Written By Paul Street and published in CounterPunch on February 19th 2021, this article provides seering analysis of capitalism and ongoing environmental collapse in the current politic climate.
We could stop being surprised by terrible things if we paid more attention to past and current history.
We could also remember that we are part of Nature and cannot survive much longer in a state of capitalist war on the web of life.
Shocking, Yes; Surprising, No
No Empathy Joe
Yes, it’s terrible that Joe Biden has refused to forgive more than a pittance of student debt. But do we not recall him telling a Los Angeles Times host that he had “no empathy, give me a break” for the plight of Millennials in the savagely unequal and environmentally unsustainable world he’d helped create over decades of Congressional service to corporate and financial America? No surprise.
Fascists Doing Fascist Stuff
The Trump-instigated January 6th fascistic Attack on the Capitol was shocking. Contrary to the “oh my God I can’t believe this is happening in America!” response of dismayed cable news talking heads, it was hardly surprising. As the historian Timothy Snyder noted in its aftermath, “When Donald Trump stood before his followers on Jan. 6 and urged them to march to the United States Capitol, he was doing what he had always done. He never took electoral democracy seriously nor accepted the legitimacy of the American version.”
That’s because Trump was and is a fascist, as was clear well before he was elected. So are many of his backers. Nobody who paid attention to the real record of this white-supremacist racial- nationalist authoritarian and his Amerikaner base (please see my chapter on “the Trumpenvolk” in this excellent volume) should have been astounded by January 6th. It was the final crazed act in a rolling coup campaign that had been underway for months.
A Predicted and Predictable Pandemic Nightmare
The COVID-19 pandemic has been shocking. It should never have been surprising. Public health experts had been warning about such an event for many years from their observation of global capitalism’s encroachment into new geographic and biological spheres and the remarkable speed and scale with which the world capitalist system spreads people and germs across planetary space.
The special virulence with which the virus hit the United States is shocking but unsurprising. It was to be expected given the nation’s extreme attachments and captivity to corporate power, extreme class disparity savage racial inequality, and military empire. The U.S profits and war system is incapable of protecting public health. American “democracy” is about the upward concentration of wealth and power, with disastrous consequences for the common good. The terrible outcomes include a for-profit health care system wired to serve only the rich and a poisoned food system and environment that feeds rampant co-morbidities across the land. The steepest health price is paid by poor people of color, who have died to a disproportionate degree.
Of course COVID-19 made the U.S. its most favored nation. It’s the extreme capitalism, the over-the-top individualism, and the related acute racial oppression that made this predictable.
Capitalogenic Ecocide
The ongoing collapse of livable ecology, whose symptoms include ever more extreme weather (like the recent and ongoing polar cold snap within and beyond the U.S. South) is shocking. It is proceeding as predicted by environmental scientists who have warned for many decades about the exterminist consequences of unrestrained capitalism. The climate we used to know is being blown up by carbon capitalism, as predicted even by Exxon-Mobil.
The capital order is addicted to perpetual “growth,” that is accumulation, to sustain its rate of profit and to paper over its inequalities. It’s an environmentally unsustainable dependence. If we don’t break our dependence on capitalism, we are done for (we may already be done for). Capitalism is wired for the termination of livable ecology.
This Kills Everything
On this last point, this would be a good time for us to stop avoiding the little mater of ecocide, the biggest issue of our or any time. I enjoyed the esteemed Marxist economist Richard Wolff’s recent reflection on how the accumulation and investment centers of global capitalism are “migrating away from the U.S., Europe, and Japan.” By Wolff’s analysis, which strikes me as correct:
The blunt truth of modern economic development is this: capitalism is leaving its old centers and relocating to its new centers. About this leaving we can and should borrow the phrase: this changes everything…. On the one hand, the movement of capitalism from old to new centers plunges the old into a long-term decline evident in decaying industries and cities. Politics shifts away from prioritizing growth, adjudicating internal conflicts in ways that reproduce growing capitalism, and shaping the world into a distinctive center-periphery pattern. Instead, policies shift toward maintaining the global status quo against the many forces eroding it. For many politicians that shift of focus degenerates into scapegoating amid cascading social divisions and decay…On the other hand, capitalism finds profitable new territory in its new centers. Growth there offsets a decline in the old centers. The global 1 percent get richer because they draw increased wealth from both the old and new centers (emphasis added).
After reading this, I had two reactions. First: “brilliant, this helps us demystify a lot of recent economic, social, and political history.” Second: “fine but guess/so what?” Wherever its leading control, investment, and growth centers are located, capitalism has now so completely polluted and cooked the entirely planetary ecosystem that we will be fortunate to survive another half century as a species if we don’t get off this lethal growth-/accumulation-/profit-addicted system.
Here’s a little secret about capitalism: it kills everything no matter where its leading centers are located. It’s not Marx’s midwife to socialism; it’s a malignant cancer ready to bring about “the common ruin of the contending classes.”
Interesting, Even Exciting Times!
More disturbing on this and related scores was the brilliant and (I think justly) celebrated American historian and political commentator Rick Perlstein’s recent dialogue with Salon’s Chauncy de Vega, who deserves special recognition for having properly identified and denounced Trump was a fascist from the start:
De Vega: “How are you feeling given the Age of Trump and all that mayhem and pain, a pandemic and an overall surreal state of affairs? How are you making sense of this?”
Perlstein: “For all the horror of seeing one of America’s two major parties descend into fascism, the fact is that I am a writer and a historian. That we are living in the middle of a time that people will probably be talking about in a hundred years is interesting and exciting to me.”
