Stacy Czyzewski checks a machine that can manufacture complex aerospace components at Pioneer Service Inc. in Addison, Ill. Photographs by David Kasnic for The Wall Street Journal

THE NEW LEFT’S ‘NEW WORKING CLASS THEORY’ FROM 1968 HAS FINALLY SHOWN UP. Within three years, U.S. manufacturing workers with college degrees will outnumber those without

By Austen Hufford
Wall Street Journal

Dec. 9, 2019 – College-educated workers are taking over the American factory floor.

New manufacturing jobs that require more advanced skills are driving up the education level of factory workers who in past generations could get by without higher education, an analysis of federal data by The Wall Street Journal found.

Within the next three years, American manufacturers are, for the first time, on track to employ more college graduates than workers with a high-school education or less, part of a shift toward automation that has increased factory output, opened the door to more women and reduced prospects for lower-skilled workers.

“You used to do stuff by hand,” said Erik Hurst, an economics professor at the University of Chicago. “Now, we need workers who can manage the machines.”

U.S. manufacturers have added more than a million jobs since the recession, with the growth going to men and women with degrees, the Journal analysis found. Over the same time, manufacturers employed fewer people with at most a high-school diploma.

Employment in manufacturing jobs that require the most complex problem-solving skills, such as industrial engineers, grew 10% between 2012 and 2018; jobs requiring the least declined 3%, the Journal analysis found.

At Pioneer Service Inc., a machine shop in the Chicago suburb of Addison, Ill., employees in polo shirts and jeans, some with advanced degrees, code commands for robots making complex aerospace components on a hushed factory floor.

The Factory floor at Pioneer Service Inc.

That is a far cry from work at Pioneer in the 1990s, when employees had to wear company uniforms to shield their clothes from the grease flying off the 1960s-era manual machines used to make parts for heating-and-cooling systems. Pioneer employs 40 people, the same number in 2012. Only a handful of them are from the time when simple metal parts were machined by hand.

“Now, it’s more tech,” said Aneesa Muthana, Pioneer’s president and co-owner. “There has to be more skill.”

How can U.S. manufacturing workers be saved from the spread of robots? Join the conversation below.

Pioneer, which makes parts for Tesla vehicles and other luxury cars, had its highest revenue last year, Ms. Muthana said. The company’s success mirrors that of other manufacturers that survived the financial crisis.

Improvements in manufacturing have made American factories more productive than ever and, despite recent job growth, require a third fewer workers than the nearly 20 million employed in 1979, the industry’s labor peak.

Manufacturers added 56,000 jobs this year compared with 244,000 jobs through this time last year. Automation and competition from lower-wage countries have contributed to declining U.S. manufacturing jobs.

Specialized job requirements have narrowed the path to the middle class that factory work once afforded. The new, more advanced manufacturing jobs pay more but don’t help workers who stopped schooling early. More than 40% of manufacturing workers have a college degree, up from 22% in 1991.

“The workers that remain do much more cognitively demanding jobs,” said David Autor, an economics professor at MIT.

Looking ahead, investments in automation will continue to expand factory production with relatively fewer employees. Jobs that remain are expected to be increasingly filled by workers from colleges and technical schools, leaving high-school graduates and dropouts with fewer opportunities. Manufacturing workers laid-off in years past also will see fewer suitable openings.

“It’s just not the case that bringing back manufacturing will be good for low-and-middle-skill workers,” said Mr. Hurst, who along with colleagues have studied the increasing demands of factory workers.

Robot wranglers

Advantage Conveyor Inc. in Raleigh, N.C., spent more than $2 million over the past decade on machines that cut and bend metal and plastics for the conveyor belts it builds. New machines allow technicians to make more parts per worker compared with the era when employees fashioned parts by hand.

Some of the workers were reassigned; others were laid off. “All of that menial labor moved to skilled labor,” said Vann Webb, company president. “You virtually have to have a two-year degree to work in our shop.”

Joshua Dallons, 28 years old, had hoped to become a nuclear engineer, but juggling college classes and a 30-hour-a-week grocery job was too much.

“I had that crisis,” Mr. Dallons said. “Do I want to keep pursuing engineering, or do I want to pursue this sort of job where I can quickly get into the field and quickly start making money?”

He decided to complete a training program in welding and was hired by Advantage in 2014. Mr. Dallons now works at a computer, designing conveyor layouts. He makes more than $25 an hour.

Large manufacturers also are tilting their workforce toward higher skilled, educated employees. Around 70% of new hires this year at Honeywell International Inc. ’s aerospace business have at least an associate degree, said Darren Kosel, a Honeywell plant manager.

The company isn’t a place for factory workers who want to just punch in and punch out every day, Mr. Kosel said: “If you want to be one of those people, you won’t be successful here.”

At a Caterpillar Inc. plant in Clayton, N.C., investments in technology help a single shift of workers produce the small-wheel loaders that four years ago would have taken two shifts.

The Harley-Davidson Inc. ’s engine plant in Milwaukee has robotic arms to ferry motorcycle pieces, taking over the tough, repetitive work formerly done by employees, said plant manager Chuck Statz. The machines have made the workplace safer, he said, mirroring a national trend. In 2018, factory workers were hurt at half the rate as in 2003.

Harley-Davidson employed 2,200 unionized manufacturing workers in 2018, 400 fewer than in 2014, which the company attributed to several factors. Caterpillar reported that it had 10,000 unionized workers at the end of 2018, down from 15,000 in 2007 During the same period, the equipment maker’s revenue climbed 20%.

A recent search of all Caterpillar’s U.S. job posts show that more than four in five require or prefer a college degree. A majority of the company’s production jobs called for a degree or specialized skill.

High risk
Ms. Muthana faced a hard choice in 2012: whether to invest millions of dollars in automated manufacturing and training, or to retire and close Pioneer, the company her uncle started 30 years ago.

In the old days, the factory’s oil-sputtering machines were adjusted by two dozen workers wielding foot-long wrenches. At the end of their shifts, they were covered in grease and metal shavings.

Pioneer’s biggest clients, makers of heating and cooling systems, switched to cheaper foreign suppliers. Business fell 90% in one year. And the company owed more to suppliers than its outstanding orders could cover.

Ms. Muthana sat in the company parking lot on October 15, 2012, looking at the cars of her employees. “If I closed my doors, where were they going to go?” she recalled thinking.

Rather than close the plant, she hired Pioneer’s first salespeople. They found vehicle makers that needed complex metal components that Pioneer could make more profitably than the parts for heaters and air conditioners.

The problem was that Pioneer’s old machinery couldn’t make the parts fast enough. So Ms. Muthana sought machines that could be programmed to precisely cut and drill the intricate parts in a single operation.

Labor Lag
U.S. manufacturers have shifted investmentfrom labor to capital more quickly than thebroader economy.

Pioneer had little experience with such advanced equipment, Ms. Muthana said, but she persuaded suppliers to help her install and set up the machines, as well as train employees to use them.

“We put a lot of money on her floor at one time with minimal guarantees that we were going to get that money back,” said Dave Polito, owner of her main machine supplier. Ms. Muthana said she has now spent more than $6 million on new technology, largely for machines and software.

The machines can make one complex part every six minutes, compared with 45 minutes of work on multiple machines once needed to produce a single part. Learning how wasn’t easy for longtime Pioneer employees.

Fernando Delatorre, who operated the older machines at Pioneer for 14 years, struggled to memorize the codes used to program the new machines.

“I wasn’t into computer things, learning all these numbers,” said Mr. Delatorre. He earned $16.50 an hour when he left Pioneer in 2017 for a construction job that paid more.

For Ms. Muthana, losing or firing longtime employees was the toughest part of her factory’s transition. About 10 of the company’s 40 workers remained. Just one of them operates a special grinder that hasn’t been computerized.

“I saved those jobs, and I gave them the opportunity,” she said, “but then most of the team is no longer here anyway.”

On a recent morning, Pioneer workers inspected parts that the automated equipment had made on their own overnight. They took digital measurements to make sure the parts matched customer specifications. A screen overhead detailed how efficiently each machine was operating.

A yellow light on one machine caught the eye of technician Stacy Czyzewski. A cutting tool was due to be replaced. She opened the machine’s enclosure, which seals in the oil and metal scraps. Using a small Allen wrench, she popped out the worn part and replaced it.

She punched codes on the machine’s keypad from memory and marked the repair on her iPad. Ms. Czyzewski wiped her hands on a towel. Her black polo shirt, emblazoned with Pioneer’s logo, was spotless.

Ms. Czyzewski had previously worked five years cleaning equipment at an Altria Group Inc. chewing tobacco plant. When it closed in 2017, a grant helped Ms. Czyzewski pay for a four-month training program where she learned to operate the machines used at Pioneer.

In a room at the center of the Pioneer factory, Rachith Thipperi converts customer orders into 3-D blueprints that are used to program machines. He started work at Pioneer as an intern while studying for a master’s degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Mr. Thipperi saw a future in the modern American factory.

Rachith Thipperi, an engineer, creates 3-D blueprints to program machines that manufacture customer orders at Pioneer Service Inc.

“There are people who are stuck in old manufacturing,” he said, “but there is also this innovative and growth aspect of it.”

Production workers at Pioneer start at $14 an hour and rise to $27 an hour with experience. Before investing in modern machinery, worker pay started near minimum wage, which was $8.25 an hour around the time the company was transforming in 2010.

Inspirational inscriptions decorate the walls of the Pioneer factory. “The most dangerous words are we’ve always done it that way,” one said. The boss has lunch with her 40 employees each quarter. Half are women.

Ms. Muthana attends college career fairs to find workers with skills and a desire to learn. “I’m willing to give you the opportunities,” she said. “But if you’re not willing to change, and you’re not willing to get out of your comfort zone, there’s nothing I can do.”

Write to Austen Hufford at austen.hufford@wsj.com

October 2018:An exchange prompted by the essay 

The Precariat: Today’s Transformative Class? 

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Bill Fletcher
Taking a long view of precariousness as an inherent feature of capitalism can shed light on the contemporary debate on “the precariat.” Read

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Nancy Folbre
The focus on “the precariat” is useful but limited: the fight over distribution isn’t just between labor and capital. Read

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Azfar Khan
A universal basic income is key to delivering security and autonomy to people in a precarious world. Read

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Alexandra Köves
Beyond policies like a universal basic income, a transition to a equitable and sustainable society requires the redefinition of well-being, needs, and work itself. Read

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George Liodakis
There is no “precariat,” per se—the working class as-a-whole remains the necessary agent for transformation. Read

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Ronaldo Munck
Work in the Global South has always been precarious, but the resurgence of global labor organizing offers a way forward. Read

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William I. Robinson
The “precariat,” rather than a new class, is part of the global proletariat, on whose struggle with transnational capital our fate depends. Read

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Pritam Singh
A basic income alone is not transformative, but a feature of a broader ecosocialist vision of dismantling capitalism. Read

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Eva-Maria Swidler
Workers in the Global North have a lot to learn from the past struggles of workers in the Global South (as well as in their own countries). Read

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Alison Tate and Evelyn Astor
Labor unions must continue to play an important role in the fight for economic justice and against precariousness. Read

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Author’s Response
Guy Standing addresses points raised by the contributors to this roundtable. Read
 

By Guy Standing

October 2018

Black Youth Project 100 action to #DecriminalizeBlack (Photo Credit: Sarah Jane Rhee)

By Bernardine Dohrn

Praxis Center

“Those who kill their own children and discriminate daily against them because of the color of their skin; those who let the murderers of blacks remain free, protecting them, and furthermore punishing the black population because they demand their legitimate rights as free men—how can those who do this consider themselves guardians of freedom?”

Che Guevara, Before the United Nations, 12-11-1964

March 4, 2015 – In my lifetime young people rose up to challenge and change the world in Little Rock and Birmingham, in Soweto and Tiananmen, in Palestine and Chiapas. In the last decade we saw the rise of Arab Spring and Occupy, and now we are in the midst of vivid mass resistance to the police killing of unarmed Black men and women spurred by the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Now and historically, it is the youth who reject taken-for-granted injustices.[1] In this moment, young people are the social actors – the leadership, catalysts,  the activists, and the organizers – who seized and defined a continuing travesty of North American life: the police murder of Black lives. Rising up against the thickening layers of institutionalized white supremacy, young people are insisting that Black Lives Matter.

With their radical impulse to revolt, that spirit of hopefulness and possibility, the laser-like insight of adolescents into the hypocrisies of the adult world, propel youth to break the rules, resist together, and transcend the immoral status quo. Inspired by the courage and determination of Ferguson youth, young people across the nation walked out of schools, sat-in, died-in, blocked highways and bridges – becoming the fresh, searing forces for equality, racial justice, and dignity.

Youth were not unaware of the risks they were taking by challenging police violence. In fact, it is young people who were painfully and brutally aware of the police targeting of Black youth, and pervasive US institutionalized de-valuing of Black lives.

Though many young activists had already been challenging police violence and the criminalization of Black lives in their own communities, the harrowing, police stalking and shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown on August 9, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, became the spark that generated a fresh wave of youth uprisings. This new movement in the long struggle for racial justice brought young people together across the country to become more than the sum of their parts.

The activism of the Black Lives Matter movement not only illustrates the brilliance and clarity of young people, but also flies in the face of popular currency that children and youth are less competent, less thoughtful, less wise and more dangerous than adults. The continuing reality of young people as social actors stands in opposition to official policies of silencing, suppressing, expelling and punishing our youth, depriving them of an education and denying their creativity and right to be heard.

