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"We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Paul Street at Feb 22, 2005

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I work at a civil rights organization, possess a doctorate in US History (for what that's worth), and tend to field phone calls from community members and journalists in February, officially designated as Black History Month. As a result, this time of year commonly finds me reading/reviewing US black history classics and/or sources. I am currently a few chapters into David J. Garrow's 1986 Pulitzer-winning biography Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference....almost up to Birmingham/1963. Two impressions. The first is the fortuitous nature and suddeness of the merely 27-year-old King's emergence as a national figure during the year of the Montgomery bus boycott. Talk about being in the right place at the right time. King used to reflect on the chance involved in all of that. The second thing is the earliness of his basic tendency towards radicalism and socialism. Having already read such mid-late-1960s King classics as The Trumpet of Conscience (1967 book) and Where do We Go From Here? (1967 book), "A Testament of Hope" (1968 essay), "A Time to Break the Silence" (1967 speech), and "Remainng Awake Through a Great Revolution" (1968 speech), I knew that the late King had linked the struggle against racism to an essentially democratic-socialist battle against imperialism and class inequality. I had previously thought this came only out of his experience in the mid-1960s. In Garrow's book, however, you see King devoting much of his 1949 Christmas holiday to "a close reading of Marx" (p.41). Two years later, in his third year at Crozer Theological Seminary, King (acording to one his professors), "thought the capitalistic system was predicated on exploitation and prejudice, poverty, and that we wouldn't solve these problems until we got a new social order" (43). In 1952, according to Coretta Scott King recalled (from the period in which she dated MLK Jr. in Atlanta) King "talk[ed] about his concern for the masses. He talked about the unequal distribution of wealth and he said 'It's so unfair that a small percentage of the population could control all of the wealth.'" Coretta remembered King saying that his minister father "is a capitalist and I don't believe in capitalism as it is practised in the United States." King felt "that...his father loved money and thought only about his own family, not the rest of humanity." Daddy King (Martin Luther King, Sr.) later said about Junior in the early 1950s that "politically, he often seemed to be drifting away from the basics of capitalism and Western democracy that I felt very strongly about" (p.46). During the famous boycott, King travels to Chicago and meets with the officials of the largely left-led United Packinghouse Workers union. At one point in Chicago he tells reporters that the boycott is part of a broader, international struggle: "the oppressed people of the world are rising up. They are revolting against colonialism, imperialism and other systems of oppression" (63) Later in the boycott period (56-57), he tells a mass meeting that "it is bigger than Montgomery....We must oppose all exploitation....We want no classes and castes....We want to set everybody free" (p.71). In 1958, he comes back from Africa and tells reporters "privileged classes never give up their priveleges without strong resistance...Freedom comes only with persistent revolt" (91). In 1960, he meets the American democratic socialist Michael Harrington, who is surprised by "how intellectually serious he was, that he was radical on all kinds of econonic issues." "As far I was concerned," Harrington related, "he was a socialist" (140). Of course, early or late, the basic underlying radicalism of King (for all its flaws and limits) is essentially deleted from the official celebration of the man, brought into the mainstream as an official icon long after an assassination that seemed increasingly inevitable as he linked the civil rights crusade ever more firmly to the anti-poverty and anti-imperialist struggles. King predicted that incorporation in a way, noting that most Americans probably figured everything had pretty much been fixed with the passage of the Civil Rights Act. For the actual King, of course, the historic civil rights and voting rights bills of 1964 and 1965 were likely understood as elementary and regionally specific bourgeois-democratic victories. His point was to spread "the battering ram of social justice" across the entire nation (not just the old South) and to link up with oppressed people the world over to break down what he called the "triple threats that are interrelated": imperialism, racism, and poverty. He was aware (from a fairly young age) that capitalism was at the heart of these problems and of the reluctance of many to commit to the full-fledged struggle for justice and democracy. Two other official American "heroes" whose personally socialist beliefs are rendered invisible by American historical thought control: Helen Keller and (the admittedly not all that political) Albert Einstein (Time magazine's "Man of the 20th Century"), who published an argument for socialism in an early edition of the Marxist magazine Monthly Review. For some useful reflections on Keller and the general tendency of official American history to "whitewash" past personalities, see James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (1995), pp. 9-29, which helps you understand why most of your fellow Americans don't know about Keller's bolshevism or--- for that matter --- Woodrow Wilson's racism. Back to King, here is a line from his 1968 address "Remaining Awake" that might resonate for some Americans today, residents of the most unequal and wealth-top-heavy nation in the industrialized world and home to more than 42 million citizens who are so "free" as to lack basic health insurance and where more than a million black children had become so "free" by early 2003 as to live at less than half of the nation's scandalously low "poverty level": "This day we are spending five hundred thousand dollars to kill every Vietcong soliders - every time we kill one we spend about five hundred thousand dollars while we spend only fifty-three dollars a year for every person characterized as poverty-stricken in the so-called war-on-poverty program; which is not even a good skirmish against poverty." "Not only that, [this war] has put us in a position of appearing to the world as an arrogant nation. And here we are ten thousand miles away from home fighting for the so-called freedom of the Vietnamese people when we have not even put our own house in order. And we force young white men and black men to fight and kill in brutal solidarity. Yet when they come home they can't hardly live on the same block together." Have you seen the latest segregation indices for metropolitan America in the "Post-Civil Rights Era"?

