#catalyst journal

CATALYST JOURNAL

As a lonely critic who dared to challenge Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan during the stock market mania of the late 1990s, then congressman Bernie Sanders received recognition from the political left and dismissive coverage from the mainstream media. Sanders subsequently won significant national attention as an outspoken populist critic of the banking system in the wake of the 2007–8 financial crisis. After declaring his presidential candidacy in 2015, he cemented this reputation as the nation’s preeminent critic of bankers, using the campaign to express the anger that many Americans shared about the financial crisis and the resulting bailout. “If elected president,” Sanders pledged, “I will rein in Wall Street so they can’t crash our economy again.”1 Hillary Clinton conceded the appeal of this campaign promise when — panicked by the popularity of Sanders’s attack on finance and unable to respond effectively to his criticisms — she sought to change the subject by exclaiming, “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow . . . would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community?”2 The stand that Sanders took against the banks was compelling, true to the contemporary moment, and appeared novel. But although unfamiliar to the times, opposing the excesses and power of bankers was hardly original. Sanders emerged as the successor to an influential strand of American political culture with deep historical roots that has motivated far-reaching economic demands in the past and could do so again in the future.

As the Sanders campaign demonstrated, while banking is widely considered to be dry and dull, it’s nevertheless an issue that can energize working-class politics. Discussing and debating banking calls attention to opposing material interests, which promotes a politics that is attuned to questions of class. Workers confront the relevance of banking to their daily lives every time they check their account balance or pay a bill.3 When Sanders presented financial policy as a clash between Wall Street on the one hand and “working families” on the other, he articulated a class-based populist message that could reach a diverse spectrum of working-class voters. In the past few years, local single-issue groups promoting public banks made real headway in several heavily Democratic cities and states. Among other issues, their campaigns foregrounded green energy projects and unequal credit access due to racial discrimination. This messaging excites liberal Democratic politicians, but its capacity to forge broader coalitions and inspire the solidarity that sustains working-class politics is more limited.4

A look at the past reveals that banking programs that are framed in universal terms can offer an effective organizing device with widespread appeal. Shared commitments to remaking the banking system were the cornerstone of an influential American political tradition. In the late nineteenth century, the “money question” galvanized two mass political parties that protested Gilded Age inequality, the Greenback and Populist parties. In the early twentieth century, large numbers of workers and farmers across the nation rallied around banking reforms as a means to make American society more democratic. Seen in the light of this history, the promise of material benefits from government banking continues to present a source for working-class political mobilization today.

CATALYST JOURNAL

One of the consequences of the Left’s intellectual decline has been a turn away from materialism. This article addresses some of the most common criticisms of materialist understandings of politics and shows that they are unfounded. It then makes a case for why the approach is not only legitimate but necessary.

For decades, Marxism and the socialist tradition more generally — of which Marxism is just a part — were associated with a doctrine known as materialism. But in the recent past, this approach has largely been abandoned by critical theorists, to the point where its mere mention is met with skepticism, if not derision. In this article, I briefly describe what materialism entails and then examine some common criticisms leveled at the theory. I show that these objections are in large measure misplaced and, further, that it is not only still possible to abide by traditional materialism in social theory but that it is the indispensable foundation for the revival of left-wing politics.

To fix our thoughts, let us note that materialism can be understood in three distinct senses. One is an ontological or metaphysical materialism. This is the view that reality exists independently of our minds, which is true of the natural world as well as the social world. This is in contrast to what is sometimes called idealism, which supposes that what we take to be real might just be a product of our imaginations.

The second is an epistemological materialism, which is the view that, even though ideas mediate our access to reality, the structure of reality imposes limits on the variability of our impressions of the world. This means that although we might have mistaken understandings of what is “out there,” there is a means to correct them through engagement with the world around us. Hence, an approximately accurate knowledge of reality is possible.

And the third is social materialism, the view that, in trying to explain some important phenomena in the social world, we rely on the premise that agents are acting on their objective interests — more specifically, their material or economic interests. So social materialism in this paper should be understood as interest-based explanations of human action.

These three elements come together in a coherent framework that asserts an objective reality, which can be apprehended through careful analysis and thereby changed through practical intervention that mobilizes people around their interests. For over one hundred years, Marxists abided by all three of these arguments. This was because, as a political theory, Marxism was proximally motivated by the third — social materialism. To abide by social materialism requires that you also commit to its ontological and epistemological presuppositions. You cannot believe that agents are motivated by their objective interests unless you believe that those interests, and the agents that are motivated by them, are really “out there” in the world, and neither can you insist that you understand their interests unless you believe that it is possible for theories to actually apprehend the world.

The ostensibly radical turn in recent social theory largely rejects the second and third components of traditional materialism — the claims that it is possible to accurately understand the world and that actors share certain common material interests. This was the core of the cultural turn, and from it came an epistemological relativism (from rejecting thesis two) and cultural relativism (in rejecting thesis three). It is hardly controversial to suggest there has been a powerful tendency toward an overriding epistemological and cultural relativism stemming from the influence of poststructuralism and its lineal descendant of postcolonial theory, both of which are pillars of the turn to culture.