Think of young peoples’ loss of rights, for example, through truancy laws; school censorship of high school newspapers, email communication and graduation speeches; the banning of books; relentless harassment and violence against LGTBQ and trans youth; school locker searches and drug testing without reasonable suspicion or due process; school zero tolerance policies that include punishments, school suspensions and expulsions, gang terrorism profiling, stop and frisk, and the calling of police for minor misbehavior. Control, cameras, drug searches, testing, arrests, and school exclusion have replaced dignity.

Rights vs. protections and the myth of the “Superpredator”

Children and youth, in fact, are whole persons who bear human and constitutional rights. They are inevitably an active part of their time and place, their culture and community, their race, class, and ethnicity, and their extended family. Simultaneously, they may also be more vulnerable, more easily manipulated and used by adults, such that they must be, to the extent possible, protected, sheltered and insulated from serious harm, both from their own impulses, and adults who might prey upon them or use youth for their own purposes. This is why human rights activists, for example, advocate for children to be protected from the harshest consequences of war and hazardous labor and family violence.

Of course, young people are becoming-persons, not yet fully adults; but what kind of a person is a child? In considering children as social actors, this contradiction is worthy of continuing deliberation and nuance. How can society heed this paradox – rights versus protections – and tilt toward children as bearers of rights while taking the responsibility for providing youth with equal access, due process, Constitutional rights, economic rights, and human rights? Are youth not right to see the adult world as compromised, duplicitous, and worst of all—indifferent to the crimes and suffering around them? (Continued)

Children were acknowledged as Constitutional persons almost fifty years ago in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case of In re Gault.  Yet the with the subsequent repressive wave to restrict their active whole personhoods, U.S. courts and legislators have shrunken the Constitutional rights of children by constricting or eliminating their rights to speech and expression, association, action, education, privacy, health care, due process, equal protection, and their right to liberty (by depriving them of liberty). This has been done in the name of either protecting them and “saving” them from themselves, or by constructing some children as superpredators, fearful, larger- than-life monsters, wolf-packs and gangs out to rob, rape and even kill (white) adults. Consequently, specific populations of children are seen as dangerous and capable of destroying civilization.

The diabolical invention of the 1990s youth predator by law enforcement, academics, and the mass media resulted in the harsh criminalization of youth of color– subjecting them to arrests, incarceration, trials in adult criminal courts, and extreme sentencing. The profound echo of young Black men as “superpredator” would arise again with the Ferguson grand jury testimony of Officer Darren Wilson, who saw in Michael Brown someone enormous, looming up and becoming larger even after being stalked and shot by Wilson six times.

“It looked like a demon,” Wilson told the grand jury.

Fully 75% of youth who are locked up are confined for non-violent offenses. Racial and ethnic disparities are unconscionable, but the naked disproportion of who is arrested, beaten, and killed characterize the entire youth justice system.[2]

At its best, contemporary analysis of children and adolescents recognizes the dialectical nature of youth: being and becoming, categorically less culpable than adults, and with enhanced prospects for recovery, rehabilitation, and “attaining a mature understanding of [one’s] humanity.”[3]  Diminished culpability is not, however, the same as lesser competence or capacity.  Culpability is commonly misunderstood, and the current conversations about adolescent development research frequently becomes an imprecise discourse that easily collapses into language of lesser adolescent competence or moral action.

Military arsenal deployed against Ferguson protesters

The story of the Aug. 9, 2014 police killing of Michael Brown stayed in the news because the young people in Ferguson refused to leave the streets. And although the protests there and nationally was one of the broadest and most sustained radical coalitions in decades, the protesters themselves were largely young, black, queer, poor, working-class, secular, women and trans.

The young people of Ferguson did not back down in the face of a highly militarized small town police force armed with federally-funded Kevlar helmets, assault-friendly gas masks, combat gloves and knee pads, woodland Marine Pattern utility trousers, tactical body armor vests, some 120 to 180 rounds for each shooter, semiautomatic pistols attached to their thighs, disposable handcuff restraints hanging from their vests, close-quarter-battle receivers for their M4 carbine rifles and Advanced Combat Optical Gunsights[4].

There are scattered reports of stun grenade use in Ferguson, also known as flashbangs or flash grenades. This weapon of choice for American SWAT teams (and Israeli soldiers) originated within British Special Forces more than four decades ago. Ostensibly less than lethal, stun grenades have been known to kill or severely injure numerous victims, and the device was recently in the news for burning a 19-month-old baby in Georgia, resulting in a coma, during one of the thousands of domestic police raids this year. They are designed to temporarily blind and deafen, thanks to a shrapnel-free casing that is only supposed to emit light and sound upon explosion

The grenade launchers used against unarmed youth in Ferguson included the ARWEN 37, which is capable of discharging 37mm tear gas canisters or wooden bullet projectiles. The police used tear gas unsparingly in Ferguson. The Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993 actually bans the gas as a permissible means of warfare. Then again, it is allowed for domestic riot control, and nations like Turkey, Bahrain, Israel and the United States who have exploited the loophole to great avail. Tear gas sucks out your organs, hogs your oxygen and burns you inside and out. Interim blindness and extended coughing fits are common, as well as an overall sense that you are dying or dead. These are police weapons against an unarmed, Black, civilian, domestic population.

The use of “pepper balls” is lethal; the Boston Police Department banned them after a young woman was killed by one which passed right through her eye and skull to the brain. She was guilty of being present in a rowdy crowd after a Red Sox/Yankees game in which the former won. The same goes for the rubber bullets, wooden bullet projectiles, and beanbag projectiles on view with the police in Ferguson

Contemplate the Ferguson police department’s possession of the BEARCAT G3, the SWAT team’s version of the military’s Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle, or its MRAP All Terrain Vehicle. This armored tank was donated to the Ferguson police by the US Department of Homeland Security.  There are no known mines or IEDs in Ferguson, an ambush is unlikely, so the decision of the St. Louis County Police Department to roll out (or even own) one of these tanks is apparently the contemporary version of fire hoses and dogs.

K-9 dogs. Yes, the 2014 St. Louis County and Ferguson Police Departments also used growling German shepherds to threaten demonstrators. In addition, these police forces had access to the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), which emits a sound so pain-inducing that is causes bleeding from the ears. LRADs were also on display (though not used) during the Chicago anti-NATO demonstrations in 2011. On top of all this, the police department of Ferguson – a police force that is 94% white, in a town that is 67% Black – not only possessed an armored personnel carrier and weapon loads to intimidate demonstrators, carried out surveillance of the protesters from an MD Helicopter 500 Series in the sky above Ferguson.

Vibrant transformation of the possible

The fierce young, unarmed and highly disciplined young people who dared to stand up against police violence are to thank for revealing to the US public that the war-making hardware, paid for by our tax dollars, is coming home to police forces for use against the Black, Latino, indigenous communities and to patrol US borders.

This military-grade weaponry of the police in Ferguson was not about riot control during the long months leading up to the grand jury verdict in the murder of Michael Brown. It was the arsenal of white supremacy and racial oppression.

In the face of this violent intimidation, young people continued to peacefully demonstrate in Ferguson and to document their struggle at websites like Ferguson Action and using Twitter hashtags like #SHUTITDOWN.

Created in the crucible of Black Lives Matter is a new generation of young, African American organizers and activists, with experience in strategy development, tactics, decision-making under pressure, coalition building, and clarity about long range, radical goals, about their vision. They are savvy and wise, filled with love and caring for each other and for everyone who has suffered the terror of police violence: youth, their families and loved ones, allied people of color, trans and LGBTQ youth, native and Palestinian people, victims of police violence and whole communities.

Thus the Chicago struggle for city reparations for those who suffered police torture and subsequent decades on death row or juvenile life without parole before they were exonerated utilizes art, performance, persistence and unlikely allies. New York activists agitate for divestment from corporation that construct and operative for-profit prisons. There are movements to end solitary confinement from California to Rikers Island, and renewed efforts to commemorate and open old cases of lynchings across the nation.  The struggle for dignity and justice continues in immigrant rights struggles and the fierce, elegant courage of the youth and dreamers who have seamlessly embraced their queerness, their multiple heritages, and their human rights.

All this indicates a vibrant transformation of the possible. Police torture and killing of African Americans is visible, no longer background normal, as Black youth resist being branded as criminals at birth. Their resistance is communal, shared, and collective.

Can we hold the moment? Do we have the knowledge that young people are capable of seeing and seizing what adults cannot imagine?  In the uncertainty and complexity of civil strife and disciplined rebellion, shall we see children and young people capable of being agents of their own liberation?

[1]   Sources for the Ferguson story include: Darryl Pinckney, Ferguson and Resistance Against the Black Holocaust, © 2015 The New York Review of Books, Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate;Chris Crass, SpeakOut | Op-Ed; Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, Ferguson Exposes the Reality of Militarized, Racist Policing, Popular Resistance | News Analysis; Adeshina Emmanuel, Ferguson Case Highlights Need for National Data on Police Shootings, The Chicago Reporter .

[2]  See the website of the W. Haywood Burns Institute, at www.burnsinstitute.org for racial and ethnic disparities at every stage of the youth justice system.

[3] See the trilogy of U.S. Supreme Court cases and the accompanying Amicus briefs: Roper v. Simmons (2005) , Graham  v. Florida (2010), and Miller v. Alabama (2012).

[4] See Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (2013) for this research, photos, and the following details of Ferguson police weaponry.

Bernardine Dohrn is the founder and former director of the Children and Family Justice Center at the Bluhm Legal Clinic of Northwestern Law School. She has advocated for fair sentencing for children, for applying international human rights standards here at home, and for ending the over incarceration of children of color. 

Students in Milan took to the streets to protest against Italian austerity, October, 4 2013. (Photo via Shutterstock)

Reality always has this power to surprise. It surprises you with an answer that it gives to questions never asked – and which are most tempting. A great stimulus to life is there, in the capacity to divine possible unasked questions.

— Eduardo Galeano

By Henry Giroux

Truthout, July 2, 2014

Neoliberalism’s Assault on Democracy

Fred Jameson has argued that “that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” He goes on to say that “We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world” (Jameson 2003).

One way of understanding Jameson’s comment is that within the ideological and affective spaces in which the neoliberal subject is produced and market-driven ideologies are normalized, there are new waves of resistance, especially among young people, who are insisting that casino capitalism is driven by a kind of mad violence and form of self-sabotage, and that if it does not come to an end, what we will experience, in all probability, is the destruction of human life and the planet itself.

Certainly, more recent scientific reports on the threat of ecological disaster from researchers at the University of Washington, NASA, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reinforce this dystopian possibility. [1]

As the latest stage of predatory capitalism, neoliberalism is part of a broader economic and political project of restoring class power and consolidating the rapid concentration of capital, particularly financial capital (Giroux 2008; 2014). As a political project, it includes “the deregulation of finance, privatization of public services, elimination and curtailment of social welfare programs, open attacks on unions, and routine violations of labor laws” (Yates 2013). As an ideology, it casts all dimensions of life in terms of market rationality, construes profit-making as the arbiter and essence of democracy, consuming as the only operable form of citizenship, and upholds the irrational belief that the market can both solve all problems and serve as a model for structuring all social relations. As a mode of governance, it produces identities, subjects, and ways of life driven by a survival-of-the fittest ethic, grounded in the idea of the free, possessive individual, and committed to the right of ruling groups and institutions to exercise power removed from matters of ethics and social costs. As a policy and political project, it is wedded to the privatization of public services, the dismantling of the connection of private issues and public problems, the selling off of state functions, liberalization of trade in goods and capital investment, the eradication of government regulation of financial institutions and corporations, the destruction of the welfare state and unions, and the endless marketization and commodification of society.

Neoliberalism has put an enormous effort into creating a commanding cultural apparatus and public pedagogy in which individuals can only view themselves as consumers, embrace freedom as the right to participate in the market, and supplant issues of social responsibility for an unchecked embrace of individualism and the belief that all social relation be judged according to how they further one’s individual needs and self-interests. Matters of mutual caring, respect, and compassion for the other have given way to the limiting orbits of privatization and unrestrained self-interest, just as it has become increasingly difficult to translate private troubles into larger social, economic, and political considerations. As the democratic public spheres of civil society have atrophied under the onslaught of neoliberal regimes of austerity, the social contract has been either greatly weakened or replaced by savage forms of casino capitalism, a culture of fear, and the increasing use of state violence. One consequence is that it has become more difficult for people to debate and question neoliberal hegemony and the widespread misery it produces for young people, the poor, middle class, workers, and other segments of society — now considered disposable under neoliberal regimes which are governed by a survival-of-the fittest ethos, largely imposed by the ruling economic and political elite. That they are unable to make their voices heard and lack any viable representation in the process makes clear the degree to which young people and others are suffering under a democratic deficit, producing what Chantal Mouffe calls “a profound dissatisfaction with a number of existing societies” under the reign of neoliberal capitalism (Mouffe 2013:119). This is one reason why so many youth, along with workers, the unemployed, and students, have been taking to the streets in Greece, Mexico, Egypt, the United States, and England.

The Rise of Disposable Youth

What is particularly distinctive about the current historical conjuncture is the way in which young people, particularly low-income and poor minority youth across the globe, have been increasingly denied any place in an already weakened social order and the degree to which they are no longer seen as central to how a number of countries across the globe define their future.

The plight of youth as disposable populations is evident in the fact that millions of them in countries such as England, Greece, and the United States have been unemployed and denied long term benefits. The unemployment rate for young people in many countries such as Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Greece hovers between 40 and 50 per cent. To make matters worse, those with college degrees either cannot find work or are working at low-skill jobs that pay paltry wages. In the United States, young adjunct faculty constitute one of the fastest growing populations on food stamps. Suffering under huge debts, a jobs crisis, state violence, a growing surveillance state, and the prospect that they would inherit a standard of living far below that enjoyed by their parents, many young people have exhibited a rage that seems to deepen their resignation, despair, and withdrawal from the political arena.

