Burning Down the American Plantation
An Interview with the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement
Colin Jenkins
The political situation in the United States, and the world at large,
is really dire and after many years of organizing, discussion, and
reflection we came to the conclusion that we should lay out the
foundational text for organizing that could lend some direction to the
revolutionary movement in the country. If we look at the political and
social problems in the US today, we can immediately see there is a gap
between the activities of revolutionary organizations and the
fortitude, seriousness, and capacity that must be developed to contend
with the current situation. There are huge sweeping political problems in the US, which could be
resolved through reformist measures. The centralization of political
power in two rather similar parties, the remarkable concentration of
wealth into a few dozen people's hands (making this one of the most
unequal countries in the world), and military industrial complex, which
ties it all together, are some of the more acute political problems.
One could imagine how there could be a structural change to deal with
these - permitting other political parties, redistributing wealth, or
ending the bloated military industry. However, the most consistent and unresolvable feature of American life
has been the dehumanization and destruction of black..
Marx's Capital for the 21st Century
Susan Williams
The mid-1800s, when Marx developed his economic theories, was a period with
many similarities to ours. People were outraged at injustice, destitution,
state violence, the lack of civil rights, and heavy taxation due to
governmental debt, conditions caused at that time by the rise of industrial
capitalism and the oppressive remnants of feudalism.
In 1848, a revolutionary wave surged across Europe. But the outcome was a
series of defeats that left workers and radicals beaten down and believing
the capitalist rulers were invincible. Striving to understand why the
revolts were crushed and what victory would require, Marx began the
economic studies that would occupy the rest of his life. Before Marx, socialist thought was dominated by utopianism. This was the
dream of an ideal society which only had to be imagined "to conquer all the
world by virtue of its own power," as Marx's collaborator Frederick Engels
wrote. In contrast, Marx and Engels took a scientific approach. Rather than
springing from ungrounded wishes and hopes, Marxism analyzes what actually
exists in the social and material world.
In his introduction to the first volume of his seminal work, Marx says, "It
is the ultimate aim of this work to lay bare the economic law of motion of
modern society, i.e., capitalist, bourgeois society." He was embarking on
the ultimate "know thy enemy" campaign.
Fred Perry, Proud Boys, and the Semiotics of Fashion
Anya Simonian
Social scientists took note of these subcultures and worked to explain
their meaning in relation to a changing post-war Britain. The seminal work
on subculture studies to which all later studies pay homage, or attempt to
refute, is Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson. Published in 1976, Resistance Through Rituals, as well as the Birmingham Center for
Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) from which the work emerged,
understood youth subculture in Marxian terms as a manifestation of social,
political, and economic change. The historical context for the CCCS
interpretation was the post-war period of the 1950s that saw the rise of
commercial television, age specific schools, and extended education that
brought youth together for longer, more isolated periods of time. Adding to
these challenges were the recent violence of war and more fatherless
children as a result of war deaths. These factors contributed to the making
of an isolated, and later unique subculture of resistance.
Drawing from Italian Marxist theorist Antionio Gramsci, a driving
foundational assumption of Resistance Through Rituals is that one
or more dominant groups in society hold "cultural capital" and subordinate
groups or classes find ways to express or challenge their subordinate
experience in their own culture. This dominant culture, according to the
CCCS, exists solely within the framework of capitalism, whereas the
struggle for "cultural capital" becomes a struggle between those with
capital versus those who labor. The dominant culture acts as a hegemon and
attempts to define..
Race, Solidarity, and the American Working Class
Edward Carson
The search for solidarity has escaped white, black, and brown working class
people, in part, due to white people's historical reluctance to embrace
shared experiences that cross racial boundaries. Because of recent
political news, mass rallies by Black Lives Matter, and the growing
concerns about the economic gap, I aim to resurrect past and present
conversations about the "working class." As we know, it is not monolithic.
In order to confront working class issues, society must mend the color line
through class, which is complex, as the American race question is the real
problem. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, expresses the
unchanged dimensions of the American color line and class-consciousness
among the working class: "Solidarity is standing in unity with people even when you have
not personally experienced their particular oppression. The reality is that
as long as capitalism exists, material and ideological pressures push white
workers to be racist and all workers to hold each other in general
suspicion. But there are moments of struggle when the mutual interests of
workers are laid bare, and when the suspicion is finally turned in the
other direction - at the plutocrats who live well while the rest of us
suffer." Black lives do matter, but many accept arguments that society operates
under the guise of color blindness, a falsity that permits modern day
atrocities to black and brown Americans. This argument stands in the way of
interracial workers forging unity. Black Lives Matter further elicits a
reaction to the present-day injustices that were not wholly resolved via
1960's de jure legislation.