Where to begin in responding to this? To start with, Perlstein might have wanted to tell de Vega, “hey, I was wrong and you were right about Trump” since Perlstein engaged in some brilliant but (as it turned out) wrongheaded denial of Trump’s fascist essence in the fall of 2015, by which tine de Vega was correctly identifying the orange monster for what it really was.
Then there’s the horrific candor of Perlstein finding recent American fascist politics and history “interesting and exciting” (on an intellectual level). Perlstein’s comment struck me as an elegant version of Tourette’s Syndrome. This is something you don’t say even if you think it. “Interesting and exciting” (to a well-off white professional American author)? Tell it to the immigrants penned up in Amerika’s concentration camps, the parents whose children were stolen from them at the southern U.S. border, and the survivors of the 450,000-plus Americans who have died from the pandemic Trump fanned across the nation, dismissing its significance (he said it “affects virtually no one” even after he survived it with the help of the best taxpayer-funded socialist medicine and treatment available).Tell it to the survivors of people murdered by white-nationalist killers triggered by Trump’s hateful rhetoric (e.g., Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, the victims of the El Paso Wal-Mart massacre, and the Tree of Life killings in Pittsburgh), and the people of Puerto Rico, who Trump left to suffer without adequate federal relief (while downplaying the extent of death and destruction) in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Tell it to the people of Iran. Tell it to the Muslims and others from Muslim countries who were unable to visit loved ones because of Trump’s racist travel ban. Tell it to the survivors of the hundreds of prospective migrants who have died in the southwestern U.S. desert (including 227 people whose remains were found along the U.S,-Mexico border last year) thanks to Trump’s intensified border enforcement and partial wall construction.
Mad Max if We’re Lucky
As my fellow historian and journalist Terry Thomas comments: “I think one might place more emphasis on the ‘horror’ of the Republican Party’s descent into fascism than the business about it being a time people will be talking about in a hundred years. … in a hundred years it could be something like a Mad Max movie, because we failed during this historical juncture. I don’t know how ‘exciting’ that is.”
But back to the environmental matter: it does not look good for a 22nd Century historian being able to look back smartly on the “interesting” and “exciting” times experienced in the US during the Trump years and their aftermath. There’s this little problem of the Antarctic melting around 2050 or 2060, under the pressure of growth-addicted global capitalism, whose key centers shift across geographic zones and nation states while rain forests are felled, arctic ice sheets collapse, and methane bubbles up in mass quantities from melting permafrost.
That changes everything.
I’d say its Mad Max if we’re lucky, to partly paraphrase Istvan Meszaros who (thinking of the environmental crisis) updated Rosa Luxembourg by writing “it’s socialism or barbarism if we’re lucky” two decades ago.
On a small but happy note, the epic fascist hate machine Rush Limbaugh has finally been silenced by Mother Nature. Vatican geologists report one of the fastest descents into Perdition on record.
Editor’s note: The article shows very well how this culture has lost connection to landbases and food sources, evolving ever more “efficient” ways to exploit the planets resources.
Fishing is as old as humanity itself. Indeed, it is older — paleontologists have found evidence that our ancestors Homo habilis and Homo erectus caught lake and river fish in east Africa a million years ago. Large shell deposits show that our Neanderthal cousins in what is now Portugal were eating shellfish over one hundred thousand years ago, as were Homo sapiens in South Africa. Island people have been fishing in the southwestern Pacific for at least thirty-five millennia.[1]
For most of our species’ existence, fish were caught to be eaten by the fishers themselves. “They may have traded dried or smoked fish to neighbors, but this trade was not commerce in any modern sense. People donated food to those who needed it, in the certain knowledge that the donors would someday need the same charity.”[2]
Fishing for sale rather than consumption developed along with the emergence of class-divided urban societies, about 5,000 years ago. Getting fish to towns and cities where people couldn’t catch it themselves required organized systems for catching, cleaning, preserving, transporting and marketing. This was particularly true in the Roman Empire, where serving fresh fish at meals was a status symbol for the rich, and fish preserved by salting was an essential source of protein for soldiers and the urban poor. In addition to boats, an extensive shore-based infrastructure was needed to provide fish for millions of citizens and slaves: “elaborate concrete vats and other remains of ancient fish-processing plants have been found all along the coasts of Sicily, North Africa, Spain, and even Brittany on the North Atlantic.”[3]
The first surviving account of fish depletion caused by overfishing was written in Rome, about 100 CE. The poet Juvenal described a feast at which the high-quality fish served to the wealthy host and important guests had to be imported from Corsica or Sicily, because
“… our waters are already Quite fished-out, totally exhausted by raging gluttony; The market-makers so continually raking the shallows With their nets, that the fry are never allowed to mature.
So the provinces stock our kitchens.”
Fish populations in rivers and coastal areas were also depleted by urban and agricultural pollution. At the same meal, Juvenal says that less-favored guests were served
“a fish from the Tiber, covered with grey-green blotches … fed from the flowing sewer.”[4]
When the Roman Empire collapsed in Europe after 500 CE, commercial fishing contracted sharply: it was no longer safe or profitable to transport food large distances for sale. Fish was still on the menu everywhere, but for several centuries, “inland and coastal (shoreline) fisheries were common but local everywhere in medieval Europe.”[5]
The first mass-produced food commodity
Beginning in the 11th century, increased political stability and renewed economic growth made possible what some historians call the “fish event horizon” — a rapid expansion of commercial fishing in the North and Baltic Seas. Fishers in Norway and Iceland had two great advantages: proximity to waters that were home to more fish than all European rivers combined, and climates that were ideal for air drying cod. Hanging gutted fish on open racks in cold winds for several months removed most of the water, leaving all the nutrients of fresh fish in hard sticks that could be eaten directly or soaked and cooked. The dried fish could be stored for years without spoiling.
