opposed to the classical Marxian distinction which views those forms of exploitation as preceding and outside of capitalist relations): “In contrast to Marx I consider the capitalist production process as one which comprises both: the superexploitation of non-wage labourers (women, colonies, peasants) upon which wage labour exploitation then is possible.”^[96]

When child bearing and domestic work are viewed in this light, the idea that men’s social dominance arises from their greater economic contribution fades. Unlike so many explanations of how women’s subordination is brought about by the sexual division of labour (recall, for example, Carol Meyers’s theory that women haven’t historically enjoyed equality with men because they only ever have time to contribute 40% of society’s productive work or the similar assertion by Engels and many feminists since that women need jobs before they can hope for equality), Mies points to anthropological evidence that women have always performed the bulk of subsistence labour (and continue to do so in many pre-industrial societies), usually in the form of planting and gathering, as opposed to men’s highly valued but less reliable procurement of hunted meat. She offers an alternative theory of the subjugation of women through technological rather than direct economic means. With the invention of ranged weapons capable of killing large mammals, which were controlled by the men who specialized in hunting, she posits that a predatory mode of production became possible (though this possibility would not be fully realized until the rise of pastoral societies):

In the last analysis, we can attribute the asymmetric division of labour between women and men to this predatory mode of production, or rather appropriation, which is based on the male monopoly over means of coercion, that is, arms, and on direct violence by means of which permanent relations of exploitation and dominance between the sexes were created and maintained.^[97]

The authors of Women’s Work, Men’s Property, a 1986 inquiry into the origins of women’s subordination in the tradition of Engels’s theory of a fall from matrilineality, recognize that women’s labour is devalued despite its majority contribution to food production, but they don’t uniformly agree that male supremacy can be traced directly to men’s monopoly over weapons. Stephanie Coontz and Peta Henderson de-emphasize the role of technology, and instead see women’s subordination as a gradual, non-conscious outcome of social dynamics, whereas Nicole Chevillard and Sébastien Leconte find it “highly significant that men in lineage societies are adamant that women should be disarmed.” (“Lineage societies” are the pre-state ‘primitive’ societies anthropologists love to pretend hold clues to prehistoric society.) Chevillard and Leconte agree generally with Engels that the transition to patriarchal society was a sudden, revolutionary, and intentional development. “It is well known that differential access to arms always reflects class relations. […] in all historical periods women have been subjected to a set of class relations whose essential nature is betrayed by the fact that they invariably prevent women from bearing arms.”^[98]

The monopoly-on-arms theory of male domination has the advantage that it is simple compared to theories like those of Morgan and Engels, and it has fewer fragile dependencies on anthropological findings. And even if the direction of its causality is unclear (might men have greater access to weapons because of their social or political dominance?), it provides an explanation which maintains continuity from prehistory to the present day. In the United States today, with a strikingly well-armed and violent populace compared to other wealthy democracies, women are still less likely to own a gun (39% of adult men and 22% of adult women in the USA own at least one gun). Only about 15% of active duty U.S. Army soldiers and 12% of American police officers are women.^[99] Furthermore, according to a Pew Research survey, among those Americans who do own guns, women are much less likely to keep one loaded and nearby, less likely to regularly practice shooting, and even among Republicans are much more likely to support stricter gun-control policy.^[100]

By locating the origin of class formation (and preservation) in the differential ability to carry out violence, thus in the ability to appropriate rather than produce, materialist feminist theories like those of Mies and Federici also avoid the self-contradictory idea that reward in class societies is proportional to contribution. It’s an idea that constitutes a sacred pillar of capitalist ideology and persistently dogs anthropological thinking, but if it were true that wealth and power were awarded according to work and risk, then slaves, wage workers, and women would be the most well-off members of any society. As Coontz and Henderson ask, “What kinds of work did slave owners or family patriarchs do that justified their power and prestige vis à vis slaves, wives, and junior men? Why did women have low status in slave societies, such as fifth-century Athens, where free men took few risks and did little work?”^[101]

As an aside, for a demonstration of how prevalent the inversion of the actual work-and-reward relationship remains in the capitalist imaginary, it is probably sufficient to ask a liberal friend their opinion of Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, or whoever is the celebrity captain of industry du jour, and witness an outpouring of praise for these men at the top of our oppressive economic, racial, and gender hierarchies reaping the material and social fruits of labour and other suffering done by others. Hence the importance of the socialist slogan “To each according to their contribution,” a demand which most socialists would deem insufficient (looking forward to an economy which provides instead for “each according to their need”) but necessary to confront both the injustice and the false promises of capitalism.^[102]

2.4. Witch hunts as primitive accumulation

The degree to which capitalism was made possible by violence targeted at women, in particular, has been underemphasized in many accounts of primitive accumulation. The transition from feudalism to capitalism in Western Europe (from the late fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries) was accompanied by the Scientific Revolution’s transformation of the natural sciences and humanity’s understanding of its place in the cosmos. Francis Bacon, father of empiricism and the inductive scientific method, gave a philosophical grounding to the new sciences. Baconian science was not so much a rejection of alchemy and the old occultic arts, but their de-mystification, systemization, and professionalization. Nature was feminized by the rhetoric of the new philosophy of science as a subject to be systematically dominated: constrained, explored, penetrated, exploited, and its secrets and wealth extracted by machines (with the courtroom, the operating theater, and the alchemists' laboratory as the prototypes for such domination).^[103] By an analogous and concurrent process, women and their fertility were naturalized as fundamental but unacknowledged inputs to the production of profit for capital owners. It is then perhaps unsurprising that women played prominent roles (as Federici points out) in many of the peasant uprisings and heretical religious cults that rose in rebellion against both the old aristocratic and new bourgeois orders.

In her 1979 book The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, Carolyn Merchant drew a connection between the new sciences (and Bacon’s rhetoric), the rise of capitalist mechanized industry, and the European witch hunts:

The interrogation of witches as symbol for the interrogation of nature, the courtroom as model for its inquisition, and torture through mechanical devices as a tool for the subjugation of disorder were fundamental to the scientific method as power.^[104]

Merchant’s work informed both Mies and especially Federici whose Caliban and the Witch explores the connection in detail. The European witch trials were sporadic in both time and place, with few commonalities shared by accused witches other than the fact that they tended to be older, poor women (the same demographic and at a similar gender ratio, incidentally, as recipients of Kiva’s microfinancial services). Mies emphasized simple dispossession as a motive for the witch hunts, a means for magistrates and enterprising witch hunters to collect fees from the community and confiscate the property of condemned witches. But Federici, noting that most victims were very poor, rejects such direct greed as a significant factor in the early modern witch hunts (though she does give the seizure of land from old, non-productive community members as a driving force of witch accusations in Africa today). Instead, she sees the witch hunts as “class war carried out by other means,” targeting older women in part because those women were survivors of earlier peasant uprisings who harbored resistance to the local elites and to the expropriation of primitive accumulation.^[105]

One caveat to be aware of regarding the work of Mies and Federici is that they both overestimate the impact of the witch hunts. Mies puts the upper bound on the number of people executed as witches at ten million, repeating a then-current trope among feminists that the witch hunts were similar in scale to the holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany. Such high estimates, it turns out, were based almost purely on polemical speculation rather than actual documentary evidence. Federici is much more conservative, claiming “hundreds of thousands of women were burned, hanged, and tortured in less than two centuries,” citing in a footnote the conclusion of Anne L. Barstow (author of Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts) “that at least 100,000 women were killed.” But even that figure is beyond the high end of most scholarship, which estimates the death toll closer to 50,000.^[106] Of course the arrest, torture, and execution of witches even at the revised scale was traumatizing to the regions they affected and demand some explanation. But instead of treating witch hunts as the predominant process of primitive accumulation by which women were disciplined, degraded, and made to serve capitalist production, as Federici does, it is better to think of them as a striking example of such processes.

The witch hunts terrorized Europe during times when a fledgling capitalism demanded workers, but food was scarce (with crop failures and unusual weather associated with the Little Ice Age affecting Northern hemispheric climate) and population was on the brink of collapse. The most consistent theme underlying the panics is connected to anxiety about fertility and witches' ability to make crops, animals, and humans unproductive. As Lyndal Roper discovered by studying the witch craze in Germany, “the fears that surrounded witches were not just about the deaths of infants and the early weeks of motherhood, but featured animals and crops, in short, fertility itself. These terrors were credible because of the realities of life in a precarious economy.”^[107] And the primary themes which shaped the violence “turned on motherhood, the bodies of ageing women, and fertility.”^[108] One way these thematic anxieties were expressed was as a distrust of women and the control they have over reproduction: a fear that witches consort with the devil (instead of productively with men?), cause miscarriages, kill and consume children, and generally that they “hinder men from generating and women from conceiving.”^[109]

Federici hypothesizes that “the witch-hunt was, at least in part, an attempt to criminalize birth control and place the female body, the uterus, at the service of population increase and the production and accumulation of labour-power.”^[110] Significant in light of this hypothesis is the de-feminization of obstetrics corresponding with the witch hunts. Female midwives, who exercised a great deal of control over reproduction as experts not only in delivery but in contraceptives and abortion, were specifically denounced by demonologists. Following the height of the witch craze, midwifery was progressively displaced by the state-regulated, male-dominated medical profession. “Just as the Enclosures expropriated the peasantry from the communal land, so the witch-hunt expropriated women from their bodies, which were thus ‘liberated’ from any impediment preventing them to function as machines for the production of labour.”^[111]

The German economists Gunnar Heinsohn and Otto Steiger arrived at a similar understanding of the witch hunts through their reading of Jean Bodin’s infamous Démonomanie. In the Démonomanie, Bodin, who was probably the most influential French political theorist at the end of the seventeenth century, sought to justify the torture and extermination of witches, saying of witchcraft that “there are no crimes which are nearly so vile as this one, or which deserve more serious penalties.” Heinsohn and Steiger explain the puzzle of how such a scientific thinker as Bodin could also be completely obsessed with rooting out witchcraft by arguing that what Bodin meant by witchcraft can be reduced to birth control, motivated by his mercantilist anxiety about underpopulation. They believe this theory fills a gap in the historical accounts which fail to adequately explain the timing, content, and target of the witch hunts:

The first enigma we explain as the most ruthless method in Early Modern Times to suppress the traditional and highly sophisticated means of birth-control […] by eliminating its best experts, the midwives […] regarded as the most serious obstacle to the repopulation of Europe after its economic devastation by the Population Catastrophe.^[112]

But while midwives were frequently the targets of demonologists' rhetoric, and they were the center of some witch hunts and included among the victims of a few high-profile executions, in practice they seem to have made poor scapegoats. As demanded by their practice, midwives tended to be integral members of their communities: trusted, respected, and depended upon. David Harley’s investigation into the phenomena of the midwife-witch turned up little evidence that midwives were disproportionately accused or convicted of witchcraft: “The midwife-witch is a stereotype that has passed straight from the works of the demonologists into the works of historians with barely a glancing impact on the lives of real midwives.”^[113]

The brunt of the violence fell instead on women far more marginalized than the typical midwife. Witches were not only, or even primarily, women who posed a threat to reproduction through their control over their bodies and their children, but men and women whose very existence was a monument to sterility and impediments to a productive future. Especially susceptible to the fears and violent hatred of barrenness were widowed or never married women who had outlived their usefulness as [potential] mothers, did not work common land, were not employed, and if they kept animals at all they were for companionship rather than for food or increase. Many of the 20% or so of accused witches who were men were also viewed as unproductive, “mostly drawn from the ranks of the vagabonds, beggars, itinerant laborers, as well as the gypsies and lower-class priests.”^[114] Men, in other words, who did not fit neatly into the changing sexual division of labour or population control demanded by the emerging capitalist order. In the case of Russia, which was transitioning from a system of slavery to full serfdom, 75% of accused witches were men; a correspondingly large subset of Russian witches were vagrants (“wanderers, minstrels, seasonal laborers, freed slaves, defrocked or self-proclaimed monks, priests, and nuns, and the evocatively named vol’nye liudi, ‘free people,’ people subject only to their own will, a term of sharpest opprobrium in a society that valued stability and hierarchy”).^[115]

2.5. Neoliberal echoes of early modern witch hunts

According to Federici, “A return of the most violent aspects of primitive accumulation has accompanied every phase of capitalist globalization, including the present one, demonstrating that the continuous expulsion of farmers from the land, war and plunder on a world scale, and the degradation of women are necessary conditions for the existence of capitalism in all times.”^[116] If the link between witch hunts and capitalist primitive accumulation she theorized is real, we might expect to see the rise of similar phenomena accompanying the intense bouts of ongoing primitive accumulation characterizing neoliberal globalization since the late 1970s. And indeed Federici has noted several examples of the resurgence of witch hunts in Africa, India, Latin America, Papua New Guinea, and elsewhere during the 1980s and 1990s (leading to the execution or other punishment of accused witches, and often the confiscation of their property).^[117]

Some of the parallels between recent witch cases and the old witch crazes are striking. For example the case of Fawza Falih Muhammad Ali in Saudi Arabia which made Western headlines. She was found guilty of witchcraft in 2006 and sentenced to death by beheading. The most serious among the slew of supernatural crimes she is supposed to have committed, and confessed after being beaten, is making a man impotent.^[118] She died in 2010 while still languishing in prison. But as anxieties have shifted, for example from fears of underpopulation to overpopulation (and back again in some places), so too we should expect to see the violence of fear, resentment, and economic restructuring take new forms.

Summarized below are six examples of neoliberal violence and mass delusion which reflect various qualities of those early modern panics — femicide, torture, and fears of child-sacrificing Devil worship. Some witch hunts work to help uproot society in order to discipline women, enforce gender roles, squash dissent, and to shape society and its reproduction in ways suitable for expanded capitalist accumulation; others appear to be a mirrored effect: an uprooted society exposing its marginal members to unrestrained collective fear and hatred.

Maquiladora Murders

The disintegration of society along the US-Mexican border following industrialization and the rise to power of drug cartels has exposed the already vulnerable to deadly violence. According to Amnesty International, more than 370 young women and girls were murdered between 1993 and 2005 in the cities of Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua, their bodies left in the surrounding deserts, ditches, garbage dumps, or deserted streets.^[119] Approximately one third of the recovered bodies exhibit signs of sexual violence, torture, or mutilation. With the intensification of the war on drugs, the rate of murders has accelerated. In the next five years, between 2005 and 2010, more than 500 women and girls were murdered.^[120] Many victims were found with their factory work uniforms still on their bodies or dumped nearby. Despite the “maquiladora murders” moniker the Juárez feminicide has gained for itself, less than 10% of identified victims worked in manufacturing. As a symbol for the devaluation of female labour and lives, which presaged the dehumanization of entire cities, however, the name remains apt:

The feminicides demonstrated a violence and lawlessness linked to Juárez’s position as a space of neoliberal exception. This lawlessness was linked to the dehumanization of female maquila workers, many of whom were denounced as prostitutes whose life was not worthy of recompense. As the military and the federal police entered the fray, the drug war created a similar type of dehumanized person — the drug trafficker. Murders went unpunished, and the violence and lawlessness previously restricted to the female factory workers became part of the fabric of the city. Killings between the cartels, killings by the military and police, and killings by kids on the street corner all became normalized and dehumanized under the banner of the “drug war.”^[121]

The maquiladora murders have a counterpart at the fringes of capitalist society near the USA’s northern border, most famously along the Highway of Tears in British Columbia, where hundreds or thousands of indigenous women and girls have been murdered or disappeared since the 1970s.^[122]

Bride Burning

In the Indian dowry system, the bride’s family pays a dowry to the groom’s family (taking on loans or promising future payments if they can’t afford the demanded amount immediately). Through this system, young women become a direct source of commodities for men — a more practical form of wealth than children in a highly populated society. Once the family of the bride is unable to provide further dowry payments, the bride is in danger of becoming disposable to her husband or his family; in the classic form of an Indian dowry murder she is burned to death in her kitchen by her husband who is then free to remarry.

Mies describes the phenomenon of bride burning in Patriarchy and Accumulation:

Either the husband or his mother or other in-laws of the bride begin to harass her to extract more dowry from her father or brothers. Apart from these demands, she is often subjected to all kinds of humiliations and brutalities. If she cannot bring more dowry, one day — as in many of the dowry cases — she is found dead. The in-laws usually inform the public that the woman either committed suicide by burning herself, or that an accident occurred while she was cooking. By the method of burning the women to death all evidence is usually destroyed so that hardly any of the dowry-death cases is taken up by the police and the law courts.^[123]

Despite increasing activist and state efforts to put an end to bride burning since the 1960s, the practice remains rampant with thousands of women per year being burned to death — one woman is burned in a dowry-related death nearly every hour in India.^[124]

Terrorist Entrapment

Federici has noted that charges of witchcraft performed a similar function to the crime of High Treason during the same years, and to the charge of “terrorism” today. “The very vagueness of the charge — the fact that it was impossible to prove it, while at the same time it evoked the maximum of horror — meant that it could be used to punish any form of protest and to generate suspicion even towards the most ordinary aspects of daily life.”^[125]

Since the September 11 attacks, the FBI has developed a pattern of sting operations in which they invent a terror plot, hire an informant to convince a young Muslim man (particularly targeting emotionally unwell men, or those otherwise struggling with life) to carry it out, then swoop in and save the day. The convicted “terrorist” is then sentenced to prison for decades, suffering harsh treatment sometimes including solitary confinement or other tortures.

A report by Human Rights Watch takes an in-depth look at 27 federal terrorism cases that involved 77 total defendants.^[126] In the 13 cases involving an informant, “the defendants do not appear to have been involved in terrorist plotting or financing at the time the government began to investigate them.”^[127] Like the witch inquisitors who first told suspected witches what they were guilty of and then found confirmation in their torture-induced confessions, the FBI provides the suspected terrorist with ideological motivation, weapons and materials, and then the suspect’s guilt is confirmed when he is finally convinced by the informant to go along with the plan. “In this way, the FBI may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals.”^[128] That report also points out that about half of the 500 federal counterterrorism convictions since 2001 involve an informant, and that all but one of the foiled high-profile terror plots were actually sting operations devised by the FBI. The New York Times reported in 2016 that the FBI has sharply increased its use of sting operations to entrap young Muslim men who might be attracted by the messaging of the Islamic State.^[129]

Enhanced Interrogation

As part of America’s imperial War on Terror during the Bush administration, an extensive torture (“enhanced interrogation”) program was designed by the CIA and deployed in conjunction with various parts of the US military at black sites around the world. At those covert prisons, suspected terrorists were subjected to brutal physical abuse (including waterboarding, confinement to small boxes, exposure to cold and heat, beating, violent forced anal feedings) and inhumane conditions and psychological treatment (including sleep and sensory deprivation, sexual humiliation, and threats toward detainees' family members). In lieu of demonologists, the CIA outsourced the design of the torture methods to two American psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who were paid $81 million over the course of the program.

Of the approximately 100 terrorist detainees known to have died while in U.S. custody between August 2002 and the end of 2005, at least a third are known to have been the result of homicide, and at least 8 of those deaths were the result of torture.^[130] No CIA officers or interrogators have faced criminal charges by the United States related to the torture or deaths of detainees, but John Kiriakou, former Chief of Counterterrorist Operations in Pakistan, was arrested for blowing the whistle during a televised interview on the CIA’s use of waterboarding. For that admission the Obama administration’s Justice Department charged him with espionage and finally had him convicted and sentenced to 30 months of prison on a lesser charge.

While the full extent of the horrors carried out by the CIA and its contractors against suspected terrorists will likely never be known because of efforts to destroy and falsify records, a report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence^[131] and efforts by journalists and watchdog organizations^[132] have revealed the main features of the torture program (which officially ended in 2009).

The very first finding made by the Senate Intelligence Committee report is that “The CIA’s use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.” The brutal program did not produce any actionable information about future terror attacks (but several detainees did, unsurprisingly, fabricate information under the duress), and appears to have been designed to punish rather than to interrogate, an observation made more disturbing by the revelation that 26 of the detainees were “wrongfully held” according to the CIA’s own criteria. Included among the 26 wrongfully held are at least 2 detainees who were implicated by testimony fabricated during torture,^[133] the same highly effective method witch inquisitors used to “discover” more witches.

Satanic Panic and the McMartin Preschool Case

Old fashioned moral panics of the Devil-worshipping variety roared back to the centers of capitalism along with the dark forces of neoliberal de-industrialization by 1980. Starting in the United States and then spreading to other developed countries, fantastic rumors that satanists had infiltrated small towns and the suburbs and were regularly sacrificing and sexually abusing children and animals during their rituals and orgies made their way from the anxious minds of frightened parents to psychotherapists, social workers, and courtrooms aided by sensationalized headlines.^[134]

In her recounting of the satanic scares of the 80s, Mary de Young located the source of the bizarre conspiracy theories in the interaction between family life and the market economy: “Coincident with that concern about the protection of children was another one about their daily care.” The intensifying tensions between these two spheres of social life “made that most innocuous of social institutions, the local day care center, the target of a moral panic.”^[135] Between 1983 and 1991 over 100 day care centers were investigated for satanic ritual abuse, but the most well-known of the sexual abuse scandals, and in many ways the epicenter of the whole panic, was the McMartin preschool in Manhattan Beach, California.

Police and prosecutors spent seven years investigating and prosecuting two of the day care workers, Peggy McMartin Buckey and her son Raymond Buckey, on dozens of charges of child-molestation (the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history at that point). The children the Buckeys are supposed to have abused (at least one of whom has since publicly recanted and apologized^[136]) described, among other incredible acts (such as Ray flying around like a witch):

the ritualistic ingestion of urine, feces, blood, semen, and human flesh; the disinterment and mutilation of corpses; the sacrifices of infants; and orgies with their day care providers, costumed as devils and witches, in classrooms, tunnels under the center, and in car washes, airplanes, mansions, cemeteries, hotels, ranches, neighborhood stores, local gyms, churches, and hot air balloons. In the accusatorial atmosphere of this nascent moral panic, they named not only the seven McMartin day care providers as their satanic abusers, but local business people and city officials, world leaders, television and film stars, and even their own family members.^[137]

The children were coached in their testimony (comprising almost all of the evidence presented by the prosecution) by parents and social workers who would persistently ask leading questions until the children had learned the sorts of things they were supposed to say to first create and then confirm the satanic ritual abuse narrative.

Peggy, who had spent two years in jail during the investigation, was acquitted of all charges. Ray was acquitted on all but 13 counts for which the jury was hung (11 vs. 2 jurors in favor of acquittal). He was tried a second time, also resulting in a hung jury, before the panic had subsided and the prosecution lost interest in the case. During his trials Ray spent five years in jail without ever having been convicted of a crime.

The Buckeys were literally accused of being witches by the children in their care. Peggy and her 75-year-old-mother (who was also originally indicted in the case along with several other workers), as women in charge of other people’s children during a time of economic uncertainty, and Ray as a man in the same position fulfilling an untraditional gender role, fit the profiles of their seventeenth-century predecessors who were also often accused by children (most famously in the case of the Salem witch trials).

De Young noted that “In a sample of 35 major satanic day care center cases, 30 (49%) of the 61 criminally charged day care providers were male,” and that one of the lasting effects of the panic was the near-total refeminization of day care work as men were driven out of the profession. The accusation of witchcraft, in this incarnation of the old libel, worked to restore a familiar division of labour in a changing world in which “the primary responsibility for the care and socialization of young children was placed on the shoulders of low-paid women” who now work under stricter state regulation.^[138]

Pizzagate

The resurgence of right-wing populism in 2016 brought with it an internet-fueled mini revival of the satanic abuse conspiracies. Most notable is “Pizzagate,” so dubbed because it revolves around a pizzeria in Washington, DC, called Comet Ping Pong. The Pizzagate conspiracy holds that Comet Ping Pong and other area restaurants are used as dungeons for child sex rings operated by Hillary Clinton and other high-ranking Democratic Party officials. The rumors, which developed to include “kill rooms, underground tunnels, satanism and even cannibalism,”^[139] got started when conspiracy theorists, deploying a finely developed hermeneutic of delusion, found hidden references to pedophilia in leaked emails from John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, and then discovered satanic symbols hidden in the Comet Ping Pong logo.

In contrast to the panics of the 1980s which were widely believed in the communities they affected and were sometimes encouraged by broadcast media, social workers, police officers, and local politicians, the Pizzagate conspiracy theories propagate mostly via pseudonymous online discussion forums, amplified by conspiracy-laden faux news outlets like infowars.com (whose host, Alex Jones, has made inflammatory claims including that “Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped” many children). But the pizzeria panic has not been without some effect on the real world. One poll found that 46% of Trump voters (and 17% of Clinton voters) believed the Podesta emails talked about pedophilia and human trafficking.^[140] Edgar Maddison Welch, the father of two young daughters, believed the rumors so sincerely that on December 4, 2016, he drove from his home in North Carolina to Comet Ping Pong on a mission to free the non-existent child sex slaves in the non-existent basement and secret tunnels under the restaurant. He entered the pizzeria with an AR-15 style rifle and a revolver, and as frightened diners fled the scene, he fired at walls and a closet door in search of secret passages. He discovered none and was arrested without further incident.^[141]

In his work on the earlier satanic scares, Jeffrey Victor wrote that rumor panics,

most commonly arise when people do not trust “official” sources of news, or when people have little confidence in the authorities whose job it is to provide information. When people lose faith in their authorities, they will regard bizarre and frightening rumor stories as plausible, such as those about satanic cults, because it might seem dangerous to simply disregard them.^[142]

This is an accurate description of the political moment that produced Donald Trump and his unique style of ‘alternative facts.’^[143] During his campaign rallies, Trump would sometimes lead the crowds in chants of “Lock her up!” referring to Hillary Clinton. The person of Clinton — as a member of the hated elite, a politician strongly associated with American neoliberal globalization policy, and perhaps most damning of all as a woman poised to become the first female president of the United States forever breaking a gender barrier at the highest level of the state — became the natural target for a confluence of anxieties and resentments.

One notable feature of Pizzagate is that its mob-like threats are aimed almost exclusively upward, at national politicians and property owners, rather than downward on marginalized women (though the culture from which the theory germinated is replete with more generic misogynistic tendencies, with some continuity with the earlier Gamergate controversy, a prolonged anti-feminist campaign of online harassment targeting women involved in the video game industry). This populism, which reflects an environment saturated with a mistrust of mainstream media and of a political elite who represent less than ever the economic well-being or social values of much of America, has a counterpart in the early modern witch hunts which would occasionally turn on elites and even inquisitors who would become fatally embroiled in accusations themselves.

The most extreme expression of anti-elitist conspiracy theory might be the baffling reversal in the belief of many in the Alex Jones milieu that events such as the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, where children actually were targeted and murdered, was staged by the government using crisis actors. In both cases, whether by inventing victims of supposed elite pedophile rings, or by refusing to accept real, horrific, but difficult to understand violence against innocents, fear is redirected up to mysterious government or ‘globalist’ agendas.

The Pizzagate claims have been widely debunked in the media, the pizzagate subreddit has been shut down, Edgar Welch apologized as part of his sentencing, and Alex Jones has apologized at the behest of attorneys representing the owner of Comet Ping Pong. But its premise lives on in morphed forms, most preeminently as a conspiracy theory known as “The Storm,” promulgated by an 8chan user named QAnon and endorsed by actress Roseanne Barr, which claims President Trump is secretly working to take down a global ring of elite (usually members of the Democratic Party) cannibalistic satanic pedophiles.^[144]

2.6. Non-feminist perspectives

Before finally returning from this long diversion to the part played by microfinance, there are two important points, which don’t fit easily into a feminist narrative, that should be acknowledged. The first is the invisible male victims of patriarchy: male casualties are often ignored as ‘natural’ victims of deadly violence, even as feminist critiques work successfully to draw attention to and de-naturalize violence against women.

Several examples of the elision of male victims can already be found in this essay. Twenty percent or more of the witches condemned during the early modern European hunts were men, and in some places (including Iceland and Normandy) over 90% of witches were men. Yet in some scholarship those men are often glossed over to preserve a simplistic model of witch hunting as woman hunting. As Lara Apps and Andrew Gow stated in their attempt to bring some gender balance to witchcraft studies, “there is something disturbing, on several levels, about an act of historiographical revenge that replicates, by inversion, the past neglect of women as historical subjects.”^[145] Another example is the case of the Maquiladora Murders. While the grisly rape and murder of young women in Juárez has rightly garnered a great deal of attention, the fact that men and boys are killed in the same city at ten times the rate (one statistical model of homicides in border cities including Juárez found that “the only variable that explains femicide rates […] is male homicide rate”^[146]) has not generated an equivalent gender-specific alarm from activists or academia.^[147]

Warren Farrell's influential The Myth of Male Power (1993) engagingly draws attention to the facts that men are overwhelmingly more likely to be used as cannon fodder, be murdered, become homeless, to commit suicide, to be imprisoned, and that men have an overall shorter life expectancy than women, in support of his claim that men belong to the “disposable sex.”^[148] Farrell, considered one of the founding authors of the modern men’s movement, began his career as a celebrated feminist speaker and three-time board member of the New York chapter of National Organization for Women and adapted that liberal feminist methodology to men’s issues. The main theme in his work is that feminism can and should be just as liberating for men as it is for women, premised on the assumption that patriarchal institutions affect men and women in different but equally oppressive ways. Unfortunately Farrell has the habit of undermining his own statistics and anecdotes in The Myth of Male Power (which might otherwise stand on their own) with his own commentary, speculations, and attempts at analogy or argument. In one egregious example he understandably complains about the trivialization caused by the broadening definition of rape, but then elsewhere claims that when a man is fired from his job it is the “psychological equivalent” to rape for a woman. The book’s most convincing lesson, though I think it is one the author provides unintentionally, is that society and its gender roles — from its families to its political institutions — are even more dysfunctional than most feminists have imagined.

Farrell’s conception of symmetrically oppressed genders leaves him unable to identify the fundamental role the oppression of women plays in the reproduction of class society. But if feminist scholars and activists continue to fail to engage with the legitimate causes of the men’s movement, the conversation around those issues will be increasingly dominated by the anti-feminist (and sometimes bitterly misogynistic) resentment of reactionary men’s rights movements.^[149]

The other counterpoint worth noting is the assertion that women’s work is not (or no longer) uniquely exploited as the basis of modern economies. This assertion is given weight by findings that women in developed countries do not do more work than men — and that any gender differences that do remain in the workforce are mostly the result of women’s own preferences rather than of patriarchal social structures. The sociologist Catherine Hakim takes this position in Key Issues in Women’s Work (1996) backed with a great deal of data from workforce studies conducted mostly in the United Kingdom but also from Europe and North America. Hakim found that the amount of total paid and unpaid work done by men and women is converging (especially if commute times are counted) and that although women continue to do most of the domestic work, “There is little evidence that wives generally, or full-time housewives, are exploited in the sense of working longer hours in total than men.”^[150]

Hakim is skeptical toward second-wave feminism, at one point dismissively speculating that the only reason its theories on housework are treated with importance “is that women feel the status of the housewife has diminished; they therefore seek a revaluation of their role and status by underlining the marginal market work done by women and the productive element in their domestic work.”^[151] She goes on,

It is said that women’s work is invisible in industrial society because women are family helpers, do home-based work, work in the informal economy, do voluntary work. All of this is true. The lie is the unstated implication that women are distinctive in engaging in these activities; that their important contribution is hidden from sight by not being recorded in national statistical surveys; that the activities are devalued by being excluded from the definition of economic activity. All of these conclusions are untrue […] men do many more hours of market work than women, in addition to all their other informal work activities."^[152]

Hakim (like some liberal feminist policy wonks) takes such a data-oriented approach that she mistakes the charge of invisibility brought by feminists against women’s work to mean ‘unrecorded in national statistical surveys’ rather than its intended meaning as a description of tasks considered ‘naturally’ to be done by women without the social recognition of a wage. She also links exploitation merely to share (quantity) of work rather than to the quality of much of women’s unpaid work as fundamentally vital to the reproduction of the capitalist workforce. Pointing out that men make up for their lackluster share of housework by spending more time at paid jobs only restates rather than refutes the feminist claim. These misunderstandings are somewhat surprising considering earlier in the book she makes claims similar to those of socialist feminists when she refers to women as a “crypto-servant” class and writes that “The great achievement of Western capitalism has been to persuade women that housework and homemaking are an expression of their femininity.”^[153]

To reinforce the point that the materialist feminist analysis is still useful even in developed capitalist countries today, Colin C. Williams noted in 2005 (using UK data) that “women still spend well over twice the amount of time as men on subsistence work. Non-exchanged work, therefore, remains chiefly women’s realm, even if there appears to be a slight redistribution of this work towards men as the decades have rolled on.”^[154]

2.7. Integration: The triple day and the role of microfinance

Today, as a juggernaut of mutant capitalism finally acts to pulverize the world’s “peasantry” and to drive working-class women directly into gigantic transnational industries, the exploitation of women’s labor is being dramatically reconfigured. Women are being busted out of traditional rural and urban patriarchal families to serve capitalism better.

— bromma
Exodus and Reconstruction

You work three jobs? Uniquely American, isn’t it? I mean, that is fantastic that you’re doing that.

— President George W. Bush to a divorced mother of three
Omaha, Nebraska, Feb. 4, 2005

The lengthy previous sections are just to say that one of the main functions microfinance performs in global capitalism is to draw previously underexploited labour into the field of capitalist accumulation. The answer to the questions evoked by Kiva’s celebratory “10 Years of Impact” infographic — ‘Why women? Why small-scale farmers?’ — is that those are the groups with the greatest potential to be further integrated into capitalist production through financial services.

There is a tension in the effect encroaching neoliberal capitalism has on rural women. On one side is the uprooting force described by bromma which frees young women from their homes en masse and sends them to urban centers as factory or service workers. But Stephen Young, drawing on his field work in Andhra Pradesh, India, notes that microfinance programs tend to limit the mobility of women as they put an emphasis “on disciplining women to be ‘good mothers’, responsible for the everyday work of social reproduction. These dual responsibilities mean that their entrepreneurial activities must usually be located in or close to the home.”^[155] The ambiguity is resolved if both effects occur: women who can be ushered into factories are, and those left behind are instead re-integrated by means of microfinance.

But bromma provides an important reminder:

Let’s be clear: the process we are witnessing is not “changing rural women into workers.” […] These women have been working as agricultural labourers, either on large capitalist farms or as unpaid labour on family farms owned and controlled by men serving capitalism. They have been working in family businesses and performing the endless hours of domestic and care work that made rural capitalism possible.

This is why I use the language of “re-exploitation” and “re-integration” to describe the process of financing marginal workers: it provides an opportunity to tap again the labour of women and peasants for profit. Feminists often speak of the ‘double day’ done by women who are both employed in a formal job and do the bulk of unpaid domestic work. Microfinance brings with it the possibility of a triple day for the world’s poorest women who can do the work needed at home, do work for a boss or sell goods in the informal economy, and take on responsibility for debt payments as an entrepreneur (even if the loans she receives are only used to buy consumer goods).