CATALYST JOURNAL

The Gulf states are transit states because migrants constitute a majority of their populations. The politics of labor control is central to the organization of these states and to the predominance of their political and capitalist classes. The contradiction of Gulf labor politics lies in the autocratic nature of rule based on nonmarket forms of labor control and the continuous demand of the market for a willing labor force.

“When I was coming here [Abu Dhabi], I was asked ten types of questions [by Indian emigration officials] and when non-Muslims went through immigration, they & nbsp;. . . just stamped [the passports] and let them go. This is the reason that Muslims tend to go abroad. We don’t get opportunity there [in India].”1

“It’s just like when the Europeans transported and sold Africans into slavery in America. What happened to the Africans then, happens to us now. We are transported here, the company sells us, commands us. There is no choice. In Nepal, we changed from a kingdom to a republic. If we could take action, if we could organize a strike, we could change this country.”2

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, Sheikh Mohammed al-Maktoum, the self-styled “CEO of Dubai” and its ruler, initiated a construction boom that would turn Dubai into the “city of the future,” a testament to its leadership of a neoliberal Gulf and a model to be emulated elsewhere. As the primary owner of much of Dubai’s real estate and the head of a conglomerate of companies bound to his new vision, Sheikh Mohammed turned Dubai into a node for global finance capital, trade, and consumerism.3 Within a few years, Dubai’s population of migrants, most of them workers, amounted to close to 90 percent of its population. Qatar was soon to follow when, in 2010, it won the right to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Hundreds of billions of dollars were invested in twelve football stadiums, highways, train stations, hotels, and entertainment facilities. Hundreds of thousands of workers rotated in and out of Qatar over twelve years to build and maintain the social and auxiliary economic infrastructure these investments required. By 2017, migrants made up 95 percent of Qatar’s labor force and 89 percent of its population. While the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar have the highest proportions of migrants to citizens, in all other countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) except for Saudi Arabia, migrants make up more than half of the population, accounting for thirty million people.4

The Gulf states are transit states, according to political economist Adam Hanieh. They are dependent on the employment of migrants who have no hope of obtaining citizenship because of restrictive laws established in the 1930s.5 Access to citizenship is the most important factor that shapes the rights of migrants. Migrants’ permission to work and live in the country is regulated by a kafala, sponsored by their employers (usually citizens) and regulated by the state, which sets limits to their stay and restricts their ability to change jobs and leave the country. It ensures that migrants, laborers and otherwise, remain transitory residents, excluded from citizenship and deprived of the ability to remain in the country. Abuse of labor under the kafala system is common. It includes restricting the ability of workers to change jobs if their employers do not fulfill their promises. Should the migrants leave their jobs, they become illegal residents. Their very illegality makes them vulnerable to further abuse. Employers often do not pay wages on time or withhold them.6 Wage theft is one of the major complaints that migrants have about their working conditions.7 Migrant workers have no political rights to organize in their own interest because Gulf countries have labor laws that are confined to their own citizens. It is left to international organizations to intervene. These organizations frame workers’ rights as human rather than political rights. As a result, their interventions are dependent on the willingness of the Gulf states to implement them.

The International Labour Organization, Human Rights Watch, and other organizations have turned their attention to the lack of protection and rights of migrant laborers and have succeeded in mitigating some of the abuses. These attempts do not account for the structures that have historically linked capital accumulation by oil companies and the petrostates of the independent Gulf with the regional and global networks and companies that recruit and manage labor. In addition, for the ruling elite in countries so dependent on hydrocarbon and its derivates, finding an acquiescent and disposable labor force is critical for maintaining production, building alliances, and sustaining a class of national capitalists wedded to the perpetuation of labor control.8 Oil companies and the rulers of the GCC states learned this lesson after a series of labor strikes by local migrant Pakistani, Indian, and Arab workers — many inspired by the anti-colonial struggles in the region — threatened to undermine what they termed the “stability” of the relations between labor, capital, and the state.9

CATALYST JOURNAL

If US journalism is going to survive, the advertising-based economic model has to be replaced by a robust and democratic public financing. In this interview, leading media scholar and activist Robert W. McChesney outlines a proposal to revitalize journalism along just these lines.

Interview by Editors

Editors: Just to set the stage, what is the state of the news media in the United States today?

Robert McChesney: It is basically in free fall, and probably about a foot above ground, falling at one hundred miles an hour. It’s in complete disarray and decline. This is not a controversial point. This is not something that is debated. Everyone sees this. The data is overwhelming.

The way people measure journalism, especially local journalism, is through funding and revenues for daily newspapers. Even today, daily newspapers provide most of the original news reporting in any community. This data includes digital journalism, which is the direction all journalism is heading, if it is not there already.

Until around the middle of the twentieth century, daily newspapers accounted for 1 percent of GDP in the United States. It was a massive industry, among the most prominent in the country, with a footprint in every nook and cranny of the nation. It started a slow decline in the mid-twentieth century, with total collapse over the past two decades, so that daily-newspaper revenues now account for less than one-tenth of 1 percent of GDP, and they continue to fall at a precipitous rate.

