It’s 2015, and American Capitalism has won.
- PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS/AP
Last Friday, President Obama shook hands with Cuban President Raul Castro, announcing the end of a 53-year-old embargo that has punished, for more than half a century, this small Caribbean country for its Communist sympathies and its Cold War alliance with the USSR.
Much of this punishment has probably been unnecessarily harsh. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it was already clear that America had won. The Soviet Union crumbled from the inside, and had been crumbling all along. Secrets were spilled of the horrors of Soviet gulags, of how China’s Great Leap Forward left maybe 18 million, maybe 32.5 million, people falling backwards into their graves – and very quickly, the hippie glow of ideal Communism, crumbled into disillusionment. That idealism, which caused quite the Red Scare in the 60s, now seems like a silly thing to have been so worried about.
After all, according to the leading neoliberal doctrine of our day, any tampering of the state in markets leads to inefficiencies, so the best thing to do is to leave well enough alone, and let corporations maximize their “comparative advantage” by dutifully pursuing their self-interest, for the greater profit of all. (Signed with love, Milton)
Freedom has been America’s mantra – free markets and political freedoms – “they hate us for our freedoms,” we declared, even as we marched our troops into Baghdad and Kabul. Dictatorship is the great enemy. Communism, which is necessarily autocratic, must be contained and defeated, lest it spread like a disease across the planet. We quarantined Cuba like a disease, injected our American medicine by night into Nicaragua and Guatemala, thrashed about feverishly in the juggles of Vietnam, and when that proved to be unwise, we conjured up a much more potent medicine: financial loans and economic doctrines, direct from Chicago to Chile, the institutionalization of “development” and the popularization of “human rights.”
The idea of “human rights” arose in the afterglow of blitz-torn battlefields, and like much of Europe, was sponsored with the American seal of approval, and budgeted in with the Marshall Plan.
As long-suffering heroes like Vaclav Havel took leadership after decades of war-torn trauma, there was a weariness against more bloodshed over ideology; rather, human rights were supposed to be “non-ideological.” That is, they do not challenge class hierarchies or global inequalities. The predominant focus of Human Rights doctrine has always been about “indisputable” political and civil liberties of the “American freedom” variety, not the more controversial economic or socio-cultural demands for equitable distribution of wealth (which sounds way too much like “ideological” Communism, God forbid.)
According to historian Samuel Moyn, in his book The Last Utopia, the rise of human rights also signaled the fall of utopic Communism. Human rights takes on the voice of universalism, and claims to have roots in the humanist ideals of the Enlightenment. Some historians, such as Micheline Ishay, claim that the basis for human rights, the idea of a common moral code for all humankind, is seen in every civilization, from Babylon to China to the U.S. Constitution. Yet according to Moyn, this claim to universalism is a reconstruction of “human rights,” which would be better understood in historical context, as a Western (American-led) response to the challenges of the Cold War and the World Wars, which more than anything took predominance during the Carter administration’s diplomatic efforts abroad. The seemingly “neutral” language of human rights is now the dominant vocabulary for justice work across the globe, replacing other vocabularies for justice such as Marxism and anti-colonialism / anti-imperialism. While this language is useful in articulating political oppression and empowering marginalized people to stand up against the state, it is also important to take note of where the language of human rights is less effective, in challenging corporations and economic inequality. Moyn warns us that it is important to consider what other utopic visions have been replaced by the dominant vocabulary of “human rights.”
Human rights plays so nicely with money-based solutions like “corporate social responsibility” and “social entrepreneurship.” Like the investment side of global Capitalism, human rights crosses borders and functions internationally, bringing attention to wrong-doings of the state to be judged before the international community of the United Nations. It prioritizes the rights of the individual, and can serve as a powerful platform for individuals to raise complaints against their own governments before a global audience. It also empowers wealthy countries to send Non-Governmental Organizations to do a kind of missionary work that weaker states seem to fail at supplying. It accomplishes all this with the pristine halo of “non-ideological” and indisputable charity.