It is also important not to mistake financial capitalism as a fundamentally new method of exploitation. Debt is simply generalized wage labour, a convenience for a segment of the capitalist class who is freed from the hassle and risk of doing the actual hiring and management of employees. It is an especially impersonal and cruel employer, for that matter, as indebted workers are responsible for finding ways to earn money and make payments (or simply make payments, sinking ever more hopelessly into debt) on their own. Phil Mader has made this point well in his book:

Microfinance thus makes entreployee-type capital–labour relationships possible even with the denizens of slums and villages in the global South — a truly astonishing innovation. This form of surplus extraction is plainly more congruent with financialized capitalism than traditional employment, and it may be understood as part of a fundamental ongoing transformation in how labour power is made amenable to capital accumulation in many different spaces.^[156]

As we’ve briefly outlined earlier, the existing (and growing) body of evidence suggests that microfinance is not an effective means of poverty reduction, and it sometimes results in extreme tragedy. But how effective is it at its more clandestine role of re-integrating the world’s self-employed women and peasants into exploitable schemes of finance? Researchers have estimated (using MFI’s own self-reported data) that between 2003 and 2010 the microfinance industry extracted $124.6 billion (USD) from borrowers. Clearly, “microfinance has the capacity to extract payments (and thereby resources) from borrowers in significant quantities, adding value to the portfolios of financial actors through the economic activities of the poor.”^[157]

One question that remains is why women are so much more likely than men to contribute to Kiva loans. I don’t have much insight to offer other than the observation that risk is often quite gendered, with men feeling a responsibility for ‘risky investments’ and perhaps women more attracted to ‘social investments’.^[158] It may also have something to do with the liberal feminist discourse which renders Western women as liberated economic agents who are in a position to empower the poor women of the global south, who are in turn rendered as potential heroes capable of raising entire households and countries out of poverty if given the slightest opportunity. “This heroic woman narrative explains why the microfinance agenda is so appealing to educated, critical activists, including feminists. The new woman that microfinance promises to create is not simply empowered and thus ‘modern,’ but also independent and inspiring to many liberal feminists.”^[159]

Maria Mies has explored links between ‘First World’ and ‘Third World’ women which may get to some of the underlying hopes and fears which motivate the connection. Considering the process of ‘flexibilization’ of labour during the 1980s (today sometimes called the ‘gig economy’ creating a class of ‘precariat’ workers) in which women were pushed out of the formal sector and re-integrated into part-time service jobs, contract work, or informal work-from-home type schemes, she wrote “Thus, we can say that the way in which Third World women are at present integrated into capitalist development is the model also for the reorganization of labour in the centres of capitalism.”^[160] She observed that white women in capitalist centers were encouraged to consume commodities and produce children, while non-white women in the periphery were made to produce commodities and encouraged not to become mothers. “The new wave of racism which we encounter today in the West has its deepest roots in this contradiction, and in the growing fear of an increasing number of marginalized people in the rich countries that they might all become as expendable as women in Third World countries.”^[161]

3. Alternatives

Expanded super-exploitation of new, youthful, and female proletarians of low-wage countries rescued capitalism from the hole in which it found itself in the 1970s. Now, together with workers in the imperialist countries, it is their mission to dig another hole — the grave in which to bury capitalism and thereby secure the future of human civilization.

— John Smith
“Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century”

What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own gravediggers.

— Engels and Marx
Manifesto of the Communist Party

In what is probably the most often quoted line from her Economic Philosophy (1962), the economist Joan Robinson quipped that “the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.”^[162] In its original context she was referring to the plight of workers in nominally Socialist countries who didn’t even have the luxury of calling their exploitation by name. But it applies just as well to the misery of unemployment, or to those rural poor with increasing need for commodities but with inadequate access to financial services. Because whatever evils may be inherent to the microcredit model, and I believe that in many cases it exists merely as (yet another) institution for robbing the poor, MFIs (like loan sharks) would not find so many willing customers if their services weren’t in demand. Even putting questions of profit and exploitation aside by assuming that MFIs operate efficiently and at some optimal balance between charity and sustainability, the question which remains and confronts the Kiva user is whether giving poor women in impoverished neighborhoods expensive debt is a good way to help them — and if it is not, then what else can someone on their computer in a rich Western country do to help?

Finding ways to escape Robinson’s dilemma — that is, escaping the misery of being included within capitalism without the misery of remaining excluded from capitalism — has been the essential task of the socialist project since the early nineteenth century. Most attempts have centered around building alternative economic structures which eliminate or minimize profit, rent, and interest through cooperative workplaces (which are owned and managed by the workers who democratically allocate surplus, rather than being owned by investors and managed by bosses beholden to those investors), redistribution of real estate (away from landlords and to the people who actually use and live on the land), and interest-free mutual credit (which is most relevant as an alternative to microcredit, and we will look at a few examples below).

3.1. Socialist markets?

We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.

— Mikhail Bakunin

The modern socialist movements got their start with the classical political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo who in their defenses of the emerging capitalist class against landlords let slip that labour, as a unique factor of production, is the source (or ultimate cost) of all economic value. These labour theories of value were quickly adopted by socialists and used against capitalists themselves. As Robinson once described this turn of events:

Ricardo was followed by two able and well-trained pupils — Marx and Marshall. Meanwhile English history had gone right round the corner, and landlords were not any longer the question. Now it was capitalists. Marx turned Ricardo’s argument round this way: Capitalists are very much like landlords. And Marshall turned it round the other way: Landlords are very much like capitalists. Just round the corner in English history you see two bicycles of the very same make — one being ridden off to the left and the other to the right.^[163]

But before Marx and Marshall learned to ride their bicycles, breathing new life into the labour theory of value as a critique of political economy and synthesizing the marginalist and classical schools, respectively, Ricardian socialists and vulgar economists had already fought several rounds: socialists holding that profit was the result of unfair labour markets, and economists insisting that capital was productive on its own and so capitalists were deserving of their fair share expressed as profit.

During the 1840s and 1850s, socialists found a champion in Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a popular French social theorist who tried to find a synthesis between what he considered to be property’s tyranny of the strong over the weak and communism’s tyranny of the weak over the strong. As the first modern European socialist to have adopted the label for himself, Proudhon is sometimes referred to as the “father of anarchism,” though he described his social and economic prescriptions as mutualism (a term he borrowed from worker cooperatives in Lyon). Not only did Proudhon put forth influential arguments that property owners had no right to profit or to claims of surplus beyond their actual expenses (hence his famous pronouncement that “property is theft”), he anticipated Marx by pointing out that capitalists exploit workers even in ideally fair labour markets by unjustly appropriating the result of collective force.^[164]

Proudhon also came close to a basic formulation of Marx’s more complete account of capitalist exploitation with his proposition that the “laborer retains, even after he has received his wages, a natural right of property in the thing which he has produced.” It was by violating this principle, Proudhon thought, that capitalists appropriated what they had not earned (“the labor of the workers has created a value; now this value is their property. But they have neither sold nor exchanged it; and you, capitalist, you have not earned it”).^[165] It’s there, where labour-power and its products are separated into two commodities both owned but only one paid for by the capitalist, that Marx would later locate the secret to the capitalist extraction of surplus value (as we briefly summarized in the first few subsections of Chapter 1, Capitalism).

Proudhon’s writing had a profound effect on Marx who formulated important parts of his own theories explicitly or implicitly against the shortcomings he saw in utopian and ‘petite bourgeois’ socialisms (he’d classify Proudhon as the latter) and those tendencies' attendant hopes that capitalism could be either worked-around or out-competed within the realm of commodity production itself. The tensions between Marx and Proudhon, and those which lead to the historic 1872 split between Marxists and anarchists in the International Workingmen’s Association, still underlie many of the divisions among today’s socialists. The theoretical divisions become most apparent over issues of how to use, subvert, subordinate, or abolish the market and the state. While anarchists and Marxists (or mutualists and communists, etc.) differ on these issues, socialists in general do not hold the naive liberal view that the institutions of ‘the market’ (at least in its capitalist, exploitative forms) and ‘the state’ are opposed to each other as alternative means of economic distribution. Instead, socialists of all stripes tend to view both as interrelated forces which confront and dominate individuals. Proudhon and Marx both emphasized free association as an alternative to a society organized by coercive and alienating forces. David McNally explains the concept of ‘free association’ as:

the idea that a socialist society will be self-regulating, a form of society in which there is no need for an external agency (the state) which stands over and against individuals. Indeed, Marx’s hostility to the capitalist market is internally related to his hostility to the state: both express modes of social alienation in which human beings are unable to regulate and govern their economic and political affairs democratically, and in which institutions and mechanisms outside their control dominate and direct their life activities.^[166]

The role of the current state institutions in achieving a society of free association, however, is contested among socialists. On one side the so-called “state socialists” (including orthodox Marxists) advocate seizing the coercive tools of the state to suppress exploitation; on the other, the “libertarian socialists” (including anarchists) advocate negation of the state to undermine exploitation and to take the bite out of all kinds of oppression. To Marxists, the propensity for capitalism to lead to monopoly and centralization provides the very possibility for democratic control over the whole of the economy and the tool by which the capitalist system is to be overcome; for anarchists, it is monopoly and the concentrations of power which are at the root of many of the evils of capitalism. State and libertarian socialists therefore often find themselves working at odds toward the same ends. Libertarians work to build a new world in the shell of the old, while state socialists work to create the conditions within which the old world can be smashed and a new world can flourish.

Phil Gasper has written concisely against the idea (sometimes associated with the libertarian approach) that economic initiatives alone are sufficient for a lasting socialism:

Economic democracy and workers' self-management […] can only be permanently established by adopting a strategy aimed at dismantling the power of the capitalist state and expropriating the expropriators. In other words a political strategy, not one focused primarily on attempting to create alternative economic models within existing capitalist society.^[167]

A hundred years ago Lenin elucidated this Marxist strategy in The State and Revolution:

Marx expressly emphasized the “revolutionary and transient form” of the state which the proletariat needs. The proletariat needs the state only temporarily. We do not after all differ with the anarchists on the question of the abolition of the state as the aim. We maintain that, to achieve this aim, we must temporarily make use of the instruments, resources, and methods of state power against the exploiters, just as the temporary dictatorship of the oppressed class is necessary for the abolition of classes.^[168]

But it is the Marxists' supposedly-temporary ‘dictatorship of the oppressed class’, made up of self-appointed representatives of the people, that anarchists mistrusted from the beginning. Mikhail Bakunin, Marx’s primary anarchist antagonist in the International Workingmen’s Association, saw the two approaches to establishing socialism as nearly diametrically opposed:

Between the Marxian policy and the Bismarckian policy there no doubt exists a very appreciable difference, but between the Marxians and ourselves, there is an abyss. They are Governmentalists, we are out and out Anarchists. […] Indeed, between these two tendencies no conciliation to-day is possible.^[169]

Camillo Berneri, writing from Spain in 1936 where he was fighting together with other Italian anti-fascists against Franco’s forces in the civil war, responded directly to Lenin’s formulation to express the anarchist suspicion that the Marxian use of the state would not be as transitory as its theorists implied:

Lenin was disguising the facts. The Marxists “do not have the complete destruction of the State in mind,” but they foresee the natural disappearance of the State as a consequence of the destruction of the classes by the means of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’, that is to say State Socialism, whereas the Anarchists desire the destruction of the classes by means of a social revolution which eliminates, with the classes, the State.^[170]

A few months after Berneri published the short article in which the above quote appears, he was murdered by Stalinist soldiers while walking in Barcelona.^[171] With the historic trajectory of the Bolshevik revolution to its final disintegration in Stalinism now fully in hindsight, the reluctance of the anarchists to seize state power has been given greater weight.

Many libertarian socialists point to the lack of competition and the high barriers to entrepreneurship as causes for the divergence in the price of labour-power and the price of labour’s products. Employers have access to legal privileges and capital, so most people have no choice but to find employment and accept whatever wages they can get, a situation pithily summarized by GK Chesterton with his quip that “Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.”^[172] These free-market anti-capitalists,^[173] heavily influenced by Proudhon and skeptical that the state’s coercive organs are useful for anything other than protecting privilege and injustice, have thus sought to minimize exploitation in economic relations by establishing cooperatives, attacking wage-suppressing and interest-maintaining monopoly, and agreeing to normative just prices so that everything is bought and sold at cost without profit as if in a perfectly competitive market. Exemplary of the last item is the American utopian Individualist, Josiah Warren, regarded by many as the first American anarchist, who advocated for economic relations based on “cost the limit of price” as a precept aimed at eliminating profit and usury. As an experiment in his normative mutualist economics (what he called ‘equitable commerce’), Warren opened and successfully operated for several years the Cincinnati Time Store where users could buy and sell goods and services using labour notes (promises to perform a certain number of hours of work).

The strongest nineteenth-century case for free-market anti-capitalism was made by the individualist Boston anarchists centered around Benjamin Tucker and his journal Liberty. In a pamphlet he wrote in the summer after the 1886 Haymarket affair, Tucker presents state and libertarian socialism as diametrically opposed (“there is no half-way house between State Socialism and Anarchism”). Tucker’s pamphlet remains an eloquent introduction to individualist anarchism, but his dichotomy is constructed on a market fundamentalism not representative of the wider anarchist movement. Writing from his retirement in France for the 1911 edition of the essay, he added a postscript in which he expressed a loss of hope that capitalism and its monopolies can be overcome by purely economic means (arriving at what was Marx’s position from the outset) and stated instead that it “must be grappled with for a time solely by forces political or revolutionary.” He became resigned that his vision of a practical free-market anarchism must wait until after “measures of forcible confiscation, through the State or in defiance of it, shall have abolished the concentrations that monopoly has created.”^[174]

Although Marx himself was optimistic about worker cooperatives and some forms of labour notes, viewing them as prefiguring a socialist economy and even as a sufficient transitory stage on the route to communism,^[175] his theory (and the politics arising from it) is generally very pessimistic toward markets as a socialist tool. Not only does the model presented by Marx in Capital allow profit to be extracted even in a competitive market, but his theory of prices relies on the cost of labour-power being determined at market. The implication, that it is impossible to eliminate the labour market (and thus alienation if not exploitation) without undermining the price system generally, gives rise to an interesting bifurcation of arguments, almost like Robinson’s two bicycles riding in different directions from Ricardo’s critique of rent. To the right, Marx has anticipated the core arguments articulated by the Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek now often used against Marxism and economic planning (the so-called “economic calculation problem” which holds that without a market to determine prices, it is infeasible to rationally allocate resources). To the left, Marx’s analysis can be used as an argument against the possibility of a socialist market as done, for example, by David McNally in Against the Market:

by accepting market relations (commodities, prices and wage-labour), market socialists must logically accept the inevitable consequences of these relations — exploitation, class inequality and economic crises. But market socialists fail to see this because they do not understand that without the market in human labour-power there is no generalized commodity exchange. […]

The elimination of exploitation and class inequality is impossible without the abolition of the labour market. And this can only mean the demarketization of economic life. A consistent socialism can only be unrelentingly hostile to the market as regulator of economic relations.^[176]

Furthermore, even if cooperatives manage to minimize exploitation by placing surplus under the control of worker-managed firms, those cooperatives still must compete with each other at market. In other words, cooperatives remain subject to market forces and are pressured to re-invest surplus rather than use it toward more socially desirable ends, hardly a full escape from capitalism. Marxist critics of the cooperative movement would say that workers at worker-owned businesses which compete on the market become their own capitalists. McNally recognizes this as the “key issue” with a cooperative-based economy:

Workers' control is not possible, in other words, in a situation in which groups of workers continue to relate their labour and its products to those of other workers by means of the market. So long as acts of concrete labour are connected only through the market, society’s means of production will obey the competitive imperative to accumulation as an end in itself and will thus continue to evade the control of the direct producers — which is to say that they will remain a form of capital.^[177]

Putting these complaints about markets together, we see that the Marxist critique of market socialism is threefold: 1) even competitive markets allow for capitalist exploitation via the wage system, 2) without market-determined wages markets become useless at allocating other resources, and 3) even cooperative firms are slaves to capitalist accumulation. It’s remarkable that after 150 years of attempts by bourgeois economists to defend capitalist exploitation by discrediting socialism, it is still Marx, an anti-capitalist himself, whose theories (formulated in basic algebra without even the use of calculus) pose the most formidable theoretical hurdle to most socialist projects.

That said, all three objections to socialist uses of markets tend to be overstated. To the first criticism, it is true that within Marx’s model exploitation goes on without any coercion. But that model is intentionally unrealistic (by not incorporating primitive accumulation) in order to reveal the working of capitalist accumulation in its own terms. In reality a great deal of coercion goes in to creating and maintaining labour markets, and classical socialists and mutualists are justified in pointing to monopoly and state intervention as ultimate sources of profit, rent, and interest. As Kevin Carson summarized the process of primitive accumulation in Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, his book defending free-market anti-capitalism against marginalist attacks:

without the state to rob the peasantry of their land, to terrorize the urban proletariat out of organizing, and to legally proscribe alternative working class forms of self-organized credit, this propertyless condition of the working class arguably would never have come about.^[178]

The second and third criticisms, that any commodity market implies a labour market (and thus the exploitation and alienation of workers) even if the actors in those markets are worker-owned cooperatives, are only insurmountable if we assume that the way markets work within capitalism reflects some eternal nature of market exchange. But such an assumption is idealistic and uncritical (in contravention of the methodology Marxists usually pride themselves on). Markets are not irresistible forces visited upon human society as some divine curse; they are social institutions created by humans, which can be re-created and subverted by humans. In confronting this ambiguity — or outright contradiction — existing between the principled rejection of commodity production and a liberatory path consistent with Marxist methodology, the late Michael Harrington (a founding member of the Democratic Socialists of America) defended socialist markets as a matter of practicality over dogma:

even though Marx in one persona clearly rejected markets altogether, his methodology allows room for the assumption that the markets of a socialist future need not be anything like the markets of the capitalist past. And, much more important, his basic political values, his commitment to freedom and human emancipation, are simply at odds with the consequences that follow from his own analysis of socialism as a centrally planned society or a progressive monopoly.

[…]

Piety about an ambiguous tradition should not, then, keep socialists from seeing that markets can, and must, play a role in the transition to a humane future. All one needs to do is to choose the libertarian Marx over the centralist Marx and then confront reality instead of texts.^[179]

Marxist warnings about the alienating effect of production for exchange should not be ignored, but the reforms put forth by most socialists who advocate for the use of markets (via federated worker cooperatives, for example) — including the tactic of revolutionary syndicalism advocated by many anarchists and democratic socialists — are not meant to preserve markets as they exist, but to intentionally take control of, transform, and whenever beneficial to transcend them. Markets are a familiar social institution which sometimes already prefigure mutually beneficial social and economic interactions and reach to the heart of capitalist production — in short, they present themselves as the ideal shovels for the gravediggers of capitalism.

An anti-market path is less clear. McNally provides a short description of an alternative society based around a computer-aided, democratically planned economy which goes to some lengths to reproduce many features provided elegantly by markets (individual preference in consumer goods, individual trade, the ability to do extra work in exchange for luxuries). His sketch also allows, or even relies on, limited auxiliary markets to provision non-necessity goods and services (including such mundane items as haircuts).^[180] A rather anticlimactic conclusion to a Marxist takedown of markets.^[181] Marx himself is not much help here. In the first volume of Capital he gave some space to sketching primitive accumulation and capitalism’s pre-history, but he gives almost none to what a post-capitalist future would look like or how to get there. The few paragraphs he did devote to the topic mostly reinforce his caricature as an economic determinist:

The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

[…] capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a natural process, its own negation. This is the negation of the negation. It does not re-establish private property, but it does indeed establish individual property on the basis of the achievements of the capitalist era: namely co-operation and the possession in common of the land and the means of production produced by labour itself.^[182]

Marx’s ‘individual property’, made possible by the historic synthesis of capitalist private property and socialist production for use, sounds a lot like the individual property of the anarchists. But how to achieve such an expropriation of the hitherto expropriators is left as an exercise for the reader.^[183]

Some libertarian and left communists are hopeful that a transitory stage of state or market socialism can be bypassed altogether via a process of direct communization. The Russian anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin argued that even if we wanted to distribute wealth fairly, based on relative contribution of work, it is impossible to determine what that distribution should be. So a more sensible solution, which would still be preferable even if “to each according to contribution” were possible, is represented by his slogan “All is for all!”^[184]

If mutual market exchanges can minimize exploitation and approach this communist ideal, if they can approach “to each according to need,” and if they can do so while avoiding the pitfalls and overbearing bureaucracy accompanying so many attempts at non-market allocation, all the better.^[185]

3.2. Mutual credit: zero percent interest

“To advocate market socialism,” the British political theorist David Miller has written, “is not to make a fetish of the market.”

Markets are an effective device for providing a wide range of familiar goods and services, but where the boundaries should be drawn — which goods and services are bet provided through the market and which through public agencies — is a matter of practical experience, not of principle.^[186]

In fact, markets alone, capitalist or otherwise, bring no guarantee of success at even their most basic function of distributing goods according to want. Rather than matching supply to demand, markets are only capable of matching supply to the demand of those with money, a disastrous defect producing failures such as the export and destruction of food crops during depression-driven famines or holding millions of empty houses out of use while nearly the same number of people go without permanent shelter.^[187]

A prerequisite for markets to approach their potential usefulness, then, is a relatively equal distribution of money together in the meantime — or in addition to — a guaranteed basic standard of living by keeping a base level of income, food, housing, and medical care decoupled from market distribution (here anarchists and proponents of the social democratic welfare state see eye-to-eye, even if their methods differ).^[188]

Central to the market socialist attempt at setting markets on more equitable footing is access to inexpensive non-exploitative money, including interest-free credit. But unlike microcredit, the various mutual credit schemes are explicitly non-profit and aim to provide an alternative to capitalist accumulation. Not only would increased access to credit allow prices to respond to everyone’s wants rather than only to the wants of the wealthy, but a low interest rate^[189] on credit would tend to create an upper bound on the rates of profit and rent derived from capital and land, reverberating an equalizing force throughout the economy. If credit were easily and inexpensively available for all, then workers would have the realistic option of going into business for themselves, keeping upward pressure on wages. This is why mutualists emphasize interest-free credit (with fees to cover operating expenses and expected losses only) as a route to the elimination of exploitative profit. Warren’s Time Store comfortably managed by charging a mere 4% markup; credit associations should be able to administer loans with a similarly low overhead (probably closer to 1% if expressed as an interest rate rather than a one-time fee).

The history of socialist innovations is difficult to pin down because cooperative forms of business, mutual aid societies, and prices limited by labour-time (including labour exchanges like time banks and Warren’s Time Store) are re-discovered and re-invented everywhere exploitative commerce produces poverty and inequality. The most successful and mainstream adoption of mutual banking principles to date is embodied by the credit union movement. The lineage of modern credit unions — cooperatively owned banks operated in the interests of their member-owners — owes more to the practical cooperative credit societies pioneered by liberals in nineteenth-century Germany than to any utopian or specifically socialist scheming. Not long after Proudhon’s People’s Bank failed to get off the ground in France, the 1850s saw a proliferation of Franz Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch's credit cooperatives throughout Germany and Europe.

The structure of Schulze-Delitzsch banks were introduced to the United States via Canadian proponents of cooperative credit, and were first legally formalized there in Massachusetts in 1910.^[190] Today 235 million people belong to credit unions (over 45% of whom live in the United States) controlling $1.7 trillion in assets.^[191] But the emphasis on loans provided by credit unions, at least in developed countries, has shifted from production and wholesale purchase of supplies — as a means of competing with capitalists or maintaining livelihoods outside of major capitalist influence — to consumption within capitalism. Over 90% of the approximately $1 trillion in loans provided by American credit unions are distributed as mortgages, automobile loans, and personal credit card loans.^[192]

Another pioneer of nineteenth-century German cooperatives, Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen, adapted the Schulze-Delitzsch model to serve rural communities so that farmers could pool their limited savings to issue credit and purchase supplies. British colonial officials, impressed by the success of Raiffeisenian credit unions, adopted the ideas and introduced them in India in an attempt to combat poverty and the loan sharks preying on rural populations there. The credit union movement thrived in India in the early twentieth century (counting four million members by 1930) before declining under two opposing forces. In one direction, the sustainability of credit unions was compromised when lending standards and collection efforts became lax; in the other, control of the cooperatives tended to be captured by local landlords and moneylenders, rendering them ineffective as means away from poverty or toward self-determination.

It is in the void left by this first generation of rural colonial British credit unions in India and Bangladesh that modern microfinance was born. But as Phil Mader has warned, a strict acceptance of this lineage is misleading — microfinance institutions are usually not cooperatively owned and operated by their customers — and histories of microfinance sometimes give the industry an undeserved cooperative veneer: “the microfinance movement and the cooperative movement have little in common, and they differ most fundamentally regarding who owns and governs the credit-giving institutions.”^[193]

Silvia Federici has also emphasized the difference between mutual credit societies and microfinance institutions which rely on social pressure and group lending to collect payment and interest:

The other side of women’s struggle for direct access to means of reproduction has been the formation, across the Third World—from Cambodia to Senegal — of credit associations that function as money commons. Differently named, “tontines” (in parts of Africa) are autonomous, self-managed, women-made banking systems, providing cash to individuals or groups that can have no access to banks, working purely on the basis of trust. In this, they are completely different from the micro-credit systems promoted by the World Bank, which functions on the basis of shame, arriving to the extreme (e.g., in Niger) of posting in public places the pictures of the women who fail to repay the loans so that some have been driven to suicide.^[194]

By providing a way to pool assets, cooperative savings and loan organizations (such as credit unions) increase the money supply and make investments in large projects possible within cash-poor communities. But what about the stalled economies of communities full of people willing to work with, buy from, and sell to each other but who don’t even have the spare cash to put in a small savings account? It is not unusual for people living in neighborhoods left in the wake of capitalist crises and villages at the forefront of neoliberal primitive accumulation to be reduced to this economic absurdity: the ability to work and the necessity to eat, but separated from the capital and consumer goods markets for lack of money. The commercial microfinance solution is to capitalize on the misfortune: import finance capital from global markets and export profits from the work of borrowers.

A more cooperative approach is to create a mutual credit society backed not by deposits but by the labour of its members: a way to buy goods in exchange for the promise to perform some work. One popular scheme of labour-backed local currency in the age of neoliberal capitalism, called Local Exchange and Trading System (LETS), developed in Vancouver, British Colombia, during the stagflation and widespread unemployment of the 1980s. A LETS exchange provides a directory of goods and services offered and wanted. Members agree on a price which is credited to the seller and debited from the buyer in the LETS ledger, in effect providing interest-free credit and thereby allowing people who are otherwise unemployed or have no money to produce for and buy from each other. “In a LETS, currency is unlimited; there are neither credit limits, debt charges, nor disciplinary methods of forcing people to work.”^[195]

Peter North, ethnographer of LETS communities in the United Kingdom, has explored the degree to which alternative currencies have and can potentially act as “micropolitical” resistance to capitalism. North, writing from the position that the Marxist critique of utopianism cannot be assumed a priori such that he expresses hope in bottom-up markets as a possible path away from capitalism, quotes an anarchist member of the Manchester LETS:

The great thing about LETS is that you can start to live life outside capitalism, outside mainstream work or on the dole. Being unemployed is very soul-destroying and isolating, but LETS gives you a way to be part of a wider group and sell your skills so unemployment doesn’t grind you down.^[196]

As with personal computers, which make systems like LETS practical, the internet has introduced new tools for administering and federating mutual credit. In terms of popularity, there is nothing to rival what Kiva has done for microfinance, but one of the first web-based LETS groups, the Community Exchange System based in Cape Town, is now a global network with nearly 1,000 exchanges operating in 90 countries.^[197] Another adaptation of LETS to the internet is the Ripple payment system which uses a web-of-trust to allow users to establish decentralized interest-free credit lines amongst themselves. Ripple was directly inspired by the Vancouver LETS scene, but it has since re-branded and shifted its focus to connecting commercial banks with its transaction protocol and to its Bitcoin-inspired cryptocurrency (XRP).^[198]

3.2.1. Cryptocurrency

Bitcoin itself differs from mutual credit ledgers like LETS in important ways. Instead of being a unit of accounting freely created as needed, Bitcoin, aptly named, is a commodity that must be purchased or computed (“mined”) before it can be used as money. Furthermore, Bitcoin so far has proven more popular among speculators as a store of value than among traders as a general-purpose medium of exchange. As a result, the Bitcoin economy has tended to mirror the inequalities and concentration of wealth in the mainstream economy. The enthusiasm surrounding Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency technologies is also often fueled by a market fundamentalism at odds with socialism. Still, the Bitcoin-led explosion in electronic currencies and its underlying blockchain technology have introduced new fields of opportunity and experimentation in egalitarian and libertarian economics:

Subversive money

The psuedo-anonymous nature of transactions, and the difficulty of controlling the public blockchain ledger by a central authority, make cryptocurrencies attractive to individuals and communities wishing to escape state surveillance, repression, and monopoly. One leftist Bitcoin user has expressed their enthusiasm in these rather utopian but sympathetic terms:

We now have the tools to create a world-wide global revolution where there no more Gods or Masters of the economic system. We can allow for our peer-to-peer relationships via the internet to become a new paradigm for social, economic, and political organization. No longer do we have to believe in the false divisions of nationality, obey the repugnant laws of states that keep us oppressed and impoverished, nor tolerate governmental theft via law, or the exploration by capitalist allowed by their laws. Through forging a new economy that is built on top of non-state based currencies, we can create a new way forward free from the hands of both statist and capitalist, and their desire to exploit others for their own gains. […]

By pulling money into the digital realm outside of the hands of states or bankers, we can create a new system of economic exchange and money that does not need the violence of the state, or the exploitation of capitalist.^[199]

Private money

Bitcoin itself functions as a gigantic public ledger of transactions which provides less privacy than traditional cash. But some cryptocurrencies, such as Monero (XMR), are designed to provide much more anonymity.

In November 2017, The New Inquiry magazine launched Bail Bloc, a project to mine Monero to raise money for the Bronx Freedom Fund (providing bail for low-income detainees in New York) and Immigrant Bail Fund (providing bail for detainees in immigrant detention centers). As of May 2018 the project has mined over 44 XMR (over $7,000 USD) which they claim is enough to post bail for 12 people.^[200] The project organizers admit the cryptocurrency route is a bit of a gimmick (“This is as much about catapulting a radical criticism of bail into the public imagination as it is about raising bail funds via cryptocurrency”), a tactic of public engagement they call “rhetorical software”.

Circulating money

Bitcoin is inherently (and intentionally) deflationary in the long run (supposing demand remains constant): the rate at which new coin is mined becomes increasingly slower as it approaches a predefined maximum. Because deflation incentivizes hoarding and prospecting, some alternative cryptocurrencies have experimented with inflationary designs (for example by removing the upper-limit on the number of coins issued). At the extreme are projects like Freicoin (FRC), one of several cryptocurrency projects born during the Occupy Wall Street protests, which dissuades hoarding by implementing a demurrage fee so that all coins lose approximately 5% of their value per year. The perishable currency of Freicoin is influenced by the Freigeld (“free money”) of the German economist Silvio Gesell, who was himself an anarchist influenced by Proudhon.^[201]

Environmental and democratic money

The Bitcoin network reaches consensus about its distributed ledger by means of an energy-expensive proof-of-work algorithm which has raised concerns regarding environmental degradation and the speed of transaction verification. Many alternative cryptocurrencies have experimented with more efficient algorithms and alternative incentives for mining nodes. One of the most unconventional solutions is that used by FairCoin (FAIR). Rather than being fully decentralized, Faircoin relies on designated validation nodes which take turns creating and validating blocks in the blockchain, an inexpensive process involving no mining or mindless number crunching. But perhaps the most interesting thing about FairCoin is that it has been adopted as the currency for the FairCoop project, an umbrella for several cooperative economic initiatives. FairCoop’s initial stock of FairCoins was donated by Enric “Robin Banks” Duran, an activist who took commercial and personal loans from dozens of Spanish banks totaling €492,000, and used them to fund various anticapitalist projects with no intention of making any payments.^[202]

Venture communism

The blockchain technology underlying Bitcoin is capable of being used as more than a mere ledger for cryptocurrency; other potential applications include a generic consensus-based distributed database or a platform for self-executing ‘smart’ contracts which can facilitate all kinds of trades and transactions. One experimental group which hopes to harness the blockchain for the cause of liberty is the Finnish Robin Hood Asset Management Cooperative, an “activist hedge fund” founded by critical-theory-reading artists, is structured as a cooperative, invests its members' contributions in major US stock exchanges (according to a trend-finding algorithm they have developed and named “Parasite”), and earmarks a portion of any profit to fund community projects. Robin Hood, described by one of its founders as a “counter-investment cooperative of the precariat,”^[203] accepts Bitcoin contributions and maintains its membership database using the Ethereum blockchain platform. In the words of Brett Scott, author of The Heretics Guide to Global Finance (2013), “The Dada artist Marcel Duchamp took a urinal and called it Fountain. Robin Hood takes a hedge fund and calls it a liberator of precarious workers.”^[204]

As of July 2018, Kiva accepts payment from users in Bitcoin. In 2019 Kiva is planning on launching an experimental blockchain-based credit bureau in Sierra Leone in hopes of decreasing the cost of validating credit worthiness.^[205]

3.2.2. Direct and interest-free: The redemption of microfinance?

In the case of microcredit, one way to side-step the difficult question of how much interest is too much is simply to replace the traditional expensive, exploitative credit with affordable, mutual credit. There are slight motions in that direction in the crowd-sourced microfinance space.

Zidisha (named for the Swahili word for “grow” or “expand”) was founded in 2009 as a competitor to Kiva that actually facilitated direct peer-to-peer lending (rather than going through third-party MFIs like Kiva does). Although much less scrutinized than the more popular Kiva, in 2014 a writer at a weblog called Modern Microcredit pointed out that Zidisha was reporting misleadingly low interest rates. While Zidisha claimed an impressively low average rate of 5.3%, it neglected to include all costs; Modern Microcredit sampled 20 loans and found the true average APR to be closer to 159%.^[206] Partly in response to this criticism,^[207] in 2015 Zidisha moved away from charging interest entirely and has settled on a one-time fee of 5% of the loan amount plus a mandatory (and usually refundable) deposit into an insurance fund. In a 2016 retrospective for Huffington Post, Zidisha founder Julia Kurnia describes the process of arriving at the zero interest model, during which she also relates this anecdote which underscores the way alien economic forces can be felt as diabolic power: “In some cases, early Zidisha adopters were accused of witchcraft when they showed up with lump sums of cash in places a loan officer hadn’t visited in months.”^[208] As of May 2018, Zidisha has disbursed over $14 million in loans and is currently offering loans to borrowers in Ghana, Haiti, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, and Zambia.

Kiva also has a few initiatives in the works which bring it closer to the direct and interest-free vision of itself that it projects. In 2013 they launched Kiva Zip, a pilot program which offered loans directly to entrepreneurs (without an intermediary MFI) in the United States at 0% interest and without any credit score requirement. In 2016 the Kiva Zip program was integrated into the main Kiva website as Kiva U.S.^[209]

3.3. Debt strike

As delinquency rates rose in Nicaragua’s microfinance sector during the global financial crisis of 2008, MFIs turned to aggressive tactics in collecting late payments from over-indebted^[211] microfinance borrowers, including the seizure of collateral property. In June of that year, an MFI called ProCredit operating in the northern city of Jalapa had several delinquent borrowers arrested for non-payment. The arrests galvanized a simmering unrest into a widespread protest that became known as the No Pago (“non-payment”) movement. Thousands of borrowers struggling with interest payments on loans they could no longer afford (if they ever could), demanded relief from the government and directly from MFIs in the form of lower interest, payment lenience and restructuring, and debt forgiveness.^[212]

To bring attention to their grievances, No Pago protesters took to the streets, keeping some highways closed for days. They also brought their protests to MFI branch offices, a tactic which was intensified after President Daniel Ortega publicly praised the protesters but urged them to clear the highways and take their complaints directly to the “usurers”.^[213] An attempt was made to burn down the offices of an MFI in Ocotal, and other loan offices were barricaded by protesters with staff members trapped inside. Several protesters were seriously injured during the ensuring battles with police. In the immediate wake of the riots, several MFIs in northern Nicaragua closed down.