This is the first generation, as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues, in which the “plight of the outcast may stretch to embrace a whole generation.” (Bauman 2012a; 2012b; 2012c) He rightly insists that today’s youth have been “cast in a condition of liminal drift, with no way of knowing whether it is transitory or permanent” (Bauman 2004:76). Youth no longer occupy the hope of a privileged place that was offered to previous generations. They now inhabit a neoliberal notion of temporality marked by a loss of faith in progress along with the emergence of apocalyptic narratives in which the future appears indeterminate, bleak, and insecure. Heightened expectations and progressive visions pale and are smashed next to the normalization of market-driven government policies that wipe out pensions, eliminate quality health care, raise college tuition, and produce a harsh world of joblessness, while giving millions to banks and the military. Students, in particular, found themselves in a world in which unrealized aspirations have been replaced by dashed hopes and a world of onerous debt (Fraser 2013; On the history of debt, see Graeber 2012).

The Revival of the Radical Imagination

Within the various regimes of neoliberalism that have emerged particularly in North since the late 1970s, the ethical grammars that drew attention to the violence and suffering withered or, as in the United States, seemed to disappear altogether, while dispossessed youth continued to lose their dignity, bodies, and material goods to the machineries of disposability. The fear of losing everything, the horror of an engulfing and crippling precarity, the quest to merely survive, the rise of the punishing state and police violence, along with the impending reality of social and civil death, became a way of life for the 99 percent in the United States and other countries. Under such circumstances, youth were no longer the place where society reveals its dreams, but increasingly hid its nightmares. Against the ravaging policies of austerity and disposability, “zones of abandonment appeared in which the domestic machinery of violence, suffering, cruelty, and punishment replaced the values of compassion, social responsibility, and civic courage” (Biehl 2005:2).

In opposition to such conditions, a belief in the power of collective resistance and politics emerged once again in 2010, as global youth protests embraced the possibility of deepening and expanding democracy, rather than rejecting it. Such movements produced a new understanding of politics based on horizontal forms of collaboration and political participation. In doing so, they resurrected revitalized and much needed questions about class power, inequality, financial corruption, and the shredding of the democratic process. They also explored as well as what it meant to create new communities of mutual support, democratic modes of exchange and governance, and public spheres in which critical dialogue and exchanges could take place (For an excellent analysis on neoliberal-induced financial corruption, see Anderson 2004).

A wave of youth protests starting in 2010 in Tunisia, and spreading across the globe to the United States and Europe, eventually posed a direct challenge to neoliberal modes of domination and the corruption of politics, if not democracy itself (Hardt & Negri 2012). The legitimating, debilitating, and depoliticizing notion that politics could only be challenged within established methods of reform and existing relations of power was rejected outright by students and other young people across the globe. For a couple of years, young people transformed basic assumptions about what politics is and how the radical imagination could be mobilized to challenge the basic beliefs of neoliberalism and other modes of authoritarianism. They also challenged dominant discourses ranging from deficit reduction and taxing the poor to important issues that included poverty, joblessness, the growing unmanageable levels of student debt, and the massive spread of corporate corruption. As Jonathan Schell argued, youth across the globe were enormously successfully in unleashing “a new spirit of action”, an expression of outrage fueled less by policy demands than by a cry of collective moral and political indignation whose message was

‘Enough!’ to a corrupt political, economic and media establishment that hijacked the world’s wealth for itself… sabotaging the rule of law, waging interminable savage and futile wars, plundering the world’s finite resources, and lying about all this to the public [while] threatening Earth’s life forms into the bargain. (Schell 2011)

Yet, some theorists have recently argued that little has changed since 2011, in spite of this expression of collective rage and accompanying demonstrations by youth groups across the globe.

The Collapse or Reconfiguration of Youthful Protests?

Costas Lapavitsas and Alex Politaki, writing in The Guardian, argue that as the “economic and social disaster unfolded in 2012 and 2013”, youth in Greece, France, Portugal, and Spain have largely been absent from “politics, social movements and even from the spontaneous social networks that have dealt with the worst of the catastrophe” (Lapavitsas & Politaki 2014). Yet, at the same time, they insist that more and more young people have been “attracted to nihilistic ends of the political spectrum, including varieties of anarchism and fascism” (Lapavitsas & Politaki 2014). This indicates that young people have hardly been absent from politics. On the contrary, those youth moving to the right are being mobilized around needs that simply promise the swindle of fulfillment. This does not suggest youth are becoming invisible. On the contrary, the move on the part of students and others to the right implies that the economic crisis has not been matched by a crisis of ideas, one that would propel young people towards left political parties or social formations that effectively articulate a critical understanding of the present economic and political crisis.  Missing here is also a strategy to create and sustain a radical democratic political movement that avoids cooptation of the prevailing economic and political systems of oppression now dominating the United States, Greece, Turkey, Portugal, France, and England, among other countries.

This critique of youthful protesters as a suspect generation is repeated in greater detail by Andrew R. Myers in Student Pulse (Myers 2012). He argues that deteriorating economic and educational conditions for youth all over Europe have created not only a profound sense of political pessimism among young people, but also a dangerous, if not cynical, distrust towards established politics. Regrettably, Myers seems less concerned about the conditions that have written young people out of jobs, a decent education, imposed a massive debt on them, and offers up a future of despair and dashed hopes than the alleged unfortunate willingness of young people to turn their back on traditional parties. Myers argues rightly that globalization is the enemy of young people and is undermining democracy, but he wrongly insists that traditional social democratic parties are the only vehicles and hope left for real reform. As such, Myers argues that youth who exhibit distrust towards established governments and call for the construction of another world symbolize political defeat, if not cynicism itself. Unfortunately, with his lament about how little youth are protesting today and about their lack of engagement in the traditional forms of politics, he endorses, in the end, a defense of those left/liberal parties that embrace social democracy and the new labor policies of centrist-left coalitions. His rebuke borders on bad faith, given his criticism of young people for not engaging in electoral politics and joining with unions, both of which, for many youth, rightfully represent elements of a reformist politics they reject.

It is ironic that both of these critiques of the alleged passivity of youth and the failure of their politics have nothing to say about the generations of adults that failed these young people — that is, what disappears in these narratives is the fact that an older generation accepted the “realization that one generation no longer holds out a hand to the next” (Knott 2011:ix). What is lacking here is any critical sense regarding the historical conditions and dismal lack of political and moral responsibility of an adult generation who shamefully bought into and reproduced, at least since the 1970s, governments and social orders wedded to war, greed, political corruption, xenophobia, and willing acceptance of the dictates of a ruthless form of neoliberal globalization.

In fact, what was distinctive about the protesting youth across the globe was their rejection to the injustices of neoliberalism and their attempts to redefine the meaning of politics and democracy, while fashioning new forms of revolt (Hardt & Negri 2012; Graeber 2013). Among their many criticisms, youthful protesters argued vehemently that traditional social democratic, left, and liberal parties suffered from an “extremism of the center” that made them complicitous with the corporate and ruling political elites, resulting in their embrace of the inequities of a form of casino capitalism which assumed that the market should govern the entirety of social life, not just the economic realm (Hardt & Negri 2012:88).

Resurrecting the Radical Imagination

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have argued that what united the Occupy Movement in the US with other movements globally was their emphasis on direct action and their rejection of modernist structures of representation and politics, including support for elections and traditional political parties, which they considered corrupt. As such, they did not reject the project of democracy, but asked where it had gone and how they could “engage with it again” and win back “the political power of the citizen worker” (Hardt & Negri 2012:29). Commenting on the radical nature of such youth protests, David Graeber argues that the potential of the new youth movements, if not their threat to both conservatives and liberals alike, is that they were more “willing to embrace positions more radical than anything seen, on a mass scale” in a number of countries, particularly “their explicit appeal to class politics, a complete reconstruction of the existing political system, [and] a call (for many at least) not just to reform capitalism but to begin dismantling it entirely” (Graeber 2013:69-70).

What recent critics of the current state of  youth protests miss is that the real issue is not whether the occupy movements throughout Europe and the US have petered out, but rather, what have we learned from them, how have they been transformed, and what are we going to do about it? More specifically, what can be done to revitalize these rebellions into an international movement capable of effecting real change? Rather than claiming that youth have failed protesting the politics of austerity, neoliberal economies of stagnation, and the corrupt rule of finance capital, it is more important to recognize the ways in which such actions are undermined by the continued struggle for survival, and the threat and reality of state violence. The great “crime” of the youthful protesters is that they have embraced the utopian notion that there is an alternative to capitalism and, in doing so, are fighting back against a systemic war on the radical imagination, the belief that everything is for consumption, and that the only value that matters is exchange value.

The protesters in various countries have not failed. On the contrary, they realize that they need more time to fully develop the visions, strategies, cultural apparatuses, infrastructures, organizations, and alliances necessary to more fully realize their attempts to replace the older, corrupt social orders with new ones that are not simply democratic, but have the support of the people who inhabit them. Rather than disappearing, many protesters have focused on more specific struggles, such as getting universities to disinvest in coal industries, fighting the rise of student debt, organizing against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, protesting austerity cuts, creating free social services for the poor and excluded, and developing educational spaces that can provide the formative culture necessary for creating the needs, identities, and modes of agency capable of democratic relations (Zeese 2013; Taaffe 2013; Brahinsky 2014). At the same time, they are participating in everyday struggles that, as Thomas Piketty points out in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, make clear that free-market capitalism is not only responsible for “terrifying” inequalities in both wealth and income, but also produces anti-democratic oligarchies (Piketty 2014:571). And it is precisely through various attempts to create spaces in which democratic culture can be cultivated that the radical imagination can be liberated from the machinery of social and political death produced by casino capitalism. What was once considered impossible becomes possible through the development of worldwide youth protests that speak to a future that is being imagined, but waiting to be brought to fruition.

Challenges for Dark Times

New rights, demands, visions, and modes of political representation dedicated to the public and social good need time and involve long-term commitments to develop. How the construction of alternative forms of power, strategies, and organization will be developed that can both challenge established powers and become more fully realized is not clear. Needless to say, while youth movements around the globe have and are providing what Hardt and Negri call “a scaffolding” in preparation for an unforeseen event that would provide the ground  for a radical social break out of which a new society can be built, there is much to be done in preparation for such an event (Hardt & Negri:103). The challenge young protesters face centers on developing visions, tactics, and strong organizations that enable strategies for change that become more than ephemeral protests reduced to “signs without organization”, incapable of making a real difference (Aronowitz 2014).

Youth in various countries need to cultivate a radical imagination capable of providing alternatives to capitalism that will offer a challenge not only to neoliberalism and its destructive austerity policies, but also a vision that speaks to people’s needs for a radical democracy, one that is capable of convincing diverse elements of a broader public that change is possible, and that existing systems of globalization and casino capitalism can be overcome. While the crisis of financial capital, among other dominant modes of oppression, must be challenged, there is also the urgent need for youth protesters to articulate “the broader dimensions of alienation beyond income disparity” (Aronowitz 2011). Issues of existential despair, meaninglessness, hopelessness, and a retreat into the orbits of privatization must be addressed if subjectivities and modes of agency are to be mobilized, capable of engaging in the long struggle for a radical democracy. Moreover, as long as these protest groups are fragmented, no significant change will take place. Planning effective strategies and building sustainable organizations will not work as long as there are divisions around authority, race, gender, class, sexuality, and identity. When these divisions function so as to democratize all demands and fail to provide some of democratic leadership, politics dissolves into a jumble of competing discourses and power becomes pathologized. As Sarah Jaffe points out,

The paradox of Occupy is that many of the things that made it succeed also made it splinter. The attraction to a “leaderless” movement was palpable, and the lack of demands made it possible for anyone to join in as long as they agreed with the basic premise that a tiny elite has too much power. Yet the idea of leaderlessness, as so many have written, masks the ways power continues to operate, and the lack of demands wound up as a refusal, oftentimes, to deal at all with existing systems. (Jaffe 2014)

Alliances among different groups, especially with workers and labor unions, must take place across national boundaries, motivated by a comprehensive understanding of global politics and its mechanics of power, ideology, corporate sovereignty, and its devastating effects on people’s lives, and the reality and ideal of a radical democracy and more just world. The possibility for such alliances, unity, and comprehensive understanding of politics among the youth of the world is greater than ever before, given the new technologies and the growing consciousness that power is now global and has generated a need for new modes of politics (Epstein 2014:41-44; Aronowitz 2014a; Aronowitz 2014b). It is time for authentic rage to transform itself into an international movement for the creation of a genuinely democratic formative culture and an effective strategy for social, political, and economic change.

Notes:

[1] See, for instance, the 5th Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. See also, the Obama Administration’s publication of the third US National Climate Assessment, which provides a comprehensive and dire scientific assessment of generated of climate change, focusing on its effects on the US economy, as well as on various regions across the United States.

References:

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This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

Henry A. Giroux

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His most recent books include: Youth in Revolt: Reclaiming a Democratic Future (Paradigm 2013), America’s Educational Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013) Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket Press, 2014), and The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America’s Disimagination Machine (City Lights, 2014). The Toronto Star named Henry Giroux one of the twelve Canadians changing the way we think! Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s Board of Directors. His web site is www.henryagiroux.com.

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Henry A. Giroux (Screengrab via Disposable Life / Vimeo)"The commanding institutions of society in many countries, including the United States, are now in the hands of powerful corporate interests, the financial elite and right-wing bigots whose strangulating control over politics renders democracy corrupt and dysfunctional," says Henry A. Giroux.

To read more articles by C. J. Polychroniou, Henry A. Giroux and other authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here.