“Stockfish, as wind-dried cod and ling were called in medieval times, was the first mass-produced food commodity: a stable, light, and eminently transportable source of protein. From about 1100, Norway exported commercial quantities of stockfish to the European continent. By 1350, stockfish had become Iceland’s staple export commodity. English merchants, among others, brought grain, salt, and wine to trade for stockfish, but Icelandic fishermen could not keep up with European demand. Thus, after 1400, the English developed their own migratory fishery at Iceland, carried on at seasonal fishing stations.”[6]
When Europe-wide trade reemerged, merchants found that air-dried cod from Norway and (later) salted herring from Holland commanded premium prices. Archaeological evidence from across western Europe shows “a dramatic shift from local freshwater fish to air-dried cod from Norway from the 11th century onwards.”[7] For centuries to come, preserved fish from northern waters “fed the European need for a relatively cheap, long-lasting and transportable fish food.”[8]
The market for ocean fish in the late middle ages was driven, at least in part, by declining stocks of freshwater fish, caused by expanded agriculture and the growth of towns and cities. Deforestation, erosion caused by intensive plowing, and a doubling or tripling of the urban population combined to dump masses of silt and pollutants into rivers across Europe, while thousands of new watermills, built to grind grain and cut lumber, blocked rivers and streams where migratory species spawned.[9] As a result, “even in wealthy Parisian households and prosperous Flemish monasteries, consumption of once-favored sturgeon, salmon, trout, and whitefish shrank to nothing by around 1500.”[10]
In The Ecological Rift, Foster, Clark and York show how capital’s irresistible drive to expand “sets off a series of rifts and shifts, whereby metabolic rifts are continually created and addressed — typically only after reaching crisis proportions — by shifting the type of rift generated…. [and subsequently] new crises spring up where old ones are supposedly cut down.”[11] This happened with fish in the late Middle Ages, when capitalist industries first formed, in Henry Heller’s apt phrase, “within the pores of feudalism.”[12] When intensive fishing and pollution undermined the natural processes and environments that had maintained freshwater fish populations for millennia, the fishing industry shifted geographically, moving to exploit different kinds of fish in different locations. As we will see in a future article, in modern times the fishing industry has employed a variety of metabolic shifts, with devastating impacts on ocean’s ecosystems.
The shift from freshwater to ocean fish required much greater fishing effort and investment. Catching enough cod and herring for continental markets required ocean fishers to travel further and stay at sea longer, and processing the fish onshore required more time, equipment and labor. By the 1200s, merchants from northern Germany were financing expanded fishing operations in Denmark and Norway, providing advance payments, salt and other necessities.[13] Over time, outside capital investment funded ever-larger fishing operations.
“[In the 1200s] more than five hundred English, Flemish, and French vessels gathered off Great Yarmouth to supply unnumbered English and Flemish needs, while Paris had more than thirty million salt herring annually barged up the Seine and another twelve million plus were shipped to Gascony. At the same time along the southwestern coast of Danish Scania each year for a century and more, five to seven thousand small boats caught more than a hundred million fish and the merchants from northern Germany who ran the industry shipped 10,000 to 25,000 tonnes of product.”[14]
Capitalist fishing in the Low Countries
In the late 1500s, popular rebellions in the Low Countries triggered the world’s first bourgeois revolution, founding what Marx called a “model capitalist nation.”[15] In volume 3 of Capital, he identified fishing as key factor in Holland’s economic development.[16]
The area that now comprises the Netherlands and Belgium had been part of the Spain-based Hapsburg empire, a regime that rivalled Russia’s Tsars in reactionary hostility to any form of economic or political change.[17] The Dutch Revolt, as Marxist historian Pepijn Brandon writes, overthrew Hapsburg rule in the northern provinces and “left the state firmly under the control of the merchant-industrialists … [and] liberated one of Europe’s most developed regions from the constraints of an empire in which trade and industry were always subordinated to royal interest.” The new republic “became Europe’s dominant centre of capital accumulation.”[18]
An important factor in the rise of the Dutch merchant-industrialist class, scarcely mentioned in many accounts, was the absolute dominance of the Dutch fishing industry in the North Sea.
For most of the late middle ages, Dutch fishers had to work close to shore, because their principal catch was herring, a fatty fish that spoils in a few hours unless it is quickly preserved. Catches were limited by the need to return to shore, where the fish could be gutted and preserved by soaking in barrels of brine.
In about 1400, Dutch and Flemish fishers invented gibbing, a technique of rapidly gutting and salting herring. In 1415, another invention took full advantage of that technique — a Haringbuys (herring buss), was a large, broad-bottomed ship designed not only for high-volume fishing, but also with sufficient deck space for gibbing a full day’s catch and storage capacity for up to 60 tonnes of salted fish in barrels. A crew of 12 to 14 men could work at sea for months in what was, as environmental historian John Richard writes, “essentially a floating factory.”[19]
Every year, hundreds of herring busses sailed from Dutch ports to the far north of Scotland and then followed the vast shoals of herring that annually migrated southward in the North Sea, east of England, using mile-long driftnets. Often the fleet was supported by smaller boats that regularly replenished their supply of food, barrels and salt, and took full barrels back to port.