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Shannon, James at Feb 28, 2005 02:08 AM
No one needs to pull the trigger. The pen if far mighter than the sword. George W and the Neo-Nazi's that run our corporations and government have already released financial armagedon upon the world. The US went from a $5.7 Trillion surplus to a $5 Trillion deficit. - a 5 year $10.7 Trillion swing caused by a tax cut of which 80% went to the wealthiest 1% of the population. The US is borrowing $2Billion a day from the rest of the world that is funding our insane materialism. The US baby booms 70,000,000 social security/medicare/medicaid/pension entitled recipients will drain 10's of Trillion's of $$$$$$$$$ from our financial markets and economy. The pay as you go programs of our society are so fataly and severely underfunded that only severe tax increases can save us all. The true "Evil Doer" and champion of human Greed will prevent that from happening. The United States is doomed by its pen and the lies told to all of us by the academic fiction of financial accounting.

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Dead_ringer, Dead_ringer at Feb 27, 2005 22:33 PM
Indeed, wealth always protects itself, and it exploits within and outside of this nation to perpetuate itself. When you see a police force reponding to a demonstration, or a labor union dispute who do they represent? They represent a moneyed class, after all the police force are the descendants of the early private enterprise thugs that split open the heads of protesting union ranks - that captured escaping slaves it the south and beat them mercilessly. They are prostitutes, a mercenary force within our own boarders. If we are equally inept enough to believe that this body politic will legislate in the interest of the people, we deserve every injustice we receive. Money does protect itself to the point of officially silencing us through it's institutions, and it's enforcement of oppression. They put bullets in the bodies of MLK, Malcom X and will do so to anyone who tries to grasp the crown off their unworthy brow. So what are you going to do about it? They have dictated the means of their own demise, who will pull the trigger?

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Person

Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Shannon, James at Feb 27, 2005 21:01 PM
My grandfather used to say "Never pick a fight with a man that has nothing to loose" Life and History teach that a man would rather die than see "his" money given / stolen / taxed / swindled / extorted / to others who are "less deserving". Human nature dictates that is everyone other than "me". Law exists for one reason. Protection of property. All laws through out hisrory have had one goal and Wealth protects itself.

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Person

Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Dead_ringer, Dead_ringer at Feb 27, 2005 05:13 AM
This is the root of the issue, until we can admit that we have been unwilling to sacrifice to even the point of death - nothing will essentially change. We have allowed this systemic octopus to wrap it's deadly tentacles tightly in every area of our life - from the cradle to the grave. Even though I believe our founding fathers were somewhat of an elite in their own right, at least they were not naive - they knew that they would have to pledge their lives, their fortune and sacred honor on the alter of sacrifice for change. They were a colony not nearly as confounded with a system as we are today, and yet they knew what it would take to produce real lasting change even in a colonial condition (much less severe than our present condition). So lets not kid ourselves by merely posting cheap moral indignation on a virtuously anonymous blog. The enemy is no longer outside of us (like the colonial period), it comes from within and requires a much more virulent house cleaning.