C. J. Polychroniou, for Truthout: It is widely believed that the advanced liberal societies are suffering a crisis of democracy, a view you share wholeheartedly, although the empirical research, with its positivist bias, tends to be more cautious. In what ways is there less democracy today in places like the United States than there was, say, 20 or 30 years ago?

Henry A. Giroux: What we have seen in the United States and a number of other countries since the 1970s is the emergence of a savage form of free market fundamentalism, often called neoliberalism, in which there is not only a deep distrust of public values, public goods and public institutions but the embrace of a market ideology that accelerates the power of the financial elite and big business while gutting those formative cultures and institutions necessary for a democracy to survive.

"Neoliberal societies, in general, are in a state of war – a war waged by the financial and political elite against youth, low-income groups, the elderly, poor minorities of color, the unemployed, immigrants and others now considered disposable."

The commanding institutions of society in many countries, including the United States, are now in the hands of powerful corporate interests, the financial elite and right-wing bigots whose strangulating control over politics renders democracy corrupt and dysfunctional. Of course, what is unique about the United States is that the social contract and social wage are subject to a powerful assault by the right-wing politicians and anti-public intellectuals from both political parties. Those public spheres and institutions that support social provisions, the public good and keep public value alive are under sustained attack. Such attacks have not only produced a range of policies that have expanded the misery, suffering and hardships of millions of people, but have also put into place a growing culture of cruelty in which those who suffer the misfortunes of poverty, unemployment, low skill jobs, homelessness and other social problems are the object of both humiliation and scorn.

Neoliberal societies, in general, are in a state of war – a war waged by the financial and political elite against youth, low-income groups, the elderly, poor minorities of color, the unemployed, immigrants and others now considered disposable. Liberty and freedom are now reduced to fodder for inane commercials or empty slogans used to equate capitalism with democracy. At the same time, liberty and civil rights are being dismantled while state violence and institutional racism is now spreading throughout the culture like wildfire, especially with regards to police harassment of young black and brown youth. A persistent racism can also be seen in the attack on voting rights laws, the mass incarceration of African-American males, and the overt racism that has become prominent among right-wing Republicans and Tea Party types, most of which is aimed at President Obama.

At the same time, women’s reproductive rights are under assault and there is an ongoing attack on immigrants. Education at all levels is being defunded and defined as a site of training rather than as a site of critical thought, dialogue and critical pedagogy. In addition, democracy has withered under the emergence of a national security and permanent warfare state. This is evident not only in endless wars abroad, but also in the passing of a series of laws such as the Patriot Act, the Military Commission Act, the National Defense Authorization Act, and many others laws that shred due process and give the executive branch the right to hold prisoners indefinitely without charge or a trial, authorize a presidential kill list and conduct warrantless wiretaps. Of course, both [former President George W.] Bush and Obama claimed the right to kill any citizens considered to be a terrorist or who have come to the aid of terrorism. In addition, targeted assassinations are now carried out by drones that are more and more killing innocent children, adults and bystanders.

Another index of America’s slide into barbarism and authoritarianism is the rise of the racial punishing state with its school-to prison pipeline, criminalization of a range of social problems, a massive incarceration system, militarization of local police forces and its use of ongoing state violence against youthful dissenters. The prison has now become the model for a type of punishment creep that has impacted upon public schools where young children are arrested for violating something as trivial as doodling on a desk or violating a dress code. Under the dictates of the punishing state, incarceration has become the default solution for every social problem, regardless of how minor it may be. Discordant interactions between teacher and student, however petty, are not treated as a criminal offense. The long arm of punishment creep is also evident in a number of social services where poor people are put under constant surveillance and punished for minor infractions. It is also manifest in the militarization of everyday life with its endless celebration of military, police and religious institutions, all of which are held in high esteem by the American public, in spite of their undeniably authoritarian nature.

"The US has launched an attack not only on the practice of justice and democracy itself, but on the very idea of justice and democracy."

As Edward Snowden made clear, the hidden registers of authoritarianism have come to light in a trove of exposed NSA documents which affirm that the US has become a national security-surveillance state illegally gathering massive amounts of information from diverse sources on citizens who are not guilty of any crimes. To justify such lawlessness, the American public is told that the rendering moot of civil liberties is justified in the name of security and defense against potential terrorists and other threats. In reality, what is being defended is the security of the state and the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of the controlling political and corporate elites.

The real threat, in this case, is the American people and the possibility of their outrage and potential action against such dangerous Orwellian modes of surveillance. What is at risk and must be prevented at all costs is the possibility of dominant power and its machinery of civil and social death from becoming visible. There is also the shameful exercise under Bush, and to a lesser degree under Obama, of state sanctioned torture coupled with a refusal on the part of the government to prosecute those CIA agents and others who willfully engaged in systemic abuses that constitute war crimes. What this list amounts to is the undeniable fact that in the last 40 years, the US has launched an attack not only on the practice of justice and democracy itself, but on the very idea of justice and democracy.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the realm of politics. Money now drives politics in the United States and a number of other countries. Congress and both major political parties have sold themselves to corporate power. Campaigns are largely financed by the financial elite, such as the right wing Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, major defense corporations such as Lockheed Martin, and major financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs. As a recent Princeton University report pointed out, policy in Washington, DC has nothing to do with the wishes of the people but is almost completely determined by the wealthy, big corporations and a corrupt class of bankers and hedge fund managers made even easier thanks to Citizens United and a number of other laws being enacted by a conservative Supreme Court majority. Hence, it should come as no surprise that Princeton University researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page came to the conclusion that that the United States is basically an oligarchy where power is wielded by a small number of elites.

In other words, you do not think we have an existential crisis of democracy, the result of an economic crisis, with unforeseen and unintended consequences, but an actual corrosion of democracy, with calculated effects? Is this correct?

I think we have both. Not only has democracy been undermined and transformed into a form of authoritarianism unique to the 21st century, but there is also an existential crisis that is evident in the despair, depoliticization and crisis of subjectivity that has overtaken much of the population, particularly since 9/11 and the economic crisis of 2007. The economic crisis is not matched by a crisis of ideas and many people have surrendered to a neoliberal ideology that limits their sense of agency by defining them primarily as consumers, subjects them to a pervasive culture of fear, blames them for problems that are not of their doing, and leads them to believe that violence is the only mediating force available to them, just the pleasure quotient is colonized and leads people to assume that the spectacle of violence is the only way in which they can feel anything anymore. The existential crisis is further intensified in the brutal and degrading manner in which those marginalized by poverty, joblessness, and other constructed forms of misery are demeaned and humiliated in the dominant discourse of conservatives and other right-wing fundamentalists. Despair now disavows politics and turns into a kind of sadomasochistic knot seeking a kind of revenge on those deemed disposable, while demeaning those who thrive in such an emotional wasteland.

"Self-interest has become more important than the general interest and common good."

How else to interpret polls that show that a majority of Americans support the death penalty, government surveillance, drone warfare, the prison-industrial complex and zero tolerance policies that punish children. Trust, honor, intimacy, compassion and caring for others are now viewed as liabilities, just as self-interest has become more important than the general interest and common good. Selfishness, self-interest and an unchecked celebration of individualism have become, as Joseph E. Stiglitz has argued, "the ultimate form of selflessness." One consequence of neoliberalism is that it makes a virtue of producing a collective existential crisis, a crisis of agency and subjectivity, one that saps democracy of its vitality. There is nothing about this crisis that suggests it is unrelated to the internal working of casino capitalism. The economic crisis intensified its worse dimensions, but the source of the crisis lies in the roots of neoliberalism, particularly since its inception since the 1970s when social democracy proved unable to curb the crisis of capitalism and economics became the driving force of politics.

In your writings, you refer frequently to the specter of authoritarianism. Are you envisioning Western liberal democracies turning to authoritarian-style capitalism as in China, Russia, Singapore and Malaysia, to "friendly fascism" or to oligarchic democracy?

Each country will develop its own form of authoritarianism rooted in the historical, pedagogical and cultural traditions best suited for it to reproduce itself. In the US, there will be an increase in military-style repression to deal with the inevitable economic, ecological, political crisis that will intensify under the new authoritarianism. In this instance, the appeal will largely be to security, reinforced by a culture of fear and an intensified appeal to nationalism. At the same time, this "hard war" against the American people will be supplemented by a "soft war" produced with the aid of the new electronic technologies of surveillance and control, but there will also be a full-fledged effort through the use of the pedagogical practices of various cultural apparatuses, extending from the schools and older forms of media, on the one hand, to the new media and digital modes of communication, on the other, to produce elements of the authoritarian personality while crushing as much as possible any form of collective dissent and struggle. State sovereignty has been replaced by corporate sovereignty and this constitutes what might be called a new form of totalitarianism that Michael Halberstam once stated, "haunts the modern ideal of political emancipation."

"State sovereignty has been replaced by corporate sovereignty and this constitutes what might be called a new form of totalitarianism."

As Chris Hedges has argued, "There is no national institution left that can accurately be described as democratic." What is unique about this form of authoritarianism is that it is driven by a criminal class of powerful financial and political elites who refuse to make political concessions. The new elites have no allegiances to nation-states and don’t care about the damage they do to workers, the environment or the rest of humanity. They are unhinged sociopaths, far removed from what the Occupy Movement called the 99%. They are the new, gated class who float above national boundaries, laws and forms of regulation. They are a global elite whose task is to transform all nation-states into instruments to enrich their wealth and power. The new authoritarianism is not just tantamount to a crisis of democracy; it is also about the limits now being placed on the very meaning of politics and the erasure of those institutions capable of producing critical, engaged and socially responsible agents.

The role of neoliberalism in reducing democracy and destroying public values is an undeniable fact as the economics of neoliberal capitalism seek to establish the supremacy of corporate and market values over all political and social values. Many of your books represent a systematic attack on the neoliberal project. Do you treat neoliberalism as a policy paradigm congruent with a certain stage in the evolution of capitalism or as a particular philosophy of capitalism?

Neoliberalism is both an updated and more ruthless stage in predatory capitalism and its search for the consolidations of class power globally, buttressed by the free market fundamentalism made famous by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, without any regard for the social contract. As Robert McChesney has argued, it is classical liberalism with the gloves off or shall we say liberalism without the guilt – a more predatory form of market fundamentalism that is as ruthless as it is orthodox in its disregard for democracy.

The old liberalism believed in social provisions and partly pressed the claims for social and economic justice. Neoliberalism considers the discourse of equality, justice and democracy quaint, if not dangerous, and must be either trivialized, turned into its Orwellian opposite or eviscerated from public life. It certainly represents more than an intensification of classical liberalism and in that sense it represents a confluence, a historical conjuncture in which the most ruthless elements of capitalism have come together to create something new and more predatory, amplified by the financialization of capital and the development of a mode of corporate sovereignty that takes no prisoners.

Some years ago, in an attempt to analyze the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, you invented the term "the politics of disposability." Do you consider "disposability" to be a systemic element of global neoliberal capitalism?

Neoliberalism’s war against the social state has produced new forms of collateral damage. As security nets are destroyed and social bonds undermined, casino capitalism relies on a version of social Darwinism to both punish its citizens and legitimate its politics of exclusion [and] violence, and convince people that the new normal is a constant state of fear, insecurity and precarity. By individualizing the social, all social problems and their effects are coded as individual character flaws, a lack of individual responsibility, and often a form of pathology. Life is now a war zone and as such the number of people considered disposable has grown exponentially and this includes low income whites, poor minorities, immigrants, the unemployed, the homeless and a range of people who are viewed as a liability to capital and its endless predatory quest for power and profits.

"Life is now a war zone and as such the number of people considered disposable has grown exponentially."

Under the regime of neoliberalism, Americans now live in a society where ever-expanding segments of the population are subject to being spied on, considered potential terrorists and subject to a mode of state and corporate lawlessness in which the arrogance of power knows no limits. As American society becomes increasingly militarized and political concessions become relics of a long abandoned welfare state, hollowed out to serve the interests of global markets, the collective sense of ethical imagination and social responsibility towards those who are vulnerable or in need of care has become the central source of societal scourge. What has emerged under the regime of neoliberalism is a notion of disposability in which entire populations are now considered excess, relegated to zones of social death and abandonment, surveillance and incarceration. The death-haunted politics of disposability is a systemic element of neoliberal capitalism actively engaged in forms of asset stripping as is evident in the wave of austerity policies at work in North America and Europe.

The politics of disposability is also one of neoliberalism’s most powerful organizing principles rendering millions who are suffering under its market-driven policies and practices as excess, rendered redundant according to the laws of a market that wages violence against the 99% for the benefit of the new financial elite. Disposable populations are now consigned to zones of terminal exclusion, inhabiting a space of social and civil death. These are students, unemployed youth and members of the working poor as well as the middle class who have no resources, jobs or hope. They are the voiceless and powerless who represent the ghostly presence of the moral vacuity and criminogenic nature of neoliberalism. The growing ranks of those considered disposable are also its greatest fear and potential threat. What is particularly distinctive about this neoliberal historical conjuncture is the way in which young people, particularly low-income and poor minority youth, are increasingly denied any place in an already weakened social contract and the degree to which they are no longer seen as central to how the many neoliberal societies define their future.

Adjusting themselves to the neoliberal reality, universities worldwide are turning increasingly toward corporate management models and marketization. What impact are these shifts likely to have on the traditional role of the university as a public sphere?

The increasing corporatization of higher education poses a dire threat to its role as a democratic public sphere and a vital site where students can learn to address important social issues, be self-reflective and learn the knowledge, values and ideas central to deepening and expanding the capacities they need to be engaged and critical agents. Under neoliberalism, higher education is dangerous because it has the potential to educate young people to think critically and learn how to hold power accountable. Unfortunately, with the rise of the corporate university which now defines all aspects of governing, curriculum, financial matters and a host of other academic policies, education is now largely about training, creating an elite class of managers, and eviscerating those forms of knowledge that conjure up what might be considered dangerous forms of moral witnessing and collective political action.