The floating factories gave Low Country shipowners a huge advantage over their English and French competitors in the North Sea. They could stay at sea longer, travel farther, catch more fish, and deliver a commodity that needed little on-shore processing. For the next 300 years, the Dutch North Sea fishery was “the single most closely managed and technologically advanced fishery of the world.” In most years, the Dutch fleet captured 20,000 to 50,000 tonnes of fish in the North Sea, more than all other North Sea fishers combined. In one exceptional year, 1602, the Dutch fishers brought in 79,000 tonnes of fish.[20]
As economic historians Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude point out, the economic impact of what was called the “great fishery” extended beyond the revenues derived directly from selling fish.
“This sector not only employed many workers but possessed strong forward and backward linkages to shipbuilding, ropeworks, net and sail makers, the timber trade and sawing mills, ships provisioning, salt refining, cooperage and packing, smoking houses, and long-distance trade and shipping. It is not altogether surprising that jealous foreigners saw the fisheries as the secret weapon of Dutch merchants and shipowners.”[21]
Building and equipping herring busses required more capital than the small boats used by traditional coastal fishers. De Vries and van der Woude describe the industry’s evolution from early partnerships to truly capitalist organizations.
“In its early stages, the ownership of the herring busses was in the hands of partnerships, the partenrederij prevalent also in ocean shipping, which usually included as partners the skippers of the vessels. Even the fishermen sometimes invested in the partnership, typically by supplying a portion of the nets, which their wives and children, or they themselves during the off-season, had made. However, already in the fifteenth century, many fishermen worked for wages … and over time wage labor so grew in importance that first the fishermen and later even the skipper disappeared as participants in the partnerships, leaving a partenrederij composed primarily of urban investors. In the mid-sixteenth century, when the herring buss fleet of Holland alone already numbered some 400 vessels and other economic activities were yet of a rather modest scope, these partenrederijen must have formed one of Holland’s most important fields of investment.”[22]
The success of Dutch fishing gave an impetus to a substantial shipbuilding industry. As historian Richard Unger has documented, in the 1400s ships were built one at a time by independent shipwrights and their apprentices, but by 1600 Dutch shipbuilding was concentrated in a few large operations, and “the industry shifted from a medieval handicraft to something along the lines of modern factory organization.” Journeymen were paid daily wages at rates negotiated with local guilds, and were required to work fixed hours. The industry produced between 300 and 400 ships a year, each taking six or more months to complete. Dutch shipbuilders were widely seen as the best in Europe, so a considerable part of the industry’s revenue came from ships that were commissioned by merchants from other countries. The capitalist owners of Dutch shipyards were “among the wealthiest of businessmen in a country of wealthy men.”[23]
In 1578, Adriaen Coenan. a Dutch businessman who had spent his life in the fishing industry. described herring as Holland’s “golden mountain.”[24]
In 1662, Pieter de la Court, a wealthy businessman and strong supporter of the republic, wrote a widely read and translated book — Interest van Holland (Holland’s True Interest) — to explain the Dutch Republic’s economic success. He particularly stressed the importance of fishing, claiming that it generated “ten times more profit” each year than the Dutch East India Company’s state-enforced monopoly. Fishing was economically important not just on its own, but for the impetus it gave to related industries. “More than the one half of our trading would decay, in case the trade of fish were destroyed.”
He identified fisheries, manufacturing, wholesale trading (traffick), and freight-shipping as “the four main pillars by which the welfare of the commonalty is supported, and on which the prosperity of all others depends.”[25]
Writing two centuries later with the benefit of hindsight, Karl Marx’s shortlist of the most important drivers of early Dutch capitalism was different — he identified “the predominant role of the basis laid by fishing, manufactures and agriculture for Holland’s development” — but he too saw the fishing industry as a major factor.[26] Modern research confirms that intensive fishing for profit played a critical role in the birth and growth of Dutch capitalism.
The revolution that the Dutch fishing industry began in the North Sea in the fifteenth century — the conversion of immense quantities of ocean life into commodities for sale across Europe — did not stop there. Part two of this article will examine the even greater impact of a capitalist fishery on the other side of the Atlantic.
This article is part of a continuing project on metabolic rifts. Your constructive comments, and corrections will help me get it right. —IA
References
Brian Fagan, Fishing: How the Sea Fed Civilization(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017) provides an excellent account of current knowledge about pre-capitalist fishing.
Geoffrey Kron. “Ancient Fishing and Fish Farming,” in Gordon L. Campbell, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Animals in Classical Thought and Life (Oxford University Press, 2014).
Juvenal: The Satires, translated by A. S. Kline, 2011. Juvenal’s social criticism frequently exaggerated for comic effect, so his account may not have been literally true.
Richard Hoffmann, “A Brief History of Aquatic Resource Use in Medieval Europe,” Helgoland Marine Research 59, no. 1 (April 2005), 23; Richard Hoffmann, “Medieval Fishing,” in Working With Water in Medieval Europe, ed. Paolo Squatriti (Boston: Brill, 2000), 331. Fish was on the medieval menu not only for nutrition, but because the Church banned meat (but allowed fish) on over 130 days a year — every Friday, every day Advent and Lent, and on a variety of other holy days.
At the end of the ninth century, there were just 200 watermills in all of England. Two hundred years later, the census known as the Domesday Book recorded 5,624. Richard Hoffmann, “Economic Development and Aquatic Ecosystems in Medieval Europe,” American Historical Review 101, no. 3 (June 1996): 640.
“No other major Absolutist State in Western Europe was to be so finally noble in character, or so inimical to bourgeois development.” Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979), 61.
Poul Holm et al., “The North Atlantic Fish Revolution (ca. AD 1500),” Quaternary Research, 2019, 4. The Dutch North Sea catch was small by modern standards, but far greater than any other European fishery at the time.
Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy, (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 235.