However, charity is a gift with strings attached. A charitable organization relies on an unequal relationship between the giver and the receiver, wherein the receiver is indebted to the giver. Nonprofits reliant on philanthrocapitalism and the current do-gooder ecosystem of grant-giving foundations, are ever in the service of paying gratitude. In this system of service provision, as money trickles down from top to bottom, from the first world to the rest of the world, from corporations to the poor – leaving a trail of expensive human rights conferences, fat salaries, hotel rooms and all-inclusive breakfasts – there is a cookie trail, with the ones closest to the money grabbing the biggest crumbs. In this trickle-down model of social change, grassroots movement-building is coopted by saviors with expensive backpacks. As voluntary mutual aid and neighborhood associations become professionalized, and plugged into the ecology of philanthrocapitalism, they become reliant upon an elite system for resources and legitimacy, and become less and less able to challenge that system in any meaningful way.
American Capitalism has won by bribing all its opponents into sweet submission. However, not everyone is taking the bait. 
In America, human rights is not the only vocabulary for social justice. The other, more radical, vocabulary that has been gaining power in the U.S. is the vocabulary of People of Color (POC) Feminism and queer theory – not the gilded, superficial snarkiness of corporate feminism, but the kind of feminism led by women of color, which challenges the American enterprise from within: its for-profit prison system, its racially segregated underclass of low-wage workers, its educational inequality as systemic oppression, and its corrupt electoral system of sham-democracy and corporate rent-seeking.
POC feminism, the second most dominant vocabulary of justice in the U.S., provides a stronger connection to other vocabularies of popular movements rooted in the global South: the anti-imperalist and nationalist movements of Latin American and Africa in the 1950s, and the Marxist ideas of class struggle and economic oppression. However, it also has its points of weakness in the conundrums of “strategic essentialism,” the impossibility of true “representation” in identity politics, and the reinforcement of essential oppressions linked by definition to groups of people who selectively benefit from affirmative action policies. Like many other theoretical systems of thought, the academic language of feminism takes an elite form, and is most often propagated among students in wealthy private colleges, rather than rising more organically out of the lived experience of working people. The anti-Capitalist idealism of this language often contradicts the day-to-day resource needs of working people, who are beholden to the monetary system for survival. Given the dominance of neoliberal Capitalism, it is usually more pragmatic for activists to speak the language of economic policy than the language of radical theory. However, selling out entirely to the language of philanthrocapitalism in the name of “pragmatism” also feels like it is not demanding enough – and the structural injustice of racist criminal law and asymmetrical trade agreements require much stronger demands for change. What language should I use, and when?
As a Chinese-born immigrant, growing up in New York City public housing, I am one of the lucky recipients of selective non-profit aid from an affirmative action organization called Prep for Prep, which took me out of an underfunded public school and placed me on scholarship in an elite private school. Prep for Prep is often critiqued for selectively helping a few students out of an unjust educational system, and assuaging the guilt of a few private schools and universities that recruit from this small pool of the “privileged poor,” but failing to challenge the greater system, or devote its resources to improving public education for all.
While I agree with this critique of Prep for Prep, I am also grateful for the enormous gift that this nonprofit brought to me. That said, due to this unearned gift, my self-definition has been strongly shaped from a very young age by attempts to rationalize that gift – which required believing firmly in the narratives of “strategically essential” identity. I needed to believe in structural racism in order to feel justified in taking the scholarship I was given in compensation. I needed to believe in racism to feel entitled to receive special help. And now that I have received this help, I need to believe that my body and my life can be an instrument towards fighting that racism, so that the investment in me will not have been in vain.
During high school, I participated heavily in radical Asian American activist groups, whose “political consciousness education” programming for youth took the code name of “leadership development” – which seemed to me at the time like a necessary boost for college applications. This leftist “political education” involved inculcating Marxist and feminist ideas of oppressor/oppressed binaries along a spectrum of categories, from race, gender and class, to age, ability, and sexuality – all in rather reductionist terms.