Why is that? Since social media came along around 2005, the whole business model that twentieth-century journalism is predicated upon collapsed, because it is based on 80 percent of the revenue coming from advertising. No one makes money on a daily newspaper from just subscriptions or selling copies. Circulation could never suffice. Advertising revenues are what kept papers alive — they were a kind of subsidy on top of the sales or subscription revenues.

When social media and broadband internet came along, it didn’t take very long for advertisers to realize they no longer had to subsidize journalism to reach their target audiences. They could go to Google or AOL or Yahoo or Facebook and say, “This is the target audience we want for our product, find them for us.” And those companies all had the micro-level information to say to the advertisers, “Yeah, we can send your message directly to your target audience on whatever website they’re on. We’ll get on it, so you don’t have to subsidize journalism anymore, and we can dramatically lower your costs and increase your effectiveness.”

And so advertisers abandoned daily newspapers; they no longer support them. As a result, newspapers’ incomes have fallen, and a significant percentage of them are now out of business. Just since 2008, the number of journalists in the country has been cut in half. And that was after two decades of previous downsizing. Most of what remains will be gone in short order. There’s just a handful of successful daily newspapers remaining, and they’re successful with a small s, not a capital <S — the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal.

While I emphasize local news media, national news media is far from satisfactory. Ironically, we now have a national news media that’s pretty much like what the Soviet Union had in its glory days. There are maybe two or three decently staffed newsrooms covering the entire country. Fifty years ago, there were probably as many as fifty different newsrooms in Washington, DC, many representing local newspapers that had Washington bureaus, like the Chicago Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Los Angeles Times. Many of those bureaus are closed now.

Editors: You’ve said that the public relations industry increasingly accounts for more and more news content.

Robert McChesney: That has been the case. It was actually built into journalism throughout the twentieth century, because public relations people realized that professional journalism had codes for newsgathering — reliance on official sources, and news events in particular — that PR firms could exploit for their clients. Newspaper owners liked PR because the material it provided allowed them to reduce their editorial budgets. Journalists were less enthralled by it.

PR-infused journalism has expanded in the last few decades with media corporations and conglomerates so eager for profits. They found that they could use more of these public relations materials as the basis of stories, that it would cut their editorial costs, and that readers might not notice much of a difference.

PR has always been there. Today, however, with media owners desperate to survive and far fewer working journalists on board, PR has more power than ever to shape the news as it pleases.

Something else happened with the emergence of super-profitable monopoly daily newspapers over the course of the twentieth century. News media institutions became fully commercial, owned by investors who cared only about profit maximization. In our constitutional system, however, news media were regarded as necessary political institutions, the veritable fourth branch of government that informed and empowered citizens so they could effectively engage in self-governance. In the nineteenth century, every great social movement — from abolitionism and women’s suffrage to agrarian populism and labor rights — was built around newspapers. Much of the work around rejuvenating local journalism is built on the idea that local news media will return to their roots and draw people into a public life that is in the process of disintegrating. When we recreate local news media, we are building the necessary institutions for effective democratic politics.

Editors: You refer to “news deserts” in your writing. What does this term mean?

Robert McChesney: “News desert” refers to something that has never existed before in American history. The term describes an area — a county, a town, or even a region — that has no paid journalists in a newsroom covering it, so nothing gets reported (or, if you want to loosen the definition a bit, if you just have one newsroom or so few journalists that it’s impossible for them to cover more than the local high school football game or take whatever the mayor says and transcribe it and call that news).

News deserts now account for the vast majority of this country. If you looked at a map, you would conclude that the whole country was pretty much a news desert. There are communities now, like Salinas, California, where there is not a single journalist. If you’re a politician there, you can do whatever the hell you want; no one’s going to have any idea.

CATALYST JOURNAL

While the uptick in strike activity in 2021 is heartening, its influence should not be exaggerated. The number and extent of job actions was noticeable but still very small by historical standards, and union density continued to decline. A significant labor upsurge might be in the works, but it is not in evidence yet.

In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Pope Francis spoke movingly of the workers keeping the world turning in dark times:

People who do not appear in newspaper and magazine headlines or on the latest television show, yet in these very days are surely shaping the decisive events of our history. Doctors, nurses, storekeepers and supermarket workers, cleaning personnel, caregivers, transport workers, men and women working to provide essential services and public safety, volunteers, priests, men and women religious, and so very many others. They understood that no one is saved alone.1

These workers have done everything we’ve asked of them and more. They have been through hell, particularly those who have risked their health and well-being to care for the sick, educate the young, feed the hungry, and deliver the things the rest of us need to get through this period of grinding uncertainty. Employers, politicians, and talking heads have lauded them as essential workers, but the stark gap between the praise and the grim realities of working life in the United States — which was already miserable for millions before the pandemic — have pushed many to the breaking point. Indeed, record numbers of American workers have quit their jobs in what the media has dubbed the Great Resignation. According to the US Labor Department, 4.5 million workers voluntarily left their jobs in November 2021. The number of monthly quits has exceeded three million since August 2020, and the trend shows no sign of slowing down.2 Job switchers span the employment ladder, but turnover has been largely concentrated in the low-wage service sector, where workers are taking advantage of the very tight labor market to get a better deal for themselves. According to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, workers with high school diplomas are currently enjoying a faster rate of wage growth than workers with bachelor’s degrees, a remarkable situation that has not occurred in decades.3