Any subject or mode of knowledge that does not serve the instrumental needs of capital is rendered disposable, suggesting that the only value of any worth is exchange value; the only pedagogical practice of any value must be reduced to a commercial transaction. The corporate university is the ultimate expression of a disimagination machine, which employs a top-down authoritarian style of power, mimics a business culture, infantilizes students by treating them as consumers, and depoliticizes faculty by removing them from all forms of governance. As William Boardman argues, the destruction of higher education "by the forces of commerce and authoritarian politics is a sad illustration of how the democratic ethos (educate everyone to their capacity, for free) has given way to exploitation (turning students into a profit center that has the serendipitous benefit of feeding inequality)."

"Any subject or mode of knowledge that does not serve the instrumental needs of capital is rendered disposable."

Particularly disturbing here is the corporate university’s attempt to wage a war on higher education by reducing the overwhelming number of faculty to part-time help with no power, benefits or security. Many part-time and non-tenured faculty in the United States qualify for food stamps and are living slightly above the poverty level. The slow death of the university as a center of critique, a fundamental source of civic education and a crucial public good make available the fundamental framework for the emergence of a formative culture that produces and legitimates an authoritarian society. The corporatization of higher education constitutes a serious strike against democracy and gives rise to the kind of thoughtlessness that Hanna Arendt believed was at the core of totalitarianism.

A glimpse of such thoughtlessness was on display recently at Rutgers University when the university offered an honorary degree to Condoleezza Rice, while offering to pay her $35,000 and to pay her to give a commencement speech. There is no honor in giving such a prestigious degree to a war criminal. Too many universities have become captives of corporate power. For instance, New York University, in its attempt to expand the reach of neoliberal academic globalization, constructed a campus in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, in which, as The New York Times pointed out, workers were beaten and deported for going on strike, forced to pay recruitment fees that added up to a year’s wages, and had their passports held in order to squelch dissent. But, then again, higher education is now firmly entrenched in what President Eisenhower once called the military-industrial-academic complex.

What role does popular culture play in contemporary democratic life?

Popular culture is largely colonized by corporations and is increasingly used to reproduce a culture of consumerism, stupidity and illiteracy. Mainstream popular culture is a distraction and disimagination machine in which mass emotions are channeled towards an attraction for spectacles while suffocating all vestiges of the imagination, promoting the idea that any act of critical thinking is an act of stupidity and offering up the illusion of agency through gimmicks like voting on American Idol. What is crucial to remember about popular culture is that it is not simply about entertainment; it also functions to produce particular desires, subjectivities and identities. It has become one of the most important and powerful sites of education or what I have called an oppressive form of public pedagogy. Film, television, talk radio, video games, newspapers, social networks and online media do not merely entertain us; they are also teaching machines that offer interpretations of the world and largely function to produce a public with limited political horizons. They both titillate and create a mass sensibility that is conducive to maintaining a certain level of consent while legitimating the dominant values, ideologies, power relations and policies that maintain regimes of neoliberalism.

"Market culture functions largely to turn people into consumers, suggesting that the only obligation of citizenship is to shop."

There are a number of registers through which popular culture produces a subject willing to become complicit with their own oppression. Celebrity culture collapses the public into the private and reinforces a certain level of stupidity. Surveillance culture undermines notions of privacy and is largely interested in locking people into strangulating orbits of privatization and atomization. A militarized popular culture offers up the spectacle of violence and a hyper-masculine image of agency as both a site of entertainment and as a mediating force through which to solve all problems. Violence now becomes the most important element of power and mediating force in shaping social relationships. Market culture functions largely to turn people into consumers, suggesting that the only obligation of citizenship is to shop. This is largely a way to depoliticize the population and distract them from recognizing their capacities as critically engaged agents and to empty out any notion of politics that would demand thoughtfulness, social responsibility and the demands of civic courage.

There is also a subversive side to popular culture as Stuart Hall implied when he argued that the left "has no sense of politics being educative, of politics changing the way people see things." In a similar fashion, the late Pierre Bourdieu argued that the left "has underestimated the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle and have not always forged appropriate weapons to fight on this front."Both theorists were pointing in part to the failure of the left to take seriously the political unconscious and the need to use alternative media, theater, online journals and news outlets. At the same time, there is enormous pedagogical value in bringing attention in the rare oppositional representations offered within the dominant media. In this instance, popular culture can be a powerful resource to map and critically engage the everyday, mobilize alternative narratives to capitalism, activate those needs vital to producing more critical and compassionate modes of subjectivity. Film, television, news programs, social media and other instruments of culture can be used to make education central to a politics that is emancipatory and utterly committed to developing a democratic, formative culture.

At stake here is the need for progressives to not only understand popular culture and its cultural apparatuses as modes of dominant ideology but to also take popular culture seriously as a tool to revive the radical imagination and to make education central to politics so as to change the way people think, desire and dream. Stanley Aronowitz is right in arguing that "education would be one of the crucial tasks of a radical political formation" and would need to launch a comprehensive educational program extending from the creation of online journals and magazines to the development of alternative schools. Everything must be done to offer an educational and political counter-offensive to what Cornelius Castoriadis called "the shameful degradation of the critical function."

While we speak of a crisis in democracy, some writers speak of a crisis in neoliberalism, probably influenced by the recent global crisis in neoliberal capitalism. Do you believe that neoliberalism is in a crisis?

I think it is more appropriate to argue that neoliberalism creates and thrives on crises. Crises provide the opening for radical neoliberal reforms, for suspending all government regulations, and for building support for extreme policies that under normal conditions would not be allowed to be put in place. One only has to think about Hurricane Katrina and how the Bush administration used to destroy the public school system and replace it with charter schools. Or how 9/11 offered up an opportunity for going to war with Iraq and drastically curtailing civil liberties that benefitted the rich and powerful defense corporations.

The "retreat of the intellectuals" is not a recent phenomenon, yet it has become quite pervasive, partly due to the collapse of socialism and partly due to the marketization of contemporary society as well as the neoliberal restructuring of the university. In your view, how critical is the "retreat of the intellectuals" to the struggle for radical social change?

The seriousness of the retreat of intellectuals from addressing important social issues, aiding social movements and using their knowledge to create a critical formative culture cannot be overstated. Unfortunately, the retreat of the intellectuals in the struggle against neoliberalism and other forms of domination is now matched by the rise of anti-public intellectuals who have sold themselves to corporate power. More specifically, neoliberalism has created not only a vast apparatus of pedagogical relations that privileges deregulation, privatization, commodification and the militarization of everyday life, but also an army of anti-public intellectuals who function largely in the interest of the financial elite. Rather than show what is wrong with democracy, they do everything they can to destroy it. These intellectuals are bought and sold by the financial elite and are nothing more than ideological puppets using their skills to destroy the social contract, critical thought and all those social institutions capable of constructing non-commodified values and democratic public spheres.

"Intellectuals have a responsibility to connect their work to important social issues, work with popular movements and engage in the shaping of policies that benefit all people and not simply a few."

They are the enemies of democracy and are crucial in creating subjectivities and values that buy into the notion that capital rather than people are the subject of history and that consuming is the only obligation of citizenship. Their goal is to normalize the ideologies, modes of governance and policies that reproduce massive inequities and suffering for the many, and exorbitant and dangerous privileges for the corporate and financial elite. Moreover, such intellectuals are symptomic of the fact that neoliberalism represents a new historical conjuncture in which cultural institutions and political power have taken on a whole new life in shaping politics. What this suggests is that the left in its various registers has to create its own public intellectuals in higher education, the alternative media and all of those spaces where meaning circulates. Intellectuals have a responsibility to connect their work to important social issues, work with popular movements and engage in the shaping of policies that benefit all people and not simply a few.

At the heart of this suggestion is the need to recognize that ideas matter in the battle against authoritarianism and that pedagogy must be central to any viable notion of politics and collective struggle. Public intellectuals have an obligation to work for global peace, individual freedom, care of others, economic justice and democratic participation, especially at a time of legitimized violence and tyranny. I completely agree with the late Pierre Bourdieu when he insisted that there is enormous political importance "to defend the possibility and necessity of the intellectual, who is firstly critical of the existing state of affairs. There is no genuine democracy without genuine opposing critical power." The very notion of being an engaged public intellectual is neither foreign to nor a violation of what it means to be an academic scholar, but central to its very definition. Put simply, academics have a duty to enter into the public sphere unafraid to take positions and generate controversy, functioning as moral witnesses, raising political awareness and making connections to those elements of power and politics often hidden from public view.

One final question. Are you optimistic about the future of the left and of progressive politics in general?

It is impossible to be on the left and at the same time surrender to the normalization of a dystopian vision. One has to be optimistic, but also realistic. This means that there is no room for a kind of romanticized utopianism. Instead, one has to be motivated by a faith in the willingness of young people principally to fight for a future in which dignity, equality and justice matter and at the same time recognize the forces that are preventing such a struggle. More specifically, hope has to be fed by the need for collective action. Power is never completely on the side of domination and resistance is not a luxury but a necessity.

"Power is never completely on the side of domination and resistance is not a luxury but a necessity."

As Stanley Aronowitz has argued the left has to engage the issue of economic inequality, overcome its fragmentation, develop an international social formation for radical democracy and the defense of the public good, undertake ways to finance itself, take seriously the educative nature of politics and the need to change the way people think, and develop a comprehensive notion of politics and a vision to match. History is open, though the gates are closing fast. The issue for me personally is not whether I am pessimistic, but how am I going to use whatever intellectual resources I have to make it harder to prevent various events and problems from getting worse while at the same time struggling for a society in which the promise of democracy appears on the horizon of possibility.

A life mesmerizingly truncated, James Dean left behind only three films, and the gaping absence of the career that might have been.

Even though he only made three films, James Dean introduced Hollywood to a new kind of man: Photo above: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

by India Ross

New Statesman

17 April, 2014 – In Rebel Without A Cause, from 1955, a 24-year old James Dean, red-jacketed and tight-jeaned, climbs behind the wheel of an old black Mercury. To his right, the opponent he will race to the edge of a cliff hangs out of his driver-side window for a last slug of bravado: “Hey Toreador!”, he jeers. “First man who jumps is a chicken.” Re-inserting a trademark cigarette, Dean flicks on his headlights and hits the gas, and the two cars accelerate towards the brink. Frames from the edge, Dean glances right, grabs for the door and rolls out onto the turf. His adversary, jacket sleeve caught on his door handle and jammed into his driver’s seat, slips wrenchingly over the edge with his car.

Less than a year later, the real life James Dean, whose legacy is the subject of an upcoming retrospective at the BFI, was to die in an echoing event, flipping a race-car on a bend on a California highway. A life mesmerisingly truncated, he left behind only three films, and the gaping absence of the career that might have been. It was a sequence of events morbidly inkeeping with the themes of doomed youth his characters embodied.

The word “iconic” is tossed around ad nauseum, but if ever it were to apply, in the sense of an individual and a star whose off-screen persona outshines the sum of their roles, who bends the fabric of the society in which they live, Dean would surely qualify. In life, and even more so in death, the bee-stung darling of early Technicolor has held the awe of the movie-going public.

But facial anatomy and excellent hair were not the traits for which Dean was influential. Hollywood does not suffer a shortage of cheekbones. He slotted into a blurry interlude following the second world war but before the flowering of the Beat movement, in which the role of a man in society was under sudden and unsuspected dispute. A generation primed for combat found itself at a loss of purpose, and gender roles that were without meaning overnight began to merge and reconfigure themselves.

Dean was a new kind of man. His characters cried and struggled and screamed in frustration at the blurry world they had to live in. They were awkward and uncertain, grappling with sexuality and the disappointment in older men around them. “What can you do when you have to be a man?”, screams Jim, the tortured hero of Rebel Without A Cause, at his impotent father.

The cut of the male star was formerly more robust: Charlton Heston, Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable – these were men’s men, manoeuvring from the Alexandrian chariot to the Western Front with a raised eyebrow in place. But the type of machismo with which Hollywood used to cash cheques, which slipped so easily into the rhythm of day-saving and woman-placating, is now all but redundant. George Clooney is perhaps the only contemporary relic of that 1940s flavour of heterosexuality. With a Cary Grant jawline and non-threatening cool, Clooney lingers as a housewives’ favourite, occasionally modernising his brand with political activism and dips into independent pictures. He banks on a nostalgia for the screen heroes that preceded him.

But the successors to James Dean are in evidence everywhere. From the contemplative Ryan Gosling to the part-time poet James Franco, the Emotional Man is now a marketable asset. Matthew McConaughey, 2014’s case in point, has lived an entire spectrum of masculinity, latterly dropping frat-boy kilos to become a thoughtful shadow of himself – a feminised brand that has been remunerated well beyond his Oscar.

In Hollywood today, a “male icon” is a contradiction in terms. Where fame has become all but genderless, a new batch of androgynous stars has fumbled its way to the surface. From Michael Cera to Jesse Eisenberg, the cinema is synonymous with a group of loping, hobbit-haired boys so divorced from masculinity that their characters actively mock the idea of sexual power. A swelling interest in superheroes, as an object of ironic admiration by the tech generation, is not coincidental, as fanboys reflect on a lost type of man, so distant from themselves.

James Dean opened a door for the re-imagining of the male star. An awkward icon, he gave early shape to a model that would take decades to take hold. A man not just uncomfortable in himself but in the very idea of what a man represents, alongside Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash he broke a cycle of sexual dogma, laying the tracks for a half-century of flexible, sensitive masculinity. From the Beatles to The Graduate, The Smiths to Superbad, another type of man entirely was to dominate a soft, new horizon.