This piece, republished from Counterpunch, explores the current uprising against police brutality in the context of the struggle against capitalism and asks: what are the most effective forms of struggle going forward? Join the conversation in the comments section.
“We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.”
— Henry Kissinger
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
— Sun Tzu
Over the past several weeks, hundreds of thousands of Americans have taken to the streets in the wake of George Floyd’s hideous murder. Police stations have been commandeered and torched, corporate stores destroyed and set ablaze. In Seattle, people have constructed the ‘Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,’ otherwise known as CHAZ, which encompasses several city blocks, a police station, apartments, and storefronts. Protests and actions ranging from nonviolent marches to small-scale rebellions and uprisings have taken place in over 2,000 cities across the United States.
Before the uprisings, the U.S. was crumbling under the weight of its bloated empire, vicious economic system, and ossified political institutions. Not only has Trump’s response to the pandemic been criminal, to say the least, the political system at every level has failed to respond to the crisis.
The U.S. has been exposed as a failed state.
GOP Senators wheel and deal stocks, including ‘Human Capital Stock,’ as White House adviser Kevin Hassett put it. Meanwhile, Democrats respond to the current crisis with half-measures and symbolic (and absurd) acts of solidarity. So far, the pandemic, which has killed over 115,000 Americans, accounting for 25% of the world’s total deaths due to COVID-19 (the U.S. has only 5% of the world’s total population), continues to spread like wildfire, yet most of the country has gone back to business as usual. Prior to the pandemic, over 140 million Americans lived in poverty.
Now, with 40 million additional Americans out of work, with no end to the pandemic or job prospects in sight, those numbers have and will continue to increase dramatically. Millions of Americans are incapable of paying their bills; tens of millions endure mounting student loan, credit card, and personal debt; and hundreds of thousands face evictions in the coming weeks. At the same time, Wall Street loots trillions from the Treasury and Federal Reserve.
From the very beginning of the pandemic and economic crisis, the state has refused to enact even small-scale economic measures or social programs that would benefit poor and working class people. As a result, tens of millions remain jobless, with no hope in sight. On July 31st, the CARES Act provision that provides an extra $600 a week to Americans receiving unemployment benefits will expire.
People are tired, angry, and rightly so.
Unsurprisingly, many corporate media commentators suggest that systemic racism and policing are the driving factors of the current wave of protests and rebellions. Without doubt, those are the issues that sparked our current ‘Movement Moment,’ but they’re not the only factors playing a role in the uprisings. Class is front and center, though ignored in mainstream political discourse, which seeks to frame everything through a racialized lens. If the corporate media spent some time in the streets, they’d understand that the uprisings have as much to do with class as they do about race.
Corporate Media Lags Behind
During the initial days of the Minneapolis Uprisings, the independent media outfit Unicorn Riot (UR), which describes itself as a “decentralized, educational non-profit media organization of artists and journalists,” was my preferred outlet for on the ground reporting. Journalists at UR don’t necessarily provide commentary as much as they document events in real-time. Outlets such as UR report directly from the streets, with the people, long before or after the corporate media outlets arrive or leave. Young people appreciate and trust UR (UR started during the Standing Rock protests), so they’re given access to moments and events that cable news journalists cover from miles away, if at all. While protesters were smashing up CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta, UR was documenting those actions on the ground, talking to people in the street (CNN commentators were hiding in their studio bunkers high above the streets, shocked that non-Trump supporters also hate their guts).
It’s hard to downplay what Unicorn Riot does: namely, report from streets and document what’s happening from Ground Zero without commercial breaks or talking heads to provide out of touch commentary. Corporate media outlets lack legitimacy. When they do show up to a protest or uprisings, they misinterpret or outright lie about what’s happening. UR, on the other hand, shows up, starts their livestream, and allows anyone and everyone to grab the mic and speak to those watching at home.
Their work is phenomenal and necessary.
At one point during their live broadcast, hundreds of thousands of people were watching the uprisings in real time, along with hundreds of thousands watching live on mediums such as TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat. In Minneapolis, hundreds of protesters got on camera and spoke at length about the horrors of capitalism, why they’re angry (issues ranging from poverty to housing, gentrification, climate change, corruption, and wars), and why they were in the streets with such fervor (because they see no hope in existing political institutions). I haven’t seen any such interviews on corporate news outlets.
The uprisings do make one thing very clear: Americans under 35 years old are not getting their information or commentary from traditional news sources such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, or even cable channels such as CNN or MSNBC. The Old Guard was caught flat-footed. Professional class liberals, major NGOs, prominent progressive and leftwing thinkers and writers admit they were shocked at the scale of the uprisings. This isn’t surprising. Professional class commentators live in a different world, socially, culturally, and economically, than the younger generation. And that gap only widens with time.
Poor and working class teenagers and Americans in their 20s, regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender, receive most of their news and information, for better or worse, via social media and various other digital platforms/modes (podcasts, videos, memes) — those are the entities shaping young peoples’ consciousness and ideologies. Young Americans are much more sophisticated than many older people assume. The recent wave of protests and uprisings show that to be the case. Likewise, poor and working class Americans are much angrier than the professional class could possibly understand. There’s an entire underbelly of seething anger and resentment just beneath the surface of our society: the 50% of Americans who don’t vote
Their voices are now heard loud and clear. Bernie’s campaign asked, “Where are the young people?” They’re in the streets, Bernie. And they’re more radical than you. And their voices will only grow angrier with time, as they realize the current government is incapable of responding to their needs and that Wall Street would rather see them die than enjoy healthcare or UBI. The younger generation, as always, is way ahead of the eight ball with their demand to ‘defund the police.’