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Person

Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Dead_ringer, Dead_ringer at Feb 27, 2005 04:34 AM
We need to understand that we live in an epistemic autocracy. That we believe in illusions, and embrace spurious authorities. From the cradle to the grave we are fed both overtly and in a subliminal sense that we are powerless spectators. Hence we have this all to pervasive sense in the pit of our stomach - "what can I do to change anything?" We attack things like the media, a number of racists, and even the disparity of the rich and the poor - but they are all derivatives of a pervasive system. All we have in America is an elite which rules others with impunity, it is just different in it's structure from it's ancient European counterpart. We need to ask ourselves - do we like our golden chains so much, or our perceived priviledged lives so much, that we are unwilling to do anything that will disturb our personal peace and comfort for the betterment of mankind? If we can't give hearty YES to this question, don't even think about changing a damn thing.

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Dead_ringer, Dead_ringer at Feb 27, 2005 03:57 AM
Paul, It is interesting how you mentioned in your article how truths about people, like MLK, are scrubbed from biographical material. In fact, I think it is the single most reason why we do nothing to further change in our society. If you remove any knowledge from the people that is contrary to this present system you win a resounding victory. They can than minimize the issue(s) and stop any further development. With completely truncated world-life views we can be reduced to fighting with each other, plus it gives us the illusion that we have changed things, when nothing of import has happened.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Street, Paul at Feb 25, 2005 22:47 PM
The corporate mass culture in turn seems to divide the rich and powerful African-Americans into "good" (e.g. Powell and Obama) and "bad" blacks, shading the latter into a shared space with the officially marked predator-criminals: Artest, Rodman, Snoop DD, Iverson (who is actually decent towards neighborhoods from what I've seen...different than the gambling-cheating Jordan)etc. For what its worth, Jews were divided between an overclass and and underclass in the mass cultural perceptions of Weimar Germany.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Street, Paul at Feb 25, 2005 22:39 PM
Franco I can tell you that people I work with (95 percent black American) got real tired of Obama's supposed "rags-to-riches" story (he kept saying he could happen "only in America") real fast last summer. On television I see super-rich and/or powerful African-Americans (Jordan, Oprah, Powell, Rice, and then the panoply of sports and entertainment celebrities) and then I see the unnamed "black male suspects" on the 10 O'Clock News. I see very little in-between, including none of the ordinary middle, and working-class black Americans in my workplace or the many very poor African-Americans that are struggling as best they can with the lack of jobs and affordable housing and seeking basic services from that organization....ctd

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Franco1108, Franco1108 at Feb 25, 2005 22:20 PM
To make things clearer, the only examples of African-American life that are presented in mainstream circles are the hyper-rich celebrities that openly discuss how they "made it" through their "undying determination" and of course "hard work." In fact, Oprah herself once said that "luck" is simply a matter of "preparation meeting oppurtunity." Of course, the very bleak reality and lack of "luck" for those that are denied oppurtunities is never discussed by her or anyone in her social class. This disturbing fact may be part of the reason why many African-Americans harbor such disdain for many mainstream black celebrities. These celebrities often refuse to discuss the ongoing struggle of their people and instead focus on their own personal story of triumph (which is usually a euphemism for subservience to power).

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Street, Paul at Feb 25, 2005 22:16 PM
Get out of Jail Free...pass Go and Collect $2000. It's called white privilege among other things. Of course the ultimate example of white perpetrators going scot-free is none other than war-crime family mafia boss George W. Bush, who among other things got a cocaine bust freaking EXPUNGED from his record through wealthy connections and family name. By the way Laura Bush killed her high school boyfriend with a car. Paint these fascist ruling class mothers black or brown and I hazard to project they'd be dead or doing time....know what I'm saying?

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Street, Paul at Feb 25, 2005 22:15 PM
Thank you ebogan and others. I recommend the Elaine Brown book (The Condemnation of Little B) that is cited in the article: it's a riveting, radical, and morally engaged read. Her chapter titled "Abandonment" contains interesting comments on Gates, Bill Clinton, and Oprah among others (but may be a little over-harsh on WJ Wilson.)WhiteBear your point about double standards on self-sabotage is dead on. I think I'll do a full piece on this. If McWhorter and his ilk are going to undertake all this racial snitching (so to speak) on poor blacks, then maybe left antiracist whites need to start snitching out all the Caucasians who don't pay the price for all the incredibly nasty shit we did and do. I'll start with myself. I self- (and other-)sabotaged like crazy (as bad as the inner city "supre-predators") in youth (and so did half of my 90 percent white High School) but the system picked me and other others up and passed us along again and again: ....