A Moratorium Bill was finally enacted by the Nicaraguan legislature in 2010 which set lower maximum interest rates and provided payment restructuring to a small number of distressed borrowers. But by that time the Nicaraguan microfinance industry had been deeply damaged: between 2008 and 2010 around 100,000 microcredit clients stopped receiving credit, the total sector loan portfolio fell from $420 million to $170 million, and in addition to the millions lost to default, foreign investors withdrew around $60 million in funding from MFIs affiliated with Nicaraguan Association of Microfinance Institutions.^[214]

Near the height of the No Pago movement in 2009, twenty-five international funds including Kiva took out a full page ad in La Prensa calling on the government to protect investments in Nicaraguan microfinance. Kiva also placed an alert on the profile pages of all Nicaraguan borrows which warned that the moratorium law “could have a crippling effect on the microfinance industry and banking sector in Nicaragua.”^[215] More than the short term losses, MFIs and investors were preoccupied with a fear that the No Pago movement would cultivate a permanent “culture of non-payment”^[216] rendering Nicaraguan peasants and artisans unexploitable as a source of surplus value.

In his popular history of debt, David Graeber commented on the peculiarity of the Christian adoption of the word redemption: “It is rather striking to think that the very core of the Christian message, salvation itself, the sacrifice of God’s own son to rescue humanity from eternal damnation, should be framed in the language of a financial transaction.”^[217] Drawing from the ancient Hebrew custom of Jubilee, according to which slaves were freed and debts were forgiven every 50 years, he reads Christian soteriology as awaiting a final, permanent Jubilee:

If so, “redemption” is no longer about buying something back. It’s really more a matter of destroying the entire system of accounting. In many Middle Eastern cities, this was literally true: one of the common acts during debt cancelation was the ceremonial destruction of the tablets on which financial records had been kept, an act to be repeated, much less officially, in just about every major peasant revolt in history.

This leads to another problem: What is possible in the meantime, before that final redemption comes?^[218]

Earlier I charged the Marxist opposition to markets, an opposition which ends up relying upon markets for the foreseeable future, with being anticlimactic. But even if that’s the case, the small-scale socialist experiments in cooperative business, mutual credit, and the even more minuscule experiments in alternative currencies I described as hopeful alternatives are downright irrelevant, at least to most people suffering under debt, wage labour, lack of credit, and unemployment now. The actions of those like Enric Duran who defrauded so many Spanish banks of hundreds of thousands of dollars by simply refusing to pay back his loans and the No Pago defaulters in Nicaragua point to one of modern capitalism’s soft spots and a potential source of relief in the meantime: the availability of consumer credit mixed with a culture of non-payment provides practical opportunities to expropriate a bit of our share from the expropriators.

Graeber along with several other activists involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement have attempted to spark such a culture of nonpayment in the United States by establishing a network of debt resistance called Strike Debt.^[219] Strike Debt has launched two initiatives so far: the publication of The Debt Resisters' Operations Manual, a book with information on how various forms of consumer credit work and how payments can be resisted, and the now-defunct Rolling Jubilee project which bought up bad debt (mostly student and medical) for cheap and then forgave it outright^[220]

Such debt resistance, of course, is not sustainable. Although microfinance in Nicaragua has now largely recovered,^[221] the fear of a culture of non-payment expressed by investors is valid: if credit is abused on a large scale, as advocated by debt resistors, then it will cease to be profitable to investors who will find more lucrative ventures leaving behind an even greater crisis of liquidity and lack of financial services than the poor already face.

But to reject debt strikes on grounds of sustainability is to beg the question of whether capitalism itself should or can be sustained. (Note that I single out capitalism because it is the dominant form of economic exploitation, not because it is the worst possible form). To some naturally empathetic people the answer is obvious. For the rest of us, I hope this essay has at least highlighted some reasons why, at the very least, we ought to be highly suspicious of capitalist production and the societies built around it.

4. Further Reading

Most of the ideas I’ve engaged with in this essay were inspired by, and are expressed more fully in, these five or six works:

bromma, Exodus and Reconstruction: Working-Class Women at the Heart of Globalization (Kersplebedeb: 2013): This evocative essay — by emphasizing the primacy of women’s oppression to the maintenance of capitalism — explores the role and plight of women in a working class being remade by the latest waves of global primitive accumulation. It is also available as a 34-page printed pamphlet from AK Press (ISBN: 9781894946421).
Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation On A World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, 3rd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2014): Published at the tail end of the second-wave feminist domestic labour debates (see Chapter 2, Housework), this is now a classic look at the capitalist system from a materialist feminist perspective. For further further reading, consider Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation which greatly expands on some topics raised by Mies, especially the early modern witch hunts as a form of capitalist primitive accumulation.
Philip Mader, The Political Economy of Microfinance: Financialising Poverty (Palgrave Macmillan: 2015): A concise and readable Marxist criticism of microfinance. “[T]he question at stake here is not whether microfinance ‘works’ at reducing poverty — for which negative (or, at least, zero-impact) findings already abound — but what microfinance works at, and how? The answer I offer is that microfinance financializes poverty: it works to turn it into a problem of finance and makes it the basis for new credit relations which serve surplus extraction.” (80)
Milford Bateman and Kate Maclean, eds., Seduced and Betrayed: Exposing the Contemporary Microfinance Phenomenon (University of New Mexico Press, 2017): I believe this recent book is the most complete single-volume criticism of microfinance available. I was unable to obtain a copy in time to incorporate more of its findings and conclusions about the false promises of microfinance, but they generally emphasize and expand upon the concerns I have already raised in this essay.
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1990): First published in 1867, this is the book in which Marx most completely presents his theory of capitalist exploitation at the micro-economic level (see Section 1.2, ““Primary exploitation” (wage labour and accumulation)”). But it is no dry economics text, as it is full of Marx’s literary flourishes and philosophic insight. It is long (though many sections, particularly the listings of various statistics, can be skimmed or skipped without missing anything important), but it is highly recommended reading for nerds interested in economics and philosophy. “A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” (163)

Appendix A: Data and Scripts

The data used to plot the compensation-productivity gap (in Chapter 1, Capitalism) is from the Economic Policy Institute^[11] and can also be downloaded as a tab-separated file: wage-prod-gap.txt

wage-prod-gap.r - R script to produce compensation-productivity gap line chart.

References and Notes

1. Philip Mader, The Political Economy of Microfinance: Financialising Poverty (Palgrave Macmillan: 2015), 1.

2. For my full criticism of Kiva, see “Some thoughts on Kiva’s interest rates”

3. Philip Mader, “Rise and fall of microfinance in India: The Andhra Pradesh crisis in perspective,” Strategic Change 22, no. 1‐2 (2013): 47-66.

4. Associated Press, “SKS Under Spotlight in Suicides,” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 24, 2012.

5. Milford Bateman and Ha-Joon Chang, “Microfinance and the illusion of development: From hubris to nemesis in thirty years,” World Economic Review 1 (2012).

6. Abhijit Banerjee, Dean Karlan, and Jonathan Zinman, “Six randomized evaluations of microcredit: introduction and further steps,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 7, no. 1 (2015): 13-14.

7. Talea Miller, “Celebrating 10 Years of Impact,” Kiva Blog (27 October 2015). As of March 2017, Kiva users have lent $1.13B (https://www.kiva.org/about).

8. “Kiva Lender Demographics for Kiva Field Partners,” https://fellowsblog.kiva.org/partner_help/kiva_lender_demographics

9. https://www.kiva.org/about/finances/supporters/corporations retrieved July, 2016.

10. Philip Mirowski, “Defining neoliberalism,” in The road from Mont Pèlerin: The making of the neoliberal thought collective (2009): 417-450.

11. Josh Bivens et al., Raising America’s Pay: Why It’s Our Central Economic Policy Challenge, Economic Policy Institute’s Briefing Paper #378 (2014). The same data is plotted in Figure A of that report.

12. “microcredit reflects a rescaling of neoliberal debt to integrate the poor and their informal economies into the financial sector.” (John Carr et al., “Kiva’s Flat, Flat World: Ten Years of Microcredit in Cyberspace,” Globalizations 13, no. 2 (2016): 147.)

13. Katharine N. Rankin, “A critical geography of poverty finance,” Third World Quarterly 34, no. 4 (2013): 548.

14. Rankin, “A critical geography of poverty finance,” 560

15. Rankin,“A critical geography of poverty finance,” 557-558.

16. Perhaps a better one-paragraph summary of Marx’s theory of capitalist exploitation is provided by Selma James in her 1972 introduction to The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community: “The commodity [women] produce, unlike all other commodities, is unique to capitalism: the living human being - ‘the laborer himself’, Capital’s special way of robbing labor is by paying the worker a wage that is enough to live on (more or less) and to reproduce other workers. But the worker must produce more in the way of commodities than what his wage is worth. The unpaid surplus labor is what the capitalist is in business to accumulate and what gives him increasing power over more and more workers: he pays for some labor to get the rest free so he can command more labor and get even more free, ad infinitum-until we stop him. He buys with wages the right to use the only ‘thing’ the worker has to sell, his or her ability to work. The specific social relation which is capital, then, is the wage relation. And this wage relation can exist only when the ability to work becomes a saleable commodity. Marx calls this commodity labor power.”

17. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 1:875-876.

18. Marx, Capital, 875.

19. Marx, Capital, 431.

20. If we want, the analogy can be made to resemble capitalism’s self-expansion even closer by considering a diesel engine which doesn’t even require the well-timed input from a spark plug to carry on cycling, only a supply of fuel. It could also be noted, like most two-stroke engines, that capitalism tends to be rather inefficient and produces much pollution. It may also be interesting to note, apropos our analogy, that all of the loans I have chosen on Kiva so far have been to women wishing to buy motorbikes.

21. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), Chapter 3.

22. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 159. This passage is also present in The New Imperialism, but in the copy of that book I am referencing the passage suffers from a catastrophic typographical error. For a good overview and critique which includes a charge that Harvey uses the term ‘primitive accumulation’ too loosely, see Geoff Bailey, “Accumulation by dispossession: A critical assessment,” International Socialist Review 95 (2014).

23. Marx, Capital, 915.

24. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland, Ohio: Meridian Books, 1962), 138.

25. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 137.

26. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 153.

27. For a collection of essays from a leftist perspective on neoliberal wars fought since 1990, see The Neoliberal Wars, pamphlet (Treason Press).

28. Subcomandante Marcos, “The Fourth World War Has Begun,” trans. Ed Emery, Le Monde Diplomatique (September 1997).

29. bromma, Exodus and Reconstruction: Working-Class Women at the Heart of Globalization (Kersplebedeb: 2013).

30. Harvey, New Imperialism, 188.

31. J. Sakai, “The Shock of Recognition,” in Confronting Fascism: discussion documents for a militant movement (Quebec: Kersplebedeb Publishing, 2002).

32. Most representative of the fascist appropriation of leftist causes, rhetoric, and icons are the various Third Position and ‘left fascist’ tendencies. For a look into one such tendency, national-anarchism, see Spencer Sunshine, “Rebranding fascism: National-anarchists,” Public Eye Magazine 23, no. 4 (2008). Sunshine concludes: “The danger National-Anarchists represent is not in their marginal political strength, but in their potential to show an innovative way that fascist groups can rebrand themselves and reset their project on a new footing.” For a book-length treatment of the history of fascism with an emphasis on red-brown alliances, see Alexander Reid Ross, Against the Fascist Creep (Ak Press, 2017).

33. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, The International Migration Report 2017 (Highlights) (New York: 2017).

34. Pililip Connor, “Most displaced Syrians are in the Middle East, and about a million are in Europe,” Pew Research Center (29 January 2018).

35. 2016 年农民工监测调查报告 (Monitoring report on migrant workers), 28 April 2017. For a press release in English based on the 2014 report see China Labour Bulletin, “Migrant workers and their children.”

36. Ian Johnson, “China’s Great Uprooting: Moving 250 Million Into Cities,” New York Times (15 June 2013).

37. Based on estimates by Pew Research. See Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, “More Mexicans Leaving Than Coming to the U.S.,” Pew Research Center (19 November 2015), specifically tables A1 and A2 in the appendix for absolute migration numbers, and Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, “Overall Number of U.S. Unauthorized Immigrants Holds Steady Since 2009,” Pew Research Center (20 September 2016), for numbers of unauthorized migrants.

38. International Organization for Migration, Fatal Journeys: Tracking Lives Lost During Migration, ed. Tara Brian and Frank Laczko (Geneva: 2014), Chapter 2.

39. No More Deaths, A Culture of Cruelty: Abuse and Impunity in Short-Term U.S. Border Patrol Custody (2011); La Coalición de Derechos Humanos and No More Deaths, Disappeared: How the US Border Enforcement Agencies are Fueling a Missing Persons Crisis, Part II: Interference With Humanitarian Aid (http://www.thedisappearedreport.org). Some of these abuses are corroborated by allegations from a Border Patrol agent who spoke with the Intercept (John Washington, “'Kick Ass, Ask Questions Later': A Border Patrol Whistleblower Speaks Out About Culture of Abuse Against Migrants,” The Intercept (20 September 2018)).

40. International Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School and the American Civil Liberties Union, Neglect & Abuse of Unaccompanied Children by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (23 May 2018), 11, 36.

41. Alice Speri, “Detained, Then Violated,” The Intercept (11 April 2018).

42. Carrot Quinn, “Why was this man arrested for giving water to migrants crossing the border?” The Guardian (26 January 2018); Ryan Devereaux, “Bodies in the Borderlands,” The Intercept (4 May 2019).

43. Caitlin Dickerson, “Hundreds of Immigrant Children Have Been Taken From Parents at U.S. Border,” The New York Times (20 April 2018).

44. Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear, “How Trump Came to Enforce a Practice of Separating Migrant Families,” The New York Times (16 June 2018).

45. Exec. Order. No. 13841, 83 Red. Reg. 29435 (25 June 2018).

46. Data on maquiladoras is available from the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI)'s Banco de Información Económica website, http://www.inegi.org.mx/sistemas/bie/default.aspx (accessed November 28, 2017). The August 2017 data series gives 5,114 export factories employing 1,740,223 production employees (plus hundreds of thousands of contractors and administrative employees) who worked 350,445,000 hours that month (an average of 47 hours per week for each employee) and paid 9,046 pesos in direct real wages to each employee (in terms of 2010 pesos) which is about 45 pesos/hour or, assuming a conversion rate of 12.5 pesos/USD, about $3.60 per hour on average for all export factories. The Mexican government stopped reporting separate compensation cost information for workers in foreign-owned export factories in 2006. At that time the average compensation for a production worker in a foreign-owned maquiladora was $2.64 per hour (up from $0.80 per hour in 1986) which includes all wages as well as direct and indirect benefits (see the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Mexico: Hourly Compensation Costs for Workers in Maquiladora Manufacturing Export Industries, 1975-2006,” Table 1). The actual take-home pay could be much less. For brief overview and accounts of some of the unsafe and oppressive conditions faced by maquiladora workers, see Esteban Flores, “Misery in the Maquiladoras,” Harvard International Review, 38 (2017): 10; Stephanie Navarro, “Inside Mexico’s Maquiladoras: Manufacturing Health Disparities”; and Todd Chretien and Jessie Muldoon, “Misery of the maquiladoras,” Socialist Worker (9 June 2000).

47. No More Deaths, Shakedown: How Deportation Robs Immigrants of Their Money and Belongings (2014).

48. John Smith, “Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century,” Monthly Review 67, no. 3 (2015), 82.

49. National Alliance to End Homelessness, The State of Homelessness in America 2016: An examination of trends in homelessness, homeless assistance, and at-risk populations at the national and state levels (Washington, DC: 2016).

50. National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, Housing Not Handcuffs: Ending the Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities.

51. Don Mitchell, “The Annihilation of Space by Law: The Roots and Implications of Anti-Homeless Laws in the United States,” Antipode, 29 (1997): 305.

52. Smith, “Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century.”

53. David Graeber, Fragments of an anarchist anthropology (Prickly Paradigm Press: 2004), 61. He is paraphrasing the economist Yann Moulier Boutang here, who I have not read.

54. Vladimir I Lenin, “Report On The Work Of The Council Of People’s Commissars,” in the marxists.org copy of Collected Works, 4th English ed., trans. Julius Katzer (Progress Publishers, Moscow: 1965), Volume 31, pages 461-534.

55. See “Struggles over Accumulation by Dispossession” beginning on page 162.

56. Harvey, New Imperialism, 164.

57. See also my essay “Sweatshops Are Good for the Poor,” American Cynic (9 June 2012).

58. Christopher Blattman and Stefan Dercon, “Occupational Choice in Early Industrializing Societies: Experimental Evidence on the Income and Health Effects of Industrial and Entrepreneurial Work,” Working Paper No. 22683: National Bureau of Economic Research (2016).

59. Silvia Federici says it well: “Capitalism was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle — possibilities which, if realized, might have spared us the immense destruction of lives and the natural environment that has marked the advance of capitalist relations worldwide. This much must be stressed, for the belief that capitalism ‘evolved’ from feudalism and represents a higher form of social life has not yet been dispelled.” (Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (New York: Autonomedia, 2004), 21-22.)

60. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (New York: Autonomedia, 2004), 13.

61. Marx, Capital, 342.

62. “This phenomenal form, which makes the actual relation invisible, and, indeed, shows the direct opposite of that relation, forms the basis of all the juridical notions of both labourer and capitalist, of all the mystifications of the capitalistic mode of production, of all its illusions as to liberty, of all the apologetic shifts of the vulgar economists.” (Marx, Capital, 680).

63. Strong’s #6093

64. Strong’s Concordance gives grievous, idol, labor, and sorrow as synonyms (#6089). The Septuagint gives the same word for pain, lupé (λύπη), wherever the Hebrew text gives 'itstsabown or 'etseb in these verses.

65. Carol L. Meyers, “The Genesis Paradigms for Female Roles, Part II: Genesis 3:16” in Discovering Eve (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) which is a variation of her earlier translation given in “Gender Roles and Genesis 3:16 Revisited” in The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman in Celebration of His Sixtieth Birthday (Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 1983), 337-354.

66. Meyers, “Gender Roles and Genesis 3:16 Revisited,” 339.

67. Meyers, “Gender Roles and Genesis 3:16 Revisited,” 339-340.

68. Frederich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, trans. Alick West, rev. ed. (Lawrence & Wishart, 1972; New York: Penguin Classics, 2010), Chapter II.

69. Engels, Origin, Chapter II. Note that today it is known that agriculture was developed alongside of or before the large-scale domestication of herd animals.

70. Engels, Origin, Chapter II.

71. Including on grounds of methodology (it extrapolates from a few pieces of evidence from linguistics and isolated social groups), philosophy (its nineteenth century evolutionism which imagined an innate engine of progress within humans), evidence (the huge amounts of anthropological, archaeological, and primatological evidence collected since the days of Morgan and Engels do not fit neatly into their universal theory), and ideology (some twentieth century anthropologists attacked Morgan’s work in order to protect the nuclear family from investigation). Chris Knight and other members of the Radical Anthropology Group in London have defended the major points of Engels in recent years including Knight’s “Early Human Kinship Was Matrilineal” in Early Human Kinship, eds. N. J. Allen et. al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 61-82. For an in-depth look at the history of kinship studies which takes a sceptical view toward the existence of any identifiable “primitive society” see Adam Kuper, The reinvention of primitive society: transformations of a myth (Routledge, 2005).

72. sorry.

73. Joan Bamberger, “The myth of matriarchy: why men rule in primitive society” in Woman, Culture and Society, ed. M. Z. Rosaldo, L. Lamphere, & J. Bamberger (Stanford University Press: 1974): 263-280.

74. Kathryn Kopinak, Desert Capitalism: North America’s Western Industrial Corridor (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1996), 8-9; Susan Fleck, “A gender perspective on maquila employment and wages in Mexico” in The Economics of Gender in Mexico: Work, Family, State, and Market (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 2001), 133-173, Table 4.3; Luis Bernardo Torres Ruiz, “Mexican maquiladoras: Evidence from plant-level panel data,” Economics Graduate Theses & Dissertations (PhD diss., University of Colorado at Boulder, 2011), Paper 18, Tables 1 & 4.

75. Marx, Capital, 517.

76. But even here the explanation is deficient, because the lowest paid factory work, where women tend to predominate, is often labour-intensive assembly and precision work requiring no heavy machinery. In the case of the maquiladoras, it was the automated “second wave” maquilas that tended to hire unionized men as opposed to cheaper female labour (Kopinak, Desert Capitalism, 19).

77. Ten Hours' Factory Bill: The Speech of Lord Ashley quoted in Marx, Capital, 526 note 60.

78. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, 3rd ed. (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975), 29.

79. Heidi I. Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,” Capital & Class 3, no. 2 (1979): 24.

80. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Women in the labor force: a databook (November 2017).

81. Engels, Origin, Chapter II

82. “The only worker who is productive is one who produces surplus-value for the capitalist, or in other words contributes towards the self-valorization of capital. If we may take an example from outside the sphere of material production, a school-master is productive worker when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his pupils, he works himself into the ground to enrich the owner of the school. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of a sausage factory, makes no difference to the relation. The concept of a productive worker therefore implies not merely a relation between the activity of work and its useful effect, between the worker and the product of his work, but also a specifically social relation of production, a relation with a historical origin which stamps the worker as capital’s direct means of valorization. To be a productive worker is therefore not a piece of luck, but a misfortune.” (Marx, Capital, 644). For a convenient summary of everything Marx wrote about productive and unproductive labour, see Ian Gough, “Productive and unproductive labour in Marx,” New Left Review 76 (1972): 47.

83. Dalla Costa, Subversion, 35.

84. Rosa Luxemburg, “Women’s Suffrage and Class Struggle,” in Hal Draper and Anne G. Lipow, “Marxist women versus bourgeois feminism,” Socialist Register no. 13 (1976). I first found this quotation in Nancy Holmstrom, “"Women’s Work," the Family and Capitalism,” Science & Society (1981): 186-211.

85. For another overview of the domestic-labour debate see Chapters 1-3 in Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women (Rutgers University Press, 1983; Brill, 2013). Some ‘post-Marxists’ view the domestic-labour debate to be the beginning of the end of Marxism as a coherent, universalizing approach to liberation. As Ronald Aronson put it, “Feminism destroyed Marxism” (Ronald Aronson, “The Marxist-Feminist Encounter” in After Marxism (New York: The Guilford Press, 1995), 124-140). But some theorists fear the cultural turn toward identity-based movements has played into the hands of capitalism’s own neoliberal turn and that a return to a materialist understanding of care work is needed (Nancy Fraser, “How feminism became capitalism’s handmaiden - and how to reclaim it,” The Guardian, 14 October 2013.)

86. Hartmann, “Unhappy Marriage,” 5.

87. For an overview of social reproduction theory see Sharon Smith, “Domestic labor and women’s oppression,” International Socialist Review 88 (2013).

88. Dalla Costa, Subversion, 33.

89. Vogel, Marxism, 176.

90. Engels, Origin, Chapter II. Or again: “The emancipation of woman will only be possible when woman can take part in production on a large, social scale, and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant amount of her time” (Chapter IX).

91. As Marxists have not tired of pointing out for nearly half a century. For a relatively recent critique from a classical Marxist position see Gilles Dauvé’s review of Caliban and the Witch: “Federici versus Marx,” troploin, November 2015. I think these sentences from his conclusion, aimed at the autonomist movement in general, are worth reproducing and keeping in mind: “Instead of a critique of work, we are offered its generalisation, as if extending the status of worker to everyone could blow the whole system apart. The practical inability to undertake a critique of the factory resulted in the factory being theoretically expanded to the home.”

92. Dalla Costa, Subversion, 35.

93. Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975), 2-3.

94. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation On A World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, 3rd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2014), 45. Emphases in original.

95. Mies, Patriarchy, 47. Emphasis in original. Or: “the activity of women in bearing and rearing children has to be understood as work. It is one of the greatest obstacles to women’s liberation, that is, humanization, that these activities are still interpreted as purely physiological functions, comparable to those of other mammals and lying outside the sphere of conscious human influence.” (Mies, Patriarchy, 53-54.)

96. Mies, Patriarchy, 48. Emphasis in original.

97. Mies, Patriarchy, 65.

98. Nicole Chevillard and Sébastien Leconte, “The Dawn of Lineage Societies: The Origins of Women’s Oppression,” in Women’s work, men’s property: the origins of gender and class, ed. Stephanie Coontz and Peta Henderson (London: Verso Books, 1986). Editorial note in brackets my own.

99. Office of Army Demographics, Army Demographics: FY16 Army Profile infographic; FBI Criminal Justice Information Services Division, “Police Employee Data,” Table 74.

100. “America’s Complex Relationship With Guns,” Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. (June 22, 2017), accessed January 17, 2018.

101. Stephanie Coontz and Peta Henderson, “'Explanations' of Male Dominance,” in Women’s work, men’s property: the origins of gender and class (London: Verso Books, 1986).

102. For an account of the slogan and its variations used by socialists, see Wikipedia contributors, “To each according to his contribution,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia (accessed January 16, 2018).

103. Carolyn Merchant, “The Violence of Impediments: Francis Bacon and the Origins of Experimentation,” Isis 99, no. 4 (2008): 731-760.

104. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983), 172, as quoted in Mies, Patriarchy, 88.

105. Federici, Caliban, 176.

106. Jenny Gibbons, “Recent Developments in the Study of the Great European Witch Hunt,” Pomegranate 5 (1998): 2-16. For a note and discussion on the accuracy of Federici’s figure see Joseph Kay, “Witch-hunts and the transition to capitalism?” libcom.org (20 December 2011). Lyndal Roper says “upwards of perhaps 50,000 people died” in the witch hunts, half of whom were killed in Germany (Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (Yale University Press, 2006), electronic edition, Prologue).

107. Roper, Witch Craze, Preface.

108. Roper, Witch Craze, Prologue.

109. From the Bull of Innocent VIII (1484), giving Papal permission to punish witches for making crops, animals, and people infertile. Quoted in Federici, Caliban, 180.

110. Federici, Caliban, 181.

111. Federici, Caliban, 184.

112. Gunnar Heinsohn and Otto Steiger, “Inflation and Witchcraft or the Birth of Political Economy: The Case of Jean Bodin Reconsidered,” Univ., Inst. für Konjunktur-und Strukturforschung, 1997, 54. Later published in abridged form as “Birth control: The political-economic rationale behind Jean Bodin’s Demonomanie,” History of political economy 31, no. 3 (1999): 423-448.

113. David Harley, “Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-Witch,” Social History of Medicine 3, no. 1 (1990): 1-26.

114. Federici, Caliban, 179.

115. Valerie A. Kivelson, “Male witches and gendered categories in seventeenth-century Russia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 3 (2003): 618-619.

116. Federici, Caliban, 12-13.

117. Silvia Federici, “Witch-hunting, globalization, and feminist solidarity in Africa today,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 10, no. 1 (2008): 21-35; Silvia Federici, “Women, witch-hunting and enclosures in Africa today,” Sozial.Geschichte Online 3 (2010), 10–27.

118. “Letter to HRH King Abdullah bin Abd al-’Aziz Al Saud on ‘Witchcraft’ Case,” Human Rights Watch (13 February 2008).

119. “Mexico: Intolerable Killings: Ten years of abductions and murders of women in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua,” Amnesty International (November 2003).

120. Julia Monárrez Fragoso and Luís Ernesto Cervera Gómez, “Actualización y georreferenciación del feminicidio en Ciudad Juárez (1993-2010),” in Geografía de la violencia en Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua (Tijuana, Mexico: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 2013): 80.

121. Stephen Eisenhammer, “Bare life in Ciudad Juárez: violence in a space of exclusion,”, Latin American Perspectives 41, no. 2 (2014): 99-109.

122. Amnesty Invitational’s No More Stolen Sisters campaign has helped raise awareness of the murders, releasing reports in 2004 and 2009 on the scope and some of the causes of violence underlying the murders (https://www.amnesty.ca/our-work/campaigns/no-more-stolen-sisters/resources). In 2016 the Canadian government announced it was launching an independent National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls to gather information from survivors and families of victims and to make policy recommendations (http://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca). The final report was released in June 2019.

123. Mies, Patriarchy, 147.

124. The Indian government reported 7,621 dowry deaths in 2016 (National Records Crime Bureau, Crime in India 2016: Statistics, 10 October 2017.)

125. Federici, Caliban, 170.

126. Human Rights Watch, Illusions of Justice: Human Rights Abuses in US Terrorism Prosecutions (21 July 2014).

127. Human Rights Watch, Illusions of Justice, 13-14.

128. Human Rights Watch, Illusions of Justice, 22.

129. Eric Lichtblau, “F.B.I. Steps Up Use of Stings in ISIS Cases,” New York Times, 7 June 2016.

130. Hina Shamsi ed. Deborah Pearlstein, Command’s Responsibility: Detainee Deaths in U.S. Custody in Iraq and Afghanistan (Human Rights First: 2006).

131. The full 6,700 page report is still classified, but a 500-page summary has been released to the public (United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program,” 3 December 2014); The Wikipedia entry contains a useful summary (Wikipedia contributors, “Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, accessed March 30, 2018.)

132. See, for example, the ACLU’s Torture Report and Torture Database

133. Scott Shane, “Amid Details on Torture, Data on 26 Who Were Held in Error,” The New York Times (12 December 2014).

134. A concise overview of the 1980s satanic panics is provided by Jeffrey Victor, “Satanic cult rumors as contemporary legend,” Western Folklore 49, no. 1 (1990): 51-81.

135. Mary de Young, “Another look at moral panics: The case of satanic day care centers,” Deviant Behavior 19.3 (1998): 260.

136. Kyle Zirpolo and Debbie Nathan, “I’m Sorry: A long-delayed apology from one of the accusers in the notorious McMartin Pre-School molestation case,” Los Angeles Times (30 October 2005).

137. De Young, “Another look at moral panics,” 261.

138. Mary de Young, “The devil goes to day care: McMartin and the making of a moral panic,” The Journal of American Culture 20, no. 1 (1997): 24.

139. Gregor Aisch, Jon Huang, and Cecilia Kang, “Dissecting the #PizzaGate Conspiracy Theories,” New York Times, 10 December 2016.

140. Kathy Frankovic, “Belief in conspiracies largely depends on political identity,” YouGov/Economist Poll (27 December 2016).

141. Marc Fisher, John Woodrow Cox, and Peter Hermann, “Pizzagate: From rumor, to hashtag, to gunfire in D.C.,” Washington Post, 6 December 2016.

142. Jeffrey Victor, “Satanic cult rumors as contemporary legend,” 58.

143. For more thoughts on the paradox of Trump’s rhetoric, see my essay “He tells it like it is (a note on Trumpist propaganda),” American Cynic (13 Februrary 2017).

144. Luke Darby, “Roseanne Barr and the New, Dumb Conspiracy Theory We Have to Hear About Now,” GQ (31 March 2018).

145. Lara Apps and Andrew Gow, Male witches in early modern Europe (Manchester University Press: 2010), 31.

146. Pedro H. Albuquerque and Prasad R. Vemala, “A statistical evaluation of femicide rates in Mexican cities along the US-Mexico border,” SSRN eLibrary (2008). This is an archived preprint, and as far as I can find it was never published in a peer-reviewed journal.

147. But for a defense of the ‘feminicide’ label against revisionist approaches see Steven S. Volk, “The Historiography of Feminicide in Ciudad Juárez: Critical and Revisionist Approaches,” FAIR 8, no. 3 (September 2015): 20-45.

148. Warren Farrell, The myth of male power: Why men are the disposable sex, Fourth Estate (London: 1993).

149. For a good account on the rise and disappearance of the men’s liberation movement in the 1970s and the emergence of the men’s rights movement which has seen a recent resurgence, including a critique of Farrell’s work, see Michael A. Messner, “The Limits of ‘The Male Sex Role’: An Analysis of the Men’s Liberation and Men’s Rights Movements' Discourse,” Gender & Society 12, no. 3 (1998): 255-276.

150. Catherine Hakim, Key Issues in Women’s Work: Female Heterogeneity and the Polarisation of Women’s Employment (London: Athlone, 1996), 51.

151. Hakim, Key Issues, 53.

152. Hakim, Key Issues, 203.

153. Hakim, Key Issues, 50.

154. Colin C. Williams, A commodified world?: Mapping the limits of capitalism (Zed Books, 2005), 140.

155. Stephen Young, “Gender, Mobility and the Financialisation of development,” Geopolitics 15, no. 3 (2010): 608.

156. Mader, The Political Economy of Microfinance, 106.

157. Maren Duvendack and Philip Mader, “Poverty Reduction or Financialization of Poverty?” in Seduced and Betrayed: Exposing the Contemporary Microfinance Phenomenon, 41 (emphasis in original).

158. For a much more sophisticated take on the gendering of risk within the context of Kiva see Megan Moodie, “Microfinance and the gender of risk: The case of Kiva.org,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 2 (2013): 279-302.

159. Meena Khandelwal and Carla Freeman, “Pop Development and the Uses of Feminism,” in Seduced and Betrayed, 62 (emphasis in original).

160. Mies, Patriarchy, 125.

161. Mies, Patriarchy, 127.

162. Joan Robinson, Economic Philosophy (Middlesex, England: Pelican Books, 1964), 46.

163. Joan Robinson, “Open letter from a Keynesian to a Marxist,” in Collected economic papers, Volume IV, quoted in Mike Beggs, “Joan Robinson’s ‘Open letter from a Keynesian to a Marxist,’” Jacobin (17 July 2011).

164. ‘Collective force’ is the increased productivity which results when people work together. A team of ten people working together on a project can produce more than ten individuals working alone, but the capitalist who hires the team still pays them as individuals and pockets the result of their collective force. In Proudhon’s words: “A force of one thousand men working twenty days has been paid the same wages that one would be paid for working fifty-five years; but this force of one thousand has done in twenty days what a single man could not have accomplished, though he had labored for a million centuries. Is the exchange an equitable one? Once more, no; when you have paid all the individual forces, the collective force still remains to be paid. Consequently, there remains always a right of collective property which you have not acquired, and which you enjoy unjustly.” (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property?: An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government, Chapter III § 5.)

165. Proudhon, What is Property?, Chapter III § 5.

166. David McNally, Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique (Verso, 1993), 186.

167. Phil Gasper “Are worker’s cooperatives the alternative to capitalism?” International Socialist Review 93 (2014).

168. V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution 2nd ed. (1918), Chapter 1.

169. Mikhail Bakunin, Marxism, Freedom and the State, trans. K.J. Kenafick (London: Freedom Press, 1950; marxists.org, 1999), Chapter IV.