Worker discontent is not only finding expression in the form of quitting and job switching. In 2021, we witnessed a modest increase in the frequency and visibility of collective action in the workplace. Tens of thousands of workers, union and nonunion alike, challenged employers through protests and strikes across sectors and in many different geographical regions. Workers in health care and social assistance, education, and transportation and warehousing led the way, but they were joined by workers in hotels and food services, manufacturing, and other industries. Protests and strikes tended to be concentrated in states where labor is relatively stronger, namely California, New York, and Illinois, but some states with low union density, like North Carolina, saw an uptick in labor action, too. Pay increases were easily the most common demand, but health and safety, staffing, and COVID-19 protocols were high on the agenda as well.

The year 2021 was less a strike wave than a strike ripple, and it has not yet resulted in any appreciable increase in unionization. A few trends stand out. The first is that labor protest and strike action were heavily concentrated among unionized groups of workers. Unionized groups of workers accounted for nearly 95% of all estimated participants in labor protests and more than 98% of all estimated participants in strikes. The second is that protests and strikes were concentrated by industry — namely health care and education, which together accounted for roughly 60% of all labor actions. Finally, protests and strikes were heavily concentrated geographically. Just three states with relatively high levels of union density — California, New York, and Illinois — accounted for more than half the total estimated participants in protests and strikes. In short, collective workplace action is by and large taking place where organized labor still retains residual sources of strength. In this context, spreading protest and strike action beyond its current industrial and regional confines depends on unionization in new places.

Conditions conducive to labor action — rising inflation, pandemic-related pressures, and a tight labor market — are likely to persist into 2022, and the Biden administration’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has been meaningfully supportive of worker organizing. US labor is probably not on the verge of a historic breakthrough, but in this context, workers may have an opportunity to make modest material and organizational gains.

Making new organizational gains is critical to the fortunes of the labor movement and the reviving US left. The vast majority of the workers involved in strikes and labor protests last year were already members of unions, not unorganized workers looking to unionize. This is why it is so concerning that last year’s uptick in labor action occurred amid a further decline in union density in 2021. The overall rate of union membership stands at 10.3% of the total labor force, while the total number of union members, just over fourteen million in 2021, continues its long decline.4 While some have argued that treating union density as the key measure of labor’s strength is a mistake, it seems clear that, at least in the US context, where union density and union coverage almost entirely overlap, it does provide an effective measurement of working-class power.5

Boosting the level of union density should therefore be among the leading priorities of progressives and socialists in the United States. As the power resources school of welfare state scholars has long argued, the relative strength of the labor movement and its affiliated political parties has been the single most important factor shaping welfare state development over time and across countries. Here in the United States, where we have never had a nationwide social democratic party aligned with a strong labor movement, the weakness of working-class organization is clearly reflected in the fragmentation and stinginess of our welfare state. The state-level wave of attacks on organized labor that began in 2010 have made it that much harder for unions to defend working-class interests and reduce inequality. But the fact that they were able to meaningfully mitigate the growth of inequality, even during the period of neoliberal retrenchment, shows that rebuilding the labor movement needs to be a chief priority of any progressive political agenda.6 The Biden administration’s pro-union stance suggests it understands this. But if it’s unable to act decisively to boost union membership, all the pro-union rhetoric it can muster will ultimately amount to little.

TRACKING LABOR ACTION

Researchers at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) began documenting strikes and labor protests in late 2020. Their ILR Labor Action Tracker provides a database of workplace conflict across the United States, based on information collected from government sources, news reports, organizational press releases, and social media. It counts both strikes and labor protests as “events” but distinguishes between the two. The major distinction between strikes and labor protests, according to this methodology, is whether the workers involved in the event stopped work. If they did, the event is defined as a strike; if they did not, it is defined as a labor protest. The Labor Action Tracker also collects data on a number of additional variables, including employer, labor organization (if applicable), local labor organization (if applicable), industry, approximate number of participants, worker demands, and more.7

ACTION TYPES

In 2021, there were 786 events with 257,086 estimated participants.8 Over 60% of the events were labor protests, while less than 40% were strikes (there was one recorded lockout). Roughly one-third of the estimated number of workers participated in labor protests, while roughly two-thirds participated in strikes. Further, the average number of estimated workers per labor protest (188) was significantly smaller than the average number of estimated workers per strike (553, see Table 1 for details).

DURATION

Neither labor protests nor strikes tended to last very long, which tracks with the generally sharp decline in strike duration in recent decades.9 Labor protests in particular were very short affairs. Of the labor protests with a start and end date, 96% lasted for just one day or less. Strikes also tended to have a short duration, but they typically did not end as quickly as protests. Of the strikes with a start and end date, one-third lasted for one day or less. Roughly two-thirds of strikes (68%) ended within a week, and over 90% ended within thirty days. One strike stands out for its unusually long duration: a 701-day strike by United Auto Workers (UAW) members against a metallurgical company in Pennsylvania, which began in September 2019 and ended in August 2021.