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Franco1108, Franco1108 at Feb 25, 2005 21:56 PM
Great article in BC. This country's highly segregated nature is something that is seldom discussed anywhere and I'm glad you alluded to the fact. I actually graduated from a suburban high school that included only 12 minority students (myself included) in the graduating class of 175. This lack of diversity creates an environment in which white students derive their perception of African-Americans from pop culture icons such as Oprah, Allen Iverson, and 50 Cent. The average black worker is ignored and indeed invisible as you pointed out in your article.

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Brzrkr, Whitebear at Feb 25, 2005 14:35 PM
Why isn't there any talk of white self-sabotaging behaviours? It is their apathy which is responsible for America's crime. White people are victimized by crime, and crime is expensive, as is law enforcement, as are courts, and as are prisons. Who pays for these things? Predominantly white people. When society doesn't use everybody's potential efficiently, productively, everybody pays. They pay in opportunities lost as much as in the costs of managing and maintaining the dysfunction. White self-sabotage operates with equal force abroad as it does at home. The costs of 911 and the 'war on terror' are just staggering, and the costs will continue to mount... and neither costs nor causes seem to given much attention. Why isn't America's white majority more concerned with exactly why there is so much hostility globally towards them?

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Brzrkr, Whitebear at Feb 25, 2005 14:34 PM
When Gates says “Unless there is a moral revolution and a revolution in attitude among our people,” he's placed the burden on the backs of black folks. There is no perception of need on the part of whites for a moral revolution of attitudes towards race (or class). Following this logic, the solution instead is not a more equitable distribution of public funding. The solution is not a change in moral attitudes of whites. It's not a case of levelling the playing field. It doesn't involve dismantling the white system of affirmative action. There is never any discussion of the white sense and system of entitlement. Instead they say "they just need to work harder" (for the man).

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Person

Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Brzrkr, Whitebear at Feb 25, 2005 14:33 PM
25/02/2005 Good article Paul, here are some thoughts thereto I've heard the remark that (most) blacks "don't have any class" before. If that isn't an inherently classist racist statement I don't know what is. There is truth in the idea that the disenfranchised are responsible at least in part for their predicament. However this is largely because of their failure to develop a political consciousness. It is not a failure to 'work harder' for the man that keeps blacks down; it is a failure to work harder against him. It is a failure to challenge the structural, societal racism politically. Civil rights eliminated politically sanctioned racism (more or less). If political empowerment isn't all about challenging social and economic inequities it is meaningless, mere fluff and window dressing. You won't hear whites or their uncle Toms declaring that blacks need to come together to resist the forces that oppress them. Instead their answer is collaboration.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Street, Paul at Feb 24, 2005 19:39 PM
or democracy abroad and fascism at home! blog readers may be interested in my recent denunciation of "New Age Racism" (Elaine Brown's phrase in a neat book titled The Condemnation of Little B [Boston, 2002])in the form of "the Oprah effect:" "The Full-Blown Oprah Effect..." http://www.blackcommentator.com/127/127_oprah.html

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Person

By Brzrkr, Whitebear at Feb 23, 2005 04:23 AM
Thanks Paul. All of this only goes to show that you cannot support fascism abroad and democracy at home.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Street, Paul at Feb 23, 2005 02:58 AM
WhiteBear says "There exists a whole system of denial over America's home-grown color system. An entire warped morality that allows us to kill in order to free these we kill, and to conquer in order to liberate those we subjugate. Our victims are not our victims; they are recipients of our largess. And if those so bless do not want our generosity it only serves to demonstrate how much they deserve to be our victims. America's color system is alive and well, and it functions with as much brutality as it ever did." Well said. As tokens of my agreement, see “Why They Might Hate Us,” at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=4236. "Love Motivates Us To Kill the Enemy: From the Evangelical Church of the New American Fascism," at http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Dec2004/Street1228.htm “Martin Luther King, Jr., and ‘The Triple Evils That Are Interrelated,'” at www.dissidentvoice.org/Jan05/Street0117.htm “ ‘How You Gonna Export Something You Ain't Even Got At Home?' at www.blackcommentator.com/40/40_cover.html

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Street, Paul at Feb 23, 2005 02:36 AM
Great and rarely mentioned book on JFK (does JFK and class, JFK and race, and JFK and empire, including good chapter I think on US in Latin America, which gets an interesting amount of mention in the King speeches and writings I've recently reviewed): Bruce Miroff, Pragmatic Illusions (published 1970-something...a good historically informed New Left political science monograph).