170. Camillo Berneri, “Dictatorship of the Proletariat and State Socialism,” The Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review 4 (1978). The original appeared in Guerra di Class 4 (1936).

171. For a brief biography of Berneri see Toni “Berneri, Luigi Camillo, 1897-1937,” trans. David Short, libcom.org (September 2004), retrieved 12 May 2018.

172. GK Chesterton, The Superstition of Divorce, Chapter III. Chesterton was an advocate of a program of Catholic petite bourgeois socialism called Distributism. In one of his main works dealing with his economic system he gives this classical definition of capitalism: “what we call Capitalism ought to be called Proletarianism. The point of it is not that some people have capital, but that most people only have wages because they do not have capital” (GK Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity, Chapter I).

173. For a reader with selections of free-market anti-capitalist thought from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, see Gary Chartier and Charles W. Johnson, eds., Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty (Minor Compositions, 2011). For a defense of the labour theory of value from a free-market anti-capitalist perspective, see Kevin A. Carson, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (2007).

174. Benjamin Tucker, State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree & Wherein They Differ (London: A. C. Fifield, 1911), 5-6, 30.

175. Bruno Jossa, “Marx, Marxism and the Cooperative Movement,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 29, no. 1 (2005): 3-18.

176. McNally, Against the Market, 169.

177. McNally, Against the Market, 182.

178. Carson, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, 95.

179. Michael Harrington, “Markets and Plans: Is the Market Necessarily Capitalist?” in Frank Roosevelt and David Belkin, eds., Why Market Socialism?: Voices from Dissent (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1994).

180. McNally, Against the Market, 205.

181. McNally is opposed to a society regulated by markets and wage labour, not necessarily to mere market mechanisms; but the line between market regulation and the use of market mechanisms does not always appear clear to me in his denunciations and acceptance of various market forms.

182. Marx, Capital, 929.

183. The most influential of the few things Marx did write on the economic and political transition from capitalism through socialism to communism are contained in the short and pedantic Critique of the Gotha Program which was not published until after his death.

184. “If the man and the woman bear their fair share of work, they have a right to their fair share of all that is produced by all, and that share is enough to secure them well-being. No more of such vague formulas as ‘The right to work,’ or ‘To each the whole result of his labour.’ What we proclaim is The Right to Well-Being: Well-Being for All!” (Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, Chapter I).

185. Cosma Shalizi captures this cautiously market-optimistic leftism in an essay on the computational feasibility of replacing market-derived prices: “A bureaucracy, or even a thoroughly democratic polity of which one is a citizen, can feel, can be, just as much of a cold monster as the market. We have no choice but to live among these alien powers which we create, and to try to direct them to human ends. It is beyond us, it is even beyond all of us, to find ‘a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all’, which says how everyone should go. What we can do is try to find the specific ways in which these powers we have conjured up are hurting us, and use them to check each other, or deflect them into better paths. Sometimes this will mean more use of market mechanisms, sometimes it will mean removing some goods and services from market allocation, either through public provision or through other institutional arrangements. Sometimes it will mean expanding the scope of democratic decision-making (for instance, into the insides of firms), and sometimes it will mean narrowing its scope (for instance, not allowing the demos to censor speech it finds objectionable).” (Cosma Shalizi, “In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You,” Crooked Timber (30 May 2012).)

186. David Miller, “A Vision of Market Socialism: How it Might Work — and its Problems,” Dissent 38 (1991): 407.

187. In the United States, for example, it has been estimated that there are nearly six times as many empty houses than there are homeless people at any time (Tanuka Loha, “Housing: It’s a Wonderful Right,” Human Rights Now Blog (21 December 2011).)

188. For a mutualist take on a guaranteed social minimum see Shawn Wilbur, “Thoughts on a Mutualist Minimum,” The Libertarian Labyrinth (16 August 2015).

189. Zero or ‘low’ interest? The inconsistency here is due to an ambiguity in the word interest itself: economists tend to use it to refer to gains above any costs, while in the ordinary sense it simply means any payment beyond the principal balance. By ‘low’ interest rate I mean a rate which does not provide any profit beyond costs, the same as zero economic interest.

190. For a general history and description of the operating structure of Schulze-Delitzsch banks see Donald Skeele Tucker, The evolution of people’s banks (New York: Columbia University, 1922).

191. World Council of Credit Unions, 2016 Statistical Report, http://www.woccu.org/

192. Based on CUNA estimates for March 2018: Credit Union National Association Economics and Statistics Department, Monthly Credit Union Estimates (1 May 2018).

193. Mader, Political Economy, 44-46; Phil Mader, “False Histories: Microfinance and its non-Lineage of German Cooperative Banking,” Governance Across Borders (14 September 2011).

194. Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 143.

195. Peter North, Money and Liberation: The Micropolitics of Alternative Currency Movements (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 89. For a brief overview and academic assessment of LETS see Colin C. Williams, “The new barter economy: an appraisal of Local Exchange and Trading Systems (LETS),” Journal of Public Policy 16, no. 1 (1996): 85-101.

196. North, Money and Liberation, 89.

197. “Community Exchange Network Statistics,” Community Exchange Service website, retrieved 31 May 2018, https://www.community-exchange.org/home/cen-statistics/

198. Despite the emphasis on the blockchain-based XRP currency, Ripple still facilitates the transaction of generic IOUs between users who trust each other, and so it can still be used as a mutual credit platform. The original Ripplepay website is still online at https://classic.ripplepay.com. For an overview of the orignal Ripple system, see “The Ripple mutual credit and payment system: Will It Work?” by webisteme as excerpted on the P2P Foundation blog (11 June 2011).

199. Bitcoin Theory, “Bitcoin: A Utopian Response to Nightmare Capitalism,” Bitcoin Theory blog (6 May 2015).

200. “Stats,” Bail Bloc website (retrieved 16 November 2018).

201. For some more details, a failed Indiegogo campaign, and discussion, see the announcement of Freicoin on the Bitcoin forum: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=89843.0

202. Vice News has published a short profile of Duran and his use of cryptocurrency in his efforts at establishing post-capitalist economies: Nathan Schneider, “On the Lam with Bank Robber Enric Duran,” VICE (6 April 205).

203. Akseli Virtanen, Taylor C. Nelms, and Bill Maurer, “Is It Art? Is It a Hoax? Hedging Precarity and Protecting the Commonfare: An Interview with Akseli Virtanen,” Journal of Cultural Economy, 8 Februrary 2016.

204. Brett Scott, “The Activist Hedge Fund,” 2 October 2016.

205. “Kiva Protocol FAQ,” Kiva.org (accessed Februrary 2019).

206. “4 Ways That Zidisha (YC W14) is Misleading the Public About Its 25% Interest Rates,” Modern Microcredit (1 April 2014).

207. See this discussion on hacker news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7546394

208. Julia Kurnia, “The Story of Zidisha: Dramatically Reducing Microloan Interest Rates,” Huffington Post (31 March 2016).

209. All interest-free loans currently seeking funding on Kiva are always listed at: https://www.kiva.org/lend?avgBorrowerCost=0,0

210. A list of current social enterprise loans is available at: https://www.kiva.org/lend/social-enterprises

211. The executive secretary of ASOMIF, Nicaragua’s largest network of microfinance institutions, explained that “It’s now commonplace for people to take out a loan from one MFI, fall into arrears and then go to another one and another, bailing themselves out of debt with one by getting into debt with two more.” She recounted the case of one kite maker who took out loans from all 19 of ASOMIF’s affiliates and then disappeared (Patricia Padilla, “The Micro-Financing Institutions Are Politically Very Attractive,” Envio Digital (August 2008).)

212. For a brief contemporary account of the No Pago movement in English see Elyssa Pachico, “'No Pago' Confronts Microfinance in Nicaragua,” NACLA Report on the Americas (28 October 2009); The most comprehensive English-language analyses I’ve found are: Jean-Michel Servet, “No Pago, A Social Movement Against Microcredit Institutions in Nicaragua,” in The crises of microcredit (University of Chicago Press: 2015) and Johan Bastiaensen et al., “After the Nicaraguan non‐payment crisis: Alternatives to microfinance narcissism,” Development and Change 44, no. 4 (2013): 861-885.

213. Daniel Ortega’s authoritarian leadership is viewed by many as the betrayal of the Sandinista revolutionary promise (Jennifer Goett and Courtney Desiree Morris, “Nicaragua’s Authoritarian Turn is Not a Product of Leftist Politics,” NACLA Report on the Americas (16 September 2016)). While I am composing this section, a protest movement, much larger and more violent than No Pago, against Ortega and his regime (sparked when he tried to reform social security) is facing severe repression from the police. Several hundred people have been killed so far during the state’s crackdown on the protesters. Amnesty International released a statement describing the state repression as having reached “deplorable levels”. For reporting on the violence through May, 2018, see Sarah Kinosian, “Nicaragua’s Students Have Spent Months Protesting President Daniel Ortega,” Teen Vogue (4 June 2018). Of course the American-backed political right and neoliberal-aligned business community are taking advantage of the situation in an attempt to effect a regime change in their favor, so it is very difficult to fully trust any reports circulating in the English-language media at this time. Crimethinc has been providing commentary on the protests from an anarchist perspective along with interviews with some participating student activists (“Taking Stock of the Nicaraguan Uprising: Asking the Hard Questions after Three Months of Revolt,” Crimethinc. (2 August 2018)).

214. Wendy Álvarez Hidalgo, “67 mil microcréditos menos,” La Prensa (20 December 2010).

215. Victoria Kabak, “Following The No Pago Movement in Nicaragua,” Kiva blog.

216. Sergio Guzmán, “Ley Moratoria (Moratorium Law) Passes in Nicaragua,” Center for Financial Inclusion blog (23 March 2010).

217. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011), 80.

218. Graeber, Debt, 82.

219. A brief history of Strike Debt and analysis of the Rolling Jubilee program can be found in Erhardt Graeff, “Strike Debt and the Rolling Jubilee: Building a Debt Resistance,” Civic Media Project (April 2016).

220. The Rolling Jubilee initiative is no longer accepting donations or buying debt; the website claims it abolished $31,982,455.76 in debt purchased for $701,317.

221. ASOMIF has more MFIs and clients than ever and default rates are at less than 5% (Dora González Álvarez, “Microcrédito crece 14.6 % en Nicaragua,” La Prensa (22 November 2017).)

On the road to May Day: A non-report-back from Denver 2017

2017-05-11T19:09:59Z

Figure 1. “Diogenes Asking for Alms” by Jean-Bernard Restout (1767). Here Diogenes is begging from a statue, which he did to practice being rejected.

A spectrum of beggars

Being asked why people give to beggars but not to philosophers, Diogenes said, “Because they think they may one day be lame or blind, but never expect that they will turn to philosophy.”

Every other day of the year I’m dismissive toward churches, parties, unions, and holy days; but on May 1st, I’m somehow always hopeful that a large number of radicals will turn out and cause trouble. It’s been a few years since I’ve written a post complaining about the tameness of May Day in Denver. That’s because I realized that I’m too shy to contribute to or get much out of protests and stopped attending them. This year, however, with good weather, the drama around Trump, and the centennial of the 1917 revolutions, I thought the demonstrations could be big. I searched online and saw that the Democratic Socialists of America and some other groups planned a “May Day Against Trumpism” at the capitol building. Wanting to not miss out, I took the bus to the city.

Between Union Station and Denver’s capitol building is a mile of pedestrian shopping called 16th Street Mall. Recounting one’s walk down 16th Street Mall is often to sketch a continuum-forming typology of beggars:

Figure 2. A print-quality diagram depicting the perfectly sensible multi-dimensional typology of begging. I’m not at all embarrassed of the concept or drawing. The bus icon is by Naomi Atkinson; the capitol icon is by Loren Klein (CC-BY-3.0). The lines were drawn by me: ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Click image for SVG version.

Almost as soon as I stepped outside of the bus station a woman approached me and asked if I had “a dollar or something to help with food.” I remembered that I had grabbed some extra change with my bus fare and handed her the two dimes. She cheerfully assured me that every little bit helps. This is the unpretentious beggar: she offers nothing in exchange for taking money except to live and beg another day. Every other beggar I’d meet on my way to the capitol would present their case as an exchange; they’d tell me that either I or an even more helpless third party somewhere would benefit from my donation.

A girl with a clipboard standing at the nearby intersection who witnessed my twenty-cent donation caught my eyes and asked, “Do you want to save a child with me today?” From what I gathered before the crossing light changed, the plan was for her to get paid to solicit donations for some sponsor-a-child charity scheme and for me to give her my money. I couldn’t even think of a sensible response to that offer of teamwork and just awkwardly shook my head before crossing the street. Later down the mall I met some more clipboard beggars, and I did much better. One girl got my attention with a friendly greeting and then explained that with Trump in office it is very important that I give to the ACLU. I told her I didn’t have any money. She was understanding and told me that I could donate online whenever I do have money.

A man begging on behalf of Save The Children, an organization currently helping victims of the Syrian civil war, asked if he could talk to me about their work. I told him I don’t have any money, and he politely asked if he could give me his spiel anyway. So I listened. When he got back to asking for a donation I wished him luck and walked on. It turns out that while he’s trying to extract money from unemployed anarchists on the mall, the President and CEO of Save the Children, Carolyn Miles (whose background is in marketing, specifically in selling American Express cards to college students), is paid $455,000 per year.

Further down the mall I looked down and walked fast to avoid interacting with a pair of clipboard-holders wearing Greenpeace shirts.

But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. When I crossed to the other side of 16th Street, on the first block of the mall, there was a man playing the flute along to some kind of electronic jazz music playing from a loudspeaker while also talking to passers-by trying to get them to dance. It was a tough crowd, but he was a skilled performer and there were several dollars in the wooden box on the ground in front of him.

Unlike most beggars, buskers are generally not only tolerated but desired by downtown business improvement districts because they provide some cultural authenticity which makes shopping a less sterile experience. People often give to buskers because they genuinely enjoyed the performance rather than out of pity, in which cases street performing is a commercial art rather than begging proper. While I’ve not witnessed them in Denver, other cases in which unsolicited services are pre-rendered with the expectation of payment, such as squeegee beggars who clean windshields at stoplights for donations, probably rarely make that transition (and so precede busking in the spectrum).

The claim that donations are actually payment for a service is a rhetorical game Diogenes played when he said people should pay him “not for alms, but for repayment of his due” (presumably for being such a great philosopher). And like some guilt-tripping clipboard beggars, he also tried leaning on potential donors' sense of fairness and morality to reason them into giving to him: “If you have already given to anyone else, give to me also; if not, begin with me.”

Jesus, the founder of the other ancient tradition of begging which has been gnawing the foundations of Western civilization for over 2,000 years, also gave some rather cynical advice on how to handle beggars. Included in his Sermon on the Mount are three of his most characteristic pronouncements. The first, “Do not resist an evildoer,” is followed by three examples of enduring more abuse than one’s day-to-day abusers expect (if someone slaps your face, turn turn the other cheek; if someone sues you for the literal shirt off your back, give them your cloak too; if you are conscripted to walk a mile, walk two miles). The third is “Love your enemies,” after which Jesus points out that even tax collectors — the very agents of exploitation — are nice to their friends, so that should be, like, the absolute minimum standard of behavior.

Perhaps less famous (though not less vexing) than those two paradoxical sayings is found right between them: “Give to everyone who begs from you.”

Jesus’s first followers were propertyless peasants who had left even their homes, were used to putting up with abuse at the hands of their social betters, to going without sufficient clothing, to walking more than even soldiers, were more often beggars than givers, and who nevertheless treated everybody well. Whatever the deeper and more general applications of these sayings, then, on their surface they not only presented the lifestyle of the early Christians (that which potential followers would be expected to adopt), they also seem to be lightheartedly self-serving in the same style of the Cynics who taught that it was virtuous to give to homeless philosophers.

The co-optation of Christianity by the rich and powerful not long after Jesus was executed imbued these sayings with even greater difficulty for their future audiences, especially “give to everyone who begs from you” which cannot be so easily philosophized away as a paradox. As an example, consider the case of a 19th-century Russian aristocrat named Leo Tolstoy who after a legendary career as a novelist attempted to take the sayings of Jesus seriously. His struggles with “do not resist an evildoer” produced several works which had profound influences on social justice movements around the world and are still read by pacifists and anarchists today. But it wasn’t until he was quite old that he finally got the courage (if sneaking away from one’s wife in the middle of the night counts as courageous) to leave all of his possessions by setting out on train with nothing but the clothes of a standard Russian peasant. He developed pneumonia and died within days of leaving home.

The pretensions of the cynical beggar are ironic in that the audience is aware of the rhetorical game, but like in the case of the street performer, it is the decision of those who give as to whether they are giving out of pity or gratitude. Beyond that, the type of beggar represented by the Cynic and the Christian are honest both in the sense that they present neither sob stories nor pretended friendliness, but even more so in that they invite their listeners to throw off their own pretensions about the society they are living in and reproducing. That is, to the Cynic and the Christian, giving to beggars is not in tension with more systematic solutions to poverty, it is the systematic solution to poverty. The clipboard-holding fundraiser, in contrast, who has perfected the sob story, the salesman-like friendliness, and who claims salvation is found in non-profit organizations, is perhaps the paragon of the dishonest beggar.

I didn’t have occasion to mention it, because I have thankfully never been a witness or victim to a robbery (not that such crimes are unknown on the 16th Street Mall), but robbers also make no claim to be helping their victims and should logically precede the unpretentious beggar in our spectrum. While of course theft and robbery, being characterized by their involuntary demands, are not begging properly, even muggers sometimes couch their activity in the language of a market exchange (‘your money for your life’).

Julian, the fourth-century Roman emperor (a nephew of Constantine) who tried to peacefully revert the empire from Christianity back to Paganism, was annoyed with the openly atheist and crude Cynics of his day. He wanted all Cynics to be as pious and educated as he imagined Diogenes and Crates were, and argued that most Cynics were even worse than bandits and pirates who were at least decent enough to be ashamed of their lifestyle and live in their faraway hideouts instead of preaching at people in the streets. He also referred to Cynics as “monks,” intending the association with Christians to be an insult (Christians were only one or three gods away from being atheists themselves).

At many of the intersections along the mall I saw newspaper salesmen — often older men with all of their possessions in bags on the ground at their feet — selling the Denver VOICE for a suggested $2 per copy. Originally founded 20 years ago as “a grassroots newspaper created by homeless people for homeless people,” the VOICE is now written for a general audience and sold by homeless vendors (who buy the papers for $0.50 each) as a way for them to earn some income. (The Denver VOICE is independent, but its operating model is influenced by similar street newspaper vending networks which operate in cities around the world.)

These charity vendors, whose sales depend at least as much on pity as on satisfying the wants of their customers, are located in the middle of the murky space where begging becomes selling (somewhere to the retail side of the children in third-world cities who sell trinkets to Western tourists).

Of course the entire mall is lined by actual retail shops and beggardly advertisements. Salespersons and advertisers (and the business owners they work for) likely imagine they are much further along the spectrum of begging than they actually are.

Downtown business associations and city councils will often commission artwork to help beautify shopping areas and, as in the case of buskers, will happily tolerate some guerrilla murals which provide a degree of authenticity to the shopping environment. But for the most part any art or graphic design which might distract from the commercial purposes of the property is forbidden. In the words of the street artist Banksy, “The people who truly deface our neighborhoods are the companies that scrawl their giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff. They expect to be able to shout their message in your face from every available surface but you’re never allowed to answer back.”

Banksy’s observation echoes one by GK Chesterton a hundred years earlier that “It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money”:

A man would be annoyed if he found himself in a mob of millionaires, all holding out their silk hats for a penny; or all shouting with one voice, “Give me money.” Yet advertisement does really assault the eye very much as such a shout would assault the ear. “Budge’s Boots are the Best” simply means “Give me money”; “Use Seraphic Soap” simply means “Give me money.” It is a complete mistake to suppose that common people make our towns commonplace, with unsightly things like advertisements. Most of those whose wares are thus placarded everywhere are very wealthy gentlemen with coronets and country seats, men who are probably very particular about the artistic adornment of their own homes. They disfigure their towns in order to decorate their houses.

Shop and restaurant owners on the 16th Street Mall have been known to be hostile to the more needy beggars operating on their turf and have enlisted the police to carry out revanchist actions against the most vulnerable. In 2012, legislation criminalizing the act of sleeping outside with shelter (defined as “any tent, tarpaulin, lean-to, sleeping bag, bedroll, blankets, or any form of cover or protection from the elements other than clothing”) was passed on behalf of downtown business owners. Under the authority of that code, police have conducted winter raids on homeless camps to confiscate blankets. Recently three individuals accused of camping with shelter were tried by jury, convicted, and sentenced to several days of forced labour.

The City of Denver in collaboration with downtown business owners has installed mechanical panhandlers — modified parking meters — which are meant to compete with live beggars. The city has promised the money collected by the machines will go toward “job training, meals and permanent housing options that help get people back on their feet,” but it has been caught spending it instead to help fund the police sweeps of homeless camps.

The mall ends where 16th Street dead-ends into Broadway. To the north is the financial heart of Denver’s business center. On 16th Street itself are the two Denver World Trade Center buildings and Republic Plaza (the tallest building in Denver); scattered beyond those are more high-rise office buildings and skyscrapers. These buildings exhibit almost none of the colorful and chaotic elements of the shopping mall and are instead dark, sleek, and inauspicious.

The craft of capital allocation and investment, which is practiced in many of these buildings, does not depend on demanding, begging, or offering so much as on staking ownership and simply taking interest. Like the robber on one end of our spectrum, we have financial capitalism on the other: the bandit subsumed. The full spectrum of begging plays out between these dialectical bookends of the modern capitalist economy, as it does everyday between Union Station and Broadway.

Walking a block south on Broadway brought me to the state capitol building. I could see maybe 100 demonstrators nestled up on the steps waving red and black flags. A large banner facing the street read “No War But Class War,” and another further back read “Workers & Oppressed People of the World Unite!” There were no police or pro-Trump counter-protestors in sight.

The prospect of joining them seemed both socially overwhelming and boring. Like some sort of party. So I continued walking down Broadway and spent my afternoon in the Denver Public Library. It was a good May Day.

Other people’s May Day 2017

Of course, some people actually followed through on their plans to attend a May Day demonstration. The local Fox News affiliate was kind enough to both get the word out about various May Day protests in Denver as well as to follow up with a short video and a couple of pictures from the event at the capitol: “May Day events taking place in Denver” (Fox31, 1 May 2017). More photos can be found on the Facebook event page.

A few cities around the world saw major protests, with the riot in Paris getting the most headlines because protesters responded to police tear gas with spectacular petrol bombs. Hundreds of protesters and six cops were injured during the clashes.

In the United States the most unusual thing about May Day this year was the presence of Trump-inspired right-wing counter-protesters who turned up in several cities. Seattle was unusually quiet though there was a minor confrontation with participants of a “Stand Against Communism” rally.

The most rowdy demonstrations were in Portland and Olympia. In Portland a minor riot broke out after a few protesters threw full cans of Pepsi at riot police who responded by charging into the mostly peaceful crowd of marchers. The bloc’d up [mostly-anarchist, no doubt] protesters who instigated the police response have been criticized for endangering the rest of the march.

There was also a small riot in Olympia where protesters threw rocks at police (and some counter-protesters threw rocks at marching demonstrators). In one unfortunate and embarrassing instance, a protester tried to pepper spray some taunting counter-protesters and accidentally sprayed passers-by including a dog. Most cops are not even that irresponsible with chemical weapons.

The Red Guards Austin, a Maoist group which has gained some notoriety in recent months due to their open-carry demonstrations, tried to march in Austin, but they were surround by an alarming number of reactionary counter protesters. Apparently racists and anti-communists of the InfoWars variety are numerous in the Austin area (I didn’t realize until now that Alex Jones lives in Austin and hosts his show there). Some Red Guards members were carrying rifles, and so were a few of the right-wingers. In their public self-criticism which they posted to their weblog, the Red Guards described this scary moment:

Early on in the march a fascist named William Fears physically assaulted one of the comrades who was guiding chants and for this Fears came very close to forcing our units to use lethal force. Those in attendance could see fear in his eyes as the Partisan unit moved into the ready position prepared to chamber a round.

My impression is that the Austin PD did a good job keeping the groups apart and possibly from literally killing each other. The independent journalist Kit O’Connell was present and wrote a good postmortem of the event: “Unpacking The Fascist Rampage On May Day In Austin: What Happened, What Went Wrong.” I could not find a single report from a main stream news outfit.

Sources of quotations

The sayings of Diogenes quoted above can be found in Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book VI. Those of Jesus are recorded in Matthew 5:38-48. Julian’s thoughts on Cynics are preserved in his seventh Oration: “To the Cynic Heracleios.” The Banksy quote is from his introduction to Wall and Piece. GK Chesterton’s opinion on advertisements can be found in his 1920 book The New Jerusalem.

This Andrew Jackson Jihad: Thoughts from the first forty days

2017-03-02T04:55:40Z

Donald Trump is President of the United States of America

I was a sexy little viper rune
In the corner of a King Tut tomb
When the hate train started
Going "Choo-choo"

— “Kokopelli Face Tattoo” by AJJ

Radical social change is difficult; much easier is Cynicism: just awkwardly excuse yourself from society and then bark unconvincingly at passers-by as they try to go about their business. And of course if you can’t change a thing, you can always change its name. If you were in St. Petersburg on March 8, 1917, for example, you would say you were in Petrograd on February 23. But regardless of calendar or map, to the war protesters staging a march in that city on that day it was International Women’s Day, and, to everyone’s surprise, that little Women’s Day demonstration prompted a spontaneous strike of workers and soldiers. The rebellion lasted for days in the streets and shook the establishment to its top, resulting in the abdication of the Tsar and the replacement of his autocracy by a contentious dual government of liberals and socialists — and eventually to the Bolshevik revolution and civil war.

Now, after so much intervening Russian history — the rise and fall of Stalinism and European Fascism including another world war, a nuclear cold war, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, other things, Putin — it is in the headlamps of the approaching centennial of those days in 1917 that I’ve set about trying to understand the crisis Donald Trump has brought both to America’s ruling classes and to my own personal political views.

Because of his anti-political and buffoonish style, his denouncements of the press, his early push of executive power targeted at immigrants, and the encouragement his success has provided to white nationalist movements, there has been some debate as to where Trumpism fits in the Fascist family tree. If Trump is the farcical reappearance of one of those tragic 20th-century personages, then he is something like an inarticulate ghost of Mussolini. But as far as comparisons to other political leaders go, Trump is probably best understood as an American Berlusconi with a platform heavily flavored by his old Reform Party rival Pat Buchanan (but without Pat’s dedication to non-interventionism) who is assembling a band of robbers to exceed the cronyism of Warren Harding's cabinet.

His own administration seems to favor comparisons to Andrew Jackson (seventh President from 1829 to 1837). In an interview with a journalist for the Hollywood Reporter in November, Stephen Bannon said of the Trump campaign that “Like Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement.” Pat Buchanan described Trump’s ‘America First’ inauguration speech as “Jacksonian” in that “he was speaking to and for the forgotten Americans whose hopes he embodies.” And during his first days in the White House, Trump had a portrait of Jackson installed in the Oval Office so that a painted Jackson could watch him sign his flurry of executive orders beside a real-life Bannon.

Most of the parallels that could be drawn are shallow, but Jackson was a populist candidate who was elected as a champion of angry white men who felt disenfranchised by the East Coast elites and bankers. While its opponents accuse Trumpism of implicitly empowering white supremacists (as do some of its proponents), Jacksonian democracy explicitly emphasized the whiteness of citizenship. As was the fashion of southern job creators of that period, Jackson enslaved almost two hundred black men, women, and children as workers at his Tennessee cotton plantation. Jackson also developed a reputation for sometimes flexing his executive powers, like when he ignored the spirit a Supreme Court ruling by continuing to help Georgia in its negotiations with the Cherokee government. The result of those negotiations was the forced relocation of tens of thousands of indians (and their slaves) during extreme weather which killed thousands.

Neoliberalism with nationalist characteristics

To a formalist, the way to fix the US is to […] figure out who owns this monstrosity, and let them decide what in the heck they are going to do with it. I don’t think it’s too crazy to say that all options - including restructuring and liquidation - should be on the table.

— Mencius Moldbug

As if in a nod to that brutal 19th-century primitive accumulation, on his fourth day in office Trump directed the Army Corps of Engineers to expedite their review and approval of the easement required to complete the Dakota Access Pipeline. The next week North Dakota police raided a camp established by the Standing Rock Sioux to protest the pipeline and arrested 76 people. The easement was granted, and on February 22 the main Oceti Sakowin camp was cleared and razed.

Andrew Jackson was true to his commitment to the common white man, including standing up to a central bank he felt unduly privileged the wealthy. But during Trump’s transition to the White House, there have been strong indications that not only does he intend to continue the plutocracy as usual, he intends to further it toward a naked fact. Like his role as a billionaire non-politician in the highest executive office, his executive actions and appointments tend to erase the imaginary line between business and government.

With now-former Goldman Sachs COO as Director of the National Economic Council and hedge fund manager (and former Goldman Sachs partner) Steven Mnuchin as Secretary of the Treasury, the Trump Administration is posed to reduce corporate taxes and rollback regulations put in place by the so-called Dodd-Frank legislation in response to the 2007 financial crisis. Trump’s appointee to Chairman of the FCC is an opponent of net neutrality and an advocate for private telecommunication monopolies which charge prisoners and their families exorbitant rates on phone calls. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s controversial Attorney General, has already rescinded an Obama-era memo that directed the Justice Department to reduce the use of private prisons. In a rent-seeking parallel to support for private prisons, his appointee to Secretary of Education, the billionaire Betsy DeVos, is a proponent of public funding for privately owned schools. The fact that Trump’s Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, has sued the EPA several times on behalf of industrial profiteers indicates probable deregulations in that agency’s future. Etc.

In some ways the orientation Trump’s administration seems to be taking with its planned regulation cuts, infrastructure spending, withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and increased immigration restrictions are consistent (one of the precious few consistent points through Trump’s campaign) with what Bannon (who is a former Goldman Sachs deal maker himself) calls a policy of “economic nationalism.” But Bannon has also spoken out against bailouts and crony capitalism, qualms which Trump obviously does not share.

In any case, deregulation and de-facto privatization are the major economic motifs of the emerging Trump administration. Bannon has described the goal behind those trends as a “deconstruction of the administrative state.” It looks a lot like typical neoliberal fare taken around an introspective turn. Using David Harvey’s terminology, the Trump folks are reverting from a spatial to a temporal fix to the recurring overaccumulation of capital. Will it be enough to revive the profitability of American manufacturing and mining? Or has the Eye of Sauron turned its gaze inward to Mordor too late?

In much the same way as Sauron could only respond to the movements of the ring bearer, I think Trumpism is a response to global economic conditions more than a determining cause. Take, for example, this sentence from Trump’s executive order on border security and immigration enforcement:

The recent surge of illegal immigration at the southern border with Mexico has placed a significant strain on Federal resources and overwhelmed agencies charged with border security and immigration enforcement, as well as the local communities into which many of the aliens are placed.

It is a strange and circular justification for the executive order, because other than the possible increase in illegal immigration triggered by Trump’s own rhetoric about building a wall, there has been no surge of illegal immigration. In fact, as reported by the Pew Research Center, the net immigration from Mexico between 2005 and 2014 was negative and the Mexican immigrant population has been in decline since 2007.

For decades nationalists and wage-jealous racists have been screaming about the porous southern border, but the ruling class paid them little heed and instead maintained whatever level of control at the border was deemed necessary to steer wages and keep illegal immigrants abundant but vulnerable and easily exploitable by employers. Now, when migration levels are such that controlling the border provides little in the way of economic leverage, the xenophobes and protectionists have won the day. How convenient.

Culture/Wars

The king and Haman sat down to drink; but the city of Susa was thrown into confusion.

— Esther 3:15

Steve Bannon must be some kind of a genius. In a span of about two years he boosted the significance of Breitbart News (a pro-Israel right-wing news site) by aligning it with the antisemitism-riddled alt-right, then leveraged his position at Breitbart to become CEO of a presidential campaign where he got Donald J. Trump elected as President of the United States of America (?!), and he has now managed to get himself appointed to the National Security Council. Yet everything I’ve heard him say sounds typical, a mundane obsession with defending the “Judeo-Christian West” against its conspiring enemies (represented most fiercely by “jihadist Islamic fascism”).

He reminds me a bit of Robert California, the opaque, psychopathic, manipulative character featured in some of the more tedious episodes of the American version of The Office who was hired as a manager but then immediately convinced the owner of the company to give him her position as CEO. Not so much his personality, but in his enigmatic genius and his knack for landing in positions of power (including a stint as the CEO of the company running the Biosphere 2 project in Arizona).

The 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK and the election of Trump in the US signal a widespread discontentment with neoliberal globalism finally reaching the Anglosphere (almost ten years after the 2007 financial crisis and 17 years after the Seattle '99 WTO protests). Maybe Bannon’s current success stems simply from his inclination to keep in touch with the underlying sentiments which have now surfaced in a cultural confluence.

I don’t understand much of what motivates the alt-right and its reactionary fellow travelers in Europe. I do suspect that in many ways they can be seen as ‘Western’ counterparts to the patriarchal revolts against globalism in the developing world. As racial and gender hierarchies are being reformed to better serve capitalism, and as oppressed groups continue to further the progress of their own liberation, old local and familial forms of privilege, wealth, and exploitation are being lost at both ends — whisked out to financial centers or destroyed by feminists and other progressive reformers.

Trump and company hitched a ride to power on the conservative cultural impulse desperately opposing those changes. They have an ideology to execute. Even if they are adrift in economic currents they have little power over, they seem determined to do more thrashing than floating. So opposite the most extreme, violent patriarchal groups like ISIS we now have Donald Trump as Commander-in-Chief of the world’s most powerful armed forces. Trump has no business being president, and the powerful machines of war at his disposal have no business existing. Yet he is and they do.

In the words of Bannon, “We are — I believe — at the beginning stages of a global war against Islamic fascism.” (Or more concise is Trump’s own analysis: “I think Islam hates us.”)

It should go without saying here — but American leftists sometimes fail to make clear — that denouncing Trumpism and its Islamophobic tendencies is certainly not to side with Islamist regimes. Frankly, Bannon’s “jihadist Islamic fascism” is an apt description of the war Salafism espoused by groups like ISIS in the wake of America’s overt and covert imperialist actions in Iraq and Syria (respectively) and elsewhere. While the movements may draw on much different traditions, the label ‘fascist’ applies more cleanly to ISIS — which maintains totalitarian rule through terror while adhering to a philosophy of endless war and is using its newfound state powers to institutionalize slavery, genocide (including antisemitism), and rape — than it does to America under Trump. I will always oppose American militarism, but you won’t hear me complaining very loudly about NATO airstrikes which protect Yazidi villages and Kurdish forces in Syria.

The Obama State Department spent eight years waging slow-burning proxy wars against Russia. Trump has already tried to bring about a realignment of foreign policy by consistently making nice with Putin (likely for the sake of some shady Crimea deal or other scandalous intrigue). An improved relationship with Russia could have a drastic effect on the priorities of America’s intelligence/military adventures — a shift from maintaining American oil interests to a more ideologically-driven crusade against Islamist militias (though, like Obama, I expect the Trump administration to fight Islamist groups in places that just happen to be oil-rich and where America is already heavily invested: places like Iraq but not Nigeria).