INDUSTRIES

An informed observer will not be surprised by which industries saw the largest number of labor action events (Table 2). The leading two industries by far were health care and social assistance and education, which are both highly unionized and have been subjected to enormous pressures during the pandemic. Together, they accounted for nearly 40% of the total labor protests and strikes. These industries also comprised over 60% of the overall number of estimated labor action participants — health care with 41.5% of the estimated participants, education with 18.8%. The overrepresentation of health care and education workers becomes even starker when we compare this to their employment shares in the overall labor force. In 2020, these two industries accounted for 16.3% of total nonfarm employment — health care with a 13.8% share and education with 2.3%.10 Put another way, the share of health care workers in 2021 labor actions was roughly three times larger than their share in the nonfarm labor force, while the share of education workers was more than eight times as large.

These two pace-setting industries were followed by a second tier of industries including transportation and warehousing, accommodation and food services, and manufacturing. It is not surprising to see these listed among the most turbulent industries, as they contain a mix of highly unionized employers and nonunion employers that have become a major focus of labor organizing activity, namely Amazon — the most frequently targeted employer, with twelve total labor actions — which was the target of twice as many labor actions as McDonald’s, the second-most targeted employer.

The industrial distribution of labor protests generally follows the overall distribution of labor action, with the notable exception of manufacturing, which saw far more strikes than protests. While the health care industry did not experience the largest number of strikes, it accounts for more than half of estimated strike participants (53%). Workers in education (12.4%) and manufacturing (16%) also accounted for outsize shares of the estimated number of participants.

CATALYST JOURNAL

W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 is one of the greatest modern studies of revolution and counterrevolution. While it deserves its place alongside the classics, it is also an extraordinary example of a materialist and class analysis of race under capitalism. In recent years, the latter aspect of the book has been obscured and even denied. This essay seeks to restore Du Bois’s great work to its rightful place on both counts.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880, published in 1935, is one of the greatest scholarly studies of revolution and counterrevolution.1 It deserves a place on one’s bookshelf next to other modern classics, including Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins, Georges Lefebvre’s The Coming of the French Revolution, and Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Scholars of revolutions, unfortunately, have not usually considered the US Civil War to be one of the great social revolutions of the modern era, akin to the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions. Many readers, in fact, view Du Bois’s book much more narrowly, as a response to white-supremacist histories of the Reconstruction era (1865–76) and, more particularly, a defense of the role of African American politicians — and the black voters who elected them — in the Southern state governments of that time. Du Bois does present such a defense, but Black Reconstruction offers much, much more than this.

Black Reconstruction is not only a towering work of history but also a work firmly embedded in the Marxist tradition. Du Bois reinterprets the Civil War as a social and political revolution “from below” — a workers’ revolution — that brought about the overthrow of both slavery and the Confederate state, thereby opening a door to interracial democracy in the South. The book then reinterprets the subsequent overthrow of this democracy as a class-based counterrevolution that destroyed the possibility of freedom for half the Southern working class and imposed a “dictatorship of capital” that brought about “an exploitation of labor unparalleled in modern times.”2

But why should one read Black Reconstruction in the twenty-first century? In short, because Du Bois is writing about issues that remain of tremendous political importance, including the nature of racial oppression and the racism of white workers. Unlike most contemporary analysts of race, moreover, Du Bois approaches these issues from the perspective of political economy. He rejects an approach to racial oppression that starts with prejudice, discrimination, or culture, trying instead to dig beneath these and understand how they are rooted in the material interests of different classes. Instead of insisting on the separation of race from class, as so many liberals do, Du Bois insists on their intimate connection.3

Black Reconstruction is rightly famous for stressing the collective agency of enslaved people in winning their own freedom and for its impassioned rebuttal of racist historiography. What has been less emphasized is the way in which Du Bois very explicitly rejects analyses of the Civil War and Reconstruction that emphasize race and racism as the primary drivers of historical events. Racism certainly played a hugely important role in that era, Du Bois argues, but it was a product of — and usually disguised — another, more powerful force: capitalism. More specifically, Du Bois argues in Black Reconstruction that two characteristic features of capitalism — capitalists’ competition for labor and workers’ competition for jobs — are the root cause of conflicts that seem to be driven by racism.