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Bauerly, Mtbrad at Feb 23, 2005 02:24 AM
JFK was the liberal bait that brought many back to two party politics. He played it liberal enough to get the votes of the left, but he was really all about upholding the status quo. King was a different breed from a different class. He understood the role of the politicians in the continued suppression of the majority by the dominant elites. Just like JFK used the racial inequality to get the votes of the left, so too now GW and the right uses the gay issue to get the votes of the Right and middle.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Street, Paul at Feb 23, 2005 00:04 AM
bwong rightly criticized liberals who like to mention MLK and JFK in the same breath - as if they were part of the same basic movement. In June of 1960, MLK Jr. said that then presidential candidate John Fitzgerald Kennedy "was so concerned about being President of the United States that he would compromise basic principles to become President" (Garrow, p. 139). Sounds like a current black pro-Condi Rice-voting Senator from Illinois. As emerges later in the book and in any decent history of the civil rights movement (see Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality), the great supposed liberal civil rights heroes in the Kennedy White House have to be pushed into minimal civil rights action again and again from below. The movement sparks white reactions that tend to embarass the US on the Cold War world stage, forcing Kennedy to guarantee basic protections.

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Shannon, James at Feb 22, 2005 21:08 PM
King was a smart man. Freedom is meaningless without ecomomic equality. All Governments exist to decide who will get the wealth/money - that is the beginning, middle, and end of story - its'only goal is to maintain power and lord over others. We give it the power, but men allow us to survive. In the end we are only capable of caring about ourselves. Reality teaches a simple and absolute fact of Nature. We are born slaves to our own existance. Slavery is a fact known by all. Wealth and greed and power are the opiate of denial that allow some to form a belief that they are not slaves. Dust to Dust. Labor begets capital. Capital begets survival. Society is as it is because of the 7Natures of man. Man's nature can only change through evolution - it is the only reality capable of changing man. We all hate slavery - we fear death more. We march in step because we are the good little nazi's we were created to be. United we fall -devided we stand!

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Bauerly, Mtbrad at Feb 22, 2005 21:04 PM
All right I've seen this guy ruin good discussions enough. Lets ignore him and maybe he will go back to the trailer park.

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Person

Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Wtgn, Wtgn1 at Feb 22, 2005 19:08 PM
Guess what guys, gays are part of the economic and cultural elite. Thats the only reason anyone made such a big hubabalou about AIDS when it was almost exclusively an issue for the gay community.

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Wtgn, Wtgn1 at Feb 22, 2005 19:06 PM
Hmmmmm, Always though King was a god damn commie! Paul, if you feel so bad about ssegregated neighborhoods, why not move to Altgeld Murray Homes. I am sure they would welcome you with wide open arms and big smiles. That would, after all, be doing your bit to end segregation. You do that and I wont piss and moan so much when the section 8 parts of my town.

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Xihatemegux, Nohope at Feb 22, 2005 18:33 PM
Each page of this book has insights, connections and new approaches to old debates, making it a monumental achievement of scholarship for the anticapitalist movement. An extremely readable work, free of academic jargon, but meticulously researched (reading the footnotes is like reading a second, equally rewarding book), this book, at about $16, should be on every antiglobalization activist and feminist bookshelf in years to come. Federici has provided us with an understanding of the rise of capitalism appropriate for and useful to our struggles today: to stop the privatization of everything, to defend abortion rights and stop the use of biotechnology to take human generation out of the hands of women and put it into the hands of capital, to defend nature itself and its animals and seeds from corporate control and from a capitalist paradigm that threatens the continuation of life itself. Enough to recall the great chant of Italian women at marches in the 1970s: "tremate, tremate, le streghe sono tornate": "tremble, tremble, the witches have returned!" http://auto_sol.tao.ca/node/view/860

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Xihatemegux, Nohope at Feb 22, 2005 18:33 PM
This reinterpretation goes beyond the limitations of Foucault, who developed a history of the body that is gender-biased toward men, as he failed to address the changes occurring to women at the time: criminalization of birth control, prostitution, and midwifery, severe punishment for abortion which had previously been tolerated, tolerance for rape; the torture, mutilation and fiery death for women who were too free with their sexuality, who aborted pregnancies or who were now too old to reproduce more labor power from their wombs. Later, the same methodologies were used against women, who were able to maintain some of their social power over land and reproduction, in the colonial New World.