But it is far from clear how Trump’s foreign policy will evolve. His Secretary of State, former CEO of ExxonMobil Rex Tillerson, has extensive business experience in Russia and personally with Vladimir Putin. Tillerson has expressed his opinion that Obama’s sanctions against Russia for invading Ukraine were too weak and the US should have instead responded with military support to Ukraine. Tillerson also holds more conventional views on free trade (he supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership) and may be a counterweight to the Bannon wing of the administration.

Trump has already demonstrated he lacks the light touch required by Obama’s drone war approach. The first raid he authorized in office, a continuation of the Obama-Saudi offensive against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, resulted in a reported 24 civilian deaths (including 9 children) and the Yemeni government’s revocation of its permission for US ground missions (it still allows drone strikes). Who knows, maybe with Tillerson keeping the State Department on the same hawkish anti-Russian line as Clinton and Kerry, combined with the anti-immigrant and anti-Islam schemes of Trump and Bannon, we could be in store for one of the worst of all possible foreign policy positions in American history.

For a president who has never had a popular mandate — but who does have enemies in the intelligence community, the tech sector, the media, and probably the judiciary — Trump’s noisy entrance to the White House resembles a page from the ISIS playbook: usurp a few pieces of artillery, declare war on everyone, enjoy a life of heroic conflict while it lasts.

Trump remains unpopular and his executive excesses in check by the courts, but I can’t shake an uneasy feeling that he has managed to wriggle onto the throne in such a way that the sword of Damocles is hanging at least as much over American civil liberties as it is over his own head waiting for (almost taunting) any self-motivated terrorist to cut the thread. A patriotic fervor uniting behind Trump could easily be more devastating than it was with George W. Bush in office — and the wars it would make possible could be more bloody than anything even the deranged minds in ISIS could hope for.

And so it is with Trump and Bannon in the White House that those who are obsessively frightened of violent Islamists destroying our way of life have made it possible that violent Islamists can trigger the destruction of our way of life to an unprecedented degree.

Politics

How’s the world so small when the world is so large?
And what made the world, may I please speak to who’s in charge?
Everything is real, but it’s also just as fake
From your daughter’s birthday party to your grandmother’s wake
And your bipolar illness, it comes and it goes
Your parasympathetic nervous system reacts
And you’re in fight or flight mode

— “People II: The Reckoning” by AJJ

From my vantage point here at American Cynic (where I never vote but I do occasionally bark unconvincingly at a passer-by), there is a silver lining to Trump’s electoral victory. Well, there is a grey lining and an opportunity.

If you are like me, there is also a fleeting moment of joy: it is a delight to see democracy backfire, smug liberals despair, and the federal government so embarrassed. By “like me” I mean a healthy, white, straight, uneducated, contrarian, broken-hearted American man who was long in the process of giving up on fitting in to any meaningful extent within capitalist society before Donald Trump became president. I realize that for people not like me in those regards, Trump may be more terrifying than fun.

There is one quick distinction I’d like to make, because I do see some of myself (and Diogenes) in the trolls celebrating the folly of Trump. That is that there is a difference between Cynic parrhesia and what is sometimes defended as free speech these days: one is a homeless man telling Alexander the Great to step out of his sunlight; the other is an internet shock troll stepping into the shadow of the White House.

The grey lining is that Trump’s victory in the face of a nervous establishment demonstrates that the American electoral system is more democratic than I thought. Not only did Trump — a controversial, unpredictable, perhaps uncontrollable populist candidate — survive the Republican primaries and that party’s safeguards against popular misfits (unfortunately the Democratic Party was much more successful in defeating Bernie Sanders), but he survived a general election despite (or unintentionally because of) hostile media coverage, and he got the requisite votes from the Electoral College, the last defense against democracy, despite a record number of faithless votes (okay, only seven) and a plot to use the electoral college to replace him with a mainstream Republican post-election (Colin Powell ended up in third place with three electoral votes, good enough to have been considered if nobody got a majority).

And, as always, I was impressed by voter turnout. About 55% of American adults voluntarily cast a ballot in the presidential contest (59% if you count only eligible voters).

I’m aware, of course, that given those points many people would not find evidence for the resilience of American democracy — America maintains an unusually low voter turnout for a rich republic, Trump lost the popular vote, and his administration may be the biggest threat to the American system in recent memory (in my lifetime, anyway). But those people, I submit, hold an overly optimistic and realist, almost magical, view of formal political process.

With the election of Trump, concrete reality is seeping into the liberal delusions that constitutional republicanism can produce equality and liberty. Faced with a rising cognitive dissonance, many progressive liberals have retreated from democracy to the safety of the institutions. This retreat can be seen in the current hysteria over Russian influence. They are willing to believe that by exfiltrating a bunch of boring emails from the DNC, which almost nobody read and even fewer people considered when voting, the Russians have successfully subverted the electoral process. (I’m not even that cynical about elections.) And, despite being shocked (shocked!) that rival imperial powers would dare interfere with each other, those same liberals, who have become little neo-McCarthyites suddenly discovering all-powerful Russian spies lurking in every corner of the White House, while whining about a lack of democracy, and with a straight face, are putting their hopes in the intelligence agencies, the judiciary, and the media — powerful institutions with little democratic allegiance or oversight — to save us from Trump.

But there is nothing like a state of emergency to reveal the nature of sovereign power — or at least a state of epistemological crisis to shatter one’s illusions. The opportunity provided by the Trump victory is in its revelatory (apocalyptic?) potential. As the embodiment of the dishonest lie, Trump reveals the truth of political power: its reality is something more like blind obedience and brute force than the formalisms of monarchy, democracy, et cetera that it is so often clothed in. Thanks to Trump, even true-believing liberals have found themselves faced with the insight, as David Frum put it in his story about what America might look like under a Trump dictatorship, that “checks and balances is a metaphor, not a mechanism.” Maybe some will also realize the same applies to politics-as-usual.

Karl Marx observed that the liberal forms of governance and wage work simply mask old relations of brutal rule and slavery in an idyllic, ideological veneer. Carl Schmitt noted that no matter how seriously parliamentarianism takes itself, the rule of law can never completely do away with sovereign power or escape the fundamental political distinction between friend and enemy — as exemplified in [the possibility] of war. These two philosophers, Karl the Communist and Carl the Nazi, can provide a crude schematic of the bifurcated post-liberal possibilities which Trump’s moment has brought back into view. One path, socialism, seeks to take out coercive social hierarchies including those upon which capitalism relies; the other, which we can generically call fascism, seeks to preserve social hierarchies against the leveling and self-destructive tendencies of capitalism. Liberals pretend that equality and liberty exist where they don’t. Socialists seek to create equality and liberty where liberalism has failed. Reactionaries believe equality and liberty are undesirable (and probably impossible anyway).

Interestingly, some of Trump’s most sophisticated supporters cling to the possibility of a third way. They see the futility of existing liberalism and are revolted by equality, but they cannot stomach the reality of fascism. So they hope to ditch the democratic elements of liberalism and thereby arrive at a stable, peaceful version of capitalism (using the right-wing definition of ‘peaceful’ that means ‘undisturbed status quo’). Peter Thiel, a billionaire donor to Trump’s campaign and member of his transition team, wrote in 2009 that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” By “freedom” he seems to mean capitalism (he goes on to call “capitalist democracy” an oxymoron), and he cites the enfranchisement of women as one of the major stumbling blocks to his vision of a “free” society. Thiel, who was a student of the late René Girard, hints that through meritocratic monopolies, the elimination of economic competition, humanity’s cycle of mimetic violence can be escaped (and then king-CEOs can finally sleep peacefully without worrying about becoming scapegoated victims of mob violence, or something).

Thiel’s ideas are a variation of Silicon Valley neoreactionary thought as propounded by Mencius Moldbug, the movement’s pioneering theorist. Moldbug views democracy as a source of inevitable violence (and latent totalitarianism). Many of his essays are dedicated to exploring capitalism-preserving alternatives to democratic systems. One possibility is what he calls neocameralism in which a state is a joint-stock business that owns a country. A more obvious name might be “neofeudalism” (and Moldbug has half-jokingly described his anti-democratic project as neo-fascist).

But despite its fascist-like qualities, the apolitical, non-democratic capitalist utopia proposed by Moldbugian neoreaction, in which wars for survival have been made impossible and economic categories blur with and replace the political, would seem to represent everything Schmitt was against. From a Schmittian view, we might conclude that such neoreactionary thought is not an alternative to bourgeois liberalism, but its most degenerate form.

Whether neoreactionary schemes are classified as fascism or extreme liberalism, Karl Kautsky’s famous dictum from 125 years ago has gained a renewed relevance in Trump’s shadow: “As things stand today capitalist civilization cannot continue; we must either move forward into socialism or fall back into barbarism.”

Of course no matter how interesting or illuminating I think Trump might be on questions of political theory, it is not the case that police and customs enforcement agents are about to look at him and then resign en masse. The fundamental conflict of politics is now the same as ever: between police and their victims. Resistance is also the same: finding means of disobedience — with a renewed emphasis in America on defending immigrants, Muslims, Jews, and people of color against police and white-supremacist violence.

Trump didn’t invent borders or deportations or prisons or torture or execution or the military-industrial complex or patriarchy or racism or theft or taxes or profit. They have been normal for my entire life, so I don’t really understand my own visceral response to his presidency. I traditionally struggle alternately with apathy and pacifism — the Trump victory has muted both impulses within me.

Still, I’ll grudgingly agree with liberal opponents of Trump that a contingent retreat to the institutions may be the only practical chance to minimize the damage he can do in the short term, but it would be nice if in doing so we manage to avoid the intellectual retreat to liberalism’s false promises.

"Ideas of Max Stirner" by James Huneker (1907)

2016-08-20T17:55:55Z

Transcriber’s introduction

Max Stirner's book on conscious egoism was published in English (as The Ego and His Own) for the first time in 1907 — 65 years after its original publication in German and over 50 years after Stirner’s death. To mark the occasion, an essay by James Huneker, transcribed below (from the archived PDF provided on nytimes.com), about the philosopher’s life and ideas appeared in the New York Times on April 20, 1907.

Huneker’s essay provides both a summary of John Henry Mackay’s biography of Stirner (Max Stirner: His life and work) and a brief review of Stirner’s book, with plenty of the art critic’s name-dropping flourishes throughout. In order to help today’s reader appreciate the context from which Huneker wrote, I’ve hyperlinked most of the names that appear in the essay (pointing to their Wikipedia entries for the most part). This might be especially helpful in the case of those intellectual figures which were no doubt well-known to Huneker’s [very cultured] audience in 1907, but which are no longer much discussed today.

A slightly modified and expanded version of this essay also appeared as the last chapter of Huneker’s Egoists, a book of supermen (1909). In addition to the scanned book available on the Internet Archive at that link (and an okay OCR’d ebook), a nice transcription of this later version of the essay has been archived at The Anarchist Library as “Max Stirner by James G. Huneker.” (I did not discover this version until after I had transcribed the New York Times article below, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered. Oh well.)

The main difference between the two versions of the essay is that the later version, which appeared in Huneker’s book, includes an additional section ("II"). There are also minor differences, a few of which I point out in the footnotes of the transcription below (the first footnote appeared in the original article, the rest are mine).

Finally, I’d like to give a few thoughts on one of Huneker’s terms. Huneker sees Stirner’s egoism as, if nothing else, “a handy weapon” against Socialism. He calls The Ego and His Own “the most drastic criticism of Socialism thus far presented.” Given that Stirner’s work has been taken up for the most part by self-described socialists — early on by Engels who saw Stirner’s egoism as a possible philosophic foundation of communism, later by Benjamin Tucker who published the very book Huneker is reviewing, and by many anarchists today — these comments may be confusing.

Huneker’s fear, like Spencer’s earlier, was of an oppressive, heavy, grey State Socialism sacrificing individuals and individuality to some notion of a mediocre “Society.” But it is a narrow and one-sided (if popular) retreat from socialism which too eagerly, in 1907 and today, sacrifices individuals to existing conditions. Thus we see Marx and Engels in their manifesto mock their detractors who fear in communism what already exists in capitalism. And we see artists like Oscar Wilde (under the influence of Godwin and Kropotkin) claim that “Individualism, then, is what through Socialism we are to attain to.” Indeed, Wilde not only considered socialism as necessary for a full individualism, he uses the terms almost as synonyms.

But the matter is not so simply cleared up by distinguishing between state and libertarian socialism (see Tucker’s “State Socialism and Anarchism”), because similar bipolar tensions have always existed within libertarian socialism itself. Beginning with Proudhon’s investigations of social antimonies and his rejection of “Communism,” which finds an ally in Stirner’s egoism, individualist anarchists have worried that socialist projects would end up simply mirroring the tyranny of capitalism and other exploitative societies: that instead of the few dominating the many, socialism would consist of the many dominating the few, or (to use Proudhon’s somewhat paradoxical phrase) the exploitation of the strong by the weak. These tensions have played their part in the various calcified, broken, and re-calcified divisions which criss-cross the anarchist landscape to this day.

Still, Huneker’s view of Stirner as mostly useful as an antidote to state socialism not only makes Stirner out to be less interesting than he is, but it ignores all the interesting bits of socialism. If we use the word in a minimalist sense, insofar as it means opposition to (and transcension of) capitalism and traditionalism — to exploitation and domination — Stirner’s egoism is only useful to a socialist. For more along similar lines, see section G.6 of An Anarchist FAQ: “What are the ideas of Max Stirner?”

IDEAS 0F MAX STIRNER.

First English Translation of His Book, “The Ego and His Own” — His Attack on Socialism — The Most Revolutionary Book Ever Published.^[1] Written for The New York Times Saturday Review of Books by James Huneker, author of “Iconoclasts.”

I.

In 1888 John Henry Mackay, the Scottish-German poet, an intransigent, while at the British Museum reading Lange's “History of Materialism,” encountered the name of Max Stirner and a brief criticism of his forgotten book, “Der Einzige und sein Eigentum.” [“The Only One and His Property”; in French translated “L’Unique et sa Propriété,” and in the first English translation more aptly and euphoniously entitled “The Ego and His Own.”] His curiosity excited, Mackay, who is a man of assured talents, wealth, and an ardent scholar,^[2] procured after some difficulty a copy of the work, and so greatly was he stirred that for ten years he gave himself up to the study of Stirner and his teachings, and after incredible painstaking published in 1898 the story of his life. [“Max Stirner: Sein Leben und sein Werk,” John Henry Mackay, Schuster & Loeffler, Berlin and Leipsic.] To Mackay’s labors we owe all we know of a man who was as absolutely swallowed up by the years as if he had never existed. But some advanced spirits had read Stirner’s book, the most revolutionary ever written, and had felt its influence. Let us name two: Henrik Ibsen and Frederick Nietzsche. Though the name of Stirner is not quoted by Nietzsche, he nevertheless recommended Stirner to a favorite pupil of his, Prof. Baumgartner at Basle University. This was in 1874.^[3]

One hot August afternoon in the Year 1896 at Bayreuth I was standing in the marktplatz when a member of the Wagner Theatre — the performances were in progress that Summer — pointed out to me a house opposite, at the corner of the Maximilianstrasse, and said: “Do you see that house with the double gables? A man was born there whose name will be green when Jean Paul and Richard Wagner are forgotten.” It was too large a draught upon my credulity, so I asked the name. “Max Stirner,” he replied. “The crazy Hegelian,” I retorted. “You have read him, then?” “No; but you haven’t read Nordau.” It was true. All fire and flame at that time for Nietzsche, I did not realize that the poet and rhapsodist had forerunners. My friend sniffed at Nietzsche’s name; Nietzsche for him was an aristocrat, not an Individualist. In reality, a lyric expounder of Bismarck's gospel of blood and iron. Wagner’s adversary would, with Renan, place mankind under the yoke of a more exacting tyranny than Socialism, the tyranny of culture, of the Over-Man. Ibsen, who had studied both Kierkegaard and Stirner — witness Brand and Peer Gynt — Ibsen was much nearer to the champion of the Ego than Nietzsche. Yet it is the dithyrambic author of “Zarathustra” who is responsible, with Mackay, for the recrudescence of Stirner’s teachings.

Stirner, Nietzsche and the Doctrine of Individualism

Nietzsche is the poet of the doctrine, Stirner its prophet, or, if you will, its philosopher. Later I secured the book, which had been reprinted in the cheap edition of Reclam. [1882.] It seemed colorless, or rather gray, set against the glory and gorgeous rhetoric of Nietzsche. I could not see what I saw a decade later — that Nietzsche only used Stirner as a springboard, as a point of departure, and that the Individual had vastly different meanings to these widely disparate temperaments. Stirner, indifferent psychologist as he was, displayed nevertheless the courage or an explorer in search of the pole of the Ego.

The man, whose theories make a tabula rasa of civilization, was born at Bayreuth Oct. 25, 1806, and died at Berlin June 25, 1856. His right name was Johann Caspar Schmidt, Max Stirner being a nickname bestowed upon him by his lively comrades in Berlin because of his very high and massive forehead. His father was a maker of wind instruments, who died six months after his son’s birth. His mother remarried, and his stepfather proved a kind protector. Nothing of external importance occurred in the life of Max Stirner that might place him apart from his fellow-students. He was very industrious over his books at Bayreuth, and when he became a student at the Berlin University he attended the lectures regularly, preparing himself for a teacher’s profession. He mastered the classics, modern philosophy, and modern languages. But he did not win a doctor’s degree; just before examinations his mother became ill with a mental malady, (a fact his critics have noted,) and the son dutifully gave up everything so as to be near her. After her death he married a girl who died within a short time. Later, in 1843, his second wife was Marie Dähnhardt, a very “advanced” young woman, who came from Schwerin to Berlin to lead a “free” life. She met Stirner in the Hippel circle, at a Weinstube in the Friedrichstrasse, where radical young thinkers gathered: Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Moses Hess, Jordan, Julius Faucher, and other stormy insurgents. She had, it is said, about 10,000 thalers. She was married with the ring wrenched from a witness’s purse — her bridegroom had forgotten to provide one. He was not a practical man; if he had been he would not have written “The Ego and His Own.”

It was finished between the years 1843 and 1845; the latter date it was published. It created a stir, though the censor did not seriously interfere with it; its attacks on the prevailing government were veiled. In Germany rebellion on the psychic plane expresses itself in metaphysics; in Poland and Russia music is the favorite medium. Feuerbach, Hess, and Szeliga answered Stirner’s terrible arraignment of society, but men’s thoughts were interested elsewhere, and with the revolt of 1848 Stirner was quite effaced. He had taught for five years in a fashionable school for young ladies; he had written for several periodicals, and translated extracts from the works of Say and Adam Smith.

Max Stirner and His Wife.

After his book appeared, his relations with his wife became uneasy. Late in 1846 or early in 1847 she left him and went to London, where she supported herself by writing; later she inherited a small sum from a sister, visited Australia, married a laborer there, and became a washerwoman. In 1897 Mackay wrote to her in London, asking her for some facts in the life of her husband. She replied tartly that she was not willing to revive her past; that her husband had been too much of an egotist to keep friends, and was a man, “Very sly.” This was all he could extort from the woman, who evidently had never understood her husband and execrated his memory, probably because her little fortune was swallowed up by their mutual improvidence. Another appeal only elicited the answer that “Mary Smith is preparing for death” — she had become a Roman Catholic. It is the irony of things in general that his book is dedicated to “My Sweetheart, Marie Dähnhardt.”

Stirner, after being deserted, led a precarious existence. The old jolly crowd at Hippel’s seldom saw him. He was in prison twice for debt — free Prussia! — and often lacked bread. He, the exponent of Egoism, of philosophic anarchy, starved because of his pride. He was in all matters save his theories a moderate man, eating and drinking temperately, living frugally. Unassuming in manners, he could hold his own in debate — and Hippel’s appears to have been a rude debating society — yet one who avoided life rather than mastered it. He was of medium height, ruddy, and his eyes deep blue. His hands were white, slender, “aristocratic,” writes Mackay. Certainly not the figure of stalwart shatterer of conventions, not the ideal iconoclast; above all, without a touch of the melodrama of communistic anarchy, with its black flags, its propaganda by force, its idolatry of assassinations, bomb throwing, killing of fat, harmless policemen, and its sentimental gabble about fraternity. Stirner hated the ward Equality: he knew it was a lie, knew that all men are born unequal, as no two grains of sand on earth ever are or ever will be alike. He was a solitary. And thus he died at the age of fifty. A few of his former companions heard of his neglected condition and buried him. Nearly a half century later Mackay, with the co-operation of Hans von Bülow, affixed a commemorative tablet on the house where he last lived, Phillipstrasse 19, Berlin, and alone Mackay placed a slab to mark his grave in the Sophienkirchhof.

The Most Thoroughgoing of nihilists.

Max Stirner. Portrait sketch made by Friedrich Engels. From John Henry Mackay’s “Max Stirner,” (Schuster, Loeffler & Co., Berlin.) The only portrait of the great “individualist” extant. The philosopher of anarchy looks like a harmless domino player.

It is to the poet of the “Letzte Erkentniss,” (“Sum of Knowledge,”) with its stirring line, “Doch bin ich mein,” (“But I am mine,”) that I owe the above scanty details of the most thoroughgoing Nihilist who ever penned his disbelief in religion, humanity, society, the family. He rejects them all. We have no genuine portrait of this insurrectionist — he preferred personal insurrection to general revolution; the latter, he asserted, brought in its train either Socialism or a tyrant — except a sketch hastily made by Friedrich Engels, the revolutionist, for Mackay. It is not reassuring. Stirner looks like an old-fashioned German and timid pedagogue, high coat-collar, spectacles, clean-shaven face and all. This valiant enemy of the State, of Socialism, was, perhaps, only brave on paper. But his icy, relentless, epigrammatic style is in the end more gripping than the spectacular, volcanic, whirling utterances of Nietzsche. Nietzsche lives in an ivory tower and is an aristocrat. Into Stirner’s land all are welcome. That is, if men have the will to rebel. Above all, if they despise the sentimentality of mob rule. “The Ego and His Own” is the most drastic criticism of Socialism thus far presented.

II.

The book called “The Ego and His Own” is divided into two parts: first, The Man; second, I. Its motto should be, “I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.” But Walt Whitman’s pronouncement had not been made, and Stirner was forced to fall back on Goethe — Goethe, from whom all that is modern flows. “I place my all on Nothing.” [“Ich hab Mein Sach auf Nichts gestellt,” from the joyous poem “Vanitas! Vanitatum Vanitas!”] is Stirner’s keynote to his Egoistic symphony. I, Me, Ich, Ego, je, moi — the list might be lengthened of the personal pronoun in various languages. The hateful I, as Pascal said, caused Zola, a solid egoist himself, to assert that the English were the most egotistic of races because their I in their tongue was but a single letter, while the French employed two, je, and not capitalized unless beginning a sentence! Stirner must have admired the English, as his I was the sole counter in his philosophy. His ego and not the family is the unit of the social life. In antique times, when men were really the young, not the ancient, it was a world of reality. Men enjoyed the material. With Christianity came the rule of the Spirit; ideas were become sacred, with the concepts of God, Goodness, Sin, Salvation. After Rousseau and the French Revolution humanity was enthroned, and the State became our oppressor. Our first enemies are our parents, our educators — an idea first enunciated by Stendhal, though also original with Stirner. It follows, then, that the only criterion of life is my Ego. Without my Ego I could not apprehend existence. Altruism is as pretty disguise for egotism. No one is or can be disinterested. He gives up one thing for another because the other seems better, nobler to him. Egotism! The ascetic renounces the pleasures of life because in his eyes renunciation is nobler than enjoyment. Egotism again! “You are to benefit yourself, and you are not to seek your benefit,” cries Stirner. Explain the paradox! The one sure thing of life is the Ego. [Descartes] Therefore, “I am not you, but I’ll use you if you are agreeable to me.” Not to God, not to man, must be given the glory. “I’ll keep the glory myself.” What is Humanity but an abstraction? I am Humanity. Therefore the State is a monster that devours its children. It must not dictate to me. “The State and I are enemies.” The State is a spook. A spook, too, is freedom. What is freedom? Who is free? Free for what? The world belongs to all, but all are I. I alone am individual proprietor.

Stirner’s Idea of Property.

Property is conditioned by might. What I have is mine. “Whoever knows how to take, to defend, the thing, to him belongs property.” Stirner would have held that property was not only nine but ten points of the law. He repudiates all laws. Repudiates competition, for persons are not the subject of competition, but “things” are; therefore if you are without “things” how can you compete? Persons are free, not “things.” The world, therefore, is not “free.” Socialism is but a further screwing up of the State machine to limit the individual. Socialism is a new god, a new abstraction to tyrannize over the Ego. And remember that Stirner is not speaking of the metaphysical Ego of Hegel, Fichte, Schilling, but of your I, my I, the political, the social I, the economic I of every man and woman. In a sense Stirner is not a philosopher. He is, rather, an Ethiker. He spun no metaphysical cobwebs. He reared no lofty cloud palaces. He did not bring from Asia its pessimism, as did Schopenhauer; nor deny reality, as did Berkeley. He was a foe to general ideas. He was an implacable realist. Yet while he denies the existence of an Absolute, of a Deity, State, Categorical Imperative, he nevertheless had not shaken himself free from Hegelianism [he is Extreme Left as a Hegelian,] for he erected his I as an Absolute, though only dealing with it in its relations to society. Now, nature abhors an absolute. Everything is relative. So we shall see presently that with Stirner, too, his I is not so independent as he imagines.

He says “crimes spring from fixed ideas.” The Church, State, the Family, Morals, are fixed ideas. “Atheists are pious people.” They reject one fiction only to cling to many old ones. Liberty for the people is not my liberty. Socrates was a fool in that he conceded to the Athenians the right to condemn him. Proudhon said, “Property is theft.” Theft from whom? From society? But society is not the sole proprietor. Pauperism is the valuelessness of Me. The State and pauperism are the same. Communism, Socialism abolish private property and push us back into Collectivism. The individual is enslaved by the machinery of the State or by socialism. Your Ego is not free if you allow your vices or virtues to enslave it. The intellect has too long ruled, says Stirner; it is the will (not Schopenhauer’s Will to Live, or Hartmann's Will to Power,^[4] but the sum of our activity expressed by an act of volition; old-fashioned will, in a word) to exercise itself to the utmost. Nothing compulsory, all voluntary. Do what you will. Fay ce que vouldras, as Rabelais has it in his Abbey of Theleme. Not “Know thyself,” but get the value out of yourself. Make your value felt. The poor are to blame for the rich. Our art to-day is the only art possible, and therefore real at the time. We are at every moment all we can be. There is no such thing as sin. It is an invention to keep imprisoned the will of our Ego. And as mankind is forced to believe theoretically in the evil of sin, yet commit it in its daily life, hypocrisy and crime are engendered. If the concept of sin had never been used as a club over the weak-minded, there would be no sinners — i.e., wicked people. [Here the Christian Scientists should read.] The individual is himself the world’s history. The world is my picture. There is no other Ego but mine. Louis XIV said, “L’Etat, c’est moi”; I say, “l’Univers, c’est moi.” John Stuart Mill wrote in his famous essay on liberty that “Society has now got the better of the individual.”

Ibsen and Rousseau.

Rousseau, a madman of genius, is to blame for the “social contract” and the “equality” nonsense that has poisoned more than one nation’s political ideas. The minority is always in the right, declared Ibsen, as opposed to Comte's “Submission is the base of perfection.” To have the will to be responsible for one’s self, advises Nietzsche. “I am what I am,” (Brand.) “To thyself be sufficient,” (Peer Gynt.) Both men failed, for their freedom kills. To thine own self be true. God is within you. Best of all is Lord Acton's dictum that “Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is of itself the highest political end.” To will is to have to will (Ibsen.) My truth is the truth (Stirner.) Mortal has made the immortal, says the Rig Veda. Nothing is greater than I (Bhagavat Gita.) I am that I am, (the Avesta, also Exodus.) Taine wrote, “Nature is in reality a tapestry of which we see the reverse side. This is why we try to turn it.” Hierarchy, oligarchy, both forms submerge the Ego. J. S. Mill demanded: “How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds?” Bakounine in his fragmentary essay on God and the State feared the domination of science quite as much as an autocracy. “Politics is the madness of the many for the gain of the few,” Pope asserted. Read Spinoza, “The Citizen and the State,” (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.) Or Oscar Wilde's epigram: “Charity creates a multitude of sins.”

Science tells us in this century that our I is really a “we”; a colony of cells, an orchestra of inherited instincts. We have not even free will, or at least only in a limited sense. We are an instrument played upon by our heredity and our environment. The cell, then, is the unit, not the Ego. Very well, Stirner would exclaim (if he had lived after Darwin and 1859,) the cell is my cell, not yours! Away with other cells! But such an autonomous gospel is surely a phantasm. Stirner, too, saw a ghost. Stirner, too, in his proud Individualism was an aristocrat. No man may separate himself from the tradition of his race unless to incur the penalty of a sterile isolation. The solitary is usually the abnormal man. Man is gregarious. Man is a political animal. Even Stirner recognizes that man is not man without society.

“Letting Go and Holding On.”

In practice he would have agreed with Havelock Ellis that “all the art of living lies in the fine mingling of letting go and holding on.”^[5] The body includes the soul and the soul permeates the body. That gentle mystic Joachim of Flora said: “The true ascetic counts nothing his own, save only his harp.” But Stirner, sentimental, henpecked, myopic Berlin professor, was too actively engaged in wholesale criticism — that is, destruction of society, with all its props and standards, its hidden selfishness and heartlessness — to bother with theories of reconstruction. His disciples have remedied the omission.^[6] He speaks, though vaguely, of a Union of Egoists, a Verein, where all would rule all, where man, through self-mastery, would be his own master. “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” Indeed, Stirner’s notions as to Property and Money — “it will always be money” — sound suspiciously like those of our captains of industry. Might conquers Right. He has brought to bear the most blazing light rays upon the shifts and evasions of those who decry Egoism, who are what he calls “involuntary,” not voluntary, egotists. Their motives are shown to the bone. Your Sir Willoughby Patternes are not real Egoists, but only half-hearted, selfish weaklings. The true egotist is the altruist, says Stirner; yet Leibnitz was right; so was Dr. Pangloss. This is the best of possible worlds. Any other is not conceivable for man, who is at the top of his zoological series. (Though Quinton has made the astounding statement that the birds follow the mammals.) We are all “spectres of the dust,” and to live on an overcrowded planet we must follow the advice of the Boyg: “Go roundabout!” Compromise is the only sane attitude. The world is not, will never be, to the strong of arm or spirit, as Nietzsche believes. The race is to the mediocre. The survival of the fittest is to the weak. Society shields and upholds the feeble. Mediocrity rules, let Carlyle or Darwin enunciate laws as they may. It was the perception of these facts that drove Stirner to formulate his theories in “The Ego and His Own.” He was poor, a failure, and despised by his wife. He lived under a dull, brutal regime. The Individual was naught, the State all. His book was his great revenge. It was the efflorescence of his Ego. It was his romance, his dream of an ideal world, his Platonic republic. Philosophy is more a matter of man’s temperament than some suppose. And philosophic systems often go by opposites. Schopenhauer preached asceticism, but hardly led an ascetic life; Nietzsche commanded us: “Be hard!” when he really meant it for his own tender, bruised soul. His injunctions to be free, to become Immoralists and Overmen, were but the buttressing up of a will diseased, by the needs of a man who suffered his life long from morbid sensibility. James Walker's suggestion that “We will not allow the world to wait for the Overman. We are the Overmen,” is a mordant criticism of Nietzscheism. I am Unique. Never again will this aggregation of atoms stand on earth. Therefore I must be free. I will myself free. (It is spiritual liberty that only counts.) But my I must not be of the kind described by the madhouse doctor in “Peer Gynt”: “Each one shuts himself up in the barrel of self. In the self-fermentation he dives to the bottom; with the self-bung he seals it hermetically.” The increased self-responsibility of life in an Egoist Union would prevent the world from ever entering into such ideal anarchy (an-arch, without government.) There is too much of renunciation in the absolute freedom of the will — that is its final, if paradoxical, implication — for mankind. Our Utopias are secretly based on Chance. Deny Chance in our existence and life will be without salt. Man is not a perfectible animal. He fears the new and therefore clings to his old beliefs. To each his chimera. He has not grown mentally or physically since the Sumerians — or a million years before the Sumerians. Man is not a logical animal. He is governed by his emotions, his affective life. He hugs his illusions. His brains are an accident, possibly from overnutrition, as De Gourmont says. To fancy him capable of existing in a community where all will be selfgoverned is a rare poet’s vision. That way the millennium lies. And would the world be happier if it ever did attain this truth?

Qualities of the English Translation.

The English translation of “The Ego and His Own” is admirable; it is that of a philologist and a versatile scholar. Stirner’s form is open to criticism. It is vermicular. His thought is never confused,^[7] but he sees so many sides of his theme, embroiders it with so many variations, that he repeats himself. He has neither the crystalline brilliance nor the poetic glamour of Nietzsche. But he left behind him a veritable Breviary of Destruction, a striking and dangerous book. It is dangerous in every sense of the word — to socialism, to politicians, to hypocrisy. It asserts the dignity of the Individual, not his debasement. It fascinates even though it does not convince, and it is a handy weapon in these days when Socialism is tightening its sluggish coils preparatory to swallowing the State. Herbert Spencer, too, foresaw the dangers of Socialism.

“Is it not the chief disgrace in the world not to be a unit; to be reckoned one character; not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred of thousands, of the party, of the section to which we belong, and our opinion predicted geographically as the North or the South?”

But Spencer did not write these words, nor did Max Stirner. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote them. J. H.

New York, April, 1907.

1. “THE EGO AND HIS OWN.” By Max Stirner. Translated from the German by Stephen T. Byington, with an introduction by James L. Walker. New York; Benjamin R Tucker. $1.50

2. The later version of this essay described Mackay simply as “an anarchist”

3. But see Wikipedia’s “Relationship between Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Stirner”

4. The later version of this essay reads “Nietzsche’s Will to Power”

5. This was corrected in the later version of the essay to read “he would not have agreed with Havelock”

6. This was expanded in the later version of the essay by the insertion of two sentences: “In the United States, for example, Benjamin R. Tucker, a follower of Josiah Warren, teaches a practical and philosophical form of Individualism. He is an Anarch who believes in passive resistance.”

7. In the later essay this reads instead, “His thought is sometimes confused”

A Look At Bernie Sanders' Electoral Socialism

2016-02-27T22:33:51Z

Bernie v. Debs: The Confusing Terminology of a Self-Avowed Socialist

Band-aids don’t fix bullet holes

— Taylor Swift

The presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, the formerly-independent senator from Vermont, has already accomplished what seemed impossible: it has further confused the American people about the meaning of socialism.

Sanders has consistently referred to himself as a "democratic socialist" for decades. While he was a student at the Univeristy of Chicago (1960-1964) his reading included works by Jefferson, Lincoln, Fromm, Dewey, Debs, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Freud, and Reich.^[1] Though his writings reflect a greater influence by Freud and Reich than Debs and Marx, the mere fact that he’s read Marx and knows of Eugene V. Debs almost makes Sanders a revolutionary leftist by contemporary American standards. In 1979, disappointed that many of the students he spoke with had never heard of Debs, Sanders wrote and produced a 30-minute narrated film on his life and ideas.