Thus, without really knowing it, I was recruited from a very young age into a long-standing political battle rooted in the previous century, between an increasingly neoliberal American state and a handful of NYC people of color organizations, still fighting the good fight of a rapidly weakening Marxist left.
My life has been so strongly shaped by the messaging of these organizations, and the impact of affirmative action policies on my education, that it is difficult, at times, for me to question the primacy of identity politics. When I entered college, I felt a strong sense of duty to “give back” to my community. The first place I looked to “do Good” was the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and its director, Jeffrey Sachs, whose Millenium Development goals at the UN seemed like an unerringly “Good” path. Yet, no sooner was I introduced to the ideas of Sachs, I was confronted with equally enthusiastic criticism against Sachs for his “White Man’s Burden” attitude towards economic development, and his previous failings doling out “shock therapy” in Russia while working for the IMF.
Suffice it to say, I was so confused by the contradiction between the “economic development” view on doing good in the world via charitable “social entrepreneurship”, and the “radical” anti-Capitalist and “critical race theory” view on social justice, which demanded power not charity. I knew that I wanted to dedicate myself towards doing meaningful work in service of making things better for people in some way, but after my first year of college, I had no idea which was the “right” direction to turn. I was left thoroughly cynical and disillusioned by these competing vocabularies of justice.
At this point in my life, I lean left towards the second, more radical mode of thinking – not just Keynesian economics, but a kind of Naomi Klein shock doctrine of disaster Capitalism and an Audre Lorde prescription about not using the Master’s tools…
I am currently training to be a community organizer through a program that emphasizes “capacity-building” rather than service delivery. The mission of the program is “to create a just and equitable society and the diverse leadership to sustain it.” This is a bold mission towards equity, which seeks to support movement-building that challenges existing power structures, so that “diverse” and historically marginalized groups of people in this country can lead structural change.
As a prison abolitionist and an advocate for open borders and migrant labor rights, I am a firm believer right now in the importance of structural change that is led by a strong populist base – one that goes beyond the superficial charity of heroic nonprofits led by privileged white philanthropists. That said, I am not without fear of the tragedies of history – of the mistakes of Communism and the great human cost of populist struggles in the last century. I am afraid of causing harm upon the “everyday” poor people who want merely to live “regular” lives, work hard and raise families – who are not interested in activism, and whose beliefs are not well represented by the “activists” who claim to speak for them. Often, I am afraid of the reductive and alienating nature of identity politics, and disgusted by the hypocrisy of “minority elites” who self-appoint to represent their communities without truly connecting to their base. Even more so, I am afraid of usurping the voices of already silenced peoples, and exposing these people to risk in the face of entrenched oppression, against powerful interests which can do unthinkable violence upon their opponents. I am afraid of the retaliation of the oligarchic superclass, not for my own sake because I seem to have already resigned myself to the life of being a pawn for the movement that created me – but for the “everyday” people who should not have to suffer from the failure of our movement, should we fail. And of course, as history indicates, populist movements fail often and fail tragically.
I am afraid of bloodshed. I am not a militant. I recognize that the world we live in is a mix of Capitalism and socialism, and it is complex and never “pure.” I recognize the troubling failures of theory to capture that complexity, and I recognize that real social change must be done slowly and steadily, or people will get hurt in the process. I want to build alternatives for living in community within the dominant system – nurturing spaces that heal people, and valorizes all the qualities of human life that are undervalued under neoliberalism. I want to do this without becoming isolationist in my utopianism, and without neglecting the bigger picture of pushing for greater structural change for all people outside my immediate community.