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Xihatemegux, Nohope at Feb 22, 2005 18:32 PM
The origins of the stereotypes of witches stem from these struggles. The suppression of women was the central part of a process of redefining the human body itself from a sacred repository for the soul, or an animal body capable of pleasure to a work-machine available for capitalism. In order to accomplish this, practical and theoretical changes were needed. The practical changes in the use of the human body were taught by torture and burning ? as women, and many men, learned as heretics and then as witches what the price was of using one?s body for purposes other than to produce profits for bosses. The theoretical changes were accomplished by Descartes and Hobbes, who developed mechanical models of the body ? animal and human ? which saw it as merely a set of related mechanisms or automatic responses (Descartes went so far as to vivisect animals denying that they could feel pain — as they were merely nature'?s windup toys).

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Xihatemegux, Nohope at Feb 22, 2005 18:32 PM
For to abolish the commons, a protracted process that was not complete in Europe in the 20th century, it was necessary to divide the unity of men and women, villagers and urban artisans that had produced the crisis of the ruling classes in the first place. The Witch Trials, and the nightmarish burning of hundreds of thousands of women as witches in towns across Europe for two centuries accomplished this: first by breaking the power of women who were often leaders collectively and individually of the revolutions; second by forcing men to decide whether to risk their lives to save the women from the stake; third by enabling capitalism to impose on women reproductive work: that is to turn women?s bodies into a machines for producing laborers, and taking away their control over reproduction itself (many ?witches? were midwives); finally, those most in need of the commons, and therefore most willing to fight to defend it, as a place to graze animals, grow herbs or garden, collect firewood, berries or other foods, or to build a house on, were likely to be elderly women or single mothers, those most vulnerable and in need of the social security system provided by the common lands.

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Xihatemegux, Nohope at Feb 22, 2005 18:31 PM
The second was accomplished by what is known to history as the Enclosures movement: in medieval Europe, much land was owned communally and managed democratically by assemblies of peasants in the villages. The Enclosures, in England and Scotland, were legislative acts privatizing communal lands (the commons) to be the property of the local barons or lords. For Marx, the Enclosures constituted the basis of primitive accumulation of capital: the initial theft of property that produced a proletariat — a propertyless population available for work for others, and the initial wealth for capital investment. Marx acknowledged the importance as well of slavery and colonial conquest and genocide but it is African and African-American as well as Latin American authors who have stressed the importance of the role of these massive events. Federici ties each of these together seamlessly to retell the story of the origins of capitalism as a counter-revolutionary process, but she adds the other great event of these centuries, restoring the witch-trials to their rightful place alongside the slave trade, colonialism and enclosures.

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Xihatemegux, Nohope at Feb 22, 2005 18:30 PM
The ruling elites of Europe, under siege, needed to accomplish several goals: to find a substitute workforce for the rebellious workers, urban and rural in Europe; to privatize land and expropriate from it the village populations who were the basis of the heretical and other revolts; and to alter the way humans thought about and used their bodies so as to enforce a new kind of regular work-discipline without which capitalism would be impossible. The first of these goals was accomplished through the conquest of the Americas and the enslavement of Africans and of indigenous peoples of the New World — the rise of a plantation economy and with it of a world market for capitalism's commodities — silver, gold, sugar, tobacco, later cotton.

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Xihatemegux, Nohope at Feb 22, 2005 18:29 PM
Workers and peasants, often organized in widespread heretical networks such as the Cathars — networks Federici terms, "the real First International", fought for freedom from Feudal obligations, against Church power and for the communal ownership of land and resources — seeking not only to abolish the old Feudal system, but to prevent the new capitalist one from coming into being. In doing so, workers, often led by women, gained control of several cities in the late 14th century, establishing the first workers' democracies, centuries before the Paris Commune or the Russian Revolution. In the 16th century Germany and parts of what is today the Czech Republic saw gigantic uprisings of virtually the whole working populations. Most of these revolts were drowned in blood, while others were outmaneuvered by a new strategy of the ruling classes to prevent their own overthrow: capitalism.