The Debs video was so successful that Sanders considered producing “a video series on other American radicals — Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, Paul Robeson, and other extraordinary Americans who most young people have never heard of.” Unfortunately he never did.^[2]

Bernie’s first involvement in electoral politics came in 1971 when he stopped by a meeting of the Liberty Union Party in Vermont and got nominated as the party’s candidate for an upcoming Senate special election. (Today the Liberty Party is so disappointed in his foreign policy that they have an article linked to the top of their website which refers to him as “Bernie the Bomber.”)

America has been a hostile environment to anyone and anything associated with the S-word during Sanders' entire political career, but he has still had impressive success at electoral politics as a self-avowed socialist in Vermont. When he ran for a fourth term as the mayor of Burlington in 1987, the Democratic and Republican Parties finally decided to join forces and run a single candidate against him. Sanders still won (as did his third-party successor, Peter Clavelle, who beat a joint Democratic-Republican candidate in the 1989 election).^[3] Even as a senator he still considers Eugene Debs to be a hero of his, and he even at one point had (maybe still has) a plaque commemorating Debs hanging on the wall in his Washington office.^[4]

Sanders did not shy away from the “socialist” label during his 2016 presidential campaign, and it has continued to galvanize both his supporters and detractors during his current campaign. But his “socialism” is very tame. He seems to welcome every interview as a chance to emphasize to the American people that his democratic socialism is nothing scary or radical.^[5] He has always been indirect but clear that what he means by “democratic socialism” amounts to what is more commonly today called “social democracy.” But when discussing contemporary political ideas in English, it is generally important not to confuse “democratic socialism” with “social democracy.” As goals, they have come to mean nearly opposite things.

“Democratic socialism” is used to describe a broad range of approaches which emphasize a bottom-up and peaceful eradication of capitalist ownership and transition to a socialist economy (whatever that might look like). It is sometimes contrasted to Marxism-Leninism and other revolutionary schools which make less of a pretense of using or preserving liberal democratic institutions.

In contrast, “social democracy” usually refers to social and economic reforms which seek a more humane and democratically-controlled capitalist economy. It has come to be almost synonymous with the policies put in place by the Nordic states during the 20th century. In Sanders' terminology, it aims to curtail the excessive political and economic power currently enjoyed by America’s “billionaire class” in order to restore and maintain a healthy “middle class” supported by a Scandinavian-style welfare system.

But the two terms have not always referred to distinct ideas; a hundred years ago they were used interchangeably. And even while social democracy today doesn’t challenge capitalism, its reforms did grow out of the broad socialist and labor movements of the 19th century. One of the early theorists of social democracy was a German Marxist named Eduard Bernstein who became influenced by the British parliamentarian socialists of the Fabian Society. Bernstein argued at the turn of the 20th century that capitalism was capable of adapting and reforming itself to provide workers with rights and prosperity so that its collapse was avoidable and its extralegal overthrow was unnecessary. One of Bernstein’s most famous pronouncements is: “The final aim of socialism, whatever it may be, means nothing to me; it is the movement itself which is everything.”

Rosa Luxemburg, another German theorist, provided a defense of orthodox Marxism against Bernstein’s reformism as Reform or Revolution? (1900). In language which could be directed at a Sanders-style social democrat today, Luxemburg noted that reforms must be made in relation to a goal, so to divorce the socialist goal from social reforms is to abandon socialism itself:

[P]eople who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform in place and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Our program becomes not the realization of socialism, but the reform of capitalism; not the suppression of the wage labor system but the diminution of exploitation, that is, the suppression of the abuses of capitalism instead of suppression of capitalism itself.

While Sanders' use of “democratic socialism” to refer to mere reforms of capitalism is confusing in its anachronism, it is not without precedent. And there is a specific thread of American socialism that is almost continuous with Sanders' presidential bid and which provides some historic context to help understand the movement building around Sanders.

The short version of that history begins in the late 1950s with a man named Michael Harrington who is today most famous for his 1962 book on poverty (The Other America). Harrington was something of a protégé to Max Shachtman, a long-time member of the American socialist scene and an associate of Leon Trotsky. In 1958 Shachtman and his followers joined the Socialist Party of America (the party which was founded by Eugene Debs back in the day). Shachtman and Harrington argued that the Socialist Party was so small that it should adopt a strategy of “realignment”: focusing its energy on joining and realigning the Democratic Party to the left, including voting for and otherwise supporting the Democratic presidential nominees. Since workers weren’t going to the socialists, they said, the socialists should go to the workers. Harrington thought the New Left arising on American campuses could be the beginning “not of a ‘third’ party of protest, but of a real, second party of the people,” and that the Democratic Party could be transformed to that end.^[6]

Harrington became a leader of the youth wing of the Socialist Party, the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL). Significantly, not long after Harrington’s realignment movement became influential, a young university student and civil rights activist named Bernie Sanders joined the Chicago chapter of YPSL.

A 21-year-old Bernie Sanders being arrested by the Chicago PD at a civil rights protest in 1963

Disagreement over the realignment strategy contributed to several schisms of the Socialist Party of America in the early 1970s. Harrington resigned and founded the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) which endorsed the 1972 Democratic candidate George McGovern for president and continued to try to develop a socialist program within the Democratic Party. In 1982 DSOC joined with another democratic socialist group to become the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

I’m not sure if Sanders was directly or consciously influenced by the Shachtman-Harrington realignment caucus back in the '60s, but the movement ignited around his 2016 and 2020 campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination is the most successful expression to date of that strategy.

The DSA still exists today. They were one of the few socialist organizations to enthusiastically rally behind Sanders in 2016, and his campaign has revitalized the organization.

In November 2015 Sanders gave an hour-long speech at Georgetown University to elucidate his meaning. The whole speech including this bit toward the end exemplifies the confusing way he uses the term socialist to mean something very much like capitalist:

The next time you hear me attacked as a socialist — like tomorrow — remember this: I don’t believe government should take over the grocery store down the street or own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and the working families of this country who produce the wealth of this country deserve a decent standard of living and that their incomes should go up, not down. I do believe in private companies that thrive and invest and grow in America.

For all of his talk about “socialism,” Sanders talks about raising wages and not about abolishing wage labour; about a government-guaranteed job and not about a life beyond wage work; about increased representation within the ruling class’s government and not about abolishing the ruling class. He manages to identify working families as the creators of wealth (though without mention of the non-American families who create so much of our wealth), but he never questions the fundamental mechanisms by which that wealth ends up in the hands of employers and bankers. As the editors of Jacobin magazine summarized his speech, “In short, for Sanders, democratic socialism means New Deal liberalism” (“The Socialism of Bernie Sanders”).

There is a persistent and widespread misconception which holds that an essential element of socialism is either government control of business or/and it is government funding of services. When Sanders promotes the latter by contrasting it to the former, he manages to reinforce both misconceptions simultaneously. The effect of such a shallow understanding is that the popular definitions of socialism make almost no useful distinctions and socialism talk in America consists almost entirely of debating various forms of capitalist policy.

It is argued by some pragmatic bandwagoners that labels are unimportant and whether we call Sanders a democratic socialist or a social democrat it’s his message and the movement he is building which are important. Others tack the opposite way: they say the referent is unimportant and we should just be happy someone is finally talking about socialism seriously and positively on TV.

Both views show a rather severe under-appreciation for the importance of radical rhetoric. It is when making modest, mundane reforms that it is most important to keep long-term radical goals in mind; without linguistic reminders, projects will inevitably lose themselves to the prevailing ideology. Likewise, to obscure the radical meaning of socialism as Sanders has done is to cut loose those rhetorical anchors and risk losing any transformative potential of his program.

Untangling the various meanings and histories of socialism to detail its useful distinctions and critiques is beyond the scope of this article. But it is worth pointing out, contra Sanders, that some socialists (even those so wary of being mistaken for Bolsheviks that they insert the redundant “democratic” modifier everywhere) still think socialism is supposed to be radical and maybe a little bit scary. The main point of departure between socialists and other reformers is that socialists, historically, have tended to be, you know, anti-capitalist in their rhetoric and projects. That may seem obvious, but it is a point apparently lost on Sanders and many of his young “socialist” supporters. An idea of what it means to be (and to not be) anti-capitalist can be had by comparing the rhetoric of Sanders with that of his hero Debs:

Sanders talks about the “billionaire class” and the “middle class,” or about the “1%” and the “99%”. Debs talked about the “capitalist class” and the “working class”; about the “master class” and the “exploited class.” The class analysis of socialists like Debs has the advantage that it is based on a clearly defined relationship to production rather than on arbitrary levels of income. One points to the symptoms; the other both explains the symptoms and points to the disease.
Sanders talks about increasing wages for the middle class. Debs talked about wages as slavery and worked to abolish the wage system.
Sanders talks about protecting American jobs, wages, and profits even at the expense of the global poor. In one interview last year he described open borders as a “right-wing proposal” which “would make everybody in America poorer.”^[7] Debs talked about a world-wide revolutionary movement and said “I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth; I am a citizen of the world.”
Sanders says the USA should be a leader, but not a unilateral actor except as a last resort, in military conflicts. Debs opposed all war and empire. In 1918 he delivered a speech against World War I for which he was arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison (of which he served three).
Sanders is seeking the nomination of one of the most powerful capitalist political parties in the history of the world. Debs founded independent parties to challenge the monopoly held by the Republican and Democratic parties of his time. While he was in prison in 1920 he ran for president as the Socialist Party candidate and received nearly a million votes (about 3.4% of the popular vote).

I know it is not fair to measure any electable socialist politician against Eugene Debs. Who could stand up to that? I don’t think I’ve heard Jeremy Corbyn or Kshama Sawant speak much about abolishing the wage system either. But such a comparison does hopefully cast light on why some socialists are nonplussed about Bernie Sanders. A masseur is no good when what one wants is a surgeon. Band-aids don’t fix bullet holes.

Neither Socialism Nor Barbarism: Making America Great Again (Again)

The graph below shows the share of all income which went to the richest 1% (blue) and 0.1% (red) of American families over a 100-year period from 1913 to 2013:

Note the relatively flat bit spanning about thirty years starting after World War II and continuing until around 1978 during which income inequality was at its lowest. The economist Fredrich Hayek referred to those years as the Great Prosperity. They were characterized by Keynesian-inspired welfare policies aimed at maximizing employment and a post-Fordist economy of domestic manufacturing with strong labour unions and high wages. An unprecedented number of workers (among men) made a “family” wage and could afford to buy many of the products they helped produce which spurred business and incentivized further domestic investment, jobs, and spending.

That is the America Bernie Sanders is nostalgic for. But even while the apparent health of that period (notwithstanding the millions of less-lucky American families who lived in poverty) was made possible by many concessions to the working class (Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society), those concessions comprised a temporary capitalist alternative to socialism, not its expression. It didn’t take long after the postwar world stabilized for the capitalist class to remove its restraints whenever convenient to return to a renewed, more profitable liberalism.

Obviously the current trend of high and rising inequality cannot be sustained indefinitely. If the capitalist state can’t get control of the capitalists under its charge, then everybody faces a future of economic and environmental ruin. In that sense members of the ruling class, who always have the most to lose, might be wise to feel the Bern. But it’s not clear that last century’s methods of saving capitalism would find success again.

The overall U-shape apparent in our graph above was made famous by French economist Thomas Piketty in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. By looking at tax records in the United States, France, Germany, and several other countries, Piketty and his team found that the low-levels of wealth inequality during the Great Prosperity was a singular occurrence, an aberration from the normal path of capitalism on which returns from capital tend to outpace income from labour. (At the bottom of the last page of the copy of Piketty’s Capital I’m consulting, a previous library patron penciled this mini-review: “577 pages to say the rich get richer & the poor get poorer.”)

Piketty, who is himself a social democrat with “no interest in denouncing inequality or capitalism per se,”^[8] presents a rather dismal outlook for the future of capitalism. The best try at regaining democratic control over the globalized financial capitalism of this century, he says, would be for nation-states and financial institutions dedicated to transparency to somehow work together to approximate a global progressive tax on capital. But as one reviewer for The Guardian responded to Piketty’s proposed restrictions on capital, “It is easier to imagine capitalism collapsing than the elite consenting to them.”^[9] More generally, as a Marxist critic of Piketty pointed out, “Capitalism can dispense with democracy more easily than with profits.”^[10]

The democratic socialist guise of Sanders' New Deal liberalism, then, is a regressive walk back toward an antiquated capitalist society which, in the light of Piketty’s data and the global nature of modern capitalism, may no longer even be within reach.

Socialists vs Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Party

Of course American socialists don’t expect to be presented with an actual socialist who they can vote for as a viable candidate. But they do have hope that an independent social democrat is possible. Most of the criticism Sanders has received from the socialist press is directed at his strategic choices: specifically the efficacy of working with or within the Democratic Party rather than building an independent political movement to challenge the two capitalist parties.

The senator plots his next move. Original photo by Charlie Enscoe (who retains copyrights).

A younger Sanders may have criticized himself on the same grounds. In his book about becoming a US Representative for Vermont he commented on the Labor Party slogan (“The bosses have two parties. We need one of our own”) with “Hard to argue with that.”^[11] And here’s an excerpt from that video he wrote about Eugene Debs:

Every four years the Democratic and Republican parties come forward and tell the working people of this country all they’re going to do for them. How they’re going to end unemployment, raise wages, lower prices, and stop war. Gene Debs didn’t believe a word of it. He believed that the only way that workers could protect their own interests was to have a political party of their own: a socialist party.

Socialists who are not optimistic about expending their efforts on the electoral politics of a capitalist party see the Sanders campaign as little more than a mechanism to “sheepdog” potential leftists, attracting them to and keeping them within the Democratic Party where any potential for radical change will be dissipated or even redirected toward strengthening the established order. I don’t know who first coined the phrase, but the ability of the Democratic Party to attract and neutralize radical movements has earned it the reputation among activists as being “the graveyard of social movements.”

As the primaries began in 2016 and Sanders proved his electability by remaining neck-and-neck with Clinton in polls, the tone of the socialist press predictably became less concerned with Sanders' inevitable loss and subsequent endorsement of Clinton and more concerned with defending Sanders against Clinton and the mainstream Democratic Party. And then Trump’s surprise Republican nomination had something of a simultaneously accelerating and abortive effect on the usual dynamics between the Democratic Party and the grassroots movement it sought to absorb as both the party and its discontents turned their focus to Trump.

At the beginning of the 2020 Democratic primaries, after three years of a Trump administration, Sanders' campaign has in many ways started in arguably a stronger position among socialists than last time: more American leftists than ever are so disillusioned that they are willing to support a social democrat even as he is seeking the nomination of an unfriendly and powerful capitalist political party.

Dyer Lum on the Civil and Mormon Wars

2015-01-20T15:43:34Z

The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.

— Karl Marx
The Civil War in the United States (1861)

“Where then is the remedy? Politics offers none. Our political state is based on the present economic condition of things.”

— Dyer Lum

Civil War

Slavery becomes non-conducive to capitalism. Slave ownership is a large and fixed investment which is unsuitable to quickly changing industrial markets. During economic downturns it is less expensive to fire a worker than to sell a slave. And as industry expands, even the slave-owning agricultural sectors of an economy begin to conflict with the interests of capitalists. Slave owners hold a substantial portion of the labour force off of the labour market reducing competition for jobs and forcing capitalists to pay higher wages than would be the case if slaves' labour power were available on the market. What capitalists want is as much unemployed but available labour at their disposal as possible (without causing riots) — that, and labourers who are responsible for housing and feeding themselves.

That is why at the rise of capitalism in Europe serfdom was abolished, the commons were enclosed to force the peasants off of their land (and their means of subsistence), and finally harsh vagrancy laws and forced-labour workhouses were established to coerce the first wage workers into the factories. And that is why, in the United States during the 19th century, the industrial North increasingly came into conflict with the slave-owning South. The war eventually crushed the slaveholders' economy and established wage work as the basis of capitalism throughout the Union while providing former slaves' labour power to the labour market as free workers.

Dyer D. Lum

One of the early writers to give such an economic theory of the forces which lead to the American Civil War was Dyer Lum (1839 – 1893) who became an influential anarchist and labor activist toward the end of the 19th-century. Writing in 1886 he said of the capitalist North and the agrarian-slavery South, “They were rival industrial systems which had met in the same path, and one must give way. The war followed.”^[1] Lum, eager to do his part in ending slavery, volunteered for and served the Union forces for three years. But upon observing the way the South was re-integrated into the union after the war in terms favorable to speculators, military contractors, and monopolists, he had second thoughts about the ultimate purpose of the war.

To-day, South and North alike admit the fundamental principle of our industrial system, the corner stone of our economic structure: Free labor is cheaper than slave labor! Employers without responsibilities could find new fields for enterprise when the system which entailed responsibilities was once removed. The South are converted; the poverty of a factory population is no longer an Eastern peculiarity. The gray meets blue in hearty union to draw dividends and cut coupons. They have found free labor the cheapest. (88)

Mormon Wars

Just as the Civil War had brought the South into alignment with the capitalist system of wage labour, Lum saw the Federal repression of the Mormons in Utah as an attempt to undo the cooperative-based economy the Mormons had established in order to expose them to the exploitation of the industrial East. It was for the expansion of capitalism, Lum wrote, “that the cry has gone forth that the Mormon must go!”

Lum, who traveled to Utah as part of a congressional committee on labor issues, had a very high regard for Mormon society. In one of his booklets he wrote, “The whole Mormon system, social, religious, industrial, is essentially based on two fundamental principles: cooperation in business and arbitration in disputes” (which he contrasted to the mainstream American values of capitalism and civil litigation).^[2] He was so enamored with their cooperative businesses that he viewed Utah as perhaps the most successful socialist country anywhere: “The living question of the present is that stated in the preamble of the constitution of the Knights of Labor as ‘the abolishment of the wage system,’ a problem the Mormon alone has solved.” (86)

Lum was writing at a time when the United States government was taking advantage of American bigotry toward Mormons and polygamy in order to pass legislation aimed at dismantling the Mormon society. The Edmunds Anti-Polygamy Act of 1882 disenfranchised Mormons and put many of their leaders in jail while the Edmunds–Tucker Act of 1887 disincorporated the LDS Church, seized its property, and replaced Utah judges with federally-appointed judges.

But the war against Mormons began before the Civil War. In the 1830s, not long after Joseph Smith founded his church, Mormons began settling in Missouri. They did not find many friends among their new neighbors. Not only were the Mormon immigrants vocally against slavery (in a slave-holding state), but they voted. At one polling place in 1838, around 200 non-Mormon Missourians gathered to prevent Mormons from voting. The Mormons asserted their rights, and a brawl broke out. The skirmish at the polls was the first violence in a series of minor armed conflicts and raids that took place between Mormons and Missourians known as the 1838 Mormon War.

On October 27, 1838, the governor of Missouri, Lilburn Boggs, issued Executive Order 44, which has become known as the Extermination Order. The order read in part:

The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the state if necessary for the public peace—their outrages are beyond all description.

— From Boggs' Extermination Order

The Mormons (around 10,000 of them) were expelled from Missouri and found refuge in Illinois (and then eventually in the Utah Territory). While they were chased out of Missouri for threatening the slave economy there, they were also nearly chased out of Utah for threatening the expansion of capitalism.

In 1857-1858, President James Buchanan sent thousands of US troops to invade the Utah Territory in what has been called the Mormon War. The Nauvoo Legion, the Mormon’s militia, activated and held the Federal troops at the border (in what is now Wyoming) where both armies made winter camp.

Of course the Mormons knew that if the Federal troops were intent on entering Utah, they could not be held off for long. Brigham Young wanted to avoid any open fighting if possible. So in March of 1858 he began executing an evacuation plan. In northern Utah (including Salt Lake City), Mormons buried the foundation of the temple they were constructing, put kindling to their buildings, and as many as 30,000 fled southward leaving only enough men behind to set fire to everything in case the Army entered the territory.

When it became clear that the Mormons would rather burn their territory than give up their mode of living, a peace accord was reached with the federal government. The terms of the agreement allowed the Mormons to return to their homes and continue living unmolested, and in return Young was replaced as governor of the territory and the Army was allowed to enter and maintain a remote fort. Federal troops remained in Utah until they were withdrawn to fight the Civil War in 1862.

But against the renewed persecution of the 1880s, of which Lum and other American anarchists wrote, the Mormons were not as victorious. In 1890 the LDS Church capitulated and renounced polygamy; in 1896 Utah joined the Union as the 45th state and became increasingly integrated into the capitalist economy. The hierarchical structure of the Church fit well with capitalism and became a weapon against the more democratic elements of its priesthood.

The church today owns significant for-profit (non-cooperative) property, including businesses which employ church members (who also pay tithes). Some of the profits from church investments pay the salaries of the General Authorities (high-ranking leaders) who are themselves often property owners, executives, and/or well-paid professionals before accepting the church position. Meanwhile the rank-and-file members and third-world converts must work for a living. The church still inculcates mutual aid and relief societies (it is rare to find a truly destitute Mormon), but nobody today would mistake Utah for a great socialist country. In that sense it can be said that the Mormon War was eventually successful in defeating Mormonism.

The War on Fundamentalist Mormonism

I agree with Lum that the 19th-century Mormon economy in Utah was a barrier to Eastern capitalism, but I think Lum’s account is overly optimistic, especially his claim that the Mormon cooperatives had managed to abolish wage labour. As Leonard Arrington pointed out in his celebrated economic history of the Mormons in Utah, the Mormon principle of cooperation often meant class collaboration — Mormon capitalists and workers uniting against Eastern capitalists — rather than the class antagonism of socialist cooperatives.^[3]

The Mormon social experiment — which sought not the abolition of capital but the cooperation between the owning and working classes (including state-ownership and central planning of some industries), strove for economic self-sufficiency, looked to a single almost supreme prophet for guidance, believed it was restoring ancient order to a decadent society, and cultivated a strong identity as a unified people in the face of external threats — shared some features of the Fascist movements which later arose out of radical unions in Europe.

Of course the LDS Church is also built on principles which would be impossible to reconcile with anything like Fascism, especially its cosmopolitan missionary program by which the church since its inception has made friends and converts from nations and in countries all over the planet. But suppose the church stopped proselytizing: what would an insular Mormon church look like, especially if its authoritarian elements were emphasized? We don’t have to imagine. The American West is dotted by isolated fundamentalist Mormon communities which split with (or were excommunicated by) the LDS Church beginning in the first years of the 20th century and have refused to this day to integrate into the mainstream society or economy. The largest organized group of fundamentalist Mormons is the “Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints” (FLDS) which is infamously characterized by authoritarian rulers, revered (or at least accepted) as prophets, who sexually abuse and economically exploit their subjects.^[4]

Governments have used the crimes of those leaders to punish and attempt to dissolve FLDS communes in order to integrate members into society at large as taxable worker-shoppers. A series of raids culminating in a large 1953 action against the town of Short Creek (which is today the twin towns of Colorado City and Hildale) carried out by Arizona state troopers and national guardsmen resulted in the arrest of 400 Mormon men, women, and children. Some children were never reunited with their families, and the fact that most of the families were allowed to return home was only because of the immense nation-wide public outrage at the raid and the way it was carried out.

Again in 2008, acting on a false report of sexual abuse made via telephone by a non-Mormon woman in a different state, militarized police raided an FLDS compound in Texas. The police removed 462 children under the age of 18 and placed them in protective custody. The children were kept in custody for a month until an appeals court ordered that they be returned to their families. In 2012 the state of Texas initiated legal forfeiture and seizure proceedings against the ranch, a move reminiscent of the old Edmunds–Tucker Act, and in 2014 the State took physical possession of the property.

While fundamentalist Mormonism is not nearly as sympathetic as the Mormon society Dyer Lum knew and described, the retreat fundamentalist Mormons have made to insular authoritarianism is a direct result of the 19th-century campaign of state repression, a campaign which continues today.

On Camels, Liberal Myths, and Ferguson

2014-12-07T13:41:11Z

“In a world that really has been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood.”

— Guy Debord
The Society of the Spectacle

Background: The Killing of Michael Brown

As far as I know, none of the following facts are disputed. On August 9, 2014, Officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson City Police Department confronted Michael Brown, 18, and his acquaintance^[1] Dorian Johnson, 22, from his vehicle because they were walking in the middle of a residential street. The officer ordered them to move to the sidewalk. Instead of simply complying, Brown argued with the officer through the window of the police SUV. A scuffle ensued, Brown, who was unarmed, hit Wilson in the face with his hand, and according to Wilson’s testimony, made a grab for the officer’s firearm. In response, Wilson fired 2 shots at Brown who ran down the street for about 150 feet before turning around to face the officer (some witnesses reported he had turned around in surrender). Meanwhile Wilson had exited his vehicle and pursued on foot, firing at least 10 more times. Less than 90 seconds after initially contacting the jaywalker, Wilson had hit Brown with at least 6 bullets, including a fatal shot to his head.^[2]

Johnson later explained that Brown was in the midst of a some sort of mystical crises on the day he died. He had an earlier preminition that his stepmother and grandmother would be delivered from their illnesses through his prayer, and was experiencing what seemed like supernatural phenomena including that he was being protected from cars as he walked in the street. This state of mind may help explain both why Brown was walking in the middle of road and why he made the courageous but suicidal decision to turn and face the officer who was firing at him.^[3]

A grand jury was convened after the shooting, and it found the evidence to be insufficient to provide probable cause for bringing criminal charges against officer Wilson. He was never arrested in connection with the killing.

Both the shooting and the grand jury decision have been met with significant social unrest in Ferguson and in cities around the country including protest marches, riots, looting, and destruction of retail storefront property.

The sentiment behind some of the protesters' demands for “justice for Mike Brown” and the bewildered response of spectating [white] Americans trying to make sense of why the black residents of Ferguson (sometimes just “thugs”) would destroy “their own” neighborhoods both reveal something of the mystified nature of capitalism and the myths which sustain it.

Myths the Size of Camels

Frederich Engels used the term ‘false consciousness’ to describe beliefs about the world which obfuscate its actual workings and mislead people into accepting the current social structures as “natural” or even inevitable. And it was Karl Marx, an often unemployed theorist living under industrial capitalism, who taught us the importance of the economic basis in understanding the nature, ends, and ideologies of the dominate political structures in all times and places. But it was Jesus of Nazareth, a propertyless Jewish peasant subsisting under imperial Rome, who taught us how to see and see through the moral judgments which flow from such false consciousness, a morality which serves to protect and create the exploiting classes.

Among the sayings of Jesus which have been preserved, there are a handful of colorful and memorable quips employing exaggerated contrasts to illustrate the hypocritical judgments made by the dominant political and religious ideologies and leaders of his time. One of the most famous is his rhetorical question to those who fixate on the speck of sawdust in their brother’s eye, but don’t even notice the log sticking out of their own eye.^[4] Another is, “You blind leaders! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!”^[5]

What Jesus' sayings help to reveal, although it is counterintuitive, is that the most successful and stubborn ideas which make up a false consciousness do not operate on subtle misconceptions or minor deceptions. They are always complete reversals resulting in total hypocrisies.

Jesus' cynicism can be applied generally to see how the hypocrisy is borne out today (and a few specific examples of such reversals from Ferguson will be demonstrated in the next sections). Every stable mode of production has its own obfuscating myths which are accepted by a sufficient number of both the exploiting and exploited classes to maintain widespread complacency. And so in liberalism we can expect to find those myths which hide the horrors of capitalism from the citizens of republics:

Private Property, a ruthless process and legal institution which deprives millions of property, requiring armies of police and soldiers to maintain, is seen as a provider of prosperity and stability. The Rule of Law, which so impartially allows the rich and the starving poor to depend on the purchase of commodities for survival, is seen as an egalitarian force. Above all Progressivism — by which the current social organization is seen to be fundamentally good and always improving through the democratic mechanisms of elections, petition, and scientific enlightenment — condemns as criminal any attempt by the oppressed to assert their dignity or make actual improvements to their conditions.

‘Justice for Mike Brown’

If the pig who shot Mike Brown ever sees the courtroom
You’ll have mostly the looters to thank for it

— Pat The Bunny
"I Was A Teenage Anarchist"

Returning to the death of Michael Brown: arming oneself then confronting, fighting with, pursuing, and finally shooting to death an unarmed young man is behavior which should require significant extenuating circumstances to excuse. Even if Wilson were not a police officer, his actions would likely warrant a criminal trial to determine the facts more fully. But Wilson is a police officer who has been entrusted by the public (whom he is ostensibly protecting) with weapons, training, and legal authority. If anything, while acknowledging his work will tend to place him into conflicts, he should be held to a higher standard of behavior and legal culpability than an ordinary citizen in handling those confrontations. Instead, in accordance with the law, he has been granted extra leniency and the case against him will not even be examined in open court.

Given all of that, and not even considering pre-existing systemic injustices or the patterns of police abuse, it is plain why there is such widespread belief that an injustice was committed against Michael Brown and the Ferguson community. ‘Justice for Mike Brown’ has become a slogan for protests, and is taken as a demand by journalists looking to provide a motive for protesters. But what would such ‘justice’ look like? All too often the slogan is simply a demand that Darren Wilson be more fully subjected to the same criminal justice system which produced him. In such cases it is actually a demand of ‘justice for Darren Wilson’.

It’s a demand that reveals two divergent but both conservative reactions. The first, the ‘peaceful protesters,’ believe the justice system provides its own adequate channels of reform and view protest, insofar as it is legal or at least peaceful, as legitimate democratic petition of the government. The second, sharing the logic of a lynch mob, believes itself to be an extralegal corrective to a justice system gone so far astray that its own means of reform are no longer effective. Both accept at face value the necessity of the justice system as it promises to function.

On one of the riotous nights following the grand jury decision, CNN described a crowd of protesters who overturned and burned a police cruiser and then chanted across the street toward the lines of riot police and national guardsmen, “We are not your enemy. We just want justice.”^[6] The demand for justice, referring to criminal justice, shows how fully even some of the vandalizing protesters in Ferguson have internalized the liberal myths which legitimate capitalism and its political superstructures. Except to the grieving friends and family of Michael Brown who can’t be blamed for seeking whatever peace and closure they can find from a legal system which purports to provide it, the question of justice in the case of Darren Wilson is a symptom, a speck of dust, a gnat. Yet the Ferguson community leaders and many protesters strain at him while swallowing the murderous political system they believe can bring them justice.

Vandalism, even in the cause of liberalism, is clearly seen as a threat to the authorities and the image of control they’d like to maintain (hence the frenzied calls for peace among political leaders at all levels). But the split between the strictly peaceful and the extra-legal protesters also provides an opportunity to control the scope of debate during times of social unrest. For example, note what the highest ranking office of liberalism in the world has to say about rioting. During the 1992 LA Riots, President Bush acknowledged that while Americans have reason to be frustrated with the law, they should not actually unleash those frustrations on the legal system itself:

“In this highly controversial court case, a verdict was handed down by a California jury. To Americans of all races who were shocked by the verdict, let me say this: You must understand that our system of justice provides for the peaceful, orderly means of addressing this frustration. We must respect the process of law whether or not we agree with the outcome. There’s a difference between frustration with the law and direct assaults upon our legal system.” ^[7]

— George Bush

Similarly, president Obama in his address to the nation after the Ferguson grand jury decision pleaded for frustrations to be channeled “constructively”:

“First and foremost, we are a nation built on the rule of law. And so we need to accept that this decision was the grand jury’s to make. […] But what is also true is that there are still problems and communities of color aren’t just making these problems up. […] What we need to do is to understand them and figure out how do we make more progress. […] That won’t be done by throwing bottles. That won’t be done by smashing car windows. […] So, to those in Ferguson, there are ways of channeling your concerns constructively and there are ways of channeling your concerns destructively.”^[8]

— Barack Obama

Riots provide several benefits for the working class at the expense of the owning class. As such, there is an ideological benefit in dissuading those who can be persuaded by liberalism from rioting. The liberal kit outlined by Obama — foundation on a Rule of Law, Progress, the sanctity of Property, and proper Democratic channels — is so ingrained in the minds of Americans that such appeals may work at an almost instinctive level. But even if they are ineffective in that, appeals to the law serve at least two important roles in maintaining order:

By constantly making a distinction between lawful and non-lawful protest, the debate becomes centered on the morality and efficacy of extralegal reform. This has the effect of pushing radical change to the periphery, and completely out of view of most protesters and spectators.
By creating a sense of urgency in maintaining peaceful protests, politicians can induce protesters to police each other.

A darker theoretical speculation can be drawn about the role of murderous policing itself, including the double-standard seen in the indictment process. By deviating so obviously from the promise of justice the system purports, prosecutors and police have succeeded in prompting people to take to the streets in support of the criminal justice system.

Why Are They Looting Their Own Neighborhoods?

Meanwhile, much of the American populace suffers from a similar but different aspect of the liberal mystification. They read the reports of looting and see the pictures on TV of shops on fire, and they just can’t seem to figure out why those black people would destroy “their own” neighborhoods. As if the shopping centers in any American neighborhood, much less a black neighborhood, are collectively-owned cooperatives or in any way belong to the community rather than to petite bourgeois owners.

These Americans are so ensconced in liberal mythology that they are utterly unable to make sense of the world that confronts them on their cable news programs every night. It seems perfectly natural to think of people — especially the dark skinned and uneducated — as automatons who should spend their lives working and obeying (or begging and obeying), but any disruption of peace and order is a startling transgression. ‘Peace and order’ is paramount; it implies the ability to peaceably and orderly employ, tax, fine, and blame the poor… in Ferguson and everywhere.

As it is with gnats and camels, so it is with looting and capital. Businesses have stolen more from the working class — and most extensively from the black working class — than any practical amount of looting could ever recover. Yet the political leaders, news journalists, and the average American worker will strain all of their moral indignation at the tiny acts of re-appropriation like when a looter makes off with food or a television, but will swallow without question the entire impoverishing, alienating system of wage work which leaves so many with so little.

The wealth of the United States of America, from a British colony to an imperialist superpower, is the result of over four centuries of indentured servitude, chattel slavery, genocide, debt peonage, subjugation of women, plundering wars, and a system of wage labour which has no end in sight, all legally sanctioned and enforced by the established police forces. And what Americans cannot understand, the thing that is beyond acceptance, is when a liquor store is looted.

The Virtue of Rioting

Of course not all events that occur during times of rebellion are necessarily good. There is nothing useful or dignifying in opportunistic violence against individuals or theft of personal property committed under cover of social unrest, and such acts are properly crimes. It is also important to recognize that spontaneous uprisings like Ferguson are not organized revolutions in which targets are prioritized, goods are seized and distributed according to need, and capital is taken over to be run collectively — or whatever revolution might look like.

As much as some of us may wish to see such activity, and while some spontaneous rebellions have historically lead to more directed revolutionary efforts, it is not even possible without more preparations than currently exist. The national guard in Missouri is happy to guard only the highest value centers of capital during a couple of nights of light looting of consumer goods. But if any protesters had attempted to actually take control of and operate their own workplaces, it would have been SWAT raids, live rounds, and whatever carnage was deemed necessary to return property to its lawfully exploiting owners.