And what role could I hope to serve in this movement-building? What should my work be? Prep for Prep left me in the trenches of No Man’s Land, between the rich and the poor, neither elite nor underprivileged. I am well-educated, and I have grown up with personal connections to some very wealthy and powerful people and institutions. I am a banana, more American than Chinese, and even though I grew up poor in public housing, my educational privilege makes me feel separated from other people in my neighborhood. Though my parents have worked in restaurant work and domestic work, I personally do not feel I can speak for the working poor, since even though I live below the poverty line now, I still feel privileged to be paid to organize.
Writer and activist Rinku Sen of Colorlines wrote in the first chapter of her book, Stir It Up: Lessons in Community Organizing and Advocacy, that in order for the left to revitalize itself, there needs to be considerable base-building among the working poor, accompanied by supportive intellectual work:
“The most important goal is increasing our organizing to build new constituencies of progressive activists among people in the most desperate straights. Such direct action organizing needs to be accompanied by substantial research and media capacity – intellectual resources…Our increased intellectual capacity should allow us to reframe key debates and influence public opinion….Progressives need to take a lesson from the New Right – its disciplined organizing, attention to ideas, willingness to lose battles in order to win the war, apparent unity in messages and political goals….Regaining that ground requires that progressive organizers turn their attention to ideological work without delay in order to articulate a set of values that will help win back the constituencies that are rapidly losing to the right.”
Although I love organizing, cherish my one-on-one relationships, and value bringing people together by creating warm, nurturing community spaces – I am, above all, a bookish person, who is more introverted than extroverted. I feel better suited to providing what Rinku Sen calls “intellectual support for movement-building,” rather than inserting myself directly into identity-based organizations that are composed of people “in the most desperate straights,”or claiming membership among the working poor. I never feel “representative” enough, even (and especially) as a sex worker and former domestic worker / restaurant worker / dabbler in construction work – though I think often about what it means to be a good ally. Somehow, the politics of self-advocacy sometimes seems for me too reductive and dangerously narrow, though I defend its use for others. When it comes to community organizing, as much as I believe that people need to organize “for themselves,” I am also wary of falling into the double-think trap of “strategic essentialism.” I strongly believe that the role of a community organizer is to put others before her/himself, to build platforms for direct advocacy, but then to take a step back by focusing on supporting others. The ultimate work of community organizing is to make your organizing redundant and your organization no longer necessary; and not to leech on to the problem like so many NGO’s do. In my work as a community organizer, I want to stay behind the scenes as much as possible, and serve with as little ego as possible. While I acknowledge how impossible this goal is in practice, given the way campaigns are strategized from both top-down and bottom-up, I think it is important for a community organizer to try their best to minimize their “self” (or, as they say in post-gonzo journalism, be as fair and “objective” as possible, while acknowledging your “standpoint” and the limitations of your fleshly lens) – even while you actively support the primacy of self-advocacy for others.
After all, strategic essentialism is a tool, and we must never forget that this tool was built to be temporary, and even with the moderating efforts of intersectional theory, this analytical tool could become a gravestone instead – a ceiling for progress – when it takes on the identity of the oppressed with a definitive permanence.
In general, I would prefer to do the capacity-building work of technological, media and research-based, archival and analytical support – that could benefit the people who are organizing for change, according to their own experiential analysis, and I am committed to doing so without the self-serving ego of academia, which so often coopts community knowledge without giving anything back. In my activism, I would like to serve as a good librarian of sorts, like Che Gossett with IT skills, operating quietly outside the system, striving to build resources and infrastructure for nurturing spaces, but never to dominate them.