Defund the Police
Right now, activists and organizers throughout the U.S. are debating what it means to ‘defund the police.’ This demand is very strategic, and for many reasons. Not only does it allow for a conversation about the redistribution of material resources, it also responds to the demands of those on the ground. For better or worse, this is the demand that organically arose within the context of our current struggle. In other words, leftists can choose to ignore or ridicule this demand (I’ve seen both), or they can respond to popular demands and find strategic ways to connect those demands to broader class issues and larger institutional change. If leftwing organizers and intellectuals are interested in meeting people where they’re at, but not leaving them there, it would be wise to take the latter approach.
Since others have written at length about the details about what it would mean to ‘defund the police,’ there’s no need to rehash those points, though the details are interesting and important. Leftists who shrug off this demand for not going far enough, or not encompassing enough class politics, are missing the boat in terms of how powerful this demand could potentially prove to be.
Capitalism has three primary weapons: 1) capital itself, which can engage in capital strikes, divestment, capital flight, and broader forms of economic warfare, 2) the police, who break strikes, arrest protesters, and protect private property, and 3) the military, who also protect property and break strikes, but whose primary function is to express power on an international scale, securing and opening new markets, protecting business interests abroad, and so on.
Defunding the police not only saves black, Latinx, and poor white lives, it also takes away one of capitalism’s primary weapons.
Without overfunded and highly militarized police forces, it becomes much more difficult for the state to protect fossil fuel infrastructure, banks, government buildings, corporate headquarters, and a host of other potential targets. Nonviolent protesters would no longer face the wrath of racist and militarized police departments. Communities would no longer live in fear of being pulled over, harassed, arrested, tortured, or killed by the cops.
Defunding the police also provides an opportunity to dismantle one of America’s favorite sacred cows. The fact that the majority of Americans side with the protesters is a profound ideological, political, and cultural shift. The police, much like the military, regularly rank in the top five in terms of the jobs and institutions most respected in U.S. society. Dismantling the police is a significant step toward eventually dismantling the U.S. Empire. Redistributing funds from police departments to social programs could serve as an example and model for how to proceed with defunding the military, the logical next step. Since the police have limited funds (the NYPD’s operating budget for 2020 is $5.6 billion), the only way to actually meet the needs of poor and working class people will be through a radical defunding of the military, coupled with the nationalization of critical industries, and a broader redistribution of wealth from corporations and the rich to social programs and the poor.
Defund the Military
The U.S. Empire operates 800-1,000 military bases stretched across the globe. The U.S. ‘Defense Budget’ for 2020 is $721 billion, but if we tally the cost of maintaining its nuclear stockpile, intelligence/spy agencies, Veterans Affairs budget, homeland security budget, international-affairs budget, and its share of the national debt, the total cost of maintaining the U.S. Empire in 2019, according to William D. Hartung and Mandy Smithberger, was $1.25 trillion. Without question, a tremendous amount of resources could be redistributed by defunding and dismantling the military. According to the National Priorities Project, the $712 billion the U.S. spent in 2018 to maintain its empire could have provided 49 million Americans monthly relief payments of $1,200 for one year, or 20 billion COVID-19 tests for one year, or 209 billion N-95 respirator masks for one year, or 9 million elementary school teacher salaries for one year, or 20 million Head Start slots for four years, or 300 million children receiving low-income healthcare for one year.
Overall, the total cost of Uncle Sam’s post-9/11 ‘War on Terror’ comes to $6.4 trillion, money that could’ve been used to pay off the $4 trillion in outstanding consumer debt Americans suffer. Aside from the potential social and economic benefits, it’s equally important to note the massive amount of death, pain, and suffering that would be prevented by dismantling the U.S. Empire, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. noted over 50 years ago. Since King’s assassination, millions have died as a result of U.S. militarism, with tens of millions forced from their homes and turned into refugees.
Yes, there’s much to gain from dismantling the empire, not the least of which being America’s soul.
Seeing as more and more Americans are beginning to understand that the primary task of police forces within the U.S. is to protect property and repress popular rebellion, it’s a great time to connect the same critique to the U.S. Empire, which performs the same function on the international stage. The U.S. Empire crushes international revolts and anyone who dares to dream of alternatives to global capitalism and so-called ‘American values.’ Doing so, however, would require activists to fundamentally challenge U.S. nationalism, an inherent component of the imperial project, both at home and abroad. Even amongst poor Americans, there remains a sense that Uncle Sam is a force for good in the world, and that the U.S. military ‘protects our freedoms.’ Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.
The concept of American Exceptionalism must be challenged head-on if we hope to transition to defunding the U.S. Empire. It’s not surprising that the U.S. government has deliberately hidden not only the financial cost of war, but the images, pictures, and stories of its post-9/11 wars. After all, most Americans would be quite upset if they saw the death and carnage unleashed in their name, with their tax dollars. Important distinctions exist between the military and police, as my friend and former Army Ranger, Graham Clumpner put it:
“The U.S. military doesn’t have the same relationship with Americans as police departments do. Americans interact with cops all the time, and usually those interactions are bad. Cops also sign up for careers. Military personnel sign up for 2-6 year contracts, with the overwhelming majority leaving after their first enlistment ends. The contradiction is that the military is much more powerful and destructive than domestic police forces, yet it’s much easier to organize dissent within the military than it is to organize dissent within police departments. U.S. history shows this to be true. GIs have mutinied throughout the history of this country, from the Revolutionary War and Civil War to the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. We should build on this tradition.”
If activists in the U.S. seek any level of partnership and solidarity with individuals inside existing repressive state institutions, they should look to the military before they look to the police.