By Ramon Glazov

Jacobin Magazine

Oct 28, 2013 -  The easy narrative about Adbusters, accepted by its friends and enemies alike, is that it’s, at heart, an anarchist project. To those wishing it well, the magazine is one of the cornerstones of the Left, a wellspring of anti-authoritarian tools meant to revive progressive activism and shake things up for the greater good. For curmudgeonly detractors, “culture jamming” is little more than a powerless rehash of old Yippie protest tactics. Yet anarchism, nearly everyone assumes, is either the best or the worst part of Adbusters.

But those explanations miss a much weirder side of the magazine’s underlying politics.

This March, Adbusters jumped into what ought to seem like a marriage made in hell. It ran a glowing article [4] on Beppe Grillo – Italy’s scruffier answer to America’s Truther champion Alex Jones – calling him “nuanced, fresh, bold, and committed as a politician,” with “a performance artist edge” and “anti-austerity ideas… [C]ountries around the world, from Greece to the US, can look to [him] for inspiration.” Grillo, the piece gushed, was “planting the seed of a renewed – accountable, fresh, rational, responsible, energized – left, that we can hope germinates worldwide.”

Completely unmentioned was the real reason Grillo is so controversial in Italy: his blog is full of anti-vaccination and 9/11 conspiracy claims, pseudoscientific cancer cures and chemtrail [5]-like theories about Italian incinerator-smoke. And, as Giovanni Tiso noted [6] in July, Grillo’s “5-Star Movement” also has an incredibly creepy backer: Gianroberto Casaleggio, “an online marketing expert whose only known past political sympathies lay with the right-wing separatist Northern League.” Casaleggio has also written kooky manifestoes about re-organizing society through virtual reality technology, with mandatory Internet citizenship and an online world government.

Adbusters could have stopped flirting with Grillo at that point, but it didn’t. Another Grillo puff-piece appeared in its May/June issue. Then the magazine’s outgoing editor-in-chief, Micah White (acknowledged by theNation as “the creator of the #occupywallstreet meme”) recently went solo to form his own “boutique activism consultancy,” promising clients a “discrete service” in “Social Movement Creation.” Two weeks ago, in a YouTube video, White proposed that the next step “after the defeat of Occupy” should be to import Grillo’s 5-Star Movement to the US in time for the 2014 mid-term elections:

    After the defeat of Occupy, I don’t believe that there is any choice other than trying to grab power by means of an election victory … This is how I see the future: we could bring the 5-Star Movement to America and have the 5-Star Movement winning elections in Italy and in America, thereby forming an international party, not only with the 5-Star Movement, but with other parties as well.

The day after Adbusters ran its first pro-Grillo article, Der Spiegel compared [7]Grillo’s tone – and sweeping plans to restructure Italy’s parliamentary system – to Mussolini’s rhetoric. Ten days before that, a 5-Star Movement MP, Roberta Lombardi, faced a media scandal [8] after writing a blog post praising early fascism for its “very high regard for the state and protection of the family.”

Most progressives might reconsider their glowing assessment of a party as “the seed for a renewed left” when its leaders peddle absurd conspiracy theories and praise fascists. No such signs from Adbusters or White.

But Grillo may be more than a random ally for the gang at Culture Jammers HQ.

Just where did Adbusters get its defining philosophy? Why was it always so obsessed with ads and consumerism, while hardly focusing on class dynamics until the financial crisis?

In 1989, Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn claimed to have had an epiphany in a supermarket and started a movement to fight branding and advertisement. This wasn’t to be a repeat of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book! [9]-style anarchism, with roots in Proudhon’s famous “property is theft” dictum. Culture jammers weren’t acting to communalize most products, but to “uncool” them by taking on those products’ ads, with their own slickly-produced spoofs.

To them, the brand names bearing the coolness were more important than what the branded products did. It wasn’t drinking itself that their anti-Absolut vodka ads seemed to target, but glamorous logo-brands – as if smokers and alcoholics were hooked solely on label prestige.

The earliest Adbusters website on the Wayback Machine reads like a tamer, more Canadian, version of Alex Jones’ operation. Greeting you on the intro page is a Marshall McLuhan quote about “guerrilla information war.” Above its table of contents is the All Seeing Eye engraving from US currency.

“There’s a war on for your mind!” is the current InfoWars tagline. Not too far from the early Adbusters (the “Journal of the Mental Environment”) which promised to “take on the archetypal mind polluters – Marlboro, Budweiser, Benetton, Coke, McDonalds, Calvin Klein – and beat them at their own game.”

Oddly for a site now considered left-wing, Adbusters 1.0. was cheesily evasive about its political position, claiming to be “neither left nor right, but straight ahead.”

There’s good reason to be suspicious of anyone who pulls that “neither left nor right” line. Though Alex Jones’ InfoWars may not have been directly based on early-days Adbusters, the two were undeniably similar in sentiment. Both take a hostile view to mass media and widely-available consumer products, pushing readers towards an ascetic alternative lifestyle that insulates them from “The System” and its toxic worldliness.

And, as luck would have it, both are also the merchants of the (rarer, more expensive) alternative products needed to live this lifestyle. Alex Jones expounds the virtues of food-hoarding and drives Truthers to amass his survival packs, anti-fluoride filters, and nascent iodine drops; Adbusters flogs Blackspot shoes, Corporate America protest flags, and overpriced culture-jamming kits to “create new ambiences and psychic possibilities.”

With Lasn as its guru, culture jamming became popular among activists in the 1990s. Behind all those “subvertisements” lay one big assumption: regular sheeple were so brainwashed by consumerism that they couldn’t even snicker at rose-petally tampon ads without an enlightened jammer to spell everything out for them. Every adbuster got to feel like Morpheus, unplugging Sleepers from the Matrix with the Red Pill of Situationism.

This view of society wasn’t Marxist, left-liberal, or anarchist, so much as Don Draperist: “We are the cool-makers and the cool-breakers,” Kalle Lasn told an audience of advertising “creatives” in 2006. “More than any other profession, I think that we have the power to change the world.”

Lasn might claim not to believe in leaders, but he believes in elites: marketing professionals with a higher calling, responsible for shepherding public consciousness to save humanity from brands, from themselves.

And by exaggerating the mass media’s ability to zombify the public, jammers could imagine that they, too, had Svengali-like powers over ordinary proles. For all the “tools” Adbusters offered to sway public consciousness – stencilling, stickering, page defacement, supermarket trolley sabotage – there was never much emphasis on social skills, on persuading people with politics instead of bombarding them with theater or treating them like hackable machines.

More than anything, what sets culture jammers apart from social anarchism and weds them to the Grillo camp of quacks is a unifying emphasis on a theory called “mental environmentalism.” Mental environmentalism, Micah White explains, is “the core idea behind Adbusters, the essential critique that motivates our struggle against consumer society.”

    For Adbusters, concern over the flow of information goes beyond the desire to protect democratic transparency, freedom of speech or the public’s access to the airwaves. Although these are worthwhile causes, Adbusters instead situates the battle of the mind at the center of its political agenda. Fighting to counter pro-consumerist advertising is done not as a means to an end, but as the end in itself. This shift in emphasis is a crucial element of mental environmentalism.

    …

    Mental environmentalism is an emergent movement that in the coming years will be recognized as the fundamental social struggle of our era. It is both a unifying struggle – among mental environmentalists there are everything from conservative Mormons to far-left anarchists – and a struggle that finally, concretely explains the cause of the diversity of ills that threaten us.

    To escape the mental chains, and finally pull off the glorious emancipatory revolution the left has so long hoped for, we must become meme warriors who, through the use of culture jamming, spark a wave of epiphanies that shatter the consumerist worldview.

“The end in itself.” For culture jammers, posters and billboards don’t justrepresent exploitation, they are the tyranny (“the cause of the diversity of ills that threaten us”), and fighting them trumps all the progressive causes of their would-be allies.

That “neither left nor right” thing? It wasn’t just posturing. Not only is White equally willing to work with “far-left anarchists” and “conservative Mormons” but his mentor Lasn once hoped to guide Occupy into a merger with the Tea Party [10], producing a “hybrid party” that would transcend America’s “rigid left-right divide.”

White’s explanation of how mental pollution works sinks even deeper into conspiracy babble. Sounding a bit like a Scientologist, he tells us that humanity’s biggest problems are due to something called “infotoxins” which enter us through “commercial messaging”:

    If a key insight of environmentalism was that external reality, nature, could be polluted by industrial toxins, the key insight of mental environmentalism is that internal reality, our minds, can be polluted by infotoxins. Mental environmentalism draws a connection between the pollution of our minds by commercial messaging and the social, environmental, financial and ethical catastrophes that loom before humanity. Mental environmentalists argue that a whole range of phenomenon from the BP oil spill to the emergence of crony-democracy to the mass extinction of animals to the significant increase in mental illnesses are directly caused by the three thousand advertisements that assault our minds each day. And rather than treat the symptoms, by rushing to scrub the oil-soaked beaches or passing watered-down environmental protection legislation, mental environmentalists target the root cause: the advertising industry that fuels consumerism.

Instead of blaming mental illness rates on obvious culprits – workplace stress, problems at home, school bullying, bad genes, changes to DSM criteria – the “mental environmentalists” at Adbusters pin it all on subliminal infotoxins polluting our precious bodily fluids. How do they prove it? About as well as you can prove rock albums are demon-infested or that 70-million-year-old thetans cause influenza. White has decided that “external” environmentalism just doesn’t go deep enough – only “mental environmentalists,” with their meme wars, are fighting the “root cause.”

Lasn’s “mental environment” writings are just as L. Ron Hubbard-ish as White’s. (His epiphanies spawned the concept, after all.) In 2006, hesuggested to the Guardian [11] that advertising may be the cause of “mood disorders, anxiety attacks and depressions.” Four years later, he co-wrote an article with White repeating the same claims [12], along with new fears that TV was poisoning us with too many sensual images of “pouty lips, pert breasts [and] buns of steel”:

    Growing up in a violent, erotically-charged media environment alters our psyches at a bedrock level. … And the constant flow of commercially scripted, violence-laced, pseudo-sex makes us more voyeuristic, insatiable and aggressive. Then, somewhere along the line, nothing – not even rape, torture, genocide, or war porn – shocks us anymore.

    The commercial media are to the mental environment what factories are to the physical environment. A factory dumps pollution into the water or air because that’s the most efficient way to produce plastic or wood pulp or steel. A TV station or website pollutes the cultural environment because that’s the most efficient way to produce audiences. It pays to pollute. The psychic fallout is just the cost of putting on the show.

If “mental environmentalism” had a true ally in American political thought, it would be Allan Bloom, with his Platonist neocon fretting about Sony Walkmans and MTV reducing life to cultural impoverishment, a “nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.” You can’t as easily picture Lasn agreeing with the “Anonymous” brand of anarchism or its “Information wants to be free!” maxims: whenever volume comes up in these mental environment articles, more infomation is apparently worse.

White made this explicit in a July blog post, “Toxic Culture: A Unified Theory of Mental Pollution,” writing:

    How do we fight back against the incessant flow of logos, brands, slogans and jingles that submerge our streets, invade our homes and flicker on our screens? We could wage a counteroffensive at the level of content: attacking individual advertisements when they cross the decency line and become deceptive, violent or overly sexual. But this approach is like using napkins to clean up an oil spill. It fails to confront the true danger of advertising … is not in its individual messages but in the damage done to our mental ecology by the sheer volume of its flood.

White has even theorized a much earlier spiritual forefather for Adbustersthan Kalle Lasn: Emile Zola [13], “who wrote what may be the first mental environmentalist short story, Death by Advertising, in 1866” and offered “a deeper look at advertising’s role in inducing a consumerist mindset” with his later novel, Au Bonheur Des Dames. Yes, Zola the social reformer who devoted his career to chronicling the fecund depravity and bestial desires of the underclasses. The guy who wrote a twenty-novel cycle promoting determinist psychology and Second Empire theories about hereditary animal passions of the colonized. Au Bonheur Des Dames is a cautionary tale about the nervous excitation big department stores can wreak on women’s fragile senses.

White hopes to take some morals from Zola’s shorter fiction:

    Like junk food can make us obese, junk thoughts and advertisements can make us moronic. …We are, in a literal way, poisoned each time we see an advertisement and that is the essential danger of a consumer society based upon advertising.

    …

    Zola glimpsed a hundred and forty years ago…that advertising has poisoned our minds and corrupted our culture. As we march toward collapse, the question remains whether we will go passively toward our death and remembered only as a foolish civilization killed by advertising, or whether there remains within us a spark of clarity from which a mental environment movement may catch flame.

Advertising, to culture jammers, is virtually the same kind of universal scapegoat psychiatry became for Scientologists: an insidious, corrupting Demiurge responsible for all evils. But you’ll rarely find paranoia without self-importance. The grander vision, for Lasn, White, and their associates, is a world where marketers have the power to save humanity or destroy it with their “carefully-crafted imagery.” Instead of “clearing” the planet with Hubbard’s E-meter auditing, they hope Zen subvertisments, Buy Nothing Days, and strange hybrid political parties will be the answer.

Given the focus of their psychosis, it can often seem like culture jammers have the same concerns as anarchists and socialists: saving the environment, fighting capitalist exploitation, building a popular movement. But if they hate some of the things leftists also hate, it’s for the wrong reasons – and worse, their solutions are quack ones.

So don’t be surprised by White’s new alliance with Grillo, or Lasn’s dashed hopes for a merger with the Tea Party: Adbusters was never on our side.