This perspective on Du Bois’s masterpiece runs counter to some influential interpretations of his work. Not surprisingly, there is resistance in some quarters to stating plainly that Black Reconstruction is a work of Marxism. Many people who come to Black Reconstruction for the first time are not expecting to read a Marxist text. They have most likely read Du Bois’s earlier collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, which precedes his turn to Marxism by three decades.4 While a number of authors do recognize Du Bois’s Marxism,5 many others deny that Black Reconstruction or his subsequent writings are Marxist. In 1983, for example, Cedric Robinson described Du Bois as a “sympathetic critic of Marxism.”6 Gerald Horne’s 1986 book examines in great detail Du Bois’s involvement in leftist (mainly Communist) causes after World War II, but he never offers an opinion as to whether Du Bois was a Marxist.7 And Manning Marable’s book on Du Bois, published just a few months later, portrays him as a “radical democrat” — although Marable later suggested that Du Bois might usefully be viewed as part of the “Western Marxist” tradition.8

More recently, a group of “Du Boisian” sociologists recognizes that Du Bois integrates some elements of Marxist thinking into his worldview. But according to these writers, not only is Du Bois not a Marxist but his ideas clearly transcend Marx’s. Marx gave theoretical primacy to class, they say, whereas Du Bois grasped the “intersectionality” of class and race, emphasizing their connections while giving theoretical primacy, by implication, to neither.9 According to these writers, this theoretical move allowed Du Bois, unlike Marx and his followers, they claim, to understand colonialism, the ways in which race “fractures” class consciousness, and racial oppression generally.10

In this essay, I argue that these “Du Boisians” and others who deny Du Bois’s Marxism are wrong. Du Bois actually does give theoretical primacy to capitalism. In both Black Reconstruction and his subsequent writings, Du Bois repeatedly emphasizes how racial oppression is a product of capitalism. Time and again, furthermore, Du Bois takes issue with what we would today call “race reductionism,” that is, attempts to explain historical events primarily in terms of race. His rejection of race reductionism only deepened in the years after Black Reconstruction’s publication.

After 1935, in short, “Du Boisianism” is Marxism. Du Bois’s failure lay not in the fact that he embraced a Marxist orientation but that he came to uncritically support Soviet authoritarianism. This was perhaps the greatest tragedy, in my view, of Du Bois’s long life. But the main point of this essay is to show that, despite all efforts to ignore or deny his Marxism, Black Reconstruction stands as a brilliant work of class analysis.

BLACK RECONSTRUCTION IN AMERICA

Du Bois’s turn toward Marxism occurred rather late in his life, shortly before the publication of Black Reconstruction. His trip to the Soviet Union in 1926, months before Joseph Stalin’s consolidation of power, certainly pushed him in this direction. “Never before in life,” writes his biographer David Levering Lewis, “had he been as stirred as he would be by two months in Russia.”11 Du Bois traveled more than two thousand miles across the Soviet Union, “finding everywhere … signs of a new egalitarian social order that until then he had only dreamt might be possible.”12 “I may be partially deceived and half-informed,” Du Bois wrote at the time. “But if what I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my ears in Russia is Bolshevism, I am a Bolshevik.”13 (Du Bois would visit the Soviet Union again in 1936, 1949, and 1958.)

Du Bois later wrote that his trip to the Soviet Union led him to question “our American Negro belief that the right to vote would give us work and decent wage,” or would abolish illiteracy or “decrease our sickness and crime.”14 Only a revolution, by implication, could attain these ends. Du Bois also now believed that “letting a few of our capitalists share with whites in the exploitation of our masses, would never be a solution of our problem.”15 Black liberation was impossible, in sum, so long as the United States remained a capitalist society, and “black capitalism” was a dead end.

Du Bois had been broadly familiar with Marxist ideas since his graduate student days at Harvard and in Berlin. But it was not until 1933, in the midst of the greatest crisis of capitalism in world history, that Du Bois began conscientiously to study Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin. He was then sixty-five years old. As Lewis writes, Du Bois fell hard for Marxist analysis:

Like so many intellectuals in the thirties who broadcast Marxism as a verifiable science of society, the Atlanta professor was mesmerized by dialectical materialism. Calling Marx the “greatest figure in the science of modern industry,” Du Bois seemed to rediscover with the avidity of a gifted graduate student the thinker who Frank Taussing, his Harvard economics professor, had smugly ignored. Marx made history make sense — or more sense, Du Bois came to believe, than all other analytical systems.16

Du Bois was prodded to master Marxist theory by the rise of a group of so-called Young Turks within the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the civil rights organization he helped found. These young scholar-activists, including Abram Harris, Ralph Bunche, and E. Franklin Frazier (all members or soon-to-be members of the Howard University faculty) “were attempting to shift the Negro intelligentsia’s focus on race to an analysis of the economics of class.”17 All were convinced that a powerful interracial labor movement was necessary to smash racial oppression, and they were critical of the NAACP for its lack of an economic program. Members of this group would offer advice to Du Bois about which texts were essential for him to read. Harris’s book, The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement, coauthored with Sterling Spero, proved particularly influential; it was no coincidence that Du Bois titled the first chapter of Black Reconstruction “The Black Worker.”18 (I discuss the precise significance of this below.)

CATALYST JOURNAL

The scholarship on the civil rights movement has increasingly moved away from a focus on political economy. In this interview, Doug McAdam recounts the context in which he wrote his classic book, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970, and how the evacuation of class analysis has changed the field.