Here we are, at the height of a second industrial revolution, driven by the World Wide Web, and the world is ripe with possibility – we can be guided by the wisdom of history, and we can use history to disentangle the myths that have been naturalized, but we don’t have to be tied down by history or limited to the analyses of the past. In the words of historian Yuval Noah Harari, socialism was the biggest idea of the last century, and the reason why socialism was so impactful was that it was rooted in the present – it provided much needed analysis for all the technological changes of the day, during the industrial revolution, and it provided a vision for people based on present possibilities. Today however, I feel that many socialists are weighed down by analyses of the past, by an outdated sense of what class struggle and Marxist labor organizing ought to look like. But like a classic Marxist, I believe that technology is key in determining the relations of production, and the possibilities for resource creation and distribution, for movement-building and strategizing power, for staying relevant and navigating the unique challenges of our planet now. That is why I want to focus on technology and information – to ever be working towards harnessing these forces as a resource for popular movement-building and social justice.
https://soundcloud.com/intelligence2/yuval-noah-harari-on-themyths-we-need-to-survive
In a time of great technological change, when people’s jobs are rapidly replaced by machines, we need to divorce ourselves from the notion that people must do menial work in order to have a right to survive – there must be a movement for basic income – housing should be a human right, rather than merely a commodity to be traded on. In the face of enhanced reproductive technology, there needs to be a movement for changing family structures and restrictive gender roles. When there is enough food production and resources in the world for all people to live fulfilling lives without having to pay for it with “the sweat from their brow,” we need to abolish our antiquated ideas of “work” as tied to money, and money as tied to housing and food and economic survival, especially when unnecessary production in the name of economic growth occurs at the cost of environmental degradation – all to serve the orthodoxy of neoliberal economic doctrine even at its dangerous and irrational limits.
Capitalism has played a positive role in some ways, by incentivizing some technologies that have brought humanity to a place of greater material wealth and human welfare/health. To argue otherwise would be obtusely dogmatic. However this wealth is not evenly distribute and many people are suffering more than ever before. Now we need to work towards equity and the non-material, non-economic values of wellness, community/friendship, and artistic expression in peoples’ lives.
That said, here I am, at the height of this second industrial revolution – and I’m manically typing away, in isolation, on my MacBook Pro, even though I know the NSA could be watching, and even while I’m aware of all the Orwellian dangers, how Big Brother harvests my click-habits into the data warehouses of “evil marketing corporations” – how we are all slowly selling our souls, click by click, into the inevitable Matrix, wherein one day, our merciful robot overlords will drown us in virtual reality and exploit our brains for (very inefficient) battery power. Or something like that… I understand that technology is likely to be our greatest tool and greatest oppression. Nevertheless, I slothfully submit to my web-oppressors because the data privacy apps on Firefox are far too complicated or inconvenient, and I am not a savvy Linux user / cool hax0r bro, so I don’t even trust my own use of these tools most of the time; or maybe I’m just cynical. Or maybe, it’s because the dystopia I live in feels more Brave New World than 1984, which really just doesn’t seem all that bad yet, right now. And probably, when I’m done writing this post, I’ll share it on Twitter or Reddit, since my personal “soma” feels a bit like the dopamine rush of a Facebook notification, the ping of a Twitter mention, the upwardly mobile stats of a WordPress chart.
American Capitalism is winning hard – so much that even as we say “the revolution will not be funded,” we are simultaneously demanding that organizers be properly compensated for their work and their time. We are simultaneously critical of, and reliant upon, this “nonprofit industrial complex” – the Master’s tools; the hand that feeds, and becomes us.
I don’t know how to “create the revolution” or if revolution is truly what we need. What I do know is that there is no simple solution along ideological lines – that all solutions require material resources and fallible human energy, and all strategies must be tested and improved in particular contexts by particular people – I am not afraid of mathematics or scientific methodology (nor do I believe these are essentially “gendered” or “Capitalist” in any intellectually honest way – sorry feminist epistemology!) I am anti-theory and pro-empiricism when it comes to social change.
Most of all, I don’t believe in being manipulated to fight on the old battlefields of past generations, using old frameworks that may no longer apply, revering old gods or canonized prophets, playing for power at the price of people’s lives – Let the Communist Revolution and the Cold War pass now, in peace – I will not fight an army of ghosts, or spectres.
I am committed to the living.