But why loot and riot at all? Earlier in this essay I claimed that riots provide benefits to the working class. What are they? Most obvious is the material benefits inherent in the act of looting. In addition to material gain, looting brings a flavour of what a post-capitalist economy will feel like. On every other day of their life, a looter’s needs rule over them in the form of money and commodities. For a few brief days during a riot, commodities are subordinated to the form of mere goods which satisfy needs.

Secondly, riots win political concessions. They signal to the ruling class that it is squeezing a tad tightly and needs to let up in order to keep its grip. The unrest in Ferguson has directly prompted the federal government to begin investigating the Ferguson Police Department for possible civil rights abuses,^[9] and President Obama has asked congress for $75 million to fund 50,000 body cameras to help reduce murder and other abuse by America’s police officers.^[10] Other reforms may follow, none of which would have happened if protesters in Ferguson and elsewhere had not forced the issue.

But most importantly, riots and the reactions to riots reveal the hypocrisy Jesus saw so clearly. The public judgment of rioters lays bare the false morality of the dominate ideology. Covert domination — including economic exploitation and racism — can be swallowed and transmitted to new generations without being noticed. But overt domination is noticed and generates its own resistance. It is when domination is exposed and individuals are freed of their false consciousness that Jesus' “kingdom of heaven,” the Wobblies' “new world in the shell of the old,” and the Marxist’s “whithering away” of classes is possible. There are Christians who don’t understand a word of what Jesus said, but who nevertheless believe with all of their strength that his words have the power to save their souls. I don’t think they are wrong.

Loving v. Utah and Mormonism's Embarrassing Saga of Marital Policy

2014-04-24T16:16:07Z

Kitchen v. Herbert

The State’s prohibition of the Plaintiffs' right to choose a same-sex marriage partner renders their fundamental right to marry as meaningless as if the State recognized the Plaintiffs' right to bear arms but not their right to buy bullets.

— Judge Robert Shelby
Kitchen v. Herbert

April 10 was the 47th anniversary of the date Loving v. Virginia^[1] was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. Loving was the landmark case which found miscegenation laws (those laws which prohibited interracial marriages) to be unconstitutional. April 10 also happened to be the date the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in Kitchen v. Herbert,^[2] the case challenging Utah’s constitutional prohibition of same-sex marriages.

Almost 66% of Utah’s voters approved Amendment 3 in 2004. The amendment defines marriage as consisting “only of the legal union between a man and a woman,” as a preemptive measure to defend the state’s marriage statutes against constitutional challenge. On December 20, 2013, a Federal District Court ruled in Kitchen that the amendment violated the rights to due process and equal protection under the law as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, on a rational basis alone.

In the conclusion of his ruling, Judge Robert Shelby found the state’s contentions in Loving to be “almost identical to the assertions made by the State of Utah in support of Utah’s laws prohibiting same-sex marriage.” He found those assertions to be unconvincing:

Anti-miscegenation laws in Virginia and elsewhere were designed to, and did, deprive a targeted minority of the full measure of human dignity and liberty by denying them the freedom to marry the partner of their choice. Utah’s Amendment 3 achieves the same result.

Rather than protecting or supporting the families of opposite-sex couples, Amendment 3 perpetuates inequality by holding that the families and relationships of same-sex couples are not now, nor ever will be, worthy of recognition. Amendment 3 does not thereby elevate the status of opposite-sex marriage; it merely demeans the dignity of same-sex couples.

Judge Shelby’s ruling was appealed, and the parties are currently waiting on the Tenth Circuit Court in Denver to make a decision. If it is appealed again, there is a chance that the case will be selected to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court which could finally establish some national precedent on the matter.

Judge Shelby’s ruling was appealed, providing an opportunity for the Tenth Circuit Court in Denver to consider the validity of marriage bans for the first time. That court found the appellants' justifications to fail the strict scrutiny test, affirming the district court’s ruling “that Amendment 3 and similar statutory enactments do not withstand constitutional scrutiny.” In October, the Supreme Court denied without comment the writ of certiorari leaving the appellate court’s mandate in effect: same-sex marriages are valid and must be recognized in the State of Utah. (On June 26, 2015, in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court found it to be unconstitutional to deny marriages to same-sex couples making such marriages available and recognized throughout the union.)

Legal analogies between interracial couples' right to marry and same-sex couples' right to marry have been made almost since the Supreme Court ruled on Loving in 1967. In her celebrated and comprehensive history of miscegenation law, What Comes Naturally, Peggy Pascoe mentioned such an analogy being dismissed by the Minnesota Supreme Court in 1971. It wasn’t until a ruling by the Hawaii Supreme Court in 1993 that courts began taking the same-sex analogy to Loving seriously:

“After the Hawaii ruling, both the energy of the campaign to legalize same-sex marriage and the number of court cases that accompanied it grew by leaps and bounds. Over the next decade, several judges issued rulings overturning state bans, and they used the parallel to Loving v. Virginia to do so.” (299-300)

In an essay she wrote for History News Network, “Why the Ugly Rhetoric Against Gay Marriage Is Familiar to this Historian of Miscegenation,” Pascoe argued that in order to understand the current debate over same-sex marriage it is first necessary to understand the history of American miscegenation laws, “because both supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage come to this debate, knowing or unknowingly, wielding rhetorical tools forged during the history of miscegenation law.” She also noted that, “The arguments white supremacists used to justify for miscegenation laws—that interracial marriages were contrary to God’s will or somehow unnatural—are echoed today by the most conservative opponents of same-sex marriage.”

Heteronormativity for Time and All Eternity

And indeed the opponents of same-sex marriage are almost invariably religious and motivated by an adherence to what they believe to be divine revelations and/or a philosophy of natural law. In the Kitchen appeal, a coalition of Christian churches filed a 42-page amicus brief in support of the state.^[3] The brief represents something of an ecumenical wonder, bringing together in the battle against same-sex marriage the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the National Association of Evangelicals, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod.

Apparently if there is anything Catholics, Mormons, Evangelicals, Lutherans, and Southern Baptists all agree on, it is that the sexes of would-be spouses are important and should be regulated by the state.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) appears to have the strongest motivation to preserve a traditional definition of marriage in Utah. Not only because of that church’s deep ties to Utah, but also because family occupies an unusually important position in Mormon thought. Unlike other Christian sects who marry “until death do us part,” Mormon couples partake in an ordinance of “celestial marriage” in which they are sealed during a temple ceremony “for time and eternity.”

To Mormons, family is not merely the fundamental unit of society here on earth. It is also an everlasting institution, a cosmic matrix underlying the very purpose of life and eternal progression: we were spirit children of Heavenly Father and Mother in our pre-earth existence; we gain physical bodies, faith, and families in this, our mortal life; after physical death, our bodies and families will be raised into exalted existence, like God was in his body, at the time of the resurrection to progress evermore and perhaps begin the cycle anew.^[4]

In 1995, the LDS First Presidency released a statement reaffirming the importance of the family and emphasizing that marriage is between a man and a woman (“The family is ordained of God. Marriage between man and woman is essential to His eternal plan”). That statement, titled “The Family: A Proclamation to the World”, is cited on page 10 of the amicus brief filed in the Kitchen appeal to demonstrate, strangely enough, that for Mormons “homosexuality is remote from teachings about marriage and family” in order to argue against “the suggestion that religious support for husband-wife marriage is rooted in anti-homosexual animus.”

The Church’s interest in the state definition and regulation of marriage may be explained by a fear expressed succinctly on page 19 of the religious brief: “if the meaning of marriage is changed in concept, the cultural significance attached to marriage will also change in practice.”

Freedoms and Restrictions in the History of Mormon Marriage

But there was a time when the Mormons were condemned for having too liberal a view of marriage and family. In nineteenth-century Utah “celestial marriage” was a euphemism for “plural marriage,” a practice in which some Mormon men would take multiple wives. At that time, plural marriage was taught as being essential to eternal progression, just as opposite-sex marriage is proclaimed by the Church to be essential today.

In 1866 Brigham Young, the second president of the LDS Church and himself a great fan of the doctrine of plural marriage, delivered a brief defense of polygamy in which he stated, “The only men who become gods, even the Sons of God, are those who enter into polygamy.” In that same sermon, Young declared that if Utah was not admitted as a state to the union until it outlawed polygamy “then, we shall never be admitted.”⁠^[5]

Faced with increasing social pressure and ruinous repression by the federal government (particularly the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887), the Church leaders' courageous defiance was set aside in favor of practicality. In 1890 Wilford Woodruff, the fourth president of the Church, after claiming to have received a revelation from Jesus Christ on the matter, issued `The Manifesto' which ended the practice of plural marriage by the Church. Utah was admitted as the 45th U.S. state a little over five years after the manifesto was issued.

While the LDS Church experimented with marriage freedoms in the number of wives, it also historically restricted freedoms based on race. From the presidency of Brigham Young until 1978, the Church did not ordain black men to its priesthood or allow black members to participate in temple sealing ordinances — blacks were excluded from celestial marriage and the postmortal exaltation for which it is essential.

Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Mormons combined contemporary justifications for slavery and apartheid, such as the theory that black skin was a divine curse marking out the descendants of Cain, with their own doctrine of premortal existence and agency to develop an especially vicious justification for racism: blacks were to be disenfranchised, and it was their own fault by their own choosing.^[6]

The Church’s race realism, while tenuously implementable in the United States, was completely useless when the Church began proselytizing in ethnically mixed populations such as in Brazil. This practical difficulty combined with increasing political pressure since the Civil Rights Movement forced the Church to abandon its racist policies. In June 1978, the Church leadership received a revelation which removed the racial restrictions on priesthood membership and access to the temple including celestial marriage — over ten years after Loving v. Virginia.^[7]

Conclusion

With their efforts to exclude same-sex couples from both celestial and mortal marriage (the 1995 Proclamation, California’s Proposition 8, Utah’s Amendment 3, etc.), the men who lead the LDS Church today seem determined to continue the Mormon tradition of teaching divine principles of marriage which it is later forced to rescind.

If I were a Mormon, the thing that would frustrate me the most is how completely unnecessary the emphasis on heteronormative marriage is to the doctrine of celestial marriage. It would be much less painful (and more consistent with the Church’s pro-family rhetoric) to make room in the Celestial Kingdom for same-sex families than it is to kick against the goads of a changing culture. It is embarrassing for an organization lead by purported prophets, seers, and revelators to repeatedly exhibit such shortsightedness.

References and Notes

Pascoe, Peggy. What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Tanner, Jerald, and Sandra Tanner. Curse of Cain?: Racism in the Mormon Church. Salt Lake City, UT: Utah Lighthouse Ministry, 2004. http://www.utlm.org/onlinebooks/curseofcain_contents.htm

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Race and Priesthood”. https://www.lds.org/topics/race-and-the-priesthood?lang=eng

Young, Brigham. “Delegate Hooper—Beneficial Effects of Polygamy—Final Redemption of Cain”. Journal of Discourses 11 (1866): 266-272. http://jod.mrm.org/11/266

1. Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967)

2. Kitchen v. Herbert, 961 F.Supp.2d 1181 (D. Utah 2013), _affirmed_ 755 F.3d 1193 (10th Cir. 2014); stay granted, 134 S.Ct. 893 (2014); petition for certiorari denied, No. 14-124, 2014 WL 3841263 (Oct. 6, 2014)

3. The brief is available in several formats at archive.org: “Brief if Amici Curiae United States Conference of Catholic Bishops; National Association of Evangelicals; The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention; and Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod In Support of Defendants-Appellants and Supporting Reversal, Case Nos. 13-4178, 14-5003, 14-5006, United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit (February 10, 2014)”

4. For an example of teaching on these topics, see the 1909 statement issued by the First Presidency, “The Origin of Man”, in which President Joseph F. Smith taught that “man, as a spirit, was begotten and born of heavenly parents, and reared to maturity in the eternal mansions of the Father, prior to coming upon the earth in a temporal body to undergo an experience in mortality.”

5. Young, “Beneficial Effects of Polygamy,” 269.

6. For many quotations by Mormon leaders on the curse of Cain and the premortal justification of racism, see Tanner, Curse of Cain?

7. “Race and Priesthood.”

When Police Kill the Homeless

2014-04-16T14:03:07Z

Homo sacer

In Western politics, bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city of men.

— Giorgio Agamben
Homo Sacer

Homer sacer (“the accursed/sacred man”) is an obscure figure from ancient Roman law whom anyone can kill without committing a crime, but who may not be sacrificed: an outlaw. Homo sacer thus inhabits the threshold of the political realm by being included within the law only by being abandoned by both profane and divine law. In his extensive study of this archaic figure, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben sees remnants of the original foundation of the Western political sphere in which political life (Aristotle’s bios) is constituted by excluding the ‘bare life’ (zoe) of the home.

The other limit of the political sphere is the mirrored figure of homo sacer: the sovereign whose inclusion in the law consists of the exclusive ability to suspend the law by declaring a state of emergency (the “sovereign exception”). Insofar as subjects are exposed to legal homicide (such as extra-judicial executions) under the state of exception, sovereign power produces bare life. “The sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life—that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed—is the life that has been captured in this sphere.” (83)

In his book Citizens Without Shelter, Leonard Feldman presents a theory in which the homeless body is seen as an example of homo sacer. Through readings of U.S. case law on anti-homeless ordinances (those municipal codes which forbid begging, public feeding, sitting on sidewalks, sleeping outdoors, etc.) he shows that the courts have constructed homeless life as bare life. The homeless life, even when lived in the very center of the city, is included by the law only through its exclusion from political life.

Homeless life shares similar ambivalence as the sacred life of homo sacer: private and public, disgust and august, reviled and romanticized, criminal and victim, excluded and included. In recognizing homeless life as sacred life, Feldman has done well in following Agamben’s directive: “We must learn to recognize this structure of the ban in the political relations and public spaces in which we still live. In the city, the banishment of sacred life is more internal than every internality and more external than every extraneousness.” (111)

Even anti-authoritarian or pacifist utopians might concede the benefit of a professional peacekeeping organization whose members, authorized in the use of violence, are dedicated to defending victims and seeking out and providing comfort to the hurting. But in the parlance of actually existing cities, `peace officer' is synonymous with `police officer,' who is often dedicated to enforcing the interests of the strong against the weak and to making cities into safe, clean spaces for bios — for capitalists and their worker-shoppers — by excluding bare life (and relegating the activities of bare life as much as possible to the sphere of the home).

If the production of homeless life within the cities of global capitalism can be seen as an instance of (or at least an approximation to) the production of bare life by sovereign power, then the sovereign counterpart to the sacred life of the homeless is the professional policeman (who shares the same, if mirrored, ambivalences as the homeless: respected and reviled, defender and criminal, public and private, human and animal, etc.).

In a quotable line from his Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell emphasized the role professional police play in maintaining property and class relations when he called the policeman the “natural enemy” of the worker. But a more diametric contrast would be between the policeman and the unemployed [non]worker: those unwilling or unable (or just too unlucky) to fit into capitalist society, including the ill and homeless.

In downtowns throughout the world, the homeless beg outside of skyscrapers which are guarded by police and full of financial workers allocating and reinvesting immense concentrations of wealth. Visible on these homeless bodies, refugees with no camp (or whose camp is the streets in the business district of the city), living without homes in the hearts of cities which have banned homeless life, is not only the ancient foundation of political life itself but also the extreme contradictions which characterize life under global capitalism today.

The interactions between the police and the homeless sometimes show the relation between homeless life and sacred life as more than mere approximation. When the police kill the homeless, they often do so with impunity. Below, I highlight four recent examples of police in the United States needlessly killing homeless men in plain sight of the public and video cameras. In all four cases it is undisputed that the police directly ended the life of the victim, and in three cases the state (local) jurisdiction determined that no crime was committed while carrying out the killing (in the other case, it was a jury which made that determination). Each of the cases reached national attention in part due to street protests following the announcements that officers would not be charged with criminal homicide.

In some of the cases below, the Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are still conducting their own review of the incidents. Even if those investigations reveal violations of constitutional or federal law, however, it seems unlikely that the individual police officers who carried out the killings will be indicted for homicide by the federal government.

In the footnotes I provide at least one link to video of each incident. Most of these videos, and other videos of each incident, are available from several locations on the Internet.

Marvin Booker

On July 9, 2010, five Denver Sheriff’s deputies held, beat, and shocked Marvin Booker to death in the waiting area of Denver’s Van Cise-Simonet Detention Center. Booker, a 56-year-old homeless street preacher, was being held on charges of possession of drug paraphernalia. The incident was witnessed by tens of people and captured on several surveillance cameras.^[1]

Just as sacred life is excluded from legal sanctions against homicide, “The coroner ruled that Booker’s death was caused by homicide, meaning he died at the hands of others. But the deputies were cleared by a criminal investigation which found they had not broken any laws.”^[2]

In 2012, the FBI announced that it would investigate the slaying, but it’s been two years and no report has been released yet.^[3] In November, 2014, a federal civil suit found the deputies to have used excessive force. The City of Denver paid a record $6 million to Booker’s family.^[4]

Kelly Thomas

On July 5, 2011, officers in Fullerton, California, confronted Kelly Thomas, an unarmed homeless man whom they incorrectly suspected of breaking into cars. Thomas became impatient with the policemen’s questions and did not immediately comply with all of their demands. A digital recording device carried by the police captured one of the officers, Manny Ramos, calmly make the following statement to Thomas after putting on some white latex gloves, “You see my fists? They are getting ready to fuck you up.”^[5]

Two officers then began striking Thomas with their batons and tackled him to the ground. Once on the ground, backup officers arrived who helped to restrain, shock, and beat him. Thomas began apologizing repeatedly, complained he couldn’t breathe, called for help, begged for mercy, screamed in pain, and cried out “Dad! Help me, Dad! They’re killing me, Dad” before losing consciousness.

When paramedics arrived, they were directed to treat an officer’s minor injury while Thomas lay dying in his own blood on the street.^[6] In the eyes of the police officers at the scene, the bare, biological life of Kelly Thomas was excluded not only from the protections of law, but from also from medicine. Five days after the beating, Thomas was removed from life support and died.

An unusual element of this case is that (after significant public protest) three of the six officers involved were actually charged with crimes: officer Ramos was charged with murder in the second degree, and the other two officers were charged with involuntary manslaughter. A jury found the first two officers (including Ramos) not guilty, and the charges against the third officer were dropped.

The city of Fullerton agreed to pay Thomas' mother $1 million in order to avoid civil litigation.^[7]

Milton Hall

On the morning of July 1, 2012, members of the Saginaw Police Department in Michigan responded in force to an aggressive man suspected of stealing a cup of coffee and being impolite to the owner of a convenience store.^[8] The police confronted Milton Hall, a 49-year-old black man, in a parking lot. Hall was armed with a three-inch folding pocket knife — hardly a deadly weapon. The confrontation was witnessed by passing motorists and captured on video by both police dashboard cameras and a witness’s cellphone camera.^[9]

The dashboard cam videos were shown during a news conference and are available on the MLive website.^[10] The videos show that eight police officers (including a K9 unit) formed a semi-circle around Hall. Six of the officers had firearms, both pistols and rifles, trained on Hall who was squatting in a defensive position with the small knife in his hand. At one point, the K9 handler backed up, apparently deciding not to sic the dog on Hall. In response, Hall seemed to relax, took a few steps backward and then two steps to his right. But when Hall appeared to take a step back toward the police line, all six officers opened fire, discharging 46 rounds in a few seconds and killing Hall.

A video obtained and broadcast by CNN was captured by a witness across the street and shows the incident from a different angle and with audio.^[11]

An investigation by the Saginaw County Prosecutor’s Office and the Michigan State Police into whether the shooting was justified concluded that “Criminal charges aren’t warranted.”^[12] The Department of Justice and the FBI then conducted their own investigation and likewise determined that “this tragic event does not present sufficient evidence of willful misconduct to lead to a federal criminal prosecution of the police officers involved.”^[13]

Milton Hall’s mother, Jewel Hall, described the shooting as “a firing squad dressed in police uniforms.”^[11] It is worth noting, however, that while the police presented themselves to Milton Hall as executioners and ended his life with an extreme degree of overkill reminiscent of a firing squad, the killing was not carried out according to any legal ritual or due process. Like homo sacer, Milton Hall’s homeless life was exposed to death by being excluded from both legal prohibitions against homicide and from sacrificial rites.

James M. Boyd

Jewel Hall is a retired public school teacher and community organizer in the Albuquerque, NM, area. In a tragic coincidence, at the time her son was killed by police in Saginaw, she was working to get the federal government to investigate an alarming pattern of shootings and use of force by the Albuquerque Police Department. In 2011 she wrote an opinion piece for the Albuquerque Journal urging “a full investigation by the Department of Justice.”⁠^[14] A year and a half after her son’s death, a similar shooting unfolded on the outskirts of her hometown in which police with a K9 unit shot an uncooperative homeless man to death.^[15]

On March 26, 2014, members of the Albuquerque Police Department (APD) approached and attempted to frisk 38-year-old James M. Boyd based on the suspicion that he was camping without a permit in the Sandia foothills just east of town — he was suspected, in other words, of getting his zoe all mixed up with the city’s bios. Boyd, who was homeless with no private place where he could legally sleep, refused to cooperate. The situation escalated into an hours-long standoff including a tactical team and a State Police liaison. Home video aired by KRQE News 12 shows six regular uniformed officers holding Boyd at gunpoint even before the APD Crisis Intervention Team arrived.^[16]

Boyd remained defiant. He armed himself with two small knives, and at one point he warned the officers that “I would have the right to kill you right now because you’re trying to take me over. Don’t get stupid with me.”⁠^[16]

The APD has released video footage from the helmet camera of one of the officers on scene which clearly shows how the standoff came to an end.^[17] Boyd, who had apparently had enough of the negotiations, began gathering up his belongings to leave the scene. One of the officers called out, “Do it!” and a flashbang grenade detonated a few feet in front of Boyd. Simultaneously a dog was released which appeared to bite Boyd’s hand, and both the dog’s handler and an officer with a rifle moved toward him. Boyd dropped his bags and put his arms up to his side (while still holding at least one knife.)

Boyd then turned to walk away, which is when two officers with rifles fired six live rounds at his back, striking him at least once. Boyd fell forward to the ground. Mortally wounded and lying prone, he was apparently unable to move his hands. The officers demanded that he drop the knife that was still clutched in his left hand. Boyd replied, “Please don’t hurt me. I can’t move.” Instead of moving to render aid, officers repeatedly ordered him to drop the knife while firing three beanbag rounds into his back from a shotgun. After some deliberation, officers then released the dog a second time. Boyd was unresponsive as the dog chewed at and pulled on his leg. Officers finally moved in, stepped on one of his hands, removed the knife from his other hand, and handcuffed him.

Boyd died from his gunshot wounds in the hospital the next day. At a news conference several days later, APD Chief Gordon Eden announced that the officer-involved shooting was justified.^[16]

In January of 2015, in an exceptional move which brings a challenge to the sovereignty of the police, Bernalillo County District Attorney has brought murder charges against the two officers who shot Boyd.^[18] The charges came in the wake of almost six months of large protests across the nation after district attorneys in several jurisdictions failed to indict police officers who shot and killed unarmed black men. Whether the charges will result in a criminal trial depends on the outcome of the preliminary hearing which will be held in a few months — at which point the charges may be downgraded or dropped.

Department of Justice Investigation

At the time of Boyd’s shooting, the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice was already investigating the APD for its large number of shootings (37 since 2010) and apparent pattern of other uses of excessive force during arrests. After the video of Boyd’s death was released, and after hundreds of riotous protesters demanded reform to the police department,^[19] Albuquerque Mayor Richard Berry wrote a letter to the DoJ requesting that they expedite their investigation.^[20] The DoJ complied, and on April 10, 2014, about 17 months after the investigation began, it released its findings in the form of a 46-page letter to the mayor.

The findings did not address the Boyd shooting because it is still under criminal investigation. It did, however, refer to Chief Eden’s comments at the press conference as evidence “that more work is needed to change the culture of APD.” (4)

According to the findings letter, the DoJ found “that the department engages in a pattern or practice of using excessive force during the course of arrests and other detentions in violation of the Fourth Amendment” stemming “from systemic deficiencies in oversight, training, and policy.” The report also noted that “A significant amount of the force we reviewed was used against persons with mental illness and in crisis.” (9-10)

Those and similar findings from the DoJ investigation reveal how members of the Albuquerque Police Department routinely constitute themselves as little sovereigns acting in de facto states of exception by suspending the constitutional rights of their victims, especially those subjects with mental illness and in crisis who misfit within and are excluded from the political life of the city.

As a final illustration of how both police (who are excepted from the normal prohibitions of the law) and homeless (who are excepted from the normal protections of the law) share in what Agamben calls the “relation of exception,” here is an account from the DoJ findings letter of an incident in which police confronted an angry 75-year-old homeless man named “Ben” who depends upon a cane to walk:

The incident happened in September 2012 after officers responded to a bus station because Ben refused to leave. When officers arrived, they offered to take Ben to a homeless shelter and also called a Crisis Intervention Team officer to assist. Ben sat on a bench and told officers that he was not going to leave peacefully and that he was angry with the bus company for refusing to let him board. After officers tried to convince him to leave for about an hour, Ben threatened bus company employees and reached for his cane. Officers ordered him to put his cane down, but he refused. As Ben was trying to stand up using his cane (presumably for support), the CIT-trained officer shot Ben in the abdomen with his Taser. He did so even though the threat from Ben was minimal: Ben had trouble walking on his own, a sergeant and three officers were standing around him, and there were no indications that bystanders were near Ben. The sergeant on the scene found the Taser use reasonable, as did other supervisors. One supervisor praised the officers' conduct as “exceptional.” (18, emphasis added)

References and Notes

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford University Press, 1998.

Feldman, Leonard C. Citizens without Shelter: Homelessness, Democracy, and Political Exclusion. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.

Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia. Adelaide: The University of Adelaide Library, [1938] 2008. http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79h/

U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division. “Re: Albuquerque Police Department.” Findings Letter. April 10, 2014. http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/spl/documents/apd_findings_4-10-14.pdf

1. YouTube video ID: vG7Mjt_j8Cs. Footage from the surveillance cameras is available elsewhere on the web, including the Denver Post website

2. Tom McGhee, “No discipline for deputies in Marvin Booker’s death at Denver jail,” The Denver Post, May 9, 2011.

3. Tom McGhee, “FBI looking into Marvin Booker’s 2010 death at Denver jail,” The Denver Post, February 21, 2013.

4. Noelle Phillips, “Denver to pay $6 million in Marvin Booker jail death settlement,” The Denver Post, November 26, 2014.

5. YouTube video ID: KU0Imk2Bstg. Witnesses with a cellphone also captured video

6. Eileen Frere, “Kelly Thomas Trial: Forensic Expert, Paramedic Testify,” ABC7 Eyewitness News, December 4, 2013.

7. Richard Winton, “Homeless man’s mother settles with Fullerton over his death,” Los Angeles Times, May 16, 2012.

8. David Ariosto, “Prosecutors: Police won’t face criminal charges in Michigan death,” CNN, September 13, 2012.

9. YouTube video ID: YC3OAMi9kjY. The cellphone video obtained by CNN is also available on LiveLeak: “Saginaw Police Shoots Homeless Man (Milton Hall) 46 time in 5 Seconds.”

10. Bob Johnson, “Video: Police cruiser footage shows events that led to Milton Hall police shooting,” MLive, September 13, 2012.

11. Jason Carroll and Sheila Steffen, “Video captures Michigan man’s shooting by police,” CNN, August 17, 2012.

12. Bob Johnson, “Saginaw officers who shot and killed Milton Hall won’t face federal charges,” MLive, February 25, 2014.

13. Department of Justice, “Justice Department Announces Results of Investigation into the Death of Milton Hall,” February 25, 2014.

14. Jewel Hall, “APD Protects a Culture Out of Control,” Albuquerque Journal, November 23, 2011.

15. I’m not the only one to notice the connections between the Hall and Boyd shootings: “Michigan police shooting similar to ABQ case,” Albuquerque Journal, April 8, 2014.

16. Chris McKee, “APD: Officer involved shooting was justified,” KRQE News 13, March 21, 2014.

17. YouTube video ID: dgRkkLyZMKM. A slightly edited version of the helmet camera video (as released by KRQE) is available on LiveLeak: “Police helmet camera captures fatal shooting of James Boyd armed with a knife as he’s turning away” (though the YouTube video has better audio)

18. “Officers in Boyd shooting charged with murder,” KRQE News 13, January 12, 2015

19. Elizabeth Barber, “Albuquerque protest over police shootings turns to `mayhem' (+video),” The Christian Science Monitor, March 31, 2014.

20. Anna Velasquez, “Mayor asks DOJ to fast-track review of APD,” KOAT Albuquerque, April 2, 2014.

Why I Don't Vote: An Egoist Perspective

2012-11-01T06:00:00Z

Figure 1. Painting of Vermin Supreme by u/Shitty_Watercolour

First Some Reasons I Don’t Not Vote

Many libertarians consider voting in political elections to be either a waste of time, a breach of their anti-authoritarian principles, or an act of aggression and otherwise morally unjustifiable. I am a non-voter myself, but my abstention is not primarily motivated by any of those considerations.

I don’t think there is anything inherently immoral about voting or elections. Voting is merely a form of communication, a formal (or not-so-formal) registration of an opinion serving to help individuals choose as a group between mutually exclusive options. Whether deciding where to eat or electing a chief executive for your favorite democratic republic, voting is useful. There are reasons democracy works so well in so many settings, and they go beyond simple fairness. Voting, especially in large, heterogeneous groups, is effective at both processing localized information which would have escaped a central decision-maker and at minimizing partiality toward specific individuals or factions. Decentralized decision-making also diffuses authority and its abuses.

Political races for high-profile offices seem to almost always produce candidates to nobody’s liking, forcing voters to adopt the lesser evil principle: voting for whichever candidate they think will be the least unfit or do the least damage. (This seems most likely in a two-party winner-take-all system, but I suspect there are enough politicians in the world that the lesser evil principle would easily generalize to a system with a large number of candidates and winners.) Some purists use this phenomena as an argument against voting. “The lesser of evils is still evil,” they say, and then absolutely refuse all options. But, assuming the office in question should exist in the first place, the “evil” rhetoric is simply an expression of the relatively strong disfavor voters hold even for the “best,” or better, viable candidate. The ranking is ordinal. Supposing again the office in question is necessary, we could shift the rhetorical scales and speak of “the best of two goods.” We’d have lost the expression of strong disfavour for both candidates, but the phrase would still be accurate in that it unambiguously refers to the same candidate. In other words, the “evil” in the lesser evil principle is more rhetorical than moral, and so it does not justify purists' moral abstention. It does not follow that because no option is ideal, no choice should be made.

I do not think the widespread frustration with the choice of viable candidates at election time is simply an unfortunate coincidence which happens every election cycle. One hope for democracy in the classical liberal tradition was that it would do away with favoritism and replace the selective edicts of absolute sovereigns with the rule of law. The limited democracy of republicanism goes even further by attempting to constrain the tyranny of majorities. That is, one goal of republicanism is to have a government made up of representatives who are favored by the many generally but not the few (including local majorities) specifically. Given a sufficiently large discrepancy in preferences of voters, then, an electoral process which produces candidates viewed almost universally as “evil” is a feature of liberal republicanism, not a bug. In fact, Madison’s argument in Federalist No. 10 (for example) is that republics should be large (and unlike democracies, can be large) to make it less likely that any local majority should be able to “execute their plans of oppression.” Large republics are also likely to have larger discrepancies in preferences among its electorate.

So I don’t accept the “there are no good choices” complaint as a strong argument against voting. In fact, although Madison obviously imagined more parties existing than the current duopoly which dominates American politics, viable candidates that nobody likes may be a sign that the system is working as expected.

From an anti-authoritarian perspective, which rejects the necessity of far-removed representatives holding inherently-authoritarian positions in the first place, on the other hand, the office itself and therefore almost any candidate seeking it would be viewed as actually evil. A strong libertarian argument against supporting (even merely with a vote) any candidate for such an office could be made. Elections thus present most libertarians with at least a moral hesitation: By voting am I consenting to or endorsing an authoritarian political system? Does it make sense to select a ruler for myself? for my neighbors?

But also: If I don’t vote, will I be complicit in allowing an even worse outcome than was possible? This dilemma can and has been answered from libertarian perspective in favour of voting when faced with two competing but unequal evil options. For example, leading up to the 2008 US presidential elections Noam Chomsky argued that “There is nothing immoral about voting for the lesser of two evils. In a powerful system like ours, small changes can lead to big consequences.” ^[1]

The practical motivation behind Chomsky’s chaos-theoretic defense of voting is similar to arguments that the use of the ballot, like the weapons placed in the hands of gladiators forced to battle each other, is a form of self-defense.^[2] These defenses of voting admit there is a level of implied coercion in the ballot, but seek to justify that force.

It’s Ghosts All the Way Down

The flaw in all of the above arguments in favour of voting, and in most of those against it, is that they assume the efficacy of voting reaches further than it does. That’s not to say that voting is ineffectual in the sense of the famous aphorism attributed to Emma Goldman, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.” Electoral politics will never bring about the sort of revolutionary changes Goldman wanted to see, granted. But as Chomsky pointed out, the outcome of an election can still have a consequential effect which may be worth caring about.

I also don’t mean that voting is a waste of time, even though it is (from a decision-theoretic perspective). Since the chance of any single vote being pivotal in the election is nearly zero, and there are non-zero costs (like the time it takes to register and fill out and mail in a ballot) involved, it is necessary to posit some kind of consumption benefit beyond choosing a winner to explain why so many people turn out to vote. As I explain in this section, I believe at least a large part of that consumption benefit for many people can be explained as the religious-like duties they satisfy by voting. In their article “Why Vote?,” Dubner and Levitt (the Freakonomics authors) interpret a Swiss study to suggest that one consumption benefit of voting is the social recognition received just by being seen fulfilling the civic duty of voting. This is reminiscent of the vainly religious who attend church or otherwise flaunt their religiosity for the sake of being seen acting piously.^[3]

What I mean is the more obvious, that voting literally, in a mechanical sense, accomplishes very little: registering a preference with a ballot doesn’t actually effect much beyond leaving a mark on a piece of paper (or whatever method is used to record the vote). Even if the process of collecting, interpreting, and counting the ballots is so reliable that voting can be considered to directly determine the outcome of the election, there is still a leap of faith required to get from the announced election results to the acceptance of those results in the minds of the electorate (and the entire body politic). A candidate doesn’t receive political power and responsibility from a vote count but from the public behaving as if the winning candidate, instead of somebody else or nobody, has those powers and responsibilities.

Beyond the initial leap of faith required to accept a new (or first, I suppose) representative, political power only continues to exists as long as it is recognized as legitimate in the minds of the faithful. Such reified ideas which an individual encounters as something alien and set above herself as a cause or duty are what Max Stirner calls “spooks” haunting the mind. The entire electoral process depends on an electorate haunted by such spooks as Civic Duty, Patriotism and allegiance to parties, sacrosanct Democracy, and the like. Politicians do not wield any actual, physical power over the political body. The phantasmal machinery of politics only becomes real through the violence of its possessed subjects which are bound against each other with ghoulish chains-of-command.