Interview by jeff Goodwin

In the scholarship on the civil rights movement, Doug McAdam’s work has played a pioneering role. His 1982 book Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 — a classic in the field of sociology — presents a primarily materialist explanation of the civil rights movement. His book Freedom Summer, about the struggle in Mississippi in 1964, won the C. Wright Mills Award in 1990. And he is the coauthor, with Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly, of the influential 2001 book Dynamics of Contention, which argues that social movements, revolutions, riots, and rebellions are related forms of “contentious politics.” McAdam’s later works cover issues ranging from environmental activism to political polarization.

Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, which grew out of McAdam’s doctoral dissertation at Stony Brook University, is far and away the most frequently cited academic book — or book of any kind — on the US civil rights movement, with over ten thousand citations. The book has also had an enormous influence on social science theorizing about social movements and the broader field of contentious politics.

Political Process develops a “political process model” to explain the civil rights movement. Scholars have subsequently applied this model to a wide range of social movements. The model emphasizes the importance of three factors for the emergence and dynamics of social movements: political opportunities, formal and informal organization, and what McAdam calls “cognitive liberation.” But these factors are, in a sense, secondary to McAdam’s main argument — for lurking behind them are more fundamental political-economic forces and class interests.

The longest chapter in McAdam’s book argues that it was the changing political economy of the South — the decline of cotton and the rise of urban industrial and service-sector employment — that led to the overthrow of Jim Crow and caste (but not class) oppression. As McAdam makes clear in this interview, Marxist scholars like Michael Schwartz (one of his dissertation advisers) and Jack Bloom led him to incorporate political economy into his explanation of the civil rights movement.

Ironically, this core element of McAdam’s theoretical perspective would be forgotten (or willfully ignored) by subsequent scholars. Political Process is mainly remembered for the concept of political opportunities — or what some would call “political opportunity structure” or POS — not for its more fundamental political-economic analysis.

For the most part, political economy remains marginal to sociological studies of social movements, at least in the United States, up to the present day. The Marxist roots of political process theory have been almost totally forgotten.

McAdam recently sat down with Jeff Goodwin to discuss the origins of his interest in civil rights and the influence of Marxism and political economy on his work on the civil rights movement.

Goodwin | Where did your interest in the civil rights movement originate, biographically speaking?

McAdams | I was born in 1951. I don’t know why, but I was always very attuned to politics and current events. I was only eight at the time of the lunch counter sit-ins in 1960, and I don’t remember being aware of them at the time. But the other major campaigns of the civil rights movement — Birmingham, Freedom Summer, Selma — were exploding on television when I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen years of age. I remember watching the Democratic National Convention in 1964. It was gavel-to-gavel coverage. They even showed some of the credential committee hearings with Fannie Lou Hamer, and she was so clearly standing for a just cause. That was seared into my brain as a kid.I graduated high school in 1969 and was already somewhat involved in the antiwar movement. I went to college and played basketball at Occidental College, but I took a leave every spring to work for a coalition of peace churches on the West Coast, where I’m from. I remember going to DC to lobby for an end to the draft in spring of 1970 and 1971 and organizing on college campuses around the resistance in 1972. And I had no illusions. I somehow understood that the touchstone struggle had been civil rights, and that my involvement in the antiwar movement was an extension of New Left struggles that had run from the 1960s forward. We called what we were doing “the movement.” We didn’t say “the antiwar movement.” We had a sense that all these struggles were part and parcel of the same bigger struggle. Remember that the first real antiwar critique was about race, and it came out of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). It focused on the idea that black and brown soldiers were being sent to a far-off country to kill “yellow” people. I don’t think we give the civil rights movement enough credit for kick-starting the antiwar movement.The Korean War never generated a mass opposition movement at all. So why did Vietnam? Because it occurred in the context of the civil rights movement, which had already sensitized progressives and the Left in general to the centrality of race in other areas.When I went to graduate school at Stony Brook University, Charles Perrow had just secured this big grant to study insurgency in the 1960s. And he basically said that we could study any movement associated with the ’60s and apply a given methodology. The project had been going for a year when I got there. People had chosen various movements to study. And I couldn’t believe nobody had picked the civil rights movement, the most important struggle of them all. It was the movement that launched the others.

CATALYST JOURNAL

Iraqi protests of the last decade are products of the contradictions and corruption that marked the American project in Iraq for the last thirty years. They are an indictment of the confessional and neoliberal order the United States created after the 2003 US invasion. Against insurmountable odds, Iraqi citizens have created a movement that seeks a political and social order that is both civic and nonsectarian.

In early October 2019, Iraq was shaken by one of the biggest waves of popular protest since the American occupation. During yet another of the periodic negotiations among Iraq’s political elites on the formation of a new government, thousands of young unemployed university students, joined by other Iraqis, gathered in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square to protest their unemployment, their poor living conditions, and the corruption of the political class. Iraq’s protests were part of the recurring eruption of global protest movements against the privatization of state resources, political corruption, and increased inequality. The protesters in the streets of Iraqi cities, particularly Baghdad, reproduced symbols and repertoires used by protesters since the Arab Spring in 2011, as they did of the 2019 protests in Lebanon and Chile.1