Additionally, it remains unclear how the military would respond to a call for genuine Martial Law, whatever that may entail. Certainly, many active-duty troops and veterans are not motivated by the idea of patrolling the streets of America. In fact, “a majority of U.S. veterans believe the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a mistake,” as recent polls show. An even larger majority of U.S. veterans are opposed to a potential war with Iran. Indeed, more and more U.S. troops understand they’re being asked to fight unwinnable, illegal, and immoral wars, and they’re sick and tired of it. That’s a good thing. Troop morale is low after 19 years of war and civil unrest at home. Antiwar activists should build on this momentum, which will require a new antiwar movement, one led by U.S. veterans, the families of U.S. veterans, and the primary victims of Uncle Sam’s wars: Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans, and so on.
Defund the Empire
Without the military and police at its disposal, the repressive arms of the state, American capitalism would be amputated, if not crippled. Political movements in the U.S. would greatly benefit, as would revolutionary political movements abroad. The cause of Internationalism would benefit. The planet would benefit, as would human beings in general. In short, there are countless upsides to dismantling the police and military.
Hell, why not extend the same treatment to the FBI, CIA, DEA, NSA, ICE, and a host of other repressive, violent, and inherently undemocratic agencies? Defund them all. After the police, military, and national security state is defunded, and their resources redistributed, why not defund the fossil fuel industry, Israel, Wall Street, the prison-industrial complex, and every other subsidy and corporate handout the state provides to entities?
Violence, Nonviolence, and Resistance to Capital
Discussions concerning violence and nonviolence always pop up during ‘Movement Moments.’ Usually, conversations about violence are overplayed, unhelpful, and totally detached from reality. This time, however, such conversations have entered mainstream political discourse for perfectly good reasons: Americans are engaging in more militant actions than at any point in recent memory. Police stations have been occupied, ransacked, and burnt to the ground. Government buildings have been stormed by leftwing activists and occupied by armed rightwing militias. Gun stores are empty. And Americans are stocking up on ammo. The situation in the U.S. is ripe for political violence.
Some on the left are actively promoting armed struggle, but the left in the U.S. isn’t prepared to engage in guerilla warfare against the military or the police, nor is the left prepared to face off against rightwing non-state actors. The left is disorganized, small, undisciplined, and fragmented. Even if the left generally agreed, which it doesn’t, that armed struggle is strategic, reasonable, or ideal, it wouldn’t matter because the left in the U.S. is simply incapable of waging an armed campaign against the military, police, or rightwing militias.
That said, coordinated, sustained, and dynamic nonviolent actions, including massive acts of civil disobedience, strikes, walkouts, and direct actions such as blockades, occupations, and various forms of sabotage could create a series of crises significant enough to bring the current regime to its knees, if not topple it. At this stage in the game, an overemphasis on weapons, self defense, and militant posturing could prove detrimental.
The U.S. military is far more fragile, unorganized, and ideologically incoherent than many Americans realize.
Even leftists have a view of the U.S. military as an omnipotent force capable of locking down the entire country, maintaining the empire abroad, and imposing martial law throughout the fifty states. Nothing could be further from the truth. According to the Department of Defense Manpower Data Center, “There were a total of 1.3 million active duty military and more than 800,000 reserve forces as of September 2017 . . . Total active duty personnel for the five armed services were approximately 472,000 for the Army, 319,000 for the Navy, 319,000 for the Air Force, 184,000 for the Marine Corps and 41,000 for the Coast Guard.” About 1.1 million Americans are in military reserve units, which only train periodically and lack the combat skills or experience to effectively engage in serious counterinsurgency efforts.
Remember, only a tiny fraction of soldiers (15%) and marines (12%) perform infantry functions — most active duty troops are ‘Personnel Other than Grunts,’ otherwise known as POGs. They drive trucks, fix vehicles, run supply warehouses, conduct logistical operations, set up communications networks, work on computers, answer phones, file paperwork, conduct ceremonies, and a host of other non-combat related tasks.
The U.S. military doesn’t actually have the manpower to keep the country locked down.
Sure, one could argue that the U.S. military has the capacity to carpet bomb the entire country and turn the landscape into rubble, true, but it’s not clear whether or not the military would actually respond to such orders, or initiate such actions, especially if massive numbers of Americans were engaged in nonviolent acts as opposed to offensive guerilla assaults. Again, if the left can effectively organize within the ranks of the military, the odds of such calamity decrease significantly. That’s why the work of groups such as About Face: Veterans Against War and Veterans For Peace is so important. Their efforts should be supported.
Right now, members of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and United Electrical workers’ union (UE) are organizing non-unionized workers in a wide-range of industries. Their efforts should also be bolstered and supported. Defunding the police and military, at best, allow us to amputate capitalism, but the ultimate goal is to decapitate capitalism, and the only way to do that is through highly coordinated actions that include massive numbers of people, particularly workers who have the ability to shut down business and bring society to a halt. It also requires a vision of what we want after capitalism (a topic for another day).
Students, mothers, nurses, teachers, the disabled, and unemployed have a role to play. Bus drivers, healthcare workers, retail, and restaurant workers as well. Workers in the most critical industries: railroads, trucking, warehouses, shipping, and factories, will play a vital role in determining how things play out over the coming months and years.
If the current wave of rebellions can result in long-lasting revolutionary organizations and institutions that operate coherently and cohesively with national and international movements, while building up bases of support at the local level through deep organizing efforts, there’s a serious opportunity for radical political change in the U.S. If not, it’s easy to see this entire wave of protests dying out, being stomped out, or morphing into a spectacle of violence utterly void of substance and detached from reasonable political ends. Now is not the time for posturing. Now is the time for deep organizing.