The observation that political power comes not from votes but from belief suggests a corollary: that there is no fundamental difference between a democratic government and any other government; to turn Jonathan Swift’s normative phrase into a tautology, all governments rule by the consent of the governed.^[4] Of course not everybody is possessed by the morality of the state to recognize its legitimacy or the authority of its agents. While most politicians enjoy the support of a haunted majority, they certainly don’t need more than a very small portion of the public to believe in the state to maintain power, and they always need a way to control those whose own morality hasn’t been displaced by that of the state.^[5] They need only enough “moral” individuals to act as soldiers and police and prison guards. Of course the chains-of-command which hold the whole state together are designed to effectively funnel commands from executives and magistrates to police and soldiers, who are so possessed by morality, by duty, that they have convinced (or frightened) themselves to always obey, while dissipating the responsibility of that obedience to nowhere, to the nonexistent conscience of a ghost.

That’s what government is: a shared delusion, a ghostlike hierarchy and a whole tangled hierarchy of ghosts in the minds of its subjects. It is a religion, and voting is one of its sacred rites. Those who attribute magic to that ritual, whether they believe it be for good or evil, have bought into the superstition of the state.

Why I Don’t Vote

On its own, such a Stirnerist deconstruction of voting doesn’t decide the question, Should I vote? An egoist might acknowledge the spooks, then, owning her ability to vote rather than being owned by any sense of duty, proceed to vote (or not) to further her own interests.

In his essay, “The Apostasy of the Anarchist Vote,” the left libertarian writer Jeremy Weiland uses a similar egoist analysis of voting to argue that it is okay and possibly at times preferable for anarchists to vote. In that essay (directed towards anarchists) Weiland asks a good question:

In the end, it is the behavior, not the myths and abstractions, that matter. So if by voting, you can engage with your neighbors to influence them within this mixed society, or possibly influence state actors to behave more peaceably, why would you insist on abstaining?

So why do I insist on abstaining? I don’t vote because external authorities are less dangerous than the spooks which rule our minds. “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” Political rulers (or at least those who believe in and obey them) kill the body; the religion of Civic Duty kills the soul. I’m not satisfied with a cowardly egoism which allows me to seek my own interests while leaving others to their demons. Such a naive egoism is self-defeating: I cannot be free in an unfree society. “I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. … My personal freedom, confirmed by the liberty of all, extends to infinity.”

So I don’t vote for exactly the reason Weiland suggests that anarchists might vote: as pedagogical engagement with my neighbors. Weiland concludes that:

The vote is a meaningless, superstitious ritual that masks deeper social issues and sanctions nothing. It does not bolster our argument to agree with statists that elections matter. Instead, we should treat them as what they are: the trivial rites of a false religion.

With which I completely agree, although I hold that the way to engage with a false religion is not to join in its meaningless rituals, but to blaspheme those sacred rites in plain view of its adherents. That, at least, has a chance of capturing their attention and bringing the spooks into the purview of their conscious minds where they can be devoured.

Everywhere is different, of course, but where I live (white, educated, ‘middle class’ America) voting is a normative process which works to condition people to accept the state apparatus and its (sometimes horrific) results. People here are “supposed” to vote, and when they encounter one of their peers who refuses to do so it opens up an opportunity for them to question their acceptance of the status quo.

This individualism with an emphasis on pedagogical outreach is a very Cynical endeavor, and I know of no better place to seek guidance in confronting the ghost of Civic Duty than those ancient philosophers. The Cynics went out of their way to blaspheme with anti-political lifestyles, satire, and theatrical spectacle the sacred rites of the polis for the benefit of their audience. As Diogenes said, “Other dogs bite only their enemies, whereas I bite also my friends in order to save them.”^[6]

Voting is held so sacred by some that mere abstention is enough to scandalize them (and maybe jolt them back to conscious thought). But what might a proper Cynic response to election day myths look like? Here’s an anecdote about Diogenes, as recalled by Lucian of Samosata, which might provide some inspiration:

A report that Philip was marching on the town had thrown all Corinth into a bustle; one was furbishing his arms, another wheeling stones, a third patching the wall, a fourth strengthening a battlement, every one making himself useful somehow or other. Diogenes having nothing to do—of course no one thought of giving him a job—was moved by the sight to gird up his philosopher’s cloak and begin rolling his tub-dwelling energetically up and down the Craneum; an acquaintance asked, and got, the explanation: ‘I do not want to be thought the only idler in such a busy multitude; I am rolling my tub to be like the rest.’^[7]

Instead of quiet abstention or the usual protest vote campaigns, I’d like to see something similar to Diogenes' take on the civic duty of war preparation: a satirization of the hustle and bustle of the voting ritual. A useless activity to point out the uselessness of the activity everybody else is taking so seriously. One idea: when engaged in electoral discussions, earnestly take the position that a vote for anyone but a satirical candidate (à la Vermin Supreme) is a waste of a vote.

1. Wars, Bailouts, and Elections: Noam Chomsky interviewed by David Barsamian

2. An analogy first put forward by Lysander Spooner in No Treason II.1.12. I’ve read many similar hypotheticals meant to justify voting for the lesser evil as a defensive measure, usually involving unlikely choices presented to slaves or some poor individual who is given the choice of abstention or the cataclysmic death of millions.

3. Two good reviews of the academic literature on this “paradox of (non) voting” are Feddersen, Timothy J. 2004. “Rational Choice Theory and the Paradox of Not Voting.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 18(1): 99–112, and Geys, B. (2006), ‘Rational’ Theories of Voter Turnout: A Review. Political Studies Review, 4: 16–35.

4. David Hume made a similar observation, that all governments are supported by opinion, in his essay “Of The First Principles of Government” (1742): “Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.”

5. Stirner, and most people, use the words moral and morality to denote living according to a haunted conscience, according to the dictates of an external code given by parents, religion, law, etc. In fact that is the exact opposite of morality; it is a counterfeit morality consisting of an alien concept acting as if it were an individual’s autonomous conscience. See also my essay, “Authority or Autonomy”

6. As reported by Stobaeus, and quoted by Wikiquote.

7. From The Way to Write History.

Transcript of Dateline NBC's Exposé of Gabriel of Sedona

2012-06-20T20:42:34Z

After I posted three links to a video of a Dateline episode featuring a small Arizona religious group, two of the three hosts received DMCA take-down notices from the group’s lawyer and took down the video. So I pulled out my stenotype keyboard and made this quick transcript of the 40-minute program. Corrections welcome. "Transcript of Dateline NBC’s Exposé of Gabriel of Sedona"

Jesus on [Same-Sex] Marriage

2012-05-25T20:06:48Z

There is no consensus as to what the purpose of marriage is. But whatever its purpose, it is political. Private friendships, romances, sexual partners, economic alliances, housemates and other relationships are sometimes subject to legal agreements of lease and contract. But more often they are informal and mutually beneficial arrangements. Marriage is all these relationships made public and explicit. It benefits from social recognition and acceptance in return for public accountability in ways that previously private (and often implicit) vows of commitment that create new families do not.

Marriage is how society — or its body of political representatives — controls its reproduction: who can legitimately rear children and inherit property. The state traditionally subsidizes favourable families and de-legitimizes (and sometimes criminalizes) unfavourable forms based on age, ethnicity, gender, consanguinity, number of spouses, or whatever other criteria creeps into the imagination of the masses and our masters as constituting a proper or “natural” union.

The twentieth century saw the end of so-called miscegenation laws; laws which were the result of a confused project to restrict the reproduction of American society based on ethnicity and skin color. For those who see through the distorted logic of racism, there remains no comprehensible reason to exclude families from social recognition based on arbitrary notions of “race” that too often grab hold of humanity’s haunted mind. Likewise it is no easy task for many of us to understand those who currently wish to restrict marriage based on gender.

President Obama recently evoked his Christianity in prompting his change of heart about same-sex marriage. Others have been known to appeal to Christianity to argue against same-sex marriage. In his 2003 argument for privatizing marriage, one commentator wrote of the gay marriage debate, “It’s going to get ugly. And then it’s going to get boring.” Well, it’s gotten boring. Nay, beyond boring, it’s gotten frustratingly monotonous watching marginalized groups clamor for acceptance from their oppressors while all sides explain what Jesus would do.

I can think of one vaguely philosophic, though not very compelling, argument against abstract homosexuality. That is an argument from teleology: since men and women are endowed with some complementary bits, they are naturally meant to pair off. That argument not only assumes a binary gender, but to apply it to marriage is to presuppose that the sole purpose of marriage is sex and biological reproduction. Nobody takes that position. Despite those apparent weaknesses, Jesus does use such a teleological argument against divorce in the accounts of Matthew and Mark:

Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?”

“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

— Matthew 19:3-6

One great thing about Jesus' responses to the Pharisees is that he often confounds them by intentionally quoting passages of the Old Testament out of context (there’s a lesson there about sacralizing a book). In Genesis (2:24), which Jesus is quoting, the reason men and women are compelled to unite as ‘one flesh’ is because Woman was originally made from Adam’s rib. It’s an explanation for marriage, or at least of sexual union. Jesus divorces (pun!) the explanation (the rib story) from the result (the drive to sexual union) and substitutes the less etiological gender binary of Genesis 1:27 (‘male and female He created them’) as an explanation.

In Genesis 2, God separates Woman from Adam, and later men and women rejoin themselves in sexual union. In Matthew 19 Jesus ignores the mythology and reverses this story: “Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” Now it is God doing the joining and people doing the separating. I’ll give my high-level interpretation: Men and women are attracted to each other not because of some imaginative creation myth, but because that is the nature of mammals with their sexuality and whatnot. Society will reproduce itself both biologically and culturally -- “Life finds a way,” as one chaos theorist put it. ^[1] Even well-meaning attempts at regulating reproduction by establishing legal institutions to control who can legitimately begin or dissolve a family aren’t a part of Jesus' vision of society.

As usual the Pharisees don’t quite catch that Jesus just reversed their assumptions and they continue their line of legal questioning: “Well if God did not intend divorce, then why did Moses allow it?” (Matthew 19:7). Jesus responds the same way he did in the Sermon on the Mount, by replacing law with morality. Moses told you not to murder; I tell you not to be angry. Moses told you not to commit adultery; I tell you not to lust. Moses told you to keep your oaths; I tell you not to make oaths, simply say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Moses said an eye for an eye; I say give to those who steal from you. Moses said love your neighbor; I say love your enemy. Moses told you to be civilized about divorce; I tell you that divorce is tantamount to adultery (compare Matthew 5:31 and Matthew 19:8-9).

To his disciples, marriage without divorce essentially made marriage unworkable (“if this is the case, then it is neither profitable nor advisable to marry” — which is what Diogenes was trying to say all along). Jesus' response was, “then don’t get married.” Actually he said that not everybody could accept the teaching, but some will renounce marriage “for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.” As an aside, I’ve always thought that his analogy about the eunuchs would be a good slogan for Linux: “And there be Unix which have made themselves Unix for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.”

So, even though Jesus uses the limited gender-binary language of Genesis, his answer here can also be applied to the question of same-sex marriage: Don’t let legal institutions separate what God has joined. More generally, don’t let the state supplant your morality with its laws by dictating what kind of society you will produce and reproduce. I cannot see how gender similarities or differences play into that teaching.

Elsewhere Jesus took an even more explicit stance on marriage:

The Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. “Teacher,” they said, “Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring for him. Now there were seven brothers among us. The first one married and died, and since he had no children, he left his wife to his brother. The same thing happened to the second and third brother, right on down to the seventh. Finally, the woman died. Now then, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be of the seven, since all of them were married to her?”

Jesus replied, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. But about the resurrection of the dead—have you not read what God said to you, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.”

— Matthew 22:23-31

Whatever literal resurrection the Sadducees had in mind which gave rise to paradoxes like the widow being married to all of her husbands in heaven, their vision was not the same as the one Jesus had been teaching in which “people will neither marry nor be given in marriage.”^[2] It’s clear that whatever the concerns of the Life that Jesus taught, marriage is not one of them. As such, I do not believe it is consistent for anyone to appeal to Jesus' teachings to decide who should or should not be included in the legal institution of marriage, unless the answer is nobody. An appeal to Jesus in order to justify extending or denying the state privilege of marriage to certain populations requires ignoring the few things he is recorded as saying on the subject.

1. Okay, a fictional mathematician: Ian Malcolm from Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. In the motion picture adaptation, Dr. Malcom warns about the folly of trying to control the park’s population by cloning only female dinosaurs: “Life breaks free, expands to new territories, and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously … I’m simply saying that life finds a way.”

2. Luke offers something of an explanation as to what Jesus meant by ‘they will be like angels’: “Jesus replied, ‘The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are considered worthy of taking part in that age and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection.’” (Luke 20:34-36)

Biased Belief: Why the Mormon Missionaries Haven't Converted Me Yet

2012-02-18T16:22:52Z

When a friend of mine left for Brazil to serve his two-year mission with the LDS church after graduating high school, I began meeting with pairs of missionaries at home. After almost nine years of these occasional discussions, I think I have a pretty good idea of what they believe, and why I don’t.

Mormon Recap

First a quick recapitulation for those who aren’t familiar with Mormonism: the Latter Day Saint Movement, or “Mormonism,” got its start during the Second Great Awakening (1820’s) in western New York when a farm boy named Joseph Smith got fed up with the infighting of the various Christian sects and decided to ask God which church was the True church. God answered by appearing in person and telling Joseph that none of the current churches had the full truth. Eventually God used Joseph as a latter-day prophet to restore the full gospel to Earth:

He was shown the location of an ancient American record, and given the ability to translate it to English as the Book of Mormon. (Mormon being the name of the ancient historian who compiled the book, written on metal plates, from the records available to him. It was Mormon’s son, Moroni, who hid the plates and later appeared to Joseph as an angel and told him where to find them buried in a hillside in New York.)
He was visited by John the Baptist, and later by other New Testement personages, which conferred to him the authority of previously lost priesthoods.
He organized the church, founded cities, and introduced some of the unique theological concepts associated with Mormonism: that God has a physical body, that families are eternal, and that, for 50 years during the late 19th century, some families were better off with one husband and several wives, etc.

Today the largest organization in the Latter Day Saint tradition is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints based in Salt Lake City, Utah. That church has an impressive missionary program, sending out pairs of young missionaries to cities all over the world to teach the doctrines of the church and seek converts. It is with these missionaries that I’ve been meeting.

The one essential claim of Mormonism

There is plenty to talk about, from church history to theology. Most missionaries are happy to discuss their claims both rationally and empirically (from archeology to textual criticism). But, ultimately, Mormonism can be distilled to one truth-claim: that the priesthood authority was restored by God through Joseph Smith. This is what the church is; the line of prophets established by God is once again on Earth, and this authority alone holds the keys necessary for humans to reach their intended destiny. And there is but one way to know the truth of that claim: subjectively, by the help of the holy spirit, you must recognize the truth in your own mind and heart.

As such, the modus operandi of missionaries is not to convince investigators that the church is true in order to lead them to accept its doctrines; rather it is to present the doctrines (their teaching on families or the existence of the Book of Mormon, for example) as reasons why the church could be true.

The Prophet Complex Theory of Joseph Smith

My theory is that Joseph Smith was motivated by what I call the Prophet Complex. Like most of us, he would sometimes get excited about his ideas: when he had a moment of insight or a personal breakthrough in harmonizing contradictory ideas he had been struggling with or when he discovered an explanation or object he found elegant or beautiful. Unlike most of us, he interpreted his feelings, the stirrings in his chest, not as mere excitement but as divine validation of his ideas. Few things induce as much excitement within a person as romantic attraction or in discovering what appears to be a metaphysical or scientific truth about the universe.

This theory easily leads to a “pious fraud” theory of why Joseph Smith would pass his own ideas off as divine revelations, and, as I see it, successfully accounts for several historical facts about Smith:

As a teen he made a living as a scryer: he convinced himself, or at least his employers, that by gazing into seer stones he could divine the location of hidden treasures.
He was devoted to his wife, Emma, until his death. Emma’s father refused to sanction the marriage, so she and Joseph eloped. According to at least one account, not until Joseph married Emma, and brought her with him, was he allowed to finally retrieve the golden plates from which he translated the Book of Mormon.
Despite his devotion to Emma, he took several other wives and introduced polygamy as an acceptable family structure among the saints.
He believed he was a prophet of God.

We see a similar epistemological method being taught by the missionaries today.

Mormon Epistemology: Burning Bosoms and Confirmation Bias

Early in my first discussions with the missionaries, they presented Moroni’s promise, found in the last chapter of the Book of Mormon, to me:

And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.

— Moroni 10

So if you do manage to overcome the bootstrap problem of “having faith in Christ” in order to find out if His church is true, how does the power of the holy ghost manifest that truth? One oft-quoted Mormon scripture is a revelation given to Oliver Cowdery after his attempt at translating the Book of Mormon plates:

But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right.

— Doctrine & Covenants 9:8

When I would ask the missionaries what the feeling was like when they finally had the truth manifested within them, most of them explained that it wasn’t a single experience but a conspiracy of feelings, thoughts, and events which lead them to their divine knowledge. The overarching theme was that the more I would pray for specific answers, the more I would experiment and invest myself in the teachings, then the more likely I would be to “feel that it is right”.

The Experiment - Alma 32

The one chapter of the Book of Mormon I was asked by my missionaries to read the most often was Alma 32. Part of this chapter is a sermon by Alma, using a metaphor of a seed, on how one can cultivate faith and belief. It is an excellent example of Mormon epistemology and can even be read as Joseph Smith’s own apology for his revelations. I’ll quote the bulk of it beginning at verse 27 adding emphasis to important bits I’ll discuss below:

But behold, if ye will awake and arouse your faculties, even to an experiment upon my words, and exercise a particle of faith, yea, even if ye can no more than desire to believe, let this desire work in you, even until ye believe in a manner that ye can give place for a portion of my words.

Now, we will compare the word unto a seed. Now, if ye give place, that a seed may be planted in your heart, behold, if it be a true seed, or a good seed, if ye do not cast it out by your unbelief, that ye will resist the Spirit of the Lord, behold, it will begin to swell within your breasts; and when you feel these swelling motions, ye will begin to say within yourselves—It must needs be that this is a good seed, or that the word is good, for it beginneth to enlarge my soul; yea, it beginneth to enlighten my understanding, yea, it beginneth to be delicious to me.

[…]

But behold, as the seed swelleth, and sprouteth, and beginneth to grow, then you must needs say that the seed is good; for behold it swelleth, and sprouteth, and beginneth to grow. And now, behold, will not this strengthen your faith? Yea, it will strengthen your faith: for ye will say I know that this is a good seed; for behold it sprouteth and beginneth to grow.

And now, behold, are ye sure that this is a good seed? I say unto you, Yea; for every seed bringeth forth unto its own alikeness.

Therefore, if a seed groweth it is good, but if it groweth not, behold it is not good, therefore it is cast away.

And now, behold, because ye have tried the experiment, and planted the seed, and it swelleth and sprouteth, and beginneth to grow, ye must needs know that the seed is good.

— Alma

Confirmation Bias

Alma suggests an experiment: believe, or at least desire to believe, something is true. If it turns out to be good, then you know it is true and worth believing; otherwise forget it. This is an approach to knowledge that is exceedingly prone to confirmation bias: the tendency to favor information that confirms preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.

Observer-Expectancy Effect

The missionaries would often use this scripture to ask me to conduct various ‘experiments’ to help me recognize the manifestations of the holy spirit. Worse, they would often use methods which introduced further bias. For example they would ask me to pray by asking God if the Book of Mormon was true. They would then bear testimony that they know the Book of Mormon is true and they are sure if I’m sincere then I will come to know as well. At our next meeting they would ask me what I felt when I was reading and praying, especially did I feel good or peaceful (as if the only way I would feel peaceful while reading is if the holy spirit were speaking to me). That technique, suggesting what an investigator will feel when they pray, is prone to the observer-expectancy effect in which the missionaries' cognitive bias affects the investigator’s. It is an attempt to avoid this bias that many courts do not allow leading questions during direct examination.

Sunk Costs

Other experiments included changes to my lifestyle (praying everyday and attending church service and events). Whenever I didn’t receive a testimony of the truth of the church, the solution was to suggest more ways I could become invested in the church. One sister missionary, in all sincerity, suggested I be baptized into the church because she thought that would help me gain a testimony. I was reminded of the part of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when Tom is trying to convince Jim to tame a rattlesnake: “Blame it, can’t you TRY? I only WANT you to try — you needn’t keep it up if it don’t work.”

The technique of asking investigators to spend more of their time ‘experimenting’ is prone to escalation of commitment: the investigator has so much invested in the truth of the church that they will tend to believe it is true without sufficient reason.

Falsifiability and the Prophet Complex

In any case neither Moroni’s promise nor the experiment of the seed are useful in determining the truth of the church. Moroni’s promise presupposes the truth: either the investigator has it confirmed by the holy spirit, or they didn’t pray sincerely (or they just haven’t waited or invested enough yet). Alma’s experiment doesn’t test for truth, it tests whether an idea is good or not.

Note that early in the passage I quoted above Alma equates “true seed” with “good seed”. From then on he only discusses what is “good”. He even uses the metaphor of a growing plant to explain the physical feeling of swelling emotions which occur when an idea is good. This is the prophet complex! Alma 32 contains insight into the internal justifications of a pious fraud. It seems likely to me that in Joseph Smith’s mind if an idea felt good enough after consideration, then it also passed the test of truthfulness. Indeed many members of the LDS church, the so-called Cultural Mormons, are members precisely because they believe the church is good though not necessarily true. While interesting, it is not a path to knowledge I would take for myself and I do not consider Mormonism to be on firm epistemological ground.

Conclusion

Of course none of my observations preclude the possibility of personal revelation, and it is certainly possible that the missionaries I’ve talked to believe because they have direct and irrefutable knowledge from God that Joseph Smith was a prophet, that the Book of Mormon is an ancient record, and that the church’s priesthood is based on divine authority. If that’s the case, outside of me having my own mystical experience, there is no good way for me to confirm their claims. I remain unconvinced.

I Was Arrested at Occupy Denver: A Brief Narrative and an Anarchist's Perspective

2011-11-02T21:01:56Z

My Arrest at Occupy Denver on October 14, 2011

It’s not cool. It’s trespassing, and that is breaking the rules. Cool people make the rules. They don’t break the rules. And if those kids want you to break the rules then they’re not really your friends.

— Leslie Knope
Parks and Recreation

Municipalities are in recent decades increasingly responding to homelessness by ordaining public spaces like parks and sidewalks to be off-limits for sleeping.^[1] Combined with the partitioning of cities into private and public property, and the fact that acts such as sleeping are biological imperatives, these ordinances effectively make it criminal for anybody who does not own or rent property to be. Such anti-homeless camping ordinances are an example of what the geographer Don Mitchell calls the annihilation of space by law.^[2]

I happen to hold the opinion that real property should not be a requirement for citizenship or a prerequisite to live and participate in the city. Informed by that opinion, I have recently been preparing to spend my nights sleeping on public property in and around my Colorado hometown as a form of direct action challenging the legitimacy of the legal annihilation of those spaces. That is why when I read Governor Hickenlooper’s statement^[3] that he would begin enforcing the law to remove protesters and homeless who had occupied the state-owned park in front of Denver’s capitol building between the hours of 11pm and 5am, I decided to pack my sleeping bag and bivy shelter into my backpack and head to Denver.

I arrived at the park at about 9:45pm on Thursday (October 13th).^[4] I walked around and sat watching the protesters do their thing until about 1am when it got cold enough that I spread out my sleeping pad on the grass near a statue at the northeast corner of the park (which was a bit away from the main group of tents along the west-side of the park near the sidewalk on Broadway) and got into my sleeping bag. I slept off-and-on between 1am and sometime just before 3am when I was awakened by the PA system of a police SUV announcing that the park must be cleared within half an hour. I got up and packed my stuff back into my backpack so I wouldn’t lose track of anything if I was arrested. The three homeless guys who were sleeping near me packed up and left the park. The SUV returned (to the east-side of the park, on Lincoln) at least twice more to make the same announcement. On these latter occasions it was accompanied by a small number of state troopers in riot gear.

I joined the main group of protesters near the tents. A little before 4am a small army of riot-gear-clad officers (I’d estimate around 80) of the Colorado State Patrol entered the park from the south-east and began searching and dismantling tents. As I watched, I was approached by one trooper who told me to leave the park or face arrest.^[5] I said I wasn’t going to leave, and he repeated himself then walked away. I retreated with most of the protesters to the area near the kitchen and first-aid tent, which was the heart of the encampment. When the police finished dismantling the other tents, they then lined up facing us and ordered us to get out of the park and move onto the sidewalk. I refused. The state was going to impose its exclusionary property rules with or without me, the least I could do was make them go to the bother of carrying out their threat of force.

So I sat on the grass.^[6] I sat there and shivered for two hours while the troopers initiated a staring contest with the other protesters who had moved to the sidewalk or had gathered to defend the kitchen. I believe I was the only one to remain on the grass, which gave me a unique perspective of the standoff. I was twice approached by officers (I think from the Denver Police Department) while I was sitting who matter-of-factly told me that I would be arrested if I did not leave. I was usually sitting within a few feet (sometimes inches) of the troopers (in their riot gear) holding their line. Sometimes a portion of the police line was actually on the other side of me, between me and the protesters on the sidewalk.

While the protesters alternated between cursing the police and asking them to join the protest, the police remained largely stoic and unresponsive. The trooper nearest to where I was sitting, however, engaged me in conversation a few times: he once asked me if I was doing okay, then joked that he had been standing for so long he might have to sit next to me, and another time asked where I was from. Other than that I don’t remember seeing any other attempt at the police to engage the protesters in dialogue.

Finally, around 6:20am, the police lined up for their final push, right in front of me. Before the push, the officer directly in front of me pointed to me and told the trooper next to him, "he is a passive". They then deliberately stepped around me as they began their assault on the protesters defending the kitchen, leaving me sitting alone on the grass. I watched them begin to break up the few remaining protesters, who had linked arms around the kitchen, for a minute before state troopers in standard uniform (no riot gear — they were the mop-up team) noticed me. They spent a minute or so trying to convince me to leave (they could tell I was concerned about my backpack and told me if I was arrested it would probably be "lost"), before they finally arrested me. I refused to stand, and after informing me that I was resisting, two officers lifted me by my arms and handcuffed me with plastic cuffs.

My arresting officer read me my charge (18-9-117 "Unlawful Conduct on Public Property") and placed my backpack in an orange bag with my cuff number written on it.^[7] This is the first time I’ve ever been arrested. When we arrived at the processing center he asked if I felt at least a little bit silly for being arrested. The cognitive disconnect in that question was striking to me: here was a man who just participated in a senseless waste of other people’s time and money insinuating that the guy who disobeyed a law in accord with his conscience was the one who should feel silly about his actions.

I counted twenty-two other protesters who were arrested (I was the third arrestee to arrive at the processing area). They transported us a few blocks to the Van Cise-Simonet Detention Center, where they processed us quickly enough that we were able to have our bond hearing the same day. Two of my sisters and a friend found out about my arrest and were in the courtroom during my hearing which was a nice surprise. The Denver Anarchist Black Cross had arranged for attorneys to be present on our behalf. Most of us, including me, were released with no bond and less than twelve hours after our arrest. My first appearance in court was October 21. The National Lawyer’s Guild and other organizations found enough lawyers to volunteer that each of us, including 24 who were arrested during demonstrations the next day, had representation at our hearings. The Denver Police Department has confronted protesters in riot gear on several additional occasions since my arrest, and over 100 protesters have been arrested since that first confrontation.^[8]

Trial

So that was my first experience with civil disobedience. It is discouraging because it has made plain to me how easily living my life openly in accordance with reason and conscience can bring me into conflict with the state, and how easily conflict with the state can bring me to spending my time in a concrete room. Which is a bummer, because that seems like an otherwise good way to live my life. I think I understand now why Diogenes could never find an honest man on the streets of Athens: he never looked in the prisons.

It is a difficult balance resisting the crimes of the state without either becoming complicit in its actions through obedience, or mimicking its actions through violence. In trying to walk that balance I adopted Tolstoy’s tactic of non-resistance to evil by force (or what I would call non-forceful resistance to evil) by not leaving the park when I was told to, not standing up to help the officer in arresting myself (for which I was charged with the crime of “Obstructing a Law Officer”), not accepting any of the plea deals I was offered, and also not actively or violently resisting. I feel I navigated the balancing act rather successfully.

My case went to jury trial April 30, 2012. Several of my friends and family members came to watch the proceedings (many for the entire day — thank you everybody!) My attorney did an excellent job presenting a negative defense given the law and facts of the case. The prosecution’s case was not especially strongly argued, despite fairly clearly having the law and the facts on their side in at least one of the charges ("Unlawful Conduct on Public Property" — it was undisputed that I ignored a police officer’s request to leave a public park). During jury selection voir dire he smartly emphasized the oath the jury took to determine only the facts of the case, and not to decide whether a law is just. He even implied that all laws must be obeyed in a sensible society. I wish I (or my attorney) had asked them to think about the absurd implications of that and to consider whether an oath which will cause more harm than good is an ethically binding oath.

As far as evidence, the prosecutor’s strategy was to first demonize the Occupy Denver camp and then to condemn me by association. Unfortunately my attorney was so focused on his negative defense he didn’t focus on the hypocrisy of the State’s actions nearly as much as I’d have liked. For my part I wasn’t sure whether to defend Occupy Denver, to defend myself, or to explain why it is unjust to criminalize living in public. When I finally took the stand to testify I was too nervous to say much of anything. The trial went late, so after both sides finished presenting their case the Court decided the jury would return in the morning to deliberate a verdict. After my rather narrow defense, the verdicts the next morning were not surprising to me:^[9]

Unlawful Conduct on Public Property: Guilty
Obstructing a Law Officer: Not Guilty
Criminal Trespass: Guilty

After several weeks to allow for a pre-sentencing investigation, I was sentenced on June 29th:^[10]

$249.50 in fines and fees
32 hours of useful community service to be completed by October
12 months of unsupervised probation

Anarchy and The Occupy Wall Street Movement

Liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.

— Mikhail Bakunin

The Occupy movement has been criticized for being vague and not standing for anything definite. But there is some educational opportunity, at least, arising from the pluralistic nature of this movement. Vaguely disaffected individuals are attending events or following them on the Internet and, potentially, discovering almost 200 years of anarchist and Marxist thought. Even so, I cannot get excited about the entitled attitude which seems to saturate the “1% vs 99%” rhetoric, or the reformist/progressive elements of the movement. It’s not that the progressives are fighting a losing battle, but that they are fighting the wrong battle.

Capitalism, a system of production whereby the worker of capital and owner of capital are two different individuals, is not a salvageable system. Saving capitalism from plutocracy still leaves us with capitalism and with wage labour. Those who identify as “the 99%” seem more focused on comfort than autonomy. They don’t care who owns their workplaces or the products of their labour, as long as they have workplaces and their wages are high enough. It’s been said that Man does not live by bread alone. The point of eating is to live; capitalism has it backwards.

Government, a system of organizing people by force (in which capitalist production is an example form), is not a salvageable system. To ruin an old programming joke: Some people, when confronted with the problem of concentrated wealth and capital, think “I know, I’ll solve it with government.” Now they have two problems. I do agree with the sentiment held by many of those participating in the occupations that if we are going to be governed through representative democracy, then it should be elected by and representational of sentient people rather than corporations. And again, if we are going to control credit through centralized banking, and create credit through fractional-reserve banking, then those banks should be guided by macroeconomic policy in such a way that they contribute to the wealth of everyone, rather than to just a few. But at the root, government (historically if not logically) is a tool of the ruling class to preserve the status quo. Restoring capitalism to health is no great accomplishment. What good is it to gain the world of economic justice if it costs your soul?

Libertarian socialist political views like this, which reject both authoritarian government and the private ownership of capital which depends on and perpetuates such governments, were advanced by 19th century philosophers and revolutionaries who called themselves anarchists (from the Greek for ‘without a ruler’). Anarchist political theories are often challenged on grounds of feasibility (“Sure anarchism may sound good, but it would never work because human nature…”). While there are many points of specific debate, these challenges ask in general, “Can and will libertarian socialism result in a better (happier/safer/wealthier/…) world than current social organization?” This is a consequentialist approach: it seeks to determine what policies to pursue by trying to judge the goodness of their consequences. While I believe convincing arguments can be made in favor of libertarian socialism on this basis, I do not believe consequentialism to be a necessary or sufficient theory of ethics.

The problem all consequentialist theories must face is that as individuals our ultimate consequent is already known. To prioritize ends over means is to prioritize death over life. My anarchism^[11] is not merely a political recommendation; it is a moral philosophy. The goal is not to establish a utopian future by whatever means necessary. The future can worry about itself. The goal is to live a meaningful life now. The basic assumptions of anarchism are equality and reciprocity. So anarchists won’t rule others and will resist being ruled. They won’t claim ownership of others' labour, and will resist others' claims to what they use and produce. From squats to cooperative collectives to challenging unfair property rules by sleeping in a park, living anarchism will not bring about the revolution; it is the revolution. As Leo Tolstoy put it in his essay On Anarchy, “There can be only one permanent revolution — a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man.”^[12]

1. “Homes Not Handcuffs: The Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities.” The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty and The National Coalition for the Homeless. July, 2009. https://www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/crimreport/CrimzReport_2009.pdf

2. Mitchell, Don. “The Annihilation of Space by Law: The Roots and Implications of Anti-Homeless Laws in the United States.” Antipode 29:3 (1997): 303–335. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8330.00048/pdf Also reworked as Chapter 5 of his book: The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. The Guilford Press, 2003.

3. October 12, http://www.denverpost.com/commented/ci_19100471

4. All of my times are approximate. My only clock was on my Kindle, which I didn’t check very often

5. I found a photograph of me talking to this trooper (I’m not sure who the photographer is): photos/talkingtotrooper.jpg

6. I found two photos of me sitting by Westword photographers. This one by Jenn Wohletz: photos/sitting.jpg and this one by Brandon Marshall: photos/sitting-closeup.jpg

7. All of my property is still (two weeks later) in the possession of the Executive Security Unit of the Colorado State Patrol. They have been unable to give me an estimate of when I will be able to reclaim it. Update: the CSP has lost my property (I stupidly had most of my camping gear with me, worth about $1,700). I’m told it is probably thrown away.

8. Whipple, Kelsey. “Occupy Denver update: 100-plus arrests, more charges added, one case misplaced.” Westword, 21 Feb 2012. https://www.westword.com/news/occupy-denver-update-100-plus-arrests-more-charges-added-one-case-misplaced-5903435

9. For a more detailed account of my trial and May Day in Denver, see: https://americancynic.net/log/2012/5/6/my_may_day_2012/

10. For a few of my thoughts on the sentencing, see: https://americancynic.net/log/2012/7/6/my_sentence/

11. And of course many who identify as anarchists will disagree with much of what I’ve said here

12. Tolstoy, Leo. “On Anarchy” in Pamphlets. Translated from the Russian. 1900. Online: http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Leo_Tolstoy__On_Anarchy.html

Diode's Appalachian Trail Hike

2011-09-19T21:15:03Z

I spent five months, over two summers, hiking the Appalachian Trail, walking over a total of over 2,000 miles between Georgia and Maine. I hiked the entire distance in two pairs of Crocs (shoes). See my Appalachian Trail page which includes the trail reports I periodically made via email, an annotated interactive map, and other info.