The government’s loss of great swaths of northern and northwestern Iraq to the Islamic State in 2014 marked the beginning of mass organized protest movements against Iraq’s corrupt and kleptocratic political elite and their militarized parties in the southern and central Iraqi cities. The 2019 protests were spearheaded and dominated by youth who had come of age after the fall of the Ba’ath regime. The protesters were largely drawn from the Shia population, in whose “interests” the political elite of Arab Iraq ruled. They called for a “homeland” that included Iraqis irrespective of their religious sects and a state that protected their social and civil rights: “I am out here to take my rights,” they chanted. They eschewed the politics of injury and redress that had dominated the political discourse of the post-Ba’athist political class. They asked for a democratic government that would jettison the apportionment of power and economic resources according to sect.2

Like a series of protests that had started in 2015, the 2019–20 demonstrations drew on cross-class and group alliances in the capital and the southern provinces of Iraq, developed new repertoires of protest, and produced distinctive cultural symbols. By early November, the protesters had articulated clear political demands. Despite their violent repression by the government and lack of a unified leadership, they refused to be assuaged by the government’s promises of new public-sector jobs, a knee-jerk reaction to the demands of earlier protests. They wanted radical change: a new election, reform of the electoral law and its system of confessional representation, and the appointment of an independent electoral commission. In other words, they wanted to overturn the neoliberal and confessional form of democratic politics and the economic and political distributive order that undergirded it, an order created and enforced by the United States and its Iraqi allies after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

(The Tree of Protest. “And we do not dream of a life more than life, and that we die in our own way: Iraq, Iraq, and nothing but Iraq.”)

The demands of the protesters for a homeland and the conspicuous presence of the Iraqi flag in the iconography of the protests represented a call for a nonsectarian form of rule and for a state that guarantees their rights.3 Although the protest leaders did not clearly articulate a vision of a state, they evinced a rejection of the kind of distributive corporate state that had existed under the Ba’ath regime and pushed instead for a state that guarantees the conditions for the provision of care and social goods: jobs, electricity, health care, education, security, and a semblance of what some have called, using a stanza from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, “a dream of life, no more than life.”4 The protesters organized outside and against the politics of party, drawing on the support of labor, professional, and women’s organizations as they did on the support of tribal networks in the southern cities of Iraq. They deployed, according to sociologist Zahra Ali, a notion of “madaniyya,” a form of civicness that is post-sectarian.5

While the wave of protests did eventually recede, the factors that led to its eruption did not. Indeed, the underlying contradictions, conflicts, and power constellations that were behind the upsurge are still very much in place. They can be traced directly to the settlement cobbled together by the United States after invading the country and, even further, to the sanctions regime of the 1990s. While Iraq no longer commands the attention of the American media, the catastrophic effects of the invasion and subsequent occupation still define much of the current political scene.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE PROTESTS

The protesters demanded an end to an order created by the twinning of political power to privatization of state resources that was forged by what political economists Christopher Parker and Pete Moore have characterized as a war economy. Iraq’s war economy was born in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war, but it was transformed and sustained in the context of the United States’ long war (1991–2011) against Iraq.6 Three features of Iraq’s political economy are relevant to our understanding of the protesters’ demands for their rights and a homeland. The first is the erosion and dispersal to social, political, and military organizations of what they perceive as the state’s imperative to provide a measure of security, social rights, and employment; the second is the peculiar form of corruption and distributive politics of the post-2003 political order; and the third is the increasing precarity in employment and access to services created by the privatization of the public sector and the insecurity of life.

Most analyses of the current impasse in Iraqi politics and the protest movement against the government begin with the post-invasion destruction of the Iraqi centralized state, its various coercive and bureaucratic institutions, and the privatization of its public sector. This process, “state rebuilding in reverse,” entailed the disbanding of the army and the devolution of security and military functions, particularly after 2005, to an amalgam of US military forces, foreign contractors, and private militias of Iraqi allies of the United States.7 The de-Ba’athification of state institutions led to the economic and political disenfranchisement and criminalization of tens of thousands of Sunnis.8 It fueled an insurgency and a sectarian civil war in the predominantly Arab regions of Iraq, even as it empowered Shia parties who held control of the government. Paul Bremer, the chief executive officer of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the US governing body that oversaw the US “experiment” in Iraq and its reconstruction into a free market democracy, enacted Order 39, which permitted private and foreign ownership of Iraqi state-owned companies (excluding those of natural resources), allowed for total overseas remittances of profits, and imposed a flat tax of 15 percent, replacing a progressive taxation regime that had existed under the Ba’ath regime. By 2006, most state institutions had become arenas for competition between militarized political parties for the distribution of patronage and capital from income generated by public goods.

The post-invasion political and economic order, however, has a longer history, one that renders it challenging for the protesters to uproot. Iraqi state policies during the 1970s had followed what Isam al-Khafaji has called “state incubation of capitalism.” The government financed private capitalist enterprises, particularly in the construction industry. The pressures created by the costs of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) led the Iraqi government to expand the scope of this policy as it sold state-owned enterprises and land to private investors often connected to the Ba’ath leadership.9 It was, however, the US long war against Iraq that radically transformed and weakened the Iraqi state’s capacity to allocate capital, distribute social goods, and monopolize the means of coercion.