See more stories tagged with:
adbusters [14]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/media/behind-bizarre-ideology-fuels-adbusters-magazine

Links:

[1] http://jacobinmag.com
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/ramon-glazov
[3] http://jacobinmag.com/2013/10/adbusted/
[4] https://www.adbusters.org/blogs/beppe-grillo.html
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemtrail_conspiracy_theory
[6] http://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-211/feature-giovanni-tiso/
[7] http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/beppe-grillo-of-italy-is-the-most-dangerous-man-in-europe-a-889104.html
[8] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/05/beppe-grillo-mp-fascism
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steal_This_Book
[10] http://www.canadianbusiness.com/business-strategy/interview-kalle-lasn-publisher-adbusters-magazine/
[11] http://www.theguardian.com/media/2006/jan/09/advertising.g2
[12] https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/90/ecology-mind.html
[13] https://www.adbusters.org/blogs/blackspot-blog/death-advertising.html
[14] http://www.alternet.org/tags/adbusters
[15] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

By Michael Synder

Progressive America Rising via EconomicCollapseBlog.com

Oct 3, 2013 – Why are young people in America so frustrated these days?  You are about to find out.  Most young adults started out having faith in the system.  They worked hard, they got good grades, they stayed out of trouble and many of them went on to college.  But when their educations where over, they discovered that the good jobs that they had been promised were not waiting for them at the end of the rainbow.  Even in the midst of this so-called "economic recovery", the full-time employment rate for Americans under the age of 30 continues to fall.  And incomes for that age group continue to fall as well.  At the same time, young adults are dealing with record levels of student loan debt.  As a result, more young Americans than ever are putting off getting married and having families, and more of them than ever are moving back in with their parents.

It can be absolutely soul crushing when you discover that the "bright future" that the system had been promising you for so many years turns out to be a lie.  A lot of young people ultimately give up on the system and many of them end up just kind of drifting aimlessly through life.  The following is an example from a recent Wall Street Journal article…

James Roy, 26, has spent the past six years paying off $14,000 in student loans for two years of college by skating from job to job. Now working as a supervisor for a coffee shop in the Chicago suburb of St. Charles, Ill., Mr. Roy describes his outlook as "kind of grim."

"It seems to me that if you went to college and took on student debt, there used to be greater assurance that you could pay it off with a good job," said the Colorado native, who majored in English before dropping out. "But now, for people living in this economy and in our age group, it’s a rough deal."

Young adults as a group have been experiencing a tremendous amount of economic pain in recent years.  The following are 30 statistics about Americans under the age of 30 that will blow your mind…

#1 The labor force participation rate for men in the 18 to 24 year old age bracket is at an all-time low.

#2 The ratio of what men in the 18 to 29 year old age bracket are earning compared to the general population is at an all-time low.

#3 Only about a third of all adults in their early 20s are working a full-time job.

#4 For the entire 18 to 29 year old age bracket, the full-time employment rate continues to fall.  In June 2012, 47 percent of that entire age group had a full-time job.  One year later, in June 2013, only 43.6 percent of that entire age group had a full-time job.

#5 Back in the year 2000, 80 percent of men in their late 20s had a full-time job.  Today, only 65 percent do.

#6 In 2007, the unemployment rate for the 20 to 29 year old age bracket was about 6.5 percent.  Today, the unemployment rate for that same age group is about 13 percent.

#7 American families that have a head of household that is under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent.

#8 During 2012, young adults under the age of 30 accounted for 23 percent of the workforce, but they accounted for a whopping 36 percent of the unemployed.

#9 During 2011, 53 percent of all Americans with a bachelor’s degree under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed.

#10 At this point about half of all recent college graduates are working jobs that do not even require a college degree.

#11 The number of Americans in the 16 to 29 year old age bracket with a job declined by 18 percent between 2000 and 2010.

#12 According to one survey, 82 percent of all Americans believe that it is harder for young adults to find jobs today than it was for their parents to find jobs.

#13 Incomes for U.S. households led by someone between the ages of 25 and 34 have fallen by about 12 percent after you adjust for inflation since the year 2000.

#14 In 1984, the median net worth of households led by someone 65 or older was 10 times larger than the median net worth of households led by someone 35 or younger.  Today, the median net worth of households led by someone 65 or older is 47 times larger than the median net worth of households led by someone 35 or younger.

#15 In 2011, SAT scores for young men were the worst that they had been in 40 years.

#16 Incredibly, approximately two-thirds of all college students graduate with student loans.

#17 According to the Federal Reserve, the total amount of student loan debt has risen by 275 percent since 2003.

#18 In America today, 40 percent of all households that are led by someone under the age of 35 are paying off student loan debt.  Back in 1989, that figure was below 20 percent.

#19 The total amount of student loan debt in the United States now exceeds the total amount of credit card debt in the United States.

#20 According to the U.S. Department of Education, 11 percent of all student loans are at least 90 days delinquent.

#21 The student loan default rate in the United States has nearly doubled since 2005.

#22 One survey found that 70% of all college graduates wish that they had spent more time preparing for the "real world" while they were still in college.

#23 In the United States today, there are more than 100,000 janitors that have college degrees.

#24 In the United States today, 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees.

#25 Today, an all-time low 44.2 percent of all Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 are married.

#26 According to the Pew Research Center, 57 percent of all Americans in the 18 to 24 year old age bracket lived with their parents during 2012.

#27 One poll discovered that 29 percent of all Americans in the 25 to 34 year old age bracket are still living with their parents.

#28 Young men are nearly twice as likely to live with their parents as young women the same age are.

#29 Overall, approximately 25 million American adults are living with their parents according to Time Magazine.

#30 Young Americans are becoming increasingly frustrated that previous generations have saddled them with a nearly 17 trillion dollar national debt that they are expected to make payments on for the rest of their lives.

And this trend is not just limited to the United States.  As I have written about frequently, unemployment rates for young adults throughout Europe have been soaring to unprecedented heights.  For example, the unemployment rate for those under the age of 25 in Italy has now reached 40.1 percent.

Chokwe Lumumba, Mayor of Jackson, MS

By Ajamu Nangwaya
SolidarityEconomy.net via Rabble.Ca

Ajamu Nangwaya participated in the recent Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy 2013, speaking about the potential for worker self-management in the City of Jackson, Mississippi, following the historic election Chokwe Lumumba as mayor. This article, Part 1 of 2, is based on Ajamu Nangwaya’s presentation to the conference, and is part of our ongoing focus on labour and workers’ issues [8] this week on rabble.ca.

Sept 3, 2013 – “We have to make sure that economically we’re free, and part of that is the whole idea of economic democracy. We have to deal with more cooperative thinking and more involvement of people in the control of businesses, as opposed to just the big money changers, or the big CEOs and the big multinational corporations, the big capitalist corporations which generally control here in Mississippi.” [1] – Chokwe Lumumba

"Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children." – Amilcar Cabral [2]

I am happy to be a participant at the Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy 2013 and to be in the presence of worker cooperators, advocates of labour or worker self-management [9] and comrades who are here to learn about and/or share your thoughts on the idea of workplace democracy and workers exercising control over capital.

Worker self-management or the practice of workers controlling, managing and exercising stewardship over the productive resources in the workplace has been with us since the 19th century. Workers’ control of the workplace developed as a reaction to the exacting and exploitative working condition of labour brought on by capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. Many workers saw the emancipation of labour emerging from their power over the way that work was organized and the fruit of their labour got distributed.

I believe we are living in a period that has the potential for profound economic, social and political transformation from below. It might not seem that way when we look at the way that capitalism, racism and the patriarchy have combined to make their domination appear inevitable and unchallenged. But as long as we have vision and are willing to put in the work, we shall not perish. We shall win!

On June 4, 2013, the people of the City of Jackson, Mississippi, elected Chokwe Lumumba, a human rights lawyer and an advocate of the right to self-determination of Afrikans in the United States, as their mayor. That is a very significant political development. But that is not the most momentous thing about the election of Chokwe Lumumba. The most noteworthy element of Lumumba’s ascension to the mayoral position is his commitment to economic democracy, "more cooperative thinking" and facilitating economic and social justice with and for the people of Jackson.

The challenge posed to us by this historical moment is the role that each of you will play in ensuring a robust programme of worker cooperative formation and cooperative economics in Jackson. We ought to work with the Jackson People’s Assembly, the Malcolm Grassroots Movement and other progressive forces to transform the city of Jackson into America’s own Mondragon [10]. It could have one possible exception. Jackson could become an evangelical force that is committed to spreading labour self-management and the social economy across the South and the rest of this society.

The promotion of the social economy and labour self-management could engage and attract Frantz Fanon’s "wretched of the earth" [11] onto the stage of history as central actors in the drama of their own emancipation. By promoting the social economy/labour self-management and participatory democracy by civil society forces and structures (the assemblies), Chokwe and the social movement organizations in Jackson are privileging or heeding Cabral’s above-cited assertion that the people are not merely fighting for ideas. They need to see meaningful change in their material condition. The development of a people controlled and participatory democratic economic infrastructure in Jackson would give concrete form to their material aspirations.

Amilcar Cabral was a revolutionary [12] from Guinea-Bissau in West Afrika whose approach to organizing and politically mobilizing the people could provide insights and direction to our movement-building work. In order to build social movements with the capacity to carry out the task of social emancipation, we need to organize around the material needs of the people. The very projects and programmes that we organize with the people should be informed by transformative values; a prefiguring of what will be obtained in the emancipated societies of tomorrow.

As an anarchist, I am not a person who is hopeful or excited by initiatives coming out of the state or elected political actors. More often than not, we are likely to experience betrayal, collaboration with the forces of domination by erstwhile progressives or a progressive political formation forgetting that its role should be to build or expand the capacity of the people to challenge the structures of exploitation and domination. I am of the opinion that an opportunity exists in Jackson to use the resources of the municipal state to build the capacity of civil society to promote labour self-management.

Based on the thrust of The Jackson Plan [13], which calls for the maintenance of autonomous, deliberative and collective decision-making people’s assemblies and the commitment to organizing a self-managed social economy [3], which would challenge the hegemony or domination of the capitalist sector, I see an opening for something transformative to emerge in Jackson. As revolutionaries, we are always seeking out opportunities to advance the struggle for social emancipation. We initiate actions, but we also react to events within the social environment. To not explore the movement-building potentiality of what is going on this southern city would be a major political error and a demonstration of the poverty of imagination and vision.

Primary imperatives or assumptions

There are four critical imperatives or assumptions that should guide the movement toward labour self-management and the social economy in Jackson. They are as follow:

1. Build the capacity of civil society

We should put the necessary resources into building the requisite knowledge, skills and attitude needed by the people to exercise control over their lives and institutions. In the struggle for the new society, we require independent, counterhegemonic organizational spaces from which to struggle against the dominant economic, social and political structures.

In any labour self-management and social economy project in Jackson, we must develop autonomous, civil-society-based supportive organizations and structures that will be able to survive the departure of the Lumumba administration. If the social economy initiatives are going to operate independently of the state, they will need the means to do so. Therefore, the current municipal executive leadership in Jackson should turn over resources to the social movements that will empower and resource them in their quest to create economic development organizations, programmes and projects.

2. Part of the class struggle, racial justice movement and feminist movement

When we talk or think about social and economic change in the City of Jackson, it is not being done in a contextless structural context. We are compelled to address the systems of capitalism, white supremacy/racism and patriarchy and their impact on the lives of the working-class, racialized majority. It is critically important to frame the labour self-management and the solidarity economy project as one that is centred upon seeking a fundamental change to power relations defined by gender race and class.

The worker cooperative movement ought to see itself as a part of the broader class struggle movement that seeks to give control to the labouring classes over how their labour is used and the surplus or profit from collective work is shared. The solidarity economy and labour self-management will have to seriously tackle oppression coming out of the major systems of domination and allow our organizing work to be shaped by the resulting analysis.

3. Develop an alternative political decision-making process — an assembly system of governance

The system of assemblies that is proposed in The Jackson Plan is the right approach to creating alternative participatory democratic structures. It is through these political instruments that the people will set the communities’ priorities and wage a struggle of contestation with the powers-that-be in the liberal capitalist political system.

As we strive to build the embryonic collectivistic economic structures of the future just society, we need the political equivalent. The latter should be of a scale that allows for direct democratic participation of the people. The federative principle can be used to link the community-based assemblies into a unified body, whose role would be a coordinating one. Power must reside at the base where the people are located.

4. Displacing economic predators who are currently located in racialized, working-class communities

In working-class Afrikan communities across the United States, there are economic predators that exploit and dominate the local business scene. These petty capitalists must be seen for what they are; business operators who do not normally employ the people in the local community and they live and spend the wealth generated elsewhere. We do not need to search for business ideas or opportunities because the existing capitalists and their businesses should become targets for replacement with worker cooperatives and other solidarity economy enterprises. If these existing owners would like to become worker-cooperators, they are free to join the labour self-managed enterprises.

The City of Jackson could contribute to worker cooperative development in a number of areas. It could make a material contribution in the areas of technical assistance provision, financing, procurement and contract set-aside for worker cooperatives, education and promoter of labour or worker self-management and the social economy.

Evangelical promoter of worker self-management and the social economy

The City of Jackson’s Office of Economic Development [14] is the chief organ that facilitates business development. Its mandate is "to maximize the city’s potential as a thriving center for businesses, jobs, robust neighborhoods and economic opportunity for everyone in the Capital City…. supports business and the development community within city government and between city agencies. It also partners with other organizations to further economic development."

This terms of reference should be expanded and specifically state that it "promotes worker cooperatives, consumer cooperatives and other social economy enterprises as instruments to create economic security, jobs, livable wages, economic development and economic democracy."

Furthermore, the Office of Economic Development should be empowered to vigorously, strategically and relentlessly create the enabling condition for the development of worker cooperatives and other social enterprises in Jackson. A part of its worker or labour self-management agenda should include transforming the city of Jackson into a catalyst for this approach to workplace democracy, workers’ control of the means of production and the producers of wealth being the ones who determine how the economic surplus or profit shall be distributed.