Vincent Emanuele is a writer and organizer born and raised in America’s Rust-Belt. A former US marine and Iraq War veteran, Vince refused orders for a third deployment in 2005 and immediately began working with the anti-war movement during the Bush years.
This episode of the Green Flame is an interview with Kim Hill, a permaculture design teacher based on the South East coast of New South Wales, and Joanna Pinkiewicz, a women’s rights activist and environmental activist, based in Tasmania. We discuss the Australian bush fires, the role of fire in the landscape, indigenous land management practices, land defense, grief rituals and nature connection, and the likelihood that corporations and developers with backing from the government will open up fire-affected land to development and mining. Two of DENNI’s songs are included with permission: Trees and Wise Ones.
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
The latest Living Planet report from the WWF makes for grim reading: a 60% decline in wild animal populations since 1970, collapsing ecosystems, and a distinct possibility that the human species will not be far behind. The report repeatedly stresses that humanity’s consumption is to blame for this mass extinction, and journalists have been quick to amplify the message. The Guardian headline reads “Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations”, while the BBC runs with “Mass wildlife loss caused by human consumption”. No wonder: in the 148-page report, the word “humanity” appears 14 times, and “consumption” an impressive 54 times.
There is one word, however, that fails to make a single appearance: capitalism. It might seem, when 83% of the world’s freshwater ecosystems are collapsing (another horrifying statistic from the report), that this is no time to quibble over semantics. And yet, as the ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer has written, “finding the words is another step in learning to see”.
Although the WWF report comes close to finding the words by identifying culture, economics, and unsustainable production models as the key problems, it fails to name capitalism as the crucial (and often causal) link between these things. It therefore prevents us from seeing the true nature of the problem. If we don’t name it, we can’t tackle it: it’s like aiming at an invisible target.
Why capitalism?
The WWF report is right to highlight “exploding human consumption”, not population growth, as the main cause of mass extinction, and it goes to great lengths to illustrate the link between levels of consumption and biodiversity loss. But it stops short of pointing out that capitalism is what compels such reckless consumption. Capitalism – particularly in its neoliberal form – is an ideology founded on a principle of endless economic growth driven by consumption, a proposition that is simply impossible.
No extinction risk for ‘commodity species’. Baronb / shutterstock
Industrial agriculture, an activity that the report identifies as the biggest single contributor to species loss, is profoundly shaped by capitalism, not least because only a handful of “commodity” species are deemed to have any value, and because, in the sole pursuit of profit and growth, “externalities” such as pollution and biodiversity loss are ignored. And yet instead of calling the irrationality of capitalism out for the ways in which it renders most of life worthless, the WWF report actually extends a capitalist logic by using terms such as “natural assets” and “ecosystem services” to refer to the living world.
By obscuring capitalism with a term that is merely one of its symptoms – “consumption” – there is also a risk that blame and responsibility for species loss is disproportionately shifted onto individual lifestyle choices, while the larger and more powerful systems and institutions that are compelling individuals to consume are, worryingly, let off the hook.
Who is ‘humanity,’ anyway?
The WWF report chooses “humanity” as its unit of analysis, and this totalising language is eagerly picked up by the press. The Guardian, for example, reports that “the global population is destroying the web of life”. This is grossly misleading. The WWF report itself illustrates that it is far from all of humanity doing the consuming, but it does not go as far as revealing that only a small minority of the human population are causing the vast majority of the damage.
Global map of Ecological Footprint of consumption, 2014. Although the WWF report highlights disparity in consumption, it says nothing about the capitalism which produces this pattern. WWF Living Planet
From carbon emissions to ecological footprints, the richest 10% of people are having the greatest impact. Furthermore, there is no recognition that the effects of climate and biodiversity collapse are overwhelming felt by the poorest people first – the very people who are contributing least to the problem. Identifying these inequalities matters because it is this – not “humanity” per se – that is the problem, and because inequality is endemic to, you guessed it, capitalist systems (and particularly their racist and colonial legacies).
The catch-all word “humanity” papers over all of these cracks, preventing us from seeing the situation as it is. It also perpetuates a sense that humans are inherently “bad”, and that it is somehow “in our nature” to consume until there is nothing left. One tweet, posted in response to the WWF publication, retorted that “we are a virus with shoes”, an attitude that hints at growing public apathy.
But what would it mean to redirect such self-loathing towards capitalism? Not only would this be a more accurate target, but it might also empower us to see our humanity as a force for good.
Breaking the story
Words do so much more than simply assign blame to different causes. Words are makers and breakers of the deep stories that we construct about the world, and these stories are especially important for helping us to navigate environmental crises. Using generalised references to “humanity” and “consumption” as drivers of ecological loss is not only inaccurate, it also perpetuates a distorted view of who we are and what we are capable of becoming.
By naming capitalism as a root cause, on the other hand, we identify a particular set of practices and ideas that are by no means permanent nor inherent to the condition of being human. In doing so, we learn to see that things could be otherwise. There is a power to naming something in order to expose it. As the writer and environmentalist Rebecca Solnit puts it:
Calling things by their true names cuts through the lies that excuse, buffer, muddle, disguise, avoid, or encourage inaction, indifference, obliviousness. It’s not all there is to changing the world, but it’s a key step.
The WWF report urges that a “collective voice is crucial if we are to reverse the trend of biodiversity loss”, but a collective voice is useless if it cannot find the right words. As long as we – and influential organisations such as the WWF, in particular – fail to name capitalism as a key cause of mass extinction, we will remain powerless to break its tragic story.