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Xihatemegux, Nohope at Feb 22, 2005 18:29 PM
What do the witch trials in Europe have to do with capitalism? It is the main task of this book to answer this question. In doing so, it ranges far and wide, reinterpreting the history of several centuries from the point of view of the class struggle and the struggles of women in often startling ways. In the process of answering it, Federici teaches readers about the staggering level of mass struggle by workers and peasants in the late Middle Ages, about the role of the philosophers Descartes and Hobbes in reshaping human nature to become more useful to capitalist exploitation, and about the vast struggles of women suppressed in the horrors of witch burning.

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Xihatemegux, Nohope at Feb 22, 2005 18:27 PM
During the 16th and 17th century, hundreds of thousands of women were burned as witches across Europe. This holocaust, unprecedented in the history of any society before or since, is at the center of this brilliant new book by Silvia Federici, an early opponent of the IMF's role in Third World countries and veteran feminist theorist. This book is the most important new work on the origins of capitalism to appear in thirty years, since Immanual Wallerstein's The Modern World System. For activists today, Caliban and the Witch is more relevant and useful to our anticapitalist struggles and movements. For the inspiration for the book came from the author's years in Nigeria where she witnessed and participated in struggles against IMF and World Bank structural adjustment and privatization of land and resources. The book is part and parcel of the anticapitalist globalization movement (or global justice movement) and links the struggles at the dawn of the capitalist era with those in Chiapas, in Bolivia, in the oil fields of southern Nigeria, in the forests of Indonesia, against privatization of communally owned land and wealth.

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Xihatemegux, Nohope at Feb 22, 2005 18:26 PM
http://silviafederici.littlerednotebook.com/ Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Silvia Federici Autonomedia, Brooklyn, 2004. Reviewed by Steven Colatrella

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Brzrkr, Whitebear at Feb 22, 2005 16:48 PM
There exists a whole system of denial over America's home-grown color system. An entire warped morality that allows us to kill in order to free these we kill, and to conquer in order to liberate those we subjugate. Our victims are not our victims; they are recipients of our largess. And if those so bless do not want our generosity it only serves to demonstrate how much they deserve to be our victims. America's color system is alive and well, and it functions with as much brutality as it ever did.

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Brzrkr, Whitebear at Feb 22, 2005 16:48 PM
There are those who can point to inequities in non-white societies such as India's caste system, the treatment of women in the Middle East, or, 'black on black' violence at home, but these are just used as excuses to propagate and promulgate the color system. They are simply used as masks to cover our own caste system. Hence it becomes OK to discriminate against blacks because 'they deserve it'. Ask yourself how many Americans actually care about Iraqi women? Yet their 'plight' is used as an excuse to drop bombs on those self-same women. When America levelled 75% of Fallujah through aerial bombardments, was it done with bombs designed to kill only men? Was it done with 'smart bombs' that were so intelligent as to tell 'insurgents' from innocents? The American public has scarcely a clue about these distinctions. We can hardly expect better from their bombs.

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Brzrkr, Whitebear at Feb 22, 2005 16:46 PM
Regarding Castes and Classes: Our word for caste is not the same as the word in Hindi which is 'varna'. Varna means 'color'. The color system was imposed on India by Aryans (white people) invading from outside the region. Of course today the Indian elites resemble the general population of India, but the 'color system' remains. It seems to me that pretty much the same thing is going on here. For 500 years America's Aryans have practice the most brutal kind of color system, even exceeding the brutality of the 'Indian' system in terms of genocide. With time this system has become attenuated somewhat, now that the conquest of this continent is complete, but for the average non-white 'citizen' there is still no equality to be found. 'Success stories' like, say, Condoleezza Rice are the exception. NOT the rule. The color system may have become less rigid, but it is hardly on its' death bed.