This new role for the Office of Economic Development will be startling for some and is likely to generate opposition. But Mayor Lumumba ought to borrow a play from the playbook of conservative governments; move lightning fast in implementing his administration’s policies in the first two years and keep the opposition dizzy, disoriented and playing catch up.

Lumumba has a mandate to include labour self-management by way of worker cooperatives. The economic development plank in the mayor’s election platform stated that he is committed to "build[ing] co-ops and green industry" and ensuring "that Jacksonians are well-represented with jobs and business ownership." [4] Labour self-management, cooperatives of all types and social enterprises are the tools needed to give form to his electoral commitment. Colorlines’ writer Jamilah King also interprets Lumumba’s platform in a similar fashion:

    In his campaign literature and in news media interviews, Mayor Lumumba stressed that his economic program will incorporate principles of the "solidarity economy." Solidarity [15] economy is a[n] umbrella term used to describe a wide variety of alternative economic activities, including worker-owned co-operatives, co-operative banks, peer lending, community land trusts, participatory budgeting and fair trade. [5]

Larry Hales correctly asserts, "Lumumba’s political history did not scare away voters, nor did the bold and progressive Jackson Plan, which is reminiscent of the Republic of New Afrika’s program of the 1960s, calling for the establishment of an independent Black-led government in six former confederate states." [6] The City of Jackson should move ahead and start implementing the solidarity economy mandate. Mayor Lumumba should immediately hire a team of solidarity economy and labour self-management personnel, whose principal role would be to bring about the condition for the economic democracy take-off.

They would be embedded in the Office of Economic Development and at least one of the positions should be a senior leadership/management one. The latter is needed to communicate Lumumba’s seriousness about the social economy thrust of his administration and to give the necessary clout to the economic democracy team to get the work done. Lumumba, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and the Jackson People’s Assembly will have to get out into the community and in all available spaces to educate the people about labour self-management and the solidarity economy.

Ajamu Nangwaya, Ph.D., is an organizer with the Network for Pan-Afrikan Solidarity and the Network for the Elimination of Police Violence.

Notes

[1] Chokwe Lumumba, “Jackson, Mississippi, Mayor-elect Chokwe Lumumba on economic democracy,” interview by Anne Garrison, San Francisco Bayview [16], June 20, 2013.

[2] Amilcar Cabral, Revolution in Guinea: Selected Texts, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 86.

[3] Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) and the Jackson People’s Assembly, “The Jackson Plan: A Struggle for Self-determination, Participatory Democracy and Economic Justice,” Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, July 7, 2012, http://mxgm.org/the-jackson-plan-a-struggle-for-self-determination-participatory-democracy-and-economic-justice/ [13]

[13][4] Electlumumbamayor.com [17]

[17][5] Jamilah King, J. “Mayor Chokwe Lumumba wants to build a ‘solidarity economy’ in Jackson, Miss.,” Colorlines [18], July 2, 2013.

[6] Larry Hales, “The political, historical significance of Chokwe Lumumba’s mayoral win in Jackson, Miss.,” Workers World [19], June 25, 2013.

Tags:
labour [20] urban development [21] US politics [22] urban planning [23] economic development [24] municipal government [25] cooperatives [26] workers self-management [27]
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Source URL (retrieved on Sep 6 2013 – 7:27am): http://rabble.ca/news/2013/09/we-have-to-make-sure-economically-were-free-worker-self-management-jackson-ms

Links:
[1] http://rabble.ca/taxonomy/term/20
[2] http://rabble.ca/category/bios/ajamu-nangwaya
[3] http://rabble.ca/
[4] http://rabble.ca/contact/editor/[letter to editor for rabble.ca-node-103266]
[5] http://rabble.ca/supportrabble
[6] http://rabble.ca/contact/corrections/[correction for article rabble.ca-node-103266]
[7] http://rabble.ca/sites/rabble/files/node-images/chokwe-lumumba-wins-democratic-primary-run-off-052113.jpg
[8] http://rabble.ca/issues/labour
[9] http://libcom.org/library/worker-self-management-in-historical-perspective
[10] http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2013/3/25/video_understanding_the_mondragon_worker_cooperative_corporation_in_spains_basque_country
[11] https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/fanon/index.htm
[12] https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/index.htm
[13] http://mxgm.org/the-jackson-plan-a-struggle-for-self-determination-participatory-democracy-and-economic-justice/
[14] http://www.jacksonms.gov/business/economy
[15] http://searchtopics.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/topic/Solidarity
[16] http://sfbayview.com/2013/jackson-mississippi-mayor-elect-chokwe-lumumba-on-economic-democracy/
[17] http://www.electlumumbamayor.com/
[18] http://colorlines.com/archives/2013/07/mayor_chokwe_lumumba_wants_to_build_a_solidarity_economy_in_jackson_miss.html
[19] http://www.workers.org/2013/06/25/the-political-historical-significance-of-chokwe-lumumba-mayoral-win-in-jackson-miss/
[20] http://rabble.ca/category/tags-issues/labour
[21] http://rabble.ca/taxonomy/term/2811
[22] http://rabble.ca/category/tags-issues/us-politics
[23] http://rabble.ca/category/tags-issues/urban-planning
[24] http://rabble.ca/category/tags-issues/economic-development
[25] http://rabble.ca/category/tags-issues/municipal-government
[26] http://rabble.ca/taxonomy/term/17557
[27] http://rabble.ca/category/tags/workers-self-management

The importance of education and conscientization: Part II on labour self-management

By Ajamu Nangwaya

Sept 5, 2013 – The people have been long exposed to the capitalist approach to economic development and it is quite fair to assert that the ideas of capitalism are dominant on the question of economic efficacy. The people might have critique of capitalism but it is generally seen as the only game in town, especially with the demise of the former Soviet Union and with it bureaucratic, authoritarian state socialism. In this context Marley’s exhortation to the people to "Emancipate yourself from mental slavery / None but ourselves can free our minds" is very instructive.

The preceding verses from Marley implicitly call on us to engage in critical education about oppression and emancipation. As worker self-management practitioners and/or advocates our educational programmes would also provide the necessary knowledge, skills and attitude to operate worker cooperatives, other social enterprises and the enabling labour self-management structures. Therefore, the educational initiatives would be directed at facilitating worker self-management and the social economy and political/ideological consciousness-raising.

In carrying out this educational programme, the method of teaching and learning should mimic the democratic economic development method that we are pursuing. We are not seeking to reinscribe authoritarian, leadership-from-above ways of teaching and learning. I believe ancestor Ella Baker, advocate of participatory democracy and an organizer within the Afrikan Liberation Movement in the United States, was onto something when she declared, "Give people light and they will find a way." [1]

We are not seeking mastery over the people. The goal is to engender in the laboring classes an appreciation and consciousness of the transformative possibilities and to move toward their realization.

Paolo Freire in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed reminds us, "Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people — they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress." [2]

One of the admirable features of labour self-management is its commitment to placing the power of economic self-determination in the hands of the worker-cooperators. Education has long been an instrument for igniting the passion for emancipation within the radical or revolutionary sections of the labour self-management movement. Mayor Lumumba is very much aware of the educational task ahead in developing the social economy:

    And this will bring about more public education and political education to the population of the city, make our population more prepared to be motivated and organized in order to participate in the changes which must occur in the city of Jackson in order to move it forward. We say the people must decide. ‘Educate, motivate, organize.’ [3]

Mayor Lumumba and his civil society allies can carry out the following educational initiatives to advance worker cooperatives and the social economy:

- Hire worker cooperative educators and developers among the staff of the Office of Economic Development.

- Execute professional development education of all city personnel with economic and business development responsibilities.

- Educate institutional actors such as hospitals, educational institutions and the city’s bureaucracy on the economic virtue of purchasing from worker cooperatives and other social enterprises that are located in Jackson.

- Organize labour self-management and social economy workshops for all relevant elected municipal officials and their staff.

- Develop a public education campaign to educate the people about worker cooperatives, labour self-management and the social economy.

- Enlist the support of the United States Worker Cooperative Federation, regional worker cooperative federations and cooperative educators in designing a worker cooperative/labour self-management education training manual and programme.

- Develop a three-year social economy and worker self-management education pilot project in an elementary, junior high and high school.

- Infuse materials on the social economy and labour self-management in all business and economics courses in the elementary and secondary school curricula.

- Engage in dialogue with the colleges and universities in the city of Jackson to add courses and programmes on the social economy and labour self-management.

- Work with colleges and universities and the state on workforce adjustment or retraining programmes that prepare workers for cooperative and labour self-management entrepreneurship

Technical assistance

Jackson’s Business Development Division provides prospective business operations with advice on preparing their business plans, site selection and access to financial resources. Its role and that of other entities within the city’s bureaucracy should be enhanced to provide business formation and development technical assistance to prospective worker cooperatives and other social economy businesses. The City of Jackson’s technical assistance provision role could include the following:

- Work with civil society groups and the postsecondary institutions in the region to create a civil society-based technical assistance provider organization that would facilitate the formation and development worker cooperatives and other social economy businesses.

- Sell a city-owned building at the nominal price of $1 to a community-based labour self-management and social economy technical assistance provider.

- Aid the technical assistance provider to create a labour self-management and social economy incubator to increase the survival rate of these firms.

- Provide assistance and advice on the identification of business creation opportunities and the development of feasibility studies and business plans.

- Provide training and development opportunities to social enterprises that would allow them to bid for city contracts

Financing labour self-management

One of the most serious challenges faced by small businesses is their limited access to investment and working capital. We have to find creative ways to build organizations that are able to mobilize capital for labour self-management and other social economy projects. The City of Jackson currently provides grants and incentives to businesses so as to attract investment dollars. It can expand the criteria to include worker cooperatives, other cooperatives and social enterprises. Some of the financial instruments that could be explored are:

- Encourage worker cooperatives and other cooperatives to apply for its matching business grants Small Business Development Grant Program and the Storefront Improvement Grant, which provides up to $15,000 to recipients.

- Create a Social Economy Development Grant Program that provides up to $30,000 to worker cooperatives and other social economy firms that employ at least seven employees, invest at least $100,000 (20 per cent of which can be sweat equity) and employ at least 75 per cent of the workers from within Community Development Block Grant eligible area.

- Create a Social Economy Feasibility and Business Plan Grant that provides a 1:1 matched funding grant of up to $10,000.

- Create a credit union that is committed to facilitating cooperative entrepreneurship and community economic development.

- Collaborate with credit unions to expand their capacity to serve as agents for cooperative economic development.

- Work with civil society organizations to create a cooperative and social enterprise loan fund. The revolving loan fund Cooperative Fund of New England [10] could be used as a model for the provision of start-up and working capital to social economy entities.

- Capitalize the cooperative and social economy loan fund with a $300,000 grant over four years that would be matched at a 2:1 ratio from foundations, trade unions and other social movement organizations and/or other levels of government.

- Procure funding for a labour self-management and social economy incubator that is operated by a civil-society-based organization.

- Seek funds to support the matched savings instrument called the Individual Development Accounts [11]. Prospective worker-cooperators would use their accumulated savings to capitalize their labour self-managed enterprises. This programme would develop the business plan through its accompanying educational component.

Procurement and equal opportunity programme function

- Create procurement opportunities for worker cooperatives and other social economy businesses, including those with a few worker-cooperators or employees and a small annual turnover.

- Establish business or contracting set-asides that are exclusively directed at worker cooperatives and other social economy businesses.

- Include worker cooperatives in equal opportunity or affirmative action business programmes established by the city.

- Develop sub-contracting opportunities for cooperative businesses on the city’s infrastructure development projects.

- Develop the creative capacity to ensure that labour self-managed and social economy firms are able to participate in business opportunities with the City of Jackson.

Conclusion

We have to build the road as we travel. All of our organizing work should be directed at developing the capacity of the oppressed to act independently of the structures of domination. The Lumumba administration, the Jackson People’s Assembly and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement have an opportunity to use the resources of the municipal state to advance labour self-management and the solidarity economy.

The worker cooperative movement and progressive entities across the United States should support the civil society forces in Jackson in their effort to build the supportive organizations and structures to engender labour self-management and the solidarity economy. The labour self-management and social economy work being advanced in Jackson ought to be geared toward the purpose of social emancipation and to place the people in the driver’s seat in creating history.

I would like to close with a statement by the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta [12] who captures the spirit in which we ought to wage struggle and create a participatory-democratic culture within the movement for emancipation:

    We who do not seek power, only want the consciences of [the masses]; only those who wish to dominate prefer sheep, the better to lead them. We prefer intelligent workers, even if they are our opponents, to anarchists who are such only in order to follow us like sheep. We want freedom for everybody; we want the masses to make the revolution for the masses. The person who thinks with [her] own brain is to be preferred to the one who blindly approves everything…. Better an error consciously committed and in good faith, than a good action performed in a servile manner. [4]

Ajamu Nangwaya, Ph.D., is an academic worker and an organizer with the Network for Pan-Afrikan Solidarity in Canada. He was a participant at the founding conference of the United States Federation of Worker Cooperative and was elected to its first board of directors.

Notes

[1] Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker & The Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 105.

[2] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed – 30th Anniversary Edition. (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005), 178. Retrieved from http://libcom.org/files/FreirePedagogyoftheOppressed.pdf [13]

[3] Monica Moorehead, “People’s Assembly’s platform brings mayoral victory for Chokwe Lumumba,” Workers World, June 11, 2013, http://www.workers.org/2013/06/11/peoples-assembly-platform-brings-mayoral-victory-for-chokwe-lumumba/ [14]

[4] Cited in Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism. (Oakland: AK Press, 2009), 184.