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Ryanglover1969, Ryan1969 at Feb 22, 2005 07:44 AM
"The current anti-gay campaign is a classic example of economic motives causing social incohesion and bigotry." Maybe, but also anti-gay bigotry, and the rhetoric that accompanies, is used primarily as a lever to manufacture the consent of the majority for other right wing agendas. At its base, the neo-cons employ theological rhetoric that renders the masses unable to reason, thus policy becomes a choice between good and evil.

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Gammon101, Bwong at Feb 22, 2005 07:42 AM
Big corporations such as Disney have extended benefits to gay employees even though they are not required to by law. Law firms, big corporations, universities and other elite institutions are in general more hospitable to gays. Gay people are in general percieved to be economically priviledged demographic. Ask any marketing expert.In terms of general perceptions, gays are hardly in the same economical catagory as blacks or Mexican immigrants. Now I am not saying somehow the gay gene makes you rich. But the fact that more gays are likely to admit their homosexuality in the high paying professions indicates that the elite circle are quite tolerent in terms of sexual orientations

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Bauerly, Mtbrad at Feb 22, 2005 07:30 AM
Anti-gay bigotry did not come from the economic elite? I would look again, they initiated it and proceded to push it to the top of the agenda. I was not saying that most of the right wing nuts are in the elite, they are just being used by the elite to concentrate the wealth, in this case by removing a large portion of competition.

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Gammon101, Bwong at Feb 22, 2005 07:22 AM
"Anti-gay bigotry is a means to exclude people from recieving higher paying, or in this case equal benifits.." Except anti gay bigotry doesn't come from the economical elite.I have not sure if benefits even pay any role in standard anti gay arguments.

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Gammon101, Bwong at Feb 22, 2005 07:19 AM
Then I thought of Ghandi. Because of his non violence philosophy Ghandi is held out to be the role model for all oppressed people everywhere by the non oppressed people.For example, I have read news commentators lecturing the Palestinians that they should imitate Ghandi. Nevermind Ghandi was quite oblivious to the violence perpetrated upon untouchables and has refused to abolish this form of slavery. But does "non violence" work for national liberation in general? While I am no history scholar(Paul can correct me if I am wrong)I think Ghandi lucked out. The British were going to pull out anyway. The evidence is that ALL common wealth countries gain independence even though most of them have no Ghandi or similar character. If the British were in their hay days they would have gunned down Ghandi or sent him to exil without even a second thought.

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Gammon101, Bwong at Feb 22, 2005 07:19 AM
Paul brought up an interesting point. That is, how the media renders cultural icons such as King "harmless" by censoring their more radical ideas. It's an absolute travesty to hear well meaning liberals talk about Kennedy and King in the same breath in the context of the civikl right movement.I don't see anything in common except for the fact that both got shot.

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Bauerly, Mtbrad at Feb 22, 2005 07:00 AM
Anti-gay bigotry is a means to exclude people from recieving higher paying, or in this case equal benifits. It is the same reason economics is behind womens oppression and racism. If a elite economic group can remove people from competition by means of any sort of bigotry or even for religious reasons, it gives them a bigger piece of the pie.

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Gammon101, Bwong at Feb 22, 2005 06:47 AM
"The current anti-gay campaign is a classic example of economic motives causing social incohesion and bigotry." I am not sure what does economics have to do with anti-gay bigotry. Gay people don't belong to any particular economical class. If anything, the general perception is that gay people are on the average better off economically and are better educated(I don't believe this myself. I think people in a certain socio economical strata are just more likely to come out with impunity) Homophobia is found to be more prevalent among the rual population, immigrants from certain countries and religious people. Older men and the less educated also tend to be more against homosexuality. I don't see economics being the determining factor here except to the extent that the less educated also tend to be economically less well off. But this does not seem to be an explaining factor to homophobia. I think anti gay bigotry comes as close as possible to a purely cultural/regligious phenomenon.

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Re: "We Want No Castes or Classes"

By Bauerly, Mtbrad at Feb 22, 2005 06:06 AM
Great article Street, this just proves what I have long thought, that economic injustice is at the root of all evil in our society. Any society that allows humans to amass large quantities of wealth while others live in destitute is not a free society. Any individual that want justice in the world will eventually have to face the root cause of the problem, the economic inequality built into the capitalist system. King and anyother social activist understand the class structure inhearent in all contemporary, maybe historical also, strugles. The current anti-gay campaign is a classic example of economic motives causing social incohesion and bigotry.

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